Japanese-language game and entertainment magazine, Famitsu conducted a survey and discovered that 88 percent of readers said the PS3 will be too expensive. Even worse for Sony, the survey reported that 69 percent are most anticipating the Wii this holiday season.

Source: News.com

Eyeing boosts in application performance, Sun Microsystems is researching how to improve handling of objects in multiprocessors with a project dubbed Maxwell.

Maxwell is intended to enable microprocessors to handle objects such as Java objects. The goal is to develop an object-aware memory architecture, with the benefit of making programs run faster.

Source: InfoWorld

Fake emails that claim to offer security advice from Microsoft are cloaking the presence of a password-stealing Trojan horse, security experts have warned.

The bogus emails claim to come from ‘patch@microsoft.com’ with the warning that a hole has been found in the Microsoft WinLogon service that could ‘allow a hacker to gain access to an unpatched computer’.

Source: webuser.co.uk

Poultry experts are turning to sophisticated computer imaging to help them prepare for the expected arrival of the deadly bird flu virus in the United States later this year.

Geographic Information System (GIS) technology is being used to pinpoint the location of commercial poultry flocks, feed mills and processing plants, said Sherrill Davison, professor of avian medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The information will be used to help create buffer zones around an infected flock and contain the H5N1 strain when it makes its U.S. appearance.

Since the beginning of the year, experts have also been using Google Earth, which combines satellite imagery, maps and the company’s search engine to span the globe. It gives extra details including the location of buildings, schools and roads near large chicken and turkey farms and production facilities.

Source: Reuters

Japanese police said they had arrested a 14-year-old boy on suspicion of fraud after he allegedly used the Internet to steal personal details in Japan’s first case of phishing involving a minor.

The boy allegedly threatened people, mainly young girls, so they would send him naked photos of themselves after he had already obtained their identification details and other personal information, local media said.

Source: AFP

The European Court of Justice has ruled that a deal the European Commission made with the US to allow access to passenger’s personal information was illegal. The data-sharing scheme was approved by all 25 member states, but annulled by judges today.

The agreement allows authorities in the US access to airlines’ Passenger Name Records (PNR) as part of the the US’s self-declared War on Terror. As well as names, the files can include address, date of birth, timing and duration of trips, and other data.

Source: TheRegister

The first virus affecting StarOffice was detected today, but so far it isn’t being used to infect computers.

Since the virus has not been launched with malicious intent yet, a teenager hacker may have written it, said Roel Schouwenberg, senior research engineer for Kaspersky Lab. The virus uses macros to attack the office suite from Sun Microsystems.

Source: PCWorld

The Supreme Court passed up a chance Tuesday to consider whether Yahoo Inc. could use American courts to resolve an overseas dispute over the Internet company’s display of Nazi memorabilia.

Source: AP

A fresh round of spam with a password-stealing Trojan horse detected this week uses a German-language pitch, saying the malicious attachment is an official Microsoft Windows update.

The attached malware, called “Trojan-PSW.Win32.Sinowal.u” by antivirus software developer Kaspersky Lab, is a next-generation Trojan that’s on the rise, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior research engineer with the company. The Sinowal family of malware was first detected in December, and first seeded on malicious Web sites.

If a user visited the site and did not have a properly patched browser, the software would install itself, allowing it to harvest login and password information for some European banks’ Web sites, Schouwenberg said

Source: PCWorld

According to the Peoples’ Daily Online, the Chinese government has passed new legislation regarding copyright on the internet. As well as increasing the penalties for online infringement and forcing ISPs to remove illegal content if given written notice, the law also bans “the production, import and supply of devices capable of evading or breaching technical measures of copyright protection”.

Source: Slashdot

Lucene 2.0 has been released. The change from Lucene 1.9 is relatively small, with mostly bug fixes being applied; however, the deprecated methods and classes have been removed with one exception for DateField, which will still be supported for some time so Lucene can read its date fields from old indexes

Source: TheServerSide

An electronic gadget that promises to unshackle consumers from their TV sets became available in Europe for the first time on Tuesday, opening up new ways for users to watch television wherever they go.

The Slingbox plugs into a terrestrial, cable or satellite TV set-top box and then transmits the video over the Internet. Users can then tune in via a PC or a laptop. It is part of a new product category known as “placeshifting,” similar to the “time-shifting” made popular by digital video recorders like Sky+ and TiVo.

Source: Reuters