News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Group on Tuesday said it plans to expand its online music and teen hangout site, MySpace.com, to 11 countries and seek programming deals with traditional media companies.

Source: Reuters

Coca-Cola Co. said on Tuesday it will close its British online music service mycokemusic.com on July 31, after losing market share to Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store.

Mycokemusic launched in Britain in January 2004 and quickly became the biggest online music download service there in brand recognition and sales. But it was overtaken later in the year by iTunes, which launched a dedicated U.K. site in June 2004.

Source: Reuters

Microsoft is adding a brand-new feature to Windows Vista to allow businesses to load ActiveX controls on systems running without admin privileges.

The new feature, called ActiveX Installer Service, will be fitted into the next public release of Vista to provide a way for enterprises to cope with the UAC (User Account Control) security mechanism.

Microsoft said it will be an optional component on the Ultimate, Business and Enterprise SKUs of Windows Vista. The service is expected to debut in Windows Vista RC1 (Release Candidate 1) and will only be enabled on clients where it’s installed.

Source: eWeek

IBM and Georgia Tech have coaxed a chip to run at 500GHz, a record for a silicon-based device, by dropping the temperature to minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

The experiment is part of a project to explore the ultimate speed limits of silicon-germanium (SiGe) chips. SiGe chips are similar to standard silicon chips, but they also contain germanium for better performance and lower power consumption.

Source: News.com

After months of promises, Sirius Satellite Radio has finally launched an online stream of the Howard Stern show.

Source: Wired

The final version of the latest Linux kernel, 2.6.17, was released to the public over the weekend.

The kernel, dubbed the “crazed Snow-Weasel”, includes a range of new features. They include support for Sun Microsystems’ Niagara chip architecture and for Broadcom’s 43xx-based wireless card family, as well as several performance improvements.

Source: News.com

The first high-definition movies on Blu-ray Disc launch today–from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE). Blu-ray is locked in a format battle with HD DVD for dominance as the primary means of delivering packaged, high-def entertainment.

The titles launching today are: 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, The Terminator, Underworld Evolution, and XXX. Next week, Ultraviolet will be the studio’s first Blu-ray title released at the same time as the DVD-only version. SPHE plans to release four catalog titles each month (by the fourth quarter of 2006, the company expects to be releasing up to ten titles per month); in addition, it plans to release new titles simultaneously with their DVD counterparts.

Samsung officially launches its BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc player on June 25. Sony’s Blu-ray player, the BDP-S1, is due out in August. Both are expected to cost $1000.

Source: PCWorld

A new Internet worm capable of stealing bank details and other personal data from users is circulating via Orkut, Google Inc.’s social networking service, a computer security company warned Monday.

Instant-messaging service provider FaceTime Communications said its software security lab had detected the spread of the electronic virus, the third such threat to disseminate itself via messages posted on Orkut users personal Web pages.

The malicious program, dubbed by FaceTime as “MW.Orc,” works its way onto users’ personal computers when they click on infected links on Orkut scrapbook pages. The link is followed by a message in Portuguese that entices the user to click.

Source: InformationWeek

About 37 percent of people living in the European Union have no computer skills, with Scandinavians being the most computer-literate and Greeks the least, a survey showed on Tuesday.

The study by the EU statistics agency Eurostat showed 65 percent of Greeks, 59 percent of Italians and 57 percent of Hungarians had no basic computer skills, compared with 10 percent in Denmark and 11 percent in Sweden.

Source: Reuters

Microsoft appears to be working to add physics support inside of its DirectX application interface, according to a job posting by the software giant.

Microsoft is currently advertising for a software design engineer to join Microsoft’s “Direct Physics” team, “responsible for delivering a great leap forwards in the way game developers think about integrating Physics into their engines,” according to the posting.

Source: extremetech

Microsoft has become the first major beneficiary of a patent precedent set by the US Supreme Court last month. The software giant does not have to stop using technology that infringes someone else’s patents as long as it pays the patent holder.

Entrepreneur David Colvin’s company z4 Technologies had previously won its case that Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system and software from Autodesk infringed its anti-piracy patent which describes a form of product activation.

Source: TheRegister

Opera Software have finally released version 9.0 of their web browser. The new version features correct ACID2 rendering, native support for the SVG Basic profile, a built-in BitTorrent client, support for Microsoft’s designmode and contenteditable extensions, per-site configuration, Atom support, Web Forms 2.0 support, Canvas support (and some Opera-specific extensions), NTLM authentication, some support of parts of CSS3 and lots more.

Source: Slashdot