n a major step toward new penalties against Microsoft Corp., Europe’s antitrust regulators voted unanimously Monday in favor of fining the world’s largest software company for flouting a 2004 ruling, two people close to the case said.

The regulators backed EU plans to penalize the company but did not discuss the amount of the fine - which they will do at another meeting next week, according to the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because no formal decision has been reached.

The European Commission threatened in December to levy daily fines of up to 2 million euros ($2.5 million) against Microsoft for not complying with an order to supply rivals with “complete and accurate” information to help them develop software that works smoothly with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Source: AP

US authorities said all 50 states have joined a national web site that lists addresses and other details of convicted sex offenders.

The states of South Dakota and Oregon were added last week to the registry, which “provides real-time access to public sex offender data nationwide with a single Internet search,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.

The online database includes more than 500,000 convicted sex offenders who are required to register their address with local authorities.

Source: AFP

Microsoft has apparently taken to demo’ing Windows Vista on… er… an Apple MacBook Pro. That at least is what a series of shots taken by Belgian photographer Pieter Baert at a presentation the software giant made at its Belgian HQ, near Brussels, last month.

The MS staffers were showing off Office 2007 too - again, running it on the MacBook Pro, Baert maintains.

Source: TheRegister

Computer experts from the University of Cambridge claim not only to have breached the Great Firewall of China, but have found a way to use the firewall to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific Internet Protocol addresses in the country.

The Cambridge research group tested the firewall by firing data packets containing the word “Falun” at it, a reference to the Falun Gong religious group, which is banned in China.

The researchers found that it was possible to circumvent the Chinese intrusion detection systems by ignoring the forged transmission control protocol resets injected by the Chinese routers, which would normally force the endpoints to abandon the connection.

“The machines in China allow data packets in and out, but send a burst of resets to shut connections if they spot particular keywords,” explained Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge computer laboratory. “If you drop all the reset packets at both ends of the connection, which is relatively trivial to do, the Web page is transferred just fine.”

Source: News.com

BenQ Corp. unveiled an optical disk writer which can handle the new Blu-ray high volume DVD storage format selling for 799 euros ($1,022) from August 2006.

A late August launch means that BenQ is one of the first electronics companies to sell a Blu-ray burner, simultaneously or even ahead of the main Blu-ray inventors and promoters Sony Corp, Pioneer and Philips.

Source: Reuters

Notice Aviran’s Place users.

Due to the growth of this site, Aviran’s Place need to upgrade the hosting plan. The upgrade started this morning, during the upgrade you might notice some difficulties connecting to the site and the site might be unavailable for times.

I’ll try to make this a painless as possible, but the outage might be for several hours. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Upgrade completed

Eclipse 3.2 is part of the Callisto release train. Callisto is about improving the productivity of the developers working on top of Eclipse frameworks by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle. By releasing ten projects at the same time, the goal is to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment.

Source: TheServerSide

Microsoft has “no plans” to offer a version of its Xbox 360 console with an internal HD DVD drive, a company employee has stated in a bid to confound rumours to the contrary.

According to the software giant’s official Xbox employee blog, the company is “sticking” with the external drive it announced in January this year and demo’d in May.

Source: TheRegister

blinkx search engine announced an agreement with The History Channel UK. Under the terms of the agreement, users will have access to hours of historical audio and video content on the Web.

blinkx’s unique search technology connects users to The History Channel UK’s wide range of audio and video content including a variety of historical audio clips including speeches from icons such as Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, Albert Einstein and Neil Armstrong as well as The History Channel UK’s video picks of the week.

Freedb, the free music database used by tons of CD ripping software, has been shut down due to a disagreement among its developers. One of its developers used a data dump from the original freedb.org and is providing the service at freedb2.org, though, and will be adding features and posting them at his site as they become available.

Source: Slashdot

OpenOffice.org has released a security update to its alternative office productivity suite following the discovery of three potentially serious security vulnerabilities during an internal audit.

Both 1.1.x and the newer 2.0.x releases of the software are affected. Users are advised to update to version 2.0.3 or to wait for an upcoming patch to version 1.1.5 of the code.

Source: TheRegister