In response to previous reports that Microsoft is going to release Vista on schedule world wide the EU released a statement saying that they did not approve Microsoft to release Windows Vista in Europe.

“The Commission has not given a “green light” to Microsoft to deliver Vista because, as the Commission has consistently stated, Microsoft must shoulder its own responsibilities to ensure that Vista is fully compliant with EC Treaty competition rules and in particular with the principles laid down in the March 2004 Commission anti-trust decision concerning Microsoft”

Ten months after leaving the commercial airwaves for subscription-based Sirius Satellite Radio, shock jock Howard Stern is out to attract a broad new online audience with his first-ever free Internet broadcast.

Stern’s four-hour-plus program will be made available live online at no charge for two days, October 25 and 26, to promote an Internet radio service Sirius is launching this week. A formal announcement was planned for Monday morning.

Source: Reuters

The Firefox web browser has come a long way since the project was announced as a fork from the open-sourced Mozilla project. Version 1.0 was released in 2004 and quickly won critical acclaim for its speed, compatibility with web standards, and features. In a couple of years, Firefox managed to reach a milestone that its predecessor never quite reached: hitting 10 percent market share worldwide. Version 2 of the browser recently hit Release Candidate 2, but the team is already making plans for 3.0. The Mozilla organization has set up a feature brainstorming web site that allows everyone to enter their favorite wish lists for the open source browser.

Source: arstechnica

The U.S. military may soon be able to communicate better with Iraqis in their own language, thanks to technology developed by IBM that quickly translates spoken English into Iraqi Arabic.

The technology could help the military overcome a major hurdle in Iraq, which is the inability of most troops to speak Arabic beyond basic phrases, and a shortage of interpreters, International Business Machines Corp. and military officials said.

IBM says it has delivered 35 notebook computers with the voice voice recognition software to be initially used by medical personnel, U.S. Special Operations forces and the U.S. Marine Corps. It will be used to ease communications in medical situations and with Iraqi security forces and citizens.

For now, however, it will not be used in combat or conflict situations that require split-second communications and decision-making, according to IBM.

Source: InformationWeek

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped received and attempted to install a leaked copy of the GDrive client being used by Google employees, and posted some interesting information.

Platypus syncs an online copy of selected files with a downloaded local version. Users can share by individual or project and can provide view or edit permission for individual users. GDrive shows up as a separate drive icon on users’ computers and can be accessed via a static URL. Internal users by default get a mere 500 MB of storage each. Philipp posted the Platypus Help file for Windows and Linux as well.

Source: Techcrunch

Google’s new office applications, Docs & Spreadsheets, will provide APIs for custom apps. Johnathan Rochelle, project manager: ‘We definitely want to build out APIs, especially for the spreadsheets side, as spreadsheets are more data-oriented, but maybe also for the word processor. People will be able to do mashups with our tools for other things, and not be stuck behind our dev cycle for everything they want.

Source: Slashdot

Just days after patching four bugs in PowerPoint, Microsoft Corp. is warning of a new attack targeting its presentation software.

“We’ve been made aware of proof of concept code published publicly affecting Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint,” wrote Microsoft Security Program Manager Alexandra Huft in a Thursday blog posting. “The reported proof of concept may allow an attacker to execute code on a user’s machine by convincing them to open a specially-crafted PowerPoint file.”

Huft said that Microsoft is not aware of any attacks that take advantage of the bug, but with code now in circulation on public Web sites like Securitydot.net, the attack is easily available to attackers.

Source: itworld.com