Samsung Electronics Co. said on Thursday it has developed a way to broadcast digital television signals to car screens and to devices such as DVD, game and music players, with an aim to creating a standard for portable digital television.

The South Korean company said it is not close to developing commercial products based on the technology, but plans to demonstrate it for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week using content from Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc

Source: Reuters

Warner Bros. is set to introduce a high definition DVD disc that can hold films and TV shows in rival and incompatible formats, the latest sign that the yearlong format war is long from over.

Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., said it developed the “Total HD Disc” to help break the stalemate between HD DVD, developed by a consortium led by Toshiba Corp., and rival Blu-ray, backed by Sony Corp. Both deliver sharper pictures and increased space for special features.

Retailers and others had hoped the rival camps would compromise on one format, or that one would prove dominant.

But the decision by Warner Bros. to accommodate confused consumers by placing both formats of films on a single disc shows that the battle continues.

Source: AP

A patch has been widely released for a vulnerability in the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, a problem rated as “highly critical” by one security vendor.

The flaw could be exploited by creating a malicious file in the Windows Metafile (WMF) or Enhanced Metafile (EMF) formats. If the file was opened by a user, it could start running unauthorized code on a computer, according to an advisory by
Linux distribution vendor Red Hat, which offers the OpenOffice.org suite with several of its products.

OpenOffice.org is a free software suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet and a presentation program. It’s a competitor to Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite, although it’s not as widely used.

OpenOffice.org has published a patch, which in turn is being distributed by Red Hat.

Source: Yahoo

A legal battle between Microsoft and a French video game publisher appears to be holding up the development of a mobile version of “Halo,” the popular Xbox game.

Microsoft signed a deal in late 2005 with game developer In-Fusio to develop a version of Halo for mobile phones and other devices. In-Fusio is now accusing Microsoft of breach of contract in a lawsuit filed last month in a U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Source: Yahoo

A Brazilian court ordered the popular video sharing service YouTube, a unit of Internet search provider Google Inc., to be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site, a judicial clerk said on Thursday.

Daniela Cicarelli, a model and ex-wife of soccer great Ronaldo, sued YouTube after a video of her apparently having sex in shallow water on a beach with her boyfriend was posted to the site.

For days it was the most viewed video in Brazil.

Cicarelli and boyfriend Tato Malzoni filed to force YouTube to take the video down and demanded $116,000 in damages for each day the video remains up. Some copies of the video have been taken off the site but users have reposted it.

The case dragged on for several months before they filed a third suit in December requesting that YouTube be shut down as long as the video is available to users.

Source: Yahoo

Sandisk wants to replace the hard drive in notebooks with flash memory, a swap that it says will make thin laptops faster and more reliable.

The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more.

Sandisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but Sandisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.

Source: News.com

LG Electronics said Wednesday it plans to sell a DVD player that will play both warring high-definition DVD formats.

The first dual-format high-def player will play discs in the HD DVD format, which is backed by a consortium headed by Toshiba Corp., as well as the rival Blu-ray format, backed by a group led by Sony Corp.

The LG unit will be unveiled at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, LG said. Details, including pricing and availability, will become available then, the company said.

Source: AP

Hollywood studios have approved a new technology and licensing arrangement that should remove a major obstacle consumers now face with burning movies they buy digitally over the Internet onto a DVD that will play everywhere.

Sonic Solutions Inc. is introducing on Thursday the Qflix system for adding a standard digital lock to DVDs burned in a computer or a retail kiosk.

Source: AP

Foreign countries, especially nations in the Asia-Pacific region, have intensified their efforts to steal sensitive U.S. defense technology, according to a Pentagon report circulated on Wednesday.

The Defense Security Service Counterintelligence Office recorded an annual jump of nearly 43 percent in the number of suspicious foreign contacts reported to U.S. authorities by defense contractors and other defense-related sources.

The agency, which helps protect the U.S. defense industry from foreign espionage, said in an unclassified report that spies used phony business offers and computer hackers to target advanced U.S. technology including lasers, sensors, missiles and other systems. The report covered the fiscal year ending September 2005 and is the most recent for which complete statistics are available.

In one case, a female spy seduced an American translator to learn his computer password. His unclassified network was later found to be infected by viruses planted by a foreign intelligence service.

Source: Reuters