Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called ‘Protected Media Path’ (PMP), which is designed to seriously degrade the playback quality of any video and audio running on systems with hardware components not explicitly approved by Microsoft.

The bypass of the DRM protection was in turn performed by breaking the Driver Signing / PatchGuard protection in the new operating system.

Photoshop Lightroom, the photo file manager from Adobe Systems, is now available for preorder, the company announced Monday.

Adobe’s photo management software, which has been in beta for months for Windows users and since 2005 for Mac OS users, is scheduled to begin shipping in mid-February.

Lightroom is a file management tool intended to complement photo-editing software such as Adobe’s Photoshop. It enables photographers to import, minimally edit, manage and output batches of large digital photo files rather than having to deal with each file individually.

It is a direct competitor to Apple’s Aperture 1.5 software, which currently sells for $299.

Lightroom will sell at the Adobe store for US$199 in the United States and Canada through April 30, according to Adobe. After that, it will be sold for about US$299. The public beta version is set to expire February 28.

Source: News.com

Ars Technica is reporting that upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition cannot be installed on a PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already installed. This is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key. This change has the potential to make disaster recovery very tedious.

The article says: ‘For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.

Source: Slashdot

News Corp.’s popular Web network MySpace said on Monday it will donate a database on U.S. sex offenders to a center that tracks missing children, though state legal authorities warn the company has not done enough to protect youngsters on its site.

MySpace will donate use of its database, which combines close to 50 U.S. state registries on convicted sex offenders, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The center will use the database to help law enforcement in their investigations.

Source: Reuters

Microsoft Officially launched the the new operating system, Windows Vista, in Israel a day early than the rest of the world. In addition to Vista, Microsoft also released Office 2007.

Israel is the first country to get the official release of Vista. Microsoft will launch Vista in the rest of the tomorrow, January 30th’ 2007 with the official kick off by Steve Ballmer scheduled to be in New York city at 10:00 am EST

Adobe Systems on Monday is expected to detail plans to submit its Portable Document Format specifications to the International Organization for Standardization, a body of particular importance to governments and large corporations.

Subsets of the PDF format have already been standardized, including one for archiving documents. But Adobe customers, particularly governments, have told Adobe that making PDF an ISO-approved standard would raise their level of confidence that the format would be around in the long term, said Kevin Lynch, Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect.

Source: News.com