U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday proposed requiring sex offenders to register their e-mail and instant messaging addresses with law enforcement authorities in a bid to protect children using popular social Internet sites like MySpace.

The legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives also would require the Justice Department to develop a system that would allow commercial social networking Web sites to check members’ addresses against individuals listed in the National Sex Offender Registry.

Violators who fail to comply with registering their online communication identities would face up to 10 years in prison under the bill. If the offender was on supervised release from prison, the individual’s probation would be revoked.

Source: Reuters

As Windows Vista appeared in computer stores worldwide, Microsoft said Tuesday that part of the design of the new operating system is the work of the
European Commission.

“Following discussions with European Commission, Microsoft committed to make a number of changes to the Windows Vista operating system prior to release,” the software maker said in a statement, pointing to three functions of the operating system: security, search, and fixed document formats.

Source: Yahoo

An award-winning Microsoft researcher has been missing since he set off on a solo sail trip on Sunday.

Jim Gray, who works in Microsoft’s Research Center in San Francisco, left alone on his 40-foot sailing yacht Tenacious sometime on Sunday morning and was expected back in the evening that same day, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement Monday. However, the 63-year-old Gray had not returned by Monday night.

The Coast Guard said a search for Gray started Sunday night after his wife reported him missing. The overnight search involved an airplane, helicopter, patrol boat and a life boat and continued during the day on Monday, with three additional patrol boats and a utility boat, the Coast Guard said. However, no signs of Gray or his yacht have been found.

Source: News.com

Microsoft and the British Library have digitised two of Leonardo da Vincis’ notebooks.

British Library CEO Lynne Brindley said to celebrate the consumer launch of Vista it would offer free access to two da Vinci notebooks - one owned by the library, and one from Gates’s private collection.

The British Library has created an updated version of its application called “Turning the Pages” which allows people to browse parts of its 150 million piece collection via a web browser. We heard how this works better using Vista.

Gates paid $30.8m for the Codex Leicester in 1994. He said his wife wasn’t very impressed when he said he’d bought a notebook - until he told her it was one of da Vinci’s.

The British Library owns a second notebook called Codex Arundel. Both books will be freely available at the British Library website for the next six months.

Source: The Register

Bloggers and online journalists have completed their final victory lap in a protracted fight against Apple. Earlier this month, a Santa Clara County Court ordered Apple to pay the legal fees associated with the defense of subpoenas issued to online journalists (and other related entities) in response to online reports about a confidential audio/video product — code-named “Asteroid” — under development at the Cupertino-based company. The “Asteroid” product was never released, but Apple claimed the news reports violated California state trade secret law and that the journalists were not entitled to First Amendment protections. However, following an appeals decision last year that strongly sided with the journalists, the Court ordered Apple to pay all legal costs associated with the defense, including a 2.2 times multiplier of the actual fees. [updated]

“The court’s ruling is a victory for journalists of all mediums and a tremendous blow to those firms that believe their stature affords them the right to silence the media,” said Kasper Jade, the publisher of AppleInsider.com, one of the sites that broke the original “Asteroid” report (the other was PowerPage.org). “Hopefully, Apple will think twice the next time it considers a campaign to bully the little guy into submission.”

Source: MacNN

Israel’s central Holocaust memorial said on Tuesday over 2,000 people in Iran and thousands of other people, including Iranians, had visited its new Farsi Web site documenting the mass murder of 6 million Jews.

The Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem launched a Farsi language version of its main site, at www.yadvashem.org, on Thursday which includes historical material and pictures.

A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said since then 11,000 people had visited the new section of its site, with 2,242 of them from Iran. She said the body logged around 3,500 visits to its main Web site from Iran in 2006.

The spokeswoman said the body planned to launch a similar site in Arabic shortly.

Source: Reuters

Two South Korean computer programmers have been arrested on suspicion of sending out 1.6 billion spam e-mail messages in violation of the country’s commerce laws, police said on Tuesday.

The two men, one aged 20 and the other 26, are suspected of sending out the unsolicited e-mail messages between September and December last year in what police describe as one of the biggest spam blasts in the country’s history.

The two are suspected of obtaining personal and financial data from 12,000 South Koreans who responded to their spam messages. The pair then sold information on those people to lending services firms in return for 100 million won ($106,400), police said.

Source: Reuters

Retailers across the country stayed open through the wee hours of Tuesday morning to sell the long-awaited Windows Vista operating system, even though most knew customers wouldn’t be lining up out the door for the midnight launch of Microsoft Corp.’s latest product.

At a CompUSA store in Raleigh, only about a dozen people waited around to be among the first to get Vista. The store reopened at 10 p.m., offering customers coffee and discounts on other items including printers and recordable DVDs, and planned to stay open until at least 2 a.m.

The low turnout wasn’t surprising, especially after Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said the company wasn’t pushing the midnight sales events.

Source: AP

Some TomTom satellite navigational devices used to keep drivers on the right road shipped with malicious code that tries to install onto any Windows PC the gizmo is connected to, the Amsterdam-based company confirmed Monday.

A “small, isolated number of TomTom GO 910’s” manufactured during the fourth quarter of 2006 “may be infected by a virus,” TomTom said in a statement. Althouth the TomTom GO 910 runs Linux and so is not affected by the malware, when the hardware is connected to a PC to back up its data, the virus tries to infect the computer.

TomTom pooh-poohed the risk, calling it “low” and telling users to update their PC’s antivirus scanning software or, if they don’t have the defense installed, to add it. “The Internet offers many free online virus scanners like Symantec and Kaspersky that will remove the virus safely from the TomTom GO 910 as soon as it is detected,” the company said.

Security vendors didn’t take such a laissez-faire attitude. Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, for instance, disputed TomTom’s claim that the malware risk was low.

Source: InformationWeek