Apple Inc. has delayed until March the launch of its gadget for streaming video and other content from computers to TVs, but the company would not explain why. The company had said in January the $299 Apple TV set-top box would be available this month.

“Wrapping up Apple TV is taking a few weeks longer than we projected, and we now expect to begin shipments mid-March,” Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox said Monday. She declined to comment further.

Apple TV is designed to move digital content from a user’s computer to a TV set and is anticipated to be a highly competitive product in the growing crop of offerings that deliver Internet-based videos to the television.

Source: AP

Sony Corp. said Monday it is bringing out a cheaper player for Blu-ray discs early this summer, a crucial step in its battle to make the high-definition format the replacement for DVDs.

The BDP-S300 will cost $599, yet will have the same capabilities as the $999 BDP-S1 Sony is currently selling, said Randy Waynick, senior vice president of the home products division of Sony Electronics.

Sony and Samsung Corp., which also makes a Blu-ray player, have been undersold by Toshiba Corp.’s players for the rival HD DVD format. Toshiba has a model on the market for $499.

However, sales of players for either format have been tepid, as consumers have stood back, waiting for the market to settle on one of the discs.

Source: AP

Symantec on Monday released its much-anticipated Norton 360 service, packing a full security suite plus utilities into a subscription offering.

Norton 360 includes all the expected security features—antivirus, antispyware, firewall, intrusion prevention, and more. But it also incorporates a backup solution, transaction security, and a module to optimize PC performance. The price is large as well, though: $79.99 per year.

According to Symantec, Norton 360 is “designed to work as automatically as possible” and to “offer a user experience that is reassuring, helpful and unobtrusive.”

Norton 360 includes the same type of security protection found in the popular Norton Internet Security 2007, but makes even fewer demands on the user. It includes the new SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response) technology, which catches zero-day attacks by detecting and preventing malicious behavior. Antispam and parental controls are pushed out into a separate add-on pack, just as with NIS 2007.

Source: PC Magazine

Little-known Texas MP3 Technologies Ltd. is taking on Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Sandisk Corp. with a patent-infringement lawsuit.

The suit, which came to light over the weekend, was filed on Feb. 16 in Marshall, Texas. The eastern Texas city is fast becoming one of the leading locations of patent infringement lawsuits in the U.S. thanks to speedy trials and juries that more often than not find in favor of the plaintiff.

In the complaint, Texas MP3 Technologies alleges infringement on U.S. patent 7,065,417, which was awarded in June 2006 to multimedia chip-maker SigmaTel Inc. and covers “an MPEG portable sound reproducing system and a method for reproducing sound data compressed using the MPEG method.”

Source: computerworld

BitTorrent Inc., makers of a technology often used to trade pirated copies of Hollywood movies, is launching a Web site that will sell downloads of films and TV shows licensed from the studios.

The BitTorrent Entertainment Network was set to launch Monday with films from Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate and episodes of TV shows such as “24″ and “Punk’d.”

The service is squarely aimed at young men and boys who regularly use BitTorrent to trade pirated versions of the same films and who more often watch such files on their computer instead of on a big screen TV in the living room.

The San Francisco-based company is betting that at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded the BitTorrent software will be willing to pay for high-quality legitimate content rather than take their chances with pirated fare.

TV episodes are $1.99 to download to own, which is typical for competitor sites such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes.

BitTorrent’s content is protected by Windows Media DRM and will only play back using Windows Media Player.

Source: AP

Think the new built-in phishing filters in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 will protect your private data? Think again. The number of sites devoted to phishing skyrocketed last year, and the number of Americans taken in by phishing schemes has nearly doubled. In November 2006, the last month for which data is available, the Anti-Phishing Working Group found 37,439 new sites, up an astounding 709 percent from the 4630 sites in November of 2005.

Last October, both Mozilla and Microsoft released new versions of their browsers that use blacklists to block access to known phishing sites. In response, resourceful phishers are flooding new fake Web sites onto the Internet too quickly for them all to be shut down or blacklisted.

The alarming ease with which the fraudsters changed course, plus other new phishing tactics, makes some security experts say that phishers have the upper hand in the war against online fraud.

Source: Yahoo