Lala.com, a Silicon Valley-based digital music start-up, said on Monday it is launching an iPod-compatible online music service that offers free online song play in a bid to get customers to buy music downloads.

The start-up is launching the service with artists from the fourth-largest music company, Warner Music Group, which will sell songs and albums without copy protection software known as digital rights management.

To prevent illegal distribution, downloads will only be possible to an iPod.

Security researcher Michal Zalewski has published four new vulnerabilities to the Full Disclosure mailing list for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. There are no patches yet available from either vendor. The most serious is MSIE page update race condition, where users navigating with JavaScript from one page to another page with the same domain experience a window of opportunity for attackers to concurrently execute JavaScript to perform actions with the permissions of the previous page.

The next most severe is Firefox Cross-site IFRAME hijacking where an attack against about:blank frames could allow malicious code execution.

Toshiba will unveil in Taipei on Tuesday a slim HD DVD rewriter suitable for use in laptop computers.

The SD-L912A, which will be unveiled at the Computex trade show, can read and rewrite to single and dual-layer HD DVD-RW discs and also read and write to recordable HD DVD, DVD, and CD media, Toshiba said Monday on the eve of the Computex trade show in the Taiwanese capital. Sample shipments of the drive to PC makers will begin in July.

Forest guards in western India are using cell phones with ringtones of cows mooing, goats bleating and roosters crowing to attract leopards that have wandered into human settlements, officials said on Monday.

The wild cats in the state of Gujarat often roam into villages near forests in search of food, say officials, adding that this results in attacks on people.

But rather than use methods such as live bait like goats tied to trees to lure the leopards, which then fall into large pits dug by guards, officials say they have found a safer method to trap the cats.

“The moos of a cow, bleating of a goat from the phone has proved effective to trap leopards,” said D. Vasani, a senior forest official in Gujarat. “This trick works.”

Vasani said forest guards have downloaded the sounds of over a dozen animals as ringtones on their mobiles which they attach to speakers and fix behind a cage.

They then play the ringtone continuously for up to two hours until the curious leopard appears and moves into the cage looking for its easy meal.

With dominance of the market for high-definition movie discs still up in the air, Sony Corp. said Monday it is including a small surprise with the new Blu-ray disc player it is shipping this week: a price tag $100 lower than previously announced.

When Sony announced the BDP-S300 player in February, it put the price at $599, but it has now set a list price at $499.

That means the new player costs half of what the company’s first Blu-ray player cost when it launched just six months ago — probably one of the fastest price declines in the consumer electronics industry. The new player has essentially the same capabilities as the older BDP-S1 but is smaller.

The price cut is due to falling production costs and the growing demand for Blu-ray products, according to Chris Fawcett, vice president of Sony Electronics’ home products division.

Microsoft is again inviting people to join video-sharing site, Soapbox, following a two-month hiatus.

On Friday, Soapbox re-emerged with software tools designed to thwart copyright violations. A note posted on Soapbox’s blog said the systems, created by digital fingerprinting company, Audible Magic, offer “proactive filtering” of videos uploaded to the site.

“Audible Magic bases their filtering on the video’s audio track and their database is being updated constantly,” Soapbox said in their blog.

In March, Soapbox abruptly stopped accepting new registrations. The move came a day after Microsoft agreed to stream long-form video for a joint venture from NBC Universal and News Corp.

Search terms related to music and technology are most likely to return sites with spyware and other malicious code, a new study finds.

Some 42 percent of the results using the term “screensavers,” for example, led to sites flagged with a “red” warning or a cautionary “yellow” by McAfee Inc.’s SiteAdvisor service. Other keywords McAfee deemed risky include names of file-sharing software - “BearShare,” “LimeWire” and “Kazaa.”

In many cases, the programs come bundled with adware and toolbars McAfee considers unwanted, according to McAfee’s “The State of Search Engine Safety” report, scheduled for release Monday.

Nonetheless, McAfee found it slightly safer to use search engines overall. Although about 4 percent of search results lead to sites deemed risky, that’s down from 5 percent a year ago.