Hackers attacked the website of a French magazine this month, attempting to sway an opinion poll on the Beijing Olympics and change the site’s content, its publisher said on Wednesday.

Jean-Joel Gurviez said the website of business magazine Capital was first hit in March, when it opened a poll on whether France should boycott the Games’ opening ceremony in China.

“On the first day, we had about 300 responses, which was normal for this type of poll, and they were 80 percent in favour of a boycott. The next day there were 20,000 responses, with 80 percent opposing a boycott,” he said.

Almost all of the responses arrived via Chinese servers, Gurviez said, leading technicians to initially think the influx was driven by Chinese sites directing patriotic fans to vote.

“But a few days later we had hackers operating off servers in China try to change our content, and there were 2.5 million attempts to access protected files. We had to shut down the site temporarily,” he said.

The growing use of encryption software– like Microsoft’s own BitLocker– by cyber criminals has led Microsoft to develop a set of tools that law enforcement agents can use to get around the software, executives at the company said.

Microsoft first released the toolset, called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), to law enforcement last June and it’s now being used by about 2,000 agents around the world, said Anthony Fung, senior regional manager for Asia Pacific in Microsoft’s Internet Safety and Anti-Counterfeiting group. Microsoft gives the software to agents for free.

While Microsoft can point to wide usage of COFEE, some experts are skeptical about using that type of tool to recover data, and even the developer of the product at Microsoft acknowledges that it’s not accepted by some users.

Fung, who initiated the creation of COFEE, spent 12 years as a police officer in Hong Kong, with the final seven dedicated to fighting cybercrime. When he joined Microsoft, he sought to devise a way that agents could do better at finding valuable information on computers used by cyber criminals.

While COFEE doesn’t break BitLocker or open a back door, it captures live data on the computer, which is why it’s important for agents not to shut down the computer first, he said.

COFEE is a set of software tools that can be loaded onto a USB drive. Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft, called it a “Swiss Army knife for law enforcement officers,” because it includes 150 tools. A law enforcement agent connects the USB drive to a computer at the scene of a crime and it takes a snapshot of important information on the computer. It can save information such as what user was logged on and for how long and what files were running at that time, Fung said. It can be used on a computer using any type of encryption software, not just BitLocker.

Although the final upgrade to the Windows XP operating system was supposed to be made available this week on Microsoft’s Download Center, Microsoft has apparently decided to delay its release. Service Pack 3 was originally released to manufacturing on April 21 and plans were set for May 2 to make the upgrade available via MSDN and Technet download.

The issue cited by Microsoft relates to compatibility problems between SP3 and the Microsoft Dynamics RMS for small and midsize businesses. The glitch also affects Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which Microsoft began pushing out for automatic updates last week.

The SP3 upgrade includes a variety of bug fixes and other minor enhancements to the Windows XP operating system. Several Windows Vista features are also included, such as Network Access Protection, “black hole” router detection, and the Microsoft Kernel Cryptographic Module. The SP3 service pack also incorporates all fixes made in prior versions.

The laundry list of operating systems covered by the service pack includes Windows XP, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Home Edition N, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional N, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Starter Edition, and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. The download size is between 428KB and one megabyte, depending on which components are selected.

Thanks to a new software driver Nvidia is cooking up, any PC game can be played in 3D, with no extra work on the part of game developers.

Beginning this summer, any PC with an Nvidia graphics processor will have the ability to run a game in normal mode, or in 3D, with the aid of 3D glasses.

The software driver will enable the ability to have two views–left eye and right eye–which, at the push of a button, appear blurry and pixelated to the naked eye. When viewed through 3D lenses though, the game pops into three-dimensional mode.

The important part is that game developers won’t have to do anything differently. They just continue to make their games the way they want, and Nvidia will take care of the rest. It’s just an option for gamers though–it doesn’t mean all games have to be three-dimensional.

Radiohead won’t be repeating its initiative to let fans pay what they want for their downloads, The English rock band’s frontman said Tuesday.

“I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation,” Thom Yorke said of the band’s decision last October to let viewers pay what they wanted for digital downloads of the new album “In Rainbows.”

“Yes. It was a one-off in terms of a story. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time,” Yorke told the Hollywood Reporter.

Radiohead’s decision to allow fans to pay into the online equivalent of an honesty box for the album came shortly after it walked away from troubled record label EMI, sparking acres of comment about the future direction of the music industry and the dwindling revenue pot from CD sales.

The band has remained quiet about whether the experiment was a success, with many fans thought to have downloaded the album without paying anything at all. “In Rainbows” was later released conventionally as a CD, and topped the U.S. and U.K. charts.

Several electronics manufacturers said Tuesday they are working to create a worldwide standard for how their devices will talk with each other in people’s homes.

The effort, launched by Infineon Technologies AG, Intel Corp., Panasonic and Texas Instruments Inc., is aimed at making sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to home wiring for digital entertainment such as movies, music and pictures.

The HomeGrid Forum would create standards for coaxial cable, power lines and phone lines, and certify products that meet those standards.

As more people connect computers, gaming consoles, and TVs in their homes to enjoy digital entertainment, the industry hopes to create a seamless standard so that content can be more easily used.