The Eclipse Foundation plans to deliver in September a maintenance release of the Eclipse platform, as well as an update to its 10-project coordinated release known as Callisto.

According to organization members and the Eclipse.org Web site, on Sept. 29 the Eclipse Foundation is scheduled to deliver Eclipse 3.2.1, a maintenance release of the platform, along with a maintenance release of the Callisto projects.

Source: eWeek

Google could be planning to invest as much as an additional $1 billion in India, according to a Bear Stearns research report.

The research report, released Aug. 11, claims that the Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant is interested in investing in the city of Hyderabad, one of the largest urban areas in India and an emerging hub of IT and biotechnology.

“Google is planning to invest an additional $1 billion in India beyond its current investment in its R&D center in Bangalore,” said Robert Peck of Bear Stearns. “Our conversation with the company indicated that Google is definitely interested in investing in Hyderabad but unable to confirm the amount of investment, which could be significantly lower.”

Source: eWeek

The first Blu-ray (BD) disc drive for desktop PCs is here, but be warned — it won’t play commercial BD movies.

Vincent Bautista, Sony’s product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.

Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn’t yet possible.

The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn’t “released as a saleable item yet”. Today, the only HDCP-supporting BD playback application is the OEM version of Intervideo WinDVD BD that’s bundled with Sony’s VAIO VGN-AR18GP notebook.

Source: News.com

Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox said Thursday he is charging two companies, one of them from California, with breaking a new law against sending unsolicited e-mails about inappropriate topics to children listed on a state registry.

The spam sent by RR Media Inc. of Cathedral City, Calif., and Data Stream Group Inc. of Bonita Springs, Fla., sought to entice children into gambling sites and promoted alcoholic beverages, Cox said.

Cox filed criminal and civil charges against the companies, saying they violated a state law that requires them to check e-mail addresses against a registry designed to protect children from inappropriate e-mails.

Source: mercurynews.com

Google’s free Web log service, Blogger, is once again accessible from Beijing without the use of a proxy server, indicating that apparent government efforts to block the site have been lifted.

Access to Blogger was restored on Thursday. The site has largely been inaccessible from China since late 2002, when government censors apparently blocked access to Google’s search engine and other sites. Last year, Blogger was accessible during a three-month period that stretched from mid-October until December, when the service once again became inaccessible.

Source: InfoWorld

Apple will not only ship Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Pro notebooks next month, but also versions of its consumer-oriented MacBook fitted with Intel’s latest mobile processor - and its first 64-bit laptop chip - Asian reports have claimed.

Source: Reg Hardware

BetOnSports PLC, the British-based Internet gambling company that has been charged with fraud and racketeering in the United States, said Friday it will shut down its services for American gamblers.

BetOnSports said it plans to stop operating in Costa Rica and Antigua - from where it accepted wagers from tens of thousands of customers in the United States - as soon as possible following a U.S. federal court order for the company to stop taking bets from the country.

Source: AP

A new security flaw has been discovered in Yahoo mail, which allows hackers to gain full access to users mail box, and also to steal private and personal information.

Researchers from Avnet, an Israeli security firm, discovered this flaw said that by sending a special crafted html attachment to a user’s mail, hackers can easily steal a person’s security cookie and with it to gain full access for unlimited time to the user’s mail box.

Yahoo spoke person said that Yahoo is fixing this problem and deploying the fix to all the servers, users do not have to do anything to defend themselves against this flaw.

Source: Ynet

Dell, the world’s leading personal computer maker, could be hit with multiple lawsuits in China for alleged false advertising of its popular laptop computers, state press has reported.

A Shanghai court is reviewing fraud allegations from 19 Chinese customers who say Dell’s laptops are installed with lower quality chips than the ones the US firm advertises, the China Daily said Friday.

Source: AFP