Rivals attack Vista as illegal under EU rules

Source: Reuters
Author: David Lawsky and Sabina Zawadzki

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A coalition of rivals charged on Friday that Microsoft Corp.'s new Vista operating system coming out next week will perpetuate practices found illegal in the European Union nearly three years ago.

The group, which includes IBM, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Oracle and Red Hat, said its complaints made last year are yet to be addressed just days before Vista is due for release.

The European Commission found in 2004 that Microsoft used its dominance to muscle out RealNetworks and other makers of audio and video streaming software and that it made its desktop Windows deliberately incompatible with rivals' server software.

"Microsoft has clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the Commission's March 2004 decision," said Simon Awde, chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS).

Microsoft said it had no comment. The Commission was not ready to act.

"We are in the process of examining this complaint," a Commission spokesman said. ECIS disclosed on Friday that the latest additions to its complaint were made only last month, after it studied Vista.

Microsoft's new Vista operating system is due for formal release on Tuesday, including a major rollout in Brussels, complete with a news conference and party.

"Vista is the first step of Microsoft's strategy to extend its market dominance to the Internet," the ECIS statement said.

It said Microsoft's XAML markup language was "positioned to replace HTML", the industry standard for publishing documents on the Internet. XAML would be dependent on Windows, and discriminatory against systems such as Linux, the group said.

It said a so-called "open XML" platform file format, known as OOXML, is designed to run seamlessly only on the Microsoft Office platform. It governs the way a document is formatted and stored.

"The end result will be the continued absence of any real consumer choice, years of waiting for Microsoft to improve -- or even debug -- its monopoly products and of course high prices," said Thomas Vinje, lawyer for ECIS, in the statement.

Other complainants in the group include Corel, RealNetworks , Linspire and Opera.

SOME ISSUES RESOLVED

On some fronts, however, complaints were resolved. Microsoft announced earlier this month concerns raised by security companies such as Symantec and McAfee had been dealt with.

Those companies had said Vista would deny them access to the heart of the operating system, which they needed to protect it from certain kinds of malicious software. After negotiations, Microsoft said it would provide information the firms needed.

"The information was indeed what we expected and what we were looking for," said Cris Paden, manager of corporate public relations for Symantec, who earlier had raised concerns.

Microsoft has challenged the Commission's 2004 decision, which included a record fine of nearly 500 million euros ($649.4 million) and orders to change its business practices. It awaits a decision by the EU's Court of First Instance.

Sony Plans to Charge More for PlayStation 3 in Europe (Update5)

Source: Bloomberg
By Michael White

Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Sony Corp., the world's biggest maker of video-game players, will charge Europeans as much as $836 for a PlayStation 3 when the console debuts in March, more than consumers in the U.S. or Japan are paying.

Sony is ``working toward'' having 1 million consoles in Europe by the March 23 release date, Kimberly Otzman, spokeswoman for Sony Computer Entertainment America, said.

Consumers in Europe, Australia and New Zealand will pay the most. The console with a 60-gigabyte hard drive will cost 425 pounds ($836) in the U.K. and 599 euros ($776) in other European countries, Sony's London-based European entertainment division said today in a statement. That's more than the $599 U.S. price and 59,980 ($497) in Japan for the model with the most capacity.

``It is expensive and I'm interested to see if they move all those million units right away,'' said John Broady, an analyst at San Francisco-based Gamespot.com, which tracks sales. ``It's a reminder that this is an expensive system.''

Australians will be charged A$999.95 ($780) for the large machine and New Zealanders NZ$1,199.95 ($840), based on prices set in Sony's statement.

Shares of Tokyo-based Sony gained 2 percent to 5,740 yen as of 1:58 p.m. on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. They have gained 16 percent in the past 12 months.

European Delay

In the U.S., sales have trailed those of Nintendo Co.'s $250 Wii console, which features a motion-sensor remote control.

Sony last year bowed to protests and lowered the price in Japan for the least expensive system to 49,980 yen ($425).

The European release was delayed by four months to March because parts for the console's Blu-ray disc player were in short supply. Sony overcame early stumbles and said on Jan. 8 that it reached its goal of shipping 1 million PlayStation 3 units to the U.S. by the end of 2006.

The Blu-ray player can be used to play games and to watch movies in high-definition format.

The 1 million-unit target for Europe suggests that Sony has overcome the glitches that limited supply at the console's Nov. 17 U.S. start, Broady said.

``They had some real stumbles at launch in the U.S.,'' Broady said. ``It's an impressive feat to have 1 million units ready for Europe.''

Initially, Sony won't offer a 20-gigabyte PlayStation 3 in Europe. That version sells for $499 in the U.S. Introduction of the low-end model later in the year is dependent on demand, Sony said. More than 30 game titles will be available during the launch, the company said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael White in Los Angeles at Mwhite8@bloomberg.net

Researchers Build Memory Chip The Size Of A Blood Cell

Source: Informationweek
Author: Sharon Gaudin

Chip development has taken on a new scope -- microscopic, actually.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have created a memory circuit the size of a white blood cell that they claim has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and still have space left over. The circuit, built by a joint Caltech-UCLA team, has a 160-Kbit capacity -- reportedly the densest memory circuit ever fabricated.

James Heath, a Caltech chemistry professor who led the research team, called the creation of the memory circuit a milestone in manufacturing, even though it's nowhere near ready for wide-scale production and sale.

"It's the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year 2020," says Heath. "But at the moment, it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions."

Caltech researchers say the 160,000 memory bits in the circuit are arranged like a large tic-tac-toe board -- 400 silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires -- with a layer of molecular switches sandwiched in between. Each wire crossing represents a bit, and a single bit is 15 nanometers wide. That's one ten-thousandth of the diameter of a human hair. In comparison, they add, the densest memory devices currently on the market are about 140 nanometers wide.

"Whether it's actually possible to get this new memory circuit into a laptop, I don't know," says Heath. "But we have time."

The researchers' work appears in today's issue of the journal Nature.

Hi-def DVD security is bypassed

Source: BBC News

The encryption on high-definition DVDs has been bypassed, the consortium backing the copy protection system on discs has confirmed.

At the end of last year a hacker claimed he had defeated the protection on a number of HD-DVD titles, leading to fears the entire system was broken.

But the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) Licensing Authority has said the breach is limited.

"It does not represent an attack on the AACS system itself," the group said.

The AACS group has admitted that a hacker had managed to decrypt some discs and other people were now able to make copies of certain titles.

The hacker, known as muslix64, has been able to access the encryption keys which pass between certain discs and the player. Once those keys have been obtained the disc can be stripped of its encryption enabling the digital content to be played on any machine.

A spokesman for the AACS group said the large size of the files and the high cost of writable hi-def discs made widespread copying of the movies impractical.

The attacks on the new format echo the early days of illegal trafficking in music files, AACS spokesman Michael Ayers said.

Security

AACS copy protection is used on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray titles, giving rise to concern from the entire movie industry about the security of its content.

A large-scale breach of AACS could be a threat to the $24bn DVD industry and dent hopes that high-definition discs would invigorate the market.

The hacker obtained the keys from "one or more" pieces of software which plays high-definition DVDs, said Mr Ayers.

But the AACS group would not identify them or say whether their AACS licensing would be revoked.

"We certainly have not ruled out any particular response and we will take whatever action is appropriate," Mr Ayers said.

In a recent interview with digital media website Slyck, hacker muslix64, said his motivation for defeating the protection system was frustration.

'Fair use'

"I'm just an upset customer. My efforts can be called 'fair use enforcement'," he said.

He said he had grown angry when a HD-DVD movie he had bought would not play on his monitor because it did not have the compliant connector demanded by the movie industry.

As part of the copy protection system on high-definition DVD, content providers can insist that movies will only play correctly if there are HDMI - or in some specific cases, compliant DVI - ports on the player and screen as these two connectors can handle the HDCP copy protection system.

"Not being able to play a movie that I have paid for, because some executive in Hollywood decided I cannot, made me mad," said the hacker.