China developing its own DVD format

For the second time in two years, China has announced plans to develop its own next-generation DVD standard to break the monopoly of foreign companies and avoid paying heavy licensing fees.

The Associated Press reports in The New York Times (7 October) that, if successful, the move could add a new wrinkle to the battle between HD DVD and the competing Blu-ray Disc formats over which will become the dominant new DVD standard.

The AP/NYT report says that the official Xinhua News Agency said the new standard will be based on but incompatible with HD DVD, which is being promoted by Toshiba and Universal Studios, as well as Intel and Microsoft, the leading suppliers of chips and software for most of the world's personal computers.

The Chinese standard, not expected to reach markets until at least 2008, would provide higher definition, better sound and better anti-piracy measures, Xinhua quoted Lu Da, deputy director of the government-affiliated National Disc Engineering Center, as saying earlier this week.

AP says the announcement marks China's latest attempt to leverage its manufacturing muscle to play by its own terms in the home video market. Up to 80 percent of DVD players are made in China, but makers have to cough up around 40 percent of the cost of each player to license holders, according to Chinese reports.

According to AP, Xinhua didn't give a name for the new HD DVD-based standard, and it wasn't clear whether it had borrowed technology from the EVD standard. No directory listing could be obtained for the National Disc Engineering Center on Friday, which was a holiday in China.

Blu-ray is backed by Sony, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, along with a variety of other tech companies and studios.

Dutch police have arrested three people for building a worldwide zombie network of more than 100,000 PCs used to launch internet attacks on companies and to hack into bank and Paypal accounts.

The Register reports (7 October) that the main suspect, a 19 year-old man, and his alleged accomplices, a 22 year-old and a 27 year-old, were collared in raids on their homes. Police seized "several computers, documents, a bank account, bare cash and a sports car". More arrests are expected.

The Register says that the compromised PCs were hacked using a trojan horse, called W 32.Toxbot, according to the police, who say that "some thousands" of the victims were based in the Netherlands.

Investigators have identified at least one distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, targeting an unnamed American company, emanating from the zombie botnet, according to The Register, which adds that DDoS attacks are often used by extortionists to unleash a barrage of computer-generated request to victim websites to cripple their operations, with online gambling firms and web retailers typical victims.

The Register says that the suspects are also thought to have hacked into a large number of PayPal and eBay accounts, enabling them to order several goods over the internet, without actually paying for them.

New guidelines for the procurement of IT equipment for Ireland's public sector have levelled the playing field for technology manufacturers, according to The register in a 7 October report.

The Register says that the updated guidelines prohibit specific requests for brand names or trademarked technologies.

The move by Ireland's Department of Finance is in response to new European Union procurement rules, which require public agencies to use an open procurement process and prohibit the use of certain supplier brands or products in public tender documents. Also, on the banned list is any mention of certain technical features such as the clock rate or the cache of the microprocessor.

According to The Register, the EU rules are intended to promote competition and help public sector departments in Ireland get the best technology at the best price. Unsurprisingly, the new guidelines have been welcomed by number two chipmaker AMD, which said in a statement that the directives would help avoid descriptions that could lead to "discriminatory and non-competitive bids."

The Register says that, in the past, there has been criticism of public sector tender documents in certain EU member states that specifically called for the use of Intel microchips, or other hardware and software made by specific manufacturers.

Procurement processes that specifically requested Intel chips in computers have already been investigated by European regulators after complaints were made. Last year, Germany and Italy also fell foul of the European Commission, when it threatened legal action against them for what it saw as the favouring of systems with Intel chips.

The publication says that this shift in EU-wide procurement rules marks the latest chapter in the battle between rival chipmakers AMD and Intel. AMD has already filed complaints against Intel, claiming it indulged in "coercion" to suppress competition in the market. Its complaint accused Intel of intimidating global PC manufacturers and discouraging them from buying AMD products. As such, Intel is currently facing a European Commission investigation, as well as similar inquiries in other markets, The Register adds.

The America Online unit of Time Warner agreed yesterday to buy Weblogs, the owner of 85 Web sites that serve as hosts to the popular online diaries called blogs.

The Associated Press reports in The New York Times (8 October) that the closely held Weblogs publishes about 1,000 blogs a week on topics including technology, parent issues and video games, AOL said. The company did not disclose the price, but it was widely reported as US$25 million.

According to AP., the acquisition will help AOL attract advertisers as the company looks for new sources of revenue. Although anyone with an internet connection can post a blog on the Web, Weblogs hires experts to write the columns on the 75 topics it covers.

In the US., traffic resumed between two feuding internet access providers on Friday, mending a rift that had blocked off portions of the internet for thousands of users over the past two days, reports Reuters in The New York Times (7 October).

Reuters reports that Cogent Communications Group said rival Level 3 Communications had begun to accept its internet traffic again after blocking it on Wednesday during a dispute over payments, according to Reuters.

Level 3 was not immediately available for comment.

Reuters says that other internet users confirmed that traffic between the two large wholesale providers was flowing again.

According to Reuters, the dispute meant that thousands of internet users, including customers of Time Warner's Road Runner cable-modem service, were unable to send e-mail and view web sites located on the other company's network. Roughly 15 percent to 17 percent of the internet was affected, Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer said.

The report says that large wholesale providers commonly hand off traffic from one network to another free of charge. But Level 3 cut off Cogent after it said it was handling too much of Cogent's traffic.

A US appeals court refused on Friday to reconsider a patent infringement ruling against Research In Motion (RIM) in a case that could halt US sales of its popular BlackBerry wireless e-mail device.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (7 October) that the Canadian firm had asked that all the judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rehear and reconsider the ruling of a three-judge panel first issued in December.

According to Reuters, the case goes back to 2002, when patent holding company NTP successfully sued RIM in a lower court. That first ruling found RIM infringed on 16 claims tied to five NTP patents.

NTP won an injunction in 2003, stayed pending appeal, to halt US sales of the BlackBerry and shut down its service in the United States.A December appellate ruling concluded that RIM infringed on 11 NTP patent claims, but scaled that back to seven in August, says Reuters in the NYT report.

NTP said in a statement that the latest appeals court ruling means the case will go back to a lower court for ''re-confirmation'' of the injunction. An NTP lawyer said the firm would move quickly to get the case back before the lower court.RIM said it now plans to seek a review of the case by the US Supreme Court, according to the Reuters report.

While ever more ways exist to replicate your favorite computer environment on any PC, researchers at IBM are trying to take the concept further, according to Associated Press report in The New York Times (7 October).

The AP report says that the aim is to capture the true ghost in the machine. Since 2003, an IBM group has been developing a way for portable storage devices to transfer literally everything someone might do on one computer to another -- including programs that are in action, reports AP.

The report says that IBM calls the project SoulPad, because it's as if the soul of the computer is frozen in the portable device, ready to be reconstituted in another machine's ''body'' at the user's will.

IBM has had to fiddle with some programs to make this possible, but many computer applications are already built to survive interruptions, such as when a Wi-Fi connection momentarily goes on the fritz, reports AP.

According to the AP/NYT report, for now, SoulPad remains a research project, as IBM fine-tunes the program. For instance, while SoulPad needs only 30 seconds to preserve a computing session, it takes more than two minutes to relaunch it on another machine.

Japan's Nintendo cut its first-half operating profit estimate by one third on Friday due to sluggish sales of its GameCube game console and software in the United States, but boosted its net profit estimates due to currency-related gains.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (7 October) that the Kyoto-based company, known for software titles featuring characters such as Mario, Donkey Kong and Pokemon, also cited price cuts to its ``DS'' portable game machine and high development costs for a new game system as factors weighing on its earnings.

Nintendo said it now expected to book a group operating profit of 20 billion yen for the six months ended September 30, compared to its prior estimate of 30 billion yen.

The Reuters reports said that Nintendo lowered its first-half sales estimate by 8 percent to 175 billion yen.

Yoshihiro Mori, senior managing director at Nintendo, said the biggest negative factor was sluggish sales of software for the GameCube as third-party developers had focused on making games for its next-generation console due next year.

According to the Reuters/NYT report, following the sluggish first-half performance, the game maker slashed its forecast for operating profit in the full year to next 22 March by percent to 90 billion yen and cut its sales forecast by about 4 percent to 500 billion yen.

PSP users are being urged to beware of a Trojan which, once executed, turns their games gizmo into little more than an expensive book weight, reports The Register (7 October).

The Register reports that the PlayStation Portable PSP Brick Trojan poses as a utility that allows gamers to run homebrew apps or pirated games.

According to The Register, the latest version 2.0 of the PSP firmware stops the execution of custom code on the device. But after the discovery of a buffer overflow in version 2.0 of the PSP firmware, a firmware downgrade to 1.50 became the "Holy Grail" of PSP homebrew development.

The publication says that various firmware dowgrade tools sprung up. But one of the utilities has turned out to be a Trojan that renders the PSP unusable. The malware poses as software from the "PSP Team". In reality the code will remove important system files from the flash which makes the system unbootable or a brick, as gamers call it.

Symantec said it would be difficult to recover an infected device. Some gamers have been hit after downloading the malware from gaming forums and running it on their PSP.

Californian Governoir Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation on Friday to outlaw the sale to teenagers of electronic games featuring reckless mayhem and explicit sexuality.

The New York Times reports (8 October) that the governor's approval of the bill was in doubt until the last minute, when he signed it as part of a series of measures that he said would protect children and strengthen families. The video game industry, which has sales of more than US$7 billion a year and is largely based in California, lobbied heavily against the bill and vowed to challenge it in court, saying it violated the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech.

The newspaper says that the video game measure is similar to bills passed recently in Illinois and Michigan but is expected to have far broader impact because of the size of the California market and the state's role in blazing national trails on social issues.

The report says that the bill bans the sale or rental to those under 18 of any video games that "depict serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel." Violations carry a fine of up to US$1,000.

The newspaper says the issue of violence in video games is not new, with numerous games that arm players with fantastically powerful weapons used to kill or dismember their enemies. But, says the NYT., the issue erupted onto the national scene in recent years with the popularity of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The games, made by Take-Two Interactive, reward a player for undertaking various criminal pursuits, including shooting rivals and stealing cars.

DirecTV, the US satellite television operator, is introducing a US$30 million advertising campaign on Monday to promote its highly anticipated digital video recorder.

The Associated Press reports in The New York Times (8 October) that the campaign, created by the New York office of BBDO Worldwide, is DirecTV's first widespread public effort to distance itself from TiVo. Of DirecTV's 14.7 million customers, 2.3 million now subscribe to TiVo. DirecTV, which pays TiVo a monthly fee of US$1.13 per TiVo subscriber, hopes those users will switch to its own service.

AP reports that the software for the new service is provided by NDS, a subsidiary of the News Corporation, which also owns a controlling interest in DirecTV.

The report adds that DirecTV's standard DVR, originally set to be released this past June, will be introduced in late October, and another model featuring high-definition service will be introduced in mid-2006. The standard DVR will feature up to 100 hours of recordable space, compared with TiVo's 70 hours.

AP says that DirecTV will continue to support the TiVo service without marketing it, and both services will be priced at us$5.99 a month. The company's current contract with TiVo is set to expire in early 2007. DirecTV has not said if it will continue the contract after that.

The chief financial officer of struggling Japanese electronics maker Sanyo Electric has quit because he was at odds with the president and chief executive over how to rebuild the firm.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (8 October) that in a statement released late on Friday, Sanyo said Yoichiro Furuse handed in his resignation because of "differing views over management policies."

Furuse, 63, had been working with Sanyo President Toshimasa Iue and Chief Executive Tomoyo Nonaka on a plan to rebuild the company after earthquake damage to a chip factory and sluggish demand for core products pushed it deep into the red, says Reuters in the NYT report.

Reuters says that in July, Japan's third-largest consumer electronics maker unveiled a 3-year restructuring plan under which it vowed to cut 14,000 jobs, or about 15 percent of its global workforce, shutter plants and halve its 1.2 trillion yen (10.5 billion pound) debt. But its earnings have since worsened and last month Sanyo announced it would accelerate those job cuts, exit the DVD player business and raised its full-year net loss forecast to 140 billion yen from 92 billion yen, according to Reuters.

A Singapore court Friday sentenced two ethnic Chinese to prison for posting racist remarks about ethnic Malays on the internet, in what is considered a landmark case underscoring the government's attempts to crack down on racial intolerance and regulate online expression, according to an Associated Press report in The New York Times (7 October).

The AP/NYT report says that animal shelter worker Benjamin Koh Song Huat, 27, was jailed for one month while Nicholas Lim Yew, an unemployed 25-year-old, was sentenced to a nominal prison term of one day and fined the maximum 5,000 Singapore dollars (US$2,969) for racist comments against the minority Malay community.

Lim and Koh stood in the docks with their heads bowed as they pleaded guilty to charges of committing acts ''which had seditious tendencies to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races and classes,''AP reports.

The AP report says that Lim had posted disparaging comments about Malays and Islam on an internet forum for dog lovers in a discussion about whether taxis should refuse to carry uncaged pets out of consideration for Muslims, whose religion considers dogs unclean.

In his online journal, Koh had advocated desecrating Islam's holy site of Mecca.

According to an 8 October report in The Register, consumers embarking on a shopping spree may be able to leave their wallets behind in the near future, despite some security and privacy experts' concerns.

The Register reports that, this week, Pay By Touch Solutions, a San Francisco-based firm whose system allows customers to pay at participating grocery stores with the press of a finger, announced that investors have pledged US$130m to fund the company's expansion plans.

And, rival BioPay has already enrolled more than two million people into its service for cashing payroll checks and paying at the supermarket checkout, the report says.

The Register reports that paying by fingerprint is a hit with consumers, because people want convenience and faster check outs, said Shannon Reardon, director of marketing for Pay By Touch.