South Korea orders Microsoft to unbundle Windows

Microsoft was ordered to separate its instant messaging service from its Windows software and allow rival products on its system in South Korea after losing a ruling on unfair business practices on Wednesday.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (7 December) that the US software firm, which was also fined about US$32 million, said it would appeal the decision by South Korea's Fair Trade Commission but did not plan to make good on a threat to withdraw Windows from the country.

The ruling, which resembles a 2004 European Commission decision, held Microsoft breached antitrust laws by selling a version of its Windows operating system that incorporated its instant messaging software.

Reuters reports that analysts said the ruling would benefit smaller rivals who used rival Linux-developed software.

Microsoft was ordered to introduce a version of Windows that allows embedding of products of other software makers, while separating its Media Server from the operating system.

The FTC also fined Microsoft 33 billion won, the largest fine imposed on a foreign firm by the commission, and ordered it to unbundle its Messenger and Media Player from Windows. It gave the firm six months to comply with the ruling.

{mospagebreaktitle=Microsoft to add 3,000 jobs in India}Microsoft to add 3,000 jobs in India

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Wednesday that his company plans to add 3,000 jobs in India over the next three to four years, nearly doubling its workforce in the country.

''We have 4,000 professionals in India today, we will increase it to 7,000 over the next three to four years,'' Bill Gates told a forum of Indian business leaders, reports Reuters in The new York Times (7 December).

According to Reuters, Microsoft has long viewed India, a country of 1 billion people with a robust economy, as a potentially huge market.

In his fourth trip to the nation, Gates was to meet with senior Indian officials, business leaders and programmers and take stock of a US$400-million investment program the company announced for India three years ago.

Gates didn't say if expanding staff in India would also involve new investments, but industry officials expect him to make some announcement later Wednesday.

The Reuters/NYT report says that earlier this year, the company opened a research centre in the southern city of Hyderabad, the fourth such Microsoft facility worldwide. Next month, the company plans to open an innovation center in Bangalore, India's technology hub, that will be part of a global network promoting education, entrepreneurial development and innovations by small businesses.

Gates said the company's efforts in India were aimed at narrowing the digital divide, by creating products that are not only affordable to the poor people but also address their unique needs.

{mospagebreaktitle=Sun makes Niagara an open-source chip}Sun makes Niagara an open-source chip
 
In a bid to increase the relevance of its processor line, Sun Microsystems pledged Tuesday to make the underlying designs of its new UltraSparc T1 an open-source project.

CNet reports in The New York Times (7 December) that the Sparc chip specifications have been available for years to those who pay a fee to licensing organisation Sparc International. But now Sun plans to release not just the specifications, but also the design itself, written in the Verilog hardware description language, and an accompanying verification suite and simulation models.

The report says that Sun plans to release the information through a new group called OpenSparc in the first quarter of 2006 and will use a license approved by the Open Source Initiative, the company said during Tuesday's launch of the ambitious T1-based T1000 and T2000 servers.

{mospagebreaktitle=News Corp. expands online strategy}News Corp. expands online strategy

Ross Levinsohn, the internet chief at News Corp., told investors Tuesday the company was considering teaming up with a partner in sponsored search as it expands its online strategy.

The Associated Press reports in The New York Times (7 December) that Levinsohn, speaking at a media conference sponsored by the UBS investment bank, said it was still unclear whether Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate would acquire an internet search provider or form a partnership with one. He said the company was hearing proposals from several parties, including Quigo.

Search, which enables computer users to find information by entering keywords, remains an element to be added to News Corp.'s growing array of online media assets. These began with the US$580 million acquisition this summer of the owner of social networking site MySpace.com.

The AP report says that Levinsohn revealed some other details of News Corp.'s online product, which Murdoch has indicated is the next key growth area for the conglomerate that owns the Fox broadcast network, the 20th Century Fox studio, and Fox News Channel.

Levinsohn said News Corp. would begin producing web-only episodes next year of the hit Fox show, ''Family Guy.'' They would be accessible mostly on the show's own web site but also be promoted on IGN, a gaming site that News Corp. acquired. He said there would likely be an advertising component, but it was unclear what form it would take.

According to AP, MySpace is continuing to build up its music business, launching a record label and signing its first band. Music remains an ''absolutely critical'' component of MySpace's business going forward, News Corp. said.

Asked about opposition among some MySpace members that emerged after the site's purchase by News Corp., Levinsohn said the company was being ''pretty careful'' about preserving the freewheeling culture of MySpace, noting that it has continued to expand even after its purchase by News Corp. and now has some 40 million users.

Levinsohn said the company is considering how to sell advertising on the space without detracting from the experience of people who use the site to build their own personal pages, where they can post photos.

{mospagebreaktitle=Sony BMG urges security fix for CDs}Sony BMG urges security fix for CDs

Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Tuesday some 5.7 million of its CDs were shipped with anti-piracy technology that requires a new software patch to plug a potential security breach in computers used to play the CDs.

The Associated Press reports in The New York Times (7 December) that the security vulnerability was discovered by online civil liberty group Electronic Frontier Foundation and brought to the attention of Sony BMG, which has been under fire in recent weeks over security issues with an unrelated CD copy-protection plan.

The company said Tuesday it brought the issue up with the MediaMax software maker, SunnComm Technologies, which has developed a software patch to fix the problem.

AP reports that the MediaMax Version 5 software was loaded on 27 Sony BMG titles, including Alicia Keys' ''Unplugged,'' and Cassidy's ''I'm A Hustla.''

CD copy-protection software is generally designed to restrict how many times computer users can make duplicate versions of a CD in an effort to stem piracy.

The AP/NYT report says that a computer security firm working with EFF discovered the security issue with the MediaMax Version 5 CDs and how it affects computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system.

{mospagebreaktitle=NBC to sell tv shows for viewing on Apple software}NBC to sell tv shows for viewing on Apple software

In the US., NBC Universal said yesterday that it would start to sell downloadable versions of 11 of its current and older television shows through the iTunes Music Store of Apple Computer.

The New York Times reports (7 December) that NBC is the second major television network to distribute programming through Apple. In October, Apple started to sell episodes from five current programs on the ABC network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company. Those programs can be watched both on Apple's latest generation of iPod portable players and on Apple and Windows-based personal computers running Apple's iTunes software.

In addition to full programs - which will not have commercials - NBC will sell video excerpts from some programs, like the headlines feature of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."

The newspaper reports that all of these programs will sell for US$1.99, the price for the ABC offerings.

Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, said in an interview that he hoped that his company could create the same market for US$1.99 video that it did for 99-cent song downloads.  He pointed out that Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs and now has two million.

{mospagebreaktitle=Panel backs ruling on memory patent}Panel backs ruling on memory patent

The United States International Trade Commission has ruled that the SanDisk Corporation, the maker of flash-memory cards, could not prohibit STMicroelectronics from selling cards that store digital pictures and music.

The New York Times reports (7 December) that the trade commission has said that it had upheld an administrative law judge's decision that STMicroelectronics did not infringe a SanDisk patent. SanDisk said it would appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specialises in patent law.

The two companies are suing each other in California and Texas over flash-memory cards, which retain data after the devices they are in are shut off. They are used to manage data in devices like digital cameras and cellphones.

{mospagebreaktitle=Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules}Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations.

The Associated Press reports in The New York Times (6 December) that Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the US-based web site said. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.

According to AP., the change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler, a one-time administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, complained in an op-ed published in USA Today that a biography of him on Wikipedia claimed he had been suspected in the assassinations of the former attorney general and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

Wikipedia, often cited as a prime example of the type of collective knowledge-pooling that the internet enables, has some 850,000 articles in English as well as entries in at least eight other languages, including Italian, French, German and Portuguese.

Since it's launch in 2001, it has grown into a storehouse of information on topics ranging from medieval art to nanotechnology, says AP.

{mospagebreaktitle=Chip makers drive race to US$20 cellphones by 2007}Chip makers drive race to US$20 cellphones by 2007

Prices of mobile phones will drop sharply over coming years with US$20 handsets available to consumers as early as 2007, chip companies said on Tuesday.

Reuters reports in The New York Times that mobile phones may even be produced as cheaply as US$10, but the major phone vendors seem reluctant to do so because they will have to use cheap parts and the lower quality may hurt their brand image, said Horst Pratsch, vice president for Entry Platforms at German chip maker Infineon.

The Reuters report says that low-cost handsets have been a major driver of the cell phone market in 2005, with vendors such as Motorola selling models for less than US$50 to consumers in emerging markets who could previously not afford to buy a phone.

Infineon, and rivals such as Philips from the Netherlands, are striving to integrate the key functions of a mobile phone into a single chip of around US$5.

Reuters reports that this will help phone producers assemble a complete phone with far fewer components than the 150 used now, Pratsch said.

{mospagebreaktitle=Google makes US brand top three}Google makes US brand top three

Google has stormed an annual poll measuring public reputations and perceptions of the "most valuable" companies in US corporate culture.

The Register reports (7 December) that the sprawling provider of search and Web 2.0 infrastructure services came third out of 60 household names in Harris Interactive's annual Reputation Quotation. This is the first time in its seven-year history that Google made Harris' poll.

In a tribute to the growing importance placed on search by US internet users, or possibly the growing chatter in the media and on Wall St concerning the subject of search, Google was the highest placed tech company.

The Register says that Google's aspiring search rival Microsoft, meanwhile, dropped a position to seventh, swapping places with Sony. Only blue chip giants Johnson & Johnson and the Coca-Cola Company beat Google, coming first and second respectively.

Elsewhere in the top 20, 3M Company came fifth, Intel tenth, Dell fifteenth, and IBM nineteenth.

{mospagebreaktitle=Red Hat designs rubber stamp for open source stacks}Red Hat designs rubber stamp for open source stacks

Red Hat will certify open source applications running on its Linux distribution with three subscription-based services that potentially challenge start-ups.

The Register reports (7 December) that the Linux distributor will certify and support a catalogue of open source software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, grouped into three buckets called the web application stack, Java web application stack and enterprise Java stack.

Red Hat will charge US$599 per server per year for each of the services, scheduled for launch during the first quarter of 2006.

According to The Register, Red Hat is launching the services to ease development and delivery of software based on an increasingly popular swathe of open source web, tools and infrastructure applications running on RHEL. Red Hat's services potentially identify and eliminate conflicts between the different software elements.

According to Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat, certified stacks will help developers get to market faster. The services are also designed to give developers confidence that the integrated stacks will work.

{mospagebreaktitle=eBay UK takes down pirate software sales}eBay UK takes down pirate software sales

Microsoft and eBay are working together to stop the sale of pirate software on the online auction site. According to Microsoft, more than 21,000 suspect software sales were removed from the UK eBay site between August and October this year.

The Register reports (7 December) that over half (52 per cent) were sales of counterfeit Microsoft Windows, while 36 oer cent were fake copies of Microsoft Office.

According to Microsoft, the crackdown is working. It says that eBay removed 11,535 suspected counterfeit sales from the site in August. This fell to 4,460 in September and 5,423 in October.

The Register reports that a band of approximately 100 suspected illegal traders accounted for more than 3,000 of the items.