Topic: News

Indian pirates may soon find themselves at the receiving end of their own weapons of mass distribution, the DVD-recordable drives, if what happened at Manipal is an indication.

Security researchers have uncovered new techniques to hide the presence of malware on infected systems. By hiding rootkit software in virtual machine environments, hackers have the potential to avoid detection by security software, boffins at Microsoft Research and the University of Michigan warn.

In the battle to attract viewers to digital TV, cable has been at a disadvantage. For both Sky, with its excellent Sky+ box, and Freeview, with models such as the Humax PVR-8000T, boast hard disk-based video recorders that work seamlessly with their services to make recording programmes very easy.

Following LG's lead, Fujitsu-Siemens has announced that it too will avoid taking sides in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD war, and will support both platforms. "We don't take a stand in that fight, and actually we're very sorry that fight is happening," a Fujitsu-Siemens exec has said.

Sony is in strife after being forced to remove a poster which advised consumers to "Take a running jump" from tram and train stations across the country after transport staff expressed safety concerns.

Flash memory manufacturer Samsung has developed a 32 GB Flash drive which they are packing into a notebook to replace the harddrive.

Soon you could be running your laptop computer all day without a recharge as commercial versions of fuel cells go on sale.

Press release: A South Korean company called Kevis has launched a CCTV digital video recorder series, the KR-5300. The recorders in the range all use M-JPEG compression and support DVD-RW, CD-RW and USB. They also features triplex operation and jog-shuttle search.

NEC is demonstrating at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover a recently developed optical disc drive that can write to HD-DVD media.

BenQ have announced its first 'Trio' writer - the BW1000 - a triple writer that encompasses BD, DVD and CD format support.

InterVideo and their partner Ulead are demonstrating Blu-ray (BD) authoring, burning, content navigation and playback software at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, this weekend.

A new online music service called La la Media, aims to offer full-length CDs for $1 (60p), by letting users trade discs, in a bid to avoid legal pitfalls that face online song trading.

A Channel Isles tax loophole that allows companies to sell VAT-free goods such as CDs and DVDs online to the UK is slowly tightening.

Toshiba on Wednesday unveiled the first high definition laptop computer with a HD DVD optical drive for the new generation of DVD disks and a high resolution display.

Ricoh has developed recordable disks for Blue-ray Disk and HD DVD, the next-generation DVD formats, and has started shipping samples to hardware manufacturers.

Torrent outfits isoHunt and TorrentBox are joining forces to fight a legal attack from the Motion Picture Ass. of America.

According to the Sunday Mirror, publicans could face prosecution if they allow dodgy dvds to change hands in their pubs.

TDK have announced that it is to begin shipping 25GB recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Disc (BD) media across Europe and will follow with 50GB media in April.

The majority of the Taiwnese-based CD-R makers are reportedly reluctant to join Philips' new licensing system for CD-R media, dubbed "Veeza".

ABC, the american broadcasting giant, is to make shows available to download free this year. The downloads will be interspersed with advertising, meaning that viewers of the downloads will get 15 minutes of content interspersed with 5 minute ad-breaks, as they currently get on the TV.