Malaysia's plan to forcibly cut prices of film and music discs to curb piracy won't work, and tougher penalties for crooks are the only solution, a senior U.S. trade official has said.

This autumn, Pioneer will launch a new line of DVD recorders featuring TiVo's personal video recorder technology. Almost certain to cause anxiety among Hollywood studios and network broadcasters, the new recorders will combine TiVo's versatile recording and operating features, and give consumers the choice of archiving their recordings on magnetic hard disks or DVD-R/RW optical disks.

Sony have released details of their RDR-GX3 budget DVD-R/RW and DVD+RW video recorder. The recorder is expected to cost around £450.00 and is due in September 2003.

Iran to become a major world CD producer.

A group of hackers claims to have publicly posted software that defeats all Xbox security measures, after failing to win concessions from Microsoft.

IT managers are bracing themselves for a flood of web defacement attacks this weekend as vandals take part in this year's run of The Defacers' Challenge.

Sanyo Electric will start selling key components for DVD recorders to outside companies, by the end of the year.

Hitachi Maxell announced a series of Blue Ray discs based on blue REIDISUKURIRAITA format Ver.1.0. The new discs offer an 23GB capacity which means that they can hold up to 2-hours of high definition video. Availability in the market is expected by 25th of August, at an estimated street price of 25 EUR.

Investors are scrambling to buy Taiwan's loss-making computer compact disk makers amid signs of a turnaround in the US$2 billion industry after last year's deep slump.

Intersil introduced a new family of dual laser diode drivers (LDDs) optimized for low power, slim CD and DVD recordable disk drives used in laptop PCs. Intersil’s new Elantec® EL683X family is comprised of dual output four-channel LDDs that offer the performance, flexibility and power efficiency needed in portable drives supporting all popular disk drive formats, including DVD+R/W, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, CD-R/W, CD-R and CD-ROM.

Prices for DVD-Dual drives have continued to drop amid intensified competition as a number of manufacturers have recently launched the products and more are expected to follow suit in the second half of the year.

LSI Logic Corporation today announced it has co-developed next-generation DVD players with Philips Electronics based on the high-performance ZiVA(TM)-5 DVD system processor and Philips' user-friendly interface.

Apple iTunes has received all the media attention in the online music distribution field, but also the Spanish pioneering company Listen.com can put some impressive figures on the table.

DVD-ROM drive sales will grow significantly in the second half of this year and eat into CD-ROM drive sales, as the devices see a more rapid price decline, Taiwanese distributors project.

mm02 paraded a clutch of plans today to improve data revenues. The mobile network operator is setting up a public wireless LAN (PWLAN) network in the UK, introducing ICQ instant messaging to its German operation, committing to an updated version of its XDA voice/data handset, out in time for Christmas.

Connie, the annoyingly prim face of AOL UK for the last five years, has been told her (virtual) services will no longer be required by the company.

PC manufacturer Gateway has launched several non-PC products during the last couple of months, trying desperately to turn the company profitable again. The company's latest consumer electronics product is a stand-alone DVD player that includes 802.11b compatible WLAN access.

Australian lawmakers could make spam illegal by the end of the year, reports state. The move could make Australia the first country in the world to outlaw what Bill Gates calls this "pollution of the email ecosystem".

321 Studios has released a new version of DVD X Copy XPRESS.

The software company this month quietly launched a new search program called MSNBot, which scours the Web to build an index of HTML links and documents. The homegrown system--which performs robot functions previously left to Inktomi and other partners--may pose a significant threat to Google if Microsoft fulfills its promise to make the program a cornerstone of its overall PC and services strategies.