Nate Mook

Despite speculation that Microsoft had all but put to rest its controversial next-generation security system for Windows, "Palladium" is now set to make its first appearance in a Longhorn preview release at WinHEC 2005 later this month.

Palladium, renamed to the less-ominous sounding Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), was first announced in 2003 as a marriage of software and hardware technologies. A Trusted Platform Module would reside in the hardware, while the software contained the Trusted Operating Root.

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"What's LI-Nux?"

The question came from my cousin, Mary an art teacher. Mary is the first to acknowledge that she knows little about operating systems and has no interest in them, though she is an avowed Macintosh enthusiast.

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RealNetworks announced on Thursday that it will be unveiling what it calls "a groundbreaking initiative in digital music" at a New York City event on April 26. The company is sponsoring a free concert with Good Charlotte at Radio City Music Hall. Tickets will be distributed through radio stations and other promotions.

"Ten years ago, RealNetworks brought sound to the Internet with RealAudio. On April 26, RealNetworks will change the Internet again and revolutionize digital music," the company said in a statement. No further details were offered, but Real has been rumored to be working on a portable subscription service similar to Napster To Go.

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While Google News may be garnering all the attention, Yahoo has been quietly refreshing its own news aggregator, which is now available in beta form. The revamped Yahoo News streamlines the site's interface to pack in more headlines and pictures, along with adding support for user-added news sources via RSS feeds.

Unlike Google, which has even begun including blog postings as news, Yahoo only pulls headlines from a limited number of major media outlets. But to make up for the smaller pool of content, Yahoo members can add headlines from any RSS-enabled Web site, which appear in the "My Sources" tab.

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While online music stores begin to gain acceptance among the recording industry and consumers alike, Google is looking to a future beyond just audio. The company is preparing a video distribution platform that provides a complete ecosystem of services for content producers, publishers and end-users.

Google began testing its prototype video search engine in January, which scours the closed captioning text of television shows from a variety of channels. Users can view still images from a segment, but due to unsettled licensing issues, cannot see video clips nor read full transcripts.

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At the Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix Wednesday, Microsoft announced the availability of a public beta release of its Data Protection Manager (DPM) software. DPM provides a near continuous disk-based backup and offers rapid recovery in the event of a failure - without relying on tape.

Microsoft has been beta testing DPM among its partners since last September, and boasts a resounding positive response for the product.

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AOL has finally let loose its new media player beta to the general public. As first reported by BetaNews, AOL Media Player (AMP) runs independent of the company's client software and is one of many new efforts to expose AOL products and services to Web users outside its "walled garden" of subscribers.

AMP was previously slated to be a component of AOL's Fanfare suite, which has since been disbanded. Although AOL client tie-ins will remain, AMP is now a full-fledged application, complete with media library, video support and CD ripping to MPEG4 AAC or Microsoft's WMA formats.

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palmOne on Wednesday took the wraps off its latest Tungsten handheld, the Bluetooth-enabled E2. The second revision sports a brighter 320x320 screen, 32MB of Flash memory, and wireless capabilities. Battery life has also been given a boost.

But palmOne didn't just focus on internal improvements with the Tungsten E2, hoping to attract more style-conscious PDA consumers.

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Microsoft said on Tuesday it has hired Yahoo's head of research and development, Dr. Gary Flake, to join its MSN portal team. Flake will be charged with helping MSN bulk up its search offerings to better compete with market leaders Google and Yahoo. Flake's background includes NEC Research Institute and Overture.

Dr. Flake is no stranger to search; at Yahoo, he focused on creating the next-generation Web search. "At Microsoft he'll be responsible for bridging the innovation happening between Microsoft Research and MSN and for setting the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and monetization engine," said Oshoma Momoh, MSN Search general manager.

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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said Tuesday it intends to file lawsuits against hundreds of college students sharing music and movie files over Internet2, the next-generation network of college universities that is intended for research of new technologies.

On Wednesday, 405 lawsuits will be filed against students at 18 universities.

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The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the global recording industry, has filed suit against 963 individuals across Europe and Asia for illegally sharing copyrighted music on peer-to-peer networks.

The lawsuits will be the first time such legal action has been taken to combat P2P piracy in Japan, the Netherlands, Iceland, Finland and Ireland. The IFPI has previously launched hundreds of similar attacks on file swappers in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the UK.

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Adobe has followed up its March public beta of Acrobat Reader 7 for Linux with a version it has deemed final. The release brings back the PDF viewer for the open source platform, after Adobe skipped version 6. The company cited customer demand for creating a Linux edition, although it took Adobe three extra months to prepare.

"The rate of adoption of the Linux operating system among enterprises worldwide - especially among government and financial services organizations - is increasing," said Eugene Lee, Adobe vice president of product marketing. Acrobat Reader 7 includes new commenting tools and support for 3D CAD graphics.

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Google has updated its mobile capabilites to include local search functions, which find nearby businesses using a name and zip code. Browser-enabled cell phone users can now pull up Yellow Pages data on the run, and even retrieve driving directions by sending an SMS text message to Google using the code "46645."

Google Local went live in February after being part a of the company's Google Labs development sandbox. The service currently only works in the United States and Canada, but Google plans to expand its reach in due time. Google has offered mobile Web searches since 2001, with SMS support being added late last year.

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Hewlett-Packard announced Tuesday that it has struck an agreement with Apple to sell HP-branded versions of the iPod Photo, despite assumptions that flat sales of the standard HP iPod would limit such an expansion. HP will offer both the 30GB and 60GB iPod Photo priced identically to Apple's own models.

The iPod Photo was unveiled last October and features a 65,536-color screen sporting a 220x176-pixel resolution. Users scroll through pictures just like songs, browsing 25 thumbnails at a time, and can also view album art while music is playing. The 30GB model is priced at $349 USD while the 60GB version runs $449 USD.

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LexisNexis said on Tuesday that a security breach which resulted in personal information of thousands of its customers potentially being compromised could be ten times worse than originally thought. An investigation has discovered that 310,000 U.S. citizens may have had their addresses and Social Security numbers accessed.

As reported last month, the break-in occurred at LexisNexis-owned Seisint, a company that specializes in creating databases from information it gets from the U.S. government. At the time it was believed only 32,000 customers were affected by the hack.

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