BetaNews Staff

Apple released an update to its Boot Camp dual-booting application on Thursday, including some new features as well as tweaks to ensure smooth operation. Among the new features is the support for the keyboard backlighting feature on MacBook Pros, and added support for Apple Remote Pairing.

Enhancements include a smoother installation process for Boot Camp drivers, which incorporates an improved graphics driver. International keyboard support is improved, and localization issues have been remedied. Apple has also provided an update to the Windows Help files for Boot Camp. According to Apple, repartitioning of the drive is not necessary, however the user would have to update the Boot Camp Assistant software and create a new drivers CD.

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NBC Universal and News Corp. have announced the inclusion of several cable networks in their online video venture expected this summer. Gemstar-TV Guide, Fuel TV, Oxygen, Speed, and the Sundance Channel have all agreed to provide content for a new portal designed to rival Google's YouTube.

The content, which will range from short-form clips to full-length original programming will also be available through News Corp.'s MySpace and Time Warner's AOL, as well as MSN, Yahoo and Comcast.

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UPDATE: Yahoo has posted a fix for the security flaws with the release of Yahoo Messenger 8.1.0.401 Code for two exploits in Yahoo Messenger first disclosed earlier this week by security firm eEye appeared on the Full Disclosure mailing list on Thursday. At the current time, the only fix is to set the 'kill bits' in the ActiveX controls responsible for the vulnerabilities, although it requires a system registry edit.

The first set of code takes advantage of buffer overflow issues within the Webcam ActiveX component, while the other causes a buffer overflow in the ywcvwr.dll viewer. The issues affect both Yahoo Messenger 8.0 and 8.1 running on Windows.

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Microsoft has released version 6.1 of the Windows Mobile Device Center, which most notably adds support for the Redmond company's newest Windows Mobile 6 platform. The update also enables a PC to access the Internet over a connected phone.

Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 only works with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, and Microsoft Office is required to synchronize contacts and calendar items. The software does not currently support syncing Windows Calendar and Contacts items. Download WMDC 6.1 from FileForum.

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Dell is rumored to be exiting the HDTV business by the end of this month, a little under four years after it first entered the market to diversify its product portfolio, according to Taiwanese business newspaper Economic Daily. While the company only sells HDTVs in the US and Japan, it was not immediately clear whether the decision was part of the continuing reorganization of the company, or due to poor sales.

The Texas-based electronics maker has pulled out of other sectors in the past, including the music player business. The paper seems to indicate that founder and CEO Michael Dell played a large part in the decision. He returned to the company he founded amid declining revenues and falling market share earlier this year. Since then, the company has begun to focus on its core product: personal computers. Dell had no comment.

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Ahead of Apple's yearly developer conference, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz confirmed Wednesday that the next version of Mac OS X -- code-named Leopard and due in October -- will feature Sun's ZFS file system instead of Apple's HFS+ used previously.

The change to ZFS will bring numerous improvements, including checksums to protect data integrity and the ability to abstract storage space from physical drives using a virtual layer, making it easier to add space. ZFS snapshots also improve backup capabilities, and as a 128-bit file system, potential disk size is virtually unlimited. In addition, built-in compression increases performance by 2-3x, according to Sun.

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Adobe on Tuesday released the first major update to both Acrobat and Reader 8.0, adding support for Windows Vista and remote printing capabilities through a partnership with FedEx Kinko's. Version 8.1 (download from FileForum) also brings integration with Microsoft Office 2007.

Acrobat users can now export Office documents to PDF files by right clicking, as well as preview multi-page PDF files from without Outlook 2007. Adobe has additionally added Flash movie playback for Mac users, removing the need to use QuickTime. The new "Send to FedEx Kinko's" toolbar button quickly sends a document to the company's remote printing service, primarily designed for business users when traveling.

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Security firm eEye says it has notified Yahoo of multiple security vulnerabilities within its instant messaging application, which could lead to "remote execution of arbitrary code with minimal user interaction." The flaws were given a severity rating of "high."

Although eEye has withheld specific details of the vulnerabilities and says no exploit code has surfaced, the company notes that both Yahoo! Messenger 8.0 and 8.1 running on Windows are affected. Yahoo says it is working on a fix for the problems, which follow an April security update related to audio conferencing.

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Nearly doubling the educational institutions participating in its massive effort to digitize the world's books, Google said Wednesday that another twelve universities have joined Google Book Search. In total, they will contribute up to 10 million volumes to be scanned.

The new agreement was forged with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which is represented by the University of Chicago and 11 universities that make up the Big Ten athletic conference: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin. The committee and Google say they will respect copyright law, but the search engine is facing lawsuits from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the effort.

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Following in the footsteps of rival CBS, NBC said Wednesday that it will allow users to post snippets of popular NBC news and sports programs to their personal Web sites. Programs to initially be offered include Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Dateline NBC and programming from NBC Sports, DotComedy.com, and iVillage.com.

NBC has allowed users to post clips of Saturday Night Live and Heroes in the past. A Web site owner can post the video through the use of a widget, much like YouTube does to allow its videos to be distributed.

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Continuing its effort to provide an alternative to the One Laptop Per Child project, Intel announced plans on Tuesday to team up with Asustek to produce a notebook for developing countries that could cost as little as $200. The 'Eee PC' will be a full-featured low-end notebook, whereas the OLPC is more aimed at children. Intel has criticized the device in the past for being too simple, and not having enough functionality to even make it worthwhile.

Depending on the feature set, the Eee PC will retail for $199 to $299 and be available publicly. The OLPC currently retails for about $180 to government clients, but there is no currently planned retail push. Intel said it hoped to ship about 200,000 of the notebooks this year after production begins later this summer.

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Toshiba will ship HD DVD drives in all of its laptops beginning in 2008, its senior vice president said Tuesday. While it is unclear what effect the decision will have on the prices of its laptops, typically bundling the high definition drives have resulted in higher retail costs.

Doing so, however, holds promise for the future of the format. According to data from IDC, the company sold 9.2 million notebooks last year, and is in the top five overall in shipments. The company is also planning to use flash memory in its laptops beginning this month, as prices on NAND chips have fallen far enough to make them feasible for such use, it said.

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In a blast from the past, the Netscape Browser, which was resurrected in 2005 by AOL, has become Netscape Navigator once again for version 9.0. The new release, currently in beta, brings a number of new features such as built-in news, URL correction, and link-sharing.

As expected, Netscape Navigator 9 (screenshots) closely integrates with AOL's new Netscape.com site, which lets users vote on stories and leave comments. A new Friends' Activity Sidebar and Tracker provides a quick view of recently posted news and comments on the site.

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The OpenOffice.org development team on Tuesday released the first alpha test version of OpenOffice Aqua, which is built specifically for Apple's Mac OS X operating system. The previous Mac port of OpenOffice required the use of the X11 system, making the software slow and difficult to run.

Although the release is six years in the making, developers warn that the early alpha is still very buggy, and "it may crash and destroy your data." A number of features are still not functional, including printing, PDF export, copy and paste, and multi-monitor support. In addition, OpenOffice Aqua will crash after quitting.

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In an effort to better compete with rival Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com said Tuesday that they would collaborate on several services aimed at small business. The first is a web advertising collaboration where Salesforce.com customers can order ads from the company's website. Other collaborations could include integration with other Google products as well, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Neither company will confirm that the moves are indeed aimed at taking on Microsoft head on, although Google's onine productivity applications could be combined with Salesforce.com's business applications to offer a comprehensive package for enterprise customers, some say.

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