12-05-2001 Essential news of the week

Brought neatly together and presented on a plate, here is a roundup of some of the week's main news stories from the world of IT. Samsung announces world's smallest audio player Rio slips Iomega in its pocket Dell foresees PC upturn Palomino will be Athlon 4, say sources Windows XP delivery date Delphi gets seriously corporate CD-R prices to skyrocket Homepage virus invades UK Crusoe scripted for a Libretto Another round of tech job cuts Don't forget, we welcome your comments. Just click on a story and go for the 'Comments' link on the right-hand side of the screen. ...more

Gamers are fickies

Neurological research suggests that videogame playing is going to be responsible for the production of an 'educationally-disadvantaged' generation with a propensity for violence. A team in Japan, headed up by brain-mapping expert Professor Ryuta Kawashima, has conducted an experiment on two groups of teenagers at Tohoku University, reports The Observer International Online. One of these groups was required to perform a simple and repetitive arithmetic exercise, while the other got to sit and play Nintendo games. ...more

Microsoft IE security patch thrown in doubt

It looks likely that Microsoft will once again have to patch a vulnerability it has already addressed. The flaw involves Internet Explorer's cross-domain security model and had a severity rating of 'critical'. By the means of specially crafted HTML, an attacker could run programs on your computer when IE is used to view the attacker's website. ...more

Google reserves YouTube DRM for partners only

The commercial content and mainstream media sector is up in arms with video sharing site YouTube over its plans to offer digital rights management and other anti-piracy tools to companies it has signed distribution deals with. According to sources close to the discussions, YouTube, bought last year by Google, will implement technology to help media companies identify pirated videos uploaded by users. However, the tools are currently being offered as part of broader negotiations on licensing deals, they said. ...more

IBM lets you talk to Honda

The latest developments in speech recognition will be fitted as standard on Honda's 2005 Acura RL and as options for other models. Working with IBM and its ViaVoice voice recognition technology, the in-car system recognises more than 700 commands and 1.7 million street and city names across the US. ...more