No hackers for Microsoft

Microsoft has issued a statement regarding the recent outage of its Web sites and blamed a misconfigured DNS server rather than the work of hackers. In a statement issued late yesterday, the company admitted that a Microsoft engineer made a configuration change to routers at the edge of the DNS network. Unfortunately, the mistaken configuration change meant that many of the Microsoft sites were unreachable. ...more

Holographic discs set for retail next year

The first holographic storage systems, storing up to 300GB on a single disc, will go on sale towards the end of 2006. InPhase Technologies and Hitachi are jointly developing the technology, which uses laser light interference to store data in a light-sensitive crystal material. The technique could be developed to store up to 1. ...more

HP budgets for first-timers with new printer range

New Deskjets to suit anyone's pocket. From August it will be possible to buy the HP Deskjet 3550, 3650 and 5159 inkjet printers at ?49, ?69 and ?89 inc VAT respectively. The former will produce prints up to 2400dpi (dots per inch) using HP's PhotoREt III droplet technology on premium photo paper. ...more

Sun adds open source database to Solaris 10

Sun has announced a number of new additions to the Solaris 10 platform and OpenSolaris project, including first-time support for an open source database. The company said yesterday that it will distribute and support the open source PostgresSQL database - a decisive move for the company that has such strong ties to Oracle. Execs said that the move was a response to customer demand and places Solaris 10 as a key platform for hosting high-performance, mission-critical database solutions. ...more

Two new vulnerabilities announced for Windows and IE

Microsoft has issued two new warnings for its Windows software in this month's security bulletin. One is a flaw found in Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, while the other covers a number of security patches for Internet Explorer. The first is a so-called 'privilege elevation' vulnerability that has been privately reported to Microsoft. ...more