UPDATED: Microsoft denied patent for FAT filing system

Microsoft has lost the first round in the battle to patent the FAT filing system used in DOS and which formed the basis of the disk management system of early versions of Windows. The US Patent and Trademark Office decided in a review of the patent granted to Microsoft in 1996 that it did not differ sufficiently from the work of other programmers to merit legal protection. The challenge to the 1996 patent was mounted in April of this year by the Public Patent Foundation (Pubpat) after Microsoft began to start collecting royalties on the patent. ...more

Intel signs up to join Eclipse consortium

Intel has announced that it has become a supporting member of Eclipse, which is a consortium of software development tool vendors building an 'open platform' for integrating third-party tools. Developers optimising applications for the Pentium 4, Xeon or Itanium processors will be able to use plug-ins to integrate Intel compilers and the VTune Performance Analyzers into the Eclipse development environment. Eclipse describes itself as 'a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular'. ...more

Real patches RealOne vulnerabilties

Real Networks has issued patches in response to three vulnerabilities found in its RealOne players. Although the company says it has received no reports on anyone being affected by the security holes, it recommends that users with affected software should upgrade. The first problem, which affects RealOne Player, RealOne Player v2 for Windows only, the RealPlayer 10 Beta and all versions of the RealOne Enterprise Desktop or RealPlayer Enterprise edition allows an attacker run a malicious Javascript file from a domain opened by a SMIL or other file. ...more

The weekly roundup - Friday 4 May

Keep abreast of the news with our weekly roundup of the week's main tech stories. The battling blue laser formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD, are never far away from the news and this week's main development was the battle to contain the cracking of AACS copy-protection. The organisation responsible for licensing AACS, which is used by both Blu-ray and HD DVD, sent out 'cease and desist' notices to various websites that were linking to a software key that enables the DRM to be cracked. ...more

OpenOffice debuts bizdev community

The OpenOffice project has created an online meeting place for developers, consultants and business users of the OpenOffice and Sun's StarOffice office suites. Covering both OpenOffice and Sun's StarOffice the bizdev.openoffice. ...more