New blue laser technology promises portable Blu-ray players

Blu-ray goes mobile - this is the promise of a new technological development prototyped by Japanese company Victor. The company has created a single-objective glass lens with the world's highest numerical aperture (NA), reports NE Asia Online. By improving production yields and cutting the current lens size, the technology could promote the use of portable Blu-ray discs in mobile equipment, for example BD players. ...more

Hackers crack Tiscali

A denial of service attack on the ISP Tiscali temporarily brought down its Web site, Internet access and email services yesterday. In a brief statement the company said, 'Tiscali has been subject to an external attack on our network. However, we have taken steps to identify the source and isolate the problem. ...more

E3 2002 - Xbox online plans go live

Microsoft sprang a few surprises when it lifted the lid on Xbox Live, the console's online gaming platform. The software giant plans to roll out Xbox Live in North America and, fingers-crossed, Japan and Europe before the end of 2002. The software giant officially announced that the platform will consist of five key features: Gamertag (a unique online ID for all Xbox Live games across the service), Xbox Communicator (support to allow for voice communication during play), Matching (a system that simplifies multiplayer game selection), Friends List (that allows you to find friends on the service and invite them into a game no matter what they happen to be playing at the time) and, finally, a facility to download extra game content onto the hard drive. ...more

Sony presses play for MP3 files on Walkmans

MP3-playing Walkmans are being launched by Sony, and existing NW-series Walkmans will also have a firmware update for accommodating the de-facto Internet standard for compressed music files. As we reported back in September - Sony does u-turn for MP3 support - Sony has abandoned its position on only supporting its own ATRAC-format. The devices, which have up to 1GB of Flash memory, are Sony's first to accommodate the more popular MP3 format. ...more

Microsoft beat off Linux in battle for key council contract

After toying with the affections of the Open Source movement, the London Borough of Newham has announced that it has signed a deal with Microsoft to upgrade the council's IT systems. Last year, the borough was part of a Government project comparing Open Source and proprietary software. As such, its IT infrastructure was independently assessed by CapGemini which looked at costs, business benefits and risks. ...more