DVD Jon promises DRM-free iTunes downloads

DVD Jon, notorious hacker and one-time scourge of the movie industry, has turned his attention to music and claims to have cracked the FairPlay digital rights management technology that Apple uses to copy-protect downloads from the iTunes Music Store. Working with two other programmers, Travis Watkins and Cody Brocious, Jon Lech Johansen has released a Windows application called PyMusique which promises DRM-free iTunes downloads. FairPlay enables Apple to control which devices you can copy songs onto - namely iPods - and the number of different computers on which they can be played. ...more

Microsoft maps Britain

Microsoft has introduced a UK version of its Virtual Earth mapping service. Included is some 230 miles of aerial photography including London, Portsmouth, Southampton and Cambridge. Not only can you get pretty clear pictures of an area - more so than with Google Earth - Microsoft helpfully adds the street names to the photographs to help with identification. ...more

GNU founder defends new GPL licence

The founder of the GNU free software project has strongly defended the project's new software licence. Richard Stallman said that version 3 of the GNU General License (GPLv3) will prevent 'tivoization', restrict DRM and protect software developers from patent litigation, particularly litigation by Microsoft. Tivoization - named after set-top box maker TiVo, refers to computers and devices that contain open-source software covered by GPL that you cannot change, because the appliance shuts down if it detects modified software. ...more

Boot Camp update puts Vista on the Mac

Apple has updated Boot Camp to support Windows Vista, quashing once and for all rumours that incompatibility with Microsoft's latest operating system would delay the shipping of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The new release - version 1. ...more

Hard-drive giants to merge

The way has been formally cleared, by US and European authorities, for the go ahead of the proposed merger of hard-drive manufacturers Maxtor and Quantum HDD. The new company will be known as the Maxtor Corporation and it is estimated that the merger will result in annual cost savings of $120-200m. Its focus will include disk drives for desktop machines, high-performance SCSI drives, hard drives for consumer electronics and network-attached storage. ...more