UPDATED: Watford Electronics takes over the Carrera and Demonite brands

Watford Electronics has taken over Carrera SSC and Demonite, which worked under the parent company of Digital Networks. Rumours were circulating of Carrera seeking administration, but it is believed that Watford Electronics has bought the brands. Shiraz Jessa, MD of Watford Electronics confirmed today that the company was the new owner of the Carrera and Demonite brands and it would be honouring existing orders. ...more

DVD Jon attacks Windows Media encoding

Notorious software hacker DVD Jon has succeeded in removing encoding on Windows Media streams that restricts playback to Microsoft's Windows Media Player software John Lech Johansen, who got his nickname after hacking the copy protection on DVDs so that they could be copied to a computer hard drive, revealed in his So sue me blog that he had reverse engineered encryption coding in order to allow people to access the content using open source media player software. Derk-Jan Hartman, who works on one such open source player, VideoLAN, said that he and a fellow developer had expressly asked Johansen to help. 'VideoLAN members need to multicast video, but the Windows Media Player creates NSC files that contain encoded text,' he said. ...more

Sony hooks up MiniDisc Walkmans to PCs

Sony has increased the capacity of its memory-stick walkmans and made its MiniDisc players networkable in a Walkman rebranding exercise. The new MiniDisc player, called the MZ-R700PC, comes with a USB cable and PC-link converter so that MiniDisc enthusiasts can convert downloaded MP3 and WMA files into analogue and write them to MiniDisc. Meanwhile, the memory-stick and Flash Walkmans are now called Network Walkmans, though little else has changed. ...more

Intel gets into the movie business

Intel is getting into the movie business. The chip giant has announced that it is to create a new digital entertainment company called ClickStar with Revelations Entertainment that will distribute films over the Internet to viewers around the world. ClickStar will offer a pay per view online service in which consumers can download and watch first-run, pre-DVD-release films. ...more

Yahoo! and Sun see the Web through corporate-coloured spectacles

Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems have signed a deal to deliver a corporate portal aggregating Yahoo! sourced content with internal corporate information and applications via the Sun ONE Portal Server. The Sun ONE Portal Server gives employees a personalised portal, maintaining the company brand. It will combine relevant internal content with access to more than 2,000 content sources from 25 countries and in 13 languages through Yahoo's 'My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition'. ...more