Sony Connect service rides again

Sony is planning to relaunch its Connect music downloads service and its range of digital Walkman portable players as part of new CEO Howard Stringer's strategy for revitalising the ailing electronics giant. Having failed so far to make much of an impact on Apple's dominance of both the downloads and portable player markets, Sony is hoping the revamped Connect will banish memories of poor software, incompatible formats and out-of-date hardware. For the first time both the development of the Connect software and the Walkman hardware will be under the same management and the company will be focussing all its digital music efforts in one direction. ...more

US law firm hunts down man for email trespassing

A San Francisco legal firm is using the power of the law to chase down someone for sending in a solitary email - on the pretext that it is trespassing on their systems. Law Firm Shearman & Sterling have subpoenaed a bulletin board for the identity of a member who posted a message, which was later sent as an email to the company and which it found offensive. It is that email which apparently trespassed the company's email system, and was in breach of a 'contract'. ...more

It's all systems go for anti-virus rescue disk

Works with Windows, DOS, Linux, UNIX, OS/2... ...more

ATi tops out X800 line with X850 XT PE

Graphics specialist ATi has launched a new member of its Radeon series of graphics processors. Squaring up to Nvidia's GeForce 6800 Ultra, the Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition replaces the X800XT at the top of ATi's product tree. The X850XT PE has the same 16 pixel pipeline, 6 vertex shader architecture as the X800XT, but it has quite a different form. ...more

Firefox 1.5 gets a release candidate

Mozilla has announced the availability of the first beta release candidate version of Firefox 1.5. Mozilla emphasises that this is not a full beta and requests that reviewers and bloggers do not 'jump the gun' and say that it is. ...more