UPDATED: Real claims a million tracks a week in music promo

Real Networks sold three million songs in three weeks, the company has announced, as it ends its 49 per song promotion on its online music store. What proportion of those were bought by iPod owners exploiting Real's Harmony technology which hacks Apple's digital rights management is not known. Apple has said that it will close this loophole and if it does it will leave a lot of Real customers with songs that they can no longer carry around. ...more

Cisco and Microsoft agree to agree on network security

Cisco Systems has promised that its Network Admission Control security architecture will work with Microsoft's Network Access Protection. Both systems do essentially the same thing. That is, to prevent potentially compromised machines from connecting to a company network. ...more

Holiday surfers suffer laptop woes

One third of British holidaymakers are taking their laptops on holiday with them, often with calamitous results, according to one high-street retailer. Colin Middlemiss of The Computer World told the Reuters news agency that 35 per cent now take their portables, and many return with them in somewhat less than working order. 'Some have been left too long in the sun, some have been dropped in swimming pools and others have had booze spilled on them,' he said. ...more

Microsoft previews real-time corporate messaging

Microsoft is hoping the popularity of instant messaging will put a fire under its corporate communications version, which supports a number of encryption technologies as well as logging mechanisms. Hugely popular in the consumer space, AOL leads the instant messaging market with its AIM service, despite Microsoft's ability to bundle its version of instant messaging with other key products such as Windows XP. But with the first public beta of 'Greenwich', the company is hoping to tackle the enterprise market with a real-time messaging system that authenticates users, supports industry standard security protocols, including SSL encryption, Digest and Kerberos, and offers logging functions needs to comply with financial and securities regulations. ...more

Netgear preps for 802.11n

Netgear has announced that it is shipping the 'world's first' wireless-enabled ADSL2+ modem router based on the draft 802.11n specification. The box combines a next-generation broadband modem with a four-port Ethernet 10/100 switch, a double SPI and NAT firewall with Netgear's draft 11n-compliant RangeMax NEXT wireless LAN technology. ...more