Feds chalk up first victories in p2p piracy

The US Justice Department has chalked up its first convictions against those who use peer to peer networks to distribute pirated material. Two men have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement. The men, William Trowbridge, 50, of Johnson City, N. ...more

HP's erstwhile chairman brought to book

HP's erstwhile chairman Patricia Dunn has been formally booked under four counts of felony. Dunn resigned under the dark cloud of a spying scandal when it emerged that HP chiefs had hired companies that used legally dubious methods to spy on members of the media and its own board in order to track down a leak of confidential information. She appeared at a Santa Clara County court yesterday for a brief hearing before continuing to the sheriff's office to be booked. ...more

NEC screens its 50 incher

NEC has unveiled a 50 inch flat screen plasma XGA monitor for multimedia displays. The monitor, known as PlasmaSync 50MP1, has a resolution of 1365x768 and a split screen display that allows images from multiple sources to be displayed simultaneously. A zoom feature allows part of an image to be selected and enlarged up to 300 per cent. ...more

Philips unveils three way compatible Blu-Ray R/W drive

Dutch electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics has developed a optical drive which can read and write to CDs, DVDs and the upcoming Blu-Ray disc format. The announcement of a fully compatible drive which can burn and play in the three most common optical disc formats will be seen as a big boost for the Blu-Ray format over the rival HD-DVD format favoured by Toshiba and many of the big Hollywood studios. Philips has achieved its three-way compatibility by the simple expedient of fitting the drive with three lasers. ...more

Sandisk intros 8GB MP3 player

SanDisk Corporation has introduced in the States what is claimed to be the world's largest capacity flash-based MP3 player. The Sansa e280 is equipped with 8GB of flash memory as standard. For those who feel they need to put multiple versions of Wagner's Ring cycle on their MP3 player there is also a microSD expansion slot option to plug in up to 2GB of extra memory through a microSD card providing up to 10GB of memory or approximately 2,500 tunes. ...more