Liberty Alliance turns its attentions to identity theft

The Liberty Alliance has turned its attention to the question of identity theft. It has produced a white paper outlining ways of reducing identity theft, both in its frequency and its impact on consumers. The Alliance quotes research (April 2003) that worldwide economic losses due to identity theft could reach $2 trillion by 2005. ...more

Mozilla updates Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey

Mozilla has released updated versions of three of its Internet software products with security and stability improvements, plus Intel Mac compatibility for the Thunderbird email client. Firefox 1.5. ...more

Google joins badware battle

Google is joining the battle against sites that host spyware or adware. It will warn users, via a popup, when they are about to follow a search result to a site that will download such malware. The search giant is working as part of a 'badware' initiative, along with Sun and Lenovo, to flag websites that have previously been reported to StopBadware. ...more

Microsoft simplifies its virtualisation licences

Microsoft has announced a comprehensive overhaul of its virtual machine licensing as part of its push to get its customers moving towards a dynamic systems network model. Self-managing dynamic systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in the larger scale enterprises where resources are allocated dynamically through virtual machines. The deployment of dynamic systems not only saves on hardware costs as many virtual machines can run on a single physical box, it also cuts down the time spent by IT staff in maintaining the plethora of computers linked together in the network. ...more

iTunes 'heads to Japan'

Japanese finance daily Nihon Keizai says it learned on Wednesday that Apple has plans to roll out its iTunes music download service in Japan as early as March of next year. The Japanese iTunes would be up against at least nine other music download services available and a device market where MP3 players were well-established even before the introduction of the iPod. The recent introduction of the iPod mini, however, has fuelled sales. ...more