Mac news sites reject Apple's legal demand for disclosure

Two of the Mac news websites facing legal action from Apple have asked a California court to reject subpoenas that demand the sites' editors disclose their sources of leaked information about forthcoming Apple products. Lawyers for PowerPage and Apple Insider argued on Monday that Internet journalists are entitled to the same protection under the First Amendment as their paper- and TV-based colleagues. The First Amendment to the US Constitution states that, 'Congress shall make no law . ...more

Sun bolsters x86 server line with AMD Opterons

Sun has expanded its Solaris x86 range with more AMD Opteron-based servers and workstations. New announcements include the Sun Fire V40z Server, Sun Java Workstation W1100z and Sun Java Workstation W2100z, which are now officially available. 'With Sun offering unparalleled leadership on operating systems, high-performance hardware and the Sun Java System software, including the Java Enterprise System and the Java Desktop System, I'm confident our newest systems based on the AMD Opteron processor will leave our competitors in the dark,' boasted John Fowler, executive VP of Sun's Network Systems Group. ...more

EU takes battering as Net villain nominee

The UK ISPs' trade body has announced the nominations for its annual Internet hero and villain awards. Nominated for the Hero award are: the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) for its recommendations to amend the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) to further protect individual websites and the infrastructure of the Internet against the threat of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks; the Independent Office of the Telecommunications Adjudicator for helping to develop new Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) products and processes; Ofcom, twice, for not wrecking the 0845 regime used to access pay-as-you-go (PAYG) Internet services and for recognising its role in ensuring that Service Providers deliver on their quality of service promises to end-users; and Roger Darlington for his work as Chairman of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) from which he retires this year. In line for the Villains gong are: European Commissioner Viviane Reding for the revision of the TV without Frontiers Directive which threatens ISPs by extending the scope of broadcasting regulation to content delivered via the Internet, in a market which is not yet fully developed; the European Commission for its inability to get through one year without producing yet another piece of Intellectual Property Legislation; Russia for failing to deal with illegal websites and online abuse hosted within its borders; Sony BMG for compromising the security of its customers' PCs with its copyright-protecting rootkit technology; and the UK Presidency of the European Union for seeking EU-wide data retention laws which will force ISPs and to retain more data for longer without proper impact assessment. ...more

Firefox 1.5 reaches release candidate 1

The first release candidate version of Firefox 1.5 is now available from the Mozilla Organisation. The release adds nothing bar bug fixes to previous beta releases. ...more

Mozilla stamps out bug

Developers of the open source browser Mozilla have closed a security hole that would allow the program to run remote executables. The bug affects not only the Windows versions of Mozilla but also the separate Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client. Versions for the Mac and Linux are unaffected. ...more