Digital music download sales stall

Apple may be in the process of selling over 10 million iPods each month but a development that is bound to be worrying record company executives is that sales of digital music downloads have stalled. Since May the number of tracks sold, most of which are downloaded from Apple's iTunes Music Store, has remained almost static at around 6.5 million per week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. ...more

Toshiba calls back Sony notebook batteries

Toshiba has announced that it will replace 340,000 Sony-manufactured laptop batteries, the third such recall by a major notebook maker in little over a month. The company said that the lithium-ion batteries, installed in Dynabook and Dynabook Satellite laptops manufactured between March and May this year, could fail because of problems with both power storage and transmission. Ohmori reassured Toshiba users that the fault as not the same one that led both Apple and Dell to recall more than four million batteries after verifying that they could overheat, in some cases causing users to get minor burns and in extreme circumstances resulting in laptops bursting into flame. ...more

HP shows off blue iPod

HP CEO Carly Fiorina has given the first public showing of the HP branded iPod, announced on Friday. Fiorina waves the device around in this C|net video. Microsoft has, as you might have expected, given the Apple-HP alliance a frosty response. ...more

The security union of IT giants

There's strength in numbers - everyone knows that - and now a group of big-hitting technology firms are to work together over computer security. The US companies - which include Intel, Microsoft, AT&T, Oracle, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Computer Associates, EDS and Cisco Systems - are planning to form an ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Centre). There are already such centres, in the US, for the telecommunications and finance sectors and the companies want to emulate the cross-company co-operation in IT. ...more

Microsoft allows commercial modification of its embedded Windows system

Microsoft has opened up the source code that powers its mobile and embedded operating systems to developers: the first time Redmond has allowed developers to freely modify its code. Under what the company is calling a Shared Source licence, developers will be allowed to tinker with the code of Windows CE 5.0 and come up with their own commercial versions that they can then sell on, without having to show their work to either Microsoft or other shared source licencees. ...more