A federal judge in Seattle has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to testify in a class action lawsuit against Microsoft that alleges the company misled consumers in a marketing campaign for its Windows Vista operating system in which computers sold with an older Microsoft OS were labeled 'Vista Capable' when in fact they could only run a basic version of Vista.

Ballmer has unique personal knowledge of facts surrounding the case, therefore he must face questioning, Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle ruled, according to court documents released late Friday.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs will have no more than three hours to take a deposition from Ballmer at the time and place of his convenience, the documents said. The deposition must take place within 30 days of the order.

The case against Microsoft was launched early last year. The plaintiffs allege that most computers labeled 'Vista Capable' in the marketing campaign, which began in early 2006, cannot run or run poorly Vista Premium, the version of Vista with the most popular features.

Microsoft had sought to exclude Ballmer from questioning, saying he was not involved in operational discussions around the 'Vista Capable' program, the court documents say. Microsoft had offered up then co-president Jim Allchin and then-senior vice president Will Poole instead of Ballmer, saying the two had superior knowledge of the program.

The plaintiffs won the argument to question Ballmer by pointing out conversations between Ballmer and Intel CEO Paul Otellini in which the two discussed possible changes in the Vista Capable requirements.

Microsoft is getting serious about global security, offering a free anti-malware package code-named Morro that has been specially designed for low cost PCs in developing nations.

The software will be available in the second half of 2009 and will provide 'comprehensive protection' from 'the majority of online threats', including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.

Morro is based on - and will replace - the current Windows Live OneCare subscription service, although it has been architected to use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs. Amy Barzdukas, Senior Director at Microsoft, said: "This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware."

Morro will deliver the same core protection against malware as Microsoft's enterprise solutions, but without the additional non-security features found in many consumer security suites, which probably means password managers, identity protection software and online secure storage.

"By offering basic protection at no charge to the consumer, Microsoft is promoting a safer environment for PCs, service providers and e-commerce itself, since it is through unprotected PCs that the worst threats are introduced to the system as a whole," said Roger Kay, Founder of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

Morro will be available as a stand-alone download for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Windows Live OneCare will continue to be sold until June 30, 2009, and all existing subscriptions to it will be honoured.

Microsoft will end retail sales of Equipt within the next 90 days and halt subscription services in the first half of 2009.

Cisco System Inc.'s the king of network security, commanding almost a quarter share of the worldwide $6.8 billion network security market, according to IDC. But can it hold the fort?

Tops in selling firewalls, VPNs, intrusion-protection systems and unified threat management (UTM) gear, Cisco nonetheless fights an ongoing battle to be recognized as best-of-breed as it jousts against Juniper and a host of pure-play security vendors, including Fortinet, McAfee and TippingPoint.

Complicating matters is the fact that Cisco sells a substantial portion of its security wares not as purpose-built standalone gear, such as appliances, but as software integrated-services modules that are installed inside Cisco routers and switches.

While all customer networks have different traffic patterns, there's growing doubt about how well these firewall, VPN and IPS modules hold up trying to handle process-intensive security functions.

"It presents a tremendous bottleneck," says Vik Phatak, chairman and CEO of NSS Labs, which has just completed an extensive round of tests of security gear, including that from Cisco, Juniper Networks, IBM, McAfee, and TippingPoint, in its Austin-based labs.

Cash-strapped BT has identified a vogueish fillip in its lobbying campaign for a looser regime to regulate access to forthcoming next-generation fibre deployments: the recession.

For several months BT has been pushing the line that Ofcom will have to give it more control over wholesale access and pricing to make investments in fibre worthwhile. Now chief executive Ian Livingstone has issued a threat that even the £1.5bn so far allocated might be imperilled by the economic climate if regulators don't play ball.

Estimates say a nationwide fibre network would cost up to £29bn.

Livingstone was quoted in The Guardian on Friday warning that some mean shareholders might not let him spend the money. "But I have to tell you there are some shareholders who say 'you know something, don't do that, don't do a whole lot of other things. That leaves you with a lot more cash and cash today is worth a lot more than cash in a few years' time'," he said.

If Ofcom would just see things his way, Livingstone suggested, he could persuade nervous shareholders that splurging billions on digging up roads is a good idea, despite the recession and BT's own particular financial problems. "I personally believe if it is the right thing to do as a 20-year decision it is the right thing to do," he said. "But we need to have the environment in which our shareholders feel there is a good chance of us making a return."

Ubisoft producer Ben Mattes has said downloadable content for the new Prince or Persia game is very much part of the plan, and will add "significant value" - perhaps even as much as an entire prequel or sequel.

"We certainly have plans for downloadable content, [but] we can't really say more than that right now," Mattes told Gamersyde in a video interview.

"The intention is to do downloadable content that adds significant value, so I don't think you'll see downloadable content of a new skin or a new weapon or something like that.

"If we're going to do it, it's going to be a new story, a new experience, maybe a prequel, maybe a sequel - we're going to do something that really offers a lot of value for the player. In terms of when: sometime next year - I'm not sure of exactly when, it's all still in discussion."

Prince of Persia will be released for Xbox 360 and PS3 on 5th December, followed a week later by the PC version.

Famously, the new instalment adopts a flashy 'next-gen cel-shaded' visual style, one Mattes believes will be "copied in the coming years".

The other major addition to the series is Elika, a magical lady who co-operatively helps the Prince in combat and exploration, and acts as a safety net - a sort of personified rolling check-point system.

Apple has revealed its intentions to capture a slice of the games market by establishing its iPod Touch as a gaming platform.

The company plans to pit its handheld device against Sony's PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's bestselling DS.

Greg Joswiak, head of iPod and iPhone marketing, told MCV: "It's not just the screens that are superior to DS - it’s the graphics capability, the computing power and the App Store distribution model.

"I had an analyst tell me in September - and he was right - that the DS is the past of gaming devices, and iPod Touch is the future of gaming devices. It certainly has our competitors scrambling in what they're going to do in reaction to this. This product is capable of so much more, and there’s a tremendous synergy we have with the iPod Touch and game developers.”

There are already over 1,500 iPod Touch games available for download via Apple's App Store, and the company is hoping to get third-party developers on board to add to this number significantly next year.

Nintendo has no plans to release a new home console any time soon, according to the president of the company's US arm.

"We believe the role of a new console, a new system, is to bring great new entertainment ideas to life. We launched (the Wii and DS) those systems when we had great ideas that would benefit either from a touch screen or from a Wii remote," Reggie Fils-Aime told Reuters.

"We will consider the launch of new consoles when we have got great new entertaining ideas that can only be done with a new console. As we sit here today the Wii console has a long run ahead of it, (the DS too).

"At some point we will launch the DSi here in the Americas. So as we look at the near term for us its all about maximizing the opportunity with the (Wii and DS)."

Fair enough. The Wii's selling like hot cakes, so why would Nintendo announce that it's planning on releasing a successor any time soon?

Still, we bet it's working on one behind closed doors, or perhaps a Wii HD upgrade.

Internet fraudsters sell complete financial identities for just £80, according to an online safety group.

The details packaged and sold online include names, addresses, passport numbers and confidential financial data such as credit card numbers.

With six out of 10 people now managing finances online, experts say the public needs to do more to prevent e-crime.

The figure comes in data released as part of a week highlighting ways to protect identities online.

The Get Safe Online group, which is backed by police, government and banks, says ID theft is a serious problem because of an international trade in stolen identities and data.

Online marketplaces, often sited in countries with lax controls against e-crime, sell bundles of data harvested in concerted attacks against poorly defended computers in wealthier nations.

The safety group estimates that nearly half of all computer users in the UK are vulnerable because they are not using defensive measures such as a firewall, or up-to-date software which can identity malicious programs.

Crucially, warn experts, too many people use the same password for key websites, making it easier for bank details and other sensitive data to be gathered.

Microsoft has quietly launched a new online store where U.S. customers can buy its software and hardware products.

There were already Microsoft Stores for people in the U.K., Germany and Korea, and the U.S. store launched on Thursday.

"With this launch, our customers in the U.S. are able to buy first-party software and hardware directly from Microsoft offered in a comprehensive online catalog," said Trevin Chow, Microsoft senior program manager, in a blog post about the site launch.

Online shoppers in the U.S. have been able to buy and download some Microsoft software from the Windows Marketplace. But some Microsoft hardware, like the Xbox, has been available only from third-party retailers and is now for sale in the Microsoft Store.

People will be able to re-download software products that they buy for as long as Microsoft supports the product, typically five years, Chow said. Customers can also copy the software onto disks for future access.

Microsoft will store product keys for buyers, who will be able to access the keys online if they need to re-install the software.

Today's round of updates to Apple's Safari contains just four patches that affect the Mac OS X edition, but eleven for Windows Vista and XP, several of which would forestall some very familiar sounding exploits.

In October 2007, users of the first-edition iPhone were treated to a Safari patch that addressed what was then considered an indication of a serious design flaw: the capability for a malicious TIFF image file to be crafted that could trigger unprivileged code to be executed. At the time, an active exploit was feared to be in the wild.

Now, a patch for a vulnerability with a very similar, if not altogether identical, profile appears in the latest version 3.2 of Safari for Windows (this particular patch does not apply to Mac OS X users). Specifically, TIFF images that have been compression using the well-known Lempel-Ziv (LZW) algorithm will now be treated with more care and concern, according to Apple's security bulletin released today.

That's one of two patches in version 3.2 that improve handling of TIFF images specifically, and five patches overall that involve malicious hijacking of image processing. Among the four patches that apply to both Windows and Mac editions is one that disables the ability for Safari plug-ins to launch local URLs without safeguards -- an ability that was identified by, and which Apple gives full credit to, Microsoft and VeriSign security researcher Billy Rios.

AMD is looking to expand its Stream project, which uses graphics chip processing cores to perform computing tasks normally sent to the CPU, a process known as General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU)..
Closely integrating GPU and CPU systems was one of the motivations for AMD's $5.4bn acquisition of ATI in 2006.

GPGPU systems have emerged in recent years as a favourite tactic for high-performance computing tasks.

By leveraging thousands of processing cores on a graphics card for general computing calculations, tasks such as scientific simulations or geographic modelling, which are traditionally the realm of supercomputers, can be performed on smaller, more affordable systems.

AMD Stream Computing director Patricia Harrell said that the company is now looking to bring the programme to the enterprise and consumer markets.

At the RIPE meeting in Dubai two weeks ago, Google presented results from a study about how IPv6-capable "ordinary users" are. And the results are surprising. While an earlier study by Arbor Networks showed only 0.0026 percent of all traffic was IPv6 enabled, Google determined that world wide, 0.238 percent of their users' systems have IPv6 enabled and prefer to use IPv6 over IPv4 where possible.

The results were obtained by "enrolling" a small fraction of the users visiting www.google.* into the experiment. When displaying search results, these users' browsers were asked to perform a background HTTP request to a Google system with both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. The results were recorded along with the OS as reported by the browser and the geolocation of the user's IPv4 address. In addition to the 0.238 percent of all users world wide that have working IPv6 connectivity—which is increasing at a rate of several thousands of a percent per week—there's another 0.09 percent that have IPv6, but it doesn't work. So more than a quarter of all measured IPv6 users have broken IPv6 connectivity.

The results start getting more interesting when correlating IPv6 use with country. The top five IPv6-using countries (that generate significant traffic) are: Russia (0.76 percent), France (0.65 percent), Ukraine (0.64 percent), Norway (0.49 percent), and the US (0.45 percent).

Carphone Warehouse is to stop selling one of their Linux netbooks after the return rates went through the roof. The Elonex Webbook, which ships with Ubuntu, was taken back to the shop by 20 per cent of purchasers. Contrary to some reports, the laptops are not being 'recalled.'

It seems the main problem is customer expectation; people expect a netbook to work just like a normal laptop and are surprised when it doesn't. Behind that would seem to be a lack of willingness to acquiesce to the charm of Ubuntu. Around 60,000 of the netbooks were shipped; mostly with a broadband bundle.

It's not the first time we've heard about high return rates for these reasons. TechRadar has previously investigated strong rumours of high netbook return rates to DSG stores (PC World, Dixons, Currys.digital) but was rebuffed.

And it seems that high return rates aren't only a problem this side of the pond. In an interview with Laptop Mag in the US, MSI's Director of US Sales Andy Tung admitted that people just weren't used to Linux. "Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux," he said.

Advanced Micro Devices will launch its Phenom II microprocessor at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this coming January, executives at AMD's annual analyst meeting said Thursday.

Specifically, AMD will launch the Phenom II X4 processor, part of its "Dragon" enthusiast platform, said Bob Grim, the senior manager of product marketing for AMD's desktop group. The Phenom II X4 is also known as the "Deneb" core, which is the desktop version of the "Shanghai" processor for servers that AMD launched on Thursday.

The Dragon platform will be AMD's platform for the enthusiast segment during 2009, replacing the "Spider" platform that launched at the end of 2007 in conjunction with the first Phenom processor.

Grim and other executives provided a few details about the Dragon and the Phenom II X4. The processor will contain 8 Mbytes of cache and connect to either DDR-2 or DDR-3 memory, AMD executives said.

A senior U.S. lawmaker plans to introduce a bill in January that would bar Internet providers like AT&T Inc from blocking Web content, setting up a renewed battle over so-called network neutrality.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, believes a law is essential to prevent telephone and cable companies from discriminating against Internet content, even though regulators have taken actions to enforce free Web principles, a top Dorgan aide said on Thursday.

"We feel that legislation is definitely necessary," said Frannie Wellings, telecom counsel to Dorgan, speaking at a University of Nebraska law school event on changes in telecom law after the election of Democrat Barack Obama.

Dorgan has been influential on the issue, and will be among the highest ranking Democrats on the Senate's Commerce Committee when it reconvenes in January.

The net neutrality fight pits Internet service providers (ISPs) like AT&T against content companies like Google Inc and Microsoft Corp.

Verizon Wireless said on Thursday that it would sell the touch-screen BlackBerry Storm for $199.99, after a rebate -- in line with pricing for its popular rival, Apple Inc's iPhone.

The wireless venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc said the first touch-screen phone from Research In Motion would cost $199.99 after a $50 rebate for customers who sign a new two-year service contract.

Pricing for the highly anticipated device, which goes on sale online and in Verizon stores on November 21, has been the source of much speculation after Vodafone said October 31 that it would give the Storm free to UK customers who sign a contract.

U.S. carriers in particular often shoulder a big part of the price of cell phones in exchange for getting customers to commit to a two-year service contract but analysts have worried about the effect a hefty subsidy on the Storm would have on Verizon Wireless's profit margins.

AT&T Inc , the exclusive U.S. provider for iPhone, has already shown that its subsidy for the latest iPhone has hurt its profits in the recent quarter.

While Intel is looking to position its low-power x86-based Atom Z500 processor family to challenge ARM-based processors in the mobile device market, ARM is returning the favor by aggressively developing a complete platform to challenge Intel in the netbook segment, with ARM's current focus being on strengthening its mobile computing software ecosystem.

In line with such a strategy, ARM has announced that Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, will bring the full Ubuntu desktop OS to the ARMv7 processor architecture. ARM noted that the development was driven by demand from device manufacturers, and a complete hardware and software solution would increase the likelihood that Taiwan ODMs, which dominate hardware development in the global notebook market, would develop netbook type devices based on an ARM platform.

The Ubuntu ARM distribution for desktops and netbooks will be officially available from April 2009, and will target the ARMv7 architecture including ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processor-based systems.

One other area ARM has been challenged by its competitors is the lack of support for Flash software on the ARM platform. However, sources in Taiwan indicated that ARM should soon be making breakthroughs in that area as well.

Advanced Micro Devices is preparing to release its latest FireStream general-purpose GPU for high-performance computing. The AMD FireStream 9270 GPU offers an additional performance boost to better handle high-performance computing and scientific applications. In addition, AMD is updating its software development kit to allow developers to write more applications that use the FireStream GPU. The AMD FireStream GPU competes against Nvidia’s Tesla 10 series GPU and what Intel’s Larrabee processor will offer when the chip is released.

Advanced Micro Devices is adding additional muscle to its line of FireStream graphics processing units with a new stream processor that looks to boost the company’s offering around high-performance computing . AMD is also expanding its software development kit for developers creating applications for this growing field.

On Nov. 13, the same day AMD will release its latest quad-core Opteron processor called “ Shanghai,” the company will also launch the AMD FireStream 9270, a general purpose GPU (GP-GPU) that competes against the Nvidia Tesla 10 GPU in the HPC market.

The AMD FireStream GPUs are part of what the company refers to as ATI Stream, which looks to solve complex HPC problems by using the technology original development for the graphics market.

The closure of a web hosting firm that is believed to have had spam gangs as clients has led to a drastic reduction in junk mail.

Two US internet service providers have pulled the plug on the firm McColo following an investigation by the Washington Post newspaper.

Anti-spam firm Ironport has seen junk mail levels drop by 70% since McColo was taken offline on 11 November.

But, it warned, it will be a temporary respite from the menace of spam.

Plug pulled

"It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny," said Jason Steer, a spokesman for Ironport.

The Washington Post has been gathering data on McColo for the past four months and passed the information to its internet service providers, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric.

Both decided to pull the plug on the firm on Tuesday.

It is believed that it hosted gangs running botnets - networks of computers that have been taken over by criminals to send malicious software and spam.

According to MessageLabs, botnets are responsible for over 90% of spam.

Seven-and-a-half years, in fact, if you count the time it's taken Microsoft to patch a security issue in its SMB (Server Message Block) service, fixed Tuesday. This software is used by Windows to share files and print documents over a network.

In a blog posting, Microsoft acknowledged that "Public tools, including a Metasploit module, are available to perform this attack." Metasploit is an open-source toolkit used by hackers and security professionals to build attack code.

According to Metasploit, the flaw goes back to March 2001, when a hacker named Josh Buchbinder (a.k.a Sir Dystic) published code showing how the attack worked.

Symantec Research Manager Ben Greenbaum said the flaw may have first been disclosed at Defcon 2000, by Veracode Chief Scientist Christien Rioux (a.k.a. Dildog)

Whomever discovered the flaw, Microsoft seems to have taken an unusually long time to fix the bug.

"This is definitely out of the ordinary," Greenbaum said. He said he did not know why Microsoft had waited so long to fix the issue.

"I've been holding my breath since 2001 for this patch," said Shavlik Technologies Chief Technology Officer Eric Schultze, in an e-mailed statement. Buchbinder's attack, called a SMB relay attack, "showed how easy it was to take control of a remote machine without knowing the password," he said.

For the attack to work, a victim could be sent a malicious e-mail message that, when opened, would try to connect to a server run by the attacker. That machine would then steal network authentication credentials from the victim, which could then be used to gain access to the victim's machine.