Tired of being "stiff-armed" by eBay, the Software and Information Industry Association is signaling its ready to sue over pirated software sales on the dominant online auction site, PC World reports. SIIA has offered eBay several suggestions for stemming the sale of pirated software on its site, but the auction giant has rejected most of those ideas, said Keith Kupferschmid, senior vice president of the SIIA's antipiracy division. "We are at our last straw here," Kupferschmid said Friday. "If eBay continues to stiff-arm us ... then we will certainly consider litigation as an option." Chief among the ideas: end one-day and buy-it-now auctions of software, which would "go a long way toward addressing most of our concerns," Kupferschmid said. Tiffany's...

Last October, roughly one year after the release to manufacturing of Windows Vista, I did a comparison of how well Windows Vista was living up to its promise of being more secure than its predecessor, Windows XP. My data source was the Microsoft Security Bulletin Search page, where I tallied up security bulletins rated Critical or Important for the two Windows versions. The result? Vista had an overwhelming edge over XP. So, has Vista maintained its security edge in the succeeding nine months? I did the same comparison for that period. Go see the numbers for yourself.

Digital media delivery firm RealNetworks has shipped a high-prority patch to cover four gaping holes in its flagship RealPlayer software, warning that the vulnerabilities could put users at risk of code execution attacks. The patch comes a few hours after Secunia released an advisory warning for one of the vulnerabilities, a heap-based buffer overflow caused by a design error within RealPlayer's handling of frames in Shockwave Flash (SWF) files. According to RealNetworks, at least one of the four bugs affects all platforms -- Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. [ SEE: IE users beware: RealPlayer zero-day flaw under attack ] Details are only available for these two vulnerabilities: CVE-2008-1309: The RealAudioObjects.RealAudio ActiveX control in rmoc3260.dll 6.0.10.45 in RealNetworks RealPlayer 11.0.1...

Several readers have sent me a link to a discussion in progress on the Ubuntu forums which outlines how hardware manufacturer Foxconn crippled Linux support on the G33M-S motherboard by breaking ACPI support.

I’ve been carting around my latest sheaf of press releases about the green-ness of electronic document technology for weeks now. Yes, as I’ve blogged before, I am still one of those people who can’t help printing out certain emails in order to act on them. Yes, it's bad, I know. In any event, Xerox pinged me last week with some new stats gleaned out of a survey from HansalGCR about environmental issues, with a slant on printer-related habits. The survey of 600 decision makers at large and midsize companies was sponsored by Xerox and several other companies. The data suggest that more than half of IT managers are now studying the green tech profile related to their printers and other...

Earlier this week I attended Fortune magazine's Brainstorm Tech conference which "aims to sharpen the thinking of (the very well heeled) attendees about the escalating impact of tech-driven change for all business and global society". There was a terrific menu of topics on offer: I live 'micro blogged' on Twitter (in this case using the hashtag #brainstormtech). These are my notes from the conference: I've trained myself to condense my notes into 140 character chunks which I share with my followers. I had some great feedback and questions from my following friends which enriched the experience. Sadly again we were again at a tech conference with lousy wifi, so interaction on Twitter was sporadic and dependent on location/signal strength....

On this week's EIC squared podcast, Dan is back and we talk about Microsoft's analyst meeting, Kevin Johnson's departure from the software giant, Carl Icahn's deal with Yahoo and Facebook. The big news this week was Microsoft's financial meeting (see Mary Jo Foley and Ina Fried's coverage) where CEO Steve Ballmer talked strategy and outlined the company's plan for the year ahead. There was a healthy dose of enterprise and a lot of talk about search. I argue that Microsoft needs a little IBM-ish moment of clarity and that it should focus. Dan says that theory is nuts and Microsoft should be investing in multiple markets. We briefly touch on Kevin Johnson's departure from Microsoft. Johnson was the bigwig in...

On the heels of the release of weaponized exploit code for the DNS cache poisoning vulnerability, Microsoft has joined the chorus of security pros pleading with DNS server providers to immediately apply patches to protect users from malicious attacks. The Redmond, Wash. security giant issued a formal security advisory advisory today with a terse warning that "attacks are likely imminent" because of the availability of exploit code: Since the coordinated release of these updates, the threat to DNS systems has increased due to a greater public understanding of the attacks, as well as detailed exploit code being published on the Internet. Microsoft is not currently aware of active attacks utilizing this exploit code or of customer impact at this time. However,...

CBC News out of Canada is reporting that British ISPs are making an aggressive move against illegal file sharing by implementing a program designed to discover copyright violators, who will be sent warning letters and may potentially have their internet connections disconnected. For more on the article, read below. The article states: Under the agreement announced Thursday between the British film and music industries, telecommunications regulator Ofcom and the country's six biggest ISPs — BT, Virgin Media, BSkyB, Carphone Warehouse, Orange and Tiscali — people who illegally share copyrighted files over the internet will receive weekly letters warning them that they are being monitored. The program will be tested for three months while the parties discuss how to best take...

Previously I speculated about the mysterious “product transition” that Apple's Peter Oppenheimer (CFO) mentioned no less than seven times in the Q3 2008 Earnings conference call with analysts. Some of his quotes from the call: We are working to develop new products that contains technologies that our competition will not be able to match. I cannot discuss these new products, but we are very confident in our product pipeline. Apple believes that the software is the key ingredient. We believe that we are many years ahead of the competition and we welcome any and all competition as long as they do not step on our Intellectual Property. We plan to deliver state-of-the-art products that I cannot discuss today and...