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May 30, 2003
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Amazon vs. Apple in music downloads?
As millions of songs figuratively fly off the shelves of Apple Computer's recently launched iTunes Music Store, analysts are looking at Amazon.com as one of the likeliest candidates to take the next crack at the retail music-download business.
At a company shareholders meeting Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the e-tailing giant has plans for new stores in the works. He declined to comment on whether those plans include a music-download store, telling the Reuters news service that the idea has been under consideration "for years."
Amazon did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment. But analysts put the company at the top of the list of potential Apple rivals.
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Class on Virus Creation Draws Industry Ire
When the University of Calgary announced plans this week to offer a course that includes instruction on writing computer viruses, officials expected the antivirus industry to support the move--designed to help educate future virus fighters. Instead, industry leaders have roundly criticized the plan.
"It legitimizes the creation of destructive code and provides justification for virus writers to do their work," says Robert Vibert, administrator of the Antivirus Information and Early Warning System and the Antivirus Information Exchange Network. Both organizations help antivirus researchers and virus fighters share information about new and emerging threats.
"You can quote me on this," he says. "Please don't do this, please don't teach people to write viruses."
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Lockyer weighs in on piracy
Saying California's economy is threatened by computer-aided piracy, Attorney General Bill Lockyer joined the movie industry Thursday in urging the state Supreme Court to forbid the Internet posting of a program that lets users copy DVDs.
Making his second appearance ever before the high court, Lockyer asked the justices to reject a state appellate court's ruling that a San Francisco man was exercising free speech when he posted the program in 1999.
Lockyer said the unscrambling program, devised by a Norwegian teenager, was simply "a burglary tool" designed for "breaking, entering and stealing" a trade secret -- the industry-owned code designed to prevent unauthorized playback of movies recorded on digital versatile discs, or DVDs.
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Intel concedes Centrino snag
Chipmaker Intel acknowledged that a software incompatibility may cause problems for people trying to use a Centrino-based notebook with a virtual private network.
The flaw involving the new chip family--which Intel said it had rigorously tested--was mentioned in a bulletin issued this month by VPN software maker Nortel Networks. The bulletin said the issue could cause notebooks to crash and display the Windows blue screen error notice.
Intel said possible notebook malfunctions could indeed be caused by an incompatibility between the application that controls its Intel Pro Wireless 2100 module--the wireless module from the Centrino family--and some VPN applications. But the company said it knew about the problem and had issued a fix in a bulletin to PC makers in early March, around the time the Centrino line was unveiled.
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HP leads server pack
Hewlett-Packard led in revenue from worldwide server sales in the first quarter of 2003, but IBM and Dell made the real market gains, according to a report released Friday.
The computing giant garnered the largest share--28 percent--of the $10.5 billion worldwide server market in the quarter with $2.94 billion in sales, the report from IDC said. But that figure marks a decline of 11.7 percent from the first quarter of 2002.
By contrast, IBM saw its server revenue rise by 6.9 percent from a year ago, IDC said. The second-placed company collected $2.68 billion, or nearly 26 percent, of the worldwide market in the first quarter of 2003.
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