A company that specializes in rights-management technology for online stores has declared its plans to reverse-engineer the FairPlay encoding system Apple uses on iTunes Music Store purchases.

The move by Cupertino-based Navio Systems would essentially break Apple’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) system in order to allow other online music retailers to sell

A new variation of the long-running Sober worm uses extremely effective tactics to trick users into infecting their PCs, security companies said Tuesday, including posing as messages from the FBI and CIA.

Sober.w -- called Sober.x by Symantec, and Sober.z by Sophos and F-Secure -- is spreading rapidly, said security experts, fast

Octavian Scientific Inc., an early stage company creating semiconductor test technology, has said it has secured $6.6 million in financing from OVP Venture Partners, TL Ventures and Northwest Technology Ventures.

Octavian (Portland, Oregon) also announced that OVP partner John Hull and Javier Fernandez of TL Ventures have joined the company's board of

Researchers from Brown University have created what they believe is the first directly pumped silicon laser, a breakthrough that they say could eventually help to make faster, more powerful computers or fiber optic networks.

According to Brown, scientists have fashioned lasers since 1960 from substances ranging from neon to sapphire. But the

New versions of SQL Server, Visual Basic launched this month, but without some of the promised features of the applications

Leveraging a 10-city Canadian marketing tour, Microsoft is hoping businesses and ISVs will be attracted to new versions of its relational database and its development system.
 
“We think from

One way of handling the differences between the power and broadband businesses is for utilities to offer broadband through joint ventures, such as Duquesne Broadband, a joint venture between BPL Global and DQE Communications Network Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Duquesne Light Holdings, which launched a wireless Internet pilot in targeted Monroeville, Pa.

Joining the herd of Web sites jostling to cash in on the holiday shopping season, online search engine leader Google Inc. is adding a tool designed to make it easier for consumers to map out their local trips to the mall.

The feature, to be unveiled Tuesday at Google's Froogle shopping site,

Sun Microsystems, in an effort to broaden the scope of its flagship enterprise operating system, is offering support for the open-source Postgres database.

In addition, the company is integrating its 128-bit file systems, Solaris ZFS, into the OpenSolaris project, which is another nod to open-source technology.

The Solaris ZFS file system

South Korea's two semiconductor giants, Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor, have signed separate deals to supply 750 million dollars worth of NAND flash memory chips to Apple Computer.

Both Samsung and Hynix said the deal were part of Apple's 1.25 billion dollar global drive to secure NAND flash memory chips from five

A wireless mesh network that will cover the entire country of Macedonia was announced Monday.

The vendor that will supply the equipment for the network, Strix Systems, claimed that mesh network, which will cover more than 1000 square miles, is the first nationwide wireless broadband system in the world. The network will