Fake Vista available in China

Microsoft's worldwide Vista launch has been tainted by news that pirated copies are already available in China, reports Red Herring.

US companies are reportedly still suffering "unacceptably high" losses in China due to counterfeiting and piracy. With pirated copies said to be already available in Beijing, Microsoft took some steps to protect its $6 billion investment in its first major upgrade since Windows XP in 2001.

"We have done a lot of things on Vista to reduce the impact of piracy on the product," Scott Di Valerio, a Microsoft VP, told reporters in Beijing. "There will be reduced functionality that will occur if you run non-genuine versions of the software."

Computing superstore PC World will no longer sell the storage devices, affectionately known as floppies, once existing stock runs out, reports BBC News.

New storage systems, coupled with a need to store more than the 1.44MB of data held by a standard floppy, have led to its demise. Only a tiny percentage of PCs currently sold still have floppy disk drives.

"The floppy disk looks increasingly quaint and simply isn't able to compete," said Bryan Magrath, commercial director of PC World. The first nail in the coffin for the disk came in 1998, when the iMac was revealed without a floppy disk drive.

The LinuxWorld Conference and Expo will not be held in SA this year, reports Tectonic.

Exhibitions for Africa, which ran the LinuxWorld Expo for the past two years, decided the licensing costs for the show were too high. The company says it is unlikely the show will be staged again in the country.

Instead of a separate LinuxWorld show, Exhibitions for Africa will now make space available for Linux and open source exhibitors within the combined Futurex and Equip shows, which will take place from 15 May to 18 May, in Johannesburg.

New research indicates enterprises will continue to grapple with long lists of dangerous software vulnerabilities during 2007, reports eWeek.

Experts at IBM predict continued growth in the number of flaws found in popular products over the next 12 months.

A report by IBM's Internet Security Systems X-Force research team says the group observed just under 7 250 vulnerabilities during 2006, which breaks down to an average of 20 new software flaws being isolated every day. This is a 40% increase over the number of vulnerabilities discovered during 2005.

The Federal Trade Commission has spanked Sony BMG for its surreptitious installation of nasty-ware and an adult Web site that was responsible for the sending of x-rated spam, reports The Register.

Sony BMG agreed to pay up to $150 for each computer damaged in its secret scheme to load spyware-laced DRM software on its customers' machines. The software loaded with no warning, reported users' listening habits to a Sony BMG-controlled server, prevented copying that may be protected under the fair use doctrine, and opened open a hole that could have allowed online criminals to completely own the machine.

The settlement could represent a bitter dose for Sony if enough infected users - estimated by one researcher to range from 100 000 to a million - claim their stake.

IBM is working on an open source project called Jazz to promote programming tools for globally distributed teams, reports CNET.

Set to launch in June at Jazz.net, the project will be based on work from IBM Research and its Rational tools division around geographically distributed collaborative software development.

Jazz aims to modernise development tools for geographically spread programming teams. The effort has the potential to become a widely used foundation for distributed development tools.