DoS attack hits Sun Grid

The publicly available Grid computing service from Sun Microsystems has been hit by a denial-of-service (DoS) network attack on its first day, reports News.Com.

The report says a text-to-speech translation service for tasks such as turning blog entries into podcasts became the focus of a DoS attack, in which numerous computers simultaneously attacked and took down the service.

Sun says the attacks did not disturb the corporate Sun Grid, which is not publicly available and requires user authentication and verification. Sun CEO Scott McNealy is on record as saying absolute anonymity breeds irresponsibility and that audit trails through authentication provide a much more civil society.

Apple has denounced as "state-sponsored piracy" a law passed by the lower house of the French Parliament that could force Apple to open its iTunes online music store to all portable music players, not just iPods.

According to a Forbes report, Apple says the recent progress in popularising legal downloads could be lost if iPod users could freely load interoperable music files. Apple contends that free movies for iPods would not be far behind, warning the move would probably result in a state-sponsored culture of piracy.

The Bill is now set to go before the upper house of the French Parliament. If approved, the law could force Apple, Sony and others to share their exclusive copy-protection technologies with rivals. French officials say the law is aimed at preventing any single media playing operating system from dominating the digital online music retail market.

Microsoft has opened a Web site to encourage software developers to write "mashup" applications that connect to the company`s Web properties to promote Microsoft`s products and services as a platform on which third-party developers can build applications.

News.Com says the site offers documentation for software developers to write applications that tap into data or services from Microsoft Web sites and the move reflects a company-wide transition to hosted services.

This means a programmer could write a hybrid software (mashup) combining information from an e-commerce Web site with MSN Search or Microsoft`s Virtual Earth mapping site.

A laptop with information on almost 200 000 current and former HP employees has been stolen, putting them at risk of identity fraud.

The Register says 196 000 current and former HP employees have been told in an e-mail that Fidelity Investments, record-keeper for the HP retirement plans, recently had a laptop computer stolen that contained personal information about them, including their name, address, social security number and compensation.

The report says the incident is the latest in a string of data security breaches. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 53 million personal records have been exposed in dozens of incidents in the past 13 months and US consumers filed more than 255 000 identity theft reports to the Federal Trade Commission in 2005.

Ageia Technologies has announced availability of its PhysX processor, which is described as a dedicated physics processing unit designed to work in conjunction with games that use Ageia`s physics engine.

MacWorld says hardware-based physics processing represents a new trend in gaming that enables games to feature dramatically more realistic real-time physics effects, including smoke, particle effects, dynamic physical motion and interaction.

Ageia`s approach is to license a physics engine to game manufacturers to enable them to incorporate the new processor`s capabilities into their games. It claims that more than 100 games supporting the PhysX processor are in development by companies including Ubisoft, Epic Games and others.