Extended monitoring sought for MS

Google yesterday urged a federal court to extend its supervision of Microsoft to ensure it complies with a 2002 anti-trust consent decree. It argued that Microsoft has not done enough to make sure its new desktop search product leaves room for competitors, says the Washington Post.

"Given Microsoft's history of aggressively minimising the impact of court-ordered relief, it is appropriate for the court to use its authority to extend" the consent decree, Google said in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in US District Court, in Washington.

The provisions of the decree relating to Google's attempt to intervene are mostly set to expire in November.

The WiFi Alliance yesterday launched the action phase of its plan to get faster wireless networking products into the market, kicking off certification testing of gear based on a draft version of the IEEE 802.11n standard.

The industry group that popularised wireless LANs expects 802.11n Draft 2.0 products with its seal of approval to be on the market before September, reports PC World.

Those routers, access points, clients and other products should work with other certified gear based on the draft standard, as well as existing WiFi gear that uses the 802.11a/b/g standards.

More than a month after Symantec knocked out 50 000 Chinese PCs with a bad software update, the company is ready to offer compensation. But Chinese users eligible for the offer have to act fast; it's only good for a couple of weeks, says PC World.

Symantec's problems in China began on 18 May, when it released a bad software update that caused its Norton anti-virus software to wrongly identify two system files in the Simplified Chinese version of Windows XP as malware and quarantine them.

That mistake, which Symantec blamed on "an automated process", left tens-of-thousands of PCs crippled and Internet bulletin boards full of angry posts.

A Briton has been jailed for 51 months after pleading guilty to software piracy charges in the US, according to BBC News.

From his Australia home, Hew Griffiths led the DrinkOrDie piracy group, which specialised in cracking protection codes on software, music and movies.

The US Department of Justice estimated DrinkOrDie created and spread more than $50 million of pirated goods.