Hacker denied US visa

Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian programmer at the centre of the first Digital Millennium Copyright Act prosecution, has been denied a US visa, TheRegister reports. The move jeopardises his requirement to testify in the forthcoming trial of his former employer, ElcomSoft. Planet PDF reports that Alexander Katalov, ElcomSoft`s chief executive, has also been denied a visa, in a move that surely means the already delayed 21 October start of the trial will be put back still further.

ElcomSoft is charged with supplying a tool that circumvents the copy protection in Adobe eBooks, which can be used in making audible copies of e-books for the blind, or copies of legitimately purchased electronic books. ElcomSoft`s Advanced eBook Processor, which is legal in Russia, was sold over the Internet.

Sklyarov was also indicted in the case, and spent a month in a US jail and four months on bail, before striking a deal that allowed him to return to Russia in exchange for testifying in any case against ElcomSoft.

That agreement, thanks to his visa application being denied, is now in jeopardy and he faces the dilemma of being legally unable to enter the US to attend a trial he is legally obliged to testify in. [More at TheRegister]

OpenOffice.org, the office suite based on Sun`s StarOffice, celebrated its second birthday this week with the release of a version for Mac OS X as well as a new developer release which will lay the basis for the future version of OpenOffice.org. The suite, widely considered to be a potential Microsoft Office killer, has already been downloaded 8.5 million times since its release.

Newsforge (www.newsforge.org) recently did an interview with OpenOffice`s Sam Hiser, who says the number of OpenOffice.org users is anywhere between two and five million, excluding StarOffice users. It is a fairly broad range but even at its lowest is still not bad for a challenger in the Microsoft Office space.

Hiser says there is no doubt in his mind that OpenOffice.org poses a real threat to MS Office but says the hardest task will be to win "mind share". He also admits that there are some elements still missing from the suite but insists they are being worked on. These include a calendar, scheduling software and an e-mail application. "Once OpenOffice.org introduces these features, there will be no excuse for most users, institutions, businesses or corporations to continue to pay a premium for the office suite." [More at NewsForge]

Apple says 25 million copies of QuickTime 6 have been downloaded in less than 100 days, adding that the number of downloads indicates broad support for the MPEG-4 open standard. The company also claims to be the leader in "end-to-end" MPEG-4 streaming solutions, based on the number of QuickTime downloads combined with almost 200 000 downloads of the QuickTime Darwin Streaming Server.

MPEG-4 has already been adopted by the broader industry and Jive Records reportedly recently used MPEG-4 to deliver video streams of Britney Spears` online exclusive, "I Love Rock and Roll".

Released in mid-July, QuickTime 6 supports MPEG-4 and is touted as a standards-based solution to delivering quality audio and video over IP networks. The QuickTime Player has also been a hit, with more than 126 million users downloading it in the past year.

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