Vista's first hole uncovered

Blogger George Ou has claimed the honour of being the first to identify a hole in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system since the software was released to the public on Tuesday. However, the flaw is relatively obscure and will not pose a threat to most users, reports PC World.

According to Ou, attackers could conceivably use Vista's speech recognition feature to run malicious programs using pre-recorded verbal commands played over the system's speakers. Microsoft is investigating the matter, but says the impact of the flaw is expected to be small.

Microsoft says Vista users would be vulnerable only if the speech recognition feature was enabled, a microphone and speakers were connected and if hackers can find a way to trick the computer's owner to download and play an audio recording of the malicious commands. The commands would also be limited to the access rights of the logged on user.

Most US mobile telecommunications providers plan to upgrade their 3G wireless networks to increase Internet upload speeds, reports News.com.

Some have already begun working on their networks to include a CDMA-based technology called Evolution Data Optimised Revision A. The latest version of the technology is likely to offer average speeds from 450kbps to 800kbps for downloads and 300kbps to 400kbps for uploads.

According to the networks, the upgrade will mean that users will be able to use mobile computing devices to download a 1MB e-mail attachment in less than 15 seconds, and upload the same size file in less than 25 seconds.

Electronic Arts (EA) has will increase its support for Nintendo's Wii games console in 2007, according to a Financial Times report published by MSNBC.

The company released only two Wii titles in its busiest quarter ending 31 December, during which time both the Wii and PlayStation 3 (PS3) were launched. Four games were released for the PS3 and five for the Xbox 360. EA says it is working on 15 new Wii games.

The move comes after the release of sales figures showing the Wii console has been outselling Sony's PS3. Nintendo said last week it had sold 1.25 million Wii consoles in North America, while Sony shipped only a million PS3s to the US.

Nearly 30% of US Internet users are already tagging online content to categorise and label material they upload or find on the Web. This is bound to grow as more sites offer tagging tools and users begin to see the benefits of tagging, according to a new study by The Pew Internet & American Life Project.

PC World says the report concludes that tagging appears destined to become mainstream. The report says tagging is a kind of next-stage search phenomenon that enables users to mark, store and retrieve useful Web content.

The study is the first of its kind and, therefore, does not indicate how fast tagging adoption is growing, but says the rising popularity of tagging sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us are a clear indication the practice is increasing in popularity.