Windows learns to play nicely

Seeking to stake out a place in the digital home, Microsoft is unveiling a plan to better integrate PCs with popular consumer electronics devices, such as television sets and digital audio players, reports PC World.

The vendor`s integration initiatives include upgraded Windows audio drivers; a new protocol to transfer digital media between PCs and media players; a prototype for a media centre TV client that can play content recorded on a media centre PC; and technology to make it easier for networked media players to access content anywhere on the network.

The announcements are being made at the annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this week, which lurched into full gear this morning with a keynote speech by Bill Gates, Microsoft`s chairman.

In a sign of users` increasing frustration with the security shortcomings of many software applications, a civic group in South Korea has made good on its threat to file a lawsuit against Microsoft`s Korean subsidiary, a Korean Internet service provider (ISP) and the country`s information ministry, reports eweek.com.

The suit is the direct result of the havoc caused by the SQL Slammer worm in January. The worm infected thousands of machines all over the world running Microsoft`s SQL Server 2000 software, but it hit South Korea particularly hard. Some ISPs in the country were knocked offline for extended periods of time thanks to huge amounts of network traffic generated by the worm.

Microsoft will raise the curtain on the first piece of its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) for Windows technology this week, reports eweek.com.

The company plans to demonstrate Nexus, the software module at the heart of the NGSCB architecture, this week at the company`s WinHEC conference in New Orleans. Nexus functions as a separate operating system kernel, controlling the way a PC interacts with Nexus-aware applications, hardware and memory. To run in secure mode on an NGSCB-enabled machine, an application will have to be trusted by Nexus.

But the same technology that enables this kind of protection is also what worries many of NGSCB`s critics. They say the tight control over the PC`s interaction with applications could easily lead to onerous digital-rights-management-style restrictions on content use and could give Microsoft and other vendors the ability to dictate which applications users can run.