Apple re-starts browser war

Apple CEO Steve Jobs yesterday kicked off the annual Macworld show in San Francisco with the company`s own browser. Jobs said the browser, called Safari, is as much as three times as fast as competitors such as Internet Explorer on the Macintosh platform.

"We have done our own browser, and it`s awesome," Jobs said. "It`s the fastest browser on Mac, period."

What makes the new browser particularly interesting is the fact that unlike many of the "alternative" browsers built around the Mozilla Gecko code, Safari is built using the khtml code, the open source code underpinning KDE`s Konqueror browser.

The other software worthy of mention from Macworld`s opening is the release of an application called KeyNote. Proving that Apple is still up to the battle with Microsoft, KeyNote is essentially a PowerPoint replacement and can import and export to the Microsoft product as well as handle PDF files. [Computerworld]

A poll of Liberty Alliance Project member organisations indicates that 2003 will be the year in which the organisation`s authentication system will see the real light of day. Among the projects ready for launch is a plan by General Motors to use the system on its intranet.

On the product side, the alliance announced that by the end of January, Communicator will deliver a version of its Hub ID product line that uses the Liberty 1.1 specifications, and that SourceID, an open source development community, will release a Java toolkit for implementing Liberty-standard single sign-on features.

The organisation also said a second phase of specifications, version 2.0, is planned for the first half of this year with guidelines for site-to-site authentication and user-attribute sharing, according to the alliance. [PCWorld]

Jon Lech Johansen, also known as "DVD Jon", has been acquitted in an Oslo City Court of charges regarding his development and distribution of DeCSS, a program that can be used to break the digital copy-protection mechanism of DVDs.

The court found that Johansen was entitled to access information on a DVD that he had purchased, and was therefore entitled to use his program to break the code.

Johansen`s attorney, Halvor Manshaus, says the court also considered the distribution of the code on the Internet and it had found that "this program could be useful for both legal and illegal purposes, like many other devices".

Johansen created the program, called DeCSS, in 1999 to crack the CSS (Content Scrambling System) copy protection on DVDs, and made the code available to others on the Internet. Norwegian police raided his home in January 2000 after the Motion Picture Association of America filed a complaint. [Infoworld]

Microsoft says demand for the online add-on to its Xbox game console system has been strong, with more than 250 000 kits sold in about two months.

Xbox Live is an online gaming service launched in November, a key component in Microsoft`s $2 billion strategy to make its video game console the centre of a networked home entertainment system.

Sony, the leader in the game console market, launched its own competing online adaptor for the PlayStation 2 in August. [Reuters]

This week`s TechNiche:
Microsoft to release software for CDMA networks