According to a report by NewTeeVee a court has ordered RealNetworks to temporarily suspend distribution of its RealDVD product until Tuesday.

The Judge will review papers filed in the case by Hollywood movie studios until Tuesday when a decision will be made whether to keep the ban for longer.

The software, only available for a week, is a DVD ripping and archiving product allowing for personal copies to be made. As soon as the software was made available last Tuesday Real and the Hollywood studios both launched lawsuits almost simultaneously, with Real pre-emptively asking for a declatory judgment and the studios wanting sale of the product blocked, saying it violates copyrights.

Currently the RealDVD site has the following message for customers "Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable. Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use."

View: RealDVD

Given its history of moving deadlines at a moment's notice, it hardly seems surprising that Microsoft is keeping Windows XP alive even longer than expected, but its latest move looks particularly bad for Vista.

The apparent decision to allow OEM computer sellers to offer disks that downgrade installations of Windows Vista to XP until the end of July next year clearly bumps up against the period when Windows 7 might be released.

Microsoft had previously said it would end the scheme next January, but the continued lack of demand for Vista appears to be behind the change of heart.

If the move is confirmed, it's yet more bad news for Vista, as XP users may have the option to skip the unloved OS entirely and move straight to Windows 7.

View: TechRadar

The veiled threat to shut down iTunes if royalty rates on downloaded songs were hiked has been averted. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) opted to keep the status quo and turned down a request to increase royalties from 9 to 15 cents on songs bought online. The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) asked for the rise while Apple opposed it and said it could result in iTunes being shut down.

"We're pleased with the CRB's decision," said Apple's Tom Neumayr.

In testimony submitted to the CRB 18 months ago, but only brought to light this week, Apple executive Eddy Cue said: "Apple has repeatedly made clear that it is in this business to make money and would most likely not continue to operate iTS (the iTunes Store) if it were no longer possible to do so profitably." The CRB also rejected a call to cut the rate to 4.8 cents and in the end agreed to peg it at 9.1 cents a song for the next five years.

Link: Read more at BBC News

Researchers have demonstrated a flexible television screen which could result in people folding up their computer and putting it in their pocket. The design could be used for television and posters, as well as computers, while it could also pave the way for the development of newspaper display technology which would allow readers to upload daily news to an easy-to-carry display contraption.

The concept demo was unveiled by researchers from Sony and the Max Planck Institute in Germany who believe "Rigid television screens, bulky laptops and still image posters are to be a thing of the past". It is all organic, flexible and transparent with an extremely low energy requirement, while it has an almost unlimited viewing angle and high efficiency. There is no need for a backlight and response times are up to 10 times fast than LCDs (liquid crystal displays), meaning ultra-smooth motion without blurring. Due to the transparency, it is thought multiple layers can be stacked possibly for some types of 3D effects.

Neowin.net presents the NeowinCAST News Edition for October 2nd, 2008. This week, Christopher Vendemio (bangbang023) and Rob Wright (Rob) discuss the following topics:

• Google releases Chrome (read)
• T-Mobile G1: First Android phone (read)
• Apple threatens to close iTunes store (read)
• Skyfire public beta fiasco, Windows Mobile browsing options
• Neowin 5 news (read)

Click play to listen to the show immediately or follow the appropriate links to download the current episode. Enjoy, and remember to leave your comments about the show.



Download: NeowinCAST News Edition Episode #39 (Right click, Save As)
Subscribe: Via iTunes | Via Zune | Via RSS

Symbian has released the latest version of its Series 60 (S60) mobile phone operating system, and has added features to make it more competitive with Apple's iPhone and Google's Android.

The fifth edition of the S60 will integrate touch screen control to new handsets, support for higher screen resolutions and a widescreen mode for viewing. Mobile internet use has also been improved, with touch scrolling of web pages and support for Adobe's Flash Lite 3 built in. Motion control has been added, so that users can silence an incoming call by simply turning the handset upside down.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Mozilla has pushed back its development schedule for Thunderbird 3, the next version of its email client. A planned beta of the package will now be described as a third alpha build. The first beta of Thunderbird 3 was due to come out at the end of September. It would have been followed by a second in November and a release candidate sometime towards the back end of January, according to a preliminary release schedule. This date is now likely to be pushed back, given that several features are not yet in place, but by how long remains unclear. The cross-platform email client has been available as an alpha for several months.

The revised description is intended to avoid raising the profile of the release when neither the product nor Mozilla Messaging are ready, according to a blog posting by Mozilla developer Dan Mosedale.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Skype was unaware of a major privacy problem affecting Skype users in China, the company's president said Thursday. In a blog posting to the eBay subsidiary's corporate blog, Skype President Josh Silverman said his company had no idea that the Tom-Skype software, distributed to Skype users in China, was logging chat messages and storing them on a publicly accessible server. "It was our understanding that it was not Tom's protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords," he wrote.

Tom-Skype is developed by China-based Internet service provider Tom Online. On Wednesday, Canadian researchers published a report (pdf) finding that the Tom-Skype client was storing certain text messages and user information on public servers. The data was encrypted, but the encryption key required to read the data was publicly available.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Internet infrastructure vendors are working on patches for a set of security flaws that could help hackers knock servers offline with very little effort. The security community has been buzzing about the bugs since Tuesday, when security researcher Robert Hansen discussed the problem on his blog .

Technical details on the vulnerabilities have not been released, but the security experts who discovered the problem, Robert Lee and Jack Louis of security vendor Outpost24, say that they can knock Windows, Linux, embedded systems and even firewalls offline with what's known as a denial of service (DOS) attack. The flaws lie in the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) software used by these systems to send data over the Internet.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Nine years after Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice, the resulting OpenOffice.org project is ready to roll out its 3.0 release. Enhanced format compatibility and features put it on par with Microsoft Office.

When Sun Microsystems bought the little-known StarOffice productivity suite in 1999, and soon thereafter released the product's code base as open-source software, it was unclear how far the arguably quixotic initiative might reach—and what damage it could possibly wreak on Microsoft's ironclad grip on the office productivity market.

View: The full story @ eWeek

It has been long rumoured that Microsoft would introduce Zune software onto the Windows Mobile operating system.

In an interview with CIO magazine Steve Ballmer confirms that Microsoft is looking to port the software to Windows Mobile devices.

When questioned why Microsoft developed the zune, Ballmer replied:

"At the end of the day, one of the big trends is that all content is going digital. And if we don’t have the software and services that are useful, helpful and valuable for the consumption of music and video, we are sort of not really a player.

Now, we built the Zune hardware with the Zune software - and what you’ll see more and more over time is that the Zune software will also be ported to and be more important not just with the hardware but on the PC, on Windows Mobile devices, etc."

This is the strongest indication that Microsoft will be porting the software. We're not sure when exactly but you can bet that Windows Mobile 7 will have it included.

As part of Neowin's 8th birthday celebrations, we are proud to announce the launch of a forum skin specifically for our members who like to surf on the go. The new skin has been tested across a range of the most popular mobile browsers to give members a great Neowin experience out on the road.

Our developer Timan has worked tirelessly on this skin to ensure it contains all the features you need to post on Neowin from a mobile device. To keep the skin bandwidth friendly, the number of images on the page is very low, and signatures and other less necessary parts are not displayed.

Screenshot: >> Neowin Forums on Windows Mobile <<
Screenshot: >> Neowin Forums on iPhone <<

To view the mobile skin, simply load up the forums in your browser on your mobile device. Your mobile will be detected and the mobile skin applied. A link is available at the bottom should you wish to switch back to the full skin

ATI, graphics products group of Advanced Micro Devices, said at Ceatec trade-show in Japan that its expects DirectX 11-compatible graphics processing units (GPUs) in 2009, which may be considered as intention to release a new breed of chips that support new application programming interface. In addition, the company predicts prosperity of general purpose computing on GPU (GPGPU).

AMD’s ATI unit outlined several expectations for the consumer 3D graphics industry in 2009. Among the highlights are GPU manufacturing transition to 40nm process technology and widespread usage of GDDR5 memory standard, which will drive performance of graphics chips considerably up, something, which will allow game developers to create video games with more sophisticated effects

View: The full story @ Xbit Labs

Some of the biggest names in the security industry have failed the latest Virus Bulletin 100 test. The test used 100 pieces of malware collected from active samples and put them up against a number of major security suites for Windows Server 2008.

Only 16 of the 24 products pitted against the test passed, while eight fell short owing to missed malware samples or false positive returns. Most of the major vendors, including McAfee, Symantec, Microsoft and Sophos, were able to pass the test. However, several others, including F-Secure, Kaspersky and Computer Associates, fell short of the certification.

View: The full story @ vnunet

A revised version of an important security standard for ecommerce merchants was published on Wednesday. Version 1.2 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) mostly tweaks and clarifies the existing framework for the secure processing of credit card data. The 12 existing requirements - covering areas such as the need to used a firewall, store cardholder data securely and encrypt transmission of cardholder data - remain unchanged.

The revised standard, however, adds tighter controls for the security of wireless networks. The latest version of the standard calls for wireless networks "connected to cardholder data environments" to be tested alongside those that transmit card data. Also, use of the aging WEP wireless encryption will not be allowed in certified environments from the start of July 2010, and banned in new environments from April 2009.

View: The full story @ The Reg