Sony ends game controller legal dispute ... YouTube to broadcast BBC ... Slashdot gets Digg-y

HIGHLIGHTS
News: YouTube to offer BBC news and entertainment videos
News: Dell beats earnings mark despite sinking profits
News: Adobe to launch Apollo beta later this month
News: Slashdot revamps tech news aggregation site
Security Tip: Password cracking reminder
Podcast: Today's IT news audio update
Geek comic of the week: The Book of Biff


NEWS UPDATES

YouTube to offer BBC news and entertainment videos
Users of YouTube's online video service will soon be able to view news, TV series, documentaries and other programs from the BBC. Under the nonexclusive partnership, the BBC and its commercial subsidiary BBC Worldwide will create its own advertising-funded commercial "channels" on YouTube, the companies said Friday.

Dell beats earnings mark despite sinking profits
Still gasping from the resignation of its chief executive in January and an ongoing investigation of its accounting practices, Dell Inc. reported fourth quarter profits of $673 million, down sharply from the $1 billion it reported for the same period last year. Still, the company posted earnings of $0.30 per share, just over Wall Street expectations of $0.29 per share.

Adobe to launch Apollo beta later this month
Adobe Systems Inc. later this month plans to launch the beta of a new runtime that will allow rich Web-based applications to run offline, technology that could threaten the popularity of programming platforms such as Java and Microsoft Corp.'s .NET.

Slashdot revamps tech news aggregation site
Slashdot.org released on Thursday a new feature designed to give more participation in the selection of articles to its users, who submit links to stories and comments about them to the site.

Sony ends game controller legal dispute
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and Immersion Corp. said Friday that a five-year-old legal battle between them was settled and that they will explore ways to use Immersion's technology in PlayStation products.

Sanyo and Lenovo may share cost of battery recall
Japanese electronics company Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. and computer vendor Lenovo Group Ltd. are discussing how to pay for the recall of over 200,000 laptop PC batteries, and may end up sharing the burden.

Study: Businesses 'flounder' over outsourcing value
More than 4 in 10 businesses are unable to quantify the benefits of their outsourcing deals, new research from KPMG International shows. And nearly 4 out of 5 of respondents to the KPMG survey of CIOs and senior executives at more than 650 major enterprises worldwide admitted they did not accurately know the cost of selecting their outsourcing providers.

Finally from Sony, a video Walkman
Eighteen months after rival Apple Inc. raised the bar in the music player market with its video iPod, Sony Corp. will launch its first digital video Walkman. The NW-A800 series Walkman will initially go on sale in Europe in April.

IBM aims for midmarket with BI appliance server
IBM Corp. hopes to bring business intelligence (BI) to a wider audience of midmarket customers with a new software stack developed in partnership with Business Objects SA, industry sources said.

Rivals launch dueling virtualization products
Two makers of virtualization software for running Windows on Apple computers have issued dueling upgrades this week. On Feb. 27 Parallels unveiled an update to its Desktop for Macs software. And VMware said Friday it's going to release sometime in June a beta 2 upgrade to its VMware virtualization software for the Mac, code named Fusion.

Nokia-Palm buyout reports baffle some experts
Recent reports that Nokia Corp. is in talks to buy Palm Inc. surprised some analysts, who nonetheless said some type of buyout might make sense and could even be a good thing for customers.

Red Hat updates RHEL 4
Red Hat will provide a taster of the upcoming version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by adding Xen into the current version of RHEL. Version 4 becomes 4.5 and is the first version of the OS to include the open source Xen, which uses para-virtualization technology to enable virtual machines. Xen is already included in the latest version of the Fedora kernel, Red Hat's community release, and is also part of Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise 10.


SECURITY TIP

Password cracking reminder
By Brent Huston, MicroSolved, Inc.

Attackers have made a quantum leap in password cracking in the last few years. Time is no longer on our side. In many cases, it is faster to crack the password than to change it across an enterprise, especially if politics, change controls and cross-platforms are involved. Quite simply, we must checkmate attackers before they get the password hashes.

Read the full article here.

Subscribe to Security Strategies - Tips and technologies to protect your enterprise.


PODCAST

Daily IT News Audio Update
Oracle to buy Hyperion for $3.3 billion ... Lenovo recalls more batteries ... Dell's Q4 profits sink

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ITWHIRLED

Geek comic of the week: The Book of Biff
Biff -- an odd-looking fellow with some unruly eyebrows -- has a series of ideas that in hindsight might be best described as "sounding good at the time." Like speeding up the painting process with dynamite. Or watching a fireworks display from a hot-air balloon. Or using a glacier as a cold-water source.

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