The holiday season saw Sony BMG provide a welcome gift to those who challenged its use of controversial anti-piracy software on music CDs.
The company said it would stop making the discs, recall those already on the market and settle outstanding class-action lawsuits in the US. The software employed file-cloaking technologies that could be used by hackers. The firm also said it would offer those who bought the discs a choice of compensation – either $7.50 in cash and a free album download, or three free album downloads.
Another gift, this time for mathematicians, arrived on Christmas Day with confirmation of the . The colossal prime, at 9,152,052 digits long, was unearthed by two members of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), who contribute spare computing power to a collaborative effort to find these mathematical objects of desire.
A less welcome arrival was an designed to spread via Instant Messaging software. The worm exploits a bug, revealed on 28 December, in the way the Windows operating system renders graphics files – a flaw that Microsoft has .
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Another nasty piece of software revealed over the Christmas break was a “trojan horse” program that sneakily replaces Google web adverts with unsavoury ones of its own. The trojan via a web page and then replaces legitimate Google AdSense ads with links to mainly adult and gambling sites.
Google suffered further indignity when a New York company announced that it owns the patent to technology used by the chat program Google Talk and Google for $5 million over the alleged patent infringement.
Meanwhile, the US military got a Christmas present to make any gadget lover envious – the first complete prototype of a that enables soldiers to carry 100 kilograms of gear without breaking into a sweat.
