Carphone Warehouse takes pre-orders for the Motorola ROKR phone

Carphone Warehouse is taking pre-orders for the Motorola ROKR, aka the iTunes phone, which will ship in the UK on 15 September. O2 is the network operator and the phone will be available on a monthly contract or pay-as-you-go for ?209.99. ...more

OS X 10.1.5 update released

Apple has released the latest update to Mac OS X, delivering improvements in application reliability, networking, security, and PC Card and external device support. Application improvements comprise increased stability of Mail and Sherlock, support for 2D and QuickTime hardware acceleration for Rage Pro graphics cards, and anti-aliased text display in certain Carbon applications. Networking and security improvements comprise: improved networking via AFP when accessing multi-level directories on Windows NT file servers; improvement to file searching on local and remote volume; a generic PC Card driver to support a variety of PC Card modems; Mail accounts go offline to indicate that SSL encryption settings are not supported by mail server. ...more

Apple wins iTunes contract war

Apple has renewed its contracts with the four major record companies without having to give in to demands for variable pricing. Company spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said that she was unable to provide details of the licences, such as when they expire or whether the terms had changed but confirmed that the US iTunes Music Store will continue to cost 99 cents across the board. The FT reports that record company executives privately accepted that while Apple's iTunes Music Store is by far their largest source of online sales - currently it has over 80 per cent of the market - they had little leverage in the negotiations, despite threatening at various times to refuse to renew Apple's licence to sell their music. ...more

Microsoft security: moderate to incomplete

Microsoft has published two new patches for vulnerabilities in its products it rates as moderate. The most serious, however, looks to be a flaw in Outlook 2002. Outlook 2002 clients that connect using POP3, IMAP or WebDAV protocols could be subject to attacks that cause the program to fail. ...more

China accuses West over WAPI wireless encryption technology

China has accused the International Standards Organization of insulting the country and waging a conspiracy against its WAPI wireless encryption technology. In March the ISO rejected China's attempt to have WAPI recognised as a standard, preferring the 802.11i protocol developed by the US engineers' group, the IEEE. ...more