UPDATED: Real claims a million tracks a week in music promo

Real Networks sold three million songs in three weeks, the company has announced, as it ends its 49 per song promotion on its online music store. What proportion of those were bought by iPod owners exploiting Real's Harmony technology which hacks Apple's digital rights management is not known. Apple has said that it will close this loophole and if it does it will leave a lot of Real customers with songs that they can no longer carry around. ...more

Broadband dates, speed test results

BT has named the latest batch of exchanges that will get ADSL broadband upgrades later this year. The 15 exchanges and dates are as follows: ? 1 August: Battle. ? 13 August: Fullwood, Linlithgow, Longton and Midhurst. ...more

Sun bids for Java-bundled Windows

Sun asks judge to order XP to ship with Java to repair Microsoft damage Yesterday saw the start of a week-long hearing, as Microsoft wheeled its antitrust lawyers back into the courts to defend itself from Sun. Sun has asked for a preliminary injunction to replace Microsoft's Java interpreter with its own version in Windows XP and Internet Explorer. US District Judge Frederick Motz said such a solution would be 'elegant and simple, although dramatic' but expressed concerns that giving Java a free ride piggybacking XP would give Sun possibly unfair benefits. ...more

Nokia trumpets the N91 as mobile jukebox

Nokia has introduced a new sub-brand Nokia Nseries dedicated to presenting multimedia content. The phones - the N91, N90 and N70 - were unveiled at a Destination Multimedia event in Amsterdam, where Nokia has been proclaiming 'the next step in digital convergence' with major support for mobile multimedia content. Leading the way is the N91 (pictured, left), which is marketed as a mobile music centre as much as a phone, with its storage for up to 3,000 songs on a 4GB hard disk and its support for transferring music files from a computer and sharing playlists, a la iTunes. ...more

NTL to tackle email blockage

NTL has announced a number of changes designed to prevent the kind of blockages that have stopped customers being able to receive their email over the past week. The company said that 'intermittent' problems caused by their servers being unable to handle the total volume of email passing through them had resulted in some users being unable to receive messages. There have been no problems sending mail, a spokesman confirmed, nor has any email been lost. ...more