German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called "Deepz0ne" who happen to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium.

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

However, growing displeasure reached a boiling point with Nullsoft’s unsanctioned release of WASTE -- an encrypted file-sharing network -- in June 2003. Frankel threatened to resign after AOL removed WASTE, but remained with the company long enough to finish Winamp 5.0.

But without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.

Domain names could become easier to hijack as a change in domain transfer rules takes effect Friday. Under new rules set by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), domain transfer requests will be automatically approved in five days unless they are explicitly denied by the account owner. This is a change from current procedure, in which a domain's ownership and nameservers remain unchanged if there is no response to a transfer request.

"Failure by the Registrar of Record to respond within five (5) calendar days to a notification from the Registry regarding a transfer request will result in a default 'approval' of the transfer," the new rules state. "In the event that a Transfer Contact listed in the Whois has not confirmed their request to transfer with the Registrar of Record and the Registrar of Record has not explicitly denied the transfer request, the default action will be that the Registrar of Record must allow the transfer to proceed."

Microsoft has started implementing features in upgrades to Windows XP which specifically prevent users of pirated keys from upgrading parts of the operating system.

Owners of pirated keys in Western Europe tell the INQUIRER that scheme has now kicked in. What this means, for example, is that if you upgrade the Media Player to version 10, and you're using a pirated copy of XP, you'll lose functionality on your machine.

Microsoft said in Dublin that it would launch the scheme in China at the end of October, and throughout Europe early next year. But it appears to have implemented it early.

Pirate users are being invited to either validate their copies of the operating system, or to download and pay for a full version of Windows XP.

An 11-year-old boy in central China took his mother to court for breaking a promise to buy him a computer if he did well at school, a news report said last Monday.

The woman told her son she would buy him a computer if he scored average marks of more than 94% for his school work, the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily reported.

However, she welshed on the deal when he achieved an average of 97%, telling him she could not afford to buy the computer, the newspaper said.

The schoolboy from Xingzheng, Henan province, then went to court asking a judge to make his mother honour the verbal agreement. At the hearing, the judge reconciled the mother and son.

According to the newspaper, the boy gained his knowledge of law after helping his parents with their small business.

A networking research and development outfit claims that the Mighty Microsoft is planning to take over the internet by retroactively claiming IP (intellectual property) rights over many of the Internet's basic protocols.

Merit Network's Larry Blunk said that having a quick squint at Microsoft's Royalty Free Protocol License Agreement, the software colossus seemed to be suddenly claiming IP rights to many vital Internet protocols.

Some of the RFC protocols include the TCP/IP protocols and the DNS (Domain Name System), are key bits of the Internet's network infrastructure.

He notes that Vole does not specify how this list of protocols was derived and to what extent it has investigated their possible rights holdings over them.

"Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".

The same company that makes those cute little household vacuuming robots now has a military robot that is equipped with a pump action shotgun capable of firing shotgun rounds and presumably killing enemy combatants (or anyone who happens to be standing in front of the 'bot). The robot is called the Pacbot, and it has already seen action in Iraq. The Pacbot weighs about 40 pounds, and is propelled by heavy-duty tracks. It also has chemical sensors that detect nuclear, biological, and chemical contaminants. It's currently being tested by the 29th Infantry Regiment at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Of course, the big story here is not that robots are being used in Iraq or tested by the U.S. Army – the big news is that they are being equipped with lethal weapons. Up until now, robots have always been limited to support roles, such as carrying equipment, sniffing out bombs, or performing remote detection of nuclear, biological, or chemical contaminants. But now there are Army robots with shotguns. Next up? Robot-controlled Hummers that can't drive straight, but can still shoot. Once they get the bugs out of the software, they'll even be able to limit their shooting to the enemy rather than just randomly firing off shotgun rounds at anything that moves.

The very citizen journalists who very nearly pushed John Kerry into the White House have continued with their stellar work, uncovering a shocking photo naming policy on a shared Netscape/CNN site.

Citizen journalists traveling to this page discovered a dubious name for the file of the photo showing a lovable Laura Bush holding her ape-faced hubby. Until late last night, the photo was unpleasantly called asshole.jpg. It has now been changed to the more innocuous georgelaura135.jpg. The old photo page now chucks up an error message.

The photo name raises some obvious questions. Does CNN or Netscape hate the President? Have these organizations allowed unbiased web monkeys into their midsts? Is W. an asshole?

CNN has fingered a Netscape employee as the culprit, and Netscape agrees.

More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.

Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.

Nationwide, only scattered problems were reported in electronic voting, though roughly 40 million people cast digital ballots, voting equipment company executives had said.