August 11, 2004

Hand over nuclear weapons and know-how, Iran tells Britain Telegraph - Iran has issued an extraordinary list of demands to Britain and other European countries, telling them to provide advanced nuclear technology, conventional weapons and a security guarantee against nuclear attack by Israel. Teheran's request, said by British officials to have "gone down very badly", sharply raises the stakes in the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme, which Britain and America believe is aimed at making an atomic bomb. Iran's move came during crisis talks in Paris this month with senior diplomats from Britain, France and Germany. 9:45:20 AM

Microsoft Battens Down Windows XP's Hatches TechnologyReview.com -With the latest update to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system, personal computers will soon join parents , bosses, teachers and spouses as a source of nagging in your life. But as mom always said, it's for your own good. You'll get nagged at startup if you're not running an antivirus program or it's out of date. You'll get a warning if a firewall isn't turned on. Other messages pop up when you try to download, install or run software from that sea of malware called the Internet. The nagging is among the more obvious changes made by Service Pack 2. There are others -- ranging from an Internet browser popup blocker to components that will no longer interact with strangers -- that will make computing more secure and, despite the warnings, less annoying. For a company that managed to create both the most widely used operating system and No. 1 hacker target, Microsoft has done remarkably well with SP2. Unlike previous patches, this update doesn't just fix a glitch or two but boosts security overall.  9:16:40 AM

Movie industry settles DVD-copying software case Out-Law.com -The Motion Picture Association of America announced yesterday that it has settled a copyright infringement action brought against 321 Studios. The controversial software firm announced last week that it has ceased trading. 9:14:39 AM