Format wars revisited: Blu-Ray beats HD DVD

Toshiba announced in February that it would discontinue its HD DVD products, handing victory to Sony and rival high definition disc format Blu-Ray. The move ended an epic standards battle. The final blows were dealt by Warner Bros., which earlier in February said it would stop issuing movies on HD DVD, and Wal-Mart, which in January announced it would phase out the sale of HD DVD products. As in most format wars, there are no clear winners. Both camps sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the battle, not always to make the products better but in efforts to woo content makers. The format war also stunted growth by confusing consumers. It made logistics more difficult for retailers. Sony has conceded it won't make its sales goal for Blu-Ray players this year. Part of the problem is the price for films on the discs, but Sony and other player manufacturers also may be hesitating to bring prices down after spending so much money on their battle.

McColo, king of spam, falls and the fight goes on

At the end of October, McColo, a company based San Jose, California, that hosted a range of cybercrime activities, was shut down. About half the spam on the Internet disappeared. A private citizen, Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs, had put pressure on ISPs to drop McColo's service. The problem is that without support from the police and federal agencies, there's no way to ensure that spammers like McColo will go out of business permanently. Private citizens do not have authority to raid and confiscate data center technology, which could shutter an operation like McColo forever. Some security experts are saying that spam is again on the rise, and suspect that McColo, one way or another, may be at least partially back in operation. It's difficult to get authorization for the possibly hundreds of warrants it would take to confiscate the property of a spammer like McColo. Sweden's TeliaSonera in fact did help resurrect McColo for a while. Until international cybercrime laws and enforcement procedures are in place, victories against spam are only temporary.

XP is dead, long live XP