Sony has launched a new music and video download service as it gears up to challenge Apple’s iTunes.
The announcement, made at the IFA technology fair in Berlin, was timed to coincide with an Apple media event in the US.
The cloud-based service will be available on PlayStation 3s, Bravia TVs, Blu-Ray players and Sony’s personal computers.
Initially it will offer movies. Music will be added at the end of the year.
Sony’s online services platform Qriocity has offered video-on-demand in the US since April this year but will now be available in Europe.
The …

There’s a Linux distribution for every occasion and the main purpose of Jolicloud is to present a web enabled GUI for netbooks and similar devices. I’m going to take a look at a preview release of the forthcoming 1.1 version. Under the hood, it’s based on the Ubuntu long term service release (10.04), and the front end is handled by a combination of the Chromium web browser and a full screen user interface that eschews overlapping windows.
Netbooks are the obvious target of this distribution, and by default, it’s setup as a …

The first release candidate of office-suite LibreOffice is now available to download.
The RC1 sees bug fixes, branding refinements and stability improvements. As with the beta releases, use of this version is not recommended in a production environment.
Full change-log
Download
Unofficial .deb installers exist for Ubuntu users to use. Users upgrading from LibreOffice Beta 2 need to uninstall the suite prior to installing the release candidate.

download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/testing/3.3.0-rc1/deb/

Bing is putting social gaming into search results pages, letting users play a title without ever having to visit its specialty Bing Games site, or the publisher’s hosted game page on social networks like Facebook.

The first social title to be offered with this functionality is Happy Island from social gaming company Crowdstar. When a Bing user searches for the game in Bing, the full playable title will show up as an embedded result on the top of the page using technology from Sibblingz. Users can then play through the first …

The Humble Indie Bundle is back! Independent gaming company WolfireGames are once again letting you set the price for five of mutli-platform DRM-free games.
The games making up the bundle include the first ever Linux releases of platform puzzler ‘Braid’ and side-scrolling action game Coretx Command, the launch of new game Revenge of the Titans as well as indie favourites Osmos & Machinarium.
The bundle is only on offer for the next 7 days. Set your price (don’t be a grinch) over @ humblebundle.com

The latest iteration of web browser Opera has been released.
Adding in many new features, refinements and obligatory performance boosts, it’s an essential upgrade for Opera fans and well worth a punt for the curious.
This minute-and-a-bit video by Opera demonstrates the new features succinctly. For the stat hounds the the full change-log for Linux is here.
Download @ opera.com

Android 2.3 has been announced by Google, and now owners of smartphones such as the Nexus One and the HTC Desire are eagerly awaiting the update.
There’s very little news on when Android 2.3 will roll out at this early stage, although we do know that the first phone to go on sale with Android 2.3 is the successor to the Nexus One, the Google Nexus S.
Google Nexus One Android 2.3 update
The Nexus One has already been confirmed as getting the Android 2.3 update in early Q1 2011.

Google will open source two of the Java Eclipse coding tools it acquired with its purchase of Java-obsessed outfit Instantiations.
Less than five months after paying an undisclosed sum for Instantiations, Mountain View has announced that it will donate the source code and IP for Instantiations’ WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler tools to the open source community via the Eclipse Foundation. According to Google, the code and IP is worth more than $5m.
WindowBuilder is an Eclipse Java GUI designer for use with the Swing, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), …

Independent research suggests that Bing has cornered 12.7% of the market in the 12 months since it launched.
However Google has 62.6% and Yahoo 18.9%, according to figures from ComScore.
At a Microsoft summit to discuss Bing’s progress, the search engine’s executives admitted that there was “a long road ahead” for the site.
“There is something that we are doing that is clearly resonating but that said we are a low share player,” Satya Nadello of Microsoft’s online division told BBC News.
“We have barely gotten into double digits but we want this to …

A flaw in the module pam_motd (message of the day), which displays the daily motto and other information after login (to the shell), can be exploited under Ubuntu to expand access rights. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to gain root access. Ubuntu has already provided a patch for the flaw. Operators of multi-users systems should install it as soon as possible because directions are already in circulation via Twitter on how to exploit the flaw to get access rights to the password file /etc/shadow. The file can then not only be read, but changed.
The …