Issue no. 388 - 1 June 2008

• Microsoft boosts support for rival formats in Office (CNET News)
  Microsoft says it plans to add new formats to Office 2007, including the Open Document Format (ODF), Portable Document Format (PDF), and XML Paper Specification (XPS). The new formats will be added to Office as part of Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, due in the first half of next year. ODF, a rival document format to Office's native format, has become popular with governments and schools.

Issue no. 386 - 20 April 2008

• UK - Standard adopted for filtering tools (BSI)
  The Kitemark for Child Safety Online has been launched with the Home Office and Ofcom to provide consumers - especially parents - reassurance that their children will not be subjected to undesirable web content. Manufacturers of filtering, monitoring and blocking applications can get their products certified against the Kitemark standard and those that pass the tests will be able to display the Kitemark symbol on their products. Parents will be able to see clearly and quickly which products will give their children the most effective protection whilst online. The Kitemark for Child Safety Online has been developed through a collaboration between BSI (the UK's National Standards Body), the Home Office, Ofcom and representatives from ISPs and application developers.

Issue no. 385 - 21 March 2008

• EU - Digital TV, Mobile TV: let's push for open technologies in Europe and worldwide (RAPDI)
  Speech by Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media, DVB World Conference 2008, Budapest, 12 March 2008.

• EU - Mobile TV across Europe: Commission adds DVB-H to standards list (RAPDI)
  The Commission has added the Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld standard (DVB-H) to the EU List of Standards, which serves as a basis for encouraging the harmonised provision of telecommunications across the EU. The addition of DVB-H is a new step towards establishing a Single Market for Mobile TV in Europe that will enable all EU citizens to watch TV on the move.

Issue no. 384 - 24 February 2008

• ETSI - Specification and guidelines on provision of information services to young children (ETSI)
  A Specialist Task Force has been funded by EC/EFTA to produce an ETSI Technical Specification, DTS/HF-00089, "Specification and guidelines for service providers on the provision of information services to young children". The current draft can be found here. By young children, we mean those between 4 and 12 years of age. A workshop to obtain consensus on the new specifications and guidelines will take place in Brussels on Wednesday 12th March.

Issue no. 381 - 8 December 2007

• News Web Sites Seek More Search Control (AP)
  The desire for greater control over how search engines index and display Web sites is driving an effort launched by leading news organizations and other publishers to revise a 13-year-old technology for restricting access. Currently, Google, Yahoo and other top search companies voluntarily respect a Web site's wishes as declared in a text file known as "robots.txt," which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site. The formal rules allow a site to block indexing of individual Web pages, specific directories or the entire site, though some search engines have added their own commands. The proposal unveiled by a consortium of publishers, known as Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), seeks to have those extra commands - and more - apply across the board.

Issue no. 372 - 25 February 2007

• Microsoft to release ODF document converter (CNET News)
  A Microsoft-sponsored open-source project is to release a translator that will convert file formats between Microsoft Office and rival standard OpenDocument, or ODF. The plug-in will work with Microsoft's Word application, including the latest Office 2007 version as well the Office 2003 and Office XP editions, Microsoft said. Once installed, a person can open and save documents in the ODF format from Word.

Issue no. 362 - 11 June 2006

• CN - China Walks Out of Encryption Meeting (AP)
  An international dispute over a wireless computing standard took a bitter turn with the Chinese delegation walking out of an IEEE meeting. The delegation's walkout escalated an already rancorous struggle by China to gain international acceptance for its homegrown encryption technology known as WAPI. It follows Chinese accusations that IEEE used underhanded tactics to prevent global approval of WAPI.

Issue no. 356 - 27 February 2006

• EU - Digital interactive TV: Voluntary standards best (RAPID)
  Compulsory technical standards imposed by regulators are not necessary for the roll-out of interactive digital TV in Europe. This dynamic market is best served by voluntary, industry-led standardisation initiatives, said the European Commission in a new Communication on interoperability of digital interactive TV. see also Frequently Asked Questions.

Issue no. 352 - 18 December 2005

• EU - Commission welcomes changes in ETSI IPR rules to prevent 'patent ambush' (RAPID)
  The European Commission has closed its investigation of the European Telecommunications Standardisation Institute (ETSI) following ETSI's recent change to its standard-setting rules. This change strengthens the requirement for early disclosure of those intellectual property rights (IPRs) which are essential for the implementation of a standard in order to minimise the risk of so-called 'patent ambush' (where a company hides the fact that it owns IPRs essential for a standard).

Issue no. 328 - 4 January 2005

• Toshiba signals DVD format war (Guardian)
  Sony, the Japanese electronics and entertainment group, has approached arch-rival Toshiba in an attempt to prevent a damaging format war over their next-generation DVDs. Toshiba, which is preparing to launch its own high-definition DVD player as soon as next Christmas, rebuffed the offer to work together, however, setting in train a worldwide battle for consumers.

Issue no. 322 - 17 October 2004

• Music industry presses for common standard for downloads (Guardian)
  Major record labels have vowed to take on computer giants such as Microsoft and Apple in an effort to establish a common standard for digital music and avoid a repeat of the damaging video format wars between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s. They are determined to ensure that music fans with portable digital music players such as Apple's popular iPod can download and play tracks from online shops running rival Microsoft copyright software.

Issue no. 318 - 5 September 2004

• Microsoft Quits a U.N. Standards Group (New York Times)
  Microsoft has withdrawn from a United Nations software standards group for commerce, the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, or U.N./Cefacts, which is attempting to define standards for creating a new generation of Internet services to automate buying and selling through networks of computers. Microsoft's withdrawal apparently stemmed from a set of thorny issues over control of intellectual property that is being contributed to the standards-setting effort.

Issue no. 304 - 21 March 2004

• Microsoft on every DVD? (CNET News.com)
  An industry standards group has made a preliminary decision to include Microsoft's video compression technology in a next-generation DVD format, giving the company a key boost in the digital media arena. The steering committee for the DVD Forum announced provisional approval for Microsoft's VC-9 and two other video technologies- H.264 and MPEG-2 - as mandatory for the HD-DVD video specification for playback devices. VC-9 is the reference title for the underlying video decoding technology within Windows Media Video 9.

Issue no. 294 - 14 December 2003

• Group wants P2P files to pay (CNET News.com)
  A new standards group, anchored by Microsoft and Universal Music Group, is developing a technology that members hope will let music, movies and other content be distributed more efficiently online. The Content Reference Forum is hoping to create a kind of intelligent file that can be distributed through file-sharing networks like Kazaa, Web pages, e-mail or almost anywhere else online. Instead of containing a song or movie itself, the file would set up a process that automatically delivers files in the right format and potentially triggers an automatic payment system that could be changed moment to moment by the content distributor.

Issue no. 293 - 7 December 2003

• Instant messaging - A Conversation with Peter Ford (ACM Queue)
  Instant messaging (IM) may represent our brave new world of communications, just as e-mail did a few short years ago. Many IM players are vying to establish the dominant standard in this new world, as well as introducing new applications to take advantage of all IM has to offer. Among them, hardly surprising, is Microsoft.

Issue no. 291 - 15 November 2003

• EU - IPv6 task force puts forward action for wireless Internet (EurActiv.com)
  The IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) task force set up by the Commission issued a report on progress made in the completion of this new Internet protocol.

Issue no. 289 - 26 October 2003

• Antispam methods aim to merge (CNET News.com)
  A new group will try to reconcile competing methods to thwart spam with a kind of caller ID for e-mail. The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) has formed a subcommittee to hammer out differences between a number of competing protocols that all aim to do the same thing: verify that e-mail senders are who they say they are. Proposals for how to achieve e-mail verification without scrapping Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) abound. These include Sender Permitted From (SPF), the Designated Mailers Protocol (DMP) and Reverse Mail Exchange (RMX). The ASRG's new subcommittee is charged with blending them into a single standard.

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