The PC Pro weekly news round-up

By Alun Williams

Posted on 22 Jun 2007 at 14:56

It was Round Two for the printer slanging match, as Kodak hit back at Epson's dismissal of its EasyShare inkjet range. It pulled no punches: "the 'separate colours are more efficient argument' was invented by printer companies who charge a fortune for a thimble full of ink"...

Meanwhile, the issue of data privacy still reverberates for Google. At the European announcement of localised versions of YouTube, the company raised the prospect of data-retention opt-ins, allowing users to enable greater personalisation of search results. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, also stressed that user trust was essential on these matters: "I'm extremely sensitive to this issue," said Schmidt. "If people stop trusting Google, then we have a problem. Everything is gated on this issue. Our rivals are only one click away."

Microsoft was also busy with announcements: it posted a feature-complete version of its Home Server to its Connect testing site, it decided to stop selling Office 2003 at the end of this month, and it seemingly wobbled over which versions of Vista can legally run within virtualised system. It also retuned its IPTV platform - adding new media sharing features and renaming it as Microsoft Mediaroom.

Here's our pick of the week's headlines:

Friday 22 June

EU watchdog set on rival search engines

Hacker forces Pentagon email systems offline

Orange breaches UK data privacy laws

Thursday 21 June

Epson "charges fortune for thimble of ink"

Hollywood gets go-ahead for new Blu-ray DRM system

LaCie fingers 1TB biometric drive

Wednesday 20 June

Ninety per cent of printing costs could be hidden

Yahoo! rolls out Go 2.0 mobile web service