China jails 11 for software piracy

In today's podcast: China jails 11 for software piracy; Zune 30GB can't handle leap year; and Wikipedia raises funds for operations.

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A court in Shenzhen, China, sentenced 11 members of a software counterfeiting operation Wednesday, with the defendants getting between one and a half and six and half years in prison. The sentences included the longest sentences handed down for software piracy in China's history. Microsoft, as well as hundreds of customers and partners, assisted in the investigation by China's Public Security Bureau and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The 11 defendants were leaders in a syndicate responsible for manufacturing and distributing more than US $2 billion worth of counterfeited Microsoft software, Microsoft. The counterfeit software, found in 36 countries, contained fake versions of 19 of Microsoft's products, available in at least 11 languages.

Microsoft's Zune 30GB music player just wasn't ready for a leap year. That's what owners of the devices discovered Wednesday morning when they awoke to find their players frozen and unworkable. The problem turned out to be a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year." The issue does not affect all Zune players, but all models of the Zune 30GB are potentially affected. Zune is Microsoft's alternative to Apple's popular iPod devices.

The Wikimedia Foundation has raised the necessary funds to operate Wikipedia until the end of June. Wikimedia has received about US$6.2 million since launching its fundraising campaign in early November. More than 125,000 donors have chipped in. The organization will use the money to maintain and grow its technical infrastructure, a big part of which is devoted to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is one of the Web's most popular sites. Wikipedia is free and doesn't run advertising, so it depends on donations, grants and gifts to operate.

Samsung Electronics plans to unveil a flat-panel TV that's as thin as just 6.5-millimeters at this week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The TV set, few details of which were immediately available, is between 6.5mm and 7mm across its width and has an LED backlight. The backlight sits behind the LCD panel and generates the light that shines through it to allow the image to be seen. Most LCD panels use thicker backlights that make use of fluorescent lights but LEDs are fast finding favor with TV makers for their thinness and better overall light. The Samsung TV stands at present to be the thinnest LCD TV yet demonstrated.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.