Neowin.net

Thanks bob

DVD 7.6 has been released for Windows XP, Windows Millennium and Windows 2000.
This software requires DirectX 8.1. Windows XP includes DirectX version 8.1. For Windows Millennium and Windows 2000

ISSUES RESOLVED

• Captured MPEG-2 video clips play back 10% too fast.
  
• DVD 7.6 includes an updated MPEG2/DVD decoder which corrects the issue where MPEG2 video clips captured using the ATI Multimedia Center TV application will play back a little to quickly. This symptom is generally noticed during playback due to the slightly higher pitch in the audio.
  

And at the same time ATI has released some new official Radeon XP/ 2K / 98 Drivers. No word yet on whats new / fixed.

News source: ATI DVD download page
Download: ATI DVD Player 7.6 [6.64mb]
Download: ATI Radeon v6.13.10.6043 driver for Windows XP
Download: ATI Radeon 5.13.01.6043 driver for W2K
Download: ATI Radeon v4.13.9021 driver for Win98

Phoning home?
One of the files the Assistant fetches is the MS Search Companion privacy statement. This is done for P3P compliance. According to the statement, MS doesn't collect information about local searches. "No information is ever collected by Search Companion when you search your local system, LAN, or intranet for any reason."

I certainly didn't pick up anything to contradict that. But there is some obvious collecting when SA is used to search the Internet.

"When you search the Internet using the Search Companion, the following information is collected regarding your use of the service: your IP address, the text of your Internet search query, grammatical information about the query, the list of tasks which the Search Companion Web service recommends, and any tasks you select from the recommendation list."

"Search Companion does not record your choice of Internet search engine, and does not collect or request any personal or demographic information.
Information collected by the Search Companion cannot be used to identify you individually, and is never used in conjunction with other data sources that may contain personal data."

Hopefully there aren't too many loopholes in that, though I rather think the user's IP can be considered personally identifying. However, MS tells us that the policy statement is out of date. IPs were logged for testing purposes during the XP beta period; but since the product launch, there has been no IP logging.

In addition to the privacy statement, the remaining files fetched are XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) stylesheets:

transform.xsl

balloon.xsl

prevectr.xsl

vector.xsl

boolean.xsl

pretrans.xsl

transform.xsl

Users curious to know exactly what they contain can quite easily locate them on their local machine and have a peek. According to MS, they're simply used to maintain up-to-date associations between file extensions and file types, to make searching more productive.

I'm not acquainted with XSL, so I'm in no position to affirm that or to argue with it, but I'd be pleased to hear from readers who can shed additional light on the subject.

For now it appears that there's nothing here for users to worry about. But there is a question about MS playing fast and loose with people's Internet connections. Certainly, the minute one ventures onto the Web, one starts bleeding information all over the place, fetching images and ads and taking cookies from secondary and tertiary sources too numerous to mention.

But when we run an application for some local business like a file search, we don't expect it to connect silently to the Net, even for a good reason. When we discover something like this, it feels like someone else is in control of our computer, and that is definitely not a good feeling.

If Trustworthy Computing is going to mean anything, it's going to have to mean that actions like file downloads aren't going to happen without the user's knowledge and consent. A simple popup asking if one wants the latest XSL files with the options to decline, to be asked each time, or to grant permission to go ahead without further consultation is all that would be needed.

This article was by Thomas C Greene of The Register