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AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch authorities intend to crack down on illegal online casinos and are calling on banks to stop providing financial services to them, a Justice Ministry spokeswoman said on Saturday.

“It is illegal to offer gambling services in the Netherlands without a permit. These companies know they break the law,” she said.

She confirmed that Swedish online gamer Unibet and Dutch firm Oranje Casino, were targets, but declined to give other company names. The ministry has made a list of 30-50 Internet gamers and has asked banks to stop services to these companies.

The spokeswoman said dossiers would be passed to the public prosecutor who would be tasked with bringing cases to court.

In the Netherlands only the Dutch state lottery De Lotto has a permit to offer online gambling, and last month the Dutch upper house defeated a bill that would have allowed Holland Casino to open a gambling website on a trial basis.

The Dutch approach to online gaming has put it on a collision course with the European Union, which is pushing for member states to open up their markets to competition. In February the EU gave Greece and the Netherlands a final warning before it initiates court action over restrictions in their gaming markets.

Most of the illegal Web gambling is via credit cards.

“This is a Dutch issue, so we have only asked banks operating in the Netherlands to participate,” the spokeswoman said.

Europe is grappling with the issue of Internet betting. While some countries like Britain have opened up to almost every kind of online gambling, others like Germany and France have been reluctant to follow suit, concerned about gambling addiction and worried that state betting monopolies would see their revenues eroded.

Last year Unibet's Chief Executive Petter Nylander was arrested in the Netherlands and taken to France where a judge had issued a European warrant for contravening France's betting laws. He was freed on bail.

(Reporting by Harro ten Wolde; Editing by Matthew Jones)

Apple has reportedly agreed to give refunds of $25 to $79 in cash to as many as 2.3 million Mac users who bought replacement power adapters for the PowerBook and iBook, court documents revealed Friday.

The refund is part of Apple's proposed settlement of a class-action suit filed in 2006 over spark-prone adapters that shipped with the Mac computers. According to documents filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., federal Judge James Ware gave preliminary approval March 24 to the agreement reached with plaintiffs, BloombergNews reported.

The suit claimed that Apple misrepresented problems with the adapters, the news agency said. The Mac maker recalled 570,000 of the devices, and offered replacements at no charge. A hearing on final approval of the deal is scheduled for Sept. 8, Bloomberg said.

The settlement was the second reported this week involving an Apple product. Apple Canada offered a total of $3.54 million (U.S.) in credits to Canadian iPod owners, in order to settle two lawsuits over the battery life of the portable music players.

The credits are being offered to owners of first-, second-, or third-generation iPods bought before June 24, 2004, The Gazette newspaper in Montreal reported. The lawsuits, one filed in Montreal and the other in Toronto, claimed that the rechargeable batteries in the devices died after three hours of use, while Apple advertised the iPods as running for eight hours between charges.

As many as 80,000 Canadians could be eligible for a credit, lawyer Philippe Trudel, who represented the plaintiff in the Montreal suit, told the newspaper. The credit of $44 (U.S.) per person would be usable at Apple's online store.

Apple has had to deal with other marketing-related lawsuits this year. In March, a class-action suit filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., accused the company of deceptively marketing its 20-inch iMacs by grossly inflating the capabilities of the monitor. The plaintiffs claimed the monitors were inferior to previous generations of displays. The suit is pending.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

Microsoft plans to release Office 2007 Service Pack 1 via the company's automatic update service starting June 16.

The advanced announcement is a result of the software maker's promise to give at least a 30-day notice before making Office service packs available through Microsoft Update, which is a part of Windows Vista and Windows XP, the company said in its Office Sustained Engineering blog.

Microsoft released Office 2007 SP1 five months ago as a download on the company's Web site. Over that time, Microsoft claims to have had tens of millions of downloads and “a very good reaction” from customers.

Microsoft said the automatic update would be rolled out gradually to ensure that the service's infrastructure can handle distribution of the software. “Think of the 16th as the earliest possible start of distribution and that no sooner than that date will SP1 start to become available to customers' systems via this channel,” the company said.

The strategy of rolling out service packs in phases gives the market plenty of time to evaluate the software and gives Microsoft time to address specific customer concerns, the company said. Microsoft used the same strategy with Service Pack 3 for Office 2003.

Among the new technologies in Office 2007 is a controversial new document format called Office Open XML, which was approved last month as an open standard by the International Organization for Standardization.

The ISO's action sparked an outcry from critics who claimed Microsoft stuffed local voting committees with supporters of OOXML, an allegation the company denies. The ISO said 75% of its member nations voted to approve OOXML as a standard, 14% voted against the format, while the rest abstained, the ISO said.

See original article on InformationWeek.com