CE Groups Back Cablevision in Remote DV-R Appeal
A large cluster of consumer electronics and Internet industry trade groups, including the Consumer Electronics Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US Telecom Association, and the Center for Democracy & Technology filed an amicus brief last Friday, in support of Cablevision's appeal of a ruling last March that stated its plan to deploy off-site, on-demand DV-R systems for its subscribers amounted to copyright infringement.
"If Cablevision were a direct infringer because it houses and maintains the machines that consumers use to make recordings," the amicus brief reads, "then providers of similar services likely would be as well."
'Day One' for Safari for Windows Becomes Zero-Day Nightmare
It took security engineers perhaps less than two hours yesterday to introduce Apple's surprise entry in the field of Windows browsers to the big, cruel world of exploits and vulnerabilities, following its introduction yesterday morning at WWDC. As a result, much of the clout Safari had received as the secure browsing alternative to Internet Explorer and Firefox -- as long as it was on a Macintosh -- was burned off like fire to a flash fuse.
Errata Security engineer David Maynor had a report posted on the first vulnerability he found by 1:48 pm, complete with screenshots of the pre-crash letdown dialog produced by his fuzzing tool. As he admitted, it wasn't a difficult crash to find, posting a screen shot of the memory dump revealing both a stack corruption and an access violation, and then giving credit to Thor Larholm for posting a complete report on the calamity not an hour later.
Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Escapes Delayed Beta Process
Finally emerging from beta after Microsoft told an already anxious customer base in May of last year it would eventually be available early in first quarter 2007, Service Pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2 has at last emerged from beta. But some customers looking for a feature that Microsoft brochures said it has may be disappointed today to learn they really should have said it's a feature that SP1 supports (big difference): Volume Shadow Services.
For users of Windows Server 2003 on physical systems, the support is actually good news. They already have VSS, which currently enables them to take backup "snapshots" of their hard drives while they're running, for possible restoration to an earlier state in case of an emergency. After SP1 is installed, their existing VSS software will take similar snapshots of virtual hard drives as well as physical ones.
US Patent Office to Try 'Open Source' Approach
As urgent appeals for lawmakers to finally address multiple defects in US patent law appear to finally be taken seriously, the US Patent and Trademark Office is considering riding this wave of upheaval and making a tremendous change of its own: Last week, it announced its official support of a Web site whose purpose will be to encourage citizens to assess the validity of patent applications for themselves, and issue challenges where necessary.
The goal is to expedite the discovery of "prior art" - creations that existed before the applicant for a patent claimed he invented them. If successful, the Peer-to-Patent Web site could become a kind of SourceForge for intellectual property integrity.
Could Google Unravel the Microsoft + Justice Dept. Accord?
The New York Times revealed Saturday that Google was the unidentified party mentioned in a US Dept. of Justice status report last March as having lodged a "middleware-related complaint" against Microsoft. That revelation raised perhaps zero eyebrows in the technology community, who could file that fact under "D" for "Duh."
But a memo by a key antitrust enforcement official that the Times also turned up, rejecting Google's arguments and advising states' prosecutors to reject them as well, has raised some legal eyebrows over whether the relationship between the DOJ and Microsoft has grown too cozy.
TechEd 2007: What Did We Learn Today?
ORLANDO - It has been a long and fruitful week for us here, which was a welcome surprise. A computer convention, or any kind of convention, is a broad and complex story whose importance becomes clearer once the details are all assembled. Conventions are about the details, the parade of little events, the things you overhear, the questions that were unanswered and then unanswered again, the discoveries you didn't expect.
From Wednesday to Friday of this week in Orlando, I heard from some of our newest and some of our regular readers face-to-face, personally thanking BetaNews for sticking with the full five-day program. I heard you, and I thank you. One of my most important and most enjoyable jobs in covering a conference is listening to the everyday people, not just the program managers and the presenters and the keynotes. It's through them that I learn what's truly important to developers, administrators, architects, designers, and engineers. This week, they changed my point of view on a few interesting points.
TechEd 2007: IronPython May Rival C# for XNA Game Development
ORLANDO - Yesterday's TechEd demo of building an XNA Game Studio Express version of Asteroids using C# appeared to indicate the resurgence of low-level (in the processing sense) programming languages in experimental development.
But this morning, Microsoft's lead program manager for the Common Language Runtime team, Mahesh Prakriya, may have one-upped C#, showing another XNA revamp written by IronPython developer Jim Hugunin, of the exact same demo package, but using Microsoft's dynamic language IronPython instead.
TechEd 2007: Virtualization to Become Ninth Server Core Role
ORLANDO - At a morning session introducing many to the window-less Server Core installation option in the forthcoming Windows Server 2008, Microsoft product manager Andrew Mason made it official: Windows Virtualization Services (code-named "Viridian") will become the ninth role available for the trim server option, joining Internet Information Services 7 announced last Monday and other common, unattended role such as DNS server, DHCP server, and Active Directory Application Mode (now called AD LDS).
This addition may be both welcome and extremely important for enterprises working to create homogeneity of services where heterogenous (OS-specific) applications are deployed. Now SUSE Linux and other systems can be hosted by servers that don't need to waste space managing Windows printer and display drivers, such as DirectX and Direct3D, when they're not ever going to be used there anyway.
TechEd 2007: Microsoft May Build XNA Game Developers' Community
ORLANDO - During a TechEd demonstration of arcade game development using XNA Game Studio Express for novices to the genre, Microsoft Game Technology Group community program manager David Weller (whose online handle is "LetsKillDave") stated his company is exploring the possibility of assembling an online community of XNA game developers, not only for sharing with but also for marketing and selling their works to one another.
If Microsoft goes ahead with this project, Weller said, it may have to be separate from Xbox Live Arcade, which showcases downloadable works from Microsoft and its selected partners.
TechEd 2007: Vista's Priorities Now Favor Media Player, Russinovich Demos
ORLANDO - Perhaps the closest thing to a rock star you find at a technology conference is a guy whose talks are so good, that the same attendees will attend their encore performances. If anyone makes a list of three "rock stars" at TechEd, one of them would have to be Mark Russinovich, the former SysInternals security engineer, now a Technical Fellow with Microsoft.
Russinovich's "Kernel Changes" talks are among the "must see" items on attendees' schedules, and is often the only place where you can find them walking up to the podium to shake the presenter's hand and introduce themselves...before the session begins. Each time, Russinovich mixes the talk up a bit. This time around, he used virtual XP and Vista sessions to demonstrate an interesting new set of priorities on the part of the operating system, as provided by Multimedia Class Scheduler Service.
TechEd 2007: Skinning Demonstration for Silverlight Touts C# Payoffs
ORLANDO - During an early morning session on Thursday, Microsoft program manager Chung Webster introduced developers to some of the basic concepts of building Silverlight-capable Web applications, including the creation of customizable video controls. The tools Webster used were the Beta 1 edition of Visual Studio 2008, the current beta of Expression Blend 2, and the Silverlight Alpha 1.1 version which uses Web services and C#.
What Webster was implying - and many in the crowd knew he was doing so - was that there is indeed a payoff to be gained from developing Silverlight apps using the strongly-typed C# language. One is the ability to utilize Web services through JSON - not yet SOAP, he said, although Microsoft is currently working with the W3C to make that happen. Another is the ability to use Expression Blend to tinker with the skin of the video control, producing a new set of XAML framework code that can be imported into the project.
TechEd 2007: The Story So Far
ORLANDO - We've passed the midway point here of this week-long affair, and we're noticing the effect that the more practical, toned down, brass-tacks Microsoft -- without a glistening new operating system hovering twelve months into the future -- is having on attendees. It's a mixed bag, actually. While I happen to like the difference, I've noticed my feelings haven't been shared by everyone here - the presenters, the press, the developers, or the administrators.
Though I've said this before, it continues to amaze me how the type and level of information that, just 30 years ago, would have had to have been taught in colleges, is being presented by one company during the course of one week.
TechEd 2007: Health Modeling Tool for Visual Studio 'Re-Premieres'
ORLANDO - Every so often, new products or tools from Microsoft that aren't always "front burner" projects have to be re-announced...and sometimes, even some big news doesn't find a proper place in the cycle. (We've been tripped up by this before ourselves.) This afternoon at TechEd, Microsoft architect evangelist "Chef" David Aiken (complete with white uniform) demonstrated a component called Visual Studio Management Model Designer. He described it as an essential component of .NET Framework 3.0 development, and it is downloadable from Microsoft's CodePlex, though it is probably as official a .NET component at this point as PowerShell was a component of Longhorn as of last year.
The concept of this component is to enable developers to automatically generate code that enables the reporting of their own health and status, based on standards in the midst of being set for Windows. Within a few minutes, applications become capable of producing their own text logs - an essential part of development that is often missed for the sake of compressing the schedule.
TechEd 2007: First Demos of Microsoft SoftGrid Application 'Sequencing'
ORLANDO - Although Softricity was officially in the business of finding ways to virtualize applications within their own self-contained memory envelopes since 1998, for many of us (guilty as charged) the concept is an entirely new science, with new concepts and technologies. In what for many was the first demonstration they'd seen of these concepts, Microsoft senior technical product manager Chad Jones - who came on board when it acquired Softricity - introduced the concept of application sequencing, which is the process admins will undertake to pre-install applications that users will run within a SoftGrid virtualization envelope.
What am I talking about? SoftGrid is now Microsoft's system for enabling remote users to run applications in Vista without their having to be installed there beforehand. In reality, they're being run on the server, in such a way that they just appear to be run on the client.
TechEd 2007: The WS2K8 Upgrade, and Two Universes Cohabiting One World
ORLANDO - Last Friday, I wrote about how Microsoft appeared to be scheduling TechEd this year in a way that reduces its emphasis on "what's coming next," and focuses more on what developers should be doing to improve their standards and practices, to catch up with the operating systems that are already on our doorstep: Vista and the forthcoming Windows Server 2008.
I said it was a welcome change, and on Monday, I emphasized that point once again with some words of approval of the abbreviated keynote event (down from an often three-day affair to 90 minutes), giving more time for attendees to attend sessions and hands-on labs.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.