Analysis: Will Linux Make a Difference to Palm Treo Buyers?
Yesterday during a meeting of analysts in New York City, Palm CEO Ed Colligan revealed that among the platforms his company's Treo handheld would support going forward, which includes Windows Mobile and Garnet (the former Palm OS, now produced independently), Linux would join the mix.
But rather than acquire a license to use Access Linux, the mobile operating system currently developed by the company that purchased the Palm OS producer in September 2005, Colligan said he intends for his company to develop its own Linux flavor in-house. The revelation raises all kinds of new questions, as well as the striking irony of Palm's re-entry into the operating system business.
McAfee Warns of Zero-Day Rash in Wake of Patch Tuesday
Even if today's most prominent malicious software writers aren't particularly clever - waiting until security engineers discover another Windows problem then going after it with a "zero-day exploit" - engineers at McAfee's Avert Labs believe they may actually be learning about how to use timing to maximize their impact on the public.
The team is saying they believe malicious writers now tend to release their code on Microsoft's regular Patch Tuesday, in order to maximize its window of opportunity to exploit systems before the next month's Patch Tuesday rolls around.
AACS LA Pulls the Trigger; Revocation System Under Way
Last Friday, the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA), which is responsible for providing the encrypted copy protection scheme for both HD DVD and Blu-ray high-definition disc players, exercised the option their system was designed to enable:
Through the distribution of new movie discs with embedded revoked keys, AACS LA will trigger a self-destruct system for PC-based high-def player software whose integrity from unauthorized copying is found to be compromised. And based on its last statement, the revocation could extend beyond Corel InterVideo, which warned its users last Friday.
AMD Plans Restructuring, Warns of Even Lower Revenue
Whenever a company makes a financial announcement to the press over a week ahead of its scheduled quarterly report, the news probably isn't that good. So just the fact that AMD had a statement this morning was a bad portent; the follow-up wasn't much better. Its revenue for the fiscal first quarter of this year looks worse than earlier guidance suggested: down to $1.225 billion.
Exactly how bad is this? AMD's fiscal first quarter revenue last year was $1.33 billion. But before you get out your calculator and do simple subtraction, realize that the AMD of 2006 is not the AMD of 2007. There was supposed to be an extra company welded into the mix, called ATI. In the previous quarter, the absorption of ATI added $400 million of revenue to the company. If the new AMD was growing as it should, revenue for the combined corporation should have come closer to $2 billion.
Corel Warns InterVideo Users AACS Revocation May Be Forthcoming
The question hanging over the heads of users of high-definition DVD player software since the development of software that reveals all the encryption keys used by HD DVD and Blu-ray discs - potentially enabling them to back up their contents - has been whether manufacturers will invoke the AACS revocation key.
This is the feature of the encryption scheme that would unleash a handful of methods "downstream" into the user community, that would disable their players from working now that discs have apparently been cracked.
Groklaw's Jones Confident Amid SCO Deposition Summons
PERSPECTIVE - Calling her the "self-proclaimed operator of an internet website known as 'Groklaw,"' attorneys for UNIX vendor SCO Group filed a motion on Monday stating it is seeking to serve blogger Pamela Jones with a subpoena to be deposed in its intellectual property case against Linux vendor Novell. SCO also seeks to use the deposition content in its seemingly interminable case against IBM.
In its memorandum, SCO does not actually lay out a case for how Jones may have damaged the company directly, though it cites a multitude of press reports as "evidence" that the company hopes to prove is relevant, including some that allege a financial or material connection between Jones and IBM - albeit several steps removed.
Google Rejects Anti-censorship Shareholder Petition
Marketwatch broke the news late Wednesday that Google's board of directors voted down a shareholder petition put forth by the New York City Comptroller's office, which would have compelled its management not to engage in "pro-active censorship," and not to host users' private data in countries that place restrictions on their citizens' Internet use.
Comptroller William Thompson, Jr., issued the petition last December on behalf of the New York City Pension Funds, which at the time, according to the comptroller's office, held $276.2 million in Google shares on behalf of city employees. A similar shareholder petition was issued at the same time to the board of Yahoo, in which the pension fund holds $110.5 million in shares based on last December's value.
E-mail Scam Using .ANI Exploit Proves a Point
PERSPECTIVE Just days after BetaNews responded to a reader inquiry about the Windows Animated Cursor exploit, asking how it affects users who don't use animated cursors, by hypothetically suggesting a phishing site could e-mail .ANI files disguised as revealing pictures of celebrity Britney Spears, researchers at WebSense Security Labs discovered an apparent e-mail spamming source which does precisely that.
Apparently users began receiving e-mails with the subject line, "Hot Pictures of Britiney Speers" (note the intentional misspelling to bypass filters). Users clicking on the embedded links were apparently taken to one of any number of Web sites that utilize so-called obfuscated JavaScript - the replacement of easy-to-read code with mangled symbols that can still be parsed by the interpreter - to redirect users to a single site. There, the .ANI animated cursor exploit BetaNews reported on last week is delivered as a Trojan horse file.
H-1B Visa Limits Hit After Only 1 Day
On the day after it began receiving applications for H-1B work visas, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service reported yesterday it had already received more than double the number of applications it is permitted by law to grant for 2008. The same limit took two months to reach last year.
While H-1B grants are officially capped at 65,000, USCIS reported receiving over 150,000 applications as of Monday afternoon.
Class Action Lawsuit Claims 'Vista Capable' is Misleading
A lady in Washington state who apparently purchased a computer in late 2006 bearing the "Vista Capable" sticker, and who only later discovered it was only capable of running Vista Home Basic, has filed a class action lawsuit against Microsoft in her home state, seeking in excess of $5 million.
The lawsuit alleges Microsoft misrepresented the capacity of computers to run all of Vista's purported features, directly citing Acer senior vice president Jim Wong's comments last October that "Premium is the real Vista" as indication that at least one PC maker believed Basic was not the real Vista.
Qualcomm Extends Patent Complaints Against Nokia
Perhaps sensing a relative dearth of patent litigation either brought by it or against it, due to its long-standing squabble with Broadcom finally reaching its denouement, Qualcomm today extended the number of patent infringement counts against Nokia by five.
Yesterday, Qualcomm filed suit in (as if you couldn't guess) federal district court in Marshall, Texas, alleging that Nokia is utilizing intellectual property related to the ability for mobile phones to download applications from servers remotely - IP to which Qualcomm says Nokia is not entitled.
EU Threatens Fines Against Apple for Staggered iTunes Prices
1:05 pm CT April 3, 2007 - In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, European Commission chief spokesperson Jonathan Todd said that both Apple and the record companies with which it has entered into agreements to sell music tracks in Europe, may be subject to fines as a result of alleged inequitable deals between them. Those deals, the European Commission claimed in a Statement of Objections issued to both Apple and major record companies today, allegedly charge varying prices per download for customers in different European member states.
"In any anti-trust case, the relevant ceiling on fines is 10% of the whole group's worldwide turnover," Todd told BetaNews. In this case, "the whole group" refers to everyone who is a party to the deal. Presumably, the ceiling applies to revenues arising specifically from the deal, though this has yet to be made clear.
Microsoft: Learning to Play Nice in the OpenAjax Alliance
There was a time when the word "standard" referred to a common custom or practice among members of an industry or society, or a set of minimum guidelines of quality upon which a device was built. After the browser wars of the 1990s, the term lost much of its distinct meaning. Manufacturers came together to intentionally develop standards, and then one powerful manufacturer countered by successfully deploying a Web browser whose underlying technologies set their own standards.
Having emerged from that era, it's difficult for us to reconcile the original concept of the standard with what it has come to mean in practice. Is a standard something that a majority of manufacturers settle upon well in advance of a device's or a software product's creation? Or is it something that the largest quantity of users adopt, whether by their own design or by someone else's?
iTunes to Offer EMI's DRM-free Music
12:00 pm ET April 2, 2007 - In what could be a watershed moment for the digital entertainment industry, leading music publisher EMI Group announced today it would provide most of its music catalog to listeners without any digital rights management restrictions.
And making Apple CEO Steve Jobs live up to his promises from earlier this year, the two companies have reached a breakthrough agreement where DRM-free EMI music will be available on iTunes next month.
Dell: 'Evidence of Misconduct' in Financial Reports
In an acknowledgment this afternoon that the worst may yet come to pass, Dell Computer stated its audit committee looking into irregularities in its financial reporting in advance of an SEC investigation, "has identified a number of accounting errors, evidence of misconduct, and deficiencies in the financial control environment."
As a result, the company may be venturing into dangerous territory further than any other US publicly traded company has gone before, by stating now it doubts it will be able to file its annual 10-K report for the last fiscal year even by the typical extended deadline of April 18, were it to ask for an extension.
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