Intel E-mails Lost Due to IT Manager Error, Lawyer States
In a meeting of corporate attorneys at the Argyle Executive Forum in New York last Wednesday, Bloomberg News reported over the weekend, Intel's general counsel stated that e-mails for 151 employees who were to have been instructed to retain them as possible evidence in the AMD antitrust trial were lost by virtue of a single IT manager misreading a spreadsheet where the employees' names were first distributed.
Apparently the names were categorized across multiple tabs, if general counsel D. Bruce Sewell's remarks are accurate, and this single manager didn't click on the tab where the 151 were listed. As a result, they never received backup instructions.
Samsung Gives UMPC Form Factor One More Go
Just over one year after Microsoft and a handful of hardware partners followed up a stupendous marketing campaign for something called "Origami" - which included a presentation to the press that asked the question, "What am I?" rather than answering it - Samsung revealed at the CeBIT conference in Hannover today its intention to upgrade the now-largely-forgotten UMPC platform with at least some of the key features it lacked.
For instance, the device whose category had been touted as providing "ubiquitous connectivity" - albeit without WiFi, broadband, or Bluetooth - will now have access to all three, at least in Samsung's trial run of its new Q1Ultra for the Korean market. ("Ultra," in this case, means "this time for real.")
Microsoft Calls Reports of Missing Outlook Files 'Not Accurate'
In a new post-script to a message headed "OneCare's Dedication to Our Customers" originally posted yesterday on the Microsoft Windows Live OneCare Team blog, lead product manager Gina Narkunas declares the Outlook e-mail file deletion issue "fixed," but then attempts to explain that the .PST files containing the entirety of users' local e-mail stores weren't really deleted to begin with: "not that the files are deleted, just that they can't find them."
The message comes a day after a OneCare user accidentally discovered on his own that his .PST file, which he believed had been deleted when it was supposed to have been merely quarantined by OneCare, had actually been rendered "deleted" by Windows System Restore, which he had invoked earlier in trying to recover the .PST file. In attempting to address an unrelated bug, the user had rolled back his system restore, after which the .PST reappeared within OneCare's quarantine directory.
Microsoft Engineer Attempts Daring OneCare PR Rescue
In a short span of time, Microsoft's new OneCare anti-virus service has been faced with a barrage of reports and blog posts remarking about how it failed a Virus Bulletin test that several of its competitors passed, along with consumers' complaints that OneCare deleted their Outlook e-mail files in the act of disarming viruses they may have contained. Now, a key engineer on the company's anti-virus team finds himself in the awkward position of defending the reputation of a firm he's only worked with for a few months, after having spent ten years at McAfee, and some time at Symantec before that.
"When we think about priorities we put our customers first and in doing that we ask ourselves, 'What do our clients want? What do they need?"' writes Jimmy Kuo, a respected anti-virus engineer who joined Microsoft last September along with some McAfee colleagues, in his inaugural blog post for the Anti-Malware Engineering Team yesterday.
HD DVD Makes American Pitch to European Consumers
With claims that Toshiba's HD-E1 HD DVD player was the first on the market for the European consumer just last November (claims that a BetaNews reader tonight pointed out was wrong; see update below), and Sony's European edition of the PlayStation 3 with built-in Blu-ray player only emerging from its long launch delay a week from tomorrow, the Toshiba-backed format is already well ahead in the European market. Taiwanese industry analysts (on behalf of parts suppliers for high-def players) estimate HD DVD has already captured an 85% market share in Europe in just the first four months.
Now HD DVD supporters are working to cement the format's presence in the European mindset. Today, those supporters announced the formation of that continent's edition of the HD DVD Promotional Group, to be led by Toshiba, Microsoft, Universal, and French movie producer Studio Canal.
Cisco Becomes a Microsoft Competitor
Throughout its history, Cisco has built its vast portfolio talents through mergers and acquisitions. Indeed, startups in the networking field intentionally developed business plans and product portfolios designed to attract a Cisco buyout. But with two new Cisco buyouts this week -- storage appliance producer NeoPath Networks on Tuesday, and collaboration software developer WebEx this morning -- Cisco appears not just to be building up but building out. And today, analysts believe Microsoft may be on notice.
Thousands know WebEx as one of the first live, online conferencing services, and its obvious FedEx-like approach to doing business in the virtual space isn't lost on anyone. It launched the pay-per-use services model online years before its competition would pretend they came up with the idea first.
Google to Purge Personal Data from Logs
In a significant change to company policy, Google announced late yesterday it will begin systematic purges of personally identifying data from its search logs at least 18 months after it's collected. The move could quash some consumers' -- and some governments' -- concerns about its intentions to harvest its now-colossal database of personal information.
"We had previously kept the logs data for as long as it was useful," reads an FAQ about the policy change published by Google yesterday (PDF available here). "When we implement this policy change, we will continue to keep server log data so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses, but we will anonymize our server logs after 18-24 months, unless legally required to retain the data for longer."
Viacom Lawsuit Accuses YouTube of Outright Piracy
In its lawsuit against Google and its YouTube subsidiary which came to light yesterday, Viacom not only alleges that YouTube is guilty of massive copyright infringement by allowing its users to post unauthorized content without restrictions or filtering, but the corporation goes one step further: It accuses YouTube of actually reproducing and posting some unauthorized content itself.
"YouTube itself publicly performs the infringing videos on the YouTube site and other websites," Viacom's lawsuit proclaims. "Thus, YouTube does not simply enable massive infringement by its users. It is YouTube that knowingly reproduces and publicly performs the copyrighted works uploaded to its site."
Microsoft Aims to Replace Dial Tones with Voice-Aware Services
When Microsoft introduced businesses last spring to its plan to attach its brand to virtually all digital voice communication, by inviting businesses to participate in the first stage of the assembly of a voice-automated "Unified Communications" platform, a majority of would-be interested parties did not take Microsoft too seriously.
Microsoft is not a company that appreciates not being taken seriously for very long, and this morning, it responded with all the vim and vigor of the Microsoft of old: by buying an established provider of such services outright.
NBCU Inks Content Deals with MobiTV, VMIX.com
As if to answer the question, "What's the real value of the paid content deals YouTube is not making with content providers like Viacom?" today, two new deals with NBC Universal were announced: one with the burgeoning player in the IPTV space, MobiTV, and the other with an emerging YouTube competitor, VMIX.com.
The MobiTV deal will make primetime programming from NBC and several of its cable channels, including Bravo, Sci-Fi Channel, USA Network, and Telemundo, available following their initial airing, for a streaming fee of $1.99 per show. Each show would then be viewable and even repeatable for a 24-hour period, though the show isn't fully downloaded to the user's hard drive. Instead, the fee opens up a window for viewers to tune into shows they may have missed - or that they'd rather see online at their own convenience anyway.
New 65nm IBM Cell CPU Promises 19% Power Reduction
While AMD and Intel have been using die size and lithography as measures of finesse and production power against one another -- a measure where smaller is better -- IBM stayed largely out of the foray up to now, making a conscious choice to keep its Cell BE CPU at 90nm while the x86 producers move on to 65nm, and soon 45nm.
IBM's reasons at the time had something to do with leakage: As some theorized, the way Cell's processing engines were designed, current leakage could impact reliability for the symmetric processing units if they were made any smaller.
Windows Server 2003 SP2 Quietly Released
With an absence of fanfare, but otherwise on schedule, Microsoft opened up its download page for Service Pack 2 of Windows Server 2003, both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Perhaps most importantly, enterprises won't have to wait until Longhorn to be able to utilize Windows Deployment Services, the company's new image-based system for pre-composed, remote Windows installations.
Keeping the little abbreviations after the operating system name straight has been a tricky job for server admins. Two years ago, Microsoft released WS2K3 Service Pack 1, which added the Windows Firewall and Group Policy Management Console for the first time. Using both these tools together, admins could craft policies -- not unlike creating filtering rules in Outlook -- for guiding and filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic.
EU Commissioner's Consumer Plan not so Apple-Focused After All
While advance statements to the press, especially in Germany, managed to build up expectations that EU Commissioner Meglena Kuneva's much anticipated program for consumer protection would include measures giving dissatisfied buyers a way to "return" downloaded tracks from iTunes and elsewhere, the actual program released this morning only makes parenthetical references to the Internet and digital music.
Yesterday, a portion of a German Focus magazine interview with Commissioner Kuneva highlighted her disapproval of the idea that audio CDs purchased anywhere could be heard through any CD player or computer, but tracks downloaded through Apple's iTunes could only be heard using iPods or Apple's software. Kuneva made this reference to illustrate the types of consumers' grievances that keep them from using the Internet to make any kind of purchases from companies outside their native countries' borders, including the US.
Viacom Files Landmark Copyright Case Against Google, YouTube
The case that will likely determine the future of the online video sharing industry at least, and the Internet media economy at most, has been filed. Viacom, one of the world's largest media rights holders, has sued Google in federal court in New York, seeking $1 billion in damages for an estimated 1.5 billion separate infringements of copyright.
Viacom's legal team released a four-paragraph statement this morning, which is best read in its entirety:
ISO to Fast-Track Office Open XML Process
As reported first by Computerworld's Eric Lai this afternoon, the head of the International Standards Organization committee JTC 1 has given her official approval to giving consideration to Microsoft's Office Open XML document standard under a fast-track process. This approval comes as opposition to the standard's discussion, which at one time was believed to have been fierce and widespread, may actually have been much more limited and tempered, according to Lai's own survey of JTC 1 members.
While ISO officials had earlier confirmed reports of as many as 19 nations opposing Microsoft's and ECMA's move for the world's largest standards body to ratify OOXML, the response to Lai's survey -- a kind of exit poll, using ISO-approved questions -- indicates that only six nations may have lodged their formal disapproval of fast track consideration, while another five may have expressed concerns but not objections.
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