Mixed Messages from Microsoft on China
Microsoft has, from time to time in its history, been compared to a many-headed dragon. This week, at least two of those heads were speaking simultaneously, though the messages they were delivering were completely contradictory with one another on a critical issue, and corporate sources are apparently still working to reconcile the opposing messages.
On Monday, at the start of an innovation summit being held in Beijing, Microsoft announced it was following up on its expanded investments in that country by licensing what it described as key technologies to two important Chinese start-up firms, Comtech Group and Hunan Talkweb. Dancing very carefully around the topic, and avoiding use of the dreaded abbreviation "DRM," Microsoft described this technology as an intellectual property protection system being developed at its Asia research facility.
US-CERT: Turn Off ActiveX for Security
Although it's not the first time this branch of the US Dept. of Homeland Security has made this suggestion, its Computer Emergency Response Team this morning is recommending that users disable ActiveX altogether, in the wake of yesterday's discovery of a critical vulnerability caused by a Microsoft scripting library.
The library is installed by way of Visual Studio 2005, so it may only be present in development systems, and may therefore limit the scope of possible victims of an exploit. Microsoft, however, believes such an exploit may be in progress.
Kazaa Settles with Music Trade Association for $10 Million
The legal battle may finally be over for P2P technology firm Sharman Networks, which operates the Kazaa file-sharing network and whose founders gave birth to the Skype messaging service. Late yesterday, the National Music Publishers' Association, which represents the holders of music IP rights in court, announced it had settled its dispute with Sharman.
The settlement was announced by the company in US District Court in Los Angeles yesterday; today The New York Times learned Sharman will pay the Association as much as $10 million.
Windows Embedded CE 6 Kernel to be Completely Shared
Last May, when a new version of the embedded operating system Windows CE was announced by Microsoft at an embedded systems conference in Las Vegas, the company indicated that a larger percentage of its source code would be available for licensed sharing than for Windows CE 5.0, for which 56% of its source code could be licensed.
The questions on developers' minds were, does this mean Microsoft will license the file system code, and how much of the embedded OS will still be under wraps?
Microsoft Scrambling to Patch Exploit
This morning, Microsoft Security announced it has been alerted to proof-of-concept code that may already have been referenced in the creation of a malicious exploit.
Although details about the exploit itself have not yet be revealed, according to this morning's advisory, the point of weakness is a Windows library that is shipped with Visual Studio 2005, called wmiscriptutils.dll. Apparently a call to this library, placed from within a script executed in some installations of Internet Explorer 7 with default settings, on operating systems other than Windows Server 2003, can trigger possible unguarded remote malicious code execution.
NVidia to Restate Three Years of Earnings
Last month, graphics processor producer nVidia appealed a possible de-listing on the NASDAQ exchange, on account of the company failing to file its quarterly 10-Q report for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2007, which ended in July.
The company is one of many targeted by a US Securities and Exchange Commission probe into the practice of granting backdated stock options to senior executives - specifically, into whether companies record those grants as expenses. The appeal bought nVidia some time while its accountants determined the extent of the damage.
DOJ Investigating Sony for RAM Price-fixing
Add to the extraordinarily long list of woes afflicting consumer electronics giant Sony the revelation today that the US Dept. of Justice will be investigating it, along with market rivals Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Samsung, and Cypress Semiconductor, in conjunction with a probe into alleged price fixing in the static RAM (SRAM) market.
It is the latest extension of a federal probe that has already netted some big fish, and cost their employers dearly: Last March, three executives from Samsung agreed to plead guilty to several counts of price fixing in the DRAM market. Even so, they had to spend up to eight months in federal prison, and pay fines of up to $250,000 apiece. Just two weeks ago, two more Samsung officials were indicted in the same scheme, along with a third from Hynix Semiconductor.
MS: Ability to Co-opt Pop-ups a 'Design Consideration'
The ability for a Web page to wrest control of the source of content for a pop-up browser window that appears beside it, is not a design flaw or vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7, as security services firm Secunia stated yesterday, but instead "an important design consideration...to provide a consistent customer experience," according to a statement from Microsoft security spokesperson Christopher Budd.
"Because Microsoft had previously determined that this actually isn't a security vulnerability," Budd writes, "there has been some confusion over these new reports." Browsers, he said, are designed with the capability for pages to pop up windows beside them, and direct them to reload their content from specific sources.
AMD Pursues Remainder of Intel Suit
Despite having watched one of its key claims against Intel get thrown out the courthouse window last month, and having briefly wrestled with the prospects of the remainder of its case being discontinued, AMD this week is proceeding with the remainder of its antitrust case against Intel.
Yesterday, AMD filed a motion with the Special Master appointed last month to oversee the discovery process -- where relevant evidence is revealed -- to compel Intel to turn over information regarding its own foreign conduct, which AMD claims is damaging its business in the US.
Xbox 360 to Get 1080p Upgrade
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting what a multitude of Web sites, including gaming authorities, have apparently been alerted to this afternoon: Microsoft will announce tomorrow the release of a software upgrade that will boost its high-definition video mode from 720 lines progressive scan (720p) or 1080 lines interlaced (1080i), to a full 1080 lines progressive scan (1080p), with 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio.
However, sources are not in agreement as to the extent of tomorrow’s 1080p upgrade. While some are reporting they’ve been given a heads-up that the upgrade will apply only to streaming video content from Xbox Live and from connected PCs using Windows XP Media Player 11 (officially released just today), others are quite emphatically stating the release will scale up all content, including games, that are output to high-definition displays.
Encrypted Seagate Hard Drives Could Enable On-board DRM
Last February, storage provider Seagate announced it would be introducing later in the year new hard drive platforms that can be fully encrypted at the hardware level, rendering their usefulness to would-be thieves almost pointless.
Today, with the absorption of former competitor Maxtor almost complete, Seagate is moving with all speed to deploy its implementation of the Trusted Platform Module, now called DriveTrust, on upcoming Momentus hard drives, including one 2.5" model for notebook computers, and another for DV-R devices.
Vulnerability Affects Firefox and IE, New and Old
A newly discovered vulnerability, which the CTO of security services firm Secunia described this morning as affecting Internet Explorer 7.0, can also affect not only IE6 but Firefox versions 1.5 and 2.0, as observed by BetaNews in our own tests.
The vulnerability can become an easy exploit, and has actually been an annoyance for developers for years: Essentially, code within a Web page has the capability to address new popup windows as they appear, by means of a JavaScript trigger. If the event that code is executed prior to the code for the popup window's own page, it can effectively pre-empt the popup window's content, substituting its own.
What's Behind Acer's Vista Complaints?
In an interview published last week by the British publication PC Pro Acer Senior Vice President James Wong complained that Microsoft -- a company with which Acer has, at least on paper, partnered -- is actively scheming to force computer users to invest in more expensive PCs, in order to take advantage of the more feature-rich tier of its upcoming operating system, Windows Vista Home Premium.
"The new experience you hear of, if you get [Vista Home] Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong reportedly stated, adding that the company is actually actively undermining its own lower tier in an effort to persuade customers to move up the value chain.
Supreme Court to Hear Microsoft Appeal
This afternoon, the Associated Press reports, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal of defendant Microsoft, in a case where it was found by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) to have infringed upon patents currently held by AT&T.
The case surrounds a company's right to sell abroad a product that includes what the law calls a "component of a patented invention" of another company, and then enable the buyer to resell that product and pocket the proceeds. Specifically, algorithms developed by AT&T used for speech recognition and reproduction, are packaged and sold with Microsoft Windows.
Vulnerability in ActiveX Data Objects
This morning, Microsoft's Security Response Center acknowledged the discovery of a vulnerability affecting its key ActiveX Data Objects database control, which is enrolled in COM under the handle ADODB.Connection. The vulnerability was apparently discovered by an independent researcher, and was brought to light by US-CERT and SecurityFocus.
ADO was designed to serve as a basic, no-frills sequential database access library that could be called using ordinary scripting languages. Prior to its initial release in the mid-1990s, the library was beta-tested for possible use with distributed Web applications, where a Web page containing a database control console could enable a user to access a database on his local system.
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