Mozilla: We'll keep pushing for Ogg Theora in HTML 5
The software maker with the ability to rectify everything for the open source community in the field of free video is Google. Right now, its YouTube division relies upon Flash video, whose codecs require Web browsers including Google's own Chrome to have plug-ins installed. If YouTube merely had the option of supporting an open source standard such as Ogg Theora -- a standard supported by sites including France-based DailyMotion -- in one fell swoop, the balance might shift in favor of Ogg's being adopted, as was originally planned, as the basic codec for HTML 5's <VIDEO> element.
But that project was suspended late last month by HTML 5's principal caretakers, who perceived a stalemate between the proprietors of online videos including Google, the manufacturers of Web browsers who are also interested in maintaining high performance levels, and the rights holders to the various technologies that still underlie modern video codecs. Now Mozilla, whose Firefox 3.5 is the biggest browser so far to include built-in HTML video support, says in a statement to Betanews last night that it will press on with its support of Ogg Theora despite the setback, perhaps in hopes that online video services may come to adopt the codec as a de facto standard.
Fiscal Q4 numbers for Microsoft disappoint, net income down 29%
Analysts had been settling on 13% as the average earnings hit that a company in the IT sector should take in this down economy, which some believe may be finally on the mend. But the early report from Microsoft, minutes in advance of its quarterly conference call Thursday, was not good by comparison: Net income was down 29% year-over-year to $3.05 billion, on revenue that was down 17% from the year-ago quarter to $13.1 billion.
It could be Microsoft's first genuinely bad quarter since the year terrorism struck the US, and it has managed to drive its full-year net income down 18% over fiscal 2008.
US DHS advises users to turn off Flash pending Adobe security fix
In the wake of reports that malicious users have found a way to trick Adobe Reader 9 into triggering an exploitable crash in Adobe Flash 9 and 10, the US Dept. of Homeland Security's CERT cybersecurity team is asking users and administrators everywhere to turn off Flash video in their Web browsers.
This prompted Adobe, which has recently been seeing perhaps the onset of a deluge of security issues, to update its security advisory, now rating the exploitable issue as "critical." Adobe is not advising users to take such drastic measures as disengaging Flash in their browsers (which would make it very hard to watch YouTube). What it's suggesting instead is that users manually delete the file %ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\authplay.dll, which is a library that Adobe Reader and Acrobat use to trigger embedded Flash and Shockwave videos.
Intel appeals massive EC antitrust fine
In a statement to Betanews this afternoon, a spokesperson for Intel confirmed that the company has filed an appeal of last May's European Commission ruling, in which the company was fined the equivalent of $1.4 billion for what it found to be antitrust violations. According to spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, Intel's theory for its appeal is that the EC was prevented from seeing critical and possibly exculpatory documents, on account of an order of the court trying AMD's civil case against Intel in Delaware.
"As we said in the fall of 2008, we had asked the Court to require the Commission to get evidence from AMD that would be exculpatory," Mulloy told Betanews. "The Court said it was premature to rule on that and said we could bring it up on appeal. The documents [in question] are AMD documents that exist in the Delaware litigation, but we are not allowed to give them to the Commission because of the protective order in Delaware."
It's done: Windows 7 releases to manufacturing
The final validation checks for build 7600 of Microsoft Windows 7 were met today, reports Microsoft blogger/evangelist Brandon LeBlanc. Yesterday may have been the day that the marketing team was planning for release to manufacturing (RTM), since the text of Microsoft's code rollout announcement went live anyway about 24 hours ago.
This officially means that the development of the latest installment in the sixth generation of Microsoft's Windows operating system (the first installment having been Vista) has now concluded.
AMD foresees strength in server CPUs, big market opportunity for ATI
In the PC industry, it's the OEMs that are the first to feel the effects of a recovering global economy, as demand for PCs from four of the world's top five producers has picked back up. It could actually be a good holiday quarter for HP and Acer. So if Dell or anyone else is still feeling negative impact, analysts are coming to the conclusion that the economy isn't to blame this time.
For CPU manufacturers, the economy works a little differently. With parts inventory having built up already, PC manufacturers have to sell through their existing product lines before they start ordering new replacement parts. Those "new" parts may actually be a little old, which is why AMD has a few more 65 nm parts on hand than it had planned. Getting rid of those parts means cutting prices, which is one reason why gross margins -- today's key indicator of a producer's relative health -- came in at lower than expected for AMD's second quarter of 2009.
Stalemate for Web standards continues with no open video for HTML 5
The dream of a completely free platform for online video has run up against a significant roadblock, and it's another drama that Microsoft appears happy to watch play out from the sidelines. That dream is that Web developers can embed video into their sites using the <VIDEO> element of HTML 5, without being encumbered by anyone's proprietary technology. If it works, those sites can be assured of being able to stream to browsers' native codecs, rather than requiring users to install usually proprietary plug-ins like Adobe Flash or Apple QuickTime.
The problem with online video is that the technology behind it -- encoding, decoding, streaming and distribution -- is typically owned by somebody. That means it can't freely be distributed in an open source package. The exception here is Ogg Theora, the leading open source codec, and the hope of the community for a royalty- and penalty-free Web video platform. Yet its underlying technology may not only be outmoded, some are arguing, but may also actually still be owned by someone who has yet to assert patent rights.
First Windows 7 RTM code available August 6
In an announcement late Tuesday afternoon, Microsoft product evangelist Brandon LeBlanc did not reveal the precise date in which Windows 7 would release to manufacturing. He did state, however, that the first availability of the final code will come Thursday, August 6, for independent software and hardware vendors, and also for MSDN and TechNet subscribers (English language version only).
Volume license customers will be next to see availability the following day, if they subscribe to Software Assurance (SA), said LeBlanc. Those without an SA license must wait until September 1 to download their copies.
Report: Microsoft to drop out of the race against YouTube
Microsoft's scaling back of its social media initiatives continues, with the news today first reported by paidContent.org, learned during an interview with Corporate Vice President Erik Jorgensen, that MSN Video's Soapbox service will be shutting down completely. Soapbox has been its portal for user-submitted videos, but Jorgensen indicated to Fried that sponsorship for those videos -- which constituted about 5% of MSN Video's content portfolio -- was too low for the service to be sustained in the present economy.
In an interview with CNET's Ina Fried last month, Jorgensen stated then his team's intentions to scale back Soapbox, though he was careful at that time not to reveal the extent. The paidContent.org interview indicates that user-generated content may still be feasible on a revised MSN Video service, or whatever it should be called, although Microsoft is unlikely to give that content its own portal.
Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 4: Running Web apps
While some are still sounding the trumpets over Google's proclamation that its Chrome Web browser technology will be elevated to the role of operating system sometime next year, there are some Web applications engineers who wonder why it isn't one already. Once Chrome 3 is proclaimed fully functional on Linux, it will essentially make the same Web applications accessible from the desktop that Chrome OS plans to do. And if you don't mind the fact that the Chrome 3 Web browser is in the development stage, whether you're running Linux or Windows XP on your netbook, it does that right now.
Though I've made the point before that most businesses and a majority of consumers today still prefer Microsoft Office, there will be a small, though potentially beneficial, market of consumers who appreciate the flexibility and versatility that a Web application may offer. If they can suffer through the bugs, users will have the opportunity to produce some respectable, if not altogether spectacular, documents. But what is there for users to gain by installing these Web apps on their desktops, and use them like software installed on their computers, as opposed to simply running them in their browsers?
RIAA spokesperson denies proclaiming DRM 'dead'
The principal spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America -- whose name, for all who are interested, is correctly spelled Jonathan Lamy, not "Larry" -- denied telling an SC Magazine reporter, even off the cuff, that "DRM is dead," calling it a "blatantly inaccurate quote."
Lamy provided Betanews with an excerpt of his actual e-mail with the reporter, Deb Radcliff. As part of a discussion about consumers' continued willingness to bypass digital rights management schemes for digital music, for a story Radcliff was writing for SC, Lamy said, "There is virtually no DRM on music anymore, at least on download services, including iTunes." He went on to state that MP3s today tend to be sold without any DRM included anyway, with the interest of consumers being able to play tracks on any device.
Mozilla challenges security researchers, says Firefox exploit reports are false
If a bug in a program makes it possible for that program to crash, is that a vulnerability? Mozilla is saying "no" to that this morning, claiming that recent warnings, including one issued Friday by the US Dept. of Homeland Security, are exaggerations.
"While these strings can result in crashes of some versions of Firefox, the reports by press and various security agencies have incorrectly indicated that this is an exploitable bug," reads a blog post yesterday from Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver. "Our analysis indicates that it is not, and we have seen no example of exploitability."
A salute to a true managing editor: Walter Cronkite (1916-2009)
He would insist on the truth, so I won't embellish anything here: Walter Cronkite was not my hero growing up, but the guy playing for what I -- a boy trying to make sense of my world -- perceived as the other team. My hero was David Brinkley, one of only two other men I knew of besides myself (the other being Chet Huntley) who could command my mother's attention. As a toddler in the 1960s, my assessment of the true value of that feat alone may have actually directed me toward a career in journalism. So while my classmates' idea of a rivalry was between the Sooners and the Longhorns, or between the Beatles and the Monkees, the rivalry that gave me cause for excitement every day was between NBC News and CBS News. And Walter was the competition.
Later, as I truly studied electronic journalism, I would understand what it was that Cronkite had created and had contributed to the craft, early enough for me to use it in forging my career. Unlike most people in this business who wear the moniker "Managing Editor," Cronkite not only steered the ship of his news organization, but developed the principles by which a complete news product is expertly produced. He created the system of priorities by which news "packages" were conceived, organized, and delivered. And he would be the one reorganizing and reconfiguring that sequence, sometimes as late as seconds before air time, and on certain days literally in-between commercials. He saw his broadcast as a "front page," and he adapted it to the importance of the moment. He created the system of flexibility that should, if we were smart, be applied to the business of Internet journalism -- he knew the weights and measures that were necessary to obtain a balance between the stories people needed to know, and the stories people wanted to know.
Google addresses its own security bugs in Chrome stable release update
The stable channel for Google's Chrome Web browser (Chrome 2) has not seen a lot of action in recent weeks, perhaps indicating just how stable it has been. But a pair of exploitable defects that Google's engineers rate as "high" and "critical" have prompted the company to issue an automatic update to its deployed Chrome 2 Web browsers, beginning after midnight last night.
Although code running in Chrome is supposed to be tightly sandboxed, as engineers admitted very early this morning, the possibility existed for a maliciously crafted regular expression (RegEx, used in local searches) to generate a heap overflow, creating a situation where arbitrary code could be executed without the need for privilege. That was the "high" problem, which could lead to the ability to trigger the "critical" problem: An already compromised browser could then be maliciously maneuvered into allocating inordinately colossal memory buffers, thus slowing down the computer (denial of service) and possibly crashing the browser along the way.
Is Google optimizing Chrome 3 for Windows XP netbooks?
Download Google Chrome 3.0.193.1 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Over the last few weeks, Google has been releasing development builds of its Chrome 3 Web browser in a fast and furious pace. And with each release, the browser has been leaping forward in performance, particularly in Windows XP. With yesterday's release of beta build 3.0.193.1, Chrome 3 has given Betanews reason to suspect that these performance gains are no accident.
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