Up front: Another no-go for Adobe Flash on iPhone, and does Google beat the Pre?
Here's an idea, see what you think: You remember that big Domain Name System cache poisoning warning we faced last year, the one where the whole Internet was threatened and every major vendor acted swiftly to prevent it from happening (with Apple bringing up the rear, again)? Well, even Microsoft was on top of this one, with the idea that if DNS servers used authentication, they could encrypt communications between each other and secure DNS servers from being spoofed or from having false entries inserted into their lookup tables. Not that it was Microsoft's idea, engineers had actually been considering it since the 1980s. So what if the US Government got in on the act? Maybe that might prevent a telecommunications disaster! Do you think?... The government gets wise later in WN|WN, but first, Adobe and Apple aren't getting any wiser.
Even now, no Flash for iPhone
StrongWebmail apparently hacked after issuing $10K challenge
Who among us doesn't love a good hack? After putting forth a $10,000 come-and-get-us challenge, it's possible that StrongWebmail CEO Darren Berkovitz is rethinking his stance on that. The company, which makes voice-based authentication software, dared hackers to break into Mr. Berkovitz's Web-mail account and report back details from an upcoming date on his calendar. A week later, a team of high-profile security researchers contacted a reporter with precisely that information.
The contest even gave hackers a head start, providing the target e-mail address ([email protected]) and that account's password. The idea was to point out StrongWebmail's unique value proposition -- voice verification through a pre-registered mobile number. The idea is that one's account setup includes a phone number at which the system can reach you. When you attempt to login to check mail, the system phones you with a three-digit number, which acts as a final verification before you hop into the inbox. The authentication is provided by Beverly Hills-based Telesign, which offers similar services to various Web sites.
Bing vs. Google face-off, round 4
The big problem which massive multimedia online indexes face today, which may only get worse before it can ever get better, is with their capability to shield certain viewers from content they do not want appearing on their computer. Regardless of the entire debate over whether the Internet should have content regulation, individuals should have the right not to see what they do not wish to see, and they should also have the right to prevent their children from seeing it as well. It may be everybody's Internet, but in the end, it's my computer and it's your computer.
Since we started our Face-off series with Google and Bing just last Monday, we've gotten a lot of very positive comments and accolades from readers (thank you so much), plus we've received suggestions that we pit the two search engines together to see which one is the most capable of filtering out the junk. What do you not want to see on your computer, and what things about you personally do you not want others to see on their computers -- and which search engine cares the most about answering those questions?
European politicians not sold on social media
On Thursday, the European Union undertook the second-largest election in the world, voting in 27 countries to fill 736 seats in the European Parliament. They've got Greens. They've got fascists. They've got countries that want into the system and countries that want out. But you know what they haven't got? They haven't got a whole lot of social networking drama about it.
Yet. According to a spring survey by Fleishman-Hillard, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are only just starting to see the point of extending their digital presence past having a Web site. That part they get -- 75% of MEPs surveyed have a Web site -- but just under one-quarter of the group blogs, and only about a quarter of those who do blog take the time to comment on other blogs. As for Twitter, 62% have either never heard of it or have no plans to use it.
Windows Mobile 6.5 developer toolkit available now
Late last night, The Windows Mobile team made the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit available, which is not a standalone Software Development Kit, but an add-on component for the Windows Mobile 6 SDK.
The Toolkit includes emulator images, new touch and gesture APIs, and code samples for developing software for Windows Mobile 6.5. The team is most excited about widget development, and in its blog today provides a step-by-step guide for widget creation (essentially "write the code, package it, run it.")
Does Bing have a future?
I've never been addicted to drugs, but watching Microsoft's seemingly never-ending drive to introduce a search engine that sticks helps me understand why the company simply can't say no.
First, the Redmond software giant's bread and butter, Windows and Office, are failing businesses. Although they're still hugely profitable, selling boxes of disc-based software is yesterday's business model. Microsoft needs to replace those revenue streams. Soon.
Verizon deploys its cloud, complete with admins for rent
As a recognized public utility already, Verizon may be one of the best suited organizations on the planet to provide a monthly billable service to businesses, that just happens to include computing. That's the basis of the US' number one carrier's announcement yesterday. But what is it that Verizon plans to sell? With something as nebulous as cloud computing, it's often difficult to determine just what it is that a service provider is actually offering, and whether it's on a par with competitive brands. And like much of its competition, Verizon "buries its lead" with paragraphs and paragraphs of introduction about how big the cloud is these days, and how competitive business is these days, and how crappy the economy is these days.
What's the news in all of this? A company that already has a huge connectivity infrastructure is leveraging it to deliver a service for businesses to offload not only their applications, but the administrative responsibility for those apps as well, to Verizon for a monthly fee.
Palm Pre: Rounding up (or down) the reviews
It's on, and most of the outlets we've seen so far compared Palm's new phone to -- what else? -- the iPhone. To summarize:
Pre beats iPhone: Associated Press, USA Today, TG Daily
Why suing auditors won't solve the data breach epidemic
The life of a security auditor has its high points, of course -- travel, getting paid to break stuff, and more travel -- but there's a lot about that job that doesn't recommend it. You're going into someone else's place of business and trying to figure out what they're doing wrong, so you can write a big report that goes to their bosses? I don't care how personable you are, this isn't on the Dale Carnegie list of How To Win Friends.
Nor, in a disturbing number of situations, is it on the list of ways to Influence People. Take a pack of security auditors out for a beer sometime. (You will not have to ask twice, and if you get two beers in them they'll tell you about that mid-sized city whose network is end-to-end pwned right now and that international airport that has an ongoing problem with stolen IDs -- no names, of course, but plenty of other detail. After that, you'll want another beer just for yourself.) When they're done scaring you, they'll start trading tales of clients who simply refused to accept a bad audit.
Up front: Telecoms can keep their wiretap immunity...for now
When the President of the United States grants authority to a private entity for it to conduct operations that he says are in the national interest, there typically is very little that a single federal judge can do to overturn that authority. So perhaps it should be no surprise that US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker yesterday upheld President Bush's grant of immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications companies including AT&T, for working with the National Security Agency in anti-terrorist operations. But did Judge Walker leave bread crumbs for plaintiffs in those suits to seek redress from the former president himself? This morning, the EFF has found some crumbs.
Federal judge tosses warrantless wiretap suits, but not too far
Ericsson and Intel: Carrier-subsidized netbooks are the future
The popularity of the netbook is undeniable. In just two years it has risen from a product of uncertain necessity to a killer gadget that makes up as much as thirty percent of all notebook sales for its leading manufacturers.
But where is the form factor headed?
Bing vs. Google face-off, round 3
Download Microsoft Bing Maps 3D 4.0 from Fileforum now.
If you've ever used any of the major travel sites like Travelocity or Priceline to plan a business trip, you may have already encountered what I consider to be their principal deficiency thus far: They don't make hotel suggestions based on the hard, raw data about what amenities are in the general vicinity, and what travelers want to see or to have close at hand.
How E3 got its groove back
Two years ago, the Entertainment Software Association decided that its E3 convention was getting too big and too costly to manage. It changed venues, and tightened admission policies to only allow a select group of attendees. Attendance was upwards of 60,000 in 2006, but in 2007 it was limited to 5,000. Unsurprisingly, a number of studios opted to not even go to the next year's E3, as it would only garner a fraction of its former attention.
This year, attendance rules were somewhat slackened to allow 40,000 attendees (including media), and cable video game channel G4 made its coverage of the events available on Justin.tv as live, free (and commercial free) streams. The decision to stream these events for all to see was a wise one, and Justin.tv counted more than five million total impressions for their live streams of the event's opening press conferences.
Microsoft 'extends' Windows: What does that mean?
This morning in What's Now | What's Next, we reported on the early word from a keynote address to the Computex trade show in Taiwan, from Microsoft Corporate Vice President Steven Guggenheimer. What might have been big news there was already leaked in advance: Windows 7 will be available to the public October 22. The #2 story was supposed to have been the company casting its net wider, making Windows available on a broader range of devices.
Yet in Taiwan, where IT device production is shifting away from PCs and toward smaller, more customized devices, the question is just how broad that new range will be. The industry there (which locals refer to as "ICT" for "information and communications technology") has drawn a borderline around a concept called smartbooks -- devices whose blueprints can be assembled using pre-existing intellectual property that's licensed to vendors, typically using ARM processors. Meanwhile, Microsoft has drawn some borderlines of its own -- again -- by way of announcing that Windows may be addressing new market segments in the near future, extending its reach to new platforms. But now, there's dispute and confusion over whether the ICT industry's boundaries and Microsoft's have any overlap.
Pixel Qi's latest display is not touchscreen
Last year, Pixel Qi appeared at Computex to present its lofty goals of creating a dual-touchscreen notebook for the One Laptop Per Child project that cost as little as $75, including scintillating mockups of its ultimate goal.
One year later, the group has made distinct progress toward...something. At Computex in Taipei this week, Pixel Qi will be showing off its 3Qi display, which is an improvement on the OLPC XO's current screen. They have created a higher efficiency "transflective" screen. This type of screen has a sunlight-readable black and white (reflective) mode that offers an equally high-quality full-color (transmissive) mode.
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