Region woes hose Obama gift to UK prime minister
It's either a minor diplomatic gaffe or an incredibly nuanced commentary on the current state of international copyright protec... nope, definitely a gaffe: The 25 classic DVDs given to British prime minister Gordon Brown when he recently visited President Obama turned out to be more DRM than drama.
According to the report in the Telegraph, when Mr. Brown returned to 10 Downing Street and tried to relax with the movies, his player returned a wrong-region message and would go no further. It's an embarrassment, atop the original fuss made when the gift was contrasted with Mr. Brown's thoughtful and historically rich gift to Mr. Obama. On the bright side, wouldn't it be something if an incident like this one clarified thinking on certain long-deplored aspects of digital rights management? Or at the very least, caused Vice-President Biden to have to explain why he thinks DRM is a reasonable thing to do to law-abiding -- let alone law-making -- citizens and lawfully purchased products?
Slow, but steady usage share growth in IE8's first day
The early numbers from Web analytics firm NetApplications indicate a slower than expected, but steady uptick in usage share for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, a product which was introduced at noon yesterday on the East Coast. It's not being pushed as an update to the Windows operating system, so trading up for now is still a voluntary affair for users.
Still, if NetApplications' numbers are accurate -- based on the browser traffic it receives from Web sites it analyzes professionally, compared against the Web as a whole -- about as many new users have tried IE8 a day after launch as tried Google Chrome the day after its launch. Worldwide usage share as of 3:00 pm EDT was pegged at 1.90% and climbing. That's just slightly ahead of Google's initial uptick the day after it was launched, according to the firm's numbers.
Here Lies SpiralFrog (2007-2009)
SpiralFrog, the ad-supported music service launched by Universal Music Group and EMI in 2007, is now defunct.
To say SpiralFrog started off on the wrong foot would be an understatement. The service's launch was delayed by nearly a year due to an internal coup that resulted in the departure of the entire executive team. Then, beta testers reported a very unfriendly system of that commanded the user to authenticate each download within a 60-second span after it was completed, or else the download would be negated. This made the service impossible to use passively.
Skydiving through the cloud: Windows Azure gambles with 'Full Trust'
When Microsoft first unveiled its Windows Azure cloud-based platform last October, the company made clear it was not some kind of virtual hosting service -- in other words, not a place to house virtual implementations of Windows Server, like Amazon EC2. More to the point, Azure was designed to be a staging service for the deployment of server-based distributed applications, for clients without the data center capacity to deploy it themselves or without the cash on hand necessary to acquire that capacity.
But in its initial description, those distributed applications were essentially .NET managed apps, which don't exactly encompass the gamut of enterprise apps throughout the world. By "managed," I mean the use of a real Common Language Runtime -- in this case, within Microsoft's cloud -- to interpret code from a program or script, using a .NET language like C#. The operating system in Microsoft's cloud truly is Windows, and it manages the .NET platform in a similar way to any other version of Windows residing on Earth's surface.
TomTom countersues Microsoft in Linux patent battle
At the end of February, Microsoft sued personal navigation device maker TomTom for violations of eight of Microsoft's patents, three of which deal with file system and memory management issues within the Linux operating system of TomTom devices.
The Dutch company responded this week by countersuing Microsoft in the Virginia District Court for violating three TomTom patents. The countersuit seeks not only damages, but entreats the court to block Microsoft's legal actions.
New clouds floated by NetSuite and SAS
NetSuite's SuiteCloud launch and the SAS Institute's announcement of a 38,000-square-foot cloud computing facility followed the day after Sun's introduction on Wednesday of its own cloud initiative.
NetSuite's SuiteCloud, rolled out on Thursday, is a cloud platform in a similar vein to Salesforce's Force.com. SuiteCloud offers a developer's network; a program for building applications and add-ons that will work with NetSuite's software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment; and an online marketplace for posting developers' SuiteCloud applications.
Windows Mobile 6.5 drops its 'honeycomb'
At MIX 09 in Las Vegas, Microsoft showed off its latest version of Windows Mobile 6.5, which has experienced a number of UI design tweaks.
The most noticeable change since the OS debuted last month is the elimination of the on-screen honeycomb on the home screen. While the layout remains essentially the same, the icons have grown in size, and the hex-grid pattern has been removed. Microsoft Product Manager Loke Uei Tan said that users who were testing the UI in real life found that it wasn't quite "finger friendly," so it has been tweaked with that in mind.
A new recession hallmark: the pay-as-you-go iPhone
Next week, AT&T is expected to begin selling Apple's iPhone in the US without the required two-year contract.
A company spokesman told the Associated Press that the devices will cost $599 and $699 for the 8 GB and 16 GB models respectively, which normally cost $199 and $299 with the two-year contract. These iPhones will reportedly not be unlocked, and will still require an AT&T iPhone account to operate.
Much ado about undo: A new Gmail feature literally lasts five seconds
In perhaps another sterling demonstration of the effectiveness of Google's own product announcements by way of its blog posts, the world awakened this morning to an experimental capability in Google's Gmail that, if you think about it, you wonder why no one's thought about it before: An independent developer with the handle Yuzo F is distributing a Gmail add-on that gives users five seconds after clicking on the Send button to click on an Undo link that stops distribution from going forward.
"This feature can't pull back an e-mail that's already gone," writes Google UX designer Michael Leggett this morning, "it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don't worry -- if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we'll still send your message."
Great minds think alike... on hacker exploits
Ah, the CanSecWest season -- spring is springing, Pwn20wn is smiting browsers, and the fearsome Invisible Things Lab team of Joanna Rutkowska and Rafal Wojtczuk have debuted another attack on SMM (system management mode) memory. Thing is, so has researcher Loic Duflot; in his case, right at the CanSecWest conference. The public disclosure was coordinated for Thursday, but the exploit itself was discovered independently by both teams.
Rutkowska's got the whole story on her site. Invisible Things and Duglot's team are all good eggs, so Intel was informed about the exploit well before CanSecWest attendees got the details. The exploit itself (PDF available here) allows for privilege escalation from Ring 0 to the SMM on various newer motherboards with Intel CPUs. "Informing Intel," by the way, turns out to be the weirdest part of the story -- turns out that not only has the company known about the SMRAM-related security gap since 2005, they've mentioned it in a patent application.
In search of better Web security: Three approaches
It feels as if we've been waiting forever for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, which is why the fuss a few days back over Microsoft Research's "Gazelle" project -- ZOMG NEW BROWSER MAYBE!!!! -- was sort of refreshing and fun, if pretty far removed from reality as we know it.
The confusion came down to some observers' misunderstanding of the relationship between Microsoft Research and the parts of the company that actually ship products. Microsoft Research is, of course, a research facility; they think interesting thoughts, they test their theories, and after that maybe their ideas are taken up and maybe they're not.
Diebold admits serious design flaw in e-voting machines
Premier Election Systems -- the company formerly known as Diebold -- admitted in a public hearing on Thursday that the software used to manage audit logs on their electronic-voting systems had flaws that would not only drop certain votes entered into the system, but can delete the audit logs that could indicate a problem.
The testing, conducted after an election last June in Humboldt County, Calif., revealed at the time flaws in Diebold / Premier's GEMS system later confirmed by the California Secretary of State. The hearings now underway will help state officials to decide whether to decertify the GEMS v. 1.18.19 system for use in future state elections. The Humboldt testing revealed that the software dropped ballots under certain circumstances. Further investigation by the Secretary of State's office confirmed that problem -- and revealed that the audit logs themselves could be radically altered, sometimes with just one click. The problems with the audit logs, had they been known during the certification process (as Diebold knew for years, it was revealed today), should have disqualified the systems from being certified at all.
Palm, holding tight for Pre, reports Q3 earnings
Thursday's Palm Q3 2009 earnings call in a nutshell:
Analysts: Are we there yet? Palm: No. Analysts: Are we there yet? Palm: No. Analysts: Are we there yet? Palm: No. Analysts: Hey, are we there yet?You can't blame them for asking. As predicted by virtually everybody, Palm is, as CEO Ed Colligan put it during the call, "proceeding through a challenging transitional period" as the company gears up for the Pre and the WebOS future. The firm on Thursday reported that total Q3 revenue for the quarter ended February 27 was $90.6 million; after expenses, there's a gross profit of $4.2 million. Total operating expenses were $106.4 million. The let loss for the quarter was $95 million; so far in FY 2009, Palm's net loss is $640.7 million.
720p for keeps: iTunes gets HD movie downloads
Apple has turned up the juice on its iTunes movie store and now offers HD downloads of Hollywood motion pictures.
To download HD movies, users must have iTunes 8.1, which was released to coincide with the launch of the third generation iPod Shuffle last week. This is the first time movies can be purchased in HD through iTunes. Prior to this, only certain television content was available for purchase in HD, while H.264 movies in 720p were only available for rent.
IDC: Linux poised for more growth when economy recovers
In a new survey, IDC found that existing users of Linux servers are "highly satisfied," with plans to deploy more Linux at such time as financial constraints start fading away.
"Given the severity of the current economic downturn and the potential for a lengthy and gradual recovery that will likely take years rather than months, Linux is in a desirable competitive position to emerge from this downtown as a stronger solution with a key position in the industry," according to IDC's report.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.