Apple Mac sales are down, but maybe not everywhere
Although Apple no longer seems immune to the PC industry sales slump, analyst figures released this week don't actually show the entire sales picture.
On Tuesday, analyst firm NPD Group released an estimate that Apple computer sales in US retail stores, measured in units sold, fell six percent in January from the same month last year, and that Apple's market share dropped to 13.7 percent from 16.4 percent.
50 Mbps Comcast network to be 65% complete this year
Comcast began the rollout of its wideband DOCSIS 3.0 network in October last year, promising a 50Mbps "Extreme" tier for 10 million homes in the northeastern United States.
The goal for completing Comcast's "wideband" network remains 2010, which will then serve as a waypoint for further DOCSIS development. Yesterday, the company announced it will triple the network's size this year.
Adobe acknowledges another JavaScript issue with Acrobat, Reader
An independent security research firm is warning of a non-ingenious JavaScript buffer overflow ploy that modern Web browsers would probably filter out, but which impacts recent versions of Adobe Reader for PDF files.
The surprise about the latest Adobe Acrobat issue is that there doesn't seem to be much new about it, at least in terms of methodology. A group called the Shadowserver Foundation announced yesterday that it was aware of an active ploy using malformed PDF files. Embedded JavaScript in those files can trigger a kind of managed buffer overflow, the group said, which leaves the heap full of shellcode that can be executed without the need for privilege.
CBS/Hulu conflict lends power to third party sites
This week, NBCU/News Corp. joint venture video service Hulu removed its content from CBS Interactive's TV.com without specifying a motive, just like it did with Boxee earlier this week.
While content producers affiliated with CBS and Hulu two are busy sorting out who's entitled to the other's content, third party sites continue to offer content from both services.
The data-breach devil's in the details
Kim Zetter over at Wired's Threat Level blog has a tremendous feature story up today concerning the work of the Open Security Foundation, a volunteer organization that keeps track of data breaches big, small and smaller.
By monitoring breach reports published in thousands of places (including those that never get journalists' attention), the group has become ace at seeing patterns -- most recently, putting the pieces together about the Heartland Payment Systems breach well before the company copped to it. Zetter's coverage is long but impressive; well worth your time this morning.
Our troops and the Internet (the continuing saga)
No one reasonable thinks that our armed forces' cybersecurity isn't regularly at risk from The Bad Guys. On the whole, the various service branches have been working recently toward a reasonable balance of security and access. So how badly do you have to mess up, Maxwell-Gunter AFB in Montgomery, Ala., to get your entire Internet connection taken away?
Seriously, this sounds like a doozy. The Defense Department's still holding to that ban on thumb drives, since people couldn't follow directions on how to keep them from ending up improperly attached to the classified SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) network. But they still have network access. You don't, flyboys.
Oh, Yahoo, that's just rich
Yahoo celebrated the fifth anniversary of its own home-brewed search engine this week, and to mark the occasion they're folding multimedia ads into the sponsorede-links mix -- a big step for the company's ad program.
According to Jeff Sweat at the Yahoo Search Marketing blog (from which the above image is borrowed with thanks), the new system had a test run with a limited group of advertisers late last year, and that group saw great improvement in click-through rates -- as much as 25% in some cases. Advertisers are trying a big of everything with the new system; Pedigree has video, while another advertiser might choose to go with their logo or even an interactive element (though the example Yahoo gives -- a search -- leads to headache-inducing thoughts of recursivity).
Dell launches XP Mini 10 netbook on QVC first, its own site later
Dell's new Inspiron Mini 10 netbook is pre-orderable from the QVC consumer shopping site about a week before Dell starts taking advance orders on its own Web site.
Initially sold preloaded with Windows XP, with Vista and Ubuntu Linux editions to follow, the 2.86-pound Mini 10 features a 10.1-inch widescreen display with a 16:9 aspect ratio; a multi-touch gestures touchpad; a 160 GB hard drive; 1 GB of RAM standard; internal Wi-Fi; and a built-in webcam.
Who ya gonna call? CISOs!
A brief interlude to brighten your day, security-minded readers, as Guerilla CISO Michael Smith explains how Everything He Needs To Know About Security, He Learned From Ghostbusters. Many information-security personnel could do a lot worse.
Smith's a contractor working at a government agency and, for want of anyone else to take up the task, the de facto security officer there. Like many security folk, he occasionally has trouble explaining the job to people, including himself. And so Smith took a moment on his Guerilla CISO blog to map his general routine to the action in beloved 80's movie -- not so much the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (or the memorization of ISO 27001, for that matter), but the approach that best gets the job done without causing irreversible harm to Sigourney Weaver the workplace and its processes.
More Palm Pre goodies -- this time, it's HTML 5
The giddiness continues over Palm's upcoming Pre handset, as attendees at a Mobile World Congress demo this week saw the much-anticipated handset running a version of Google Maps and an offline-ready Gmail entirely coded in HTML 5. And running them well, apparently.
For those who signed off from HTML somewhere around the blink-tag era, this is indeed the latest version of the specification, and the first to have two threads in parallel development -- HTML 5 and XHTML 5. (XHTML 5 is an iteration of XML and, if you like, a way of making HTML's relatively freewheeling markups work with XML's persnickety processing tools.) Tags can now give useful information about content types; most appealingly perhaps for developers, there are several new APIs to facilitate apps and improve interactivity.
Sony to close its only US PlayStation retail store
As Microsoft ramps up its own retail efforts, Sony will be closing its flagship PlayStation store in the Metreon Mall in San Francisco, California.
It may seem hard to believe, but the 5,500 square foot store has been open for nearly ten years, a substantial chunk of the life of many PlayStation fans. Sony representatives said the lease to the store expires on June 16, and it will not be renewed.
Microsoft in pact with semi-open source map maker
The deal allows 123map -- a German-based company that delivers maps across multiple phones and other devices -- to use Microsoft technology in layering "place of interest" data on top of existing digital maps.
For its part, 123map recently launched "flosm," a tool that enables comparisons between freeware and commercial mapping data through the use of overlay technology, according to information on 123map's Web site.
Norwegian Communist party voices support for Pirate Bay
It wasn't long ago that Microsoft's "I'm a PC" campaign took the label originally intended to be a pejorative and made it a badge of honor. Now, Norway's Red (Rødt) Party is trying to do the same with "pirate."
Capitalizing on the furor surrounding the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, Norway's Red political party has opened a site called Filesharer.org where people who illegally share media files can de-anonymize themselves in support of the Pirate Bay.
Baidu search engine takes financial hit after scandal
Et tu, Baidu? The Chinese search engine showed both profit and growth during its recent fourth quarter, but it didn't meet analyst estimates. The company's struggling not only with the rough economy but with a fracas over preferential placement given to paid search results.
Baidu's numbers were hardly dismal; the firm reported year-to-year growth of 36% and profits of around 31%. Still, that's as low as it's been since that country was listed in 2005, and both Q4 profits and Q1 estimates are down -- in fourth quarter, a noticeable 6.8% lower than analysts had estimated, at 288.7 million yuan.
ComScore January survey reveals uptick, Web de-stress tactics
Fifty-two percent of people stressing out about the economic situation are de-stressing by surfing the Web -- more than using the TV or family time to knock the edge off, according to numbers released Thursday by comScore.
On the other hand, according to statistics presented by comScore chairman Gian Fulgani, we're stressing out plenty online as well. The consumer-research firm, which tracks online and offline activities for more than 2 million Americans, notes an increase in certain search terms that appear to be a sign of the times.
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