Microsoft tells its security story (in pictures)
It's been a long strange trip toward better security for Microsoft, but they've made enough progress to have both improvements to their technique and some highly interesting war stories. The company's got a new site explaining the past decade's advances, and you have a reason to read comics at work today.
The process of "baking security in" -- getting developers to think about security less as "those people who yell at us" and more as an integral part of any software-construction effort -- lends its name to Baking Security In, which details Microsoft's progress on the Security Development Lifecycle, a process involving 14 stages and checkpoints over the six stages of the software-dev cycle (requirements, design, implementation, verification, release, support/service).
Courtroom webcast fight may delay RIAA trial
In an attempt to block the Courtroom View Network (CVN) from broadcasting the RIAA v. Tenenbaum trial, the counsel representing the record labels escalated the affair to the US Court of Appeals.
The legal counsel for the defendant in the copyright infringement suit -- a Harvard Law School class led by Charles Nesson of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society -- moved to have the case broadcast online in January. Developments in this aspect of the case today may lead to the hearing's ultimate delay.
Something to woot about
In an age of breakdown, a small but cheerful -- not to mention colorful -- bit of news reaches us from Texas, where woot.com's t-shirt site recently sold its 1,000,000th printed piece of geek culture. Since site launch, shirt.woot.com has sold a garment every 48.24 seconds since July 22, 2007.
The millionth shirt, according to the company, was sold for $10 on January 30th at 8:25am CST to a man in Houston. Fittingly, the shirt was a Derby winner -- a short designed by an artist competing to have a shirt chosen (by the users) for printing. "Sun Wukong (The Monkey King)" was the first-place shirt in that week's Derby, the theme of which was "Myths and Legends." Many of Woot's shirts are designed for them for free; tomorrow (Thursday), the site will branch into celebrity-designed T's with an offering from geek icon Wil Wheaton.
Verizon names partners in LTE development
Partners in Verizon's most recently announced LTE deployment will include hardware vendors Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, packet core vendor Starent Networks, and IMS partner Nokia Siemens.
Verizon Executive Vice President and CTO Dick Lynch has been vocally supporting the 4G standard LTE (Long Term Evolution) for two years, and only two months ago said LTE services could begin by December of this year. In Barcelona today, Lynch discussed Verizon's LTE deployment plans, which more realistically anticipate construction to begin in 2010.
MySpace expands smartphone support, embraces Symbian
Social network MySpace is now battling back against Facebook by adding more smartphone support to its mobile site, including new applications for both the Palm Pre and Symbian OS-based Nokia S60 phones.
Beyond the newly added Palm and Symbian, the MySpace mobile site already supports the iPhone, BlackBerry, Sidekick, and Google Android mobile platforms.
Nintendo DSi comes to US on April 5
Today, Nintendo announced that the next generation of its DS handheld gaming console will be released on April 5 in the Americas, just one day later than last month's predictions.
The DSi has been available in Japan since November, and within the first two days 170,779 units were sold, amounting to more than 85% of the initial shipment, according to Enterbrain. Both of Nintendo's premier game systems, the Wii and DS, have consistently dominated the video game market in sales, and more than 3.04 million DS units were sold in 2008.
Could Intel stop Nvidia from producing chips for Nehalem?
Last July, Nvidia announced it would make its chipsets and SLI multi-GPU technology interoperable with Intel's latest generation of CPUs, with their highly-advanced Nehalem architecture. Monday, Intel said no to that in court.
In a court filing Monday in Delaware which remains under seal, CPU maker Intel asked for a declaratory judgment against GPU and chipset producer Nvidia, stating that the terms of the companies' existing x86 technology license do not extend to the Nehalem generation. This according to Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, who confirmed the filing with Betanews this morning.
HP joins the Ubuntu Linux bandwagon
HP's Linux support will no longer be limited to Red Hat and SuSE Linux. Through a new partnership with Canonical, HP is becoming one of the latest in a series of huge IT players to hop aboard the Ubuntu Linux bandwagon.
More specifically, HP and Linux distributor Canonical are now working toward full certification of Ubuntu on HP Proliant servers, according to Mark Murphy, Canonical's alliances manager.
The long road to a happy ending for Nokia and Qualcomm on 3G
Handset manufacturer Nokia and wireless chip maker Qualcomm were in and out of court for the better part of two years. Now, after a six-month truce, they'll be working together on UMTS devices for the North American market.
The companies have agreed upon S60 as the operating system, and Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem (MSM7, MSM8 series) as the 3G chips. The latest Qualcomm MSM chipset -- the MSM7227 -- is a 12 x 12 HSPA solution with a 600 MHz applications processor, 320 MHz application DSP, and a 400 MHz modem processor designed for smartphones below the $150 price point.
New Sidekick, Pre spotted 'in the wild'
Sightings of both the Sidekick 2009 and the Palm Pre -- both wildly anticipated smartphones not yet available to the masses -- have been inflaming the gear-gossip blogs for days in the wake of the the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.
The Pre, rumored in some highly optimistic circles to be hitting the stores on February 15 (hint: that didn't happen), turned up in sighting, conveniently showing a Monday date on the (apparently larger!) screen. The image shows only the front of the device with the screen flipped up, so it's hard to see much in the way of changes, though one does notice that the buttons look slightly different and the body's a bit curvier along the edges.
Sun gives key management an open-source twist
Key management standards may not be the most glamorous aspect of IT security, but when you're trying to get your encryption-using devices to interoperate with your network, it matters. Now Sun's offering an open-source option.
The Crypto KMS Agent Toolkit is Sun's version of a KIMP (Key Management Interface Protocol) is, according to the company, the world's first generic communication protocol between a Key Manager and an encrypting device. It's available as part of the OpenSolaris Project.
Facebook backpedals on terms snafu, seeks advice
Switching it up a bit from its usual privacy-undercutting changes to their Terms of Service, Facebook's recently changed ToS slipped in new language that many users identified as a violation of personal privacy and copyright... and, after mass uproar, promptly rolled them back again.
Controversial Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg described the changes to the ToS as an attempt to "clarify a few points for our users," but close reading of the new terms indicated it might not be that simple. (Of course, Zuckerberg claims in the same post that "In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want," an assertion that anyone who's attempted to quit the service and remove all their information can easily refute.)
RIM settles options kerfuffle with SEC
An SEC inquiry into whether their options-granting practices were on the square has concluded for Research In Motion, which has -- jointly with four of its senior executives -- entered into two settlements over the matter.
Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, former CFO Dennis Kavelman, and former VP of finance Angelo Loberto, along with the company as an entity, were accused of backdating stock options -- a situation that got them into hot water with both Canadian and American regulators. Last week the Ontario Securities Commission announced that it had reached a deal with the company and the four named execs plus other members of the board of directors.
Some analog TV stations have already thrown the switch
It was supposed to be a day of reduced confusion, but in many places around the US today, some major affiliate stations have gone dark on their old analog frequencies...while others go on.
Back in 1953, a family whose name would come to be synonymous in Oklahoma with two things -- broadcasting and waffle syrup -- launched a cottage television institution in what was surprisingly one of the most competitive markets in the country. For most of the time from then until now, it has been the standard-bearer for weather alerts, even to the point where its over-the-top advertising was parodied by The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. Still owned by the Griffin family today, KWTV in my old hometown of Oklahoma City has already said goodbye to Channel 9 -- what we Okies might call, "the lady that brung you."
NPD: 2008 was a bad year for operating systems
Market research company NPD released its non-game software sales figures for 2008, which showed a nearly 10% overall decline, with operating systems taking the greatest hit, selling 40% less than the previous year.
While the data does not take enterprise software deployments into account, the numbers are quite dramatic when considering the lifespan of the operating systems in the consumer market. Though due consideration can be given to the various Linux operating systems, any changes within their 1% collective market share would have only a minimal effect on the health of the OS market overall.
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