Court tells Kentucky 'no dice' on seizing gambling domain names
Kentucky is just about out of luck in its attempts to leverage its own state legislature and court system for protecting online horse race betting from competition by overseas gambling Web sites.
The Kentucky Court of Appeals decided on Tuesday that the state does not have the authority to seize 141 Internet domain names associated with online gambling.
Conficker, Downadup, Kido: A skunk by any other name
The vulnerability that's enabled the new Downadup (or Conficker or Kido or whatever) worm was patched back in October of last year. Still, because at least 9 million machines that haven't been patched are now infected, here's what you need to know.
Windows of all shapes and sizes. The worm targets them all: Win95, Win98, Windows Me, NT, XP and Vista, along with Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows server 2008. Oh, and Windows 7 pre-beta.
They talked over Obama's speech in China, too
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions...To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
If you live in China and read only Chinese, you didn't see those lines from President Barack Obama's inauguration speech yesterday, and if you were watching the inauguration live on television, you didn't hear them, either.
Seagate confronts an overflow of bricked hard drives
Faced with a firmware bug fix that is making many of its hard disk drives even harder -- to read, that is -- Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade and free data recovery services if users still cannot read their data.
The scope of the problem is so massive, with so many users complaining in so many places online and attributing any drive failure to this problem, that it's difficult to determine what exactly happened. But it appears that the majority of those posting originally had a 1 TB drive using SD15, which with no warning became not detectable by BIOS after about three months of use. Some users felt that the problem was more likely to occur with drives made from Thailand.
EFF asks for public's help in fighting against locked phones
Has a locked cell phone ever frustrated you? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now organizing consumers and software developers to tell their "real stories" on this subject to the US Copyright Office.
Under a new campaign, the EFF's FreeYourPhone.org is now soliciting petitions and other help from the public in its efforts to convince the Copyright Office to grant exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Microsoft is not expected to meet fiscal Q2 2009 guidance
The game of lowering expectations continues for Microsoft this morning, as financial analysts fear that the company's fiscal second quarter numbers will fall shy of expectations, when it reveals its performance numbers tomorrow afternoon.
That's actually a pretty safe bet. Last October, the company targeted $17.3 billion in revenue as its low end of its guidance target. CFO Chris Liddell told analysts at that time that the company would be able to squeak through that number based on a lowering of its operating expenses.
Please leave the DTV deadline at February 17, begs Qualcomm
Qualcomm may now be a key industry holdout against a proposal to extend the digital television switchover deadline from February 17, potentially to June 12.
While Verizon and AT&T have each indicated that they would not object to a proposed extension to June 12, Qualcomm reportedly wrote a letter to Congressional representatives asking them not to delay the switchover because of how it would affect the company's rollout plans.
Analyst: Twitter traffic pulls even with Digg
One of the smartest Internet analysts in the business, Heather Dougherty of Hitwise, revealed some potentially prophetic data yesterday: Based on the samples of traffic that Hitwise tracks, it would appear US-based traffic associated with social contact service Twitter is at least equivalent to US-based traffic on news sharing service Digg, at about 21 out of every 1,000 hits.
Now, it's worth noting that Digg traffic tracked by Hitwise isn't exactly plunging, though Dougherty's chart does appear to indicate it's trending slightly down.
Heartland breaks the nine-figure data-breach barrier
The 2006 Veteran's Administration breach will always hold a special place in our hearts for targeting a population who deserved much better protection, and the TJX breach of 2007 will live forever in the legends of security professionals who can't fathom how the security-light retailer managed to stay in business after such a heaping helping of incompetence, but the newly revealed hole at Heartland Payment Systems gets some special price for sheer scope of theft. Even the head of the company isn't sure, but the company handles over 100 million transactions every month.
The company does know what was not compromised, according to a release this morning: merchant data or cardholder Social Security numbers, unencrypted personal identification numbers (PIN), consumer addresses or telephone numbers; Heartland's check management systems; Canadian, payroll, campus solutions or micropayments operations; Give Something Back Network; or the recently acquired Network Services and Chockstone processing platforms. And they really knew how to kick off the damage-control effort: Announce when all eyes are on the inauguration, and pick up a URL for their breach-info site that emphasizes the year the breach apparently occurred (2008) rather than the year it was revealed (2009).
Here comes the BlackBerry Application Storefront
The BlackBerry Bold and Storm models have already swept southward into the US like some of those classic, cold Canadian currents, but neither model has performed in the market to the potential that analysts have expected. The number one and two reason folks use BlackBerry, it's believed, are for secure e-mail and for practical applications. But it's in that number two category that BlackBerry is perceived to be falling behind the iPhone and even Symbian, and now manufacturer Research in Motion is working to do something about that.
This week, RIM is accepting applications from third-party developers for their software to appear on what's being called the BlackBerry Application Storefront. This will be a tricky concept to pull off, particularly for RIM, since unlike Apple, RIM has maintained relationships with its supporting carriers for exclusive apps distribution. So while there will be one "main" portal, RIM is arranging with its supporting carriers -- like Rogers and Bell in Canada -- to enable their own "flavors" of the Storefront.
Mono 2.2 may overtake .NET in some critical categories
Meeting another milestone for the open source effort to extend Microsoft's .NET platform outside of Windows, the Mono Project -- backed by Novell, but with a little help from Microsoft too now and then -- is celebrating the release of version 2.2 this week.
Perhaps the most important addition to this latest release is full support for SIMD (Single Instruction / Multiple Data) extensions, which should provide orders of magnitude in performance improvements for developers who are building .NET games -- and there are more of these developers in high places than you might think -- to run cross-platform. "When the Mono runtime's SIMD optimization are active the operations on the structures defined in this namespace are mapped to hardware operations which can improve the performance of your graphics, multimedia or 3D operations significantly," reads a recent edition to Mono's online documentation.
Debate: Is SOA dead, or 'just resting?'
Must a programming methodology be a philosophy in order to survive the corporate boardroom? Maybe, but when the philosophy itself doesn't tread water for long, then what happens?
During the late 1980s and early '90s, during what was then my dual career as a software developer, I was something of a contrarian about a major methodology of my business: I believed, and actively advocated, that the design of programs should not tightly associate data with the code that utilizes it. I was told at the time I was not only rebutting a methodology, I was threatening a fundamental tenet of business, and some said I was against a way of life.
IBM is in its happy place for Q4
The once oft-heard phrase, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM," certainly extends to IBM's stocks today, as the company released a sunny fourth-quarter earnings report.
Late this afternoon, IBM reported a gain in net income to $4.43 billion, up from $3.95 billion in Q4 2007. That works out to Q4 2008 earnings of $3.28/share, much better than the predicted $3.03/share, with returns of $8.93/share for the full year. Revenues were slightly squishy at $27.1 billion, off from the $28.1 billion predicted by analysts.
Malware purveyors skeeve around the Inauguration
New Administration, new(ish) botnet? Maybe the perpetrators of Waledac have that sort of sense of history. They're definitely taking advantage of everyone else's sense of the importance of the moment.
The latest malware pitch appears tailored to would-be purchasers of commemorative gear. According to analysts at MessageLabs, fully 0.2% of all spam on Tuesday is "related" to the new president and the activities around his inauguration.
Employee alleges Belkin review scam
Belkin has been receiving a lot of unfavorable attention recently for reportedly offering to pay for favorable Amazon product reviews. The company's president, Mark Reynoso, posted a letter confirming the behavior, but attributing it to a single employee.
"It was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Web site inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment," Reynoso wrote.
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