DHS to take on core routing vulnerability
No serious security geek has forgotten last year's big reveal of the hole at the heart of the net's routing protocol, but is the Department of Homeland Security the outfit you'd imagined patching it?
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is essential stuff, allowing the Net to be decentralized but still able to get stuff from point A to point B. It's not something you can simply not use, like JavaScript or even HTTP. As such, BGP is a fat target for bad guys, and last year at DefCon, two security researchers demonstrated a technique that would let such entities monitor and even alter unencrypted net traffic.
CNN.com invites beta testers to a live Inauguration Day event
If you've been considering or planning an interactive party with a few million of your closest friends to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden next Tuesday, CNN.com has an idea for a way you can use that time as a productive beta tester. On January 20, the interactive division of the news network will be partnering with Facebook in a worldwide test of a video delivery and sharing service.
Here's the details as CNN.com presented them to Betanews this afternoon:
Sony Ericsson posts a $247 million losing quarter
Mobile telecommunications joint venture Sony Ericsson sold 6.6 million fewer phones in the fourth quarter of 2008 than it did the previous year, resulting in profits dropping from last year's €373 million to a loss of €73 million, a €446 million year over year decline.
Mobile handset sales for the holiday season look to have been very weak overall. Sony Ericsson sold some 24.2 million phones during the holiday shopping season, which resulted in a quarterly profit loss of €187 million ($247 million). In 2007, the company reported sales of 30.8 million in the fourth quarter.
Agora Android phone gets curtailed by Kogan
Promising prospective early adopters refunds on their pre-orders, Australia-based Kogan today imposed an indefinite delay on the Android-enabled Agora phone, citing issues around interoperability, screen size, and resolution.
Manufacturing had already started on the Agora when Kogan made the move to temporarily pull the plug on production, said Ruslan Kogan, the company's founder and CEO, in a letter to customers.
New service pack for CorelDRAW X4
Today, Corel is making available the first service pack for its CorelDRAW X4 graphics package, the latest edition of the first great illustration app for Windows. In my experience with the package (I wrote a book on version 6 way, way back, and I reviewed version 1.0 for Computer Shopper two decades ago), it's my opinion that X4 could use some help in the stability department.
Though Corel's marketing is touting SP1 for its increase in the number of cameras supported for RAW images, a check of the change log shows SP1's main focus is stability improvement. Since simply moving the X4 palette around can crash the program, I'm hopeful that Corel has paid serious attention to its users' complaints. Of course, being able to actually download SP1 will help; in my experiences today, X4 is certain it already did download it. When it tries to install SP1, though, that routine naturally fails. Maybe it's a firewall problem (that's always a candidate), though I'll keep you apprised as to what I find.
Samsung to divide into consumer and component divisions
Samsung announced today that it will split itself into two parts, with one new division to focus on consumer electronics items such as mobile phones and TVs and the other on semiconductors and LCDs.
The two new divisions will be led by executives with hefty experience in the two respective areas. Choi Gee-sun, now in charge of the new consumer products unit, headed up Samsung's mobile phone operations for the past two years.
YouTube opens beta of TV-maximized site
Bringing YouTube to the living room television has been a mostly incomplete mission thus far. Series 3 and HD TiVo DVRs can browse YouTube, and Apple TV has been able to play clips from the site since 2007. Yesterday, YouTube announced youtube.com/tv, a new sub-site dedicated to bringing its content to connected devices, namely the PS3 and Wii.
"Very few...devices today contain a Web browser or provide access to YouTube," reads a YouTube Team blog post yesterday, "Our hope is that this site may help to accelerate an industry evolution towards open television access to Web video. Over time, we plan to add support for additional TV devices that provide Web browsers."
Circuit City to liquidate remaining inventory
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Circuit City has reached an agreement with liquidators to sell all the merchandise in its remaining 567 stores in the US. This is the beginning of the endgame for the nationwide electronics retailer, which already filed for Chapter 11 protection last November.
In a press statement minutes ago, the court-appointed CEO of the company, James Marcum, said, "We are extremely disappointed by this outcome. Regrettably for the more than 30,000 employees of Circuit City and our loyal customers, we were unable to reach an agreement with our creditors and lenders to structure a going-concern transaction in the limited timeframe available, and so this is the only possible path for our company."
Data: Nintendo drives the video game industry
NPD group yesterday released its figures representing the video game industry at large, and with total sales up 19% over 2007, Nintendo was responsible for nearly all of that growth.
Nintendo secured the top two spots in number of consoles sold in 2008. The Wii accounted for 55% of all gen7 console sales, moving 10.17 million units in America last year, breaking all previous single-year sales records. The company's handheld system, the DS, fell in just behind the Wii, with 8.52 million units sold. In December alone, the DS sold 3.04 million units and the Wii sold 2.14 million.
IFPI: 95% of all music downloads are unauthorized
Although sales of digital music are increasing worldwide, the global recording industry's representatives are now calling on ISPs to temporarily shut down music pirates' Internet accounts if all else fails.
A large majority of digital music downloads are "unauthorized" -- meaning, no payment is made to either artists or producers. This according to a report issued Thursday by the IFPI trade association, which represents the recording industry worldwide.
Is the Atom saving Intel?
Falling consumer demand for PCs is triggering declining orders for CPUs, Intel admitted yesterday, but not across the board. As it turns out, its smallest consumer processor may be the mightiest of all this year.
While the world's economic troubles have corporations everywhere clamoring for solutions, it's not as though nobody saw the storm coming. The news from Intel yesterday, during its quarterly conference call to financial analysts, indicates that the processor it created not as much for performance but for portability and price may be floating the company's boat: the unsinkable Atom.
Remotely control your TiVo with kwiry
Your DVR may rule your world, but it's also given you a special new sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you're away from home and remember that you forgot to punch something in. Enter kwiry, giving a lift to both you and your TV.
The kwiry service is free, and all you'll need to do ahead of time is set up your account. (You can remember that much, right?) When you realize that you're going to be away from home for that Very Special Episode of your favorite show, you'll text the name of the show to the kwiry service (59479) -- TiVo gossip girl, but we won't tell -- to the service. Kwiry picks up the ball from there and schedules the next available episode of the show on your recorder.
Twitter gets terms of service, finally
It was never the legendary Wild West of the early Web (as if that ever accurately described the early years, then or in retrospect), but on Wednesday, Twitter gained a list of rules designed to reign in current and future mayhem.
Twitter's been flapping along with the sparsest of Terms of Service for quite some time now. No more: On Wednesday, Twitter support team lead Crystal posted a list of rules of the road.
Nokia adds less restrictive licensing option to Qt development platform
A growing number of general purpose applications, including Adobe's latest version of Photoshop Elements, are being built upon an open source software platform that was originally developed by a company called Trolltech, and that was originally marketed as a tool for developing "widgets." That may have been a misnomer; while it certainly provides widgets, the Qt platform builds an underlying graphical model for programs that can be deployed across Windows, Linux, and Macs on the desktop, and even on smartphone OSes.
It's for that reason that Nokia acquired Trolltech last year, resulting in the leading cell phone manufacturer having its first desktop software platform. The deal was approved by the European Commission last June, though developers remained skeptical about how seriously committed Nokia would be to maintaining the cross-platform aspect of Qt.
Palm still noncommital on Best Buy, although deal makes sense
Neither confirming nor denying bloggers' accounts of a supposed deal with Best Buy around the Palm Pre, Palm today essentially issued a "no comment" to Betanews.
"Those are just rumors, and Palm doesn't really have a comment on them at this time," said Alex Hunter, a Palm spokesperson, speaking with Betanews on the phone today.
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