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INTEREST: Happy New Year and sorry 'bout the Zune's leap-year thing...
by billing 05 Jan '09

05 Jan '09

...from: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/music/showArticle.jhtml;j… Zune Leap Year Bug Fixed, Microsoft Says The software maker says affected users need to drain their batteries and restart the device. By Paul McDougall InformationWeek January 2, 2009 09:39 AM Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) says it has resolved a glitch that caused the 30-GB model of its Zune MP3 player to freeze up over the past week. "You can go back to using your Zune!" the company said in a support note posted Thursday on its Web site. The note details steps that Zune owners should take to eliminate the bug by resetting their players. CBSSPorts.com GM(NYSE: GM) Jason Kint Talks About the Video On Demand Offering for March Madness 2008 Earlier this week, thousands of Zune users flooded blogs and support forums with reports that their devices had locked up. Microsoft traced the problem to a software bug that caused the Zune's internal clock to fail when switching from the past leap year to 2009, which is not a leap year. To fix the problem, Microsoft advised users to unplug the Zune from its power source and allow the batteries to drain. "Wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black," the company said in its support bulletin. It then instructed users to power up the devices, but only after 7 a.m. Eastern time on New Year's Day Thursday. "No other action is required," said Microsoft. However, the company added that Zune owners with copyright-protected songs might have to resync their devices with their PCs after rebooting in order to restore DRM files that allow the songs to be played. Prior to Microsoft's posting of the fix, some Zune owners took matters into their own hands and turned to the Internet for help. One procedure for resolving the problem that made the rounds involved opening the device and disconnecting the battery in order to force a reset. "This is a bad idea and we do not recommend opening your Zune by yourself," said Microsoft, noting that such a move would immediately void the warranty on the device. The inability of Microsoft's engineers to anticipate a leap year is the latest black eye for the company, which has been stung by criticism of its unpopular WindowsVista operating system and by Xbox 360 hardware failures. The glitch also won't help the Zune gain ground against Apple's popular iPodplayer, which controls more than 70% of the MP3 hardware market.

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INTEREST: Spam levels climb as crippled botnets restored
by billing 09 Dec '08

09 Dec '08

...from: http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&article… Spam levels climb as criminals replace crippled botnets Four weeks after McColo takedown, spam back to 63% of earlier volume By Gregg Keizer December 9, 2008 (Computerworld) Four weeks after spam levels plummeted when a rogue hosting company was yanked off the Internet, junk mail volumes are again up, a researcher said today. According to IronPort Systems Inc., spam volumes have partially recovered since the Nov. 11 takedown of McColo Corp., the California hosting firm that was pulled off the Web by its upstream service providers after security researchers presented them with overwhelming evidence that it was harboring a wide range of criminal activity. Among McColo's clients: cybercriminal groups that ran some of the biggest spam-spewing and malware-spreading botnets in the world. Yesterday, approximately 94.6 billion spam messages were sent worldwide, said IronPort, which estimated today's volume at 96.8 billion. Those numbers were 62% and 63%, respectively, of the 153 billion spam messages sent four weeks ago, the dayMcColo went offline. Immediately after the takedown, spam levels dropped to 64.1 billion, just 42% of the pre-McColo volume. Spam's resurgence comes courtesy of several botnets -- some well- known, some not -- that were largely unaffected by McColo's disappearance, said Joe Stewart, director of malware research atSecureWorks Inc. First of all, reports that the "Srizbi" and "Rustock" botnets have beenresurrected are "mostly untrue," said Joe Stewart. "These botnets are not monolithic, especially Srizbi, which is in the hands of a lot of people. Each has a couple of variants [of the bot Trojan], and maybe a few thousand bots. Some have regained control of their botnets, some have not." In fact, Srizbi and Rustock -- which were the world's largest and third-largest botnets, respectively, before Nov. 11 -- have effectively faded into the background. "It's looking like these botnet spam providers have had their customers jump ship," said Stewart. Other botnets have stepped up to take their place. "Mega-D has come back to its original strength," Stewart said, referring to another botnet that had been controlled by McColo-hosted servers. "Cutwail is running strong, and so is Kraken. Botnets that weren't badly affected [by McColo going offline] seem to have picked up customers." Other researchers have recently reported Mega-D's restoration. London- based Marshal8e6, for example, said yesterday that Mega-D's controllers have set up new command servers, re-established links with their compromised PCs and have resumed spamming. The criminals who ran Srizbi and Rustock have had far less success, said SecureWorks' Stewart. "Everyone fully expected Srizbi to come back," he noted, although that's not happened. Srizbi's controllers were stymied for a while by FireEye Inc., which for a time was registering the domain names the bots would use to reconnect with new command servers. FireEye, however, was unable to finance the tactic indefinitely, and stopped. "We're seeing Srizbi bots that are asking for [routing] domain names that aren't registered to anyone," said Stewart. He was unable to explain why the hackers had walked away from their botnets, but speculated that it was a business decision. "The longer they left it, the more the botnet diminished," he said, noting that botnets continually lose machines as PCs are cleaned of the malware or taken out of service and replaced by new systems. "They have to make a decision, is it worth it to regain control or just build a new botnet?" In the meantime, once-smaller players have grown in size as spammers turned to new providers. "Xarvester is one that has seemed to pick up a lot of traffic," said Stewart. "It's somewhere between Mega-D and Cutwail in size, so it's moved into the top three with at least 130,000 bots." Xarvester and another botnet, which Stewart has dubbed "Gahg," are spamming some of the same types of messages that once came from bots controlled by Srizbi's and Rustock's herders, he added. "There aren't any new botnets, not so far," Stewart continued. But he warned that the criminals responsible for Srizbi and Rustock could very well be working on new malware and spreading it on vulnerable PCs. "That could be one reason why they haven't restored the [downed] bots, they could be in development right now." = - = - = - = ...from: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&art… Massive botnet returns from the dead, starts spamming Criminals regain control after security firm stops preemptively registering routing domains By Gregg Keizer November 26, 2008 (Computerworld) A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals. The "Srizbi" botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye Inc., when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and- control servers, which are now based in Estonia. Srizbi was knocked out more than two weeks ago when McColo Corp., a hosting company that had been accused of harboring a wide range of criminal activities, was yanked off the Internet by its upstream service providers. With McColo down, PCs infected with Srizbi and other bot Trojan horses were unable to communicate with their command servers, which had been hosted by McColo. As a result, spam levelsdropped precipitously. But as other researchers noted last week, Srizbi had a fallback strategy. In the end, that strategy paid off for the criminals who control the botnet. According to Gong, when Srizbi bots were unable to connect with the command-and-control servers hosted by McColo, they tried to connect with new servers via domains that were generated on the fly by an internal algorithm. FireEye reverse-engineered Srizbi, rooted out that algorithm and used it to predict, then preemptively register, several hundred of the possible routing domains. The domain names, said Gong, were generated on a three-day cycle, and for a while, FireEye was able to keep up -- and effectively block Srizbi's handlers from regaining control. "We have registered a couple hundred domains," Gong said, "but we made the decision that we cannot afford to spend so much money to keep registering so many [domain] names." Once FireEye stopped preempting Srizbi's makers, the latter swooped in and registered the five domains in the next cycle. Those domains, in turn, pointed Srizbi bots to the new command-and-control servers, which then immediately updated the infected machines to a new version of the malware. "Once each bot was updated, the next command was to send spam," said Gong, who noted that the first campaign used a template targeting Russian speakers. The updated Srizbi includes hard-coded references to the Estonian command-and-control servers, but Gong was unaware of any current attempt to convince the firm now hosting those servers to yank them off the Web. In the meantime, FireEye is working with several other companies -- including VeriSign Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Network Solutions Inc., a domain registrar -- on ways to reach the more than 100,000 users whose PCs FireEye has identified as infected with Srizbi. Discussions about how to best handle any future McColo-Srizbi situation are also ongoing, Gong said. "We're trying to find a solution, and talking about ideas of how they can help fund efforts for some period of time to [preemptively] register domains," he said. "Right now, though, we have this window of opportunity to help clean all those [100,000] machines," Gong said. "Registering those domains was just a way to buy us time. We have to reach those machines to clean them up." Although some message security companies said yesterday that spam volumes had climbed back from post-McColo troughs, Gong was hesitant to finger Srizbi's return as the reason. "Srizbi may have contributed," he said, "but Rustock is also back." Rustock, another botnet whose command-and-control servers were hosted by McColo, was partially restored when a Swedish Internet provider briefly stepped in 11 days ago to reconnect McColo to the Web. Even though McColo's connection was quickly severed by TeliaSonera after it received complaints, Rustock's controllers had enough time to instruct some of the bots to look to a Russian-hosted server for commands.

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INTEREST: digital boarding passes
by billing 27 Nov '08

27 Nov '08

...from: http://www.gadling.com/2008/11/26/so-how-well-do-these-digital-boarding-pas… So how well do these digital boarding passes work? by Grant Martin Nov 26th 2008 @ 10:30AM Digital boarding passes in this eco-friendly, high-tech world are the next new big thing among the big airlines. Continental, American and Northwest are rolling out service to airports all over the country, and if you haven't got a kiosk at your local airport, there is probably one on the way. In concept, the system is pretty simple. When you check in online, instead of printing off your boarding pass you're given the option to receive it digitally onto your phone or PDA. In addition to saving paper, the big advantage is that those on the go without a printer can just flash the barcode (it's actually a matrix code) at security and at the gate then not have to worry about the slip of paper. In actuality, the system still needs some time to get going – or rather, the airport employees still need some time to adapt. This past Friday on the way to New York's LaGuardia airport I was given the chance to try out a digital boarding pass on my iPhone. After the jump I'll tell you how it went. In the two weeks that I had been away from Detroit, McNamara terminal incorporated the barcode system into their gate and security checkpoints. Forgetting that the system was in place when checking in for my regular New York bound flight that Friday, I was surprised to find that e-boarding was an option, so had to give it a try. From my desktop terminal at work, getting the boarding pass was easy. I went through the normal online check in procedure and instead of clicking "Check in and print boarding pass" I selected the e-boarding pass option and hit continue. The software then asked me for my carrier (AT&T), device (iPhone) and mobile phone number, digested them and sent me a text (SMS) message containing an online link to the pass. Opening that page with Safari gave me a one-page boarding pass with the QR code and gate information which I took my merry way to the airport. Walking up to the security checkpoint at McNamara terminal, I cheerfully greeted the TSA agent with my iPhone and driver's license extended. "Oh.... one of those," she said. The agent reached in front of her to a device just smaller than a breadbox, flipped a switch on the back of it and a red light illuminated at the top. Gesturing to me, I flipped my phone face down on to the window and let it sit. Nothing happened. Gently I waved the phone back and forth. "Stop that," she scolded me, and asked me if my backlight was on. As she poked at the machine a bit I turned the phone back to me and zoomed in on the QR code. Then I flipped it back over to the red light and it immediately accepted it. The agent silently gave my ID back and ushered me into the security line, where after a brief wait I found myself pushing my belongings through the X-ray. But what to do with the boarding pass that I was supposed to show the metal-detector wielding agent? I waved my phone at him as my belongings were swallowed by the monster. "Put it anywhere, just don't keep it on your body." "It's got my boarding pass," I muttered, probably too quietly. "Put it anywhere, just don't keep it on your body." Okay. I tossed it in the vanishing bin and walked through the X-ray. "Boarding pass?" I told him it was on my phone and shrugged. The agent visibly rolled his eyes and paused. "I'll.... just need to pat you down." He felt the pockets of my sweater and my jeans, turned me around and patted my lower back. Then he sent me on my way, ushering for the next passenger to pass under the magnetic arch. Since I was a little late for my flight, I reached the gate only twenty minutes before departure. By that time the boarding zone was nearly empty and the gate agent was attending to a few stragglers. Walking up to the gate I showed her my iPhone with the QR code still zoomed in. She didn't bat an eye, gestured to another red light and I flipped my iPhone over the top of it. The machine blipped happily, like a child who has just eaten a grilled cheese sandwich, and passed into the jetbridge, one sheaf of paper saved. In summary, the system is works fairly well and I can see it being fairly useful some day when I'm in a hurry on the way to the airport. The small drawbacks I can foresee, which largely have to do with phone battery life, can be planned around, and in the worst scenario you can always get a paper copy. Once the TSA and airline staff are all up to speed on procedure, I think that the technology will really gain traction.

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INTEREST: OK, now 50 GB Blu-ray... then what: holograms?
by billing 19 Nov '08

19 Nov '08

...from: http://www.oto-online.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1202&It… GE nears 1TB storage Wednesday, 19 November 2008 Imagine storing 200 DVDs on one disc? GE Global Research is working on it. Specifically, GE is designing a next-generation optical data storage technology that will fit at least 1 terabyte (TB) of information on a standard CD-size disc. This is not only equivalent to 200 DVDs, but also 40 Blu-ray Discs. GE's approach to this next-generation technology is called single-bit micro-holographic data storage and uses microscopic holograms throughout the volume of the plastic disc to store information. The GE technique goes beyond the traditional surface-based storage technology to use an entire volume to store data in 40-50 layers, Todd Alhart, a spokesman for GE Global Research, told One to One. Potential applications for this technology extend from the individual consumer to professional domains. In the consumer space, high-definition video formats and high- resolution entertainment continues to grow and expand. "As a result, consumer-generated content proliferates the corresponding requirements for content storage and distribution," said Alhart. "In the professional segment, information is increasingly generated in bandwidth-hungry native digital format." High-definition broadcast and motion picture video generation creates new demands for long-term, high-density archival storage systems. In addition, "medical imaging techniques are moving away from static- information film to dynamic digital detection and storage that can generate thousands of petabytes [1PB = 1,000TB] of electronic medical records data each year," Alhart added. Commercialisation for professional markets is targeted for 2011, and some GE technology may start to penetrate consumer markets as soon as 2012.

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INTEREST: MCor to introduce less expensive 3D printer; uses paper
by billing 09 Nov '08

09 Nov '08

...from: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2008/0704/1215054785022.html http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2008/0704/1215054784815.html Friday, July 4, 2008 3D printing: how does it work? Video: navigate to http://www.mcortechnologies.com/ and click "NEW" FAQ at: http://www.mcortechnologies.com/faq.html#3 THE MCOR Matrix printer creates an object out of paper from a computer- generated CAD (computer-aided design) model. A standard CAD file for a design is prepared for the printer by proprietary MCor software, which renders the design into slices (each slice for a single piece of paper). About three reams of office paper are loaded into the machine to produce the object, though several – as many designs as will fit the size of an A4 sheet of paper stacked three reams high – can be made in one go. The paper is passed sheet by sheet into the printer and cut by a tungsten carbine blade. Each sheet is sprayed with nanoparticles of a water-based adhesive to adhere to the next sheet and, slowly, the object is built from the bottom up. More adhesive goes on the cross-sections and less on the waste paper, to reduce wastage. A sheet might have up to 48,000 dots of adhesive. When finished – a process that takes several hours – the object comes out still encased in the block of paper and is then popped out. It looks and feels as if it is made from lightweight wood. The model can then be coated with a special adhesive, sanded and painted to give it a hard protective exterior. The objects and waste are biodegradable and ecofriendly. "This is a machine that will revolutionise the way things are designed in the future," says chief executive Dr Conor MacCormack, who co- founded the company in 2004 with his brother Fintan. Before him on a table sit a solid model of a human hand, a motor impeller, and a small hollow model of a house, all made in their printer from compressed paper. The house took about eight hours to produce, while the solid hand ran to 15 hours, he says. The Mcor Matrix is now available direct in Ireland and the UK and it is expected to be rolled out globally in 2009.

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INTEREST: Windows 7 in 2010...
by billing 01 Nov '08

01 Nov '08

...from: http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/07/windows-7-still-slated-for-2010-says-mic… Windows 7 still slated for 2010 says Microsoft, Bill Gates just crazy- talking by Joshua Topolsky, posted Apr 7th 2008 at 6:58PM If your pants / panties were in a "bunch" upon hearing news that Windows 7 would be headed into your ever-loving arms "next year," you might just want to hold off on those party invites for a little bit. Sure, Bill Gates just happened to mention that we'd see a new version of the OS "Sometime in the next year or so," but it's looking like that "or so" makes a world of difference. Microsoft wants to chill everyone out with the somber news that its got no plans to introduce Windows 7 any earlier than January 2010 (three years from the launch of Vista), and reassure us that crazy old Gates may have just been talkin' developer speak. "As is standard with the release of a new product, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its general availability as a means to gain tester feedback," a spokesman for Microsoft said, downplaying Gates' statement. Of course, this means that XP's cutoff will suddenly move even further down the line, which makes us wonder what the point of setting that June 2010 date was in the first place. Why are you toying with us like this, Microsoft? [Thanks, Tony] READ = - = - = - = - = ...FROM: HTTP://WWW.ENGADGET.COM/2008/10/28/WINDOWS-7-DETAILS-GALORE-INTERFACE-TWEAK… Windows 7 details galore: interface tweaks, netbook builds, Media Center enhancements by Nilay Patel, posted Oct 28th 2008 at 1:58PM Microsoft's Windows 7 announcement earlier today was followed up by an extensive demo of the new features during the PDC keynote, and since then even more info about the new OS has flooded out, so we thought we'd try to wrap up some of the more important bits here for you. Microsoft seems to have done an impressive job at this early pre-beta stage, folding in next-gen interface ideas like multitouch into the same OS that apparently runs fine on a 1GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM, but we'll see how development goes -- there's still a ways to go. Some notes: Obviously, the big news is the new taskbar, which forgoes text for icons and has new "jump lists" of app controls and options you can access with a right-click. You can select playlists in Media Player, for example. Super cool: when you scrub over the icons, all the other app windows go transparent so you can "peek" at the windows you're pointing at. Gadgets now appear on the desktop -- the sidebar has been killed. That makes more sense for all those laptop owners out there with limited screen space, and you can still see gadgets anytime by peeking at the desktop, rendering all other windows transparent. Window resizing and management now happens semi-automatically: dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it, pulling it down restores; dragging a window to the edges auto-resizes it to 50% for quick tiling. Nifty. The system tray now only displays what you explicitly say it should -- everything else is hidden, and the controls have been streamlined. User Account Control settings are now much more fine-grained -- you can set them by app and by level of access. They demoed multitouch features on an HP TouchSmart PC -- it was pretty cool, although the usual nagging "what is this good for / that'll get old fast" concerns weren't really addressed. The Start menu gets 25 percent bigger when using touch to make it easier to handle, and apps will all get scroll support automatically. There's also a giant on-screen predictive keyboard. Again -- could be amazing, but we won't know until it's out in the wild. We've always known Microsoft intends Windows 7 to run on netbooks, and we got a small taste during the PDC keynote: Windows SVP Steve Sinofsky held up his "personal" laptop running Windows 7, an unnamed 1GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM that looked a lot like an Eee PC, and said that it still had about half its memory free after boot. (We're guessing it was running a VIA Nano, since most Atoms run at 1.6GHz.) At the other end of the scale, Windows 7 supports machines with up to 256 CPUs. Multiple-monitor management is much-improved, as is setting up projectors -- it's a hotkey away. Remote Desktop now works with multiple monitors as well. Media Center has been tweaked as well -- it looks a lot more like the Zune interface. There's also a new Mini Guide when watching video, and a new Music Wall album artwork screensaver that kicks in when you're playing music. Devs got a pre-beta today; a "pretty good" feature complete beta is due early next year. No word at all on when it'll be released to market apart from that "three years from Vista" date we've known forever. That's just the good bits -- hit the read links for piles of more info and screenshots, and we'll keep our eyes out for anything else interesting. Exciting times! Read - Keynote videos on the PDC site Read - Technologizer Windows 7 hands-on Read - Ars Technica Windows 7 interface walkthrough Read - Laptop Windows 7 hands-on Read - Windows 7 Media Center revealed

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Re: [APPLE-L]: FYI: today only - CodeWeaver's Crossover free to download
by Tom Dubinski 28 Oct '08

28 Oct '08

According to billing... > http://www.codeweavers.com/ > For today only (until midnight CST), you can download Crossover for > Mac and or Linux for free Bwahaha! Cheap bastard that I am, I investigated and... Main Website Temporarily Offline Due to the high volume of traffic for the Lame Duck Challenge Free Offer, we have temporarily streamlined the CodeWeavers main website. We apologize for any inconvenience. We still love Digg, even if our server disagrees. ;-) Use this form to register for a serial number. Due to load, expect your serial number to be emailed to you in a few days. -- Tom Dubinski Phone: +1.204.474-8841 Fax: 474-7609 Computer Science, E2-596 EITC CompSci General Office: E2-445 EITC University of Manitoba E-Mail: tom_dubinski(a)umanitoba.ca Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~tdubins/

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FYI: today only - CodeWeaver's Crossover free to download (OS X and LINUX)
by billing 28 Oct '08

28 Oct '08

..from: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/10/27/codeweavers-says-cheap-gas-free-software-tom… Three months ago, CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White offered a challenge to another CEO -- the nation's chief executive, George W. Bush. If the president achieved one of White's six "Lame Duck" goals during the twilight of his 2nd term, White would make Windows-API enabler & WINE GUICrossOver free to customers for one day. Some considered White's proposal a great motivational tool for GWB; others found it smug, partisan and kind of a goofy way to promote the company's products, but in any event none of his six challenges seemed to be on the path to achievement, so that's where the story should have ended. CrossOver is a fine way to run Windows apps on your Mac, but as a force for political change, not so much. Then a funny thing happened on the way to January 20th: due to global economic conditions and through no fault of the president, the price of crude oil dropped precipitously and the cost of gasoline moved in parallel... bringing the average price per gallon in Minneapolis down to the target $2.79 level called for in White's goal #1. http://www.codeweavers.com/ For today only (until midnight CST), you can download Crossover for Mac and or Linux for free - -- it's usually ~US$40 or so. About CodeWeavers CodeWeavers' mission is to make Linux and Mac OS X fully Windows compatible operating systems. We do this through the power of Wine, which powers all of our CrossOver products. The CrossOver products make it possible to run Windows programs on Mac OS X and Linux without needing a copy or license for Windows itself. About Wine Wine is an open-source reimplementation of the Win32 API for Unix- based operating systems. Wine allows Windows applications to be run without a Windows operating system license. CodeWeavers is the largest corporate sponsor of the Wine Project, and contributes all of its work free to Wine. Crossover is a commercial version of the WINE emulator, that allows the user to run Windows apps on Mac or Linux.

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FYI: An Elephant Backs Up Google’s Library
by billing 14 Oct '08

14 Oct '08

...from: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/an-elephant-backs-up-googles-libra… October 13, 2008, 6:17 PM An Elephant Backs Up Google’s Library By MIGUEL HELFT Google often says that it likes to take the long-term view of things. But Google’s idea of long term does not appear to be long enough for some librarians, who tend to equate long term with forever, at least when it comes to preserving books. On Monday, a group of major libraries that are participating in Google’s Library Project, said they are working together to create what amounts to a publicly accessible backup of the digital library that Google is creating. The project, which is called HathiTrust, includes libraries at 12 Midwestern universities like the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois, plus the 11 libraries of the University of California system. (Hathi is Hindi for “elephant,” an animal that is said to never forget.) In the Google Books Library Project, the Internet giant has been scanning the collections of several large libraries. The company gives users access to the complete text of books that are in the public domain, and to snippets of books that are protected by copyrights. Google also gives each library a copy of the books it digitized from that library. “Google is an excellent partner,” Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan, said in an interview. “They are a corporation with a responsibility to its stockholders. Google could last 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years. We are academic institutions with a commitment to the preservation and use of scholarship and the scholarship record for the indefinite future.” Mr. Courant said that the majority of the 2 million or so volumes already in HathiTrust were digitized by Google. HathiTrust also includes fragile and hard-to-find books that the libraries have digitized on their own, he said. HathiTrust is an agreement by several of those libraries — but not all of them — to pool their digital copies into one giant database that will be accessible online. It will not make snippets of copyrighted works available, as some authors and book publishers said that amounts to copyright violations, but will allow users to search those texts. “I am hoping others will join, and I am hoping that we will be a destination for hundreds of thousands of people on the Web,” Mr. Courant said. “Google will probably be better than we are at large- scale consumer applications.” But Mr. Courant said that for some services aimed at scholars “we’ll be as good or better than them at that.” http://www.hathitrust.org/

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INTEREST: Parental Restrictions on iPod touch and iPhone?
by billing 10 Oct '08

10 Oct '08

The Limits of iPod touch/iPhone Restrictions By Christopher Breen mailto:cbreen@macworld.com I recently got an e-mail from a reader asking if he could place parental control restrictions on an iPod touch's Web browsing functionality with Safari. Yes, and here's how it works. On an iPhone or iPod touch, you go to Settings: General: Restrictions, tap on Enable Restrictions, and enter and confirm a four-digit code. With this done, you have the option to switch off these features: Explicit iPod Content, Safari, YouTube, iTunes, and Installing Apps (the iPhone adds Camera as a final option). When you slide the On/Off toggle for Explicit iPod Content, any tracks marked Explicit become invisible. They're still on the device, you just can't access them. Toggle off Safari, YouTube, iTunes and/or Installing Apps and the associated applications on the iPhone or iPod touch are hidden. But then, how difficult would it be for someone to work around these restrictions? As it turns out, not difficult at all. All a kid has to do is restore the iPod touch or iPhone in iTunes. This removes the restrictions. The person could then restore from a backup and then enable restrictions on his or her own--using a new passcode instead of yours. That way, should you eyeball the thing and see Safari and YouTube missing from the Home screen, you might think your restrictions were still in place. Of course, if you're sneaky you'd then grab hold of the device and test restrictions to see if it works with your passcode. "Ah, but wait," you think, "all I have to do is switch on Parental Controls on my Mac and disable access to iTunes. That way they can't restore the thing!" And that would be great if your family lives in the middle of the Australian Outback and your next nearest neighbor is 400 kilometers away. You can restore an iPod touch or iPhone on any computer running iTunes. If your kid has a single friend with access to a computer, say goodbye to restrictions. In other words, yes, parental controls are built-in, but those controls are about as sturdy as a damp piece of bathroom tissue. Technological parental controls have their place, but communication and trust between parent and child remain the most effect tools available. Get all the latest iTunes and iPod news at http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/ipodblog.html?lsrc=mwipod.

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