- apple-list - University of Manitoba Mailing Lists

INTEREST: US universities see Apple introduce Touch/iPhone developer program for students
by billing 22 Sep '08

22 Sep '08

NOTE: this program is not yet available in Canada. More information can be obtained by leaving questions at: http://developer.apple.com/contact/ ...from: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/university.html http://www.macworld.com/article/135675/2008/09/iphone_university.html?t=213 The iPhone Developer University Program is a free program designed for higher education institutions looking to introduce curriculum for developing iPhone or iPod touch applications. The University Program provides a wealth of development resources, sophisticated tools for testing and debugging, and the ability to share applications within the same development team. Institutions can also submit applications for distribution in the App Store. The free iPhone Developer University Program is currently available to accredited, higher education institutions in the United States. The iPhone Developer University Program includes: iPhone SDK iPhone Dev Center Resources Testing on iPhone and iPod touch Internal or App Store distribution Student Development Team The iPhone Developer University Program allows instructors and professors to create a development team with up to 200 students. Development Resources With the suite of sophisticated and elegant tools included in the iPhone SDK, and a wide-range of resources in the iPhone Dev Center, students participating in the class will have everything they need to create innovative applications for iPhone and iPod touch. Testing, Debugging, and Optimizing Students can test, debug, and optimize their applications using Xcode's graphical debugger, or collect real-time performance data in Instruments' timeline view. These powerful optimization tools allow for quick identification of any performance issues. Distributing Applications The iPhone Developer University Program allows students within the same development team to share their applications with each other through email, or by posting them to a private website for presentation and grading purposes. In addition, higher education institutions can submit applications for distribution in the App Store.

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FYI: USB power adapter exchange/safety alert
by billing 22 Sep '08

22 Sep '08

...from: http://www.apple.com/support/usbadapter/exchangeprogram/?sr=hotnews Apple Ultracompact USB Power Adapter Exchange Program Important Safety Notice Today Apple announced the Apple Ultracompact USB Power Adapter Exchange program. Apple has determined that under certain conditions the new ultracompact Apple USB power adapter's metal prongs can break off and remain in a power outlet, creating a risk of electric shock. We have received reports of detached blades involving a very small percentage of the adapters sold, but no injuries have been reported. The ultracompact USB power adapters were supplied with every iPhone 3G sold in the following countries, and may also have been purchased separately as an accessory: US Japan Canada Mexico Several Latin American countries (click here for a detailed list of countries) Note: Apple USB power adapters supplied with original iPhones or supplied with iPhone 3G units sold in other countries are not affected. Customer safety is always Apple's top priority, and therefore we have voluntarily decided to exchange every ultracompact power adapter for a new, redesigned adapter, free of charge. Users with ultracompact power adapters should immediately stop using them until they exchange them for a new, redesigned ultracompact adapter. In the meantime, they should charge their iPhone 3G by connecting it to their computer with the USB cable that came with their iPhone or by using a standard-sized Apple USB Power Adapter (with fold up prongs) or with a third party adapter designed to work with the iPhone, such as a car charger. Identifying your adapter If you purchased an iPhone 3G in any of the countries listed above, you received the ultracompact USB adapter. Compare your USB power adapter to the pictures below. If it matches, we will provide a replacement adapter in exchange for your current one. If you have purchased this ultracompact adapter as a standalone accessory, you may also exchange it for a new one. Replacement adapters have a single green dot on the bottom, like this: If you have an ultracompact adapter with a green dot on the bottom, you already have a new, redesigned adapter and do not need to participate in this exchange program. The Exchange Process Replacement adapters will be available starting Friday, October 10, 2008. There are two ways to exchange your current ultracompact Apple USB power adapter for a new, redesigned adapter. Order a replacement adapter via the web. These replacement adapters will ship within three weeks of your order, starting on Friday, October 10. Exchange your adapter at an Apple Retail Store starting on October 10. We'll need to collect your iPhone 3G's serial number as part of the exchange process. If you apply via the web, you will also need to provide your name and address so that we can send you a new adapter along with a shipment box so that you can return the affected adapter to Apple. If you visit an Apple Retail Store, you need to bring your affected adapter(s) and your iPhone 3G(s) with you to complete the exchange process. If you live in Latin America, we will announce the appropriate exchange program information before October 10. Thank you for your cooperation with this exchange program, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

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FYI: odd MacBook Pro battery behaviour?
by billing 14 Sep '08

14 Sep '08

...from: http://www.macworld.com/article/134496/2008/07/mbpbadbattery.html MacBook Pro Battery Woes Mac 911 Tip of the Week Another year, another iPhone. Reader Bill Grant has a problem with power, specifically the battery in his MacBook Pro. He writes: "Recently, my MacBook Pro has been behaving strangely. I charge the battery over night, yet the battery menu constantly flickers between estimating a fully-charged state and telling me that the battery isn't charging. When running from battery power, I see a readout of about half full and then the computer shuts off abruptly. Any idea what's going on?" It's quite likely you have a bad battery. From the Apple menu, choose About This Mac and then click the More Info button in the resulting window. When System Profiler appears, select the Power entry and eyeball the Health Information entry. If, under Condition, it says "Check Battery," that battery is probably on the fritz. Fortunately, these batteries are under an extended replacement program as they're defective. Apple has issued a document that outlines symptoms a defective battery might exhibit as well as a link to a software update that can fix some battery issues. http://www.apple.com/support/macbook_macbookpro/batteryupdate/ If the software fix doesn't work, you should follow the document's advice and contact Apple about having the battery replaced.

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INTEREST: PRACTICAL TRAVELER - IPHONE E-GUIDES
by billing 06 Sep '08

06 Sep '08

If you've been thinking about Apple's iPhone, this article may give you an idea of the kinds of things it can do.... oh, ya, it's a cell phone and mp3 player too. ::-) If you're interested, I'd suggest reading the NYTimes article below first but then also read the articles at these links to become aware of some of the things you should be aware of when traveling with your iPhone: - Roaming charges - iPhone and international travel: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6415357&tstart=0 - solar charger: http://www.iphoneworld.ca/iphone-reviews/2008/04/28/solio-magnesium-review/ - displaying UTC on WorldClock: http://automators.net/news/macosxhints-com/display-utc-on-the-iphone-s-worl… - transfer data from Blackberry, WinMob, to iPhone: http://www.iphoneatlas.com/2008/01/02/missing-sync-for-iphone-migrate-data-… Wayne ....from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/travel/07praciPhone.html?th&emc=th Clueless in Cleveland? Use Your Thumb Doug Panton By MICHELLE HIGGINS Published: September 7, 2008 SURE, you can turn your iPhone into a Star Wars-like light saber, a virtual pet or an interactive mug of beer. But did you know that those newfangled applications can also tell you the nearest sushi bar inLondon, the wait time at La Guardia’s security checkpoints or how to say “Where’s the toilet?” in Cantonese? New iPhone ads: http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ads/ As Apple’s iTunes App Store continues to grow with hundreds of titles, the iPhone is proving to be a useful travel tool — and not just for when you’re bored on that 18-hour flight to Singapore. The best programs take advantage of the iPhone’s location-aware feature, tailoring the information to your whereabouts. Say you land in Baltimore and you have a sudden craving for crab cakes. With a few taps, iPhone apps with names like Yelp, Urbanspoon and iWant can quickly guide you to Faidley Seafood or Obrycki’s Crab House. Other apps can point you to the cheapest gas station, book a hotel and even call a cab. Below are some of the handiest apps for travel. Many are free, though some cost from 99 cents to $24.99. Warning: Some apps require data downloads that may incur roaming fees if you’re overseas. To avoid such fees, turn off “Data Roaming” and look for Wi-Fi hot spots. Getting There A number of airlines are creating mobile-friendly versions of their Web sites, allowing iPhone users to shop for flights, buy tickets, check in, select seats and modify reservations. Now, at least one, British Airways, has a free downloadable iPhone app that makes finding the next red eye to London as easy as flicking your thumb. Frequent fliers might want to download Flight Status ($3.99). It gives the status of thousands of flights, as well as the arrival gates and baggage carousels. Another app that can be useful for today’s delay- plagued skies is AirportStatus (free). It displays a list of airports in North America with delays or closings. Travelocity (free) takes an all-in-one approach, letting you check flight schedules, gate numbers, security wait times and — if you booked through Travelocity — your itinerary. The app also lets you search for “Hotels Nearby Me” — a feature that could come in handy in travel emergencies (or, perhaps, for some other purpose). Where to Eat Looking for a place to nosh on the road? Urbanspoon (free) recommends restaurants in more than 50 cities using the iPhone’s location-aware capability and offers reviews from newspapers, blogs and fellow users. While suggestions (and prices) can be out of date, the fun and easy-to-use app looks like a slot machine and is activated by shaking the phone. Foodies, however, might prefer Local Eats (99 cents), an iPhone version of the guidebook series “Where the Locals Eat,” which ranks what it considers the top 100 restaurants in 50 American cities. Tapping “Near Me” finds places nearby from that list, along with reservation numbers and directions. What to Do Need an A.T.M.? Thirsty for a sakitini? Shopping for a Marni purse? Several location-aware apps are vying to be your mobile concierge. Among the best are Yelp (free), which has a fanatical base of reviewers who weigh in on everything from dry cleaners to karaoke bars. Where (free) lets you scroll through different services (like Starbucks, gas stations and restaurants) and plots them on a Google Map, along with your location. And iWant (free) offers a similar service, but in a streamlined interface with clean black-and-white icons: a martini for bars, a projector for movies, a hanger for clothing stores, and so on. Traditional travel guides are getting into the action, with mixed results. Frommer’s has turned several of its guides, including New York, Paris and London, into iPhone apps ($9.99 each). The e-guides offer many of the same maps, reviews and suggested itineraries as the bulky book. But unlike Yelp, Frommer’s doesn’t take advantage of location-aware technology; you still must look up the suggestions manually, as with a book.Washingtonpost.com’s City Guide app (free) is smarter; it lets users easily navigate through 2,000 bars and restaurants, many with well-written reviews. Unfortunately, it is limited to the Washington area. How to say it A handful of apps seek to lower the language barrier. Lonely Planet ($9.99) offers phrasebook apps in 10 languages including Czech, Italian and Vietnamese. In addition to translating phrases like “I’ll buy you a drink,” in written text, the app also translates it verbally (“Te invito a una copa,” it says in Spanish, in a suave male voice). A different approach is taken by Babelingo ($5.99), which may appeal to those afraid of mangling pronunciations. After choosing a phrase like “Please take me to the airport,” it displays the translation in big bold type, making it easier to show to someone, like a taxi driver. Babelingo offers 300 phrases in seven languages, including Italian, German and Japanese. How to Get Around Numerous subway and mass-transit apps are available for major cities, with the best offering clean design, location-based station finders and service advisories. Worthwhile apps include CityTransit (for New York City, $2.99), Tube London City ($9.99) and iBart (for the San Francisco area, free). Taxi! (free) has a yellow cab-inspired design and finds taxi services throughout the United States based on your location. Just tap one of the companies, and the iPhone dials it for you. It also offers user ratings, whether the company accepts credit cards and, according to the App Store’s description, a prescreened list based on hotel referrals. Cool Tools Until Skype creates an iPhone app, Truphone may be the closest thing. It allows you to make cheap international phone calls over Wi-Fi (about 6 cents a minute to landlines and 30 cents to mobile phones), especially when compared with roaming rates. Some kinks need to be worked out — voice quality can be poor and calls didn’t always go through. How much is that Chinese wardrobe in dollars? Currency (free) is a frequently updated converter for more than 50 currencies. Easier to use is MOMPF Currency Converter (free), which has a funny-looking cartoon for a mascot, and allows you to easily switch among currencies and to store favorites.

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Oooops. Sorry about that last post. Mistyped address.
by billing 06 Sep '08

06 Sep '08

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INTEREST: George Carlin: Baseball vs Football
by billing 06 Sep '08

06 Sep '08

(one of his non-bitter compairsons ::-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-gakLqibP4

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FYI: some Macs work with 64-bit Vista...
by billing 05 Sep '08

05 Sep '08

Most everyone will just pass over this item, I know, but if you need 64-bit Vista support, I hope this helps... ...from: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1846?viewlocale=en_US Boot Camp: Macs that work with 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista Last Modified: May 07, 2008 Article: HT1846 Summary 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista are supported on certain Intel-based Macs via Boot Camp. (Boot Camp is included with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard). Products Affected Boot Camp, Microsoft Windows Vista (64 bit editions) These Macs support 64-bit editions of Windows Vista: MacPro (Early 2008) MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2008) MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2008) Important: Information about products not manufactured by Apple is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute Apple’s recommendation or endorsement. Please contact the vendor for additional information. = - = - = - = - = - = - = [thanks, Doug. Wayne]

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INTEREST: Windows VISTA/XP get another web browser - from Google
by billing 03 Sep '08

03 Sep '08

Why another web browser? ...from: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/why.html?hl=en A fresh take on the browser At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends - all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they're doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago. Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build. So today we're releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome. On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff - the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go. Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers. This is just the beginning - Google Chrome is far from done. We've released this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and we'll continue to make it even faster and more robust. We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward. The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better. New CHROME features: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features.html?hl=en ...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/technology/02google.html?th&emc=th Microsoft Faces New Browser Foe in Google By STEVE LOHR Published: September 1, 2008 The browser war is back on. GraphicJoining the Party RelatedTimes Topics: Google Inc.Webcast: Google Chrome AnnouncementGoogle Chome (Beta) This time, Microsoft’s opponent isGoogle, a familiar foe. On Tuesday, Google will release a free Web browser called Chrome that the company said would challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as well as the Firefox browser. The browser is a universal doorway to the Internet, and the use of Internet software and services is rapidly growing. Increasingly, the browser is also the doorway to the Web on cellphones and other mobile devices, widening the utility of the Web and Web advertising. Google, analysts say, cannot let Microsoft’s dominant share of the browser market go without a direct challenge. Google already competes with Microsoft in online search and Internet advertising. They both make operating software for cellphones. Google is increasingly competing with Microsoft head-on in software that handles basic productivity like word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail programs. Google has Web-based software in these markets that are low-cost or free alternatives to Microsoft’s lucrative desktop software. Despite the frequent clashes with Microsoft — including the role Google played in thwarting an attempted acquisition ofYahoo — Google has come out on top only in search and search advertising. But Google does not have to win the browser war. Strategically, opening yet another front against Microsoft forces it to divert resources to defend franchises. Now, Chrome heightens the rivalry and marks a shift for Google, which has strongly backed Firefox, the open-source browser that has gained about a fifth of the market against the dominant Internet Explorer. Google’s browser project has been under way for more than a year, a person close to the company said. In a brief statement, Microsoft welcomed the new entry and expressed confidence that people would prefer Explorer, which is on every Windows PC sold. “The browser landscape is highly competitive,” said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer group. “But people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.” Google has clashed with Microsoft before, saying it had designed IE to gain ground in search, a market where Google is the runaway leader. After Microsoft introduced IE 7 in 2006, Google complained that the browser’s search box favored Microsoft’s search service. Microsoft responded and made modifications, and a federal judge overseeing the antitrust consent decree against Microsoft determined that the browser design was not anticompetitive. The first round of the browser wars in the 1990s led to a sweeping federal antitrust suit against Microsoft for the tactics it used to stifle competition from the commercial pioneer in browsing software, Netscape Communications. A federal appeals court ruled in 2001 that Microsoft had repeatedly violated the nation’s antitrust laws. Microsoft later reached a settlement with the Bush administration, which included some sanctions but left the company free to bundle browsing software with Windows, which runs more than 90 percent of all personal computers. Microsoft recently stepped up its own browser development efforts, given the increasing importance of the browser and signs that Firefox is nibbling at its lead. Microsoft released a new version, IE8, last week to generally favorable reviews. Microsoft still holds 73 percent of the browser market, according to Net Applications, a research firm. The market share for Firefox has climbed to 19 percent, while Apple’s Safari has 6 percent. Chrome also puts Google in competition with an ally, the Mozilla Corporation, which manages the Firefox project. Just last week, Google renewed its deal with Mozilla. Under the arrangement, Google Search is the home page for Firefox and Google is its default search bar, and Google makes substantial payments to Mozilla. The agreement runs through November 2011, and will continue. Google’s cooperation with Mozilla, however friendly, meant that it was ceding control of the Internet’s vital gateway technology — and the dominant supplier of that technology is its archrival, Microsoft. Given the increasing importance of the browser and its widening competition with Microsoft, Google’s entry into the market is not surprising, said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla. “It would be more surprising to me if Google didn’t do something in the browser space,” Mr. Lilly said. “After all, Google is 100 percent on the Web.” Google’s move, he said, would put “more competitive pressure on us to keep coming up with great browser technology. But having more smart people competing to improve browser technology and the user experience is a good thing.” Mr. Lilly also noted that Mozilla, while a private company, is entirely owned by the Mozilla Foundation. The browser project was begun to provide an alternative to Microsoft’s browser. “The mission of Mozilla is to keep the Web open, a pure public benefit,” he said. “Others have other motivations and Google’s move also serves to highlight our position in the marketplace.” Chrome will be available to download in a test, or beta, version on Tuesday, Google announced on its Web siteMonday afternoon. The browser will run on Windows. Google is also working on Chrome versions for Apple’s Macintosh, as well as Linux, an open source operating system. In a curious twist, Google made its online announcement after its plans appeared as a digital “comic book” that was posted by Google Blogoscoped, a Web site that tracks the Internet search giant. According to Google’s Web site post, by Sundar Pichai, an engineering director and vice president for product management, Chrome is designed for speed and ease of use. But the other design goal, it seems, was to make sure Google could control how well the growing range of Web-based software it is developing will perform, instead of having to run on a Microsoft browser. “Under the hood,” Mr. Pichai wrote, “we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex Web applications much better.” Later, he wrote, “we improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.” Chrome is based on an open-source rendering engine, WebKit, and an open-source version of Google’s Gears technology. Chrome will also be able to run in a privacy mode, InCognito, so that no information about a person’s browsing is collected. With IE8 last week, Microsoft added a privacy mode of browsing, called InPrivate. The privacy features, analysts note, could undercut the Internet advertising business of Google, but also Microsoft, Yahoo and others that depend on ads aimed at users based on their browsing behavior. But it is unclear, analysts say, how large a share of users will opt for the privacy browsing mode and give up the convenience of having a browser store sites recently visited in tabbed settings for easy navigation.

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INTEREST: DVD3 fomat keep video interactive on Macintosh
by billing 03 Sep '08

03 Sep '08

...from: http://www.oto-online.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1091&It… DVD3 technology pumps up Mac experience Wednesday, 03 September 2008 A proprietary DVD3 authoring technology that allows studios and DVD manufacturers to combine three separate disc formats, including set- top DVD player, Mac and PC, on a single disc, is new from Studio 7 Media. The DVD3 application allows the three formats while reportedly retaining full Mac OS X functionality and breaking through the data size limitations that can restrict the amount of DVD video content that can be included in a triple-hybrid scenario. According to company sources, prior to DVD3, additional DVD video content could not be added to a disc containing both PC and Mac interactive applications without sacrificing the Mac user experience. With DVD3, there is the ability to maximise the leftover space on disc two with additional value-added DVD video content and with the PC, Mac and set-top formats adhering to DVD specifications. "With the explosion of the Mac audience, studios no longer have the luxury of releasing new DVDs with PC-only interactive features," said Cyndee Sugra, CEO of Studio 7 Media. "Where the problem has been is that the existing DVD authoring software for Hollywood movies was never really designed to offer a fully optimised Mac experience to the consumer. By designing DVD3 from the ground up as a Mac application to handle PC, Mac and set-top formats, we were able to offer a solution that delivers the best possible end-user experience for Mac and PC users, which adheres to DVD specifications and works seamlessly with studios and mastering houses."

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FYI: Open Source Code Licence On Firmer Ground After Jacobsen Ruling
by billing 18 Aug '08

18 Aug '08

Clarification: The following article states, "Open source licenses, particularly the GPL from the Free Software Foundation, reverse the established doctrine of copyright. They give away the right to use code...." At the recent World Science Fiction convention in Denver, Laura Majerus was a member of the "Privacy, Free Speech, and Copy Protection" panel in which she mentioned that "the reason Open Source works is because the original author retains all copyright. That's why Open Source [licencing] works. Others are allowed to use the code as part of that copyright." No rights are "given away"... Laura Majerus, In-house counsel at Google. Formerly a partner in the intellectual property group of Fenwick & West. Expertise Laura Majerus' practice concentrates on intellectual property protection and patent counseling in the areas of software, electrical and computer systems. She also counsels clients on Open Source licensing issues. Ms. Majerus is currently serving as the pro bono Director of Legal Affairs for the Open Source Initiative. She obtained her J.D. from the University of Iowa, with distinction, in 1987. She was awarded an MS, also from the University of Iowa in 1987 jointly with her law degree. She also has a B.S. in computer science form the same school. She is admitted to practice in California, Iowa and the District of Columbia. = - = - = - = - = - = - = ...from: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/open_source/showArticle.jhtml?… Open Source Code On Firmer Ground [in USA] After Jacobsen Ruling Before the decision, it wasn't clear whether a court of law would regard an open source license as being capable of imposing enforceable copyright restrictions on the use of computer code. By Charles Babcock InformationWeek August 14, 2008 07:00 PM A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision has upheld the binding provisions of open source licenses, saying to fail to abide by their terms makes the user an infringer of their inherent copyright protections. Until the decision in Jacobsen vs. Katzer was issued Wednesday, it wasn't clear whether a court of law would regard an open source license as being capable of imposing enforceable copyright restrictions on the use of computer code. The Circuit Court of Appeals cited Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons license and as well as Jacobsen's use of the Artistic License in saying that their provisions constitute a form of copyright. "It's a fantastic win. Bob Jacobsen and I are very pleased with this result," declared Victoria Hall in an e-mail toInformationWeek. Hall represented Jacobsen in the case. "For non-geeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge," wrote Lessig on his blog Wednesday. Open source licenses, particularly the GPL from the Free Software Foundation, reverse the established doctrine of copyright. They give away the right to use code, provided you abide by their provisions to make any changes available to other users. The opposite case, where you do not have the right to use material without paying for it, has a rich body of copyright case law. The open source licenses do not, and it has not been clear how the courts would decide the issue once it came before them. The first decision in U.S. District Court for Northern California last Aug. 17 went against open source advocates. Jacobsen, a creator of open source model railroad control software, had been billed by Matthew Katzer, a commercial seller of similar code, for each free download that Jacobsen's project had allowed. The bill came to $203,000. Jacobsen, sued for a declaratory judgment that his open source code did not infringe Katzer's company's code. The lower court ruled that the provisions of the Artistic License didn't protect Jacobsen. It was a stunning setback for all open source licenses and opened other projects to potential challenge. The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision Wednesday and sent it back to the district court.

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INTEREST: Researchers use browser to elude Microsoft Vista memory protections
by billing 14 Aug '08

14 Aug '08

...from: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1324395… Researchers use browser to elude Vista memory protections By Dennis Fisher, Executive Editor 07 Aug 2008 | SearchSecurity.com LAS VEGAS -- Two security researchers have developed new techniques that bypass the memory protection safeguards in the Windows Vista operating system through the use of browser exploits. In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd and Alexander Sotirov demonstrated the new methods they've found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization(ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and others by using Java, ActiveX controls and .NET objects to load arbitrary content into Web browsers. By taking advantage of the way that browsers, specifically Internet Explorer, handle active scripting and .NET objects, the pair have been able to load essentially whatever content they want into a location of their choice on a user's machine. The attacks themselves are not based on any new vulnerabilities in IE or Vista, but instead take advantage of Vista's fundamental architecture and the ways in which Microsoft chose to protect it. In their presentation at Black Hat., Dowd and Sotirov stressed that despite their advances in getting around the Vista memory protections, there are still a number of security mechanisms in place in the operating system to mitigate attacks. Internet Explorer running in Protected Mode, for example, can protect against attacks that overwrite some files. Also, some of the pair's attacks will be addressed in future versions of third-party software, including Flash, which will opt into ASLR in its next release. The message that emerged from Dowd and Sotirov's presentation is that although Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., went to great lengths to upgrade the security of Vista over that of Windows XP, there are still ways in. "The protection mechanisms in Windows Vista are not very effective at preventing browser exploits," Sotirov said in the presentation. "The game has changed and browsers are now the major threat. Even on Vista where ASLR is enabled, we're able to put our data where we want." "The genius of this is that it's completely reusable," said Dino Dai Zovi, a well-known security researcher and author. "They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That's completely game over. What this means is that almost any vulnerability in the browser is trivially exploitable." Many of the defenses that Microsoft added to Vista and Windows Server 2008 are designed to stop host-based attacks. ASLR, for example, is meant to prevent attackers from predicting target memory addresses by randomly moving things such as a process's stack, heap and libraries. That technique is useful against memory-corruption attacks, but Dai Zovi said that against Dowd's and Sotirov's methods, it would be of no use. "This stuff just takes a knife to a large part of the security mesh Microsoft built into Vista," Dai Zovi said. "If you think about the fact that .NET loads DLLs into the browser itself and then Microsoft assumes they're safe because they're .NET objects, you see that Microsoft didn't think about the idea that these could be used as stepping stones for other attacks. This is a real tour de force." In the paper on which their presentation was based, Dowd and Sotirov say that while their attacks may give attackers the upper hand right now, they expect Microsoft and other vendors to respond quickly. "In this paper we demonstrated that the memory protection mechanisms available in the latest versions of Windows are not always effective when it comes to preventing the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities in browsers. They raise the bar, but the attacker still has a good chance of being able to bypass them. Two factors contribute to this problem: the degree to which the browser state is controlled by the attacker; and the extensible plugin architecture of modern browsers. The authors expect these problems to be addressed in future releases of Windows and browser plugins shipped by third parties," they say in their conclusion. "This is not insanely technical. These two guys are capable of the really low-level technical attacks, but this is simple and reusable," Dai Zovi said. "I definitely think this will get reused soon, sort of like heap spraying was." This story was updated and corrected to include more accurate information on Dowd and Sotirov's attacks from their paper and their session at Black Hat. The research paper on this can be downloaded at: http://taossa.com/archive/bh08sotirovdowd.pdf

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FYI: desktop mounting of your ccu UNIX volume...
by billing 31 Jul '08

31 Jul '08

...will see a short disruption this coming Sunday afternoon. For anyone mounting their CCU UNIX directory on their OS X desktop by using "Connect to server..." and specifying afp:// rigel.cc.umanitoba.ca, there will be a short outage of this service on Sunday afternoon this weekend. The exact time for this outage is unknown (beyond Sunday afternoon) as this is just one stage of many updates being done but it should not last more than 10 minutes or so.

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FYI: Sun's VirtualBox: open source virtualization for OS X, Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris
by billing 18 Jul '08

18 Jul '08

...from a list subscriber: > VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for > enterprise as well as home use. > > Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and > OpenSolaris > hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including > but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), > DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD. > > http://www.virtualbox.org/ > > Related to the aobve, which actually what pointed me to it: > > Virtualization continues to be a big topic among Mac users with > Intel-powered Macs. Products from Parallels and VMware allow you to > easily run many different operating systems on your Mac, each within > its own protected virtual environment. Recently, a third player > entered the market -- Sun, with its VirtualBox product. > > http://www.macworld.com/article/134584/2008/07/mwvodcast59.html > > Usual disclaimer: just read about it for the first time, haven't yet > tried it. > I downloaded the installer and here's the "caution" given during the install process: Sun xVM VirtualBox for Mac OS X Welcome to Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2 for Mac OS X! This installer will guide you through the installation process. In a minute from now, you will be able to execute virtual machines running different operating systems on your desktop. You will find that VirtualBox delivers a great feature set and excellent performance. As one of the strengths of VirtualBox is user friendliness and excellent operating system integration, we are looking forward to receiving feedback, especially suggestions on how to make VirtualBox the most user friendly OS X application. Send your feedback to info(a)virtualbox.org Currently, we are aware of the following restrictions: • No support for Host Interface Networking • No support for Internal Networking • No support for audio input • No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required) • No support for raw disk access • The numlock emulation isn't implemented yet • The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts Note that we are planning to address all known issues. Should you experience a crash in any of the VirtualBox applications (VirtualBox, VirtualBoxVM, VBoxSVC, VBoxHeadless, VBoxManage), please include the CrashReporter log in the report if possible. You can find the CrashReporter Logs in: {user-dir}/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/ Wayne

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FYI: The Economist tech view of Windows XP, Vista, "7", and Midori("green")
by billing 10 Jul '08

10 Jul '08

The Economist magazine (http://www.economist.com) "is the premier source for the analysis of world business and current affairs, providing authoritative insight and opinion on international news, world politics, business, finance, science and technology, as well as overviews of cultural trends and regular industry, business and country special reports." The Economist magazine is published weekly and each week they also make much of the material available in audio/PodCast format. One of the podcasts looks exclusively at "Technology and Science". In this weeks Economist technology podcast they report on what's been happening with Microsoft XP and Vista. Tthere is also mention of Microsoft's commitment to XP upgrades and patches 'till 2014 Microsoft Windows "7" and the version of Windows to come after "7" currently called "Midori". http://gizmodo.com/5021126/microsoft-midori-is-a-secret-post+windows-operat… The podcast can be found at: http://downloads.economist.feedroom.com/economist/t_assets/20080707/2008070… ...or... http://preview.tinyurl.com/5d5sye ...also of interest related to "What's happening with Microsoft VISTA?": http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E00E0DA163DF933A05755C0A96E… http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jh… http://blogs.computerworld.com/intel_backstabs_microsoft_by_abandoning_vista June 26, 2008 - 6:40 P.M. Intel backstabs Microsoft by abandoning Vista Preston Gralla The news that Intel has decided it won't upgrade its PCs to Vista must be especially bitter for Microsoft because court documents show that Microsoft may have launched its ill-fated "[Vista Capable] PC" scheme at the behest of Intel. Is this the kind of payback that Microsoft expected? According to the New York Times, Intel has decided that it won't upgrade the PCs of its 80,000 computers to Windows Vista. The Times reports: "...the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly." [...] A refresher for those who might not remember the "Vista Capable PC" scheme: It was a marketing scheme in which people claim that Microsoft misled consumers into buying the Windows Vista Capable PCs, even though the PCs couldn't run the most important features of Vista. According to court documents released in a suit related to the scheme, Microsoft's John Kalkman sent an email to Scott Di Valerio, who was in charge of the company's relations with PC makers, noting that the Vista Capable PC scheme was being launched on behalf of Intel: "In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded. This in turn did two things: 1. Decreased focus of OEMs planning and shipping higher end graphics for Vista- ready programs and 2. Reduced the focus by IHV's to ready great WHQL [Windows Hardware Quality Labs] qualified graphics drivers. We can see this today with Intel's inability to ship a compelling full featured 945 graphics driver for Windows Vista." http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/02/28/did-microsoft-lower-its-standards-t… Kalkman makes clear in the email that it was a mistake to try and bail out Intel: "...it was a mistake on our part to change the original graphics requirements. This created confusion in the industry on how important the visual aspects of visual computing would play as a feature set to new Windows Vista upgraders." So Microsoft went out on a limb to bail out Intel, and this is the payback it gets? They're no doubt talking about back-stabbing at Redmond these days.

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FYI: Problems opening older WORD documents in Microsoft WORD 2008(12)?
by billing 30 Jun '08

30 Jun '08

...from: http://www.macworld.com/article/134138/2008/06/officeupdates.html?lsrc=mwwe… Opening Old Word Files By Christopher Breen mailto:mac911@macworld.com Mac 911 Tip of the Week Reader Jim Harper feels like Word 2008 has severed his ties with the past. He writes: "I'm running Tiger and when I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008 from Office 2004 I cannot open Word files created with my 90s Microsoft Word versions. Any solution available?" Yes. Start by updating your copy of Office to the very recently released Microsoft Office for Mac 12.1.1 Update. This update is supposed to address an issue where older Word files won't open when you double-click them. http://www.macworld.com/article/134138/2008/06/officeupdates.html?lsrc=mwwe… I use the phrase "supposed to" in this context because it may not work. Microsoft has issued contradictory information on this subject. In a support note, Microsoft states that the 12.1.1 Update "fixes an issue that prevents Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac Service Pack 1 (SP1) from opening Word documents when you double-click the document or when you download the document from a Web site." Yet, Knowledge Base document 953266 states that "The Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.1 Update blocks users from opening older Word for Mac documents by using the methods that are mentioned in the 'Symptoms' section." And those symptoms include double-clicking on a document, dragging a document to the Word 2008 for Mac program icon, dragging a document to the Word 2008 for Mac program icon that is in the Dock, and executing an AppleScript that uses the Finder to open a Microsoft Word document. And the reason? Apparently these older documents may pose a security threat and opening them in such ways puts you at risk. Of course Microsoft is happy to let you open them by choosing Open from the File menu, which is somehow more secure because... uh, it's more inconvenient?

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FYI: two OSX trojan horse programs encountered
by billing 23 Jun '08

23 Jun '08

...from: http://www.intego.com/news/ism0803.asp INTEGO SECURITY MEMO - June 20, 2008 OSX.Trojan.PokerStealer Trojan Horse Attempts to Take Control of Macs Exploit: OSX.Trojan.PokerStealer Discovered: June 20, 2008 Risk: Low Description: A Trojan horse has been found in the wild masquerading as program for Mac OS X called “PokerGame”. The Trojan in question is a shell script encapsulated in an application, and is distributed in a 65 KB Zip archive; unzipped, it is 180 KB. The Trojan horse, when run, activates ssh on the Mac on which it is running, then sends the user name and password hash, along with the IP address of the Mac, to a server. It asks for an administrator’s password after displaying a dialog saying, “A corrupt preference file has been detected and must be repaired.” Entering the administrator’s password enables the program to accomplish its tasks. After gaining ssh access to a Mac, malicious users can attempt to take control of them, delete files, damage the operating system, or much more. Intego VirusBarrier X4 and X5 with virus definitions dated June 20, 2008 protect against this Trojan horse. Intego recommends that users never download and install software from untrusted sources or questionable web sites. = - = - = - = - = - = - = INTEGO SECURITY ALERT - June 19, 2008 Apple Remote Desktop Vulnerability Allows Malicious Programs to Execute Code as Root Exploit: ARDAgent root privilege escalation Discovered: June 19, 2008 Risk: Critical Description: A vulnerability has been discovered that allows malicious programs to execute code as root when run locally, or via a remote connection, on computers running Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. This vulnerability takes advantage of the fact that ARDAgent, a part of the Remote Management component of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, has a setuid bit set. Any user running such an executable gains the privileges of the user who owns that executable. In this case, ARDAgent is owned by root, so running code via the ARDAgent executable runs this code as root, without requiring a password. The exploit in question depends on ARDAgent’s ability to run AppleScripts, which may, in turn, include shell script commands. When an application enables a root privilege escalation of this type, any malicious code that is run may have devastating effects. These may range from deleting all the files on the Mac (regardless of who owns them) to more pernicious attacks such as changing system settings, and even setting up periodic tasks to perform them repeatedly. Any application could use this vulnerability to obtain root privileges without users ever needing to enter passwords. Users could run malicious programs that they download from the Internet or receive from friends or colleagues, and, if the program exploits this vulnerability, simply launching it once would be sufficient for damage to be done. There are cases where this exploit does not work. If a user has turned on Remote Management in the Sharing pane of System Preferences under Mac OS X 10.5, or if a user has installed Apple Remote Desktop client under Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier and has activated this setting in the Sharing preferences, the exploit will not function. Most users, however, will not have this service turned on; generally only those users who want to observe or control other computers on their network will turn this on to do so. Note that Mac OS X 10.5’s Screen Sharing function has no effect on this vulnerability. This exploit can be triggered by any type of user account: standard user, administrator, or even a guest account. Therefore, a guest logged in using Mac OS X 10.5’s Guest Account feature has the ability to download an application and unwittingly run malicious code with no security warning.

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INTEREST: iTunes Store - biggest music retailer in USA; world's biggest online movie store
by billing 23 Jun '08

23 Jun '08

....from: http://www.macworld.com/article/134054/2008/06/itunesstore.html?lsrc=mwweek iTunes Store - five billion sold and counting by Peter Cohen, Macworld.com Jun 19, 2008 8:35 am Apple on Thursday announced that more than five billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from its iTunes Store. According to NPD MusicWatch figures, the iTunes Store is the number one music retailer in the U.S.; Apple also says that the iTunes Store is the most popular online movie store in the world, with people renting and buying more than 50,000 movies every day. The U.S. iTunes Store’s music catalog stretches to over eight million songs, more than 20,000 TV episodes and more than 2,000 films, including more than 350 movies in high-definition video.

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INTEREST: A.M.D. and Its War With Intel: predatory pricing?
by billing 21 Jun '08

21 Jun '08

...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/business/21nocera.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&… A.M.D. and Its War With Intel By JOE NOCERA Published: June 21, 2008 A few weeks ago, Stephen Labaton of The New York Times broke the news that the Federal Trade Commission had decided to open a formal antitrust investigation into Intel, the world’s dominant maker of microprocessors. Subpoenas had gone out not just to Intel, but to many of the computer manufacturers who rely on Intel chips. The investigation, as Mr. Labaton wrote, was going to revolve around “accusations that Intel’s pricing is intended to maintain a near monopoly on the microprocessor market.” The chief accuser, of course, was Intel’s main (some would say only) rival, Advanced Micro Devices. I say “of course” because I can scarcely remember a time when A.M.D. hasn’t been complaining about Intel’s supposed predatory behavior. But I can also recall the company’s many missteps and execution failures over the years, which have tended to undercut its claims. It was always a little hard to swallow A.M.D.’s argument that it was being hurt by Intel’s anticompetitive practices when it had such a long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. In recent years, however, two things have happened. First, in 2003, A.M.D. came out with a chip called Opteron, which was far superior to anything Intel had on the market. Indeed, this was one of the few times that Intel was the company stubbing its toe; it took a year before it had a competitive chip. What’s more, the Opteron was aimed at the highly profitable server market, which has long been Intel’s domain. It is fair to say that Intel was none too happy with this state of affairs, and it wasn’t too long before A.M.D. was complaining that Intel was cutting deals to keep computer makers from straying, even though many of them wanted to use the Opteron. Which perhaps explains the second thing that happened: A.M.D.’s accusations finally began to gain some traction. In 2005, after a lengthy investigation, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission asserted that Intel had violated the country’s antitrust laws by, in effect, paying Japanese computer manufacturers to limit their business with A.M.D. That same year, A.M.D. sued Intel in federal court, charging predatory pricing; the case is scheduled to be tried in February 2010. Meanwhile, the European Commission began looking into Intel’s pricing practices; it has since made several preliminary rulings that don’t bode well for the chip giant. And in South Korea this month, Intel was fined $25.4 million for giving rebates to two South Korean computer manufacturers, which had the effect of “excluding” A.M.D., according to the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Intel has said it will appeal. (The New York attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has also started an investigation, but he’s just piling on.) With all this ferment, it was probably inevitable that the F.T.C. would follow suit. If the rest of the world is busy imposing sanctions on Intel for abusing its monopoly power, it hardly looks good for the nation’s chief antitrust enforcer to be sitting on its hands. When I made some inquiries this week, the strong sense I got was that the commissioners wanted to get to the bottom of the Intel accusations once and for all, and needed subpoena power to gather all the evidence they needed. But in antitrust, the notion of “getting to the bottom of it” is notoriously squishy, and this case is squishier than most. There is no question that Intel offers large discounts to its big customers, along with rebates, quarterly marketing dollars and other goodies. Because those discounts are directly related to how much business a manufacturer gives to Intel, it necessarily has the effect of excluding A.M.D.—since it’s the only other company competing for the business. Is that predatory behavior? Or is that good old-fashioned competition? What makes antitrust so maddening is that the answer depends as much on who is asking the question — and where — as it does on the evidence. • Let’s start with a simple question: Are discounts good or bad? When I put it like that, the answer is obvious: discounts are clearly good. They allow consumers to buy things at lower prices. Indeed, price competition is at the very heart of free-market capitalism, and it is the natural result of competition. It’s what we as a society want companies to do. For as long as we’ve had antitrust laws in the United States, predatory pricing — pricing intended solely to prevent a rival from being able to compete — has been against the law. After all, if a big company drops its prices on a short-term basis to drive a smaller rival out of business — and then can raise prices with impunity because it has eradicated its competitor — consumers are ultimately harmed by the price cuts. But our definition of predatory pricing has tended to vary over time. In the 1950s and 1960s, United States antitrust enforcers — and the courts — tended to view many forms of discounting as predatory. One sorry result was that actions that actually helped consumers were considered illegal practices. But in the 1970s, that all changed, as legal scholars argued persuasively that anticompetitive behavior had to be defined in more rigorously economic terms, and that there needed to be a high standard of proof that monopolistic behavior was harming consumers. This became known as the Chicago School of antitrust theory, and in time, the courts embraced many of its theories. One consequence is that today, it is almost impossible to bring a discounting case, even if it has exclusionary consequences. It is presumed by the courts that discounting benefits consumers. The only form of discounting that is now viewed by the courts as proof of predatory behavior is pricing below cost. When I spoke to Robert E. Cooper, a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who is representing Intel, he cited a series of Supreme Court cases, going back 20 years, that has come down in favor of discounting — even enormous discounts based on market share, which have the effect of excluding rivals. Intel insists that it doesn’t price below cost, and given the nature of these things — selling in huge volume brings Intel’s own costs down, thanks to economies of scale — it will be almost impossible to prove otherwise. Does this mean that Intel is all warm and fuzzy when it is negotiating with the big computer manufacturers? Not remotely. Roger Kay, the president of Endpoint Technology Associates, and a very close observer of the Intel-A.M.D. wars, laid out a scenario to me that he thought likely. A computer manufacturer sees its market share declining. When it comes time to negotiate a new microprocessor contract with Intel, it is told that its volume has diminished so much that it can not longer get the same big discounts it has come to depend on for its own profits. But, the Intel salesman adds, if the company is willing to shift more business to Intel, and increase the volume a little, it will still get the discount. Naturally, the company agrees. Indeed, Mr. Kay says he believes this is precisely what happened in Japan, where the two companies that abandoned A.M.D. completely were Toshiba and Sony — which were both losing market share to competitors. “Thus,” he wrote me in an e-mail message, “Intel can claim it is doing nothing wrong and A.M.D. can claim its options are being foreclosed, and in a sense, they’re both right.” One reason A.M.D. has had more success pressing its case abroad than in the United States is that in many places in the world, the reigning antitrust view is what’s called the post-Chicago School, which holds that there are times when pricing above cost can still constitute predatory behavior. Indeed, the European Commission tends to put far more emphasis on competition than on consumers, and views with suspicion companies with oversize market share, like Intel But what happens if the commission rules against Intel — as seems likely — but the F.T.C. and the United States courts rule in favor of the company? That’s what happens these days with mergers that need government approval — Europe has turned thumbs down on a number of mergers involving two American companies, and as a result they haven’t gone through. The world economy really won’t function very well if multinational companies have to dance between dueling regulators. Either we need to adopt their standards, or they need to adopt ours. The Intel-A.M.D. shows, if nothing else, how untenable the current state of play is in antitrust. Despite its recent investigation, the F.T.C. has long been reluctant to pursue a formal investigation against Intel; I hear that even now many of its economists simply do not believe that Intel’s policies amount to predatory pricing. But there is one other reason why A.M.D. faces an uphill struggle pressing its case in the United States. Its own market share numbers don’t seem to back up its contention that Intel is preventing it from competing. According to data provided to me by Ashok Kumar, a well-known technology analyst with CRT Capital Group, A.M.D.’s overall market share in microprocessors was 17 percent in March 2005. By December 2006, it had risen to 25 percent. Today it has sunk back to 20 percent. The rise in market share is directly attributable to A.M.D. having strong products like the Opteron. But then Intel came roaring back, leap-frogging A.M.D.’s technology. Meanwhile, the smaller company’s latest high-end chip, code-named Barcelona, has been delayed when a flaw was discovered in it. A.M.D. has lost money for six quarters in a row. Apparently, some things never change.

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INTEREST: Wall Street Journal conference - D: All Things Digital
by billing 28 May '08

28 May '08

Once a year, the Wall Street Journal puts on the "D: All Things Digital" conference. This conference, created and produced by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, invites the computer and electronics top players to participate in "informal" conversations about the impact of digital technology on our lives now and in the future. Last year's feature was a session with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher talking with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: VIDEO: D5: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates This year's speakers for D6 include Facebook’s Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sony’s Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Time Warner’s President and CEO Jeff Bewkes, IAC’s Chairman and CEO Barry Diller and Amazon.com’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos. There was also a joint appearance by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer. All the video can be found at: http://d6.allthingsd.com/ = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = Microsoft Windows 7 is currently scheduled to ship sometime in 2009. "D" saw the first Windows 7 demo: http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080528/windows-7-touch-demo/ = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = ...from: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/slow-fade-bill-and-steve-at-the-d-… May 28, 2008, 12:37 am Slow Dissolve: Bill [Gates] and Steve [Ballmer] at the D Conference By JOHN MARKOFF Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, is intent on performing what must be the world’s longest-running Cheshire Cat act. Mr. Gates — who is reducing his role at Microsoft on July 1 and will work only on specific projects but will remain as chairman — appeared with his longtime friend and business partner Steve Ballmer on the opening night of the Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, Calif. During the 105-minute conversation, the two executives were most comfortable chatting about the past. They were cagey when it came to talking about the bid for Yahoo and what might happen next, and they were generally testy when they were challenged about whether Microsoft would continue to lag behind Apple in some areas. The hosts of the conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, tried several times to draw the two men out on the company’s failed effort to acquire Yahoo, but neither man was willing to say much beyond his previous public statements. Mr. Ballmer did reiterate that he reserved the right to reopen Microsoft’s bid in the future, but he was unwilling to talk about the circumstances under which that might occur. Mr. Ballmer also repeated his recent statement that, having failed to see eye to eye on the price of the acquisition, the two companies are now talking about other unspecified partnerships. Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Gates were much more willing to reminisce about their days as college students at Harvard. Mr. Ballmer also described how Mr. Gates attempted to recruit him to Microsoft while his former classmate was attending Stanford Business School and living in a “fleabag” apartment in Palo Alto. Mr. Ballmer recalled that he had been reluctant, and that Mr. Gates had told him, “Too bad you don’t have a twin brother.” He said he called Mr. Gates back the next day and asked him if he would consider him for the job. The joint interview took a slightly odd turn when, halfway through, the Microsoft executives consented to give the audience of computer industry executives a “sneak peek” of the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, known as Windows 7. Although Windows 7 is not scheduled to ship until the end of 2009, Microsoft has been creating some consternation in the computer industry by talking about the new program as an opportunity to address some of the shortcomings of Windows Vista. On stage Tuesday evening, neither Mr. Gates nor Mr. Ballmer was willing to concede any major shortcomings in Vista. Mr. Ballmer said the company has shipped 150 million copies of the program, but he did acknowledge that Microsoft might have done some things differently “in hindsight.” He blamed compatibility issues that have led to criticism of the program on the company’s decision to focus on computer security problems. During the brief onstage demo of Windows 7, a Microsoft software designer made the puzzling choice to unveil a new “multitouch” feature by working with a paint program, evoking memories of the original Macintosh paint program in 1984. She then used the touch-sensitive technology with a photo collection and a mapping program, evoking comparisons to both the iPhone and Google Maps, which already have similar capabilities. (You can watch a video of the multitouch feature on the Microsoft Vista blog.) Another new feature appeared to be a circular pop-up menu that provided a “concierge” function. Fencing over the issue of whether Apple will get to market first with desktop multi-touch features, Mr. Ballmer implied that the two companies don’t compete directly. “We’ll sell 290 million PCs, and Apple will sell 10 million PCs,” he said. “They’re fantastically successful and so are we and our partners. But it’s a different job. Steve can flip his hand and sell a few models and I don’t take a thing away from him.” In response to a question from the audience, Mr. Ballmer insisted that Microsoft had not been damaged as a brand or in its strategy by its failure to acquire Yahoo. “The world recognizes even greater seriousness than when we started,” he said. “It’s certainly something we thought about before we put in the bid because there was no guarantee.” Mr. Gates was the less vocal of the the company’s two largest individual shareholders, but he did show animation at various points during the evening. Asked if he saw himself as a businessman, Mr. Gates responded, “Sure, sales minus costs equal profits. Is there more?” In response to a question asked by Tim O’Reilly, the computer book publisher and conference impresario, about whether Microsoft had a “big hairy audacious goal,” in the tradition of its original commitment to put a personal computer on every desk and in every home in America, Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Gates suggested that the company now had many big goals, but not a single overarching goal. The industry commentator and investor Esther Dyson suggested that the company did need a single goal, like transforming the nation’s health care system. Mr Ballmer responded that he wasn’t sure that tackling problems where software wasn’t fundamental to the solution was appropriate for Microsoft.

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FYI: MacBook helps save itself: "I know who that is — it’s Ian"
by billing 12 May '08

12 May '08

...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/nyregion/10laptop.html?_r=1&ref=technolog… May 10, 2008 Stolen Laptop Helps Turn Tables on Suspects By LISA W. FODERARO WHITE PLAINS — The thieves were voracious, filching flat-screen televisions and computer games, purloining iPods and DVDs, even making off with a box of liquor and a set of car rims in a burglary two weeks ago at an apartment three young people shared here. Luckily, they also took two laptop computers. One of the laptops was a Macintosh belonging to Kait Duplaga, who works at the Apple store in the Westchester mall and thus knows how to use all its bells and whistles. While the police were coming up dry, Ms. Duplaga exploited the latest software applications installed on her laptop to track down the culprits and even get their photographs. On Wednesday, the police arrested Edmon Shahikian, 23, of Katonah, and Ian Frias, 20, who lives in the Bronx. Virtually all of the property stolen from the apartment was recovered at the two men’s homes. They face charges of burglary and possession of stolen property; Mr. Shahikian was released on $3,500 bail, while Mr. Frias was at the Westchester County Jail, held in $7,500 bail. “It doesn’t get much better than their bringing us a picture of the guy actually using the stolen property,” Daniel Jackson, the deputy commissioner of public safety in White Plains, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “It certainly made our job easier. The fact that they knew who these guys were certainly added solvability.” The high-tech solving of the White Plains burglary, which was reported Friday in The Journal News, is one of several recent cases in which the police and crime victims have turned the keyboards on their adversaries, so to speak, taking advantage of computer software and other high-tech tools. In March in Modesto, Calif., for example, the police recovered a stolen computer containing vital personal information, including Social Security numbers, belonging to the public school system’s 3,500 employees. Detectives used tracking software on the computer to apprehend a suspect, who had a long criminal record. The police said he had stolen the computer from a data processing firm, perhaps with the intention of committing identity theft. Here in White Plains, a break in the case came on Tuesday when a friend of Ms. Duplaga’s sent her a congratulatory text message on the return of her stolen computer. “She said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and her friend said, ‘Well, you popped up as being online,’ ” Mr. Jackson said. He said that Ms. Duplaga immediately signed on to another Macintosh computer and, using a feature called “Back to My Mac,” was able to gain access to her missing laptop remotely. She could see that that the person who had her computer was shopping for beds, Mr. Jackson said. Then it occurred to her that she could activate a camera on her laptop and watch the thief live. At first, the photo application revealed only a smoky room and an empty chair, Mr. Jackson said, but then a man sat down. Ms. Duplaga, again using remote technology, typed in the command to snap a photo. “When you take a picture with that computer, it shows a countdown, and when it does, this guy figures out what’s going on,” Mr. Jackson said. “It all clicks for him, and he puts his hand up to cover the lens, but it was too late. She had already taken the picture.” Had the suspect been a complete stranger, the photographic evidence would have been a “great lead,” but not the decisive clue, Mr. Jackson said. He said that when Ms. Duplaga described the tattooed subject of the picture to one of her roommates, the roommate replied: “Oh, I know exactly who that is — it’s Ian,” referring to Mr. Frias. Mr. Frias and Mr. Shahikian, it turns out, had been among the guests at a party at the apartment weeks before, and were friends of friends of the victims, as Mr. Jackson put it. Ms. Duplaga was able to retrieve a photograph of Mr. Shahikian from the laptop as well, but Mr. Jackson was not aware of the circumstances. Mr. Jackson said that Mr. Frias and Mr. Shahikian were arrested last year on a felony marijuana possession charge, but are not career criminals. The disposition of their cases was not known. Mr. Jackson said that Ms. Duplaga did not wish to be interviewed. On Friday, no one answered the door at the beige colonial-style house on Ridgeview Avenue where she rents an apartment diagonally opposite a church. The neighborhood is on the edge of the city’s downtown; in recent years, many of the prewar homes have been renovated. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the case or on the phenomenon of tracking criminals through computer software. “Back to My Mac” is part of an online service that costs $99 per year and allows users to gain access to their personal computer from any connected Macintosh computer with the operating system Leopard. The software that Ms. Duplaga used to take a picture of the thief, called PhotoBooth, is standard on all newer Apple laptop models, perhaps an unintended new frontier in crime-fighting. “It’s certainly a great use of what was probably meant as a business product,” Mr. Jackson said. “But if she had taken the picture and didn’t know who he was, we wouldn’t be in the same place as far as the investigation goes.”

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INTEREST: Spam Moves to Cellphones and Gets More Invasive
by billing 11 May '08

11 May '08

...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/technology/10spam.html?th&emc=th Spam Moves to Cellphones and Gets More Invasive Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times By LAURA M. HOLSON Published: May 10, 2008 If you thought spam on your computer was a bother, brace yourself: spammers want to find you on your cellphone. Cellphones have become consumers’ most personal technological devices. Some industry executives, along with consumer groups and security experts, are concerned that unwanted text messages on phones will be an even greater headache than unwanted computer messages. Cellphone spam is particularly annoying to its recipients because it is more invasive — announcing itself with a beep — and can be costly. Taber Lightfoot, an assistant director for new media at the Yale School of Management, is among those who have paid for the privilege of receiving cellphone spam. “I was at work and I got so annoyed,” she said of the first burst of three messages she received. She got another burst two days later. “That is when I called Verizon and demanded they reimburse me $1.60 for eight text messages,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was my money.” American consumers are expected to receive an estimated 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, according to Ferris Research, based in San Francisco, which tracks mobile messaging trends. That is nearly double what they received in 2006. Of course that is a small percentage of the overall number of messages: an industry survey showed that consumers in the United States sent and received about 48 billion text messages in December alone. But for many people who are charged as much as 20 cents for an incoming message or are interrupted in the middle of dinner, even one is too many. “The reason this really burns people up is because they have to pay for messages they don’t want, and they shouldn’t have to,” said Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, a nonprofit group. Now some consumers, like Ms. Lightfoot, are monitoring their cellphones more aggressively for unwanted messages and, in some cases, demanding refunds. Computer security companies have developed products to help fight mobile spam. And AT&T, Verizon and others are making it easier for customers to block unsolicited messages and keep spammers at bay. The fees that customers pay to receive messages are a source of profit for the phone companies. It is hard to estimate how much they make. Many consumers pay for a monthly plan that allows them to send and receive large numbers of messages. But for those without a plan, getting as few as 10 unsolicited text messages a month at 20 cents each would cost an extra $24 a year. Communications companies say they are not interested in spam as a profit center. They want to one day exploit the power of customized advertising on mobile phones, and tawdry spam pitches threaten to make their customers hostile toward all commercial messages. The companies are trying to head off the problem before consumers revolt. The carriers regularly adjust spam filters to block offending messages. At Sprint, more than 65 percent of all text messages sent over its network are identified and blocked as spam before they reach customers. The companies use legal weapons as well. Verizon said it had filed eight lawsuits against spammers since 2004. “Even if Verizon or AT&T are not the ones sending text messages to customers, there is the perception that the operator is to blame,” said Seamus McAteer, a senior analyst at M:Metrics, which tracks mobile phone advertising. “It is not in the companies’ best interest to have customers calling and complaining about their bills all the time.” Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T’s wireless unit, said wireless companies recently agreed to quickly share information about the sources of spam to fight it more effectively. Most phone spam is actually e-mail that comes through gateways linking the Internet and cellphone networks, industry executives said. Most wireless phones have a dedicated e-mail address. At AT&T, for example, it is a customer’s cellphone number followed by @text.att.net. Using computers, spammers create millions of possible number combinations, then send messages to those addresses. One day in March, Anthony Melone, Verizon Wireless’s chief technology officer, began getting complaints from customers in the Northeast and Midwest about a wave of unsolicited text messages that were flooding its network. Mr. Melone said Verizon technicians tracked down the source and found the messages were coming from someone using e-mail accounts at Microsoft’s Internet portal, msn.com. It took a day to quell the assault because the spammers kept changing their e-mail addresses and the Web sites they were promoting. By then, nearly five million messages had made it past the network’s anti-spam filters, resulting in grumbling and demands for refunds from customers like Ms. Lightfoot. “Even when you find them, spammers know how to keep it below the radar,” Mr. Melone said. Christopher Siracusa, a 24-year-old medical student in Brooklyn, said he gets about one or two spam messages a week, usually from pornographic sites with come-ons like, “Hey Sweetie, we talked last night.” As a result, he disregards any text message from a number not programmed into his cellphone. This, though, has caused miscommunication more than once with people he actually wanted to reach. Recently, he said, he got a text message from a female friend who wrote, “I have a new number, call me.” Mr. Siracusa did not, thinking the message was spam, and he later had to explain the problem to her. But inconvenience is not the only downside; there is also the threat of viruses as phones become more like personal computers. Some companies are already preparing for this. Last winter, Symantec, a maker of security software, introduced a product for smartphones that connect with the Internet to detect mobile threats, check for viruses and automatically delete spam or corral suspect texts in a folder. Khoi Nguyen, a product manager for mobile security at Symantec, said the company developed the software mainly for Asia and Europe, where creative spammers try to steal credit card information or banking data through phones. He said he expected to see the same trend here in the next 6 to 12 months. “There has been a transition from annoying spam to threatening spam,” he said. Michael Zaruba, an AT&T customer who works in Chicago as an editor and producer, recently received unsolicited texts from “Rose,” asking him to visit a Web site. He said he did not visit the site, but it made him question whether his 12-year-old brother, who just got a new cellphone, would. “Nowadays phones come equipped with access to the Internet,” Mr. Zaruba said. “It’s another way to mess with your computer. I can see people getting viruses on their phones.” All major communications companies give consumers the ability to thwart spam by changing the easily guessed e-mail addresses for their phones, or completely blocking messages coming from the Internet. They can do this by logging onto the company’s Web site and changing their preferences. “I did that six months ago and I have not received any spam,” Mr. Melone of Verizon said. “No one, not even me, wants their cellphone to ring at 2 in the morning.”

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INTEREST: Microhoo (Yasoft?) not to be
by billing 04 May '08

04 May '08

Just to bring you up to speed if you haven't already heard. Some months back, Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com) made an unsolicited bid to purchse Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com). At the time, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer described the move this way, "“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.” “Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.” “The combined assets and strong services focus of these two companies will enable us to achieve scale economics while reaching R&D critical mass to deliver innovation breakthroughs,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft. “The industry will be well served by having more than one strong player, offering more value and real choice to advertisers, publishers and consumers.” Indeed, the letter that was sent from the Microsoft Board of Directors to the Yahoo! Board of Directors includes, "In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing." After much to'ing-and-fro'ing by the two companies, Yahoo!'s April 7th response, however, was an unencouraging, "We consider your threat to commence an unsolicited offer and proxy contest to displace our independent board members to be counterproductive and inconsistent with your stated objective of a friendly transaction", in a reply to the Microsoft Board, while also saying Yahoo! is open to a deal but only at a higher price. Yahoo's letter also said Microsoft had not responded to requests for more information on antitrust issues since a deal would be subject to regulators: "To date, you have still not provided any of the requested information." (http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/07/Yahoo-again-rebuffs-Microsoft-in-… ) On Saturday (May 3, 200) Microsoft pulled the plug on the deal: ...from: http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/03/microsoft-pulls-bid-for-yahoo/ Microsoft pulls bid for Yahoo! Microhoo will never be by Ryan Block, posted May 3rd 2008 at 8:33PM Well, that's that! Microsoft has officially pulled its bid for Yahoo! -- inflated for good measure this weekend by another $5 billion -- after the company did "not move toward accepting [the] offer", asking again for even more, another $4 bil (totaling $9b more than the original offer). In a letter from [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer to [Yahoo! CEO Jerry] Yang, he states that Microsoft also won't be looking at its option for a hostile takeover, stating that Yahoo! likely "would take steps that would make [it] undesirable as an acquisition"; Ballmer then goes on to make a few backhanded criticisms of Yahoo's possible new partnerships with Google (which is no surprise). Good night, Microhoo, the monstrous, hamstrung, lumbering mega-merger that might have been. Update: Yahoo! makes its public response here. Yang sums it up: "With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies..." etc. Alright then.

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INTEREST: Warning on Storage of Health Records
by billing 17 Apr '08

17 Apr '08

...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/business/17record.html?th&emc=th Warning on Storage of Health Records By STEVE LOHR Published: April 17, 2008 In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft andGoogle into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records. The authors, Dr. Kenneth D. Mandl and Dr. Isaac S. Kohane, are longtime proponents of the benefits of electronic patient records to improve care and help individuals make smarter health decisions. But their concern, stated in the article published Wednesday and in an interview, is that the medical profession and policy makers have not begun to grapple with the implications of companies like Microsoft and Google becoming the hosts for vast stores of patient information. The arrival of these new corporate entrants, the authors write, promises to bring “a seismic change” in the control and stewardship of patient information. Today, most patient records remain within the health system — in doctors’ offices,hospitals, clinics, health maintenance organizations and pharmacy networks. Federal regulations govern how personal information can be shared among health institutions and insurers, and the rules restrict how such information can be mined for medical research. One requirement is that researchers have no access to individual patients’ identities. Under the current system, individuals can request their own health records, but it is often a cumbersome process because information is scattered across several institutions. As part of a push toward greater individual control of health information, Microsoft and Google have recently begun offering Web- based personal health records. The journal article’s authors describe a new “personalized, health information economy” in which consumers tell physicians, hospitals and other providers what information to send into their personal records, stored by Microsoft or Google. It is the individual who decides with whom to share that information and under what terms. But Microsoft and Google, the authors note, are not bound by the privacy restrictions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or Hipaa, the main law that regulates personal data handling and patient privacy. Hipaa, enacted in 1996, did not anticipate Web-based health records systems like the ones Microsoft and Google now offer. The authors say that consumer control of personal data under the new, unregulated Web systems could open the door to all kinds of marketing and false advertising from parties eager for valuable patient information. Despite their warnings, Dr. Mandl and Dr. Kohane are enthusiastic about the potential benefits of Web-based personal health records, including a patient population of better-informed, more personally responsible health consumers. “In very short order, a few large companies could hold larger patient databases than any clinical research center anywhere,” Dr. Mandl said in an interview. But the authors see a need for safeguards, suggesting a mixture of federal regulation — perhaps extending Hipaa to online patient record hosts — contract relationships, certification standards and consumer education programs. “I’m a great believer in patient autonomy in general, but there is going to have to be some measure of limited paternalism,” Dr. Kohane said in an interview. Peter Neupert, the vice president in charge of Microsoft’s health group, said that he admired the authors and that they raised some important issues. But he resisted the suggestion of extending Hipaa to newcomers like Microsoft and Google. “Philosophically and politically, I am skeptical of the concept of paternalism,” Mr. Neupert said in an e-mail response to the article, which he was sent, and to the authors’ comments. “It never turns out to be ‘limited.’ ” Designing a health records system that clearly informs consumers and requires their consent for data use is the better approach, Mr. Neupert said. “We have to earn the consumer’s trust for our brand,” he said. “So I can imagine a scenario where we have a third party verify that our system works the way we assert it does,” much as an auditor reviews a company’s financial reporting. Dr. Mandl and Dr. Kohane are physicians and researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston, the primary pediatric teaching hospital of the Harvard Medical School.

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INTEREST: Net Neutrality
by billing 17 Apr '08

17 Apr '08

What is it? - long answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jHOn0EW8U - short answer: In a "neutral" Internet the infrastructure owners do not differentiate one packet of information from another either by content, source, or destination. Neither is there a restriction on the type of device that can be connected to the Internet. Without this neutrality, infrastructure owners can give higher priority to certain packets and charge differential fees for each packet depending upon the contents, source, or destination of that packet. Differential fees could also be applied to the type of computer you connect in a non- neutral Internet. A "non-neutral" infrastructure is what is now found in the cell phone networks. The more you pay the more you are entitled to talk on them. There are also additional fees for the type of information and how much of it you send on the cell network: voice, SMS messaging, data, etc are all charged differently. There are also different fees for day and night cell service. A "neutral" infrastructure is your traditional telephone service. You pay one monthly fee (the same fee, pretty much, as everyone else) and you can talk 24x7 without it costing you more. In addition, you can connect your computer (over the older modems) and transfer data over that phone line and that also costs nothing more for the use of the telephone line. - - - - - - - - - - - - - Bell Canada seeking to create "non-neutral" Internet structure in Canada: ...from: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/story/4161642p-4748665c.html Bell seeking to curb heavy bandwidth use By: Sarah Schmidt OTTAWA -- Bell Canada says it is downgrading the Internet services of bandwidth hogs in the public interest, and is asking the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to toss out a landmark complaint by competitors alleging the telecom giant is regulating the web in its own interests. [...] The practice, known as "traffic shaping" or "traffic throttling," is part of a new billing system by telecom giants based on usage instead of connection speed. In addition to penalizing heavy bandwidth users with hefty charges and slower service at peak times, Bell is lifting a cap on over-usage charges for all its Internet customers. Last month, Bell informed smaller Internet service providers that it was bringing traffic-shaping to the network space it sells to them, effectively downgrading the services these smaller companies are able to provide to their customers. The association, which represents over 50 smaller companies, replied with a complaint to the CRTC, saying Bell's use of "deep packet inspection" technology to "choke" the traffic of its customers is illegal and tantamount to anti-competitive behaviour. Technology expert Jesse Hirsch says Bell's argument before the CRTC is bewildering -- and bad news for consumers. He says Bell is acknowledging it failed to anticipate the growth of the Internet, and is now penalizing innovative users who are turning to the web to swap TV shows and movies. [...] In its brief to the CRTC, Bell says the "balance of convenience" supports its new traffic shaping. - - - - - - - - - - - - ...from: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/16/EDM11064UL.DTL Public must fight to maintain net neutrality Lawrence Lessig - Stanford University, Ben Scott www.freepress.net Thursday, April 17, 2008 The Internet is an engine of economic growth and innovation because of a simple principle: net neutrality, which assures innovators that their next great idea will be available to consumers, regardless of what the network owners think about it. No previous mass media technology has been so remarkably open. Traditional media - newspapers, radio, TV - have gatekeepers standing between consumers and producers, with the power to control content. The Internet eliminates the gatekeeper. Now, however, the Internet's unprecedented openness is in jeopardy. Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have been lobbying to kill net neutrality. They say they won't build an information superhighway if they can't build it as a closed system. No other industrialized country has made that devil's bargain, and neither should we. Without net neutrality, online innovation is vulnerable to the whims of cable and phone companies, which control 99 percent of the household market for high- speed Internet access. And Silicon Valley venture capitalists are unlikely to bet the farm on a whim. Network owners say the threat of abuse is hypothetical. But actions speak louder than words. Last fall, Comcast was caught secretly blocking popular technologies that can bring HDTV to your laptop - used by everyone from the Hollywood studios to NASA. It was no coincidence: Comcast is targeting a growing competitor to its cable TV service. In response, the media reform group Free Press and a coalition of public interest organizations and legal scholars filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission calling for urgent action. This is a bellwether case - a signal of whether we're headed toward an open or a closed Internet. After the FCC started an investigation, Comcast admitted to blocking, but thumbed its noses at the government and the public - going so far as to hire seat-fillers at an FCC hearing at Harvard University to stifle the debate. Public, government and media scrutiny ultimately forced Comcast to stop blocking one of the file-sharing companies. But we can't expect everyone to negotiate a side deal for permission to innovate. This limits the online marketplace to ideas and commerce that don't pose a threat to network owners - a chilling prospect. This type of behavior shows why we can't trust the future of the Internet to these companies. Just two years ago, telecom executives went before Congress vowing never to interfere with the open Internet. Their broken promises are exactly why we need net neutrality laws back on the books. Fortunately, members of Congress from both parties have introduced legislation that would do precisely that. But net neutrality is just the first step. If this nation is to return to the economic growth of the 1990s, it takes a renewed commitment to Internet deployment and technology. The past eight years have seen America fall behind other industrial nations - a deficit that we will pay for in jobs, wealth and social opportunity. Better policies in other countries have created a competitive high- speed broadband market. But these policies require political leadership - and public pressure to ensure that politicians aren't distracted by the telecom industry's cash and clout. Today, the FCC is holding a hearing at Stanford University - the birthplace of our Internet economy - to give the public a chance to weigh in on this debate. It's not often that federal regulators leave the Beltway to ask people what they think. It's time to stand up and make your voice heard. The threat posed by would-be gatekeepers is real and getting worse. The success of future innovation depends on an open Internet for everyone. Lawrence Lessig is a law professor at Stanford University and founder of the Center for Internet and Society. Ben Scott is policy director of Free Press, the national, nonpartisan media reform organization ( www.freepress.net ). The FCC hearing will be held at Stanford University's Dinkelspiel Auditorium today from noon to 7 p.m.

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FYI: Safe financial sites in Canada? Don't bank on it.
by billing 14 Apr '08

14 Apr '08

...from: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/story/4157473p-4745347c.html Safe financial sites? Don't bank on it Study finds banks misleading customers Guarantees giving users a false sense of security By: Sarah Schmidt Updated: April 10 at 02:00 AM CDT OTTAWA -- Canadian banks mislead their customers about the safety of online banking in their marketing materials and give users a false sense of security with a refund guarantee if hackers raid their accounts, a leading software-security expert concludes in a new study. Paul Van Oorschot, Canada Research Chair in Network and Software Security at Carleton University, and PhD student Mohammad Mannan, a specialist in Internet security, tested the standard banking claim of a "100 per cent online security guarantee" against the fine print that makes it conditional on fulfilling complicated security requirements. The researchers opened up bank accounts at Canada's five major banks and one online bank, and surveyed 123 technically advanced users, mainly computer-science students, professors and security researchers. Most in the survey are more security-aware than average customers, and still failed to satisfy common security requirements. Expecting average people to meet them is "extremely naive," they write. "We conclude that most average users are ineligible for the 100 per cent reimbursement guarantee banks assert, and doing online banking with 'confidence' and 'peace of mind' is no more than a marketing slogan which misleads users." They found that despite strong recommendations about password uniqueness, most banks allow weak passwords, such as "123456" and "111111." In one case, RBC listed "iwthyh," an acronym for the Beatles' song I want to hold your hand, as an example of a "rock-solid" password, even though it doesn't meet RBC's password length requirement of eight characters. The researchers also found weaknesses in banks' Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol for transmitting private documents known as SSL certificates. Software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner's knowledge, known as malware, can easily access all user information, including on SSL-protected sites, the study says. The researchers also point out that malware can replace a bookmarked login URL with a phishing site URL that masquerades as the bank. And increasingly, phishing sites include SSL certificates to gain the confidenc of users. Meanwhile, most banks' customer agreements require users to install and maintain up-to-date copies of anti-virus, firewall and anti- spyware programs. The survey of 123 tech-savvy users found fewer than half reported using anti-spyware on computers used for banking, and more than a quarter do not use anti-virus software. Ten per cent do not use any firewall. Further, 65 per cent of users didn't read the banking agreements when they signed on to online banking and 85 per cent couldn't name any conditions for being eligible for the 100 per cent reimbursement in the case of hacking. "Banks advertise that users can start online banking 'in minutes.' However, to comply with the security requirements and recommendations, we expect most users would be delayed hours or days, if indeed technically capable of doing so at all." Maura Drew-Lytle, spokeswoman for Canadian Bankers Association, says the expectations of banks are fair and are no more stringent than what people should have on their home computers to do simple things like sending e-mails. It's also fair to expect customers to read agreements before they agree to the terms, she added. The study points out agreements can be changed at any times, and customers will be notified by notice on the bank's website. -- Canwest News Service

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