Corporate Stories.
IBN: Microsoft launches Windows Vista New York: Microsoft has launched Windows Vista, the much-awaited upgrade to its Windows operating system. This is the first major upgrade since the release of Windows XP in October 2001. But despite all the hype, experts warn that consumers may encounter early problems with the software. "This is a six year interval, from 2001 to 2007, so while it's a big bang launch around the world, there's so much coming out at once and only so much that all the test families and corporate testers can do, that you may have some surprises and the hackers are just lined up around the world to attack it,” says Research Director, Envisioneering Group, Richard Doherty. Microsoft claims Vista is its most secure operating system. The company has invested six billion dollars on it. The new features in Vista include easier searches, gadget sidebars, and increased security. Windows vista will be available in six versions. Bought out of the box, it will cost you $ 239 US. The upgraded from Windows XP is for $139 US. But there are hidden costs as well. "The graphical user interface is really snazzy. But that comes at a price. If you've got a brand new PC, it's probably going to look great. If you're trying to put this on a PC made two or more years ago, your PC may slow down incredibly, so finding things may be offset by how come my typing is going slower, and how come everything else is slower,...Already more than 95 per cent of the world's computers run some version of Windows operating system, and in 2007, 72.5 percent of new computers purchased by consumers will come preloaded with a version of Windows Vista.
DWT: Ten new Core 2 Duo processors from Intel Intel unveiled its new Core 2 Duo processor lineup on Thursday, increasing the pressure on rival AMD. The 10 new dual-core chips promise markedly better performance and greater energy efficiency than Intel's existing products. The Core 2 Duo launch has been billed as Intel's most significant since the introduction of the original Pentium processor in 1993. The introduction comes at a crucial moment. Intel executives have watched AMD expand its share of the processor market recent quarters and they want to reclaim this lost ground. "We're really bullish on Core 2 Duo and we believe that it's going to enable us to grow a significant amount of (market) share over the second half of the year. That's our goal," said Tim Bailey, director of platform marketing at Intel Asia-Pacific. Among the chips announced by Intel are five processors designed for laptops and five desktop chips, including the high-end Core 2 Extreme processor for gamers. Pricing for the desktop chips ranges from US$183 for the 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo E6300 to $999 for the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800. Pricing of the mobile chips was not available. Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme are based on Intel's Core microarchitecture, which replaces the NetBurst architecture used in the Pentium 4. The same microarchitecture is used in Woodcrest, the latest version of the Xeon server processor announced last month. PC vendors say Core 2 Duo, formerly called Conroe and Merom, offers excellent performance for its price, allowing them to reach new markets.
ZDNet: Symantec, Yahoo team up on security The arrangement between the two companies will include "some new security offerings," according to an e-mail sent to reporters by Yahoo public-relations representatives on Monday. Yahoo and Symantec officials declined further comment. News of the new tie-up comes shortly after Yahoo rival AOL started testing a new security offering, dubbed Total Care, which it created largely in partnership with Symantec foe McAfee. Yahoo and Symantec have a history of working together on products such as antivirus scanning for Yahoo's Web-based e-mail service. However, users of the AT&T Yahoo Internet access service are currently offered security software in partnership with CA.
MC: Moser Baer launches next generation format Moser Baer today announced that it has begun shipping HD DVD-R (recordable), a next generation format, to its global OEMs customers. The HD DVD-R will have a capacity of 15 GB and offers more than three times the data storage capacity of standard DVD media. HD DVD offers an ideal solution for reliable business backup, including medical and government imaging, photography, videography, as well as high definition video recording. According to Ratul Puri, executive director, Moser Baer, The world is moving towards High Definition content. This is a significant technology shift in the global optical media industry and will radically change the consumer’s viewing experience. According to the US based Strategic Marketing and Decisions, the demand for the next generation high density formats is expected at 1.5 billion discs over the next three years. This represents an exciting opportunity for us, as Moser Baer now has the first mover advantage with this launch.”
VNUNET: Warner Bros signs up for iTunes Warner Bros has announced plans to make content from its television library available for purchase and download on Apple's iTunes music store. Content includes popular sitcom Friends, sci-fi epic Babylon 5 and some of the most popular sketches from MADtv, as well as animated classics including The Jetsons and The Flintstones. ITunes will offer over 150 episodes of the TV shows for $1.99 per episode for viewing on a computer or iPod. Also available is a never-before-seen pilot of Aquaman, a contemporary reinterpretation of DC Comics' Aquaman from the writing and producing team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar famous for Smallville. "Making our television content available to iTunes consumers is an important step in our digital distribution strategy," said Simon Kenny, president of Warner Bros Digital Distribution.
CNN: Swiss warned of Internet addiction The canton's Department for the Prevention of Addiction has launched a poster campaign and offers a self-assessment questionnaire for potential addicts on its Web site. "Spending lots of time in virtual worlds, especially chat rooms, online games and sex sites, can lead to a dependence comparable to other addictions," the department said in a statement. Around 50,000 Swiss are addicted to the Internet or at risk of becoming addicted, the department said. Young people are particularly vulnerable although adults are increasingly succumbing to the lure of the Web."They are at risk of facing problems in their social surroundings or at the workplace," the department said. Internet addicts suffer from psychological withdrawal symptoms, it said.
Google stories.
COMPUTERWORLD: Using Google to attack databases The concept isn't new: use Google and the other search engines to find vulnerable systems and attack them. What seems to be new is the sheer volume of attacks currently being performed , up by a factor of forty or more in the last couple months alone. And it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The search engines are doing their job; they're indexing every site exposed to the Internet. They reveal the good as well as the bad about these sites and report it without any filtering. All we have to do is type in the right query string and we get the information we want. The crackers are just taking the right search queries, plugging them into bots or other programs and letting them run over night. Next morning they have a nice listing of vulnerable targets just waiting to be attacked. So what can we do about this? Some people want to make the search engines stop indexing sites with known vulnerabilities. The information is already out there and any filtering by the search engines is going to make their results suspect for all queries. Besides which, the bad guys would simply create their own web crawlers and no one else would have access to the information. Another suggestion is to remove the information of how to create these search queries from the Internet, but the information is already out there and the genie can't be put back in the bottle. The real answer is much harder than either of those; systems administrators need to pay more attention to how they're securing their databases. Once again, there is no easy answer to the problem with security.
CHRON.Com: Google will tell of bogus clicks Google, owner of the most-used Internet search engine, is now disclosing to advertisers the number of clicks on ads that it deems are invalid in a bid to assuage concerns over "click fraud." Advertisers can see how many clicks on ads are excluded from their bills, Shuman Ghosemajumder, a Google business product manager, said this week. Clients will be able to see information on clicks going back to the beginning of the year.....Companies or individuals using special software can click on an ad repeatedly to artificially boost a rival's marketing costs or to increase their ad revenue."It's definitely addressing some of the concerns that marketers have about click fraud," said Satagopan, who is based in San Francisco.Google sells ads using an online auction in which clients bid for certain search keywords. Companies pay each time users click on their ads, which appear next to search results.Google had said in the past that it didn't provide information on bogus clicks because it could help fraudsters mount new attacks. Ghosemajumder said the information disclosed now won't increase the risk of attacks.
eWEEK: Yahoo Hires DB Guru to Compete with Google Yahoo named on Monday a database guru to study links between computer and human-aided search. Raghu Ramakrishnan, formerly professor of computer sciences at UW-Madison, is now at Yahoo Research helping the company define its social search strategy. Yahoo sees social search as a major part of its strategy against Google. Google relies on computer-aided search, but does have some products -- such as Google Co-Op -- that rely on user expertise.Yahoo has invested heavily in social search with the acquistion of social bookmarking site del.icio.us and photo sharing site Flickr, both of which use user-generated taxonomies to self-organize data. Yahoo has also developed a service called Yahoo Answers which matches user questions with user answers.Yahoo's not the only one making competitive hiring moves. Microsoft recently advertised for a position called "Google compete lead" who will unite all Microsoft's Google compete iniatives.
Other Stories.
BBC: Thousands of EU net names frozen Thousands of website names ending in the .eu suffix have been suspended by the body that administers the domain. Brussels-based EURid froze 74,000 domain names which it believes have been stockpiled by a syndicate of registrars who intend to sell them on. The process, known as "warehousing", is not permitted by EURid which is suing 400 registrars for breach of contract. The organisation believes the domains were acquired by three UK companies which acted as a front for the group. EURid named the companies as Ovidio Ltd, Fausto Ltd and Gabino Ltd. "In this case we are convinced that the domain name holders of the 74 000 .eu names are acting as a front for a number of registrars. The domain name holders and the registrars can be regarded as one and the same," said Herman Sobrie, legal manager of EURid. "Since registrars should only register domain names for existing customers and not 'warehouse' the names in order to resell them at a higher price, this is clearly in breach of the registrar contract."
TNW: Apple's Mighty Mouse Now Bluetooth-Enabled ...introduced a Bluetooth-powered version of its popular Mighty Mouse product, a multi-button mouse it introduced last year.The wireless Mighty Mouse includes up to four independently programmable buttons and a Scroll Ball that lets users scroll in any direction. Like its popular wired predecessor, the wireless version has programmable touch sensors that act as primary or secondary buttons, depending on the user's preference, that can access menus in Mac OS X Latest News about OS X and other applications. Mighty Mouse's two other buttons are activated by pressing its Scroll Ball and squeezing its sides, and can be programmed to give users one-click access such features as Spotlight, Dashboard and Expose, or to launch Safari or iChat. The wireless Mighty Mouse's power management system automatically switches to low power modes during inactivity, and then off completely to maintain battery life while not in use. It works with either one or two AA batteries and is available for US$69. "We cut the cord on our popular Mighty Mouse to give consumers even more flexibility when using a Mac," said David Moody, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing. "A Bluetooth-enabled Mac desktop with an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mighty Mouse is the ideal cable-free setup at home or in the office, and the wireless Mighty Mouse is the perfect travel companion for the MacBook user on the go."
PLAYFULS: Americans are the top spammers No matter what the authorities do about it, it seems that the spam phenomenon in the US cannot be defeated. E-mail spam is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients by E-mail. Perpetrators of such spam ("spammers") often harvest addresses of prospective recipients from Usenet postings or from web pages, obtain them from databases, or simply guess them by using common names and domains. By popular definition, spam occurs without the permission of the recipients. Sending spam violates the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of almost all Internet Service Providers, and can lead to the termination of the sender's account. Many jurisdictions, such as the United States of America, which regulates via the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, regard spamming as a crime or as an actionable tort. The US authorities have failed in reducing the number of spam sent on the Internet, for the first time in two years. The US now boasts” with 23.2% of the world's spam in Q2 2006.
IEBlog/MSDN: IE7 to be distributed via Automatic Updates! Microsoft announced today that it will distribute Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP as a "high priority" item in its Automatic Updates system -- most commonly used for security patches. The news has drawn a mix of responses. The company says the security improvements in the browser make Automatic Updates an appropriate channel. In addition, consumers will be given a choice of whether to install, and companies will be able to use a tool to block the delivery.In some of the coverage, the notion of using Automatic Updates to distribute the new browser is drawing comparisons to the way the company sent out the controversial Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool through the same system. See stories by CNet News.com and Microsoft Watch.
Symantec: Latest Threats Backdoor.Mulim is a Trojan horse that opens a back door on the compromised computer and spreads through popular IM programs. It allows a remote attacker to download files, gather sensitive information and start unauthorised processes. Backdoor.Scarycrow is a Trojan horse that opens a back door on the compromised computer. Infostealer.Snifula is a Trojan horse that steals sensitive information from the compromised computer.
