Congress urges peace talks in Net radio conflict

Slashdot It! Member of Congress expressed reluctance to intervene in a raging conflict over new Internet radio fees scheduled to take effect in scarcely two weeks, saying they hope Webcasters and the record industry can work things out.

The controversial fee decision by U.S. copyright judges earlier this year has prompted opponents--including large and small Webcasters, independent artists and record labels, public radio stations and listeners--to lobby for relief from Congress. So far, they've had some success, with nearly identical bills introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that would overturn the fee hikes.

But after hearing from both fans and foes of the new rules at a morning hearing here, leaders of the House's Small Business Committee admitted they were struggling with the best way to balance Webcaster concerns about bankruptcy with the need for fair artist compensation. They concluded that crafting a legislative fix isn't necessarily the best idea.

Through a quirk of history and politics, Webcasting rates and many other music-related licensing fees are set by a tribunal with members chosen by the Library of Congress, part of the legislative branch. That makes this area unusual among types of intellectual property: licensing rates for photographs, videos, movies, novels, and news articles are set by the free market, not the federal government.

Co-chairman Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) said it would be better for the parties to try to find common ground on their own because government intervention "often times (messes) things up even more than they already are."

Should Congress meddle? Not all of their colleagues, however, feel quite the same way. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) said in an appearance at Thursday's hearing that he firmly believes the government's Copyright Royalty Board has made a mistake that Congress may need to fix. He gave a pitch for his bill, called the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would level the royalty rates for Webcasters, satellite and cable radio broadcasters at 7.5 percent of their revenues. He did, however, say that he wouldn't object to the parties' working out their differences without Congress's help.

But many believe there's no way the bill will make its way through both chambers and to the president's desk before the fees kick in. Congress has been focusing on other hot-button topics of late, a weeklong July 4 recess looms, and no votes or debate are currently scheduled on the bill.

Inslee, for his part, said the "effort in Congress will continue and swell dramatically, because when those decisions are made to shut off Internet radio, whatever congressmen and women have heard to date, you're going to hear five to 10 times as much after July 15."

Outside of reaching a compromise on their own, another potential lifeline for the Webcasters fearing shutdown is a federal appeals court, which has been asked to delay the onset of the fees, but action there is also uncertain.

Thursday's hearing highlighted again the pronounced split over the need for the increased fees.

On one side are Webcasters, public radio operators and primarily independent, emerging artists and record labels, who argue that the changes will raise large Webcasters' costs by as much as 300 percent and small entities' costs by as much as 1,200 percent, effectively shutting them down. On the other side are arguably more established record labels and artists and SoundExchange, the nonprofit entity that collects the fees on their behalf, which argue the changes were the result of a fair, impartial 18-month proceeding and are necessary to compensate artists adequately in a digital age.

Some music industry representatives on Thursday urged politicians not to get lost in the Webcasters' rhetoric and protests like Tuesday's highly publicized "day of silence," in which a number of Webcasters shut off their normal music streams. After all, it is the 20 largest Internet radio operators, such as Yahoo Music, RealNetworks and Pandora, that are responsible for 95 percent of the royalty payments, they said.

Besides, SoundExchange has not been insensitive to the needs of small Webcasters, they argued. They were referring to an offer to cap the fees for those that fit into the "small" category--a move that the Internet radio industry rejected, saying it would effectively stunt its growth.

Opponents argued before the politicians that it's not just small Webcasters who will be crippled by the new fees. The three largest Webcasters alone are expected to have to pay more than a billion dollars per year, thanks to a requirement that they pay a minimum of $500 per "channel"--of which those services have thousands. A SoundExchange representative said Thursday that the group has offered to cap that fee at $2,500 per year, although it was not immediately clear whether that would satisfy the Webcasters.

Opponents who spoke at the hearing further argued that preserving as many Internet radio options as possible is in the interest not only of listeners, but artists, because it has given a voice to smaller names--like Joey Allcorn, a Georgia-based "classic country" singer who testified before the committee--who can't make the playlists of traditional radio stations. They also noted that Webcasters often provide listeners with links to e-commerce sites where they can purchase the albums they play, further generating publicity and revenue for the artists they play.

All Webcasters are asking Congress to do, said Bryan Miller, general manager of the indie rock Internet radio station WOXY.com, is to equalize the royalty rates required of comparable digital services. "We're not talking about (giving away) anything for free," he said.

Some people use the iPhone for charity purposes

Slashdot It! Clayman, a soft-spoken, bespectacled 21-year-old, graduated from the University of Chicago earlier in June and decided to spend a few days touring the Big Apple before starting his job as a consultant at enterprise software company SAP. He was staying in a youth hostel, exploring the city, when he walked by the massive glass cube of the Fifth Avenue Apple store and saw that the first person had already gotten in line to wait for the company's coveted iPhone.

Clayman has been involved in large-scale charity initiatives for some time, having once organized a charity stair climb at Chicago's Sears Tower--105 stories from the sub-basement to the summit--that raised $22,000 in donations for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. So he decided to change his New York tourism plans, hop in line, and use the experience as a way to support the nonprofit Taproot Foundation, which provides professional marketing and design services to nonprofits.

Waiting in line for days to be one of the first to obtain a pricey and highly desired piece of personal technology, whether it be the Windows 95 operating system, the PlayStation 3, or the iPhone, is arguably one of the ultimate expressions of Digital Age materialism. By turning that craze into a publicity initiative for charity, Clayman is putting a new spin on what could be thought of as an uglier aspect of the consumption culture.

He wasn't the only one who had the idea, though. A parallel sequence of events was taking place downtown, unbeknownst to Clayman. Johnny Vulkan, who works in product development for the new-media advertising agency Anomaly, was walking through Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood when he noticed iPhone advertisements outside the Apple store on Prince Street. "I thought, 'I wonder when the first crazy person is going to come out and line up?'" Vulkan said in an interview on Thursday morning. But like Clayman, Vulkan wondered how he could turn the media hype into a way to do some social good.

Anomaly, after all, handles the advertising for the AIDS charity Keep a Child Alive. Within a day, Vulkan decided that Keep a Child Alive volunteers would stake out the first position in the SoHo Apple Store's iPhone line, wait while wearing T-shirts from the organization, and "get our media moment and use it for a good cause," he said. By 7 a.m. Tuesday, he and several other volunteers had lined up. The organization began to solicit other recruits to sign up for three- to four-hour shifts in order to divide up the efforts, and soon there were about 80 people from both Keep a Child Alive and Anomaly who'd offered up their time.

Uptown at the Fifth Avenue store, Clayman's strategy for the Taproot Foundation is similar, but on a much smaller scale since he's more or less on his own. As soon as he gets his hands on the iPhone, he plans to list it on eBay and donate the profits that may incur from high demand. He'd never been involved with Taproot before, but admires its mission. "I chose Taproot because I thought it would be the best for New York," he said, citing its focus on urban legal activism.

Clayman's early spot in the line (second place) guarantees that he'll get some coverage and the occasional interview, and he's been wearing a Taproot T-shirt to publicize the organization. He's blogging about the experience, too. Additionally, the foundation has put out a press release announcing Clayman's intention to contribute the proceeds and spread the word about Taproot.

Sniffing wireless network traffic can tell a lot about you

Slashdot It! Simply booting up a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop can tell people sniffing wireless network traffic a lot about your computer--and about you.

Soon after a computer powers up, it starts looking for wireless networks and network services. Even if the wireless hardware is then shut-off, a snoop may already have caught interesting data. Much more information can be plucked out of the air if the computer is connected to an access point, in particular an access point without security.

"You're leaking all kinds of information that an attacker can use."

--David Maynor CTO, Errata Security

There are many tools that let anyone listen in on wireless network traffic. These tools can capture information such as usernames and passwords for e-mail accounts and instant message tools as well as data entered into unsecured Web sites. At the annual Defcon hacker gathering, a "wall of sheep" always lists captured login credentials.

Errata Security has developed another network sniffer that looks for traffic using 25 protocols, including those for the popular instant message clients as well as DHCP, SMNP, DNS and HTTP. This means the sniffer will capture requests for network addresses, network management tools, Web sites queries, Web traffic and more.

The Errata Security sniffer, dubbed Ferret, packs more punch than other network sniffers already available, such as Ethereal and Kismet, because it looks at so many different protocols, Graham said. Some at Black Hat called it "a network sniffer on steroids."

Snoops can use the sniffer tools to see all kinds of data from wireless-equipped computers, regardless of the operating system.

For example, as a Windows computer starts up it, it will emit the list of wireless networks the PC has connected to in the past, unless the user manually removed those entries from the preferred networks list in Windows. "The list can be used to determine where the laptop has been used," Graham said.

Apple Mac OS X computers will share information such as the version of the operating system through the Bonjour feature, Graham said. Bonjour is designed to let users create networks of nearby computers and devices.

Additionally, computers shortly after startup typically broadcasts the previous Internet Protocol address and details on networked drives or devices such as printers that it tries to connect to, Graham said.

And that's just the data snoops can sniff out of the air when a laptop is starting up. If the computer is then connected to a wireless network, particularly the unsecured type at hotels, airports and coffee shops, much more can be gleaned. Hackers have also cracked basic Wi-Fi security, so secured networks can't provide a security guarantee.

In general, experts advise against using wireless networks to connect to sensitive Web sites such as online banking. However, it is risky to use any online service that requires a password. The Errata Security team sniffed one reporter's e-mail username and password at Black Hat and displayed it during a presentation.

People who have the option of using a Virtual Private Network when connected to a wireless network should use it to establish a more secure connection, experts suggest. Also, on home routers WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access, offers improved security over the cracked WEP, or Wired Equivalent Privacy.

Microsoft ending Vista family discount

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Five months after its introduction, Microsoft is discontinuing a program that offered some Windows Vista purchasers the ability to buy additional copies of the operating system at a substantial discount.

Since Windows Vista went on sale to consumers at the end of January, U.S. and Canadian buyers of Vista Ultimate have had the option of buying up to two additional copies of Vista--albeit the Home Premium version--for an additional $50 apiece. The company had said it would re-evaluate the "Windows Vista Family Discount" after June 30.

In a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Microsoft product manager Nick White said the program would "sunset" as of 11:59 p.m. PDT on June 30.

"Around the time of the Windows Vista launch, we announced the Windows Vista Family Discount program to further persuade families to become early adopters of Windows Vista," White wrote. "We've been pleased with the response to the program, which has enabled thousands of multicomputer families to upgrade more than one PC in their home to Windows Vista."

The move immediately drew the ire of some users, who posted responses to White's posting.

"This really sucks," a poster by the username of Hartelc wrote on the site. "I thought it was bad enough that we have to pay $50 for an additional license to get a downgraded version of (Vista)."

White responded in a follow-up posting: "Sorry you're disappointed with the program and its pricing structure. This was a trial for us to see how people responded to the offer, and we've gotten lots of constructive (criticism) as to how we could make it better if we were to do it again in (the) future."

Another poster pointed out that the program Microsoft is ending falls well short of what Apple offers with Mac OS X, allowing up to five Macs in a home to use the same upgrade version of the Mac OS for $199. Apple has offered that option since 2002.

TV Colors With L.E.D.’s and Lasers

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Samsung Electronics America sells several high-definition TVs with light-emitting diode chips, which produce a far wider range of colors than the bulbs they replace.

HIGH-DEFINITION television sets grow ever more sophisticated, but the colors on many of the screens are still created the old-time way: with tubes or bulbs that give off white light that is filtered into primary colors and remixed.

Now, several manufacturers are replacing these bulbs with lasers and light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s. These lasers and L.E.D.’s do not beam white light, but rather its three basic building blocks: red, green and blue. Beams are emitted in a narrow band of wavelengths very close to those of single, pure colors, giving off the brilliant, saturated red of a blazing sunset or the shimmering, luminous blue of a rainbow.

Beam these three primary colors in varying intensities at the same spot on a television screen, and a palette of hues can be created in a wider range than in TVs without this technology.

The new lighting is already built into a handful of commercial TV sets. Last year, Samsung Electronics America, of Ridgefield Park, N.J., introduced its first TV with L.E.D.’s. This year, the company has added six more, all large-screen, high-definition models.

The L.E.D.’s within the sets, which are all rear-projection models, are made by Luminus Devices, of Woburn, Mass. They emit beams of red, green or blue light when current is passed through the semiconductor chips that house them. The L.E.D.’s are expected to last the lifetime of the TV, unlike the bulbs typically used in these rear-projection TVs, which must typically be replaced every few years at a cost of about $200 to $350.

Laser TVs, unlike L.E.D. models, are not yet on the commercial market, but several manufacturers have demonstrated them at trade shows. Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America in Irvine, Calif., said the company would show a large-screen laser TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next January. “It will spawn a new category for the premium end of the market,” he said.

The distinctive range of colors produced by lasers and L.E.D.’s may provide a competitive edge for rear-projection TVs, which have steadily lost market share to plasma and liquid crystal display models, said Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, a market research firm based in El Segundo, Calif.

ISuppli expects that 5.3 million rear-projection sets will be sold worldwide this year, making them the smallest segment of the TV market. In contrast, 74 million L.C.D. sets and 11 million plasma sets are projected to be sold, Mr. Semenza said.

Large-screen rear-projection TVs traditionally cost less than L.C.D. or plasma models with similar sizes of screens, but the rear-projection TVs are as much as 10 inches deeper.

Consumers may also appreciate the longevity of L.E.D.’s and lasers in rear-projection TVs, compared with the bulbs they are replacing. Rear-projection sets are typically lit by high-pressure white-light mercury lamps. “After a year or two, the lamp goes out,” Mr. Semenza said. “You spend $3,000 on the TV and then have to buy a light bulb for $300.”

L.E.D.’s and lasers offer a more efficient design. “With light bulbs, you have violent high-voltage arcs across the metal electrodes,” he said. “Eventually the bulb fails because metal from the electrodes is knocked off.”

For the first Samsung model with L.E.D.’s, viewers paid a premium of $1,200 above the price of a similar model with standard lighting, said Dan Schinasi, senior marketing manager for HDTV product planning at Samsung. “This year the premium dropped to $300,” he said, “and as the year goes on, we’re hopeful the premiums will shrink even more.”

The L.E.D.’s are in sets with screens of 50 inches (Model HL-T5087S, $2,299); 56 inches (HL-T5687S, $2,599), and 61 inches (HL-T6187S, $2,999), among others.

The sets use Luminus PhlatLight-brand L.E.D.’s. The red, blue, and green beams illuminate a Texas Instruments digital light processing chip where the image is created. This is a more direct method than starting with a white light source and filtering it into primary colors for recombination, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a market research firm in Norwalk, Conn.

“You start with pure spectral colors and mix them very efficiently,” he said.

Lasers promise an even wider range of colors than L.E.D.’s, Mr. Chinnock said. “The lasers produce extremely saturated colors — the red is very red.” In contrast, he said, the red in many displays has a lot of orange in it. Because of that limitation, it is harder to show the range of shades that the eye can see, for example, between red and orange.

LASER light may also help rear-projection sets become thinner. “You can create some different architectures in how the light is folded and managed inside the TV,” Mr. Chinnock said, “so that you could potentially get a rear-projection laser TV that’s 6 to 8 inches deep.”

One of the lasers widely demonstrated at trade shows is made by Novalux, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “The lasers will be able to give more than 90 percent of the color range that our eyes can see,” said Jean-Michel Pelaprat, chief executive of Novalux. “That’s not available from plasma displays and L.C.D.’s, whose color gamut reaches only 40 percent and 35 percent, respectively.”

L.C.D. televisions, too, may soon be affected by the new light sources, Mr. Chinnock of Insight Media said. The next step may be to eliminate the cold cathode fluorescent lamps that illuminate the sets from the back.

“The idea is to replace these lamps with a laser or L.E.D. light source in the back, and get much better color saturation,” he said.

Mr. Schinasi of Samsung said the company was interested in lasers as a light source but was sticking with L.E.D.’s for now. “The L.E.D.’s are getting at least 30 percent brightness boosts every year,” he said. “If that continues, we might not need lasers even for the 67-inch and 72-inch screens.”

Mr. DeMartin of Mitsubishi said he was holding out for lasers. “The bottom line is that the L.E.D.’s can’t reproduce some of the truly deep greens and reds as well as the laser,” he said. “The laser can do this better.”

YouTube traffic surpasses rivals combined

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YouTube, which has had to pull copyrighted videos off its site after legal attacks by some big media franchises, has enjoyed a surge in U.S. audience share that leaves it far larger than the next 64 video-sharing sites combined, a survey found.

The U.S. market share of visits to YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70 percent from January through May, online audience measurement firm Hitwise said in the survey published on Wednesday.

By contrast, visits to the next 64 largest sites tracked by Hitwise rose only 8 percent during 2007's first five months.

"As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50 percent greater than those 64 sites combined," Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott said in a summary of her firm's data.

YouTube's share of the U.S. online video market was 60.2 percent in May, according to Hitwise. Its closest rival, News Corp.'s MySpace Videos site, had 16.08 percent of market share, the survey of Web surfing habits showed.

YouTube's sister site, Google Video, held 7.81 percent, while Yahoo had 2.77 percent and Microsoft's MSN, 2.09 percent, according to the study.

Start-up Metacafe ranked No. 8 in U.S. visitors to video sites with 1.07 percent, Time Warner's AOL Media had 0.94 percent and Veoh was No. 10 at 0.86 percent, Hitwise said.

Viacom filed a copyright infringement suit against YouTube in March seeking more than $1 billion in damages and demanded that YouTube take down thousands of segments from its popular programs, including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park.

A separate suit was filed in early May by plaintiffs including English soccer's Premier League. Both suits argue YouTube encourages massive copyright infringement to boost the site's traffic in the hopes of generating advertising sales.

Google has responded by saying that these lawsuits threaten the way people exchange information, news, entertainment and artistic expression over the Internet.

Many of the most popular YouTube videos come from so-called user-generated sources--the bedroom confessional produced by teenagers with cheap computer Webcams pointing at them is the archetypal format. The site's slogan is "Broadcast Yourself."

It also features unrestricted professional media programming like music videos, extreme sports feats like skateboarding, and politicians promoting their campaigns.

The Hitwise statistics track visitors to video sites, but do not capture whether or not visitors actually watched the video streams or embedded videos from these sites, she noted.

Prescott presented the data at the Searchnomics Internet industry conference held in Silicon Valley.

Mr. Bechtolsheim working on world's fastest computer

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Andreas Bechtolsheim plans to introduce his newest machine.

Today, at a high-performance computing conference in Dresden, Germany, he plans to introduce his newest machine: a supercomputer to be named the Sun Constellation System that will compete for the title as the world’s fastest when installation is complete this year.

“It is hard to believe that 30 years later I am still working on the same problem,” said Mr. Bechtolsheim, who is better known as Andy.

Between the milestones, Mr. Bechtolsheim, who is 51 years old, has designed a parade of computers that have continued to squeeze the most processing power or storage capacity into the smallest possible space. And, despite becoming one of the richest people in the world, he remains obsessed with designing ever more powerful computers. His new machine, which is currently being installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, is the latest example of his trademark elegant and simple engineering. It is set apart from other supercomputers made from tens of thousands of networked microprocessor chips by Mr. Bechtolsheim’s ability to orchestrate the range of computing disciplines that are needed to create the fastest computers.

As such, he is the leading candidate to inherit the mantle of Seymour Cray, a famous computer designer who consistently designed the world’s fastest computers from the 1960s until his death in a car accident in 1996. “He is this amazing blend of artist and engineer and that reminds me of Seymour,” said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist and supercomputer user, who was an early customer of Sun Microsystems’ computers as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications during the 1980s.

Mr. Bechtolsheim’s 18-hour-a-day dedication to computer design is all the more remarkable because of his wealth. He has founded three successful companies in addition to being one of Google’s first financial backers. The initial $100,000 check he wrote to the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page is an investment now worth more than $1.5 billion.

None of that great wealth is apparent in the man who sits in a windowless conference room talking about supercomputing switching fabrics at a rapid-fire pace with his eyes closed and with one hand pressed against his face in concentration. A reporter who first interviewed Mr. Bechtolsheim in 1981 while he was still at Stanford, discovered last week that the computer scientist was still clad in Birkenstock sandals and still dressed like a graduate student.

Ola Torudbakken, a Sun engineer who worked for Mr. Bechtolsheim on the Texas supercomputer from his home in Norway, said it was routine to begin exchanging e-mail messages with Sun’s chief architect when it was 5 a.m. in California, then complete their conversations as late as midnight West Coast time when he was starting the next day’s work in Europe.

Since returning to Sun in 2004, Mr. Bechtolsheim has been appearing in technical settings, speaking about the problems impeding progress in the design of the fastest supercomputers. As supercomputers have shifted from custom processors to machines made from tens of thousands of off-the-shelf microprocessors, the design challenge has become how to permit the processors to share data needed to answer ever more complex scientific and engineering problems. Mr. Bechtolsheim has been critical of some of the biggest machines that have had high performance claims, but have performed poorly in real world applications.

Mr. Bechtolsheim thought he had found a solution to that problem by modifying an industry standard data switch, making it possible for any of the 13,000-plus Advanced Micro Devices Barcelona microprocessors to communicate with each other more than 10 times as fast as with existing switches.

Like Steve Wozniak, another Silicon Valley computer design luminary, Mr. Bechtolsheim became immersed in the world of computing in high school. According to John Fowler, the executive who runs Sun’s systems business, Mr. Bechtolsheim took a job in a machine shop while in high school in rural Germany. His boss asked him if he could build a system to make it possible to program an advanced milling machine. Mr. Bechtolsheim, constructed a computer and an operating system from scratch to control the machine. He then struck a licensing deal for his system which proved so successful that by the time he graduated from high school he was earning more than his father.

That led him to believe that studying computer science might be a worthy goal, Mr. Fowler said.

Before transferring to Stanford as a graduate student, Mr. Bechtolsheim attended graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in 1976 where he joined an early project to build a cluster-based supercomputer. Mr. Bechtolsheim literally filed down plastic computer chip packages in order to make them small enough to squeeze into the design of an early system board, recalled Brian Reid, who was a graduate student with him at Carnegie Mellon.

People who know him well say that that persistence underscores his determination as a designer.

Mr. Bechtolsheim’s newest machine will ultimately be tested against his most powerful rival, I.B.M., in the $10 billion market for high-performance computers. I.B.M., based in Armonk, N.Y., now dominates the high end of the fastest computing ranks and expects to maintain that position when the newest Top500 supercomputer rankings are announced today in Dresden.

Indeed, I.B.M. will introduce a redesigned version of its BlueGene supercomputer, to be named BlueGene/P today at the conference, saying that the new machine, scheduled to be installed next year, will finally break the petaflop computing barrier — the ability to execute a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second.

Executives at I.B.M. are skeptical about the new Sun supercomputer, noting that the system is late to be installed. “Having done six generations of machines,” said Dave Turek, the company’s vice president of Deep Computing. “I have come to realize that very little goes right the first time.”

A number of Silicon Valley technologists are, however, betting on Mr. Bechtolsheim. “He’s a perfectionist,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, who worked with Mr. Bechtolsheim beginning in 1983 at Sun. “He works 18 hours a day and he’s very disciplined. Every computer he has built has been the fastest of its generation.”

Affiliates reviews

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Introduction

Summer is the perfect time for many things: vacation, picnics, camping, and spending time at the beach. Unfortunately, all this warm weather means that computers will not be running as cool as they normally would, and system stability can become threatened. Benchmark Reviews has recently tested the MaxOrb CL-P0369 from Thermaltake. Read on to discover if this product is a computer enthusiast and overclockers dream, or just another fancy fan with some heat pipes.

Thermaltake has been a longtime contender in the cooling solution industry, with new product being released as they make improvements over the older ones. For example, this MaxOrb cooler is a result of previous releases, such as the BlueOrb, which was in turn a revision of the GoldenOrb CPU cooler. Unlike the former products, the new MaxOrb is a lot more than just a tweaked design. Continue on to see the full extent of this redesigned cooler.

Features

• Six Independent Channel Heatpipe Cooling
  • Utilizes radial fins to generate smoother multi-directional airflow and reduce turbulence when fan is operating.
  • Creates open channels from the center to the outside to dissipate heat efficiently with cool air from all directions.
  • Utilizes multi-directional airflow to cool adjacent components such as chipsets and the surrounding VRM as well.
• Radiant Heat-Transfer
  • Six Independent channel heatpipes equipped on MaxOrb cover the entire surface of the heat source (CPU)
  • Heat is conducted tot eh surrounding fins very evenly through 6 independent circular heatpipes which provides swift heat transfer and maximum thermal dissipation.
• Extreme Silence and Maximum Cooling
  • VRFan Speed Control

Specifications

Socket: 754 / 775 / 939 / 940 / AM2 Dimensions: 143(L) x 144(D) x 95.2(H) mm Heatsink Material: Copper Base and Aluminum Fin Heatpipe: Copper Tube 6mm x 6pcs Fan Dimensions: 120x120x25mm Rated Voltage: 12V Started Voltage: 7V Power Input: 3.00W Fan Speed: 1300~2000 RPM Max CFM: 86.5 Max Air Pressure: 2.22mmH2O Noise: 16dBA ~ 24dBA Life Expectation: 50,000 Hrs Connector: 3 pin Weight: 465g

Read more at http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46&Itemid=47

Critical update for Intel Core CPUs

Slashdot It! A COUPLE OF WEEKS ago, we heard that Dell was dealing with a certain situation considering Intel dual-core MCW and quad-core KC marchitecture, and that the company was releasing urgent BIOS and microcode versions for its line up.

We learned that the affected CPUs are the Core 2 Duo E4000/E6000, Core 2 Quad Q6600, Core 2 Xtreme QX6800, QX6700 and QX6800.

In the mobile world, people with the Core 2 Duo T5000 and T7000 need to visit Microsoft's site, while the server guys will want to use motherboard BIOSes if they do not rely on Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The affected servers are Xeon 3000, 3200, 5100 and 5300s - or just about every model from the second generation of Core marchitecture.

Oddly enough, Yonah - 32-bit Core Duo processor - isn't among the affected cores.

We are assured that no product recall will happen, and that La Intella took all appropriate steps in order to minimise damage to its public image, because if a product recall happened, Intel's credibility would be ruined for good.

Anyway, if you have a Core CPU based machine, go to the link below to download the update. AMD processors are not affected at all, in case you were wondering.

Google Desktop Linux

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Google was set to launch a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop.

Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline.

Google Desktop for Linux was written natively and uses Google's own desktop search algorithms, not existing Linux search applications such as Beagle, a company representative said. Only computers with x86 processors can use the software. It supports the Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, Novell Suse 10.1 and Red Flag 5 versions of Linux, and uses either the KDE and GNOME graphical user interfaces.

Although Google has released other projects as open-source software, where it can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone, Google Desktop for Linux is proprietary. The software was developed by Google's Beijing engineering team and is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

Google also offers Linux versions of its Picasa photo-editing software, as well as Google Earth and Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Boeing 787's wings are very flexible

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Next May Boeing's scheduled to deliver the first 787, a new jet they're frantically trying to build right now, to All Nippon Airlines. The 787's been selling like gangbusters, putting Boeing out front, business-wise, versus its main competitor, Airbus. (Airbus, for its part, is working on the massive, double-decked A380 in a flat-out competition.)

Boeing's strategy with the 787 has been to make a light, efficient, smaller-scale jet to appeal to carriers concerned about costs. So among the other innovations, the company is making the wings out of carbon-fiber composite instead of metal. No one's ever really tried that before, so testing is critical. Here's the June 25 Aviation Week and Space Technology on that subject:

Boeing has completed static testing of a three-quarter wingbox, but engineers are still considering whether to limit testing of the full wing to a 150% load limit held for 3 sec. of to continue bending it to see when it breaks. "There's a raging debate within the engineering team to see if we should break it or not," says [787 General Manager Mike] Bair.

Breaking it isn't necessary for certification, but Bair says the wing is so strong and flexible that there's been talk that maybe it could be bend far enough for the wingtips to touch above the fuselage—or come quite close.

What the iPhone do not have?

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• Songs as Ringtones • Games • Any flash support • Instant Messaging • Picture messages (MMS) • Video recording • Voice recognition or voice dialing • Wireless Bluetooth Stereo Streaming (A2DP) • One-size-fits-all headset jack (May have to buy an adapter for certain headphones)

Stuff we already knew it didn't have • 3G (EV-DO/HSDPA) • GPS • A real keyboard • Removable battery • Expandable Storage • Direct iTunes Music Store Access (Over Wi-Fi or EDGE)

iPhone would not make a dent in Nokia's market share

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Nokia is headed toward 40 percent global-market share and Apple's iPhone won't make a dent in that, according to a U.S. distributor of mobiles and other wireless devices.

"Nokia's market share is on its way towards the 40 percent mark, and it has a superior standing in cheap, midrange as well as high-end wireless devices," Brightpoint Chief Executive Bob Laikin told Finnish financial daily Kauppalehti, in comments published.

Nokia, the world's top cell phone maker, is Brightpoint's largest customer. Nokia reported a global market share of 36 percent in the first quarter.

Laikin also said he expects that Apple's iPhone, set to go on sale Friday in the United States, will have only a novelty position in the market.

"Apple's iPhone will sell in the U.S. in the coming quarters maybe 1 to 2 million units. That is quite small, considering that perhaps 170 million cell phones are being shipped in North America this year," Laikin told Kauppalehti. Apple's phone costs $499 to $599, while many Americans wish to buy a device for $99, he said.

Discuss about this at http://chewontech.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?p=17#17

HP and Microsoft eying on supercomputer market

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Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard announced an extension of their long-running collaborative sales and marketing pact as they seek a bigger share in the growing market for supercomputers.

The two companies aim to give high-performance computers more "mass market" appeal by making them easier to deploy, support and manage. Enhancements will include work on Windows Compute Cluster Server that includes custom installation scripts and documentation aimed at making deployment easier. HP said there is now increased scalability of large clusters with the HP Message Passing Interface and InfiniBand drivers offering better performance in applications that require high-speed, low-latency communications.

Customers can "realistically expect to have a 64-node cluster deployed and running within two hours," HP said in a statement.

Earl Joseph, an analyst at IDC, said there will be "continuing strong growth, averaging over 20 percent a year, with (high-performance computing) standards-based clusters growing at even higher rates. End users are looking for easy-to-use systems and will likely go with vendors that can provide an easy transition from their desktop to (high-performance computing) servers," Joseph said.

IBM, for instance, announced that its latest Blue Gene computer, the Blue Gene/P, is capable of processing more that 3 quadrillion operations a second, or three petaflops. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

And Sun announced the Constellation System, a high-performance computing platform that Sun executives claim will vault the company back into the top ranks of supercomputer manufacturers.

The influential Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, which currently has IBM in the top four positions, will be updated at the International Supercomputing Conference this week.

Visualization may break Vista's DRM

Slashdot It! Conspiracy theorists may link Microsoft Corp.'s abrupt decision not to remove restrictions on consumers virtualizing its Vista operating system to a Department of Justice agreement announced the same day or to a desire to jerk Intel Mac users around.

But the actual reason may be found in three little letters: DRM.

Vista's new digital rights management features enable movies or music files to be password-protected or made accessible only to authorized users for opening, viewing or changing.

Whether most users would call DRM a feature, however, is questionable. A close cousin to DRM technology, known as Windows Rights Management Services (which in turn is part of a larger category of technologies called Enterprise Digital Rights Management, or ERM), can help business users password-protect key documents and files, or assign the ability to open them only to trusted co-workers. But DRM's main purpose seems to be to help the Warner Bros. and Sony Musics of the world keep consumers from sharing movies and music. The entertainment industry claims that almost all blocked sharing is illegal; digital rights watchdogs argue that legitimate consumer uses are also blocked by such technology.

DRM is capable of blocking both overt piracy -- distributing movies via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks -- as well as other common scenarios that most consumers do not consider piracy, such as moving legally acquired music files from their desktop PCs to their notebook computers.

The problem is that virtualization, by accident, appears to break most of Vista's DRM and antipiracy schemes.

Virtualization software -- think VMware Inc.'s VMplayer, Microsoft's Virtual PC or Parallels Inc.'s Parallels Desktop -- allow computer users to boot one operating system but run a second one as a "guest" at the same time.

That can allow a user who has booted Windows Vista to load XP-only applications in a guest XP operating system, also known as a virtual machine (VM). Or it can let a user with an Intel Mac boot up the OS X operating system but also run Windows Vista or XP applications at the same time.

Microsoft's original plan was to announce on Tuesday changes to the contracts, known as end-user licensing agreements (EULA), for its Vista Home Basic and Home Premium editions. Those changes would permit buyers who use those editions to create VMs. The change was purely to the EULA; there is no technical limitation preventing knowledgeable users from virtualizing retail versions of Home Basic or Home Premium.

Microsoft allows only full retail versions of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate (as well as Vista Enterprise for big corporations) to run as virtual guests of a host PC. Vista Business and Ultimate cost $299 and $399, respectively. The simple change in Microsoft's license for the two cheaper editions -- Home Basic Edition and Home Premium Edition cost $199 and $239, respectively -- would have saved customers at least $60 and up to $200.

In addition, Microsoft planned to permit the use of DRM, IRM (Information Rights Management) and Vista's storage encryption technology, BitLocker, in a VM for any version of Vista.

Besides boosting flagging perceptions of Microsoft's overall virtualization strategy, the move would have made Vista virtualization much more attractive to a key and growing segment -- Intel Mac owners who want to run Windows software.

But at the last moment, Microsoft did a 360. Its explanation was terse: "Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that we will maintain the original policy announced last Fall," said a spokesman in an e-mailed statement.

A perfect picture (of cross-purposes)

When a user creates a VM, the virtualization software takes a snapshot of the PC's hardware and then creates an exact copy of how that works in memory, according to DeGroot.

This ability to perfectly simulate the way the original PC ran (albeit more slowly than the original) is why VMs are such a useful tool. But a VM, once created, can be copied hundreds or thousands of times and ported over to radically different PCs without triggering the antipiracy and DRM schemes of most software or multimedia files, including Vista's. Those schemes raise red flags only if they realize they've been moved to another computer, DeGroot said.

Analysts say what probably happened behind the scenes is that Microsoft or one of its media partners decided at the last moment that encouraging consumers to use virtualization would, at least symbolically, be at odds with its attempts to enforce DRM.

Microsoft has more at stake than other high-tech firms, McGuire said, what with its partnerships with NBC, its Xbox gaming platform, its Media Center PCs and even its Zune music player.

"It's a very fine line that Redmond has to walk," McGuire said. "They have to answer to these companies if they want to have any hope of making the PC and their software the de facto usage model for multimedia."

The problem is that even if Microsoft -- and U.S. law -- insist it is still illegal to use virtualization to enable the sharing of software or movies or music, its antipiracy technology is powerless to stop it.

"It's absurd to expect that something demanded by a EULA is followed when technology and common practice permit otherwise," Sinnreich said. "Microsoft is banking on ongoing consumer naivete and goodwill. There will be a backlash against DRM in some not-so-distant future."

Would anyone have bothered?

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? Not anytime soon, say analysts.

One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself.

Online video recorders stoke new piracy concerns

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It took Brian Baker only five minutes to persuade a major U.S. television network that it needed his company's technology to protect their programs from Web pirates.

Using software easily found on the Internet, Baker, chief executive of Widevine Technologies, recorded a video clip stream from that network's Web site, stripped out the commercials and sent the company back the altered video.

The network executive's reaction? "Wow, we need protection now!" Baker recalled. "Major television operators are seeing their offerings re-posted on the Internet, often times with the advertising stripped out."

Media companies fear that video recording software will facilitate piracy and rob them of lucrative advertising revenue just as they are making more TV shows, movies and video available online.

Stream rippers, or software that records any online video and downloads it onto a computer hard drive, can be bought on the Internet these days for under $100. The technology is expected to move into the mainstream with the introduction of several new video players in the coming months.

"This is an application and development of great concern," said a major U.S. network executive, who declined to be identified. "This is a dramatic move in the wrong direction."

Media conglomerate Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google and its video sharing site YouTube demonstrates the lengths copyright owners will go to maintain ultimate control over where their entertainment ends up.

Three new recording video players are expected out before the end of 2007, with each company pursuing a different strategy.

RealNetworks' new media player, which will be available for public testing next week, allows users to record video streams with one click. It prevents a user from downloading video embedded with digital rights management, but it does not prevent the recording of all copyrighted content.

"The technology we built is a utility, it's a tool. The VCR or TiVo doesn't really understand where the stuff is coming from," said Jeff Chasen, a vice president at RealNetworks. "It's really up to the consumer."

RealNetworks and other media player makers see the software as a way for consumers to create a library of content they can view at a time that is convenient for them.

But media companies fear it could become a tool for pirates to widely distribute their entertainment and make money from it at their expense.

TiVo for the Internet Internet video start-up Veoh Networks unveiled a new product called VeohTV, a digital video recorder (DVR) for the Internet that can find and store material from nearly every site on the Web including the major networks.

Veoh contends that it does not violate copyright laws and records videos with commercials contained. Analysts said major networks may take legal action to prevent the company from showing their copyrighted content next to ads sold by Veoh.

Adobe Systems' new media player downloads video for offline viewing. Adobe, a leader with its flash video format, wants to hand over more control to media companies, allowing firms to serve ads and track video usage.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the media companies' reservations about the streaming video recorders demonstrates a lack of understanding. Smart companies will embrace, not shun, the technology, he said.

Seattle-based Widevine, which has or is close to deals with all the major U.S. networks, said its video protection technology is the answer for media companies.

Widevine, a survivor of the dot-com bust, encrypts digital content so that if the company's algorithm detects a user recording the material off the portal, it will stop the video stream.

The key, according to Widevine's Baker, is that the company's digital rights management technology ensures that commercials will not be tampered with.

Apple ups Balda orders for iPhone screens

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Apple has significantly increased its orders for touch screens for its keenly awaited iPhone at German supplier Balda, German daily Handelsblatt reported on Tuesday.

The order increase was due to delivery problems at Japan's Sharp, tipped to be one of Apple's suppliers, Handelsblatt said without citing sources.

A Balda spokesman declined to comment on the report but did say that Balda was expanding its production site for touch screens in China.

He said the touch-screen business in general was very interesting for the company.

Apple is due to launch the iPhone on Friday in the United States, with a target of 10 million units in 2008.

Analysts have said a runaway success for the feature-jammed phone could create huge challenges for some of its parts suppliers.

Discuss about this at http://chewontechforum.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=14

"Vista only" games tittle being cracked to play on Windows XP

Slashdot It! Hacking group warez has released a patch allowing gamers to run Halo 2 and Shadowrun, both released by Microsoft as Windows Vista-only titles, on the firm’s older Windows XP operating system.

It had been claimed that neither title would be able to run successfully using the older DirectX 9 graphics engine, with Microsoft urging gamers to take the plunge and switch to the Vista.

The news is sure to irk Microsoft who may now face an increased delay in some consumers adopting Vista at this early stage. However, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Earlier this month Falling Leaf Systems said in a press release that it believed Microsoft was deceiving consumers by stating that the titles would only work on Vista, and announced its intentions to release compatability software to disprove the claim.

“Microsoft has, in typical Microsoft fashion, decided to launch their forced migration onslaught in full force with the release of two games that will only run on Windows Vista,” said Falling Leaf Systems CEO Brian Thomason in the press release.

“First they claim that it was impossible to implement DirectX 10 compatibility atop Windows XP, and now they also want us to believe that they couldn’t successfully launch two DirectX 9 based titles on XP either. We plan to expose both theories as patently false.”

It appears Warez has beaten Falling Leaf to its goal, although Windows Live and in-game achievements are features still only availalbe to Vista gamers.<

Affiliates reviews

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Introduction

Benchmark Reviews has seen some major changes within the power supply industry over the past year. Even in such a limited purpose industry, somehow fads manage to come into existence. At one point, the number of rails a PSU offered was key to media hype. At another point, you could see everyone pushing for the highest watts in their new product. I can't forget how modular power supplies, with the assortment of cables and interfaces, also shared some time in the limelight. The latest trend seemed to be 80-Plus efficiency, but since most PSU's are at least this efficient the label has lost meaning. And then without any warning, it was as if every company manufacturing power supply units suddenly decided that they could win the battle for industry dominance by combining all of the above features, and add a nice paint job or mirror finish for good measure.

It has been said before in our reviews: the power supply unit is the single most important part of any computer. Regardless of the system or purpose there is a given rule: whether it is a simple workstation with integrated components or an advanced gaming system with newest technology available, everything requires power to operate. As anyone who has suffered the failure of a low-end power supply will tell you: not all power supply units (PSU's) are created equal, and looks don't mean a thing.

I am very aware of what the more knowledgeable readers think about these power supply reviews: impractical and often useless. Power supplies are not like other computer components, where it is a simple matter of comparing the item to others in the same category. Power supply units offer many different variables, and each must be analyzed with unique tools. In the past, Benchmark Reviews has been guilty of the same thing its affiliates are guilty of: testing with a digital multimeter alone. So beginning now with this review, we are taking a corrected approach to testing PSU's.

Benchmark Reviews has researched the equipment necessary to complete the most thorough PSU review possible, because the best possible PSU tests are what we want to give our readers. But after discovering the prices on a programmable output DC power supply system, variable range load testing units, and a DC power analyzer, we felt that more than ten-thousand dollars worth of equipment is too cost prohibitive for testing a hundred-dollar power supply. So without compromising too much, we made a slightly less-expensive investment into an Oscilloscope in order to test voltage current power ripple. Together, the digital multimeter and oscilloscope will offer the best measurement of power stability any review site could practically offer.

The new generation of power supplies has begun to amp up the competition for placement in your computer case. Antec’s EarthWatts series was among the first to cause a stir in the PSU industry by emphasizing efficient power delivery over the multi-rail hype. But now 80% or better efficiency is very common. A perfect example of combining high-power wattage, efficiency, and good looks can be found in the Hiper HPU-4M730-SS Type M 730W PSU. The four +12V rails offer regulated power distribution, but they also deliver at least 80% of the power that they promise, which will result in a more efficient system. Hiper's Type M PSU claims to support dual and quad processors, dual (SLi and CrossFire) graphics card sets, and just about anything else you can throw at it, but Benchmark Reviews will load test the DC voltage regulation and ripple just to be sure.

About the company: High Performance Group

High Performance Group was founded with the passion of providing the computer users & customers the best innovative products & services. The company's untraditional approach from its patented design to its business conducts gains itself partnership with many respectable firms including AMD. Always committed to excellence, High Performance Group strives to be the best in every aspect.

Hiper Business Philosophy (V.I.P.)

VIGOROUS People are the core of any business. Our name "High Performance Group" not only implies to its product, but also to its people. Our company is filled with vigorous officers & staff; "whatever it takes" is our spirit, our belief, as well as our habit.

INNOVATIVE Hiper (trademarked) represents our corporate identity in the ultimate form. This symbol represents true innovation. Hiper product line is always imitated, but can never be duplicated. Our entire ID, mechanical, electrical, electronics, visual effect & web designer teams are truly elites in the industry because their passion of embracing technology & changes is noticeable with the first contact. It captures even the most ordinary person's attention with details everyone appreciates.

PROACTIVE High Performance Group means proactive way of business. Our solid & honest policy in business put everyone at peace, and then we police and enforce it. We make sure that our business partners (you are included) are well protected. Many who joined us has become us, and we are sure that you'll become one of us once you join us.

Read more at http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&amp;id=26&Itemid=47

Some waiting for iPhone to improve before buying

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Apple's upcoming iPhone is shaping up as this year's must-have gadget, but several perceived shortcomings are pushing some potential buyers to wait for an updated version.

Worries over the high cost, slow network speed, and battery life are deterring some customers from ponying up a minimum of $499 for the iPhone, despite the buzz across the gadget-crazed landscape of tech retail.

AT&T, the largest U.S. wireless provider, has an exclusive agreement to sell two version of the phone, priced at $499 and $599, in the United States under a two-year contract.

The new phone features a touch screen and combines the features of a cell phone, iPod, digital organizer and wireless Internet device. The phones will go on sale Friday at 6 p.m. local time across the United States in Apple and AT&T retail stores, as well as on Apple's Web site.

But the phone does not work on AT&T's fastest network, which runs on so-called 3-G technology. That, some said, will make Web-browsing slower than phones running on other networks.

Kate Rockwood, 24, a graduate student at Northwestern University, is shopping for a new phone as her contract with Verizon Communications expires this month.

But she said a desire for faster network speed, as well as longer battery life, will make her wait for a later version. She said she is wary of investing big money for service with questionable speed.

Phillip Kaplan, 29, a graduate student in Chicago with a background in graphic design, said he would not even consider buying the first version of the phone.

Another area of concern is whether the iPhone's on-screen keyboard will be as easy to use as Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs claims. A wonky keyboard could turn off power users who write a lot of e-mail.

"Just like you don't buy the first model year of a car, you might not want to buy the first version of the iPhone," said Todd Dagres, a partner in Boston-based venture capital firm Spark Capital, which specializes in digital media and technology.

Dagres also said Apple has a track record of rolling out new, improved and cheaper models, such as the later versions of its iPod digital music and video players. Apple will likely do the same with iPhone, he said.

AT&T's network speed, however, poses no problem for Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research.

Wu said the iPhone's network and battery are competitive with what's already in the market. Apple says the phone will allow up to eight hours of talk time, six hours of Internet use and 24 hours of audio playback.

"So what if it doesn't run on 3G? Most other phones don't either," Wu said, adding: "The faster the network, the higher the cost."

Given the hype created by past Apple products that went on to become cultural icons, questions such as network speed and battery life may be moot, Wu said.

Some customers plan to camp out on Thursday night to ensure a place in line at stores. And on the popular Web community site Craigslist, customers unwilling to miss work on Friday were posting requests for people to stand in line for them.

Petaflop is here

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The petaflop era has begun.

IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer--the Blue Gene/P--that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

Blue Gene/P marks a significant milestone in computing. Last November, the Blue Gene/L was ranked as the most powerful computer on the planet: it topped out at 280 teraflops, or 280 trillion operations a second during continuous operation.

Put another way, a Blue Gene/P operating at a petaflop is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops.

The development of Blue Gene/P seems certain to extend IBM's position atop the Top 500 Supercomputer list, which comes out this week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. IBM had 93 computers on the list when the rankings last came out in November; four were in the top 10.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory will deploy the first Blue Gene/P in the U.S. later this year. Meanwhile, in Germany, the Max Planck Society and the Forschungszentrum Julich research center will start to install a Blue Gene/P in late 2007. Others will be installed at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Labs (upstate New York facilities that have collaborated with IBM on other projects) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council in Cheshire, England.

Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns.

Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems.

The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.

The chip inside the Blue Gene/L contained two PowerPC cores running at 700MHz.

The 1-petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912 processors and takes up 72 racks in all. Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster, according to IBM. The chips and other components are linked together in a high-speed optical network.

Several companies will be in the German city this week to tout supercomputer accomplishments. Sun Microsystems will use the show to show off its Constellation System, which features a switching architecture that Sun says will greatly enhance performance. The first Constellation System, which Sun hopes will be ready by October, will provide 500 teraflops of performance at its peak.

BitTorrent sites come under threat

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Leaseweb, the ISP of some of the largest BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy, BTjunkie and Demonoid was forced to take down everlasting.nu, a relatively small BitTorrent site. The outcome of the lawsuit initiated by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit Brein could spell trouble for some of the key players in the BitTorrent landscape.

In response to this decision (Dutch link) several BitTorrent admins, who prefer not to be named, already announced that they have plans to leave Leaseweb. Others are setting up backup locations in case their site s are targeted. An admin of one of the bigger BitTorrent sites said:

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”

This Thursday, the Amsterdam court concluded that everlasting.nu structurally facilitated copyright infringement by allowing their users to download copyrighted content via torrents hosted on their site.

Leaseweb’s lawyers argued that there was no evidence that these torrents really pointed to copyrighted works. They referred to the fact that rights holders often upload fake files themselves and that the name of a .torrent file is not sufficient to prove that copyrighted works are being distributed. Brein responded to this argument by stating that everlasting.nu then would be a very customer unfriendly BitTorrent site if this was the case, and the judge agreed with this.

At the end of the hearing the court decided that Leaseweb has to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner. Additionally, Leaseweb is obliged to take down everlasting.nu, in case the site returns in the near future.

It still remains unclear what made the judge decide that everlasting is facilitating copyright infringement and how this will affect the position of all the other BitTorrent sites hosted by Leaseweb. The fact that everlasting has their own BitTorrent tracker was not used as an argument in the decision. So does this mean that hosting .torrent files is illegal now?

Brein sure thinks so, they already announced another lawsuit against Leaseweb to take down another BitTorrent site. At this point it is not sure whether this is one of the big players like Torrentspy, BTjunkie and Demonoid, or yet again a smaller BitTorrent site.

Hardware Firewall

Slashdot It! Yoggie Security Systems has squeezed a complete hardware firewall for Windows systems into a USB key sized form-factor. The "Yoggie Pico" runs Linux 2.6 along with 13 security applications on a 520MHz PXA270, a powerful Intel processor popular in smartphones and other high-end consumer devices.

Yoggie Pico

Yoggie Gatekeeper

The Yoggie Pico is a spectacularly miniaturized version of the company's original Yoggie Gatekeeper product (pictured at left), which shipped nine months ago and is also based on the Intel PXA270 processor. Both products aim to offload firewall functions to a separate device, in order to increase security and performance of the host PC, and save users from confusing security-related pop-up messages. CEO Schlomo Touboul explains, "Internet security software running on Windows takes a lot of time to boot, and uses a lot of CPU to scan. It gets fatter and fatter with every update, and as a result, the Windows machine gets slower and slower. The idea of Yoggie is, 'Let's have a second computer, and screen traffic before it reaches the PC.'" How does it work? The original Gatekeeper sported a pair of RJ-45 jacks that allowed it to be connected in-line between the network and a PC running any OS, similar to traditional hardware firewalls. Alternatively, it could be connected via its full-speed (12Mbps) USB port, and used in conjunction with low-level Windows drivers that "hi-jack traffic at layers 2-3, below the TCP/IP stack, and route it to USB," Touboul explained. The Pico eschews the Gatekeeper's bulky RJ-45 ports, while upgrading USB connectivity to a high-speed (480Mbps) interface. "On a 100Mbps Ethernet, you can barely notice it's there," Touboul said. One nice benefit to the USB-plus-host-driver approach is that it works not only with wired networks, but for any network interface on the host PC, including dial-up, WiFi, or even GPRS add-in cards, Touboul said. Drivers for Linux and MacOS X are planned, he confirmed. Yoggie Pico architecture What does it do? When plugged into a host PC's USB port, the Yoggie Pico first uses the open source U-Boot bootloader to copy its Linux-based OS and application stack from secure, read-only flash memory onto a separate flash-based boot device, Touboul said. Thus, regardless of what attacks the device may endure, it should always boot up in a pristine state. The second flash device may well be a NOR flash device capable of supporting XIP (execute-in-place) or another fast-bootup scheme, given that the Pico is said to boot significantly faster than the earlier Gatekeeper -- 40 seconds, including launching the 13 applications, compared to 105 seconds for the original Gatekeeper, according to Touboul. Once running, the Pico establishes an SSL (secure sockets layer) http connection to Yoggie's central servers, where it checks for updated firewall policies and rule sets, Touboul said. It subsequently checks every every five minutes, by default. A secure browser-based interface allows users to tune operational parameters, and access system status information. According to Touboul, "There is no ssh, no nothing into the Yoggie. The Web interface is the only interface, and it offers some nice graphs and reports about what Yoggie was doing for you over the last week." Yoggie's browser-based interface The Pico actually runs 13 separate security applications, with typical CPU usage ranging between 35 and 50 percent, Touboul said. The stack has knowledge of various file types, such as Word attachments and Java executables, and can fluff up zip and other compressed files on the fly for analysis prior to passing them to the host PC. Three of Yoggie's applications were licensed from third parties, while half a dozen were written in-house, and another four derived from open source software packages. In particular, Touboul cited the snort intrusion detection and HAVP (HTTP anti-virus proxy) packages as key components of the stack. The Yoggie Pico's firewall stack Stack components, according to Touboul, include:

• Anti-Spam
• Anti-phishing
• Antispyware
• Antivirus
• Parent control system
• Transparent email proxies (POP3; SMTP)
• Transparent web proxies (HTTP; FTP)
• Intrusion detection system
• Intrusion prevention system
• Firewall
• Adaptive security policy
• Multi-layer security agent (Patent pending)
• "Layer-8" security engine (Patent pending)

What's under the hood?

Gumstix Verdex (Click for details)

The Pico is based on a highly miniaturized single-board computer (SBC) with no less than 12 layers inter-connected via blind vias, Touboul said. Given its USB-key form factor, the Pico's SBC appears to be about half the size of Gumstix's recently introduced Verdex (pictured at right), an 8-layer design that was previously the smallest PXA270-based board we've seen. The Pico is based on an Intel PXA270 processor clocked at 520MHz. It has 128MB of RAM, and 128MB of flash memory, apparently divided between 64MB of secure flash and 64MB of boot flash (as described above). The Pico SBC's two flash chips appear to reside on a separate add-in card connected via surface-mount connectors. This could give the design some expandability, should storage needs grow and/or memory sizes/prices fall. The Pico's SBC relegates flash to a daughtercard (Click to enlarge) Rather than using the PXA270's full-speed USB interface, the Pico incorporates an off-chip USB controller capable of high-speed (480Mbps) operation. According to Touboul, ten engineers worked nine months on the combined hardware/software design, with cooling proving to be "quite a challenge," albeit not an insurmountable one. "It can run pretty hot, but not hot enough to cause problems," he said. On the software side, Yoggie developed its Linux stack in-house, starting out with Debian Linux packages. Touboul stated, "The growing threat from Internet borne attacks and the negative user experience with heavy software security suites has led us to develop the Yoggie Pico series. Now users can offload security tools from their computer and regain their application performances while trusting the highest security level provided by Yoggie Pico." Availability The Yoggie Pico will ship the first week of June, priced at $180 with a year's subscription to updates, according to the company. Subscriptions will cost $30/year thereafter. Distribution channels are being finalized, but will include big-box retailers like CompUSA and Fry's (Outpost.com), Touboul said. Also available for $200 will be a "Pro" version targeting the enterprise market. It adds VPN features, and is designed to fetch firewall updates from a local enterprise server rather than Yoggie's central servers.

Google To Acquire GrandCentral

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Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral, we’ve learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed. We are trying to nail down the acquisition price. Just last week I flagged this company as the most exciting startup we’re currently tracking.

The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

The company, which has raised less than $6 million in capital from Minor Ventures (the exact amount has never been disclosed), beta launched just last September. Earlier this year mainstream press and blogger attention heated up.

The company may have received too much press attention before the product was ready, and we reported on some backlash from beta users abandoning the service in March. Still, the company pushed ahead, launching a mobile product and other features.

GrandCentral was recently pitching a second round of financing to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but broke off discussions abruptly as the Google talks heated up.

I’m speculating on where Google will use GrandCentral, but the synergies with Gmail and GTalk are fairly obvious and could be the next step in Google’s competition with Skype and other instant messaging platforms.

This is, in my opinion, a great move by Google. Grand Central is an awesome productivity and simplifies the lives of users with multiple phones by giving them a single phone number and letting them handle calls via rules. It’s a natural fit with GTalk and Gmail.

Discuss this at http://chewontechforum.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=8

First Apple iPhone shipments arrive in stores

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The first retail-bound volume shipments of Apple Inc.'s hotly anticipated iPhone device arrived successfully in the United States this past weekend, touching down quietly at a handful of drop locations just six days before the device is due to go on sale at nearly 2000 Apple and AT&T retail locations.

People familiar with the matter say the intrinsically valuable freight was carried inbound by a certain Hong Kong-based air courier, which services Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. The early arrival is to assure the cargo can clear customs with enough time to handle unexpected delays, those people said. Awaiting the freight at each location on Sunday were armed personnel, who were reportedly hired by Apple through its courier's ground handling agent and then cleared by the Transportation Security Administration. Armed guards are extremely unusual for freight coming out of the Asian sector, those familiar with the matter explained, and are typically reserved for shipments containing riches such as gold and diamonds. Once on the ground, the iPhone shipments were to be broken down under the watch of the armed personnel, who would then observe the loading of the freight onto ground vehicles and become party to its transportation outbound. It remains unclear where the eagerly sought Apple gadgets will spend the better part of the business week ahead of their planned launch Friday afternoon at 6:00 p.m. local time. It's possible, however, they could begin turning up in stockrooms of Apple and AT&T retail stores days in advance. Apple management on Sunday began informing its retail personnel that beginning Monday, no cameras of any kind will be allowed in the back stockrooms of its retail outlets. The ban reportedly spans all cell phones -- regardless of whether they contain camera functionality -- and all personally owned Apple notebooks that feature built-in iSight video cameras. This past weekend, Apple retail stores nationwide began preparing for Friday's iPhone launch with new planogram layouts, employee attire, and window displays that feature 4-foot iPhone replicas equipped with massive LCD displays screens.

Nintendo beats Sony and Microsoft

Slashdot It! Nintendo briefly zipped past Sony in market capitalization to become one of Japan's 10 most valuable companies as it elbows the PlayStation maker out of its decade-long dominance of the game industry.

Nintendo joined global household names such as Toyota Motor, Honda Motor and Canon on the top-10 list before its shares erased earlier gains and ended the day lower.

The Kyoto-based company finished in the 11th place by market value, just above Panasonic maker Matsushita Electric Industrial and below Sony. Those companies, the world's largest and second-largest consumer electronics makers, both have sales more than eight times as big as Nintendo's.

"It is becoming quite clear that Nintendo is taking back its market share from Sony in the console market while well defending its stronghold of portable games," Mizuho Securities analyst Takeshi Koyama said.

Nintendo's Wii game console has outsold Sony's PlayStation 3 by 3 to 1 in Japan and by more than 2 to 1 in the United States so far this year, according to game magazine publisher Enterbrain and research firm NPD.

Demand for Nintendo's DS handheld game players also far outstripped that for Sony's PlayStation Portable.

Based on the closing price, Nintendo's prospective price-earnings ratio comes to 36.5, compared with 20.3 for Sony.

Sony shares have increased 66 percent over the past two years, outperforming the Nikkei average, which rose 57 percent. But Nintendo shares soared more than fourfold over the same period.

Nintendo in recent years has offered a slew of innovative and easy-to-use game software including Brain Age and Nintendogs, which has helped broaden the game-playing population beyond young males to women and the elderly.

Sony, which has dominated the $30 billion game industry over the past decade with its PlayStation and PlayStation 2, saw a slow start for the PS3, launched late last year, due mainly to its high prices and lack of attractive software titles.

Strong sales of the Wii and DS have prompted third-party software makers to actively develop new titles for the Nintendo machines, creating a virtuous circle for the company known for such game characters as Mario, Donkey Kong and Pokemon.

Sega Sammy Holdings, for example, plans to almost double the number of new software titles for Nintendo hardware to 49 in the year to March 2008, while cutting the number of new titles for Sony gear by 45 percent to 42.

Sony's game unit posted an operating loss of 232 billion yen in the year ended March, hit by heavy start-up costs for the PS3.

The division, however, is estimated to report a much smaller loss for the current business year, and profits at its mainstay electronics unit will likely grow sharply, led by brisk demand for its Bravia liquid crystal display televisions.

Google may close Gmail Germany over privacy concerns

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Spiegel a german news site is reporting that Google is threatening to shut down the german version of its Gmail service if the german Bundestag passes it’s new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, googles german privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Googles practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any german citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal.

Tight privacy laws is something the Germans are used to the country's largest email provider gmx.de forces users to enter legit address, and they make sure you prove it and will shut off if you cant. I feel Google should be applauded for trying to maintain the privacy of its customers

Who says P2P takes up the most bandwidth

Slashdot It! Ellacoya Networks, a leading provider of carrier-class broadband service optimization solutions for IP networks, today released findings based on usage data of approximately one million broadband subscribers in North America.

After more than four years during which peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have overwhelmingly consumed the largest percentage of bandwidth on the network, HTTP (Web) traffic has overtaken P2P and continues to grow. Presently, as a result of streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP is approximately 46% of all traffic on the network. P2P continues as a strong second place at 37% of total traffic. Newsgroups (9%), non-HTTP video streaming (3%), gaming (2%) and VoIP (1%) are the next widely used applications.

Breaking down application types within HTTP, the data reveals that traditional Web page downloads (i.e. text and images) represent 45% of all Web traffic. Streaming video represents 36% and streaming audio 5% of all HTTP traffic. YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet.

“The popularity of browser-based video such as YouTube is having a significant impact not only on overall bandwidth consumption but also on the distribution of application traffic on the network,” said Fred Sammartino, vice president of marketing and product management at Ellacoya. “The way people use the Internet is changing rapidly - from browsing to real-time streaming. We expect to see new applications over the next year that will accelerate this trend.”

About Ellacoya Networks

Ellacoya Networks is a leading provider of carrier-grade Broadband Service Optimization solutions that leverage deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to give broadband service providers the visibility and control necessary to optimize Internet services for their subscribers.

The top list of hated words in the internet

Slashdot It! "Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published.

Wikipedia already has thousands of people logging on at their homes and offices. "Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to a poll.[Wikipedia]

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard" was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

"Blogosphere", the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; "blog" itself was third; "netiquette", or Internet etiquette, came fourth and "blook", a book based on a blog, was fifth.

"Cookie", a file sent to a user's computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while "wiki", a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.

British pollsters YouGov questioned 2,091 adults earlier this month for the poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for books, which released the results in a statement.

Earlier this month, the growing use of words inspired by cyberspace was highlighted when the Collins English Dictionary announced that a string of them would be included in their ninth edition.

These included "me-media", a term for personal content websites such as Facebook, and "godcast", a religious service which has been converted to an MP3 format.

The dictionary's compilers monitor the use of English through a 2.5 billion word database of websites, magazines, books, journals, newspapers and broadcast transcripts to help them decide if new words should be included.

Affiliates reviews

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Introduction

The power supply unit is the single most important part of any computer. Regardless of the system there is a given rule: whether it is a simple workstation with integrated components or an advanced gaming system with fresh piece of technology available, everything requires power to operate. As anyone who has suffered the failure of a low-end power supply will tell you: not all power supply units (PSU’s) are created equal. Benchmark Reviews updates the original review with new features and load tested Oscilloscope ripple results for the A2 Revision Antec TruePower Trio 650W PSU.

This year alone the computer industry has made huge leaps in power supply technology. Single rail power supplies were dominantly standard heading into 2006. Now just one year later, we have seen a very sudden shift making dual-rail power supplies the most commonly used configuration in most products. But it is certain that it won’t take another year to witness a change to the trends. As power supply technology continuously evolves, a three-rail power supply may not make headlines against the bleeding edge five-rail power supply we unveiled here last week. However, Antec helps drive power supply evolution forward and brings to us the Trio series with three independent power rails to enhance power stability under load; all at a bargain price that won’t bleed the wallet.

The new generation of power supplies has arrived with Antec’s TruePower Trio series. The three +12V rails allow you to distribute your power more evenly, which will result in a more stable system. Available in three models: 430 Watt, 550 Watt and a 650 Watt that gives you serious power for even the most cutting edge components. TruePower Trio perfectly handles dual processors, dual graphics cards, and just about anything else you can throw at it.

Quite the claim that Antec makes of its TruePower series of power supplies; and I will prove once again if this is just more marketing hype to draw you in, or if it is in fact bragging rights for a product that I can personally recommend buying. One thing is certain even before the testing begins: at a street price of $99.99 (after $30.00 Rebate) at the time of this writing, the Antec TruePower Trio 650W PSU already offers the latest triple-rail technology for less then the cost of nearly all of the other 650W power supplies on the market.

Antec: The Company's Overview

Antec began in 1986, long before the tech boom of the late 1990’s, in Fremont, California. Now operating offices in the United States and Europe, Antec offers products to 25 countries worldwide. Presently, Antec maintains a popular range of products in: computer cases, power supplies, cooling fans, lighting components, and accessories. Antec is the original High Performance Upgrade company, which created the PC upgrade replacement category at retail. Their enclosures and power supplies have been the #1 seller by far in North American distribution and retail channels for five years running.

Read More at http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11&Itemid=1

Nokia poised to get next billion mobile users

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Rivals to Nokia have their work cut out to catch the world's biggest maker of mobile phones in the race to win the world's next billion cell phone users.

Industry figures at the CommunicAsia telecoms trade fair in Singapore this week were eager to take advantage of the continent's huge untapped markets, where only one person in every three owns a handset.

But barriers to entry into markets such as India are significant and Nokia is already well established with a wealth of distribution channels and 40 percent of the Asia-Pacific market--higher than its 36 percent overall global share.

Risks are also high--as evidenced by Motorola, Nokia's closest competitor in the lowest end of the market and overall, whose drive to win more of this type of business pushed it into the red last quarter.

Sony Ericsson already abandoned the very low end of the market to competitors.

The cell phone industry expects the number of people owning a mobile phone worldwide will grow to at least 4 billion over the next three years from 3 billion currently.

Between 300 and 400 million of these new users are expected to come from India alone, where users can take advantage of call rates as low as 1 cent a minute.

Tens of millions of people living in rural areas of India are buying their first phone--in most cases, an ultra-cheap model.

A strong retail presence is crucial in Asia, where more than 70 percent of consumers decide which phone to buy at the point of sale--in contrast to Europe and the United States, where phones are often bought from operators who subsidize them.

Samsung had a 16 percent share in the region in the first quarter, while Motorola held 12 percent, according to Strategy Analytics.

Nokia's much larger scale has also allowed it to keep its gross profit margin for low-cost handsets above 25 percent, close to its global average.

But adding tens of thousands of retail outlets or opening stores in just India is expensive, even for large vendors.

iPhone set to ring in more profits for Apple

Slashdot It! Few companies generate the kind of excitement before a product launch as Apple has before the debut of its eagerly awaited iPhone on June 29.

Consumers -- not to mention many tech writers and investors -- expect the iPhone to be a superior, standard-setting device. In other words, the iPod of cell phones.

The wait is almost over. Apple's iPhone will be released on June 29.

Apple has a lot riding on the iPhone as the company continues to branch out from its roots as a computer maker.

The company has sold 100 million iPods since the product's debut in November 2001. Apple's transformation to a consumer electronics giant under CEO Steve Jobs has yielded fat profits for the company and rewards for shareholders. Shares of Apple have surged 212 percent in the past two years, trouncing both the broader market as well as the Nasdaq.

But with so much promise in the air, the risk of "unprecedented" hype about the iPhone is great, said Van Baker, an analyst with technology research firm Gartner.

Hang up on the hype

Jobs has predicted the iPhone will sell 10 million units by the end of 2008.

No one doubts the slim white, GSM phone, equipped with Wi-Fi, a 3.5 inch screen, and built-in iPod looks good. And Apple has dug in deep to make technological improvements such as voicemail that can be sorted like email.

But the main question hanging over its release is how well all consumers - and not just Apple loyalists - will respond. Analysts see the battery life, the lack of a keyboard and price as possible sticking points. It's also going to be available from just one carrier, AT&T.

In mid-June the company announced that the iPhone's battery life will last longer than originally expected: 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 24 hours of audio playback.

AT&T hires extra 2,000 for iPhone launch

Analyst Shaw Wu of American Technology Research says the battery life is "decent." But the iPhone doesn't have a removable battery either, which could be a problem.

Wu explains that while an iPod is just used as an iPod; the iPhone "will be used for multiple functions" including, presumably, business matters that can't wait should a battery fail. The iPhone's user interface will use the battery, too.

As for the lack of a keyboard, virtual keys appear on the touch screen. Wu said he's heard that the there is a "learning curve." If it's too obtuse, potential buyers could be put off.

The cost of the iPhone is above the industry average, too. The iPhone will come with 4 gigabytes or 8 gigabytes of memory, priced initially at $499 or $599. That's on the high side for handheld devices and far above what most consumers pay for cell phones.

Analyst Hugues De La Vergne, also of Gartner, estimates 70 to 80 percent of cell phones in the U.S. are sold for less than $100 due to incentives consumers get from wireless service providers.

And if consumers balk at the high price, that could hurt Apple since Lehman's Blount says the consumer electronics market is expected to grow two to three times faster than the corporate hardware market over the next four years.

Remember the Mac?

Given the focus on the iPhone and the fact that iPods and other music products now account for a majority of Apple's sales, it's easy to forget that until not so long ago, Apple was known mainly as a computer maker. And Macs are still an important part of Apple's growth.

Thanks to the iPod's success, Apple has enjoyed a modest increase in computer market share during the past few years, from 3.2 percent in 2003 to 4.7 percent last year, according to information from Bear Stearns.

Apple analysts and industry watchers have made much of the so-called "halo effect," where satisfied iPod owners have decided to switch from PCs to Macs.

Thomas Telford, a portfolio manager at investment management firm American Century, who oversees a tech fund that holds shares in Apple, said he thinks Apple's computer market share could grow to 10 to 15 percent in the next five years.

And with all the hype on the iPhone, the Mac isn't the only Apple product that's getting lost in the shuffle. Another new offering from Apple, the Apple TV, also hasn't received a lot of attention.

Apple is hoping to win the battle for the living room with Apple TV. That device, which was released in March and sells for $299, allows users to play movies, TV shows, music and podcasts from their iTunes library on their TV. It can hold up to 200 hours of video, 36,000 songs or 25,000 photos.

Apple TV could be an important part of the company's overall digital entertainment strategy. But the sales haven't exactly gone through the roof since its debut. Jobs called Apple TV a "hobby" rather than a business at a recent industry event and said that at this point it expects to sell hundreds of thousands, rather than millions, of units per year.

Discuss this news at http://chewontechforum.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=12

Why web pirates are safe?

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Pirates don't just plunder. In Sweden, it seems, they also believe in sharing.

As the world's largest repository of BitTorrent files, ThePirateBay.org helps millions of users around the world share copyrighted movies, music and other files--without paying for them.

That's illegal, of course--at least it is in the U.S. But when Time Warner's Warner Bros. studio accused them of breaking U.S. copyright law in 2005, the pirates gleefully reminded the movie company that they didn't live in America, but rather in "the land of vikings, reindeer, Aurora Borealis and cute blond girls."

Based in Stockholm, The Pirate Bay serves as a massive worldwide hub for copyright infringement but is shielded by its home country's lax copyright laws. The site lives in a comfortable legal loophole, one of many available to Web sites that offer users copyrighted content. Some exploit vagaries in U.S. law, while others depend on their international immunity.

That rankles big media outfits like Sony, General Electric -owned NBC, News and Viacom as they vie to hang on to their sales and carve out a slice of the Web's growing audience--hence Viacom's ongoing $1 billion suit against Google's YouTube. But no matter the outcome of that trial, sites like The Pirate Bay show that the Web will always offer safe harbors for clever copyright violators.

Take the growing guerrilla army of YouTube clones. Video sites like DailyMotion, Veoh, GoFish, OuOu, Peekvid, LiveDigital and 1Dawg work on the same model as YouTube, allowing any user to upload content. But they don't suffer from as much legal scrutiny as better-known video sites, nor do they limit the length of clips uploaded by users.

That means practically any television show or movie can be dug up on one of these YouTube imitators, and another subindustry of Web portals has sprouted just for that purpose. Sites like Alluc.org, VideoHybrid.com, Peekvid.com, TVlinks.co.uk and YouTVPC.com all collect and organize links to movies and shows on these second-tier video sites, offering streaming, on-demand video copyright infringement.

These two classes of video sites--one that lets users upload videos and another that links them to movies and shows located elsewhere--work together in a careful symbiosis. Alluc.org, for instance, links to Lost episodes on Veoh, Scrubs episodes on LiveDigital and kung-fu movies on DailyMotion, bringing in about 500,000 unique visitors a day. The site’s creators, three teenagers living in a suburb of Hamburg, Germany, say they're making plenty of money, though they won't say how much. They also say they're not breaking any copyright laws, since they merely link to content instead of hosting it on their own site.

Their argument is rooted, ironically, in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that U.S. lawmakers approved in 1998. The Alluc.org kids, as well as the operators of most sites that let users upload content, argue that they're not violating copyright law if they're not the ones putting it up and if they take it down at the copyright holder's request. It's the same argument Google is making in its YouTube case.

But there are more practical reasons that sites like Alluc.org get away with what they're doing. One is that there are simply too many of them to keep track of. Media companies' lawyers rarely have time to police so many obscure sites, and even when they do, users can always upload the infringing files again. So the flow of copyrighted streaming video continues.

Not every scheme to evade intellectual property laws is so subtle. The music-selling site AllofMP3.com uses a simpler business model: Base your company in Russia, steal music from American labels and sell it cheaply. AllofMP3 allows users to download full albums for as little as $1 each--10% of what they would cost on iTunes. From June to October 2006 alone, the Recording Industry Association of America says that 11 million songs were downloaded from the site. AllofMP3 claims those sales adhered strictly to Russian law, but that doesn’t satisfy the RIAA; the record labels have launched a lawsuit, asking for $150,000 for each stolen file, totaling $1.65 trillion.

As Russia seeks to join the World Trade Organization, it may be forced to step in line with international copyright licensing and stamp out sites like AllofMP3. But there's still hope for international pirates: Despite Sweden's membership in the WTO since 1995, The Pirate Bay's copyright sabotage campaign is alive and well. Though Swedish police raided the site's headquarters and confiscated its servers in May of last year, the site was soon back online, running on donated hardware. Since then, Pirate Bay administrator Peter Sunde says, the site has started distributing its servers and bandwidth to other locations to avoid the possibility of another raid. Sunde claims even he doesn't know exactly where the servers are stashed.

Still, Sunde and his partners in piracy are waiting for the Swedish government to press charges. If they are prosecuted, Sunde suspects it will most likely be in the next month, before the servers confiscated from their headquarters last year become inadmissible as evidence. But he isn’t worried. "If the Swedish government presses charges, they’ll lose. If they don’t, the U.S. government will be mad at them," Sunde says. "They’re in quite a pickle."

So, he might have added, are the world’s copyright holders.

Internet radio go silence on June 28 in a silent protest

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Thousands of U.S. webcasters plan to turn off the music and go silent this Tuesday, June 26, to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of this country’s Internet radio industry.

In March, the Copyright Royalty Board announced that it would raise royalties for Internet broadcasters, moving them from a per-song rate to a per-listener rate. The increase would be made retroactive to the beginning of 2006 and would double over the next five years. After the announcement, a group of broadcasters spearheaded by National Public Radio petitioned the CRB for a rehearing, but a panel of judges denied the request less than a month later. Internet radio sites would be charged per performance of a song. A “performance” is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 “performances” for each song it plays.

Many webcasters are planning to shut off access to their streams entirely, while other webcasters plan to replace their music streams with long periods of silence (or static or ocean sounds or similar) interspersed with occasional brief public service announcements on the subject. Internet-only webcasters and broadcasters that simulcast online will alert their listeners that “silence” is what Internet radio may be reduced to after July 15th, the day on which 17 months’ worth of retroactive royalty payments — at new, exceedingly high rates — are due to the SoundExchange collection organization, following a recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision.

Jake Ward, a spokesman for Save Net Radio, said:

“The arbitrary and drastic rate increases set by the Copyright Royalty Board on March 2nd threaten the very livelihood of thousands of webcasters and their millions of listeners throughout the country. “The campaign to save Internet radio - a genuine grassroots movement comprised of hundreds of thousands of webcasters, artists and independent labels, and Net radio listeners - has quickly brought this issue to the national forefront and the halls of Congress, but there is still more to be done before the approaching deadline of July 15th. On Tuesday, thousands of webcasters will call on their millions of listeners to join the fight to save Internet radio and contact their Congressional representatives to ask for their support of the Internet Radio Equality Act.”

This would force some people to pirate music and let piracy hit a new height. Why can't they just understand that this is backfiring them!!!! Discuss about this at http://chewontechforum.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=10

Pentagon hited by Cyber attack

Slashdot It! The Defense Department took as many as 1,500 computers off line because of a cyber attack, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Few details were released about the attack, which happened Wednesday, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the computer systems would be working again soon.

Gates said the Pentagon sees hundreds of attacks a day, and this one had no adverse impact on department operations. Employees whose computers were affected could still use their handheld BlackBerrys.

During a press briefing Gates said: "We obviously have redundant systems in place. ... There will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences."

He said the Pentagon shut the computers down when a penetration of the system was detected, and the cause is still being investigated. When asked if his own e-mail account was affected, Gates said: "I don't do e-mail. I'm a very low-tech person."

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Pentagon spokesman, said Defense Department systems are probed every day by a wide variety of attacks. "The nature of the threat is large and diverse, and includes recreational hackers, self-styled cyber-vigilantes, various groups with nationalistic or ideological agendas, transnational actors and nation-states," Peppler said.

Google says Vista search changes not enough

Slashdot It! Ars Technica inspected Microsoft's joint filing and found that Microsoft is not going to allow a complete override of the default search service in all Explorer windows, and that the company also rejects Google's concerns about performance.

In response, Google said yesterday that the remedies don't go far enough. Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement, "We are pleased that as a result of Google's request that the consent decree be enforced, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general have required Microsoft to make changes to Vista."

Nevertheless, Drummond said that "Microsoft's current approach to Vista desktop search clearly violates the consent decree and limits consumer choice," and the proposed remedies "are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers."

Google did not elaborate on its expectations, although they are not difficult to piece together. Google had argued that it should be possible to disable Vista's search entirely, and Microsoft has not accommodated this demand. Search still runs, and OEMs and third-party software companies have not been given a way to schedule or disable it.

Furthermore, Microsoft did not make it possible to change the search defaults in a universal way, instead keeping its search system as the default throughout most of Windows Explorer. In short, Vista's search boxes will by and large return Vista's own search results if you type text into them and hit return. Microsoft's changes appear to mostly involve links to the "default" third party program, not a drop-in replacement.

Google's disappointment was only partly echoed by California Attorney General Jerry Brown, who called the remedy a step in the right direction. "This agreement—while not perfect—is a positive step towards greater competition in the software industry. It will enhance the ability of consumers to select the desktop search tool of their choice," he said.

At this stage, it's unclear what recourse either Brown or Google has to change Microsoft's plan. Thomas O. Barnett, assistant Attorney General and head of the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, said in a statement that the agreement reached between Microsoft and the DOJ "resolve[d] any issues about desktop search under the final judgments."

The DOJ and all 17 state attorneys general agreed with Microsoft's proposal. "Plaintiffs are collectively satisfied that this agreement will resolve any issues the complaint may raise under the Final Judgments, provided that Microsoft implements it as promised," according to the joint filing.

Google and eBay makes friends again

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eBay said the online auction leader plans to resume placing Web advertising through Google, but that it would rely on alternative advertising services to a greater degree.

eBay is one of the biggest buyers of keyword ads on Google's leading pay-per-click advertising system, AdWords, using them to promote its online auctions. It canceled all Google ads 10 days ago in protest over the Web search company's bid to woo eBay customers to a rival payment system.

Hani Durzy, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based eBay, said his company later on Friday would begin advertising on Google, but at reduced levels than previously. eBay had been buying tens of millions of keyword ads on Google each year.

eBay owns PayPal, which, with 143 million accounts, is the world's most popular online payment service among merchants and consumers. Last year, Google introduced an alternative payment system called Google Checkout and has been seeking to woo eBay merchants to accept direct payments via the rival service.

Now eBay plans to rely to a greater degree of competing advertising systems from Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, Time Warner's AOL, and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com.

Google generates virtually all its billions in revenue from AdWords, which shows related ads alongside Web search results tied to the words a user types into Google's search service.

The growing rivalry between the two companies' payment services spilled over at eBay's annual conference for key merchants last week in Boston when eBay protested Google's plans to hold a competing party outside the conference hall. Google was seeking to put pressure on eBay to accept its system on eBay auction sites. In response, eBay moved to eliminate all U.S. advertising on Google-affiliated sites. Amid the controversy, Google aborted its own promotional event.

'World of Warcraft' fan site sold for $1 million

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There's a lot of buzz in the World of Warcraft fan site universe this morning, with reports and rumors flying about fan sites being sold, about $1 million sale prices and even that the uber company in the business of selling WoW gold, IGE, has been sold.

According to a report from the blog, TechSoapBox, the WoW site Wowhead has been sold for $1 million.

Another blog, meanwhile, claims that, in fact, Wowhead was purchased by IGE parent Affinity Media.

Getting away for a second from the complexities of what it all means in the gold business, that's a pretty impressive number if it's true.

Of course, WoW gold is a huge business. I don't know any exact numbers--nor does anyone else since the buying and selling of WoW virtual assets, and those of most online games, is prohibited by the games' publishers. But by some estimates, the so-called secondary market for these virtual assets (of all online games) is approaching $1 billion a year.

So, in that regard, $1 million for a site that traffics in these virtual assets may not be very much money at all.

More interesting, perhaps, is the rumor that IGE has been sold.

Why HDMI got it all screwed up

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HDMI Cable

HDMI, as we've pointed out elsewhere, is a format which was designed primarily to serve the interests of the content-provider industries, not to serve the interests of the consumer. The result is a mess, and in particular, the signal is quite hard to route and switch, cable assemblies are unnecessarily complicated, and distance runs are chancy. Why is this, and what did the designers of the standard do wrong? And what can we do about it?

The story begins with another badly-developed standard, DVI. A few years ago, there was a movement within the computer industry to develop a new digital video display standard to replace the traditional analog VGA/RGBHV arrangement still found on most computer video cards and monitors. Interested parties grouped together to form the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG), which developed the DVI standard.

DVI had all the earmarks of a standard designed by committee, and it remains one of the most confusing video interfaces ever. DVI could run analog signals, digital signals, or both, and it could run digital signals either in a single-link configuration (in a cable using four twisted pairs for the signal), or in a dual-link configuration (using seven). Identifying which DVI standard or standards any particular device supported was not always easy, and the DVI connector came in various flavors and was never really manufactured in any form that wasn't well-nigh impossible to terminate.

But the worst thing about DVI was something that the computer-display professionals involved in its development really didn't give much thought to: distance runs. Most computer displays are mounted at most a few feet away from the CPU, so it didn't seem imperative that DVI work well over distance. This lack of concern for function at a distance, coupled with common use of twisted-pair cable (e.g., CAT 5) in computer interconnection, led to a decision that DVI would be run in twisted-pair cable.

Had the DVI standard been designed by broadcast engineers rather than computer engineers, things probably would have turned out very differently. In the broadcast world, everything from lowly composite video to High-Definition Serial Digital Video is run in coaxial cables, and for good reasons, which we'll get to in a bit. Long-distance runs of VGA, in fact, are always handled in coaxial cable (though there may be a number of miniature coaxes in a small bundle, rather than something which obviously appears to be coax).

DVI lacked a couple of things which the consumer audio/video industry wanted. It was implemented on a variety of HD displays and source devices, but it was confusing for the consumer because of the many variants on the standard and different connector configurations, and it didn't carry audio signals. A consortium to develop and promote a new interface, HDMI, was formed; the idea was to come up with a standard which could be implemented more uniformly, was less confusing, and offered the option of routing audio signals along with video.

Here, again, was an opportunity to avoid problems. The difficulties of running DVI-D signals over long distances were well known, and the mistakes of the past could have been avoided by developing HDMI as a wholly new standard, independent of DVI. Instead, the HDMI group elected to modify the DVI standard, using the same encoding scheme and the same basic interface design, but adding embedded audio and designing a new plug. Instead of many DVI options, analog, digital, single and dual link, there was one "flavor" of HDMI (actually, there is also a dual-link version in the HDMI spec--but you won't find it implemented on any currently available device). This provided the advantage of making HDMI backward-compatible with some existing DVI hardware, but it locked the interface into the electrical requirements of the DVI interface. Specifically, that means that the signals have to be run balanced, on 100 ohm impedance twisted pairs.

We're often asked why that's so bad. After all, CAT 5 cable can run high-speed data from point to point very reliably--why can't one count on twisted-pair cable to do a good job with digital video signals as well? And what makes coax so great for that type of application?

First, it's important to understand that a lot of other protocols which run over twisted-pair wire are two-way communications with error correction. A packet that doesn't arrive on a computer network connection can be re-sent; an HDMI or DVI signal is a real-time, one-way stream of pixels that doesn't stop, doesn't error-check, and doesn't repair its mistakes--it just runs and runs, regardless of what's happening at the other end of the signal chain.

Second, HDMI runs fast--at 1080p, the rate is around 150 Megapixels/second. CAT5, by contrast, is rated at 100 megabits per second--and that's bits, not pixels.

Third, HDMI runs parallel, not serially. There are three color signals riding on three pairs, with a clock circuit running on the fourth. These signals can't fall out of time with one another, or with the clock, without trouble--and the faster the bitrate, the shorter the bits are, and consequently the tighter the time window becomes for each bit to be registered.

Consider, by contrast, what the broadcast world did when it needed to route digital video from point to point. The result was HD-SDI, high-definition serial digital interface. One coaxial cable can route an HD SDI signal hundreds of feet without errors, with no repeater hardware or EQs in the line. Had the consumer industry opted for a coaxial-based standard, we'd be able to do the same in our homes. Admittedly, few of us need to make 300-foot runs; but the ability to run 300 feet without problems would be accompanied by rock-solid certainty of being able to do 50, or 75, without any worry at all.

But why is there such a big difference between twisted pairs and coax? It all has to do with the electrical properties of the two methods of routing signal from one place to another: balanced, through twisted pair, and unbalanced, through coax.

We tend to assume, when thinking about wire, that when we apply a signal to one end of a wire, it arrives instantaneously at the other end of that wire, unaltered. If you've ever spent any time studying basic DC circuit theory, that's exactly the assumption you're accustomed to making. That assumption works pretty well if we're talking about low-frequency signals and modest distances, but wire and electricity behave in strange and counterintuitive ways over distance, and at high frequencies. Nothing in this universe--not even light--travels instantaneously from point to point, and when we apply a voltage to a wire, we start a wave of energy propagating down that wire which takes time to get where it's going, and which arrives in a different condition from that in which it left. This isn't important if you're turning on a reading lamp, but it's very important in high-speed digital signaling. There are a few considerations that start to cause real trouble:

1. Time: electricity doesn't travel instantaneously. It travels at something approaching the speed of light, and exactly how fast it travels depends upon the insulating material surrounding the wire. As the composition and density of that insulation changes from point to point along the wire, the speed of travel changes.
2. Resistance: electricity burns up in wire and turns into heat.
3. Skin effect: higher frequencies travel primarily on the outside of a wire, while lower frequencies use more of the wire's depth; this means that higher frequencies face more resistance, and are burned up more rapidly, than lower frequencies.
4. Capacitance: some of the energy of the signal gets stored in the wire by a principle known as "capacitance," rather than being delivered immediately to the destination. This smears out the signal relative to time, making changes in voltage appear less sudden at the far end of the wire than they were at the source. This phenomenon is frequency-dependent, with higher frequencies being more strongly affected.
5. Impedance: if the characteristic impedance of the cable doesn't match the impedance of the source and load circuits, the impedance mismatch will cause portions of the signal to be reflected back and forth in the cable. The same is true for variations in impedance from point to point within the cable.
6. Crosstalk: when signals are run in parallel over a distance, the signal in one wire will induce a similar signal in another, causing interference.
7. Inductance: just as capacitance smears out changes in voltage, inductance--the relationship between a current flow and an induced electromagnetic field around that flow--smears out changes in the rate of current flow over time.

Impedance, in particular, becomes a really important concern any time the cable length is more than about a quarter of the signal wavelength, and becomes increasingly important as the cable length becomes a greater and greater multiple of that wavelength. The signal wavelength, for one of the color channels of a 1080p HDMI signal, is about 16 inches₁, making the quarter-wave a mere four inches--so impedance is an enormous consideration in getting HDMI signals to propagate along a cable without serious degradation.

Impedance is a function of the physical dimensions and arrangement of the cable's parts, and the type and consistency of the dielectric materials in the cable. There are two principal sorts of cable "architecture" used in data cabling (and HDMI, being a digital standard, is really a data cable), and each has its advantages. First, there's twisted-pair cable, used in a diverse range of computer-related applications. Twisted-pair cables are generally economical to make and can be quite small in overall profile. Second, there's coaxial cable, where one conductor runs down the center and the other is a cylindrical "shield" running over the outside, with a layer of insulation between. Coaxial cable is costlier to produce, but has technical advantages over twisted pair, particularly in the area of impedance.

It's impossible to control the impedance of any cable perfectly. We can, of course, if we know the types of materials to be used in building the cable, create a sort of mathematical model of the perfect cable; this cable has perfect symmetry, perfect materials, and manufacturing tolerances of zero in every dimension, and its impedance is fixed and dead-on-spec. But the real world won't allow us to build and use this perfect cable. The dimensions involved are very small and hard to control, and the materials in use aren't perfect; consequently, all we can do is control manufacturing within certain technical limits. Further, when a cable is in use, it can't be like our perfect model; it has to bend, and it has to be affixed to connectors.

So, what do we get instead of perfect cable, with perfect impedance? We get real cable, with impedance controlled within some tolerance; and we hope that we can make the cable conform to tolerances tight enough for the application to which we put it. As it happens, some types of impedance variation are easier to control than others, so depending on the type of cable architecture we choose, the task of controlling impedance becomes harder or easier. Coaxial cable, in this area, is clearly the superior design; the best precision video coaxes have superb bandwidth and excellent impedance control. Belden 1694A, for example, has a specified impedance tolerance of +/- 1.5 ohms, which is just two percent of the 75 ohm spec; and that tolerance is a conservative figure, with the actual impedance of the cable seldom off by more than half an ohm (2/3 of one percent off-spec). Twisted pair does not remotely compare; getting within 10 or 15 percent impedance tolerance is excellent, and the best bonded-pair Belden cables stay dependably within about 8 ohms of the 100 ohm spec.

If we were running a low bit-rate through this cable, it wouldn't really matter. Plus or minus 10 or 15 ohms would be "good enough" and the interface would work just great. But the bitrate demands placed on HDMI cable are severe. At 1080i, the pixel clock runs at 74.25 MHz, and each of the three color channels sends a ten-bit signal on each pulse of the clock, for a bitrate of 742.5 Mbps. What's worse, some devices are now able to send or receive 1080p/60, which requires double that bitrate.

Impedance mismatch, at these bitrates, causes all manner of havoc. Variations in impedance within the cable cause the signal to degrade substantially, and in a non-linear way that can't easily be EQ'd or amplified away. The result is that the HDMI standard will always be faced with serious limitations on distance. We have found that, at 720p and 1080i, well-made cables up to around 50 feet will work properly with most, but not all, source/display combinations. If 1080p becomes a standard, plenty of cables which have been good enough to date will fail. And it gets worse...

In June 2005, the HDMI organization announced the new HDMI 1.3 spec. Among other things, the 1.3 spec offers new color depths which require more bits per pixel. The HDMI press release states:

"HDMI 1.3 increases its single-link bandwidth from 165MHz (4.95 gigabits per second) to 340 MHz (10.2 Gbps) to support the demands of future high definition display devices, such as higher resolutions, Deep Color and high frame rates."

So, what did they do to enable the HDMI cable to convey this massive increase in bitrate? If your guess is "nothing whatsoever," you're right. The HDMI cable is still the same four shielded 100-ohm twisted pairs, still subject to the same technical and manufacturing limitations. And don't draw any consolation from those modest "bandwidth" requirements, stated in Megahertz; those numbers are the frequencies of the clock pulses, which run at 1/10 the rate of the data pairs, and why the HDMI people chose to call those the "bandwidth" requirements of the cable is anyone's guess. The only good news here is that the bitrates quoted are the summed bitrates of the three color channels -- so a twisted pair's potential bandwidth requirement has gone up "only" to 3.4 Gbps rather than 10.2.

What's to be Done?

It's unlikely, given the wholehearted way in which the consumer electronics industry has embraced HDMI, that this interface will disappear anytime soon. We're stuck with it. Given that that's so, what can a person do to avoid problems with video dropouts and outright signal failure?

First, limiting run lengths is a good idea whenever it can be done. If you don't need to put your sources at one end of the room and the display at the other, by all means avoid doing so.

Second, if run lengths can't be limited, consider relying on analog component or RGBHV signals for your distance runs; these formats are much more robust (in large part because they run in coax rather than in twisted pairs) and can be run hundreds of feet.

Third, eliminating unnecessary switches, couplers, and adapters may help; as bad as the impedance mismatch problems are in the cable itself, those problems are even worse when the cable's conductors must be split out to join to a connector, or when the signal must travel through connections that can't be kept at 100 ohms.

Fourth, there are some things that can be done in cable design, and we're on the task. In particular, though the impedance of pairs can be controlled only to a limited degree, there are some things which the Chinese (who, as of this writing, manufacture all of the HDMI cable sold by anyone, anywhere, under any brand name) do not have the technical capacity to do but which American manufacturers do, and which help address the problem. Belden has a patented "bonded pair" technology which involves molding twisted pairs together rather than simply twisting them, and which was developed specifically to address the problem of running high bitrates through twisted pairs. Beginning in 2005, we consulted with Belden on construction of such a cable for use in HDMI applications and in 2006, Belden built a series of sample reels of cable for us in its engineering lab. Our in-use testing has shown the cable working at 150 feet at ordinary high-definition resolutions (720p, 1080i) and up to 180 feet at 480p. Electrical tests of the cable indicate that it should be good for 1080p at a greater distance than any cable currently on the market. The cable has been ordered for full-scale production and should be available on our site around the very end of June or the first half of July 2007.

From http://www.bluejeanscable.com/index.htm

Affiliates Reviews

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The age of the heatpipe is upon us. Ever since it broke onto the scene, cooling devices of every style and shape have emerged, so of which seem to defy logic. It is assured to us then that the age of the aluminum block cooler is long gone, hopefully never to be seen again.

The engineers at Zaward are something like a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, because they have taken to a unique style of functional cooling devices. One of their featured products is the Sylphee aluminum CPU cooler. Benchmark Reviews tested this dual-heatpipe dual-impeller cooler, and it proved to be a very unique product, with results just as uncommon. Read on to see if function came before fashion, or if these looks can kill you system.

I have a feeling that Zaward knows that not everyone is open to trying out something radically new. This seems the case, because the retail packaging does a decent job of disguising the unique shape of the Sylphee. The packaging reveals only hints of what lies within, but hopefully the contents offer a pleasant surprise for consumers.

Features

• Dual embedded silent fans.
• 2 pcs high performance heat pipes.
• Auto fan speed controlled by Thermistors.
• Extremely silent fans at 18dBA, intake air flow from both sides.
• Airflow blows to multi-direction and cools the whole computer system.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=1

Sony promises more games for PS3

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Sony expects at least 380 new PlayStation 3 games to hit the market this business year and says that should rev up demand for the console that has so far lost out to Nintendo's wildly popular Wii.

There are about 150 games currently available for the PlayStation 3, including online titles.

Chief Executive Howard Stringer said at Sony's annual shareholders' meeting that the company will review its dividend policy once it has achieved its profitability target for the year to March 2008, raising the possibility of future dividend hikes.

"Attractive game software is the key to accelerate PS3 growth over the next year," Stringer said on Thursday.

Sony's game division posted an operating loss of $1.88 billion in the past business year because of hefty start-up costs for the PS3, prompting investors to see the console business as Sony's biggest risk factor.

Nintendo's Wii game console has been outselling the PS3 by three to one in Japan and more than two to one in the United States so far this year, according to game magazine publisher Enterbrain and research firm NPD.

A lack of attractive games has been widely cited as a reason for the PS3's relatively weak performance in addition to the fact that it is twice as expensive as the Wii.

More than 200 packaged software titles will likely be released for the PS3 in the year to March 2008, and more than 180 titles are expected to be launched over the Internet, Stringer said.

"PlayStation 3 going forward will be vital to our future and we'll succeed," said Stringer, the first non-Japanese to run the Tokyo-based electronics and entertainment conglomerate.

Sony aims to double its PS3 shipments to 11 million units in the current business year and reduce the game unit's loss to $404.5 million.

Responding to a shareholder request for higher dividend payouts, Welsh-born Stringer said Sony management is willing to re-examine its dividend policy, but achieving its profitability target should come first.

Sony aims to hit a group-wide operating profit margin of 5 percent in the current business year, and a 4 percent margin for its electronics division.

In the past business year, when its earnings were hit by the massive loss at the game unit and costs to recall 9.6 million PC batteries, its overall operating margin came to 0.9 percent, and its mainstay electronics unit posted a 2.6 percent margin.

Want to install Malware in websites, just subscribe to the subscription

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Like many just-launched e-commerce sites in the world, this unnamed Web site has a fairly functional, if somewhat rudimentary, home page. A list of options at top of the home page allows visitors to transact business in Russian or in English, offers an FAQ section, spells out the terms and conditions for software use and provides details on payment forms that are supported.

But contact details are, shall we say, sparse. That's because the merchandise being hawked on the site -- no we're not going to say what it is -- aren't exactly legitimate. The site offers malicious code that webmasters with criminal intent can use to infect visitors to their sites with a spyware Trojan.

In return for downloading the malware to their sites, Web site owners are promised at least 50 Euros -- about US$66 -- every Monday, with the potential for even more for "clean installs" of the malicious code on end user systems. "If your traffic is good, we will change rates for you and make payout with new rates," the site promises.

As organized gangs increasingly turn to cybercrime, sites like the one described are coming to represent the new face of malware development and distribution, according to security researchers. Unlike malicious code writers of the past who tended to distribute their code to a tight group of insiders or in underground newsgroups, the new breed is far more professional about how it hawks, plies and prices its wares, they said.

"We've been seeing a growth of highly organized managed exploit providers in non-extradition countries" over the past year or so, said Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategies at IBM's ISS X-Force team. For subscriptions starting as low as $20 per month, such enterprises sell "fully managed exploit engines" that spyware distributors and spammers can use to infiltrate systems worldwide, he said.

The exploit code is usually encrypted and uses a range of morphing techniques to evade detection by security software. It is designed to use various vulnerabilities to try and infect a target system. And many exploit providers simply wait for Microsoft's monthly patches, which they then reverse engineer to develop new exploit code against the disclosed vulnerabilities, Ollmann said.

One such site was discovered by Don Jackson, a security researcher at SecureWorks, an Atlanta-based managed security service provider. While investigating a Trojan named Gozi recently, Jackson discovered that it was designed to steal data from encrypted SSL streams and send it to a server based in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Trojan took advantage of a vulnerability in the iFrame tags of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and had apparently been planted on several hosted Web sites, community forums, social networking sites and sites belonging to small businesses.

The server to which the stolen information was sent to held more than 10,000 records containing confidential information belonging to about 5,200 home users. It was maintained by a group called 76Service and contained server-side code for stealing data from systems -- as well as code for an administrator interface and a customer interface for data mining, Jackson said.

The front end allowed subscribers to login to individual accounts, view indexed data and get results from queries based on certain fields such as IP addresses and URLs. Each customer-generated query had a price associated with it, Jackson said. The currency unit used on the site was WMZ, a WebMoney unit roughly equivalent to the U.S. dollar, Jackson said. A customer query returning three passwords for a small retailer might cost 100 WMZ, while a query for 10 passwords for an international bank might fetch 2,500 WMZ or more. Customers could also choose how they wanted their search results delivered -- as compressed files in e-mails or via FTP.

The actual Gozi Trojan code itself appears to have been purchased by 76Service from a Russian hacking group called the HangUp Team. Such code typically costs about $1,000 to $2,000, depending on its sophistication, Jackson said. In addition to the original Trojan, the server also hosted two ready-to-deploy variants in a separate staging area. The malicious code included a downloader and a stored password stealer and appeared to be have been made to order for 76Service.

Often, groups such as the HangUp Team also offer a detection monitoring service with which they keep an eye on anti-virus vendors to know exactly when signatures are available that can detect their malware. Customers who can afford the service are then told to start releasing variants to evade detection. And customers willing to pay for premium service can get hundreds of such ready-to-use variants bundled with their initial malware code purchase.

"When the first variant is detected by many AV vendors and data from new infections starts to slow, the person providing the executable code is to spot that and release a new variant," Jackson said.

The actual server hardware that the 76Service used was being managed by another entity called Russian Business Network (RBN), which provided SNMP-based management and back-up services. "This ensured a level of service [comparable to] a hosting provider," Jackson said.

"We are not talking about kids doing it for kicks over the weekend anymore," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak,, chief technology officer of Finjan a Californian-based security vendor. "This is real cash, real money that's involved here."

A report released last June by Finjan, had already noted a trend towards the commercialization of malicious code, Ben-Itzhak said. That report noted that cybercriminals hold "vulnerability auctions" at they sell information on freshly discovered software flaws to the highest bidder. Another trend spotted was the packaging of exploits into professional, off-the-shelf tool kits that can be used to create malicious Web sites. One such tool kit -- Web Attacker -- cost just $300 from a Russian Web site.

"Just like any other legitimate software company, the Russian Web site even solicited support and update service, and provided detailed reporting capabilities that could outline the number of people infected per exploit and per operating system," the Finjan report noted. "The level of investment in this particular software indicates that there is substantial demand for such products."

Future versions of Windows to support more cores

Slashdot It! Microsoft executive Ty Carlson spoke about the future of Windows recently during a panel discussion at the Future in Review 2007 conference held in San Diego, California. Carlson said that future versions of Windows would have to be "fundamentally different" in order to take full advantage of future CPUs that will contain many processing cores.

"You're going to see in excess of eight, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, whose job title is director of technical strategy at Microsoft. Windows Vista, he said, was "designed to run on one, two, maybe four processors."

Carlson is tipping his hat to the fact that little growth is expected from straight MHz scaling of single CPU cores over the coming years. Multi-core is the only way to go (for now), but Microsoft isn't exactly behind the times. The Windows kernel has supported multiple processors since the first release of NT (which for marketing reasons was called version 3.1) back in 1993. The NT kernel can allocate various processes and threads to different CPUs, and the maximum number of CPUs that it supports is generally an issue of licensing, not technical capability. (There is a hard limit, however, on NT systems: 32-bit Windows can have only 32 total processor cores, and 64-bit Windows has a 64-core limit, no matter how many physical processors are in the system).

It only makes sense that as the multi-core scene matures, so will Microsoft's embrace of it. Whether or not this embrace will result in something "fundamentally different" is not particularly clear, and given that Carlson is more of a marketing person than a technical one (he previously held the position of manager of the rapid deployment program), there's always the possibility that "fundamentally different" means nothing more than "different." Still, let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

Carlson might be talking about features that exist in specialty versions of its operating systems, such as Windows DataCenter Server, trickling down to the consumer level. Alternatively, Carlson might be implying that the layers of software, including the user interface, that run on top of the Windows kernel may need to receive an overhaul.

Currently, Windows already spawns many different processes and threads as it goes about its business, but there are still areas where it could be improved. Back in 1991 when ex-Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée was starting development of a new operating system called BeOS, its designers tried to make the entire operating system "pervasively multithreaded" in anticipation that multiple CPUs would be much more common in the future. This ensured that any one window that became unresponsive would not interfere with any other windows, although the forced multithreaded programming model increased the risk of programming errors such as race conditions and deadlocks. It does seem highly unlikely, however, that Microsoft would make major changes to the GUI model, given that they just rewrote the 20 year-old GDI/GDI+ model for Windows Vista.

It will still take some time before many applications take full advantage of multithreading and thus full advantage of multiple CPU cores. Even game developers, who by necessity need to stay on the cutting edge of performance, have only recently started taking advantage of multiple threads.

Exactly how Windows in particular will adapt to the reality of dozens of cores on a single chip is still not yet known, although I bet that Ars readers can come up with all sorts of interesting and unusual ideas. When contacted for clarification of Carlson's statements, a Microsoft spokesperson would only say "We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we're working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates."

Recycling PCs is not a profitable business for HP

Slashdot It! Being environmentally friendly is quite fashionable, but it's not exactly pretty at the Hewlett-Packard Recycling Center.

It's here that everything from video cassettes to server racks to notebooks, CRT monitors and multifunction printers go to die. But they're not allowed to pass away quietly; instead, they're ground and melted down to almost unrecognizable chunks of motherboards and copper dust.

It used to be that consumers just set old monitors or printers on the sidewalk with a "free" sign, and corporations sent massive shipments straight to the local landfill. But electronics recycling programs are getting much more attention these days, and governments have imposed strict regulations on how to get rid of electronics. So now when you ship a broken video camera or router back to the manufacturer, it could end up in a place like this.

Inside the massive facility, pallets of gray copiers are stacked next to shrink-wrapped packages of mismatched monitors awaiting slow, painful deaths. But before they get to the grinding machine, most electronics first have to face a horde of men and women armed with air guns and screwdrivers.

Hunched over their desks in blue lab coats, the recycling center employees swiftly strip machines of their innards, separating them for the grinding process. One petite, affable-looking woman made quick work of a stack of black notebook PCs--folding the screen open, snapping the plastic hinge with a loud crack, removing the LCD screen, then flipping it over to remove both the main battery and smaller button cell battery. The PCs' plastic casing, batteries and screen are all divided and ground separately.

The hazardous materials--mercury bulbs in old CRT televisions and monitors, batteries, and inkjet and laserjet cartridges--are teased out and sent elsewhere to be melted down right away, but the rest face the granular shredder, which sounds as painful as it looks.

Corporations, particularly technology companies, are beginning to realize there are significant public relations and other benefits to having a green policy. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 3 million tons of electronic waste, e-waste, get dumped in landfills every year. That's potentially dangerous to consumers and the environment, as materials like cathode ray tube monitors contain lead and mercury, which when placed in landfills can seep into groundwater. And plastics don't biodegrade very well.

HP's recycling efforts are not directly beneficial to the company's bottom line. Though he declined to give specific figures, the product recycling operation in Roseville costs "millions of dollars" a year, said Kenneth Turner, HP's manager of product takeback operations.

"It's not profitable, but it's worth doing for our reputation," he said. Ensuring that the process is done the right way--not putting hazardous materials into the ground--also lessens HP's vulnerability to environmentally oriented lawsuits, he added.

The HP Roseville recycling facility processes 4 million pounds, or 24,000 tons, of electronic hardware per month, not counting ink cartridges, which are recycled at separate plants in Virginia and Tennessee. HP says it's been recycling its products since 1987, but mostly by taking back broken machines and swapping out the reusable parts. Ten years later, HP built the Roseville plant with what the company claims is the first electronics shredding machine.

The facility, which operates almost continuously, isn't just for HP products. Instead, many electronics companies send their leftovers, their unwanted and broken products there. The 200,000-square-foot facility receives what looks like up to half a football field's worth of unwanted electronics per day, including returns from individual customers.

The first step of the process minces the material into 4-inch shards. The precious metals, like gold, silver, platinum and copper, are collected and sent to a smelter, where they are melted down and sold for reuse. What's left rumbles by on a conveyor belt for a second grind, this time into 2-inch pieces. A giant magnet then picks out the small pieces of steel.

Next is another conveyor belt with positively charged tubes on each end. The tubes create an Eddy current, which causes the aluminum pieces to bounce around, separating itself from the plastics.

The end result is a 5,000-pound box of silicon, glass, and plastic confetti, which is shipped out to a separate contracted facility and reused to make auto body parts, clothes hangers, plastic toys, fence posts, serving trays, roof tiles--and maybe even your next PC.

Patents on Security patches?

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Security researchers, are you tired of handing your vulnerability discoveries over to your employer, as if that were what you're paid to do? Helping vendors securing their products—for free—so that their users won't be endangered by new vulnerabilities? Showing your hacking prowess off to your friends, groveling for security jobs or selling your raw discoveries to middlemen for a fraction—a pittance—of their real value?

Take heart, underappreciated, unremunerated vassals, for a new firm is offering to work with you on a vulnerability patch that they will then patent and go to court to defend. You'll split the profits with the firm, Intellectual Weapons, if they manage to sell the patch to the vendor. The firm may also try to patent any adaptations to an intrusion detection system or any other third-party software aimed at dealing with the vulnerability, so rest assured, there are many parties from which to potentially squeeze payoff.

Intellectual Weapons is offering to accept vulnerabilities you've discovered, as long as you haven't told anyone else, haven't discovered the vulnerability through illegal means or have any legal responsibility to tell a vendor about the vulnerability.

Also, the vulnerability has to be profitable—the product must be "highly valuable," according to the firm's site, "especially as a percentage of the vendor's revenue." The product can't be up for upcoming phaseout—after all, the system takes, on average, seven years to churn out a new patent. The vendor has to have deep pockets so it can pay damages, and your solution has to be simple enough to be explained to a jury.

Because goodness, you will be looking at juries and lawyers, you can count on that. Intellectual Weapons says this isn't for everybody. The firm says it "fully [anticipates] major battles."

"We need people who have the emotional stability and the tenacity to persevere with each project—from describing the vulnerability, and helping develop the fix, through to generating and enforcing the IP," the firm states on its site.

Patenting may be a new twist, but the idea of profiteering from vulnerabilities is nothing new. iDefense Labs has its Vulnerability Contributor Program, and TippingPoint has its Zero Day Initiative. Even the Mozilla Foundation tried it, although of course the open-source software project dedicated funds to bugs found in only its own code.

The blogosphere is frothing.

"Nice. The race to the bottom started by [TippingPoint parent company] 3Com and [iDefense] is now complete. I for one hope that Matasano is able to use this idea in regards to a TippingPoint vulnerability," wrote Chris_BJune in a response to a blog from security firm Matasano's Thomas Ptacek.

According to Ptacek, the reasons why nobody should care about Intellectual Weapons includes the fact that the time required to complete a patent filing is over seven years. Add on to that the years it will take to "initiate, litigate and prevail in a patent claim, especially against an established software vendor," Ptacek said. "Presuming you do prevail; you likely won't."

Intellectual Weapons has plans to deal with these inconveniences, however. The company says that it may try to use a Petition to Make Special in order to speed up the examination process when filing a U.S. patent. Another strategy the firm proposes using is to go after a utility model rather than a patent—a utility model being similar to a patent but easier to obtain and of shorter duration—typically six to 10 years.

"In most countries where utility model protection is available, patent offices do not examine applications as to substance prior to registration," the company says. "This means that the registration process is often significantly simpler, cheaper and faster. The requirements for acquiring a utility model are less stringent than for patents."

Ptacek calls utility models "patents-lite." Other nicknames are "petty patent," "minor patent" and "small patent." Such patent workarounds are available in some EU countries and other countries including Argentina, China, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Korea and Uzbekistan.

"Would it be [possible] for an outfit like 'Intellectual Weapons,' exploiting the services of contingency-fee lawyers, to get an injunction against a Microsoft security fix in the Republic of Moldova? Anything's possible," Ptacek said.

He doesn't believe it will happen, however, given that international patents have to be fought jurisdiction by jurisdiction. "In this case, you'd be slogging through those fights for a shot at a tiny sliver of the revenue generated by the products you're targeting. This is nothing like NTP vs. RIM, where NTP's claims enabled RIM's entire product."

I think this would be crazy if they really patent security patches.

Sell your torrent on this website

Slashdot It! I had just found this torrent website that allows you to sell your torrent on the website. This is showing that Piracy is winning despite all the government officials clamping down on piracy. How it works?

1. Alice lists her home movie for sale on PeerIt.com. She has an unlimited amount of licenses - its her movie. The sale price is $12, and the payout is $2. Alice chooses to accept both PayPal and Google Checkout as payment types. Alice begins to seed her movie by opening the torrent created by PeerIt with the PeerIt BitTorrent client
2. Bob searches PeerIt.com for home movies and finds Alice's movie. Bob purchases the move by paying with Google Checkout. He then downloads the movie from Alice with his PeerIt BitTorrent client. Bob leaves his PeerIt BitTorrent client open, and continues to share the movie he downloaded from Alice.
3. Carol browses PeerIt.com movies section, and decides to purchase Alice's movie. Carol pays for the movie via PayPal, and downloads the movie with the PeerIt BitTorrent client. Carol recieves half of the movie Alice and half from Bob.
4. Alice now owes Bob $1 for helping deliver half of the movie to Carol - since the payout is $2, and Bob gave Carol half of it.
5. Alice logs into PeerIt.com and notices a bill in her Account, under Accounts Payable.
6. Bob logs into PeerIt.com and notices Alice owes him $1 for sharing Alice's home movie
7. Alice chooses to Pay her bill, and sends Bob $1 via PayPal MassPay. Alice marks her bill as "Paid"
8. Bob notices that he received $1 from Alice, and sees that his Accounts Payable has listed Alice as paying him $1
9. Bob leaves Alice positive feedback for his pleasant PeerIt.com experiance

My option Payment through PayPal is a breeze for everyone as PayPal is very safe. But you need to download their client to sell your torrent

Selling An Item on PeerIt

1. Create A Seller Account
   1. Start by logging in or creating an account. No personal information is gathered in this step. Your email is used only in case you loose your password.
2. List An Item
   1. Open the PeerIt BitTorrent Client.
   2. Choose "Create Torrent" from the "File" menu.
   3. You will be prompted to select files or folder, select the files or folders you wish to sell.
   4. Once your torrent is created, click "Sell It On PeerIt" button. This will bring you to the sell page.
   5. On the sell page fill in the item details. A help link is available on every page to explain the details.
   6. Under "Torrent" click "Browse" and select the file you just created.
   7. Once you have all the information filled in click "List ". If there are errors a yellow box will appear at the top telling you how to fix the problem. If everything is OK then you should see your item listed and you must now seed it.
   8. If you have not already added a PayPal or Google ID to your account you will be prompted for them after clicking "List".
3. Seed An Item
   1. Next seed the item you have just listed. As the first person to own the digital item you are selling you must make it available on the PeerIt network.
   2. Click the "Start Seeding" button in the middle of the page for the item you have just listed
   3. Click either "Save As" or "Open" on the file download window. Make sure your browser is not blocking the download.
   4. The PeerIt BitTorrent Client client will autmatically open the downloaded torrent and begin seeding your digital goods.
   5. Make sure that there is a green "play" button next to all the torrents your client is seeding. If not right-click the item and choose "Start".
4. Verify Item Availability
   1. To verify that your item is listed and seeded go to the "My Listings" tab.
   2. Find your item and verify that "Health" indicates at least 1 seed.
   3. If not please see Configuring Your Firewall.
   4. The health should be updated in no longer than 5 minutes

Seller Security

1. To sell an item you must provide a PayPal or Google ID. WE NEVER ASK NOR REQUIRE YOUR PAYPAL OR GOOGLE PASSWORD.
2. Your PayPal or Google ID will be used by the buyer of your items to send you money.
3. PeerIt does not email distribute or use your PayPal or Google ID in any way.
4. All transactions are directly between the seller and the buyer. All PayPal and Google warranties and terms of service apply.
5. Our goal is to help you sell your digital goods online.
6. We will not jeopardize the trust of our sellers or our buyers.
7. If you see an abuse of PeerIt seller or buyer information please contact PeerIt so that we may resolve it.

PeerIt BitTorrent Client

1. All sellers must seed their items via the PeerIt BitTorrent Client client.
2. The client has built in encryption and security mechanisms that ensure your username and password is never compromised.
3. Also the client will ONLY download from items buyers have paid for, sellers are protected against illegitimate downloads via tight encryption and strict access control in the PeerIt servers.
4. Our goal is to help you get paid for your digital goods.
5. We will not enforce the ownership rights of our sellers and the quality of goods for our buyers.
6. If you see an abuse of PeerIt seller or buyer goods please contact PeerIt so that we may resolve it.

Download the torrent client at http://www.peerit.com

New way to fool spammers

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On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a human — until you fill out a captcha.

Puzzles known as captchas, like this one from YouTube, have become so distorted that tech experts say they have trouble gaining access.

Human, Read This

Aleksey Kolupaev says that he found ways to circumvent puzzles on sites like PayPal and has sold his software to spammers and companies.

Captchas are the puzzles on many Web sites that present a string of distorted letters and numbers. These are supposed to be easy for people to read and retype, but hard for computer software to figure out.

Most major Internet companies use captchas to keep the automated programs of spammers from infiltrating their sites.

There is only one problem. As online mischief makers design better ways to circumvent or defeat captchas, Web companies are responding by making the puzzles more challenging to solve — even for people.

They are twisting the letters, distorting the backgrounds, adding a confusing kaleidoscope of colors and generally making it difficult for humans.

With captchas getting easier for computers and more difficult for real people, several Internet companies, including Microsoft and eBay, are working on replacements.

“You can make a captcha absolutely undefeatable by computers, but at some point, you are turning this from a human reading test into an intelligence test and an acuity test,” said Michael Barrett, the chief information security officer at PayPal, a division of eBay. “We are clearly at the point where captchas have hit diminishing returns.”

If that is true, at least captchas had a good run. Though several researchers devised similar tests early in the decade, credit for inventing the technology usually goes to Carnegie Mellon University, which was asked by Yahoo in 2000 to create a method to prevent rogue programs from invading its chat rooms and e-mail service.

University researchers devised a collection of cognitive puzzles that they knew modern computers could not solve. They called their approach the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, or captcha for short. The reference was to the computer scientist Alan Turing, who did research into ways to tell man from machine in the 1950s.

Captchas quickly became popular online and soon expanded into new dimensions. When advocates for the visually impaired complained that some people could not read the puzzles, many sites added audio versions, where a computer voice recites a string of letters and numbers, often over noises in the background.

The emergence of the technology started a wave of research into ways to make computers smart enough to crack the puzzles.

Yet some of that activity can be ethically murky. Aleksey Kolupaev, 25, works for an Internet company in Kiev, Ukraine, and in his spare time, with his friend Juriy Ogijenko, he develops and sells software that can thwart captchas by analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise. They charge $100 to $5,000 a project, depending on the complexity of the puzzle.

Mr. Kolupaev said he had worked both for legitimate companies that want to test their own security and for spammers who seek to infiltrate Web sites.

“Nothing is unbreakable, and each system has its own weakness,” he said. “If you create a program that only recognizes one picture from a hundred, it’s not a problem. You just hit the site 100 times, and you break through.”

On his Web site, ocr-research.org.ua, Mr. Kolupaev boasts of cracking the captchas of companies like MySpace and PayPal; the site also ranks the effectiveness of each captcha. He says he believes that his work makes the Internet more secure because companies tend to improve the captchas that he critiques.

Internet companies have responded to these challenges by making their captchas more complex. On YouTube, for example, the letters and numbers in the captcha float on an uneven grid of colors. On the technology news site Slashdot, random squiggly lines slice through the letters and numbers, as if a child had scrawled with a pen on each puzzle.

All these tricks are attempts to disguise the boundaries of the characters, so that software cannot identify the numbers and letters.

But often these measures prove too tough for humans to decipher as well. On Ticketmaster’s site, the characters appear over a grid of diagonal lines that are so thick that they often obscure the puzzle. Jacob Hanson, the chief technology officer of HireVue, an online employment agency in Salt Lake City, estimated that he had failed to solve the Ticketmaster captcha once every four times.

As a result, the hunt is on for puzzles that are friendlier to humans and more difficult for computers. Many researchers are focusing on expanding the test beyond the constrained realm of 26 letters and 9 digits.

Microsoft researchers have developed an alternative captcha that asks Internet users to view nine images of household pets and then select just the cats or the dogs.

The project, called Asirra (for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), uses photographs of animals from Petfinder.com, a site that finds homes for homeless pets and has more than two million images in its database.

Other companies prefer to keep their next-generation captcha research quiet. Mr. Barrett of PayPal will say only that the new breed of captchas might resemble simple image identification puzzles, like asking users to view pictures of a head of lettuce, a tree and a whale — and pick out the vegetable.

“Captchas have gotten as good as they are going to get, and it is likely they are going to be slowly supplanted with a different technology that achieves the same thing,” he said.

He added: “No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

Not everyone feels that the traditional captcha is finished. Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a member of the team that invented captchas, recently unveiled an effort to give them new usefulness.

His reCaptcha project (recaptcha.net) seeks to block spam while handling the challenge of digitally scanning old books and making them available in Web search engines.

When character recognition software fails to decipher a word scanned in a book — when the page is yellowed or the letters are smudged, for example — Mr. von Ahn’s project makes it part of a captcha. After the mystery word has been verified by several people, it is fed back into the digital copy of the book.

Some internet radio would go silent on June 26

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If you depend on the sounds of Internet radio to get you through your workday, don't be surprised if your headphones pipe out little more than dead air next Tuesday.

In protest of the elevated royalty fees Webcasters are poised to begin owing to the record industry next month, Internet radio operators are planning to stage a "day of silence."

So far, Live365 and AccuRadio.com have agreed to cease their music programming on June 26, save for brief audio public service announcements sprinkled throughout the day, according to a Wednesday report by Kurt Hanson of the Radio and Internet Newsletter,. So has the online presence of KCRW, the Southern California-based public radio station. Other public radio broadcasters and larger operators, such as Yahoo, RealNetworks' Rhapsody service and Pandora, may also sign on, Hanson said.

A number of small commercial Webcasters are also on board with the idea, and all told, thousands are expected to participate. Smaller Webcasters staged a similar protest five years ago in response to a similar rules change by the U.S. copyright officials.

At issue are fee hikes that the Internet radio community says could bankrupt its services, particularly those run by smaller operators. SoundExchange, the non-profit collection entity that lobbied for the changes, has repeatedly argued the changes are fair and necessary to ensure artists are compensated adequately.

Opponents of the changes are still hoping for a reprieve before the July 15 date on which the royalties are scheduled to kick in. They are continuing to pressure politicians on Capitol Hill to pass bills that would overturn the royalty rate increases and align them with those required of other digital services, such as satellite. Some groups have also asked a federal appeals court to delay the rate changes.

iPhone offers more talk time

Slashdot It! Appleannounced that iPhone will deliver significantly longer battery life when it ships on June 29 than was originally estimated when iPhone was unveiled in January. iPhone will feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback.* In addition, iPhone will feature up to 250 hours—more than 10 days—of standby time. Apple also announced that the entire top surface of iPhone, including its stunning 3.5-inch display, has been upgraded from plastic to optical-quality glass to achieve a superior level of scratch resistance and optical clarity.

“With 8 hours of talk time, and 24 hours of audio playback, iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other ‘Smartphone’ and even longer than most MP3 players,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve also upgraded iPhone’s entire top surface from plastic to optical-quality glass for superior scratch resistance and clarity. There has never been a phone like iPhone, and we can't wait to get this truly magical product into the hands of customers starting just 11 days from today.”

iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a revolutionary multi-touch display and pioneering new software that allows users to control iPhone with just a tap, flick or pinch of their fingers. iPhone combines three products into one small and lightweight handheld device—a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod, and the Internet in your pocket with best-ever applications on a mobile phone for email, web browsing and maps. iPhone ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.

Pricing and Availability

iPhone will be available in the US on June 29, 2007 in a 4GB model for $499 (US) and an 8GB model for $599 (US), and will work with either a PC or Mac. iPhone will be sold in the US through Apple’s retail and online stores, and through AT&T’s select retail stores.

*All Battery claims are dependent upon network configuration and many other factors; actual results may vary. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information. Music capacity is based on four minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; actual capacity varies by content.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and will enter the mobile phone market this year with its revolutionary iPhone.

The World's First Solar Cell Phone

Slashdot It! We've seen the prototypes and heard the speculation for years now, but here we have it, the world's first solar cell phone, and you can buy one right now...if you happen to live in China. HiTech Wealth telecommunications has just begun selling the S116 and the specs are pretty impressive. However, the $510 pricetag will have you wondering why you don't just get an iPhone. A 1.3 mpx camera, and an MP3 player are fairly standard additions to cell phones these days, but the solar panels do make this guy stand out. The panels trickle-charge the battery in any amount of light, including indoors (or even by candlelight), and the battery life is 2.5 times longer than it would without the panels. An hour of direct sunlight will give users 40 extra minutes of talk time. While this first model is pretty exciting, HiTech Wealth will be releasing six more solar phones within the year and has promised 30 solar models before 2009.

Microsoft agrees to change Vista desktop search

Slashdot It! Microsoft agreed to make changes to the desktop search feature in Windows Vista in an effort to assuage Google and head off a further antitrust battle with U.S. regulators.

In a filing made jointly with the Justice Department on Tuesday night, Microsoft said it would change the search feature as part of the first service pack to Windows Vista. In the filing, Microsoft talked for the first time about when that service pack would arrive, saying a beta version will come by the end of the year.

Under the agreement, Microsoft will create a mechanism whereby both computer makers and individuals will be able to choose a default desktop search program, much as they can choose a rival browser or media player, even though those technologies are built into Windows.

"Plaintiffs are collectively satisfied that this agreement will resolve any issues the complaint may raise under the Final Judgments, provided that Microsoft implements it as promised," regulators said in the filing made with the Judge overseeing Microsoft's consent decree.

Microsoft said it too, was glad to reach an accord.

"We're pleased we were able to reach an agreement with all the states and the Justice Department that addresses their concerns so that everyone can move forward," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

A federal prosecutor said that the move satisfied the U.S. government as well as 17 state attorneys general and that the software maker was adequately addressing antitrust concerns raised by Google.

"In addition to reaching an agreement with Microsoft to resolve any issues about desktop search under the final judgments, the (Justice Department) has worked to ensure that Microsoft fully discloses and provides complete technical documentation for all protocols covered by the decrees," Thomas O. Barnett, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, said in a statement.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown said Tuesday that he had become concerned with allegations that the desktop search feature in Vista was in violation of the antitrust accord Microsoft reached in 2002. In a statement, he offered qualified praise for the agreement.

"This agreement--while not perfect--is a positive step towards greater competition in the software industry. It will enhance the ability of consumers to select the desktop search tool of their choice," Brown said.

Details of the agreement began to dribble out ahead of the filing on Tuesday.

Google first expressed concern over Vista's desktop search feature last year. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that the U.S. Justice Department was siding with Microsoft, while some state regulators, including Connecticut's attorney general, said they wanted to look further into Google's concerns.

Last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed Google's complaints, saying at the Detroit Economic Club that the rival's objections were "baseless."

"We continue to comply with the consent decree we signed with the U.S. government in recognition to the findings around our position with Windows," Ballmer said, according to Reuters. "We think all claims to the contrary are baseless."

This is not the only antitrust skirmish going on involving Microsoft and Google, which have become increasingly fierce rivals. Microsoft has sought to get regulators to take a closer look at Google's planned acquisition of DoubleClick. However, the Federal Trade Commission is also reportedly evaluating Microsoft's planned $6 billion purchase of Aquantive.

As part of the pact, Microsoft is required to do three things in relation to desktop search. First, it has to add the mechanism for computer makers and users to change the default desktop search. Second, that default search program "will be launched whenever Windows launches a new top-level window to provide search results." That includes the Start menu, when a user selects to display results in a new window. However, in areas, such as the Windows Explorer, where Microsoft includes a search bar, Vista "will continue to display the search results using the internal Vista desktop search functionality." Microsoft, however, must also add a link that, when clicked, will launch the default desktop search program and display that program's results.

Finally, Microsoft will "inform" software makers, computer makers and users that "the desktop search index in Vista is designed to run in the background and cede precedence over computing resources to any other software product, including third-party desktop search products and their respective search indices," according to the filing.

Microsoft must emphasize that there is no technical reason why computer makers and users cannot install rival desktop search programs "even if those products maintain separate indices from that operated by Windows." Also, Microsoft will be required to provide the technical details to enable rivals to write programs that minimize the performance impact of Vista's own search index.

Halo 3 toys

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With the announcement that Microsoft's upcoming Halo 3-branded Xbox 360 controllers will feature art by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, it seemed only a matter of time before McFarlane Toys officially took the wraps off a full toy line based on the sci-fi shooter.

The company did just that, announcing a licensing agreement with Microsoft that should have Halo 3 toys on shelves by spring 2008.

McFarlane Toys' foray into the Halo universe will result in five action figures and three vehicles. In addition to the iconic Master Chief (who will sport more than 18 points of articulation), the action figure roster includes a brute chieftain, a jackal sniper, a two-pack of grunts, and the holographic guide Cortana (with light-up action, naturally).

Credit: McFarlane Toys

A prototype of the Master Chief toy.

The figures will retain a semblance of scale, with the grunts standing 3.5 inches tall, and the 6-inch brute chieftain towering over the rest of the toys.

As for the vehicles, McFarlane Toys is releasing replicas of the Warthog, the Ghost and the debuting single-wheeled Brute Chopper. Each vehicle will measure 3 inches in length and be made from die-cast metal and plastic.

Halo follows the events of an intergalactic war between the last surviving members of the human race and a collection of alien races known as The Covenant. The first title in the series, Halo: Combat Evolved, was the flagship title for Microsoft's Xbox video game console when it was released in 2001.

McFarlane Toys is no stranger to the world of games. Previously, the company has released lines based on Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Soul Calibur II, Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny and Ultima Online: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge.

Microsoft flip-flops on Vista virtualization

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Microsoft planned this week to announce that it was broadening the virtualization rights for Windows Vista, but decided at the last minute to reverse course and stick with existing limits.

The software maker had briefed reporters and analysts on plans to allow the Home versions of Vista to run in virtual machines, addressing criticisms from virtualization enthusiasts and Mac users who had chafed at having to buy one of the two priciest versions of Windows in order to run Vista in a virtual machine.

Software like Parallels Desktop for the Mac or Microsoft's own Virtual PC for Windows allow multiple operating systems to run simultaneously. When it announced licensing rules for Vista last year, Microsoft said that only Vista Business and Vista Ultimate could run as guest operating systems. The company said virtualization presents inherent security risks and that it hoped by limiting which versions of the OS could act as virtual machines, only sophisticated users and businesses would employ the tactic.

On the Mac in particular, though, virtualization has become a consumer feature and many people wanted to use the Home versions of Vista, which Microsoft executives concede present no additional security risk.

The company said in interviews this week that it was still concerned about the security risks, but said it was going to make the change and leave the choice up to users.

"Virtualization enthusiasts would like to make that choice," said Scott Woodgate, a director in the Windows Business Group. "We're really responding to that feedback."

Earlier this week, when Microsoft was believed to be planning to make the licensing changes, Parallels praised the software maker and said it was pleased it had listened to customers.

After Microsoft's reversal, Rudolph expressed disappointment with the decision.

"While we're disappointed that Microsoft won't be changing the Vista (license agrement) to permit users to run all versions of Vista in a virtual machine, it is ultimately up to Microsoft to decide how they want to license their own software, and we respect their decision," Rudolph said in an e-mail. "We'll definitely keep working with Microsoft on this issue."

Microsoft provided little explanation for the about-face.

"Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that we will maintain the original policy announced last fall," the software maker said in a statement.

Google launches YouTube local language sites

Slashdot It! Literally, it might be known as Voustube, Voitubo or Vocetubo, but the world's most popular video-sharing site introduced local-language sites in nine countries that will all just go by YouTube.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the co-founders of YouTube, which was acquired by Web search leader Google for $1.65 billion last year, told a news conference in Paris that the nine country sites will eventually feature locally popular content.

Until now, while user-generated videos and comments could be posted in any language, the YouTube.com site framework and navigation menus are in English only. And the featured pages users first see are heavily skewed to U.S. tastes. This is despite the fact that more than half of YouTube's audience comes from outside the United States, Chen said.

YouTube unveiled national sites for Brazil, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

During the first stage of the international move, each site will offer fully translated local home pages and video search functions. Over time, each national site will have an entirely "local" feel that will allow for country-specific video rankings and comments in various sections, YouTube said.

Consumers will have a variety of ways to reach the international sites. Users with computer Internet addresses in the nine countries will be offered the option to switch to the local sites. A series of flag icons will run along the top of YouTube sites, allowing users to jump to other country sites.

In recent months, YouTube has signed up various major international media partners including broadcasters such as the British Broadcasting Corp., France 24, the Spanish Antena 3 and Cuatro TV, the Portuguese RTP, and the Dutch VPRO and NPO.

It also features archive and daily news from popular European football clubs such as Chelsea FC, AC Milan, Barcelona FC and Real Madrid, but is restricted from showing live matches in most cases. It also has programs from nonprofit groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, UNHCR and Medecins du Monde.

"Right now, the content will be available to everyone, unless the (media) partner specifies otherwise," YouTube international manager Sakina Arsiwala said in an interview.

It has more than 150 international media partners.

"It is not that we want to limit content by geography," she said.

Media contracts have traditionally been negotiated country by country, reflecting the local nature of broadcast television technology.

I.B.M. to Show Stream Computing System

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I.B.M. is introducing a high-performance computer system that is intended to rapidly analyze data as it streams in from many sources, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision making in fields as diverse as security surveillance and Wall Street trading.

The company plans to demonstrate the system, called System S, at a conference of Wall Street technology managers today. The announcement, analysts say, is a significant step in the commercialization of the emerging technology of stream computing.

Early this month Google acquired PeakStream, a start-up in stream computing, and industry analysts say its software could help Google improve its video search functions.

Stream computing is an effort to deal with two issues: the need for faster data handling and analysis in business and science, and the growing flood of information in digital form, including Web sites, blogs, e-mail, video and news clips, telephone conversations, transaction data and electronic sensors.

The conventional approach to computer analytics and data mining is to collect data, store it in a database program and then search the database for patterns or ask it questions. It is an effective approach, but also tightly structured and often time-consuming.

In stream computing, advanced software algorithms analyze the data as it streams in. Text, voice and image-recognition technology, for example, can be used to determine that some data is more relevant to a particular problem than others. The priority data is then shuttled off into a program tailored to work on complex, fast-changing problems like tracking an epidemic and predicting its spread, or culling data from electronic sensors in a computer chip plant to quickly correct flaws in manufacturing.

I.B.M. deems its System S research project ready to make its way into the marketplace. The planned announcement to the Wall Street group is the beginning of its effort to find industry partners.

The initial system runs on about 800 microprocessors, though it can scale up to tens of thousands as needed, I.B.M. said. The most notable step, researchers say, lies in the System S software, which enables software applications to split up tasks like image recognition and text recognition, and then reassemble the pieces of the puzzle into an answer.

Nagui Halim, director of high-performance stream computing at I.B.M. labs, said System S was a new model of computing that offered greater flexibility and speed. The approach, he said, was less machinelike than in conventional systems. “It’s a computing system that can morph and adapt to the problems it sees,” Mr. Halim said.

As I.B.M. moves toward developing a business in this area, it says it can either sell stream computer systems to customers or stream computing as a pay-for-use service over the Internet.

AMD outsource manufacturing of chips

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2007 has not been kind to AMD. The company saw its workstation market share slip, has taken on $2 billion of new debt, lost almost $1.2 billion over the past two quarters, has been unable to close the gap with Intel when it comes to CPU performance, and has been the subject of recent rumors that Barcelona will be delayed. AMD has been in cost-cutting mode for the past several months and, according to IDG News Service, is considering getting out of the fabrication business.

Currently, AMD operates two fabs: Fab 30 and Fab 36. Fab 30 is in the process of being fitted to handle 300mm production, and when the transition is complete, it will be rechristened Fab 38. It hasn't come cheaply, either—the chip maker has invested over $2.5 billion to expand its 300mm capabilities. AMD has also been talking up a new 45nm plant in Malta, NY, that would come online in 2009.

Speculation is building in the analyst community that AMD will attempt to further cut costs by outsourcing more—or all—of its chip making as early as 2008. One Citigroup analyst is predicting a "transformational move" that would result in AMD's lower-end CPUs being manufactured by a third party and possibly selling off part or all of its Dresden, Germany facility. Another report from Goldman Sachs outlines the investment firm's belief that the company will leave manufacturing completely in the hands of third parties.

Currently, Chartered Semiconductor handles some of AMD's manufacturing, and AMD said last fall that its plans called for Chartered to eventually manufacture CPUs on a 65nm process. AMD also has a long-standing partnership with IBM under which AMD gets to use Big Blue's East Fishkill, NY, plant for R&D and manufacturing.

An AMD spokesperson said that the company is looking to extend a model that it already has in place to other parts of the manufacturing and supply chain. "For instance, on the process technology side, we have a joint development agreement with IBM," AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie told Ars. "We use their 300mm R&D facilities right now. One extension of that is looking at taking some of the assets that are currently on our books off our books." We also asked whether AMD was head in the direction of going completely fab-less as part of its asset-light strategy. "At no time did we signal that going fab-less was part of the discussion with asset-light," said Prairie.

Getting out of manufacturing is certainly a plausible—if not likely—scenario for AMD. It would allow AMD to drastically cut costs and possibly stave off a private equity buyout. Outsourcing chip manufacturing would save the company a large chunk of money, and other semiconductor manufacturers—TI and Sony come to mind—have taken steps towards a fab-less existence.

But it's a different story for CPU makers. From a technical perspective, ditching your fab capabilities is an iffy proposition as it introduces a separation between design and manufacturing that could ultimately stretch out development times. AMD would no longer be able to design CPUs with its own fabs in mind, as both it and Intel currently can. AMD may be confident that its history of successful partnerships with the likes of Chartered and IBM will allow it to overcome the obstacles inherent in becoming a fab-less company and that it would be better off selling its own manufacturing facilities to free up cash.

Pressure is on IBM to forgive millions in IT debt

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Can a $93 billion company be publicly shamed into charity? My guess is not, but the Contra Costa school district in California is hoping IBM can see it in its Big Blue heart to erase some $5 million in long-overdue debt.

This week four California state legislators threw their support behind West Contra Costa School District by pleading with IBM to release the district from the debt. Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley; Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord; state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland; and Sen. Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch, sent a letter to IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano requesting that the computer-industry giant write off the 15-year-old debt as a charitable contribution, according to a story in the Contra Costa Times.

"Unlike corporations such as IBM - with revenues of $22 billion in the first quarter of 2007 alone - our schools do not have the ability to generate new dollars to fund projects or pay for employees," the lawmakers wrote. "Our schools rely solely on limited state and federal assistance to educate our students and every dollar is precious."

The back story on this tale is that the school district owes IBM for computers ordered in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For one reason or another the computers were never used and no one now seems to be able to locate neither the paperwork nor the hardware. The school district experienced hard financial times and ultimately never paid Big Blue for the computers.

In 1993 the district and IBM negotiated a long-term settlement that said the school district would pay the first of four $1.25 million installments beginning in 2008. Payments were deferred until then because 2008 was the year the district was scheduled to finish making state loan repayments under its previous loan plan, according to the Contra Costa story.

Reports this past April said IBM executives expect the district to pay the amount in full under the agreed-upon pay schedule. A letter from IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge to district Superintendent Bruce Harter called the repayment plan "generous" on the part of IBM because the company is not charging interest. IBM has not commented on the situation since then.

So now the school district is looking to put a little political pressure on IBM to forgive the debt entirely. Such a move might create a precedent IBM wouldn't want to set.

Typically such debts are restructured further or spread into a new contract. For example, IBM and Amtrak in 2002 signed a $229 million IT outsourcing deal with that will save the passenger railroad $85 million over the course of the seven-year deal. The contract, which is an extension of a 10-year agreement between the two companies, calls for IBM Global Services in Armonk, New York, to manage Amtrak's entire computing infrastructure from a data center in Manassas, Virginia. Because Amtrak still owes IBM $101 million from the previous contract, the total of the renegotiated deal is $330 million, according to an IBM.

Then again maybe IBM has had it with state educators. IBM is involved in another case in North Carolina where state education officials recently dropped IBM as the contractor for an elaborate computer network intended to manage student and school data statewide and will instead complete the costly project themselves, according to the News & Observer.

IBM and the state Department of Public Instruction have been at odds for months over the development of a complex computer system, known as NC WISE, that will replace a data management system in place since the mid-1980s. The state has withheld $4.5 million in payments to IBM, saying the company has failed to correct problems and provide promised computer applications. The company didn't respond to a request in December from the state to fix what it said were problems and says it has lived up to its obligations.

Ubuntu, Red Hat ignore Microsoft patent deal

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Red Hat, the largest Linux vendor, and Ubuntu-maker Canonical have both rejected calls from Microsoft to forge a deal similar to the one the Redmond giant signed with Linux distributors Novell, Xandros, and Linspire.

Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's CEO, said in a blog posting, that Canonical has declined to talk to Microsoft about any agreement that provides legal protection to Ubuntu users related to "unspecified patents".

"Allegations of 'infringement of unspecified patents' carry no weight whatsoever. We don't think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together," he wrote.

Shuttleworth said these patent agreements create "a false sense of security" and do not effectively protect the user from a patent suit from a big company like Microsoft.

Canonical is a commercial company that sponsors free-software projects and provides services for the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Following Microsoft's wide-ranging deal with Novell last fall, Microsoft in the past month has announced similar deals with Xandros and Linspire. They cover technical interoperability and offer legal indemnification to some customers who use those Linux distributions.

Microsoft has not yet sued any of those companies but has said it has identified 235 Microsoft patents on which Linux infringes.

Last week, Microsoft's general manager of interoperability and standards, Tom Robertson, said Microsoft is eager to extend these types of arrangements to other Linux and open-source companies, calling it an "issue of coexistence".

No deal between Microsoft and leading commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has happened. After the announcement of Microsoft's Novell contract, Red Hat said it would not pay an "innovation tax" to Microsoft.

Red Hat remains unmoved Red Hat said there would be no such deal. Referring to previous statements distancing itself from Microsoft, the company insisted: "Red Hat's standpoint has not changed."

The company referenced a statement written when Microsoft revealed it was partnering with Novell, saying that its position remained unaltered. Red Hat director of corporate communications Leigh Day added: "We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency."

Many open-source followers argue that Red Hat, as the largest Linux vendor, would have a lot to lose from partnering with Microsoft.

Ubuntu cold on Microsoft Open XML In the same blog post, Canonical's Shuttleworth said pursuing technical interoperability between rival document formats Office Open XML and OpenDocument -- included in the other Linux deals -- was not worth the effort. He did say Ubuntu stands to benefit from investments to improve interoperability between Linux and Windows.

"I have no confidence in Microsoft's Open XML specification to deliver a vibrant, competitive and healthy market of multiple implementations. I don't believe that the specifications are good enough, nor that Microsoft will hold itself to the specification when it does not suit the company to do so," Shuttleworth said.

OpenDocument Format, or ODF, is better, and Microsoft should improve its support for that standard, he said.

Shuttleworth did not rule out working with Microsoft in some capacity but made clear that the makeup of its existing Linux partnerships held little interest for Canonical.

"All the deals announced so far strike me as trinkets in exchange for air kisses," he said.

Linspire and Xandros Microsoft has already made deals with Novell, Linspire and Xandros, but the latter two are much smaller companies.

Linspire will work closely with Microsoft in a number of areas, including instant messaging and Web search. Although Microsoft has said that open source infringes its patents, the software giant has agreed not to sue users of Linspire.

Microsoft's deal with Xandros, a distributor, is based on both technical and legal considerations. They will work on improving interoperability between their servers to improve systems management.

Microsoft's pact with Novell is rather more complex. The two companies are marketing each other's products and are working on product interoperability. Their pact is subject to a series of sales- and patent-related payments worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Piracy more serious than burglary, fraud, bank robbery

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NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year." Cotton's comments come in Paul Stweeting's report on Hollywood's latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

There are two obvious rejoinders to such a ridiculous statement. The first is that "hundreds of billions of dollars a year" is a myth. The MPAA's own cherry-picked study from Smith Barney in 2005 put their annual loss at less than $6 billion, and while the music and software industries also like to publish trumped-up claims, the figures are nowhere near hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

The second objection, of course, is that the traditional crimes Cotton describes often involve the destruction of people's lives along with property. Burglaries can result in homicide, as can fraud (ask the preacher's wife), while bank robbery is, without a doubt, a dangerous game. Those crimes also typically involve real property. For better or for worse, real property should not be confused with intellectual property, which is not subject to the same rules of scarcity. Stopping a bank heist is, without a doubt, a far more important matter than stopping the bootlegging of Gigli or Spider-Man 3. Chances are you would prefer that the cops spend their efforts protecting people from rampant home burglaries than chasing down kids with pirated music on their iPods.

Regardless, Cotton and his Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy are seeking to change federal law enforcement emphasis so that intellectual property crimes are given priority over other kinds of crime... a realignment, to play off Cotton's statement. Battling organized crime is hardly objectionable, and we hope the coalition sees success in taking down the profiteers of piracy. Offending the public with yet more lies and hyperbole isn't going to curry much favor, however.

Your locked down iPhone

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Though Apple has released the iPhone’s debut date, one important question is still unanswered; what will it really cost? One anonymous AT&T store manager said users will get their WiFi…when they sign a contract locking them into a data plan and EDGE. Kiss your dreams of WiFi reliance goodbye.

This manager revealed that distribution materials that are now reaching stores clearly state users must purchase data plans to buy iPhones. In fact, he said the iPhone will come with a unique contract that doesn’t exist for any other phone AT&T sells…which could be good or very, very bad.

Though Steve Jobs clearly stated the the connectivity dependence of the iPhone will focus on WiFi and Blu-tooth, visual voicemail, Google Maps, or any of the other main features will be available only through a contractual AT&T data plan. Though this might not sound bad, prices on iPhone plans have yet to be released; I, for one, am constantly immersed in the world of WiFi, nearly everywhere I go…a data plan (for the actual data transfer capabilities) would be a complete waste of money. I don’t want to be locked into a 2 year data package when I use WiFi constantly…but apparently it isn’t an option.

This is how AT&T will make back all the money they aren’t making on selling the iPhone itself. Though WiFi will be complimentary, users will be forced to buy a plan they don’t necessarily need to use all the features of the iPhone. Get out your checkbooks, because the iPhone’s $599 pricetag is just a scratch on the surface of how much you will be paying.

Expect a hybrid phone service/data plan at a moderate rate that cannot be discontinued without a serious fee…by locking the data plan and phone service plan, AT&T will ensure users cannot drop the EDGE network and attempt to use WiFi cingularly.

Mozilla exec calls Apple's Safari plan 'duopolistic'

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Mozilla's chief operating officer, John Lilly, is calling Steve Jobs' plans for building Safari's market share "out of date" and "duopolistic."

Lilly made his comments following the Apple CEO's keynote speech last week at the Worldwide Developers Conference, where the Mac maker unveiled a version of the Safari browser designed to run on Windows Vista or XP.

In the speech predicting how Apple would expand its market share, Jobs showed a slide with Safari dominating almost a quarter of the market--a market shared only with a single other browser, Internet Explorer.

Lilly says he doesn't believe that this was an omission or simplification, but instead an indication that Jobs is hoping to steal people who use Firefox and other smaller browsers in order to run a "duopoly" with Redmond.

"This worldview...betrays (Apple's) thinking: it's out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented...It's not good for the Web. Which is sort of moot, I think, because I don't think this two-party world will really come to be," Lilly said in his blog.

A browser market split exclusively between two companies is the "wrong thing to do" and would cause a dip in end-user experience, as well as ruining participation and engagement, the Mozilla Foundation executive said.

Still, Lilly went on to welcome the latest addition to the browser market. "Another browser being available to more people is good," he said. "I'm glad that Safari will be another option for users...We've never ever at Mozilla said that we care about Firefox market share at the expense of our more important goal: to keep the Web open and a public resource. The Web belongs to people, not companies."

Lilly, however, cast doubt on whether Jobs' two-browser state would come to pass, saying the rise of Wikipedia and Linux suggests that people are no longer content with the "monopolies and duopolies and cartels of yesterday's distribution" led by the big software vendors.

Since Safari for Windows debuted on June 11, it has notched up 1 million downloads. It has also seen a number of security vulnerabilities unearthed, resulting in Apple issuing three patches.

I can see that Safari had not released a new feature that Mozilla Firefox and IE have that let someone wow about it. It is just like Mozilla Firefox. It loads the website slowly and worse of all, it has security holes just 2 hours after release.

Michael Moore’s Latest Movie ‘Sicko’ Released Onto The Internet via P2P

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Michael Moore is a film maker that loves controversy and his new eagerly awaited movie ‘Sicko’ is causing some of it’s own having been leaked onto p2p networks like BitTorrent two weeks before it’s official release date.

Sicko is Oscar Winner Moore’s latest creation about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on earth the USA. A reporter reportedly downloaded a copy of the movie around June the 14th around two weeks before it’s official release date of 29th June.

Moore had also allegedly hidden a copy of the movie ‘Sicko’ in Canada in case the federal government decided to impound it over an apparently unauthorized trip to Cuba made during its filming. It doesn’t look although Moore will have to worry about people seeing his movie now though.

If the breach is as wide as it appears — and this reporter downloaded a copy and watched it late Thursday night with ease — Moore, and his distributor, The Weinstein Company, have a every film maker’s worst marketing nightmare on their hands — how to persuade people to go to the theater to see a show that’s available free on the Internet. Source: Advertising Age

Blu-Ray wins the war

Slashdot It! Blockbuster Inc. will rent high-definition DVDs only in the Blu-ray format in 1,450 stores when it expands its high-def offerings next month, dealing a major blow to the rival HD DVD format. The move, being announced Monday, could be the first step in resolving a format war that has kept confused consumers from rushing to buy new DVD players until they can determine which format will dominate the market. Blockbuster has been renting both Blu-ray and HD DVD titles in 250 stores since late last year and found that consumers were choosing Blu-ray titles more than 70 percent of the time. "The consumers are sending us a message. I can't ignore what I'm seeing," Matthew Smith, senior vice president of merchandising at Blockbuster, told The Associated Press. Blockbuster will continue to rent HD DVD titles in the original 250 locations and online, the Dallas-based company said. The decision was helped in large part by the lopsided availability of titles in Blu-ray, Smith said. All major studios except one are releasing films in Blu-ray, with several, including The Walt Disney Co., releasing exclusively in Blu-ray. Only Universal Studios, which is owned by General Electric Co., exclusively supports HD DVD. Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., and Paramount Pictures, which is owned by Viacom Inc., release films in both formats. "When you walk into a store and see all this product available in Blu-ray and there is less available on HD DVD, I think the consumer gets that," Smith said. The rollout of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 game console, which comes standard with a Blu-ray drive, also helped give the format momentum, Smith said. Blockbuster's decision, while significant on it's own, could boost Blu-ray even more if other retailers follow suit. "It will help shift the balance toward Blu-ray, clearly," said Richard Doherty, president of The Envisioneering Group, a research company. The North American HD DVD Promotional Group said Blockbuster's decision was shortsighted and skewed by the success of films released by Blu-ray studios in the first three months of the year. The group said HD DVD has since gained momentum, selling more players and popular titles such as "The 40-Year Old Virgin" and "The Matrix" trilogy. "I think trying to make a format decision using such a short time period is really not measuring what the consumer is saying," said Ken Graffeo, co-president of the group. The two formats have been battling it out since they both hit the market last year. Studios hope the high-definition discs, with their sharper picture and more room for interactive special features and games, will replace standard definition DVDs. The formats are incompatible and neither will play on standard DVD players, although standard DVDs can be viewed with either a Blu-ray or HD DVD player. The Blu-ray camp has been helped by the release of such huge hits as "Casino Royale," ''Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Spider-Man" coming out exclusively in its format. As the battle has unfolded, the price of the high-definition players needed to show the movies has plummeted. Toshiba Corp., the major supporter of HD DVD, is selling its player for $299 with a rebate, down from $499 when it first went on sale. Sony, which is pushing Blu-ray, recently slashed the price of its player by more than half to $499. The player retailed for $1,000 when it first was introduced.

Linux thinking of leaving Microsoft alone or fight the pantent lawsuit

Slashdot It! The high priests of free software have congregated at Google headquarters this week to debate the future of the movement and face down recent patent threats by Microsoft.

Leading names of Linux, the world's biggest grassroots software phenomenon, are spending three days debating whether an increasingly commercial open-source community should fight or ignore the world's largest software maker.

Dressed in the alternative software movement's casual uniform of T-shirts and jeans, the group is coming to grips with internal divisions that sap at its success--Linux is now used to power desktop computers, major Web sites, mobile phones--since rival factions often create very similar products.

But as many of the world's top tech companies and corporate customers demand ever more from Linux, open-source devotees still fight among themselves with the fervor of a tiny monastic order seeking to root out theological error in their midst.

"Guys: Be seekers of truth, not finders of contradiction," Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, organizer of the event, only half-jokingly told the 150 attendees of what is billed their "Collaboration Summit."

Linux is the best-known variant of so-called open-source software--software that is freely available to the public to be used, revised and shared. Linux suppliers earn money selling improvements and technical services. By contrast, Microsoft charges for software and opposes freely sharing its code.

Recently, Microsoft has sown dissension by claiming open-source programs such as Linux violate 235 of its patents while striking deals to insulate the customers of two Linux suppliers--Novell and Xandros--from patent lawsuits.

On Thursday, Linspire, which sells Linux-based personal computers through Wal-Mart and other retailers, became the third company to strike a patent deal with Microsoft.

Microsoft: Enemy or punching bag Collectively, the group is militantly opposed to Microsoft, which some attending the summit openly refer to as "the enemy."

But most believe Linux users control their own destinies and Microsoft's patent threats are just the latest attempts to create "fear, uncertainty and doubt" among customers. After closed-door sessions Thursday and Friday, the group aims to issue a consensus statement next week on what they plan to do.

James Bottomley, who works as chief technology officer at Steeleye Technologies, is in charge of maintaining the software code used by Linux to transfer data between computers and peripheral devices like printers, a job he does for pleasure.

Bottomley says Microsoft is unlikely to sue Linux customers because most Linux users also buy Microsoft. "Their customers are our customers," he said, adding that: "It's just bloody annoying. It gets everyone riled up."

Zend Technologies, developers of an open-source programming language called PHP that is used in many Web sites, is seeking to remain neutral. Eighty percent of its customers use open-source software, but it recently struck a deal with Microsoft.

Working to work together This is the first conference of the Linux Foundation, an umbrella advocacy group formed early in 2007 to unite two predecessors, Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group.

There are as many as 360 rival flavors of Linux, known as distributions, according to Distrowatch.com. This factionalism fuels rapid innovation but splits the energies of developers.

"There really is a sense in many projects that there is an 'us' and a 'them'," said Mark Shuttlesworth, founder of Ubuntu, a free, desktop version of Linux that competes with Windows. "There are the folks who are inside a project and those who are outside a project."

The Linux Foundation boasts 70 corporate and non-profit backers, including Intel, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, Motorola, Nokia, NTT, Dell, Red Hat and Sun, along with major customers like ADP, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.

Linux used to be worked on by professionals doing the work on their own time, said Jason Wacha, an expert on licensing Linux and attorney for MontaVista, a maker of Linux software for mobile and consumer electronics devices.

"Ultimately, I think (Linux) is being pushed by commercial forces...Now a lot of people are being paid to do Linux as professionals," he said of how many top open-source developers now work for big-name companies like Google, HP and Oracle.

Data stored in live neurons

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Information has been stored in live neurons for the first time, bringing closer the creation of "cyborg" computer chips that combine electronic circuits with human cells.

Networks of cultured neurons are known to spontaneously fire in specific patterns. Researchers have previously attempted to program these neural networks with new patterns, representing bits of information, by electrically stimulating individual cells. However, such zapping disrupts their spontaneous firing patterns, and for a network to successfully store information new firing patterns must be imprinted without erasing the old.

Now Itay Baruchi and Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel Aviv University in Israel have taught new firing patterns to a network of neurons by targeting specific points of the network with a chemical called picrotoxin. The new patterns lasted for up to two days without harming the pre-existing firing patterns (Physical Review Letters E, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.75.050901). "You can think of it like a Christmas tree with lights that flicker," says Ben-Jacob. "We imprinted another pattern of lights on top of the original."

Many believe that complex patterns of neuronal firing are templates for memory, which the brain uses when storing information. Imprinting such "memories" on artificial neural networks provides a potential way to develop cyborg chips, says Ben-Jacob. These would be useful for monitoring biological systems like the brain and blood since, being human, they would respond to the same chemicals.

Windows Genuine Advantage test is a joke

Slashdot It! According to Ubuntu's forum, a user going by the name of mig5 has said that he was able to bypass Windows Genuine Advantage test by downloading the application and the amazing thing he was verified as a Genuine Windows and was able to download Windows defender on Xubuntu. This was what he said: I just did this for a laugh and didn't expect it to work. I went to microsoft.com using IE4Linux ( http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page ) and tried to download Windows Defender, on Xubuntu. Of course, I was asked to do the Genuine Advantage test. I used the alternate authentication method (IE4Linux doesn't support Active X), downloaded and then ran the genuine advantage application (which took quite a while to start). It gave me a code that I pasted into the authentication box, and to my surprise it verified me and forwarded me to the download page. This just goes to show how rubbish they're validation software is. I thought it was funny though, so I've uploaded a recording of it to rapid share, which you can get here: http://rapidshare.com/files/37580147/recording.ogg (the file is about 10MB, so it might take a while to get)

Microsoft says Google's complaint 'baseless'

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Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said a complaint lodged by Google was "baseless," as the software company was complying with a 2002 antitrust settlement.

In a complaint filed with the Department of Justice in December, Google said a feature built into Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system that allows users to search a computer's hard drive did not leave room for competition from other desktop search applications.

Google argues that this feature violates a consent decree that monitors Microsoft's behavior as part of its settlement with the U.S. government, which had accused the company of using its monopoly to harm competition by incorporating new features into its operating system at no additional costs.

"We continue to comply with the consent decree we signed with the U.S. government in recognition to the findings around our position with Windows," Ballmer said at the Detroit Economic Club.

"We think all claims to the contrary are baseless," said Ballmer, a Detroit native, in response to a question from the audience following his speech to the group.

The latest quarrel between the two technology heavyweights reflects the growing competition between Microsoft, the world's largest maker of software that runs on a computer's hard drive, and Google, the leader in Web search and other services working on the Internet.

BBC, Yahoo invite developers to hack Web apps

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At first glance it is not immediately obvious why a sewing machine, handbag and pedometer would be useful to engineers at Internet giant Yahoo, but organizers say anything goes at "Hack Day."

The event is a series of open days held around the world by Yahoo for anyone such as computer programmers and developers to attend and come up with new innovative applications.

The latest event has been held over the last 24 hours in London, staged by Yahoo and the British Broadcasting Corporation for anyone to develop new projects that use either of the media group's programs.

After a series of in-house events in 2005, Yahoo opened the day to the public. The first winners in 2006 were a team who made a handbag with a camera phone and pedometer, which sent photographs to Yahoo picture-sharing site Flickr after every 100 steps.

Dickerson said the idea to allow developers and programmers to use Yahoo technology had developed a sense of goodwill toward the company and resulted in ideas Yahoo staff would never have thought of.

The day is a mixture of a Web programming competition and an overnight slumber party. Few of the contestants sleep, but this year's event had an added twist when the venue, Alexandra Palace, was hit twice by lightning.

While no one was hurt, organizers said it did cause the fire alarm system to briefly open the roof of the venue, leaving the more than 400 participants at Hack Day working under large umbrellas.

eBay thinks outside with eBox

Slashdot It! eBay is rebuilding its technical infrastructure in a project that could lead to the e-commerce giant hosting applications from outsiders.

An initiative, internally referred to as eBox, calls for the company to rebuild the technical guts of its eBay.com site as a series of modular services, rather than a single, unified application.

The idea is that internal engineers--and potentially outside developers--can use these services as building blocks to construct new applications, said Eric Billingsley, senior director of eBay Research Labs, which is behind the initiative.

Billingsley is scheduled to outline the project, which he refers to as an "open platform," on Tuesday afternoon at the eBay developers' conference here. In an interview with CNET News.com on Monday, he described the technology and the company's goals in undertaking the services-oriented architecture.

eBox aims to make it quicker to build applications by providing pre-built services that can be combined to create new applications without extensive coding. All of the functions on eBay, such as search and inventory management, will be accessible as services via application program interfaces (APIs).

This service-oriented architecture should make it easier for eBay engineers to roll out features, Billingsley said. Once in place, these services could also be offered to outsiders who build eBay applications, he said.

"We will try (writing software) using this experimental framework. Now from there, it's not that far for external developers to build applications within that same framework and be able to run them inside the eBay system," he said.

In the second half of this year, eBay will start rolling out the framework internally.

Billingsley's hope is that eBay would next allow outsiders to use that same development framework, although a date has not been set for public release. The whole process will take about one or two years, he said.

Company spokesman Hani Durzy, however, cautioned that eBay has not made any decision on whether to open up eBox to outside developers.

eBay's proposed hosting plan brings to mind the utility computing-like services offered by Amazon.com Web Services, a division of the online commerce company that offers hosted computing power and storage.

The move would also be a significant extension to eBay's outreach to outside developers. Software programmers have become increasingly important to Web site operators such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, which are trying to create a healthy network of products and add-ons to their services.

Once completed, the eBox "application stack" will benefit eBay internally because internal teams will have fewer dependencies on each other when making product releases, which means faster development, Billingsley said.

Right now, by and large, eBay does not host third-party applications, Durzy said.

But Billingsley anticipates that the services-oriented architecture of eBox would invite many more outsiders to rapidly build eBay-hosted applications. Outside developers could even compete with eBay's own internal teams for certain site features, he said.

eBay already offers outside developers access to its Web services via APIs--in a recent survey, the company's developer program ranked highest among other Web properties.

But eBox calls for these services, such as search or inventory management functions, to be more modular, rather than tightly linked into one large application. Billingsley envisioned developers competing to offer the best application for very specific functions.

"My dream is someday we have a perfect shopping experience for collecting glass monkeys in Vietnam," he explained. "I want to create a market and a system that is so open and easy to build upon that that becomes actual reality--that we could put out a request for a feature and have someone build it for us for 500 bucks."

The business model would be a profit-sharing situation with third-party developers, Billingsley said.

The services-oriented architecture includes a set of core services, or "kernel," and a "thin layer" of APIs, Billingsley said. The eBox initiative also draws on eBay Research Labs' work on grid computing.

Gates to Harvard grads: Pay it forward

Slashdot It! The richest man in the world can now also claim a degree from the college he dropped out of three decades ago.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates delivered the commencement address at Harvard University here Thursday, and was awarded the L.L.D. honorary doctorate bestowed upon Harvard's commencement speakers.

"Our speaker is known as the most influential entrepreneur of the personal computer revolution. He was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004, 2005, 2006 and again in 2007," said Harvard's interim president, Derek Bok, who presided over the ceremony. Bok then spoke more directly to Gates: "Just think what you could have achieved if you had stayed another two years."

Even though the school has said that it considers him to be a member of the Harvard College Class of 1977, Gates dropped out of Harvard as a junior in 1975 to run Microsoft full time and never got his bachelor's degree.

Gates told the students, many of whom will soon be launching into full-time careers, that work isn't the only thing of significance.

"Judge yourself not on the professional accomplishments but on how well you have addressed the world's inequities, how you have treated people who have nothing to do with you other than a shared humanity," he said.

In recent months, Gates has been giving a larger portion of his time and energy to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on issues including global health and education. In 2008, he plans to make the foundation his chief responsibility.

"I'll be changing my job next year, and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume," he joked.

But for the most part, the Microsoft co-founder stuck to the serious message about trying to make the world a better place. He urged the graduates not to get discouraged about seemingly intractable challenges of poverty and poor health.

"It's difficult to look at suffering when the solution to the problem is so complex, so we look away," he said. "I love getting people excited about software, but why can't we get people excited about saving lives?"

Inequity has been around forever, Gates said, "but the new tools we have to cut through the complexity have not been with us forever. The personal computer and the Internet give us the chance to end extreme poverty."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who is a degreed Harvard '77 alumnus and who lived in the same dorm with Gates their freshman year, was also in attendance on the stage, as was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times op-ed columnist Nick Kristof, '82, who was celebrating his 25th reunion.

In 1996, Gates and Ballmer together donated $25 million to Harvard for Maxwell Dworkin, a computer science building bearing their mothers' maiden names.

"I also want to be recognized as the one who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school," Gates joshed.

As many as 30,000 people were expected to attend the outdoor commencement ceremony.

Gates wasn't the only high-profile speaker on the Cambridge campus this week. On Wednesday, former President Bill Clinton delivered Harvard's Class Day speech. Gates and Clinton have collaborated on philanthropic efforts to fight the AIDS epidemic in developing countries.

Recent past Harvard commencement speakers have included journalist Jim Lehrer in 2006, actor and writer John Lithgow in 2005 and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2004.

Microsoft works closer with Linux

Slashdot It! Microsoft Corp. announced that it will license instant messaging and digital media technology to a small desktop Linux distributor, Linspire Inc., adding to a growing number of deals meant to help the Windows operating system work more smoothly with open-source software.

San Diego-based Linspire's relationship with Microsoft hasn't always been so friendly. The company was founded under the name Lindows in 2001 but took $20 million to switch to Linspire as part of a trademark infringement settlement with Microsoft.

Kevin Carmony, Linspire's chief executive officer, said settling the trademark lawsuit took care of any problems between the companies.

Under the agreement, Linspire will license Microsoft code related to Voice over Internet Protocol, Windows Media files and TrueType fonts. With the addition of the Microsoft code to Linspire's operating system, users will be able to voice-chat with Windows Live Messenger buddies, watch Windows Media video and audio files on open-source media players, and view and create documents using familiar typefaces.

Linspire also agreed to set Microsoft's Web search engine as the default on PCs that run its operating system.

As in a recent deal between Microsoft and Xandros Inc., a distributor of Linux mainly for servers, Linspire will work with Microsoft on technology to translate between two different types of documents: Microsoft-developed OpenXML format and the Open Document Format.

The agreement also protects Linspire users against legal action by Microsoft, which claims open-source software violates more than 200 of its patents.

Microsoft gave similar protections to end-users in deals with Xandros and major Linux distributor Novell Inc. to ease legal worries among a growing number of companies and government agencies that use both Windows and Linux software.

Redmond-based Microsoft has also included patent covenants in recent agreements with consumer electronics makers, whose music players, digital video recorders and other devices often include open-source code. The protections were part of patent cross-licensing deals with Korea-based Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Worldwide.

The open-source software community broadly includes both individual programmers and companies such as Red Hat Inc., which gives away a Linux-based operating system software and makes money from related services. Open-source programs can be distributed — and modified and redistributed — without charge.

The patent protections Microsoft included in these deals sparked outcry from some in the open-source world. Free software advocates say that under open-source licenses, the code Microsoft shares with some open-source partners should become freely available to all.

Microsoft's Acoustic Caller ID Patent

Slashdot It! Automatic identification of telephone callers based on voice characteristics

Abstract

A method and apparatus are provided for identifying a caller of a call from the caller to a recipient. A voice input is received from the caller, and characteristics of the voice input are applied to a plurality of acoustic models, which include a generic acoustic model and acoustic models of any previously identified callers, to obtain a plurality of respective acoustic scores. The caller is identified as one of the previously identified callers or as a new caller based on the plurality of acoustic scores. If the caller is identified as a new caller, a new acoustic model is generated for the new caller, which is specific to the new caller.

Read more at http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&amp;d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&amp;f=G&l=50&s1=7,231,019.PN.&OS=PN/7,231,019&RS=PN/7,231,019

Amazon valuation passes Google

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Two months after Amazon.com posted first-quarter results that gave a boost to bulls anxious for a sign of improved earnings and profit margins, the online retailer's valuation is soaring--and perplexing many.

Trading at 53 times expected 2008 earnings, Amazon's valuation is more double that of Google and eBay, and nearly twice that of Apple.

Amazon's rich valuation, which has historically ranged higher than most tech companies and well above brick-and-mortar rivals like Wal-Mart Stores, is due to a confluence of factors involving a limited concentration of holdings, a period of intense investment, and an indefatigable faith in the company's future among some core investors, Wall Street says.

The company posted net earnings in late April that nearly doubled, helped in large part by a lower tax rate, and raised its 2007 sales and operating income estimates. But the share price, up 58 percent since earnings were announced, has grown faster than earnings expectations, boosted Amazon's price-to-earnings ratio to a dizzying level.

A unique psychology is at work when it comes to Amazon, argues Global Crown Capital's Martin Pyykkonen, who describes some of the company's bulls as having gone "off their rocker."

"It's the psychology behind it," he said of investors' reaction. "It's more a case of the news (in the first quarter) didn't get any worse and in some cases it got better."

Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets said, "I struggle with the valuation, too. Many people have questions."

Pyykkonen, calling himself a "perennial bear in terms of (Amazon's) valuation," said bulls might be betting on a more substantial and sustained scale-back in investment spending than he is.

Amazon has just begun to decelerate spending on technology and content that has depressed earnings over the past few years in an investment spree that frustrated many on Wall Street.

But given the competitive nature of the retail business, Pyykkonen does not see Amazon sitting on the sidelines as rivals gain traction. Instead, he said, spending at Amazon will be a given over the long haul: "To stay competitive, you have to invest. It's the way it is."

Another issue with Amazon's valuation may be that many shareholders have substantial stakes, limiting the number of shares that are freely available to be bought and sold.

Chief Executive Jeffrey Bezos' has nearly 25 percent of Amazon's shares. Its top five institutional investors also hold significant stakes. For example, Amazon's largest institutional investor, Legg Mason, controls 20 percent of the stock.

So the free float that is left is relatively small, RBC's Rohan explained, and even slight shifts in the company's fundamentals can spark a disproportionate move.

"Amazon shares are destined to be wild and volatile," Rohan said.

Short sellers also contributed to the initial run on Amazon shares after earnings were released. The shorts, betting against Amazon, rushed to buy stock to limit their losses when shares began to rise, pushing the stock price even higher.

Robert Toomey of E.K. Riley sees Amazon's high multiple as a sign of the retailer's recent investment cycle, and says the phenomenon is seen whenever earnings are temporarily depressed, whether from recession or investment.

Investors are betting that the improved profit margins seen in the first quarter will continue, while revenues will be buoyed by much-hyped, newly introduced digital services such as video and music, which pits Amazon against Apple's successful iTunes service.

Amazon executives, Pyykkonen argued, are probably equally dumbfounded by their share price rise and wondering: "What did we say that made people feel that good?"

Comparing Amazon with Google, Pyykkonen said the two companies' price-to-earnings ratios--with Amazon using GAAP numbers and Google adjusted--have over the last two years been comparable. That has now shifted.

"When I look at both companies, the advertising market, the margins, the competitive position...that should be worth a whole lot more multiple than an online retailer that's in a brutally competitive business," Pyykkonen said. "I would argue (Amazon) should be worth less than Google."

Price drop cuts sales growth for chip makers

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Global microchip sales will grow by only 1.8 percent this year, much slower than an earlier projection of a 10 percent increase, as prices in key markets tumble, an industry group said.

Total microchip sales will reach $252 billion in 2007 as prices fall rapidly in the three main market segments of microprocessors, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) for computers, and flash memory used in consumer gadgets, the Semiconductor Industry Association said.

"Rapid price attrition...is the major factor contributing to lower growth than previously projected," the association's president, George Scalise, said in a statement.

Prices for semiconductors used in personal computers will decline 1.6 percent in 2007 despite an expected 10 percent increase in PC unit sales. "Intense competition is contributing to price erosion at a more rapid pace than historical patterns," the group said.

Average selling prices of DRAM were down by about a third in April compared with December. The group said rising inventories will continue to depress prices for DRAM chips.

The association said it expects total microchip sales to rise to $306 billion in 2010.

The new forecasts come as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, the top two microchip processor makers, remain locked in a price war as they fight for market share. Makers of flash memory, including SanDisk, have also cited falling prices for weak earnings or losses.

Sales of consumer gadgets such as digital music players are experiencing "very strong unit growth," but prices of flash memory fell 35 percent in April from a year earlier, even as unit shipments rose nearly 54 percent, SIA said, citing data from the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics organization.

"Despite a forecast of slower growth, we expect that global sales of microchips will surpass last year's record level," Scalise said.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index of 19 chip stocks was up 1.1 percent in noon trading.

Nokia's low-power Wibree to become Bluetooth standard

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Handset maker Nokia's ultralow-power short-range wireless technology is to be developed as a new version of Bluetooth to connect devices such as watches and heart monitors, the company said.

Nokia's agreement to offer the technology as the basis for an ultralow-power Bluetooth standard should help speed its adoption and encourage acceptance rather than be a competing technology, the Bluetooth special-interest group said.

Nokia's Wibree short-range radio link uses a fraction of the power of previous systems and can hook up devices with small batteries or power capacity.

The agreement could mean wireless links for toys, sports monitors and watches, as well as sensors used in health monitoring, which have not been able to use Bluetooth until now because of its power demands.

Mike Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth group, said product developers have been calling for an ultralow-power standard, which should now be finalized in about a year.

"I would see the products coming relatively quickly after the specs are done," he said in an interview.

Nokia has worked since 2001 on Wibree, which provides a radio link of up to 30 feet between devices.

"The capability of addressing and connecting low-power devices should actually also bring a boost to the traditional Bluetooth," said Harri Tulimaa, head of Nokia's technology-licensing team.

EU lauds at Google limits on data retention

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The European Union's top security official lauded Google's decision to scale back how long it keeps personally identifiable data accumulated from its Web users as a step toward addressing privacy concerns.

The world's top provider of Web search services said this week it will curtail the time it stores user data to a year and a half, seeking to mollify an EU watchdog group that has questioned its privacy policies.

That was the low end of an 18- to 24-month period it had originally proposed to regulators in March.

The European Union data watchdog, made up of national data protection supervisors of the bloc's 27 member states, said in May that Google seemed to be failing to respect EU privacy rules and asked for clarification before its next meeting in mid-June.

It is an advisory body that is independent from the European Commission. A representative for the watchdog group said last month it would not make a final decision on whether Google may be violating European privacy laws before October.

Each time a Google user searches the Web, the company gathers information about that customer's tastes, interests and beliefs that could potentially be used by third parties such as advertisers. Google shares general user statistics but is adamant it never shares personal data outside the company.

Google has more than 60 percent of the world's Web search business, market research groups estimate.

Other household Internet names--including Amazon.com, AOL, Apple, eBay, Microsoft and MySpace--have yet to disclose any limits on how long they retain consumer data, according to a report by a rights group.

A preliminary report released over the weekend by Privacy International accused Google of being the most hostile to data protections of any major Internet company, a charge that the company is seeking aggressively to rebut.