Posts by newsguy

A few months ago News Corporation announced that it was taking on Apple in the music downloads marketplace. Chris DeWolfe, the CEO of MySpace, said it would be starting up a one-stop music shop by spinning out the existing MySpace Music service to become an independent joint venture. The interesting thing about this, at the time, was that the joint venture would be with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. All of whom would be minority shareholders and major content providers, with their entire back catalogs online.

Combining free streaming music that is sponsored by advertising, allowing shared playlists with others, and throwing in downloadable tracks as well it all sounds good. Adding subscription-based music for a monthly fee to release unlimited downloads makes it sound even better. It starts to sound really exciting when you realise that MySpace is talking about all this in a DRM free format as well.

Of course, then you sit back and reflect upon the market it is breaking into, a market totally dominated by iTunes.

The difference, of course, is the MySpace effect. By bringing community into the music downloads equation, and more to the point a proven and active community such as MySpace Music, a new dimension is added to the whole music shopping thing. All of a sudden there is that Web 2.0 polish to add a shine to what can be an otherwise fairly flat experience.

Also in favour of MyTunes is …

According to IT Pro the BT exchange in Mayfair, London has been the victim of a well executed heist. The London exchange suffered a break-in with at least £2 million worth of telecoms equipment being stolen.

As a result of the theft, it is reported, thousands of homes and businesses in London were left without Internet access.

Amongst the haul were servers and routers, not the usual far for villains in Guy Ritchie movies. But then this was no movie, although Guy Ritchie does appear to have played a small role along with his wife, Madonna.

Apparently the police are investigating reports that a 40th birthday party, being held right next door, for Guy Ritchie and where he Madonna were partying for much of the night, could have been used as a handy distraction to allow the villains to go undetected.

CERN is a funny old place. It was where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and it is where many have predicted the beginning of the end of the world started today. Of course, that is a load of old codswallop. Not least because the Armageddon today hype has proven to be somewhat premature.

So there are, for now at least, no God Particles underneath Switzerland. No mini black holes floating around near Geneva. Not even any protons crashing into each other as they whoosh around the sub-atomic racetrack buried underground near the Swiss-French borders.

You might be wondering where all the very nearly £5 billion what the project has swallowed so far went in that case? I know I am.

The good news is that it hasn't all been wasted on this theoretical scientists wet dream. Some of it has helped build the super fast network called The Grid Project. This has been built to help collect and collate the data from the Large Hadron Collider experiments, with the aid of thousands of computers lending a processing power collaborative hand. And it needs to be big, because the LHC experiments are expected to produce somewhere in the region of 15 million Gigabytes of raw data every year!

The really interesting bit though, for me at least, is the possibility that it could lead to an Internet running at 10,000 times the speed of the one I am …

Now I'm not usually one who advocates the use of spyware of any sort. As a parent myself, I like to think that trust works better than software when it comes to controlling access to questionable content online. However, in the case of the British parents who spied on their 15 year old daughters online activity in order to trap a suspected paedophile, I will make an exception.

According to reports it would appear that the teenage girl had gone from being an open and happy child to a secretive and withdrawn one. She used to tell her Dad everything, so he reckons, but then started telling him nothing. Worse, she said she would be in one place with one person but ended up somewhere else with someone else.

That someone else turned out to be a 38 year old man.

By monitoring her email and IM activity online using an application called WebWatcher, the parents were able to identify the man and reveal that he was involved in a sexual relationship with the under age teen.

The man, who met the girl while he was working as an ice hockey coach, was arrested and after being found guilty of five charges of sexual activity with a child is now starting a four and a half year prison term.

Rather surprisingly, this has sparked some comments blaming the parents for their actions. One stated that "I do object to this monitoring …

Apple today had one of 'those' events in San Francisco. At 10am PDT, under the banner of Let's Rock, Steve Jobs made a number of important product announcements. These included a brand new version of iTunes in the shape of iTunes 8. This comes with support for HD television programmes, a 'Genius' playlist function which recommends songs based on what you listen to and what you own, and a new flat album view. A new iPod Nano, the Nano 4G, becomes the thinnest iPod ever. It can do the Genius thing all on its own without needing to be connected to iTunes and a computer. Best of all if you shake it then it shuffles, seriously. It also has an accelerometer built in so is capable of doing the same flipping from landscape to portrait trick. A new Nano will cost from $149 for the 8GB device and $199 for the bigger 16GB one.

The new iTouch has also been announced, which brings a built-in speaker and a curved back in the same fashion as the iPhone. From what we can tell, and there is likely to be some more in-depth detail released during the course of the day, or at least I hope so, that's about it though. Other than to say the range starts with a 8GB version for $229 and goes up to the 32GB range topper at $399.

Last, but not least, is the long awaited iPhone 2.1 firmware update that promises to give …

Some headlines are just too good to pass up, and this is one of them. According to reports it would appear that an iffy Google News search was responsible for stock in United Airlines to crash. And crash is a pretty good description as the stock plummeted by 75 percent, down from $12.30 to less than $3 at one point.

So how was Google News to blame for all this? Well it seems that the South Florida-based Income Securities Advisors service did a Google News search and stumbled across a Chicago Tribune story that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy.

The story was quickly filed into the news digest for the day and, of course, the news spread.

Unfortunately, the story found on Google News was actually from 2002. United Airlines came out of bankruptcy in 2006.

The airline issued a press release, the stock climbed back, and the Chicago Tribune deleted the story from its archives just in case...

According to Sophos it seems that cyber-tension between North and South Korea is increasing of late. Not least thanks to allegations from the South that officers of the military command and control centre have been targeted by the North in a spyware attack on the orders of the infamous electronic warfare division.

It is being speculated that the bog standard malicious email attachment style attack hit various military contacts on the Won Jeong Hwa hitlist. Miss Won, 35, is apparently facing trial for treason after her defection Northwards three years ago. It is said the she did a Mata-Hari and seduced army officers during a tour of South Korean military bases. Pretending to just be lecturing about the evil of Kim II Sung, she faces charges of actually spying and sleeping her way to military secrets all the time.

"North Korea is the latest in this year's roll call of countries accused of engaging in cyber warfare," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "While it's difficult to prove that this sort of espionage is happening as computer systems give hackers the anonymity they need, countries around the world have been spying for centuries and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't now use more up to date methods - along with the age old technique of deploying a pretty woman to weadle out the information. In this instance, it's not known if any military secrets were stolen, but it's an embarrassing breach of security. …

According to the VeriSign Domain Report for the second quarter of 2008 which has just been published, there were some 168 million domain name registrations across the Top Level Domain Names at the midpoint of the year. That represents a 22 percent increase over the same period last year, and up four percent over the first quarter of 2008. Country code top level domains were also up, 27 percent when viewed as a year on year figure to a total of 65 million domain names.

If you break the domain name industry down into the largest top level domains when ordered according to base size, then the list has remained relatively constant. No surprise that .com sits at the top, although it might come as a bit of a shock to some that the Germans are right there in the number two spot with .de ahead of China, .cn, in third.

Then we have .net in fourth, followed by .uk, .org, .info, .nl (The Netherlands), .eu (European Union), and .biz

When it comes to Domain Name System queries, then VeriSign report that it processed peak loads of more than 48 billion per day in the second quarter 2008. Amazingly, during this time the VeriSign DNS kept a 100 percent uptime record. Perhaps not so amazingly, as it has remained up for the past decade!

“Securing and protecting the integrity of DNS is critical to the stability of the global Internet, and VeriSign is continuing …

Here's an interesting question: just how much data do you think your iPhone consumes in an average month? I mean, it's the kind of thing you should know the answer to, given how obsessed everyone seems to be with iPhone service plan data caps and costs.

Rather surprisingly, the carrier which has the iPhone 3G exclusive in Canada, none other than the much maligned Rogers, reckons it is a lot less than you might imagine.

It came under fire online for its data caps which varied from 400MB a month on the $60 plan through to 2Gb at the top end $115 a month plan. In fact, it came under so much hostile fire that it even took cover behind a hastily introduced, albeit for a limited time only, special offer plan which provided 6GB for $30.

Yet all that aside, Rogers reckons that only 1.2 percent of its customers actually used more than 1GB of data in four weeks, with the vast majority using less than 500MB.

In fact, it says that 95 percent used less than 500MB and 91.2 percent used less than 100MB.

Funnily enough, I rarely exceed 200MB of data transfer via my own iPhone in a month and I always thought I was a quite average user of mobile online services. Now it seems that I was right.

So I ask again, out of interest, how much data does your iPhone move in an average month?

Look, I know it is fashionable to knock Internet Explorer. It is an easy target, and I will admit to aiming my own fair of kicks over the years. But when Beta software gets slated for having some bugs, well isn't that just taking things a little too far?

That was my impression when I first saw some of the reports breaking online, but as I dug deeper I realised there was more to this story than meets the eye.

The problems go further than just the usual software bugs, it would seem, and instead look like they could actually be with Microsoft services instead. Indeed, some reports are saying that Microsoft has acknowledged at least some of these service issues.

First there was the revelation from Microsoft itself that if you had upgraded to IE8 on Windows XP SP3 then there was no returning to IE7 without first uninstalling the service pack. Which is a bit harsh, don't you think? Might have been nice to let us know earlier in the day.

Then there are the user reports coming in about ClearType and difficulties in cleanly leaving Windows Live Mail without it crashing and burning. It is even being reported that IE8 Beta 2 is not being recognised as a supported browser by, well, err, Windows Live Meeting.

Whoops.

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth are creating a rehabilitation programme for stroke victims that puts them onto a treadmill which immerses them into a virtual environment.

Apparently the device works by using a series of moving images which essentially trick the brain of the patient into believing they are walking more slowly than is actually the case. This, I am assured, somehow encourages them to walk faster and to walk further.

Wendy Powell, the PhD student who has developed the software says that the early results suggest patients using virtual rehabilitation may experience less pain than traditional physiotherapy techniques following trials on real patients at the McGill University in Canada.

Wendy, formerly a professional chiropractor, is hopeful this project will the way for a new and innovative approach to physiotherapy. "The virtual system encourages patients to walk more quickly and for longer, almost without them realising it" she told us, adding "The environment is stimulating and entertaining and there's less fear of falling over. Our test subjects are usually surprised when I tell them they've improved by up to 20 per cent."

Wendy's system uses a variety of different images from urban landscapes to forest and mountain scenes. She has built a system of rewards into some of the programmes, which encourages the patient to pick up objects and collect points. She said that older people were not at all put off by the 'computer game' element but seemed to enjoy it.

And that word is: S-U-N-K. Although not entirely without trace it must be said.

Yeah, yeah. I know that you guys in North America had already lost Scrabulous after Hasbro had taken legal action to take down the popular Facebook application there.

Now Mattel, which has the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, has achieved the same result for the rest of the world.

It seems that Facebook has decided to jump overboard and abandon the Facebook application ship before a court in India could push them. Which is more than a little odd, as usually you might expect it to wait for the legal ruling before taking the action.

Still, I guess in the light of the earlier Hasbro success it was only ever going to be a matter of time.

I expect that the rest of the world will now get to play with Wordscraper, or Scrabulous in new clothes as it is also known. Somehow I cannot see too many ex-Scrabulous players moving loyalty to either the Mattel or Hasbro official Facebook versions of Scrabble...

According to the BBC there are now 16.5 million UK households which have Internet access. Not only is that figure up from last year, up by 1.2 million to be specific, but it also means that some two-thirds of UK homes are now online.

The Office for National Statistics figures reveal that those in the South East of the country are the most likely to be online at home, while those in the North East are not.

The BBC also reports that in those homes where there is no Internet access, representing some 35 percent of the households in the United Kingdom, there is a good reason why. Not that they cannot afford it, or did not understand it, but rather that they did not want it.

In fact, the proportion of these homes saying they did not want the Internet thanks very much has risen from just 3 percent in 2006 to 24 percent now.

The games developers convention in Leipzig, Germany, has been used to announce that The Sims 3 is to be released world-wide on February 20th 2009.

Electronics Arts is also set to release a limited edition collectors version which will come complete with a Sims 'plumbob' logo USB drive, a virtual Italian sports car for in-game use and some exclusive stickers.

Even if you don't opt for the limited edition version of the game, Sims fans who pre-order might be able to get an in-game vintage sports car and a neighborhood map poster. I say 'might' because it depends upon the retailer you pre-order from apparently.

Every copy of The Sims 3 will feature a new games engine for more immersive play, in particular with regard to the new totally explorable neighborhood. The new engine will also impact upon how your character lives, with your actions having a knock on effect on the entire population within the game. In other words, more of a 'living' virtual world than players of The Sims 2 can experience.

The Sims avatar will be more customisable, with everything from body type to hair and skin tone being playable with.

Despite India being something of an emerging technological powerhouse economy these days, the decision to launch the iPhone 3G there has to be amongst the more bizarre made by Apple of late.

Heck, I would chance my arm and say that there is more chance of seeing someone really do the Indian Rope Trick than there is of Apple making a really stunning success of the iPhone 3G in this particular market.

Let me explain the two very good reasons why.

Firstly, and this will probably surprise many readers, Apple is launching the iPhone 3G into a country which has no 3G network. What's more, it would seem more than likely that India will remain without 3G for some time to come as government departments slog it out, and Draconian regulatory measures prevent network operators doing deals with each other to share connectivity within a few years of the 3G spectrum auctions finishing. Do not get me wrong, Apple and Vodafone are being upfront about this, and the small print on the relevant web pages do say "Currently compatible only with 2G networks. Only select features and services are currently available in India." But how many people will read that, how many will understand the implications, how many will just see the ads and read the online reviews and assume the iPhone 3G will do 'all that' in India as it does everywhere else?

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, buying an iPhone 3G …

New laws have just come into force in the UK which apply to motorists who cause death as a result of careless driving. The Road Safety Act 2006 has been changed to incorporate distractions such as changing the radio station, applying make-up or eating a sandwich while behind the wheel. It has also been beefed up so that whereas last week someone found guilty of the offense would have been facing a maximum UKP £5000 fine and some driving license penalty points, this week they are facing up to five years in jail.

It gets better, or worse I guess if you are on the wrong end of the judgment stick, if the court should decide that the distraction was both gross and avoidable. Then the charges get ramped up into death by dangerous driving territory and come with mandatory jail time of between 2 and 14 years.

Interestingly, reading or composing text messages constitutes such a gross and avoidable distraction when done over a period of time, although just glancing at a text message would be considered an ordinary distraction.

Listen, if you are stupid enough to text while driving you deserve everything the law throws at you. Especially if you take someone else's life as a result of your own lack of brain cells.

It seems that the draft spec for USB 3.0 has been released by Intel following much online speculation over exactly what the technology would and would not be able to do.

To be precise, what Intel has released is the 'Extensible Host Controller Interface draft specification revision 0.9' for Super-Speed USB. However, we all know it is USB 3.0 really.

Mind you, super-speed is a good alternative name considering USB 3.0 will come sporting a data rate of 600MB/per sec.

The rest of the Intel draft specification is actually very dull, unless you happen to be involved in the development of hardware peripherals in which case no doubt all that talk of communications registers and data structures will be essential bedtime reading no doubt.

According to ChannelWeb a federal judge sitting in the US Court of Appeals has ruled that open source software licenses are legal under copyright law. This is a complete u-turn on a previous ruling which had thrown the not so small matter of open source licensing into something of a legal quagmire.

The case appears to have arisen out of a dispute, of all things, over the legality of an open source license for model railway control software after a developer gave another an 'artistic license' and that other then used it while developing a competing product.

Earlier, a court had decided that there was no violation of copyright law in the case, but rather it was a matter of contractual promise more than anything.

The higher court did not agree and has stated "copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material."

According to VeriSign, more than half of the Internet using people on the planet can get protection from an EV SSL-enabled web browser. Protection, that is, from data and identity theft.

According to Net Applications, as revealed in their latest Web browser market share report, a total of 52.8 percent of web browsers support EV SSL. That breaks down to IE7 covering 47.1 percent and Firefox 3 the remaining 5.7 percent.

Add in whatever percentage share crumbs Opera 9 can muster these days, and allow for the fact that Firefox 3 is new and so uptake and share will inevitably continue to climb, and this all spells good news for web users.

Extended Validation (EV) Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are, of course, a VeriSign invention which is why the company PRs are passing on this statistical information. If you use a modern browser client then you will probably have noticed the address bar turning green as you visit sites.

That's a good thing, it means those sites are protected by an EV SSL certificate. In turn this provides assurance that the site has been authenticated and is not some cloned resource harvesting your data.

But it is not all good news. as VeriSign admits that "nearly 6,000 Web sites already rely on VeriSign EV SSL Certificates" which is not exactly that confidence inspiring when you consider the millions of sites out there.

"The schemes cooked up by identity thieves to steal personal information …

Global IP Solutions has one big claim to fame in that it invented the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) iLBC codec standard. OK, you might not have heard of this if you are not a card carrying geek, but you have probably benefited from the iLBC codec.

This narrowband speech algorithm was designed specifically to allow for better quality voice calls across the Internet. As well as being employed within the VoIP technology of many Internet Service Providers, iLBC is also part of the iPhone itself.

Now GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile promises to enable Voice over IP for the iPhone. Third party developers will be able to include real-time voice, using the iPhone WiFi capability rather than the mobile telephone network connection, within their applications.

The possible options are almost endless, with business applications being perhaps the most obvious. However, given the popularity of gaming with iPhone application downloaders there is a great opportunity for in-game, multi-player chat for example.

"The popularity of the iPhone, along with the emergence of various applications and faster connectivity, makes it an ideal platform for developing applications that incorporate quality real-time VoIP, giving consumers real-world communication experiences" Emerick Woods, GIPS' Chief Executive Officer says.

"We are excited to enable the iPhone with VoIP capabilities and lead the mobile communications market with our voice processing technology" Woods continues, adding "With GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile, we are providing the capabilities that turn voice into IP packets so they can be transmitted …

Anyone remember all the fuss back at the end of 2005 when, in December of that year, it was revealed that Google had managed to beat off the attentions of Microsoft to ensure that its relationship with AOL remained good? The New York Times reported at the time how Time Warner had agreed to sell a 5 percent stake in AOL to Google for $1 Billion.

Of course, the deal was really all about online advertising share. Not only in helping keep Google right there at the top of the online ad brokerage tree, but perhaps just as importantly to help thwart Microsoft plans to climb that tree itself.

Now, it would seem, the true cost of that deal can be revealed. It would appear that Google has told the Securities and Exchange Commission that the 'investment' if that is the right word, is likely to have less value now than it did three years ago.

Regulations required that Google reviews its investment, and in the report to the Securities and Exchange Commission it said that "we believe our investment in AOL may be impaired." More damning than that, Google then went on to explain that "we do not believe that such impairment is other-than-temporary."

If those analysts who value AOL at around half the $20 Billion at the time of the Google deal are right, that would make the 5 percent stake held worth around $500,000.

It has been a long time coming, but Microsoft has finally announced the release to manufacturing of SQL Server 2008.

"Microsoft developed this release of SQL Server with the customer in mind," said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft. "SQL Server 2008 is the only major database that includes comprehensive, tightly integrated functionality for data management as well as advanced business intelligence out of the box. By offering a complete solution, we save customers time and money and allow them to focus on deriving the most value from their data assets."

The pre-release stats are impressive enough, with more than 450,000 customer and partner downloads of the SQL Server 2008 community technology previews and at least 75 large-scale applications already in production. Microsoft tell us that some 1,350 applications are being developed by around 1,000 independent software vendors using SQL Server 2008.

There is some confusion over the multiple flavours of SQL Server that are available, however. So here's a quick round-up of those different editions:

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise
SQL Server 2008 Enterprise is a comprehensive data management and business intelligence platform that provides enterprise-class scalability, data warehousing, security, advanced analytics and reporting support for running business-critical applications. With this edition, it is possible to consolidate servers and perform large-scale online transactional processing.

SQL Server 2008 Standard
SQL Server 2008 Standard is a complete data management and business intelligence platform that provides best-in-class ease of use …

Andy Zeigler is the Program Manager for Reliability and Privacy on the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 team. Now there's a job and a half, it has to be said.

Writing on the official IEBlog he says "For Internet Explorer, reliability means that the browser should always start quickly, perform well, connect to the Internet, and show Web sites without crashing or hanging. Most users want their browser to work, recover smoothly after a crash, and display the Web correctly. Users are not as concerned with what causes the problem, whether that be a poorly functioning add-on or poorly performing website. As part of our ongoing commitment to improve reliability, we have done a great deal of work in IE8 to make the browser more robust in all of these areas: performance, recovery and display."

Which is why Beta testing is so important. For the most part, users who download the Beta versions of something like IE8 don't really get to do much other than play with some new software which might not be totally stable. There is precious little real and direct interaction with the development team, unless you are part of the Microsoft Connect Beta programme team that is.

But now, in an unusual move it has to be said, Allison Burnett, another Program Manager on the IE8 team, has posted a request for great people to become great Beta testers by filing great bug reports. Great!

"Beta 2 is right around the …

The Inquirer reports that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has formally approved a 3.2Gbps supporting Firewire specification which goes by the catchy name of IEEE 1394-2008.

As well as that amazingly fast rate, IEEE 1394-2008 also supports full backwards compatibility with both S400 and S800 ports and is perfectly capable of connecting as many as 63 hot swappable peripherals in a tree format.

Which will pretty much make this the fastest game in town, at least until 2010 when Universal Serial Bus 3.0 is due to make an appearance. A very fast appearance at that, which will make IEEE 1394-2008 look positively pedestrian.

How fast?

How does 4.8Gbps sound to you?

Of course, whether the increase in nominal speed of USB 3.0 will actually mean it moves more data more efficiently than IEEE 1394-2008 is debatable. Even though Firewire-400 should be slower, on paper, than USB 2.0 out in the real world of the video professional there are few who would disagree that it actually manages a higher data throughput.

According to The Telegraph newspaper here in the UK, British Members of Parliament are kicking up a right old stink about YouTube. Specifically regarding what it does, or more to the point what it does not do, to prevent sexually explicit and violent video clips from being posted.

The House of Commons "Culture and Media Committee" says that it is completely unimpressed with the systems that YouTube has in place to filter out sexual and violent content. Surely, the point is that there is no active filtering to prevent the publication of such material. Instead, YouTube relies upon user intervention to report 'bad' videos which can then be removed as soon as their inappropriate nature has been confirmed by YouTube staff.

The MPs are dismissive of the YouTube argument that there are too many video posted to pre-approve them for publication. Even though YouTube says there are some 10 hours of video posted every minute, the MPs say that pre-publication filtering should be the norm for all user generated content.

The Culture and Media Committee answer is to propose policing standards set by a self-regulating body within the user generated content industry online.

I guess you could call it karma. HD Moore's company, BreakingPoint, found that traffic was being diverted to a scammer Google page. This kind of cache poisoning attack on DNS servers is not unusual, however this particular case was because HD Moore is the man who created the Metasploit hacking toolkit. What's more this kind of poisoning was recently made a lot easier than it used to be, in no small measure thanks to the HD Moore Metasploit project being the first to release software that exploits the new technological method for doing so.

According to PC Advisor it would seem that HD Moore himself was not the target of this attack, however, just an unfortunately high profile and somewhat ironic victim. The attack was actually against an AT&T network in Austin, Texas which served BreakingPoint.

When AT&T got owned so did HD Moore.

It was only a matter of luck that the hack was spotted. When HD Moore went to visit google.com he was redirected to the scammer pages which were a direct clone of the Google site. Apart from the fact that the hacker forgot to use the NASA themed logo that Google had been using that particular day...

According to reports it looks like Facebook and Microsoft have agreed a deal which will see Microsoft Live Search integrated into the Facebook service. Along with the related advertising of course.

This should come as no great surprise to anyone who watches the technology market for trends, as Microsoft had already 'expressed an interest' in Facebook when it bought $240 million worth of shares in the social networking giant last year.

OK, so $240 million only got it a measly little 1.6 percent Facebook stake, but it did enable Microsoft to get an exclusive deal on advertising outside of the US Facebook market.

It also rather cemented the intention to do more business at some point in the not so distant future. That point would appear to be now.

The Inquirer suggests that "The cozy alliance between Microsoft and Facebook only served to illustrate Redmond's soured relationship with Yahoo."

According to BIOS Magazine there is a new Xbox 360 Dashboard interface coming our way real soon now, like next month.

In a move that has been designed to make it easier buy additional functionality as well as improve the social aspects of the Xbox 360 gaming experience, Microsoft is also reported to be launching the sale of user generated game content for the console.

"The first major change to the system involves basic navigation" the article says, adding "The top-level channels now consist of six items that closely resemble the menu structure of Windows Media Center: Spotlight, Games, My Xbox, Primetime, Community, and Videos. Each option contains additional functionality in sub-menu options and contains major innovations."

Interestingly, when you press the controller guide button during game play a miniature version of the dashboard blades pop up allowing access pretty much from anywhere at any time.

Then there is that user generated content to consider. "The Games channel will let you easily find games to purchase and explore" BIOS says, which will include demos, full downloads and game previews.

That, my friends, is the message being touted by the latest Security Threat report to emerge from Sophos which says that one web page was infected every five seconds (count them) during the first half of 2008.

Last year it was only, and I feel bad enough saying only, one every 14 seconds.

To put it into some kind of perspective, every day of the first six months of this year Sophos has detected 16,173 malicious web pages. The vast majority, around 90 percent we are told, thanks to those sites being hacked. The main culprit being that old favourite the SQL Injection exploit.

Sophos consultant Graham Cluley told IT Pro that “There’s been a concerted campaign to infect people,” said Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley. “If you were to paint a picture of what the first six months of 2008 were all about when it came to malware, it was about SQL injections hitting websites.”

Sophos has identified that the number one host for malware on the web is Blogger (Blogspot.com), which allows computer users to make their own websites easily at no charge. Hackers both set up malicious blogs on the service, and inject dangerous web links and content into innocent blogs in the form of comments. Blogspot.com accounts for 2 percent of all of the world's malware hosted on the web according to Sophos.

According to IM services provider ProcessOne a staggering 72 percent of UK businesses have banned the use of IM software such as MSN and AIM citing security fears as the main reason. At the same time, some 75 percent of those businesses admit that IM could be a valuable collaboration tool for their organisation. It seems, however, that the fear of confidential information leaking out of the confines of the business, with software downloaded and installed without company approval, tips the scales enough to cancel out the perceived benefits.

“It is a shame that more businesses in the UK aren’t taking advantage of the benefits that instant messaging can bring,” said Mickael Remond, CEO of ProcessOne. “Many organisations are torn between wanting to maximise security or gain collaboration and productivity benefits, and clearly maintaining security is winning at this point. However, businesses need to ask themselves whether taking such a knee-jerk reaction as completely banning the use of IM is really the best option for the company.”

I am not sure that knee-jerk is the correct description to apply here, after all the research does refer to public IM services rather than an in-house system which could still be used but without quite the same security implications.

However, there is no doubting that the level of concern over security risks of public IM use was widespread: some 88 percent of IT directors said as much. 56 percent insisting that their organisation was worried about losing …

It has not been a good day for Apple. Actually, let me rephrase that - it has not been a good day for Apple customers. Here in the UK supplies of the Jesus Phone, the all new iPhone 3G, were scarce to say the least. Those people who did brave the early morning queues and get their hands on a handset were soon finding themselves coming down from the temporary high as they tried to activate the devices.

The same problem has apparently been hitting iPhone 3G users the world over. Indeed, in the US an AT&T spokesman admitted there was a problem with the Apple iTunes servers which was preventing the handsets from being properly activated before leaving the stores.

Some people have been told to go home and try the last step in the process there, although they are not having much luck either as the iTunes servers have simply buckled under the strain.

The same problem has hit users of earlier iPhones who wanted to upgrade, for free, to the new version 2.0 software in order to take advantage of the Apps Store and its third party software downloads. While the upgrade went OK for most folk, eventually, not so the final step: are-activating the handset. So Apple is in that wonderfully ironic situation of effectively bricking their own users for upgrading their handsets with official software.

iTouch owners did not even get as far as the software upgrade. …

Having worked out the cost of an iPhone 3G on any contract anywhere in the world as being just too expensive, and learning today that the Pay As You Go option will not be available until Christmas here in the UK at least, I wondered if there was any real alternative out there?

Luckily, the Web and an Electric Pig came to my rescue.

The Electric Pig gadget sites has a round up of three mobile handsets which go a little further than just Google Maps for location display and include proper satnav functionality. The three phones covered are:

1. Garmin Nuvifone which automatically switches into GPS mode when you put it on your car dashboard.
   
2. N96 with Nokia Maps which comes with a dedicated pedestrian mode as well as optional voice prompts.
   
3. Windows Mobile with CoPilot Live 7 which combines, according to Electric Pig at any rate, the best Windows Mobile Smartphone with the killer navigational app.

Meanwhile, Dan Costa over at PC Magazine is urging people not to buy an iPhone 3G at all. Amongst the persuasive arguments he puts forward are the fact that it isn't worth the upgrade, the battery life will suck and it simply is not a feature leader.

The list of bad stuff continues over at TrustedReviews where we are told that amongst the disappointments, as the reviewer tactfully calls them, are:

• It is fatter 115.5 x …

Interesting story starting to appear across the pond on the UK news wires, with sites such as Electric Pig reporting that things are either looking good or bad for the Apple iPhone 3G depending on which way you look at the news.

That news being the sole network supplying the 3g Jesus Phone in the UK, 02, has totally sold out of the new handset some 4 days before the official launch this coming Friday.

Of course, strange marketing tactics and Apple iPhones are not exactly strangers it has to be said. And the news that 02 is telling enquiring customers to call back on the 10th July, one day before the units start to go in sale, suggests that this could just be a tactic to ensure media coverage.

In which case, mea culpa, it worked.

Whatever, when I just checked the 02 website there was a notice posted which said "Due to huge demand for the iPhone 3G we’re currently out of stock online. Come back on 10 July for more information."

Which would mean that, in effect, 02 sold out of allocated supplies within around 6 hours of starting to take online orders.

Following on from my posting two days ago, the EFF is reporting that Viacom has issued a statement regarding the US court ruling over disclosure of those YouTube video viewing logs. Here is the statement in full:

It is unfortunate that we have been compelled to go to court to protect Viacom's rights and the rights of the artists who work with and depend on us. YouTube and Google have put us in this position by continuing to defend their illegal and irresponsible conduct and profiting from copyright infringement, when they could be implementing the safe and legal user generated content experience they promise.

The Court's recent decision has triggered concern about what information will be disclosed and how it will be used. Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any user. Any information that we or our outside advisors obtain -- which will not include personally identifiable information -- will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against You Tube and Google, will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner.

It would appear that Ask.com, the search site which used to be known as Ask Jeeves, has purchased Dictionary.com

Dropping the 'Jeeves' branding after 10 years, the search engine retained the same 'ask a straightforward question' approach to Internet searching. With the acquisition of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com that concept will take a huge leap forwards. Assuming, that is, there is to be some kind of back office integration to unleash this new power from within a single search interface.

Currently Ask is ranked the fourth biggest search engine in the United States with a 4.23 percent share of the market according to the most recent Hitwise statistics. This puts it just behind Microsoft on 5.89 percent but there remains a huge chasm before you reach Yahoo in second place on 19.95 percent and Google somewhere on the horizon with 68.29 percent.

InterActiveCorp, which owns Ask, has made no secret of the fact that it hopes to add 11 percent to the number of monthly unique visitors that Ask gets, which would take that total up to 145 million. Just how this will impact upon overall search share remains to be seen.

And don't forget that Microsoft has been buying into new search technology as well, with its acquisition of Powerset. It is thought that Microsoft is looking to make a push into natural language searching, making the semantic web …

Sometimes I am left almost loss for words, and today is one of them. Judge Louis Stanton gave a ruling in the federal court for the Southern District of New York which has, quite frankly, dismissed the right to privacy of anyone who has ever watched a video clip on YouTube.

The man who obviously has his finger on the pulse of technological culture (spot the irony) has ordered that Google must pass over to Viacom, the broadcast media giant which owns MTV and DreamWorks amongst others, records regarding every single video clip ever published to its YouTube service. All of them.

What sort of records? Oh you know, the user name, address and IP address which detail every video clip you have ever watched on YouTube, or elsewhere for that matter as the ruling also includes videos that are embedded on other sites but played via the YouTube site.

Viacom quite obviously do not need this information to determine if there are copyright violating videos on YouTube, it has already said there are more than 100,000 of them and issued take down notices.

Viacom is either positioning itself to get better leverage with regard to the ongoing $1 billion lawsuit it has against Google and YouTube, and of which this decision was part. Or it is just making an old media grab for new media information, so it can tell who watches what and when.

Whatever the real reason, the fact remains: Viacom has …

Could it be that Apple, having placed an order for some 50 million 8Gb flash chips, is planning to sell rather a lot of the new iPhone 3Gs? At the very least it will mean that the competition, such as Samsungs other customers, will have to go hang.

Indeed, Samsung has been warning them that NAND flash is about to become pretty scarce for a while.

Looking at the math, and remembering that 8Gb is the same as 1GB, it works out to enough flash to build either 3 million 16GB iPhone 3G handsets or 6 million 8GB iPhone 3G handsets. Or, of course, a combination of the two.

Given that Apple predicts it will sell some 10 million iPhones before the year is out, it looks like the NAND shortage could get worse before it gets any better.

According to the official Microsoft Developer Network IEBlog Internet Explorer 8 will come packed with a whole host of new security features. These will include the SmartScreen Filter which replaces the Phishing Filter in current versions of the browser. Eric Lawrence, Program Manager for Internet Explorer Security says that this will be "a replacement that improves upon the Phishing Filter in a number of important ways" which include:

• Improved user interface
• Faster performance
• New heuristics & enhanced telemetry
• Anti-Malware support
• Improved Group Policy support

There is also going to be better cross-site scripting (XSS) defenses courtesy of IE8 blocking the most common form of XSS attack, the reflection attacks. The IE8 XSS Filter is a heuristic-based mitigation that sanitizes injected scripts, preventing execution. Lawrence says "XSS Filter provides good protection against exploits, but because this feature is only available in IE8, it’s important that web developers provide additional defense-in-depth and work to eliminate XSS vulnerabilities in their sites."

David Ross, a security software engineer working on IE8 adds that "The XSS Filter operates as an IE8 component with visibility into all requests / responses flowing through the browser. When the filter discovers likely XSS in a cross-site request, it identifies and neuters the attack if it is replayed in the server’s response. Users are not presented with questions they are unable to answer – IE simply blocks the malicious script from executing."

Apple has rolled no less than 25 patches into the Mac OS X 10.5.4 Leopard update that was announced yesterday. These address a number of Ruby vulnerabilities, as reported here on DaniWeb last month by fellow blogger Davey Winder.

So that's six of the patches accounted for at any rate. Others are a little more difficult to pin down, although Apple does say that they address operating system and application performance issues. It seems, from a quick bit of asking around the usual online suspects, that these include components such as Alias Manager, CoreTypes, c++filt, Net-SMTP, Tomcat, VPN and Webkit as well as the aforementioned Ruby that is.

We also know that the Alias Manager patch deals with a memory corruption issue in OS X 10.4.11 and OS X Server 10.4.11 which manifests itself in the handling of AFP volume mount information in an alias structure.

Then there is the small matter of problems that people have been having with Adobe Creative Suite 3, in particular related to saving and reopening it.

Finally, the Safari problems with loading secure web pages that impacted upon performance are also said to have been fixed.

Speaking before the start of the Microsoft Big Picture gaming showcase in San Francisco, Jon Schappert, a Microsoft Corporate VP, took the opportunity to lay claim to Windows being the biggest gaming platform on the planet.

Not Microsoft, you might like to note. Not the Xbox. But rather, and specifically, the Windows-based PC.

I will reiterate that in his own words: "Microsoft and a growing community of the gaming industry’s leading publishers, hardware manufacturers and retailers have made the Windows-based PC the largest gaming platform in the world.”

Schappert was talking in terms of an installed user base, and Windows does have quite a few. Of course, truth be told, not all of them play games. Actually, I suspect that very few of them play games. Unless you count securing yourself against malware and the like.

“While the challenges we face as an industry are many, PC gaming has never been stronger, and we’re confident this trend will continue in the years to come" Schappert insists.

Zotac has today announced the availability of what it claims is the fastest core clock speed for a graphics card straight out of the box. The GTX 280 AMP! Edition overclocks the NVIDIA GTX 280 card to top, are you ready for this, 700 MHz.

OK, so it adds about £30 ($60) to the cost of a standard GTX 280, but that is not bad when you work it to a 5 percent price increase for a 12 percent performance hike.

For a relative newcomer to the graphics market, Zotac certainly seems to be making something of a splash. Last year it stormed in with the then highest clocked performer, the 8800GT, and now this.

"Yet again Zotac has demonstrated its exceptional ability to design and engineer the fastest card on the market" claimed Carsten Berger, Marketing Director, Zotac, "Overclocking the GTX 280's core by almost 100 MHz is a fantastic achievement, but to then mass produce it and maintain a 5 year warranty is outstanding".

The full specs of the GTX 280 AMP! compared to the standard GTX 280 show a 98 MHz increase in core clock speed from 602 MHz, the processor clocks run at 1400 MHz instead of 1296 Mhz, and the memory clock speed increases from 2214 MHz to 2300 MHz.

As publishers go, O'Reilly has managed to build itself quite a reputation as a forward thinking company. Not only for the way in which it tackles emerging and niche technologies from the developer perspective, but also for being something of a pioneer in making them available in a digital format. The Safari Books Online service being a hugely successful venture, with O'Reilly claiming it generated more revenue than "typically associated with the entire downloadable ebook business."

It has now decided to go one step further and make at least some of its catalogue of titles available without any DRM at all.

Yes, you read that right, DRM-free ebooks. Not free of charge, mind, just free of proprietary security restrictions. O'Reilly does admit that it is investigating digital watermarking options, but that is about it.

This isn't all new news though, as there have been DRM-free PDF books available from O'Reilly for some time now. However, it does signal yet another move towards a thriving digital book market unhampered by the petty restrictions of DRM obsessed publishers.

The official US PlayStation 3 blog has posted a confirmation of the forthcoming firmware update. I think we can accept this as being genuine, seeing as how it has come from the Director of PlayStation Network Operations, Eric Lempel, himself. So no more speculation and rumor, the truth is finally out there.

In what is, admittedly, a rather short posting Lempel confirms that the update will include the long awaited XMB access in-game to enable players to access the console menu without first having to quit the game they are playing. About time too. I am sure I cannot be the only PS3 gamer fed up with the already long load times, and then faced with having to wait all over again just because I need to access the system menu!

Actually, that does seem to be pretty much it on the official confirmation side of things. Other than the ability to download gamer graphics, or 'trophies' as Lempel calls them which can be thought of as similar to the Xbox 360 gamer graphic download packs I guess. Indeed, the blog has already spoken about these downloads and made them sound a little like Xbox 360 achievements. Which is cool. As is the new and more dynamic UI that has been promised...

Those clever boffins at the University of Bath, England have managed to develop a machine called RepRap which can, effectively, replicate itself. The boffins themselves describe it as being a 3D printer which can print, or rather produce, real mechanical parts. Perhaps most interesting is the claim that RepRap can actually copy and produce the parts needed to build another RepRap. In other words it is a machine that can replicate itself.

RepRap itself stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and works by building up the component in layers of plastic to produce something akin to a Lego brick in terms of robustness. Sure, there are other 3D printers out there but most are hellish expensive. RepRap did not cost tens of thousands of pounds but less than a thousand.

Best of all, it's open source. The developers say that "following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend..."

How much is $630 worth? According to The Register the rather surprising answer is $714. That is the price that an enterprising eBayer has put on some money, and by manipulating the Microsoft Live Search advertising cashback offer implemented by Microsoft last month the guy reckons you can turn a profit when you buy.

The theory being that accessing the purchase page via a special Love Search advertising link, which promises 35 percent cashback (direct from the advertiser) on the purchase price, you get back more than the $84 premium you've paid. In fact, everyone wins - except Microsoft and eBay it seems.

El Reg has not managed to get anyone from either company to comment, nor has it actually tried to buy $630 in order to test the theory either.

The loophole in the cashback scheme itself was exposed by FatWallet who noted that the eBay purchase has to be a buy it now option and paid for via PayPal in order to work. I have a funny feeling that if it did work before, after The Register story it certainly won't be working now.

Sky News reports that there are less than 100 days to go before Europeans have to start disposing of their old batteries in a more environmentally friendly manner. It appears that there is a new European Union directive coming in to force which will set national targets for the recycling of batteries.

Apparently as many as 660 million batteries each year end up being buried in European landfill sites, a figure that is being driven upwards by our increasing reliance upon portable power. Things will have to change over the next few years, as the EU have set a target of 25 percent of all batteries being recycled by September 26th 2010 and 45 percent six years on from then.

According to the EU:

Approximately 800,000 tonnes of automotive batteries, 190,000 tonnes of industrial batteries and 160,000 tonnes of portable (consumer) batteries are placed on the EU market annually. The metals used in those batteries vary considerably and include mercury, lead and cadmium (batteries containing them are considered hazardous waste by Commission Decision 2000/532/EC), nickel, copper, zinc, manganese and lithium. In case of incineration, the metals used in batteries contribute to air emissions and pollute incineration residues. When batteries end up in landfills, the metals contribute to the leachate from landfills. Moreover, on a resource management level, batteries are considered a source of secondary raw materials. Thousands of tonnes of metals, including valuable metals such as nickel, cobalt and silver, will be recovered when batteries …

Not a fan then? :)

The good old Federal Communications Commission has finally decided, and about time to, that download speeds of up to 200Kbps cannot be sold as broadband. While those people still struggling on dial-up connections would probably disagree, the truth is that such slow connectivity really does not justify being labeled as broadband. In fact, the FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate has gone as far as saying that doing so had become "something of a running joke."

As from now, then, ISPs in the US will not be allowed to get away with conning people into buying slow connections under the guise of joining the broadband society. Indeed, speeds of between 200Kbps and 768Kbps cannot even be described as broadband either any more. Instead, these must be referred to as 'first generation data' connections in a totally confusing manner I believe. To get on the broadband ladder will require speeds of between 768Kbps and 1.5Mbps, and shall be known only as 'basic broadband' it would seem.

You can read the full FCC declaration covering all speeds in this pdf document.

Not my sentiment but that of Johnathan Nightingale, the Firefox security interface designer no less who has gone on record as saying that "we didn't want to put in something that was half baked" when talking about how the privacy button might interact with websites and mashups alike. Which might explain why the feature has been removed from the final version of Firefox 3 which is due for release real soon now.

It's a real shame in my opinion, because the privacy button provided that Holy Grail of web browsing: a non-sticky surfing experience that is integral to the browser client rather than coming by way of a third party add-on.

It would have worked by disabling caching and cookie downloads alike, as well as history logging and form data saving during any given session. It would say directly to the browser, as Nightingale himself admits "I would like what I'm about to do to not be logged anywhere."

Or at least it would have done, had it not been removed from the release version.

Apparently, Nightingale says it "touches a lot of code" which could be problematical. So, on balance, perhaps a stable browsing experience is preferable to a private one. Well maybe, but it's a damn close call for a lot of folk.

According to the New Scientist it appears that Apple has decided to cover all bases when it comes to how iTunes is used. Apparently, buried deep within the iTunes End User License Agreement is this little gem of a clause:

"Licensee also agrees that Licensee will not use the Apple Software for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons."

So there you have it, in black and white, straight from the lawyer's mouth as it were: iTunes should not be used to help produce weapons of mass destruction. Of course, two things jump out at me regarding this truly mind-boggling bit of licensing. Firstly, I am extremely confused as to just how a terrorist could use iTunes software to produce such a weapon. Unless, that is, you think in terms of maybe recording audio instructions or playing back some kind of 'bomb making for dummies' video. OK then, let's assume that iTunes can indeed be put to such a nefarious use by followers of the axis of evil. In which case you surely also have to assume that these terrorists are going to have bigger legal worries than being in breach of an Apple EULA. I doubt it would act as any great deterrent in the overall scheme of things.