Posts by newsguy

People have been saying that Google is going to buy Digg for the longest time, but now that Digg founder Kevin Rose confirms he is not against selling up does this mean that GDigg is a real possibility? It seems so, yes, and to the tune of $200 million as that's the figure that is flying around the web grapevine.

Rose is quoted as saying "if there ever becomes a partner that can help us achieve our goals, and where two plus two equals 10, then that is something I would consider." OK, that's not exactly a signed in blood confession that Google is a favored purchaser or even that there is any deal on the table. However, there is much industry speculation about Digg becoming an integrated part of Google News which does, at face value, appear to be a very obvious move for both parties. Neither has exactly been brilliant at monetization on their own, but together all that could change. Not least because it would make for a much more easily marketable advertising platform. It seems to be working for Conde Naste which has successfully married the likes of Wired and Reddit.

The story exposing how some TomTom satnav units had been sold complete with no less than three pieces of malware pre-installed which broke right here in the DaniWeb blogs last year was yesterday named 'Best Information Security News Story' at a prestigious awards ceremony held at the Haymarket Hotel in London, England. DaniWeb administrator and staff writer, Davey Winder, who was responsible for investigating and writing the story in his 'Inside Edge' blog had a good day at the ceremony which is sponsored by BT: for the second time in three years, Davey was named as the Information Technology Journalist of the Year.

Ray Stanton, global head of BT’s business continuity, security and governance practice, was joined by fellow members of a prestigious judging panel which included Ron Condon, former editor-in-chief, SC Magazine; Graham Edwards, head of group information and IT risk, HBOS plc; Malcolm Marshall, UK lead partner for security and continuity services at KPMG; and Professor Fred Piper, director of the information security group at Royal Holloway University of London. Stanton told us that “The diversity of entries this year was very impressive with articles covering an ever broader range of topics. Yet again the quality was excellent, underlining just how strong UK journalism is in the security space. Davey Winder, impressed the judges with the originality, topicality and relevance of his writing. The judges had their work cut out and our congratulations go to the winners and shortlisted journalists, all of whom …

Do any of the following sound familiar? Intel is not only driving but actually creating the USB 3 specification, while at the same time refusing to share the full spec with the industry, oh and don't forget that it has 'borrowed heavily' from the PCI Special Interests Group.

They all do to Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer, which is probably why he has taken the opportunity to dispell what he refers to what he calls myths about USB 3 and set the record straight via the Views@Intel blog.

The problem, according to Knupffer, seems to be that the media has not been making a proper distinction between the USB 3 spec and that Intel Host Controller which supports it. While there is, of course, an Intel involvement in the USB 3 spec itself, that involvement is as part of the USB 3 Promoter Group which also includes HP, MSFT, NEC, NXP and TI. Not to mention the other 180 or so companies that fall under the contributor company umbrella, such as AMD and Nvidia if you want to home in on chipset makers, who are also helping with the final stages before the spec is made available later this year.

"In parallel, but separately" Knupffer insists "Intel is investing heavily in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology. Think of the host controller spec as a ‘Dummies Guide’ to building a USB 3.0 …

OK, so Barack Obama is not the first politician to 'get' the Internet, heck Al Gore invented it after all. However, sarcasm aside, what Obama has done is grasp the true power of the next generation Web: he has transformed political campaigning at a national level thanks to social networking and, perhaps above all else, YouTube.

Bear with me. Although I am not an American, I do follow the US political circus with considerable interest, and I am something of a geek for good measure. I have seen how both Howard Dean and John Kerry have embraced Internet campaigning in the past to mixed overall effect. But what Obama has done, it seems to me, is truly understand that you can raise a lot of money by asking for very little of large numbers of citizens. The Internet is the ideal conduit to reach out to that disparate electorate, and that's exactly what Obama has done to a quite extraordinary level. If the general consensus of opinion is correct, then more than 90 percent of the $55 million raised in February alone, for example, was comprised of donations under the $200 ceiling and the majority of it raised online. The campaign has tapped into the MySpace generation, young voters on low incomes who nonetheless are happy to throw a few bucks into something they believe in, to become a small part of a big movement - not unlike the social networking concept itself.

And it is social networking, …

There is a really very interesting article in the online edition of Vanity Fair called 'How the Web Was Won' and subtitled 'An Oral History of the Internet' which recounts through the comments of those involved the first fifty years of Internet history.

Sure, you are probably thinking that the Internet is nowhere near celebrating the half century, but the article hinges around it being that long since the US established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which would go on to develop the ARPANET which, in turn, kick-started the Internet.

Anyway, the point here is that the feature itself is a treasure trove of interesting quotes from people who have been there at important stages during the life of the Internet. People like Paul Baran who says "I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole goddamned Internet, you know?" and Bob Metcalfe with "I'm traveling around the Arpanet showing them: Ooh, look. You can do this. And I'm in U.C.L.A. in Los Angeles now. And now I'm in San Francisco. And now I'm in Chicago. And now I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- isn't this cool? And as I'm giving my demo, the damned thing crashed."

Channel Insider has announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has beaten off the competition in the 2008 Product of the Year awards to scoop the server operating system award. This is important for two reasons: firstly the fact that awards are given to products which "exemplify attributes of high importance to the channel including value, support and profit potential" which gives it a very real world impact, but also because Microsoft could not muster a top three place at all. In fact, Sun came in second with Novell in third.

OK, Microsoft did pick up some gongs elsewhere, such as winning the client operating system category as well as the system and network management one. But this cannot dilute the fact that as far as the core group of Value Added Resellers that were surveyed by Channel Insider was concerned Microsoft simply is not as profitable, simply does not provide the value nor the support, in the server operating system arena. The point being that while it is all too easy to lay the blame for the Microsoft snub at the usual suspects, the Bill baiters and haters, the fact that Microsoft won other categories suggests this is not the case.

Server operating systems were ranked based upon familiarity with the product, opportunity for after-market sales, product profit potential, impact of the product on the technology market as a whole and the product vendor's service and support. "We are very honored to receive the …

Google would argue that it does not need to make the privacy policy it has any easier to find, after all you only have to click the 'About Google' link on the homepage and then go and click the 'Privacy Policy' link that can be found at the foot of the page that consequently opens. Indeed, that is exactly what a Google spokeswoman has said and she insists that there are no plans to change the privacy link positioning. Yet an open letter demanding just that has been sent to Google, drafted by US consumer and privacy groups. The signatories to the letter point out that a prominent homepage privacy link is, in fact, a requirement under California law and even where a legislative demand does not exist the practise has become hugely commonplace amongst commercial online businesses.

The letter is addressed to Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO, and urges him to comply with the California Online Privacy Protection Act "as soon as possible." With signatories including the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU of Northern California and Consumer Federation of California this is no Mickey Mouse group of campaigners. The full text of the open letter can be found here.

According to an Information Week article, it would appear that gamers actually like the in-game adverts that they see while they play. Or rather Massive Inc, a Microsoft subsidiary that handles in-game advertising, has said as much. Gamers were surveyed and the results suggest that they will happily accept such marketing mechanisms, indeed an example is given of an Adidas advert that was placed within the Major League Baseball 2K7 game - of those players that remembered the adverts, many said they actually enhanced the gaming experience.

Grant Johnson, chief client officer and founding partner of Interpret which carried out the survey for Massive Inc, concludes that games within a real world setting are indeed enhanced by real world advertising. As well as the aforementioned Major League Baseball 2K7 game, another example of Nascar 08 is given which suggests that 72 percent of players agreed that a candy bar being advertised was a great snack to eat while playing the game.

I guess if nothing else it proves that advertising really does work and can cross over from the virtual gaming space right into the real world.

The MessageLabs Intelligence Report for May 2008 has revealed that spam levels have risen across all industry sectors, but manufacturing remains the leading vertical as far as spam activity is concerned at 83.7 percent. The biggest rise, however, can be found in the non-profit sector with spam levels up by 7 percent to 81.3 percent. The retail sector sits at 80 percent, the public sector 75.7 percent and finance 71.7 percent. The finance sector also saw 1 in every 248.2 emails containing some kind of virus activity, although that is way behind the 1 in 43.8 infected emails that can be found in the accommodation and catering sector.

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in the report is that spam levels are back on the up, with overall levels hitting 76.8 percent of all emails in May which is a level not seen since early in 2007 according to MessageLabs.

“The savvy, intelligent and accurate cybercriminals of today seem to have abandoned the attachments tactic that was so innovative in late 2007 and are now focused on exploiting free hosted applications which have become mainstream in 2008,” said Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst, MessageLabs. “The spammers are taking advantage of the fact that these services are free, provide ample bandwidth and are rarely blacklisted; this is one more addition to the growing list of ways the spammers have succeeded in outsmarting traditional detection devices.”

Forget the One Laptop Per Child project hyperbole, there seems to be another contender emerging which is deserving of the title 'cheapest Linux laptop on the planet' despite having very little in the way of publicity when compared to the OLPC machine. The Linux lappy in question is the Elonex One, a device which Elonex is saying it will provide one unit free of charge to underprivileged kids for every hundred commercial systems it sells. Now that might not sound overly generous, but the argument would seem to be that when you consider it is selling at under $200 (or £99 here in the UK) that sufficient volume will be shifted in order for that buy hundred get one free deal to make a difference.

Of course, I tend to veer towards the argument that if they are that cheap to produce (and one has to assume that Elonex some margin on each unit sold) that the company could just bite the bullet and donate a decent number of laptops no matter what the commercial sales volume turns out to be.

Still, that gripe apart, working in conjunction with the National Laptop Initiative here in the UK the plan is that every child in the UK should have access to a laptop. Here's hoping that particular dream is realised, and perhaps more deservingly realised in less financially privileged nations as well.

As for the Elonex One itself, it comes with a 300MHz LNX …

There's an interesting story up at The Consumerist at the moment about some chap called Bill who has been charged $1632 for a single Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade license. It would appear what has happened is that Windows Live Marketplace kept saying to try again later when Bill pressed the submit button for his upgrade license purchase, when what it should have said was we have just debited your bank account $233.15 so whatever you do don't keep pressing that button.

Unfortunately for Bill, that's exactly what he did. Another six times in fact.

Bill insists that "upon selecting "submit" from their site I was immediately taken to a page stating "Microsoft cannot be contacted at this time" or similar, "Please try again later." So needing a license for Vista right away I re-submitted it and, again, got the same thing "Microsoft cannot be contacted at this time, please try again." After 6 attempts, finally, the 7th attempt was successful and I was able to purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade" and "I thought all was well until the following morning... I received a call from the fraud prevention department at my bank stating I had been charged by Microsoft 7 times at $233.15."

Worse yet, it appears he was buying the wrong license anyway!

Microsoft has, according to The Consumerist, refunded 4 of the purchase charges but 3 remain outstanding. Which leaves Bill $466.30 out of pocket by my calculations. …

Although the overall market for Linux in China is relatively small on the global scale, at around $5.4 million for the first quarter of this year, the China-based CCID Consulting group reports that the actual sales value has shot up by a whopping 22.6 percent during the last year. This would seem to be partly because of the broadening of distribution channels by manufacturers, and the increased approval by government and telecoms alike, especially outside of the usual major cities of Beijing and Shanghai. CCID is certainly seeing much more in the way of Linux uptake in what it calls the second- and third-tier cities as well as the much poorer regions of Western China.

CCID also suggests that smaller vendors do not feel the same pressure as the Lenovos of this world to include Windows with pretty much every PC sold within China, and those smaller vendors are turning to Linux in order to shave precious points off the bottom line production cost. Savings which can be passed on to the consumer. That said, it also appears that many consumers are using the cheaper Linux PCs as a quick and cost effective route to Windows courtesy of the piracy problem which is widespread within the country.

According to a news story published at IT Pro it would appear that Nokia is predicting that Linux will play an increasingly important role within its Internet enabled device line up. Nokia spokesperson Kari Tuutti is quoted as saying that while the mobile phone giant has used Linux already in Internet tablets it will "expand that range and we believe that the role of Linux will grow." A sentiment echoed by Nokia's chief financial officer Rick Simonson who is said to have responded to a question regarding the role of Linux-based tablets at Nokia with "It's going to be terribly important."

Given the positive impact of Google going with Linux for the Android platform, and the huge developer community out there, it makes perfect sense for a company like Nokia to be considering Linux as the obvious choice for future product developments. Lowering costs and adding value through more attractive applications must be a consideration.

There is a long way to go, of course, before the likes of Symbian in its Nokia S60 guise could be caught up with in terms of market share when it comes to cellphone usage, but I doubt that Nokia would mind having the market leader on handsets and a Linux driven market leader in the emerging mobile tablets and Internet access device market as well.

Slippery Brick reports that it is now possible to run Windows Vista on your iPhone, well after a fashion at any rate. In fact what you get is a Vista emulator called VistaPerfection 2.0 which provides your iPhone with "wallpapers, sliders, sound effects and over 90 Vista-themed icons for everything from the computer to the recycle bin, plus all of the standard iPhone apps. It even gives you a simulated version of Vista’s Sidebar and Start menu."

The iPhone does need to be jailbroken in order to install the thing in the first place, which is one point against it. If you need another one, how about what the heck did you buy an iPhone for in the first place if you wanted something running a Windows OS? Surely the whole point of the God Phone is the clean and crisp and innovative Apple interface? Remove that, and replace it with Vista of all things, and you are left with just another cellphone.

According to The Inquirer Microsoft has lost the long running Alcatel-Lucent patent case. The US International Trade Commission has ruled against Microsoft in the case which accused Alcatel-Lucent of violating four Microsoft patents concerning IP-based phone software.

The ITC concluded that "there is no violation of section 337" which refers to the infringement of intellectual property, despite Paul Luckern, the administrative law judge in the case originally ruling that Alcatel-Lucent did infringe one of the patents concerned.

Microsoft is naturally a little miffed, with spokesman David Bowermaster commenting "We are disappointed that the International Trade Commission reversed Judge Luckern's ruling that Alcatel-Lucent infringed Microsoft's '439 patent. We look forward to receiving the detailed ruling so we can understand the Commission's reasoning."

Pop quiz: which is the most popular website in the US? For years the correct answer would have been Yahoo, despite everyone thinking it is Google. However, the latest comScore rankings, which list popularity in terms of the unique monthly visitor metric, has Google beating Yahoo for the first time ever. The confusion comes as a result of Google being way ahead of the competition in terms of search visibility, but when you start adding in other web real properties the statistics turn on their heads.

In fairness, the actual scale of the Google lead is miniscule in Internet terms; a mere 466,000 out of a combined head count of something fast approaching 300 million.

The actual figures, to be released officially later today, are:

Google audience in the US for April is 141.1 million, 18 percent up from 12 months back, while Yahoo was also up but only by 7 percent to 140.6 million. To give you some idea of how far ahead in the game these two are, and why Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo so badly, Microsoft sits in third place some 20 million adrift on 'just' 121 million.

As always though, things are not quite as straightforward as you might think. Because comScore still has Yahoo ahead of Google when it comes to page views which although not as universally recognized as a valid metric for popularity as unique visitors, does mean that either visitors are spending more time on Yahoo than …

PC Pro is reporting that Intel hopes that its Chinese manufacturing plant is back in production by next week, but following the earthquake disaster has to admit that the situation could best be described as being 'dynamic.'

The chip packaging plant in Chengdu, some 60 miles away from the earthquake epicenter, was forced to close for the safety of its workers - none of whom were injured during the quake. With a seismic survey being carried out currently, workers could be back in place by the end of this week at the earliest.

Something in the region of 60 percent of the world's laptops are supplied by Quanta Computer and Compal Electronics, and they have issued a statement saying that they are waiting to hear from Intel with regard to how the closure and the earthquake will impact upon supplies of chips. Truth be told, it should not be too great, even if the plant were to remain closed into next week as it seems contingency plans are in place with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Amkor and Siliconware to fill any gaps in supply.

According to Andrea Frome, a software engineer at Google Maps, the search giant has started to give Manhattan a makeover as far as its Street View is concerned at any rate. Manhattan was one of the first cities to get the Street View treatment when the service originally launched, and with dozens more added in the meantime, Google has decided to go back and revisit it to make things even better.

Things such as the Street View maps being more recent for a start, so landmarks such as the New Museum in the Bowery now being pictured in its near complete state for example. Or how about sharper images, as exampled by the Washington Square pictures which really are much clearer than before, especially when it comes to visible detail on the arch in this case. You can also now look upwards in Street View which means you can see the Manhattan skyscrapers in all their glory.

However, by far the most interesting update as far as I am concerned would have to be the face blurring technology. Not because Google is doing it at all, although the idea that it is taking personal privacy seriously is always nice if a little unexpected, but rather how it is doing it. It has taken a full year of research and development, resulting in a face detection algorithm that searches the Street View image database and digitally blurs any human faces it finds. To be fair it seems …

According to Cellular News Apple has decided it will, after all, settle in the case of two Canadian class-action lawsuits concerning the battery life of the iPod. It only covers old iPods, specifically those purchased before the 24th June 2004, and concerns those iPod owners whose devices have reduced battery life of less than five hours on a full charge for 1st and 2nd gen iPods, less than four hours for 3rd gen devices. However, if you do meet the requirements, and that Includes being a Canadian resident who purchased an iPod in Canada, then apparently Apple will pay you just under $45 in compensation to offset the marketing claim that the iPods could run for anything up to ten hours.

US iPod owners should not feel too miffed at this, as I understand a similar class-action lawsuit was settled covering US devices in 20905 and some iPod owners got a choice of $25 cash or a $50 Apple store credit if battery life had dipped below a set level.

I feel sorry for us Brits and our European cousins who get nada, except an iPod which goes flat really rather quickly...

An employee of the Northern Trust Bank in Naples, California apparently stole a number of bank owned computers which he then either sold to his co-workers, pawned or auctioned off on eBay. The 34 year old man pleaded to a felony fraud charge and sentencing has been deferred until it is determined how much of the $40,000 worth of theft is reimbursed to his now former employers as part of a good faith bargain. He could face less than 36 months imprisonment thanks to the plea, which is not bad considering that the charge actually carried up to 30 years if he had taken his chances with a jury.Brian E. Helton has admitted to stealing up to 15 pieces of computer equipment, according to reports.

According to the Collier County Sheriff’s Department report one employee paid $416 for a laptop, another got a flat screen monitor for $152. A third, and one has to assume none too savvy employee, bought a flat screen monitor for $618 while a fourth took both a computer and flat screen for $756. An eBay auction raised $1250 for a laser printer, although according to the report Helton made a mistake and sent him two printers for the money.

As Mark Fullbrook, Director of data security outfit Cyber-Ark, told me: "This case illustrates that good old employee theft is yet another security risk facing organizations. In the case of the 34-year-old bank employee, the fact that up to 15 …

The Opera client used to be universally recognized as the alternative browser to Internet Explorer, and then along came Firefox and stole all the alternative browser thunder - and how. But the fat lady is still singing, and to prove it has released the Opera Dragonfly to debug web pages, widgets and web applications on any device.

Available in Opera 9.5 beta 2 to start with, the alpha release of Dragonfly includes a JavaScript Debugger, DOM and CSS Inspectors, Error Console and Command Line.

The full list of Dragonfly features is as follows:

• Debug pages whether they are on your computer or a separate, supported device. Opera Dragonfly can remotely connect to computers and devices running a supported version of Opera.
  
• Opera Dragonfly is a new breed of hybrid application: part desktop application, part Web application. It resides in local persistent storage without any server-side processing, yet instantly updates when a new version is released - just like your favorite Web sites.
  
• Opera Dragonfly's source code is released under the BSD license, making the code itself available for inspection and reuse.
  
• View source isn't much use if you use DOM Scripting to alter the DOM. Opera Dragonfly allows you to inspect the updated DOM and all its properties. Support for editing the DOM will follow.
  
• Check out what CSS rules apply to which element, and what rules are inherited or set by browser defaults. Overridden rules are highlighted so …

Here's a good one, according to The Guardian newspaper in the UK, the incomes of each and every single Italian citizen were published for each and every other Italian citizen to see on the web. Rather than being some terrible data breach, or the work of some sinister hacker, it appears that it was the departing government which published the details. It seems, according to the Italian finance ministry at any rate, that this was done quite deliberately as part of a "crackdown on tax evasion."

Although the move was not popular with critics of the government, although it does seem to have proved to be akin to a light for a moth in terms of magnetism when it came to the Italian public who just couldn't keep away from the website. I guess the opportunity to find out how much the bloke next door, the mother-in-law or some celebrity or politician actually earned (in fact how much they actually declared, but that is another matter altogether) proved too much for most people.

"It's a clear violation of privacy law," ADOC, the Italian consumer group, told Reuters. "There is a danger for an increase in crime and violence as the data are an irresistible source for criminals."

It is too late now, mind, to go and take a look yourself as the Italian treasury pulled the site within 24 hours of it going live after receiving a formal complaint from the government's own privacy watchdog. …

Despite insisting that its proposed acquisition of Yahoo! "made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole" Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, has admitted defeat and withdrawn its proposal to purchase the Yahoo! business. "Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer.

Here is the text of the letter that Ballmer sent to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang on the subject:

May 3, 2008
Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our …

According to The Register gamers who are desperate to get hold of the latest entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and let's face it that has to be just about every hardcore gamer who did not get a copy today, are the latest target of drive-by spyware scammers. Spam email is being distributed which promises the chance of winning not only a copy of GTA IV, but also a brand spanking new PlayStation 3 to play it on.

There is, of course, no such competition and no such prize. There is, however, a whole bunch of spyware included that can grab your valuable data once your PC is compromised by clicking on the links in the spam.

This kind of scam is highly opportunistic and shows just how quickly the malware merchants can react to news such as how GTA has been sold out, with even some players who pre-ordered the game being left empty handed as stocks got oversold. The Register reports that spam filtering outfit ClearMyMail claims "more than half of the junk mail being blocked by its service" on Tuesday 29th April at any rate "is Grand Theft Auto IV-related" and "the vast majority of the junk mail messages offer the opportunity to win a PS3 complete with the game."

According to some online reports it seems that those of us who suffer from seasonal allergies, which we politely refer to as hayfever over here in the UK, might have more than just pollen and plants to blame for our runny noses, watering eyes and itchy skin. One medical evaluation site seems to be suggesting that the use of modern technology could act as a trigger for these allergic events.

The use of cell phones, and myriad other wireless technologies, has without doubt brought with it a medical debate concerning the dangers of exposure to radiation and microwaves resulting in skin rashes, fatigue and headaches. But the latest research tends to suggest that, for those who already suffer from the most common allergies at least, gadgets such as your iPhone or PDA could also be acting as a trigger by increasing sensitivity to allergens. Cell phone users might also cause rashes in those with a sensitivity to metals used in the manufacturing process such as nickel (phone casings and batteries) which is cited as a leading reactor of skin allergies and could mean cell phone users are susceptible to allergic contact dermatitis.

"In addition to the typical pollen-producing allergies that are rampant during the months of spring, technophiles should take caution that some of their favorite gadgets may be the culprit of certain allergy symptoms," said Dr. Todd Rosengart, Chief Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stony Brook University Medical Hospital and Chief Medical Advisor of MDX …

According to a story running in The Register Sun Microsystems is said to have paid "a bit north of $5m" for the technology assets of Montalvo Systems, a chip start-up outfit which is best known for its work on a low-power x86 processor.

The Register says it has seen a notice supporting the purchase which will become a part of the Sun business unit, although it also suggests that any interest in the x86 IP is nothing more than a red herring and the real interest lies in asymmetrical core design. This is an area where Montalvo has plenty of experience, and it would make sense for Sun to be investing money in being able to run both high and low power cores on a single chip with each handling the specific software it is best suited to. El Reg further speculates that the very fact that Sun mentions assets in the notice is a red flag to suggest Montalvo, as rumoured, has struggled to get much interest in its technology so far. "This is a personnel and patent thing" The Register reporter insists.

Certainly, Montalvo has never really managed to produce a working model for the energy-efficient multicore chip that it has been working so hard on it would appear. This despite the venture cap injection of at least $75 million that has been spent on the project.

According to a Sun statement quoted in the report "We believe acquiring these assets will enhance …

According to Fujitsu Siemens Computers the days of simply upgrading to faster processors in order to squeeze extra performance out of legacy applications are rapidly coming to an end. In a press release distributed today the company warns that the increasing use of multi-core processors, and the simple replacement of single core processors in general, is just simply not enough when it comes to delivering the expected benefit concerning improved efficiency running companies' key business applications.

There is no doubting that many IT departments are, indeed, shifting focus from older single-core processors to the new multi-core hardware. FSC, however, reckons that whilst this transition to multi-core processors would not be problematical if the software world was also moving with enough speed to be able to embrace parallel architectures. The truth of the matter, out here in the real world, is that this is often not the case. As a consequence, as far as many monolithic applications are concerned the new machines manage to run them slower than the previous hardware, something that is particularly noticeable if this is all the computer is doing.

If you apply Moore's Law to processors then you might imagine that the number of cores will double within an 18 month time-frame. So running with this for a moment, within a couple of years we should have eight or 16 core servers becoming commonplace along with quad core desktops and notebooks. But where is the development will to re-write applications to exploit …

One of the best known soccer clubs in the world is tackling the phishing threat and has placed a penalty on the head of those who might try to con their fans on the web. As the annual InfoSecurity Europe show kicks off, so Manchester United has launched the implementation of Extended Validation (EV) Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates on the Man U website in order to provide premier league protection for online fans.

The official Online Manchester United Megastore, as you might expect from such a high profile commercial sporting success, is more than just a fanboy website. It is where fans can buy tickets and merchandising online, learn about the latest club news and access up-to-the-minute match information as well as get to listen to their favourite players. It is also, of course, something of a magnet to cyber-criminals who would love to get their hands on a slice of the lucrative action by any means possible.

Which is where the use of VeriSign EV SSL Certificates comes in, providing a visible level of protection from Internet scams. Browsers including Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and the latest beta version of Firefox 3 display these certificates by triggering the address bars to change colour, to green, when a site is recognised as being safe. A recent Tec-Ed study even found that as many as 93 percent of users feel more secure doing business on a site with just such a green EV bar.

Stewart …

Following on from the RSA security conference the other week, where PayPal published a paper which included comment from chief information security officer Michael Barrett that suggested 'unsafe' web browsers would be banned, the eBay owned payments company has now appeared to backtrack somewhat. Online media channels, and in particular the blogosphere, have been vibrating madly with comment on the potential for the browser ban. Which is not altogether surprising when you consider that in the paper Mr Barrett not only said that it is "critical to warn users about unsafe browsers" but also to "disallow older and insecure browsers" and went as far as claiming that "letting users view the PayPal site on one of these browsers is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seatbelts."

One of the reasons for the media furore was the inevitable Apple connection. You see the paper made it clear that in order for browsers to be considered safe by PayPal then they would have to be able to block known and/or suspected phishing sites as well as having support for extended validation certificates. You can usually tell those browser clients which implement the extended validation certificates as they include some kind of colour coded phishing toolbar as a visible guide to site security. The sort of toolbar you will find, or will soon find, within the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but which is noticeably absent from Safari.

It is …

Scientists from the University of Glasgow in Scotland have developed a nanotech switch, the size of a molecule, which could herald the 500,000 GB iPod.

The scientists reckon that the breakthrough means an iPod could increase its capacity by no less than 150,000 times the current storage capability. Professor Lee Cronin and Dr Malcolm Kadodwala say that the 500,000 GB capacity will be possible on a single square inch, compare that to the current maximum for such a space of just 3.3 GB and you'll understand why people are getting excited.

If, as the Glasgow team believe, it means that the number of transistors per chip could increase from around 200 million to a theoretical billion and more, then that excitement is well justified. Imagine the devices that could be produced, and the functionality they would offer, if storage could increase by a factor of 150,000 without demanding an increase in physical size to accompany it.

Professor Lee Cronin says "What we have done is find a way to potentially increase the data storage capabilities in a radical way. We have been able to assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32nm apart so that they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule-based switch that can be easily manipulated using an electric field. By taking these nano-scale clusters, just a nanometer in size, …

Well it was news to me :)

How cool is that? A financial software programmer has put his coding skills to good use by hacking into a popular video game and adding an Easter Egg with a twist. Hold on a minute, you are probably thinking, surely you are not condoning the illegal hacking into a commercial game? Well in this case, yes I am. What's more, so are the developers of the game itself, Seattle based PopCap.

You see the nerd concerned, one Bernie Peng aged 26 from New Jersey, hacked the Bejeweled game so that when his girlfriend hit a certain score instead of the usual jewels falling onto the screen a pink sapphire ring would appear instead. What's more, this was accompanied by a wedding proposal.

The girlfriend accepted, and got a matching pink sapphire ring in return.

PopCap games meanwhile offered to help pay for the wedding itself according to reports online as it appealed to the geek in them. PopCap spokesman Garth Chouteau says "As a bunch of geeks we have to say, 'Bernie, hats off to you.'"

If you believe the results of a survey conducted by InfoSecurity Europe then women are four times as likely to give away their passwords for chocolate than men. This reveals two things: women prefer chocolate to IT and men rather predictably do not.

It also reveals that we, as a whole, are getting much more security savvy. The same survey carried out last year as part of a social engineering exercise, discovered that 64 percent of folk would give their passwords up for a chocolate bar whereas this year that figure had dropped to just 21 percent.

Carried out in the street outside a busy London railway station, by a bunch of pretty researchers who also asked people for their date of birth to validate that they had taken part, it proved that the security message isn't fully understood just yet. 61 percent happily gave their DoB when asked, without giving it a second thought or considering the identity theft potential of such an action when coupled to the password data also revealed. Most people used only one (31 percent), two (31 percent) or three (16 percent) passwords at work, but some had to use as many as 32. Unfortunately, 43 percent of those asked rarely or never changed their password, just to add to the security risk woes.

"Our researchers also asked for workers names and telephone numbers so that they could be entered into a draw to go to Paris, with this incentive …

Reports are emerging that according to a Gartner analysis, albeit a controversial one, Windows is on the verge of collapse. The conclusion being that unless something is done soon then it is only a matter of time before a competitor that is more able to tackle the problems it has faced will emerge and dethrone the OS King.

The analysis, carried out for Gartner by Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald, included a survey which asked if Microsoft needed to radically alter its approach to Windows to stay viable. Of the assorted IT managers and executives questioned, half apparently raised their hands.

Interestingly, the spectre of Windows 7 might be having an impact upon the commercial success of Vista with Silver providing anecdotal evidence of customers calling to ask if it was advisable to wait for the next generation Windows OS rather than upgrade now to Vista. The answer, according to the Daily Tech report at any rate, was to adopt Vista on an attrition basis and replacing XP only when those machines died.

The analysis offers the following advice for Microsoft: reduce development time, deliver better inter-platform consistency, tailor fit the operating system to specific applications and simplify licensing.

New Scientist magazine has compiled a pretty darn interesting list of what it says are the top ten weirdest computers ever.

Some are weirder than others, like the chap at the University of Illinois who has developed a method of creating 3D optical waveguides out of photonic crystals, with the aim of making it possible to trap light and even slow it right down and bend it around very sharp corners. The future of optical computing no less.

Or how about DNA computing where DNA has been used to form logic gates and play tic-tac-toe to perfection? My favourite though, has to be the mouldy computing process in Japan where researchers have discovered that slime mould can work out the shortest route through a maze.

IT Week reports that business is just too slow to respond to cyber-criminals, and as a result the hackers are simply worried about their ability to prevent them breaking in.

The article quotes Dan Hubbard, the Vice President of Security Research at Websense as saying that from a purely technological perspective "it is almost possible to admire the ways attackers are creating tools and using modern enterprise IT infrastructure to propagate their attacks" and that these are evolving at a faster pace than the security industry. "They haven't got business processes holding them back; they're free to innovate" he added.

The two technologies causing most concern would appear to be virtualisation and cloud computing. The former is compared to the early days of firewalling at an enterprise level when users complained about being restricted so security was weakened and the bad guys sneaked through, and the same is happening with server virtualisation. Cloud computing is equally scary stuff, it is suggested, with services capable of running an entire OS and streaming enterprise data right out the front door while the IT department only sees web traffic moving around.

To be fair, the article isn't all doom and gloom, but don't read it if you are involved in IT security from your business and want to put a smile on your face today…

According to the Wall Street Journal today Yahoo could be talking Google about the outsourcing of search advertising sales. This comes as, so the report suggests, as part of two pronged strategy to fight off the Microsoft acquisition threat. The other prong being a deal with AOL to combine Internet operations.

But it's the whole is Yahoo finally admitting that Google does advertising better thing that intrigues me, and I suspect a lot of other Internet watchers. Especially considering that Yahoo has always dismissed the notion that Google is better in this regard up until now. Of course, it does still seem to be fairly dismissive, insisting that that it is "only a limited test" which will involve no more than 3 percent of Yahoo's web search queries and adding that it "does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense program."

Yeah right, and the Pope is Jewish.

By outsourcing to AdSense Yahoo could boost its cash flow, no doubt about that. Equally, I suspect, there is little doubt that industry regulators would take an interest considering that such an arrangement would give Google something like 90 percent of the search advertising market. So in order to fight Microsoft off, perhaps Yahoo will deliver an early Christmas present in an opportunity for MS to fight back at Google with an anti-competitive complaint…

Word is that HP will debut the new Mini-Note micro-notebook PC next week, with the $500 base model shipping with a SuSe Linux OS. With an 8.9 inch display and a spill-resistant keyboard which somehow only manages to be around 8% smaller than a standard notebook device, the aluminium encased Mini-Note looks like being quite the talking point.

Not least, and despite the low price tag for the base model, because HP is pitching this as a more upscale device than the other mini-notebook Linux powered budget units that have been hitting the streets and the headlines of late. Indeed, they will be faster than the Eee with a minimum spec of a 1GHz Via C7-M and the display is a better resolution as 1280x768. Opt for a faster, and more expensive model, and you can switch from SuSe Linux to a Windows OS if you want, even Vista on the top of the range models.

I reckon that it is the base level Linux powered Mini-Note that will be the real star though, with that low price tag coupled to 512MB of RAM, 4GB of solid state storage and the SuSe OS. At $500 it really could prove to be too good to resist.

According to reports it looks possible that the next big upgrade to the Windows OS, the fabled Windows 7, could arrive much earlier than expected. Within the next 12 months even. And who is responsible for making this prediction? None other than Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates himself, apparently.

If this is true then it means the development schedules that have been bandied about up to now have undergone a radical rethink.

The News.com article suggests that Gates responded to a question about Vista asked at a speech to the Inter-American development Bank and is quoted as saying "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version" and went on to refer to Windows 7 by adding "I'm super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways."

Don't get too excited though, because the same story carries word that just 24 hours before a Microsoft representative told CNET that it expected to ship the Vista successor about three years on from the Vista debut in January 2007. Do the math, either Microsoft has got the dates wrong or Gates slipped up. My guess is on the latter.

How much would you pay for a pizza? Chances are not as much as the anonymous bidder who won the auction to relieve entrepreneur Chris Clark of the pizza.com domain. Clark invested in pizza.com in 1994 for just $20, and even allowing for his annual $20 domain registration fees he has turned a pretty healthy profit considering the domain went for a staggering $3 million. Funnily enough that's the same amount that vodka.com sold for in 2006.

According to the BBC news report Clark had hoped back in 1994 that buying pizza.com would help to get a contract with a pizza firm for his consulting company, something that didn't happen. When the business was sold in 2000, he kept hold of the domain and used it as a vehicle to sell advertising.

In perhaps the greatest bit of understatement of all time, the BBC says that Clark now regretted not buying more domain names in the 1990s.

It would appear that Google is being sued by the owners of a house in the Franklin Park suburb of Pittsburgh because the search giants photographed the property and included it in the Google Maps street view feature.

Why anyone would want to take an interest in the boring house, yes according to the reports the couple who have sued are called Aaron and Christine Boring, is beyond me. It pretty much lives up to the boring tag. However, the complaint states that "a major component of their purchase decision was a desire for privacy" and it is that privacy which has been violated according to the Borings, along with a devaluation of the property. I am not 100 percent sure how it is devalued, but there you go. They do have a point regarding privacy though, as it would appear the Google snappers had to drive up a driveway clearly marked as private in order to take the photographs.

Of course, the real irony is that no court case was required as Google will happily remove photographs upon the request of the proven owner whereas now that the litigation has attracted publicity there are photos of the house popping up all over the web. Not least the Allegheny County real estate site which reveals information about most every property in the county, including photos. In the case of the Boring house, it tells us how much the couple paid for it, the size …

The word online is that Apple is facing legal action over its claims the MacBook range supports millions of colours. This might actually be true were it not, say the reports, for the small matter of Apple ditching the old 16,777,216 colour supporting 8-bit displays used in MacBooks and replacing them with the cheaper 6-bit TFT which only manages 262,144 colours.

This is not the first time that Apple has faced controversy over its colour math, nearly a year ago a couple of angry MacBook owners filed a suit making similar claims. That was eventually settled out of court last month, although the details of the settlement could not be disclosed to the press as part of the settlement agreement.

Apple might want to take a stroll down legal history lane though, as many display manufacturers have been successfully sued for misleading claims about monitor colour depth. Even the argument as put forward by one of the biggest LCD panel makers a few years back, AU Optoelectronics, that interpolation on 6-bit panels creates millions of colours might not be enough to deflect criticism as you then have to consider if there can be millions of colours on screen at the same time.

Managing partner Brian Kabatech of Los Angeles based Kabateck Brown Kellner which is filing the current class action for false advertising concerning the 20" iMac is quoted as saying "Apple is duping its customers into thinking they're buying 'new and improved' …

Oh the irony.

According to The Inquirer and others it would appear that Sony BMG, you know the same Sony BMG that has fought such a high profile and bitter legal war against individuals for copyright violation by using music file sharing sites, is itself in trouble on charges of using pirated software.

Apparently a small French software company called PointDev were a little perplexed to get a support call from a Sony BMG employee regarding one of its products, Ideal Migration. Mainly because, says the French newspaper which broke the story, it discovered that the software had been activated with a stolen authorisation key.

PointDev went so far as to get a search warrant and the Sony BMG office concerned was raided, and four servers with further unlicensed copies of PointDev software installed were seized as evidence.

Yes, court evidence. For it further appears that PointDev want this to go through the legal process as an example. Of course, the lawsuit does contain a rather large demand for financial compensation as well.

Did I say “oh the irony” already?

According to a report by the Sydney Morning Herald a UK judge has ruled, as part of a harassment case, that being a Facebook friend is not the same as being a real friend.

The case revolved around a woman claiming that the act of sending a Facebook friend request was enough to prove that her ex-boyfriend was in fact harassing her. The former boyfriend countered the claim by arguing that a popular British radio DJ, Chris Moyles, has 1 million Facebook friends but probably knows very few, if any, of them intimately.

How refreshing, of late, to read a story about a judge who understands modern online culture enough to make a balanced ruling regarding it.

Mac OS X is not, on the whole, known as an OS which attracts too many problems when it comes to malware. However, in the last few days there has been something of a scare involving the Immunizator Trojan. According to IT security specialists Sophos this may well just be a case of one bad apple which should not induce panic amongst users.

Sophos reports that the Troj/MacSwp-B Trojan, if you want to be formal about naming, appears to try and scare Mac users by claiming there are privacy issues on your computer and the cure is to purchase some software which is not in fact required.

"Windows users are no stranger to scareware like this, but it is rarer on the Apple Macintosh. Nevertheless, the discovery of this Trojan horse does follow fast on the heels of other malware that has been identified on the Mac OS X platform in recent months," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Cybercrime against Mac users may be small in comparison to Windows attacks, but it is growing. Apple Macintosh users need to learn from the mistakes made by their Windows cousins in the past and ensure that they have defences in place, are up-to-date with patches and exercise caution about what they run on their computer."

According to reports it would appear that Microsoft has confirmed the presence of a critical vulnerability which impacts upon users of MS Word for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 SP1. Shame it has taken many weeks for Microsoft to admit this, and only after a second security vendor recently discovered in the wild exploits.

The vulnerability exploits bugs in the Microsoft Jet Database Engine, Jet.dll, and Symantec has stated that the attacks have been described by its own Security Response team as using malicious Word 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007 documents to call the Windows component.

Another security outfit, Panda, claims to have blogged about the vulnerability some three weeks back but accuse Microsoft of dismissing the in-the-wild-exploits reports by saying "they would not fix these mdb vulnerabilities" which researcher Ismael Briones reckons is part of some bizarre policy not to acknowledge vulnerabilities which are from .mdb files.

Indeed, to back up the claims, the report quotes an email response from Microsoft which states "You appear to be reporting an issue with a file type Microsoft considers to be unsafe. Many programs, such as Internet Explorer and Outlook, automatically block these files."

According to UK IT magazine PC Pro the Mozilla CEO has accused Apple of coming close to using malware tactics to install the Safari browser on Windows PCs via the iTunes updater.

It reports that the latest version of the Windows iTunes updater, designed to make upgrading to the latest version of the music software as easy as possible along with notifying the user of updates to other installed Apple software, will automatically select Safari for download even if it is not a previously installed application. The only way to avoid the download, and subsequent installation, is to uncheck the box. Something not every user might spot.

"What Apple is doing now with its Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that's bad - not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole web" claims Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who goes on to suggest that the Apple tactics "borders on malware distribution practises."

Speaking at the VoiceCon conference in London, Mike Rhodin, General Manager of IBM Lotus software has predicted five trends which he says will drive the future of unified communications, reshaping the way that we work around the globe. According to IDC, the unified communications market will be worth a staggering $17 billion in revenue by 2011. That's a growth rate of 38 percent compounded annually from 2007. IBM has no less that 70 researchers and more than 1300 developers and technical experts working on social and collaborative software research projects in the field.

So what are those five predictions then?

1. The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling on being their in-person. Work models will be changed by expanded globalisation and green business initiatives that reduce travel and encourage work at home.
2. Instant Messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. A new generation of workers has a new expectation for instant messaging as the preferred method of business interaction.
   
3. Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes. Companies will go beyond initial capabilities like click-to-call and presence to deep integration with business processes and line-of-business applications, where they can realise the greatest benefit.
4. Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. Converged, aggregated, and rich presence will allow businesses and individuals to better find and reach the appropriate resources, removing inefficiencies from business processes …

A rather interesting article in the EETimes suggests that the holy grail of artificial intelligence, the ability to pass the Turing Test, may become a reality later this year courtesy of a collaboration between IBM and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The Turing Test was first described by Alan Turing back in 1950, and requires a human being acting as a judge to hold a natural language conversation with a machine and with another human being and not be able to tell which is which. So far, no machine has been able to pass this simple test.

But now the AI experts at RPI reckon that by using the IBM Blue Gene, the fastest computer in the world, they can crack it before the year is out.

The secret would appear to be Star Trek. Or at least the fact that the AI team have been working on a Star Trek-alike holodeck system. The team are creating a synthetic character with a back story, a huge knowledge base that includes such things as education, upbringing, family and so on. "We want to engineer, from the start, a full-blown intelligent character and converse with him in an interactive environment like the holodeck from Star Trek" says the leader of the research project, and head of the RPI Cognitive Science Department, Selmer Bringsjord. The team reckon that they have the intelligence algorithm sorted and juts need to couple it to a supercomputer of the …

Speaking to the Northern Virginia Technology Council this week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made the distinctly predictable prediction that during the next ten years there will be even greater technological advances than during the previous decade. Amongst the advances that Gates suggests are likely to be of most importance were speech recognition, handwriting recognition and touch screen surfaces. I have checked and this is a current news story and not something that fell out of my in-tray five years ago folks, honest.

It gets better, and the predictions retreat further back in the time-warp, as Gates moved on to interactive television telling the enthralled audience that "TV will be based on the Internet; it will be an utterly different thing."

So why am I bothering to recount the tale here? Mainly because the speech came hot on the heels of his testimony to Congress in which he advocated greater maths and science investment along with a relaxing of immigration rules to encourage more people to come to the US, qualify and then work there. Gates argued that current policy forces such students to return home after the educational investment was complete, more often than not.

Am I missing something or is the message come to the US, get educated in matters science, and stay to invent the past?