Posts by happygeek

In what has to rank as one of the most surprising outbursts of the summer, the BBC reports how the president of the British Cartographic Society has blasted online maps and accused them of "demolishing thousands of years of history."

The remarkable rant took place at the Institute of British Geographers conference in London. During her speech, Mary Spence is said to have taken aim at Internet mapping services for "wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map."

The argument appears to be that while online maps are great for driving directions, they suck when it comes to imparting the kind of data required to truly understand a landscape. Things such as churches and stately homes are not included on many of these maps, and as a result they are in danger of being erased from the consciousness of the masses.

The BBC reckons that Mary Spence believes this will have the consequence of causing long-term damage to a future generation of map readers. I reckon she is wrong because there will not be such a future generation, at least not in the sense of how we think of map reading today.

Maps are, quite frankly, old technology. Maps are, when it comes down to it and for the majority of us today, nothing more than the raw data that feeds out satnav devices. Who cares what symbols are drawn upon the image of a landscape, when you just want to …

According to the China Daily newspaper the latest Internet sensation, iPhone girl, will not be fired from her factory job despite some speculation to the contrary.

It all started when a young Asian woman working at a factory making iPhones inadvertently left her picture on one device after it was tested. The purchaser posted the photos to the MacRumors website, and well, the rest is likely to be very short lived Internet history.

There were three photos in all, showing the young girl working on the assembly line, smiling and giving a victory V salute next to an iPhone.

Dressed in a pink striped outfit, wearing a white hat and gloves, and smiling prettily the woman was quickly dubbed 'iPhone Girl' and then the comments started.

Amongst the hundreds of comments to the posting were some suggesting she was only 12 and Steve Jobs will be angry about child labour being used in iPhone production, and others claiming she will be 'so fired' when her identity is revealed.

However, China Daily reports that the Taiwan Foxconn Technology Group factory has now claimed her as a member of staff, without naming names, and confirmed that she is so not fired after all.

Apple, meanwhile, is keeping quiet on this one.

The Advertising Standards Authority is an independent body, established by the advertising industry in the UK, to self-police rules laid down within advertising codes. It has just issued an adjudication against Apple (UK) Ltd over what have been referred to as misleading advertisements for the iPhone.

The adjudication comes as a result of complaints, well two complaints actually, from television viewers who thought the Apple iPhone ad campaign was misleading.

The advert in question showed weather reports, mapping and hotel bookings via the Safari browser. A voice-over stated quite clearly that "...all parts of the Internet are on the iPhone."

This, of course, is not actually true. The complainers pointed out that "the iPhone did not support Flash or Java, both integral to many web pages."

Apple responded to the ASA investigation by arguing that the aim of the advert in question was to highlight the benefit of the iPhone "in being able to offer availability to all internet websites, in contrast to other handsets which offered access to WAP versions or sites selected by service providers."

Apple believed that by browsing the Internet with an iPhone, the user got a similar experience to browsing at home or work. It said that this "was different from accessing the internet using an ordinary mobile phone handset" and that "proprietary languages or technologies, such as Flash or Java, were not open source and required a plug-in or individual download in order for content to appear …

File under: what was the point of that?

Apple iPhone 3G users have been blighted with poor 3G reception since day one. So bad is the problem that it prompted Apple to release an iPhone software update which has had mixed results. Apple says iPhone OS 2.0.2 improved 3G communications, many users have said it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

Now, just to add to the confusing array of opinions, a Swedish company selling wireless device test chambers has apparently tested an iPhone 3G and concluded everything is fine.

No doubt that Bluetest, the company in question, performed perfectly viable tests under laboratory conditions. Its testing chambers are used by many of the world's major mobile phone manufacturers after all.

The testing antenna engineer, who comes complete with a M.Sc in Engineering Physics attached, has said that the values were completely normal, and compared them with test results for a Sony Ericsson P1 and a Nokia N73. The difference between all three was minimal. The iPhone was tested with WLAN, GPS and Bluetooth switched off and then again with them all on. The Bluetest boffins concluded that there was no obvious interference from any 'noise' caused by the assorted connections.

OK, so this means that the iPhone 3G hardware is not at fault, that Apple are off the hook and that it must be the network operators that are causing the 3G reception problems. Right?

Despite the fact that many …

The UK economy has officially ground to a halt, and is in danger of heading for recession. In the second quarter of the year growth was, well, zero actually. That means that the longest period of economic expansion in British history, some 16 years of it, has come to an abrupt end.

Some observers note that not only could this mean that the boom times are over, but that bust is around the corner. If the next quarter shows a further economic slowdown in growth then the UK will officially be in recession.

However, it seems that the credit crunch is not bad news for everyone. The IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index for July shows that online spending actually increased during that month.

With a total market value of some UKP 4.8 billion, that works out I am informed to average online spend of UKP 79 per person during the month.

I am sorry to report I did not do my bit, as I only spent UKP 52.26 online during July.

Still, the Capgemini index does show an 11.3 percent rise in online sales which compares very favourably to the zero percent overall economic growth figure for the UK. And what could possibly have caused this rise in online sales? Could it be that as people feel the credit crunch on the high street that they turn to the Internet to bag a bargain?

No, apparently not. According to IT …

Paris Hilton is 27 years old and pretty much made her name for two things: being the heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune, and starring in a home made porno flick that ended up on the Internet. OK, make that famous for one thing, being the heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune who starred in a porn film.

Of course, she has since gone on to make a name for herself as being the world's biggest celebrity with no real reason to be famous other than being rich and that porno flick. Google searches for such things as Paris Hilton Naked continue to surge through the popularity ratings, and pretty much anything she does makes for good SEO these days.

This popularity has not escaped the malware gangs which use her name to entice punters into opening emails and clicking on links. The most unusual of which has to be the claim that Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf on Street.

However, the scams usually revolve around the promise of seeing Paris Hilton naked again, or starring in a new video.

Funnily enough she did recently star in a new, and very popular Internet video clip, but this time she kept most of her clothes on and made a spoof play on becoming the next US President.

Now it seems that Paris has a rival in the unlikely shape of a 50 year old women getting down and dirty in some adult action. …

I am assuming that was sarcasm? :-)

It does seem odd to go with an iPhone 3G launch way before any 3G network is operational. My understanding is that the spectrum auctions have not even been held yet, let alone any work done on infrastructure building.

Makes no difference if it is a first or third world country, if there is no 3G network it is just bonkers.

Still, a nice little cash cow for Apple I guess.

That's the question I had not thought of asking, nor really given much thought to at all, until now. What prompted the question was the appearance of the Official Engineering Windows 7 blog.

The third posting proved to be a fascinating read, providing the kind of insight into the development of a software project as large as Windows that frankly is hard to get anywhere else. This is real horse's mouth stuff. Steven, writing on behalf of the Windows E7 team, says simply that none of the posts are ghost written by the PR department but instead he is "typing this directly in Windows Live Writer and hitting publish. This blog is the real deal—typos, mistakes, and all. There’s no intermediary or vetting of the posts."

Which is cool.

But not as cool as the detail revealed about that team which is developing Windows 7.

"Rather than think of one big org, or two teams, we say that the Windows 7 engineering team is made up of about 25 different feature teams" Steven says, continuing "A feature team represents those that own a specific part of Windows 7—the code, features, quality, and overall development. The feature teams represent the locus of work and coordination across the team."

How big is a feature team? It varies, but the average is 40 developers per team. Each of these work on parts of the platform which have familiar sounding names. "In general a feature team encompasses …

Rumour has it that this is the much talked about software fix for the Infineon chip 3G reception problem, although users who have already updated seem to have mixed opinions (http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20104/53/) as to whether it actually makes any difference or not...

Nobody likes the iPhone kill switch that was recently confirmed by Big Brother Apple as being very much a reality.

Apparently it is there for our own good, just in case something nasty gets on to the iPhone by way of a rogue App Store application. Apple can then remotely disable it, and the application you paid for, on your behalf without your permission.

Nice.

Unless, that is, you kill the killswitch first.

Now before going any further it is probably wise to point out that, despite the privacy implications and all the rest of it, disabling the killswitch could have unpredictable results as far as your iPhone is concerned. If not now, then further along the line. Who knows what Apple might do with it? Also, anyone jailbreaking their iPhone always does so entirely at their own risk.

Anyway, parental lecture over and on to the class geek one instead.

Disabling the kill switch can apparently be accomplished in three simple steps:

1. Jailbreak your iPhone with PwnageTool
2. Install the BossPrefs 2.12b app from Cydia
3. Hit the big 'neuter' button to disable the kill switch (look under "Allow Apple App Killswitch")

Congratulations, you have killed the killswitch!

According to reports, Intel has decided that there will be no more Centrino Atom chipsets.

Fear not, mobile Internet device loving gadget fans, for this does not mean the same thing as there being no more of the chipsets that are helping to power the ultra-low-cost mobile PC market.

All it means is that they will not be powered by Centrino Atom as everyone pretty much expected, but rather the chipset will be branded as simply Intel Atom from now on.

It is something of a surprise, it has to be said, coming just a few months after the chipset was actually launched. Not least given that Centrino as a brand is so well associated with mobile, power saving, devices. Intel seems to be saying that this is just a matter of product range simplification, but one has to wonder if there is more to it than that.

Perhaps it has something to do with Atom powered hardware, the so-called Mobile Internet Devices or MIDs, not exactly flying out of the window since March. Netbooks have just not been the big seller that Intel and others assumed they would be.

Intel say no, instead pushing the line that MIDs could not use Centrino Atom if they had a different Atom processor and a two-chip chipset, it had to be an Atom processor and a single chip or nothing. By removing the Centrino branding it removes the market confusion and, one assumes, removes the stumbling block …

Italian Internet Service Providers have been ordered to block access to the Pirate Bay file-sharing Bit Torrent tracker site in Sweden by a judge in the Northern Italian town of Bergamo.

This is the same judge, who has not been named, which only last month closed a leading Bit Torrent site in Italy and is due to hear charges against three of its administrators.

Colonel Alessandro Nencini of the Italian police squad specialising in finance matters is currently investigating a total of four people who stand accused of being administrators of Pirate Bay and breaking copyright laws in Italy.

The Pirate Bay is a hugely popular file-sharing service, with as many as 20 million visitors happily trading music and movies each and every month.

The action is being taken following formal complaints from the Milan-based Federation against Musical Piracy.

The Swedes, meanwhile, have suggested that unhappy Italians should use an OpenDNS system to get around the ISP blocking after calling the Italian action nothing less than an assault on freedom of speech.

"We're quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators" a Pirate Bay spokesman stated.

It would appear that Japanese swimmer Kosuke Kitajima, who won gold in the men's 100m breast stroke event, has a Nintendo Wii to thank.

I was always told not to wee in the pool, but Kitajima had his Wii in the gym so that's OK then.

Apparently, the Olympic swimmer included playing games on the Wii as part of his training routine to prepare for the Olympic Games.

Now you are probably thinking he was using that Wii Fit thing, but no, Kitajima reckons he played Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games instead.

"Mario does the breaststroke. And thus, it's perfect mental training for envisioning the actual Olympic hall" Kitajima says.

Is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like someone who either has or is hoping to get a sponsorship deal?

Meanwhile, injured athletes are turning to Wii Fit as part of a rehabilitation process according to yet further reports. "Fitness-oriented video games have great potential for core strengthening and rehabilitation" we are assured.

Still, it makes a change from mass murderers training by playing GTA I guess.

VIA has a pretty long and glorious record when it comes to producing low budget but high performance motherboard chipsets. Indeed, for many shoestring performance PC enthusiasts VIA has achieved something nearing saintly status.

Unfortunately, like all other saints, it seems that as far as the VIA motherboard chipset business is concerned it too will soon be dead.

According to reports VIA is to focus on x86 processors and integrated motherboards. Vice President of Corporate Marketing in Taiwan for VIA, Richard Brown, has told Custom PC magazine in the UK that it effectively sees no future in producing chipsets for the likes of AMD or Intel.

"One of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear, and we would need to have the capability to provide a complete platform" Brown said, adding "That has indeed come to pass."

Of course, the small matter of Intel making its own chipsets now that it owns ATI, and AMD following pretty much in the same direction, sort of accelerates the decision to quit.

Quite where this leaves players such as SiS, other than looking increasingly isolated and vulnerable, remains to be seen...

Well, at least as far as getting reasonably unrestricted access to the Internet is concerned it does. It had been widely reported that the Chinese authorities had backtracked on their promises to the IOC that reporters would get free and unrestricted access to the Internet during the games. This, no surprises here, turned into something into a media explosion of fury around the free world. It did not take long, with the opening ceremony looming, for the Chinese to backbacktrack, if you will allow such a concept. As our own Guy Clapperton reported last week, the Chinese opened up that Internet access for reporters.

Unfortunately, it remains far from being unrestricted even for authorised reporters. Still, it is a damn site better than your average Chinese citizen is allowed. Then there is the small matter of who is watching where you go online, and in China the chances of being monitored are pretty good I would imagine.

Unless, that is, you have a $30 gadget from Germany. The Freedom Stick is a USB dongle which comes preloaded with a host, no pun intended, of TOR Network software which acts like a stick of dynamite stuffed into the Great Firewall of China.

What it does, quite simply, is cloak the connection and route your traffic all over the place in order to fool anything trying to monitor your online activity. Stick it into an available USB slot, avoid getting caught by a secret policeman …

Dell is still selling new machines with XP, under what it ironically calls the Windows Vista Bonus scheme :)

If you have ever been vaguely interested in search beyond the simple 'where can I find x' type question, and perhaps more from an 'who is asking about y' or 'where is z the most popular' instead, then listen up.

Google has announced the launch of Insights for Search which aims to answer just those sort of questions.

OK, so Google Trends helps with this stuff to a certain degree, but Insights for Search promises toe let you dig much deeper into current Internet interests than ever before. It is being aimed at advertisers and marketers primarily, but bog-standard inquisitive web-users will benefit as well.

Here's how, according to the Google press office:

• Search trends over time - See how user interest rises and falls around a particular subject. Type in more than one keyword, separated by a comma, to compare keyword popularity.
  
• Regional interest - See which countries, cities and regions are most interested in a certain topic; click on a part of the heat-map to see more about search volume in a specific region.
  
• Top and rising related searches - find out what queries related to your own are most popular, and which ones are gaining in popularity.
  
• Refine your insights searches by category - see top searches in a category--rising searches in 'Celebrities', for example, or popular searches in 'Vehicle Brands'. Specify by date, region or subject to get more detailed results.

"We think this is …

That didn't take long! Apple has started rolling out the first update to the iPhone 2.0 software in the shape of the mysterious iPhone 2.0.1 which iTunes told me was available when I fired it up this morning.

I say mysterious with good reason: Apple isn't exactly shouting loudly from the roof tops with regards to what was wrong with iPhone 2.0 that needed fixing so damn quick.

What it does say is that the update includes 'bug fixes' and nothing more. Obviously, if iPhone users were told anything else they would have to be shot as it is top secret data.

Still, I have installed it like a good boy and can report that I have discovered, err, not very much at all really. Seriously, a couple of hundred MB of update download and the usual faffing around waiting for it all to happen, and then nothing to show for it.

Well, almost nothing.

The keyboard seems a little 'snappier' in use I guess, not quite as sluggish as it was. However, this is a marginal improvement and had there been any real substantive feature or functionality upgrade focus I probably would not have even bothered writing about it.

I would still have mentioned that apps are loading a little quicker than before, just a little mind. Even that would have been more a footnote than a headline though.

Oh, I know what it did, it re-arranged all my app icons back …

Wow! That's a lot of e-book reader hardware units. I mean, everyone knew these things were popular after selling out so quickly straight off the bat. But 240,000 units? Who would have thought there would be such a huge demand for this kind of technology. Especially since every e-book reader I have tried, including those which incorporate the admittedly really quite gob-smackingly good e-ink display technology, has been let down by one crucial factor: content.

Sure, it is great to have a few hundred books in one paperback-sized device. But only if they are a few hundred books that you want to read. Most devices seem to either just let you read those out of copyright texts that can be found online for nothing, or tie you into some proprietary format.

Now I have nothing against the classics, indeed I have read many of them. But when I am relaxing on the beach during my vacation, or whiling away the hours on the plane getting there, I don't want to get lost in Dickens or Shakespeare thanks very much. I want to see what Michio Koku is predicting for the quantum physics future, or maybe grab a little bit of Darkly Dreaming Dexter to calm my nerves.

If I did want to read a freely available e-book, I might download the PDF to an Apple iPhone or iTouch which is much smaller and does much more than the Kindle ever could.

Still, some 240,000 people would …

According to a survey by BroadbandChoices.co.uk, most parents in the UK are not actively monitoring what their kids are up to when using the Internet. In fact, while 40 percent of kids between the ages of 11 and 16 use Facebook and MySpace, 45 percent make new friends in chatrooms and 48 percent regularly download stuff online. Yet 84 percent of parents say they prefer to rely upon 'verbal agreements' to ensure that their children are able to surf safely.

The fact that parents do not apparently know what their kids are downloading could be problematical in the UK as it will be parents, through their Internet accounts, who are punished if pirate music and moves are on that download menu. A new industry agreement will see the potential for households to find they have no Internet access in such circumstances, on a three warnings and you are out basis.

Michael Phillips, Product Director, BroadbandChoices.co.uk, said "There are financial implications to your child’s internet activities. With 48% downloading music online it would be easy to exceed your broadband fair usage limit leaving unsuspecting parents out of pocket at the end of the month.”

However, is it really that surprising so many parents are relying upon verbal agreements considering that their kids are often far more tech savvy than they are themselves? Many would have no idea where to start as far as parental control software, filtering, blocks and the like enter the browsing …

Not quite 'free Internet access' or 'unrestricted' though, even for the media.

The report that you referenced says, towards the bottom and quoting the IOC press commission spokesman:

"There will be sites blocked that have to do with pornography or where in the opinion of the national government are sites which are subversive or against national interest"

The important bits being 'in the opinion of the national government' and 'which are subversive or against national interest' which, I suspect, means that nothing will have changed much at all - other than there being reports in some parts of the media saying that everything is coming up Chinese roses now...

Looks like the PC Advisor story, using an IDG interview, was not 100 percent accurate in as far as the HD Moore owned quote is concerned at any rate. The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/31/hd-moore-owned-dns-flaw) has a piece about HD Moore himself saying he was misquoted, and never said he was owned like the IDG writer stated.

That said, the basis of the story seems sound, it's just that HD Moore wants to make it clear that "Stating that my company was "compromised" leads the reader to believe that there was some sort of security breach, which is reinforced by the fabricated quote."

So there you have it, HD Moore did not get owned and he was joking when he said he did. And while no BreakingPoint computer was actually compromised by the attack on AT&T, it was still a victim.

Pretty much like we have said in our coverage of the story here, in fact.

Davey wearing his Blog Editor hat...

Claiming to be the biggest search engine on the web is a pretty confident thing to do on the day that your search engine launches, but that is exactly what the creators of Cuil have done today.

Combining the "biggest Web index" with "content-based relevance methods" whereby results are organised by way of ideas, is what Cuil hopes will differentiate it in this already crowded market.

Cuil claims 120 billion indexed Web pages, which it maintains is a stonking three times more than any other search engine. Google has just revealed that during its automatic indexing process it recently counted 1 trillion unique Web pages but it admits that it did not index all of them. There was good reason for this, as many are dynamically generated copies of the same URL and many have duplicated content. So it remains to be seen just how Cuil has come up with a figure that apparently obliterates the current search king indexing number on day one.

Certainly it talks a good fight, with a little dig at Google in the press release saying that it goes beyond the normal 'link analysis and traffic ranking' of its competitors in order analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.

There is also no shortage of technical pedigree at Cuil, which again sounds odd when it has only just launched …

According to the Observer newspaper this morning Gary McKinnon, the British hacker accused of what US prosecutors refer to the biggest military computer hack of all time, has claimed he was threatened with a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay. His lawyers are using this as part of their defence against his extradition, arguing that such an attempt at getting McKinnon to accept a plea bargain were an unlawful abuse of the court process.

The Observer claims the lawyers say that US prosecutors suggested "he would be treated like a terrorist" if he did not agree to plead guilt at a US based trial.

McKinnon will find out sometime on Wednesday if the UK House of Lords will allow his appeal against extradition to the US on those charges, following a decision in favour of US prosecutors by the UK High Court back in 2006.

If found guilty of the charges against him, McKinnon faces up to 60 years in prison for the alleged hacking exercise for which he was arrested way back in 2002. McKinnon has always claimed he was just looking for proof that the US government knew aliens existed and that UFO sightings had been officially confirmed.

According to the Observer story, his supporters claim that if McKinnon had agreed to a deal offered during secret meetings at the US embassy in London, which involved the hacker pleading guilty at an American trial, he could have got a maximum of four years …

Well, OK, they have agreed to throttle the bandwidth of those accounts found to be indulging in the illegal downloading of music via file-sharing networks if their customers do not take heed of a warning letter or two.

The BPI (formerly known as British Phonographic Industry) which represents the British music recording industry has announced that it has successfully reached a 'groundbreaking agreement' between record labels and major UK internet service providers, as well as the British government, on measures to help significantly reduce illegal filesharing.

"Following negotiations facilitated by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), BPI on behalf of hundreds of UK record companies big and small has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), with the UK’s six largest internet service providers. The Motion Pictures Association of America and BERR have also signed."

This places joint commitments on the signatories to continue developing consumer education programmes and legal online services. But it also, for the first time, requires ISPs to work with music and other rights holders towards a “significant reduction” in illegal filesharing.

To this end hundreds of thousands of warning letters will be sent out by ISPs in the first year. Any customers whose accounts are identified by the BPI as being used illegally will get a letter. Repeat offenders are likely to see the bandwidth of their broadband connections reduced if they do not take heed. Ultimately, they could be cut off from the Internet at least …

It has been a long time coming, and the subject of much online speculation as a result, but now Google has finally officially launched Knol. Google seems to be positioning this as less alternative to, and more complimentary with, Wikipedia.

"Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics" Google says "written by people who know about those subjects."

Which sounds very much like Wikipedia, apart from the 'people who know about those subjects' bit in many cases of course. He says, tongue planted only partially in cheek. So what is the difference? Over to Google again:

"An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone."

Right, that still sounds an awful lot like Wikipedia to me. The real difference is that Knol will not rely upon the wisdom of crowds but rather the wisdom of the individual. "The key principle behind Knol is authorship" Google insists, adding "Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion."

There will, of course, be multiple Knols covering the same subject matter as a direct result of this approach. But Google is not phased by this and actually sees the multiplicity as a good thing. Although there will be a moderated collaboration option …

It seems that botnet usage could have been behind an increase in the number of click fraud clicks cited in the latest Click Fraud Index which monitors such things.

Running for three years now, the index monitors and analyses data from more than 4000 online advertisers and advertising agencies. The Pay Per Click data is collected from online advertising campaigns, large and small, across all leading search engines.

The latest report suggests that while the overall industry average click fraud rate was down 0.1 percent from last quarter to 16.2 percent. it was up from the 15.8 percent rate this time last year. However, the average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and other search engine operated schemes was up from 25.6 percent this time last year to 27.6 percent.

Interestingly though, and for the first time, the traffic from botnets was responsible for more than 25 percent of all click fraud traffic.

When it comes to a geographic breakdown, North America rules the roost (although percentage figures were not readily available as I write this) but outside of the US China accounted for 4.3 percent, Russia 3.5 percent and France 3.2 percent.

“Although click fraud rates were relatively unchanged in the second quarter, we found that the methods used to commit click fraud have become increasingly more sophisticated and difficult to detect,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “The threat from botnets is the …

It's what is known as a news story...

Wow! That's a lot of kit being shifted by Apple. With the publication of its financial results for the fiscal 2008 third quarter ended June 28, Apple announces revenue of $7.46 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.07 billion, or $1.19 per diluted share. International sales accounted for 42 percent of the quarter's revenue.

Compare that with a revenue of $5.41 billion and net quarterly profit of $818 million, or $.92 per diluted share, for the same time last year. Mind you, the gross margin was down from 36.9 percent to 34.8 percent but I guess that Apple will not be complaining too loudly about that.

It is the amount of hardware shipped that impresses me most though, let's just run over those figures again:

• 2,496,000 Macintosh computers shipped, which represents a 41 percent unit growth and 43 percent revenue growth over this time last year.
  
• 11,011,000 iPods sold, which represents a 12 percent unit growth and seven percent revenue growth over this time last year.
  
• 717,000 iPhones sold, compared to just 270,000 this time last year.

Given the disastrous launch of the iPhone 3G, from the end user perspective during the first few days at least, Apple will be happy to focus on those hard fact, bottom line figures instead of suffering the verbal gunfire from bloggers.

"We're proud to report the best June quarter for both revenue and earnings in Apple's history," said Steve …

It might come as a surprise to some that there is an underground economy online which revolves around the sale of malware. However, with botnets for hire by the hour and rootkits to purchase outright such off-the-shelf security nightmares have been the norm for a number of years now. What is unusual about the Limbo 2 Trojan is that it costs so much, topping out at some $1300 for the user license. Yes, without any hint of irony the authors of these malware applications do seek to protect their intellectual property with end user licensing schemes. The fact that for the most part they have stolen the code from someone else and simply adapted it slightly to create a new version is neither here nor there.

But the reason for the high value of Limbo 2 is simple: it comes with a guarantee of being able to evade the top ten anti-virus solutions. Not just evade them now, but do so continuously thanks to a morphing shell which provides in effect a cloaking device to hide the Trojan from the prying eyes of AVG, McAfee, Symantec and their ilk. So the shell changes, but unfortunately the payload remains constant: stealing financial data.

PrevX, the security company which uncovered Limbo 2, has analysed the code and confirmed that the Trojan can produce pretty much infinite variants to avoid detection by signature-based AV solutions. So while the AV researchers will, soon enough, produce a signature to detect Limbo 2 the …

Security researchers within the Marshal TRACE Team have warned that malicious spammers are using fake United Parcel Service invoices in order to deliver a malware payload.

Always looking for a new and convincing hook to snare the unsuspecting user into downloading malicious components from the web, this new attack utilises the Pushdo botnet to distribute fake UPS invoices requiring printing in order to claim an 'undelivered' package from the local office.

Of course, the attached executable file called 'ups_invoice.zip' which has an MS Word icon in an attempt to add authenticity is not an invoice at all but rather installs some malware which "seeks to download more malicious components from the web" according to Marshal.

“For the unwary or uninitiated, at first glance, the message appears to come from UPS,” warned Phil Hay, Lead Threat Analyst for Marshal TRACE Team. “The subject line of the message provides a seemingly official tracking number and the message itself seems sincere." However, upon a little closer inspection you might notice that the message is full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that would be unlikely to escape from any official UPS outlet.

“The subject line misspells the word packet" Hay reveals "and the message provides no contact address for the supposed collection of the package."

All of which should set alarm bells ringing. Which is just as well considering that the Pushdo botnet is currently estimated to include some 125,000 compromised computers, and is responsible for …

According to the Consumer Electronics Association the global revenue for consumer electronics will jump 10 percent this year, reaching a staggering $700 billion by next year. In its Worldwide Consumer Electronics Sales & Forecast report, the CEA says that consumers will spend $42 billion more in 2009 than they did in 2008, despite the credit crunch.

The fastest growth will be seen in countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so called BRIC countries) but China alone is expected to account for as much as 15 percent of all global consumer electronics revenue by 2009. Which leaves it trailing only Western Europe on 16 percent and North America with a 22 percent share of the market in terms of revenue.

When it comes to dissecting the market by sector, mobility well and truly leads the way as far as revenue and unit sales are concerned. Indeed, the CEA suggests that mobile products as a genre will shift more than 1.5 billion units this year. Top of the mobile pops are GPS navigation devices with growth of 20 percent expected this year, followed by laptops which are up 15 percent, and mobile phones up 14 percent.

“No matter where consumers are, whether it’s on the coast of Turkey or the mountains of Peru, they crave access to information, entertainment and two-way communication,” says Tim Herbert, CEA’s senior director of market research. “Many regions of the world face high population densities or underdeveloped infrastructures. Mobile …

Yes, I know it sounds pretty daft, but MIO has confirmed that it will be releasing a satnav built entirely around a Knight Rider theme next month in the US.

Fans who want to experience that genuine eighties retro feel, but in a totally modern way, will just love KITT greeting them with "Hello Michael, where would you like to go today." And it is KITT as well, or at least it is actor William Daniels who was the original voice of the black Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT) 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with the pulsing red LED smile.

If you don't happen to be called Michael, there are 300 or so names to choose from. But to change it would be, well, missing the point. After all, if you are investing in a satnav because it reminds you of a TV series then you will probably want that extra authenticity. Maybe legally changing your name is a better solution.

From everything that has been leaked about the unit so far it does look like it will bring that KITT feel into your own, no doubt much less interesting, automobile though. Things such as the "two synthesizer displays" that fluctuate in time with KITT speaking. Just brilliant, and yes I do want one, despite my own car having a very intelligent SmartNav system already installed.

At around $270 when it finally hits the streets, US only for now, next month it seems quite …

We now know that developers working on applications for the iPhone had to submit those applications to Apple on Monday if they were to be included in the launch day offerings for the all singing, all dancing, all new Apple iPhone App Store.

The developers were told "Have your application be among the first available when the App Store goes live. To ensure your application can be considered for the exciting launch of the App Store, submit your application by 12 PM PDT, on July 7, 2008. We will continue to accept applications after this time, however your application may not be available until after the launch of the App Store. Conduct final testing of your application with iPhone OS beta eight and submit your app today."

Michael Arrington, writing at TechCrunch, says that "Most developers will only get a few hours notice prior to the go live time, and Apple is keeping a tight reign on PR, as usual." While it is widely expected that the App Store will go live to coincide with the global launch of the iPhone 3G on the 11th July, some are predicting it will open a day or two earlier.

This seems highly unlikely as it will mean that the iPhone 2.0 software would be made available to existing iPhone/iTouch owners before the iPhone 3G is actually sold. I cannot see how Apple marketing would consider this a good thing, or get …

According to a report at The Register Apple is failing to keep iPhone software up to date with security patches. This despite the iPhone 1.1.4 software being nothing more than a "pared-down version of Mac OS 10.5" it says.

The Jesus Phone is said to be vulnerable to a number of exploits which have been patched pretty damn quickly in desktop software. The article refers specifically to the Apple WebKit vulnerability which uses a bug that was present in some versions of Safari to allow data theft from the iPhone. Miller successfully demonstrated this in March during the CanSec West security conference.

Successfully enough to win $10,000 in the Pwn to Own competition there at any rate.

Miller has a tool to exploit the vulnerability on the iPhone which, after having clicked on a malicious link of course, the user of the handset could find outgoing calls being made by he attacker as well as data being compromised.

Other security researchers are warning of more to come, including one uncovered by Aviv Raff which can allow phishing attacks using the iPhone. Raff is not publishing details as he waits for an Apple patch to emerge.

According to The Inquirer a new report by the Ponemon Institute, rather appropriately sponsored by Dell, has revealed that an astonishing number of laptops are lost at airports across the United States on a weekly basis.

Asking questions of 800 business travellers at some 106 major airports in the US, the Ponemon Institute also discovered that on average only 30 percent of those lost laptops are recovered. Which is worrying as just under half the people taking part in the survey admitted their laptops are full of confidential business data.

When you work it out over the course of a year that works out to some 624,000 lost laptops, just in airports. Around 300,000 of them full of confidential data, and 195,000 of those with no encryption or protection to keep that data from prying eyes in the event of such a loss. Only 60,000 will be statistically likely to have either whole-disk or file encryption in place. If you look at the figures in the report, 126,000 of those lost laptops will not even have been backed up before the owner left on his or her trip.

So, where in an airport are you most likely to get separated from your lappy? That's easy: the security checkpoint. If you want to be specific about it, the survey would suggest that the best place to avoid if you value your laptop would be the security checkpoint at Los Angeles LAX airport.

Chairman of the …

Matrox has announced what it claims to be the first true QuadHead GPU, the Matrox M-Series. Which begs the question, just how many monitors do you need? With 512 MB of memory, native PCIe x16 performance and a fanless design for quiet operation you might think Matrox has done enough with the new M-Series graphics card family. But you would be wrong. These babies are capable of stretching desktop applications across not two, but no less than four monitors.

Taking multi-monitor to a whole new dimension, Matrox insists that the M-Series represents the first true QuadHead GPU within the industry. Although that would only seem to be the case if you move to the top end of the series. At the lower end you only get support for two displays, like that's not going to be enough for most people. For the quad-display you need to be looking at the top money M9140.

The question is, of course, can this be enough to bounce Matrox back from the pit of oblivion it seems to have found itself in over recent years. Certainly the ATI/nVidia duopoly has pretty much dominated the high end graphics hardware scene as far as I can see,

"Many applications require the ability to drive multiple monitors—from two to eight displays per seat—especially in high-end corporate, government, and industrial environments," states Alan Vandenbussche, VP Sales and Marketing, Matrox Graphics. "The M-Series represents next-generation Matrox graphics technology specifically designed for these display-hungry professionals."

According to the official Google Webmaster Central Blog it would appear that much better Adobe Flash indexing is heading for Google.

In fact, if the Googlebot engineers posting to that blog are to be believed, the ability to index textual content in SWF format files, including Flash, has already improved. The engineers claim that any text that a user can see when interacting with a Flash file can now be properly indexed by Google.

So, for example, the textual content of Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Which is cool. As is the ability for Google to now match query terms in searches with words appearing in Flash files.

"We're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages" the Google engineers say, adding "if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website."

Unfortunately, the same does not extend to images. Google will not recognize nor index text appearing in Flash file images. Google will not generate anchor text for Flash buttons which target a URL but do not have any associated text.

Rather bizarrely, given that Google owns YouTube, it does not index YouTube video FLV files. The reasoning being that these contain no text elements so it cannot be done, as of …

According to AppleInsider Nicholas Woodhams, an Apple iPod repair shop owner from Michigan, has found himself at the wrong end of the Apple legal machine.

Apple has apparently filed a lawsuit which claims misuse of the iPod trademark.

Actually, that is not all Apple claims. The iPod owning giant also accuses Woodhams of allegedly 'manipulating' Apple in order to get free replacement iPods. If that were not enough, the triple whammy is completed by another allegation of conning Apple into repairing iPods which were out of warranty.

However, where Woodhams is probably on the most dodgy of legal grounds is with regard to that trademark misuse charge. Buried within a nine page lawsuit, Apple says that the repair guy was asked to stop using the iPod name way back in 2006 as he had never been given permission to use it in the first place.

Apple say that he agreed to a deal in which he would phase the use of 'ipodmechanic' out by January last year, an stop using the web domain a coupe of months later.

Although Apple say none of these things happened, I note that the ipodmechanic.com URL is now resolved to imechanic.com instead. That said, the resulting webpage has an iPod Mechanic banner and the phrase is repeated throughout the site. So I guess they have a point.

While neither Apple nor the ipodmechanic seem to be saying anything in public about the …

It wasn't due for another six weeks or so, but today Microsoft surprised many folk by starting to sell its new Hyper-V server virtualisation software. Microsoft had repeatedly told anyone who asked, and anyone who was listening, that it would be released in August. However, Microsoft customers were alerted to the fact that they could actually start downloading it today from the Microsoft website.

That is, the final Release to Manufacturing version is now available for full deployment into production environments. A beta of Hyper-V was included with Windows Server 2008 and this update provides the final release version.

According to IT Pro this will put added pressure on to virtualisation rival VMware. Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio told them that Microsoft's entry into the virtualisation market will give VMware customers bargaining power to negotiate discounts. "I always tell companies to press very hard on pricing when negotiating with all software companies," DiDio said. "It's a buyer's market."

Remember the big fuss that spread all over the world when HM Revenue and Customs, the UK government department that deals with income tax and the like, managed to lose discs containing the financial details of 25 million people? amazingly, the official Independent Police Complaints Commission enquiry into the shameful affair has concluded that no one can be blamed for the HMRC data loss, but rather it happened as a result of the culture in the department. Citing a lack of adequate training and support, the reports says it was just a bit of a muddle really.

Well that's OK then. Not!

Greg Day, security analyst from McAfee comments:

“With a growing volume of data loss incidents occurring, businesses have to recognise the value of their data and the controls required around it. Effective data protection requires clear data classification so appropriate practices can be applied. The Government already had both of these in place, putting it in a more advanced position than most in managing data usage but human mistakes are a challenge every business or organisation face. Recent research from McAfee Data Protection (formerly SafeBoot) show that 98 per cent of UK office workers don’t see the protection of corporate electronic data as their responsibility, this is an attitude that needs to be changed. Whilst technology can always provide a back up, employees need to be educated about why they should be careful with data and usage policies are needed to enforce good data protection …

It is no secret that Google is facing problems with the Open Source Android cellphone project. Manufacturers finding it hard to meet deadlines delivering the handsets themselves, and developers finding it hard to work with Google and get Android compatible applications ready.

Now, just to add to a week of misery for Google, it appears that Nokia has stepped in with a swift kick to the unmentionables.

The Inquirer reports that the Finnish cellphone King is to buy Symbian, the handset OS people.

In fact, according to the report author Tony Dennis, Nokia is buying all of Symbian, every last bit, so as to help "take the whole Symbian ecosystem open source."

The Symbian Foundation will spearhead the march to Open Source, aided and abetted by the likes of Sony Ericsson who are throwing the UIQ UI into the mix, and NTT Docomo from Japan who are adding MOAP(S) assets.

Not to forget Nokia itself with the Series 60 platform. Or Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics who are both founding members.

If Google is not worried, if the Android is not doing a broken robot dance, by now then it has obviously not been paying attention.

The Symbian Foundation platform is to be royalty-free to anyone who comes on board, and will be truly Open Source. I guess that the cellphone market has just got really interesting again...

Critically ill perhaps, but not dead. Yet.

According to Tech President "Mike, Liz and Ana will be using their personal Twitter accounts, @mikenelson, @lizmair and @anamariecox, and we've also asked them to tag their responses with the hashtag #pdfdebate. We suggest that readers who want to follow along use a Twitter application like Summize.com to track the conversation."

Sorry, Obama and McCain are Twitterers. That's what I should have said. Or at least that's what Tech President reckons.

Representatives of both candidates are apparently both hard at it, debating the presidential race on Twitter. The debate started on Friday and is due to run until Tomorrow.

Moderated by a Time Magazine blogger, McCain is being represented by RNC online communications director Liz Mair while Obama has some professor called Mike Nelson in his corner. Nelson, I am informed, served under Vice President Gore during the Clinton administration, advising on tech policy issues.

Is it just me, or is it a shame that we have the tech-heads rolled out for this debate rather than the candidates themselves?

Now Obama reduced to a 140 character limit would be something to see, and McCain would have to grasp the use of smileys.

All, of course, assuming Twitter does not fold under the strain on its servers.

According to BT the average UK office worker sees less sun than the average coal miner. The growing trend of 'chain-desking' where workers feel that being out of the office is the same as being out of touch, is blamed for the vampire-like existence.

The research was conducted on behalf of BT Wireless Broadband, and revealed that the majority of city workers see natural sunlight for less than an hour per day. Rather shockingly, 22 percent see the sun for less than twenty minutes during the working day.

No surprise at all then that 65 percent said they felt unmotivated knowing that they'll be stuck indoors all day working, and some have considered throwing a sickie to compensate.

In response to the research Stephen Alambritis of the Federation for Small Businesses says "Lack of sunshine or outdoors activity has an enormous effect on morale and productivity is likely to drop in tandem. With a wide variety of internet access options available to office workers, and more bosses approving remote working, there's never been a better summer for those workers stuck at their desks to get some productive time in the sun for their boss and themselves."

BT has chipped in with some tips on getting the best out of working away from the office:

• Don't flash your devices around. Find a sensible and safe location to work in.
• Activate your computer's firewall before going outdoors.
• Take care that no-one is looking as you …

I have both, and the PS3 is now pretty much used as a Blu-Ray player and that's it. The XBox 360 Elite gets all the gaming action, mainly because it has all (well most, in the case of our family) the really playable games.

Sandro Gauci, founder of EnableSecurity, has revealed that six years on from his 2002 report into extended HTML form attacks the problem has simply refused to go away.

The original report included details of how attackers could abuse non-HTTP protocols in order to launch Cross Site Scripting attacks, even in a situation where the target web application was not itself vulnerable to XSS. This applied to most web browsers at the time. Now, he says, not much has changed.

"Six years later I’m releasing an update to this research in this paper. This security vulnerability still affects popular web browsers nowadays."

Gauci lists the following browsers as all being tested and vulnerable:

Internet Explorer 6
Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 8 (beta 1)
Opera 9.27
Opera 9.50
Safari 1.32
Safari 3.1.1

Of course, it is not that the vulnerabilities have just been ignored, but rather that these browsers have not managed to make it go away completely. The problem seems to lay with how they block ports, and how attackers exploit browser blacklists by using ports which are not on them.

Gauci concedes that a decent job has been done as far as the web forms which get exchanged with HTML servers are concerned, but not when we start talking about FTP, SMTP or any other non-HTTP server.

"When an attacker can control what is returned by the server, the victim becomes vulnerable …

Multiple arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities in Ruby have been revealed by the Apple Product Security team which could lead to Denial of Service attacks. A total of five vulnerabilities have been reported, with versions impacted being:

1.8.4 and all prior versions
1.8.5-p230 and all prior versions
1.8.6-p229 and all prior versions
1.8.7-p21 and all prior versions
1.9.0-1 and all prior versions

Upgrading to either 1.8.5-p231, 1.8.6-p230, 1.8.7-p22 or 1.9.0-2 is recommended.

This is, of course, of particular interest to Apple as its Mac OS X Leopard comes complete with a Ruby on Rails web development framework.

For an in-depth examination of the vulnerabilities head over to security guru Eric Monti at the Matasano Chargen blog who has been dissecting the detail.

Monti says "These vulnerabilities are likely to crop up in just about any average ruby web application. And by “crop up” I mean “crop up exploitable from trivial user-specified parameters”. Unlike un-handled ruby exceptions getting raised, these bugs aren’t the fault of the programmer as much as the fault of the interpreter. Part of the unwritten “contract” with your interpreted language is that it will prevent you from letting ridiculous things happen by raising an exception."

Amazingly, according to The Inquirer, an Orange County hacker is facing an incredible 38 years in prison if found guilty of several counts relating to hacking into his school computer.

It seems that Omar Khan, 18, of Coto de Caza, California hacked into computer in order to change his grades. Indeed, it is reported that he attempted to change all his C, D and F grades to As and Bs. The discrepancy soon came to light when school administrators were asked for a new school transcript by Khan as he appealed a denial of admission to the University of California.

The Orange County Superior Court is hearing a total of 69 felony counts against Khan, including second degree burglary, ID theft, altering an falsifying a public record and, of course, computer access and fraud. It is also suggested that he installed spyware on a teachers PC and altered grades for a total of 12 other students.

He is charged alongside fellow student Tanvir Singh, 18, of Laera Ranch, California who is accused of breaking into a classroom to steal the answers to an exam test paper.

Although it could be argued that both were, essentially, doing the same thing by cheating, Singh only faces a maximum of three years in prison if found guilty. This had led many online commentators to suggest that the law is, to be blunt, an ass.

Certainly when a rapist can be found guilty and serve a fraction …