Posts by happygeek

All is not well for Apple, in a week when it should be flag waving the release of Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' the firm finds itself, and its users, under attack instead. The culprit being a new Trojan which, once installed, changes the Mac's domain name system server. This kind of DNSChanger Trojan is nearly always criminally motivated, and that would certainly seem to be so in this case, which of course means that the people behind it calculated the potential profit was valuable enough to develop the malware.

That has to be a worry for Mac users.

The OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan is distributed in a common fashion, being distributed exclusively as far as I can tell on pornography websites and forums which link to them. The rather familiar scam of 'view a free dirty video' is used to get the unsuspecting Mac user to click on an image to start the streaming video process. Instead it just displays a standard QuickTime cannot play this movie message and prompts the user to download a new version of the codec which will be able to bring on the porn. Or so the user thinks, what they actually get is an executable .dmg file. The user has to enter their admin password in order to proceed with the 'codec' installation and then, hey presto, the DNSChanger is installed and running with full user privileges.

Just as predictably, the DNS is changed to point towards porn and phishing …

That is, indeed, the clip. That is, indeed, the quality of the audio track. That is, indeed, the music industry shooting itself in the foot once again...

According to a legal document published at the Electronic Frontier Foundation site, the copyright Nazis at Universal Music Group might have bitten off more than they can chew when they ordered the removal of a Dancing baby clip from YouTube.

Stephanie Lenz posted a video clip on YouTube of her 18 month old baby dancing. Oh ha ha, how original and amusing, you are probably not thinking. It seems that the lawyers at UMG didn't see the funny side either, as they issued YouTube with a notice to remove the clip for copyright violation. The terrible crime committed in this instance being that the baby was dancing, for a whole 29 seconds, to a Prince song. You know, that chap who gave away his last album as a freebie with the UK tabloid newspaper the Mail on Sunday. Anyway, UMG did not like the fact that a baby could be dancing to a 23 year old track (Let's Go Crazy) without getting some money out of it. Let's not worry about the small fact that the song was being played on the television, as part of the half time entertainment during the Super Bowl...

YouTube did as it was told and informed the offensive pirate mother that any further infringements would result in her account being cancelled.

Nice.

No wonder so many people get hot under the collar about copyright issues when a giant such as UMG manages to get all heavy …

According to the latest IDC Quarterly Server Tracker report the growth of Linux as far as the US x86 server market is concerned has started to slow. In fact, it is has done more than just slow, when compared to Windows-based server growth it has slipped backwards. In 2005 Windows Server growth was sitting comfortably around 25 percent and Linux was right up there at 53 percent. Fast forward to now and that IDC report suggests that as far as figures for 2006 are concerned Linux has dropped to an astonishing -4 percent growth rate. Unfortunately for Linux, the growth of Windows-based servers has stayed positive racking up figures of 4 percent during the same period.

It has been suggested that Linux adoption has fallen off the pace because it is mirroring the rate of migration from Unix to Linux which has also slowed right down. It has also been suggested that Linux is losing market share to Windows, based upon these latest figures. Interestingly, when you talk to industry analysts about Linux-based enterprise applications they paint a different picture, one of increasing and continued growth in an area of the market where Microsoft has historically had the major presence. So it's all a matter of swings and roundabouts rather than massive cause for concern in both camps methinks.

Observers should also bear in mind that trying to double-guess OS trends based upon numbers of servers being shipped is notoriously dangerous territory. More so when we …

According to the Inside AdSense blog better management tools for AdSense users are on the way. The new tools will allow you to manage your ad units from within your AdSense account, meaning that settings such as colors and channels will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. What this means, practically, is that you will no longer have to manually replace ad code on all your pages every time you want to make any changes. Want to change all the borders of one size ad from red to blue? No problem, with just a couple of mouse clicks it will be done.

"We'll be rolling it out in phases in the next few weeks. When you see the "Manage Ads" page appear under your AdSense Setup tab, you'll know the feature is available for you to use" Google says.

Google has added IMAP support to its free webmail service Gmail. Users can now access email from client applications using the Internet Message Access Protocol, and at the same time automatically update the message status within Gmail itself. This is something that many people who access Gmail messages via the supported POP service have been long asking for as it enables the problems of read messages remaining marked as unread within Gmail to be solved. IMAP also enables forwarded messages and replies sent using the external client to be reflected in the Gmail web interface.

A full list of supported email clients has been published at the Gmail help site, but mainstays like Outlook and Outlook Express are amongst them as is the Apple iPhone email applications. Users of Palm handhelds will be disappointed though, as these have been specifically excluded from the fun for now.

According to figures relating to the audited financial statements and tax form for 2006, posted at Mozillazine by Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker, the project is doing pretty well with revenue up and outpacing rising expenses. "Mozilla remains financially healthy: we're able to hire more people, build more products, help other projects, and bring more possibilities for participation in the Internet to millions of people. The Mozilla project is growing in almost every way - size, scale, types of activities, new communities, and in reach" Baker says.

Revenues for 2006 were $66,840,850, which represents a 26% increase over 2005 figures, and can be pretty much accounted for by search functionality revenue in Firefox. Or put another way, Google continues to bankroll Firefox. Although there were other revenue sources such as the Mozilla Store and some public donations, Baker concedes that it is Google which is the main injector of money into Mozilla.

When it comes to expenses, those grew from $8.8m to $19.8m but can be summed up in two words: infrastructure and people.

"By the end of 2006 Mozilla was funding approximately 90 people working full or part-time on Mozilla around the world. Expenditures on people accounted for roughly 70% of our total expenses in 2006. The largest concentrations of people funded by Mozilla were in California, Tokyo, Toronto, and Paris. The number of funded people and of multi-person locations continues to grow. As of October 2007 we have additional concentrations of people in Beijing …

Many of the world's leading Internet and media companies, including CBS Corp., Dailymotion, Fox Entertainment Group, Microsoft Corp., MySpace, NBC Universal, Veoh Networks Inc., Viacom Inc. and The Walt Disney Company, have pledged their support to a set of collaborative principles that are designed to foster the growth and development of user-generated content online while at the same time protecting the intellectual property of content owners. The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that Google, owners of the biggest video-sharing site on the planet, YouTube, is strangely absent. Well, perhaps not so strangely given that both Google and YouTube are currently facing a $1 billion copyright infringement suit filed by Viacom Inc which has signed the User Generated Content principles (UGC) agreement.

In what many people are seeing as an attempt to bring DRM into the online video-sharing space, the UGC principles set out a comprehensive set of guidelines to assist publishers and content creators alike to produce more content through legitimate channels. The principles call for a broad range of constructive and cooperative efforts by copyright owners and UGC services, including:

• Implementation of state of the art filtering technology with the goal to eliminate infringing content on UGC services, including blocking infringing uploads before they are made available to the public.
• Upgrading technology when commercially reasonable.
• Cooperating to ensure that the technology is implemented in a manner that effectively balances legitimate interests, including fair use.
• Cooperation in developing procedures for promptly addressing claims that content …

Indeed. Unless, of course, enough people wanted to buy one for us to ship them in volume and reduce shipping costs that way...

Plus another £50 for the shipping from Bangkok...

I have to admit I am seriously thinking about one of these MicroClient boxes, if I can find out what the import costs are. I have a funny feeling that shipping and taxes to the UK will negate the low cost value.

There was a kind of cult of C-list celebrity surrounding Adam Lyons a few years back, but only amongst teenage boys who asked him for help with cheat codes on the UK Sky One TV video gamers show Gamezville. Back then he was known simply as the Games Guru, but since leaving the show he has been setting himself up as an expert player of a different kind. I was rather bemused to get a press release detailing how Adam had turned his attention from cracking the hardest games to finding the cheat codes for picking up women. Apparently, by suing simple systems and word games he has 'managed to break down his system into a simplified formula that is duplicable by all' and which is particularly of interest to video gamers.

According to Lyons guys that play videogames actually have a massive advantage when it comes to learning this stuff. Lyons says "gamers are predisposed to be good at observing patterns and breaking systems. We've been doing it against those end of level bosses for years. All I've done is shift the focus from the screen onto the girls." There's even a video of Adam on YouTube using his pick-up techniques in a video game shop, to prove just how easy it is.

OK, so what are the top five techniques that a video gamer should apply to picking up members of the opposite sex then?

1. Open, Open, …

There can be no denying that Social Networking has been the Internet phenomena to watch over the last couple of years, displaying explosive growth around the world. In fact just about anywhere that people have an Internet connection, people have embraced social networking. It is true to say that most large social networking services have a very long tail of geographic distribution, especially those which allow the distribution of video content.

However, according to a new report from Datamonitor, published today, this explosive growth will come to an end in just five years time. Datamonitor expects global active memberships in social networking sites to reach 230 million at the end of 2007. By the end of 2007 Asia Pacific will account for 35% of the world’s social networking memberships, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) will hold 28%, North America 25% whilst the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) will account for 12%. Adoption curves vary dramatically by region, but Datamonitor expects membership growth in all regions to have peaked by 2009 and to have leveled out by 2012 and in the US things will get worse earlier…

“For social networking services, barriers to entry are virtually non-existent, and both competition and innovation are ferocious,” says Ri Pierce-Grove Technology Analyst at Datamonitor and author of this report. “Users have a vast array of options, from Titanic generalists like MySpace and Facebook to tiny individual networks on DIY platforms like Ning. This year revenues from social networking …

For anyone outside the UK, news about the BBC iPlayer is hardly going to be earth shattering I agree. Indeed, for most people inside the UK and who are not part of the Beta trial there is no access to the BBC TV content via streaming video across an IP connection either. But there will be at Christmas when Auntie Beeb go public and launch their big new Internet TV scheme. Unfortunately, until today it looked like only Windows users were going to be able to play, but the BBC has now announced a deal with Adobe which will add Flash video streaming to the iPlayer service and let Linux users get in on the act.

The iPlayer service lets viewers download and view 400 hours of TV from the previous week, which can be stored for a month.

OK, agreed, it is something of a Heath-Robinson quick-fix approach, but if it works then it works. It also ties the BBC into a single technology vendor which isn't ideal, although I guess it could have done worse than jump into bed with Adobe and its fairly universally supported Flash technology. Certainly it is an improvement on the ironically more restrictive combination of Windows Media, QuickTime and Real technology that is used currently. Or at least it is for getting TV programming on-demand from the BBC website at the moment. This fix will still not enable Mac OS and Linux users access to the iPlayer …

The man from Mirapoint makes sense, effective management is the key here not some numb-nuts type with a big axe and no long term vision.

A study of some 800 workers in the UK, conducted by HP with the help of The Mind Lab, compared working environments to see what impact it made upon productivity and health. The experiment was headed up by cognitive neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis, and involved the creation of a 'battery office' which simulated an environment where employees had to work using older IT equipment including slow PCs and bulky CRT monitors in small, cluttered spaces, and a 'free-range office' which gave workers the space and technology to have far greater freedoms about how and when they worked.

"On every measure from memory to IQ to the speed with which new information was processed, the battery office produced a marked decrease in intellectual performance combined with a sharp increase in stress levels," comments The Mind Lab research director neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis. "The study clearly shows that restrictive working conditions are not just bad for employees, they are also very bad for business."

The tests proved that volunteer workers could suffer from increased stress, diminished IQ and the reduced ability to retain and process information if they spent long periods of time at their desks. The same workers were then given HP mobility technology to work in a more 'free-range' style and experienced a significant improvement in their well being as well as seeing their productivity rise by up by 400 percent.

• Stress levels fell by more than 50 percent when the volunteer workers …

Oddly enough, I don't have a spam issue with Gmail as the built-in anti-spam filtering seems to be very efficient. So, yes, I get a lot of spam but I don't see it. Just empty the junk folder every week to keep the volume down.

Well I don't use it to store MP3 or movie files, but I do use my Gmail account as a backup system, and one that is easy to access from pretty much any device and any where. All email to both my business and personal POP3 boxes gets forwarded to Gmail, attachments included (documents mainly, although magazine copy includes images in zipped archives), and my account is currently showing I am using just over 2Gb of my 3Gb allowance.

However, I think the point here is that the trend amongst your Joe Consumer types is that webmail is increasingly being used to move around and archive media files, hence the need for more storage capacity and also hence the charging structure that Google has introduced.

I still think that it is in danger of losing trade if it ignores the free storage issue while others in the same space are not.

Rob Siemborski, Gmail Engineer, wrote in the official Gmail blog on Friday that "a few of you are using Gmail so much that you're running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we're announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage."

I have just checked my account and, yes, the storage limit has now gone up to 3Gb which is nice. Unfortunately for Gmail, not as nice Microsoft with its Windows Live Hotmail service which recently raised its own free webmail storage limit to 5Gb. Or, indeed, Yahoo which has been offering an unlimited storage option for webmail users since May.

So while Gmail may well have the high ground as far as sheer ease of use is concerned, when it comes to storage it is starting to slip way behind. This could be vitally important as the free mail market demands the capacity to store photo, video and other data so increasingly commonly attached to messages. It will be interesting to see how much the storage counter mentioned by Rob does speed up by. Currently it has been rising by between 0.4Mb per day, and unless it at least doubles that I cannot see it making much of an impact on high volume users. And I doubt that it will rise that much simply for economic reasons. Storage capacity costs money, and Gmail is looking to monetize the storage side of its mail service. Which is …

Red Hat has opened a dedicated online resource for its partners around the globe, giving them access to the product, program, pricing and training information on both Red Hat and JBoss solutions and services from one single location which is localized in the Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish languages.

"We worked closely with our business partners from around the world during the development of the Red Hat Partner Center. Our partners made it clear that they wanted a central partner repository, an easy and seamless way to work with Red Hat, language localization, a single global agreement and access to information to help develop new business and manage existing business" said Mark Enzweiler, Vice President of North American Channel Sales at Red Hat.

This looks like being just the start of a process of change at Red Hat which should be good for the Linux industry as a whole. It flags a positive effort to become not only a channel-friendly company but a channel-driven one, and the partner portal is the strongest display of evidence yet. Of course, there was a previous partner website for Red Hat resellers but it hardly inspired confidence in the company or helped people in the business of selling Linux to actually sell it. The statistics show that during the last quarter alone in North America, channels sales accounted for more than half of all Red Hat sales.

"In the past seven years, we …

I would expect if it were a battery issue with the Nano that we would have heard of more cases of pants aflame by now, considering this one was 18 months old according to the guy involved. It is possible it is age related, so we should keep an open mind.

Hopefully he will have returned the device to Apple now so it can investigate.

It could just have been a couple of small things rubbing together in his pocket causing a spark I guess :)

According to a report at The Inquirer an Atlanta airport worker was a little surprised to discover, upon looking down to see where the smell of burning was coming from, that it was him.

Well, it was his trousers to be precise.

Apparently the chap, one Danny Williams, had an 18 month old iPod Nano and a piece of glossy paper in his pocket at the time. As well as flames that were fierce enough to be licking around his chest. The iPod, of course, gets its power from a Lithium Ion battery which raises suspicions of another hot battery problem about to hit the consumer.

The local news station took up the story and sent images of the burned out iPod, and one assumes the flaming pants, to Apple which has yet to make an official comment. Williams, however, reports that Apple wants the iPod back to investigate further and has promised to issue a replacement.

I should think so, along with his burned out pants.

If you have ever spent a few minutes looking for an email that the sender swears they sent the week before, but seems to have vanished into the ether now, then you are not alone. A new report by e-Media for Mimecast suggests that IT managers in the UK alone are wasting 5 Million man hours every year hunting for those lost messages. To put that into some perspective, it equates to more than £140 ($275) Million per year as a cost to the companies involved in time spent searching.

The independent survey reveals, unsurprisingly, that email is considered the most important communication medium as far as business is concerned today. Perhaps, given the propensity to do anything to reduce the amount of spam that interferes with our use of this medium, false positives (genuine emails identified and treated as spam) are behind the missing email epidemic.

The survey confirmed that 51% of IT managers questioned considered email to be the most important communication tool, the telephone mustered only 40% support and 'snail mail' a paltry 9%. The latter figure some cold comfort in a week where the UK postal service is in the midst of strike action and there is simply no post being collected or delivered for an entire week. But the survey also revealed a lack of confidence in the ability of spam filters to properly identify genuine email and not get caught in the false positives trap. This results in …

Some devices set the world on fire, just ask Apple for details. Others, do not. The UMPC seems to be falling into the luke warm gadget category at the moment, and despite the best efforts of the usual suspects sales of the Ultra Mobile PC remain disappointing. Maybe because nobody knows what the UMPC actually is. Is it the Microsoft/Intel defined, Windows Tablet PC powered device with a touchscreen of less than 7" in size? Is it one of those bizarre Nokia Internet tablet things which have made such an impact that I am struggling to recall the name, N800 is the one I think? Or maybe it is because nobody knows what to use it for. Larger than a smartphone but smaller than a sub-notebook is a strange territory to be in, and no killer application springs to mind.

Not that any of this is stopping Arm, Mozilla, Texas Instruments and Samsung from getting together and looking to build a Linux UMPC platform. Incorporating everything from the chip design through to the OS, this new collaboration intends to bring an open source Linux based platform to the genre which will help the hardware guys build a better UMPC. The director of strategic alliances at Arm's connected mobile computing group is quoting early 2009 for the first devices to hit the market.

I cannot say that I am convinced that this will make any real difference, after all it will not be the first Linux UMPC …

I don't hate Microsoft at all. If that was the case I wouldn't write a column for Microsoft.com nor would I be a Windows user.

A comparison can only help give an impression of success if it compares apples with apples. Otherwise it remains pure hype and nothing more...

Not one to sit back and reflect quietly upon its moments of glory, Microsoft has been making quite a fuss over the record breaking Halo 3 launch. It is, Microsoft insists, the "biggest entertainment launch in history." Sales in the first 24 hours, in the US alone, topped $170 million. More, Microsoft is happy to tell anyone who asks, than the opening box office record of Spiderman 3, more than the Harry Potter book launches. Whichever way you look at it, Microsoft is spinning the record breaker angle: 1.7 million copies pre-ordered in the US = fastest selling computer game in history.

Is it really such a big deal though? Comparing sales with Harry Potter is a dangerous tactic as although the 'entertainment launch' umbrella might cover it, the truth is that computer games and books and movies are very different things. Doh!

Money and sales are different things as well. Is there any value in comparing the box office take of a 2007 blockbuster with that of an equally important movie from 30 years ago when tickets cost a whole lot less? Of course not. Is there any value in comparing the amount of money in the bank when selling a pretty expensive next generation console game against a Nintendo classic from 10 years ago? Nope.

To then compare the amount of money made by an expensive, and non-discounted, computer game against the amount taken in the first day be a ridiculously heavily discounted …

IBM researchers have unveiled prototype 3D visualisation software that will enable doctors to interact with their medical data in pretty much the same way they interact with their patients. The technology, known as the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), uses an avatar representation of the human body which the doctor can click on to trigger a medical records search relevant to that body part.

"It's like Google Earth for the body," said IBM Researcher Andre Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM's Zurich Research Lab. "In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare records, we've tried to make information easily accessible for healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data that can improve patient care."

If went to see my doctor today with a bad back, they would question me about any previous back problems I may have experienced, examine me both visually and physically, maybe run some tests. The doctor will also rifle through records to search for relevant information, some of it archived on computer some of it buried in the paper files. Even in the increasingly networked age we live in, the chances are that the doctor will not have immediate access to a full patient history however. Which means the patient will not have access to an immediate and 100 percent accurate diagnosis.

IBM argues that the ASME 3-D avatar changes that. By clicking on …

Is that not just the greatest name for a member of the government ever? Ed Balls. Brilliant...

The UK government has started a concerted campaign to stop what Schools Secretary, Ed Balls MP, refers to as a "particularly insidious type of bullying." According to government figures more than one third of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 15 have fallen victim to cyber bullies. Perhaps more surprisingly teachers are also on the receiving end of the victimization, with teaching unions claiming members have been belittled and bullied by offensive comments posted on the Internet. There have even been calls for YouTube to be banned as it has become a favorite amongst youngsters who post mobile phone video footage of teachers being verbally, and sometimes physically, abused. So called 'Happy Slapping' has become something of a craze amongst gangs of kids in the UK who will approach vulnerable youngsters out alone and subject them to a sudden and violent attack just so it can be filmed 'for a laugh.'

The new campaign, therefore, targets both pupils and teachers in an effort to protect them both from abusive text messages, emails and Internet video clips. Amongst the recommendations from the government, that teachers confiscate mobile phones and laptops. Simon Sinnot, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, says it was the first time that such "clear and in-depth guidance" on this kind of bullying had been published. Ed Balls MP commented "the vast majority of schools are safe environments to learn in, however…bullying of any kind is unacceptable. Cyberbullying is a particularly insidious type …

Beyond 3D recently reported that id Software, you know the people behind such games as Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, was not going to be making the next big release available on the Linux platform. Quoting an interview in a German publication with the id Software CEO, Todd Hollenshead, the article suggested that there would be no Linux version of Rage, and that the Windows version would use Direct3D instead of OpenGL as a further kick in the family jewels for the open source movement.

The interview does, indeed, show Hollenshead as stating that a Linux version of id Tech 5, the new game engine, is not planned. It also suggests that id Lead Programmer John Carmack isn't as interested in Linux as he once was and so Rage will be a DX9 game.

The good news for Linux loving first person shooter fans is that the man himself, John Carmack, has responded by posting a comment at Slashdot which was awash with rumours regarding the change of heart.

Here is what he has to say:

"There is certainly no plans for a commercially supported Linux version of Rage, but there will very likely be a Linux executable made available. It isn't running at the moment, but we have had it compiled in the past. Running on additional platforms usually provides some code quality advantages, and it really only takes one interested programmer to make it happen. The PC version is …

Everyone was excited about the launch of a new range of iPods, everyone apart from Linux users of course. In its wisdom, Apple decided to prevent media players other than iTunes from syncing with the MP3 devices, and in so doing locked out Linux users for whom there is no compatible iTunes version. In fairness, Windows users were also screwed over because they had the choice of management application removed entirely.

Of course, you would expect the iTunesDB file to change with every iPod release, adding support for video and podcasts and album artwork etc. You wouldn't expect the basic structure of that file to change though, which is why third party management tools have been able to get by. iTunesDB was reverse engineered a long time ago, and has required only minor tweaks with each new release.

Until now.

Now along comes Apple with the new iPod Touch and throws a few SHA1 hashes into the start of the database which not only locks it to your iPod but prevents anyone from fiddling with the file format. Actually, that is not true. You can fiddle with the format, and you can try and sync with something other than iTunes. It won't work though, because iTunesDB will report that it contains precisely zero songs if you do.

Of course, if Apple really thought that it could lock out anyone in this way for any length of time, let alone the Linux community, it needs …

Internet security giant Symantec has just published the latest Internet Security Threat Report, based on an in-depth analysis of global Internet traffic and email during the last six months. Beyond all the usual who is hosting what and where, how much malware is contained in spam and which threats are continuing to cause problems data, there is one truly shocking statistic buried within the 134 page document: stolen information is dirt cheap on the black web economy.

The report suggests that cyber crime has become a professional, even a corporate, business. Organized crime units across the world are rolling out targeted, sophisticated and above all else hugely profitable online attacks. But they are also showing real business-savvy by creating the tools and the opportunity for wanabees to get involved who possess little in the way of criminal hacking, coding or scamming skill. They are establishing what can only be described as a criminal and fraudsters pyramid scheme.

If you want to enter the world of the cyber crime lord then you can start at the bottom by investing in an out-of-the-box toolkit, just $50 for a ready made phishing kit that is easy to install and professionally coded to enable the newbie to get out there and get defrauding the online public. These packages even come with built-in support for everything from fake website creation to email targeting. A Symantec investigation into the three most widely used phishing toolkits reveals that they alone were responsible for …

On the 11th September a customer of the PC World computer superstore in Colliers Wood, London took his laptop back for an under warranty repair. The computer was only a few months old, and a crack had appeared near the left hinge which is indicative of an internal joint failing. Whatever, it is pretty straightforward to agree that this hardware issue is something that is covered by the warranty. Not least because if left unrepaired the split will eventually cause the screen to fall off if experience is any indicator of events. PC World agreed, until they noticed that the customer had committed the mortal sin of replacing the Windows OS with a Linux distro instead. All of a sudden, all bets are off and the Linux leper was refused a warranty repair and that was the end of the matter.

The tech guys at the store agreed it was a hardware fault that could hardly be said to be impacted upon in any way by a software issue, but their hands were tied. This was a management thing, and the manager he say no.

Well, it might have been had the customer not also been a blogger. When faced with such injustice bloggers do what comes naturally and blog. He did just that, here. Pretty soon the blogosphere caught on and the story was Dugg, Sladshdotted and otherwise flung around the virtual grapevine, and now the madness of PC World was visible to …

Boffins from the University of California, San Diego have succeeded in developing new algorithms to map the Internet. While mapping any network topology can be complex and demanding, mapping the Internet takes the task to a whole new level. Yet Priya Mahadevan and Amin Vahdat think they have accomplished it with the Orbis project which produces maps known as digital dandelions.

Quite apart from being pretty to look at, admittedly in a rather geeky kind of a way, these digital dandelions have a serious use. No matter what the size of the network, understanding the topology is a crucial component in also understanding performance issues, security issues and scalability. Knowing where any weaknesses might lay when it comes to both random failures and targeted attack, being able to predict the likely speed at which a virus may spread, determining the best defence against a denial of service attack all rely upon network topology knowledge.

The topology maps created by Mahadevan and Vahdat really do look like the heads of a dandelion, but the red dots are Internet nodes and the green lines their linkages. Interestingly, what Orbis has done is to create these maps using randomly generated graph data that retains the specific characteristics of a particular piece of the Internet while doubling the number of nodes. This allows predictive models of the Internet to be produced, annotated (with relevant peer-to-peer business relationship data) Internet router graphs of differing sizes but all based upon …

Paul, mea culpa. I have no idea how I managed to mix up the data for 2005 and 2007. However, even allowing for the 14 percent figure, it is still disappointing all things considered. I say this as a huge Firefox fan, who really cannot understand why the market just refuses to budge in any meaningful way when it comes to jumping ship from IE.

Mozilla has hit the 400 million downloads mark for the Firefox web browser client since it was officially launched in November 2004, a rise of 56 percent in the last 12 months alone. Of course, updates, reinstalls and trials are all included in download figures which have little real world impact upon the only statistic that really matters: market share based upon usage. Again, Mozilla will tell you, and indeed told me, that it commands a 28 percent market share across Europe according to the latest figures from XiTiMonitor which also reveals that Internet Explorer enjoys a 66.5 percent share in the same region.

Which is a good result for Firefox, no doubt about that, but how does it pan out when you take a more global view? Well according to a recent PC World report, the answer would appear to be not so hot actually. Quoting figures from NetApplications.com it reckons that Firefox is going backwards in the global share stakes, dropping from 8.71 percent to just 8.07 percent while Internet Explorer is regaining lost ground up from 86.56 percent to 87.2 percent.

Let's just look at that again, without the rose tinted spectacles that Mozilla PR would have me wear: despite 400 million downloads in three years, and despite gaining impressive ground in Europe, the real deal is that Firefox has still not managed to be anything more than a bruise on the big toe of Internet Explorer. …

Qualcomm is best known for two things: making mobile phone chips and owning the once hugely popular Eudora email client software. Or perhaps I should say once owning the once hugely popular Eudora email client software as Qualcomm stopped selling it back in May and handed over the codebase to the open source community. The Beta 1.0 release is now available for download under the new name of Penelope.

Surprisingly this is being developed and distributed under the Mozilla Foundation wing. Surprising because just a couple of months ago the Mozilla CEO was talking up Firefox and talking down Thunderbird, the original Mozilla email client. One wonders how Mozilla will be able to put the kind of effort into developing, distributing and promoting Penelope if it feels that Thunderbird was taking too much organisational focus away from browser development?

"We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on Mozilla and Thunderbird. It's not our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it." So says a statement at the official Mozilla Penelope website, but it's really very hard to understand how that can be the case. What is the point in splitting the development effort between two email clients, one of which is based in part on the other? Everyone knows that if you dilute beer you end up with a weak and weedy mess, not a better beer.

"It is our goal …

Simon Willcocks is a man on a mission, albeit an unusual one that no doubt many developers will recognise as being something of a geek driven dream. The mission in question to deliver native RISC OS desktop applications under Linux. This dream is fast becoming a reality, however, with the news that the RISC OS Look and Feel (ROLF) project is ready to produce a live bootable CD to demonstrate just what it is capable of. The ROLF live CD is said to include an iconbar, filer, terminal emulator, MP3 player, NetSurf, Inkscape and more.

The idea of being able to run native RISC OS apps alongside Linux ones, all the time retaining a familiar desktop environment, is certainly ambitious. If Willcocks can pull it off, the end result will be a Linux driven PC that can produce the RISC goods as well as being able to play DVDs, games and deliver the latest web technologies.

Using a custom written window manager, ROLF enables GTK+ applications to run on a RISC OS style desktop courtesy of an interface layer. Using the bundled library it is possible to develop native ROLF applications, although it should not be too difficult to port programs using OSLib in the enar future either the developer promises.

What is missing at the moment is the ability to allow native ARM-targeted RISC OS applications to run over the Brandy BASIC interpreter and QEMU on a standard Intel-powered Linux PC, although Willcocks says …

According to a report at The Register it would appear that Dell is making life difficult for UK customers who want to buy a Dell PC running Linux. Being a snooping journalist myself, I went to have a look for myself and indeed it is a lot harder to buy a Linux powered Dell than all the hype, fuelled in no small part by the Dell PR machine of course, would lead you to believe.

I particularly like the way that you are given the impression that Dell really doesn't want to sell you a Linux machine, with plenty of negative commentary when you do finally discover the information hidden away in the darkest corners of the UK site. Want to know more about Ubuntu? No problem, and the most important thing to note, according to Dell, is that when you choose it "you don't get a Windows operating system." If that hard sell didn't persuade you to go with Linux, how about the advice that it's not compatible with lots of other software, maybe that will help?

As The Register says "you might be forgiven for expecting the same even-handed approach from Dell to its Vista-based machines" but you would be wrong, because there are no similar warnings about software compatibility, just lots of loud chest beating in favour of Microsoft. And that was exactly what the reporter experienced when calling the Dell helpdesk to get advice on an OS for a Dell machine. A …

In the UK last year there were a staggering 3,237,500 cybercrimes committed according to a new report from online identity specialists Garlik in collaboration with leading criminologists. Do the math and that works out to one cybercrime committed every ten seconds in the UK alone.

Of these, some 60 percent were what are termed offences against the person such as threatening emails, libellous website comments and Internet perpetrated blackmail attempts. There were more than 200,000 cases of online financial fraud, double the number of real-world robberies that took place in the UK during the same period. ID theft online hit the 90,000 incidents mark, while unauthorised access to someone's PC with an underhand or unknown motive peaked at 144,500 and online sexual offences a worrying 850,000.

Stefan Fafinski, CEO of criminology firm 1871 Ltd who are the authors of the report, said: "Although measuring cybercrime is difficult, it is clear that in many instances it is outstripping 'traditional' crime. This is a result of the unparalleled opportunities that the Internet gives both for making familiar crimes easier and for enabling 'pure' cybercrimes that could not exist without the Internet."

Categories and number of cybercrimes committed in the UK in 2006

• Online identity theft 92,000
• Online financial fraud 207,000
• Online offences against the person 1,944,000
• Computer misuse offences 144,500
• Online sexual offences 850,000

Perhaps of most concern though is the assertion that as much as 90 percent of all …

The Carnegie Mellon research would seem to back up the idea that IT staff are the least trustworthy, which is the point I was making here. In fairness, Cyber Ark did highlight some of the comments of IT staff in their own survey which showed how the results were skewed somewhat.

A survey by secure data specialists Cyber-Ark Software has revealed that the least trustworthy members of staff include temps, cleaners, security guards and the board of directors. PR, marketing and sales staff were also low on the list. At the other end of the trust scale, the personnel and legal departments along with the boss's secretary were flying high.

The most trustworthy were considered to be IT staff. But are they really?

The fact that the survey was conducted amongst office workers consisting predominantly of IT personnel may well have influenced the results, of course. But interestingly, the IT crowd gave themselves away in their comments with 1 in 3 admitting they abuse their privileges by using admin passwords to snoop on confidential data.

One fairly typical comment being "so I know some personal stuff about my co-workers but who cares? Sales and marketing are constantly making things up about our products. That's so much more dangerous to our company than me knowing how much Viagra the COO ordered last month - okay it's a bit cheeky snooping around other peoples email systems but at least I'm not lying! I also don't trust the board of directors who trump up figures just to please the shareholders and just like politicians only tell us what they want us to know."

Another IT Administrator laughed out loud as he answered the survey, saying: "Why does it surprise you that so many of us snoop around your …

According to a report in the Financial Times of all publications, the Chinese military has hacked the Pentagon in what it describes as the most successful cyber attack on the US defense department to date.

Although the Pentagon has acknowledged that a computer system which serves the office of US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was shut down for more than a week, officially it refuses to comment upon whom it believes initiated the attack. However, the FT claims that both current and former Pentagon officials have told it that an internal investigation following the breach, which occurred in June, revealed that the People’s Liberation Army had been pinpointed as the source. The PLA is thought to engage in regular probes of US military networks, just as the Pentagon probes Chinese military networks.

The attack on the Pentagon follows reports of similar infiltration of German government computers which have widely been reported as being of Chinese origin. Indeed, on a recent visit to Beijing the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, brought the matter up with the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. This prompted the Chines foreign ministry to release an official statement condemning any such ‘criminal acts’ that undermine computer systems ‘including hacking’ and going on to claim that China itself was the victim of many such attacks.

Whether George W. Bush brings the matter up with the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, later in the week when the two meet up before the Apec summit in Australia remains …

The number crunchers at security specialists Sophos have published the figures revealing which bits of malware have been spreading the fastest during August. While the fact that infected spam attachments have dropped from one in 322 for the first six months of the year to one in every 1000 for August is interesting, it isn't as interesting as pointing a big hairy finger at those countries which host the most malware infected web pages.

The weapon of choice for spreaders of malware continues to be spam that links to infected websites, as we have seen of late with the ever changing tactics of the Storm Trojan gang. The total number of infected websites has continued to grow, although Sophos does reveal that the rate has slowed from an average of 6000 new infected site every day in July to 'just' 5000 a day in August. That's probably worth repeating, more than 150,000 newly infected websites during August alone. No wonder the criminal gangs continue to build bigger and more valuable zombie botnets, as click happy users visit these sites and pick up a Trojan along with a pointless animated postcard from someone they don't know or a picture of some C-list celebrity with no clothes on. As we all should know by now, but huge swathes of the Internet using population seem blissfully unaware of, these Trojans can steal personal data to be used in ID theft fraud as well as control computer resources to create botnets …

Controversial media company and alleged spreader of adware Zango, formerly 180solutions, has been forced to back down from its legal attempts to get both Kaspersky Lab and PC Tools to reclassify its applications as non-threatening and prevent security software from blocking them.

Kaspersky Lab reports that the US District Court of Washington has ruled in their favour, granting immunity from liability in a case brought by Zango which claimed its applications, which install pop-up ads, were being unfairly blocked. Judge Coughenour of the Western District of Washington obviously didn't agree with Zango, throwing the case out of court on the grounds that Kaspersky was immune from liability under the provisions of the Communications Decency Act, which states in part: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected, or any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [such] material."

"Kaspersky Lab's mission is, and has always been, to make the Internet a safer place for all. We are thrilled with the outcome of this case because it supports the key message of the information security industry - consumer protection comes first" Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of …

I don't think so. It is unlike anything I have seen before, but as a search experience it is forgettable. Not instantly forgettable, I admit, but by this time next week I doubt I will be devoting much brain time to it :)

Microsoft has been keen to get me to take a look at a new experimental site launched to showcase the potential of its Silverlight technology. Tafiti, which apparently means 'do research' in Swahili, is the site in question. An exploration of two trends: search specialization and the Web 2.0 rich user experience. It is meant to help people use the Web for research that spans multiple queries and sessions, and does this by letting them visualize, store and share the results. Or at least that is the theory. In practice what you get is an undeniably visually attractive interface that uses Microsoft Silverlight, but a pretty poor search experience in conjunction with the Microsoft Live Search engine.

Installing the Silverlight engine is not problematical, it is only a 6Mb download, unless you happen to be running Linux in which case you cannot play: this search game is for Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X users only. It does, however, seem to work well with most browser clients including IE 6/7, Firefox 2 and Safari 2. Surprisingly though, not Safari 3 or Opera. Once installed, however, the experience is nothing short of irritating.

If you want to perform a quick search and get the most useful results presented with minimum fuss, Tafiti is not for you. The interface sure looks pretty enough, and the drag-and-drop saved search results thing is neat.

Which search engine do you use? The answer is probably Google, and not some Adobe …

It may surprise you to learn that of the 400 million airline tickets issued by members of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), only 64 million of them are actually printed on paper. It seems that most of the world has already been bitten by the e-ticketing bug, which is a good thing. Not least because IATA has just placed its very last order for some 16.5 million paper tickets as it gets ready to switch over to a completely paper free, e-tickets only, system from June 2008.

It could also be a good thing for both the airlines, which stand to save $9 per traveler (or $3 billion annually for the industry as a whole) when using e-tickets, and the environment with an estimated 50,000 mature tress being saved from the chop each year. Perhaps most importantly from the airline perspective, it might just provide a little positive PR which they could do with given the bad press regarding carbon footprints they have been getting of late.

IATA represents the vast majority of airlines, more than 240 of them in fact, around the world. The statistics are impressive enough, with IATA members accounting for 94 percent of scheduled air traffic. "This is the last call for paper tickets" IATA CEO Giovanni Bisignani told DaniWeb, continuing "it's been 38 months since we launched the drive for 100 per cent e-ticketing as part of IATA's Simplifying the Business initiative. E-ticketing went from 16 per cent in June 2004 to …

A statement from the All of MP3 folk reads "the service will be resumed in the foreseeable future. We are doing our best at the moment to ensure that all our users can use their accounts, top up balance and order music." This follows a Moscow district court ruling earlier in the month that All of MP3 and its owners had acted within the bounds of existing Russian copyright law. Indeed, the court ruling went on to state that the site had paid a share of revenue to the copyright holders as required by the law, and that the decision to ban the service was a premature one based upon an investigation that failed to provide sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Do not expect this to be the final chapter in this particular story, with a trademark Hollywood happy ending for the Russians and folk desperate to get those suspiciously cheap music downloads going again. Hollywood, or more to the point the influential entertainment industry lobby in the US, is unlikely to back down over this one and will instead step up the campaign to keep All of MP3 out the hugely lucrative audio downloads playground.

It was, after all, pressure brought by the US on the Russian government that got the whole thing going in the first place. Unfortunately, it was going round in circles and had all the due process of a dog chasing its own tail. In a nutshell, the US let it be …

>2.100000999.432325.432321545.35beta143523alpha542323.5234323

ROFL!