RSSTechnology News Headlines and Software
November 6, 2009, 5:46 PM
Google Chrome 4: Yes, it's fast, but is it usable?
As Betanews readers have responded to our stories about Chrome's JavaScript superiority...Does that mean we'd actually use this browser? Well...
News Display:
Myka announces its latest Linux-based 'net top box'
By Tim Conneally on November 6, 2009, 5:45 PM
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Early in the summer, IPTV startup Myka delivered an impressive Linux-based device which was not quite a set-top box and not quite a home theater PC (HTPC). Though the device's identity was sort of nebulous, the company's goal was crystal clear: to easily make the tons of different types of Internet video content viewable on the TV.
This week, the company has announced its second device, the Myka ION, which pushes itself up against the HTPC category. Because it's equipped with a 1.6 GHz dual core Intel Atom 330 CPU, it could even be called a "net-top box."
What hath Mac wrought? A remembrance after a quarter-century
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 6, 2009, 4:02 PM
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[ME's NOTE: This article was originally published on January 30, 2009, here in Betanews. I'm reprinting it today in honor of the memory of a man I refer to in this article, who was one of my early mentors in computing and in business, and who passed away last October 26: Elmer Zen "E.Z." Million, the proprietor of the original Southwest Computer Conference, later the CEO of private aircraft services company Million Air, and occasional candidate for some lofty, high Oklahoma office. He was a brilliant businessman, a true fiscal conservative who really did teach me how to run a business, through long hours in his office poring over accurately written ledgers. And he was the absolute antithesis of everything people assumed a "computer pioneer" was, but he was all of that and more. I dedicate this to E.Z.'s enduring memory.]
The reason there's a Macintosh today is not because of some brilliant flash of engineering genius, as many revisionists like to believe. It's because Apple had the audacity to make a few big mistakes first, and learn from them.
Video: Netflix on PlayStation 3
By Tim Conneally on November 6, 2009, 2:52 PM
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As a PlayStation 3 owner, I did not have the luxury of Netflix Instant streaming through my video game console until today. Now, with the aid of Blu-ray's BD-Live and a free Netflix disc which must remain loaded in the PS3, I now have access to an experience similar to the one Xbox Live Gold subscribers had on their 360s.
These discs shipped out to subscribers this week and started landing in mailboxes today.
Early build of Moblin 2.1 improves connectivity, but not device support
By Tim Conneally on November 6, 2009, 12:41 PM
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Until recently, netbooks seemed to be computers designed by a subtractive process. That is, you start with a notebook design, and you scale back on the cost by equipping it with lower-power processors, less on-board storage, smaller screens, and either open source software or truncated desktop operating systems.
There really hasn't been a powerful example of a "netbook experience" that was built from the ground up to differentiate the devices from their full-powered counterparts.
Early sales figures for Windows 7 nicely high, but do we know why?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 6, 2009, 11:32 AM
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The initial sales figures for Microsoft Windows 7 after its worldwide launch on October 22 are still being tabulated, but the early estimates sound very promising: According to industry analysis firm NPD, unit sales for Windows 7 software SKUs in the US were 234% higher -- better than triple -- the unit sales for Vista's launch, and US revenue from Win7 software sales was up 82% over Vista's launch.
But as Vista veterans will recall, that launch was botched somewhat, first by a costly delay, then by a decision to launch the product twice (first to businesses in October 2006, then to consumers in January 2007), and then by a lack of participation from partners. And there were still more reasons the Vista launch fizzled, one of which, believe it or not, included the scheduling of the launch on a Tuesday.
The iPhone's China syndrome: Sales of 5,000 and climbing
By Richard Adhikari, MacNewsWorld on November 6, 2009, 10:30 AM
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The iPhone went on sale last week in China, and it landed more or less with a thud. Cupertino's carrier partner in that country, China Unicom, announced on Tuesday that only 5,000 customers had purchased the phone thus far. At this rate, the handset may have trouble meeting sales expectations. China Unicom had pledged to sell 1 million iPhones per year.
Price could be one deterrent -- the iPhone starts at around the equivalent of USD$730. Add in monthly subscriber fees, and you're soon looking at a rather pricey phone in a country where the average income of urban workers in 2008 was less than $4,300.
New European counterpart to FCC will ensure 'a more neutral net'
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 5, 2009, 9:21 PM
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During one of the more noteworthy weeks in Europe's modern history, as the 27 member nations of the European Union prepare for a newer and more centralized executive authority, the EU will also be making way for a powerful regulatory authority for telecommunications: the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). This is the name for the new European Telecoms Authority; and whereas in the US, there remains considerable debate over whether the Federal Communications Commission can and should have regulatory authority over Internet transactions, in Europe, the debate has officially been settled: BEREC will have authority to propose regulations for telecommunications in all forms, including the Internet.
But the power for approving, exercising, and then administering those regulations has been delegated to the European Commission. So although the new telecoms authority will be comprised of the national telecom regulatory heads from each member nation, the EC will have the authority to overrule them. Negotiations over this single provision extended for hours and eventually days, according to the EC, with the central point of contention being this and only this provision.
Verizon Wireless launches new Android, Chocolate, and ruggedized phones
By Jacqueline Emigh on November 5, 2009, 7:07 PM
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In New York City today, Verizon Wireless rolled out new additions to its expanding Android and LG Chocolate phone families, while also delivering sneak previews of a new, consumer-friendly ruggedized phone called the Casio G'zOne Brigade (shown above).
Like its previously announced top-of-the-line Android phone, known simply as the Droid, the less expensive Droid Eris will be available for the first time in Verizon stores tomorrow -- which is also when pricing will be revealed.
Sophos study suggests Windows 7 UAC's default setting is self-defeating
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 5, 2009, 4:08 PM
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A blog post Tuesday by Sophos senior security engineer Chester Wisniewski stated that recent Sophos tests revealed that User Account Control -- the part of Windows that prompts the user for permission before granting elevated privileges -- was ineffective in stopping common samples of malware from running, in a Windows 7-based system without virus protection.
Whereas two of the ten chosen malware samples for the test would not run in Win7 without UAC turned on at all, only one more sample (a low-prevalence worm code-named W32/Autorun-ATK) was thwarted by UAC. The other seven ran as though they were being blocked only by a stack of dominoes.
Indiscreet tweet trips awareness of Web SSL vulnerability
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 5, 2009, 3:20 PM
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Internet security engineers who had been meeting secretly to discuss a possible extension to Transport Layer Security (TLS) to thwart a possible low-level exploit, were compelled yesterday to reveal the existence of their meetings after another security engineer unconnected to their project went public with a conceptual framework of the very type of exploit they were working to pre-emptively patch.
The problem is essentially a repeat of what developers of TLS and its parent protocol, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), have dealt with a handful of times in the past: the potential of man-in-the-middle attacks by malicious servers that can pass themselves off as security authenticators. As the team from wireless security service provider PhoneFactor discovered last August, it was possible using both Microsoft IIS 7.0 and Apache httpd Web servers to demonstrate a situation where a false TLS server authenticates itself to a genuine Web client, then authenticates itself to a genuine TLS server, effectively setting itself up as a go-between that's privy to the complete contents of what appears to the innocent client to be a fully encrypted SSL session.
BlackBerry shipments grew five times faster than iPhone in Q3
By Joe Wilcox on November 5, 2009, 2:40 PM
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Despite last week's blog and news assertions that iPhone market share had reached 30 percent or even 40 percent, today IDC put Apple's smartphone smack in its place: No. 3, with 17.1 percent worldwide smartphone market share during third quarter. A year earlier, Apple ranked ahead of Research in Motion, which has reclaimed second spot, behind Nokia.
Manufacturers shipped 43.3 million smartphones during third quarter, up 3.2 percent from 41.9 million units in second quarter and up 4.2 percent from 41.5 million units in third quarter 2008. More broadly, manufacturers shipped 287.1 million handsets, up 5.6 percent year over year, according to IDC.
How RIM can avoid a premature endgame for BlackBerry
By Carmi Levy on November 5, 2009, 12:23 PM
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Once not so long ago, if you wanted bulletproof e-mail on a mobile device, you bought a BlackBerry. Research In Motion, the company that practically defined wireless messaging a decade ago, has done quite nicely for itself since then, garnering over 56% of the market for smartphones in the US and about 20% of the overall wireless handset market that includes smartphones as well as conventional feature phones. Its end-to-end encryption and still-unique service paradigm that routes messaging traffic through secure Network Operations Centers further endeared the platform to enterprise buyers, even as the company was successfully pushing the franchise into the consumer space.
Unfortunately for RIM, nothing stays the same in the increasingly competitive wireless market. The BlackBerry is no longer a market of one, and many of the features that defined the platform -- including push e-mail and enterprise-class security -- are no longer unique. Worse, the critical feature set for a modern smartphone has expanded to include rich Web access, broad application availability, and an integrated, Web services-aware operating system. It's no secret that the BlackBerry platform lags in all of these areas with its fine-for-the-1990s browser, relatively paltry app ecosystem, and an OS that despite regular incremental updates still betrays its decade-old roots.
Is AES encryption crackable?
By Jack M. Germain, TechNewsWorld on November 5, 2009, 11:06 AM
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In the field of computer technology, some topics are so frequently and fiercely disputed that they almost resemble religious feuds -- Mac vs. PC, for instance, or open source vs. proprietary software.
Other topics, though, don't see nearly the same level of high-profile debate. Take the invulnerability of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, for example. Governments and businesses place a great deal of faith in the belief that AES is so secure that its security key can never be broken. However, a team of researchers from Germany, France and Israel has recently demonstrated what may be an inherent flaw in AES -- theoretically, at least.
Faster or more secure? Microsoft publishes IE patch to Automatic Updates
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 5, 2009, 10:40 AM
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Given the choice between speed and security, Betanews readers this week have been siding with security, in a show of support that suggests that Windows Vista had the right idea after all. This morning, Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 users who have their Automatic Update notifications turned on manual will be making that choice, as Microsoft has published update 976749 -- released as a manual update on Monday -- to its Windows Update service, not as a "security update" or anything "critical" or even "important."
It's an "Update for Internet Explorer" whose purpose is to "resolve issues that may occur after installing the Internet Explorer cumulative security update issued as MS09-054" -- one of the major updates from the last Patch Tuesday round. The issue that update addressed is a very serious one, and Windows users who are concerned about their operating system possibly being vulnerable to a new class of attack, should apply that update and also apply the patch to that update, released this morning. Many users with Automatic Updates turned on full may wake up this morning with the update already having been applied.
New York: Intel's agreements to lower CPU prices led to overcharges
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 4, 2009, 4:29 PM
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This morning, the State of New York filed an antitrust suit against Intel, joining its voices with those of the European Commission, Korea, and other countries in alleging that its ability to make exclusivity deals was illegal. The claims made this morning by the State Attorney General's office were not at all unprecedented. Essentially, A-G Andrew Cuomo focused on two of the issues already central to the EC's existing case against the company: its CPU purchasing deals with major PC makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell, the existence of which is no longer truly disputed.
But the theory of damages in the case may be difficult to prove, and the lawsuit complaint makes a calculated move in not really arguing damages at all, beyond the fact that they exist. While presenting more evidence than the general public has seen to date of negotiations between Intel and its leading OEMs, clearly suggesting they conspired to keep CPU maker AMD at a safe distance, that evidence also supports the notion that PC prices were rendered lower as a result of those deals, not higher.
Is there any sense to Microsoft's 800 layoffs?
By Joe Wilcox on November 4, 2009, 3:14 PM
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Today's Microsoft layoffs -- 800 employees -- are surprising. Following the last round, executives seemingly slammed the axe into the chopping block, even though the full number of 5,000 layoffs planned over 18 months hadn't been met.
Late last night, TechFlash first reported that layoffs would be coming today. Microsoft started informing employees today, in what surely has to be an unexpected misfortune. So much time has passed since the last layoffs, the threat of more surely faded. For good reasons. Until these 800 pink slips, there were reasons to be cheerful on the Microsoft campus.
Apple's App Store hits 100K apps: News or rhetoric?
By Tim Conneally on November 4, 2009, 2:19 PM
23 Comments
Apple today announced that its App store has more than 100,000 apps available for download and use on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The number of applications available on the platform has been a major selling point for Apple's iPhone, and the company has made sure to keep the public informed when its catalog grows. In July, the company announced when it had hit 65,000 available apps; and In September, it let us know when it had exceeded 85,000.
In fact, ever since July 2008, when the App Store debuted with only 500 apps, the number of available applications has been used as a running tally to illustrate how much more viable a platform the iPhone is than its competitors.
Performance drain: The first public perception test of the Windows 7 era
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 4, 2009, 11:41 AM
66 Comments
The key selling point for Windows 7, as emphasized in a concerted advertising campaign that stretches across both TV and the Web, is that it's leaner, simpler, and faster. It doesn't have to complete the phrase "faster than..." because we all know how to complete that phrase. Microsoft's bet for Windows 7 is that users smart enough to complete that phrase, care.
So if some of the comments Betanews has been receiving about Internet Explorer's recent problems being a non-event, or a "YAWN," really did reflect reality, then Microsoft has already lost the bet.
On the eve of a new EU constitution, Poland suggests distance from 'open source'
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 3, 2009, 5:19 PM
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5:45 pm EST November 3, 2009 · A press officer with the Delegation to the European Commission in Washington contacted Betanews this afternoon, stating that the press office could not attribute the document being circulated as "EIF 2.0" this week as an official European Commission document. It is therefore not a leaked version of EIF 2.0 as was suggested elsewhere; and it's extremely unlikely that the Commission is actively considering replacing its last draft of EIF 2.0, completed in July 2008, with the version that Betanews was able to trace to the Polish Ministry of the Interior.
Just hours ago, Czech President Vaclav Klaus was the last to add his signature to a list of 26 others, effectively ratifying sweeping amendments to the Treaty of Lisbon -- effectively, the constitution of the European Union. A new centralized executive authority will be created, dramatically expanding the roles of the EU's President and formalizing the role of its own, continent-wide Foreign Minister. A country upon countries is born.
For those who missed Google Voice beta, Ribbit Mobile opens in beta
By Tim Conneally on November 3, 2009, 4:58 PM
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Some of us missed the boat and never got in the Google Voice beta test group. With all the controversy the service stirred up among the media, the public, telecommunications companies, and the FCC, there's a distinct possibility that Google Voice as we know it could end up in regulatory limbo after being politicized and thrown into the "net neutrality" conflict.
Today, a beta of an alternative has opened up: Ribbit Mobile from Ribbit, an independent British Telecom subsidiary often billed as "Silicon Valley's first telephone company."
Looking for the full list of software downloads you used to find here? That same listing is now over at Fileforum!
Paint.NET 3.50
November 7 - 10:26 AM ET
AllMyNotes Organizer 1.11 Beta
November 6 - 6:49 PM ET
ConvertXtoDVD 4.0.3.313
November 6 - 2:03 PM ET
XnView for Windows 1.97 Beta 2
November 6 - 1:31 PM ET
Spiffy 0.3.11
November 6 - 12:48 PM ET
Hmonitor 4.4.3.5
November 6 - 12:10 PM ET
RealTemp 3.39.2 Beta
November 6 - 11:49 AM ET
Microsoft Expression Encoder 3.0.1359.0
November 6 - 11:28 AM ET
µTorrent for Windows 2.0 Build 17188 Beta
November 6 - 11:07 AM ET
Microsoft Windows Identity Foundation 1.0 RC
November 6 - 10:56 AM ET
Movie Label 2010 5.1.4 Beta 1
November 6 - 10:45 AM ET
Password Memory 2010 3.0 Beta 1
November 6 - 10:34 AM ET
Microsoft Application Request Routing for IIS 7 (x86) 2.0 RC
November 5 - 5:01 PM ET
AOL Instant Messenger for Windows 7.1.2.18 Beta 1
November 5 - 4:24 PM ET
AppRemover 2.1.0.1
November 5 - 3:41 PM ET
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