Microsoft close to signing Verizon Wirless search deal
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-12 23:12:46 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft might beat Google to the punch when it comes to closing the deal with Verizon Wireless to become the default search provider on the wireless carrier's mobiles.
Sources at the Wall Street Journal claim the Vole is this close to sealing a deal with Verizon, which would involve revenue sharing from ads shown on mobile web searches and guaranteeing Verizon $550 million to $650 million over five years, about twice what Google offered for the same deal.
Microsoft is also trying to plug its Windows Mobile software to Verizon, with the FT claiming it will either pay Verizon to use it or give it away for free. Both desperate-sounding measures. Together, say the secret WSJ sources, both deals could have a value of over $1 billion.
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-12 22:44:33 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
Google today launched Gmail voice and video chat, making it simple for people around the world to chat in high-quality video for free right within Gmail. All you need is a webcam and a small web browser plugin, and you can start video chatting with your friends, family, and coworkers on Gmail and Google Apps. Gmail voice and video chat lets you start a video chat without switching to another application or signing up for another account. And if you don't have a webcam, you can simply chat by voice. We've made it easy enough that your mom -- or your employees -- will actually use it.
The launch comes as video communication grows in popularity; many of the latest lines of laptops, for example, come with built-in webcams. Businesses stretched across continents and timezones want more face-to-face collaboration among their employees, but in this economic climate, they're looking for ways to cut travel and IT expenses. Having a meeting with a colleague over video allows communications to continue in person without the expense of traveling there. Whether it's a coworker demoing a new product, or a first-time grandmother saying hello to her new grandson, sometimes there's no substitute for speaking to and seeing someone. Google is offering browser-based voice and video chat as a natural extension to webmail and instant messaging, allowing people to choose how they want to communicate at each moment -- by email, instant message, voice, or video.
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-11 21:11:02 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
A Romanian hacker has been given a suspended sentence after hacking into the U.S. Navy, the Department of Energy and NASA.
Victor Faur has been given a 16-month suspended prison sentence and been ordered to pay damages totaling $238,000 to the three U.S. government departments for hacking into their systems between November 2005 and September 2006,
His lawyer said that the court convicted Faur on Thursday under a 2003 law making it illegal to break into an information system without authorisation and to change, delete and alter data. Faur was tried in Romania because he hacked into the systems from his home in Arad.
Faur had faced a possible 12 years in prison on the Romanian charges after being indicted in the United States on nine federal counts of computer intrusion and one of conspiracy in 2006.
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-11 21:06:39 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS at Japan's embedded Linux software vendor Lineo announced technology last week that can boot a low-power computer system within 2.97 seconds, the company claims.
Lineo calls its quick-start software system Warp 2, apparently either never having heard of IBM's ill-fated and abandoned OS/2 Warp operating system or not being particularly superstitious.
The company says Warp 2 consists of a bootloader, a customised Linux software stack, and a 'hibernation driver' similar to familiar suspend-to-disk software. Lineo's innovation is that its hibernation driver writes a snapshot of RAM into flash memory instead of to a hard disk.
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-11 20:55:55 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
THE USB Implementers Forum will formally announce the technical specifications of the next generation of Universal Serial Bus connectivity at a conference in San Jose, California, next week.
Despite a difficult birth – hampered by infighting and political shenanigans between the big players, including Intel Nvidia and AMD – the new standard is expected to be something in the order of ten times faster than the current USB 2.0 specification.
We have reports that a 25GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds using the new system, compared to nearly 14 minutes for USB 2.0 and a pitifully slow (how did we ever cope?) 9.3 hours for 1.0.
That's 4.8Gb a second. Other improvements will include better power management and the use of optical cabling.
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-10 16:47:51 in category: Security [ 0 Comment(s) ]
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption can be partially cracked in about 15 minutes, German researchers have discovered.
Eric Tews from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and fellow German security researcher, Martin Beck, determined that an attacker could decrypt packets from a WPA -protected network and also inject malicious packets into the network, Tews told SCMagazineUS.com Thursday in an email.
The vulnerability exists in the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), a security protocol that replaced the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard and was renamed WPA by the Wi-Fi Alliance trade group. It's main improvement was that it generated new packet encryption keys at frequent intervals.
WEP, now considered a weak standard, was superseded in 2003 by the more robust WPA standard, designed to be compatible with then-existing hardware, and in 2004 by WPA2, a standard incorporating AES, the U.S. government encryption standard.
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-10 16:46:20 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
METRO GOLDWYN MAYER will be the first movie studio to post full-length, advertising-laden movies to Youtube according to Cnet.
And it won't be long before other Hollywood studios finally catch the plot and follow MGM's lead.
For many years Tinseltown has been in a bitter battle with video sharing sites, quibbling over copyright issues and making lawyers even fatter and even richer trying to force the likes of Youtube to remove fan-posted clips.
Finally the studios have realised that they're fighting a losing battle and have decided to join the enemy by offering full-length feature films and TV shows, which will generate revenue through on-screen advertising.
Microsoft confirms Windows 7 sped up for 2009 launch
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-10 16:41:01 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
Microsoft late Thursday admitted that it was ultimately targeting the public release of Windows 7 for 2009, confirming suspicions of an early release. In a presentation for its Vista Velocity program, which speeds up and improves the user experience of upcoming PCs, the company largely confirmed that its attention for Velocity would be on Windows 7 for later in 2009. The focus is "definitely" on having 7 ready for holiday 2009, according to Microsoft director Doug Howe.
The news is a change in stance for Microsoft. Publicly, the company has avoided committing to a narrow timeframe for the launch of Windows 7 and has at most alluded to aiming a release at early 2010, or the three-year anniversary of Vista's release. However, the company has increasingly given hints that its next major Windows release is on a fast-track schedule and may have effectively confirmed this at its Professional Developers Conference late last month, when it showed that it would have just one major beta release followed by feedback and a public beta.
Posted by dan on: 2008-11-04 21:08:55 in category: General [ 0 Comment(s) ]
WiQuest Communications Inc. officially closed its doors today, the first of perhaps several casualties to fall among ultrawideband chip designers. The Allen, Texas, company employed about 120 people focused on the wireless USB protocol.
At least a dozen mainly venture-backed companies have been pursuing UWB for uses such as wireless USB links on consumer and computer gear. One analyst predicted a shakeout in UWB chip makers earlier this year based on slow adoption of the technology that has been plagued by cost, performance, power consumption and regulatory issues.
"We've been looking for a variety of alternatives for awhile now including new investors and acquisitions, but none looked like positive alternatives to our investors so we decided to shut the doors today," said Todd A. Brown, vice president of worldwide sales at the company.
IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft might beat Google to the punch when it comes to closing the deal with Verizon Wireless to become the default search provider on the wireless carrier's mobiles.
A Romanian hacker has been given a suspended sentence after hacking into the U.S. Navy, the Department of Energy and NASA.
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS at Japan's embedded Linux software vendor Lineo announced technology last week that can boot a low-power computer system within 2.97 seconds, the company claims.
THE USB Implementers Forum will formally announce the technical specifications of the next generation of Universal Serial Bus connectivity at a conference in San Jose, California, next week.
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption can be partially cracked in about 15 minutes, German researchers have discovered.
METRO GOLDWYN MAYER will be the first movie studio to post full-length, advertising-laden movies to Youtube according to Cnet.
