Monday Tuesday News Day
June 30, 2004
The flu’s got me down, but must… blog… news….
- Steve Jobs’ keynote Tuesday at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference was full of the usual self-congratulatory rhetoric, but some news leaked through, too. He mentioned the new Airport Express mini-Wi-Fi basestation, and the iPod-BMW interface that puts the iPod’s controls on the steering wheel, and apologized for not hitting the promised 3 GHz mark on the G5. Then he showed three cool new aluminum bezeled LCD monitors, including an amazing 30 inch version sporting a 2560 x 1600 resolution for $3299. The focus of the conference, however, has been on OS X Tiger. Lots of new features here including an RSS reader and private browsing in Safari, a Konfabulator-like Dashboard, and system-wide content searching called Spotlight. Under the hood there’s a 64-bit optimized kernel and version 2.0 of the Apple development tools, XCode. iChat A/V has been heavily upgraded to support audio and video conferencing with multiple participants. H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10 support has been added to the Quicktime engine.
Look for Tiger in the first half of 2005.
- Bill Gates, in obvious contravention of actual reality, says Microsoft is getting faster at fighting viruses. Of course the holes in IIS and IE that allowed last week’s Scob attacks remain unpatched. So I guess the question is, faster than what?
- Oh yeah, and there’s a new attack taking advantage of the unpatched IE that gathers your passwords when you visit any of 50 major banking sites - even secure sites. US-CERT, in partnership with the US Department of Homeland Security, says you should just stop using Internet Explorer.
- According the the Anti-Phishing Workshop, phishing attacks have increased seven-fold since the beginning of the year.
- The Supreme Court, in its last decision of the year, said the Child Online Protection Act is too broad. The divided Supremes sent the case back to a lower court with the instruction to investigate less intrusive technological means to block access to adult sites.
- Yahoo! Mail says spam happens because it works. According the their survey, 20% of e-mail users have bought products advertised in spam messages.
Loading ...Friday Flash
June 25, 2004
Serious news today, including a warning from the department of Homeland Security.
The fork was introduced in America on this day in 1630. The first building was constructed in Yerba Buena, now San Francisco, in 1835. The first color TV broadcast, Arthur Godfrey, in 1951. The Beatles performed (and recorded) All You Need is Love before an estimated international audience of 400 million in 1967. David Letterman left NBC in 1993.
George Orwell was born in 1903. Mike Meyers in 1963.
- The Despartment of Homeland Security warned Windows users Thursday night about a virus that can infect systems just by visiting a compromised web site. Hackers have been breaking into sites running Microsoft’s IIS web server and appending hidden Javascript to pages. When users visit the page, the Javascript code loads malicious code hosted on a Russian server.
There’s quite a bit of panic over this particular exploit. CERT is telling users to turn off Javascript. “US-CERT recommends that end-users disable JavaScript unless it is absolutely necessary. Users should be aware that any web site, even those that may be trusted by the user, may be affected by this activity and thus contain potentially malicious code.” According to the Internet Storm Center several major sites have been compromised. There is currently no patch for the exploit, however you should update your anti-virus software immediately. Most AV software will detect the infection as the JS.Scob.Trojan.
Should you stay off the net today? CNET quotes Brent Houlihan, chief technology officer of NetSec, “I told my wife, unless it is absolutely necessary and unless you are going to a site like our banking site, stay off the Internet right now.”
Or use Mozilla. Or Firefox. Or Opera. Or Safari. Or anything but Internet Explorer. And by the way, IIS ain’t such a hot idea either.
- Australia is considering legalizing music copying for personal use. The Canadian model, as it’s called, includes a royalty on blank media.
- The creator of ASCII has died. Bob Bemer invented ASCII in 1961 as a standardized way for computers to communicate with each other. He also created the backslash and the escape key sequence. He was 78.
Tune in to my show every Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3p Pacific on KFI, Los Angeles.
Thursday’s Tech News Yard Sale
June 24, 2004
It’s news time.
Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle was born on this day in 1915. The home video recorder was first demonstrated at the BBC in 1963.
Today’s TechTV Ebay auction items (aka the former TechTV employees’ retirement plan and party fund) include fridge magnets, a TechTV t-shirt autographed by Kevin Rose, Sarah Lane, and Jessica Corbin, a crystal layoff cube (hey, where’s mine?), a Silicon Spin mug, TechLive and Big Thinkers caps, and a stained America’s Cup t-shirt.
- Comdex 2004 has been cancelled. Citing lack of interest, Medialive decided to forgo this year’s computer trade show, but in an unaccountable display of optimism they did book the Las Vegas Convention Center for November, 2005. Comdex, which was once the premiere computer trade show in the world with 200,000 attendees, shrank to 1/4th that size last year. I haven’t gone in two years, and apparently I’m not the only one. CES in January, also in Vegas, is now the show of the year.
- Citing Oliver Twist and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Senator Orrin Hatch introduced the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, late Tuesday. As I reported earlier, the act proposes fines and jail time for any company that produces technology that intentionally helps people violate copyrights. Hatch said that, like Fagin from Oliver Twist, companies like Kazaa were teaching children to steal. He does have a point there. Companies like Verizon and the Consumer Electronics Association are howling, though. CEA president Gary Shapiro said that if the law passes “the VCR would not be a legal product; TiVo would not be a legal product.” He does have a point there.
- Meanwhile a judge has temporarily blocked a Utah law that would make spyware illegal. Lawyers from WhenU obtained an injunction against Utah’s Spyware Control Act, saying it amounted to an unconstitutional regulation of interstate commerce. No court date has been set to decide on a permanent ban on the law.
- A little late to the game, Microsoft’s Hotmail has announced it will follow Yahoo’s lead and increase mail storage for its free customers from 2 megabytes to 250 and will allow attachments up to 10 megabytes. For $20/year you can get 2 gigs.
- Yahoo Messenger is blocking Trillian again, saying that third-party IM clients make it possible to spam their customers. Yahoo says it will change its protocols regularly to defeat services like Trillian. I say bye-bye Yahoo Messenger.
- A Russian kid who sent an obscene message to 15,000 cell phones has been convicted of spamming. He got a suspended sentence and a $100 fine. Russian authorities say this is their first successful prosecution of a spammer.
- A former AOL employee has been arrested for selling 92 million screen names to a spammer last spring.
- Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Earthlink are joining forces to find a caller id for email system that works. User authentication is considered by most experts the only effective way to eliminate spam. The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance issued 21 guidelines for fighting spam on Tuesday. The companies say they hope to settle on a unified authentication system by next year.
- Y’all don’t sound like you’re from around here. Indian call center employees are taking “accent neutralization” classes after a group of Texans complained.
Listen in tomorrow at 8:35a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.
Tuesday’s Tiny Dancer
June 22, 2004
Time for ToIP: tech news over IP.
Skype for Linux is out.
Bilbo Baggins returned to Bag End on this day in 1342 (Shire reckoning). Charles II established the Greenwich Observatory in 1675. The doughnut was invented in 1847. The voting age was lowered to 18 in 1970. Florida bans the thong in 1990.
The first American born world chess champion, Paul Morphy, was born in New Orleans on this day in 1837. The voice of Boris Badenov, the Haunted Mansion, and the Pillsbury Doughboy, Paul Frees was born in 1922.
- The EFF, Sun Microsystems, the Consumer Electronics Association, Gateway, Intel, and the Baby Bells along with many others are throwing their support behind a new bill from Virginia Representative Rick Boucher to re-write the Digital Millennium Copyright act. The bill would make it legal to circumvent copy protection as long as no violation of copyright occurs. The Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act would allow the FTC to regulate CD copy protection as well. Time for Congress to read Cory Doctorow’s brilliant speech on why copy protection doesn’t work, is bad for business, and is bad for society.
- Long live the 45. Universal is debuting a new Pocket CD format in Britain. The three-inch CD is big enough to carry a couple of songs and ringtones. The record company is also abandoning CD copy protection in Germany, citing consumer dissatisfaction.
- The US Army is building a new supercomputer based on 1,566 dual-processor G5 Macintosh computers. Mach 5 will cost $5.8 million and will be used by the Army to model the complex aerodynamics of hypersonic flight.
- Never recharge your laptop, PDA, or cell phone again. New portable fuel cell technology will make it possible to plug in little methane cartridges to keep your device running. MTI Micro Fuel Cells will announce their new Mobion cells this week. Duracell will sell the replacement cartridges just in time to power my wearable cell phone. The FAA has yet to approve fuel cell use on airplanes.
- Cablevision is offering its three million New York City customers cable TV, high-speed Internet, and unlimited long-distance VoIP phone service for $90.
Monday in Space
June 21, 2004
In the year 2525… tech news will still be alive.
Zager and Evans released “In the Year 2525″ on this day in 1969.
- SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded manned space initiative to actually go into space today. The project, headed by Burt Rutan and funded by Paul Allen, took pilot, Michael Melvill, 100 km above the Earth, just outside the atmosphere. At stake: the $10 million X-Prize. To win it SpaceShipOne will have to carry three astronauts into space, return safely, then do it again two weeks later.
- The Texas Department of Transportation is taking bids from vendors to set up free wireless Internet access at rest stops and travel information centers in the state. This to encourage drivers to take more frequent breaks. The department iplans to choose a vendor in July. TxDOT has been testing roadside Wi-Fi hotspots since last fall.
- Intel has released its Grantsdale and Alderwood chipsets. The 915 and 925 support the new PCI Express bus, DDR2, HD video, 7.1 surround, and dual displays. The company also announced the Pentium IV 755, topping out at 3.6 GHz.
- Meanwhile the US Supreme Court ruled against Intel 7-1 this morning, saying the company had to turn over confidential documents to European anti-trust investigators. The EU is pursuing Intel due to a complaint by AMD Europe.
- A handful of bloggers will cover the Democratic Convention this summer with full press credentials. The Republicans haven’t decided what to do.
- Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network (SUNET) have broken the Internet land speed record, transferring 840 GB 10,000 miles in 27 minutes. That’s an average speed of 4.23 Gbps.
Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.
Friday Follies
June 18, 2004
The goings on about Silicon Valley.
Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. (The USSR’s Valentina V. Tereshkova became the first woman in space almost exactly 20 years earlier, June 16, 1963.) Disney got into the portal “business” by buying Infoseek in 1998 for $70 million.
Happy Birthday Paul McCartney. He’s 62.
- According to Keynote, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft suffered system slow downs on Tuesday due to a massive and “sophisticated” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Akamai, one of the companies that provides them with distribution. Akamai disputes Keynote’s portrayal of the outage.
- The US House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection has proposed a bill that would regulate spyware, forcing companies to notify consumers before installing monitoring programs on their computers. HR2929, proposed by Mary Bono and Ed Towns, has been dubbed the “Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act,” SPYACT, and would also ban keyloggers and pop-up ads that can’t be closed. The US Senate is considering a similar bill.
- According to CNET, the Senate is also considering a bill which would effectively ban P2P file sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus. The Induce Act says that “whoever intentionally induces any violation” of copyright law could face fines and prison time. The bill could conceivably ban products like ReplayTV and even VCRs according to some experts. The law is not yet public but could be introduced by next week.
- Russian anti-virus company, Kaspersky Labs, claims to have discovered the first cell phone virus. Cabir infects Symbian-based Series 60 phones from Nokia, Siemens, Sony-Ericsson and others and propagates via Bluetooth. The virus writes the word “Caribe” on the screen and runs the battery down by searching for other Bluetooth phones to infect, but is otherwise apparently harmless. Users must accept a Bluetooth file to be infected.
- The number one CD in the nation, Velvet Revolver’s Contraband, can’t be copied to an iPod. The CD is one of a dozen copy protected discs distributed in the US by BMG. The success of the CD despite the label “protected against unauthorized duplication” will likely encourage record companies to use copy protection more widely. The MediaMax technology from SunnComm International can be defeated on PCs by holding down the “Shift” key while the CD is loading. The copy protection scheme prevents ripping the CD to MP3, but the disc contains protected WMA tracks that can be copied to some MP3 players. The WMA tracks don’t work on the iPod and other players which don’t support Windows DRM. Want to know why copy protection is a bad idea? Read Cory Doctorow’s brilliant, and hilarious, speech delivered in the Lion’s Den: Microsoft.
- U2 lead singer Bono has joined a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. According to the Wall Street Journal, Elevation Partners will invest in entertainment technology. Not copy protection I’m betting.
- Terry Semels, CEO of Yahoo, has donated $25 million to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.
- Scientists have discovered a gene that makes vole rats monogamous. Genes from the prairie vole can turn the swinging meadow vole into a homebody. That’s like turning Frank Sinatra into Pat Boone, yeah he’s monogamous but can he sing?
Listen in Friday at 8:35a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.
Thanks Illiad
June 15, 2004
http://userfriendly.org
Monday/Tuesday Newsday
June 15, 2004
I‘m taking a mini-vacation this week, and Internet access is spotty, so the news may be, too.
The Magna Carta was sealed on this day in 1215. Goodyear patented the rubber vulcanization process in 1844. Celluloid was patented in 1869. Ford manufactured its 10 millionth car in 1924. The first commercial electronic computer (the LEO) was dedicated in 1951. Lennon and McCartney met for the first time at a church social in 1956.
Doogie Howser is 31. Courtney Cox is 40.
Firefox 0.9 is out and looking good.
- A new fast spreading virus, Zafi.b, disables firewalls and anti-virus software while spreading political messages in English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, German or Finnish. The worm displays a message in Hungarian which translates into “We demand that the government accomodates the homeless, tightens up the penal code and VOTES FOR THE DEATH PENALTY to cut down the increasing crime. Jun. 2004, PÉcs (SNAF Team).” Wonder how they feel about the death penalty for virus authors?
- The Gartner Group is set to release a study that says nearly two million Americans had their checking accounts raided in the last 12 months.
- A Mission Viejo teenager has been sentenced to 33 months in prison for bilking Ebay customers and a local bank. The 19-year-old was ordered to pay $1.2 million two years ago for a fraudulent investment web site. Looks like he has a bright future as a television executive.
- Speaking of which, Paul Allen has been busy lately. His Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame opens at EMP in Seattle Friday. And next week the Allen funded SpaceShipOne will attempt to leave the Earth’s atmosphere in a trajectory similar to Alan Shepard’s historic 1961 flight. Allen and his partners aim to become the first privately financed team to create a manned space program.
- Tim Berners-Lee will finally reap his reward today as inventor of the World Wide Web in 1989. Berners-Lee will receive the first Millennium Technology Prize, awarded by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. The prize includes a cash award of one million Euros.
- MessageLabs says 76% of all email is now spam. The cost of dealing with spam has doubled this year. According to Nucleus, the average employee receives twice as much spam as last year, an average of 7500 messages, and spends $1934 a year handling junk email. And all this after the Federal CAN-SPAM act went into effect.
- Earlier this year the FTC declined to address the growing spyware issue, saying that Spyware companies should self-regulate. Now state and Federal legislators are responding with new anti-spyware laws. Utah has made installing programs on a PC without the user’s approval a $10,000 offense. California, Iowa, and New York are considering similar laws. Dell announced yesterday that it’s starting an anti-virus and spyware education program for its customers.
- PayPal is settling three law suits from customers who contend their accounts were illegally frozen. The company admits no wrong doing but will pay $9.25 million to settle the suits. As part of the settlement, PayPal agreed to change the way it handled dispute resolution.
- AMD has announced it is developing a dual-core chip for sale next year. Intel, Sun, IBM, and Apple have also announced chips that combine two processor cores onto a single die. Intel says it has already gone to silicon and will be shipping dual-core processors for PCs, notebooks, and servers by next year, as well.
- It’s the battle of the email servers. Yahoo has responded to Google’s Gmail service by upgrading its free email storage space from six megs to 100. Pay $19.99 and you’ll get two gigabytes. The user interface will be improved, too. And 50 million addresses that have been dormant for over a year are being released.
- Apple launches iTunes in Europe today, but all is not sweet music. Independent labels are holding out, claiming that Apple is using its virtual monopoly of the online music business to squeeze the little guys. Apple has deals with the Big 5: Warner, Universal, BMG, Sony and EMI, but The Association of Independent Music says signing with Apple Europe would be “commercial suicide.”
- Starz and Real Networks launched an all-you-can-download movie service on Monday. For $12.95/month Starz! Ticket will offer 100 movies at any given time, with 25 added and dropped each week. The service requires broadband because each movie is 500 megs. You can watch a movie as many times as you want until it’s removed from the list of 100.
- Looking for 108 megabit Wi-Fi? Then you need MIMO. According to my pal Eric Griffith, writing in Wi-Fi Planet, the chipset from Airgo networks is being adopted by SOHOware, Planex, Askey and Taiyo Yuden and even Intel is reportedly looking into building MIMO into the next generation of Centrino systems. MIMO stands for multiple input, multiple output, and it’s supposed to increase 802.11b, a, and g speeds considerably.
- There a good article in PC World on DVD and CD longevity. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is testing blank discs and has come up with some interesting preliminary findings. “We’ve found the quality varies, depending upon the type of dye used to make the write-once discs and the manufacturer,” reports Fred Byers, the information technology specialist who is leading the study. Byers is proposing an industry-wide grading system to indicate disc quality.
Listen in Tuesday at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.
Leo Globe and Mail
June 11, 2004
From the Great White North… the tech news of the day.
The first auto race took place on this day in 1895. The Main Street Electrical Parade debuted at Walt Disney World in 1977. ET was released in 1982. MS-DOS 5.0 was released in 1991.
- The FBI made arrests in several countries in connection with the theft of the source code for Half-Life 2 thanks to tips from unhappy gamers. Half-Life developers had to delay the game and re-code part of it when the stolen source code was released on the Internet. The eagerly awaited sequel to the 1998 hit is expected later this summer.
- Microsoft has filed lawsuits against eight spammers accusing them of misleading consumers. The company now has over 80 pending suits against junk emailers.
- Zombie PCs infected by various spam viruses were used to send out anti-immigrant polemics in German to computers all over the world Thursday. Experts believe that political activists used spammers to send out the emails.
- Comcast, whose broadband subscribers unknowingly send out hundreds of million spam messages a day via zombie PCs, has finally decided to selectively block port 25 - the outgoing email port - in an effort to control the traffic. The port is only being blocked on machines that are suspected of sending out spam.
- British advertising watchdogs have upheld a complaint against Apple for their G5 ads. The Advertising Standards Authority took issue with ads claiming that the G5 was the “world’s fastest personal computer.” Noting that the G5 was not the fastest computer “in all circumstances for all applications” the ASA will require Apple drop the language from future advertising. The ASA did uphold two other Apple claims that the G5 was the world’s first 64-bit personal computer and that it could support more memory than any PC.
- According to Slashdot, McDonald’s Germany will begin using SuSE Linux in all its stores.
- The remaining Beatles are finally considering putting their music online.
Tune in tomorrow at 7:40a Eastern for my weekly visit with John Donabie on 1010 CFRB Toronto. And, of course, every Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3p Pacific on KFI 640 AM, Los Angeles.
Call for Canada
June 10, 2004
I‘m very happy to report that I’ve agreed to host a daily show for G4/TechTV Canada starting later this summer. We’ll produce the show here in Toronto. I’ll fly up one week a month to shoot. It looks like the format will be very similar to Call for Help, and, yes, we’ll be taking calls. Once we get the web site up and running there will be a place for you to submit your questions as before.
Pictured at left, my co-hosts (and actual Canadians) the lovely Jelena Mihajlovic and the geeky Andy Walker.
More details to come. Stay tuned. Now we’re off to see the Jays and the Dodgers. I’ll post pictures.
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