At the Black Hat security conference, researchers Rob Ragan and Francis Brown from security firm Stach & Liu, detailed their new efforts for hacking both Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing search engine. The new tools and techniques are intended to provide a rapid alert system for enterprises to help identify risk within their organizations.

The GoogleDiggity and the BingDiggity projects, these are the tools that enable users to perform security research with pre-built query strings to locate common vulnerabilities. The GoogleDiggity tool uses the Google AJAX API and Google’s custom search to deliver results.

Ragan noted that back in 2004, researcher Johnny “I Hack Stuff” Long created a Google Hacking Database, which included queries that could be used to detect potential security issues. Ragan and his colleagues are now using a similar idea to build a Bing Hacking Database for vulnerability search queries using Microsoft’s search engine.

Brown noted from an enterprise scalability perspective that it’s not practically feasible for companies to periodically Google hack themselves. But for an enterprise, it is important to have a way of knowing when they have some kind of vulnerability or information leakage as soon as possible, he argued.

The researchers have leveraged their Google hacking work to create search-engine-powered back alerts. The approach is similar in scope to the Google Alerts system in which users select a keyword and are then sent emails or RSS updates whenever new instances of that keyword are found.

Ragan said, “What we did is we imported our hacking query database into Google and Bing hacking alerts”. “So we’re looking at over 2,300 queries and getting updates via RSS as they happen.”

Brown noted that the hack alerts system will be made available as an OPML file so that others can simply import the RSS feeds into a feed reader.

In an effort to help enterprises scale and customize the hack alerts, Ragan said that his team is working on a Google desktop gadget as well.

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http://www.all1sourcetech.com ]]> http://www.all1sourcetech.com/google-hacking-evolves-defense/feed/ 0 http://www.all1sourcetech.com/ubuntu-1010-btrfs-default-filesystem/ http://www.all1sourcetech.com/ubuntu-1010-btrfs-default-filesystem/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 11:15:35 +0000 Naggie http://www.all1sourcetech.com/?p=1089 The next version of Ubuntu 10.10 could include btrfs as the default filesystem replacing ext4, said Ubuntu Developer Manager Scott James Remnant.

A lot has to go right between now and the Ubuntu 10.10 feature freeze before btrfs can get promoted to the default.

According to the Kernel.org Wiki, Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing fault tolerance, repair and easy administrative. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL.

According to Remnant, the btrfs needs to not be marked “experimental” in the kernel config. He also added, “This is planned for 2.6.35, which is the kernel version and expecting to ship” with Ubuntu 10.10.

Currently, the new filesystem is not supported by Grub2, Ubuntu’s boot loader, or the installer. That would need to be finished, before feature freeze, said Remnant.

He explained, if that happens, we may make it the default for Alpha releases to gain testing, that testing must go smoothly. And the btrfs upstream must be happy with the idea and, we must be happy with the idea.

He put the odds of all of this working out at 1 in 5.

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According to the release announcement, this version combines the licence change occurring in the 4.0 release with the development work that has been going on while the re-licensing process took place.

The latest version includes integration of Cog’s closure implementation, improved user interface look and feel, new anti-aliased fonts, core library improvements and advances in modularity.

According to the Weekly Squeak, one key focus for this release was to address the issues that have been known to frustrate developers using Squeak for the first time.

A much improved set of UI widgets, the new menu bar including the fast search control, integrated help, improved test coverage, more class and method comments, and integrated syntax highlighting all make the system more accessible.

According to the Joomla Web Site warns, Version 1.5.16 contains two serious bugs that will affect your site if you use a version of PHP prior to 5.2 or if you have the Session Handler parameter set to none in Global Configuration.

The new version of Joomla fixes several security problems with the previous version, according to Joomla, “If you haven’t already upgraded to version 1.5.16, you may wish to wait for version 1.5.17 instead.”

And the next release is expected to be on April 27, 2010.

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“In the last six months or so, over half the sites being launched with WordPress are really not blogging sites per se, they are complete sites,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, vice president of media services for Automattic, the company WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg started to offer a hosted version of the software.

Such use has caught at least some of the CMS community by surprise.

“There’s a debate raging within Twitter about whether traditional blogging platform WordPress is also a CMS,” wrote Tony Byrne in a blog post. Byrne is the founder of the CMS analyst firm The Real Story Group, formerly called CMS Watch. “Our take: many organizations are using WordPress as a CMS. That makes it a CMS.”

“A larger enterprise would almost never want [to] use one of those tools for a major web property. But they offer useful alternatives for [small and medium-size business] scenarios, as well as simpler projects,” Byrne elaborated.

WordPress, created in 2003, uses a variety of open-source programs and open standards, such as PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

Byrne admitted he was skeptical at first of the idea of using WordPress as a CMS. Out of the box, it doesn’t have many of the capabilities, such as workflow or advanced version control, needed even for basic CMS duties.

“It’s one thing to run a blog with a few extra plug-ins and widgets. It’s another to run a corporate Web site,” Byrne said in an interview.

Nonetheless, The Real Story Group spoke with customers and examined Web sites. It found that if an organization had to maintain a relatively simple Web site, one with 50 pages or fewer, then WordPress could prove to be a low-cost, relatively easy-to-maintain option.

“It’s not a [full] development platform, but it can drive a simple Web site fairly capably,” Byrne said.

While it is less sophisticated than many CMS packages, such as the open-source Drupal, it could provide an alternative to other simple platforms, like Joomla and the .Net-driven DotNetNuke.

In this realm, WordPress offers a few distinct advantages, most notably its intuitive interface. “WordPress has an ease of use that is something other vendors could learn from,” Byrne said.

Also, thanks to third-party developers, WordPress has a wide array of plug-ins to extend its functionality, some of which can be used to tackle CMS chores. For instance, a plug-in called
Edit Flow offers workflow, or the ability to route a document to multiple parties for editing and approval.

Overall, the WordPress site itself lists more than 8,600 plug-ins.

WordPress has its downsides as well. For one, access control is quite limited, Byrne said. The software offers only sitewide roles. Anybody with administrative rights has the ability to edit any page on the entire site. Someone from human resources, for instance, wouldn’t be restricted to editing only HR pages.

Another shortcoming is the lack of advanced content modeling. While a site can host a series of Web pages, it would be difficult to make finer distinctions among the pages — for a news site to separate news articles from case studies and features, for instance.

Making such distinctions would be possible through some development work, though other CMSes can make this sort of templating much easier.

In general, the deeper into development that a Web site administrator must go, the more the organization should consider another platform, Byrne said.

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The new offerings will fulfill the dual role of delivering cloud-management applications and services to their enterprise clients while also increasing functionality, security and efficiency for IT service providers building cloud environments for their own customers.

According to NetApp’s (NASDAQ: NTAP) vice president of solutions and alliances, Patrick Rogers, “NetApp has a proven track record of successfully teaming with leading service providers to power the cloud service offerings”.

NetApp’s new Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) will give service providers a standardized and unified infrastructure that allows them to use and deploy storage, bandwidth and compute resources in a repeatable manner to give IT administrators greater flexibility throughout the cloud deployment process.

Data Protection-as-a-Service (DPaas) serves as a roadmap or design guide for organizing archiving and display recovery applications and processes, which includes NetApp’s FlexClone app for disaster recovery testing as well its SnapLock and Multistore applications for compliance and secure multi-tenancy, respectively.

NetApp also has teamed with on-demand backup and recovery software vendor Asigra on a Backup/Recovery-as-a-Service (BRaaS) offering that runs on the NetApp SOI platform to secure and storage huge data reservoirs in the cloud.

Its NetApp Open Management tool will enable service providers to link their IT service management and orchestration portals to NetApp’s storage automation engine for simplified storage provisioning and protection services.

NetApp announced a comprehensive cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft in December that’s designed to improve the technical integration between the two companies’ cloud computing, virtualization and data storage and management applications.

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And object orientation is used where it brings advantages and not in places where other solutions are more obvious.

Key Features of Seed7:-

• User defined statements and operators.
• Types are first class objects (Templates and generics can be defined easily without special syntax).
• Predefined constructs like arrays or for-loops are declared in the language itself.
• Object orientation with interfaces and multiple dispatch.
• Static type checking and no automatic casts.
• Support for bigInteger and big Rational numbers which have unlimited size.
• exception handling
• overloading of procedures/functions/operators/statements
• Various predefined types like resizable arrays, hashes, bitsets, structs, color, time, duration, etc.
• Runs under linux, various unix versions and windows.
• The interpreter and the example programs use the GPL license, while the runtime library uses the LGPL license.

Newly included features in this release:

• The functions in the gethttp.s7i library were improved to allow the specification of a port number as part of the location (e.g.: localhost:1080/index.html).
• The tarx.sd7 (tar archiving utility) example program was
renamed to tar7.sd7 .
• The codepage 8859_11 was added to the charsets.s7i library.
• The bas7.sd7 (basic interpreter) example program was improved.
• The toutf8.sd7 example program was improved to write an explanation and to support several IANA/MIME charset names.
• An explanation what to do, when the path of the bcc32 C compiler contains a space, was added to ’src/read_me.txt’.
• Documentation comments were added to the charsets.s7i library.

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PHP 5.3.2 is a maintenance release in the 5.3 series, which includes a large number of bug fixes.

Security/bug fixes included in this release take care of things like:

• Safe_mode validation inside tempnam
• A possible open_basedir/safe_mode bypass in sessions
• Added support for SHA-256 and SHA-512 to php’s crypt.
• Fixed a bug in the garbage collector that could cause a crash
• Crashing when using ldap_next_reference

Key Bug Fixes in PHP 5.3.2 include:

• Added protection for $_SESSION from interrupt corruption and improved “session.save_path” check.
• Fixed bug #51059 (crypt crashes when invalid salt are given).
• Fixed bug #50940 Custom content-length set incorrectly in Apache sapis.
• Fixed bug #50847 (strip_tags() removes all tags greater then 1023 bytes long).
• Fixed bug #50723 (Bug in garbage collector causes crash).
• Fixed bug #50661 (DOMDocument::loadXML does not allow UTF-16).
• Fixed bug #50632 (filter_input() does not return default value if the variable does not exist).
• Fixed bug #50540 (Crash while running ldap_next_reference test cases).
• Fixed bug #49851 (http wrapper breaks on 1024 char long headers).

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Installation: Unpack and upload it to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

Requirements: • WordPress 2.7 or higher

New in this release:-

• Plugin works with database now
• Plugin will get the latest data if you used API limit
• Now you can manage what to write After and Before status and counter
• Bugged versions are not downloadable anymore

Language: php

PTS Desktop Live 2010.1, codenamed “Anzhofen,” a live DVD distribution designed solely to run the Phoronix Testing Suite, has now been released, bringing the comprehensive benchmarking and testing software suite to those that want the most accurate results.

Like previous releases, it’s based on the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution and PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 comes with the latest Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.1. The idea is to give users a standard software stack to run the testing suite ensuring that the underlying operating system doesn’t interfere with the validity of the results.

Highlights of PTS Desktop Live 2010.1:

• Custom Linux Kernel 2.6.33 Release Candidate 6;
• Based on the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx packages;
• 43 tests from the Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.1;
• Stripped-down version of GNOME 2.29;
• Designed for relatively modern hardware.

It requires:

• Modern 64-bit AMD or Intel processor;
• 2GB of RAM;
• An ATI, NVIDIA or Intel graphics card;
• Internet connection.

Phoronix has gone to great lengths to ensure that PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 squeezes every last ounce of performance out of the PC and that all unnecessary components are removed. As such, the developers have put the Linux Kernel 2.6.33 on a diet, taking out support for older hardware and platforms and the Anzhofen 2.6.33-rc6-phx10 kernel weighs in at just 16 MB, being some 40 percent smaller than the vanilla Linux Kernel in Ubuntu, Phoronix says.

The developers warn that this means that you’ll likely need a machine not older than two or three years to ensure that everything works. Continuing with the minimal design, PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 comes with just a customized GNOME 2.29, a web browser and a text editor and, obviously, the newly released Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.1.

The next release, PTS Desktop Live 2010.2 (codenamed “Rottbach”), is expected to land at about the same time as the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 2.6, in May 2010. A version of the live OS designed with netbooks in mind, PTS Netbook Live 2010.1, should be coming soon.

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For the year 2010, the PapugLinux 10.1 is the major release in a little over a year and likely the only one for 2010 based on previous release schedules. PapugLinux 10.1 is mostly aimed at bringing the various software components up-to-date, though version numbers aren’t, for the most part, the newest ones.

In terms of package update and hardware support, Version 10.1 is a major release of PapugLinux. The latest version of X server will allow you to enjoy PapugLinux at the best capacity of your hardware.

PapugLinux 10.1 comes with a very short list of default applications installed with just the bare-bone functionality covered. The latest version updates the X-Window server to X.Org-7.4 (the latest stable release is 7.5). Mozilla Firefox 3.5.6 is included as the default web browser; email is handled by Sylpheed 2.6.0. and instant messaging by Pidgin 2.6.3.

For simple office tasks, the AbiWord 2.6.4 word processor and the Gnumeric 1.8.4 spreadsheet editor are also included. On the server side, PapugLinux 10.1 comes with the Apache 2.2.14 web server, the latest version, the Cups 1.3.11 print server and the ProFTP 1.3.2b FTP server.

PapugLinux 10.1 uses the Rox 2.9 file manager/desktop environment with a few customizations for better integration. The distro is designed as a Live CD that should run on even the oldest x86 hardware, but it can also be used as a stand-alone hard drive install.

No password is required, as the user ‘papuglinux’ is the default operating user. System user ‘root’ can be used by advanced users, the password has been set to ‘papuglinux.’ If you have 512 MB of RAM, try ‘linux copy2ram’ as boot option.”

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Mloovi Translate Widget
The Mloovi widget allows you to easily add links to 52 different language versions of your blog and RSS feeds.

Online Backup
The plugin allows online backup as well as email backups both on demand and scheduled. Put your backups on auto pilot with 50 MiB of free space and encryption. Save time and protect your blog from lost info. You will need to register for a free account.

WP Comment Pages
Your users can link directly to an interesting comment, instead of the whole article.

InvestorGuide.com Stock Ticker Link
This plugin automatically looks for ticker symbols like (AAPL) or (GOOG) and link the tickers to research pages at InvestorGuide.com

WordPress Exploit Scanner
This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

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Other updated packages include DigiKam, evolution, Mono, GnuTLS and libgphoto2. Developers will also find Bootchart 2.0.0.9, a tool for analyzing slow system booting, included.

The previous milestone’s support for LXDE has now been incorporated into the installation process, allowing users to install openSUSE 11.3 with only the LXDE desktop.

The openSUSE developers plan to switch to GCC 4.5.0 in the next milestone to benefit from its better optimisation. According to a new timeline page, milestone 3 is due at the start of March, and a final release mid-July.

The openSUSE 11.3 milestone 2 is available to download now for testing purpose; known bugs are documented on the openSUSE wiki. The developers would like special attention paid to the GNOME accessibility stack as new features in it need extensive testing.

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OpenOffice.org has issued version 3.2, which adds a lengthy list of new features and improves the suite’s overall performance while also fixing six vulnerabilities.

Three of those problems could allow a remote attacker to execute code. In one of those cases, a malicious XPM file — a type of image format supported by ODF (Open Document Format) — could be maliciously crafted and allow remote user to execute other code on the computer with the same privileges as the local user.

The suite had a similar vulnerability involving the GIF image format, which has also been fixed.

The third vulnerability could allow an attacker to take over a PC by getting a user to open a maliciously crafted Microsoft Word document. All three of those vulnerabilities affect all versions of OpenOffice.org prior to version 3.2.

Increasingly, Hackers look for these three kinds of vulnerabilities, since users can be targeted by e-mail, and various social engineering tricks can be employed to try to get them to open a document.

The latest version can be downloaded from OpenOffice.org.

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Ontologies have become common on the World-Wide Web. The ontologies on the Web range from large taxonomies categorizing Web sites (such as on Yahoo!) to categorizations of products for sale and their features (such as on Amazon.com).

The WWW Consortium (W3C) is developing the Resource Description Framework  a language for encoding knowledge on Web pages to make it understandable to electronic agents searching for information.

Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the reasons are:

• To share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents
• To enable reuse of domain knowledge
• To make domain assumptions explicit
• To separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge
• To analyze domain knowledge

Sharing common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents is one of the more common goals in developing ontologies . For example, suppose several different Web sites contain medical information or provide medical e-commerce services. If these Web sites share and publish the same underlying ontology of the terms they all use, then computer agents can extract and aggregate information from these different sites. The agents can use this aggregated information to answer user queries or as input data to other applications.

Enabling reuse of domain knowledge was one of the driving forces behind recent surge in ontology research. For example, models for many different domains need to represent the notion of time. This representation includes the notions of time intervals, points in time, relative measures of time, and so on. If one group of researchers develops such an ontology in detail, others can simply reuse it for their domains. Additionally, if we need to build a large ontology, we can integrate several existing ontologies describing portions of the large domain. We can also reuse a general ontology, such as the UNSPSC ontology, and extend it to describe our domain of interest.

Making explicit domain assumptions underlying an implementation makes it possible to change these assumptions easily if our knowledge about the domain changes. Hard-coding assumptions about the world in programming-language code makes these assumptions not only hard to find and understand but also hard to change, in particular for someone without programming expertise. In addition, explicit specifications of domain knowledge are useful for new users who must learn what terms in the domain mean.

Separating the domain knowledge from the operational knowledge is another common use of ontologies. We can describe a task of configuring a product from its components according to a required specification and implement a program that does this configuration independent of the products and components themselves . We can then develop an ontology of PC-components and characteristics and apply the algorithm to configure made-to-order PCs. We can also use the same algorithm to configure elevators if we “feed” an elevator component ontology to it .

Analyzing domain knowledge is possible once a declarative specification of the terms is available.  Formal analysis of terms is extremely valuable when both attempting to reuse existing ontologies and extending them .

Often an ontology of the domain is not a goal in itself. Developing an ontology is akin to defining a set of data and their structure for other programs to use. Problem-solving methods, domain-independent applications, and software agents use ontologies and knowledge bases built from ontologies as data

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For software platforms on cellphones, the market is led by the Nokia’s Symbian operating system, but it has lost much ground over the last year to Apple Inc and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Linux, the computer operating system, is starting to win traction with Google Inc using Linux to build its Android platform, and Nokia rolling out its top-of-the-range model N900 using Linux Maemo.

According to head of LiMo, Morgan Gillis, there has been a step change for Linux in mobile. No other operating system now matches the vendor coverage of Linux — it is being commercially deployed by virtually all leading mobile device vendors from the largest downwards.

LiMo, a non-profit foundation, hopes to benefit from its focus on giving greater say over software development to telecoms operators.

The role of top operators in the platform – Vodafone uses it in its 360 offering – is a key attraction for Adobe, whose Flash is among the world’s most widely used web-based computer programs, and it has some 1.6 million developers.

Vodafone and other operators have strongly pledged for a smaller number of operating systems, as supporting them is a timely and costly exercise. However, in recent years, the number of large operating systems has increased, with new players like Apple and Google entering the mobile market.

In a latest twist Samsung Electronics — the world’s second largest handset maker and one of the key members of LiMo – unveiled in late 2009 its own smartphone platform.

Linux is the most popular type of free or so-called open source computer operating system which is available to the public to be used, revised and shared. Linux suppliers earn money selling improvements and technical services, and Linux competes directly with Microsoft, which charges for its Windows software and opposes freely sharing its code.

Japanese electronics firms NEC and Panasonic, and Israeli firm Else unveiled on Monday a total of seven new phones running on LiMo software.

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Symbian is the world’s most popular smartphone OS, which is used on phones including the Nokia E72. You will extremely found it common in Europe and Asia, typically AT&T carries one Symbian phone at a time (right now the Nokia E71x and Nokia sells some unlocked phones to individual consumers.

Last week, Symbian announced that the company had made its existing Symbian OS platform open-source and promised that Symbian devices would come to US carriers in 2010.

Symbian’s improvements

The new Symbian 3 works hard to integrate touch-screen support into the OS, something that has seemed awkward on some previous Symbian devices like the Nokia 5800.

The new OS moves to a “single-tap paradigm,” reducing the number of times you have to tap the screen, and implements multi-touch gestures such as flick-to-scroll and pinch-to-zoom. The new OS release also livens up the phone’s home screen with support for multiple pages of widgets and a widget manager.

Symbian 3 supports 2D and 3D graphics acceleration and HDMI video output. And unlike Apple’s iPhone OS, Symbian 3 embraces multitasking third-party applications. The new OS improves low-level memory management by using writeable data paging, which lets apps running in the background, swap their data out to persistent flash storage, and free up RAM when they’re not busy.

According to chairman of Symbian’s Features & Roadmap Council, Ian Hutton, it means more of the data that was stored in RAM can be paged out, giving you more apps running in parallel.

Symbian 3 also takes care of some old Symbian problems. For instance, many Symbian phones and applications tend to get confused about which Internet access method to use if they have several options. “One-click connectivity” in Symbian 3 fixes that. Hutton said, it bashes a load of those dialogs [away] and just essentially does the right thing.

Symbian vs. Google

Symbian 3 will go up against Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile in a bid to attract third-party manufacturers. Both Android and Symbian are at least somewhat open-source, and both OSes rely on an alliance of partners to build phones – the Symbian Foundation and Google’s Open Handset Alliance. But Symbian sees its strength in the fact that the company isn’t shepherded by a single, for-profit corporation.

Symbian also approves of a broader array of development tools than Google does. While Google generally tries to get Android developers to focus on writing for the Dalvik Java engine, Symbian developers can write native code in C and C++ or choose to write in Nokia’s QT framework or Web standards like JavaScript and CSS, according to Hutton.

By the end of the year, Symbian 3 could appear in phones, said Larry Berkin, Symbian’s head of global alliances. And this week, a demo of Symbian 3 will get at Mobile World Congress this week.

Verizon Wireless will allow the customers to use the Internet phone service Skype to make free calls on some phones, an application that wireless carriers have been slow to allow.

Under a deal announced Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow, users of some Verizon phones who have a voice and data plan will be able to download a free Skype application in late March. That will let them call or instant-message other Skype users for free or call regular phone numbers outside the United States for a fee paid to Skype. These calls would go over Verizon’s network and would not use up minutes on a cell phone plan.

However, Minutes would be deducted to use Skype to cal regular phone numbers in the US, according to Verizon.

Initially, the mobile application will be available for nine Verizon phones, including several BlackBerry models and Motorola Inc.’s Droid and upcoming Devour handsets.

According to Verizon’s chief marketing officer John Stratton, the application will be able to run all the time in the background. This means other people should be able to contact you through Skype even if your phone is on standby.

Other wireless carriers have blocked the Skype app from running all the time. It’s available on the iPhone only in Wi-Fi hot spots. In October, AT&T said it would relent and let the program work over its cellular network as well, but Skype has not yet released an application to enable that. Verizon’s version of Skype mobile will not work over Wi-Fi, the companies said.

Skype CEO Josh Silverman in an interview said, working directly with Verizon let Skype do things it couldn’t, such as integrating its service with a phone so Skype is built into the address book.

Originally, wireless carriers feared giving customers a way to avoid using voice minutes in their cell phone plans.

Now the companies are recognizing the value of customers who pay extra for data service. When the carriers “see how popular Skype is with American consumers they realize by offering Skype they can attract more customers,” according to Silverman.

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At Mobile World Congress, a cell phone trade show in Barcelona at a demonstration, an engineer shot a picture of a German dinner menu with a phone running Google Inc.’s Android software. An application on the phone sent the shot to Google’s servers, which sent a translation back to the phone.

It translated “Fruhlingssalat mit Wildkrautern” as “Spring salad with wild herbs.” There was no word on when the software would be available.

Software that translates text from pictures is already available for some phones, but generally does the processing on the phone. By sending the image to its servers for processing, Google can apply a lot more computing power, for faster, more accurate results. The phone still won’t order for you, though — you’ll have to point at the menu.

The demonstration was part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech at the trade show, the largest for the wireless industry. He said phone applications that take advantage of “cloud computing” — servers accessible through the wireless network — will bring powerful changes to the industry.

Schmidt’s speech also featured a demonstration of videos and a game running on an Android phone using Flash, a format that’s ubiquitous on Web pages intended for PCs, but hasn’t worked on many phones, including the iPhone. Support for Flash in Android and a few other smartphone operating systems are expected later this year.

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San Francisco-based MacSpeech makes general-use programs and ones designed specifically for the medical and legal fields.

According to Nuance, which already makes a dictation program for Apple’s iPhone, the deal will help it produce its flagship Dragon Naturally Speaking desktop software for Macs.

Shares of Nuance rose 18 cents, or 1.3 percent, to close at $14.63.

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The patent, #7,657,941, is entitled “Hardware-based anti-virus system,” is awarded to inventor Oleg V. Zaitsev (Technology Expert at Kaspersky Lab) and assigned to Kaspersky. The abstract reads:

An anti-virus (AV) system based on a hardware-implemented AV module for curing infected computer systems and a method for updating AV databases for effective curing of the computer system. The hardware-based AV system is located between a PC and a disk device. The hardware-based AV system can be implemented as a separate device or it can be integrated into a disk controller. An update method of the AV databases uses a two-phase approach. First, the updates are transferred to from a trusted utility to an update sector of the AV system. Then, the updates are verified within the AV system and the AV databases are updated. The AV system has its own CPU and memory and can be used in combination with AV application.

So it seems this device is an actual separate computer running an embedded AV application. While the press release and abstract emphasize that the AV functionality doesn’t strictly need a software counterpart running in the host system, it does need host software in order to update itself, because the AV hardware won’t have network access. This update application will need to be trusted and hardened against attack.

The difficulty of detecting rootkits once they have installed does call for unconventional measures. Whether a hardware approach is truly more effective remains to be seen. If the device is just an AV system running below the level of the rootkit then the improvement will be small, as it will still only operate as well as the signature process allows. If the fact that the device is running below rootkits allows it to run heuristic tests which are better capable of detecting rootkit behavior then the difference could be substantial.

There is another advantage to hardware-based AV: Because the device has its own CPU and memory and minimal software running on the host PC, the performance impact on the PC will be lessened. But in fact, this device can not be a complete security solution, since it can only monitor disk operations. Modern security suites also monitor network connections.

Sonne DVD Burner is an almighty DVD burner designed to meet all your needs in burning video, ISO Image file and VIDEO_TS to DVD disc and burning all files to data disc, creating DVD from other video files. For the more, it can capture videos to burn or create to DVD. It s necessary to add an intact capture function to meet users need. Users can easily capture video or image from other devices, DV and TV Tuner. Auto shot, overlay, audio settings volume and balance can be adjusted by easy to use buttons… [/center]

Key Function:

• Create a DVD disc with DVD menu.
• Capture video or image from other devices like USB webcams, TV tuner and DV in real time.
• Snapshot pictures with hotkeys.
• Set properties for each capture device.
• Burn data to disc.
• Burn DVD (VIDEO_TS) folders to DVD disc.
• Burn video files to DVD disc without menu.
• Show information about recorder.

How to Create DVD

Sonne DVD Burner can let you directly create DVD from other video files.

• Step 1: Define the desired DVD mode as pagination menu or chapters menu.
• Step 2: Define a template for your DVD from the template list.
• Step 3: Input your desired video files.
• Step 4: Click Create button, a dialog will pop up. You can define the DVD Output Path as your like. Start the process with Start button.
• Step 5: Click Burn button to burn the newly created DVD folder or others, relative settings interface will pop up.
• Step 6: Click Start to start burning.

Opera showed off an iPhone version of the company’s Opera Mini Web browser on Monday. If Apple accepts it, it would be the first true alternative Web browser available on iPhones and iPod Touches.

Apple has so far forbidden Web browsers that complete with Safari, anything that claims to be a “browser” in the App Store is a skin or plug-in that uses Safari to do its actual browsing.

According to Opera product manager Igor Natto, Opera Mini has a chance because it isn’t actually a browser. It’s a rendering engine for a highly compressed data format called OBML, which reduces data transfer by 80 to 90 percent over surfing real, live Web pages. When you go to a page using Opera Mini, it just sends a command to Opera’s servers, which are doing the real browsing.

Opera Mini would make a great solution for iPhone users on congested or roaming networks, where every bit counts, he also added. By reducing a 1-Mbyte page to 200 Kbits, roaming fees could drop from $5 to $1 for that page.

On a horribly congested Vodafone network with lousy reception in the middle of the convention center, Opera Mini loaded the New York Times Web page much more quickly than Safari did – in maybe 10 seconds as opposed to 30. And Opera’s customized zooming always centers the column of text you’re trying to read.

Opera Mini for iPhone looks like an iPhone app, but it seems to wilfully defy iPhone user interface rules that Opera deems silly. For instance, there’s no pinch-to-zoom. Instead there’s Opera’s optimized tap-to-zoom, with just one level of zoom. Some buttons look a bit more like Opera buttons (rectangular) than like iPhone buttons (roundish). If Apple requires pinch to zoom, and will implement it, according to Natto.

The browser has both visual bookmarks on its “speed dial” page and tabs, which appear as a stack of miniature pages that you can shift around. It looks more like Opera Mini 5 on other phones than like something designed to Apple’s requirements, and Natto said that’s on purpose.

Natto said, “What we did was to take Opera Mini and port from Java to a native iPhone app”. He also said, we’ll see what Apple thinks of that when Opera decides to submit Mini to the app store.

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If your hard disk is clogged with massive photos and Microsoft Office documents, or if you’re looking for a better way to share those large files, consider FileMinimizer Suite 6.0. This simple-to-use software reduces photo sizes by approximately 90 percent with little noticeable degradation of on-screen quality, and typically it shrinks Office files by at least 25 percent, with no quality loss.

FileMinimizer does not create .zip archives containing your data; the files it creates retain their original format and are usable just as the originals are, so .jpg files remain .jpg files, .ppt files remain .ppt files, and so on. It handles Excel, PowerPoint, and Word files, as well as an assortment of image file formats (such as .jpg, .png, .gif, .tif, .bmp, and .emf).

The basic operation couldn’t be simpler. Choose the files that you want to compress and select the compression strength (low, standard, or strong), and FileMinimizer quickly goes about its work, taking only a few seconds to compress each individual file.

By default it keeps your original file and creates a new one, appending the text ‘(FILEminimizer)’ to the name. However, you can tell the program to overwrite your original file, and you can also have the utility apply a different name rather than appending the ‘(FILEminimizer)’ label.

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Now, your PC will operate smoothly by using Error Repair Professional to identify and repair hidden errors inside your PC. With only a single click, it will scan your PC for any invalid registry entries and provides a list of the hidden errors found. You can then choose to selectively clean each item or automatically repair them all.

Features:

About Error Repair Professional
Windows Registry is the nerve center of your PC and problems with the Windows Registry are a common cause of Windows crashes and error messages. These problems can occur for many reasons including uninstalling software with poor un-installation routines, by missing or corrupt hardware drivers, improperly deleting files and orphaned startup programs. By using Error Repair Professional regularly to fix error in Windows registry, your system should not only be more stable but it will also help Windows boot faster.

How Error Repair Professional works?
Error Repair Professional via registry cleaner that uses high-performance error identification algorithms to quickly identify missing and invalid references in your Windows registry. It will safely clean and repair Windows registry problems with a few simple clicks and enable you to enjoy a cleaner and more efficient PC. Error Repair Professional will guarantee that you eliminate errors in the nerve center of your PC.

What’s Windows Registry?
The Windows registry is a database which stores settings and options for the operating system for Microsoft Windows 32-bit versions, 64-bit versions. It contains information and settings for all the hardware, software, users, and preferences of the PC. Whenever a user makes changes to “Control Panel” settings, or file associations, system policies, or installed software, the changes are reflected and stored in the registry.

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According to HP, the AirLife 100, which was developed for accessing the Web, takes the best of a smartphone and puts it into a netbook design.

The device turns on instantly, has up to 12 hours of battery life and up to 10 days of standby time. It comes with a customized touchscreen user interface, which features a new “tabbed” touch-enabled browser, a mechanism for zooming on Web pages and a touch optimized media suite.

The extended battery life comes courtesy of Qualcomm’s QSD8250 processor, said HP. The Snapdragon processor is used by a growing number of smartphones, including the Android-based Acer Liquid, the Google Nexus One and the upcoming Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

Like an Android-based smartphones, the AirLife 100 comes with support for GPS and Internet access using 3G and Wi-Fi. The design is standard netbook fare: the device has a 10.1-inch screen and a keyboard that is 92 percent the size of a regular one, according to HP.

Data is stored on a 16GB SSD (solid-state drive) or an SD card.

And the AirLife 100 will start shipping this spring in Europe, via a deal with operator Telefónica, which operates under the O2 brand in the U.K. and Germany. There is no information on pricing or availability in other countries yet.

With the HP’s Android-based smartphones, the additional smartphones, netbooks, and other devices with the OS will be shown at next week’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona.

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How to Hack Your Wii For Homebrew Apps and Games

Looking to do more with your Wii? The Homebrew Channel provides a thriving community of developers and users looking to bring some amazing new features to the aging Wii console, including emulation, DVD and game playback from other regions, and the ability to run Linux. Mike Keller provides instructions for installing Homebrew on your Wii, which is easier than ever thanks to the mature Homebrew scene. Game on!

AMD Details Speed, Power Saving Features of Fusion

Code-named Llano, the new quad-core AMD Fusion processor running at speeds in excess of 3.0 GHz is due for release in 2011. A hybrid chip that combines a graphics processor and a CPU on a single piece of silicon, Fusion’s integrated graphics processor will natively support DirectX 11, allowing users to view Blu-ray movies or play 3D games. While the heat output from all four cores on a Fusion chip could be 100 watts, AMD’s new power management capabilities allow more efficient control of the chip’s energy draw, ensuring a cool processing and gaming experience.

ATI Introduces Radeon HD 5570, Targets Small Desktop PCs

Right after announcing the affordable Radeon HD 5450 line of GPUs, ATI introduced the energy-efficient, high-performance Radeon HD 5570, which is geared toward small form factor PCs. The new card supports both Direct X 11 and OpenGL 3.2, can drive up to three monitors, and only draws 45 watts when under a full processing load. Newegg is selling the HD 5570s for around $85.

Rumor: Core i7 coming soon to MacBook Pro?

The Apple rumor mill is at it again, but this time it has nothing to do with mythical tablets: Instead, reports are circulating that Apple will release an updated MacBook Pro featuring Intel’s newest Core i7 chips. What leads credence to this rumor? A recent benchmark test spotted on the Geekbench Web site lists a system that identifies itself as a MacBookPro 6,1. Current MacBook Pros identify themselves with “5,x” codes.

Details include a 2.66GHz Core i7 processor and an unreleased build of Mac OS X (10.6.2 Build 10C3067; the current release is 10.6.2 build 10C540). However, the track record of the site that announced this rumor is spotty at best, so your guess is as good as ours as to the validity of this leak.

Ametrine Audio has announced the release of Fire and Ice, a new synthesizer powered by the Wusik-Engine. The concept was to make a synth with two personalities: The “Fire” section covers basses, stab, synth and lead sounds, whilst the “Ice” section features pads, keys, organs, bell-tones and arps. 160 main presets are included with 250 variations. Two brand new skins have also been developed for the Fire and Ice.

Fire and IceFire and Ice is available for Windows in the VST format.

Summary:

• Powered by the Wusik-Engine.
• 160 main presets with 250 variations.
• Custom made Bass, Stab, Synth, Lead, pads, Keys, Organs, Bell-tones and Arpeggio sounds:

-Bass and Stabs 44
-Synth and Leads 23
-Arp and Wave-sequences 20
-Pads and Strings 30
-Bell-tones 21
-Keys and Organs 22

• Windows Platform Only

System requirements:

Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT/XP/Vista, 128 MB RAM Recommended.

4.2 GB free hard disc space, VST compatible host software.

(Works Great in Logic Audio 5.5)

Install Note-

• Run WusikStation or FireAndIce
• Drug&Drop WusikPACK file to it.

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Microsoft Corp is set to announce the new mobile phone software on Monday, as it looks to wrestle back market share from Apple Inc’s iPhone and Research in Motion Ltd’s BlackBerry, said the source close to the company.

The world’s largest software company, which makes operating systems for phones made by HTC Corp, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Motorola Inc and others, is hoping to regain momentum in the fast-growing sector after a lackluster update to its mobile software in October.

The overhaul of Microsoft’s phone technology comes as it hemorrhages market share in the burgeoning smartphone market, which many see as the key to the future of communication and media.

Last year, Microsoft took an 8.8 percent of the global smartphone operating system market, according to technology analysis firm Canalys, down from 13.9 percent the year before.

It trails Symbian, the system used on Nokia phones, which has 47.2 percent of the market, RIM’s BlackBerry with 20.8 percent and Apple’s iPhone with 15.1 percent.

Microsoft also faces competition from Google Inc’s new Android system, which already has a 4.7 percent share of the market.

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According to the firm, Android’s steady new application growth over the second half of 2009 closed the gap against the iPhone, reaching as many as one out of every three new applications starts within Flurry for December, the recent spike in Apple iPad support has swung the pendulum back in Apple’s favor to a level not seen at Flurry in six months.

For iPad, unprecedented surge in support for iPad is a positive early indicator for its commercial potential, Flurry adds. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the iPhone OS saw a surge after the iPad announcement. Developers are always happy to get a shiny new piece of hardware to play with. And, by most accounts, the additional real estate that the iPad provides is an enormous asset. There’s also just naturally bound to be excitement surrounding any new Apple announcement for the foreseeable future.

Here, question is what, if any, affect Android tablets have had on the numbers. The devices were all over the place at CES, but, not surprisingly, have failed to capture the public’s attention in the same manner at the iPad.

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Fabric Batteries

Stanford University researchers have developed a way to effectively make batteries out of fabric. The method used is similar to the one developed to make batteries out of paper. It’s pretty out-there, but it could be the first step in developing clothing that could be used to charge portable electronics like MP3 players or smartphones.

The process involves coating polyester fibers with a special “ink” made of single-walled carbon nanotubes. These nanotubes are electrically conductive microscopic carbon fibers, and are only 1/50,000 the width of single human hair.

After coating, the fabrics become porous conductors that can conduct electricity. These treated electronic textiles should be as flexible and elastic as untreated cotton and polyester. The conductive textiles retain their electronic capabilities even after multiple laundry cycles.

The next step is to replace the expensive carbon nanotubes with the less costly graphene, another form of carbon that comes from graphite oxide. No mention on whether or not the carbon nanotube or graphene “inks” can be made available in colors other than black.

Flexible, Wearable Displays

Recent research in stamping inorganic LEDs into fabrics introduces more possibilities to make light-up clothing similar to Phillips’ Lumalive products. Inorganic LEDs usually need to be cut and assembled for use in devices like cell phones. But newer methods allows them to be fitted onto all kinds of materials including rubber, plastic, and glass. Remember the light-up shoe craze from several years back? Imagine pants that lit up as you walked. Not appealing? Tell that to your kids.

These new developments should give designers more options. For example, the electronic Rock Guitar Shirt and Rock Drums Shirt at thinkgeek.com, could be made even more appealing without having to carry around a battery pack for your shirt. Other possibilities might be electronic billboards instead of logos on shirts, or an animated version of your favorite “I’m With Stupid” type shirt.

Textile batteries can be practical too. Heated clothing is one possible application: Textile batteries could allow such clothing articles–jackets, gloves, pants, and so forth that are similar in nature to an electric blanket–to power themselves instead of relying on a separate battery.

Joggers and athletes could also benefit from power-on-the-go clothing: pedometers, heart monitors and such could be incorporated into your clothing, for example.

What kinds of new fashions would you guys like to see? I’m fine with any technology that doesn’t point us towards those stupid Battlestar Galactica tanktops.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com

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Omnifone, which already provides its service to the likes of British pay TV Company BSkyB and Vodafone, said it would debut its service on the Google Nexus One and HTC handsets at the Mobile World Congress industry event in Barcelona.

Immediate access will be offered by MusicStation for Android to all users on the Android platform to a catalog of over 6.5 million tracks, with additional features such as search and discovery systems, social networking aspects and news updates.

According to Omnifone Chief Executive Rob Lewis, Omnifone is delighted to be able to deliver the richest and most sophisticated music capability on mobile, and one that will work effortlessly on any manufacturer’s Android device.

Mobile operators and handset makers have all started to offer music services in a bid to increase customer loyalty and grow revenues.

In Barcelona, Spain, South Korea’s Samsung and Swedish-Japanese group Sony Ericsson showed their new multi-media handsets on the eve of the industry’s biggest annual gathering, the Mobile World Congress.

The two companies trail far behind Nokia, iPhone-maker Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) in the market for smartphones, devices with Internet, emails, music players and games.

The touch-screen Samsung Wave, to be launched in May, is the first device fitted with company’s new mobile operating system, Bada, which was unveiled late last year.

Samsung Electronics head of mobile communications business, JK Shin, this is a new era, the smartphone era, said at a launch party which featured a huge video presentation with splashing waves and a live dance act.

According to Shin, Samsung is committed to making the smartphone era available for everyone and also committed to making the smartphone era a true democracy for billions of people on all continents in all corners of the world.

Jean-Philippe Illarine, telecommunications marketing director at Samsung Electronics France, told AFP the Wave would be the crown jewel of about 15 smartphones that Samsung will launch this year. No sale price was released.

With a 20.1 percent share of the mobile phone market last year, Samsung is the world’s number two mobile phone maker after Finland’s Nokia, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

But it only captured 3.2 percent of the smartphone market in the third quarter of last year, far behind Nokia, RIM and Apple, according to research firm Gartner.

“Smartphones are sort of our weak point,” Illarine said. Consumers have shown a big appetite for smartphones.

In the last quarter of last year, the global shipments of handsets grew by 10 percent as compared to the same period in 2008, smartphones jumped 30 percent, according to Strategy Analytics. And while handset sales are expected to grow by nine percent this year, smartphones will skyrocket by 46 percent, according to Gartner.

The Samsung Wave has a 3.3-inch long touch screen with a five-megapixel camera, high-definition video and the all-important applications store, which allows users to download games and news programs.

The Samsung applications store, which was launched in France, Britain and Italy last year, would be available in more than 50 countries this year, Shin said.

This year, the Wave is among around five Banda smartphones to be launched, according to Illarine. Samsung will also release five or six other smartphones this year powered by Internet giant Google’s Android operating system and a few more with Microsoft Windows.

Sony Ericsson, the world’s fifth biggest mobile phone maker and a pioneer of the smartphone segment, has lost ground in recent years. Its chief, Bert Nordberg, conceded in Barcelona on Sunday that the company had gone through a “turbulent year”.

The company unveiled its first Android smartphone, Xperia X10, in November. On Sunday, it displayed its touch-screen “little brothers”, the X10 Mini and the X10 Pro.

Sony Ericsson will also launch Vivaz Pro, which includes high-definition video and works under Nokia’s Symbian operating system.

Christopher Tarnovsky, the former US military security specialist, found a weakness in Infineon’s SLE66 CL PE and presented the results of his hack at the Black Hat 2010 computer security conference. The Infineon chip is used in PCs, satellite TV hardware, and gaming consoles to protect secure data.

According to Tarnovsky, who works for security firm Flylogic, the cracking the Infineon chip, which has a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) designation, was a long process involving an electronic microscope (which retails for around $70,000). The attack on the chip took six months to plan and execute, and it involved dissolving the outer part of the chip with acid and using tiny needles to intercept the chip’s programming instructions.

Tarnovsky still had to navigate the chip’s software after gaining physical access to the chip. According to the Associated Press, Tarnovsky remarked that “This chip is mean, man–it’s like a ticking time bomb if you don’t do something right.”

Infineon was aware that a physical hack was possible, but a company representative notes that an attack of this sort would require resources beyond that of the typical cracker. Joerg Borchert, a vice president of security at Infineon told the AP that this attack requires a combination of physical access to the chip, a smart hacker, and expensive equipment, so the risk is manageable, and you are just attacking one computer.

Will we start seeing peripherals for the Xbox that take advantage of this hack? Maybe, but don’t count on it, unless you know hackers who are willing to shell out almost $100,000 for the electron microscope and other equipment they would need in order to compromise the Infineon chip.

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On Thursday, the organization announced that OpenOffice 3.2 is now available for download.

The latest version of the productivity suite- which is intended to be an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office- boasts faster start-up times, ODF support, proprietary file support, support for postscript-based OpenType fonts, and more.

The release comes after OpenOffice.org hit a milestone of 300 million downloads over the course of its 10-year history, 100 million of which occurred from the organization’s main Web site.

The suite includes basic components like word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, and formula and database capabilities. Improvements to those components the version 3.2 boasts, including the Calc spreadsheet. The Chart module, meanwhile, received a “usability makeover” and includes new chart types.

Some people are currently locked in to other personal productivity tools – maybe by corporate IT policy, or by tie-in to other legacy software. For everyone else, we want OpenOffice.org to be the 2010 office software of choice, and 3.2 takes us another step towards that goal,” said Florian Effenberger, marketing project lead of OpenOffice.org.

Version 3.2 is available for download on the organization’s Web site.

The world’s No.1 Internet search engine, Google has launched Buzz earlier this week in a bid to tap into the fast growing social networking market dominated by companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Similar to Twitter and Facebook, Buzz allows users to broadcast messages and share photos and videos with friends and colleagues online. But unlike those services, Buzz is built directly into Google’s Gmail and the product automatically creates each user’s social network based on the person’s most-frequently emailed contacts.

According to Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou, they have considered among all other features that they add to Buzz in the future, to create a stand-alone experience in addition to it being in Gmail.

In the days since the product launch, a number of online blogs and publications have argued that the Buzz-Gmail link creates a privacy problem since the Buzz contact network is publicly viewable by default and could expose people’s private contacts.

Google announced Thursday, a couple of changes on its corporate blog designed to address some of the concerns, including making it easier for Buzz users to keep their contacts list private.

The blog Search Engine Land quoted Google Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz as saying the company was considering removing Buzz from Gmail, but Google’s Katsarou said that that was not the case and the blog later reported that Buzz would remain in Gmail.

In the blogs posted, Google said that more than 9 million posts and comments have been created on Buzz since its launch and that tens of millions of people have “checked Buzz out.”

Gmail is the world’s third most popular Web email service, with 176.5 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore, behind Microsoft Corp’s Windows Web email services and Yahoo Inc’s email.

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Once users have installed the program, they see a screen, falsely informing them that their PC is infected with several types of malware, according to researchers at Symantec. That’s typical of this type of program. What’s unusual, however, is the fact that the free trial version of Live PC Care includes a big yellow “online support” button.

Clicking the button connects the victim with an agent, who will answer questions about the product via instant message.

According to Symantec, the agent is no automated script, but in fact a live person. This lends an “air of legitimacy” to the program, said Marc Fossi, a manager of development with Symantec Security Response.

The tech support doesn’t help much, though, said Symantec, the support staff simply tries to convince victims to shell out between US$30 and $100 for the product.

This isn’t the first time a fake security product has been spotted offering tech support. Another company called Innovative Marketing operated a call center to support its security products, including a program called WinFixer. According to security experts, Innovative Marketing’s tech support technicians acted in the same way as Live PC Care’s, trying to reassure victims that they were buying a legitimate product.

Rogue antivirus products can, sometimes, lower security settings on a victim’s computer. At best, they offer a false sense of security because the products never protect computers from the latest security threats.

Over the past year, rogue antivirus has been a major headache for users. It is often installed via annoying pop-up ads that try to convince the victim that something is wrong with their PC. Symantec tracked 43 million rogue AV installation attempts between July 2008 and July 2009.

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The cofounder of Opera Software, Jon von Tetzchner said he is “thrilled” to offer the preview and added that the software provides a “fast, feature-rich” experience for iPhone users. Opera on the iPhone brings the company “one step closer” to its mission of “bringing the web to the world”.

Will Apple Approve?

However, the big question is whether Apple will approve Opera as an iPhone application on its App Store. Apple currently only accepts browsers that run on the WebKit engine — the same engine that powers Apple’s Safari browser.

But Apple has gotten into hot water with the Federal Trade Commission over its initial refusal to certify Voice over Internet Protocol applications, Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, noted. This time around, Apple will be hard-pressed to exclude competitors.

Enderle said, Given Apple is under FTC review for their application approval process, I don’t think they can refuse this application — but they could break it or limit its capability. “For instance, both the ARM processor and the Opera browser support flash on other platforms, but Apple will likely make sure Flash doesn’t work on Opera any better than it does on Safari on the iPhone.”

“Changing defaults will likely be difficult as well,” Enderle added, “so that it is the Safari browser that opens when you click on a link. If Opera gets on the phone, it is likely that [Google's] Chrome will soon follow, and Apple will do whatever it can to make sure that never happens.”

Advanced Features

Currently, Opera Mini 5 in beta boasts quite a few advanced features over Safari, including tabbed browsing so users can view several sites simultaneously and “easily jump from one to another,” the company said. Another feature is Speed Dial, a display of frequently used pages so users can launch a favorite site with just one click, a feature Safari and Chrome offer in desktop versions but not on smartphones. There’s also Opera Link, which synchronizes bookmarks and Speed Dial between the user’s mobile phone and desktop computer, and Download Manager, which manages downloads from the browser.

According to Opera, its browser offers an intuitive, easy-to-user interface, and is much faster than other browsers because it compresses web pages as much as 90 percent before downloading. Other features include adaptive zoom, in-page searching, landscape mode, and kinetic scrolling.

A senior research analyst at IDC, Raman Llamas said, Opera has a great browser and offers a great experience.

Lucky in 2010?

In 2008, von Tetzchner told The New York Times that Opera had started work on an iPhone version of Opera but stopped development because of Apple’s restrictive developer agreements. Apple initially banned all third-party browsers but finally allowed other browsers based on WebKit.

Around this time, von Tetzchner clearly feels he will have more luck with Apple. Indeed, given that Opera is making a big deal about the availability of Opera Mini 5 for iPhone, Opera may have already received Apple’s blessing.

According to Christen Krogh, Opera’s chief development officer, Opera Mini is compatible with every requirement for the App Store. Krogh also said, there aren’t any identical applications on the iPhone, discounting Safari as an identical application. Opera Mini is a different kind of browser, so we cannot see any conflict with any requirements in the App Store.

Krogh said Opera hasn’t yet submitted the application to the App Store. “We’re comfortable enough [with] where Opera Mini is at to show it to select partners and journalists,” he said. “It won’t take long before we’re ready to submit it to the App Store.”

In contrast to CEO Larry Ellison’s well-publicized mocking of cloud computing, the move stands, which he has deemed a rebranding and conflation of existing technologies. But it’s not as if the ongoing tour wasn’t telegraphed.

During a recent webcast on how the company plans to use the assets it gained from the purchase of Sun Microsystems, executives indicated Oracle’s main focus will be on helping customers build private clouds. In 2008, Ellison himself said, albeit with sarcasm, that Oracle would make cloud computing announcements in the future.

Ellison said, “If orange is the new pink we’ll make orange blouses. I’m not going to fight this thing”. “Maybe we’ll do an ad. I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than … change the wording on some of our ads.”

But the road show will apparently go further than that by detailing in depth Oracle’s particular take on cloud computing, a label that has been slapped on everything from virtualized, scalable pools of computing infrastructure, such as that sold by Amazon Web Services, to SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications.

Events’ attendees will be able to “break through the haze” surrounding the topic, as “Oracle experts” clarify how companies can take advantage of “enterprise cloud computing.” The topics will include the tips to develop a private cloud, how to move current IT environments to a cloud-like structure, and how to use public cloud options such as AWS.

According to 451 Group analyst China Martens, the company simply has to stake a public claim in cloud computing given how pervasive the market forces in this direction are. One issue facing Oracle is how to include the Sun technologies in its plans, and that work is probably not complete, she added.

Already the company has made it clear that it has no immediate designs on Amazon’s turf, as it has abandoned Sun’s plans for a public cloud service. According to Martens, Oracle has sometime to formulate its own answer.

She added, whatever [Ellison] says is going to get lots and lots of play, and sometimes he says whatever comes into his head. And Oracle has to pull back and rephrase that. That’s what they’re doing, but slowly and carefully. They can set their own pace but have to show they’re listening to the market and [are] not in a bubble.

The RC stage is considered the last step prior to a general release, with developers able to offer final feedback. The launching of Visual Studio Microsoft has scheduled the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 for April 12, after having scrapped an initial March 22 launch date to work on performance issues found by beta testers.

The downloadable release candidate was offered to MSDN subscribers on Monday, while non-members can get it on Wednesday. Visual Studio 2010 features capabilities for developing applications for the Microsoft SharePoint collaboration platform, Windows 7, and the Windows Azure cloud platform; .Net Framework 4 offers features such as a reduction in size.

According to S. Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft developer division, the goal of RC is to get more feedback from you and ensure it has addressed the performance issues in the product. RC has made significant performance improvements specifically as it relates to loading solutions, typing, building and debugging.

General Manager of the Microsoft developer division, Jason Zander said in a blog post that Microsoft has received a lot of feedback on the Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.

In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with [Visual Studio 2008] and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product, said Zander. Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intellisense), designers (Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.

Zander said, in December Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry and I made the hard call to extend the Beta 2 period to continue to drive improvements into the product. Zander also added that Microsoft also is working with third-party companies with Visual Studio add-ins, such as Resharper and CodeRush, to make sure the environment works well.

Developers can report feedback on the RC.

In other software development-related happenings at Microsoft, the company and NBC this week are reporting that the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in technology for rich Internet applications will again be used for online Olympics video coverage this month at NBCOlympics.com. Use of Silverlight for the 2010 Vancouver winter games follows the use of Silverlight for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

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Anyway, not a big deal see the Opera Mini simulator, or check out these five reasons Opera Mini could become your favorite iPhone Web browser, if Apple approves it:

Super Speed

According to claim made by Opera, its mobile Web browser can cut the iPhone’s Web data traffic by 90 percent, thanks to a method of compressing images and text on its own servers. This would, of course, improve the loading time of Web pages as well.

Home Page

Forget loading up a new browser window with nothing in it. Opera Mini’s “Speed Dial” features lets you customize a grid of nine favorite Web sites for quick loading without visiting your list of bookmarks.

Find in Page

The searching inability within a Web page for text is Safari’s most glaring omission. In Opera Mini, it’s as simple as clicking the Tools icon, then clicking “Find in Page” and typing whatever you’re looking for. Sorry Apple, sometimes Web pages just need to be searched.

Greater Flexibility

Here are some other things you can’t do in Safari, all of which can be controlled or enabled in Opera Mini’s settings menu: Saved passwords, adjustable image quality, full screen browsing, adjustable font sizes and customizable skins.

Free, Presumably

Experts of iPhone might point out that there are already plenty of other browsers to choose from, but the vast majority of them cost money. Opera Mini is a free download for other phones, so I assume it’ll be free if Apple approves it for the iPhone. That alone could make it the most attractive Safari alternative yet.

The forthcoming iPad tablet computer of Apple Inc, it will cost as little as $229.35 for the company to produce, according to an estimate on Wednesday from research house iSuppli

The group conducted what it called a “virtual teardown” of the iPad, since the device is not yet available and component suppliers have not been announced.

Apple’s iPad that resembles a large iPhone and uses the same operating system will go on sale as early as next month, as the company looks to define a new category of mobile devices.

For the $499 iPad — the lowest-cost model, which features 16 gigabytes of flash memory — iSuppli estimated the total materials cost at $219.35, with a $10 manufacturing cost.

The priciest iPad will cost around $335 to produce, while the mid-range model will cost roughly $287, according to the group.

In the iPad, the most expensive component is the 9.7-inch display and touchscreen, at an estimated cost of $80, according to the estimate.

Analysts expect Apple to ship somewhere between 2 million and 5 million iPad units in the first year.

Last week in a blog posted, Oracle’s Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president for tools and middleware, cited java.net as the destination for projects being moved off of the Project Kenai hosting site that had been set up by newly acquired Sun Microsystems.

According to Farrell, their plan is to shut down kenai.com and focusing efforts is on java.net as the hosted development community. Farrell also said, we are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology. This means that any project currently hosted on kenai.com will be able to continue as you are on java.net. We are still working out the technical details, but the goal is to make this migration as seamless as possible for the current kenai.com projects.

Farrell advised users to stay on kenai.com for now, let Oracle work through details, and wait for the company to report back later this month.

According to the company, Kenai would be shut down by April 2 and projects should be moved by then.

“I think we did a poor job at communicating our plans for Kenai.com to you. I would like to remedy that now. Our strategy is simple. We don’t believe it makes sense to continue investing in multiple hosted development sites that are basically doing the same thing,” Farrell said.

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SOA refers to a systems design approach that eschews monolithic applications and instead designates various processes, such as running a credit check on a customer, as interoperable “services” that allow code to be flexibly reused.

AmberPoint’s software is used to monitor the performance of SOA-driven applications and help users solve problems. According to an FAQ document Oracle released Monday (PDF), it is “highly complementary” to Oracle’s own SOA software and will “enable increased control and performance of critical applications across the enterprise.

It’s not yet clear how the deal will affect road maps for AmberPoint’s products. A review is under way and more details will be forthcoming, according to Oracle. And investment in the products is expected to increase.

According to Tony Baer on the On Strategies Perspective blog, AmberPoint was one of a dwindling group of still-standing independents delivering runtime governance for SOA environments.

He added, the move “patches some gaps in its Enterprise Manager offering, not only in SOA runtime governance, but also with business transaction management — and potentially — better visibility to non-Oracle systems”.

And in the first half of this year, the deal is expected to close.

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According to IBM, the Power7 chip has up to eight cores, with each core able to run four threads. A Power7 chip can run 32 tasks simultaneously, which is quadruple the number of cores on the older Power6 chip. The Power7 will also run up to eight times more threads than Power6 cores.

During a press event in New York on Monday, Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM’s Power Systems unit, said Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz. The chip will come with four, six or eight cores.

The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. The company has made memory-level improvements that should enable the processor to execute tasks faster.

Power7 systems will deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but be four times more energy efficient, according to Mauri. The systems will run operating systems including AIX and enterprise Linux offered by Red Hat and Suse.

The new chip also has TurboCore technology, which allows customers to crank up the speed of active cores for performance gains. The technology also puts memory and bandwidth from eight cores behind the four active cores to drive up the performance gains per core.

The company also launched four Power7-based servers. IBM Power 780 and Power 770 high-end servers are based on modular designs and come with up to 64 Power7 cores. The IBM Power 755 will support up to 32 Power7 cores. The company also launched the 750 Express server. The Power 750 Express and 755 will ship on Feb. 19, while the Power 770 and 780 will become available on March 16.

In addition to boosting performance, the Power7 servers can save more energy. A technology called Unique Intelligent Energy allows parts of a system to be switched off to reduce power drawn. The technology also allows the processor clock speed to be cranked down on a single server or across a pool of multiple servers, which can reduce power consumed.

Representative of IBM declined to provide server pricing, and said it would be competitively priced. Rod Adkins, senior vice president of IBM’s Systems and Technology group, said the servers will deliver better performance and bang for the buck than existing Power6 systems.

IBM officials called the chip the “world’s fastest processor,” but emphasized that system performance will be measured by the ability to deliver “intelligent” performance.

Adkins said, “As we conceived this Power7 system… raw performance was a given. What you will see is a tremendous focus around … intelligent performance”. He also added that a mass of data will flood servers as computing expands to devices like mobile devices and smart meters.

This data will need to be collected, processed and analyzed on the fly. For example, collecting data will allow utilities to instantly analyze energy usage patterns, and new ways to acquire energy from multiple sources.

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Union called new license, unde4r which Microsoft would charge enterprises the same for software whether it is hosted on-premises or in the cloud, according to a report in SDTimes earlier this week that quoted unnamed Microsoft channel partners who had been told of the program. No prices were listed.

The new license would help reduce complexity for large companies with workers with widely varying degrees of software usage. Heavy and regular users of a Microsoft app might require an on-premise server version, while light users can make do with a hosted version from Microsoft.

According to SDTimes, the union license would either apply to Microsoft Office run locally and hosted on the just-launched Windows Azure, or to Exchange and SharePoint, which Microsoft offers in software and hosted form. The latter is via Microsoft’s year-and-a-half-old Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

“Union” could be a new bundle that combines Office 2010 (on-premise) with Office Web Apps and, to store the data from the latter, SharePoint Online, according to Paul DeGroot, an analyst with the independent research firm, Directions on Microsoft.

It would allow Microsoft to maximize its revenue without driving customers toward cheap and free solutions such as Google Apps, Zoho and VMware’s recently acquired Zimbra e-mail app.

DeGroot wrote in an e-mail, Microsoft may ask the customer to pay for both ways, license plus subscription.

The new software, which competes with Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom and ACD Systems’s ACDSee, borrows features from Apple’s consumer iPhoto application.

Notable among these are that product’s Faces and Places features, which let users organize and find photos based on the people in them and their locations. A face expands and enhances the face detection and recognition technology introduced in iPhoto, according to Apple, retaining the iPhoto Faces feature set. It embeds those names as keywords when exporting images. Places, as the name suggests, includes support for GPS-based geotagging of images.

A new Brushes tool mimics that in Adobe’s Photoshop, allowing users to apply adjustments and enhancements to part of a photo based on previous actions. And new Adjustment Presets let you apply one-click professional effects to photos. And a new slideshow feature lets you build presentations that can include HD video and background soundtracks with simple drag-and-drop. In all, Apple claims more than 200 new features.

Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Philip Schiller said, the millions of people love using iPhoto to organize, edit, and share their digital photos.

Aperture 3 is designed for both professionals who edit and manage massive libraries of photos and iPhoto users who want to take their photos further with easy-to-use tools such as Brushes and Adjustment Presets. The Mac-only software sells for $199 direct or $99 for upgrades from Aperture 2.

And at apple.com/aperture, a free 30-day trial download is available.

The new platform for delivering mobile services, which is based on the Starent ST40, is being announced less than a week before the Mobile World Congress, one of the biggest wireless conventions in the world. Cisco will also use the conference to demonstrate the platform, which is available now.

As mobility becomes a key part of data services for enterprises and consumers, equipment providers are beefing up infrastructure for delivering mobile services consistently and profitably. Reaching a subscriber who may be moving or have a thin connection presents special challenges, as well as opportunities to target content to them. Last year, Cisco acquired Starent for about US$2.9 billion as part of its bid to lead in this area.

According to a senior manager of solutions marketing who joined Cisco from Starent, John Morgan, the ASR 5000 is a rebranded ST40 but also incorporates the Cisco Unified Reporting System, which brings together various pieces of information about subscribers and networks for easy access by administrators. It’s the first of many new elements that Cisco intends to incorporate into the platform over time, Morgan said.

The device combines several network components that are used to connect subscribers to the Internet and mobile data services. In addition, it lets the mobile operator use information about subscribers’ service plans, locations, activities and current network connections to personalize applications and make them run better. The ASR 5000 will also tie mobile services into a variety of other capabilities on Cisco networks, such as the company’s Medianet concept, designed to adapt multimedia content for different devices and connections.

Morgan said, the platform’s capabilities, in turn, could open the door to more personalized advertising and make mobile services more attractive to deliver, Morgan said.

For example, a mobile operator could offer a service that blocks objectionable content on a subscriber’s phone when their child is using it. When the user moves from a 3G (third-generation) to a faster 4G network or Wi-Fi, the system could automatically adjust settings so that a video continues seamlessly and looks good all the way through, Morgan said. The carrier could also deliver ads based on the subscriber’s location and recent browsing activity.

About three years ago, the DCS unit was formed to help Dell get more business from large Internet firms. Its engineers often spend several weeks on-site with those companies to design low-cost, low-power systems that meet the special requirements of their search, social networking and other Web applications.

In an interview, Dell executives said that hands-on role means the DCS group designs servers only for large companies, such as Ask.com and Microsoft’s Azure division, which order tens of thousands of servers per year, but that’s about to change.

Dell will turn some of those custom servers into standardized products and sell them to companies that order lower volumes of systems later this year, including enterprises building “private cloud” environments in their data centers, and a second tier of smaller Internet companies. They will likely be sold under a new brand, CloudEdge.

Andy Rhodes, a director with Dell’s DCS group, said “What we’ve found is, there are a whole bunch of other customers who want access to those designs but who are not buying in those types of quantities”. “So the big thing we’re solving now, and we’ll talk more publicly about over the next couple of months, is how to provide more of that capability to many, many more customers.”

Dell isn’t discussing specific products yet and is still working out details, such as whether the servers will be sold by DCS or through Dell’s standard server channels. But the goal is to offer the designs to a wider market, even while DCS continues to do custom work for very large customers..

DCS aims to build highly energy-efficient servers that pack a lot of computing power into a small space. The systems often forego redundant power supplies and fans, for example, which saves on component costs and energy bills.

That also makes the servers less resilient to failure — a trade-off large Internet companies are willing to make for lower operational costs. Companies like Google and Yahoo design their Web applications to run on such “fail in place” architectures, so that workloads are rerouted around failed servers with little or no disruption to services.

According to Barton George, cloud evangelist for Dell, the main thing with these hyperscale systems is that the availability and resiliency are baked into the customers’ applications rather than into the hardware.

Release Candidate 2 of ASP.Net MVC 2 follows a release candidate build shipped in December that has released last week, according to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Microsoft developer division, in an entry on his ASP.Net blog. The release is built for use with Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5.

Guthrie said, the second release candidate] includes a bunch of bug fixes, performance work, and some final API and behavior additions/changes. Significant performance tuning improvements have been made, such as lambda-based strongly typed HTML helpers being much faster.

And among the other changes between the first and second release candidates is an ASP.Net MVC 2 validation features that performs model-validation instead of input validation, according to Guthrie. This means when a developer uses model binding, all model properties are validated instead of just validations on changed values of a model.

Also, the jQuery 1.4.1 JavaScript library is included by default.

According to Guthrie, visual studio now features scaffolding support for Delete action methods within controllers and Delete views as well. Guthrie added, they will shortly releasing the Visual Studio 2010 RC (Release Candidate), which will be available for everyone to download. It will include ASP. NET MVC 2 support built-in.

According to Microsoft, ASP.Net MVC 2 is an update to ASP.Net MVC 1.0 that shipped in March 2009. Yet Microsoft has not announced a final release date for ASP.Net MVC 2.

The MVC framework “encourages developers to maintain a clear separation of concerns among the responsibilities of the application — the UI logic using the view, user-input handling using the controller, and the domain logic using the model,” Microsoft said on a download page for the release candidate.
“ASP.Net MVC applications are easily testable using techniques such as test-driven development.”

David Litchfield, a researcher at NGS Consulting, demonstrated how a user can subvert security to elevate his privileges to take complete control over Oracle 11g. Altogether Litchfield announced this was his final day at NGS, saying he was considering changing his focus to computer forensics.

Researcher claims hack of processor used to secure Xbox 360, other products

Currently reported, Litchfield’s discovery shows that due to the way Java has been implemented in Oracle 11g Release 2, there’s an overly permissive default grant that makes it possible for a low privileged user to grant him arbitrary permissions. In a demo of Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, he showed how to execute commands that led to the user granting himself system privileges to have “complete control over the database.” Litchfield also showed how it’s possible to bypass Oracle Label Security used for managing mandatory access to information at different security levels.

Until Oracle remedies the zero-day flaws he exposed, Litchfield advised Oracle 11g administrators to revoke public execute access to certain Java-based functions. He said he expects Oracle to soon release patches for the problems he identified and he intends to publish a white paper on the topic.

According to Litchfield, he thinks Oracle probably deserves a “B+” for security in the current version of its database, which he characterized as an improvement over the previous version, but criticized Oracle for not finding these problems in the requirements and design phases of the product. He added Oracle appears to be relying too much on security tools to catch problems after its product is shipped.

According to a Friday posting on the Southwest blog, the discount US airline has signed a deal with Row 44 after a number of delays in order to become the latest carrier to offer wireless Internet access in the cabins of its airlines.

Southwest has made its name as a no-frills airline and will be adding Wi-Fi after several other U.S. airlines have at least begun their deployments. For example, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines all provide the service on some planes, and the smaller AirTran Airways and Virgin America offer it throughout their fleets.

But Southwest, like Alaska Airlines, is taking a different route than most carriers, using the satellite-based network of Row 44 rather than Aircell’s GoGo service, which uses 3G to link planes to the Internet. Row 44 received a U.S. Federal Communications Commission license just last month to commercially deploy its latest system, the one Southwest will be using. Southwest and Alaska at one time had planned to launch trials with Row 44 in 2008 but didn’t formally announce their tests until February 2009. Now, Southwest says it has finished testing and signed a contract to buy equipment from the company.

Airlines haven’t provided many hard numbers on the use of in-flight Wi-Fi, which typically costs about $6 for a short flight. During the holiday season in the U.S., Google sponsored a promotion that made Wi-Fi free on Virgin America and in 47 airports around the country that program ended Jan. 15.

According to Southwest, it would disclose the pricing of its service in April. Under the airline’s deal with Row 44, the airline agrees to deliver a certain amount of revenue to Row 44 but can set its own prices for customers, said Gregg Fialcowitz, president and co-founder of Row 44.

Fialcowitz said, the Row 44 service is designed to deliver an average of about 10Mbpsfor all the users on the plane to share. Southwest won’t allow voice calls over the Internet and will filter inappropriate content by preventing passengers from visiting certain sites, according to Southwest spokeswoman Whitney Eichinger.

Row 44, based in Westlake Village, California, currently covers North America, from Alaska through Canada and the continental U.S., Fialcowitz said. By the middle of this year it will provide coverage across Europe, with Norwegian Air Shuttle offering its service, as well as supporting services on trans-Atlantic flights and in Africa, he said. By the end of 2012, Row 44 expects to offer service around the world.

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Originally, the new Itanium 9300 processor was slated to release early 2009 but that timetable slipped twice last year. The timing turned out to benefit Intel a bit as Tukwila comes out the same day as IBM’s long-anticipated new Power7 processor .

An analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, Dan Olds said its good that Intel finally stepped up and delivered Tukwila and that the chip is shipping with the promised tweaks that caused the delays. “However, competitors haven’t been standing still. IBM had two revs of its Power processor during this time, with the second rev coming out today. So, Intel is still playing catch-up in this market.”

Olds added that IBM has moved a step ahead of Intel with new Power processor family. He said, the rivalry in the enterprise space is getting hotter and hotter. And with this between Intel and IBM, it’s getting interesting.

Intel officials today noted that the Itanium 9300 chip has two billion transistors and four cores, and that’s up from two cores in the previous Itanium iteration. It also has eight threads per processor. And the chip maker noted that, compared to the last Itanium release, this new processor has up to 800 percent the interconnect bandwidth and up to 500 percent the memory bandwidth.

According to Olds, the computer builders and corporate IT shops are likely more interested in the capabilities of the Itanium 9300 processor family than the reasons for the delays — that Intel changed its design mid-stream. He also added that the Itanium line has been rife with delays from the start, which has frustrated the hardware OEMs that have relied on the chip for their systems. “However, Intel discussed a four-year roadmap for Itanium today, saying that they’d be delivering new chips about every two years. It’s important that Intel hit those milestones.”

Intel today said it’s committed to putting out at least two more generations of Itanium — one in two years and the next in four years.

The code name for the next Itanium processor, Poulson is expected to add an advanced multi-core architecture, instruction-level and hyper-threading enhancements and new stability features, the chip maker said.

Intel also pointed that it’ll refresh its two-socket systems with Westmere EX processors later this quarter and it’ll launch an embedded storage chip, code-named Jasper Forest, in the next several days. Intel also noted that it’ll launch an eight-core Nehalem EX chip later this quarter.

Beta-based on OpenOffice 3.x. that released on Thursday, is the first version of Symphony. Users have been asking the company to make Symphony’s features more competitive with Microsoft Office, the dominant productivity suite among corporate users. Lotus claims more than 12 million users of Symphony, which is available in 28 languages.

Jeanette Barlow, manager of Lotus Symphony, said the OpenOffice 3 code means we pick up a lot of improvements both from the ODF file format as well as the core code base. She says it is the most significant step forward since the first Symphony beta was released in 2007.

IBM Lotus, along with many others, is trying to provide alternatives to Microsoft Office, which has dominated for years. With companies segmenting their user base and assessing needs, many are looking at less expensive alternatives to Office.

One corporate hook in Symphony 3.0 is support of VB Marcos, which lets users run on Symphony customized applications built on Microsoft Office software.

Also new is support for ODF 1.2, which enhances existing Symphony access features for Word 2007, and audio/visual features that let users add content directly to slides and documents. Lotus also has added digital signature support, editing features, graphic objects rendering, richer Java and LotusScript APIs, and an add-on installer for Notes.

It also continues support for the .docx format that was at the heart of the i4i patent infringement suit against Microsoft.

Symphony 3.0 represents the first push from Lotus to update its Symphony tools, and the company plans to follow with two more releases in the coming 12 to 14 months. IBM Lotus plans to follow up Vienna with a “feature enablement and maintenance” update code-named Amsterdam by the October. The release will further refine VBA macros and Office 2007 support and include document filters for the HTML file format. The release also will include enhancements to APIs for presentation and documents, templates for business content, and central management tweaks centered on preference, policy and deployment.

In the first half of 2011, IBM Lotus plans to again update the Symphony suite with more VB macro enhancements, improve links to other Lotus software such as Foundations and Connections, and add more API enhancements.

Novell, which sponsors Mono, said the release features infrastructural capabilities designed to move Moonlight closer to the capabilities of Silverlight 3.

Novell VP Miguel de Icaza, who has been in charge of Moonlight and Mono projects, described the release as the first preview of Moonlight 3.0 in a blog posted this week.

Capabilities include MP4 demuxer support, although there are no codecs for it yet unless a developer builds them from source code and configures Moonlight to pick up codecs from ffmpeg.

Also featured is initial work on UI virtualization and a platform abstraction layer. The Moonlight core is now separated from the windowing system engine. This should make it possible for developers to port Moonlight that are not X11/Gtk+-centric, according to de Icaza.

The alpha release features 3.0 Binding/Binding Expression support and updates to APIs. An SVN (Subversion) of Silverlight 3.0 offers pixel shader support from developer David Reveman.

A beta version of Moonlight 3.0 is due this summer, followed by a final release in the fall, according to Novell. A download page for Moonlight 3.0 stresses that the project is only in an alpha stage and offers caution.

According to the page, this release should be considered alpha quality. There are various new subsystems in Silverlight 3 which expose new and different attack vectors, and the implementations of these subsystems have not yet been exercised or audited.

The page recommends that one should use this plugin on trusted sites on non-production computers. This situation will gradually evolve over the beta releases. According to the page, an up- to-date overview of Moonlight security features status can be found on Moonlight Security Status wiki page.

The Symbian Foundation has given the Symbian mobile operating system a second life, making the smartphone platform open source. The lifeline will revitalize the platform, and has benefits for Nokia, smartphone developers, Symbian handsets, and smartphone users.

With all of the hype and attention devoted to the iPhone, it’s easy to forget that Symbian is actually the leading smartphone operating system in the world. Symbian has nearly as much market share as the rest of its competitors combined–including the iPhone, with more than 330 million Symbian smartphones in use.

If Symbian is so dominant, why should Nokia spin it off, and why should the Symbian Foundation make it open source? The answer is that the Symbian is yesterday’s smartphone operating system. It may be dominant, but it’s declining.

Globally, Symbian has a huge footprint, but RIM and Apple have been steadily chipping away at it. It is somewhat geriatric compared with next-generation smartphone operating systems like iPhone and Android.

For the Symbian platform, the move to open source is a good move with benefits at all levels.

Here are five ways an open source Symbian is good for the smartphone platform:

1. Nokia. From the transition to open source, Nokia will be benefited because it pumps new blood into the waning platform without any effort or investment from Nokia.

While Nokia moves on to creating new devices built on its Linux-based Maemo platform, it will still gain a marketing and public relations boost from its relationship with Symbian and its dominant contribution to the development of the smartphone platform.

2. Smartphone Manufacturers. The availability of Symbian as an open source operating system gives smartphone manufacturers an alternative to Google’s Android. Android has demonstrated that an open source mobile operating system can be a very effective platform–enabling smartphone vendors to customize the OS, and develop robust devices at a lower cost (or higher profit margin) due to the lack of associated licensing fees.

Some manufacturers may be interested in leveraging an open source platform, yet be reluctant to partner too closely with Google. Even vendors who have embraced Android may be looking for alternatives now that Google has entered the market as a direct competitor with the Nexus One.

3. Developers. Making the source code of the Symbian operating system available as open source opens up a huge market for developers. Symbian will never achieve the rabid success of the iPhone App Store, but it’s hard to ignore a market of 330 million potential customers. Just based on economy of scale, even a mediocre Symbian app could be quite lucrative.

4. Businesses. Taking the developers benefit in a different direction, companies of all sizes will benefit from the ability to customize the platform, and develop unique applications to integrate Symbian smartphones with the enterprise, and streamline business processes.

For businesses that are already invested in Symbian-based smartphones, an open source Symbian can extend the useful life of the devices and enable the company to maximize the investment it’s already made rather than allocating precious budget dollars to smartphone upgrades.

5. Users. The 330 million Symbian users of the world get some new life as well. As developers embrace the open source Symbian and begin to create innovative applications for the smartphones, Symbian users will benefit from new features and functionality without having to trade their devices in for an iPhone or a Nexus One.

The transition to open source isn’t necessarily all wine and roses, though. As different developers take the open source code in different directions, there is a risk of the platform forking and creating some confusion as far as which Symbian will work with which Symbian smartphones.

Making Symbian open source may stop some of the hemorrhaging of market share Symbian has experienced, and it is almost guaranteed to extend the useful life of the platform. However, it is still yesterday’s smartphone platform and Symbian’s days are still numbered–the number is just higher now.

With vPro technology, Laptops and desktops enable IT administrators to use hardware-based technologies to manage and secure PCs through a wired or wireless network. The new vPro technologies will be in systems with Intel’s Core i5 and Core i7 processors, which were announced earlier this year, Intel executives said during a webcast on Thursday.

The vPro platform includes new hardware, which can solve a larger number of problems than prior vPro platforms. The technologies could help reduce support costs and the number of support visits to desktops, said Rick Echevarria, vice president of the Intel architecture group.

For example, a technology called Anti-Theft 2.0 uses software and hardware technology to remotely disable systems and lock access to data if a PC falls into wrong hands. A message can also be designed for disabled PCs that will be displayed after boot. This feature will be especially important to secure data on laptops, which can get easily stolen. The technology can also enable a disabled laptop remotely.

The new platform also includes technology called Keyboard-Video-Mouse Remote Control (KVM Remote Control), which gives support personnel better control of PCs remotely. Intel has introduced new hardware to enable the KVM capability, which helps establish a stable connection to remote PCs, Echevarria said. System administrators get pre-boot access to systems, which help solve a larger set of problems including disk and operating system failure.

Users will need to agree to start a KVM session with support personnel in order to maintain privacy, according to Echevarria. Built-in KVM technology also helps cut costs as it reduces the need for a KVM switch or software usually needed to enable such functionality.

As part of vPro, the new Core i5 and Core i7 chips will take advantage of a new instruction called Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for faster data encryption and decryption. That could help secure data residing in servers or virtualized environments.

During the webcast, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s server division, said Intel has worked with Microsoft to enable vPro features on Windows 7. The platform enables Windows 7 to do things in System Center that previously required a desk-side visit from support, including remotely awakening and troubleshooting PCs.

The latest vPro platform based systems will include Intel’s Q57 Express chipset. Close to 500 hardware and software vendors will take advantage of the latest vPro technology. PC makers including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo will be releasing systems based on the platform, according to Intel.

The company declined comment on whether the new platform will support systems with Advanced Micro Devices processors. But Echevarria said that there are scenarios that Intel has enabled with vPro that utilize specific Intel-developed technologies. For example, the new AES instructions are found only in Intel’s new Core processors, and do not apply to platforms that don’t include support for those instructions.

Advanced Micro Devices offers competitive tools to compete with vPro. It offers a tool to remotely fix PCs based on DASH (Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware), a suite of specifications set by Distributed Management Task Force for remote management of laptops and desktops.

Intel’s Core vPro processor technology supports standards such as DASH, Echevarria said in an e-mail. “Intel is a contributor to the specifications from the DMTF. Remember that standards are necessary, but not always sufficient,” he said.

ASP.NET MVC 2 is a framework for developing highly testable and maintainable Web applications by leveraging the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The framework encourages developers to maintain a clear separation of concerns among the responsibilities of the application – the UI logic using the view, user-input handling using the controller, and the domain logic using the model. ASP.NET MVC applications are easily testable using techniques such as test-driven development (TDD).

The installation package includes templates and tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 to increase productivity when writing ASP.NET MVC applications. For example, the Add View dialog box takes advantage of customizable code generation (T4) templates to generate a view based on a model object. The default project template allows the developer to automatically hook up a unit-test project that is associated with the ASP.NET MVC application.

Because the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5 SP 1, developers can take advantage of existing ASP.NET features like authentication and authorization, profile settings, localization, and so on.

System Requirements

-Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP

.NET 3.5 SP1. Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 are required to use certain parts of this feature.

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Bjorn Olstad, CTO for Fast and a Microsoft distinguished engineer, wrote that Microsoft would continue offering and updating standalone versions of the company’s ESP platform for Linux and Unix after it bought Fast Search & Transfer in 2008. “Over the last two years, we’ve done just that”, he added.

But the products being released this year will be the last containing a search core compatible with Linux and UNIX, he said. There is logic behind Microsoft’s decision, according to Olstad.

Microsoft is trying to make the move easier on affected customers, Olstad added.

He stated that they will always interoperate with non-Windows systems on both the front- and back-end. Our search solutions will crawl and index content stored on Windows, Linux, and Unix systems, and our UI controls will work with UI frameworks running on any operating system.

In addition, it will support ESP 5.3, the search core for the products that will be released this year, for 10 years. Customers who decide to keep running the core on Unix or Linux can “add Windows-only innovations or cloud-based services by using a mixed-platform architecture,” he said.

Microsoft is also rolling out an “upgrade program” that will “help customers evaluate our hosted solutions and/or a Windows-based deployment.”

However, “there’s no immediate action required as a result of this announcement-and I expect that most of you will stay with your current deployments for some time,” Olstad added.

According to Jared Spataro, director of enterprise search at Microsoft, a significant number of customers are running Fast on Linux or UNIX. He declined to provide specific figures. Microsoft made the announcement now in order to give those users plenty of time to prepare, he said.

According to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews, Microsoft’s promises of continued interoperability offer some comfort. “This doesn’t mean Microsoft is casting out Linux users from their customer base. There will be people running Fast on Linux right out to the 10-year limit.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s announcement raises another question: whether it will continue offering a standalone search product for the long term, given its moves to align the Fast technology with its Share Point collaboration platform.

According to Spataro, there are no plans at this time to drop a standalone version, although Microsoft doesn’t tend to “project out any further than one product wave”. “When we look at any strategy, we really are looking at market demand. [Right now] we certainly hear there’s a need for a standalone version.”

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The small-distribution extensions were previously available via Mozilla’s add-on site, but have since been removed. According to Mozilla’s post, the Master Filer add-on had been downloaded about 600 times and installed the Bifrose Trojan. The Sothink Web Video Downloader version 4 slipped in the LdPinch Trojan, and had been downloaded about 4,000 times.

According to the open-source organization, the malicious add-ons managed to sneak by the one malware scanner (unnamed in the post) used by Mozilla. The organization says it will now be scanning with two additional detection tools.

If you happen to have installed either of these malicious add-ons, note that removing the add-on will not remove any installed Trojan. You’ll need to run a separate antivirus scan and disinfection to clean your system. Mozilla’s post includes a list of antivirus software currently known to detect the particular Trojans involved.

This unfortunate incident makes clear why relying solely on one antivirus scanner is never a good idea, as no one program detects everything. Since this has happened at least once before with an infected Vietnamese language pack, I’m curious why Mozilla doesn’t simply switch to uploading all add-on submissions to the free Virustotal.com, which uses about 40 different engines to scan each submission. I’ve also asked Mozilla which scanner it had been using. If I get that information I’ll add it to this post.

According to Mozilla, it had been using ClamAV as its sole scanner prior to this incident. I’d guess Mozilla feels it’s a natural match as an open-source app, but the ClamAV engine didn’t fare well at detection tests when I reviewed the Windows version of the program, ClamWin.

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On Friday, Microsoft said Bing will power Internet searches for Facebook’s 400 million members in an arrangement that returns control of display advertising to the social-networking service.

Previously, Bing had powered online searches on US Facebook pages.

According to Bing general manager Jon Tinter, Microsoft will provide Facebook users full access to Bing features as part of an “expanded cooperation in search”. You will start to see the fruits of our expanded relationship show up in the Facebook experience over the weeks and months ahead, he said.

According to Tinter, the companies mutually agreed that Facebook will take over selling display advertising posted at the website because it “just made more sense” given the unique nature of the website.

The control over the displaying advertisement by Microsoft served up at Facebook stretched back to shortly before the US software giant bought a 1.6-percent stake in Facebook in 2007 for 240 million dollars.

The arrangement was inked in a contract, which was up for renewal.

Last year, Microsoft launched its new Bing search engine.

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PCWorld editors Ed Albro, Jason Cross, Robert Strohmeyer, and Nick Mediati take a look at the facts surrounding Flash and HTML5. Is HTML5 almost ready for prime time, or is this just more posturing from Apple?

Meanwhile, the sudden rise of e-book readers may now be threatened by the upcoming crop of tablets. Is it time for Amazon to give up on the Kindle and shift its focus back to content?

You can also stream the podcast via QuickTime: Subscribe to the PC World Podcast on iTunes or via the PC World Podcast RSS feed.

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An application store has also been announced by Amazon. And this week produced a software development kit for “active content” that includes sample code and a simulator. The company plans to add puzzles, games and travel guides to selections that readers can download.
However, Amazon reportedly will exclude applications that use the Voice over Internet Protocol.

Playing Catch-Up

Some analysts are skeptical that the Kindle can avoid being swamped by the iPad tsunami. According to Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, it depends on what else they add, adding touch to the existing Kindle seems gratuitous and actually can work against E Ink legibility.

Currently, E Ink, the largest supplier of electronic-paper display technology, provides the Kindle’s monochrome display. Gartenberg questioned why the world’s leading online retailer would want to compete with hardware giants.

He asked, “if the question is, is Amazon thinking of a new generation of devices that can more effectively compete with the iPad, the better question is, should Amazon be in the device business at all [instead of focusing] on adding value to other devices?”

For the iPad’s basic model, the price is $499, which is almost double the Kindle’s $259; it was set lower than the anticipated $700 to compete with the e-reader.

According to the New York Times, Amazon has purchased Touchco, a company that manufactures a highly sensitive touchscreen that costs only $10 a square foot, far cheaper than the screen used in Apple’s devices. The screen has unlimited touch points and is able to distinguish between fingers and pens or styluses.

Currently, the Kindle relies on a hardware keyboard for data entry.

Multi-Touch Is In

About multi-touch capability, the report is the second in two days, which is designed to tackle the iPhone and iPodedge in that realm. On Wednesday, Google announced that its Nexus One smartphone now has a software patch to enable “pinch and zoom” for maps, photos and search results.

Neither Amazon nor Touchco’s representative would comment for its report, but citing “a person briefed on the deal,” the paper reported that Amazon’s hardware facility, Lab 126, will merge with Touchco, which began as a project at New York University’s research lab.

According to Touchco’s web site, the company is no longer doing business as of last month.

In June, Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal predicted that the Kindle would generate $310 million in revenue for Amazon in 2009 and $2 billion a year by 2012, with gross profit reaching $70 million, and $560 million in 2012.

In October, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated that Amazon would sell 1.5 million Kindles in 2009.

Videogame star “Fallout 3” is taking its devoted fans to nuclear war ravaged Las Vegas. Bethesda Softworks announced Thursday that a “New Vegas” chapter in the award-winning franchise will be available by the end of this year. A video trailer has been posted online by the studio at fallout.bethsoft.com.

According to Bethesda, ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ takes all the action, humor, and post-apocalyptic grime and grit of this legendary series, and raises the stakes.

After the release of “Fallout 3” in 2008, it was crowned Game of the Year, and proved so popular that Bethesda has expanded on it with adventures in an array of downloadable software.

A “Broken Steel” addition to “Fallout 3″ even modified the end of the original game to resurrect the hero, who had sacrificed himself for the sake of other survivors in the post nuclear war scenario.

“Fallout 3″ players start out as a youth venturing out of an underground survival bunker to search for a scientist father and make moral choices shaping his or her destiny.

Players take on quests such as freeing slaves, rescuing hostages, and integrating an elitist survivor settlement.

Conversations players have with in-world characters affect directions stories take, with choices regarding whether to do good or evil determining their reputations, opportunities and allies.

The mobile world continues forging an open strategy with the open-sourcing of Symbian along with the Google’s Android operating system that invites handset makers to further customize and differentiate their products.

According to Haydn Shaughnessy, CEO of Cogenuity and editor of the Symbian Foundation’s blog, the open-sourcing a market-leading product in a dynamic, growing business sector is unprecedented. “Over 330 million Symbian devices have been shipped worldwide, and it is likely that a further 100 million will ship in 2010, with more than 200 million expected to ship annually from 2011 onwards.”

Is the Future Open Source?

Symbian’s transition from proprietary platform to open source is the largest in software history. The Symbian Foundation insists the open-sourcing of the platform lays the foundation for unlimited innovations in mobile development.

According to Lee Williams, executive director of the foundation, the development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result. “When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open-source release of the platform by mid-2010, and it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of schedule.”

Any individual or organization can use and modify the code for any purpose under the terms of the Eclipse Public License, whether that be for a mobile device or something else entirely. Symbian’s commitment to openness also includes complete transparency in future plans, including the publication of the platform road map and planned features up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the road map and contribute new features.

According to IDC analyst John Delaney, it’s increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. “The placing into open source of the world’s most widely used smartphone platform emphatically fits that bill. It will be exciting to see where this takes the industry.”

Mobile OS Competition

Despite rolling out ahead of schedule, questions around Symbian’s success in the open-source realm remain. Symbian is still inextricably linked with Nokia, despite the fact that the handset maker set it free and established a foundation around it.

Open-sourcing Symbian is a positive development in light of competition with Android, Gartenberg said, but the resources required to optimize and customize Symbian may deter some handset makers from straying away from Android and Windows Mobile.

“The basic problem that Nokia has with its bulk of ownership of Symbian is the quintessential issue. How do you license something to someone else when you are competing with them?” Gartenberg asked. “Will other handset vendors view even an open-source Symbian as still being primarily a Nokia product and part of the Nokia ecosystem? If so, they may not want to contribute.”

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Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch in a lengthy blog post railed against Apple’s Flash avoidance and detailed why Flash has become successful on the non-iPhone part of the web. From its humble start allowing low-bandwidth vector animations on the web, Flash now includes animation, streaming audio, rich interactivity, arbitrary fonts, two-way audio/video communication, local storage, and “enabling the video revolution on the web, Lynch wrote.

Lynch wrote in blog that the explosion of smartphones and the imminent wave of tablet devices — including the iPad — means an “important crux for the future of Flash”. A plethora of devices in the mobile with different web-browsing capabilities threatens to break up what Flash largely built — “seamless, consistent and rich experiences,” he added.

Flash for Smartphones

According to Lynch, “Adobe is attempting to manage the transition to the mobile web with a version of the Flash player for smartphones — which will be deployed by all but one of the top manufacturers”. Any Guesses…

Flash works just fine on Apple’s devices, Lynch wrote. Adobe is developing stand-alone apps built on Flash that are currently available on the App Store. “This same solution will work on the iPad as well. We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen,” Lynch charged.

HTML5 Won’t Replace Flash

Apple is a supporter of the open-standard HTML5, which it says will eventually replace Flash. According to Lynch, he doesn’t think so. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does, that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass.

“The coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the web with incompatibility issues,” Lynch wrote.

At the iPad’s introduction, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Flash “buggy,” a charge Lynch denied in his post. “Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically, Flash could not have achieved its wide use today,” Lynch wrote. “Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10.”

Battle of the Titans

Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, said in a phone interview that this really all comes down to market power. “There’s a lot at stake for Adobe here. If Apple continues to gain and the iPad is a hit, and there are millions of devices out there that Flash is not compatible with, it’s a danger for them.”

As the phone was an “app” device, then the lack of Flash on the iPhone wasn’t a huge deal, it’s a different world with the larger iPad screen. According to Sterling, it was very jarring to see Jobs scrolling around the {New York] Times site and all these blue boxes where there should have been videos.

Sterling said, it seems really foolish at one level for Apple to shun Flash — it’s a media device and it needs to be able to play media. “On the other hand, perhaps it’s the height of arrogance where Apple thinks they can move the whole world to their technological choices.”

With the applications, middleware and the Kernel itself, the Symbian 3 platform will be offered under terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses. According to Larry Berkin, head of global alliances for the foundation, “you can download it, you can modify it”. Previously, the kernel was made available via open source.

Berkin said they’re open-sourcing 108 packages that will be available at the source code level. Handset manufacturers can modify the code and build differentiated handsets, he added.

According to Berkin, the foundation members accelerated the process originally due to be fully open-sourced by June. Code, more than 40 million lines of it, will be available at Symbian’s Website at 6 a.m. Pacific Time.

“End-users will see, ideally, differentiated devices, converged devices that are based on Symbian that range from smartphones [to converged devices],” such as cameras or a phone that is a gaming device, he said.

According to Berkin, the open-sourcing could possibly result in incompatible, forked versions of the platform, and manufacturers need to be responsible for their work with Symbian. The market can be self-correcting in situations such as this, he said.

There are 330 million Symbian-based devices in use, said Berkin. Five manufacturers currently build Symbian devices: Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Fujitsu, and Sharp.

Symbian technology had been driven by Symbian Limited, the majority of which was owned by Nokia, which then spun it out as an open source project.

Putting Symbian into open source will boost the platform in the marketplace, said analyst William Stofega, program manager for mobile device technology and trends at IDC. Development Kits are also available to download for building Symbian applications and mobile devices. These include the Symbian Developer Kit and the Product Development Kit.

In November 2009, Nokia put the Linux-based Maemo OS on its high-end N900 “mobile computer,” which features a phone and capabilities like email, a Web browser, and video. But the company remains a backer of Symbian, according to Nokia representatives.

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After the technology blog TechCrunch, the flat touch-screen computer was known until December as the CrunchPad. It was born from a post by the blog’s well-connected and outspoken founder, Michael Arrington that called for collaborators on a “dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen Web tablet.”

Singapore-based Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan stepped up. His software startup, Fusion Garage, worked with Arrington and his team until November. And at that point the project imploded, with Fusion Garage announcing it would sell the device under a new name — and without Arrington’s involvement.

The production of the Joojoo is under way, said Rathakrishnan Wednesday, despite a federal lawsuit filed by Arrington. CSL Group, a Malaysia-based mobile phone and netbook maker, is subsidizing production costs in exchange for an undisclosed revenue share, according to Rathakrishnan.

Arrington is seeking damages and to keep Fusion Garage from selling or profiting from the Joojoo device. His lawyer didn’t return a message seeking comment about whether they might take further legal action.

CSL, which makes Blackberry-like phones it calls “Blueberry,” will also be an investor in the startup’s next round of funding, expected to close in the next two weeks. Late last year, Fusion Garage said it raised $3 million in a first round.

In an interview, Rathakrishnan would not specify how many people pre-ordered the $499 tablet, but “a good part” of those who did will receive their devices at the end of this month, he said.

Dramatically, the tablet landscape has changed since the Joojoo was first unveiled. At the International Consumer Electronics Show in January, Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and others presented tablet prototypes. Less than a month later, Apple Inc. took the wraps off a long-anticipated version it calls the iPad.

Apple’s iPhone upended the smart phone category, leaving competitors scrambling to come out with touch-screen phones and application stores of their own. Many analysts expect Apple’s iPad to define the nascent tablet category in the same way.

However, Rathakrishnan said he believes the Joojoo gives consumers a better experience than the iPad because it has a larger screen and people will use it to surf the “real” Web, or sites they see on their regular PCs, rather than consume bits and pieces delivered through add-on apps.

He also implied Apple had imitated Fusion Garage in its development and marketing of the iPad. Both devices start at $499, Rathakrishnan noted, and Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, made his presentation from what looked like a couch after Fusion Garage described the Joojoo as perfect for “couch computing.”

Apple didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.

Programmers enjoy the freedom offered by Google’s looser reins, and this will make life much easier for any business that adopts the platform. The Android operating system and marketplace are both pretty open, something that makes life much easier for the IT departments that support the phone. Distributing an app to all internal clients, consultants, and customers is much simpler without the tight strictures of the iPhone world.

Nowhere, the Android Market is near as deep as the iPhone’s App Store, and it shows when you browse through the apps. But the lack of depth isn’t as important to a business user as it might be to the casual consumer or gamer. Many of the dumb apps filled with scantily clad models aren’t available for Android yet, and those are a surprisingly large slice of the iPhone marketplace.

Even though the market for Android apps is still emerging, there are a number of good apps for business users. Take InfoWorld’s quick, at-a-glance tour of 10 Android apps for business users that help you find where you’re going, track your expenses and exchange rates, overcome language barriers, view and edit Office documents, and connect remotely to a company database or your desktop PC.

This story, “Android apps for business users,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments on mobile computing and Google Android at InfoWorld.com.

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On Apple’s Web Site, the issue is heavily documented in this support thread, should fix what users have called intermittent flickers lasting a quarter of a second or so. But the fix won’t solve another concern: complaints of yellowing in the monitor, which Apple requires users return the monitor to an Apple store.

However, Apple has issued what appears to be a standard warning or disclaimer: “If your screen remains black after applying the update, contact Apple Care or an Apple Authorized Service Provider. If you continue to experience image corruption or display flickering, make sure you have also installed the 27-inch iMac Graphics Firmware Update 1.0. If you are still having display issues after successfully completing both firmware updates, contact AppleCare or an Apple Authorized Service Provider.

The graphics firmware update, issued in December, was supposed to address ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards that may caused image corruption or display flickering. We can only assume the fix didn’t work, however, necessitating the second update.

It’s difficult to say whether Apple has solved the problem, as one user pointed the inherent problem with support forums: once the problem is fixed, people no longer visit the site, as their problems have been solved.

User “Aaron Stroot” reported: I have a week 45 27″ iMac i7. It has had minor screen flickering since the beginning, but it never really bothered me enough to worry about exchanging it. I never saw the flickering in Windows 7 so I figured it was a software thing that could be fixed, he added.

“Anyways, here is my experience:
1) First firmware update – seemed to fix it, but flickering came back after a day.

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According to a spokeswoman for Google China, Marsha Wang, the service is available online now. The Google Spring Festival Map is based on the company’s regular map service but has “more features” targeting users’ special needs during this month’s holiday, the busiest travel period of the year in China, she said.

The statement posted on googlechinablog.com said, the special map provides information including real-time flight status, train schedules and ticket prices, highway conditions and weather updates.

The government estimates says that about 240 million people are expected to crowd China’s trains and planes for the holiday.

Chinese traditionally return to their home towns and villages for family reunions with this year’s travel period stretching from January 30 to March 10. The Lunar New Year falls on February 14.

Last month, Google threatened to abandon its Chinese-language search engine google.cn, and perhaps end all operations in the country, following hack attacks it says targeted the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists. It has also said it is no longer willing to bow to Beijing’s army of Internet censors — and will stop filtering search results soon, a move China says would violate its laws.

The US and Chinese officials have discussed the issue at length, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton qualifying her latest talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi as “open and candid.” But the row is one of an ever-increasing list of issues threatening relations between the United States and China.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt reiterated last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the Internet giant wanted to stay in China, but also said he hoped censorship rules would change.

According to Wang, it was “business as usual” at Google China’s headquarters in Beijing.

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However, despite the good news for the majority of regular iPhone owners, the upgrade has posed something of a problem for those who have taken the notorious jailbreaking route.

Currently, popular jailbreaking tools Redsn0w, Blackra1n, and Pwnage Tool are not compatible with version 3.1.3. The jailbreaking community was quick to warn jailbreak users not to update to the most recent iPhone OS release, especially if your device is the 3G or 3GS model. This forewarning comes just one day after the Redsn0w tool received an upgrade that made it work with iPhone OS 3.1.2.

The jailbreaking community is advising users to not update their devices, and also recommended that jailbreakers play the patience game until their tools of choice are all up to speed.

What has your experience been like if you have a jailbroken iPhone? Let us know in the comments.

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Though an iPad has commanded the technology world’s attention, Google quietly continued working on tablet computer software that could run rivals to Apple’s latest creation.

An image of what a Google tablet might look like were featured at a Chromium developers web page on Tuesday along with talk of how touchscreen controls could work based on the Internet titan’s Chrome computer operating system.

The images were posted online two days before the January 27 event at which Apple unveiled an iPad tablet computer that will begin shipping worldwide in March.

According to Google Chrome lead designer Glen Murphy, you may have seen our Chrome OS tablet concepts from last Monday; in the video, some floating hands interact with a touch surface.

Google made images and video of Google tablet gesture control capabilities available online for developers to consider.

The “concept user interface under development” could signal another front on which Google will battle with Apple, which uses its own custom software in the iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Macintosh computers.

The website focused on Chrome OS software and did not indicate whether Google would make its own tablet or opt to let others tend to the hardware.

Google’s mobile Android software is built into iPhone competitors, including the Internet firm’s own Nexus One smartphone released in January.

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According to NetApps, Chrome finished January strong, with a 5.2 percent market share. Although a 0.6 percent gain may not immediately rattle the dominance of well-entrenched players like IE and Firefox, it does show a steady flow of users to the youngest player in the browser market.

Overall, Google has doubled its market share, and in January saw the second-largest gain since rolling out the browser in September 2008. Google has already surpassed Apple’s Safari in the browser wars, making it the third-most-used browser.

Google has exceeded its goals, hitting five percent well before its September 2010 deadline. Google aims to reach 10 percent by September 2011 but could reach that number this year if its growth rate holds steady.

Digging Deeper Into IE Usage

Weeks after the bad publicity around Internet Explorer 6 and its role in the China-based attacks on Google, Internet Explorer lost half a percentage point of market share in January, according to NetApps. That leaves Microsoft with 62.2 percent of the browser market, a record low.

Microsoft has steadily seen its share of the market eroded by the likes of Firefox, Opera and even Apple. Google seems to be putting another dent in the browser market leader. Microsoft has lost 10 percent of its market in the past 12 months while Google reached its 5.2 percent mark.

Looking a little deeper, IE6 saw a 0.9 decline in market share to 20.1 percent. IE7 also suffered in January, dipping a full percentage point to 14.6 percent. The good news for Microsoft is that IE8 is stemming the tide of losses, at least in part. Launched last March, IE8 rose 1.5 percent in January, ending the month with a 22.3 percent market share. That makes IE8 Microsoft’s most popular version.

Browser Round Up

The number-two browser, Firefox, also wasn’t immune to market declines in January. For the second month in a row, Firefox usage dipped. However, unlike Microsoft, Mozilla may not have as much reason to worry.

Although Firefox saw usage declines in December and January, there is no long-term trend. Firefox has only seen declines twice in about a two-year period. Overall, Firefox dipped 0.2 percent in January and still holds 24.4 percent of the browser market.

Turning to Safari, Apple gained a slight advantage, ending January with 4.5 percent market share, not enough to regain the number three spot but enough to outpace Opera, which fell to 2.4 percent.

Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, doesn’t think the IE6 incident related to Chinese hackers has affected IE. Rather, he credits Google’s gains with the fact that the search giant regularly advertises Chrome on its home page.

“When you go to Google.com, if you are not using Chrome, you get offers to download and upgrade. When you’ve got the kind of clout Google has on its home page, it’s going to help drive adoption going forward,” Gartenberg said. “Of course, Chrome is a pretty good product, so that helps as well. It goes to show how fluid the tech market is today. It’s not easy for a small company to do a browser, but if you are a company the size of Google, you can make an impact on the industry.”

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In this case, Finnish geek Toni Nikkanen has become the first person to successfully run Mac OS X–, Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther”(released in 2003)–on a cell phone. The phone he managed to achieve this feat with – Nokia’s N900 smartphone. Sadly the hack, which makes use of PowerPC emulator Pear PC, runs incredibly slowly.

Some bloggers had suggested that the iPad might finally deliver a more full Mac OS X mobile experience. However, this was not to be, as last week’s unveiling revealed that Apple’s tablet will run a variant of the iPhone’s operating system, multi-tasking limitations included.

If you have a few hours to spare–and you don’t mind stepping into a legal gray area by breaking Mac OS X’s end-user license agreement–check out Nikkanen’s blog for more information.

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South Korea boasts the world’s highest average connection speed at 14.6 Megabytes per second (Mbps) and also has six of Asia’s 10 cities with the fastest link-ups, all with average speeds above 15 Mbps.

According to the report by US-based network provider Akamai Technologies, Japan had the second highest average connection speed of 7.9 Mbps, followed by the Chinese territory of Hong Kong with 7.6 Mbps.

The other countries in the top ten are Romania, followed by Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark and the Czech Republic, with the United States at 18th place, with an average speed of 3.9 Mbps.

The survey classifies “broadband” connections as those of two Mbps or more, and “high broadband” as five Mbps or over, while link-ups at 20 Mbps and better were categorized as “extremely high speed connectivity.”

The report said, South Korea, 74 percent of connections were “high broadband,” the world’s top rate, while the figure was 60 percent in Japan, followed by Hong Kong with 46 percent.

The United States came 12th, with just 24 percent of its connections at five Mbps or more. Worldwide, the high broadband percentage was 19 percent.

Akamai’s ‘State of the Internet’ report for the third quarter of 2009, said the growing demand for online high-definition video content is driving demand for faster connections.

As the quantity of HD-quality media increases over time and the consumption of that media increases, end users are likely to require ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth, said the report.

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Mozilla has launched a mobile version of its Firefox browser for the users of Nokia’s N900 smartphone, which runs the handset maker’s high-end Maemo operating system. And it’s built on the same engine as Firefox 3.6 for PCs.

According to the developers, the new mobile browser is currently available for download in more than 30 languages, with support for more smartphone platforms and languages on the way.

It’s the next step of Mozilla’s mission of providing one web that everyone can access — regardless of device or location, Mozilla blogger Erica Jostedt said Friday. “Key design principles are at the heart of the mobile browsing experience, including minimal typing, seamless synchronization with desktop Firefox, and the ability to take your Firefox with you, to name a few,” Jostedt wrote.

Expanding the Market

According to Gartner, the fledgling mobile browser market represents a huge opportunity for browser makers, since smartphones accounted for about 14 percent of the estimated 1.2 billion mobile devices shipped last year. The new mobile version of Firefox is intended in part to help counter the browser’s slowing growth on desktop and notebook PCs. According to Net Applications, Google’s Chrome browser outpaced Firefox by increasing its market share from 1.6 percent to 5.2 percent since March, even as Firefox boosted its share from 23.3 percent to 24.4 percent.

Mozilla is hoping to expand the browser market by bringing a full-fledged browser experience to smartphones, beginning with the N900. Though the world’s leading handset maker has not released any sales numbers for the smartphone so far, Nokia did say the device has been positively received.

Due to the N900’s fairly expensive price, however, Gartner expects the device to be of interest to technology lovers rather than a product destined for the mass market, noted Research Director Carolina Milanesi.

According to Milanesi, “What it does is to show the potential of the Maemo platform for the next-generation device, which should be in the market in the second half of the year”. Moreover, the Gartner analyst thinks the appeal of the platform “will be higher” once Nokia’s OVI Store gains “some traction as an ecosystem.”

Playing YouTube Videos

According to Mozilla, it’s currently investigating the development of a mobile Firefox version for smartphones running Google’s Android operating system and indicated that smartphones running Windows Mobile are also possible. Jostedt wrote, “We will continue to investigate and consider other platforms that can support the full Firefox experience”.

Still, the browser maker admits the door is currently closed to developing a browser for Apple’s iPhone. Moreover, smartphones from Research In Motion are out of bounds because Firefox’s Java-based operating system is not compatible with RIM’s Blackberry OS.

Firefox for the N900 introduces support for add-ons that anyone can build and distribute to bring new features to the mobile browser. For example, N900 owners can customize Firefox by adding language translators, AdBlock Plus, TwitterBar and even an enabler for watching the latest YouTube videos. However, the mobile browser does not yet offer a plug-in for Adobe Flash.

“The Adobe Flash plug-in used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards,” Jostedt wrote. “We are working on an add-on that will allow the user to have control of which sites to enable plug-ins for.”

For the Nokia N900, Mobile Firefox offers support for touch-interface capabilities such as quick zoom, panning and scrolling. Tabs and browser controls are on the sides of the screen to enable the user to see entire web pages.

Additionally, a new technology called Weave Sync is on tap for synchronizing the user’s Firefox history, saved passwords, bookmarks and open tabs between computers and the Nokia N900.

By the end of February, Fusion Garage’s JooJoo tablet PC is expected to be in consumer hands when it will likely give some indication as to the public’s interest in tablets such as the Apple iPad.

Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan says that not only have the preorders for the JooJoo tablet exceeded expectations, but there has been an increase in inquiries since the debut of the iPad–so it looks like the public may be ready for tablet computers after all, according to Venture Beat.

The JooJoo tablet, which began its life as the TechCrunch Crunch Pad, was announced in December 2009. The 2.4-pound touch screen tablet has a 12-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display, 1GB of memory, and a 4GB Solid State Drive (used to store the OS and cache data). It also features a USB 2.0 port, Bluetooth support, built-in speakers, Wi-Fi, and a Webcam with a mic. The JooJoo tablet also features a fun (and potentially incredibly annoying) color-tinted screen–but don’t worry, the color can be changed.

The JooJoo tablet uses the web as its primary platform instead of custom-built apps. It also supports Flash and reportedly plays 1080p YouTube streaming videos fairly well. The JooJoo tablet’s price point is close to that of the iPad’s, at $499.

While the JooJoo tablet does beat the iPad in a few ways, it also falls short in some pretty major areas. It has a 4GB SSD, but users cannot directly save files to said drive–it’s purely an internet tablet. The problem with this, of course, is that the JooJoo has Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi only–there is no 3G option, though Fusion Garage is “not ruling out the possibility of 3G in the near future.” Here’s a tip, guys–the “near future” had better come pretty soon or people are going to start wondering what the point is of a big Internet-only-device that you can’t store music on.

Because the JooJoo tablet uses the Internet as its platform, the lack of an “App Store” is another downside. Sure, you don’t really need a Facebook app when you can just go to Facebook itself, but the Apple App Store is definitely a benefit of having an Apple product. Though some are critical of Apple’s extreme vigilance when it comes to apps, recent influxes of malware into other, similar app stores suggest that perhaps Apple is merely being alert. Not only will JooJoo’s lack of an app store make it harder for users to use the platform, but the openness may leave the JooJoo vulnerable to outside attacks.

Simply, the JooJoo tablet is just an internet in your hands, but if Rathakrishnan’s report of increased interest in the JooJoo after the announcement of the iPad is true, perhaps there is a big market for tablet PCs, regardless of what they do (or don’t).

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The discount US airline has signed a deal with Row 44 after a number of delays in order to become the latest carrier to offer wireless Internet access in the cabins of its airlines, according to the Southwest blogs posted Friday. Once Southwest begins installing the gear, it plans to equip about 15 planes every month and have Wi-Fi available throughout its fleet of 540 craft in early 2012.

Southwest has made its name as a no-frills airline and will be adding Wi-Fi after several other U.S. airlines have at least begun their deployments. For example, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines all provide the service on some planes, and the smaller AirTran Airways and Virgin America offer it throughout their fleets.

Like Alaska Airlines, the Southwest is taking a different route than most carriers, using the satellite-based network of Row 44 rather than Aircell’s GoGo service, which uses 3G to link planes to the Internet.

Row 44 received a U.S. Federal Communications Commission license just last month to commercially deploy its latest system, the one Southwest will be using. Southwest and Alaska at one time had planned to launch trials with Row 44 in 2008 but didn’t formally announce their tests until February 2009. Now, Southwest says it has finished testing and signed a contract to buy equipment from the company.

Not many hard numbers have been provided by Airlines on the use of in-flight Wi-Fi, which typically costs about US$6 for a short flight. During the holiday season in the U.S., Google sponsored a promotion that made Wi-Fi free on Virgin America and in 47 airports around the country, and that program ended Jan. 15.

According to Southwest, it would disclose the pricing of its service in April. Under the airline’s deal with Row 44, the airline agrees to deliver a certain amount of revenue to Row 44 but can set its own prices for customers, according to Gregg Fialcowitz, president and co-founder of Row 44.

Fialcowitz said, the Row 44 service is designed to deliver an average of about 10M bps (bits per second) for all the users on the plane to share.

According to Southwest spokeswoman Whitney Eichinger, Southwest won’t allow voice calls over the Internet and will filter inappropriate content by preventing passengers from visiting certain sites.

Row 44, based in Westlake Village, California, currently covers North America, from Alaska through Canada and the continental U.S., Fialcowitz said. By the middle of this year it will provide coverage across Europe, with Norwegian Air Shuttle offering its service, as well as supporting services on trans-Atlantic flights and in Africa, he said. By the end of 2012, Row 44 expects to offer service around the world.

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“The Tester” is a reality show in which the top prize will be a job at Sony.

Sony Corp. is launching the show on its PlayStation 3 on Feb. 18. The premise? Pit a broad swath of video game fans against one another to see who’s the best at testing out the games.

The winner will get a job as a real game tester at Sony. It’s an entry-level job, a way to get a start in the industry. The show will have 11 contestants, which include a writer from Ohio, a cheerleading coach from California and a used car salesman from Maryland.

According to Sony, the show is part of its strategy to provide content beyond games on the PlayStation. This includes music, movies and TV episodes.

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Google has begun letting online visitors tell its news website what topics they want to tune into.

According to Google Software engineer Jude Britto, people can click on “stars” to mark groups of stories on preferred subjects to signal Google News to watch for updates or developments.

In a blog post, Britto said, it’s one way to let us know that you’re interested in that subject, when you star a story in Google News.

He added, when there are significant updates, we’ll alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information.

The 20 most recently “starred” stories will be tracked in a section added to the Google News page, according to Britto.

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According to the Journal, whose article was based on anonymous sources, Google would let customers purchase the software from its store and charge the third-party developers a commission.

Though Google’s spokeswoman declined top comment on the Journal article, but she pointed out that Google already has a site called Solutions Marketplace where it features applications and professional services from third-party developers that complement Google Apps and other Google enterprise products.

However, Solutions Marketplace doesn’t have e-commerce capabilities, meaning that customers interested in purchasing the products and services have to contact the vendors by going to their Web sites or calling them on the phone. The Google Solutions Marketplace is an information resource and portal for customers to connect with third-party vendors, according to the spokeswoman.

For the Solutions Marketplace, it would seem a natural extension to gain e-commerce transaction capabilities, an area in which Google has ample experience with products such as Google Checkout, the s elf-serve ad-selling system of Google AdWords, the Android Market and Google Apps itself, for which users can sign up online. Thus, the app store could be more an evolution of the existing Solutions Marketplace site than an entirely new site built from scratch.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has singled out the company’s IT products for business as one of several attractive businesses to complement its core online search ad business.

.Google Apps comes in several versions, including the most sophisticated one, Apps Premier, which costs US$50 per user per year and is geared toward medium and large businesses. However, most Apps customers are individuals and small businesses that use the free Standard version. The free Education edition for schools and universities is also popular.

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And on March 11, the drive will go on sale, which will cost ¥15,540 (US$172).

Its launch in Japan will mark the first time Microsoft has offered a 250GB drive add-on for the Xbox 360 as a stand-alone unit. The drive has been available overseas since late last year but only in a bundle with a new console.

According to a Microsoft spokesman, Kei Iwasaki, Microsoft has no current plans to put it on sale as a stand-alone unit outside of Japan.

The new drive more than doubles storage capacity from the 120GB drive available on the current Xbox 360 Elite console. The drive is used to store downloaded software, TV shows, movies and other content from Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace online store.

Local storage on the console is becoming more important to Microsoft as it attempts to expand its online store and generate additional revenue from entertainment content.

Throughout 2009 the company continued to attract users to its Xbox Live service and ended the year with 29 million users, up 35 percent from the last day of 2008.

Recently, Rival Sony re-launched its PlayStation 3 console and includes a 120GB drive in each unit as it too works on expanding online sales of content such as movies and game downloads.

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A Chinese company, selling a tablet PC like Apple’s newly announced iPad, may sue the US Company over the similar design between the devices, said the company Monday.

Last Year, Shenzhen Great Loong Brother Industrial started selling its P88 tablet and is not ruling out a lawsuit against Apple, a company representative surnamed Wu said by phone.

The company is based in a southern Chinese city known for producing knock-off phones, which are called “shanzhai,” or “bandit” phones, and sometimes takes the form of counterfeit iPhones or other popular handsets.

According to Wu, we are not shanzhai for these things, because we were first.

The P88 weighs more than the iPad and has much shorter battery life at just over one hour during active use, compared to Apple’s stated battery life of 10 hours for the iPad. But both devices use touchscreens that have a black border and a similar size, at 10.2 inches for the P88 and 9.7 inches for the iPad. Wu said his company’s tablet is sold in the U.S., but declined to say at which outlets.

No immediate comment was returned from an Apple’s spokeswoman.

China’s gray market for electronic devices also reacted quickly to Apple’s announcement of the iPad last week. Some users on Taobao.com, a Chinese auction and retail site, are taking pre-orders for iPads they will first obtain in Hong Kong or elsewhere. Popular devices such as the iPhone or the Hero from Taiwan’s High Tech Computer (HTC) are often brought into China informally and sold there online or at electronics bazaars.

Apple has not yet cleared that if the iPad will be sold in China. Local carrier China Unicom started selling the iPhone last year, but gray-market versions of the device were already widely sold in China.

And according to Japanese electronics company Fujitsu, it owns the rights to the name “iPad,” raising another possible legal challenge for the Apple device.

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More English learners-based country, China is playing an increasingly important role for UK-based Pearson, which owns the world’s largest education publishing business as well as the Financial Times and Penguin books.

Last year, it bought Wall Street English for $145 million in cash, giving it a leading position in China’s English-language teaching market.

The new joint venture, named Beijing Mobiledu Technologies, builds on a service that Nokia launched in 2007, providing content from a variety of publishers, which so far has about 20 million subscribers and 1.5 million active users each month.

Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service’s mobile website.

In order to access the information in China, mobile phones are crucial that has at least 720 million mobile subscribers, double the amount of Internet users it has.

Nokia, the world’s biggest handset maker, sold almost 18 million phones in China last quarter, 36 percent more than a year earlier.

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