Fox Interactive Launches Desktop/Website Widget Platform

Fox Interactive Media will announce a new widget platform called SpringWidgets on Monday morning at the Widgets Live Conference in San Francisco. It is a unique offering in the increasingly complicated widget space, although the desktop portion of it only works on the Windows platform.

Widget platforms today work on websites (see Google Gadgets and WidgetBox) or the desktop (see Yahoo Widgets). Microsoft has a widget platform that will work on the Vista desktop and also on live.com pages. But no one has created a single widget platform that works on most websites as well as the desktop. That’s what SpringWidgets is launching.
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Wireless insecurity: do not use the cheerleader defence

Comment: The message boards are alive with misguided advice about wireless networks. Switch off your security, they say: you’ll get away with murder.

It follows the news that the music industry has dropped a lawsuit against Tammie Marson of Palm Desert, California. Marson argued that the fact that her computer contained illegal music files downloaded over her internet connection was not proof of a crime. As a cheerleader teacher, she said, hundreds of girls passed through her house, any one of whom could have used her PC. She also ran a wireless network without security – so anyone outside her house could have used her net connection.
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Nvidia buys iPod chip supplier

Nvidia is buying PortalPlayer, Apple's supplier of the MP3 decoder and controller chip that goes inside your iPod.

Founded in 1999, PortalPlayer also supplies silicon for Sandisk media players, and counts Bang & Olufsen, Philips and Samsung as customers.

The headline price for the Silicon Valley semiconductor firm is $357m, but the real price Nvidia is paying is the $161 million net of cash on PortalPlayer's balance sheet as of September 30, 2006.
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Sun's board gets leather jackets and talking cars

Sun Microsystems appears to have misunderstood analysts' call to "see some black ink."

The company today picked up two new board members with strong ties to the publishing industry. Tony Ridder, the former chairman and CEO of newspaper giant Knight Ridder, will serve on Sun's Leadership Development and Compensation committee. And Peter Currie, a CNET board member and former Netscape CFO, will serve on Sun's Audit committee.

Sun's board opened up when venture capital legend John Doerr left the company this month. Doerr had been one of Sun's strongest supporters, during booms and busts.
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Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk Program to Speed Software Testing

Microsoft has unveiled a virtual hard disk test drive program, which allows customers to evaluate its enterprise software and products from its software partners in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

The software maker announced the new program ahead of VMware's VMworld show, where it will give booth demonstrations of its application virtualization, server virtualization and virtualization management tools.

The VHD program is a first for Microsoft and for the more than 7,000 software vendors that can now deliver pre-configured applications within Windows Server-based virtual machines to their customers, said Mike Neil, senior director of virtualization strategy for Microsoft's Windows Server Division, in Redmond, Wash.

The VHD format captures the VM operating system and the application stack in a single file to create a larger virtualized system.
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New bug found in Microsoft's Core Services

An "extremely critical" vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft's XML Core Services, according to several security firms.

The vulnerability, caused by an unspecified error in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX Control, could be used to seize control of an affected system, according to note posted on Secunia, a security company based in Denmark.

IBM-owned ISS X-Force detailed on its site the kind of damage that could be caused by the vulnerability.

"This could lead to loss of confidential information, disruption of business, or further compromise," according to the security firm.
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Coming soon to YouTube: Sun product videos

In a sequel to its advocacy of internal blogs, Sun Microsystems has begun encouraging its rank-and-file employees to publish videos promoting the company's products.

Sun has launched an internal contest to see who can publish the most compelling video at video-sharing site YouTube, said Sun Chief Marketing Officer Anil Gadre. He said that Sun minions tell him, "If I could just get out and tell everyone about my product myself, we would sell so much more," Gadre said. "YouTube allows us to enable every one of them to do just that."

The internal contest has triggered some inter-group rivalry, Gadre said. John Fowler, executive vice president of the server group, posted his own Halloween video exhorting his employees to come up with "creative, wacky, energizing educational videos."
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RealNetworks reports leap in quarterly earnings

Digital media company RealNetworks on Monday reported a sharply higher net profit, boosted by proceeds from the settlement of its antitrust litigation against Microsoft and commercial agreements with the software giant.

Net income was $42.2 million, or 24 cents per share, compared with $11.2 million, or 6 cents per share, in last year's third quarter.

Third quarter revenue rose to $93.7 million from $82.2 million in the year-ago period.
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Eclipse marks five years of expansion

If you'd like to study how open-source development has transformed the software industry, look no farther than Eclipse which celebrates it fifth anniversary on Monday.

Founded by IBM in 2001 as an open-source project, the now-independent Eclipse Foundation has built its market clout by attracting many software vendors to collaborate. Its development software is popular with end customers as well: Eclipse claims 2.25 million users worldwide.
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Will Blu-ray, HD DVD be united by 2008?

Chipmakers such as Broadcom, NEC and STMicroelectronics are preparing components that will allow consumer electronics manufacturers to come out with players and PCs that will play both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.

And these universal players may come out sometime in 2007, according to a story in EE Times. While the report was a little vague about when in 2007 these players might come out, at least one exec was bullish on the presence of these machines in 2008.
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Novell Layoffs Rumored

According to sources close to Novell, the Linux company has laid off numerous mid-level employees from several departments, including training and sales.

While Bruce Lowry, director of global public relations for Novell said, "We don't comment on rumors," one former employee said that he had been let go on Nov. 1.
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NTP slaps Palm with patent infringement suit

NTP, the company behind the epic patent infringement lawsuit against BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, is now going after Palm.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Virginia on Monday, NTP asserted that Palm's products, services, systems and processes infringe on NTP's patents.

NTP is a holding company that was formed to pursue intellectual-property cases involving patents held by the late Thomas Campana for a wireless e-mail system. The company settled a multiyear legal ordeal with RIM earlier this year for $612.5 million, after alleging that RIM's BlackBerry devices and wireless e-mail service infringed on NTP's patents.
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CBS goes 'Interactive' with hire of Valley veteran

CBS has hired Silicon Valley investment professional Quincy Smith as president of its new CBS Interactive division, a revamped incarnation of its Digital Media group.

The 35-year-old Smith made a name as a tech investor, specifically working on mergers and acquisitions like Delicious' sale to Yahoo and AOL's buy of Netscape. Prior to his hire at CBS, Smith worked at the firm Allen & Company.

With the addition of Smith, announced Monday morning, CBS has replaced its Digital Media division with the new CBS Interactive. Larry Kramer, president of CBS Digital Media, has in turn stepped down from his post but will remain a presence at CBS as an adviser. Smith will now oversee CBS' digital and interactive brands, which include CBS.com, CBSNews.com, CBS SportsLine.com and the Innertube broadband channel, which recently saw a popular Web-only show, Inturn, promoted to on-air status.
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Video: Microsoft Virtual Earth preview

One-upping Google on several fronts--including using real photographs of buildings--Microsoft has released Virtual Earth, a competitor to Google Earth that works with its Live Local service. CNET's Rafe Needleman gives a preview and compares the two platforms.
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ActiveX Flaw Identified

Unpatched vulnerability, triggered by certain sites, could give intruders remote access.

Microsoft is investigating reports of a vulnerability in a Windows ActiveX control that could allow an attacker to remotely take control of a computer, according to an advisory issued Friday. One security company rated the vulnerability critical, while Microsoft said it allows only limited attacks.

The vulnerability, which was not patched as of this morning, affects certain versions of Windows running Microsoft XML Core Services 4.0, a set of tools that allows programmers to use scripting languages to access XML documents.

The affected versions are Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1.
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IT managers increasingly in demand

A war between companies for the favors of top IT managers and tech-savvy staff is looming, according to industry consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Within three years a scarcity of talented technology staff will cause a scramble for those with mathematical, scientific and engineering skills. The best positions will go to those people who are innovative and able to collaborate, and who demonstrate a willingness to learn, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report titled "Technology executive connections--successful strategies for talent management."

The report is based on interviews with 153 top European executives. Eighty-three percent of respondents thought that engineering knowledge coupled with creative and collaborative thinking is in short supply. Similarly, 55 percent say that mathematics, science and engineering talent pools in developed nations are drying up, compared to those available in emerging markets.
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FTC chief warns against 'unnecessary' Net regulations

update: WASHINGTON--The head of the Federal Trade Commission on Monday voiced reluctance toward adopting consumer protection laws that target technological concerns du jour, saying the "collective voice" of consumers often prompts change.

Deborah Platt Majoras, the agency's Republican chairwoman, said she prefers relying on a combination of existing laws, vigorous competition and user pressure to address complaints about new products or potentially worrisome uses of technology.

For proof, look no further than a situation in September in which hundreds of thousands of users of the popular social-networking site Facebook rebelled against a new feature that some charged was Big Brother-esque, Majoras said. Within days, the site's president had quieted some of the fury by giving users the option of turning off the "minifeed," which showed users whenever someone in their network makes a change to their relationship status, favorite music or other profile information.
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Review: Vasstek's 'Quasi' RAID 6153S

Hardware Review: Redundancy is always nice, especially when a drive meltdown decimates high profile data. You find yourself working on deadline and then, wham, your system has corrupted files, or worse yet, a drive that will no longer boot.
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InterSystems' Cache 2007 Speeds Database Development

The latest version of InterSystems' Cache database product features new technology for rapid, rich Internet application development.

The Cambridge, Mass., company released Cache 2007 Nov. 6 and announced new components including Zen, a framework for building rich platform-independent Web applications faster than ever before. Another new component, known as Jalapeño, eliminates object-relational mapping for Java programmers and reduces development time by at least 40 percent, the company said.

Zen features a library of prebuilt components, including grids, tables and selection trees that enable the quick creation and easy management of complex processes, InterSystems said. It also builds on the concept of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and takes advantage of the Cache security model to avoid security issues.
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VMware, VMLogix Court Software Developers

Software developers are getting more tools that take advantage of virtualization to streamline the application testing and quality assurance processes.

In advance of its VMworld 2006 show in Los Angeles, VMware on Nov. 6 is introducing Lab Manager, a product designed to enable enterprises to automatically provision data center resources to application development teams.

For its part, VMLogix on the same day is launching its first commercial product, LabManager, which—while not a virtualization platform—enables enterprises to leverage multiple virtualization technologies to make it easier and faster for engineers to create applications.
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SPI Adds Web Application Security Tools for Java, AJAX

SPI Dynamics launched the newest iteration of its DevInspect Web applications vulnerability testing software on Nov. 6, adding support for programs written in Java and Microsoft's flavor of AJAX.

The Atlanta-based software maker introduced several new add-ons to DevInspect 3.0, which promises to help Web applications designers locate potential flaws in their work using so-called black box testing tools in combination with source code inspection technology.

By identifying and verifying exploitable security defects using the automated black box system, and scouring program source code for more common errors, the company maintains that the product provides customers with a hybrid technique for eliminating potential glitches in Web-based systems.
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Cingular Wireless to Sell First 3G PDA

Cingular Wireless will begin selling a new broadband PDA on Nov. 15, a company executive told eWEEK.

The new HSDPA/UMTS enabled Cingular 8525 includes a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a wide screen, and it also supports quad-band EDGE, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

The device will sell for $399.00 with a two-year agreement. It supports tri-band HSDPA, so it should work anywhere in the world that the wireless broadband protocol is supported.

"This is the first 3G PDA that we've offered," said Mike Woodward, executive director of Cingular's Mobile Professional Solutions.
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Virus creators target Wikipedia

Malicious hackers have turned to Wikipedia to try to help them catch out PC users.

The virus writers created a page on the German Wikipedia that linked to a fake fix for a new version of an old malicious Windows worm.

But instead of curing a bug, those installing the fix would be infected by a new Windows virus.

The booby-trapped page on the German version of the online encyclopaedia has now been removed.
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Zune problems for MSN customers

People who have bought music from Microsoft's MSN Music store could face problems if they decide to buy the firm's new Zune portable player.

Microsoft has said it will stop selling music from MSN music from 14 November, when Zune goes on sale in the US.

But in a move that could alienate some customers, MSN-bought tracks will not be compatible with the new gadget.

The move could also spell problems for the makers of MP3 players which are built to work with the MSN store.
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Microsoft Ends Photo-Sharing Project

'Max' image technology may appear in new Web, desktop applications.

Microsoft has ended a project to develop a tool, codenamed Max, for sharing photos with friends and reading Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, among other functions.

In an October 31 blog posting, Microsoft said feedback from the project has contributed to development of its .NET 3.0 programming framework, and may also end up in Windows Live, a new series of Web and desktop-based applications.

Max also let users annotate their photos, as if they were using a felt-tip pen, while the original images were preserved. In March, developers incorporated MSNBC Newsbot into Max, which pulls content from online news sources.
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DriveSentry Unveils Storage 'Firewall'

Program manages whitelist of safe applications, blocks others from writing to hard drive.

A Mountain View, California startup company has developed what it calls a storage "firewall" to prevent computer viruses from wrecking the data on desktop computers.

DriveSentry's software sets up a whitelist of trusted programs that are allowed to write to certain folders or file types. Should another program try to write to the drive, DriveSentry generates a pop-up window and asks the user if this should be allowed.
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Microsoft aims to make Dynamics more dynamic

Microsoft is looking to liven up its Microsoft Dynamics line of applications for midsize businesses.

Bill Gates, the company's chairman, is slated to outline Microsoft's strategy for these customers on Monday at its Convergence conference in Munich. The event, the first Convergence to be held outside the U.S, is for users of Microsoft Dynamics products.

The software maker has been touting a future in which its desktop applications for midsize customers will be augmented by a host of online services. However, it is still treading fairly cautiously when it comes to providing full-on hosted versions of its Microsoft Dynamics products, which include customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools.

With hosted services, companies buy access to software running on an outside server, rather than on their own in-house machine.
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Microsoft wraps up work on new Office

Microsoft said Monday it has finalized the code for Office 2007, marking the completion of the first of two key projects for the software giant.

Both Windows Vista and Office are slated for release to big businesses on Nov. 30. Microsoft has issued near-final test releases of Vista, but has not yet completed the final, or "gold," code for the new operating system.

As for Office 2007, the upcoming release sports some major changes from Office 2003, including new file formats and a radically revised user interface. In addition to those and other changes that have been known for months, Microsoft noted that it has also added a feature to Outlook to make it easier to send text messages to cell phones.
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Why tomorrow’s election won’t change net neutrality debate

I know that many advocates of meaningful Congressional action on net neutrality are hopeful that tomorrow's elections will result in a shift of power to a Democratic party that generally seems to be more sympathetic to pro-net neutrality arguments than the Republicans are.

There's two reasons why tomorrow's results are not going to shift things.
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HD radio boosts distribution, marketing

U.S. radio operators on Monday said sales of its high-definition radios will expand to Circuit City, and stations are set to air some 75,000 ads a week pushing HD digital radio, in an effort to defend its turf against satellite radio and iPods.

In the latest phase of a $200 million marketing push, timed to take advantage of the holiday season, the radio industry starting November 13 will also cut prices, bringing some automotive units to around $150, according to the HD Digital Radio Alliance, a group of broadcasters hoping to speed consumer adoption of HD digital radio.
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Why Wi-Fi competition is good for Logan, and for Boston

By now, some of you know that after a 17-month battle, the Federal Communications Commission decided last week to let Continental Airlines provide Wi-Fi service at its Presidents Club facility at Boston's Logan International Airport.

Massport, which runs Logan, had claimed the service violated Continental's contract with Logan, which charges $7.95 a day for their Wi-Fi offering.

I'm happy with the ruling for several reasons:

Wi-Fi reception sometimes don't work well in enclosed airport areas, exemplified by lounges such as the President's Club

Airport VIP/Frequent Flyer facilities already pay rent and service fees to the host airport. So why shouldn't they have the right to offer Wi-Fi as well?
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Take your MacBook Pro’s temperature

If you've used an Apple notebook for any extended length of time you probably have an opinion on its operating temperature. But how do you quantify the temperature of an Apple's notebook? Let's take a look at different ways to measure the temperature in the MacBook Pro.

You may have noticed that CoreDuoTemp (upper highlight in the screen shot at right), smcFanControl (lower highlight) and Fan Control all report different temperatures on the MacBook Pro. That's because they're measuring different things.

CoreDuoTemp (1.0) is a menu bar application that reads the temperature from the Intel CPU's built-in sensor. The primary purpose of this sensor is to shut down or slow down the CPU if it is in danger of overheating. This sensor is rather simple and can be inaccurate.
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Microsoft “bricked” 360s with “Live” update

Users had been anticipating Microsoft's dashboard update for some weeks. It was the update that bought 1080p support to the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, it bought something else to some users - a totally bricked console.

It's pretty easy to spot a bricked 360. Just turn it on and watch ERROR CODE E71 flash endlessly on the screen. A bricked 360 is bad news for anyone wanting to play games or surf Xbox Live - because you can't do either of those things. In fact, it turns the games console into a very expensive paperweight.

Initially it was believed that the bricking was confined to consoles which made use of firmware modded to allow backups of games (or, lets be honest here, pirated games) to be played, but now it seems that this isn't the case. However, the issue does come down to Microsoft trying to detect consoles running on modded firmware. Unfortunately, the experiment seems to have gone too far, damaging consoles that weren't modded in any way (it's unclear what effect the update was supposed to have on modded consoles).

Microsoft says that it is aware of the issue, is working on a fix and that "less than 1 percent" of users have been affected.
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One Skype user’s tale of SkypeOut “Add Credits” woe

Skype user rox has recently experienced a customer-service meltdown of the highest magnitude. She writes us to call attention to the many Skype Forum posts she has made in which she has given a blow-by-blow account of the ordeal.

This whole bloody mess started when rox attempted to add an additional $30 to her SkypeOut balance. The credit card authorization for the purchase went through, but it seems that the requisite amont of minutes weren't added to her account.

Four days after contacting Skype support, rox received a response asking her for additional details about the credit card account she used to make the purchase. Then, she received a follow-up from Skype saying that an unnamed "another department" would look into this issue. By that time, the problem was nine days old.

After multiple attempts over the next six days, she finally made things work on October 15. Here's what rox did to get Skype to let her in:
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Newspapers invest $15 million more in Topix.net

update: News aggregator Topix.net on Monday announced that it has received an additional investment of $15 million from the three newspaper groups that already own a majority stake in the company.

After the latest funding, Gannett and Tribune each own 33.7 percent stakes, and McClatchy owns an 11.9 percent stake in Topix. Last year, Knight Ridder--which was acquired by McClatchy in March--jointly purchased a 75 percent stake in Topix with Gannett and Tribune. The second round of funding boosts the newspaper companies' combined total stake to 79.3 percent.

"The support of these leading newspaper companies has been invaluable in helping us quadruple our traffic since their initial investment," Topix CEO Rich Skrenta said in a statement.
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MySpace to launch in Japan with Softbank

News Corp.'s MySpace.com online service will be launched in Japan in a joint venture with Japanese Internet and telecoms group Softbank, the Nihon Keizai business daily reported on Monday. The 50-50 venture, to be called MySpace Japan, will first offer services for personal computers and later allow users to post photos and write blogs via cell phones, the paper said.
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TVU chief grapples with copyright questions

Paul Shen, the CEO of controversial TVU Networks, said he doesn't understand why anyone in television would consider his company a threat. In fact, he said he comes to the TV industry bearing gifts.

Shen is the creator of the TVUPlayer, which enables people to stream live TV broadcasts to one another via the Internet. The blogging community in recent months has showered praise on the technology for aggregating TV channels such as ESPN, the Disney Channel, Fox and NBC in one place, and for creating a Web TV experience that more closely resembles traditional viewing.

But almost everyone who writes about TVU Networks' growing popularity has plenty of questions about the start-up. Who is behind the nifty technology? How does the company make money? Is the service legal?
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Does Web 2.0 bubble have a silver lining?

Hundreds of technology executives and investors will congregate this week to take the quickening pulse of Internet entrepreneurship.

At the third annual Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, dozens of industry players will gather to break down topics like Internet infrastructure, Net neutrality, mashups, data protection and the future of video. Among those on hand at the city's Palace Hotel will be Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie; and Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.

For industry players, many of whom lived through the dot-com crash, the surging wave of new Web companies and the corresponding media buzz can mean only one thing: an investment bubble where too much money is chasing too few good ideas.
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Political ads go up against DVR tech

Christopher Ditty, like so many television viewers by now, is sick of political ads.

The Horn Lake, Miss., resident lives just five minutes from Memphis, Tenn., and is being bombarded with commercials from the two candidates for the open U.S. Senate seat in Tenneesse, Republican Bob Corker and his opponent, Democrat Rep. Harold Ford.

"It seems like there (are) one to two (political) ads every break," Ditty said.

But Ditty now has the technology to fight back: His digital video recorder (DVR), a generic model from his local cable company, allows him to skip through the barrage of increasingly nasty ads.
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