Microsoft's Vista AV Fails Certification

An anonymous reader writes

"Microsoft's much-hyped anti-virus solution, Live OneCare and three other Vista AV products failed to achieve the Virus Bulletin's VB100 certification. The other products are McAfee's VirusScan Enterprise, G DATA's AntiVirusKit 2007, and Norman's VirusControl. All failed to pass a series of tests that are required to display the VB100 badge. 'With the number of delays that we've seen in Vista's release, there's no excuse for security vendors not to have got their products right by now,' said John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin."

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Google Docs to support Powerpoint

KindredHyperion writes

"Garett Rogers at ZDNet has an article on the prospect of a Powerpoint-esque addition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. From the article: "If you dig around the language files in Google Docs, you will find what appears to be traces of a new service preparing for launch soon. Meet Google Presently — an online presentation creator that will likely read and write the most common formats like Microsoft PowerPoint and Open Office Impress.""

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Amazon & Tivo Take on Netflix

RadioTV writes

"Amazon is in Beta testing with select Tivo users to allow Unbox videos to be downloaded to Series 2 and 3 set-top boxes. The FAQ for the service is available."

The price point for movies is fairly reasonable. No HD and won't work with DirecTV's obsoleted HD tivo, but this is a step in the right direction.

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Dell Laptops Have Shocking New Problem

dapsychous writes

"A friend of one of my coworkers has noticed a problem in Dell notebook computers (also covered in this engadget article) about a problem that has been popping up lately in Dell 17" notebook computers. It seems that these computers are putting out between 19 and 139 (65 according to article, 139 according to him) volts of AC power as measured from any chassis screw vs. earth ground. This has led to several problems including fried ram, blown video circuits, and a stout zap on his left hand. According to him, Dell has tried to keep him quiet about the problem and has even gone so far as to have him banned from a few websites, and threatened him with legal action if he tells people about the problem."

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Facebook ready to make TV debut

Facebook.com, the social-networking Web site, said Tuesday it is moving into television by teaming up with cable operator Comcast's online video site Ziddio to produce a new series from users' clips called Facebook Diaries.

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Sony Ericsson to launch eight new phones

Sony Ericsson, the world's No. 4 mobile-phone maker, aggressively expanded its lineup of low-cost phones Tuesday, joining bigger rivals in the fight for customers in emerging markets.

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LG wins contest for low-cost 3G phone contract

LG Electronics has won a contest organized by the GSM Association to produce a low-cost handset for third generation mobile phone networks, a source close to the contest told Reuters on Tuesday.

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Kodak's consumer printers aim to chop ink costs

Eastman Kodak announced a new line of inkjet printers on Tuesday that are geared toward everyday consumers and designed to cut down on ink costs.

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What rising sea levels could mean for coastal areas

If sea levels rise a meter, the streets of Miami could end up underwater while New Orleans could become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But those aren't the only areas that will be in trouble, if two researchers from the University of Arizona are correct.

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Jailed blogger hits record as supporters rally

SAN FRANCISCO--Dozens of supporters of jailed freelance video blogger Josh Wolf gathered at City Hall here Tuesday to rally for Wolf's release.

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Solar 'Heliotube' company partners with installers

Solar power start-up Practical Instruments has signed on three installers of its "Heliotube," a solar panel equipped with tubes that follow the sun's direction.

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Internet backbone at center of suspected attack

There are signs that hackers attacked key parts of the backbone of the Internet on Tuesday, but no damage seems to have been done, experts said.

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Kyoto Protocol successor on British agenda

Britain wants to launch a major international clean-energy project with other European countries, Japan and the United States in a drive to combat climate change, Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday.

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If catastrophe strikes tomorrow, are we ready?

If a major catastrophe struck the United States today our first responders would not have the communications capabilities they need to save lives. Our federal, state and local public safety officers lack "interoperability," the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently across jurisdictions. Currently, in most places in the United States, a state police unit cannot directly communicate with a local sheriff. Nor can a county fire chief talk directly to a local firefighting unit or to federal officials.

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Outsourcing your 'Warcraft' skills

According to an estimate from a company called Power-levels.com, it would take someone starting from scratch 768 hours to reach the highest level you can hit in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

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Video stars in Cisco's earnings boost

Demand from cable operators and phone companies upgrading and building new networks to carry video is fueling growth for Cisco Systems, the world's largest supplier of equipment that shuttles bits around the Internet.

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Warner Music enters social-networking content deal

Warner Music Group has signed a deal to allow its entire catalog to be played over the fast-growing social-networking music service LastFM, the innovative site that links music fans to new and old hits.

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IBM tunes up for Jazz open-source project

IBM is working on an open-source project called Jazz to promote programming tools for globally distributed teams.

Set to launch in June at Jazz.net, the project will be based on work from IBM Research and its Rational tools division around geographically distributed collaborative software development.

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Raining on Microsoft's parade

On the eve of the Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 launch, Thomas Vinje describes himself as a "native son gone bad."

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Intel ups server share, but AMD wins in PCs

Intel continued to reclaim server chip market share from Advanced Micro Devices in the fourth quarter of 2006, but the smaller rival's strength with consumers helped it gain in desktops and notebooks.

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Vista's actual launch? Think whisper, not bang

NEW YORK--The actual New York City release of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, at midnight on Tuesday, couldn't have been more different from the prelaunch events that filled up many a reporter's business and social calendars on Monday.

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Vista steals the show

NEW YORK--Now that Steve Ballmer has launched Windows Vista and Office 2007, he has his sights set on getting a key user to upgrade: his wife.

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Sony profit down on PS3, outlook raised

Sony posted a 15 percent fall in quarterly operating profit on Tuesday after massive losses at its game unit offset robust sales of flat-panel TVs, but it raised its annual outlook closer to market expectations.

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Sony profit down on PS3, outlook raised

Sony posted a 15 percent fall in quarterly operating profit on Tuesday after massive losses at its game unit offset robust sales of flat-panel TVs, but it raised its annual outlook closer to market expectations.

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Web giants ask for feds' help on censorship

WASHINGTON--Google, Yahoo and Microsoft representatives on Tuesday implored the U.S. government to help set ground rules for complying with demands by foreign law enforcement agencies for user records or censorship.

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Apple's 802.11n software now available

Apple on Tuesday released the software needed to unlock the fast Wi-Fi chips inside almost every one of its new Macs.

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Bill Gates' to-do list

NEW YORK--It's still a year before Bill Gates shifts from a full-time Microsoft worker to a part-timer. Which is good, because there's plenty he still wants to achieve.

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Fighting to protect 'orphans'

An effort among Internet activists to halt the extension of copyright protections for orphan works--out-of-print books and media--was dealt a setback last week by a U.S. appeals court decision.

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Sony settles with FTC in rootkit case

Sony BMG Music Entertainment announced on Tuesday that it has reached a proposed settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the controversial embedding of antipiracy software its CDs without users' knowledge.

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At AlwaysOn, talking 'bout the IM generation

NEW YORK--It's not uncommon these days to hear debate about how advertisers and media insiders can successfully get through to the age demographic known as "Generation Y," the "MySpace generation," or the "IM (instant message) generation."

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Sweden to open 'Second Life' embassy

Sweden plans to be the first country to open an embassy in the popular virtual world Second Life. "It will have answers to questions on all aspects of Sweden," Olle Wastberg, general director of the Swedish Institute, an organization that promotes the country's image abroad, said Tuesday.Read more...

Prices to plunge with demand for plasma TVs?

It looks as if plasma is losing ground in the high end of the TV market.

Shipments of plasma panels--sheets of glass placed inside plasma televisions--rose only 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006 over the same period the year before and actually declined 4 percent from the third quarter of 2006, according to research firm DisplaySearch.

It was the first quarter that plasma panel shipments grew less than 47 percent on a year-to-year basis and only the second time since the first quarter of 2003 that there has been a sequential decline.

Plasma panel shipments were 15 percent lower than the suppliers' aggregate forecast and 9 percent below DisplaySearch's forecast.

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Alleged porn spammer settles with FTC

An alleged marketer of online porn has agreed to pay a $465,000 penalty to settle spam charges, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.

Under a proposed settlement, TJ Web Productions has also agreed to adhere to federal spam laws, the FTC said in a statement. This means the company has promised to use the phrase "sexually explicit" in message subject lines and ensure that the initially viewable area of the message does not display explicit images.

Additionally, TJ Web Productions has promised that any unsolicited commercial e-mail will include an opportunity for recipients to opt out of receiving future e-mail and provide a postal address, the FTC said. The promises are all required by the FTC's Adult Labeling Rule and the Can-Spam Act.

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Hubble humbled by power failure

The main camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has stopped functioning due to a short circuit, NASA announced Monday.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed on the Hubble in March 2002, is considered the Hubble's "workhorse," according to Dave Leckrone, the senior project scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope.

About the size of a public phone booth, the scientific instrument consists of filters and dispersers that can sense wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared on the light spectrum, and three electronic cameras.

The Hubble will still be able to function, but until a new camera is installed in 2008, the images will not be as far reaching.

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Symantec unveils Vault for enterprise storage

Symantec has launched Enterprise Vault 7.0, which the company says will enable IT managers to prioritize how they store messages.

As well as handling e-mail storage, IT managers can use the product to archive business-critical instant messages, the company said.

"We had a long, hard look at what's happening in the market," said Fredrik Sjostedt, European senior manager for product marketing at Symantec. "E-mail is a mission-critical function, but we needed a wider look to include instant messaging and Microsoft Sharepoint, as people are using the Web as a group interaction tool," he said.

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SanDisk to make USB security push

Flash memory maker SanDisk next week plans to announce a product designed to help businesses manage and control the use of USB drives.

The Milpitas, Calif., company has scheduled the announcement for the RSA Conference in San Francisco, the annual bonanza of security products for businesses. "SanDisk will unveil a comprehensive solution for the enterprise security market, providing protection and control for USB flash drives," the company said in a statement.

USB drives and other gadgets carried around by workers pose a real security risk, security experts have said. Connecting the devices to work PCs could be a vehicle for malicious code to enter a corporate network, or a tool for disgruntled employees to smuggle confidential information out of the office, for example.

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Outdated Domains To Meet Their End

Dr. Eggman writes

"The little used .um internet domain is no more. The domain was used, or rather unused, for US minor outlying islands and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it. This announcement comes as last month ICANN began taking comments on deletion of outdated suffixes. Among the top of the list? .su, the internet domain of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's .su may prove harder to remove however, as Google still lists 3 million .su sites."

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Verizon Wireless passed on iPhone two years ago

Verizon Wireless could have been the first wireless carrier to offer the Apple iPhone, but the mobile carrier passed on the opportunity because Apple's financial terms were too steep, Verizon said Monday.

Denny Strigl, president and chief operating officer of Verizon Communications, said the iPhone will help draw attention to the whole mobile-music movement, but he said he was glad Verizon passed on the opportunity. Verizon Wireless is jointly owned by Verizon Communications and the European wireless carrier Vodafone.

"The iPhone product is something we are happy we aren't the first to market with," he said during Verizon Communications' fourth-quarter 2006 earnings call on Monday.

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Nickelodeon to launch virtual world for kids

Nickelodeon on Tuesday plans to launch "Nicktropolis," a virtual world that encourages kids to play games, watch TV and interact with animated characters like SpongeBob.

With Nicktropolis, the children's cable network joins parent unit Viacom's MTV Networks in embracing virtual worlds as a way to showcase television programming and advertisements against a backdrop of 3D graphics, instant chat, games and shopping. MTV operates the virtual world Laguna Beach and owns the wildly popular virtual game NeoPets, among other Net properties.

"The virtual worlds we've been building across our networks give the fans of our brands the high level of interaction they want with one another...with the content itself," MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath said in a statement.

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MySpace donates sex offender database to center

MySpace.com will donate a national computer database on U.S. sex offenders to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the popular social-networking site said Monday.

Sex offender data is collected by individual state authorities. News Corp.'s MySpace and background verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings developed a technology that combines close to 50 U.S. state registries in an aim to help police keep track of an estimated 600,000 convicted sex offenders.

MySpace has increased efforts to block convicted adult sex predators from the site, which is a meeting place for a large population of teens attracted to the service to share photos, blogs, music and videos.

Earlier this month, the families of five girls abducted by adults they met on MySpace sued the company for negligence.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) said it will use the new database to help law enforcement in investigations. Its local alerts are now incorporated within MySpace.

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Patents for dynamic Web pages to get another look

U.S. patent examiners are poised to take another look at two controversial patents that critics say may sweep up the dynamic Web page systems commonly used by search features, online merchants and millions of other sites.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced the move last week in letters to the Public Patent Foundation, which last November requested the re-examination. PubPat, as it is known, is a public interest legal group whose directors include free and open-source software advocates.

The patents in question, Nos. 5,894,554 and 6,415,335, cover systems and methods for managing dynamic Web page generation requests--that is, sites that return a customized page based on user input. An enormous number of Web sites use some form of dynamic processing, often through programming languages, such as PHP, that are designed to create Web pages based on database queries.

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Newspapers don't make the grade in Web-savvy schools

More U.S. teachers are using national and international online-news sites in the classroom, leaving behind newspapers that fail to grasp the Internet's importance in trying to reach students, a study found.

Fifty-seven percent of teachers use Internet-based news in the classroom with some frequency, said the study, which was based on a survey of 1,262 teachers in grades 5 through 12 in the fall of 2006 and released on Monday by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education.

That compares with 31 percent for national television news and 28 percent for daily papers. Local television news, at 13 percent, was at the bottom of the list, the study found.

"Students do not relate to newspapers at all--any more than they would to vinyl records," one teacher said in the study.

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Priceline, Travelocity, Cingular settle over adware charges

Priceline.com, Travelocity.com and Cingular Wireless have settled over charges that they used secret adware Internet software programs as marketing tools, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Monday.

This is the first time marketers have been held responsible for ads displayed through adware, the software that automatically displays promotional material, Cuomo's office said in a statement.

The settlement calls for Priceline.com, Travelocity and Cingular, the wireless unit of AT&T, to pay New York $35,000, $30,000 and $35,000, respectively, to cover penalties and investigatory costs.

"Advertisers can no longer insulate themselves from liability by turning a blind eye to how their advertisements are delivered, or by placing ads through intermediaries, such as media buyers," the statement said.

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Getting printers down to iPod size

Zink wants to take the printer off your desk and put it in your pocket. The question now is whether you want it there.

The Waltham, Mass.-based start-up has created--with help from Polaroid--a way to print photographs or documents without ink or an ink cartridge. Without an ink cartridge, a printer can be reduced to the size of an iPod or smaller, said CEO Wendy Caswell. The controlling factor when it comes to printer size is whether you want 2 x 3 inch prints or 4 x 6 inch prints. Zink says it has two manufacturing partners lined up, and products based on its technology will come out later this year.

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Adobe: Make room for Photoshop Lightroom

Photoshop Lightroom, the photo file manager from Adobe Systems, is now available for preorder, the company announced Monday.

Adobe's photo management software, which has been in beta for months for Windows users and since 2005 for Mac OS users, is scheduled to begin shipping in mid-February.

Lightroom is a file management tool intended to complement photo-editing software such as Adobe's Photoshop. It enables photographers to import, minimally edit, manage and output batches of large digital photo files rather than having to deal with each file individually.

It is a direct competitor to Apple's Aperture 1.5 software, which currently sells for $299.


Lightroom will sell at the Adobe store for US$199 in the United States and Canada through April 30, according to Adobe. After that, it will be sold for about $299. The public beta version is set to expire February 28.

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TomTom shipped viruses on its navigation devices

Satellite navigation company TomTom has admitted that it shipped two viruses on a number of its devices.

According to the company, a "small number" of TomTom GO 910 satellite navigation devices were shipped last year with malicious software preinstalled.

"It has come to our attention that a small, isolated number of TomTom GO 910s, produced between September and November 2006, may be infected with a virus. Appropriate actions have been taken to make sure this is prevented from happening again in the future," said TomTom in a statement.

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About South Korea's 'dependency' on Microsoft

A couple of people recently have alleged that South Korea is being pushed around by Microsoft. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds.

"This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online," wrote South Korean blogger Gen Kanai. Commentators on technology news site Slashdot have also tsk-tsk-ed the situation.

The pending release of Vista has prompted many to speculate that it could increase security risks.

To some, this looks like the ugly face of monopolism and bad decisions by government leaders and large corporations. But there is actually a much simpler reason why people in South Korea have so much Microsoft software.

They steal it.

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Analysts: Latest breakthroughs won't alter chip race

Intel is set to capitalize on a new breakthrough in microchip technology more quickly than its rival Advanced Micro Devices, but analysts say the advantage will only be temporary.

Like two superpowers announcing successful nuclear tests at the same time, last Friday Intel and IBM both said they had solved a vexing electricity leakage problem in microchips.

While hailed as the biggest breakthrough in transistor design in four decades, the advances do not alter the product roadmaps for the two companies, which call for their chips to shrink roughly every two years.

"It sounds more evolutionary to me rather than revolutionary," said Eric Ross, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners.

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Windows Cheif Bows Out

REDMOND, Wash.--Sitting behind a one-way mirror, a white-haired man struggles to access a shared music library within Windows Vista.

"I'm lost," he says. "I'm in trouble here."

On the other side of the glass, several Microsoft executives try to talk him through the experience. Thousands of people have gone through similar tests inside Microsoft's usability lab. But on this day, February 1, 2006, the person inside Building 28 isn't just some random beta tester. It's Windows boss Jim Allchin.

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Borland to throw down Gauntlet in life cycle tools strategy

Borland Software on Monday is expected to release a product meant to further its strategy of selling broad product suites for corporate software development.

Borland Gauntlet is an application that allows software development teams to track and measure the progress of ongoing projects. The release marks the first time Gauntlet is being issued under the Borland name. The company acquired the technology when it bought Gauntlet Systems in May.

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