Author Archive | David Worthington

Microsoft Invests Millions in Multitouch Company

N-Trig MultitouchIn an effort to make Windows 7’s multitouch user-interface one of the OS’s top selling points, Microsoft has invested millions in Israeli startup N-trig to provide PCs with touchscreen technology.

Today, N-trig announced that it had completed a US$24 million fund raising round from investors, including Aurum Ventures, Challenger Ltd., Canaan Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, and Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft was the largest investor.

This investment should help ensure that the screens work well with Windows 7 and any other multitouch devices Microsoft might release (touchscreen Zunes, anyone?)  in addition to making the technology more widely available to hardware manufacturers. It makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to be certain that multitouch devices are on the market when it ships Windows 7, because customers will doubtless be looking for the feature.

A friend, who is a not-so-tech savvy lawyer, sent me a text message today expressing his excitement after he read an article about “Windows 7 having a touchscreen.” Customers will be dissatisfied if there are no multitouch PCs ready to buy when Windows 7 ships.

Microsoft needs happy customers in order to maintain its market share and strengthen the Windows brand. Its investment in N-trig is a down payment.

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Windows 7 Beta General Availability Delayed

windows7-logoStretch your legs, go outside, and get fresh air–the Windows 7 beta is delayed until tomorrow. Windows team blogger Brandon LeBlanc has announced that Windows 7 is such a hot commodity that the company has to shore up its server infrastructure to meet the demand.

Developers who have MSDN or TechNet subscriptions can download Windows 7 Beta today; it will (in theory) become generally available tomorrow at 12 PM PT. Direct download links are live if you want to get the jump on all the people that will spend their Saturdays downloading a beta operating system, but installations without product keys are limited to 30-day trial periods.

As an aside, has anybody told Microsoft about BitTorrent yet? It seems to be a reliable way to distribute big files to lots of people.

If you want to upgrade to the Windows 7 beta from Windows XP, you are out of luck–it doesn’ offer an upgrade path. Upgrade installations are only supported for PCs that are running Windows Vista with Service Pack 1. The company has not yet announcing finalized upgrade paths for Windows 7, a spokesperson wrote in an e-mail. The beta is available in one edition that is roughly equivalent to Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.

It behooves Microsoft to provide an upgrade path from Windows XP Professional. Only about 10 percent of enterprises have deployed Windows Vista as their major OS, Information Technology Intelligence Corp’s principal analyst (and owner) Laura DiDio said yesterday. Windows 7 can’t arrive soon enough.

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OLPC Slashes Staff, Refocuses Mission

olpcJust weeks after administering its “Give One, Get One” holiday season drive, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation has cut its staff by 50 percent to downsize its operational costs. But the news is not entirely grim: OLPC has announced several new technology initiatives.

In a blog posting, founder Nicholas Negroponte explained that as a non profit, OLPC is bearing the brunt of the worldwide economic downturn. It has reduced its team down to 32 people, and the remaining personnel have reduced compensation. With luck the person that produced the foundation’s creepy John Lennon ad wasn’t spared the pink slip.

Negroponte reaffirmed the organization’s commitment to its mission of providing children in developing countries with laptops. To that end it will embark on several new technology initiatives. Those include:

1. Development of Generation 2.0 of the XO laptop
2. A no-cost connectivity program
3. A million digital books
4. Passing on the development of the Sugar Operating System to the community.
5. Creating a $0 laptop to be distributed in the least developed countries.

The foundation will also change its deployment strategy, targeting Afghanistan and Northwestern Pakistan, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Further, it is restructuring its Latin America operations into a separate support unit.

500,000 children have already received laptops, according to OLPC. Computer literacy plays a role in economic development, and the foundation’s work should continue. Let’s all hope it rides out the downturn.

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AMD’s Neo Chip Makes its Debut in Cheap HP Ultraportable

amdlogoHP is showcasing its new Pavilion dv2 ultraportable notebook at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. It is the first PC manufacturer to utilize AMD’s value-priced Neo processor, which it is selling for under $1000, and looks like a sensible option for buyers that want to purchase a lightweight–but not bleeding-edge-machine.

The Pavilion is stylish and packs some decently robust hardware. The Neo processor, formerly codenamed “Huron” has a clockspeed of 1.6GHz and is comparable to Intel’s Ultra Low voltage Chips in its power consumption. The notebook offers hard-drive options as large as 500GB, it has AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 graphics, a 12.1-inch LCD screen, and Blu-Ray. Pricing starts at $699; higher-end models cost nearly $900.

Consumers that pay less than $700 for an ultra-portable should not expect every bell and whistle. AMD’s Neo processor has scant cache memory (512K), and is a single-core processor. However, people who are in market for the Pavillion probably will not be using the kinds of applications that take advantage of many-core processors. There isn’t much commercial ‘parallelized’ software on the market anyway.  The Pavilion will pack more than enough of computing power for people to surf the Web and type reports.

AMD will release a dual-core portable chip code-named Conesus in the second half of the year, News.com is reporting. In the meantime, I see no reason why the average person should hold off their PC purchases other than Windows 7 compatibility (although it would seem unlikely that a relatively new machine would not be upgradable).

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Sorry, Mr. President Elect: Twitter Gets Hacked

Twitter logoMalicious users gained access to Twitter’s account support tools by exploiting an undisclosed security vulnerability and hacked into 33 high profile accounts, including those belonging to Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly, U.S. President Elect Barack Obama, and CNN anchor Rick Sanchez. The intrusions caused no real harm, but Twitter’s status as a soapbox for public figures obligates it to be more responsible going forward.

Twitter acknowledged the exploits on its blog, which it considered to have been a “very serious breach of security.” It took the tools offline and froze the affect accounts when it was alerted to the problem. The Twitter team speculated that the breach may have been prevented had it been using the open authentication protocol (OAuth), a protocol to allow secure API authorization from Web applications.

The hacker (or hackers) used the President Elect’s account (which had been inactive since election day) to plug a gas card offer, made O’Reilly a more interesting individual, and changed Sanchez’s status to, “high on crack and might not be coming into work today.” Screen grabs of the exploits have been posted by TechCrunch.

No real harm was done, but the hackers’ puerile statements could have caused a real kerfuffle. Had Barack Obama already been swore in as President, an inappropriate statement could have inflamed political tinderboxes around the world. Indeed, Officials of other governments have been using Twitter for official statements.

The Israeli Consulate has been using Twitter to explain its justification for its recent military action; the wrong statement could have made an already acute political and humanitarian situation worse. It may be time for public officials and governments to reconsider their participation in social media unless there has been some form of a security audit. Twitter should take the responsibilities that come with being an impactful channel for disseminating information seriously.

The TV station across the street from me has a security guard and uses access cards at the door for a reason. The same standard should apply to new media.

In an indication that Twitter has become hackers’ target de jour, the intrusions come on the heels of a major phishing campaign that took place over the weekend. An untold number of Twitter users were lured into giving up their passwords for the promise of an iPhone.

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Semiconductor Sales Decline Slightly in 2008

The Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group comprised of computer, device, and chip makers, is reporting that chip sales dipped to $20.8 billion in 2008 from $23.1 billion in 2007, New York Times is reporting. It’s yet another sign of the U.S. economy’s fragile condition. But the “glass is half full” part of my brain can’t ignore the fact that sales are still brisk.

We already knew, of course, that businesses and consumers are spending less on IT. It makes perfect sense that non essential capital expenditures would lower: you can’t eat silicon. Innovations in technology can give businesses an edge, but when it comes time to tighten the belt, it is better to delay buying new workstations or BlackBerries for interns than it is to cut advertising or hand out pink slips. Consumers can afford to wait another year for the latest and greatest gadget.

There could be other contributing factors. Aside from the economy, the industry is on the downward edge of a sawtooth. I’m not going to buy a new computer today unless I have to, because OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 aren’t out yet. Many consumers are informed enough to know that they may want to hold off purchases for those releases.

While it is widely accepted that 2009 will be a difficult year economically, that does not mean that every sector of the economy will be affected equally. The IT industry is not the automobile industry–let’s not panic because one report tells us what we already anticipated.

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Michael Dell Targets Executives with Layoffs

Dell logoHey dude, you’ve got a golden parachute. Dell Computer founder Michael Dell has fired the executives that he handpicked to turn the financially ailing PC manufacturer around when he returned as CEO in 2007, and may target lower level executives next, according to press reports.

The reports indicate that Michael Cannon, who has served as president of global operations and had responsibilities for streamlining manufacturing operations, will assume another role. Mark Jarvis, Dell’s chief marketing officer, is out. The duo received a combined US$22.8 million in compensation.

Until now, the company has asked its rank and file employees to bear the brunt of its cost savings. Employees were asked to take unpaid days off in November. Around that time, the company also began to charge customers a monthly fee for premium support.

While the company’s stock value has plummeted, it has remained profitable; albeit less profit than it was two years ago. It has assumed more debt, but its overall financial health is okay.

A Datamonitor Industry Market Research report from Apr. 2008 has Dell with a 8.1% share of the global computers & peripherals industry. Without having to play around with ratios, I’m confident that the company is not going under any time soon. When the world economy turns around, so will Dell–provided it has competent people in charge of its marketing and operations.

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Researchers Demo E-Commerce Insecurity

When you see the little padlock icon in your browser, it’s supposed to indicate that the Web page you are visiting is legitimate and that your connection is secure. Today, at the Chaos Computer Club’s annual conference in Berlin, a group of researchers undermined that assumption by exposing flaws in the underlying authentication mechanism that e-commerce relies upon.

A group of researchers represented by David Molnar, a doctoral student in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, demonstrated a proof of concept of an exploit that bypasses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security safeguards. Every Web browser that implement SSL can be spoofed into displaying the padlock.

In short, the researchers successfully exploited a vulnerability in the MD5 algorithm that is used to verify whether or not SSL certificates are legitimate, enabling them to forge certificates that would be accepted by Web browsers. The certificates are used to authenticate the ownership of domains.

But don’t get too worked up just yet–there is a lot of work involved. Creating a forged certificate took the team over two weeks and required the muscle of a cluster of 200 PlayStation 3 consoles. Further, a malicious user would have to trick a victim into visiting a fake version of the legitimate site that he or she meant to visit. The gory details of the exploit will not be publicly disclosed until the problem has been addressed, according to a report by News.com.

Techniques as complex as DNS poisoning to simple social engineering have proven that traffic can be rerouted to rouge Web sites. There is a potential for real mischief, but today’s browsers have facilities that go beyond SSL to detect phishing attempts. Microsoft’s phishing filter compares domains against black lists (As an aside, the Phishing Filter Web site has an expired SSL certificate).

End users are more secure than they were a few years ago, but I never underestimate the ingenuity of criminals – especially when the incentive is valuable identity and financial information. It would not be inconceivable for a group to develop a grid-enabled application to churn out false SSL certificates.

That said, the research is important work toward securing the Web, and this type of research should remain unrestricted. There is no real security in obscurity, but research should prompt action.

The MD5 algorithm is critically important for e-commerce, yet it is an early 90’s era technology that was not designed for today’s Web, just as DNS was not designed with security in mind. The experts knew the risks.

It is alarming that little was done to harden SSL even while MD5’s weaknesses were understood; papers were published and reported on in the press four years ago. OpenID authentication also relies upon MD5: This vulnerability affects more than just e-commerce.

There must be more coordination to secure the Internet going forward. The industry needs to learn from past mistakes and bake security into the design life cycle of all future Web standards.

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HP’s Digital Media Server Edges into Apple’s Territory

HP has received favorable reviews for its new 1.5TB MediaSmart Server ex487, a Mac-compatible Windows Home Server that serves as a centralized hub for digital media libraries and connects to social Web services. And its launch has revived rumors that Apple could be improving its Time Capsule network storage device to perform many of the same functions..

Surprisingly, much of the praise centers on HP’s successful integration of its middleware on top of Windows Home Server. (Anyone with a memory as short as a matchstick can recall lousy software being preloaded onto HP machines in the past.) Two other variations of the server that have lower storage capacities are available; the product family’s shared specs are as follows:

· HP Media Collector: conveniently schedules the MediaSmart Server to copy and centralize digital files and libraries from networked PCs
· Media Streaming: remotely streams photos and music to any Internet-connected PC or Mac
· Server for iTunes: centralizes iTunes music libraries on the server for playback to any networked Mac or PC running iTunes
· HP Photo Publisher: easily upload photos to Facebook®, PicasaTM Web Albums and Snapfish(3)
· HP Photo Viewer: allows easy sharing of photos with friends and family
· PC Hard Drive Backup: backs up networked PCs via the Windows Home Server backup feature
· Mac Hard Drive Backup: backs up Macs running Leopard using Apple Time Machine software
· Server Backup: duplicates designated shared folders to a separate hard disk drive
· Online Backup: duplicates designated folders to Amazon’s S3 online backup service for an additional layer of protection
· Smart Power Management: can schedule times for server to go to “sleep” and “wake up,” saving on energy costs
· Processor: Intel Celeron, 2.0 GHz 64-bit. Two gigabytes (GB) of 800-MHz DDR2 DRAM now standard on MediaSmart Server

The drive bays are expandable to over 9TB. With storage being as affordable as it is, I can’t imagine why HP is not providing more storage from the get-go. My old reliable Windows XP Pro desktop has over a terabyte of storage. Then again, I built it, and am more of an early adopter than the average consumer.

The average consumer is also very likely to associate Apple with all things media. Frankly, Apple has needed to make the Time Capsule a more attractive product. Customers that are savvy enough to back up their data are likewise savy enough to know that there are some pretty cool storage alternatives. Rumored new Time Capsule features such as MobileMe support woud differentiate it from HP’s offering.

Other rumored upcoming Time Capsule features include a shared iTunes library databases for music and video, facilities to share media among Apple devices both at home and over the Internet, file-sharing, and back ups that can be remotely initiated. It may also provide for multiple hard drive configurations.

If I were an Apple customer, I would not switch back. If I was thinking about making the jump from PC to the Mac, it would probably take more than HP’s media server to stop me. In that scenario, the only other element that work really in HP’s favor would be price: The HP servers are relatively inexpensive, with the ex487 starting at $749.

That said, Apple could throw PC manufacturers a real curve ball by shipping souped up Time Capsules with Macs for a reasonable price–if not free with some higher-end models. With HP upping the ante, Apple will have to polish its products that much harder.

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Apple Invests in Advanced Mobile Graphics

oldapplelogoIf news that broke today is any clue, future iPhones and iPods could boast more potent graphics capabilities. UK-based chip maker Imagination has announced that Apple had acquired a 3.6 percent stake in the company and licensed its PowerVR graphics technology. Apple already a great gaming platform in the iPhone, and this transaction plays to that strength.

The deal may have been in the works since earlier this year, according to a report by AppleInsider, which has been following Apple’s supply chain. With the acquisition, Apple will be better positioned to offer its developers a more compelling gaming platform.

Many of the top applications in the iTunes App Store are games. Cupertino–which touts the iPod Touch as the “funnest iPod ever” knows that and sees the opportunities that it presents. In the near term, it would serve itself well by promoting the existing iPhone’s portfolio of games, and highlighting a handful of the most compelling titles. (It has already leveraged restaurant-finder app Urbanspoon in its advertising.)

Why ensure that media-centric devices like the iPhone and iPod appeal to gamers, too? Consider this: The gaming industry now eclipses Hollywood in revenue. Mobile gaming could be a very lucrative revenue stream for Apple, so it’s only logical that it invest in technologies that will excite game developers.

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