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China has stepped up computer espionage against the US government and American businesses, according to an influential Washington congressional panel. In its annual report to Congress, the panel warned that China was gaining increasing access to sensitive information from US computer networks.
It said China was aggressively pursuing cyber-warfare capabilities to gain an advantage over the US in any conflict. There has been no comment so far from the Chinese on the report. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission was set up by Congress in 2000 to advise, investigate and report on US-China issues.
It alleges that the Chinese are looking for diplomatic and military secrets in government databases, and potentially lucrative industrial secrets held by American corporations. The report said the US government and economy were critically vulnerable to cyber-space attack since both depended heavily on computers and the internet.
 News source: BBC News
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With the details on Microsoft's decision this week to discontinue OneCare next year, as well as Symantec's and Kaspersky's thoughts on the decision, it's now time to focus on the product codenamed Morro. Microsoft has revealed very little about Morro so far, mainly because it isn't done. Here's what we know, and what Redmond still refuses to discuss.
What we know
Microsoft can't leave the security market altogether; that would go completely against the huge strides Redmond has made in security over the past couple of years. Enter Morro, a free real-time antimalware solution for consumers to be released in the second half of 2009. It will not be bundled with Windows, and will instead be available as a standalone download for Windows XP/Vista/7. It will be "built on Microsoft's award-winning malware protection engine and will take advantage of the same core antimalware technology that fuels the company's current line of security products," a Microsoft representative told Ars. Furthermore, as more people use Morro, Microsoft will gain access to a larger amount of data that it can then use in security research and improvement of other solutions like Forefront.
 Full story: One Microsoft Way
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| Last comment was by MrCobra
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In just over 20 years, the U.S. could wean itself from coal and oil for electricity generation and nearly halve its gasoline consumption, according to an analysis done by energy experts at Google. The search giant's Google.org philanthropy on Thursday released updated numbers and policy recommendations on how the U.S. could dramatically change its energy consumption by 2030.
According to its Clean Energy by 2030 Web site: "Google's proposal will benefit the U.S. by increasing energy security, protecting the environment, creating new jobs, and helping to create the conditions for long-term prosperity. Some of the necessary funds will be public, but much of it will come from the private sector--a typical approach for infrastructure and high technology investments."
Full story: News.com
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A federal judge ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to testify in a class-action lawsuit revolving around Microsoft's marketing prior to the launch of its Windows Vista operating system.
Plaintiffs allege that Microsoft misled consumers by allowing PCs makers to designate PCs running Windows XP as "Vista Capable" even when they could only run a basic version of Vista.
Microsoft had opposed plaintiffs' motion asking that Ballmer testify, saying that other Microsoft executives had made the key decisions in the "Vista Capable" program.
Full story: Seattle Tech Report
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I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.
Full story: Gizmodo
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| Last comment was by crahak
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Two pieces of malicious software affecting Apple's Mac OS X appeared this week: a Trojan horse with the ability to download and install malicious code of an attacker's choice, and a hacker tool for creating backdoors, according to security vendors.
The Trojan — called 'OSX.RSPlug.D' by Intego, the Mac security specialist that discovered the threat — is a variant on an older piece of malicious code but with a new installer, Intego said.
"It is a downloader, and it contacts a remote server to download the files it installs," Intego said in an advisory. "This means that, in the future, the downloader may be able to install payloads [other] than the one it currently installs."
Full story: ZDnet
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| Last comment was by crahak
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There’s been a lot of talk recently about how much money Microsoft is spending (and some would say wasting) on its new advertising campaigns to promote its brand. Of course you know the ones: The Bill Gates/Seinfeld ads and the newer “I’m a PC” ads. But there hasn’t been much focus on how much Microsoft rival Apple is spending on its advertising. You might think it’d be hard to get a figure out of the ever-secretive company, but BNET’s Technology Industry Blog was able to dig the figure up from Apple’s 10-K filing.
Full story: VentureBeat
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Google SearchWiki lets you customize the search results by promoting, demoting and adding new pages. You can also annotate the results. Some people think that the new feature clutters Google's clean search results, without bringing too much functionality.
Google doesn't offer a way to turn off SearchWiki other than logging out from your Google account, but you can install a Greasemonkey script that hides the interface for this additional functionality. If you use Firefox, install Greasemonkey extension, restart the browser and the add the No SearchWiki script. Google's search results will look clean again, even if you are logged in.
Full story: Google Operating System
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The latest post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog is about disk space and is written by Michael Beck, a program manager in the core OS deployment feature team. The Windows 7 team outlined tradeoffs between disk space and a few key features, and emphasized the reliability concerns that Windows Vista addressed in Windows XP. These justified disk space hogs include device drivers, hibernation support, the page file, international language fonts, logging, registry back up, and support for robust rollback and recovery after installing critical security and functionality updates (System Restore). The Windows 7 team is not just looking at the size of the system once deployed, but also how the system grows over time with logs, updates, backups, and service packs.
Full story: One Microsoft Way
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IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains. Part of a field called "cognitive computing", the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa. The resulting technology could be used for large-scale data analysis, decision making or even image recognition.
"The mind has an amazing ability to integrate ambiguous information across the senses, and it can effortlessly create the categories of time, space, object, and interrelationship from the sensory data," says Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration. "There are no computers that can even remotely approach the remarkable feats the mind performs," he said. "The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain."
IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do. The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.
News source: BBC News
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| Last comment was by Nicon
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Microsoft said Thursday that it would give 10 free songs a month to owners of its Zune media player who also pay $14.95 a month to get on-demand access to millions of tracks. The offer is an attempt to accelerate the growth of the Zune's Zune Pass subscription service, said Zune Marketing Director Adam Sohn. Earlier this week, the company also slashed the price of several of its music players to boost demand ahead of the holidays.
As it is currently configured, Zune Pass subscribers can stream or download an unlimited number of tracks onto their Zune and share the songs among up to three PCs and three Zunes. However, once the subscription expires, they can no longer play the music. Now, Zune Pass members will be able to select 10 tracks to keep, even when the subscription runs out.
"Given where the economy is and given where our software is at focusing deeply on 'music discovery scenarios,' we think it's a pretty compelling offer for the holidays," Sohn said, adding that the most common feedback from subscribers was "let me keep some of the music."
News source: Seattle Pi
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Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday. The next test, essentially a "release candidate" version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won't hit Microsoft's initial goal of finishing the browser this year.
"Our next public release of IE (typically called a "release candidate") indicates the end of the beta period," general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting. "We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done."
Microsoft first demonstrated the browser at the Mix conference in March. Among its improvements are malware protection, better standards support, and the ability to carve off a piece of a Web page, known as a Web slice. It also supports having private sessions that don't get logged in a browser's history.
News source: C|Net News
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A new voice-recognition search tool for the iPhone has problems understanding British accents, leading to some bizarre answers to spoken queries, a newspaper report and users said Wednesday.
The free application, which allows iPhone owners to use the Google search engine with their voice, mistook the word "iPhone" variously for "sex," "Einstein" and "kitchen sink," said the Daily Telegraph. Comments left by users on the application's website seemed to confirm the problem. "Awesome job google. only problem is every time I say the word 'fish' it registers as 'sex'," wrote one, identified as Kevin.
A video demonstration of the Google Mobile App on the online giant's website shows an American engineer successfully asking for pictures of the Golden Gate as well as cinema timetables and temperature conversions. The website also includes a link to a video showing people with Irish, British and Chinese accents asking for relatively complicated searches, with apparent success. But British iPhone owners had less luck when speaking the word "iPhone" into the application -- a Scottish user was offered a porn website after it mistook his search for "sex," the Telegraph reported.
News source: Yahoo
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Mid-2009 is tipped as Windows 7's release date, but the big question is: will Microsoft abandon, or expand, its strategy of making umpteen versions of the same OS? Speculation is running rampant over when Windows 7 will officially get released (mid-2009 is a popular current choice), how many versions will be released by Microsoft, and what the upgrade paths and system requirements will be. We review the evidence to date.
On the record, Microsoft has no official stance on when Windows 7 is due, beyond saying that it currently expects Vista's successor appear within three years of Vista itself — that is, by January 2010. Microsoft similarly says that the question of whether Windows 7 will have a comparable number of variants as Vista (which comes in Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate releases) is not yet finalised.
However, the very public discussions of Windows 7 at the recent Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and WinHEC event mean that there's a lot of contradictory evidence floating around. In the world of Microsoft, anything can happen, but here's our current take on how the release dates, editions and upgrade paths might pan out.
Full story: APC Magazine
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| Last comment was by MrCobra
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