Tech News on ZDNet By Suzanne Tindal, ZDNet Australia
Nov 27, 2007 New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.
Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.
Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds.
Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent. The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.
In response to the test, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that although the company understood the interest in the service packs, they are "still in development" and will continue to evolve before their release. "It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum of customer needs," the spokesperson said.
If SP1 does not evolve sufficiently, it could be another setback for Vista, with many businesses waiting to adopt the operating system until the service pack is released.
A year after its launch, only 13 percent of businesses have adopted Vista, according to a survey of IT professionals.
Microsoft admits that the launch has not gone as well as the company would have liked. "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista," corporate vice president Mike Sievert said in a recent interview at Microsoft's partner conference in Denver.
Microsoft has not done enough to make users aware of the benefits of Vista, NPD analyst Chris Swenson said at the conference. "The problem is that there are a lot of complex new features in Vista, and you need to educate consumers about them...much like Apple educating the masses about the possibilities of the iPhone or focusing on a single feature or benefit of the Mac OS in the Mac-versus-PC commercials. Microsoft should be educating the masses about the various new features in a heavy rotation of Vista in TV, radio, and print ads. But the volume of ads (for Vista) has paled in comparison to the ads run for XP."
XP has proved to be more popular than its younger sibling, with the first six months of U.S. retail sales of box copies of Vista 59.7 percent below those of XP's in the equivalent period after its release.
Microsoft has had to allow PC manufacturers to continue to sell XP on new PCs, setting a deadline for the last sale at January 31. However, the pressure from manufacturers and consumers has been so great that Microsoft has been forced to extend the deadline another five months, until June.
According to Microsoft, sales of Vista have been picking up, with the software giant reporting 88 million units sold.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
German Police Unable To Crack Skype Protocol....
Soft32.com News
Published on Software, Security, Communications, Internet November 26, 2007, 8:13 am by Adrian Flucuş, Soft32
Officials in the German police, have complained that Skype calls cannot be intercepted and listen to, which makes the police work more difficult.
Everybody knows about phone tapping. Altough most of us have heard about it from the movies, we all know that this is what the police does in order to find out what are the bad men’s intentions and eventually send them to jail based on those evidence. Well, those days might be over as the VoIP calls are becoming more frequent even among the bad guys.
According to German president of police, Joerg Ziercke, the combination of strong encryption and the methods inherent to VoIP makes wiretapping impossible for the police. “We can’t decipher it. That’s why we’re talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it’s been decrypted,” Ziercke told Reuters.
Skype doesn’t use an open-source protocol for its VoIP service so the way the voice is encrypted before transmission is not available to the public. Also, the information is send over public networks in a series of small packets which take different routes over the network thus making them impossible to track.
Ziercke also told that the Police also needs legal means to perform online scanning of remote hard-drives. This would allow the authorities to install trojan-horse spyware programs remotely on targeted computers and find any information that is relevant for the investigation. Currently, the german law prohibits the use of spyware programs in police investigation.
Published on Software, Security, Communications, Internet November 26, 2007, 8:13 am by Adrian Flucuş, Soft32
Officials in the German police, have complained that Skype calls cannot be intercepted and listen to, which makes the police work more difficult.
Everybody knows about phone tapping. Altough most of us have heard about it from the movies, we all know that this is what the police does in order to find out what are the bad men’s intentions and eventually send them to jail based on those evidence. Well, those days might be over as the VoIP calls are becoming more frequent even among the bad guys.
According to German president of police, Joerg Ziercke, the combination of strong encryption and the methods inherent to VoIP makes wiretapping impossible for the police. “We can’t decipher it. That’s why we’re talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it’s been decrypted,” Ziercke told Reuters.
Skype doesn’t use an open-source protocol for its VoIP service so the way the voice is encrypted before transmission is not available to the public. Also, the information is send over public networks in a series of small packets which take different routes over the network thus making them impossible to track.
Ziercke also told that the Police also needs legal means to perform online scanning of remote hard-drives. This would allow the authorities to install trojan-horse spyware programs remotely on targeted computers and find any information that is relevant for the investigation. Currently, the german law prohibits the use of spyware programs in police investigation.
Microsoft takes steps to prevent another WGA meltdown...
Computerworld
By: Gregg Keizer 28/11/2007.
WGA project manager says his team will be better prepared for future outages. Three months after a major failure of Microsoft's anticounterfeit system fingered legitimate Windows XP and Vista users as pirates, a senior project manager has spelled out the steps his team has taken to prevent a repeat.
Alex Kochis, the senior project manager for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), used a company blog to outline new processes that have been put in place, including drills that test the WGA group's response to an outage like the one in late August.
"We've revamped the monitoring that is used to track what's happening within our server infrastructure so that we can identify potential problems faster, ideally before any customer gets impacted," Kochis said. "[And] since August, we have conducted more than a dozen 'fire-drills' designed to improve our ability to respond to issues affecting customers or that could impact the quality of the service."
Those drills, Kochis said, have ranged from pre-announced simulations to surprise alerts that test a specific scenario. "The team is now better prepared overall to take the right action and take it quickly," he promised.
In late August, servers operating the WGA validation system went dark for about 19 hours. Customers who tried to validate their copy of Windows -- a Microsoft requirement for both XP and Vista -- during the blackout were pegged as pirates; Vista owners found parts of the operating system had been disabled, including its Aero graphical interface.
Several days after the weekend meltdown, Microsoft blamed preproduction code for the snafu and said that a rollback to earlier versions of the server software didn't fix the problem immediately, as expected.
Microsoft, however, downplayed the incident, claiming that fewer than 12,000 PCs had been affected. The company's support forums, however, hinted that the problem was much more widespread: one message thread had collected over 450 messages within two days and had been viewed by 45,000 people.
One analyst gave Kochis' status report a mixed grade.
"I was looking for two things from Microsoft, and the first was that they would acknowledge that there was a failure," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. "If they couldn't do that, it would show a real lack of insight into the severity of the problem. But they called it an 'outage' [here], which I don't think they had actually admitted before."
Cherry was more than on the mark. While Kochis called the incident a "temporary service outage" in his newest post, three months ago, he denied that the word applied. "It's important to clarify that this event was not an outage," he said on August 29, five days after the servers went down.
"Second," said Cherry, "I wondered if Microsoft would acknowledge that failures are going to happen, that something's going to go wrong no matter how many drills they have. And when that happens, what would they do? But I don't see anything like that here."
Kochis said the WGA team has also changed the way it updates the validation service's servers, beefed up free WGA phone support to round-the-clock coverage and improved the speed of delivery of "get-legal" kits to users who discover they're running counterfeit software, but he made no mention of any modifications to the antipiracy program itself, how it's implemented or how users are handled when it determines they're using fake copies of Windows.
"They should make it so that any impact [of an outage] is on Microsoft and not on the customer," Cherry said.
Back in August, Kochis claimed that Microsoft's policy was to do just that -- err on the side of the customer -- but he contended that the outage had been an anomaly. "Our system is designed to default to genuine if the service is disrupted or unavailable," Kochis said then. "If our servers are down, your system will pass validation every time. [But] this event was not the same as an outage, because in this case the trusted source of validations itself responded incorrectly."
That's not good enough, according to Cherry. "If users can't validate, for whatever reason, Microsoft should leave them in their current state, but not invalidate them, or validate them, at least until the next check," he said.
"You have to take the utmost care before you deny something to someone that they have purchased in good faith," he concluded.
By: Gregg Keizer 28/11/2007.
WGA project manager says his team will be better prepared for future outages. Three months after a major failure of Microsoft's anticounterfeit system fingered legitimate Windows XP and Vista users as pirates, a senior project manager has spelled out the steps his team has taken to prevent a repeat.
Alex Kochis, the senior project manager for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), used a company blog to outline new processes that have been put in place, including drills that test the WGA group's response to an outage like the one in late August.
"We've revamped the monitoring that is used to track what's happening within our server infrastructure so that we can identify potential problems faster, ideally before any customer gets impacted," Kochis said. "[And] since August, we have conducted more than a dozen 'fire-drills' designed to improve our ability to respond to issues affecting customers or that could impact the quality of the service."
Those drills, Kochis said, have ranged from pre-announced simulations to surprise alerts that test a specific scenario. "The team is now better prepared overall to take the right action and take it quickly," he promised.
In late August, servers operating the WGA validation system went dark for about 19 hours. Customers who tried to validate their copy of Windows -- a Microsoft requirement for both XP and Vista -- during the blackout were pegged as pirates; Vista owners found parts of the operating system had been disabled, including its Aero graphical interface.
Several days after the weekend meltdown, Microsoft blamed preproduction code for the snafu and said that a rollback to earlier versions of the server software didn't fix the problem immediately, as expected.
Microsoft, however, downplayed the incident, claiming that fewer than 12,000 PCs had been affected. The company's support forums, however, hinted that the problem was much more widespread: one message thread had collected over 450 messages within two days and had been viewed by 45,000 people.
One analyst gave Kochis' status report a mixed grade.
"I was looking for two things from Microsoft, and the first was that they would acknowledge that there was a failure," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. "If they couldn't do that, it would show a real lack of insight into the severity of the problem. But they called it an 'outage' [here], which I don't think they had actually admitted before."
Cherry was more than on the mark. While Kochis called the incident a "temporary service outage" in his newest post, three months ago, he denied that the word applied. "It's important to clarify that this event was not an outage," he said on August 29, five days after the servers went down.
"Second," said Cherry, "I wondered if Microsoft would acknowledge that failures are going to happen, that something's going to go wrong no matter how many drills they have. And when that happens, what would they do? But I don't see anything like that here."
Kochis said the WGA team has also changed the way it updates the validation service's servers, beefed up free WGA phone support to round-the-clock coverage and improved the speed of delivery of "get-legal" kits to users who discover they're running counterfeit software, but he made no mention of any modifications to the antipiracy program itself, how it's implemented or how users are handled when it determines they're using fake copies of Windows.
"They should make it so that any impact [of an outage] is on Microsoft and not on the customer," Cherry said.
Back in August, Kochis claimed that Microsoft's policy was to do just that -- err on the side of the customer -- but he contended that the outage had been an anomaly. "Our system is designed to default to genuine if the service is disrupted or unavailable," Kochis said then. "If our servers are down, your system will pass validation every time. [But] this event was not the same as an outage, because in this case the trusted source of validations itself responded incorrectly."
That's not good enough, according to Cherry. "If users can't validate, for whatever reason, Microsoft should leave them in their current state, but not invalidate them, or validate them, at least until the next check," he said.
"You have to take the utmost care before you deny something to someone that they have purchased in good faith," he concluded.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Plasma vs. LCD or is it Myths vs Lies...
CNET Home audio & video Forums
by gabereyes - 14/11/07 12:51
So I got bored and did a google search on Plasma vs LCD.
Wow I never heard so much crap in my life and its still all about bashing plasma, One said that plasma bulbs dim over time, what bulb are they talking about I didnt know plasma TV's used a bulb, a second one stated that most people can hang there own LCD TV's but should get a professional to hang there plasma because they are harder to install, they use the same type of mount and mount the same way, Ive mounted both and its the same drill both ways.
Then everyone talks about room lighting, and how a plasma is only good in low lighting, what is low lighting? is it only one window and one light 60watts only, the fact is every person has had a CRT TV in the room at one time and plasma and LCD are brighter then a CRT TV and no TV type look good in direct light, everyone says that they have a bright room but I have never went to a house that was brighter then a retail store, so what is all this low lighting only all about.
Next is the glare issue dont buy a plasma because of the glare, but its ok to buy an LCD with a glassy type screen, most living rooms have one or two walls with windows so you should have a 25%-50% chance of having glare from a window, so why is 80%-90% of people concerned about it? I have no idea.
but what about my lamp? well lets think about it you are watching TV not you lamp so maybe you should move it.
and the list goes on and on.
plasma's uses to much power.
they run hot.
they are not as sharp.
they burn in.
they dont last very long.
they are too heavy.
you cant lay them down.
they leak gas.
you have to refill the gases.
you have to replace the bulbs.
my friend said dont buy them.
So I dicided to make a list for LCD TV's
dont buy an LCD because
they leak liquid
you have to replace the crystals
they are to lite and can fall over
they cant do a deep black level
they dont have good colors
they loss image quality at an angle
you have to replace all the bulbs at one time.
they have motion blur
the lie about there contrast or dynamic contrast
the lie about there refresh rate and viewing angle's
they are only good for still images not motion
they are harder to install
they dont work in cold climates
and the name is too long, Liquid crystal display, and the new light-emitting diode Liquid crystal display, wow that a hard to say fast five times.
I think this should be a simple thing
do you want a TV with a good black level and colors look at a TV with a glossy screen (LCD or Plasma), if you dont want glare look at a TV with out a glossy screen but it will most likely not get good blacks and/or colors.
Or size could make the choice easier, if you need a 37 inch or smaller, and if you need a 58inch or bigger.
Everything else they say about LCD and Plasma is just really not that important and/or BS.
Sorry I needed to vent on this subject.
Thanks for reading
Gabe
Message was edited by: admin to correct spelling in subject line
by gabereyes - 14/11/07 12:51
So I got bored and did a google search on Plasma vs LCD.
Wow I never heard so much crap in my life and its still all about bashing plasma, One said that plasma bulbs dim over time, what bulb are they talking about I didnt know plasma TV's used a bulb, a second one stated that most people can hang there own LCD TV's but should get a professional to hang there plasma because they are harder to install, they use the same type of mount and mount the same way, Ive mounted both and its the same drill both ways.
Then everyone talks about room lighting, and how a plasma is only good in low lighting, what is low lighting? is it only one window and one light 60watts only, the fact is every person has had a CRT TV in the room at one time and plasma and LCD are brighter then a CRT TV and no TV type look good in direct light, everyone says that they have a bright room but I have never went to a house that was brighter then a retail store, so what is all this low lighting only all about.
Next is the glare issue dont buy a plasma because of the glare, but its ok to buy an LCD with a glassy type screen, most living rooms have one or two walls with windows so you should have a 25%-50% chance of having glare from a window, so why is 80%-90% of people concerned about it? I have no idea.
but what about my lamp? well lets think about it you are watching TV not you lamp so maybe you should move it.
and the list goes on and on.
plasma's uses to much power.
they run hot.
they are not as sharp.
they burn in.
they dont last very long.
they are too heavy.
you cant lay them down.
they leak gas.
you have to refill the gases.
you have to replace the bulbs.
my friend said dont buy them.
So I dicided to make a list for LCD TV's
dont buy an LCD because
they leak liquid
you have to replace the crystals
they are to lite and can fall over
they cant do a deep black level
they dont have good colors
they loss image quality at an angle
you have to replace all the bulbs at one time.
they have motion blur
the lie about there contrast or dynamic contrast
the lie about there refresh rate and viewing angle's
they are only good for still images not motion
they are harder to install
they dont work in cold climates
and the name is too long, Liquid crystal display, and the new light-emitting diode Liquid crystal display, wow that a hard to say fast five times.
I think this should be a simple thing
do you want a TV with a good black level and colors look at a TV with a glossy screen (LCD or Plasma), if you dont want glare look at a TV with out a glossy screen but it will most likely not get good blacks and/or colors.
Or size could make the choice easier, if you need a 37 inch or smaller, and if you need a 58inch or bigger.
Everything else they say about LCD and Plasma is just really not that important and/or BS.
Sorry I needed to vent on this subject.
Thanks for reading
Gabe
Message was edited by: admin to correct spelling in subject line
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Bank manager gives woman loans for sex...
Reuters
Fri Nov 9, 2007 8:24am BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bank manager gave loans to a woman for sex and then embezzled thousands of euros to buy the silence of her relatives, authorities said on Thursday.
When the man realized he could not offer the jobless woman a loan because of her poor credit history, he offered to lend her the money personally in return for sexual favors, said a spokesman for a court in the southern town of Tuebingen.
The 31-year-old then stole the money from the bank. The pair continued their arrangement for the next three years.
In total, the man diverted some 520,000 euros ($760,000) from clients' accounts, of which he gave about 70,000 euros to the woman, and kept 40,000 euros for himself.
The biggest chunk of the cash went to her relatives who were blackmailing the bank manager, a married man with children. The manager had himself told her cousin about the sex deal.
"As incredible as it sounds, that's what he told us," the Tuebingen court spokesman said. "The cousin was suspicious and she called him to ask how the woman had got a loan."
The court said bank officials uncovered the ruse after probing irregularities linked to the man's handling of other loans. The court gave the man, who confessed, a jail sentence of three years and nine months.
© Reuters2007All rights reserved
Fri Nov 9, 2007 8:24am BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bank manager gave loans to a woman for sex and then embezzled thousands of euros to buy the silence of her relatives, authorities said on Thursday.
When the man realized he could not offer the jobless woman a loan because of her poor credit history, he offered to lend her the money personally in return for sexual favors, said a spokesman for a court in the southern town of Tuebingen.
The 31-year-old then stole the money from the bank. The pair continued their arrangement for the next three years.
In total, the man diverted some 520,000 euros ($760,000) from clients' accounts, of which he gave about 70,000 euros to the woman, and kept 40,000 euros for himself.
The biggest chunk of the cash went to her relatives who were blackmailing the bank manager, a married man with children. The manager had himself told her cousin about the sex deal.
"As incredible as it sounds, that's what he told us," the Tuebingen court spokesman said. "The cousin was suspicious and she called him to ask how the woman had got a loan."
The court said bank officials uncovered the ruse after probing irregularities linked to the man's handling of other loans. The court gave the man, who confessed, a jail sentence of three years and nine months.
© Reuters2007All rights reserved
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Online paedophile ring busted by Aust cops...
ZDNet Australia
06 November 2007. An investigation instigated by Australian authorities and followed up by 18 European police forces has led to more than 90 arrests in eight countries, authorities reported today.
Operation Koala led to 40 arrests in Britain, 21 in France, 11 in Spain, eight in Sweden, five in Belgium, four in Italy, two in Iceland and one in Denmark, the officials from the Eurojust prosecutor's organisation said.
The arrests included not only the network's operators but also its clients who viewed sexually graphic images of children on the Internet.
"The inquiry is ongoing; it will result in further arrests," Eurojust president Michael Kennedy said.
Jim Gamble, from the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre, said 46 people had been arrested in the past five months in the UK as part of the operation, and further arrests were expected.
Eurojust and the European police organisation, Europol, coordinated the efforts to crack the group.
The main suspect was nabbed in Italy with 70,000 euros (AU$110,000) on him and large quantities of paedophilic materials.
Italian police arrested him while he was trying to leave for Ukraine, where he has two homes -- and where the vast majority of the victims are from.
Often young girls aged nine to 16, the victims were lured into a Ukrainian studio where photo shoots would become increasingly explicit and end with the victims being sexually abused, the investigation found.
Europol said 21 of the 23 victims were from Ukraine.
The other two were Belgian girls whose father forced them to take sexually explicit pictures. He was arrested last year.
The network's 2,500 clients could access 1.5 million paedophilic images by Internet, the inquiry showed. Some figured among those arrested, Eurojust official Michele Coninsx said.
"Customers come from all layers of society -- lawyers, school teachers, students, people with no jobs," Coninsx said.
The inquiry began a year ago, after Australian authorities alerted their Belgian counterparts of filmed images showing the rape of two Belgian girls.
Officials later tracked down the Italian producer and found he offered 30-minute to hour-long pornographic movies, among other services, to Internet clients worldwide.
"To fill the gap between the 2,500 clients and 92 arrests is a matter of time," Eurojust's Kennedy said.
The findings were announced as paedophilia topped the agenda of a separate, four-day Interpol meeting that began today in Morocco.
© 2007 Australian Associated Press Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors
06 November 2007. An investigation instigated by Australian authorities and followed up by 18 European police forces has led to more than 90 arrests in eight countries, authorities reported today.
Operation Koala led to 40 arrests in Britain, 21 in France, 11 in Spain, eight in Sweden, five in Belgium, four in Italy, two in Iceland and one in Denmark, the officials from the Eurojust prosecutor's organisation said.
The arrests included not only the network's operators but also its clients who viewed sexually graphic images of children on the Internet.
"The inquiry is ongoing; it will result in further arrests," Eurojust president Michael Kennedy said.
Jim Gamble, from the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre, said 46 people had been arrested in the past five months in the UK as part of the operation, and further arrests were expected.
Eurojust and the European police organisation, Europol, coordinated the efforts to crack the group.
The main suspect was nabbed in Italy with 70,000 euros (AU$110,000) on him and large quantities of paedophilic materials.
Italian police arrested him while he was trying to leave for Ukraine, where he has two homes -- and where the vast majority of the victims are from.
Often young girls aged nine to 16, the victims were lured into a Ukrainian studio where photo shoots would become increasingly explicit and end with the victims being sexually abused, the investigation found.
Europol said 21 of the 23 victims were from Ukraine.
The other two were Belgian girls whose father forced them to take sexually explicit pictures. He was arrested last year.
The network's 2,500 clients could access 1.5 million paedophilic images by Internet, the inquiry showed. Some figured among those arrested, Eurojust official Michele Coninsx said.
"Customers come from all layers of society -- lawyers, school teachers, students, people with no jobs," Coninsx said.
The inquiry began a year ago, after Australian authorities alerted their Belgian counterparts of filmed images showing the rape of two Belgian girls.
Officials later tracked down the Italian producer and found he offered 30-minute to hour-long pornographic movies, among other services, to Internet clients worldwide.
"To fill the gap between the 2,500 clients and 92 arrests is a matter of time," Eurojust's Kennedy said.
The findings were announced as paedophilia topped the agenda of a separate, four-day Interpol meeting that began today in Morocco.
© 2007 Australian Associated Press Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors
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