Pc News

[Rasputin]

HP Enters the Cell Phone Fray

BARCELONA, Spain -- Hewlett Packard today unveiled its first smart phone, a slimmed-down iPaq that will be among the first Windows Mobile 6 handsets when it appears, probably in late spring, officials say.

HP announced the pewter-colored candy-bar-format GSM/EDGE iPaq 500 series Voice Messenger on the first day of the huge 3GSM cell phone industry show here, and only a few days after Microsoft released details about Windows Mobile 6, the latest iteration of its operating system for smart phones and connected handhelds.

The 500 series will be the first iPaqs that look like cell phones, with phone keypads instead of QWERTY keyboards or touch screens and styli.

Phone Details
Consciously targeting enterprise customers who already turn to HP for everything from servers to desktop and notebook PCs, the iPaq handsets will include some corporate-oriented extras as well as Windows Mobile 6's enhancements to mail and Mobile Office applications.

For example, leveraging technology from recent HP acquisition Bitfone, the iPaq Voice Messenger supports over-the-air management by corporate IT staffs. You can, for example, remotely delete all data from a lost handset, or install software updates over the air.

A Voice Commander feature lets you initiate actions (phone calls, for example) and navigate through the phone by speaking into it. The iPaq 500 series also uses text-to-speech technology to let you listen to your e-mail messages, which you can then respond to with a voice recording--all features that might come in handy when you're driving.

The handset has a 1.3-megapixel camera, and a voice-over-IP client that leverages built-in Wi-Fi (it supports Bluetooth, too). Like other Windows Mobile 6 devices, it ships with pared-down versions of core Office apps (editing and document creation capabilities are extremely limited) as well Windows Media Player.

HP says the phone's battery life will be robust, supporting 6.5 hours of talk time and up to 260 hours on standby. Of course, heavy Wi-Fi use could dramatically reduce these figures. You'll be able to charge the phone through a laptop USB port as well as a normal outlet.

Although HP will focus on selling to the enterprise market, the phone will be available to individuals through carriers that have not yet been named. In the United States, the phone will be marketed as the iPaq 510 Voice Messenger; the model number will be 510 in Asia and 514 in Europe, HP officials say.

The first phones should appear this spring. Pricing has not been announced, but HP expects it to be in the $300 to $350 range.

[Rasputin]

Intel Tests Chip Design With 80-Core Processor

Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a teraflop of operations (trillions of floating point operations per second) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip.

First described by Intel executives at a September trade show, the chip fits 80 cores onto a 275-square millimeter, fingernail-size chip and draws only 62 watts of power--less than many modern desktop chips.

The company has no plans to bring this "teraflop research chip" to market, but is using it to test new technologies such as high-bandwidth interconnects, energy management techniques, and a tile design method to build multicore chips, said Jerry Bautista, director of Intel's tera-scale research program. He spoke in a conference call with reporters on Friday before presenting technical details of the research at the ISSCC (Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference) trade show in San Francisco. Intel has discussed the 'era of tera' before.

Other Uses
Intel engineers are also using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, multimedia data mining, photo-realistic gaming, and artificial intelligence.

Until now, that degree of computing performance has been available only to scientists and academics using machines like ASCI Red, the teraflop supercomputer built by Intel and its partners in 1996 for U.S. government researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. That system handled a similar amount of computing as the new chip, but demanded an enormous 500 kilowatts of power and 500 kilowatts of cooling to run its nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro chips.

Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend, Bautista said.

Specs
Running at 3.16 GHz, the new chip achieves 1.01 teraflops of computation--an efficiency of 16 gigaflops per watt. It can run even faster, but loses efficiency at higher speeds, performing at 1.63 teraflops at 5.1 GHz and 1.81 teraflops at 5.7 GHz.

The processor saves power by shunting idle cores into sleep mode, then instantly turning them on as they're needed. Each modular tile has its own router built alongside the core, creating a "network on a chip."

Despite using such an efficient grid, the researchers found they could actually hurt performance by adding too many cores. Performance scaled up directly from 2 cores to 4, 8, and 16. But they found that computing performance began to drop with 32 and 64 cores.

"If we simply added more than 16 cores, we would get diminishing returns, because the threads and data traffic would not be used properly, so the cores get in the way of each other. It's like having too many cooks in the kitchen," said Bautista.

To solve the problem on the new chip, they used a hardware-based thread scheduler and faster on-chip memory caches, optimizing the way data flows from memory into each core. To improve the design, Intel researchers plan to add a layer of "3D stacked memory" under the chip to minimize the time and power required to feed the cores with data. Next, they will create a mega-chip that uses general purpose cores instead of the floating-point units used in the current design.

[Rasputin]

Verizon Calls for New Broadband Incentives

The U.S. government should launch a new program that provides grants and loans for broadband providers to extend service to rural areas, a top executive at Verizon Communications Inc. said Monday.

The U.S. should use as a model a state program called ConnectKentucky, which has provided 94 percent of Kentucky residents with broadband options, said Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communications.

Kentucky, a state with large rural areas and chunks of hilly terrain, expects to provide about 99 percent of its residents with a broadband carrier by the end of the year, Tauke said.

The rest of the nation likely won't reach U.S. President George Bush's goal of universal broadband access by the end of 2007, Tauke said. The U.S. needs to look at broadband incentive programs "sooner rather than later," he said.

Broadband access can have a large impact on local economies and services such as health care, Tauke said.

The new program proposed by Verizon could use some existing funding, including redirecting some funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS), which had a 2006 budget of US$6.1 billion, he said. The RUS now subsidizes several types of utilities, including broadband, electricity, distance learning and telemedicine.

New funds may also be needed, Tauke said, although he didn't provide specific numbers at a press briefing.

Part of the problem is there's no good measure of how many U.S. residents have access to broadband, Tauke said. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a report Jan. 31 saying 99 percent of all U.S. postal codes had at least one broadband provider, but critics have noted that the FCC would count a postal code if a provider offered service to just a handful of residents.

Tauke called for a comprehensive study of what broadband gaps exist. "We just don't know today who has broadband and who doesn't," he said.

Verizon has not yet pitched the idea to most lawmakers, Tauke said.

The telecom giant also called on the U.S. Congress to make changes the Universal Service Fund program, a $4 billion program that subsidizes telephone access in rural and poor areas. Instead of providing USF funds to multiple carriers, the U.S. government should cap USF at its current funding levels, and require carriers to bid to provide service in areas where subsidies are needed, Tauke said.

"Reverse auctions" forcing carriers to compete to provide service would end the current system in which multiple carriers, sometimes five or more wireless voice providers, receive USF money to provide service in the same territory, Tauke said. Verizon does not currently take USF money, he said.

"If you have multiple carriers offering service in a territory, that would seem to suggest you don't need Universal Service Fund support," he said. "[Carriers say] 'If somebody's going to hand out money, why not take it?'"

The tax on telephone service to pay for USF has risen from about 3.2 percent in 1998 to 9.7 percent currently, Verizon noted in a proposal to the Federal-Sate Joint Board on Universal Service, filed Friday. "The level of fees is becoming staggeringly high," he said. "The system is broken, it's not working, and it's unfair."

Several rural lawmakers have opposed changes to USF.

Tauke didn't address net neutrality, an issue that dominated telecom debates in Congress last year, until asked about it. Verizon expects efforts that would prohibit broadband carriers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors to fail in Congress this year, partly because the FCC and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission are monitoring providers, he said.

The two agencies "are watching the issue like hawks," he said.

[Rasputin]

Lionsgate Signs up with iTunes for Movie Deal

Lionsgate is the newest movie studio to offer movies for purchase and download via Apple's iTunes Store. The two companies on Monday announced a distribution deal that will see the iTunes Store expand its catalog of online movies by more than 150 titles in February, including hits like "Terminator 2.

Lionsgate plans to offer past blockbusters like "Basic Instinct"; "The Blair Witch Project"; "Rambo"; "Total Recall"; "Chaplin"; "The Boys from Brazil"; and many other popular movies for download. The movies will cost $9.99, and will be playable on Macs, PCs, fifth-generation iPods and, soon, Apple TV. They're rendered at 640 x 480 pixels (depending on aspect ratio).

Lionsgate is an independent studio and a producer and distributor of movies, TV programs and home entertainment content. It counts more than 10,000 titles in its library.

[Rasputin]

Flu Pandemic Could Choke 'Net, Force Usage Restrictions

Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly run aground as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic.

Such a surge would almost certainly prompt calls to restrict or prioritize traffic, such as blocking video transmissions wherever possible, according to business continuity planners who gathered on Friday at a SunGard Availability Systems hot-site facility in northern New Jersey to consider the impact of a pandemic on the Internet.

Businesses as well as home users likely would be asked to voluntarily restrict high-bandwidth traffic, the planners said. And if asking didn't work, they warned, government action to restrict traffic might well follow.

"Is there a need for a YouTube during a national emergency?" asked John Thomas, vice president of enterprise systems at a large, New York-based financial institution that he asked not be identified.

Whether the avian flu will morph into a human pandemic is unclear. But if it does, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths could result worldwide. To try to limit a pandemic's spread, many people will seek to work from home, either voluntarily or under government quarantine orders. Consequently, "the demand for communication will soar," said Renate Noone, vice president of professional services at SunGard's Availability Services unit.

Businesses and government agencies are in the best position to deal with any online traffic surges, via the use of redundant communications systems and techniques such as diverse routing. But that may not help teleworkers or customers and business partners who are trying to access systems remotely, said Noone and other pandemic planners.

"I think it's definitely the most vulnerable part of the equation," said Bernard O'Neill, vice president and chief network officer at Prudential Financial Inc., referring to the communications problems that teleworkers may face.

For their most critical workers, employers can sign contracts with telecommunications services providers for business-class services, such as dedicated lines. Companies may balk at paying for such services to prepare for a problem that may never occur, but waiting could be a risky strategy. For instance, if the World Health Organization raises its pandemic threat alert from the current level of stage 3 on the WHO's six-stage scale, demand for backup communications services could outstrip the ability of vendors to provide them, said participants in Friday's daylong pandemic forum.

Many of the people who attended the event have been hardened by experience and know how bad things can get in a disaster. The skyline of New York is visible from the back steps of the SunGard data center where the forum took place. In their comments and questions, the participants cited the disruptions wrought by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as by Hurricane Katrina and various hurricanes in Florida -- even the impact of the recent killer tornado in that state.

For pandemic planners, nothing can be taken for granted. Elizabeth Byrnes, a continuity planner at AT&T Inc., was asked how the telecommunications services provider would handle a hurricane or another secondary problem that occurs during a pandemic. Byrnes said the issue has received consideration within AT&T.

But in general, the focus of her presentation was on reviewing the company's plans to ensure continued operations during a pandemic. Byrnes insisted that AT&T would be able to meet its customer service-level agreements but also acknowledged that there are unknowns. For instance, AT&T has identified critical employees who would be asked to come into the office during a pandemic, she said. But there's no way of knowing in advance how people will react. "Will they come in? I don't know," Byrnes said.

A pandemic also could threaten the Internet and corporate networks in other ways. From a geopolitical perspective, a major influenza outbreak could be perceived by enemies in less-affected regions as leaving the U.S. in "a weakened state," said George Johnson, founder and chief technology officer of The ESP Group LLC, an application services provider in Arlington, Va., that focuses on development of secure systems. That could result in heightened risks of cyber attacks, Johnson warned.

[abadani69]

وزير ارشاد از اقدامات جديد براي رسيدن فيلترينگ سايت هاي اينترنتي به نقطه مورد نظر نهادهاي دولتي خبر داد. وي گفت: "گروهي همراه با نرم افزارهاي نظارتي جديدي شروع به کار کرده اند که فعاليت آنها هر روز قوي تر از روز پيش، برآورد شده است".

وزير ارشاد با دفاع از آئين نامه مصوب در هئيت دولت آن را برگرفته از مصوبه شوراي عالي انقلاب فرهنگي دانست و "وزارت فرهنگ وارشاد اسلامي، قوه قضائيه، مخابرات، وزات اطلاعات و سازمان صداو سيما" را متوليان اصلي رسيدگي به فيلتر شدن سايت ها اعلام کرد

خبرگزاري مهر همچنين به نقل از وزير ارشاد نوشت حضور وزارت اطلاعات در کميته فيلترينگ سايت هاي اينترنتي "به منظورشناسايي جنبه هاي امنيتي و جاسوسي بيگانگان" است.

به گفته صفار هرندي "داشتن نظارت بر مجموعه سايت هاي اينترنتي را از جمله وظايف اين کارگروهها" خواند ولي در عين حال " فيلتر شدن تعدادي از سايت ها به واسطه بخشي از نام افراد را جزء پيگيري هاي اين کارگروه ندانست".

يک ماه قبل که اکبر اعلمي، نماينده تبريز در سئوالي از وزير ارتباطات با اشاره به فيلترشدن ده ميليون سايت اينترنتي در ايران که اغلب سايت هاي علمي و تخصصي و يا سايت هاي سياسي و خبري اند، در مورد "استفاده ناصحيح از كلمات كليدي براي فيلتر كردن سايت*هاي اينترنتي که سبب مسدود شدن بسياري از سايت*هاي مجازي كه ادامه فعاليت آنها منع قانوني ندارد شده است" پرسيد، وزير ارتباطات اين حرف را "نادرست و غير واقعي" اعلام کرد.

محمد سليماني هم چنين با اشاره به اينکه"فيلترينگ بحثي علمي است" و "فيلتر از درس*هاي اساسي در رشته**هاي مختلف مهندسي است و اين امر پالايشي براي جدا سازي موارد مناسب از موارد نامناسب و مخرب است و اين مسئله اجتناب ناپذير مي*باشد" وزارت ارتباطات و فناوري را "مجري مصوبات كميته تعيين مصاديق و تصميمات قضايي" معرفي کرد و گفت: "از ميان مصاديقي كه نماينده سؤال كننده مطرح كرد، فقط يك سايت فيلتر شده و آن هم به دليل مستهجن بودن آن است و بقيه پايگاه*هاي عنوان شده باز است".

کمترازيک ماه بعد، در 20 بهمن، مدير كل دفتر امور اجرايي فناوري اطلاعات وزارت ارتباطات و فناوري اطلاعات با اشاره به اينكه فيلترينگ وبلاگ*هاي ياهو كه در هفته اخير رخ داده برداشته شده است، به ايرنا گفت: "اين اشتباه درپي خطاي فني موجود در سيستم*هاي فيلترينگ پيش آمده بود".

اصغر انصاري افزود: "در زمان حاضر ما از سيستم*هاي *ايراني براي فيلترينگ استفاده مي*كنيم كه به*دليل جديد بودن آنها در برخي موارد با اشكالات فني مواجه مي*شويم". وي حتي خبر داد که وزارت ارتباطات شماره فاكسي را براي پيگيري فيلترينگ اشتباهي و عدم معطلي مردم اعلام كرده است.

تهديد سايت هاي خبري

از سوي ديگر وزير ارشاد در پاسخ به سئوال خبرگزاري مهر درباره ضرب الاجل 72 ساعته به سايت هاي خبري در مورد برداشته شدن نام خبرگزاري از ابتداي صفحه هاي سايت هاي اطلاع رساني، گفت: "تنها 11خبرگزاري غير دولتي ثبت شده و مجوز دار در کشور فعاليت مي کند". وزير ارشاد در نامه قبلي خود به روزنامه ها در نيمه شهريور ماه تعداد خبرگزاري هاي داراي مجوز را 24 خبرگزاري اعلام کرده بود.

وي شروع فعاليت تعدادي از سايت ها را دليل مجاز بودن فعاليت آنها ندانست و گفت: "با ابلاغ قانون نظارت بر خبرگزاري غير دولتي، تکليف فعاليت آنها روشن مي شود". وزير ارشاد در مورد اينکه آيا آنچه به عنوان قانون نام مي برد در مجلس به تصويب رسيده يا نه توضيحي نداد اما اعلام کرد: "آن دسته از پايگاههاي اطلاع رساني که نه خبرنگار و نه تشکيلاتي از جنس خبرگزاري دارند، نمي توانند به عنوان خبرگزاري فعاليت کنند و بايد بر اساس برنامه هاي ساماندهي سايت ها، براي ثبت و معرفي خود اقدام کنند".

[abadani69]

[Rasputin]

Is the iPhone a Groundbreaker or Severely Flawed?

The iPhone has been hailed as a ground-breaking wonder. And dismissed as a mediocre product. It's clearly innovative--and also quite flawed. People will clamor for one--unless they decide not to. And competitors are already coming up with iPhone killers.

Not bad for a product that hasn't even shipped yet.

It's been a month since Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone during Macworld Expo. All that we know about the mobile device comes from Jobs' two-hour keynote, a post-keynote briefing with Apple executives, and whatever iPhone information is posted on Apple's Web site. And yet, that hasn't stopped a flood of commentary on why the iPhone will succeed or flounder, what its flaws may or may not be, and what Apple needs to change about a device that isn't even in the hands of one user yet.

It's easy to understand the outpouring of coverage--since its January unveiling, the iPhone has piqued the interest of people like no product since the iPod. Yet, with the iPhone still four months away from its expected June 2007 ship date, there's very little pundits can add about the phone's features and performance. So what you wind up with is a lot of speculation--and all too often, that speculation turns into accepted fact.

A Reality Check
To add some measure of a reality check to all this iPhone pondering, we're taking a closer look at some of the more frequently asserted opinions to see which ones provide more noise than signal.

Closed system? Users of traditional smartphones often add third-party apps to the devices that augment the phone's features--everything from utilities to document management tools. But some analysts seem to be interpreting Apple's reticence to talk about third-party opportunities as a sign that developers will be shut out of the iPhone system.

"With a Palm or Symbian device you can add applications whenever you want and that's important to some people," said Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis. "The iPhone doesn't have the ability to add third-party applications."

However, it's not clear that's necessarily the case. Jobs did tell the New York Times that Apple would "define everything that is on the phone." But that's not the same thing as preventing third-party developers from creating any sort of iPhone add-on.

"Apple has never said they would not open it up to the development community," noted Tim Bajarin, president of high-tech consulting firm Creative Strategies.

Instead, what Apple might do is keep a tight lid on the iPhone through its initial launch, giving developers more opportunities as the phone gains greater footing. "If you think about it from a strategic standpoint with them being in control of the applications in the early stages they can control how the applications are written, but once the process is solid, they can open it up to developers," Bajarin said.

[Rasputin]

HTC Unveils Tiny 'Laptop' 3G Phone

HTC has launched a trio of smartphones at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, including a device resembling a tiny laptop and a Window Mobile 6-based handset with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Separately, BT announced a range of HTC handsets would be added to its converged Fusion offering. HP is also joining Fusion with a dual-mode Windows Mobile 6 device.

The devices are among the dozens of handsets introduced at the trade show, with some manufacturers focusing on the convergence of fixed and mobile telephony, and others, like Research In Motion, on the convergence of business and consumer features.

Still other handsets, such as Samsung's Ultra Smart F700 or the earlier Apple iPhone, are oriented around new interface technologies such as touchscreens.

The HTC Advantage, aka the X7500, to be launched by T-Mobile across Europe in March under the Ameo brand, is a 3G handset built to resemble a tiny laptop. It has a 5-inch VGA screen, magnetic QWERTY keyboard, eight-hour battery life and a sensor technology that allows users to navigate the screen by tilting the device.

Other features include 8GB hard drive, miniSD slot, video output for making presentations, GPS and 3-megapixel camera, as well as standard office software and other features. It handles tri-band UMTS.

The HTC S710, to be launched across Europe by Orange under the SPV E650 brand, is destined to be one of the first Windows Mobile 6 devices on the market. Its principal attraction is a QWERTY keypad that slides out from behind a standard-looking "brick" form-factor; it also sports push email, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The HTC P3350 is a media-oriented handset resembling a PDA, and, like the Advantage, runs on Windows Mobile 5.

FusionBT said it would add an unspecified range of HTC handsets to Fusion, which combines mobile and home wireless telephony using GSM and voice-over-IP.

Fusion will also see the addition of HP's iPaq 514 Voice Messenger, a Windows Mobile 6-based candybar handset with quad-band GSM and 802.11b/g, using UMA to roam between the two.

The device is HP's first candybar-style iPaq and is HP's first Wi-Fi device allowing power management, HP said. Users can turn the Wi-Fi radio off if desired, or it can be left in sleep mode, waking up when it detects Wi-Fi infrastructure.

[Rasputin]

Microsoft Fixes 20 Flaws, Patches Full Security Line-Up

Microsoft Tuesday unveiled a dozen security updates that patched 20 vulnerabilities, including one found in every security product of its consumer and enterprise lines, including software either bundled with or able to run on the new Windows Vista operating system.

More than half of the 20 patches--11 total--were labeled "Critical," the highest rating in Microsoft's four-step threat scoring system.

Among the updates are several that tackle long-standing problems in numerous editions of Microsoft Office, including six patches for Word, and one each for PowerPoint and Excel.

Most Import Fix
But the update deemed by analysts to be most important is MS07-010, which patched a critical bug in the malware scanning engine used by Windows OneCare, Windows Defender and the Forefront Security and Antigen products. The flaw, said Microsoft, could be leveraged by a hacker to hijack a supposedly protected PC because the scanning engine improperly parses PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Attackers could feed malformed PDFs to PCs via e-mail, for instance, and grab control of the machines without any interaction from users.

According to Microsoft, the scanning engine bug hasn't been used yet by attackers.

No matter, said Amol Sarwate, who manages Qualys' vulnerability lab. "MS07-010 is the most critical of the bulletins. The flaw in the core protection engine of several Microsoft [security] products can be used to execute attack code on a machine without any user interaction. And this [is the software] which is supposed to protect your desktops and servers from attack."

Others concurred. Symantec's alert to customers of its DeepSight threat network, for instance, rated MS07-010 as a "10" out of a possible 10 on its urgency scale. And Minoo Hamilton, senior security researcher with patch management vendor nCircle, said the patch was not only a critical fix, but an embarrassment to Microsoft.

"There have been so many vulnerabilities having to do with parsing files," said Hamilton, "that this is exactly the kind of thing that you would have expected Microsoft to catch. They'll have to put more effort into securing their security software because this is embarrassing."

Lamar Bailey, the senior X-Force operations officer at IBM's Internet Security Systems (ISS), disagreed with Sarwate's, Hamilton's, and Symantec's prognosis. "These products automatically update, so the exposure will be short," said Bailey. "I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't already updated themselves."

IE Fixes
Instead of the malware bug, Bailey tagged MS07-016, the bulletin that patched three flaws in Internet Explorer (IE), as the one ISS feels should be deployed right away. The reason: a vulnerability in how IE processes requests from FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers.

"Lots of shareware sites actually use links to an FTP server," said Bailey. "Users don't always know that they're even connecting to an FTP server." Attackers could entice users to malicious Web sites hosting innocent-looking files for downloading, while they're actually exploiting the IE bug to hijack the PC.

Of the three IE bugs in MS07-016, two affect the newest version of the browser, IE 7, on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003f, although the threat rating has been downgraded to "Important." IE 7 on Vista is not at risk, said Microsoft.

Another bulletin, MS07-014, has been long anticipated. The update for Microsoft Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003 and Word 2004 for Mac patches six bugs, four of which have already been used by hackers. "We recommend that users also patch this immediately, since exploits are in the wild," said Jonathan Bitle, Qualys product manager.

Three of the four already-used vulnerabilities date back to December, and were reportedly scheduled for release last month before being pulled at the last minute for quality issues.

Other bulletins in the massive patch day--Tuesday's tied a record with two months in 2006 when Microsoft also released a dozen updates--fixed flaws in Windows, Office, Visual Studio, various ActiveX controls, the RTF (Rich Text Format) file format, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Users can obtain the February patches via Windows' Automatic Update, from the Microsoft Update service, or through enterprise tools such as Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and Software Update Services (SUS).

[Rasputin]

IBM Taps Partners to Bolster Speech Applications

Speech-enabled applications have been around for some time, but they have never reached the level of adoption that proponents of the technology have predicted over the years. IBM Corp. is out to change all of that.

In New York on Tuesday, the company showcased a host of applications -- both prototypes and commercial -- that its research labs and partners have built incorporating voice recognition and speech technologies.

While IBM has been doing research for about 10 years in the speech area, speech-enabled applications have come a long way since the company first introduced dictation technologies to the medical industry, Dr. David Nahamoo, chief technology officer of speech technology at IBM Research, said.

And IBM's partners, some of whom were on hand at the event in IBM's Manhattan office to show off applications using IBM ViaVoice technology, are a big part of why speech technology is moving forward, he said.

"We're working with partners to make a lot of things happen so we accelerate the delivery of useful products and offerings in the marketplace," Nahamoo said.

Another thing IBM did about a year ago to accelerate the company's ability to offer speech-enabled applications that are "truly useful" to the average person was to integrate its speech research into its core software group, said Dan Miller, an analyst with Opus Research in San Francisco.

"[This] means they're willing to bring solutions that involve the full line of WebSphere middleware, and application servers along into solutions that indeed involve speech," he said.

IBM's long-standing tradition of innovation also brings credibility to speech-enabled applications and could inspire more people to use them, Miller added.

At Tuesday's event, companies such as Navigation Pioneer Electronics and All Media Guide showed how they are using Embedded ViaVoice speech-recognition technology in commercial applications.

For example, Pioneer's AVIC-Z2 new car navigation system provides detailed driving directions that go beyond the usual "turn left at the next street" with the help of Embedded ViaVoice, said Ted Cardenas, product planning manager, Navigation Pioneer Electronics. "It will actually tell you the street name," he said, adding this is safer because the driver does not have to look at the screen to double-check the street name.

The AVIC-Z2 system also learns a driver's driving habits, and will only map out directions that avoid certain freeways and streets if a driver tends to do the same thing, Cardenas said.

All Media Guide, which provides information about music, musical artists, songs and albums for Web sites, online music stores and other entertainment outlets, has teamed with IBM and Avoca Semiconductor Inc. to allow users to interact by voice with their personal media collections, said Zac Johnson, product manager for All Media Guide.

Avoca's speech-enabled user interface is called the Media Control Platform, within which is IBM Embedded ViaVoice. All Media Guide provides the engine within the platform that lets people use voice capabilities to find artists and songs they want to listen to, he said.

For example, a user can tell the system it wants to hear Bruce Springsteen, or "Play The Boss," using his nickname to identify him, Johnson said. The technology can work with a variety of devices on which users store their digital media, such as PCs, iPods or MP3 players.

IBM faces its stiffest competition from Nuance Communications in the speech technology market, but another big software competitor, Microsoft Corp., also is moving into the space, Opus's Miller said.

In particular, Microsoft is focused on embedding voice into its Office Communication Server collaboration software, he said. This will provide some interesting competitive offerings down the road as IBM also is doing the same with its Lotus/Sametime collaboration suite, Miller said.

"I think those companies are really pushing each other to innovate in that area," he said.

[Rasputin]

Yahoo Schmoozes Mobile Operators, Seeks Deals

Yahoo Inc. is schmoozing mobile phone operators at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona in the hopes of enlisting partners for its new mobile search services.

With mobile phones soon expected to push PCs aside as the most popular tool to access the Internet, the company has given mobility a top priority and is taking steps to establish its mobile search engine as the technology of choice for mobile operators, Marco Boerries, senior vice president of Yahoo Connected Life, said Tuesday at a news conference at the mobile phone show in sunny Spain.

A gamma version of the company's new Java-based search application, Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0, is now available after a beta version was released in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to Boerries.

The application is designed to help users easily navigate a selection of personal channels for areas such as news, sports, entertainment and maps.

"Mobile search so far hasn't worked because it's been an adaption of PC search," Boerries said. "Mobile users want instant answers" that are intelligently selected for small devices.

A key feature of Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 is oneSearch, a new search engine designed specifically for mobile devices. Instead of returning a list of Web sites, the search engine provides facts related to the query term, according to Boerries.

More than 400,000 users have downloaded the beta application to about 100 different devices.

Yahoo is particularly keen to have mobile phone operators and vendors preinstall the application.

On Monday, the company reached a deal with LG Electronics Inc. that will bring its brand to the screens of tens of millions of LG cell phone handsets shipped later this year. Under the deal, LG will preload Yahoo services, including Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger on phones sold worldwide.

Clearly set on establishing an ad-funded search service on mobile phones similar to its service for PCs, Yahoo said Monday it will start showing mobile display ads on its Yahoo Mobile Web service in 19 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Major advertisers include Intel Corp., PepsiCo Inc. and Proctor & Gamble Co.

The use of ad-funded search services will help mobile phone operators generate revenue that they may want to return to customers in the way of free services, Boerries said. "You can only give something away if you make something," he said. "Mobile advertising will enable this."

[Rasputin]

Intel to Stay with Wi-Fi in New Centrino Platform

Just weeks before launching its new Centrino notebook platform, Intel said today it had cancelled plans to provide wireless access with an HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) module built by Nokia.

Instead, the next-generation Centrino Duo platform, code-named "Santa Rosa," will rely solely on Wi-Fi technology to give mobile PC users wireless Internet access. Intel plans to launch the platform in the second quarter of 2007.

Intel had first announced the partnership in September, saying the Nokia module would be an ingredient in its improved Centrino Duo platform, a recipe for wireless-enabled notebooks with long battery life centered around Intel's Core 2 Duo processor.

But Intel has now decided that notebook vendors would not be willing to pay enough to justify the investment.

"After doing further analysis, we decided it wasn't a good enough ROI to bring that product to the notebook market now. But that doesn't change the value proposition of Santa Rosa at all," said Intel spokeswoman Connie Brown.

HSDPA in Future Platforms
The company still plans to use HSDPA in future platforms.

"We will continue to look into embedding 3G capability at some time. It's certainly on the table, but we're not ready to announce anything at this time," Brown said.

In the original announcement, Intel said that adding an HSDPA module would complement its Wi-Fi component by letting notebook users gain wireless broadband connectivity through a popular international standard. The partnership was supposed to assign Intel the tasks of platform design, software, integration and support, and sales and marketing. Nokia was to manufacture the module, as well as sharing its expertise in 3G HSDPA, connectivity products and carrier relationships.

Now, Intel will provide all notebook connectivity with its "Kedron" Next-Gen Wireless-N card, an embedded network adapter that uses the IEEE 802.11 Draft-N standard, as well as existing a, b, and g standards. Intel announced that card in January, ahead of the IEEE body's official adoption of the new standard.

Wireless Card Specs
The new wireless card will allow notebook PC users to share five times the data at twice the range of their current 802.11a/g cards, giving them far better performance with downloading music and streaming high-definition video, Intel said. Notebook vendors including Acer, AsusTek Computer, Gateway, and Toshiba have already begun selling the card in PCs, while Dell and Hewlett-Packard are expected to wait for the full Santa Rosa system.

HSDPA Still Popular
Despite Intel's judgement about weak demand for HSDPA, the standard remains popular with cell-phone vendors. At the 3GSM trade show in Barcelona this week, Qualcomm announced plans to use HSDPA-based chips to deliver mobile television to handhelds, while Samsung said its new Ultra 12.9 slide-design cell phone would use HSDPA as part of its tri-band data scheme. And notebook users will be able to use the standard by the third quarter of 2007, according to an announcement by Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB on Feb. 7 that it would use HSDPA in the PC300, a mobile broadband access card for Mac and PC laptops.

In the meantime, users could also resort to EV-DO, a slightly slower wireless standard available in notebooks from Sony, Gateway and Lenovo, said Richard Shim, a senior research analyst with IDC.

"The ultimate fallout is that the proliferation of cellular wide area networks just took a big hit," Shim said. "When HSDPA is built into chipsets, it gets the volume of users up. But without that incentive to the carriers, it hurts the forecast for building out new networks."

[Rasputin]

iPhone Competitors Not There Yet

So much for Apple Inc. raising the bar in the mobile phone industry.

BARCELONA -- Since Apple announced it would soon start selling a combined music player and mobile device called the iPhone, industry experts have predicted that competing cell phone makers would rise to the challenge and start producing equally exciting phones.

They may yet do that, but so far they haven't.

I took a quick stroll around the show floor of the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona checking out the music phones from some of the biggest handset makers out there to see if anything might compare to the hype around expectations for the iPhone. Apple is known for great hardware designs and simple, intuitive user interfaces. While I saw a dizzying array of form factors and a multitude of user interface styles, I was unimpressed with the hardware I saw and downright confounded by the complexity of all the user interfaces.

My examinations were quick -- the show floor is incredibly crowded and hot, so sometimes it took some sharp elbows to even get to touch a phone. I took a brief look at the overall form factor of the phones and then did some navigating around the music player.

I started out at the Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB booth, perhaps because I know the company has been pushing its Walkman handsets. The W880 is a really nice looking phone. It's incredibly thin and has unusual raised keys that work nicely. Sony Ericsson gets high marks for the hardware form factor on this one, but the software user interface was a different story. I never did manage to find the music player from the home screen. Ultimately, I just moved along to another phone in the display area that was already running the music player.

I had a similar navigation problem on Nokia Corp.'s 5200 music phone. From the home screen, I clicked on an icon with a music note in it, which seemed a logical place to launch the music player. But that took me to a music-related game. I scrolled and scrolled through a horizontal bar of icons but didn't find a music player there. Then I noticed that floating in the middle of the screen were two long bars: one for the music player and one for the calendar. That threw me -- of all phone functions, why were the music player and calendar the only two to be presented that way?

At least Nokia had loaded the demonstration phones with music. Some of the other handsets I tried out, such as the Sony Ericsson one, had just one song on them. That makes it difficult to get a feel for navigating around the music player.

I don't love the form factor of the 5200 but I think some people might. It's sporty, in white and bright red, and a shape reminiscent of Motorola Inc.'s PEBL phones. It slides open.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s SG HF300 "Ultramusic" was next up. I couldn't help but be struck by the cool design. One side of the phone is nearly all screen; the flip side has a keypad for dialing the phone.

I never managed to figure out how to use the control panel on the music player side of the phone. It looks like the iPod's but square. I don't have an iPod so maybe iPod users can easily figure it out. If you're not an iPod user -- and you may not be if you're in the market for a music phone -- the SG HF300 might require a steep learning curve.

Motorola was next in line. I'm probably least impressed with the Z8 then any of the others. I think the design is clunky and looks and feels like a slider phone from a couple of years ago. For the innovator of the thin phone, Motorola should have done better with the Z8's size. I found it difficult to figure out which buttons corresponded with the words at the bottom of the screen so even hitting "back" proved difficult initially. Then, when looking for the music player application, I suddenly found an error message on the screen and the phone froze. Not a great sign.

My final stop was Neonode AB, a Swedish company that has been touting its music phone, particularly its touch screen. The device is in a category of its own and is very un-phone like. About the size of a business card, though not as thin, its touch screen definitely requires training to use. I would have never been able to figure it out without instruction.

Users sweep up along the home screen within three columns. The first opens a navigation page with icons for functions such as the music player, calendar and calculator. The middle column opens a touch pad for dialing calls. And the final column opens a tools menu.

[Rasputin]

Make Vendors Liable for Bad Code, Says Expert

When U.S. courts ruled more than a decade ago that consumers weren't liable for fraudulent use of their credit card numbers after the first US$50, credit card companies -- which were left holding the huge bill -- took notice and dove into fighting fraud and losses.

That's the same approach needed now in the software industry to help drastically improve IT security, according to Bruce Schneier, a security expert, author and CTO of Mountain View, Calif.-based enterprise security vendor BT Counterpane. Today's more secure credit card systems were "built because the credit card companies were forced to assume the liability for fraud," Schneier said Wednesday at the opening keynote of the first LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit held here this week. "The trick here is to align responsibilities with capabilities."

A major problem with IT security, he said, is that even as new software patches and other fixes are posted, not every company or home user installs them. Instead, many users, both at work and at home, aren't motivated to keep up with security because vulnerabilities are often unseen, leaving them unaware that they are risking their own operations -- and the larger global system of networks, Schneier said.

"I think things are getting worse, not better," he said.

To change that, the ultimate economic responsibility for better software should be moved directly to software makers, who can directly influence the creation of more secure applications, he said. "If there is liability, we'll pay more [for software], but at least we'll get better software out of it and things will improve," Schneier said.

A penalty system will ultimately result in a more secure global IT system through better-built and better-maintained products. "That's what I want to affect, and liabilities have a way of doing that," Schneier said.

In his talk about the economics of IT security, Schneier said today's software development system lets software vendors sell products without any real responsibility for it once users begin working with it. That doesn't encourage software vendors to stay on top of security problems that arise, he said. The situation is similar to a company that dumps pollution into a river but doesn't worry about the problem because it's not directly affected by the pollution downstream, he said.

Scenarios like that "are all over [the] security [world] and a lot of security failures are due to them," Schneier said. If a third-party company loses someone's data in a breach, then that company can have little concern because the data loss wasn't ever suffered by a direct customer.

Those attitudes must change, he said. "We're living in a world where our security all depends on each other."

Every year, when Schneier visits his mother, he said, he cleans up her home computer and strips it of worms and other security problems. For her -- and other corporate and private users -- security is seen as mainly important to individuals, without an awareness of the interconnections between users. "I'm sorry to tell you, she really doesn't care about you," he said of his mom's lax home computer security regimen.

By modifying the cost-benefit analysis and giving greater IT security responsibility to software companies through liability assignment, security can eventually be improved, he said. "All I need is for the cost of doing the bad [work] to increase. This is why I favor software liability because it raises the costs of bad software."