Pc News

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Microsoft Admits Halo 3 Caused Xbox Live Glitches

If you were one of the few Xbox 360 owners who didn't buy Halo 3 this week, you were probably wondering why your game of Uno wasn't working properly. The answer, in a word, was Halo.

A Microsoft rep told disgruntled users that the flood of online Halo 3 activity was to blame for a series of "minor issues," and that everything should be back to normal now.

"Xbox Live and Xbox.com experienced minor issues [Tuesday] as a result of increased activity due to the launch of Halo 3. The issues were quickly resolved and both Xbox Live and Xbox.com are now working fine," said a statement from Microsoft.

The larger problem may have been dealt with, but Wired's Susan Arendt said she was still experiencing freezes on Live as recently as Thursday afternoon.

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Video Game Teaches Diet -- By Deactivating

With child obesity rates rising, the U.S.'s biggest health maintenance organization last week launched an online video game to teach kids what to eat -- and then shut down after 20 minutes.

Kaiser Permanente said "The Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective" was designed to teach 9- and 10-year-olds about healthy eating and exercise.

But rather than keep children in front of the computer for hours, the title aims to get kids moving. It has a function that locks players out after 20 minutes -- and another that won't let them back in until for another 60 minutes.

"Kids in America spend too much time in front of the TV, and the messages they get there about eating, activity, and role models are all the wrong (ones)," said Ray Baxter, senior vice president for community benefit at Kaiser Permanente.

"Finger-wagging and telling kids to eat more green vegetables is not going to work. You've got to change the environment and change the message."

The game includes printable scavenger hunts that teach kids to make sense of food labels, experiments that show kids how to measure sugar in drinks, healthy recipes, muscle-building exercises and family activities to promote better eating.

The new game is part of Kaiser's campaign to combat childhood obesity, rates of which have tripled in the past 15 years.

Nearly 20 percent of children in the United States are now obese, fueling concerns about shorter life-expectancy and the soaring cost of caring for adults with diabetes and other obesity-related diseases.

The state of West Virginia, which has the worst childhood obesity problem in nation, helped pioneer the use of video games in the battle of the bulge when it made Konami Corp's "Dance Dance Revolution" dancing game part of the curriculum in public schools.

"Because obesity that begins in childhood is associated with more severe adult obesity, the effective prevention and treatment of childhood obesity is a critical strategy to control the rise in medical costs," said William Dietz, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert on obesity and nutrition.

Over the past six years, Kaiser has partnered with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in developing an anti-obesity strategy.

Kaiser's game is available free of charge in English and Spanish versions at www.kp.org/amazingfooddetective and through the CDC's site at www.cdc.gov.

Kaiser and publisher Scholastic Inc also will distribute the game, along with teacher lesson plans and parent guides, to more than 5,000 public schools nationwide.

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Storm: The Largest Botnet in the World?

Storm may not be the most creative or malicious piece of malware ever written, but it's on track to become the most productive; threat researchers' recent estimates put the number of PCs it has infected at more than 1 million.

First showing up on researchers' radars about a year ago, Storm is defined by some as a worm, others as a Trojan Horse.

Though it has gone by many names, Storm -- referring to the spam blasts it's been behind that mention storms -- has stuck.

Although Storm doesn't use any particularly inventive or malicious techniques, such as erasing files on a hard drive or recording keystrokes to capture passwords and personal information, it has gained notoriety through its writers' ability to update and adapt both the malware's code and the spam blasts that lure people to become infected with it -- all with the purpose of building a giant botnet.

"Storm is a very aggressive worm," says John Levine, president of consulting firm Taughannock Networks and co-chair of the Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group. "It's interesting because it uses a [peer-to-peer] control structure that makes it hard to kill."

Most threat watchers say no one knows who is behind Storm, but Finnish antivirus maker F-Secure, which takes credit for giving Storm its name, says a group called the Zhelatin Gang is responsible and whom the company believes is operating out of Russia. F-Secure also says that Storm is the largest botnet in the world with just more than 1 million infected PCs; however, other researchers say there's no way to know how many PCs have been infected.

What Does Storm Do?
Compared with highly destructive pieces of malware such as Slammer and Blaster that took down many computers and services, Storm sticks to mostly sending out spam and occasionally launching distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, particularly against security companies that research the malware. But because of its size, Storm's potential for harm is serious, says Patrik Runald, technical manager at F-Secure.

"As [Storm's owners] have roughly 1 million computers under their control, we do have to take the threat of them attacking critical networks very seriously," he says.

The way Storm secretly installs itself on PCs is via spam, but typically Storm is not carried by the message; instead the message attempts to get the recipient to visit a Web site that downloads the malware. It's hard to avoid Storm-related spam, which was particularly active in late summer and shows no sign of stopping. These spam blasts take advantage of whatever the malware's owners think would most entice recipients to click on the embedded link to a Web site purportedly related to the e-mail's subject -- be it a recent event such as the Labor Day weekend or the start of the football season or pop culture items such as computer games or a YouTube video clip.

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Search Evolution: New Ways to Get Better Results

If you're ready for a new take on Web searching, a bunch of beta services are set to offer novel ways to search and to organize your results. Imagine stacking those listings on virtual shelves for easy retrieval the next time you need them, or flipping between results via 3D tabs. And now you can even troll for information by speaking your search terms to your cell phone. The beta services that are offering these and other innovations promise to turn conventional Web search on its ear.

Searching for Meaning
Google's relevance rankings have served Web searchers well, but search is more than a numbers game. Technology developed by Hakia attempts to extract meaning from phrases on the Web and in search queries. The service suggests that you search in phrases or questions, and those phrases are highlighted in the results to make them easier to browse. Hakia's SemanticRank algorithm is designed to consider the credibility of sources and to enable the engine to learn how to make better choices in the future.

But there are times when entering any text is inconvenient. If you're on the road and need to search via your mobile phone, you can speak your searches using Vlingo (currently available only to Sprint customers). Most phone-based voice-recognition systems accommodate a limited vocabulary, but Vlingo claims that its Hierarchical Language Models allow you to say anything and be understood. The system attempts to predict what a user is likely to say next based on the context of the previous words. Vlingo's technology also adapts to understand new words, and to improve accuracy by learning individual speech patterns as one uses the system.

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Hackers at Microsoft?! Now Wait a Minute . . .

For the record, there are hackers at Microsoft. Just don't call them hackers.

In August, a blogger using the handle "Techjunkie" started a Microsoft Developer Network blog called Hackers @ Microsoft that, he claimed, would introduce the world to some of the ethical "white hat" hackers working there.

White hat hackers are security professionals who use many of the same techniques as the bad guys, but who learn how to break into systems for research purposes only. "The focus of this blog is likely to be a little different from most other blogs you'll see on blogs.msdn.com," Techjunkie wrote.

Then he went silent for a month and a half.

Late Thursday, however, Techjunkie resurfaced, saying that he was dropping the Hackers @ Microsoft name. "There was some concerns raised that the average blog reading audience may not be able to discern the difference, and we may inadvertently associate Microsoft with the negative connotations of the word 'hacker' that is out there," he wrote.

Techjunkie didn't say whether the decision to drop the name came from Microsoft Corp.'s marketing department, but if it did, he's found a way to get even. "To alleviate that concern, I've changed the name of the blog to '%41%43%45%20%54%65%61%6d'," he wrote.

"%41%43%45%20%54%65%61%6d" may not be as memorable as Hackers @ Microsoft, but it does mean something. It is code for "ACE Team," apparently a reference to Microsoft's Application Consulting & Engineering Team, which does performance, security and privacy development work at Microsoft. They have a blog too.

Microsoft's public relations agency was unable to comment immediately on Techjunkie's blog. However, the company has talked frequently about its growing use of ethical hackers to test its products for bugs. The software vendor even invites them onsite twice a year for its Blue Hat security conference.

Techjunkie followed up his Thursday evening post explaining the name change with a generic blog item on the need for security processes when developing software.

The debate over the term "hacker" is long running and bitter. Originally used to denote someone creative who enjoyed building new things with computers the term has also come to mean computer attacker in the popular culture, much to the dismay of the white hats.

One security professional who also maintains a hacking blog said he understood why Microsoft may have wanted to drop the name. "Unfortunately, I think there's a bit of a stigma associated with the word hacker," said Robert Hansen, CEO of security consultancy SecTheory LLC and also the man behind the ha.ckers.org Web site.

Though Hansen considers himself a hacker, he says that he sometimes downplays this fact in business situations. "There are definitely times at which I use the ha.ckers.org persona more than I use the SecTheory persona," he said. "Some people aren't comfortable with the concept."

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Spammers Hit YouTube's E-Mail Servers

Spammers are using YouTube's servers to send massive quantities of unsolicited email, according to security firm Marshal.

The company has warned email users to be wary of messages carrying YouTube invites which appear to derive from the video-sharing site's 'Invite Your Friends' feature, claiming the compromised servers are sending out spam messages from the service@youtube.com address.

"YouTube users have a facility where they can invite their friends to view videos that they are looking at or have posted. This effectively allows them to email to any address from their YouTube account. This is the functionality that the spammers are exploiting," said Bradley Anstis, Marshal's director of product management.

Marshal said the emails have the same appearance as a legitimate YouTube invite, except they include typical spam content and links to spam websites.

"Spammers are doing this to defeat spam filters and to lower the recipient's guard by making it look as though the messages are coming from a perfectly innocuous email address. YouTube's own Help Center suggests that you exclude the service@youtube.com email address from spam filtering. The spammers are keenly aware of this."

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Gran Turismo Producer Confirms PSP Version

Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi says a PSP version of the game is already in the works to be released after Gran Turismo 5 on PS3.

"We are working on the PSP version, and we will get around to it eventually," Yamauchi told GamePro in an interview published on Wednesday. The famed driving producer expects to complete the PSP game once Gran Turismo 5 has shipped for PS3 in 2008.

Gran Turismo, an exclusive PlayStation property, is currently the tenth most successfully franchise of all time with 47 million games sold.

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An Ohio state official must surrender about a week of future vacation time as punishment for not ensuring the security of personal data stored on a stolen backup tape holding Social Security and other personal data. The tape was pilfered in June from the car of an intern responsible for carrying data used by the Ohio state government's computer systems.

Jerry Miller, payroll team leader for the Ohio Department of Administrative Services' Administrative Knowledge System (OAKS) ERP project, was informed of the decision by department officials on Sep. 26, said Ron Sylvester, a spokesman for DAS. Miller accepted the penalty, Sylvester said.

Sylvester described Miller as a "stellar longtime DAS employee" and said he has been forthright in acknowledging his role in the "management glitch" pertaining to the stolen backup tape.

Last month, the state announced that an investigation by computer forensics experts at Interhack Corp. in Columbus, Ohio, had determined that the missing tape contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers.

The data breach is expected to cost the state upwards of US$3 million.

Though the administrative services unit was responsible for the data, Sylvester said the tape was handled by a number of people from other state agencies.

"Part of the problem is [the data] was outside of any one single person's hands. There were people who were not full-time tasked to OAKS who were coming in from agencies doing data migration and testing and introducing data on the drive," said Sylvester. "We believe we had some contractors who continued to introduce data on the drive.

"One lesson that the state learned is that we need to throw more resources at security and privacy when we have an issue like that," he added

A third party brought in from Ohio's Office of Collective Bargaining investigated the incident and recommended the penalty, Sylvester said.

"The next time the state takes on a project of this scope, we're going to have people on the job whose major responsibility is just data security," he added.

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Student Who Uncovers Breach Escapes Expulsion

A student at Western Oregon University who accidentally discovered a file containing personal data on a publicly accessible university server and then handed that data over to the student newspaper has narrowly escaped being expelled for his actions.

But a contracted adviser to the newspaper has been dismissed for allegedly mishandling the data and for failing to properly advise the students on the university's policies relating to handling of personally identifiable data.

Brian Loving, a student at WOU, stumbled upon a file containing the names, Social Security numbers and grade point averages of between 50 to 100 students on a publicly accessible university server in June. Loving downloaded a copy of what he discovered and handed it over to the Western Oregon Journal, the campus newspaper.

After making a copy of the file, the newspaper's editor and Loving then informed the university about the security breach. Though the paper's final publication date for the academic year had already passed, it decided to publish a four-page special report with an article describing Loving's discovery. No names of any of the students were published in the article.

The episode triggered an internal investigation at WOU. It also prompted campus officials to send IT staffers into the paper's closed newsroom and search newsroom computers for copies of the file that may have been stored in those systems.

Two months into the investigation, Loving -- who is now a staffer with the newspaper -- was found to have broken a university computer use policy that prohibits unauthorized people from accessing confidential files that may have been inadvertently placed in a publicly accessible location. On Sept. 28 he faced a disciplinary hearing over the incident.

Mark Weiss, the university executive vice president of finance and administration, on Wednesday cited student confidentiality and refused to describe the outcome of the hearing. But he denied that Loving had ever been expelled as a consequence for his action, as some local media outlets suggested.

Adviser Adieu
Weiss also confirmed that Susan Wickstrom, who had been an adviser to students working at the newspaper, is no longer in that position since the university chose not to renew her contract. He did not say if the reason for the non-renewal had anything to do with Loving's security breach incident report.

A source at the university who wished to remain anonymous said that Wickstrom's contract was not renewed because of her failure to advice students against making copies of the exposed file and for her failure to advise them about the school relevant computer use policies.

"This was not a freedom of the press issue at all," Weiss said. The school newspaper should be able to write on any topic it wants to, he said. Similarly, "the issue is not that the student discovered a file that contained confidential information. For that we are grateful," said Weiss who also expressed gratitude to Loving for discovering a vulnerability the university had not been aware of up to that time.

Rather, the problem had to do with the manner in which the information was handled after it had been discovered, Weiss said.

"Once confidential information is discovered, we don't expect people to be downloading copies of that information and giving it to other people," he said. "He mishandled copies of the file," Weiss said of Loving. "People who know this shouldn't be done should be advising students on what the right thing to do is," he said in an apparent reference to Wickstrom.

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Viacom CEO Dismisses Google Antipiracy Plan

Viacom Inc.'s president and CEO took a swipe at Google Inc.'s announcement earlier this week of plans to launch a video-blocking tool aimed at allowing content owners to intercept copyrighted clips as they are uploaded to Google's video site YouTube.

Viacom's Philippe Dauman said at the Web 2.0 Summit here that instead of a proprietary system to block content that may infringe on copyright, there needs to be an industry standard for that type of effort.

Viacom is one of several companies that announced Thursday a new principle aimed at supporting filtering technology to ward off copyright violations. Viacom sued YouTube parent Google earlier this year for more than $1 billion, alleging that YouTube infringed Viacom's copyrights by posting unauthorized video clips.

"The timing of the [Google] announcement is interesting," Dauman said. "They knew about the announcement we made today. Google is a very high quality company [with] a lot of very, very smart people. They can do things very quickly when they want to. I guess they haven't wanted to until this point."

Viacom joined with The Walt Disney Co., NBC Universal, Microsoft Corp., CBS Corp. and other companies to endorse the new principles. Google was not among the companies to endorse the principles, which Dauman described as "rules of the road" between technology and content companies.

"They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies," he noted. "Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems."

Dauman also provided some behind-the-scenes Silicon Valley insight into the lawsuit it filed against Google, noting that he had many calls from Silicon Valley companies -- which he declined to name -- "who said it's about time somebody took a stand. We obviously have to protect our business just as Google or anybody else will protect what is very valuable to them. I don't see all the [Google] algorithms being shared very openly with their competitors."

The Viacom chief also outlined the company's plans going forward to grow its online businesses, which generated $250 million last year but will pull in more than $500 million in revenue in 2007, he noted.

Viacom Thursday will be unveiling a new Web site that will have access to all of the 13,000 clips of the The Daily Show With Jon Stewart produced since the show's inception in 1999 along with social networking features like RSS feeds and widgets, Dauman said. The company plans to make more of its content available directly to consumers in this way, he added.

"We believe in following the consumers," he said. "Our core business, our only business is creating great content. Our objective is to distribute our content and create a richer, more engaging experience for our consumers."

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Judge to White House: Back Up E-Mail

The White House must preserve e-mail and maintain copies of millions of backup e-mail messages that were allegedly deleted improperly from servers, according to a temporary restraining order issued Monday by a U.S. judge.

The order from Judge Henry Kennedy in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia was a victory for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group that filed suit against the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives and Record Administration in September. The group contends that the White House has not been accountable about the deleted e-mail messages and has a deficient e-mail archival system in place.

The lawsuit also alleged that the defendants knowingly failed to recover, restore and preserve millions of electronic communications records in the White House. CREW alleged that the e-mail messages were improperly deleted from the servers.

CREW said that if any copies of the deleted e-mail messages existed, those would be on backup storage devices, and asked for devices and documents to be preserved.

The restraining order will add transparency to "an administration committed more to secrecy than compliance with the law," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW, in a statement referring to the administration of President George Bush.

The White House routinely assured CREW that it had a proper e-mail archiving system in place, according to court filings related to the case. White House officials couldn't be reached for comment.

The White House discovered in 2005 that an unknown number of e-mail messages were missing from its archive, said Keith Roberts, the deputy general counsel of the White House Office of Administration, in a May briefing to the congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Roberts also stated that a contractor responsible for daily audits of the e-mail system and archiving failed to detect and report the problems at the time.

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Oz Study Confirms iPods Boost Learning

Yet more evidence has emerged indicating that using popular technologies such as iPods and MacBooks boosts learning and attainment in schools.

An Australian research project has found that teachers and pupils all drew benefit from use of these technologies in the classroom.

Research on the part of the Victorian Department of Education was conducted across six months at Heathmont College, using Apple solutions and the Studywiz managed learning environment.

According to teachers, half the students reported that they learned better by doing things and liked to be active learners.

"I'm more of a hands-on person -- I liked listening to podcasts and watching as well," one pupil said, according to a presentation explaining the results.

Among other improvements, the use of engaging technologies and switched-on learning resources is alleged to have improved pupil performance, test scores, had helped pupils remain focused on learning and had also boosted attainment among those who were socially isolated or suffered literacy problems.

According to the Victoria Department of Education, the scheme led to: "Improvements in all curriculum areas and also in behavior, motivation and responsibility by the end of the project."

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Microsoft Blows Zune Supply

While Microsoft's Zune may have briefly toppled Apple's iPod from the top of the Amazon.com bestseller's list, US customers are having a hard time getting hold of the new version of the product.

Amazon briefly showed the last-generation Zune as its best-selling MP3 player earlier this week. Essentially it appears that a steep price discount on the superseded product had inspired bargain-conscious US shoppers to buy one of Zune's so-called 'iPod-killers'.

While that report attracted lots of publicity, it did ignore that Apple had no less than 15 slots in the top 25 list - Microsoft clearly has some way to go to regain lost ground in digital media.

Now the Zune 80, the Apple competitor's top-of-the-range Zune player is already sold out and in limited supply across US retail outlets. The 80GB device includes Wi-Fi and an FM radio, but was pretty much unavailable - just in time for Thanksgiving, which took place yesterday.

Despite strong sales, it's not Apple that Microsoft is killing, but its previously jilted 'Plays For Sure' partners the company is hurting most.

From Apple's standpoint, even if demand for Zunes is strong, it would likely take share from other hopefuls, not Apple, Shannon Cross, analyst at Cross Research told USA Today. "No one is going to touch" Apple, she said.

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Google Gmail Integrates AOL's AIM

Google has integrated AOL's popular AIM instant-messaging service into its Gmail Web-based e-mail client, the company announced on Tuesday.

Gmail has had its own chat service since February 2006, but now Gmail users will be able to connect to AIM through a drop-down menu on the Gmail Web page, Google said. Gmail users can sign into AIM through the "set status here" menu, Google said. AIM contacts and Gmail chat will appear on the same menu.

Google said it was rolling out the new feature on the English version of Gmail on Tuesday. AIM access will be available on other language versions of Gmail soon, the company said.

"We're always looking for new and useful ways to help our users connect with friends, family, and coworkers," Google said in a statement.

The ability to connect to AIM through Gmail is a "very big deal," said Michael Osterman, founder of messaging analysis firm Osterman Research. About 75 percent of people who use IM in business settings use AIM or the AIM enterprise product, he said.

Now, when people are using Gmail, they can see if the people they're sending e-mail to are available for live chat on AIM instead, he said. "You've been given another option for communicating with people," he said. "It's one more way to talk to them."

Gmail users can keep a history of chats and e-mails together in so-called conversation threads.

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AT&T Opens Network

AT&T says its GSM-based wireless network in the U.S. is essentially open to any GSM device and any software application, and has been for several years.

"We've not gone out of our way to tout the fact that we have this, and very few people have taken advantage of it," spokesman Mark Siegel said in a telephone interview.

AT&T Wireless Services Inc. CEO Ralph de la Vega told USA Today in an interview Wednesday that users can "use any handset on our network you want ... we don't prohibit or it or even police it."

Siegel later clarified that the phone must work over GSM, but otherwise confirmed de la Vega's comments. Only the iPhone will remain closed, Siegel said, to comply with a multiyear exclusivity agreement with Apple Inc. IPhone users must sign a two-year contract.

The USA Today story made it seem that AT&T had just recently made the move to open access, but Siegel said AT&T has "always allowed people who have unlocked GSM devices that operate on U.S. radio frequencies" to use AT&T's network.

"We think we are the most open company in the industry," Siegel added.

A user would take advantage of the AT&T network by buying a SIM card for an unlocked phone for US$25 and then prepaying or postpaying for service, without the need for a contract, Siegel said. For $39.99 a month, a person could postpay, subject to credit approval, he added.

Siegel denied that the carrier had kept quiet about its open policy. He also said AT&T did not open access to its network in recent days in response to steps by Google Inc. and more than 30 other companies to create the Open Handset Alliance and the Android wireless software platform. Nor did the announcement by Verizon Wireless to support any device and any application have any bearing, he said.

"We've had this ability for several years," he said.

AT&T also has filed to bid in the 700-MHz auction sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission that will be held next month, but Siegel said he could not give any details. A portion of that spectrum in the auction is reserved for bidders who will create an open network.