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Television

Submission + - Banned colors on the screen (google.com)

Submitted by A little Frenchie
A little Frenchie writes: Deutsche Telekom and Red Bull have deposited the color magenta, and the combination blue-argent as trademarks, banning their unauthorized use in the United States and Europe. The German company Deutsche Telekom declared that the color magenta is an integral part of its logo, prohibiting anyone from using it without his permission, even on a computer screen. Meanwhile, the makers of Red Bull drinks filed as a trademark combination of blue and silver that appears on its cans.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft apologizes for Windows Update snafus (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by A little Frenchie
A little Frenchie writes: Microsoft has been having all sorts of problems with automatic Windows updates lately. First, it was reports of users who had turned off automatic update installations finding that their computers had installed and rebooted anyway without their consent, then some enterprise Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) users found out that Windows Desktop Search (WDS) had been installed without administrator approval. Microsoft acknowledged the first problem but denied the second, then relented and issued an apology via WSUS product manager Bobbie Harder's blog.
Handhelds

Submission + - iPhone Contains Secret Keylogger (tuaw.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Not quite a keylogger, but still disturbing. It's been discovered that a file on the iPhone automatically stores new words that are typed on the phone for its auto correction feature. So far, so good, but unfortunately it also appears to store passwords in plain text within the file. With all the methods of accessing the iPhone filesystem, this is bad news for people who lose their iPhones or sell them without a full wipe.
AMD

Submission + - AMD 8.42 Driver Brings Fixes, AIGLX! (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by A little Frenchie
A little Frenchie writes: For ATI Linux customers, last month was certainly a very exciting time from AMD announcing open specifications (and the subsequent delivery of the first batch and the creation of the RadeonHD driver) to the release of the fglrx 8.41 display driver. The AMD 8.41.7 driver was the first driver to be based upon AMD's new code-base and had not only delivered R600 support for the Radeon HD 2900XT, but clear performance improvements across the board from the R300 to the R500. However, this 8.41.7 driver was not well received by all. AMD had intended this driver to be targeted solely for the R600 customers, but many with older GPUs had immediately upgraded with some then having a foul experience.

Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL! This is coming 13 months after NVIDIA had introduced its AIGLX support, but now just days after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon it's here for ATI hardware. Granted, if you were using an older ATI GPU with the open-source Radeon driver, you could have been benefiting from AIGLX already.
Privacy

Submission + - fMRI Scanner Reads Your Most Private Thoughts, (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by
angelaelle
angelaelle writes: "Is the concept of digital thought police part of a sci-fi movie plot, or a reality? According to Popular Mechanics, proponents claim that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners will allow "the government, employers, even your spouse — might turn to technology to determine whether you are a law-abiding citizen, a promising new hire or a faithful partner." Opponents call it snake oil. PM discusses the technology behind the fMRI, and lists some of the recent experiments in this field, and their results."
Microsoft

Submission + - Another Microsoft unwanted update... IE6 --> IE (google.com) 5

Submitted by A little Frenchie
A little Frenchie writes: On Friday, October 5, Microsoft has made an update without our consent. We have more than 70 computers, 95% were using IE6 (Win98 WinXP SP1 and 2).

Our network responsible was on leave that day. However, during lunch time, a lot of computers have been restarted with the return, IE7 installed. Yet our responsibility did not authorize this update and all the computers had the option to upgrade automatic non-active (it is the system that pushes updates, usually on Wednesday).

It's as if Microsoft had forced an update of which nobody wanted! We are under Novell and information logs indicated that the update had not been accepted. But it happened anyway!
Windows

Submission + - Stealth Windows Update auto-installed w/o consent

Submitted by
AngusSF
AngusSF writes: "I'm running a little program called Tiny Watcher (http://www.donationcoders.com/kubicle/watcher/) that is a sort of poor-mans freeware HIDS (XP Pro SP2, IE6). Once a night I run it on a test system looking for stuff that has changed in critical areas, and recently it notified me that two files, wups.dll and wups2.dll, in the system32 directory had changed. I finally got around to investigating this and I found that even though I have Automatic Updates set to "Notify", this update was installed stealthily at 3:30 one morning. I found a thread on the Microsoft Community groups which sort-of discusses this: Critical Update slipped in through the back door — in Announcements http://preview.tinyurl.com/39gsrr — the full URL is a 281-character monster: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en -us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.private.security.spy ware.announcements&tid=26e8ce20-718f-44aa-bfcf-06c c172998da&cat=en_US_35183423-7a58-4c2c-881c-928711 0c8cfb&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=en-us&m=1&p=1&mid=d4954b 09-f430-47c2-9a69-f7eb81d9a960 Here's an excerpt:

"dean-dean" wrote: > Windows Update Software 7.0.6000.381 is an update to Windows Update > itself. It is an update for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. Unless > the update is installed, Windows Update won't work, at least in terms of > searching for further updates. Normal use of Windows Update, in other > words, is blocked until this update is installed. .... > In XP, it updates the following system32 files to version 7.0.6000.381: > > wuweb.dll > wuaueng.dll > wuapi.dll > wucltui.dll > wuaucpl.cpl > cdm.dll > wuauclt.exe > wups2.dll > wups.dll
Well, it certainly appears that Microsoft is installing updates without permission or consent. I have Windows Update set to "Notify" (XP Pro SP2, IE6), and I run WU manually. The date-time stamp of the directory where wups.dll v7.0.6000.381 is loaded (C:\WINDOWS\system32\SoftwareDistribution\Setup\Se rviceStartup\wups.dll\7. 0.600 0.381\ for the curious) is 8/24/07. When I check "Installed Updates" on the WU site I see that I ran WU on 8/15 (for August's Black Tuesday) and again on 8/29 (for KB933360). I checked all of the updates that occurred after the 7/30 date-time stamp of wups.dll and wups2.dll, and none of them list either file in the "File Information" section for Windows XP. Interestingly a search at microsoft.com for "wups.dll 7.0.6000.381" turns up NOTHING while a search for "wups.dll 7.0.6000.374" turns up a couple of hits, one of which is this KB article "When you use Automatic Updates to scan for updates or to apply updates to applications that use Windows Installer, you experience issues that involve the Svchost.exe process" http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/93249 4 ... I checked my Event Viewer log for anything interesting on 8/24 and I found an entry at 3:34 AM where the Windows Update Agent installed _something_: >> Installation Successful: Windows successfully installed the following update: Automatic Updates All of the other "Windows Update Agent" Event-19 entries in the System Log include a KB number in the event listing: >> Installation Successful: Windows successfully installed the following update: Update for Windows XP (KB933360) I checked on other XP desktops I have handy, all of which are also set to "Notify" _AND_ all of which have non-Admin users and I see date-time stamps from 8/21 through 8/24 for the wups.dll install-directories %SYS32%\SoftwareDistribution\Setup\ServiceStartup\ wups.dll\7.0.6000.381\. This update is particularly disturbing. I find it both curious and very annoying that Microsoft still hasn't learned not to sneak around behind people's backs. I'm curious, does anyone running a WSUS server on their network also have this stealth update on any of their systems? Is this something that was also distributed through WSUS or is this just something that was installed by folks running WU directly from Microsoft? TIA Angus"
AMD

Submission + - AMD frees ATI graphics hardware specs (lwn.net)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Check this out, corbet of LWN fame reports on a major happening at the Linux Kernel Summit. "AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well;" Wohoo!!!

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