This made me chuckle, (I may have even chortled).

Windows XP outshines Vista in benchmarking test 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.

This is the best part of the article:

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.

He reminds me of this Apple ad: Podium

Amusing!

ARS Technica tells us that the Zhelatin gang's "Storm Worm" has now evolved way beyond spam and infected e-card greetings. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070902-storm-worm-adds-millions-of-computers-to-botnet.html

The "Zhelatin gang"--named after the trojan it installed--was responsible for what started out as the "storm worm." First spotted earlier this year, the spread of the "storm worm" started via e-mails purporting to provide information on some dangerous storms in Europe at the close of January.

But the Zhelatin is no longer your typical worm beastie ... The worm has now been modified to use an infected users own Blog to spread itself.

It's not just blogspam we're talking about here, the little sucker actually writes a blog post to the victim's blog all by it's own bad little self, in order to lure your unsuspecting readers to an infection site. More from ARS Technica:

...the worm has now switched its focus to blogs. Unlike the typical "comment spam" that many of us have grown used to on our personal blogs, the worm is actually getting into people's Blogspot accounts and creating new blog posts with links to the trojan.

This worm has been reported to find it's way through multiple hardware email filters and breeze passed almost every AV engine at one time or another in it's various iterations only to be finally stopped by the firewall (which you should have already set up on workstations and which theoretically should be the last resort). Decent firewall software packages are usually able to stop the actual infected file from performing it's processing.

The funny part about workstation firewalls catching the worm's rogue processing is when users inevitably click "Yes" to allow the process and also check the "Do Not Ask Again" check box.

ARS Technica estimates that there could be as many as 10 million Zhelatin gang bots out there:

Just how many computers are part of the botnet is anyone's guess, but estimates from some security firms are reaching as high as 10 million. Just last June the FBI warned that it had discovered more than a million PCs in a botnet. This looks to be just the tip of the iceberg.

IMHO This is one of the most serious threats to the IT community in a number of years. 10 million bots can do a lot of damage in a lot of ways ... in a hurry.

Check out this video of 24 hours monitoring the infection: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH8cS1AkqiI

According to eWeek a new Vista beta service pack is now available. One which can be used as an "Upgradeable Version" for existing Vista installations. eWeek article here: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2176563,00.asp

(yea I know there is one of those "Flash Annoyance" things, just click passed it)

Over the Aug. 24 weekend, a new Vista beta has appeared on the BitTorrent sites.

The first beta SP1 appeared on hacker sites in early August as a 3.2 GB DVD ISO. This version could only be used to install a full version of Windows Vista. As such, it was not so much an SP as a testing platform for some proposed patches. The just-leaked version, however, expands from a compressed file of about 200 MB in size, depending on the system architecture, into an installation program that totals approximately 684 MB. With it, an adventuresome Vista user could use it to update his or her's Vista-powered system to a beta SP1.

A closer look reveals that, regardless of platform, the beta is named: "Build: 6.0.6001.16633 (longhorn.070803-1655)." When installed, at least one patched version of Vista Ultimate states that the system is running Vista Ultimate, Service Patch 1, v.165.

You can find the upgrade for Vista SP1 here: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3786032/Vista_SP1_Update-windows6.0-kb936330-x86_Standalone_installer Thank you Sweeden!

As many IT folks are currently working on (struggling with?) Prototyping Vista in the enterprise, do we really have much of a choice but to be "adventuresome"?

I'll be giving it a test drive over the holiday weekend, how about you?

Ars Technica reports:

iPhone bill is surprisingly Xbox HUGE (lol) http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070811-iphone-bill-is-surprisingly-xbox-huge-lol.html

(Err..That really is the headline - Poli) "AT&T's iPhone bills are quite impressive in their own right. We're starting to get bills for the iPhone here at Ars, and while many of us have had smartphones for some time, we've never seen a bill like this.

One of our bills is a whopping 52 pages long http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/Iphone%20bill2.jpg, and my own bill is 34 pages long. They're printed on both sides, too. What gives?

The AT&T bill itemizes your data usage whenever you surf the Internet via EDGE, even if you're signed up for the unlimited data plan. AT&T also goes into an incredible amount of detail to tell you; well, almost nothing. For instance, I know that on July 27 at 3:21 p.m. I had some data use that, under the To/From heading, AT&T has helpfully listed as "Data Transfer." The Type of file? "Data." My total charge? $0.00.

This mind-numbing detail goes on for 52 double-sided pages (for 104 printed pages!) with absolutely no variance except the size of the files.

You would think that a data company would have a more efficient billing process. I guess the iPhone is more like a Cingular or Blackberry than Apple would like to admit. I have it on good authority (not really! Just reading various comments on the inter-tubes) that Cingular and Blackberry billing is similar in "Quality". Funny none the less!

From the "We Told You So" department...

California City to Transform Red Light Cameras Into Spy Cameras http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/18/1886.asp

Oakland, California to lobby legislature to allow 24-hour video surveillance with red light camera system.

Privacy advocates have long viewed red light cameras with the suspicion that the devices were the first step down a path of increased surveillance.

Those fears may come true as the city of Oakland, California has revealed that it is working with the state legislature to secure a change in the law that will allow red light cameras to become full-scale surveillance cameras.

In a memo from the Oakland Police Department dated June 26, Police Chief Wayne G. Tucker recommended that the city's lobbyist be ordered to advocate a new law in Sacramento.

"The legislation would also allow the use of those (red light camera) images for evidentiary purposes other than the enforcement of red light violations, such as reckless driving, assaults, public nuisance activity, drug dealing, etc."

The camel's nose is now far enough under the privacy tent that soon we will be in bed with the whole 1984-ish video surveillance camel.

Update:

Heh ... days later this topic gets the green light...

Surveillance Camera Network Coming To New York?http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/04/075203/

I'm just that good! and you should really pay more attention when I post to my Journal. (It's not bragging if its true!)

Via the INQUIRER http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=40228

Google suspects users are not human

Prove you're not a virus, or be terminated!

In Philip K Dick's famous novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' 'bounty' hunters track down, identify and kill human-like androids, this time, ironically the situation is reversed ... it wasn't a human looking for rogue machines, but a machine (the GoogleMind) testing to see if it was a human actually performing the search.

Lucky for us humans that the GoogleMind isn't armed with anything more dangerous than pixels and text! ... yet.

Link has screen-shot goodness.

FTC official (William Kovacic) says "Let's imprison spyware distributors"

Steep fines are nice, but one of the best weapons against spyware purveyors is locking them up, a federal regulator told senators on Tuesday.

At a morning Senate Commerce Committee hearing here, Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic said most wrongdoers in the spyware arena "can only be described as vicious organized criminals."

"Many of most serious wrongdoers we observed in this area, I believe, are only going to be deterred if their freedom is withdrawn," so it's important for the FTC to collaborate on its cases with criminal law enforcement authorities, Kovacic said.

Kovacic's remarks came in response to a question from Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who was presiding over Tuesday morning's hearing, about whether the FTC is sufficiently equipped to combat the scourge of software planted surreptitiously on a user's computer.

"It's a real source of frustration for my constituents, my family, my office...basically anyone who has a computer," Pryor said.

Pryor said a mouthful there ... Just ask Julie Amero.

UPDATE: Dausha points out that Mark Pryor is the junior senator from Arkansas. The FTC official is William Kovacic. I fixed it ... My Bad!

I know this is old, but I just wanted to point out that the moderator did a good job of realizing I had a typo. The moderator presented the article in such a way that I could correct it, thus maintaining some semblance of credibility. So thank you Zonk!

D-Wave held a Quantum Computer demo today at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The actual Quantum Computer itself is located back at the company's British Columbia HQ. headquarters.

D-Wave qubits in the era of Quantum Computing

D-Wave showed three examples of Orion in action, marking the first such demonstration of a quantum computer. The most impressive display came during a drug molecule matching exercise, while two less impressive efforts had Orion crunch through a party table seating arrangement that paired like-minded guests and then go on to solve a SudoQ puzzle.

But there's only so much you can do with 16 qubits. So, D-Wave plans to produce a 32 qubit chip by the fourth quarter, a 512 qubit chip in the first quarter of 2008 and then a 1,024 qubit chip in the third quarter of 2008. D-Wave next year will also allow customers to send calculations to the Orion system via the internet and then have calculations returned to the customer and then later in 2008 ship actual systems.

The cost for such boxes will likely be comparable to large, high performance computing clusters.

Of course, these grand plans might fail to occur.

"It could turn out that these systems are not protected (from interference) the way we thought that they are," Rose said. "If so, this system could dead-end after 16 qubits.

"If you combine too many of these devices together and you are not good enough at filtering out the noises, then you will end up with a hunk of a (trashed) computer."

Start-ups rarely admit to such disastrous possibilities, as you all know too well.

Read it all here...

I'll be on the lookout for reports by attendees. But no matter how you slice it, this is an exciting development and this demonstration will help to drive competing QC models to more rapid development.

I'm sure that my video encoding projects could benefit!

Here is Steve Jurvetsons Flickr blog where you can find some great pictures of the Quantum Computer equipment.

Endgadget's take ... funny.

Some technical papers for interested folks!

ARS Technica has more news here.

The D-Wave blog (rose blog)

Here is some more good "Quantum" reading from ARS Technica: Quantum Deathmatch: PvNP

I just hope that the new parallel universe we just switched to is the one where I hit the lottery!

We've all heard of Google bombing, well the US Government takes the expression sort of literally...

U.S. cyber counterattack: Bomb 'em one way or the other

National Cyber Response Coordination Group establishing proper response to cyberattacks

If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nations critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source.

It's almost funny ... except for the fact that such an overreaction is so possible.

Source: U.S. cyber counterattack: Bomb 'em one way or the other

Google Kills Bush's Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs.

After just over two years, Google has finally defused the "Google Bomb" that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on miserable failure. The move wasn't a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it's part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass link pranks from working.

Story and screenshots here: http://searchengineland.com/070125-230048.php/

Funny, this made the SlashDot front page with a different post that was submitted just a couple of hours after I submitted it. Someone is asleep at the switch, (or is it just someone playing favorites?)

China internet users to overtake US in two years, report says

http://rawstory.com/news/2006/China_internet_users_to_overtake_US_01232007.html/

dpa German Press Agency Published: Tuesday January 23, 2007

Beijing- China is likely to overtake the United States as the world's largest online population within two years, after the estimated number of internet users soared by 23 per cent to 137 million last year, state media said on Wednesday. "We believe it will take two years at most for China to overtake the United States," Wang Enhai of the state-run Chinese Internet Network Information Centre told the official China Daily.

"We are expecting even faster growth in 2007 and 2008 given that internet penetration now has exceeded 10.5 percent in the country," Wang said.

From the horses mouth (the "Windows Vista Team Blog") comes confirmation of every horrible charge leveled at Vista by Gutmann. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html/

Windows Vista Content Protection - Twenty Questions (and Answers) http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx/

Over the holidays, a paper was distributed that raised questions about the content protection features in Windows Vista. The paper draws sharp conclusions about the implications of those features for our customers. As one of the Lead Program Managers for the technologies in question, I would like to share our views on these questions.

Here are some examples of the Microsoft Lawyer version of Q & A.

Will echo cancellation work less well for premium content?

We believe that Windows Vista provides applications with access to sufficient information to successfully build high quality echo cancellation functionality.

Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality. Windows Vista's content protection features were developed to carefully balance the need to provide robust protection from commercial content while still enabling great new experiences such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

What is revocation and where is it used?

Renewal and revocation mechanisms are an important part of providing robust protection for commercial audiovisual content. In the rare event that a revocation is required, Microsoft will work with the affected IHV to ensure that a new driver is made available, ideally in advance of the actual revocation. Revocation only impacts a graphics driver's ability to receive certain commercial audiovisual content; otherwise, the revoked driver will continue to function normally.

Nice...

Here is a good quote from the Inquirer article about this "Blog" entry: http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=37091/

"Microsoft confirms just about every point in the Gutmann pieceand tries to spin it as good. It is one of the most amazing piece of PR weaselwork I have seen for years. Try this one on for size."

Time to remove the restriction on MP3s

By Nick Farrell: Monday 22 January 2007

RECORD COMPANIES are closer to removing restrictions on MP3 distribution over the Internet.

According to iht.com, a meeting of executives in Cannes over the weekend revealed that the major record labels are wrestling with the question of unrestricted internet access to content.

John Kennedy, head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said that this year it is likely at least one of the big names will experiment with dumping DRM or providing MP3 songs as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Apparently the music business is at a loss as to what to do about the Internet which has destroyed the monopoly of the leading record producers over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade.

Now it seems that the only reason that the music industry has not gone to such music distribution sooner is because of technology companies which insist on flogging them DRM systems that they claim is 'hacker proof'. Of course the music industry executives do not blame themselves for investing huge amounts of cash in the technological equivalent of snake oil.

However, the music industry has its own religious movement to tackle before it can make any shift towards DRM free content. The Recording Industry Association of America is still convinced that it can stop the rot with expensive and increasingly less supported court cases.

http://http//uk.theinquirer.net/?article=37094/

http://http//www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/21/yourmoney/music.php/

Nanomaterials Produce Heterogeneous Three-Dimensional Electronics
Researchers at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois have developed a new, experimentally simple approach for combining broad classes of dissimilar electronic materials into heterogeneously integrated systems with two or three dimensional layouts on rigid or flexible substrates. The materials and techniques, published in the December 15 issue of Science, provide capabilities that can complement those achievable with conventional methods.
We have developed a simple approach to combine disparate types of semiconductor devices into three dimensional, heterogeneously integrated (HGI) electronic systems, added Rogers, who has appointments in the departments of materials science and engineering, chemistry, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical science and engineering, and is also a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
The process starts with the synthesis of semiconductor nanomaterials, in the form of micro and nanoscale ribbons, wires, tubes and bars, on specialized growth substrates. Repeated application of a printing technique that uses soft, elastomeric stamps with these nanomaterials as solid inks followed by device integration yields heterogeneously integrated electronics that incorporate any combination of these or other semiconductor nanomaterials on virtually any type of device substrate, ranging from rigid inorganic materials to flexible plastics. Circuits built in this way offer electrical and mechanical (e.g., bendability) attributes that would be impossible to achieve using conventional, wafer-based approaches to electronics.
A key feature of the strategy is that it occurs at room temperature, thereby enabling the electronics to be placed on unconventional substrates such as thin sheets of plastic.
This work shows that it is possible to liberate high performance electronic devices from semiconductor wafers and to integrate them onto surfaces and substrates that better serve important end applications, Science News from: scitizen.com