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Microsoft

Submission + - New Outlook will not use IE to render HTML e-mails

Submitted by
loconet
loconet writes: "From MSDN: "Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007." This means that HTML and CSS handling will be taken care by the Word engine rather than the IE engine as it has been in the past. Campaign monitor has a more detailed take (with screenshots) on the possible issues of this decision by Microsoft."
Music

Submission + - ITunes music sharing makes for awkward neighbors

Submitted by scottyscout
scottyscout writes: A cool NPR story about a reporter who meets his neighbor through her iTunes library when she freeloads on his wireless network.

One night, NPR reporter David Kestenbaum was listening to music on iTunes. And he was bored with his playlist. Then he noticed something strange — a mysterious folder called "Anna's Music" had popped up his screen. He'd never seen it before.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Locating a server in your home

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: It's going to be 41 degrees C here tomorrow. At the moment my server (with 5 hard disks) is located temporarily in a room on it's own, mostly because no one wants to be in the same room as all those fans and disk motors. This is not a wise allocation of limited house space :-} (Yes — you guessed it — I am single) Q: Where do folks locate their servers in suburban homes? Q: Whats your best tricks and tips for making that server more house friendly? I am thinking about security, heat, noise, space, access...I guess in cooler climates any cupboard will do....
Announcements

Submission + - Free Multilingual guide VoIP in developing regions

Submitted by
Alberto Escudero
Alberto Escudero writes: "The "VoIP-4D Primer" is a free guide available in four major languages (english, french, arabic and spanish) under Creative Commons. The booklet is an effort to disseminate the use of telephony over the Internet in developing regions.

The 40-page guide targets both technical and non-technical readers. The first part presents the essentials of telephony over the Internet. For those interested in the more technical details, hands-on guidelines and configuration files are included in the second part. The examples provide essential background to build your own low-cost telephony system.

More info, media coverage and free PDF downloads are available here: http://voip4d.it46.se/"
Music

Submission + - UK Copyright fight intensifies

Submitted by tnmc
tnmc writes: Ok, it's The Sun (a Rupert Murdoch tabloid), but the article is unbelievable: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006560780,00 .html "TOP musicians this week joined forces in a bid to tighten copyright law. They want to extend the legal protection on songs they have recorded. This copyright is currently just 50 years and allows them to receive royalties whenever their song is played. Once it's out of copyright — as will soon happen to early songs by the likes of The Beatles and Rolling Stones — they get nothing. And crime gangs could then churn out low-quality copies of Cliff Richard recordings to fund other activities, such as drug-running."
Google

Submission + - Google Blinks - Responds to AdWords Accusations

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Based on the thoroughness of the statement and the use of the word "precedent" in the second sentence, it appears that the Google PR team huddled with the legal team and issued a statement on the Inside AdWords Blog.
"...it seems that the underlying issue here is Google's lack of transparency which is a recurring theme in how it runs its business."
HP

Submission + - HP Agrees to Pay 14.5 Million to Settle Civil Suit

Submitted by
elzurawka
elzurawka writes: "HP has agreed to pay 14.5 Million dollars to settle a civil suit brought on them by California Attorney General. This stiff fine goes to show that need to watch out how they conduct business. HP may have saved themselves a world of hurt by cooperating instead of trying to cover this us. FTA:
"Hewlett-Packard (HP) has agreed to pay $14.5m (£7.4m) to settle a civil lawsuit over its much-criticised investigation into a boardroom leak. The probe by the Californian attorney general came after allegations that HP had wrongly spied on its directors to try and find the source of the leak....The investigators were said to have illegally gained phone records by pretending to be the people they were spying on, a practice known as 'pretexting'. HP's chief executive Mark Hurd has already admitted that the methods the investigators used to try and identify who was behind the boardroom leaks were 'very disturbing'.""
Power

Submission + - Do We Drive Less Now That Gas Prices Have Tripled?

Submitted by
Prof. Goose
Prof. Goose writes: "After my update on the global supply situation the other day, I also wanted to catch up with another of my favorite topics: how US drivers are responding to the flattening of global oil supply (something I last looked at here). We now have VMT (vehicle miles traveled) data through August, and that allows us to see what happened during the summer when oil (and thus gasoline) prices were very high...

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/12/5 /17243/2556"
Windows

Submission + - Pirates crack Vista Activation Server

Submitted by Smithd132
Smithd132 writes: 7th December 2006 — James Bannan of apc magazine — Vista

Pirates have released another ingenious workaround to Vista's copy protection: a hacked copy of Microsoft's yet-to-be-released volume licencing activation server, running in VMware. Volume Activation 2.0 is one of the more controversial features of Vista: it means that every copy of Vista has to be activated, even the Business/Enterprise volume licenced editions. However, to make life easier for administrators, Microsoft worked in a more convenient system of in-house for en masse activation of PCs called KMS — Key Management Service.

The idea behind KMS is that you have a single PC running KMS which can then handle activation for all your Vista clients, so that they don't have to connect back to Microsoft every single time. The downside of KMS is that the activation is only good for 180 days, to discourage people bringing in their home systems, activating them and wandering off again. Bearing in mind that KMS wasn't scheduled to be released until next year, pirates have managed to get hold of KMS and produce a standalone, fully-activated KMS server called "Windows Vista Local Activation Server — MelindaGates". Tongue-in-cheek of course...the first "cracked" version of Vista was called Vista BillGates.

The download is a VMWare image, and the idea behind it is that you download and install VMWare Player (a legal free download), boot the image and use some VBS script (supplied with the activation server download) to have the client Vista machine get its activation from the local server. And that's it — no communication back to Microsoft. Of course, in line with the Volume Activation 2.0 model, this only works with Vista Business and Enterprise editions, as they are the only ones which will accept KMS keys. Home and Ultimate editions still use normal single-use activation that calls back to Microsoft for validation of the product ID. On one hand, this is strikes a serious blow to Vista's activation model. Simply possessing the Vista DVD (which was released on the boards about two weeks ago) wasn't enough to get you past the robust activation requirements. But if you can load up a local activation server and activate Vista that way, it sort of makes the whole thing redundant.

There are two caveats though. Vista still has to be installed with a KMS product key, so if that activated system ever goes through the WGA system with a known pirated key, Microsoft will be able to track it down and eventually close the loop. The second is that this is a true KMS server, so the activation is only good for 180 days, then the client needs re-activation. It's also still not a crack. In this instance, as with the Vista BillGates release, it's an activation workaround. Admittedly a very clever one, and one that Microsoft will have a lot more trouble stamping out, but the fact that it's taken the acquisition of a KMS server shows that Vista activation is still holding strong in its own right. But is that of any comfort to Microsoft right now, while its yet-to-be-widely-released OS is being pirated like crazy?
Enlightenment

Submission + - Detecting Conflict-Of-Interest on the Semantic Web

Submitted by
CexpTretical
CexpTretical writes: "At the 15th International WWW Conference in Edinburgh Scotland, Refereed Track on Semantic Web accepted many thorough and interesting academic papers on semantic web research on subjects related to where the Web is in the Semantic Web? One such paper nominated for Best Paper Award, Semantic Analytics on Social Networks: Experiences in Addressing the Problem of Conflict of Interest Detection hits on the whole subject of validation and/or verification in the brave world of so called "Web 3.0" topologies/frameworks/architectures. The paper describes a "Semantic Web application that detects Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships"."
The Internet

Submission + - Shortage of electricity drives data center siting

Submitted by
Engineer-Poet
Engineer-Poet writes: "Per the San Jose Mercury News, competitors such as Google and Yahoo are meeting to discuss the issue of electricity in Silicon Valley. How much of the USA's 4038 billion kWh/year goes into data centers? Enough to make a difference. Data centers are moving out of California to spread the load and avoid a single-point-of-failure scenario. This is a serious matter; as Andrew Karsner (assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy for the Department of Energy) asked, "What happens to national productivity when Google goes down for 72 hours?" I'm sure nobody wants to know. (Though setting up to generate another 5000 billion kWh/year or so would put the issue off for at least a decade or three.)"
Google

Submission + - Google Earth's Road To Nowhere

Submitted by Simonetta
Simonetta writes: The big story of the day in Oregon is about a family that got lost in the dense woods after following a 'road' listed on Google Earth. After being lost for days, the family survived but the father died after leaving his family to get help. The 'road' listed on Google Earth is nothing more than a grown over logging trail that is barely accessable in the summer. The area in southwestern Oregon where they got lost is one of the largest sections of semi-wilderness left on the coast of the USA. If Google Earth or Maps lists a road that goes deep into the wilderness, and the road doesn't really exist, and you drive your SUV far into it and get hopelessly lost, are they responsible?

RIAA Mischaracterizes Letter Received From AOL 287

Posted by CowboyNeal from the guilty-until-proven-innocent dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Elektra v. Schwartz, an RIAA case against a Queens woman with Multiple Sclerosis who indicates that she had never even heard of file sharing until the RIAA came knocking on her door, the judge held that Ms. Schwartz's summary judgment request for dismissal was premature because the RIAA said it had a letter from AOL 'confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed.' When her lawyers got a copy of the actual AOL letter they saw that it had no such statement in it, and asked the judge to reconsider."

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