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Cellphones

Microsoft Should Dump Middlemen, Build Own Phones 262

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'll-do-it-myself dept.
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company and start making its own phones."

Comment AVG has fixed the false positive (Score 1) 4

by phaedo00 (#32913200) Attached to: Arstechnica.com infected by malware?
Just to keep this updated, we're pretty sure this is a false-positive. AVG pushed an update yesterday which caused this to crop up on a ton of sites, including Amazon. We've compared hashes of the version of site.min.js being served on our site (the file AVG is complaining about) to a local, freshly compiled version and they match exactly, so there's no "infection" or corruption of our JavaScript taking place. I'll try to keep this updated as we hear more. We made a little post about it on the site here: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/07/a-recent-avg-update-is.ars?comments=1#comments-bar Update: I've also been told that AVG pushed an update which fixes this false positive.

Comment Can you help me? (Score 1) 4

by phaedo00 (#32908764) Attached to: Arstechnica.com infected by malware?
Hey guys this is Clint from Ars. JSBiff, I think you also emailed in but you didn't put in a valid email so I couldn't see what the deal is. Can you guys give me any more pertinent information on the false-positives AVG and this "Malwarebytes" are throwing? There's no malicious JavaScript on the site, so the only possibility is that your anti-virus programs are flipping out over some kind of ad-code. If you could email me at civis@arstechnica.com or clint@arstechnica.com and give me all the information your application is reporting, I can start figuring out what's going on. Thanks!

Submission + - Judge rejects SCO's motion for a new trial (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A judge has rejected SCO's motion for a new trial in the company's dispute over UNIX intellectual property ownership. The ruling validates a verdict that was issued in April by a jury which determined that Novell, and not SCO, is the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. This means that SCO cannot continue to pursue its litigation against IBM and other Linux users. "There was substantial evidence that Novell made an intentional decision to retain ownership of the copyrights," the Judge wrote in his decision. "The Court finds that the verdict is not clearly, decidedly, or overwhelmingly against the weight of the evidence. Therefore, SCO is not entitled to a new trial."
The Courts

Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record 384

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the yes-but-does-she-know-what-she-is-talking-about dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Thomas O'Toole writes that President Obama's choice for Associate Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, authored several cyberlaw opinions regarding online contracting law, domain names, and computer privacy while on the Second Circuit. Judge Sotomayor wrote the court's 2002 opinion in Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., an important online contracting case. In Specht, the Second Circuit declined to enforce contract terms (PDF) that were available behind a hyperlink that could only be seen by scrolling down on a Web page. 'We are not persuaded that a reasonably prudent offeree in these circumstances would have known of the existence of license terms,' wrote Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor wrote an opinion in a domain name case, Storey v. Cello Holdings LLC in 2003 that held that an adverse outcome in an administrative proceeding under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy did not preclude a later-initiated federal suit (PDF) brought under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). In Leventhal v. Knapek, a privacy case, Judge Sotomayor wrote for the Second Circuit that New York state agency officials and investigators did not violate a state employee's Fourth Amendment rights when they searched the contents of his office computer (PDF) for evidence of unauthorized use of state equipment. While none of these cases may mean much as far as what Judge Sotomayor will do as an Associate Supreme Court Justice 'if confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court,' writes O'Toole."
Programming

Submission + - How Microsoft dropped the ball with developers (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by cremou
cremou writes: As part of a series on how Microsoft bungled the transition from XP to Vista, Ars Technica looks at some unfortunate decisions Microsoft made that have made Windows an unpleasant development platform. 'So Windows is just a disaster to write programs for. It's miserable. It's quite nice if you want to use the same techniques you learned 15 years ago and not bother to change how you do, well, anything, but for anyone else it's all pain... And it's not just third parties who suffer. It causes trouble for Microsoft, too. The code isn't just inconsistent and ugly on the outside; it's that way on the inside, too. There's a lot of software for Windows, a lot of business-critical software, that's not maintained any more. And that software is usually buggy. It passes bad parameters to API calls, uses memory that it has released, assumes that files live in particular hardcoded locations, all sorts of things that it shouldn't do.'
KDE

Submission + - KDE 4.1 alpha 1 released, looks promising (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Crobain
Crobain writes: The first alpha release for KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising. The KDE Plasma desktop shell now has preliminary support for Mac OS X dashboard widgets and SuperKaramba, and panels can be added and removed via contextual menu items. 'This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability. Despite the current breakage, the actual feature set that has been stubbed out for this release is pretty darn good. If the developers can deliver on all of this functionality and make it stable and robust, version 4.1 will offer a much better overall user experience than 4.0, and Plasma will come close to achieving functional parity with the KDE 3.5.x panel system.' The KDE Techbase wiki has a full list of the features planned for the 4.1 release.
Security

Submission + - The state of grayware on the PC (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Checkers and Pogo
Checkers and Pogo writes: Grayware inhabits a murky area between pure malware and useful apps, and it's a growing problem. 38.1 percent of all malicious PC software falls into the grayware category, and so-called 'grayware 2.0' is targeting social-networking sites. 'The "threat" of rogue applications like SuperWall wasn't immediately obvious: they seemed more like annoyances than real security risks. But as users entered more and more personal information into their Facebook accounts, it became clear that the possibilities for abuse were rampant. For example, because Facebook allows users to "tag" photos with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute photos that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends.'
The Internet

Submission + - ISPs say P4P negates need for net neutrality regs (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Donut hole hole
Donut hole hole writes: AT&T and Comcast are using recent successful P2P trials to argue to the FCC that there's no need for strong traffic management or net neutrality rules. 'Comcast's statement, filed with the FCC on April 9th, hails an announcement by P2P developer Pando Networks that its experiments with P4P technology on a wide variety of U.S. broadband networks have boosted delivery speeds by up to 235 percent. This news, Comcast vice president Kathryn A. Zachem wrote to the Commission, "provides further proof that policymakers have been right to rely on marketplace forces, rather than government regulation, to govern the evolution of Internet services."' Looks like Comcast only likes P2P technology when it can be used to serve its political and regulatory agenda.
Programming

Submission + - A decade of OSS: 10 years after the FSF summit (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Jacob's ladder
Jacob's ladder writes: Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit and founder of Electric Cloud was there, and notes how much the landscape has changed. 'When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world. By the time of the first O'Reilly conference, there were dozens; now there are probably thousands. Also, open-source software has received substantial mainstream acceptance. 10 years ago, people were suspicious or afraid of it; now it is widely embraced.'
IBM

Submission + - Cell hits 45nm, PS3 price shrink likely to follow (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Septimus
Septimus writes: At this weeks ISSCC, IBM announced that the Cell CPU used in the PlayStation 3 will soon make the transition to IBM's next-gen 45nm high-k process. 'The 45nm Cell will use about 40 percent less power than its 65nm predecessor, and its die area will be reduced by 34 percent. The greatly reduced power budget will cut down on the amount of active cooling required by the console, which in turn will make it cheaper to produce and more reliable (this means fewer warrantied returns). Also affecting Sony's per-unit cost is the reduction in overall die size. A smaller die means a smaller, cheaper package; it also means that yields will be better and that each chip will cost less overall.'
Music

Submission + - Install copyright filters on PCs, says RIAA boss (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Don't squeeze the Sherman
Don't squeeze the Sherman writes: At a conference last week, RIAA president Cary Sherman said he didn't support mandatory filtering by ISPs, but in a video clip posted by Public Knowledge, Sherman offers a far more troubling 'solution': installing filters on users' PCs. From Ars Technica's coverage: 'The issue of encryption "would have to be faced," Sherman admitted after talking about the wonders of filtering. "One could have a filter on the end user's computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work."'
Google

Submission + - A Google blunder: the sad story of Urchin (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anenome
Anenome writes: Google has a track record of buying startups and integrating them into its portfoilo. But sometimes those acquisitions go terribly wrong, as Ars Technica argues has been the case with Google's 2005 purchase of web-analytics firm Urchin Software Corp. 'In the wake of Google's purchase of the company, inquiring customers (including Ars Technica) were told that support and updates would continue. Companies that had purchased support contracts were expecting version 6 any day, including Ars. What really happened is this: Google focused its attention on Google Analytics, put all updates to Urchin's other products on the back burner, and rolled out a skeleton support team. Everyone who forked over for upgrades via a support contract never got them, even though things weren't supposed to have changed. The support experience has been awful. Since the acquisition, we have had two major issues with Urchin, and neither issue was solved by Google's support team. In fact, with one issue, we were helped up until the point it got difficult, and then the help vanished. The support team literally just stopped responding.'
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Upcoming firmware will brick unlocked iPhones (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by iCry
iCry writes: It was rumored last week, and Apple has now confirmed it: 'Apple said today that a firmware update to the iPhone due to be released later this week "will likely result" in SIM-unlocked iPhones turning into very expensive bricks... So what are users of SIM-unlocked iPhones to do? Not run the latest software update, that's for sure. Users can instead pray to the hacking deities — the famed iPhone Dev Team that released the free software unlock, and iPhoneSIMfree, which released a commercial software unlock — to write applications that will undo the unlocks, as it were, if those users want to run the latest iPhone software.'
The Courts

Submission + - Verizon sues FCC over 700MHz open access rules (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Carterfone
Carterfone writes: Verizon is upset at the open access conditions for the 700MHz spectrum auction, and they're going to court to get them overturned. The company has filed a lawsuit in the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, urging the court to overturn the rules. 'In its petition for review, Verizon argues that the FCC exceeded its authority in mandating the two open access conditions, accusing the Commission of being "arbitrary" and "capricious," and saying that the rules are "unsupported by substantial evidence and otherwise contrary to law." Google is critical of Verizon's lawsuit: 'It's regrettable that Verizon has decided to use the court system to try to prevent consumers from having any choice of innovative services. Once again, it is American consumers who lose from these tactics.'

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