|
|
Microsoft hit with patent suit
A company that develops cameras that produce 360-degree videos is suing Microsoft for alleged patent infringement in its RoundTable conferencing product.
In a filing this week with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, FullView asks the court to require Microsoft to stop selling RoundTable and to award FullView triple damages.
FullView's patent, which builds on other patent applications dating back to 1995, covers a camera system that combines the fields of view of several cameras to form a continuous 360-degree view.
Microsoft, Yahoo talks intensify
Microsoft and Yahoo have intensified talks in a last-minute effort to reach a friendly agreement on a buyout of Yahoo, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday.
Yahoo shares rose 7 percent on news of the accelerated talks. Investors had feared Microsoft might walk away from its unsolicited bid, now worth about $42.2 billion, or launch a hostile takeover battle. The software maker had set a deadline for Yahoo that passed last Saturday.
Microsoft has since increased its offer by several dollars per share, though the talks could yet fall apart, the New York Times's DealBook blog reported, citing a person involved in the discussions. Microsoft declined to comment.
Microsoft snags Photoshop guru
The competition between Microsoft and Adobe heated up some more recently when Microsoft scored a key hire from its competitor.
Mark Hamburg, who had been chief architect of Adobe Photoshop and who launched the Adobe effort that became Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, resigned from Adobe after 17 years and is joining Microsoft.
Malware infected hardware
Samuel King and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown that they could gain control of a computer by adding malicious circuits to its processor. Because these circuits interfere with the computer at a deeper level than a virus, they effectively operate "below the radar" of AV software.
To evaluate the risk from such hardware, King's team designed their own malicious circuits. They used a processor called a field programmable gate array (FPGA), whose logic circuits can be rearranged, to create a replica of an existing open source processor called Leon3, which contains around 1.7 million circuits. They then added about 1000 malicious circuits not present in Leon3.
The team found that the circuits allowed them to bypass security controls on Leon3 in a similar way to how a virus hands control of a computer to a hacker, but without requiring a flaw in a software application. When they hooked the FPGA up to another computer, they were able to steal passwords stored in its memory and install malicious software that would allow the operating system it was running to be remotely controlled.
HP builds intelligent memory
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a working unit of a memory circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it has retained.
The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events.
For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave the heating time for different food types based on the information it has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP.[Can you say Skynet?]
Man gets prison for sending spam
A Colorado man accused of sending hundreds of thousands of spam emails has been sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and falsifying email headers.
Thirty-five-year-old Edward "Eddie" Davidson of Louisville was also ordered to pay nearly $715,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced Monday and ordered to report to prison authorities in May.
Microsoft directors mull Yahoo bid
Microsoft's directors were meeting Wednesday to consider raising the software maker's $41.9 billion bid for Yahoo instead of pursuing a threatened hostile takeover attempt, according to a published report.
A decision could emerge after the meeting, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
Microsoft also is weighing withdrawing its bid--a move likely to cause a precipitous drop in Yahoo's stock, which has been bolstered by the 3-month-old takeover bid.
Microsoft expands management capabilities
Microsoft in 2000 rolled out its Operation Manager software with the goal of bringing the same management strengths the company had in desktop environments to Windows-based data centers.
Now company officials are looking to continue expanding those capabilities to include virtualized and non-Microsoft environments.
At its Microsoft Management Summit April 29 in Las Vegas, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, also will outline the company's new use of open-source technologies and industry standards.
Taming Vista's UAC
User Account Control is one of Windows Vista's most controversial and most misunderstood features. This walkthrough will help you smooth over some of its harder edges without shutting it off completely.
Reiser conviction may kill ReiserFS
Software developer Hans Reiser was found guilty today of first degree murder in the death of his wife in late 2006, a conviction that carries up to 25 years in prison and a possible death sentence for the Reiser4 file system.
ReiserFS (File System) is incorporated in the Linux kernel and is used in many top Linux distributions, although EXT3 has succeeded it a the leading file system. The Reiser4 open source project, the successor to ReiserFS also conceived by Hans Reiser, continues to be developed and supported by a group of open source programmers. In an e-mail interview over the weekend, Edward Shishkin, a top developer of Reiser4, said work continues on the file system but the fate of the open source project long term is uncertain.
Microsoft should give up on Yahoo
Companies (at least publicly traded ones) are beholden to shareholders. But they also are beholden to their employees. And while most Softies are afraid to state for the record that they think Microsoft should abandon its takeover of Yahoo, that opinion is a real and prevailing sentiment among many in the Microsoft ranks.
These aren't folks who are saying Microsoft should walk away from Yahoo so that Yahoo's stock price will tank and Microsoft can swoop in and buy them later. They are folks who are opposed to a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo at any price. And while it's tough to take over successfully a company where many of the employees don't want to work for you, it's potentially far worse to alienate your own employees by spending billions to buy technology and people with whom your rank and file have no interest in working.
Google enhances offline access
Google continued its rapid cycle of innovation for its Docs trio of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications April 25.
Weeks after allowing Google Apps users to view and edit word processing documents offline, the company has added the capability to view its spreadsheets and presentations offline.
XP SP3 confilcts with Dynamics
Microsoft has delayed the release of a third service pack for Windows XP, blaminga "compatibility issue" between the software and a retail-chain-management application.
Microsoft had said last week that it completed development on Windows XP, Service Pack 3 (SP3), and that it would be available via its software-update services on Tuesday. However, incompatibilities discovered in the past several days between an application called Microsoft Dynamics RMS and both Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will force the company to hold off on releasing the software. Dynamics RMS is a retail-chain-management software for small and mid-sized businesses.
Microsoft/Yahoo deadline passes
Yahoo failed to agree to an acquisition deal with Microsoft by Saturday, the deadline Microsoft had set for wrapping up negotiations.
Now Microsoft must decide whether to pursue a hostile takeover via a proxy fight or to drop the bid and seek other acquisition alternatives.
Court expands White House email order
A judge tells the Bush administration to collect and preserve all email in .pst files; millions are missing.
Concerned over contradictory White House statements about the government's controversial email archiving efforts, a U.S. district judge April 24 ordered the Bush administration to collect and preserve all emails in .pst files for individuals employed at the White House between March 2003 and October 2005. Millions of White House email are missing from the period.
The White House admits emails are missing but insists the emails are on back-up tapes and drives that as yet haven't been located. Federal law requires the preservation of all White House email. The period of time covered by the order includes the start of the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame affair and the White House response to Hurricane Katrina.
Dell will install XP after deadline
Dell will sell and support systems with the Windows XP operating systems to its customers even after the June 30 cutoff date set by Microsoft.
What will happen is that Dell will leverage on the "downgrade" license inherent in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate to pre-install Windows XP Professional on a selection of Dell desktop PCs and laptops. This will save users the hassle of having to do it themselves, says a Dell spokesperson. This service will be offered on some Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision systems for free. Some Vostro and XPS systems will also get this offer--for a small fee.
One Web page infected every five seconds
Web threats have risen significantly in the first quarter of 2008, with one Web page being infected every five seconds, according to a new report from security vendor Sophos.
Sophos said in its Security Threat Report that an average of over 15,000 Web pages were compromised daily between January and March.
In contrast, the daily average for the entire 2007 was about 6,000, or one infected Web page every 14 seconds.
Schwartz sees end to blogging
Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz rightly gets credit for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. But pretty soon the novelty of his methods will wear off, he predicted.
"At some point the word 'blogging' will be anachronistic," Schwartz said at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. "I communicate."
And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. "Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O'Reily Media chief Tim O'Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."
New article: The worrisome implications of the Mexican theft of White House BlackBerry devices
Our ongoing story about the security of White House email took a strange turn on Friday, proving some of the national security concerns I've been discussing to be true in a particularly tangible and unfortunate way. What makes this topic so troubling, of course, is the serious national security breach that may have occurred. But there's more to the story, including issues of the relationship between the United States and Mexico, and even how racial stereotyping may have contributed to spinning this story in a way that may be obscuring the true magnitude of the possible damage to our national security.
Read this OutlookPower article.
Tech jargon bad for your career
Jargon shows up in all professions, but in few is it more apparent, or more divisive, than in the world of technology. Picture this. You're in the middle of a presentation to a business team about some technology it would behoove the company to invest in and this comes out of your mouth:
"Just last week, we loaded 15 BGUs in the OTB and got an output of 1,300 cycles, which shows our testing program is right on target."
You might have missed it, but half the room was day dreaming and the other half were checking email on their BlackBerrys. What they were not doing: considering whether they should budget for this technology, because you had lost their attention. Can an over-reliance on tech jargon be bad for your career? Some experts say yes.
XP may yet live
Microsoft could re-think plans to phase out its Windows XP operating system by June 30 if customers show they want to keep it but so far they have not, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said.
"XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments," Ballmer told a news conference on Thursday.
Microsoft has announced that it will stop licensing Windows XP to computer makers and end retail sales by June 30.
New rules of techie etiquette
Here are Eric Lundquist's new rules of being the techie gentleman or lady.
|
| |
