The SD Association announced on Wednesday that the new SDXC card standard will support sizes up to 2 terabytes, with data transfer speeds up to 104 MB/sec and potential future speeds up to 300 MB/sec. The SDXC specification will be released in the first quarter of 2009, the association says, which means that cards may come out by the end of the year.
"Big" SDXC cards will fit into digital cameras and music players. But the most amazing part of this news is that SDXC even applies to the sort of "micro" cards that go in cell phones. "The microSDXC card [would be] based on current SD interface for use in mobiles," an association spokeswoman said via e-mail.
The SDXC standard will use the Microsoft exFAT file system (aka FAT64), which extends the venerable FAT file system to handle file sizes greater than 4 GB and more than 1000 files per directory.
Microsoft Corp. yesterday posted a toolkit to block the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) from downloading and installing automatically when it is officially released later this year.
If the company uses a timeline similar to its previous browser, the toolkit's release means Microsoft is likely to deliver IE8 within the next three months.
In an entry to a company blog, an IE program manager said that Microsoft would push IE8 to users via its Windows Update and Microsoft Update services when the browser is finished. The blocker modifies each PC's Windows registry.
"We've done a lot of work in IE8 to maintain compatibility with sites designed for Internet Explorer 7, for example, compatibility view and the compatibility meta tag," said Jane Maliouta, the IE program manager. "However, we know many IT organizations will still want to test the browser before it is deployed."
The toolkit offers two components: an executable blocker script that creates a new key in the Windows registry to stymie automatic downloading and installation, and a group policy template that can be imported into a company's existing policy infrastructure.
Even though it wasn't CEO Steve Jobs giving the keynote, Apple couldn't resist giving users "one more thing" at its final Macworld.
After announcing updates to the iLife software suite, and a new MacBook Pro, keynote speaker Phil Schiller said there would be major changes coming to the iTunes music store, including the stripping of digital rights management, variable pricing, and tighter iPhone 3G integration.
For the last six years, Apple has sold the vast majority of its music through iTunes for 99 cents with DRM. It has been a winning strategy so far, as Apple's iPods hold nearly 75% of the digital music market, and the iTunes store has become the largest seller of music in the United States.
But the music labels have bristled at the single price point, and some consumers felt the DRM was too restrictive. This potentially opened the door for digital music competitors like Amazon.com, which sells DRM-free music for multiple prices.
But Schiller said starting today users can buy 8 million tracks without DRM. This DRM-free music comes from the four major labels, and multiple independent labels. By the end of the quarter, Apple said it will offer its whole catalog of music, 10 million tracks, for sale without DRM.
Attendees of the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York today were reminded of the shortcomings of Windows Vista a day before Microsoft Corp. is expected to reveal the first beta for its follow-up, Windows 7.
Microsoft Investigative Consultant Michael Dunner asked attendees how many of them have used Vista as he gave a presentation on the security differences between that operating system and Windows 7.
When people in the audience raised their hands, Dunner then asked, "How many of you like it?" Only about half of those who acknowledged using Vista raised their hands.
Dunner also called Vista's User Account Control (UAC) feature "annoying" and one of its "biggest problems," to which one audience member responded, "Yes, it is annoying."
Problems with UAC have been widely publicized and even spoofed by television commercials from competitor Apple. The feature was meant to improve the security of Vista by preventing users without administrative privileges from making unauthorized changes to a PC. But because of how it was set up, it can prevent even authorized users from being able to access applications and features through a series of screen prompts that interrupt normal user workflow to ask for account privileges.
Microsoft earned more than $1.5 billion from the sale of PCs marked as "Vista Capable" in the months leading up to the 2007 debut of Windows Vista, according to an expert's estimate.
University of Washington economist Dr. Keith Leffler pegged Microsoft's income from sales of Windows XP licenses on Vista Capable-labeled computers at $1.505 billion. Leffler has testified for the plaintiffs in the ongoing class-action lawsuit that accuses Microsoft of deceiving consumers during its Vista Capable marketing program. The company created the program to maintain PC sales momentum as the launch of Vista neared.
In a heavily redacted document unsealed on Friday, Leffler outlined how he arrived at his estimate.
"In Microsoft's Supplemental Responses, it estimates that it received revenue of [redacted] from Windows XP licenses installed on upgradeable PCs sold in the U.S. during the April 2006 through January 2007 period," said Leffler, referring to the nine-month run of the Vista Capable campaign. "From the estimates of Windows [Vista] Capable but not Vista Premium Ready PCs compared to all upgradeable PCs as in Table 1, I estimate that [redacted] of the [redacted] from Windows XP licenses on upgradeable PCs were for XP licenses on Vista Capable but not Vista Premium Ready PCs -- those PCs purchased by the Plaintiff class.
"From these figures, I have, therefore, reached the opinion that the Microsoft revenue from the Windows XP licensing on Vista Capable but not Vista Premium Ready PCs sold to Plaintiffs was $1.505 billion," Leffler concluded.
Micro-blogging site Twitter was the victim of a phishing scam over the weekend that took control of users' direct messaging capabilities.
Scammers have been taking control of users' accounts and sending direct messages to their followers. These messages include links to what looks like the Twitter sign-in page, but is actually a phishing site that will steal account information once a user has signed in, then add the user to the list of accounts being used to extend the phishing scheme.
"The email says something like, 'hey! check out this funny blog about you...' and provides a link. That link redirects to a site masquerading as the Twitter front page," according to a Saturday blog post from Twitter.
"If you receive a direct message or a direct message email notification that redirects to what looks like Twitter.com - don't sign in," Twitter said. "Look closely at the URL because it could be a scam."
The Recording Industry Association of America has dumped the company charged with gathering evidence for use against people accused of illegally sharing copyrighted music, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.
As part of its controversial antipiracy strategy, the RIAA had enlisted MediaSentry to search the Internet for evidence of people sharing large amounts of music. The trade group's campaign on behalf of the world's largest recording labels reportedly resulted in lawsuits against about 35,000 people.
However, MediaSentry was often criticized for its gathering techniques, often characterized as invasive and excessive.
If 2007 was witness to the rise of the professional hi-tech criminal, then 2008 was the year they got down to work.
"The underground economy is flourishing," said Dan Hubbard, chief technology officer at security company Websense.
"They are not just more organised," said Mr Hubbard, "they are co-operating more and showing more business savvy in how they monetise what they do."
Statistics gathered by firms combating the rising tide of computer crime reveal just how busy professional cyber thieves have been over the last twelve months.
Sophos said it was now seeing more than 20,000 new malicious programs every day. 2008 was also the year in which Symantec revealed that its anti-virus software now protected against more than one million viruses.
One of just 17 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante saloons made has been found in a garage in Tyneside.
The super-rare 1937 Bugatti two-seater was found by nephews and nieces of Dr Harold Carr, who inherited his car collection (also including a Jaguar E-Type and an Aston Martin) after his death last year.
They knew that their reclusive uncle - described as 'eccentric' and an 'obsessive compulsive' - had some classic cars in a long-abandoned lock-up, but had no idea just how valuable these were until they cleared out his property.
The Bugatti is tipped to be one of the most expensive cars ever to be sold at auction when it goes under the hammer at the Bonhams' event at the Retromobile show in Paris next month. It will be sold with a 3million (pounds) reserve, but the auctioneers reckon it may fetch as much as 6million.
Internet Explorer's market share plunged by a record-setting amount during December, Web metrics vendor Net Applications Inc. said today.
Microsoft Corp.'s browser lost 1.6 percentage points of its market share last month, ending December with a 68.2% share, down from November's 69.8%. Since the end of October, IE's market share has lost 3.1 percentage points, nearly half of its total 2008 losses.
IE ended the year down 7.9 percentage points, a 10.4% decline in its share since December 2007.
Not surprisingly, the bulk of IE's December loss came from IE6's declining popularity; the older browser, which first appeared in August 2001, has long lost share to the newer IE7. However, IE7 also slipped significantly. Microsoft's newest production browser dropped six-tenths of a percentage point last month, the largest slip since its October 2006 launch.
Microsoft is currently working on IE8, and has said a "release candidate" build of the browser is "just around the corner."
Mark January 15 in your calendar: Rumors of layoffs at Microsoft peg that as the day the bad news will come.
The latest to report on the possibility of layoffs at the software giant is the blog Fudzilla, which puts the number of job cuts at 15,000, or nearly 17 percent of Microsoft's worldwide operations. The January 15 date is a week before Microsoft's second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for January 22.
Microsoft also has a briefing for financial analysts planned for January 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with the headliner listed as Robbie Bach, president of the entertainment and devices division.
Those purported layoff numbers are up from earlier rumors, which suggested that 10 percent of the company's employees would lose their jobs.
Google is pushing users of its Gmail e-mail service to dump Microsoft's Internet Explorer for its own Chrome browser or Mozilla's Firefox.
When users of IE6 reach Gmail.com, a "Get faster Gmail" message appears in the Web-based service's menu bar. The message, in turn, links to a page on Google's Web site that touts Chrome and Firefox 3 as being "twice as fast" at running Gmail.
Last week, the Gmail site also displayed the message to users browsing with Microsoft's IE7, but Google has since discarded that version of the notice. Users running other browsers, including Apple's Safari and Opera Software ASA's namesake browser, haven't been shown the speed-up message.
Google currently lists IE7, Firefox 2.0 and later releases, Chrome and Safari as the only supported browsers for Gmail. Others, including Opera and older editions of IE, Firefox, and Safari, can be used to access the e-mail service but aren't able to handle some of its features.
A treasure hunter testified in a Texas courtroom Tuesday that he used Google Maps to locate a shipwreck.
Houston Chronicle writer Mary Flood reported that Nathan Smith, a 39-year-old musician and filmmaker from Los Angeles, has been fighting representatives of an estate in Refugio County, Texas, for the right to excavate his claimed find.
Smith seeks to prove that the wreck lies in navigable waters rather than on privately owned land.
The case, Nathan Smith v. The Abandoned Vessel, was filed in March 2007. The significant documents, including the initial complaint, are under seal to hide the location of the supposed shipwreck.
In the publicly accessible depositions, much of the questioning has to do with the area in and around Melon Creek and Melon Lake, near the Mission River.
In reaction to the news that security researchers have come up with a way to spoof the digital certificates that secure many Web sites, Microsoft Corp. downplayed the threat to users.
In a security advisory, Microsoft acknowledged the disclosure earlier in the day of an exploit of long-known bugs in the MD5 hashing algorithm used to create the digital certificates that in turn provide proof of a secure connection between users and Web sites. But the software vendor minimized the danger that users could face.
"This new disclosure does not increase risk to customers significantly, as the researchers have not published the cryptographic background to the attack, and the attack is not repeatable without this information," said Microsoft. The company added that it wasn't aware of any actual attacks using the techniques described by an international team of researchers from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.S.
Microsoft also noted that most of the certificate authority vendors that issue digital certificates have abandoned MD5 and upgraded to the more secure SHA-1 algorithm.
Microsoft's Zune 30GB music player just wasn't ready for a leap year.
That's what owners of the devices discovered Wednesday morning when they awoke to find their players frozen and unworkable.
The problem turned out to be "a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year," Microsoft Zune spokesman Matt Akers said in a posting to Zune forums Wednesday. The issue does not affect all Zune players, but all models of the Zune 30GB are potentially affected, he said.
Zune is Microsoft's alternative to Apple's popular iPod devices.
The bug disabled the players on Dec. 31, the last day of a leap year. Microsoft expects that the bug will resolve itself by Jan. 1, when the device's internal clock will reset itself.
"By [Thursday] you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on," Akers said. "If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device."
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The SD Association announced on Wednesday that the new SDXC card standard will support sizes up to 2 terabytes, with data transfer speeds up to 104 MB/sec and potential future speeds up to 300 MB/sec. The SDXC specification will be released in the first quarter of 2009, the association says, which means that cards may come out by the end of the year.
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Microsoft Corp. yesterday posted a toolkit to block the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) from downloading and installing automatically when it is officially released later this year.
Full story: 
Even though it wasn't CEO Steve Jobs giving the keynote, Apple couldn't resist giving users "one more thing" at its final Macworld. 
Attendees of the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York today were reminded of the shortcomings of Windows Vista a day before Microsoft Corp. is expected to reveal the first beta for its follow-up, Windows 7.
Microsoft earned more than $1.5 billion from the sale of PCs marked as "Vista Capable" in the months leading up to the 2007 debut of Windows Vista, according to an expert's estimate. 
The Recording Industry Association of America has dumped the company charged with gathering evidence for use against people accused of illegally sharing copyrighted music, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal. 
If 2007 was witness to the rise of the professional hi-tech criminal, then 2008 was the year they got down to work. 
Internet Explorer's market share plunged by a record-setting amount during December, Web metrics vendor Net Applications Inc. said today. 
Mark January 15 in your calendar: Rumors of layoffs at Microsoft peg that as the day the bad news will come.
Google is pushing users of its Gmail e-mail service to dump Microsoft's Internet Explorer for its own Chrome browser or Mozilla's Firefox. 
A treasure hunter testified in a Texas courtroom Tuesday that he used Google Maps to locate a shipwreck. 
Microsoft's Zune 30GB music player just wasn't ready for a leap year.