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IE7's do no evil approach

Looks like Microsoft got it right with its IE7 browser that was made available as a public beta today.

The first time a user launches the application, he is presented with a welcome screen asking him about three settings: phishing, language and quality feedback. The first and last one send information back to Microsoft, and therefore are switched off by default. So even if you're too lazy busy to read the page, you'll still get the most privacy conscious settings available.

Microsoft also deserves credit for making Yahoo and not MSN Search the default search engine. But for some reason you need to manually add Google to the search options before you can make it the default engine. And I wouldn’t be surprised that the MSN becomes the default engine as soon Microsoft marketing gets involved.

Lastly, the second page you visit (the one after the configuration screen) has an html error (error box displayed below). It's on Microsoft.com. Oops.

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Update 5:49 pm.

I had to uninstall the application because it failed to work with our webbased content management system (CMS).

That brings forward the most important set-back about this application: you can't run IE6 next to IE7: one will overwrite the other. And since IE7 is in beta, that sucks because you'll effectively lose you stable browser if you want to test the unstable one.

Yet another related problem was that the CMS kept acting up even after I uninstalled IE7. Only after clearing out the chache and browser history would it function properly.

Privacy by default (click image for larger version)

But the html on the ie7 tour page still needs some work. (click image for larger version)

Tags: internet explorer, ie7, microsoft

January 31, 2006 at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Starforce joins the laughable lawsuit squad

StarForce, a Russian firm developing a poorly engineered anti-copying application that is used by some game distributors, is pretending to be threatening BoingBoing for exposing the application for its crappyness.

The megablog earlier today received an email from "PR-manager" Dennis Zhidkov:

"I urge you to remove your post from [link]because it is full of insults, lies, false accusations and rumors. Your article violates approximately 11 international laws. Our USlawyer will contact you shortly. I have also contacted the FBI , because what you are doing is harassment."

Sigh… Why don't I ever get such amusing emails? I'd love to violate approximately 11 international laws. Or see how the FBI would get involved in a case that is clearly outside of its jurisdiction. But then, how would a Russian like Zhidkov know?

And the most amusing fact is that Zhidkov's email will only backfire now that he has exposed his company as being completely clueless about the law and point even more people to the questionable reputation of its software.

Starforce actually has a history of leashing out against people that dare to criticize its anti piracy protection in computer games. And it's PR policy is about hitting first and ask ing questions later.

Boingboing was spot-on about StarForce software messing with users operating systems. As one experienced gaming journalist wrote in October last year in an email to Mr. Zhidkov:

"Myself and my peers have come across many games with StarForce, among other systems, installed and as much as one or two problems might be considered circumstantial evidence against the system, consistent and regular problems following the same patterns I would view as concrete beyond reasonable doubt."

Zhidkov's only reply back then: "I respect your opinion".

The company meanwhile is waging a PR war to disarm some of the more serious claims about the software containing rootkits or disabling CD-Rom drives.

But the company addressed widespread complaints about its device drivers causing system instability and computer crashes.

Game over for Starforce?

Tags: starforce, boingboing, frivolous lawsuit

January 31, 2006 at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

180solutions fails to follow through on its threats – again

Adware maker 180solutions has dropped it’s lawsuit against security vendor ZoneLabs.

The vendor's ZoneAlarm application labelled 180solutions' software as malware that monitors user keystrokes and mouse movements. That is wrong, 180solutions claimed, and they are actually right. 180solutions makes a malicious application that presents users with pop-up ads and is nearly impossible to remove. Tar and feather them for that, but not for committing identity theft.

The company claims that it's dropping the suite because "ZoneAlarm downgraded its classification of 180solutions' S3-enabled search assistant software."

180solutions' lawsuits are starting to look like paper tigers. The company last year also sued a group of seven former distributors who illegally installed the 180solutions software on computers they had hacked and by doing so collected plenty of affiliate fees. That suit too was soon dropped.

It seems like the company doesn't want to spend the money to actually pursue its legal claims. Instead it's using the court system to generate PR and create the impression that it is an honourable business.

Honour however is deserved through outstanding customer service and by delivering a product that consumers actually want. 180solutions fails to qualify for either one.

Tags: 180solutions, adware, spyware

January 31, 2006 at 01:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spyware coalitions everywhere

A new industry consortium has been formed to improve the battle against spyware.

The group is a who's-who in the world of computer security, including McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, ICSA Labs and Thompson Cyber Security Labs.

It's all jolly great that vendors are trying to kill the spyware pest, but what's up with all these groups and alliances? Last week we saw the creation of the Stopbadware.org programme, spearheaded by the universities of Oxford and Harvard and funded by Sun Microsystems and Google, among others.

And then there is the anti-spyware coalition, whose members among others include McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro and ICSA Labs.

From the looks of it, the Coalition and the new consortium are doing about the same work. But as things go, a smaller group moves faster than a big one. Add the fact that three of the world's largest security vendors are involved in the new consortium, and they are in a good position to force their will upon their peers this way.

Tags: spyware, anti spyware coalition, badware

January 30, 2006 at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Vista schedule stays the undefined course

For a product that is ridden by launch delays and features being pulled, it's no surprise that Windows Vista's beta release schedule too is being changed on a regular basis.

The much expected beta 2 of the application is no longer scheduled to be released, Microsoft has disclosed. In stead the company will stick to releasing its CTPs: community technology previews.

The CTPs too are subject to changes however. When Microsoft first started talking about the releases, they were supposed to be released on a monthly basis. But Microsoft skipped the November release and now is forfeiting on the January release too.

Microsoft has a lot to learn when it comes to setting expectations and living up to them.

January 30, 2006 at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Where did the $10bn Itanium pledge come from?

The Itanium Solutions Alliance on Thursday beat its PR drum and came up with a stunning figure that would be invested into the platform over the next five years: 10 billion dollars. The money is earmarked for marketing and the creation of software and hardware that will work with the servers.

But as it turns out, the alliance simply wrapped an old stone in some shiny gift-wrap. Because the $10bn adds up to what the alliance members are already investing anyway.

For starters, the figure isn't as impressive as it might seem. The alliance has nine members including HP, Intel, Fujitsu and SGI, and the investment is spread out over 5 years, making for $220 per member company per year. HP alone is investing about $1bn a year in Itanium at this moment, analyst Nathan Brookwood with Insigh 64 told vnunet.com, and Intel too is pulling more than just its weight in trying to salvage the high end server chip.

Unfortunately the big money pitch takes away the attention from the important news. The nine members will also ensure that applications work across systems, fostering the Itanium ecosystem. Practically, if one of the vendors ports over an application to Linux on say HP, users can easily repeat that for an SGI or Bull system. More applications makes for a more attractive platform.

Tags: itanium, intel, SGI, HP, itanium solutions alliance,

January 28, 2006 at 03:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The truth about Windows Vista? It's vapourware

Bill Gates earlier this month had the opportunity to show off Windows Vista to the world. His keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show was actually the first time that the Microsoft chairman demonstrated the forthcoming operating system to an audience outside Microsoft – no developers or hardware engineers.

Surely a company will show the best features in a demonstration of this year's most important product launch at the world's most important consumer electronics show, before partners, competitors and a gathering of media from all over the world?

The pictures from his keynote show perfectly well what those features are:

A way to scroll through your applications in 3D – and while alt-tabbing your movies will be able to see your movies still playing and preview documents;

Next came sidebar, the idea that Microsoft stole from Apple's Dashboard, which stole it from Konfabulator.

What about the new photo editing tools? It allows Windows to do what Google's free Picasa application has been doing for years: organise photos.

And certainly don't forget the new user interface for your windows and applications like Windows Media Player. Because, really, its shiny black interface is the main thing that a user will see when he boots up Vista, and the only feature that's really new about the operating system. All the other "new" features are just rip-offs of existing applications that Microsoft copied. In the end, Vista won't do anything that Windows XP can't do already with a little help from third party vendors.

As a user, would these features make you stand in line to purchase a copy, some night in November when Microsoft chooses to launch Windows Vista?

Even Windows boss Jim Alchin seems to realise that his offering has become extremely weak. So in trying to justify he five years that his team spent on delaying developing the product, he is now touting safety and security as Vista's big feature.

"Even if [people] are not into home entertainment or in any of the specialty areas, they are just going to feel safer and more secure by using [Vista]," Alchin told Zdnet.

Cynicism has taken over in Redmond. Microsoft has taken five years to finally make a secure operating system and now wants us to pay for it. After Microsoft pulled every feature in the software, all that's left now are under the hood  adjustments.

Put it in a box and slap a price on it, because Microsoft's monopoly days are far from over.

Windows Vista loses by knock-out (pictured: Bill Gates beats Steve Ballmer in a computer game at CES

Tags: jim alchin, bill gates, Microsoft, windows vista

January 28, 2006 at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBack

Cingular claims it invented emotions

The US mobile operator Cingular is trying to patent emoticons on mobile phones.

Let us remember that patents are there to protect inventors from copycats, allowing them to earn back the hard work that they put into their inventions.

Emoticons are the little cartoon drawings that are displayed in IM or SMS conversations, expressing the author's emotions. The Cingular patents doesn't cover the emoticon itself but "a method and system for generating a displayable icon or emoticon" on a mobile device. Or to put it in plain English: a shortcut to creating emoticons.

It remains unclear exactly what innovation Cingular has brought to the concept of mobile shortcuts to display emoticons, other than that it ripped of the emoticon and the shortcut – none of which were Cingular inventions – and applied it to the field of mobile phones.

I don't pretend to know much about patents, but this one has the stench of "prior art" hanging over it like smell of a run over skunk.

Tags: cingular, emoticon, patent, patent reform

January 27, 2006 at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

GPL3 is going too far

GPL3 is about to alienate many of the people that made it a success.

So today Linus Torvalds launched a full-out assault against the proposed revisions of the premier open source license. He said that he wouldn't adopt the license for the Linux kernel because of its controversial statements about digital rights management technology (DRM).

The controversy is centred around a provision in the license draft that would prevent developers from using a GPL3-licensed application together with DRM. Practically TiVo would be unable to use Linux to power its digital video recorder boxes (as it does today) if Linux would adopt GPL3. The same would go for GPS navigation devices, media adapters, etc. etc.

The draft for version 3 of the GPL was in part drafted by Richard Stallman, and the battle against DRM is one of his pet projects. 

Needless to say that a GPL3 governed Linux would be a gift from heaven for Microsoft (or Sun Microsystems, in pushing OpenSolaris), as very few organisations would be able to use it without violating the license.

Linux is the premier example of a GPL application. The GPL in fact governs the vast majority of all "open source" software, even though there are about 70 different open source licenses.

The inclusion of the DRM provision would effectively render GPL3 useless for the vast majority of this world's users. It could be that the Free Software Foundation really wanted to create a license that takes open source to the furthest most extreme, making it more of a political statement than a practical tool.

In that case the GPL2 will be around for many years to come.

Stallman protesting Sony's DRM

Tags: GPL, richard stallman, linus torvalds

January 27, 2006 at 02:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Con of the day proofs: you have zero privacy

Next at eleven: a con that has the cellular business up in arms and why your personal phone records out in the open.

That's probably how a local television news station would advertise the news of the latest con that is going around in the cellular sector.

Websites like eFindOutTheTruth.com and locatecell.com are selling individual's phone records. Pay about $100, give the site a name and a (mobile) phone number and soon you'll receive a list with all the numbers that have been dialled from that number.

It turns out that the con works ridiculously easy. An employee for one of the sites calls a carrier's customer service claiming to be the owner of the number, armed with  information such as address and sometimes even a social security number. Or they pretend to be co-workers or field technicians, anything that gets them the records.

Customer service easily lets go of the security protocol and coughs up the information.

Cingular yesterday won an injunction against one of the websites. But the real problem here are flawed security policies and a lacking privacy legislation.

As a consumer, you can only be extremely paranoid about your privacy and assume that you have none. Prepare for the worst, and hope that things will turn out for the better.

Tags: mobile phone record, privacy

January 26, 2006 at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack