Tech News

Even the 768 bit RSA algorithm cracked, so far 1024 is safe

2010-01-09T13:01:00.000+05:30

Cracking encryption codes is an activity that has been carried out for millenia now, since the carrying of information in a way that outsiders cannot read it is as old as man's quest for politics and fighting with each other. The tales of the Enigma project in the second World War, the quest between the Allied and Axis powers to read each other's secret messages, and then the quest between the Soviets and the US over encryption and safety of messages eventually turned into a battle of mathematics; and this is what encryption is all about now, a quest for who can have a higher degree of combination of mathematics and computing power to either set up more secure systems, or to break other other's codes.
A few years ago, it seemed that 128 bit encryption was secure, and now it does not even seem that 768 bit is secure (link to article):

Most modern cryptography relies on single large numbers that are the product of two primes. If you know the numbers, it's relatively easy to encrypt and decrypt data; if you don't, finding the numbers by brute force is a big computational challenge. But this challenge gets easier every year as processor speed and efficiency increase, making "secure" a bit of a moving target. The paper describes how the process was done with commodity hardware, albeit lots of it.
Although most people aren't going to have access to these sorts of clusters, they represent a trivial amount of computing power for many organizations. As a result, the authors conclude, "The overall effort is sufficiently low that even for short-term protection of data of little value, 768-bit RSA moduli can no longer be recommended." 1024-bit values should be good for a few years still.

Feedback of a Flash user on Silverlight

2009-11-14T22:28:00.002+05:30

I came across this article a couple of days back, and found this to be a nice review, although a bit one-sided. The article takes the case of a long time Flash developer who got tempted to use Silverlight for a project. The article presents the problems he faces, and although he mentions in the end that he was not experience enough in the Microsoft and Visual Studio area, this should not be a roadblock. And he is right, since Silverlight is meant to take the battle to Flash, and it should have a great experience for somebody whose expertise on Flash. If a Flash developer found it difficult to move to Silverlight, it would just add another level of difficulty in getting Flash user to convert to Silverlight. Read the article at this location.
The article is a thorough criticism, not only of Silverlight, but also the efforts around Microsoft for improving the infrastructure related to Silverlight. For example, the article talks about how difficult and time-consuming it is just download and install Visual Studio. And the help and guidance provided was not very friendly.

Don’t dumb things down on my account, but understand that not everyone installing (rather, waiting for the install process to complete so they can use) your tools knows them well enough to get themselves in and out of your workflow with ease. Lower the barrier of entry and you may appeal to, and more importantly, enable, a lot more folks. This may be hard for you, seeing as your existing and historic developer contingent has already adapted to what I think is a very hardcore centered developer process.

The iPhone app that shows climate change

2009-10-04T16:35:00.002+05:30

The iPhone is a great commercial success for Apple. The phone has mesmerized users all over the world, and become the corner-store for a smartphone that is well designed, provides what users want, and most noticeably, provides a platform for 3rd party apps that can extend the various functions available to users. The App Store allows developers to create apps and have them in front of users, whether these Apps be free or purchasable, and the number of apps that have been downloaded is an ever increasing number. The Apps cover a huge gamut of areas, whether these be news, business usage, games, cool gadgets, useless stuff, sports, and so on.
A different topic; that of global warming. Global warming is a phenomenon that is progressing at a rapid pace, and human efforts to put a brake on emissions are really not up to the mark; developed countries that have contributed to the problems in the most significant ways do not want to take measures that will harm their economies, unless developing countries take similar steps. Developing countries want to make sure that the contributor pays the maximum, and do not want to get strung by tough climate norms without exacting all the possible help they can (even though it is developing countries that will be hit harder by the impacts of global warming).
Some of the impacts of global warming are:
- Glaciers receding and carrying less water
- Water levels rising due to melting of polar and Greenland ice caps
- Atmospheric temperatures rising
These are just an indicative list.
Well, visitors to the Swiss Alps can now get to evaluate the results of global warming on an iPhone (link to article):

As these rivers of ice retreat back up the valleys they carved out, so scientists' knowledge of climate change advances, in turn helping us recognize the signs of a warming world. Now a new iPhone app is helping visitors to the Swiss Alps understand how climate change is altering the landscape. Developed by the Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern in Switzerland and Swiss software company, Texetera, the Jungfrau Climate Guide is an interactive guide to glaciers and climate change.
For a fee of 20 CHF (around $19) visitors to the Jungfrau Alpine region can hire an iPhone loaded with the app. "For example," Meuli explained, "if you are standing in front of a glacier you will be told why it is no longer as big and provided with images of what it looked like 100 years ago, and what it might look like in the future."

Such an App can be very interesting to the user. They provide information that a tourist seeks in terms of tourists tracks, information about flora and fauna, and also provides information about how global warming has changed the levels of glaciers. As you get more Apps that cover changes in weather patters, track storm patterns and sea levels, people will be more aware.

Twitter confirms that it does not own user Tweets

2009-09-13T15:17:00.002+05:30

There is a section of Users (using various internet services such as Facebook, Email services, Twitter, etc) that are very sensitive to any thought that companies might want to be claiming copyright on the content that users generate. So, for example, when Google first announced that Gmail would have advertisements running next to the email, and these advertisements would be based on the content of the email, there was some controversy about how Google would be looking at the content of user's emails to generate these ads (and it slowly died away after Google talked about a computer algorithm to derive the context-aware advertisements).
Facebook faced a problem in February 2009, when its Terms of Use scared people into thinking that the Facebook is claiming copyright over the content uploaded by users; that controversy became very large very quickly, and needed changes and announcements by Facebook management to mollify and dampen the controversy. Twitter was in danger of landing in a similar public relations problem, but they seem to have taken quick action (link to article):

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on Thursday said that the popular online messaging site had updated its Terms of Service to clarify what users can expect from the service, though the announcement appears to be more about reassuring users than delineating substantive rights. "The revisions [of Twitter's Terms of Service] more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership," said Stone in a blog post. "For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter."
"The vast majority of tweets are likely to be too short and lacking in creativity to qualify for copyright," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an e-mail. "So they are not 'owned' by anyone, much like your idle chatter while walking down the street isn't 'owned' by anyone."

Apple responds to FCC enquiry about rejection of Google Voice

2009-08-22T20:23:00.003+05:30

The Apple iPhone is such a popular device that it has encouraged a huge number of 3rd party developers to write applications for the iPhone, and Apple makes a large number of them available on the iTunes store (Apple claims that around 20% of the 500 apps that it receives per week are not approved - either directly rejected, or they need some modifications). However, it is apparent that one area where Apple is most concerned about is apps that either affect Apple's or AT&T's data plans or the money they make from voice calls. There was a lot of controversy in the month of July when Apple rejected the Google Voice (learn more) application, a software that could enable people to save money in making calls (even if Google Voice is not a VOIP application). The FCC was concerned about this apparent rejection, since it would seem that customers were being denied an alternative, and asked Apple for an explanation.
Apple has finally replied to the FCC, giving multiple reasons for the rejection, including privacy issues, and an apparent change of the basic call making flow inside the app (link to article):

"The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail," Apple said in a statement posted on its Web site. Apple also said Google Voice's importation of the Contacts database represented a privacy concern. "[T]he iPhone user's entire Contacts database is transferred to Google's servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways," Apple said.
Separately, Apple acknowledged that its agreement with AT&T obligates it "not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T's cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP session without obtaining AT&T's permission.

However, Apple is stating that the application is still under review, and not rejected; an apparent subterfuge to ensure more time, and maybe hope that back-channel contacts ensure that the issue goes away.
At some time in the future however, Apple will find that the platform that it has built in the form of the iPhone and the app store will be broken open, that Apple will find that the rights it has to deny an application will need more openness. This could happen through a mix of consumer reaction and pressure from regulators.

Twitter shuts down for some time due to attack

2009-08-07T19:57:00.003+05:30

The fragile nature of many of the important destinations of the internet was visible once again. Social networkers of the world, suddenly found that they were not getting their fix from the highly popular Twitter site, and that the site had stopped responding on Thursday, the 6th of August. And it was not only Twitter that was affected, other sites such as Facebook were affected as well. However, Twitter was the site that was most affected.
When sites start going down to attacks, this is mostly due to something called a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service), and is mostly done through the use of requests for service from many different machines (many could mean hundreds of thousands or millions). In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately. One way to do these attacks is through the use of botnets (wikipedia), machines all over the internet that have been taken over.
However, this attack was somewhat different. This was carried out through the use of spams, and was actually part of an attack against the accounts of a person called Cyxymu (wikipedia), a blogger who supports the country of Georgia against Russia. People were sent spam messages with links to his accounts on different social networking sites, and a huge number of them clicked on these links (link to article):

The messages were designed to discredit Cyxymu by associating him with a spam run. Other security researchers, such as Patrik Runald at F-Secure (here) and Graham Cluley at Sophos, are sceptical about this Joe Job-style theory for the attack.
Twitter’s two NTT hosted address blocks were moved in response to the attack, Arbor adds. Twitter's reliance on just one service provider, and apparent lack of back up and redundancy, much less a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, goes a long way towards explaining why it was hit so badly.

One such attack normally causes the attacked entity to place a much higher emphasis on trying to prevent such attacks in the future, and one can expect Twitter to do the same.

Fined a huge amount for downloading songs

2009-06-21T12:44:00.000+05:30

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been fighting a battle against people indulging in music-sharing across the internet. For the past many years, the music industry has seen a reduction in the number of music sales through the physical medium (CD's, DVD's, etc.) and this reduction is being blamed on the amount of file swapping that happens (file swapping gained prominence with Napster, and when the RIAA shut down Napster through a court case, other, more difficult to control file sharing methods such as P2P and torrents have gained prominence).
The music industry and the RIAA have been fighting against these, although fighting against a much widely dispersed enemy in the form of torrent sites and servers is more difficult. The music industry also started attacking the actual users, getting their details from ISP's, and then serving them notices with huge amounts of damages. The RIAA also had some hugely embarrassing mistakes, suffering from targeting people such as single mothers, children, and so on, all of which were huge Public Relations disasters. In some cases, they have successes, with people settling with the RIAA out of court. However, in another case, they have won huge damages (link to articles):

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs. Jammie Thomas-Rasset's case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said. Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents.
This was the second trial for Thomas-Rasset. The judge ordered a retrial in 2007 after there was an error in the wording of jury instructions. The fines jumped considerably from the first trial, which granted just $220,000 to the recording companies.

Not sure about whether this will be a success, given that the accused is a single mother who works for an Indian tribe. Also, the RIAA has mostly given up fighting these cases, so this would be one of the few such cases that are still existing.

Problems with depending on cloud computing

2009-05-17T01:03:00.003+05:30

In recent years, we are being sold on the total promise of cloud computing, or to be on a much simpler level, storing our data on sites on the internet and depend on internet applications for a lot of their work. Some examples of these are using Google Mail, Hotmail, Google Docs, Online Maps, Online photo sharing and storage. Corporations also depend on applications running off the internet such as Salesforce, Google Apps, etc. In fact, the entire concept of Software as a Service (SAAS) depends on companies basing their primary business applications on 3rd party hosted apps. We are now at that stage when companies no longer have a backup for these services; consider your own case - when you save something on Google Docs, do you also have a local copy of that data ? Do you have a backup way of running your business when the internet app goes down for whatever reason ?
Most companies now depend on these hosted services / data storage being always available. After all, if you are a photo storage company and depend on customer photos being stored on Amazon's S3 service, the service better be always available. If the service even goes down for a couple of hours, that is a time when your customers can no longer access their photos, and would not be a pleasant experience. Now consider the recent case of Google services being unavailable for a few hours due to a traffic jam at one of its data centers. This means that services such as Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and so on were unavailable (link to article):

Google has apologized for yesterday's service outage that left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours. Google said in a blog post the outage came down to a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center. Well, a quick look at this graph from the Web security company Arbor Networks shows a canyon-sized hole in North American Internet traffic during the G-outage. With a wide variety of practical services like Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, Calendar, and even Google search gone, online activities came to a standstill for many people during the Google blackout.
Just how smart is it to depend on a company to store all your data online? Some smaller storage companies have even gone under without giving users a chance to collect their precious bits and bytes. Canadian photographer Ryan Pyle told Spring how he lost more than 7000 edited and retouched images after the storage company Digital Railroad abruptly shut its doors last year.

Leads to 2 problems - with many companies operating on wafer thin margins and in a recession, there is a greater chance of many companies disappearing. If these companies were in the service of either data storage or app hosting, then customers will be hit when these companies go down. In some cases, when the disappearance is sudden, then customers may be hit with data loss.
In the second case, it may be possible that a company does not go down, but operations are hit for some time due to some technical issues, planned downtime, or even hacker attacks. Customers dependent on them will need to suspend activities during such a period.

Huge China based computer ring broke into computers worldwide

2009-03-31T00:38:00.001+05:30

For the past several years, there has been an active discussion among researches about the impact that a sustained attack on the computer infrastructure of developed countries could achieve. With modern infrastructures such as electricity, water, transport, finance, etc all being controlled through computational technologies, there is a persisting fear that all of this infrastructure is under threat from any clever band of cyber attackers. Modern military games incorporate threats by hackers who are affiliated to sovereign countries, and in many cases, it is claimed that developing the ability to bring down the computer networks of other countries is part of the game plan for offensive action. In the past, it has been feared that countries such as China and Russia have developed capabilities for offensive cyber-warfare.
Consider this case where a computer network, based in China, and dubbed as the 'GhostNet' by a team of Canadian researches turned up a huge network based on computers located in China; these computers were the initiators of hacking attempts that broke into computers all over the world; this probe was based on a need by the Dalai Lama office in India to ensure that its own computers were not infected (link to article):

In "Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network," issued over the weekend, the Canadian researchers say that the GhostNet comprises 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries, almost one third of them being "high-value targets, including ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs."
The breaches tended to stem from a so-called social-engineering exploit, in which targets in the Tibetan community were sent an e-mail that appeared to be from the address campaigns@freetibet.org and that carried an attached Word document titled "Translation of Freedom Movement ID Book for Tibetans in Exile"--and that Word document was infected with the malicious code. The University of Cambridge report, "The snooping dragon: social-malware surveillance of the Tibetan movement," doesn't refrain from charging that the Chinese government was directing malware attacks: "(I)t was a targeted surveillance attack designed to collect actionable intelligence for use by the police and security services of a repressive state, with potentially fatal consequences for those exposed."

These incidents are also warnings to Governments about how their infrastructural systems are only as strong as their weakest links. One node in the system getting hacked can lead into other nodes also falling, and lead to a risk that the entire system is being compromised. In the current system, it was also found that the exploit had the powers to turn on the voice recording and the camera systems of the infected computer, leading to a spying of the proceedings happening in front of the computer.

PhoneGap

2009-03-30T15:39:00.001+05:30

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.

If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.

PhoneGap Creators
Rob Ellis, Creator, JavaScript Maintainer

Rob is a developer at Nitobi Inc. As one of the PhoneGap creators, Rob is focused on trying to make mobile device app development easy and open. At Nitobi, Rob is part of a team that makes web applications easier to use by building software that allows both developers and end-users be more effective.

Brock Whitten, Creator, iPhone Maintainer and Repo Maintainer

Brock is a software developer at Nitobi Inc. He is one of the brains behind PhoneGap and recently presented on PhoneGap at MobileCamp Vancouver. Brock wants to see developers get really creative now that the barrier of entry for developing on mobile devices is getting increasingly lower.

If you want to read more, click this link.

Satellites crashing in space - Russian and US satellites

2009-02-12T17:43:00.002+05:30

One always thinks of space as a large open area, with plenty of space in all directions. You combine this space with the concept of satellites being well regulated and following controlled orbits, and then it is difficult to believe that satellites under the control of such countries such as the United States and Russia could actually collide, and yet that is exactly what seems to have happened:

The collision between a U.S. and a Russian satellite over Siberia may have been accidental and the first of its kind, but experts say more crashes will inevitably occur and could have geopolitical consequences. "This is an event that really makes us realize that things are not so straightforward as we originally thought," said Francisco Diego, a senior research fellow in physics and astronomy at University College London.
The collision, between a spacecraft operated by U.S. communications group Iridium Satellite LLC and a Russian Cosmos-2251 military satellite, happened 485 miles above the Russian Arctic on Tuesday afternoon. The crash sent at least 600 pieces of debris off into space, officials said, increasing the risk that other satellites, including the vast International Space Station, which orbits 220 miles up, could be struck and damaged.

This crash may have been accidental, but what is to prevent countries from investing in such technologies. For example, a couple of such crashes have the effect of impacting the GPS and communication technologies that are used by the US military to great affect.

Internet users reach 1 billion

2009-01-27T00:53:00.002+05:30

This was a landmark that people have been waiting for some time. It has always be portrayed that internet usage is something that does not affect poor people in developing countries (and this may still be true), but the fact that the overall number of internet users the world over is now past 1 billion (as reported in December) is a big landmark by itself (link):

The key metric in the number of users is that most of them are from Asia, predominantly so: 41 percent, compared to 28 percent in North America and 18 percent in Europe. Although a sizeable percentage of Europe speaks English in some capacity (as does Asia), the numbers indicate that most of the world's Internet traffic will most likely be communicated using some non-English language. China, for example, had 179 million users, topping the list of wired countries; the U.S. was second, at 163 million. Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom rounded out the top five.

The growth areas are also significant. Slowly, the world is moving to incorporate more languages; however this is counter-balanced by the growing prevalence of English as a global language.

Valuing Twitter at $250 million

2009-01-26T23:28:00.002+05:30

Remember those old style internet valuations, as when Google bought Youtube for 1.6 billion dollars. A lot of those valuations never made it much, such as the huge amount of money paid for AOL by CNN, something that killed the long term strength of the company. A offshoot of these kind of valuations was that other companies also started expecting the same sort of valuations, way out of their earning potentials (even if you were very optimisitic).
The standard model is simple, setup a site with something new or a better way of doing something that brings in the millions of users, and then poof!, the valuations start screaming upwards. In the midst of this, revenue and short-to-mid term potential cannot meet these valuations. And there are a number of companies who have done very well in terms of attracting users, especially social networking sites. So, a site like Facebook has a lot of heavy-usage users, including a lot who hunt for people to add to the network. However, very few people have been able to generate long term revenue generation plans. Twitter is one such network that has become extremely popular over the relatively short period of time of 2 years, although it has the same problems in trying to show an effective business model. Consider that this micro-blogging network gets a valuation of $250 million:

Rumor is Twitter hit up more than a few venture firms to pitch the $250 million valuation, and got more than one 'no,'" TechCrunch wrote Saturday. "But someone's bit, perhaps encouraged by Twitter's breakneck growth and the interest from Facebook. That means Twitter gets a new cash injection and time to figure out its business model at an even more leisurely pace."
That certainly would be a boon for Twitter, which until now has not shown signs of a viable business model. Though it is growing rapidly and has millions of users, no one knows how the company could support itself. Some have worried that while it is increasingly useful to the many people who rely on it, it might not be financially viable over time.

One can only hope that the world is saner now in terms of valuations, especially the considersation of revenue generation.

Twitter hacked

2009-01-07T18:23:00.003+05:30

Twitter is a service that has become tremendously popular, that too, within a very short period of time. The ability to post micro-blogging type messages (restricted to 140 characters) and for others being able to read them through a variety of means (SMS, RSS, via the Twitter site, email, or through specialist applications) made the usage of Twitter even more popular. With such a popular site, one can only imagine the number of attempts that would be made to hack into such a service, and it happened - the Twitter sites of many celebrities where hacked through the compromising of some internal Twitter administration tools:

Members of the online forum Digital Gangster may have been behind yesterday's Twitter hack. On Monday, hackers gained access to, and posted messages from, 33 Twitter accounts including those of Bill O'Reilly, Britney Spear and CNN's Rick Sanchez. According to this thread, a hacker named GMZ gained access to Twitter login information and then posted a different thread--that has since been removed--calling on other DG members to email him for credentials to individual accounts. At least another four members then claim to have been part of yesterday's Twitter hack.
The hack included several prank posts from Twitter users such as Fox News, Facebook and president-elect Barack Obama. The strange thing about some of these messages is that they included affiliate links--a common marketing program that pays the creator of the link for driving traffic to another Web site such as Amazon--according to reports. That may make finding the culprits easier as the affiliate programs in question should have a virtual paper trail leading back to the payee

No matter who did this, the hacking of Twitter (and not much apparent concern from users about this) is a reminder that security on the internet can be compromised; revealing personal details on the internet comes with a certain amount of risk.

What happened to the Sony PS3

2008-12-07T08:25:00.004+05:30

As a lot of people who follow the gaming console industry know, a couple of years ago, there was a duet between 2 of the major contenders - the Sony PS3 and Microsoft's XboX 360 (during their development, the entire discussion was about which of these would be the winner). And then there was a sudden winner, Nintendo was the surprise leader, with its Wii gaming platform selling much higher than the other platforms. Both the PS3 and the XboX are much more powerful in terms of processing speed and raw power, but the incredible user-interactivity built into the Wii made it much more attractive to people, and it started out-selling the others within a short time. And no matter what Sony and Microsoft are trying, they are not able to compete with Nintendo, even with price cuts and a lot more marketing.
The latest selling season further amplifies this trend, with the Wii pulling ahead of its competitors, way ahead:

Sony's PS3 is dying on the shelves. Alone among the three major videogame consoles, sales of the PS3 are down about 19% from November 2007, according to the latest stats from the NPD Group. Sony was only able to sell 378,000 PS3s this November, compared to 466,000 last year.
And the problem for Sony isn't the recession, it's the PS3. Microsoft (MSFT) put up respectable numbers with its Xbox 360, selling 836,000 units vs 777,000 in November 2007. And Nintendo's (NTDOY) Wii continues to dominate the market, more than doubling sales from 981,000 to 2.04 million.

Sony is stuck with its initial plan to build a powerhouse, since that (along with a Blu-Ray drive) makes the PS3 much more expensive; in addition, since the Wii is much ahead, there aren't enough developers making quality games for the PS3 - causing further problems.

Yahoo's Yang steps down as CEO

2008-11-18T23:37:00.004+05:30

As a previous post on this blog had mentioned, the Yahoo-Google-Microsoft drama will not end so easily. The number of twists and turns this story has been taking are pretty dramatic, and forms a soap opera worthy of spinning into a hard-balled corporate story. For a matter of many months now, it has seemed clear that Yahoo does not have what it takes to challenger Google and Microsoft in the online space; the only logical path forward was to tie up with another party and then make a pitch to fight for the top. However, when Microsoft made its bids for Yahoo in order to form a much stronger team to challenge Google, it was the Yahoo Board led by Yang which played hardball, pitching for more money.
This was a traumatic situation for shareholders, since the Yahoo stock was around half the offer price, and here was this company offering a pretty good deal for shareholders. And then you have the Yahoo management refusing this deal, or finally holding out for a higher offer that never came. And then, the collapse. The Yahoo share, which was quoting close to $20 during this offer period, is now quoting around $10. Yang made promises during this period, and they have not come true, probably the reason why he is stepping down now:

Shares of Yahoo Inc soared nearly 15 percent on Tuesday on hopes that the departure of Jerry Yang, its embattled chief executive, would clear the way for a deal with Microsoft Corp. Yahoo announced late on Monday that Yang, whose leadership had come under growing criticism from shareholders after he failed to agree to a deal with Microsoft, would step down from his role as soon as the board finds a replacement.
Analysts said Yang's decision to step down is a sign that the board was frustrated with his efforts to turn around the company, which he co-founded. Yang took on the CEO role in June 2007. "Jerry's resignation as CEO reflects failed promises he made while fighting off Microsoft's offers, and the board's displeasure with his go-it-alone strategy," wrote Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali in a research note.

Yahoo's board must be hoping that this new management decision may lead to re-starting of discussions with Microsoft, even though Microsoft is not likely to offer above $30 now. And given the collapsed deal with Google (due to anti-trust), Yahoo would most likely die down rather than reach a top position on its own.

Sinowal Trojan: Stealing financial information for 2 years +

2008-11-03T20:32:00.002+05:30

In the recent past, there has been a lowering of the apparent threat level of Trojans, it almost seems like people have taken them for granted. Well, here is news that should make you reconsider, should remind you that if you are unprotected, then there are many dangers out there that could affect your financial status:

RSA FraudAction Research Lab has discovered log-in information for about 300,000 online bank accounts and 250,000 credit and debit card accounts that have been gathered by a cybercrime gang over the past three years using the Sinowal Trojan. "This may be one of the most pervasive and advanced pieces of crimeware ever created by fraudsters," according to a blog entry posted Friday from RSA, EMC's security unit. The Sinowal Trojan infects computers without the owner knowing it by surrepticiously planting itself onto the computer while the owner is Web surfing in an attack dubbed a "drive-by download."
The Trojan is programmed to execute when the victim visits a particular banking or financial Web site; it is triggered by more than 2,700 specific URLs, according to RSA. The malware then inserts additional fields into the victim's browser prompting the victim to type in information such as PIN and Social Security number, which the Web site itself does not ask for.

This was truly a dangerous Trojan. Imagine being undetected for so many years, especially when the trade of user financial information is now manipulated by criminal gangs. With greater internet usage, the transfer of money is now much quicker and money can vanish from one place to another in no time at all. Further, there are a large number of people who would fall prey to such attacks and have their financial information revealed.

A paper vanishes from the printing area - Christian Science Monitor

2008-11-03T18:40:00.003+05:30

For many years now, it has been predicted that the online news arena will continue to have rapid growth, and giving new credence to the phrase, 'a zero sum game', this will also result in a decrease in the number of print newspapers out in the market. This has been happening to some extent, not with the shutting down of major print media publications, but with a decrease in the classifieds and advertisements. However, now there is a clear marker to the extent of this change. The Christian Science Monitor, a 100 year daily, is shutting down and will take on a internet only avatar.
They are offsetting this to some extent with the introduction of a new weekly physical edition, but it is not the same as having a thriving daily print edition. With this event, many other newspapers and media companies (especially ones that have shareholders) will be weighing the impact of this news and wondering as to when their turn will come:

Stop the press, it’s finally happened. A national American newspaper, with an illustrious 100-year publishing |history and seven Pulitzer prizes, has gone totally digital. Last week, the Boston-based The Christian Science Monitor announced its decision to shift its daily news business entirely on to the internet. In April of next year, The Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper begun in 1908, will stop printing its newspaper and will, instead, invest all its daily news resources into its enhanced, advertising supported www.CSMonitor.com website.
A hundred years later, the internet publishing platform, with its instant global reach and shrinking technology costs, has turned the news business upside down. In today’s online world of instant publishing, where news junkies are hooked on up-to-the-minute information and commentary, a daily newspaper, printed or otherwise, is quickly becoming both a cultural and economic anachronism.

This is indeed a major event, and will be heralded as a major indicator to the massive growth of the internet platform and point out the print version to be an anachronism.

Women kills husband in an online game, arrested

2008-10-23T23:43:00.000+05:30

Online games where people live in a virtual reality using 'avatars' have become wildly popular, with millions using such games. But if people think that online worlds are a more utopian alternative to the real world, they are mistaken. There are the same kind of emotions, same kind of strange behavior, same weaknesses that exist in real life; they are making their existence felt in such online games as well. Consider the case of this lady who was married in virtual reality to a person who actually lived more than 620 miles away. One day she found herself divorced, and this unnerved her so much that she decided to kill the 'avatar' of her online husband (no implication in real life, but his online character died):

A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband's digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday. The woman, who is jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his identification and password to log onto popular interactive game "Maple Story" to carry out the virtual murder in mid-May.
"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry," the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

There have been other cases like this, with people swindling virtual money (with this virtual money capable of being converted into real currency, this is a crime), people objecting when their spouses spend too much time in these games or get married in the virtual world to somebody else, and so on. As time passes by, the probability of such incidents happening would increase.

Google launches Adsense for Games

2008-10-09T22:37:00.003+05:30

Google is always on the lookout for how to keep on increasing its ad portfolio. Getting ads into more and more platforms, into different devices, and accordingly getting a higher amount of revenue is what Google has always been interested in. Its corporate acquisition program has also been geared towards this effort, buying more and more companies that it believes can help it in its ad serving platform.
The popularity of online Flash based games has been soaring over the last few years, with usage figures soaring. For a long time, there was a feeling that Google will jump into this space, and the acquisition of Adscape Media in 2007 increased this feeling into a near certainty. The ongoing Beta by Google in this space, involving some of the Game developers since earlier this year made the intention clear:

More than a year in the works, Google finally launched its in-game advertising platform Wednesday. Called AdSense for Games, the platform will offer advertisers access to millions of Web-based Flash games. The in-game advertising market is small. The games industry scored only $1 billion from advertising and subscriptions in 2007, according to research firm Parks Associates. Google's entry is expected to make it explode.
Google's new ad platform, which grew out of its 2007 acquisition of Adscape Media, has operated in beta since early 2008. Game developers like Konami, Playfish and Zynga participated in the beta, but now other developers and publishers will also be able to apply to the program. The most prevalent ads throughout the company's beta test were short video spots from Esurance, but the network will also provide contextual and text ads.

Some of the success stories from developers using Adsense for Games has made the likely success of Adsense for Games more of a certainty, and is likely to increase the space between Google and its competitors in the Ad space.

Another iPhone attacker: BlackBerry Storm from RIM

2008-10-09T22:01:00.002+05:30

Ever since Apple came out with the iPhone, and made it a tremendously hot selling gadget, most of the other providers of smartphones have been jealous of the success of the iPhone, and have been casting around for a successful product that could appeal to people. At the same time, it has been difficult going for them, there have been a number of phones that have been launched that have been advertised unofficially as iPhone-killers, but none of them have managed to stand upto the marketing might of the iPhone.
Here comes another of these devices. At some point, RIM realized that its safe world of selling gadgets to office workers was under threat; the iPhone has started acquiring acceptance among office IT administrators over the world; this is threatening the sale of devices of RIM:

Research In Motion is taking on Apple's iPhone 3G head on with the introduction of the touch-screen BlackBerry Storm. The much-awaited smartphone sports many of the features of Apple's handsets, and even outshines it in certain categories. The touch-screen smartphone may give Verizon Wireless a legitimate rival to the iPhone 3G, and it may help stem the loss of subscribers to AT&T.
The Storm has 3.25-inch touch screen that has a 360 by 480 resolution. Like the iPhone, the Storm has support for multi-touch interface, but RIM's device will have haptic feedback for its virtual keyboard, and it will be capable of cut and paste. The keyboard will have RIM's SureType layout in portrait mode, and it will be a full QWERTY layout in landscape orientation.

It will be a tough call. Getting consumers to switch from the ultra cool iPhone to the dull RIM Blackberry phones (most Blackberries have the reputation of being thick, wide and very boring). It does have several advantages over the iPhone, but will not likely appeal to normal consumers. That is a big killer, with trying to compete on the office platform / business user only. Does not give it the volume to compete with a phone that is spread over the entire consumer buying span.

Adobe launches Creative Suite 4

2008-09-23T23:52:00.002+05:30

For some time now, Adobe (the maker of such softwares such as Acrobat, Photoshop and Flash) has been bundling its major softwares such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Digital Video, etc under one bundle (with variations) called the Creative Suite. As a result, when the Creative Suite is finally released, it is a major release; for some time before it is to be released, people put a slow-down on buying the previous version; they would rather get the latest and greatest.
A big part of the CS release is the release of a new version of Photoshop, and it is one of the most eagerly awaited products of the Creative Suites. Now Photoshop CS4 has been announced, and would be available in October. The major changes in this release include being able to use the GPU for greater speed, something that is eagerly awaited. Using the GPU allows the application to do its graphics processing faster (and that is typically one of the most time consuming portions of the overall time taken in the product).
Another major change in the release details support for 64 bit processors on the Windows platform, not much of a benefit for regular users, but more easily appreciable once the user starts moving onto much more memory-intensive work. Another areas where there is much better support is by making it easier for 3rd party developers to deploy extensions - they can create their own control panels in the form of Flash and just drop it in. Photoshop will also be integrating the latest Camera Raw Plugin (v 5.0) so that the latest version of RAW files from newer cameras are supported.
The upgrade price for Photoshop is $199 for the Photoshop CS4 and $349 for CS4 Extended; full purchase prices are $699 and $999.

Google's chrome - shaking the browser market

2008-09-09T17:05:00.003+05:30

Just a few years ago, Microsoft would have thought that it had sewn up the browser market; then came Firefox (backed by Google as well). Firefox won a lot of converts, and seemed like the open source alternative to a market that Microsoft had almost totally won, and it won a significant minority of the browser market. For the first time after Netscape, there seemed like an open source alternative in the form of Firefox; and now, Google seems suddenly to buck all the open source support and launch its own browser called Chrome - in the process, it seems to have withdrawn support from Firefox.
Chrome however promises much more to people everywhere, an open source software that can actually serve as the backbone for an alternative to the standard desktop - no longer will applications have to choose between the desktop and the internet:

Far from a betrayal, Chrome represents the best possible future for open source developers everywhere. What Google has delivered is a giant-slayer, a self-contained WebOS that could one day supplant Microsoft's desktop hegemony. Chrome is the ultimate end-run -- around Windows, Win32/.Net, the whole entrenched ecosystem.
This is the future of FOSS, a future where Chrome becomes the OS and Linux is relegated to its rightful place as a glorified boot loader. You know that's where they're headed. You know that's Google's master plan. The wunderkinds envision a world where the OS is irrelevant, where everything revolves around their pumped-up browser and advertising-laced SaaS offerings.

Right now Chrome only exists for the Windows platform, but versions for other operating systems will be available; and one can bet that pretty soon we will start seeing applications that are made for Chrome, that showcase this platform and live up to all its promises.

The importance of news in today's world

2008-09-09T15:48:00.003+05:30

Computers have been blamed for a number of problems that occur in today's world, but the malfunction of news reporting (causing an older page to appear and seem as current news) and the impact on a company's stock price is not something that we hear too often; neither would the investors who lost money on such a thing happening have imagined that they were watching a computer glitch. They did not bother to check elsewhere, and sold at panic levels, such is the dependency that people have on news items. Read on:

Information can live in cyberspace forever. And that cost some investors in United Airlines parent UAL Corp. a load of money Monday. Shares of UAL briefly plummeted as low as $3 early in the day -- from $12.30 on Friday -- after a 6-year-old story on the company's 2002 bankruptcy filing resurfaced on the Web and was reported as news by an investment letter.
But investors who sold at the day's lows are stuck: The Nasdaq Stock Market, where UAL stock is listed, said trades triggered by the erroneous report wouldn't be rescinded. What's more, shares of other carriers, including Continental Airlines Inc. and AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines, also briefly dived with UAL before rebounding.

All this was caused by a series of events in which an old story got posted on the home page of a newspaper, and then got included in Google's automatic story picker (because the story had appeared as a top item on the newspaper site), which was then forwarded as part of an investment bulletin (where the researcher saw it on both the company page and on Google news and concluded it was authentic). By the time that UAL saw the news posted on Bloomberg and issued a retraction, the share had nose-dived and people had sold in panic.
People are too much in a hurry nowadays to be the first with the news, and traditional methods of confirming news and such data no longer seem to be in vogue.

Microsoft ropes in Seinfeld to bring more zest to advertising

2008-08-25T14:35:00.002+05:30

The Windows Operating System is a massive money-earner for Microsoft; together with Microsoft Office, the software earns a huge portion of the total revenues for Microsoft. However, it has been 2 decades now since Microsoft rolled out the Windows brand and took a commanding share of the computer desktop software market. Users are slowly getting tired of this brand name, and seeking a cooler alternative, are latching onto the Mac platform in bigger numbers (they have not moved on in very high figures, but even a percentage decrease in Windows sales would be worrying for Microsoft). Another section of users have got introduced to the Mac through the Mac option of being able to load both the Mac and Windows on the same Mac machine; and there would be a number of such users who would find the Mac software more compelling (and of course, there are a number of Ads that show Mac users as cool, while Windows users are shown as nerdy). So what does Microsoft do ? It recruits Seinfeld to star in some ads designed to bring a cool look to the Windows platform:

Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld. The software giant's new $300 million advertising campaign, devised by a newly hired ad agency, has been closely guarded. But Seinfeld will be one of the key celebrity pitchmen, say people close to the situation. He will appear with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in ads and receive about $10 million for the work, they say.
The attempted image overhaul comes as Microsoft executives privately acknowledge that Windows - the company's most important brand - has grown stale and has been battered by Apple's “Mac vs. PC” ads. Microsoft's immediate goal is to reverse the negative public perception of Windows Vista, the latest version of the company's personal-computer operating system.

The company must be really worried. Normally, the Mac has always been derided by Microsoft, and not worthy of attention; so the campaign to hire a popular comedian (even though his shows stopped production in 1998) along with a new Ad agency smacks of an effort to try and get back some freshness, some new enthusiasm among its market base.