Microsoft patent peace--or patent war?

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 3, 2006, 2:04 PM PST

 

news analysis Microsoft on Thursday declared a "patent peace" with Novell, the No. 2 Linux seller. But did the company in fact just declare a patent war with the open-source realm?

Microsoft and Novell announced the deal under which Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop customers need not fear Microsoft will assert patent rights against them. In addition, Microsoft pledged not to assert patents against unpaid open-source programmers or against any open-source programmers contributing to Novell's OpenSuse.

The companies said they struck the partnership--which also includes technical cooperation to ensure various products interoperate--at the behest of customers. But the extent to which customers are reassured by the deal correlates directly with the extent to which they're worried about the absence of anything similar with Red Hat or any number of other open-source software companies.

In other words, the partnership can be interpreted as an attempt to inject Microsoft's patent values into the open-source world. That move is an affront to open-source businesses that generally share intellectual property, an approach anathema to the proprietary ways of Microsoft.

"I think it elevates the level of fear," said Raven Zachary, an analyst with The 451 Group, and gives new prominence to legal protection. "Indemnification was a hot issue a few years ago, and now it seems to be back."

Microsoft has expressed a fondness for software patents and a desire to profit from licensing them. That patent-centric approach has caused indigestion in the open-source realm at times. For example, Red Hat has forsworn using an open-source version of the Windows NT File System (NTFS) that could ease lives for those whose computers run both Windows and Linux.

To be sure, Microsoft's relationship with the open-source movement today is less adversarial and more sophisticated than in the past. The Novell partnership acknowledges that Linux is a force to be reckoned with. Microsoft's Shared Source plan involves some elements of the open-source philosophy. The company this week announced a partnership with Zend, developer of the open-source PHP Web site software. Microsoft has pledged not to sue anyone over a variety of patents involved with Web services.

And representatives of some open-source interests don't think Microsoft's move portends a further attack.

"Is this all things to all people? No. But it's a great first step," said Stuart Cohen, CEO of a multi-company Linux consortium, the Open Source Development Labs. "Obviously we're fairly comfortable that there aren't any IP risks (in using Linux), but it's been something standing over everyone's head."

But that doesn't mean Microsoft suddenly has an urge to help out open-source competitors. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Thursday's agreement essentially provides a way to ensure the company's intellectual property preferences have teeth in the open-source world.

"We don't license our intellectual property to Linux--because of the way the Linux licensing, the GPL (General Public License) framework works, that's not really a possibility," Ballmer said. "The cleverness was, how do we get protection and respect for our intellectual property in a world in which that license agreement works?"

For its part, Novell argues that the partnership allays, not heightens, any intellectual-property worries.

"The reality is that the patent concerns are out there. We didn't invent them. This deal actually removes patent concerns for customers wanting to use Linux," said spokesman Bruce Lowry. "And it protects developers from patent challenge by Microsoft . This is good for the community. There's nothing that would stop Red Hat from doing something similar."

Alliance against Red Hat?

But Red Hat--already on the defensive after Oracle's plan to try to undercut the company's Linux support business--has a pessimistic interpretation.

"For Microsoft, it's the opportunity to try to take their whispering campaign about intellectual property and bring it out front," said Mark Webbink, Red Hat deputy general counsel.

It won't work, Webbink argued: "They should have learned a lesson from SCO"--a company that sued Linux companies and users regarding assertions that proprietary Unix technology was improperly used in open-source Linux--"that putting your customer in the middle of the squeeze play is not a good idea for business."

Zachary, though, believes that ultimately Microsoft isn't likely to go after Red Hat for patent infringement. "It would be a mistake," he said. "The public relations nightmare isn't worth the benefit, and it would make the open-source community even more hostile to Microsoft's overtures. It would also likely be a fast track to overturning software patents in the European Union."

Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with DLA Piper, sees the move as a straightforward alliance against Red Hat.

"I think that they are picking out a Linux vendor who is weak and trying to drive companies to them, so that the stronger vendors such as Red Hat become less competitive," he said.

Red Hat adds new Linux legal protection

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 3, 2006, 4:40 PM PST

Faced with new competitive challenges from Novell, Microsoft and Oracle, Linux seller Red Hat has begun promising protection against intellectual-property lawsuits.

The leading Linux seller quietly slipped the indemnification provision into a question-and-answer page on their Web site after Novell and Microsoft announced a technical and patent partnership on Thursday.

"As with any indemnification provision, if (a customer) were to get sued for intellectual-property infringement over code they got from us, the provision of the indemnification language kicks in. At that point, we step into their shoes" to handle the legal attack, said Mark Webbink, Red Hat's deputy general counsel.

Indemnification of open-source software rose to prominence after the SCO Group sued IBM, arguing that it copied proprietary SCO Unix code into open-source Linux against the terms of IBM's Unix license. Then the issue died down--until recently.

Last week, Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison bragged that his company would provide legal indemnification along with a higher-cost option for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux support subscription. And Thursday, Novell boasted that its partnership with Microsoft means customers need not fear patent lawsuits from Microsoft, an expansion of an earlier promise to counterattack in patent lawsuits regarding open-source software it sells.

The indemnification is a new element to Red Hat's Open Source Assurance program, which guarantees customers that the company will rewrite code found to violate another's intellectual property. Webbink said he believes that earlier pledge is more significant than the indemnification.

"We still think the earlier version of the Open Source Assurance was the far more critical thing, and we'll continue to stand behind that," Webbink said.

But the company decided adding indemnification was worthwhile.

"Our management and board looked at it and said, 'Look, this isn't worth a hill of beans, but if saying it will make people feel better, we'll say it.' We've added it to the program," Webbink said.

AOL, Microsoft seek indie-rock cred

By Reuters

Published: November 4, 2006, 2:46 PM PST

 

AOL and Microsoft are wooing indie-rock fans to help solidify their digital music strategies.

Corporations seeking indie cred are nothing new. But both bids come at critical times for the technology giants.

AOL, in the midst of shifting from an Internet service provider model to an advertising-driven business, aims to expand its audience at the margins by stretching beyond the pop crowd with new programming aimed at hipsters.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is trying to make inroads with its new Zune digital media player by winning over the same group of tastemakers that first embraced Apple Computer's iPod.

As part of AOL's indie strategy, the portal on Oct. 26 launched a weekly Web-only video show called "The DL," hosted by Sara Schaefer of the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade. It also plans to launch a revived version of its Spinner radio brand with special channels dedicated to indie music. Additionally, the company is already up and running with a new weekly podcast series called "The Interface," which focuses on acts like Spoon.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is targeting the indie community with heavy promotional activity around music festivals like CMJ, which runs through Nov. 4. CMJ is working with Microsoft to identify as many as 300 music-savvy students ages 18-22 to assist with on-campus and online promotions as well as feedback for the Zune, which is expected to hit stores Nov. 14.

The company already has been courting the blogger community. Microsoft made headlines this summer for flying big-name music bloggers including Coolfer and Stereogum out to its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to test the Zune on a first-look basis. It's also running Zune ads across leading blogs, and the device will come preloaded with music and video from Sub Pop Records, Astralwerks, V2, Ninja Tune and Quango Music Group.

Bill Wilson, senior vice president of programing for AOL, says the indie-rock community is a natural fit given its strong involvement with digital music.

But corporate brands may not resonate with more discriminating rock fans, which is in part why both companies are cultivating new brands that can be promoted.

Story Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

U.S. analysts had flagged atomic data on Web site

By William Broad
The New York Times

Published: November 4, 2006, 11:07 AM PST

 

Two weeks before the government shut down a Web site holding an archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war, scientists at an American weapons laboratory complained that papers on the site contained sensitive nuclear information, federal officials said yesterday. Two documents were quickly removed.

The Bush administration set up the Web site last March at the urging of Congressional Republicans, who said giving public access to materials from the 48,000 boxes of documents found in Iraq could increase the understanding of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

But among the documents posted were roughly a dozen that nuclear weapons experts said constituted a basic guide to building an atom bomb. They were accounts of Hussein's nuclear program, which United Nations inspectors dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

The site was shut down on Thursday night after The New York Times asked questions about the disclosure of nuclear information and complaints that experts had raised. Yesterday, federal officials said they were conducting a review to understand better how and when the warnings had originated and how the bureaucracy had responded.

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, called the posting of the weapons information "a serious security breach," and other Democrats called for an investigation. The Republican congressman who had led the campaign for the creation of the Web site, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, questioned whether the government had received any serious warnings about the site, and said he had always stressed the need to "take whatever steps necessary to withhold sensitive documents."

The complaints two weeks ago by the American weapons scientists, as outlined by federal officials yesterday, indicated for the first time that warnings about the site had come from the government's arms experts, as well as from international weapons inspectors.

A senior federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California last month had protested some of the weapons papers on the site to the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that runs the nation's nuclear arms laboratories. The objections "never perked up to senior management," the official said. "They stayed at the midlevels."

Managers at the security administration passed the warning to their counterparts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversaw the Web site, the official said. As a result, a nuclear weapons expert said, the government pulled two nuclear papers from the Web site last month. He said the dangers of the documents had been recognized at Livermore and in the wider community of government arms experts. "Those two documents were on everybody's list," he said.

The first known protest about the site came last April, when United Nations weapons inspectors lodged an objection with the United States mission to the United Nations over a chemical weapons document, diplomats said. It was removed. After the site started posting nuclear documents in September, concern arose among United Nations weapons inspectors in Vienna and New York.

Earlier this week, two European diplomats said that weapons experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that they should warn the United States government of the dangers of posting the documents. They said that Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the agency, conveyed those concerns last week to the American ambassador to the agency, Gregory L. Schulte.

But Matthew Boland, Schulte's spokesman, said yesterday that the ambassador had received no warnings. Asked about that, one of the two European diplomats raised questions about whether Heinonen had followed through. Even so, intelligence officials in Washington said they were exploring whether the government had received warnings from United Nations inspectors.

An official of National Nuclear Security Administration said his agency would review the documents. To the best of his knowledge, he added, none of them had been reviewed by his agency, which is the government's expert on nuclear secrets.

Entire contents, Copyright © 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

Woz highlights celebration of Apple's history

By Daniel Terdiman
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 5, 2006, 10:20 AM PST

 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If there's one machine that more than other shaped the future of the computer business, it almost surely is the Apple I.

And what do you get when you bring together four of the team,--including Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak--behind that groundbreaking computer? A lovefest.

That's what was on display Saturday at the Computer History Museum here as several hundred longtime Silicon Valley veterans and youngsters alike showed up for a panel discussion called "Apple in the Garage" celebrating Apple's 30th anniversary.

To be sure, that anniversary was really in April, but as part of the ninth annual Vintage Computer Festival, Wozniak, Apple employee No. 6 Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 8 Chris Espinosa, and longtime Apple employee and original Macintosh team member Daniel Kottke got together for an afternoon of storytelling about the earliest days of Apple and its seminal computers.

Last year, festival organizers, including Bruce Damer, founder of the DigiBarn computer museum in California's Santa Cruz mountains, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak appeared at the event as well, and to some, Saturday's event was a suitable bookend for a historical look back at the birth of personal computing.

And on Saturday, many of those in attendance were happy just to hear the four panelists tell stories about the creation of the Apple I in 1976, and its successor, the Apple II in 1977.

"We thought it would be a shame if we didn't have a birthday party for Apple with a cake," Damer said at the beginning of the discussion. And indeed, he had brought along a birthday cake adorned with a digital print of Apple's original logo.

But before anyone could eat the cake, the panelists took the audience down a memory lane of poignant Apple history.

Espinosa, for example, recalled how he had begun working for Apple while still in high school, and that he still counts himself lucky--he still works at Apple today--to have gotten to work alongside such technology luminaries.

"It was really interesting being 14 and 15 years old and having my hobby being hanging out with guys who were" changing the face of technology, Espinosa said. "I didn't really know that this wasn't the way 14-year-olds spent their high school year."

Apple's roots
Kottke recalled how he had become friends with Steve Jobs--who was not present at Saturday's event to the dismay of some in attendance--when both were college students at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He said the two had bonded over Eastern philosophies and that Jobs had not talked about his computer work.

But upon being invited to Silicon Valley, Kottke said he visited Jobs' house--the home of the famous garage where Jobs and Wozniak started Apple--and the first thing he found was Jobs' sister watching "The Gong Show" on TV and plugging chips into Apple Is.

Wozniak said that the early Apple team didn't have a telephone, and that Jobs was essentially running the entire business form his bedroom.

"It was a nice, warm place to meet people," Wozniak said of the Jobs' garage.

Wigginton remembered that in those days, many of today's computer industry luminaries hung out at the Homebrew Computer Club because it was a way to have access to working computers.

"Nobody could afford their own computer," Wigginton said. "It's amazing to me that owning your own computer was considered impossible."

For his part, Espinsoa joked about why he had gone to work for Apple rather than for another computer company.

"Scott Computer was too far away to work because I only had a bicycle," Espinosa said. "So Apple was much better for me because it was much closer."

He also said that when Apple began working on the Apple II, the team got its own building, though it didn't have any furniture beyond some telephones.

"When you're in a building with nothing but telephones and Steve Wozniak," Espinosa said, alluding to Wozniak's storied history building blue boxes, "you know you're going to have some fun."

But he also said the carpeting in the building was a constant source of static electricity, and that anytime someone was walking over the carpet and touched an open Apple II case, "you fried the keyboard chip."

"So we spent an incredible amount of time," Espinosa said, "replacing keyboard chips."

Before co-founding Apple, Wozniak was working for Hewlett-Packard, and he said that in order to protect himself from claims by HP that he was profiting off work that the computer giant owned, he got the company's legal team to run the Apple I plans by every department. They all turned the project down, he said.

And while HP was interested in the machine, Wozniak said that ultimately, the company was afraid it wasn't polished enough to be an HP computer. Later, he added that if HP had wanted it, it probably would have been a commercial failure and might have set the personal computer business back significantly.

In the early days, Apple was putting software on cassettes, but that the company didn't have automated tape duplication machines.

So, someone rigged up a system in which a rack of Panasonic tape machines were linked together off an Apple II and in order to copy as many tapes at a time as possible, the team would have to simultaneously press play and record on all the tape machines and hit the return key on the Apple II to begin the process.

"Any time someone would come in and talk about something like a $25 million Bank of America credit line," Espinosa said, an Apple employee might have to "stop the meeting and go over and switch out the cassettes and put in new ones and then come back and say, 'So what were we talking about?' That's the kind of place it was."

But of course, Apple is now one of the most important technology companies in the world, and its hallmark, despite Wozniak's long-ago departure, is elegant design. And he hopes to lay claim to that legacy.

"I don't want credit for designing the first (personal) computer," Wozniak said. "I just want credit for designing the first good one. (And for) publicizing the fact that a computer could be attractive."

Web tool splices filmmakers' global divide

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 3, 2006, 4:00 AM PST

 

Behind the making of the upcoming animated film "Happy Feet" is a tale of two film producers struggling to work together from different continents.

Like most global team efforts, the story features off-hour conference calls and a lot of e-mail trickling in overnight. But for a small digital-effects house like San Francisco's Giant Killer Robots, it also meant sending large, bandwith-hogging digital video files to the director's company, Animal Logic, in Sydney, Australia.

That's not an easy task when you're a little company that can't afford fiber-optic lines into the office. But if an innovative joint university-government project pans out, global movie-making teams like the one behind "Happy Feet"--due in theaters Nov. 17--could have an easier time getting their jobs done.

A small group of engineers in San Francisco is developing a Web browsing tool for use over a high-speed fiber network that would allow animation and film producers to co-produce a movie in real time. The application, called Sebastian, would work over a dedicated, point-to-point Internet connection, or so-called dedicated light paths, and would let remotely located artists accomplish tasks like marking up frames, editing video and changing color palates as if they were in the same room.

It would make a huge difference to smaller outfits like Giant Killer Robots. When the two "Happy Feet" teams were collaborating over broadband from different time zones, using a QuickTime video editing tool called CineSync, the video clips were more like watching a YouTube clip than a high-resolution wide-screen shot, which made it hard for the director to form an educated opinion on the fly. That sometimes painful process, suffice to say, slowed the movie-making process.

"It's a two-cans-and-a-string-in-between-them kind of problem. You're really trying to break down the walls of globalization. And it all depends on really wide pipe," said Pete Oberdorfer, co-owner of Giant Killer Robots.

Sebastian is under development at the Digital Sister Cities lab, a research and development team that's part of San Francisco-based Digital Sister Cities Initiative (DSCI). DSCI is focused on connecting cities and promoting economic development through advanced technologies.

One of the major goals of the organization is to get high-speed fiber connections beyond universities and big companies--right now about the only entities that can afford them. By first working with data-intensive businesses like movie outfits, DSCI hopes to begin seeding a market and sparking demand that will eventually convince big telecommunications companies to decrease their sometimes dizzyingly high fiber-line rates.

In other words, build the market, and just maybe the carriers will come. Of course, it won't be easy, but DSCI researchers see their project in two parts: First, give filmmakers the tools to collaborate remotely. Second, and likely more difficult, give them the high-speed network to make real-time collaboration possible.

Companies such as Cisco Systems and Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic "can burn thousands of dollars to create infrastructure themselves," Oberdorfer said. "Companies (like ours) don't have that option. As this progresses, we see it scaling so that anyone can get access to it."

A key to this project is the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), which operates the state's high-speed fiber network for education and research purposes.

Since DSCI has access to the network, Sebastian's developers can work on it in a high-speed environment. For companies to participate in the Sebastian development process, however, they also need access to a fiber-optic network. That's where's CENIC comes in. Sebastian's core team hopes to extend the network to small production houses, have them come to a California university campus to try it out, or acquire their own fiber network.

Fiber doesn't come cheap

There's little question that fiber connections are making modern movie making easier.

For example, Lucasfilm's San Francisco office has a 10-gigabit-per-second fiber network, which they use on some movie making projects, according to Joaquin Alvarado, director of DSCI. Of course, the studio behind the "Star Wars" movies isn't exactly a little company, and therein lies the challenge--getting small outfits access to fiber.

That's a problem, because it isn't cheap. Large telecommunications carriers typically charge between $15,000 and $20,000 per month for these services.

Michael Mages, former lead developer of Apple Computer's Final Cut Pro, is heading up the development of Sebastian, which is named after one of Mages' favorite musicians, John Sebastian.

"We're developing a product to enable the next-generation Internet...That's available in a research capacity right now, but we have early access to it, so we can build one of the first working tools for creative professionals," Mages said.

Alvarado said he believes that DSCI needs to develop compelling applications for business collaboration. Hence, the work with filmmakers.

"Filmmakers want to collaborate with people directly, and either you buy a dedicated line, which is mostly not accessible to low and mid-level production houses, or you don't. We're going to build a ubiquitous tool that's inexpensive, runs on standard platforms and allows people to preview video and film content remotely and interactive with each other," Alvarado said.

Sebastian will work like a Mosaic or Safari browser with a secure IP connection, according to Mages. The tool might offer the user a selection of production houses to link to from a list of menu options, and then once selected, it would connect the two companies in real time, with about an eighth of a second latency, Mages said.

An editor in San Francisco, for example, might select a video clip for review, and the director in Paris, could mark it up with suggestions. The two sides will also be able to talk over separate pipes designated for voice conferencing and over-the-shoulder video conferencing. With the tool, producers can also record the connected session for later review. Sebastian's player engine will support the film-editing tools Apple Final Cut Pro and QuickTime.

Mages said the lab plans to complete a prototype within the next year, developing it in partnership with production houses from San Francisco and international cities like Paris. Ultimately, he said, DSCI hopes to license the technology or sell it as software for around $149.

So far, several film and animation producers in San Francisco have agreed in principle to test the software. Giant Killer Robots' Oberdorfer said he hopes to eventually work with the technology. Wild Brain, another San Francisco digital-effects company, said it is in preliminary discussions with DSCI about using the technology, according to company representative. And according to Alvarado, engineers from Lucasfilm and several animation companies in Paris have signed on to the project.

"This is our pilot project," Alvarado said of Sebastian. "Our focus is this network and what kind of intellectual property we can build on top of this that incubates the students' and the city's relationship with all these other tech centers and companies. It's the next level of globalization."

 

MySpace to launch in Japan with Softbank

By Reuters

Published: November 5, 2006, 7:20 PM PST

 

News Corp.'s MySpace.com online service will be launched in Japan in a joint venture with Japanese Internet and telecoms group Softbank, the Nihon Keizai business daily reported on Monday. The 50-50 venture, to be called MySpace Japan, will first offer services for personal computers and later allow users to post photos and write blogs via cell phones, the paper said.

The firms are expected to announce the deal as early as this week after a meeting between News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, it said. A Softbank spokesman declined to comment on the report.

 

Microsoft to patch critical Windows, Office flaws

By Dawn Kawamoto
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: October 5, 2006, 2:57 PM PDT

Microsoft plans to issue nearly a dozen security patches on Tuesday, including critical fixes for Windows and Office.

The company will release six updates for the operating system and four for the office suite, according an advance notice sent out Thursday by the software giant. Some of the patches will be deemed "critical," the company's highest severity rating. The company also plans to send out a security bulletin for Microsoft .Net that will be tagged moderate, it said.

The updates, part of Microsoft's regularly scheduled monthly patch cycle, come after sample attack code has surfaced for vulnerabilities in the Windows Shell component of the operating system. Those flaws could enable attackers to use a Web site to load malicious software onto systems.

The past few weeks have seen the arrival of third-party patches for the Windows Shell problem. The Zeroday Emergency Response Team, or ZERT, delivered its own fix, aiming to help people protect their PCs until Microsoft issued an official update. In addition, security company Determina provided an outside patch for the same issue.

Microsoft has said it will provide a patch for the Windows Shell vulnerability in its October bunch of bulletins. It is expected to announce more details regarding the flaws once the patches are released next week.

In September, the company delivered a critical fix for Office, one of three security bulletins in that monthly patch cycle.

 

Torpark v1.5.0.7

Ada senjata baru untuk surfing internet dengan aman tanpa meninggalkan jejak. Beritanya aku dapat dari rubrik 'Digital Internet' Koran Tempo hari ini. Software tersebut bernama Torpark. Dijelaskan bahwa Browser Torpark diciptakan oleh Steve Topletz dan release perdananya adalah tanggal 19 September lalu.

Kalau boleh dibilang sih software ini tidak bisa di sebut Browser. Kenapa? Karena yang aku lihat dia tidak berupa suatu software yang utuh tetapi ternyata disandingkan dengan Mozilla fire fox, bisa juga disebut plugin. Sewaktu aku install di komputer ternyata Firefox yang selama ini selalu menemaniku tidak bisa disandingkan dengan Firefox bawaannya Torpark. Akhirnya ketahuan juga penyakitnya. Ternyata Firefox ku adalah versi desktop sementara Firefox bawaan torpark adalah versi Portable Edition.

Tapi selain itu memang sewaktu Torpark aku jalankan ada beberapa tahapan sebelum firefoxnya muncul. Jadi sewaktu loading tidak serta merta firefox muncul seperti pada browser biasa. Ternyata pada waktu Torpark dijalankan, dia akan menciptakan sebuah koneksi yang ter-encript ke jaringan TOR. TOR sendiri adalah singkatan dari The Onion Router yaitu suatu program yang memungkinkan penggunanya untuk berkomunikasi secara anonim di internet.

Jadi sekarang kita tidak perlu khawatir jejak-jejak penjelajahan kita di dunia maya bisa terendus oleh oknum yang tidak bertanggung jawab. Disebutkan di situs resminya, apabila menggunakan Torpark sewaktu kita menjelajah internet, IP kita akan berubah-ubah setiap menit sesuai data yang dipasok oleh jaringan TOR. Untuk membuktikannya kita bisa mencoba lewat situs yang menyediakan layanan pembacaan IP seperti di www.whatismyip.com . Akan terlihat apabila setelah sekian lama direfresh alamat IP kita akan berubah dengan sendirinya. Bisa saja IP saya yang di indonesia setelah beberapa menit akan berubah menjadi IP negara nun jauh di sana semisal Afrika Selatan. Saya sertakan screenshot.Torpark ketika pertama kali dijalankan.

Ada kelemahan yang sangat kentara apabila kita menggunakan Torpark. Kinerja browser kita akan terasa melambat. Ini disebabkan karena sebelum surfing di internet kita harus melewati dulu jaringan TOR. Tetapi jangan khawatir apabila kita tidak sedang ingin menggunakan Torpark, kita bisa menonaktifkannya sementara lewat tombol yang ada di browser firefox.

Untuk lebih jelasnya bisa dilihat langsung di situs resminya di http://torpark.nfshost.com/.

IBM deal could mean smarter cars, better drivers

By Candace Lombardi
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 2:13 PM PDT

 

IBM will help design software that could lead to self-adjusting headlights on cars and sensors that help avert crashes, as part of a deal signed Wednesday.

Big Blue will design and develop software and handle intellectual property management in a five-year deal with Magna Electronics, an auto electronics division of Canada-based Magna International, that has already begun developing "smart" car parts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Magna Electronics' partnership (with IBM) will be growing and enhancing the capability that we already have. It puts us on a different playing field," said Tracy Fuerst, a spokeswoman for Magna International.

Neither company would comment on specific products. But, Bernie Meyerson, the chief technology officer for IBM Systems Technology, did say that the collaboration could produce things like embedded sensors and cameras that would slow down a car approaching a stop sign if a driver does not react in time. Another system placed inside a car could tell when a driver is drifting off to sleep and sound an alarm, or emit an evergreen scent, to wake him. "Intelligent headlights" could adjust depending on lighting and weather conditions, said Meyerson.

According to one analyst, this deal will create multiple business opportunities for IBM. Whether it's hardware, software, storage, operations or management services, IBM will be able to become a supplier for these kinds of channels to the automotive industry, said Jonathan Eunice, president and principal analyst for Illuminata.

Meyerson said that the collaboration will incorporate the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) technology that IBM unveiled in 2003. In this case, the UIMA technology would retrieve real-time data, including a car's speed, the speed of the car in front of it, traffic patterns and the average speed of multiple cars on a particular road. That data could then be used to regulate the car's driving patterns.

Having a car organize all that information and then respond to it accordingly is extremely complex, said Meyerson. It requires several software and hardware components in the car to work together seamlessly.

"To put it in the simplest terms, you need a computer that takes care of itself," said Meyerson. "It becomes like the human body. You don't act to make your heart beat. You don't act to make your immune system fight off bacteria. That level of autonomic function has not gotten there yet" for cars, said Meyerson.

Eunice said that politicians and technology companies like to put forth grand visions of car autonomy, safety and convenience to gain support for technology that is complicated and tedious to explain otherwise. Most likely, said Eunice, you will see such advancements in government and commercial vehicles first.

"We expect these to eventually be pervasive like seatbelts and antilock breaks. But it takes decades to happen," Eunice said. "It does require quite a long time to develop and the progress happens somewhat fitfully."

Sun seeks Solaris security badge

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 3:33 PM PDT

 

Sun working on a new high-level security certification, Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+, for a coming security-enhanced version of Solaris 10 operating system, the server and software company said Wednesday. Sun previously maintained a separate version of the operating system, Trusted Solaris, for high-security environments. But because the demand for its features is expanding to mainstream customers, the company discontinued that product in favor of "Trusted Extensions" folded into ordinary Solaris.

The extensions will be available later this year in the Solaris 11/06 update, Sun said. The current Solaris 10 is under evaluation for two EAL4+ profiles, Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) and Role-Based Access Control Protection Profile (RBACP), and with the extensions, for a third, Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP). That third level is required for storing secret or top secret data on the same server as public information, Sun said. The last version of Trusted Solaris was based on Solaris 8, Sun said.

Microsoft wants more Vista testers

By Ina Fried
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 10:34 AM PDT

 

Microsoft said on Thursday that it is looking for more people to give Windows Vista a try.

The software maker said that the Release Candidate 1 version offered up earlier this month is now being opened up to consumers who were not already testing the new operating system.

Microsoft is looking for more testers, as it works to iron out the bugs in Vista. After several delays, the company hopes to release Vista to large business customers in November and start selling it broadly in January.

"RC1 represents a significant industry milestone on the road to delivering Windows Vista, and customer participation and feedback are integral parts of the development process," Microsoft said in a statement. "The feedback received thus far from testers has been extremely valuable, and Microsoft expects that by expanding the (customer preview program) with RC1, the Windows Vista team will gather even more worthwhile input."

In all, Microsoft expects to make the latest test version available to about 5 million people.

Dell: Exploding batteries are Sony's fault

By Tom Espiner
Special to CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 9:49 AM PDT

Last modified: September 14, 2006, 10:32 AM PDT

 

NEW YORK--Chairman Michael Dell has denied that the way Dell constructs its PCs played a part in a spate of battery-related fires. He instead laid the blame entirely with the manufacturer of the battery cells, Sony.

"We know exactly why there was a problem. Sony had contaminated its cells in the manufacturing process," Dell told ZDNet UK at the company's Technology Day event here on Tuesday.

Dell refuted reports by Sony that the way his company integrates the battery cells into its PC designs made its machines more susceptible to problems than devices from other computer makers.

"The batteries were contaminated and were no good no matter what you did with them," Dell said. "We know the batteries, under rare circumstances, catch fire, (which is why we recalled them)."

Dell recalled the batteries last month after several of its laptops overheated and caught fire. Other manufacturers are known to use Sony battery cells, but only Dell and Apple Computer have been affected by any problems.

Sony has agreed to help financially with the Dell recall and another by Apple resulting from faults with Sony batteries. However, a Sony representative denied that the blame for Dell's battery cell problems lay completely with the Japanese manufacturer.

"It is the configuration. We use the same batteries in our Vaios, and have our own safeguards against potential overheating. Other manufacturers which use the same cells haven't come forward with any issues. On rare occasions, a short circuit can occur, but this is affected by systems configurations found in different laptops," the representative said.

Extra problems for small manufacturers?
But Dell has maintained that other laptop manufacturers may face the same battery problems that forced it to recall 4.1 million cells. The computer giant claimed that it preempted the rest of the market in recalling the batteries.

"We were out in front on this issue, we see this stuff faster. Maybe there are products out on the (reseller) channel that could (have problems). I don't see anything to preclude that," Alex Gruzen, general manager of the Dell product group, told ZDNet UK. "Maybe we're seeing problems ahead of the smaller-volume producers."

Dell said this may be more difficult to rectify for smaller manufacturers that sell through reseller channels, as those manufacturers, because they had not sold directly to customers, would have to take extra steps to trace and recall faulty batteries.

"We can identify who has the faulty batteries in a way our competitors cannot, because they sell through the channel," added Gruzen.

Gruzen added that the recall was progressing well but admitted the company had little control over any damage to its reputation following the battery problems.

"It's really up to you (the consumer), to be honest. Customers will have to decide for themselves. We're going to worry about what's under our control. We are executing the recall extraordinarily well," Gruzen said.

Jeff Kimble, European marketing manager for Dell, said that the faulty batteries were a problem Dell wasn't proud of, but that it was "proud of its response."

Sony said the recalls had arisen because of microscopic metal particles in the recalled battery cells coming into contact with other parts of the battery cell, leading to a short circuit within the cell.

"The potential for this to occur can be affected by variations in the system configurations found in different notebook computers," Sony said.

Sony currently estimates that the overall cost of supporting the recall programs of Apple and Dell will amount to between 20 billion and 30 billion yen ($170 million and $255 million). The estimate is based on the cost of replacement battery packs and any related costs to be incurred by Sony.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from New York.  

Behind Google's German courtroom battle

By Anne Broache
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 4:00 AM PDT

 

Google's free Web e-mail offering may be available for correspondence in 40 languages, but efforts at worldwide expansion using the moniker "Gmail" continue to face complications.

Last October, the search giant grabbed headlines--and miffed some British users--when it voluntarily renamed its service "Google Mail" in the United Kingdom, following an out-of-court trademark dispute.

The woes don't end there. Across western Europe, a quiet battle rages on between Google and Daniel Giersch, a German-born venture capitalist who insists he'll never relinquish his 6-year-old trademark registration of "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" (translation: G-mail...and the mail goes right off).

"Google's behavior is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it's very evil," he said in a recent telephone interview with CNET News.com from his part-time Los Angeles home.

A Hamburg, Germany, district court has already handed Giersch victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the litigation. Dismissing Google's arguments that the two names are not confusingly similar, it ordered the company earlier this year to remove all "Gmail" references from its German service and to cease handing out gmail.com aliases to users within the geographic area.

Buoyed by that success, Giersch said he plans new lawsuits to defend more recent registrations of the trademark in Switzerland, Norway and Monaco, where he hopes to expand his electronic postal delivery business that goes by the G-mail (short for "Giersch mail") name. He said he is also considering a suit in the United States based on alleged "investment losses" that the overseas disputes have wrought on the American arm of his venture capital firm. (Google has already encountered competition for the U.S. trademark.)

Google still maintains it has clear rights to use the Gmail name in Germany and in countries throughout the world where it has applied for such trademark rights. It lodged an appeal against the Hamburg district court's decision but claims it has nevertheless been abiding by the orders to restrict all people determined to be German residents to use only of googlemail.com, ever since a preliminary injunction was issued in April 2005.

"In no case do we offer or allow a user to use '@gmail.com' if the user's IP address is German," a company representative said in an e-mail interview.

Google has initiated its own actions against the 32-year-old Giersch in other European countries since the German litigation began, asserting it has prior rights to the Gmail name and that Giersch's registration attempts should be blocked. Giersch's lawyers said the company has filed--so far, unsuccessfully--for a cancellation of his Norwegian holding with the country's trademark office. The Google representative would confirm only that a court challenge is pending against the Swiss trademark, adding that "there are a number of cases outstanding against Giersch in Europe."

For the Mountain View, Calif.-based search market leader, the rationale is simple: "Google will take the action it deems necessary to protect our interests in Europe," the company representative said.

Google v. Giersch
Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google with a home-brewed data center in a dorm room. For Daniel Giersch's venture, it was a backpack and a bicycle.

When he was 18, Giersch founded his first company, a same-day mail delivery service designed to offer a swifter alternative to the Deutsche Post. Within a few years, by his estimation, the company was delivering 80 percent of the mail within his hometown of Itzehoe, a town of about 30,000 residents near Hamburg.

Giersch ultimately sold control of the physical delivery operations and started on a new venture he called "hybrid mail." The idea is to combine the relative security of physical mail delivery with the speediness of e-mail. A sender's document is scanned into Giersch's system at its origin, transmitted electronically to a G-mail office in the destination city, printed out at the other end and hand-delivered to its recipient. Giersch also offers users a "secure" gmail.de address, which they can obtain only by verifying their identities with a passport or other official ID card--a far different business model from Google's Gmail, he said.

In 2000, Giersch registered "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" with the German trademark office. He was still investing in and developing his hybrid mail service four years later (in Germany, one has five years after registering a trademark to commercialize its use), when he saw news reports that Google planned to launch a Web e-mail service named Gmail. Google's e-mail service debuted in April 2004.

"Knowing Google is very powerful, I liked it at the time; I Googled myself everyday. I said, 'you know what? I want to call these guys,'" Giersch said in a telephone interview. "I did my MBA, and I know what a big company is looking for, and that is international growth. I knew sooner or later they would go to Germany."

After rebuffing his initial attempts to talk over the situation, Google eventually offered to buy the German trademark rights for $250,000, Giersch said. But by then, turned off by what he deemed "arrogance" on the search giant's part, he had decided never to settle. When Google started offering the Gmail service in German in 2005, Giersch believed he had grounds under German trademark law to sue the company for infringement, so he did just that.

 

New Web sites seek profit in wikis

By Robert Levine
The New York Times

Published: September 4, 2006, 9:55 AM PDT

 

Every day, millions of people find answers on Wikipedia to questions both trivial and serious. Jack Herrick found his business model there.

In 2004, Herrick acquired the how-to guide eHow.com, which featured articles written by paid freelance writers. Although the business made a profit, he realized that the revenue brought in by selling advertising would not support the extensive site he had in mind. "If the page were about how to get a mortgage, it would work," he said. "But the idea was to be the how-to guide to everything."

So in January 2005 he started wikiHow, a how-to guide built on the same open-source software as Wikipedia, which lets anyone write and edit entries in a collaborative system. To his surprise he found that many of the entries generated by Internet users--free--were more informative than those written by freelancers.

"Wikipedia proved you could get there with another method," Herrick said. Several months ago he sold eHow to focus on the new site, which now has 10,000 entries in English, Spanish and German.

Herrick is hardly the only entrepreneur inspired by the efficiency and low cost of what has become known as the wiki model. Although Wikipedia is operated by a nonprofit foundation, ideas for advertising-based wiki sites are beginning to take their place alongside blogs and social networking sites as a staple of Silicon Valley business plans.

In addition to Wikia, a site devoted to topics judged too esoteric for the online encyclopedia, there is ShopWiki, for product reviews, and Wikitravel, for tourism advice. Several start-ups allow users to operate their own wiki sites.

"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and this is about the other 999,000 books in the library," said Ben Elowitz, chief executive of Wetpaint, a start-your-own wiki site.

Others wonder how big that library can get. All of the companies making consumer-oriented wikis are privately held and do not release revenue figures. But so far not one of them has come close to the popularity of Wikipedia, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. WikiHow had 1.1 million visitors in July, Wikia had just over 270,000, and several other wiki sites had too small an audience to be measured by the Nielsen/NetRatings methodology.

Andrew Frank, a research director at the Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm, said that all of this interest in wikis might rest on some naïve assumptions.

"The assertion that these sites are cheap to run is questionable," he said. For example, to sell a substantial amount of advertising, wiki sites might have to filter for objectionable content. And he says he believes that ads on wikis could be worth less per impression than those on sites that aim at a more specific audience.

"I think there's going to be a lot of wikis," Herrick said. "But I'm not sure how many of them will make money."

Others are more optimistic. Last month John Gotts, an entrepreneur known for buying the rights to domain names, agreed to buy the site Wiki.com for $2.86 million.

"I would never have paid this much for any other domain," Gotts said. "I can't think of one that would be worth more." He pointed out that the site Wiki.com drew traffic before he bought it, even though it had little content.

The wiki concept was invented in 1994 by Ward Cunningham, a computer scientist who created a program called WikiWikiWeb as a way to share programming techniques. He named his creation after the Hawaiian word for fast.

"The subject I had in mind was the knowledge necessary to write good computer code," Cunningham said, "but I realized it would have broader implications. It's a medium that allows people to collaborate more easily than they could in systems that are modeled after the precomputer world, like e-mail."

Over the last few years, wikis have gained traction as tools in the business world, where companies run them on internal networks to foster collaboration on complex projects. The Gartner Group has predicted that half of all companies will use them internally in some fashion by 2009. There has also been at least one failed experiment with wikis in journalism: The Los Angeles Times tried online "wikitorials" but quickly abandoned the idea.

Even Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is looking for ways to broaden--and profit from--the wiki concept. With financing from technology luminaries like Marc Andreessen and Mitchell Kapor, he and Angela Beesley started Wikia, which includes 1,500 separate wikis, from the Star Wars-focused Wookieepedia to user-generated pages on depression. Although Wikia is a for-profit company, it was founded with some of the communitarian idealism of Wikipedia, and its business plan calls for it to donate money to that foundation.

"It's never going to be a billion-dollar-revenue business," said Gil Penchina, the company's chief executive. He said that the site currently made less than a dollar a page per month, although the site's growing number of pages could make that significant.

"It feels to me like Craigslist," he said. "It's a small business, but it's a good business and it makes a lot of people happy."

If wikis become a big business, some of that idealism may fade--and consumers may begin to resent contributing to the sites free. So far, though, the sites are growing fast, thanks to dedicated volunteers. Sondra Crane, a 75-year-old retiree who lives in Altamonte Springs, Fla., has written scores of entries for wikiHow on subjects both practical (how to make pot roast) and profound (how to get old without feeling old). "I've been writing all my life and I always wanted to have my name known," she said. "I'd like to get paid--I put a lot of hours in. But it's nice to know that people are being helped."

Wikia and wikiHow operate much like Wikipedia: they let all users contribute and stipulate that any content they generate may be used freely, much as open-source software is. Other start-ups, including Wiki.com, are departing from the traditional collaborative spirit of the wiki model, in that they will let users decide who has permission to contribute to the wikis they start.

Gotts, who has been paying for Wiki.com in $10,000 installments with a final payment of about $2.8 million due within six months, said that he intended to share revenue with those who used his site to start wikis. "The main way we're going to make money," he said, "is to lead the trend for users to make money."

He said that he would let users register Wiki.com subdomains free on topics of their own choosing--he suggested that might be anything from soccer.wiki.com to smokedsalmon.wiki.com--in the hope they would attract advertising or e-commerce.

But Ramit Sethi, co-founder of PBwiki, another make-your-own wiki site, said that it was still too early to determine what model would turn wikis into money-makers.

"Nobody has found the de facto business model for wikis," said "It's kind of the Wild West."

Entire contents, Copyright © 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

Double the cores, double the heat?

 By Tom Krazit, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: August 3, 2006, 4:00 AM

 

The earth may be heating up, but Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are determined to keep PC warming trends in check.

A few years ago, fast single-core processors were causing fits in the PC industry, which tried to design systems to stay reliable as the temperature rose inside the PC chassis. Newer dual-core chips from both AMD and Intel run cooler than their single-core antecedents, much to the relief of PC designers.

But as both companies prepare products that use four processing cores, some wonder if they've seen what was just a brief respite from the processor heat wave, especially as virtualization technologies reach the average user's system.

Intel, fresh off the launch of its Core 2 Duo chips, has announced plans to accelerate the introduction of a quad-core processor called Kentsfield, now expected in the fourth quarter. Not to be outdone, AMD later this year will release a product called "4x4," which is two AMD processors connected together on a high-end motherboard.

Both chipmakers' products will run hotter than the current processors, although it's unclear how much of a gap will exist. Intel hasn't released thermal specifications for Kentsfield yet, said Intel spokesman George Alfs. However, Kentsfield is essentially two Core 2 Duo processors bolted together onto a chip, so its thermal profile will certainly be higher than a single Core 2 Duo processor.

Likewise, 4x4 systems will consume more power than a dual-core AMD processor, said AMD's vice president of advanced marketing, Pat Moorhead. AMD plans to make the 4x4 product consume less power than two separate processors would in one system, although Moorhead declined to specify how the company plans to do that.

But Intel and AMD both say they've learned their lessons on power consumption and heat. A buildup of heat inside a PC can contribute to component failures, especially with sensitive items like hard drives, said In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor, during an interview at Intel's recent Core 2 Duo launch. That heat buildup requires noisy fans to keep the system cool, especially in notebooks.

Kentsfield and 4x4 are designed for high-end users who are willing to spend lots of money on a PC with cooling systems and powerful technology, said Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research. But mainstream users are not willing to take on that expense, he said.

Taming the thermals
When quad-core processors become the norm for the millions of PCs shipped each quarter, Intel and AMD will have to be vigilant about keeping power consumption at their current, PC-friendly levels. "When you push the thermals or the electric consumption too far outside the norm, that does put you into a niche segment," McCarron said.

Intel hasn't announced specific plans for quad-core processors beyond Kentsfield, Alfs said. Sources familiar with Intel's plans have indicated that when the company is ready to move from its current 65-nanometer manufacturing technology to its 45-nanometer process next year, it will start with dual-core chips to make the transition easier. And then at some later date, it will be ready to build quad-core chips with the smaller 45-nanometer transistors on a single piece of silicon, unlike the multichip package used for Kentsfield. Chipmakers also usually see a decline in power consumption as they move to smaller transistors.

Intel's Alfs declined to comment on those plans, but did say the company plans to have a wide range of products available at various levels of power consumption. This could include low-power chips for small-size PCs or high-power chips for expensive gaming PCs. Intel will talk more about its plans for quad-core processors at the next Intel Developer Forum in September, Alfs said.

AMD's first quad-core processor, to be introduced in 2007 and made with its new 65-nanometer technology, will be released within the same thermal profile as its current dual-core chips, Moorhead said. "Performance outside of an appropriate thermal envelope doesn't really do anybody any good," he said.

The definition of an appropriate thermal envelope could change, however, when virtualization technologies reach the desktop.

Virtualization software has been used primarily in servers to let IT managers run several different types of applications on a single server. Instead of running multiple servers at low utilization rates, managers can increase the utilization rate of a single server and reduce the number of boxes they have to nurture.

PC virtualization is some years away from becoming prevalent on the desktop, although early examples have started to appear in products such as Parallels, which allows Mac users to run Windows alongside the Mac operating system on Intel-based Macs.

Virtualization being still uncommon on PCs, most users currently hit the maximum performance of their processor only for short periods of time. But if they begin running numerous applications in multiple virtual environments on multicore processors, they'll be running their system at higher levels of performance for extended periods of time. That's when the inside temperature of PCs could once again start climbing.

Still, this is primarily a server problem at the moment, McCarron said. Heat could once again become an issue for PCs, however, when coupled with the demands for power from newer, more sophisticated graphics processors.

AMD's Moorhead said that although the PC industry isn't at that level yet, chipmakers will have to continue to build low-power transistors, improve the performance of power sensitive technology, and work with the PC industry to design efficient cooling products.

A dual-core or quad-core processor is still better for PC thermals than running two or four separate processors, McCarron said. But chip and PC companies will have to keep a close eye on the utilization rates of their multicore chips to stay cool into the next decade.

 

A blogger's battle from behind bars

Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old freelance journalist, made headlines last week as the first known blogger to be thrown into federal prison for not cooperating with judiciary officials.

One of the Internet's earliest video bloggers, Wolf refused to testify before a U.S. grand jury and also refused to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005.

Wolf might normally be protected by California's shield law. But federal prosecutors, who want to see if Wolf's footage shows a San Francisco police car being set on fire at the protest, say they have jurisdiction over the case because the car was paid for in part by federal dollars. (Click here for video. Note: Contains some profanity.)

And in an ironic twist, the very members of the corporate-controlled mainstream media that Wolf and many fellow new-media members like to criticize, have come to his defense and are contributing to his legal fund. Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail last year for refusing to testify in a federal investigation, aired her support for Wolf on Saturday in front of the facility in which he is being held in Dublin, Calif., but was denied an interview with him.

Prison officials allowed CNET News.com to do a 15-minute phone interview with their now famous Netizen inmate, who calls himself a "student of anarchist philosophies." The San Francisco man said his jailing might have something to do with his politics, or at least the politics of the people on the tape. But his greater concern is what he sees as the government's attempt to further erode the protections affording to journalists.

Q: First of all, how are you holding up in there, and what's your situation like? Are you being housed in a protected area or among the hard-core felons?
Wolf: I'm holding up quite all right. I'm very lucky to be in this facility. It seems more akin to what one might expect from a mental ward, except the people aren't crazy. I've established a rapport with most of the inmates there. The food is edible, which is a great relief seeing as I'm someone who's a little finicky about food and you can't be too finicky in jail, if you know what I mean. I'm going to refrain from discussing who's in the population other than to say that everyone has been respectful to me and quite friendly and outgoing. The guards have also been very professional and treat everyone, not only myself, but everyone in the population as human beings which is something I was a little afraid I wouldn't observe but I'm happy to say is the case in this federal facility.

Tell us about your rationale in deciding not to hand over the video tapes. How much of it was about protecting your sources, or activists caught on tape, and how much of it was about First Amendment rights?
Wolf: First and foremost, this issue should be a state issue. The federal grand jury is investigating the alleged attempted damage to a San Francisco police vehicle. That is the subject of the investigation. If an S.F. police vehicle is considered federal property, then what isn't federal property? Your school? Even City Hall itself. I'm not sure that that extension is accurate, but it's not very much of a stretch and that is very disturbing.

Beyond that, I should be protected in the state system by the California shield law. The state of California, the local jurisdiction, has made no attempts to try to get this footage. This is an attempt of the federal government circumventing the state protections for who knows what purpose. Something tells me that it's about more than damage to a San Francisco police vehicle. And it's a scary position when you have the government acting in such a coercive, secretive manner. The fact that I am a journalist and should be protected is a very big part of it. When I went in and began documenting this movement, I gave my word to numerous people that I would only publish what my discretion allowed and beyond that would not turn over additional material. So they are sources in a different sort of way than the Judith Miller case, but there still is an element of protecting sources and also protecting people's right to privacy and freedoms of association.

Do you feel the federal government is making an example of you because of your political beliefs?
Wolf: I don't feel that that is the case so much, but I do feel it's an attempt of the government to further erode the protections affording to journalists. I do feel it may be a political attempt to catalogue and chronicle who in the San Francisco Bay Area identifies as anarchist, not particularly myself, but the people on the tape. I'm sure you're aware of the 1950s HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) McCarthyism. Today's communist is the anarchist. I'm very much concerned that this is a political witch hunt, although I feel it's less about me than about people out in the community.

British pensioner becomes YouTube star

YouTube, the popular online video site, has an unexpected star--a septuagenarian British widower--whose soft-spoken, humble manner has won the hearts of users of the youth-dominated Web site.

Peter posted his first video on YouTube about a week ago, under the user name geriatric1927, which refers to the year of his birth. He called it "first try."

In the clip, which starts with "geriatric gripes and grumbles" and some blues music, Peter tells how he became addicted to YouTube.

"It's a fascinating place to go to see all the wonderful videos that you young people have produced so I thought I would have a go at doing one myself," he says, sitting against a backdrop of floral wallpaper and family photographs.

"What I hope I will be able to do is to just to bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old person who has been there and done that and hopefully you will respond in some way by your comments."

YouTube is one of the fastest-growing sites on the World Wide Web and announced last month that 100 million clips are watched every day. The site has almost 20 million visitors a month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

In his profile, Peter says he is widower living alone in the country in the middle of England. His favorite music is blues and he has loved motorcycles all his life. He says has no piercings or tattoos. His profile says he is 78 but he says in a video clip he is 79.

He has since posted another five videos on his YouTube page and has had about 79,000 viewings and 6,500 subscribers, putting him at the top of the most-subscribed list on YouTube in the past week.

In his second video, Peter starts with a photograph of himself on a motorbike and says he has received more than 4,700 e-mails. "I am absolutely overwhelmed and don't quite know what to say," says the white-haired pensioner who keeps his eyes closed for most of his videos.

"I just need to say thank you...this YouTube experience has been one of the major changes and breakthroughs in my life and given me a whole new world to experience."

Peter, who talks about his life, the horrors of war and police harassment, has received wide praise for his videos and for proving technology is not just for the younger generation.

"It's great that someone from your generation has chosen to share their views on life, and a shame more elderly people don't too," wrote one commentator.

"I don't have a grandpa, but if I could choose, I'd want you to be mine!" says another.

A few who mocked him were quickly rebuked by the rest of the online community.

"IGNORE all the rude comments because obviously the people who leave nasty comments on your page are those who have the least number of comments on their videos!" said one.

Attempts by Reuters to contact Peter by e-mail were not immediately successful with the latest YouTube star inundated with e-mails.

Story Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

HP offers Debian Linux support

Debian is a steadfastly noncommercial version of Linux. But Hewlett-Packard will give it a big corporate hug Monday with the announcement of a plan to provide support for the open-source operating system.

"We've had a number of customers continuing to ask us to have broader support for Debian," and HP decided to oblige, said Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager at HP's Open Source and Linux Organization. Red Hat and Novell will remain HP's main Linux partners globally, however.

HP announced the news in conjunction with the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing company will offer technical support for installation and configuration during a server's warranty period, Wade said. And later this year, it will begin selling "care packs" to help customers with Debian problems, he said.

The move reflects the continuing price pressure that exists in the Linux marketplace, where free versions of the open-source software always are an alternative to paid versions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Sophisticated HP Linux customers requested the Debian support, after wondering if they could get "a better value with a distribution that doesn't require a subscription fee and subsequent renewals for that subscription," Wade said.

Debian won't be on the same level as Red Hat or Novell, though, Wade said. HP won't market it, and customers will have to download the software on their own. Software combinations with partners such as BEA Systems or Oracle won't be available with Debian. And HP won't formally certify Debian for its servers.

HP expects the Debian offer to appeal chiefly to sophisticated customers who usually have internal software support and a long history of Linux expertise. However, the company is pleased with its support; of the 48,000 Linux-related support calls HP got in 2005, the company answered 99.5 percent on its own, meaning that only 180 had to be transferred to experts at Red Hat or Novell, Wade said.

HP's offer will apply to the current "Sarge" version 3 of Debian and to version 4, "Etch," due in December. (Debian versions are named after characters in the movie "Toy Story.")

The company has a long history of cooperation with Debian. It formerly employed one Debian leader, Bruce Perens, and another former leader and current contributor, Bdale Garbee, is chief technologist of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization.

Play your own Xbox game

Microsoft is trying to turn hard-core gamers into Xbox programmers.

The company plans to show off on Monday a new set of developer tools that will let college students, hobbyists and others create their own games for the Xbox 360 console, for a Windows PC or both.

Dubbed XNA Game Studio Express, the free software is expected to be available in beta form by the end of the month, with a final product available sometime this holiday season.

"The tools we are talking about make it way easier to make games than it is today," said Scott Henson, director for platform strategy for Microsoft's game developer group. Microsoft will demonstrate the new software at Gamefest, a company-run show for game developers that takes place in Seattle this week.

The approach is similar to one Microsoft has taken with software development in general, selling its Visual Studio tools to professional programmers while making a more limited "express" version free to hobbyists.

Microsoft released the first version of its XNA tools for professional developers in March 2005, ahead of the Xbox 360's release the following November.

With the hobbyist release, the software giant is hoping to lay the groundwork for what one day will be a thriving network of enthusiasts developing for one another, something akin to a YouTube for games. The company, however, is pretty far from that goal.

In the first incarnation, games developed using the free tools will be available only to like-minded hobbyists, not the Xbox community as a whole. Those who want to develop games will have to pay a $99 fee to be part of a "Creators' Club," a name that is likely to change. Games developed using XNA Game Studio Express will be playable only by others who are part of the club.

Next spring, Microsoft hopes to have a broader set of tools that will allow for games to be created that can then be sold online through Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft will still control which games get published, and it'll get a cut of the revenue.

Down the road, probably three to five years from now, Microsoft hopes to have an open approach, where anyone can publish games, and community response helps separate the hits from the flops.

That would mark a major shift in the gaming world. While people have long been able to create their own PC software, console game titles have historically been created by a far more limited set of developers.

Everyone says they could do better if only they had a chance, says Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty. Now gamers can match their skills with the pros, he said. "They may not have a popular game, but they can at least try it."

Plus, in creating a new outlet for enthusiasts, Microsoft is looking for one more way of winning the hearts and minds of the hard-core gamer set ahead of the release of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii, both due later this year.

Sony tried something somewhat similar with the original PlayStation, releasing in limited quantities a $750 add-on kit called the Net Yaroze that let people write their own games.

Part of the impetus for expanding the pool of developers is the growing expense of making major video games. Many games take 18 to 36 months to develop Henson said, meaning big game companies only want to back sure hits. "Future titles look like existing titles," he said. "There's not a lot of branching off and taking risks."

A particular target of the new program is colleges, with Microsoft having signed up 10 universities to use the new software as part of their curricula, some as early as this fall.

Doherty said Microsoft is the biggest beneficiary of the program as the effort both helps tie gamers to the Xbox and potentially leads to new ideas.

"I think some new talent is going to come out of it," Doherty said. "I'm not saying it's going to be 'American Idol.'"

Multi OS dalam satu Harddisk

Setelah browsing sana-sini akhirnya aku dapet juga artikel untuk membelah satu harddisk jadi beberapa partisi dan di isi dengan multi os tapi sementara pake bahasa nggris ya tar aku translate dech. ini dia :

 

 

This article courtesy of Snebjorn Andersen.

Introduction:

This short article is meant as an introduction to configuring your computer system for running multiple operating systems. I have tried to present some general ideas and tips for doing this and provide a few links to places where you can get more detailed information. If some parts of this text need clarification or more detail please don't hesitate to tell me about it.

Disclaimer:

Before I start to talk about actually repartitioning your drives and so on, I want to make sure that you understand a few things:

• The process of moving, deleting and creating partitions on your disk drives is potentially harmful for your data, some of which may be very valuable to you. It's your own responsibility to have working backups of all important files in case something goes wrong.
• Failed installations may leave your system in a state where it's not able to boot at all. It's your own responsibility to have installation or boot media available for re-installing.
• I don't want to scare you away from setting up your computer to run multiple operating systems, but you have to be careful and think about what you do or you're going to run into some very serious and frustrating problems - and I don't want that to happen to you. This is your chance to learn the easy way from someone who learned the hard way!

With that understood we can proceed. If not, stop reading this article.

The ideal multi-OS system:

Whatever your choice and combination of operating systems, there's one thing you should always try to obtain: clear separation between system files and data files. The more clearly your files are divided into these two groups, the easier it will be to:

• Make backups
• Install, re-install and update operating systems
• Share data between different operating systems

Disks are getting bigger and less expensive all the time. If you're at all able to afford them, separate physical disks for each OS/data set is an extremely good idea and will make your life a lot simpler in the long run. The current setup on my home machine is one disk containing the different OSs in their own partitions, well out of sight of each other and one disk containing two large FAT partitions for my data.

All modern OSs support FAT and all my data files are thus available from whichever OS I'm using at the moment. You may not get all the benefits of the more sophisticated modern file systems, but this is in my opinion a small price to pay for all the freedom you get from this setup.

One great way to make sure you don't accidentally harm your data when installing or reconfiguring your system is by simply not having your important data drives in the computer during the process. Inexpensive removable drive trays are available for IDE and SCSI disks and if you do more than a little recording, they can also be a very convenient way to store individual projects that you need to work on at a later time.

General partitioning theory:

Partitioning is basically just a way to make one physical disk appear as several individual disks. Each partition consists of a contiguous section of disk blocks and is assigned a separate drive letter in Windows. There may be space left on a disk that's not used by any partitions. That space just goes to waste and you generally don't want that. Most PC systems that come with Windows already installed will have just one large partition filling up the entire disk and containing the OS and any bundled applications. When partitioning was first invented four partitions on a disk was the limit. Of course, this soon proved to be insufficient, so a rather confusing but clever system of fitting more partitions in there was introduced: the original four partitions are now called "primary partitions".

If you want more than four partitions, you will have to dedicate one of your partitions to acting as an "Extended Partition" - - a sort of container for all the extra partitions you want to create. (No actual data is stored in an "extended partition."). It is subdivided into a number of so-called "logical partitions." I don't know what's so logical about it, but I hope that knowing about the different types of partitions will help you make sense of other sources of information about partitioning. Now let's look a bit at some of the different operating systems that you could be interested in running.

Windows:

All the different releases/versions of Microsoft Windows share one "quality" - - they want the whole machine for themselves and will gladly overwrite the master boot record on your first disk during installation. In a multi-boot system, this is definitely not what you want to happen, so be careful when upgrading or reinstalling Windows. The partitioning utility in Windows (and DOS) is a rather unfriendly text mode program called FDISK.EXE. You can do terrible things to your system with this crude tool, so be careful with it! It has some rather brain-damaged ideas, one of them is its blank refusal to create more than one primary partition, another is the way it ignores partition types it does not know about, eg. Linux. Still, it's what we have been given to do the task of creating partitions in Windows, so we'll just have to live with it.

Before you can use any partitions you've created with FDISK.EXE they must be formatted. In NT you have the option of using the technically superior HPFS formatting, but if you want to access data on the partition from other OSs I recommend FAT instead. An important feature of FDISK.EXE is the /mbr option that will recreate the master boot record on your disk. In other words, enter the command "fdisk /mbr" at the DOS prompt to get Windows to boot the way it used to before you installed LILO (the Linux loader) or whatever it is that is causing trouble.

Linux:

Linux uses the traditional fdisk tool to make changes to the partitioning tables of your disks. Like DOS fdisk, it's text based and not very user-friendly, so watch your step! Linux will only let you repartition drives if you are logged in as root or "super-user" (this corresponds to the administrator account in NT). This prevents the risk and fear of doing any serious harm to the system when you're logged in as a normal user without special powers. In Linux there's a direct connection between the partition types and the device names used for disks. Primary partitions and the extended partition are given the numbers 1 to 4, logical partitions are numbered from 5 and up. As an example, here's the disk info about my first IDE disk (named /dev/hda) as printed by fdisk:

Disk /dev/hda: 128 heads, 63 sector, 620 cylinder

Units = cylinder of 8064 * 512 bytes

 

As you can see, my main Linux partition is /dev/hda5, one of two logical partitions inside the extended partition /dev/hda2. This demonstrates an important point: unlike most other OSs, Linux will boot from logical partitions. If you're short on primary partitions for multiple OSs, this feature is very handy. Some recent Linux distributions (notably RedHat) will merrily go on and kick out other OSs during the installation process.

Since you're reading this text about running several OSs on your computer, I assume that's not what you want. Make sure you choose the "Custom" installation option instead of the one labelled "Workstation" and generally watch your step. Several very detailed guides to setting up Linux with different other OSs are available on the Internet. Most of what you will need is freely available at the Linux Documentation Project home page at http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/linux.html.

BeOS:

Creating a partition for running BeOS alongside Windows is very simple and user-friendly. The good folks at Be, Inc. know very well that most people will want to hang onto their Windows systems for the time being, so they've bundled a special edition of PartitionMagic (see below) with the OS. This makes the whole partioning process very easy. The only thing that you really have to know if you're trying to plan your partitioning is that BeOS needs to boot from a primary partition. It has recently been announced that the next version of BeOS (version 5) will be free for personal use. At the time of writing it's still not available, so I don't have any actual experience with installing it, but I would expect it to be as smooth as the current version. For more see Be.

Tools:

There's a number of utilities and tools that can make life easier for you if you plan to have several different OSs installed. Here's a short presentation of some of them.

FIPS:

This is a somewhat primitive, but very useful free DOS tool for splitting primary partitions that contain data. Of course, you will have to have three or less primary partitions when you do this or there won't be room for the added primary partition. There can be only four of those, remember? After splitting the partition, you can then go on and install Linux on it or whatever it is you're trying to do. It goes without saying that you shouldn't even think about attempting this potentially disastrous operation without having a working backup of everything of any importance on the disk. Make sure you read the documentation carefully before you start. More information is available at the FIPS home page at http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/.

VMware:

A very interesting new software product for people who need to run multiple operating systems is VMware. It basically provides you with a virtual computer running a different OS inside your real computer. This way you can run Windows inside Linux or vice versa. While fantastically convenient for many applications (I use it daily at work) it is not a good solution if you need to run real-time sound processing applications. VMware does not perform well in digital audio applications and does not support MIDI yet but will be soon according to the manufacturer. In short, if you need to run music or recording software, you don't want to run it inside a VMware virtual machine, but it could still be very handy if you need several OS's running at the same time. A trial version is available at http://www.vmware.com. The full product is priced at $299.00, $99.00 for hobbyists and students.

PartitionMagic:

If you often need to juggle disk partitions, PartitionMagic is an extremely handy tool for resizing and moving partitions without data loss. There's a demo version available at http://www.partitionmagic.com. The full product sells for $89.95.

Well I hope this gets you started on the road to safe partitioning. Remember to back up your data first and proceed carefully. There is more to this world than Windows!

di salin dari : http://www.pcrecording.com/partition.htm