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Apple, Java, and the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 9:38pm CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, as fans of Douglas Adams know, is a creature so mind-bogglingly stupid that it assumes that if you can't see it, then it can't see you. They are natives of the planet Traal, but on Earth are often found in Cupertino, address One Infinite Way. (Leave it to an RBB to name its lair after a programming error.)
On Traal, one fends off attacks of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast by wrapping a towel around one's own head. As nearly as I can tell, that's Apple's actual security strategy. How otherwise would you explain the company's non-response to CVE-2008-5353, known these past nine months and patched by everyone but Apple?
CVE-2008-5353, which is a client-side arbitrary remote code execution vulnerability, was one of the more interesting holes discussed at CanSecWest's Pwn2Own this year. Discovered by Sami Koivu in August, it was patched by Sun in late 2008 in Java 6 Update 11. It was later exploited by Koivu and Julian Tinnes (who writes most engagingly about it on his blog) to own up the Pwn2own Mac on the first day of competition (a feat disallowed for competition, by the way, because Koivu and Tinnes had already done the right thing and warned Sun and Apple; no good deed goes unpwnaged).
Here's the cool and special thing about this vulnerability: It's pure Java. It doesn't care what operating system you're running; if you're able to run Java -- and the overwhelming majority of browsers do, often by default -- you can be pwned if you haven't been patched. Windows users are patched. Linux folk are patched.
That leaves the snarling hulk with the towel around its head.
Sun took, according to Koivu's records, 122 days to issue a patch for CVE-2008-5353. But it's done, and before the word got out at CanSecWest in February. Apple, on the other hand, not only hasn't updated the JRE in even its latest security update or in the Safari patch it pushed to my MacBook this morning, it hasn't warned its userbase that there's any problem whatsoever -- and hasn't suggested that, at the very least, users should disable Java in their browsers.
(The Mac's high price explained: Free towel with every purchase.)
The vulnerability lies in Java itself, and there will be the odd fanboi who insists that this means that Apple's products are still not at risk from security problems. This is what sociologists would describe as a case of technical virginity, only we've already debunked that concept too. The users who think that recent PC/Mac commercial actually means a Mac will be secure do not want to hear that their machines were busted into via a technicality.
Tinnes, who appreciates a beautiful thing even when it's poisonous, has tested the exploit he wrote on Firefox, IEs 6 through 8, Safari, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and OpenBSD, and it works everywhere. He calls CVE-2008-5353 "close to the holy grail of client-side vulnerabilities." It's not easy to patch -- Java generally isn't -- but that's no excuse for pretending it's not there.
Notes from all over
Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle blog team has a little list, oh yes -- they're keeping track of function calls that are seriously more trouble than they're worth from a security standpoint. The latest addition to their just-don't list is memcpy(), a nasty piece of work that's made for vulnerabilities in DirectX, Outlook Express, Messenger Service, and many other programs over the years. The blog post by Steve Lipner recommends that programmers deprecate the function, along with RtlCopyMemory and CopyMemory, in their own code starting immediately and use instead buffer-friendly memcopy_s(). ("I wonder when Larry, Steve and Linus will start banning strcpy() in their products?" he snarks at the end of the post -- oh, snap.)
Some commenters were skeptical. "Sure, this sounds good, but I'm not convinced memcpy_s will really help. It's only checking consistency between 2 of the arguments, which means that all 4 can still be wrong," wrote user "t-scotmc." And user "nelsonchandler" has a broader vision for solving C's myriad problems: "Are we ever going to see Microsoft Ada? It can do everything C does, but in a much safer way." (And if you might have made that comment yourself, I recommend a side trip today to James Iry's A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.)
Be advised that Sophos, like James Iry, is having more fun than you are. They've got a page up right now for Klingon Anti-Virus from Sophos, which promises to shut down the usual adware, malware, Betazoid sub-ether porn diallers, Tribbles, zero-day threats and the like. The program was developed to honor the memory of a brave Product Marketing team who made the mistake of making their product pitch on Qo'noS without sufficient training in bat'leth techniques. They will be missed.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Dell: Most Linux users don't really need the latest version

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 9:24pm CEST par Jacqueline Emigh

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews
The new Mini 10v netbook that Dell launched last week will get more capabilities over the year ahead, including what the company is calling "wireless improvements." However, although "Linux enthusiasts" might wish otherwise, an upgrade from the currently supported Ubuntu Linux 8.04 to the newer 8.10 or 9.04 won't be happening yet. A later release of Ubuntu isn't in the best interests of "mainstream users," according to an e-mail from Dell to Betanews last night.
The official word from Dell is that there are two main reasons for sticking with Canonical's Ubuntu 8.04 -- for the time being, anyway -- in the Linux editions of its Inspiron netbooks, a line-up also available with Microsoft's Windows XP.
As Betanews reported last week, one of Dell's other Inspiron netbooks -- the Mini 10 (without the "v") -- is now being groomed to act as a subsidized mass market offering from an as yet unnamed wireless carrier.
"We are trying to stay on a 12-month cadence to keep costs down, and build a stable platform," a Dell spokesperson said in an e-mail to Betanews late last night. "A mainstream user does not care if it's [Ubuntu Linux] 8.04 or 8.10 or 9.04 (he/she does not know what those are) -- she just wants it to work right and be stable/safe...Most of the Linux enthusiasts would not like to be so far behind (i.e., 8.04 vs. 9.04), but they are not our primary target audience for the [operating system] image."
Also, Dell doesn't seem about ready to stray away from Ubuntu as its Linux platform for netbooks or any other consumer products.
"We have offered Ubuntu pre-installed on our consumer systems for two years now, based on customer feedback on Ideastorm. Canonical has been enthusiastic about working with us to deliver a rock-solid Linux experience for the general non-technical community, and we look forward to continuing this dedicated team effort going forward," Betanews was told.
Meanwhile, Dell has already added a network manager feature to the Mini 10 and 10v which is aimed at bringing the sort of 3G wireless connectivity that's built into Ubuntu 8.10. "That should support whatever 3G cards are now supported in stock Ubuntu," according to the e-mail.
"In addition to 8.04, we chose to control our updates (via our own update repository -- similar to MS update). We go the extra mile in double qualifying all updates (that one would see in stock 8.10 and 9.04) and only publish those that are rock-stable. We will [put in] select features over the course of the year that make sense for the product, like wireless improvements," according to Dell spokespersons.
Yet seemingly, the availability of Dell netbooks still varies considerably from one country to another, as does the availability of various operating systems aboard the systems. A check by Betanews of Dell's country-specific sites this morning turned up the fact that some sites -- for the UK and Australia, for example -- have also been marketing another netbook, the Atom-based Latitude 2100, with a choice of Ubuntu 8.10, Vista, or an XP downgrade. The "smart rubberized 10.1-inch netbook" is a tad weighiter than the Mini 10 -- 2.91 lbs. rather than 2.86 lbs. -- and also a little pricier. You can also buy a Mini 10 or Mini 9 from the UK site, but at this point, only with Windows XP.
In Spain, on the other hand, the advertised Dell netbook choices are limited to the Mini 9, also with XP; and in Venezuela, to the Mini 10 with XP.
In the US as in the UK, though, Dell is launching the new Mini 10v on Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP simultaneously, according to the officials, who didn't delve into specific plans for the Mini 10v in other countries. Dell also plans Ubuntu 8.04 availability on the Mini 10 soon for the UK, and the Ubuntu option is already in full swing in the US, Betanews was told. "Our goal is to provide choice and while we may not have been able to launch Windows and Ubuntu simultaneously on all of our mini platforms, we have offered [it] when it was ready," according to the company. "It's very important for us to make the Linux experience as simple and seamless as possible for mainstream users vs. 'Linux enthusiasts.'"
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Discovery.com targeted in patent battle over Amazon Kindle

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 7:11pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
In March, Discovery Communications, the company responsible for the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet cable networks, filed a patent infringement suit against Amazon.com for its Kindle e-reading device. The patent is property of Discovery founder John S. Hendricks, and was granted in 2007, nearly ten years after it was filed. The company sought damages and royalties from Amazon and its successful Kindle.
Amazon fired back at Discovery on May 15, in two separate legal actions. The first is a categorical denial of all of Discovery's complaints and countersuit in the US District Court in Delaware. And the second is a suit in US District Court in Western Washington, claiming that the Discovery Channel's online store uses search and recommendation methods that infringe on four of Amazon's patents. Like Discovery's suit beforehand, it asks for royalties and damages sufficient to compensate for the infringement.
Amazon's defense against Discovery's complaint asserts that it has not infringed on Discovery's patent, and even if it did, the alleged infringement would be non-actionable under Title 35 of the US. Code. Furthermore, Amazon goes on to accuse Discovery Communications of inequitable conduct in its patent filing, meaning the company failed to cite known prior art -- including its own patents that would have been material prior art. Amazon goes on for 20 paragraphs in the defense, citing dozens of instances of withheld or misrepresented prior art.
Amazon countersued Discovery on eight counts in the Delaware Court case, and asked that Discovery's complaint be dismissed, damages and legal fees be paid, and that Discovery and its cohorts be blocked from filing further patent litigation on the issue. If a jury finds Discovery guilty of infringement, Amazon asks for treble damages and an injunction on anyone infringing on its patents.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
5 Gbps USB 3.0 comes closer to reality with new controller

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 5:59pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
USB 3.0 has been expected to "arrive" for a considerable amount of time, but due to the lengthy draft certification process, and general lack of pressure to get 3.0 "SuperSpeed" devices out in the market, it wasn't expected to become widespread until 2010. However, with NEC's new host controller, the arrival of the new USB standard could arrive soon.
The host controller is a chip which connects the host system such as a PC to external storage, peripherals or other systems, and NEC's new host controller (µPD720200) is based on the SuperSpeed USB standard which was finalized in November of 2008, more than eight years after the USB 2.0 spec was released.
The 3.0 spec promises transfer speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second with full backwards compatibility with 480 Mbps USB 2.0 (a.k.a., High Speed), 1.5 Mbps - 12 Mbps USB 1.0 (Low Speed to Full Speed). NEC says the new chip requires only 70 seconds to transfer 25 GB of video content to/from a Blu-ray disc, compared to the 14 minutes it would take with USB 2.0.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Intel to compete head-on against Microsoft in netbook OS

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 5:53pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
You can't really use the term "Wintel" to refer to computers any more. That fact has never been made clearer than yesterday, when during an Intel conference call with select general press reporters, company officials announced two major moves in the burgeoning arena of very small computers -- netbooks. First, its single-chip platform for netbooks is ready for sampling -- chipset, graphics, and Atom CPU all on one die. Second, its next generation slim form-factor Moblin Linux 2.0 is entering beta.
While netbook manufacturers currently -- and rather suddenly -- are relying on the venerable Windows XP for as much as 96% of pre-installations, by one analyst's estimate, Moblin's engineers are banking on the possibility that manufacturers are settling for XP because it's the most uniformly adaptable, low-profile system there is for portable media. That said, XP could be too general-purpose in nature for what a netbook wants to be, which is a portable communicative device that isn't a phone.
For that reason, Moblin tries to look less like a computer operating system and more like a hybrid smartphone/Web browser front end. Rather than a desktop, its home screen is something its developers call the "m_zone," complete with underscore character (when I first heard it, I thought it was a football reference). Here, basic functionality is tucked away along a toolbar that drops down from the top and hides itself when not in use (not unlike Mozilla Fennec). A smartphone-like reminder of events and to-do list items inhabits the left pane, along with a panel for user-installed applications.
But it's the center workspace where all the activity is going on. Perhaps borrowing an idea from Palm's upcoming new Pre, there's "tiles" here that represent goings-on in the user's online social and Web spheres as they happen. If you'll look closely, you'll notice that the leftmost two columns of this area are devoted to Web site related activities and media posts, while the rightmost two columns contain tiles dealing with social network events (like incoming Twitter feeds) and dedicated Web apps like Last.fm.
Though Moblin is officially a product of the Linux Foundation, its principal source of funding and support is Intel. That might partly explain why Moblin is so hard to test: To do it right, you need a netbook that you're not doing anything else with at the moment. And it needs to be a netbook built on Intel's Atom CPU and graphics chipsets -- anything from AMD, Qualcomm, or Nvidia will not do. The Moblin 2.0 beta is available for download as a "live image," although you may opt instead to use the Foundation's Image Creator tool to build your own live image with your choice of optional features. That tool requires Fedora 9 or later, OpenSUSE 10.3, or Ubuntu 8.10.
The news of Moblin 2.0 beta going live comes as Intel reveals the first details of its "Pine Trail" chipset, whose select sampling has likely already begun in advance of next month's Computex show in Taiwan. That chipset will integrate memory controller and graphics functionality on the same die as the Atom CPU, for a complete system-on-a-chip that will automatically be best suited for running a Moblin-based handset or netbook. The very concept of integrating memory control with the CPU is among the technologies AMD will likely be contesting as its renewed battle over cross-licensing with Intel begins its next round.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Ahead of Sprint's Pre launch, AT&T weighs tiered mobile data plans

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 5:07pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Rather than lower the cost of AT&T's $70 per month unlimited iPhone data plan, the company may introduce tiered mobile data plans. Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets yesterday said the plans would be similar to the subsidized netbook trials that began in early April in Philadelphia and Atlanta.
In those trial markets, the mobile broadband plans were $40 per month for a 200 MB data cap and $60 per month for a 5 GB cap, options that AT&T found "met the needs of casual to occasional data users, as well as frequent and heavy users." That is, of course, when coupled with Fast Access DSL service (also a part of some plans.)
Yesterday, the telco announced that it will be taking the subsidized netbook plan nationwide, with more than 2,200 AT&T stores carrying mini-notebooks by Acer, Dell, and Lenovo.
"Our customers in the Atlanta and Philadelphia markets have responded well and the response isn't limited to a specific demographic," de la Vega said in a statement. "We're getting interest from tweens, teens, young adults, moms on the go and small business owners. Consumers and small business customers really seem to be attracted to the convenience and portability of this connected device."
But talk of offering a variety of limited plans is sure to raise some questions about the strength of AT&T's network, especially after the sting of recent headlines that claimed too many iPhones have begun to eat up all the bandwidth at too low a profit for AT&T.
"Right now we continue to study what is the best thing that is available, not just from an iPhone point of view, but what you can do to stimulate additional demand," de la Vega told Reuters yesterday, "Our business is to sell services."
This announcement precedes what is expected to be a monumental week for mobile phone competition. Sprint will be making the Palm Pre available on June 6, and Apple's WWDC 2009 begins on June 8, where it is rumored that third-generation iPhone hardware will be unveiled with the new iPhone 3.0 software. While analysts expect the Pre will sell chiefly to Palm loyalists and existing Sprint subscribers, the mobile carrier has to contend with a critical case of customer drain. Simply put, customers leave Sprint, and customers go to AT&T. With variably priced data, a new rack of netbooks and the potential nuclear bomb of a new iPhone, AT&T has stacked up a fierce second week of June to compete with Sprint's Palm Pre launch.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Microsoft unveils Windows Media Center support for your Netflix queue

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 9:32am CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Users of Windows Media Center just got a big boost in the variety of content available through their preferred media manager, as Microsoft announced on Wednesday that the Vista Home Premium and Ultimate users who are also Netflix unlimited members have access to over 12,000 movies and TV shows via WMC, effective immediately (give or take a couple of days).
The arrangement dramatically ups the appeal of WMC, especially for those users who don't feel the need to throw a TV tuner into their PC -- or, for that matter, to sign up for Netflix's Instantly To Your TV service.
The combination puts Netflix's excellent Watch Instantly collection directly into WMC's roster of available video, where it can be scrolled through and sorted like any other "aisle" of available video. Netflix members can also manage their DVD queues from within WMC.
Netflix's instant-watch videos are of course already available through the site itself, as long as you've got the correct (Silverlight) software installed, and the partnership between Microsoft and Netflix to bring Instant Watch to the Xbox 360 is nearly a year old now. There was even an extension available that melded certain Netflix and WMC functions -- written, as it happened, by a Netflix employee having some fun. Ben Reed, a senior product marketing manager for WMC, says that the value proposition here is the ease of discovery: Users love their online video viewing, but would prefer not to have to root around multiple sites to find the good stuff, not to mention having to learn a new set of controls for every player around.
The arrangement makes sense in light of recent efforts by Microsoft both to bulk up Media Center's offerings and to bring its TV, movie, and music thinking into closer accord. On the first front, we have the March launch of the Sports Channel, which combines news, video, stats and such from MSNBC.com, FOX Sports, CBSSports.com, and more for the major sports; the continued buildout of the MSNBC News portal is another good example of the direction in which Microsoft's thinking about content consumption.
More broadly, this move brings the company's "three screen" vision of viewing any content on your PC or your TV or your mobile device a bit closer to reality. And it's indicative that the push in-house at Microsoft to coordinate television, movie, and music efforts is serious business -- the Netflix-Microsoft partnerships already has quite a bit of history, in interesting contract to the comparative upheaval around other services such as Hulu.
The Netflix capabilities are rolling out, according to Microsoft, over the next 24-48 hours; at some point during that period, each machine that has run WMC in the past will gain a "Netflix" option under the TV + Movies section.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
New iteration of Flock browser bolsters Twitter, multi-service support

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 2:53am CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Of all the specialized browsers out there, Flock is perhaps the one best suited to the social-networking scene, with support for a constellation of services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and so on. To date it's been a nice way of keeping an eye on one's daily flood of information, but serious interaction required that you pop open a browser window. (Such a burden.)
You might find you never need to do so again with the 2.5 version, just released for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Those who closely follow streams from highly prolific twitterbugs may need to go to the main browser window from time to time, but for most purposes, the Twitter reader in Flock rises to the level of the very best standalone readers. (And their new non-Twitter toys aren't so shabby either.)
We looked at Flock on both Windows and the Mac. The Vista machine's clean install was seamless; the Mac's update from the previous version went smoothly enough, managing not to drop any of the 74 tabs currently open on that system. (Don't judge. Flock does however recommend backing up one's profile before upgrading.) Interestingly, the Flock startup process now recognizes enough services to require that they not all be displayed on a single screen. Twenty-two services are currently known to Flock, including webmail favorites such as Google, AOL and Yahoo (still no Hotmail); seven dedicated blogging services; and multimedia options such as YouTube and Truveo.
Flock also, for the first time, supports in-browser chat, specifically Facebook's chat function. Sending a link over to a friend was as simple as dragging and dropping the object onto her username in a picklist at the lower right of the window. We found that we had to login twice to get the feature going -- once for the usual sidebar Facebook feed, once for Chat -- and it periodically insisted that we were offline even when the sidebar was updating without incident. (A restart seemed to clear things up.)
FlockCast has similar ease-of-sharing goals, allowing you to more easily post the same update to more than one service -- a blog post duplicated to your Facebook page, for instance, or a status to all the services you care to inform of your whereabouts. It that's just too much sharing, you can disable all of FlockCast as part of your Privacy preferences.
Most notably, Twitter support has radically improved, with the "sidebar" reader now very nearly as good as a dedicated Twitter readers. One's feeds can be sorted alphabetically or in the order they were tweeted. The old "terse" display style, which required the user to roll over a specific tweet to read the whole thing (cranky functionality under some circumstances), can be toggled to a full-view version with fully clickable URLs. One click gets you to direct messages and @mentions, which are tabbed options above the usual feed of followers' posts. Notifications of new DMS and @mentions are clear and obvious.
Best of all for regulars, retweets, replies and direct messages are utterly simple -- one click, a pop-up appears, and off you go. That single change may be the most compelling upgrade for many users. It's good enough that it could conceivably even affect Twitter itself, since the reasons one would need to visit the site (and view the ads) just dropped to a small and out-of-the-ordinary subset.
The "My World" page isn't everyone's cup of tea; it seems that either you find it a useful overview of the day or you do not. For those unconvinced, Flock's brought up its Twitter game here too, adding a Search Widget that pulls in live search results on whatever topic's on your mind. You can also save individual searches as widgets of their own, though we noticed that search doesn't go back infinitely far.
We're quite taken with Flock's new Twitter attitude, which shows both applications development intelligence and a close understanding of how people actually use the service. Would that Twitter were so well-behaved. As we worked through our review process, the service started flailing, sending random tweets to telephones that have long since blocked SMS messages from that service. Perhaps Flock should consider adding a Twitter status alert to the sidebar in future editions; this extraordinarily well-thought-out update is certainly in better shape than the service itself.
Flock 2.5 is available immediately for Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, current users are advised that the "check for updates" option in the browser's help menu is not yet aware of this. (We Twittered this factoid and quickly had responses from @flocker and Flock VP of Engineering @claytonstark, noting that they're still testing the auto-updates.) The browser can be downloaded directly from the site. For the moment only the US English version has been updated, but more localization is forthcoming.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Napster: What you should know before plunking down five dollars

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 12:25am CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
There's no doubt that five dollars a month for a music subscription is about as dirt cheap as you can get, so Napster is right on when it comes to attractive pricing. Five dollars for five DRM-free MP3s and unlimited streaming of Napster's catalog per month is a price seated squarely on the "why not?" point.
But this is the point where you have to be wary, because you could end up buying more of what you already have.
Rob Daumeyer of the Business Courier of Cincinnati wrote an editorial earlier this year about the perils of bargain basement shopping, and the "It's so cheap, I can't afford not to buy it" mentality. He rifles off a list of on sale items that he's drooling over, but concludes that there's not a legitimate reason to buy any of them and he is torn. He says, "What's a man supposed to do? Do I really need a fifth beer fridge? Costco is whispering, 'Yes you do, girlie man. And while you're here, why not take home a few dozen flat-screen TVs? They're 40 percent off.'"
If the Napster Cat is beckoning you in such a way, take a moment to consider your music consumption habits. This is something you should do before you commit money to any subscription service, cheap or not. For example, if you prefer "programmed" radio such as Sirius XM, Terrestrial/HD broadcast radio, or live Internet radio, then Napster really has nothing to offer you at present. The "stations" that Napster offers (and its Automix function) are more like the "seeded" family of Internet radio services like Pandora, Jango, and Last.fm. They lack the unpredictability and flow of a radio program with a DJ, and draw from a limited well of similar artists. This means that when you select a Napster station, you are likely to hear a number of songs by the same artist in close succession. While this can be fully tailored to a listener's tastes and is a useful tool for discovery of new music, those other services do it for free. Napster ultimately does not.
Furthermore, even though Napster says there are seven million songs to stream, you'll find yourself frequently running into 30 second clips instead of full songs. In Betanews tests, one search in three yielded an album with only clips instead of full tracks. If you want to hear one of those full songs, you have to buy the MP3. Though it attempts to differentiate itself from MP3 stores such as iTunes, Amazon, and Wal-Mart by adding "unlimited" streaming, underneath the subscription veneer Napster is really quite the same as the others.
I was a Napster user ten years ago when it was a P2P service. Using it today, I found myself flung back into a late 90's mindset. I started to recall bands that I have long since "un-discovered" which I spent hours downloading on a dial-up connection those years ago. I found an album that I wanted to listen to, but all the tracks were only 30 second clips, even as a subscriber. I recalled that there were alternate versions of some of the songs released on various EPs. Napster had none of those, nor did any of the download shops I typically patronize. I ended up turning to the old search engine. From there, in less than the 30 seconds Napster would have given me to listen to each track, I found them in a music blog.
Illegal? You bet. But an apropos outcome. Napster was the original supervillain of music piracy, and now after six or so years as a completely different being, it's totally "establishment." It's so legitimate that it doesn't carry a lot of the out-of-circulation and obscure stuff that used to be so easy to find there. It's like a digital Best Buy, and for most, that isn't necessarily even a bad thing.
There is no single perfect medium for consumption of music, and Napster does offer a couple of shining gems. The artist-chosen playlists are somehow morbidly interesting (Rick Springfield likes Portishead, Depeche Mode, and Frou Frou?) and the Napster-made playlists provide entertaining streaks of musical themes (27 Years of "Weird Al" Yankovic, for example).
Even though you will not be able to satisfy your most obscure tastes, there is a substantial enough library of content from which to build your own long playlists. And since it allocates a limited number of downloads per month like Microsoft's Zune Pass, it is a viable way to give parents a "music allowance" for their kids who may otherwise be downloading music illegally on their computer.
Most of the MP3s available on Napster are also available elsewhere (there are some Napster-exclusive live performances), so for those with regularly-used iTunes and Amazon accounts, there is little here in the way of additional services that you cannot already get elsewhere for free.
The bottom line: Napster's streaming is good for the price, but not indispensable by any means.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #4: A worthwhile Windows Explorer

Publié: mai 20, 2009, 12:08am CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Over the last few decades of Windows' existence, Microsoft has wrestled with the problem of how much control it should give users over the arrangement and organization of files on their computers. In a perfect world, users shouldn't have to care about their \Windows\System32 or \Windows\SysWOW64 directories, so a good file manager shouldn't make the mistake of exposing users to information they don't know how to deal with. On the other hand, knowledgeable users will need to have access to system directories in such a way that they don't have to jump through hoops to find them.
It is a balancing act, but not an impossible one. Over the years, third-party file management utilities such as Total Commander and xPlorer2 have been among the most popular software downloaded through Betanews Fileforum. Granted, these are typically installed and used by folks who know such bits of trivia as the fact that the \Application Data\Local Settings\Microsoft\Office folder in Windows XP maps to the \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office folder in Windows Vista. But the reason they're popular with folks such as myself is because we need more direct and comprehensive access to the systems we manage. What's more, we commonly need access to two directories at once, and it makes more visual sense to have them both open.
Almost dual-pane While the updated Windows Explorer in Windows 7 is not in itself a dual-pane file manager, the surprise is that it does not need to be. With the company's designers having implemented a snap-to feature called Aero Snap -- born out of the company's more intensive experiments with multitouch -- two open Explorer windows can very rapidly become as functional as a side-by-side, dual-pane file manager.
You open the first pane the usual way -- for instance, by selecting Computer from the Start Menu. Then drag that new window by its title bar over to the left side. (By the way, contrary to what we've been told and what we've read, the behavior we're actually seeing in Win7 is that you cannot drag a window by its title bar past the screen border.) By default now, there is a folder tree along the left side of each pane; you don't have to pull it up manually as you did with XP, and you don't have to pull up folders from a hidden frame as you sometimes did with Vista. So you open up a second Explorer window by right-clicking on the destination directory in the folder list, and from the popup, selecting Open in new window. Drag that to the right and release, and the second pane semi-maximizes to fill the space.
Libraries For most production environments, business documents have a variety of home locations. Though you might think it's nice to have a "My Documents" directory, a single locale for wrapping all manners of media together in one tidy folder, when you manage any kind of enterprise whose business is the production of content, in practice, it becomes tenuous at best, untenable at worst. What's more, the business has its own documents, you have your own personal documents…and then you have your very personal documents. Relying on the Windows file system to keep those locales appropriately segregated and yet associated with one another, is not a productive use of one's time.
Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008 R2) address this dilemma in a new and, at least from my point of view, hopeful way, through the use of libraries. We introduced you to libraries in our article on Homegroup networking. Essentially, a library is an aggregate collection of all the subfolders belonging to a set of one or more member folders. So you can collect documents (not videos, not pictures, not CD images, but the stuff you can print) together from multiple locations throughout your network or your Homegroup, in a centralized repository called Documents. That way, you can go ahead and keep those documents stored in multiple locations as necessary; the library collects their subfolders together into a single view without coalescing them into a single folder or locale.
While this changes things for Explorer, it can make things confusing for other programs, especially with regard to saving files. If you'll recall, Windows Explorer also provides the Open, Save, and Save As dialog boxes for applications such as Word and Excel. There are two ways of viewing libraries with respect to other folders, and their differences are esoteric but important: By default, Libraries are stationed along the left pane in a batch by themselves (in these screenshots, you'll see a library I've created called "Mixed Media," which is not one of Windows 7's default libraries). There, Documents looks like a subfolder marked with a piece-of-paper icon, but it isn't one -- it's just a member library. Now, the alternate view mode is accessible from the Tools menu (when you have the menu bar showing); from the Folder Options dialog box, under Navigation pane, it's called Show all folders. While that expands the number of folders you see in the entire list, it also scoots the Libraries group to make it look like a subfolder of Desktop. That doesn't quite make sense to me yet, but maybe I'll adapt.
Anyway, when you "Save As," in Office 2007 by default, you're still pointed to your default personal documents directory, which in Windows 7 is now called, once again, My Documents (a phrase brought back from the XP days). This is because you need to be able to save files to explicit locations. When you open a file, however, Office 2007 SP2 knows to look at the Documents library first, which makes this aggregation both convenient and smart. Again, how you see the libraries listed in Explorer depends on whether you have Show all folders checked or unchecked.
The existence of libraries in Windows 7 creates another benefit for keeping one's personal documents and media on separate drives or network locations from your operating system: Should you do a clean and fresh install of Win7, as many will choose to do for perfectly good reasons (we've had some talks about this in the Comments section in recent days), it only takes a few moments to re-enroll your media and other files in Win7 libraries, rather than having to restore them from backups.
Next: Catching up with your cell phone's view of media…
Content View If you're a Windows user, there's a good chance your cell phone has a better and more interesting way of organizing your media files than does your current version of Windows Explorer. Windows 7 addresses this little discrepancy with the addition of a new option called Content View.
For your MP3 file collection, Windows 7 automatically (and this will be a controversial feature for some, I know it) search the Web for album art associated with each file. It will then store album art thumbnails as hidden JPEG files alongside your MP3s in their native directories. That's a lot of album art, quite frankly; and we were surprised to find that Microsoft appears to have gone to great lengths to find even some very obscure album covers, including these from some old movie soundtrack albums from the 33 RPM era.
Seeing media files this way, however, makes more sense than Tiles view when you're hunting down something, especially a piece of music. A lot of us are more visual than verbal when remembering music; when you think of "The Sounds of Silence," for instance, your mind sees two fellows in black turtleneck sweaters in black-and-white. You can't input that as criteria into Windows Search; yet it might escape you that the name of the album you'd be looking for is "Bookends."
Simplified sharing In an optimum home networking situation, you would want to avoid having to organize your media files in folders based on what you want to share and what you don't. Almost like setting up a firewall for a business, you'd rather exclude items from being shared with other family members by default, and then include exceptions to that rule at will. But Windows has never made sharing files easy for everyday folks; right-clicking on files and going to the Security tab and referring to security groups and their permissions, is the sort of thing dads don't want to be doing when they've finally located and downloaded the music files needed for their daughters' recitals next week.
The addition of Homegroup networking has led to the subsequent addition to Windows 7 Explorer of a one-click action Share with. Preferably, its best use is with homegroups (where more than one computer runs Win7), in which case you can take a non-shared directory, choose the files you do want to share, select Share with -> Homegroup, and find them enrolled in everyone's libraries.
In cases where you don't have a homegroup going just yet, it's still simpler: The same logic that Vista used in making sharing printers simpler on a home network, is applied to finding users to share files with. When you choose files and select Share with -> Specific people, you'll get a dialog box that brings up the names of users (security principals) who share this computer or who have been located in the network's workgroup. Now, right at first, there will probably be problems within networks shared by Win7 and Vista computers, where the latter group hasn't upgraded yet. But we do at least see the possibility of this being rectified in the field over time.
For most everyday users, Windows Explorer is their homebase of computer operations -- their administrative console. With Vista, we saw some glimpses of hope as it appeared the company was addressing the topic of how real-world users would expect this program to work. But maybe for the first time ever, we're seeing in Windows 7 Explorer some evidence that Microsoft engineers actually looked to other programs for inspiration.
Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 32-bit from Fileforum now.
Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit from Fileforum now.

FOLLOW THE WINDOWS 7 TOP 10 COUNTDOWN:
- #10: Homegroup networking
- #9: Native PowerShell 2.0
- #8: Automated third-party troubleshooting
- #7: 'Play To' streaming media, courtesy of DLNA
- #6: DirectX 11
- #5: Multitouch
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009