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BetaNews.Com (8 non lus)

US gov't, ICANN declare joint agreement concluded, international era begins

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 10:44pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The US Dept. of Commerce will no longer have a direct oversight role over the independent corporation responsible for maintaining the Internet's domain name system (DNS) and top-level domain (TLD) registry. This announcement came from ICANN on the very day -- essentially, the last minute -- of the Commerce Dept.'s official oversight of the group.
Under the terms of an Affirmation of Commitments document released by ICANN today, the United States will maintain a seat on ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, an 109-member league of nations, not all of which actively participate. But that's it. The periodic review process for accountability that ICANN underwent since its establishment by the DOC in 1998, will now shift to what new ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom describes as "an international committee of parties chosen by the chairman of our Governmental Advisory Committee."
As today's Affirmation of Commitments reads, "DOC affirms its commitment to a multi-stakeholder, private sector led, bottom-up policy development model for DNS technical coordination that acts for the benefit of global Internet users. A private coordinating process, the outcomes of which reflect the public interest, is best able to flexibly meet the changing needs of the Internet and of Internet users."
What exactly is a "stakeholder?" Since Beckstrom's appointment to the ICANN CEO post last June, that term has been used rather loosely, referring in general to any private institution that has invested resources in the Internet, plus any government whose citizens tend to use the Internet. But the new Affirmation now defines the term even more loosely than that: as anyone, even an individual, who tends to care more about the Internet than the average person, and who therefore makes some everyday contact with a product of ICANN -- such as the domain name system itself.
"ICANN and DOC recognize that there is a group of participants that engage in ICANN's processes to a greater extent than Internet users generally," reads the Affirmation.
From there, ICANN and the DOC agree to disagree on one very big issue: the creation of internationalized, generic top-level domains (gTLD). Beckstrom voiced his support for this concept from the very beginning, which led to members of Congress issuing a warning to the Commerce Secretary that such a plan could lead to a chaotic new regime for TLDs having nothing to do with deference to non-English languages. Paraphrasing congresspersons' illustrations, a refrigerator repairperson could register his domain under "FixMyFridge.refrigerator," while a completely separate service could register "FixMyFridge.repair." Or one service, in an effort to spread its name over as many slots as possible, could register both, along with "FixMyFridge.fridge," "FixMyFridge.please," and "FixMyFridge.JessicaBiel."
To avert such a situation, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Henry Waxman (D - Calif.), suggested to Sec. Gary Locke that his department extend its existing joint project agreement, perhaps for another three-year period.
That did not happen, although both the Affirmation statement and Beckstrom's comments today made it apparent that he doesn't exactly want this kind of chaos either. The Affirmation promised only to begin pursuing the adoption of gTLDs once "security, stability and resiliency issues are first addressed."
"In addition to the Affirmation agreement, we're moving towards fully supporting different scripts and languages in domain names, and these two efforts will tie together very nicely," Beckstrom said in an ICANN video released today. "But the Internet's becoming more global because today you have to type dot com or a dot extension that has English-like or Latin characters, what we call ASCII. In the near future -- next year -- we'll be rolling out Chinese, Russian, and different languages."
ICANN's move was welcomed warmly by European Commissioner Viviane Reding, whose purview includes the Internet and the "digital society." "Since 2005, the European Commission has repeatedly called for reform of the governance of the internet's key global resources. This is necessary to ensure important public policy objectives such as freedom of expression and facilitating stable business transactions online," reads a statement from Comm. Reding this afternoon. "The European Commission is strongly committed to accompany and support the implementation of the reforms announced today, in close cooperation with the EU's 27 Member States."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Windows Mobile 5 and 6 get a new interface

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 10:27pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

As smartphones gained popularity outside of the business world, a division formed between devices made for consumers (lifestyle smartphones) and those made for enterprise deployments (professional smartphones). Professional devices tend to be more integrable into bigger systems and offer more in the productivity department while lifestyle devices cater more to the individual's tastes and offer more in terms of entertainment.
Though Microsoft has plenty of consumer smartphones running Windows Mobile, the operating system has found itself on the far end of "Professional," struggling to appeal to consumers enamored with touch-based operating systems. So Microsoft has worked to make Windows Mobile 6.5 and future versions much more "finger friendly," without sacrificing their professional capabilities.
Meanwhile, SPB Software has devised its own interface for previous versions of Windows Mobile that does that very thing. Today, the company has released the latest update to its SPB Mobile Shell, an interface for Windows Mobile Professional that has layouts for both lifestyle and professional users which can run either simultaneously or individually.
Earlier this year, SPB Software released Mobile Shell 3.0, which really took the software ahead into the most current UI zeitgeist, with much greater emphasis on widgets. With this release, the company has added many more widgets, including social networking, wireless settings, and Internet search.
While many mobile interfaces incorporate portrait/landscape screen shifting when the phone is tilted, SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 goes a step further and lets a phone's velocity sensor control the UI in three dimensions. It's somewhat like HTC's TouchFLO 3D Windows Mobile interface, except far more 3D.
SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 is priced at $39.95, and can be downloaded directly from SPB. It is compatible with Windows Mobile 5 (Phone, Pocket PC,) WM6 (Classic, Professional) and WM6.1 (Classic, Professional).
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Verizon fails with The Hub

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 8:30pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Verizon has reportedly discontinued the Verizon Hub VoIP phone/widget tablet a little more than six months after it debuted.
The short-lived Hub was intended for households with multiple Verizon Wireless phones, where it could act as a calendar, home messaging and management platform and VoIP base station. And though fixed-line telephony continues to dwindle as technologies such as Femtocell gain cachet among wireless carriers, both The Hub and Verizon's femtocell Wireless Network Extender suffered from the same problem: they weren't tied into FiOS.
The Hub was not meant to be paired exclusively with a Verizon FiOS connection, and that could have proven to be its ultimate undoing. It was marketed as a companion to a 2-year Verizon Wireless contract, and allowed the device to be used on an Internet connection from any provider. Nevertheless, it added a $35 monthly charge onto the customer's wireless bill, in addition to the initial $200 investment and $80 per additional VoIP handset charge.
Unlike Verizon's Hub, AT&T's VoIP "kitchenphone" called HomeManager is packaged with AT&T's U-Verse service and is limited to markets supporting that service, therefore, it has managed to last for just over a year with no outward signs of stopping.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Google Wave expands, in search of a clear use-case scenario

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 7:14pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Today, Google is expected to invite as many as 100,000 more participants into the private beta of its concurrent communications system, called Wave. As that happens, many more participants will be able to not only communicate with one another in a more granular form of real-time, but potentially collaborate on work and projects.
It's that latter part of the program that's supposed to congeal at some point into a collective sense of purpose. But this time, unlike Microsoft's first experiments with Dynamic Data Exchange between applications on the same computer three decades ago, there isn't yet a clear, single purpose for the system. No question it could bring individuals as close together as people separated by indefinite distance could become; but as to the question of what they do with one another once they do get together, Google is hoping this question -- like so many others it puts out there in the open -- resolves itself.
Yesterday, Google offered links to a number of different independent assessments of the possible, eventual purpose of Google Wave, though it offered them as use-case scenarios rather than projections of possible goals for the product...which is what many actually were.
New York filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky, for instance, envisioned a new scenario for collaborative filmmaking where all the creative resources are continually working on the same digital product, existing in the same space. He pointed out that, if computing has done anything for the filmmaking process up to now, it's in building up the current workload and expediting it under the sequential model that has existed for decades.
"The movie-making process has remained largely unchanged in over a hundred years. Think about it. While technology may have advanced the way we do things, it hasn't really affected what we are doing," Poritsky wrote. Using workflow charts to help demonstrate his point, he continued, "Whether you are making a low-budget documentary or a Hollywood blockbuster, these steps are all required. You go somewhere to shoot your subject. The film is processed at a lab, then color corrected and put onto video tapes, which are then dubbed to any number of formats depending on how many people need to access your footage. This is key, the more people who need to access the footage need a physical copy of it. The tapes are then captured into an editing system and cut together. The final step...encompasses all of the steps required to get the piece viewable for an audience. Touching up picture, tweaking color, negative cutting, digital intermediate, and film printing are just a few examples of this last leg of filmmaking."
Enabling this sequence to flow smoothly, he went on, requires a hard and fast process of accountability, all of which is hardened by e-mail and databases (and, if Microsoft has its way, a workflow management system). "These kinds of systems are a safety net. They don't enhance the process, they simply make it so that when things break down you can find where the weak spot is hidden."
A possible substitute model for this kind of workflow, Poritsky posited, is represented by a star topology where all the creative resources are exchanging work processes concurrently with a centralized repository and communications nexus, which he calls the "Filmmaker's Wave." He acknowledged that even today's networks aren't fast or wide enough to be able to manage completely concurrent, real-time sharing of super-high-definition video. But once that problem was solved, Google Wave could utilize something similar to its model for photo sharing between family members, to share moving images with crisp, multi-channel sound between technicians, editors, and producers.
But does Google understand that message, and is it setting similar goals for its Wave project? An interview this morning between two Google Wave developers and the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones suggests that they may be aware of goal-setting endeavors such as Poritsky's, but that they're more content to let folks such as Poritsky foster those goals for themselves, than drive that process from the top down.
Cellan-Jones asked Google's Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon a very direct question: What's the difference between communicating and collaborating using Wave, and "instant messaging on steroids?" It wasn't just a spur-of-the-moment metaphor, and Cellan-Jones probably knew that at the time: As far back as 2001, British Telecom was involved in a joint venture with Intel to develop a concurrent wireless telecommunications network that they repeatedly described using the exact same language; more recently, IBM has been trying to market a set of so-called Community Tools that has been marketed using that same metaphor.
That didn't faze Google's Rasmussen, though, who was happy to just claim the metaphor for himself and leave it at that: "I think e-mail and instant messaging on steroids is not a bad start," he responded, "but you can actually do a lot of different types of both communication and collaboration in Wave. You can have conversations like you would in e-mail today...you can have instant messaging conversations. But you can also collaborate on content; you can let users edit each other's messages."
This was demonstrated through the use of colored tags on cursors that can, in real-time move up the ladder of an IM conversation to change some words into other words, or turn an emoticon from sad to happy.
If this phase of the Google Wave project accomplishes anything truly significant, it may be in helping to frame the enormous gulf between what we have to do to make live collaboration truly functional over a global network, and what we have today to do it with.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
TiVo/RIM partnership yields new BlackBerry app

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 6:11pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Just about one year after announcing their partnership, TiVo and Research in Motion today have announced that the "TiVo for BlackBerry smartphones" application is downloadable today in BlackBerry App World or as a direct download.
The free app lets users schedule recordings on their Series2 or Series3 TiVo DVR from their BlackBerry (software v.4.2.0 and up), browse most popular shows or daily picks and view programming details such as title, description, runtime original air date and time and thumbnail. It also includes an advanced search function which lets users filter results by title, keyword, or by actor.
Previously, the only option presented to smartphone users for mobile access to their DVR was through TiVo's mobile site, which lacks much of the richness of today's dedicated app. The app's UI is even styled after the TiVo DVR interface.
TiVo has not announced if a similar app is coming to iPhone, Android, or webOS. Last June, AT&T began to offer an iPhone app to let users remotely access their U-Verse DVRs, comparable to today's TiVo for BlackBerry smartphones app.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Microsoft credits/blames user feedback for latest Home Server delay

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 5:38pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It's beginning to be a habit: In the short history of Microsoft's surprisingly popular Windows Home Server product, its first two major upgrades (each with truckloads of bug fixes), called Power Packs, suffered from delays -- especially after Microsoft heavily promoted their upcoming release. Monday evening, it happened again: After what appeared to be a successful launch event at the CEDIA 2009 expo in Atlanta last week, Microsoft announced that Power Pack 3's release is now slated for toward the end of this year.
That's bad news for many customers who had been planning to upgrade their home systems to Windows 7. There are a number of features in the current Windows Home Server Power Pack 2, designed for Vista, that do not work properly in Windows 7, especially with respect to backup -- one of the main reasons to use Home Server in the first place. PP3 was supposed to include the fixes that make it compatible with Win7's completely revised backup, and last week, at least, they looked pretty good.
There is only one way that Microsoft could have made the situation worse for Home Server users, and that is by making it appear that they were the reason for the delay. But that's what product representative Nicole Berett implied in a statement on one of the company's blogs last night.
"The bottom line is that we've gotten tremendous feedback (and test coverage) from you, our enthusiasts, around Power Pack 3 -- and we couldn't be more excited," Berett wrote, invoking one of those euphemisms that have come to be associated with letdowns. "This being said, our top priority is to ensure the absolute highest level of product quality, and to this end, we will continue with additional testing of the software. As with past software releases, our team will not ship the official final release of Power Pack 3 until the community has validated our work. We expect to deliver before the end of the year."
Berett went on to say that the latest beta of PP3 does appear to resolve the main Windows 7 incompatibility issues, including the ability to do a full "bare metal restore," and enabling Win7 clients to wake up automatically to perform overnight backups. But with GA day for Windows 7 still set at October 22, Home Server users may be stuck using the PP3 beta for at least another three months.
The only real clue as to why this latest delay is occurring, if the issue is not technical, comes from the fact that suddenly there are two Windows Home Server blogs. The one that had been kept up by the engineering team, through TechNet, this morning deferred the bad news announcement (wisely) to this new one maintained by the marketing team. The old blog's community lead, Kevin Beares, foreshadowed a likely transition of power to marketing with an ominous sounding blog post yesterday that contained the following: "In the near future, we may make a complete move from our TechNet location to the Windows Team Blog. Stay tuned..."
There is only one way that Microsoft could have made the situation even worse for itself than this: Early this morning, in an coincidental move that surely could not be blamed on him, another marketing team member on a separate section of the Windows Team Blog stressed the vital importance of all of Microsoft's partners getting products for Windows 7 ready on time, in a post praising his team's Windows 7 Logo program.
"The Compatible With Windows 7 Logo is designed to help customers make better purchase decisions by identifying products that have passed Microsoft designed tests for compatibility and reliability with Windows 7," wrote senior director for strategy Mark Relph. "Since we designed Windows 7 to be compatible with the products you use every day, many of these products will just work and thousands of partners are committing to meeting an even higher quality bar."
As it turns out, though, it will be Microsoft itself that will fail to meet many of Relph's goals, with one of Windows 7's major supporting products probably missing the holiday shopping rush.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Bento personal database for Mac gains Wi-Fi sharing, security

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 4:25am CEST par Jacqueline Emigh

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

Launched on Tuesday, Bento 3 is the third major release of the personal database from Apple's FileMaker division since the original rollout of the product in January 2008.
With the new Bento 3, users can employ Apple Bonjour, a technology intro'd earlier for iTunes and iPhotos, to let other users on a Wi-Fi or wired LAN locate and view information in their personal databases.
Bento 3 users can protect their information by allowing access only to those who know a "sharing password," said Ryan Rosenberg, FileMaker's VP of marketing services, in a briefing for Betanews. The new version also adds 128-bit AES encryption, which can be used for safeguarding either the entire database or fields.
New in version 3, too, are iPhoto integration, a "Grid" view, and ten more templates, including Job Search, Home Search, TV & Movie Catalog, Vacation Planner, and Meeting Notes, for instance.
Added to the 25 templates already included in Bento, the ten new ones bring the total to 35. But users can also download any of 286 templates from the online Bento Template Exchange that went live on June 16, Betanews was told.
In a demo, Rosenberg showed how a husband and wife might use the new Home Search template in Bento 3 to give individual ratings to new houses they've visited, and then to share their respective ratings of the various buildings over a network.
But although people continue to use Bento for these and other personal purposes, including keeping track of hobby collections, recent research by Apple's FileMaker indicates that many users have turned to Bento for running small businesses out of their homes. One home-based appellate lawyer in San Francisco, California, uses Bento to organize information about clients and cases, said Rosenberg.
Mac users in larger organizations tend to gravitate to the FileMaker database, according to Rosenberg. Apple first devised Bento to compete with Microsoft Access, he noted.
Through the new iPhoto integration in Bento 3, you can see photos in Bento through any of four views: Table, Form, Split, or the new Grid view. You can link photos to contacts, projects, events, and other Bento data, and you can store more information about a photo than what iPhoto is able to accommodate, the VP elaborated. The new Grid view can show text along with thumbnails of pictures, forms files, and movies.
Available immediately, Bento 3 is priced at $49. Apple's FileMaker is also offering $20 rebates to people who own Bento 1 or 2.
Last May, FileMaker unveiled a smaller edition of Bento specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Rosenberg pointed out. A free update to the $4.99 mobile edition -- supporting synchronization with the Bento 3 desktop edition for Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard -- was also announced this week.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
US court vacates another jury's huge patent verdict against Microsoft

Publié: septembre 30, 2009, 4:15am CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In the second colossal overturning of a jury verdict against Microsoft this month alone, a US District Court judge in Rhode Island has completely tossed out a $388 million patent infringement ruling against Microsoft. But rather than just accept the arguments that the jury's formula was excessive -- an argument that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with last September 11 -- the district court judge flame-broiled the case of an Australian inventor who claimed to have created keycode-driven software activation, as not only without merit but ludicrous.
Judge William Smith shot down most of inventor Uniloc's arguments, except for the one right up front. It concerned whether Microsoft's product activation system used a locally unique identifier (LUID) to represent a software license holder -- the person, not the software. Uniloc's patent described a system whereby a completely unique (or as Microsoft might put it, "globally unique") identifier represents a licensee. The randomizer in this system is supposed to be powerful enough that it would be virtually impossible for any two systems operating independently to generate the same number. (This despite the fact that, years ago, this reporter was able to accomplish this feat during a beta test of GUID.)
Microsoft's argument was that "virtually" impossible was not enough, but more importantly still, that its activation system was written in such a way that personally identifying information was excluded from the license -- intentionally, so that no one stealing a computer could reverse-engineer a software license to learn about the licensee. Judge Smith ruled, however, that a reasonable person could come to the conclusion that such a uniquely generated number tended to represent the software installed on the computer belonging to the person whose name could be looked up in the Windows account directory. That fact, however, inevitably played into Microsoft's hands, because of how Uniloc defended its own patented method by comparing it to how DNA identifies an individual person. Microsoft's method, it turns out, isn't like DNA.
Uniloc's own expert witness testified that its patented technology generated unique values using a hashing algorithm that would utilize multiple inputs using addition. Microsoft's technique uses the MD5 algorithm, which Uniloc's own expert described as not performing the task explained in Uniloc's patent.
"A simple comparison of MD5 as a whole to the algorithm Uniloc's patent discloses clearly reveals non-equivalence," Judge Smith ruled. "While the existence of additional components or different steps does not per se preclude a structure from being considered substantially the same as another structure, the various non-additive mathematical operations in MD5 demonstrate significant (and undisputed) differences between MD5 and the summation algorithm in the '216 patent [for Uniloc], which cannot be overstated. For example, the compressive, circular shifting and mixing functions fundamentally create a more secure result compared to an algorithm based in summation as the specification discloses. Indeed, the unchallenged evidence was that MD5's hallmark is the variety of its logical and mathematical steps to obtain a more secure result. This complexity highlights the advantage of an irreversible one-way function with a fixed output, instead of an algorithm that uses a single type of reversible operation (with no fixed output), such as that disclosed in the patent."
Uniloc's case pretty much falls apart from there, because the use of a different technique than the one patented pretty much implies that Microsoft could not have acted maliciously to infringe Uniloc's patent; indeed, it could be argued that Microsoft actively worked to avoid infringement by using MD5, which Microsoft's expert explained as a superior algorithm and which Uniloc avoided contesting directly.
Instead, Uniloc's attorneys went with the strategy of trying to explain its technology in very simple terms -- perhaps too simple, relying on bits and pieces of spotlighted terms and concepts as evidence that Microsoft's entire scheme violated Uniloc's entire patented concept. The judge called Uniloc on it: "Uniloc's approach, both to the jury and now the Court, is to boil down complex computer software programs to a kind of generic word find puzzle, that ignores how the allegedly infringing system actually works and, most important, the actual disclosure in the '216 patent. Some of these documents no doubt say MD5 and SHA-1 are a type of hash, or checksum. This is undisputed. But the fact that the word 'hash' or the phrase 'hash total' appears in the same sentence as 'addition' (in documents unrelated to PA [program activation) is beside the point in the overall picture of what the evidence showed the complex hashes in this case actually do, and whether that is equivalent to the 'by addition' structure Uniloc disclosed."
One of the areas fuzzed over using this tactic, the judge found, was the concept in Uniloc's patent that the software only becomes functional once the software is activated. Microsoft's system has historically given users a grace period, sometimes with limited or diminished functionality, before shutting off access to software; and that very fact suggests that it isn't the activation that makes the software functional in the first place.
"This grace period functionality is not trivial. For example, Office XP limits the licensee to 50 boots, and the product functions with all of its features during this time (the evidence was that on the 51st try, if the user does not activate most features become disabled). But if a user were to install the software, agree to the EULA [end user license agreement] and then not close the software for six months, it would function fully for that period of time, and have 49 boots remaining. This is clearly much more than a frisbee. The long and short of it is this: as a matter of law, PA cannot be a registration system with mode switching means as that term has been construed. Uniloc deems this conclusion a hypertechnical trap contrived by Microsoft. But in this writer's view, it is the unavoidable (and correct) result -- one that in hindsight could have, and perhaps should have, been reached when Microsoft first raised it as a summary judgment question of law for the Court, not the jury. It is undisputed that licensing of Microsoft's accused products takes place separate from and before activation."
Judge Smith evidently was capable of navigating through the most intricate details of both sides' expert arguments, including a very passable summary of how MD5 works. Perhaps neither side expected him to have such a comprehensive understanding of technology as well as the law. As the remainder of his ruling unraveled, he did take the jury to task after all for succumbing to Uniloc's appeal to the jury, which he said "elevates form over substance," in assessing damages not at $18 million or less but at $388 million. Should this case be retried, Judge Smith wrote, the evidence that led the jury to that higher figure should be deemed "irrelevant."
[This article was slightly corrected at 3:47 pm EDT September 30, 2009, to account for a missing sentence. Facts were not altered in the editing process.]
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009