Gregarius » BetaNews.Com » octobre 14, 2009

BetaNews.Com (7 non lus)

Senate GOP: FCC's net neutrality 'will limit the freedom of the Internet'

Publié: octobre 14, 2009, 11:40pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Using the strongest language to date in firing a shot across the bow against unchallenged regulation of the broadband access market, a group of 18 Senate Republicans led by Sam Brownback (R - Kan.) sent Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski a letter yesterday, signaling their intention to oppose any efforts by the FCC to create new restrictions on broadband Internet access suppliers, without clear case studies proving such restrictions are necessary.
"We fear that the proposals you announced during your September 21, 2009 speech will be counterproductive," wrote Brownback and his colleagues, "and risk harming the great advancements in broadband speed and deployment that we have witnessed in recent years, and will limit the freedom of the Internet." (PDF available here, from the Washington Post.)
Brownback's words appear to echo -- only with greater volume -- the case made by House Republicans in their own letter to the Chairman last week. The case that Republicans in Congress have been making since the installment of a new administration is that no commission should impose unilateral regulations on markets without clear proof that such regulations are necessary -- specifically, that players in those markets are acting unfairly, and that consumers are harmed in the process.
Last month, in a landmark speech, Chairman Genachowski proposed the addition of two "Freedoms" in the communications industry worth protecting, to the "Four Freedoms" originally proposed by former Chairman Michael Powell. The "Fifth Principle," as Genachowski called it, would prevent ISPs from utilizing content-based means to restrict consumers' access to Internet content, or conversely to clear the way for less restricted bandwidth to be made accessible for a premium to content providers. On principle, as it were, Republicans in Congress are opposed to the Fifth Principle because it would eliminate the incentives provided in legislation dating back to 2005, for the creation of a nationwide licensing program for broadband services, supplementing the municipal and statewide licenses that currently exist.
But there's another reason: By deferring the matter of mandating net neutrality to the FCC -- an agency of the executive branch of government -- Senate Democrats pave the way for communications industry matters to be fast-tracked to a committee where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 2. Despite the biggest Democratic majority in years in the Senate, filibusters are still feasible, at least in theory.
Yet even when filibusters can't overcome a 3-2 vote of the FCC, Senate Republicans may still have a hand to play, as Sen. Brownback directly implied, more than once. Broadband providers have been seen as siding with Republicans since before the net neutrality debate began. If Genachowski were to pass his Fifth and Sixth Principles without debate, Brownback intimated, certain faucets of investment might be turned down a few notches.
"Broadband service providers have invested billions of dollars in building and upgrading their networks to better serve their customers," the senators write. "However, burdensome regulations will have a chilling effect on further private sector investment, at a time when the US economy can least afford such an impact. It is because of significant competition among broadband service providers that consumers have more choices and are enjoying the best online experience that has ever been available...Market-based solutions and competition is working [sic]."
Among the other leading Senate Republicans signing Brownback's letter were Chuck Grassley (R - Iowa), former Presidential candidate John McCain (R - Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R - SC), Tom Coburn (R - Okla.), and Saxby Chambliss (R - Geo.)
After the FCC issued a ruling last February against Comcast, saying it was wrong for the leading cable ISP to throttle traffic based on BitTorrent-related sampling, it was Sen. Brownback who issued one of the strongest comments in opposition to the ruling: "There has been no market failure to justify the heavy-hand of so-called net neutrality," the senator said (emphasis ours), "and I do not believe the Commission has the authority to enforce principles as if they were adopted rules. The Bush Administration has made deregulation of the Internet and the telecommunications sector a priority; today's move was a giant step backward and may harm innovation and broadband deployment. Competitive markets, not the government, should decide which business model best suits the industry."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Verizon's Storm 2, hopefully with stronger gusts than Storm 1

Publié: octobre 14, 2009, 9:15pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The BlackBerry Storm 2 (also known as "Odin," "9550," or "9520") has been the subject of passing rumors for the last six months. As the purported sequel to Research in Motion's first touchscreen BlackBerry, it looked as though the new device would improve upon the shortcomings of its predecessor without deviating from its familiar style. In other words, it would keep the same chassis shape and trademark "clickable touchscreen," but would give the device more consumer appeal by doing things they actually want, like adding Wi-Fi, improving the interface, and bringing the applications up to par with its competition.
It's not that the original Storm was a slouch by most measurements. But since it was such a great departure from the traditional BlackBerry form factor, its reception among BlackBerry fans was mixed. I personally know four BlackBerry loyalists who bought a Storm and subsequently returned it, citing such reasons as, "It didn't feel right," and "It wasn't what I was expecting."
Six months ago, sources "familiar with the subject" predicted a September 29 launch; and last month there were predictions that the device would actually launch today, so prior reports have been pretty much voided. But there's been a recent blitz of information, which essentially guarantees that the device is about to arrive.
Last week, the customary pre-launch accessories began to show up at Best Buy, fan sites began posting pictures and videos (some more Canadian than others). Yesterday The New York Times said Verizon will be launching the Storm 2 in the US this week, and overseas reports suggest a mid-October launch. Vodafone Germany began listing the BlackBerry Storm 9550 on its Site this week, but the page has since been removed.
It's still not official, but all eyes are on Verizon for the new Storm to hit tonight, tomorrow, or Friday.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Not that Windows is any enclave of safety: Microsoft's biggest Patch Tuesday

Publié: octobre 14, 2009, 9:03pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

A lot of the presentations at security (or perhaps more appropriately, "insecurity") conferences such as Black Hat are devoted to experiments or "dares" for hackers to break through some new version of digital security. After awhile, it gets to be like watching pre-schoolers daring one another to punch through ever-taller Lego walls. But in the midst of last July's briefings came at least one scientifically researched, carefully considered, and thoughtfully presented presentation: the result of a full-scale investigation by three engineers at a consultancy called Hustle Labs, demonstrating how the presumption of trust between browsers, their add-ons, and other code components can trigger the types of software failures that can become exploitable by malicious code.
Engineers Mark Dowd, Ryan Smith, and David Dewey are being credited today with shedding light on a coding practice by developers that leaves the door open for browser crashes. The discovery of specific instances where such a practice could easily become exploitable is the focus of the most critical of Microsoft's regular second-Tuesday-of-the-month patches -- arguably the biggest of 13 bulletins addressing a record 34 fixes.
Among today's fixes is one that specifically addresses a relatively new class of Web apps that use XAML, Microsoft's XML-based front-end layout language, instead of HTML for presenting the user with controls. The class of apps is currently being called XAML Browser Application, or XBAP (perhaps Microsoft should have it shut off just for the lousy acronym). Simply browsing to a maliciously crafted XBAP application could create an attack vector, says one of Microsoft's bulletins published this morning.
But that isn't actually the problem, but the symptom of a very serious problem uncovered by the Hustle Labs trio -- one that may generate several more security fixes in coming months. At the root of the problem is the fact that browser plug-ins and components external to browsers -- for instance, the components that tie browsers to the .NET Framework in order to run XBAP apps -- are given higher levels of trust than the browser itself. These days, trust levels are turned down on the browser to disable most any chance of a simple JavaScript deleting elements of the user's file system without authorization; but plug-ins are often given a medium level of trust simply because they must be interoperable with a component (the Web browser) that is outside of its own context.
So when a plug-in creates references to new components, a principle called transitive trust mandates that this medium-level trust be transferred to the new component. And when that new component is an instance of an ActiveX object, that new level of trust may mean that if the object causes an exception, the mess it leaves behind could have just enough privilege attributed to it to execute malicious code.
The mess itself, the Hustle Labs researchers illustrated last July at Black Hat (PDF available here), can be caused by a tricky data type that has raised my eyebrows since the early '90s when I witnessed its first demonstrations: It's the variant type, created to represent data that may be passed as a parameter between procedures or components, whose type may be unspecific or even unknown. The way Microsoft represents variants in memory is by pairing their type with their value as a single unit, and that type is actually a pointer to a structure. That structure may be a primary type, but most often in the case of COM components (known to Web users as ActiveX components), it's a complex object comprised of multiple data elements, assembled together like records in a database, often whose types may include other variants.
The problem with using variants, as Microsoft learned the hard way (more than once), is that when you're trying to secure the interfaces between components, the absence of explicit types makes it difficult to ensure that they're behaving within the rules. But as the researchers discovered, it's the security code itself -- what they call marshaling code, resurrecting language from COM's heyday -- that can actually cause a serious problem, a mess that leaves behind opportunities for exploitation.
"The most obvious mistake a control can make with regard to object retention is to neglect to add to the reference count of a COM object that it intends to retain," the trio writes. A reference count helps a control to maintain a handle to the object it's instantiated. But marshaling code, in an effort to provide security to the system, will also amend the reference count; and when it thinks the control is done with the object, it will decrement that count in turn. So if the control had any other plans for the object, it has to add its own reference count to the same object.
To make a (very) long story short, there often ends up being more pointers to the object than there are objects. And with medium-level privilege, those pointers can theoretically be exploited.
The case-in-point involves those nasty variants. Adding references to objects in memory often involves copying the objects themselves; and in the case of variants, there's a special function for that. But to know to use that special function, marshaling code would have to be aware that the objects being copied and re-referenced are variants; so instead, they resort to the tried-and-true memcpy() library function. That function is capable of copying the complex object, but in such a "shallow" way that it doesn't give a whit about whether the contents of the complex object are complex objects in themselves -- and since memcpy() predates COM by a few decades, it doesn't increment the reference count for new instances of included objects that are created in the process. A pointer to the new object exists, of course, but not the reference that COM requires.
So an ordinary memory cleanup routine could clean up the contents of the duplicated contained object, even though a component has designs on using that object later. As the group writes, "If the variant contains any sort of complex object, such as an IDispatch [a common COM object], a pointer to the object will be duplicated and utilized without adding an additional reference to the object. If the result of this duplicated variant is retained, the object being pointed to could be deleted, if every other instance of that object is released."
There are a multitude of similar examples in this research paper of essentially the same principle in action: a principle that points to a fundamental flaw in the way COM objects have been secured up to now. The Hustle Labs team takes Microsoft to task only at one point in the paper, and quite gently, for implementing Patch Tuesday fixes that tend to resort to using "killbits" in the Registry for turning off COM components and ActiveX controls impacted by this kind of vulnerability, instead of reworking the marshaling code to address the problem at a fundamental level.
So today's round of Patch Tuesday releases may go into more detail than just resorting to killbits -- in a few situations this week, new patches actually go into further depth at patching problems that were said to have been patched already, including with the GDI+ library. But it's an indication that independent researchers with conscientious goals are truly getting through.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Wi-Fi Direct aims to be the 'Bluetooth Killer'

Publié: octobre 14, 2009, 6:29pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Imagine a wireless home network where devices communicate directly with one another instead of through the wireless router -- a sort of mesh network without the need to switch to ad hoc mode. Today the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it has almost completed the standard which could make these a reality: Wi-Fi Direct.
Wi-Fi Direct was known as "Wi-Fi Peer-to-Peer," and has repeatedly been referred to in IEEE meetings as a possible "Bluetooth Killer." By means of this standard, direct connections between computers, phones, cameras, printers, keyboards, and future classes of components are established over Wi-Fi instead of another wireless technology governed by a separate standard.
Even though the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands are often dreadfully overcrowded in home networks, the appeal of such a standard is twofold: Any certified Wi-Fi Direct device will be able to communicate directly with any legacy Wi-Fi devices without the need for any new software on the legacy end, and transfer rates will be the same as infrastructure connections, thoroughly destroying Bluetooth. The theoretical maximum useful data transfer for Bluetooth 2.0 is 2.1 Mbps, while 802.11g has a theoretical maximum throughput of 54 Mbps.
"Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn't available. The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise," Wi-Fi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa said in a statement today.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Intel's plan to bring back the PC market

Publié: octobre 14, 2009, 6:03pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

When the worst part of the Economic Storm of 2008 was about to hit, Intel made preparations by moving its emphasis toward Atom, its lowest-end processor for netbooks and embedded devices -- at the time, a single-core unit. Sure, it would drive average selling prices (ASPs) down several points, but it would provide the sales volume necessary to keep Intel in the game, so all hands were bracing themselves against Atom for support.
The biggest sign to date that the storm has officially passed came from Intel's quarterly call exactly one year later. Mention of Atom, the lifeline of the company through the worst of it, was minimized. And we're back to talking about Nehalem, the company's current power-saving architecture, and the move from 45 nm to 32 nm lithography. At least in the skies above Santa Clara, the all-clear has sounded.
During Intel's quarterly conference call to financial analysts yesterday (our thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript), we heard the high, resonant sound of that all-clear siren, in the form of a strong and comfortable 57.6% gross margin -- almost one point higher than forecast by the company last year, seven points better than in Q2 2009, and just one point lower than the company was facing before the bad economy hit full-force.
We also heard some evidence of how Intel plans to move forward from here, based on estimates that the general PC market has grown back from its pitfalls in Q1 2009, to just about flat if not slightly better. Essentially, it works like this: Usually, chipsets are a no-gainer business for Intel -- in fact, analysts used to complain during the years when Intel thought it could rely on chipsets as a growth market in itself. Now, with the chipset market having shaken out somewhat, there's more of an expectation that CPU makers AMD and Intel will contribute more to that end of the market, in order to better define the platform.
So Intel has seeded the market in the previous quarter with chipsets, knowing that as OEMs build more motherboards and notebook PCs that utilize those chipsets, demand will be seeded for the CPUs on which these chipsets rely. It's the reverse of the 2005 strategy (that didn't always work), which boiled down to, "If you like the CPU, you'll love the chipset that's made for it."
Here's how Intel CFO Stacy Smith described it to a Merrill Lynch analyst: "Remember the way the supply chain works -- and we think the supply chain is looking pretty normal right now -- if they put some chipset inventory in place in the third quarter, and then they couple it with a CPU in the fourth quarter, [that will] probably [result in] a little richer mix to CPUs in the fourth."
CEO Paul Otellini did mention Intel's shift toward more "systems-on-a-chip," but that refers more to the embedded side of the business. That's where Atom still rules, but Atom was not the star of the day today by any means. The shift in the "product mix" is now clearly toward notebooks and away from desktops, just like it was before, though the netbook form factor was given thanks for helping Intel hang on.
Here's how Otellini passed the torch back to the old generation, from his opening remarks: "Our mobile business had a particularly strong quarter -- in fact, we saw the sequential unit growth rate of notebook processors and chipsets actually exceed the growth rate of Atom processors and chipsets. While Atom and netbooks are important growth drivers for us, our traditional notebook business remains one of the primary drivers of revenue growth, and we expect that to continue in the future."
You don't need chipsets to drive Atom -- that's what system-on-a-chip architecture is all about. Atom already is a platform. As the traditional end of the market resumes its shift to notebooks -- perhaps on fast-forward, compared to the speed that CPU makers anticipated back in 2007 -- Intel is looking to build a complete platform, where the platform drives demand for Nehalem and future 32 nm architectures rather than the other way around, "allowing us to expand margins in a difficult economic environment," remarked Otellini.
It was a leaner Q3 for 2009 than for 2008, but Intel successfully scaled down its operating expenditures to match: its margins year-over-year are a little higher than flat, when Atom's success could have easily driven them into the toilet. The company earned $1.9 billion after expenses last quarter, on $9.4 billion of revenue. For the next quarter, the company gave more direct guidance than we'd seen in recent quarters, expecting as much as 62% gross margins on revenue of about $10.1 billion -- great returns on what probably will not be record sales.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Acer rings in year 2 of Android with a Snapdragon-based device

Publié: octobre 14, 2009, 5:15pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Acer today took the lid off of its first Android-based smartphone, the Liquid, formerly shown off as the "A1." In addition to being the top computer manufacturer's first Android smartphone, it's also the first Android phone based on the 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset.
It's not the first Snapdragon phone altogether -- that honor went to the Windows Mobile-based Toshiba TG01 earlier this year -- but the Liquid will become be the most powerful Android handset available. Sony Ericsson is rumored to also be working on a Snapdragon-based Android phone with a UI known as "Rachael," and HTC is reportedly working on the "Dragon," but neither company has officially debuted a product as Acer has today.
The majority of the half dozen or so Android handsets available worldwide run at 528 MHz; but as the software platform approaches the beginning of its second year in commercial availability, companies are beginning to step up its processing power. November more or less marks the beginning of the "Android year," so Sprint will be breaking out the 800 MHz Samsung Moment on the first of the month.
Acer however, did not announce when the Liquid will be made commercially available. Today's announcement was made in the UK, so that will presumably be the first market to receive the new Acer Liquid.
The specs for the Liquid have yet to be released, but the Snapdragon chipset specs are no mystery: 1 GHz CPU; 600 MHz DSP; 3D graphics support (up to 22 million triangles per second and 133 million 3D pixels per second); 1280 x 720 HD video support; integrated 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth; built-in gpsOne engine; support for cameras up to 12 megapixel; and mobile broadcast TV support.
Though Snapdragon is capable of 720p HD, the Liquid's resolution is only WVGA (800 x 480). Additionally, Acer says the device will come with "a new user interface with easy access to entertainment and Web bookmarks," so expect yet another manufacturer-specific Android UI like HTC's Sense and Samsung's TouchWIZ.
Similar to the way T-Mobile packaged Geodelic's Sherpa exclusively with the MyTouch3G, Acer will package a Spinlets app exclusively with Liquid. Spinlets is a relatively new media company which has partnerships with Sony BMG, CBS Interactive, Grab Networks, and Vio Mobile to provide free streaming music and video content.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
First public Opera 10.1 beta competes against its predecessor for performance

Publié: octobre 14, 2009, 12:18am CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Opera 10.1 Beta 1 for Windows from Fileforum now.
At a time when performance and speed are more important to browser users than ever before, and when Web apps users need the best platform available, suddenly it's Opera Software that is having the most difficult time delivering. While Opera 10's "Turbo Mode" is intended to leverage the company's pre-rendering capabilities originally designed for the Opera Mini mobile browser, none of that matters with respect to raw JavaScript performance; and these days, Web browsers are essentially JavaScript engines with some markup on the side.
Today, the first builds of Opera 10.1 that officially bear the "Beta 1" label were released to the company's servers. Betanews tests on this latest build were not very promising, as its overall CRPI score outperforms that of the latest stable Opera 10 by less than one percentage point. In fact, scores for the first public beta fell in Vista actually fell below those of the latest stable Opera 10 by about 7%.
Opera 10 Beta 1 scores a CRPI of 6.35, which compares to a 6.30 score for the stable Opera 10 (which we retested in Vista), and a 6.56 score for the last Beta 1 preview build we tested last week.
Click here for a complete introduction to the Betanews Comprehensive Performance Index.
On both newer Windows platforms (Vista and Windows 7), Opera 10 Beta 1 tended to post slower rendering times than the stable version, with the exception being a slightly faster rendering score in XP (6.17 for Beta 1 versus 6.11 for Opera 10). On Vista, for some reason, the differences in the CSS rendering test are far more pronounced, in tests we repeated just to validate the results (6.46 in Beta 1 versus 8.81 in Opera 10, and yes, O10 is faster at rendering on Vista than XP).
And even in the CSS selectors test, where the previous beta preview builds had shown some nice gains, performance fell flat or below, with scores in XP and Windows 7 for Beta 1 falling below those for the stable build. The differences are not severe, though multiple browser users who have been spoiled in recent days by the hurdle-jumping contest between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome may be disappointed by Opera essentially bringing up the rear.

FOR THE LATEST COMPLETE CRPI SCORES:
- Expect 22.8% performance boost from next week's Firefox 3.6 beta by Scott Fulton
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009