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BetaNews.Com (7 non lus)

Move over GarageBand and make room for MAGIX Music Maker MX

Publié: septembre 6, 2011, 11:40pm CEST par Mark Wilson

Music creation software has something of a poor reputation, with many people regarding it as being expensive to buy and complicated to use. This is a reputation that MAGIX is trying to change with its Music Maker program, and the latest version, MAGIX Music Maker MX goes a long way to achieving this aim. While the program is incredibly simple to use, the music creation you produce using the software can be made as basic or as complex and involved as you like.

Used at its most basic, MAGIX Music Maker MX provides you with 64 audio tracks onto which you can arrange a series of samples to create the skeleton of a musical composition. If you want, you can leave things as they are, but even the least musically minded of people could not resist tinkering with special effects, dropping in a few loops here and there, and then there is the drum machine to play with. Before you know it, you have become fully engrossed in the process of putting together a piece of music -- and it does not matter that you’ve never picked up an instrument in your life.

Creating music using the building blocks of readymade loops and samples is the easiest way to get started with the program, and even in this way it is possible to create something quite impressive. With samples covering everything from hip hop and rock to dance and electronic, there’s sure to be something that inspires you. A wide range of drum and melody loops means that a completed track is never far away.

Of course, to get the most from the application, it is necessary to take things to the next level, and MAGIX Music Maker MX has a fairly gentle learning curve that enables you to take things at your own pace. You can learn how to use individual components of the music suite and each will enable you to come up with something new that can be added to your current project. One such a component is the Lead Synth which is an analog synthesiser that can be used to create your own melodies. Used in conjunction with a selection of realistic Vita Solo instruments, the results can be stunning.

Dance To Your Own Beat

Few tracks would be complete without some sort of percussion being present, and this is where the Drum engine comes into its own. Whether you are looking for a basic beat to keep things going, or you like the idea of recreating a classic drum sound, all the tools you need are available to enable you to do so.

The MX part of Music Maker’s name stand for Media eXchange and is a reference to the fact that it is now easier than ever to share tracks between different MAGIX products. For example, if you use Music Maker to record yourself playing an instrument, there may be unwanted background noise. It is now quick and simple to transfer the recording to Audio Cleaning Lab for enhancement before passing it back for use in your music project. Music Maker need not just be about creation stand-alone music; it can also be used to create soundtracks for videos. If you have a video project that you have been working on in Movie Edit Pro, it can be imported into Music Maker so you can get to work.

While the program is very easy to get started with -- if you are not the most musically minded of users, one of the best ways to learn about the various tools is by trial and error -- there are a number of online video tutorial that can point you in the right direction if you get stuck at any point. But the point is that MAGIX has made its name by producing software that makes potentially complicated things, such as music creation, simple for anyone to try their hand at.

Premium Edition

While the standard version of the program is packed with features, there is even more to work with in MAGIX Music Maker MX Premium. If you were worried that the 64 audio tracks available to you in the standard version of the software, the Premium version gives you 96 top work with as well as a wider range of effects, samples and instruments. BeatBox Plus is an enhanced version of the MAGIX drum machine, while tools such as the analog compressor and high quality synthesiser allows for great experimentation. To help with the process of creating loop and samples, a dedicated audio editor as well as a MIDI editor are available. Going Premium also unlocks the ability to work with 5.1 surround sound and includes a mastering suite to help with the production of CDs.

Whether you opt for the standard or premium version of MAGIX Music Maker MX, you are investing in a quality program that will service your music creation needs well. You can find out more and download a free trial of the program by paying a visit to the MAGIX Music Maker MX download page. The software runs on Windows XP/Vista/7.
Google says Gmail has been up 99.99% of the time in 2011

Publié: septembre 6, 2011, 11:14pm CEST par Tim Conneally

Google has set a pretty high bar for itself, guaranteeing 99.9% availability of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Groups and Google Sites to its Google Apps customers. If it cannot meet that level of availability, all of its customers are entitled to a certain amount of free days worth of service in each billing cycle.

In a somewhat self-aggrandizing blog about Google's cloud services today, Google Apps product manager John Collins reiterated that Gmail was up for 99.984% of 2010, and revealed that it's currently at over 99.99% uptime for the first half of 2011.

Looking through the Google Apps Status list reveals how comparatively isolated Gmail outages have been. On August 29th, for example, there was an outage for 3 hours that affected less than .05% of the Gmail userbase, and the last outage was a little over a month prior, affecting less than .01% of the Gmail userbase for about 8 hours, by the unofficial number of registered Gmail users, that amounts to less than 20,000 users.
Partition Wizard 7 offers little new in free version

Publié: septembre 6, 2011, 9:24pm CEST par Nick Peers

MiniTool Solution Ltd has released a brand new version of its non-destructive partitioning software. MiniTool Partition Wizard 7.0, available as a free-for-personal-use Home Edition, is also can be had in a number of paid-for editions, with prices starting from $30 for Partition Wizard 7.0 Professional.

The biggest update in Partition Wizard 7.0 is actually restricted to paid-for editions of the program, namely the added support for Simple, Spanned, Striped, Mirrored and RAID-5 volumes, with the addition of a brand new Dynamic Disk menu offering a host of new options for handling such volumes.

Although the Dynamic Disk menu is present in Partition Wizard 7.0 Home Edition, it’s grayed out, indicating the option isn’t available. Other options restricted to paid-for editions include merging partitions, converting dynamic disks back to basic ones without data loss and changing a partition’s cluster size.

Dynamic volumes can be created, deleted and formatted, plus you can resize or move volumes without data loss as well as error-check and repair file system errors on dynamic volumes. You can also change dynamic volume cluster sizes as well as securely wipe volumes if they contain sensitive data. You can also explore volume contents before you change any parameters.

Partition Wizard 7.0 Home Edition does gain one feature, albeit one that was previously restricted to paid-for customers: the ability to “hot extend” the Windows NTFS system partition without having to reboot your computer as part of the process.

Despite the lack of new functionality in the Home edition, the free bootable CD version has also been updated to version 7.0, complete with grayed out Dynamic Disk menu. This is downloadable as an ISO file which you subsequently burn to a bootable disc using software like Active@ ISO Burner. Once done, boot from the disc and you gain the same functionality as found in the Home edition of Partition Wizard.

Partition Wizard 7.0 Home Edition is available now as a free-for-personal-use download for Windows XP, Vista and 7.
Sprint files antitrust lawsuit against AT&T, T-Mobile merger

Publié: septembre 6, 2011, 8:24pm CEST par Tim Conneally

On the last day of August, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit in the District of Columbia to block the proposed merger of national wireless network operators AT&T and T-Mobile. Tuesday, competing national carrier Sprint Nextel announced it had filed a similar antitrust suit in federal court, saying the $39 billion merger is, in short, illegal.

"Sprint opposes AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile,” a statement from Susan Z. Haller, vice president of litigation at Sprint, said today. “With today’s legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.”

Sprint has already been very outspoken about the potential harm it sees coming from the merger, and CEO Dan Hesse has said the merger would stifle competition and growth, and that "wireless innovation will be jeopardized" if it passes.

"AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile is brazenly anticompetitive," Sprint's complaint says. "In one fell swoop, AT&T’s proposed purchase would eliminate one of four national competitors and marginalize a second (Sprint), pushing the market back toward a 1980s-style cell phone duopoly that would force consumers to endure higher prices and be denied the fruits of vigorous innovation...No matter how market shares are measured – all wireless services for consumers, postpaid wireless services for consumers, wireless services for business and governmental accounts – the proposed transaction would leave AT&T controlling in excess of 40 percent of the national markets, and would give it the ability to exercise market power both unilaterally and in coordination with Verizon, as these Twin Bells together would control more than three quarters of all wireless services."
AOL will ruin TechCrunch

Publié: septembre 6, 2011, 7:37pm CEST par Joe Wilcox

Joe Wilcox argues that TechCrunch produces boatloads of original content using a method called process journalism. In counterpoint, "TechCrunch just exposed what is wrong with tech journalism today", Ed Oswald contends that the blog is rife with conflict of interest and questionable news reporting ethics.

Have you been on the Internet long enough to remember Global Network Navigator -- yeah, that's GNN. It was the first web portal I used to get news and quick access to other useful sites. O'Reilly & Associates (now O'Reilly Media) launched the site in 1993. AOL bought GNN in 1995 and closed it in 1996, quite unceremoniously. The domain is still active and points to Huffington Post. Old-time Netters will remember GNN and a long list of other properties and products purchased by AOL that were later abandoned or closed -- all part of a decade-and-a-half plan to reinvent as a new media company.

Another AOL acquisition is on the hit list. TechCrunch, rather than writing tech news, is tech news following several days of tumultuous commentaries both inside and outside the organization. The AOL property, acquired in September 2010 for $30 million, is ripe for major shakeup. What was good about TechCrunch could be gone by year's end; heck by the end of the week, if core staffers bolt or are canned. Love him or hate -- and there seems to be little between these emotions -- TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is out, or soon will be in the inevitable AOL slaughter.

Arrington's fate, and that of TechCrunch, was certain in February 2011, when AOL announced the $315 million acquisition of Huffington Post. It was never a question of if but when things would change. There isn't room enough for two big blog media personalities at AOL, particularly with such opposing worldviews about news acquisition.

About 90 minutes after I posted, Arrington made a startling admission and demand of AOL:

"I believe that AOL should be held to their promise when they acquired us to give TechCrunch complete editorial independence. As of late last week TechCrunch no longer has editorial independence. Some argue that the circumstances demanded it. I disagree. Editorial independence was never supposed to be an easy thing for AOL to give us. But it was never meaningful if it shatters the first time it is put to the test".

Perhaps editorial independence looked easier 12 months ago, before AOL handed over control of its blogs to Huffington. Arrington:

"We’ve proposed two options to AOL.

1. Reaffirmation of the editorial independence promised at the time of acquisition. Given the current circumstances, that means autonomy from Huffington Post, unfettered editorial independence and a blanket right to editorial self determination. To put it simply, TechCrunch would stay with AOL but would be independent of the Huffington Post.

or

2. Sell TechCrunch back to the original shareholders.

If AOL cannot accept either of these options, and no other creative solution can be found, I cannot be a part of TechCrunch going forward".

My content below takes on richer context in light of Arrington's official response to AOL.

The Huffington Way

Ariana Huffington is the queen of news aggregation, and it is a heap successful business model that many long-time journalists loathe. Huffington also is queen of free; the site summarizes news content many other organizations pay some writer to produce. The practice is now widespread, as other sites imitate the aggregation-by-summarization model.

By contrast, TechCrunch mostly produces original content, which is an increasing rarity on the web, particularly among blogs. There has been fierce debate about Arrington's ethics -- running a site that reports news about companies he invests in -- but few critics can legitimately argue that TechCrunch doesn't produce boatloads of original content. From that perspective, TechCrunch is a model of traditional journalism and values of in-depth, original reporting.

But that's not the kind of content company AOL wants to be, and that's warning to other profile AOL acquired blogs -- Engadget and The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Already, Engadget had a mass exodus of senior staff, following the Huffington Post acquisition, to form a new tech news site. Engadget editor Paul Miller left within 10 days of the acquisition. The Huffington Postification of AOL media sites had begun.

Last month, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong couldn't gush enough about Huffington Post, in the media company's second-quarter earnings press release and on the conference call. "The Huffington Post traffic surpassed The New York Times during the quarter and passes nearly 10 million monthly unique users", Armstrong said. AOL launched 17 new sites during the quarter, mostly from the Huffington Post Media Group. "In the consumer side area, we launched AOL Healthy Living, Huffington Post Canada and Huffington Post U.K., Huffington Post Women, Huffington Post Celebrity, Huffington Post Parent, Huffington Post BlackVoices", Armstrong said. "We've been very busy in the content business".

The AOL Way

Change is inevitable at AOL, which has been trying to reinvent as a media company since the mid 1990s. GNN was one of the earliest casualties. In her November 1996 SFGate.com news story on the closure, Julia Angwin wrote about the "little-known GNN": It "actually helped make the World Wide Web a household name". That's a fact. As did the more visible Netscape, which AOL bought and later killed, just as browser competition was starting to pick up again. The company has smart sense for good products or properties but often doesn't understand what to do with them, once it has them.

Overnight, TechCrunch's MG Siegler wrote overly-whiny "TechCrunch may be over as we know it":

"This is a post I never thought I’d have to write. Unfortunately, I do. And the worst part about it is that it should be Michael Arrington writing this post, not me. But he can’t. TechCrunch is on the precipice. As soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows...

By now, if you read TechCrunch, you likely know about the nuclear situation that has exploded over the past several days. Mike unveiled an investing entity known as the 'CrunchFund' with full AOL support -- so much support, mind you, that they’re the largest backers of the fund -- only to have his legs kicked out from under him due to what can only be described as nonsensical political infighting and really poor communication. To make matters worse, some Journalists (with a big “J” and even bigger senses of entitlement) have".

Siegler explains how he sees TechCrunch differences from traditional journalism in a personal blog post. He attributes the news blogs' success to its lose organizational structure.

The Arrington Way

I see more fundamental reasons for the site's success. By my observation of TechCrunch business practices, Arrington, who is an attorney by trade, applies lawyer’s ethics to the blogging operation. Lawyer principles seek to protect client relationships. Pretty much anything else is OK, except disclosing information clients share with the attorney. Journalists protect sources, which isn't so dissimilar, but are obliged by other ethical standards obligations -- like getting the facts straight. Lawyers are not bound by such principles and they often misrepresent things to benefit their clients. Lawyers are notorious for floating out trial balloons -- information, misinformation or rumors to gauge somebody’s reaction. TechCrunch regularly floats trial balloons by way of rumor stories. The blog uses rumors to advance the reporting process. The stories generate helpful comments and other leads.

Traditional journalists are expected to get the facts right before a story is published. TechCrunch takes a different approach. "Stories evolve on our blog", Arrington explained in June 2009. "It can start with a rumor, which we may post if we find it credible and/or it’s being so widely circulated that the fact of the rumor’s existence is newsworthy in itself. But then we evolve a post to get to the truth".

There's a name for it: process journalism, which Jeff Jarvis, associate professor of journalism at City University of New York, explained two summers ago. Print journalism is obsessed with perfection. A story isn’t ready until it is authoritatively written and fact checked, which makes sense when the medium is print. The story needs to be nearly as perfect as possible. Jarvis explains about the myth of perfection held by journalism and some other industries:

"If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be... Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection…It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish -- as caveats, rather than afterward -- as corrections".

For TechCrunch, the process can be surprisingly good reading. I haven’t done an official count, but I’d guess that TechCrunch posts more unfinished stories than the more complete kind published by, say, the New York Times. TechCrunch stories evolve -- and, I must assert, too often from unsubstantiated rumors. It’s a process I must grudgingly acknowledge that TechCrunch can be quite transparent about. The process, of the story unfolding over time, produces original content that often is interesting reading, and readers participate in that process, through comments and other social media tools.

AOL puts that process at risk. Where Huffington Post processes news stories like pieces of coal moving down an assembly line, TechCrunch uses process journalism to produce diamonds. Which is more valuable? They both have their place, but as a journalist I'll take TechCrunch over Huffington Post every day of the year.

Photo Credit: Joi Ito
No more waiting for annoying cell phone salesmen to configure your new gear while they try to sell you accessories

Publié: septembre 6, 2011, 6:01pm CEST par Tim Conneally

While the short-range wireless technology known generically as Near-field communications (NFC) is still in its early stages of consumer adoption, the technology is already in its seventh year of development and it is maturing beyond the point where it can be used simply for exchanging small bits of information or payment authorization. Imagine if companies could make a single production run of smartphones, tablets, or notebooks without having to regionalize the software on it, and that was done the moment the machine was purchased.

Switzerland-based semiconductor company STMicroelectronics on Tuesday launched a new dual-interface EEPROM memory unit (M24LR64) that is specifically designed to make a system's data available via NFC at all times. EEPROM is a non-volatile form of memory commonly used in microcontrollers in industrial machinery, and can often be found in digital sensors and timers.

But the company today pointed out that RFID and NFC are becoming especially common in supply chain management, because it reduces the amount of time spent counting individual items in a shipment. If each item contains an RFID chip, a pallet of items could be scanned and counted instantaneously. With this new type of EEPROM memory, ST says these products could not only be counted, but be activated upon delivery, and updated with regional settings and firmware when they're sold.

Because NFC can be paired through sealed packaging, an NFC-capable terminal could, scan your new product when you purchase it at Best Buy, for example, and tell the system clock EEPROM that you're on Eastern Standard Time so when you flip open your new Notebook for the first time, you wouldn't have to choose your region and language or connect to the cloud to run an initial setup.

To show off how data can be manipulated via NFC, ST has constructed a prototype temperature sensor and datalogger with this new chip which pairs with an Android app called Dual EE. This is meant to show how the smartphone can perform both read and write functions on the chip, including starting and stopping temperature collection and changing settings, downloading logged data, displaying metrics and creating graphs, and so forth.

Tim Conneally's all-encompassing disclosure statement
DigiNotar scandal worsens: 500+ rogue certificates issued, five CAs breached

Publié: septembre 6, 2011, 4:58pm CEST par Larry Seltzer

The hacker who breached the DigiNotar certificate authority has come out, or at least claimed to. He appears to be the same hacker who breached Comodo, another CA, several months ago. (Hat tip to F-Secure.) "COMODOHACKER" seems to have a problem with the Dutch government.

He claims to have gotten past numerous sophisticated protections in DigiNotar's systems, the details of which he will divulge later, and that he retains inside access to four other "high-profile" CAs and can still issue rogue certificates from them. He also claims that the password for the PRODUCTION\Administrator account (the domain administrator of certificate network) is "Pr0d@dm1n".

As more details come out about the actual hack, the news just gets worse and worse. Among the fraudulent certificates issued were the wildcards *.*.com and *.*.org. Some of the best detail can be found in this blog posting at the TOR Project.

The TOR posting includes a link to a spreadsheet with 531 rogue certificates issued by COMODOHACKER on behalf of DigiNotar. One of them appears to be a calling card. I quote the TOR posting:

"Of particular note is this certificate:
CN=*.RamzShekaneBozorg.com,SN=PK000229200006593,OU=Sare Toro Ham Mishkanam,L=Tehran,O=Hameye Ramzaro Mishkanam,C=IR
The text here appears to be be an entry like any other but it is infact a calling card from a Farsi speaker. RamzShekaneBozorg.com is not a valid domain as of this writing.
Thanks to an anonymous Farsi speaker, I now understand that the above certificate is actually a comment to anyone who bothers to read between the lines:
"RamzShekaneBozorg" is "great cracker"
"Hameyeh Ramzaro Mishkanam" translates to "I will crack all encryption"
"Sare Toro Ham Mishkanam" translates to 'i hate/break your head'"

Reactions continue to roll in from around the web. Microsoft has updated their response to it. They dismiss the significance of the *.windowsupdate.com certificate as the domain is not used and Microsoft's update software has multiple protections against false updates. They note the *.microsoft.com certificate but make no particular remarks about it.

Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 users have been protected for some time against these fraudulent certificates because of updates Microsoft made to an online CA list they maintain. The picture for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 users is less clear. KB2607712 says that "Microsoft will release a future update to address this issue for all supported editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003." Are they still vulnerable? The lack of a claim that they aren't would seem to be confirmation that they are.

Trend Micro's Malware Blog argues that these certificates were used to spy on Iranian Internet users on a large scale. The certificates were encountered by users across the country.

Kaspersky's Roel Schouwenberg says that the DigiNotar scandal may turn out more important than Stuxnet, not because of sophistication, but because of ominous consequences. DigiNotar had operated a CA used for Dutch government operations and that CA is also presumed broken. Government services and communication have been disrupted. Schouwenberg: "Because of this one could make an argument the attack is an act of cyberwar." He also expresses concern that Apple has taken no actions to revoke the bogus certificates nor made any announcements that they plan to.

Many claim that this is proof of the failure of the CA system. I'm not sure it's worth going that far, but this incident does underscore the main weakness of that system, namely the great amount of trust placed in certificate authorities by client software, mainly web browsers, and therefore by users of those programs. If the CAs are not trustworthy, the security of the system collapses.

Photo Credit: Jimmi/Shutterstock

Larry Seltzer is a freelance writer and consultant, dealing mostly with security matters. He has written recently for Infoworld, eWEEK, Dr. Dobb's Journal, and is a Contributing Editor at PC Magazine and author of their Security Watch blog. He has also written for Symantec Authentication (formerly VeriSign) and Lumension's Intelligent Whitelisting site.