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BetaNews.Com (12 non lus)

NBC pressures Twitter to shutter account of journalist critical of Olympics coverage

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 10:28pm CEST par Ed Oswald

As criticism over NBC's coverage of the 2012 Olympics in London grows, the network now finds itself at the center of a controversy surrounding its apparent involvement in the suspension of the Twitter account of an American journalist.

Guy Adams, the Independent's Los Angeles bureau chief, has been extremely critical of NBC's coverage of the games. In a series of tweets, Adams takes on NBC's decision to run almost no major event live, and Matt Lauer's sometimes inane banter during the Opening Ceremony coverage. Adams even went so far as to criticize NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel.

But there's one tweet that apparently ticked off executives at Comcast-NBC enough for them to seek out Twitter to silence Adams, and here it is:

guyadams Guy Adams
The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven't started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com

Adams' decision to publish Zenkel's e-mail is apparently what caused NBC to complain directly to Twitter, and successfully have Adams muzzled. "We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives", a spokesperson for NBC Sports says in a statement.

So far, Twitter has not responded to BetaNews' requests to confirm that the network's complaint is behind their decision. That said, in a Monday piece for The Independent, Adams reports that Twitter support representatives told him that the aforementioned tweet is why his account is suspended.

"Since I’m still trying to get to bottom of the hows and whys of my suspension, which conceivably raises various ethical issues relevant to journalism in the online era, it seems premature to comment further", Adams writes. "Except, perhaps to say that I do not wish Mr Zenkel any harm, and to share a transcript of my most recent email to Rachel Bremer, Twitter's head of European PR".

In that e-mail, Adams tells Bremer that no rule was broken as Zenkel's e-mail is not private. Adams is right: a simple search for the executive's e-mail address will turn that information up (even after you take out all the results from the dozens of news outlets now covering this story, which are also republishing Zenkel's address).

There's another problem: Twitter really isn't following its own rules. The policy against the sharing of certain information on Twitter only covers "non-public, personal e-mail addresses". Zenkel's address is already public, and it is a corporate e-mail for a public company.

Under a strict reading of this policy, Adams has violated none of Twitter's rules, and his suspension sounds more like a move to appease an advertiser. As a story last week in the Wall Street Journal indicated, the two companies are working together to "tweet" the Olympics, with a full-on Olympics Hub to centralize coverage of the games.
Google+ Hangouts come to Gmail, joins group video chats with your inbox

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 10:01pm CEST par Tim Conneally

Google on Monday announced it had expanded its almost four-year old Gmail Video Chat service to include Hangouts, the popular new Google+ group video chat service. Beginning today, users will be able to connect to Google+ Hangouts directly from their Gmail interface.

In 2008, Google's Gmail team rolled Google Talk with video chat into Gmail via a relatively small browser plug-in. That plug-in was actually a peer-to-peer client which enabled users to connect to their list of contacts via their respective messaging clients.

Hangouts, however, are not delivered in a P2P fashion, and instead utilize Google’s own network to carry the traffic. So in this way, users who are chatting do not necessarily even have to have a chat client open, and they can go directly through their desktop or mobile browsers.

Hangouts is one of the big draws of the Google+ social network, as it offers groups of users the ability to watch YouTube videos together, or hold "on air" forums on certain topics with limited participants, but open public viewership. There is no comparable feature built into the other popular social networks, but services like Stickam and Tinychat provide the group chat experience as their central offering.

Facebook, for example, unveiled video calling last year, which utilizes the Skype API, but there is no browser-based group chat element yet.
Google resumes 16GB Nexus 7 sales

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 8:27pm CEST par Wayne Williams

When the larger model of the Nexus 7 vanished from the Play store a week ago, it was generally assumed that demand outstripped supply. After all, the tablet has been insanely popular since its launch, and pretty much sold out everywhere. The fact that the 8GB model was still available in the store just suggested that people were more interested in physical memory than cloud storage.

But then the conspiracy theories began to kick in. There had been a lot of complaints about the 16GB model prior to its disappearance, with most focusing on screen issues, which led my colleague Joe Wilcox to question whether the model had been withdrawn for reasons other than just overwhelming popularity. His article certainly struck a nerve and generated some interesting comments, including further complaints about the device. Could he be right? Was there more to the story than Google was telling us?

Apparently not. From today the 16GB version is back on sale at Google Play, available to purchase in both the US and UK, and delivered as before in 3-5 business days. Those who preordered should start receiving their tablets very soon.

Quite how long the 16GB model will remain in stock is anyone’s guess, so if you’re thinking of getting one direct from Google, I suggest you hit the Add to Cart button sharpish.
Have you looked at your .htacess file recently? Your Apache server may not be secure

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 8:13pm CEST par Cameron Camp

If your organization’s website runs on Apache, and many do, you might wonder if the webserver’s .htaccess controls are securely configured. If you believe the demo we saw on July 27 at Black Hat by Matias Katz and Maximiliano Soler, the answer is a resounding ‘NO!’ What Katz and Soler describe in their session is not some rare “corner case” hack that could only possibly occur in a lab with billions of automated attempts, this is easily testable in the real world, and the tools to exploit it are freely available.

It turns out that Apache, the most commonly-used web server in the world, has an arrangement where it hands off PHP-based requests within .htaccess to PHP itself, which has worked fine on millions and millions of websites for years. But with .htaccess, you can specify what requests get sent to PHP to try to interpret. The usual methods are GET and POST, but if you feed the .htaccess process some non-standard input, PHP automatically (unless otherwise instructed) treats it as a GET request, and allows the utility to start saving the PHP files on a webserver to your local filesystem.

Then it gets worse. Once the process has identified links buried in the files it just saved, it goes hunting down those links, requesting to save them all. It also checks to see if it already saved the file that the link points to, and in this way, won’t download duplicates, keeping the fileset fresh.

But wait, there’s more. After it saves all those linked files, it scours them as well, searching for files located wherever they link to, and so the process goes. With so many pages linking to other resources, it’s easy to see how a bad actor can pull down all the PHP files that run the site. These may well contain references to login credentials for databases, passwords, personally identifiable information and a host of other goodies that can be sold on the black market or used to enable further exploits.

Want to protect yourself? Turns out you can get very specific in your .htaccess file about what types of requests get handed to PHP by using the “LimitExcept” directive instead of the more commonly used “Limit”. You can also fix the issue within your PHP code as well.

So, now might be a good time to check your website configuration to make sure you’re protected, before the bad guys go scouring around trying to use this type of exploit. And if you’re not the person in charge of your website, you might want to point out this problem to the person who is, they may thank you, a lot.

Reprinted with permission

Photo Credit: Sergej Khakimullin/Shutterstock

Cameron Camp is a researcher for global security provider ESET and has played a critical role in building the ESET North America Research Lab. Cameron has been building critical technology infrastructures for more than 20 years, beginning as an assembly language programmer in 1987 and eventually becoming an evangelist for Linux and open-source technologies with an emphasis on the security sector. Prior to joining ESET, he founded Logical Web Host in 1998, a data-driven web services company.
Virtual network architecture is hot: Oracle acquires Xsigo for undisclosed sum

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 5:58pm CEST par Tim Conneally

Leading IT systems and technology company Oracle on Monday announced it will be acquiring privately-held company Xsigo Systems. Oracle targeted Xsigo for acquisition because of its network virtualization solutions, a hot zone in IT right now. Just one week ago, VMware announced the billion dollar acquisition of Nicira, a company that specializes in software-defined networking technology similar to Xsigo's.

"The proliferation of virtualized servers in the last few years has made the virtualization of the supporting network connections essential," said John Fowler, Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems in a prepared remark on Monday. "With Xsigo, customers can reduce the complexity and simplify management of their clouds by delivering compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically reallocated on-demand."

Xsigo's network virtualization technology, broadly falling under the brand name of "Fabric," will be combined with Oracle VM for server virtualization, and the resulting product will be a simpler, lower cost cloud solution. Xsigo's Fabric Directors dynamically connect servers to cloud resources to reduce the number of switches in place; the Fabric Accelerator connects virtual machines to various resources (servers, networks, other VMs) through a software-defined private virtual link; and Fabric Manager is the network management interface for monitoring and maintaining all of these virtual connections.

Neither Oracle nor Xsigo announced any financial details of the transaction, but the deal is expected to close in Fall 2012, with Xsigo working independently of Oracle until then.
If YouTube isn't the best place to watch the Olympic games, it should be

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 5:08pm CEST par Robert X. Cringely

If you are living in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Bhutan, Cambodia, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Iran, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, or Vietnam and want to watch the London Olympics today I’m told your only choice is YouTube. Ten events are available at any time through the International Olympic Committee (IOC) YouTube channel.

Of course 60 live channels are available in the USA through youtube.com/nbcolympics, but I think the international story is more compelling by far because it brings live competition to places where it was never available before.

YouTube seems to have really thrown itself into this Olympics thing, raising its live video game in the process and many of the advances they are rolling-out will be available broadly on the service going forward, not just for the Olympics.

On Friday, I visited YouTube in San Bruno to learn all this. My son Channing, who is 10 and addicted to YouTube fishing videos, was astounded to learn YouTube had a physical existence at all. How quickly our kids have embraced the cloud.

It will be interesting to see what breaks. Jason Gaedtke, YouTube’s director of software engineering, says they do not expect a flawless performance.

According to Gaedtke all video processing is being done in the Google Cloud and no custom hardware (or even additional hardware) is required.

With NBC, YouTube offers 60 simultaneous live events and hundreds of recorded ones, all transcoded into seven different video streams for various devices starting at 1080p and going all the way down to feature phones. There’s a new DVR interface, too, that allows viewers to pause live action or even start at the beginning of an event already in progress. On completion all live events go into the library and remain accessible.

NBC editors are even adding metadata hints to the video thumbnails so lazy viewers can go straight to the most exciting moments -- scores, finishes, etc.

It’s free (there are commercials), happening in real time (not tape delayed for primetime), and covers even the most obscure events. What’s not to like? Well, I had to identify myself as a Comcast subscriber, so I wonder what off-the-air TV viewers will get? Please let us all know.

To me this feels like Internet video really coming into its own, providing a live service that simply couldn’t be done any other way. I can imagine an Olympics or two from now when the Internet may be the dominant (possible only) way to watch the games.

My Real World Experience

July 29, 3:30 pm: We’re trying to watch the Olympics on YouTube and it, in a word, sucks. Maybe this is Comcast, though Netflix and Hulu are running just fine. ~~More likely it is YouTube having capacity problems.~~ Of course the commercials seem to load okay. I’ve sent a message to YouTube and will update this post as I learn more. Hopefully they’ll be able to grab a bigger chunk of cloud and fix the problems.

July 29, 7 pm: It’s the speed of the PC. A dual-core 2-GHz iMac is jerky while a 2 GHz four-core I7 Mac Mini runs fine. A 2.4 GHz AMD four-core PC running Windows 7 Professional runs fine, too. But I can’t watch the Olympics on a 2 GHz iMac, a 2 GHz Mac Mini, or my mid-2010 MacBook Pro (also 2-GHz). All three computers have two cores and are at their max RAM. Yes, I can slow down the connection, but anything above 360p clearly has problems (240p is best) and this on a 25 Mbps Internet connection. Understand that in each case I’m starting with the resolution setting on “auto”, so YouTube clearly expects my machines to run faster than they actually do.

Did YouTube test with any real world computers regularly used by small boys?
Mountain Lion downloaded 3 million times in 4 days: what it means for market share

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 4:57pm CEST par Mihaita Bamburic

Apple released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on July 25, and based on that small sliver of time, data analysis company Chitika released a statistic forecasting Mountain Lion's adoption rate, claiming a 3.21 percent OS X market share in just 48 hours. Five days after the release, Apple has announced Mountain Lion downloads exceeded 3 million in just four days. What does all of this mean?

Apple responded rather quickly last year after OS X Lion’s release, claiming 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Yet, with Mountain Lion, 3 million downloads in the first four days averages out to 750,000 downloads per day. Granted that's an estimate, but it would actually place Mountain Lion behind Lion based on first day downloads.

There's further evidence to support this theory, as the Chitika study points out that the Mountain Lion adoption rate considerably increased after the first day, accounting for a very slow first day start. So why is Apple calling it "the most successful OS X release in Apple’s history," according to the press release?

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing is quoted: "Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever,” but if it is as popular as they say wouldn’t it have made sense for Apple to deliver a press release claiming more than 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours?

Judging by the average, last year’s press release, and this year’s lack of a first day download tally, Mountain Lion likely started slow, with downloads increasing the following days. But there's more to it than first day downloads. During the WWDC keynote, Apple claimed that they have shipped 26 million OS X Lion copies; that placed it at 40 percent market share two months ago, so how does the statistic from Chitika fare against official Apple numbers?

The numbers posted by Chitika are in direct contradiction to the numbers posted by Apple at WWDC, but also to the numbers posted by Net Applications which for June 2012 paint a completely different picture. Not only is OS X 10.7 at a 46.49 percent adoption rate, but it’s also higher than OS X 10.6 which only has a 38.24 percent market share; this hierarchy is inverted on Chitika’s statistics with OS X 10.7 having a 34.97 percent share and OS X 10.6 dominating it with a 45.51 market share.

If Net Applications claims that OS X 10.7 has a higher market share than OS X 10.6 in June, it doesn’t make sense for Chitika to invert that ranking and place OS X 10.6 at the top, in July. By comparing the two sets of numbers it would appear that Mac users have massively downgraded from Lion to Snow Leopard in just a month; an extremely implausible scenario.

The most realistic estimate of Lion market share is given by Apple, which is the only one that can actually count the number of units sold. Actual market share for Apple’s latest OS version is somewhat difficult to determine at this point.

Chitika's numbers on Mountain Lion adoption rate are just an estimate and don't tell the whole story, but 3.21 percent seems like a fair estimate for the first two days; or 1.6 percent per day.

However, we can make an estimate of our own.

Apple claimed at WWDC that there are 66 million Mac users worldwide, and combined with the 3 million downloads Mountain Lion has that we know of, it would make for a rough estimate of a 4.5 percent market share in four days.

Chitika claims that OS X Lion had a 14 percent market share in the first three months and by the current estimates it seems that even though Mountain Lion didn’t start as well as Lion, it’s going to fare even better than its older brother in three months.
Olympics fans asked not to tweet during events

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 4:41pm CEST par Wayne Williams

London 2012 has been described as the first true “social media games”, with sports fans tweeting, texting and sending photos and videos live from events. But on Sunday it became clear that all this activity placed a strain on the networks when a deluge of messages sent by fans lining the streets to watch the men’s cycling road race prevented TV commentators from telling how far ahead the leaders were.

The problem, apparently with one so-far unidentified provider, stopped data from the cyclists’ GPS satellite navigation system getting through to the studios, leading to confusion. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was forced to ask enthusiastic tweeters to limit the sending of non-vital messages -- at least until more network capacity could be arranged.

“Of course, if you want to send something, we are not going to say 'Don't, you can't do it', and we would certainly never prevent people" a spokesman says. "It's just -- if it's not an urgent, urgent one, please kind of take it easy."

Although there are more events set to take place on London’s roads, including the marathon, it’s unlikely the problem will be repeated. British Telecom, the official Olympic communications services provider, is reportedly offering four times as much network capacity as was available during the 2008 Beijing Games, and although no figures are available for other services, such as Vodafone, O2, or Orange, the IOC says it is working with all parties to ensure greater capacity across the networks to prevent this from becoming an issue again.

Photo Credit: London 2012 Olympic Games
Microsoft debuts Wedge Touch Mouse and Mobile Keyboard for Windows 8

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 4:31pm CEST par Martin Brinkmann
Microsoft's Surface tablet has received praise and only light criticism since its introduction a month ago. The innovative tablet addresses one of the biggest issues that computer professionals have when it comes to touch-based devices: the lack of a physical keyboard.

But Surface is not the only product that Microsoft will be making available to accommodate the launch of much-anticipated Windows 8. The company just announced the availability of four hardware peripherals that have been specifically designed for the next version of Windows.

Wedge Series

The Wedge Touch Mouse and Wedge Mobile Keyboard are top-of-the-line products designed for use with tablets and mobile devices.

Probably the most interesting product of the series is the Wedge Mobile Keyboard, a full-sized compact keyboard that uses Bluetooth to communicate with laptop or tablet. And just like Microsoft's Surface, the peripheral introduces an interesting feature that makes it stand out from the bulk of wireless keyboards, literally. The cover of the keyboard converts into a tablet stand that allows you to position the tablet in an upright position when you work with it on a desk or another flat surface.

When you look at the keyboard layout, you will notice that Microsoft has mapped hotkeys that activate Windows 8's Charms menu to the F5 to F8 keys of the keyboard. The four keys make available the search, share, devices and settings Charm menu items, with the Metro startpage Charm still mapped to the Windows key.

The Wedge Touch Mouse looks different than any other mouse that you may have worked with in the last couple of years. It is a small lightweight device that only offers enough space to rest two of your fingers. It has no physical scroll wheel, and scrolling is handled using gestures on the surface of the mouse.

The mouse features Microsoft's BlueTrack technology, which makes it usable on nearly every surface you place it on. And just like the keyboard, the mouse uses Bluetooth to communicate with the computer.

Another interesting feature that Microsoft has integrated into both products: Backpack Mode, which syncs with the computer's sleep mode. When the computer is put into sleep mode, the mouse and keyboard power down as well, to extend the battery life.

The Sculpt Series

The Sculpt Mobile Keyboard features a Comfort Curve design that helps position the wrists and hands in a natural resting position. It too establishes connections via Bluetooth and features hotkeys for the Windows 8 Charms menu, just like the Wedge Mobile Keyboard does.

Microsoft makes no mention of a cover in the press release, but likely it will ship without one.

The Sculpt Touch Mouse finally uses a regular design that is complemented by a four-way touch scroll strip. It connects via Bluetooth and ships with the same power-saving technologies that the other products ship with.

Microsoft Touch Mouse

Microsoft's existing Touch Mouse will receive an update that supporting new Windows 8 specific gestures:
- One-finger swipes to move up or down, or from side to side
- Two-finger gestures to switch between apps, show app commands or manage apps
- Three finger zooming
- Thumb gestures to navigate backward and forward in apps
Pricing

The Wedge Touch Mouse and Wedge Mobile Keyboard will have an estimated retail price of $69.95 and $79.95, respectively, while the Sculpt Touch Mouse and Sculpt Mobile Keyboard an estimated retail price of $49.95 each.

Closing Words

The Wedge Mobile Keyboard is the product that I'd personally be most interested in as it combines a physical keyboard with a tablet stand. If I would not have my eyes fixed on the Surface tablet, I'd definitely consider getting a Wedge keyboard for a Windows 8 tablet, if it would ship without a physical keyboard of its own.

The Wedge Mobile Mouse, on the other hand looks, completely alien at first glance, and while it certainly may have its appeal, I can't really convince myself to give the mouse a try.

Are you interested in any of the products personally? Feel free to share your opinion in the comments below.

Photo Credits: Microsoft
Upgrade Windows 8 with an awesome Metro-themed Explorer

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 3:51pm CEST par Wayne Williams

Whether you love or hate Metro (and BetaNews readers certainly seem to be divided on the topic), it’s an integral part of Windows 8 and something we’re all going to have to learn to get along with. Although I personally find using the interface with a keyboard and mouse a rather clumsy experience, I do appreciate Metro’s aesthetics and think it's a bit annoying (not to mention odd) that Microsoft hasn’t extended its design to Windows Explorer.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not alone in this viewpoint but while I’m happy to just complain about it Julien Manici decided to do something and has come up with a very early, but brilliant application called Immersive Explorer.

Although not a Metro app, it has the look of the tiled interface and offers desktop features like scroll-to-zoom and keyboard navigation (in time it will also fully support touch). It’s based on Win32/.NET/WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and makes use of graphical hardware acceleration to deliver fluid animations and transitions.

The application doesn’t replace Windows Explorer, but rather runs alongside it and so doesn’t need admin rights to install.

The interface displays common folders, profiles and drives and offers most of the Explorer features you’d expect, allowing you to open files, cut, copy, paste, and rename items, view properties and create new folders. It also includes a built-in photo viewer so you can view images without needing to open a separate application. Arrows on either side let you scroll through other photos in the folder.

Because it’s such an early version, certain features such as network discovery and Control Panel links are missing, but Manici plans to update the application regularly, and release new builds on a weekly basis.
Freehand Painter gives your Windows tablet the right touch

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 2:30pm CEST par Mike Williams

Launch the average painting tool and you’re generally confronted with a stack of options covering brushes and color, outlines, fills and more. Which is fine, sometimes, but if you just want to be creative then all this functionality can get in your way.

Freehand Painter is, well, simpler. Much simpler. Launch the program and you can start drawing right away, with your finger if you like (you can use a mouse as well, but it’s designed for a touch-sensitive screen). And any other tweaks you might want to make will only take a moment.

Want to change colors, say? Just tap on the on-screen palette. Need a new brush size? Hold and drag on the size selector until you’re happy. Made a mistake? Tap Undo; use the Eraser tools to remove individual pixels or an entire stroke; or select individual objects with the Lasso tool and move them elsewhere in the picture.

When your masterpiece is complete you can save it as an ISF file, or export it as a bitmap in GIF, PNG, BMP or JPG formats.

And while there’s not exactly much more to know, a straightforward local Help file does contain a few extra scraps of useful information (like the keyboard shortcuts you need to select individual tools or vary brush size, for example).

If you’re looking for any kind of advanced functionality then Freehand Painter probably won’t be for you. There’s no Fill tool, for instance, no Text option, no clever selection tools, no colour picker: you get basic vector drawing, and that’s about it.

If you just need a simple painting app to keep your kids entertained, though, the program works very well. Installation is easy (no toolbars, adware or other junk), the interface is clean and simple and just about anyone should be happily using it within seconds.

And while Freehand Painter is rather basic, it’s also very new (the program is still only at version 0.7), so we’ve no doubt that more features will be added in the near future. It’ll be interesting to see how the project develops.
Makeover OS X 10.8 with Mountain Tweaks 1.0.1

Publié: juillet 30, 2012, 1:37pm CEST par Mark Wilson

There are no operating systems that are free from irritations and, despite its largely warm receptions, Apple’s latest OS X release, Mountain Lion is no exception. When Lion released Lion Tweaks was on hand to allow users to tweak and customize the OS and there is now an updated version available in the form of Mountain Tweaks. This is a free tool that enables you to change numerous settings to tailor OS X to suite your needs.

Tweaking tools have always been incredibly popular, but it is usually Windows users that reap the benefits of utilities designed to allow for easy changes to regular and hidden changes to the operating system. Lion Tweaks was an impressive tweaker made available for OS X Lion, and this latest release sees the app updates to add support for Mountain Lion. Mountain Tweaks can in fact be used under both Lion and Mountain Lion, but there are some settings specific to the latter.

Of course, OS X is customizable to a certain degree out of the box, but Mountain Tweaks opens up a number of new options. Using the tool you can unlock OS X’s hidden FTP server, ensure that hidden files are main visible and choose whether the Library folder should be displayed or not. If unnecessary animations irk you, you can disable the animations that are used on windows and mail and change the look of Contacts and Calendar.

You can customize the appearance of the dock as Launchpad and decided whether or not permanent scrollbars should really be permanent on display. Other options include the ability to enable TRIM support., enable Airdrop on older hardware and disable Gatekeeper. Some tweaks are practical, others visual, but you’re sure to find plenty that you’ll want to implement.

You can find out more about the app and download yourself a free copy by paying a visit to theMountain Tweaks review page.