Gregarius » BetaNews.Com » janvier 10, 2013

Adobe has published a public CS2 download page with links to a host of older applications -- the full Creative Suite 2.0, Acrobat Pro 8.0, Audition 3.0, GoLive CS2, Illustrator CS2, InCopy CS2, Photoshop CS2, Photoshop Elements 4.0/5.0, Premiere Pro 2.0 -- as well as the serial numbers required to activate them.

As soon as the page was noticed, multiple stories appeared recommending what looked like a great freebie. But what’s really going on here? It’s hard to say.

First, Adobe’s Dov Isaacs posted a forum message saying that the company was "absolutely not providing free copies of CS2!" Apparently the CS2 activation servers are being terminated, and these builds and serial numbers are intended for existing licence holders to use as an alternative.

The company didn’t take the CS2 page down, though, or add a warning or explanatory message, or do anything else to keep people away.

In fact, Adobe has done the opposite. Initially you needed to log in via your Adobe account to view the download page; now it's freely accessible to everyone. It looks like the company have accepted that there’s no putting the cat back in the bag, and whatever the original intention, CS2 is now available for free.

We may find out for sure in the next day or two, if Adobe issues a press release or add further information to the CS2 download page which fully explains the situation.

But if, in the meantime, you want to sample a CS2 application or two then they’re all ready and waiting.

You do need to keep in mind the age of these programs, though. CS2 was released in 2005, and written for Windows 2000 and XP. Even getting the apps installed on a modern PC can require some work, and there’s no telling what issues might crop up later.

We managed to successfully complete a couple of installations on Windows 7 x64, though, and have written up the various problems we encountered along the way. Check out the download pages on Creative Suite 2.0 and Adobe Professional 8.0 for more information.

Photo Credit: Denys Shentiapin/Shutterstock

If your office, like many others in businesses around the world, uses Cisco-branded telephones then you may have a big problem. The networking company issued a security advisory with the catchy name "cisco-sa-20130109-uipphone".

"Cisco Unified IP Phones 7900 Series versions 9.3(1)SR1 and prior contain an arbitrary code execution vulnerability that could allow a local attacker to execute code or modify arbitrary memory with elevated privileges", the notice warns.

Two weeks ago, Columbia University Ph.D student Ang Cui reported the flaw. He detailed the process in talk "Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean your phone isn't listening to everything you say", which entire video posted to YouTube December 28th.

The good news: physical access to the phone is required for this to be carried out. Of course, if you work in a public area -- think security desk inside a company door, or even a locked office that maintenance and cleaning has access to -- then there is no shortage of people who can carry out the exploit. In fact, we have seen in the past how easily social engineering can gain access to the most restricted areas of a building.

The hack allows an attacker to monitor phone calls and to even turn on a microphone and listen in on conversations within earshot. In fact, they could even stream them over a network.

Cisco acknowledges that "Ang Cui initially reported the issue to the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT). On November 6, 2012, the Cisco PSIRT disclosed this issue in Cisco bug ID CSCuc83860 (registered customers only) Release Note Enclosure. Subsequently, Mr. Cui has spoken at several public conferences and has performed public demonstrations of a device being compromised and used as a listening device".

The company goes on to promise that it will "conduct a phased remediation approach and will be releasing an intermediate Engineering Special software release for affected devices to mitigate known attack vectors for the vulnerability".

And you thought that post-it note over your web cam was enough to keep you safe.

Photo Credit: ollyy/Shutterstock

If you’re one of those people who still prefers audio CDs to digital downloads (because you can’t beat a physical product with album art and sleeve notes, right?), but then rip the tracks so you can actually play them, Amazon’s new AutoRip service is for you. Purchase an AutoRip CD from the site and you’ll get the MP3 version for free.

The tracks will be automatically uploaded to Amazon Cloud Player, where you can stream or download them immediately, even before the CD arrives. And that’s not all. Any eligible CDs you’ve purchased from Amazon after 1998 will be added to your Cloud Player too, for free. If you don’t have a Cloud Player account you’ll be able to sign up for one.

Eligible albums, of which there are already over 50,000 available to buy now, are marked with the AutoRip icon.

If you listen to your CD purchase and decide you don’t like it you can return it and get a full refund as you would normally, and the tracks will be deleted from your Cloud Player. If, however, you’ve downloaded any of the tracks in the meantime, Amazon will charge you for them at the MP3 price. Which sounds fair enough to me.

AutoRip is currently only available for US customers.

The problem with making apps -- whether for smartphones, tablets or the Windows Store -- is getting enough people to sit up and take notice. Sure, if it’s good enough, word of mouth might propel it upwards, but the sad truth is a lot of great apps never get the traction they need to succeed.

If you have an idea for a Windows Store app, Microsoft’s Windows Startup Challenge could be just the boost your concept needs. The winner of the app design contest will get the chance to launch their creation at DEMO Mobile in San Francisco on 17 April.

The rules of the competition are straightforward. All you have to do is sign up between now and January 29 and submit an app prototype. It doesn’t have to actually be an app, it can be a video, a presentation, or some images. It just needs to meet the judging criteria.

You can go it alone, or as part of a team -- so long as the team has no more than five members and doesn’t include any Microsoft employees. The app must be new, and not have been previously submitted to the Windows Store, although it can be an app that’s already available on other platforms (like Android and iOS), provided it’s your app of course.

If your prototype makes it past that stage (50 percent of your app’s score will come from public votes), you’ll then have to actually build it, and quickly. Finished apps need to be submitted by March 1 and run on Windows 8 and RT.

The winning team (well, two of them anyway) will be flown to DEMO Mobile in San Francisco and given the chance to launch their app in front of the press, seed investors and VCs. The top runners up will receive marketing packages and design and technical support.

If that sounds like something that appeals, sign up now, and good luck.

Little under a month after Nokia introduced part of its new Windows Phone 8 lineup for pre-order on the Chinese market, the Finnish manufacturer has revealed that, starting Friday, the company's current Lumia lineup will be available for purchase in India.

By tapping into the local Indian market, Nokia expands its presence, and therefore the reach of Microsoft's smartphone operating system, into one of the largest Asian markets. The Espoo, Finland-based manufacturer announced that the first two handsets that will be available Friday "in select retail stores across major cities" are the high-end Lumia 920 and mid-range Lumia 820 Windows Phone 8 devices.

The Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 will be available for roughly INR 38199 (about $700) and INR 27559 (about $505), respectively. Nokia also said that the budget-friendly Lumia 620 will be available for purchase, starting in "early February, with pricing to be announced closer to the release date. Judging by previously released details, the Lumia 620 will run for $250, without operator subsidies or local taxes.

Photo Credit: Luciano Mortula/Shutterstock

A Distributed Denial of Service attack is no different from someone repeatedly tapping F5 in their web browser, at least accordingly to loose hacktivist collective Anonymous. The group (or someone claiming to be affiliated with it at least) has added a petition to the White House's We the People website, asking the US government to recognize DDoS as a legal form of protesting, and comparing it to the international "occupy" movement.

The petition also calls for the immediate release of those who have been jailed for DDoS attacks, and for their records to be cleared.

According to the petition:

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), is not any form of hacking in any way. It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage. It is, in that way, no different than any "occupy" protest. Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time.

The logic of this argument is, of course, exceptionally wonky, and likening a DDoS attack to refreshing your browser is akin to comparing Niagara Falls with someone turning a bathroom tap on and off repeatedly. The latter approach might cause the basin to fill up, eventually, but it won’t smash houses to pieces, drown everyone on your street, and cost a fortune to clean up afterwards…

I must admit, however, I do rather like the idea of an organized protest whereby disgruntled citizens of the world go -- with synchronized precision -- to the website of a hated organization, and sit in their homes manually refreshing pages for hours on end, until they eventually get bored, or build up giant blisters on their fingertips.

The new petition requires 25,000 signatures by February 6 and has so far managed to garner just 843.

Photo Credit: arindambanerjee/Shutterstock

Far away from events unfolding at CES in Las Vegas, South Korean Android device manufacturer Samsung has unveiled a new device in its Galaxy smartphone lineup. Dubbed the Galaxy S II Plus, the new handset borrows familiar cues from the popular Galaxy S II, but with an added Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean twist.

Samsung has decided to play it safe with the Galaxy S II Plus, as the new smartphone bears an uncanny resemblance to its sibling from 2011. The only apparent physical differences lie with the color choices. The Galaxy S II is available in black, pink and white, while the Galaxy S II Plus only comes in blue and white, embracing Samsung's Galaxy S III color palette. But what about the specs?

The Galaxy S II Plus boasts the same 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, suggesting an RGB matrix, with a resolution of 800 by 480. Power comes from a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, likely part of the Exynos family, 1 GB of RAM and a 1,650 mAh battery.

The smartphone features an 8 MP back-facing camera, with LED flash, capable of 1080p video recording, while on the front the handset sports a 2 MP shooter. Samsung bundles Buddy Photo Share, Face Zoom and Group Facetag software.

Other noteworthy specs include 8GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot available to extend the capacity by a further 64GB. In the connectivity department the handset comes with HSPA+, with speeds up to 21.1Mbps for download and 7.2Mbps for upload; Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n; USB 2.0; optional NFC (Near Field Communication); accelerometer; light as well as proximity sensors; gyroscope and GPS with Glonass support.

Without NFC, the Galaxy S II Plus measures 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.5 mm and 121 grams, while with the added NFC chip the smartphone comes in at 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.9 mm and 121 grams. Basically just 0.4 mm of added thickness when paired with near field communication.

Alongside Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, Samsung also bundles its branded suite of apps, including ChatOn, Samsung Hub, Direct call, Smart Stay, Smart Alert, Popup Video, S Voice, Voice Unlock and S Beam, among others.

The South Korean manufacturer has not yet provided a date of availability nor pricing details.

Third in a series. Some readers of my last column in this series seem to think it was just about the movie business but it wasn’t. It was about the recorded entertainment industry, which includes movies, broadcast and cable television, video games, and derivative works. It’s just that the movie business, like the mainframe computer business, learned these lessons first and so offers fine examples.

Whether from Silicon Valley or Seattle, technology companies see video entertainment as a rich market to be absorbed. How can Hollywood resist? The tech companies have all the money. Between them Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel and Microsoft have $300 billion in cash and no debt -- enough capital to buy anything. Apple all by itself could buy the entire entertainment industry, though antitrust laws might interfere.

Right now these companies are not trying to buy the entertainment industry but to buy access to content and audiences. Their primary goal is disintermediation of cable and broadcast TV networks. The vision held by all is of Americans sitting in our homes buying a la carte videos over the Internet and eating popcorn.

This is unlikely to happen simply because cable companies and TV networks aren’t going to hand over their businesses.  If such a transition does take place, and I think it is only a matter of time before it does, the catalyst won’t be phalanxes of lawyers meeting across conference tables. When the real entertainment revolution happens it will be either because of a total accident or an act of deliberate sabotage.

Sabotage is the Way

With accidents so difficult to predict or time, I vote for sabotage.

But sabotage doesn’t come naturally to the minds of big company executives, or at least not executives at the companies I’m naming here. They are hobbled by their sense of scale for one thing. Big companies like to hang with other big companies and tend to see small companies as useless. When elephants dance the grass is trampled. Well it’s time for someone to pay more attention to the grass.

While Silicon Valley has more than enough money to buy Hollywood, Hollywood is unlikely to sell. And even if they sell, it’s unlikely Silicon Valley would get anything truly useful because they’d only be buying a shell. Networks and movie studios don’t typically make anything, they just finance and distribute content.

If you can’t buy Hollywood, then you have to steal it.

What makes Hollywood unique is its continuous output of ideas. When technology companies talk about gaining access to content what they really mean is gaining access to this flow of ideas. For all we might talk about the long tail, what defines Hollywood is new content, not old, with a single hit movie or TV series worth a hundred times as much as something from the library. Intel has no trouble getting rights to old TV series, for example: it’s the new stuff that’s out of reach.

Amazon and Netflix have bought a few original productions between them but the economics aren’t especially good because they have to pay all the costs against what is so far a limited distribution outlet. These companies need to find a way to control more content for less money.

The trick to stealing Hollywood is interrupting this flow of ideas, not just for a show or two but for all shows, diverting the flow to some new place rather then where it has always gone. Divert the flow for even a couple years and the entire entertainment industry would be changed forever.

What if there were no new shows on CBS?

Two Months from Bankruptcy

Here’s where it is useful to understand something about the finances of content production. This $100+ billion business (the U.S. Department of Labor says the U.S. entertainment industry pays $137 billion per year in salaries alone) is driven by cash yet there is very little cash retained in the business. While Apple is sitting on $100+ billion, Disney isn’t, because there’s a tradition of distributing most video revenue in the form of professional fees.

While workers in most industries think in terms of what they make per year, during the heyday of the studio system the currency in Hollywood was always how much any professional made per week. Today the entertainment industry often thinks of what someone makes per day.

The numbers are big, but not that big. George Lucas just sold his life’s work for $4 billion, which would make him a second-tier tycoon in Silicon Valley.

The only person to ever extract more cash from Hollywood than George Lucas was Steve Jobs when he sold Pixar. Ironic. eh?

So the Hollywood content creation system is fueled with cash, but the pockets from which that cash comes are not very deep. Every production company -- every production company -- is two months or less from bankruptcy all the time. They create or die.      

So here comes an Intel, say, looking to buy or license content for its disruptive virtual cable system. They attempt to acquire content from the very sources they hope to disrupt. "License us your content, oh Syfy Channel, so we can use it to decrease the value of that same content sold to Time Warner Cable".

Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture?

Big Business is Small

Google has taken a somewhat more clever approach with YouTube financing 100+ professional video channels. But this, too, won’t have much impact on the industry since it doesn’t truly divert the content flow from its traditional destination to a new one. And at $8,000 per hour or less, YouTube budgets aren’t exciting many real players in Hollywood.

You get what you pay for.

If your goal is disruption -- and that ought to be the goal here -- then disrupt, damn it! Impede the flow of ideas. That means negotiating not with big companies but with small ones. Because the Hollywood content creation ecosystem is based on a cottage industry of tiny production companies where the real work is done. There is no mass production.

I happen to own a tiny production company, NeRDTV, which produces this rag and other stuff. I’ve laughed on this page from time to time at what my company is supposedly worth based on acquisition costs in Silicon Valley. I know my real value is much lower after negotiating with Mark Cuban, who at one time  looked to put some money in this operation.

"It’s a production company" Cuban says. "No production company is worth more than $2 million".

Yours for Just $4 billion

And he’s right. By the time you separate the production infrastructure from the content it produces -- content that is usually owned by someone else who pays for making it -- all that’s left over is about $2 million in residual payments, office furniture, editing equipment and BMW leases.

There are probably 1,000 legitimate production companies in California and 2,000 in America overall. If they are worth an average of $2 million each, buying them all would cost $4 billion.

So the cost of installing a valve on the entire content creation process for the $100+ billion U.S. entertainment industry would be $4 billion. Think of it as an option.

Or cut it a different way: $4 billion would buy a controlling share of every TV pilot and every movie in pre-production. Talent follows the money, so they’d all sell out.

This is a classic labor-management squeeze tactic from the early days of the labor movement, and it works.

Bribe the Peasants

There are no antitrust issues with buying $2 million companies or early investing in productions. They are beneath the radar at both the U.S. Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission. Nobody cares about small companies.

Something like this tactic is occasionally used in what’s called a roll-up, where borrowed or investor money is used to buy a basket of companies that are integrated then eventually sold or taken public. But that can’t happen here because of the sneaky antitrust requirements. Apple, if it were to try this, would have to do it through a new content division or subsidiary.

Let’s look at a real world example of what I mean.

My little sister started an Internet business selling to consumers copies of jewelry used on TV shows. Her original idea was to go to the studios and networks and cut revenue sharing deals in exchange for exclusive licenses, but the studios and networks wouldn’t even talk to her. The deals were too small, the money not enough, they claimed, to even justify the legal expense. But most importantly they didn’t want to make a mistake and set the wrong precedent. No precedent was better than a bad precedent.

Undeterred, my sister took a different approach very similar to the one I am presenting here. She found that the jewelry used in TV shows typically comes from a separate wardrobe budget and each such budget is controlled by a wardrobe mistress. If the wardrobe mistress could get jewelry for free then she wouldn’t have to buy it or rent it with that part of the budget falling to her bottom line. Unspent budget = profit. So my sister cut her deals not with the studios or networks but with the wardrobe mistresses — eventually more than 40 of them. Nearly every U.S. primetime TV show uses her jewelry with not a penny going to the networks and it was all perfectly legal.

If Seattle and Silicon Valley make a frontal attack on Hollywood they’ll fail. But if they undermine the current system by bribing the peasants, they’ll succeed for a tenth the money they’d have lost the other way.

Will they follow my advice? Probably not.

Reprinted with Permission

Photo Credit: FotoYakov/Shutterstock

Maybe you’re having problems with Flash, and would like to do a clean reinstall. Or perhaps you’ve decided the technology causes more problems than it solves, and would like to delete it forever. Whatever the reason, you may one day find you want to completely remove Flash from your PC -- but that can sometimes be a problem.

You won’t be able to use the standard uninstaller if there are other background processes using Flash, for instance. And your Flash installation can sometimes become corrupted, causing further complications. Don’t give up, though -- with just a little perseverance your PC should soon be Flash-free (apart from embedded plugins via apps like Chrome, anyway).

To get started, first close all non-critical programs: all your regular applications, and everything in the system tray which isn’t security-related. Conflicts with other software are a prime cause of Flash uninstall issues.

And with that done, launch Control Panel, open the “Uninstall a Program” applet, select Flash and try the Uninstall option. (On Windows 8 you may need to click View Installed Updates before using Search to find KB2758994.) And if it complains this isn’t possible because a particular program is open, find that application and close it.

Sometimes you may not recognise the application it’s talking about, though. Or the program may fail without giving you any sensible reason at all. The issue may still be a conflict with other software, though, so we’d recommending rebooting into Safe Mode, and trying again.

Once the process is complete, restart your system, and verify any results by pointing your browser at Adobe’s online Flash version checker. If it shows you a blank box, rather than a version number, than all is well (for that browser, at least). And if you want to reinstall Flash at some later date then the same page explains precisely what you need to do.

If you’re still having problems, though, Adobe provide a stand-alone Flash uninstaller you can use. The same rules apply: close down all other apps, run the program, click Uninstall and wait for the results.

If even this doesn’t work then you need to scour your PC more thoroughly for apps which might be using Flash. Search your hard drives for files matching NPSWF*.*, for instance, and note their location. You may find a few npswf32.dll’s, for instance, which represent the Flash plugin for a particular application. It’s possible that some of these may be causing your problems, so first make sure none of those programs are currently running. And then consider uninstalling any that you can do without for a while.

Once the uninstaller has ran to completion, though, all you then really have to do is clean away any remaining Flash-related files and folders (which may also help if you want to reinstall). Hold down the Windows key and press R to launch the Run box, copy and paste the path \Windows\system32\Macromed\Flash there, click OK to open that folder, and delete all the files and folders there.

Repeat the process to delete the contents of the folders \Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash, %appdata%\Adobe\Flash Player and %appdata%\Macromedia\Flash Player, and as long as those operations proceed without error, you’ll be able to reboot your Flash-free PC. And again, Adobe’s version checker will both confirm this, and give you instructions on reinstalling the plugin, if you want to do so.

This year could be big for game consoles. Ouya expects to begin shipments in March or April and Steam has announced its very own console is in the works. Not to mention that Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, has placed a mysterious countdown clock on his blog, leading to lots of speculation, including, of course, the next Xbox -- the "720".

Where does all of this lead? The good analysts at IDC are convinced you will purchase a new console this year: "2011 and 2012 were tough for many console game disc developers and publishers", says Lewis Ward, research manager. "With the advent of eighth-generation consoles, starting with the Wii U, historical norms strongly imply that game disc revenue will stop bleeding in 2013 and rise substantively in 2014".

The analysts make bold predictions for Wii U as well: "shipments will exceed 50 million by year-end 2016". Given that the original Wii trailed off as quickly as it rose, this number may be a reach, but maybe not. Nintendo has become more savvy in what today's users want, and I will be getting to that next.

All of this comes as less of a surprise and more of a "duh" moment, because new consoles are on the way -- Wii U has kicked it off -- and most avid gamers will upgrade. The kicker here is the extras -- this is what I alluded to with the Wii U. These days, thanks in part to the Xbox 360, people expect more than just games -- they want an entertainment device. A living room hub. Most manufacturers are trying to deliver on that wish already.

So, do you plan to buy the next-generation console of your choice when it hits the market? Will you buy one of the new boxes slated for 2013? I already fall into the "yes" category because I am guilty of pre-ordering the Ouya. In other words, I have already fallen into IDC's hands here. And you?

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox