Friday, June 28, 2013

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Video tribute to Ed Iacobucci posted

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 04:21 AM PDT

See this mug?  It is from the early days when Microsoft and IBM worked together to produce a pre-emptive multitasking operating system – that is to say, OS/2.

Ed Iacobucci, recently deceased, was instrumental in the cooperation between IBM and Microsoft when he worked at Big Blue in Boca Raton.  You can find our own tribute to Ed here.

Virtualworks has also produced a video that summarises some of Ed’s achievements in computing, which you can see here.

US general claims hacking China is OK

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 04:03 AM PDT

A top US spook has been complaining that the recent leak which showed his nation hacking computers with the same vigour as other states is an unfair comparison.

The US defence community's hacking antics were revealed by Edward Snowden who showed that the complaints about Chinese hackers were simply hypocritical.

Now, according to Reuters, Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that it was not being hypocritical to attack China's hacking approach.

All countries gathered intelligence on their potential adversaries but Beijing's problematic "niche" was intellectual property theft, he said.

Dempsey told an audience at the Brookings Institution think tank that all nations on the face of the planet always conduct intelligence operations in all domains.

He said that he had words with China about their approach and the view was that there are no "rules of the road in cyber, there's nothing, there's no laws that they are breaking, there's no standards of behaviour".

The United States has become increasingly vocal about Chinese hacking, which officials say has cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars in lost intellectual property and is helping the nation's enemies speed up development of advanced weaponry.

Dempsey said the government is close to completing an update of its rules of engagement for dealing with a cyber attack.

He dusted off the old warning that if a government launched a cyber attack on the US it could be met with a cruise missile or an invasion. 

Google planning its own console

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 03:13 AM PDT

It seems that Google has been taking a page from Microsoft's game plan and waiting until something is an established market seller before going in with all guns blazing.

The Wall Street Journal's deep throats are telling it that Google is developing a videogame console and a wristwatch based on Android.

 

The Journal said that the devices could be available as soon as this autumn.

Google is also working on a revamped version of the Nexus Q music-streaming device. Google unveiled the Nexus Q in June 2012, but never released the product, which was slammed by critics.

A video game console could provide a significant opportunity for Google to expand Android's reach beyond its stronghold in smartphones and tablets. However it is dealing with a market which has a lot of competition and has seen a fair few casualties in its time.

The Journal claims that games that run on Android software have proved popular, and they are growing more quickly than games made for the big-name consoles supplied by Microsoft and Sony.

They are certainly different from the big budget titles available on the traditional consoles.

The appeal of such games has prompted the development of new devices aimed specifically for Android by other hardware companies, like Ouya. 

Has Larry Ellison been body snatched?

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 03:08 AM PDT

It is starting to look like the abrasive CEO of Oracle Larry Ellison has been bodysnatched and replaced by someone who wants to make friends with everyone.

While we knew he had buried the hatchet with long term enemy Salesforce, and signed a friendship agreement with Microsoft, the comments he has been making about CEO Marc Benioff indicate a dramatic shift in personality.

According to USA Today, the depths of the change were obvious in a conference call the pair made to outline their new pact. They seemed to be like a couple of love-sick teens talking about each other in terms which could be dangerous for our diabetic readers.

Ellison remembered the days before he called Salesforce a cockroach hotel when the pair worked together in perfect harmony.

As Benioff waxed on the praise in the conference call, he said: "the pre-integration of the application layer, the continuous improvement, the security and performance and the economy at the infrastructure level, are not going to come from a customer-supplier relationship but from a partnership relationship and that is what is very important to Oracle".

While most of the world would not have a clue what he was saying, you could tell that love was in the air.

This is a far cry from Ellison slaming Salesforce.com, for using the "wrong" cloud model - unlike Oracle's, Ellison dubbed Salesforce.com's multi-tenancy architecture 15 years out of date, saying it has a "horrible" security model.

Now it seems that Ellison is looking forward to working with Salesforce for years to come.

Benioff said that this is "a new world, this is a new time". The couple were in the "third wave of computing and companies like Salesforce and Oracle working together is evidence that that's how it has to be in this new world because the value that can get creative is just going to be epic".

Ellison watchers are not sure what to make of the superfriendly new rolemodel. We know that he has bought an Island near Hawaii so maybe the sea air is agreeing with him. 

Intel CTO Justin Rattner to step down

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 02:59 AM PDT

Industry veteran Justin Rattner is stepping down as Intel CTO after four decades in the company. Rattner recently turned 65 and Intel doesn’t keep employees in corporate posts once they hit that magic number.

It’s not quite like Logan’s Run. Rattner will stay at Intel in an undetermined role, but right now he is on leave, dealing with a family matter.

Rattner joined Intel back in 1973 after a brief stretch at HP and Xerox. In 1979 he was appointed Intel’s first principal engineer and he became Intel’s fourth fellow in 1988. He became one of the first Intel Senior Fellows in 2001. Intel did not name a successor, but whoever gets the job will be faced with plenty of challenges in the hot seat.

Under CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel is set to embark on programme aimed to improve its competiveness in mobile. So far Intel has not had much luck in the smartphone and tablet business, which has become a force to be reckoned with over the past three years. However, there are some positive signs for Intel.

Its next generation Silvermont architecture could prove more than a match for frugal ARM cores and the company is slowly starting to get high-profile design wins in mobile, such as the recently announced Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1.

Developers need to quit worrying and learn to love DRM

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 02:55 AM PDT

The head of the web standards body, W3C, said that developers need to embrace DRM as a way of preventing different parts of the web being walled off.

There are fears that the W3C will include DRM as part of the new HTML standards.

But Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium said that this was the lesser of two evils.

He told ZDNet that proposals to provide a hook for DRM-protected media within HTML are necessary to help prevent scenarios such as movie studios removing films from the web to protect them from piracy.

He said that if this does not happen there is a danger that such media will only be available through native apps, rather than the browser.

Jaffe believes it is in the interest of everybody that protected content remains available on the web, and that DRM is a compromise.

If the owners of premium content who want DRM do not get their way, they will end up providing their content behind walls.

He wanted the web to be a universal platform and it is not good when content finds its way into walled gardens or into closed apps.

Jaffe added that the latest plan does not involve standardising proprietary DRM systems, but on the other hand it will not be excluded from the web platform.

He said that the compromise is a set of open APIs that give a standard framework to bring in this content via plug-in, but where the plug-in is not standardised. 

Wikileaks worker was FBI spook

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 02:35 AM PDT

Wikileaks worker "Siggi" Thordarson has outted himself as a double agent working for the FBI.

According to Wired, Thordarson was a long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key organiser.

He had the role of double agent for three months and earned $5,000 for his trouble. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings.

Thordarson was 17 when he joined WikiLeaks in February 2010. He joined after WikiLeaks published internal bank documents connected to that country's financial crisis.

When the local staff revolted over what they considered Julian Assange's self-promotion, Assange put Thordarson in charge of the WikiLeaks chat room, making Thordarson the first point of contact for new volunteers, journalists, potential sources, and outside groups.

He was also the middle man in the negotiations with the Bradley Manning Defense Fund that led to WikiLeaks donating $15,000 to the defence of its alleged prime source.

In January 2011, Thordarson was implicated in a political scandal in which a laptop packed with spying gear was found running unattended in an empty office in the parliament building.

According to chat logs, Assange promised to back him, but said that he expected total loyalty in return.

In June 2011 he visited Ellingham Hall where Assange was then under house arrest while fighting extradition to Sweden.

Thordarson had tried to get Lulzsec to hack Iceland's government systems as a service to WikiLeaks. He shot and uploaded a 40-second mobile phone video that opens on the IRC screen with the chat in progress, and then floats across the room to capture Asssange at work with an associate.

This video fell into the hands of the FBI who had just arrested Lulzsec's leader, Hector Xavier Monsegur, AKA Sabu, a week earlier.

The FBI warned Iceland and a huge team of FBI came to the country, asking authorities to help them.

They never caught Thordarson but he approach the FBI two months later.

Talking to Wired he said that he cooperated because he didn't want to participate in having Anonymous and Lulzsec hack for Wikileaks. But Wired think his second reason was more likely - he did it for the adventure.

To prove he had the adventure he provided Wired with emails that appear to be between him and his FBI handlers, flight records for some of his travels, and an FBI receipt indicating that he gave them eight hard drives. 

Adblock Plus denies ad fixing allegations

Posted: 27 Jun 2013 09:21 AM PDT

Adblock Plus is one of the most popular ad blockers on the market and up until a few months ago it was going from strength to strength, finding its way onto millions of PCs and mobile devices.

However, Adblock’s venture into mobile seems to have been a wrong move, as it started unravelling ever since the service hit Google’s Play Store. Google wasn’t willing to tolerate ad blockers on the Play Store and it quickly banished the app, but at about the same time even more sinister rumours started to emerge.

The vigilant corners of the internet were saying that there was more to Google’s decision than meets the eye. They were alleging that Adblock was in fact playing a very dangerous game, by blocking some ads and allowing others to get through.

Mobilegeeks’ Sascha Pallenberg has now alleged that Adblock isn't squeaky clean. Pallenberg points out that back in 2010, Adblock entered an odd strategic partnership with Cologne based Eyeo, which had 15 people on the payroll. In the end it turned out that the company’s only product was a free browser extension, which doesn’t sound like it can pay the rent and 15 salaries in Germany. 

Pallenberg says that by late 2011 Adblock Plus was offering an option called “Acceptable Ads” which would basically include ads which were unobtrusive and acceptable, based on community ratings. Nothing wrong with that, but the acceptable ads list was not just that. The “acceptable” ads were supposed to be small, unobtrusive, non-blinking and not based on Flash.

Pallenberg alleges Adblock practically whitelisted all ads coming from “friendly” sites and subsidiaries, all with a bunch of fake reviews, shady business practices and some porn to spice things up a bit.

He points out that Adblock managing director Till Faida told a Swiss paper that the “strategic partners” could not be named, but that the partnership is basically part of the “Acceptable Ads” whitelist.

Faida told TechEye: "We have an initiative called Acceptable Ads to support websites with unobtrusive ads. Every website can participate. The [Pallenberg] article on purpose just slanders our good name".

The biggest problem for Adblock might not be its execs, but another bit of software dubbed YieldKit. It basically “manages” thousands of advertisers and allows them to get past ad blockers. Nothing odd, but it’s on the list of “Acceptable Ads” and it was created by people with ties to the Adblock team.

This wouldn’t be the first time Adblock was accused of shaking down websites through its “Acceptable Ads” programme. Digitaltrends ran a piece on the subject earlier this year. 

Top HP cloud exec: snooping happening worldwide

Posted: 27 Jun 2013 08:20 AM PDT

A top Hewlett Packard cloud executive has revealed that there has not been a European kick-back in the wake of the NSA's Prism spying revelations, suggesting there's a shared understanding it is happening in "every country around the world".

HP hasn't seen "any adverse reaction as it relates to the cloud," Steve Dietch, vice president, worldwide cloud at HP told TechEye. "Privacy and data sovereignty issues were there before the exposure of that - which to be frankly honest is happening in every country in the world".

The comments come during a US backed manhunt for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed the extent of spying details to the Washington Post and the Guardian, which showed the United States' secretive NSA, along with other western powers, was maintaining a security network that can intrude on almost everyone in the world.

Dietch suggested companies with sensitive data were already well aware that such dangers exist.

"If you're in a highly regulated environment you are already dealing with privacy and security issues that come into play or are reinforced. If you're an enterprise customer you're already worried about the exposure of your data," Dietch said.

Governments and business are affected because the majority of popular web services are hosted on American soil - and it appears there is a bilateral agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom to tap into each other's data networks, effectively bypassing sovereign law and acquiring such data quasi-legally.

"There's not much you can do if a government has access to your data and is being provided legally, or illegally, depending on the country you're in, with access via your service providers," Dietch said.

"You have to do everything to the best of your ability within your corporate guidelines to adhere to security and data sovereignty policies, that's high on the list," Dietch said. "Security and data sovereignty are a couple of the top issues when getting onto the cloud".
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