may the force be with you

On Thursday, the company kicked off a campaign aimed at helping customers prepare for the new operating system, which is set for a mainstream launch in January.

As expected, Microsoft gave details of two programs. The "Vista-capable" program allows machines that meet a minimum set of requirements to tout themselves as able to run the new Windows.

Computer makers who meet higher requirements will be able to tout their machines as "Premium Ready," indicating the PCs are able to take advantage of higher-end features, such as Vista's Aero graphics.

"There's really no reason to wait until the launch of Windows Vista to start shopping for a PC that can deliver a great Windows Vista experience or to start thinking about upgrading your current PC to windows Vista," product manager Greg Amrofell said in a telephone interview.

Microsoft also launched on Thursday a "Get Ready" Web site, which includes an Upgrade Advisor tool to help people determine just how Vista-ready an existing PC is.

The downloadable program is designed to tell people which features and versions of Vista their PC is able to run, thereby abstracting some of the complex requirements of Vista. For example, Aero graphics require a certain amount of memory bandwidth--a measurement of PC performance that few people are likely to know about in their machine. The advisor tool will simply say whether a PC will work out or not, rather than focus on specific requirements.

That way, customers "don't have to spend time in the footnotes of complex system requirements," said Mike Burk, the PR Manager, Windows Client.

That said, Microsoft did publish official minimum requirements for Vista on Thursday, largely matching the Vista-capable specifications. Systems need an 800 MHz processor, 512MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive with 15GB of free space and a CD-ROM drive. That guarantees access to Vista's core features, but not Aero and other premium features.

To be classified as Vista-capable, a computer needs an 800MHz processor, 512MB of memory and a DirectX 9-capable graphics card. Premium Ready machines need a 1GHz processor, 128MB of graphics memory, 1GB of system memory, a 40GB hard drive and an internal or external DVD-ROM drive.

While Microsoft has provided some clarity on checking a PC for Vista, it's not a straightforward process, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at market research firm Directions on Microsoft.

"I don't understand why it has to be this complex," he said. "Why can't this be written up on a one-page piece of paper in a manner that you don't have to be an electrical engineer to understand?"

Most shipping PCs should be Vista-capable, Microsoft said. For example, all systems introduced by Dell this year are Vista-capable. The majority of Dell's Vista-capable machines will support Aero graphics and more than three-fourths of its models can be configured to run the fancier graphics. Dell is also offering 17 custom-configured systems that are designed to support Aero.

"Our sense is that the vast majority of PCs do meet the requirements for the Vista-capable logo," Amrofell said. As for Premium Ready, he said that "a good number of PCs do meet the bar, and that's going to grow over the next few months."

Related coverage
Piecing together Vista

All the news in the run-up to release.

The marketing programs and upgrade tool are designed to ease some of the uncertainty around Vista well ahead of the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, the two biggest PC selling times of the year. Vista had long been expected to arrive by the 2006 holidays, but Microsoft said in March that it would not arrive on store shelves until January.

Kevin Johnson, head of the business unit that includes Windows, said in an interview with CNET News.com this week that Microsoft is likely to have some kind of discount or upgrade program to help those who buy a PC this holiday season upgrade to Vista.

"Yeah, there's likely to be something," Johnson said, without giving specifics.

source:http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Set+your+systems+for+Vista/2100-1016_3-6073779.html?tag=html.alert

# posted by dark master : 5/19/2006 09:38:00 AM  0 comments

Sensor can capture high-quality photos, high definition video

BOISE, Idaho - Chip-maker Micron Technology Inc. will unveil a thumbnail-sized digital sensor that enables pocket-sized cameras and cell phones to capture bursts of 10 high-quality photos in a single second or even high-definition video.

Production of the new 8-megapixel digital image sensor is expected to begin early next year at Micron's fabrication plants in Idaho and Italy, the Boise-based company said Thursday.

Devices using the new chip should reach consumers by late 2007 and will feature high-speed, high-megapixel digital photography capabilities normally found in more expensive, single-lens reflex cameras. Micron did not identify any customers in its announcement.

"We're saying it can go in a point-and-shoot camera selling in the $200 to $300 range," said Suresh Venkatrama, Micron's director of the digital camera segment. "It brings high-quality digital video and photography down to the consumer space."

The new sensor is a type of chip known as a "complementary metal-oxide semiconductor," or CMOS. Analysts say the technology, which is also used in memory chips and microprocessors, will challenge the dominance of traditional light-sensing charge-coupled devices, or CCDs.

"With CMOS' lower power consumption, cost advantages and the ability to integrate more functionality onto the chip set, CCD is under a lot of pressure in this market," said Jeff Hayes, director of consumer imaging for InfoTrends in Weymouth, Mass.

But Chris Chute, research manager for IDC Digital Imaging Solutions in Framingham, Mass. said it may take a while for the new sensor to become commonplace in consumer cameras. Most digital cameras are made in Japan and manufacturers there tend to buy image sensors from Japanese suppliers, who primarily produce CCD chips.

"This will immediately appeal to photography enthusiasts, but the average consumer is really more of a middle- to late-adopter and doesn't pay attention to the specs and features as much," said Chute. "You are probably going to see this in mainstream digital cameras and high-end cell phones in another year or so."

Micron's new sensor includes a faster processor that eliminates usual point-and-shoot delays between taking pictures. That means users can shoot up to 10 images per second at 8-megapixel resolution or 30 frames per second at a resolution of 2-megapixels.

A 2-megapixel digital picture file can be printed in the normal 4-inch-by-6-inch format without noticeable graininess while an 8-megapixel picture can be printed in the larger 8x10 format without a loss of quality.

The sensor's rapid capture rate and high resolution also allows smaller cameras to incorporate features such as image stabilization, faster auto-focus, higher quality digital zoom and recording HD video, said Micron, which also is the largest U.S. manufacturer of computer memory chips.

"There is growing interest in mobile video, especially among younger consumers," Hayes said. "With large memory chips coming out on camera phones, you are talking about capturing 20 to 30 minutes of HD-quality video on a mobile device and that pushes the consumer closer to where they consider using their phone as an everyday camcorder and camera."

source:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12851321

# posted by dark master : 5/19/2006 09:37:00 AM  0 comments

The suit, originally filed in February, was refiled Wednesday by ServersCheck BVBA, a small company that makes network monitoring software, over Google's "Suggest" feature, included in the latest version of its search toolbar for Web browsers. When a user types in keywords for a search, the toolbar shows a drop-down menu of guesses related to those words.

If ServersCheck is entered, Google generates suggested search terms such as "serverscheck crack," "serverscheck pro crack," and "serverscheck keygen," which lead to pirated software, said Maarten Van Laere, chief executive officer of ServersCheck.

Van Laere said he was told by Google that Web sites with illegal content would be removed from their index, but that it couldn't tweak the Suggest feature. So Van Laere filed suit, an action he said is an expensive option for a small company against a behemoth such as Google.

He's trying to get Google to change the Suggest results. Van Laere uses Google's tool for analyzing Web traffic and found that about 93 percent of ServerCheck's customers come to their Web site by way of the popular search engine.

"We don't have any problems with the fact that in Google you can find illegal copies of our software," Van Laere said. "There are people who will never buy the product at the end of the day.

"But people that are looking for your company's name in good faith are then being suggested by Google to go and look for a crack. That is a complete different ballgame," Van Laere said.

Censorship Concerns

In response to the suit, a Google attorney told a Belgian newspaper on Wednesday that they could not filter the results of Google Suggest, citing censorship concerns.

Van Laere said the defense isn't accurate, since it appears that Google Suggest will not try to complete tracking numbers for shipping items or offer alternate suggestions for sexually-related terms. In a test, Google Suggest did not offer any related words for the terms "pornography," "naked" and "sex."

An attorney based in Belgium for Google was not immediately available for comment.

The latest problem is not the only run-in ServersCheck has had with Google. In its original lawsuit, ServersCheck complained that Google was allowing a competitor to use its brand name in an advertisement, falsely claiming that ServersCheck's software could be downloaded, Van Laere said.

Google agreed while the suit was making its way through court to halt advertisements on its AdWords service that used ServersCheck's name, Van Laere said.

source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20060518/tc_pcworld/125758

# posted by dark master : 5/19/2006 09:35:00 AM  0 comments

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the company, which alleges that AT&T illegally cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic-surveillance program.

In this recently surfaced statement, Klein details his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T office in San Francisco, and offers his interpretation of company documents that he believes support his case.

For its part, AT&T is asking a federal judge to keep those documents out of court, and to order the EFF to return them to the company. Here Wired News presents Klein's statement in its entirety, along with select pages from the AT&T documents.

31 December 2005

I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it's been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.

-- 16 January, 2004

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it, and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:

"As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant." The New York Times, 9 November 2002

To mollify critics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) spokesmen have repeatedly asserted that they are only conducting "research" using "artificial synthetic data" or information from "normal DOD intelligence channels" and hence there are "no U.S. citizen privacy implications" (Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General report on TIA, December 12, 2003). They also changed the name of the program to "Terrorism Information Awareness" to make it more politically palatable. But feeling the heat, Congress made a big show of allegedly cutting off funding for TIA in late 2003, and the political fallout resulted in Adm. Poindexter's abrupt resignation last August. However, the fine print reveals that Congress eliminated funding only for "the majority of the TIA components," allowing several "components" to continue (DOD, ibid). The essential hardware elements of a TIA-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into "real world" telecommunications offices.

In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The "secret room" itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.

The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the "secret room," which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company's endless "downsizings," but he was quickly replaced by another.

Plans for the "secret room" were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from "AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services" and authored by the labs' consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. (See sample PDF 1-4.) This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not "leak" their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.

This problem is solved with "splitters" which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the "secret room." The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform -- in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter -- its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet.

The above-referenced document includes a diagram (PDF 3) showing the splitting of the light signal, a portion of which is diverted to "SG3 Secure Room," i.e., the so-called "Study Group" spy room. Another page headlined "Cabinet Naming" (PDF 2) lists not only the "splitter" cabinet but also the equipment installed in the "SG3" room, including various Sun devices, and Juniper M40e and M160 "backbone" routers. PDF file 4 shows one of many tables detailing the connections between the "splitter" cabinet on the 7th floor (location 070177.04) and a cabinet in the "secret room" on the 6th floor (location 060903.01). Since the San Francisco "secret room" is numbered 3, the implication is that there are at least several more in other cities (Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are some of the rumored locations), which likely are spread across the United States.

# posted by dark master : 5/19/2006 09:32:00 AM  0 comments