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Palladium tech up for discussion, says MS security chiefBy John Lettice Posted: 07/04/2002 at 06:33 EST Unaccountably, Microsoft seems to have forgotten to invite The Register to Tech Ed in Barcelona this week, but we're pleased to see some useful information making it into the public prints. Yesterday, IDG News correspondent Gillian Law obtained some useful information about Palladium from Microsoft UK chief security officer Stuart Okin. First of all, we do not get the impression that Okin is entirely pleased by the release of information about Palladium last week. Details, he claims somewhat bizarrely, were "leaked or squirrelled out...

Microsoft books LinuxWorld stand in bid for 'dialog'By John Lettice Posted: 07/04/2002 at 07:10 EST Microsoft is to exhibit at LinuxWorld Expo this August, and it appears that the company wants to be nice. Yesterday, Linux Today spotted the Beast's presence on the Expo exhibitor list, and after publicising this was contacted by an apparently kinder, gentler Microsoft. In the shape of Peter Houston, senior director of the Windows Server Product Management Group, who got in touch and explained that it's all about dialogue. The audience is important to Microsoft, and showing up is a first step "towards forming an...

Microsoft gets into PC hardware business Launches "Dream Machine" with FIC By Mike Magee: Thursday 04 July 2002, 08:49 INTEL IS NOT GOING TO LIKE this one little bit if it's true. A report in the Economic News claims that Microsoft and FIC will jointly launch a so–called "Dream PC" which doesn't even use an Intel chip, but instead makes use of a Via C3. The report claims that the first jointly developed "Dream PC" will be introduced towards the end of this month and that Microsoft will also show quite a few so called "baseline" or cheap machines which...

Where do I start? I am the dummie referenced in the headline. And, how do I choose a webhost?

In the months leading up to the debut of the new Ford Thunderbird last fall, the car's four-person design crew was asked to show its most recent tweaks to company executives. So it did what any auto-design team does: It hauled its latest prototype out to the center of a conference room for a group "walkaround." There, managers cooed over the slick coupe's rakish lines from every imaginable angle. But "prototype," in this case, might be the biggest understatement in automotive history. What the designers and executives were in fact viewing was a computer-generated hologram -- hovering slightly off the...

A group of Japanese security enthusiasts has developed a little tool called IE'en which exposes traffic between an IE user and any server he's contacting, including logins and passwords over HTTPS. The group, SecurityFriday, has made the tool available for download here. To use the tool it's necessary to log in as a current user on a Win-NT or 2K system. Of course if someone can log into your account they already have a great deal of your life in their hands and this is only going to give them a little bit more. What's interesting here is the ability...

Apple dumps on 70,000 users What are these people like?By Andrew Thomas, 02/07/2002 10:16:42 BSTAPPLE'S MASTERLY BUSINESS SENSE has once again come to the fore. Trumpeting the company's takeover of German pro audio outfit Emagic, which will now operate as an Apple division, the company was obviously concerned that Emagic was far too successful and has immediately taken the axe to 35 per cent of its revenues. Apple says that Mac based products account for over 65 per cent of Emagic's current revenues and that all Windows-based products will be discontinued at the end of September. With a claimed 200,000...

Apple today announced that it has acquired Emagic, makers of the Logic product line. Emagic will operate as a wholly owned division of Apple. "Emagic has set the industry standard for professional music creation and production," said Sina Tamaddon, Apple's senior vice president of Applications. "We're very excited to have the Emagic team join Apple and create more amazing products for musicians." According to information released by Apple, Macintosh-based products account for over 65 percent of Emagic's current revenues. Emagic's Windows-based product offerings will be discontinued on September 30, 2002. Over 200,000 musicians around the world actively use Logic. Emagic's...

Why we can't trust Microsoft's 'trustworthy' OSTue Jul 2,11:58 AM ETDavid Coursey COMMENTARY--Stung by criticism of its current offerings, Microsoft seems to be pinning its hopes for a truly "trustworthy" operating system on a future version of Windows, code-named Palladium. ? BizTech Library ? 2GHz Notebooks ? Wireless ISP Info ? Bluetooth Report  Sign up for the free ZDNet News Dispatch:     (CNET Networks Privacy Policy) Don't expect to see that OS anytime soon. Palladium is a long-term project that requires not only a new operating system, but new computers as well. How long Microsoft won't say. I'm thinking 2006 or later....

Microsoft’s Freon project is an Xbox, with extras July 1 — Its code name is “Freon,” reflecting the notion that it is the coolest secret project at Microsoft Corp. these days, at least in the eyes of the Xbox video-game division. FREON STANDS FOR is a souped-up successor to the Xbox console — capable of playing games but also offering television capabilities, such as pausing live TV and recording shows onto a computer hard drive, say people familiar with the effort. Though it is unclear whether such a product will ever be built, its core concept appears to have the...

Record makers could win the right to carry out hack attacks on music sharing services if a US proposal becomes law. Californian congressman Howard Berman has drawn up a bill that would legalise the disruption of peer-to-peer networks by companies who are trying to stop people pirating copyrighted materials. If his idea becomes law, record companies will be able to carry out a variety of attacks on the sharing services to make them unusable or so irritating to use that people abandon them. Existing legislation makes it an offence for anyone to carry out many of the attacks mooted in...

MS security patch EULA gives Billg admin privileges on your box By Thomas C Greene in Washington Posted: 06/30/2002 at 01:05 EST If you caught our recent coverage of the Windows Media Player trio of security holes you may have followed a link to the TechNet download site for a patch, or you might have activated Windows Update. If you did the former (though, oddly, not if you did the latter), you would have been confronted with an End User License Agreement (EULA) stating, most ominously, that: "You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and...

I Told You So Alas, a Couple of Bob's Dire Predictions Have Come True Just over three years ago I wrote a column titled "Cooking the Books: How Clever Accounting Techniques are Used to Make Internet Millionaires." It explained how telecom companies were using accounting tricks to create revenue where there really was none. Take another look at the column (it's among the links on the "I Like It" page), and think of Worldcom with its recently revealed $3.7 billion in hidden expenses. Then last August, I wrote a column titled "The Death of TCP/IP: Why the Age of...

Jonathan SkillingsThe debate over electronics recycling will grow a little more heated Monday with meetings of a legislative committee in California and a government-industry group in Minnesota. More resources from CNET:  •  CNET News.com: Top CIOs  •  Tech gifts for Father's Day, click here!  •  Find a job you love. Over 1 million postings.  •  Live Tech Help. Submit your question now. CNET Newsletters: News.com Daily Dispatch News.Context (weekly) News.com Investor (Daily) More Newsletters(CNet/ZDNet Privacy Policy) News.com Video:  •  Could Red Hat be the next Microsoft?    The upshot for companies is that, sooner or later, consumers are likely to...

News Flash: U.S. House of Representatives Says Alexander Graham Bell Did Not Invent the Telephone By HNN Staff Mail it to a friend "Bell, Alexander Graham (b. Edinburgh, Scotland, 1847; d. Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, 1922), inventor of telephone." Dictionary of American Biography "Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged." United States House of Representatives, June 11, 2002 On June 11, to little fanfare, the United State House of Representatives declared that the...

My MS Front Page is not behaving properly. When I import text into my main page in this new version 2002, it does not stay in its previous format and is a bear to reformat. It becomes slow and adds extra text. I made up a new intermediary page and imported the text there and it held but when I imported it into the original main page the format held, but the page is slow, as if a buffer is full. I looked at the html and there are no long strings of a command, the way there was before....

A team of physicists in Australia have successfully teleported a laser beam of light from one spot to another in a split second, it emerged today. The physicists, from the Australian National University, said they had managed to disembody a laser beam in one location and rebuild it in a different spot about one metre away in the blink of an eye. Project leader Dr Ping Koy Lam said there was a close resemblance between what his team had achieved and the movement of people in the science fiction series Star Trek, but the reality of beaming human beings between...

[...]Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshhold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed. The new threat bears little resemblance to familiar financial disruptions by hackers responsible for viruses and worms. It comes instead at the meeting points between computers and the physical structures they control.By disabling or taking command of floodgates in a dam, for example, or of substations handling 300,000 volts of electric power, U.S. analysts believe an intruder could use virtual tools to destroy real-world lives and property....

California nightmare: County declares CSC in default Negotiators seek to stave off death of outsourcing projectBy William WelshStaff WriterComputer Sciences Corp. and San Diego County negotiators are desperately working to settle a contract dispute after county officials charged CSC with being in default on a groundbreaking information technology outsourcing project. The county withheld a $44 million payment due to CSC in January, saying the company has failed to provide the required outsourcing services, such as adequate bandwidth for users, network support, security planning and refresh of infrastructure, applications and servers. The county April 18 issued a formal “Notice of Default”...

A recent article by Caroline E. Mayer in the Washington Post's National Weekly Edition tells an interesting tale about what might be called our national inclination to high-tech laziness. "Americans," Ms. Mayer reports, "buy the most sophisticated computers, the coolest digital cameras, the most advanced automobiles, the most versatile cell phones and handheld organizers, and then...and then we forget, or decline, or flat out refuse, to read the directions." Mayer goes on to detail some of the results of this endemic aversion to reading the users' manuals: unnecessary and costly product repairs and returns, clogged manufacturer "Help" lines, frustrated...