Latest Technology News

Up until today, Google had been distinguishing between development tracks 1 and 2 of its Chrome Web browser. Track 1 (last known build version 1.0.154.65) was the company's production edition, though a link on the same page where you could download 1.0 could take you to the "test" version instead, version 2.0.177.1. Google's always had interesting variations on the "beta" theme.

Anyway, today the company stated on its blog that it's "updating to a faster version" of Chrome, quoting an internal benchmark score giving its JavaScript processing 32.1% better speed in the new version over the old version. Well, that new version -- as Betanews verified today -- is actually 2.0.177.1, which is the same "new version" it's been for a few weeks now. Users of version 2 -- which other services had been distributing as the "most recent release" -- will notice no difference in performance.

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During the era of Office 2000's dominance in the desktop applications market, Microsoft was frequently criticized for forcing businesses into supporting a document format that was, by design, a moving target. Whenever the company added features to its Office components, support for those features had to be retrofitted onto the document format. That often made archives of thousands of older documents difficult for companies to manage.

It was a situation which many thought would enable Microsoft to self-perpetuate, creating dependencies from which businesses couldn't escape, forcing them to invest in whatever new versions that came along just to maintain their efficiency. Whether it was attained by accident or design, it was such a prime market position for the company that when it announced in 2005 that it would sacrifice its own Office document formats for an entirely new, publicly viewable, XML-based scheme originally entitled Office Open XML, even Betanews asked the question, "Is It Truly Open?" To this day, even now that Microsoft's efforts led to the publication of an international standard based on OOXML, now called ISO 29500, people are wondering -- often aloud -- where's the string that's attached to this rug that Microsoft will eventually pull?

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The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees on Thursday made official the previously expressed wishes of the user community, passing a resolution that swaps out the project's previous GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) for the Creative Commons Attribution / Share Alike License.

The Creative Commons version -- CC-BY-SA, in that system's nomenclature -- will, according to Wikimedia representatives, allow for greater reuse and legal interoperability with other projects offering the CC-BY-SA, including Yahoo's Flickr service, a variety of archives and libraries, and innumerable independent creative folk. Greater legal compatibility leads to greater reuse opportunities, which leads (the involved groups believe and hope) to further acceptance of the greater-freedom approach (a.k.a., copyleft) to copyright.

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What will happen to the video game rental trade and companies like GameFly and Blockbuster when the market changes, and when the more direct channel -- downloads over the net -- takes over? Sony looks to be thinking ahead to that point, as evidenced by its own recent survey.

The handheld market it going to be the first to drop hard copy and go fully downloadable. With the iPhone unexpectedly proving itself a viable outlet for small-footprint, small-price tag games, Nintendo dropping its customary cartridge slot upgrade on its DSi, and rumors of a new disc-less PSP, the changeover is imminent.

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"There is little benefit for end users (i.e., business) to upgrade to [Windows Mobile] 6.5," stated Adam Leach, London, UK-based principal consumer wireless analyst for Ovum, in an e-mail to Betanews this morning.

It's a sharp condemnation coming from the oft-cited telecom analyst and contributor to BBC Radio 4, and it's sounding more and more like Leach is not alone. Although there had been a buzz since last February around the upcoming revision to Microsoft Windows Mobile, it has noticeably died down. This even though Windows Mobile 6.5 was supposed to be launched on May 11, the first day of TechEd 2009. As it turned out, the system was only "announced," after having already been "announced" at Mobile World Congress back in February.

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When you're a developer with Mozilla Labs or another open source laboratory, one of the things you'll often find yourself doing is "launching" a project before it's anywhere near complete. That's what it means to be truly open. In the case of Aza Raskin and his design team, last night, he "launched" (that's Mozilla's term for it) a project to encourage Web site developers to build simpler but more accessible add-ons for the Firefox browser, by means of a JavaScript API and Firefox plug-in called JetPack.

Although Firefox is itself an exercise in JavaScript, crafting plug-ins to do simple things is not a simple matter. There's actually a cottage economy developing already around plug-ins, which Jetpack could disrupt merely by giving everyday programmers simpler means to make additions to the browser.
"Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser (e.g., HTML, CSS and JavaScript)," wrote Raskin late yesterday in his Call for Participation, "with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play."

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Last February, Google unveiled the preliminary beta of Google Sync for Mobile, which synchronizes contacts and calendar data between the user's Google account and his iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia Standard, S60, Sony Ericsson, or Windows Mobile device.

As Google did previously with BlackBerry, yesterday it launched an OS-specific version of the software beta for S60.

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Download Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.

For the fourth time since last September, a Microsoft spokesperson has contacted Betanews to suggest that our explanation of the remote application services deployment model brought closer by today's release of Beta 1 of .NET Framework 4.0 might confuse some folks. Thing is, we at least have reason to believe we understand the concept of it pretty well, having first spent up-front time with it last October at PDC.

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Information security doesn't have the easiest time in the budget process even under the best of circumstances, but many observers had hoped that the threat of greater risk in tough times would shield security budgets from cost-cutting moves that could prove dangerous in the long run. Sadly, that's not what Deloitte's recent Global Security Survey for the Technology, Media & Telecommunications Industry is seeing out there.

There's not a lot of optimism afoot when you feel compelled to call the Key Findings synopsis of your report "Losing Ground," but the information Deloitte's researchers turned up is actually more nuanced than that -- it's not just that the budgets are getting smaller, but that the threats are getting bigger. (Last year's report, for the record, was titled "Treading Water"; before that we had "Protecting the Digital Assets.")

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The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, as fans of Douglas Adams know, is a creature so mind-bogglingly stupid that it assumes that if you can't see it, then it can't see you. They are natives of the planet Traal, but on Earth are often found in Cupertino, address One Infinite Way. (Leave it to an RBB to name its lair after a programming error.)

On Traal, one fends off attacks of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast by wrapping a towel around one's own head. As nearly as I can tell, that's Apple's actual security strategy. How otherwise would you explain the company's non-response to CVE-2008-5353, known these past nine months and patched by everyone but Apple?

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The new Mini 10v netbook that Dell launched last week will get more capabilities over the year ahead, including what the company is calling "wireless improvements." However, although "Linux enthusiasts" might wish otherwise, an upgrade from the currently supported Ubuntu Linux 8.04 to the newer 8.10 or 9.04 won't be happening yet. A later release of Ubuntu isn't in the best interests of "mainstream users," according to an e-mail from Dell to Betanews last night.

The official word from Dell is that there are two main reasons for sticking with Canonical's Ubuntu 8.04 -- for the time being, anyway -- in the Linux editions of its Inspiron netbooks, a line-up also available with Microsoft's Windows XP.

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In March, Discovery Communications, the company responsible for the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet cable networks, filed a patent infringement suit against Amazon.com for its Kindle e-reading device. The patent is property of Discovery founder John S. Hendricks, and was granted in 2007, nearly ten years after it was filed. The company sought damages and royalties from Amazon and its successful Kindle.

Amazon fired back at Discovery on May 15, in two separate legal actions. The first is a categorical denial of all of Discovery's complaints and countersuit in the US District Court in Delaware. And the second is a suit in US District Court in Western Washington, claiming that the Discovery Channel's online store uses search and recommendation methods that infringe on four of Amazon's patents. Like Discovery's suit beforehand, it asks for royalties and damages sufficient to compensate for the infringement.

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USB 3.0 has been expected to "arrive" for a considerable amount of time, but due to the lengthy draft certification process, and general lack of pressure to get 3.0 "SuperSpeed" devices out in the market, it wasn't expected to become widespread until 2010. However, with NEC's new host controller, the arrival of the new USB standard could arrive soon.

The host controller is a chip which connects the host system such as a PC to external storage, peripherals or other systems, and NEC's new host controller (µPD720200) is based on the SuperSpeed USB standard which was finalized in November of 2008, more than eight years after the USB 2.0 spec was released.

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You can't really use the term "Wintel" to refer to computers any more. That fact has never been made clearer than yesterday, when during an Intel conference call with select general press reporters, company officials announced two major moves in the burgeoning arena of very small computers -- netbooks. First, its single-chip platform for netbooks is ready for sampling -- chipset, graphics, and Atom CPU all on one die. Second, its next generation slim form-factor Moblin Linux 2.0 is entering beta.

While netbook manufacturers currently -- and rather suddenly -- are relying on the venerable Windows XP for as much as 96% of pre-installations, by one analyst's estimate, Moblin's engineers are banking on the possibility that manufacturers are settling for XP because it's the most uniformly adaptable, low-profile system there is for portable media. That said, XP could be too general-purpose in nature for what a netbook wants to be, which is a portable communicative device that isn't a phone.

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Rather than lower the cost of AT&T's $70 per month unlimited iPhone data plan, the company may introduce tiered mobile data plans. Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets yesterday said the plans would be similar to the subsidized netbook trials that began in early April in Philadelphia and Atlanta.

In those trial markets, the mobile broadband plans were $40 per month for a 200 MB data cap and $60 per month for a 5 GB cap, options that AT&T found "met the needs of casual to occasional data users, as well as frequent and heavy users." That is, of course, when coupled with Fast Access DSL service (also a part of some plans.)

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