Rumor: Xbox 360 Ultimate?

Basically, the logic behind the meat of this story is that there was the 360 Core, then Premium, next the Elite, and soon, the Ultimate (Legendary after that anyone?). So, now that we have addressed my issues with the supposed name, lets get into the story.

Some guy at some forum (Proelite from Neogaf to be more exact) said that his one of the employees at his local Gamestop told him that they are getting a new SKU, and essentially what is happening (with the HDMI being added to the Premium systems and the HD-DVD drive prices dropping) is the Elite’s feature, minus color, are being dropped down to the Premium systems, and then there is a new SKU for a system that is basically an Elite (don’t know which color) with an integrated HD-DVD drive.

The reason why, to me, this makes sense is because I firmly believe that their were two driving factors for Microsoft not including a next generation Optical drive in their system from the beginning, the first is price (hehehmm, $600 PS3?) and the second is they didn’t know if either would lose significant ground.

Right now, Blu-Ray is winning by about 10%, if you ask me that could be corrected by subtracting the massive number of PS3’s with them integrated, and even then, winning by 10% isn’t enough to really say one is losing. So, since HD-DVDs aren’t losing by a lot, and Xbox 360s are selling like hot cakes, and there is now an HDMI port on the 360, why not go ahead and integrate the drives. Besides, Microsoft has already proven the modularity of their system with the USB HD-DVD drive they have already released, and integrating the drives would allow for larger game discs I would reckon.

Like I said, I have no idea how true this information is, but it does kind of make sense.

[ View ]

Google hawks online storage for money

In what appears to be another step in Google’s unrelenting march to lure users off the desktop into the online space, the search market leader has launched a paid storage plan for Gmail and Picasa Web Albums users.

The new paid storage service, announced last week by Ryan Aquino, Software QA Engineer Lead, Picasa Web Albums, does not come cheap. In addition to the free 2.82GB provided to all Gmail users, Google will provide a further 6GB for US$20 a year, 25GB for US$75 a year, 100GB for US$250 a year and 250GB for US$500 a year.

Google plans to extend the new service to other applications such as Google Docs & Speadsheets where paid storage may present a viable revenue alternative to advertising.

The new paid storage service may also present an attractive choice for users with diskless portable devices who are satisfied with Google’s range of online office productivity tools.

Gmail 9GB False Alarm

There’s a nice line of whispers going around about Gmail’s storage being upped to 9GB’s! Guess they’re trying to compete with Yahoo’s unlimited storage? I don’t understand it at all really, because very few people actually use the amount of space they have now, let alone 9GB’s. I’m only using 10mb’s to be honest (0%). Let’s not fool ourselves people. I recommend checking out the comments section of the provided link up above. Why? Because upon further reading you will find out that:

quamis:
“Gmail and picasa and other google services will share the same storage (fore premium users) so what you see there is the 2.8Gb quota from gmail + the picasa quota + everything else… this means that you should have 9Gb avail for Picasa also;)”

Daniel:

“False news…

Google is simply now SHARING your storage space between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums – so those who are seeing additional storage in Gmail are so because they’ve upgraded their Picasa Web Albums account.”

[ View ]

Windows “7″ FAQ

With Windows Vista finally behind us, it’s time to turn our attention to the next Windows client release, which is currently codenamed Windows “7″, though Microsoft has used other code-names, like “Vienna” and “Windows Seven” in the past. Despite an almost complete lack of verifiable information about this next major Windows release, there are at least two excellent reasons to begin discussing this project now:

1. This Web site, the SuperSite for Windows, is dedicated to discussing upcoming Microsoft products, so it’s only natural that I’d post a FAQ like this as soon as possible.

2. Microsoft isn’t particularly interested in discussing Vienna yet. “The launch of Windows Vista was an incredibly exciting moment for our customers and partners around the world, and the company is focused on the value Windows Vista will bring to people today,” Kevin Kutz, a Director in the Windows Client group at Microsoft said on February 13, 2007. “We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we’re working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates.” This quote was provided after I wrote a WinInfo article denouncing recent news reports about Vienna, all of which provided absolutely no new information at all.

Clearly, what’s needed is a central location for accurate information about Vienna. This is it.

[ View ]

ATI patches “purple pill”

There is a Vista exploit called Purple Pill that targets Vista through graphics drivers. It made a lot of news last week among the security and hacker communities, but how the affected companies responded is quite illuminating.The way it works is if a vulnerability exists in a driver, since the driver has kernel level access, a moronic design decision on MS’s part that we will all pay for over the next few years, attack code can load into the kernel and run rampant. Without getting too much into the joke that is Vista security window dressing, lets just say from that point on, there is pretty much nothing you can do.

The current exploit was said to be a flaw in a graphics driver, and was later revealed to be an ATI driver flaw, specifically an exploit in the installer. The interesting point is not that a graphics driver, or any kernel level driver flaw can expose a system, it is how quickly ATI reacted to it.

According to ATI, it was first notified that its drivers were at fault last Thursday, and as of late Friday, there was still a chance that the fixed drivers could be posted that day. At worst, the patched drivers would be upped on Monday.

The problem centres on the installer rather than the driver, about 4MB of the approximately 35MB package. In a day or so, the flaw was found, patched, tested and posted. [Edit: It looks like the Catalyst 7.7s are now up, so I guess it is Monday] Since the drivers themselves are not changed, only the peripheral programs, they will still be labeled Catalyst 7.8, and scores should not change.

What is comes down to is that a minor bug in a driver installer can own a box, this is a Microsoft problem, not an ATI or Nvidia problem. Both companies can be used to poke a nose into a joke of an MS security model, but rather than holding the messenger’s feet to the fire, we should put the blame where it is due, in Redmond.

As a side note, I wonder how NV would react to this situation. Its past reactions to bad news seems to be to shoot the messenger, and I wonder if that carries over to security as well. Since the hot exploit path to Vista for the next few months will be GPU related, I am sure we will find out. Won’t this be fun to watch.

[ View ]

Google Pack Adds StarOffice

Google Pack, the collection of applications recommended by Google, includes a new software: StarOffice, an office suite developed by Sun. In 2000 Sun released StarOffice’s source code, which became the foundation of OpenOffice.org, an open source project sponsored by Sun.

StarOffice 8 is a full-featured office suite that contains a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, applications for presentations, databases, math formulas and drawing. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats (except for the formats introduced in Office 2007), but it can also export documents as PDF out of the box. The software normally costs $70, but it’s available for free in Google Pack. It’s worth noting that StarOffice has a huge installer (more than 140 MB), so you should download it only if you have a fast Internet connection.

It will be interesting to see why Google didn’t choose to include OpenOffice.org, the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration.

The next step would probably be the addition of a plug-in that lets you synchronize local documents with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, so you can have the best of the both worlds: edit complicated documents offline, collaborate and store files securely online. For now, StarOffice is integrated with Google Search and Google Desktop.

[ View ]

Facebook Source Code Leaked

TechCrunch just received a tip that the source code for the Facebook main index page has been leaked and published on a blog called Facebook Secrets. There are at least two possible ways that the source code got out – the first is that a Facebook developer has sent it out, or the more likely option that a security hole or other method has been used on either one of the Facebook servers or in their source code repository to reveal the code. The blog that published the code only has a single post on it, so it was created exclusively to publish this code – meaning that whoever is behind this both isn’t taking credit for the hole and doesn’t want to be associated with it. While there is no certain way to verify if the code is actually from Facebook, by taking a quick look through the code and by double-checking some paths that have been referenced, we can say with some certainty that this seems to be both real and also a recent version of the main Facebook page.There are a number of clear ramifications here. The first is that the code can be used by outsiders to better understand how the Facebook application works, for the purposes of finding further security holes or bugs that could be exploited. Since Facebook is a closed source application, without access to the code security holes are usually found through a process of black-box testing, whereby an external party will probe the application in an attempt to work out how the application behaves and to try and find potential race conditions. In closed source applications it is common that developers rely on the closed nature of the application to obfuscate poor design elements and the structure of the application. An attacker getting access to the source code more often than not leads to further security holes being discovered. It is for these reasons that it is often claimed that open source software is more secure than closed source software, since there are many more eyes auditing the code and obfuscation can’t be used as a security measure.

The second implication with this leak is that the source code reveals a lot about the structure of the application, and the practices that Facebook developers follow. From just this single page of source code a lot can be said and extrapolated about the rest of the Facebook application and platform. For instance, the structure doesn’t follow any object oriented development practices, and it seems that the application is one large PHP file with a large number of custom functions living in the same namespace (they also seem to be using the Smarty templating engine).

This leak is not good news for Facebook, as it raises the question of how secure a Facebook users private data really is. If the main source code for a site can be leaked, then it can be said that almost anything is possible. Facebook has become such a success and has such a high profile that it has become a magnet for attacks against its systems. Most large scale applications suffer a breach at some point or another, since the odds are always stacked in favor of attackers, but companies can respond in a number of ways and the hope here is that Facebook will handle this situation gracefully. I don’t doubt that Facebook will pursuit this case with a lot of energy to both find the cause of why the code has leaked as well as to find who was responsible. They will also need to take some very quick short term measures to mitigate the risk to users since you can bet that right this minute there are hundreds of potential attackers pouring through the leaked code and probing their systems. At a quick glance, I know that I can see some obvious things in the code that both reveal certain hidden aspects of the platform and give a potential attacker a good head start.

[ View ]

Dell launches Linux desktops for China too

In addition to launching two new Linux consumer desktop machines for the European market, Dell has also announced that it intends to factory-install Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktops on its hardware in China.

Dell’s chief technology officer, Kevin Kettler, announced the plan is his keynote at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, California. No further details were given as to which configurations will be offered or why the company chose SLED for the Chinese market when it is pre-installing the Ubuntu distribution in the US and Europe.

Dell’s transactional desktop product manager for Europe, Adam Griffin, was unable to shed any light on that decision, but said that the global expansion of Dell’s Linux desktop project was driven by feedback on the company’s IdeaStorm and Direct2Dell sites.

Dell this week launched two configurations in Europe: Inspiron 6400n laptop and Inspiron 530n desktop. The 530n is also available with Ubuntu in the US, while Griffin revealed that the 6400n is actually the same as the E1505n Dell originally offered with Ubuntu in the US but with different branding.

The E1505n has since been discontinued in the US and replaced with the 1420n in the Ubuntu line-up. Griffin added that the company would be looking to develop more consistent branding for its Linux-based machines in the future.

As for business customers, Griffin said the company currently had no plans to offer Ubuntu-based machines for enterprises large or small but would continue to monitor demand.

“We continue to read the blogs and work through IdeaStorm and if there is demand we’ll take a look at that,” he said, noting that the company continues to ship nSeries desktops and laptops with FreeDOS for enterprises to install the Linux distribution of their choice.

[ View ]

Torvalds on Linux and Microsoft

Sniper223 writes with a link to an interview on the Network World site with Linus Torvalds. Linus goes through the usual spiel about stuff like why he released the Linux OS in the first place, and how the future is open source. He also has some interesting commentary on the Microsoft/Novell deal: “I actually thought that whole discussion was interesting, not because of any Novell versus MS issues at all, but because all the people talking about them so clearly showed their own biases.

The actual partnership itself seemed pretty much a nonissue to me, and not nearly as interesting as the reaction it got from people, and how it was reported … I don’t actually personally think the Novell-MS agreement kind of thing matters all that much in the end, but it’s interesting to see the signs that the sides are at least talking to each other.

I don’t know what the end result will be, but I think it would be healthier for everybody if there wasn’t the kind of rabid hatred on both sides. Some people get a bit too excited about MS, I think. I don’t think they are that interesting.” An interesting contrast to our earlier conversation.

First look: The HTC Shift

This has to be UMPC scoop of the year. Hugo got hold of the HTC Shift for a few days and had the chance to test it out and make a video. At last we have some REAL info on the device:

I had The HTC Shift for a little over 60 hours and was able to play with many of its great features, which include Pocket PC, HSDPA, Vista Business, Tilt Touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard and more. It is an incredible device with many possibilities, this video will hopefully showcase some of that. I managed to literally squeeze it into a very tight schedule I am running at present and did what I could to cover off some of the burning questions folks might have.

Machine specs (as tested):

• Windows Vista Business (3 hrs battery)
• Intel Santa Rosa A110 Processor
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 40GB HDD
• HSDPA (Data only) ready
• Web Cam
• Biometrics
• Windows Pocket PC (over 5 days battery life when used exclusively)
• Qualcomm 400MHz Processor
• 64MB RAM

[ Download ] [ View ]