Watch Streaming HDTV!

The world is changing. All around the world, television stations both traditional and digital are catching the wave that is internet television. Just a few years ago people used to sit down in front of their TVs and choose from 4 or 5 Channels that were broadcast through the air. The evolution has rapidly progressed: Color, Cable, Satellite, Projection TVs, Plasma TVs, LCD TVs, DVRs, Streaming TV, HDTV and on it goes. Today we will cover what TV you can see online (including HDTV) and where you can see it. Where color television was once the breakthrough of the century, watching television online for free in the stunning quality of HDTV is the new revolution.

Source: Watch Streaming HDTV!

Downloading various types of media over the internet has skyrocketed in popularity as broadband connections become more and more common. Adoption rates are steadily increasing, giving more consumers every day the speed necessary to download high quality video. With that capability comes the desire to find custom media tailored to a users tastes from all around the world. WatchOnline TV has unleashed a service designed to fill that very desire.

Historically, a television tuner card was needed for your PC to be able to carry a live television signal. Aside from that, web browsers have offered video and the presence of those sites has increased over time. However, the philosophy behind WatchOnline TV is to take a long list of those outlets, centralize that information and then provide an application to easily access television programming, be it web-specific or not, from anywhere in the world.

The key question here is cost and WatchOnline TV runs at a pretty reasonable price. For $47.70 (as of writing this article), you can sign up for lifetime unlimited access to the software and its subsequent updates. A two-year membership will run $1.79 per month and a one-year membership goes for $2.25 each month. Those are all reasonable prices if the service delivers and over the course of working with the software, I can say that it provides a valuable service that is more than worth a couple of bucks a month.

Continue here ...

---

  

Pandora Downloader (Windows)

Windows only: Free, open source app Pandora Downloader lets you save MP3s from the popular internet radio site, Pandora.

Source: Lifehacker

Pandora Downloader is similar to Pandora's Jar with a few important differences. It's not nearly as tightly integrated with Pandora, but it's much easier to set up and get started with. The best part of Pandora Downloader is that it keeps a running tally of all of the tracks you've played (it even shows three songs in advance), so you can download any of the songs you've heard in your session by selecting as many as you want and clicking Download.

Continue here ...

---

  

Gizmo Project Will Make Web Calling Easy

Source: Web Worker Daily

One of the biggest challenges of being a mobile worker is that it is almost impossible to make VoIP calls, either over EV-DO networks, or commercial wifi services, like the T-Mobile network, often found in Starbucks. Port blocking, and lack of bandwidth makes it difficult to make phone calls when you most need them, forcing you to spend the expensive premium mobile wireless minutes.

Well, there is some good news coming. Earlier this morning I had a chance to chat with Jason Droege, CEO of San Diego-based VoIP services provider, SIPphone, and he showed off a new version of his service that is ideally suited for Web Workers.

Continue here ...

---

  

StopBadWare.org's new resource: FAQ for site owners

Source: StopBadWare.org

StopBadware has heard from several website owners whose sites have been flagged by Google’s search results as possibly containing badware. Whether the badware culprit on their site was a hacker or a third-party ad link, these site owners contacted us wanting to know what they could do to get their sites cleaned up and their search results back to normal.

We’ve collected the most popular questions into a special section of our FAQ page. Check it out to find out how the search engine warning process works, and what you can do if your site’s search results have a warning page.

Continue here ...

---

  

Analysis of Microsoft's Suicide Note (Part 2)

“Some argue that the consumer gets little or negative ‘benefit’ from this increase, this is false. The consumer gets premium content on their PC.”
Pete Levinthal
Software Engineering
ATI Technologies, Inc

Source: BadVista / Oliver Day - Copyright 2006, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

This is a fair statement. Playing HD content from a Blueray or HD DVD disk is clearly an advantage that end users would appreciate. So in the sense that a benefit is an advantage I would say Levinthal’s statement is accurate. However, benefit can also refer to "profit" which would make his statement questionable. Considering that he mentions ‘negative "benefit"‘ I think we should delve further into this connotation. Profit is the positive difference between the amount spent and the amount earned. So in purely mathematical terms the amount of "cost" to the end user to play premium content must be lower then the amount gained in the operation of HD playback for a profitable expierence. I believe it is safe to assume what the amount gained is, HD playback. What isn’t so clear is what the costs are. In the programmers universe cost is generally associated with amounts of cpu cycles spent solving some problem. Thus if a programmer writes a function for a program which needlessly recomputes values it is considered "expensive". An accomplished programmer can write elegant solutions which do not incur much cost.

Keeping the previous definition of "cost" in mind I think it is fitting to look into what the premium content protection really costs a user. From this analysis we can make a fair judgement on whether a user profits overall from the ability to play HD content. According to the Micosoft presentations here, here, here, and here the playback of HD content requires no less then two rounds of encryption/decryption before the video is sent to the display. First the video comes from the original HD media in encrypted format and is decoded. That decoded media is then encoded again using the AES algorithm and sent across the PCIe bus. Once it reaches the other side of that bus it is decoded and then sent across the HDMI interface to the display.

Continue here ...

---

  

PayPal steps up security

A security keyfob that changes its password every 30 seconds is being introduced by PayPal to make online payments safer.

Source: 'Webuser' Magazine / Ben Camm-Jones

The online transaction company, owned by eBay, is offering the PayPal Security Key for $5 - just under £3 - to customers who want to add an extra level of protection to their PayPal account.

The keyfob generates a different six-digit number every 30 seconds. When you log into your PayPal account, you will need to enter your own password as well as the number displayed on the Security Key at that particular moment.

Continue here ...

---

  

Storm worm arrives in waves

A mass-mailing worm that has been circulating since violent storms hit Europe last week is still causing security problems all over the world.

Source: 'Webuser' Magazine / Ben Camm-Jones

A mass-mailing worm that has been circulating since violent storms hit Europe last week is still causing security problems all over the world.

An initial wave of attacks was contained in emails with subject lines relating to the stormy weather and other news events such as the satellite shot out of the sky by the Chinese military.

Security firm Symantec has now raised the risk level of the 'Storm Worm' - which it has named Trojan.Peacomm - to a category three threat, "due to the speed and volume in which it is being aggressively spammed across the internet".

Category three means that the risk level is 'high', according to Symantec, and it is advising that surfers should update their anti-virus defences as soon as possible.

Continue here ...

---

  

A Chindogu Clock for Procrastinators

Setting one’s clock ahead by 15 minutes is a useful trick for procrastinators.

Source: David Seah's Blog

Setting one’s clock ahead by 15 minutes is a useful trick for procrastinators. I do this myself with my alarm clock, not that it ever does me any good, in the hopes of being a little bit earlier out of bed. This comment by "Vadi" in Academic Procrastination gave me pause:

If this advancing clock can be done for dates it will be great. Perhaps you have a Calendar that is a day in advance? But somehow that idea still looks far fetched. Any good suggestions?

That does seem far fetched, but I got to thinking about why the "set your clock ahead" trick works. I think it presumes the following:

* You have a terrible sense of time, or are obsessed by last-minute details, either of which cause you to be late.
* You actually do care being on time, but your friends have started keeping a separate timetable just for you thanks to your legendary unreliability.
* Enough awful things have happened because of lateness that you’ve resorted to pre-emptively tricking yourself by advancing the time on all your watches and clocks.

Now, the problem is that you know that I know you know you’ve already set your clock ahead, so you cleverly take this into account and end up being even later. It’s a vicious circle. What we need is a way to channel fear and anxiety positively, while keeping you from getting too comfortable with your clock.

Enter the Procrastinator’s Clock. It’s guaranteed to be up to 15 minutes fast. However, it also speeds up and slows down in an unpredictable manner so you can’t be sure how fast it really is. Furthermore, the clock is guaranteed to not be slow, assuming your computer clock is sync’d with NTP; many computers running Windows and Mac OS X with persistent Internet connections already are.

Continue here ...

---

  

Top 10 Tweaks, Tips, and Tricks for Windows Vista

Source: Chris Pirillo's Blog

1. If you’re annoyed by Internet Explorer’s incessant barking that you’ve lowered your security settings (like, if you’re a non-paranoid expert), launch "gpedit.msc" from either the Run command or Start Search field, navigate through Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Internet Explorer. In the rightmost pane, double-click "Turn off the Security Settings Check feature" and set it to Enabled.

2. If Internet Explorer’s Information Bar also annoys you, you can turn it off (again) in the Group Policy Object Editor (gpedit.msc) through Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Internet Explorer / Security Features. In the rightmost pane, double-click “Internet Explorer Processes” and set it to Disabled. Hallelujah!

Continue here ...

---

  

Analysis of Microsoft's Suicide Note (part 1)

Oliver Day is a former corporate hacker turned student. While at eEye Digital Security he wrote audits for the Retina Vulnerability Scanner and was a Principal Security Consultant for @stake. He has written an unpublished book on SAN security and found a variety of exploits in web-based applications. He is contributing to BadVista.org a series of posts about the presence and implications of the "content protection scheme" in Microsoft Windows Vista.

Source: BadVista / Oliver Day

Oliver Day is a former corporate hacker turned student. While at eEye Digital Security he wrote audits for the Retina Vulnerability Scanner and was a Principal Security Consultant for @stake. He has written an unpublished book on SAN security and found a variety of exploits in web-based applications. He is contributing to BadVista.org a series of posts about the presence and implications of the "content protection scheme" in Microsoft Windows Vista. This post is the first in that series.

In a controversial technical analysis Peter Gutmann goes into fantastic detail about the recently released Vista operating system and its content protection scheme. One thing became clear to me after reading this analysis. Vista is being marketed to content producers, not consumers. If Windows XP was Microsoft’s attempt to embed a browser into the operating system then Vista is the attempt to embed DRM. Digital Rights Management technology has been applied to literally every ring of the OS architecture.

Vista's target market is content producers and the underlying philosophy of the user experience will be far different then what many consumers expect it will be. Microsoft has attempted to plug the infamous "analog hole" as much as is possible by forcing all data through encryption algorithms. For those unaware of the "costs" of encryption it is sufficiently high. Pushing HD audio and video content through encryption/decryption routines is a tremendous strain on any system currently available and in the near future. Even with the application of Moore's Law a conservative estimate could place affordable and usable systems within this new content system 5 years away. It will be interesting to see how these restrictions will be spun by the large marketing and PR teams since none of these innovations will benefit consumers in any way. The job that has been handed to these PR and marketing teams is to dress up a product designed with every restriction a producer has asked for and make a consumer want to buy it. One of the most quotable lines from the Gutmann analysis sums this up perfectly as, "breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches."

Continue here ...

---

  

Who patches better: Microsoft or Mozilla?

Source: Security News, Bill Brenner,Senior News Writer

Window Snyder was a senior security strategist at Microsoft before leaving in 2005 to become a founder and CTO of Matasano Security LLC. Last September she became Mozilla Corp.'s security chief and is now responsible for locking down the popular Firefox browser and other programs. In this Q&A, Snyder credits Microsoft for working hard at a faster and more accurate patching process and admits that, sometimes, even Mozilla has to pull back on security updates at the 11th hour. But she says Mozilla will always be a step ahead because a huge open source community is helping the company find and fix problems around the clock.

You worked for Microsoft before moving over to Mozilla. Talk about why you left the software giant.

Window Snyder: Actually, I went from Microsoft to a start-up that a few friends were doing [New York-based security consultancy Matasano Security LLC] and from there went to Mozilla. I went to Mozilla because it seemed like there was a real opportunity to impact how users really experience the Internet and to try and make that as secure as possible.

Continue here ...

---

  

IM in the workplace - if you can't beat it, manage it

Rob Nash, director of eBusiness at Unipalm, looks at the challenges facing IT managers with the growing use of instant messaging in the workplace.

Source: ITNOWextra - January 2006

According to analysts, corporate use of instant messaging (IM) is proliferating far beyond early expectations. Instant messaging continues to be the fastest growing communications medium of all time, and is invading the enterprise at a rapid rate. A recent report by IDC found that there are more than 28 million business users worldwide using enterprise instant messaging products to send nearly one billion messages a day in 2005, this does not include the crossover of consumer instant messaging services used in businesses. Either way, for a communication medium once viewed as the exclusive domain of gossip-mad teenagers, IM can no longer be ignored by IT managers.

How widespread is IM usage and how can it be managed?

Gartner Group believes that 50 per cent of all business-to-client communication in 2005 will take place on IM. For many IT managers, corporate IM use has been placed in the 'all too difficult' category. After all, it's exceptionally easy for staff to download free IM services like AOL, Yahoo and MSN. Many IT managers are simply unaware of the extent of IM use within their organization and if they are, they're unsure how to manage it, so look to prevent its use.

Yet IM offers genuine business benefits such as improved productivity and collaboration, it's truly 'instant' and it can save on bandwidth consumption. Gartner estimates that IM can reduce long distance calls by 30 per cent, reduce email usage by 40 per cent and lead to a 15 per cent reduction in voicemail usage.

There are solutions available today that make it possible to harness these benefits whilst maintaining control, and without compromising security. IDC found that in 2004 the demand for management and security of the instant messaging market, from vendors such as FaceTime, has increased. IM management solutions such as these appreciate why you need to choose the right system for you and understand the security risks posed by what they call 'greynets'.

FaceTime considers IM, P2P and spyware part of a larger, fast-growing set of unsanctioned applications called "greynets". Greynet applications are downloaded and installed on end user systems, without expressed permission from, or awareness by IT (and often without even the end user's awareness - as with spyware) and then use evasive encryption and port agility techniques to traverse the network. Greynet applications include instant messaging, P2P file sharing, web conferencing, SKYPE, web mail and adware/spyware and anonymizers.

Continue here ...

---

  

Vista Exploit Looking For Achilles Heel

Security researchers claim that the first flaw to hit Microsoft's new operating system is now for sale by malicious hackers.

Source: Internet.com / Ed Sutherland

The flaw, which was discovered in December, was dismissed as a limited threat. But Marc Maiffret, founder and CTO of eEye Digital Security, said virus writers and malware authors are still shopping it around as a way to deliver more destructive payloads to the operating system.

Unlike XP, which allows anyone to have complete control of the operating system as an administrator, Windows Vista is billed as limiting so-called "system" privileges as a way to reduce how effectively a virus or malicious code could wreak havoc on a user's computer. The first Vista exploit drives a truck through that claim, Maiffret said. The security researcher said as Microsoft improves its software "the cockier they get."

He said if the Vista exploit is coupled with an Internet Explorer vulnerability, the local threat expands, putting consumers at risk when online.

Continue here ...

---