NYTimes.com’s new video platform, which runs Brightcove 3, will display videos in 16×9 widescreen format and boast an individual playback page for each video to make it easier for visitors to find the videos they are looking for. More importantly, each video will now feature share tools, which will allow viewers to share the videos on sites like Digg, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“Demand for high-quality video is on the rise across the Web from both our users and our advertisers,” Nicholas Ascheim, vice president of product management at NYTimes.com, said in a statement. “To meet this need, we have upgraded our technology, increased our production values, and given video even more prominence across the site.”

NYTimes.com already produces about 100 videos per month from well-known journalists like David Pogue. But with the announcement of its new platform, it looks like video will become an integral part of its strategy going forward as more original videos are produced each month.

NYTimes.com said Friday it has launched a new platform that will bring more video to more sections of the site.

The videos will be presented in HD and made available to the home page, articles, blogs, and the site’s video library in an effort to make video a central part of The New York Times Co.’s overarching strategy.

“This acquisition strengthens CA’s ability to continually enhance critical elements of CA’s Identity and Access Management suite,” Dave Hansen, CA Security Management general manager, said in a statement.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

CA on Tuesday announced it acquired identity management company IDFocus.

Specifically, the CA Identity Manager aims to give employees various authorizations, then run a check against the segregation of duties (SOD) policies set up in the IDFocus software. If a policy has been violated, the CA Identity Manager is designed to kick in and prevent the employee from accessing the information or performing the attempted task.

Then there’s “I bet I can do 15 shots of tequila in 60 minutes.” Um, that’s called “really dangerous.” I hope Bragster has good lawyers.

Bragster, a London-based site “for dares and social bets,” announced Wednesday that it has secured $3.5 million in Series A venture cash. The funding round was led by none other than Intel Capital, the investment branch of the famed chipmaker.

The premise of the Digg-meets-Jackass-esque site is that members dare one another (or place open dares) to perform ridiculous feats, then insist on video evidence that they were completed. Bragster, co-founded by a former Morgan Stanley employee and an Amazon.com alum, provides prizes to some of the most over-the-top stunts and also sponsors contests like the “Undies at Uni Challenge,” which appears to encourage college students to take their clothes off.

So what are some of the top bets and challenges on Bragster? One member has dared another to “slap someone around the face with a fish in a supermarket.” O.K., I’d like to see that, however inappropriate it may be. Same thing with “dress like a Spartan and run around in the street shouting lines from the movie 300.” Others, like “pour 2 mugs of boiling hot coffee on my laptop,” start to make me uneasy. Call me old-fashioned, but somebody could get hurt. At least Johnny Knoxville occasionally informed his viewers that they shouldn’t imitate him at home.

Well, when it rains it pours. After a day of writing about Windows Live mail problems, I was alerted by a colleague that Yahoo mail was out for them.

Well, I guess I’ve had enough e-mail for one day anyway. I’m headed to bed. Hopefully everyone’s servers will be working tomorrow.

When I tried to reload the page, I got the following message:

Update: As I was publishing this blog, my mail service was restored.

“Can’t talk now. System’s down,” read the headline. “Sorry for the holdup. Looks like a temporary glitch in our network has part of Yahoo! mail down, so you’re briefly without service. Rest assured the alarms are blaring in the basement and our team is working frantically to get you up and running ASAP. Again, the snag is on our end — so there’s no need for you to do a thing.”

(Credit:
CNET News.com)

As soon as the deal was announced, the Department of Justice was finding fault. And although Microsoft knew the chances were slim that it could acquire Intuit and control the entire personal finance industry, it still performed due diligence and knew exactly what its largest competitor was planning for the future. Even better, it knew how all the software was made and realized its own shortcomings.

Don’t kid yourself. The Microsoft-Yahoo merger was never meant to happen and all the former wanted was some information to increase its ability to compete in the market. And although Yahoo didn’t accept the deal and Microsoft’s plan backfired, it wouldn’t surprise me if the company tried again and again until Yahoo had no other choice.

Allow me to say with total and utter certainty that Microsoft never wanted this deal with Yahoo and was using it to gain important information about the company before it was forced to drop billions of dollars on an acquisition that almost everyone knew was tenuous, at best.

Back in 1994-95, Microsoft was being man-handled by Intuit. And although the company was riding high with Windows, its inability to compete in the financial sector became a vexing issue. After all, with such a huge sum of capital spent on trying to destroy a smaller competitor to no avail, what other reaction could Gates and company have?

And almost 15 years later, we’re in a very similar situation. Microsoft is once again being trounced by a competitor and has little possibility of getting out from under its deficit. Realizing Google would be a far too difficult target to acquire, Microsoft decided Yahoo would be the next best bet.

In reality, Microsoft realized that the chances of getting the acquisition through the DoJ and even the EU were minimal at best, and decided to capitalize on a moment of weakness at Yahoo to get the company to accept the deal. In essence, all Microsoft really cared about was Yahoo accepting the deal.

Realizing that Intuit was beating it with a far superior product that appealed to more people, Microsoft decided to, in the words of then VP Mike Maples, “try to be non threatening, but let [Intuit] know [Microsoft] would do something aggressively.” That aggressive stance was a threat from Microsoft that said it would either spend $1 billion on personal finance development to beat Intuit or acquire it for about the same fee.

And once that happens, look for Microsoft’s search to look suspiciously similar to Yahoo’s. Is it just me or is history repeating itself?

Although I wasn’t planning on writing this column for at least a few months, it looks like the recent developments in the Microsoft-Yahoo merger have precipitated my need to do just that.

But unfortunately for Microsoft, its plan backfired and now it’s left with nothing to show for it.

Realizing it was up against a major competitor that had no patience for losing, Intuit finally decided to an acquisition for about $1.5 billion in Microsoft shares.

Of course, the real goal all along was to initiate the acquisition phase of the deal, perform due diligence tests to see what sort of technology Yahoo employs and what it has in store for the future and once the Department of Justice found problems in the deal, back out.

In the end, the Department of Justice found serious issues with the attempted acquisition and instead of fighting for it in an attempt to control yet another industry, Microsoft curiously backed away in a flash, armed with more knowledge than it knew what to do with.

Just one year later, Microsoft competed better than ever with Intuit’s Quicken program and offered a number of enhanced features that had heretofore never been available in a Microsoft program. Sure, the company may have called it a coincidence, but others knew better.

Don’t believe me? Look no further than Microsoft’s attempted deal with Intuit for all the proof you need.

Once that happened, Microsoft could relive the Intuit coup of a decade ago. Instead of worrying about dropping almost $45 billion and possibly take out a loan for the first time in years, Microsoft would have used the opportunity to see what Yahoo has up its sleeve, how it creates such a better search and capitalize on its knowledge. After all, in the slight chance that the deal would have gone through, Microsoft could have commanded a significant portion of the market. And if it didn’t get through the DoJ, who cares? Ballmer could have still walked away with a boatload of knowledge that he could tell his developers to capitalize on.

Google has won the search wars primarily because Google focused first on pleasing consumers. It didn’t try to stripmine the search experience in search of every last penny of profit from ads, the way Yahoo! and Microsoft did. These latter two littered their pages for years with absolute rubbish, neon advertising, making the search experience feel like Vegas.

If you’re an open-source or proprietary company, there’s a lesson in this. Focus on adoption first. Focusing on adoption helps a company to fixate on how to make software (or hardware) enjoyable, and not necessarily what will make it sell better. The sales follow the adoption.

I love my
Mac. I love its look and feel. I love the software. I actually look forward to using my Mac. It’s not a Dell, dude. It has class.

Another (overused) way of saying this is that Apple has “consumerized” the computing experience. As it turns out, enterprises employ consumers. Lots of them.

But it’s not just Apple.

For those commercial open-source vendors out there, this means your first order of business should be to focus on adoption and the user experience, rather than proprietary extensions (if any). These may be convenient, but they will corrupt priorities if they are the first order of business.

I’m rereading Businessweek’s excellent article, “The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit,” and it became very clear why Apple is succeeding in the enterprise despite not focusing on the enterprise.

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As we focus on the unwashed masses rather than the elite, which begs a focus on adoption first, software will become easier to use and more pleasurable to use. Like Apple. Like Google.

Apple’s secret is that it cares more about the consumer experience than in milking its potential market for every last penny. It could hire an expensive enterprise sales force, but lets its users sell the Mac experience instead.

Focus on the average users within your potential user demographics, not the alpha geeks. Average people buy more software than the uber-geeks do. Microsoft learned this long ago, lowering the bar to computing. It has lost its way of late as it tries to complicate the user experience a bit by adding bells and whistles designed to drive upgrades, not customer satisfaction. That’s why it’s slowly starting to lose.

Not Google. It focused on adoption first. It focused on making the search experience simple, fast, and useful.

In a way, successful open-source projects have thrived in much the same way. Linux is popular because it focuses on its consumers first. Same with Apache and MySQL. These are not “consumer” applications in the way that, say, Apple’s iMovie is, but they are consumer-ish in the way I’m describing because they put the end user’s experience first in the equation, rather than the cash in her pocket.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval)

LOS ANGELES–A Paramount Pictures executive added to the chorus of positive reviews for Big Stage’s face-mapping technology during the Digital Hollywood conference on Tuesday.

“This is where the advertising community has completely failed at adjusting and adapting and being creative,” Broes said, adding that if they did, “I think we would see a much higher cpm value for video.”

Derek Broes, Paramount Pictures executive vice president of worldwide business development, was asked during a panel discussion about what interesting new technologies he’s seen.

Webware’s Rafe Needleman calls it an automatic avatar builder. Broes sees it as a potentially revolutionary tool for advertisers.

“The technology was very, very compelling,” said Broes, a former Microsoft senior director of global wireless. “Hey, if I can actually star in my own commercials, I’m going to watch them…If you look at a Facebook environment; if my face is in a database there, and I watch a…let’s say a Mountain Dew commercial (about) a rock concert and I’m the lead singer. Let’s say my friends have their heads in the database and they become members of the band. Then it becomes entertaining and it’s no longer a commercial.”

He criticized the advertising sector for being too slow to profit from these sorts of technologies.

Paramount Pictures' Derek Broes says advertisers have failed at being creative with new technologies

Australian teens will be pleased to hear that later this year Qantas will allow passengers to send and receive text messages and e-mails on domestic flights. Voice calls will not be permitted, but passengers will be able to tap away to their heart’s content.

If the idea of your fellow passengers yakking away makes you nervous, you’ll be glad to know that Emirates will impose restrictions on the service. The cabin crew will activate the satellite receiver equipment only after the aircraft is at cruising altitude. What’s more, the cabin crew will be able to prevent calls at certain times, such as during red-eye flights. If you’d rather not talk, you can stick with texting, and in the future you may be able to use your phone’s data service as well.

Dubai-based Emirates also conducted a texting trial last year, but the airline has gone a huge step further by becoming the first commercial airline to allow voice calls while aloft. According to the BBC, after Emirates allowed calls on a recent flight from Dubai to Casablanca, the airline now plans to add the service to other aircraft in its fleet. The calls don’t operate through normal cellular signals; cell phone towers can’t reach 30,000 feet into the air. But they will operate through a satellite system that connects to receiving equipment on board the airplane. As such, you can expect that calls will be expensive, at least $2 per minute.

Back in the United States, the FAA shows no signs of budging from its in-flight cell phone ban. Though debate continues on whether cell phone actually interfere with aircraft navigation and communication systems–a MythBusters episode suggested that they do not–I’m comfortable with the FAA taking its time.

Go ahead, send that all-important message

In a new type of attack that requires physical access to a target computer, an attacker can cut power to a machine that is in sleep mode, restore the power, and boot a malicious operating system from a USB drive or an
iPod that can copy the RAM contents.

In addition to Halderman, the research team included Princeton professor Ed Felten, as well as Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, Joseph Calandrino, and Ariel Feldman of Princeton; Jacob Appelbaum; Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and William Paul of Wind River Systems.

The group found that contrary to common knowledge, RAM data fades gradually over a period spanning from a few seconds to a few minutes after the power is cut. This could give an attacker time to read the RAM data, including encryption keys, after rebooting into a different operating system or removing the memory chips and placing them into a different computer.

(Credit:
Center for Information Technology at Princeton University)

But won’t the contents of the RAM be lost when the power is turned off? Actually, no, according to the team of mostly Princeton University researchers led by J. Alex Halderman, a doctoral candidate.

Popular disk encryption schemes like Microsoft’s Bitlocker in Vista don’t protect against this type of attack, and actually make the laptops more susceptible, the researchers said.

This video created by the research team explains how the attack is done:

“Overall, the significance is that disk encryption is not the silver bullet that we might have thought in its present state,” Halderman, said in an interview after the presentation. “Individuals and businesses that rely on disk encryption need to pay much closer attention to the physical security of their devices.”

An attacker can extend the data decay time period by cooling the chip off while the machine is running with a spray of “canned air” commonly used for cleaning keyboards of dust. With liquid nitrogen, an attacker could take days to retrieve the data if needed.

This image shows how data on a RAM chip fades gradually over time. The far left shot shows an image in memory five seconds after the power was cut, followed on the right by 30 seconds, 60 seconds and 5 minutes.

]]> http://www.hydcdcbs.com/index.php/2010/08/disk-encryption-is-no-silver-bullet-researchers-s/feed/ http://www.hydcdcbs.com/index.php/2010/08/google-android-almost-here/ http://www.hydcdcbs.com/index.php/2010/08/google-android-almost-here/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:02:00 +0000 admin http://www.hydcdcbs.com/?p=247 But to lead the open mobile revolution, Google needs to lead out in transparency, innovation, and marketing, not mimic the worst of Apple’s proprietary approach.

This, however, is not a difficult problem to solve. Google doesn’t necessarily need to invite the world to contribute to Android…yet. Though it’s not the traditional open-source way, it does make sense for Google to try to exercise some quality control with access to its Android SDK to ensure high-quality applications out of the gate.

To get there, Google has its work cut out for it, given that Symbian and LiMo are already pushing the open-source mobile message. Google has made it clear that it doesn’t intend to converge Android with Symbian or other alternatives. Fine.

However, Google does need to be more transparent in what it’s doing, and it needs to determine if it wants to compete as the open alternative to the
iPhone, or whether it thinks it can largely go it alone against Apple. I think Google would struggle to beat Apple at its own game, and should instead work to make Android a gathering place for developers who don’t want to tie themselves into the iPhone’s proprietary platform.

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As it readies its long-anticipated open mobile OS for public release, Google is behaving in a way that threatens to permanently taint its relationship with many Android developers. The company’s actions–including restricting access to key development tools and allegedly treading on open source principles–have created, if not a full-fledged revolt, at least a sense of disappointment and disillusionment among many in the tightly knit Android development community.

The Register is reporting that Google’s Android should see ship with its first (T-Mobile) phone within five weeks, and that the phone will require that buyers sign up for a Google Gmail account. Shades of Microsoft and its Passport service.

First things first, however. Google is still struggling with an unhappy crew of Android developers, its primary crime being a lack of transparency.