By Scott M. Fulton, III , Betanews In green-lighting Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems today, the European Commission says it considered whether in doing so, Oracle would effectively eliminate the "competitive constraint" of competition from the open source field by way of MySQL, the open source relational database that Sun acquired in 2008 [......]
Archive for January, 2010
 A code flaw in Windows that has been around for 17 years raises some interesting questions. Are hackers not as diligent in ferreting out these vulnerabilities as we normally suspect? Or is it there are so many weaknesses in Windows that hackers haven’t yet gotten around to exploiting this particular one[......]
By Jacqueline Emigh , Betanews According to a report on Consumer Password Best Practices culled from an analysis of 32 million passwords exposed in the recent Rockyou.com Web security breach, the three most commonly used passwords among users of the Rockyou social networking site turned out to be 123456, 12345, and 123456789. Also making in into the top ten, in this order, were the following: Password, iloveyou, princess, rockyou, 1234567, 12345678, and abc123. During the Rockyou breach last month, a hacker exploited a SQL Injection vulnerability to expose 32 million passwords -- which had been stored in clear text in Rockyou's database -- and then posted the passwords, without any other identifying information, on the Web[......]
By Scott M. Fulton, III , Betanews Over the past few days, security engineers have warned that variations of the publicly-released Hydraq exploit are being engineered for later versions of Internet Explorer than the one targeted in the recently discovered wave of attacks against Google and others, IE6. One security researcher on the "good side," Dino Dai Zovi, claimed on Twitter earlier today he has a functional derivative of Hydraq for IE7 and IE8...kind of[......]
 Whether or not Apple announces a tablet PC next week, the tech world is fretting about the possible impact. Take, for example, Amazon. It’s cute little Kindle is basically a uni-tasker--it lets you read books and little else. [......]
Maybe pricing is just now starting to make them a viable option, but integrating mini-projectors into notebook PCs seems like a natural fit, and that's exactly what HP plans to do . According to Monty Wang, vice president and manager of personal computing systems group at HP Taiwan, Quanta Computer will build the upcoming notebooks, and will most likely plop the projector on top of the notebook's display, right where the webcam would normally be[......]
VIA this week unveiled what it claims is the first product based on the recently announced Mobile-ITX form factor, the EPIA-T700. It measures just 6cm x 6cm and is intended primarily for medical, military, and in-vehicle applications. [......]
By Scott M. Fulton, III , Betanews Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 for Windows from Fileforum now[......]
By Scott M. Fulton, III , Betanews Leading China search engine Baidu's lawsuit against US domain registrar and ISP Register.com, filed yesterday, was not at all what analysts, especially in the British press, expected it to be: There's no evidence, including in the context of its many redacted paragraphs, of any sort of "retaliation" whatsoever against Google's new public stance against China in the wake of attacks against it that it claims emanated from China. Although diplomats from both countries may continue to play the Baidu case as another volley in a brewing trade dispute, from Baidu's perspective, that's not what it is at all[......]
Perhaps looking to run with the big dogs (think Google, Apple), Opera announced it has acquired AdMarvel, a privately held Norwegian Web browser company who makes a product suite aimed at managing how ads are shuttled over to mobile phones. [......]
Whether you own an iPod touch, Zune HD, Nintendo DSi, or any number of other portable devices, there's one tool that makes easy work out of ripping DVDs and converting incompatible video files into manageable formats: Handbrake. This wonderful utility has just about everything you could ask for, including robust compatibility, a slick interface, and snappy performance. [......]
Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang offered some interesting thoughts on the PC industry in a recent BBC interview. He said that people are no longer wowed by their computers . Huang chalked this up to a maturity in PC hardware. [......]
The Boxee folks have found themselves lodged between content owners and its user base for some time. On one hand, Boxee has always promised to deliver as much content for the right price (i.e. free)[......]
By Scott M. Fulton, III , Betanews This afternoon, just hours following Microsoft's stunningly fast response to a critical Internet Explorer vulnerability made stunningly public by Google last week, a Google spokesperson told Betanews today that it expects to engage in a dialogue with the government of China within the next few weeks[......]
Apple has decided to join the Windows 7 club, or at least let users of Mac hardware to become members. It has released an updated version of Boot Camp that will let you install Windows 7 on intel-based Macs. [......]
