Introducing the next generation of webmail. With its smart use of the latest web technology, the new .Mac webmail will remind you of the Mail application on your desktop. You’ll feel right at home with its simple and elegant interface, drag-and-drop capability, built in Address Book, and more.
WE MANAGED TO learn the official NDA expiry date and the launch of AMD’s quad core offering. Or, should we say, its dual die dual socket chip.
After AMD laughed off Intel’s dual core and upcoming quad core microprocessors as “not true multicore”, with the main reason they physically share two dies, it seems to have done the same thing. Intel’s Pentium D “Presler” consisted of two Cedar Mill cores, Core 2 Extreme “Kentsfield” features two Conroe cores and shared the front side bus.
Quadfather or the 4×4 as AMD marketeers have it, is actually a dual die quad core chip, using the Opteron processor socket and will launch on November 14th. The nForce 680a, the launch chipset is proof that the AMD-Nvidia strategic alliance still has four legs.
The launch line up was revealed, but the pricing has been “re-constructed” severely downwards, with the fastest CPU pack now matching the price of Intel’s Kentsfield.
INTEL decided to paper launch its upcoming CPU, but the space between launch and availability isn’t that long.
The company told the world+dog that reviews of Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Core Processor QX6700 will hit the wires on November 2nd 6AM time in continental Europe. This long name is the official one that Intel picked for this dual core baby.
These CPUs will be available on the November 14th and this includes retail and etail for systems based on it.
The Xeon 5300 reviews should arrive on November the 14th UK time and available that day too. Quad Core samples have already been out for a while but there is no gaming improvement what soever, it runs the same as dual Core 6700 CPU but it performs great for rendering and multimedia.
This picture, of course, is not legal, but another intrepid engineer is braving the wrath of Apple Computer with what he believes is a legitimate use of OS X on non-Mac hardware. Despite the fact that other OSx86 projects have been shut down, a kernel enthusiast has gone ahead and rolled his own Tiger. Semthex believes that using publicly available or legally acquired source for OS X gives him the legal right to compile as he sees fit.
Since the kernel is open source, it is free to modify it. I just modified it to work, it’s just theoretical you know 
So if anyone “missuses” it, I can’t do anything about it. Basically, I provide it as working source code. If people use this to run hackintosh systems, they can, but I am not responsible for that “misuse”.
By “misuse,” he is referring to the circumvention of the TPM module used to keep just this sort of thing from happening. How could that circumvention be legal?
I had to remove a key which you need to reinsert if you want to run its GUI, due to legal issues. I called it the “magicpoem” maybe you got the point now. The hex for it is around so don’t mail me about it, I want [won't] spread anything illegal.
Again, the above picture is just for proof of concept, and is not what Semthex is all about. Semthex, in his own words, believes “information and other things should simply be free.” Bypassing the TPM means bypassing the restricted code, thus only the “free” OS X is compiled and run.
Unfortunately, free and legal are not necessarily the same thing, and the EULA for OS X requires Mac hardware. However, there is an interesting comment on the blog, one that asserts the requirement of Mac hardware is a “post-sale” restriction. Such a restriction may not be applicable in certain countries, such as those of the European Union. Expect to see what Apple Legal thinks about that shortly.
Microsoft is effectively smuggling through a price hike for Windows Vista - by making the entry-level version so poor that no-one will want to use it. So says Jim Wong, senior veep at Acer, the world’s number four PC maker, who told UK hack Jon Honeyball: “The new [Vista] experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won’t feel it at all. There’s no [Aero] graphics, no Media Center, no remote control.”
Wong notes that the Premium Version of Vista is 10 per cent more expensive than XP Home. This will increase PC build costs by 1-2 per cent, which the PC makers will have to soak up, he says.
But Acer has high hopes for the PC market next year, and Vista will play its part in fuelling sales, chairman JT Wang told reporters attending the company’s 30th birthday this week.
His optimism is shared by other PC builders, which are racing to buy components for Vista-capable PCs. This has created a supply shortage in the last couple of weeks for CPUs, DRAM, chipsets and lithium batteries, according to EMSNow. JT Wang is doing his bit to help out: he has been spotted at American vendors drumming up supplies for Acer, the electronics trade magazine reports.
In light of previous events, the whole Lik-Sang vs. Sony intellectual property rights case has now escalated to the point wherein the said distributor of Asian electronics has eventually closed its doors.
Statements are flying left and right from Lik-Sang and from Sony. And now, every Tom, Dick, and Harry is wondering: where’s all of this taking us? Should we take sides now? Where do we get our PS3s come launch date? What really happened? Lik-Sang’s marketing manager Pascal Clarysse now follows up their statement from last October 22, and tries to set things straight.
The statement talks about what hardships they had to go through, with a bombardment of lawsuits “forcing the relatively small company behind Lik-Sang.com into a bizarre world of lawyers.” There’s also an update about the said Sony officials that were reputed to have purchased orders from Lik-Sang.
It seems as if this issue is far from settled. Although Lik-Sang is now no more, their memory and what they stood for is still very much alive in a lot of gamers. The battle might have been won, but the proverbial war isn’t quite over yet.
Now, before you take up your pitchforks and torches, better read Pascal Clarysse’s full statement first:
“First of all, Sony’s claim that Lik-Sang didn’t turn up and therefore incurred no legal cost is absolute nonsense. Lik-Sang’s legal representatives spent over a year to vigorously contest the UK’s court jurisdiction until the last moment, produced witness statements and documents, and replied to Sony’s allegations about parallel importation and copyright infringement. Plenty of documents were sent back and forth from Hong Kong all the way to the UK, and it was also argued to the London High Court that Sony has launched duplicate actions in different countries, but all to no avail. The court case in Hong Kong is still ongoing, and Lik-Sang as well as its lawyers spent hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to catch up with Sony’s mass of documents and claims. As a result, two different High Court judges at different occasions expressed their surprise about the unusual high legal expenses claimed by Sony’s law firm.
Through their lawsuits, Sony forced the relatively small company behind Lik-Sang.com into a bizarre world of lawyers charging more than GBP 380 (EUR 550+) per hour (!), and if you believe it or not, these guys don’t come alone, they need their (not necessarily much cheaper) assistants and clerks around them to get something done.
The UK courts ruling that outlaws what Lik-Sang and the gaming community enjoyed ever since, and the imminent direct threat from Sony about yet a third lawsuit and a PlayStation 3 injunction, will absolutely not make things easier and fairer for anyone involved.
Denying boldly any correlation between Sony’s legal actions and Lik-Sang’s closure must probably be cynical sarcasm on their behalf. Unfortunately for Lik-Sang, the current situation is neither a joke, nor a game: A bunch of people have lost their basis for existence because of corporate lawsuits for something that is not only regarded as lawful in Hong Kong, it is considered to be beneficial for consumers (free trade). And a huge amount of gamers all around the globe lost a place on the Internet that they were enjoying.
Lik-Sang is not involved into any other lawsuits apart with Sony, and, while they “strongly denied that their actions have had anything to do with [Lik-Sang's] closing” in their statement, they still had the time to send a 15 pages fax less than 24h later, lining out the terms of the order made by the UK court last week and asking Lik-Sang to pay the sum of GBP 100,000 (EUR 150,000) just for their legal costs before 4pm at November 1. By the way, the fax also includes a penal notice, nicely reminding the reader that not obeying the order (which means shipping any PlayStation branded product to any country in Europe) may mean sequestration of all assets and, in worst case, imprisonment for the directors of the company. The judge also ordered that ‘there be an inquiry as to the damages suffered’ by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in the UK and in any other member state of the European Union, based on each EU country’s own rules.
Finally, Sony’s unbelievable statement that all purchase orders made by their own directors ‘would’ be for investigatory purposes speaks volumes, and also doesn’t explain why these and all the other orders placed by Sony officials were not revealed to the High Court (despite what is called duty for ‘full and frank disclosure’ in court proceedings, as Lik-Sang understands it as laymen).
Oddly enough, all investigatory orders that were revealed by Sony to the High Court in London and to the High Court in Hong Kong started much later than the purchases placed by their directors. Further to this, Sony Europe’s own Legal and Business Affairs Manager signed a witness statement in the High Court of London that says that Sony Europe ‘became aware’ of parallel imported PSP consoles in the UK and in the rest of Europe only in March 2005, and the same witness statement presents a trainee solicitor from Sony’s lawyers as the one placing such investigatory orders during May 2005.
On top of that, more than a half year after the named Sony officials started to receive their PSP purchase orders from Lik-Sang, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (managed by the very same directors) sent a letter to Hong Kong claiming that they just ‘recently discovered’ that Lik-Sang is offering PSP consoles and games to customers in the UK (United Kingdom) and that they would be entitled for a court injunction.
The three directors that were revealed in Tuesday’s press release are very important and directly linked to Sony’s lawsuits against Lik-Sang. A copy of their purchase orders, along with a fine selection of others, was produced by Lik-Sang’s legal representatives to Sony Europe during the Hong Kong High Court discovery proceedings long before the trial in the UK took place. No purchase orders of non-management level Sony employees were revealed, not in court or otherwise.
UK news website Spong.com tried to call all three of the listed Sony directors, just to learn that 66% of them are not in their office or are on holidays this week. They are probably still very exhausted from placing all these investigatory orders for the trainees of their legal department…
My final words: Sony should be proud of having such a die-hard import gamers community rushing to buy their products and supporting them with a passion. Instead, they march all over us.”
Four out of eight administrators of the Finnish BitTorrent tracker “Finreactor” have been declared guilty in court and have to pay damages totalling 60,000 dollars each.
The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close (Finnish report). This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site.
Three of the four administrators found guilty are under the age of 18. It is unclear how they are going to scrape together enough money to pay their fines.
With a little help from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi), the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA (Teosto) shut down Finreactor in late 2004. It was, at the time, possibly the largest Finnish BitTorrent tracker with more than 37,000 registered members.
The Keskusrikospoliisi, after getting the go-ahead from Teosto, raided the administrators’ homes and seized computers and hard drives. The evidence they found was condemning.
Niko adds that at least one admin avoided the lawsuit because his hard drive was encrypted, and that there were more people on trial:
Alltogether 32 people were on trial. 21 of these 32 were declared guilty by the court. The eight admins mentioned here were probably only the ones represented by Turre Legal. The others were represented by another law firm.
Update: The IFPI just released a press-release which confirms that 21 admins were convicted. They have to pay compensation, damages and expenses of approximately $700,000 (in total) to the copyright holders.
21 operators of the Finreactor peer-to-peer-network were convicted yesterday by the district court of Turku in Finland. Finreactor was a BitTorrent network that had 10,000 registered users. Fourteen operators were convicted for copyright offences and seven for aiding for copyright offences. The operators were in charge of the technical operation of the system as well as the user control.
It is sad to see under-age BitTorrent fans get sentenced in court. The reality is that the content industries have decided that they are going to sue to compete with illegal filesharing. However, if a phenomenon like filehsaring is taking place at such an extraordinarily large scale, maybe there’s something to it. Maybe we need to find a new business model. Either that, or soon fans aren’t going to have enough money to legally buy the content they normally would, let alone the stuff they’re “pirating.”
Takeaway: To save power on your computer, Windows Vista provides you with a Web page-like interface, which allows you to select and configure power plans.
As you know, when it comes to saving power on your Windows XP desktop or laptop computer, you start your configuration operation by going to the Control Panel and double-clicking Power Options. The same is true in Windows Vista. However, instead of seeing a multitabbed dialog box, which allows you to select and configure power schemes, Windows Vista provides you with a Web page-like interface, which allows you to select and configure power plans. Microsoft describes Windows Vista’s power plans as “a collection of hardware and system settings that manages how your computer uses power. Power plans can help you save energy, maximize system performance, or achieve a balance between the two.”
Power plans serve essentially the same purpose as Windows XP’s power schemes, but Windows Vista’s power plans provide you with an easier to use interface as well as some new features. In addition, Windows Vista will allow computer and peripheral manufacturers to add proprietary power plans to the new interface.
In this edition of the Windows Vista Report, I’ll take a closer look at Windows Vista’s power options interface. As I do, I’ll examine each of the power plans and explain how each one works.
The preferred power plans
When you double-click on Power Options in Windows Vista’s Control Panel, you’ll see the Power Options page, as shown in Figure A. There are three preferred power plans to choose from.
As you can see, each of the three power plans provides you with an at-a-glance graphic rating for quickly determining the energy savings and performance of each plan. The first one is the Balanced power plan, which is designed to offer full performance when you need it and save power during periods of inactivity. The Power Saver power plan will save power by reducing system performance and is designed to help mobile PC users get the most from a single battery charge. On the other end of the spectrum is the High performance power plan, which is designed to maximize system performance and responsiveness, but will do almost nothing to save power. As such, mobile PC users will notice that their battery doesn’t last as long.
Customizing power plan settings
Under each one of the three preferred power plans, you’ll notice a link titled Change Plan Settings. Clicking this link takes you to the Edit Plan Settings page.
On this page, you can alter the amount of idle time that must elapse before Windows Vista turns off the display and puts the computer into sleep mode. You can access more granular configuration settings by clicking the Change Advanced Power Settings link, which displays a Power Options dialog box with a single tab titled Advanced Settings.
As you can see, in addition to the more common power settings, there are a host of power consuming devices for which you can adjust settings. For example, you can regulate how a wireless adapter consumes power by choosing maximum performance or low, medium, or maximum power savings.
Hybrid sleep mode
Under the Sleep heading in the Advanced Settings dialog box you’ll find a new setting called Hybrid Sleep. This new sleep mode is being introduced in Windows Vista and is designed to combine the resume speed of Standby mode with the power savings of Hibernate mode. The combination manifests itself by reducing the system to a deep hibernation state, yet the system will wake up just a few seconds after pressing the [Spacebar].
In addition to configuring the system to go into Hybrid Sleep mode after a period of inactivity, you can manually induce Hybrid Sleep from the Start menu. By default, clicking the orange, graphical shut down button, which appears at the bottom of the Start menu, will actually put the system into Hybrid Sleep mode. To really turn off the computer, you must access the Shut Down command which appears on a fly out menu.
Conclusion
Windows Vista’s Power Plans and hybrid sleep mode are designed to balance performance and power consumption. If you have comments or information to share about Windows Vista’s Power Plans and Hybrid Sleep mode, please take a moment to drop by the Discussion area and let us hear.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of the beloved Windows XP operating system. And I think in honor of this birthday, we will spread the love towards the often-hated Windows XP operating system. (If you recall, we did a similar thing for the iPod earlier this week).
With Windows Vista on the horizon, it is important to look back at the life of Windows XP and commemorate it with a list of why we love that old workhorse of an operating system.
• The Right Mouse Button
Sure, the competitor has been supporting the right mouse button for quite some time now, but they still neglect to include it in their packaged mice or touchpads on the laptops. XP has always supported the beloved right mouse button and always will. How else can you quickly steal images from the internet without the right mouse button?
Jump for the rest of the <3.
• Application Support
Don’t get me wrong, the competitors have some cool software suites, but if there is a program out there, then there is a good chance it was made for XP, or has a version available for XP.
• Gaming
Hands down, XP is a gaming machine. Gaming companies always make an XP version, and very few port their game over to the competitor’s operating system. Where would we be as a society without Solitaire, Freecell and Minesweeper. And don’t forget Pinball.
• Customizability
Sure prepackaged computers with Windows XP are great (and cheap, see next bullet-point). But what if you want to build your own? Windows makes it easy as hell. Feel like upgrading components? Still easy. Half the time XP already has the drivers. Boy, this new video card sure is swell! And don’t even get me started on the awesome case mods that always accompany XP-powered machines.
• Machine Competition
There are hundreds of companies out there manufacturing machines to run XP. This drives the prices of machines down. Want a complete desktop unit for $300? It’s possible with XP.
• Speed
The competition may think they are cool with the animated enlarging icons, but that shit eats the ram, hardcore. XP uses less ram and runs a lot faster.
• New Technology
What’s that? Core 2 Duo? 64-bit processing? SLI graphics? Oh, XP has been doing that for ages now.
• Media Center
XP saw the addition of Windows Media Center edition. And hell, they have been doing it for years. The addition of MCE to the XP operating system saw the first steps of home entertainment and PC integration. What’s that? iTV in a year? Oh, neat, if you like old ideas.
• Versions
Five years later, it is still Windows XP. Sure, they have had some service packs, but that is a hell of a lot better than buying a new update every year named after a silly animal.
• Piracy
Raise your hand if you have ever used a version of XP that wasn’t exactly purchased. Windows Genuine Advantage has since hindered that possibility, somewhat, but still. XP helped kick start a generation of kids that do not pay for software with the help of P2P programs like BitTorrent, as of late. Free is always good.
Happy Birthday, XP. May you live long and prosper, and may Vista give us the same awesomeness that you did.
I’m still here 
Bethesda Softworks sent out official word today that Rogue Warrior is being developed for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC platforms. Rogue Warrior is being developed by Zombie Studios and is based on the best-selling series of books of the same name by Richard Marcinko.
Rogue Warrior makes use of the Unreal 3 engine to create large freeform battlefields. In it, players will be allowed how to direct their squad through the fight. The game focuses on allowing players to create the action rather than using scripted events to drive the game. The online portion of Rogue Warrior features over 200 maps through a map creation system that uses tiles to build it from smaller portions prior to each map. It also features hot-swappable co-operative play for one to four players.
“Rogue Warrior is the game we’ve been waiting to make for years,” said Mark Long, lead producer at Zombie Studios. “We’re using terrific technology in a way that’s different from other games - we have a unique HUD and control system for your teammates, on-the-fly co-op play, and we’ve really focused our efforts on making multiplayer more fun and challenging by giving you lots of modes and hundreds of maps you can see and play. We’re thrilled to be working with Bethesda on this new initiative using a brand we know and love.”
Rogue Warrior is scheduled for a fall 2007 release.
With the news this week that he had broken the digital rights management (DRM) protections in iTunes, 22-year-old Viking hacker Jon Johansen once again put himself front and center in the issue of copy protection vs. intellectual properly. Only this time, he’s taking a much greater risk.
In 1999, the then-15-year-old Norwegian was part of a trio of programmers called MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering). He never actually spoke with them. They all were anonymous to each other, one of the conveniences of the Internet.
The three found a Windows-based DVD player, made by Xing Technologies (which was acquired by Real Networks in 1999) that wasn’t properly protected. DVD uses a copy protection system called Content Scrambling System (CSS), an encryption key designed to prevent copying the DVD files.
CSS used a relatively weak 40-bit key because back then, 40-bit encryption was the maximum allowed by law for export. But that didn’t matter, because Xing forgot to encrypt its CSS key, so it was trivial for the MoRE trio to reverse-engineer it.
They produced a program called DeCSS, which opened the file, read the data, decrypted it with the Xing CSS decryption code, and wrote it back to the disk without any copy protection.
I know this all too well because I was the first reporter to speak with Johansen on the subject. A friend at the Motion Picture Association of America sent me an innocuous e-mail, right around this time in 1999, with a link to a site claiming their utility could remove DVD protection.
It worked. I gave my friend one week to do some damage control with the studios before I ran a story. One week later, my stories, with interviews with Johansen, ran on Wired News, where I was a freelancer at the time. It became national news.
I asked Johansen several times during the interview if he wanted me to leave his name out of the story. “What can they do to me?” he asked.
Famous last words.
His life was turned upside down, as was his father Per’s, since his father’s Web site was used as the host for the DeCSS code. The Norwegian Motion Picture Association acted as the proxy for the MPAA and brought copyright violation charges against the two.
Johansen became a poster boy for electronic free speech, celebrated and supported legally by the Internet’s hacker culture, the EFF and civil liberties groups. He would face two trials. It took three years but he was eventually acquitted both times.
Now he’s gone after FairPlay, the DRM in iTunes that locks digital music to the iPod. Johansen claims to have broken the restrictions tying iTunes songs to one iPod player and plans to license it to digital music stores looking to sell copy-protected songs so they can be played on an iPod.
He claims to have broken it.
Johansen is part of a company called DoubleTwist Ventures, which consists of two people: him and co-founder Monique Farantzos.
You would think he might be a little gun shy about taking on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) again. Wrong. This is a guy who adopted the nickname “DVD Jon.”
Thus far, Johansen has gotten a lot of press but nothing has been made public, other than the claim to breaking the code; no licensees have been revealed.
The implications of Johansen’s work are unclear. Without customers, he won’t be going very far. Johansen and Farantzos didn’t respond to requests for an interview and, as usual, the Apple (Quote) public relations have not responded to requests for comment.
Van Baker, vice president of research for media at Gartner, said the fallout depends on whether it sticks and on what the crack really means.
“Does that mean Apple stuff can be played on other devices? It could be a boon to some of the other player vendors, but I don’t think it will cause a wholesale move from the iPod because the iPod is a pretty good product,” he said.
Now, if it means that all of the FairPlay stuff can be cracked and turned into open MP3 files, then the labels could be upset if it doesn’t get fixed. Chances are good that once he delivers his crack, Apple will just fix it in a few days and go on its merry way, said Baker.
The real risk is performing such a crack in the U.S. “By cracking FairPlay, he’s in violation of the DMCA, so he’s subject to prosecution if he’s here.”
Even though Johansen was put on trial twice in his native Norway, Baker thinks he got off easy. “I think the Norwegian courts were a bit more forgiving than the US courts would be,” he said.
Good luck, Jon.
