Around The Industry:
A servie letting people store their music online has been ruled an infringement of copyright by a Tokyo district court. According to the Everyday Newspaper, the service run by an outfit called ‘Image City’ enabled the punter to store their CD in an off-site server. It could then be downloaded to a mobile phone when the customer was on the move. However the cunning plan was attacked by the Japanese music copyright association (JASRAC) who claimed that it was an infringement of copyright. It has demanded that the service be switched off.
U.S. software company Beatnik Inc. is approaching mobile phone operators with a new music download system that compresses songs up to 10 times more than the MP3 format, allowing for faster downloads on lower-end mobile phones equipped with the company’s software. Beatnik hopes the system will make music download services more appealing in developing markets. The faster download capability it offers is good for markets that haven’t upgraded to 3G and where users have less expensive phones. The company is in talks with operators, handset manufacturers and content providers about adopting the system and expects to announce a partnership in a month.
According to In-Stat, while better known equipment vendors like Samsung, Nokia Siemens, and Motorola received extensive press coverage in 2006 due to their high-profile service provider wins, it was still the original market entrants – Alavarion, Aperto, Redline, and Airspan that held the dominant market positions. The high-tech market research firm does expect that will change as Sprint starts its network deployment. The company has not selected any of those early market pioneers as an infrastructure partner.
UBS, the Swiss investment bank, predicts Sky will come out on top in its dispute with Virgin. The investment bank said that Virgin was suffering an “identity crisis” as Sky’s launch of broadband and voice services had taken its unique selling point as a “triple-play” provider. Thus it argued that Virgin is exposed to competitive pressures with customers surveyed perceiving that Sky offered better customer service and product. Virgin Media dismissed the research as out of date, sensationalist and unrealistic.
BT Scotland director, Brendan Dick, said: “It says a great deal for Scotland and its people that it now boasts the five most switched-on local authority areas in the UK. Fast internet access is now making a huge contribution to the economic success of Scotland, as businesses find new markets and work more efficiently.” In the ADSL broadband take-up league table Aberdeenshire is in first place, with 50.9% and Shetland close behind with 50.7 percent. Third is Stirling with 48.4% and then Aberdeen with 47.9 percent. The Scottish national average of 33.3% is ahead of the UK average of 31.2 percent.
A merger between Avaya and Canada’s Nortel Networks could create a leading vendor of Web-based phone systems, analysts said as talk swirled over a possible buyout bid for the U.S. telecommunications equipment maker. Avaya has long been the subject of takeover speculation because of its small size compared to rivals like Cisco and due to a growing number of companies vying to sell IP phone systems to businesses. Yet it is also rumored that Cisco is interested in Avaya, along with private equity firm Silver Lake.
Southern California Edison Company is proposing changes to its tariff schedule, a move that should finally pave the way for a long-delayed Wi-Fi project in Diamond Bar, California. The Los Angeles Times made an issue of this bottleneck last year in an article about how local electric utilities in general, and Southern California Edison in particular, were blocking the deployment of municipal wireless broadband networks. The problems delayed Diamond Bar’s project for more than a year. SCE originally suggested that the city pay as much as $2,000 per month per pole, the same as commercial cellphone carriers to attach antennas to utility poles.
The Broadband Rumble Down Under makes the US look like a broadband utopia. The broadband issue in Autralia has become a real political sticking point as incumbent Telstra and Aussie regulator Australian Competition and Consumer Commission continue to catfight and bitchslap each other every chance they get. This week ACCC chairman Graeme Samuels said of Telstra, “There is an enormous amount of spin-doctoring going on and an enormous amount of part-information, misinformation that you couldn’t correct in a short period of time.” Meanwhile, Telstra public policy director Phil Burgess earlier this month said it was time for the government to get the ACCC out of the way of the company’s broadband plan. This is getting more entertaining by the moment.
WildBlue has been busy telling rural America that the company has the solution for broadband access in hard-to-reach places. It seems that the industry is listening, because WildBlue and it’s satellite-delivered high-speed internet has now received the 2007 International Satellite Communication exchange (ISCe) Innovation and Technology Award. The ISCe’s advisory board chose WildBlue “in recognition of their development of innovative technologies which have advanced significantly the satellite and communications industry.”
SecurityBits:
Security research firm Immunity released exploit code for a serious bug affecting Mac OS X less than 24 hours after Apple released a patch for it. The flaw is a buffer overflow vulnerability in the UPnP Internet Gateway Device Standardized Device Control code used to create port mappings on home NAT gateways in the OS X mDNSResponder implementation. A software and security engineer at Arbor Networks said it was unusual for an exploit of a Mac vulnerability to be released so quickly. “I don’t know of any others that have been quite that fast, within a day or two,” Jose Nazario said, adding that Mac OS X has increasingly become a source of interest for hackers and security researchers alike.
Sun Microsystems says two buffer overflows in the SOCKS module of its Sun Java System Web Proxy Server 4.0 can give a remote attacker the privileges of a superuser. Sun says that Sun Java System Web Proxy Server 4.0.4 or earlier versions are susceptible to the vulnerability and that a successful exploit won’t demonstrate any predictable symptoms. The company has released an update to address the problem in all affected platforms: SPARC, x86, Linux, Windows, HP-UX and AIX.
Apple has plugged two holes in its QuickTime media player that could create serious security problems for people tricked into visiting malicious websites. The release, which is available for both Windows and Mac platforms, is Apple’s second security patch in less than a week. The most serious of the two vulnerabilities involves QuickTime’s implementation of Java, which could allow for the manipulation of objects outside what should be allowed by the allocated heap. The other vulnerability also resides in the way QuickTime works with Java and could allow a maliciously crafted applet to read a web browser’s memory. That could allow an attacker access to potentially sensitive information, Apple said. QuickTime has emerged as one of the more vulnerable Apple packages, with at least four security updates this year. QuickTime’s susceptibility is due in part to its ability to run on both Windows and OS X and its wide use (and occasional abuse) on sites such MySpace.
A flaw in the design of P2P network DC++, which is based on Direct Connect, has given attackers the ability to create massive DoS attacks that can easily overwhelm corporate websites according to security solutions provider Prolexic Technologies. Older versions of the hub server software have a flaw that allows an attacker to direct clients to get information from another server, said Fredrik Ullner, a developer for the DC++ project. Maliciously redirecting those client results in a large number of computers continuously demanding data from the victim’s web server, overwhelming it with requests. Over the past three months, more than 40 companies have endured attacks emanating from hundreds of thousands of IPs, with many of the attacks producing more than a gigabit of junk data every second. A general solution is unlikely to appear from the DC++ project. While the problem has already been fixed in the DC++ hub software, it’s hard to force everyone to adopt the fix, said developer Ullner.
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It’s now worth buying a PS3
Running linux on it will make all the difference 
Comment by vdi — May 30, 2007 @ 5:09 pm