From cool accessories to fresh laptops and smart phones, here are 25 new products to help keep mobile workers connected, protected and productive.
A rough week on Wall Street didn't spare IT vendors or channel companies. Here's a look at how 20 companies' stock prices have fared since Oct. 3.
Want to get some holiday shopping done early? Here are 10 hot digital gift ideas from ShowStoppers NYC, guaranteed to make anyone with even the slightest interest in technology happy.
YouTube rejected a written plea from the McCain-Palin campaign to subject political videos to a more lengthy review process before taking them down for alleged copyright violations.
The McCain-Palin campaign sent a three-page letter to YouTube and Google after a number of McCain political videos were taken down from YouTube for alleged violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Trevor Potter, general counsel for the McCain-Palin campaign, in the letter sent to YouTube, argued that the clips in question in the videos were no more than 10 seconds long, and fell under the fair use doctrine. In the letter, Potter made this request:
"We fully understand that YouTube may receive too many videos, and too many takedown notices, to be able to conduct full fair-use review of all such notices. But we believe it would consume few resources -- and provide enormous benefit -- for YouTube to commit to a full legal review of all takedown notices on videos posted from accounts controlled by (at least) political candidates and campaigns."
Zahavah Levine, chief counsel for YouTube, sent a letter Tuesday refusing the McCain-Palin campaign's request, citing, among other reasons:
"While we agree with you that the U.S. presidential election-related content is invaluable and worthy of the highest level of protection, there is a lot of other content on our global site that our users around the world find to be equally important, including, by way of example only, political campaigns from around the globe at all levels of government, human rights movements, and other important voices. We try to be careful not to favor one category of content on our site over others, and to treat all of our users fairly, regardless of whether they are an individual, a large corporation or a candidate for public office. "
Users will be able to watch full-length episodes of "Star Trek," the original "Beverly Hills 90210," and soap opera, "The Young And The Restless."
Before this deal with CBS, YouTube primarily displayed shorter clips of 10 minutes or less of television shows, although YouTube had been airing some few full-length shows from HBO and ShowTime in recent months.
According to YouTube, the CBS archive shows will display a full-length badge to differentiate them from the shorter clips, and will also be shown in a new theater mode, Reuters reported.
Google-owned YouTube told Reuters on Friday that YouTube was looking to broker similar agreements with other TV networks to show their archived television shows.
This partnership is both an attempt by YouTube to boost ad revenue, and to compete with video-sharing Web site Hulu.com. Hulu features full length episodes of currently airing shows from Fox, NBC and CBS. However, YouTube has a much larger viewer-base that Hulu, with 330 million viewers as compared to Hulu's 3.3 million viewers.
CBS will sell the ads on YouTube around the CBS archived shows, YouTube execs told Reuters. CBS and YouTube will share the ad revenue.
"It's all about advertisers maximizing their reach and using the most effective ad format for where the user might be situated," Shiva Rajaraman, a senior product manager for YouTube, said in an interview, Reuters reported.
The new feature is Google's latest attempt to make more money from its massively popular video-sharing site, which until now had relied on advertising hot links to generate revenue. Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006. The click-to-buy feature will be unobtrusive retail links placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features, Brown and Tran wrote in the blog. "Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click to buy products—like songs and video games—related to the content they're watching on the site," they said. The company has started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music and providing Amazon product links to the newly released video game Spore on videos from Spore's publisher Electronic Arts, according to Google.
"This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries—from music, to film, to print, to TV—offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos," Brown and Tran wrote. In addition, companies that use Google's content identification and management system can enable these links on user-generated content by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.
Retail links are currently only available in the U.S., but the goal is to expand the program to additional content and international users, according to Google.
"We'll be experimenting with the UI over time to make sure this works for our community, and we'll continue to innovate based on your feedback. We're just getting started, so stay tuned for other innovative new features and product options soon," Brown and Tran wrote.
October spam starts off with a whimper, with declining mail volumes. There's some virus activity, but what is more noteworthy is what we are not seeing.
With the seesawing stock market and the looming U.S. Presidential elections, we expected to see more email subject lines on those topics. While there are a handful of headline-spam instances, it's not anywhere near expected volumes.
Instead of headline spam, there is an increase in messages with generic headlines but with references to current events in the body. The messages are poorly written letters, which discuss a news event and stating the attachment is "without any virus and any other danger." Security vendor Iron Port has also noticed an increase in these types of messages.
A modified version of Nigerian spam was also noted. Instead of a widow or an assistant to some government official, the scams proposing a fund transfer of an obscene amount of money are coming from treasury officials in "Republic of United States" or "Republic of America."
Blocked connections inched down to 88.2 percent yesterday, but it's still higher than the average daily volume for blocked connections. Blocked mail has been consistently four to five percent higher than the average for a few days now.
Spam inched up four percent to make up 11.3 percent of total mail volume. The filters reported less "High" spam, or blatant spam, but more "Medium" -- consistent with past observations that filters are having a harder time separating legitimate URLs from URLs of legitimate sites that host malware sites.
Virus relays came from Czech Republic and Poland. The most active spam relay came from Chile. The most active blocked mail were sent from Russian and Spain. After the past few days with most activity originating in China, this shift to Latin America and Europe is intriguing.
AttackWatch: Oct. 2
The Test Center trap network remains busy. A login attempt against the service FTP GUILD was logged by the trap network Thursday. Log files show that the user was able to authenticate into the network. The user then tried to access a number of IIS files without success. This is a signature of a known scanning tool that looks for vulnerable FTP servers. The trap network caught a few scan attempts against SSH. The scanner's domain information reflects a domain from Russia. Requests for information about the trap network were logged coming through TELNET from an IP that traces to Mauritius, an island nation off the coast of the African continent. There were several logged spam relay attempts from an email address traced to a self-described SEO site that traces back to a registrant in Beijing; we'll be watching for continued activity from this location. One of the regular sets of malicious attempts, brute force login attempts against our SQL database, from Asia, was also logged.
The astronauts were cheered amid a backdrop of hundreds of Chinese flags at the start of what the Chinese government calls National Day, a day to celebrate Chinese achievement.
The celebration comes amid growing international criticism of China over the tainted milk scandal, the lead paint toy debacle and the poor green record of the Chinese industry and government. The poor track record of the Chinese government and industry will eventually take its toll on Chinese exports, including high-tech exports. The big question is when.
The U.S. imported a whopping $112.3 billion in high-tech products from China in 2007, according to AeA, a trade association. Mexico was the second biggest player in U.S. high-tech imports at $51.3 billion.
With the going green movement gaining steam in the U.S., computer buyers are going to start looking closely at these high-tech exports, namely how are they being manufactured and at just what cost to the world environment.
Besides the going green implication, there are issues of product quality that are sure to be raised by U.S. companies OEMing or buying Chinese high-tech products.
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