I think it is a bit disingenuous to say that the reason some of the tested programs failed to receive a VB100 award had anything to do with changes to the test procedures used by Virus Bulletin Magazine. The tests consist of ItW (In The Wild), macro, polymorphic, file infector virus "zoos," with ItW and macro tests being repeated for both scheduled on-demand scanning and on-access (file I/O wedge) scanning, plus a set of clean files which are used to test for false positives. You can view information about the test sets here on Virus Bulletin's web site.
The tests performed are basically those of detection (or lack of detection in the case of the false positive set—remember, a false positive report can be just as damaging to productivity in a corporate environment as an actual viral outbreak), along with some sometimes-snarky comments about the program being tested (usually related to usability issues). The VB100 award means that a product passed the ItW and false positive tests; it could still have faired poorly on the other tests and received the award.
The idea that you can somehow "optimize" a product for these tests is a bit silly; ItW viruses are the ones which affect a vendor's customers and their technical support department receive calls about all the day. The idea that a vendor was somehow not concentrating their detection efforts on these is ludicrous; the ability to handle these types of threats is how they generate their revenue. As for avoiding a false-positive report against a clean set, well, I cannot think of a practical way to engineer a virus scanning engine's signature database for that.
Computer Associates and Symantec received VB100 awards in this test and they are enterprise vendors, so claiming that the "major vendors missed it" this time around is incorrect. Conversely, vendors which specialize in anti-malware like Norman did not receive a VB100 award this time around. While there may be some correlation between the size of a vendor and their detection rate, I do not know if it is as linear a mapping as you imagine.
I shared my thoughts on this over here on Neowin.Net's forums, so I really don't just want to do a cut-and-paste job and post what I wrote in verbatim here.
This is one of the first of a series of comparisons to include Microsoft Windows Live OneCare that Virus Bulletin Magazine has been doing for many years. While I suspect it is more frustrating than embarrassing at this point for the team responsible for Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare, this is really Microsoft's first attempt at providing their own comprehensive anti-malware solution—MSAV, the product which shipped with DOS does not count, it was licensed from Central Point Software (who was later acquired by Symantec) who, in turn, had licensed the software from Carmel Software—and it is going to take some time and lots of signature release cycles in order to get their detection rate fine-tuned.
I don't expect this first Virus Bulletin product comparison to be the last, and the question really isn't how Microsoft did this time: It is how their product does over the next year or two that matters. If it gets worse or stays the same, they are just another competitor in the space (albeit the one with the deepest products). If, however, their detection rate improves, it is going to make it just that much more difficult for their competitors to compete against them.
As a disclaimer of sorts, I should mention that happen I work for one of the computer security companies that Microsoft competes against with this products, so this dicussion is far from academic for me. Frankly, though, I'm not expecting Microsoft's entry into this space to have any effect on my employer—we are good at what we do and have a very loyal customer base. Also, we tend to compete against other, similarly-sized companies in the field. What I do worry about, though, is how some of my friends and colleagues at the largest companies are going to handle Microsoft's entrance as they are going to be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for marketshare.
As an American, I have become somewhat desensitized to the various class action suits which seem to have become water and fodder for the legal industry, but this strikes me as being just sad.
Today is February 2, 2007 and Microsoft publicly released the consumer-oriented versions of Microsoft Windows Vista (the Home and Ultimate Editions) on January 30th, just three days ago. I participated in the testing of Windows Vista and installed the RTW version (Build 6000) on my primary desktop and laptop computers when it became available in November of last year. During testing, nVidia was good--not stellar, but not bad--about providing device drivers, and any problems I experienced during my testing with nVidia 6800GT and 7900GT-chipset based cards generally disappeared as new builds of the operating system and device drivers became available.
Right now, there is a huge installed base of nVidia GPUs out there (5200 and up are officially supported according to this) which people are using with Windows Vista and I am sure the percentage of those users with 8800-series GPUs out there hovers around a single percentage point or two.
Given that Microsoft Windows Vista is a brand new operating system in many respects, such as introducing a completely new video device driver model, and that, likewise, the 8800 series represents nVidia's own most complex product to date and so far has only a small market penetration, why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?
Also, while I would imagine that nVidia has a large staff of developers writing device drivers for their various bits and blogs of silicon, I would imagine the size of that staff is finite and that nVidia has to prioritize their work based on hard business decisions, such as the number of customers using a particular product with a particular operating system. Was it wrong of nVidia to focus their driver development efforts on satisfying the needs of the largest percentage of their installed base? Or should they have focused their efforts on their newest customers and satisfy the needs of thousands or tens of thousands instead of tens of millions?
What I do know is that, generally-speaking, nVidia has historically done a good job of providing decent support for their products and nothing I have seen or read in TFA has changed my opinion. Frankly, the number of nVidia owners who have 8800-series GPUs is a small majority. While these early adopters have paid a premium for their latest-and-greatest video cards and do deserve to be treated with respect by nVidia, I suspect that right now nVidia's engineers are working very hard on device drivers with support all the new features of their video cards and will probably have them available in a few days or a week or two.
Just as an experiment, I tried placing my cell phone into an anti-static mylar baggy and the signal went from 100% to 40% (or five bars to two). Repeating this with tin foil with a small opening to see the LCD (about 1cm^2) reduced the signal to 20% (or one bar).
I am wondering that if someone wants to have a private verbal conversation sans listeners on the cell phone, all they have to do is place their cell phone in metal box?
This would seem much more convenient than having to pull the battery out, as well as reduce wear and tear on the contacts or thin plastics of today's cell phones.
Perhaps someone who is a bit more familiar with electronics could explain whether or not a "tin foil hat" (or a metal box or foil bag, ala Enemy of the State) for a cell phone would work?
I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?
In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of PublicSecurity and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When BillLarson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.
Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.
So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.
Regards
Aryeh Goretsky
PowWow used point-to-point IP lookup from database
on
Net2phone Sues Skype
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· Score: 1
Hello,
Strangely enough, the patent describes an IP and email address registration and lookup mechanism which appears to be identical to that used by Tribal Voice's PowWow program.
PowWow worked by registering the user's email address, IP address and password with a database serve. If the password matched, the IP address associated with the email address was updated in the database. When someone wanted to chat with another user, they entered (or selected) the email address for the other user, which did a query against the IP address database to locate the last known IP address associated with their email address. The client then disconnected from the server and initiated a connection with that IP address. There was a lot of other things done including presence detection, version checking and so forth, but thtat is the basis of how connections were registered and established.
Development of PowWow started at the end of 1994, and the first version was released around March or April of 1995, so while it does not pre-date the patent by years and years, it does predate it by at least several months.
Hello,
OP is right on target. There are quite a few programs which interface with the operating system that I am expecting will need to be updated. In no particular order:
Backup - traditional (tape) backup, CD and DVD disc burning software, disk imaging software
Performance tuning/optimization - disk defragmentation, registery tweakers/cleaners and so forth
Also, applications such as games and productivity software which were intended to be run under an Administrator account under Windows XP and earlier operating systems might need to be updated as well in order to work under Windows Vista without presenting an annoying number of dialogs.
A bit of searching came up with the following free or trial versions of anti-virus programs which are capable of detecting and removing Win32/MyWife (née CME-24):
I'm certain other readers will look up and post links to additional vendors, too. Ob-disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies listed above, so there.
Sadly, CMGI closed Tribal Voice before giving PowWow an opportunity to take off. Of course, that could be said of many--if not all--of CMGI's acquisitions. But I digress... you had asked about PowWow.
A small PowWow server which an old version of the PowWow client was set up by former employees and is still available for use/download. Visit http://powwow.jazy.net/ for more details or to download a copy of the software.
This was a while ago, so I don't have exact dates but Peter Tippett founded a company named FoundationWare around 1987-1989 nwhich made an integrity checking program called Vaccine. Vaccine was eventually renamed to Certus and the company followed suit in the early 1990s, renaming itself after its flagship product.
Certus was initially an integrity checker and behavior blocker. The integrity checker calculated a CRC or hash value on files and system areas, stored them in a database and compared the two to look for differences which could be the result of viruses. The behavior blocker looked for "virus-like" behavior (attempts to write to boot sectors of floppy diskettes, master boot records of hard disk drives, executable files and so forth) and prevented/required prompting to allow the changes to occur. Later on, a "standard" signature-based scanner was added to the suite, but I don't think this was updated as frequently as those from companies who developed them as a primary means of protection.
In late 1992, Symantec completed its acquisition of Certus. At that point, Symantec had already acquired Peter Norton Computing, Inc. (PNCI) and had moved forward with Norton Anti Virus (NAV), scrapping their own DOS-based anti-virus product, which was code-named Andromeda. The primary reason they grabbed Certus was to incorporate the integrity features into the product--I don't know if this happened--and to consolidate marketshare, which did.
I was working at McAfee Associates at the time of the acquisition and while the move was viewed with interest, there was not any particular alarm on our part. Stealth viruses (viruses which hooked the interrupts managing disk and file I/O and redirected attempts to look for themselves or stripped copies of the viral code off the file before passing it to the requesting program) were becoming more and more common which limited the effectiveness of integrity management programs since a stealth virus would pass "clean" copies of the infected disk structures or files back and behavior blockers were viewed as ineffective because of the high false-positive rate. Perhaps someone who was at Symantec at the time of the acquisition could give a better view of what was going on at the time.
I too have been running the beta test version of MicrosoftAntispyware too and when I looked on my PC and found the ERRORS.LOG and CLEANERS.LOG in the installation directory. They were 8KB and 2KB, respectively. To contrast, Spybot - Search & Destroy had 188KB of logs in its \LOGS directory and Ad-aware had 1.4MB (although these seemed mostly to be related to installation), so perhaps it is an issue with your computer's configuration? Either that, or perhaps it found malicious software and removed it--something my installation did not.
The program is still in beta, so support isn't available through normal Microsoft channels, here is the link to the support newsgroup.
Howard Stern actually called into an interview Michael Powell was doing with KGO radio in San Francisco last October. Interesting enough, one of Howard Stern's main complaints was the FCC was preventing Viacom from buying stations.
More information (MP3, transcript) can be found at Boing Boing.
While it may not sound appealing, water has been recycled for millions and millions of years now, so this is not such a new thing after all. What is novel, though, is how the water is being filtered, and, of course, that a government is getting into the business of selling bottled water.
If we are ever to have a lasting presence in space, it is technologies like this which will be needed.
I am a bit surprised to see all of the comments treating Bulletin Board Systems as if they no longer existed or were a thing of the past.
While they heyday of the BBS is over, they definitely do still exist. The USBBS list documents hundreds (thousands?) of BBS systems, most of which are available by telnet access these days.
I've known/worked for John for over a decade, and he always pronounced his last name MACK-uh-fee.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Or the company may have decided to change the pronunciation at some point....
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Doesn't Fellowes already make one of these?
on
Stolen Laptop Alarms
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· Score: 3, Informative
Hello,
I saw a similar device for sale as Best Buy from Fellowes called a Mobile Proximity Alarm. From looking at their web site it doesn't seem to have a motion detector, but sets of an alarm if the sensor is moved more than fifteen feet from the base. It cost about $30.00USD.
Obviously, it's hard to compare this against something which only exists in prototype form, but has anyone used one of these? If so, how well did it work?
It's important to keep in mind that just like automobile manufacturers, motherboard manufacturers make products targeted at different markets.
Just as automobile enthusiasts replace stock carburetors and transmissions with performance parts, overbore engines, modify ECUs and so forth, computer enthusiasts tweak their BIOSes, replace stock heatsinks with watercooling, use rounded cables, et cetera.
But for the overwhelming majority of automobile or computer users out there, they get by just fine on with their Fords or Chevys or Dells or Gateways. While Ferraris and Falcon Northwests are fast, how often is the average driver going to need to go 150MPH or get involved in a lanparty frag-fest? It's important to keep in perspective that the overwhelming majority of automobile and computer drivers perform routine tasks like driving back and forth from work, word processing, going down to the corner grocery, web surfing, and so forth. And for those types of activities, a Saturn or eMachine is going to do the job just as well as the most exotic car or PC you can imagine.
Having worked around average (read: non-computer industry) computer users long enough, I can tell you that they just don't care about what brand of CPU or type of memory their computer has, much less its CAS and RAS timings. They just want something that's inexpensive and reliable.
This is the market that Intel goes after for its motherboards. Not necessarily the end users themselves--I would imagine Intel's retail motherboard sales account for a small percentage of total motherboard sales compared to their OEM sales--but the companies who make those mass-market computers. And for those end users, that's fine. They'll probably never play a video game more challenging than Solitaire just like they'll never drive more than 120MPH. And they're more concerned about being able to get work done on their computer or getting to the dry cleaners on time to pick up the laundry then burning out a CPU or cracking an engine block.
IBM makes several keyboards with built-in TrackPoints, such as this one and this one. They replace the older TrackPoint II keyboard.
Other manufacturers include PCKeyboards.Com, who have this model and this one.
I have one of their smaller keyboards. It is based on a laptop keyboard and, frankly, is not as as crisp as the keyboard in my ancient IBM ThinkPad 770. For occasional use it is fine, but I would not want to use it as my primary keyboard.
McAfee Associates' VIRUSCAN used to have an interesting error message in it:
An impossible internal error has occurred.
If you saw this, it usually meant you had a damaged copy of the SCAN.EXE executable.
This was in version which was distributed electronically as shareware. By the time the product has entered the retail channel the error message had been removed.
A couple of months ago I was visiting a client in Old Colorado City (a suburb of Colorado Springs) and he mentioned his next-door neighbor, a wireless ISP named Old Colorado City Communications ISP, was providing technical assistance in this project. Old Colorado City Communications is owned by Dave Hughes, who was a columnist for BoardWatch magazine back in the early 90's.
Dave gave my client a nice color brochure talking about the wireless initiative, printed in both English and Welsh.
Let's see, in no particular order, what I'd like to see in a PDA:
Case - A durable outside. A lightweight metal such as Al, Mg or Ti would be great, with a slip on ruggedized "boot" if I need to use it in an extreme environment.
Battery - A removable Li-Polymer battery, with a separate memory backup backup (the ever-popular CR-2025 come to mind). The main battery should be available in both standard (slim-line) and extended (fat) capacities.
Charging - A regular barrel-plug is fine. That way if I leave my integrated sync/charge cradle at home (the office, etc.), I can go buy an inexpensive charger at any electronics store.
Expansion Slots - A 32-Bit CardBus slot would be great. Two would be even better. If need be, I can always purchase adapters for CompactFlash, MemoryStick, SSFDC, MMC, and so forth. But having the larger form-factor available would allow me to use a greater range of devices such as 802.11, Ethernet, GPS, modem, ATA-FLASH, and those nice Toshiba 1.8" hard drive cards. An internal CompactFlash II slot for storage devices might be useful for IBM MicroDrives.
Device Interfaces - Low speed: IRDA and BlueTooth (never used them myself, but understand others do). High Speed: USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394. As for 802.11, Ethernet, etc., these can be handled via the CardBus port(s).
Display - A 640×480 65K color touch screen with some rudimentary 3-D acceleration (nothing wrong with a little game-playing).
Keyboards - A variety of keyboards should be available as well, ranging from Blackberry-sized "thumb" keyboards to a wrist-stappable-sized keyboard to ThinkOutside's full-sized foldable keyboards. Of course, the keyboard should have its own separate ort, so all the other ports are accessible/usable.
Expansion Cage - In order to plug in even more devices, an expansion cage would be great. It would also have its own removable battery to increase the PDA's operating time.
Volatile Memory> - 64MB of memory minimum, with some sort of low-power SO-DIMM's available to expand it up to 512MB.
CPU - Fast enough to handle web browsing (with all its multimedia), play MP3s, perform artillery calculations, etc.
Audio Output - A decent monaural speaker, with a standard 3.5mm out for headphones (or plugging into stereo system). A hardware-based speech synthesizer would make the device even more useful, especially for visually-impaired.
Buttons - Several (4? 8?) programmable application buttons around the outside of the case. The buttons should be identifiable by touch (raised imprint, bas-relief, Braille, textures, whatever).
Operating System - A variety of OS's should be available on removable cards such as Windows CE and Linux. Cards would flashable for OS upgrade/bug-fix purposes.
Applications - Yes. And lots of them. A PIM-type program or programs, scaled-down office-type applications, multimedia player, web-browsing and email programs at a minimum.
Games - Yes, games. Throw in a few killer games and watch folks come up with justifications to have one.
Development Tools - To encourage development, they should be made available as cheaply as possible (right down to the cost of just downloading them).
Well, that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
I am a bit surprised that no one has taken a look at the reasoning behind this product.
Microsoft is fundamentally a software company. When they produce hardware it is for a reason. For example, the original Microsoft Mouse was created in order to help stimulate demand for Windows. Likewise, all the joysticks and game controllers stimulate demands for games, which, in turn, stimulate demands for the Microsoft operating systems under which they run.
One use I can see for "soft" WiFi is to reduce the cost of wireless access in laptop, Pocket PC-like devices, and the forthcoming Microsoft "Mira" Tablet PC's. The allows Microsoft to license more operating systems to the folks who will manufacture and sell them.
Of course, another possiblity is this would help slow the development and deployment of wireless devices based on non-Microsoft operations systems, which, of course, would be a Good Thing for Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello,
I think it is a bit disingenuous to say that the reason some of the tested programs failed to receive a VB100 award had anything to do with changes to the test procedures used by Virus Bulletin Magazine. The tests consist of ItW (In The Wild), macro, polymorphic, file infector virus "zoos," with ItW and macro tests being repeated for both scheduled on-demand scanning and on-access (file I/O wedge) scanning, plus a set of clean files which are used to test for false positives. You can view information about the test sets here on Virus Bulletin's web site.
The tests performed are basically those of detection (or lack of detection in the case of the false positive set—remember, a false positive report can be just as damaging to productivity in a corporate environment as an actual viral outbreak), along with some sometimes-snarky comments about the program being tested (usually related to usability issues). The VB100 award means that a product passed the ItW and false positive tests; it could still have faired poorly on the other tests and received the award.
The idea that you can somehow "optimize" a product for these tests is a bit silly; ItW viruses are the ones which affect a vendor's customers and their technical support department receive calls about all the day. The idea that a vendor was somehow not concentrating their detection efforts on these is ludicrous; the ability to handle these types of threats is how they generate their revenue. As for avoiding a false-positive report against a clean set, well, I cannot think of a practical way to engineer a virus scanning engine's signature database for that.
Computer Associates and Symantec received VB100 awards in this test and they are enterprise vendors, so claiming that the "major vendors missed it" this time around is incorrect. Conversely, vendors which specialize in anti-malware like Norman did not receive a VB100 award this time around. While there may be some correlation between the size of a vendor and their detection rate, I do not know if it is as linear a mapping as you imagine.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I just checked the review (have Virus Bulletin subscription at work) and it is indeed McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i that was reviewed.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I shared my thoughts on this over here on Neowin.Net's forums, so I really don't just want to do a cut-and-paste job and post what I wrote in verbatim here.
This is one of the first of a series of comparisons to include Microsoft Windows Live OneCare that Virus Bulletin Magazine has been doing for many years. While I suspect it is more frustrating than embarrassing at this point for the team responsible for Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare, this is really Microsoft's first attempt at providing their own comprehensive anti-malware solution—MSAV, the product which shipped with DOS does not count, it was licensed from Central Point Software (who was later acquired by Symantec) who, in turn, had licensed the software from Carmel Software—and it is going to take some time and lots of signature release cycles in order to get their detection rate fine-tuned.
I don't expect this first Virus Bulletin product comparison to be the last, and the question really isn't how Microsoft did this time: It is how their product does over the next year or two that matters. If it gets worse or stays the same, they are just another competitor in the space (albeit the one with the deepest products). If, however, their detection rate improves, it is going to make it just that much more difficult for their competitors to compete against them.
As a disclaimer of sorts, I should mention that happen I work for one of the computer security companies that Microsoft competes against with this products, so this dicussion is far from academic for me. Frankly, though, I'm not expecting Microsoft's entry into this space to have any effect on my employer—we are good at what we do and have a very loyal customer base. Also, we tend to compete against other, similarly-sized companies in the field. What I do worry about, though, is how some of my friends and colleagues at the largest companies are going to handle Microsoft's entrance as they are going to be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for marketshare.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
As an American, I have become somewhat desensitized to the various class action suits which seem to have become water and fodder for the legal industry, but this strikes me as being just sad.
Today is February 2, 2007 and Microsoft publicly released the consumer-oriented versions of Microsoft Windows Vista (the Home and Ultimate Editions) on January 30th, just three days ago. I participated in the testing of Windows Vista and installed the RTW version (Build 6000) on my primary desktop and laptop computers when it became available in November of last year. During testing, nVidia was good--not stellar, but not bad--about providing device drivers, and any problems I experienced during my testing with nVidia 6800GT and 7900GT-chipset based cards generally disappeared as new builds of the operating system and device drivers became available.
Right now, there is a huge installed base of nVidia GPUs out there (5200 and up are officially supported according to this) which people are using with Windows Vista and I am sure the percentage of those users with 8800-series GPUs out there hovers around a single percentage point or two.
Given that Microsoft Windows Vista is a brand new operating system in many respects, such as introducing a completely new video device driver model, and that, likewise, the 8800 series represents nVidia's own most complex product to date and so far has only a small market penetration, why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?
Also, while I would imagine that nVidia has a large staff of developers writing device drivers for their various bits and blogs of silicon, I would imagine the size of that staff is finite and that nVidia has to prioritize their work based on hard business decisions, such as the number of customers using a particular product with a particular operating system. Was it wrong of nVidia to focus their driver development efforts on satisfying the needs of the largest percentage of their installed base? Or should they have focused their efforts on their newest customers and satisfy the needs of thousands or tens of thousands instead of tens of millions?
What I do know is that, generally-speaking, nVidia has historically done a good job of providing decent support for their products and nothing I have seen or read in TFA has changed my opinion. Frankly, the number of nVidia owners who have 8800-series GPUs is a small majority. While these early adopters have paid a premium for their latest-and-greatest video cards and do deserve to be treated with respect by nVidia, I suspect that right now nVidia's engineers are working very hard on device drivers with support all the new features of their video cards and will probably have them available in a few days or a week or two.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Just as an experiment, I tried placing my cell phone into an anti-static mylar baggy and the signal went from 100% to 40% (or five bars to two). Repeating this with tin foil with a small opening to see the LCD (about 1cm^2) reduced the signal to 20% (or one bar).
I am wondering that if someone wants to have a private verbal conversation sans listeners on the cell phone, all they have to do is place their cell phone in metal box?
This would seem much more convenient than having to pull the battery out, as well as reduce wear and tear on the contacts or thin plastics of today's cell phones.
Perhaps someone who is a bit more familiar with electronics could explain whether or not a "tin foil hat" (or a metal box or foil bag, ala Enemy of the State) for a cell phone would work?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?
In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of Public Security and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When Bill Larson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.
Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.
So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.
RegardsAryeh Goretsky
Strangely enough, the patent describes an IP and email address registration and lookup mechanism which appears to be identical to that used by Tribal Voice's PowWow program.
PowWow worked by registering the user's email address, IP address and password with a database serve. If the password matched, the IP address associated with the email address was updated in the database. When someone wanted to chat with another user, they entered (or selected) the email address for the other user, which did a query against the IP address database to locate the last known IP address associated with their email address. The client then disconnected from the server and initiated a connection with that IP address. There was a lot of other things done including presence detection, version checking and so forth, but thtat is the basis of how connections were registered and established.
Development of PowWow started at the end of 1994, and the first version was released around March or April of 1995, so while it does not pre-date the patent by years and years, it does predate it by at least several months.
Regards,Aryeh Goretsky
Also, applications such as games and productivity software which were intended to be run under an Administrator account under Windows XP and earlier operating systems might need to be updated as well in order to work under Windows Vista without presenting an annoying number of dialogs.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
A bit of searching came up with the following free or trial versions of anti-virus programs which are capable of detecting and removing Win32/MyWife (née CME-24):
Alwil - Avast! 4 Home Edition (free for personal non-commercial use)
ESET - NOD32 trial version (30-day evaluation)
Grisoft - AVG Free Edition (free for personal non-commercial use)
Kaspersky Lab - Anti-Virus Personal 5.0 (30-day evaluation)
McAfee - VirusScan (30-day evaluation)
Microsoft - Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (KB890830) (free)
Panda - Titanium Antivirus 2006 (30-day evaluation)
Sophos - Anti-Virus (30-day evaluation)
Symantec - W32.Blackmal@mm Removal Tool (free)
Trend Micro - PC-cillin Trial Version (30-day evaluation)
I'm certain other readers will look up and post links to additional vendors, too. Ob-disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies listed above, so there.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Sadly, CMGI closed Tribal Voice before giving PowWow an opportunity to take off. Of course, that could be said of many--if not all--of CMGI's acquisitions. But I digress... you had asked about PowWow.
A small PowWow server which an old version of the PowWow client was set up by former employees and is still available for use/download. Visit http://powwow.jazy.net/ for more details or to download a copy of the software.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
This was a while ago, so I don't have exact dates but Peter Tippett founded a company named FoundationWare around 1987-1989 nwhich made an integrity checking program called Vaccine. Vaccine was eventually renamed to Certus and the company followed suit in the early 1990s, renaming itself after its flagship product.
Certus was initially an integrity checker and behavior blocker. The integrity checker calculated a CRC or hash value on files and system areas, stored them in a database and compared the two to look for differences which could be the result of viruses. The behavior blocker looked for "virus-like" behavior (attempts to write to boot sectors of floppy diskettes, master boot records of hard disk drives, executable files and so forth) and prevented/required prompting to allow the changes to occur. Later on, a "standard" signature-based scanner was added to the suite, but I don't think this was updated as frequently as those from companies who developed them as a primary means of protection.
In late 1992, Symantec completed its acquisition of Certus. At that point, Symantec had already acquired Peter Norton Computing, Inc. (PNCI) and had moved forward with Norton Anti Virus (NAV), scrapping their own DOS-based anti-virus product, which was code-named Andromeda. The primary reason they grabbed Certus was to incorporate the integrity features into the product--I don't know if this happened--and to consolidate marketshare, which did.
I was working at McAfee Associates at the time of the acquisition and while the move was viewed with interest, there was not any particular alarm on our part. Stealth viruses (viruses which hooked the interrupts managing disk and file I/O and redirected attempts to look for themselves or stripped copies of the viral code off the file before passing it to the requesting program) were becoming more and more common which limited the effectiveness of integrity management programs since a stealth virus would pass "clean" copies of the infected disk structures or files back and behavior blockers were viewed as ineffective because of the high false-positive rate. Perhaps someone who was at Symantec at the time of the acquisition could give a better view of what was going on at the time.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Perhaps you meant Borland Sidekick?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I too have been running the beta test version of Microsoft Antispyware too and when I looked on my PC and found the ERRORS.LOG and CLEANERS.LOG in the installation directory. They were 8KB and 2KB, respectively. To contrast, Spybot - Search & Destroy had 188KB of logs in its \LOGS directory and Ad-aware had 1.4MB (although these seemed mostly to be related to installation), so perhaps it is an issue with your computer's configuration? Either that, or perhaps it found malicious software and removed it--something my installation did not.
The program is still in beta, so support isn't available through normal Microsoft channels, here is the link to the support newsgroup.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Howard Stern actually called into an interview Michael Powell was doing with KGO radio in San Francisco last October. Interesting enough, one of Howard Stern's main complaints was the FCC was preventing Viacom from buying stations.
More information (MP3, transcript) can be found at Boing Boing.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
3Com makes the unimpressively-named 3CRPAG175, a CardBus card with an XJack-style retractable antenna.
I use one in my IBM ThinkPad T23 and it works quite well--no problems with the antenna getting stuck or failing to retract.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
While it may not sound appealing, water has been recycled for millions and millions of years now, so this is not such a new thing after all. What is novel, though, is how the water is being filtered, and, of course, that a government is getting into the business of selling bottled water.
If we are ever to have a lasting presence in space, it is technologies like this which will be needed.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I am a bit surprised to see all of the comments treating Bulletin Board Systems as if they no longer existed or were a thing of the past.
While they heyday of the BBS is over, they definitely do still exist. The USBBS list documents hundreds (thousands?) of BBS systems, most of which are available by telnet access these days.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I've known/worked for John for over a decade, and he always pronounced his last name MACK-uh-fee.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Or the company may have decided to change the pronunciation at some point....
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I saw a similar device for sale as Best Buy from Fellowes called a Mobile Proximity Alarm. From looking at their web site it doesn't seem to have a motion detector, but sets of an alarm if the sensor is moved more than fifteen feet from the base. It cost about $30.00USD.
Obviously, it's hard to compare this against something which only exists in prototype form, but has anyone used one of these? If so, how well did it work?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
It's important to keep in mind that just like automobile manufacturers, motherboard manufacturers make products targeted at different markets.
Just as automobile enthusiasts replace stock carburetors and transmissions with performance parts, overbore engines, modify ECUs and so forth, computer enthusiasts tweak their BIOSes, replace stock heatsinks with watercooling, use rounded cables, et cetera.
But for the overwhelming majority of automobile or computer users out there, they get by just fine on with their Fords or Chevys or Dells or Gateways. While Ferraris and Falcon Northwests are fast, how often is the average driver going to need to go 150MPH or get involved in a lanparty frag-fest? It's important to keep in perspective that the overwhelming majority of automobile and computer drivers perform routine tasks like driving back and forth from work, word processing, going down to the corner grocery, web surfing, and so forth. And for those types of activities, a Saturn or eMachine is going to do the job just as well as the most exotic car or PC you can imagine.
Having worked around average (read: non-computer industry) computer users long enough, I can tell you that they just don't care about what brand of CPU or type of memory their computer has, much less its CAS and RAS timings. They just want something that's inexpensive and reliable.
This is the market that Intel goes after for its motherboards. Not necessarily the end users themselves--I would imagine Intel's retail motherboard sales account for a small percentage of total motherboard sales compared to their OEM sales--but the companies who make those mass-market computers. And for those end users, that's fine. They'll probably never play a video game more challenging than Solitaire just like they'll never drive more than 120MPH. And they're more concerned about being able to get work done on their computer or getting to the dry cleaners on time to pick up the laundry then burning out a CPU or cracking an engine block.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
IBM makes several keyboards with built-in TrackPoints, such as this one and this one. They replace the older TrackPoint II keyboard.
Other manufacturers include PCKeyboards.Com, who have this model and this one.
I have one of their smaller keyboards. It is based on a laptop keyboard and, frankly, is not as as crisp as the keyboard in my ancient IBM ThinkPad 770. For occasional use it is fine, but I would not want to use it as my primary keyboard.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
McAfee Associates' VIRUSCAN used to have an interesting error message in it:
An impossible internal error has occurred.
If you saw this, it usually meant you had a damaged copy of the SCAN.EXE executable.
This was in version which was distributed electronically as shareware. By the time the product has entered the retail channel the error message had been removed.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
A couple of months ago I was visiting a client in Old Colorado City (a suburb of Colorado Springs) and he mentioned his next-door neighbor, a wireless ISP named Old Colorado City Communications ISP, was providing technical assistance in this project. Old Colorado City Communications is owned by Dave Hughes, who was a columnist for BoardWatch magazine back in the early 90's.
Dave gave my client a nice color brochure talking about the wireless initiative, printed in both English and Welsh.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Let's see, in no particular order, what I'd like to see in a PDA:
Well, that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I am a bit surprised that no one has taken a look at the reasoning behind this product.
Microsoft is fundamentally a software company. When they produce hardware it is for a reason. For example, the original Microsoft Mouse was created in order to help stimulate demand for Windows. Likewise, all the joysticks and game controllers stimulate demands for games, which, in turn, stimulate demands for the Microsoft operating systems under which they run.
One use I can see for "soft" WiFi is to reduce the cost of wireless access in laptop, Pocket PC-like devices, and the forthcoming Microsoft "Mira" Tablet PC's. The allows Microsoft to license more operating systems to the folks who will manufacture and sell them.
Of course, another possiblity is this would help slow the development and deployment of wireless devices based on non-Microsoft operations systems, which, of course, would be a Good Thing for Microsoft.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky