At the moment I’m writing, the Demonoid site (including torrent listing and its forums) is back online and working. It looks exactly as it looked before the downtime, and the following annoucement has been made:
We received a letter from a lawyer represeting the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and we need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this.
Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.
Source: In-House
Demonoid.com mysteriously disappeared earlier this week, but there is hope. The website is still down but the trackers are now fully operational again, perhaps a sign that Demonoid is crawling back up?
The demonoid downtime caused quite some controversy, especially after the popular Dutch news site nu.nl reported that the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) was responsible for the downtime.
We contacted both the CRIA and Demonoid
If there’s one advantage Microsoft’s Hardware division should have over everyone else making cameras, mice and keyboards, it would be the ability to write supporting software that worked pretty well with Windows. So it’s both annoying and mysterious that the drivers for its latest notebook web cams are proving problematic to the point of being literally unusable with Vista.
Transit recently decided to try out new Microsoft’s LifeCam NX-3000, a remarkably compact web cam (it’s about the size of my thumb). The miniaturisation is a welcome development, the camera boasts of the ability to take still pictures at up to 1.3 megapixels, and the price (around $70) isn’t too shabby either. But whether it’s actually any good remains an open question here at Transit HQ, because it resolutely refuses to install under Windows Vista Business.
Read on to discover how downloading new drivers reveals some fundamental flaws in Microsoft’s own approach to its security model.
View Full Article: iTWire
Earlier this month, the rumor mill suggested Nvidia’s upcoming G92 graphics processor would arrive on a card dubbed the GeForce 8700 GTS. Now, however, the rumor mill has ground to a halt and changed direction. VR-Zone reports Nvidia has renamed the upcoming card GeForce 8800 GT, which the firm intends to offer in two flavors.
According to VR-Zone, the cheaper version of the GeForce 8800 GT will come with 256MB of memory and will be priced at $199, while the other will have 512MB of RAM and will launch at a pricier $249. Both versions will be nine inches (22.9 cm) long, carry memory of the GDDR3 type, and offer performance somewhere between that of the GeForce 8600 GTS and GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.
These GeForce 8800 GT cards should face off against RV670-based offerings AMD is reportedly prepping for a mid-November launch at $229-299. The AMD cards are expected to feature graphics processors based on 55nm process technology with Shader Model 4.1 and PCI Express 2.0 support. In light of AMD’s plans, VR-Zone says Nvidia may opt to strike first by pulling the G92 launch forward to early November.
News Source: The Tech Report
Apple Inc. general counsel Donald Rosenberg is leaving for Qualcomm Inc. after just 10 months at Apple, where Oracle Corp. general counsel Daniel Cooperman will replace Rosenberg in a shuffle of veteran lawyers accustomed to high-stakes work.
Rosenberg joined Apple in November, when the maker of iPod players and Macintosh computers was in the thick of a stock options scandal. His predecessor there, Nancy Heinen, is now fighting civil charges that she fraudulently backdated stock-options awards to the executive team and a grant to CEO Steve Jobs.
Jobs has a reputation as a tough boss, and his Cupertino-based company maintains an overflowing plate of legal work. But Rosenberg, who spent more than 30 years at International Business Machines Corp. before joining Apple, is jumping to another post brimming with challenges. Apple announced Friday that he will serve as general counsel at cellular phone chip provider Qualcomm Inc.
San Diego-based Qualcomm is under investigation in Europe for claims of anti-competitive behavior. It also faces major legal battles with rivals Nokia Corp. and Broadcom Corp. over its patents.
Apple did not disclose why Rosenberg left.
“We thank Don for his contributions to Apple during the past 10 months and wish him well in his future endeavors,” Jobs said in a statement.
Apple spokeswoman Susan Lundgren declined to comment further, and she said Rosenberg and Cooperman were both declining interviews.
Cooperman, who starts at Apple Nov. 1, became Oracle’s general counsel in February 1997 and is currently chairman of the Software & Information Industry Association, the software industry’s largest trade group.
At business software giant Oracle, Dorian Daley, corporate counsel since 1992, will become the new general counsel, Oracle said.
News Source: Yahoo News - AP
How far along is Microsoft with the next version of Internet Explorer - which might be IE 7.5 or IE 8.0, depending on what Microsoft decided to do since last time we heard anything truly tangible from the IE team (which was about a year ago)?
View Full Article: ZDNet
Long Zheng: Copying files is the Achilles
A Microsoft employee on Thursday accidentally blogged about an upgrade to Office Mobile that shouldn’t be available for another couple of weeks.
The upgrade, when it becomes available, should solve an incompatibility issue that left Windows Mobile 6.0 users unable to read Office 2007 file formats.
Jason Langridge, who works in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile group in the U.K., wrote that Office Mobile 6.1 was available and he included a link to the download page. But a representative with Microsoft’s external public relations firm said that the upgrade was put up on the site initially for internal testing and was accidentally made available to the public.
The new version of Office Mobile is expected to become available very soon, probably within the next two weeks, he said.
Langridge has not yet removed the post from his blog. (It is now)
The download page, which is no longer accessible, said that the upgrade allows viewing and editing of Word documents and Excel Workbooks and viewing of PowerPoint slides that were created using Office 2007. Office 2007 was released in January and is based on the Open XML format. Windows Mobile 6.0 devices began hitting the market in the middle of this year but users have been unable to read Office 2007 documents, unless they used a third party software product. DataViz, for example, offers software that lets Windows Mobile 6.0 users read Office 2007 documents.
Users of the upgrade will also be able to view and extract files from compressed .zip folders, it said.
Following the link on Langridge’s site now leads to a page with this message: “The download you requested is unavailable. If you continue to see this message when trying to access this download, go to the “Search for a Download” area on the Download Center home page.”
News Source: InfoWorld
Imagine our surprise when among the dozens of phishing e-mails that arrive to our inboxes was one message that leads not to a free hosting provider but to a .GOV.CN site URL. Hackers are apparently in control of a Chinese government web server, or someone at that site is engaged in phishing Paypal accounts.
The e-mail, like many others of that ilk, told us about the need to log-in due to “suspect activity”. It reads “We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your PayPal account from a foreign IP address”.
It continued “If you recently accessed your account while traveling, the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you. However if you are the rightful holder of the account,click on the link below to log into the account and follow the instructions.”
Below, one could see the familiar Paypal log-in address, but once you looked where the hyperlink lead to, it was instead to
http://gtt.xinjiang.gov.cn/remark.html
Knowing it was a fake, I visitied the site and to my amusement was forwarded to a fake Paypal log-in screen in studypoint.sk, a Slovakia domain - a country far away that this gaucho knows nothing about.
Hours later, when I tried the URL again, the redirector at the Chinese .gov.cn site changed its destination to an IP address, clearly hinting out that the persons in charge of this redirector had access to change the remark.html file contents so they can create new fake log-in pages elsewhere once the first ones are reported and shut down, so they could continue their exercise forever.
But what is http://gtt.xinjiang.gov.cn, the server hosting the “remark.html” redirector?. This ignorant scribbler never heard of Xinjiang before, so I had to look it up on the wackypedia, which tells Xinjiang is an autonomous region in the People’s Republic of China, right next to Mongolia, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
The INQ scribbler and correspondent in Taiwan, Simon Burns, stepped to the plate and said: “it appears to be an official website of a department of the Xinjiang Provincial Government. The site title translates to Xinjiang Land and Natural Resources Office, I think. I’d guess it’s the office in charge of stuff like
land zoning regulations and probably also connected to things like mining and mineral rights - though my Chinese isn’t that great, so I can’t be certain that these areas are their main focus”.
The redirector now leads to an IP address
So there you have, a Chinese Government web site hosting a “remark.html” redirector file that through a “refresh” command in the HTML “head”, loads a fake Paypal log-in form. I’m sure the Chinese authorities will quickly find the person in charge of the web site and ask him how was that possible.
Since the INQ does not have currently any correspondent in the Chinese Turkestan, we will rely on the knowledge of our readers up there in Asia to seek comment from the proper authorities. Or perhaps our colleague the great Kzakh journalist, Mr. Borat can give us a hand and cross the border to find out the realities of the Chinese Turkestan, predictably with “Great Success”?
News Source:the INQUIRER
Apple has released the iPhone 1.1.1 Software Update to iTunes.
The 154MB download warns that “If you have modified your iPhone’s Software, applying this software update may result in your iPhone becoming permanantly inoperable.”
Apple previously released a press release saying that users who specifically had SIM unlocked their iPhone should not proceed with the update as it may cause irreversible damange to your iPhone.
Apple’s website has been updated with a new video that shows off the latest features of the iPhone update. The video is titled “Wi-Fi Music Store. Ringtones. And more.”
View Full Article: Mac Rumors
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