Microsoft Readies Two-Way Firewall for Vista

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service Wed Jan 25, 7:00 PM ET

For its upcoming Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft is readying a new, highly configurable firewall designed to give administrators much greater control over which applications can run on the systems they manage.

After just over a month of testing by users of Microsoft's Community Technology Preview (CTP), the firewall is "very much on track" to be in the final Vista release scheduled for later this year, and the company is considering adding a similar feature for its consumer users, said Austin Wilson, a director in Microsoft's Windows client group.

Two-Way Details

The new firewall is called "two-way" because it filters both incoming and outgoing network traffic, so it can block outside machines that are trying to connect to the Windows PC as well as applications on the PC that are trying to connect to other systems on the network.

Windows XP can't block outgoing traffic, but this ability will give Vista administrators powerful options, Wilson said. By using the firewall, administrators could (for example) ensure that their PCs used only a preferred instant messaging application. "If you tried a different instant messaging application, it would be blocked," he said. "It's really something that we're targeting toward enterprise administrators in corporations."

Though Microsoft has previously discussed plans to include the firewall in Vista, it has only recently provided details on how the software will work.

More Extensive Than Expected

The new firewall capabilities first appeared in last month's CTP build 5270, but they were difficult to access and turned out to be much more extensive than testers had expected, according to Windows blogger Ed Bott, coauthor of the book Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out.

"After installing Windows Vista Build 5270 and examining all security options in Control Panel, you might conclude that Windows Firewall hadn't changed at all," he wrote in a January 14 blog posting.

To access the new firewall features, Vista users must create a customized management console and configure it to load the "Windows Firewall with Advanced Security."

How It Works

The console can operate in two ways. In single-machine mode, it manages only the PC it has been installed in; but when configured using Active Directory, it can set up policies that apply to a large number of machines. "If I have 10,000 machines, I can set up a policy, one time, to block a given application. And that would propagate across all of my 10,000 machines," Wilson said.

Though many security products already have similar capabilities, building outbound blocking into the operating system will make life much easier for enterprise system administrators, who will now be able to create custom scripts and group policies to restrict the uses of Windows PCs, Bott said.

Though the underlying firewall code--called the Windows Filtering Platform--has been rewritten for Vista, Wilson said that most users will not notice major differences between XP and the new operating system. "There are really two different firewall consoles in Vista. If you go to Control Panel/Firewall, you get the traditional one that was there in Windows XP," he said. "If you go to the other console, which is called Windows Firewall with Advanced Security, you see both the inbound and outbound filtering."

both firewall consoles use the Windows Filtering Platform, which has been rewritten to improve how Windows intercepts network traffic and to make the software work more efficiently with the Windows kernel, Wilson said. "We wanted to have a flexible platform that we could use and that third parties could use for filtering," he said.

Consumer Version?

Microsoft is thinking about adding outbound filtering for consumers to a post-Vista Windows product, but work needs to be done to ensure that such a two-way firewall is easy to use, Wilson said. "First of all, we have to make sure that application compatibility is very good when that's enabled," he said.

Such a firewall must also do a "great job of helping users make good decisions on what applications would be allowed to talk outbound, and make that decision without overwhelming them with dialog boxes," he said.

Microsoft to Launch Internet Research Lab

By ALLISON LINN, AP Business Writer Thu Jan 26, 12:20 AM ET

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. is creating a research lab devoted solely to developing Internet technology, as part of efforts to move products to market faster and better compete with rivals such as Google Inc.

Microsoft Live Labs, announced late Wednesday, will be a partnership between Microsoft's MSN Internet product group and its research arm. Unlike traditional Microsoft Research labs, which are given leeway to take on academic-type research into far-flung fields, the goal of Live Labs is to create new products and tough competitors.

Microsoft hopes the collaboration will result in useful products that are also cutting-edge, said Gary William Flake, a Microsoft technical fellow who will head up the project.

"Its goal is to hit the sweet spot in the middle between science and engineering, where each is ... better together," he said.

The move comes as Microsoft is facing intense competition from companies including Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in Internet-based business and consumer applications. Microsoft has been criticized for lagging behind in key areas such as search technology, and some have questioned whether its massive size has inhibited it from moving nimbly enough in such a rapidly changing technology sector.

Seeking to rebut those criticisms, Microsoft last year announced a major strategy shift to focus on Internet-based software and services. The goal of the shift, which includes initiatives dubbed Windows Live and Office Live, are to create online products to complement cash cows such as its Windows operating system and Office business software.

Microsoft also said Wednesday that it was creating a related organization, Search Labs, to focus solely on improving methods for Internet search. Earlier this month, Microsoft also unveiled adLab, a research effort focused on the lucrative field of Internet advertising.

Matt Rosoff, an analyst with independent researchers Directions on Microsoft, said the moves aren't unusual in that Microsoft has been forging closer relationship between its researchers and its product groups, in the hopes of cashing in on the work of some of its brightest minds. But he said the fact that the company is putting so much emphasis on Internet technology shows that it doesn't want to again be in the position of missing the boat on the next round of online technology advances.

"This indicates Microsoft's long-term commitment to this (field)," said Michael Gartenberg with Jupiter Research. "Certainly they're not content with their position in the marketplace."

Telekom Malaysia sees profitable ring to Vodafone deal

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - Malaysia's state-owned telecommunications company Telekom Malaysia is eyeing a rise in profits following a tie-up with British-based mobile giant Vodafone Group.

Telekom group chief executive Abdul Wahid Omar was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times that the company is expecting to earn up to "tens of million ringgit" as a result of the strategic partnership.

The two companies signed a partner network agreement here this week which will boost access to each other's networks for customers travelling abroad.

The pact will allow Telekom, Malaysia's largest telco, to gain access to nearly 200 million additional subscribers and ultimately increase roaming revenues from international travellers, said the daily.

Telekom currently has interests in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Cambodia. It also has investments in Africa.

The agreement is also expected to boost Telekom's brand and allow it to access Vodafone's expertise in product development.

In return, Vodafone will be able to tap into Telekom's 23 million subscriber base and strengthen its presence in the region.

"We expect roaming revenues to increase," said Vodafone group director of business development Devin Brongham.

Telekom said the partnership will allow co-branding arrangements between Vodafone and Telekom Malaysia subsidiaries Dialog Telekom of Sri Lanka, PT Excelcomindo Pratama of Indonesia and Celcom of Malaysia.

In the individual markets of Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Vodafone's products and services will be marketed under a dual brand, it said.

Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin said the Telekom partnership would boost its network presence in the region, building on Vodafone's existing relationships with Mobile One in Singapore and SmarTone in Hong Kong.

"This is helping to improve our roaming footprint in the Asia Pacific region, providing our customers with a greatly enhanced service," he said in a statement.

Vodafone is the world's biggest mobile phone operator in terms of revenues.

Intel Proves 45-nm Process With Test Chips

Mark Hachman - ExtremeTech Wed Jan 25, 1:21 PM ET

Intel Corp. said this week that it had produced working silicon on its next-generation 45-nanometer manufacturing process, and is on schedule to move the technology into production in the second half of 2007.

Intel's announcement from its research division will help keep its production schedule moving forward into smaller and smaller geometries. Intel currently manufactures chips from two fabs using 65-nm equipment, and more than 50 percent of its PC microprocessors will be manufactured on the newer 65-nm chips beginning in the third quarter of the is year, Intel executives said in a teleconference.

The shift is the practical application of Moore's Law, Gordon Moore's theorem that transistor counts double every 12 to 18 months. Like any good equation, that axiom can be rewritten to mean that as transistor sizes shrink, the overall speed of the chip can be pushed faster and faster, or that the power consumed by the semiconductor will drop, all other things being equal.

Intel traditionally has prided itself on its manufacturing prowess, part of the leverage it exerts in its position atop the PC microprocessor sales chart.

According to Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow and director of its process-technology and integration schedules, the 45-nm "P1266" process can either mean twice the transistor density, or a 30 percent reduction in switching power compared to the 65-nm process. Designers also have a choice to either cut leakage power by 5X -- the charge that trickles or leaks away when a device is running in a low-power mode -- or trade that for a 20 percent improvement in transistor switching speed.

Specificaly, Intel showed a 153-Mbit, 119-sq. mm SRAM chip containing over a billion transistors, which had been fabricated using the 45-nm process. For Intel, the key is not to produce chips using embedded or discrete memory, but to manufacture logic components that form the foundation for its microprocessors. According to Bohr, the test chips contain some transistor and interconnect features used in the logic process.

Intel uses a "bulk" silicon process, a different process than rival Advanced Micro Devices, which uses a "depleted silicon on insulator" (SOI) manufacturing process to achieve faster speeds. In the past, Intel has been critical of SOI, and Intel engineers have claimed that SOI risks becoming structurally more fragile as the manufacturing processes use finer linewidths. Those same challenges will be faced by Intel, although Bohr declind to discuss the specific solutions Intel had found to solve these.

"Every new technology is getting more and more challenging to scale," Bohr said. "We have a pretty talented team of engineers. As we go to finer linewidths, though, we need to ask what sort of lithography tool and techniques are needed to extend the current 193-nm lithography -- it gets more challenging. Fortunately, we have found some tricks and techniques to do that."

Intel also plans a low-power derivative of the 65-nm manufacturing process for handheld chips and chipsets, Bohr added.

A blossoming trade in Apple iPods and other digital devices pre-loaded with movies, TV shows and thousands of songs is raising alarms and legal questions.
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For the past couple of years, people have sold their used iPods and other music players filled with music on eBay and other auction sites with little notice. But lately, a new breed of seller has popped up, touting like-new iPods jammed full of content - for prices hundreds of dollars more than the cost of an untouched new iPod. (Related item: Kevin Maney's blog)

Examples from eBay on Monday:

• A 60-gigabyte video iPod loaded with 11,800 songs, with a starting bid of $799. The iPod alone would cost about $400. "I don't see how it's different than selling a used CD," seller Steve Brinn, a Cincinnati pediatrician, wrote in an e-mail to USA TODAY. "If the music industry asked me not to do it, I just wouldn't do it."

After USA TODAY asked eBay about the listing, eBay removed it. "That is a copyright violation, one that we don't even need to hear from the rights owner about before removing," says eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.

• A "brand new" 60-gigabyte video iPod loaded with 10,000 songs plus more than 50 movies and TV shows, including the three Matrix movies and the first four seasons of 24. In the listing, the seller says the buyer "must already own all of the music and DVDs. ... If not, they must delete them as soon as they receive it in the mail." The item sold for $551 on Monday.

Such sellers are making money from copies of content they purchased. Though on the surface that might seem the same as selling pirated copies of CDs and DVDs, the legalities aren't clear-cut, say experts in digital copyright law.

"Some of those sales may be legal, and some not," says Andrew Bridges, digital music lawyer at Winston & Strawn. EBay is among his clients.

One aspect of copyright law allows people to resell copies they made legally under the "fair use" concept. But courts have plenty of leeway to interpret fair use - and selling copies of content on iPods as a business venture could be deemed illegal. "Some courts may react badly to this," Bridges says.

Adding to the confusion, new companies are popping up to sell iPods pre-loaded with content that the customers purchase new.

Customers of TVMyPod, launched in November, order an iPod plus the CDs, movies and TV shows they want. TVMyPod then buys the disks, loads them on the iPod, and ships the iPod and all the disks to the customer, says TVMyPod co-founder David Onigman.

Even that raises legal questions, because most DVDs are encrypted to prevent them from being copied. "The question that needs to be asked is, if you buy a DVD, are you allowed to put it onto an iPod?" Onigman says.

Internet Explorer 7 Will Flush Its History

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service Tue Jan 17, 10:00 AM ET

Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 7 browser will have a thorough flush feature that clears its history and all associated files stored after a Web site is accessed.

In IE 6, a user has to spend lots of time trying to expunge the information stored after a Web site has been visited, wrote Uche Enuha, a program manager on the IE user experience team, on the company's browser blog.

The new "delete browsing history" feature under the "tools" menu will be able to wipe out five major data categories, including temporary Internet files, cookies, history, form data, and passwords, Enuha wrote.

A user can delete all of those at once or can individually choose which ones to wipe through the "delete browsing history" panel, Enuha wrote.

Deeper Cleaning

The feature goes deeper than a novice user would likely pursue. For example, deleting files from the temporary Internet files folder will also clean out attachments stored by the Outlook e-mail program in that folder, Enuha wrote.

A beta version of IE 7 has been out for
Windows XP Service Pack 2 and an enhanced beta version is available for the beta 1 version of Windows Vista, according to Microsoft's Web site.

Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/

New Technology Boosts Hard Drive Capacity

By MATTHEW FORDAHL, AP Technology Writer Mon Jan 16, 9:35 PM ET

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Seagate Technology LLC has started shipping a notebook PC hard drive that overcomes an obstacle many feared would be a major roadblock to the further expansion of disk capacity — and the overall growth of the storage industry.
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The new approach that aligns bits of data vertically rather than horizontally enables Seagate — and other drive vendors — to further boost the density of drives without increasing the risk of scrambling data.

Since the first hard drive was introduced 1956, bits have been arranged in a flat, horizontal fashion on the spinning platters. To boost capacity, engineers reduced the size of the particles whose magnetic state is what actually remembers data.

But with some drives now topping out at 500 gigabytes, the miniaturization is nearly at its limit. Made any smaller, the particles can begin to interfere with the magnetism of their neighbors. The result is disastrous for data.

By storing bits in a vertical, or perpendicular, arrangement, engineers are able to boost capacity by taking advantage of the real estate that is freed up.

It's a major change that all drive makers are in the process of undertaking, said John Donovan, vice president at the research firm TrendFocus.

"It a whole new way of doing things," he said. "Not only do you have to change the thinking, but the tooling, the way the heads and disks interact with each other."

Seagate's new drive, the Momentus 5400.3, was being shipped as of Monday, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company said. The shift to perpendicular recording allows it to bump up the maximum capacity of its notebook drive to 160 gigabytes from 120 gigabytes.

The 2.5-inch drive costs $325, compared to about $240 for the 120 gig model. Seagate plans to extend the new recording technology to other notebook drives, as well its 1-inch drives used in handheld gadgets and 3.5-inch drives for desktop PCs.

"Our transition to perpendicular technology increases our ability to meet the needs of our growing customer base," said Karl Chicca, general manager of Seagate's Personal Storage unit.

Other drive makers also have either announced products or plans that include perpendicular recording. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Toshiba unveiled its second 1.8-inch drive that relies on the new technology.

Perpendicular recording has benefits beyond boosting storage density by reducing the need for additional components, said Mike Hall, a Seagate spokesman.

"If you can reduce the component count, you reduce the power drawn, you reduce the heat and you reduce the wear and tear," he said.

In the next three to five years, the new technology is expected to increase maximum drive capacities five fold, Hall said.