Aug 10 2002 Modern PC News

Technical, Business and Product News from the Modern Computer World... Updated Once Per Month

www.paypal.com - Ebay Buys PayPal
...eBay will acquire all of the outstanding shares of PayPal in a tax-free, stock-for-stock transaction using a fixed exchange ratio of 0.39 eBay shares for each PayPal share. Based on eBay's stock price on July 5, 2002, the acquisition is valued at $1.5 billion. ...The acquisition, which is subject to various stockholder, government and regulatory approvals, is expected to close around year-end 2002....

Unexpectedly, it does NOT include IE6. Other than a slew of security updates it also addresses some of the issues from Microsofts 'consent decree' with the US Department of Justice. Specifically, you will notice a new configuration link added to your start menu, which is just a short cut to a new feature in ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS, that allows you to select integration options like your preferred browser and media player.

I have installed SP3 on about 10 Pro boxes and one server and had only one minor problem.

Roland Cadrin - Interesting Windows Security Hole
...Applications within Windows are entirely controlled through the use of messages. When a key is pressed, a message is sent to the current active window which states that a key was pressed...

...This is a very reliable mechanism for controlling applications. However, on Win32 the mechanism for controlling these messages is flawed. Any application on a given desktop can send a message to any window on the same desktop, regardless of whether or not that window is owned by the sending application, and regardless of whether the target application wants to receive those messages. There is no mechanism for authenticating the source of a message; a message sent from a malicious application is indistinguishable from a message sent by the Windows kernel. It is this lack of authentication that we will be exploiting, taking into consideration that these messages can be used to manipulate windows and the processes that own them.... Click the title link for all the details.

...Higbee and Davis perform penetration tests, and developed their game box cum attack tool after finding themselves more than once with physical access to a client's facilities -- posing as an employee in once case, crawling through a drop ceiling in another -- but without a way to leverage that access into remote control of the company's network...

...Loaded with custom Linux-based software and covertly plugged into a spare network port under a desk or above a ceiling, the harmless-looking toy becomes the enemy within, probing the company firewall for a way out to Internet.

The box cycles through the ports used for common services like SSH, Web surfing, and e-mail, which tend to be permitted by firewall configurations. Failing that, it tries getting "ping" packets out to the Internet, and finally looks for proxy servers bridging the network to the outside world.

Whatever it finds, it uses to establish a tunnel through the firewall to the intruder's home machine. "Most organizations focus on the perimeter," said Davis. "Once you get through the outside, there's a soft chewy center."...

Associated Press - Fax.com Fined $5.4M for Junk Faxes
By DANNY FREEDMAN
The Federal Communications Commission ( news - web sites) issued a record fine of nearly $5.4 million Wednesday against a company for sending "junk faxes" to businesses and consumers.

The fine against Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Fax.com is the largest ever by the commission for violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The law protects against unsolicited faxes, telemarketing calls and prerecorded messages, among other things.

"Fax.com appears to have founded its business on the practice of sending unsolicited faxes in flagrant violation" of the law, Kathleen Q. Abernathy, an FCC ( news - web sites) commissioner, said in statement. "Despite repeated warnings from the commission and numerous consumer complaints, the company appears to have made no effort to mend its ways."...

www.zdnet.com - Linux slips but won't fall
By Stephen Shankland
Linux sales lost some ground to Windows last year, but are expected to climb in coming years as distributors of the alternative operating system create new revenue streams.

According to market research firm IDC, Linux sales declined nearly 5 percent in 2001 to $80 million, but are expected to grow to a $280 million market in 2006.

Meanwhile, Windows sales climbed 11 percent to more than $10 billion last year, according to IDC analyst Al Gillen....

www.zdnet.com - Intel's To Stop Selling on Mhz Alone
By Michael Kanellos
Banias, Intel's energy-efficient processor designed primarily for notebooks, will debut at three speeds when it arrives next year, sources say--but megahertz won't be its selling point

...Although Intel has already been touting the performance characteristics of the chip, it will have to overcome a marketplace obstacle that it helped create: buyers who judge a chip by its clock speed.

Clock speed is measured in megahertz. At 1.6GHz, Banias will be far slower in terms of raw speed than Pentium 4 notebook chips, which will hit 2.2GHz in the fourth quarter of this year. Mobile Celerons for the budget crowd already run at 1.2GHz.

"They've got good performance, but they can't sell it on megahertz," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research...

Like Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and other competing chips, Banias' performance will actually be better than its numbers might indicate because it will complete more work per clock cycle than the Pentium 4, according to Intel and other sources. "It will have higher performance and consume less power than today's Intel mobile processors," said an Intel spokeswoman who declined to comment on the chip speeds.

Notebooks using the chip will consume roughly 25 percent less energy, company executives have said, thus increasing battery life. Whole subsections of the chip will shut down when not in use to conserve battery power. Banias notebooks will also come with integrated 802.11 wireless connectivity.

...The public, however, has embraced chip speed as its yardstick, and Intel benefits from this. The company gained substantial market share in the second quarter from AMD, which has fallen well behind its rival in the speed race.

AMD's profits and prices have also been hurt by megahertz monomania. The Athlon XP 2000+ may perform as well as a 2GHz Pentium 4, but because it runs at 1.7GHz, it sells for around the same price as a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 in various markets, according to Converge, which tracks component pricing.

"That's the problem they (Intel) have been facing," said Kevin Krewell, an analyst at The Microprocessor Report. "They are not going after high clock frequency with Banias. They are probably going to come up with some sort of metric to compare."

Most likely, the company will have to emphasize the total user experience--a strategy similar to one employed by Transmeta, which developed the first low-power notebook processors. Banias notebooks will weigh less, said Krewell, and likely have substantially better battery life.

The skinny on Banias
While word of Banias' speeds has leaked out, much of the technology behind the chip, which was designed in Israel, remains under wraps. The chip will include a cache--an internal reservoir of memory for rapid data access--but the size is unknown. Krewell predicts it will be at least 512KB but could be as high as 1MB of some versions of Banias.

..The ultimate brand name is also unknown. Engineers at Intel casually refer to it as "Mobilium," said sources, but that is probably not the final product name.

"Hopefully it is better than Celeron," one source said. "I heard Duron (the brand name of an AMD chip being discontinued) is unavailable."

Details will likely come out at the Intel Developer Forum in September and the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif., in October.

www.commodore.ca - Mad Magazine Sneek Preview of WinAmp v3
Click HERE for a screen shot. Click HERE for download information.

www.itworldcanada.com - Frustrated Microsoft Users Explore Options
By Tom Mainelli
Frustration with Microsoft Corp. is prompting more companies to consider "un-Windows" alternatives, according to a study released Tuesday.

...At the heart of people's dissatisfaction is Microsoft's new Licensing 6.0 program [Please see Microsoft Licensing: Day one]. The new policy launched on August 1 after confusion and delays dating back to last October. Nearly 40 per cent of respondents said they are "outraged" by Microsoft's new licensing scheme, and are actively seeking alternate products, DiDio says.

The new volume-licensing program — called Software Assurance — asks corporate buyers to pay higher prices for new products as well as for maintenance and upgrade services, she says. And those who don't stay current with updates will pay more down the line. At a time when corporate budgets are tight, such tactics are not going over very well, she says.

Corporate customers understand that Microsoft is facing declining revenues as companies slow down their PC upgrade cycles. But many feel the company has drastically overstepped its bounds, she says.

Writes one Yankee Group respondent: "For frickin' sake they have (US)$36 billion in the bank and they are trying to squeeze us." Another writes: "I can't stand being bullied by Microsoft like this."

What's notable about the customer frustration is that it hasn't cooled over time, DiDio says. A similar study conducted in October 2001 showed people were already fuming, and that frustration clearly hasn't waned, she says.

...Finally, Microsoft's ongoing security issues are a factor for many users. Despite Microsoft's assurances that it is working to improve security in its products, few customers feel reassured. "It seems not a day goes by that you don't hear about some security flaw," DiDio says.

Despite these issues, the analyst doesn't expect an immediate, major shift in the OS market. Windows owns about 90 per cent of the desktop market, with the various Linux distributions and Apple splitting the final 10 per cent.

"Windows is the dominant OS — and that's not going to change any time soon," DiDio says. "There is no mass defection, no march on Redmond." But she says Linux and Apple fans — small but enthusiastic groups — should feel optimistic. "Basically it was clear--there are changes in the wind."

www.pcmag.com - Brief Windows .NET Server RC1 Review with Screen Shots
By Richard V. Dragan
Slated for an end-of-year release, Microsoft Windows .NET Server (pricing not yet released) is nearly finished. This release candidate shows off a new focus on ease of administration and plenty of improvements for better performance and security, plus, of course, support for .NET.

We tested the new Enterprise version, upgrading a system running Windows 2000 Server. Because our server was a primary domain controller, we first upgraded our Active Directory schema with the included ADPrep utility. The setup wizard looks and feels very much like Windows XP, and the upgrade, which took about 45 minutes, was effortless...

For administrators, an obvious win here is a Manage Your Server wizard, which lets you configure servers for nearly a dozen common functions such as DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), DNS (domain name system), IIS (Internet Information Server), and file serving. For example, the wizard not only installed required components for Terminal Services, but pointed us to the right management console for administrative tasks. Active Directory wizards make it easier to work with groups, users, and security settings. And we liked the Effective Permissions tab that let us see the effect of overlapping policies.

Standout features in the new release include the ability to shadow copy user files remotely, which is a sort of built-in automatic back-up feature for remote users. We tested this feature on a Windows XP Professional client with favorable results.

The new emphasis on security in Windows .NET Server is evident in several ways. In addition to under-the-hood support for Internet Connection Firewall, IPSec (Internet Protocol Security), PKI (public key infrastructure), and SmartCards (and other standards), the OS comes locked down by default. For instance, IIS 6 users are prevented from accessing scripts and other executables until you say otherwise.

For many organizations, new performance and availability enhancements for IIS 6 will be more valuable immediately. These include an HTTP kernel mode driver (which places the Web server code directly inside the OS), application pooling (which can be used to keep Web applications up-and-running) and more flexible clustering and load-balancing options. The Enterprise Server version we tested will also include support for 64-bit processors and for 32GB of RAM for x86 CPUs as well as a whopping 64GB upper limit for Itanium processors.

How stable is this release candidate? According to Microsoft, Windows .NET Server is already used in-house extensively at Redmond. It currently runs all the Web servers at the company's Web site (www.microsoft.com), for example... Although we give no rating here because of the early state of the release, we were definitely pleased with what we saw.