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Modern PC News for the Week Ending March 5, 2003
Commodore.ca | Massive New Tax on Blank CD / DVD Media in Mid March After hearing rumours about new taxes on blank CD's for the last year or so but not seeing much happen, I decided find out what was going on for myself. I ended up talking to several federal government bearcats at the Copywrite Board and two people from the Canadian Private Copying Collective. The Federal Government will be approving new substantial levy's on blank media and when the decision comes down in Mid-March 2003, this new tax would go into effect the next day (i.e. you will have no notice and no time to stockpile disks). All believed that the fees will be very close to what the lobby group is asking for:
When talking to CPCC I mentioned that I personally pay about CDN$.32 per spindled disk and that I therefore did not think I was paying the current $.21 per disk levy. I was informed that so called 'grey market' CDR's are quite common and many many people are not likely paying the current government fee. The new fees will increase the price of disks to such an extent that it will be obvious who is retailing legal disks and who is bootlegging. Currently London Drugs is collecting a fee when you take your blanks to the till. The problem is that there is some question as to where that fee is currently going and many customers have been annoyed by the difference between the sticker price and actual price paid. I was told that the government is "aware of the London Drugs situation" which sounded quite ominous to me. In case you are wondering where the money from this giant slush fund end up, the CPCC web site states: "The Copyright Board also designates the proportion of total royalties (to be distributed)... amongst... songwriters and publishers, recording artists, and record companies. ...Conservatively, one song will trigger as many as 12 payments. Although it has taken similar but bigger organizations in other countries far longer to effect their first distributions, CPCC is poised to begin making payments in 2003. Over $28 million are now available for distribution, representing private copying royalties collected during 2000 and 2001" The CPCC is also offering companies a way around paying the fee:
This is great if you like to keep paperwork, pay $60 to get around paying for something you should not have to deal with in the first place, and buy only from who the government tell you to. Click HERE for details. The real answer is BUY DISKS NOW... LOTS OF DISKS! FeedRoom.com | Give Them the Finger! No Cash Or Card Needed
ZDNet.com |
Intel Signals the End of the BIOS One of the last and least-loved remnants of the original IBM PC is about to get its marching orders, Intel predicted at its Developer Forum here this week. For more than 20 years, the PC has relied on the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), a small set of fixed software routines normally built into a chip on the motherboard. This hangover from a distant past is causing more and more problems, said Mark Doran, Intel's principal engineer behind the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) that aims to humanely kill the antique technology. ...EFI is a tiny operating system in its own right, freed from the constraints of the BIOS. The first difference people will see is in the splash screen, the display the PC shows when first turned on. Unlike the BIOS, EFI supports high-resolution displays. Likewise, it can run with a proper graphical user interface, rather than the blocky text-only interface. EFI also has its own networking, so it can be used for remote diagnostics. The differences are much more than just the interface, Doran said. "The BIOS is the last place on the PC where people have to write in low-level assembler code, and we want to end that," he said. Instead, EFI is almost entirely written in the C programming language and allows additions to be created using standard programming tools. Such additions can include much more detailed and useful diagnostics, self-configuration programs, and ways to sort out problems even if the operating system has died. "We even have a concept of the afterlife, so if your OS freezes you can go in and look at the state of the machine, change the configuration, load a different driver, and do a sensible restart," Doran said. As part of the demonstration, he showed a network driver being replaced on a live machine, as well as multiple reconfigurations of various USB (universal serial bus) devices. Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS. Digital rights management and security designers also have an interest in EFI because it gives them a new level of control over the hardware. Finally, EFI can pretend to be a BIOS. "We're not expecting people to throw out the BIOS overnight, so EFI can support legacy systems by running on top of an existing BIOS and handing over control when appropriate," Doran said. Associated Press | Roxio Aims to Start Napster Subscriptions Napster the pioneering online music service, is getting another lease on life with the launch by year's end of a legal, subscription-based music business, its new owners said Monday Roxio Inc., which bought Napster's name and intellectual property for $5 million at a November bankruptcy sale, said it is in discussions with the five major music labels to provide content for the online service. ..."Before it launches, it will have to be legal," Kelly said. "And it will be top-tier content, not unheard-of bands you see now with most of the subscription services." FeedRoom.com | Are Hi Tech TV's Worth the Money and the Effort?
BetaNews.com |
Connectix Multi-Operating System Techology Sold to Microsoft
Microsoft this week acquired
from
Connectix virtual machine technology that enables a single workstation to
run multiple operating systems and application platforms. Microsoft will take
over development and support of Virtual PC for both Windows and Mac, as well as
Virtual Server from Connectix. ...Even Apple came out to bless
the purchase. "We're glad to see Virtual PC go into such good hands," said
Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, Ron Okamoto. ZDNet.com |
Windows Server 2003 is Almost Gold ...Microsoft has set March 12 as the release to manufacture date for the six new versions of its server operating system... (and) will be followed by a seventh, called Windows Small Business Server 2003, due late summer. ...Support for Windows NT 4 was due to be cancelled early this year, but pressure from customers forced Microsoft to put the date back to January 2005. "We want to get to the NT4 base onto Windows Server 2003... ...Tennant said 70 percent of the development time that went into the Windows Server 2003 platform was spent on simplifying, tweaking, and improving security. "It is more of an evolution than a revolution... ZDNet.com |
Intel & AMD Chop Chip Prices PC chipmakers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices this week enacted their first sweeping desktop processor price cuts of the year. Intel reduced the prices on all its desktop Pentium 4 processors by as much as 21 percent Sunday. Meanwhile, AMD cut prices on select Athlon XP desktop chips by as much as 32 percent Monday. ...The Intel 2.6GHz and 2.66GHz chips were reduced from US$305 to US$241, while the 2.5GHz and 2.53GHz chips went from US$243 to US$193 and the 2.4GHz from US$193 to US$163. ...The Athlon XP 2700+ moved from US$349 to US$267, a 23 percent drop. AMD dropped its Athlon XP 2600+ processor from US$297 to US$241, a 19 percent reduction. Its Athlon XP 2400+ saw a 27 percent decrease, from US$193 to US$141. AMD's 2200+ chip dropped the most, 32 percent, from US$157 to US$107...
ITWorldCanada.com |
HP Set to Roll Out IP Storage Router Hewlett-Packard Co. will announce its entry into the IP storage market Monday with an iSCSI storage router, which lets SCSI data be transported across a gigabit Ethernet network. ...Sources say the router attaches to the network via two gigabit Ethernet ports and to storage arrays via two Fibre Channel connections. Cisco manufactured it for HP, but it will not be sold as a separate Cisco product. ..."It is another step in the evolution of iSCSI, albeit a small one," says Anders Lofgren, senior analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. "The bigger question is, when will major storage vendors introduce native support for iSCSI on their array products, especially the midrange offerings."... News.com |
Palm Released Hybrid Palm Phone:
Tungsten W
News.com |
Who Supports DVD-R and Who Supports DVD+R? ...The DVD+RW Alliance announced late Monday that Microsoft had joined its ranks, adding that the software giant will also have a seat on its policy-setting team with representatives from Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Chemical/Verbatim, Philips, Ricoh, Sony, Thomson and Yamaha. The DVD+RW Alliance is a group of companies that promotes and develops the DVD+RW format. The rival DVD Forum, which includes Apple Computer, Hitachi, NEC, Pioneer, Samsung and Sharp, advocates the DVD-RAM, DVD-R and DVD-RW formats. The two sides have been competing against one another to push their formats as the dominant ones in the market... InfoWorld.com | Sun Picks AMD's Athlon for Blades Sun will use Athlon XP-M processors, originally developed for mobile computing, running at 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz. "We want to offer a standard, x86 platform. AMD offered the best compromise between performance, density, power consumption and heat dissipation,"... Sun wanted the Sun Fire B1600 chassis, which holds up to 16 AMD or Sparc blades, to consume less than 1,000 watts... Toshiba.ca | Toshiba Releases SOHO "Wireless Routing Center" in Canada The new Toshiba WRC-1000 five
port switch performs the services you would expect a
DLink
DI-804 or
Linksys BEFSR41:
but it also includes 16MB of RAM and capacity for 250 802.11b wireless users. The item retails for about CDN$250. Click HERE for a detailed specs. Microsoft.com | 802.11b Wireless LAN Functionality and Security Explained ...There are currently two prevalent wireless LAN solutions being deployed. These solutions are the IEEE 802.11standards, primarily 802.11b, and the solution proposed by the HomeRF working group. These two solutions are not interoperable with each other or with other wireless LAN solutions. While HomeRF is designed exclusively for the home environment, 802.11b is designed and is being deployed in homes, small and medium businesses, and large enterprises and in a growing number of public wireless networking hot spots.
Microsoft considers 802.11 to be the most promising and robust solution for use in multiple environments. The rest of this paper focuses on 802.11 technology. ...The laptop or smart device, which is characterized as a "station" in wireless LAN parlance, first has to identify the available access points and networks. This is done through monitoring for 'beacon' frames from access points announcing themselves, or actively probing for a particular network by using probe frames. The station chooses a network from those available and goes through an authentication process with the access point. Once the access point and station have verified each other, the association process is started. Association allows the access point and station to exchange information and capabilities. The access point can use this information and share it with other access points in the network to disseminate knowledge of the station's current location on the network. Only after association is complete can the station transmit or receive frames on the network. ...Access to the network is managed using a carrier sense and collision avoidance protocol. The stations will listen for data transmissions for a specified period of time before attempting to transmit – this is the carrier sense portion of the protocol. The station must wait a specific period of time after the network becomes clear before transmitting. This delay, plus the receiving station transmitting an acknowledgement indicating a successful reception form the collision avoidance portion of the protocol. Note that in infrastructure mode, either the sender or receiver is always the access point. Because some stations may not be able to hear each other, yet both still be in range of the access point, special considerations are made to avoid collisions. This includes a kind of reservation exchange that can take place before a packet is transmitted using a request to send and clear to send frame exchange, and a network allocation vector maintained at each station on the network. Even if a station cannot hear the transmission from the other station, it will hear the clear to send transmission from the access point and can avoid transmitting during that interval. The process of roaming from one access point to another is not completely defined by the standard. But, the beaconing and probing used to locate access points and a re-association process that allows the station to associate with a different access point, in combination with other vendor specific protocols between access points provides for a smooth transition. Synchronization between stations on the network is handled by the periodic beacon frames sent by the access point. These frames contain the access point's clock value at the time of transmission so can be used to check for drift at the receiving station. Synchronization is required for various reasons having to do with the wireless protocols and modulation schemes. ...Other challenges arise out of the unique capabilities of wireless networking. With the freedom of movement gained by removing the tether (wire), users are free to roam from room to room, building to building, city to city and so on, expecting uninterrupted connectivity all the while. Some challenges have always existed in networking, but are compounded when complexity is added such as with wireless networks. For example, as network configuration continues to become easier, wireless networks add features (sometimes to solve other challenges) and metrics that add to the configuration parameters. ...With a wired network there is an inherent security in that a potential data thief has to gain access to the network through a wired connection, usually meaning physical access to the network cable plant. On top of this physical access, other security mechanisms can be layered. When the network is no longer contained by wires, the freedom gained by the users of the network can also be extended to the potential data thief. The network now may become available in the hallways, insecure waiting areas, even outside of the building. In a home environment, your network could extend to your neighbors houses if the proper security mechanisms aren't adopted by the networking gear or used properly. Since its inception, 802.11 has provided some basic security mechanisms to make this enhanced freedom less of a potential threat. For example, 802.11 access points (or sets of access points) can be configured with a service set identifier (SSID). This SSID must also be known by the NIC in order to associate with the AP and thus proceed with data transmission and reception on the network. This is very weak security if at all because:
While there may be other problems with this scheme, already this is enough to stop none but the most casual of hacker. Additional security is provided through the 802.11 specifications through the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) algorithm. WEP provides 802.11 with authentication and encryption services. The WEP algorithm defines the use of a 40-bit secret key for authentication and encryption and many IEEE 802.11 implementations also allow 104-bit secret keys. This algorithm provides mostly protection against eavesdropping and physical security attributes comparable to a wired network. A principal limitation to this security mechanism is that the standard does not define a key management protocol for distribution of the keys. This presumes that the secret, shared keys are delivered to the IEEE 802.11 wireless station via a secure channel independent of IEEE 802.11. This becomes even more challenging when a large number of stations are involved such as on a corporate campus. To provide a better mechanism for access control and security the inclusion of a key management protocol in the specification is required. The 802.1x standard, which is described later in this paper, was developed specifically to address this issue. ...As a user or station roams from access point to access point, an association must be maintained between the NIC and an access point for network connectivity to be maintained. This can present an especially difficult problem if the network is large and the user must cross subnet boundaries or realms of administrative control. If the user crosses a subnet boundary, the IP address originally assigned to the station may no longer be appropriate for the new subnet. If the transition involves a crossing of administrative domains, it is possible that the station may no longer be allowed to access the network in the new domain based on their credentials. Beyond simply roaming within a corporate campus, several other roaming user scenarios are very real. With airports and restaurants adding wireless connectivity to the Internet and wireless networks becoming popular networking solutions for the home. Now it becomes more likely the user could leave the office to meet with someone from another company that also has a compatible wireless network. On the way to this meeting the user could find himself in a train station, restaurant or airport with wireless access and need to retrieve files from the home office. It would be useful for this user to be authenticated and use this connection to access their corporate network. When the user arrives at their his destination they he may not be allowed access to the local corporate network he is visiting. It would be fortuitous however, if the user could be provided access to the Internet in this foreign environment. This access could then be used to create a virtual private network connection to his corporate network. The user might then leave for home and wish to connect to his home network to upload or print files to work on that evening. The user has now roamed into a new wireless network, possibly even running in ad hoc mode. ...Now that we have a wireless network connection and the added complexity, there are potentially many more things to configure. For example we might need to configure the SSID of the network we are connecting to. Or, we might need to configure a set of WEP keys for security; possibly multiple sets if we have multiple networks to connect to. We might need to have a configuration for work where we have a network operating in infrastructure mode and a configuration for home where we are operating in ad hoc mode. Then we might need to choose which of these configurations to use based on where we are at this time. ...To provide security beyond that provided by WEP, the Windows XP networking team worked with the IEEE, Networking vendors and others to define IEEE 802.1X. 802.1X is a draft standard for port-based, network access control used to provide authenticated network access for Ethernet networks. This port-based network access control uses the physical characteristics of the switched LAN infrastructure to authenticate devices attached to a LAN port. Access to the port can be prevented if the authentication process fails. While this standard is designed for wired Ethernet networks, it is applicable to 802.11 Wireless LANs. Specifically for the wireless case, the access point will act as an authenticator for access to the network, using a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) server for authenticating client credentials. Communication is allowed through a logical "uncontrolled port" or channel on the access point for the purpose of validating credentials and obtaining keys to access the network through a logical "controlled port." The keys that are available to the access point and client as a result of this exchange allow the client's data to be encrypted and be identified by the access point. We have thus added key management protocol to the security of 802.11. ...This 802.1x approach capitalizes on the widespread and growing use of RADIUS for authentication. A RADIUS server can query a local authentication database if that is appropriate for the scenario. Or, the request could be passed to another server for validation. When RADIUS decides that the machine can be authorized on this network to sends the message back to the access point and the access point then allows the data traffic to flow into the network. A real world example might look like this:
To provide this level of security, Microsoft is providing an 802.1X client implementation in Windows XP and enhancing the Windows RADIUS server, Internet Authentication Server (IAS) to support wireless device authentication. Microsoft has also worked with many 802.11 device vendors to support these mechanisms in their NIC drivers and access point software. Currently many top vendors are either close to shipping or are shipping 802.1x support in their devices. ...In Windows 2000, media sense capability (detecting an attached network) was used to control the configuration of the network stack and inform the user when the network was unavailable. With Windows XP this feature is used to enhance the wireless roaming experience by detecting a move to a new access point, forcing re-authentication to ensure appropriate network access and detecting changes in IP subnet so an appropriate address can be used to get optimum resource access. Multiple IP address configurations (DHCP assigned or Static address) can be available on a Windows XP system and the appropriate configuration automatically chosen. When an IP address change occurs, Windows XP allows for additional reconfiguration to occur if appropriate. For example, quality of service (QoS) reservations can be updated and IE proxy settings re-detected. Through Windows Sockets extensions, applications that want to be network aware (firewalls, browsers, etc.) can be notified of changes in network connectivity and update their behavior based on the changes. The auto-sensing and reconfiguration effectively negates the need for mobile IP to act as a mediator and solves most user issues when roaming between networks. When roaming from access point to access point there is state and other information about the station that must be moved along with the station. This includes station location information for message delivery and other attributes of the association. Rather than re-create this information upon each transition, one access point can pass this information to the new access point. The protocols to transfer this information are not defined in the standard, but several wireless LAN vendors have jointly developed an Inter-Access Point Protocol (IAPP) for this purpose, further enhancing multi-vendor interoperability... |
