Cisco Profit Up 25%; Routers and Switches in Demand

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 7 (AP) — Profit at Cisco Systems jumped 25 percent in its fiscal fourth quarter as the company, which makes network equipment, continued to have strong sales of the routers and switches that direct traffic over the Internet.

Cisco shares jumped more than 5 percent on an improved financial forecast.

Net income for the period that ended July 28 was $1.93 billion, or 31 cents a share, compared with $1.54 billion, or 25 cents a share, during the quarter a year ago.

Excluding one-time charges, Cisco earned 36 cents a share, a penny above the estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Revenue for the period was $9.43 billion, an 18 percent increase from the $7.98 billion in sales Cisco rang up last year. The revenue also beat Wall Street’s estimate, which was for $9.29 billion in sales.

In a conference call with analysts, Cisco’s chief executive, John T. Chambers, said the company was raising its revenue forecast to 13 percent to 16 percent growth for 2008 over 2007. For the current quarter, the company expects revenue of $9.45 billion to $9.55 billion, above the average analyst estimate of $9.39 billion.

Mr. Chambers also announced that the chief financial officer, Dennis D. Powell, would retire at the end of the second quarter of the current fiscal year. His successor will be Frank Calderoni, currently a Cisco senior vice president.

Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif., is profiting from widespread network upgrades as Internet service providers and other companies increase capacity to handle increasingly bandwidth-heavy downloads, particularly video.

Some analysts have expressed concerns, however, about whether Cisco can keep up its rapid growth. Investors have been particularly worried in the last couple of quarters about a slowdown in one of Cisco’s critical businesses — orders from United States businesses — whose growth plunged to mid-single-digit rates. That segment rebounded in the fourth quarter, growing about 12 percent over last year.

Cisco is also growing by moving beyond its roots as purely a maker of networking gear. During the fourth quarter, the company completed its $3.2 billion acquisition of an online meeting company, WebEx Communications, and the $830 million takeover of IronPort Systems, a maker of security products.

Shares of Cisco were up $1.74, or nearly 6 percent, to $31.43 in after-hours trading. Before the earnings were released, Cisco’s stock price closed up 19 cents at $29.69.

Link:www.nytimes.com

Computer networking

Computer networking is the engineering discipline concerned with communication between computer systems or devices. Networking, routers, routing protocols, and networking over the public Internet have their specifications defined in documents called RFCs.

Communicating computer systems constitute a computer network and these networks generally involve at least two devices capable of being networked with at least one usually being a computer. The devices can be separated by a few meters (e.g. via Bluetooth) or nearly unlimited distances (e.g. via the Internet). Computer networking is sometimes considered a sub-discipline of telecommunications, and sometimes of computer science, information technology and computer engineering. Computer networks rely heavily upon the theoretical and practical application of these scientific and engineering disciplines.

A computer network is any set of computers or devices connected to each other. Examples of networks are the Internet, or a small home local area network (LAN) with two computers connected with standard networking cables connecting to a network interface card in each computer. All modern aspects of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) are computer-controlled, and telephony increasingly runs over the Internet Protocol, although not necessarily the public Internet.

Views of networks

Users and network administrators often have different views of their networks. Often, users that share printers and some servers form a workgroup, which usually means they are in the same geographic location and are on the same LAN. A community of interest has less of a connotation of being in a local area, and should be thought of as a set of arbitrarily located users who share a set of servers, and possibly also communicate via peer-to-peer technologies.

Network administrators see networks from both physical and logical perspectives. The physical perspective involves geographic locations, physical cabling, and the network elements (e.g., routers, bridges and application layer gateways that interconnect the physical media. Logical networks, called, in the TCP/IP architecture, subnets , map onto one or more physical media. For example, a common practice in a campus of buildings is to make a set of LAN cables in each building appear to be a common subnet, using virtual LAN (VLAN) technology.

Both users and administrators will be aware, to varying extents, of the trust and scope characteristics of a network. Again using TCP/IP architectural terminology, an intranet is a community of interest under common administration, usually in the same enterprise. An extranet creates a community of interest that spans multiple enterprises and usually involves multiple administrators, but is not accessible by arbitrary users of the public Internet.

Informally, the Internet is the set of users, enterprises,and content providers that are interconnected by Internet Service Providers (ISP). From an engineering standpoint, the Internet is the set of subnets, and aggregates of subnets, which share the registered IP address space and exchange information about the reachability of those IP addresses using the Border Gateway Protocol. Typically, the human-readable names of servers are translated to IP addresses, transparently to users, via the directory function of the Domain Name System (DNS).

Over the Internet, there can be business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) communications. Especially when money or sensitive information is exchanged, the communications are apt to be secured by some form of communications security mechanism. Intranets and extranets can be securely superimposed onto the Internet, without any access by general Internet users, using secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology.

Cisco to Build Social Networks for Others

Cisco wants in on the social networking pie. It’s announced its plans for creating social networking websites for other companies at the Web 2.0 Conference this week, in what looks to be a white label offering.

With its acquisition of Five Across Inc., a company that offers website creation tools, and the technology from social network Tribe, it’s clear that Cisco is looking to social networking as a substantial stream of revenue. And not for its own social network, but for those businesses that would like to create social networking options to present to end users. The NHL is already a client of Five Across Inc., and has a social network for users to meet and share online, which reportedly gains more traffic than its main website.

Sponsorship of MTV’s Digital Incubator and investment in TokBox and BlackArrow also indicate a heavy interest in the development of online networks and applications. No details have been given regarding Cisco’s plans for the software, but with all the other networks opening their platform, perhaps Cisco could be in a position to offer an aggregated solution for distributing applications across its white label networks. Someone will do it soon.

At any rate, Cisco’s announcement follows those made at the conference by MySpace and Microsoft earlier this week, with plans for an open platform and the acquisition of 20 companies per year, respectively.

Red Hat launches open-source Exchange

Red Hat has launched its Red Hat Exchange, a site where customers can buy a range of open-source applications from the company's business partners.

The Red Hat Exchange offers a much wider range of software than Red Hat's two core products, Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Java server software. Red Hat will sell and support the software, but the business partners will get a percentage of the proceeds and provide deeper support when necessary.

The company announced the Red Hat Exchange in March while launching its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, a major update to its core product. It announced the RHX launch Thursday at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego.

The exchange makes Red Hat a stronger competitor to Microsoft and the company's top Linux rival, Novell, which sells Suse Linux Enterprise Server and a variety of server software packages. But it also means Red Hat steps more directly on the toes of business partners such as IBM, Oracle and SAP.

"We think this could be an interesting strategy to determine market demand for complementary open-source technologies and eventually lead to acquisitions," said Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard in a research note Thursday. "We see immediate synergy with two RHX partners: Alfresco for content management and Zimbra for collaboration and messaging."

The RHX partnership list is a who's-who of open-source server companies: JasperSoft and Pentaho for business intelligence; EnterpriseDB and MySQL for databases; Alfresco for document management; Compiere for enterprise resource planning; Zimbra and Openfire messaging; for Zmanda for backup; CentricCRM and SugarCRM for customer relationship management; and GroundWork and Zenoss for systems monitoring.

As with its core products, Red Hat sells the software as an annual support subscription. Prices vary, but for example, Zimbra costs $1,895 per year; Alfresco, $4,595; SugarCRM, $2,495; and MySQL, $895.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Careful of that iPod, it could be dangerous

iPod looking harmless

(Credit: CNET)

The iPod may not be as innocent as it looks. And there's something even more dangerous than the terrible music the person next to you is listening to. A study by medical doctors and one inquisitive teenager shows the iPod may interfere with the activity of cardiac pacemakers. No other handheld music players were tested. So the iPod joins a whole long list of electronic devices that may interfere with pacemakers. They range from microwave ovens (even if you don't stick your head inside) to radio transmitters.

Could we be seeing health warnings on iPods and their cousins?

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Alltel launches Jump Music

Alltel wireless

(Credit: Alltel Wireless)

Alltel Wireless has partnered up with frog design and eMusic to offer Jump Music, a free application that lets you transfer music from your PC to your cell phone. Similar to the iTunes Music Store model, consumers can also navigate to eMusic directly from the Jump Music interface and purchase songs from eMusic's vast catalog of DRM-free MP3s. New Jump Music users can take advantage of a special introductory offer of 35 free eMusic songs. All this, and you can transfer your existing music collection to your cell phone as well. It's initially compatible with only five Alltel phones -- the LG AX8600, the Motorola Krzr K1m, the Motorola Razr V3m, the Samsung u520, as well as the Samsung Wafer -- but Alltel hopes to have more phones added to the list as time goes on. If you wish, you can purchase a Jump Music accessory kit, which features a 256 MB memory card, a USB cable, and a stereo headset, all for $49.99 from the Alltel store.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

'Second Life' publisher removes child porn after German TV probe

In a blog entry, Second Life publisher Linden Lab has acknowledged it was contacted by a German TV station that said it had discovered images in the virtual world showing a child avatar engaged in "depicted sexual conduct" with an adult avatar.

Linden lab said it quickly began an investigation and banned the two people behind the avatars, as well as removed the images.

The television station said it had turned the images over to German authorities, but Linden Lab explained that it had not been able to get in contact with law enforcement there.


The practice of having child and adult avatars playing at sex acts in virtual worlds is known as age play, something that has been a taboo subject among the Second Life community for some time.

But Linden Lab said it has a zero tolerance policy regarding such behavior and acts quickly to remove residents who engage in it or the content itself when it is informed of its existence.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Helio Ocean launches today

Helio Ocean

(Credit: Helio)

Happy Helio Ocean day! Yep, the highly-anticipated dual-slider phone from Helio has finally launched today for $295 each. You can get one from Helio's online store or from any of their retail stores, or if you want, you can also pick one up from EBGames or Gamestop starting next week. We're still busy reviewing it over here, but until we unleash the full review unto you, here are a couple of our first impressions.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Eben Moglen's (slightly) lower profile

Eben Moglen admits he is a talker, and his performance during a recent 30-minute interview does nothing to persuade otherwise.

The former general counsel to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego on Thursday to put his considerable oratorical skills to use, updating attendees on the soon-to-be-launched third installment of the GNU General Public License, or GPL--a set of rules and restrictions that underpins the use of a lot of open-source software.

However, following reports that he has effectively stepped down from the FSF, it seemed strange that Moglen was at the summit speaking about the GPL. But Moglen claims that reports that he is stepping away from the FSF have been exaggerated. He is merely putting a little distance between himself and the organization.


The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the legal service which he founded in 2005 to represent key free-software and open-source projects, will continue to serve the FSF; he just wants to step out of the limelight, he said.


"One of the things that people hate to admit is that sometimes a community is actually stronger if you step away from it," he said.

Moglen will now devote more of his time to his role as chairman of SFLC and to his teaching post at Columbia Law School. Comments posted in his blog shed some more light on the motivation for the change. "We're taking risk out of projects everybody is using or is going to want to use. Helping my colleagues do that work, supporting their growth as they support their clients, is the right thing for me to do right now," he said.

It's not surprising, given his gift for speech and passion for furthering the use of free and open software, that his name was on a list, which emerged earlier this month, of individuals who were apparently facing a potential gag order from SCO Group as part of its ongoing legal tussle with IBM over patent infringement in the Linux operating system. The request was never enforced.

Moglen became interested in computers at the age of 12. By 14 he was making money from writing computer programs. He spent several years coding for IBM, before turning away from the IT industry to become a lawyer. He worked as a law clerk for both the New York District Court and the Supreme Court before joining Columbia Law School in the late 1980s, where he is a professor of law and legal history.

Free legal service, free software

While working at Columbia, he tackled his first major legal case relating to software freedom. Moglen explained that, while "trawling a bulletin board" in the early 1990s, he came across Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the e-mail encryption program written by computer scientist Phil Zimmermann. Moglen was impressed with the software, but also realized that Zimmermann was exposing himself to potential legal issues, as U.S. legislation restricted the export of the software.

The U.S. government accused Zimmermann of violating regulations by publishing the PGP software on the Internet. Moglen helped Zimmermann pro bono and eventually the government dismissed the case. It was while he was working on the Zimmermann case that Moglen was contacted by Richard Stallman, the founder of the FSF, who was also in need of legal help. Moglen again offered to do the work for him for nothing, and the rest is history.


This is not the first time that Moglen has made an appearance at a Red Hat Summit. At last year's summit, in Nashville, he delivered a keynote speech that basically stole the show--his was the only one to warrant a near-standing ovation halfway through. Not bad given that other speakers included MIT veteran and "One Laptop per Child" project founder Nicholas Negroponte.

In that speech, Moglen made some brave assertions, including a declaration that free and open software is not anticapitalist, as some detractors--most famously Bill Gates--have observed.


"The actual politics are very American--they are not scary, but as natural as apple pie. The free-software solution is a return to the traditional result of personal ingenuity. It's freedom to invent, not reinvent--not invent over again something someone else had invented and locked up, but invent in the way that inventing was done in the great spurt of 19th-century inventiveness," he said.

So, one year on, does he think that the plight of free and open software has improved? Certainly, there have been setbacks--most notably the decision by Linux distributor Novell to partner with Microsoft, which was widely lambasted by open-source advocates, including Moglen, who questioned whether the deal actually violated the GPL.

"If you make an agreement which requires you to pay a royalty to anyone for the right to distribute GPL software, you may not distribute it under the GPL," he said.

However, there have been some wins for free and open development, including Apple's and EMI's moves to distribute music free from digital rights management controls. Without reflecting on specific examples, Moglen claimed that during the last year people have finally begun to realize that free and open software can have a profound effect on their lives and, in many cases, shape those lives.

"Time magazine had a cover claiming 'The people of the year are you,' and more and more free software is changing the way human beings live," he said.


ZDNet UK's Ingrid Marson contributed to this article.

Andrew Donoghue of ZDNet UK reported from San Diego.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Sony VAIO TZ photos leaked

(Credit: NotebookReview.com)

When we told you about several leaked Sony laptops a few weeks ago, there weren't any photos of the ultraportable VAIO TZ11 to share. But Andrew at NotebookReview.com managed to uncover some images and more detailed specs on a French retailer's Web site.

"Anyone think that keyboard redesign looks a lot like the MacBook keyboard?" Andrew asks, and our answer is a hearty yes. We just hope it's comfortable for typing--which is tough to do when the case is only 10.9 inches wide.

Like its TX series predecessor, the 2.6-pound TZ11 is expected to include an LED-backlit display, which not only keeps the case slim but should also extend battery life. Also note that (at least on this European version) Sony has dropped the annoying WWAN antenna that hung off the side of the VAIO TXN17.

You'll find more photos and full specs at NotebookReview.com.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Verizon to nab Samsung SCH-U410

Samsung SCH-U410
(Credit: Mobiledia)

With four new cell phones in the last three months it's clear that Samsung and Verizon Wireless have become quite chummy lately. We've seen the QWERTY keyboard SCH-U740. the V Cast Mobile TV SCH-U620, the 3G SCH-U540 and the low-end SCH-U340. And now it appears the two companies will round out their portfolio even more with the new Samsung SCH-U410.

Sporting a rather generic flip phone design the SCH-U410 doesn't offer an eye-popping feature set but it's not exactly a lightweight either. According to Mobiledia you'll find a VGA camera, Bluetooth, a speakeprhone, voice dialing and support for Verizon's VZ Navigator GPS service. We don't know pircing at this time but we should see the device by the middle of the year.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Fancy Java in action: Iris photo editing

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems is trying to make the case at this year's JavaOne conference that its Java software is good for snazzy and elaborate desktop software. To give a taste for this concept, Sun showed off a Flickr-based photo editing site it calls Iris.

Sun's Iris service gives a Java interface to Flickr.
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

Iris--though either pokey or unable to handle the collective attention of the thousands of JavaOne attendees--lets Flickr members view their photos and perform a variety of editing tasks such as cropping, rotating, sharpening and blurring. Each image is shown with a histogram that represents the distribution of light and dark tones in the photo.


The site also enables users to e-mail slide shows to others. The slide show takes the form of a downloaded Java application. Hint: if you can't figure out how to stop the slide show, wave your pointer over the lower center part of the screen and some clickable buttons appear.

I'm glad people are working on fancier interfaces to Flickr, and Java is a good way to do it. I have a powerful aversion to installing new software on my computer, being unwilling to load up the Windows registry with ever more cruft. But Java is a nice way to use software that doesn't degrade your performance when you're not using it. I also recommend a Firefox plug-in called Fotofox that works with several image-sharing sites.


Iris' editing features worked on Thursday but were in limbo Friday, however. For a slicker and equally nonfunctional interface, it's worth looking at the Flash-based mockup of Adobe Lightroom.


(Via Gordon Haff and John Nack.)

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

The next big growth market: education

Half Moon Bay, Calif.--A novel trend emerged at the Think Tomorrow Today conference in Half Moon Bay this week: educational investing.

Not as in "The government must invest more in education." Instead, a number of companies that specialize in managing schools or creating curriculum have begun to crop up on the in radar screen. And some are growing fast.

Mosaica Education, for instance, is expected to hit revenues of $120 million this year, according to CEO Michael Connelly, up from $65 million in 2003. Mosaica runs charter schools in many inner cities in the U.S. as well as in Abu Dhabi. The schools Mosaica runs are public (the revenue comes from government grants) but the company tries to import concepts from private schools.


In its schools, parents have to volunteer for at least once an hour once a month, he said. Curriculum goals are set for students at the beginning of the year and students, teachers, the principal and parents must sign off on them. Teacher bonuses are tied to performance.

"The most important thing we do is parent involvement," he said.

Overall, kids see a test score increase of around 15.6 percent after a year in the schools, according to Connelly. (It's a complex formula and we will do more stories on this subject, so if you have questions, hold tight for now.)

p>

Other educational companies appearing at the conference included Brightside Academy (child care centers), Experiencia (immersive learning programs), Flashpoint (digital media arts colleges), The Savvy Source for Parents (social network for families on things like preschool and summer camp) and SchoolNet (school performance management systems).

That's six education-related companies making pitches to investors at a conference usually dominated by semiconductor designers, cell phone companies and Internet companies. But it makes sense: opportunities in investing often come up through demographic changes, according to Michael Moe, founder of Think Equity partners and the sponsor of the conference.

Education, of course, has been a huge issue in the past several years. Parents are far more obsessed about getting their kids on the right educational track earlier than in the past. Countries like Singapore and Qatar have inked deals with name universities to help bring U.S. style colleges to their countries. Every politician talks about the need for a more educated workforce.

Interestingly, Moe has pointed out that the University of Phoenix has been one of the better performing stocks in the past 15 years.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Software reconstructs thousands of shredded German Stasi files

Think shredding paper is a good way to hide printed information? Think again. German officials who faced the daunting task of reconstructing thousands of bags of shredded paper containing secret files left behind by the former East German Stasi have turned to computer software for help. According to an article on Speigel Online International, the paper was shredded in 1989 about the time of the fall of the Berlin wall when human rights activists were able to scoop up 16, 250 black garbage bags of paper scraps. By 2000, the contents for no more than 323 bags had been reconstructed by 15 volunteers. At a cost of estimated to run up to 30 million Euros, the new scanner and software process is designed to perform the task of reassembling thousands of shreds at one time, a process experts had estimated would take 30 humans working roughly 600 to 800 years to complete. The shreds are first scanned, front and back, then specially designed software rearranges the digitized fragments according to shape, texture, ink color, handwriting style and recognizable official stamps. Lurking within the paper mess are thought to be the identities of East Germans who spied on other East Germans.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Vista supports Pentax 'raw' camera images

Pentax has released software that lets Windows Vista read and manipulate "raw" images taken directly from higher-end Pentax cameras' image sensors without in-camera processing.

Pentax's K10D digital SLR
(Credit: CNET Networks)

Microsoft announced on its photo blog the availability of the Pentax codec used to encode and decode raw images.

Raw images are popular among professionals and enthusiasts who want more elaborate control over their photography, but supporting raw formats is tough, mostly because there's largely no standard from one camera to the next. Pentax is unusual in digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera makers in that its high-end model, the K10D, supports Adobe Systems' DNG (digital negative) format that attempts to bring some standardization to the raw image realm. The raw codec now available supports the .PEF format used in several Pentax digital SLR cameras.

Adobe and Apple write their own raw codecs, but Microsoft chose to partner with camera manufacturers to supply their own for the higher-end image-handling components in Windows Vista.

In addition, Olympus has updated its raw codec to support 64-bit versions of Windows, Microsoft saidTag parser: Expected start tag before ''

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Carbon, the atmosphere and our future

Tropical deforestation
(Credit: CSIRO)

Carbon dioxide is known to be one of the greenhouse gases that can cause the earth's atmosphere to retain heat. Today two new scientific studies have been released with more insight into carbon and its dispersal into the air as carbon dioxide.

First, from Australia's CSIRO, the national science agency, comes a study on carbon contained within tropical forests. That carbon is thus not available to be released as CO2.

This study says the current deforestation rate in the tropics releases 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. That's about one-fifth of all carbon emissions caused by human activity.

Another study describes the fate of CO2 trapped within the Pacific Ocean.

The study released by Kent State University found there had been massive prehistoric releases of carbon dioxide. Two of these occurred at the end of the last ice age, triggered by changes in the ocean currents. Right now, the scientists say, carbon dioxide levels in the earth's atmosphere are the highest they've been in 650-thousand years. That's even before the invention of the radio and phonograph if you're following on a timeline.

The oceans have absorbed about half the carbon we humans have pumped into the air in the past three hundred years. But if current climate change alters ocean currents enough, there could be another massive release of carbon dioxide now trapped within the ocean. That would only accelerate the warming of the atmosphere.

Meanwhile one company is working on trying to increase the amount of carbon now trapped by the oceans. Their plan is to use some friendly plankton to capture carbon. I just hope we humans haven't totally alienated every other organism on this plant.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Microsoft getting ready for 'Halo 3' beta

For fans of the hit Halo video game franchise, San Francisco is the place to be Friday.

That's because Microsoft is hosting a hands-on press event where invitees will be able to play the game (click here for screenshots) for the first time.

Microsoft said it wouldn't be making any announcements at the event, but those in attendance will have a chance to get an advance look at the game before the company opens up its beta on May 16.

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Urban robot race gears up

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said Friday that it has whittled down the contestants for its upcoming urban robot race from 89 to 53 teams via qualification events. Among the 53 teams are the Stanford Racing team (winner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge--a desert robot race across 132 miles), Princeton University and Team MIT. The 53 teams will get a visit from DARPA people next month for a road test of their autonomous cars, in a test of their safety and viability for the Urban Challenge, a robot race across mock city streets slated for Nov. 3. (DARPA will award $2 million, $1 million and $500,000 awards to the top three contestants that finish in the six-hour limit.)

After the tests in June, DARPA will select 30 semifinalists to proceed to the National Qualification Event from Oct. 21 to 31. The location has yet to be disclosed.

"We are requiring more and more complex behaviors at each stage of the competition," Dr. Norman Whitaker, Urban Challenge program manager, said in a statement. "Site visits will be the first real test with moving traffic."

Source: CNET News.com - Business Tech

Apple's AirPort Extreme can pose security risk

Apple on Monday released a software update that addresses a pair of security problems in the company's latest AirPort Extreme base station.

The update, available for download from Apple's Web site, tightens the default configuration of the AirPort Extreme Base Station with 802.11n, Apple said in a security alert. The update also fixes a security flaw that exposes file names on a password-protected disk attached to the device, Apple said.

The default configuration of the Apple base station allows incoming IPv6 connections. This may expose network services on hosts connected to the device to remote attackers, Apple said. IPv6 is the next version of the Internet Protocol designed to support a broader range of IP addresses as the IP version 4 addresses currently in use become scarce.

"This update addresses the issue by changing the default setting to limit inbound IPv6 traffic to the local network," the Mac maker said.

The second issue relates to AirPort Disk, a feature of which allows network users to share storage space on a USB disk connected to the base station. Airport Disk has a password protection feature, but that doesn't protect file names, Apple said.

"An issue in the AirPort Disk feature allows users on the local network to view file names--but not their contents--on a password-protected disk without providing a password," Apple said. The software update fixes that problem, the company said.

Both issues only affect the AirPort Extreme Base Station with 802.11n, a wireless router Apple introduced in January at Macworld in San Francisco. The software download, which updates the device's firmware, can be installed through the Airport Utility.

CNET News.com

Dell stops selling Axim handheld

Dell has stopped selling its Axim line of handhelds and is not planning a new product in the category, the computer maker said Monday.

"The Axim X51 family is no longer being offered, and we have no plans for a follow-on product at this time," Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden said in an e-mail. Camden noted that the company does sell handhelds from other makers on its Web site, including GPS devices and smart phones.

Dell introduced its first Axim Pocket PC in 2002, helping to bring lower prices to a market in which customers had grown used to spending several hundred dollars. Over time, Dell expanded its lineup, adding features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless technologies. The company debuted its most recent model, the X51, in the fall of 2005.

However, the market for personal organizers has stagnated as many users have opted for smart phones that combine such features as calendar and contact functions with telephony.

The demise of the Axim was noted by handheld enthusiast Web site MobilitySite.

Microsoft: 2007 China sales to rise 20 percent

Software giant Microsoft said on Tuesday it expects its China sales to rise more than 20 percent this year, boosted by new products and a national crackdown on software piracy.

Responding to complaints by Western governments and companies, as well as criticism from a growing field of domestic firms, China has been clamping down on piracy over the last two years to the benefit of software makers such as Microsoft.

As part of the campaign, most of the nation's top domestic PC sellers, including Lenovo and Founder, have pushed to boost their number of PCs sold with legal copies of Microsoft's Windows operating systems already installed.

Other major foreign players in the market, including global leaders Hewlett-Packard and Dell, are pushing similar policies in China.

Reflecting the trend, only about 30 percent of Lenovo PCs now being sold will ultimately contain pirated Windows systems, down sharply from 90 percent last year, said Timothy Chen, chief executive officer of Microsoft's greater China region.

"We've made great progress there," he told Reuters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. China is the world's second-largest PC market by unit sales, with more than 20 million units shipped last year, according to data tracking firm IDC.

Following the implementation of China's crackdown starting in late 2005, IDC estimated the number of PCs sold with legal copies of Windows reached about 50 percent in last year's first quarter.

Rampant piracy there previously made the market a difficult one for software makers like Microsoft, with many industry watchers estimating that most computers in the country used pirated copies of Windows.

Chen added that growth was also coming from new product sales, including the company's newly introduced Vista operating system, the next-generation equivalent of Windows, which Microsoft rolled out at the beginning of this year.

The company plans to launch seven new products in China this year, and another six in 2008, Chen said.

"It is a great year for the region," he said. "Vista is selling very well." Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in February that Vista had been well received and that PC vendors had seen a nice lift in their sales.

Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Windows zero-day flaw gets a fix

Microsoft on Tuesday issued five security bulletins with fixes for eight flaws, including a "critical" zero-day vulnerability in Windows that also affects Vista.

Four of the security bulletins released as part of Microsoft's monthly patch cycle address problems in Windows. Three are tagged "critical," Microsoft's highest severity rating, while the other is pegged "important," a notch lower. The most serious rating is for bugs that could cause a computer to be fully compromised with little, if any, user action.

Among the Windows patches is a fix for a zero-day vulnerability first disclosed in December. Security experts had initially deemed the flaw less serious, stating it could be exploited only by someone with access to a vulnerable computer.

The flaw lies in an essential Windows component called the Client/Server Run-time Subsystem and critically affects all current Windows releases, Microsoft said in security bulletin MS07-021. "If a user viewed a specially crafted Web site, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system," the company said.

The MS07-021 update is the only patch released Tuesday that affects Vista. All of Tuesday's Windows fixes apply to its predecessor, Windows XP. This includes a critical hole in the Microsoft Agent, a help tool that succeeded the famous Clippy Office assistant. The Microsoft Agent flaw also affects Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

The Microsoft Agent is flawed in the way it handles certain specifically crafted Web links. The vulnerability could be exploited through a malicious Web site, Microsoft said in security bulletin MS07-020. The Windows Agent has been patched up before.

The Client/Server Run-time Subsystem and Microsoft Agent bugs are the most serious in Microsoft's April patch pack, Vince Hwang, a group product manager at Symantec Security Response, said in an e-mailed statement.

"These patches are critical because there is an increased potential for exploitation since these vulnerabilities affect multiple versions of Windows," Hwang said.

Windows XP also has a critical vulnerability in the operating system's plug-and-play feature, which has been a patch target in the past and was exploited by the Zotob worm in 2005. The vulnerability could be exploited without any action by the user, but an attacker has to be on the same subnet as the target machine, Microsoft said in bulletin MS07-019. Attacks may also be blocked by a firewall, it said.

Despite the mitigation, miscreants are likely to jump on the plug-and-play flaw, said Tom Cross, a researcher at IBM Internet Security Systems. "Due to the ease of exploitation, we are taking the Universal Plug and Play flaw very seriously and expect to see an exploit by the end of the week," Cross said in an e-mailed statement.

Microsoft's fifth Patch Tuesday bulletin, MS07-018, addresses a pair of vulnerabilities in Content Management Server, including one deemed "critical." An attacker could gain control over Web sites maintained by the Microsoft software by exploiting the flaw, which lies in the way it handles certain requests.

Microsoft's Tuesday patches come a week after the company issued an early security update to repair seven other Windows vulnerabilities. Microsoft rushed out that update because cybercrooks were using a flaw in the way Windows handles animated cursors to attack PCs. Microsoft did not release any fixes in March.

.eu Storms into Top 10 Web Domains

The .eu domain has become one of the most popular in the world only a year after its launch, ranking third most common in the European Union.

About 2.6 million domain names have already been registered, the European Commission reported on Wednesday. One survey indicates that as many as one out of every five Europeans owns a .eu name.

Germany holds the most registrations, with 795,000 domains. It is followed by the United Kingdom, with 439,000, and the Dutch with 320,000. Registrations are limited to EU residents, and cost between 10 to 30 euros ($13.37-$40.11 USD) per year.

.eu was opened to the public in April of last year following a six-month period where businesses got priority on their copyrighted and trademarked names. The EC claimed that some 700,000 registrations were received in the first four hours alone.

80 percent of those domains purchased are running a website. Only .uk and .de are more popular than .eu, although as preliminary statistics show, those countries also carry the highest .eu registration rates as well.

Betanews

AMD Plans Restructuring, Warns of Even Lower Revenue

Whenever a company makes a financial announcement to the press over a week ahead of its scheduled quarterly report, the news probably isn't that good. So just the fact that AMD had a statement this morning was a bad portent; the follow-up wasn't much better. Its revenue for the fiscal first quarter of this year looks worse than earlier guidance suggested: down to $1.225 billion.

Exactly how bad is this? AMD's fiscal first quarter revenue last year was $1.33 billion. But before you get out your calculator and do simple subtraction, realize that the AMD of 2006 is not the AMD of 2007. There was supposed to be an extra company welded into the mix, called ATI. In the previous quarter, the absorption of ATI added $400 million of revenue to the company. If the new AMD was growing as it should, revenue for the combined corporation should have come closer to $2 billion.

It doesn't take an analyst to tell you what the problem is, because AMD has said so up front today: Though lower margins remains a problem, "significantly lower unit sales, especially in the resale channel" appears to be the principal trouble. Simply put, AMD CPUs aren't selling like they did.

But the company appears willing to shave margins even further if it means capturing back market share lost to Intel since last July. A price reduction AMD announced last month has since triggered a street price drop even at the higher performance levels, with the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ selling for as low as $249 - almost 45% lower than its street price three weeks ago.

Prices for individual Athlon 64 FX-74 processors have dropped 11% from last month, to as little as $444.99 according to Pricewatch CPU (though you need two FX-74s to make a system). Individual FX-72 prices have dropped about 21.6% since last month, to $326 (again, you need two).

Meanwhile, Intel keeps introducing quad-core models, with the QX6800 announced just yesterday at the $1,200 price point. While that price represents the upper crust of what enthusiasts will pay for power, such introductions typically push other price points down, and may in fact be responsible for a price drop of about 4% in existing top-of-the-line Intel processors.

With Intel not appearing to let up, AMD now has to respond with a restructuring plan of its own. The company announced this morning it is looking to cut half a billion in capital expenditures, yet in such a way that manufacturing capacity for the year isn't affected. In proportion with its size, this could be a more difficult task for AMD than Intel's restructuring, which began in spring 2006 and is nearing its completion.

Details of AMD's plans are expected to be announced a week from Thursday.

[BetaNews]