Nokia Readies iPhone Response

Nokia remains at work on its answer to the Apple iPhone, codenamed “Tube,” a company official said on Monday.

Shown in a slide at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, California, Tube looks similar to the popular iPhone. The Nokia device showed graphical displays, such as a promotion for the movie Shrek the Third. Other capabilities will be featured, such as the ability to upload photos.

“It’s our first touch device,” said Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia. Interfacing with the system is done via touch similar to the iPhone. He said the company has not published the planned date of shipment for Tube.

Nokia believes it can compete with iPhone, and during his presentation, Libretto compared volume shipments of iPhone to Nokia’s shipments of phones. Since the launch of iPhone in June, Apple has shipped 5 million to 6 million of the devices, paling in comparison to Nokia’s device shipments, Libretto said. “We’ve done that [volume] since we’ve had dinner on Friday,” he said.

(Apple afterward said 4 million iPhones had shipped worldwide by January.)

The Tube will support Java, something Apple has been reluctant to do with iPhone.

Windows 7 Release Set For 2009

Microsoft has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations.

It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies.

Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched to consumers until January 2007. Given Microsoft’s recent track record – Vista arrived more than five years after XP – most outsiders had pegged some time in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7’s arrival.

But News.com reported on Friday that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates answered a question at a business meeting in Miami about Windows Vista by saying “sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version”.

And during its announcement on Thursday that it would extend the availability of Windows XP Home for low-cost laptops. Microsoft said it would retire the operating system only after June 30, 2010, or one year after the release of Windows 7, whichever comes later.

That implies that Microsoft is targeting the middle of next year for some sort of release milestone for Windows 7 – the only codename known at the moment – although whether that would be a final release to consumers or an RTM, which allows businesses and OEMs to start installing it, is unknown.

A Microsoft spokeswoman told Computerworld US the company “is in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA”. She said the company was providing early builds of the new operating system to gain user feedback, but otherwise was not providing further information.

Gates also said that he was “super-enthused about what [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways” but didn’t elaborate.

What could those be? Microsoft has divulged a few things. Responding to criticism that Windows has become unnecessarily bloated, the company has 200 engineers developing a slimmed-down kernel called MinWin that uses 100 files and 25MB, compared to Vista’s 5,000 files and 4GB core and is so small it lacks a graphical sub-system.

Microsoft has also confirmed that the operating system will come in consumer and business versions and in 32bit and 64bit editions.

Screenshots of early betas of Windows 7  build 6519 of Windows 7 released in December

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Microsoft needs to start generating excitement about its software months or years in advance in order to prepare its millions of reselling partners.

But if it talks up Windows 7 too much, it runs the risk that large companies – Microsoft’s most profitable customer segment – will hold on to their Windows XP machines and skip Vista entirely in favour of Windows 7.

That appears to be happening. A recent enterprise survey by Forrester Research showed that only 6.3 percent of enterprises were running Vista at the end of December, with most of the upgrades coming at the expense of aging machines running Windows 2000, not XP.

The vast majority of the 100 million copies of Vista that Microsoft has sold so far have gone to individuals and small businesses purchasing new PCs.

The least-loved version of Windows has long been Windows Millennium Edition (ME), a buggy minor upgrade that was superseded by XP within a year of its release. Despite its far greater – some would say, too great – technical ambition, Vista may end up lumped together with ME as one of the blips on Windows’ long-term roadmap.

LG Teases Latest ‘Black Label’ Cell Phone Ahead of Launch

LG has begun teasing the upcoming launch of the third cell phone in its style-focused “Black Label” family of handsets.

The phone, the name of which wasn’t announced, will follow on from LG’s popular Chocolate and Shine handsets that launched in 2006 and 2007.

It will be officially unveiled and named at a product launch in London on April 24, but ahead of that LG released three images of the new phone.

It’s a slider-type handset with a shiny face, three shortcut buttons for answering a call, hanging up on a call and a cancel button sit below the shiny face and the upper part of the phone’s body is covered in what appears to be a faux leather plastic. Previous LG phones have touch-sensitive keys underneath the shiny cover and the new phone appears to have enough room for such a keypad but it’s impossible to tell from the images if there is indeed one.

The only technical detail available was the inclusion of a 5-megapixel camera.

The phone will first be available in Europe before being launched in other regions around the world, said LG.

Seagate Unveils Self-Encrypting Disk Drive

Seagate says it’s adding a self-encrypting capability to its Cheetah 15K disk drive based on a specification promulgated by the Trusted Computing Group.

The TCG Storage Architecture Core Specification 1.0 defines a way that storage system drives will recognize encryption and decryption security commands and authorization requests, says Gianna DaGiau, senior product marketing manager.

The self-encrypting functionality will be added to the Seagate Cheetah 15K drives by this summer, she says.

“The drive will be encrypting data coming to it,” DaGiau says. “The encryption key is inside the drive and never leaves it. It will require an authentication key for decryption.” The type of encryption supported in the Seagate self-encrypting process is the Advanced Encryption Standard.

The reason that supporting the TCG specification is important is that “a storage system is likely to have dual sources, not just Seagate necessarily,” and system managers will benefit from having a common way to use the self-encrypting process, she says.

New Attack Kit Targets Bag of ActiveX Bugs

Hackers are using a new multiple-attack package composed of seven ActiveX exploits, many of them never seen in the wild before, said a security company on Friday.

Fewer than half of the flawed ActiveX controls have been patched.

The attack framework probes Windows PCs for vulnerable ActiveX controls from software vendors Microsoft, Citrix Systems and Macrovision, as well as hardware makers D-Link, Hewlett-Packard, Gateway and Sony, said a Symantec researcher.

“What’s interesting about this attack is that there are so many vulnerabilities in one attack that have not been seen in the wild previously,” said Symantec researcher Patrick Jungles, who wrote an analysis of the multistrike package for customers of the company’s DeepSight threat service.

According to Jungles, visitors to compromised Web sites are redirected by a rogue IFRAME to a malicious site serving the package. The attack pack tests the victim’s PC for each ActiveX control, detects whether a vulnerable version of a control is installed, and then launches an attack when it finds one.

Bugs in ActiveX, a Microsoft technology used most often to create add-ons for the company’s Internet Explorer browser, have always been common, but so many serious flaws have been disclosed of late that some security experts have recommended that users do without them.

The seven exploited in the package outlined by Jungles are a mix of old and brand-new flaws. For example, Microsoft’s own ActiveX vulnerability — a bug in IE’s Speech API — was disclosed in June 2007, while the vulnerability in the Citrix Presentation Server Client control harks back even further, to December 2006. Others, such as the ActiveX bugs in D-Link’s security webcams and in Sony’s ImageStation, are much more recent, having been revealed in February.

Four of the seven ActiveX flaws — those in the D-Link, Gateway, Sony and Macrovision products — have not been patched, said Jungles.

Assuming the exploit framework succeeds in compromising a PC, the hackers drop a Trojan on the machine that turns it into a spam-spewing zombie; the Trojan includes a rootkit component to mask the malware from antivirus scanners.

Symantec added that while the initial IP address that sent users to the malicious site was no longer infected with the IFRAME code, other addresses were redirecting users.

“The list of IPs involved in the exploitation is by no means comprehensive,” said Jungles, “because the nature of the exploitation indicates that several other sites are likely forwarding victims.” The IFRAME code, he continued, had been found embedded in the legitimate sites’ HTML and was at times distributed via online advertisements; DNS poisoning, he said, was also suspected.

Jungles’ report recommended that users apply patches, when they’re available, and set the “kill bit” on those ActiveX controls that have not yet been updated by their makers.