Google is developing an operating system (OS) for personal computers, in a direct challenge to market leader Microsoft and its Windows system.
Google Chrome OS will be aimed initially at small, low-cost netbooks, but will eventually be used on PCs as well.
Google said netbooks with Chrome OS could be on sale by the middle of 2010.
“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” the firm said in its official blog.
The operating system, which will run on an open source license, was a “natural extension” of its Chrome browser, the firm said.
For Microsoft the news comes just months before it launches the latest version of its operating system, called Windows 7. “We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds,” said the blog post written by Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Google’s engineering director Linus Upson.
Both men said that “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web” and that this OS is “our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be”.
To that end, the search giant said the new OS would go back to basics.
“We are completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.
“It should just work,” said Google.
Google already has an operating system for mobile phones called Android which can also be used to run on netbooks. Google Chrome OS will be aimed not just at laptops but also at desktops for those who spend a lot of time on the web.
The announcement could dramatically change the market for operating systems, especially for Microsoft, the biggest player with around 90% share.
“This announcement is huge,” said Rob Enderle, industry watcher and president of the Enderle Group.
“This is the first time we have had a truly competitive OS on the market in years. This is potentially disruptive and is the first real attempt by anyone to go after Microsoft.
“Google is coming at this fresh and, because it is based on a set of services that reside on the web, it is the first really post web operating system, designed from the ground up, and reconceived for a web world,” Mr Enderle told the BBC.
Last year Google launched the Chrome browser, which it said was designed for “people who live on the web – searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends.”
Stephen Shankland at CNET said the move had widespread implications.
“One is that it shows just how serious Google is about making the web into a foundation not just for static pages but for active applications, notably its own such as Google Docs and G-mail.
“Another: it opens new competition with Microsoft and, potentially, a new reason for anti-trust regulators to pay close attention to Google’s moves.”
Some commentators said Google’s motivation in all this was pretty clear.
“One of Google’s major goals is to take Microsoft out, to systematically destroy their hold on the market,” said Mr Enderle.
“Google wants to eliminate Microsoft and it’s a unique battle. The strategy is good. The big question is, will it work?”
At the popular blog, TechCrunch, MG Siegler said “Let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of all bombs on its rival, Microsoft.”
Microsoft releases Windows 7 later this year to replace Windows Vista and Windows XP which is eight years old.
The Redmond based company claims that 96% of netbooks run Windows to date.
In a separate announcement Google also revealed that many of its most popular applications had finally moved out of trial, or beta, phase.
Gmail, for example, has worn the beta tag for five years.
“We realise this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of beta software as being not yet ready for prime time,” wrote Matthew Glotzbach, the director of product management in the official Google blog.
The decision to ditch the beta tag was taken because the apps had finally reached the “high bar” mark, he wrote.
More than 1.75 million companies use Google apps, according to the firm.
source: BBC
A web tool that “could be as important as Google”, according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.
Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.
The “computational knowledge engine”, as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.
“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime,” said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The tool computes many of the answers “on the fly” by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.
People can use the system to look up simple facts – such as the height of Mount Everest – or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country’s GDP.
Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.
“Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results,” said Dr Wolfram.
As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.
Dr Wolfram said the “trillions of pieces of data” were chosen and managed by a team of “experts” at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.
Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.
Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove ‘linguistic fluff’
“Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain,” he wrote earlier this year. “It computes answers – it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”
The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.
This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.
For example, a relatively simple search, such as “who was the president of Brazil in 1923?”, will return the answer “Artur da Silva Bernardes”.
This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.
Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people’s questions.
“We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case,” he said.
In addition, he said, the system had got “pretty good at removing linguistic fluff”, the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.
Searching for ‘Blair Bush’ could give a different result…
However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.
“Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say ‘I don’t need all those extra words’.”
Instead they tended to use “concepts” similar to how most people use search engines today.
But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was “disappointed” by Dr Wolfram’s “dismissal of English syntax as ‘fluff”’.
For example, he said, suppose someone asks ”When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?”
“Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama,” he said.”
“I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing.”
Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be “the world’s first web-based question answering system”. It has been on the web since December 1993.
Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.
Dr Katz said, it answers “millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world” on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.
It is also able to compute answers form several sources in a similar way to Alpha.
Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.
For example, Powerset, uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.
The company is attempting to build a similar search engine “that reads and understands every sentence on the Web”.
In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.
Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.
“In a sense we are at the beginning,” he said.
A new online video game distribution network hopes to revolutionise the way people play games and re-write the economics of the industry.
OnLive, to be launched at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, aims to let players stream on-demand games at the highest quality level.
The service could provide competition for Playstation, Xbox, and the Wii.
“OnLive is the most powerful game system in the world,” said company founder Steve Perlman
“No high-end hardware, no upgrades, no endless downloads, no discs, no recalls, no obsolescence. With OnLive, your video game experience is always state-of-the-art,” he declared.
Mr Perlman said that the company has developed a data compression technology that allows games to be powered on remote servers rather than on game consoles.
Users download games instantly through the OnLive MicroConsole or straight onto a PC or Mac. The MicroConsole also connects to any TV. All that is required is a high speed connection.
Gamers will be able to select from an on-demand catalogue of video titles stored on these data servers. The Palo Alto based company promises that the service will provide instant access to the most advanced games in the world, solo and multiplayer.
To date nine publishers have signed up including familiar names like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, THQ and Atari Interactive.
Initial reaction from the gaming press has been a mixture of the positive and the sceptical.
Sid Shuman of GamePro told PC World “When we finally got hands-on with OnLive, I gotta admit, I was impressed.”
OnLive screen shot
So far nine big game publishers have signed up to the service
Michael McWhertor of Kotaku.com admitted “We were a little suspicious of OnLive’s capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work.
“Will it work in the wild? It might,” concluded Mr McWhertor.
At VentureBeat, which is holding its own games conference called GamesBeat, Dean Takahasi said “OnLive’s technology could eventually sweep through all forms of entertainment and applications, providing the missing link in helping the internet take over our living rooms.”
“It remains to be seen if this is just vapourware,” said Cesar A. Beradini of TeamXbox.com.
“The real question is what would happen if this actually works as promised? Is it the end of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo as console manufacturers?” he asked.
From that standpoint Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities told USA Today “OnLive shows the potential for a gaming world without consoles” if the pricing is right.
According to Mr Perlman a new era for gaming is here.
“We’ve cleared the last remaining hurdle for the video games industry: effective online distribution.
“By putting the value back into the games themselves and removing the reliance on expensive, short-lived hardware, we are dramatically shifting the economics of the industry. Delivering games instantly to the digital living room is the promise game fans have been waiting for,” he said.
source: BBC
Infections of a worm that spreads through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without the latest security updates is “skyrocketing”.
The malicious program, known as Conficker, Downadup, or Kido was first discovered in October 2008.
Anti-virus firm F-Secure estimates there are now 8.9m machines infected.
Experts warn this figure could be far higher and say users should have up-to-date anti-virus software and install Microsoft’s MS08-067 patch.
In its security blog, F-Secure said that the number of infections based on its calculations was “skyrocketing” and that the situation was “getting worse”.
Speaking to the BBC, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with anti-virus firm Sophos, said the outbreak was of a scale they had not seen for some time.
“Microsoft did a good job of updating people’s home computers, but the virus continues to infect business who have ignored the patch update.
“A shortage of IT staff during the holiday break didn’t help and rolling out a patch over a large number of computers isn’t easy.
“What’s more, if your users are using weak passwords – 12345, QWERTY, etc – then the virus can crack them in short order,” he added.
“But as the virus can be spread with USB memory sticks, even having the Windows patch won’t keep you safe. You need anti-virus software for that.”
According to Microsoft, the worm works by searching for a Windows executable file called “services.exe” and then becomes part of that code.
It then copies itself into the Windows system folder as a random file of a type known as a “dll”. It gives itself a 5-8 character name, such as piftoc.dll, and then modifies the Registry, which lists key Windows settings, to run the infected dll file as a service.
Once the worm is up and running, it creates an HTTP server, resets a machine’s System Restore point (making it far harder to recover the infected system) and then downloads files from the hacker’s web site.
Most malware uses one of a handful of sites to download files from, making them fairly easy to locate, target, and shut down.
But Conficker does things differently.
Anti-virus firm F-Secure says that the worm uses a complicated algorithm to generate hundreds of different domain names every day, such as mphtfrxs.net, imctaef.cc, and hcweu.org. Only one of these will actually be the site used to download the hackers’ files. On the face of it, tracing this one site is almost impossible.
Speaking to the BBC, Kaspersky Lab’s security analyst, Eddy Willems, said that a new strain of the worm was complicating matters.
“There was a new variant released less than two weeks ago and that’s the one causing most of the problems,” said Mr Willems
“The replication methods are quite good. It’s using multiple mechanisms, including USB sticks, so if someone got an infection from one company and then takes his USB stick to another firm, it could infect that network too. It also downloads lots of content and creating new variants though this mechanism.”
“Of course, the real problem is that people haven’t patched their software,” he added.
Technicians have reverse engineered the worm so they can predict one of the possible domain names. This does not help them pinpoint those who created Downadup, but it does give them the ability to see how many machines are infected.
“Right now, we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of unique IP addresses connecting to the domains we’ve registered,” F-Secure’s Toni Kovunen said in a statement.
“We can see them, but we can’t disinfect them – that would be seen as unauthorised use.”
Microsoft says that the malware has infected computers in many different parts of the world, with machines in China, Brazil, Russia, and India having the highest number of victims.
Microsoft is to due to issue a patch to fix a security flaw believed to have affected as many as 10,000 websites.
The emergency patch should be available from 1800 GMT on 17 December, Microsoft has said.
The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal passwords.
Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of computer users and the flaw could affect all versions of it.
So far the vulnerability has affected only machines running Internet Explorer 7.
According to Rick Ferguson, a senior security adviser at security firm Trend Micro, the flaw has so far been used to steal gaming passwords but more sensitive data could be at risk until the security update is installed.
MICROSOFT SECURITY ADVICE
Change IE security settings to high (Look under Tools/Internet Options)
Switch to a Windows user account with limited rights to change a PC’s settings
With IE7 or 8 on Vista turn on Protected Mode
Ensure your PC is updated
Keep anti-virus and anti-spyware software up to date
“It is inevitable that it will be adapted by criminals. It’s just a question of modifying the payload the trojan installs,” he said.
It is relatively unusual for Microsoft to issue what it calls an “out-of-band” security bulletin and experts are reading the decision to rush out a patch as evidence of the potential danger of the flaw.
Some experts have suggested that users switch browsers until the flaw is fixed.
Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Apple’s Safari system are not vulnerable to this current flaw.
But Graham Cluley, senior consultant with security firm Sophos, said no browser is exempt from problems.
“Firefox has issued patches and Apple has too. Whichever browser you are using you have to keep it up to date,” he said.
“People have to be prepared and willing to install security updates. That nagging screen asking if you want to update should not be ignored,” he said.
