ALL COMPUTERS INTERNET NEWS

[punchaki]

IE 7 clocks up 100 million users

More than 100 million people have installed Internet Explorer 7, making it the second most used browser in the US, trailing only its predecessor, IE 6, the software maker said on Friday.

"I'm pleased to report that on January 8, we had the 100 millionth IE7 installation," Microsoft group program manager Tony Chor said on the IE blog. "However, even more important than installations is usage. According to WebSideStory (the company we use to measure browser usage), as of this week, over 25 percent of all visitors to Web sites in the US were using IE7, making IE7 the second most used browser after IE6."

Microsoft said it expects IE 7 usage to grow as the company completes more localised versions, offers it up to more Windows XP users through Automatic Update and releases Vista to consumers at the end of the month. The final version of the new browser has been available for download by XP users since October and is also built into Vista.

Rival Firefox is not standing still, meanwhile. The latest version, Firefox 2, was released in October. Mozilla has also released an alpha, or early test version, of Firefox 3.

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Microsoft wants to get your whole house running Windows Vista.

In what is being billed as a limited time offer, Microsoft will let those who buy a boxed version of Vista Ultimate Edition purchase discounted licences for up to two more PCs in their house. The cost for each of the additional PC licences is $50 (£25.29); for that amount, consumers can install the Home Premium version of Vista on the other PCs.

"It's targeted at what we term the 'super-engaged customers,'" said Bill Mannion, a director in the Windows marketing group. Such customers tend to have more than one PC, he said. "This is a focused programme designed to encourage these super-engaged customers to upgrade multiple PCs in the household."

The programme is being offered only in the US and Canada and only from Vista's 30 January mainstream launch through to 30 June.

"We're going to evaluate the programme at that point and determine if we make any changes to the programme," Mannion said.

Apple has been giving a break to homes with multiple computers for years. In 2002, the company introduced a product allowing users, for $199 (£100.66), to upgrade up to five Macs in a home to the latest version of Mac OS X. Apple still sells the family pack for the same price, which is just $70 (£35.40) more than the cost for a single PC.

Microsoft has been weighing whether to make such an offer for some time. Windows chief Jim Allchin said a year ago that such a family pack was "a great idea".

Under an existing but not necessarily well-known programme, Microsoft already offers a 10 percent discount on additional PCs to those who buy a boxed copy of Windows. That program will continue with Vista, Mannion said. The new programmme requires customers to buy the priciest version of Vista — Ultimate, which sells for $259 as an upgrade and $399 for use on a new PC.

Microsoft is relying on other novel ways to try to get Vista on more PCs. One is the Anytime Upgrade, which allows users of one version of the operating system to easily move to a pricier edition without having to go to a store.

The company is also looking to get computer makers and retailers in on the act, allowing them to create campaigns to encourage their customers to use the Anytime Upgrade. If their pitch succeeds, they'll get the profit margin on the sale.

Customers who discover the Anytime Upgrade feature within Vista will be prompted with a list of places to buy from. It's not clear what they'll be choosing, since all they are getting is a product key — the software bits themselves will already be in their hands — either on the hard drive of their Vista PC or on a DVD that came with the computer or boxed copy of Windows.

The suggested prices of the Anytime Upgrade are:

Home Basic to Home Premium — $79
Home Basic to Ultimate — $199
Home Premium to Ultimate — $159
Business to Ultimate — $139

Another option for getting Vista is to download it directly from Microsoft's online software site, Windows Marketplace. In a first, Microsoft is making the new releases of both Office and Windows available for download at their standard list prices.

Mannion said Microsoft is trying to reach consumers in new ways, particularly as software purchases shift online. He said that IDC is predicting a 34 percent annual growth rate for electronically downloaded software through 2009, while Gartner is projecting that by 2008, 80 percent of consumer software will be distributed electronically.

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Broadband over power lines is set to overtake cable and DSL connectivity in the US, according to industry watchers.

A report from Parks Associates has found in the US, growth in power line connections will outstrip that of more traditional broadband conduits. By 2007, it's predicted there will be 400,000 residential subscribers. That number is set to rise to 2.5 million in 2011.

According to the report, consumers in rural areas where other broadband delivery mechanisms don't reach will spur growth, while utilities offering broadband services will drive availability.

Chris Roden, research analyst at Parks Associates, also noted that such connectivity will give utilities "to better manage power demand and troubleshoot line issues".

Europe is looking to roll out broadband over power lines too. The EC announced in 2005 it was encouraging member states to take a look at the technology in the hope of using it to bridge the digital divide.

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Virgin Media is set to launch next month with a marketing campaign reportedly costing £20m and featuring Pulp Fiction star Uma Thurman. According to The Sunday Telegraph, Virgin Media—formed from the merger of cable operators ntl and Telewest, and Virgin Mobile—will launch on St Valentine's Day, offering a new digital TV recorder and promising UK-wide coverage by the middle of 2008.

The new digital recorder is reportedly based on Telewest's TVDrive device which allows subscribers to download high-definition as well as standard-definition TV programmes, as well as pause and rewind live TV. The Sunday Telegraph said Virgin Media would counter BSkyB's charge that its cable network only reached 55% of the UK by installing its own equipment in BT's exchanges—the process known as local loop unbundling—as well as via a wholesale deal with a telecommunications operator.

In September ntl unveiled its much-heralded 'quadruple play', offering digital TV, fixed and mobile telephony plus broadband access for £40 per month. Last week BSkyB threw down the gauntlet to ntl and BT by offering a triple-play of TV, broadband and telephony for £26 a month (though BT line rental would cost an extra £11 per month).

Announcing the marketing campaign featuring Thurman, Virgin Media marketing chief James Kydd told The Independent Thurman would be "helping us launch the most exciting and the biggest Virgin-branded company in the world".

Meanwhile, the Financial Times said Chancellor Gordon Brown was being urged by Sky to resist a regulatory intervention over its 17.9% stake in ITV. Sky surprised the City, rivals and regulators alike by acquiring the stake, which scuppered ntl's hopes of merging with ITV.

Both the Office of Fair Trading and Ofcom are investigating the competition implications of the stake. Trade secretary Alistair Darling could this week announce whether Ofcom will also review the public interest issues raised by the stake.

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Virus alert as Storm Worm rages on

he first big attack of 2007

Many home PC users may have been infected after a large-scale sustained Trojan horse attack that took place over the weekend, security vendors believe.

The Trojan, named 'Storm Worm' by antivirus vendor F-Secure, first started to spread last Friday as extreme storms engulfed Europe. The email claimed to include breaking news about the weather, in an attempt to get people to download an executable file.

Over the weekend there were six subsequent waves of the attack, with each email attempting to lure users into downloading an executable by promising a topical news story. There were emails that purported to carry news of an as-yet-unconfirmed missile test by the Chinese against one of its weather satellites, and emails reporting that Fidel Castro had died.

Each new wave of emails carried different versions of the Trojan horse, according to F-Secure. Each version also contained the capability to be updated, in an attempt to stay ahead of antivirus vendors.

Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research at F-Secure, said: "When they first came out, these files were pretty much undetectable by most antivirus programs. The bad guys are putting a lot of effort into it - they were putting out updates hour after hour."

As most businesses tend to strip executable files out of emails they receive, Hypponen said he expected companies would not be overly affected by the attacks.

However, F-Secure said hundreds of thousands of home computers could have been affected across the globe.

Once a user downloads the executable file, the code opens a backdoor in the machine which means it can be remotely controlled, while installing a rootkit that hides the malicious program. The compromised machine becomes a zombie in a network called a botnet. Most botnets are currently controlled through a central server, which - if found - can be taken down to destroy the botnet. However, this particular Trojan horse seeds a botnet that acts in a similar way to a peer-to-peer network, with no centralised control.

This is not the first botnet to use these techniques. However, Hypponen called this type of decentralised botnet "a worrying development".

Antivirus vendor Sophos called Storm Worm the "first big attack of 2007", with code being spammed out from hundreds of countries. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said the company expected more attacks over the coming days, and said the botnet would most likely be hired out for spamming and adware propagation, or be sold to extortionists to launch distributed denial of service attacks.

The recent trend has been toward highly targeted attacks on individual institutions. Mail services vendor MessageLabs said this current malicious campaign is "very aggressive" and said the gang responsible is probably a new entrant to the scene, hoping to make its mark.

None of the anti-malware companies interviewed said they knew who was responsible for the attacks, or where they had been launched from.

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Criminals 'may overwhelm the web'

Criminals controlling millions of personal computers are threatening the internet's future, experts have warned.

Up to a quarter of computers on the net may be used by cyber criminals in so-called botnets, said Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet.

Technology writer John Markoff said: "It's as bad as you can imagine, it puts the whole internet at risk."

The panel of leading experts was discussing the future of the internet at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Internet pandemic

Mr Cerf, who is one of the co-developers of the TCP/IP standard that underlies all internet traffic and now works for Google, likened the spread of botnets to a "pandemic".

Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.

Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-called Trojan virus programs.

While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes.

Net resilience

Mr Markoff, who writes for the New York Times, said that a single botnet at one point used up about 15% of Yahoo's search capacity.

It used retrieved random text snippets to camouflage messages so that its spam e-mail could get past spam filters.

"Despite all that, the net is still working, which is amazing. It's pretty resilient," said Mr Cerf.

The expert panel, among them Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers, and Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, agreed that a solution had to be found to ensure the survival of the web.

But its members were unsure about feasible solutions, even though they identified operating systems and authentication as key issues.

It was still too easy for net criminals to hide their tracks, several panel members said, although they acknowledged that it was probably not desirable that every individual was definitively identifiable.

"Anonymity has its value, and it has its risk," said Jonathan Zittrain, professor for internet governance at the University of Oxford.

Closing doors

Operating systems like Microsoft Windows, meanwhile, still made it too easy for criminals to infiltrate them, the experts said.

Microsoft had done a good job improving security for its latest operating system, Windows Vista, said Mr Markoff.

But already pirated copies of Vista were circulating in China, even though the consumer launch of Vista has been scheduled for next Tuesday.

Experience showed that about 50% of all pirated Windows programmes came with Trojans pre-installed on them, Mr Markoff said.

Mr Dell said the future might bring "disposable virtual PCs", accessed through the internet, that would minimise the threat of a persistent virus infection.

Mr Toure said that whatever the solution, the fight against botnets was a "war" that could only be won if all parties - regulators, governments, telecoms firms, computer users and hardware and software makers - worked together

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Microsoft's antivirus fails to protect Vista

Microsoft's own antivirus software, Live OneCare, is unable to fully protect Vista users against viruses; and one of McAfee's antivirus software packages also fails to protect users, according to independent research released on Friday.

Virus Bulletin, backed by a team of Oxfordshire-based security researchers, tested 15 antivirus software packages used by businesses and designed specifically for Vista, Microsoft's newest operating system, and released to businesses two months ago. The researchers tested whether each of the antivirus products would stop a set of viruses known to be currently circulating. In order to be awarded a pass, the software had to detect all the viruses with no false positives.

But out of the 15, four failed: Microsoft Live OneCare 1.5; McAfee VirusScan Enterprise version 8.1i; G DATA AntiVirusKit 2007 v17.0.6353; and Norman VirusControl v5.90. The other 11, including software from Computer Associates, Fortinet, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Sophos and Symantec, detected all the viruses.

"With the number of delays that we've seen in Vista's release, there's no excuse for security vendors not to have got their products right by now," said John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin. "In these days of hourly updates, it's always a surprise and a disappointment to see major products missing [viruses]. Vista cannot fend off today's malware without help from security products. It certainly looks like people upgrading to the new platform are going to need additional security solutions."

Joe Telafici, vice president of operations for McAfee's Avert Labs, told CNET.co.uk's sister site, ZDNet UK, that in his opinion Virus Bulletin had not used its latest antivirus updates, causing the failure. He said McAfee would issue further results with the updated software.

Microsoft pledged to improve Live OneCare. A company spokesperson said: "We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests and, most importantly, as part of our ongoing work to continually enhance Windows Live OneCare."

On the subject of Vista, the Microsoft spokesperson added: "It's important to remember that no software is 100 per cent secure. Microsoft is working to keep the number of security vulnerabilities that ship in our products to a minimum, through our Security Development Lifecycle process, and that work is paying off. The release of Windows Vista is the first Microsoft operating system to use the Security Development Lifecycle from start to finish and was tested more, prior to shipping, than any previous version of Windows."

[Avivolo21]

I doesn't understeand how can microsoft not be Able to prorect her own software
and specialy her newst release of operating systam,
I think it is the time for them to conceder applying new emploeds whom could be able to do a better work
btw, microsoft like any other major compeny hire "hackers" and crackers and they are trying to hack the system and to report the security problems,
lol..sry for grammar:S

[xite-line]

lol I agree with Avivolo why can't microsoft prtect her own compunet or how ever it spells..
i think they need to seriously conceder upgraing there work...
but to be honest...they are doing quite good work :)