Thunderbird 2.0 roars out of Mozilla

THE popular open source development community Mozilla has released its Thunderbird 2.0 free and open email client, adding new features that include email tagging.

The organization says the free email client has better features – a main one being email tagging – improved security and better privacy provisions. From its first day of release, it is available in 30 different languages.

Mozilla chief executive Mitchell Baker, who is a keynote speaker at the CeBIT Keynote Series on May 1 at the Darling Harbour convention and exhibition centre in Sydney, says the new Mozilla Thunderbird is “personalisable” and customisable than the previous version.

“Thunderbird 2 has powerful new features and proven security, delivering an improved email experience to users worldwide,” said Thunderbird’s lead engineer at Mozilla Scott MacGregor.

“In Thunderbird 2, we incorporated the proven benefits of tagging to email. Tagging initially gained popularity on blogs, photo and link-sharing sites as an intuitive way to organize online information so users could easily find desired content, MacGregor says in a statement about the release.

The software is available for Windows, Mac and Linux clients.

Mozilla said the messaging tagging feature would make it much easier for users to track and search email. The user can create their own tag (like From Mum, or This Weekend) or use default tags like Important, or To Do.

Another strong new features is the message history navigation that is similar to the web browsing history. Users can move backwards or forwards through their messages and easily browse through their message history.

For more Open CeBIT news, click here.

IT boom continues as PC market surges

WORDWIDE shipments of personal computers grew by about 10 per cent in the three months to the end of March according to two new research reports, signaling the underlying strength in the ICT sector.

A Gartner report found global PC sales surged 8.9 per cent to total 67 million units in the fourth quarter. IDC put growth at 10.9 per cent to 58.9 million units, far exceeding its forecast of 8.5 per cent.

As a bell-weather, the industry has traditionally looked to the PC shipment reports to understand the underlying health pf the ICT sector, as well as a reliable indicator of the strength or otherwise of economic investment.’

IDC said it expected strong growth would continue for the next two years.

IDC found growth was stronger in the portable PC market than the desktop commercial PC space.

“The strong first quarter is a good indicator of the health of the industry,” said IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker director Loren Loverde.

“The United States and Japan didn't grow much in the first quarter, but solid gains elsewhere and a boost from Vista brought us back to double-digit growth,” she said.

“The key market drivers – portable adoption and consumer demand – continue at a healthy clip, and commercial replacements should contribute more in coming quarters.

“Growth is likely to stay in double-digits over the next two years although it will be concentrated in portables and international markets.”

Gartner said the Asia Pacific region overtook the US in total shipment volumes for the first time in the first quarter.

HP capitalised on the strong growth in the consumer and portables market, boosting its own unit shipments by 28 per cent for the quarter and growing its market share to 19.1 per cent.

Dell has continued to struggle with a slow US market and a current internal restructure. Overall shipments for the year declined 6.9 per cent, though it did manage to boost non-US sales.

Both research groups said the launch of Microsoft Vista operating system in January would have had very small impact on the growth of global PC shipments.

For more Office Automation news, click here.

NICTA spin-off leaves Australia

THE first tech start-up to be spun our of the federally funded research agency NICTA has been a mixed success for the organisation – the company has good technology that attracted customers, but it has also left Australia for good.

Open Kernel Labs was established as a commercial entity in Australia just nine months ago, the result of research work at NICTA’s Embedded, Real-Time and Operating Systems Research Program.

OK Labs (as it is called) has now moved on, establishing its corporate offices – including business development and field application engineering functions in the US as it headquarters.

The company said research and development functions would remain in Australia.

OK Lab’s product, OKL4 is an advanced microkernel and “supports a structured approach to building trusted and secure systems, and is being successfully deployed in a number of commercial consumer mobile devices,” the company said.

In a statement, NICTA chief executive Dr David Skellern did not express disappointment at the company’s operations heading offshore.

“With the incorporation of OK, NICTA can claim another success of its program to commercialize technology developed at its resource-rich development labs,” Dr Skellern said.

“OK is the first spin-out of NICTA to be incorporated in the United States and the company begins its commercial life with a revenue stream as well as strong interest from large global companies.”

Secure, reliable and trustworthy embedded systems software for mobile and consumer electronics requires strong, hardware-enforced protection boundaries around system components, enforced by a trustworthy microkernel.

OKL4 was initially developed under the direction of Dr Gernot Heiser, the chief technology officer and co-founder of OK. Dr Heiser is also professor of operating systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and a program leader at NICTA

With additional input from early customers, the open source community and PhD candidates at UNSW, this team has produced the highest performing microkernel operating system available today, he said.

For more Export Alley news, click here.

Hacker cracks Mac OS security

A HACKER has won a US$10,000 (A$12,000) prize at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver after managing to break into a Macintosh computer running OS X.

Conference organisers said they had set up the contest to highlight potential risks of the Mac systems.

The competition had originally been planned as a challenge just for CanSecWest attendees through its onsite wireless network. But when 3Com subsidiary TippingPoint stumped up the cash prize they decided to put the two target machines online and open the context to everyone.

Few details of the hack have been released, and the hacker/prize-winner has not been named, although it is understood they are not at the conference.

“One OSX box has been owned! At this point all we can say is there is an exploitable flaw in Safari which can be triggered within a malicious web page,” according to the CanSecWest web site.

“Of course all of the latest security patches have been applied. Technical details will be forthcoming as the winner works out the release. There is still one more Mac to go (the same flaw cannot be used again, but other Safari bugs are allowed),” it said.

“Just to review the rules, the first box required a flaw that allows the attacker to get a shell with user level privileges. The second box, still up for grabs, requires the same, plus the attacker needs to get root.”

Apple released a security patch late last Thursday (soon after the conference began) or 25 vulnerabilities which attendees thought might be more than a coincidence.

For more IT Security news, click here.

DoubleClick-Google draws privacy groups fire

THREE high-profile privacy and civil liberty groups in the US have lodged a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in a big to halt the Google acquisition of DoubleClick, citing deep concerns about its consumer impact.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy, and the US Public Interest Research Group joined forces to file a complaint, lodge an injunction against the acquisition and to request an FTC investigation.

“Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick will give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world,” the complaint reads.

“Moreover, Google will operate with virtually no legal obligation to ensure the privacy, security and accuracy of the personal data that it collects.”

The groups say the proposed acquisition ill “create unique risks to privacy and will violate previously agreed standards for the conduct of online advertising.”

Further, the groups say that even as separate entities, neither Google nor DoubleClick have taken adequate steps to safeguard the personal information they already collect.

Google and DoubleClick announced last week the companies had reached agreement – subject to approval – for the US$3.1 billion (A$3.7 billion) acquisition.

The deal has already attracted criticism from competitors Microsoft and Yahoo! Microsoft released a statement soon after the deal was announced saying a single Google/DoubleClick entity would control too much of the online advertising market and called on regulators to investigate the deal.

But it is the public interest groups that may present the biggest barriers to the two online advertising giants.

EPIC has already tangled with DoubleClick, having complained to the FTC in 2000 about DoubleClick’s planned practice of merging names and personal details with anonymous web surfing activity – and selling the result to national database marketing company.

The three groups say Google has already expressed an intention to merge data from Google and DoubleClick databases to profile and target internet users. They say this will have a direct impact on 233 million internet users in North America, 314 million users in Europe and more than 1.1 billion users worldwide.

The complaint says Google has a history of non-compliance with Federal privacy guidelines, and has been reluctant to tell users precisely what it does with their private information – in particular its tracking of web visits in connection with their IP address.

Google currently stores uts users’ search activity in connection with their IP address indefinitely, something the company does not disclose on its Privacy Policy Highlights (and something 89 per cent of its users are completely unaware of, according to a 2006 survey).

For more Digital Content news, click here.

BlackBerry outage highlights mobile dependence

THE 24-hour outage at Research In Motion (RIM) in the US, the company that runs the BlackBerry email service, has highlighted just how dependent business users are on the mobile data.

For many users, the outage represented a nightmare: It’s not for nothing that the Blackberry is known by its most ardent fans as the ‘CrackBerry’. For email addicts, the mobile device means uninterrupted, on-the-go email 24/7.

And there were some lessons in crisis management for RIM. The service went don for 24 hours last week, and it took the company two days to respond publicly to the outage in any way. Its customers, meanwhile, were left to climb the walls and tear their hair out as email anxiety set in.

RIM co-chief executive Jim Balsillie says the company is now working to make sure the outage never happens again. He said the company took a while to respond publicly because it was focused on remedying the problem.

Ultimately, the company announced the outage had been caused by the addition of a new storage feature to the service that had not been adequately tested.

Mr Balsillie said the outage like the one experienced at RIM were “very rare” these daya in the context of modern software platforms and said it was extremely unlikely to happen again.

“It wasn't a capacity issue, it wasn't a security issue. It was an outage overnight when there was an upgrade,” he said.

“I think it's pretty likely that the systems are in place that this kind of thing, as incredibly unlikely as it is to happen, is all the more unlikely to happen again,” he said.

There are about 8 million subscribers to the mobile email service in the US, with one million users added in the first quarter. The company expects to add more than million additional users in the three months to he start of June.

BlackBerry-based mobile email is marketed in Australia by Telstra Mobile, which was not affected by the outage.

For more Wireless news, click here.

Google moves to sort YouTube copyright mess

GOOGLE has announced it is working on a tool that will let big content owners like television networks and movie studios more quickly remove their copyrighted material from the YouTube website.

Development of the “Claim Your Content” tool has taken on greater sense of urgency since media giant Viacom sued Google’s YouTube ubsidiary.

Claim You Content would appear as a tool button on web pages alongside video material uploaded by users to let content owners lodge complaints to get copyrighted material removed from YouTube faster.

Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt said the tool would let the content owners automate the take-down process.
“It is not a filtering system and doesn't block downloads; it makes it much quicker for us to remove copyrighted content,” Mr Schmidt said.
It is not clear whether the measures outlined by Google will be enough to placate Viacom, which earlier this month launched a US$1 billion (A$1.2 billion) lawsuit against YouTube for breaches of copyright.

Google acquired YouTube in a stock-swap deal for US$1.6 billion last year.

Viacom has complained YouTube leaves the onus for copyright protection on the content owners, rather than YouTube as publisher.

YouTube communications chief Julie Supan said the new tool does not itself identify copyright material, because it can’t identify what copyright material the content owners want on YouTube, and the material it doesn’t.

Rather, the company is testing identification technology that helps content owners more identify and locate their content on YouTube, and then give them the ability to either request the material be removed or to leave it up for promotional and marketing purposes, she said.

For more Digital Content news, click here.