Internet the new face of warfare?

A new Air Force manual for cyberwarfare describes a shadowy, fast-changing world where anonymous enemies can carry out devastating attacks in seconds and where conventional ideas about time and space don’t apply.

Much of the 62-page manual is a dry compendium of definitions, acronyms and explanations of who reports to whom. But it occasionally veers into scenarios that sound more like computer games than flesh-and-blood warfare.

Enemies can cloak their identities and hide their attacks amid the cascade of data flowing across international computer networks, it warns.

Relentless attackers are trying to hack into home and office networks in the US “millions of times a day, 24/7.”

And operating in cyberspace “may require abandoning common assumptions concerning time and space” because attacks can come from anywhere and take only seconds, the manual says.

The manual – officially, “Cyberspace Operations: Air Force Doctrine Document 3-12” – is dated July 15 but wasn’t made public until this month. It is unclassified and available on the internet.

It dwells mostly on protecting US military computer networks and makes little mention of attacking others.

That could signal the Pentagon wants to keep its offensive plans secret, or that its chief goal is fending off cyberattacks to keep its networks up and running, analysts said.

“Their primary mission is in some ways defensive,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Lewis said the government still hasn’t decided whether offensive cyberwarfare is the province of the military or intelligence agencies.

“Who gets to do it? Is it a military operation?… An intel operation?” Lewis said. “They’ve made a lot of progress in the last year but they’re still sorting out the doctrine.”

Noah Shachtman, a contributing editor to Wired magazine and a fellow at the Brookings Institute think tank, said even the limited mention of offensive operations in the manual surprised him.

The manual cites one example of a cyberwar objective as “shutting down electrical power to key power grids of enemy leadership.”

“That’s usually not the kind of thing we talk about doing to others,” Shachtman said. “The offensive stuff is supersecret.”

Much of the manual is entry-level material, Shachtman said, citing an appendix listing 10 things Air Force personnel should know, including a warning not to open attachments in e-mails from unknown senders.

“The equivalent appendix would be like, ‘This is a gun. Guns are unsafe. Please do not point them at your face,”‘ Shachtman said.

The manual explains how dependent the military and civil society have become on computer networks for communication, banking, manufacturing controls and the distribution of utilities.

It also outlines the vulnerabilities of the internet, including the relatively low cost of computers that could give an adversary a way to block, manipulate, damage or destroy a network.

It describes a 2005 incident when a hacker or hackers got access to personal information of more than 37,000 Air Force personnel.

The manual points out that much of the internet’s hardware and software are produced and distributed by private vendors in other countries who “can be influenced by adversaries to provide altered products that have built-in vulnerabilities, such as modified chips.”

Defending the entire US military network is unnecessary and probably impossible, the manual says. Just as the Air Force doesn’t try to defend every square mile of airspace around the globe, it won’t try to defend the whole of cyberspace.

“Whether used offensively or defensively … conducting particular cyberspace operations may require access to only a very small ‘slice’ of the domain,” the manual says.

Overall US military cyberwarfare operations will be the job of the US Cyber Command, which began limited operations in May. It will have components from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines.

The Air Force component – the 24th Air Force at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas – is part of the Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.

Lewis said the Cyber Command had a hand in the content of the Air Force manual.

“I see it as the first step in assigning special missions to the services. It’s a division of labor among the services,” he said.

The Marine Corps’ cyberspace operation document is still in development, a spokeswoman said. Army and Navy officials didn’t immediately respond to Associated Press questions about their planning.

Responsibility for civilian and government cybersecurity is less clear. Congress is debating between giving more power to the Homeland Security Department or the White House and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Homeland Security and the National Security Agency announced this month they would co-operate to strengthen the nation’s cybersecurity.

Source: www.stuff.co.nz

Kiwis first to get Windows phone

New Zealand has become the first country in the world to take delivery of Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone, the Windows Phone 7.

Vodafone New Zealand made the HTC 7 Trophy phone, one of nine Windows Phone 7 models to be sold worldwide, available online at 12.01am today and was selling the phones from its retail stores from noon today.

The Microsoft release is in stark contrast to Apple’s release of the iPad, earlier this year, which saw New Zealand tech heads wait months for the model while other countries lapped it up.

The Windows Phone 7 includes special versions of Microsoft’s Office productivity suite including the Outlook email program, as well as the Internet Explorer web browser, and Windows Media Player for playing digital music and video.

Meanwhile Microsoft New Zealand’s competition for software developers to design a Windows Phone 7 application with a New Zealand theme is due to close on November 1. There is a Trade Me category in the competition.

Source: www.stuff.co.nz

Smart phone, pity criminals are proving even smarter

The global obsession with the iPhone is not only becoming a threat to security: an entire criminal industry has sprung up around it, says the head of the Australian Crime Commission.

Speaking at an Australian Institute of Criminology conference in Melbourne, John Lawler said an ”overwhelming desire for instant services [was coming] at the expense of security and safety”.

This year Apple’s chief financial officer told a shareholder meeting that more than 70 Fortune 100 companies were either using or trying out iPhones, and it was rapidly replacing the BlackBerry as the must-have business phone.

But unlike the BlackBerry and other smartphones, the iPhone does not allow a company’s IT staff to install and upgrade its own security software, leaving business networks at risk of penetration.

Mr Lawler also said the increasing ubiquity of the phone meant that criminals were finding more and more opportunities to use it to intrude, to steal and to defraud.

”With the explosive uptake of personal communication devices there are certainly already opportunities that appeal to organised criminals,” said Mr Lawler, who spent 25 years with the Australian Federal Police before becoming the Crime Commission’s chief executive in March last year.

Even the desire for the phone is creating a burgeoning black market, he said.

In May European police launched raids in 11 countries to break up a Neapolitan mafia ring that was importing and distributing fake iPhones made in China.

Source: www.stuff.co.nz

Sony unveils web-surfing TVs

Sony’s lineup of sleek televisions boasting Google’s Web-surfing system will go on sale Saturday, testing how much consumers are willing to pay to combine access to the entire Internet with their regular TV programming.

The high-definition sets unveiled Tuesday evening in New York will have LCD screens ranging from 24 inches to 46 inches, with recommended retail prices from US$600 to US$1,400.

Sony will begin selling the new sets in its online store Saturday, and they should be available in Best Buy’s US stores by early next week. Pre-orders are currently being taken at both Sony’s and Best Buy’s websites.

Sony’s price for its Google TV sets is US$200 to US$400 higher than comparable TVs without the highly touted software, a differential that threatens to dampen sales at a time the still-shaky economy is causing more households to pinch their pennies.

The strong sales of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad have demonstrated that people are still willing to open their wallets to buy breakthrough gadgets, but persuading them usually requires a snazzy marketing campaign that shows why the products are worth the extra money.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said he isn’t convinced that Sony and Google will be able to make a compelling enough case to turn this new generation of TVs into a must-have item, even though he is impressed with the technology inside the sets.

“Price is going to be important,” he said. “Google TV is a powerful experience, but most people aren’t going to understand it unless they can see it in action. And Google isn’t known for its consumer marketing experience. I think they have the right concept here, but I am not sure about the execution yet.”

Sony is planning a marketing blitz to promote its Google TV sets through the holiday shopping season, although the company isn’t saying how much it will spend on the campaign. Google traditionally has refrained from buying TV ads, relying instead on its ubiquity on the Internet and the marketing acumen of its partners.

Like millions of mobile phones that have been sold in the past two years, Sony’s new TVs will be built on Google’s Android operating system. They will navigate websites with Google’s Chrome browser and rely on Intel Corp.’s Atom chips for their processing power. The system can comb through the Internet, television programming guides and even DVRs from satellite operator Dish Network Corp. to find all video connected to a request entered into a search bar at the top of the screen.

“Finally, you can seamlessly search your favorite TV programs and websites on the same screen, at the same time,” said Mike Abary, senior vice president of Sony Corp.’s home division.

The remote control for Sony’s Google TVs includes a standard, “QWERTY” keyboard to enter the search requests or make other comments on the Internet while retaining the ability to watch TV simultaneously.

Logitech International SA has bundled the same Google TV package into a set-top box that can be plugged into existing TVs with HDMI sets. The Logitech boxes, already available for pre-order, are selling for US$300, undercutting a similar box with a Blu-ray player that Sony is selling for US$400.

Google TV devices will likely face their stiffest competition from an array of less-expensive boxes that also connect to popular Internet services such as movies from Netflix Inc. and songs from Pandora’s music-streaming site.

But those enticements haven’t been enough to get most people to buy Internet-connected boxes. McQuivey estimates that Apple has sold about 1 million of its set-top boxes so far. Roku Inc. has sold even fewer since it entered the market more than two years ago, McQuivey said, even though the price for its Internet player has fallen to US$60.

Those relatively modest sales figures show how reluctant people have been to inject the Internet into the three to five hours they spend, on average, in the so-called “lean back” mode of watching television.

But that almost certainly will change as younger people who have grown up Web surfing on their computers while channel surfing on the TVs look for products that bring together the different media. The only question seems to be how much longer it will be until the market reaches the tipping point where Internet TV goes mainstream.

Sony’s own research has identified consumers who are under 44 years old as the most likely buyers of the new Google TV sets. McQuivey thinks the market is probably even narrower than that right now, ranging mostly from people between 30 and 45 years old who have settled down into their own households and can afford fancy TVs.

Convinced the Internet TV will be the next big thing, other consumer electronics manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics, Vizio and Mitsubishi also are promoting Web-connected sets and Blu-ray players.

And after brushing off Internet TV as nothing but as “hobby” for years,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs appears ready to get serious about the market. His company last month introduced a retooled set-top box that sells for just US$99.

The Apple TV product is still more limited than Google TV’s system, but McQuivey said that may not matter to consumers who have come to love Apple’s “prettier and shinier” gadgets.

There should be ample opportunity to convert more people to Internet TV, given that McQuivey expects about 22 million new TV sets to be sold in the U.S. next year.

Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt appears fairly certain a lot of them will be showing content from the Web.

“Instead of wasting time watching television, you can waste time watching the Internet,” he said in a recent speech.

Source: www.stuff.co.nz

Microsoft sends out major fix

Microsoft issued its biggest-ever security fix on Tuesday, including repairs to its ubiquitous Windows operating system for flaws that could let hackers take control of a user’s personal computer.

Microsoft released 16 security patches to address 49 problems it identified in its products.

It said four of the patches were high priority and should be deployed immediately to protect users from potential criminal attacks on the Windows operating systems. The patches are software updates that write over glitches.

Microsoft said it also repaired other less serious security weaknesses in Windows, along with security problems in its widely used Office software for PCs and Microsoft Server software for business computers.

The total of 49 vulnerabilities exceeds the previous record of 34, which was set in October 2009 and matched in June and August of this year.

The constant patching of PCs is a time-consuming process for corporate users, who need to test the fixes before they deploy them to make sure they do not cause machines to crash because of compatibility problems with existing software.

Source: www.stuff.co.nz

Windows Phone Comes to NZ!

New Zealanders will be some of the first in the world to get their hands on the new Windows Phone 7, which goes on sale later this month in line with the global launch. Microsoft believes the gloves are officially off in the smartphone market with the Windows Phone 7 launch. Mark Bishop, Windows Phone Business Manager at Microsoft New Zealand says Windows Phone 7 has the smartest of the smarts and Microsoft is set to compete aggressively with other offerings. “We think the time is right for a different kind of phone – people’s needs and expectations of phones are increasing and there is a great opportunity in the smartphone space to offer a different experience. We have built a phone for people that don’t want to live on their phones, but rather have phones that help them live their lives, doing more in less steps. The lines between our work and home lives have blurred – Windows Phone 7 will deliver an innovative set of features for social networking, entertainment and marry those with our traditional strengths in messaging and productivity.” Windows Phone 7 is designed to bring together what customers care about most, quickly and easily through the ‘glance and go’ functionality. Key features of Windows Phone 7 include: The only smartphone with Hubs and Live Tiles that update on the Start screen so you can see all the information you care about at a glance Making it easier and faster to find popular features such as pictures, music, games and information about friends and family Combining basic every-day tasks like Search, taking pictures, interacting with contacts or managing email to do more in fewer steps The first phone to have one button to Bing, Xbox LIVE, Office, Internet Explorer Mobile and the Zune experience all built in The Windows Phone 7 will be launched initially on the Vodafone network, making them Microsoft’s premier partner for launch Vodafone’s GM of Business Marketing, Becky Lloyd says, “We are delighted to be working with Microsoft to launch this fantastic new smartphone to New Zealanders and to be Microsoft’s premier partner for launch. The combination of Windows Phone 7 with our smart network is going to provide an exciting smartphone experience for our customers.” More than 1,700 people have downloaded the developer tools for building applications for the Windows Phone 7 in New Zealand. Gavin Jones, Senior Developer at Enlighten Designs says the Windows Phone 7 is a fantastic and easy platform to develop applications on. “I am really excited about the fact it seems such a simple platform to design and develop applications – the tools are easy to use and Microsoft has leveraged a lot of its existing technology. It is also fantastic to see that the design tools are free to download, and having the local Microsoft New Zealand team to talk to and ask questions has made it a lot easier to get involved and make our mark on the Windows Phone 7.”

Vodafone is launching with the HTC 7 Trophy. The phones can be purchased as part of a Vodafone pricing plan, or alternatively, Prepay customers can buy handsets for $899. Windows Phone 7 plans on Vodafone start from $40.85 per month (includes 30 minutes of calls, 300 texts and up to 250Mb of data) with the handset priced at $799. To get a Windows Phone 7 for under $500, customers can sign up to the $81.75 monthly plan which includes 120 minutes, 600 texts and up to 250Mb of data. For more information visit http://www.vodafone.co.nz/windowsphone, call into a Vodafone Store, talk to your Vodafone Business consultant or Account manager for more details, or visit

Source: www.windowsphone.co.nz

Android nips at Apple’s heels

It seemed Android smartphones was all anyone at a telecoms industry pow-wow in California talked about this week.

After years alone in the limelight, Apple’s iPhone now shares it with a slew of devices built on Google’s operating system.

At the CTIA wireless industry show in San Francisco, Android smartphones, such as Motorola’s Droid, Samsung’s Galaxy S and HTC’s Evo, dominated displays and conversations.

Sales of the iPhone are still growing at a healthy clip and its annual smartphone launches generate hype that rivals only dream of matching. In addition, Apple could get another boost if Verizon Wireless gets the iPhone on its network next year, as many expect.

But Android is giving Apple a run for its money in the consumer market, according to research data. Android was the most popular platform among US customers who bought smartphones in the past six months, despite the launch of the iPhone 4 in June, Nielsen reported.

“Anybody who watches it with a keen eye would be crazy to assume that Android wouldn’t gain more share than Apple over time,” Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves said.

“They’ve got more devices, they’re going to be on more networks across a wider spectrum of price points.”

Android has effectively expanded the smartphone market, which had been dominated by Apple in the consumer space and Research in Motion in the business world.

ComScore said Android gained 6.6 percentage points of U.S. market share from May through August, while Apple remained essentially flat and Research in Motion – which makes the BlackBerry – shed 4.1 percentage points.

ComScore put Apple’s US smartphone market share at 24.2 percent and Android’s at 19.6 percent.

FREE TO AIR

Hargreaves said that because Android software is free for handset makers to license, it means Apple could have a tougher time generating higher margins on the iPhone than its rivals can on their smartphones.

Analysts estimate Apple sold about 12 million iPhones in the September quarter, which would translate into roughly 60 percent growth from last year.

That’s despite reports of a faulty antenna on the device.

But rivals are nipping at its heels. Motorola on Tuesday announced what it called the single largest launch of Android devices at any one time. It also unveiled the Droid Pro, as it aims to make inroads in the enterprise market.

“The Motorola phones are pretty good. The HTC phones are pretty good,” said Sterne, Agee & Leach analyst Vijay Rakesh.

But Rakesh said much of Android’s growth has come because of heavy promotion at Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. mobile provider, which is owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc.

Rakesh expects Android growth to slow next year if Verizon begins to offer the iPhone, as many analysts expect.

“The only thing Verizon could push was Android. Next year, if Apple gets on Verizon, that should slow,” he said.

The developer community has also increased its support for Android. Apple launched the craze for mobile applications when it opened the App Store in 2008.

Apple’s store now boasts more than a quarter of a million apps for purchase. The Android Market is smaller, with more than 80,000 apps, but can still offer its growing user base access to many of the most popular mobile programs.

Source: www.stuff.co.nz

Apple slapped by watchdog as new iPhone cracks emerge

Australia’s consumer watchdog has taken Apple to task over warranty issues as reports surface of new design problems relating to the iPhone 4’s glass body.

Telstra, following discussions with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, agreed to provide full two-year warranties for customers who buy handsets on two-year contracts. The agreement included all manufacturers except Apple.

“Although nearly all major handset manufacturers have agreed to honour full warranties, the ACCC continues to have concerns in relation to warranty issues with the Apple iPhone,” the ACCC said.

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel said the strengthening of Telstra’s mobile warranties, which comes after a similar agreement with Vodafone Hutchison Australia, was designed to avoid customers being “hung out to dry”.

“Just because the manufacturer’s warranty period is up, it does not mean that consumers can be hung out to dry if they are left with a faulty product and ongoing service contract,” he said.

Previously, phone manufacturers offered standard one-year warranties but Samuel said in a phone interview that the ACCC took issue with this in cases where phones are sold on contracts that last longer than a year. Retailers then managed to negotiate two-year warranties with all major handset manufacturers except Apple, which charges customers extra for extended warranty.

“The retailers are saying well we can’t negotiate a 24 month warranty with Apple because it’s too expensive,” he said.

“The truth of it is they can but it’s going to cost them, and of course that cost would  then be passed on to the consumer in the purchase price of the phone. Consumers will then make up their mind whether it’s a better deal to buy an Apple iPhone or a Samsung or HTC.”

The consumer watchdog’s concerns come as new reports surface of large cracks appearing in the iPhone 4’s body when certain third-party slide-on cases are used.

The affected cases are Apple-approved third party products, not the rubber “bumper” sleeves that Apple was forced to give away free following the “Antennagate” issue that causes reception problems when the iPhone 4 is gripped in a certain way by the bare hand.

Well-known tech blogger Ryan Block, who ran Engadget.com before starting a new site, Gdgt.com, reported that sources inside and outside Apple had told him that the iPhone engineering team have been sent into “lockdown” over “another potential design flaw”.

“Apple has apparently found that non-bumper style cases – specifically those that slide onto the iPhone 4, which are occasionally prone to particulate matter getting caught between the rear of the phone and the case – can cause unexpected scratching that could quickly develop into full-on cracking or even much larger fracturing of the entire rear pane of glass,” Block wrote.

“To put it another way: Apple is afraid you might buy a standard slide-on iPhone case, put it on your phone, and then discover the next time you take it off that the entire back of your device has been shattered by no fault of your own.”

Anthony Agius, owner of the popular Australian Apple community site MacTalk, said he hadn’t seen any first-hand reports of Australian iPhone 4 owners experiencing the problems described by Block.

But he said some users had complained about Apple’s iPhone warranty process, specifically that they were receiving refurbished replacement models instead of new phones and that they had to wait weeks to get a repaclement via a telco.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was working on a new version of the iPhone 4 for Verizon Wireless in the US, to be launched early next year, that would have a slightly different form factor to fix some of the design problems.

Separately, the white version of the iPhone 4 has still not been released, with little in the way of an explanation from Apple.

The glass design of the iPhone 4 is pleasing to the eye but within days of the handset’s launch repair shops were complaining that it smashes too easily. Dropped phones are not covered by Apple under warranty.

Other reported iPhone 4 issues include the recent daylight savings bug and a mysterious camera fault that causes a coloured tinge to be added to photographs.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment (Surprise, Surprise!).

Source: www.stuff.co.nz (inc. Image)

World of Warcraft Cataclysm date released

Blizzard has announced that the next expansion for World of Warcraft, called Cataclysm, will be released on the 7th of December.

Cataclysm will have a recommended retail price of $79.95.

You can read Gameplanet’s coverage of Cataclysm, including interviews with Blizzard designers Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and Cory Stockton, previews and beta notes here.

“Cataclysm includes the best content we’ve ever created for World of Warcraft. It’s not just an expansion, but a re-creation of much of the original Azeroth, complete with epic new high-level adventures for current players and a redesigned leveling experience for those just starting out,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment.

“With the help of our beta testers, we’re putting on the final polish, and we look forward to welcoming gamers around the world to enjoy it in just a couple of months.”

Source: www.stuff.co.nz

Google’s prince of online search

For a search analyst at Google, Amit Singhal certainly talks the talk.

Our phone interview had hardly started when Singhal asked, “Did you go for a bike ride this morning?”

I’m a keen cyclist and made this known on the internet in various ways. The question showed me that either Singhal has pyschic powers or he used his employer’s search engine to find out what he could about me before the interview. I’m going for the second option.

Singhal, a senior member of Google’s ranking team in California and a Google Fellow, fell in love with “this sleepy field called search” when he was a graduate student in the United States, fresh from India 20 years ago. “It wasn’t as black-and-white as most of the computer science disciplines were then. It was a nice real- life problem that would help real people because natural languages are still not understood by computers.”

Singhal completed a masters degree and a doctorate in search. He joined Google in 2000, about fours before it went public.

Singhal wrote a new ranking system for Google not long after joining the company and has been running it since.

“When I started, search was still just keyword-based – searching for the exact phrase that you had written,” he says. Then Google changed to PageRank. Then I wrote the new ranking system and it changed in a different way – it was not as visible to users. Then we started moving away from the keyword model.”

In 2003, Google launched the language-understanding version of the ranking system, which made Google relevant to the language in different countries.

“The same language in different countries is also very different – you guys down there [New Zealand] speak a different English than we do [the United States]. Sometimes we don’t even understand it, so what we did was re-make Google relevant in every language, in every country. This kind of language understanding is very different for New Zealand than it is for Australia, for India, for the UK, for Canada, for the US, even though these are all English- speaking countries.”

Real-time search is another highlight for Singhal. “Real- time search, which allows us to take any piece of information which has just been generated – be it a Tweet, be it a Facebook status update, be it a Google Buzz update or a blog – and we take that information and within a few seconds filter it through a relevance algorithm and, if relevant to a user-query, it shows on Google’s results page.

“Twenty years back that was not even a dream, not even a thing of dreams,” he says.

What does the future hold for search? “This is the question I think about every day. This is my job and I think we are just cracking the surface of what search can do for us.

“What I dream about all the time is why can’t search just be a platform and why can’t the machines that I have in my pocket be searching for me all the time and help me towards the next step of being a more efficient human being?”