Samsung Electronics said it has developed the first 10-megapixel camera phone, that the company asserts could usher in a new round of mobile convergence.

Samsung said its SCH-B600 camera phone will be disclosed during the one-week CeBIT 2006 show in Hanover, Germany, which started Thursday (March 9).

The 10-megapixel camera features a 3x optical zoom, 5x digital zoom and a 1/2,000th of a second shutter speed. Samsung claims it is the first camera phone to adopt an auto-focus, fill-light function to deliver higher-resolution pictures.

The phone is equipped with a 2-inch, 16-million-pixel color TFT LCD, supports satellite digital multimedia broadcasting services and comes with a dual-face and dual-speaker system. It also includes TV-out and MP3 player functions.

Source: InformationWeek

The consumer VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) darling Skype dialed in to small-business and branch office needs Thursday with a new offering, Skype for Business.

“We know from listening to our … customers that 30 percent are of them are regularly using Skype for their businesses and most of these are small companies,�? Skype Chief Executive Officer Niklas Zennstrom said Thursday.

The move builds on Skype’s existing small business offerings with a dedicated Web site, skype.biz, and support, new hardware and new features to better manage groups of users and prepaid accounts, Skype said.

Source: InfoWorld

A Texas lawyer named Kenneth Nash owns a patent on a method for detecting pirated software by assigning each program a unique ID and verifying it over the Internet.

Nash sued Microsoft over its product activation program and lost when a judge in Houston ruled against him. On Thursday, he took his patent claim before a federal court here in hopes of a victory on appeal.

The dispute involves patent 6,449,645. It describes how to collect the unique ID–such as a serial number or activation key–assigned to each computer in an Internet database, preferably without the user’s knowledge, and checking for multiple copies of the same program running. That could let it flag two friends who were illegally running, say, a video game with the same activation key.

If the software patent is found to be valid to apply to Microsoft’s software, other companies could be at risk. Adobe says it uses software activation technology that “uniquely” identifies the computer and sends the information “to Adobe’s Web server.” Symantec also uses product activation. And the patent is broader than just software: it also covers “digital music, digital movies, multimedia or the like.”

Source: News.com

Design software maker Adobe Systems Inc.expects to see increasing revenues from the sale of its flagship products for use on mobile phones, its president and chief operating officer said on Thursday.

“We expect mobile to increasingly contribute to the company,” Shantanu Narayen told Reuters in an interview in Finland where he visited clients such as Nokia .

Adobe, known for its Acrobat document sharing and, after its Macromedia acquisition last year, for Flash animation software, expects to increase penetration of its products in mobile phones through sales to handset makers and telecoms operators, he said.

“We certainly like to believe that as rich media is being consumed more on these devices … that both Flash and Reader become essential part of these devices … We are vigilant to make it happen,” Narayen said.

Flash and Reader software are currently available mostly on top-end phones, but Narayen said the company was aiming also to have it in the cheaper products.

Source: Reuters

American Airlines is demanding that Google and video-sharing site YouTube reveal the name of the person who posted a portion of one of the airline’s training videos on the Web.

Someone uploaded part of a video used to train flight attendants on YouTube and Google Video. The airline subpoenaed those companies on Feb. 21 under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), according to airline spokesman Tim Wagner. Under the provisions of the DMCA, companies have the right to request information in the event that their copyright materials are infringed upon.

The video in question, titled “Flight Attendant, Upside Down,” is under copyright, Wagner said.

Responding to questions about the subpoena, Google said in an e-mail that the company “complies with valid and appropriate legal process, including subpoenas.”

Source: News.com

Advanced Micro Devices plans its own mid-year counterattack as Intel begins to roll out new versions of its processors based on the Core architecture. AMD will refresh its entire portfolio with new chips that promise greater performance and new functionality.

The next-generation AMD processors for servers, desktop, and mobile computing will include the company’s first use of DDR2 (Double Data Rate) memory, and its embedded hardware-assisted virtualization capability, formerly known as Pacifica.

While Intel has previously used DDR2 memory in its processors, Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for AMD, says the company held off until now because DDR2 had been too expensive for the modest gains in performance it provided. As the memory has come down in price and increased in performance from 400 MHz to 667 MHz, Kerby believes the time has come for AMD to make the switch.

Source: InformationWeek

Would-be transit system bombers could be foiled when they pay their fares if a new generation of ticket machines works as its developers hope.

The machines are equipped to detect traces of explosives on ticket buyers’ fingers, said GE Security and transit systems company Cubic Corp., who jointly engineered them.

If they work as intended, the machines could have the potential to thwart attacks such as the London transport bombings last July.

The automatic ticket vendor, shown for the first time at a conference in Washington, D.C., this week, incorporates a GE Security-developed fingertip “trace detection analyzer.”

It has been selected for a transit pilot program to be announced in the coming weeks, said General Electric Co. and partner Cubic.

Source: Reuters

Novell has introduced the next version of its desktop
Linux OS, a release the company hopes will begin a “viral” migration from Windows in the next several years, said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Novell.

Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10), launched at the CeBIT show here, is the first version of Novell’s desktop Linux that is “good enough” for enterprises to replace Microsoft’s Windows OS in more than just limited deployments, Jaffe said.

“Our new SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop now meets the needs of the basic office worker,” he said.

Jaffe acknowledged that desktop Linux has barely made a dent in the enterprise, though a migration from Windows to Linux on enterprise desktops has been predicted for years. However, he said that he expects enterprise pilots of SLED 10 to begin in earnest in late 2006.

Then, once companies realize how painlessly they can integrate a Linux desktop into an enterprise dominated by Windows, the trend to use Linux alongside or to replace Windows in the enterprise should catch fire by 2008, Jaffe said.

“I don’t think mass migrations will come until 2007, maybe 2008, but this is the year to really prepare for it,” he said.

Source: PCWorld

The RSA Cyota Anti-Fraud Command Center (AFCC) at RSA Security (Nasdaq: RSAS) announced this week that it has discovered that online fraudsters have developed a new phishing technique in response to increasingly aggressive moves to identify and shut down phishing sites.

This new type of attack, known as a Smart Redirection Attack, is designed to ensure that potential phishing victims always link to a live website. So far two attacks on two different banks — one based in the UK and the other in Canada — have been detected.

How it works

For a Smart Redirection Attack, the fraudster creates a number of similar phishing websites based at different locations. All of the emails received by consumers contain URLs that direct the victim to an IP address that hosts the ’smart redirector’. When the potential victim clicks on the link, the ‘redirector’ checks all related phishing websites, identifies which sites are still live, and invisibly redirects the user to one of them.

The thinking behind the scam - Fraudsters are aware that once a user identifies the site as fraudulent, s/he will report the site’s address, and there’s a good chance that someone will shut it down. If the fraudster has used a single address for an entire batch of emails, the entire mailing list directed to that site would be wasted. However, sending the redirector address (hidden from the consumer) assures that the consumer will always reach a live site.

NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), extends its NVIDIA SLI technology to notebook PCs for the first time. Delivering new levels of visual realism at extremely high-definition resolutions, SLI technology enables two NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX graphics processing units (GPUs) to be used in notebooks based on the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI core-logic solution.

The GeForce Go 7800 GTX was the first top-of-the-line notebook GPU to deliver performance on par with desktop PCs, and provide the gamer with enthusiast-class performance on the road.

“Desktop PCs featuring SLI technology still had the performance edge. They needed that edge because of the higher resolutions desktop monitors,” said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of the GPU business unit at NVIDIA. “Now gaming notebooks with extreme HD resolutions of up to 1920 x 1200 are here, requiring more processing power so gamers can still turn up their 3D quality settings. SLI technology delivers that power — creating high-performance notebooks for gamers on the go.”

If you’ve noticed your Windows Media Player acting strange, Microsoft has an explanation.

A trio of updates for the media player software, including a recent security patch, can cause the software to malfunction, the software maker said in a technical support article published on its Web site earlier this week. Microsoft late Wednesday e-mailed notices alerting customers to the support page.

The updates can cause issues when trying to seek, fast rewind or fast forward in Windows Media Player 10, Microsoft said. Playback might freeze, even though the status bar shows it is still playing. Also, the playback position slider could jump back to the start of the media file for no apparent reason, the company said.

These situations can occur after installing one of three updates, Microsoft said. One is the latest security fix for Windows Media Player, a “critical” patch released last month. The flaw could allow an attacker to gain control over a vulnerable PC by tricking a user into opening a malicious file. Examples of code that exploits the flaw was available only days after Microsoft released the patch.

Source: News.com

Symantec has quietly pulled the plug on sales of L0phtCrack, the venerable password auditing and recovery application.

The decision to discontinue support for L0phtCrack, also known as LC5, comes just months after Symantec stopped selling the application to customers outside the United States and Canada out of concerns that it violated cryptography export controls.

The ship date of L0phtCraft was Mar. 3, 2006 and Symantec will offer customer help until Dec. 16, 2006. The company will not be shipping any product code updates, enhancements or fixes to L0phtCraft after March 3.

Source: eWeek