Software

Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard: World Cup Scores Live To Desktop
If watching the World Cup on TV, online or down the pub wasn’t enough, Microsoft can help you stay up to date with goal-by-goal action.
They’re providing a little app (3.5Mb) for Windows users called Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard. We’ll forget that to the rest of the world outside the US, the game is called Football, and focus on what it can do.
When you’ve downloaded it (after proving that you have ‘Genuine Windows’), the setup is minimal – choose your team; set how transparent you want the app to be; decide if you want automatic or manual data updates and specify an option RSS feed.
It’s a looker
It’s an attractive looking piece of software, which is slightly more that a one trick pony. The next match in your teams group will be shown, as is the current top four positions of the Group with the cumulative totals. Both of these have the option to view full details, which refreshes the screen in a scrollable window.
Scores of other matches scroll across the bottom of the window in a CNN stock price style.
Not missing a trick, they offer you the ‘opportunity’ of clicking on a link, taking you to MSN for further details.
If you specify an RSS feed (Digital-Lifestyles, natch), the headlines from these are intermittently scrolled along the bottom too.
There’s also a compact mode that only displays the particular match that’s being played.
Use-by date
This software does have a use-by date. Clearly you’re not going to get any information updated after the World Cup ends on 9th July, because …. there’s no more matches being played.
Following this you’re going to have 7 days to obsessively click around the historic match information imagining ‘what if?”
Most refreshingly, on 31 July, the software will prompt you to uninstall the software.
Microsoft Live
Microsoft Live is something that Microsoft pushing really hard. They see it as a way to try and claw back some the gain that Google has had. This is being lead by 13 June, 2006
Anti-DRM FlashMobs Hit Apple Stores
Saturday saw anti-DRM protests at eight Apple stores across the USA organised by DefectiveByDesign, who are running an on-going ‘Campaign to Eliminate DRM.’
The protests took place between 10am and noon, where those involved got dressed up in brightly coloured HazMat (hazardous material) suits, stood outside the shops carrying placards and handing out leaflets.
They argue that it is unreasonable, among other things, that purchasers of music tracks on iTunes are not able to resell their music once they have finished with it – a right they previously had when they used to buy physical media.
Where as to most people DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, Defective By Design label it ‘Digital Restrictions Management.’ Their particular beef with Apple is that, because of the use of DRM, Apple are locking-in people who buy music tracks at the iTunes store.
It’s the first time we’ve heard to a flashmob being used for anything approaching useful.
Being online-types there’s loads of media to look at whether is be photos and a number of videos from Chicago and San Francisco.

List of Apple stores affected
Apple Store – 1 Stockton St, San Francisco, CA 94108
Apple Store – 679 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611
Apple Store – 4702 NE University Village Pl, Seattle, WA 98105
Apple Store – 100 Cambridge Side Place, Cambridge, MA 02141
Apple Store – 767 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10153
Apple Store – 160 Walt Whitman Rd. Huntington Station, NY 11746h
Apple Store – 6121 West Park Blvd. Plano, TX 75093
Apple Store – 189 The Grove Drive Los Angeles, CA 90036
DefectiveByDesign call to arms
12 June, 2006
Google Spreadsheets Heads Into Excel Territory
Google is ready to shove its size nines deep into Microsoft territory with the launch of a free Web-based spreadsheet program, Google Spreadsheets.
The new program will allow people to view and simultaneously edit data online while conducting what Google describe as “in-document” chat.
This new spreadsheet product looks sure to put the heat on Microsoft, who have long ruled the roost with their desktop-based, spreadsheet app Excel long being the de facto office tool.
Google’s announcement comes hot on the heels of their purchase of Writely, a Web-based word processor, and puts them in direct competition with the Redmond mob who are busy prepping their new online-focused Windows Live and Office Live services.
Launching in beta form today, Google Spreadsheets supports the import and export of documents in the .xls format used in Excel and the .csv (common separate values) format, although it is not yet compatible with many of Excel’s more powerful features – the program can’t, for example, create charts or serve up control menus by right clicking on the screen.
Jonathan Rochelle, the Google Spreadsheets product manager, explained that the new service will be able to handle several hundred formulas used to manipulate data in Excel, but it won’t be able to handle more complex functions like Excel macros.
He explained that the program’s main goal is to make it easier for family, friends or co-workers to read and work on the same spreadsheet from different computers at different times, letting authorised users add and edit data without having to keep sending e-mail attachments back and forth.
“When people want to share and collaborate, we think this product fits in well,” he added.
Users must have a Google account to use the new service, which will initially only be offered to a limited number of users.
Google
6 June, 2006
N-Gage Online Game Purchase Launched
Nokia took a step into the world of online content delivery today with the launch of a new Website specialising in downloadable games for its N-Gage device. Gamers can download time-limited demos of games such as One and Pathway to Glory before purchasing at between 19.99 and 29.99 euros.
The shop, is a significant step for the company allowing them to deliver games directly to customers, an achievement not always matched in stores. It could also pave the way for online games downloading services, perhaps the gaming equivalent of Apple’s iTunes?
The process? All that is needed is to identify the game that you’re interested in, pay for it, download it to your computer, then load it on to a spare memory card to your N-Gage.
The N-Gage has not had an easy time. The first version was launched to widespread derision due to its ‘unique’ side-talking feature, which forced users to speak into the side of the device, instantaneously transforming them into raging doofuses. A succession of model changes followed, culminating in the more sensibly configured, 7710, or N-Gage QD as it’s more often known as..
While the concept of side-talking may fuel nerd in-jokes for some time to come (see sidetalkin) Nokia are determined to develop the N-Gage platform to create a multi-player, mobile gaming community which can connect via a variety of devices. The N-Gage platform for multiple devices was announced at the E3 trade show in Washington last month and will roll-out in early 2007.
“As we move forward with our next generation of mobile gaming, we continue to offer N-Gage owners easy ways to get games,” said Jukka Hosio, Director, Global Sales, Multimedia, Nokia. “The N-Gage platform is recognized worldwide for its high-quality mobile gaming content. By making these games available for download over the internet, we’re making it easier for N-Gage owners to find and purchase new games.”
Gameshop
6 June, 2006
Adobe NoteTag Revealed
Adobe has made available a proof-of-concept version of their new productivity tool, NoteTag. NoteTag harnesses Web 2.0 standards (such as RSS and tags) and integrates them with social software services. It allows users to take electronic notes and share them in a multi-user, collaborative environment. NoteTag users can quickly record, assign and update tasks locally from within the Web-based system but can also access them on Blogger, Typepad and del.icio.us.
The really clever bit of NoteTag is that Blogger, TypePad and del.icio.us are the back end of the system. There are no proprietary file formats or technologies; instead, NoteTag is built on current tagging standards and so can interface with anything that supports the Atom Publishing Protocol.
NoteTag is the first release from Adobe’s Kiwi Project which aims to create rich Internet content using Flex2 technology. The software is open source and free, and the project is keen for users to feedback their experiences and comments.
As bloggers Stowe Boyd and Steve Rubel and have noted, NoteTag is somewhat complex to get up and running and needs to be hosted on a server, but its integration with Web 2 services points to interesting new directions for Adobe.
A NoteTag demo and a Kiwi Project blog are available.
2 June, 2006
Personal Train Timetables Review: For Mobiles, PCs and Palms (85%)
If you’re a regular train traveller across the UK, or you’re planning a holiday involving lots of different journeys, keeping track of all the various train times can be a bit of a pain.
Normally, you’d have to lug around a bag full of separate timetables or fork out for those spoddy jumbo timetable books often seen in the clammy paws of trainspotters, but thanks to the cunning skills of the German railway Website bahn.de, you can download customised timetables direct to your PC, phone or Palm handheld.
Setting up individual timetables is simplicity itself – just type in your start and destination stations and then select the date period you want journey information on.
Then tick off what days of the week you want included in your timetable along with the outward/return journey times (or select ‘whole day’ for the all trains) and select what modes of travel you want included or excluded from your file.
Next, you have to you choose what format you want your timetable in: PDF, PDB (for Palm handhelds) and J2ME for Java mobiles, downloadable as a zip file or via a WAP URL.
Then it’s a case of bashing the ‘create’ buttom and waiting for a few minutes as the Teutonic technlogoy does it thing, before being presented with links to your timetable (you can elect to download the timetable directly from the site or have the files emailed to you).
Free Palm viewer
Palm users can also download a highly functional free custom viewer called, appropriately enough, Personal Viewer, created by the German company that powers the timetable engine, HaCon.
This small download provides a simple interface serving up enough timetable-related data to give train buffs a moist spot or two.
Users can store as many timetables as they like on their Palm (the files can also be run from the card to save space), with the tabbed interface letting travellers select their journey and time of travel and then see available trains, journey details and stops on the way – there’s even an indication whether snacks will be available on the selected train!
We’ve been using this program on our Palm handheld for years, and can thoroughly recommend it – especially as it’s totally FREE!
Overall score: 85%
Personal Timetable
1 June, 2006
Nokia Mobile S60 Browser Code Goes Open Source
At the W3C conference in Edinburgh today, in a move to get the mobile industry (and possibly more) to standardise on a single Web browser, Nokia has released the source code for the mobile Web browser it developed last year.
Using the same open-source frameworks used by Apple’s Safari browser, originally created by the KDE team, Nokia designed a browser for its S60 phone range, adding various enhancements designed to improve mobile browsing.
Under the open source deal, any individual software developer, third party mobile phone makers or operators can get their grubby mitts on the software engine that powers the Nokia-developed browser and customise it for their own needs.
Nokia’s S60 Web Browser for S60 is a fully fledged affair, offering full mobile browsing of complete Web pages straight off the Internet, complete with support for AJAX technologies, dynamic HTML and scripting languages.
Nokia intend to offer “active participation” with the open source community, sharing enhancements, widgets and improvements to the core browser engine in real time.
“We want to reduce the fragmentation currently in place in mobile browsing,” said Lee Epting, VP of Forum Nokia, Nokia’s software development support program.
Although sceptics may suggest the last thing rivals would want to do is to start using a Nokia browser, she insisted that the terms of the ‘liberal license’ would let anyone use the code to develop their own commercial offerings.
The source code will be made available to open source developers through the WebKit Open Source Project.
Further resources can also be found at Nokia Opensourcesite and Nokia S60 browser.
24 May, 2006
Over A Third Of All PC Software Pirated
Over a third of all packaged software installed on PCs worldwide in 2005 was pirated, according to a study released by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a trade group charged with fighting the use of unauthorised software.
Although the percentage of dodgy software in use remained the same as last year, global losses from software piracy rose by US$1.6 billion to $34 billion, according to BSA’s figures.
Exaggerated figures?
Not everyone buys into the hefty figures though, with some economists questioning the estimated losses in the annual study.
The total is based on the price users would have paid for legitimate versions of the pirated software, but, as BSA president and CEO Robert Holleyman recently commented himself, some users would have decided not to use the software if they had to fork out for it.
In fact, some have claimed that BSA’s accounting methods are so inaccurate that it amounts to scaremongering, especially when extrapolating figures from third world countries where just a few programs at full price would cost more than a citizen’s average annual income.
More notably, IDC, the company that produces the reports, has already stated publicly that the BSA is misrepresenting the numbers, pointing out that the US$34 billion claimed “losses” aren’t actually “losses” at all – it’s just the estimated retail value of the pirated software.
Instead, IDC estimates that only one out of every ten pirated programs should be counted as an actual loss, which makes for much less of a headline-grabbing story.
Piracy league tables
Back to the BSA, Holleyman noted the anti-piracy progress being made in some countries, but insisted that, “much more needs to be done.”
Of all the countries studied, the US came out with the lowest piracy rate of all at 21 percent, but the massive size of the software market there meant that it recorded the highest claimed loss of $6.9 billion.
In second place was China with recorded losses of $3.9 billion and a piracy rate so high that anyone actually buying a registered copy of software must be seen as a bit of a weirdo – 86 percent.
In third place was France which notched up losses of $3.2 billion, accompanied by a piracy rate of 47 percent, while in Brit-land, 27 per cent of PC software used in the UK was claimed to be illegal.
In terms of outright piracy, Vietnam and Zimbabwe led the purloining world with piracy rates approaching 90 percent, followed by Indonesia at 87 and China and Pakistan at 86 percent.
Although the amount of global piracy has remained constant, the study found that some traditional piracy hotspots have decreased, with Ukraine registering the biggest drop in piracy rates last year, down 6 percentage points, with China, Russia and Morocco also managing a 4 percentage points decrease.
Next to the US, countries with the lowest piracy rates included New Zealand, Austria and Finland.
Business Software Alliance (BSA)
24 May, 2006
Skype Security Hole Patched
Skype users are advised to upgrade their software in double quick time after a security bug was reported late last week by a security researcher in New Zealand.
Rating the vulnerability as ‘medium risk’, Skype says that the bug affects several versions of the Skype client for Windows and could allow an evil attacker to download a file from an affected PC without permission.
It has to be said that it’s a little bit obscure – to get stung by this fella you’d have be first tricked into visiting a nefarious Web page set up by the attacker who would need to have already added the victim to his contact list.
Danish bug tracking firm Secunia said that the “moderately critical” flaw was in Skype’s parsing of URLs, so a malformed link – sent in a Skype message, for example – could begin the transfer of a file without the victim’s consent,
The bug affects all releases of Skype for Windows up to and including version 2.0.x.104, as well as version 2.5.x.0 up to and including 2.5.x.78. Skype advised users to upgrade to Skype 2.5, release 2.5.x.79 or later, or Skype 2.0, release 2.0.x.105 or later.
A free upgrade is available online now (select ‘help’ and ‘check for update’ from the drop-down menu).
This is the first security bulletin issued by Skype in around seven months – good news for us as we use the program every day.
Skype security bulletin
22 May, 2006
Yahoo! Messenger Worm Installs Its Own ‘Safety Browser’
Much as we hate steenkin’ virus writers, we have to reluctantly take our hats off to the author of this Yahoo! Messenger Worm for at least being a bit original.
Described as “one of oddest and more insidious pieces of malware we have encountered in years,” by Tyler Wells, senior director of research at FaceTime Security Labs, the ‘yhoo32.explr’ Instant Messaging worm takes the novel step of installing its own Web browser onto a victim’s PC.
Somehow managing to keep a straight face, the dodgy-as-feck application announces itself as “The Safety Browser”, and sneakily uses the IE icon to make it easy for users to mistake it for the legitimate Internet Explorer browser.
Once installed, the browser opens up a user’s PC to a world of nasties, switching on pop-ups by default, hijacking their Internet Explorer homepage to point to a well-iffy site stuffed full of spyware-loaded links and, curiously, introducing an awful looped music track that plays every time the computer is turned on.
Once installed on the victim’s machine, the self-propagating worm hotfoots it to the user’s Yahoo! Messenger contacts and sends out links to a Website that then loads a command file onto the user’s PC and installs the (ahem) ‘Safety Browser’.
“This is the first instance of a complete Web browser hijack without the user’s awareness,” said Tyler Wells.
“Similar ‘rogue’ browsers, such as ‘Yapbrowser,’ have demonstrated the potential for serious damage by directing end-users to potentially illegal or illicit material,” he added, before concluding that such ‘rogue’ browsers are becoming the “hot new thing among hackers.”
The worm was found by the India research arm of FaceTime Security Labs via a ‘honeypot’ a trap set to detect viruses, worms, spyware and other threats, and reflects the growing threat from Instant Messenger applications and protocols being used to distribute malicious files and executables, as well as IM spamming (which now has now earned the daft acronym ‘SPIM’).
If you want to find out more about the details of this latest worm – and the people behind it – check out the amusing blog of Chris Boyd, a FaceTime Security Labs researcher.
22 May, 2006