The Great Geek Manual News

The Apple brand has the biggest impact on the world’s consumers, while Microsoft and the United States nation brand are those considered most in need of a remake, a survey showed on Monday.

The poll by online magazine brandchannel.com asked its readers to identify the brands with the greatest impact on their lives, and say how they affected readers’ behaviour and their view of the world.

The nearly 2,000 professionals and students who voted named Apple overwhelming winner. The creator of the iPod and Mac computer triumphed in six categories including most inspiring brand and the one readers cannot live without.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker was also a winner, but it received the dubious honor of the brand most readers wanted to argue with, and the one they most wanted to revamp. Voted into second place in the category was brand USA.

“Apple has clearly captured the hearts and minds by leading across most categories. Others, such as the USA nation brand, which ranks highly as most in need of a rebrand, requires help according to our readers,” said brandchannel editor Jim Thompson.

The poll does not take account of economic brand value, the murky science of assigning a financial value to brand, which regularly puts Coca-Cola Co’s (KO.N) Coke in first place.

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Source: Reuters

If you’ve ever wanted to know just exactly how much DNA you share with your ridiculously tall brother or doppelganger best friend, you’ll soon be able to find out. 23andMe, a personal genomics startup in Mountain View, CA, is about to unveil a new social-networking service that allows customers to compare their DNA. The company hopes that the new offering will encourage consumers to get DNA testing, potentially creating a novel research resource in the process.

“I think the idea of social networking has untapped potential,” says George Church, a pioneer in genomics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and a member of 23andMe’s scientific advisory board. “The idea has precedence in PatientsLikeMe, people who have been enabled to find one another by their disease. Here, people can find each other by their alleles [or genetic variations].”

23andMe is one of a number of companies that have sprung up in the past year to offer genome-wide DNA testing directly to consumers. People who order the $999 kit send in a sample of spit and, in return, receive an analysis of nearly 600,000 genetic variations linked to disease and other factors, such as ancestry, height, and eye color.

These fledgling companies have garnered both hype and criticism, with most of the controversy centered on the medical applications. Customers can learn their genetic risk, compared with the general population, of myriad diseases, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, macular degeneration, and cancer. But many scientists and physicians say that it’s unclear whether the average user can truly comprehend this information, and whether knowing her genetic risk will actually improve her health.

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Source: Technology Review

Hacker Charlie Miller nets $10,000 and a laptop for hacking Apple, Inc.’s MacBook Air in two minutes. But analysts say it could just as well have been a Windows PC since Miller was using Apple’s flawed Safari browser at the CanSecWest conference. Apple has been notified of the new, undisclosed vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser.

First he hacked Apple’s iPhone. Now he’s hacked Apple’s MacBook Air. But some analysts are warning not to be quick to judge security Relevant Products/Services based on Charlie Miller’s work.

Miller, a researcher at Independent Security Evaluators, won $10,000 and a laptop Thursday at the CanSecWest security conference’s Pwn 2 Own hacking contest. He did it by hacking the MacBook Air — and it took him all of two minutes.

CanSecWest organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and a MacBook as booty for hackers who could find a way to breach security and gain access to the contents of system files using a previously undisclosed zero-day attack. A zero-day attack is the exploitation of unpatched software vulnerabilities.

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Source: News Factor

More than just the cute guy or girl catches your eye at the bar these days.

Nearly 80 percent of people surveyed in a recent study recalled at least one of four advertisements running on digital billboard screens at bars where they were partying. That’s not a bad number considering the audience surveyed by Arbitron and Zoom Media & Marketing — 500 people aged 21 to 34. That’s a demographic that advertisers love.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Zoom Media is an advertising company with a big digital presence in bars and nightclubs. Still, the survey suggest that digital billboards really are getting eyeballs.

Another finding from the survey: “Consumers who were exposed to the advertising were much more likely to consider certain brands as category leaders. For example, when asked what they thought the top new video games were, twice as many people were likely to answer Assassin’s Creed — which was one of the commercials used in the survey — compared to those not exposed to the ad.”

Note that the study found 40 percent of those surveyed visit bars over 10 times a month. So whether these folks could recall the advertisements — or where they left their shoes — the next day is another matter altogether.

Source: Reuters

US colleges and their alumni may be offered the right to P2P file-sharing under one of the most radical copyright reforms in a hundred years, The Register has learned. The amnesty would be part of a “covenant not to sue”, covered by a collective licence that offers the right to exchange major label repertory over a participating college’s campus network. Rights holders would be compensated from a pot of money drawn from students’ tuition fees.

Today, many US universities participate in a compulsory Napster or Rhapsody program; these only offer time-limited DRM-encumbered songs, though, and students are still liable for prosecution by the RIAA or its biggest members. Unexpectedly, the deal would extend outside the campus network to college alumni, too.

However, the proposals, which are still at the planning stage, have already drawn concern from publishers and smaller labels. Digital deals, and specifically collective licensing deals proposed by major labels typically offer songwriters little or no compensation, and leave the burgeoning independent sector as an afterthought.

An even greater concern is that a “covenant not to sue” would destroy the market for innovative business models built on collective licence. As explained last week, a one-time deal gives neither the music supplier nor the network operator any reason to innovate to produce more attractive services for music lovers.

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Source: The Register

Although Firefox 3 is still in research and development, Mozilla is already working on new features for the fourth version of its increasingly popular Web browser. Webware spoke with Mozilla vice president Chris Beard, who mentioned two specific new concepts for Firefox 4 that will evolve the online experience and add greater integration with content stored on computer hard drives.

One of the new features is called “Prism,” a next-gen software technology that would allow users to run Web-based content offline. For example, users would be able to visit websites and still access non-dynamic content even when they don’t have an active Internet connection.

The other big feature already unveiled for Firefox 4 is called “Weave.” This is an option that would basically create a set of online preferences and settings that is stored for each user instead of each computer.

In other words, users would be able to bring up their bookmarks, font settings and privacy preferences no matter which computer they use. This feature is set to be in its first stages in Firefox 3, but Firefox 4 will reportedly allow users to access these profiles on other browsers as well.

Beard told Webware that these are just a hint of some of the “crazy ideas” the development team is working on for the next-next-gen browser.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

VeriSign is activating terms of its operating agreement with ICANN and raising the fees for registering .com and .net domains by 40 cents each as of October 1.

Domain registrar and net infrastructure operator VeriSign announced today that it will raise the fees for registering .com and .net domains by $0.40 beginning October 1, 2008. The fee increases are allowed under Verisign’s agreement with ICANN; under that agreement, Verisign can raise fees for .com domain registration in four of the six years between 2006 and 2012.

The new fees for registering a .com domain will be $6.86; a .net domain will run $4.23. These fees are components of th overall cost to register a domain; various registrars have different fee structures, but will likely pass along the fee increases directly to domain buyers.

VeriSign says continued increased in Internet traffic, the proliferation of consumer-driven Internet services, and the need to further fortify the TLD’s infrastructure against “increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks” are behind the fee increases. The company says it plans to increase the capacity of its overall Internet infrastructure tenfold by 2010, pushing bandwidth at key operation centers around the world to over 200 Gbps and expanding its DNS capacity from being able to handle 400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day.

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Source: Digital Trends

Ordinary Cubans will soon have the luxury of owning a cell phone, according to a story by the Associated Press. President Raul Castro’s government said Friday that it will allow anyone in the country to get cell phone service, a right previously limited to executives working for foreign companies or high communist party officials.

This is the first announcement that a major government policy or restriction has been changed since the 76-year-old Castro took over as leader of the island nation from his older brother Fidel Castro.

The AP said there has been a kind of black market for cell phones in Cuba where people who were ineligible were able to get phones and service by having foreigners sign contracts in their names. But for the most part, mobile phones are not common in Cuba.

The small wireless market in Cuba is a monopoly controlled by Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A., or ETECSA. The company has said it will soon offer prepaid contracts to the general public now that the ban has been lifted.

But because most Cubans only make about 408 Cuban pesos, or a little less than $20, a month according to the AP, it’s hard to imagine that many Cubans will be able to afford a cell phone. Still, even the poorest of the poor have managed to afford cell phones in other countries. I was amazed on my a recent trip to the Philippines that everyone I encountered, from housemaids to Bangka boat captains to street vendors, all had cell phones. The Philippines also happens to be considered the texting capital of the world.

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Source: CNet

Apple’s teasing commercials that imply its software is safer than Microsoft’s may not quite match the facts, according to new research revealed at the Black Hat conference on Thursday.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology looked at how many times over the past six years the two vendors were able to have a patch available on the day a vulnerability became publicly known, which they call the zero-day patch rate.

They analyzed 658 vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and 738 affecting Apple. They looked at only high- and medium-risk bugs, according to the classification used by the National Vulnerability Database, said Stefan Frei, one of the researchers involved in the study.

What they found is that, contrary to popular belief that Apple makes more secure products, Apple lags behind in patching.

“Apple was below 20 [unpatched vulnerabilities at disclosure] consistently before 2005,” Frei said. “Since then, they are very often above. So if you have Apple and compare it to Microsoft, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple.”

It’s generally good for vendors to have a software fix available when a vulnerability is disclosed, since hackers often try to find out where the problem is in order to write malicious software to hack a machine.

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Source: PC World via Yahoo! News

Philippine PC manufacturer Neo and multinational computer processor maker Intel have jointly launched a new 16,999-peso (406-dollar) mini laptop, spokesmen said Saturday.

The Neo Explore is a “ruggedized and shock-proof” laptop with a keyboard that will not be damaged by spillages of liquids, said Neo spokeswoman Mariel Que.

It weighs 0.66 kilograms (1.45 pounds) and is the size of a schoolchild’s lunchbox but will have the memory capacity and usual features of a standard basic laptop.

Though the Explore is primarily designed for primary school children here, it can also be used by first-time PC users for word-processing and Internet access, said Intel Philippines country manager Ricky Banaag.

It will be available in stores in major Philippine cities.

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Source: Yahoo! News via Yahoo! News

Book lovers across Canada on Saturday bade farewell to the Book Room, Canada’s oldest bookstore, considered by many as a Nova Scotia icon.

The 169-year-old establishment survived two world wars and the Great Depression but buckled under the pressure of online ordering, big-box stores and the expansion of books into grocery stores and drugstores.

“The market reality is really changing,” said owner Charles Burchell, as the Book Room closed its doors for the last time.

Burnell said that the Christmas of 2007 was his worst on record in the 42 years he’s run the bookstore. Apart from online ordering and mass expansion, he attributed the store’s losses to the dual pricing of books- Canada price being higher than the US.

He said publishers did not react quickly enough to the rising Canadian dollar.

The store has served the Halifax community since 1839, and customers said the closing will be like a family member gone missing or dying.

Source: All Headline News

When Victory Baptist School, a small private school in Millbrook, Ala., was struggling to keep its computer network together last year, an 11-year-old student named Jon Penn stepped in as network manager.

Penn did it to help his mother, Paula, the school librarian who had computer support added to her workload a week before the school year started when the existing IT systems overseer suddenly departed. For Jon — who says his favorite reading material is computer trade magazines — it’s been the experience of a lifetime, even getting to select and install a gateway security appliance largely by himself.

“This is kind of a small school, and I’m known as the computer whiz,” the sixth grader says. “We spent $2,158,” says young Penn, describing how he picked out the McAfee Secure Internet Gateway Appliance after evaluating it in a 30-day trial. He also looked at the Barracuda box — a tad more costly — and tried the Untangle open source product, which he said didn’t meet the school’s needs as well.

His school needed a gateway to protect against attacks, filter viruses and spam, and block inappropriate sites. Keeping costs down is important since the school is operating on a shoestring budget to keep its 60 aging computers, a donation from years ago, working for the roughly 200 students permitted to use them, along with the teachers.

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Source: Network World

A new study reveals that iPods and other digital music players do not hinder the function of a pacemaker. This finding contradicts May 2007 study published last year indicating that emissions from iPods are harmful for people for pacemakers. However, cardiac electrophysiologists at Children’s Hospital Boston says that iPods are compatible with pacemakers.

The study involves 51 patients, all with active pacemakers or implanted cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) and the patient’s average age is 22 years. The researchers played four different kinds of digital music directly over each patient’s pacemaker or ICD.

The study shows that the low-level magnetic fields and resulting induced voltages made by the iPod poses no risk to patients with implanter pacemakers. Electrocardiographic (EKG) reveals no changes in any of the 255 separate tests and none of the patients showed any symptoms.

“This provides reassuring evidence that should allay the fears of people using iPods and other digital music players,” study senior investigator Dr. Charles Berul said.

The researchers suggested that patients should not use digital music device while a doctor is reprogramming their heart device because the music players interfered with the computerized device used by the doctors to check and calibrate the heart devices.

The study appears in the April issue of Heart Rhythm.

Source: All Headline News

The Pentagon said on Wednesday that it had approved the start of development of a next-generation radio system for aircraft, ships and ground stations, paving the way for a huge contract award to either Boeing Co (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) or Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) in coming days.

Pentagon acquisition chief John Young signed a document approving the next phase of the Joint Tactical Radio System program late on Monday, a spokesman for him said.

Defense analysts say the contract for system design and development of the Airborne Maritime and Fixed Station (AMF) segment of the program will total $800 million to $1.2 billion. A later production contract could translate into business deals valued at $10 billion or more over the long term, they say.

The tactical radio system is a family of advanced software-based communications that will replace current radio equipment throughout the U.S. military. It will provide secure Internet-like capabilities and networking for voice, text, audio and video.

The contract will be the final piece of the JTRS program, which also includes development of the underlying software and of handheld and backpack-sized radios.

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Source: Reuters