By Gavin Clarke 21 Dec 2005 21:07
The next few weeks could be crucial in the evolution of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next client operating system. Microsoft engineers will crunch through feedback from 500,000 beta testers who evaluated the latest Windows Vista Community Technology Preview (CTP).
At stake is a "feature complete" Windows Vista CTP due for release in "early" 2006. At last, after three years of big promises and broken dreams, we should be able to cut away the hype and get a realistic idea of Windows Vista's features and capabilities.As Microsoft decides what to put into Vista, one thing has become clear: after months of glitzy presentations Microsoft must explain in unambiguous terms why exactly corporate IT departments should bother upgrading, instead of waiting to receive the new software when they buy their next round of PCs.
more...Online retailers are not known for rapid fire, high-profile business moves.
But that has not been the case lately. In the last few months, two leading companies have made major acquisitions, and two others began the process of raising capital, signaling that investing sprees may continue in 2006.
Why so much activity in a market sector that typically churns away unnoticed? Some say it's Google Inc.'s doing.
Google's financial and business clout is such that it can introduce a new business venture, then sit back and watch the market incumbents scramble to adjust.
That's apparently now the case for companies that serve as online stores, comparison shopping sites and other peripheral services.
In May, Google unveiled Google Base, a free classified service with overtones of an eBay-like online store. The company has also been leaving clues of an online payment system, known as Google Wallet and/or Google Automat, that's now under construction.
The problem arises from the different treatment of the characters in the users mind and the computer's programming. From the viewpoint of the user, a Cyrillic "?" within a Latin string is a Latin "a"; there is literally no difference in the glyphs for these characters in most fonts. However, the computer treats them differently when processing the character string as an identifier. Thus, the user's assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between the visual appearance of a name, and the named entity, breaks down.
In a typical example of a hypothetical attack, someone could register a domain name that appears identical to an existing domain but goes somewhere else. For example, the spoofed domain "p?ypal.com" contains a Cyrillic a, not a Latin a. In many ways, this is not a new thing. For example, even staying within the old character set of A-Z, 0-9 and hyphen, G00GLE.COM looks much GOOGLE.COM in some fonts; or, using a mix of uppercase and lowercase characters, googIe.com (capital I, not small ell) looks much like google.com in some fonts. Or, displaying characters in lowercase alone, rnicrosoft.com (" RNICROSOFT.COM") looks very much like microsoft.com in many fonts. What is new was that the expansion by the internationalized domain name system of the character repertoire from a few dozen characters in a single alphabet to many thousands of characters in many scripts greatly increased the scope for homograph attacks.
During a keynote at the Apache Software Foundation's ApacheCon in San Diego, Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun and XML specification co-editor, said Sun was incorporating the open-source Java DB into the Sun Java Enterprise System and providing additional support for the database with the NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) 5.0 plug-in.
