What’s interesting about this update is the timing, coming one week before Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). The iPhone 3.0 software will be the star attraction, and developers have been working with betas for a couple of months. Could Apple be planning to release the final version of the iPhone 3.0 software to coincide with the event, ahead of a rumored iPhone hardware update? When the iPhone 2.0 software was released on the same day as the iPhone 3G (which was also the day Apple switched .Mac to MobileMe), Apple’s servers crumbled under the load of activations (see “iPhone 3G: On the Line in Seattle,” 2008-07-13). So I can see the case in separating the software and hardware releases, even if it means owners of the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G get to install the new operating system before new units running it appear.

More likely, I think, is that Apple released iPhone 3.0 compatibility so developers can test live interactions between iTunes and the new software before iPhone 3.0 ships. With a larger share of the market, tens of thousands of developers, and more competition (such as from the Palm Pre, which is due to ship two days before WWDC), Apple doesn’t want the same type of fiasco as last year’s MobileMe release (see “Apple Claims MobileMe Mail Fully Restored,” 2008-07-30).

Also released today was QuickTime 7.6.2, which provides support for iTunes 8.2 and fixes a number of security vulnerabilities related to viewing malformed media types. It’s also available via Software Update or as standalone downloads for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (57 MB), Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (48 MB) or Windows (20.9 MB).

Bucking the trend for ever-smaller devices, Amazon has announced the Kindle DX, a scaled-up version of the company’s much-discussed ebook reading device. Along with a larger screen, the Kindle DX provides a native PDF reader, finally making it compatible with the most common digital format for highly formatted electronic documents.

Apart from the larger screen, native PDF support, capability to rotate the screen to landscape mode, and increased internal storage, the Kindle DX is almost exactly like the recently released Kindle 2 (see “Amazon Announces Kindle 2 Ebook Reader,” 2009-02-09). Such standard features include 3G wireless connectivity that’s built into the purchase price, integration with Amazon’s online store for quick purchasing of books, long battery life, and text-to-speech on select titles.

The Kindle DX will be available “this summer” (read, “sometime before September 2009″) for $489; it’s available for pre-ordering now if you want to get into the queue early. The $359 Kindle 2 remains available. Unfortunately, both Kindles are sold only in the United States at this time, with Amazon blaming the limitation on “import/export laws and other restrictions.”

Specs — The big news for the Kindle DX is, of course, the large E-Ink screen. It’s 9.7 inches (24.6 cm) measured diagonally, up from the Kindle 2′s 6-inch (15.24 cm) screen. It has a 824 by 1200 pixel resolution at 150 ppi (pixels per inch), and offers 16 levels of grays. In comparison, the Kindle 2 screen offers only 600 by 800 pixel resolution, but at 167 ppi and with the same shades of gray.

The larger screen increases the physical size of the Kindle DX significantly, bumping it up to 10.4 by 7.2 by 0.38 inches (26.4 by 18.3 by 0.97 cm) and increasing the weight from 10.2 ounces (289 g) to 18.9 ounces (535 g).

Although an improvement on the Kindle 2 and original Kindle, the Kindle DX’s screen is still rather small – a standard size for a trade paperback is 7 by 9 inches (17.8 by 22.9 cm), giving it a diagonal size of 11.5 inches (29.2 cm). Textbooks are larger yet, often at 8.5 by 11 inches (21.6 by 27.9 cm). However, the overall physical dimensions of the Kindle DX are fairly close to that trade paperback size, which is quite comfortable to hold.

The lower pixel density than the Kindle 2 may make for fuzzier fonts, and the larger screen could be more sluggish to redraw – remember that the E-Ink screen must be redrawn in its entirety for each page flip. We won’t know until people have had a chance to compare the two side-by-side in a few months.

Amazon also increased the internal storage of the Kindle DX, giving it 4 GB of memory, up from 2 GB in the Kindle 2. Not all of that is available for user content, with the usable space at 3.3 GB for the Kindle DX and 1.4 GB for the Kindle 2.

Finally, the Kindle DX must have some sort of an orientation sensor, since it can automatically rotate the display from portrait to landscape when you turn the device, just like the iPhone and iPod touch. There’s no indication of any other accelerometer-based functionality at this time.

PDF, at Long Last — The main advantage of the larger screen is that, for the first time with a Kindle, PDF documents will not have to be converted to simple HTML and reflowed to fit a tiny screen. Almost all magazines and many books – particularly technical books, textbooks, and reference works like cookbooks – have significant effort put into their layout, to the point where the content is almost worthless without the layout. That has made the Kindle and Kindle 2 nearly useless for layout-intensive content.

The Kindle DX, however, will be capable of showing full-page PDFs such that they can be read without zooming in, as is often necessary on the tiny iPhone and iPod touch screens. Of course, that will be dependent on the text on those pages – text that may be readable on paper in a large format textbook may still be too small to read comfortably when shrunk down to the Kindle DX’s screen.

This has the potential to be a big deal for the Kindle.

Aiding the Industry — Amazon needs content for the Kindle DX, and to that end has reached an agreement with three leading textbook publishers to make textbooks available for the Kindle DX. The goal, of course, is for students to be able to carry around a Kindle DX rather than a backpack stuffed with heavy textbooks. Not incidentally, it would ensure that every student buys a new copy of every textbook, as opposed to now, when textbooks are commonly purchased used and resold at the end of the semester. Textbook publishers would be insane not to get behind the Kindle DX in a big way if it takes off initially.

The $489 cost of the Kindle DX seems steep for students, but textbooks aren’t cheap either, even when purchased used, and students are a captive audience – they must buy the textbooks for their courses. Kindle versions of textbooks could be significantly cheaper than paper versions, partly because of the elimination of printing and distribution costs, and partly by eliminating the “losses” due to sales of used copies. Although details haven’t yet been revealed, five universities will be “piloting” the Kindle DX in the next academic year. They include Princeton University, Reed College, Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

The other source for content for the Kindle DX will be newspapers. Amazon has signed deals with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle to offer reduced prices for long-term subscription commitments. It’s not clear what that means just yet, but I do think that the larger screen size will make for a notably better newspaper reading experience, though I can’t see the Kindle stemming the flood of red ink gushing from the newspaper industry.

In terms of traditional books, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that the company has continued to add titles that can be read on the Kindle, starting with 90,000 titles 18 months ago for the original Kindle’s launch, 230,000 titles in February 2009 for the Kindle 2′s launch, and 275,000 now.

That said, we’ve been trying for months to make TidBITS available on the Kindle, but have been almost entirely ignored by Amazon. In theory, making our Take Control ebooks available for the Kindle DX should be fairly easy (it doesn’t require human intervention), but there’s no indication from Amazon yet about how publishers will be able to submit PDF-based books without having them munged horribly by conversion to the limited subset of HTML that the Kindle supports.

Enough Better for the Price? — At $489, a full $130 more than the Kindle 2, the Kindle DX is quite pricey for a dedicated reading device, and that high price might hurt its adoption rate. People who are happy with a Kindle or Kindle 2 probably won’t want to upgrade – there is no discount – unless the lack of PDF support has been a major problem. But the combination of the larger screen and PDF support changes the game. Although Amazon has pushed the concept of reading traditional text-only books on the Kindle (in part because they have no formatting and can thus be reflowed to the small screen easily), I think the Kindle in general is actually more attractive for reading ephemeral content, and the Kindle DX’s larger screen and native PDF support open up a wide range of ephemeral content that wasn’t previously available.

That’s because traditional books have a different sort of cultural significance and value as artifacts. People who like books like them for their very physicality, for being able to lend them to a friend or relative. It says something about a person when they have shelves of books in their house. Between the virtuality of the ebook and Amazon’s DRM, it’s hard for some of us to be too enthused about buying a book for the Kindle that we can’t use in the ways to which we’ve become accustomed.

But newspapers, magazines, and blogs? They’re ephemeral by definition. No one keeps newspapers for reference purposes, and even people who hold on to old issues of magazines seldom refer back to them. People even leave magazines and newspapers on planes and trains all the time, since they have so little value after being read. Blogs are basically the same – although it’s nice to be able to access blog postings after the fact, most of the time, once you’ve read a blog post, you don’t need to see it again. (One strike against the Kindle DX is its lack of color in a world where most magazines and many books are now printed in full color.)

Technical books that go beyond the basics of a column of text and a few pictures may in fact have more in common with magazines and newspapers than might be initially apparent. For instance, our Take Control ebooks, which have just enough formatting to be difficult to convert for the Kindle, are ephemeral too, though on a longer time scale than a magazine or newspaper. Newspapers last for a day, or maybe a week, and magazines can be current for a week, a month, or even a couple of months. Technical books like ours are current only until the underlying technology covered changes, which could be anywhere from a week to 18 months. After that, there’s little reason to keep them around.

Textbooks have a different sort of ephemerality. Although they presumably are relevant until their underlying field changes sufficiently to warrant a new edition, what’s more important is that most students care about them only for a semester or two. And because students theoretically advance beyond the level of the textbook as they progress through school, there isn’t much value in keeping old textbooks around.

I could also see the Kindle DX becoming popular for reference works like cookbooks, where it’s not so much that the content is ephemeral, but that you don’t need most of it at any given time and a search capability is highly useful. A single page is often enough for a recipe, and the Kindle DX is small enough that it could be leaned against a shelf in the kitchen while you cook. Much of this sort of content will be provided by the Web (no word on whether the Kindle DX has better Web capabilities), but there’s still a role for reference books.

Alas, Amazon has never been forthcoming with sales figures for the Kindle, so we may never know how successful the Kindle DX is, either on its own or in comparison to the Kindle and Kindle 2. And, as interesting as the Kindle DX is, if Apple were to release a much-rumored tablet-sized iPod touch at a somewhat comparable price point, I think the Kindle DX would fade into the background. After all, what student would buy a Kindle DX over a large-screen iPod touch that could also play movies and run thousands of iPhone apps?

Another new addition (which is more exciting, to me) is full AppleScript support in Things on the Mac. I haven’t had a chance to dive into it yet, but it’s a topic I discussed with Cultured Code at the last Macworld Expo and I’m excited to see it come to fruition. People using Things in any kind of group setting will appreciate the reconsidered approach to task delegation, as well.

For those who aren’t familiar with Things in general, I’ll take a quick step back. Things for the Mac has been a staunch competitor in the Mac task-management colosseum. Battling it out with OmniFocus and newer gladiators like The Hit List, it’s been recognized by many for its simplicity and elegance. Things is powerful and flexible, while remaining reliable and simple. Things Touch is its iPhone companion, usable on its own or synced with Things Mac.

You may be asking, what’s an “Area of Responsibility?” This is one of the features of Things which was hardest for me to grasp. It’s not quite a GTD context, and it’s not a folder for projects. Basically, Areas provide a flexible means of handling tasks which aren’t part of a “project” and aren’t necessarily sequential in nature. In the words of Cultured Code:

With an Area of Responsibility (or simply “Area”), you don’t ask yourself about the desired outcome, but what standards you would like to maintain. An Area corresponds to an ongoing activity. These could be, for example, job responsibilities, roles you have taken on in your family, or personal responsibilities like health.

Things is available for download as a free trial, and can be purchased for $49.95US. Things Touch, the iPhone version, is available in the App Store for $9.99US.

The inspiration for many SSB offerings was the Firefox offshoot Webrunner, and the descendant of that project has now earned a 1.0 beta designation and its own website: Prism, from Mozilla Labs, gives you a power tool for creating your own SSBs at will, either via a Firefox extension or by launching the Prism config app and typing in the target URL.

Aside from having a dockable icon for each website you convert, you can also set your SSBs to launch at login, or assign mailto: links to open your web email client (similarly achievable for Gmail with the Gmail Notifier tool). If you have to keep separate sets of credentials for work & personal accounts for web services, no need to log in and out repeatedly — just set up a Prism SSB for one of the accounts, and the passwords & cookies will stay as they need to be. In my brief testing this morning, several sites worked just as expected; the only sticking point is that the Choosy extension gets confused about whether or not Firefox is running when an SSB is open.

Safari 4 developer seeds had offered a “Save as Web Application” feature for creating SSBs, which has been stripped from the File menu in the current public beta but still looks to be part of the final release; meanwhile, you can still make WebKit-centric SSBs with the excellent and free Fluid.

Here’s an illustration of how the Conficker worm works

Conficker is a collection of related malware strains typically described as a worm due to its ability to self-propagate through a network.  In other words, in contrast to a typical virus, Conficker does not necessarily need a user to do anything such as click on an infected file to compromise a system.  There are currently three known variants of Conficker (also called Downadup by some anti-malware vendors) and each of them can propagate through a number of mechanisms, the most common is by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows.  This vulnerability can be fixed by applying a patch from Microsoft that was released last November (link below).

On April 1st, the Conficker C variants will begin utilizing a new domain name-generating algorithm that utilizes a much larger set of potential domain names than the previous variants to attempt to stay in contact with its command and control channel.  That is all that the drones are programmed to do.  It is important to note that the authors could also do this today via the P2P capability so there is no real significance to the April 1st date other than the activation of the new domain name generating algorithm.

Windows Update
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

Free Anti-Virus Online Scan
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm

Free Anti-Virus Software
Http://free.avg.com

The free VIP Access for Mobile application relies on a unique credential created for your iPhone based on its phone number, and confirmed with an SMS message sent to that number. Once the credential is confirmed with this looped-back process, the program generates a unique 6-digit token every 30 seconds using an algorithm that’s uniquely derived from the credential. (VIP stands for VeriSign Identity Protection.)

iPod touch devices can’t use VIP Access because of the lack of an out-of-band method of confirming a unique identity, at least in the current system design. VeriSign has released this application previously only for mobile phones, including the BlackBerry and other platforms.

When using this system you’re much less likely to experience account theft, even if there’s a breach of login data at a Web site or if you’re scammed out of your login credentials. Because VeriSign separately controls and authenticates its own tokens, a cracker can’t get in, even if he has your user name and password. A site would have to suffer an internal security flaw that allowed token entry to be disabled or bypassed. (Passwords are always encrypted and protected at any well-designed site, but a data breach could allow crackers to pair account information with commonly guessed passwords or passwords assembled from other sources that are then matched up by email or other data.)

At sites that support VeriSign’s system, you log in the first time with your current user name and password, and then enter the credential from VIP Access to activate two-factor authentication (one factor is your regular login; the other, the token). From then on, you must have the phone and the current token to supplement your regular login to use that site.

The convenience of having this second factor on your phone can’t be overstated: we iPhone users generally have our phones with us most of the time, and when we’re using a computer, it’s likely on our person or nearby. And it’s a single device that many Web sites can support. I currently have key fobs from eBay/PayPal and Etrade. I use those sites regularly but not frequently, and I’m always rooting around to find the key fob.

The security of a second factor is that a thief needs two parts to abuse your information, and it’s hard to obtain both parts at once. If someone obtains your credential number, the current token can’t be reverse engineered from it. If someone glances at your current token or obtains it in some other fashion, it’s no good after less than 30 seconds. Note that I include a token in the screen capture above from my iPhone, which was good for only 30 seconds from when I took it.

Even if a thief steals your phone, as long as you haven’t stored your account names and passwords for sites you’re using with VIP Mobile, having the token generator won’t do the thief any good.

A phishing attack is still possible. Imagine that you are convinced you are visiting a secure site that uses a VIP token, and enter your login name, password, and the current token. If the site is malicious and enters the same credentials at the real site within a few seconds, a phisher could gain access.

This makes it extra important that you note tell-tale signs that the secure site you think you are at is actually the correct site: check the domain name, look for https in the URL (location field), and make sure a lock icon appears in the browser – Safari in the upper right, and Firefox in the lower right.

Participating sites pay what the New York Times reported is $3 to $10 per year per customer to gain this login with extra confirmation of a user’s identity; customers pay nothing.

This is a great deal on both sides. Customers get the assurance that their accounts are safe at the price of a little inconvenience – although most of us are always carrying our phones with us. And site operators get the additional security of not having to deal with the cost and complexity of having accounts hacked.

Vonage, the international VoIP provider, has just released its Vonage Companion software for OS X. Vonage Companion is available to users who subscribe the the Vonage Pro plan and it basically allows users to use their laptops or desktops to make or receive phone calls. Think of it as Skype but for your Vonage account.

You can use Vonage Companion to record calls, set-up conference calls (or separate conference calls into separate phone calls), selective call block, call transfers and more.

I don’t have a Vonage Pro account, so I wasn’t able to check out the features firsthand, but flipping through the manual (PDF link) it looks pretty powerful. The biggest benefit to a service like this is the ability to make and receive calls from the road, using your Vonage number and account credentials.

Vonage Companion is free for Vonage Pro customers (existing Vonage users will need to upgrade to a Vonage Pro account) and it works with OS X 10.4.11 Tiger and OS X 10.5 Leopard, though Vonage strongly recommends having the latest security updates and latest OS updates installed. You can download Vonage Companion here (direct .DMG link)

Read more…

There’s been a lot of hype in the hard drive world about Seagate’s 1TB hard drive. It has come to light in the early weeks of 2009 that one particular model and revision is failing at alarming rates. The ST31000340AS Barracuda 7200.11 with firmware level SD15 made in Thailand is locking up and being rendered inoperable due to firmware problems.

Many customers are claiming a failure-plague of sorts also referencing the recent reduction in warranty time periods raising doubts about quality.

So what do you do if you potentially have one of these ticking time bombs on your hands? First of all be informed. If you’ve recently bought a new hard drive record the model number and information off of the drive. Be certain it’s not the above- mentioned model. Keep an eye on Seagate’s website for any updates or information they may provide on the situation. As of this moment they have made a statement on their website that they have “isolated the problem and customers are eligible for a free upgrade.”

If you or your customers suffer a data loss on one of these drives and need assistance, contact us today, we’ll be glad to help.