110V to 240V.
In an era of dazzling battery-powered portable devices including iPods, computers and cellphones, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be unable to catch the news and entertainment anytime and anywhere we want. But millions of people who own portable televisions, including those who depend on them when they flee their homes or lose power during hurricanes and other emergencies, may soon return to the dark ages. Virtually all of the nation’s 7 million battery-powered TVs receive analog signals. They’ll become useless after Feb. 17, when broadcasters must abandon analog and just transmit digital signals — unless the sets are connected to digital-to-analog converter boxes.
The problem is, the vast majority of converters must be plugged into the wall. That makes them unreliable in an emergency.
“Unfortunately, a lot of well-intentioned policymakers found out after the ink was dry that there were more (portable) devices and households affected” than they imagined, says Richard Doherty of The Envisioneering Group, a research and consulting firm.
That’s a “great irony” in the federally mandated move to digital TV, says Shannon Dunham, a communications specialist at law firm Sherman & Howard. Although the government “intended to reclaim the (analog) bandwidth for emergency use” — including police, fire and medical communications– “in the end, they’re going to affect people who get emergency information” from portable TVs. Radios equipped to pick up audio from local TV broadcasts also will lose those analog signals. The Red Cross says that it’s not worried.
“More people tend to listen to radio (stations) than watch TV in a disaster,” spokesman Jonathan Aiken says. Looking for Local News But many local disaster officials are apprehensive about the loss of portable TV at a time when lots of chain-owned radio stations have cut back on local news. “It is absolutely a concern of ours,” says Veronica Mosgrove, a spokeswoman for…
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Portable TVs To Be Left Behind in Signal Switch
[Posted on October 3, 2008 - 6:47 PM]
STAMFORD, Conn., Sept. 29 -- The term "cloud computing" is being loosely applied and defined differently, and it's creating a lot of confusion in the market, according to Gartner, Inc. Analysts say it is imperative to understand these different perspectives and set the proper expectations to obtain the anticipated benefits.
Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided "as a service" using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. However, there have been different perceptions of what is included in cloud computing.
"The term cloud computing has come to mean two very different things: a broader use that focuses on 'cloud,' and a more-focused use on system infrastructure and virtualization," said David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "Mixing the discussion of 'cloud-enabling technologies' with 'cloud computing services' creates confusion."
The two prevalent views of cloud computing are as follows:
"Although these perspectives are different, there is a connection between them. Any provider of cloud computing services must have an environment that includes an infrastructure to support their delivery. Virtualization often is used to implement this underlying infrastructure to support delivery of the cloud computing services," Smith said. "Cloud system infrastructure services are a subset of cloud computing, but not the entire picture."
Gartner recommends that users clearly separate the consideration of cloud computing and cloud computing services from the use of cloud computing-related concepts and technologies for the creation of internal systems. Both perspectives (services and technologies) are valuable and should be pursued; however, they are two separate but related initiatives.
Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on cloud computing during the upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, taking place Oct. 12-16 in Orlando, Fla. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. More than 6,000 senior business and IT strategists will gather for the insights, tools and solutions they need to ensure their IT initiatives are key contributors to and drivers of their enterprise's success. Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees' annual planning efforts. They rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/symposium/us.
The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.
Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.
But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.
"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian.
"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."
The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.
His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do," he said. "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
The growing number of people storing information on internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines, has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies such as Google.
Computer manufacturer Dell recently even tried to trademark the term "cloud computing", although its application was refused.
But there has been growing concern that mainstream adoption of cloud computing could present a mixture of privacy and ownership issues, with users potentially being locked out of their own files.
Stallman, who is a staunch privacy advocate, advised users to stay local and stick with their own computers.
"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Andrew Davey, who lives in Knaphill, got the idea after reading a blog by Mark Ontkush, a green computing specialist based in Boston, USA.
Mr Ontkush had calculated that an all-white web page used 74 watts of electricity to display, whereas an all-black screen uses only 59.
He said that on a website such as Google, which deals with approximately 200 million queries per day, the change from a white screen to a black one would save 15 watts each time it was displayed. That would add up to a significant amount of energy saved per day.
Andrew said: “After reading the article I thought it was quite amazing that it hasn’t been done already. It’s so simple but very effective.”
The youngster set up his own energy-saving black web page alternative to Google called ecosmartsearch, which took him about a week to do.
He said: “It works with the Google search engine and gets the same results as Google. I’ve always been good at computers and I turned my talents to website design, not something easy at all.
“My friends really like it. I’m just trying to get them out of the habit of using Google. I showed a couple of teachers and they think it’s really good. They are really impressed and have started to use it.”
Andrew had previously made a website for his dad’s medal business.
He said: “I wanted to make my own website in which I could gain some income and become better at website design. I decided to put the writing into green to associate it with energy-saving.
“I also wrote: ‘We are saving energy, now it’s your turn,’ on the home page, hoping that people will think about that light they left on and go and turn things off.
“I have a couple of ideas to make things that save energy. I would like to be an entrepreneur and have my own web design company.”
Andrew has also been part of the green team at Woking High School.
He said: “We were looking at energy-saving issues. I think helping the environment is a great thing to start doing. Every little helps.
“I’m really proud of myself for what I’ve done as I don’t think many people of my age have made a proper website and got it on to the web.”
To use Andrew’s search engine and save energy, go to www.ecosmartsearch.com.
© S&B media 2008
In the past months, cybersecurity vendors including F-Secure, McAfee (nyse: MFE -news - people ), Symantec (nasdaq:SYMC - news - people ) and Trend Micro have all released new versions of their software designed to move more of the work of identifying viruses, Trojans and other forms of "malware" off of desktop PCs and onto faraway servers connected by the Internet. Beyond lightening the load on their customers' machines by performing more analysis as a networked service, they also claim that cloud-based approach may be a more effective strategy for keeping up with the ever-faster flood of new malicious code.
By all appearances, more desktop machines are becoming infected with malicious software than ever before. Over the past year, the number of PCs ensnared in botnets--herds of users' computers infected with malicious software that sends spam or performs click fraud--has more than quadrupled, according to cybersecurity researchers at the Shadowserver Foundation.
One element of the problem, says Trend Micro's vice president, Carol Carpenter, is the acceleration of malware's mutation into new, as-yet-undetected strains. "Three or four years ago, we saw 50 new threats a day. Now we see 50,000 threats a day," she says. "The order of magnitude has changed dramatically."
That means protecting users from newly discovered malware is no longer a matter of days or hours but seconds. Updating a customer's anti-virus software three times a day, as the 2008 version of Symantec's Norton software advertises, or even 10 times a day, as F-Secure boasts, is no longer enough.
The cloud-based solution announced by Trend Micro in June and implemented earlier this month by McAfee and F-Secure is designed to cut that vulnerable period to seconds. Rather than wait for a database of newly identified malware signatures to be downloaded to a PC, the upgraded software takes a "hash"--an identifying number that doesn't reveal the file's contents--of every new application running on a machine and compares that identifier to the software vendors' continuously updated database of threats on in-house servers. If the application doesn't match anything in the vendor's database of safe files, the software issues a warning to the user and performs a closer scan of the file for suspicious characteristics.
That communication between the PC and the database over the Internet, say researchers at F-Secure and McAfee, takes as little as 100 milliseconds. And by pulling the process off the desktop and into the cloud, it uses just a fraction of the computing resources of a traditional anti-virus scan.
Software developers have different approaches to the cloud-based anti-malware system. F-Secure, for instance, scans every application, while McAfee uses an initial filter based on size and how hidden a file's source code is to determine whether it needs scanning in the cloud. Jon Oltsik, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, points out that Trend Micro was the first to announce the technology, but balks at picking which company's approach is most effective. "From a technology perspective, they're all pretty close," he says. "This is not a game of leapfrog. It's a change in the way we have to do things to keep up with the monumental growth in the number and sophistication of attacks."
Security offerings in the cloud aren't strictly new. The security firm Postini, for instance, offered to scrub e-mail for spam and viruses as early as 1999, filtering e-mail before it reached a user's computer without any software on his or her desktop. In July of 2007, the firm was purchased by Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) to be integrated into the search giant's software-as-a-service applications.
In fact, none of the major software vendors implementing malware-detection in the cloud are offering "cloud computing" in that pure form: Each application still involves installing software on the desktop to more easily scan a client's machine and also to detect threats that come from sources other than the Internet, such as a USB drive.
Still, that incomplete move to the cloud holds the potential to act as a kind of collective intelligence, says Oltsik. A software vendor like Symantec, for instance, asks its users to opt in to what it calls the Norton Insight system, which currently assembles data from 17 million customers and uses it to better understand when a new strain of malicious code has appeared. Security researchers liken that approach to a "neighborhood watch" strategy.
Even so, cybersecurity isn't likely to overtake the extraordinary evolution of malware, says Rich Mogull, a security consultant and blogger. Even with malware detection performed over the Internet and piped out at faster speeds than ever before to client computers, no company offers anything beyond "signature-based" filtering, or filtering by characteristics in the program's code, says Mogull. In other words, new malicious files can only be detected after they've been found elsewhere in a company's anti-malware network.
Because malware will appear in forms that even a company's Internet-hosted database doesn't recognize, outbreaks will still occur even among "protected" computers, he says. Given that some cybercriminals are now writing custom malware targeted at single organizations, that's not enough, he says. "No matter how fast we react in this cloud-based scenario, it's still reactive," he says.
But the next generations of anti-malware software may go beyond signature-based detection. Researchers have been working for years on "behavior-based" malware detection, watching what applications do rather than looking at their characteristics to determine their intent.
Symantec's vice president of research and technology, Carey Nachenberg, says its software, possibly in the next year, will try a "reputation-based" approach. He declines to share details of the new strategy but says that one simple element of reputation is simply how many times an application has been seen before--newer, unique applications will be automatically less trusted than common, tested ones. He says the system is closer to Google's Web page ranking algorithm than traditional anti-virus programs.
"Right now, our fingerprinting is faster than ever before," Nachenberg says. "But in the future, the fingerprints disappear completely."
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/09/21/virus-clouds-security-tech-security-cx_ag_0922virus.html
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