Eizo Nanao has announced the inclusion of an “EcoView Sense” feature into its just announced FlexScan monitors, the 20-inch EV2023W and the 23-inch EV2303W.

The EcoView feature allows the monitors–using motion detectors–to detect if a person is sitting in front of it.

Its benefits to would-be ninjas aside, these are two of the world’s first monitors to receive the recently announced TCO Displays 5.0 Certification. Why should you care? Well, according to TCO, the tests used in the 5.0 spec are just plain tougher. Also, According to Eizo these are the first Eizo products to achieve EPEAT Gold status.

And that brings us to ninja training. If I’m ever lucky enough to get one of these in, the first two tests I’m running are the “Can I be still enough that it thinks I’m not here?” test and the “Can I return to my chair slowly and smoothly enough, that it doesn’t know I ever came back?” Yes, I have the mind of a 10-year-old. So what of it?

(Credit:
Eizo)

Other energy-saving features include an ambient light sensor that adjusts the display’s brightness according to the amount of light in the room. And each monitor includes a power switch that allows them to turn off completely and not draw any power whatsoever.

The FlexScan EV2023W is equipped with a VA panel with a 1600?900 native resolution, 178-degree viewing angles, and 3000:1 contrast ratio. The EV2303W comes with a TN panel with a 1920?1080 native resolution, 160? viewing angles, and 1000:1 contrast ratio. Both monitors claim a 250 cd/m2 brightness and come with one VGA and one DVI-D input. HDMI was not mentioned as these are more business-centric displays.

Angering your new Eizo monitor is never a good idea. One minute you're at work, updating your Facebook status. The next, disintegrated. Without even a speck of dust left. Co workers, coming to snatch you for foosball will never suspect that your monitor just ended your existence. Meanwhile, the Eizo waits, unsuspected, for its next victim. We advice disabling this feature after unboxing the display.

Check out CNET’s new Monitor Green Guide for more information on all things green…and monitors.

If it senses for 40 seconds that no one is there, it puts the monitor into sleep mode. It then resumes normal operation when the user returns. For example, it won’t be fooled by such shenanigans as leaving a cardboard cutout of yourself in front of it. It will only resume if there is movement up to 120 centimeters in front of it.

The unit will work on delivering consumer Web services on mobile devices and driving new revenue for the British carrier. Knook, a 17-year Microsoft veteran, will start on March 10.

Microsoft recently announced a significant boost to its mobile effort, with plans to buy T-Mobile Sidekick maker Danger for a reported $500 million.

Server and Tools executive Andy Lees is being tapped to run Microsoft’s mobile unit, according to sources. Microsoft also recently hired Staples executive Todd Peters to head Windows Mobile marketing.

So the seductive power of the gun seems to work on those who choose the Web to find the best deals.

He added: “There’s a tremendous crime problem around here with people doing meth. These people have lost their souls. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about me. They care about getting more dope.”

However, Muller is keen to point out that just because he lives in a more rural area, this promotion is not indicative of some sort of uncultured nature on his part.

Well, last year he offered a free handgun. And, in an interview with CNN (embedded here), he said: “It spiked our Web traffic and we sold, we estimate, 35 more
cars during the promotion than we normally would have.”

However, I feel confident that Muller’s strategy will prove to be a good one.

This year, Muller said, he is looking to sell 100 extra vehicles, hence the attempt to locate your inner Rambo.

He believes in standing up for one’s right to defend oneself. Indeed, he has a motto for his dealership that expresses his feelings very clearly: “God, Guns, Guts and American Pick-up Trucks.”

In case you were wondering whether he will have a pile of AKs in his showroom, from the top of which he’ll take one and present it to every purchaser, well, it’s not quite so glamorous.

At least that seems to be the view of Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors in Clay County, Mo. Because, in August, he is offering a free AK-47 with every vehicle sold.

I am sure there will be at the very least a handgun tickling his hip as he nibbles on his rainbow roll.

You might wonder how on earth he came to devise such an outlandish, and perhaps slightly unnerving, promotion.

Hence the need, according to Muller, for something stronger than a little handgun.

In this tough economy, forearmed is better than forewarned.

He was quoted in the Telegraph as explaining: “They think we are all cross-eyed rednecks down here. We are not. Tonight I am going to the theater with my wife to see Anything Goes and we will eat sushi on the way.”

You might think this promotion a little on the eccentric side. However, Muller is no lily-livered Collapsenikov.

Muller explained to CNN: “Look, there’s a bunch of evil in the world and we need to protect ourselves.”

He will offer a voucher that the lucky truck-owner can take down to a gun store and go through the proper vetting procedure before he gets his precious free gift. Which, should you suddenly feel the urge to pack extra protection, will set you back a mere $450.

85% of the music on my Zune was recorded from a CD or LP that I legitimately own. Most of the rest comes from CDs I borrowed and ripped.

Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I took a quick look through my
Zune 30, which is my primary personal MP3 player (the
iPod has more family stuff on it), and catalogued my own digital music collection by origin. Here’s how it stacked up:

• 2,714 songs (85 percent) from a CD or LP purchased by me or given to me as a gift.

• 439 songs (14 percent) acquired from somebody else without payment–a CD I borrowed and ripped, or that was burned for me by a friend, or given to me as digital files on a flash drive.

• 47 songs (1 percent) downloaded from an approved Internet source, such as the Zune Marketplace.

• 10 songs (<1 percent) downloaded for free from non-industry-approved Internet sources.

Obviously, I’m not a normal music consumer. I’m almost 40 years old, so much of my collection stems from the pre-Internet days, when the only real way to get music was to buy it. The question is, how does the industry make the average user look more like me? I don’t know the answer, although lowering prices on CDs or promoting vinyl (which is harder to rip) with codes for one-time digital downloads might help. One area where I don’t look like the ideal consumer is with digital downloads: I’m at far less than the average 10 percent. I might buy more music online if (a.) it were in a format that could be used on both my iPod and my Zune (b.) online catalogs were deeper, with more obscurities, no black-outs for long songs, and so on.

A recent NPD survey cited by the New York Times’ Bits blog confirms what I’ve suspected for a long time: the record industry’s campaign against file-sharing sites is not only ineffective, but misguided. According to the survey, 19 percent of the music in consumers’ collections comes from file-sharing networks. That’s up 5 percent from last year–in other words, lawsuits and education campaigns have so far been ineffective.

iTunes 9 photos

iTunes 9 was announced today at this year’s annual music event from Apple. Named the “It’s Only Rock and Roll event,” Apple didn’t disappoint with the return of Steve Jobs, upgraded (and cheaper)
iPod Nanos and Shuffles, and plenty of new
iPhone app demonstrations from third-party developers. As many predicted, iTunes 9 (Mac or Windows) was also on the agenda and it received a number of cool new feature enhancements to make navigation and syncing to your devices easier. iTunes 9 is available today, but has not yet been added to Apple’s software update service.

The new interface buttons across the top act as pull-down menus so you can drill down to the content you want.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

The way you interact with apps on the iPhone and the iPod Touch has also been improved. Now your home screen can be interacted with visually, right inside the iTunes window, letting you drag apps wherever you want before syncing to your device. Apps can be dragged from page to page and within pages, and when you’re done you can apply the changes to sync them to your device. iPhone syncing has been improved as well, with the ability to selectively sync specific artists or playlists, or sync your photos by specific albums or faces.

Steve Jobs also announced that iTunes now offers Home Sharing. This new feature will let you share purchased songs across a home network. As long as all the computers on the network are on the same iTunes account, you can drag to copy songs to other computers. iTunes 9 also will automatically sync new purchases across your computers.

Overall, with new interface enhancements to the iTunes Store, a better way to organize apps on your iPhone or iPod Touch, and improvements to syncing, the new iTunes update offers plenty of improvements for iTunes users. As a free update, iTunes 9 is a no-brainer for those who use the program.

Along with the iTunes Store interface enhancements, Apple announced newly packaged digital content it referred to as “LPs.” According to Apple, buying the full album will now give you new content, kind of like extras on a DVD. You can show songs with lyrics, explore bonus content, and check out extra content created by the musicians themselves. Additionally, you get the same new content for movies, with extras, bonus content, chapter selection, character details, and more.

(Credit:
Wikipedia)

Whoever wrote the fake Ima Hogg bio might want to think about pursuing a career in screenwriting. It sounds more amusing than any of the movies I’ve seen recently…

The site revamped its “On This Day” section with events that actually did happen on April 1, but with the wording cleverly tweaked to make them sound ridiculous. “(In 1969) The British-born model Hawker Siddeley Harrier was introduced at a Royal Air Force event, becoming the only one in the 1960s to successfully perform on a short runway,” Wikipedia’s front page read. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier is actually an airplane, not a vintage Derek Zoolander.

The Beverly Hillbillies-esque teaser is fake, but clicking on the “article of the day” link does go to the Wikipedia article for the real Ima Hogg, who managed to get past her embarrassing name to become a prominent Houston-based philanthropist and patron of the arts in the first half of the 20th century.

Wikipedia also April Fool-ified its featured article of the day, the biography of “Ima Hogg.” Typically, a few paragraphs of the featured article are displayed on the front page. “Raised in government housing, young Ima frolicked among a backyard menagerie of raccoons, possums, and a bear,” the fanciful Wikipedia front page read. “Her father, ‘Big Jim’ Hogg, in an onslaught against fun itself, booby-trapped the banisters she loved to slide down, shut down her money-making schemes, and forced her to pry chewing gum from furniture. He was later thrown from his seat on a moving train and perished; the Hogg clan then struck black gold on land Big Jim had forbidden them from selling.”

(Credit:
Wikipedia)

Wikipedia might not take too kindly to pranks any other day of the year, but the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia sure had some fun with April Fools’ Day.

A fun show. Let me know what you think.

commentary

Episode 15 of The Register’s Open Season Podcast just went live, and proved to be more fun than usual to record.

In Episode 15, Matt Asay, Dave Rosenberg and I dig into the real motives behind Microsoft’s lust for Yahoo!, including its desire to use Yahoo! as a nice software delivery mechanism that works around those pesky PC bundling restrictions. But, even with such craftiness on its side, it’s hard for Microsoft to justify this deal, since we don’t think it will work. And what the hell gives with Microsoft’s idea of opening Apple-like Microsoft stores? Come on, guys.
Zune brown walls. Even Wal-Mart can beat that.

Away from Microhoo, we hit on the cloud’s rise this week through a number of announcements, including Google’s new software as a service push and Sun’s GPL v2-happy Project Caroline. We also look at the list of top Linux contributors, Red Hat’s position in the open source realm and a nifty hand-sized Linux server.

The technology features tens of millions of digital images from sources like the Hubble telescope as well as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project championed by missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray.

It is for former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble. A couple weeks back he said on his blog that a new Microsoft technology made him cry. He didn’t give many details, citing a confidentiality agreement, but he provided enough there for folks to connect the dots.

I’ll be traveling to Redmond for the event, but I’m going to take a risk and leave my hankies at home.

Attendees of the posh TED conference will get to see the new Microsoft software next week, while the company also plans to show it at TechFest, the internal science fair that takes place the following week.

Microsoft researcher Curtis Wong showed an early version of the telescope software at last year’s TechFest, Microsoft’s internal science fair. Sources tell me that Microsoft’s desktop software is far more immersive than what was shown at last year’s TechFest or than the sky feature in Google Earth. In particular, the software will let you get extremely close to celestial objects, enough so that the software might be useful not just to armchair astronauts, but also to serious researchers.

Is flying through outer space from the comfort of your living room enough to make you cry?

(Credit:
Christopher Soghoian)

The IRS is frequently mimicked by phishers. The agency even goes so far as to offer advice on its site, debunking many common phishing attacks. Furthermore, agency has shut down more than 1,600 phishing sites claiming to be the IRS in the past few years.

Secondly, the URL, http://sa2.www4.irs.gov/irfof/IRServlet?app=IRACTC is simply horrible. The vast majority of users will have no idea if this is a legitimate Web site or not. Why could they not select something a bit more readable, such as “www.irs.gov/stimulus”.

From a security education perspective, it is a really bad idea to have such a form on the official IRS Web site. The IRS should not be training users (via positive reinforcement) to enter their full Social Security numbers into Web sites. It is bad enough that credit cards and banks require us to do so when signing up. The IRS has an existing relationship with every tax-paying citizen. It does not need to use our SSN to authenticate us, and could use one of many other bits of information.

A new IRS Web site that allows taxpayers to check on the status of their refund checks could lead to users being phished.

To see why this is such a bad idea–look at the image below of a phishing scam claiming to be an IRS refund Web site. Now look at the image above, the IRS’s new refund status site. Can we really expect most users to tell the difference?

The new “Where’s my stimulus payment?” site asks taxpayers to enter in their Social Security number, and a few other trivial bits of information before informing the user of the amount of their refund, and the date it will be sent out.

At the very least, the IRS should authenticate users with additional information (such as the amount of federal taxes paid in 2008). It already does this for users who wish to e-file. This would at least stop the site being used as an oracle to confirm/guess someone else’s SSN.

Screenshot of the IRS Stimulus Website

Phishing Site targetting IRS

While no doubt useful, this Web site sets a horrible example, and encourages dangerous behavior by users. Furthermore, in the hands of someone who knows the last four digits of a taxpayer’s Social Security number, it could be used as an oracle (by submitting multiple requests) to determine the full SSN of a taxpayer.

If you can get your pals to install it, go for Zfone, but for those you can’t, Skype is probably good enough.

Mobile phones

While we can’t rely on Steve Jobs to bring this to us, there is a decent chance that Google’s Android system may end up having these features. It’s an open platform, right? So it’s just a matter of time until someone hacks it up, and releases it.

Just like Google, if the NSA wants to expand its surveillance abilities, it simply has to build another data center. Want real-time spying on the phone calls of 10 million more people? No problem — just buy another 10,000 computers, and set them up with NSA’s existing pattern recognition software

While there are so many scary things being done by intelligence and law enforcement, hope is not far away. Easy to use privacy technologies are upon us, and with them, comes a radical shift in the balance of power. As this article will explain, the scalable techniques with which the NSA, FBI and other agencies can spy on innocent Americans may soon be made useless - forcing them to go back to the old school (and labor intensive) black bag job.

Secure Instant Messaging

As large as the NSA is, it simply doesn’t have that level of resources. Thus, simply due to the man hours required, the NSA’s surveillance net was limited in scope.

Skype’s security is good enough, it seems, to stump the police and intelligence agencies in Germany. They’ve had to resort to paying 2500 euros per victim suspect to install malware that secretly records the audio as its recorded and played on the user’s PC during a Skype call.

For now, we as consumers are left out in the cold. However, the rise of devices such as the iPhone and Google’s Android OS do give me some hope. If we get Skype on mobile phones (a not so unrealistic possibility), law enforcement is going to have a very very tough time. Furthermore, if we can replace SMS text messages with off-the-record encrypted IMs, users will finally get the privacy they deserve.

With all of the attention that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) update (and the administration’s vigorous attempts to immunize the criminals telcos), it seems like a good time to explore the issues surrounding surveillance and privacy in America today.

Both Microsoft
Windows Vista and Mac OS X include encrypted disk support out of the box. While I can’t speak to the Windows experience, I can say that encrypted disk support is a piece of cake on the Mac. As recent court cases have shown, this disk encryption can be a total roadblock for law enforcement, and can completely derail any attempted investigation or prosecution.

The deployment of easy to use cryptography for the average user will significantly upset the status quo. Large scale surveillance will no longer be possible, and the spooks will have to return to the days of the black bag job. Will they still be able to focus on high-profile terrorist targets? Sure. However, their days of spying on the average American, simply because it’s easy, could be over.

For those users not willing to trust their communications to a closed-source communications system, the gold standard really is Zfone, an encrypted VOIP solution made by famed cryptographer and cypherpunk Phil Zimmerman. While it’s easily the best tool out there, it unfortunately suffers from the network effect — that is, there really isn’t anyone using it right now…. and Skype has, in a few years, become the most widely deployed cryptographic application ever.

Skype has been extremely secretive about the technical details of their encryption technologies. They paid a few security consultants to conduct a review of the system, which, not surprisngly, was rewarded with rave reviews. However, some crypto geeks have been able to reverse engineer Skype, and have determined that by and large, the program does a pretty good job.

Fact: The National Security Agency (NSA) has data-mined the call records of millions of Americans. These records were handed over to the spying agency without a court order or warrant.
Fact: Calling your Aunt Susan in Australia? The NSA is listening. No warrant? No problem. What about for international calls made to a lawyer, doctor or priest? No warrant necessary there either.
Fact: Mobile phones transmit extremely accurate location information back to the wireless carriers. The FBI, DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies routinely get access to this location data without demonstrating “probable cause,” which is typically required before a judge will issue a warrant. Fact: Most mobile providers claim that they do not save copies of text messages sent to phones and pagers for extended periods of time. However, up until the point that the messages are deleted, the companies will happily turn them over to the police without a warrant, requiring only that the prosecutors claim that the records are “relevant and material” to an investigation.
If you are arrested by the police, in addition to searching your body, they are also permitted to search through your mobile phone and look through anything that they can find. Got an
iPhone? They may be able to browse through hundreds of emails from your gmail account using the device, all without the pesky requirement that they first get a warrant.

These IM applications and the off-the-record encryption standard they use are protocol independent. That is, they work with AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo IM, and others. By using one of these applications, your IM communications are encrypted, authenticated, and completely deniable.

Secure Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP)

I’ll now explore the technologies that will make that possible.

In addition to enabling the average Joe to regain a bit of his privacy, the rapid deployment of easy to use crypto will have a major impact on our society: The end of large scale surveillance.

The nice thing about the black bag job - is that it is labor intensive. Want to install bugs in the home of a suspected Soviet agent? That’ll take a team of five agents, plus around the clock surveillance for a few days beforehand. Using traditional techniques, spying on an additional 10,000 Americans would require an additional 50,000 NSA black-bag-job agents to install the bugs.

Anonymous Web Surfing

Thus, for most users, Skype is more than good enough - and a complete pain in the ass for law enforcement.

Raising The Bar: The Black Bag Job

Unfortunately, due to computers, and the willing assistance of telecom companies - this is no longer a problem. Surveillance today scales very very easily, and it is almost trivial for the NSA to spy on an additional 100,000 Americans.

As fans of the HBO show The Wire will already know, mobile phone privacy and anonymity is something that there is a significant market need for. For now, psuedo-anonymity can potentially be achieved through the use of prepaid phones, but this provides no safety against a government agent with a wiretap order (or a spying agency willing to break the law).

Consumers will need to take matters into their own hands - and luckily, secure communication technology is finally user-friendly enough to be usable by non-geeks.

One word: Tor. If you’re not using it already, you need to be.

First, a few facts:

The big problem with the surveillance techniques currently used by the NSA, aside from the fact that they are creepy and illegal, is that they scale so well.

NSA: We're watching you….

With regard to the mainstream voice solutions, Skype is the clear exception to the rule. All Skype communications are encrypted (as long as you don’t live in China, where the government has forced the eBay owned software company to install some fairly suspect filters).

No amount of telecom company assistance will enable the Feds to passively snoop on an encrypted IM conversation. In order to have any chance at getting a copy of the messages, Uncle Sam will need to resort to a significantly more invasive (and riskier) surveillance techniques.

I’ve written extensively about this form of secure communication before. Adium, one of the most popular instant messaging applications for the
Mac, ships with high-end encryption out of the box. Similarly, Pidgin, an IM application shipped with practically every Linux distribution, also includes support for the same encryption protocol that Adium uses. A port of Pidgin is also available for Windows users.

Unfortunately, out of the box, most internet based telephony services are horribly insecure. Use Vonage, Packet8, or one of the other popular VOIP services? Your calls are going over the wire in the clear. Using one of several open source hacking tools, it’s trivially easy for an attacker or nosey neighbor to snoop on your calls.

An encrypted conversation in Adium

Encrypted Computer Data

As the debate over FISA and telco immunity has demonstrated, the telecom companies are willing to completely eviscerate consumer privacy in order to help law enforcement and the intelligence community. With the telcos getting handsomely paid for their participation in illegal surveillance programs, its clear that consumers cannot rely upon AT&T and Verizon to protect their privacy.

In the old days, the spooks would have to rely on the so called ‘black bag job’ — a term to describe the act of breaking into a suspect’s house in order to install bugs and other listening equipment. The team doing it, at least in Hollywood movies, were, like ninjas, dressed in all black.

(Credit:
The Adium Dev Team)