Microsoft: Windows 7 UAC is Fine, Don’t Worry, We Don’t Want to Talk About It, OK?

When it comes to Windows’ User Account Control security feature, Microsoft just can’t catch a break. The version of UAC that debuted in Windows Vista is famously paranoid and pushy. And now there’s controversy brewing that the default settings of Windows 7′s less in-your-face UAC are too lax. Malware can turn off UAC without Windows 7 notifying the user; it can also take advantage of a security hole to give itself auto-elevate permission, thereby hiding its actions. Over at ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley has a good report on this.

I’m most concerned about the fact that Microsoft refused to let Mary Jo interview anyone on the subject–instead, the company provided her with a terse and not very satisfying prepared statement. There may be a rational argument for why Windows 7′s approach to UAC makes sense, but so far, Microsoft doesn’t even seem to be trying to make it…

AT&T Could Be Hit By Strike Saturday

[UPDATE 4/3/09 2:30PM]: The CWA has ratified a new contract, meaning a strike has been averted. Please see our updated coverage here.

The Communications Workers of America, which represent some of the sales force at AT&T’s wireless stores, have begun to warn its members that a strike may be possible beginning on Saturday.

From the CWA website:

“Picket signs are being sent out to every CWA Local with Mobility members as the February 7th expiration date approaches. With little progress at the bargaining table, every Local must be ready to walk, if necessary, to get some RESPECT from AT&T Mobility.”

AT&T and the union have been negotiating since January 21 on a new contract known as the “Orange Contract,” which covers everyone in the country except for the former Southwestern Bell and BellSouth areas. At issue is wages, vacation time, job security, and benefits — the typical contract issues.

Wages appear to be the sticking point: the most recent update from Tuesday indicates what increase AT&T is proposing would not offset increases in health care costs.

I am not entirely clear here on whether a walkout would occur just in the Orange Contract areas or across the entire company footprint. In any case, a strike could paralyze retail services for a significant majority of AT&T customers.

I’ll watch my local store here. Members are being encouraged to wear red in solidarity on Thursday: I’m going to go into the stores and see who is. More on this as we get it…

Update 2/6/09: A Message to Our Commenters… we know this subject is of a personal matter for both those in the union and their non-union counterparts, and those who may have strong opinions on unionization in general. However, we will not tolerate personal attacks. Please, by all means speak your mind, but keep it at a level of intellectual discourse that keeps out the attacks. Thanks for visiting!

5Words: A Really Short News Roundup

You’re a really busy person. I’m a really busy person. Enter our new feature, 5words. It consists of quick news hits from around the Web–and just to keep things moving right along, every item will be five words long. (If that leaves you hungry for more, click the links to get more words on these stories elsewhere–hundreds of them, sometimes.) Here we go…

Google’s Latitude: Track your friends.

Facebook celebrates its fifth birthday.

Palm’s Pre arriving March 15th?

Asus keeps introducing Eee PCs.

15,000 Panasonic staffers are toast.

India’s $10 laptop: thumb drive?

Are six Windows 7s excessive?

Firefox update patches security holes.

Cloud computing for…slot machines?

Amazon starts selling downloadable games.

Rumors of iPhone background tasks.

A two-million-laptop supercomputer.

A new iPhone in June?

Toshiba introduces another “iPhone killer.”

NVidia’s Ion netbook platform impresses.

MySpace’s 90,000-sex-offender list.

iLife ’09 Unfriendly to PowerPC Macs

Well, you have to admit its not overly surprising this is occurring considering the switch to Intel processors in Macs occurred over two years ago: several media outlets have aptly noted that iLife ’09 has begun to lock out PowerPC users.

This trend started with last year’s version of iLife, which limited use of iMovie to G5 processors only which rendered it useless for any Mac PowerPC portable. That limitation continues in iLife ’09, but GarageBand has also now begun to limit functionality.

GarageBand’s standard application appears to still work. However, if you want to make use of its Learn to Play functionality, you must access it with an Intel-based Mac.

Apple has also been rumored — although it has not confirmed — to be doing away with PowerPC support in Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” It makes sense: limiting the OS’s capability to support legacy hardware is a trap that Windows has fallen into, and Mac OS should avoid.

For those of you holding out: upgrade. Now is a better time than ever to pick up a new Mac. The added functionality, including the capability to run Windows when you need to (and I bet some of us Macheads thoroughly enjoy running Windows IN a window) is more than enough for me.

In the end however, supporting its legacy hardware this long was a good move for Apple and gave its users ample time to prepare for what would have been an inevitable switch.

Technologizer’s RSS Feed: Try It Again For the First Time

Just a quick note: By popular demand, the Technologizer RSS feed now features the full text of posts rather than brief teasers. If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll probably like this news. If you’re not a subscriber, it’s a reason to check the feed out. Here it is.

Introducing Technologizer’s Digital Media Central

I’m tickled to announce a new Technologizer section: Digital Media Central. It’s entirely devoted to a topic that’s near and dear to my heart and utterly core to our beat: the crossroads of the digital world and entertainment and other forms of content, from iPods and other media players to satellite radio to Internet TV to DV camcorders to media-savvy smartphones. The section will include news, reviews, and commentary by me and my Technologizer posse, plus guest posts by some big-name bloggers you know from elsewhere.

I hope you’ll contribute to the discussion, too, by jumping in via comments to share your experiences and opinions, especially when they differ from ours–and just to make participating even easier, we’ll throw some silly little polls your way as time goes on.

[Note: Digital Media Central is sponsored by HP's MediaSmart Server; as part of this sponsorship, HP is holding a contest that lets you submit your favorite videos, songs, and photos in return for a chance at winning a MediaSmart Server. As with all of Technnologizer, however, the buck stops with me when it comes to the editorial content; HP doesn't see it or control it.]

Analyst: Kindle will become Billion Dollar Product

Amazon.com has cause to celebrate before it unveils Kindle 2.0 next Monday. Using Apple’s iPod as its model, Citigroup predicts that the Kindle, what it calls the, iPod of the book world,” will become a $1.2 billion dollar business by 2010.

Analyst Mark Mahaney estimates that Amazon sold over 500,000 of the e-book readers last year alone based upon filings about wireless service activations from Amazon partner Sprint. He came to the $1.2 billion figure by assuming that Kindle owners will purchase an e-book every month.

The Kindle seems to be a hit–enough of one that Amazon has struggled to keep up with demand. Whether it is on the road to becoming another iPod is another story. There may be many avid readers, but few people that I know buy a book every single month. It is much easier for people to consume music and video than it is to sit down and find the time to read. And many titles now cost over $10.

Sure, certain segments will buy books regularly–commuters, book club members–but the iPod model may not be the best fit for the Kindle. Would you buy your kids a $300 e-book reader when a single book can occupy them for under $10?

Call me a curmudgeon, but my take is that the Kindle will sell briskly, and it could help e-books become more mainstream–but it won’t become a runaway success like the iPod has been.

A Little Gmail Tweak That Makes a Big Difference

I may be more excited about this than I am about offline Gmail access: Google has made a minor change to Gmail’s user interface that makes it–for some of us, anyhow–a far more appealing service.

Here’s the new Gmail menu bar:

What’s new are the “Move to” and “Labels” items. The latter simply moves the ability to apply a Label to an e-mail into its own menu, which makes it easier to get at the command. (Until now, you’ve had to burrow to the bottom of “More actions” to get at Labels.)

But “Move to” is the addition I’m so enthusiastic about: It lets you apply a Label and move an e-mail out of your inbox into Google’s archive with one click. Essentially, it duplicates the functionality that every other e-mail client on earth provides by allowing you to plunk an e-mail into a folder, thereby filing it away by subject matter and getting it out of your way. Kinda amazing that Google didn’t let you do it until now. (You’ve had to apply the Label and move the e-mail to the archive in two distinct steps–in theory not a biggie, but extra work is extra work. I’ve tended to ignore the problem, which means my inbox is bursting at the seams.)

Google has also introduced keyboard shortcuts and auto-complete functionality that let you label and move messages without touching your mouse; I’m not that much of a shortcut guy, so I’m less jazzed up about these. But some people will be very happy, I bet.

Unlike Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, I don’t think Gmail has reached perfection. And it won’t until it either improves the threaded-conversation interface or makes it optional. But between features that Google launches as Gmail Labs options (such as offline access) and ones it just rolls out for everybody (like the new Label interface), the company is improving Gmail at a dizzying rate…

Windows 7: Versions Aplenty

As my colleague Ed Oswald blogged, details are out about the versions of Windows 7 that Microsoft will make available. Here’s the scoop on the six versions as explained at Geekzone:

Windows 7 Starter: up to 3 concurrent applications, ability to join a Home Group, improved taskbar and JumpLists;

Windows 7 Home Basic: unlimited applications, live thumbnail previews & enhanced visual experience, advanced networking support (ad-hoc wireless networks and internet connection sharing), and Mobility Center;

Windows 7 Home Premium: Aero Glass & advanced windows navigation, improved media format support, enhancements to Windows Media Center and media streaming, including Play To, and multi-touch and improved handwriting recognition;

Windows 7 Professional: ability to join a managed network with Domain Join, data protection with advanced network backup and Encrypting File System, and print to the right printer at home or work with Location Aware Printing;

Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate: bitLocker data protection on internal and external drives, DirectAccess for seamless connectivity to corporate networks based on Windows Server 2008 R2, BranchCache support when on networks based on Windows Server 2008 R2, and lock unauthorized software from running with AppLocker.

In other words, the lineup is mostly similar to the situation with Windows Vista, except that the version that’s called Windows Vista Business will be replaced with one called Windows 7 Professional. But there are, apparently, some subtle differences in emphasis.

According to Geekzone, Windows 7 Starter will be available on netbooks and Windows 7 Home Basic will be for emerging markets. I hope it’s true that Home Basic won’t show up over here, since the existence of Windows Vista Home Basic was a contributing factor to the train wreck that was Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” program. But the news that Windows 7 Starter, unlike Windows Vista Starter, will be marketed in more developed nations is potentially a big deal. Microsoft is presumably doing so in order to get Windows onto super-cheap netbooks that would otherwise run Linux. Will people who buy such machines be happy with an intentionally crippled copy of Windows that can only run three programs at a time? We’ll see, I guess.

Some folks had held out hope that Microsoft might move to a simpler, easier-to-understand lineup of Windows versions a la the one that Apple offers. (There’s only one version of OS X, unless you count the Family Pack as a separate edition.) No such luck, apparently–which is kinda understandable given the far larger universe of people who Microsoft must attempt to make happy. (Apple, presumably, feels no need to figure out how to make Macs appealing to people in the world’s poorest nations.)

According to Mary Jo Foley’s post at ZDNet, Microsoft learned from the customer confusion that resulted from all the Windows Vista versions…but whatever lessons it learned still resulted in a mess o’ Windows 7 versions. That says a lot about Microsoft. Even though the theory is that most people will only encounter Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional.

Of course, there’s one version of Windows that’s not in the new lineup which would sell a lot of copies if it were available. That would be Windows XP. Maybe Microsoft should sneak it in under the name Windows 7 Classic Edition or something…

Windows 7 SKUs Announced

Well, I guess we can consider this a half win. While Microsoft will still offer just about the same number of SKUs as it did for Vista – criticized because it confused consumers – it will only focus on two of them. Pricing has yet to be announced, however.

Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet has the details straight from Windows business chief Bill Veghte. There will be three main consumer-focused versions of the OS which will work as follows:

• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Windows 7 Professional
• Windows 7 Ultimate

Two SKUs would be available to the so-called ‘developing markets:’

• Windows 7 Starter Edition
• Windows 7 Home Basic

There would also be a version aimed at business, Windows 7 Enterprise. This does not include the EU-mandated N and K versions, which add additional SKUs to the lineup. In any case, you will be able to purchase upgrade media even if you have XP installed. Very smart move on Microsoft’s part.

Google Puts Tasks on the iPhone

A couple of months ago, Google brought a simple but effective task manager into Gmail, courtesy of Gmail’s Labs proving ground for new features. Now it’s brought the feature to the iPhone, using a Mobile Safari-friendly interface:

The desktop version of Google Tasks emphasizes simplicity and speed over features; the iPhone one (which you reach by visiting http://gmail.com/tasks) is even more basic. I wish that it, like the desktop one, were integrated with Gmail itself–when I’m in Gmail on the iPhone, I’d like to be able to bop quickly into Tasks, and to be able to instantly turn an e-mail message into a task.  (On the iPhone, the two services are sepearate and unrelated.) You also can’t indent tasks on the iPhone.

But Tasks for Gmail is snappy and useful–and it’s especially welcome given that the iPhone still has no native task manager. For now, though, I’m sticking with the iPhone version of Remember the Milk. It’s part of RTM’s paid Pro service, which runs $25 a year, but unlike Google Tasks, it brings all the richness of its full-blown Web version to the iPhone. And I like supporting Remember the Milk, a very small company that consistently makes worthwhile products and does interesting things (like supporting offline access via Google’s Gears) before larger companies like Google get around to doing them…

Windows 7 from a Mac Guy’s Perspective

I’m definitely a Mac. Saying that now is kind of weird, considering just three short years ago other than a brief stint in college the last time I used an Apple computer was in Elementary School. Apple’s ease of use sucked me in, and although yes there is a learning curve, once you get going  things just work smoother.

No doubt Apple is resurgent at this point. Microsoft needed to do something to stop the bleeding before it would take some permanent damage. As I argued back in December, Windows stood to benefit from some Mac-like functionality, even though some Microsoft pundits seemed to disagree.

Now actually having the OS in front of me, I can honestly say for the first time in a long time I am impressed with Microsoft. Windows 7 actually is pretty slick. Instead of consisting merely of window dressing, this time it actually appears as if it may be worth it to upgrade.

Continue reading this story…

Is Internet Explorer a Goner? Will It Ever Be?

“Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE.” That’s the headline on a story by Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb, reporting on browser market-share numbers from Net applications that have IE being used by 67.5 percent of Internet users, down 7 percent in a year–and down from 90+ percent a few years ago.

Marshall’s title is provocative–is the day really nearing when IE users will be in the minority? (Actually, he defines “soon” loosely, since he says it might take a few years.) I don’t think there’s any real way to project where IE will be in the future based on its decline in recent years. Absent some truly startling development–I once suggested that Microsoft get out of the browser business and simply use Firefox as the basis for Windows’ browser, but it wasn’t listening, apparently–there must be some floor below which IE usage won’t fall. A meaningful chunk of Windows users consists of folks who give little or no thought to Web browsers, and will therefore use whatever Microsoft provides; the big question is just how large that chunk is.

Continue reading this story…

Windows XP Remains the Dominant Business OS. What’s Next?

Windows Vista has been available for over two years now, but Windows XP has proven its staying power.  It remains the dominant desktop operating system for businesses in Europe and North America, according to a new report by Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray.

While I’m hesitant to make any conclusions about a survey without reviewing its methodology, the findings mesh with similar research from other analysts. Gray surveyed IT managers–I don’t know how he defined the position–and found that Windows Vista was powering fewer than 10% of PCs within enterprises. Windows XP remained strong and steady with a 71% share of the market.

“While most IT managers are anticipating the struggle with managing their upcoming dual-OS environments of Windows XP and Windows Vista, some recognize it will only get worse as they are required to more broadly support Macs, Linux, and even consumer PCs as a result of Tech Populism’s impact on the client domain,” Gray wrote.

It’s not all doom and gloom for Windows Vista: thirty-one percent of respondents have begun to migrate to it. That finding led Forrester to predict that Windows Vista will be the OS that displaces Windows XP, despite interest in Windows 7.

My sense is that Microsoft is aiming Windows 7 most directly at consumers, not businesses. The changes Microsoft is making to the Windows Taskbar are long overdue, and well done, but business users might require training to work with it and other new features in the OS. Other changes, including more mellow User Account Control settings, also target home users.

Windows Vista is a fine OS for businesses. It got off to a rough start due largely to compatibility issues, but many of those issues were ironed out in Service Pack 1.

With Vista Service Pack 2′s release imminent, it is stable and reliable enough for businesses to migrate to. It also provides better support for many core applications and hardware than Windows XP does.

My take: If given a choose between the reasonably mature Windows Vista and a new, unproven OS such as Windows 7, any IT manager worth his or her salt would migrate to Vista and not skip a generation.

iPhone Games Getting Cleverer

We’ve previously written about the artistic side of iPhone games, and now it seems they’re taking a turn for the political.

Startup game company Yanki revealed that it’s awaiting Apple approval for Pay2Play: Illinois Governor Edition. The clear rip on Rod Blagojevich is a Drug Wars-style hustle, where players pay off various unions while earning money through the sale of cushy jobs, government contracts and, of course, senate seats. There’s even a nod to Alcopop, the fruity drink whose depiction Illinois banned from kid-centric video games earlier this year. Hopefully Apple will give this one the nod.

The news comes a week after Persuasive Games unveiled Jetset: A Game For Airports, a satirical TSA simulator that requires constant adaptation to changing security rules. It’s actually a remake of the 2006 game Airport Security, designed by the same studio, but with some twists for the mobile device. In addition to the usual hunting for banned items, such as pressurized cheese and toothbrushes, players can unlock souvenirs by playing the game in specific airports. The prizes are then shareable through Facebook and downloadable into the iPhone’s Snowglobe app.

These offerings fall into the categorization of “Serious Games” — those which strive for some meaning or statement beyond just entertainment value — and I never pegged the iPhone as a host for the genre. There’s no guarantee that either of these titles will be “fun,” per se, but they at least get you thinking about current events within gaming’s problem solving framework.

Hulu’s Super Bowl Ad Takes The Cake

I didn’t watch more than 2 minutes of the Super Bowl. I boycotted it. For those of you who know where I am located, you may be able to deduce why — I am a hardcore Philadelphia Eagles fan. The thought of sitting through that torture was just too much to bear.

So, I have not seen many of the commercials that aired until today. I will say out of all of the ones I’ve seen so far, the Hulu ad is one of the best.

The ad essentially claims to reveal Hulu’s “true secret,” delivered in a way that only Alec Baldwin could. The ad had to be good: yes us techies have known about Hulu for quite awhile, but most probably have not.

No doubt NBC was going to use its power as the carrier of the event in order to advertise it to the world. And its worked: according to all metrics, including site performance which was notably slow for hours after the commercial aired, it looks like people responded well.

Well played Hulu.