Power of Thought

As Facebook.com’s mastermind, Mark Zuckerberg is sitting on a potential gold mine that could make him the next Silicon Valley whiz kid to strike it rich.

But the 22-year-old founder of the Internet’s second largest social-networking site also could turn into the next poster boy for missed opportunities if he waits too long to cash in on Facebook Inc., which is expected to generate revenue of more than $100 million this year. The bright outlook is one reason Zuckerberg felt justified spurning several takeover bids last year, including a $1 billion offer from Yahoo Inc.

“We clearly have a bias toward building than selling,” Zuckerberg said in a recent interview. “We think there is a lot more to unlock here.”

The build-or-sell dilemma facing Zuckerberg is becoming more common among the precocious entrepreneurs immersed in the latest Internet craze, a communal concept of content-sharing that has been dubbed “Web 2.0.”

Besides Facebook, other Web 2.0 startups frequently mentioned as prime takeover targets include online video site Metacafe Inc. and Photobucket Inc., which has emerged as one of the Internet’s busiest destinations by hosting personal videos and photos that are routinely linked to top social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

These sites find themselves at a critical juncture reached several years ago by the Internet’s first big social-networking site, Friendster.com, which chose to stay independent instead of selling. That decision is now regarded as one of Silicon Valley’s biggest blunders.

Web 2.0 startups have emerged as hot commodities because they are drawing more people away from television, newspapers and other media traditionally used for advertising. Online video channels and socials networks, a catchall phrase attached to sites that enable people with common interests to connect and deepen their bonds, are particularly hot.

Deep-pocketed companies are now angling for a piece of the Web 2.0 action — a quest that already has yielded a couple big jackpots, helping to propel the sales prices of startups to their highest levels since the dot-com boom.
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Experts say Windows Vista may still be susceptible to hackers. Vulnerablities in Windows Vista will plague users in coming months and years, a prominent security researcher warns, despite its security improvements over predecessor XP.

Security bug-hunters are now turning their attention to the new platform and users should not expect Vista to be immune to attack, said Marc Maiffret, founder and chief hacking officer of eEye Digital Security.

“I don’t think it’s a huge leap forward,” he says. “Here we are a few weeks after Vista’s been released to retail and there’s already been five or six different Vista-specific vulnerabilities.”

Last week eEye discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Office 2007 software which it claims can be exploited in Vista.

But Mr Maiffret does not blame the software giant for the mismatch between the market’s expectations about Vista’s security and the less palatable reality. “There’s no other software company that does more to secure their code than Microsoft,” Mr Maiffret says. “It’s weird to me that a lot of people think there should be this thing that we reach at some point where the operating system is impenetrable… I don’t think that is ever going to happen.”

Matt Thomlinson, Microsoft’s senior director of security engineering, says Vista is a vast improvement on XP. He highlights the system’s handling of system memory as a big step forward.

Protective measures that detect the abuse of a computer’s memory by an attacker have been written into the operating system, and Vista’s processes are now loaded randomly into memory for security purposes.

By randomly placing system files into memory while booting, the operating system is harder to attack, he says.

Some digital attacks require the perpetrator to know precisely where certain processes are located in memory. By randomising the layout of the operating system in a computer’s memory, Mr Thomlinson hopes Vista will sidestep an entire class of attacks.

“The idea here is . . . we want our customers to get the advantage of natural variation. Every Windows box looks just a little bit different to an attacker,” he says. “So if somebody is writing (attack code) and they’re depending on something being in a certain place, it’s not going to work, or it will only work one half of 1 per cent of the time.”

Chris Spencer, Australian vulnerability researcher and organiser of the Sydney-based Ruxcon security conference, is more upbeat than Mr Maiffret when assessing the improvements to Windows. “The heap management system’s been improved, so it’s going to be a lot harder to exploit vulnerabilities,” he says. “Not impossible, but a lot harder.”

Like Mr Maiffret, Mr Spencer predicts bugs will still be found in the operating system, but hackers and researchers like himself will have to work much harder to transform security glitches into meaningful attacks. “It’s going to be a massive improvement,” he says.
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Wembley Stadium (a football stadium located in London, UK) will be the most expensive stadium ever built at a cost of £798 million ($1,560 million) and will have the largest roof-covered seating capacity in Europe.

Facts and Figures
1. With 90,000 seats the new Wembley will be the largest football stadium in the world with every seat under cover. There will be NO obstructed views.

2. The arch is 133 metres above the level of the external concourse.

3. The stadium roof rises to 52 metres above the pitch. This compares to the 35 metres tall Twin Towers of the old stadium.

4. The new Wembley has a circumference of 1 km.

5. The London Eye could fit between the top of the arch and the pitch.

6. The new roof will be over 11 acres. Four acres are moveable.

7. The rows of seating, if placed end to end, would stretch 54 kilometers.

8. 4,000 separate piles will form the foundations of the new stadium. The deepest of these, at 35 metres, is as deep as the Twin Towers were tall.

9. There will be 35 miles of heavy-duty power cables in the stadium.

10. With a span of 315 Metres, the arch will be the longest single span roof structure in the world.

11. With a diameter of 7.4 metres the arch is wide enough for a Channel Tunnel train to run through.

12. 90,000m3 of concrete and 23,000 tonnes of steel will be used in the construction of the new stadium.

13. The roof alone will weigh almost 7,000 tonnes.

14. At peak construction there will be 2,000+ people working on site.

15. The new pitch will be 4 metres lower than the previous pitch.

16. Each of the two giant screens in new stadium is the size of 600 domestic television sets.

17. The new Wembley encloses 4,000,000 m3 (cubic metres) inside its walls and under its roof. This is the equivalent of 25,000 double decker buses or 7 billion pints of milk.

18. The total length of the escalators will be the same as a 400 metre running track.

19. There will be 2,618 toilets - which WNSL estimate is more than any other stadium in the world.

20. There is more leg room in EVERY seat in the new Wembley Stadium than there was in the Royal Box of the old stadium.

Wembley Stadium is due to open around March 2007, and will play host to the 2012 Summer Olympics and the first regular season NFL game outside North America between the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins.

Google has released its first product which could challenge Microsoft in its own manor.

The big idea is to get corporations to subscribe to its online corporate software bundle which includes office software over the interweb.

Google Apps Premier Edition, which was released today, has an online e-mail, calendaring, messaging and talk applications as well as a word processor and a spreadsheet.

Unlike the free version - which has been ignored by the great unwashed public for a while - the Premier Edition has a few bells and whistles that make it more useful for medium and larger sized businesses.

For $50 per user, a year, Google Apps Premier Edition has programming interfaces that businesses can use to integrate it with their own applications.

It comes with 10GB of storage for ad-free Gmail as standard, service agreements that promise 99.9% uptime, and “always on” tech support.

If a business can cope with its data being stored at Google then it is possible for it to give ten users an office product for the cost of one Office professional seat.

On the down side, it lacks a presentation tool and only has limited contact management capabilities. You also have to trust Google a lot and you can probably buy a Linux install for all the applications you can eat for about the same price.

Original URL: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37784

Entertainment giant Viacom is to provide TV programmes and films to much-hyped online video service Joost.

The deal includes programming from MTV Networks, BET Networks and film studio Paramount Pictures.

Joost was founded by Niklas Zennstroem and Janus Friis, the men behind Skype, and is pitching itself as a broadband video network.

Earlier this month Viacom asked YouTube to remove 100,000 “unauthorised” clips from the service now owned by Google.

The terms of the deal between Viacom and Joost were not made public but the service will have “free access to thousands of programmes and channels not readily available on the web”.

The agreement reflects the growth of interest mainstream media is taking in online delivery of video.

Similar services
Services such as iTunes and websites from networks like NBC and ABC are turning to the web to offer programmes and films.

In the UK Channel 4 was the first of the main broadcasters to offer a video-on-demand service, while the BBC and ITV plan similar services for later in the year.

The content Joost will receive from Viacom is aimed at a younger demographic, with programmes such as Laguna Beach, Beavis and Butthead, Real World and Punk’d on offer.

Joost is still in a beta - or test - form, allowing users to give technical feedback to the developers.

The company recently announced a version of its software that will allow it to run on Apple Macs as well as PCs.

Janus Friis, founder of Joost said: “We built this platform from the ground up, with companies like Viacom in mind.”

“We’re extremely pleased to be working with Joost, and couldn’t be prouder to be a key partner in the launch of the next generation in broadband video technology,” said Philippe Dauman, Viacom president and chief executive officer.

There are also reports that Joost is in talks with British broadcasters ITV and Channel 4.

Original URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/6379595.stm