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MCITP, mcitp certification, MCITP Training, MCSE, MCSE Certification, MCSE Training, MCTS, MCTS Certification, MCTS Training, Microsoft, Tech, Windows 7

Windows XP Gets Security Certification

Touting the success of it’s new Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) process, Microsoft late Wednesday said Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP SP2 Professional and Embedded have secured the highest Common Criteria security certification from the United States government’s National Information Assurance Partnership.

 

 

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Four versions of Windows Server 2003 were certified, including Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, Datacenter Edition and Windows Server 2003 Certificate Server. Both Windows 2000 Professional and Server editions previously achieved the same security rating, dubbed Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4.

To obtain the certification, which is handled by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), the six operating systems were put through 20 real-world scenarios, or “workloads.” The Common Criteria testing was ratified as an international standard in 1999.

“CC certification of these Windows platform products, which includes evaluation of the broadest set of real-world scenarios of any operating system platform today, underscores our deep and ongoing commitment to the Common Criteria process,” said Steve Lipner, senior director of security engineering strategy at Microsoft.

Lipner said SDL played a critical role in helping to achieve the certification. SDL is Microsoft’s new approach to software development, in which it carefully reviews all code for security risks and takes into account the best practices it learned after undertaking an extensive security review in 2002.

Microsoft says its newly released development products, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, have undergone the SDL process from beginning to end. In the process, the company also developed two security debugging tools known as PREfast and FxCop.

“This milestone complements our ongoing advances in software quality through the Security Development Lifecycle process, ultimately benefiting any IT organization that is serious about security,” Lipner added.

Microsoft, Windows 7

Microsoft previews Internet Explorer 10 II

The next-generation browser has a heavy emphasis on HTML5 and offers CSS3 capabilities and accelerated graphics
Preaching the mantra of HTML5, Microsoft began offering on Tuesday a preview of its planned Internet Explorer 10 browser, which emphasizes the critical Web specification and its visual effects.

 

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Microsoft also announced the availability this morning of Windows Azure cloud platform capabilities, including services to accelerate application performance and enable secure Web access via popular identity providers like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. A preview of a traffic management capability for Azure, to balance application performance across different geographies, was made available as well. Additionally, Microsoft unveiled a preview of a Windows Azure content delivery network for media streaming.

Also from Microsoft on Tuesday, version 1.1 of the Orchard project was rolled out, for delivering applications and reusable components based on ASP.Net. Improvements include a Recipes feature for streamlining setup, a new admin panel design, usability and workflow improvements more extensibility and customization. Orchard features a content management system and blogging support out of the box. The company also refreshed of its ASP.Net MVC (Model-View Controller) 3 software, with tools offering HTML5 capabilities.

Microsoft, Windows 7

Microsoft previews Internet Explorer 10

The next-generation browser has a heavy emphasis on HTML5 and offers CSS3 capabilities and accelerated graphics

Preaching the mantra of HTML5, Microsoft began offering on Tuesday a preview of its planned Internet Explorer 10 browser, which emphasizes the critical Web specification and its visual effects.

 

 



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The browser offers CSS3 capabilities and accelerated graphics. “We’re hard at work on IE10 on some forward-looking things,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division at Microsoft, during a presentation Wednesday at the Mix11 conference in Las Vegas. Company officials demonstrated the IE10 platform preview, featuring HTML5 video, CSS3 gradients, and 3D transforms. The preview, which was shown running on a machine running an ARM processor, also boasted faster SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), CSS3 Flexible Box Layout capabilities, and ECMAscript 5 Strict language improvements.

[ Despite having proprietary technologies to rival HTML5, both Microsoft and Adobe are on board supporting HTML technologies. | Get your websites up to speed with HTML5 today using the techniques in InfoWorld’s HTML5 Deep Dive PDF how-to report. | Follow Paul Krill on Twitter. ]

Microsoft is about three weeks into the development of IE10. The preview is available at the IE Test Drive site, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft corporate vice president of Internet Explorer. He also stressed Microsoft’s adherence to “native HTML5,” supported in IE9, which was released four weeks ago. “You and your site can take advantage of that today and deliver significantly better browser experiences.” Native HTML, Hachamovitch said, means “that you really use the language to take advantage of the underlying OS” and leverage hardware acceleration.

Updates to the IE10 platform preview are planned for every 8 to 12 weeks. No specific time was offered for a general release of the browser. Hachamovitch acknowledged that browser upgrades at user sites can be a slow process. He cited an example of a hospital nuclear imaging system he was aware of that still used IE6: “Sometimes, the old versions just take a while to go away.”

Despite’s Microsoft’s emphasis on HTML5, seen as a rival to the company’s proprietary Silverlight rich Internet application plug-in, a beta release of Silverlight 5 also is due to be released at the conference. But in touting HTML5, Hachamovitch stressed it offers capabilities previously requiring a plug-in. “Native HTML5 support within Windows in IE9 makes a huge difference in what these sites can do.”

Microsoft is acknowledging that HTML5 “is the language for developing front ends on the Web,” said analyst Al Hilwa, of IDC. “The position on Silverlight is no different than that articulated earlier. It seems to me that Silverlight will remain native-type technology as an extension of .Net into lighter-weight devices. Silverlight will likely be heavily used in Windows 8 tablets, but we will not know for sure until September.”

Tech, Windows 7

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Lags iOS, Android In Consumers’ Eyes: Report

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 is running behind Apple’s iOS, Android and RIM as a desired smartphone for consumers, says a new Nielsen Company research note.

Windows Phone 7 lags behind RIM’s BlackBerry franchise, Google Android devices, and Apple’s iOS among desired smartphones, according to new data from The Nielsen Company.

 

 



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That comes despite recent data suggesting that Microsoft’s latest smartphone platform is seeing some traction among third-party developers, whose apps are considered a vital part of any smartphone’s appeal.

For the period between January and March, some 31 percent of consumers indicated they wanted an Android smartphone as their next device, up from 26 percent from Nielsen’s July-September 2010 survey. Meanwhile, Apple’s iOS scored 30 percent, down from 33 percent, and RIM’s BlackBerry came in third at 11 percent (a dip from 13 percent).

The combined Windows Mobile/Windows Phone 7 scored 6 percent, a slight downtick from the 7 percent in Nielsen’s last reading. Microsoft managed to beat out Palm/webOS and Symbian. Around 20 percent of respondents weren’t sure about the brand of their next smartphone, up from 18 percent.

“Consumer preferences can be fickle,” cautioned an April 26 posting on Nielsen’s blog.

According to recent data from analytics firm comScore, Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market dipped to 7.7 percent for the three months ending in February, down from 9 percent in November 2010. That placed the platform behind Google Android, Apple’s iOS, and RIM’s BlackBerry. During its MIX11 conference in Las Vegas, however, Microsoft executives insisted that third-party developers were busy adding high-quality apps to Microsoft’s app storefront, and that the upcoming “Mango” software update would introduce essential features such as multitasking and Internet Explorer 9—both indications, apparently, that the platform was on the way up.

On April 21, Microsoft and Nokia also announced a definitive agreement to partner on Windows Phone 7, a relationship that could radically alter the mobility landscape in years to come. Under the terms of that agreement, Nokia will manufacture phones loaded with Windows Phone 7, receiving billions of dollars in return from Microsoft. (Nokia also remains publicly committed to supporting its Symbian OS through at least 2014, with new Symbian phones slated to hit the market in 2011 and 2012.)

“With the definitive agreement now signed, both companies will begin engaging with operators, developers and other partners to help the industry understand the benefits of joining the new ecosystem,” read a joint statement. “At the same time, work will continue on developing Nokia products on the Windows Phone platform, with the aim of securing volume device shipments in 2012.”

According to a recent research note from IDC, that Nokia partnership could propel Windows Phone 7 past RIM and Apple to become the second-ranked smartphone operating system in the world by 2015. “The new alliance brings together Nokia’s hardware capabilities and Windows Phone’s differentiated platform,” IDC analyst Ramon Llamas wrote in that statement. “IDC expects Windows Phone to be number 2 operating system worldwide behind Android.”

That could take a bit more desire than the Nielsen numbers indicate.

Microsoft

Microsoft Explains Its Phone Location-Data Policy

Microsoft moved to explain how and when its Windows Phone devices collect location data, even as Apple moved to squash chatter about iOS location-tracking.

As Apple wrestled with controversy over iOS devices storing location data, Microsoft moved to offer its own explanation for when and how its Windows Phone devices collect information on a user’s physical location.

 

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“When you allow an application or game to access your device’s location, the application or game will connect to Microsoft’s location services and request the approximate location of the device,” reads the FAQ posted on Microsoft’s corporate Website. “The location service will respond by providing the application or game with the location coordinates of the user’s device (when available), which the application or game can then use to enrich the user experience.”

Microsoft’s location services apparently rely on a database of local cell towers and known WiFi access points to “provide an approximate location of the user’s device.” (Microsoft insists the “managed driving” it uses to collect information about WiFi access points will not take any emails or passwords transmitted by those hotspots.) Users can also deny applications access to their location information.

“Applications that use your location are required to provide the ability to turn off that application’s access to your location,” reads another part of the FAQ. “And you can always turn off access for all applications by turning off location services.”

In addition to WiFi access points, Microsoft’s location services can leverage a device’s GPS to provide observed longitude, latitude, direction and speed.

Furthermore, Microsoft’s location services “will only collect information when you allow a particular application to request location information and that particular application requests location information.” While Microsoft apparently creates a randomly generated ID to identify mobile devices sending information to its location services, the FAQ makes no mention of whether such transmissions are encrypted in transit. Microsoft also claims the location information “is not shared with mobile operators.”

Windows Phones don’t seem to store the user’s location data on the smartphone itself, a marked departure from iOS or Google Android.

Both Apple and Google are under additional government pressure to reveal how they collect and store location data, after Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan asked to meet with executives from both companies to discuss privacy issues. Apple is also facing inquiries from U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who fired off letters to Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking for greater clarification on news that the iPhone and 3G-enabled iPad running iOS 4 have been saving location data to a hidden database file.

Researcher Alasdair Allan wrote about iOS 4’s supposed location-sniffing abilities in an April 20 posting on the O’Reilly Radar blog. Working with co-researcher Pete Warden, he released an open-source iPhone Tracker application that can plot stored location data on a map.

“The database of your locations is stored on your iPhone as well as in any of the automatic backups that are made when you sync it with iTunes,” Allan wrote as part of a FAQ about removing the data. “One thing that will help is choosing encrypted backups, since that will prevent other users or programs on your machine from viewing the data, but there will still be a copy on your device.”

Location data saved by iOS 4 apparently includes information gleaned from cell towers and the names of WiFi access points, and not actual GPS data from a tablet or smartphone. Other recent news reports have suggested that smartphones running Android are transmitting location data to Google.

In a FAQ posted on its corporate Website, Apple attempted to clarify its position on location-logging.

“The iPhone is not logging your location,” reads one section. “Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested.”

Apple goes on to insist that the iPhone only stores a protected subset of that total crowd-sourced database. “The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of WiFi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location,” reads the FAQ, “which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone.”

Apple apparently plans to stop backing up this cache “soon,” courtesy of a future software update.

Microsoft, Windows 7

Microsoft Promises Multitasking, Augmented Reality Apps for Windows Phone

Microsoft showcased the next version of its Windows Phone platform at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas Wednesday. The upcoming iteration should bring several important improvements, including support for application multitasking.

 



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The new platform will become available to developers in May. Besides multitasking, key improvements should enable developers to take advantage of audio and file transfer, fast app switching, deeper OS integration and access to the camera and motion sensor library, which will enable augmented reality apps similar to those we’ve seen on other platforms such as iOS and Android.

To showcase the capabilities of the new platform, Microsoft gave visitors an early look into new concepts for several popular apps from Skype, Spotify, Layar, Qantas, Amazon Shopping and Kik Messenger.

Microsoft also announced the the new Microsoft Silverlight 5 beta, available now, providing support for hardware video decoding, a new XNA-based interface for delivering 3D visualizations within apps and something Microsoft calls Trickplay, a feature that provides variable-rate video playback with audio pitch correction. The new beta version is available for download at microsoft.com/silverlight.

Finally, Microsoft showcased some new features from the Kinect for Windows Beta SDK coming this spring. It includes Robust Skeletal Tracking, which tracks the skeleton image of one or two people moving within Kinect’s view; an XYZ depth camera that indicates the distance of the object from Kinect’s sensor; and advanced audio capabilities that include a four-element microphone array with sophisticated acoustic noise and echo cancellation as well as beam formation to identify the sound source.

Developers can sign up at research.microsoft.com/kinectsdk to be notified when the SDK is released.

Microsoft, Nokia

Microsoft Windows Phones Built By Nokia Due in 2012

Microsoft and Nokia signed a definitive agreement that seals the deal announced in February between the two companies, creating a formidable competitor against Google‘s Android and Apple‘s iOS.

 

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Now, Nokia can migrate away from its aging Symbian operating system, embracing the Windows Phone software to create a new ecosystem of Nokia hardware and Microsoft software. The companies announced that Nokia-built Windows Phones are already in development, “with the aim of securing volume device shipments in 2012.”

While Nokia engineers are busying themselves creating hardware for the Windows Phone, Microsoft gains the power of Nokia’s mapping and navigation platform, certain to enhance Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Those mapping services will also show up on Nokia phones running Windows Phone, but there was no word about whether those mapping services would also run on Windows Phone handsets not made by Nokia.

What about developers? The companies plan to ease the transition for Symbian developers to move to the Windows phone operating system. According to a Nokia spokesperson (see video below), “All Symbian developers will have a free registration for the next year for the Windows developers program.”

Nokia will also reportedly open a Nokia-branded app store based on the Windows Marketplace infrastructure, where developers will be able to distribute their apps for Windows Phone, Symbian or Series 40 devices.

In our view, this looks like a mutually beneficial relationship, where Microsoft will have a formidable hardware manufacturer and map platform in its camp, while Nokia will gain Microsoft’s resources, including gaming expertise, Windows Phone, Bing search facilities on every smartphone and Microsoft’s vast marketing machine.

Which company do you think got the better end of the deal here?

Microsoft, Office, Tech

Beyond the browser: Microsoft’s ‘C3’ next-gen platform for HTML-based applications

Must a traditional Web browser be the primary way to interact with and navigate a Web application?

Microsoft researchers think the answer is no. They are building another option — ‘C3,’ an extensible platform for HTML-based applications. Along with University of Washington researchers, Microsoft researchers will show off C3 at the WebApps’11 conference this June in Portland, Oreg.

 

 



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(C3 may stand for “cloud computing client,” one of my contacts said.)

Word of the existence of C3 emerged last November when researchers posted a technical paper, entitled “Verified Security for Browser Extensions.” That paper made mention of C3, which researchers called “a new platform for HTML5 experimentation developed entirely in a type-safe, managed language,” specifically C#. (They also subsequently referred to C3 in that paper as “a research Web browser.”)

There’s a bit more information available now about C3 (though the full WebApps’11 paper on it is not yet available). From one of the University of Washington researcher’s description:

“We present C3, an implementation of the HTML/JS/CSS platform designed for web client research and experimentation. C3 introduces novel extension points and generalizes existing ones, creating simpler and more powerful opportunities for customization. In addition, C3’s typesafe, modular architecture lowers the barrier to web and browser research. We discuss and evaluate C3’s design decisions for flexibility, and provide examples for various extensions that we and others have built.”

And from a UW Engineering Web page on the project:

“Nothing inherently confines webapps to a browser’s page- navigation idiom, and browsers can do far more than merely render content.”

The C3 team, which includes on the Microsoft side Wolfram Schute and Herman Venter, have done a lot of work around the concept of extensions, it seems. That leads me to wonder whether C3 is somehow connected to another Microsoft Research project, known as Xax.

“Xax is a browser plugin model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, and entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web,” according to the Microsoft Research web page about the project. “Xax employs a novel combination of mechanisms that collectively provide security, OS-independence, performance, and support for legacy code.”

Microsoft Researchers are working on other browser- and HTML-app-centric projects, as well, including the ServiceOS/Verve one about which I’ve blogged previously.

Update: If you want to understand Microsoft’s obsession on plug-ins, the just-posted blog entry from the Internet Explorer team on add-ons and IE 9 reliability is worth a read.

Google, Tech

Google insists it will remain open source player

Google insists that Android will remain an open source platform and takes great exception to reports to the contrary.

That’s good news.

“Recently, there’s been a lot of misinformation in the press about Android and Google’s role in supporting the ecosystem. I’m writing in the spirit of transparency and in an attempt to set the record straight,” wrote Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google, in a blog earlier this month.

“Our approach remains unchanged: there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs. There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture.

Google will release its Android 3.0 code to the open source community when it’s ready.

“We continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready. As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.”

 

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It’s good news that Google reacted so negatively to questions about its open source commitment. If the company had been silent … now that would have been concerning.

I was one of those who raised concerns about Google’s decision — who spread the “misinformation.”

Rubin’s reaction is understandable to some extent. Google has done a lot of good for the open source community. And it employs Andrew Morton and Jeremy Allison, after all.

Nevertheless, it is the job of the press and the public to raise questions when there are apparent deviations to clearly defined principles of open source. That’s the beauty of transparency.

The beauty of open source is that it is open — open for inspection, open for debate and open for criticism.  Was some of the criticism a kneejerk reaction? Maybe.  Maybe not. Whether or not such criticism is “misinformation” has yet to be proven.  But it is worthy of discussion.

Tech

HOW TO: Make Craigslist Better & Prettier With a Browser Extension

Craigslist is one of the most useful and yet one of the ugliest tools on the Internet. And its bare-bones, basic feature set is both a blessing and a curse.

So, how to ease the pain of using Craigslist while keeping its simplicity and utility? Allow us to introduce you to Craigslist Helper.

 

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This handy browser extension (available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari) lets you preview text and thumbnails from your Craigslist search results. You can also bookmark listings and even make your own notes on them.

For example, if you’re househunting, you might use the app to see images of your new pad options without having 30 tabs open; then, you’d be able to prioritize them and even keep track of conversations with potential landlords, all without leaving Craigslist.

Other features include:

* Alerts when new listings that match your search appear
* Multiple searches by geographical area, or even a whole-site search
* Hide ads
* Filter by keyword; for example, choose not to see listings with “freeway”
* Map popups to show locations
* Phone number highlighting

Here’s an example screenshot showing housing listings within 350 miles of San Francisco:

As the extensions’ mysterious developer writes on Quora, “My guess is, [Craigslist doesn’t] innovate simply because they can afford not to — at least until a Facebook to their MySpace comes along.” And until another classifieds startup successfully challenges Craigslist — and believe us, a few of them are trying — apps like Craigslist Helper will have to do.

Will you be trying Craigslist Helper next time you have to do a classifieds search?