News From Around The Industry:

• 'Give One Get One' Is a Hit, So OLPC Wants To Kill It:
TechDirt points out this feel-good Xmas Season gem: "When the One Laptop Per Child project announced its "Give One Get One" program in September, I praised it as an opportunity to get some laptops in the hands of real users. And apparently the program has proven a big hit, raking in as much as $2 million a day in revenues. With numbers like that a normal firm would be looking for ways to expand the program. But not OLPC. While they have extended the program through the end of the year, Nicholas Negroponte is apparently anxious to phase it out after New Years, so that they can focus on a "give only" strategy. It almost seems like Negroponte believes there's something dirty about having people actually pay for his product. That doesn't make any sense. There's nothing wrong with making a profit, especially when those profits would presumably be plowed into giving away more free laptops to poor kids. It also appears that Negroponte is still bitter at Intel for introducing a competing low-price laptop. His angst seems rather misplaced. The goal is to get laptops into the hands of poor kids. If that goal is being accomplished, it doesn' really matter whose laptop ends up being the most popular. Poor countries have as much right to seek the best products they can get as anyone else. Intel has apparently used its considerable engineering resources to produce an attractive alternative to the XO. If third-world governments choose Intel's laptop over his own, Negroponte should be congratulating them for helping achieve the goal of universal laptop ownership, not griping about the fact that his product didn't make the cut." Am I just another commercially brain washed jaded American because this kind of thing really doesn't surprise me in the least? Bah humbug.

• Apple QuickTime zero-day flaw 'extremely critical':
Secunia has reported what it calls an "extremely critical" vulnerability in media-streaming program Apple QuickTime. The flaw, which affects the latest versions of QuickTime, 7.x, has not been patched and could allow a hacker to gain remote control of an affected system. It lies in a boundary error, when the program processes Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) replies, according to Secunia's advisory, published on Monday. RTSP allows a client to remotely control video streams. A working exploit code is in the wild, said Secunia. Secunia is advising that users do not browse untrusted websites, follow untrusted links, or open untrusted QuickTime Media Link files. With Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7, and the Safari 3 beta, the attack appears to be prevented because standard buffer overflow prevention processes act before any damage can be done, Florio wrote. With Firefox, the QuickTime RTSP response is unmoderated. As a result, the exploit works against Firefox if QuickTime is the default multimedia player.

• Skype must 'rebuild trust' after number debacle:
Last week it emerged that the VoIP company was withdrawing almost 10,000 0207-prefixed numbers from its SkypeIn service. SkypeIn is a paid-for service which gives users a geographic number for incoming calls. The withdrawal of the numbers came after talks broke down between Skype and its supplier of 0207 numbers, GCI Telecom. Due to the popularity of 0207 numbers, their cost has risen, and it seems Skype was unwilling to pay more than before to maintain those numbers. Ian Fogg, an analyst with JupiterResearch, said that Skype must "rebuild trust" among its business customers. "My advice to Skype would be: if you, as a company, wish to target small businesses or even consumers, you need to respond swiftly to reassure your users that this isn't going to happen again," he said. "Don't offer a different number without some kind of transitionary agreement." Skype has offered affected users new SkypeIn numbers which don't begin with 0207. The 0207 prefix has always been popular with business customers because it implies that the user is based in central London. Fogg added that the issue was not so much the changing of numbers, because London's dialling codes have changed several times over the last two decades, but the fact that, with only a month's notice, no transitionary arrangement seems to have been in place for the affected users.

• Google makes bid to hold all your data:
Google is hatching a cunning plan which will have it store all your hard drive data on its servers. Google will let people put all their files including documents, vid clips and images on its servers in a spooky replay of Larry Ellison's cunning plan of the 1990s. Ellison said then our data would be safer on his servers than on our own machines. Apparently it wants to give people a chunk of storage where they can bung all their crap and presumably use its mini-apps to access the stuff. The egregious outfit already indexes the world+dog but let's face it, who wants to allow a multinational giant with a somewhat dodgy record on China to be the custodian of well, everything connected with a computer. No doubt many will go for it. And it would certainly allow for the creation of very cheap devices with bills of materials (BOMs) that make an OPLC seem like a very expensive luxury.

• Microsoft on the hunt for 'serious' Windows flaw:
Microsoft bug squashers are investigating reports of a serious security vulnerability in Windows operating systems that could allow attackers to take control of vast numbers of machines, particularly those located off US shores. A Microsoft spokesman had only minimal details about the investigation, which was prompted by a presentation last week by researcher Beau Butler at the Kiwicon security conference in New Zealand. According to reports, the flaw affects every version of Windows including Vista and is actually the continuation of an old vulnerability that Microsoft supposedly fixed years ago. The bug, according to Symantec's DeepSight threat notification service, resides in a feature known as Web Proxy Autodiscovery (WPAD), which helps IT administrators automate the configuration of proxy settings in Internet Explorer and other web browsers. The vulnerability can be "widely exploited" to "intercept web sessions, direct browsers to malicious proxies, and effectively gain control over unsuspecting users' web traffic," according to Symantec, which said it had yet to confirm the vulnerability.

• Early Tests Say SP3 Speeds Windows XP:
Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), the update scheduled to release next year, runs Microsoft's Office suite 10% faster than XP SP2, a performance testing software developer reported. "Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release, the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus," Craig Barth, Devil Mountain's chief technology officer, said. "In fact, XP SP3 is shaping up to be a 'must-have' update for the majority of users who are still running Redmond's not-so-latest and greatest desktop OS." "None of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than two times slower than the most current builds of its older sibling," said Barth. While Microsoft was not available for comment over the weekend about XP's performance, it defended Vista SP1 after Devil Mountain's first round of tests. "We appreciate the excitement to evaluate Windows Vista SP1 as soon as possible. However, the service pack is still in the development phase and will undergo several changes before being released," a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

• Sales Of Multimedia Phones To Pass TVs Next Year, Report Predicts:
Worldwide shipments of multimedia-enabled mobile phones will exceed 300 million units next year, surpassing shipments of television sets, according to a research report being released this week by MultiMedia Intelligence. Sales of such phones will generate over $76 billion in revenue. By 2011, about 9 of 10 mobile phones will include basic multimedia capabilities, which consist of an image sensor, MP3 audio support, and video playback. Currently, these capabilities are available in 60% of mobile phones, according to the report. In general, MultiMedia Intelligence defines basic multimedia phones as those that have at least a 1.0-megapixel camera, MP3 audio and video playback capabilities, Java, USB, Bluetooth, 16-bit screen color, QVGA resolution, as well as Wireless Application Protocol and Multimedia Message Service support. Wireless carriers view multimedia phones as a great opportunity to attract new subscribers. Consequently, they're turning to leading manufacturers, such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics, and Sony Ericsson, for exclusive phones with innovative form factors and multimedia features. A touch screen will be another prominent feature on mobile phones in the near future. The number of phones with touch screens will reach almost 200 million by 2011.

• Hackers will feed on Vista in 2008, says McAfee:
Microsoft will face more than 40 vulnerabilities in Windows Vista next year, as the operating system climbs past the 10% market-share milestone and malware authors really start to find flaws, a McAfee analyst said. According to data from Web metrics vendor Net Applications, Vista's market share was about 7.9% at the end of October, up from 7.4% the month before. "Most of the current malware has ignored Vista," said Craig Schmugar, a threat researcher at McAfee's Avert Lab -- but that's not because the operating system has been frustratingly secure. In fact, Schmugar argued, Vista has been a worthwhile target in the first year of its release. "These people make their living writing malware or attacking users," he said. "They're driven by financial motivation, and only when market share has an impact will they really work on Vista."

• Femtocells to cure 3G headaches?:
Market demand for ubiquitous access to mobile services is making the case for femtocells - aka small indoor cellular base stations which utilise broadband connections for backhaul. Mark Heath, co-author of the report and director of research at Sound Partners Research, told silicon.com: "The idea of femtocells is a really clever way to avoid needing to make these big 3G networks more dense to provide the necessary quality of service." Some operators would have to double or triple the number of base stations they have to provide the very high quality of service required for indoor coverage, according to Heath. He added: "By eliminating transition costs by utilising DSL connections already in people's homes and getting the unit price down to a very low level, it could be a more cost effective way to deliver services."

• BBC apologises for calling Sky Broadband users stupid:
BBC columnist Bill Thompson has apologised to users of Sky Broadband’s e-mail service after making a somewhat poorly informed remark about the providers recent e-mail migration problems (original news): Had Thompson researched the situation then he would have seen that the migration suffered from a number of technical and communication related problems, which Sky itself had already admitted to. Thompson has now apologised (albeit without the use of ‘sorry’):