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[Via Geek.com]

The competition between mobile coupon purveyors is, of course, wonderful for the consumer, who could link their savings card with both services and possibly double the number of coupons to whittle down a bill. That is, so long as the savings arrive for grocery items you’d actually use, and for stores that are already on your warpath. Shortcuts.com has some coupons I would want to use, but none of its 14 partner markets is within a 60 mile radius of where I shop for food. Here’s hoping that the undisclosed grocery store AOL says it will partner with this spring is the one situated just down the street.

Coupons for popular cereal and a jumbo pack of Pull-Ups Training Pants greet you when you navigate to Shortcuts.com from the
mobile browser. After you’ve registered your savings club card with Shortcuts.com, you’ll be able to add vouchers like these directly to your account, and redeem them in-store without a paper receipt.

The new mobile focus on Shortcuts.com’s service puts some heat on Cellfire (coverage), a native coupons application built for a variety of mobile phones. While Cellfire branches out beyond grocery stores to get you coupons to local and national chain restaurants and other retail shops, Cellfire is also gunning for the supermarket tie-in. On Ralph’s supermarket Web site, for instance, Cellfire and Shortcuts.com are neck-and-neck for advertising space.

Cellfire and Shortcuts.com want your Ralph's Club Card number.

What’s even better than getting grocery store coupons online? Getting them from your cell phone. AOL has released a version of its online coupons service, Shortcuts.com, that’s now optimized for viewing from the mobile phone.

(Credit:
CNET)

However, Veoh, which competes with YouTube and Hulu, hasn’t managed to break out of the pack of also-ran video sites.

“I have no idea where their sourcing is coming from,” spokesperson Gaude Paez said Monday, adding that she was disappointed Valleywag didn’t contact the company for comment. “Everyone who was employed here Friday was employed here today, and will be tomorrow.”

Veoh had eliminated 15 to 18 jobs based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and was in the process of transferring the jobs to the U.S., Paez said. Paez also told NewTeeVee that a rumor posted to that site saying Veoh would be “$20 million in the hole” at the end of the year was untrue.

The company announced in June that it has received another round of funding, this time for $30 million, from such new backers as Intel and Adobe Systems. Previous investors include Goldman Sachs and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. The investment brought the company’s total money raised to $70 million, giving the video-sharing site a valuation of about $120 million.

The online video-sharing site allegedly laid off 40 percent of its 110-person workforce, according to tech gossip blog Valleywag, which on Monday credited “an online-video industry insider” with the tip.

There seems to be some disagreement over the financial health of Veoh.

However, a representative for the company told CNET News that the report was false.

“They have the right to protect their songs or music or pictures,” Scroggin said. “But they don’t have the right to tell me I have to be the one protecting it. I don’t want anyone doing anything illegal on my network, but we don’t work for free.”

Next, it’s expensive and time consuming to ask highly paid technicians to chase down IP logs and customer IDs, Scroggin said, noting that it’s especially difficult nowadays because it’s extremely easy to spoof IP addresses.

For more stories, see: RIAA’s year-end shocker

Scroggin, who sells Internet access to between 10,000 and 12,000 customers in Louisiana, heard the news on Friday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has opted out of suing individuals for pirating music. Instead, the group representing the four largest music labels is forging partnerships with Internet service providers and asking them to crack down on suspected file sharers.

But protecting against copyright violations just doesn’t have the same urgency, not enough that that ISPs should be asked to work without compensation, Scroggin said. Here are the realities of being “HBO’s free police,” he said.

“I’m not doing anything to damage their business,” Scroggin said. “But somehow this 99-cent song is my fault.”

UPDATE 8:40 a.m. PT:
Click here for e-mail correspondence between Jerry Scroggin and copyright owners such as Warner Bros and the family of Frank Zappa.

Scroggin wants to be reasonable. He tells me he doesn’t want to come across as a “hard ass.” He just wants someone in big media to understand his position as the operator of a small business.

“If it was life threatening, I’m the first to jump,” he said. “We’ve been contacted by police over Denial of Service and bot attacks. We’ll have Secret Service and FBI conversations. We help if police are on perv watch.”

Reached late Sunday night, an RIAA spokesman declined to comment.

According to Scroggin, if RIAA representatives ask the help of his ISP, they had better bring their checkbook–and leave the legal threats at home. (CNET News obtained a copy of the RIAA’s new notice to ISPs here). Scroggin said that he receives several notices each month with requests that he remove suspected file sharers from his network. Each time, he gets such a notice from an entertainment company, he sends the same reply.

(Credit:
Jerry Scroggin)

Jerry Scroggin, owner-operator of Bayou Internet and Communications, wants the music and film industries to know that he’s not a cop and he doesn’t work for free.

“I ask for their billing address,” Scroggin said. “Usually, I never hear back.”

Jerry Scroggin owns his own small ISP and he says protecting music costs money.

“There’s got to be a better way than HBO sending me threatening e-mail,” he said. “What I’m saying is, let’s sit at the table and come up with a way that works for everyone, including the customers.”

And then there are the letters Scroggin receives from Hollywood that demand he act or else.

First, when a media company demands he kick a customer off the network, there is very little in the way of proof offered that the person in question has committed a crime, according to Scroggin. Yet, entertainment companies want Scroggin to simply wave goodbye to a customer who might have signed up for a three-year plan. At $40 per month, that customer is potentially worth $1,440 to Scroggin over the life of the plan. That, says the ISP owner, is unreasonable.

Scroggin’s case underscores a potential obstacle for the RIAA’s plan to enlist the help of ISPs. Small companies like his are innocent bystanders in the music industry’s war on copyright infringement. Nonetheless, they are asked to help enforce copyright law free of charge. Many of them can’t afford it, he said. Significant resources must be devoted to chasing down suspected file sharers and there’s a real cost to that. After talking to Scroggin, it sounds as if the entertainment sector might also have taken a heavy-handed approach to dealing with ISPs in the past and there might be some bad blood built up.

Incorporated in 1995, Bayou Internet and Communications, based in Monroe, La., typically sells Internet access to small businesses, residences, and municipal services. His customers include parish court houses, homeowners, district attorneys, and rural hospitals. The company is probably similar to lots of small ISPs around the country that operate on tight budgets and must compete against much larger players, such as Comcast or AT&T.

Scroggin warns that the film and music industries must try a new tack if they want cooperation from ISPs. They can start by helping to cover some of the costs for helping to enforce copyright.

Scroggin is no radical. He respects the law and said he has a long history of cooperating with authorities to protect people from harm.

Scroggin has provided some of the e-mail he’s received from copyright owners and included in them is an example of his typical response.

Updated at 1:15 p.m. PST with Microsoft comment and additional context.

CNET News’ Ina Fried contributed to this report.

The software maker has been counting on the next version of Windows Mobile to enable devices that better rival Apple’s
iPhone. Among the features widely expected to be part of the release is advanced gesture recognition, perhaps along the lines of the iPhone, but possibly also using the camera as a means for reading gestures.

Microsoft has been quiet for some time on the Windows Mobile front, but that’s expected to change later this month when CEO Steve Ballmer gives a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. The company has said to expect news on the operating system, partner, and mobile services fronts.

“You are going to see a bunch of announcements at Mobile World Congress but also it is going to be the beginning of a 12-, 18-month period where you are going to see a whole bunch of different stuff,” Lees said. In addition to the traditional operating system unit, Microsoft has a fairly secretive “premium mobile services” group under Roz Ho that has been working on a variety of projects over the last couple of years. That group also includes the team Microsoft picked up when it bought Sidekick maker Danger. Separately, Microsoft’s Windows Live unit is also working on a new wave of services for Windows Mobile, Lees said

Although Windows Mobile 7 is probably a ways off, the company has said it is working on some sort of interim release, dubbed Windows Mobile 6.5, and has also promised better browsing and other features will come this year. In an interview last month, mobile unit head Andy Lees acknowledged the company has some catching up to do.

Without commenting on Jha’s comment, a Microsoft representative said the company has “nothing to announce today.”

Windows Mobile 7 is expected to improve on Windows Mobile 6.1 (shown here). But will it be delayed until 2010?

In September, CNET News reported that Microsoft told its partners not to expect Windows Mobile 7 until at least the second half of 2009. Jha’s comment seems to indicate that the deadline has been pushed back even further.

When Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha said Tuesday that his company’s phones would eventually carry Windows Mobile 7, he let on more than he probably thought.

In answering an analyst’s question during the Q-and-A portion of his company’s earnings call, Jha said: “Yes, we are still committed to Windows Mobile. As you know, Windows 6 series is available in 2009 and as compared to Android, we believe in 2009 Android is more competitive; more of our effort and focus in 2009 is going to Android, but in 2010 when
Windows 7 will become available, we will then participate in a more focused way in Windows Mobile 7 in 2010.”

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Google hopes the second time will be a charm for a Gmail Labs feature that lets people send text messages to people’s mobile phones with the company’s Web-based e-mail service.

The feature is available only in the United States for now. To use it, people must first enable it through Gmail Labs, then they can initiate SMS-based instant message chats by typing in a phone number in the chat box on the left of the Gmail page.

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Google)

Gmail is trying again with a feature to send SMS messages from Gmail Chat.

Tactfully, Dirac also observes that sending SMS messages from Gmail might be costing your buddies money, so be judicious.

People who receive SMS messages from the service will get a return phone number from the 406 area code, which Dirac was happy to point out spells G0O.

Each pairing uses a unique phone number, so a person receiving messages can store a the 406 phone number on his or her phone for future use to communicate with that specific person.

After the feature’s fleeting debut in October, Google removed it to fix a problem where turning the feature on didn’t actually fully turn it on. It took a little longer than two weeks, though.

“A few weeks back, we ran into a few snags when we first started rolling this out, but starting today you can turn on text messaging for chat,” said Leo Dirac, a Google product manager, in a blog post Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, engineer Doug Beaver wrote a blog post announcing that the total count of photos on the site now stands at about 10 billion. The social network announced informally in August that it has hit 100 million active users worldwide.

“To celebrate (the photo-hosting milestone), we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups,” the post read. “One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.”

Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to cover server costs, and while the company is still pretty much swimming in venture capital, it’s not clear that revenues will be up to par with server demands any time soon. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that the company hopes to be profitable in three years.

Facebook’s popularity may indeed reach the moon, but the news is a bit troubling too. Beaver noted that Facebook stores four sizes of each image, meaning that it has more than 40 billion images stored on its servers. That’s a lot of storage space required, and though it’s much cheaper than it used to be, hardware simply isn’t free.

Facebook might not be a photo-sharing site, per se, but there are a heck of a lot of pictures uploaded to it.

To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.

I originally heard about the Sony from Steven Stone, a writer friend, and then from an engineer at an American high-end audio company known for making awesome tuners that sell for thousands of dollars. The engineer was positively gushing about how good the XDR-F1HD is; not just that it sounded great, but also because it pulls in tough-to-receive analog stations with lower noise and distortion than tuners that sell for big bucks. You can read my full CNET review here.

Right, Sirius sounds like a crummy MP3 over the Maggies. That’s why I listen to Sirius over my Tivoli PAL table radio. Good enough sound is what most people put up with, and that’s kinda sad.

Need a second opinion? Check out Gary Krakow’s The Street review to learn more.

Sony’s XDR-F1HD HD Radio has developed a real buzz among my audiophile pals; on second thought maybe buzz isn’t the right word. It’s the quietest, noise-free radio I’ve ever used.

Thing is, not all HD stations sound great; in New York WPLJ and WXRK sound dreadful. So you see, HD Radio technology doesn’t guarantee sound quality, its up to the stations to follow through and not mess with their signal. The XDR-F1HD is a gateway to the best of over-the-air analog and digital broadcasts.

These guys can be real snobs and only listen to ultra-high-end components, and some wouldn’t be caught dead using mainstream gear with their hi-fis, and yet they’re all going ga-ga over the Sony. We’re all thinking it’s too good to be true.

I rushed right out and bought an XDR-F1HD from Amazon, and sure nuff, it’s true, the little Sony is no baloney. Analog FM stations came in like gangbusters, clean as a whistle, and HD stations, like my favorite jazz station WBGO had “CD quality” sound. That phrase is tossed around a lot, but this time it’s for real. I listened to WBGO with the Sony over my high-end system with Magnepan 3.6/R speakers, and the sound was amazing. It’s day and night better than what I get from Sirius Satellite Radio, which is almost unlistenable over those speakers.

WNYC, my local NPR outlet, multicasts HD on three channels: one is the same program as the analog FM station, the second is a 24-7 classical music stream, and the third is WNYC’s AM feed, but in FM HD. One of my favorite shows, David Garland’s “Spinning on Air” is a weekly musical journey. The October 26 all-theremin show was a mind trip, and sounded positively ethereal in HD. The theremin is an early 20th century electronic instrument, and it’s featured on the Beach Boys’ hit “Good Vibrations.”

Fake sex videos are being used to entice people to download Trojans on Google Code, McAfee says.

Google Code is a place where programmers can host projects and code. Along with the legitimate code are links to fake videos that direct users to download a missing codec, said Dave Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Avert Labs. The codecs turn out instead to be password-stealing Trojan horses and programs geared toward stealing financial information for identity fraud, he said.

“They’re using it as a way to send out links or as a place to house their links and redirects because it’s Google and obviously it gets highly ranked in the index,” he said. “The bad guys look for services like this as a way to push out code.”

The problem is similar to one that was found to be plaguing Microsoft’s MSN Spaces site a year ago and continues to occur there, according to a McAfee Avert Labs blog posting.

A Google spokesman said the company has removed malware-distributing projects from Google Code and search results.

“Google works hard to protect our users from malware. Using Project Hosting on Google Code, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies,” the spokesman said in a statement. “Using automated tools, we actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network. We have removed many of these projects from Google Code and from our search results. Additionally, we’ll continue to explore new ways to identify and eliminate such content.”

(Credit: McAfee)

Google’s free code-hosting Web site for developers is being used to distribute malware, a security researcher said on Friday.

Last year, Microsoft introduced its answer to Google Earth’s Sky mode, Stellarium, and other celestial mapping programs with WorldWide Telescope, and it’s now making it available via any browser that’s been bolstered by Silverlight. The basic features of the downloadable program have been ported to the Web, though some of the higher-end renderings didn’t make the cut.

As in the desktop version, users can whip around the galaxy using their mouse’s scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and hold down the left mouse button to drag the sky from one position to another.

The time line is also available, so that you can see what the constellations looked like as far back as 2,000 years ago, and there’s a virtual observatory cone search and registry look-up, as well as SIMBAD (Set of Identifications, Measurements and Bibliography for Astronomical Data) search.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Users will continue to get access to hundreds of terabytes of data on the sky, Earth, and other planets, though for 3D viewing, you’ll have to hit up the full program. Thumbnail previews show off relevant and nearby astronomical bodies of interest, and one of the strongest features from the desktop–the tours made by both astronomers and amateurs–are also available here.

The Web version of WordWide Telescope is limited to a geocentric perspective, though Microsoft says it has plans to include multiple points-of-view in future feature upgrades.

The Web client for WorldWide Telescope ports most of the sky-gazing tool to your browser.

With the tool, an attacker can scan a Wi-Fi network for computers checking for new updates via HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol). If the system detects a computer sending a software update request, the tool replies before the app update server can respond, Kotler said.

Itzik Kotler and Tomer Bitton of Radware

(Credit:
Elinor Mills/CNET News)

“You have to assume when on a public infrastructure that the infrastructure can be attacked,” he added.

Ippon customizes messages for the particular application and sends a message indicating that there is an update available even when the system already has the most recent legitimate update, he said. A malicious file is then downloaded from the attacker’s server onto the victim’s computer.

About 100 applications, many among the most popular on CNET’s Download.com, can be targeted, said Itzik Kotler, team leader of Radware’s security operations center, before his presentation here at the Defcon conference.

LAS VEGAS–Two researchers from Israeli security firm Radware have figured out a way to trick computers into downloading malware or take over a computer by hijacking the communications during the update process for Skype and other applications.

The researchers said they had not tested whether
Firefox or other major browsers are vulnerable. Microsoft software is not vulnerable because it uses digital signatures in its update process, which all software updates should, Kotler said.
People should be careful when using public Wi-Fi networks and avoid doing software updates on them, he said.

Kotler and colleague Tomer Bitton are releasing a tool called Ippon (which means “game over” in Judo) that enables the attack and offers a 3D view of potential victims on a network.

There is also the possibility that someone could spread an “airborne virus” via software updates that uses victim machines to attack and infect other machines on a network, according to Kotler.