China's Alibaba is spinning off its Aliyun OS into a seperate business unit

Sep 21, 2012 02:58 am | IDG News Service

China's Alibaba bolsters its own mobile OS with $200M investment 

by Michael Kan

Days after feuding with Google over its mobile operating system, Alibaba Group said on Thursday it would spin off its Aliyun OS into a separate business unit, and invest US$200 million to back the new venture.

The announcement came from Alibaba Group's CEO Jack Ma in an internal email that was leaked to the media. Alibaba declined to comment, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed its veracity.

The Aliyun OS, developed and originally operated by an Alibaba Group subsidiary called Alibaba Cloud Computing, will now be run as a separate business unit with its own president and chief technology officer. The $200 million investment will go towards improving the Aliyun OS's talent base, technology and infrastructure.

In the email, Ma said the move was being made to secure the "healthy growth" of the OS and implement the company's next step in its wireless strategy.

The Aliyun OS, a Linux-based mobile operating system, was first launched last year as a way to bring more Alibaba-powered Internet services to users and provide a new mobile ecosystem for China.

Last week, however, the operating system met stiff resistance from Google when the search giant accused the Aliyun OS of being an Android variant incompatible with the rest of the Android ecosystem. Caught in the dispute was PC maker Acer, which had originally planned to launch a smartphone using the Aliyun OS, but later decided to cancel its release.

Analysts expect Alibaba's dispute with Google could prevent bigger-name smartphone vendors from using the Aliyun OS. Currently only two local Chinese handset vendors have built handsets using the Aliyun OS as Android continues to dominate China's smartphone market, now with an 81 percent share, according to research firm Canalys.

Alibaba's investment in the Aliyun OS, however, signals that the company has major plans for its mobile operating system. Last year, Alibaba spun off a shopping search engine and a retail e-commerce site into separate companies as a way to help them expand their reach in China.

Jonathan Lu, Alibaba's chief data officer, will lead the new Aliyun OS unit as president. In his duties, Lu will be meeting with hardware vendors to secure business for the Aliyun OS, said a source familiar with the matter.

Increasingly, Alibaba and other Internet firms in China are expanding in the country's mobile Internet space, as mobile phones have become the most popular way for users in China go online. Retail e-commerce sites under Alibaba expect revenues from mobile shopping to explode in the coming years.

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AU Optronics fined $500 million for LCD price-fixing

Sep 21, 2012 02:21 am | IDG News Service

The sentence on AU Optronics and two employees was lower than the government had asked

by John Ribeiro

AU Optronics was fined US$500 million by a San Francisco court on Thursday, and two of its former executives were sentenced to serve three-year prison terms and pay fines in connection with a LCD price-fixing conspiracy, the Department of Justice said.

The sentence by a Judge of the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco division was lower than what DOJ wanted.

In a filing to the court on Wednesday, DOJ reiterated that a $1 billion fine against the Taiwanese LCD maker and the ten-year terms of imprisonment and $1 million fines against its top executives recommended by the government are "necessary, appropriate, and equitable sentences in this case." They are also the maximum sentences for the offense.

The defendants are remorseless having refused to accept responsibility or to provide any assistance that would justify a reduction in their sentences, DOJ said in the filing.

The indictment charged that AU Optronics participated in a worldwide price-fixing conspiracy from Sept. 14, 2001, to Dec. 1, 2006, and that its U.S subsidiary joined the conspiracy as early as 2003. The U.S. subsidiary was also sentenced on Thursday.

The companies and former executives were found guilty in March following an eight-week trial. A jury found that the convicted companies and former executives fixed the prices of thin-film transistor LCD panels sold into the U.S. The prices were fixed during monthly meetings with their competitors secretly held in hotel conference rooms, karaoke bars and tea rooms around Taiwan, DOJ said. The LCDs are used in computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

AU Optronics sold more than $2.3 billion worth of LCD panels in the U.S. during the price-fixing conspiracy, the DOJ said in a filing earlier this month. The conspiring companies sold $71.9 billion in price-fixed panels worldwide, with about $23.5 billion LCD panels sold in the U.S. The conspiracy particularly targeted the U.S. and its hi-tech companies like Apple, HP, and Dell, DOJ said.

Former AU Optronics president Hsuan Bin Chen was sentenced to serve three years in prison and to pay a $200,000 fine. Another former AU Optronics executive vice president Hui Hsiung was also sentenced to serve three years in prison and to pay a $200,000 fine, according to DOJ. The judge's order was not immediately available on the court website.

AU Optronics and its U.S. subsidiary were also placed on probation for three years, and are required to adopt an antitrust compliance program and to appoint an independent corporate compliance monitor, DOJ said.

Eight companies, including AU Optronics, have been so far convicted of charges arising out of the department's ongoing investigation, and have been sentenced to pay fines totaling $1.39 billion.

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Sony focuses on PlayStation Vita at the Tokyo Game Show

Sep 21, 2012 12:31 am | IDG News Service

Japan's main game show has faded a bit from recent years, but Sony still fields a massive booth at the event

by Jay Alabaster

Sony's focus is on its PlayStation Vita handheld at this year's Tokyo Game Show.

Japan's premier game event has lost a bit of its luster and is noticeably smaller than years past, as many companies focus on the larger E3 that takes place in the summer in the U.S., including Nintendo and Microsoft.

But Sony has fielded its usual sprawling display at the event, a two-story complex with over 70 PlayStation Vitas, dozens of PlayStation 3 consoles, and a special section devoted to its new PlayStation Mobile endeavor.

(See video of the Sony booth at the Tokyo Game Show on YouTube.)

On center stage at the display is a large section for attendees to try out the PlayStation Vita, which is making its first appearance at the show since its official launch last year, with over 70 units available for trial. Sony is featuring two main capabilities of the handheld, group play and augmented reality, and gamers lined up for over an hour to try one for a few minutes. The lines are expected to grow considerably when the show, currently open only to press and industry insiders, opens to the general public over the weekend.

Gamers sit at low tables with booth attendants in groups of four, battling it out on the new Sony title Soul Sacrifice. The new red and blue versions of the Vita announced last week are among those on display.

In a separate area, games using augmented reality are on display, including Puls-AR, in which the user steers a laser around the screen by positioning reflectors. The position of the reflectors in the game is set by physical cards read in by the Vita's camera, so gamers must hold the device in one hand and peer through the screen while they move the cards around, a difficult combination to master.

In Table Play Ice Hockey, similar cards can be used to assemble a hockey team and compete with other Vita users. Sony has also developed a special mystery game for gamers that bring their own Vitas to the booth, which they download to their devices and use to unravel virtual clues.

Gamers that want to try PlayStation 3 games can do so using the company's head-mounted display, which can create a virtual screen comparable to something you'd see in a movie theater. The new slimmed-down PS 3s that go on sale later this year are not available for gaming, but a few are on display behind glass.

Sony is also showing how the Vita can be used to link to a PlayStation 3. In a demonstration using the title PlayStation All Star Battle Royal, two Vitas are synced with a PS 3. Video and game action stream smoothly in real-time between the devices, which are connected with a physical cable.

Sony is also promoting its new PlayStation Mobile platform, which opens a new online store next month. The platform will let approved devices from manufacturers like HTC and Sharp play games developed in a PlayStation-branded environment, and handsets from HTC and Sharp are on display, as well as Sony's own Xperia phones and tablets.

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Microsoft offers one-click workaround for IE vulnerability, permanent fix coming Friday

Sep 20, 2012 10:05 am | PC World

by Ian Paul

Microsoft has issued a one-click security workaround for Internet Explorer as a stopgap measure until the company releases a full security update for its Web browser on Friday. The new "Fix it" solution helps protect users of Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and 9 from a recently disclosed memory corruption issue that several security experts have seen in active use. The vulnerabilities could allow a hacker to gain remote access to your system with the same user privileges as you including the ability to install or remove programs, modify files, and create new user accounts.

The one-click solution is available from this Microsoft support document under the heading "Fix it for me." Microsoft's Fix it tool does not require a reboot once enabled and the company says the automated workaround will not affect your ability to browse the Web.

Researchers at security firm AlienVault recently said a variant of the latest IE vulnerability was found in the wild and attempted to install a remote access Trojan (RAT) on a user's computer. A RAT would give hackers remote access to your computer and can be used for everything from wiping your hard drive to capturing every keystroke you enter. Security firm Sophos in a blog post also said it had seen hackers using the IE vulnerability in the wild, but the company did not specify what hackers were trying to accomplish with the exploit.

The latest Internet Explorer vulnerability is considered a critical threat. The seriousness of the issue prompted the German government on Tuesday to urge users to give up using IE until Microsoft released a security patch for the vulnerability. Other security experts also advised giving up IE until there was a fix including the Metasploit Project and the security firm F-Secure. Prior to releasing its Fix it tool, Microsoft suggested a somewhat impractical multi-step manual workaround to help mitigate any potential attacks.

Microsoft says it hopes to release Friday's security update for IE as close as possible to 10 a.m. Pacific. You will be able to get the patch via Windows Update. If you have automatic updates enabled, you shouldn't have to take any action to get the security fix. Microsoft also said Friday's update will include more fixes in addition to the memory corruption issue.

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DreamForce 2012 All About Sharing Customer Success

Sep 20, 2012 09:22 am | CIO.com

by David Taber

Salesforce.com's DreamForce 2012 in San Francisco is, in many ways, just a logical extension of what everyone experienced last year. In some areas, though, there are key differences. What follows are three flash impressions from the first day of the tradeshow.

DreamForce 2012 Impression No. 1: Size Matters

As I wrote a while back in It's the Ecosystem, Stupid, when making technology platform bets, the sheer size and coherency of the partner and consulting environments does a lot more than indicate commercial vibrancy.

For customers, a healthy ecosystem means the technology will continue to grow in depth and scope thanks to add-on products and consultants' libraries). It also means the talent base needed to customize, extend, integrate and manage the core system will be widely available. (Of course, as I also wrote a while back in CRM Talent Shortage: Here, Now, there's a chronic talent shortage in places such as the Bay Area and New York, but that's only because the growth of demand far outstrips the growth of supply.)

News: Five Questions for Salesforce.com.com at Dreamforce 2012

DreamForce 2012 conference feels like a city, or a weird mix of Burning Man and the old Mac Expo, with its own TV station, radio channel and dozens of bands performing. With a registered attendance of 90,000, this year's DreamForce has more than doubled in size since last year, and it may well be the largest single-vendor tech conference in the United States.

For attendees, this is a mixed blessing. With 800 sessions, 350 vendors, 10 buildings and dozens of parties each night, it gets overwhelming. From Salesforce.com's perspective, though, that's the whole point.

DreamForce 2012 Impression No. 2: The C-Suite Matters

Even though DreamForce 2012 is supposed to be a developers' conference, it's really focused on convincing the executive that Salesforce.com is the safe bet. The choice of testimonials and speakers couldn't make this more obvious, with internationally known names from Burberry, General Electric and Coca-Cola coming on stage and gracing the posters plastered all over downtown.

There's been a notable change over the last couple of years in Salesforce.com's own sales maturity, too. The quality of its sales thinking and execution, particularly in the enterprise sales organization, has become more sophisticated now that the company is working with more serious deals. This ends up affecting the depth of their best-practices breakout sessions-surely the result of some painful lessons learned over the years.

The choice of DreamForce entertainment seems, as always, at odds with the C-Level demographic. The headliner concerts are the Red Hot Chili Peppers and MC Hammer and the Village People-no Michael Buble here-and the "ambient" noise in the building lobbies is techno and rave music.

Feature: Best Musicians to Perform at IT Conferences

DreamForce 2012 Impression No. 3: Customer Success Matters

Salesforce.com is serious about being an agile shop. That has many implications across the engineering, marketing and sales domains. For example, it's harder to have big product launches. The initial release of any Agile product is fragmentary-the product will have quality, but by definition the initial release will be missing features. Big products will take several release cycles to really get it done. Even at three releases per year, which Salesforce.com does, that's at least two years, and it could be twice as long for the products Salesforce.com has acquired in recent quarters.

Consequently, Salesforce.com has to rely heavily on safe-harbor statements in order to make announcements. With that caveat, they announce early, sometimes before the feature is even in beta, but they also announce often-whenever they make a significant improvement to a feature that already existed, they re-announce it. It's a marketer's dream.

That said, the DreamForce 2012 keynote focused far more on advertising customer success stories than on new products. Here are the goodies:

Marketing: Salesforce.com formally anointed its Marketing Cloud, an agglomeration of features for social media (from the Buddy Media acquisition) and social measurement (from the Radian6 acquisition). In conjunction with Chatter, the new features will help social marketers target, listen to and engage audiences so they can publish and advertise in social media with real-time ROI measurements. The demo was very slick.

Human Resources: Salesforce.com also announced Work.com, its nascent offering for recruiting, goal setting and performance management that came from the Rypple acquisition. This is not a simple HR administration system, as it has the vision of leveraging social interactions to define goals, align teams around them, motivate individuals and measure high-performance organizations.

Sales: The UI for the CRM is now based on Touch, optimized for mobile devices. This is not merely a face-lift of Salesforce.com's prior mobile apps-it's a complete rewrite. Touch is perfectly timed for the explosiveshift from laptops to iPads in sales organizations.

Service: The SunLight federated search system expands the range and depth of document search results. Chatter communities for service have been oriented toward customer self-service communities that crowd-source fixes and workarounds in conjunction with internal service personnel. And Salesforce.com has added the Desk.com customer service offering for small and midsized businesses.

Collaboration: The engineers have been busy rewriting Chatter, adding APIs and features all across the system. In the winter release, Salesforce.com will introduce the ChatterBox file store system, although it's not exactly clear what's new there. Expect to see even more evolution in Chatter at next year's DreamForce.

Infrastructure: Touch/HTML5 is generally available, allowing much easier development and deployment of mobile apps for iOS, Android and even Kindle devices. The entire Salesforce.com system is being rewritten around Touch, both for mobile apps and the standard UI. This, in conjunction with Force.com Canvas, will also make for a more seamless UI experience for integrated third party applications.

News: Heroku Entices Enterprise Java Developers with Cloud Platform

Finally, Salesforce.com also added Salesforce.com Identity, a social-based SSO built on standard naming services and protocols, and announced generally available Java support for the Heroku deployment environment.

In a keynote address with a length worthy of Bill Clinton, Salesforce.com pounded the message of trustworthiness, safety and innovation that would comfort any executive-provided he or she doesn't work for Microsoft or Oracle.

David Taber is the author of the new Prentice Hall book, " Salesforce.com Secrets of Success" and is the CEO of SalesLogistix, a certified Salesforce.com consultancy focused on business process improvement through use of CRM systems. SalesLogistix clients are in North America, Europe, Israel and India. Taber has more than 25 years of experience in high tech, including 10 years at the VP level or above.

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Read more about customer relationship management (crm) in CIO's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Drilldown.

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Microsoft releases fix for Internet Explorer flaw

Sep 20, 2012 09:19 am | CSO

by Antone Gonsalves

Microsoft on Wednesday released a temporary fix for an Internet Explorer vulnerability affecting most versions of Windows, as security vendors debated the risk of infection by exploits found on the web.

Microsoft said the "one-click" fix would have to be installed manually, but would not require a system reboot or affect a person's ability to brows the Web. On Sept. 21, Microsoft planned to push out a permanent patch to Windows users through the operating system's automatic update feature.

The patch will fix the latest publicly disclosed vulnerability, as well as four other critical flaws, said Yunsun Wee, director of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing unit.

Security vendors disagree on the threat level of the known vulnerability discovered over the weekend. Sophos raised the level to "high," one notch below "critical." The flaw, in IE versions 6 through 9, enables a hacker to install software capable of commandeering a computer.

Sophos chose high for now, because an exploit for the vulnerability, known as CVE-2012-4969, had not been added to Blackhole and other popular underground tools used by hackers. "If the prevalence increases, we will likely move to critical," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser for Sophos.

Rather than wait for more exploits of the flaw, Rapid7 and FireEye rated the vulnerability as critical and highly critical, respectively. The highest ratings were warranted because the number of exploits on the Web was growing and IE accounts for a third to more than half of the browser market. The share varies by tracking firm.

[Toolbox: 10 ways to secure browsing in the enterprise]

"There are many users at risk, so it's definitely highly critical," said Atif Mushtaq, a security researcher at FireEye.

AlienVault reported on Tuesday that it had found three booby-trapped websites capable of installing malware in visitors' systems. The malware-carrying sites included nod32XX.com, led-professional-symposium.org, a fake domain of a professional site aimed at manufacturers of LED (light-emitting diode) lighting, and defensenews.in, the main defense news portal in India. Malware being used included the PlugX remote access Trojan program.

"It seems the guys behind this zero-day [exploit] were targeting specific industries," Jaime Blasco, an AlienVault researcher, said in a blog post. "We've seen that they compromised a news site related to the defense industry and they created a fake domain related to LED technologies that can be used to perform spear-phishing campaigns to those industries."

The targeted nature of many of the attacks led to nCircle rating the vulnerability between medium and high. "We are not seeing full-on, drive-by attacks with this," Storms said. "What we're still seeing is more targeted, very specific attacks." A drive-by attack is when simply going to a site can infect a computer.

Nevertheless, the vulnerability was serious enough for Germany's Federal Office for Information Security to issue an alert Monday, warning people against using IE until Microsoft releases a fix. Sophos was also recommending that people use another browser.

Microsoft was given high marks for the speed of its response to the vulnerability. "Generally, they are moving really quick, and they are communicating with the public," Storms said.

Microsoft released a workaround on Monday and said the next day that it would release a temporary fix in a "few days."

Because consumers are usually slow to install manual fixes, a much larger number of Windows users will be protected once the automatic update is released. "They need to prioritize an official patch that is deployed using Windows Update to truly provide protection to most IE users," Wisniewski said.

Read more about malware/cybercrime in CSOonline's Malware/Cybercrime section.

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Sony Game Chief: Third-party PlayStation consoles a possibility

Sep 20, 2012 08:40 am | IDG News Service

A handful of phones at the company's sprawling booth at the Tokyo Game Show mark the start of its PlayStation Mobile endeavor

by Jay Alabaster

Tucked in a quiet corner of Sony's sprawling booth at the Tokyo Game Show this week are several phones that are unique among the hundreds of game consoles on display -- they are running PlayStation games, but they weren't built by Sony.

The phones, from Sharp and HTC, will be part of the launch of an online store next month that will sell PlayStation-branded titles for use on approved third-party products. These will not be the full-fledged games that appear on its consoles, rather a separate set developed for mobile devices that generally cost less than US$10 -- Sony says they have "PlayStation-like content." But the new platform, PlayStation Mobile, is still a sharp departure from the traditional console business in which Sony owns all the hardware, and the question looms: Will this one day lead to PlayStation clones, consoles made by outside manufacturers?

"That's a really interesting question, and I don't know that I would rule it out," Andrew House, the CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, told IDG News Service in an interview.

"But I think that the key focus for the strategy right now is to be multi-device, and particularly if you're a developer, you're looking to access the broadest possible audience."

House emphasized the company's own PlayStation hardware, which includes a new line of slimmed-down PS 3 consoles to go on sale this year and the handheld Vita released last year, is still a focus and has plenty of room for growth. But he said PlayStation Mobile is an appeal to smaller game developers, who are looking to build software for the growing mass of Android phones but want guarantees that the phones will be up to a certain specification.

"We're also trying to say to developers, 'you can deliver a superior gaming experience, but across a whole range of smartphones.' And that to me is really about multi-device and multi-manufacturer strategy," he said.

The Tokyo-based electronics firm is the only major manufacturer that displays its hardware at the Tokyo Game Show. Nintendo says it isn't worth the cost, and Microsoft, which has a small market share in Japan, sits the show out, though both companies participate in the E3 show in the U.S.

Sony still draws the crowds. Thursday was the opening day of the Tokyo Game Show, with only press and industry insiders were allowed in, but hundreds still lined up, some waiting over an hour, for a chance to play "Soul Sacrifice," its new title for the Vita that allows group play, and dozens of other titles.

Sony also gave a hint of how its Vita will interact with the PS 3 at its booth, with a version of its "PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale" that users of the two consoles to engage in direct combat with each other.

The company showed its new PS 3 consoles behind glass, but gamers played on the current version, many using Sony's head-mounted displays and large stereo headphones, quietly locked in their own gaming worlds.

Sony's new PS 3 will compete with Nintendo's Wii U, to be released globally in time for the holiday season at a similar price point. The game console is now six years old, the typical time between previous PS upgrades, and some media have reported Sony is working on a successor, but House declined to comment.

Advanced, newly created hardware like the PlayStation typically incurs steep losses at a launch, and Sony's game division struggled for years to make the PS 3 profitable despite strong sales. The platform is now generating returns and is a major pillar overall for Sony as it looks to resurrect its ailing electronics business.

"It's definitely in the harvest period, now, of its life cycle," House said.

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Unity's development platform will support Nintendo Wii U

Sep 20, 2012 08:04 am | IDG News Service

Developers will be able to write games for the new console as well as other devices at the same time

by Mikael Ricknäs

Unity Technologies has joined forces with Nintendo to provide development tools which can be used to produce games for the upcoming Wii U console.

Unity's cross-platform development tools can be used to develop games for a multitude of different platforms, including smartphones, PCs and game consoles at the same time.

The agreement between the two companies will allow Nintendo to distribute Unity's development platform to its in-house, external, and third party licensee developers. Unity Technologies and Nintendo will also collaborate to create a Wii U add-on for Unity's standard tools

The two companies aren't new acquaintances: Unity's platform can already be used to develop games for the current Nintendo Wii.

The Unity development platform is available in a free standard version and a $1,500 Pro version, both of which users can expand with add-ons that port their games to iOS and Android, for example.

For now, Unity isn't saying what the Wii U add-on will cost, and isn't providing a more exact arrival date than 2013. Currently, add-ons cost $400 for a standard version and $1,500 for a Pro version.

The Wii U will go on sale in the U.S. on Nov. 18, and then in Europe on Nov. 30, Nintendo said at an event last week.

The most important addition to the new system is the Wii U GamePad. Along with buttons, the new controller also has a 6.2-inch touch screen, which can be used to add more information to the gameplay. The unit has a built-in accelerometer a gyro and NFC, as well.

The console will come in a basic version with 8GB of internal memory that will cost US$299.99, and a premium version with 32GB of memory for $349.99.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com

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Microsoft: Patch for critical IE zero-day bug coming Friday

Sep 20, 2012 06:50 am | Computerworld

In the meantime, releases stopgap measure 

by Gregg Keizer

Microsoft on Wednesday released a stopgap defense that protects Internet Explorer (IE) against attacks until the company issues a patch on Friday.

The update will fix five flaws, including one revealed by a security researcher last weekend that hackers have been exploiting to hijack Windows PCs and infect them with malware.

The so-called "zero-day" vulnerability -- meaning it was leveraged by attackers before Microsoft was aware of the bug, much less able to patch it -- has been analyzed and discussed by security experts with increasing intensity since Monday.

Wednesday, for example, U.K.-based Sophos raised its threat level to "high," following moves earlier in the week by rivals like Symantec, which boosted its Internet barometer to "ThreatCon 2."

On Monday, Germany's cybersecurity agency urged IE users to stop running the browser and switch to another, such as Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox, until Microsoft patched the vulnerability.

On Wednesday, Microsoft published a "Fixit" -- one of its automated configuration tools -- that blocks the known exploits. The Fixit has been posted in a support document on Microsoft's website.

The tool is only a temporary measure.

"This Friday, Sept. 21, we will release a cumulative update for Internet Explorer through Windows Update and our other standard distribution channels," said Yunsun Wee, director of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, in a blog post. "We recommend that you install this update as soon as it is available."

Wee said that the update, tagged as MS12-063, will patch the zero-day bug as well as four other critical vulnerabilities.

Friday's "out-of-band" update will be the first emergency patch that Microsoft has released this year and only the second since September 2010. It will also be the first emergency patch of an IE zero-day vulnerability since one in January 2010 that fixed a flaw exploited by the "Aurora" Trojan horse.

Hackers infected Windows PCs at Google and other Western companies with Aurora in late 2009 and early 2010 by exploiting a then-unpatched bug in IE6. Google accused Chinese hackers of breaking into its network, a charge that prompted the search giant to threaten a shutdown of its Chinese operations.

While Wee continued Wednesday to say that Microsoft was aware of only a "small number of customers" victimized by the newest IE zero-day, the company typically unleashes an emergency update only when it believes the threat is substantial and when the volume of attacks is quickly increasing.

IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9 all are vulnerable to attack, Microsoft confirmed in an advance notice of the impending patch. Only IE10, the version bundled with Windows 8, does not contain the bug.

Those browsers, which collectively run on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, accounted for 53% of those used last month worldwide, according to metrics company Net Applications.

One security researcher predicted at least part of Microsoft's news several hours before the Redmond, Wash., software maker announced its next move.

"I think we'll see the Fixit today and [a] patch tomorrow," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security, during a Wednesday instant message conversation. "They've been communicating something every day so far this week," Storms said.

On Tuesday, Microsoft said it would issue a Fixit tool "in the next few days."

Microsoft will release the emergency update at approximately 1 p.m. ET Friday via the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, as well as through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services), the de facto corporate patch deployment tool.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

See more by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.com.

Read more about malware and vulnerabilities in Computerworld's Malware and Vulnerabilities Topic Center.

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In new twist, actress sues YouTube to remove anti-Islam video

Sep 20, 2012 12:49 am | IDG News Service

The actress Cindy Lee Garcia said she was deceived as to the true nature of the film project

by John Ribeiro

In a new twist over the controversy surrounding an anti-Islam movie trailer on YouTube, an actress shown in the trailer has filed a lawsuit demanding that YouTube and its owner Google take down the video.

Google has maintained so far that the video, which sparked off protests in many countries, is clearly within its guidelines and so will stay on YouTube.

Actress Cindy Lee Garcia in a complaint filed Wednesday before the Superior Court of the State of California for the county of Los Angeles stated that "the lawsuit is not an attack on the First Amendment (to the U.S. Constitution) nor on the right for Americans to say what they think, but does request that the offending content be removed from the Internet."

Garcia, who claims invasion of privacy, misappropriation of her likeness, fraud, and unfair business practices, alleged in her complaint that she was cast in a film titled "Desert Warrior" and that defendant Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, also known as Sam Bacile, a resident of Los Angeles county, told her that it was an adventure film about ancient Egyptians.

On July 2, Bacile is alleged to have published on YouTube a video entitled "The Innocence of Muslims" which had its soundtrack manipulated to make it appear that Garcia was slandering Islam and Muslim beliefs, according to the complaint which names Nakoula, Google and YouTube as defendants.

The plaintiff was unaware of the vile content contained in the film as the content and overall purpose of the film was concealed from them at all times by defendant Bacile and other as yet unnamed defendants, according to the complaint.

Garcia said that after the film was published on YouTube she had received death threats, was fired from her job, and was not permitted by her family to see her grandchildren, fearing for their safety.

YouTube informed her in writing that it has declined to remove the content despite her privacy concerns, according to the complaint.

Garcia will seek an emergency temporary restraining order against Nakoula and YouTube on Thursday in the court, according to a statement by attorneys The Armenta Law Firm. She seeks an order that the content be removed permanently from YouTube, it added.

Google did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.

The trailer which mocks the Prophet has led to protests at U.S. embassies and consulates in various countries including Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

So far, Google has blocked the trailer in six countries: Egypt, Libya, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Although the company finds that the trailer is clearly within its guidelines and so will stay on YouTube, it has restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia, it said.

The trailer was also blocked in Libya and Egypt given the very sensitive situations in these two countries, Google said last week. Four Americans including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens were killed last week when a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was stormed by gunmen. (

Pakistan and Bangladesh have blocked the entire YouTube website after Google declined to remove access to the video.

White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said last week that the U.S. does not and cannot stop individual citizens from expressing their views. He however criticized the video as "disgusting and reprehensible."

The decision to block the video in Egypt and Libya was determined solely by a company in the U.S. with presumably no local expertise, and without consulting local civil liberties groups in either country, Internet rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post on Thursday. "Given the freedoms that Egyptians and Libyans risked their lives for during the uprisings of 2011, it is a shame that a Western company would serve as arbiter of what they are and are not capable of viewing online," it added.

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