The blog

Microsoft to offer antivirus software

Bill Gates’ announcement at the RSA security conference today also included the bombshell that Microsoft will provide a consumer-level antivirus product sooner than anyone thinks.

Gates expanded on Microsoft’s recently announced plans to acquire security vendor Sybari Software Inc., which provides solutions to help protect messaging and collaboration servers from malicious software. Gates noted that when the acquisition is closed, Microsoft intends to ship a Microsoft engine, based on the GeCAD technology acquired in 2003, as one of the multiple scanning engines supported by Sybari’s flagship Antigen software. Gates further noted that the Microsoft engine would also be integrated into a broad consumer offering by the end of this year.

This should be interesting.

IE is about to get a major update

I was as surprised as anyone to see today’s announcement that Microsoft is getting ready to release a new version of Internet Explorer.

Gates announced Internet Explorer 7.0, designed to add new levels of security to Windows XP SP2 while maintaining the level of extensibility and compatibility that customers have come to expect. Internet Explorer 7.0 will also provide even stronger defenses against phishing, malicious software and spyware. The beta release is scheduled to be available this summer.

In other news, Microsoft also announced that the personal version of Microsoft AntiSpyware will be available free to all licensed Windows customers. Well, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003, anyway. That’s a very good call.

Turn your Pocket PC into a Media Center remote

eHomeUpgrade picks up this intriguing press release for a new Pocket PC program called Niveus Pocket Remote.

The Niveus software enables the Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC to communicate wirelessly with any Media Center PC, allowing users to control their Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005-based PC from the palm of their hand, and any location in their home. By tapping the full-color LCD screen of the Pocket PC, users gain full control over their digital music collection, Internet radio, and more.

The Niveus Pocket Remote is the ideal solution for controlling multiple audio zones in the home. With support for an unlimited number of zones, the Niveus Pocket Remote software uses UPnP™ specifications and your wireless home network to discover and control the appropriate zone and corresponding media center pc. Once a connection is established, the user can view their entire music collection, including album art, and make selections of their favorite songs, playlists, and Internet radio stations.

This is tempting. You also get a license to use this software if you buy a Niveus Media Center PC. Of course, since those admittedly gorgeous devices start at $2,999 and top out at well over $5,000, you might think twice before plunking down for one.

What I want to know is: Will this run on my Smartphone?

A new Media Center contender?

Wired News has a solid story on the DEMO conference: Six Minutes to Stand Out.

Reporter Daniel Terdiman singled out one company that also impressed me with its six-minute presentation:

…cable TV companies may find themselves threatened by Mediabolic, whose network media player is designed to give TV viewers a previously unavailable level of personal control.

The media player allows users to run custom-designed web-based applications on their TV. For example, users can get instant eBay auction alerts, view their Netflix queues, play their Live365 music collections or any of hundreds of other applications — all on their TV.

Amazingly, all of their applications looked exactly like Windows XP Media Center Edition. In fact, several portions of their demo used add-ins that are running on my Media Center PC. It’s not a program you can buy and use to build your own Media Center. Instead, they’re selling a development platform that hardware companies can adopt. We’ll see how much interest they can muster.

Demo details

Jason, Marc, and the rest of the Weblogs,Inc. team are Blogging DEMO. I spent half of Monday at the show and will spend all of Tuesday. It’s an eclectic mix of products, most of them still under development and some of which might never see the light of day. But there’s no doubt that a few of the products I saw today will be huge hits in the next year or two.

I loved Vlog It.from Serious Magic. This is a video production tool that lets you create your own teleprompter, add special effects, and even use blue screen SFX to create the illusion that you’re broadcasting live from somewhere other than your cramped and cluttered home office. I usually scoff at the idea of homemade videos on the Internet, but this one convinced me that even I could do it and that you might actually want to watch it!

Motorola could have done without the model Hummer for their demo of iRadio, but the idea of having access to hundreds of channels of digital radio accessible in my car or on the phone sounds cool. I have no idea how this works, and I wonder how this differs from the iRadio announcements the same company made in 2000 and 2001.

In the Demo Pavilion, I saw an Outlook add-in called Outboxer that looked pretty sharp. If I ran a big corporation (or a little investment company), I’d look seriously at this utility, which helps prevent employees from sending out e-mail messages that contain inappropriate content or break Federal regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.

And I would dearly love to replace my external USB drives with a Mirra storage device, which would simplify the task of getting all my data backed up effortlessly.

I’ll be gone all day Tuesday, so look for more on Wednesday.

Protect yourself at hotspots

The Security Mentor has some interesting comments on the Windows Firewall that’s included with Windows XP SP2. He notes that, unlike the Internet Connection Firewall in SP1 and earlier, the Windows Firewall assumes that you want to trust all computers on your local network:

So the built-in Windows firewall hides file and print sharing from the Internet at large but makes them completely available to your local area network. That way you can share a printer with your wife but keep your files safe(r) from strangers on the Internet.

Q: You’re about to point out a catch, aren’t you?

Yes.

What happens when you’re at a coffee shop?

The whole coffee shop is one local area network. The firewall is going to assume that since all the other customers are on the same local network that it can trust them.

Ah, but the designers of the Windows Firewall were clever enough to plan for that scenario. The next time you’re out and about with your WiFi-equipped notebook and decide to connect to a wireless network, do this first:

  1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
  2. Double-click the Windows Firewall icon. (If you’re using the Category view of Control Panel, click Security Center and then click the Windows Firewall icon at the bottom of the dialog box.)
  3. On the General tab of the Windows Firewall dialog box, make sure On is selected and then click to select the Don’t allow exceptions check box.
  4. Click OK. Traffic from all local network sources is now blocked.

Win_firewall

Remember to clear this check box when you get back to your trusted network.

Doing the Napster math

I’ve been sampling Napster To Go for the past few months. So has Rob Pegoraro at the Washington Post, who did the math and concluded that Napster To Go Doesn’t Add Up:

It wasn’t until after my initial binge that I thought a bit more about the virtues of this service. What Napster’s ads ignore is that most people already own a significant music collection — so how many songs will they grab once they sign onto this service? How about after the first month or year? Even the most manic downloader has to slow down eventually.

Napster To Go’s $15 monthly bills, however, will keep coming due for as long as you care to listen to your downloads. And over time, those fees add up, too.

Consider this example: I have been purchasing CDs for about 20 years now, in which time I’ve accumulated about 300 of the things. At an average of $15 each, I’ve spent $4,500. Now suppose that, instead of buying those CDs, I could have opened up a Napster To Go account back in 1985. My total bill would be $3,600 and counting — and although I might have accumulated a larger, more diverse collection, I wouldn’t own any of it.

I have a hard time accepting that. At its best, music has the same lasting value as books or paintings or any other sort of meaningful art: It isn’t a disposable good that you use and then forget about. It’s something that you keep listening to and discovering new things in. When music is good, you want to know that it can’t be taken away from you.

Well, that’s one point of view. Of course, by that logic, DVD rentals are equally indefensible, and both Netflix and Blockbuster don’t add up at all. In the last five years, I’ve paid Netflix over a thousand dollars, and I have nothing on my DVD shelf to show for it. For that matter, why have I been paying HBO all these years? They don’t let me keep anything either!

Unfortunately, this half-baked analysis is getting a lot of support from other corners of the Internet. At Boing Boing, for instance, Xeni Jardin writes:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought there could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for sprouting holes which must be patched by the user), and the milk cartons vanished from your refrigerator shelf if you didn’t re-up your subscription next month? You’d get your milk elsewhere.

How is that different from other subscription-based services that we all know and use? I pay my cable company a monthly fee, in exchange for which I get to watch as much TV as I want on the channels I subscribe to. If I stop paying the fee, all of a sudden I can’t watch any more. If I stop paying the phone company, I can’t make phone calls any more. Yet by the logic in the original review and its supporting post, any subscription-based music service is flawed. Which is silly, because it ignores the actual cost. What if Napster To Go cost 99 cents per month for unlimited access to the entire library for the month? Would that be an acceptable deal? What if it were $1.99? If you don’t like the service, the objection has to be at least partly rooted in its price.

I did a little math based on what Rob wrote. He buys 15 CDs a year, and I suspect most of those are mainstream releases – the latest hits from big labels. I’ve been known to buy 15 CDs on a single visit, which is why I have a music collection that’s roughly five times the size of Rob’s. I’d say there are probably 400 CDs in my collection that I haven’t listened to in years and probably never will again. Some are just dated, but others were impulse buys based on an artist or a label. Sometimes those purchases work out well, but I can easily pick out a couple dozen CDs from my collection that I bought, listened to once, and quickly concluded that I had made a bad purchase. In some cases I was able to listen to individual tracks, either in a record store listening booth or in those 30–second clips on Amazon.com. But that was just enough to fool me into thinking I wanted to hear more when I really didn’t like the CD.

If I had had access to a download service where I could have sampled the entire recording first, I might well have avoided a few of those purchases. The basic Napster service is $10 a month, which lets you listen on up to three PCs without burning any CDs or transferring tracks to a music player. The Napster To Go service costs $5 a month more and adds the capability to transfer downloaded tracks to a compatible music player or a SmartPhone. I’ve got a Creative Zen Micro (love it!) and an Audiovox SMT5600 SmartPhone (love it, too!), both of which are compatible with the Napster To Go service. So I did the math: If I could have avoided one bad CD purchase every other month it would have justified the cost of the service.

I don’t think this is just a theoretical advantage. Since I’ve been using Napster To Go I’ve probably listened to three or four new CDs every week. I’ve already identified a few that I absolutely, positively don’t want to listen to again. I’ve found some gems that I went out and purchased (used, of course) so I could have them in my permanent collection. I’ve also found a few CDs that were worth a listen or two but don’t deserve a place in my permanent collection.

If I have issues with Napster To Go, it’s with the whole concept of DRM. Because I’m not purchasing the tracks I download, I’m not worried about “losing” them, as I would be with those overpriced 99–cent tracks I can download from iTunes or Napster. But the license acquisition process isn’t as smooth as it should be. Last week my PC decided to stop playing all the downloaded tracks, and it wouldn’t let me listen to or download any new ones. I spent an hour on the phone Friday with a capable Napster tech support guy who walked me through manually reconfiguring the DRM files on my PC. It wasn’t a lot of fun, and I wouldn’t want to have to explain the process to a less sophisticated user. (I asked for and got a free month’s service for the hassle.)

So, when I do the math, I see an equation that’s a little more complicated. If your music budget is limited to buying one or two hit CDs every month, and your tastes are satisfied with that much new music and no more, then fuggedaboutit. You won’t get your money’s worth out of Napster. On the other hand, if you have a broad musical tastes and an insatiable appetite for tunes, you might find Napster (or a similar, all-you-can-listen-to service like Rhapsody) worth a try. The catalog is huge and it’s fun to rummage around on indie labels or follow links to artists that are similar to those you like or to dig into a favorite artist’s older recordings. If I sample 10 new tracks every day, that’s a nickel per track (3 cents if I don’t care to transfer the tunes to my portable player) for the right to listen to a particular song all month long. That doesn’t seem like such a terrible deal, all in all.

Update: Christopher Baus has been thinking along similar lines:

I’ve used a subscription music service (Rhapsody) for 2 years, and I couldn’t be happier. I know exactly what I am paying for, and I think I am getting an insane bargain. I know I don’t own the music. That’s a silly argument. When you buy a CD you aren’t buying redistribution rights for that content. You are buying a personal license. Not much has changed here. If people actually tried the subscription services (rather than just complaining about them), I think they would see what an amazing technology and deal it really is.

He also thinks that Microsoft should release Windows Media Player for Linux!

Goodbye, X1. Hello (again), Copernic!

For the past four months, I’ve been evaluating two desktop search programs: X1 and Copernic Desktop Search. I’ve given each one a fair test, and the contest is over. Copernic wins.

Both programs do a thoroughly acceptable job of very quickly locating the exact message, file, picture, or contact that I need. Both have toolbars that tuck neatly into the Windows XP taskbar so I can begin a search without having to open a special window. Both give me control over exactly what gets indexed and give me excellent controls to minimize the hit that indexing puts on my system performance. Each program has a few strengths and weaknesses: X1 integrates much more fully with Outlook 2003 than does Copernic. Copernic, on the other hand, indexes my browser’s bookmarks and cache (IE or Firefox), which X1 doesn’t do. But none of the differences in the respective feature sets are crucial.

So what tipped the scales? Two things:

  1. Copernic is free, X1 costs $75. That’s a lot of money, about two to three times what comparable utilities cost. Fortunately, I didn’t have to pay for the X1 license. I qualified for a free license thanks to a promotion that Jason Calacanis ran on his blog last October. (Both Google and MSN are offering free desktop search utilities as well, but neither one is good enough for my purposes yet.) If X1 wants to charge a premium price when the competition is free, it has to offer something to justify the cost.
  2. X1 is just too buggy. Three times in the four months I’ve been evaluating X1 version 5, it has completely lost track of the index to my files, or stopped indexing new messages for several days, or lost the ability to specify folders in my main Outlook message store. That’s annoying, to say the least. It’s fatal when the whole point of the program is to offer me instant access to information that I need, when I need it, usually when I’m working on a deadline trying to pull together a proposal or an article. On all three occasions, it took roughly an hour to delete the existing X1 index and build a new one. That’s just not acceptable.

The developers of X1 have acknowledged that these bugs exist. To their credit, I was able to go to the X1 Discussion Forum and find some candid discussions of the issue (here, here, here, and here, for instance). But until they get these issues licked, I can’t recommend the program. Especially not when a free, fast, and extremely capable alternative exists in Copernic Desktop Search.

Find Media Center-compatible components

Thinking of building your own Media Center PC? Chris Lanier points out the the hardware compatibility list, officially known as the Designed for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Logo Partner List, was recently updated. I was surprised to see how many TV tuner cards are now on the supported list.

Also, don’t miss the long list of MCE add-ins that Chris has assembled in a thread at The Green Button.