By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

It seems like Microsoft is taking some cues from typical political activity: meaning playing slightly “dirty.” You probably know that Microsoft’s latest ad campaign consists of an “I’m a PC” look at real users around the world and Microsoft employees.

As the campaign enters a new phase, Microsoft has started parking kiosks around the world for people to record segments for the campaign, as well as accepting user uploads — rather than just using professionally-chosen spokespeople.

This particular location is, probably for Apple, more than a little annoying.

According to a sharp-eyed AppleInsider reader:

“It’s a friggin booth where you can record your own I’m a PC video,” he said. “This is outside the Apple Store, Bullring, Birmingham, England.” He added that a trio of Microsoft staffers will be on hand to turn patrons off from the Mac for the next three days.

Now that’s dirty pool. But while it may be dirty pool, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it funny.

After all, Apple’s been making fun of Microsoft’s latest series of ads. All’s fair in business, I guess. You can click the above image to enlarge, BTW.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

The Beatles are a stranger to Apple and iTunes, but apparently not so to MTV and their video game subsidiary Harmonix (Rock Band). A deal between the parties was announced on Thursday morning by MTV and the band’s own Apple Corps Ltd.

For those not in the know, Apple Corps Ltd. is the multimedia corporation founded in January 1968 by The Beatles to replace their earlier company (Beatles Ltd.).

I received an invitation to the event on Wednesday, and the fact that my invitation was from The Beatles’ Apple Corps and MTV raised a great deal of suspicion on my part. Additionally, leaked information to outlets such as the Wall Street Journal confirmed it. The Beatles join Aerosmith, Metallica, and Jimi Hendrix (Guitar Hero) and AC/DC (Rock Band) as the latest — and biggest — group to license its songs to a music-oriented video game.

In June, the Financial Times reported that the Beatles were in negotiation with both Activision (Guitar Hero) and MTV Games (Rock Band). It appears MTV won the battle, but not for Rock Band, but for a new game, built from the ground up.

Yes, you read that right. This will not be a Rock Band game, but a brand new game. More on that later.

I have to admit, when I joined the call, it was humorous to be placed on hold and hear nothing but music — Beatles music, of course.

The hosts in attendance were the following:

• Jeff Jones, CEO of Apple Corps, Ltd.
• Judy McGrath, Chairman and CEO of MTV Networks
• Van Toffler, President of MTV Networks Music/Logo Group

According to Van Toffler, the project has been “blessed” by the surviving Beatles (Paul Ringo McCartney, Starr) as well as Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison.

Alex Rigopulos, CEO and Co-Founder, Harmonix indicated this will not be a sequel or add on to Rock Band, but as I said, a new, built-from-the-ground-up custom game title for The Beatles only.

More

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Well, not really that bargain-basement, but certainly a good discount. Wal-Mart has confirmed that on Wednesday, its stores will start begin selling the T-Mobile G1 phone at a discounted price … $148.88 with a 2-year agreement (natch). This is $31.11 off the regular price, but more impressively, it’s slightly more than 25% off.

I wrote about this earlier, but at the time it was still just a rumor, and the target date was November 24th. It’s certainly unusual for a new gadget to be marked down so quickly.

However, this new info came directly from Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien, so it’s genuine. The original date of late November, now that was a long wait (if you really want a T-Mobile G1, that is), but Wednesday? Pshaw, that’s nothing.

As we all know, the G1 is the first Android phone, and it’s been in high demand (though not iPhone-ish-type demand). Now what we don’t know is why Wal-Mart insists on using “8s” for all their prices instead of the 99 or 95 everyone else does.

We also don’t know if any early adopters will be really ticked about this. Obviously (or hopefully), it’s not enough to start a lawsuit (such as the iPhone’s price discrimination lawsuit), but some people are really cheap, er frugal. Fortunately $31.11 isn’t much to get upset over.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Way back in January, Netflix promised to add Mac video streaming to its “Watch Instantly” feature before the end of 2008. Well, they’ve done it, ironically, with the help of Microsoft technology. Microsoft’s Silverlight to the rescue.

But hold onto your horses. Netflix calls this their second generation player, so it will likely cover PCs as well, and it also states that it will only roll out to a limited number of users at first. Yes, once again we consumers are beta-testing for someone.

Previously, Netflix outlined their issues with Mac streaming:

And that’s our holdup for the Mac - there’s not yet a studio-sanctioned, publicly-available Mac DRM solution (Apple doesn’t license theirs). I can promise you that, when an approved solution becomes available for the Mac, we’ll be there.

And that’s where Microsoft’s Silverlight comes in. The Netflix player will use Microsoft’s Play Ready DRM, a feature that wasn’t available before the release of Silverlight 2.0. Their press release says (emphasis mine):

Netflix, Inc., the world’s largest online movie rental service, today announced it has begun the deployment of Microsoft Silverlight to enhance the instant watching component of the Netflix service and to allow subscribers for the first time to watch movies and TV episodes instantly on their Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. The deployment, which will initially touch a small percentage of new Netflix subscribers, is the first step in an anticipated roll-out of the new platform to all Netflix subscribers by the end of the year.

The new Netflix player takes advantage of PlayReady DRM, which is built into Silverlight, for the playback of protected content on both Windows-based PCs and on Macs. That had not been possible with previous generation technologies.

Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt added:

“Silverlight with PlayReady offers a powerful and secure toolkit for delivery of dynamic streaming, which offers faster start-up, and higher quality video, adapted in real time to users’ connection speeds. Members who enjoy watching movies and TV episodes from the growing library of choices that can be instantly streamed at Netflix will be thrilled with this next generation improvement of access and quality, on a broader range of platforms, including Intel Macs and Firefox.”

Netflix was one of the early adopters of Silverlight, as was indicated by Microsoft when it launched the first version. This is great, but Netflix still needs to work on the other side of things — content. Lack of content is what killed HD-DVD and although Netflix says it has more than 12,000 titles to choose from for “Watch Instantly,” that’s still just a fraction of its total catalog.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Now, I find this to be an awful cute dog toy (coming from someone who owns two dogs and an iPhone 3G). And who am I to deprive my dogs of a state-of-the-art dog toy such as the iBone. However, knowing Apple, it places this company right the their sights, lawsuit-wise.

Now, sometimes these suits are understandable, but sometimes a little over the top, such as in their threat over the GreeNYC campaign’s logo (being run by New York City, natch; logo below).

And their cease-and-desist over the ProfitPod — way over the top, as that devices was a product designed to make it easier for arcades to figure out how many of those tickets that you trade in for those “valuable” prizes have been spit out by a game. It looks nothing like an iPod, doesn’t play music, is rectangular (landscape-wise). Hardly anything that could be confused with an iPod, but Apple still got hot under the collar about it.

At any rate, the iBone above is sold by Haute Diggity Dog. Its $11.95, and I’m not sure if it supports 3G or not.

It’s also unclear if the iBone comes house … or jailbroken, and if it will support add-ons from the Yap Store or not.

Hopefully, Apple will see the humor in this, and give it a pass, “cease-and-desist-wise,” at any rate. You know at $11.95, you just gotta get one for your pampered pooch.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Earlier this month a story was posted to CNN’s iReport social news site which caused Apple stock to plummet. The stories on that site are not vetted before they are allowed to appear on the site. The story said:

Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.

Because the stock plunged, the SEC obviously took interest. The post was made by an iReport user (since removed, along with the story) named “johntw.”

According to Bloomberg, two people with knowledge of the matter told them that the post was made by a teenager. At this point, investigators haven’t found any evidence that he tried to profit from the stock price drop.

The informants chose to remain anonymous as the probe hasn’t been made public.

Michael Missal, a former enforcement lawyer at the SEC now in private practice at K&L Gates LLP in Washington, said:

“If the posting wasn’t directly related to the purchase or sale of a security it’s questionable the SEC would have jurisdiction. That’s not to say some other agency of the U.S. government couldn’t take action if it felt a law was violated.'’

Jobs’ health has been a source of speculation since he appeared gaunt and somewhat ill at WWDC earlier this year.

Somewhat ironically, as this update was via Bloomberg, is the fact that Bloomberg accidentally posted Steve Jobs’ obituary to the news wires in late August.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of each month, and that’s when Microsoft typically releases security and other updates for their products. Sometimes an emergency requires an “out-of-band” patch. And today, October 23rd, Microsoft is pushing out a critical Windows security patch.

Not much has been said about the release, however. They are planning to release the Windows patch at 10 AM PDT, with a Webcast to cover specifics of the patch at 1 PM PDT. However, Webcast registration is already full.

Microsoft hasn’t offered many details about the patch, other than to say it is critical and should be applied immediately to Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 systems. For Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, the patch is only deemed (only) “important” rather than critical.

The last time Microsoft released an “out-of-band” patch was April 2007, according to a Microsoft representative.

Update: It’s this one and it looks pretty bad. Remote code execution could allow an attacker to take over your system.

The Microsoft Security Response Center said the following:

This security update resolves a vulnerability in the Server service that affects all currently supported versions of Windows. Windows XP and older versions are rated as “Critical” while Windows Vista and newer versions are rated as “Important”. Because the vulnerability is potentially wormable on those older versions of Windows, we’re encouraging customers to test and deploy the update as soon as possible. To help you better understand the details around the vulnerability, my colleagues over at the Security Vulnerability Research & Defense blog have provided some more information here. Also, Michael Howard has provided some background on the vulnerability from the Security Development Lifecycle perspective here.

In addition, to releasing a security update to address the vulnerability, we’ve also taken steps to help enable broader protections for customers. Specifically, our colleagues in the Microsoft Malware Protection Center have released updated signatures that can enable Microsoft Forefront and Microsoft OneCare to protect against current attempts to exploit the vulnerability (Exploit:Win32/MS08067.gen!A). You can read about what they’re doing to help protect here. We have also provided information to our security partners in our Microsoft Active Protections Program and our Microsoft Security Response Alliance Program. We encourage all customers to update the signatures for their security protection products to help provide protections while they’re testing and deploying these updates.

We discovered this vulnerability as part of our research into a limited series of targeted malware attacks against Windows XP systems that we discovered about two weeks ago through our ongoing monitoring. As we investigated these attacks we found they were utilizing a new vulnerability and initiated our Software Security Incident Response Process (SSIRP). As we analyzed the vulnerability in our SSRP process, we found that this vulnerability was potentially wormable on Windows XP and older systems. Our analysis also showed that it would be possible to address this vulnerability in a way that would enable us to develop an update of appropriate quality for broad distribution quickly. Based on those two factors, we felt that it was in the best interest of customers for us to release this update before the regular November release cycle.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

On Wednesday, T-Mobile’s G1 Android-based phone made its retail appearance (it was previously only available via pre-order to existing T-Mobile customers). T-Mobile opened all of its retail storefronts at 8 AM, anticipating increased demand.

According to C|Net, the first retail purchase was made Tuesday night by Christopher Laddis in San Francisco (congrats).

Or for those who prefer to avoid a line, they can purchase the G1 online. Ah, the lack of activation is a wonder (hint, hint, Apple).

T-Mobile has also started a dedicated forum for the G1, BTW, here, and it already has 3,400+ posts.

All in all, most reviewers have not been entranced by the G1 hardware (Lack of a standard headset jack? Talk about a strange decision), but rather by the Android software. Open-source as it is, it offers a great opportunity for a flood of applications to be written for it. On the other hand, right now, there are less than 50 apps in the Market.

Still, the answer to Now What? is we wait to see how the G1’s growing pains pan out. Will it have connectivity issues, a la the iPhone 3G? How quickly will apps appear? And T-Mobile’s somewhat limited 3G network — a definite negative. Time will tell.