The new SDK has a new user interface, a geocoder that lets developers search for businesses as well as translate an address into a coordinate and vice versa, support for new media codecs, and code that lets developers create layout animations.

One thing missing is change to the telephony package, laments one developer on the Android Developer discussion on Google Groups.

“This is very disappointing, especially because we were told in the Android coding day in Israel that the telephony package will be updated soon,” the developer wrote. “We still cannot detect the ingoing/outgoing call number or send DTMF tones properly.” Prototypes of Android phones were shown at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Google launched Android in November along with and the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 handset manufacturers, carriers and chipmakers that have said they plan to support Android products and services. Products are due out later this year.

Here are some screenshots, via the Hello Android blog:

(Credit: Hello Android)

(Credit: Hello Android)

(Credit: Hello Android)

(Credit: Hello Android)

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
February 14, 2008 12:51 PM

The LiMo Foundation — which includes such software companies as McAfee Corp. and Purple Labs and telecommunications giants such as Samsung — showed off 18 handsets Wednesday at the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona. Some of the devices are ready for market.

Just two days earlier, also in Barcelona, chip makers Texas Instruments Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. began demonstrating prototypes of handsets based on Android — for which no one offered a launch date.

The promise of both operating systems is that — because they are based on open-source software — they will allow developers to quickly and freely add new applications. Anyone hoping to create new applications for competing proprietary programs from Microsoft Corp., Palm Inc., Research in Motion Ltd. or Nokia Corp.’s Symbian must pay licensing fees.

That openness could speed the drive to integrate the Internet into mobile phones. It’s already drawing numerous handset manufacturers, mobile operators, software companies to chip makers.

The LiMo Foundation, which draws its name from Linux and mobile phones, was launched last February in an effort to build a mobile phone platform that would allow more devices to work together. Google also began working on Android last year with industry partners, in the Open Handset Alliance.

The initiatives overlap in many ways, which is reflected in the number of companies participating in both, including LG Electronics, Motorola and Samsung as well as chipmaker Texas Instruments. In all, LiMo has 32 members to Open Handset’s 34. And the numbers in both are growing.

So far, however, there are no signs they will pool their efforts.

“These companies are united in a deep philosophical way around an operating system, with a group of industry leaders who are sharing technology to create a new operating system for handsets,” Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, said of that collaborative. “LiMo is real technology making a real platform that goes straight to handsets.”

A key difference between LiMo and Android is that Google is presenting Android to its partners as a completed operating system, whereas the partners in LiMo have incorporated components from the various member companies and are finishing it together, said John Rizzo, a LiMo board member who is vice president for research and development strategy for the U.S. branch of Japan’s Aplix Corp.

“The platform is made up of existing, proven components,” Rizzo said. “Part of the effort is to provide a cost-effective platform for everyone involved.”

The LiMo-equipped handsets shown Wednesday in Barcelona include models from Motorola Inc., NEC Corp., Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung. Each contains just some pieces of the still-evolving platform.

Consultant John Strand of Strand Consulting in Copenhagen, Denmark, was skeptical that either initiative would have much impact on the mobile market because primacy depends on getting onto a majority of devices, which is tough in a fragmented market.

A formidable obstacle looms in the form of Nokia, which controls 40 percent of the handset market and relies on Symbian, a proprietary operating system it partially owns.

“LiMo is just a group of people trying to create an alternative to Symbian and Microsoft. But Microsoft gets out to more phones and has a bigger development community,” said Strand.

Antivirus software maker McAfee is eager to be on the ground floor of an operating system with LiMo, never having done that with a computer platform.

“This is a unique opportunity for us to be involved from day one. We’ve been half a step behind the bad guys, now we can be half a step ahead,” said Victor Kouznetsov, senior vice president for McAfee’s mobile security solutions.

Data protection is increasingly important on mobile phones as Internet applications become more prominent, and the trend has already taken off in Asia, Kouznetsov said.

Martin Cooper, the CEO of wireless company ArrayComm Inc. and an early developer of mobile phone technology, agreed that collaboratives will help developers create more new applications. But he said barriers remain to the digital revolution — chiefly the cost of data transmission.

“Digital was supposed to change our lives. It hasn’t happened yet,” Cooper said. “I’m here to say that the revolution has started. It will take a long time. Believe it or not, revolution takes about a generation. This generation has started now.”

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Yes, it’s the same Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier who used to be editorial director of Linux.com, and was later editor in chief of Linux Magazine. This week he was named openSUSE community manager, a position analogous to the one held with great distinction by Max Spevack at Fedora until just a few weeks ago. Just about every publication that covers Linux and FOSS has been clamoring to interview Joe, and he’s been typing email interview answers like crazy. As a break from that routine he stopped by the Linux.com editorial office and talked a bit about how the new job is going, what he expects to do, and how it feels to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer.

Download Ogg Theora version

http://blip.tv/file/get/Lc-LinuxcomChatsWithNewOpenSUSECommunityManagerJoeBrockmeie298.OGG

There’s lots more you can do with your wireless network than just surf the Web and transfer files.
I bet you thought your Wi-Fi network was just for Web surfing. Silly rabbit. Wireless home networks are being used for all kinds of new tricks, and they aren’t just for kids. Of course, there are Wi-Fi-ready game consoles, printers, storage devices, home security systems, and even a handful of digital cameras. But now a slew of new products are giving you even more reasons to kiss wires goodbye.

1. Crank up the tunes

Not surprisingly, Wi-Fi is starting to have a big impact on digital music (it is a kind of radio, after all). Apple’s iPod Touch and Microsoft’s Zune both allow you to sync your music collections to your PC wirelessly. Zune also lets you share tunes with other Zuners in the same room. When it comes to Wi-Fi, however, the Music Gremlin has them both beat. The $249 Gremlin lets you download tunes from any hot spot and share them with other Gremlin users anywhere in the world (you’ll have to pay a $15 monthly subscription or 99 cents per song).

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But the marriage of music and Wi-Fi doesn’t end at your pocket. Denon’s S-52 tabletop stereo ($699) can play MP3 files stored on your hard drive, tune into your fave Internet radio stations, or tap into a Rhapsody music subscription—no wires required. And the Sonos Digital Music System ($1,000 for a two-room starter kit) makes multiroom audio a snap, thanks to its internal wireless network. It now supports Rhapsody, Sirius Internet radio, Pandora, Windows Media Audio, and Zune (but still not iTunes—sigh). Pricey, yes. But it remains one of the coolest gadgets ever built.

2. Get the big picture

Slowly but surely, Wi-Fi is bridging the gap between TV and the Internet—or at least helping you watch YouTube on your tube. The newly refreshed Apple TV, Take Two ($229 for the 40GB model) lets you rent movies or buy TV episodes from iTunes, download YouTube videos or podcasts, and beam them directly over your network to your set, bypassing your computer entirely.

HP’s MediaSmart HDTVs ($1,900 to $2,400) feature built-in Windows Media Extenders, so you can enjoy videos, photos, and music stored on your hard drive; rent or buy movies from CinemaNow; and dial up Internet radio stations—all without having to sit in the same room as your PC. Add a Wi-Fi adapter to your TiVo, and you can download shows from Amazon Unbox directly to your DVR, then shuttle recorded programs and other content between your computer and your set.

3. Surf the Web without a computer

You can already beam pictures from your PC to a Wi-Fi-enabled photo frame like Samsung’s SPF-72V or PhotoVu’s PV1750. Services like FrameChannel can turn these static frames into information portals, delivering RSS feeds, news, weather reports, NASA photos, cartoons, trivia, and (my personal favorite) the Beer Channel to your frame. Just create a free account online and pick the channels you want.

The Chumby personal Internet player does this and then some. The $180 gadget is about the size of an alarm clock; besides photos, news, and weather, it can display your POP e-mail, eBay auctions, Craigslist classifieds, Netflix queue, electronic greeting cards, and interactive games. Chumby units should be available in early spring.

4. Take the Internet to go

Wi-Fi is making the move to cars. Dash Navigation’s Dash Express GPS device ($599) will offer two-way communications via cellular networks or a hot spot when one is in range. You’ll be able to do Yahoo Local searches, get real-time traffic and weather updates, or send directions straight to your car’s GPS unit (but you’ll need to fork out another $10 to $13 a month for a subscription). Dash expects to ship its first commercial devices next month.
Meanwhile, Autonet Mobile can turn your car into a rolling Wi-Fi hot spot—so you can log on from your laptop in the passenger seat as you cruise down the open road. Autonet Mobile is currently available in Avis rental cars, and the company plans to (finally) launch a consumer version of the product in February.

5. Keep your home humming

Wireless networks are also coming to your kitchen, laundry room, and beyond. For example, Miele builds Wi-Fi into both its Honeycomb washers and dryers ($1300+) and its upcoming MasterCool refrigerators and wine coolers (pricing unavailable at press time). When the appliance detects a problem–a device fails, or you simply left the fridge door open, threatening the safety of your pricey wine collection–the device will send a message over your home Internet connection to a Miele technician, who can tell you to shut the fridge or set up a service appointment. In addition, Miele says it plans to roll out its RemoteVision diagnostic service this spring.
In the “Laundry Time” project, Whirlpool, HP, and Microsoft tested Wi-Fi-enabled appliances that alert consumers when it’s time to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer. (No products have been announced yet.) In Japan, Toto sells an “Intelligence Toilet” that monitors your health (you don’t want to know how) and can transmit that information across a network to your doctor’s office. Chatty toilets have yet to be spotted on this side of the Pacific, but you know it’s only a matter of time. Before long your appliances may be talking about you behind your back—so treat them well.

SAN FRANCISCO — As other high-tech companies cut back on their research labs, Microsoft continues to increase its ranks of free-rein thinkers.
Stuart isett for the New York Times

Jennifer Tour Chayes, a mathematical physicist, will lead Microsoft’s new basic research laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.
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The company, which has research labs in Redmond, Wash.; Beijing; Cambridge, England; Bangalore, India; and Silicon Valley, will announce plans on Monday to open a sixth lab, in Cambridge, Mass., in the Boston metropolitan area.

These are labs where people focus on science, not product development. To lead the new lab, the company has appointed one of its veteran researchers, Jennifer Tour Chayes. Dr. Chayes, 51, who has a doctorate in mathematical physics, said, “We believe that in the long run, putting money into basic research will pay off, but you have to wait longer for it.”

Microsoft, beset by competitive pressures from companies like Google, sees first-rate research labs as more important than ever. The company, which made a $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo last week as one way to compete with Google, wants a set of labs in place that can develop business opportunities that will pay off well into the future.

“Essentially every other industrial lab I know is shrinking, with the exception of Google,” Dr. Chayes said. Since she joined the company in 1997, she said, Microsoft Research has grown eightfold to 800 researchers who hold doctorates.

Those research scientists are far outnumbered by the thousands of Microsoft engineers working in advanced development and direct product development.

“The outcome of basic research is insights, and what development people do is take those insights and create products with them,” Dr. Chayes said. “The two things are very different.”

Microsoft is adamant about retaining a pure research department reminiscent of the old Bell Laboratories, whose scientists were awarded six Nobel Prizes over the years.

“Microsoft is probably the sole remaining corporate research lab that still values basic research,” said Maria Klawe, a mathematician who is president of Harvey Mudd College.

Google employs 100 scientists in its research labs. Many employees are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time on something they are passionate about that may not be directly related to their main project.

The new Microsoft lab, which will be next door to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is scheduled to open in July. Dr. Chayes will be joined at first by three other Microsoft scientists, including her husband, Christian Borgs, who is also a mathematician and who will be deputy managing director of the Boston lab.

Dr. Chayes will be one of the first women to direct a research lab run by an American corporation. She was a tenured professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, when Microsoft hired her to do research. Dr. Chayes was skeptical, she said, and wondered why Microsoft would want a mathematician whose work might not pay off for many decades. But the company promised her that she would have full academic freedom and support for unconventional work.

Dr. Chayes has since built her group in Redmond, called the Theory Group, into one of the most eminent research groups on or off a university campus. “Anyone who’s anyone in theoretical computer science visits her laboratory,” said Lenore Blum, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Richard F. Rashid, a former Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who is senior vice president of research at Microsoft, said Dr. Chayes’s work is valuable.

“If you look at her research, it’s very theoretical,” said Dr. Rashid, who holds a doctorate in computer science. At the same time, he said, two areas of her expertise have proved useful for Microsoft.

The work she did in developing simple models of certain liquids and solids turned out to be useful in the study of random, self-engineered networks like the Internet. And some of Dr. Chayes’s insights into theoretical computer science have recently led to the development of some exceedingly fast networking algorithms.

Over the years, Dr. Chayes has been courted by other research labs, including Google’s, but she says she remains content at Microsoft. One reason is the intellectual freedom it offers. Unlike other companies with intellectual property interests to protect, she said, Microsoft does not require internal prepublication review of academic papers written by its researchers.

Dr. Chayes, who works with groups that help bring more young women into the sciences, said she hoped to serve as a role model for young women considering a career in computer science or math, two fields that have long suffered a dearth of women.

(CNN) — Notorious 20th-century bank robber Willie Sutton said famously, “I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”

It seems 21st-century criminals are following his footsteps.

But while Sutton disguised himself as a cop, a window washer and a Western Union messenger, cyberthieves use a different type of subterfuge — phishing — to cover their identities and wipe out bank accounts.

Phishing occurs when fraudulent e-mails that appear to be from a legitimate source are sent in an effort to obtain sensitive information from a user.

Those computer exploits and others are detailed in a survey of security threats and vulnerabilities for 2007 by the IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force.

Of the top 20 companies targeted by phishing in 2007, the report says, 19 are in the banking industry.

Computer users are often tricked into visiting fraudulent sites because of “danger, danger” e-mail subject lines like “account security measures,” “important notice” or “(your bank name) security notice.”

One sneaky thing some malware (malicious threats) does is to modify a user’s server information.

For example, a user types www.bankofamerica.com into his or her browser. But instead of the computer using the service provider’s server, which would take the user to the real Bank of America server, the computer uses a bogus server run by phishers — and that takes the user to a fake Bank of America server.

The phishers take the user’s login information and empty the account.

Most users, even the savvy ones, wouldn’t know that their server settings have been hijacked.

Just a few years ago, computer viruses and worms seemed designed for bragging rights and a hacker’s 15 minutes of fame, but the game has changed. Now, instead of creating chaos by shutting down or paralyzing computer systems, the bad guys are getting more bang for their buck by taking over systems and using them to commit crimes.

The IBM Internet security report shows that nearly 90 percent of all vulnerabilities allow this type of remote exploitation.

“The authors [of this malware] realize they are better off as parasites than they are killing their hosts,” said Chris Rouland, engineer and chief technology officer for IBM Internet security.

Rouland said that some other malicious trends include growth in Web browser exploitation, especially for Windows Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

He said that although fewer vulnerabilities were disclosed publicly last year, the number of “high-severity vulnerabilities” increased by 28 percent compared with 2006.

The X-Force collected and analyzed 410,000 new malware in 2007. That’s a third more than they analyzed in 2006.

And wildly popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook are now prime targets for exploits.

What’s an average computer user to do?

Though tech-savvy, proudly paperless home computer users may shun those so-20th-century snail mail bank statements, it might be worth it to go retro and compare your online banking information with the paper record.

Rouland says criminals in Brazil have figured out ways to wipe out bank accounts and leave no trail in an individual’s online account. And bank customers may be out of luck if the theft goes unnoticed for a while.

Usually, banks give only 90 days to remediate an account problem.

In the old days of worms and viruses and denial of service attacks, many of us learned, often the hard way, that computer security was often an afterthought compared to “user friendliness.”

But these days, with organized criminals around the globe stealing with such great stealth, the bank with the best security might turn out to be the big business winner