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For the most part, CNN appears to have avoided the brunt of the Chinese DDoS attacks.

Also on Tuesday, The Dark Visitor, a site that tracks Chinese hackers, said a downloadable tool is now available for those wanting to participate in future attacks. Over the weekend, The Dark Visitor reported on the structure in place for launching attacks on Western media. The individuals, loosely calling themselves “Revenge for the Flame” and “HackCNN” feel that Western media have not presented a balanced view in reporting on the protests in Tibet and the Olympic torch runs through major world cities.

Netcraft reported Tuesday that during a three-hour period on Sunday morning, the CNN.com site was unavailable from its listening post in Pennsylvania. And on Monday, the site experienced inflated response times. CNN.com did suffer a minor DDoS last Thursday, but recovered by limiting access from certain geographic areas, mainly Asia.

Although CNN escaped a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack planned for Saturday, the site has experienced either random outages or inflated response times over the last 72 hours, according to one Internet research company.

That wasn’t the case with The Sports Network. On Monday morning, the site (not affiliated with CNN) was down due to a “political entity in China.” Blogger Christine Lu has screenshots of the message and the defaced Sports Network page (scroll down). The group HackCNN has claimed responsibility for The Sports Network attack.

Craigslist, however, is not a publicly traded company, so a “hostile takeover” is a less likely route. eBay selling its stake to another party may be something worth keeping an eye on, given that’s how eBay came into its Craigslist stake in 2004.

The popular online classified-ad site issued its response after eBay on Tuesday filed a lawsuit, alleging that its 28.4 percent stake in Craigslist was diluted by more than 10 percent in January. eBay, which acquired its minority stake in 2004, submitted its lawsuit under seal and, as a result, few details are readily available.

And what ulterior motives could Craigslist be referring to? The company alleges: “eBay has absolutely no reason to feel threatened here - unless of course they’re contemplating a hostile takeover of craigslist, or the sale of eBay’s stake in craigslist to an unfriendly party. In which case, they’re out of luck.”

Craigslist said it was surprised by the action, stating that eBay had not attempted to discuss the matter with the company prior to filing its complaint.

“Coming from a shareholder that views craigslist as a prime competitor, filing suit without so much as mentioning these assertions beforehand seems unethical, and hints at ulterior motives,” Craigslist notes in its blog.

Craigslist has responded to a lawsuit filed by eBay, noting that it “came to us out of the blue,” according to a posting on its craigslist blog Tuesday.

[via The Unofficial Apple Weblog via Retro Thing]

While you’d look (and sound) kind of silly carrying this around with you on public transit, the device’s wide base and fairly decent viewing angle make for good horizontal viewing.

Watching videos on the screen of the iPod nano is a pretty cool feature. However, if it’s not a cartoon or three minute video podcast things can get a little rough on your eyeballs. If you don’t feel like shelling out $100 for Apple’s universal dock and AV cables, and you happen to have a slide viewer laying about, you’re in luck.

Ingenious Brit and YouTube user markrirwin has developed a solution called the NanoScope. Taking an old 35mm film slide viewer and adding external speakers, he created a cinema-in-a-box magnifier that makes those tiny videos a reasonable size on its 4 inch screen.

Until legal DVDs or iTunes-like download or rental services are available to the Chinese market, however, I can’t imagine that people will stop watching the free or cheap pirated versions.

Yesterday, a Chinese public-security ministry official asked for international help in copyright enforcement, noting that many infringers use Web sites hosted outside Chinese jurisdiction.

“Copyright infringements, by their very nature, are international crimes. To effectively curb such activities, (we) need enhanced international cooperation on law enforcement,” said Gao Feng, the official.

Internet-based copyright infringement is pretty much the only way people can keep track of TV and movies from abroad in Beijing. It’s hard to even find legal DVDs, and if there aren’t even illegal DVDs to buy, it’s often trivially easy to find entire movies on Youku or Tudou.

I don’t doubt that international borders are a challenge for Chinese enforcers, but they certainly could do more here. The illegal streaming versions of movies and TV series from Chinese video sites are even fueling viewers in the United States, where DVDs are no minor investment. The only sacrifices for viewers are the need to wait for buffering and some loss in resolution.

In the second quarter of 2008, AMD had revenue from continuing operations of $1.349 billion and a net loss of $1.189 billion. In the third quarter of 2007, AMD had revenue from continuing operations of $1.558 billion and a net loss of $396 million.

The investment is expected to allow AMD to remain directly involved in chip manufacturing–crucial for competing with Intel.

Analysts were impressed by the numbers. “Even in a normal environment this would be a pretty remarkable achievement. In today’s environment, it’s extraordinary,” said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart.

One of the largest investors, Mubadala Development, now owns 19.3 percent of AMD.

AMD said it has secured $5.7 billion of “confirmed, pledged investment,” with some of the money earmarked for a future manufacturing facility in Malta, N.Y. It will own part of the new manufacturing entity, and Advanced Technology Investment Co. (ATIC) will own the rest.

Earlier this month, AMD announced that it was splitting into two companies: one for designing chips (AMD), the other for manufacturing them (The Foundry Company). The capital-intensive business of manufacturing chips had been weighing on AMD as it reeled under a $5 billion debt load, partially due to its purchase of ATI Technologies in 2006.

Advanced Micro Devices reported a much smaller loss for the third quarter and better-than-expected revenue.

Revenue increased 32 percent compared to the second quarter of 2008 and 14 percent compared to the third quarter of 2007.

“We achieved a significant milestone with the recent announcement of our Asset Smart strategy, which will transform both AMD and the industry,” Dirk Meyer, AMD’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker reported third-quarter 2008 revenue of $1.776 billion, including process technology license revenue of $191 million.

“Improved execution across all of our businesses,” Robert J. Rivet, AMD’s chief financial officer, said in a statement, “was punctuated by a refresh of our graphics product line-up, driving 55 percent sequential revenue growth and market share gains. In addition, customer adoption of our quad-core microprocessors was strong, with unit shipments increasing 46 percent sequentially.”

Third-quarter 2008 gross margin was 51 percent, or 45 percent excluding process technology license revenue. This compares favorably to both the second-quarter 2008 non-GAAP gross margin of 37 percent, and the third-quarter 2007 gross margin of 41 percent.

In addition, ATIC will commit a minimum of $3.6 billion and up to $6 billion in additional funds over the next five years for the upgrade and expansion of fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany, and construction the Malta, N.Y., facility.

A positive surprise is the net loss, which was significantly smaller than expected. The company reported a net loss of $67 million, or 11 cents per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected a third-quarter loss of 40 cents per share on $1.48 billion in revenue. The company also reached operating profitability in the quarter.

(Credit:
Amazon)

Tomorrow, the HD DVD version of the Irish flick Disco Pigs goes on sale along with the Japanese anime collection, Freedom: 6. According to Wikipedia’s entry on HD DVD, these will be the last HD DVD titles to be released in the United States (though Bandai Visual says it wants to release the remaining episodes of the Freedom Project series on HD DVD). The final big studio releases, Warner’s Twister and P.S. I Love You, hit stores in May.

So, anybody out there still buying HD DVDs? Any collectors plan on buying Disco Pigs?

Personally, I wish The Last American Virgin was the last American HD DVD. That film, a minor 80s classic, was marked by a brutal ending that showed that sometimes nice guys do indeed finish last. HD DVD, a good format to many, shared a similar fate.

“Keeping software up-to-date is hard. So if you’re thinking of developing your own auto-updater, or have already started, we hope that the code we are releasing today will be helpful to you,” the Google employees said.

Sharing source code can allay concerns about what exactly software is up to, but Google also hopes that others will be able to use Omaha.

Google believes in automatic updates of software so security vulnerabilities can be patched quickly, and Google Update is the tool that permits automatic downloading and installation of a new version in the background so it’s ready to run the next time the program is launched.

“Some users can be surprised to find this program running, and at Google, we don’t like disappointing our users. We’ve been working hard to address these concerns, and releasing the source code for Omaha is our attempt to make the purpose of Google Update totally transparent,” Myles Jordan of Google’s software engineering team and Michael Smith of its product management team said in a blog post Friday.

The company also released an Omaha developer guide for those wishing to use the software. Omaha is governed by the Apache License 2.0, Google’s preferred open-source software license.

In an attempt to better show what its software is up to, Google has released the source code of its Google Update software, a project code-named Omaha that can automatically install new versions of programs, including the Chrome browser and Google Earth.

(Credit:
Seinfeld)

The comedian will reportedly get $10 million for the campaign, in which he will appear with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in some of the ads. Comedians Will Ferrell and Chris Rock were also considered for the new advertising campaign, the paper said.

The paper said the ads, being developed by a new agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, will use a form of the phrase “Windows, Not Walls,” and will stress connecting people and ideas. It will also focus on changing negative perceptions about Windows Vista.

Jerry Seinfeld will appear as a celebrity pitchman as part of a new $300 million ad campaign being developed for Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The campaign, which is expected to debut September 4, just around the time Apple is expected to roll out new products and ads.

Correcting lens problems is a real issue, though, and Lightroom has a chromatic aberration correction I find very useful. It lets you fix some of the magenta, red, yellow, and blue fringes that show up in high-contrast areas, especially near the corners of images, and it also can alleviate the purple fringing overall. Aperture lacks this.

Something Aperture does better is vignetting, the darkened corners that once were a lens deficiency but now have caught on (altogether too widely in my opinion) as an effect to focus attention on the center of an image. Lightroom can fix lens vignetting or add it to a full image, but if you want to apply the effect to a cropped version of the photo, only Aperture offers that mechanism.

On to editing. For sophistication, I’d give the edge to Adobe, though to be fair I haven’t looked in detail at important aspects of Aperture, namely noise reduction and edge sharpening. I sometimes find those wanting in Lightroom.

But I think Aperture makes smart design decisions with a few interface options. Its movable panel isn’t very obtrusive, and now in 2.0 you can toggle it easily between editing, tagging, and file management modes. For me, editing and adding metadata such as titles, captions, and tags are much closer operations than the big divide between Lightroom’s develop and library modules would suggest, and I don’t like switching back and forth between editing and tagging.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

The good news is that there’s some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

Apple was first to enter the higher-end photo software market with Aperture in 2005, but the software languished at the same time Adobe Systems released and rapidly updated Photoshop Lightroom over 2007. But now Apple is back in the game with Aperture 2.0, which reproduces some features in Lightroom, boosts performance, and has a price tag $100 less than Lightroom’s $300.

One unknown is the plug-in future of both applications. Right now Lightroom has a software development kit for export options, and there’s work of unknown scope to come. Apple said it’s future SDK will permit editing plug-ins, too, which Adobe says is a difficult challenge. On the other hand, Adobe’s already got some editing plug-ins of a sort, with the ability to import custom settings for all manner of adjustment options.

Speaking of metadata, though, one option I like better with Lightroom is the ability to assign five colors to photos (but where’s the keyboard shortcut for purple?). The one- to five-star ratings that both packages offer is dandy, but I use colors to classify photos in other ways.

Apple Aperture
Adobe Lightroom

News.com Poll Which software is better: Lightroom or Aperture?
With Aperture 2.0, Apple is back in the game when it comes to editing and
cataloging raw images. But Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom works on Windows and
has been evolving faster. Which do you think is better?

(Credit:
Adobe Systems)

One major edge Lightroom has had is much earlier support of the raw image files of new cameras. Apple said it was held back by an overhaul of its raw-processing engine and that things should now go more swiftly, but it’ll take real work to win back the hearts of disgruntled Nikon D300 owners. In the meantime, Apple now can make use of Adobe Systems’ Digital Negative (DNG) format as an intermediate step to handle raw files Adobe supports and Apple doesn’t.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

It looks to me like Aperture has a better search interface, especially for complicated operations that combine multiple parameters such as keywords, date ranges, and the handy photos-I-actually-edited filter. I’ve sometimes gotten bogged down swimming through Lightroom search. And I love the smart folders feature, which automatically updates a folder that’s been set to watch for a particular attribute. For example, with Lightroom, I would love for the software to automatically add a photo with a specific recurring tag to a particular collection.

(Credit:
Apple)

I like Lightroom’s targeted adjustment tool (TAT), which lets you adjust the tone curve as well as color saturation and luminance by clicking on the relevant portion of the image directly and dragging the mouse up and down. And Adobe was smart to actually employ user testing to determine which colors are individually adjustable–orange has more psychological importance than most software, including Aperture, gives it. And I’m a big fan of tone-curve adjustments, though I sometimes wish Lightroom divided the curve up into five or six subranges instead of four.

Apple’s Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

View results

Looking beyond editing, my expertise thins out because I don’t do much in the way of exporting photos to Web galleries or printing at home. But I will note one Aperture advantage: Apple expanded its book-export options with 2.0, and Lightroom has no answer so far. That’s a drag for wedding photographers and amateurs (like me) who want to whip up a quick birthday present for the grandparents.

Let’s start with the interface. I like Lightroom’s pull-out panels–as many as four–that can be deployed or tucked away as needed. Most of the time I only have zero, one, or two showing.

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software to purchase, and not just because of the necessary investments of time and money. Unlike applications such as Photoshop, which can easily be substituted or used in conjunction with other software, Lightroom and Aperture are equipped to extend their tentacles to manage your library of images.

In essence, that means the software can be a gatekeeper to your data–not the original images, but the editing settings, titles, captions, tags, and organizational structure. For me, having a rich, searchable catalog is definitely worth it, but tread carefully before you commit, because it’ll be difficult to extricate yourself.

Of course, one of the biggest advantages Lightroom has is a Windows version, and that alone is likely to ensure its market dominance over Apple. And where Apple has a lot going on with iPods and iPhones, image editing is Adobe’s bread and butter. Should those externalities be factors, too? Weigh in.

Pros and cons
Both packages are solid overall, but there are some features I preferred with one or the other. Here’s how I see things stacking up–be warned, though, that I’ve used Lightroom for countless hours but by comparison only dabbled with Aperture 2.0.

Performance is better with Aperture 2.0 (it was faster on the dual-core iMac I played with than Aperture 1.5 was on a quad-core
Mac Pro I used for Aperture 1.5), and a particularly nice feature is the ability to work in a preview mode that employs only JPEGs–either the images built into the raw image or an Aperture-rendered version. You can’t edit with it, but it’s good enough at least for the first pass through a photo shoot to delete the duds and add tags and titles.

This flood of opposition comes one week before the FCC is expected to vote on a proposal that would open up unused white space wireless spectrum that is currently used to buffer broadcast channels for unlicensed use.

Technology companies, which say opening up white space spectrum could create new wireless broadband services, say the time for comments is over. And it’s time for the FCC to move the matter forward.

Several religious leaders including mega-church pastor Joel Osteen have also sent letters to the FCC asking for a delay as has the chairman of the MGM Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

Sensing the public relations circus that is mounting around the opposition to this issue, several technology luminaries gave voice to their cause this week. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Dell founder Michael Dell, and Microsoft founder and former CEO Bill Gates, have all sent letters and made calls to the FCC this week to encourage the agency to move forward with its planned vote.

Earlier this week, country western star Dolly Parton sent a letter to the FCC asking the agency to delay its vote to open up the unused spectrum for unlicensed use.

The report noted that geo-location technology, which uses a database to help devices identify and avoid spectrum bands known to already be in use, worked very well in avoiding interference. But the report’s results were less conclusive about the use of sensing technology that would help prevent interference between white space devices and wireless microphones.

After months of testing, the FCC’s engineering office released a report two weeks ago essentially giving the green light to the FCC to allow unlicensed users to access this spectrum.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has already crafted a proposal in support of opening up the spectrum. But opponents say that the public should be given more time to review and comment on the report. /p>

Google has even mounted an online petition campaign to show support from consumers on the issue. On Tuesday, the company noted that more than 20,000 consumers support its FreeTheAirwaves.com petition online. Nearly 2,000 of those petitions supposedly were submitted to the FCC since Thursday, which was when the company posted a call to action on its Official Google Blog.

“As someone who uses the white spaces and knows the value of them for the work that I and many of my friends around the country, I ask the FCC to recognize the entertainment industry’s valuable contribution to the cultural life,” Parton wrote in her letter. “I can unequivocally confirm that the importance of clear, consistent wireless microphone broadcasts simply cannot be overstated. This industry relies on wireless technology and is in jeopardy of being irreversibly devastated by the commission’s pending decision.”

Parton is just one of several performers who in the past week have joined the fight against opening up so-called white space spectrum. In addition to Parton, Neil Diamond, the Dixie Chicks, Clay Aiken, and Guns N’ Roses have also joined together in signing a letter to the FCC asking it to delay a vote on white spaces.

When Dolly Parton speaks people listen. At least that’s what opponents to an upcoming Federal Communications Commission vote on opening up “white space” spectrum hope.

The big question now is whether the FCC will be swayed by singers Parton and Diamond’s pleas for more time, or if the five-person commission will listen to Schmidt and Gates. At this point, I suppose it’s anyone’s guess. But my bet is still with Google and Microsoft.