Comeuppance from Broadcom

The US International Trade Commission has barred the import of new cell phones that use chips made Qualcomm, following a legal determination they infringe a patent held by competitor Broadcom.…

(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will release six sets of security patches next Tuesday, four of which will fix critical flaws in the Windows operating system.

The software will be released as part of Microsoft's regular monthly security release, known informally as "Patch Tuesday." Microsoft is also planning less critical updates for Visio and Windows Vista, the company said in a note, published Thursday.

The critical Windows updates fix flaws in Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and other core components of the operating system, Microsoft said.

Microsoft considers an update critical when the flaw could be used by an attacker to remotely run unauthorized software on the victim's machine, theoretically leading to the propagation of an Internet worm.

This month, Microsoft has revealed a few more details on the upcoming patches than it has in the past. That's part of a new plan to help IT administrators better prepare for Patch Tuesday by letting them know exactly what versions of Microsoft's products will be affected by the updates.

Microsoft is slightly ahead of its 2006 patch rate. By June of 2006, the company had released 32 security updates. With these six updates, the June 2006 tally will be 35.

Last month, Microsoft released seven groups of patches on Patch Tuesday.

This story was updated on June 7, 2007

Akamai Technologies delivers 15-20% of all web traffic each day, which puts them in a unique position to monitor the status of the global web. This week, they released their previously customers-only web performance visualization tools to the public. The set of six flash-based visualizations let users identify how data is moving across the Internet in real-time.

The flagship app is the Real-time Web Monitor, which shows the countries (or Canadian provinces or American states) that are experiencing the most traffic load. As I write this, California and the United Kingdom are together accounting for 15.5% of global data requests. The app also lets you view the ten worst performing cities (Hong Kong and Tokyo are really hurting right now), and the area experiencing the most outside attacks on the network. (Venezuela is not a safe place to be a server this afternoon.)

The Visualizing Akamai tool shows the mind boggling number of visitors per minute make up just the 20% of the world's Internet traffic that the company handles. The Network Performance Comparison appears to be just a marketing tool to show how much better Akamai's network is (fun to play with, but not as useful as the others, in my opinion).

In addition to the three web performance visualizations, Akamai offers three performance indexes: News, Retail, and Music. They show traffic trends in different market sectors. For example, you can see the peak shopping times in different parts of the world. The retail graph also shows spikes around certain major shopping times of the year (there is a spike shortly before Mother's Day on the current five-month graph -- I'd expect a big spike later in the year right after Thanksgiving in the US: the official start to the Christmas shopping season here).

Above is a picture of the music index, but my favorite is the news usage visualization. The news index is neat because it has a list of the news events that caused the greatest spikes in traffic to news sites since Akamai started tracking in 2005. Interestingly, they're mostly all sports related. Taking the top spot? Ghana eliminates the US in the World Cup last June. Second and third is the first day coverage of the US college basketball playoffs for the past two years. The first non-sports news is the death of Anna Nicole Smith last February, which checks in at number four, and just 6 of the top 15 news-related traffic spikes are non-sports items.

Akamai also offers desktop widgets for its three net usage indexes. The widgets use Yahoo! Widget Engine for Windows and OS X's dashboard widgets for Mac.

Akamai's data visualization tools are attractive and addictive and a fun way to keep tabs on what's going on across the global net -- trafficwise, anyway. (Other net traffic visualizations include the Internet Health Report and the Internet Traffic Report.)

Filed under: Windows Mobile, Microsoft

• Enhanced support for Windows Mobile 6
• File synchronization option added for Smartphones (you could already synchronize files with touchscreen devices)
• Configure Windows Mobile 6 devices to open documents protected with Information Rights Management
• Synchronize HTML-formatted mail
• Acquire certificates through the PC when your mobile device is connected