Virtualization and iPhone jailbreaks

In all the hubbub surrounding the release of new Macs you may have missed the Windows 7 release. Well, if you're one of those people who needs Windows for work but prefers to use a Mac, maybe you do. Yeah, yeah, we're Mac users and so who cares?

In order to use Windows on your Mac you require either Apple's Boot Camp or some variety of virtualization application. The major players in this market-VMWare and Parallels-have released new versions of their applications and Rob's spent time with both. And it's just those applications that are the focus of my interview with senior editor Rob Griffiths. Tune it to hear his opinions. Apple has closed a security hole in a recent iPhone update and that's forced jailbreakers to seek other means of entry. After a word from Macworld Superguides, senior contributor, Ben Long, and I discuss the state of iPhone jailbreaking.

Ben and I talk about whether jailbreaking is safe and still worth the bother. Or you can point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader at: http://rss.macworld.com/macworld/weblogs/mwpodcast/ You can find previous episodes of our audio podcasts at Macworld's podcasting page. Download Episode #174 AAC version (21.3 MB, 43 minutes) MP3 version (20.4 MB, 43 minutes) To subscribe to the Macworld Podcast via iTunes 4.9 or later, simply click here. Got any feedback on this podcast? You can also leave us a message at 415/520-9761 if you'd like to have your comments included in a future podcast.

Send me an e-mail or an audio comments in the form of an AAC or MP3 file. Show Notes I begin the episode with a reading of my Eight Steps to Internet Unpopularity. Rob's taken a look at both Parallels Desktop 5 and VMWare Fusion 3. He also reviewed Sun's VirtualBox 2.1.4 last spring. If you're a troll, nitpicker, endless promoter, grudge holder, or simply clueless, you'll want to give it a listen. We touched on Boot Camp, but failed to mention that, according to Apple, Snow Leopard isn't yet ready to tackle Windows 7. During my talk with Ben I mentioned that the App Store has 100,000 apps. I also plugged Ben's book, Complete Digital Photography for good reason.

I wasn't making that up. It's outstanding. This episode is sponsored by Macworld Superguides. You'll absolutely be a better shooter after reading it. Follow this link for a discount on the just-released Total Snow Leopard Superguide.

Is Facebook Prepping a New Homepage?

New tweaks to the Facebook homepage have been spotted in the wild that may make it easier to see what's going on within your network. Screenshots of the new homepage first appeared on The Next Web, and Inside Facebook. New features include improved filters for the newsfeed, a revised right-hand column and a new Publisher box reminiscent of Facebook Lite.

A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the social network is currently testing a new homepage designs. Facebook Publisher The most obvious change of the proposed redesign is the disappearance of the "Publisher" box where you post status updates, Web links, photos, videos and events. Still, without explicit confirmation the new features should be considered rumor. Instead, you would simply have an "Update Status" button on the far right side of the news feed. News Feed Filter Where the Publisher typically sits, Facebook has placed a filter for your News Feed called 'View Top News.' The new filter looks like it functions similarly to the 'Comments' link now sitting in the left-hand column of your Facebook homepage. There are no screen shots showing how this button works or if it contains the same functionality as the Publisher, but I would assume it would do the same job.

Next to the top news filters is a title that looks like it alternates between headlines like 'Evening News' and 'Recent Stories' depending on the time of day you're viewing it. Although the new filter is just a minor tweak, this may be the first visible sign of FriendFeed-like features on Facebook. The central placement of the top news filter may make it a more popular feature by helping users keep tabs on any Facebook activity they may have missed. As Mashable points out, the new filter is similar to FriendFeed's Best of Day feature. This brings the 'Events' feature closer to the top of the page making it easier to see upcoming birthdays, parties and other events within your network.

Right-Hand Column Another interesting tweak is the removal of the 'Highlights' section in the right hand column. This is a welcome change since it moves more useful information to a place where you might actually see it. Facebook's Dark Past with Redesigns Until Facebook makes an announcement about new features, it's hard to know what new redesigns users will see. It's interesting to note that this tweak would make the Facebook home page closer to the failed redesign that Facebook users revolted against back in March. It should also be noted that the rumored tweaks look similar to features found in Facebook Lite, which makes me wonder if this just isn't a revision of that format. When Facebook caved to its user base earlier this year over a significant homepage redesign, I thought the social network made a huge mistake.

Of course, even if Facebook rolls out some new homepage features, there's no guarantee they'll stick around. I, for one, actually like the failed redesign, and the hodgepodge revision we ended up with had some serious flaws, like the poor placement of the 'Events' section. If users revolt once more, which I'm sure they will, Facebook should grow a pair and stick to its redesign plans.

Judge says TD Ameritrade's proposed security fixes not enough

A federal judge's rejection of a proposed settlement by TD Ameritrade Inc. in a data breach lawsuit marks the second time in recent months that a court has weighed in on what it considers to be basic security standards for protecting data. In September 2007, Ameritrade announced that the names, addresses, phone numbers and trading information of potentially all of its more than 6 million retail and institutional customers at that time had been compromised by an intrusion into one of its databases. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco yesterday denied final approval of a settlement that had been proposed by TD Ameritrade in May to settle claims stemming from a 2007 breach that exposed more than 6 million customer records . In arriving at his decision, Walker said the court didn't find the proposed settlement to be "fair, reasonable or adequate." Rather than benefit those directly affected by the breach, Ameritrade's proposed settlement is designed largely to benefit the company, Walker wrote in his 13-page ruling. The stolen information was later used to spam its customers.

The company also offered to retain the services of an analytics form to find out whether any of the data that had been compromised in the breach had been used for identity theft purposes. As part of an effort to settle claims arising from that incident, Ameritrade this May said it would retain an independent security expert to conduct penetration tests of its networks to look for vulnerabilities. The company also said it would give affected customers a one-year subscription for antivirus and antispam software. He described the additional security measures that Ameritrade proposed in the settlement as "routine practices" that any reputable company should be taking anyway. It was these offers that the judge dismissed as too meager.

Penetration tests provide a reliable way for companies to detect the sort of security weaknesses that led to the Ameritrade breach, Walker said. The two "very temporary fixes do not convince the court that the company has corrected or will address the security of client data in any serious way, let alone provide discernable benefits," he noted. But "as a large company that deals in sensitive personal information, penetration and data breach tests should be routine practices of TD Ameritrade's department that handles information security," he wrote. A TD Ameritrade spokeswoman said the company would provide its response to the judge's ruling soon. In August, the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois, denied a request by Citizens Financial Bank to dismiss a negligence claim brought against it by a couple. The case is the latest to illustrate a growing willingness by courts around the country to consider claims of negligence and breach of contract brought by individuals against companies for failing to protect sensitive data.

The two had claimed that Citizens' failure to implement two-factor user-authentication measures had resulted in the theft of more than $26,000 from their home equity line of credit. Such rulings are relatively rare in consumer lawsuits against companies that suffer data breaches involving the potential compromise of credit card data and personal information. The judge hearing the case allowed the claim to move forward, saying there was a reasonable basis to show that the bank had not moved quickly enough to implement stronger user authentication measures as it should have. Until recently, courts have tended to reject such lawsuits mainly on the grounds that consumers suffer little financial harm from such breaches. A case before the Maine Supreme Court is testing whether consumers can seek restitution from merchants for the time and effort involved in changing payment cards and bank accounts after a data breach. They have also held that consumers can't seek damages for any potential injury that could stem from any future ID theft that might result from such breaches.

Budget cuts could increase server failures, warns Gartner

ORLANDO - Despite an improving economy , companies aren't moving quickly replace servers, PCs and printers, which will likely cause an increase in failure rates over the next two years, according to Gartner Inc. He added that the number of delayed replacements should reach 10% of all servers by 2010. As a result, Sondergaard said, IT operations "are going to have to start to plan for the impact of increased equipment failure rates." Gartner's hardware forecast was the starkest indication of the cumulative impact of IT budget cutbacks. In round numbers, the scheduled replacement of some three million servers worldwide, or about 3% of all servers, has been delayed, Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global head of research, said today at the research firm's Symposium/ITxpo 2009 conference here. For example, recent outages at some service providers provide at least the appearance of growing equipment problems. in some recent service provider outages.

Sondergaard said that enterprise IT spending worldwide is expected to decline by about 6.8% this year, and won't return to 2008 levels until 2012. "The IT market is exiting its worst year ever," he added. Budget cuts are expected to continue. Gartner estimates that 2009 worldwide enterprise IT spending will total some $2.3 trillion compared to $2.5 trillion in 2008. Randy George, information services manager, at the Osceola County Schools in Florida, said the time for replacing the department's main computer system is fast approaching. The IBM server is four years old, and five years is an ideal replacement point, said George. George has been meeting a vendor about upgrading the IBM System I, "but whether we will have the funds for it is questionable," he said. It's not hardware reliability that's a concern, but its ability to keep up with growing demands.

The school system has 53,000 students and some 7,000 employees, he added. "There have been a couple of times where we have peaked its capacity," said George. The school district has been adding more applications to the System I while the demands on the hardware also grow. If system capacity isn't increased, then "the users may just have to live with a little less service than what they are use to." Gene Hall, Gartner CEO, said that while IT managers are planning for growth, "they don't expect to see everything back to normal in 2010," he said.

Privacy researcher pans Netflix’s contest sequel

Winners of the Netflix Prize for boosting Netflix's movie recommendation engine barely had a chance to start spending their $1 million prize before controversy erupted over a second contest. Ohm writes that Netflix would be taking too big a risk with customer privacy given the sort of demographic and behavioral data it would need to share with contest participants: "Netflix should cancel this new, irresponsible contest, which it has dubbed Netflix Prize 2. Researchers have known for more than a decade that gender plus ZIP code plus birthdate uniquely identifies a significant percentage of Americans (87% according to Latanya Sweeney's famous study.) True, Netflix plans to release age not birthdate, but simple arithmetic shows that for many people in the country, gender plus ZIP code plus age will narrow their private movie preferences down to at most a few hundred people. Privacy researcher Paul Ohm, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, posted a recommendation of his own regarding the Netflix Prize 2 on the blog Freedom to Tinker: He called on Netflix to nix the project.

Netflix needs to understand the concept of 'information entropy': even if it is not revealing information tied to a single person, it is revealing information tied to so few that we should consider this a privacy breach." Slideshow: Networkiest movies of all-time  Meanwhile, AT&T Labs-Research, Yahoo Research and other members of the Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos team are celebrating their win in the initial 3-year-long Netflix Prize contest. Netflix shared data with researchers for that contest too, and despite its efforts to do so without compromising customer privacy, researchers did find that piecing together identities from something as seemingly innocuous as movie preferences wasn't as difficult as first thought. They earned $1 million in beating out 40,000 other teams from 186 countries to improve upon Netflix's Cinematch system for predicting which movies customers will like or dislike. Ohm argues that disclosing data such as gender, ZIP codes and ages makes people much too easy to identify. Follow Bob Brown on Twitter Netflix says in its blog that Netflix Prize 2 "will focus more on helping customers early in their experience with Netflix, drawing on many more sources of data to try to find just the right movies." For more on network research, follow our AlphaDoggs blog.

Miley Cyrus Quits Twitter, World Ends

In what's certain to become the most devastating news your 8-year-old daughter has heard in her short life, Miley Cyrus has ... gasp! ... quit Twitter. Or something. Details on the pop star's last-minute ditch are scarce, but celebrity blogs are scrambling to fill in the blanks, seating most of the blame with Cyrus' male love interest. Cyrus was considered prolific and "interesting" among the Twitter crowd, and heartbroken fans - in between bouts of hysterical sobbing and hair-tugging desperation - have created a very special tag: #mileycomeback.

Like many tweets, Kutcher's contributions to the hiss of Internet white noise barely provoke a quasi-interested "huh." Is that supposed to be funny? Not surprisingly, it's trending well today on Twitter, and is, quite possibly, the most exciting news of 2009. To add to the death knell, here are five other loudmouthed celebrities who should consider taking a page from Cyrus' book: Ashton Kutcher Kutcher, the world's most popular Twitter dude, has nothing to say. Is he supposed to be funny? Glenn Beck Picking Beck out of a lineup betrays my political sensibilities, I fear, but seriously, this guy is a ridiculous blowhard. Hard to tell.

Never before in my life have I craved the warm embrace of deafness, but as soon as Beck opens his mouth or puts fingers to keyboard, I most certainly do. The Fans of Twilight feed is a bunch of gushing teenybops clinging to waifs of plot and characterization as though Stephenie Meyer had rewritten the Bible replete with more emo-posturing and vampire sex. Fans of Twilight Lord, I can't wait until this movie series is over. A brief glimpse of this feed's obsessive "insight" into the Twilight series is enough to make you slap on some eyeliner and hate your tyrannical father. Cuban, one of PC World's honorary blowhards, blabs with regularity about aspects of fancy livin' you'll never touch.

Mark Cuban Rich people are awesome, especially when they pontificate about how rich they are. Money, sports, tech, all communicated in hyper-masculine bravado, all pretty much extraneous. This guy is annoying. Ryan Seacrest Is there really anything else to add? And everywhere.

I was going to add professional train wreck Courtney Love to the list, but apparently her Twitter account has been shut down. It's awful. Perhaps it has something to do with her libelous, nearly indecipherable rants. First, there are psychotics out there, hell-bent on destroying reputations with misbegotten words. Besides the love of a hot young man, there are multiple reasons why a celebrity would quit using a social networking service like Twitter.

That is why Twitter introduced Verified Accounts - so you know the brainless celeb you're reading is actually, wow, that dumb, and not some jerk pretending to wear famous pants. There are only so many 140-character blasts of nothing one can endure before the walls of one's cranium begin to bleed ennui. Then there exists the risk of overexposure and jumping the shark. Whatever Cyrus' reasoning may be, Twitter will certainly never be the same again, and by "never" I mean we'll forget about this in 20 or so minutes.

iStockphoto guarantees its collection

Starting today, iStockphoto, the micropayment royalty-free image, video, and audio provider, will legally guarantee its entire collection from copyright, moral right, trademark, intellectual property, and rights of privacy disputes for up to $10,000. The new iStock Legal Guarantee, delivered at no cost to customers, covers the company's entire 5 million-plus collection. Recently however, Vivozoom, another microstock company, took a similar action to guarantee its collection. Additional coverage for an Extended Legal Guarantee totaling $250,000 is available for the purchase of 100 iStock credits. "Our first line of defense has always been-and continues to be-our rigorous inspection process," said Kelly Thompson, chief operating officer of iStockphoto. "The Legal Guarantee is simply an added layer of protection for our customers, many of whom are using microstock more than ever before." Although common for traditional stock houses, such legal guarantees have not been standard in microstock because of the low prices.

iStock says that files purchased and used in accordance with its license will not breach any trademark, copyright, or other intellectual property rights or rights of privacy. And, if a customer does get a claim, iStock will cover the customer's legal costs and direct damages up to a combined total of $10,000. iStock customers can increase their coverage for legal fees and direct damages up to a combined total of $250,000 by purchasing the Extended Legal Guarantee via the iStock credits (which costs between $95 and $138). iStock expects that this program will be popular with a very small percentage of sophisticated media buyers with very specific needs, and considers it to be a value-added service to customers rather than a major source of revenue.