The Guardian reveals that “BSkyB is to break into the digital music market with a new business, launched in conjunction with Universal Music, that aims to take on Apple’s iTunes in the UK. The new as-yet-unnamed venture, in which BSkyB is the majority shareholder and Universal is an equity partner, aims to launch by the end of the year. The service, which is likely to be Sky-branded, will offer a monthly subscription service as a counter to iTunes’ track-by-track purchasing.”
Internetnews.com writes that “[t]o shore up consumer confidence in shopping online, merchant-assurance company buySAFE launched today the Shopping Advisor tool, a browser plug-in that displays security ratings alongside e-commerce listings in a search results page. The new tool expands on the five-year-old buySAFE’s existing business line, through which it has been partnering with merchants to give their online stores a security and quality audit. Those that pass the review can place a buySAFE logo on their sites, a designation meant to give shoppers confidence that they are buying from a reliable merchant in a secure environment. Many of the online retailers that turn to buySAFE are smaller companies, who are particularly sensitive to the problem of consumer confidence.”
eWeek.com reports that “[d]etails of the DNS flaw uncovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky have found their way into the public arena. Kaminsky, who is the director of penetration testing for the security company IOActive, had planned on keeping the specifics of his discovery close to his vest until the Black Hat conference in August in Las Vegas. Now, the details of his findings appear to have leaked out by accident. The flaw, which can be exploited to launch DNS (Domain Name System) cache poisoning attacks against DNS servers and redirect Internet traffic, was discovered by Kaminsky several months ago and led a number of vendors to cooperate and coordinate the release of a patch two weeks ago. This is an important flaw that affects multiple products—basically any recursive DNS server. If a server is compromised, attackers could redirect traffic from that server to anywhere they wanted, say, to a fake "google.com" that was actually a malicious site.”
CNetNews.com points out that “Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman doesn’t typically bash Google in the press. While Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly ridiculed Viacom for filing a $1 billion copyright claim against Google and YouTube, Dauman is usually more reserved. But at a small press gathering Monday night in San Francisco, Dauman discussed some of the events that led up to the lawsuit and what he sees as wrong with Google’s handling of the entertainment industry. […] Dauman said he and his managers were relieved when Google purchased YouTube for $1.7 billion in October of the same year because up to that point, they had considered YouTube a ‘rogue company.’ He was referring, of course, to all the unauthorized clips from feature films and TV shows that appear on YouTube. Dauman said he was sure Viacom would eventually cut a deal with Google and was disappointed when the two companies failed to reach an agreement. But his disappointment turned into something else when clips from Comedy Central, MTV, and Paramount Pictures–all owned by Viacom–continued to accumulate on YouTube. ‘You can’t just take it from us,’ Dauman said. He added that he believed Google’s strategy all along was to defy copyright owners just as long as it took to ‘dominate the space.’”
InfoWorld today has an interesting article on “how to handle SOA vendor consolidation.”