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BitTorrent is all set to launch a legal P2P video download service, BitTorrent Entertainment Network, that will offer television shows for sale and movies for rental from some of the major Hollywood studios. The news has created quite a stir amongst the technorati. Mathew Ingram, a man not known to mince words, is convinced that the new service is destined to fail. It is hard to disagree with his assessment, though our reasons are slightly different that his. Here is a short list of challenges we see for BitTorrent’s new store:

Internet Service Providers dislike BitTorrent

Internet Service Providers can limit download speeds, and can block default BitTorrent ports, and force an inferior experience. There are other ways ISPs can mess with the Torrent traffic. Expect broadband providers to ask for their pound of flesh, I mean dollars from BitTorrent and their content partners.

BitTorrent’s not easy, especially for novices

BitTorrent is still pretty tough to use for mainstream, less sophisticated users, and can leave novices pretty confused. Little things can ruin the experience.

BitTorrent is launching a legal, paid media distribution system, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network. Essentially an online store that will compete other stories like iTunes, the new BitTorrent Network will have over 5,000 titles. TV shows will be $1.99 an episode, and users will be able to watch them as much as they want. Movies will be $2.99 or $3.99, and will time out 30 days after download, or 24 hours after the user begins playing them.

In other words, there will be heavy DRM on BitTorrent files. While the existing peer-to-peer BitTorrent file sharing network will be employed to distribute content, the B.E.N. files that it will be sending around won’t play free and clear. You’ll need to authorize them on your computer so you can play them. B.E.N. files use Windows Media DRM.

Since the BitTorrent Network relies on DRM-protected files, and doesn’t let users “own” movie downloads, it’s unlikely that it will put as big a dent in illegal file trading as the movie companies hope it will.

Windows Vista’s User Account Control (UAC), a system that Microsoft says makes the new operating system safer from attack, can be spoofed and shouldn’t be completely trusted, said a Symantec researcher.

Ollie Whitehouse, an architect at Symantec’s advanced threats research team, first used a blog entry to point out how a hacker could use a file included with Vista to disguise the UAC warning dialog in a colour associated with alerts generated by Windows itself.

The process to spoof a UAC dialog is roundabout, but doable, said Whitehouse. It would start with a user falling for any one of the current hacker tricks. “The most likely scenario is that a user gets compromised by malicious code, from a Trojan or a vulnerability in a third-party application like Office or a browser,” he said in an interview.

Next, the malicious code would drop a malformed .dll file onto a part of the hard drive that the user, who would presumably be running as a restricted Standard User, was allowed to write to. Because the user has rights to write to the disk, a UAC wouldn’t pop up at that point.

Source

After assessing damages based on each Windows PC sold since May 2003, a federal jury in San Diego ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology. Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman Mary Lou Ambrus praised the ruling: “We made strong arguments supporting our view, and we’re pleased with the court’s decision.” In a statement, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Tom Burt said that the verdict “is completely unsupported by the law or the facts. We will seek relief from the trial court, and if necessary, appeal.” The company also noted that roughly half of the damages are for overseas sales of Windows, which could be affected by a separate patent case currently before the Supreme Court. The case dates back to 2003, when Lucent first sued Dell and Gateway and Microsoft stepped into the legal fray. “This case is only one part of a larger dispute between Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent over intellectual property that began when Alcatel-Lucent took aggressive action against our customers and later against Microsoft. We will continue to defend our customers against unfounded claims,” Burt said.

The big news tonight is that Google has released a premier edition of its Google Apps package (previously known as Google Apps For Your Domain). I’ve been following the Web Office trend for a long time and, like everyone, have been particularly obsessed with Google’s gradual progression towards a Web Office suite. Tonight is another step towards fully challenging Microsoft Office, but there is still a ways to go. More on that in a minute, but first a quick overview of what’s in Google Apps Premier.

The new ’suite’ includes the existing Google Apps tools – Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page. New to the package is Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a significant edition considering that word processing and spreadsheets are mainstays of Microsoft Office. A comparison between the free edition and premier is here. Also new of note is APIs "to integrate with your existing infrastructure" and ability to integrate with 3rd party applications and services. ‘Best of breed’ web apps is another theme we obsess over here at Read/WriteWeb – so APIs and 3rd party features will go a long way towards making Google Office an attraction for external developers and startups. Google wants to be the center of the Web Office ecosystem, a very wise strategy.

ATI Catalyst 7.2 introduces a brand new version of the Catalyst Control Center for Windows XP. The new Catalyst Control Center delivers a number of significant enhancements:

* Significant performance gains; Catalyst Control Center start-up time has been substantially reduced, and overall responsiveness has improved.
* Reduced system resource usage
* New 3D preview which significantly improves the ability for users to understand the benefits of enabling the many Catalyst features of their ATI Radeon graphics accelerator
* Increased stability
* Native 32 and 64-bit support

Performance Improvements

Open GL performance improves for all ATI Radeon X1000 series products. Gains of up to 25% in Doom 3, 48% in Quake 4 and 21% in Prey can be seen on a variety of ATI Radeon X1000 cards. These performance gains are noticed under the Windows Vista operating system.

Download ATI Catalyst 7.2

Daylight Saving Time will now start on the second Sunday of March (the 11th) as opposed to the previous start time which would have been the first Sunday of April (the 1st). This will affect several Microsoft products:

Microsoft products affected by the DST legislation:

* Windows Client
* Windows Server
* Windows Mobile
* Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
* Microsoft Exchange Server
* Microsoft Office Outlook
* Microsoft Dynamics CRM
* Microsoft SQL Server Notification Services
* Microsoft Entourage

More details at

Hit the Back button and mute annoying kids with the new “A-Hole Button”

Bungie is allowing Halo 3 gamers to mute any player they find annoying by a simple press of the Back button.

The latest Bungie update included some actual useful information this time: “Anyone who’s played MP on Xbox Live knows the following is true: Teenagers, plus anonymity, plus microphone = idiot. The ‘A-Hole Button’ in Halo 3 lets you exact instant, silent vengeance. These kind of vocal buttmunches, as it turns out, are exactly as fun to play against as normal people, as long as you can’t hear them.”

Any fool can do it too, “you simply press a button (back button, for the moment anyway) and up comes the score list with everyone’s tag on it. The right stick lets you highlight the miscreant and you can then instantly mute them for the rest of the game. These morons continue smacktalking anyway because they can’t help themselves, but if you don’t have to listen to it, you can simply enjoy killing them over and over again, knowing that as their Ritalin wears off and their frustration builds, it’s less and less fun for them. Aaaah.

An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend). Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you’ll be able to use your web apps – like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc – in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google’s hands.

Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google. So it’s a very cozy relationship. We’ve discussed before how Firefox 3 as information broker suits Google very nicely, because the Mountain View company has a number of best of breed web apps – and if it’s not building them, it’s acquiring them (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc).

Rod Drury also pointed out in his post how this makes Firefox attractive as the browser platform of choice for SaaS providers (Software as a Service). For example salesforce.com.