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Over the last year we've talked a lot about Apple's AirPlay wireless streaming feature, but haven't said much -- if anything at all -- about the Windows version of AirPlay, Play To.

That's because until now, no company has billed its wireless speaker as a Windows wireless speaker, which is what Aperion Audio is doing with its upcoming $500 Aris Connected Speaker for Windows. Aperion says its giving Microsoft employees a sneak preview of the speaker today and will ship the Aris sometime in mid-June.

Aperion says you simply place the speaker where you want it, … Read more

A Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives is accusing Apple of unreasonably rejecting an iPhone attack app that accused his Democratic rival of voting to raise taxes and cut spending on Medicare.

Ari David, who's vying for the June 8 Republican nomination in the district that includes West Hollywood, says Apple claimed that his free iPhone app was "defamatory." The app targeted incumbent Henry Waxman's voting record using pointed phrases like "Soviet-style regulation."

Under the App Store policy, "it's fine as long as you show pictures of yourself with … Read more

Onetime Microsoft executive Blake Irving will take on the role of Yahoo's chief product officer, his new company said Monday.

Irving, who will start May 17 and report directly to CEO Carol Bartz, is replacing Ari Balogh, who has been chief technology officer and executive vice president of products for the past two years. According to Yahoo, Balogh is leaving his position for personal reasons but will stay until June 3 to help with the transition. Irving most recently was teaching at Pepperdine University's business school.

Yahoo has been wooing Irving to join the company. In his new … Read more

I am sure honest Hollywood agents do exist. It's just that they don't seem to employ the finest PR firms to proselytize their honesty.

This might explain why Oisin Hanrahan, the Irish creator of an iPhone app called SuperAgent, decided that the main character in his game might be a few scruples short of Mother Teresa.

SuperAgent seems to have been well received, a reception that might have led to its being noticed by, well, Hollywood super agents.

According to the Independent, one super agent may have enjoyed a particular interest in this app. His name is Ari … Read more

Ari Juels' fascination with numbers is the stuff of fiction, literally.

The chief scientist and director of RSA Laboratories recently completed a novel in which the protagonist is hired by the U.S. government to counter the efforts of Pythagoreans, a Greek group that believed in the supremacy of numbers--subscribing to the notion that by mastering numbers, one could understand and control the forces of the universe.

That concept, he told ZDNet Asia during a recent visit to Singapore, had been "a little silly" until cryptography developed to a stage where "mastery of certain mathematical problems could in principle lead to considerable power over computing resources and consequently over our lives."

The book, which will be launched at the RSA Conference 2009 in San Francisco in April, was in essence, the coming together of two of Juels' interests--computer security and classical literature. He graduated from Amherst College in 1991 with degrees in Latin Literature and Mathematics.

Thirty-eight-year-old Juels, who joined RSA in 1996, shed some light on recent RFID (radio frequency identification) issues in e-passports, identity documents, and transport-related systems, as well as how to balance security and privacy.

Q: What are you currently working on? Juels: With the acquisition of RSA by EMC, we've turned our attention to some of the special security problems that storage systems present. In particular, we've looked at...the ability of a client to verify that a file that is stored on remote servers is still there--intact. We've been able to develop a protocol which accomplishes the seemingly paradoxical property of enabling a client to verify that a file is completely intact--that every bit is there, not a single bit has been changed--without downloading the file. In fact, the archiving service can send a very short proof--some tens of bytes--and that's enough for the client to establish that the file is completely retrievable. That's been a major area of research for us.

Is there a name for this concept? Juels: There've been several names. I guess the most recent is an acronym called HAIL, for High Availability and Integrity Layer.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--On the second day of the Black Hat security conference, a trio of journalists turned on other journalists within the press room.

This was my ninth Black Hat in nine years, and I have lived in dread year after year that such a headline would affect me. On Thursday, CNET News was named as one of the two organizations "hacked," but I disagree that any such hack occurred.

Just before noon on Thursday, a trio of reporters from Global Security Mag sat in one of the two press rooms at Black Hat. Both rooms have a wired … Read more

LAS VEGAS--How confident are you when using your laptop at a conference?

For years, a group called Wall of Sheep has been showing attendees of Defcon when their network connections are insecure. The Wall of Sheep board has been a fixture at Defcon, Black Hat's sister conference set to begin tomorrow at the Riviera Hotel and Casino. The board displays the names (with some identifying information obscured) of those connecting to the Internet in insecure ways. The idea is both meant to shame and educate users on best practices.

"If the 'Best of the Best' in security can … Read more

For the last week, I've written that Dan Kaminsky undertook unprecedented action in coordinating a variety of vendors in secret over the last six months. Ari Takanen, co-founder and chief technology officer of Codenomicon, wrote to challenge that notion.

In an e-mail on Thursday, Takanen cited his work on a Simple Network Management Protocol version 1 (SNMPv1) flaw back in 2002 as an example. Like Domain Name System, SNMP is a fundamental element of the Internet.

I wrote: "There have been other multiparty patch releases, but never has there been one on such a massive scale. It took … Read more

As part of its latest reorganization, Yahoo created a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which is chartered with developing computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness, according to the press release. It could also lead to Yahoo getting into the business of selling pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure to developers and companies.

Yahoo has been building massive scale infrastructure (now known as cloud computing) for years, but the intent of the new organization is to streamline development by bringing the various people and teams working on the core technologies into a single group, according to Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh, who … Read more