D-Link Introduces Boxee Remote Control for PC and Mac

Boxee Remote by D-Link Gives Boxee Software Users Living Room Feel From Home Theater PCs

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. – July 6, 2011 – D-Link today announced the Boxee Remote Control by D-Link, giving Boxee users on PC and Mac the innovative remote previously only found with the Boxee Box by D-Link. The Boxee Remote Control features a sleek, two-sided design with a full QWERTY keypad that works seamlessly with Boxee software – the most intuitive way for Mac and PC users to bring TV shows, movies, music, and photos from the Internet to their TV.

"The Boxee Remote Control is ideal for home theater enthusiasts who have customized their home entertainment environment with a specialized PC or Mac media center, but still want the Boxee Box's unique viewing experience on their TV," said Daniel Kelley, D-Link's Associate Vice President of Consumer Marketing, North America. "We are thrilled to offer this complementary tool to consumers already using Boxee's software on their home computers – enabling people to more easily search, browse and type from the couch."

Featuring double-sided controls with a built-in QWERTY keyboard and simple browsing interface, the Boxee Remote Control enables easy access to the search and social capabilities of the Boxee software on PC or Mac. Allowing users to enjoy and share their favorite video-on-demand service through their social networks, the Boxee Remote Control lets anyone quickly and easily input URLs and account information for their favorite websites. In addition, unlike infrared TV remotes, the Boxee Remote Control uses RF signals via an included nano-sized USB adapter so consumers never have to worry about pointing the remote at the computer.

"The Boxee Remote Control was one of the most talked about advances with the Boxee Box by D-Link. We're excited to bring it to all of the Boxee users who've built customized home media centers and want to get even more out of their Boxee software," said Andrew Kippen, vice president of marketing, Boxee. "For Boxee software users, this remote makes all the difference between a PC experience and one that feels like watching TV. Consumers can literally kick back, relax and control their SmartTV experience from their couch."

The Boxee Remote Control can also be used as an additional remote for the Boxee Box by D-Link. The Boxee Box is the easiest way to bring TV shows, movies, music, and photos from the Internet to your TV in a simple, easy-to-use way – all that's needed is a TV with an HDMI input and an Internet connection. Unlike any other set-top device, the Boxee Box has support for a full web browser, full HD streaming from the Internet, support for all popular media file formats, and integrated social networking that delivers personal recommendations from Facebook and Twitter straight to the TV.

Availability and Pricing
The Boxee Remote by D-Link (DSM-22) is currently available at Amazon.com, TigerDirect.com, NewEgg.com, and Buy.com, with an MSRP of $49.99.

About D-Link
Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2011, D-Link is the global leader in connectivity for home, small business, mid- to large-sized enterprise environments, and service providers. An award-winning designer, developer, and manufacturer, D-Link implements and supports unified network solutions that integrate capabilities in switching, wireless, broadband, storage, IP Surveillance, and cloud-based network management. For more information visit www.dlink.com, www.dlink.ca or connect with D-Link on Facebook (www.facebook.com/dlink) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/dlink).

There is one thing on which we can all agree: Office 365 solidifies that one of the most established technology companies in the world has realized that the computing world is changing and that it must make that transition or die.

Perhaps the most telling statement about this transition, particularly of business IT moving from a locally deployed systems world to one hosted in the cloud, was an anecdote from Ballmer about a small business customer. The customer was pondering placing a jacuzzi in his old server room because Office 365 would allow him to dismantle many of the servers running his on-premise infrastructure.

Ballmer admitted he wasn’t sure if that customer was joking or not, but what he said next was no joke: with Office 365, one Microsoft customer was able to take 60 servers offline.

Microsoft executives drove home not only the benefits of Office 365 but also improvements made since the beta was released in April. According to Eron Kelly, senior director of online services at Microsoft, there have been some enhancements since the beta release, including scalability improvements and some changes to the UI.

“In the small business offering, there have been improvements in the way Web apps are profiled, things have popped up a bit more. These changes are based on feedback,” he said.

Kelly also waved off criticism that Microsoft is late to the cloud space. “For me personally it’s kind of funny when I hear that,” he said. “I started working in late 2004, early 2005 on cloud services. Late 2005, 2006 we put down the business plan for BPOS and now 365.”

He also addressed speculation that Office 365 could cannibalize sales of the popular Office desktop suite. “Over time we see [this] mixed shift – we’re excited about that–moving customers to the newest version more readily. We make more money, customers save more money, we don’t see this as cannibalization.”
Not everyone is so optimistic. Especially Microsoft partners. “What is the danger that clients will compare prices with their current hosting partner offers and then request Office365 services from their service provider as an agent of Microsoft, or worse still sign up directly with Microsoft?” blogger and cloud consultant Walter Adamson wrote in a blog post.

Mike Eden, president and CEO of Allarus Technology Management and a longtime Microsoft partner, also expressed his concerns. “Microsoft’s expectations that partners, particularly the SMB partners, are going to just jump and migrate all of their clients is very wishful thinking. The dollars aren’t there for the partner side,” he said.

Eden noted that a specific challenge is integrating line-of-business apps with the cloud and Office 365. “Without exception, every single one of our clients has a line-of-business app” and Office 365 creates “pieces in different places. It’s wonderful I can use my Office apps from home, but I can’t get to my accounting app—how does it interact with the cloud?”

Other vendors in the tech industy insist that Microsoft is too late to the cloud space. OfficeDrop’s Co-Founder and CEO Prasad Thammineni said, “Office 365 is too little, too late. iCloud’s APIs are better and more open. Contrast Apple’s combined phone and computer platform with Microsoft’s little-adopted Windows phone operating system and the choice to get the lion’s share of developer investment dollars is pretty clear.”

Microsoft has addressed some of its partners concerns. Tom Rizzo, senior director of Microsoft Online Services said “we’re very partner-friendly, we allow the reseller to release Office 365 licenses. Customers can come to us directly, or the partner can sign up for what we call a syndication deal. They are the front person and they become the partner on behalf of the customer. With the cloud model, partners have a more consistent touch with the customers. The great thing we have heard from partners is [the cloud shift] is not removing them, it’s placing them more in front of customers.”

Some partners are more in-line with Rizzo. “Overall, we see Office 365 as a big leap forward for Microsoft in the cloud services space,” said Tim Smith, vice president at Avanade. “They now have an offering that is marketing leading in terms of capabilities and has a variety of price points to compete in the marketplace.”

Office 365 is just off to the races and it will be interesting to see how it will be embraced and how its adoption will play out for partners.
As of today’s launch, Microsoft Office 365 is now available in 40 markets. Service plans run from $2 to $27 per user, per month. It includes Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online, and an external Web site in minutes, for $6 (U.S.) per user, per month.
Businesses can try it for free for 30 days by signing up at www.office365.com or from their local Microsoft partner.

Apparently so, as Context, a British security consultancy, released a security bulletin this week warning that the Web Graphics Library (WebGL) is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks and cross-domain image theft.

WebGL is a specification that allows Web browsers to use OpenGL–a 3-D, hardware-accelerated graphics API–with HTML5. WebGL is built into Firefox 4 and Chrome, and included with–but not enabled by default–in Safari. Many people see WebGL as a potential open source replacement for Flash, with some added benefits. Notably, WebGL is based on markup language, which means that unlike Flash, WebGL content can be indexed by search engines.

But WebGL can be compromised–causing graphics cards to lock up or execute arbitrary code–if it’s fed overly complex shading or rendering requests, or infinite-loop requests, according to Context. “It is easy to trivialize client denial of service attacks when the only affected component is the browser process–there are numerous ways of doing this already–however in this case the attack can completely prevent a user being able to access their computer, making it considerably more serious,” Context said.

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Results of a denial of service attack against WebGL include everything from making a computer unavailable to actually exploiting the machine. Context, however, declined to release related attack code.

Interestingly, the WebGL documentation itself contains a warning that the specification is subject to denial of service attacks: “It is possible to create, either intentionally or unintentionally, combinations of shaders and geometry that take an undesirably long time to render,” in effect shutting down the graphics card.

Likewise, the specification suggests a number of ways in which such attacks might be blocked, but punts solving the problem until later. “The supporting infrastructure at the OS and graphics API layer is expected to improve over time, which is why the exact nature of these safeguards is not specified,” it reads.

In response to Context’s security warning, the Khronos Group, which is the open standards consortium in charge of maintaining the WebGL specification, said that it’s already developed a WebGL extension called GL_ARB_robustness, “specifically designed to prevent denial of service and out-of-range memory access attacks from WebGL content.”

Khronos also is considering further measures, such as securing cross-domain images. “The ability to incorporate cross-domain images into WebGL scenes provides great utility to developers, but the WebGL working group is considering requiring cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) opt-in or other mechanisms to prevent abuse of this capability,” it said.

According to Context, the GL_ARB_robustness extension, which would be included by a graphics hardware manufacturer on their chips, “seems that it would at least mitigate the direct DoS condition where the whole machine becomes unresponsive or crashes.” But the extension would also require manufacturers to detect when machines lock up, and then react. That means that a graphics card could still lock up or at least interrupt users.

As a result, “we do not believe it addresses the wider issue,” according to a blog post from Context. “The resetting of the graphics card and driver should be seen as a crutch to OS stability when exceptional conditions occur and not as a mechanism to protect users from malicious code.”

Accordingly, Context recommends disabling WebGL until there’s a fix. The SANS Storm Center offers instructions for deactivating WebGL in both Firefox and Chrome.