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Amazon Web Services seems to have reached the point at which it has so many customers it can go down the well-worn road of milking them for more cash by gathering them in one place providing days of valuable hands-on training and engagement-deepening meatspace meet-ups, in the form of a new event called AWSre:invent.

The three-day shindig will take place in the fin de siècle tasteful, convention-friendly, environs of Las Vegas’ Venetian hotel and will feature the usual array of technical sessions, corporate spruiking keynote sessions and networking.

The web services giant is also promising sponsorship opportunities that will enable one to reach “influential developers, IT managers, and executive decision makers.” We suspect the sponsors will help to pay for the “Block Party” on the event’s second night, November 28th.

AWS-centric startups will have the chance to “Launch … live in front of press, analysts, VCs and the entire AWS community in our start-up launch theatre.”

Ticket prices and the agenda are yet to be decided, with the latter open to suggestions from anyone who cares to submit an idea by the end of May. ®

Mozilla and Google are crying foul over Microsoft restrictions blocking rivals from Windows 8 on ARM, due later this year.

Firefox-shop Mozilla has branded Microsoft’s restrictions a return to the digital dark ages “where users and developers didn’t have browser choices”.

Harvey Anderson, Mozilla general counsel, accused Microsoft of restricting user choice, reducing competition and chilling innovation by only allowing Internet Explorer to run on Windows RT – unveiled last month by Microsoft as the new name for Windows on ARM (WOA). He said:

Only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security to which users have grown accustomed. Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can’t do the same.

Mozilla Firefox director Asa Dotzler has weighed in with the technical argument:

On ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won’t give to other browsers so there’s no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance.

Anderson and Dotzler said this violated a 2006 statement of principles (PDF) by Microsoft on choice, opportunity and interoperability, and are calling on Microsoft to live up to these principles.

Chrome-maker Google has thrown its weight behind Mozilla. In a statement to The Reg, a spokesperson said the search giant shared Mozilla’s concerns about Windows 8′s restrictions of user choice and competition.

Google’s spokesperson said:

We’ve always welcomed innovation in the browser space across all platforms and strongly believe that having great competitors makes us all work harder. In the end, consumers and developers benefit the most from robust competition.

Microsoft’s decision to lock down Win RT is not news: introduced as WOA in February, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky said WOA would only support a small number of existing Microsoft apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote with Internet Explorer 10. x86 apps would not run on WOA. WOA would be populated with apps via the Windows Store.

The reason for this was simple and came down to chipset and interface: ARM doesn’t support native x86 apps while Windows 8 introduces the tiled and touch-based Metro UI.

For this reason, Microsoft has three development scenarios for Windows 8: Classic – Windows 7-style 32-bit APIs that won’t work with Metro; Metro that lives in a sandboxed environment; and “Metro-style enabled” desktop apps that straddle Classic and Metro and call both sets of APIs.

Back in March, Mozilla said it would build a version of Firefox in this third category, with the same system-level parity as IE10, built using traditional Win32 calls and the Windows Runtime WinRT framework that Microsoft has devised for building Windows 8 Metro apps.

At the time Dotzler said: “We should be able to build a single product, that when installed into the Classic environment via traditional means – a download from www.mozilla.org – will be able to become both the default browser in the Classic environment and in the new Metro environment.”

At the same time we at The Reg said while this sounded fine in theory, the two big questions would be whether Microsoft would actually permit rivals’ browsers to install as the default on Windows 8 and whether Mozilla’s work could be transferred to ARM.

Between then and now an answer has been delivered, and it seems this was the catalyst for Mozilla’s outburst. In a report here, Anderson says senior Microsoft lawyer David Heiner told him other browsers would not be allowed on ARM. Whether this is a technical or political choice is unclear, although Anderson’s implication is there are no technical hurdles.

Dotzler, who had been upbeat in March, now says:

Microsoft has made it clear that the third category won’t exist on Windows for ARM (unless you’re Microsoft) and that neither will the first category (unless you’re Microsoft.) That means that IE on ARM has access to win32 APIs – even when it’s running in Metro mode, but no other Metro browser has that same access. Without that access, no other browser has a prayer of being competitive with IE.

Microsoft supporters might dismiss Mozilla and Google. Certainly, Mozilla has a better track record on openness than Google when it comes to devices and the web; apps for Android can only be served from Google’s marketplace. One line of defence will be that Microsoft is being given a hard time while others, mainly Apple, are getting a free pass: Apple also only allows one native browser on its platform for tablets and phones: its own, Safari.

Mozilla, however, feels frustrated because it sees a potential market slipping away by not getting Firefox on Windows RT. ARM dominates smartphones and while it’s tiny in tablets today, it has big growth plans. This is the market Mozilla fears losing out on should it expand.

That said, Windows RT is unproven and little known commodity, so there’s no telling how successful it will actually be beyond Microsoft’s own infectious predictions – that Windows on ARM is its riskiest bet and biggest change in 30 years. We don’t know what devices will run Windows RT – although we imagine it will be ereaders; how many types of device there will be; or how they will stand up to the competition from Apple or Amazon.

Microsoft was unable to comment at the time of going to press.®

UK PC sales into the channel grew slightly in Q1, indicating that distributors have finally shifted the ageing inventory lingering from early 2011.

More than three million units were shipped in the first three months of 2012, up 2.4 per cent on the same period a year ago, according to final numbers from bean counter Gartner.

“After a decline of 16 per cent in 2011, the UK PC market showed stability in terms of shipment volume,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner.

Thanks to an interest in all-in-one systems, desktop sales into distribution were up 7.2 per cent, but mobile PC shipments fell 0.3 per cent.

The consumer sector returned to unit growth, albeit marginal, up 1.6 per cent in the quarter, and sales of desktops and notebooks to the professional market edged up 3.2 per cent.

However, Atwal said: “It remains to be seen if this is a sign of real demand or just inventory refreshment.”

Market goliath HP stretched its lead in the UK despite growing sales by just 1.6 per cent and nudging its market share up by 0.1 per cent to 21.4 per cent.

This is because second-placed Dell saw its shipments slide 7.7 per cent as did third-placed Acer with sales dropping 35 per cent and market share diving from 15.3 per cent a year ago to 9.7 per cent.

The only two vendors to post meaningful growth in the quarter were Toshiba, up 26.7 per cent and behind it in fifth, Lenovo, which posted a 59.5 per cent climb in shipments.

“Lenovo was the major winner,” said Atwal, “expansion of its Medion offerings enabled it to increase its share in the consumer PC market.”

The other major European PC markets had mixed fortunes with France declining 3.9 per cent to 2.7 million units and Germany up 7.1 per cent to 3.27 million units. ®

A pressure group campaigning for high-quality broadcasting has warned that 4G phone networks could knock out TV in one in ten UK homes – and by the time anyone notices it will be too late to fix.

The Voice of the Listener & Viewer, a membership and donation-funded lobbying body, wants guarantees that once next-gen mobile broadband is eventually rolled out, everyone will still be able to receive Freeview without having to spend money on special filters.

The group, otherwise known as VLV, had previously responded to Ofcom’s consultation on the best way to stop 4G deployments at 800MHz from knocking out neighbouring telly transmissions. Not everyone agrees with VLV, however.

A couple of million households – roughly 10 per cent of the UK total – could receive degraded Freeview signals once the government gets around to flogging off an adjacent frequency band, left empty by the shift from analogue to digital television, to mobile operators.

The Ministry of Fun has allocated £180m from the 800MHz auction proceeds to pay for mitigation, but few of those responding to Ofcom’s consultation on dispersing the cash seem to think that’s enough and even fewer agree on the methodology.

Most interference can be addressed by putting a filter on the aerial wire; the problem is that the filter has to be on the aerial side of any installed booster. No one knows how many boosters are in use, but lots of them are in the loft beside the aerial which makes fitting more difficult than it might initially appear, especially if viewers aren’t aware they even have a booster.

Ofcom, the communications regulator, hatched a plan to set up new company MitCo, which would send out filters with printed installation instructions. Anyone having problems could then ask for a fitter, with £20m ring fenced for the over-75s. If that didn’t work then MitCo could install equipment to receive FreeSat or similar satellite services, which work on very different frequencies. But respondents to the consultation have been quick to point out the problems with this approach.
Multiple TVs means multiple headaches

The primary issue is that the majority of UK homes have more than one TV. Only 40 per cent are single-set houses, according to the Communications Consumer Panel, and that means a lot of people are going to have to shell out for their own filters. Freeview – the service jointly run by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, BSkyB and transmitter biz Arqiva – reckons this isn’t fair:

Consumers have bought into Freeview with enthusiasm and in good faith and through the process of switchover have made significant investment in Freeview equipment … however, continuity of service is far from guaranteed. Many homes will be left with insufficient support to address interference problems and some will lose access to Freeview altogether.

Arqiva, which runs most of the UK’s transmitter sites for cellular networks and broadcast TV, is equally damning of the proposals:

There is a real risk that either (a) filters will be incorrectly installed and therefore ineffective or (b) there is a significant consumer cost which could result in platform-switching behaviour. To avoid both of these real risks, Arqiva believes that MitCo should be accountable for the installation costs of filter in these cases.

Mobile operator Everything Everywhere has a slightly different take, pointing out that it could mitigate at the network level and thus significantly reduce the impact of 4G, but only if someone’s gonna make it worth its while.

The existing proposal states that any surplus on the £180m gets split 50:50 between the 4G licence-holding network operators and the government, but that means, EE argues, that network mitigation, by reducing transmission power or repositioning phone masts, only makes sense where it can be done for less than half the cost of posting out more filters. That’s also not allowing for the three-way split between then operators, so EE reckons it just won’t happen.

Everything Everywhere does suggest it might find the cash for better transmission filters on the base stations, but to make that worthwhile the government will have to give up its 50 per cent share of any leftover money.

Meanwhile, rival operator Telefonica reckons the whole thing is a storm in a teacup created by commercial broadcasters trying to protect their revenue streams, and that we should just trust them not to cause undue interference.

“As DTT [digital terrestrial TV] users are also our customers, it is not in our interests to detract from their TV viewing experience,” the operator explains, adding that “reputational and brand costs” will prevent it doing anything really awful. It accepts that MitCo may have to exist in some form.

The UK is quite unique in its devotion to broadcast television; most countries have a more diverse TV market, and have less to fear from 4G interference. Some respondents argue that by the time 4G coverage is extended into the rural areas where Freeview signals are weak, and where old people live, then the issue will disappear thanks to the magic of technology (such as better base-station filters).

The Voice of the Listener & Viewer is adamant that unless something is done then “well over two million homes … may suddenly be facing blank screens”. ®

Apple has pushed out a slew of security updates for Macs running Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and Lion (OS X 10.7).

The operating system upgrades tackle various bugs that leak sensitive information, elevate a user’s privileges and, most seriously, allow malicious code to be injected remotely and executed.

The 10.7.4 update grapples with a flaw in FileVault which causes users file encryption passwords to be stored in a log file in plain text. Apple’s Remote Desktop client is also updated in 10.7.4 but isn’t included in the update pack for Snow Leopard.

Mac OS X 10.7.4 fixes more than 30 vulnerabilities in the core OS, including Apple applications such as Quicktime, and some bundled software packages such as Samba, Ruby and PHP. A similar update for Snow Leopard 10.6.8 is available as Security Update 2012-0002.

Apple’s explanation of the security components on both its Mac OS X updates can be found here. Each update requires a system restart to take effect, as is the norm.

The updates also bring in a new build of the Safari web browser. The latest version, 5.1.7, includes a feature that automatically disables the Adobe Flash browser plugin when it gets out of date and prompts users to install the latest version. This is to stop outbreaks of viruses that exploit security holes in old Adobe software.

Apple recently automatically switched off elderly Java installations in an OS update after hundreds of thousands of Macs were infected by the Flashback Trojan.

The update was broadly welcomed by security experts including Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at Qualys here, and Paul Ducklin of Sophos here.

The desktop update follows hot on the heels of Apple’s update for smartphones and tablets – iOS 5.1.1 – which was released earlier this week; that update addressed three vulnerabilities with updates to Safari and WebKit. ®

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