Recently in Beta Watch Category

I have seen one drool-worthy feature which is destined for the final release of Longhorn that excites me. Coded-named 'Metro', Microsoft developed a new group of technologies designed to act as a format for electronic document portability and as a solution to many of the limitations currently presented in the world of document printing. That's not the only thing it's for, but it's the easiest way to explain it. Metro can be viewed as part competitor to the Adobe PDF standard and part replacement for Post Script, which is the document description used to tell a printer where to put elements on a page.

How can printing be exciting? Admittedly, it's not something I think about very often beyond checking to see if I have enough paper and toner. Sure printers have gotten cheaper and the liquid dyes used to add text and images to a page keep increasing in price for smaller quantities, but those aren't things to jump up and down about; especially when you're paying more to print in 8-bit color. Most printers are limited to 256 colors, which flattens out any detail you might expect to see in a really rich image. Gradients don't translate well, rich textures are lost in translation and the level of control printer hardware has over the process is very limited.

Metro fundamentally changes the way computers do printing. Color printing is extended to 16-bits per color channel, which translates to thousands of variations of those same RGB hues, with further support for 32-bit scRGB color. In the current printing world, when you print a photo on your printer, the image is translated to a format the printer understands, which eliminates some of the details. If you take RAW format images with your digital camera or the highest resolution JPEG images supported by your particular device, printing via a Metro enabled printer retains all the richness of color and subtle shading details of the image, instead of degrading the image to fit the limitations of printing. Assuming printer manufacturers issue driver updates for existing printers, all of this should function seamlessly on your current printer, without the need to throw out your current hardware for newer stuff.

Another key component in printing that makes the process painful for those of us waiting for the physical pages is spooling time. Spooling is the process of generating all the print data required to send to the printer to generate the pages. Under the current Post Script method of printing, each page is rendered in full, with no regard for repeating of elements across pages. For instance, if every page has your company logo on it and you have a 20 page document, the logo will be generated for printing 20 times. Metro rethinks this model, rendering the logo only once and tagging each page in the spool with information telling the printer where the logo needs to go, improving printing efficiency and speeding the process along.

Of course this isn't just about printing. Like PDF, Metro provides a way to package a file and send it off to people, regardless of what other software they may be running on their machine. For instance, if you have a PowerPoint presentation that needs to go to 10 other people, but you have no idea whether any of those people has PowerPoint, you won't need to compile a PowerPoint executable. Instead, you process the file with Metro and send the Metro file off to each of the 10 recipients with a reasonable amount of confidence they will be able to view the document.

The good news is, this is one feature that will trickle down to Windows XP users. I haven't found any official documentation to confirm this, but according to the Microsoft people I talked to from the Metro team, this will be a technology made compatible with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, although if you have an older Windows operating system you may be forced to upgrade to take advantage of the features. You can read more about the Metro Specification online. Public availability of the technology is slated for "the second half of 2006," which is when Beta 2 of Longhorn will supposedly emerge.

Ever since attending the Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference, I'm thinking more about personal information security again. I say again because information security is a topic that fascinates me, but I don't tend to be proactive in protecting my privacy as much as might be prudent. I think about all the places my face is recorded on camera, the opportunities for people to gain access to my personal information by reading over my shoulder and the potential for people to be doing some kind of network sniff in the proximity of the Starbucks where I might be uploading a file and it starts to seem like privacy is a product of fiction. Reality makes it unlikely anyone is actually paying attention to my information because there are simply too many targets. It's also true that erring on the side of caution is better than just giving in to every potential information leak.

I maintain a master password list encrypted in a way that keeps anyone from getting my various pin numbers if my laptop is ever stolen. Some of my personal data is stored in encrypted locations on my hard drive and as I indicated, I'm storing backups of information on encrypted portable volumes. But I'm not thoroughly protected from information violations if my laptop were stolen because I don't encrypt the entire disk or at least I'm not encrypting particular information sectors that might contain sensitive information in the clear.

If you lose a laptop or have your computer stolen, keeping your Windows login password protected isn't enough to keep any but the laziest snoops from accessing your information. All you need to do to test this theory is download a copy of Knoppix, burn it to CD and then boot from CD to see how much of your PC data is readily available without ever booting Windows. Encrypting a disk volume storing private information keeps snoops out but you need to make sure you get all the information leaks closed.

Microsoft is thinking about these potential privacy violations as part of Longhorn. Disk encryption is being built into the operating system, in the form of Secure Startup, allowing you to lock down information with a master password, which keeps data scrambled and prevents the operating system from functioning properly if not correctly applied. This will be an optional user-configurable feature turned on or off just like the Windows Firewall, Anti-Spyware or other applications you might use to protect your data. Where this becomes important is in making sure the right information is protected. In addition to any of the basic stuff like sensitive information in the My Documents folder, Microsoft is making sure the temp files generated during Hibernation that save the state of all your applications when you close the screen on your laptop while Windows is still running get locked down. The Windows Temp file gets encrypted to make sure you aren't leaving cached information readily available for someone to steal.

The downside to encryption in this scheme is the potential for forgetting your password. If you forget the password, Windows will require reformatting in order to function; there is no password recovery short of brute-force hacking that may require months to crack the encryption algorithms. Still, the hardware you lose as the result of a theft is generally much less damaging than the potential information made available on the hard drive. You can easily avoid any risk of forgetting the password by locking it away in a lockbox or storing it in some other secure way completely separate from the laptop or PC itself. Currently, the same level of protection is achievable using third-party apps like TrueCrypt, but having it available as part of the operating system, as promised in Longhorn, makes sense because it should provide protection without needing a complex understanding of how encryption works.

Not content to be hounded with lawsuits from only one stodgy industry, the creators of Kazaa are now trying to add telephone service providers to the list of people who want their technology wiped from the Internet. Skype adds makes peer-to-peer phone communication possible, producing calls with better clarity than traditional phone lines. The beta is currently free and will work with virtually any headset. I recommend against using traditional computer speakers for listening because it creates an echo effect for the listener on the other end which isn't very pleasant. No spyware or adware is included in Skype.