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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillyG who wrote (27342)	12/31/1997 3:12:00 PM
From: Stoctrash	Respond to of 50808

(non cube) Hot digity... Microsoft Acquires Hotmail [December 31] Microsoft announced today the acquisition of Hotmail, the popular free Web-based e-mail service. Microsoft reports that Hotmail will become an integral component of The Microsoft Network. In addition to a free e-mail service, members of MSN Premier will be able to check their MSN e-mail from anywhere through a Hotmail account. "Hotmail has been a Web-mail pioneer," said Laura Jennings, vice president, The Microsoft Network. "It has built a strong following by offering a free, high-quality e-mail service that lets its members access a permanent e-mail address from any PC with an Internet connection." "Our goal is to combine the benefits of Hotmail with Microsoft services and technology to provide consumers the best combination of free and premium e-mail services. We are committed to making it even easier for people to communicate over the Internet from anywhere in the world." The Hotmail service, which serves over 9 million members worldwide, enables users to retrieve e-mail from up to four POP3 e-mail accounts via any Net-connected PC. Microsoft reports Hotmail will continue operations in Sunnyvale, Calif., as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

To: BillyG who wrote (27342)	1/1/1998 8:53:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

January 05, 1998, Issue: 987 Section: News ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VLSI provides the security for Divx............................... VLSI's data-security IC finds spot in DVD player Junko Yoshida San Jose, Calif. - VLSI Technology Inc. is carving out what it sees as an important niche for its security chip in consumer-electronics products. The San Jose-based company will announce today that the chip, built around an ARM RISC processor, has been designed into the Divx DVD player from Matsushita, Thomson and LG Zenith. Divx players will be formally introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas. The U.S. rollout is scheduled for early summer. The design win signals a new trend whereby data security is moving into consumer markets including PCs, game players, DVD systems, cable modems and TVs, said Neil Shea, vice president and general manager of the VLSI Internet and Secure Products Division. "We believe that the security chip is becoming a fundamental core-just like MPEG-2 video and Dolby Digital-embedded in a digital consumer-entertainment system." Divx is a proprietary DVD system, designed by Circuit City Stores Inc. and a Los Angeles-based entertainment-law firm offering special encrypted movie disks for on-demand, pay-per-view DVD rental. The Divx DVD players play all standard DVD disks, but encrypted Divx rental disks cannot be played on standard DVD players. Embedded security What separates the Divx system from the standard one is the security technology embedded in it. Each Divx DVD contains an encrypted digital-video signal and playback control code processed by the VLSI security chip. Multiple layers of safeguards against movie copying and piracy include individual serialization of players and disks, triple DES encryption, watermarking and analog copy prevention. The player comes with a modem that plugs into a standard phone jack. As consumers who purchase Divx players establish an account with Divx for billing, the player periodically calls the Divx processing center in off hours to send information for billing. The VLSI security chip not only decrypts encrypted Divx disks, but also monitors and reports any wrongdoing inside the box, via a back channel to the Divx processing center. When that happens, it automatically shuts down the system. As more valuable electronic entertainment content appears on the mass market via satellite, cable, Internet or DVDs, VLSI officials believe that the market for data security is destined to grow big. "Content owners want to make sure of secured electronic-product distribution before releasing their copyrighted materials," Shea said. Disney, Paramount, Universal and DreamWorks have agreed to provide movie titles for release on Divx disks. Besides Divx, VLSI data-security chips have gained design wins in high-speed cable modems sold by Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., and in a satellite tuner for broadcast PCs designed by an unnamed PC OEM. Many system makers and service providers prefer a dedicated hardware-based security measure they can embed into a system. That's because the keys, algorithms and authentication IDs would not be exposed to external buses if the embedded hardware performs encryption, decryption and key management on a chip. The dedicated hardware implementation has one more big advantage. Its on-chip 32-bit ARM RISC CPU accelerates the encryption/decryption process without tying up a system's main CPU. "When the encryption is applied to a high-speed bit stream such as video or music on DVD, the real-time decryption capability will become very important," said Joe Wallace, product-marketing engineer at VLSI's Internet and Secure Products Division. Integrated into the chip are a security block supporting triple DES; ROM to store application-specific microcode; RAM for scratchpad memory; and a 32-bit embedded ARM process. Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. New Search \| Search the Web You can reach this article directly here: techweb.com