Dell Sets Stage to Take On Apple's iCloud (PC Magazine)

With a new release of its Stage software, Dell has quietly created a cloud-based service offering that could offer consumers a compelling reason to keep investing in Dell devices.

The new release, which began shipping last week, allows users who snap a picture with a Dell Streak or other Dell mobile device to automatically upload it to a pool of free, shared cloud storage. The new software also allows devices to remotely control and play back shared audio and video, plus other services.

For consumers, Dell's Stage release is probably more important than the new "More You" ads that began playing this week. One of the results that emerged as Dell began the market research behind the "More You" campaign is that customers, unsurprisingly, have begun to use PCs and mobile devices to store their digital memories.

"We asked them, what is so important about that computer... and whether [the respondent] was Chinese, Japanese, or Indian, ultimately it was because 'my life is on that thing,'" said Paul-Henri Ferrand, the chief marketing officer of Dell's global consumer business and SMB, and also president of Dell's Asia-Pacific/Japan business.

Stage is an attempt to take that digital content and allow users to control and manage it effortlessly, said Tim Peters, a vice president responsible for platform strategy within Dell. Within the PC, it cuts across Dell's XPS, Inspiron, and Alienware brands, and can be controlled from Dell's mobile devices. "It's a critical part of the Dell experience," Peters said.

What's new: remote cloud storage, photo uploads, and more

The Stage software, which Dell began shipping last year, appears as a set of square tiles on a user's PC, with various categories like "Books," "Photos," and "Apps". The new release makes each tile 3D, versus the two-dimensional images that appeared in the older version of Stage.

Any time a user snaps a digital photo with a Stage-enabled device, the new Stage software automatically uploads it to a free 2-Gbyte pool of storage. (Any content can be stored there, according to a Dell spokesman, including movies, pictures, and music.) Users can purchase additional capacity, including 5 Gbytes for $19.99/year, 25 Gbytes for $49.99/yr, and 100 Gbytes for $149.99/yr.

Automatic photo uploads is a feature reserved for just a few services at this point, among them Google's Google's latest Google+ . Storing music in the cloud has also been the domain of other services, most notably Apple's iCloud.

Audio and video can be remotely controlled via Stage devices, Dell executives said. Dell has also added support for podcasts; an integrated Noisey application, which showcases music from all over the world; and an enhanced Napster home page.

Dell began life as a hyper-efficient box builder, known for its "just in time" strategy of managing inventory efficiently than anything else. If buyers wanted the latest Intel microprocessor, they bought it from Dell. Years later, however, leadership in the PC space has evolved into a competition whose products are differentiated using design, services, and price as metrics. Ferrand described his business as a "brand war," where Dell is aspiring to become something like an Audi of the PC world, where the quality of its fit and finish is complemented by a faith in its superior engineering.

"With Stage, we're building to the experiences of people, rather than building to specs," Ferrand said.

South Korean Web attacks might have been war drill (Reuters)

BOSTON (Reuters) – Attacks that crippled South Korean government websites in July 2009 and again in March 2011 might have been cyber war drills conducted on behalf of North Korea, according to security software maker McAfee Inc.

That would make the South Korean attacks more menacing than recent attacks by hacker activists, or "hactivists," such as the groups Anonymous and Lulz Security. Those groups have temporarily shut down high-profile websites, including those of MasterCard, the CIA and NATO.

Hactivists attack as a form of electronic protest, but the attacks on South Korea were likely Internet reconnaissance missions to test the impact that cyber weapons could have in wartime, said Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for McAfee Labs.

"This stuff is much more insidious and much more dangerous to national security than what Anonymous is doing," he said.

McAfee made the claim in a technical analysis of malicious software hackers used to launch the March 2011 denial of service attacks against South Korean websites. Denial-of-service attacks shut down websites by overwhelming them with traffic.

The document, which was released on Tuesday, said the attackers likely built the army of computers that launched the attacks by infecting healthy PCs with malicious software at a popular South Korean file-sharing site.

Once the PCs were infected, they became part of a "botnet," or army of enslaved computers, the hackers managed remotely from "command and control centers."

That botnet was used on March 4 to attack some 40 websites in South Korea, according to McAfee.

"It was a very rapid operation -- very constrained with specific goals," Alperovitch said. "The intent was to see what level of damage you can do in a very rapid time period."

The hackers responsible for the attacks tried to make it difficult for researchers to figure out what they were doing.

They encrypted their software, or scrambled it to make it difficult to study, and also programed it to destroy itself and its host PC 10 days after the March 4 attack began.

It is highly rare for botnet herders to instruct infected computer systems to attack themselves. They typically try to keep enslaved computers running as long as possible so they can use their botnet to perform many tasks.

The hackers likely worked so hard to hide their tracks because they wanted to make it difficult for authorities to ascertain the real purpose of the attacks, Alperovitch said.

They were cyber war drills designed to determine how difficult it would be to take down key government websites in the event of war, he added.

McAfee is a subsidiary of chipmaker Intel Corp.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; editing by Andre Grenon)