Real Madrid CF vs Manchester United FC wednesday feb 13,2013

Real Madrid CF and Manchester United FC will square off in a much-anticipated last-16 showdown lent extra spice by the presence of Old Trafford old boy Cristiano Ronaldo in the home ranks.

• The sight of Ronaldo facing United for the first time since his departure adds another layer of intrigue to a contest pairing clubs who have met in four previous European Cup ties – with the winners going on to lift the trophy on three occasions.

• It is also an opportunity for José Mourinho to renew his rivalry with Sir Alex Ferguson. Although United reached the round of 16 as Group H winners, Group D runners-up Madrid have won eight of their last nine UEFA Champions League home fixtures and can draw further encouragement from the fact United have conceded first in their last five European outings and have won only twice in 20 visits to Spain.

Previous meetings
• Madrid came out on top in three of the clubs' four previous encounters – in the semi-finals in 1956/57 and quarter-finals in 1999/2000 and 2002/03 – with United prevailing in the 1967/68 semi-finals.

• Madrid triumphed 6-5 on aggregate in their most recent encounter. Vicente del Bosque's side emerged 3-1 winners from the first leg at the Bernabéu, Luís Figo and Raúl González (2) scoring before Ruud van Nistelrooy pulled a goal back.

• The Brazilian Ronaldo struck a hat-trick in the Old Trafford return where United fought back to win 4-3 through two goals from substitute David Beckham on a night when Van Nistelrooy and Iván Helguera (own goal) also found the net.

• The lineups from that last meeting on 23 April 2003 were:
Man Utd: Barthez, O'Shea, Ferdinand, Brown, Silvestre (P Neville 79), Verón (Beckham 63), Butt, Keane (Fortune 82), Giggs, Van Nistelrooy, Solskjær.
Madrid: Casillas, Salgado, Hierro, Helguera, Roberto Carlos, Zidane, McManaman (Portillo 69), Figo (Pavón 88), Makelele, Ronaldo (Solari 67), Guti.

• In the 1999/2000 quarter-finals, eventual champions Madrid advanced 3-2 on aggregate as they followed up a goalless home draw by taking a 3-0 lead in Manchester through Roy Keane's own goal and a Raúl double, before Beckham and Paul Scholes replied for the then holders. Ryan Giggs and Iker Casillas also featured.

• United have a history of comebacks in this fixture. After George Best had scored the only goal of their 1967/68 semi-final first leg at Old Trafford, they trailed Madrid 3-1 at half-time in the return but goals by David Sadler and Bill Foulkes earned a 4-3 aggregate victory and United went on to lift the trophy for the first time.

• Madrid won the first-ever meeting 5-3 on aggregate to reach the 1956/57 final. The Merengues overcame Matt Busby's men 3-1 at home and then led 2-0 away before United battled back to 2-2.

Match background
• Madrid have already got the better of United's neighbours in this season's group stage. Mourinho's side earned a thrilling 3-2 comeback victory over Manchester City FC at home on matchday one, Ronaldo delivering the 90th-minute winner, then drew 1-1 away.

• The Spanish champions' home record against England clubs is W6 D4 L2. The last English visitors to beat them were Liverpool FC, 1-0 victors at this stage in 2008/09.

• United exited last term's UEFA Europa League after home and away defeats by Athletic Club, and also lost their most recent UEFA Champions League encounter with Liga opposition – 3-1 against FC Barcelona in the 2011 final at Wembley.

• United's record away to Liga clubs is W2 D8 L10. Their last success came at Valencia CF in the 2010/11 UEFA Champions League group stage, Javier Hernández scoring the only goal.

• Madrid lost the 1981 European Champion Clubs' Cup final to Liverpool and the 1971 European Cup Winners' Cup final to Chelsea FC.

• United lost UEFA Champions League finals against Barcelona in 2009 and 2011 having beaten the same opponents in the 1991 European Cup Winners' Cup final.

• Sir Alex oversaw Aberdeen FC's 2-1 defeat of Madrid in the 1983 European Cup Winners' Cup final – his first continental trophy.

Team ties
• Mourinho has faced United twice before at this stage of the UEFA Champions League, starting with Porto's success in the 2003/04 round of 16 en route to winning the trophy. A side including Ricardo Carvalho earned a 2-1 advantage at home before securing a 3-2 aggregate win as Costinha cancelled out a Scholes goal with a 90th-minute equaliser in Manchester.

• Mourinho's FC Internazionale Milano lost to United in the 2008/09 last 16. After a goalless first leg, Inter succumbed 2-0 at Old Trafford, Nemanja Vidić and Ronaldo scoring.

• In between, Mourinho enjoyed a good run of results against United as Chelsea manager, his Stamford Bridge reign starting with a 1-0 home victory over Sir Alex's United on 15 August 2004. During three years in London, Mourinho's record against United was W5 D4 L1, with the FA Community Shield in August 2007 counting as a draw having finished 1-1 before United prevailed on penalties.

• Mourinho's Chelsea team, including Michael Essien, were 1-0 extra-time winners against United in the 2007 FA Cup final. Rio Ferdinand, Vidić, Darren Fletcher, Michael Carrick, Scholes, Giggs and Wayne Rooney all played for United.

• Ronaldo spent six seasons with United between 2003 and 2009. He scored 118 goals in 292 games, winning one UEFA Champions League and three Premier League titles, as well as one FA Cup and two League Cups.

• Ronaldo played in two UEFA Champions League finals with United. He scored in the 1-1 draw against Carvalho and Essien's Chelsea in Moscow in 2008, where United triumphed on penalties although Ronaldo failed from the spot. Twelve months later, his final United appearance ended in defeat by Barcelona in Rome.

• Essien was in the Olympique Lyonnais side that met United in the 2004/05 group stage, earning a 2-2 home draw before a 2-1 away loss.

• Xabi Alonso had to wait until his fifth and final season with Liverpool, 2008/09, before tasting victory over United – his solitary success in seven attempts. Álvaro Arbeloa lost all three games against United as a Liverpool player.

• Luka Modrić won none of his eight meetings with United while at Tottenham Hotspur FC between 2008 and 2012. In his first campaign he lost the League Cup final on penalties and scored to put Spurs 2-0 up at Old Trafford in a league match they eventually lost 5-2.

• Kaká was in the Milan side that overcame United in the 2004/05 UEFA Champions League round of 16 and, two seasons later, scored three goals as Milan defeated United 5-3 on aggregate in the semi-finals.

• As a Club Atlético de Madrid player, David de Gea conceded 11 goals in five straight derby losses to the Merengues.

• Spain's Casillas, Sergio Ramos and Alonso won the 2010 FIFA World Cup final at the expense of Robin van Persie's Netherlands. The following season Van Persie faced Barcelona with Arsenal FC in the UEFA Champions League round of 16, scoring in a 2-1 first-leg victory but receiving a red card in a 3-1 second-leg defeat.

• Wayne Rooney was in the England side beaten 4-1 by Sami Khedira and Mesut Özil's Germany in the round of 16 of the 2010 World Cup. Khedira and Özil had previously helped Germany win the 2009 UEFA European Under-21 Championship with a 4-0 final triumph over England in which Özil scored.

• Jonny Evans's Northern Ireland frustrated Ronaldo and Pepe's Portugal in a 1-1 2014 World Cup qualifying draw in Porto in October.

• Brazil's Rafael made his senior international debut in a May 2012 friendly against Denmark alongside Marcelo.

Google Packed British Schools with Raspberry Pi

The search giant has recently written a cheque to provide British schools over 15,000 free microcomputers. The company’s chairman Eric Schmidt and Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton explained that the move should help raise a new generation of computer scientists and encourage kids to take up coding.

Google has said before that the schools of the United Kingdom were undermining the IT industry by rejecting to produce students who could create technology. Eric Schmidt is worried that current information and communications technology teaching is insufficient preparation for future jobs in technology.

The partnership and the initiative were announced at Chesterton Community College in Cambridge, where kids were given a coding lesson by Eric Schmidt and Eben Upton. Raspberry Pi co-founder hoped that his company’s cooperation with Google will become a significant moment in the development of computing education in the United Kingdom.

Upton believed it would be possible to turn around the constant decline in the numbers and skill sets of students applying to read computer science at university. Within the last decade, the numbers of people studying computer science in the country decreased by 23% at undergraduate level.

Eric Schmidt, when announcing Google’s Raspberry Pi giveaway, said that the UK’s innovators and entrepreneurs have changed the world and now the company should inspire the next generation of computer genius. Google hoped that its donation would go some way towards that. In the meanwhile, Google is also sponsoring ICT teacher training through a scheme in conjunction with the Teach First charity.

Embarassing Material Search Filter is Lobbied

Disgraced motorsport executive Max Mosley keeps making attempts to promote an idea to implement search engine filters in order to weed out embarrassing content. Max Mosley should know a thing or two about embarrassing leaks, because he was the one who found himself embroiled in a very controversial sex scandal a couple years ago, courtesy of the defunct News of the World. At the time, the tabloid published pictures of Mosley’s sexual escapades involving 5 sex workers dressed up as prison guards, calling the episode as a “Nazi orgy”. Of course, this didn’t go down well with Mosley, as his father was the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Nevertheless, Max claimed there was nothing Nazi about the kinky role play.

Unsurprisingly, Mosley went on the defensive, and required that newspapers must alert famous people before they publish articles about them, which allow them to block any undesirable reports. However, the European Court of Human Rights disagreed and rejected Mosley’s request, who still believes that it is possible to erase such material from public record. He explains that what should be done is filtering of Google in an attempt to change the past by taking down hundreds of websites and forcing the search giant to stop displaying embarrassing search results.

The problem is that Google have automatic search machines, which means that if somebody puts something up somewhere, if you Google “Max Mosley” it will appear, which is wrong, because the content is illegal, and the photos have been ruled illegal in the English High Court. Max Mosley then took his case to French and German courts, because he believed that continental jurisprudence is more favorable to his demands. Even if the courts ruled that the search giant needs to censor the photos, they won’t be deleted and still be easily accessible. In other words, even if the court rules in his favor, Mosley would have to go back to court and require mandatory filters on various social networks and other engines. Anyway, it is surprising that French and German courts haven’t rejected these requests at once, because the similar demands were deemed illegal by the European Court of Justice.

At the moment, a Google image search for Mosley is mostly legitimate pictures of him, but the engine puts a remark at the bottom that according to a legitimate request submitted to Google, it has removed some results from that page.

Microsoft Claimed that Linux is Wasted Cash

Microsoft has recently gone to Munich claiming that the city wasted a lot of money by dumping its software in favor of Linux. At the same time, the software giant refused to provide proof, so everyone would just have to take its word for it.

According to both Microsoft and HP, the German city made a mistake when it calculated that switching from Windows to Linux saved Munich millions. Apparently, Munich has annoyed Microsoft by claiming that it saved over $14 million up to date. The software giant carried out one of its special Total Cost of Ownership studies, which found out that Munich would have saved more than $57 million if it had stuck with Microsoft.

The German weekly Focus, which had the figures in question, claimed that the software company wanted to say that if Munich had stayed with Windows XP and Office 2003 instead of choosing Linux and OpenOffice.org, it would have saved a fortune. Microsoft confirmed that the Munich’s own calculations didn’t consider all migration costs and compared the migration to a decade-old Linux version with a migration to a newer version of Windows (for instance, Windows 7). In case Munich had stuck with Windows, it wouldn’t have needed any new software.

In the meanwhile, the report found out that 25% of the desktops are still running Windows, as not all apps can be migrated to Linux. The results of the report were leaked to the press by one of the HP employees, but neither HP nor Microsoft are now willing to disseminate it more broadly.

Most of industry experts admitted that they couldn’t understand Microsoft’s reasoning, saying that it would be tricky to see how a Windows deployment can be any cheaper than a Linux alternative. Perhaps, the reason Microsoft wasn’t releasing the report is because the software giant suspected there were some mistakes in it.

After all, the software giant might be going back to the good old days when it used to print bogus reports about the total cost of ownership of Linux with fabled figures simply for marketing purposes. 

Musicians against CNET

A lawsuit involving Alki David plus a number of R&B and hip-hop musicians and CNET was started last November. The battle was headed by Alki David and involved a handful of musicians who sued CBSI’s subsidiary CNET for encouraging piracy by offering advice on how to use file-sharing platforms. Last July, a federal judge confirmed that CNET’s actions should be scrutinized. Finally, last November the artists asked for a preliminary injunction.

In response, CBS Interactive filed a 25-page memorandum a week ago, claiming that any suggestion that reports on the distribution of legitimate music via the BitTorrent protocol evidences intent to encourage infringement is just absurd. They point out that the injunction plaintiffs seek would substantially damage their business of providing a comprehensive index of software applications and editorial information about them.

The most interesting thing is that the injunction wouldn’t prevent either downloads of BitTorrent client software, or potential infringement of plaintiffs’ content. Even if CBSI were enjoined from linking to services providing downloads of BitTorrent applications, those would still remain available to Internet users and would still be easily found by a simple Google search – albeit without the warning against violation that CBSI provides.

In addition, the public interest would be damaged by denying legal and truthful data about a pervasive technology and by impending non-infringing uses.

The memorandum also stressed the fact that the plaintiffs didn’t prove not only the ownership of works, but also the irreversible damage done by CNET. The company also insists that “vague and broad requests for injunctive relief aimed targeting speech or the press raise serious First Amendment issues”.

CNET explained that it wasn’t planning to give any validation to a product which CBS is considering illegal, other networks considered illegal and one court has already found to violate the copyright act in its application. Except for that, CNET will cover every other product and service, or that’s what the company’s representative said when talking about the company’s decision to prohibit CNET from publishing reviews about such technologies as Dish Network-owned AutoHopper and Aereo’s TV streaming device.

5-year-old DNS Bug Still Alive

One of the nasty bugs in the DNS system of the worldwide web is still installed on many PCs all over the world.

The Kaminsky bug, named after its discoverer, was found 5 years ago. Although a fix has been issued, it turned out that only a handful of American broadband providers, financial institutions and e-commerce companies have deployed it. The discoverer warned at the time that the vulnerability made it possible for cyber attackers to carry out cache poisoning attacks, redirecting traffic from a legitimate site to a fake one without both the site operator and end user knowing that.

It appeared that the only way to fix the problem was DNSSEC, using digital signatures and public-key encryption to let the websites to verify their domain names and corresponding IP addresses and thus prevent intermediary attacks. However, the statistics say that a ridiculously low number of American corporations have deployed DNSSEC.

In fact, none of the top 100 largest American e-commerce companies tested by Secure64 was using digital signatures to sign their zones, nor were they validating DNSSEC queries. The recent survey, conducted weekly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, showed that less than 1% of 1,000 US industry sites have fully deployed DNSSEC, including Comcast, PayPal, Data Mountain, Infoblox, and Sprint. In the meanwhile, Dyncorp, Simon Property and Juniper Networks have done so partly.

Worse still, the names saying they aren’t deploying DNSSEC included such giants of the US industry as Bank of America, Delta Air Lines, Disney, eBay, Apple, Cisco, Google, IBM and Symantec. 

Copyright Owners Want Cash Instead of Disconnection for Infringement

Various measures against online piracy have been adopted by a number of countries, including the United Kingdom (which has its DEA) and France (HADOPI). Generally, their regulations stipulate tempering with an infringer’s account up to total disconnection. Copyright owners, however, offer another solution: financial penalties.

Ofcom’s Initial Obligations Code says that ISPs have to send out notifications to Internet accounts alleged of conducting unauthorized activities. In addition, repeat offenders might face the full extent of the law, because broadband providers can send their personal details to copyright owners. In addition, ISPs could also temper with infringers’ connection speeds or disconnect them from the web. This drastic measure could be introduced if notifications appear inefficient in fighting Internet piracy.

French HADOPI, also referred to as the “three-strikes” system, is quite similar to the British Digital Economy Act. However, French activists have been against this anti-piracy legislation since the beginning, and claimed that disconnection from the web constitutes a brutal display of power. In response, copyright owners have come up with a different approach. Media reports reveal that outfits like the Union of Independent Phonographic Producers and SACEM (both of this groups support the country’s music industry) have come up with the suggestion that the ultimate measure (disconnection from the web) should be replaced with a fine of 140 euros. Music labels, including Warner Music, were fond of the idea, claiming that there hadn’t been a lot of repression. They come with a logical explanation of the idea, saying that the main part of their mission has failed. If the public and the industry agree that downloading is against the law, it must be punished, and it is nothing new. That’s why Thierry Chassagne, Warner Music’s president, believes that a system of fines would be more proportionate and efficient in the fight against illegal distribution of the copyrighted works. Actually, it may come true, as the proposal is currently being scrutinized by France’s politicians.