A group of lawyers focused on protecting open-source and free software has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon Communications, alleging that routers the company uses with its Fios broadband service violate the GNU GPL (General Public License).
The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed the copyright lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of developers of BusyBox, a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems. The SFLC has previously filed copyright lawsuits on behalf of the developers against three other companies, but Verizon is by far the largest target.
The lawsuit against Verizon alleges that the telecom giant uses BusyBox code in wireless routers made by Actiontec Electronics. The routers, distributed to customers of Verizon's Fios broadband and television services, contains BusyBox, the SFLC alleges, but Verizon does not provide the source code of BusyBox to customers, as obligated by the GPL.
BusyBox's developers licensed the software under the GPL "to ensure that all users of the program can access and modify its source code," said Dan Ravicher, legal director of SFLC. Verizon has not responded to SFLC's attempts to resolve the issue, he added.
"We reached out to them three weeks ago," Ravicher said. "They never responded in any fashion."
A Verizon spokesman said the company is aware of the lawsuit. "This matter is being dealt with," said David Fish of Verizon. "We've referred it to the responsible third-party vendor."
The SFLC has also contacted Actiontec, but that company has responded, Ravicher said. "We are in what we believe to be productive discussions with them about their issues," he said. "This is why we purposefully did not name them as a defendant in the lawsuit. To the contrary, Verizon has simply ignored us, which leaves us with no option other than litigation to get them to address our clients' concerns."
Both Actiontec and Verizon have obligations under the GPL as distributors of BusyBox, Ravicher said. "When Actiontec distributes to Verizon, Actiontec has obligations," he said. "When Verizon turns around and redistributes to customers, Verizon has obligations. Even if Actiontec fulfills its obligations when it distributes to Verizon, that does not fulfill Verizon's obligations when it distributes to its customers."
The Verizon action is the fourth GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley. The case against Monsoon Multimedia was settled out of court in October, with Monsoon agreeing to remedy its prior violation, ensure future compliance, and financially compensate the developers, according to the SFLC.
Cases against High-Gain Antennas and Xterasys are still active.
The SFLC assists nonprofit open-source and free software projects. Its chairman is Eben Moglen, longtime general counsel to the Free Software Foundation.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Stolen laptop had 268,000 blood donor IDs
A laptop stolen during a recent blood drive contained sensitive information on 268,000 Minnesota-region blood donors, Memorial Blood Centers said Wednesday.
The laptop was in a briefcase that was stolen just before 7 a.m. Nov. 28 as workers were setting up a blood drive, said Laura Kaplan, manager of marketing and communications with the blood center. "They were setting up for a blood drive and this was in a briefcase," she said. "The police have told us they believe it was a random crime."
Memorial Blood Centers is a nonprofit blood bank based in St. Paul, Minnesota. It operates 10 blood collection centers in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and collects about 125,000 units of blood each year.
Kaplan said that the laptop was protected by several passwords, but she would not say whether its hard drive was encrypted "We believe that the data is secure," she said.
The company is notifying donors affected by the theft in accordance with Minnesota law, Memorial said in a letter dated Wednesday and sent to those affected by the theft.
The stolen records include names, addresses, blood types and Social Security numbers -- enough information to be of use to ID thieves. But Memorial said that it was unlikely that thieves would misuse the data.
The laptop thief was videotaped on nearby surveillance cameras and Minneapolis police have circulated a video of the incident among local news media.
Following the theft, Memorial Blood Centers stopped collecting Social Security number of donors. Starting this past Monday, it began identifying donors through a series of questions and via other forms of identification such as drivers licenses, Kaplan said.
Increasingly, health organizations like Memorial are moving away from using Social Security numbers because of the risks associated with these kind of thefts.
Unencrypted data on stolen or lost laptops has become a major source of privacy breaches in the U.S. According to Privacy Rights Clearing House, sensitive data on more than 216 million U.S. residents has been compromised since January 2005.
The laptop was in a briefcase that was stolen just before 7 a.m. Nov. 28 as workers were setting up a blood drive, said Laura Kaplan, manager of marketing and communications with the blood center. "They were setting up for a blood drive and this was in a briefcase," she said. "The police have told us they believe it was a random crime."
Memorial Blood Centers is a nonprofit blood bank based in St. Paul, Minnesota. It operates 10 blood collection centers in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and collects about 125,000 units of blood each year.
Kaplan said that the laptop was protected by several passwords, but she would not say whether its hard drive was encrypted "We believe that the data is secure," she said.
The company is notifying donors affected by the theft in accordance with Minnesota law, Memorial said in a letter dated Wednesday and sent to those affected by the theft.
The stolen records include names, addresses, blood types and Social Security numbers -- enough information to be of use to ID thieves. But Memorial said that it was unlikely that thieves would misuse the data.
The laptop thief was videotaped on nearby surveillance cameras and Minneapolis police have circulated a video of the incident among local news media.
Following the theft, Memorial Blood Centers stopped collecting Social Security number of donors. Starting this past Monday, it began identifying donors through a series of questions and via other forms of identification such as drivers licenses, Kaplan said.
Increasingly, health organizations like Memorial are moving away from using Social Security numbers because of the risks associated with these kind of thefts.
Unencrypted data on stolen or lost laptops has become a major source of privacy breaches in the U.S. According to Privacy Rights Clearing House, sensitive data on more than 216 million U.S. residents has been compromised since January 2005.
Delay, repairs, even success hit Palm's profit
Struggling smartphone maker Palm can't win for losing.
The company's shares plunged Friday after it forecast a revenue shortfall and a loss for its fiscal second quarter ended Nov. 30. Even the success of its newly introduced Centro hurt its financial results, Palm said in a news release.
Palm shares (PALM) on the Nasdaq were down US$0.81 at $5.78 on Friday afternoon. As recently as October, they were trading at more than $15.
The Centro, smaller and less expensive than Palm's flagship Treo line of smartphones, shipped in higher than expected numbers in its first quarter on the market, Palm said. But because of its low price -- it's currently offered by Sprint Nextel for $99 with a two-year contract -- those big shipments contributed to a lower-than-expected gross margin.
However, the biggest black eye in the preliminary financial report was a delay in shipping an unidentified future product that was expected to be certified within the quarter, Palm said. It's just the latest product setback for the company, which is making the transition from PDAs (personal digital assistants) to phones and fighting far bigger competitors including Research in Motion, Motorola and Apple. In September, it canceled the Foleo, a much-hyped accessory for the Treo, just days after offering assurances it was still coming.
An unforeseen increase in warranty repair expenses also hurt Palm's margin, the company said.
Based on its preliminary numbers, the company expects $345 million to $350 million in revenue for the quarter, down from the $370 million to $380 million it predicted when it reported results for its previous quarter on Oct. 1. It also expects a loss of $0.22 to $0.24, compared with a loss between $0.01 and $0.03 forecast earlier. Full results will be announced Dec. 18.
It's not uncommon for a new handset to fail carrier certification, even if it doesn't have major technical flaws, but Palm has deeper problems than most device vendors, according to Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. The bulky Treo platform is aging and even Palm's vaunted developer support is in doubt as OSes such as Windows Mobile and Symbian build up big installed bases, he said.
There are still applications for Palm OS that you can't get on any other mobile platform, but the company's blunders and delays of its promised Linux-based OS are taking their toll, he said. By the time the Linux platform hits the market, late next year or after, it will be up against systems based on Google's Android, he pointed out.
"The PalmOS developer community is considering its options," Greengart said. "The future Palm Linux OS is not a slam dunk."
The company's shares plunged Friday after it forecast a revenue shortfall and a loss for its fiscal second quarter ended Nov. 30. Even the success of its newly introduced Centro hurt its financial results, Palm said in a news release.
Palm shares (PALM) on the Nasdaq were down US$0.81 at $5.78 on Friday afternoon. As recently as October, they were trading at more than $15.
The Centro, smaller and less expensive than Palm's flagship Treo line of smartphones, shipped in higher than expected numbers in its first quarter on the market, Palm said. But because of its low price -- it's currently offered by Sprint Nextel for $99 with a two-year contract -- those big shipments contributed to a lower-than-expected gross margin.
However, the biggest black eye in the preliminary financial report was a delay in shipping an unidentified future product that was expected to be certified within the quarter, Palm said. It's just the latest product setback for the company, which is making the transition from PDAs (personal digital assistants) to phones and fighting far bigger competitors including Research in Motion, Motorola and Apple. In September, it canceled the Foleo, a much-hyped accessory for the Treo, just days after offering assurances it was still coming.
An unforeseen increase in warranty repair expenses also hurt Palm's margin, the company said.
Based on its preliminary numbers, the company expects $345 million to $350 million in revenue for the quarter, down from the $370 million to $380 million it predicted when it reported results for its previous quarter on Oct. 1. It also expects a loss of $0.22 to $0.24, compared with a loss between $0.01 and $0.03 forecast earlier. Full results will be announced Dec. 18.
It's not uncommon for a new handset to fail carrier certification, even if it doesn't have major technical flaws, but Palm has deeper problems than most device vendors, according to Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. The bulky Treo platform is aging and even Palm's vaunted developer support is in doubt as OSes such as Windows Mobile and Symbian build up big installed bases, he said.
There are still applications for Palm OS that you can't get on any other mobile platform, but the company's blunders and delays of its promised Linux-based OS are taking their toll, he said. By the time the Linux platform hits the market, late next year or after, it will be up against systems based on Google's Android, he pointed out.
"The PalmOS developer community is considering its options," Greengart said. "The future Palm Linux OS is not a slam dunk."
Analyst: NetSuite IPO should find success
NetSuite's decision to hold an auction-style initial public offering later this month will probably pay off, one analyst judged on Friday.
"I expect a very good amount of demand and I do expect it to price above $16. The only caveat is, the [IPO] market is quite poor right now," said Scott Sweet, managing director of IPOBoutique.com.
The hosted business software vendor plans to sell 6.2 million shares of common stock for an expected US$13 to $16 each through the auction, which would raise a maximum of $99.2 million. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the auction will take place Dec. 21. A NetSuite spokeswoman could not immediately be reached Friday to confirm that date.
NetSuite's stock will be traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the single-letter symbol "N."
The company, which targets small- to midsized businesses, is following the lead of Google in conducting an online, auction-style IPO, which is meant to attract a wide range of investor types.
Under the auction's rules, individuals who have an account with Credit Suisse Securities, W.R. Hambrecht & Co. or ETrade Securities can submit bids, according to the SEC filing regarding the plan.
NetSuite posted a net loss of $35.7 million in 2006, and in 2007 has so far lost $20.6 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30. Also, its accumulated deficit stood at $241.6 million as of Sept. 30, NetSuite said.
However, its revenue is on a general upswing, growing from $17.7 million in 2004 to $67.2 million in 2006. That trend continued this year, as the company took in $76.8 million for the nine-month period ended Sept. 30. NetSuite said it had 5,400 customers as of that date.
"Bottom line, their losses are coming down, but they still need some work," Sweet said. "If their losses were going up, that would probably turn off many technology investors."
He also remarked on NetSuite's decision to hold the auction so close to Christmas: "Talk about pushing it. It's getting real close."
NetSuite said it plans to use the proceeds to pay off an $8 million balance on a line of credit with Tako Ventures, LLC, an entity controlled by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a major investor in NetSuite.
"We may also use a portion of the proceeds from the offering to acquire other businesses, products or technologies. We do not, however, have agreements or commitments for any specific acquisitions at this time," the statement added.
The IPO stands to further enrich Ellison, who controls about 60 percent of NetSuite's outstanding stock, or some 31.9 million shares. He is planning to move those shares into a "lockbox" limited-liability company, in order to "effectively eliminate" his voting control and to avoid potential conflicts of interest, NetSuite said in the filing.
"I expect a very good amount of demand and I do expect it to price above $16. The only caveat is, the [IPO] market is quite poor right now," said Scott Sweet, managing director of IPOBoutique.com.
The hosted business software vendor plans to sell 6.2 million shares of common stock for an expected US$13 to $16 each through the auction, which would raise a maximum of $99.2 million. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the auction will take place Dec. 21. A NetSuite spokeswoman could not immediately be reached Friday to confirm that date.
NetSuite's stock will be traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the single-letter symbol "N."
The company, which targets small- to midsized businesses, is following the lead of Google in conducting an online, auction-style IPO, which is meant to attract a wide range of investor types.
Under the auction's rules, individuals who have an account with Credit Suisse Securities, W.R. Hambrecht & Co. or ETrade Securities can submit bids, according to the SEC filing regarding the plan.
NetSuite posted a net loss of $35.7 million in 2006, and in 2007 has so far lost $20.6 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30. Also, its accumulated deficit stood at $241.6 million as of Sept. 30, NetSuite said.
However, its revenue is on a general upswing, growing from $17.7 million in 2004 to $67.2 million in 2006. That trend continued this year, as the company took in $76.8 million for the nine-month period ended Sept. 30. NetSuite said it had 5,400 customers as of that date.
"Bottom line, their losses are coming down, but they still need some work," Sweet said. "If their losses were going up, that would probably turn off many technology investors."
He also remarked on NetSuite's decision to hold the auction so close to Christmas: "Talk about pushing it. It's getting real close."
NetSuite said it plans to use the proceeds to pay off an $8 million balance on a line of credit with Tako Ventures, LLC, an entity controlled by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a major investor in NetSuite.
"We may also use a portion of the proceeds from the offering to acquire other businesses, products or technologies. We do not, however, have agreements or commitments for any specific acquisitions at this time," the statement added.
The IPO stands to further enrich Ellison, who controls about 60 percent of NetSuite's outstanding stock, or some 31.9 million shares. He is planning to move those shares into a "lockbox" limited-liability company, in order to "effectively eliminate" his voting control and to avoid potential conflicts of interest, NetSuite said in the filing.
Mozilla, Opera look to make video on the Web easier
New features in the Firefox and Opera browsers could make it less complex and cheaper for people to incorporate video into their Web sites, representatives of Mozilla and Opera say.
Firefox and Opera will support a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in Web pages. As long as the browsers support a video's specific codec, or encoding method, the browsers will then be able to play the video without launching third-party enabling software, said Chris Double, a Mozilla engineer. Mozilla and Opera are also working to support the royalty-free video codec Ogg Theora.
Video on the Web is a fractured mix of proprietary formats, encoded using systems from four main vendors. Apple offers QuickTime, Microsoft offers Windows Media, Adobe offers Flash and RealNetworks has RealPlayer. A user must have a plug-in from each of those vendors if they want to play video in that vendor's format.
The plug-ins that play video are free to download and use: The software companies make their money selling encoders to create the video, and server software to host and stream video.
Opera and Mozilla officials say the changes to their browsers will offer a new level of ease for Web developers using open-source tools to embed and stream their video. If video encoded in Ogg Theora plays directly in the browser, everyday Internet surfers would not have the burden of downloading extra plug-ins for their browser to play the video.
Developers would not have to pay royalties to use the Ogg Theora codec, and open-source streaming media servers such as VLC or Icecast are free.
"With a baseline, royalty-free codec, end-users can produce and embed their own videos without having to pay any fees for the production of the video itself or the rights to stream it," Double said.
That could prove challenging to big vendors such as Adobe and Microsoft, who are betting big on demand for their own video and multimedia tools to feed the Internet's video boom.
Adobe recently rolled out an upgrade to its software, Flash 9, used by sites such as Google's YouTube. Microsoft also recently released its Silverlight multimedia technology, designed to build dynamic videos and graphics.
Supporters of the video tag and royalty-free codec contend it's vexing to have private software companies control video formats. Those vendors, for example, could suddenly change their long-term support plans depending on changes in their business or simply halt support for certain operating systems, such as Linux.
The challenge, however, will be getting all browser makers to support a video HTML tag and one or a set of the same encoding codecs. On the photo side, this already works: All browsers support the "img" HTML tag and JPEG and PNG file formats, which don't require extra software to view.
"You don't require a plug-in to view images," said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Mozilla. "I think video is the next natural evolution of that."
HTML, the Web's mother tongue, never included a video tag in its original specifications. Videos encoded in Flash, for example, are often launched via JavaScript code, which Double argues can be difficult for people to manipulate on their own Web pages.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the caretaker of HTML, is working on a long-term project to update and add new features to the HTML specifications used by Web browsers. A video HTML tag is under consideration.
However, a final specification for HTML 5 could be a decade away, the editor of the committee developing it said. The success of the video tag will largely depend on if browser makers start supporting it and Web developers embrace it.
"It's not only about specifications," said Karl Dubost, conformance manager for the W3C. "It [the video HTML tag] requires deployment in enough browsers so that the market forces make it ubiquitous across platforms."
Mozilla and Opera are pressing ahead without waiting for an update to the HTML standard. The video tag feature won't make it in the initial Firefox 3.0 release, scheduled for next year, but will be delivered in future updates, Double said. Early last month, Opera released an experimental build of its browser with support for a video tag as well as support for Ogg Theora.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer holds about 80 percent of the browser market, and it remains to be seen how it views Opera's and Mozilla's plans. Microsoft did not response to requests for comment.
Microsoft tends to not go along with other vendors' standardization efforts, said Dimitris Dimitriadis, who consults companies on standards implementation and formerly worked with the W3C. But if a technology or specification starts to be widely used, Microsoft has been known to change course.
"I think they are very sensitive to market changes," Dimitriadis said. "If they see that people want to use embedded video they will certainly provide an alternative."
But other problems could arise if Opera's and Mozilla's implementations of a video HTML tag don't match a future W3C specification, Dimitriadis said. The process of creating a standard is very slow, and it's inevitable that companies' technology will move much faster than the administrative process, he said.
"There’s a risk of having brilliant people spending time on something that does not get implemented," Dimitriadis said.
Firefox and Opera will support a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in Web pages. As long as the browsers support a video's specific codec, or encoding method, the browsers will then be able to play the video without launching third-party enabling software, said Chris Double, a Mozilla engineer. Mozilla and Opera are also working to support the royalty-free video codec Ogg Theora.
Video on the Web is a fractured mix of proprietary formats, encoded using systems from four main vendors. Apple offers QuickTime, Microsoft offers Windows Media, Adobe offers Flash and RealNetworks has RealPlayer. A user must have a plug-in from each of those vendors if they want to play video in that vendor's format.
The plug-ins that play video are free to download and use: The software companies make their money selling encoders to create the video, and server software to host and stream video.
Opera and Mozilla officials say the changes to their browsers will offer a new level of ease for Web developers using open-source tools to embed and stream their video. If video encoded in Ogg Theora plays directly in the browser, everyday Internet surfers would not have the burden of downloading extra plug-ins for their browser to play the video.
Developers would not have to pay royalties to use the Ogg Theora codec, and open-source streaming media servers such as VLC or Icecast are free.
"With a baseline, royalty-free codec, end-users can produce and embed their own videos without having to pay any fees for the production of the video itself or the rights to stream it," Double said.
That could prove challenging to big vendors such as Adobe and Microsoft, who are betting big on demand for their own video and multimedia tools to feed the Internet's video boom.
Adobe recently rolled out an upgrade to its software, Flash 9, used by sites such as Google's YouTube. Microsoft also recently released its Silverlight multimedia technology, designed to build dynamic videos and graphics.
Supporters of the video tag and royalty-free codec contend it's vexing to have private software companies control video formats. Those vendors, for example, could suddenly change their long-term support plans depending on changes in their business or simply halt support for certain operating systems, such as Linux.
The challenge, however, will be getting all browser makers to support a video HTML tag and one or a set of the same encoding codecs. On the photo side, this already works: All browsers support the "img" HTML tag and JPEG and PNG file formats, which don't require extra software to view.
"You don't require a plug-in to view images," said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Mozilla. "I think video is the next natural evolution of that."
HTML, the Web's mother tongue, never included a video tag in its original specifications. Videos encoded in Flash, for example, are often launched via JavaScript code, which Double argues can be difficult for people to manipulate on their own Web pages.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the caretaker of HTML, is working on a long-term project to update and add new features to the HTML specifications used by Web browsers. A video HTML tag is under consideration.
However, a final specification for HTML 5 could be a decade away, the editor of the committee developing it said. The success of the video tag will largely depend on if browser makers start supporting it and Web developers embrace it.
"It's not only about specifications," said Karl Dubost, conformance manager for the W3C. "It [the video HTML tag] requires deployment in enough browsers so that the market forces make it ubiquitous across platforms."
Mozilla and Opera are pressing ahead without waiting for an update to the HTML standard. The video tag feature won't make it in the initial Firefox 3.0 release, scheduled for next year, but will be delivered in future updates, Double said. Early last month, Opera released an experimental build of its browser with support for a video tag as well as support for Ogg Theora.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer holds about 80 percent of the browser market, and it remains to be seen how it views Opera's and Mozilla's plans. Microsoft did not response to requests for comment.
Microsoft tends to not go along with other vendors' standardization efforts, said Dimitris Dimitriadis, who consults companies on standards implementation and formerly worked with the W3C. But if a technology or specification starts to be widely used, Microsoft has been known to change course.
"I think they are very sensitive to market changes," Dimitriadis said. "If they see that people want to use embedded video they will certainly provide an alternative."
But other problems could arise if Opera's and Mozilla's implementations of a video HTML tag don't match a future W3C specification, Dimitriadis said. The process of creating a standard is very slow, and it's inevitable that companies' technology will move much faster than the administrative process, he said.
"There’s a risk of having brilliant people spending time on something that does not get implemented," Dimitriadis said.
Google disables Gmail accounts by mistake
Google this week mistakenly disabled the Gmail accounts of an undetermined number of users due to an apparently overzealous attempt by the company to combat spammers.
On Wednesday night, people started reporting in the official Gmail Help Discussion forum that Google had locked them out of their accounts.
A Google staffer who patrols the forum and posts messages on behalf of the company acknowledged the existence of a problem at midafternoon Thursday.
"I understand that some of you have had a frustrating experience with your accounts being inappropriately disabled. Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate," this person, identified as Google Guide, wrote.
Several hours later, the Google staffer declared the problem fixed "Our efforts to prevent breaches of our Terms of Use caused a number of users to be incorrectly identified," the staffer wrote.
In a subsequent post to the forum, Google Guide provided more details about the situation, saying that it was the result of an effort to purge users who abuse the service, such as spammers.
People whose accounts were disabled by mistake should have regained access to them already and no data should have been lost, the Google staffer wrote.
However, it seems that Gmail declined accepting messages sent to those accounts while they were disabled, informing senders with a "bounce-back" return notice. It's not clear if Gmail will automatically attempt to redeliver those rejected incoming messages.
Also, as recently as late Friday morning Eastern time some people were still complaining of being locked out of their accounts.
Google didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.
Although the extent and scope of the problem is unclear, the discussion thread is at press time one of the longest in recent months, and is full of frantic pleas for help from affected people who use Gmail as their primary e-mail service for personal or work communications.
In addition to the problem of disabled accounts, in the past month a steady stream of Gmail users have been complaining that when they get upgraded to the new version of the service, popularly called Gmail 2.0, the service becomes extremely slow, often fails to load pages and even crashes their browsers.
One of several threads devoted to this issue in the Gmail Help Discussion forum continues growing, nearing 300 messages at press time.
Gmail 2.0, which features an upgraded contacts manager and is designed to be faster and more stable, is based on what the company calls "a major structural code change."
Gmail isn't just a free Web mail service for individuals, but also part of the company's Google Apps suite of hosted collaboration and communication applications suite, which is used by more than 100,000 organizations, mostly small businesses, as well as by hundreds of universities.
Google offers a service-level agreement of 99.9 percent uptime to people and organizations that sign up for the Premier edition of Google Apps, which costs US$50 per user per year.
On Wednesday night, people started reporting in the official Gmail Help Discussion forum that Google had locked them out of their accounts.
A Google staffer who patrols the forum and posts messages on behalf of the company acknowledged the existence of a problem at midafternoon Thursday.
"I understand that some of you have had a frustrating experience with your accounts being inappropriately disabled. Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate," this person, identified as Google Guide, wrote.
Several hours later, the Google staffer declared the problem fixed "Our efforts to prevent breaches of our Terms of Use caused a number of users to be incorrectly identified," the staffer wrote.
In a subsequent post to the forum, Google Guide provided more details about the situation, saying that it was the result of an effort to purge users who abuse the service, such as spammers.
People whose accounts were disabled by mistake should have regained access to them already and no data should have been lost, the Google staffer wrote.
However, it seems that Gmail declined accepting messages sent to those accounts while they were disabled, informing senders with a "bounce-back" return notice. It's not clear if Gmail will automatically attempt to redeliver those rejected incoming messages.
Also, as recently as late Friday morning Eastern time some people were still complaining of being locked out of their accounts.
Google didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.
Although the extent and scope of the problem is unclear, the discussion thread is at press time one of the longest in recent months, and is full of frantic pleas for help from affected people who use Gmail as their primary e-mail service for personal or work communications.
In addition to the problem of disabled accounts, in the past month a steady stream of Gmail users have been complaining that when they get upgraded to the new version of the service, popularly called Gmail 2.0, the service becomes extremely slow, often fails to load pages and even crashes their browsers.
One of several threads devoted to this issue in the Gmail Help Discussion forum continues growing, nearing 300 messages at press time.
Gmail 2.0, which features an upgraded contacts manager and is designed to be faster and more stable, is based on what the company calls "a major structural code change."
Gmail isn't just a free Web mail service for individuals, but also part of the company's Google Apps suite of hosted collaboration and communication applications suite, which is used by more than 100,000 organizations, mostly small businesses, as well as by hundreds of universities.
Google offers a service-level agreement of 99.9 percent uptime to people and organizations that sign up for the Premier edition of Google Apps, which costs US$50 per user per year.
Five tips for low-energy business computing
First, the data center dialed back its power consumption. Now it's the front office's turn.
Concerned about soaring energy costs, IT organizations have begun to make significant changes to the way their data centers are powered and cooled. But many IT departments haven't yet looked at saving energy by targeting the rest of the company's IT equipment.
That's short-sighted, say IT organizations that have been down this road. The reason -- data centers may use more power per square foot, but as a percentage of total power consumption, it's office equipment that's the big kahuna.
"Office equipment has become more highly featured and powerful than ever before, but there's an energy cost to that," says Katherine Kaplan, who manages the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star consumer electronics and IT initiatives.
"If you look at overall power consumption, you're seeing almost double for computers and monitors than for data centers," says Jon Weisblatt, senior product manager, power and cooling initiative at Dell Inc.
Verizon Wireless is one company that is saving plenty of green by going green. Earlier this year, the wireless carrier deployed NightWatchman power management software from 1E Ltd. that puts desktop computers and monitors in offices, stores and call centers into power-saving mode after a period of inactivity, overriding any personal settings. Another 1E product, SMSWakeup, automatically "wakes up" those machines after hours to deliver patches and updates, shutting them down again when the process is complete. "It saved us [money] just turning computers on and off on demand," says CIO Ajay Waghray.
But Waghray didn't stop there. He also replaced 7,000 PCs with power-sipping Sun Ray thin clients from Sun Microsystems Inc. in Verizon's call centers and migrated to LCD monitors companywide (a process that's still ongoing). Replacing nonmanaged PCs in 10 call centers with 7,000 managed thin clients cut energy use for that equipment by 30%, says Waghray. He estimates that the two initiatives combined have cut front-office power consumption by $900,000 a year.
To Waghray, going green is good business. The projects were good for customer service -- off-hours patching and the more-reliable thin clients improved uptime and reduced trouble-ticket volumes by 50%. "Just do business to make things more efficient, simple and customer focused, and green becomes a very important factor," he says.
There were an estimated 900 million desktops in use worldwide in 2006, according to IDC. Even if all of those units were Energy Star 2006 compliant, they would still consume 426 billion kWh of power annually.
If all of that equipment met the 2007 Energy Star 4.0 specification, it would cut power consumption by 27% over 2006 Energy Star levels, according to Marla Sanchez, principal research associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. That would save 115 billion kWh -- enough to power all of Switzerland for nearly two years -- and cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 178 billion lbs.
To do your part to reduce some of those emissions -- and save your own company some dough -- by following our five tips on saving resources and increasing the efficiency of front-office equipment.
1. Do an energy audit
It's hard to know where you stand if you don't first measure the efficiency of the equipment you have.
Fortunately, doing a power audit of ordinary office equipment is less complicated than auditing your data center. A simple, inexpensive meter that fits between the target device plug and the outlet can measure both current loads and cumulative power consumption over time.
If you select a device with a typical usage pattern -- say, a laser printer that gets an average-for-your-office workout each day -- you can multiply the results across the total population of similar equipment to quickly estimate total power consumption. From there, all you need to do is multiply use in kilowatt hours by your local electricity rates and you've got a baseline for savings.
Meters range from the simple to the advanced. P3 International Corp.'s Kill A Watt or Sea Sonic Electronics Co.'s Power Angel are both simple to use and inexpensive.
More advanced units, such as the Watts Up Pro from Electronic Educational Devices Inc., store data and include software for downloading and graphing that data to show watts, volts and kilowatt-hour consumption over time, giving a more accurate picture of power use.
When the facilities staff at Farmer's Almanac publisher Gieger Brothers in Lewiston, Maine, did an initial power audit, it became "a driving force behind initiatives to get power consumption down," says Joe Marshall, business systems analyst and software specialist at the firm. The audit revealed computer equipment was consuming nearly as much power after hours as it was during the day.
After you've audited energy use, the next step is to audit your internal processes to ensure that equipment is being used in the most energy-efficient manner, says Robert Aldrich, a senior manager specializing in energy efficiency at Cisco Systems Inc. And once you have that process audit -- in other words, once you know how well you are doing human-behavior-wise -- the next step is to "kick the tires on technology" by taking a look at utilities such as power management tools, he says.
2. Adopt and enforce power management
"The biggest impact you're going to make in your overall computing environment is to get systems to go to sleep," says Dell's Weisblatt. For example, a laptop that uses 14 to 90 watts in full operation uses less than 1 watt in standby mode. Desktops consume even more, and a single CRT monitor may use upward of 90 watts.
Most companies, however, aren't managing power settings in a coordinated way, and many desktops don't have power management turned on at all.
Enhanced power management tools provided by system vendors aren't even installed in the baseline system image of many corporate PCs. "We do all this work to make [computers] optimized for power management, and we find big corporations go and make changes and deoptimize it," says Howard Locker, director of new technology at Lenovo.
The issue is that it takes IT extra work to integrate and test Lenovo's bundled software with the company's standard image, he says. Often, organizations don't want to take the time to do that.
Some corporations, however, are starting to get the message. Network administrator Keith Brown deployed LANDesk Software's LANDesk to manage -- and lock down -- power settings on all laptops, desktops and attached monitors at Gwinnett Hospital System in Lawrenceville, Ga.
Power savings at the network level
When it comes to networking, power savings are more difficult to come by. In other words, sleep mode doesn't help much when the network never sleeps.
"If you want [your] YouTube video to come up in three seconds or less," quips Robert Aldrich, a senior manager specializing in energy efficiency at Cisco Systems, "the switches moving those packets have to be in always-on ready mode."
But he sees that changing. "By this time next year, any end devices we sell will have some sort of power-efficiency mode. That's a big initiative for us," he says.
Voice over IP and power over Ethernet (PoE) have also increased upfront office power demands by pushing power consumption from a central PBX out onto the desktop. An IP phone adds about 15 watts of power to each cubicle -- which adds up when you have 1,000 or more users. The PoE-enabled switches in the wiring closet also use more power than non-PoE models do.
Overall, however, a native VoIP system typically consumes less power than the digital PBX system it replaces, Aldrich says.
Like 1E's SMSWakeUp, LANDesk takes advantage of Intel Corp.'s vPro Active Management Technology (AMT), a feature built into its vPro series processors that supports remote management. That allows LANDesk and similar tools to remotely turn on PCs, upload updates, and turn them off again. "It allows you to do 'out-of-band' management on desktops," allowing control even when machines are turned off, explains Brown.
For times when laptops are turned on -- that is, when they're being used by employees -- Lenovo recommends configuring the disk drive to spin down after five minutes of inactivity, the monitor to go blank at 10 minutes, and the machine to go into standby, or suspend, mode after 20 minutes.
Others, such as Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the energy efficiency think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, recommend even more aggressive settings. He suggests turning off monitors and spinning down the disk drive after just two or three minutes of inactivity.
Verizon's Waghray says he had no trouble enforcing power-saving settings. Machines power off at 12:30 a.m. and back on at 5:30 a.m. Desktop monitors and hard drives go into power-saving mode after two hours, while on thin clients the monitors and processors go into low-power mode after 20 minutes of inactivity.
At Gieger, things were different. While the company does centrally control power management settings, it has had to back off a bit. "There's been a little bit of pushback on that, so we're taking baby steps," Marshall says, noting that current monitor timeouts are set for one hour.
The problem for users is that recovery times vary. Getting back online from hibernate mode, where the system turns off and the system's state is saved to disk, can take up to 30 seconds. It takes just a few seconds, though, to recover from low-power suspend mode or for the monitor or disk drive to come back to life. Still, some users don't like to wait at all, says Marshall.
Every organization needs to find the right balance, managers say. "A few seconds of [wait] time for the average person is not going to be invasive," says Jorge Bandin, vice president of information systems and technology at hosted services provider Terremark Worldwide Inc. His company forces all PCs to go into sleep mode after 30 minutes of inactivity.
In a call center, where computers are in use all the time, sleep mode less of an issue, but even so, people aren't given a choice, says Waghray. When users step away from a console for more than a couple of minutes, the system is powered down and locked.
3. Dump those CRTs
Replacing older computers and peripherals with Energy Star-rated equipment can save both energy and space -- and the lower power consumption can significantly reduce cooling loads in office areas, further extending savings.
The place to start is with CRT displays.
"The biggest offenders are the monitors," says Brown. Most businesses have already begun phasing out CRTs in favor of more efficient LCDs, which use about one-third less power, but they still have plenty of CRTs waiting to go. Verizon Wireless accelerated its refresh cycle because doing so not only saved energy but freed up valuable desk space in its call centers, says Waghray.
To save energy, move data, not people
Energy-efficient computers are good, energy-efficient people are even better. A green office is about more than using energy-efficient equipment: The application of information technology to support teleconferencing and telework can make both people and businesses more efficient.
Several hundred people employed with Cox Communications Inc.'s call center this year began working four out of five days from home. Using a browser and their own home computers, remote staff access a suite of applications hosted on a Citrix Presentation Server back end.
To access the system, call center workers download a browser plug-in and then authenticate to the system. "We can present the entire environment to any computer anywhere. We even stream content to employees for staff meetings," says Josh Nelson, vice president of information and network technology.
By rotating different teleworkers into the office on different days of the week, Cox has cut computer equipment and cubicle space needs, and avoided a building expansion.
Employees benefit, too: In an era of $3 a gallon gasoline, they have taken to the voluntary program because it saves four commuting trips to the office each week and takes several hundred cars -- and the emissions they produce -- off the roads each day. "It's been quite impressive from a cost perspective [and] what it does for the environment," Nelson says.
Terremark Worldwide Inc.'s hosting business requires employees to travel both globally and locally between facilities for everyday meetings. It recently deployed videoconferencing systems from Tandberg to tie together conference rooms between its facilities. Before, staff made regular trips between the main offices and its hosted data center facilities two hours away.
"It helped us avoid about 20% of the travel we were doing before," says George Bandin, vice president of information system and technology. "Just within our own facilities, it's a huge savings in fuel and time."
Energy savings can add up. Brown estimates that Gwinnett Hospital System is already saving between $30,000 and $60,000 a year in electricity costs by replacing about 70% of its CRTs with LCD monitors and using automated power management tools.
4. Slim down the client
As for the desktop, look for equipment that is Energy Star 4.0 compliant. Previous Energy Star ratings looked only at low-power modes, but "with this new version, we're comparing energy use while working," the EPA's Kaplan says. Computers that meet the standard consume 20% to 50% less energy than those that meet previous Energy Star standards, says Kaplan.
Compact PC models, such as Lenovo's ThinkCentre A61e desktop or Dell's Inspiron 531, are more efficient than standard desktops and save space as well as power (the A61e is about the size of a 3-inch-thick notebook binder). Compact PCs may use as little as half the power of a standard desktop, include Energy Star 4.0-mandated high-efficiency power supplies that are at least 80% efficient and include a low-speed fan that reduces noise levels.
Many businesses, including Jenny Craig, are moving to a Terminal Services or Citrix Presentation Server setup, which enables them to use easily managed thin client PCs on the desktop. Thin clients use less power and space, since they have no disk drive or fan, and the Windows session and applications run on the server.
For Jenny Craig, the noise factor was as important as energy savings when choosing Wyse Technology's thin clients. "When you throw 10 or 12 PCs into a front desk, you can't hear your customers anymore," says Alessandra Nicoletti, director of IT operations. So she moved the stores onto a Citrix Presentation Server back end and Java applications, and populated 484 Jenny Craig centers with thin clients from Wyse, which don't need a fan. Operating power consumption ranges from 6 and 35 watts, and power management settings can be locked and remotely managed.
While replacing PCs with thin clients does require adding servers on the back end that boost power requirements, the savings on the desktop more than make up for that, says Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer at Wyse. With the 64-bit edition of Presentation Server running on the back end, 1,000 PCs can be accommodated on three 800-watt servers. That amounts to about 3 watts per client, he says.
Jenny Craig's system uses 90% less energy than the PCs it replaced. "We see it on the bills [for the centers]," Nicoletti says.
Waghray says thin clients had other benefits in Verizon Wireless' call centers, where equipment density is high and space is at a premium. "We have seen a reduction in cooling needs for the whole building," he says.
For all their energy-saving benefits, thin clients won't work in every case, such as for some graphics or compute-intensive applications. Northrup Grumman Corp.'s space technology sector is rolling out 3,000 thin clients and has tested 39 engineering applications. While most ran just fine, a few graphics-intensive ones didn't work, says Clayton Kau, vice president of engineering.
And other companies have encountered user resistance. Gwinnett Hospital System has dabbled in thin clients, but has stalled at around 100 terminals. "It hasn't always worked out as we had hoped," says Brown, noting that most employees pushed back, preferring to have a fully equipped desktop that runs their applications locally.
5. Print more efficiently
Desktops and laptops aren't the only area where IT can improve efficiency. Printers tend to be kept longer than PCs, but each year new models bring greater efficiencies.
With each generation of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s printers, for example, energy efficiency has increased by 7% to 15%, according to the vendor's statistics. Therefore, replacing units a few generations old with new, Energy Star-labeled models can cut energy costs by as much as 25%. Also, consumables packaging may be smaller with new machines, which means less waste to throw away.
New technologies are also improving efficiency. Last spring, for example, HP began replacing the fluorescent tubes used for photocopying with LEDs in some products. The technology uses 1.4 times less energy during copying and four times less power when idle, according to the company.
Printers are also getting smarter about when to go into low-power mode. Multifunction printers from Xerox, for example, monitor printer usage patterns over time to decide when to power down and bring the machines online.
Both Jenny Craig and Terremark Worldwide have configured printers to print double-sided by default. While using duplex mode doesn't save energy, it does avoid unnecessary utilization of paper, says Jorge Bandin, vice president of information systems and technology at Terremark. Duplex mode can cut paper consumption by up to 25%, says Dave Lombato, environmental lead for HP's LaserJet business.
While that won't cut the company's energy bill, it does cut down on paper costs as well as the energy and carbon emissions required to produce it. According to Forrester Research Inc., pulp and paper manufacturing is the third biggest consumer of energy in North America, behind steel and chemicals.
Administrators can configure duplex printing across all printers, invoke power-saving modes or configure machines to shut down during specific evening or weekend hours using automation tools available from various printer vendors.
Consolidating and better managing printers, scanners and other peripherals also saves energy and money. According to Forrester, an individual copier, printer and fax machine can consume 1,400 kWh of power annually, while a multifunction printer (MFP) consumes half that.
Multifunction printer devices, which combing copying, printing, scanning and fax, offer additional efficiencies, making consumables management easier and saving space as well as energy. Consolidating just two devices into a single machine, for example, cuts energy consumption by about 40%, according to HP. Terremark uses MFPs in conjunction with j2 Global Communications Inc.'s eFax service, which routes incoming faxes to an e-mail in-box instead of to a printer.
But while MFP sales are growing at double-digit rates, many businesses still have an array of printers, copiers, scanners and fax machines that remain largely unmanaged. "For every MFP out there, there are [still] six or seven printers," says IDC analyst Keith Kmetz. By 2011, however, IDC expects the ratio to be closer to one to three.
While there's no one-size-fits-all solution for energy-efficient computing, the best options will be those that complement the business by simplifying processes, making staff more efficient and serving the customer better, says Verizon Wireless' Waghray.
While green isn't necessarily the goal, he says, it is a means to those ends. The best way to begin, he says, is to "start to think about [green computing] as something that's pretty much part and parcel of what you're doing anyway."
Concerned about soaring energy costs, IT organizations have begun to make significant changes to the way their data centers are powered and cooled. But many IT departments haven't yet looked at saving energy by targeting the rest of the company's IT equipment.
That's short-sighted, say IT organizations that have been down this road. The reason -- data centers may use more power per square foot, but as a percentage of total power consumption, it's office equipment that's the big kahuna.
"Office equipment has become more highly featured and powerful than ever before, but there's an energy cost to that," says Katherine Kaplan, who manages the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star consumer electronics and IT initiatives.
"If you look at overall power consumption, you're seeing almost double for computers and monitors than for data centers," says Jon Weisblatt, senior product manager, power and cooling initiative at Dell Inc.
Verizon Wireless is one company that is saving plenty of green by going green. Earlier this year, the wireless carrier deployed NightWatchman power management software from 1E Ltd. that puts desktop computers and monitors in offices, stores and call centers into power-saving mode after a period of inactivity, overriding any personal settings. Another 1E product, SMSWakeup, automatically "wakes up" those machines after hours to deliver patches and updates, shutting them down again when the process is complete. "It saved us [money] just turning computers on and off on demand," says CIO Ajay Waghray.
But Waghray didn't stop there. He also replaced 7,000 PCs with power-sipping Sun Ray thin clients from Sun Microsystems Inc. in Verizon's call centers and migrated to LCD monitors companywide (a process that's still ongoing). Replacing nonmanaged PCs in 10 call centers with 7,000 managed thin clients cut energy use for that equipment by 30%, says Waghray. He estimates that the two initiatives combined have cut front-office power consumption by $900,000 a year.
To Waghray, going green is good business. The projects were good for customer service -- off-hours patching and the more-reliable thin clients improved uptime and reduced trouble-ticket volumes by 50%. "Just do business to make things more efficient, simple and customer focused, and green becomes a very important factor," he says.
There were an estimated 900 million desktops in use worldwide in 2006, according to IDC. Even if all of those units were Energy Star 2006 compliant, they would still consume 426 billion kWh of power annually.
If all of that equipment met the 2007 Energy Star 4.0 specification, it would cut power consumption by 27% over 2006 Energy Star levels, according to Marla Sanchez, principal research associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. That would save 115 billion kWh -- enough to power all of Switzerland for nearly two years -- and cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 178 billion lbs.
To do your part to reduce some of those emissions -- and save your own company some dough -- by following our five tips on saving resources and increasing the efficiency of front-office equipment.
1. Do an energy audit
It's hard to know where you stand if you don't first measure the efficiency of the equipment you have.
Fortunately, doing a power audit of ordinary office equipment is less complicated than auditing your data center. A simple, inexpensive meter that fits between the target device plug and the outlet can measure both current loads and cumulative power consumption over time.
If you select a device with a typical usage pattern -- say, a laser printer that gets an average-for-your-office workout each day -- you can multiply the results across the total population of similar equipment to quickly estimate total power consumption. From there, all you need to do is multiply use in kilowatt hours by your local electricity rates and you've got a baseline for savings.
Meters range from the simple to the advanced. P3 International Corp.'s Kill A Watt or Sea Sonic Electronics Co.'s Power Angel are both simple to use and inexpensive.
More advanced units, such as the Watts Up Pro from Electronic Educational Devices Inc., store data and include software for downloading and graphing that data to show watts, volts and kilowatt-hour consumption over time, giving a more accurate picture of power use.
When the facilities staff at Farmer's Almanac publisher Gieger Brothers in Lewiston, Maine, did an initial power audit, it became "a driving force behind initiatives to get power consumption down," says Joe Marshall, business systems analyst and software specialist at the firm. The audit revealed computer equipment was consuming nearly as much power after hours as it was during the day.
After you've audited energy use, the next step is to audit your internal processes to ensure that equipment is being used in the most energy-efficient manner, says Robert Aldrich, a senior manager specializing in energy efficiency at Cisco Systems Inc. And once you have that process audit -- in other words, once you know how well you are doing human-behavior-wise -- the next step is to "kick the tires on technology" by taking a look at utilities such as power management tools, he says.
2. Adopt and enforce power management
"The biggest impact you're going to make in your overall computing environment is to get systems to go to sleep," says Dell's Weisblatt. For example, a laptop that uses 14 to 90 watts in full operation uses less than 1 watt in standby mode. Desktops consume even more, and a single CRT monitor may use upward of 90 watts.
Most companies, however, aren't managing power settings in a coordinated way, and many desktops don't have power management turned on at all.
Enhanced power management tools provided by system vendors aren't even installed in the baseline system image of many corporate PCs. "We do all this work to make [computers] optimized for power management, and we find big corporations go and make changes and deoptimize it," says Howard Locker, director of new technology at Lenovo.
The issue is that it takes IT extra work to integrate and test Lenovo's bundled software with the company's standard image, he says. Often, organizations don't want to take the time to do that.
Some corporations, however, are starting to get the message. Network administrator Keith Brown deployed LANDesk Software's LANDesk to manage -- and lock down -- power settings on all laptops, desktops and attached monitors at Gwinnett Hospital System in Lawrenceville, Ga.
Power savings at the network level
When it comes to networking, power savings are more difficult to come by. In other words, sleep mode doesn't help much when the network never sleeps.
"If you want [your] YouTube video to come up in three seconds or less," quips Robert Aldrich, a senior manager specializing in energy efficiency at Cisco Systems, "the switches moving those packets have to be in always-on ready mode."
But he sees that changing. "By this time next year, any end devices we sell will have some sort of power-efficiency mode. That's a big initiative for us," he says.
Voice over IP and power over Ethernet (PoE) have also increased upfront office power demands by pushing power consumption from a central PBX out onto the desktop. An IP phone adds about 15 watts of power to each cubicle -- which adds up when you have 1,000 or more users. The PoE-enabled switches in the wiring closet also use more power than non-PoE models do.
Overall, however, a native VoIP system typically consumes less power than the digital PBX system it replaces, Aldrich says.
Like 1E's SMSWakeUp, LANDesk takes advantage of Intel Corp.'s vPro Active Management Technology (AMT), a feature built into its vPro series processors that supports remote management. That allows LANDesk and similar tools to remotely turn on PCs, upload updates, and turn them off again. "It allows you to do 'out-of-band' management on desktops," allowing control even when machines are turned off, explains Brown.
For times when laptops are turned on -- that is, when they're being used by employees -- Lenovo recommends configuring the disk drive to spin down after five minutes of inactivity, the monitor to go blank at 10 minutes, and the machine to go into standby, or suspend, mode after 20 minutes.
Others, such as Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the energy efficiency think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, recommend even more aggressive settings. He suggests turning off monitors and spinning down the disk drive after just two or three minutes of inactivity.
Verizon's Waghray says he had no trouble enforcing power-saving settings. Machines power off at 12:30 a.m. and back on at 5:30 a.m. Desktop monitors and hard drives go into power-saving mode after two hours, while on thin clients the monitors and processors go into low-power mode after 20 minutes of inactivity.
At Gieger, things were different. While the company does centrally control power management settings, it has had to back off a bit. "There's been a little bit of pushback on that, so we're taking baby steps," Marshall says, noting that current monitor timeouts are set for one hour.
The problem for users is that recovery times vary. Getting back online from hibernate mode, where the system turns off and the system's state is saved to disk, can take up to 30 seconds. It takes just a few seconds, though, to recover from low-power suspend mode or for the monitor or disk drive to come back to life. Still, some users don't like to wait at all, says Marshall.
Every organization needs to find the right balance, managers say. "A few seconds of [wait] time for the average person is not going to be invasive," says Jorge Bandin, vice president of information systems and technology at hosted services provider Terremark Worldwide Inc. His company forces all PCs to go into sleep mode after 30 minutes of inactivity.
In a call center, where computers are in use all the time, sleep mode less of an issue, but even so, people aren't given a choice, says Waghray. When users step away from a console for more than a couple of minutes, the system is powered down and locked.
3. Dump those CRTs
Replacing older computers and peripherals with Energy Star-rated equipment can save both energy and space -- and the lower power consumption can significantly reduce cooling loads in office areas, further extending savings.
The place to start is with CRT displays.
"The biggest offenders are the monitors," says Brown. Most businesses have already begun phasing out CRTs in favor of more efficient LCDs, which use about one-third less power, but they still have plenty of CRTs waiting to go. Verizon Wireless accelerated its refresh cycle because doing so not only saved energy but freed up valuable desk space in its call centers, says Waghray.
To save energy, move data, not people
Energy-efficient computers are good, energy-efficient people are even better. A green office is about more than using energy-efficient equipment: The application of information technology to support teleconferencing and telework can make both people and businesses more efficient.
Several hundred people employed with Cox Communications Inc.'s call center this year began working four out of five days from home. Using a browser and their own home computers, remote staff access a suite of applications hosted on a Citrix Presentation Server back end.
To access the system, call center workers download a browser plug-in and then authenticate to the system. "We can present the entire environment to any computer anywhere. We even stream content to employees for staff meetings," says Josh Nelson, vice president of information and network technology.
By rotating different teleworkers into the office on different days of the week, Cox has cut computer equipment and cubicle space needs, and avoided a building expansion.
Employees benefit, too: In an era of $3 a gallon gasoline, they have taken to the voluntary program because it saves four commuting trips to the office each week and takes several hundred cars -- and the emissions they produce -- off the roads each day. "It's been quite impressive from a cost perspective [and] what it does for the environment," Nelson says.
Terremark Worldwide Inc.'s hosting business requires employees to travel both globally and locally between facilities for everyday meetings. It recently deployed videoconferencing systems from Tandberg to tie together conference rooms between its facilities. Before, staff made regular trips between the main offices and its hosted data center facilities two hours away.
"It helped us avoid about 20% of the travel we were doing before," says George Bandin, vice president of information system and technology. "Just within our own facilities, it's a huge savings in fuel and time."
Energy savings can add up. Brown estimates that Gwinnett Hospital System is already saving between $30,000 and $60,000 a year in electricity costs by replacing about 70% of its CRTs with LCD monitors and using automated power management tools.
4. Slim down the client
As for the desktop, look for equipment that is Energy Star 4.0 compliant. Previous Energy Star ratings looked only at low-power modes, but "with this new version, we're comparing energy use while working," the EPA's Kaplan says. Computers that meet the standard consume 20% to 50% less energy than those that meet previous Energy Star standards, says Kaplan.
Compact PC models, such as Lenovo's ThinkCentre A61e desktop or Dell's Inspiron 531, are more efficient than standard desktops and save space as well as power (the A61e is about the size of a 3-inch-thick notebook binder). Compact PCs may use as little as half the power of a standard desktop, include Energy Star 4.0-mandated high-efficiency power supplies that are at least 80% efficient and include a low-speed fan that reduces noise levels.
Many businesses, including Jenny Craig, are moving to a Terminal Services or Citrix Presentation Server setup, which enables them to use easily managed thin client PCs on the desktop. Thin clients use less power and space, since they have no disk drive or fan, and the Windows session and applications run on the server.
For Jenny Craig, the noise factor was as important as energy savings when choosing Wyse Technology's thin clients. "When you throw 10 or 12 PCs into a front desk, you can't hear your customers anymore," says Alessandra Nicoletti, director of IT operations. So she moved the stores onto a Citrix Presentation Server back end and Java applications, and populated 484 Jenny Craig centers with thin clients from Wyse, which don't need a fan. Operating power consumption ranges from 6 and 35 watts, and power management settings can be locked and remotely managed.
While replacing PCs with thin clients does require adding servers on the back end that boost power requirements, the savings on the desktop more than make up for that, says Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer at Wyse. With the 64-bit edition of Presentation Server running on the back end, 1,000 PCs can be accommodated on three 800-watt servers. That amounts to about 3 watts per client, he says.
Jenny Craig's system uses 90% less energy than the PCs it replaced. "We see it on the bills [for the centers]," Nicoletti says.
Waghray says thin clients had other benefits in Verizon Wireless' call centers, where equipment density is high and space is at a premium. "We have seen a reduction in cooling needs for the whole building," he says.
For all their energy-saving benefits, thin clients won't work in every case, such as for some graphics or compute-intensive applications. Northrup Grumman Corp.'s space technology sector is rolling out 3,000 thin clients and has tested 39 engineering applications. While most ran just fine, a few graphics-intensive ones didn't work, says Clayton Kau, vice president of engineering.
And other companies have encountered user resistance. Gwinnett Hospital System has dabbled in thin clients, but has stalled at around 100 terminals. "It hasn't always worked out as we had hoped," says Brown, noting that most employees pushed back, preferring to have a fully equipped desktop that runs their applications locally.
5. Print more efficiently
Desktops and laptops aren't the only area where IT can improve efficiency. Printers tend to be kept longer than PCs, but each year new models bring greater efficiencies.
With each generation of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s printers, for example, energy efficiency has increased by 7% to 15%, according to the vendor's statistics. Therefore, replacing units a few generations old with new, Energy Star-labeled models can cut energy costs by as much as 25%. Also, consumables packaging may be smaller with new machines, which means less waste to throw away.
New technologies are also improving efficiency. Last spring, for example, HP began replacing the fluorescent tubes used for photocopying with LEDs in some products. The technology uses 1.4 times less energy during copying and four times less power when idle, according to the company.
Printers are also getting smarter about when to go into low-power mode. Multifunction printers from Xerox, for example, monitor printer usage patterns over time to decide when to power down and bring the machines online.
Both Jenny Craig and Terremark Worldwide have configured printers to print double-sided by default. While using duplex mode doesn't save energy, it does avoid unnecessary utilization of paper, says Jorge Bandin, vice president of information systems and technology at Terremark. Duplex mode can cut paper consumption by up to 25%, says Dave Lombato, environmental lead for HP's LaserJet business.
While that won't cut the company's energy bill, it does cut down on paper costs as well as the energy and carbon emissions required to produce it. According to Forrester Research Inc., pulp and paper manufacturing is the third biggest consumer of energy in North America, behind steel and chemicals.
Administrators can configure duplex printing across all printers, invoke power-saving modes or configure machines to shut down during specific evening or weekend hours using automation tools available from various printer vendors.
Consolidating and better managing printers, scanners and other peripherals also saves energy and money. According to Forrester, an individual copier, printer and fax machine can consume 1,400 kWh of power annually, while a multifunction printer (MFP) consumes half that.
Multifunction printer devices, which combing copying, printing, scanning and fax, offer additional efficiencies, making consumables management easier and saving space as well as energy. Consolidating just two devices into a single machine, for example, cuts energy consumption by about 40%, according to HP. Terremark uses MFPs in conjunction with j2 Global Communications Inc.'s eFax service, which routes incoming faxes to an e-mail in-box instead of to a printer.
But while MFP sales are growing at double-digit rates, many businesses still have an array of printers, copiers, scanners and fax machines that remain largely unmanaged. "For every MFP out there, there are [still] six or seven printers," says IDC analyst Keith Kmetz. By 2011, however, IDC expects the ratio to be closer to one to three.
While there's no one-size-fits-all solution for energy-efficient computing, the best options will be those that complement the business by simplifying processes, making staff more efficient and serving the customer better, says Verizon Wireless' Waghray.
While green isn't necessarily the goal, he says, it is a means to those ends. The best way to begin, he says, is to "start to think about [green computing] as something that's pretty much part and parcel of what you're doing anyway."
Senate passes extension of R&D tax credit
The U.S. Senate has passed a one-year extension to a research and development tax credit program supported by many technology trade groups.
The Senate late Thursday voted to pass the Temporary Tax Relief Act, which the House of Representatives approved Nov. 9. The tax credit, which covers 20 percent of qualified R&D spending, expires on Dec. 31, the 13th time it runs out since first approved by Congress in 1981.
Several tech trade groups have pushed Congress to expand the tax credit and make it permanent, but lawmakers have balked because of the US$9 billion a year cost.
The tax bill now goes to U.S. President George Bush for his signature.
The Senate passage of the bill allows companies to plan for next year's R&D work, said the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), a trade group representing telecom technology vendors.
"With these votes, both houses have shown they recognize that research and development are essential to U.S. competitiveness in the communications industry," TIA President Grant Seiffert, said in a statement. "In future years we hope to see the credit made permanent, but this extension is a step in the right direction."
On Tuesday, more than 40 trade groups, including the Business Software Alliance, the Biotechnology Industry Association, the Information Technology Association of America and the Information Technology Industry Council, sent a letter to congressional leaders, pressing lawmakers to pass the extension.
Some lawmakers said a one-year extension isn't long enough, however. Companies need more time to plan investments in R&D, said Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican.
"One year doesn't do that," he said in an interview this week. "If [companies] are expecting to make major investments in technology in the future, you've got to give them a longer lead time than one year."
The Senate late Thursday voted to pass the Temporary Tax Relief Act, which the House of Representatives approved Nov. 9. The tax credit, which covers 20 percent of qualified R&D spending, expires on Dec. 31, the 13th time it runs out since first approved by Congress in 1981.
Several tech trade groups have pushed Congress to expand the tax credit and make it permanent, but lawmakers have balked because of the US$9 billion a year cost.
The tax bill now goes to U.S. President George Bush for his signature.
The Senate passage of the bill allows companies to plan for next year's R&D work, said the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), a trade group representing telecom technology vendors.
"With these votes, both houses have shown they recognize that research and development are essential to U.S. competitiveness in the communications industry," TIA President Grant Seiffert, said in a statement. "In future years we hope to see the credit made permanent, but this extension is a step in the right direction."
On Tuesday, more than 40 trade groups, including the Business Software Alliance, the Biotechnology Industry Association, the Information Technology Association of America and the Information Technology Industry Council, sent a letter to congressional leaders, pressing lawmakers to pass the extension.
Some lawmakers said a one-year extension isn't long enough, however. Companies need more time to plan investments in R&D, said Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican.
"One year doesn't do that," he said in an interview this week. "If [companies] are expecting to make major investments in technology in the future, you've got to give them a longer lead time than one year."
Unusual tales of data disaster
Ant-infested hard drives and failing parachutes top the list of data disaster horror stories for 2007.
The list provided by Ontrack Data Recovery illustrates some of the strangest and wackiest things that people put electronic storage devices through on a regular basis.
From putting drives in the washing machine to using oil to stop them from squeaking, these are just some of the stories nominated by the company's engineers.
This year the company has seen more damaged portable devices than ever before and has tackled an ever-widening range of recovery challenges.
There are the usual tales involving washing machines.
A woman called complaining she had 'washed all her data away'. Her USB stick had been through a cycle in her washing machine and unsurprisingly she couldn't retrieve any data from it.
A wedding photographer faced the potential wrath of a new bride when he discovered he had overwritten her photos with ones from another event. Two days before the couple returned from their honeymoon, he called Ontrack Data Recovery for help. Thankfully, the bride was none the wiser.
A scientist spilt acid on an external hard drive during an experiment. Thinking all the data had been burnt, he called in the experts, who were able to successfully recover the data on the drive.
A fire destroyed the majority of the contents of an office, only leaving a few CDs. The sticking point was they had melted to the inside of their cases, this was a unique job for the engineers but they succeeded.
This was another tough data recovery job. A British scientist was fed up with his hard drive squeaking, so he drilled a hole through the casing and poured oil into the mechanics. The squeaking stopped, and so did the hard drive.
Finally, in an effort to test the functionality of a parachute, a camera (acting as the cargo) was dropped from a plane. Unfortunately, the parachute failed its test and the fragile cargo shattered into several pieces. Ontrack was able to reassemble the camera's memory stick and the video of the parachute's demise was recovered.
But the best recovery of all has to be the ant invasion.
Discovering ants had taken up residence in his external hard drive, a photographer in Thailand took the cover off and sprayed the interior with insect repellent.
The ants didn't make it but engineers were able to retrieve the data.
The company's general manager, Adrian Briscoe, said staff are always fascinated by the extraordinary things people do to data that is often irreplaceable.
"We can often perform a successful recovery from what may seem to be a hopeless case - proving that you should never give up," he said.
The list provided by Ontrack Data Recovery illustrates some of the strangest and wackiest things that people put electronic storage devices through on a regular basis.
From putting drives in the washing machine to using oil to stop them from squeaking, these are just some of the stories nominated by the company's engineers.
This year the company has seen more damaged portable devices than ever before and has tackled an ever-widening range of recovery challenges.
There are the usual tales involving washing machines.
A woman called complaining she had 'washed all her data away'. Her USB stick had been through a cycle in her washing machine and unsurprisingly she couldn't retrieve any data from it.
A wedding photographer faced the potential wrath of a new bride when he discovered he had overwritten her photos with ones from another event. Two days before the couple returned from their honeymoon, he called Ontrack Data Recovery for help. Thankfully, the bride was none the wiser.
A scientist spilt acid on an external hard drive during an experiment. Thinking all the data had been burnt, he called in the experts, who were able to successfully recover the data on the drive.
A fire destroyed the majority of the contents of an office, only leaving a few CDs. The sticking point was they had melted to the inside of their cases, this was a unique job for the engineers but they succeeded.
This was another tough data recovery job. A British scientist was fed up with his hard drive squeaking, so he drilled a hole through the casing and poured oil into the mechanics. The squeaking stopped, and so did the hard drive.
Finally, in an effort to test the functionality of a parachute, a camera (acting as the cargo) was dropped from a plane. Unfortunately, the parachute failed its test and the fragile cargo shattered into several pieces. Ontrack was able to reassemble the camera's memory stick and the video of the parachute's demise was recovered.
But the best recovery of all has to be the ant invasion.
Discovering ants had taken up residence in his external hard drive, a photographer in Thailand took the cover off and sprayed the interior with insect repellent.
The ants didn't make it but engineers were able to retrieve the data.
The company's general manager, Adrian Briscoe, said staff are always fascinated by the extraordinary things people do to data that is often irreplaceable.
"We can often perform a successful recovery from what may seem to be a hopeless case - proving that you should never give up," he said.
'Zombie' exploits cached by search engines
Over a year after first coming to light, the cache engines of major search engines are still providing a safe hiding place for malicious code, a security company has revealed.
The latest warning comes from security company Aladdin, which logged an attack against a university website which was eventually traced back to just such a 'poisoned cache.' The originating site had been taken offline, but the code from it was still able to spread by living on in the caches of a major search engine.
To make matters worse, cached malicious code could circumvent URL filtering systems because they would only stop the original site URL and not the site as found via a search engine indexing it from cache.
Aladdin didn't specify the engine involved in the incident, but did say the problem affected Google, MSN Live and Yahoo. According to Aladdin's Ofer Elzam, cached pages could remain active for weeks and possibly even months, and would remain in their original state until the cache algorithm refreshed its store.
"As I see it, they [search engines] have done nothing to solve it," he said of the problem. "It is they who are infecting the users. Do they feel responsible?"
This type of cache poisoning was first noticed around four years ago, with Israeli security company Finjan claiming last year that it was also to some extent affecting ISP and enterprise caching systems.
"This is more than just a theoretical danger. It is possible that storage and caching servers could unintentionally become the largest 'legitimate' storage venue for malicious code," said Finjan's CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak said at the time. "Almost every malicious website out there has a copy on a caching server."
The attack documented by Aladdin involved a nest of inter-linked websites, and a swarm of over a hundred Trojans, of which 51 were not detectable by signature-based scanning products. Advanced cross-site scripting attacks and code injection could also be launched from cached sites, the company said.
The latest warning comes from security company Aladdin, which logged an attack against a university website which was eventually traced back to just such a 'poisoned cache.' The originating site had been taken offline, but the code from it was still able to spread by living on in the caches of a major search engine.
To make matters worse, cached malicious code could circumvent URL filtering systems because they would only stop the original site URL and not the site as found via a search engine indexing it from cache.
Aladdin didn't specify the engine involved in the incident, but did say the problem affected Google, MSN Live and Yahoo. According to Aladdin's Ofer Elzam, cached pages could remain active for weeks and possibly even months, and would remain in their original state until the cache algorithm refreshed its store.
"As I see it, they [search engines] have done nothing to solve it," he said of the problem. "It is they who are infecting the users. Do they feel responsible?"
This type of cache poisoning was first noticed around four years ago, with Israeli security company Finjan claiming last year that it was also to some extent affecting ISP and enterprise caching systems.
"This is more than just a theoretical danger. It is possible that storage and caching servers could unintentionally become the largest 'legitimate' storage venue for malicious code," said Finjan's CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak said at the time. "Almost every malicious website out there has a copy on a caching server."
The attack documented by Aladdin involved a nest of inter-linked websites, and a swarm of over a hundred Trojans, of which 51 were not detectable by signature-based scanning products. Advanced cross-site scripting attacks and code injection could also be launched from cached sites, the company said.
Hackers launch major attack on national labs
Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.' most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
In what a spokesperson for the Oak Ridge facility described as a "sophisticated cyber attack," it appears that intruders accessed a database of visitors to the Tennessee lab between 1990 and 2004, which included their social security numbers and dates of birth. Three thousand researchers reportedly visit the lab each year, a who's who of the science establishment in the U.S.
The attack was described as being conducted through several waves of phishing emails with malicious attachments, starting on Oct. 29. Although not stated, these would presumably have launched Trojans if opened, designed to bypass security systems from within, which raises the likelihood that the attacks were targeted specifically at the lab.
ORNL director, Thom Mason, described the attacks in an email to staff earlier this week as being a "coordinated attempt to gain access to computer networks at numerous laboratories and other institutions across the country."
"Because of the sensitive nature of this event, the laboratory will be unable for some period to discuss further details until we better understand the full nature of this attack," he added.
The ORNL has set up a web page giving an official statement on the attacks, with advice to employees and visitors that they should inform credit agencies so as to minimize the possibility of identity theft.
Less is known about the attacks said to have been launched against the ORNL's sister-institution at Los Alamos, but the two are said to be linked. It has not been confirmed that the latter facility was penetrated successfully, though given that a Los Alamos spokesman said that staff had been notified of an attack on Nov. 9 - days after the earliest attack wave on the ORNL - the assumption has to be that something untoward happened there as well, and probably at other science labs across the U.S.
The ORNL is a multipurpose science lab, a site of technological expertise used in homeland security and military research, and also the site of one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Los Alamos operates a similar multi-disciplinary approach, but specializes in nuclear weapons research, one of only two such sites doing such top-secret work in the U.S.
Los Alamos has a checkered security history, having suffered a sequence of embarrassing breaches in recent years. In August of this year, it was revealed that the lab had released sensitive nuclear research data by email, while in 2006 a drug dealer was allegedly found with a USB stick containing data on nuclear weapons tests.
"This appears to be a new low, even drug dealers can get classified information out of Los Alamos," Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), said at the time. Two years earlier, the lab was accused of having lost hard disks
The possibility that the latest attacks were the work of fraudsters will be seen by some as optimistic - less positive would be the possibility of a rival government having been involved. Given the apparently coordinated nature of events, speculation will inevitably point to this scenario, with the data theft a cover motivation for more serious incursions.
In what a spokesperson for the Oak Ridge facility described as a "sophisticated cyber attack," it appears that intruders accessed a database of visitors to the Tennessee lab between 1990 and 2004, which included their social security numbers and dates of birth. Three thousand researchers reportedly visit the lab each year, a who's who of the science establishment in the U.S.
The attack was described as being conducted through several waves of phishing emails with malicious attachments, starting on Oct. 29. Although not stated, these would presumably have launched Trojans if opened, designed to bypass security systems from within, which raises the likelihood that the attacks were targeted specifically at the lab.
ORNL director, Thom Mason, described the attacks in an email to staff earlier this week as being a "coordinated attempt to gain access to computer networks at numerous laboratories and other institutions across the country."
"Because of the sensitive nature of this event, the laboratory will be unable for some period to discuss further details until we better understand the full nature of this attack," he added.
The ORNL has set up a web page giving an official statement on the attacks, with advice to employees and visitors that they should inform credit agencies so as to minimize the possibility of identity theft.
Less is known about the attacks said to have been launched against the ORNL's sister-institution at Los Alamos, but the two are said to be linked. It has not been confirmed that the latter facility was penetrated successfully, though given that a Los Alamos spokesman said that staff had been notified of an attack on Nov. 9 - days after the earliest attack wave on the ORNL - the assumption has to be that something untoward happened there as well, and probably at other science labs across the U.S.
The ORNL is a multipurpose science lab, a site of technological expertise used in homeland security and military research, and also the site of one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Los Alamos operates a similar multi-disciplinary approach, but specializes in nuclear weapons research, one of only two such sites doing such top-secret work in the U.S.
Los Alamos has a checkered security history, having suffered a sequence of embarrassing breaches in recent years. In August of this year, it was revealed that the lab had released sensitive nuclear research data by email, while in 2006 a drug dealer was allegedly found with a USB stick containing data on nuclear weapons tests.
"This appears to be a new low, even drug dealers can get classified information out of Los Alamos," Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), said at the time. Two years earlier, the lab was accused of having lost hard disks
The possibility that the latest attacks were the work of fraudsters will be seen by some as optimistic - less positive would be the possibility of a rival government having been involved. Given the apparently coordinated nature of events, speculation will inevitably point to this scenario, with the data theft a cover motivation for more serious incursions.
Report: Apple threatens shops selling iPhone in Singapore
Apple recently threatened retailers in a Singapore mall with legal action if they continue to sell unlocked iPhones, prompting many to stop selling the handsets, The Straits Times newspaper reported Friday.
"Apple threatened in an e-mail to go after them for illegally 'unlocking' parallel imported iPhones," the newspaper reported Friday, citing several anonymous sources. Apple threatened to pursue damages of S$1,000 (US$691) for every unlocked iPhone sold by retailers in Sim Lim Square, a local mall full of electronics shops, the report said.
The Straits Times report indicated Apple's threats rest on a claim that unlocking the iPhone was a violation of the software license agreement. That is not the case in the U.S., where laws provide a specific exemption that allows users to unlock cell phones.
Apple was not available to comment on the report.
The iPhone is not officially available in Singapore, but unlocked handsets have been on sale for some time in local electronics market, as they have in other countries around Asia. However, calls to several shops in Sim Lim Square Friday confirmed that unlocked iPhones have become scarce.
"We used to sell it, but not anymore," said a sales manager at Royal Plus Pacific, an electronics shop in Sim Lim Square. The shop stopped selling iPhones because they ran out of stock, he said, adding they hadn't received a threatening e-mail from Apple.
"Apple threatened in an e-mail to go after them for illegally 'unlocking' parallel imported iPhones," the newspaper reported Friday, citing several anonymous sources. Apple threatened to pursue damages of S$1,000 (US$691) for every unlocked iPhone sold by retailers in Sim Lim Square, a local mall full of electronics shops, the report said.
The Straits Times report indicated Apple's threats rest on a claim that unlocking the iPhone was a violation of the software license agreement. That is not the case in the U.S., where laws provide a specific exemption that allows users to unlock cell phones.
Apple was not available to comment on the report.
The iPhone is not officially available in Singapore, but unlocked handsets have been on sale for some time in local electronics market, as they have in other countries around Asia. However, calls to several shops in Sim Lim Square Friday confirmed that unlocked iPhones have become scarce.
"We used to sell it, but not anymore," said a sales manager at Royal Plus Pacific, an electronics shop in Sim Lim Square. The shop stopped selling iPhones because they ran out of stock, he said, adding they hadn't received a threatening e-mail from Apple.
IBM system to scan streets at Beijing Olympics, NYC
When the 2008 Olympic Games kick off in Beijing next year, organizers will be using a sophisticated computer system to scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists.
The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, or S3, uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected. It can be used to warn security guards when someone has entered a secure area or keep track of cars coming in and out of a parking lot.
Beijing's S3 network is already being rolled out and is expected to be operational by the time the Games begin in August 2008, said Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM.
Terrorists have used the Olympic spotlight to grab international attention for their causes, and at next year's event terrorism will be the top security concern, Beijing officials have said.
That means that IBM's S3 system could end up being tested in a very public fashion.
"I was at the Kennedy School (of Government at Harvard University) a couple of weeks ago, and some guy got up and said, "If there's a security incident at the Beijing Olympics, it's going to change the course of capitalism forever," and I'm like, 'Oh man!'" Donahue said.
IBM is also developing a similar surveillance system for lower Manhattan, but has not yet begun deploying that project, she added.
Just one year ago, the S3 system was little more than a research project at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, but in the past year the company's service group has been working hard to develop it into a profitable line of business, selling it to retail and banking customers such as Italy's UniCredit bank.
IBM is also integrating the S3 system into the city of Chicago's existing surveillance infrastructure, as part of the city's Operation Virtual Shield emergency response project.
This ability to weave S3 into an existing network and video surveillance infrastructure is an important selling point for the product, Donahue said. "It's expensive to get that video infrastructure in place just for even basic analog cameras," she said. "So what we do is, we can hook in your analog cameras and reuse that infrastructure, put in IP-based cameras and then architect it so that we can do the right level of analytics."
"Physical security and IT security are stating to come together," she said. "A lot of the guys I'm meeting on the IT side are just starting to get involved on the physical side."
The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, or S3, uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected. It can be used to warn security guards when someone has entered a secure area or keep track of cars coming in and out of a parking lot.
Beijing's S3 network is already being rolled out and is expected to be operational by the time the Games begin in August 2008, said Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM.
Terrorists have used the Olympic spotlight to grab international attention for their causes, and at next year's event terrorism will be the top security concern, Beijing officials have said.
That means that IBM's S3 system could end up being tested in a very public fashion.
"I was at the Kennedy School (of Government at Harvard University) a couple of weeks ago, and some guy got up and said, "If there's a security incident at the Beijing Olympics, it's going to change the course of capitalism forever," and I'm like, 'Oh man!'" Donahue said.
IBM is also developing a similar surveillance system for lower Manhattan, but has not yet begun deploying that project, she added.
Just one year ago, the S3 system was little more than a research project at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, but in the past year the company's service group has been working hard to develop it into a profitable line of business, selling it to retail and banking customers such as Italy's UniCredit bank.
IBM is also integrating the S3 system into the city of Chicago's existing surveillance infrastructure, as part of the city's Operation Virtual Shield emergency response project.
This ability to weave S3 into an existing network and video surveillance infrastructure is an important selling point for the product, Donahue said. "It's expensive to get that video infrastructure in place just for even basic analog cameras," she said. "So what we do is, we can hook in your analog cameras and reuse that infrastructure, put in IP-based cameras and then architect it so that we can do the right level of analytics."
"Physical security and IT security are stating to come together," she said. "A lot of the guys I'm meeting on the IT side are just starting to get involved on the physical side."
HP touts BI services growth, NeoView success
Hewlett-Packard's business intelligence (BI) services business saw its customer base grow 50 percent in fiscal 2007, the company said this week, while also trumpeting the success of its Neoview data warehousing appliance.
The company made the announcements nearly one year after a reorganization within its software division, which created the current BI group.
HP also said what it termed "megadeals" for BI -- amounting to US$1 million or more -- grew by 32 percent. The rise follows HP's acquisition earlier this year of Knightsbridge Solutions LLC, a 700-employee BI consultancy.
Terrence Ryan, information management leader in HP's services division, declined to provide specific numbers, but placed the total revenue for BI services in the hundreds of millions. "Our biggest challenge in services is keeping up with the Neoview platform," Ryan said.
HP executives said Neoview is ideal for operational BI, the point of which is to disseminate useful business process-related information to workers on the fly, as opposed to collecting large batches of data and then generating analytical reports.
"Operational BI gives nuts-and-bolts metrics to lots of managers [such as] 'The average person in an eight-hour shift sells this much stuff at Circuit City,'" said David O'Connell, a senior analyst at Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Massachusetts. "What I like about it is, companies are always trying to increase ROI, and the greatest way to increase ROI of an application is to get more people using it."
Also this week, HP said it has landed the New York-based private equity firm Arsenal Capital Partners as a Neoview customer. It is another in a string of high-profile clients -- such as Wal-Mart -- to use the product.
However, HP executives declined to say how much revenue Neoview has grossed since its launch in April, instead stressing its overall importance to the company.
"It's a major part of our IT transformation, it's a major part of our growth strategy," said Ben Barnes, general manager of HP's BI division, which launched in January. "We're highly committed to it any way you can think about it." The company has also been working to consolidate its own data centers around Neoview, he noted.
The company made the announcements nearly one year after a reorganization within its software division, which created the current BI group.
HP also said what it termed "megadeals" for BI -- amounting to US$1 million or more -- grew by 32 percent. The rise follows HP's acquisition earlier this year of Knightsbridge Solutions LLC, a 700-employee BI consultancy.
Terrence Ryan, information management leader in HP's services division, declined to provide specific numbers, but placed the total revenue for BI services in the hundreds of millions. "Our biggest challenge in services is keeping up with the Neoview platform," Ryan said.
HP executives said Neoview is ideal for operational BI, the point of which is to disseminate useful business process-related information to workers on the fly, as opposed to collecting large batches of data and then generating analytical reports.
"Operational BI gives nuts-and-bolts metrics to lots of managers [such as] 'The average person in an eight-hour shift sells this much stuff at Circuit City,'" said David O'Connell, a senior analyst at Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Massachusetts. "What I like about it is, companies are always trying to increase ROI, and the greatest way to increase ROI of an application is to get more people using it."
Also this week, HP said it has landed the New York-based private equity firm Arsenal Capital Partners as a Neoview customer. It is another in a string of high-profile clients -- such as Wal-Mart -- to use the product.
However, HP executives declined to say how much revenue Neoview has grossed since its launch in April, instead stressing its overall importance to the company.
"It's a major part of our IT transformation, it's a major part of our growth strategy," said Ben Barnes, general manager of HP's BI division, which launched in January. "We're highly committed to it any way you can think about it." The company has also been working to consolidate its own data centers around Neoview, he noted.
Microsoft uses new XBRL data tags in SEC filing
Microsoft has submitted data to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) using a newly released taxonomy for a financial reporting language designed to make it easier to compare companies' financial figures.
Microsoft filed a Form 8-K, comprising financial data for shareholders, using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language), an XML-based (Extensible Markup Language) standard for financial data that's increasingly being used in Europe and the U.S.
Microsoft said it's the first company to submit data using a new XBRL taxonomy released on Wednesday that allows the description of data according to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The taxonomy defines, for example, what tags should be used to label data such as "net profit." Taxonomies differ between countries due to varying local laws and regulations.
The advantage of XBRL is that it is machine-readable, and computers can use the tags to pull out comparable data from different companies from their filings. It saves a person from having to read through financial reports to find specific data, as companies typically have different styles of presenting their financial data in reports.
Microsoft is one of about three dozen companies participating in a one-year pilot program to submit reports in XBRL, according to the SEC. The SEC has run a voluntary XBRL filing program since 2005.
Other U.S. agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are also using XBRL, saying use of the format has reduced data processing costs and made financial data available faster for analysis.
In Europe, the U.K.'s tax agency, HM Revenue and Customs, will require businesses filing tax data in XBRL by 2010. Other XBRL projects are underway in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
Microsoft filed a Form 8-K, comprising financial data for shareholders, using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language), an XML-based (Extensible Markup Language) standard for financial data that's increasingly being used in Europe and the U.S.
Microsoft said it's the first company to submit data using a new XBRL taxonomy released on Wednesday that allows the description of data according to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The taxonomy defines, for example, what tags should be used to label data such as "net profit." Taxonomies differ between countries due to varying local laws and regulations.
The advantage of XBRL is that it is machine-readable, and computers can use the tags to pull out comparable data from different companies from their filings. It saves a person from having to read through financial reports to find specific data, as companies typically have different styles of presenting their financial data in reports.
Microsoft is one of about three dozen companies participating in a one-year pilot program to submit reports in XBRL, according to the SEC. The SEC has run a voluntary XBRL filing program since 2005.
Other U.S. agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are also using XBRL, saying use of the format has reduced data processing costs and made financial data available faster for analysis.
In Europe, the U.K.'s tax agency, HM Revenue and Customs, will require businesses filing tax data in XBRL by 2010. Other XBRL projects are underway in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
Facebook doesn't budge on Beacon's broad user tracking
Facebook's CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg has profusely apologized for missteps in the design and deployment of the Beacon ad system, but he remains unrepentant about what privacy advocates consider a particularly egregious feature.
Absent from Zuckerberg's mea culpa Wednesday is any indication that Facebook plans to modify the system's ability to indiscriminately track actions of all users on external sites that have implemented Beacon.
While Wednesday's decision to allow Facebook members to completely decline participation in Beacon has been generally welcomed, privacy advocates will likely keep Facebook in their crosshairs until the system's user tracking mechanism is scaled back.
Announced a month ago as part of what Facebook calls Social Ads, Beacon tracks certain actions of Facebook users on some external sites, like Blockbuster and Fandango, in order to report those actions back to users' Facebook friends network.
For Facebook, these notices represent what it considers an innovative and ultimately more effective form of online advertising that leverages the deep social connections of its users.
In other words, by being intricately combined with people's social circle via the actions of friends and family, these notices promote products and services in a more organic way than regular online ads, Facebook maintains.
Even critics of Beacon had generally assumed that the ad system limited its non-Facebook tracking and data reporting to Facebook members who were logged on to the site.
However, in the past week, CA security researcher Stefan Berteau stunned many when he reported that Beacon tracks all users in these external sites, including logged-off and former Facebook members and even non-Facebook members, and sends data back to Facebook. He also found that logged-in Facebook users who declined having their actions broadcast to their friends still had their data sent to Facebook.
Beacon, already blasted for weeks by privacy advocates like MoveOn.org and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as by concerned Facebook users, has come under renewed attacks as a result of the findings from Berteau's independent research.
Facebook confirmed that this broad user tracking function remains untouched in Beacon, despite the changes announced Wednesday, a spokesperson said in an e-mail.
"Facebook does not share profile data with Beacon partner sites. The partner site prompts Facebook to check whether a Facebook user has taken a Beacon-qualified action, and passes the action data to Facebook for potential sharing with friends if the user’s privacy settings permit it," she wrote. "This checking process, which operates in a similar fashion to any embedding on a Web page of third-party content like YouTube videos or network advertisements, may collect information on logged-out Facebook users or non-users."
Facebook has said that it deletes the data in all the cases flagged by Berteau: logged-in users who declined the broadcast; logged-off users; former members; and non-members.
In his latest note regarding Beacon, published Thursday afternoon, Berteau, who is senior research engineer at CA's Threat Research Group, commends Facebook for the most recent changes, but reminds the company that it needs to go further.
As long as Beacon silently tracks logged-off, former and non-members, people who use Facebook and the sites affiliated with Beacon face a privacy threat, Berteau wrote.
"The silent transmission of data about actions on third-party Web sites to Facebook poses a serious risk, and must be mitigated by both prominent notice to the user, and a binding commitment on Facebook's part to handle the data properly," Berteau wrote.
If a user has ever checked the option for Facebook to "remember me" -- which saves the user from having to log on to the site upon every return to it -- Facebook can tie his activities on third-party Beacon sites directly to him, even if he's logged off and has opted out of the broadcast, Berteau reported in his first note on Beacon.
If the user has never chosen this option, the information still flows back to Facebook, although without it being tied to his Facebook ID. For non-members, Beacon captures addresses of Web pages visited, IP addresses and the actions taken on the site.
Berteau has said that it's particularly concerning that people aren't informed that data on their activities at these sites is flowing back to Facebook, nor given the option to block that information from being transmitted.
More than 40 Web sites have signed up for Beacon, although not all have implemented the system. Non-Facebook activities that can be broadcast to one's Facebook friends include purchasing a product, signing up for a service and including an item on a wish list.
In addition to Wednesday's changes, Facebook also modified Beacon last week, prior to Berteau's revelations. In the first set of changes, Facebook responded to complaints that Beacon was too confusing to manage and opt out of. As a result, Facebook made its workings more explicit to Facebook users and simplified the way to nix a broadcast message and opt out of having activities tracked on specific Web sites.
Absent from Zuckerberg's mea culpa Wednesday is any indication that Facebook plans to modify the system's ability to indiscriminately track actions of all users on external sites that have implemented Beacon.
While Wednesday's decision to allow Facebook members to completely decline participation in Beacon has been generally welcomed, privacy advocates will likely keep Facebook in their crosshairs until the system's user tracking mechanism is scaled back.
Announced a month ago as part of what Facebook calls Social Ads, Beacon tracks certain actions of Facebook users on some external sites, like Blockbuster and Fandango, in order to report those actions back to users' Facebook friends network.
For Facebook, these notices represent what it considers an innovative and ultimately more effective form of online advertising that leverages the deep social connections of its users.
In other words, by being intricately combined with people's social circle via the actions of friends and family, these notices promote products and services in a more organic way than regular online ads, Facebook maintains.
Even critics of Beacon had generally assumed that the ad system limited its non-Facebook tracking and data reporting to Facebook members who were logged on to the site.
However, in the past week, CA security researcher Stefan Berteau stunned many when he reported that Beacon tracks all users in these external sites, including logged-off and former Facebook members and even non-Facebook members, and sends data back to Facebook. He also found that logged-in Facebook users who declined having their actions broadcast to their friends still had their data sent to Facebook.
Beacon, already blasted for weeks by privacy advocates like MoveOn.org and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as by concerned Facebook users, has come under renewed attacks as a result of the findings from Berteau's independent research.
Facebook confirmed that this broad user tracking function remains untouched in Beacon, despite the changes announced Wednesday, a spokesperson said in an e-mail.
"Facebook does not share profile data with Beacon partner sites. The partner site prompts Facebook to check whether a Facebook user has taken a Beacon-qualified action, and passes the action data to Facebook for potential sharing with friends if the user’s privacy settings permit it," she wrote. "This checking process, which operates in a similar fashion to any embedding on a Web page of third-party content like YouTube videos or network advertisements, may collect information on logged-out Facebook users or non-users."
Facebook has said that it deletes the data in all the cases flagged by Berteau: logged-in users who declined the broadcast; logged-off users; former members; and non-members.
In his latest note regarding Beacon, published Thursday afternoon, Berteau, who is senior research engineer at CA's Threat Research Group, commends Facebook for the most recent changes, but reminds the company that it needs to go further.
As long as Beacon silently tracks logged-off, former and non-members, people who use Facebook and the sites affiliated with Beacon face a privacy threat, Berteau wrote.
"The silent transmission of data about actions on third-party Web sites to Facebook poses a serious risk, and must be mitigated by both prominent notice to the user, and a binding commitment on Facebook's part to handle the data properly," Berteau wrote.
If a user has ever checked the option for Facebook to "remember me" -- which saves the user from having to log on to the site upon every return to it -- Facebook can tie his activities on third-party Beacon sites directly to him, even if he's logged off and has opted out of the broadcast, Berteau reported in his first note on Beacon.
If the user has never chosen this option, the information still flows back to Facebook, although without it being tied to his Facebook ID. For non-members, Beacon captures addresses of Web pages visited, IP addresses and the actions taken on the site.
Berteau has said that it's particularly concerning that people aren't informed that data on their activities at these sites is flowing back to Facebook, nor given the option to block that information from being transmitted.
More than 40 Web sites have signed up for Beacon, although not all have implemented the system. Non-Facebook activities that can be broadcast to one's Facebook friends include purchasing a product, signing up for a service and including an item on a wish list.
In addition to Wednesday's changes, Facebook also modified Beacon last week, prior to Berteau's revelations. In the first set of changes, Facebook responded to complaints that Beacon was too confusing to manage and opt out of. As a result, Facebook made its workings more explicit to Facebook users and simplified the way to nix a broadcast message and opt out of having activities tracked on specific Web sites.
IDC: Disk storage capacity sales soared in Q3
The capacity of disk storage systems shipped worldwide in the third quarter grew by nearly 50 percent from a year earlier, and EMC maintained its lead in most types of disk storage systems, research company IDC reported Thursday.
The capacity of all disk storage systems sold in the quarter, including external and internal arrays, NAS (network-attached storage) and Open SANs (storage area network), came to 1.3 exabytes, IDC said in a press release. This represented a 49.4 percent rise from the third quarter of 2006. An exabyte is 1 million terabytes. IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements associated with three or more disks.
Revenue for all disk storage systems grew 4.3 percent from a year earlier to $6.3 billion, IDC said.
EMC kept a substantial lead in revenue for external disk storage systems as well as for the NAS and open SAN markets, according to IDC. The Hopkinton, Massachusetts, company brought in 21.9 percent of the revenue for external disk storage in the quarter, while IBM and Hewlett-Packard were in a dead heat for second place with 14 percent and 13.4 percent, respectively. Dell and Hitachi trailed them, but Dell posted the strongest growth of the top five vendors, at 17.9 percent.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are rapidly embracing networked storage, to the point where low-end systems -- priced under US$15,000 -- accounted for a majority of growth in this area, IDC said. Small enterprises are wrestling with more complex storage requirements and growing more knowledgeable about networked storage, according to IDC. But mid-priced and high-end systems also sold well.
A particularly strong segment of the market was iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface), where revenue grew 43.9 percent to $207 million. Network Appliance led that business with 20.5 percent of total revenue, ahead of EMC's 18 percent.
But EMC was the revenue leader in the networked disk storage market (including NAS and Open SAN) with 27.8 percent of the market, trailed by HP and IBM. Its lead was strongest in NAS, where it had a 38.1 percent share, followed by Network Appliance's 27.2 percent.
IDC is a division of International Data Group, the parent company of IDG News Service.
The capacity of all disk storage systems sold in the quarter, including external and internal arrays, NAS (network-attached storage) and Open SANs (storage area network), came to 1.3 exabytes, IDC said in a press release. This represented a 49.4 percent rise from the third quarter of 2006. An exabyte is 1 million terabytes. IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements associated with three or more disks.
Revenue for all disk storage systems grew 4.3 percent from a year earlier to $6.3 billion, IDC said.
EMC kept a substantial lead in revenue for external disk storage systems as well as for the NAS and open SAN markets, according to IDC. The Hopkinton, Massachusetts, company brought in 21.9 percent of the revenue for external disk storage in the quarter, while IBM and Hewlett-Packard were in a dead heat for second place with 14 percent and 13.4 percent, respectively. Dell and Hitachi trailed them, but Dell posted the strongest growth of the top five vendors, at 17.9 percent.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are rapidly embracing networked storage, to the point where low-end systems -- priced under US$15,000 -- accounted for a majority of growth in this area, IDC said. Small enterprises are wrestling with more complex storage requirements and growing more knowledgeable about networked storage, according to IDC. But mid-priced and high-end systems also sold well.
A particularly strong segment of the market was iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface), where revenue grew 43.9 percent to $207 million. Network Appliance led that business with 20.5 percent of total revenue, ahead of EMC's 18 percent.
But EMC was the revenue leader in the networked disk storage market (including NAS and Open SAN) with 27.8 percent of the market, trailed by HP and IBM. Its lead was strongest in NAS, where it had a 38.1 percent share, followed by Network Appliance's 27.2 percent.
IDC is a division of International Data Group, the parent company of IDG News Service.
Media formats to be the focus of upcoming Microsoft patches
Microsoft will issue seven security updates next Tuesday, including critical sets of patches for Windows and Internet Explorer.
The three critical updates are all for Windows components, Microsoft said in a note on the upcoming release. These components include Internet Explorer, the DirectX and DirectShow graphics software, and the Windows Media Format Runtime, which is used by Windows Media Player.
The media flaws could be quickly exploited by attackers, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Proactive Network Security. "With the Media Format and the Direct X update, we're looking at more ways for attackers to target rich Internet multimedia formats," he said via instant message. "The likelihood of getting someone to watch a tantalizing movie is much higher than opening an attachment."
Microsoft has said that it will fix a flaw in the way certain configurations of the Windows operating system look up DNS (Domain Name System) information, telling them how to connect with other computers on the Internet. Because of a flaw in the way Windows works, some visitors could be misdirected to inappropriate servers looking for this information, making them vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, Microsoft says.
The other four updates set for Tuesday are all rated "important" by Microsoft, meaning that they require some level of user interaction in order to be exploited. These four updates are all Windows-related. Two of them are for Vista and two of them are for Microsoft's other operating systems.
December will be a much busier month for system administrators than November was. Last month, Microsoft released just two updates.
The three critical updates are all for Windows components, Microsoft said in a note on the upcoming release. These components include Internet Explorer, the DirectX and DirectShow graphics software, and the Windows Media Format Runtime, which is used by Windows Media Player.
The media flaws could be quickly exploited by attackers, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Proactive Network Security. "With the Media Format and the Direct X update, we're looking at more ways for attackers to target rich Internet multimedia formats," he said via instant message. "The likelihood of getting someone to watch a tantalizing movie is much higher than opening an attachment."
Microsoft has said that it will fix a flaw in the way certain configurations of the Windows operating system look up DNS (Domain Name System) information, telling them how to connect with other computers on the Internet. Because of a flaw in the way Windows works, some visitors could be misdirected to inappropriate servers looking for this information, making them vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, Microsoft says.
The other four updates set for Tuesday are all rated "important" by Microsoft, meaning that they require some level of user interaction in order to be exploited. These four updates are all Windows-related. Two of them are for Vista and two of them are for Microsoft's other operating systems.
December will be a much busier month for system administrators than November was. Last month, Microsoft released just two updates.
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