Wednesday, June 18, 2008

China quake site hacker caught

A 19-year old Chinese man is in police custody after allegedly hacking into a provincial seismological bureau's Web site to place a false earthquake warning, Chinese state media reported Monday.
The teenager, identified only by his surname Chen, altered the Web site of the Guangxi Seismological Bureau to warn residents in southwestern China to prepare for an impending earthquake expected to measure 9.0 on the Richter scale, according to a report on China Central Television's Web site.

Such a posting could have caused a panic. On May 12 an earthquake measuring 7.8 struck China's Sichuan province, killing over 70,000 people and leaving millions homeless. Following the quake, many people have fallen prey to rumors that earthquakes can now be predicted in a manner similar to weather forecasts, although there was no warning of the Sichuan quake.

Authorities did not say what impact the hacker's posting had.

An earthquake measuring approximately 9.0 was the cause of the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed about 250,000 around the Indian Ocean.

Chen was arrested in the Guangxi province city of Taicang on June 4, and was being held in the provincial capital of Nanning. The report did not indicate what the exact charges would be, nor when Chen might face trial or what type of punishment was possible if he is convicted.

Chen had confessed and said that he altered the Web site to demonstrate his technical skills, according to the report.

Other young people have been involved in untoward online events since the earthquake. In late May, Liaoning province resident Gao Qianhui caused an uproar when a webcam recording she made expressing apathy towards the quake's victims reached viewers of online video sites. Gao was later arrested on unspecified charges.

Last week, a young woman known only as "Xiaoyun" or "Little Cloud" and claiming to be a native of Sichuan posted lurid photos of herself online. "I am posting some photos to encourage contributions" to quake relief efforts, she claimed. The authenticity of the photos and claims remain unknown, but the pictures have been circulated widely on blogs and bulletin boards in China.

Former 'spam king' to pay MySpace $6 million

A Colorado man has been ordered to pay US$6 million in damages and legal fees for spamming thousands of MySpace.com users.
Scott Richter of Westminster, Colorado, must pay MySpace $4.8 million in damages and $1.2 million in legal fees, a court-appointed arbitrator ruled on Thursday.

Richter, who was once accused of pumping out more than 100 million spam messages per day, had been sued by MySpace in January 2007 in connection with an August 2006 campaign in which MySpace members were hit with unsolicited messages promoting a Web site called Consumerpromotionscenter.com. The messages were sent from phished MySpace accounts, according to the findings of Philip Boesch, the court-appointed arbitrator in the case.

The messages were sent to a MySpace community that was ill-equipped to deal with any security problems. At the time, "MySpace only employed two relatively junior staff employees to deal with these issues," Boesch wrote. The company's security staff has now grown to about 40, he added.

MySpace had been seeking a court ruling in the case, but in August 2007, U.S. District Judge George King of the Central District of California granted Richter's request to assign the matter to arbitration. Terms of the award were made public on Monday.

In a statement, Richter said that he and his company, Media Breakaway, were happy to have this matter behind them, noting that the arbitrator's award was 95 percent less than the amount sought by MySpace.

"We respect the decision of the arbitrator and we're not going to appeal it," said Steven Richter, the president and general counsel of Media Breakaway and father of Scott Richter. "We're going to pay the money he awarded."

This is not the first time a Scott Richter company has had to cough up millions of dollars to fight spam charges. In 2005, his previous company, Optinrealbig.com, paid $7 million to settle similar charges brought by Microsoft.

Scott Richter was removed from anti-spam organization Spamhaus' list of known spammers that same year.

Media Breakaway, which has no other spam cases pending, is doing everything it can to build a compliance team and make sure it is acting within the law, Steven Richter said.

MySpace said the Richter award was the latest in a series of steps it has taken to combat abuse on its Web site. In May, the company was awarded a $230 million antispam judgment against Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines.

"This award reflects MySpace's continued momentum and holistic approach to ridding the site of spammers and phishers," MySpace said in a statement. "We will continue to do our part in cleansing the Internet of this invasive onslaught of spam."

Telecom industry focuses on video, fat pipes

Wired and wireless carriers will meet up with network equipment vendors this week in Las Vegas to figure out how to meet the changing and fast-growing demands of enterprises and consumers.
The NXTcomm trade show, the latest incarnation of an annual event that used to be called Supercomm, will bring together the heads of AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel, plus other luminaries, and they will have plenty to talk about. Demand for bandwidth is rising, new wireless technologies are emerging, huge swaths of radio spectrum in the U.S. have recently been allocated to wireless data and carriers are redesigning their networks to deliver packages of IP (Internet Protocol) wired and mobile services.

Video, for consumers and increasingly for business, is a major driver in the growth of data traffic and is likely to be a big topic at the conference. Research company IDC predicted last December that video distribution would be the biggest driver for service providers to consolidate their networks around IP this year.

Tandberg will push video for enterprises with two types of products on display at the show. On employees' desks, it will make the video phone a reality with its E20 Video IP Phone. It's designed from the ground up for visual calls, with a 10.6-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen built in right over the phone keypad, and a 5 megapixel video camera on top. The screen will have 448 lines of resolution, near DVD quality of 480 lines, and will feature CD-quality audio, according to Tandberg. With a button on the phone, employees can switch from video to sharing an application running on their PCs. Picture-in-picture application-sharing will come later, said Peter Nutley, director of global product marketing.

The E20 will come with a handset and also work as a speakerphone. There is an RJ-11 jack for wired headsets and Bluetooth is built in, though it won't be activated until a software upgrade due in the first half of 2009, Nutley said. Priced at US$1,490, the E20 can take the place of an existing desk phone and can be hooked up to either a Tandberg infrastructure or an existing IP PBX (private branch exchange). It is designed to work with most other IP phones and videoconferencing systems using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and other standards. The E20 is set to ship in the first quarter of 2009.

Most video phones have been designed for consumers, and enterprise employees typically have PCs they could use for IP calls with video, said IDC analyst Nora Freedman. But a dedicated device such as the E20 is likely to offer better image and voice quality and may be easier to start up and use, she said.

"I don't want to have to call my IT guy so I can dial the phone," Freedman said.

Devices such as the E20 may appeal more to a niche market, said Robert Arnold of Current Analysis, though having the video calling capability up and available all the time would be an advantage over PC-based options.

Also at NXTcomm, Tandberg will show off the beginning of its next generation of telepresence systems, featuring 1080p high-definition video. It will demonstrate the Codec C90, a telepresence engine using Tandberg's latest codec. That engine will power the T1, a telepresence system with one 65-inch 1080p screen and a 1080p camera. The arrangement of the camera and display on the T1 can make it seem that participants are looking into each others' eyes, Nutley said. The C90 will cost $36,900 and the T1 will cost $69,900, and both are scheduled to ship in the fourth quarter.

Although Cisco Systems' telepresence products also have 1080p quality, Tandberg claims its system is more in line with standards and will deliver better quality when hooked up with other vendors' products.

However, with IP communications standards in the state they are today, it's unlikely anyone could make interoperability simple, Arnold said.

"It's probably going to take some sweat," Arnold said. "None of this stuff is straightforward."

Ericsson, one of the world's largest wired and wireless network infrastructure makers, will focus its NXTcomm push on IPTV with a Televisionary Pavilion in its booth. The company said it will show how it can help carriers deliver video on everything from big-screen TVs to handheld devices, whenever and wherever consumers want to watch and interact with it.

A service provider and a group of vendors are going to tackle the bandwidth problem head-on with a real-world demonstration of 100G bps (bit per second) Ethernet at NXTcomm, which they call the world's first.

Carriers are gradually converting their data networks to IP and Ethernet to take advantage of relative simplicity and low cost and to better deliver services to enterprises, which already use Ethernet internally. An emerging standard for the next generation of Ethernet, following the current 10G bps, allows for both 40G bps and 100G bps versions.

Equipment makers Infinera and Avago Technologies will set up gear for the demonstration, in which network testing company Ixia will send data over XO Communications' network from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and back. Using products now under development, they will achieve that speed by "mapping" the 100G bps of traffic onto 10 "lanes" of 10G bps, a type of connection widely available today. The technology is based on a standard under development by the IEEE 802.3ba task force, which Infinera expects to be agreed upon within 18 to 24 months. The 100G bps Ethernet technology also will be useful in the backbones of large enterprise networks as more 10-Gig Ethernet pipes are installed in data centers, said Errol Ginsberg, founder and chairman of Ixia.

Arbor Networks will use the show to unveil a system for protecting high-speed Ethernet links from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Arbor's Threat Management System 3100 can detect and mitigate DDoS attacks on a 10G Ethernet connection, using deep packet inspection of more than 80 critical IP services and applications on the network, including VoIP (voice over IP), HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol), instant messaging and P-to-P (peer-to-peer). It can issue reports and surgically remove only attack traffic, according to the company. Arbor has integrated TMS 3100 into its Peakflow SP platform, which performs a variety of other protection functions.

Novell patches Suse Linux kernel for VMware efficiency

Novell Monday released updates to its Suse Linux kernel designed to make the operating system more efficient when running on top of VMware environments.
The upgrade to the Suse Linux Enterprise kernel lets it take advantage of paravirtualization techniques so it runs more efficiently as a guest operating system. Specifically, Novell has built in support for VMware's Virtual Machine Interface (VMI)."The patch to the kernel provides increased performance and better interoperability," says Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for open platform solutions at Novell.

The kernel patch is available in Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2, which can be downloaded.

In a paravirtualized environment the guest operating system is modified to work more closely with the underlying hardware and not just with the virtualized environment. It is one of a handful of variants for designing virtual machine environments.

In order to take advantage of paravirtualization, however, an operating system must be specifically ported to run on top of a host system. Novell and VMware have been working on the Suse upgrades for the past nine months.

Novell also has a kernel patch to support paravirtualization of SLES on the Xen hypervisor that SLES uses when it is serving as a host environment.

In addition, Novell has been working with Microsoft in a lab the two opened last September to ensure SLES runs in a paravirtualized mode on top of Windows Hyper-V, which is slated to ship later this summer. The two also are ensuring Windows Server 2008 runs in enlightened mode on top of Novell's Xen hypervisor. Enlightened mode is a Microsoft technology that allows the server to recognize when it is running on top of a hypervisor and then automatically take different avenues to access memory management and IO.

"Regardless of the different environments -- VMware or Hyper-V -- we want SLES to be the best supported, best performing guest operating system," Montero-Luque says."We expect to see mixed environments in the future for a number of reasons and interoperability has been a key part of our strategy."

State worker's child porn charges dropped; virus blamed

Prosecutors have dropped child pornography charges against a Massachusetts state employee after an investigation determined that his government-issued laptop was poorly configured and riddled with malicious software.
Michael Fiola, former investigator with the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA), had been facing two-and-a-half years in prison after being charged last year with possession of child pornography.

Those charges were dropped on June 10 after an investigation by the Massachusetts Attorney General's office found that the state could not prove that Fiola had downloaded the images. "We could not meet our burden of reasonable doubt," said Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley.

The case shows how easy it is for someone to be charged with illegal computer activity that they may know nothing about, said Fiola's attorney, Timothy Bradl. "This type of thing could have happened to anyone with a work-issued laptop," he said.

When the DIA issued Fiola his Dell Latitude laptop in November 2006, it was so badly configured that it may well have already been hacked, said Tami Loehrs, a forensics investigator hired by Fiola's defense team. The Microsoft Systems Management Server software on the laptop was misconfigured and was not receiving critical software updates, and the laptop's Symantec antivirus software was either misconfigured or not working properly, she said.

"He was handed a ticking time bomb," she said.

State IT staff examined Fiola's laptop in March 2007 after they noticed that his Verizon broadband wireless usage was four times above normal. He was fired the same month, after the pornography was discovered.

Fiola, a former firefighter with no criminal record, was ostracized by his community after being criminally charged in August 2007, Bradl said. "His life has been destroyed," he said. "His friends ran for the hills; his family mostly ran from him."

DIA spokeswoman Linnea Walsh was quoted in the Boston Herald on Monday saying, "we stand by our decision," but when reached by IDG News Service, she declined to comment on the matter, saying only "we don't want to go there right now," before abruptly hanging up the telephone.

Since his wife, Robin, was at one point hospitalized for a stress-related illness, Fiola is now facing health insurance payments in excess of his monthly mortgage. But he is unlikely to take his old job back, even if the DIA were to offer it, Bradl said. "I would think that theoretically he'd be entitled to his job back with back-pay, however he would never want to go back to work with such buffoons," he said.

Because of the heinous nature of child pornography, prosecutors and investigators often rush to conclusions while investigating this type of crime, Loehrs said. "Because the content is so disturbing, everybody just loses all sense of reality."

Take the case of Matt Bandy, who was 16 when police raided his house and charged him with possession of child pornography. The charges could have resulted in a 90-year jail sentence. Bandy eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges, but computer experts believe that he may have been the victim of a worm that turned his PC into a "zombie computer" that was used by others to store the child pornography.

According to Wark, an initial state attorney general investigation of Fiola's laptop concluded that he was likely responsible for downloading the pornography, while a second examination, conducted after Loehrs reported her findings, reached the opposite conclusion.

Judge: White House doesn't have to turn over e-mail records

The U.S. Executive Office of the President doesn't have to turn over information on an alleged 10 million missing e-mail messages to a government watchdog group seeking information on how the e-mails were lost, a judge ruled Monday.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) had sought information on the missing e-mails through the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the Office of Administration (OA) in the Executive Office of the President is not subject to the law that allows citizens to request that the U.S. government disclose the contents of previously unreleased documents.

President George Bush's administration sought to remove the OA from the information act's requirements in 2006 and 2007, Kollar-Kotelly noted. OA is also not the type of independent agency covered under FOIA, and the office generally exists to assist the U.S. president, she wrote in her ruling. A 1974 amendment to FOIA excepted branches of the Executive Office that existed only to advise and assist the president.

CREW had argued that the Bush White House may have been covering up links to a lobbying scandal, alleged political influence at the U.S. General Services Administration and other problems by deleting the e-mail. White House staffers sometimes used outside e-mail accounts to conduct official business, CREW said in an April 2007 report.

CREW had argued that the White House is required to keep e-mail messages under the Presidential Records Act.

CREW has appealed the judge's decision, said Melanie Sloan, the group's executive director.

"The Bush administration is using the legal system to prevent the American people from discovering the truth about the millions of missing White House e-mails," she said in a statement. "The fact is, until CREW asked for documents pertaining to this problem, the Office of Administration routinely processed FOIA requests. Only because the administration has so much to hide here, has the White House taken the unprecedented position that OA is not subject to the FOIA."

The White House didn't have an immediate comment on Kollar-Kotelly's ruling.

In February, Kollar-Kotelly issued a ruling allowing CREW to have limited access to OA records. The OA did deliver more than 1,300 pages of documents to CREW, but it said it was withholding thousands more.

CREW's allegations that there are more than 10 million missing White House e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005 has led to inquiries from Congress, as well. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, controlled by Democrats, has investigated the alleged missing e-mails. In April, three Democrats, including Committee Chairman Henry Waxman of California introduced the Electronic Communications Preservation Act, which would require the U.S. archivist to establish standards for the preservation of White House e-mails.

New Nokia phones targeted at enterprises

Nokia has expanded its family of enterprise phones with the introduction of the E71 and E66, which come at a time when Apple, Research in Motion and Microsoft are trying their best to attract enterprise customers.
The specs are very similar; both phones are equipped with support for HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) at 3.6M bps (bits per second), WLAN, navigation using A-GPS (Assisted Global Positioning System) and a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus.

They are optimized for personal and business e-mail, according to Nokia. Customers can choose among a wide variety of enterprise platforms, including Exchange and its own Intellisync, as well more consumer-focused services such as Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail.

For Nokia the launch is a bit of a comeback in the enterprise market. It has been nine months since it launched the last model in the E family, said Leif-Olof Wallin, an analyst at Gartner.

"That is a long time in this business, and we believe Nokia was slowed down by a reorganization," said Wallin. He praised the latest additions to Nokia's portfolio, especially the E71, which will replace the E61i. "It has a really good keyboard, and is very slim," said Wallin.

But it's not the design which will be Nokia's greatest asset when competing for enterprise dollars. Instead, built-in hardware support for encryption and the ability to switch between personal and work e-mail at the push of a button will make it possible for the company to one up competitors, said Wallin.

"I would have liked to see Nokia taking the switching between personal and work even further, and including not only e-mail, but calendar and contacts as well. But what we are seeing now is only version 1.0," said Wallin.

The encryption of both the device memory and the memory card will help companies protect its phones without losing performance, and the built-in chip can also be used to store certificates and keys. In this field Nokia is years a head of the competition, according to Wallin.

Both phones are expected to start shipping in July and cost about €350 (US$538), before subsidies. The phones will cost about as much as an iPhone 3G when the subsidies are calculated in, according to Wallin.

Nvidia dumps 240 cores in new graphics processor

Nvidia on Monday announced a new graphics processor with 240 computing cores, giving PCs the horsepower needed to run three-dimensional games and scientific applications.
The new GeForce GTX 280, the largest GPU ever built by Nvidia, includes 1.4 billion transistors and delivers 933 gigaflops of performance. It succeeds the GeForce 8800 GTX, which had 128 cores and delivered 518 gigaflops of performance.

The GPU will bring a new level of realism to gaming, with better character detail and more natural character motion, said Jason Paul, senior product manager at Nvidia.

Users can leave general purpose computing to the x86 CPU and unload advanced processing to the GeForce GTX 280, which will take care of applications like video transcoding and surfing the Web using three-dimensional Web tools, Paul said.

"What you have today are great three-dimensional games [and] high-definition video playback, but now you'll see the GPU becoming the heart of the optimized PC. It's going to provide the second processor of the PC," Paul said.

The chip includes support for PhysX, a hardware and software engine that adds physical reality to existing games, like smoke billowing from an object after an explosion, or the behavior of a rock after it hits a target.

New to the GeForce GTX 280 architecture is support for double-precision, 64-bit floating point computation that can deliver the horsepower necessary to perform high-end scientific applications, Paul said.

Nvidia may paint this as a more powerful alternative to the CPU, but this is a specialized processor designed for high-performance computing applications like weather predictions and, in some cases, CAD programs, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "This is not a general-purpose replacement for x86 processors, this is a specialized processor to take apps originally running on an x86 and now they can run it on a GPU," he said.

People have had to run scientific applications on scalar processors like the x86 chip because they couldn't afford high-end vector processors like the ones found in IBM's supercomputers, Peddie said. With the new Nvidia chip, vector processors can now be built into a home PC, Peddie said.

"This is such an incredible technology. We can go out and buy a teraflop computer for under $1,000," Peddie said.

However, a vector processor should be limited to high-performance computing because x86 chips are capable of handling general-purpose computing, Peddie said. The GeForce GTX 280 GPU can be used as a high-end gaming machine chip or on workstations to process graphics-intensive applications.

Today's applications are mostly designed for x86 processors and will need to be recompiled to take advantage of GeForce GTX 280, Peddie said. Nvidia provides CUDA, a tool that allows programmers to design and port programs to run on the new GPU.

The GeForce GTX 280 is available for US$649.

Microsoft now sponsor of Open Source Census

Microsoft has become a sponsor of The Open Source Census, a project started earlier this year that aims to track and catalog the use of open-source software in enterprises worldwide, the group announced Monday.
The company's "customers, partners and developers are working in increasingly heterogeneous environments," so participation in projects such as the census is relevant to the "ecosystem" in which Microsoft operates, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft' senior director of platform strategy, in a prepared statement.

It is the latest gesture by the Redmond software giant toward the open-source community, which has long regarded it as a bogeyman due to actions like its claim last year that open-source software violated more than 200 of its patents.

Ramji, who could not be reached for comment, is seen as a major driver behind Microsoft's gradually warming attitude -- at least publicly -- toward open source and interoperability.

It is important to balance open-mindedness with skepticism when thinking about Microsoft's open-source strategy, according to one observer.

"I've met with Sam and there's no question those guys are smart with what they're doing with open source," said Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group. "They definitely have changed. Is it genuine? Some of it is and some of it may be less so."

Microsoft's involvement could help the census gain interest from larger enterprises, Lyman noted. But at the same time, it may also draw ire from Microsoft's many critics, he added.

In addition to Microsoft, ActiveState, EnterpriseDB, Oregon State University's Open Source Lab and OSAlalt.com have also joined the effort, which provides a tool, from vendor OpenLogic, which a company can use to scan computers and spot installed open-source code. The scan data can then be pushed in anonymous form to the OSC's database.

Contributors can get reports that summarize their own use, as well as comparative data based on similar companies' results. Aggregated data untraceable to any company is available publicly.

More than 220,000 open-source packages or installations have been found during the two months since the effort launched, according to the site. But as of June 12, only about 1,300 machines had been scanned.

Lyman's firm is watching the census' progress closely to see whether it turns up enough data to provide a useful representative sample. "The theme from all accounts is that open-source usage is wildly underestimated," he said. "Maybe we'll get a better sense of that."

Greenpeace says e-waste from US stopped in Hong Kong

Environmental group Greenpeace said it identified three containers of electronic waste as they were about to be unloaded in Hong Kong Port over the weekend.
The group said the three containers were on the "Yang Ming Success" that had sailed to Hong Kong from the U.S. port of Oakland and were destined for the Sanshui district in neighboring Guangdong province. That meant the shipment was illegal under Chinese law, Greenpeace said.

In a video distributed by the group to news organizations, Greenpeace supporters that had boarded the ship can be seen unfurling a banner along the side of containers that read in English and Chinese, "Toxic waste not welcomed here."

In response Hong Kong's Environmental Protection Department has ordered the containers be held on the pier until the owner opens them for inspection, said Lo Sze Ping, a campaign director for Greenpeace. The Hong Kong authorities could not be immediately reached for comment.

Greenpeace said that Hong Kong is a major transit point for electronic waste because of several loopholes in the territory's environmental protection regulations. Among them, importers can easily claim the waste is for recycling or reuse to escape the controls, the group said. It also charged the Environmental Protection Department, which issues the import and export permits, with concentrating on waste like old batteries and paying little attention to printed-circuit boards.

The issue of e-waste is one that the Amsterdam-based group is fighting. Between 20 million and 50 million tons of electronic waste is produced each year but 75 percent of it disappears. That's a problem for the environment because if it is not properly disposed, the toxins found inside, including lead, beryllium, PVC, phthalates and brominated fire retardants can poison the environment and damage human health.

Of particular concern in the region is the Chinese city of Guiyu, which is also in Guangdong province. The city is one of the biggest electronic waste recycling centers on earth but the informal industry is centered around primitive, small-scale factories where products are dismantled by hand. The work is often done with little regard for health of the workers or the environment.

AMD's latest FireStream processor hits 1 teraflop

Advanced Micro Devices previewed on Monday the latest version of its high-performance chip package, the FireStream 9250, which is due later this year.
Chips in the FireStream line offer much faster performance for mathematical calculations than other processors. FireStream can take a single instruction and execute it using multiple sources of data in parallel.

The processor, which AMD refers to as a "stream processor" or General-Purpose General-Processing Unit (GP GPU) is capable of up to hundreds of parallel calculations per clock cycle, whereas other more general-purpose processors can only do a handful, the company said.

The 9250 will be available by the end of September for US$1,999. Last November, AMD released the FireStream 9170, the first such chip in the line that is capable of up to 500 gigaflops of computing power. A gigaflop is 1 billion floating-point operations per second. For single-precision calculations, the 9250 tops 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, AMD said.

The FireStream chips can also perform "double precision" floating-point calculations. AMD says that helps runs intensive tasks such financial analyses and seismic processing much faster.

The 9250 comes with 1 G byte of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM memory on its PCI card, a type of memory that was designed by ATI, the graphics chip maker now owned by AMD.

The 9250 will fit in a single PCI slot, making it compatible with most desktop systems, workstations and servers. Power consumption is less than 150 watts, similar to the 9170. Performance is rated at eight gigaflops per watt.

AMD has a software development kit, the AMD Stream SDK, to help developers create applications that use the full abilities of the FireStream chips. AMD says the FireStream line is not only for high-performance computing but also more mainstream and consumer applications.

New Samsung handsets made from corn

Samsung Electronics on Monday unveiled two new mobile phones made with plastic made from corn as it expands initiatives aimed at being more nature-friendly.
The W510 is the first mobile phone Samsung has ever made using the new corn-based plastic, the company said. Samsung did not use any heavy metals, such as lead, mercury or cadmium, in the handset either. The company has been working on the new plastic as a way to produce more environmentally-friendly materials.

Several companies have worked on corn-based plastics, including NEC and Fujitsu of Japan, to replace petroleum-based plastics in products such as laptop PCs and mobile phones. The idea of using corn-based plastics has been around for years, and has been reignited in recent years by the high price of oil.

In the 1990s, companies started putting corn-based plastics in a range of products, including plastic bags, water bottles and diapers, but companies avoided using them in heavier products because the plastic was weak. More recently, researchers have mixed corn-based plastics with petroleum-based plastics to create a stronger material suitable for laptops and handsets.

The second corn-based handset Samsung released Monday was the F268, which includes an alarm on the charger to alert users when the battery is fully-charged. They company also made sure accessories for the F268 did not contain PVC (polyvinyl chloride) or BFRs (brominated flame retardant), a chemical used to make it hard for products to catch fire but that may be contaminating the environment.

Samsung plans to expand its eco-friendly handset line-up, a company representative said without being specific. European users will see other environmental features on all Samsung handsets, including the charger-alarm as well as more nature-friendly packaging. Globally, Samsung plans to stop using PVC and BFRs by 2010 in all handsets.

The W510 will be launched in Korea in June, while the F268 will hit China at the same time.

Samsung has operated recycling schemes for its handsets in South Korea since 2004 and China since 2005, a company representative said. Owners of Samsung handsets need only turn old phones in at Samsung repair and service centers in both countries.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Microsoft says it offered $9 billion to Yahoo

In a letter to employees on Friday, a Microsoft executive said the company had offered to buy Yahoo's search assets for US$1 billion and invest $8 billion in the remaining company, before talks between the two ended.
Microsoft's offer, which would have included a long-term search partnership, would have increased Yahoo's operating income by more than $1 billion above the search provider's current levels, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services group, wrote in the letter to employees.

"Taken together, we believe that our proposal would have created total value for Yahoo's shareholders in excess of $33 per share," he wrote.

His letter comes a day after Yahoo said that it had concluded negotiations with Microsoft and decided to start carrying advertising from Google alongside its search results. Yahoo said it expects the Google deal to generate an annual revenue opportunity of $800 million for Yahoo.

Yahoo's stock had slumped to around $23.47 at the end of the day Friday. Microsoft recently pulled an offer of $33 per share for the whole company.

Johnson's letter, made available by Microsoft's press department, is the software maker's first public comment on Thursday's agreement between Yahoo and Google. That deal "would start to consolidate over 90% of the paid search advertising market in Google's hands," Johnson wrote. "This will make the market far less competitive."

He also hinted at potential difficulties the arrangement may face. "There are many experts who suggest that a host of legal and regulatory problems lie ahead for Google and Yahoo," he said.

Yahoo and Google have said they don't believe the deal needs regulatory approval, although they have submitted it "voluntarily" for review by the U.S. Department of Justice anyway. Google argued in a blog posting Thursday that the deal would be "good for competition."

Others have also expressed concern about how the deal might only strengthen Google's already dominant position in search advertising. U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, who is chairman of the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said Thursday he would examine the competitive and privacy implications of the deal. "This collaboration between two technology giants and direct competitors for Internet advertising and search services raises important competition concerns," he said in a statement.

Other such far flung organizations as the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the American Corn Growers Association have expressed their concerns about the deal's impact on search advertising.

In the meantime, Microsoft plans to continue to execute on its stated plan to boost its search and online advertising position including through internal development, Johnson said.

Support grows for universal power adapter

A technology that could help the environment by eliminating the need to ship a power adapter with every electronics device got a vote of confidence Friday from consumer electronics maker Westinghouse Digital Electronics.
Westinghouse said it had committed to using a smart power technology developed by a start-up company, Green Plug, that aims to let people use a single "universal adapter" to power their laptops, cell phones and other electronics gear.

Most products today ship with a custom adapter that converts AC power from a wall socket into the correct DC power required for each device. Green Plug's technology allows each device to communicate its individual power requirements to the power adapter, allowing several devices to share one adapter.

The technology's success depends partly on getting support from electronics manufacturers, who will need to embed Green Plug's firmware into their devices so that they can send their power requirements to the adapter. That's why Westinghouse's support is significant.

"We know we're not the largest [electronics company] but we are the first, and somebody has to be first," said Darwin Chang, CTO of Westinghouse, which makes LCD televisions, computer monitors and digital photo frames.

Besides helping the environment, the Green Plug technology will also help Westinghouse to cut its costs, Chang said. Eventually it could stop shipping power adapters with its products because customers will already have a universal adapter at home, he said.

Each adapter will act like a hub that several devices can plug into. The first are expected to go on sale in the first quarter next year for under US$100, Chang said. The adapters also will shut off the power supply when a device has finished charging or is turned off, giving further energy savings.

It remains to be seen whether other electronics vendors will follow suit. Green Plug also needs semiconductor makers to build its technology into chips that will go into the universal adapters. Green Plug CEO Frank Paniagua said his company already has one chip-maker on board, though he won't say yet who it is.

Westinghouse made its announcement at the second meeting of the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies, a group comprising electronics vendors, power supply makers, utility companies and others promoting standard power systems to reduce e-waste and inefficiency. The meeting in San Francisco was attended by representatives from Fujitsu, Motorola, Intel and Broadcom, among others.

The stakes for the environment are high. More than 3 billion power adapters will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 2.2 billion just three years ago, according to Greg Lefebre of the environmental consultancy ESS. The growth has been driven by the proliferation of devices like cell phones, MP3 players and digital cameras.

A whopping 434 million consumer electronics devices are "retired" in the U.S. each year, Lefebre said, including 130 million cell phones. In many cases those products, along with their chargers and power adapters, end up in landfills, he said.

Some vendors don't have an incentive to eliminate unique power supplies and connector cables, because they get supplementary revenue stream from selling replacements, Lefebre noted. He cited Apple, which uses a proprietary connector for the iPod, as a prime example.

There are other hurdles too. Code Cubitt of Motorola Ventures, speaking on a panel here, said product managers are fixated on providing a good "out of the box" experience. If the company ships a product without an adapter, and the consumer doesn't have a universal adapter at home, it creates a bad impression of the company.

Another issue is liability. If a company ships a product and a consumer plugs it into another vendor's universal adapter and it starts a house fire, all the parties involved could find themselves in court. That problem will be lessened if the product vendor can show it conformed to an industry standard, said Armando Castro of the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

In China, where 500 million cell phones were manufactured last year, the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers, including those imported, have a standard USB interface and output voltage, so consumers don't need a new one with every new phone.

Such regulations are unlikely in the U.S., but if the industry doesn't get its act together then the federal government may start to intervene in some way, speakers here said.

Green Plug offers its firmware to electronics makers for free so they can make their devices support its power specification, and it hopes to make money by licensing the technology to chip-makers. The cost to vendors to include the technology in each device will be about $2, Paniagua said.

EBay to open up merchant tool to developers

EBay will open a tool used by 700,000 of its merchants to external developers, the next step in an ongoing effort to promote the creation of applications for its online marketplace.

For the first time, eBay will feature third-party applications within Selling Manager, a tool merchants use to manage their eBay listings, the company plans to announce Monday at its annual eBay Developers Conference in Chicago.
"We're taking our open [application development] platform to the next level," said Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of mobile platform and disruptive innovation.

Selling Manager is the most popular tool among eBay merchants, but so far has only featured applications created by the company. However, eBay now recognizes that it can't extend the tool's functionality on its own in a way that meets all of its users' demands and requirements, Mancini said.

By turning Selling Manager into an open platform, eBay believes it will be able to enhance the visibility of third-party applications for the benefit of both the developers who create them and the merchants who adopt them.

The initiative, called Project Echo, is now in a closed, early-stage testing phase, and will open up to public testing at the start of the fourth quarter. A more advanced public beta test is slated for the first quarter and the official launch is planned for mid-2009.

Merchants will be able to browse and search an applications directory for tools and applications that could help them run their eBay business. In addition, eBay will also deliver to them contextually relevant promotions for such tools and applications, based on what the company knows about the merchants.

Mancini offered the hypothetical example of a merchant that sells its 10,000th item, a milestone that could trigger a promotional suggestion for CRM (customer relationship management) applications. "The point is to help sellers scale their business," he said.

EBay hasn't yet decided whether developers will have to pay for their applications promoted via the new contextually-relevant suggestion system, as in an advertising program. It's still early in the rollout of the system and eBay will settle on specifics later based on feedback from developers, Mancini said.

EBay is trying to help external developers market more effectively their applications, by giving them more direct and targeted access to the type of professional seller that typically uses Selling Manager, Mancini said.

"One of the biggest requests from developers is how we can help them to promote and distribute their applications to sellers," Mancini said.

Developers who participate in Project Echo will also get access to previously unavailable merchant data via new APIs, so that they can enrich their applications with additional functionality, Mancini said.

Meanwhile, PayPal, eBay's online payment division, will also court external developers next week when it announces a new Developer Central portal, designed to support the creation of applications for PayPal.

"The goal is to help developers be more productive," said Glenn Lim, PayPal's General Manager of Alliances and Developer Services.

The PayPal Developer Central portal will debut in July and will contain free business and technical kits, including marketing materials, sample code, training information and discussion forums.

The portal will also feature a directory where merchants can find developers who have been certified by PayPal for building tools and applications for the online payment system.

A preview version of the portal is already up.

In addition to the portal, PayPal will also announce several new APIs and fraud filters, including a Recurring Payments API for building subscription billing into an applications and a Reference Transaction API to ease transactions with repeat customers.

PayPal's Developer Program, established in 2001, currently has some 35,000 active developers, 300 of which have the PayPal certification. The eBay program, founded in 2000, has about 70,000 developers.

FBI warns of child-support card scam

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Friday that online scammers are now targeting single parents who use the EPPICard system to receive child-support payments.
The criminals are running a typical phishing scam, but one that is targeted at a new group of victims. "Individuals have reported receiving e-mail or text messages indicating a problem with their account. They are directed to follow the link provided in the message to update their account or correct the problem," said the FBI's Internet Crime Complain Center (IC3) in an advisory. "The link actually directs the individuals to a fraudulent Web site where their personal information, such as account number and PIN, is compromised."

In another scam, victims are asked to fill out an online survey and are then told that once they enter their account information, they will receive an EPPICard deposit as a token of thanks for their answers. Instead, their accounts are emptied by criminals.

EPPICards are issued by government agencies in 15 U.S. states. They work like debit cards, and are promoted as an easy-to-use alternative to child support payment checks.

The EPPICard association also warns about the scam on its Web site. "We will never request your personal information such as social security number, card number or PIN through any of these methods," the warning reads. "Please do not respond to requests like these."

Scammers have also been trying to get this information via the telephone, the association warns.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

HTC iPhone rival launches in Taiwan Saturday

High Tech Computer's Touch Diamond handset, the company's answer to the 3G iPhone, will be launched in Taiwan on Saturday as a series of promotional events begins leading up to sales of the phone at the end of the month, the company said Friday.
The suggested retail price of the handset is NT$23,900 (US$786). The price is only for Taiwan and does not reflect possible subsidies by service providers that want to bundle the handset with a 3G (third-generation) contract. Still, it's nearly quadruple the price of Apple's new iPhone, which now sells for just US$199.

HTC may have lowered its price a bit due to the iPhone launch, however. A few weeks ago, people familiar with the situation said the Touch Diamond would cost NT$26,000.

The Touch Diamond is a Microsoft Windows Mobile-based 3G handset with a 2.8-inch touchscreen, GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver and 3.2-megapixel camera. The iPhone boasts a 3.5-inch touchscreen, and many of the same wireless technologies, but only has a 2.0-megapixel camera.

Taiwan isn't the first place the Touch Diamond will go on sale. HTC shipped some handsets to Hong Kong CSL, a mobile service provider late last month. People in Hong Kong could buy the handset on May 31.

Apple's announcement of a US$199 price for the new 3G iPhone has shaken up smartphone makers. HTC's stock, which is listed in Taiwan, plunged after Apple's announcement over fears the iPhone's price will undercut HTC's smartphone prices.

MySpace to shake up its layout

MySpace will unveil next week a large-scale redesign that will alter major components of the social-networking site, like its home page, navigation scheme, search engine and video player.
On Wednesday, MySpace users will see the first phase of the redesign, which has been in the works for the past six months, according to the company.

MySpace, the world's most popular social-networking site, expects the changes to boost user engagement by making the site easier to navigate.

MySpace is routinely criticized by users and observers for a layout that many consider visually strident and messy. Its members have many options to alter their profile pages, such as changing their background color, adding hyperactive animations, using fonts of many sizes and colors and plastering them with videos and photo slideshows.

On the other hand, rival Facebook is much more conservative in its design, aiming for a cleaner and more organized look, and gives its members fewer liberties to adorn their profile pages. In fact, layout and design is one of the key areas of differentiation between the two sites, and people often choose one or the other based on this issue.

As part of the redesign plans, MySpace has conducted surveys, performed usability tests and gathered focus groups.

In addition to revamping the home page, MySpace is also changing the profile editor to make it easier for members to design and decorate their profile pages. The profile pages will also undergo renovations.

Meanwhile, the search engine interface is getting a more streamlined layout, an enhanced relevancy algorithm and a tabbed results page including categories like people, MySpace site, Web, music and video.

In addition, the video player is gaining new controls and support for Flash 9 full-screen mode.

Facebook is also busy these days toiling away at a major redesign of its member profile pages, which it has previewed and which it hopes to roll out at some point this month.

Insider threat exaggerated, says study

Insiders are not, after all, the main threat to networks, a detailed new analysis of real-world data breaches has concluded.
Verizon's 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report, which looked at 500 breach incidents over the last four years, contradicts the growing orthodoxy that insiders, rather than external agents, represent the most serious threat to network security at most organizations.

Seventy-three percent of the breaches involved outsiders, 18 percent resulted from the actions of insiders, with business partners blamed for 39 percent -- the percentages exceed 100 percent due to the fact that some involve multiple breaches, with varying degrees of internal or external involvement.

"The relative infrequency of data breaches attributed to insiders may be surprising to some. It is widely believed and commonly reported that insider incidents outnumber those caused by other sources," the report states.

"Our caseload showed otherwise for incidents resulting in data compromise. This finding, of course, should be considered in light of the fact that insiders are adept at keeping their activities secret."

Fifty-nine percent of breaches were attributed to hacking, 31 percent involved malicious code, 22 percent exploited vulnerability, with 15 percent involving a physical threat. Sixty-two percent -- the overwhelming majority - had at their root human error.

Nevertheless, the report cautions from using the statistics to dismiss the internal threat altogether. When internal or partner security compromises happen, they tend to involve greater amounts of data. Where data loss was involved, external security breaches resulted in a media of 30,000 records being compromised, some way behind the figure for internal breaches, at 375,000.

When internal hacks occur, they tend to be nastier, with 50 percent blamed on IT staff themselves, way ahead of other types of employee.

The report concludes that honest network admins are obsessed with outdated ideas of perimeter security. Had data security been looked at within the network, almost nine out of ten data breaches could have been avoided.

"While a strong network perimeter is important, it cannot be the only or even the main layer of protection around sensitive information assets," the authors say.

Weak evidence links congressmen's cyber-attacks to China

U.S. House of Representatives members who worry that China may have been responsible for attacks on their computers have provided little evidence to back up their claims, according to computer security experts.
The two Republican congressmen, Representatives Frank Wolf and Christopher Smith, disclosed Wednesday that computers in their offices were hacked in late 2006 and early 2007. Both men have been critical of China's human rights record and said that the attacks raised concerns that they were being targeted for their support of Chinese dissidents.

Wolf said that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation had told him that the attackers came from within China. Smith said that the IT professionals who repaired his hacked computers told his staff that the attacks came from Chinese IP addresses and that the hackers had accessed files related to China.

"My suspicion is that I was targeted by Chinese sources because of my long history of speaking out about China's abysmal human rights record," said Wolf in a statement. He is the senior Republican on the State and Foreign Operations subcommittee.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has denied any connection to the attacks, according to reports. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter late Thursday.

However, computer security experts said that the evidence that the two congressmen provided to back up their claims simply does not prove that the Chinese government, or even Chinese nationals, were involved.

"It's so very hard to conclude that something came from someplace if all you're going from is an IP address," said Marcus Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Center, a volunteer-run effort that tracks emerging computer threats. "Those of us who have done this for a living, we know that you can't prove that it was a Chinese person on the keyboard if you have a Chinese IP address," he said. "Without making some of the evidence public … you leave everybody else guessing."

Computer attacks are often launched from Chinese IP addresses because a large number of computer systems in China have been hacked and are being used to redirect online attacks. Also, the country is notorious for providing so-called "bulletproof" hosting services that keep servers running even when international law enforcement tries to take them down.

"For US$1,000 a month or less you can get a bulletproof server in China," said Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

China has been blamed for many intrusions on federal computer systems, including breaches at the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Pentagon, but according to Warner, virtually any computer plugged into the Internet will find itself scanned by probes from China IP addresses. "Anybody who looks at their firewall logs can prove that they're being attacked from China. Does this prove that they're really being attacked by the Chinese? I don't know, "he said.

Nearly 12 percent of all Web servers using China's .cn domain space are considered risky because they may be associated with spam, adware or computer attacks, according to security firm McAfee.

Representative Smith's office did not return a call seeking comment.

A spokeswoman for Congressman Wolf's office refused to provide any more detail on the attacks or to say what evidence linked the attacks to China. "Everything we have to say is in our press release," she said.

That's not good enough for Richard Smith, an Internet security consultant with Boston Software Forensics. "If someone is going to make these kind of charges, they really need to be willing to produce the hard evidence," he said via e-mail. "Perhaps the office is embarrassed that a staffer accidentally shared their C: drive with the entire Internet."

Google, Yahoo strike ad deal

Just hours after saying it had ended talks over a possible investment from Microsoft, Yahoo announced a deal with Google to run some of Google's advertisements alongside Yahoo search results.
The nonexclusive deal unites the online advertising businesses of Google and Yahoo and comes as a setback to Microsoft, which had been trying to acquire all or part of Yahoo to strengthen its own online business and compete better with Google.

Yahoo said it expects the deal to generate US$250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow during the first 12 months, and that it represents an annual revenue opportunity for Yahoo of $800 million. The deal is for an initial period of four years, with an option for Yahoo to extend it for a further six years.

The deal was announced after Yahoo said earlier on Thursday that it had ended its talks with Microsoft over a possible investment by the software giant. Yahoo said it ended the talks because Microsoft was interested only in acquiring Yahoo's search business, not the entire company.

"Clearly it is time to move on," Yahoo CEO and cofounder Jerry Yang said during a conference call. "We believe this agreement with Google helps us to do so by strengthening our competitive position and generating attractive financial benefits."

Yang and Sue Decker, Yahoo's president, said the deal will allow Yahoo to capitalize on growth in the online advertising market and "the convergence of search and display advertising."

They emphasized the flexible terms of the deal for Yahoo. Yahoo will be able to choose the search term queries for which Google's advertisements will appear, and also the pages on which they appear. The deal applies to the U.S. and Canada only and is nonexclusive, so Yahoo could cut deals with other companies and can also keep selling ads from its own Panama advertising platform.

Advertisers will pay Google for its ads that appear by Yahoo searches, and Google will then pay a portion of the revenue to Yahoo, Decker said. "We improve our access to the paid search universe, but on terms that work for us," she said.

While this deal isn’t quite as good as a Microsoft acquisition for Yahoo's investors, it’s the next best thing, said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. “While it’s no substitute for an outright acquisition from Microsoft in terms of shareholder value, this is probably smart for [Yahoo] provided they invest in their own platform,” he said.

Continuing to develop Panama will be key to Yahoo’s future, Sterling said. “If they get lazy about it and start to turn over more and more to Google because they have the inventory and neglect their own platform, that could over time erode the position of Panama,” Sterling said. “So they have to be vigilant about that.”

As part of the deal, the companies also plan to make their instant-messaging services interoperate, Decker said.

Yahoo and Google had been in talks over a potential deal for months. It was seen as a way for Yahoo to strengthen its advertising business and alleviate the pressure to be acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft had cited any deal with Google as a potential deal-breaker in its talks with Yahoo. It had also called it a bad business decision that would only serve to strengthen Google, the online ad market leader.

Yahoo and Google said they don't require regulatory approval for the deal, but that they would delay its implementation for three-and-a-half months while the U.S. Department of Justice reviews the arrangement. Various groups ranging from farmers to Microsoft have expressed concern about such a deal.

The deal doesn't mark the end of the turmoil around Yahoo. Its board faces a proposal by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who hopes to replace the entire board and force the company into a deal with Microsoft.

However, the announcement probably spells the end of Icahn's plan, according to Sterling. Shareholders would only be inclined to vote for Icahn’s proposed board if they think it would help force a sale to Microsoft, Sterling noted. But Microsoft has said that it isn’t interested in buying all of Yahoo, only its search business. That kind of deal would leave the remaining Yahoo in a much worse position than it is now, he said.

British hacker faces extradition hearing next week

A British hacker fighting extradition to the U.S. on computer hacking charges is preparing for his final U.K. appeal on Monday in London.
If Gary McKinnon loses this appeal, he would be the first British hacker extradited to the U.S. He could face up to 60 years in prison.

McKinnon, of London, is accused of deleting data and illegally accessing information on 97 U.S. military and NASA computers between February 2001 and March 2002. He's been charged in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

McKinnon admitted to using a program called "RemotelyAnywhere" to hack into PCs late at night when employees were gone. His hacking exploits started to unravel after McKinnon miscalculated the time difference between the U.S. and U.K., and one employee noticed their PC was acting oddly.

The U.S. pursued extradition, which McKinnon sought to block. Then-U.K. Home Secretary John Reid approved the extradition order, but McKinnon appealed. He lost that appeal in London's High Court in April 2007.

McKinnon then filed an appeal with the House of Lords, the final court of appeal for points of law in the U.K. Five lords will hear his case on Monday and then take three weeks to decide, McKinnon said earlier this week.

If the lords reject his appeal, McKinnon said he could take his case to the European Court of Human Rights. The backlog of cases in that court, however, means that an appeal could take years and in the meantime, his extradition could proceed, McKinnon said.

McKinnon said a U.S. public defender has visited him in the U.K. to prepare for his case if he is extradited. McKinnon's passport has been taken, although he still may use a computer.

McKinnon, who said he probed the computers looking for evidence that the U.S. government has knowledge of UFOs, maintains that his hacking never caused any harm.

However, the U.S. said that the intrusions disrupted computer networks used by the military that were critical to operations conducted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The U.S. estimates the damage caused by McKinnon at US$700,000.

Chinese woman disrobes online for earthquake donations

A young woman from earthquake-stricken Sichuan province hopes to draw attention to the area and inspire people to donate -- although her online photos seem to be giving rise to thoughts of a different kind.
Known only as "Xiaoyun," or "Little Cloud" in Mandarin, she has posted as many as 100 photos of herself in various poses ranging from clothed to in her underwear to seemingly naked.

However, she claims her motivation is not intended to publicize herself, but to keep eyes focused on her native province. "I am not from Shanghai, I'm from Sichuan, my hometown was hit by the recent earthquake. I have seen people from all over the country help Sichuan, and I am really happy. I hope everyone can continue donating for Sichuan, so I am posting some photos to encourage contributions."

Chinese bulletin board users have had mixed reactions to the photos. "What is with these post-90 girls, why don't they know anything about Marxist theory and work ethic? What do they hope to achieve taking everything off?" wrote one poster known as "First Light on South Street." "Post-90 girls" refers to young women born after 1990 who are often stereotyped for being materialistic and lacking morals.

"This just gets more and more crazy. I don't understand it," said a poster known as "pthxhy2008."

In May, police detained Gao Qianhui, a 21-year-old woman from Liaoning province, for making an online video of herself complaining about the lack of regular television programming during a three-day national mourning period. The mourning period commemorated the nearly 70,000 victims of the May 12 earthquake.

Xiaoyun is not the first person, in China or elsewhere, to use the Internet as a vehicle for self-promotion. In 2005, Shi Hengxia, better known as her online persona "Sister Lotus" ("Furong Jiejie" in Mandarin), achieved national notoriety for her blog posts and attempts at alluring photos. Chinese government regulators moved against her in 2006, keeping her off state-run television and asking Internet portals to keep her off of prominent positions on their sites.

One observer dismissed the woman's altruistic claims, saying she is just the latest person to be elevated to an Internet celebrity by posting racy photos of herself. But "the difference is perhaps that a lot more people in China seem to care," said Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of English-language media blog Danwei.org.

Groups ask court to review laptop searches

U.S. border agents should not be able to search travelers' laptops without a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, despite a court ruling allowing such searches, two groups said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) filed an amicus brief on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the full court to rehear and reverse a decision by a three-judge panel that ruled that border agents can routinely search files on laptops and mobile devices.

The random searching of laptops is "widespread," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the EFF. The U.S. Department of Justice "claims that U.S. border agents have the power to do so, no suspicion needed, and there are plenty of reported incidents," he added.

There have been multiple media reports in recent months of laptops or other electronic devices searched and seized at U.S. borders, Tien noted. In some cases, travelers have not gotten their electronic devices back from customs officials, he said.

The case the two groups have asked the court to review involves a U.S. man named Michael Arnold, who returned to Los Angeles International Airport from the Philippines in July 2005. A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer asked to see Arnold's laptop, and customs officers found pictures of naked women, and later, pictures they believed to be child pornography.

Customs officials seized Arnold's laptop and later had him arrested.

Arnold's lawyer argued that the search violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures. His lawyer argued that the pictures obtained in the search should not be allowed as evidence in a trial, and a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California agreed with Arnold's lawyer.

However, the three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit overturned the district court's ruling. U.S. border agents have broad authority to search luggage and their contents at borders, Circuit Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote in the panel's April 21 decision.

"Courts have long held that searches of closed containers and their contents can be conducted at the border without particularized suspicion under the Fourth Amendment," O'Scannlain wrote. "We are satisfied that reasonable suspicion is not needed for customs officials to search a laptop or other personal electronic storage devices at the border."

The EFF and ACTE argue in their brief that "invasive" searches of electronic devices should be treated differently from searches of luggage. "Your computer contains a vast amount of information about your private life, including details about your family, your finances and your health," Tien said. "All that information can be easily copied, transferred and stored in government databases, just because you were chosen for a random inspection."

Tien said he expects a decision on whether to rehear the case within a few months.

Asked if defending an alleged child pornography user was a tough place to make a stand on laptop searches, Tien disagreed. "If they randomly search your machine, don't find anything interesting, and let you go, would you sue them?" he said.

FCC examines mobile termination fees

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should abolish early-termination fees because they're unfair to customers, two mobile phone customers and a state regulator said Thursday.
Early-termination fees, or ETFs, charged by wireless carriers are "unique and frankly predatory," Molly White, a corporate consultant from Portland, Oregon, told the FCC.

"I do not sign time-sensitive contracts and agree to early termination fees with any other utility with whom I do business," said White, who had to pay an ETF for her personal phone service when former employer Nike provided a mobile phone to her. "The cellular industry appears to have built an elaborate system of additional fees, early termination clauses and hardware purchase requirements, all with the intentional appearance of offering the consumer, me, a deal, while ultimately locking me into a long-term service agreement."

A second mobile phone customer, Harold Schroer, asked the FCC to take action on ETFs, but also requested that the agency not end class-action lawsuits against the carriers in exchange for abolishing ETFs, as has been proposed by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. In late 2007, after two senators introduced legislation that would regulate ETFs, Martin said he wanted to examine ETFs charged by mobile carriers and broadband providers.

Schroer, part of a class-action lawsuit against Verizon Wireless, told the FCC that the 4 million Verizon customers represented in the lawsuit paid about US$500 million in ETFs.

"We are seeking a refund of every penny of that money," said Schroer, a resident of New York state. "I never signed a contract [with Verizon], nor was I ever requested to sign a contract."

In 2003, Schroer cancelled a Verizon contract extension that was recommended by a sales representative, and he refused to pay the $175 ETF. Verizon then reported him to credit agencies, resulting in higher interest rates on credit cards and in him being turned down for new credit, he said. Bill collectors harassed him, he added.

Schroer complained to the FCC, but staffers there told him the agency had no authority over New York contract law, he said. "When I came to this commission for help, you sent me away," he said. "When I'm now about to get my day in court somewhere else, the commission purposes to step in and prevent me from doing that."

The FCC shouldn't take half steps such as requiring that ETFs be prorated based on how long the customer has had service or requiring that wireless carriers give customers more information about pricing plans and fees, said Anne Boyle, the chairwoman of the Nebraska Public Service Commission. Instead, the FCC should prohibit wireless carriers from offering plans with ETFs, she said.

Wireless carriers would benefit from the elimination of ETFs, Boyle said. "For some time, the wireless industry has ranked among the highest in the nation for consumer complaints," she said. "Many [complaints] are related to misunderstandings, misstatements and confusing, non-negotiable contracts."

Other witnesses at the hearing said ETFs help subsidize the cost of mobile handsets and allow customers to get cheaper rates than pay-as-you-go plans. "Term contracts allow the consumer to take advantage of bundled services at competitive prices and the latest devices they choose in exchange for a commitment to keep the service for usually one or two years," said Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vice president of public affairs policy and communication.

Verizon would support an FCC policy governing ETFs as long as the agency also took away the "patchwork" of state regulation on the fees, Tauke added.

Verizon would support an FCC policy that set reasonable ETFs, required more information be provided about ETFs, that they be prorated and have test-drive periods, Tauke said. "While we continue to question the necessity of some of these provisions, we nevertheless believe that an FCC-adopted national policy ... is workable for the wireless industry," he said.

Verizon has listened to customer demand and began prorating ETFs in November 2006, Tauke said. The carrier also allows customers a test-drive period for new service, usually 30 days, and customers who cancel service within that time period are not charged an ETF, he added.

But one witness questioned the assertion from some wireless carriers that ETFs cover the costs of subsidizing mobile handsets. Lee Selwyn, president of the Economics and Technology consulting firm, said his calculations show that mobile carriers subsidized an average of $14.33 per handset in 2006, while ETFs were in the $150 to $200 range.

Selwyn, who testified last month on behalf of customers in a class-action lawsuit against Sprint Nextel in California, said Sprint lost less than $10 per customer when customers ended their contracts early.

Wireless providers have long used handset subsidies as a marketing tool, Selwyn added. "Over time, as the volume of handsets being manufactured mushroomed and the product costs plummeted, the magnitude of such subsides diminished to the point where it has all but disappeared," he said.

Intel developing video search technology

In a quest to make computing more interactive, Intel on Wednesday said it is working on video search technology that it hopes to bring to its future multimedia platforms.
The video search technology, which is being developed at Intel labs in U.S. and China, cuts down videos frame-by-frame and then uses image and face recognition technology to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. The frames are then patched together to make video search possible.

For example, users will be able to search videos of football games to zoom into moments when their favorite players score, said Lin Chao, a researcher with Intel. The technology recognizes and categorizes a player's face and objects like a goalpost and ball using algorithms and statistical processing technology that Intel has developed.

Once a user requests to see the goal, the technology looks for frames that contain related objects and delivers the video to the user.

Users can zoom into specific moments without watching entire videos, Chao said. The technology's recognition capabilities also help categorize images by person and object, which saves users from typing keywords to tag photographs.

However, the technology has challenges that can be overcome as processing power increases, Chao said. Processing a video to make it searchable takes hours, as current processing on PCs is limited. Chao couldn't predict when the technology would reach consumers.

The technology is part of Intel's "visual computing," which combines multiple cores, software development platforms and graphics capabilities to enable a more human interaction with a PC, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel during a keynote at Intel's research show in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday. Intel wants to use the visual computing platform to enable interaction with a PC in life-like 3-D environments or to analyze video instantly.

Intel is already working on the Larrabee platform, which will combine multicore processors, multithreaded streams and graphics capabilities to deliver teraflops of processing power. Larrabee is due for release in 2010.

Intel's researchers are also working on a project that can track human activity to help caregivers. The company implemented a pilot in Seattle, where it has deployed monitors in 20 homes to track human activity.

RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are attached to objects such as toothbrushes, combs and medicine containers, and when those objects are moved, the tags tell an electronic monitor. RFID bracelets worn by members of the household identify who moved the object.

Ultimately, the technology could be used to identify if someone has taken medicine, for example. If the medicine container with an RFID tag wasn't opened, the monitor would alert the caregiver.

The activity tracking is unreliable for now, at between 70 percent to 90 percent accuracy, said Matthai Philipose, a researcher at Intel. It needs to reach between 95 percent to 98 percent to become reliable, he said. No study on the technology has been done to see if it is commercially viable, so it may or many not reach users in the future, he said.

Human problems could also affect the use of this technology, Philipose said. In countries like India or China, where homes have multiple caregivers, the workload of monitoring tasks will need to be broken up equally. If multiple people monitor tasks ineffectively, for example, people may end up taking medicine twice.

At this stage in the project, the RFID tags are protected by black blobs of plastic and so the lack of pleasing aesthetics is a problem, Philipose admitted. However, the plastic makes the RFID tags dishwasher safe, he said.

Wall Street Beat: All eyes on Apple, Yahoo

Yahoo and Apple announcements overshadowed all other tech events this week for IT investors. Apple's iPhone 2.0 launch raised mobile and consumer market issues, while the breakdown of talks between Yahoo and Microsoft removed the possibility of a truly game-changing event in the Internet realm.
All eyes were on Apple's US$199 iPhone 2.0 launch this week as the announcement, made Monday by CEO Steve Jobs at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, stirred concerns -- and hope -- for the overall mobile device and retail tech markets.

Apples' good fortunes since the introduction of the iPod have depended on the success of its hit consumer products, which in turn have a "halo" effect on its Mac line. But attention is also paid to these launches because the devices themselves are seen as harbingers of things to come in the music, broadband video and smartphone markets, and IT investors bet heavily on them.

Right after the launch, the low price on the 8G-byte model and the fact that the company did not release a high end 32G-byte version, stirred fears that Apple would see its profit margin erode. Apple shares sank $4.03 to close Monday at $181.64. But the day after, high-profile analysts issued research reports saying the low price will help increase market size. They also said the already widespread geographical coverage, and an ending to exclusive carrier agreements, are setting the stage for iPhone user growth.

Citigroup and Lehman raised price targets on Apple Tuesday, sparking Apple shares to rebound to $185.64. Citing "potential for significant market share opportunities in the handset and personal computer markets," Merrill Lynch on Wednesday added Apple to its US 1 list, the investment bank's top-ranking investment suggestions for "buy"-rated U.S. companies, and reiterated its $215 price target. The investment firm also raised its forecast of 3G iPhone unit sales, estimating a 12 percent increase in fiscal 2009 to 22 million units, and a 13 percent increase in fiscal 2010 to 34 million units.

But Apple shares slumped again on Wednesday, as tech companies were dragged down with the rest of the market on renewed fears of high energy costs and inflation. The uncertain economy has depressed IT company share prices this year.

Though first quarter financial reports were better than expected, there are enough reports about faltering sales in pockets of IT -- especially in the retail market -- to stoke fears. For example, shares of Texas Instruments fell Tuesday after the company adjusted its second-quarter earnings and revenue estimates, bringing the top range of its forecasts down. Company shares declined 2.1 percent to close at $30.66 Monday.

TI now says second-quarter sales will be between $3.33 billion and $3.46 billion, compared with its prior estimate of $3.24 billion to $3.5 billion. The chip maker said sales of chips for mobile phones are weak in the second quarter and revenue from wireless devices is running behind last year's levels.

In the Internet arena, the big news of the week was the breakdown of the second round of talks between Microsoft and Yahoo.

After Microsoft ended its acquisition bid for all of Yahoo on May 3, the companies said they were negotiating for what observers believed was Yahoo's search-advertising business. That, in fact, turned out to be the case, but Yahoo once again spurned Microsoft. In a statement on Thursday, it said, "With respect to an acquisition of Yahoo!'s search business alone that Microsoft had proposed, Yahoo!'s Board of Directors has determined, after careful evaluation, that such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future."

Meanwhile, Yahoo was said to be near a deal with Google, under which it would outsource some search ad business to the Internet giant. But investors appeared unconvinced, at first blush, that a deal with its archrival -- rather than Microsoft -- would be in Yahoo's best interests. Yahoo shares dropped by $2.63, or 10 percent to close at $23.52 Thursday. Microsoft shares rose by $1.12 to close at $28.24. IT investors might be relieved that Microsoft earnings will not, after all, be diluted by a big acquisition.

Yahoo ends Microsoft talks, nears Google deal

Yahoo has ended its talks with Microsoft about a deal narrower in scope than a full acquisition, Yahoo revealed on Thursday.
Instead, the company is nearing an agreement with Google involving its search advertising business, The Wall Street Journal reported. Yahoo made no mention of such a deal in a statement it issued late Thursday afternoon. Such deals are typically announced either before U.S. financial markets open in the morning or after they close at 4 p.m. Eastern time.

Yahoo said it has concluded talks with Microsoft because Microsoft was only interested in purchasing Yahoo's search business, not all of the company.

With respect to this, Yahoo's board decided "that such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders," the company said in a statement.

Microsoft on Thursday confirmed that it was not interested in rebidding for all of Yahoo, but had been seeking an "alternative transaction" that it believed would bring Yahoo shareholders more than US$33 per share, according to a statement. $33 per share had been Microsoft's previous final bid for all of Yahoo.

Microsoft said this alternative transaction remains on the table, and did not confirm that talks between it and Yahoo have concluded.

After Microsoft ended its acquisition bid for Yahoo on May 3, the companies acknowledged that they were in talks for an unspecified deal that most observers assumed involved Yahoo's search-advertising business.

Yahoo and Google had also been in talks about a search-advertising deal for several months, a deal that Microsoft cited as one of its primary reasons for ending its acquisition bid.

In April, Yahoo announced that it would test running Google ads along with its search results. Afterward, the companies said the test had gone well, but declined to provide more details on whether they would seek a longer-term, more formal, search ad deal.

Microsoft and Yahoo failed to come to terms on either a full or partial acquisition after months of on-again, off-again negotiations. Yahoo now faces the possibility of its board members being voted out by shareholders in a proxy battle spurred by billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

Icahn and Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock have been trading barbs in public letters back and forth for the past week and a half as Icahn increased public criticism of how Yahoo has mishandled its dealings with Microsoft. On Friday he told Yahoo's board to offer itself up for sale to the software giant for $49.5 billion and be done with it. Icahn also said he would seek to replace Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang if his proxy bid is successful.

In response, Yahoo's board has defended its actions of the past several months. Through this public disagreement between Icahn and Yahoo, Microsoft has remained noticeably silent, so it was never clear if the company was still interested in purchasing Yahoo for that price or any other.

Thursday's news likely will inspire more ire from Icahn, though it's not clear what he would do with Yahoo if he is successful in ousting its board but cannot find another company to purchase Yahoo.

On May 15, Icahn sent a letter to Yahoo's board announcing he is nominating 10 candidates to replace all incumbent directors at the company's shareholders meeting in July. A few days later Microsoft and Yahoo said publicly that they were both open to negotiating another deal, although not one for Microsoft to totally purchase Yahoo but instead to buy only pieces of the company.

Icahn's move and the possible shake up of Yahoo's board may have led one director, Edward Kozel, to resign on May 22. His resignation prompted Yahoo to push its shareholder meeting back to August and to operate with only nine directors until then.

Icahn's actions came after Microsoft and Yahoo failed to come to an agreement after two months of haggling on a price.

On Feb. 11, Yahoo rejected Microsoft's Feb. 1 official bid for the company of about $44.6 billion, claiming it was too low. This set about several weeks of negotiations between the companies.

During that time, Yahoo did everything it could to avoid an acquisition by Microsoft, seeking other suitors and striking the deal with Google to test Google's AdSense for Search service as one of the Web publishers that carry pay-per-click text ads from Google.

Yahoo also attempted to buy time when Microsoft threatened to mount a proxy battle for the company, which it implied it would do first in a letter to the company on Feb. 12 and later in harsher terms in a letter to Yahoo's board on April 5.

For example, on March 5, Yahoo lifted the following week's deadline for nominating directors to its board, an attempt to discourage Microsoft from trying to replace the current board with members willing to approve its Yahoo acquisition bid.

Yahoo also unveiled a flurry of product and strategy announcements in the months following Microsoft's bid, pointing out that each initiative proved it could continue go it alone as an independent company.

Microsoft eventually pushed the price it was willing to pay for Yahoo up about $5 billion, or to $33 per share, but Yahoo still wasn't happy with the price. Yahoo executives later claimed it was Microsoft that ultimately walked away from the deal the first time.

In the days that followed before Icahn mounted his proxy battle, Microsoft distanced itself from Yahoo and executives said the company was moving on. Yahoo executives, meanwhile, seemed to backpedal when it became clear board members and investors weren't happy with the deal falling through, and said they would be open to being acquired for the right price if Microsoft or another suitor came calling.

Hacker gets 41 months for running rogue botnet

A hacker who hooked up a botnet within Newell Rubbermaid's corporate network was sentenced to 41 months in prison on Wednesday, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Robert Matthew Bentley, of Panama City, Florida, must also pay US$65,000 restitution. He was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida.

Bentley could have received a 10-year sentence. He pleaded guilty to charges of computer fraud and conspiracy to commit computer fraud for using the botnet to install advertising software on PCs located throughout Europe without permission.

Newell Rubbermaid, which makes products such as Sharpie markers and plastic food-storage containers, reported their European computer network had been hacked around December 2006. At least one other European-based company also complained.

Bentley's indictment was enabled by investigations conducted by several law enforcement agencies worldwide, including London's Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Finland National Bureau of Investigation and other local U.S. agencies.

Others who helped Bentley are still under investigation, the department said. Bentley received a commission from a company called DollarRevenue for every installation of the advertising software.

Ad software can be very difficult to remove and trigger unwanted pop-ups. Many hackers have become astute at installing the software through surreptitious means, such as exploiting software vulernabilities in a PC's operating system or Web browser.

In December 2007, DollarRevenue was fined €1 million (US$1.54 million) in the Netherlands, one of the largest fines ever levied in Europe against a company over adware. That investigation found that hackers were paid €0.15 each for installation of DollarRevenue software on computers in Europe and $0.25 for PCs in the U.S.