Information Technology News

5 easy ways to commit career suicide

2008-07-25T10:44:00.001-07:00

BANG!

Without warning, the rifle discharged, tearing a hole through the floorboard
of the car of an Army colonel. The rifle belonged to a young lieutenant who
had been invited to go hunting with the colonel.

Though no one was hurt, the incident left everyone in the car shaken. Worse,
the lieutenant hindered his own promotion, according to executive coach Bruce
Sillers, who was a member of that same battalion at the time of the incident.

You may never have committed as grave a faux pas as this lieutenant, and if
so, be thankful. Nonetheless, we're all capable of making mistakes that can
send us straight to the career doghouse. Here are five big no-nos to watch out
for.

1. Sending inappropriate e-mail

Most of us are bright enough to realize that chain letters or off-color jokes
have no place in business communications. Where most office workers get into
trouble is with the over-hasty e-mail reply.

Ever read an e-mail too quickly and fired off an angry reply, only to discover
later that you had misinterpreted the first sender's message? You end up not
only wasting everyone's time, but poisoning your work relationships -- perhaps
permanently.

Before you reply to an e-mail that has elevated your blood pressure, apply
one of these useful tests: Ask yourself, "Would I feel comfortable explaining
my response on a witness stand?" or "Would I want my response to be
published on the front page of The New York Times ?"

If the answer is no, take time to cool off. Store the message in a drafts folder
and review it later. Are you sure this is what you want to say, especially if
you're directly insulting the recipient? Can your words be interpreted more
negatively than you intended? And finally, would you want this message to find
its way to your boss -- or to the HR director?

By the way, don't rely on any "unsend" feature, either. That feature
will fail when you need it most. And be very careful of hitting Reply All --
or your supposedly personal conversation could be the talk of the office.

2. Putting down co-workers

Having done a significant amount of work for a particular client, I decided
one day to try to expand my presence there. I called an executive in another
part of that organization, introduced myself and said that "Carl"
(a fictitious name for the IT executive with whom I had been working) was pleased
with my work.

That executive responded, "Why should I care what Carl thinks?"

Not smart -- especially when said to someone outside the organization. If Carl
had heard about this remark -- and these things do get around -- it could have
created a

Microsoft to buy data-warehouse appliance vendor

2008-07-25T10:43:00.004-07:00

Microsoft continues its shopping spree to bolster its SQL Server database platform to make it more suitable for large-scale enterprise deployments. On Thursday the company said it plans to buy DATAllegro, a privately held maker of data-warehouse appliances.

The terms of the deal, which comes on the heels of one announced last week to purchase data-quality technology vendor Zoomix, were not disclosed. Microsoft will retain most of the 93 DATAllegro employees, who will continue to work out of their existing office in Aliso Viejo, California.

DATAllegro provides data-warehouse appliances, which combine data-storage functions with business-analytics software. According to the company, its appliances allow companies to rapidly query large volumes of data and have the flexibility and scalability enterprises need, but at a cost-effective price.

The acquisition will allow Microsoft to "compete with the highest-end enterprise data-warehousing solutions," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft’s server and tools business, at the company’s analyst meeting in Redmond, Washington. "It will scale well beyond what Oracle can do today," he claimed.

Microsoft plans to use DATAllegro's technology to extend the capabilities of SQL Server for enterprise customers, making it easier and more cost-effective for them to manage and mine data. The company is expected to reveal more details about what it plans to do with DATAllegro's technology in October at its Business Intelligence Conference, according to IDC analyst Dan Vesset.

Microsoft may run into some challenges when integrating DATAllegro's technology with SQL Server. One technical challenge will be to replace the open-source Ingres database that the acquired company's appliance is based on, wrote Forrester analyst James Kobielus in a research note released Thursday.

Another will be to convince customers to use SQL Server in favor of Ingres, he wrote. "Clearly, that migration to SQL Server may alienate a substantial portion of DATAllegro’s existing customer base," Kobielus wrote, adding that it also will likely raise the price of Microsoft's version of DATAllegro's appliance.

However, on the plus side, Microsoft will provide what "DATAllegro has most critically lacked -- global sales, marketing and support -- "in spades," he wrote.

Muglia said an offering based on DATAllegro will be proof of Microsoft’s commitment to meet enterprises' high-end data-warehousing requirements at a competitive price.

Managing and getting relative business intelligence from data has always been a problem for business customers, particularly large enterprises, and customers long have used data warehouses to store and manage large quantities of data.

The data-warehouse appliance market, which combines storage and management with analytics, has been growing over the past several years because it provides an all-in-one package, Kobielus wrote.

"Over the past several years, the DW [data warehouse] appliance -- a preconfigured, pre-optimized bundle of hardware and software components -- has become the predominant go-to-market approach among both established and start-up DW solution providers," he wrote.

Microsoft's purchase of DATAllegro signals that there will be more consolidation in the data-warehouse space, with large enterprise data-warehouse vendors snapping up smaller, niche players, both Kobielus and IDC's Vesset said in separate research notes.

According to Kobielus, Forrester expects that incumbent enterprise data-warehouse vendors, such as Oracle, SAP and Hewlett-Packard, will follow Microsoft in the coming year to make strategic acquisitions in the market. Other pure-play companies still up for grabs in this space include Greenplum and Dataupia, he wrote.

Microsoft expects the deal to buy DATAllegro to close at the end of this month or the beginning of the next.

iPhone 3G Windows hack appears

2008-07-25T10:43:00.003-07:00

Hackers have followed up the recent release of an unlocking tool for the Mac with the release of the equivalent software for Windows users.

The software - WinPwn - jailbreaks and unlocks older iPhones, and jailbreaks iPhone 3Gs and the iPod touch.

This process which enables installation of non-Apple-approved third party applications and lets users employ the device on non-Apple-approved carrier networks.

The site offering the unlocking software for Windows users was down earlier on this morning.

Forrester: Vista is like 'new Coke'

2008-07-25T10:43:00.001-07:00

Fewer than one in eleven of the PCs being used in large or very large enterprises runs Windows Vista, according to survey results released Wednesday by Forrester Research Inc.

Of the 50,000 enterprise users surveyed by the Cambridge, Mass. analyst firm, 87.1% were still running Windows XP at the end of June, compared to 8.8% for Vista. According to author Thomas Mendel, that implies that the majority of PCs upgraded to Vista were those running older versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 or 98.

"Vista is 'new Coke,'" Mendel wrote, comparing Microsoft's flagship OS to the ill-fated soft drink. Enterprises still on the fence about Vista would be wise, he said, to "consider following the lead of Microsoft's important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case of Vista."

Mendel's comments undercut the momentum for Vista claimed by Microsoft, which says it has sold 180 million licenses for its 18-month-old operating system to PC makers and end users.
Vista still has double the share of Macs among big businesses, however. The share of Macs grew from to 4.5% in June from 3.7% in January 2008. 80% of those are Intel-based Macs.

Linux's share of desktops, meanwhile, fell significantly, according to Forrester, to 0.5% in June from 1.8% in January.

As a result, enterprise application developers only need to "develop exclusively for Windows XP and Vista. Forget about Macs unless you're aiming at a specific business vertical where Mac use is prevalent."

Forrester's study examined the Web browser as well as the desktop environments of the 50,000 users, spread out among 2,300 companies. It found that 19.4% of enterprise users are using FireFox, up from 16.8% at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, Microsoft Internet Explorer's (IE's) share only slipped slightly, from 79.1% in January to 77.6% at the end of June.

"At least make sure that applications work on Firefox as well as IE -- this is a must," Mendel wrote.

Apple Inc.'s Safari owns only a small slice of the market -- 2.4%, according to Forrester.

Both Flash and Java were nearly ubiquitous. Flash Player version 9 was on 97% of desktops, while Java was on 99.9% of them. But application developers shouldn't try too hard to jazz up their apps with Flash elements -- "business users don't want to hunt for navigation nor do they crave excitement," Mendel wrote.

Forrester also discovered that despite ever-increasing screens and screen sizes, the largest slice -- 34.1% -- of business users are using screens between 15 and 17 inches in size with resolutions of 1024 by 768 pixels; another 25.2% use screens between 17 and 19 inches in size with resolutions of 1280 by 1024 pixels.

Study: U.S. agency workers surf for porn, gambling

2008-07-25T10:42:00.004-07:00

Employees at the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) spend significant time on sexually explicit and gambling Web sites and even more time shopping and playing online games while at work, according to a report released Wednesday.

Employee time spent at Internet auction and gaming sites cost the agency an estimated 104,221 hours in lost productivity in a year, according to the report, released by the agency's Office of Inspector General. The estimated cost in lost productivity to the DOI is more than US$2 million a year, the inspector general's report said.

In reviewing one week of computer use logs at DOI, the inspector general found more than 4,700 log entries to sexually explicit or gambling Web sites, which are prohibited in the DOI's Internet use policy. In addition, the inspector general found more than 1 million log entries, from 7,763 DOI employees who accessed online gaming and auction sites, the report said.

The continued access to porn and gambling sites is "due to a lack of consistency in department controls over Internet use," DOI Inspector General Earl Devaney wrote in the report.

Surfing porn and gambling sites not only wastes time, but it also could expose the agency's computers to malware such as viruses or keystroke loggers, said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer of Web security firm Finjan Inc. Porn and gambling sites "usually are the first ones to distribute malicious code," he said.

A DOI spokeswoman didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment on the report. The agency sent a memo to all employees last week, reinforcing its Internet use policy.

The DOI, the agency that focuses on protecting U.S. natural resources, does not expressly prohibit employees from going to online auction and gaming sites, the report said.

One employee computer had spent close to 14 hours at two Internet gaming sites during the week, another had spent about 12 hours at one gaming site, and a third had spent nearly 10 hours at a gaming site, the report said.

Despite three recent cases in which child pornography was found on DOI employees' computers, the agency has no system-wide infrastructure for Internet monitoring and blocking, the report said. Four of the agency's six bureaus surveyed in the report are using monitoring and blocking software programs "to varying degrees and with some success," the report said.

In the Bureau of Reclamation, the value of the blocking and monitoring software is "questionable," the report said. The inspector general found 148 computers in the bureau that had accessed sexually explicit Web sites during the week.

In DOI's Office of Surface Mining, it appears that Internet use reports are generated only when a supervisor requests one, "rendering the system useless for any real proactive measures," the inspector general said.

The DOI has taken only 177 disciplinary actions against employees for inappropriate Internet use since 1999, the report said. "The low number of disciplinary actions reportedly taken ... compared to the thousands of hits we found indicating user activity at inappropriate sites suggests that employees are not being held accountable," the report said.

The DOI should develop a unified approach to address inappropriate Internet use, including a more consistent use of disciplinary action, the inspector general recommended.

Planting seeds of sustainability on Facebook

2008-07-25T10:42:00.003-07:00

Two Canadian university students hope to plant the seeds of sustainability on Facebook with an application that monitors power consumption and uses peer pressure and the spirit of friendly competition inherent among many gardeners to foster energy conservation.

Kevin Muise and Jin Fan of Simon Fraser University in B.C. are hoping their application -- along with a strong dose of peer pressure, and a spirit of friendly competition -- will motivate people to save energy big time.

Dubbed GreeNet, the application offers users vital information about their energy consumption patterns. Metrics are generated using data from electricity providers.

But the GreeNet system does more than dish out dull facts and stats.
It has a powerful visual component.

The system creates a "virtual garden" based on energy usage patterns. So user participation in energy-saving activities actually causes the growth of virtual foliage and flowers within that space.

That way, application users can visualize -- in a very vivid way -- the impact of their "green" behavior.

Apart from everything else, using GreeNet is a lot of fun, its creators say. That's because users get to grow an online garden on their Facebook page, with each energy-saving action triggering the growth of virtual trees and flowers.

"It's just like actual gardening," says Muise. "You see other people's gardens growing beautifully and get the urge to improve your lawn."

The GreeNet application, designed by Muise, an M.A. student, along with third-year undergraduate Fan, placed second in interface design at the recently concluded Imagine Cup technology innovation competition.

The annual contest, sponsored by Microsoft Corp., brought together around 210,000 young technologists from more than 100 countries.

Participants showcased solutions to real-world problems, according to Daniel Shapiro, product manager for platforms at Microsoft.

The contest, he said, encourages young people to come up with innovative projects that go beyond current mainstream initiatives.

Muise and Fan their motivation to work on GreeNet came from an awareness that global warming is one of the most daunting issues facing humankind today.

The two students also believe social networking sites, such as Facebook, are among the most effective vehicles for reaching out to the greatest number of people, and generating viral campaigns.

In GreeNet, each community member starts by planting a virtual seedling. That seedling will be connected to a monitor that tracks the member's hydro consumption.

The tree's growth is inversely proportionate to the member's energy consumption. As consumption decreases the tree grows, as consumption grows the tree shrinks.

Rather than seeing bland figures of their kilowatt/hr. consumption, users are treated to a visual representation of their energy usage.

The students hope this visual display, as well as seeing the progress of their peers will encourage users to alter their behavior and reduce energy consumption.

Community members can also populate their page with different colored flowers representing various social networking and energy conservation efforts.

For example, pink flowers could represent messages the user posts on the site, yellow could stand for media links, and each violet flower could symbolize an energy saving device purchased by the member.

But for GreeNet to work, Muise said, it needs the buy-in of an energy service provider. "We have opened discussions with B.C. Hydro to get the application linked to their customers billing system".

Once the link is established, the students believe it will be easy to get hydro customers to go online and sign up with GreeNet, as a large number of the users already pay their hydro bills over the Internet.

The interface also provides several marketing and advertising opportunities for green-oriented businesses.

GreeNet can serve as a space for highly targeted online ads appealing to the environmentally conscious consumer.

The application's ranking feature ties in with the business model for selling environmental products and services online. Users can compete with one another in showcasing their violet flowers, which represent energy saving products they've purchased.

There are many free online energy calculators and individual consumers as well as small and large businesses have used them to cut power bills.

Leonard Machler, an independent bio-chemistry research analyst running a consulting firm in Toronto uses the EcoAction Calculator developed by Earth Day Canada.

Machler says he started using the calculator last year to track his lifestyle. The application helped him halve his green house gas emissions, from five tons to 2.5 tons a year.

"I was able to save hundreds of dollars in one year. An organization can use this tool to cut energy expenses by the thousands."

Machler believes applications such as EcoAction and GreeNet are on the right track when they use visual images to represent users' energy consumption.

"If something is presented to you in a graphical manner, it's easier to grasp its impact."

Muise and Fan believe social networking sites that engage users and encourage them to connect with other people are creative and effective channels of disseminating information and ideas.

"If you want to instigate change, you need to talk to the youth. They are the people who one day will be the decision makers," Muise said.

"And if you want to catch young people's attention, you need to speak to them where they are -- at that's in sites such as Facebook."

Facebook's appeal to youth and its potential for viral marketing, give it a big advantage over other media, according to a Toronto-based online marketing specialist.

"Facebook is like an Internet within the Internet. Its opportunities are limitless," said Colin Smillie, a managing partner at RefreshPartners, a boutique marketing company specializing in the use of social media.

Smillie believes larger organizations, such as banks and automakers, should develop a greater Facebook presence to gain access to the site's demographic groups.

"Imagine a young consumer inviting 50 or more of his friends to download an application that's ties in with your product and those 50 kids inviting their own friends to do the same!"

Links to vendors of environmentally friendly products and services will also open up various marketing possibilities.

Sony announces blue-laser data storage format

2008-07-25T10:42:00.001-07:00

Sony Corp. has announced development of a blue-laser based optical disc system for data storage and says it should be available by the end of this year.

The system, which has yet to be named, is technically similar to the Blu-ray Disc format that was developed by a consortium of nine companies led by Sony, although it is incompatible. The data storage technology was announced Tuesday by Sony and is on display at the AIIM storage and content management conference in New York this week.

"It's for professional use and Blu-ray is for consumer use so there is no compatibility," said Aki Shimazu, a spokeswoman for Sony in Tokyo. She said that because the new system was not compatible with Blu-ray, Sony would not have to consult with other members of the consortium and it would have sole control over the system.

The main difference between the two formats comes in the data transfer rate. Blu-ray, which is aimed at consumer recording of high-definition television, can record data onto the discs at a rate of up to 36M bps (bits per second) to match the data rate of digital television. However, Sony's new data storage system can record data at 9M bytes per second or double the rate of Blu-ray, said Sony in a statement.

The first version of the format will be based around a single-sided, single-layer optical disc and will have a capacity of 23.3G bytes and rewritable and write-once versions will be available, said Sony. The disc is 12 centimeters, just like CDs or DVDs, and is encased in a cartridge to protect the media.

Blue laser systems are able to store more data than DVDs because of the shorter wavelength of blue light. This means the laser, which is used to record data on the disc, makes a smaller spot on the recording layer and in turn that means that the space needed for each bit of data is smaller. Thus more data can be crammed onto the disc.

The company's roadmap extends to a 50G byte capacity version by 2005 and a 100G byte capacity version at an unspecified point in the future and data transfer rates are expected to rise too. With the second generation disc they are predicted to double to 18M bytes per second and then double again, to 36M bytes per second, when the third generation version is launched.

To support the fast data transfer, initial drives will have an Ultra-wide 160 SCSI interface, said Sony. Samples of the drive and media will be available from the middle of this year for around US$3,000 each for the drive and $45 for the media.

The Tokyo company is aiming the new system squarely at the professional market, at least initially, and users of magneto optical disc systems and in this respect they are not alone.

Plasmon said Monday it will offer drives for its new blue-laser based UDO (Ultra Density Optical) format that include legacy support for magneto optical devices. Targeted at the same market as Sony's new system, UDO is also similar to Blu-ray and based around cartridges that are dimensionally identical to current magneto optical cartridges.

First generation UDO will support discs with a capacity of 30G bytes and a transfer rate of 8M bytes per second. Like Sony, Plasmon is also trying to sell the system based on future promises of higher capacity discs. Its roadmap extends to 60G byte and 120G byte discs.

CG girls gone wild

2008-07-25T10:40:00.002-07:00

It's the latest in augmented reality - where computer images and the real world mix - but for many Japanese otaku, or geeks, it's destined to become another way they can interact with virtual girls. [ Watch the video ]

This system is from Geisha Tokyo Entertainment and involves a Web cam recognizing a 2D bar code on a small cube. When it sees the cube a CG-character appears on screen. Leave her alone and she'll get bored, sit around and even clean your desktop if you're lucky...

But bring another coded cube close-by and you can interact with the character. You can poke her and annoy her in various ways and even strip her down to a skimpy bikini. She'll complain at this abuse but still comply so if you're feeling guilty you can give her a present represented by another coded cube. She get happier when she sees the present and positively adore you when she finds out its a teddy bear.

If you think its too low-brow consider this: the company was formed and is largely staffed by graduates of the University of Tokyo, Japan's top university, and this first software is more about exploring the market and perfecting the technology before they go on to tackle bigger entertainment projects using augmented reality.

Alice should be arriving in October in Japan and the company has plans to put the software on-sale overseas including the US and China.

Pwnage 2.0 iPhone jailbreak software calls

2008-07-25T10:40:00.001-07:00

The iPhone Dev team has managed to create unlocking/jailbreaking software for iPhone 3G within a few days of that product's release.

The team has published software - Pwnage 2.0 - which lets any iPhone or iPod touch user unlock the device, a process which enables installation of non-Apple-approved third party applications.

The Pwnage software can also unlock the iPhone for use with other networks, the team said, "Just to clear up some confusion over what this actually does: yes, it jailbreaks and unlocks older iPhones, and jailbreaks iPhone 3Gs and iPod touches. We only support the 2.0 firmwares," the team explained.

The scale of international demand for the iPhone in countries in which the device isn't available is illustrated by the fact that by February 2008, estimates of the number of unlocked iPhones in circulation around the world ranged from 800,000 to 1.5 million.

Installing unauthorized firmware on an iPhone voids the warranty and can render the device useless.

Software group weighs piracy lawsuit against eBay

2008-07-25T10:39:00.003-07:00

A trade group representing hundreds of software vendors is considering a lawsuit against eBay for what it calls widespread sales of counterfeit software on the auction site.

The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) has offered eBay several suggestions for stemming the sale of pirated software on its site, but the auction giant has rejected most of those ideas, said Keith Kupferschmid, senior vice president of the SIIA's antipiracy division. "We are at our last straw here," Kupferschmid said Friday. "If eBay continues to stiff-arm us ... then we will certainly consider litigation as an option."

The SIIA doesn't have immediate plans to file a lawsuit, but its members talked about the possibility during a meeting in May, Kupferschmid said. The lawsuit would likely accuse eBay of secondary copyright infringement, he said.

An eBay spokeswoman wasn't immediately available for comment, but eBay has defended its efforts to police against software piracy. EBay has put volume restrictions on software sellers, and it has eliminated most short-term software auctions, Nichola Sharpe, an eBay spokeswoman, said in March.

EBay's VERO (Verified Rights Owner) program, in place since 1998, allows rights owners to contact eBay and have items removed from auction listings. "We can't be the experts on what's fake or not," Sharpe said in March. "We're not the experts on counterfeits."

Earlier this month, in a similar lawsuit against eBay, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that eBay has taken sufficient steps to protect against sales of fake Tiffany jewelry items.

EBay pulled Tiffany items suspected of being counterfeit as soon as they were reported to the auction site, Judge Richard Sullivan said in his ruling. Trademark law does not require eBay to preemptively remove listings of Tiffany jewelry suspected of being fake, the judge said.

Sullivan's ruling came two weeks after Tribunal de Commerce in Paris fined eBay €40 million (US $62.7 million) for allowing the sale of Louis Vuitton Malletier and Christian Dior Couture counterfeit goods. EBay has said it will appeal the decision and spends about $20 million a year on efforts to remove counterfeit products from its site.

An SIIA lawsuit would likely focus on copyright infringement instead of trademark infringement, unlike the Tiffany case, and there's a more established track record of secondary copyright infringement lawsuits, Kupferschmid said. Trade groups representing the U.S. music and movie industries successfully sued peer-to-peer services Grokster and Morpheus in a case that ended up with the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, and the music industry was successful in its attempt to shut down the original Napster music-sharing service.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 and other copyright law sets out strong standards for secondary copyright infringement, Kupferschmid said. U.S. copyright law allows lawsuits for vicarious infringement, when the defendant has the ability to stop infringing activity and has a direct financial interest in the infringement.

The SIIA has asked eBay to end one-day and buy-it-now auctions of software, and the group has asked to buy a banner ad on eBay aimed at educating consumers about software piracy. EBay has so far rejected both of those ideas, but it has recently told SIIA it is reconsidering some of the trade group's suggestions, Kupferschmid said.

Ending buy-it-now and one-day auctions would allow SIIA to better track software sales on eBay, he said. SIIA has several staff members and a proprietary software program that attempt to flag infringing software on eBay.

Ending short-term auctions on software "would go a long way toward addressing most of our concerns," Kupferschmid said. "Until they actually do what we're requesting them to do, I still consider it a rejections."

This year, the SIIA has filed 32 lawsuits against eBay sellers accused of marketing counterfeit software. This week, an Oregon man was sentenced to four years in prison for identity theft and for selling counterfeit software on eBay, after the SIIA complained about him.

AOL to shut down Xdrive, other services

2008-07-25T10:39:00.001-07:00

AOL will phase out several online services as the Time Warner unit continues to struggle in its transition from a business model based on subscription fees to one based on advertising revenue.

AOL will put out to pasture Xdrive, a hosted-storage service for individuals; AOL Pictures, a photo sharing and management site; and Bluestring, designed for sharing photos, music and videos, according to an internal memo obtained by technology news site TechCrunch.

In the memo, AOL Executive Vice President Kevin Conroy said these and mobile services AIM World and MyMobile will be "sunset" because they haven't gained enough popularity. A source close to AOL said the leaked memo is legit and that it was intended solely for Conroy's team.

AOL's popularity problem among end users and advertisers seems widespread, judging by the anemic growth AOL achieved in advertising revenues in the first quarter: 1 percent, when compared with the same quarter last year.

AOL has been on a years-long shift away from its traditional business, based on charging people for dial-up Internet access service and for exclusive online content. It has been trying to move to a model based on online advertising, which has been experiencing strong growth in the past five years.

However, while some of its services are undeniably popular, like its AIM instant messaging, AOL has failed to develop innovative services in growth areas, resorting to acquiring or creating many "me-too" services in markets where dominant players are already entrenched.

For example, AOL Pictures, its original photo upload and management service, couldn't compete against more technically advanced competitors like Flickr, which was founded in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo the following year. Meanwhile, Bluestring seems very similar to much more popular services like Photobucket, Slide and RockYou.

Unable to gain an edge through technical innovation, AOL has been investing heavily on acquiring advertising service providers like Advertising.com, Tacoda, Third Screen Media, Quigo, Lightningcast and AdTech, hoping to capture a piece of the action that way, but that strategy doesn't seem to be working too well either.

In its first-quarter earnings announcement, Time Warner stated that AOL's ad business had done well in sales to external sites and in paid search, but that it had been hurt by a decline in display ads.

AOL's ad revenue growth fell way below the U.S. rate. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), U.S. online ad revenue grew 18.2 percent in the first quarter.

This is the latest trimming of online services at AOL, which last year eliminated about 50 of them, as the company has become much more selective about maintaining only products that directly support the online advertising strategy, the source said.

AOL will try to sell Xdrive, AOL Pictures and Bluestring so that existing users of those services will be able to transition to a new provider, but if no buyer is found, the products will be shut down by the end of the year, according to the source.

If the services are closed, AOL plans to either burn end users' content into CDs and DVDs and send it to them or walk them through how to save the photos, videos and other media to local hard drives, the source said.

According to the memo, AOL also plans to merge its Video Portal with its AOL Programming Video Experiences by the beginning of the fourth quarter, as well as try to boost the online ad revenue generated by the AOL browser toolbar, desktop software, Webmail service and Truveo video search engine.

Open Web Foundation formed

2008-07-25T10:38:00.001-07:00

InfoWorld — The Open Web Foundation, a non-profit organization intended to help create an "Open Web," was announced Thursday at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. Specifically, the organization is dedicated to the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies. The effort was announced by David Recordon of blogging tools maker Six Apart.

As described on its Web page, the foundation "is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."
The foundation is attempting to break the trend of building separation foundations for each specification. Details regarding membership, governance, and intellectual property rights will be posted in the coming weeks.

Individuals such as Geir Magnusson, a vice president and board member at Apache, and Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, are participating in the Open Web Foundation. Organizations that support the foundation include Facebook, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, BBC, O'Reilly, Plaxo, Six Apart, SourceForce, and Vidoop.

AdaptiveMobile sees Sharp Rise in Volume of Mobile Network Virus Attacks

2008-07-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.adaptivemobile.com/ — AdaptiveMobile today recommended to mobile operators that they step-up security for their subscribers, as they witness a steady rise in attacks. Recent analysis of data from AdaptiveMobile’s mobile operator customers suggests that two virus variants – CommWarrior and Beselo – are causing particular damage. While CommWarrior only affects Nokia Series 60 phones, Beselo attacks all smartphones, spreading via Bluetooth and MMS as a Symbian SIS installation file and is growing at four times the rate of CommWarrior.

One major operator has seen a rise in virus attacks from 0.5 percent of all messages to six percent over the last 12 months. On average, this operator receives 100,000 virus incidences a day, up from 70,000 in just one year.

Gareth Maclachlan, COO of AdaptiveMobile, comments: “It’s a worrying trend that’s not going to slow down yet. Fortunately, most subscribers are not infected as viruses are still immature and of limited virulence; but those who do get infected can lose up to 100 EUR a day from the MMS being sent by the virus. As these are typically corporate users with the latest phones, and who do not scrutinize their bills, operators are concerned that their best customers will churn if a competitor offers a solution.

“Protecting its users should be the first priority for any mobile phone provider. As infection rates continue to rise and higher proportions of customers are left at risk, mobile phone security will become a key differentiator for customer creation and retention – particularly among large organizations keen to ensure their staff is properly protected. The battle is heating up – and mobile operators have to make sure they are competing effectively.”

About AdaptiveMobile:

AdaptiveMobile (www.adaptivemobile.com) is the leading mobile security provider of unified customer protection for enterprises and individuals. The company offers comprehensive proactive protection from the increasingly prominent threat of mobile viruses, malware, inappropriate content, unsolicited communications and spam at a corporate and consumer level. AdaptiveMobile’s software works across all bearers, all technologies and all media.

AdaptiveMobile was founded in 2003 and boasts some of the world's largest mobile operators as customers and the leading security and telecom equipment vendors as partners. The company is headquartered in Dublin with offices in the North America, Europe, South Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific.

MobileMe fracas continues

2008-07-23T13:10:00.001-07:00

Macworld.co.uk —
Apple's MobileMe migration continues to be troublesome, with the company last night confirming at least some problems that could be attributed to one of the MobileMe email servers.

In a note distributed last night, the company admits: "On Friday, July 18, 2008 (2008-07-18) we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers. This issue is currently affecting approximately 1% of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC."

The company - which recently offered 30-day extensions on the period paid for by existing subscribers to compensate for the seriously troublesome migration - has also been forced to apologise for this all-new problem.

"We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption. We are working hard to restore your service," the company informs.

The company claims all other MobileMe services are functional, but complaints continue to emerge from service users.

Parts of San Francisco network still locked out

2008-07-23T13:09:00.006-07:00

The high-profile troubles on the city of San Francisco's computer network continue, despite a dramatic jailhouse intervention by the city's mayor this week.

While the city has regained control of the five devices at the heart of its FiberWAN network, which carries data between city government buildings, administrators are still locked out of the city's voice over Internet Protocol system and local area networks within the Sheriff's Department and the Recreation & Park Department. Assistant District Attorney Conrad Del Rosario revealed the ongoing problems Wednesday at a bail hearing for Terry Childs, the former network administrator with the city's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) who is accused of holding the city's networks hostage for the past 10 days.

[ Related reading: San Francisco's mayor gets back keys to the network ]

During that time, the networks have functioned normally, but IT staffers have been unable to make administrative changes to some of the city's critical routers and switches.

Childs' attorney, Erin Crane, had moved for a reduction in the US$5 million bail set in the case. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Lucy McCabe denied that motion Wednesday.

[ Related reading: IT admin locks up San Francisco's network ]

Childs' defense has portrayed him as a capable engineer, surrounded by incompetent management, who simply didn't trust anyone with the administrative passwords to the five network devices at the heart of the FiberWAN. On Monday, Childs had a secret meeting with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom where Childs turned over the passwords.

Del Rosario argued against any reduction of bail, noting that Childs handed over the passwords only after a scheduled July 19 power outage at the city's One Market Street data center failed to take down the FiberWAN. Because Childs did not store network configuration files on the routers' hard drives, a power outage would wipe this information out of memory, disabling the network until it was reconfigured, he said.

[Related reading: IT administrator pleads not guilty to network tampering ]

The assistant DA said it was "extremely suspicious" that Childs only communicated with the mayor after the network did not go out of service.

In court filings, prosecutors say they do not know where these critical router configuration files are located.

As the city's principal network engineer, Childs worked on about 1,100 networking devices throughout the city, Del Rosario said. Even with the FiberWAN passwords, there are still questions about the rest of these systems. "We do not know whether we have control of these devices," he said.

Crane said that her client was the victim of jealous co-workers who were upset because his good work made them look bad. "I think the entire thing is specious," she told the judge. "This is a DTIS management problem."

This is not Childs' first time in criminal court. He also served four years in Kansas prison on aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary charges, prosecutors said. Those charges stem from an incident that occurred when Childs was 16 years old, Crane said.

The court also ordered Childs to stay away from several of his former co-workers, including Jeana Pieralde, the DTIS director of security who was allegedly so afraid of Childs that she locked herself in a room in the data center, and his former supervisor Herb Tong, whom Childs felt was undermining his work at the department.

Prosecutors say that police found bullets when they searched his Pittsburg, California, home on July 13.

In a brief appearance before reporters after the hearing, Crane said that she and Childs were "deeply disappointed that bail had not been reduced."

Childs' next scheduled court date is a Sept. 24 pretrial hearing.

Google launches Wikipedia rival

2008-07-23T13:09:00.005-07:00

Google has launched Knol, its user-generated online encyclopedia, which it announced in December but had kept under wraps in private testing.

Although its goal and approach are similar to Wikipedia's -- to tap the collective knowledge of Internet users within an encyclopedia format -- Knol is different in several ways.

Knol will encourage writers to use their real names and stand behind their articles, and will give them the possibility to generate income from their work via Google ads.

"Every knol will have an author, or group of authors, who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good," wrote Knol product manager Cedric Dupont and software engineer Michael McNally in an official blog posting Wednesday.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, has a culture of anonymity in which contributors rarely use their real names, and no ads appear on the site.

In addition, Knol apparently will have more controls over submissions and edits than Wikipedia. In Knol, readers can suggest changes to articles, and the authors have the final word on whether to accept or reject the feedback. "This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it," the Google officials wrote. Readers will also be able to rate articles and write reviews of them.

In Wikipedia, anyone can make changes to articles and have them appear instantly online.

Although in the blog posting knols are described as "authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects," a Google spokesman said that anyone can write an article.

"Google will have no advance knowledge of the content of a knol and we will not be doing editorial screening of content posted by users and authors," he wrote via e-mail.

In addition, Google will encourage authors to use their real names, but will not require it, he said. Google will give authors the ability to have their identity confirmed via a telephone or credit card verification process. Articles penned by these authors will appear with a "verified" stamp, he said.

EMC revenue, profit defy economic woes

2008-07-23T13:09:00.003-07:00

EMC's revenue grew 18 percent in the second quarter ended June 30, a result the company attributed to massive growth in the data enterprises need to store.

The company brought in US$3.67 billion worldwide in the quarter, up from $3.12 billion a year earlier. Revenue even rose 10 percent in the U.S., defying the country's economic woes, while gaining more in all of EMC's other regions around the world. The results beat expectations of analysts, who had predicted revenue of $3.56 billion, according to a Thomson Financial survey.

[ Related reading: VMware Q2 revenue up 54 percent, but slightly misses Street ]

"Despite continued economic uncertainty at the macro level, we believe spending on information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure technologies will continue to grow," said Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president and CEO, in a prepared statement.

The sales gains boosted EMC's profit as well, with net income reaching $377.5 million, or $0.18 per share, up from $334.4 million, or $0.16 per share, in last year's second quarter.

Information Storage, the company's largest business, saw revenue grow 14 percent to $2.87 billion. EMC said high points included midrange storage systems connected to Internet Protocol networks, as well as consulting and implementation. Meanwhile, the company's RSA security division had a 15 percent gain to $144 million, EMC said.

EMC derived a record 48 percent of its revenue from outside the U.S. in the quarter. The news was particularly good there, as both Asia-Pacific and Japan and Europe, Middle East and Africa had 27 percent gains in revenue from a year earlier. Latin America revenue grew 24 percent.

On Tuesday, VMware reported revenue growth of 54 percent from a year earlier, to $456 million. But that result fell slightly short of analysts' expectations.

The storage industry as a whole seems to be thriving despite economic weakness. Shipments of hard-disk drives hit 137 million units in the first quarter, up 21 percent from a year earlier, research company iSuppli said Tuesday.

Following the results, EMC's shares were up $1.24 to $13.70 in early afternoon trading Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

Luxoft Acquires Romania’s ITC Networks

2008-07-23T13:09:00.001-07:00

Acquisition of leading Romanian IT player increases Luxoft’s global delivery capability and telecom expertise

New York, NY; July 22nd 2008 - Luxoft, a global provider of high-end application and product development services, today announced it has acquired Bucharest-headquartered ITC Networks (ITCN), a leading Romanian software outsourcing provider specializing in the telecommunications industry. The combined company will have more than 3000 employees worldwide and an annual revenue run rate of over $150 million.

The acquisition of ITC Networks, which follows Luxoft’s April announcement of a new office opening in Vietnam, further expands the company’s global footprint. ITC Networks’ large scale delivery capability within the European Union, with its shared legal framework, ease of travel, and convenient time zones, makes Luxoft’s service offerings even more compelling for the European clientele. The deal also strengthens Luxoft’s expertise in the telecom industry, expanding its client portfolio with companies like Nortel Networks, Avaya, Trapeze Networks and others. In turn, existing ITC Networks clients will benefit from Luxoft’s best-of-breed processes and methodologies, financial stability, global delivery locations, and economies of scale.

“This acquisition is another step in Luxoft’s growth and strengthening of the company’s global presence,” said Dmitry Loschinin, President and CEO, Luxoft. “The tremendous telecoms aptitude of the combined team, prominent European Union location and shared commitment to engineering excellence will serve Luxoft, its clients and ITC Networks’ clients well for years to come.”

Doru Mardare, Managing Director of ITC Networks concurred. “This acquisition is a great boost to ITC Networks. We see full synergy with the Luxoft team in terms of our respective corporate cultures, ability to develop successful long term partnerships with leading global clients, and deep telecom industry expertise. We are looking forward to becoming part of a global entity, especially one that is growing as quickly as Luxoft.”

James Reeves, Vice President of R&D and World-Wide Customer Service Trapeze Networks, a client of ITC Networks, commented, “We are excited to work with such a world-class, global organization like Luxoft and are confident that this acquisition will further strengthen our relationship.”

About Luxoft
Luxoft, a member of the IBS Group, is an emerging global leader in application and product engineering outsourcing services for enterprise IT organizations and software vendors. Luxoft builds lasting partnerships with its clients, such as Boeing, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Dell, IBM, Sabre and other global leaders, based on the culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and deep domain expertise. Luxoft offers global delivery capability through its network of state-of-the-art delivery centers in North America, Central & Eastern Europe, and Asia. Luxoft’s customers benefit from the right mix of technology skills, industry knowledge, best-of-breed processes and methodologies, and a choice of engagement models.

Luxoft is the recipient of the 2007 Frost & Sullivan Global Outsourcing Growth Excellence & Customer Value Leadership Award, as well as the Applied Innovation Award from the IAOP and Wipro, ITAA and Forbes (together with Deutsche Bank). For more information visit: www.luxoft.com.

About ITC Networks
ITC Networks is a specialized provider of software engineering services for the telecommunications industry. ITC Networks’ range of services includes system and application development, re-engineering, software testing and test automation, maintenance, and support. ITC Networks is differentiated by its deep domain expertise, well defined processes and highly skilled engineers. ITC Networks’ satisfied clients include such industry leaders as Nortel Networks, Avaya, Trapeze Networks, and others. For more information please visit http://www.itcnetworks.ro

Nokia claims victory over Qualcomm in ongoing patent battle

2008-07-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

The German Federal Patent Court ruled Wednesday that a Qualcomm GSM patent claim against Nokia is invalid, said the Finnish phone giant.

"This is the third court to conclude that Qualcomm’s patent claims against Nokia are without merit. The United Kingdom High Court, and the U.S. International Trade Commission, have both ruled asserted Qualcomm GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) patents to be invalid," said Nokia spokeswoman Anne Eckert.

Today’s decision is further evidence that Qualcomm does not have relevant and valid GSM patents and that it overstates its role as a wireless innovator, according to Nokia.

Nokia and Qualcomm are embroiled in a bitter battle that started back in 2006, at the heart of which is a licensing agreement between the two that expired in April last year.

"Nokia will be happy this ruling went their way, but this is not the end of this story by any means," said Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight.

The two companies are already gearing up for another trial in Delaware, which starts on Wednesday, and in Germany yet another hearing is scheduled for Oct. 22.

The stakes are very high; any fraction of a percentage in a final settlement between Qualcomm and Nokia will have a big impact, since Nokia sells such a large number of phones, according to Wood.

Qualcomm wasn't available for a comment.

But in the report for its second quarter 2008 Qualcomm wrote that as result of the dispute, it is not recording royalty revenue attributable to Nokia’s sales after April 9, 2007, until a court awards damages or the disputes are otherwise resolved by agreement with Nokia.

AT&T income growth spurred by iPhone, mobile revenue

2008-07-23T13:07:00.001-07:00

AT&T reported growth in both its net income and revenue for the second quarter of 2008, with interest in Apple's iPhone spurring strong mobile and mobile data numbers.

AT&T on Wednesday reported net income of US $3.8 billion for the second quarter, up 31 percent from the $2.9 billion it reported in the second quarter of 2007. Adjusted net income was up slightly, from $4.3 billion to $4.5 billion, with the adjusted numbers excluding expenses related to AT&T's recent mergers.

Revenue for the second quarter was $30.9 billion, up 4.7 percent from the second quarter of 2007 or up 3.6 percent using adjusted numbers. Adjusted earnings per share was $0.76, meeting expectations of analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

AT&T has an exclusive agreement to provide mobile service for the iPhone in the U.S., and company officials said their deal with Apple has helped drive the growth. Apple released a new version of the iPhone, called iPhone 3G, on July 11, but strong sales of the new device didn't count on AT&T's second-quarter numbers, as the quarter ended June 30.

"AT&T is all about deploying and enhancing premier networks and products to deliver this world to both business and consumers," Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "The Apple iPhone 3G is a dramatic example of this transformation."

Sales of the iPhone 3G have been "everything we had anticipated and more," he added.

Even without the iPhone 3G to boost the quarter's numbers, AT&T reported that mobile revenue increased by 15.8 percent to $12 billion, with mobile service revenue up 14.8 percent.

Wireless data revenue was up 52 percent to $2.5 billion, AT&T said. Text messaging volumes on AT&T's mobile network tripled from the second quarter of 2007.

Wireline voice revenue was down 8.3 percent to $9.5 billion, but wireline data revenue was up 5.4 percent to $6.1 billion.

AT&T also reported that 170,000 new customers signed up for its U-verse TV service, which delivers television service over Internet Protocol networks. AT&T now has 549,000 U-verse TV subscribers, the company said.

Abaca Receives Network Products Guide 2008 Product Innovation Award

2008-07-23T13:06:00.003-07:00

Abaca Technology Corporation, an innovator in email protection and messaging security, announced today that Network Products Guide, a Silicon Valley Communications publication and a world leading publication on technologies and solutions has named Abaca Virtual Email Protection Gateway™ VPG 1500, a winner of the 2008 Product Innovation Award. This annually venerated award recognizes and honors vendors from all over the world with innovative and ground-breaking products that are bringing essential and incremental changes and are setting the bar higher for others in all areas of information technology.

Abaca Virtual Email Protection Gateway VPG 1500 is a virtual email security appliance and software solution that delivers unprecedented email protection against spam, viruses, phishing attacks, DoS attacks, directory harvest attacks and spoofing with zero tuning. Combined with Abaca’s ReceiverNet™ Service, the Virtual Email Protection Gateway provides secure, managed access to the Abaca ReceiverNet Protection Network and guarantees a minimum of 99 percent accuracy.

Abaca Virtual Email Protection Gateway provides all the benefits of the Abaca Email Protection Gateway appliance with the added benefits of virtualization including: maximization of existing hardware investments; standardized hardware for improved manageability, availability, flexibility, and cost savings; and simplified backup and disaster recovery. The Virtual Email Protection Gateway VPG 1500 supports up to 1,500 licensed email users. To read more about this product innovation, please visit www.networkproductsguide.com/innovations/

“The goal of any product innovation must always remain a positive change, making or improving solutions better than before,” says Rake Narang, editor-in-chief, Network Products Guide. “Innovative products such as the Abaca Virtual Email Protection Gateway VPG 1500 are bringing improvements in email security through virtualization."

“Network Products Guide’s recognition of the Abaca Virtual Email Protection Gateway VPG 1500 further validates our solutions as excellence-in-class and ahead of the curve in email security,” said Leo Jolicoeur, CEO at Abaca Technology Corporation. “Product innovation is key to our continued commitment to meeting our customer needs and providing them with solutions that are ground-breaking.”

About Network Products Guide Awards

Network Products Guide published from Silicon Valley is a leading provider of products, technologies and vendor related research and analysis. You will discover a wealth of information in this guide including product innovations, roadmaps, industry directions, technology advancements and independent product evaluations that facilitate in making the most pertinent technology decisions impacting business and personal goals. The guide follows conscientious research methodologies developed and enhanced by industry experts. To learn more, visit www.networkproductsguide.com.

About Abaca Technology Corporation

Abaca Technology Corporation is an innovator in email protection and messaging security. Abaca’s next generation technology, ReceiverNet™, offers a revolutionary approach in the fight against spam — providing an unprecedented level of performance and guaranteeing a minimum of 99 percent accuracy. Abaca has created a portfolio of advanced products and services based upon this core technology, thereby assuring users unparalleled messaging protection from spam, as well as viruses and phishing attacks. Abaca is a privately held company headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information about Abaca, please visit

Brocade deal to help drive data-center transition

2008-07-23T13:06:00.001-07:00

Brocade Communications Systems' planned US$3 billion acquisition of Foundry Networks is a major strategic move in a brewing war over the future of data-center connectivity, industry analysts said Tuesday.

The deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, would combine a maker of Fibre Channel SAN (storage area network) switches for data centers and a specialist in enterprise Ethernet LANs, two technologies that are headed toward a merger themselves.

[ Related reading: Brocade to buy Foundry for $3 billion ]

The future of data centers lies with Ethernet, because it's relatively inexpensive, keeps scaling up to higher speeds and is ubiquitous throughout the rest of enterprise networks, analysts say. Virtualization and data-center consolidation are helping to drive the need for Ethernet's growing speeds. The idea is to create a "unified fabric" that spans both the data center at the enterprise's core and the LAN where client systems are located. But there are two main ways to bring Ethernet to data centers with the features needed there.

Both Brocade and Cisco are pushing FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), an IEEE standard expected later this year that would combine characteristics of both systems. By mapping Fibre Channel traffic over Ethernet networks, it will let enterprises take advantage of Ethernet speeds of 10G bps (bits per second) and up while keeping the latency, security and traffic management benefits of Fibre Channel. FCoE will also smooth the migration to Ethernet by letting the two technologies coexist in a single switch, so existing SANs (storage area networks) can stay.

The alternative is iSCSI, (Internet Small Computer System Interface) which some smaller enterprises have adopted because it can be used with conventional Ethernet switches and without in-house Fibre Channel expertise, said Bob Laliberte of Enterprise Strategy Group. Its main proponents have been storage vendors, he said.

Although it will take years for current Fibre Channel SANs to be replaced, one of the two is likely to win out, analysts said.

"There's a major religious war between FCoE and iSCSI," said Burton Group analyst Dave Passmore. They represent completely different technical approaches to combining Ethernet and storage transport protocols. "Reasonable people will disagree," he said.

Like Fibre Channel, FCoE does not use TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the basic communication protocol of the Internet and Ethernet networks, instead making up for it with other tools. Of the two approaches, only FCoE requires expensive, specialized switches, Passmore said, but it's more attractive to many organizations because it allows for a smoother transition from existing architectures, he said.

Enterprises could eventually lose out by choosing the technology that loses, but FCoE and iSCSI will probably coexist for years, Passmore said.

A unified fabric could save users money as well as complexity, Passmore said. For example, instead of having one network connection to the LAN and another to the SAN that it taps into for data, a blade server could have just one set of connections.

"That would greatly simplify the user's network infrastructure and require fewer switches," Passmore said.

Security is the main potential concern about having a common type of network across data centers and LANs, he said. Having two completely different networks as is traditionally done has built-in security benefits. But costs and benefits always have to be balanced in adopting new technologies, he said.

Brocade's purchase of Foundry will create a second powerful vendor of FCoE, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. So far, Cisco has been the only company with both the vision and the technology to create a unified fabric, he said. Brocade had the vision and now is gaining the Ethernet goods, Kerravala said.

"If the concept of unified fabric really does come true, there are really only two vendors," Kerravala said.

San Francisco's mayor gets back keys to the network

2008-07-23T13:05:00.004-07:00

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom met with jailed IT administrator Terry Childs Monday, convincing him to hand over the administrative passwords to the city's multimillion dollar wide area network.

Childs made headlines last week when he was arrested and charged with four counts of computer tampering, after he refused to give over passwords to the Cisco Systems switches and routers used on the city's FiberWAN network, which carries about 60 percent of the municipal government's network traffic. Childs, who managed the network before his arrest, has been locked up in the county jail since July 13.

[ Related reading: IT admin locks up San Francisco's network ]

On Monday afternoon, he handed the passwords over to Mayor Newsom, who was "the only person he felt he could trust," according to a declaration filed in court by his attorney, Erin Crane. Newsom is ultimately responsible for the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) where Childs worked for the past five years

Mayor Newsom secured the passwords without first telling DTIS about his meeting with Childs, according to DTIS chief administrative officer Ron Vinson, who added, "We're very happy the mayor embarked on his clandestine mission."

[Related reading: IT administrator pleads not guilty to network tampering ]

The department now has full administrative control of the network, he said in an interview Tuesday night.

It's likely that Childs had a lot to tell the mayor when the two met.

Childs' attorney has asked the judge to reduce Childs US$5 million bail bond, describing her client as a man who felt himself surrounded by incompetents and supervised by a manager who he felt was undermining his work.

"None of the persons who requested the password information from Mr. Childs ... were qualified to have it," she said in a court filing.

Childs intends to disprove the charges against him but also "expose the utter mismanagement, negligence and corruption at DTIS, which if left unchecked, will in fact place the City of San Francisco in danger," his motion reads.

Vinson dismissed the allegations. "In Terry Childs' mind, obviously he thinks the network is his, but it's not. It's the taxpayers'," he said. "The reason he's been sitting in jail is because he denied the department and others access to the system."

The court filings help explain just how this happened.

According to an affidavit from James Ramsey, an inspector with the San Francisco Police Department, he and other investigators discovered dial-up and DSL (digital subscriber line) modems that would allow an unauthorized connection to the FiberWAN. He also found that Childs had configured several of the Cisco devices with a command that would erase critical configuration data in the event that anyone tried to restore administrative access to the devices, something Ramsey saw as dangerous because no backup configuration files could be found.

This command, called a No Service Password Recovery is often used by engineers to add an extra level of security to networks, said Mike Chase, regional director of engineering with FusionStorm, an IT services provider that supports Cisco products.

But without access to either Childs' passwords or the backup configuration files, administrators would have to essentially re-configure their entire network, an error-prone and time consuming possibility, Chase said. "It's basically like playing 3D chess," he said. "In that situation, you're stuck interviewing everybody at every site getting anecdotal stories of who's connected to what. And then you're guaranteed to miss something."

Without the passwords, the network would still continue to run, but it would be impossible to reconfigure the equipment. The only way to restore these devices to a manageable state would be to knock them offline and then reconfigure them, something that would take weeks or months to complete, disrupt service and cost the city "hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars," Ramsey claims.

Crane argues that these monitoring devices were installed with management's permission and were critical to the smooth functioning of the network. They would page Childs when the system went down and allow him to remotely access the network from his personal computer in case of an emergency.

In interviews, current and former DTIS staffers describe Childs as a well respected co-worker who may have gone too far under the pressure of working in a department that had been demoralized and drastically cut as the city moved forward with plans to decentralize IT operations.

About 200 of the department's 350 IT positions had been cut since 2000, mostly to be relocated to other divisions within city government, said Richard Isen, IT chapter president with Childs' union, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21.

Despite his conflict with some in the department, Childs has a lot of support there, Isen said. "There is a lot of sympathy, only because there is a basic feeling that management misunderstand what we actually do and doesn't appreciate the complexity of the work."

(Paul Venezia is Senior Contributing Editor with InfoWorld)

Sun moves to indirect sales for most US customers

2008-07-23T13:05:00.003-07:00

Sun Microsystems is moving to an indirect sales model in the U.S. for all but about 300 of its largest customers, a step designed to help boost its flagging revenue.

The change means customers who aren't among Sun's biggest U.S. accounts from a revenue perspective will be switched to one of its reseller partners in the coming months, said Tom Wagner, vice president of Sun's North America partner sales organization, in an interview on Tuesday.

"Effectively we're going to go 100 percent 'channel' below the top 300 or so accounts," he said. That means Sun will depend wholly on its partners to generate leads, architect systems, close deals and provide much of the support and services for those customers.

The move will likely be welcomed by Sun's 600 or so channel partners in the U.S. because they will no longer be competing with Sun for business. Sun believes it will give them more motivation to attack areas of the market where Sun's "share of the wallet" is low today, and allow Sun to scale its sales efforts to target those accounts, Wagner said.

It is less clear how the move will be received by customers. "At the end of the day it'll be a 'wait and see' in terms of the customer reaction," Wagner said.

"We have a portfolio of partners who play pretty high up in the value stack and who we believe can provide quality technical support and system engineering resources," he said. But he acknowledged that some customers may have "very specific demands about how we handle their accounts."

"We'll have to deal with that when it comes to it," he said.

The so-called Partner First initiative is limited to the U.S. today and Sun didn't announce any plans to extend it overseas. Companies will sometimes try a new strategy in one region and roll it out worldwide if it's successful.

Sun does about two-thirds of its business through channel partners today and the proportion outside the top 300 accounts is roughly the same, Wagner said. "We're turning over what we believe is a fairly significant amount of our existing business" to the channel, he said.

The plan was announced internally on July 11 and relayed to Sun's partners through a conference call last week, Wagner said. The goal is to complete the transition by the end of this quarter or early next, which means by September or October.

The change comes at a time when Sun is struggling to grow its business as fast as competitors. Last week it announced that revenue for the June quarter will probably be lower than what it reported a year ago, although the preliminary figures were roughly in line with analyst estimates. It will report its full results on Aug. 1.

Sun is also restructuring and announced in May that it would lay off 7 percent of its workforce, or about 2,500 staff. Wagner said he couldn't comment on whether the new sales plan is related to the layoffs, but one industry analyst said that's likely to be the case.

"This will help to streamline their operations. It will result in lower headcount," said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, in Beaverton, Oregon.

Sun may also end up handing over a larger proportion of its professional services revenue to the channel, Olds said.

"The challenge will be ensuring that they get the shelf space with these partners, and that they invest enough to make sure they're well represented in the field," he said.

Sun will make "targeted investments" in partners or recruit new ones as necessary, Wagner said. The company is also changing the way it supports its partners. In the past, managers were allocated to a particular region and had little incentive to help partners grow their businesses in other parts of the country. It is changing so that Sun's managers now have an incentive to help the partners they manage nationwide.

Wagner wouldn't be pinned down on which areas Sun hopes to get more business from. The company is strongest today in the telecommunications, financial and federal government sectors, and is pursuing a bigger share of the healthcare and education markets, as well as that for mid-market customers.

"We believe we have a value proposition for just about anyone out there," Wagner said
.

NAND flash memory downturn to continue

2008-07-23T13:05:00.001-07:00

A global glut of NAND flash memory chips, which store songs, photos and other data in gadgets from iPods to digital cameras, will continue for at least the next few months because companies have been slow to rein in production, according to DRAMeXchange Technology.

The market researcher, which is based in the heartland of the global memory spot market in Taipei, predicts the NAND flash supply will grow 149 percent this year despite worsening prices for the chips. The problem is that chip makers such as Samsung Electronics, Hynix Semiconductor and SanDisk's partner, Toshiba, have not moved fast enough to cut production.

The good news for users is that companies will be able to offer more NAND flash storage capacity for a lower price, or offer better deals on existing products such as flash memory cards and MP3 players. Low NAND flash prices could also spur companies to lower prices on hot products such as SSDs (solid state drives) in hopes of growing the market for the drives.

Prices of NAND flash memory dropped 20 percent on average in the month of June, DRAMeXchange said, and an upturn for the market may not be in the offing until as late as September.

The NAND flash market has been so bad that the creator of the chips, SanDisk, on Monday reported a surprise loss of US$68 million for the second quarter. The company blamed the supply glut for its problems, pointing out that it sold a record amount of flash, 120 percent more than the same time last year, but that prices are down 55 percent compared to then.

SanDisk also said NAND flash prices may worsen in the third quarter. The company's Nasdaq-listed stock fell US$4.31, or 24 percent, to end Tuesday at $13.62 as a result of its earnings news.

To counter the deteriorating market, SanDisk will delay the start of production at a new joint venture chip factory until April 2009 and put plans for another factory on hold until market conditions improve.

Credit Suisse analyst John Pitzer notes that SanDisk's plans to delay building new production lines are a positive for the NAND flash industry and rivals are likely to follow. SanDisk and partner Toshiba account for around a third of the global NAND flash supply, he said in a report.

McAfee: SMBs underestimate cybercrime risks

2008-07-23T13:04:00.007-07:00

The latest survey from security vendor McAfee has found that small to medium-size businesses in North America and Europe wrongly conclude their revenue is too low to draw the attention of cybercriminals.

SMBs are in fact rich hunting ground for hackers, McAfee said. Although there may be less money or data to steal, the attacks are also less likely to gain the attention of law enforcement organizations such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Lots of small attacks add up to large amounts of revenue," according to the survey, which polled 500 companies in the U.S. and Canada. There are an estimated 7.4 million SMBs in North America.

McAfee's study this year focused on North America, whereas last year it surveyed 600 European SMBs. However, the conclusions of the two studies are similar.

About 45 percent of North American businesses felt they did not have valuable data to steal. Last year, 58 percent of European businesses gave the same response.

In the U.S., 39 percent of businesses with up to 1,000 employees reported spending an hour or less a week on IT security. The figure is higher for Canadian businesses: 44 percent.

Part of the problem is that attention to security takes time, and SMBs have fewer resources. Many don't have an employee dedicated full-time to IT security. But McAfee argues that SMBs could face critical shutdowns in business as a result of weak security.

Every business retains employee data, which could be valuable, the survey said. Also, every business is hit with spam, which often is laden with malicious data-stealing programs.

McAfee said it expects hackers to increasingly go after VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone systems, virtual systems as well as mobile devices. McAfee's advice: patch regularly, filter e-mail and use antivirus software.

With DNS flaw now public, attack code imminent

2008-07-23T13:04:00.005-07:00

One day after a security company accidentally posted details of a serious flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), hackers are saying that software that exploits this flaw is sure to pop up soon.

Several hackers are almost certainly already developing attack code for the bug, and it will most likely crop up within the next few days, said Dave Aitel, chief technology officer at security vendor Immunity. His company will eventually develop sample code for its Canvas security testing software too, a task he expects to take about a day, given the simplicity of the attack. "It's not that hard," he said. "You're not looking at a DNA-cracking effort."

[ Related reading: Details of major Internet flaw posted by accident ]

The author of one widely used hacking tool said he expected to have an exploit by the end of the day Tuesday. In a telephone interview, HD Moore, author of the Metasploit penetration testing software, agreed with Aitel that the attack code was not going to be difficult to write.

The flaw, a variation on what's known as a cache poisoning attack, was announced on July 8 by IOActive researcher Dan Kaminsky, who planned to disclose full details of the bug during an Aug. 6 presentation at the Black Hat conference.

That plan was thwarted Monday, when someone at Matasano accidentally posted details of the flaw ahead of schedule. Matasano quickly removed the post and apologized for its mistake, but it was too late. Details of the flaw soon spread around the Internet.

And that's bad news, according to Paul Vixie, president of the company that is the dominant maker of DNS software, the Internet Systems Consortium. Vixie, like others who were briefed on Kaminsky's bug, did not confirm that it had been disclosed by Matasano. But if it had, "it's a big deal," he said in an e-mail message.

The attack can be used to redirect victims to malicious servers on the Internet by targeting the DNS servers that serve as signposts for all of the Internet's traffic. By tricking an Internet service provider's (ISPs) servers into accepting bad information, attackers could redirect that company's customers to malicious Web sites without their knowledge.

Although a software fix is now available for most users of DNS software, it can take time for these updates to work their way through the testing process and actually get installed on the network.

"Most people have not patched yet," Vixie said. "That's a gigantic problem for the world."

Just how big of a problem is a matter of some debate.

Neal Krawetz, owner of computer security consultancy Hacker Factor Solutions, took a look at DNS servers run by major ISPs earlier this week and found that more than half of them were still vulnerable to the attack.

"I find it dumbfounding that the largest ISPs ... are still identified as vulnerable," he wrote in a blog posting. "When the [hackers] learn of the exploit, they will go playing. They are certain to start with the lowest hanging fruit -- large companies that are vulnerable and support a huge number of users."

He expects that users will see attacks within weeks, starting first with test attacks, and possibly even a widespread domain hijacking. "Finally will be the phishers, malware writers and organized attackers," he wrote in a Tuesday e-mail interview. "I really expect these to be very focused attacks."

Most ISPs will have probably applied the patch by the time any attacks start to surface, and that will protect the vast majority of home users, said Russ Cooper, a senior information security analyst with Verizon Business. And business users who use secure DNS-proxying software will also be "pretty much protected" from the attack at their firewall, Cooper said.

"If anyone actually tries to exploit this, the actual number of victims will end up being extremely small," he predicted.

HD Moore said he didn't exactly see things that way. Because the flaw affects nearly all of the DNS software being used on the Internet, he said that there could be lots of problems ahead.

"This is a bug we'll be worrying about a year from now," he said.

Coverity™ Introduces New Static Analysis Solution for C#

2008-07-23T13:04:00.003-07:00

Coverity™, Inc., the leader in improving software quality and security, announced Coverity Prevent™ for C#. The product utilizes a new analysis engine developed by Coverity’s research and development lab that is designed specifically for detecting defects in applications built on Microsoft’s .NET framework. Prevent for C# expands the language coverage of Coverity’s static analysis products, and brings the company’s proven expertise in automatic defect detection to developers programming in C#. Over 450 development organizations currently use Coverity Prevent to ensure the quality and security of their C/C++ and Java code.

“To remain competitive, software development team leads need to stock their developer’s tool-box with advanced technology to maintain or improve productivity that helps them deliver higher quality code to everyone upstream,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke, a technology analyst firm. “As a language, C# is playing an increasing role in failure-intolerant devices, particularly in the embedded space. Coverity's expertise in static analysis will be a welcome addition to the tool-box of any C# developer.”

Unlike other static tools that simply extend existing analysis capabilities to encompass a new language, Prevent for C# is based on an entirely new analysis engine designed and optimized for Microsoft .NET-based applications. It seamlessly handles features of the C# language such as operator overloading, properties, and idioms for iteration and resource management. Prevent for C# also automatically finds third party .NET assemblies to ensure a complete analysis result, no matter how complex the application.

Coverity Prevent for C# automatically analyzes large, complex C# code bases and detects critical, must-fix defects that could lead to system failures, memory corruption or performance degradation. Because the product is the only C# static analysis tool to deliver 100% path coverage, it delivers the most comprehensive and accurate C# source code analysis. Prevent for C# requires no changes to existing build processes or code, and easily integrates into existing build processes and requires little or no additional hardware. Key capabilities of Prevent for C# include: Detect Critical Defects - Automatic detection of defects in C# source code that can cause crashes, performance degradation and incorrect program behavior

* 100% Path Coverage - Analysis of every path in C# code bases, ensuring that all possible execution branches are followed
* Low False Positive Rate - Accurate, actionable results help developers immediately begin improving the quality and security of their code
* Flexible Workflow - Defect Manager product interface allows teams to collaboratively view analysis results, triage defects, assign ownership, and provides comprehensive workflow capabilities
* Highly Scalable - Millions of lines of code can be analyzed in a matter of hours

“Coverity developed Prevent for C# in response to requests from our existing customer base and the growing use of the .NET application framework in mission-critical systems where software defects can be tremendously costly,” said Andy Chou, chief scientist and co-founder at Coverity. “Delivering new technology so that our static analysis product line covers C, C++, C# and Java is a significant milestone on our roadmap for our flagship static analysis solution.”

About Coverity

Coverity (http://www.coverity.com), the leader in improving software quality and security, is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco. Coverity’s groundbreaking technology enables developers to control complexity in the development process by automatically finding and helping to repair critical software defects and security vulnerabilities throughout the application lifecycle. More than 450 leading companies including ARM, Phillips, RIM, Rockwell-Collins, Samsung and UBS rely on Coverity to help them ensure the delivery of superior software.

ISP responds to lawmaker concerns about ad tracking

2008-07-23T13:04:00.001-07:00

Embarq, an Internet service provider based in Kansas, has suspended its test of a targeted advertising service that tracks subscribers' Web habits as a way to deliver relevant ads.

Embarq, in a letter to U.S. lawmakers made public Tuesday, said it has no plans to deploy a controversial behavioral ad service from NebuAd. Three members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Embarq CEO Tom Gerke last week, questioning the ISP's use of the NebuAd service, which has prompted an outcry from privacy advocates.

"Embarq has no plans for more tests or for general deployment of this technology, until such time as the privacy questions that have been raised recently have been addressed," said the Embarq letter, signed by David Zesiger, the company's senior vice president for regulatory policy and external affairs.

NebuAd's targeted ad system tracks user behavior in order to deliver more relevant ads and allows ISPs to profit from online advertising, but some privacy groups have accused the company of illegally wiretapping ISP subscribers' connections and of using common Internet attacks to deliver its service.

NebuAd's service first raised concerns earlier this year, when another ISP, Charter Communications, announced it was testing the service. Charter later announced it had suspended the test due to privacy concerns.

The lawmakers' letter came from Representatives John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee; Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the committee's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet; and Joe Barton of Texas, the ranking Republican on the full committee. The lawmakers raised concerns that the targeted ad service violated privacy and that Embarq had not notified its customers of the NebuAd test.

But Zesiger's letter says that Embarq, which provides voice and Internet service to customers in 18 states, did notify its subscribers of the test. Two weeks before the test began, Embarq posted a notice on its Web site saying it would use personal information to deliver targeted advertising. The notice included a link to a page where subscribers could opt out of this "preference" advertising.

"By opting out, you will continue to receive advertisements as normal, but these advertisements will be less relevant and less useful to you," the notice said.

The Embarq test was brief and did not collect information that could be linked to individual subscribers, Zesiger added. "Embarq put in place a number of clear protections around its test," he wrote.

The test complied with U.S. Federal Trade Commission guidelines on the collection of personal data, Zesiger added. "It appears that industry standards in this area are evolving rapidly toward a more robust form of notice and choice," he said. "Embarq ... not only welcomes, but fully intends to apply any such evolved standards."

Yahoo's profit down in Q2

2008-07-23T13:03:00.003-07:00

Yahoo reported a modest revenue increase and a considerable drop in profit for its second quarter, along the way missing Wall Street's expectations in both categories, results that are unlikely to please its nervous shareholders.

Although Yahoo managed to defuse Carl Icahn's proxy fight this week, a rare victory in its monthslong, tumultuous sparring match with shareholders and suitor Microsoft, its results for the quarter ended June 30, 2008, will probably do little to dispel doubts over its ability to survive as an independent company.

[ Related reading: Yahoo settles with Icahn on board members ]

Yahoo had revenue of US$1.798 billion, a 6 percent increase from 2007's second quarter, the company announced Tuesday. Deducting the commissions it pays to its ad network publishers, Yahoo had revenue of $1.346 billion, up 8 percent but short of the $1.374 billion consensus expectation from financial analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

Net income fell to $131 million, or $0.09 per share, from $161 million, or $0.11 per share, in 2007's second quarter.

[ Related reading: Yahoo rejects MS proposal, seeks bid for entire company ]

On a pro forma basis, taking into account one-time items, net income was $139 million, or $0.10 per share, a penny short of analysts' consensus expectation. Yahoo had pro forma net income of $163 million, or $0.12 per share, in 2007's second quarter.

Still, Yahoo President Sue Decker said in a statement that the company made significant advancements in its turnaround strategy during the quarter. "We remain confident that our efforts will lead to a stronger and more profitable Yahoo," she said.

[ Related reading: Senate panel to hold hearing on Google-Yahoo search ad deal ]

Yahoo, which has been struggling on the financial and technology fronts for the past two years, has been embroiled in a corporate soap opera since Microsoft announced a bid to acquire the company in February.

That bid collapsed in May, leading to accusations from shareholders, including Icahn, that Yahoo's managers and board had purposely sabotaged the negotiations in order to protect their own financial interests, violating their fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Yahoo's management and board have denied the accusations, which have led to shareholder lawsuits, saying they negotiated in good faith and that ultimately it was Microsoft's decision to walk away. In the meantime, Yahoo has seen a steady parade of high-profile executives leave the company in recent months.

Yahoo this week managed to reach an agreement with Icahn, who had proposed an alternate slate of director candidates for the Aug. 1 shareholder meeting in order to unseat the entire board. By expanding the board and granting Icahn three seats, Yahoo convinced the billionaire investor to call off the plan. Icahn had indicated previously that his intention was to unseat Jerry Yang as Yahoo CEO and attempt to lure Microsoft back to the negotiating table, a possibility that now seems remote.

An attempt by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo's search advertising business also fell through, as Yahoo instead opted for an alternate deal to outsource part of that business to rival Google.

VMware Q2 revenue up 54 percent, but slightly misses Street

2008-07-23T13:03:00.001-07:00

VMware reported revenue that slightly missed analyst expectations for its 2008 second quarter, a crucial period during which the virtualization leader ousted its cofounder from the CEO spot and lowered its revenue forecast for the year.

Revenue for its second quarter, which ended June 30, was US$456 million, an increase of 54 percent from the same period last year. However, consensus estimates from Thomson Financial analysts expected the company to fare slightly better, predicting $458.6 million in revenue for the quarter.

[ Related reading: VMware replaces CEO, shares plummet ]

Non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) net income for the quarter was $92 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, which was in line with analyst estimates. GAAP operating income for the quarter was $61 million, compared with $47 million for the same period last year. VMware's cash exceeded $1.5 billion, and deferred revenue was $721 million as of June 30, the company reported.

In the U.S., revenue for the quarter was up 43 percent to $240 million, and international revenue grew 68 percent to $216 million. Service revenue -- which includes support, subscription and professional services -- jumped 85 percent to $172 million, while revenue from software licenses was up 39 percent to $240 million.

On July 8 VMware replaced cofounder and then-CEO Diane Greene with former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz. A company statement hinted that Greene did not leave of her own volition.

VMware at the time also said its year-over-year revenue growth would be "modestly below" a previous estimate of 50 percent. On Tuesday, VMware said it expects revenue for 2008 to grow 42 percent to 45 percent from last year, which means it could be as much as 7 percent less than the company's original forecast.

VMware faces some of its toughest competition yet from its new CEO's former company Microsoft, which released its Hyper-V virtualization software for its Windows Server 2008 OS last month. Citrix Systems' XenServer software also is putting the heat on VMware, a subsidiary of EMC that made its initial public offering not quite a year ago. Microsoft and other companies are aiming to commoditize virtualization, VMware's bread and butter, as part of the OS.

Mozilla to release first Firefox 3.1 preview Friday

2008-07-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

Mozilla Tuesday set Friday as the ship date for the first preview edition of Firefox 3.1, the fast-track update it hopes to polish off by late this year or early in 2009.

In a meeting Tuesday, Mozilla developers and managers nailed down details of Firefox 3.1, including the release date for the first alpha. Previously, Mozilla had tentatively scheduled the alpha for sometime this month.

"Still on track for Friday release," said the notes posted online after the morning meeting.

Mozilla froze the Firefox 3.1 code Monday and will begin to assemble builds of the preview Tuesday, the notes continued. Only the US-English version of the browser will be tested before it's posted to Mozilla's servers.

Although the alpha is a work in progress -- numerous features Mozilla wants to ship with the final won't make it into the first preview -- several changes will debut Friday, including improvements to the location bar and enhanced Ctrl-Tab tab switching that presents thumbnails when cycling through open tabs.

The new Ctrl-Tab presentation and behavior -- on the latter front, pressing Ctrl-Tab switches between current and last-viewed tabs rather than simply moving to the next tab to the right -- was, like many of the features slated for Firefox 3.1, originally meant to be included with Firefox 3.0.

In May, when Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's chief engineer, first talked about Firefox 3.1, he said that the update would comprise features that didn't make it into the June release, but were "nearly complete."

The list of features being considered for 3.1 range from support for offline storage by Web apps to adding support for the Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (Cross-Site XHR) specification, a still-under-development specification that Microsoft Corp. recently said it is also investigating.

Colorado 'Spam King' walks away from prison camp

2008-07-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

Convicted penny-stock spammer Eddie Davidson walked away from a federal minimum-security prison camp in Colorado on Sunday, the U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday.

Davidson, 35, had been serving 21 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to criminal spam charges in December. He is now considered an escapee and is being pursued by U.S. marshals, with help from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and local police.

He earned millions of dollars between 2003 and 2006 by operating a spamming operation, called Power Promoters, out of his home. He would change the header information in his messages to make it appear as if they had come from legitimate companies such as AOL and then send them out to hundreds of thousands of addresses.

Davidson sent the messages on behalf of an unnamed Houston company, court filings state. He was asked to promote about 19 penny-stock companies, including one called Advanced Power Line Technologies in 2006 and 2007. He would earn fees based on the trading volume of the stocks he was promoting.

The business was lucrative: The Houston company paid Davidson about US$1.4 million for his services, court documents state.

Between 2003 and 2006, when his primary source of income was spam, bank account deposits into Davidson's account totalled about $3.5 million.

Davidson, of Bennett, Colorado, had been incarcerated at the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, about 45 miles south of Colorado Springs.

China quake site hacker caught

2008-06-18T00:32:00.005-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:32:00.004-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:32:00.003-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:32:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:31:00.003-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:31:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:28:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:15:00.002-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:15:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Microsoft says it offered $9 billion to Yahoo

2008-06-17T23:58:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

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.

HTC iPhone rival launches in Taiwan Saturday

2008-06-14T09:42:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:33:00.002-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:33:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:27:00.003-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:27:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:26:00.002-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:26:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:25:00.002-07:00

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

2008-06-14T09:25:00.001-07:00

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.

5 things you'll love about Firefox 3

2008-05-28T12:41:00.001-07:00

A couple of months ago, I downloaded a beta version of Firefox 3 just to look at the new ideas Mozilla was working on. My intention was to try it for a couple days, then switch back to Firefox 2. I wasn't worried about stability (it's a browser after all -- what's the worst that can happen?). But the beta wasn't compatible with lots of my favorite extensions and who wants to live without them?
As it turns out, I'm still using a prerelease version of Firefox (they're at Release Candidate 1 now) and loving it, even without my beloved add-ons. The improvements Mozilla has made to the browser, while subtle, are so helpful that I didn't want to give them up. Here are five of my favorites.

1. Much better performance

If you've used previous versions of Firefox you've likely had this experience, perhaps frequently: you're working away, but gradually become aware that something is horribly wrong with your PC. It's sluggish and apps take forever to load. You open up Task Manager and find that Firefox is chewing up 95 percent of your CPU cycles. Once you kill the browser and start over, you're running fine again.

I can't remember the last time I've had that experience with the Firefox 3 betas. Mozilla developers borrowed some memory management tricks from the Free BSD operating system for the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. (They say memory management on Macs already worked pretty well.) The effect is clear. The browser is much less likely to commandeer too many system resources. And Firefox's developers worked to make sure that add-ons, notorious memory thieves, don't cause problems either. They've rolled in cycle collectors that help prevent extensions from locking up RAM and not giving it back. They're also distributing tools to third-party developers that will help them build more abstemious add-ons.

2. The "Awesome Bar"

Okay, so the official name is the Location Bar, the field where you enter URLs you want to visit. But beta testers have nicknamed it the Awesome Bar and it is, well, pretty awesome. Enter text in the Location Bar and a dropdown list appears of pages from your browsing history that include that text, not just in the URL, but in the page title or the page's tag (see #4 below). The list even includes Gmail messages that include that word in the subject line. If you've already visited a Web page, there's a good chance it's useful to you. The Location Bar lets you very quickly search that useful subset of the Web.

3. Can't miss warnings

Lots of browsers have had phishing warnings before (including Firefox), but they've been wimpy. Usually they involve some part of the address bar changing color or some icon popping up near the URL. The problem is they're too easy to miss. I'm not looking at the address bar when I'm waiting for a page to load. I'm looking at the main well of the browser where the page will display.

But there's no danger of missing one of Firefox's new warnings. When you enter the URL of a suspected attack site, Firefox brings up a full-page warning. With a click, you can see a detailed explanation of why the site was blocked. Or you can just click "Get me out of here," which takes you to Firefox's start page. If you really want to live dangerously, there's a small link that lets you ignore the warning and proceed to the suspect site.

4. Better bookmarks

If you like a page, you just click the star in the Location Bar and it's a favorite. A dropdown box lets you name it, choose a folder to put it in or add a tag to categorize it. Bookmarks (and your browsing history) are now stored in a database, which means you don't have to spend so much time organizing bookmark folders. You can perform detailed searches of your bookmarks, then save that search as a special folder. Any new bookmarked page that fits the criteria automatically goes in the folder.

5. Whole-page zooming

If your eyes aren't what they used to be, it's nice to bump up the size of text on Web pages, as Firefox 2 will do. But it only changes the text size -- the other elements remain the same size. That makes for pages that look like The Incredible Hulk, with words bursting through the boxs and tabs that are supposed to contain them.

The new Firefox magnifies everything on the page equally. Everything remains in proportion, but becomes easier to read. And the next time you visit that page, it'll display at the same level of zoom.

Retailer GameStop discontinues Zune sales

2008-05-28T12:40:00.002-07:00

GameStop will no longer sell Microsoft's Zune digital media players in its stores once it runs out of its current inventory, the company said.
The games retailer, which started selling Zune when the player was released in November 2006, found Zune was not "working with our product mix," said GameStop Vice President of Corporate Communications Chris Olivera in an e-mail on Monday. GameStop is primarily a video game retailer.

GameStop made the decision internally to discontinue selling the product about a month ago, Olivera said. News of the decision first came out publicly on a conference call last week to discuss the company's first-quarter 2008 earnings.

In an e-mail statement from its public relations firm on Monday, Microsoft focused on other retail partnerships rather than address GameStop's decision specifically.

The company noted that Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart and other stores continue to sell Zune, and the company finds "good momentum online and at retail over the last few months, including a great response to our recent spring update."

For that spring update, Microsoft unveiled that NBC would be selling content through the Zune Marketplace, Microsoft's online store that sells content for the player. The news was significant in that it followed a spat NBC had with Apple that spurred the television network to pull its content from Apple's iTunes online music store.

Microsoft released its Zune player as a competitor to Apple's enormously popular iPod. So far, however, Microsoft has seen only marginal success with Zune, selling more than 2 million since its launch. That compares to more than 10 million iPods sold in the first three months of this year.

According to its Web site, GameStop has 5,264 stores, with 4,061 of them in the U.S. The retailer also has 287 stores in Canada, 280 in Australia and New Zealand, and 636 in Europe. The stores operate under the names GameStop and EB Games.

Google beefs up Mini search appliance for SMBs

2008-05-28T12:40:00.001-07:00

Google's Mini search appliance for small and midsize businesses has grown a new set of capabilities for crawling and categorizing documents, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday.
"Almost all employees store files on shared servers so other employees can access them. The Mini is now able to securely crawl and serve these file shares," says the post by Cyrus Mistry, enterprise product manager.

The revision also introduces document "biasing," the practice of ranking the importance of related or similar pieces of information.

"Many customers have told us that they want to tell us which documents are more valuable within their own companies -- for instance, published marketing collateral is more authoritative than the first draft," Mistry wrote. "Source biasing enables users to give us URL patterns and tell us if they should be weighted higher or lower."

The Mini now also enables users to rank documents based on their age.

Finally, Google has boosted the Mini's international reach, adding support for Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish in its help files and administrative interfaces, according to the blog post.

However, the posting does not list any increase in the product's scalability. It can index up to 300,000 documents, compared to its stablemate, the Google Search Appliance, which is geared for larger enterprises and can handle up to 30 million documents.

The announcement of new features stands in contrast to a recent rumor, reported by TechCrunch, that the company planned to stop selling the product and launch a new hosted search site.

Both IBM and Microsoft offer free, entry-level search products that compete with the Mini. Pricing for the Mini begins at about US$3,000, including two years of support and the necessary hardware.

A Google spokesperson did not respond directly to a query about the TechCrunch rumor, but said the company's "commitment to the Google Mini as the search solution for small to medium-sized businesses and smaller departments of large corporations is evidenced by this announcement."

The new features were prompted by customer requests and market demand, the spokesperson said.

While the capabilities are "not groundbreaking," and high-end systems have had them for years, they "do increase the functionality of base levels of search," said Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, via e-mail.

Customers wouldn't have revolted if Google hadn't added the features, according to Creese. "However, I do think it points to Google viewing the way to win in this market as giving good value for the money," he said. "While competitors are probably grinding their teeth, this is good news for the entire search market, as competing solutions will have to [improve] their feature sets as well."

The move falls in line with past practices, he added: "This is similar to what Google has done with Web analytics. In the past, free or inexpensive Web analytics [were] pretty bare-bones. However, Google Analytics has consistently added features that mean the entry-level solution is now quite full-featured."

Stephen Arnold, a search analyst who tracks Google closely, said the move shows the company has "confidence that sophisticated features are solid enough for toaster customers."

However, it is unlikely that Google plans to boost the Mini's scalability, because it wouldn't make business sense, according to Arnold.

"They never will," he said. "The logic of every box is that it has a hard limit."

UK's Tranquil PC taking orders for Atom-based home servers

2008-05-27T08:02:00.003-07:00

Tranquil PC, a computer maker in the U.K., is taking orders for two home servers based on Intel's upcoming Atom processor, formerly called Diamondville.

The two home servers, the T7-HSAi and T2-WHS-A3i, are both based on Intel's 1.6GHz Atom 230 processor, which will be launched at the Computex exhibition in Taipei next week.

The £278 (US$550) T7-HSAi comes with 512M bytes of RAM, a 500G-byte hard disk, and Windows Home Server. The T2-WHS-A3i costs £299 and has the same basic specifications, but has room for two 3.5-inch hard disks, while the smaller T7-HSAi can hold a single 3.5-inch hard disk or two 2.5-inch hard disks.

The Atom-based systems replace earlier systems based on Via Technologies' older and less powerful C7 processor. The C7-based home servers are no longer available, although Tranquil still sells other computers based on Via processors.

The home servers are not the first products to be offered by Tranquil that use Atom, a chip designed for low-cost laptops and desktops. Last week, the company began accepting preorders for a motherboard with an Atom processor, priced at £53.

Vodafone CEO Sarin steps down, to be replaced by Colao

2008-05-27T08:02:00.001-07:00

Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin will step down from the top job at the mobile operator in July, the company said Tuesday.
Sarin will leave the CEO's chair, a position he has occupied for the last five years, on July 28 at the company's annual general meeting, Vodafone said. He will be replaced by Vittorio Colao, the group's deputy CEO.

Vodafone also announced its full-year results, posting a £6.66 billion (US$13.1 billion) net profit for its fiscal 2008, compared to a loss of £4.93 billion for fiscal 2007.

Sarin was appointed CEO of Vodafone in July 2003, after serving as a non-executive director of the company. He also did a stint as CEO of Vodafone United States and Asia-Pacific. Sarin joined Vodafone in 1999, when the company acquired AirTouch Communications, where he served as president and CEO.

"Sarin has done a very good job, but has he done everything right? Of course not," said Martin Gutberlet, analyst at Gartner.

Gutberlet gave Sarin high marks for transforming Vodafone from a pure mobile operator into more of a service provider.

Under Sarin's tenure, Vodafone continued to expand its international reach, most recently with the acquisition of Indian operator Hutchison Essar, Gutberlet said. Fixed networks are also part of Vodafone's services now, he said.

Through this expansion, the number of Vodafone subscribers worldwide increased from 120 million to more than 260 million, Vodafone said.

Sarin received a lot of credit for his frank comments about what he thinks the vendors' development plans. At the Mobile World Congress in February, Sarin said WiMax and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) should be merged into one technology. Last year, Sarin challenged vendors to develop LTE faster.

Sarin's comments, along with other pressure from companies such as NTT Docomo and T-Mobile, lit a match under the vendor community resulting in faster LTE development, Gutberlet said.

Colao previously served as head of Vodafone Italy and regional CEO for Southern Europe. He left Vodafone in 2004 to become group CEO of the Italian publisher RCS MediaGroup. He rejoined Vodafone in 2006 as CEO of Vodafone's European region before taking on his current position.

The CEO of Vodafone is one of the most important roles in the industry. The rest of the mobile operators look to Vodafone for technology leadership, according to Richard Webb, directing analyst at Infonetics.

"He has to have a very clear vision and be very vocal about it, but I don't think Vodafone would pick someone who hasn't got that," Webb said.

"Colao's biggest challenge will be to keep Vodafone from turning into a bit pipe, but that is true for all mobile operators. Colao needs a dedicated Internet approach, including areas like advertising," Gutberlet said.

Via releases laptop design as open source

2008-05-27T08:01:00.004-07:00

Via Technologies released the hardware design for a low-cost laptop with WiMax support under an open-source license on Tuesday, a move intended to make customization easier and shorten design cycles for system makers.
The CAD (computer-assisted design) files for the OpenBook reference design can be downloaded for free and made available to anyone under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license. The terms of this license allow the CAD files to be freely copied, shared and modified.

The only requirements are that use of the design is attributed to Via and changes made to the design can only be distributed under the same license or one that has similar terms.

"We're hoping we'll get some interesting feedback, and look forward to seeing what the community thinks about this concept," said Richard Brown, vice president of marketing at Via.

The OpenBook is based on Via's 1.6 GHz C7-M processor and VX800 chipset. The design includes an 8.9-inch screen with a resolution of 1,024 pixels by 600 pixels and calls for a hard disk with a capacity of 80G bytes or more. The basic wireless module included in the design supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Optional modules include Assisted GPS (AGPS), WiMax, and support for high-speed cellular networks based on EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized), HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), and WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access).

Other features of the 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) OpenBook include a full-size keyboard, up to 2G bytes of DDR (double data rate) memory, a 2-megapixel camera, a memory-card reader, and a 4-cell battery that offers up to three hours of life. The laptop is designed to run Windows Vista, Windows XP, or Linux, including G/OS, SuSE Linux, and Ubuntu.

The OpenBook design is similar in appearance to Everex's CloudBook Max unveiled at the CTIA Wireless exhibition in April, but the two designs are different, Brown said, pointing to subtle design changes made to suit the requirements of Sprint, the operator that commissioned the CloudBook Max.

Depending on the exact configuration, OpenBook systems will likely cost between US$500 to $800, Brown said, adding that the first products will likely hit the market during the third quarter.

Via isn't the first company to release a hardware design as open source. In March, Openmoko, a company set up by Taiwanese hardware maker First International Computer (FIC), released an open-source smartphone design, the Neo 1973. The handset, which runs Linux, supports GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) networks, and includes Bluetooth and AGPS.

Like Via's OpenBook, the Neo 1973 hardware design was released under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Sierra Leone set for solar-powered school PC center

2008-05-27T08:01:00.003-07:00

Plans are set to install the first computer center powered by solar energy in Sierra Leone.

The beneficiary, the Prince Of Wales (POW) Secondary School, is located less than a third of a mile from Kingtom Power Station, a major Freetown electricity distribution center, but has no power.
The Prince Of Wales Alumni Association (POWAA) branch in the U.S. state of Georgia has proposed to provide the center with new desktop and laptop computers, a solar-power system and high-speed satellite Internet access – which is the only broadband option -- for their school. The estimated total capital cost of the project is between $60,000 and $70,000.

The government-owned school was officially inaugurated by the prince of Wales in 1925, and chartered to foster science education and studies in modern languages. The POWAA in Georgia was founded in 2002 by former POW students residing in the U.S.

The alumni also plan to extend Wi-Fi capability so that students and teachers who already have their own laptops can access the Internet without going to the computer center.

The solar power basics will comprise photovoltaic (PV) panels, batteries, three charge controllers, inverters, meter and breakers. The system will require about 30 solar panels to produce a total wattage of between 5 kilowatts and 6kw.

According to POWAA President Samuel O. Atere-Roberts, the solar equipment including panels and other accessories was procured from African Energy in Arizona. Atere-Roberts said that there have been delays in shipping the equipment to the U.S., due to fluctuating costs, and that installation of the center depends on when the equipment will arrive in Freetown.

POW school principal Millicent Ogoo confirmed the plans, and said that the school is expecting laptops next week.

"We’ve been getting support from organizations but this is the first time we’ll be getting a solar power system. We are also expecting 20 laptops next week. We are very proud of the project. They have really done well. It also shows that they have concern for the school," she said.

A contract for securing the classroom that will host the new computer center has been awarded to Sky Construction in Freetown and work has started in earnest, Atere-Roberts said. He charged more donors to join the project and change history in Sierra Leone as they follow the footsteps of Myeka High School in South Africa. In 2000, Myeka overcame many logistical problems courtesy of a similar project. Pass rates at Myeka school reportedly increased from 55 percent to 69 percent.

RIM says it can't provide e-mail interception in India

2008-05-27T08:01:00.001-07:00

Research In Motion (RIM) has said it is unable to give the Indian government access to messages sent by its enterprise clients over the BlackBerry service.
The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is specially designed to exclude the capability for RIM or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances, the company said in an update to its Indian customers on Monday.

For enterprise customers, the security architecture is based on a symmetric key system whereby the customer creates his own key, and only the customer possesses a copy of his encryption key, RIM said. The company does not possess a "master key", nor does any "back door" exist in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain unauthorized access to the key or corporate data, it said.

Further, RIM would be unable to accommodate any request for a copy of an enterprise customer's encryption key, as neither RIM nor any wireless network operator possess a copy of the key, it said.

RIM also offers a separate product for individual customers, BlackBerry Internet Service, hosted by telecommunications operators. It did not comment on that service Monday, and a spokesman was unsure whether carriers offering such a service would have access to the security keys.

The Indian government had refused to allow an Indian network operator, Tata Teleservices, to offer BlackBerry services until the government was able to intercept BlackBerry messages for security reasons. Other mobile service providers, who were already offering the BlackBerry service, were also asked to introduce measures that would allow the government to intercept and read BlackBerry messages whenever necessary.

Governments have a wide range of resources and methodologies to satisfy national security and law enforcement needs without compromising commercial security requirements, RIM said.

The use of strong encryption in wireless technology is not unique to the BlackBerry platform, and is a mandatory requirement for all enterprise-class wireless e-mail services, it added.

Government sources were not immediately available for comment. Discussions between RIM and the government continue, according to informed sources.

San Francisco's BART in talks for full Wi-Fi rollout

2008-05-27T08:00:00.004-07:00

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District is negotiating with a startup for a Wi-Fi network that would provide fast Internet access to riders throughout its 104-mile (167 kilometers) regional rail system.
BART would not pay anything for the network, which would be paid for by rider subscriptions and advertising, according to Wi-Fi Rail, a company based near Sacramento that says it has four patents pending on its Wi-Fi technology for predetermined paths such as railways and roads.

Municipal wireless networks have had a hard time financially, but public transit offers a daily captive audience that is growing as gasoline prices rise. Wi-Fi Rail estimates that within three years, as many as 20 percent of BART's 180,000 regular riders will subscribe to the service, according to Michael Cromar, chief financial officer of Wi-Fi Rail.

Wi-Fi Rail has been testing the system for about a year on a stretch of track in downtown San Francisco as well as on an outdoor test track. More than 9,000 people have signed up to use the system and have signed on more than 42,000 times, Cromar said.

Now BART and the company are in negotiations on the terms of a full deployment, in phases, which would take as much as two years. On Thursday, BART staff presented an update at a meeting of the transit system's board of directors.

Unlike other, established Wi-Fi providers, Wi-Fi Rail was willing to build the network, for an estimated US$20 million, at no cost to BART, the agency said. Like Sprint Nextel, which operates cellular base stations along a busy stretch of track in San Francisco, Wi-Fi Rail will have to offer wholesale capacity to other service providers to resell, said BART spokesman Linton Johnson.

The transit agency will use the wireless bandwidth to set up its in-car security cameras for live viewing, and it plans to also put screens in cars that give service information to riders, he said. BART would also receive a licensing fee from Wi-Fi Rail.

Riders will be able to use the service free with commercials that pop up every few minutes or buy a monthly subscription, Cromar said. The monthly fee would be competitive with other hot-spot services that are priced between about $20 and $30, according to Cromar. Daily and other types of subscriptions would also be offered. For that, subscribers would share between 15M bps (bits per second) and 22M bps -- both upstream and downstream -- with other riders in a car. Tests have shown no noticeable slowdown between one and eight riders on a car, he said earlier this year. In tests, the system worked on trains moving as fast as 65 miles per hour.

Riders will connect directly to a standard Cisco Systems access point on each car, which in turn will link up to the trackside network. Underground, that system will use deliberately unshielded coaxial cable, called "leaky coax," and outdoor sections of the track will be served using solar-powered parabolic antennas.

Neither side estimated how long negotiations for the full buildout would take. But once talks are concluded, the first phase of the network should be finished and paid commercial service launched in about four months, according to Cromar.

TJX staffer sacked after talking about security problems

2008-05-27T08:00:00.003-07:00

A low-level TJX employee has lost his job for speaking in public about information security problems he uncovered while working for the company.
The employee, Nick Benson, is a University of Kansas student who worked at T.J. Maxx's Pine Ridge Plaza store in Lawrence, Kansas. In an e-mail interview, he said he was fired Wednesday for violating corporate policy by disclosing proprietary information.

TJX is sensitive about information security after being the victim of a massive data theft, apparently made possible by poor security on the company's wireless networks. That breach, which compromised 94 million credit and debit card accounts, has cost the company tens of millions of dollars in legal settlements.

Benson, also known by his hacker name, Cryptic Mauler, is a frequent poster to computer security discussion groups such as Full Disclosure and the Sla.ckers.org Web forum, where he criticized the company's password policy, its server security settings, and the competence of the technicians who install firewalls at the company's stores.

"I never use anything but cash at their stores, but it's hard to sleep at night knowing the same network stores my employee information," he wrote on Aug. 22, 2007. "For all I know that information has already been picked cleaned by the hackers and [the] company could have swept it under the rug."

Although Benson didn't disclose anything that would have been news to a "vaguely smart" criminal, he did make a mistake by not disclosing the problems he'd found through the proper channels, said Robert Hansen, the CEO of Sectheory.com and owner of the Sla.ckers.org site. He first blogged about Benson's termination on Thursday.

Hansen said he felt bad for Benson, as did many of the contributors to his Web site. "He's a young guy," he said. "He didn't know the rules."

It's an all-too-common story in the information security industry, Hansen said. "When people are new to information disclosure ... they're idealistic and young and they tend to make mistakes," he said. "A good chunk of the people who sympathize with him have had almost exactly the same thing happen to them."

Benson said he reported the issues to his store manager and the company's district loss prevention manager but no immediate action was taken.

Just last week, Benson expressed concern that he might be fired for reporting the problem. "I don't want to lose my job for reporting this," he wrote. "Unfortunately anonymously reporting this will not work, since it would require me giving the store location which would then easily zero me out. "

Apparently TJX zeroed Benson anyhow, identifying him from the IP address he used to post his comments to the Web site, Hansen said.

The company met with him on Wednesday and asked him to explain all the security issues he'd found. After that, he was "fired on the spot," he said.

TJX did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

Benson said the company has threatened to take legal action against him if he talks any more about the company's security problems.

Future Apple devices may be solar powered

2008-05-27T08:00:00.001-07:00

Employees at Apple have filed a patent for integrating solar cells into portable devices by placing them underneath the layers of a touch-sensitive display, according to the filing.
Solar power could help make devices truly portable, freeing from the need for wires to connect them to a power supply.

When generating electricity from solar panels, the larger the panel the better -- but as the patent "Solar cells on portable devices" warns, after allowing space for buttons, screens and a way to hold the device, only a small area is left on most devices for solar cells.

One of the ways around that suggested in the patent is to stack a touch-sensitive layer, a display and solar panel on top of one another. That could make Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch good candidates for such a power supply, as the display occupies almost the entire face of those devices.

The use of solar powered charging in portable devices is starting to get more attention, for more immediate consumer use as well.

When Vodafone announced its plan in April to reduce its emissions of the greenhouse gase CO2 by 50 percent by 2020, it also announced plans for solar-powered phone chargers and universal phone chargers for Vodafone-branded handsets.

At the recent ITU Telecom Africa 2008 conference, Ugandan Minister for Communications and Information and Communication Technologies Ham-Mukasa Mulira talked about trials of solar-powered charging conducted there, which had showed promise.

Samsung shows 256GB SSD, plans launch this year

2008-05-27T07:59:00.001-07:00

Samsung Electronics plans to launch within this year a flash memory-based solid-state disk that boasts a 256G byte capacity and high-speed interface, it said Monday.

The drive, which was unveiled in prototype form at a Samsung event in Taipei, has the same form factor as a 9.5-millimeter high 2.5-inch hard-disk drive for which it is designed to be a drop-in replacement.

Solid-state disks (SSDs) are an emerging type of storage device that use flash memory chips in place of the spinning magnetic disks used in hard-disk drives. The memory chips mean the drives are more sturdy and typically have a higher performance but the per-byte storage cost is also much higher, so they are generally more expensive. That has largely restricted them to niche applications but as flash prices come down they are expected to become more widely used.

Samsung, which is one of the world's largest makers of flash memory chips, is eager to see the drives become popular as their widespread use will represent a big new market for its chips.

The prototype drive announced by the company has a read speed of 200M bytes per second (Bps) and a sequential write speed of 160M Bps, said Samsung.

Samples of the drive will be available to customers from September with mass production due by the end of the year.

A version with a similar form factor to a 1.8-inch drive is also expected to be available in the fourth quarter of the year, the company said.

The drive isn't the first SSD launched at this capacity. Last month a competitor, U.S.-based Super Talent, began sales of a 256G byte SSD but that drive is thicker than Samsung's at 12.5 millimeters. It has a SATA I interface, which means read speeds of 65M bytes per second and write speeds of 50M bytes per second.

China plans telecom restructuring, clears way for 3G

2008-05-27T07:57:00.000-07:00

China announced a restructuring plan for the country's fixed-line and mobile operators on Saturday, a final step towards the long-awaited release of 3G (third-generation) mobile licenses.

The plan, long a focus of discussion among Chinese government organizations, will merge or split the operations of Chinese carriers, creating three new operators that will have both mobile and fixed-line services. At present, Chinese fixed-line operators -- which are split along geographical lines -- are not permitted to offer mobile services, while mobile operators may not offer fixed-line services.

When the restructuring is completed, China will issue 3G licenses, the government said in a statement (in Chinese) that was signed by the newly formed Ministry of Industry and Information, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Finance.

The 3G licenses may even be issued before the restructuring process is completed, said Bryan Wang, Springboard Research's Greater China country manager and director of connectivity research. "Optimistically, it could happen before end of this year," he said.

By restructuring the operators into companies that offer both types of services, the Chinese government hopes to enhance the competitiveness of local operators and clear the way for 3G licenses to be released. China has one of the world's biggest mobile markets, but will be one of the last to roll out commercial 3G services.

Under the restructuring plan, fixed-line carrier China Telecommunications (China Telecom) will acquire the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) mobile network from China United Telecommunications (China Unicom). China Telecom will also acquire China Satcom, which offers satellite-based communications services.

China Unicom will retain its GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) network and merge with fixed-line operator China Network Communications (China Netcom).

China Mobile Communications, China's largest mobile operator, will merge with China Tietong Telecommunication, which operates a national fixed-line network.

The most difficult part of the restructuring process will involve splitting out China Unicom's CDMA network and transferring it to China Telecom. "China Telecom has already set up a team for CDMA, but obviously that's a smaller team conducting some studies to understand Unicom's network," Wang said.

Growing that team will be a challenge, as some important China Unicom executives may not join China Telecom. "Unicom plans to keep all the key guys for its GSM business," he said.

The statement that announced the plan did not offer a deadline for when the restructuring will be completed, but a report by the official Xinhua News Agency estimated the process could take 12 months to 18 months.

However, Wang estimated the process may be completed sooner, perhaps "within 12 months."

Microsoft's ODF support points to OOXML challenges

2008-05-26T00:08:00.003-07:00

Microsoft's plan to include ODF support in its Office suite next year reflects continued challenges for the OOXML file format, as the industry moves ahead with adopting ODF and sorts out OOXML's troubles.
Though OOXML (Open Office XML) was approved by the ISO on April 1, it continues to face impediments to widespread adoption. On Friday, it was revealed that South Africa is appealing ISO (International Organization for Standardization) approval of the standard. And earlier this week, New York state officially promoted ODF (OpenDocument Format) as a standard file format based on customer demand as it launched a new initiative for technology openness and open standards.

"If all that proprietary vendors are waiting for before they directly support ODF is a 'broad based customer request' then they should be aware that such a demand already exists in New York State," according to the report, which has been posted online.

Even Microsoft has delayed full support of the current OOXML specification, yet will support ODF in Office in a service pack to be released early next year, a move the company announced Wednesday. Office will not natively support the current OOXML specification until its next version code-named Office 14, a release date for which has not been announced.

Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group, said Microsoft coming out in favor of supporting ODF first shows that Microsoft, "is being steered toward greater support for open source, open standards and interoperability" by customers, "which in this case are primarily governments in the U.S. and around the world."

While OOXML will certainly be adopted and used in the future, ODF has a head start because it was approved by the ISO first and is not plagued by lingering questions or doubts about its merit as an international standard.

"Governments that must move now on their format plans are seeing benefits in ODF, which is approved, backed by a number of large vendors and being adopted around the globe," Lyman said.

The decision to appeal casts doubt on OOXML as a viable alternative to the already approved ODF, said Andrew Updegrove, an open-source advocate and attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston. "No one can now say, until this is resolved, that OOXML 'is a global standard,'" he said.

Updegrove also noted that because Microsoft is delaying Office support for OOXML, there is reason to take the appeal very seriously because there is no sense of urgency around resolving it and deploying the format in the near term.

Microsoft declined to comment on South Africa's appeal, saying only that the ISO and the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) have a clear process for evaluating and resolving appeals and that the issue remains between them and the South African standards body. The company also promoted its moves toward interoperability in a statement through its public relations firm.

As for New York's decision to promote ODF, Jason Matusow, senior director of interoperability at Microsoft, noted in an e-mail that in the New York study the state calls for technology to be considered on a "value-for-money" basis and that openness is just one consideration among many.

He also said that New York officials recommend that the state legislature "not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technology," implying that it's likely the state will not officially favor ODF over any other file format.

(Peter Sayer in Paris contributed to this report.)

Member of online piracy group faces prison term

2008-05-26T00:08:00.001-07:00

A member of an online piracy group has been convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and faces up to five years in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Barry Gitarts, 25, of Brooklyn, New York, was convicted Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. In addition to up to five years in prison, Gitarts could face a fine of US$250,000, three years of probation and a requirement that he make full restitution, the DOJ said.

Gitarts was a key member of the Internet music piracy group Apocalypse Production Crew (APC) from at least June 2003 through April 2004, the DOJ said. Gitarts paid for and administered a computer server located in Texas that APC group members used to upload and download hundreds of thousands of copies of pirated music, movies, software and video games, the agency said.

Gitarts also received payment from the leader of APC, the DOJ said.

APC was a "first-provider" or "release group" of unauthorized materials online, the agency said. Release groups are the original sources for a majority of the pirated works downloaded through the Internet, the DOJ said.

"Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don't do it," Chuck Rosenberg, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) praised federal authorities for bringing the case to trial. The Gitarts case was the first time a federal prosecution of an online criminal copyright infringement case primarily featuring music has gone to trial, the RIAA said.

"The crimes committed here -- as well as the harm to the music community -- are severe, and so are the consequences," Brad Buckles, the RIAA's executive vice president for antipiracy, said in a statement. "Groups like APC that specialize in leaking pre-release music are at the top of the piracy pyramid, and the efforts of federal law enforcement have dealt a real blow to these kinds of operations."

The Gitarts case is part of an ongoing federal investigation into the organized piracy groups responsible for the distribution of movies, software, games and music on the Internet. There have been 15 criminal convictions of APC members and 56 total convictions in Operation FastLink, an international investigation into Internet piracy.

IBM-Cognos to refund $13 million to Massachusetts

2008-05-26T00:07:00.000-07:00

IBM will repay US$13 million to Massachusetts for performance management software its subsidiary, Cognos, sold to the state in August 2007, according to an agreement reached this week.
The deal came under scrutiny last year following allegations the procurement process had been rushed to favor Cognos.

IBM declined to comment beyond a brief statement confirming it will give back the money and that the state will return the software. The statement also noted that Cognos struck the deal before IBM acquired it.

An IBM spokesman, Chris Andrews, refused to provide documentation pertaining to the agreement, as did Governor Deval Patrick's office, which issued a similar statement.

Massachusetts House Speaker Sal DiMasi has been at the center of a political firestorm over the controversy, with allegations flying over his connections to Cognos. The Boston Globe reported that Cognos was a sponsor of a memorial golf tournament DiMasi helped organize and that a DiMasi friend served as a lobbyist for the vendor.

DiMasi has adamantly denied any wrongdoing. His office declined to comment on Friday.

However, a March report by state Inspector General Gregory Sullivan's office provides a time line of an investigation the agency conducted into the software deal.

The inspector general began scrutinizing the procurement following a tip from a whistleblower, as well as a December request from Patrick's administration, according to Jack McCarthy, a spokesman for Sullivan's office.

"They accomplished what we asked them to do, it appears, to get the money back from a flawed procurement process," McCarthy said. "It's nice to know IBM recognized the flaws in the process and did the right thing for Massachusetts. We're also happy the Patrick administration hung tough and followed through."

The report does not mention DiMasi, but describes a number of alleged flaws in the way the Cognos pact was formed.

For one, the state's Information Technology Division did not widely advertise the fact it was looking for performance management software, according to the report.

Instead, "a staff member at ITD simply consulted a chart of leaders in performance management developed by the analytical firm Gartner Group and e-mailed the Request for Quotes to four companies identified as 'leaders.' "

Three vendors -- Cognos, Oracle and SAS -- responded to the e-mail, according to the report. ITD staffers developed a scoring sheet containing 104 criteria. The ITD team in charge never finished evaluating the vendors with the sheet, but at the time they stopped Cognos had the high score, with 69.39 points, followed by SAS with 57.38 and Oracle with 27.49, the report states.

The IG's investigation found that due to a typographical error in the spreadsheet's formula, the scores for all three vendors were flawed, with many points going uncounted.

The ITD procurement team never finalized or submitted the scoring document to the Patrick administration, and therefore the IG's office did not attempt to rework the calculations, according to the report.

Instead, after meeting with all three vendors the procurement team "unanimously felt that much more information had to be gathered because they did not adequately understand how various agencies and administrators would use performance management software," and recommended the procurement process be done over, the report states.

But on May 18, 2007, the acting CIO of ITD, Bethann Pepoli, told Henry Dormitzer, deputy to Patrick's secretary of administration and finance, Leslie Kirwan, that Cognos "was the best choice for performance management software procurement."

Dormitzer relayed the information to Kirwan, who subsequently signed an agreement to buy the software in August, the report states.

DiMasi allegedly met personally with Pepoli at some point to discuss the importance of performance management software, according to The Boston Globe. "The speaker and I never had a conversation about a vendor," Pepoli told the Globe. "I don't feel like my recommendation was influenced by any outside sources."

The ITD has "already approached us to help them go through the procurement process" as they once again seek to purchase performance management software," McCarthy said.

"It may not be Cognos' software," he noted.

Mozilla IDs 10 bugs, 3 'critical' in Firefox 3.0 RC1

2008-05-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

Mozilla has identified 10 high-priority bugs in Firefox 3.0, three of them pegged "critical," but won't decide until next week whether to release the browser anyway or restart the final stretch by issuing a second release candidate (RC2).
"We are making a go/no go decision early next week, as we are still collecting feedback [on Release Candidate 1]," Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, said in an e-mail Thursday.

Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) launched a week ago, but Mozilla has not yet committed to RC2. Previously, the company has only said it is targeting June as the release window for the final code.

On the "mozilla.dev.planning" newsgroup, Schroepfer also said that on May 27 Mozilla will either call Firefox 3.0 finished with RC1, or build RC2 with fixes for the 10 bugs that have been collected.

In the meantime, testing will begin on the 10 bugs. "If we need to do an RC2, they'll be ready to go," he said. "If we ship RC1, we can get them in the 3.0.1."

The bug list includes three marked "critical" on Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug-tracking database and management system. Eight of the bugs affect Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, while two afflict only Linux.

One of Linux bugs has caught the eye of some Firefox users, in part, because of a short blog post that garnered attention on Digg.com. The blogger, Jason Clinton, who works for Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc., a Kansas City company that specializes in cluster-based systems and Linux servers, took Mozilla to task.

On Tuesday, Clinton called Mozilla's support for Linux "second-class" and blasted the open-source developer over a bug. "Release managers just made the call that Firefox 3.0 will release with a known bug which brings Linux systems to their knees."

The bug Clinton referenced, tagged as "421482" in Bugzilla, is one of the 10 on the list that Mozilla's using to decide whether to release Firefox 3.0 as is or craft RC2 for another go towards final code.

In Bugzilla, developers argued over the extent of the problem -- which some Linux users said seriously affected Firefox's performance, as well as their systems overall -- and where the fault lay -- in the browser or in SQLite, the database Firefox uses for its revamped bookmark and history feature, dubbed "Places."

On Wednesday, in a separate e-mail, Schroepfer said that Mozilla developers were looking into the bug and were confident a solution had been found. "You can see that a couple different issues have been accidently confused," he said. "Overall, I think we have some good options to make this work well."

Firefox 3.0 will be the first major upgrade to the browser since October 2006. But Mozilla may ship another version before the end of the year, Schroepfer has said, in order to add features that weren't ready in time for Firefox 3.0.

Firefox 3 RC1 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 41 languages from Mozilla's site.

Symantec: Microsoft to blame for Windows XP SP3 registry

2008-05-25T03:03:00.004-07:00

Symantec Thursday said it was Microsoft's code that crippled some PCs after upgrades to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) emptied Device Manager, deleted network connections, and packed the registry with thousands of bogus entries.
"We finally got to the bottom of this last night," said Dave Cole, Symantec's senior director for product management of its consumer software. "All of these problems are related to the same thing, a Microsoft file that created all the garbage entries [in the registry]."

He also said that some of the same symptoms had been acknowledged by Microsoft when users updated to Windows XP SP2 several years ago; Cole referenced a pair of Microsoft support documents to back up his claim.

Two weeks ago, after Microsoft launched Windows XP SP3 on Windows Update, users started reporting that their network cards and previously crafted connections had mysteriously vanished from Windows after updating with the service pack. The Device Manager had been emptied, they said, and Windows' registry, a directory that stores settings and other critical information, had been packed with large numbers of bogus entries.

Most users who posted messages on Microsoft's XP SP3 support forum said that the errant registry keys -- which started with characters such as "$%&" and appeared corrupted at first glance -- were located in sections devoted to settings for Symantec products. Not surprisingly, they quickly pinned blame on the security company.

Earlier this week, Symantec denied that its software was at fault, and instead pointed a finger at Microsoft.

Thursday, Cole said Symantec engineers had connected the current problem to a Microsoft file named "fixccs.exe." According to information on the Web, fixccs.exe stands for "Fix CCS MaxSubkeyName mismatch," and appears to be part of both XP SP3's and SP2's update packages.

Cole wasn't sure exactly what function fixccs.exe served. "But it caused similar problems with the Device Manager after SP2. It looks like it's reared its head again."

Two Microsoft support documents -- KB893249 and KB914450 -- both describe a problem remarkably similar to what users have reported recently. "After you install Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) on a Windows XP-based computer, the Device Manager window is blank or some devices no longer appear," reads KB893249.

The fixccs.exe file attempts to make changes to the registry, said Cole, but in some cases also adds large numbers of unnecessary keys. When asked why so many users had reported seeing the errant entries in sections reserved for Symantec products, Cole called it "the luck of the draw. We have a fair number of keys in the registry, and we're on a lot of systems. This is not exclusive to Symantec."

Others have noted that too. A user identified as MRFREEZE61, who posted the first message on the Microsoft support forum thread two weeks ago, and later came up with a workaround, said as much today.

"The reported problems are not just limited to those using Symantec products," wrote MRFREEZE61 in a comment added to the original Computerworld story. "Folks on the forum report this specific registry corruption with no Symantec products installed at all. Some find this corruption in device control set enumerators associated with UPNP (Universal Plug and Play) and other 'legacy devices,' others from users of Avast [Antivirus]."

Fixccs.exe has also been linked to problems some users had installing early builds of XP SP3 late last year. In a support forum thread that started Dec. 22, 2007, Shashank Bansal, a Microsoft engineer helping users troubleshoot XP SP3 installation bugs, said: "This is a serious problem for us and we would like to investigate it to further depths. We would need help from all users on this forum for the same." Bansal then asked users who had had trouble updating from XP SP2 to SP3 to identify the process that had hung or had hogged CPU cycles. "Look out for cscipt.exe or fixccs.exe," he asked.

On Thursday, Cole said Symantec was working on a standalone tool that would delete the extraneous registry entries. "We hope to have it ready pretty quickly," he said. "We're working with Microsoft in the normal channels."

That word must not have trickled down to Microsoft's technical support representatives. Users who have posted to Symantec's support forum and others who have e-mailed Computerworld claim that they have been told by Microsoft support that the fault is all or partially Symantec's.

A user going by "ZLevee" copied messages received from Microsoft support to a Thursday post on the Symantec support site. "Based on the current research, the issue can probably be caused by the conflicts between SP3 and Norton. Please let me know if you have any Norton product installed.," ZLevee said the Microsoft support representative had claimed.

A Computerworld reader e-mailed an account of his experience last week with Microsoft's support. "I had an online chat with a tech support person named 'Obaid' on 5/18," said Thom Nielsen in the e-mail. "He told me that Symantec products do NOT work with XP SP3. He told me Symantec is aware of the problem(s) & is working on it."

"This is the first I've heard of this," said Cole when asked to comment. "I hope we can clear up any confusion."

When asked earlier Thursday whether it had uncovered any more information about the disappearing Device Manager and the corrupted registry entries, Microsoft said it nothing new to add beyond the recommendation it made Tuesday: that users contact the company's technical support desk if they have had problems upgrading to XP SP3.

Microsoft was not available for comment Thursday night.

Criminal banned from posting clips of himself on YouTube

2008-05-25T03:03:00.003-07:00

A man who posted more than 80 videos of himself and others apparently committing crimes on Google's YouTube video-sharing website has been banned from uploading any more clips or images of himself.
Speeding, taking drugs, setting off fireworks in a wheelie bin and refusing to pay a taxi fare were among the offenses that Andrew Kellett is alleged to have committed in clips posted on the site. In response to his antics, Leeds Magistrates' Court issued him with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (Asbo) that prevents him posting any more videos or images of his activities.

Kellet, who was called "Leeds' dumbest criminal" by a Leeds Councillor, claimed the ban restricted his freedom of speech and that he was simply an innocent bystander recording events.

If he breaches the terms of the Asbo, Kellet may face an immediate jail sentence.

Criminal banned from posting clips of himself on YouTube

2008-05-25T03:03:00.001-07:00

Facebook security flaw could compromise accounts

2008-05-25T03:02:00.004-07:00

A researcher has spotted a security problem in Facebook that could lead to hackers taking control of user accounts.
The flaw allows a hacker to execute scripts on Facebook, which could potentially be used to create a fake log-in page and capture people's passwords, according to the XSSED security blog. The discovery is credited to "Mox."

"Malicious people can exploit this issue to execute script code in the context of Facebook or obtain sensitive information from its users, such us clear text authentication credentials with a fake login form," according to the blog post, written by Dimitris Pagkalos.

A cross-site scripting vulnerability can let an attacker display data from another Web site or run malicious code, which can compromise user data on the targeted Web site.

Cross-site scripting flaws are increasingly becoming one of the favored vectors for hackers, and security experts have warned that a vast number of Web sites potentially contain the vulnerability. In 2006, the Web Application Security Consortium surveyed 31,373 sites and found that 85.57 percent were vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks.

Users will be able to transfer N-Gage games, says Nokia

2008-05-25T03:02:00.003-07:00

N-Gage owners will be able to transfer games from one phone to another, according to Nokia. Miscommunication is blamed for users not being told.
This week, fan Web site All About N-Gage noticed the existing licensing terms, which states that games bought and paid for can only be used on one phone, and got confirmation from Nokia that games can't be transferred to another phone.

"Internally there have been some mixed messages in this matter as well," said Oskar Södergren, communications manager at Nokia Scandinavia.

But users outraged over the licensing terms can rest easy; a mechanism for transferring games to a new phone is under development.

"We have been working on a way for this to work since the relaunch, but it is taking some time for everything to fall into place," said Södergren.

He doesn't want to elaborate on the details for when a mechanism for transferring games will be in place, or why it hasn't been released.

Nokia relaunched its gaming platform at the beginning of April. N-Gage allows owners of the N81, N82 and N95 to download games, for example FIFA 08, World Series of Poker Pro Challenge and Tetris. Each game costs between €6 (US$9.35) and €10, according to Nokia.

The original report: http://www.idgns.com/news.nsf/0/852573C4006938800025745100397BFE

Vendor goes after SMBs with BSM offering

2008-05-25T03:02:00.001-07:00

Startup BSM (business service management) vendor FireScope this week launched a low-priced product aimed at providing small and medium-size businesses with easier entry into BSM, where implementations can run into the six figures.
BSM software -- where FireScope competes with BMC, Hewlett-Packard and Managed Objects -- seeks to provide companies with a way to map the performance of their IT assets, such as servers and applications, against the day-to-day processes of a business.

"You can look at the 'health' of all your data-center stuff in relation to how smoothly, or not, the business is running," said Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk. "The idea there is two-fold: enabling, for lack of a better word, IT to simply do their job of running all the computers for the rest of the company, and, giving IT the raw data to justify their existence, resist budget cuts and ask for more budget."

Pricing for FireScope BSM Business Edition starts at US$2,450.

The product also simplifies the process of implementing BSM, said Mark Lynd, FireScope's president. "Everything has wizards and contextual information, step-by-step, how to do this." However, it does not include some key features found in FireScope's offering for larger enterprises. Among the omissions are the ability to customize the application's look and feel, multisite data aggregation, SAN (storage area network) support for Firescope data, real-time reporting and an advanced analytics package.

"Our goal is to go out there and reach [SMBs] with this, and as these companies grow, grow with them," Lynd said of the Business Edition, adding in reference to his competitors, "I don't think the market is ready for this kind of pricing."

But a representative of one FireScope rival downplayed the potential effect of such a low-cost offering on the market.

"The idea of providing some BSM functionality to smaller IT shops is noble and an interesting idea, but I'd recommend being cautious about raising expectations. ... BSM doesn't lend itself to tossing cheap and cheerful code over the wall and hoping it will self-install and model critical IT services independently," said Frank Strong, marketing communications director for Managed Objects, via e-mail.

Larry Page: U.S. government should open up its spectrum

2008-05-25T03:01:00.002-07:00

The U.S. government should explore ways to conduct real-time auctions of its vast, and often unused, wireless spectrum holdings, with agencies holding spectrum to get the profits from the sales, Google cofounder Larry Page said Thursday.
Page, speaking in Washington, D.C., repeated Google's position that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission should allow unlicensed wireless devices to access unused spectrum held by television stations. But in addition to TV stations opening up their so-called white spaces, Page called for government agencies to do the same thing.

Google suggested the FCC look into allowing winners of the 700MHz spectrum recently sold by the FCC to conduct real-time auctions as a new business model for spectrum ownership. That idea could be expanded to the federal government, with agencies that sell spectrum on a temporary basis potentially raising billions of dollars, Page said during a speech at the New America Foundation, an independent think tank.

If government agencies could conduct real-time auctions on their spectrum, the unused spectrum "doesn't stay wasted," said Page, now Google's president of products. "It's unclear how much demand you'd have. I think you'll have a lot of demand as you free up more spectrum."

At any one time, about 3 percent to 5 percent of wireless spectrum in the U.S. is being used, Page said. Wireless broadband signals in the TV white spaces could travel four times farther than typical Wi-Fi signals, he said.

It's unclear how much wireless spectrum the U.S. government holds, but estimates suggest the government has more spectrum than any private user. More than 30 U.S. government agencies control spectrum, according to New America, but the government doesn't disclose how much spectrum it has or uses.

Page suggested that government agencies using real-time auctions could shut down outside access whenever they needed additional spectrum.

Commercial spectrum holders could also conduct temporary auctions of excess spectrum, added Michael Calabrese, vice president and director of the Wireless Future Program at New America. "There's so much more unused and underutilized spectrum," he said. "That's part of what is wrong with what's been the conventional wisdom in Washington -- that there's spectrum scarcity. In fact, what's scarce is government licenses to use the spectrum."

Government agencies have been reluctant to give up or share spectrum, with some agencies citing national security reasons. Google and other tech companies advocating for using the white spaces in the TV spectrum have run into stiff opposition from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and wireless microphone vendors such as Shure.

The NAB has raised concerns about interference with TV signals, and three white-space prototype devices have malfunctioned in tests at the FCC since last July. Shure and other wireless microphone vendors have largely been using the TV spectrum without getting FCC licenses, and they, too, have raised interference concerns. Those same concerns could come up with government-controlled spectrum.

NAB has called white-space devices a technology that's "not ready for prime time." NAB has complained that Google and other tech companies "continue to try to muscle their way through Washington in support of a technology that simply does not work."

An NAB spokesman wasn't immediately available to comment on Page's speech.

But Page said opponents of using the white spaces in the TV spectrum have overblown concerns about interference. It's not difficult to deploy technology that will check for other spectrum users before sending out a signal, he said. The NAB in the past has complained about potential interference from other technologies, including satellite television signals, he said.

"People pay attention to that because they say it, but that doesn't mean it's true," he said. "I don't want people to be misled by [organizations] who have interests in this."

Green Computing Summit 2008: Going green is no longer optional

2008-05-25T03:01:00.001-07:00

If one message stood out among the others at this week's Green Computing Summit in Washington, DC, it was that going green is no longer just good for the bottom line; it's absolutely necessary. And it's not just the tree huggers who are saying so. Prominent business executives and top ranking federal officials are leading a green revolution that promises to radically change computer technology and the way it is managed.

It may well have been skyrocketing energy prices that first got industry worried about its bottom lines and federal agencies grappling with their budgets, but concern for the escalating climate crisis was hardly an afterthought. What started as a realization that going green was the easiest way to save money has evolved into a series of federal initiatives jointly aimed at reducing energy consumption and cutting CO2 emissions.

Given industry projections of computer growth, dramatic increases in online data storage and additional floor space that could be required by expanding data centers along with the resultant power and cooling upgrades, energy issues will clearly move from problem to crisis if efforts to bring energy consumption under control are not successful.

According to EPA, corporate and governmental data centers in metropolitain areas are already driving the power grid toward gridlock. By 2010, we could have 41 million servers in the US, with less than 10% utilization. Power consumption in data centers in the US could cost $7.4 billion by 2011, compared to $4.5 billion today.

How did we get here? It is estimated that 80% of IT operations managers have no idea what computing power is costing them. Historically, those who manage technology and those who pay the utility bills share little, if any, communication. Meanwhile, idle servers typically waste in excess of 70% of the power they use. Computer users, even those with Energy Star compliant systems, may leave them on around the clock and fail to activate their energy saving features.

Solutions to the computing energy problem focus on strategies such as server consolidation and virtualization to reduce the number of servers, the use of more efficient electonics (e.g., cooler CPUs), better computer life cycle management and end user training.

Twenty-three federal agencies are meeting monthly under the auspices of the ITILOB (IT Infrastructure Line of Business) -- an unprecedented level of collaboration between agencies of the federal government aimed at improving energy efficiency in three areas: end user systems, mainframes/servers and telecommunications systems. They are looking to take advantage of commonalities across the federal government as well as define cost and efficiency measures.

Part of the new green federal infrastructure is a change in the way federal leaders view computer costs. Catherine Cesnik, a Senior Program Manager in the Department of the Interior describes the purchase price of a computer today as the "tip of the iceburg" with respect to the system's real cost. The cost of powering that same system over the span of its useful life is becoming an increasingly significant portion of its real cost -- a cost that both federal agencies and energy-conscious companies are beginning to factor into their IT plans.

The inaugural Green Computing Summit was held in December of last year. This week's summit -- a one-day conference held at the Ronald Reagan Building, Washington, DC -- featured speakers from the government, academia and business communities. Prominent among the many speakers were representatives from both GSA and DOE. Keynotes were provided by John Johnson, Assistant Commissioner, Integrated Technology Service, Federal Acquisition Service, General Services Administration and David Rodgers, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Department of Energy.

Conference sponsors were on hand to display a range of energy efficient technology -- high-resolution monitor/camera units for effective teleconferencing, virtualization software to create multiple virtual systems on a single physical server, power management software that intelligently turns servers on and off, printers that use dry toner (no cartridges to recycle or throw away) and more.

This week's Green Computing Summit, subtitled "Actionable Strategies for Impact Today", highlighted federal initiatives and green technology. The next summit is scheduled for December 2nd, same venue. IT managers, procurement specialists and technology professionals should put this intense one-day event on their calendars and plan on learning about environmentally-conscious yet efficient solutions to today's IT challenges.

Microsoft Surface developer seeks new canvas

2008-05-25T03:00:00.001-07:00

What if you threw out your mouse and laid down a touch-sensitive flat-panel monitor on your desktop?
That's essentially what Andy Wilson, one of the designers of Microsoft Surface, has done with his latest project, called LaserTouch.

The idea is to train a camera down on a sheet of infrared laser light and then keep track of what it sees on the surface. Track the lasers on a flat-screen computer monitor, and you've created something that feels remarkably like a touchscreen monitor.

To the uninitiated, Wilson's LaserTouch software seems to work a lot like Surface, Microsoft's tabletop computer that can read reflections on its screen. It responds to gestures, so instead of clicking on a mouse, the user drags and drops with a fingertip. Squeezing two fingers together shrinks the screen, and a quick dragging movement can flip the screen to the next window.

Surface is being rolled out in AT&T stores, where it's being used to power customer information kiosks.

Because LaserTouch can work with screens that have a much higher resolution than Surface, Wilson said it could be used by office workers, if it's ever brought to market.

Using experimental presentation software developed by Microsoft's Office Labs, called Plex, Wilson was able to navigate through PowerPoint-like presentation slides on a 30-inch flat-panel display.

The Microsoft researcher demonstrated LaserTouch at a Microsoft Research event held for media and researchers at the software vendor's Mountain View, California campus. This was actually LaserTouch's second public outing. Wilson said that his software was also used to power the interactive whiteboard technology called Touch Wall that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated last week at the company's CEO Summit last week in Redmond, Washington.

What has Wilson excited, though, is the fact that LaserTouch could work on virtually any flat display, including a projection screen. The two lasers and a camera used in his demo cost just a few hundred dollars, he said. "By far the most expensive piece is the display."

Wilson's earlier research has shown how technology like LaserTouch can mesh with the real world in interesting ways. Wilson showed a demo video of two people playing chess against each other in two different locations. Each one put a white piece of paper and white or black chess pieces on the board and the LaserTouch software did the rest, superimposing a chess board and the opponent's pieces onto a projection screen. The only drawback: when you take a piece, your opponent, not you, has to remove it from the board.

Like Surface, the LaserTouch research work is showing how the virtual and real worlds are meshing in very interesting ways, said Rick Rashid, the senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "It's fun, but I really think it's the future."

Craigslist tops U.S. mobile browsing

2008-05-25T02:59:00.003-07:00

Mobile Web surfers in the U.S. spend more time on classified-ad site Craigslist than on any other Web site, and they spent nearly twice as much time browsing as their British counterparts in March.
Those are among the findings from a study by mobile research company M:Metrics in which client software installed on participants' smartphones gleaned information about user activity. It found U.S. owners of smartphones -- not even counting iPhones or BlackBerry devices -- spent nearly 4 hours, 38 minutes using their browsers in March. U.K. subscribers spent just under 2 hours, 25 minutes, on average. The survey tracked 3,500 users of Symbian, Palm and Microsoft Windows Mobile smartphones in the U.S. and U.K.

The devotion to mobile browsing in the U.S. has a lot to do with the wider use of so-called "unlimited" data plans in the country, M:Metrics said. In the U.S., 10.9 percent of smartphone users have data plans that don't charge them per bit or per minute for browsing, the researchers said. In the U.K., only 2.3 percent have such plans. Mobile operators in Europe have been slower to adopt all-you-can-eat pricing, said M:Metrics analyst Mark Donovan.

U.S. users spent about 1 hour, 39 minutes per month on Craigslist, M:Metrics said. The site has two big factors in its favor as a mobile destination, Donovan said. It's text-based, so it's easier to load with a weak signal, and it emphasizes local information. Donovan believes mobile users are visiting local listings for events such as yard sales along with the site's popular personal ads.

E-commerce giant eBay was the second most popular destination, with smartphone users spending about 1 hour, 26 minutes per month there, closely followed by social networking sites Myspace and Facebook. The Walt Disney Co.'s Go.com entertainment portal was fifth, with 1 hour, 7 minutes.

Although average time spent per month was higher for Craigslist, individual visits to eBay lasted longer. On the days they visited eBay, users spent an average of 29 minutes there, versus 22 minutes on Craigslist, M:Metrics said.

Facebook led in browser time in the U.K., with an average of nearly 1 hour, 45 minutes per month, followed by the portal of Three, a popular 3G (third generation telephony) operator. Media company British Sky Broadcasting's site was third, followed by Microsoft's Live.com search site and the BBC.

The study covered all Internet visits through dedicated browsers and mobile operator portals, but not through the dedicated mobile client applications that Facebook and others have introduced, Donovan said. M:Metrics hasn't yet brought iPhone or BlackBerry users into the monthly survey. Although the iPhone is the single device used most often for mobile browsing (most mobile OSes are represented by many different devices), Donovan believes the use patterns would look similar if the iPhone and BlackBerry devices were included.

Yahoo postpones board meeting, director resigns

2008-05-25T02:59:00.001-07:00

Facing a battle for its board, Yahoo on Thursday pushed back its annual meeting until the end of July and announced the resignation of a board member.
The annual meeting, during which the entire board is up for re-election, had been scheduled for July 3. Yahoo did not yet set a particular date for the annual meeting but said that it will be around the end of July.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has been scooping up Yahoo shares and has told the company he is nominating 10 candidates to replace the entire board. He has said that in doing so he hopes to reignite talks with Microsoft, which recently pulled its acquisition bid for Yahoo.

The postponement of the board meeting probably means Yahoo needs more time to work out a deal with Microsoft, said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC. He believes Microsoft ultimately will buy Yahoo, even though the software giant removed its offer and has said it is working on another type of transaction with the company.

In addition to the change in the annual meeting, Yahoo said Edward Kozel resigned from the board. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo said Kozel had planned to leave the board in February but decided to stay on following the acquisition proposal from Microsoft.

As a result of his resignation, Yahoo has reduced the size of its board to nine directors, it said.

While Kozel said he is resigning in order to spend more time with his family, he probably has another reason, Weide said. "What it means is there is dissent," he said. Kozel may not have agreed with the board's refusal to make a deal with Microsoft and he may be worried about lawsuits charging the board with failing to do its duty, Weide said.

Yahoo appointed Kozel to the board in 2000. He had spent 11 years at Cisco, including as chief technology officer, and also served on Cisco's board. Kozel also previously worked at Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and as managing partner at Open Range Ventures, a private venture capital company.

Microsoft announced its US$44.6 billion cash-and-stock bid for Yahoo on Feb. 1 but abandoned it three months later, after Yahoo initially spurned the offer. Microsoft was interested in a deal with Yahoo as a way to boost its lagging search business, although since it pulled its offer, the company has said that it can gain more market share through internal innovations.

Google extends search dominance

2008-05-25T02:58:00.003-07:00

Extending its dominance in the search market, Google grew its share of queries in April at the expense of rivals Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask.com.
Google's U.S. search query share in April grew to 61.6 percent, up from 59.8 percent in March, comScore announced Thursday. Google accomplished this although the number of search queries dropped 2 percent overall in April to 10.58 billion, compared with March, comScore said.

So even with the overall monthly decline, Google managed to increase its search queries by 1 percent, from 6.44 billion to 6.51 billion.

Meanwhile, the other four major search-engine players saw their queries and their market share drop in April, compared with March, not a great situation for them to be in, considering that search advertising accounts for about 41 percent of U.S. online advertising, according to the latest report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Yahoo's market share of queries dropped to 20.4 percent, and its number of queries fell 6 percent. Microsoft's market share shrunk to 9.1 percent, while its queries fell 5 percent. AOL, down to a 4.6 percent share, saw its queries drop by 6 percent. Ask.com, whose share slid to 4.3 percent, had the biggest fall in queries percentage-wise with 9 percent.

A desire to improve its position in search was a primary driver for Microsoft's now-abandoned acquisition bid for Yahoo. However, Microsoft is reportedly trying to strike a search deal with Yahoo, which is also in similar negotiations with Google. It's not clear whether Yahoo would be open to selling its search-advertising business outright or instead seek a deal to outsource part of it to Microsoft or Google.

Whatever happens, comScore's figures for April leave no doubt that Microsoft and Yahoo have resoundingly failed to slow down Google in search, and that Google remains well-positioned to use its search dominance to continue boosting its revenue and profits.

In a research note commenting on the comScore report, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney wrote: "As Google continues to take share, we continue to believe a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft would be necessary -- though not sufficient -- to compete effectively with Google."

Microsoft's embrace of ODF cautiously welcomed

2008-05-25T02:58:00.001-07:00

Microsoft's support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) could mean greater opportunities for software makers already using the format, observers said Thursday.
Microsoft will put native support for ODF as part of its next service pack for Office 2007, due out by the first half of 2009. The surprise decision came as Microsoft's faces continued regulatory scrutiny from the European Commission over interoperability concerns.

The Commission said in a statement Thursday that it welcomes steps Microsoft takes toward "genuine" interoperability and that it would analyze the latest announcement to see how it impacts consumers' software choices.

In January, the Commission opened two new antitrust investigations against Microsoft concerning the interoperability of Windows with other software and the company's practice of bundling software products with Windows.

At least one office software maker thinks Microsoft's turnaround on ODF will mean more flexibility for software buyers. The ability to save in ODF in Microsoft Office could give users more confidence to switch to OpenOffice.org, a free open-source suite, said John McCreesh, spokesman for OpenOffice.org.

“The whole purpose of having an open standard is to give people freedom of choice,” McCreesh said. “It means we have a level playing field, which is what it’s all about.”

Of course, those users could migrate to Microsoft from OpenOffice.org, too, McCreesh said.

A looming concern is if Microsoft's implementation of ODF within Office will handle documents with the same or better performance as competing suites. Microsoft has been criticized for embracing a particular standard but using subtle means within its software to subvert it.

Those concerns aside, one organization that has been particularly critical of Microsoft also welcomed the news. Wider user of ODF through Office could also give a boost to competing operating systems such as Linux, said the Free Software Foundation Europe.

"The move to support ODF, if genuine, would remove one of the most effective barriers for migration to GNU/Linux on the desktop," wrote Georg C.F. Greve, spokesman for the organization, in an e-mail. "The Microsoft desktop monopoly would be unlikely to continue in such a situation and millions of computer users would enjoy genuine freedom of choice."

Despite years of bitter criticism, Microsoft resisted putting native support for ODF in Office, instead supporting projects to create translators. Sun Microsystems developed one of those translators, which allows users to save in ODF in Microsoft Office 2003.

Microsoft also chose to push its Office Open XML (OOXML) format, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in April. Opponents of OOXML said Microsoft's specification would unnecessarily splinter and complicate office software productivity products.

Microsoft said Wednesday that it would not implement ISO standard 29500, as the approved OOXML version is known, in Office 2007 but instead the next version of the program, known as Office 14.

That means ODF will have a few years' head start on the ISO's approved OOXML standard. Microsoft hasn't set a date for release of Office 14. Office 2007 was released first to business users in November 2006.

In the meantime, ODF could gain wider support, wrote ODF supporter Andrew Updegrove, an open-source and open-standards attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston.

"Given the quality of open-source office suites such as OpenOffice...the frequency of ODF-based files popping up in the work flows of Office-based shops can now be expected to increase much more quickly," Updegrove wrote in an e-mail commentary.

Microsoft's latest move may help put out other fires. A British government agency filed a complaint with the European Commission earlier this month alleging Microsoft impedes the exchange of files between Office 2007 and competitors' products.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA), which advises British schools on technology, recommended in January that schools not upgrade to Vista and Office 2007.

BECTA has also called on Microsoft to make its products more interoperable, as well as putting "built-in and effective" support for ODF in Office 2007.

BECTA said Thursday it will examine Office 2007 after it has been upgraded. "If necessary we will update our advice to schools and colleges," the agency said in a statement.

IBM, one of Microsoft's fiercest critics during the OOXML deliberations, praised Microsoft's new stance on ODF.

"They will definitely benefit form being able to address this support requirement in the marketplace," said Bob Picciano, general manager and head of the company's Lotus software and collaboration business.

But Picciano said he hopes Microsoft is serious about contributing to the development of ODF as Microsoft has pledged.

Microsoft's closest competitor in the office software space, Corel, also recently decided to included ODF support.

The latest version WordPerfect Office X4, released in April, adds support for ODF as well as Microsoft's version of OOXML included in Office 2007, said Greg Wood, communications manager for WordPerfect Office. So far, Corel's customers have been more interested in OOXML support than ODF, Wood said.

Facebook provides more redesign details

2008-05-25T02:57:00.004-07:00

Facebook is disclosing more details about the planned redesign for its core member profile pages, as it attempts to regain the layout's orderly, streamlined look that had been one of its trademarks and a differentiator from competitors like MySpace.
The latest plans in Facebook's ongoing redesign efforts call for profile pages to evolve from a single repository of content and applications into a tabbed interface.

The goal is to let users organize in these tabbed sub-pages the various components of their profiles, such as the activity feed, photos, personal information and applications.

Facebook members can see the latest screenshots in this album and view this video of a presentation held Wednesday by company officials about the redesign plans.

At the event, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of product marketing, explained that the interface changes are intended to make profiles cleaner and simpler and give users more control over their look and feel, and emphasize the most recent and relevant information.

"We need to take a step forward with respect to the user experience and the UI that we present to the consumer because the amount of information that's being created both passively and proactively is increasing," he said.

No doubt this is due to Facebook's membership explosive growth and the company's decision a year ago to let external developers create applications for the site. Facebook currently has about 70 million members and about 20,000 applications.

Still Facebook must be careful about how its redesign affects a member's experience, as in the past some of its changes have riled users and industry observers.

The activity feed feature was blasted by users as violating their privacy, as was the Beacon ad program that broadcast online transactions made by Facebook's users to their friends list.

Already, there have been some early grumblings among external developers concerned that the redesigned profile page will steal visibility from their applications.

But Palihapitiya argued that the redesign will do the opposite rather, and generate instead "a more meaningful engagement with users" for applications by offering new integration opportunities in the profiles.

Facebook plans to let developers and members test the redesign before launching it formally next month.

Chinese police detain woman over quake video

2008-05-25T02:57:00.003-07:00

Chinese police in the northern city of Shenyang have detained a woman who posted a video filled with angry comments directed at victims of the devastating earthquake that rattled Sichuan province last week.
The 21-year-old woman, Gao Qianhui, was angry over a three-day mourning period that saw online entertainment and games shut down in China out of respect for those killed by the quake, according to a Xinhua News Agency report carried on Netease, a popular Chinese portal. The report, which was highlighted by Blogging for China, did not make clear what law Gao was alleged to have broken in her online outburst.

In the video, Gao is shown sitting inside what appears to be an Internet cafe. After introducing herself as a "common young girl" from Liaoning province in northeastern China, Gao complains she has no interest in coverage of the quake or its aftermath.

"How many of you died? It was just a few," Gao said. "China has so many people, anyway."

The video and apparent lack of sympathy on Gao's part for those affected by the Sichuan earthquake provoked an outpouring of anger and criticism from Chinese Internet users. The Xinhua story carried on Netease alone had more than 17,000 comments at the time of writing.

"Have you no humanity?" asked one commentator.

Chinese police detain woman over quake video

2008-05-25T02:57:00.001-07:00

Ahead of rootkit talk, Cisco patches router flaw

2008-05-25T02:56:00.002-07:00

Cisco has issued three security patches, fixing bugs that could crash its products and drawing a warning from the SANS Internet Storm Center.
The updates, issued Wednesday, fix denial of service bugs in the SSH (Secure Shell) software in Cisco's Internetwork Operating System (IOS), used to power its routers, and in the Cisco Service Control Engine, which is provides carrier-grade networking services.

Cisco has also patched a privilege escalation vulnerability in its Voice Portal automated telephone customer service software.

In its security advisories Cisco said that all of the bugs had been discovered by its own researchers, but SANS warned that researchers are likely reverse-engineering the patches and may release exploit code publicly.

These particular updates are getting extra attention from the security community, which is now closely investigating how malicious software might work on IOS, an operating system that has largely evaded serious scrutiny. On Thursday, for example, Core Security's Sebastian Muniz is slated to give a widely anticipated presentation on a Cisco rootkit he calls the DIK (Da Ios rootKit) at the EuSecWest conference in London.

Cisco recently changed its software update policy, saying it will now only issue IOS patches in March and September each year, unless forced to rush out a fix for serious bugs that were publicly disclosed or which were being actively exploited. On Wednesday, a Cisco spokesman couldn't immediately say whether his company considered the IOS patch, which fixes a flaw in the SSH server, an out-of-cycle update.

But Core Security Chief Technology Officer Ivan Arce said that Cisco's SSH bug-fix was not connected to his company's rootkit presentation. "It is more likely that this is related to an ongoing distributed SSH brute forcing attack that a few people reported in the incidents mailing list last week," he said in an e-mail interview.

The SSH server is used by administers to remotely log into a router using encryption. Bugs in the software could let an attacker repeatedly reload the device or access "spurious" parts of the router's memory and could be used to disable the hardware in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, Cisco said in its advisory.

"While the 'Exploitation and Public Announcements' portion of all three advisories states that the vulns were discovered in-house, it's a pretty safe bet that a fair number of security researchers are feverishly reverse engineering the updates to develop exploits," wrote SANS Internet Storm Center contributor George Bakos in a blog posting.

"Anytime we see a 'spurious memory access' leading to a denial of service, thoughts immediately go to arbitrary code execution. There is no evidence that this is possible, but in light of the recent work in IOS rootkits, vulns in Cisco devices should not be taken lightly," he wrote.

Ahead of rootkit talk, Cisco patches router flaw

2008-05-25T02:56:00.001-07:00

Singaporean blogger arrested, charged with racism

2008-05-25T02:54:00.000-07:00

A 24-year-old Chinese man was arrested in Singapore on May 20 and charged with posting racist comments on his blog, according to the Singapore Police Force.
The man, who was not named, was arrested after police received two complaints about allegedly racist comments posted on his blog, SPF said in a brief statement. The blog was not identified.

"Police take a serious view of such irresponsible blog postings in a multi-racial society like Singapore and will expend all efforts in tracking the perpetrators," the statement said.

Under Singaporean law, comments made with the "deliberate intention of wounding the religious or racial feelings of any person" can result in a jail term of up to three years and a fine.

Singapore is predominantly Chinese, but also has large Malay and Indian communities. For historical reasons, the government is generally quick to clamp down on public comments that might create tension between the country's different ethnic groups.

In 1964, tensions between the Chinese and Malay communities in Singapore twice erupted into riots that killed 36 and left hundreds wounded. Riots again broke out between the two communities in 1969, sparked by violence between Malays and Chinese in Malaysia.

In the case of the blogger arrested Tuesday, his comments were directed at a fellow passenger on Singapore's train system, local media reported.

"There he sat, unaffected by his surroundings, smelling like he didn't showered (sic) in years and wore some really scary dirty clothes," the blogger allegedly wrote, according to The New Paper. The blogger allegedly proceeded to make "offensive" comments about the man's race, the report said, without providing details.

Details of the man described in the blog, including his race, were not disclosed.

The man arrested for making the comments apologized, the New Paper said, saying he was "shocked by the furore over his blog entry, which he said was only intended for his close friends."

The man plans to make an online apology, the report said.

Vista laid low by new malware figures

2008-05-19T21:54:00.001-07:00

It looks as if Vista's reputation for improved security could be heading for the pages of history. PC Tools has renewed last week's attack on the platform with new figures that appear to back up its claim that Vista is almost as vulnerable as its predecessors.
According to analysis from the Australian company's ThreatFire user base, 58,000 PCs running Vista were compromised by at least one piece of malware over the six months to May 2008, equivalent to 27 percent of all Vista machines probed. Vista made up 12.6 percent, or 190,692, of the 1,513,502 machines running Windows in the user base.

In total, Vista suffered 121,380 instances of malware from its 190,000 user base, a rate of malware detection per system is proportionally lower than that of XP, which saw 1,319,144 malware infections from a user base of 1,297,828 machines, but it indicates a problem that is worse than Microsoft has been admitting to.

Only a week ago, PC Tools revealed that Vista was as likely to be hit with software vulnerabilities as Windows 2000, a claim that was denied by a Microsoft staffer in a blog.

The problem with the figures given in all cases is that it is still hard to make direct - and therefore meaningful - comparisons. As PC Tools makes clear, that malware was detected did not mean harm had been done, simply that Vista's own security had in some way been circumvented to the degree that its ThreatFire tool stepped in.

"It is important to highlight that all systems used in the research pool were at the very least running PC Tool's ThreatFire and that because the technology is behavioral-based, the data refers to threats that actually executed and triggered our behavioral detection on the client machine", said PC Tools' CEO, Simon Clausen, before aiming a kick at Microsoft's own security software.

"Furthermore, in response to alternative research from Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool, PC Tools highlights that the MSRT is not a comprehensive anti-virus scanner, but a malware removal tool for a limited range of "specific, prevalent malicious software."

An obvious objection to this is that any operating system will suffer a degree of malware compromise, which could be traced back to a variety of issues including user behavior. The acid test for Vista will be its ability to resist serious attacks over the longer term, something it has so far managed to do. However, the figures do suggest that malware writers are mastering the OS, a possible sign of trouble to come

PC Tools has publicized details of some of the malware types it has found on Vista systems during its scans, including three pages of variants based on Trojan.Agent, a few of which were described as serious.

At time of writing, Microsoft had not responded to PC Tools' allegations.

SEC goes after eight former AOL executives in fraud case

2008-05-19T21:53:00.002-07:00

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday filed a lawsuit against four former AOL Time Warner executives, charging them with falsely boosting the company's advertising revenue by US$1 billion. In addition, four other former AOL executives settled with the SEC on related fraud charges, agreeing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each in penalties.
The SEC filed the charge on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against John Michael Kelly, former chief financial officer of AOL Time Warner; Steven E. Rindner, former senior executive in the company's Business Affairs unit; Joseph A. Ripp, former chief financial officer of the company's AOL division; and Mark Wovsaniker, former head of accounting policy. The executives, according to the SEC, essentially funded AOL's own advertising revenue by giving companies money to buy online advertising.

AOL conducted the "round-trip" funding in several ways, the SEC says. For example, in some cases it would pay inflated prices for goods or services in exchange for the vendor purchasing advertising in the amount that AOL overpaid. AOL also paid more for businesses it purchased so that the seller would then buy advertising, the SEC alleges.

The scheme boosted the company's advertising revenue by more than $1 billion, the SEC says. The SEC is asking that the executives return ill-gotten gains, pay civil penalties and be barred from serving as company officers or directors. The SEC is also charging Kelly and Wovsaniker with misleading the company's external auditor about the transactions.

The AOL executives engineered the fraudulent practices in order to boost the company's advertising performance in a struggling market, the SEC said. "In mid-2000 ... AOL faced a growing crisis with regard to its advertising revenue as the market for online advertising began shrinking," the suit reads. "Kelly insisted that AOL achieve the revenue targets that he and others in AOL's executive offices had set in 2000."

In addition to that complaint, the SEC has settled a suit against former AOL Time Warner executives for their involvement in the same scheme. The executives who settled include David M. Colburn, former head of the Business Affairs unit; Eric L. Keller, former senior manager in the Business Affairs unit; James F. MacGuidwin, former controller; and Jay B. Rappaport, former senior manager in the Business Affairs unit. Colburn agreed to pay disgorgement and prejudgment interest of about $3.2 million and a penalty of $750,000; MacGuidwin will pay disgorgement and prejudgment interest of $2.1 million and a penalty of $300,000; Rappaport agreed to pay disgorgement and prejudgment interest of $493,629 and a penalty of $250,000; and Keller will pay disgorgement and prejudgment interest of $699,868 and a penalty of $250,000.

In addition, Colburn and MacGuidwin agreed not to serve as officers or directors of a public company for 10 years and seven years, respectively.

The fraudulent filings occurred between 2000 and at least 2003, and the company has since restated its earnings for those periods, the SEC said.

AOL has been struggling as it shifts its business from one that was primarily built on monthly dial-up subscription charges to one based on advertising-supported online content.

AOL did not reply immediately to a request for comment on the suits.