IT Outsourcing, Information Technology, Outsource

American Airlines Officially Rolls Out In-flight WiFi

2008-08-21T09:27:00.005-05:00

American Airlines today became the first airline to offer onboard WiFi service for its fliers. As expected from previous reports, the Aircell Gogo service will be available for passengers willing to pay the $12.95 surcharge for flights that are more than three hours in length.

Nonstop flights on Boeing 767-200 aircraft flying between New York and Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and New York and Miami will have the new WiFi service. American Airlines planned on launching the WiFi service on the 15 Boeing aircraft last month, but it was delayed because the system had to be modified.

Each Boeing plane is connected to the WiFi network via ground-based systems through an air-to-ground network. The planes receive signals from cell towers already in use, which makes the service cheaper for the fliers. Passengers must wait until the plane reaches 10,000 feet in elevation before signing up for the service.

Talking on cell phones is still prohibited and VoIP has been disabled for all flights, Aircell previously stated. Aircell will charge $9.95 for all flights three hours or less, and its pricing outline is for all airlines that use its service.

The service will be available on more flights after an initial testing phase of three to six months.Delta Air Lines confirmed it will begin testing a WiFi service in the fall, with Alaska Airlines, Jet Blue, Southwest Airlines and Virgin America also have in-air WiFi tests in the works.

Delta will use Gogo for its first class and economy passengers starting sometime in 2009, on at least 330 Delta aircraft. Several airline companies in Europe and Asia have been testing WiFi and cellular phone use while in flight, with varying results thus far.

Experts discover major Internet flaw

2008-07-09T16:15:00.001-05:00

LOS ANGELES, (UPI) --

U.S. security experts have discovered a major flaw in the design of the Internet's address system that affects virtually every corporate computer network.

The flaw in the Domain Name System could allow hackers to steer most people using corporate networks to malicious Web sites, The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

So far, hackers haven't taken advantage of the flaw, and the security experts say every major software company affected is in the process of issuing patches to fix the problem.

The man who discovered the flaw, Dan Kaminsky of the Seattle-based security firm IOActive Inc., says he hopes the patches will be broad enough that hackers won't be able to reverse-engineer them.

"We got lucky in this particular bug, because it's a design flaw," says Kaminsky. "It shows up in everyone's network, but the fix is a design fix that doesn't point directly at what we're improving."

Kaminsky says it took only a couple of hours to find the flaw but fixing it will take several months.

Microsoft Unveils New Internet Explorer Security Features

2008-07-02T15:20:00.002-05:00

Coming to IE8 is a set of cross-site scripting defenses to defeat hackers looking to steal cookies and browser history, logging keystrokes, stealing credentials, or just evading phishing filters.

By J. Nicholas Hoover InformationWeek

Internet Explorer's getting a little bit safer. Microsoft Wednesday unveiled significant new security features that will be in the next version of the company's Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, currently in public beta testing.

From Microsoft's standpoint, any improvement in security is a plus, and the company seems to be taking that to heart with Internet Explorer 8, which includes a slew of new or upgraded security features. In the past, Microsoft has been heavily criticized for its browser security, while its chief competitor, Mozilla Firefox, has been largely lauded.

One of the most important new features in IE8 is a set of cross-site scripting defenses to protect the browser against the most common type of these attacks, known as "reflection" attacks, wherein transmitted data is sent back to the attacker. During these attacks, hackers could be stealing cookies and browser history, logging keystrokes, stealing credentials, or just evading phishing filters.

Internet Explorer 8 will also have what Microsoft's calling the SmartScreen Filter, which has been previously announced, but is more than Microsoft originally let on. It's an upgraded version of the phishing filter found in Internet Explorer 7 with a twist. It now includes malware protection, a feature also found in the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

When users visit a site that's been reported by any one of a number of third-party data providers as a phishing or malware-laden site, they'll be greeted with a big red background and a warning. That's an upgrade over the anti-phishing user interface in Internet Explorer 7, which Microsoft tests found looked too much like a potentially less harmful page that just has security certificate errors.

The warning has options either to go to the user's home page or to "disregard and continue," though the first option is in much bigger text. Businesses will be able to set policy so that "disregard and continue" doesn't show up as an option. The anti-malware protection will also block suspicious downloads.

Several third-party data feeds will provide Internet Explorer with the information needed to block phishing and malware-laden Web sites. Microsoft gets data on reported phishing sites from seven providers, though it's not yet clear where it will get data on sites reported to contain malware.

Microsoft's already announced a number of security features for Internet Explorer 8. For example, the browser has a number of anti social engineering features. It will highlight domain names in the URL bar to help prevent URL spoofing, like when an e-mail tells the recipient to click on a site that's represented as a PayPal site, but is really a malicious one. There's also an additional anti-phishing feature, where a dialogue that catches certain site characteristics sets off a red flag even when the site isn't in IE's anti-phishing data feeds.

There are several new browser-based security features, including improvements to ActiveX dialogues and control. There are now several levels of security for ActiveX controls. With per user control, users can download and install a control and it will run whenever it wants. An opt in level allows users to decide whether the control should run each time it wants to. ActiveX kill bits can stop a control from loading at all, and per site control means a control can only be invoked by one particular Web site.

Data Execution Prevention helps mitigate many memory-related attacks, including buffer overruns, by blocking code execution from running in protected memory. Several other features, including cross domain request and cross domain messaging, are aimed at preventing attacks from taking place in mash-ups or any time two Web sites have to exchange information.

Cisco Ogles Russian Startups

2008-07-02T15:12:00.002-05:00

More than a year after announcing its intention to invest in some Russian startups, Cisco Systems Inc. has revealed a few details about its plans and partners.

The IP giant has contributed the "anchor investment" for a $60 million venture capital fund that will be managed by Almaz Capital Partners.

We thought that meant Cisco was supplying some nautical equipment, but that's its way of saying it's not revealing exact amounts: "Cisco is a significant contributor to that $60 million," says a spokesman for the San Jose, Calif., behemoth.

Cisco's not the only "significant" investor, though: Its contribution is being matched by Moscow-based UFG Asset Management.

The fund is focused on "high-growth small and medium-sized companies in the technology, media, and telecommunications sectors" in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

But that's not the limit of Cisco's ambitions in the region. "Cisco will pursue investment opportunities in technology-related start-ups in the region, both directly as well as indirectly through this regional venture fund."

And it's already made a direct investment, having taken a stake in Russian online retailer Ozon .
The move comes as operators in Russia and the CIS invest more and more of their capex budgets in state-of-the-art broadband fixed and mobile networks, a trend that's attracting other vendors too.

Wireless Internet Coming to Inside of Chrysler Vehicles

2008-06-25T16:31:00.001-05:00

And you thought surfing the web on a plane was already pretty cool. Soon, you may be able to watch the newest YouTube videos, read up on some terrific fighting games, and check up on the latest Mobile Magazine articles while cruising over to your family's summer cottage.

Starting with 2009 model year cars, Chrysler will begin to offer in-car wireless Internet access. According to the LA Times, the wireless access will be powered by a 3G data connection that can then be translated to a moving Wi-Fi signal. The service is called UConnectWeb and it will officially be unveiled tomorrow. Watching YouTube is probably more fun than crappy DVDs any day.

Naturally, UConnectWeb is not being targeted at the driver. He should be keeping his eyes on the road. The wireless web should only be used by the increasingly bored passengers.

Firefox 3.0 Doesn't Focus On Business IT

2008-06-18T15:15:00.000-05:00

However, a lack of enterprise support won't stop employees from downloading and using the browser on their own, with or without the backing of IT.

By J. Nicholas Hoover

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 this week, but don't expect the new version to come entirely business-ready. The company's approach is to keep the end user first in mind, not the IT manager.

"Give people the things they want and then they'll take it into the enterprise," Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's VP of engineering, said in an interview. "Our approach for a long time now has been pull rather than push." Mozilla has no enterprise sales or support staff to speak of, and the company relies on third-party add-ons such as FrontMotion Firefox MSI, CCK Wizard, or FirefoxADM for business features like centralized deployment and management. >more

38 in US, Romania Charged in Phishing Schemes

2008-05-19T15:50:00.003-05:00

Grant Gross, IDG News Service

Thirty-eight people in the U.S. and Romania have been charged in two indictments alleging they used complicated Internet phishing schemes to steal thousands of credit and debit card numbers, U.S. and Romanian authorities announced Monday.

The indictments, in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and the District of Connecticut, focus on two related phishing schemes with ties to organized crime, the U.S.

Department of Justice said. Phishing involves sending e-mail messages that look like official correspondents from banks or credit card vendors in an attempt to get recipients to go to a fake Web site and enter their account numbers.

A grand jury in Los Angeles charged 33 people for their alleged participation in a scheme that targeted thousands of individual victims and hundreds of financial institutions. The 65-count indictment was unsealed Monday. Seven people were charged in a Connecticut indictment for their roles in an Internet phishing scheme, including two who were charged in the Los Angeles case.

U.S. authorities were acting on nine arrest warrants in the Los Angeles area and Romanian authorities acting on search warrants there Monday in connection with the racketeering indictments.

Among the charges in the Los Angeles indictments are conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act; conspiracy in connection with access devices; unauthorized access to a protected computer; bank fraud; and aggravated identity theft.

The RICO conspiracy charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, bank fraud has a maximum sentence of 30 years, and device fraud conspiracy has a maximum sentence of seven and a half years. The unauthorized access count carries a maximum prison sentence of five years, and aggravated identify theft carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence.

The Romanian members of the organization obtained thousands of credit and debit card accounts and other personal information through phishing, according to the indictment. The group sent more than 1.3 million spam e-mail messages in one phishing attack, the DOJ said.
The Romanians collected the victims' information and sent the data to cashiers in the U.S.

through Internet chat messages, the DOJ said. The U.S. cashiers used hardware called encoders to record the fraudulently obtained information onto the magnetic strips on the back of credit and debit cards. Cashiers then directed other criminals called runners to test the fraudulent cards by checking balances or withdrawing small amounts of money at ATMs.

The cards that were successfully tested were used to withdraw money from ATMs or point-of-sale terminals with the highest withdrawal limits, the DOJ said. Part of the money was then wire transferred to the supplier in Romania.

Seuong Wook Lee, a cashier in the scheme, pleaded guilty on May 15 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to racketeering conspiracy, bank fraud, access device fraud and unauthorized access of a protected computer, the DOJ said.

In the related Connecticut case, seven Romanian resident were charged in an indictment returned by a grand jury in New Haven on Jan. 18 and unsealed Friday. The indictment alleges the defendants used a phishing scheme to commit fraud in connection with access devices, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft.

The Connecticut investigation came from a state resident's complaint about a fraudulent e-mail message made to appear as if it originated from Connecticut-based People's Bank. The e-mail message directed victims to a computer in Minnesota that had been compromised and used to host a counterfeit People's Bank Internet site.

Investigators found that the defendants had targeted several banks and other companies, including Citibank, Capital One and PayPal.

On April 23, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced a strategy to combat international organized crime.

"Criminals who exploit the power and convenience of the Internet do not recognize national borders; therefore our efforts to prevent their attacks cannot end at our borders either," Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip said in a statement. "Through cooperation with our international partners, we can disrupt and dismantle these enterprises, just as we have done today with these indictments and arrests."

Mozilla Opens Firefox 3 RC1 Up For Public Testing

2008-05-19T15:47:00.002-05:00

By Jennifer Hagendorf Follett, ChannelWeb

Mozilla is one step closer to the launch of Firefox 3, rolling out Release Candidate 1 of the revamped browser for testing by developers and the open-source community at large.

The new version, based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, adds several new features that will make Firefox 3 more secure, easier to use, and more personal, Mozilla said on its Web site. Firefox 3 also adds improvements for developers and will offer better performance, Mozilla said.

Mozilla Friday made Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available for download from its site for testing purposes so that it can collect feedback from Web developers and the Firefox testing community.

Among Firefox 3's new security features is one-click access to site info to allow users to quickly see information on who owns a given Web site and whether the connection is protected from eavesdropping. New malware protection warns users when they land on a site known to install viruses, spyware and other malware.

Firefox 3 also offers simplified password management via an information bar that can be used to save passwords after a successful login, simplified add-on installation and a new simplified download manager that enables users to search for downloads by the name of the Web site they came from.

Mozilla also said improvements to its JavaScript engine will enable applications such as Google Mail and Zoho Office to run twice as fast in Firefox 3 compared to Firefox 2. It will also use less memory than previous versions.

Mozilla offered no timeframe for launching the final version of Firefox 3, though executives previously have said it will be available in June. "The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users," the outfit said in the release notes for RC1 on its site.

Gates says big changes in store for Internet in next decade

2008-05-06T09:36:00.001-05:00

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said there will be a vast shift in Internet technology over the next decade as he met Tuesday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.

"We're approaching the second decade of (the) digital age," the software mogul and philanthropist told Lee at the start of their meeting at the presidential Blue House, according to a media pool report.

"The Internet has been operating now for 10 years," Gates said. "The second 10 years will be very different."

Microsoft Corp., the South Korean government and South Korean companies are investing $313 million in information technology for vehicles, games and education, according to a Blue House statement.

Microsoft and automakers Hyundai Motor Inc. and Kia Motors Corp. announced earlier Tuesday a deal to use Microsoft's in-car software, which allows people to control music and telephones with voice commands.

The company has a one-year exclusivity deal on the software with Ford Motor Co. in the U.S., but that expires in November. Fiat also has been selling cars with the software.

"We're doing some very interesting work on automobile software," Gates said after having dinner with Lee. "That's a really wide open area where some very exiting things will come out of."
Lee, a conservative former construction CEO, swept into office in February with a vow to boost economic growth through deregulation and increasing foreign investment.

In the Blue House statement, Gates was quoted as saying that new deals would boost South Korea's economic growth by as much as $6.9 billion over the next five years.

Gates, at a later event sponsored by South Korean television network SBS, talked about the future of software and human interaction in the next decade.

"We can expect that the variety and quality of software will accelerate in the years ahead," the Microsoft co-founder said.

Gates added that "natural interaction" between hardware and software was finally becoming possible, citing as an example speech commands to computers.

"The whole environment will be very, very different," he said.

Microsoft also said Tuesday that it will invest $280 million to build a research and development center in China's capital Beijing, and will double the number of its full-time research staff in China to 3,000 in three to five years.

Source

IBM CEO Palmisano Says New Trends Will Spur Old Company

2008-05-01T21:03:00.005-05:00

By Paul McDougall - InformationWeek

In addition to data centers, IBM expects to capitalize on the 3 billion people joining the middle class in the next 20 years.

IBM, which in recent years has struggled to grow its core software and services businesses, is counting on three trends to add some oomph to its top line, CEO Sam Palmisano said Thursday.

Palmisano said the company is poised to benefit from growth in emerging markets beyond the so-called BRICs -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China. IBM is also well positioned to extract more revenue from midmarket customers that want high-end technology and from large businesses that need to reduce data center costs and energy consumption.

"The world is changing ... and we need to make some adjustments," said Palmisano, speaking in Los Angeles to a group of IBM business partners.

Palmisano said IBM's efforts to expand its footprint in global tech hotspots like India and China have paid off, but noted that other parts of the emerging world are driving growth as well. "It's not just the BRICs, there are 50 or 60 others," he said.

"Three billion people will enter the middle class in our lifetime," said Palmisano. Much of that growth, he said, "will be supported by IT."

Another opportunity for IBM is the growing appetite among small and midsize businesses for enterprise-class technology. "That's a $500 million spend," said Palmisano.

Palmisano said IBM is also ready to profitably serve smaller customers thanks to its efforts to build out, along with Google, an infrastructure that enables it to deliver software and services through the Internet. The cloud, Palmisano said, is a virtual "application marketplace" that promises low overhead and high margins.

IBM's plan: to create a "Google like technical infrastructure that takes success in the consumer market and applies it to the consumer market," Palmisano said.

Palmisano said IBM also expects to profit from the fact that large corporate data centers need to be transformed in order to reduce space and energy requirements. "Those technologies have not been managed well," said Palmisano, noting that most companies spend three times more managing their data centers than they did buying the parts.

Data center modernization efforts will benefit IBM because it is, by virtue of its software, server, and services arms, the only vendor able to "solve problems end to end," Palmisano said.

"The solution is not a different router," Palmisano said. "Don't dumb down the problem."

Palmisano noted that IBM will be 100 years old in three years, but said that doesn't mean it can't cash in on new computing trends. "We don't mind being old. We're disciplined," he said.

Source

Adobe moves to broaden Flash reach

2008-05-01T20:56:00.003-05:00

No doubt, Adobe System's Flash is popular: it's installed on 99 percent of all PCs, according to the company.

But when it comes to mobile devices and other non-PC platforms, Flash is an also-ran. One reason for that situation, according to Adobe, is the lack of good development tools and the company's own restrictive licensing.

A new program, announced by Adobe on Thursday, is intended to remedy that problem. The program, called the Open Screen Project, is an industry alliance, of sorts, initiated by Adobe that includes prominent device manufacturers, content developers, and telecommunications carriers.

Open Screen is being spearheaded by Adobe. But the company is working with Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm, Chunghwa Telecom, Samsung, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Toshiba, Verizon Wireless, ARM, Intel, Marvell, NBC, MTV, and the BBC. It's "a who's who in the industry," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

"It's time for the industry to provide a consistent platform for development across PCs, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and other platforms," said Wadhwani. "There are five times the number of connected devices than PCs in the world. The consumer market is demanding video and rich content across all of these screens," he said.

Adobe's answer to the problem--no surprise--is Flash, and later Adobe's AIR software. The company's goal is to establish Flash as the common runtime software on a variety of devices and to rapidly gain market share. What about Java, Sun Microsystems' "write once, run anywhere" software, you ask? Wadhwani dismisses Java's viability. "Java does happen to be running on these devices. But not necessarily write once, run anywhere."

Sun was not immediately available for comment.

Wadhwani said the Open Screen project has five basic elements. Adobe will remove license restriction on the .swf file format. "It is published already, but in order to view it you have to say you will not create a competing player," said Wadhwani. "We're lifting that restriction. People have been worried about vendor lock-in. This will remove that obstacle, and concern."

Adobe will also remove licensing fees for embedding Flash Player on devices. The software has always been a free download for PC users. But Adobe has charged for embedding on devices. Those charges will disappear with the next release of the software.

Adobe will also publish a variety of APIs and protocols related to Flash.

Clearly, some big names will likely not be participating in Adobe's plans. Sun and Microsoft, for starters. Sun has Java; Microsoft has a variety of Windows technology for mobile devices and has developed its own Flash-like software called Silverlight.

Apple and Google are also not involved in the project. Wadhwani said that Adobe will be actively recruiting additional partners, however.

Source

U.S. targets China, Russia, others on copyrights

2008-04-30T10:00:00.002-05:00

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is accusing China, Russia and seven other nations of failing to protect American producers of movies, computer software and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.

The administration today placed the nine countries on a "priority watch list" that will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions — if the administration decides to pursue complaints before the World Trade Organization.

In addition to China and Russia, the other seven countries targeted were Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand and Venezuela.

The administration named another 31 countries to a lower-level watch list, indicating it has concerns about copyright violations in those nations but they don't warrant the highest level of scrutiny.

Because of improvements in their efforts to protect U.S. intellectual property rights, four countries — Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Ukraine — were taken off the "priority" list where they were last year and placed on the lower-level watch list.

In releasing the annual report, which is required by Congress, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said that copyright piracy is "one of the central challenges facing the global economy."
"Pirates and counterfeiters don't just steal ideas, they steal jobs and too often they threaten our health and safety," she said in a statement.

This year's report devoted attention to what it described as the growing problem of counterfeited pharmaceuticals and other products that threaten the health and safety of consumers around the world.

Stan McCoy, assistant U.S. trade representative for intellectual property, told reporters in a briefing that both China and Russia had made improvements in protecting intellectual property over the past year but that a number of issues remain.

The United States has a WTO case pending against China in which it has accused the country of doing too little to crack down on rampant piracy of American music, movies, computer programs and other products.

Discussions between the United States and Russia over improving copyright protections have been a key sticking point in negotiations over that country's bid to become a member of the WTO, the Geneva-based organization that regulates world trade.

Source

RIM looking for Cocoa devs: iPhone apps, or something else?

2008-04-30T09:53:00.003-05:00

Research In Motion is apparently looking for experienced Cocoa developers for a new software development team. The internal job listing, characterized by AppleInsider as "confidential," gives few details about what the "newly-created team" will be working on, but says that it involves "development and design of BlackBerry software." AppleInsider's sources say the company is keeping the project on the down low, sharing few details even within the company.

The requirements in the listing are reported to include emphasis on Mac OS X development with Cocoa and Objective-C, UI design, and web-related development using JavaScript and XML. Also preferred is experience with Sync Services and interfacing via Bluetooth and USB.

Though the obvious assumption is that RIM is writing applications for the iPhone—currently seen as BlackBerry's most serious competitor—the requirements read (to us) more like the skills needed to write software for syncing a BlackBerry with a Mac. With 42 percent of the current US smartphone market, according to a recent ChangeWave survey, I don't think RIM is ready to give up on itself just yet.

A native syncing application could certainly make a BlackBerry more compelling to someone looking at a new smartphone. ChangeWave's survey found that, among those looking for a new smartphone, 35 percent were eyeing the iPhone, while only 29 percent were considering a BlackBerry. Clearly, RIM is looking to answer the iPhone threat, and rumors indicate it is prepping a 3G-capable touchscreen BlackBerry to compete more directly with iPhone. With the increase in Mac sales and renewed enterprise interest, it only makes sense to make sure this device is as Mac-compatible as the iPhone.

Source

MS pulls plugs on XP SP3 mass launch

2008-04-30T09:47:00.002-05:00

Microsoft has pulled the general release of Windows XP service pack three (SP3) at the eleventh hour, blaming a “compatibility issue” for the cock-up.

The software giant said late yesterday it was suspending mass download of the long-awaited service pack while it investigates the problem between its point-of-sale app – Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) – and both XP SP3 and Vista SP1.

It said in an email that the update, which was released to manufacturing and volume licensing customers a week ago and was supposed to be generally available from yesterday, will not be pumped out to the masses via its Windows Update (WU) website as planned until the company fixes the bug.

However, the firm hasn’t pinpointed when XP SP3 will be available, much to the chagrin of Vista-shy customers who have been patiently waiting for the update to land.
“In the last few days, we have uncovered a compatibility issue between Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) and both Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1)," said the firm.

"In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience, we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to the web.”

It also said that filtering would be put in place “shortly” to prevent WU spitting out both service packs to systems running Dynamics RMS. Once that tweak has been made, XP SP3 will be made available online.

Microsoft added that customers running its point-of-sale app, which is used mainly by small to medium-sized retailers, should swerve installing the service packs on either OS until a fix has been provided.

Redmond pushed back the release date of XP’s final service pack several times, and was supposed to be withdrawing sales of the operating system from the market at the end of June.
But earlier this month Microsoft, in a somewhat embarrassing U-turn that suggested the firm was pricking up its ears and listening to unfavourable customer feedback about Vista, said it would continue to sell Windows XP Home for bargain basement PCs beyond its scheduled 30 June kill-date .

Just last week Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer hinted that XP could be reprieved from end-of-life if enough customers demand it.

Source

Apple Updates iMacs Amid Booming Sales

2008-04-28T14:56:00.002-05:00

In addition to faster processors, the new iMacs are rated EPEAT Silver and meet the Energy Star 4.0 requirements for power consumption.

By Thomas Claburn InformationWeek

Apple on Monday refreshed its iMac line with faster Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Core 2 Duo processors and an optional more powerful graphics processor on its high-end 24-inch model.

The new iMac is available in three basic configurations: a 20-inch 2.4 GHz model ($1,199), a 20-inch 2.66 GHz model, and a 24-inch 2.8 GHz model. The 2.4 GHz iMac comes with an ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (128MB memory) while the 2.66 GHz and 2.8 GHz models come with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO (256MB memory).

There's also a built-to-order 24-inch 3.0 GHz model featuring NVIDIA (NSDQ: NVDA) GeForce 8800 GS (512MB memory) that lists for $2,199 at the Apple Store, with 2GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive.

The new Intel Core 2 Duo processors that power the iMacs feature a 1066 MHz front-side bus and can be configured to support up to 4GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory.

Apple's iMacs include built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n Wi-Fi networking, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, Gigabit Ethernet; a built-in iSight video camera, five USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 400 port, and one FireWire 800 port. They also come with Apple's iLife consumer media suite and Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.2, known as "Leopard."

According to Apple, its new iMacs are rated EPEAT Silver and meet the Energy Star 4.0 requirements for power consumption.

EPEAT, the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, is a program run by the Green Electronics Council that attempts to encourage environmentally responsible electronics manufacturing. It lists 23 required criteria and 28 optional criteria that are used in determining whether products qualify for the organization's Gold, Silver, and Bronze ratings. The Silver designation means a product must meet all 23 required criteria and at least 50% of the 28 optional criteria.

Federal acquisition rules require that 95% of computers purchased comply with EPEAT criteria; as of April 2008, San Francisco city departments may only purchase computers and monitors that are rated EPEAT Silver or Gold.

Apple's new iMac arrive on the heels of another in a series of strong quarterly financial reports. Last week, Apple reported revenue of $7.51 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.05 billion, a 43% increase year-over-year.

Apple said that it shipped 2,289,000 Macintosh computers during the first quarter of 2008, a 51% increase over the same quarter in 2007.

In a statement on Monday, Apple's senior VP of worldwide product marketing Philip Schiller noted that Mac sales have been growing at a rate three and a half times faster than PC sales.
Earlier this month, research firm IDC reported that Apple's share of the U.S. PC market during the first quarter of 2008 reached 6%, up from 4.9% in the first quarter of 2007, representing 25.1% growth. Dell (Dell)'s share of the U.S. PC market during this period reached 30.9%, up from 27.7% in the first quarter of 2007, representing 15.6% growth.

PC makers find ways to extend XP's life

2008-04-26T19:41:00.001-05:00

by Ina Fried

Facing a June 30 deadline to stop selling PCs with Windows XP, the world's largest computer makers are getting creative.

Taking advantage of the "downgrade rights" offered as part of the Windows Vista license agreement, Hewlett-Packard and Dell both plan to offer machines loaded with XP well beyond June.

Technically, the computers will be Vista Business or Vista Ultimate machines that have been factory downgraded to XP at the customer's request. In practice, they are more like XP machines that come with an already paid-for upgrade to Vista when and if the customer chooses to do so.

HP said it plans to continue selling the "pre-downgraded" desktops, notebooks, and workstations to its business customers until July 30, 2009. Dell is already pitching the same option on its Web site and promising the models will stick around long after it stops taking standard XP orders on June 18. Other computer makers tell CNET News.com they are still exploring what to do but also want to sell XP beyond June 30.

There are limits to the approach being taken by HP and Dell. Only the Business and Ultimate flavors of Vista come with downgrade rights, meaning consumer machines can't be sold in a similar fashion.

While companies can offer pre-downgraded machines via their Web site, things get a little more complicated when it comes to buying a PC at retail stores. It may be possible for customers to buy such a machine, but just how this will work--and if stores will offer such an option--is not totally clear. The tricky issue is that, to stay within Microsoft's terms, the customer has to somehow "request" the XP downgrade.

All of this prompts the real question: Why won't Microsoft just extend the deadline? The company's rationale that customers and computer makers aren't demanding a longer life for XP seems to be increasingly implausible.
Kevin Kutz, a director in Microsoft's Windows unit, said that the downgrade-rights option meets customer needs.

"While (computer makers) continue to see large numbers of customers making the transition to Windows Vista, there are some pockets--like small business--that need a little more time," Kutz said in a statement. "And from what we've heard from our partners, the downgrade rights option fulfills that need."

The pre-downgraded PC option is just the latest way that PC makers have responded to stronger-than-expected demand. After shifting largely to Vista after its January 2007 mainstream launch, Dell and others quickly began adding more XP options in response to customer requests.

For some time now, computer makers have been selling machines with an XP recovery disc as a downgrade option.

Lenovo, for example, plans to keep offering an XP recovery disc with some Vista models through January 2009, according to InformationWeek.

The latest twist is the machines, like the ones HP and Dell will sell beyond June 30, that have Vista rights but contain XP pre-installed.

As for whether a broader reprieve might yet come for XP, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has left the door open a crack.

"XP will hit an end-of-life," Ballmer said in Belgium recently, according to Reuters. "We have announced one. If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter, but right now, we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments."

No Change in XP Plan Despite Ballmer Comment, Microsoft Says

2008-04-24T20:45:00.007-05:00

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

Comments by Steve Ballmer at a press conference in Europe today have led to speculation that Microsoft is reconsidering its June 30 deadline to stop selling most new Windows XP licenses. A spokeswoman from Microsoft's public relations firm said Thursday that there is no plan for a change in deadline, however.

"Our plan for Windows XP availability is unchanged. We're confident that's the right thing to do based on the feedback we've heard from our customers and partners," the spokeswoman said, reading from a Microsoft statement.

Ballmer's comments at a press conference at Louvain-la-Neuve University in Belgium led to a flurry of reports that Microsoft may be considering an extension of its deadline.

"If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter, but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments," Ballmer said, according to Reuters. Microsoft did not have a transcript of the event, but the spokeswoman from Waggener Edstrom said the comments seem accurate.

XP Petition Signed

The spokeswoman said Microsoft is aware that some customers are pushing for an extension to the deadline -- more than 160,000 people have signed a "Save XP" petition launched by Infoworld magazine, for example. But the company has also done its own research among partners and customers, and feels that "the dates are right," she said, speaking on behalf of Microsoft.

"We feel we've made the right accommodations for customers in certain segments who may need more time to transition to Windows Vista," she said. "But as Steve noted, we maintain a constant stance of listening to our customers and our partners. That's what is guiding our plan, and will continue to guide us going forward."

The "accommodations" refer to several exceptions that Microsoft has made to the June 30 deadline. For example, companies that make volume purchases of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate can ask their vendor to "downgrade" their license to Windows XP. Microsoft has also made exceptions for the emerging class of small, ultra-low-cost PCs, and it will continue to provide Windows XP Starter Edition for PCs sold in emerging markets.

Retailers and PC vendors can also continue to sell any backlog of Windows XP licenses that they bought before the June 30 deadline. Beyond those exceptions, most new Windows licenses purchased after June 30 will be for Windows Vista.

The owner of a PC support center near Boston questioned which users Microsoft had been gathering feedback from."I'd love to know exactly what, and how many 'customers' Microsoft claims to be getting this feedback from," David Bookbinder, owner of Total PC Support, said via e-mail. "My guess, and it's an educated one, is that it's more likely stockholder feedback."Total PC Support provides service to home and small-business users in eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire."I service over 600 clients and have yet to find ONE speak highly of Vista, or wish XP to end," he wrote. "And that goes from the biggest novice on up."

Interested in a Blackberry Enterprise Server?

Microsoft's Tellme launches BlackBerry voice search

2008-04-23T13:55:00.002-05:00

By JESSICA MINTZ

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp.'s Tellme subsidiary launched an application for the BlackBerry on Tuesday that lets people speak commands into their smart phones to search for businesses, look up movie times, check traffic and make other queries.

Once users download the program, they can push on their phone's green "talk" button and say either the name of a business, type of business, or the keywords "weather," "movies," "traffic," "map" or "driving directions."

Using GPS, the system figures out where the user is located and delivers nearby results from Microsoft's Live Search engine to the smart phone's screen, along with links to call, get directions, buy movie tickets and other related actions.

The program only works on some of Research in Motion Ltd.'s newer BlackBerry models. Tellme, which Microsoft acquired in 2007 for $800 million, said versions for Helio, Windows Mobile and Apple Inc.'s iPhone devices are in the works.

The Tellme program's launch comes just weeks after Yahoo Inc. unveiled a new version of its mobile search system, oneSearch 2.0, which includes voice search and is also designed to work with certain BlackBerry models.

"People are getting more frustrated with the fact that these cell phones are getting smaller and smaller, but more and more function is getting crammed into them," Mike McCue, founder and general manager of Tellme, said in an interview. "To try to get anything done — navigate through all these menus — it takes time. To try to do that while driving, walking, on the go, is very challenging."

McCue said his team hopes to add sports scores, train schedules, voice dialing, text-message dictation and other functions to the service in the future.

He also said that while Tellme's technology is separate from Microsoft's Sync system, which lets drivers use their voice to control phones, music players and other devices in some Ford car models, the two experiences will become much more similar.

The application was launched on the BlackBerry first, instead of Microsoft's own platform, because of BlackBerry's support for the Java programming language, according to McCue.
The system is advertising-free for now, but eventually, ads will be incorporated, according to Dariusz Paczuski, a senior director at Tellme.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Tellme's voice technology also powers AT&T and Verizon's 411 directory services, as well as automated customer service systems used by companies including Domino's Pizza and American Airlines.

Web criminals fuel big rise in "trojans"

2008-04-23T13:49:00.002-05:00

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Cyber-criminals are behind a dramatic rise in stealthy programs called "trojans" that infect computers to sell rogue software, send unwanted email or steal personal data, a study has found.

In a report released in London, Microsoft said the number of trojans removed from computers around the world in the second half of 2007 rose by 300 percent from the first half.
The figure has risen so sharply because more computers are fitted with software that detects malicious programs and because criminals had come to see trojans as their "tool of choice," the report said.

"The numbers have simply exploded, it's huge," said Vinny Gullotto, general manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. "There is a lot of criminal intent there."
Trojans can log keystrokes to gather passwords, send spam from private computers or harvest email addresses or personal information for criminal purposes.

The most common family of trojans last year was "Win32/Zlob," a piece of malicious software, or malware, that people unwittingly download from the Internet.

Its designers trick people into saving it by telling them they need a new piece of software to watch video online.

Once installed, it bombards people with pop-up messages and bogus flashing warnings that their computer is infected.

The messages say: "Your computer is infected! Windows has detected spyware infection. Click here to protect your computer."
The trojan then sends adverts offering to sell rogue anti-spyware on sites that could expose customers to credit card fraud. Microsoft said the problem is global and linked to organized criminal gangs.

"The majority (of trojans) come from the (United) States, China, Russia and South America," Gullotto said on the fringes of the Infosecurity Europe trade conference on Tuesday.
Microsoft said the number of computers around the world that were made safe after being infected with trojans rose from one million in the second half of 2006 to 19 million in the second half of 2007.

The report is online: http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/sir.aspx

Microsoft finishes big XP update

2008-04-22T21:34:00.002-05:00

by Ina Fried

Microsoft said on Monday that it has wrapped up development of its long-awaited Service Pack 3 update to Windows XP.

The update, which consists of previously released updates and a few new bug fixes and changes, will be available for download via the Web on April 29. Microsoft said it plans to start pushing out XP SP3 this summer to "home users" who have Automatic Updates turned on.

A Microsoft representative said the company won't update boxed copies of Windows XP with the service pack, though it will be an option for computer makers that are still offering XP on new machines. Large computer makers have only until June to sell XP on standard systems, though some low-cost, low-memory machines can be sold with XP until 2010, as can some PCs aimed at emerging markets.

Microsoft has been testing Windows XP Service Pack 3 for some time. The product was planned to be released as early as 2006, but was pushed back several times as Microsoft focused on developing and updating Windows Vista.

Yahoo sidesteps the big questions

2008-04-22T21:26:00.002-05:00

Yahoo reported solid earnings for its first quarter, but by completely sidestepping discussion of the big Microsoft acquisition issues, the company left more unresolved than resolved.

The company had solid revenue growth, expressed cautious optimism about weathering an economic downturn, and modestly beat analysts' profit expectations. Chief Executive Jerry Yang issued lukewarm metaphors: "Our results this quarter demonstrate we are on the right track. We are pursing the right strategy, and it's beginning to bear fruit."

And in after-hours trading, the company's stock was essentially flat.

I'd say "Ho hum," but the stakes are too high right now. Unfortunately, Yahoo didn't show any of its cards.

Yahoo's financial results didn't carry an implicit conclusion, either. They weren't so bad that Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo for $31 a share looks generous or so great that Yahoo shareholders will laugh off their suitor.

"The results, being neither fish nor fowl, presented a pretty clear outcome," said Gartner analyst Allen Weiner. "I think they're at that critical juncture where the best shareholder value they can give people is the $31 per share Microsoft has offered."

On a conference call to discuss the results, company executives stuck closely to a standard earnings script without advancing the discussion regarding the big issues:

• Selling to Microsoft. "Our board and management team continues to be open to any and all alternatives including a sale to Microsoft," Yang said, but, "We will not enter into any transaction that does not recognize the full value of this company."

• Partnerships such as one reported possibility to acquire AOL in exchange for an investment from Time Warner that could be used to repurchase Yahoo stock. The company is "expeditiously exploring a number of strategic alternatives," Yang said.

• A partnership to test Google's search ads alongside Yahoo's search results, a move that could increase the revenue per click that advertisers pay Yahoo. Yahoo gave passing mention to the test but said, in effect, "Stay tuned."

Given that Yang had no big news to announce, he had to walk a fine line on the conference call. He didn't want to throw in the towel to Microsoft, and he couldn't declare that Yahoo now has got Google running scared. And addressing touchy issues can open a can of worms during the question-and-answer period.

But just as there are consequences for saying something injudicious on the conference call, there are consequences to playing it too straight. If it wants to fend off Microsoft, Yahoo has to prove to its shareholders that its alternatives are real.

For example, sharing some preliminary results from the Google ad test could have helped advance the discussion about just how real some of the company's alternatives are. Analyst estimates accord 9 cents to Google for each ad clicked to 4 cents at Yahoo, so a partnership could be financially important.

Yahoo lost an opportunity to seize the initiative by rebutting Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer's latest take on the acquisition: "I wish Yahoo all the success with its results, but it doesn't affect the value of Yahoo to Microsoft."

Instead, Yahoo merely reported earnings. For seizing the initiative, I guess we'll have to wait for Ballmer.

Huge sponsorship for ICT congress

2008-04-22T13:47:00.003-05:00

PETALING JAYA: The total sponsorship for the upcoming 16th World Congress of Information Technology 2008 (WCIT 2008) has crossed the US$10mil mark, according to WCIT 2008 Sdn Bhd chief executive officer Dan E. Khoo.

The amount, which exceeded the US$6mil raised under WCIT 2006 in Austin, Texas, was achieved with the addition of 41 new strategic partners.

“Our aim is to sign up 2,500 delegates for WCIT 2008,” Khoo told a press conference after the exchange of agreements between WCIT 2008 and the 41 new partners yesterday.
Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Datuk Dr Maximus Ongkili witnessed the event.
To date, more than 2,300 delegates have signed up for the congress, often dubbed as the Olympics of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

The new partners include seven Malaysian states, four international media organisations and 26 technological development and services companies, bringing the number of institutional participants to 67.

WCIT 2008 chairman Datuk Badlisham Ghazali said WCIT 2008 would be a shot in the arm for the local ICT industry and MSC Malaysia.

“More than 100 high-profile speakers will share their wisdom and experience on pressing issues such as the impact of ICT on outsourcing, education, innovation technopreneurship, healthcare, the environment and the future of the Internet,” he said.

The latest speakers to confirm attendance include celebrity genome scientist Dr Craig Venter and Google chief Internet evangelist Dr Vinton Cerf, who is widely acknowledged as the “Father of the Internet”, Badlisham said.

Other major events that will be held in conjunction with the congress are the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Terrorism's World Cyber Security Summit, the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development, the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation E-Governance Asia Forum and the 11th International Advisory Panel for MSC Malaysia.

“These events are just as significant to support the agenda for Malaysia as well as to provide opportunities to local and foreign entrepreneurs. We are bringing the ICT world to Malaysian companies and states,'' Badlisham said, adding that the event was expected to attract some 50,000 participants comprising 6,000 delegates and 44,000 expo visitors.

Outsourcing Key For Smaller Firms

2008-04-22T11:04:00.003-05:00

By Alexandra Zendrian, Inc.com

Facing greater competition for skilled professionals, more small-business owners are turning to outside help for administrative tasks in order to remain focused on core operations, a recent study shows.

Based on a survey of 150 companies nationwide with 20-25 employees by Achilles Group, a Houston-based human resources firm, the study found that smaller employers tend to outsource at least two functions, including accounting, payroll, information technology and public relations.
Employers said offloading these tasks helped free up time to concentrate on growth strategies and other revenue-producing activities. Outsourcing also reduced costs, while offering greater access to expertise from outside the company, they said.

"The most common reason to outsource at the enterprise level is to reduce costs and typically focuses on administrative tasks before moving to more strategic matters," Achilles Group Vice President Bill Bradshaw said in a statement. Smaller businesses also tend to outsource work to save time, he added.

Windows XP SP3: A quick, painless upgrade

2008-04-21T21:01:00.005-05:00

Posted by Robert Vamosi

On Monday, Microsoft released to manufacturers (RTM) the final code for Windows XP SP3. The upgrade provides support for WPA2 and the Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP) used in Windows Vista, among other things. The public version will be available for download via the Web on April 29. Based on our initial installation, the upgrade will be effortless for most Windows XP users.

The last Service Pack for Windows XP, SP2, was released in August 2004. The initial release took some users all night to download and install. The company pushed back the initial public release from June 2004 originally. Despite numerous glitches still present in the code, Windows XP SP2 was formally made public on August 20, 2004, and Microsoft had to work hard to convince users to upgrade.

Windows XP SP2 featured a new Security Center, an improved firewall, and other tweaks.
That's not the case with SP3, which was delayed several years while Microsoft did work on Windows Vista.

Microsoft says the service pack includes functionality previously released as updates. Perhaps that's why the download and installation for SP3 was effortless on our test system. XP SP3 took only 30 minutes to download, and 10 minutes to install.

Some updates relevant to the home user include:

Support for WPA2, the latest standards-based wireless security solution derived from the IEEE 802.11i standard.

Improvements to black-hole router detection (detecting routers that are silently discarding packets). Windows XP SP3 turns this protection on by default.

BITS 2.5, which is required by Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and Windows Live OneCare.

Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP), which allows Windows XP applications to communicate with Windows Vista programs that use PNRP.

Windows Installer 3.1, which contains new and enhanced functionality and addresses some issues that Microsoft found in Windows Installer 3.0.

Digital Identity Management Service (DIMS), which allows users who log on to any domain-joined computer to silently access all of their certificates and private keys for applications and services.

However, the balance of these improvements are not necessarily relevant to the home user. For example:

MMC 3.0, which is a framework that provides common navigation, menus, toolbars, and workflow across diverse tools.

MSXML6, which provides better reliability, security, and conformance with the XML 1.0 and XML Schema 1.0 W3C Recommendations as well as System.Xml 2.0.

IPsec filter creation and maintenance. XP SP3 reduces the number of filters that are required for a server and domain isolation deployment. Also, the Simple Policy Update removes the requirement for explicit network infrastructure permit filters and introduces enhanced fallback to clear behavior.

The Security Options control panel includes more descriptive text to explain settings and prevent incorrect settings configuration.

Network Access Protection (NAP), which is a policy enforcement platform built into Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows XP SP3 to better protect network assets by enforcing compliance with system health requirements.

Starting April 29, all Windows XP SP2 users should upgrade to SP3, if only to get a complete set of Windows XP patches installed.

Red Hat Drops Plans For Consumer Desktop Linux

2008-04-17T16:55:00.002-05:00

Linux commands only about 1.2% of the desktop market in the United States, according to research group Gartner.

Red Hat said it has dropped plans, disclosed last year, to develop a version of the Linux operating system for consumer PCs -- in part because of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s dominance over the market.

"The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative," Red Hat officials said in a blog post Wednesday.

"Building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled, or are run as charities," they said. >more

Apple Patches Safari Vulnerabilities

2008-04-17T16:52:00.004-05:00

The fixes include patching a zero-day vulnerability in Apple's Web browser that allowed researchers to compromise a MacBook Air.

Apple on Wednesday issued a security patch for its Safari Web browser that fixes a widely reported vulnerability and three other holes, two of which affect only Windows versions.
At the CanSecWest security conference last month, security researchers Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel, from Independent Security Evaluators, managed to compromise a MacBook Air using a zero-day vulnerability in Safari.

Tipping Point, the sponsor of the contest, said the vulnerability would not be disclosed until Apple issued a patch.

Among the four vulnerabilities fixed in Wednesday's Safari patch is CVE-2008-1026, which Apple thanked Miller for reporting.

Apple describes the flaw thus: "A heap buffer overflow exists in WebKit's handling of JavaScript regular expressions. The issue may be triggered via JavaScript when processing regular expressions with large, nested repetition counts. This may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution." >more

Adobe Launches Online Photoshop Beta

2008-03-27T15:53:00.004-05:00

The well-known company's entrance into online photo editing and sharing is likely to be felt by competing services like Picnik, Phixr, and Splashup.

By Thomas Claburn

Online photo enthusiasts can now get their photo fix and fix their photos in one place.
Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) on Thursday announced the commencement of public beta testing for its free online Adobe Photoshop Express photo editing service and community.

Some of the editing options included in Adobe Photoshop Express include: Crop & Rotate, Auto Correct, Exposure, Red-Eye Removal, Touchup, Saturation, White Balance, Highlight, Fill Light, Sharpen, Soft Focus, Hue, Black & White, Tint, Sketch, and Distort.

Adobe's entrance into this space is likely to be felt by other online photo editing services like Picnik, Phixr, and Splashup, to name a few.

Though Adobe faces at least half a dozen competing online photo editing services, it's likely to benefit from its strong brand name and from fortuitous timing: There's considerable worry at the moment among users of Yahoo's Flickr, one of the leading online photo sharing communities, about the service's future following its likely acquisition by Microsoft. (One Flickr competitor, SmugMug, is offering discounts to those "fleeing Flickr.")

Adobe Photoshop Express is not likely to be meaningful to its professional Photoshop CS3 customers. The service offers up to 2 Gbytes of online storage, and that's only one or two pictures for many serious photographers. Adobe Photoshop Express also limits uploads to 10 megabytes and 4000 pixels in height and width.

Professional photographers often use hundreds of gigabytes of storage and tend to rely on third-party Photoshop plug-ins that aren't available through Adobe Photoshop Express.

But Adobe is clearly aiming at photo hobbyists, at least at this point. In additional to its variety of image adjustment and filtering tools, Adobe Photoshop Express emphasizes photo sharing and online galleries. It includes links to social networking and photo sharing sites Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa, though Adobe's ambition is clearly to bring more people to Adobe Photoshop Express.

Adobe Photoshop Express requires Windows XP or Vista, or Mac OS 10.4+; a minimum screen resolution of 1024x768; 512 Mbytes of RAM; Internet Explorer 6 or 7 (Windows), Safari 3.0.4+ (Mac), or Firefox 2+ (Mac or Windows); and Adobe's Flash 9.

At some point, Adobe Photoshop Express should be available as a desktop application, like Apple's iPhoto, once Adobe gets around to developing an offline client using its AIR technology.

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Windows Vista SP1 Complaints Draw Free Support From Microsoft

2008-03-24T16:04:00.001-05:00

By Paul McDougall

Microsoft has responded to numerous complaints about its new service pack for Windows Vista with an offer of free support for anyone having trouble installing or running the update.

According to Microsoft's support Web site, the company is offering no-charge Vista SP1 help for all users via e-mail and online chat. The wait time for an online chat session as of mid-afternoon Monday was about 20 minutes, according to the site.

Microsoft is also offering free Vista SP1 support via telephone for customers of its Software Assurance, TechNet, MSDN, and partner programs.

Microsoft ordinarily directs Windows users with support issues to the PC makers from whom they purchased their systems. It typically provides direct support only if the user bought a boxed, standalone copy of the operating system.

But Microsoft manager Brandon LeBlanc revealed in a blog post that the free support is available to all Vista SP1 users -- regardless of how they acquired the software. "We are offering free-of-charge support to *anyone* who is having issues installing Windows Vista SP1," LeBlanc confirmed.

The move is an apparent response to widespread criticisms from would-be Vista SP1 users who say they can't get the software to install or run on their computers.

"I downloaded it via Windows Update and got a blue screen on the third part of the update," wrote Iggy33 in a comment posted last week on the Vista team blog.

Iggy33 was just one of dozens of posters complaining about Vista Service Pack 1's effect on their PCs. "What a disaster," wrote SeppDietrich of the update. "It exiled all my Nvidia drivers to the Bermuda Triangle."

Other troubles reported by Vista SP1 users ranged from a simple inability to download the software from Microsoft's Windows Update site to sudden spikes in memory usage.

It's not uncommon for major software patches to cause problems when first released. Windows XP Service Pack 1 inflicted numerous glitches on host computers when it shipped in 2002. Microsoft fixed many of the problems with subsequent patches.

Microsoft last week made Vista SP1 widely available for the first time. The update is designed to increase Vista's speed, security, and reliability. But the company has admitted SP1 isn't perfect.
The service pack will not install on computers that use device and system drivers that Microsoft has deemed incompatible. The list includes audio and display drivers made by Realtek and Intel, as well as drivers from several other manufacturers.

Microsoft said it's working to resolve the compatibility issues.

Gates Predicts Big Technological Leaps

2008-03-16T12:45:00.003-05:00

By MATTHEW BARAKAT

WASHINGTON (AP) - Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he expects the next decade to bring even greater technological leaps than the past 10 years.

In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, Gates speculated that some of the most important advances will come in the ways people interact with computers: speech-recognition technology, tablets that will recognize handwriting and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information.

"I don't see anything that will stop the rapid advance," Gates said, noting that technological change driven by academia and corporate researchers continued even after the Internet stock bubble burst in 2000.

Gates also said the coming years will bring rapid changes in media as television increasingly becomes a targeted medium, where viewers can select niche content for news, sports and entertainment.

"TV will be based on the Internet; it will be an utterly different thing," he said.

Gates' speech came after he testified to Congress on Wednesday advocating greater investment in math and science education and more relaxed immigration rules that would allow foreigners who obtain college degrees in the United States to work here after graduation.

Current policy, he said, forces many bright, capable students to return to their native countries after the U.S. has invested in their education.

Gates said Thursday he was optimistic that policy makers would make the right decisions about investing in technology and human capital, though he acknowledged that such investments don't pay off immediately.

"Historically the United States has done a fantastic job of making the right investments," he said. "I think other countries, having seen that, are starting to duplicate those elements."

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Hackers At Harvard! University Admits Security Breach

2008-03-16T10:10:00.003-05:00

Once they put their mind into it, hackers are perfectly capable of breaking even the most ‘secure’ databases. This time, it was Harvard University’s turn to suffer such an attack just last month, when an unauthorized person gained access to personal information of over 10,000 Harvard students and applicants.

The breach was discovered on February 16 and the university immediately opened an investigation. At the same time, all students and applicants whose data may have been compromised have been notified. The information on the web included Social each applicant’s name, Social Security number, date of birth, address, e-mail address, phone numbers, test scores, previous school attended, and school records.

After the incident, the Harvard University took 5 days to investigate on the source of the attack. The investigators said they couldn’t tell whether similar information has also been accessed, but the University is offering support for identity theft (monitor credit cards and receive alerts in case of fraud).

“Protecting personal information is something Harvard takes seriously, and we are truly sorry for the inconvenience and concern this incident may cause,” said Margot N. Gill, administrative dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). “We are … apologizing to the affected individuals and making identity theft recovery services available to them at our expense. Please be assured that we are taking steps to do what we can to prevent future incidents of this kind.”

Harvard representatives also said that they couldn’t rule out the possibility that all the information stored in the server was accessed and copied, and so they continue to notify all persons whose personal information might have been compromised, and will continue to support expenses for identity theft and credit-monitoring activities.

Apple to iPhone devs: Keep on developing for Jailbroken iPhones guys!

2008-03-16T10:02:00.004-05:00

Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt is reporting that Apple has delivered a mighty slap across the face to many potential iPhone and iPod touch developers and turned what was good PR last week into what could be a PR headache this week.

By week’s end, almost everyone who had downloaded the SDK and offered to pay the $99 ($299 for enterprises) to become an official iPhone or iPod touch developer had received Apple’s polite but firm rejection letter:

“Dear Registered iPhone Developer, Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time. Thank you for applying.”

What stings for the developers who got what reads like a pink slip is that they know Apple has already let its favorite partners under the tent. In addition to the companies that demoed at the March 6 event (EA, Salesforce, AOL, Epocrates, Sega) Apple quoted a quite a few more the press release (Intuit, Namco, Netsuite, PopCap, Rocket Mobile, Six Apart and THQ Wireless).
Hmmm. I’m disappointed, but not all that surprised.

The reason I’m disappointed is that this would have been a big opportunity for new and upcoming developers to get an opportunity to showcase apps for the iPhone and iPod touch in front of a large audience. I’m pretty sure that given the quality of apps that I’ve seen for jailbroken Apple devices that these apps would have been high quality and, most likely free (or near-free). However, I’m not surprised at Apple’s “greet and toss” tactic - greet the high-profile big-name commercial companies and invite them in under the velvet rope, and toss out the riff-raff who were going to make their products available at a price (or lack of a price) that would mean that Apple wouldn’t be making money off the products. To be fair though, demand was so high that it would almost impossible for Apple to cater for every developer, but remember who was whipped up that frenzy in the first place - Apple. Overpromise, generate lots and lots of hype, and then underdeliver.

Even when the great unwashed are allowed in, you can be guaranteed that a two-tier system will operate - one for the big names and one for everyone else. A level playing field it won’t be. It’s not just Apple’s ultra-secret nature that will hamper developers. Overdemand and control-freakery comes into the equation too.

This move is likely to send a message out to the dev community that could be harmful to Apple, one that says ”Keep on developing for Jailbroken iPhones guys!” I’m pretty sure that there will always be a huge demand for “unofficial” third party apps. So far Apple isn’t doing a good job of trying to convince jailbreakers to walk the straight and narrow.

Thoughts?

Five reasons why the H-1B visa cap will increase

2008-03-15T17:23:00.003-05:00

Two bills were introduced this week to raise the H-1B visa cap. They follow Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates' visit to Washington and his push for a H-1B cap increase. The opposition faces a daunting task in challenging the push to increase the H-1B visa.

H-1B proponents in Congress acted quickly to take advantage Gates brought to the issue. U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced legislation Friday that would retroactively increase the 2008 visa cap to 195,000, as well as set that level for the fiscal year, 2009, that begins Oct. 1. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arz.) introduced legislation the same week to increase the cap to 130,000 a year. The current cap is set at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 for holders of advance degrees.

Here are five reason why opponents face a very difficult, if not impossible task, in stopping a visa cap hike:

One: H-1B opponents have no clout
If H-1B visas weren’t part of the larger immigration reform issue in Congress, the H-1B cap would have been increased long ago. The opponents have been piggybacking on the broader immigration debate and they know it. But the H-1B opposition is in decline even as the debate grows more intense. Five years ago, tech workers in Connecticut – many working or connected to the financial services industry (the first industry to really embrace offshoring) – organized a lobbying group, the Organization for the Rights of American Workers (TORAW). By 2003, Connecticut's congressional reps had introduced several bills – all affecting the H-1B issue. The legislation went nowhere, but Connecticut tech workers proved that an organized effort can have impact. It’s all part of history now. TORAW has disbanded, out of money and members. The broader base of opponents are alert, well connected and can fire off thoughtful, well researched emails to lawmakers at an instant, but TORAW is illustrative of the anemic state of the opposition. Opponents lack lobbying muscle in Washington.

Two: The Gates effect
Bill Gates is, obviously, a powerful proponent of the H-1B visa. But where is the opposition’s star power? Lou Dobbs isn’t it. The Programmers Guild has been effective in raising issues, but the real heavy weight organization, with true lobbying ability, is the IEEE-USA, and it has scaled back its opposition to H-1B visas. This group has staked out a position focused on visa reform and improving access to permanent residency, the Green Cards. The IEEE-USA was once more direct about the impact of the H-1B visa: In 2004, when the cap was scaled back to 65,000 the IEEE-USA pointed out: The number of unemployed U.S. high-tech professionals dropped sharply from the first quarter of 2004 to the third quarter. The decline mirrors the reinstatement of the H-1B visa cap to its historical level of 65,000 in Fiscal Year 2004 from 195,000 in FY 03. That was a strong message to send to Congress. But the IEEE-USA also represents many academic institutions that depend on the H-1B visas. Although universities are exempted from the cap, foreign enrollments may suffer if students feel they have little chance of remaining in the U.S. longterm. Universities also have strong ties to tech companies. It is probably safe to say that the IEEE-USA, as an organization, is getting pulled in different directions.

Three: There is grass root support for the H-1B visa
A major use of H-1B visas is to help facilitate offshore outsourcing and even in this downturn outsourcing will continue to grow. That’s the broad outlook by industry analysts. The pressure for visas remains, even in a downturn. But the H-1B visa has a very broad, grass root constituency that extends beyond the tech sector. In the 2007 fiscal year, nearly 20,000 companies, academic institutions, hospitals, public schools and others received only one H-1B visa. These organizations send emails as well.

Four: The H-1B lottery is a big problem for tech firms
The forecasted demand for H-1B visas is going to force the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) to hand out visas via a random lottery for the fiscal year 2009 that starts Oct 1. For the 2008 fiscal year, the USCIS received more than 123,000 visa petitions in two days for the 65,000 cap. Despite that number, the odds were still good that a petition would be approved in its lottery. The USCIS put all those visa petitions in a hat and selected about 100,000, rejecting the rest. The selection process works like college admission: The USCIS accepts more petitions then it has slots and expects a certain number of these applications to be withdrawn or disqualified. But this year there seems to be broad consensus that the number of visa petitions will exceed last year's total, and companies may face visa odds of two-to-one or higher. This makes the outlook for getting a visa very unpredictable and unacceptable to tech groups, which are now pushing for a cap increase with special urgency. But here is an important point to keep in mind: The people who receive visas under the 65,000 cap are more likely to only have a bachelor degree. They are the worker bees. The U.S. has a separate H-1B visa cap of 20,000 for foreign nationals who graduate with advance degrees from U.S. universities. But there was no lottery for these graduates because there was no sudden rush in demand. The USCIS filled those petitions on a first-come, first serve basis until April 30 that year. That may change this year.

Five: Congressional support for visa
Lawmakers have moved the cap up and down before and they will do it again. Congress will increase the cap this year or next and may make it retroactive as well. Had an immigration bill been approved last year the cap would have been 115,000. The open question is whether the H-1B visa will be reformed as part of a cap increase. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last year pushed for a reform that set a limit on how the visa is used. One rule set a limit that no more than 50 percent of the U.S.-based employees at a company using H-1B workers can be visa holders. It was a measure aimed at making the India offshore firms a little less nimble and raising it as a trade issue for India.

U.S. Military Restricts Google Maps

2008-03-10T12:47:00.001-05:00

The DOD took action when Street View images of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, appeared on Google Maps.

By Thomas Claburn

The U.S. Department of Defense put Google on the defensive last week when it issued a communique to make it clear that the roving photographic vehicles Google uses to acquire Google Maps Street View images aren't allowed on U.S. military bases.
In pursuing its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Google inadvertently ran afoul of the military's mission to maintain security for its personnel and sites.

The DOD took action when Street View images of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, appeared on Google Maps. Google introduced Google Maps Street View images for San Antonio in February.

Google removed the pictures at the request of the military. Fort Sam Houston is not open to the public.

Google spokesperson Larry Yu said it was against Google's policy to seek access to military installations or otherwise private facilities. "Our policy is to stay on public roads," he said. "A driver broke that policy."

Lt. Commander Gary Ross, a public affairs officer for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the U.S. Northern Command, said that the military had become aware that Google was requesting access to Fort Sam Houston and that the Pentagon issued a memorandum on Feb. 28 to clarify that Google's image capture efforts should not be allowed on military sites.

"It has operational risks for force protection and the safety of personnel who work on the base," Ross said.

Ross said that the directive doesn't apply only to Google as there are other companies that also acquire images for similar uses.

While security through obscurity is generally regarded as an inadequate strategy on the Internet, it remains a cornerstone of site security policies for governments around the globe.
London's Metropolitan Police recently launched a counter-terrorism campaign that warns citizens to be on the lookout for "odd" photographers. Posters promoting the campaign present the camera as if it were a weapon. The climate in the U.K. is such that the photographers there last year organized a photographer's rights petition out of fear that public photography might become a licensed activity.

In 2004, New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority considered a ban on photography in subway stations. It dropped the idea the following year.
In 2006, Saudi Arabia lifted a ban on photography in public places to attract more tourists; some restrictions remain, however.

In December 2005, the New York Times reported that the governments of India, Russia, and South Korea, among others, were worried that Google Earth's satellite imagery -- which comes from third-party providers -- might reveal too much about their military bases.

Google isn't unaware of the privacy issues surrounding its collection of images. "We've been pretty clear with people that if they're concerned with the imagery, we try to make it easier and easier to submit requests to get the imagery taken down," said Yu. "That's helped mitigate issues of privacy."

And if you represent a large army, you don't even have to bother with the Report Inappropriate Image link. Someone at Google will take your call.

Microsoft wants to freeze the Vista incapable lawsuit

2008-03-10T12:41:00.001-05:00

EVER SLIPPERY, Microsoft asked that the "Vista Capable" lawsuit against it be stayed while it appeals the judge's approval of class action standing for the case.

The lawsuit, filed almost a year ago, claims that Microsoft misled punters in late 2006 by letting PC makers stick "Vista Capable" labels on lower power machines sold with Windows XP that were later found capable of running only the Home Basic version of Windows Vista rather than the full version that includes most of Vista's new features including the Aero eye-candy graphical interface.

It claims that PC buyers paid more for those machines than they would have parted with had they known that they wouldn't be able to support Windows Vista when that was released a few months later in early 2007.

Never mind that those PC consumers who bought "Vista Capable" machines are likely better off sticking with Windows XP instead of "upgrading" to Vista, seeing as how Vista has turned out to be even more of a pig on qualudes than all prior versions of Windows. The Vole probably won't be arguing that, but even if it did, that wouldn't let it off the hook for having misled customers who expected that "Vista Capable" actually meant "Vista Ready" when they coughed up the readies.

US District Judge Marsha Pechman granted the lawsuit class action status two weeks ago. Microsoft filed a petition to appeal that ruling with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday, a day after it filed a motion before Judge Pechman to stay the lawsuit pending its appeal.

If the case is stayed, that would put off any further discovery by the plaintiffs until the appeal is decided, which could take up to three months or more. The delay would postpone additional revelations of potentially embarrassing emails and other documents by Microsoft and PC manufacturers, hardware suppliers such as Intel, and wholesalers and retailers.

Release of internal company emails last month disclosed that high level Microsoft executives anticipated the problems caused by the "Vista Capable" labels on PCs sold with Windows XP. Microsoft's OEM partners warned the company that the labels would confuse consumers, and even Microsoft's own executives got burned by buying PCs incapable of running the full version of Windows Vista.

In its motion to stay, Microsoft wrote: "Continued proceedings here would cost Microsoft a substantial sum of money for discovery and divert key personnel from full-time tasks...; would intrude on sensitive pricing decisions and strategies by OEMs, wholesalers, and retailers; and would jeopardize Microsoft's goodwill with class members -- all with respect to claims that might not proceed on a class basis at all."

Microsoft argued that, if its appeal is successful, any time and money it spends on additional discovery will have been wasted and any further negative publicity will have been raised unnecessarily. It also claimed that continuing discovery while its appeal is pending might needlessly impair certain business partner relationships.

"Plaintiffs' discovery almost surely will involve intrusion into the most sensitive pricing decisions of the OEMs, wholesalers, and retailers who sell the PCs at issue and set their prices," Microsoft wrote. "Continued discovery thus will disrupt Microsoft's relationships with its business partners, a disruption that will be unnecessary if the Ninth Circuit reverses."

The motion also raised the issue that continuing the lawsuit pending the appeal will require the plaintiffs to advertise nationally for class members to join the litigation, and that the class action search could damage Microsoft's reputation with its customers unfairly. "The result will be nationwide publicity that impugns the ['Vista Capable'] program," it said.

With typical Microsoft chutzpah, the appeal to the Ninth Circuit challenges Judge Pechman's basing her approval of class action standing on Washington state law because Microsoft is headquartered there. It also questions her approval of the plaintiff's theory that PC buyers might have paid more for the so-called " Vista Capable" PCs than they would have without those allegedly misleading labels.

Like many defendants, the Vole is seeking delay in the hope that the passage of time might work in its favour, as "Vista Capable" PC buyers get over having been taken in, witnesses change jobs, memories fade, documents get lost, and so on.

We'll see in due time whether Judge Pechman is fully confident in her rulings and believes the plaintiffs' case deserves to move forward timely, or decides that the potential harm to Microsoft should her rulings be reversed on appeal outweighs the plaintiffs' rights.

Vista SP1 Blocks Some Anti-Virus Programs

2008-02-22T11:42:00.003-06:00

More Vista flubs from Microsoft are surfacing, this time we are learning that Microsoft's Service Pack One (SP1) has a nasty side-effect of blocking third-party applications from working. More serious is the fact that some of these programs are security apps such as antivirus programs: Zone Alarm Security Suite 7.1, Trend Micro Internet Security 2008, and BitDefender 10.

Microsoft has put together a list of the 12 "programs that are known to experience a loss of functionality when they run on a Windows Vista Service Pack 1-based computer will either."

Problems with Vista SP1 problems started Wednesday when Microsoft pulled an update that would prepare Vista PCs for the SP1 update. Software and hardware compatibility with Vista has also been a nagging issue with users.

Most troubling is that a majority of the incompatible programs are virus detection programs. Windows Vista SP1 will block BitDefender 10, Jaingmin KV Antivirus, Trend Micro Internet Security, and Zone Alarm Security Suite. The Microsoft support page does state that a compatible version of all of these programs are now available, however older versions will be blocked.

Programs that will either not run or lose functionality include Iron Speed Designer, Xheo Licensing, Free Allegiance, NYT Reader, Rising Personal Firewall, and Novell ZCM Agent. Microsoft's support page also provides links to each program's support page so that if you experience any problems there is a source for help.

This is not the open invitation to embrace Vista that many Windows users were hoping and expecting. The fact that Windows Vista SP1 has compatibility issues with security programs that will help keep my PC running smoothly is a very worrying prospect.
Hopefully some good news will come out about SP1 before it becomes readily available mid-March. Otherwise I don’t see a switch from XP to Vista in many people's futures.

IT Consulting Available.

Microsoft yanks Vista SP1 update causing endless reboots

2008-02-20T13:31:00.005-06:00

No fix, no word on whether this delays mid-March SP1 rollout

Responding to reports of endlessly rebooting PCs that flooded support newsgroups last week, Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it had pulled an update designed to prep Windows Vista for Service Pack 1.

Although the update -- actually a pair of prerequisite files that modify Vista's install components -- has been temporarily pulled from Windows Update, Microsoft has not yet produced a fix for users whose machines either won't boot or reboot constantly.

"Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes," said Nick White, a Vista program manager, in a post to the company's blog Tuesday afternoon.

White downplayed the problem. "So far, we've been able to determine that this problem only affects a small number of customers in unique circumstances. We are working to identify possible solutions and will make the update available again shortly after we address the issue."

According to White, Update 937287 was the cause of the problem. In a support document, Microsoft describes that update as one for Vista's installation software, "the component that handles the installation and the removal of software updates, language packs, optional Windows features and service packs." Along with a companion update pushed to users starting Feb. 12 and another that was offered to machines running Vista Ultimate and Vista Business in January, the guilty update is required before Vista can be upgraded to Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Shortly after the two prerequisites hit Windows Update last week, users began reporting problems on Microsoft's support newsgroups. Most said that the update hung as the message "Configuring Updates Step 3 of 3 -- 0% Complete" appeared on the screen. When users rebooted hoping to clear the error, their PCs went into an endless cycle of reboots. A smaller number of users said that their computers refused to boot normally.

Some users have been able to regain control by booting from a Vista install DVD and selecting the "Restore from a previous restore point" option.

What's it doing in there? It's uncertain whether Microsoft knows exactly why Update 937287 is hammering PCs. Even after White posted the company statement to the Vista blog, Darrell Gorter, a Microsoft employee, was asking users to send him system logs. "I still need more log files for the investigations that we are doing," Gorter said in a message on the support newsgroup. Late last week, Gorter made a similar request on the same message board.

Also unclear is the actual extent of the problem. Although White called the number "small," the traffic on the Vista SP1 newsgroup is heavy. One thread had been viewed more than 35,500 times by late Tuesday.

But the problem is not new. Computerworld has found messages describing the endless reboot problem dated Dec. 13, one day after it first offered a Vista SP1 release candidate to the general public. That build of SP1 also required the prerequisite updates, including 937287.

Microsoft was not available for comment Tuesday night to answer questions about whether, and if so how, the snafu will impact its plans to start offering SP1 to most users next month. Currently, only beta testers, Volume Licensing customers, and subscribers to TechNet Plus and Microsoft Developer Network have been able to download legal versions of the service pack.
That will change in mid-March when SP1 is set to land on Windows Update as an optional update, and again in mid-April when Microsoft said it would start installing SP1 automatically on most PCs running Vista.

Outsourcing your IT - Percento Technologies

Microsoft Gives Away Software Worth Thousands To Students

2008-02-19T15:14:00.006-06:00

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says he wants to "equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software."

By J. Nicholas

Microsoft is giving away, free of charge, development software that would normally cost about $3,300, the company announced Tuesday. The effort, called DreamSpark, is aimed at giving jump starts to current high school and college students for their IT careers.

"We want to do everything we can to equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software to improve lives, solve problems, and catalyze economic growth," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said in a statement.
It's not all altruistic, of course. Microsoft hopes that by giving students software for free, the students will be more likely to purchase the paid versions later.

DreamSpark includes Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Expression Studio, XNA Game Studio 2.0 with a free yearlong subscription to the XNA Creators Club, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition. When Windows Server 2008 is released to MSDN, it will be available to students as well.
In the beginning, DreamSpark will provide college students in 10 countries access to all this software, and Microsoft hopes to expand the program worldwide and to high school students by the end of 2008. Students will log into a site on Microsoft's Channel 8 student-oriented Web site to get access.

The software will be available under an educational license, meaning that it isn't licensed to use for business. However, it won't stop working when students leave their institutions, and Joe Wilson, Microsoft's senior director of academic initiatives for developer and platform evangelism, said in an interview he hopes students will use the software as a way to get their business careers started.

"If we have a thousand more ISVs or new startups, I think that's a great outcome for this program," Wilson said. "Students are on the honor system. Overall, students are going to go do what the best thing for them is at that point; we don't sit around worrying about that."
It could be challenging for Microsoft to verify identities, but the company has a verification system in place to make sure students are students and not professional developers. It uses public and private sources of information to verify identities, including a database run by academic software company JourneyEd in the United States and other educational information networks in China and Europe.

That's not to say nonstudents won't fall through the cracks. "There's no magic button to instantly verify students," says Wilson.

Microsoft's effort follows that of Adobe, which began giving away a free version of its Flex Builder development software to students in November.

IT System Audit and Network Documentation

Sprint announces world-roaming Samsung Ace

2008-02-18T14:06:00.002-06:00

Good news for Sprint business customers who want a world-roaming smartphone but don't want the RIM BlackBerry 8830 World Edition. Today, the carrier introduced the Samsung Ace, a Samsung BlackJack lookalike, that offers dual-mode CDMA/GSM functionality so you can use your smartphone internationally. This means that the Ace will use Sprint's CDMA network for all domestic calls, and then you can use the included SIM card to make calls on GSM networks abroad. In addition, the SIM is unlocked so you're not restricted to the one packaged with the smartphone. That means travelers can buy a local SIM card at their destination and save some money on calling rates.

As far as design goes, the Samsung Ace bears a striking resemblance to the first BlackJack. It's slightly taller but more narrow, and the QWERTY keyboard has been slightly revamped. I've had the phone for a couple of days and prefer the Ace's keyboard to the Samsung BlackJack II, since the buttons aren't as stiff and they have a raised ridge that make them easier to press. Inside, the smartphone is running Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition with Windows Live integration and has Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and push e-mail. It's also a EV-DO capable handset with support for Sprint TV and On Demand.

The Samsung Ace for Sprint is available now for a pretty nifty $199.99 with a two-year contract, after rebates and discounts. As I mentioned earlier, I've had the smartphone for a couple of days now and I'm pretty impressed. Call quality has been great, and general performance has been solid as well. I'll have a full review when I get back to the office on Tuesday, so check back then.

Toshiba may end its HD DVD video business

2008-02-18T14:03:00.001-06:00

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Sony's Blu-ray technology is emerging as the likely winner in the format battle for the next generation of DVD players after Toshiba appeared ready to ditch its HD DVD business.

Such a move would help consumers know which system to invest in and would likely boost sales in Blu-ray gadgets, analysts say. But it will disappoint the 1 million people around the world estimated by Toshiba who have already bought HD DVD players.

Toshiba said Monday no decision has been made but acknowledged it had started a review of its HD DVD strategy. The comments follow a flurry of weekend Japanese media reports that the company was close to pulling the plug on the business.

A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because she isn't authorized to speak on the matter, said a board meeting could be held as soon as Tuesday, where a decision is likely.
HD DVD has been competing against Blu-ray disc technology, backed by Sony, Matsushita, which makes Panasonic brand products, five major Hollywood movie studios and others.

Both formats deliver crisp, clear high-definition pictures and sound, but they are incompatible with each other, and neither plays on older DVD players. HD DVD was touted as being cheaper because it was more similar to previous video technology, while Blu-ray boasted bigger recording capacity. Both formats play on high-definition TVs.

Only one video format has been expected to emerge as the victor, much like VHS trumped Sony's Betamax in the video format battle of the 1980s.

This time, however, it appears Sony will end up on the winning side.

"If true, this will be good news for the next-generation DVD industry in clearing up the confusion for consumers because of the format competition that had curbed buying," said Koya Tabata, electronics analyst at Credit Suisse in Tokyo. "This will work toward a profit boost for Sony."
The reasons behind Blu-ray's apparent triumph over HD DVD are complex, analysts said, as marketing, management maneuvers and other factors are believed to have played into the shift to Blu-ray's favor that became more decisive during the critical holiday shopping season.

Recently, the Blu-ray disc format has been gaining market share, especially in Japan. A study on fourth quarter sales last year by market researcher BCN Inc. found that by unit volume, Blu-ray made up 96 percent of Japanese sales.

American movie studios also were increasingly lining up behind the Blu-ray standard.
Last month, Warner Brothers Entertainment decided to release movie discs only in the Blu-ray format, joining Sony Pictures, Walt Disney and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox. That left only Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and General Electric Co.'s Universal Pictures as exclusive supporters of HD DVD.

On Friday, Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. retailer, said it will sell only Blu-ray DVDs and hardware. That announcement came five days after Netflix Inc. said it will cease carrying rentals in HD DVD.

Several major American retailers have made similar decisions, including Target Corp. and Blockbuster Inc.

Despite the reports, Toshiba's stock soared 5.7 percent to 829 yen ($7.69) in Tokyo as investors cheered the likely decision as lessening the potential damage in losses in the HD DVD operations, despite the blow to Toshiba's prestige.

Sony shares rose 1.0 percent to 4,900 yen ($45.45). The Tokyo-based manufacturer declined comment on the reports about HD DVD. Sony also said it did not have numbers on how many Blu-ray players had been sold globally, or a number for Sony brand Blu-ray machines sold.
Adding to Blu-ray's momentum was the gradual increase in sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 home video-game console, which also works as a Blu-ray player. Sony has sold 10.5 million PS3 machines worldwide since the machine went on sale late 2006.

But PS3 sales have trailed the blockbuster Wii machine from Nintendo, and the game machine wasn't widely seen as that critical to the video format battle.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 game machine can play HD DVD movies, but the drive had to be bought separately, and its proliferation is believed to be limited. Toshiba said such players are included in the overall tally of 1 million HD DVD players sold so far.

Kazuharu Miura, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research in Tokyo, said the final holdout for HD DVD may come in personal computers, if Microsoft decides to continue to push HD DVD. But once the balance tilts in favor of one format, then the domination tends to become final, he said.
"You've seen this happen before, as in Macintosh vs. Windows," he said. "The content makers are going to choose one format, and the stores are going to want to stack their shelves with the dominant format, too."

Toshiba is expected to focus its resources on its other businesses, including computer chip production, such as flash-memory, which are used in digital cameras and cell phones.

The Nikkei, Japan's top business newspaper, reported in its Monday's editions that Toshiba plans to invest as much as 1.8 trillion yen ($16.7 billion) in two plants in Japan for its flash memory business for fiscal 2008, starting April 1. Toshiba said no decision has been made.

BlackBerry Service Out in North America; AT&T Says All Carriers Affected

2008-02-11T18:23:00.000-06:00

NEW YORK — “CrackBerry” addicts were looking for thumbthing to do late Monday as BlackBerry smartphones throughout North America went on the blink.

A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday, wireless carriers said.

Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data services on their handheld devices, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with models like the BlackBerry Pearl.

There was no word what caused the outage or when service would be restored.

RIM officials did not return phone calls.

Major disruptions have been rare but often provoke an angry backlash against the Canadian company because of its typically lengthy silences about the cause and because it eventually gives only cryptic, jargon-laden explanations.
/**/

When the BlackBerry service suffered a major outage last April, the company remained silent about the cause for two days.

In a statement, AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook said the company first learned about the problem from RIM at about 3:30 p.m. EST.

"This is not an issue with AT&T's wireless network," Cook said. "Customers could experience difficulties using their BlackBerry devices. RIM has not given us an estimated time of when this problem would be fixed."

RIM is based on Waterloo, Ontario, and has deals with scores of wireless carriers to offer the BlackBerry service around the world.

Cable Company Mistakely Empties Customers' E-Mail Accounts

2008-01-24T16:42:00.000-06:00

ST. LOUIS — Charter Communications officials believe a software error during routine maintenance caused the company to delete the contents of 14,000 customer e-mail accounts.
There is no way to retrieve the messages, photos and other attachments that were erased from inboxes and archive folders across the country on Monday, said Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for the suburban St. Louis-based company.

"We really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen and do apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error," Lamont said Thursday when the company announced the gaffe.

Charter, one of the nation's largest cable TV operators, also provides telephone and high-speed Internet service.

It has applied a $50 credit to the bill of each customer whose account was affected by the mistake, Lamont said.

Charter gives each new Internet user a free e-mail account, but some customers opt to use other accounts instead.So every three months the company deletes inactive accounts, Lamont said.

"During this maintenance we erroneously deleted active accounts along with the others," Lamont said. "It's never happened before. They are taking steps to make sure it never happens again."

Charter provides service in 29 states, and Lamont said the affected customers were scattered around the country.

All told, the company has about 2.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers.
Computer experts advise backing up all important e-mail.

RIM Upgrades Email For BlackBerry Users

2008-01-23T10:29:00.000-06:00

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Research In Motion Ltd. Tuesday unveiled features designed to make it easier for users of its BlackBerry device and service to manage their wireless email, hoping to stay ahead of a pack of new competitors trying to chip away at the company's popularity.

With the aim of making mobile emailing more like emailing from a desktop computer, RIM said BlackBerry users will soon be able to edit documents directly from the handheld device and to view messages in their original formatting.

The Waterloo, Ontario, company also said the changes will enable users to retrieve email messages that aren't stored on the device and to check the availability of a colleague before sending a meeting request. The company will also give corporate information-technology departments the ability to wirelessly update the device's software.

RIM says the new features, announced during International Business Machines Corp.'s Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., will be phased into software releases during the first half of the year.

Some of the email features RIM is rolling out are already available through competing mobile-software services, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile. While RIM has withstood competition from rival wireless companies, it faces intensifying competitive challenges. Most significantly, Apple Inc. is trying to drive adoption of its iPhone among business users through advertising. Reinforcing that effort, AT&T Inc., the exclusive U.S. service provider for the iPhone, recently launched a service plan for business users.

In the third quarter of 2007, Apple captured 20% of all U.S. smartphone and cellular PDA shipments, according to research and advisory company Gartner Inc., second to RIM, which held 39%.

David Heit, director of Enterprise Product Management at RIM, says the appeal of the iPhone to business users is unproven. He adds that there is plenty of growth left in the business market as improvements in device memory and faster networks speeds allow the company to introduce features. "This is new territory for everyone," he says. "It is a very dynamic space."

RIM has focused most recently on broadening the appeal of its devices to non-business customers, adding features such as music players and cameras.

As of Dec. 1, 34% of RIM's roughly 12 million subscriber accounts were consumers or small-business users, up from 30% the previous quarter.

MySQL: Sun's Billion-Dollar Baby

2008-01-17T21:37:00.000-06:00

Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping $1 billion.

If the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?

Sun has toyed with the idea of a database offering of its own for at least two years. But in a market where basic relational database functionality is increasingly considered a commodity, competing successfully is no mean feat, even when playing the open source card.

Certainly, Sun isn't the first to try it. In 2001, leading Linux vendor Red Hat launched its own branded version of the open source PostgreSQL database, only to scrap the project a year later after deciding that servicing and supporting a database was not its core competency. Similarly, Computer Associates opened the source of the Ingres database in hopes of becoming a one-stop shop for customers in need of an enterprise application stack, but had little luck winning market share away from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. CA spun Ingres off into its own company in 2005, where continues to nurture a small installed base.

In his blog announcing the MySQL acquisition Wednesday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains characteristically effusive. "Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet," he wrote. "No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS."

Yet CA's and Red Hat's experiences seem to discredit the idea that a stem-to-stern platform offering from a single vendor is what customers really want. Not to mention the fact that Sun already offers enterprise support for PostgreSQL, a competing open source database that is widely perceived as being technologically superior to MySQL. Schwartz reaffirmed Sun's commitment to PostgreSQL in a conference call Wednesday, causing some analysts to speculate whether the MySQL acquisition was anything more than a billion-dollar PR stunt.

Good Will Worth the Money?

But there may be method to Sun's madness. The considerable goodwill that MySQL has cultivated among enterprise customers could have benefits for Sun that technology alone never could.

"I think the answer is simple: ubiquity," says Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, which markets a high-performance, commercial database product based on PostgreSQL. "[Sun is] a big company; to move their needle, they need to see millions of potential users, which MySQL provides."
According to the company MySQL's own estimates, there are already some 11 million active installations of the MySQL database worldwide. What's more, MySQL is virtually the de facto standard relational database for rapid application development, particularly for the Web. In future, as these fledgling sites mature and their needs broaden, they will become natural customers for Sun's enterprise support offerings.

Sun's new role as steward of MySQL is sure to ruffle feathers in the software industry, as well -- particularly at Oracle, which, with its recent acquisitions, increasingly competes with Sun in the enterprise application platform arena. In 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, makers of a plug-in component that adds advanced features to MySQL, in what was widely perceived as a competitive swipe at the open source upstart.

For his part, MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos has repeatedly denied that his company's aim is to displace high-end databases such as Oracle's. And that's only appropriate; for those customers who demand Oracle's most advanced features, no other product will do. But Mickos's protestations verge on false modesty. On the low end, MySQL is an absolute pandemic, and it's already making headway into the mid-tier territory traditionally owned by the likes of Microsoft. That trend is only likely to accelerate with Sun's backing.

Licensing Issues

What is unclear, however, is whether Sun will take any steps to alter MySQL's license terms. Licensing and project governance have played key roles in MySQL's success, and as a result, MySQL's license policy is somewhat more restrictive than the one that Sun has used for the rest of its software portfolio.

Although all MySQL code is available under the Gnu GPL (General Public License), the product is developed primarily by full-time employees of MySQL. Furthermore, the MySQL company requests that community developers sign over copyright to their code contributions to the company before those changes become part of the main MySQL code base. This allows the MySQL company to offer a separate, commercial version of its database for enterprise customers who don't want to be bound by the terms of the GPL. Initially, this license structure was used mainly to allow companies to embed the MySQL database into their own products, but the MySQL company was criticized last year for making it more difficult for non-paying customers to download the enterprise version of the database.

By comparison, Sun has been freer with its own code, foregoing separate, commercial versions of its products in favor of a subscription-based enterprise support scheme. PostgreSQL is arguably even more free; it is governed in a much more distributed, community-based fashion than MySQL, and its permissive license even allows proprietary derivatives, such as EnterpriseDB.

Name Recognition Factor

Ironically, however, MySQL's stringent intellectual property policy may be precisely what makes it so appealing to Sun. Red Hat Database and Sun's own version of PostgreSQL were merely different retoolings of an existing open source software product, one that customers could just as easily download from elsewhere. To the enterprise IT community at large, however, there's really only one MySQL -- and from now on, that name will be indelibly associated with Sun. Remember, for all Sun's talk about open source, this is a company that banks so heavily on its trademarks that it had its stock ticker symbol changed to JAVA.

Ah, but there's the rub. Sun open-sourced the Java platform in 2006, and while the move has been widely hailed by developers, not everyone in the business community was as thrilled with the idea of Sun giving away its crown jewels. As former Sun vice president Larry Singer put it, "We [at Sun] were spending all of our time and attention ... on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint, [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company."

So far, MySQL has built a solid business selling open source database software. Whether Sun has the strategic acumen to take that success to the next level, however, remains to be seen. But stay tuned; after all, $1 billion gives Sun a hell of an incentive.

Microsoft Admits Vista Update Glitch

2008-01-13T09:50:00.000-06:00

A patch to prepare for first service pack went to users of editions that didn't need the update.

A day after Microsoft Corp. accidentally sent a patch to some users running the Windows Vista operating system, the company updated the preview release of Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) to a small group of testers, the company confirmed Thursday.

"Microsoft [has] released the latest prerelease build of SP1, Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh, to approximately 15,000 beta testers," a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. "This group includes corporate customers, consumer enthusiasts, software and hardware vendors, and others. The code is not available for public download."

Four weeks ago, Microsoft made Vista SP1 Release Candidate available to the general public for the first time. The 15,000 testers, however, had earlier beta versions to work with, as well as this most recent update.
The company has slated Vista SP1 for final delivery this quarter, and on Thursday said it remained on track. "We are still on schedule to deliver SP1 RTM in Q1 [calendar year 2008]," said the spokeswoman.

In a separate issue, though, the company Wednesday admitted a snafu in a Windows Vista update it issued Tuesday to prep PCs for the later release of SP1.

The update, which is described in the support document KB935509, was one of three prerequisites for SP1 unveiled Tuesday, and was supposed to end up only on Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate machines, since it targeted BitLocker, the full-drive encryption technology bundled with those premium versions of the operating system. Instead, the update was also offered to PCs running Vista Home Basic and Home Premium.

"We had a small number of early customer reports, that in some cases, this update was being offered for installation on all Windows Vista editions versus just Ultimate and Enterprise," said an anonymous poster on the Microsoft company blog devoted to the Windows Update development team. "For systems set to download and install updates automatically, the update will not install even if it has already downloaded, so most people will not be affected by this," the post continued. "Customers who installed the initial release of the update on editions other than Ultimate or Enterprise should not be concerned as the update will have no negative impact on their systems."

Although some users on Microsoft's support forums wondered why they had seen the BitLocker patch when it didn't apply to their machines, no one running Home Basic or Home Premium had reported problems as of midday Thursday.

The remaining pair of prerequisites tweak Vista so that users will be able to roll back to the debut version of the operating system by uninstalling SP1 if they find that necessary.

This week's glitch was the latest in a series of Windows Updates snafus that include the September revelation that, contrary to users' instructions, Windows' update code had updated itself on their PCs, and charges in October that the company's OneCare security suite was also monkeying with users' update settings. Microsoft denied doing anything untoward with OneCare.

Table Touch Screen Terminals To Replace Waiters

2008-01-09T09:28:00.001-06:00

High-Tech Interactive, Social Restaurant At Your Fingertips

From ATM's to pumping your own gas, grocery stores to airports, self-service has come a long way. With the world's technological advances taking enormous strides, what can possibly be next in the world of consumer-driven convenience?CBS 2 HD has learned a new trend will be found at your favorite restaurants, allowing customers to place their own orders without the need of servers.

Ever find yourself unable to get the attention of a waiter? It can be frustrating. But soon that may be a problem of the past thanks to new tableside touch screens."It's cooler placing your own order on the computer than having a waitress come up and do it," restaurant customer Amanda Rosengarten told CBS 2 HD.That's because the order goes directly from your fingertips to the kitchen or bar, eliminating the possibility of human error during the transaction process.

The new technology is being used at uWink, the latest offering from the founder of Chuck E. Cheese. The company said the new system is providing faster service, fewer mistakes and fewer interruptions."Whenever you want ... that extra glass of wine or a dessert … bingo, it happens right away," said Nolan Bushnell of uWink."It seems a lot more immediate. If I happen to change my mind or need an additional dish, I can order it right away even if the server is busy doing something else," patron Julie Lightner said.

The National Restaurant Association has labeled self-service technology as one of the industry's top trends to watch, including fast-food restaurants to gourmet."Forty-six percent of all adults in America today indicate a likelihood of using these systems at a restaurant," said Hudson Riehle of the National Restaurant Association.Critics fear the trend will lead to less attentive waiters, but Riehle believes the opposite to be true."Many of these systems actually have controls in them which can summon the wait staff upon demand," Riehle said.Riehle also told CBS 2 HD some customers will always prefer a full service experience.

However, most diners who've used the touch screens are reporting positive feedback, especially, he said, when they're allowed to close their own bills, or play games while they wait."We've had people from all age groups, even seniors, which we didn't expect at all, come back over and over again, having a great time," Bushnell said.Many national fast-food chains are currently testing these self-service kiosks in some of their own restaurants and drive-thrus.

Bill Gates’s Farewell

2008-01-08T10:37:00.000-06:00

Microsoft's founder offers up a celeb-studded video but few tech surprises at his last CES.

It's hard to remember a time when it seemed weird for to be speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show. But when he started doing keynotes in the early '90s, was known as a software company, not a CES stalwart that made DVD players, TVs and car audio. Gates's taking center stage was then a sign that the PC was broadening its horizons into people's lifestyles, and Microsoft was positioning itself to lead the charge. Now, of course, after 11 appearances—eight on the eve of the show's formal opening—the Bill Gates keynote is a fixture here. Someone was quoted last week as saying that he's like the pope of the industry—which would make his regular Sunday-night presentation the benediction that blesses the orgy of commerce to follow. But this year's appearance marks an ending. Gates is leaving his full-time work at Microsoft this summer, and 2008 will be the last time he kicks off CES.

Not that I expected a weepy departure. Gates is unsentimental about stuff like this. For him a speech is all about the logistics of which Microsoft goodies to include, and the standard hope that the demos won't crash. This year's version was clearly in keeping with his tradition, a heaping helping of high-tech comfort food.

Over the years Gates keynotes have developed a reliable template. The speech is built around some overarching theme, usually some catch phrase that celebrates the wonderful things technology is going to do for us in the near future. In contrast to a Steve Jobs keynote, Gates's intent is not to unleash some unexpected new marvel on the world but to illustrate how Microsoft's direction in general is producing marvels. He does this by bringing on some of his employees to demo relatively new stuff. In recent years he has turned over a part of the talk to Robbie Bach, a Microsoft executive in charge of the parts of Microsoft that are most squarely in the consumer electronics realm (Xbox, Zune, video).

There's also some showmanship, within the bounds of Gates's somewhat stiff public persona. (One on one and in small groups he's much more charismatic.) Toward the beginning there's an elaborately concocted comic video, often a parody of some current cultural phenomenon and typically including some celebrity whose slickness contrasts with Gates's geeky personality. And you can expect a surprise in-person celebrity appearance onstage to close things out. (Guests in past years have included Conan O'Brien and the Rock.)

This year's keynote, held in a giant ballroom at the Venetian hotel, closely followed the pattern. Though Gates needs no introduction, he got one anyway, from Consumer Electronics Association head Gary Shapiro. Then he strolled out wearing a Gatesian outfit: a sweater (in a weird shade of lavender) and dress pants. This year, though, the huge screens behind him didn't display typical PowerPoint slides but showed larger photographic backdrops that made it seem as if he were acting against a blue screen.

This year's big theme was that a "New Digital Decade" was at hand—even though there was no clear thematic demarcation between that and the supposedly just completed first digital decade. The three things that defined this era, he said, were high-definition, connected services, and natural interfaces, such as touch and voice recognition. All of those things, of course, have been in progress for some time (Gates has been raving about voice recognition for at least 20 years). In any case, the conceit gave him a reason to bring out a couple of Microsoft functionaries to perform this year's demos, most of them of previously announced products, such as the Synch technology in Ford cars, multiple calendars on Windows Live, and features on the revamped Zune audio player. The most interesting piece of news was the announcement that NBC had chosen MSN as its partner for Internet video of the 2008 Olympics, with a plan to allow viewers to stream every single event.

Amazingly, all the demos worked, so Gates will get to quit CES while he's ahead.
Gates did explicitly acknowledge that this was the last time he'd be keynoting, and that served to introduce his video, one of the strongest yet. It was a mockumentary of his upcoming last day at Microsoft. The continuing joke was that Gates will have unlimited time to kill. After playing with "Star Wars" figures, bulking up with Matthew McConaughey as a personal trainer and honing his "Guitar Hero" skills, Gates decides to branch out into a new career. This allows for a cavalcade of celebrities trying to gracefully let Gates know that he couldn't cut it in their world. Bono has to tell him that he couldn't replace the Edge in U2. Jay-Z breaks the news to Gates that he isn't a rocker. Spielberg turns him down for the movies. And both Hillary and Obama nix him as a running mate. The audience, many of whom had waited in line as long as four hours for the keynote, loved it.

Next year, no lines. But maybe CES officials can convince him to do another video.

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2008-01-08T09:59:00.000-06:00

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Intel Unveils 'Menlow' Ultra Mobile Chips

2008-01-07T13:49:00.000-06:00

Intel (NSDQ: INTC) on Monday introduced its first notebook processors built using the company's latest 45 nanometer manufacturing process, which delivers more powerful products that use equal or less energy than previous models.

Along with the five mobile chips, Intel unveiled four server processors, and seven desktop products. All the new processors were built using the same manufacturing process, and are lead and halogen free, making them more environmentally friendly.

The latest processors bring the number of 45nm products from Intel to 32, including desktop, laptop, and server processors. Intel said it delivers higher power-to-performance ratios by packing more transistors in a chip by shrinking their size to 45nm. The previous generation chips had 60nm transistors.

Intel unveiled the new products at the International Consumer Electronics show, where chief executive Paul Otellini is scheduled to give a keynote speech Monday night. Otellini is expected to also introduce Intel's hardware and software partners that have agreed to support Intel's upcoming platform, codenamed Menlow, for mobile Internet devices and the smallest of notebooks that trade power for longer battery life.

Intel is scheduled to start production of Menlow, which will include a new low-power 45nm processor packages codenamed Silverthorne, this quarter, Anand Chandrasekher, senior VP and general manager of Intel's ultra-mobility group, told InformationWeek. In addition, Intel is building processors and chipsets for set-top boxes and digital video recorders. The platform, scheduled to ship this year, will use Menlow technology, but will be marketed under other names.

Intel's latest mobile processors are available on the company's dual-core Centrino platform for notebooks, which include the Intel 965 Express chipset. Optional with the platform are a third-party decoder for better performance in playing high-definition content in either HD DVD or Blu-ray format and support for 802.11n wireless networks. The latter is a Wi-Fi standard capable of streaming video.

Standard with the Centrino platform is Intel's latest Deep Power Down Technology that greatly reduces the power consumption of individual cores of a multi-core processor when they're not in use. In addition, the platform uses Intel's new SSE4 instruction set, which leads to faster processing of workloads, such as high-definition video encoding and photo manipulation.
One manufacturer expected to take advantage of Intel's latest chips is Apple, which industry watchers say is likely to introduce a new MacBook or other handheld computer at the Macworld Conference & Expo Jan. 14-18 in San Francisco.

Intel's latest chips for the mainstream desktop will include three Core 2 quad-core processors and four Core 2 dual-core products. The processors will feature a range of clock speeds, and up to 6Mbytes of level two cache. The dual-core products begin shipping this month, and the quad-core processors are expected later in the quarter.

Also shipping later this quarter are the four 45nm Xeon processors for servers and workstations.

Intel started shipping 45nm processors late last year, giving it a jump on rival Advanced Micro Devices. AMD is expected to deliver 45nm products later this quarter. Codenamed Shanghai, AMD (NYSE: AMD)'s quad-core microprocessor is expected to be a server product under the Opteron brand.

Gates To Kick Off CES, And Big Push By Microsoft

2008-01-06T09:08:00.000-06:00

Linux, Yahoo, AOL, and other companies and technologies will compete for attention at the annual display of consumer electronics.

By J. Nicholas Hoover

When Bill Gates takes the stage this weekend at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it will be one of his last big appearances as chairman of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). His presence as the opening keynote speaker makes clear that the consumer electronics industry, once focused on the latest gadgets and gizmos, increasingly relies on software.

Gates' keynotes is likely to set the tone for the entire show, and judging by the volume of expected announcements next week, it's likely that mobility will be a major topic of conversation. Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Smart Personal Objects Technology, and automotive business units also will be at the show. Windows Mobile 6.1 is expected to be released sometime early this year.

Meanwhile, some companies are using Microsoft software to power their own software and hardware, like Ricavision, which is coupling Bluetooth with Windows Vista's SideShow capability to display e-mail notifications and other information on a remote control.

As usual, Microsoft will have a strong presence at CES. The company unveiled Windows Home Server at last year's CES, and that team is back again this year after the product's release last summer. Microsoft's also bringing along teams representing Xbox, Windows Live, its Surface multi-touch computing group, Windows Vista, the Silverlight browser plug-in, automotive technology like Ford's new Sync software, and a Smart Personal Objects Technology group that includes things like Microsoft-powered watch software.

Microsoft will have competition from Linux at this year's CES as well. OpenMoko is showing its Linux-based smart phone, while a start-up that's already gotten its software packaged into cheap PCs at Wal-Mart will be releasing the latest version of its operating system at CES. Good OS' Ubuntu-based Rocket makes heavy use of built-in links to Web apps to bolster its functionality.

The Web won't be left out either. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) will be at CES in full force, including a keynote by CEO Jerry Yang and "several announcements centering on the company's mobile strategy." Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is nowhere to be seen, but several companies have built Google software and services into their systems, including Thompson's new GE-branded DECT 6.0 phones, which have a built-in "auto-dial GOOG-411 button" for free directory assistance. AOL will be there as well, continuing its reinvention into a portal player.

A British start-up named Invu will be exhibiting an interesting take on Web search at CES with .NET-based downloadable search software called Ergo. The software does desktop or Web searches and then clusters results. For example, a search on "baseball" might bring back clusters labeled "baseball players" and "baseball cards," among others. Ergo aggregates results from several different search engines and has a social aspect to it: users can annotate and share search results with one another.

RealNetworks will also be announcing new technology at the show. The multimedia software maker is participating in CES Unveiled, the pre-CES press preview, on Saturday. Last year, the company announced a series of partnerships with companies like Tivo. Other multimedia software companies in attendance include Cyberlink Corp., ArcSoft, Nero, and Corel, all of which are showcasing their latest wares.

Gaming software will also have a showing, though CES isn't known as a mecca for gamers. LucasArts will unveil new games, and Microsoft and Sony may have something up their own sleeves. Sony has already announced on its CES Web site that the voice-over IP service Skype will soon be available on Sony's PlayStation Portable gaming system.

The real software story this year, at least in preview, should be Microsoft. The company's massive presence plus a valedictory address from its chairman shows an intention to put on a full court press with its consumer-facing applications at the show.

Record Number Of Data Breaches Reported In 2007

2008-01-02T12:13:00.000-06:00

Researchers with the Identity Theft Resource Center cited 443 breaches in the U.S. in 2007 in their annual report, compared to the 315 they identified in 2006.

By Thomas Claburn InformationWeek

The number of publicly reported data breaches in the U.S. rose by more than 40% in 2007, compared to the previous year, according to statistics compiled by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a consumer rights advocacy group.

In its December 24 report, the ITRC said that there were publicly reported 443 breaches in the U.S. in 2007. In 2006, the ITRC identified 315 publicized breaches.

Some 127 million data records were exposed during 2007. In 2006, nearly 20 million records were exposed. In 2005, there were 158 breaches reported involving about 65 million records.
The ITRC will have to update its list to reflect breaches reported during the last seven days of the year, something organization founder Linda Foley said would happen next week.

On Friday, the Tennessean.com reported that someone broke into a Davidson County election office over the Christmas holiday and stole laptops believed to contain the Social Security numbers and other personal information for more than 337,000 registered voters in the Tennessee county.

That same day, the Pioneer Press in Minnesota reported that a laptop containing the personal information of 219 Minnesotans had been stolen from a Pennsylvania vendor doing business with the Minnesota State Commerce Department.

Also on Friday, television station WSFA in Montgomery, Alabama reported that the U.S. Air Force had sent letters to current and former service members whose Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and telephone numbers were on a laptop that was stolen from the home of an Air Force band member based at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington D.C. The station subsequently reported that the missing laptop contained the personal information of 10,501 individuals.

The rise in reported breaches may not be exclusively a reflection of rising data thievery. The ITRC speculates that in addition to an increase in data theft, more data breaches are being reported to the public. And it remains to be seen whether 2007 proves to be a high water mark for data loss, given that the T.J. Maxx breach accounted for 94 million of the 127 million exposed customer records.

Foley reluctantly characterized 2007 as the worst on record from a statistical perspective, but cautioned that the T.J. Maxx breach skews the statistics. "I don't know whether we're seeing more breaches because there's mandatory reporting or because there are more," she said, adding that 39 states and the District of Columbia now require organizations to report data breaches.

But even if 2007 proves to be an aberration, the costs associated with data breaches appear to be rising. According to a study released in November by the Ponemon Institute, an information practices consultancy, data breaches cost businesses an average of $197 per customer record in 2007, up from $182 in 2006.

And that perhaps explains why Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Raytheon, Symantec (NSDQ: SYMC), Trend Micro, and Websense have all made acquisitions in the past year or so to strengthen their data loss protection offerings. A Gartner report in May estimated that the $50 million data leak protection market measured in 2006 would as much as triple by the end of 2007.

Foley nonetheless expressed optimism, noting that in regulated industries like finance and healthcare, there are far fewer breaches than in other areas of business. "Both are highly regulated industries with a number of government agencies looking over their shoulders," she said. "[But] a lot of the businesses still have not learned how to handle information correctly."
As an example, she points to the fact that only 13 of the data breaches out of 443 reported to date this year involved encrypted data, which is far less vulnerable to unauthorized access or misuse.

While 2007 could fairly be called the year of the data breach, Foley prefers to think of it as the year of data breach awareness. "I think there is a greater awareness this year that is going to have a ripple effect over the next couple of years," she said. "And hopefully that is going to bring the number of breaches down."

Programmed for love - Sex with Robots

2008-01-02T10:00:00.000-06:00

Author sees hard-wired sex in the future - and apparently it's all good - especially if you like robots

By FRITZ LANHAM

If you're younger than 35, you'll probably live long enough to put David Levy's prediction to the test. Levy says that by 2050 we'll be creating robots so lifelike, so imbued with human-seeming intelligence and emotions, as to be nearly indistinguishable from real people. And we'll have sex with these robots. Some of us will even marry them. And it will all be good.

Levy lays out his vision of a Brave New Carnal World in Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, which, despite its extended riffs on sex toys through the ages, is a snigger-free book. Levy's no Al Goldstein. Rather he's a 62-year-old British chess master turned artificial-intelligence expert persuaded that robot sex can brighten the lives of many, many unhappy people. "Great sex on tap for everyone, 24/7,'' he writes on the final page of the book. What's not to like? >more

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Generation Y biggest user of U.S. libraries - survey

2007-12-31T09:14:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON, Dec 30 (Reuters) - More than half of Americans visited a library in the past year with many of them drawn in by the computers rather than the books, according to a survey released on Sunday.

Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said.

"These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down," said Leigh Estabrook, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results.

"Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries," she said.

Internet users were more than twice as likely to patronize libraries as non-Internet users, according to the survey.

More than two-thirds of library visitors in all age groups said they used computers while at the library.

Sixty-five percent of them looked up information on the Internet while 62 percent used computers to check into the library's resources.

Public libraries now offer virtual homework help, special gaming software programs, and some librarians even have created characters in the Second Life virtual world, Estabrook said. Libraries also remain a community hub or gathering place in many neighborhoods, she said.

The survey showed 62 percent of Generation Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year, with a steady decline in usage according to age. Some 57 percent of adults aged 43 to 52 said they visited a library in 2007, followed by 46 percent of adults aged 53 to 61; 42 percent of adults aged 62 to 71; and just 32 percent of adults over 72.

"We were surprised by these findings, particularly in relation to Generation Y," said Lee Rainie, co-author of the study and director of the Pew project. In 1996 a survey by the Benton Foundation found young adults saw libraries becoming less relevant in the future.

"Scroll forward 10 years and their younger brothers and sisters are now the most avid library users," Rainie said.

The survey of 2,796 Americans was conducted by telephone from late June through early September and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. It was funded by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency that offers federal support for U.S. libraries and museums.

Google gets even more ambitious

2007-12-30T09:02:00.000-06:00

By Elinor Mills

If Google were an adolescent lad, 2007 would mark the year his voice cracked.

Last year, Google remained at the top of its search class. This year, the company tried out for the wireless varsity teams, played hooky with YouTube, and courted cheerleader DoubleClick.
There was a wave of consolidation in the online advertising space, with search companies gobbling up ad firms like crazy. Google started it off by offering $3.1 billion to acquire online ad serving and ad exchange provider DoubleClick in April. The merger was kept in limbo most of the year due to privacy and antitrust concerns voiced by lawmakers, privacy advocates, and rivals like Microsoft.

Last week, however, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission gave its approval for the Google-DoubleClick deal. But the transaction is expected to be a tough sell in Europe, where regulators face an April 2 deadline for deciding.

Yahoo kicked off 2007 by acquiring Right Media, which runs an online ad exchange, and then later in the year it purchased online ad network Blue Lithium.
Microsoft spent a whopping $6 billion for online ad serving firm Aquantive in May, then bought ad exchange AdECN in July.

Not to be outdone, AOL acquired behavioral ad targeting firm Tacoda. And advertising giant WPP Group got in on the act, buying 24/7, a search-based ad-serving company.
While trying to become an advertising powerhouse, Google also staked out turf in the mobile and wireless-spectrum areas in the hopes of broadening access to its Internet search and other services.

Following years of "Google Phone" speculation, the company in November finally launched the Android mobile-software platform and the Open Handset Alliance of device makers, carriers, and others who aim to create an ecosystem for next-generation Internet-enabled phones.
Later that month, Google submitted its application to bid on the Federal Communications Commission's auction of the 700MHz band wireless spectrum. Google executives have been mum about their plans for the spectrum should they win, but they have hinted that they would likely partner with a network service provider rather than build out a network on their own.
Google, meanwhile, was sued by Viacom for $1 billion for alleged copyright violations over pirated videos posted to its video-sharing site, YouTube. Seven months later, Google unveiled an antipiracy tool for video that seemed to appease some media companies, but didn't make the Viacom lawsuit go away.

While Google's search market share continued to rise along with its stock price--which has topped $700--No. 2 search engine Yahoo was struggling to redefine itself. Terry Semel stepped down as chief executive in June and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang replaced him.

Yang's promotion had its drawbacks. He spent his 39th birthday in November getting called a moral pygmy by U.S. lawmakers and being forced to apologize to the families of two Yahoo users who were jailed for 10 years after Yahoo turned over information about them to Chinese authorities. A week later, Yahoo settled a lawsuit on that score and promised to create a humanitarian relief fund to help other political dissidents and their families.

In contrast, at Tech High, Google would definitely be voted "Most Ambitious" and "Most Likely to Succeed."

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2007-12-30T08:51:00.000-06:00

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IPod Tackles Online Movies

2007-12-29T17:30:00.000-06:00

The tiny iPod media device has slowly led to the demise of many of the music stores and venues across the United States. Many people feel that the lessening of music stores can be traced to the ability to download and record music on the portable iPod devices.

But will the same thing happen to movie rental stores?

No one knows for sure, but with their audacious attempt to foray into the online movie business, a new chapter in movie distribution is being written and created. Apple recently announced a deal in the works with 20th Century Fox Studios, for distribution of movies that have been released to DVD, and the promise of using movies and viewing them on your iPod has a lot of people excited.

Older models of the iPod will not be able to play video, but they have led to a avalanche of music downloading, customers often pass traditional record stores by to download music, and this had seriously hit the music stores profitability.

Beginning next month in January 08, Apple plans to use its iPod device to download movies from the Fox Studios vault to the customer. While at first many people show disbelief, because of the huge changes in how music is downloaded that the iPod device helped create, no one is disbelieving now.

According to Apple, users and customers with iPod devices will be able to rent movies from Fox Studios on its iTunes online digital media store.

Apple is not the first to venture into digital video rentals, but they are the first to produce a proven product that can do it portably. The iPod and iTunes delivery format could prove to be a giant killer to established online download stores, such as Blockbuster and NetFlix.

After the iPod was introduced, sales of CD records fell more than thirty percent in 2007, compared to sales in 2000. Huge chain stores such as Tower Records closed down.
It’s hard to predict, but the use of iPods for movie downloads promises to change everything.

IT Outsourcing

Online Sales Saw Growth For Holidays

2007-12-29T17:04:00.000-06:00

Brisk buying of video games and DVDs gave online retailers a leg up this holiday. But while they didn't end up with the lump of coal that offline stores got, their sales growth likely fell short of last year.

U.S. online retail sales from Nov. 23 through Dec. 24 rose 22.4% from the year-earlier figure, MasterCard Advisor's SpendingPulse reported on Thursday. And Chase Paymentech's Pulse Index, which uses transaction data from 10 top online merchants, says holiday sales through Dec. 23 were up nearly 30%.

While MasterCard and Chase Paymentech don't do forecasts, eMarketer has predicted an 18.5% rise in online sales this November and December. And in its most recent report late Sunday, comScore said U.S. online sales rose 19% from Nov. 1 through Dec. 17 vs. the year-earlier figure. ComScore expects to issue updated figures on Friday.

In the 2006 holiday season, both eMarketer and comScore said U.S. online sales rose about 25%. So it appears this year's increase will lag last year's results.

Still, online certainly outdid offline. SpendingPulse says offline stores posted sales growth of just 2.4% from Nov. 23, Black Friday, through Christmas Eve.

For offline and online, SpendingPulse says sales of luxury goods, excluding jewelry, jumped 7.1%. It says footwear sales rose 6.1%, while consumer electronics sales, a hot category in years past, rose just 2.7%. Men's apparel sales rose by 2.3%.
Sales of women's apparel, a tough category for most retailers this year, fell by 2.4%.
The Chase Paymentech figures buoyed observers.

"(Chase's) figures are phenomenal and are actually more positive than some of the other numbers reported," said Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

Mulpuru says e-tailers felt the pressure to execute every aspect of their business perfectly during the quarter in the face of a sluggish economy and rising fuel prices. She says any lapses meant lost customers and sales.

No. 1 e-tailer Amazon.com (NasdaqGS:AMZN - News) on Wednesday said this holiday was its best ever. Though it didn't provide sales figures, the Seattle-based company said it's all-time busiest day was Dec. 10, when customers ordered 5.4 million items.

Amazon said its top holiday sellers were toys, video games and books.

In toys, top sellers included Jakks Pacific's (NasdaqGS:JAKK - News) EyeClops Bionic Eye, the IlluStory Make Your Own Story Kit by Creations By You and Spinmaster's Air Hogs Havoc Heli. Top sellers in video included Nintendo's (Other OTC:NTDOY.PK - News) Wii player, and the "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Call of Duty 4" games. In DVD movies, top sellers included "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," "Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."

But customer satisfaction with online retailers fell slightly from 2006, says ForeSee Results, which measures customer satisfaction. An index that tracks 40 top online retailers scored 74 on a 100-point 19cale, down from 73 a year ago.

ForeSee says this means many e-tailers lost a chance to boost customer loyalty this holiday.
Customer satisfaction is more critical online, since buyers can easily switch to another seller at the click of a mouse, says ForeSee Chief Executive Larry Freed.

Still, Freed calls this year's online shopping season a success.

"In a very tough economy, a holiday season with 20% year-over-year-growth is something to be happy about," he said.

IT Outsourcing

Windows Home Server bug corrupts files

2007-12-29T11:13:00.000-06:00

by Tom Krazit

Given that the point of Windows Home Server is to allow you to store your media files, a bug in the storage process that could result in corrupted files is bound to get attention.

Microsoft has issued a support document for the 13 or so (just kidding) people using Windows Home Server, the company's latest product for those attempting to build the digital home of the future. Apparently there's a flaw in the way Windows Home Server works with certain Microsoft applications, such as Windows Vista Photo Gallery, that could result in corrupted files if you use those applications to save files to the server. A list of the specific applications can be found in the support document.

My colleague Ed Bott at ZDNet.com looked into exactly what would have to happen for the files to go bad, and it sounds like there is a convoluted series of steps that would have to be followed to produce the error. Still, as Ed points out, any bug that deletes data is a very, very serious issue.

The main culprit seems to be if you're putting Windows Home Server under a heavy load, and I doubt many of the people running the software have reached that point yet. I can see a day where a simple, easy-to-use home server will be vital in helping people organize (and back up) their vast collection of digital movies, TV shows, photos, and music--not to mention those precious home movies of the kids opening Baby's First QPhone or whatever becomes the hot-selling gadget of 2017.

But that day is not here yet for an overwhelming majority of people, as we've learned this week from Apple and Wal-Mart. The market for movie downloads--arguably the largest files people would want to store--is far from mature.

IT Outsourcing

AOL to End Support for Netscape Browser

2007-12-29T09:37:00.000-06:00

Once the dominant Web browser, AOL has discontinued development and active support for the Netscape browser.

An historic name in software will effectively pass into history in February as AOL discontinues development and active support for the Netscape browser, according to an official blog.
AOL will keep delivering security patches for the current version of Netscape until Feb. 1, 2008, after which it will no longer provide active support for any version of the software, according to a Friday entry on The Netscape Blog by Tom Drapeau, lead developer for Netscape.com. The Netscape.com Web site will remain as a general-purpose portal.

Netscape was the original mass-market Web browser and helped to popularize the Internet in the mid-1990s, but it has long taken a back seat to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Firefox itself traces its roots back to Netscape software that was made into open source. The Mozilla Foundation was founded in 2003, with support from AOL, and has released successive versions of Firefox while AOL continued to develop Netscape on top of the same platform, Drapeau wrote.

Groups within AOL have tried and failed to revive Netscape Navigator and gain market share against Internet Explorer, according to the blog entry.

"AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be," Drapeau wrote. "Given AOL's current business focus ... we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox," Drapeau wrote.

The Mosaic Netscape browser was posted for downloading in 1994 by Mosaic Communications, which later changed its name to Netscape Communications. That company kicked off the dot-com boom with its hugely successful initial public offering in August 1995 and was acquired by AOL in 1999. But Internet Explorer, introduced in 1995, eventually dominated the browser market. Microsoft's bundling of its browser with Windows operating systems was a key issue in antitrust lawsuits filed against it in 1997.

As of this month, Netscape had only 0.6 percent of the browser market, which was still dominated by Internet Explorer with more than 77 percent, according to Web application and analytics firm Net Applications. Firefox was gaining, however, with market share just over 16 percent.

Users will still be able to download old versions of Netscape from an archive, currently located here, though they will not be supported by AOL, Drapeau wrote.

IT Outsourcing

China to develop next-generation broadband wireless mobile technology in 2008

2007-12-28T10:54:00.000-06:00

BEIJING, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- China would launch a special program to develop the technology for a "next-generation broadband wireless mobile communication network" in 2008, Wang Xudong, the minister of Information Industry, said on Thursday.

The next-generation technology would be in line with developing trends in information technology and would contribute to innovation and Chinese companies' global competitiveness, the minister said.

Additionally, the country would focus on research and development of other key technologies such as those for core electron devices, high-end general chips and ultra-large integrated circuits, he said.

On Wednesday, the State Council (cabinet) approved a plan to develop the next-generation network, which analysts said was related to the third generation (3G) services.

The country is expanding the TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) network tests to prepare for 3G services during the Beijing Olympics next year.

The TD-SCDMA is a homegrown 3G technology standard. The other two types of CDMA technologies are the U.S. standard, CDMA 2000, and the European WCDMA.

There was no timetable available yet for the issuance of 3G licenses, since relevant departments were still considering how the services would operate, but analysts said the homegrown standard was most likely to get the first license.

On the news of imminent 3G service, telecom shares surged, with China Unicom up by as much as 8.28 percent to 12.29 yuan (1.66 U.S. dollars) during Thursday's trading.
China has four major telecom operators -- China Telecom, China Netcom, China Mobile and China Unicom -- and each monopolizes one or two services.

In a recent report, China's top economic planner said that the country should reorganize the four operators to require them to offer "full-range" services. This means major communication businesses such as fixed lines, internet access and mobile communication services would no longer be monopolized by one or two operators.

The report said such a reorganization would create a "relatively fair" market environment and benefit consumers.

IT Outsourcing

Year end: 2007's coolest gadgets

2007-12-26T12:48:00.000-06:00

Digital camera that records video tailored for YouTube, OLED TVs, and NEC's Lui PC round out the list

By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

The end of the year provides us with the perfect excuse to look back at some of the coolest gadgets that have come out of the consumer electronics giants of east Asia in the last year. As you might expect, the continuing convergence of all sorts of products into smaller and more functional devices was a big theme in 2007. Some of the gadgets also reminded us of the importance of services that often go hand-in-hand with hardware and are a big but often forgotten part of the "cool factor" we attach to such products.

Take for example Casio's Exilim EX-S880. Like many other digital still cameras on the market it does a good job of shooting video but Casio innovated by adding in a capture mode that records videos in the format preferred by YouTube. Combined with a desktop application to upload the videos, this means that movies can be online minutes after you've shot them and with nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks.

On the hardware side, there's been plenty of impressive gadgets and we've also witnessed the birth of a completely new product category: OLED (organic light emitting diode) televisions. Several companies have been promising these for years and in the end it was Sony that made it first to market. You've got to see this TV to fully appreciate its coolness! At just 3 millimeters thick, the TV was the star of October's Ceatec show in Japan and leads off our look back at the coolest gadgets of 2007.

Sony OLED TV
Without a doubt the coolest product of the year was Sony's OLED TV. First shown as a prototype at CES in January, the commercial version came along in October and didn't disappoint -- except perhaps on price. The set has an 11-inch OLED panel and is 3mm thick. OLEDs offer several advantages over LCD and PDP technology, including wider viewing angles, faster response time, and better contrast and colors. However, the technology is difficult to manufacture and the OLED material degrades over time. Sony said the XEL-1 has a viewing life of 30,000 hours, which allows a user to watch eight hours of television every day for 10 years. The television went on sale in Japan on Dec. 1 for ¥200,000 (US$1,750) and promptly sold out. It's not only a cool TV set but perhaps the first product for a few years from Sony that really makes you say "wow." After the turmoil of recent years could Sony finally have its mojo back?

Toshiba Dynabook SS RX1

It may not look very special at first glance, but pick up the Dynabook SS RX1 (called the Portege R500 in some markets) and you'll immediately realize why it was one of the coolest laptop PCs we saw all year. This 12.1-inch screen laptop weighs just 768 grams in its lightest configuration -- more than 100 grams lighter than Sony's impressive Vaio G laptop. At the computer's heart lies a 1.06GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor and on some models you'll also find 802.11n Wi-Fi. Toshiba has put a lot of work into smart design so that it's thin and light. The laptop has also shed a few grams thanks to the use of a 64G-byte solid-state disk (SSD) in place of a conventional hard-disk drive. It costs around US$2,000.

Casio YouTube digital still camera
Casio brought up the first digital cameras with a video mode optimized for YouTube: the Exilim EX-S880 and EX-Z77 . Getting a clip onto YouTube is easy: Shoot it, put the camera in the dock, and click a couple of times on the PC uploader application and you're done. The EX-S880 can take 8.1-megapixel images, has a 3X optical zoom and costs about US$300. YouTube mode has subsequently made it into other Casio models. The Casio deal with YouTube gave them exclusivity until the end of the year so you can look for it in devices from other makers in 2008.

Imagine most of the PC innovations you've seen in the last few years thrown together inside a single box and you start to get an idea of what the Lui from NEC is all about. The machine is a PC running Windows Vista that can also act as a home server. It has two digital HDTV tuners, so you can watch one channel while you record another. It has DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) connectivity so that programming -- live or recorded -- can be streamed to other DLNA devices over Ethernet, and it will come with a Blu-ray Disc writer so that TV shows can be copied to disc. Users outside the home can log into the server and access content in the same way Slingbox or Location Free TV works. The PC is due on the Japanese market in the first half of 2008 at a price yet to be announced. NEC is one of Japan's leading PC makers despite not being well known for PCs in all countries.

Hitachi Blu-ray Disc camcorder
The first camcorders based on an 8-centimeter Blu-ray Disc appeared in 2007 from an unlikely vendor: Hitachi. The company launched two models , the DZ-BD70 based solely on disc and the DZ-BD7H, which adds a 30G-byte hard disk drive. A single-sided 8 cm recordable (BD-R) or rewritable (BD-RE) disc can store about an hour of footage shot in full high-definition quality (1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels). The hybrid model can store an additional four hours of high-definition video on its hard-disk drive. The cameras have a 10X optical zoom lens, a 2.7-inch widescreen monitor and a viewfinder. Additionally, the cameras can be used to take still images at up to 4.3 megapixel resolution (2,400 pixels by 1,800 pixels). The DZ-BD70 costs about US$1,299 and the DZ-BD7H about US$1,499.

Nissan Pivo 2
From Nissan at the Tokyo Motor Show came the impressive Pivo 2 concept car. Fully electric, it has a cab that can rotate through 360 degrees and can also twist its wheels around so that it can move into parking spaces sideways. Equally impressive is Pivo-kun, the robot embedded in the car's dash. Since Pivo-kun is equipped with voice recognition, the driver can ask questions like the location of the nearest parking lot. Its facial recognition has an important safety aspect: It monitors the driver's face for signs of tiredness and suggests a rest if one is needed. More than that, it provides virtual companionship to the driver and that should mean safer roads -- Nissan research shows happy drivers have fewer accidents. Look for cars like Pivo 2 on city streets around 2015.

NTT DoCoMo Raku-Raku Phone Basic
We love NTT DoCoMo's Raku-Raku Phone Basic for its lack of gadgets. Developed by Fujitsu, the handset is designed to appeal to users for whom the dizzying array of functions, features and buttons on current phones are just too much. The buttons and on-screen text are bigger than conventional cell phones and there are three dedicated speed-dial buttons. The phone includes a neat-sounding "slow voice" function that can slow the speed of the other person's voice without slowing down the conversation (it slows the speech and shortens the gaps between words to compensate) and "clear voice" which automatically adjusts clarity and the ringtone volume to match the surroundings -- now why don't all phones have that?

Samsung TPEG Cell Phone
Samsung Electronics developed a cell phone capable of receiving real-time traffic information using a new system called TPEG. The SPH-B5800 phone can receive and decode the information broadcast using the Transport Protocol Experts Group format, which was developed in Europe in the late 1990s and is already in use in South Korea. The phone updates travel information every five minutes and can also receive TV via the country's Satellite DMB system. It went on sale in South Korea at the beginning of the year for around US$600 and includes a 2-megapixel camera, 330,000-word dictionary and 2-inch color TFT (thin-film transistor) LCD (liquid crystal display) screen. It measures 96 millimeters by 46 mm by 16 mm and weighs 96 grams.

World's smallest high-def camcorder

Panasonic claimed headlines with what it said was the world's smallest camcorder. The HDC-SD7 measures 52 millimeters by 110 mm by 87 mm and weighs 350 grams. One of the secrets to its small size is the use of an SD memory card as a recording medium. The electronics and socket needed for a flash card take up much less space than a DVD or hard-disk drive. It packs three CCD (charge coupled device) sensors behind a 10X zoom lens and has a 2.7-inch widescreen LCD (liquid crystal display) monitor. It can record full HD (1,920 pixel by 1,080 pixel) MPEG4 AVC/H.264 video at a range of quality levels. At the average 9M bps (bit per second) rate, a 4G-byte SD card can hold up to 60 minutes of video. It costs about ¥140,000 (US$1,175) in Japan.

Sony Video Walkman with TV
The year finally brought from Sony a Walkman with video support and then later in the year an upgraded model with mobile digital TV viewing and recording. It's an important addition because Apple's iPod, which is the biggest competitor for the devices, doesn't offer TV reception. The "OneSeg" TV system has proved very popular in Japan and can now be found in many portable gadgets including cell phones, laptop PCs, car navigation systems and even electronic dictionaries. The only difference between the three new Walkman devices with TV is their memory capacity. The NW-A916 has 4G bytes of memory, the NW-A918 has 8G bytes and the NW-A919 16G bytes. Compared to the last players the screen size has been increased to 2.4-inches from 2-inches. They went on sale in November and the NW-A916 costs about ¥30,000 (US$260), the NW-A918 ¥35,000 and the NW-A919 ¥45,000.

IT Outsourcing

IT leaders share green-tech predictions for 2008

2007-12-23T12:14:00.000-06:00

Green tech has flourished in the past year as vendors and customers alike have invested plenty of resources in making their products and practices more energy efficient, less wasteful, and eco-friendlier.
But is this sustainable-tech trend a mere green flash in the pan? Hardly. The flourishing world of green technology is driven by true need. Companies are running out of space and power in their datacenters, not to mention struggling with high energy costs. Business leaders, politicians, and consumers alike are becoming increasingly concerned about their impact on the environment.
Still, one wonders what crop of green-tech changes the year 2008 will yield. What follows are some abridged predictions from some IT experts out there who've been immersed in sustainable tech this past year and have a keen eye on the future. I've also added some predictions of my own. Predictions are listed in alphabetical order by last name; no favoritism here.

Bogomil Balkansky, senior director, product marketing, VMwareWebsite: VMware Energy Savings pageWith constantly increasing computing demands and rising energy costs, energy conservation in the datacenter will continue to be a very hot topic (no pun intended) in 2008. Customers will continue to right-size and optimize their IT infrastructure driven by the economic and social responsibility imperative to save energy, but we also expect to see a new trend: datacenter energy efficiency incentives or regulations from different levels of government around the world. IT vendors will respond to this groundswell by ramping up investments in technologies that will help reduce the carbon footprint of the datacenter.

Drew Clark, co-founder and director of strategy, IBM Venture Capital Group Website: Venture Capital Group1. In 2008, global interest in green tech will continue to grow as competitive players emerge in unexpected geographies outside the United States. Beyond investment in alternative energy, there will be a great demand for technologies that allow energy consumers (businesses and homeowners) and producers (utilities) to monitor, manage, distribute and use energy more efficiently.

2. The greening of the datacenter will continue to be a top priority for corporations, as the cost of simply powering the center begins to exceed the cost of the servers and devices in the datacenter. Key drivers to help reduce the overall carbon footprint and run more efficient centers will include intelligent sensors and advanced analytics to monitor and improve equipment utilization, reducing downtime and providing comprehensive operational visibility.

Tom Clark, chair, SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) Green Storage Initiative and principal engineer, BrocadeWebsite: Brocade greening the datacenter1. In 2008 there will be an increasing demand for consultants and vendors to help customers re-architect their data processing and storage operations to minimize the power footprint and maximize productivity by doing more with less. Server virtualization is an obvious candidate for achieving more productivity on less hardware, and storage virtualization will also help achieve maximum utilization of assets without constantly deploying more energy consuming platforms to accommodate storage growth.

2. Just as energy costs are becoming a major portion of datacenter operational expense, energy management will start to become an integral part of data management in 2008. As a datacenter administrator, I would want to monitor not only my processing efficiency and storage utilization but also the energy consumption and heat dissipation of all the major components of my IT infrastructure. We already have the framework for this in the SNIA Storage Management Initiative (SMI-S) for managing heterogeneous environments. Tapping into energy statistics provided by disparate hardware platforms (servers, SAN fabrics, storage, tape, etc.) could give administrators the ability to monitor the overall power efficiency of their operations. These are the specific types of metrics that feed into broader datacenter energy metrics a la The Green Grid.

3. The consciousness-raising around green datacenters has been accompanied by some cynicism in the trade press ("Vendors are just trying to sell more stuff"), but the subjective motivations of any particular vendor are really irrelevant. This is not a solution seeking a problem; this is, in fact, a very real problem that will continue to worsen in 2008 and every year beyond. I think we'll see some very dramatic and perhaps unfortunate initial case studies of large datacenters that failed to react quickly enough to what is actually a pending crisis of global proportions.

Lewis Curtis, infrastructure architect and advisor, MicrosoftBlog: Thoughts from the raised floor Companies who only rely on performance per watt (PPW) justifications for capital expenditures will see their power consumption increase. The logic goes like this: Most vendors are still parading the PPW marketing plan as their green answer today. Why doesn't this work in the real world? Because it never factors in its impact on the velocity of demand as well as the impact of the environment which must now support it. As technology capability increases, the velocity of people's demands of that technology will increase more. Therefore the demand for more servers, storage and network capability will increase. This, in turn, will increase the demand for power. Server consolidation through virtualization and blade systems will be more pervasive in 2008. However, I predict that those who rely on the PPW model alone will see their real power bills increase in the datacenters.

Dave Douglas, VP of eco responsibility, Sun MicrosystemsBlog: DD's Eco Notes1. This year, we went from awareness to action on the environment. The term "green-washing" became more popular too, as some companies were accused of putting hype before substance. With a public and media that are far more sophisticated and discerning about all things green, the demand for authentic action will increase, and the environment will benefit. The focus in 2008 will be about what we can actually do to reduce our impact -- or better yet, what we've already done.
2. Every day we're more and more reliant on a growing web of Internet-based social and business services. Datacenters that support these services are growing at high rates, but the power grid isn't keeping up. The probability is rising that 2008 will bring a high-impact power outage that will affect consumers in new and totally unexpected ways.

Rudy Kraus, CEO, Validus DC SystemsWebsite: ValidusOne answer to the growing IT energy crisis may come from an unlikely source in 2008, but one that has its roots in Thomas Edison's work from 100 years ago: direct current (DC) power. When DC is properly harnessed with today's technology, it can provide energy to data centers with 10 to 20 percent more efficiency, according to Lawrence Berkeley Lab Research. Against the snowballing IT energy crisis, those types of figures could benefit IT processes, CSR initiatives, and most importantly, the bottom line.

Paul Marcoux, vice president of engineering, Cisco development operations, and "green guru," CiscoWebsite: Cisco corporate social responsibility page1. Heading into 2008, companies will continue to emphasize their social responsibility behavior, creating an environment for industry leaders to combine the power of innovation with collaboration to create the most sustainable model for addressing global climate change. As a result, across business and IT functions, we'll begin to see industry standards and green languages emerge in 2008 to foster greater communication and collaboration.
2. If you can't measure it; you can't manage it. In 2008, we'll see a slew of technologies developed to offer real-time monitoring intelligence to measure energy consumption for products. By 2009, there will be few products available that cannot be monitored for energy consumption.

Christina Page, director of climate and energy, YahooWebsite: Yahoo GreenYahoo! expects to see increased activity in the voluntary carbon credit market, especially in the United States with the launch of the Green Exchange in Q1 2008. As more and more organizations choose to offset their carbon footprints, companies will be increasingly motivated to think seriously about their energy consumption, and take strong action to become more efficient across operations.

Ted Samson, senior analyst and Sustainable IT blogger, InfoWorldBlog: Sustainable IT1. Expect more organizations to follow the lead of companies such as HP and Wal-Mart in scrutinizing the efficiency, wastefulness, and eco-friendly practices of vendors in their supply chain.
2. Companies will continue to push the envelope in developing greener datacenters. They won't stop at simply employing energy-efficient hardware and cooling systems and embracing general datacenter-design best practices. They'll follow in the footsteps of companies such as Digital Realty in developing buildings that adhere to LEED. Like Google and Fujitsu, they'll install alternative-energy systems including solar panels and others. They'll raise the bar in terms of datacenter design, as did Sun with its innovative modular, forward-looking approach. They'll include eco-friendly features that have little or nothing to do with energy efficiency or cutting costs, as we saw with Unisys's datacenter that includes the conversion of 19 acres adjacent to the facility to natural prairie containing wild grasses and flowers.
3. Expect more companies to locate datacenter operations in countries outside the U.S. where energy costs are lower -- and perhaps environmental standards aren't as stringent.
4. The "energy efficiency credit" or white tag exchange will gain some momentum, though likely won't really take off until 2009 when there are stricter mandates for companies to reduce the carbon emissions.

Dave Stangis, director of corporate responsibility, Intel Blog: CSR@Intel 1. Green will move from a specific product offering to a brand offering -- and be rewarded by Wall Street.2. Consumer electronic brands will look to their suppliers to help position their products as "more green."3. Technology solutions will become center stage in solving the climate-change challenge.4. Technology will be the key in driving down the costs of alternative energy.5. Green building design will finally transition from novelty to expectation.

Pat Tiernan, VP of social and environmental responsibility, HPWebsite: HP's environmental sustainability pageGreen IT will have a more significant focus as we move into 2008. This includes designing products with the entire lifecycle in mind. In addition to energy use, companies will be more vigilant in implementing plans for disposal, reuse, and recycling. Green strategy will also become an argument for the optimization of IT resources, as well as for saving money, with more energy-efficient products.

Steve Vassallo, principal, Cleantech practice at Foundation Capital Website: Cleantech site1. Water becomes more critical than oil. Major water shortages will begin to raise awareness and investment dollars into the sector. 2. We'll see a major shift in the awareness (and communication) of companies regarding their carbon footprints and energy consumption. Fortune 100 companies will bring discussion of carbon footprints into the mainstream business conversation.

Larry Vertal, senior strategist for AMD Green, AMD Website: AMD greenEPA research shows that with relatively minor efforts by datacenter managers, including turning on already available power management features, enabling higher rates of resource consolidation, shutting off unused servers and improving infrastructure operations, we could save 20 percent of datacenter power. That's equal to cutting down the growth of our new power resources demanded by datacenters by half by 2010, or five 1,000MW power plants. So, while performance proudly held the top spot as the chief concern of all IT managers for a long time, it now needs to make room for performance-per-watt. Look for 2008 to be the year where the rubber meets the road in green computing, and energy efficiency takes over as the No. 1 priority for the IT manager.

Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data SystemsBlog: Hu Yoshida's blog1. The green-tech movement will drive a growing awareness that the storage of data has become highly inefficient, with low utilization, over-allocation, stranded storage, too many redundant copies, low access speeds, inefficient search, and disruptive movement and migration. Buying faster storage processors with larger capacity disks on the same 20-year-old architectures will not solve the problem of inefficient use of storage. New storage architectures will be required to meet this demand for greater efficiency.

. Control unit virtualization of storage with thin provisioning will be recognized as the only approach to storage virtualization that can increase utilization, eliminate allocated but unused space, recover stranded storage, reduce redundant copies, increase access speed, and provide nondisruptive movement of data for multi-tiering, migration, and replication. 3. Data more than 60 days old on production systems will be considered toxic waste. Structured data such as databases and semi-structured data such as e-mail and document management data are increasing dramatically as they are required to hold more data, longer, for compliance reasons. This will call for new types of archiving systems that can scale to petabytes and provide the ability to search for content across different modalities of data.

Final thoughtsIn conclusion, 2008 is shaping up to be an eventful year for green IT, to say the least. Companies have plenty of work ahead of them to stay ahead of the looming power crisis as well as governmental mandates to reducing their carbon footprints. Further, vendors' practices and products will garner even closer scrutiny from the press and the public. The good news is, plenty of smart people out there -- technologists, analysts, business leaders, and politicians -- have the challenges in their sights and are working as hard and as quickly as they can to meet those challenges head on.

What are your predictions for green tech in 2008?

IT Outsourcing

Google's DoubleClick deal brings greater focus on privacy

2007-12-23T12:10:00.000-06:00

In the wake of its decision to approve the Google-Doubleclick purchase, the FTC has released a set of privacy principles for online behavioral advertising

Nearly lost in the news about the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) approval on Thursday of Google's acquisition of DoubleClick was another action by the agency: The publication of a proposed set of privacy principles governing online behavioral advertising.

The release of the privacy principles is an important and welcome step, said Peter Swire, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and a law professor at Ohio State University. Although some privacy groups blasted the FTC for approving Google's DoubleClick deal, the acquisition has helped place focus on the entire online advertising industry's privacy practices, Swire said.

"It's good that the FTC is shining a spotlight on this industry," Swire said Friday. "Online advertising is in its second boom. They're trying lots of new techniques; some of those techniques have privacy problems."

The FTC hosted a workshop on behavioral advertising and privacy in November. The agency's proposed privacy principles, a series of "self-regulatory" steps the FTC is recommending for online advertisers, come in part from that workshop.

Among the FTC's proposals:

-- Web sites that collect information for behavioral advertising should provide a "clear, consumer-friendly, and prominent statement" about the reason for collecting that data. Consumers should be able to choose whether they will allow that information to be collected.-- Any company that collects or stores consumer data for behavioral advertising should provide "reasonable security" and should keep data only as long as necessary to fulfill legitimate business or law enforcement needs.-- Companies should only collect sensitive data for behavioral advertising if they obtain express consent from the consumer.The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a group focused on online privacy and civil liberties, also praised the FTC for releasing its privacy principles. The principles are a "clear sign that the commission does not believe that the industry's current self-regulation framework is sufficient to protect consumers today,” CDT Deputy Director Ari Schwartz said in a statement.

CDT also called on Google to "step up and make a clear, public statement about its plans for proactively protecting consumer privacy." Consumer privacy in the behavioral advertising market remains an industrywide concern that requires the focus of consumers, policymakers and companies, CDT said.

The release of the privacy principles should send a signal to online advertisers, said Leslie Harris, CDT's president. "In releasing these principles, the FTC hasn't closed the door to other options," she said in a statement. "Self-regulation is part of the solution for protecting consumer privacy, but clearly self-regulation hasn't lived up to its promises.... We'll need a rigorous mix of self-regulation backed by regulatory enforcement."

Other privacy groups criticized the FTC for its ruling allowing Google's acquisition of DoubleClick to move forward. The agency had reason to act on privacy concerns raised by the merger and failed, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), one of three privacy groups that asked the FTC to block the merger or impose privacy conditions.
The FTC could have established "the necessary safeguards for personal data and competition that could have allowed a global [privacy] framework to emerge," Rotenberg said. "[The FTC's] sole purpose is to protect the public interest. It failed to do so ... in a case that will have far-reaching implications for the Internet economy and the privacy rights of American consumers."
Joseph Turow, a communication professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed. The European Union is still investigating the Google-DoubleClick deal, with a decision not due until April, and it is likely that regulators there will take a harder look at privacy issues, he said.

IT Outsourcing

IT security in '08 not looking too great

2007-12-23T11:54:00.000-06:00

I've been reading and writing about Web 2.0 malware attacks for some time -- the variety leveled at Web 2.0 content specifically, not so much at AJAX or other new programming techniques -- but I finally felt the crunch myself this morning.

Upon opening my in-box I found roughly 100 new e-mails asking for me to approve comments on this here Zero Day blog, and sadly, based on the fact that I only average a handful of responses from you my faithful readers each week, I knew that something strange was afoot.

Turns out that some attacker's automated malware threat finally found its way to this blog and attempted to post bunch of links to (what I'd suspect are) malware sites. Both the names of the e-mail addresses and the links themselves were clearly generated by machine, not hand, as they were constituted of strings of random letters and numbers.

If only my writing could garner as much interest on its own!

Anyway, the personal experience just backs up what we've been telling you here throughout 2007, that the attacks are only getting more widespread and sophisticated -- really nothing new in that sense since I started covering security roughly 4 years ago -- but clearly the stakes continue to rise.

And, according to Paul Henry, a longtime industry expert who currently wears the title of "vice president of technology evangelism" at security gateway maker Secure Computing, 2008 is shaping up to be even worse than any year in the past.

(Consider that according to McAfee, 2007 was by far the worst year ever for malware exploits, as the company's Avert Labs tracked an estimated 357,000 individual pieces of malware, a 60 percent increase over 2006. FTR, McAfee is predicting that we will see over 550,000 samples during 2008.)

There are several issues feeding into this trend of rising attack professionalism, sophistication and ubiquity that Henry outlined on a recent call where we discussed the fate of '08.
Among the most striking observations he made was that many security companies aren't helping the problem, but rather adding to it.

TippingPoint, for one, and many others, he said, are intensifying the issues created by exploit bidding sites like WabiSabiLabi -- where anyone willing to pay more than the next guy can buy newly-discovered and previously unreported software vulnerabilities.

These companies are doing so by purchasing unique exploits for themselves and creating "vaccines" to protect their customers, rather than reporting the flaws to the affected applications makers or detailing them in any public forums.

Now, most security vendors will tell you they do report the vulnerabilities to the apps makers, but Paul said that increasingly many are sitting on the details longer to give themselves some sort of perceived advantage.

Being the first to report and protect against a new attack isn't good enough anymore it would seem, and he claims that more companies than ever are sitting on their vulnerability information.

That includes Symantec and McAfee, he said, but those companies are being less flagrant and merely trying to compete with everyone else who is doing it.

Another alarming issue related to this trend is that in their vaccines, Henry contends that the vendors are not hiding the details of the new exploits very well. Thus, more hackers are getting their hands on these unprotected vulnerabilities by taking the information directly from these AV providers. Yipes.

"It's like the old protection schemes in the Fifties in New York where the shady insurance guy would show you a picture of your business on fire and ask you if you wanted to buy fire insurance," said Henry. "It borders on extortion, and I've been very surprised by the number of security companies doing it; people seem to be jumping on the bandwagon because they don't want to be at some sort of competitive disadvantage."

Henry contends that the open window on a lot of these threats is as long as 18 months.
Along with more automated Web 2.0 threats such as the one attacking the comments section of this here blog, the expert believes that we'll also see more advanced social engineering threats such as the CyberLover attack that I detailed here one week ago -- which poses as an available guy on singles site forums and tries to lure women into handing over their personal details or trick them into visiting malware sites.

He believes that we'll see more targeted attacks on businesses that attempt to use this level of sophisticated, human-like automation to trick people into handing over data about their companies or their network log-in credentials. Sweet.

Some of these programs, including CyberLover, appear to be emanating from our old friends the RBN, who Henry said (echoing many other experts) have moved their ops largely to China, possibly using an ISP/hosting company known as HostFresh, located in Hong Kong.
Among the other types of attacks he believes will come from this group and other professional-grade exploit providers in '08 are more cross site request forgery (CSRF) threats, which try to capture Web session and browser cookie data and use it to break into Webmail accounts and the like.

Recent samples the expert has observed included CSRF attack for sale that advertised the ability to get into Webmail domains controlled by all big players, including Google, Yahoo, MSN and Lycos.

Some of the CSRF threats involve "cookie sniffers" which grab available log-in information from people's browsers and send it back to a central database controlled by attackers. "Cookie replayers" are actively sitting on people's machines waiting to grab their credentials when they log into their accounts.

FTR, Henry thinks that political pressure in Russia may have led RBN to move its operations to China. If that's the case, it's good to hear that the Russian law enforcement types are finally turning up the heat.

At the same time that the malware world is getting so much more professional -- and those finding the vulnerabilities and building the threats are getting better at productizing their stuff and further separating themselves from those actually carrying out the attacks -- Henry points to overconfidence on the part of security professionals as another disturbing trend.
As highlighted in the E-Crime report put out by InfoWorld sister pub CSO Magazine, along with CERT and other government experts in September, many IT and security professionals seem to think that the defenses they already have in place, including AV, firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), are sufficient to stop most threats.
But, in fact, as according to the report and Henry, real experts don't think that's the case.
Combined with these other trends, 2008 could be pretty nasty.
"As the hacking community gets more professional and we see this overconfidence in security teams, it leads me to believe that 2008 could be pretty interesting," Henry said. "We're really in a rough spot, the most common defense methodology is truly defensive today, and hackers have proven that this is of no consequence to them."

On the flip side, if more people start considering a move to positive security models, such as the white listing techniques described in my recent story on Symantec researcher Carey Nachenberg, Henry thinks we may seem some progress in the not-too distant future.
"If you look at what people are using today, you can literally see where they're falling short; they're using simple packet filters for the firewall, and nothing to protect against Web 2.0 attacks, where the big push by the attackers is moving," he said. "The entire negative security model where traffic flows freely and you try to use signatures to block threats has failed, and hackers are blowing right through it using obfuscation. But, I think that a positive security model can work someday, where you configure your firewall to accept only the good traffic you define."
The only big question? How many more years it will be until the industry can make such an approach practical to emply on a widespread basis.

IBM buys in-memory database company Solid

2007-12-23T11:46:00.000-06:00

IBM's acquisition may be a setback for MySQL, which has been a close partner of high-performance database maker Solid Information Technology

IBM is buying Solid Information Technology, a maker of high-performance databases and a close partner of IBM rival MySQL.

Solid makes an embedded database with in-memory database engine, which means it can store and retrieve data from main memory, giving faster performance than traditional disk-based systems.

That makes it popular for applications that require very fast processing times, such as routing calls in a phone network or trading stocks. Solid's customers include Cisco Systems, Siemens, TeliaSonera, and Nokia, according to its Web site.

IBM agreed to acquire the company for an undisclosed sum and expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2008, IBM announced Friday. It said the deal will enhance its database line-up by adding real-time data access capabilities. IBM rival Oracle acquired an in-memory database two years ago, from TimesTen.

The IBM acquisition may be seen as a setback for MySQL, since it marks the loss of independence of another company that makes a high-performance transaction engine for MySQL's database.

Two years ago Oracle bought Innobase, which made the most popular MySQL transaction engine. Oracle continues to license InnoDB to MySQL, but the acquisition prompted MySQL to look for alternatives.

One of those was Solid, which joined MySQL's storage engine certification program and released an open-source version of its database engine for MySQL.

Arvind Krishna, IBM's vice president of data servers, would not confirm whether the company would continue to develop MySQL. "It's a little premature to say anything about that," he said. "Up front, I don't have a particular bias.... The other side of it could be that both sides take a look at it and say it doesn't make sense."

However, MySQL is also developing its own transaction engine, so in the long term, it will be less dependant on partners. Called Falcon, the engine is due to ship with MySQL 6.0, which is due for wide release late next year.

IBM has already had a partner agreement with Solid. Purchasing it outright gives IBM a stronger play against Oracle TimesTen, according to Krishna. "That's an area we believe we can now compete in and win," he said.

Krishna said existing Solid customers have nothing to fear and "should feel really reassured they have the deeper pockets and reach of IBM."

The executive said the deal should take between three and 12 weeks to close, adding, "I would expect it to be on the lower end of that range."

The acquisition of Solid is IBM's twelfth acquisition this year, it said.