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BetaNews.Com (7 non lus)

Comcast goes WiMAX

Publié: juin 29, 2009, 11:14pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Last year, Sprint and Clearwire consolidated their WiMAX businesses in the Clear 4G wireless network, which was partly funded by investments from Google, Intel, and cable companies Time Warner, Bright House Networks, and Comcast.
Today, Comcast officially became the first Clear reseller among the investors, launching its "High Speed 2go" WiMAX subscription service in Portland, Oregon. The cable company announced that there will be further rollouts in Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia later this year as well. The plan is similar to the Sprint 4G service the carrier announced last March.
There will be no digital voice component to any Comcast High-Speed 2go packages, but there with be either 4G or 4G/3G dual-mode data packages which work on Clearwire's WiMAX and Sprint's 3G networks. The 4G-only plan is known as "Comcast High Speed 2go Metro," and the dual-mode plan is known as "Comcast High Speed 2go Nationwide."
Comcast's 4G access can be bundled with wired home access, starting at $49.99 per month for a 12 Mbps home connection and 4 Mbps WiMAX connection.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?

Publié: juin 29, 2009, 10:03pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

This is the week that the Mozilla organization is expected to unveil what may very well be the most significant half-point release in its history: the 3.5 edition of the Firefox browser. While Betanews tests confirm the new version literally blows away its own predecessor in terms of speed, operating two-and-one-half times faster in page rendering and functionality on average, your own eyes will tell you it's a much faster browser.
And those same eyes will tell you that Google Chrome is already a much faster browser, by virtue of a supremely fast V8 JavaScript engine that its developers have been refining since version 1 made its debut last year. In recent Betanews tests, the Chrome 3 beta has overtaken the stable release of Apple Safari 4 as the fastest Web browser publicly available, posting a performance index score that's 83% faster than Firefox 3.5 RC3 on Windows XP SP3. So while Firefox has made extremely significant gains, it may take open source developers until version 4.0 for it to catch up with Chrome in the speed department.
Firefox's developers tell Betanews that version 3.5 makes up for that gap in the functionality department, by providing tools and resources that Chrome currently cannot match. We decided to test that theory for ourselves, with a new series of tests that pits the two most viable choices for alternatives to Microsoft Internet Explorer against one another in everyday, real-world tasks.
Chrome users have already come across that browser's "Incognito" function, which brings up a window exclusively for pages whose history and cookies will not be tracked permanently. Firefox 3.5 formally inaugurates a similar feature with "Private Browsing." Yes, we know there's stuff that folks don't want their bosses knowing they're looking at. But the other typical use-case scenario involves folks who are shopping for gifts for other members of the household, and they want those gifts to be secret.
There are certain things that do need to be remembered during an online shopping experience. You find things, you compare them, you make notes, you do research. So our question was, is each browser capable of remembering what it needs to remember and forgetting what it needs to forget?
Our first simple test begins with the "shopping cart" (if either browser fails this test, it shouldn't be shipped). Most shopping sites can maintain a running shopping cart list for their customers, even when those customers aren't logged in. In order for sites to do this, it needs to maintain some kind of session state, which requires a cookie. So this does mean that Incognito / Private browsing maintains cookies, although they should go away after the session ends. At least that sounds about right.
To make sure this is indeed the way these features behave, I started shopping carts on the Web site of one of my favorite tech gear suppliers, Xoxide.com. Here, as is the case with most sites, you don't have to log on as a returning customer to launch a shopping cart. Xoxide is having a Fourth of July sale, and I like to check out the deals in case I want to build yet another computer. My wife might not appreciate yet another glowing receptacle of whirring electronic mayhem adorning our already wire-strewn household, so I begin by shopping incognito with Chrome 3.
Chrome lets you run a standard window alongside the Incognito window, and marks the latter with a little "cloaked spy" icon in the upper left corner. As I start building a little near-term history, my first fear is that it will have some impact on the non-private history outside the Incognito window. So in the main Chrome window, I pull up Xoxide, and I discover that window does not perceive the same shopping cart. That's good.
Next, is there any chance that the history buffer in the main window would "remember" the URL for checking the shopping cart from the Incognito window? With Xoxide, as it turns out, there's one URL for checking the active shopping cart -- and having already done that in the main Chrome window, I've messed up my test. So I have to rig a similar test using a different retailer: Newegg.com. With Newegg, the shopping cart's URL begins with a different prefix, secure.newegg.com. When I begin typing "secure" in the main window's address bar, it does not offer to complete my URL with the shopping cart name from the other window. More good news.
Firefox 3.5's Private Browsing mode works a bit differently: You can't have both private and non-private windows open simultaneously. You have to exit Private Browsing mode (which is marked with the phrase "Private Browsing" in the title bar) to return to standard mode. With Private Firefox, I started a fresh Xoxide shopping cart and chose something new. Then to check whether I left any trail, I exited Private mode and checked Xoxide in the main window. Shopping cart is empty, and there's no trail of it in the history buffer of the "Awesome Bar," which is what I expect.
Next, I return to Private mode. Here is where the "experience" changes: When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, that is when you erase your trail. Your shopping cart ceases to exist at that point, which truly means Firefox works as advertised.
Next: The trail unravels…
When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, you cannot pick up the trail again from where you left off -- anything your browser remembered up to that point, has vanished.
Does the Incognito Window in Chrome work the same way? Surprisingly, no -- and this is where one starts evaluating the browser makers' design decisions. If you exit the Incognito Window ("Nothing, honey, wasn't doing anything…just checking statistics")re-enter it again, and then re-enter the page you were on, you'll find your shopping cart is intact, right where you left it. So exiting that window did not erase your trail.
But suppose that's what you want -- suppose you want to be able to hide the Incognito window on demand without destroying your shopping, should prying eyes happen to walk by. That actually makes this feature somewhat handy -- for the time being, Chrome is remembering something you want it to forget later.
At least, isn't that what you expect…for Chrome to forget it later? What happens when you exit Chrome altogether…does it forget your shopping cart then? No. Start up Chrome again, and your shopping cart is alive and well. And that could be a problem. This suggests that for any one Windows user account, there is a general track and an incognito track. When you exit Windows altogether, and restart Windows and Chrome, that's when you find out your shopping cart and history have been wiped clean. So the session key Chrome generates for Incognito is apparently only good for the current Windows session, and that's fine. But it still suggests that some session data is being maintained somehow while you're in Incognito mode, and that may not be what you expect.
Sometimes the best software behavior you can have is the kind you expect, regardless of whether it's the most convenient. Firefox erasing your tracks the moment you exit Private Browsing may not always be convenient -- you're covering your tracks, but also destroying anything you've accomplished in the interim. But Firefox says that's what it does, and that's what it does.
When Chrome's Incognito Mode first premiered, there was some concern from users who discovered that even though they used Incognito to log onto Google's services, Google's own Web history remembered their logins. But frankly, that's what users should have expected: You can't tell a server to which you've just logged in to not remember you just because you've opted not to remember it. That may cause an inconvenience for someone who uses Google tools to remember his history, but if he reasons things out in his mind, it's an inconvenience that can be expected and anticipated, and perhaps therefore avoided.
Google suggests that users who really do want their tracks dis-remembered immediately, use the Ctrl+Shift+Delete method (actually pioneered by Firefox) to selectively remove a day's worth of browsing history. Well, if that's the solution to the privacy problem to begin with, then remind me again why we even need Incognito mode?
Firefox's Private Browsing is plain, it's less flexible, and it's actually a little dull. But it does what it says it does and behaves the way one should reasonably expect. That's why I'm judging the victor in Round 1 of this duel to be Firefox 3.5. If Chrome had given me even so much as a warning about not clearing my history yet, or an option to either retain my Incognito history for the duration of the Windows session or not, then I would have scored this one for Chrome.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Cable DVRs are legal: Supreme Court denies appeal of Cablevision decision

Publié: juin 29, 2009, 5:55pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The last possible effort by movie studios such as 20th Century Fox and cable television producers, including CNN and Cartoon Network, to forestall cable service providers such as Cablevision from providing their customers with DVRs with full commercial-skipping control, was silently shot down this morning in the final session of this year's US Supreme Court term. As a result, last year's ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stating that Cablevision's DVR service did not violate copyright law, stands.
That August 2008 ruling had overturned an earlier District Court ruling in March that had been a victory for the studios. Their argument was that when a cable service provider lets its customers record and play back shows at the headend -- using the provider's own storage rather than a local DVR -- that constituted a retransmission, which was contrary to the terms of service.
But Appeals Court Judge John M. Walker took a hard look at the technology behind Cablevision's RS-DVR service, and came to the conclusion that the District Court judge was in error: Since Cablevision's servers never stored programs or movies in a form that could themselves be copied and played like programs or movies, they weren't copies in the strictest sense. In other words, they could only be replayed in the context of each customer's DVR service.
Yet even if they were copies -- even without having determined that Cablevision buffered programming in a manner specific to the customer's own needs and no one else's -- the motivation for violating copyright law wasn't there, Judge Walker reasoned. In his ruling at the time, Walker cited earlier case law -- especially the Supreme Court's decision that made the use of VCRs legal -- to ascertain whether the creation or use of RS-DVR constituted volitional conduct on the part of Cablevision, with the intention of violating copyright.
"There are only two instances of volitional conduct in this case: Cablevision's conduct in designing, housing, and maintaining a system that exists only to produce a copy, and a customer's conduct in ordering that system to produce a copy of a specific program," Judge Walker wrote last August. "In the case of a VCR, it seems clear -- and we know of no case holding otherwise -- that the operator of the VCR, the person who actually presses the button to make the recording, supplies the necessary element of volition, not the person who manufactures, maintains, or, if distinct from the operator, owns the machine. We do not believe that an RS-DVR customer is sufficiently distinguishable from a VCR user to impose liability as a direct infringer on a different party for copies that are made automatically upon that customer's command."
CNN led the other plaintiffs in the case in filing a petition for a writ of certiorari, which would have been the high court's way of dismissing the appeals court ruling with due haste. That petition was denied this morning, with only the notice that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito -- who may have had legal experience with similar matters earlier in their careers -- did not participate in the denial process.
Today's dismissal could result in a dramatic new legal precedent, by effectively sealing into US law the notion that a copy of a digital work must be whole, or in Judge Walker's terms, "embodied" in the medium that stores it. If it's sliced in pieces and being moved around in buffers all around the Internet, it may not actually be a copy. A clever attorney may wish to conclude from this the notion that a stream does not constitute a copy, and therefore any reproduction made from that stream can only be attributed to the volition, if you will, of the person who ordered the stream.
Such an argument may be used in the future to propose that a streaming Internet broadcaster, for instance, may not be responsible for reproduction royalties, if it is not truly responsible for the reproduction. There's several viable counter-arguments to this, which could conceivably win the day if that argument were ever tried, but don't think that attorneys are blind to this new opportunity...or have been blind since last August.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
PSP Phone: A logical next step for Sony?

Publié: juin 29, 2009, 5:45pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The two-year old "PSP Phone" rumor has been resurrected yet again, this time because of a weekend article in respected Japanese business journal Nikkei Shimbun. The article says Sony now has plans to set up a PSP Phone development team in July which will be comprised of Sony Ericsson and SCE workers.
Rumors of a PlayStation Portable-branded Sony Ericsson device began when a 2007 patent application for a gaming phone was filed by the joint venture. The device in the patent is designed with a 90-degree pivoting screen not unlike the LG VX9400, and d-pad style buttons rather than the traditional numeric keypad. Earlier this year, a Christmas 2009 launch date for the device was rumored as well.
Sony put a scotch on these rumors first by explaining that it does not attach the PlayStation brand to anything that could potentially compromise its value; and second by announcing the PSP Go!, an updated PSP with more phone-like proportions. The device bears a striking resemblance to the Mylo, Sony's less-than-successful Wi-Fi communications and entertainment device.
A gaming phone would address the Apple iPhone's twofold encroachment into Sony's market share. As a gaming device, the iPhone has been enjoying increased attention from game studios, while the PSP reportedly has been having difficulties keeping developers interested. As a smartphone, the iPhone and its kindred have crept up in market share as Sony Ericsson's devices, which mostly focus on a single feature such as the camera, have retreated in popularity.
Potentially setting the stage for a PSP-branded phone, Sony Ericsson recently unveiled Entertainment Unlimited, a strategy which bridges Sony Pictures, Sony Music, and Sony Computer Entertainment with the mobile phone division. Under this strategy, Sony Ericsson premiered Saito and Aino; two phones which focus more heavily on gaming and entertainment. Saito is the first Sony Ericsson device to include more sophisticated "nHD" gaming, and Aino can connect to the PS3 via Remote Play and access the game console's content.
If the PSP Go is Sony's attempt to compete with the iPod Touch, as some analysts believe, modifying the device to compete with the iPhone would be a logical next step.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Myth-busted, or, Would AT&T have forgiven Savage's bill if he wasn't a TV star?

Publié: juin 29, 2009, 4:07pm CEST par Carmi Levy

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

You've got to feel some serious empathy for Adam Savage.
The co-star of the popular Discovery Channel television show Mythbusters found himself on the receiving end of a huge bill after a recent vacation to Montreal, Canada. He had tethered a cellular modem to his laptop, and ended up racking up $11,000 in charges before returning to the US. Upon his return, AT&T, claiming he had used over 9 gigabytes of data during his foreign surfing adventure, helpfully shut his account down. Only when he called them to complain about the outage did he learn he had been hosed.
(Disclosure: I was born and raised in Montreal. Although I moved away quite some time ago, it bothers me to see visitors to my fair city have anything remotely approaching a negative experience. I can accept a sub-par smoked meat sandwich or poutine. But being charged the equivalent of a base model Hyundai for the privilege of checking e-mail and surfing the Web for a few hours is ludicrous. I know it's an American carrier, but even the most tenuous connection to my beloved hometown bugs me. End rant.)
The benefits of fame
True to his geek's soul, Savage subsequently used his Twitter following (64,270 as I write this) to pressure AT&T into excusing the bill. He posted this plaintive tweet: "Text messaging fees are stupid robbery? (they are), AT&T is attempting to charge me 11k for a few hours of web surfing in Canada. Pls RT!" The subsequent re-tweet storm prompted AT&T to call him the same day and resolve the issue. In the end, AT&T did the right thing and waived all charges.
As encouraged as I am to see a quick resolution to this obviously ridiculous example of antagonistic customer "service", I'm reminded that AT&T's rapid and complete response has little to do with its efficient customer service capability [cough] and everything to do with Mr. Savage's wide-ranging, tech savvy celebrity.
Not all of us star in popular television programs, nor do we have tens of thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook friends. At one point, Savage tweeted a very telling exchange:
AT&T guy on the phone with me: "Apparently you've got enough Twitter followers to get our attention." Me: "50,000". Him: "Wow".
Good for Savage. Not so good for the rest of us. When you're an average, mostly anonymous, wage-earning, bill-paying shlub who's received a similar surprise, chances are your carrier won't be calling you in response to a broad-based outpouring of re-tweeted support. Instead, you'll be calling a toll-free number and waiting for hours to speak to a clueless agent in India, just like the rest of us average shlubs. You'll be lucky to have service restored within days, if at all.
Fighting back
All of which begs the question: How can consumers protect themselves from carriers who willingly bury terms of service deep in fine print so thick with legalese that even experienced lawyers have difficulty figuring it out? There's no perfect solution, of course, but I've evolved a few simple assumptions that have kept me from facing four- and five-digit bills upon my return.
Assume you'll get fleeced when you're roaming. Savage's experience with AT&T is typical. If you're out of the country and using a partner carrier's network, it will charge you 15 cents per kilobyte. In a world where the average Web page can range between 10 and 100K, simply looking up the weather, checking your e-mail and updating your Facebook status can easily cost you more than breakfast at a family restaurant. Stream some Internet radio and YouTube video and you've just paid for steak dinner at a high end restaurant. Or that Hyundai.
Assume your carrier won't make it easy to track usage. Would you drive a car without a functioning gas gauge? Of course not. But every day, we go online without understanding how much data we're consuming and how much it costs us. It may not matter so much when we're at home, because most broadband Internet services have sufficiently generous caps to accommodate all but the most voracious file downloaders. But mobile users already know to limit high-bandwidth usage lest they blow through their often paltry monthly data limits. Carriers will claim to helpfully provide online tools that facilitate tracking, but finding them is often an adventure in itself. Carriers make more money by keeping customers in the dark and hoping not all of them will contest overage charges.
Assume your carrier can't count. Even if online usage tracking tools are easily available, don't be misled into believing that they're remotely accurate. In Savage's case, he says he spent two or three hours engaged in basic Web surfing. He wasn't streaming audio or video, making video calls or otherwise engaged in any high-bandwidth activity. Yet AT&T's systems dinged him for 9 Gb of usage. If you think you've been wronged, who are you gonna call?
Savage planning
Whenever I travel internationally, I do two things before I get anywhere close to a border: I turn off data service on my BlackBerry, and I plan my trip around free Wi-Fi wherever possible. I've spent countless hours exhaustively reviewing my own carrier's terms of service, and the only conclusion I can draw is I'd be asking for a Hyundai-equivalent bill if I dared use a partner-carrier's cell-based network for data coverage.
The cynic in me knows full well why this is the case. The majority of customers, lacking the time, resources and will to pursue cases like this, choose to accept excessive international roaming charges. In most cases, the bills aren't anywhere near $11,000. If it's an extra $50 or so, the silent majority will likely assume it's normal, and grudgingly pay the premium as the cost of cross-border travel.
But in a world where watching one YouTube video from a foreign land can cost the equivalent of a week's wages, outdated and clearly punitive roaming plans clearly need to go.
And that's no myth.
Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
What's Next: Microsoft looks to throw back Razorfish

Publié: juin 29, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

Microsoft's advertising over the past three years has focused on this "human element" thing (although that's also Dow Chemical's campaign at the moment), where technology is supposed to empower people to do what people can do best, rather than simply make technology better or more complex or cooler. Well, with the May 2007 purchase of ad agency aQuantive, Microsoft had the opportunity to practice what it preached, since an ad agency is full of people -- not just ordinary laborers, either, but creative folks whose factories are their brains. Just the kind of folks you'd think Microsoft would be eager to employ, right? Nope. For two years, it's been looking to unload the creative baggage from the $6 billion technology package it bought, and this morning it may be closer to dumping its load. That's coming up in What's Next, but first, let's see if the Mythbusters can blow up AT&T all the way from Canada.

MythBuster 1, AT&T 0 in bad-bill battle
June 26, 2009, 1:17 pm • Do not mess with Adam Savage: The man builds stuff just to see if he can blow it up, and he's not going to take an $11,000 bill from AT&T lying down -- especially not with about 50,000 tweeting fans (yes, his "tweeps") forming a posse.
Savage, the co-host of Discovery Channel's popular Mythbusters program, took a brief vacation in Canada recently and used an AT&T-connected USB modem to Web-surf for a few hours while he was there. AT&T billed him as above, saying that "data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kilobyte" [Yep, that looks like AT&T math -- AG] while abroad. Adding insult to injury, AT&T cut off his service, as Savage detailed in his Tweetstream.
Savage tweeted the original message at 11:23 pm Friday night, asking readers to retweet. (All timestamps are local to his tweetstream, which may be running on Tehran time as so many currently are.) And they did. By 4:10 am, Savage tweeted that "AT&T guy on the phone with me: 'apparently you've got enough Twitter followers to get our attention.' me: '50,000'. Him: 'wow'."
The problem was solved within 20 minutes by "helpful and nice" AT&T folk, though Savage notes that "I agree with everyone: it shouldn't just work for me. The data carriers MUST stop thinking in kilobytes and start thinking in customers." Pete Cashmore at Mashable seconded that thought, commenting, "Best of luck if you end up in the same predicament and don't have a Twitter army behind you."
This morning, our own Carmi Levy, a native Canadien, has some thoughts about how ordinary people without their own Discovery Channel shows may be able to avoid the fate that almost befell Adam Savage.
Focus group digs the Bing, but...
June 26, 2009 • It usually takes a high=profile criminal case for 12 people's opinions to create such a stir, but a focus group held earlier this month by the Catalyst Group (PDF available) is making a splash with a conclusion as odd as anything we've heard since the end of the Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial: Bing's equal to Google on search-results relevance, and better than Google in visual design, organization of features, and filtering options, and so we're sticking with Google. No wonder those Bing ads just keep running.
Essentially, the focus group turned up this: Bing was better designed than Google, in their eyes -- it seemed more pleasing and nicer to use, if not always easier. And in terms of the testers who were taking notes of where the jury's eyes were roaming, they appeared to spend 50% more time reading Bing's ads than Google's, which should be a positive signal.
But in terms of relevance of search results, the group concluded that Google and Bing were about equal. And since folks were already familiar with Google, that meant that Bing did not have enough compelling new features yet to make them switch.
Meanwhile, Kevin Lee at ClickZ has an excellent article on how advertisers can make the most of Microsoft's new search.
Beckstrom to head ICANN
June 26, 2009 • Away from the NSA and into ICANN: It's just possible that Rod Beckstrom, the former head of DHS's National Cybersecurity Center who quit some emphatically last February, has found an even more bureaucratically hamstrung organization. He's the new president and CEO of ICANN following the departure of Paul Twomey, who has served for six years; the CEO job starts immediately, with the president's chair to be assumed late in the year.
The organization in charge of the Net's naming and numbering systems praised the former NCSC director on its site, saying, "He formed an effective working group of leaders from the nation's top six cybersecurity centers spanning the civilian, military and intelligence communities." Those who read that with a raised eyebrow, recalling Mr. Beckstrom's frustration with the NSA's inexorably crawling hand in DHS affairs, are reminded that ICANN's ponderous, sometimes murky maneuvers could try the patience of a stone lion. We wish Mr. Beckstrom all the very best with his new endeavor.
Microsoft may be preparing to unload its Razorfish creative team
July 2009 > looks to be the month that Microsoft gets some of its money back on a deal that didn't seem to make much sense even on the day it happened. The Financial Times broke the story (subscription required) Sunday evening that Microsoft has retained Morgan Stanley to help rid the company of Razorfish, the digital ad agency it picked up two years ago after it acquired parent company aQuantive for $6 billion. (You may remember its older moniker, Avenue A | Razorfish.)
From the very beginning, it was clear that Microsoft may have only wanted aQuantive's digital advertising platform, but not really the humanpower behind its Web site and campaign design services. At the time of the deal, Forrester analyst Harley Manning made that call, warning everyone (including employees) to prepare for a spinoff. Then in December 2007, the first handwriting showed up on the wall when Avenue A employees learned they weren't getting Microsoft's benefits package -- the clearest sign of all that they weren't going to be paired with their new parent company for long.
Almost a year ago, Microsoft put up the first signals, even to the extent where mega-agency WPP emerged as the likely buyer. But even then, the price WPP appeared willing to pay -- $800 million -- didn't seem like much of a deal. Do the math for a moment: Avenue A | Razorfish generates 60% of aQuantive's revenue, Microsoft pays $6 billion for aQuantive, and WPP wanted to pay $800 million for Avenue A?
Fast-forward through the bad economy, and suddenly $800 million might not seem like such a bad deal. That is, unless the price has actually gone down, and it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will settle for less.
Goodbye, MSN Web Messenger
June 30, 2009 > That's it, then: Now that MSN Web Messenger is integrated into Hotmail and Windows Live People, Microsoft means to pull the plug on the older site on Tuesday. (Yes, the usual Windows Live Messenger client endures as well.) The Windows Live blog has details.
Hello again, tech IPOs?
Beginning Tuesday, June 30, perhaps > Om Malik at GigaOm notices something interesting: There's a tech IPO in the works, the second in as many months. LogMeIn will be priced Tuesday; the remote-login software firm hopes to raise $107.2 million, and some observers think they just might. Malik wonders if a successful IPO could start investors back on the path to, you know, investing.
AFTER THE JUMP: Tech headlines from around the Net...
Monday's tech headlines
Federal Computer Week
• The movement to dismantle some of the Real ID program's broadest information-sharing requirements is gaining steam. DHS head Janet Napolitano has endorsed the Pass ID legislation that would supercede or roll back many of the previous system's provisions. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) proposed the Pass ID bill, which will likely be considered afte the upcoming holiday break.
• Wyatt Kash, signing in from Government Computer News, covers a speech by Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the man whom Defense secretary Robert Gates has nominated to run the new cybersecurity command. Lt. Gen. Alexander told the conference held by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's D.C. chapter that to make the system work, all service members who "operate in cyberspace" need to have "a common block of training," and the notorious mess around security clearances for network operations folk simply has to be cleaned up.
• WorldWideScience.org, the global science gateway sponsored by the Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information, has added some nifty tools for sharing results via social-networking sites -- Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Delicious and the like. You'll find similar tools on other sites, but this installation looks like a nice collaboration tool for researcher.
Seattle Times
• Halo 3: ODST is nearing, and Brier Dudley gets a look in that "mysterious Kirkland bunker" where Bungie Studios is preparing the onslaught.
• The Swiss score an impressive takedown: A child-porn ring involving more than 2,000 people in 78 countries. It was hiding in a corner of an otherwise unrelated hip-hop site. Eww.
• You know about the Gates Foundation, but plenty of other former and current Microsofties are putting their tech-earned dollars into philanthropy. Kristi Heim tells about Scott Oki's SeeYourImpact -- think charitable giving crossed with Twitter- and mobile-phone-style reportage -- and Adnan Mahmud's Jolkona Foundation, which does something a bit similar with micro-investment projects.
The Register
• EMC's attempt to acquire Data Domain lurches along. Now EMC's lengthening the offer period for the firm, which has already accepted an acquisition offer from NetApp. EMC, however, didn't let a little fact like that stop them from acquiring Iomega last year, so this really isn't over in any sense of the word.
• There exist in the world people who steal koi fish from garden ponds, and apparently they're using Google Earth to find those ponds. Isn't it depressing to know that some folks are spending their threescore years and ten thinking up antics like that?
• A spate of fake death notifications posted on Twitter over the past few days hit, among other celebrity train wrecks, Britney Spears. How (*yawn*) imaginative.
New York Times
• Miguel Helft writes that Google is trying to make the case to would-be regulators and such that the company isn't a giant, and that the firm is "in an industry that is subject to disruption and we can't take anything for granted." Google should do a search and see how well that argument worked out for Microsoft in the 1990s.
• Brian Stelter (the former TVNewser editor-in-chief turned NYT reporter) says that "journalism rules [were] bent in news coverage from Iran." Hey, that's interesting. You know where else they were bent, Brian? In Iraq when the NYT's Judith Miller was on the WMD trail. Bent 'em right the heck over.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
With Clear's airport security dissolving, what happens to all that personal data?

Publié: juin 29, 2009, 1:18pm CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews

After days of uncertainty following Verified Identity Pass's abrupt shutdown last week, representatives of the defunct company are coming forward with at least some data on what will happen to the large collection of personally identifiable information (PII) it acquired from its customers.
In a letter to former members that's also posted to its Web site, Clear Customer Service attempted to address at least a few of the questions that have come up. The company (the letter was unsigned) reiterated that the data "is secured in accordance with the Transportation Security Administration's Security, Privacy, and Compliance Standards." The company revealed that Lockheed, which has been the firm's lead systems integrator, is working with parent company Verified Identity Pass, Inc. and the US Transportation Safety Administration "to ensure an orderly shutdown as the program closes."
Laptops, both those used at airport check-in stations and those used by former employees, are undergoing the "triple-wipe process." It all sounds very sanitary, though studies (PDF available here) indicate that unless the drives are more than a few years old, one wipe will actually do -- if it's the Secure Erase process or another process meeting the specifications lain out by NIST 800-88, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Guidelines for Media Sanitization. (Whether that's the case isn't clear from the letter.) The company says it will notify members via e-mail when the process is completed.
Though the company didn't exactly rule out the sale of PII, it took some trouble to lay out the parameters of any potential sale. "The personally identifiable information that customers provided to Clear may not be used for any purpose other than a Registered Traveler program operated by a Transportation Security Administration authorized service provider," the letter explained. "Any new service provider would need to maintain personally identifiable information in accordance with the Transportation Security Administration's privacy and security requirements for Registered Traveler programs. If the information is not used for a Registered Traveler program, it will be deleted."
And about those refunds? Forget it -- your money's in limbo, especially since the company not actually in bankruptcy. Limbo everywhere, it seems -- sort of like being stuck at the airport between flights.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009