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BetaNews.Com (7 non lus)

Google's deal with the devil: Declaring war in China while competitors wimp out

Publié: janvier 21, 2010, 10:49pm CET par Carmi Levy

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

I was just old enough to remember, and appreciate the significance of, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The iconic image of a dissident standing defiantly in front of a column of People's Liberation Army tanks is as powerful today as it was when we first saw it.
Back then, activists fighting for greater freedom used surreptitiously acquired fax machines to get the word out to the rest of the world. It was an early sign that technology held the potential to undercut control-freak-government efforts to stifle free speech. Now that the Internet has taken over as the platform of choice for Chinese freedom-lovers and freedom-crushers alike, the battleground has shifted irrevocably, and the autocratic Chinese government hardly has enough political officers to keep its spy game machinery in balance.
That doesn't mean it isn't trying, however.
It all begins to unravel
Four years after it launched its google.cn search service in China, Google now finds itself staring down the gun barrel of that proverbial tank. At the time (and ever since, if we're picking nits) the company was derided for censoring search results in accordance with limitations imposed by the Chinese government. Google justified its decision then by saying this is the price foreign firms must pay if they wish to do business in China.
That all changed earlier this month. On January 12, just after discovering an unprecedented cyber attack on its services and users, the company published the following on its blog:
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.
Fair enough, and from where I sit, it was a Hobson's Choice that the "Do No Evil" company has balanced quite nicely these past four years. Google made a deal with the devil with its eyes focused intently on a bigger picture that envisioned delivering greater access to class-leading Internet Web services for Chinese citizens. It held its nose for the entire time, confident its move would eventually spark greater freedoms in a country where the government's definition of the word differs from that used elsewhere.
We won't directly accuse the government, but…
After revealing that its systems had been hacked and it would enter into discussions with the Chinese government (and possibly exit the Chinese market entirely if things weren't resolved to the company's satisfaction), Google didn't specifically accuse the Chinese government of backing the attacks. But it's fairly clear to anyone reading between the lines that Google believes the Chinese government was trying to take its censorship deal with Google to places never envisioned four years ago.
Simply put, no one outside the Chinese government has access to the scaled resources necessary to mount attacks of the magnitude uncovered by Google. Never mind the fact that the Chinese government stands virtually alone in having a motive to spy on human rights activists and their sympathizers in the first place.
The fact that Google is willing to walk away from the largest, fastest growing Internet market on earth -- it grew from 10 million users a decade ago to 340 million today -- just before it starts generating world-beating revenue, speaks volumes about how its corporate ethics have evolved since google.cn went live in 2006. Although Google plays second fiddle in Chinese search (31% market share to Baidu's 60%) it remains well ahead of Yahoo and Microsoft and stands positioned to cash in on its strong-second position as this market matures. It's all potential from where Google sits, so its threat to take its ball and go home should send a message to competing tech firms that deals with devils ultimately have limits.
Not everyone gets the message, however. Microsoft, which in December referred to China as "the most important strategic market," shows no signs of growing a spine. CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC, "We've been quite clear that we are going to operate in China, (and) we're going to abide by the law." I guess "abide by the law" makes it sound palatable, even if "the law" is little more than an autocratic edict designed to suppress the actions of freedom-seeking Chinese citizens.
At least Microsoft has company in the "Do Some Evil" camp. Yahoo, an organization that apparently never met a Communist regime it didn't like, happily filtered its search results before hooking up with Alibaba in 2005. After buying 39% of the Alibaba partnership, Yahoo made headlines later that year when it delivered material from Shi Tao, a journalist, to the Chinese regime. Mr. Tao was subsequently convicted and is now serving 10 years in prison.
I'm sure leaders of both companies are sitting on pins and needles as they wait for the outcome of Google's negotiations with Chinese authorities. I'm certain they'd be beside themselves with glee if the company that's kicked their Web services tail in virtually every international market decides to abandon this one. I'm certain their PR minders will find ways to soft pedal their cozy relationship with the Chinese government in light of the Google hacking.
Principle over profits
While the end result remains a great unknown, the fact that a profit-seeking American company would put its most promising growth market on the line over a fundamental issue of freedom and security, and be willing to duke it out with the world's most powerful Communist government, should be an eye-opener for any Western firm thinking of doing business in a country where freedom remains something of a four-letter word. Compromises made in the interest of maintaining a guiding presence in the market mean little if the government ultimately chooses to bulldoze its way to confidential data after a few years have passed.
Even if you have no business in China, ask yourself which company you'd trust with your data: the one with a spine, or the one that gives Communist officials anything they're looking for? In the end, what happens in the Far East may very well dictate what happens here, and who deserves to prevail as Web- and cloud-based services continue to creep into the mainstream.
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. 2010
EU clears Oracle + Sun: If MySQL fails, there's always PostgreSQL

Publié: janvier 21, 2010, 10:41pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In green-lighting Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems today, the European Commission says it considered whether in doing so, Oracle would effectively eliminate the "competitive constraint" of competition from the open source field by way of MySQL, the open source relational database that Sun acquired in 2008. That acquisition gave Sun its first competitive database product; but Oracle already has one of the leading commercial entries.
The conclusion the Commission reached today is a surprising one, especially from Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes just days before a planned Commission-wide job swap. Kroes had been seen as a protector of the interests of open source alternatives as a plurality. But in today's decision, the EC implied that the open source field only needed one active competitor to be relevant. If that competitor for some reason stops being MySQL, it announced, then PostgreSQL can step in and fill its shoes.
"The Commission's investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market," reads this morning's EC announcement.
Postgres Software last year released its own enterprise-class database alternative, EnterpriseDB, building onto its previous work with Postgres Plus. Last year, Postgres CEO Ed Boyajian made the case that Oracle's Sun buyout could end up fracturing the MySQL community. That would be perfectly fine with Postgres, which offers EnterpriseDB as an alternative not to MySQL but to Oracle.
A second, equally surprising conclusion emerged from the EC today: Since MySQL is open source, the EC concluded, then Oracle's acquisition of its management would not necessarily mean that it would acquire the intellectual property of the database. Thus open source developers outside of Oracle could feasibly pick apart the remains of MySQL, even if Oracle were to stop producing it, and make it into something else that's potentially as competitive.
Or as the EC put it in its announcement today, "In addition, the Commission found that 'forks' (branches of the MySQL code base), which are legally possible given MySQL's open source nature, might also develop in future to exercise a competitive constraint on Oracle in a sufficient and timely manner." The Commission may have been referring indirectly to MariaDB, a derivative of the MySQL 5.1 codebase under development by former MySQL co-founder Michael Widenius. That derivative now also includes a storage engine plug-in called XtraDB, which replaces MySQL's InnoDB storage engine -- a component that Oracle acquired way back in October 2005.
Widenius' apparent mission: Make his database a completely transparent replacement for MySQL, but that's also independent of anything that could eventually, even partly, be considered Oracle's IP. Last December, in a last-ditch effort to block the merger and, in his view, save a chunk of the Internet, Widenius pleaded with Internet users to make their voices heard, as part of his Save MySQL effort. He claimed at the time that the effort was responsible for some 10,000 letters sent to the EC, 99.3% of which were in opposition to the deal.
"Oracle is the company that has the biggest market share in revenues for databases in all customer markets/segments," Widenius wrote at the time, entitled, "Help keep the Internet free." "MySQL is the database with the highest number of installed units in all markets (except in the high enterprise market where it has only a medium size unit share). If Oracle were allowed to buy MySQL then Oracle would almost be in a monopoly position in many market segments."
Sadly for Widenius, his MariaDB brainchild may have been the undoing of Save MySQL. The Commission apparently concluded that projects like MariaDB are healthy enough to sustain the competitiveness of open source against Oracle, even in the absence of MySQL. In the EC's view, open source only needs one competitor -- as though rather than a unified community, it's a single corporation.
The EC also concluded that with respect to Java -- Sun's other principal product -- a sufficient oversight body of independent developers is already in place to provide the checks and balances necessary against any attempt by Oracle to restrict the licensing for Java developers.
In response to today's news, Oracle has planned something of a celebration. On January 27 (since no one else at Oracle had anything planned that day, apparently...no other big premiere to attend, for instance), CEO Larry Ellison has planned a five-hour event at its Redwood Shores headquarters, where the company says he will unveil his completed "industry-in-a-box" strategy for hardware, middleware, and software.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Security report: Web users pick passwords that are way too easy to hack

Publié: janvier 21, 2010, 9:31pm CET par Jacqueline Emigh

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

According to a report on Consumer Password Best Practices culled from an analysis of 32 million passwords exposed in the recent Rockyou.com Web security breach, the three most commonly used passwords among users of the Rockyou social networking site turned out to be 123456, 12345, and 123456789.
Also making in into the top ten, in this order, were the following: Password, iloveyou, princess, rockyou, 1234567, 12345678, and abc123.
During the Rockyou breach last month, a hacker exploited a SQL Injection vulnerability to expose 32 million passwords -- which had been stored in clear text in Rockyou's database -- and then posted the passwords, without any other identifying information, on the Web.
In analyzing the results for a report issued today, researchers at the Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC) discovered that even now, people are still relying on the same kinds of "weak" passwords detected in earlier studies of Unix passwords 20 years ago, and Hotmail passwords a decade ago.
About 30% of Rockyou users chose passwords with five or fewer characters, and almost 50% opted for "names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboards keys, and so on)," according to key findings of Imperva's report.
"Furthermore, studies show that about one-half of the users use the same (or very similar) password to all Web sites that require logging in."
What sorts of passwords should people put together instead? Imperva points to standards from NASA calling for "strong" passwords containing seven or more characters, and also made up of mix of four different kinds of characters: upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and "special characters such as !@#$%^&*,;" and the like.
About 40% of the Rockyou users chose only lower-case letters for their passwords, 16% used only digits, and less than 4% used "special characters."
Also, your password should not be a name, a slang word, or any word in the dictionary, and it shouldn't include any part of your name or your e-mail address, the researchers note.
"If a hacker would have used the list of the top 5,000 passwords as a dictionary for brute force attack on Rockyou.com users, it would take only one attempt (per account) to guess 0.9% of the users' passwords or a rate of one success per 111 attempts," according to Imperva.
In recommending the use of strong passwords, Imperva gives a tip from security expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier: "Take a sentence and turn in into a password. Something like 'This little piggy went to market' might become tlpWENT2m."
But what if you don't want to deal with assigning different passwords to the various Web sites you visit? Borrowing another bit of advice from Schneier, Imperva recommends jotting something down on a piece of paper to help you recall them all. "But just write the sentence -- or better yet -- a hint that will help you remember your sentence," Schneier is quoted as saying.
Imperva's report also supplies numbers 11 through 20 in the list of the most common passwords in the hacked Rockyou database, although without giving much explanation for most of them.
Here are the other passwords in Rockyou's top 20:
11. Nicole
12. Daniel
13. babygirl
14. monkey
15. Jessica
16. Lovely
17. Michael
18. Ashley
19. 654321
20. Qwerty
For their part, Web site administrators should force users to choose strong passwords, as well as to change their passwords "either by time or when suspicion for a compromise arises," according to the study.
Administrators should also make sure passwords are not either transmitted or kept in a database in clear text. Admins should encourage the use of "passphrases" -- such as sentences -- rather than passwords, and they should "employ aggressive anti-brute force mechanisms to detect and mitigate brute force attacks on login credentials," Imperva advises.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Newly released Windows fix addresses both new and old IE browsers

Publié: janvier 21, 2010, 9:06pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Over the past few days, security engineers have warned that variations of the publicly-released Hydraq exploit are being engineered for later versions of Internet Explorer than the one targeted in the recently discovered wave of attacks against Google and others, IE6. One security researcher on the "good side," Dino Dai Zovi, claimed on Twitter earlier today he has a functional derivative of Hydraq for IE7 and IE8...kind of. To make them work, two of Windows 7's more celebrated security features -- Address Space Load Randomization and Data Execution Prevention -- have to be manually turned off first.
Still, the nearness of such an exploit to reality prompted Microsoft to release its out-of-band security update today, as promised yesterday, for IE6, IE7, and IE8. Separate update packages are currently being deployed through Windows Update, and are available for download now.
Microsoft Senior Security Program manager Jerry Bryant informed Betanews just moments ago that as of this moment it has only seen evidence of actual Hydraq attacks in the wild targeting IE6. However, as Bryant warned customers in a blog post yesterday, more than the Web browser may be theoretically vulnerable.
Specifically, earlier versions of other Microsoft software, including Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Live Mail that used the mshtml.dll rendering library for showing HTML e-mails, but whose default security states may have been turned off by users (for instance, enabling ActiveX controls), could be vulnerable. Those users may not be vulnerable, Bryant said, if their security configurations are left in their recommended states. Outlook 2007 uses a later version of the library, Bryant said, and is therefore not immediately vulnerable at all.
However, if mutants of Hydraq that work on IE7 and IE8 ever do get exploited in the wild, users without today's IE patch installed (which addresses this shared rendering library as well) could be in trouble. Up until very recently, third parties answering reader and customer troubles about software incompatibilities they've encountered, have advised them to turn DEP off.
Sometimes the problem itself didn't have to be explained in detail; publications and services have advised, turn DEP off and see if that works. "User who facing problem when using Office applications can use the following trick to turn off and disable DEP for Office applications," reads a post on MyDigitalLife.info dated last August.
Microsoft, of course, continues to suggest that DEP remain turned on, stating that any software incompatibilities users may face are much less serious than being exposed to a critical exploit.
As Dino Dai Zovi told his followers on Twitter earlier today, "Right now, my exploit works against IE7 on Vista with ASLR but no DEP, but not against IE8 with ASLR + DEP." Later, he added, "My exploit works on all IE targets with none of, or one of, DEP and ASLR, but not when both are in use."
Although Hydraq's payload -- a veritable communications platform for stealth intellectual property theft -- is one of the more sophisticated such payloads that some security researchers have encountered, the package it's delivered in has been said to be not sophisticated at all. That could be one reason why Microsoft was able to patch this problem so quickly, just two weeks after Google apparently notified Microsoft of its existence.
For better or worse, the source code of a version of Hydraq (which may or may not be the version used in the Google attack) was released last week by students working with the Wepawet malware analysis service, at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Marco Cova is one of those students. This morning, Cova told Betanews that the lack of sophistication necessary for Hydraq to deliver its sophisticated stealth service, should itself be considered sophisticated.
"I would say that the attack was technically sophisticated, mostly because, as far as I know, it was targeting a previously unknown vulnerability, rather than using one of the well-known exploits that are implemented in popular exploit packs," Cova told us. "The attack techniques themselves (the shellcode injection, etc.) are well known; so the novelty here would be knowing or finding what to attack rather than how to attack."
Addressing the possibility that Google's attackers chose IE6 not out of convenience but because they knew what systems they would be attacking, Cova said, "An attack may be sophisticated from points of view other than the technical one. For example, an attack may be sophisticated because it leverages sophisticated knowledge of its targets (who is to be targeted, how, etc.). Whether this is the case may be better assessed by somebody at Google."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Firefox 3.6 RTM officially released, includes personalization

Publié: janvier 21, 2010, 6:21pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 for Windows from Fileforum now.
It's been said that improvements to Web browsers aren't truly improvements unless the user can both see and feel them. Mozilla's latest efforts in that area have just been finalized: a new stable version of Firefox that not only provides more control features to the new Windows 7 taskbar, but lets you paste posters on its wall.
It's called Personas, and it addresses one of the few features gaps between Firefox and Google Chrome -- a browser that, besides being the fastest stable Windows Web browser in the field, is relatively bare-bones compared to Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Bringing back one of the more popular features attached to Netscape Navigator back in the '90s, Firefox 3.6 offers users a way to paste an image in the background of the browser frame.
In building up for this release, Mozilla gathered several thousand candidate images in a new gallery. And this afternoon, Betanews noticed that the organization was tweaking its download service so that new downloaders (you, for example, when you visit Fileforum to download 3.6 for yourself) will be steered toward this gallery.
Most impressively of all, you can see how a persona might look on your own browser simply by rolling over its thumbnail in the gallery. This is important because with Firefox, not all components appear in exactly the same place, due to exactly the trend that the Personas feature encourages: customization. You might like a persona with your favorite pop star in the upper right corner, for instance, but the way your components are arranged now, a search box could cut right through her face.
Here's one of my favorite personas in the early going, especially suitable for a "power user" (or abuser, depending on your point of view) who has a lot of active toolbar space: It's called "Grayfox," and it presents a striking, 3D-like "electric nebula" rendering of the Firefox logo set against a charcoal gray background. Greyed out or unavailable buttons, such as the "Stop" button, do show up faintly under this persona. However, it plays nicely with other add-ons: for instance, the grey pinstripes from the graphic are faintly visible beneath the rows of tabs made available with the Colorful Tabs add-on (downloadable separately from Mozilla).
While the Personas feature could pay off big for version 3.6, it may actually present a problem for developers working on 3.7 and the future Firefox 4.0. Both of those versions are expected to introduce progressively more streamlined window frames, enabling minimalism on a par with Google Chrome. Narrower space could mean less surface area to deploy Personas and other customizations -- a real estate problem that Mozilla contributors will now have to face head-on.
In late testing on pre-release builds of 3.6, Betanews estimated that users should expect between 10% and 15% improvement in computational performance (JavaScript, CSS, DHTML) over version 3.5.8, the latest stable revision to Firefox 3.5. We'll be testing the final 3.6 today to verify that estimate.
Mozilla typically enables the download link for the final stable version of its products as much as a day before it makes its official announcement to the public. This time the organization broke with tradition, however, by issuing its announcement just one hour after its public download links were established. With version 3.5, Mozilla's engineers began building in support for browser-based HTML5 video -- a way to play back streaming movies without downloading anyone else's codecs as an attachment. Not Real's, not Adobe's, not Apple's. Version 3.6 expands that support by enabling HTML5 videos to be taken full-screen.
As if by coincidence (though probably not), YouTube this morning announced it will begin experimenting with support for HTML5 video. As of now, Firefox is the only major browser with HTML5 built-in; Google Chrome doesn't have it, and last year, Google engineers expressed some skepticism as to HTML5 video's efficacy. (YouTube is owned by Google, and currently prefers Adobe Flash video.) For YouTube to pull this off on a cross-platform basis, it needs to implement an experimental player that will display videos within a plug-in for all other browsers besides Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, while also triggering Firefox's internal HTML5 support.
UPDATE: For now, however, Google's experimental player will only run in the WebKit-based browsers Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
The need for this experimental technology may explain Google's purchase last year of On2, the firm responsible for the VP3 codec that was the basis for the Ogg Theora video codec currently adopted that had been under consideration for adoption by HTML5.
5:45 pm EST January 21, 2010 · If you've just started using Firefox 3.6 RTM and are wondering, where are some of those fancy new features you've been reading about...don't worry, they're there. For some reason, they're just not turned on. You have to make some about:config settings.
- browser.ctrlTab.previews needs to be set to True to turn on the Ctrl+Tab functionality. This lets you preview thumbnails of all your open tabs, and select the one you want by its picture -- similar to the way you use Alt+Tab to shift between tasks in Windows.
- browser.allTabs.previews needs to be set to True to add a button to the right side of Firefox's tabs bar, the effect of which is the same as Ctrl+Tab: You click on this button to see the thumbnail previews.
- browser.taskbar.previews.enable needs to be set to True to give Firefox the ability to send those thumbnail previews to the Windows 7 taskbar. When you hover over the Firefox icon in that taskbar, you can choose your tabs from the thumbnail list that pops up. This feature only works in Windows 7, of course.
7:03 pm EST · Those of you wondering whether there's any real performance gains to be realized from Firefox 3.6, as opposed to window dressing, here's your answer: Preliminary tests on Windows 7 reveal as much as 20% performance gain from Firefox 3.6 over recent versions of Firefox 3.5, but that's not quite as big a gain as we're seeing with recent builds of 3.7.
Our Betanews performance index number for Windows 7 (tests remain to be conducted on Vista and Windows XP) is 12.88 -- that's nearly 13 times the speed of Internet Explorer 7 running on Vista. By comparison, the latest stable builds of Firefox 3.5 have been scoring just about 11, while the latest stable builds of Google Chrome have scored well above 22.
Strengths and weaknesses: In deciphering page components rendered with CSS, code introduced in Firefox 3.6 and carried on into 3.7 appears to enable the browser to start rendering the first element of a page much faster than before -- even faster than Safari, which had been the speed champ in that division. The new browser runs the SunSpider battery of tests about 25% faster overall -- those are JavaScript tests that simulate everyday calculating functions. On the other side of the equation, version 3.6 is not particularly fast at rendering the 3D cube -- actually a tad slower than 3.5 -- and is processing raw text at what appears to be a 48% slower rate. That means streams of HTML are being processed after they've been loaded through the network, more slowly. All these data points will be verified in our more comprehensive tests to come.
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 for Linux from Fileforum now.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Baidu: Register.com helped 'Iranian Cyber Army' commit criminal trespass

Publié: janvier 21, 2010, 5:08pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Leading China search engine Baidu's lawsuit against US domain registrar and ISP Register.com, filed yesterday, was not at all what analysts, especially in the British press, expected it to be: There's no evidence, including in the context of its many redacted paragraphs, of any sort of "retaliation" whatsoever against Google's new public stance against China in the wake of attacks against it that it claims emanated from China. Although diplomats from both countries may continue to play the Baidu case as another volley in a brewing trade dispute, from Baidu's perspective, that's not what it is at all.
Baidu's grievance is specifically against Register.com, not the country it's in; and it would probably have filed this very lawsuit had the Google attack never happened. The public portions of the initial complaint, released by US District Court in New York this morning, accuse Register.com not only of negligence in allowing its DNS records to be hacked, and Baidu traffic diverted to a Web site purportedly from the "Iranian Cyber Army" (which may not even be Iranian). Baidu goes so far as to say that Register.com "aided and abetted" whoever produces that Web site, whom Baidu refers to as the "Imposter," in the commission of what Baidu describes as trespass upon its property. Evidence of the Imposter's true identity and/or whereabouts may, based on Betanews' reading of the complaint, could very well appear within those redacted paragraphs.
The language of the complaint alleges criminal misconduct on the part of Register.com, perhaps not through direct conspiracy, but by leaving security so lax that virtually anyone -- as Baidu describes it -- could have accomplished what the Imposter did.
"Defendant wrongfully converted Baidu's proprietary and confidential account information and electronic records held in safe-keeping by Defendant, as well as Baidu's domain name baidu.com," reads the non-redacted portions of the company's complaint. "Under New York Law, Defendant's reckless and grossly negligent actions constituted tortious conversion of Baidu's property...Defendant rendered substantial assistance to the Imposter in its trespass on Baidu's property. This substantial assistance, given with reckless disregard on the Imposter's wrongful trespass, aided and abetted the Imposter in its trespass on Baidu's property."
In a statement this morning, Register.com dismissed Baidu's claim as "completely without merit." But the registrar went ahead and associated the Baidu attack with not only the Twitter attack last December (which also diverted traffic to the "Iranian Cyber Army") but to the Google attack. Stated Register.com's Alice McGillion, "Register.com takes cyber-terrorism very seriously as we are working closely with federal law enforcement officials who are investigating this crime as well as the recent similar attacks on Twitter and Google."
The subject of search engines' respect of users' privacy and identity was a point of discussion during a policy speech this morning on "Internet Freedom" by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This despite the State Dept.'s having publicly told the press yesterday that Google and Baidu would not be mentioned during her speech. Sec. Clinton did single out the government of China, however, for having enabled a "spike in threats to the free flow of information."
"A lot of the search engines are run by private companies; they're not going to be free," Clinton told a questioner from the audience at the Newseum this morning, before adding that there are ways the US government can encourage these search engines to be more aggressively and openly respect the rights of the citizens who use them.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Beta of Amazon Kindle SDK presents unique problems to software makers

Publié: janvier 21, 2010, 5:02pm CET par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

If you're selling a broadband-connected device these days, it's almost required to have a platform for application development that goes along with it. The mobile phone space is overrun with different development options, heck, even networked printers have got one now.
Amazon is about to see if the Kindle e-book reader is a viable platform for third-party apps.
Today, the Web retailer announced that the limited beta of the Kindle Development Kit (KDK) will launch next month, and only a select number of participants will be allowed. Those chosen to participate in the beta will get sample code, full Kindle documentation and a Kindle emulator their for Windows, Linux or OS X machine.
Though the Amazon Kindle has a display that is largely incapable of animations, there are already companies developing "active content" for the e-reader. Handmark is making a Zagat guide, Sonic Boom is making word games, and puzzles such as Sudoku, and even EA has pledged support for for the platform, though it did not disclose what it is working on.
But there are a number of limitations that developers will have to face in working with the Kindle, besides the unusually slow refresh rate of the Kindle's electrophoretic display. The popular e-reader's WhisperSync wireless connection, for one, presents an interesting dilemma in how developers would charge for their apps if there were to be a Kindle app store.
Developers that take advantage of the "free" wireless connectivity offered on the Kindle must take bandwidth usage into consideration when pricing their apps, and they must be able to cover those charges with the cost of the app. Free or one-time purchase apps, for example, can consume no more than 100 KB of wireless data per user per month. If they use more data than that, users will have to pay subscription charges (Amazon charges developers 15¢ per megabyte.)
Furthermore, for apps to be downloadable in the wireless Kindle Store, they cannot be larger than 10 MB in size. If they're bigger, they will only be downloadable on the desktop Kindle Store and then transferred to the device over USB.
However, the Kindle's easy-to-read display, long battery life and persistent 3G connection are traits that could elicit some clever and useful applications. To be included in the lottery for beta testers, visit Amazon's KDK beta site.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010