Gregarius » éléments par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

éléments par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

5 reasons your organization needs to adopt a zero trust security architecture

Publié: juin 3, 2019, 12:20pm CEST par BetaNews Staff

Traditionally, network architectures were designed and secured according to the "castle-and-moat" model. Like a medieval fortress, an enterprise data center was imagined to have impregnable and unbreachable walls. All traffic entering or exiting would pass through a single access point, where a security gateway appliance would sit, like a knight in shining armor. This device would police the network traffic on a packet-by-packet basis, allowing traffic it deemed ‘safe’ unrestricted access to the network’s trusted interior. Although this model is as outdated as chain mail is for 21st-century military combat, its legacy endures in assumptions and presuppositions that can prevent… [Continue Reading]

Protect yourself against malicious websites using Web of Trust

Publié: octobre 2, 2017, 4:39pm CEST par BetaNews Staff

We might regard ourselves as advanced web users, but occasionally we still double-take when visiting a new website. Google a search term and you see a whole host possible options, including paid website ads and there’s very little stopping a rogue retailer from popping up and populating their store with known brands. Anyone can register a .com or .co.uk and you can host one of these domains from any location. There’s simply nothing stopping a company in Asia, from obtaining a .co.uk and then setting up a store with a bunch of fake products. So, how do you avoid these… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Protect your privacy with these great VPN offers, plus amazing savings on new PCs

Publié: avril 1, 2017, 9:16am CEST par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop, desktop PC, or Kindle, when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have yet another selection of superb deals to tempt you. Offers include fantastic savings on new ASUS, Acer, Dell, and HP laptop and desktop PCs, Kindle eReaders, VPN services, and much more. Featured Deals ASUS F556A Intel Core i5 Kaby Lake 15.6" 1080p Laptop w/ 256GB SSD & 8GB RAM for $539.99 (List price $799.99). 50% off 1-Year TorGuard VPN Service for $29.99 (use code: TGLifetime50). Kindle Paperwhite 300ppi eReader… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get a bonus $10 Newegg credit with purchase of a $100 gift card, plus other great offers

Publié: mars 14, 2017, 9:27pm CET par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop, desktop PC, or Surface Pro 4 tablet, when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have yet another selection of superb deals to tempt you. Offers include fantastic savings on new Dell and Lenovo PCs, 4K TVs, electronics and components, and much more. Plus, if you buy a Newegg Gift Card for $100 you'll get a $10 bonus! Featured Deals $10 Bonus Newegg Gift Card with $100 Newegg Gift Card Purchase for $100. Sony PSVR Aim Farpoint Bundle for $63.99 with Amazon… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get the XPS Tower 8910 i7 Silver Edition desktop with 16GB RAM for only $750

Publié: mars 9, 2017, 10:02pm CET par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop, desktop PC, or Surface Pro tablet, when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have yet another selection of superb deals to tempt you. Offers include fantastic savings on new Dell laptop and desktop PCs, HD and 4K TVs, electronics and components, and much more. Featured Deals Dell XPS 8910 Tower Intel Core i7-6700 Quad-Core Skylake Desktop (SILVER) w/ 16GB RAM (Single DIMM) + Windows 10 Pro for $749.99 (use code: SAVE400 -- list price $1149.99). Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Intel Core… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get a new Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming Laptop for only $882, plus other great bargains

Publié: mars 3, 2017, 8:53am CET par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop, desktop, or Xbox One bundle, when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have yet another selection of fantastic deals, with huge savings to tempt you. Offers include fantastic savings on new Dell laptop and desktop PCs, Xbox One S, Oculus Rift, electronics and components, and much more. 4K Touch Display - Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Intel Core i7-6700HQ Quad-Core 1080p 15.6" Gaming Laptop w/ GTX 960m 4GB GPU, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD for $881.99 (use code: XFFQ$2R6F92JX? --… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get a new Dell XPS Core i7 desktop for just $600, and enjoy the best savings of the year on XPS laptops

Publié: février 22, 2017, 11:35am CET par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop, desktop, or PS4 bundle, when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have yet another selection of fantastic deals, with huge savings to tempt you. Offers include fantastic savings on new Dell laptop and desktop PCs, HDTVs, electronics and components, and much more. Featured Deals New Dell XPS 13 (9360) Intel Core i7-7500u Dual-Core KABY LAKE 13.3" Laptop w/ 1080p InfinityEdge Display, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD & Win 10 Pro for $1049.99 (use code: XPS1049 -- list price $1399.99). New Dell XPS… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get a new Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming Laptop for only $900, plus other great bargains

Publié: février 16, 2017, 8:29pm CET par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop, desktop, or PS4 bundle, when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have yet another selection of fantastic deals, with huge savings to tempt you. Offers include money off new laptop and desktop PCs, HDTVs, electronics and components, and much more. Featured Deals Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Intel Core i7-6700HQ Quad-Core 1080p 15.6" Gaming Laptop w/ GTX 960m 4GB GPU, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD for $899.99 (use code: M51GTMF?VFBFP3 - list price $1350). Dell XPS 8910 Intel Core i5-6400 Quad-Core… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get a new Dell XPS 15 laptop for $1259.99, plus other great bargains

Publié: février 7, 2017, 10:24pm CET par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop, Kindle, or Smart TV when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have a selection of fantastic deals, with huge savings to tempt you. Offers include money off new laptop and desktop PCs, televisions, electronics and components, and more. Featured Deals Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Intel Core i7-6500U 15.6" 1080p Laptop with Windows 7/10 Pro, 4GB AMD Radeon R5 GPU, 8GB RAM, and 1TB HDD for $549.00 (use code: EXTRA190 -- list price $845). First Discount! New Dell XPS 15 (9560) Intel… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get a Dell Latitude 14 5000 laptop for only $599, plus other great bargains

Publié: février 4, 2017, 9:44am CET par BetaNews Staff

Why pay full price for a new laptop or Smart TV when you can get one for a fraction of the cost? Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have a selection of fantastic deals this weekend, with huge savings to tempt you. Offers include money off new PCs, televisions, electronics and components, and more. If you're in the market for a new laptop, you can save $80 off the price of a fantastic Dell Latitude 14 5000 business class laptop. Featured Deals Dell Latitude 14 5000 Intel Core i7-5600U Dual-Core 14" Business-Class Laptop with Windows 10 Pro for $599.00… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get the Google Daydream VR Headset for only $50, plus other great bargains

Publié: janvier 19, 2017, 9:37pm CET par BetaNews Staff

With the holidays out of the way, you’re probably looking to save some money, or at the very least avoid spending too much. Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have a selection of fantastic deals with huge savings to tempt you. Offers include $30 off the price of the new Google Daydream View VR headset, an Alienware Gaming desktop for $899.99 (instead of the usual $1025), and great deals on SSDs, keyboards, laptops, HDTVs, and more. Featured Deals Google Daydream View VR Headset for $49.99 (list price $79.99). Alienware Aurora Intel Core i5-7400 Quad-Core Kaby Lake Liquid-Cooled Gaming Desktop… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: This year's best Cyber Monday deals on electronics, TVs and more

Publié: novembre 28, 2016, 3:51pm CET par BetaNews Staff

If you didn't manage to pick up the tech bargains you were hoping for on Black Friday, the good news is you get a second chance with Cyber Monday! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, our selection of great Cyber Monday deals include laptop and desktop computers, televisions, media streamers, tablets, games consoles, vacuum cleaners and much more. See the latest Cyber Monday Deals at TechBargains... Top Rated for Picture Quality: 50" Vizio M50-D1 4K UltraHD Home Theater Display + $200 Dell Gift Card + 6" Android Tablet Remote for $599.99 (list price $849.99). Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Intel Celeron… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Amazing Black Friday bargains you won't want to miss

Publié: novembre 25, 2016, 3:00am CET par BetaNews Staff

Black Friday is finally upon us, and to celebrate we have some amazing bargains for you to feast your eyes on. Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, our selection of great deals include a 55 inch Samsung 4K UltraHD LED Smart HDTV (with a $150 Dell Gift Card) for just $599.99, and a Dell Inspiron 3650 Intel Core i7 Quad-Core Desktop with 16GB RAM, Win 7 Pro, and a 2GB HDD for $599. And that's just for starters. We also have great deals on Amazon products, laptops, HDTVs, electronics, cloud storage services, and much more... Be sure to check out… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Amazing Black Friday bargains you won't want to miss [Updated with even more deals!]

Publié: novembre 25, 2016, 3:00am CET par BetaNews Staff

Tech Deals: Get a 55 inch Samsung 4K UltraHD Curved LED Smart HDTV (with a $175 Dell Gift Card) for $699.99

Publié: novembre 17, 2016, 12:47pm CET par BetaNews Staff

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost here, but you don’t have to wait for those big shopping days to pick up a bargain. Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a selection of great deals to share with you right now, including a 55 inch Samsung 4K UltraHD Curved LED Smart HDTV (with a $175 Dell Gift Card) for just $699.99, Amazon Fire HD6 6 inch 8GB WiFi Tablet for $49.99, Amazon Echo Bluetooth Speaker with Alexa Voice and Home Automation Control (Refurb w/ 1-year Amazon Warranty) for $119.99, and much more. See more Black Friday Deals as they… [Continue Reading]

Tech Deals: Get a Dell Inspiron 17 5000 17.3" laptop for just $609, plus fantastic bargains on Xbox One, PS4, and more

Publié: novembre 11, 2016, 5:49pm CET par BetaNews Staff

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are fast approaching, but you don’t have to wait for those big shopping days to pick up a bargain. Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a selection of great deals to share with you right now, including a massive saving on a Dell Inspiron 17 5000 series laptop, a Dell PowerEdge T130 desktop, and a 55" Vizio M-Series 4K UltraHD LED Smart HDTV with HDR and a $250 Dell Gift Card. Plus we’ve great deals on games consoles, top games, and Amazon devices too. Featured Deals Highly Rated -- 55" Vizio M-Series 4K UltraHD… [Continue Reading]

Amazon Prime Day 2016: The best deals available right now

Publié: juillet 12, 2016, 4:29pm CEST par BetaNews Staff

As you're no doubt already aware, Amazon Prime Day is upon us. You have to be a Prime Member to take part in this day of deals, but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial if you're not already a Prime subscriber. The team over at TechBargains has prepared some of the best, longer lasting deals but be warned, this is a pretty crazy day and a lot of offers are going fast. For full coverage be sure to check out TechBargains for the most up to date coverage on the Lightning Deals which launch every 5 minutes… [Continue Reading]

The 12 most-destructive viruses [Infographic]

Publié: août 3, 2015, 7:40pm CEST par BetaNews Staff

virus detected

The world of computer viruses has changed drastically over the last 25 or so years. In the early days, internet users were very naïve towards email attachments, contributing to the alarming speed that viruses could spread across the globe.

These days, viruses very rarely land in our inboxes due to preconfigured firewalls and strict measures from the likes of Gmail and Outlook.

However, when viruses do successfully infect machines and propagate effectively, they can be highly destructive in their nature and bring some of the largest corporations to their knees. While some viruses are created to simply spread as far and wide as possible, others have more sinister payloads such as the construction of botnets and execution of denial of service attacks.

We took a look at the most destructive viruses to wreak havoc on the internet, and compiled the infographic below.

And once you’ve checked that out, head to the SSLs blog for a step-by-step guide of how each virus works.

ssls_destructiveviruses_final

Photo Credit: Thomas Bethge/Shutterstock

Happy holidays from all at BetaNews

Publié: décembre 24, 2013, 8:31pm CET par BetaNews Staff

We're all ready for Christmas here at BetaNews. The "Santa Stop Here" signs are in place, all the last minute panic shopping and wrapping is complete, and the eggnog is flowing.

Hopefully you're all similarly prepared for the big day tomorrow, (even if you don't celebrate Christmas, we trust you've got something fun in mind to do) and we'd like to take this opportunity to wish you a merry Christmas, and are crossing our fingers that you receive all the tech treats you're hoping for.

To help you get the most from any new tech you find under the tree, we've got some special guides written for popular products like Google TV, iPad Air and Surface 2 which will be appearing on the site throughout the day tomorrow. So if you find yourself at a loose end, or are browsing the web on your new tablet or smartphone, be sure to stop by.

Image Credit: d3images/Shutterstock

Logitech FabricSkin Keyboard Folio for iPad giveaway

Publié: juin 27, 2013, 8:10pm CEST par BetaNews Staff

Logitech's FabricSkin Keyboard Folio for iPad is a case and keyboard combination designed to protect Apple tablets from shocks, scratches and water spills, and also provide a comfortable typing experience. It shields both the touch screen and back panel, offers two viewing angles and is available in a choice of colors. We reviewed this Logitech iPad case a couple of days ago, and really liked it.

The iPad keyboard case retails for $149.99; Logitech has kindly given us one to give away to a lucky iPad-owning reader.

To get a shot at winning all you have to do is leave a (polite) comment below, using a BetaNews account (if you use a general Disqus account, we won't have your email details, and so won't be able to contact you).

We'll randomly select a winner on Friday 28 June, and notify them by email. If we don't receive a reply within 2 business days, we'll select a replacement winner.

We're happy to ship the FabricSkin Keyboard Folio for iPad to just about anywhere in the world, but you will be responsible for any duties, taxes or other charges.

More information on the case can be found on Logitech's site.

Logitech FabricSkin Keyboard Folio for iPad giveaway

Publié: juin 26, 2013, 12:10am CEST par BetaNews Staff

The iPad keyboard case retails for $149.99, but Logitech has kindly given us one to give away to a lucky iPad-owning reader.

We'll randomly select a winner on Friday 28 June, and notify them by email. If we don't receive a reply within 2 business days, we'll select a replacement winner.

We're happy to ship the FabricSkin Keyboard Folio for iPad to just about anywhere in the world, but you will be responsible for any duties, taxes or other charges.

More information on the case can be found on Logitech's site.

Back up unlimited devices anytime, anywhere with Carbonite Business

Publié: janvier 3, 2013, 11:06pm CET par BetaNews Staff

The popularity of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model has raised a lot of questions about security and the cloud, and firms embracing the trend also have to worry about what might happen to important data if a laptop, tablet, or smartphone gets stolen, lost, or broken while an employee is away from work.

It doesn’t matter how careful people are, accidents, thefts, or unfortunate momentary lapses will always occur. NASA famously lost a laptop containing sensitive information earlier in the year, and an Indian nuclear scientist had his laptop, reportedly filled with critical data, stolen from the train he was on. Even the security services have been known to lose laptops from time to time. A report by the Digital Forensics Association, called The Leaking Vault 2011, studied 3,765 publicly disclosed data breach incidents over a six year period (from 2005-2010), and found that 33 percent of stolen laptops were taken from the office and 28 percent from vehicles, compared to just 11 percent taken from home.

Naturally, in the case of BYOD hardware, the loss of data is usually far more worrying that the loss or destruction of the device itself.

Making sure employees always back up important content when in the office is a no brainer, but it’s also a risky strategy -- you can pretty much guarantee devices will go missing or malfunction just before that long-overdue backup occurs (in fact, it’s probably a clause in Murphy’s Law). The trick, then, is to be able to ensure all of the important documents, emails and records on every device get backed up regularly, and from wherever they happen to be located.

Carbonite Business is an affordable solution that automatically backs up an unlimited number of computers, external hard drives and NAS devices in real-time, and in the background whenever an employee goes online, and will of course allow them easy access to the files from anywhere too. There are free apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

Prices start from a flat $229 per year (just over $4 a week), which includes 250GB of storage that can be used by all computers, external hard drives and NAS devices. The administrative dashboard makes it easy to keep track of data usage, so you can check that all of the employees’ devices are fully backed up and there’s enough free space.

If 250GB isn’t enough, you can purchase additional storage in 50GB chunks (up to 12TB). Each additional 50GB costs $46 per year, or $89 per 100GB, per year. There are savings to be made by choosing to pay for two or three years upfront, rather than just the one. Larger firms can opt for Carbonite Business Premier which will enable them to back up an unlimited number of computers and Windows servers and comes with 500GB for $599 a year.

There’s no risk involved with Carbonite Business either, as you can sign up for a free 30-day trial without needing to enter any credit card details (meaning you won’t be stung if you decide it’s not for you but forget to cancel in time).

Photo Credit: Jirsak/Shutterstock

Painless IT administration is easier than you think

Publié: avril 19, 2012, 1:52am CEST par BetaNews Staff

IT administration can be a daunting task, and require hours of additional work to ensure a deployment is operating properly and at peak efficiency. Oftentimes, administrators are faced with overly complex administration software that takes months or even years to figure out.

Worse yet, this software is "built in the bubble"; that is, developers create the platform based on what they think the administrator needs rather than what he or she wants. This results in software that does not mold to the needs of its users, and further adds to its complexity.

That's where Austin, Texas-based Solarwinds comes in to the picture. Founded in 1999, the software maker serves about 93,000 customers from small business up through Fortune 500 companies. Solarwinds' focus is what it calls "user-centric software", and the company has built its suite of products around this premise.

Making IT Work for You

"We believe that the IT pros who use our products everyday should be excited about them", the company says. "That's why we put our users first in everything we do, and strive to deliver powerful functionality while making their jobs easier". This should be music to an IT administrator's ears, given the state of most of the software out there today.

Solarwinds prides itself in building flexible software to meet the diverse needs of IT, while keeping in close touch with professionals to ensure the software is meeting the needs of the administrator. Since Solarwinds' products are built by administrators themselves, better software is the result.

A better equipped IT department means a more efficient enterprise, especially these days where a company's use of technology is a major key to success. "IT departments looking to stay competitive should ask themselves what direction their company is heading, identify the goals and determine IT's strategic role", Solarwinds senior product management director Jonathan Reeve says. "The good news is that IT departments already have the upper-hand in understanding the unique requirements of the businesses they support".

How can this company help you maintain a competitive edge? Below, we take a look at three of Solarwinds' most compelling products.

Staying Fast and Nimble

The larger the deployment, the more difficult it is to make sure everything runs in tip-top shape. Having the capability to measure performance of both the applications you run and the servers that power them is the first step in trouble-free IT administration.

Solarwinds' Server & Application Monitor does that, offering reporting and alerting to issues in your environment. The setup automatically detects active servers and applications in your deployment, monitors for issues with Microsoft's Exchange and Active Directory and performance issues with Java applications, for example. Compatibility with Dell, HP, and IBM System X servers allows for extensive reporting and diagnosis of problems on the server side.

Solarwinds' expertise also shines in that Server & Application Monitor includes built-in suggestions on optimal performance for popular apps and servers to assist in diagnosis and remedying of detected issues. The company also includes a "knowledge base" including broader tips on how to run efficient IT environments to further optimize your deployment.

Server & Application Monitor licensing begins at $2,495, with a 30-day free trial available.

Tackle Issues Before They're Problems

There’s always room for trouble in any IT environment, thus an established system in place to warn of potentially serious issues is vital. Such a system should be able to warn you of negative events and be able to isolate the issue quickly with ample time to react.

Log & Event Manager is Solarwinds' answer to this issue, and will provide that key line of first defense. Say a running service in your environment begins to malfunction. Log & Event Manager's console warns of this, and presents the administrator with options to mitigate the issue, such as restarting the service.

Active Response & Threat Mitigation is a key feature of this product. Quick action is key in today's world where an administrator can be dealing with any number of security threats. Log & Event Manager automatically quarantines infected machines and IP address without user interaction, preventing significant security issues well before they become serious problems.

Solarwinds offers a 30-day free trial of Log & Event Manager, as well as offering licenses starting at $4,495.

Don't Get Caught in Patch Hell

Making sure apps and tools across your environment are up-to-date can be a serious undertaking. But not keeping on top of it is equally serious; any unpatched issue in apps in use by your users could be opening the network up to potential security risks. Developing a solid updating strategy is a vital step in ensuring network health.

So what should you look for in a service to help you stay on top of such an important facet of IT administration? Your selected solution should have the following features: the ability to deploy patches automatically and dynamically, which allows for minimal disruption in your IT deployment; the ability to scan the entire network to locate unauthorized and unpatched machines; and the capability to ensure the patch was installed right the first time.

Solarwinds' Patch Manager includes these features. This service catalogs third-party patches from a host of vendors including Adobe, Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Sun. It also pre-tests these patches, which ensures a problem-free installation when you are ready to apply them.

Patch Manager automates the process of patching and allows for the control of its rollout. This is a good thing, as applying a patch everywhere at once can be disastrous. As any administrator will tell you, Murphy's Law is always in effect when it comes to network administration. By staggering the rollout through Patch Manager IT administrators will be able to monitor and adapt based on the results.

Knowing is half the battle, they say. Patch Manager offers the capability to quickly see across your environment who is unpatched, improperly patched, or worse yet unauthorized. This further tightens up your environment, ensuring all users are using the latest and safest software.

Like all of Solarwinds offerings, Patch Manager is available for download as a 30-day trial, and begins at $2,995.

Editor's Note: Solarwinds sponsored this post.

Photo Credit: .shock/Shutterstock

Apple CEO Tim Cook's email to employees about Steve Jobs' death

Publié: octobre 6, 2011, 2:36am CEST par BetaNews Staff

"Team,

I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing
human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com.

No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.

Tim"

Photo Credit: 1000 Words/Shutterstock

How to enable Facebook Timeline in 4 steps

Publié: septembre 23, 2011, 12:41am CEST par BetaNews Staff

Facebook's new Timeline profiles go live on Thursday, September 29, 2011, but you can convert yours now. You just have to pretend you're an app developer (or continue being one if you already are.)

It's a simple four-step process that can be done in a couple of minutes. Here's how you do it:

Install "Developer" app

The easiest way to do this is just by typing "developer" in the search field. Simply click on the first app (it looks like the picture we've inserted above.) Once you click on the app, it will automatically take you to the developer portal.

Create a new app

You'll also have to enter a CAPTCHA to verify that you're a real person (even though you might not be a real developer.)

Name the app

Enable Open Graph

Name your Open Action

Return to your user profile

Once you return to your profile, you should have the prompt asking if you'd like to enable the new Timeline interface and make it public before it actually launches publicly.

Eric Schmidt's testimony to the Senate in Google antitrust hearing [document]

Publié: septembre 21, 2011, 11:15pm CEST par BetaNews Staff

Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt on Wednesday testified before the U.S. Senate in a hearing called "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?". The Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights sought to determine the impact Google's dominance (considered by some to be a natural monopoly) is having on competition.

Schmidt's oral testimony is embedded here.

ES Oral Testimony - As Prepared for Delivery - Google Docs

We wanted to give you a free HP TouchPad...

Publié: septembre 7, 2011, 10:07pm CEST par BetaNews Staff

Like many of you, we spent hours slogging through HP's overwhelmed order system to get 2 TouchPads. They're giveaways for lucky readers, in appreciation for your loyalty. We really should do more of this.

But HP took more orders than it could fill from its stock of leftover TouchPads -- the product line killed just six weeks after retail sales started. We figured that was the end of our order, but then HP decided to produce one last batch of TouchPads, increasing the likelihood we might still get our two, for you.

Today, we got an email from HP informing us that our order might be fulfilled, but we'll have to wait for it. The message:

"HP Small and Medium Business Customer,

Thank you for your interest in webOS and the HP TouchPad – the response to our price reduction has been overwhelming – both in terms of volume and in the energy and enthusiasm it has generated in our customers.

It has taken us longer than anticipated to work through the high volume of orders that were received. We apologize for any uncertainty this caused, but we are now in a position to understand our ability to fulfill your order.

Your order will be fulfilled at the discounted price. However, we do not have enough stock to satisfy your order at this time. It will take 6-8 weeks to build enough HP TouchPads to meet our current commitments, during which time your order will then ship from this stock with free ground shipping. You will receive a shipping notification with tracking number once your order has shipped. We apologize that these timelines are longer than indicated on the website at time of purchase.

At the significantly reduced price, the HP TouchPad does not qualify for our standard 30 day return policy and is not returnable.

If this delay is not acceptable, please send an email to TouchPadCancel@hp.com with your instructions for cancellation within a week. Be sure to include your HP order number and the name and ship-to address on the order. Also please indicate clearly if this is the only order requiring cancellation or if you wish all orders in your name to be canceled. You will receive an automated cancel notification when your order cancellation request has been processed. Please be aware, however, that cancellations cannot be reversed, and our US SMB store has sold out of HP TouchPad and will not make any further available for sale.

We are pleased that we will be able to fulfill your order and look forward to you joining the exciting community of webOS!

Sincerely,
Your HP Small and Medium Business Team
www.hp.com/go/touchpadFAQ"

Are you still waiting on TouchPad? Will you keep or cancel or your order?

Dell wants to find 'America's favorite small business' [sponsored]

Publié: août 31, 2011, 12:54am CEST par BetaNews Staff

There are nearly 27.3 million small business in the United States -- the majority farms or sole-proprietorships, which have no payroll employees, according to the US Census Bureau. There are 5.9 million small businesses with payrolls, and 3.62 million employ fewer than five people. Are you one of them?

The continuing economic crisis is causing more small businesses to close and the survivors aren't able to hire at pre-2008 levels. Companies with fewer than 20 employees generated only 38,000 net new jobs in fourth quarter 2010, according to the Small Business Administration (those are the latest stats available). Many small businesses are finding that they can't replace aging computers, phones and other devices or invest in tech that could make them more competitive. Is your business among them?

Dell, in cooperation with MasterCard and Microsoft, is sponsoring the "America's Favorite Small Business" contest, which could bring some new tech -- even an online web reality show -- to your company. There are $75,000 prizes total -- $25,000 in Dell computers running Windows 7 Professional and Office Home and Business 2010 and $50,000 prepaid MasterCard.

The contest is all about storytelling, small businesses explaining how they would make the best use of the prizes and communicating something about who they are and what they do. A panel of judges will select 10 finalists, "but America will ultimately decide the winner", according to Dell, which isn't yet being specific what that means.

Dell has set up a YouTube site offering more information about the contest. Contestants can submit their videos there or at this Facebook page. Will you be among them?

This post is sponsored by Dell but written by Betanews staff.

New iPhone 4 is slimmer, faster, super high-resolution, and lasts longer

Publié: juin 7, 2010, 9:55pm CEST par the Betanews Staff

By the Betanews Staff, Betanews

iPhone 4

As anticipated, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 4, at WWDC on Monday, and although we knew most of the details, there were some surprises. Here's what you need to know:

1. Design

9.3mm thick; 24% thinner than 3GS
Stainless steel exterior band is an integrated antenna
Glass front AND rear

2. "Retina Display"

325 "ppi" (apparently they are above "dots" now)
3.5-inch; same as before
800:1 contrast ratio; 4x better than 3GS
Not OLED; claimed that you can't make an OLED with high enough resolution

3. Apple A4 Chip + Bigger Battery

Claiming 40% more talk time, 300 hours of standby
Quadband HSDPA/HSUPA

4. Gyroscope

Adds three axis for pitch roll and yaw, giving a total of 6 axis with existing accelerometer
New "CoreMotion" API's for making use of motion tracking

5. Camera -- Backside

5 Megapixel
LED Flash
HD Video; 720p, 30fps
Built in video editing with iMovie

iPhone 4 FaceTime 6. Front Camera and Video Conferencing

For use with new "FaceTime" video conferencing tools
WiFi only (said that is "for now" -- Apple will work with carriers)
iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 only

7. iOS4 -- new name for the OS

Free upgrade for existing devices on June 21
Multi-tasking
Folders
iBooks for the iPhone

8. Green Cred

Recyclable
Produced without most of the nastier materials

iPhone 4 Black and White

What do you think, will you upgrade or switch to the new iPhone?

iPhone - Steve Jobs - Apple - WWDC - IMovie

Straight from Sony Chairman Sir Howard Stringer: Here's why Google TV is a huge deal for Sony

Publié: mai 21, 2010, 6:20pm CEST par the Betanews Staff

By the Betanews Staff, Betanews

Google Android TV Sony Corp. Chairman Sir Howard Stringer concluded a press conference about his company's forthcoming Android-based Internet TV yesterday with a widely quoted declaration: "This really is a very big deal." But it wasn't until his 50-minute sit down with an exclusive group of a dozen journalists and analysts did he get down to explaining why.

The alliance is one of strange bedfellows. Sony and Google are competitors in mobile phones and supporting services. In addition, consumer electronics companies have typically resisted the advances of high-tech companies. Sony also stands apart from many other consumer electronics companies, by pushing its own technologies and standards rather than embracing others. So Sony's Google embrace is surprising and foreshadowing: Sony is changing its ways.

With the planned fall debut of a standalone "Internet TV" and a set-top box that brings the functionality to existing displays, the TV, Stringer said, "is no longer dumb." By bringing the Internet and, more importantly, a cornucopia of apps to the TV, the same multimedia extravaganza that most people routinely enjoy alone on a PC or smartphone will finally make its way into the living room where they can enjoy it together.

What's so special about a Sony-Android TV? "It's who gets to experience it -- the whole family," Stringer said.

These announcements often come with a ton of hype. You won't be blamed if you believe the normally understated British exec is making too much of too little. The Internet has been moving onto the TV for quite some time. Sony has itself been making hay with its "internet-connected" TVs for two years now. Moreover, there are already platforms out there such as Apple TV and Boxee. Yahoo has been pressing its connected-TV "widgets." And Hulu certainly bridged the gap between PC and TV.

But the Sony-Google deal really does make for a King Kong -- a behemoth big enough and muscular enough to move IPTV from the fringes into the mainstream of modern life. The duo may be savvy enough to make Internet TV a reality. Google gets computers, search, and the Internet; Sony knows TVs.

But something on the Sony side makes the partnership potentially more potent: Stringer has put the finishing touches on a vast management change in Sony's TV group by turning its reins over to a group of managers who previously ran Sony's VAIO PC, PlayStation, networking, and mobile groups.

Stringer refers to these managers as his "musketeers," and they include Bob Ishida, senior vice president of Sony's home entertainment group who ran the VAIO business in the U.S. and Japan for years, and Kuni Suzuki, the SVP in charge of Sony's network products and services group. Stringer said their involvement was calculated: They don't just get TVs, they get processors, operating systems and applications, too. Plus, they bring a "much more combative" computer industry mentality to the once, but no longer, staid world of consumer electronics. They've managed in a highly price-competitive, innovation-driven segment.

The cultural revolution isn't underway just at Sony's Tokyo headquarters. It's also unfolding at its San Diego-based Sony Electronics Corp., which makes TVs, computers, MP3 players, cameras, and more for the U.S. market. Just two weeks ago, Sony named Mike Abary, who spent 10 years with the VAIO group, SVP of its Sony Electronics Home Division, which includes its American TV-manufacturing operation.

Thanks to the VAIO-connected execs, Sony got a jump at working with Google. It began shipping VAIO PCs with Google Chrome in January. And its Sony-Ericsson unit released an Android smartphone to the Japan market in January. As a result, Stringer believes he has a six-month advantage on his rivals.

Not be underestimated either is the fact that Google will be unleashing the thousands of independent developers already aboard the Android bandwagon, who will now be able to create apps for an OS that spans smartphones, PCs, netbooks, tablets, and now TVs.

In fact, Sony's Abary said Android will become the platform for apps that will turn the TV into an information device as utilitarian as other computing devices -- apps in numbers and in kinds we simply "can't imagine now."

Stringer paid homage to Google for its quick feet. When Sony called on Google to talk, it was the Google side that first proposed putting Android on Sony TVs -- and other gadgets in its portfolio later, he said. Stringer contends the relationship with Google is so far "unblemished" by any major disagreements. "It's refreshing, " he said, referring no doubt to the often contentious alliances Sony's long had with the likes of Microsoft and Intel.

By Stringer's own admission, partnerships like the one it has forged with Google often turn into love-hate affairs. In an aside before his sit-down began, he said that running a corporation in today's world of "coopitition" is like "jumping into a Viking boat where you might be handed an oar or you might be handed an axe." In short, you never know when you're friend, or when you're foe.

Today, Google has handed him an oar, he jokes. After this, though, he admits who knows.

What's Now: Apple covers up its 'FirePod' problem, backs off its Bluwiki threats

Publié: juillet 23, 2009, 3:17pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Apple flambé? Exploding iPod reports hushed up

July 23, 2009 • They got that boom boom OW! -- After years of trouble and seven months of investigation, a report by KIRO-TV reporter Amy Clancy unearthed an 800-page Consumer Product Safety Commission report detailing a disturbing number of iPods that overheated and either burst into flames or started smoking.

"At first I thought, how in the heck did I get burned? Right there?" she told Clancy, while pointing to a penny-sized, round burn on her chest. "Then I remembered that I had my iPod right there."
Balderas says her brand new iPod Shuffle overheated while she was running days before, leaving her with a small burn right where the iPod was clipped to her shirt, next to her skin. "My skin started burning really bad, like it was a bee sting that wouldn't stop."

What's Now | What's Next main banner Worse, Apple knew and chose to file exemption after exemption with the CPSC, putting its corporate image ahead of consumer safety. Clancy got the runaround from Apple's PR on this story (welcome to my world, darlin') but the information she's uncovered indicates that a recall still isn't out of the question. Public floggings for Apple's legal beagles and PRejects were not mentioned.

Apple backs off legal threats against Bluwiki

July 22, 2009 • In more Apple legal news, its legal team has decided to stop bullying Odioworks, which hosted a Bluewiki conversation about ways of syncing one's iPod or iPhone without using iTunes, for alleged DMCA violations. It took a slap from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to convince Cupertino that the iTunesDB pages, which did not discuss anything illegal or condone illegal circumvention, shouldn't be hectored by lawyers.

In its statement concerning the end of litigation, the EFF's Fred von Lohmann hinted that Apple might not want to get too self-satisfied about doing the right thing slowly and under duress: "Because Apple continues to use technical measures to lock iPod Touch and iPhone owners into -- and Palm Pre owners out of -- using Apple's iTunes software, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more discussions among frustrated customers about reverse engineering Apple products. We hope Apple has learned its lesson here and will give those online discussions a wide berth in the future."

Your reporter agrees and adds an impromptu recommendation of Red Chair Software's Anapod Explorer, a perfectly legal piece of software that's been protecting her iPod from iTunes for years.

Yahoo to acquire photo-sharing Xoopit

Evening of July 22, 2009 • Yahoo, already strong in the online-photos department thanks to Flickr, has agreed to acquire Xoopit, a site that bridges gaps between one's e-mail inbox and one's social-networking presence.

Saying it hopes to move users past the "massive digital shoebox" stage of rampant online photo sharing, Yahoo's Bryan Lamkin said Xoopit, which already works with the larger company on the My Photos app in e-mail, "will bring phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo Mail."

Qualcomm, eBay earnings have a case of the meh; Sandisk surprises

5:00 pm EDT Tuesday, July 22, 2009 • Earningsapalooza continues with Q3 results from Qualcomm and Q2 numbers from eBay, both reporting losses. The auctioner's earnings fell 29% but managed to land above Wall Street's estimate; the marketplace continues weak, but things are looking good at both PayPal and Skype. The mobile-chipset firm, on the other hand, did not meet its own predictions, even though sales were down just 1.5% year-over-year and up from the previous quarter. They returned an EPS of 44 cents, down a penny from last year's Q3 but up 62 cents from last quarter's 18-cent loss.

Meanwhile, Sandisk surprised analysts with a Q2 profit after four quarters of losses; the firm says they made $53 million (EPS of 23 cents) in the quarter just ended. Chairman and CEO Eli Harari said the company is "cautiously optimistic" about the second half of the year. What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px

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Microsoft, Amazon release earnings reports

Thursday afternoon, 5:30 pm EDT and 5:00 pm EDT, respectively > Rain City's two highest-profile high-tech firms both drop their earnings reports on the same day. (Thanks, guys.) Expect decreased year-over-year results from both, chatter about Win7's status from Redmond, and a few notes on Zappo's from Beacon Hill.

Google Wave logo Google Wave to begin crashing through this fall

September 30, 2009 > If you're still wondering what a Google Wave is or could be, there's a possibility you might find out later this fall, especially if there's an invasion of the things. During one of Google's first development conferences devoted specifically to the new technology, the company announced that 100,000 members of the general public will be invited to join an expanding "Wave Sandbox."

The Wave concept is more of a platform than an application -- in fact, no one's all that certain what the applications are or will be. But the idea is that both human beings and programs will be able to use this platform to communicate with one another, both using IM-like text and (here is the clincher) remote procedure calls. Those calls will follow an explicit protocol, but the Wave programs themselves can be written using scripting languages like Python, so the big (huge) (colossal) watchword here will be security.

ABC Television Network (US) logo How much will you pay to watch ABC?

Perhaps Q1 2010 > Just two months after ABC Television made a U-turn in its online TV roadmap plans, resuming its original plan to invest in and join TV replay service Hulu, the Disney division's CEO made statements at a Fortune Magazine conference indicating he may turn his company back around and resume his pre-Hulu plans.

"At some point," ABC President and CEO Robert Iger is quoted by the Hollywood Reporter as saying, he wants his network to deploy a subscription service to watch programming. He can't understand, he told the audience, why consumers are so willing to spend $5 per hour to watch a movie in theaters, but can't spend more than a quarter per hour to surf the Internet.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Thursday's tech headlines

Wall Street Journal

• Geoffrey Fowler explains for WSJ types the difference between buying a book and licensing its use on the Kindle. You probably already know, but the quotes he got for this piece are worth your time anyway. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Trachtenberg notes that USA Today is now including Kindle sales on its bestseller lists.

• Got kids? Got angst about whether little iMiley or Rickroll is up to snuff academically? Joseph de Avila reports on a host of Web sites providing supplemental homework excuses to park 'em front of the computer educational opportunities for the young ones.

• What do you do when the head of your company is revealed to be a big phony? After B. Ramalinga Raju, head of Hyderabad's Mahindra Satyam, admitted in January that he'd falsified the books -- a $1 billion fraud -- employees and acolytes were left to pick up the pieces. Eric Bellman reports.

New York Times

• Saul Hansell chats with Time Armstrong, the newish CEO of AOL. He's a former advertising guy, so though Hansell never uses the exact phrase "gunning for Yahoo," it's not a difficult concept to grasp.

• Claire Cain Miller reports that mom-and-pop outfits are making good use of Twitter.

• The digital divide is still real, but African Americans are bridging it in one area at least: mobile Internet use.

The Register

• A piece The Reg is posting from out-law.com asserts that the EU's upcoming tracking and monitoring system for transport is apt to violate the privacy rights of travelers.

• Hands up anyone stunned to hear that legal concerns over the GPL were the impetus for Microsoft to release that Hyper-V code. Anyone? Anyone? Gavin Clarke says that's the only reason it happens. One may disagree with his assertion that "the rest was theater," but he makes a reasonably good case.

Ars Technica

• The sky is blue, eating and sleeping are good habits to have, and end users can be complete idiots about security when they want to do something fun like social networking. Jacqui Cheng fleshes out what you already knew to be true.

• It's not available for the likes of you yet, but FCC staffers now have reboot.fcc.gov, a site to kickstart the process of improving the Federal Communications Commission by gathering good ideas from the employees. Matthew Lasar has details.

• Disney is about to start selling DVDs with copies of the movie on a MicroSD card for portable-gadget usage. (Portable gadgets that are not the Pre, anyway.)

CNET

• David Carnoy has been looking at that Apple earnings reports from Tuesday and worries that the sales numbers spell the end for the iPod Classic.

• Ina Fried hung out at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference on Wednesday and filed an assortment of nifty little reports on what the poohbahs were discussing.

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What's Now: The Yahoo makeover, about a year late

Publié: juillet 21, 2009, 3:16pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Yahoo begins beta rollout of new front page

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 • After what feels like a Google-length testing period, Yahoo is rolling out access to its fresh-and-widgety front page redesign to US users, to be followed within a week or thereabouts with rollouts in the UK, France, and India. The design features a configurable "my favorites" bar with several dozen applications that can fly out and preview content above the main screen, improved localization, slightly smaller type, and the ubiquitous purple.

The rollout will evidently be in stages; although screenshots from the prototype are showing up everywhere, certain registered Yahoo users will be the first to be asked whether they want to make the switch. Betanews gave it a shot this morning, but to no avail. What we're anxious to learn is whether the changes will affect "My Yahoo," the component-driven page whose layout is determined by each user. There are folks who already put some time and effort into customizing their pages to look...well, like Yahoo's new homepage, frankly.

New Yahoo Homepage

What's Now | What's Next main banner At All Things D, Kara Swisher is generally well-disposed to the changes, though she spotted a problem that'll vex certain power users: You can update MySpace status from the new front, you can update Facebook status, but you can't update Twitter. You kinda wonder why -- fear of a Google planet? Were the discussions really that close? Makes you think.

At ZDNet, Sam Diaz describes the new functionality as "where a user's two worlds -- My World and The World -- meet" Ben Parr at Mashable agrees that it's an improvement, but settles that hash: "Will Yahoo's new homepage help it rise back to prominence? Our answer: almost certainly not." Ow.

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Legal beagles discuss prospects for fair use as Tenenbaum trial nears

On the road to July 27 > The final pretrial conference in the Joel Tenenbaum case is over, and one hopes Judge Nancy Gertner's getting some rest before things kick off next Monday. Among other matters decided at Monday's meeting was that this thing is running for one week only, with trail to be held all day -- morning and afternoon. According to Ben Sheffner at Copyrights & Campaigns, there's still no ruling on the request by the RIAA for summary judgment on the fair use issue, but her ruling on that could be out by midweek.

Ahh, the fair use strategy... Last week the plaintiffs ran an argument up the flagpole to the effect that even if fair use might be a reasonable defense in some file sharing trial, it's not in this case, so disallow, kthx. Meanwhile, Prof. Charles Nesson keeps on blogging even as he prepares for next week's courtroom marathon, and Joel Tenenbaum does the same.

At long last, RIM readies a Blackberry desktop for the Mac

September 2009 > What took them so long? After previewing a version of BlackBerry Media Sync for Mac back in December, Research In Motion has finally announced the nearing availability of a full desktop-sync package for the Macintosh. RIM blogger Andrey offers plenty of screenshots -- though not a lot of explanation for the delay.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Tuesday's tech headlines

New York Times

• If you're suing for libel and can't get a British court to agree you've been wronged... man, that's just pitiful. (Libel laws in the UK are pretty ferocious.) But so it was Monday for a British company that tried to sue Google for comments made by a commenter on a tech-news site that the search giant indexed. No deal, said a High Court judge.

• Matt Richtel finds evidence that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concealed information from Congress about the high rate of accidents caused by mobile-phone use behind the wheel.

• Jenna Wortham looks at Watchitoo, a service that lets you share the video-viewing experience with friends.

Wired

• The Obama Administration may be gearing up for an antitrust investigation of Google that would feel like "a repeat of Microsoft," according to Christine Varney as quoted by Fred Vogelstein.

• Laid off? Quit whining, says Paul Boutin: It's good for you and good for the industry. (Your mortgage holder will be so pleased to hear this!)

The Register

• Expect some Mac-fanboi excitement at next week's Black Hat, when Dino Dai Zovi will reveal some interesting information on writing nigh-undetectable rootkits for OS X. He says he's got multiple techniques. This ought to be interesting.

• That kernel code drop was just the beginning for Microsoft, says Gavin Clarke.

...and elsewhere...

• San Jose Mercury-News Jim Clark built Netscape and Silicon Graphics back when, but what's he up to these days? He's throwing his resources into chronicling climate change, and hopefully dodging the brunt of it. Not avoiding it, because he says that's off the table now. Scott Duke Harris interviews.

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer An eastside tech firm is working with Coca-Cola to build a soda machine that can custom-mix up to 100 different sodas on command. The Coca-Cola Freestyle machine has been in development for two years.

• Chicago Tribune The Deerfield, Illinois-based Chip Factory was manufacturing something, all right -- a fraud that allegedly relocated $40 million from Best Buy's coffers to those of Abby and Russell Cole, the company's owners.

• Wall Street Journal Marisa Taylor gives a positive review to the Pogoplug network-attached storage device for consumers -- a class of devices some segments of the industry would like folks to refer to as a "personal cloud." Clearly, some segments of the industry have no memory of Brak on Space Ghost.

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What's Now: Amazon sued, Nokia not skidding so much, and Dell plunges

Publié: juillet 16, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Nokia earnings sequentially up, at least

Morning of Thursday, July 16, 2009 • One of the most wince-inducing earnings calls for reporters in recent months has been Nokia's, but things seem to be a tiny bit brighter at the Finnish phone firm as sales rose 7% in Q2 from the previous three months. They're still down 25% year-over-year, of course, but company officials Thursday said they believe the market for mobile devices to be "bottoming out." (The company still chose to revise its earlier target of raising its market share; now the company says it aims to maintain that share at 2008 levels.) Earnings per share were likewise down year-to-year (65.5%) but up sequentially (233.3%).

Nokia said it has sequentially increased its shares of the global mobile device and smartphone markets to, respectively, 38% and 41%; in a similar vein, the company says it estimates industrywide device volumes to be up sequentially about 5%, to 268 million gadgets. (It's down 12% year over year.) Looking ahead, Q3 may see some slight industry improvement in sequential sales numbers, but full-year sales results for 2009 will show a decline of around 10% from 2008 levels.

Amazon bows to Kindle-replacement pressure, but getting sued anyway

Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 1:18 pm PDT • Two ears and a tail to Brier Dudley, tech columnist at the Seattle Times, whose persistent reporting appears to have pushed Amazon to make right on all those cracked Kindles that one hears about. But the class-action suit is still on; as the lawyer for the lead plaintiff puts it, "If they would like to resolve the matter I think the way to do it is through a court-approved process." (A cynical observer might suspect that that particular Seattle-based barrister is familiar with the Amazon way of doing business.)

Facebook tops 250 million users, gets a little creepier

What's Now | What's Next main banner July 15, 2009, 9:08 am PDT • It was inevitable that Facebook would break the quarter-billion barrier, and it took only three months to get that last 50 million, according to a post by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday morning -- not the most exciting post, really (what? he only had three months to write it, people! how much can you expect from a Harvard man?), but the video showing the service's pandemic-style propagation was kind of fun. In all the [*yawn*] hubbub, though, no one seems to have noted an afternoon post on Facebook's developers' blog mentioning that advertisers can now target people based on which applications they're running. Slightly unnerving.

MySpace, a place for...who knows?

July 14, 2009 • See if this sounds familiar to you: A Web site that's been around for a good number of years is desperately seeking to define itself. And in desperation, it looks to its users, and well, they haven't got a clue either. Sure it does. Same song, thousandth verse.

Well, in one of the bigger demonstrations of that same plague affecting a major player, TechCrunch this morning has the Quote of the Week by a long shot: It has obtained a company memo from MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, summing up the problem that...well, maybe his site always had:

We consider our diverse content offering a strength but t oo many logos and disorganized verticals makes the site difficult to navigate and creates confusion about our brand identity. Our users don't know if we're a social portal, a music site, or an entertainment hub. In the last week, we've made some small but meaningful site changes that will lay the groundwork to provide more clarity on our brand and business. Unifying MySpace is critical to how we define ourselves to the world.

Bill Gates eyes hurricane management

January 3, 2008 • An assortment of recently noticed patent filings indicate that the Microsoft alumnus has some ideas about "dampening" hurricanes by pulling warm water deeper into the ocean beneath the storms. IPWatchdog digs in on the filings, while InformationWeek explains why we're just noticing these filings now and Daily Kos goes into O NOES HE IS PLAYING TEH GOD!!!1 mode. Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation quietly dropped another $6.5 million on computer upgrades for 800 public libraries Thursday, just like that.

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Is it the economy, or is it Dell?

Q4 2009 > Global PC shipments for the second quarter of this year would have declined by only four tenths of one percent over the same quarter last year, had it not been for the sudden and precipitous decline of Dell. IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker numbers released yesterday show Dell and only Dell in a calamitous freefall, with shipments declining 17.1% to just 9.1 million units.

On Tuesday, Dell was actually straightforward about its troubles. Even though the general press categorized the company's out-of-cycle earnings warning as another sign of the bad economy, alongside General Motors and "More to Love," CFO Brian Gladden made it clear that everyday market factors such as competitive pricing and low margins were pretty much to blame here. By IDC's numbers, Dell is very much in danger of losing its #1 position in US shipments -- only 40,000 units separated Dell from US #2 HP in the second quarter. And Acer's strength, which now reflects all of its consolidated brands including Gateway, is a clear sign that the global economy is no longer so terribly unstable.

Contrast that to iSuppli's report yesterday, which indicated single-digit growth for the entire PC industry into the foreseeable future. Take Dell out of the picture and suddenly that doesn't seem to be the case; and if Dell keeps performing the way it has been, including losing over five points of market share in the states, then it could be out of the picture in just a few short years. At this rate of decline, Acer could become the undisputed global #2 player by the end of the year, and conceivably the leading consumer PC brand in the world.

IBM, Google release earnings reports today

After the markets close > Mark Loughridge, senior vice president and CFO, steps up to the mic for Big Blue; SVP and CFO Patrick Pichette (along with presumably some other folk) step up for Big Goo. Both are expected to announce profitable quarters, with IBM up an estimated 4 cents per share year-to-year and Google sailing along with a 45-cent per-share increase.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Thursday's tech headlines

Wired

• Plans for health-care reform may backfire if the system relies on current her (electronic health records) software, reports Brandon Keim. And we're not just talking paperwork snafus, but deaths.

• The Obama administration really wishes the EFF would shut up about electronic surveillance dragnets, asking a federal court on Wednesday to toss the EFF's ongoing lawsuit.

• Twittering behind the pop-culture curve? Checking out porn at work? BitTorrenting movies or music you can't buy online? Wired's cover story on The New Rules for evolved humans is full of useful guidelines, plus advice from that inglourious basterd Brad Pitt.

Ars Technica

• The debate over whether to block mobile-phone signals in and around prisons continued at a Senate Commerce and Science committee hearing on Wednesday. Read Matthew Lasar's writeup and see if you can't find good arguments on both sides of the conversation.

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides the underpinnings for three indictments unsealed this week against three men connected to the Viewsat satellite receiver. Looks like one of them managed to get himself recorded saying "I don't want no traces or records" concerning the group's decryption efforts. Oops.

The Register

• Sorry, Symbian friends: Researchers have spotted the first spambot known to target your phones. YXES-B isn't widespread yet, but it sounds like a nasty piece of work if you get hit.

• As John Ozimek puts it, you know your "child-protecting" net filter is a loser when even children's charities say it is, as they're doing in Australia these days.

LA Times

• So what happens when -- not if -- AT&T loses its exclusive iPhone deal? David Sarno reports that the telco should expect a significant defection to "faster, more reliable networks."

• Zookz.com, an Antigua-based site, believes it has the legal right to offer unlimited music and movie downloads for $18/month based on its interpretation of a 2007 WTO ruling. The RIAA and MPAA just might have another interpretation. (This ought to be entertaining.) Jon Healey reports.

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What's Now: Ballmer on Chrome, Google in Labs, and a Twitter novel

Publié: juillet 15, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Ballmer ... reacts ... to Chrome OS

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 • During yesterday's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made his first public comments about Google's Chrome OS -- and to no one's surprised, he's not really moved by it, at least not to any degree he wants people to know about.

Here is a complete transcript of Ballmer's comments as presented in Microsoft's video of the conference:

First of all, I will be...what's the right word?...I will be respectful. Who knows what this thing is? To me, the Chrome OS thing is highly interesting. It won't happen for a year and a half, and they already announced an operating system. I don't know if they can't make up their mind or what the problem is over there, but the last time I checked, you don't need two client operating systems. We tried it before -- Windows 95 and Windows NT. It's good to have one. So I can't, I don't really don't know what's up at Google.
Let me comment, though, about our own situation: What we really do understand is that the model of the future brings together the best of today's rich client Windows-style applications and some of the things that people consider the best of the Web. People like the deployment model, you click on a link and you get your application deployed. People like the notion that, kind of, the globe from an information perspective, and a people perspective, is built in. And people like the richness and visualization and responsiveness and offline characteristics of the Windows applications. So as we talk about where we're going, we don't need a new operating system. What we need to do is to continue to evolve Windows, Windows applications, IE [Internet Explorer], the way IE works in totality with Windows, and how we build applications like Office, like the stuff we showed here, and we need to make sure we can bring our customers and partners with us.
The truth of the matter is, there's good data that actually says that about 50% of the time, somebody's on their PC, at least 50% they're not doing something in the Web browser. So what we need is an operating system that brings local richness together with the Internet, and Windows is the operating system for the job.

This last comment is from the company that at one time professed the "fusion" of the Web browser with "everything you do."

You can't possibly be surprised that Ballmer's no fan of Chrome, so shall we take a tour of the best verbs used to describe Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's comments at the Worldwide Partner Conference?

CNET's Ina Fried went with the mellow "shrugs at." Nick Farrell at the Inquirer chose "mocks" and got a smile out of a weary reporter with his lede concerning the "shy and soft-spoken Microsoft CEO." At PC World, Jeff Bertolucci liked "badmouths," and Reuters found some levity with "laughs off." Sensing a theme?

ITunes Apps Store passes 1.5 billion downloads; reporters seek fresh angle on story

July 14, 2009 • AppScout had the straight-up news item: The iTunes Apps Store passed 1.5 billion downloads on Tuesday according to Apple. So what's a reporter eager for those Apple-fan pageviews but unwilling to post yet another numbers story to do?

Yukari Iwatani Kane at The Wall Street Journal had a nice look at how apps developers hustle to make a splash in the ever-larger pool, while Ryan Kim at SFGate.com tells the story of I Am Poor, the little app that could, by which Kim means, "could withstand Apple's inscrutable approval process."

Google graduates one from Labs, builds another lab

June 14, 2009 • It's almost as amazing to have a Gmail applet graduated from Labs status as it is to finally have Gmail out of beta, but there it is: Tasks has done its time and is now released into the general population. According to the posted announcement, that doesn't mean that it won't continue to get improvements. Meanwhile, the Google crew has found the Labs experiment so congenial to product improvements they've gone and expanded it to Calendar. Google Calendar Labs launches with six options for your enjoyment.

Sun beams out final earnings forecast

Afternoon of June 14, 2009 • (And your reporter gets out one last pun on the company name.) In what is almost certainly one of its last important financial communications before slipping under the Oracle waves, Sun Microsystems warned Tuesday that revenues for the fourth quarter just ended were down a bit year-over-year -- down 30%, to be specific. The Wall Street Journal's coverage was distinctly elegiac, while the San Jose Mercury News made a point of saying that Oracle's still looking forward to bringing Sun into the fold. The shareholder vote on Oracle's acquisition offer is scheduled for 10:00 am PDT on Thursday.

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Analysts: PC industry growth to stay slow into 2013

Q4 2013 > It's the first sign from a major PC industry analyst firm that the double-digit growth the PC industry enjoyed since 2003 will not be enjoyed again for quite some time to come, and that double-digit linear growth is not a "foundation element" of the industry (as other analysts liked to say prior to 2008): In a report yesterday afternoon, the hardware analysts at iSuppli predicted that global PC unit shipments would resume a growth pattern, but limited to 7% in 2012 and even tapering downward.

Forecast of global PC unit shipment growth going into 2013, from analysis firm iSuppli.

Though it is not a long-term down trend in the market, it is limited growth that iSuppli is predicting, in keeping with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's theory -- repeated again at Microsoft's Partner Conference yesterday -- that the economy is resetting and that the world will need to become accustomed to a slower growth pace.

The "reset button" for the market was confirmed: a likely 4% negative growth in PC market shipments by the end of the year, not as bad as the 2001 downturn but still a bad speed bump. As trends normalize, iSuppli believes that notebook PC shipments will continue to surge -- and if that were the basis of the market, it conceivably could regain double-digit growth. But apparently the continued descent of the desktop form factor will play a counteractive role.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Wednesday's tech headlines

TechCrunch

• Michael Arrington's shop had an exciting day yesterday after an anonymous tipster handed the site a bundle of 310 documents that turned out to be corporate and personal documents from Twitter and various of its staffers. Arrington's original announcement of the "gift" triggered a lively discussion of the ethics of publishing such material, or even using it as guidance for future stories. Arrington has a habit of finding himself in these conversations about disclosure.

• In other Twitter news, TC and Valleywag spent the day lobbing posts back and forth about the rumors of a secret government backdoor "firehose" of tweets, much to Biz Stone's vocal annoyance.

• And in other other Twitter news, author Matt Stewart is publishing his 480,000-character novel about the French Revolution on the service, 130 characters at a time. MG Siegler somehow manages not to use the phrase "Chinese water torture" in this article, which must have been difficult.

The Register

• John Ozimek reports that New Zealand is on the verge of instituting a rather broad Net filter "service" for its citizens. Those Kiwis never struck your reporter as nanny-state types, but...

• A BlackBerry update pushed out to users of the Etisalat network in the United Arab Emirates contained a hefty dose of spyware. Bill Ray says that the prevailing theory right now has UAE authorities whipping up some code to try an end-run around BlackBerry's architecture, which makes surveillance certain kinds tough.

• Andrew Orlowski has the sad duty of writing an obit for blade-computing pioneer Chris Hipp, who has passed away unexpectedly at 49.

New York Times

• Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic-surgery firm that had employees giving a "facelift" to online customer comments about its services, will be paying the State of New York $300,000 for being sleazy like that.

• The Democratic Leadership Council wants to give every schoolkid a Kindle. "A Kindle in every backpack" -- have any of these think-tank types looked into the average schoolboy's backpack lately? (And wouldn't it be swell if we could get every schoolkid an actual backpack first, and pencils and paper and all the other supplies schools are having a hard time buying?

Ars Technica

• We've heard from Microsoft, but what do the instant-on Linux shops make of the Chrome OS announcement? Ryan Paul talked with Phoenix Technologies and DeviceVM.

• The RIAA's case against Joel Tenenbaum is still two weeks away from the starto of the trial, but the pre-trial motions are flying fast and furious yet. Now the RIAA wants the judge to hand down a limited summary judgment saying that Mr. Tenenbaum wasn't engaging in "fair use" when he accessed the P2P networks. If the group gets their wish, things could get sticky for the defense.

What's Now: First rollout of Office 2010 code due today

Publié: juillet 13, 2009, 3:30pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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First rollout of Office 2010 code due today

Morning of July 13, 2009 • If you're feeling a bit damp this morning, look around you, because there could be a leak going on. Yes, as fully anticipated, there's clear evidence of a leak in the latest build of Office 2010, which is expected to be officially shipped to certain select Microsoft partners as soon as today. The leak indicates that shipment has already begun, and that Microsoft's "friend" is not cooperating.

This morning, in advance of the company's Worldwide Partner Conference, a Microsoft engineer tried to filter the leak by creating a little rumor: that perhaps the leaked copy of Office 2010 may be 1) incomplete, and 2) infected with a little virus.

"As a heads up, because we want to ensure our customers are safe, we have been monitoring various torrents and already detected quite a few that were infected," writes Microsoft's Reed Shaff. "As a reminder, the Win 7 leak was used as a vector for attack and it's not surprising to see this being used the same way. So, please be aware that if you download this torrent there is a very good chance you are also getting some unexpected malware with it."

This morning, Microsoft unveiled a whirlwind of marketing videos showing peeks of the new software, and Long Zheng's blog may be the only place to see them all in one place today, since Microsoft's own Web site for these videos appears to be offline. (Ah, the wonders of server virtualization!)

AMD set to deliver low-, high-power six-core Opterons

Morning of July 13, 2009 • Last month, AMD began rolling out perhaps the most critically important line of CPUs in its history, the first six-core Opteron server processors. AMD must regain respect in this segment of the market, even if it doesn't regain market share leadership, because it will not (no CPU maker today can) earn enough from just the consumer sector to stay above water.

What's Now | What's Next main banner This morning, stage 2 of that rollout process begins, with three new models in the HE series and two in the SE. The HE is AMD's "somewhat lower power" line-up; only AMD, not Intel, is gambling that there are two facets to the low-power side of the market, with the larger slice of that market preferring to balance power and performance, with a smaller percentage (the "EE" side) wanting low power at all costs. The SE side of the market is meant to attract the opposite market segment, seeking high performance at all costs, including some supercomputer builders. But in an interview with Betanews you'll see later today, AMD admits up front that side of the market is shrinking. Or at least that may be AMD's excuse at the moment for keeping its processors clocked under 3.0 GHz once again.

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Report: Intel 'Core i7' brand to reach notebooks by Win7 launch

October 22, 2009 > Back when Microsoft and Intel were officially cooperating on getting their products launched in sync with one another (new operating system + new CPU = Your Computer's Too Old Already), they ended up at loggerheads regarding such issues as timing. Privately, it's those closed-door arguments that have been blamed for Windows Vista's infamous 2006 commercial rollout delay. Now that the two companies appear to be on their own schedules, however, there's a strange synchronicity to them.

Case in point: Intel's rollout of its new Core i7 and i5 brands, which motherboard manufacturers are now telling the Taiwanese industry daily DigiTimes should be right on schedule for Windows 7 -- certainly not later than October, perhaps as soon as September. The mid-range model in its "Clarksfield" mobile processor series, clocked at 1.73 GHz, should be ready for shipment during this timeframe, which may mean that a Core i5-based CPU may be ready for what we'll call the "just-back-in-school" market (Intel missed the "back-to-school" window already) by the end of October.

An alternate scenario for Chrome OS emerges: a backup OS

August 2009 > DigiTimes has the edge on looking ahead this morning, citing a Chinese-language Apple publication as saying global #3 PC producer Acer has plans to produce netbooks with both Windows XP and Android OS for next month.

Now, why would anyone want that? Think about this: Linux has a toehold in the emerging "instant-on" operating system market, as evidenced by the growth of Phoenix' HyperSpace OS. That's an instant-on system that provides a full suite of applications, such as an office apps suite that uses OOXML, and the Opera Web browser. In Acer's new contraption, Android can fulfill that role, getting the Linux OS in front of more pairs of eyes without sacrificing the traditional role of Windows XP. Of course, this won't drive the price down either (the XP licensing fee remains one of Acer's biggest expenses), but it could actually help clear the way for certain other Linux distros to find their way to netbook desktops, and Google's Chrome OS would be one of them.

LG has apps store, Android phone on tap

July 14, 2009 > South Korea will be the initial home of the LG's new apps store, slated to open Tuesday. But what about the rest of us? Reuters' coverage doesn't mention any wider rollout plans, which they covered in conjunction with the Korean rollout of the Arena 3D-touchscreen smartphone. Rafat Ali at mocoNews.net is more forthcoming, however, saying the store will roll out globally by the end of the year.

Surveymeisters can't get their Win7 story straight

Q4 2011 > Because a new operating system doesn't sow sufficient confusion on its own, we have analysts to further muddy the waters. Today's example: On the one hand, we have IDC claiming that Windows 7 will account for 49.5% of Windows operating systems purchased by corporations, with 75% running 7 by the end of 2011. On the other hand, we have ScriptLogic, a Windows network-management company that asked its clients and found that 6 out of 10 have no plans to deploy Win7. Hmm.

APC happened to notice both surveys and got a good chuckle (and a great photo) out of it. TechWhack picked up on the ScriptLogic numbers, Network World's John Fontana (writing for PC World) went with the IDC numbers, and the rest of us are left to remember that there are lies, damn lies, statistics, and pre-release BS-ing.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Monday's tech headlines

New York Times

• Hiroko Tabuchi has an oddly affecting story about the many Japanese robots sitting idle in the global recession. Better the machines than the humans, of course, but all this has implications for innovation down the line.

• It's hard to take the Times seriously when they say which outlets break the news first, since the paper is notorious in certain circles for using information previously appearing in other publications without proper credit. (Which, I suppose, is what it perceives as "payback.") Still, Steve Lohr is only reporting on a Cornell study -- underwritten by, among others, Google and Yahoo -- that says the traditional news media moved an average of 2.5 hours faster than the blogosphere on key stories during the 2008 election cycle. In Cornell we trust.

• Twitter has absconded with Alexander Macgillivray, deputy general counsel for products and intellectual property at Google. He will serve as general counsel for the microblogging service. No, he will not have to keep contracts under 140 characters.

Federal Computer Week

• The inspector general at DHS recently took a look at how the department has handled an assortment of security vulnerabilities spotted back in 2007, and -- surprise! -- he was impressed, says Ben Bain.

• An overhaul -- some would say a long-overdue overhaul -- of management of the radio-frequency spectrum allocations here in the US is at hand. There are two slightly different bills working their way through Congress, both called the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act. William Jackson has details.

Network World

• This ought to be good: Tim Greene has advance word on a Black Hat seminar explaining how an attacker intent on keylogging can grab the data from either an electrical socket near the computer or a cheap laser pointed at a shiny spot on or near a laptop.

• Rackspace's CEO would like to explain how the company managed have two power outages in a co-location facility inside two weeks. Jon Brodkin is listening.

Washington Post

• The Post's pair of Sunday tech columnists both delivered the goods yesterday. Mike Musgrove speaks with Mark Espinosa, the number-one citizen-reviewer on Amazon... and to Harriet Klausner, who has written 19,463 reviews and counting.

• Meanwhile, Rob Pegoraro -- clearly having something other than fun on the social networks of late -- goes into some detail about the malware situation on Twitter, Facebook and the like.

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What's Now: Angry day around the Net includes Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Mono

Publié: juillet 10, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Microsoft has known about 0-day vulnerability for months

Since spring 2008 • Really, Microsoft? All the work you've put into getting right with the security community, and this is the result? Computerworld's mighty Gregg Keizer leads the charge on the news that Redmond has known about the recently publicized DirectX vulnerability for years. Years.

Keizer gets some great quotes about wanting to "give customers a complete solution" and lets the facts -- years? -- speak for themselves. Elinor Mills at Cnet has follow-up and the official non-information from a Microsoft "spokesperson" (actually their PR firm, operating as usual several gears below the in-house blogs). Meanwhile, CNET's Ina Fried reports that Microsoft thinks it would be cute to resurrect, of all things, the loathsome Clippy in ads for Office 2010. Way to walk away from that history of fail, Redmond.

iPhone still making some users cranky

Afternoon of June 9, 2009 • As new iPhone 3G S users settle in with their devices, there are have scattered reports of trouble, but Thursday was a banner day for beefing about problems and disappointments. PC World's Bill Snyder, apparently dealing with a nasty case of Chrome Envy, led the charge with a spritied rant about "Why I Should Not Have Bought the iPhone 3G S."

CNET's David Martin covers the uproar over those discoloring white-case 3G Ss and Apple's handling thereof, and Jason Mick at DailyTech asks what the heck is up with battery life (one of Snyder's many concerns, by the way.) Elsewhere in the Apple cart, pressure from Korea has convinced Apple to recall its first-gen (that is, 2005-vintage) Nano MP3 players, which appear to have gotten into the habit of occasionally exploding.

Kindle catches a nice niche (and some complaints)

What's Now | What's Next main banner June 9, 2009 • Seriously, is the entire industry in need of fiber or something? Though The Wall Street Journal had some happy news for the Kindle -- the Practising Law Institute, a continuing-education nonprofit for lawyers, will make its materials available on the flat plastic platform -- not even Amazon's cult-fave gadget escaped the general crankiness online.

Nicholas Deleon at CrunchGear agrees: "We're starting to see more and more 'hate' being thrown Amazon's way," looking at the rising unease many book publishers have at the prospect of Amazon locking up the digital-book market. And ZDNet's ever-amusing Jason Perlow lobs the grenade many would-be buyers would like to land in Jeff Bezos' lap: Surely $299 is enough to buy PDF capability, for pete's sake.

Jack White forges a digital path

July 9 Techdirt looks at the announcement that Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather, the restart of Loretta Lynn's career) is launching a digital subscription service for fans of his work. For subscribers, The Wall Street Journal's John Jurgensen has a nice piece on Mr. White's burgeoning media empire; frankly, Mr. White (who turned 34 on Thursday) has a better handle on the business than anyone we're heard from at the RIAA or the big labels.

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Software developers learn Mono is not a danger to humankind

Fall 2009 > Could Java be displaced as the principal runtime package distributed with Linux? And by a product whose origins are the dreaded "M" word?

Certainly Microsoft has given the open source community cause for skepticism about any market move it makes, searching for rugs that can be pulled out from under them and secret trap doors that could be sprung at any moment. But ever since Microsoft's move last Tuesday to open up the C# language and its underlying .NET CLI to community licensing, even the best journalists have been unable to find real evidence of a trap this time around.

In LinuxPlanet yesterday, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols speaks to Ubuntu's technical board, which is comparing Sun Microsystems' Java to Mono, the independent implementation of .NET funded by Novell. Ubuntu is telling Steven that it plans to distribute the best software it can, and that it finds Mono to qualify in that category. Some very popular Linux apps, including the Banshee music player, are built on the Mono platform. This despite the warnings of GNU leader Richard Stallman, who has perennially warned open source advocates of the dangers, dangers I tell you, of trafficking in any code which has been touched by the unclean hands of C#.

On the other side of the argument, some guy named David Worthington (gee, that name has a familiar ring to it!) writes for SD Times that it's far too soon to write off Java as a major player, citing its well-established development community around Eclipse. But developers whom David spoke to appear to agree that it's been Mono, not Java, that in recent months has attracted the most developers.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Friday's tech headlines

Los Angeles Times

• Dave Carroll trusted United Airlines to ship his guitar without destroying it, and not only did they fail to complete the task, they gave the Sons of Maxwell guitarist the runaround for months about it. So he made a video about it, and... well, the story has an ending. Check it out, especially if you've ever flown that nasty ORD-OMA leg:

• Alex Pham interviews Sun co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, who explains that most of us are already operating in the cloud whether we realize it or not.

• If this journalism thing doesn't pan out, thinks your reporter, maybe the thing to do is go join KGB's merry band of fact-finders. Matt Milian finds out what the workday is like at the human-powered 99-cents-per-query service. (Though he doesn't answer my biggest question about KGB: Isn't this a service for people who don't know their local library is probably set up to do this sort of thing free?)

TechCrunch

• Slapfight! Bing Travel has recovered from last Friday's data-center fire, and they Twittered Thursday that they'd appreciate it if Google would freshen their data to reflect current events, kthx.

• Data portability among the social networks makes the news again, as Jason Kincaid reports that Power.com has counter-sued Facebook for restricting users from moving their info around. Facebook continues to press its suit against Power.com for scraping the site and storing user credentials, both of which are forbidden by the Terms of Service.

Adweek

• Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to buy Twitter and doesn't want to sell MySpace. And he thinks Facebook is "like a directory." Zillionaires: They are not just like us.

• Ever wondered how Bob Geldof might have done the Live Aid charity project differently if he'd had the Web at his disposal back then? Keep an eye on his new endeavor, tck tck tck.

• Elena Malykhina recaps that #moonbat Twitter deluge last week, which some called a marketing blitz and others found more akin to 140-character spam.

New York Times

• Riva Richmond covers claims by Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher who claims that preferring Facebook to MySpace is equivalent to "white flight" and other class divisions. Your reporter seems to recalling rolling her eyes about this theory when she first heard it floated years ago.

• European newspaper and magazine publishers have once again demanded that the EU expand copyright regulations, saying that it's the way to get said publishers to innovate their business models. Hmm.

All Things D

• Megastores Unclear On The Concept: Twitter messages are generally under 140 characters long. Wal-Mart has taking to tweeting... and their "terms of use" for the compiled set of micro-messages is 23,105 characters long. Charming.

• Kara Swisher likes the ubiquitous, super-simple Flip digital videocamera, but as she notes, seeing news producers using them at Michael Jackson's funeral to get footage of those poor shell-shocked kids was just... eww.

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What's Next: Google throws down the gauntlet, as Chrome challenges Microsoft

Publié: juillet 8, 2009, 3:30pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Google goes for the OS gold chrome

9:37 pm PDT Tuesday, July 8, 2009 > Google's Sundar Pichai (VP of Product Management) and Linus Upson (Engineering Director) posted an announcement that the search giant will be launching a Chrome OS, geared toward netbooks.

"Speed, simplicity, and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few seconds," reads last night's post. "The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the Web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware, and security updates. It should just work."

Did everyone hear that okay? Back in the back, Apple, did you get the part about "just work?" How about that "don't have to deal with viruses" part -- way back in the back, is that Mr. Walt Disney rising from the dead? Sir, did you get that message? The nirvana part?

What's Now | What's Next main banner Our Scott Fulton appears to have had some thoughts on the matter in the can, ready to run (just add water!), whenever Google made such an announcement.

As Technologizer's Harry McCracken puts it, "one of those breaking stories that's stunning at first -- until you think about it, whereupon it feels like it was always inevitable." McCracken has eleven questions about the announcement, and he's posted them publicly because Google itself isn't answering any more questions (at least it says it won't) until sometime i the fall.

BusinessWeek's Rob Hof has scrutinized the post and thinks that the new OS isn't necessarily a shot directly at Microsoft. (No, of course not.) Barron's Eric Savitz, writing for Tech Trader Daily, begs to differ.

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Sustained DDoS attack vexing US, South Korea

Since July 4 • Reports of its severity are either widely underreported or wildly exaggerated, but everyone agrees that various US and South Korean government targets have been under DDoS attack for the past several days. US-CERT hasn't posted anything on its site yet, but spokespersons in various government agencies say the department is on the case.

Reporting for The Register, Dan Goodin writes that 26 agencies in the two nations have been hit, though a source familiar with the attacks characterized them as "mostly modest." Choe Sang-Hun at The New York Times says that a few sites are still affected as of Wednesday morning.

Blogs-on-paper project folds

July 7, 2009 • He gave it a heck of a shot and a good six figures of his own money (and credit), but serial entrepreneur Joshua Karp on Tuesday had to lay to rest the dream of The Printed Blog. Posting to the site, he says that the project to make best-of-breed blog posts available to print reasons has been suspended "due to a lack of outside investment capital." But he learned a lot, and he still believes that "the next few years will be among the most exciting times in the history of journalism."

Not all the eulogies were as upbeat as Mr. Karp's. At TechCrunch, John Biggs described the project as "in a word, ludicrous -- it was akin to pressing MP3 podcasts onto vinyl for those who still used a Technics turntable." Claire Cain Miller at The New York Times compared The Printed Blog's troubles to those of newspapers in general, and Podcasting News' James Lewin shrugs, "It's getting harder and harder to see what value print can bring to new readers."

La Russa drops suit against Twitter

June 26 St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has withdrawn the suit he filed against Twitter after an impersonator pretended to be him (@TonyLaRussa). Most observers think that was probably a good choice considering the weakness of the case: As Zusha Elinson put it at law.com, "Tony La Russa, the famed baseball manager known for his charity work with injured pets, apparently knows when he has a dog on his hands." According to Knox Bardeen at MLB Fanhouse, previous reports that Twitter would pay La Russa's court costs and donate to his animal-shelter charity were unfounded.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Wednesday's tech headlines

The Register

• Oracle's quick post-acquisition execution of Virtual Iron's products presents a pretty opportunity for VMware's efforts to steal away those customers. But since VMware's hypervisor and server management tools aren't exactly compatible with VI's offering, the company's had to be a bit creative with their "safe passage" courting strategy.

• A recently released Linux patch gets Tom Tom's GPS around the Microsoft VFAT patent.

• "More junk in the trunk," carps the dek writer on Timothy Prickett Morgan's piece concerning the launch of PostgreSQL 8.4. That was set to launch on June 29, but a "showstopper" bug delayed it for a few days.

Engadget

• Lockheed Martin and Microvision are working on a heads-up eyepiece display for "non-line-of-sight command and control in distributed urban operations for dismounted warfighters" based on Microvision's PicoP technology, says Joseph L. Flatley. The illustration alone is worth the click, hinting as it does that a cyborg Iggy Pop is the wave of the warfighting future.

• The iSaw USB-powered chain saw may be a hoax, but your reporter will be needing one anyway. Also, a boom stick.

New York Times

• Acer's Gianfranco Lanci thinks that PC makers would be a lot better off if some of the smaller players would disappear, as profits would rise. Nice to know the CEO's got his eye on keeping that high-quality, consumer-centric vibe alive at Acer.

• Watch out for email with shortened URLs a la bit.ly, is.gd, and TinyURL, warns Brad Stone; spammers have been abusing the system to dodge the filters.

• Jenna Wortham suggests that dedicated GPS systems are going the way of the cassette deck thanks to improved smartphone capabilities.

Washington Post

• Brian Krebs reports on the latest wave of low-tech fraud -- less computer work, more phone-transfer skill.

• Emma L. Carew takes a look at the virtual-assistant phenomenon. It's a nice job option for those facing long-term unemployment, but no one's getting rich.

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What's Next: Circling the wagons against cell phone exclusivity deals

Publié: juillet 7, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Hey, guess what? Your Social Security number!

Afternoon of Monday, July 6, 2009 • Carnegie Mellon researchers have run the numbers, and with information on just your date and place of birth, they can predict with decent accuracy some or all of the digits of your Social Security number. The problem's especially severe for the 21-and-under crowd, whose numbers were uniformly assigned soon after birth and therefore conform especially closely to certain well-known numbering patterns. The authors of the survey said they were able to ID all nine numbers of test subjects' SSN in fewer than 1,000 tries for 8.5% of that population, making those numbers "no more secure than a three-digit PIN." In smaller states such as Delaware, they could guess 1 out of 20 numbers in 10 or fewer attempts. The research is available at the link above and will be presented today (Tuesday) on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors will also present at Black Hat later this month.

The political blogs are out in front with this story. (You reporter plans to tackle it tomorrow for Lockdown, by the way.) The Daily Kos goes to town on not only the SSN system but on the equally messed-up Green Card ID system, asking if we have "the political will and the administrative drive" to unscrew a system so outmoded and compromised. Randolph E. Schmidt tackles the story for Real Clear Politics, scoring a quote from a Social Security Administration official who calls claims that the code has been cracked a "dramatic exaggeration"... but says the SSA was planning to start randomizing those numbers next year anyway.

Code theft of trading-system IP could get interesting for Goldman Sachs

What's Now | What's Next main banner Since July 3, 2009 • The unfolding story of Sergey Aleynikov, Goldman Sachs, Teza and some highly sensitive trade secrets will unfold for weeks, and though tech (specifically, Goldman's powerful trading tech) is at the heart of the matter, it's the effect on the markets and the way mega-traders such as Goldman do business you'll want to watch.

For straight-up reporting, Bloomberg's David Glovin and Christine Harper have the bases covered. Zero Hedge is the go-to site for sparky commentary on the developing situation -- not the tech details, but excellent context and a great overview of how this may prove to be not just a significant breach but a matter of national security. New York's Jessica Pressler picked up the most entertaining angle: Apparently Mr. Aleynikov is a more-than-passable ballroom dancer.

Sprint and Best Buy offering a 99-cent netbook, sort of

In your Sunday circular • May Sprint interest you in some EVDO action? If you don't mind hauling to your nearest Best Buy, the telco's offering a deal: Sign up for a two-year contract, and they'll throw in a wee Compaq Mini 110c-1040DX for the price of a soft taco. Kevin C. Tofel at jkOnTheRun ("Using mobile devices since they weighed 30lbs") spotted the deal and did the math; at $60/month for service, that's a $1440 99-cent netbook you're getting. FierceWireless reminds us that we've seen a few more tentative runs at this business model already.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, RIAA make various grating requests

Monday, July 6 • Jammie Thomas, as per Ars Technica and Wired, would like that $1.92 million file-sharing judgment thrown out. The RIAA, as per the Associated Press and Home Media Magazine, would like the court to ban Ms. Thomas-Rasset from downloading or sharing any more tracks, and want the court to compel her to delete the tracks she's got. Your reporter wants all parties to fall in a deep, deep hole.

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Take notes, Yahoo will make its latest comeback play today

Morning of July 7, 2009 > We're expecting Yahoo to come forth later today with the public beta launch of Search Note, a service for users to take comprehensive, sustained notes on the Web sites that users locate using Yahoo search.

Now, Google is already out there today with its usual deflating comments, saying stuff like, "We've already got that." But Yahoo is looking for a way to get back in the game, especially in the realm of public opinion -- though it's still the #2 search engine in terms of traffic, it's been #3 in terms of buzz, thanks to Microsoft's somewhat successful Bing rebranding.

So expect Search Note to be a feature that puts Yahoo more prominently in the user's face throughout the entire research session, rather than exiting once the user thinks he's found what he's looking for. Betanews will start testing Search Note later today (assuming the launch goes as planned), and we'll let you know what we find.

Nation's new top trustbuster will take the lead on cell phone exclusivity deals

July 2009 > After The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday unofficial information stating the US Dept. of Justice's new antitrust chief, Christine Varney, will spearhead a probe into cellular carriers' exclusive deals with phone manufacturers (such as AT&T/Apple), the lack of denial on anyone's part probably means the probe will happen. There's no official word yet from the Justice Dept., though we may expect a statement as soon as today.

The news comes after Congress held hearings into the matter, placing an AT&T president on the witness stand amid a largely hostile environment. There, Paul Roth testified that deals such as the one his company made with Apple for the iPhone actually drive innovation, since they enable monetary investments and guarantees that might not otherwise happen. Roth did have some backing up there, but Sen. John Kerry (D - Mass.) eliminated any hint of neutrality on the subject, heading a barrage of questions that frequently suggested an absense of a quorum. Sen. Kerry remains on point on this issue, as he will likely join incoming FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and the DOJ's Varney in a public triumvirate that may cast suspicion on a practice whose alleged negative effects on competition may be under suspicion themselves.

Dell could pay thousands for that $15 monitor

This week > The Associated Press reports this morning that a pricing error that emerged on Dell's Taiwanese Web site has placed the manufacturer in hot water with the country's trade authorities. After having marked its Latitude E4300 notebook computer at 30% of its actual retail price, and marked a 19-inch LCD monitor at the equivalent of just over $15, the Fair Trade Commission -- the same agency that fined Intel last year -- is threatening to fine Dell if it doesn't honor those mis-marked prices, at least for the customers who saw them.

Reportedly, Dell did offer misinformed customers a discount of some kind, but just not a 70% discount. The company faces possible threats of up to roughly $750,000.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Tuesday's tech headlines

The Register

• Rik Myslewski reports that we could start getting projection-capable cameraphones in our hot little hands as early as the end of the year.

• Some British police are now sporting uniform-embedded video cameras for on-the-hoof documentation of situations in which they might find themselves. But there's a problem that has nothing to do with surveillance, Lewis Page writes: According to union head Peter Smyth, "a couple of [the camera units] have caught fire, which isn't ideal." You don't say.

• A teenager in New Zealand found some nakey pictures of his mom in the garage and decided to sell them online. His mom was okay with it. It's not quite as disturbing as the guy who called a radio station here to dedicate Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" to his mom, but it's sure up there.

Mashable

• You knew it was a matter of time: "twitter" is on its way to the Collins English Dictionary.

• Jockipedia's subject matter may not be to the taste of most Betanews readers, but Ben Parr sees some excellent thinking in the wiki-slash-social-networking site.

• Why does Stan Schroeder find the iPhone "Pocket Cemetery" app morbid? It's sweet. Remind your reporter of a project or two on The Final Curtain, in fact.

• It is more Twitter-esque that there exists a game called "Die Fail Whale," or that the game itself lasts just 25 seconds?

Ars Technica

• The American Chemical Society, bowing to the inevitable, has announced that it'll switch publishing media -- print to digital -- for all but a few of its many scientific journals. John TImmer has details, and thoughts.

• So where's Mac Quicken '09? And why has Intuit removed all reference to it on its Web site? Jacqui Cheng has questions.

San Jose Mercury News

• Larry Magid hit the National Educational Computing Conference in late June.He saw some great ideas from innovative teachers, but he's worried that the kids using "back channel" chats and messaging tech during classes will end up behaving like tech professionals at other conferences he's attending -- which is to say, like children.

• Chris O'Brien profiles Marc Canter, one of Silicon Valley's true originals, and wonders whether Northeast Ohio will know what hit it when the legendary multimedia wonk relocates there for his latest project.

And elsewhere

• The Washington Post's Michael Bimbaum tells of an online-education program designed specifically for girls. Subject matter varies from calculus-level math to art and literature, and the teaching style is more collaborative as girls are alleged to prefer. (Don't look at me, pal.)

• David Strom at Datamation clearly had a fine time compiling his list of 25 innovative-but dead tech products released over the years. #24 engendered much amusement over here, but where the heck is our beloved RocketBook or the original, far superior Sharp Zaurus?

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What's Now: Drenched with 'Purple Ra1n,' iPhone users caught eating 'redsn0w'

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Drenched with "Purple Ra1n," iPhone users caught eating "redsn0w"

Afternoon of Sunday, July 5, 2009 • If you're a Mac user and you're wondering where those fruit-punch-looking stains on your keyboard are coming from, well, it must be an outbreak of "Purple Ra1n." Last Friday, independent developer GeoHot gave iPhone 3G S users a shower of sorts with his pwnage tool for Windows, enabling iPhone users to install their own apps outside of AT&T's control. Yesterday collaborator Ari Weinstein ported that tool to the Mac, although he also acknowledged that for the "full freedom experience," users should turn to the Dev-Team's "redsn0w" tool, for unlocking their 3G S units from the AT&T network.

Andreessen co-launching new venture-cap firm

Evening of Sunday, July 5, 2009 • The founder of Netscape and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz have looked at those other Valley VC firms and figured out a fresh angle: Two general partners, one approval process. Andreessen Horowitz will launch with $300 million and is prepared to address companies at any stage along the launch continuum.

In a statement this morning, the partnership said it is willing to commit up to $50 million at a time, to any entrepreneurial venture at any stage of its development -- in other words, not necessarily fresh startups. This could be a boon for any venture looking to make a second or third try at a good idea.

What's Now | What's Next main banner Om Malik takes a look at the firm's wide net and streamlined process, while Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch got some quality time with the ever-quotable Mr. Andreessen and pulls out five points guaranteed to stir up conversation. (Guess how many VC firms Andreessen expects will go out of business in the next decade?) And those around long enough to hear "Andreessen and Horowitz" and think wait, didn't those guys hate each other? will enjoy Kevin Maney's take for Fortune.

Browser trends amuse nerds throughout holiday weekend

July 2008 - July 2009 • StatCounter's got a lovely batch of browser-adoption stats posted to its site, and since not everyone enjoys fireworks, an assorted of tech folk poked and prodded at the numbers throughout the weekend.

There's fun for everyone in there. Your reporter, for instance, is impressed by BlackBerry's massive jump in share over the past four months, from 4.74% in March to 20.83% this month, making it a close third-place finisher behind the iTouch. (Equally impressive is Android's drop during the same period, from 6.12% to .07%. Ow.) Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, on the other hand, notices that IE has lost 11.4% of share in that period to Firefox, Safari and Chrome. At Technologizer, Harry McCracken notes that such numbers probably aren't cheerful for Microsoft, which will have to convince folks to switch (back) to IE to rebuild market share -- something that, according to his Twitter followers, isn't likely.

ABC shows start to appear on Hulu

Over the weekend • So you missed the final episode of Scrubs? As of Saturday night, that and various other ABC shows are popping up on Hulu, the happy result of the deal announced back in April.

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LucasArts to spill "awesome news for our old school fans"

Sometime Monday, July 6 > LucasArts spent Sunday whipping up excitement on the Twitter concerning the announcement of... something. One of their old-school titles is getting a fresh release. If George Lucas wishes to atone for the sins of Star Wars 1-3, it will be a DS release of Grim Fandango.

Flounder-flat CrunchPad nears launch

In a few weeks > CrunchPad, a Michael Arrington project, has announced that working prototypes of its much-awaited Linux-based Web tablet are on the way to their offices, and he'll have more to say about it at a press-and-user gathering in the Valley later this month. There's no keyboard and no hard drive, though scrutiny of images at the link above seems to reveal at least one USB port as well as something that looks a lot like a memory-card slot. (You can see plenty of the browser and the onscreen keyboard, as well as the onboard camera, in the YouTube video below.) The apparently-final prototype both slimmed down and plumped up slightly, with body depth down to a willowy 18mm and the price up a bit to around $300 (estimated).

Web 2.0-related horror film on the way for Halloween

October 13, 2009 > Like Charles Durning? Of course you do. About six years ago, he and Billy Dee Williams and some other actors made a movie called iMurders, concerning a "Facespace chat room" and the murders of various participants thereon. We know that movies with Internet hooks are generally so bad they're... well, bad. This one is going straight to DVD now. Based on the trailer I believe the words we're after are "delightfully sleazy."

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Monday's tech headlines (special legal-affairs edition)

Technology & Marketing Law Blog

• Eric Goldman's fine blog has a couple of interesting case in the spotlight. First, he looks at Satterfield v Simon & Shuster, in which a plaintiff who signed up for "free ringtones from Firm A ended up having her phone number sold and resold repeatedly, and getting a bunch of unwanted text spam as a result.

• Meanwhile, it has apparently been a banner year for trials concerning one of the few bits of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that survive to this day. 47 USC 230 in a sense codifies the old "you own your own words" attitude of the Net; specifically, protecting Web sites and such from being liable as "the publishers" of content posted by someone else (generally speaking, users). In the courts, this has been working out to a lot of cases of people suing sites (eg., MySpace) for bad things that happened when users met other users offline. Fascinating stuff.

The Legal Satyricon

• The Satyricon -- known to you perhaps for its strong language as well as its great analysis -- is remarkably restrained in its coverage of last week's Lori Drew decision, choosing mainly to link back to its previous reporting on the matter, in which they fairly accurately predicted Judge Wu's assessment of the situation.

• In a similar vein, Marc Randazza has a barn-burner of a post on why the Nikki Catsouras situation is, like the Lori Drew case, one in which one's gut reaction -- eagerness to suppress some horrible, horrible photos -- is at odds with what makes for good law. If you're still furious at Drew (and if you caught her self-satisfied smirking over the weekend, I'll just bet you are), read Randazza's essay and see how you feel by the end.

New York Times

• What's Micron got to be cheerful about after ten consecutive quarterly losses? Maybe more than you realize, says Brooke Crothers.

• Symantec? McAfee? Are you running either of the two leading anti-malware packages? Ashlee vance thinks you may or may not have noticed that the two firms are in a heated competition for end users -- and that sometimes companies in battles like that do things that aren't so nice.

Engadget

• Is Sony aiming to go Nintendo's Wii one (or more) better? Paul Miller has an overview (and a diagram!) of a Sony patent application for tech that can detect ordinary objects -- not merely controllers -- and store data about them for future use.

• Is your workplace sufficiently dehumanizing? No? Talk to your boss about new technology from Japan that'll let him/her strap cameras and ankle sensors to the employees for surveillance purposes. There, fixed it for you.

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What's Next: Obama gives 'Einstein' the go-ahead, while China gives 'Green Dam' a thumbs-down

Publié: juillet 3, 2009, 3:44pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner Seattle nerds are hereby ordered to appear in costume and with a canned-food donation in Fremont at 6:00 pm PDT today (Friday) to help set the world record for largest gathering of lurching zombies. (Zombies and silly world-record attempts: It doesn't get geekier. Xbox 360's even co-sponsoring, for pete's sake. Also, BRAAAAINS!) The pyrotechnicans among us are enjoined to keep safe.

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Federal judge admonished (and that's all) for explicit material on personal site

The 21st century, believe it or not • Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, legendary for concluding his opinion in a certain high-profile free-speech case with "The parties are advised to chill," has been reprimanded after a yearlong investigation for having various explicit (but legal) photos and videos on his family's Web site.

The panel had investigated claims first made in the Los Angeles Times stating, according to the decision yesterday, "the "website" -- http://alex.kozinski.com -- included 'a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows,' 'a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal,' and 'a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.' Regarding the alleged public accessibility of the 'website,' the article reported that the Judge 'said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends.'"

Friends? Oh, well...With apologies to the jurist, who once called blogs "hateful things", we link to three for the more interesting coverage of the decision. Law.com explains the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals' reasoning. Ashby Jones at The Wall Street Journal (its Law Blog, in fact, but shh!) reached Judge Kozinski for a quote and reports that he is "pleased that today's unanimous decision reaffirms what I have said all along about my private files: They were kept on a private server and were not intended to be shared publicly." And AmLaw Daily, which does a nice job of explaining how a disgruntled lawyer started this particular ball rolling, links to the 41-page opinion, originally filed last June 5.

Californians gain access to database of lawmakers' votes

June 16, 2009 • MAPLight and the California First Amendment Coalition have prevailed in one of those lawsuits you can't believe anyone would have to file in the 21st century: Announced only yesterday, they've settled a freedom-of-information lawsuit against the Office of Legislative Counsel of California. And what do they win, Johnny Olsen? Why, a machine-readable database of state lawmakers' votes, upgrading the previous plain-text dump on the California Legislative Information site.

The two groups filed suit in December 2008 after repeated requests to the Office of the Legislative Counsel for access to the database used to create the previous plain-text site, which was clunky and very hard to search. Since then, the OLC has stepped up its game, launching a Web site that indeed provides the data -- to the two public-interest groups or anyone else visiting the site -- in a structured and machine-readable format. Thus propitiated, the CFAC and MAPLight.org withdrew their suit. Going forward, MAPlight will combine the legislative database with data on donations to California legislators, in hopes of daylighting the connections between money and political capital. And both CFAC and MAPlight will be keeping an eye on the next big legislative database, known for now as "Inquire."

Conviction stemming from MySpace suicide tentatively overturned

July 2, 2009 • There's a difference between not being convicted of a crime and being found innocent of doing wrong. Daily Kos, covering what appears to be the conclusion of the Lori Drew case, accurately states that the decision is most likely a win for free speech on the Internet... and now, please, may the grown woman who tormented a fragile 13-year-old experience "nothing but pain and anguish for what she's done." Other pertinent words in the piece by AmbroseBurnside include "vile human being," "disgusting," "people we hate or abhor," and "a true victory for all of us who love the freedom the internet allows and want to keep it safe from more government intrusion."

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Would Albert have really signed his name to this?

July 2009 > Once again, AT&T is crawling into bed with the NSA to screen computer traffic.

Last May, President Obama made an explicit pledge not to use federal government resources to spy on private Internet users. "Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority...[which] will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," the President said at the time. "We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans."

Despite that pledge, as first reported by the Washington Post this morning, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters that her department would proceed with a plan initiated by the Bush administration to screen Internet content, with the help of carriers such as AT&T, but presumably in a manner that would protect civil liberties.

The "Einstein 3" plan would, among other things, route Net traffic from civilian agencies through a monitoring system designed to parse for attacks or other intrusion attempts. The Obama administration has been figuring out which pieces of that system they mean to keep. Privacy advocates have been briefed, and say there's a lot of work to do to make this system work.

Green Dam is offline and China is on the fence

Perhaps no time after July 1, 2009 > The Chinese government hasn't given up on the Green Dam project, but between diplomatic protests, inadequate notice to manufacturers, and no strategy for controlling Mac or *nix machines, Beijing appears to have put the stewpot back on the stove.

The Chinese government has not issued any new statements on the matter since June 30, although multiple sources are reporting that PC manufacturers have been allowed to go ahead with their plans to install the "Green Dam for Escorting Children" filtering software on their systems if they want to.

The question is now, do they really want to, especially in the wake of last month's University of Michigan security report from Prof. J. Alex Halderman and his team, who discovered that Green Dam may not only be un-authentic but could cause a greater security problem than it solves.

"We examined the Green Dam software and found that it contains serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors," Prof. Halderman's team wrote. "Once Green Dam is installed, any Web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process. We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg."

Loretta Chao and Ting-I Tsai, writing for The Wall Street Journal this morning after weeks of great coverage of the situation, aren't so sure that by "postponement," China's IT ministry means "doing this within our natural lifetimes." Chao and Tsai noted that "obfuscating" by Chinese officials in the press could mean that the project's simply headed for permanent limbo.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset will appeal RIAA case

Apparently until hell freezes over > Think about it: Based on trial outcome, Ms. Thomas-Rasset is a less sympathetic defendant than Lori Drew. Copycense beats its collective head against the desk on our behalf.

Asteroids: The Movie

Coming in 2010 to a theater near you > Cue the Jerry Goldsmith music, and the Genesis effect creating a brightly-colored planet. The "Universal" letters come into orbit and the cloudless planet settles into place. A triangular ship comes into focus, fires little white pellets into it, and blows it into pairs of smaller planets. First two, then four, until the screen is full of them.

How much do you want to bet? Seriously, as The Hollywood Reporter first reported, some of the team who's bringing you the GI Joe movie this year is working on a script for Universal next year for the film adaptation of the immortal Atari 1978 coin-op game "Asteroids." No casting has been done yet, and no plot points have yet been revealed (or probably yet even created).

You think it even needs a theme song? Or just BOM-bom-BOM-bom-BOM-bom-BOM with a siren or something in the background?

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Friday's tech headlines

The Register

• Police serving in the UK's Crown Prosecution Service are being encouraged to prep for court testimony by doing research on Wikipedia.

• Apple may just keep coming at Psystar with the lawsuits, but the Mac-clone maker is on its way out of bankruptcy and refuses to lie down: "When life gives you apples, make applesauce." Oh my.

• Apple has applied for a patent for software that'll help bad karaoke singers improve their grasp of pitch and key. Alert Stockholm.

San Jose Mercury News

• The next time someone tells you that bloggers can't also be serious journalists (good morning, Judge Kozinski), you tell them about Alison van Diggelen, the proprietor of Fresh Dialogues. She's not making money from it, but her brand of interview-based environmental coverage is professional in just about every other way that matters. Mike Cassidy tells her story.

• Clean tech took a beating like everything else during the recession, but biofuels, better batteries, and the like saw improvements in venture-cap funding during the quarter just ended -- and confidence in the sector is up too, Tracy Seipel reports.

Washington Post

• Prisons in Maryland hope to cut down on inmates' mobile-phone communications by jamming signals near the facilities, but there are legal and technical consequences. Henri E. Cauvin has details.

Los Angeles Times

• The Performance Rights Act, which would put over-the-air radio stations on the hook for paying royalties to artists (as well as composers, which they do now), is making those stations nervous. More on that in a minute -- but first, 22 straight minutes of commercials and three replays of the latest Beyonce single!

• Some products just don't sell outside the brick-and-mortar environment: Hershey, the chocolatier, will close its online store as of July 31. There are closeout discounts over there if that kind of thing interests you.

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What's Next: The first signs of improvement for the tech economy

Publié: juin 30, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Pandora silenced abroad, which LimeWire gains an exec

Monday, June 29, 2009 • The strikes and gutters of digital music advanced another frame on Monday, with users in France reporting that their Pandora feed is gone while LimeWire scores an executive fresh from TotalMusic.

Jason Herskowitz blogged Monday that he's on his way from Virginia and TotalMusic to Brooklyn and LimeWire, that mysteriously-still-standing download site. Before TotalMusic, Mr. Herskowitz spent time at AOL as Director of Music Products (WinAmp!) and at -- Web 1.0 veterans, brace yourselves -- DigiScents, the company that meant to bring scent to the Web back in the day. [And what would the Web smell like? I always suspected cedar and feet, but perhaps you have other ideas. -- AG.] We wish Mr. Herskwitz the smell smell of success, minus the feet.

As for Pandora, reports are still thin on the ground, Slashdot participant randalotto reports that when s/he attempted to sign on from France, s/he received the following message: We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the US. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative. ... The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.' I'm not sure what the deal is or what licensing requirements suddenly changed, but Pandora in France is no more...

Ow and good luck to the thousands of international users coping with withdrawal at this writing.

YouTube's new citizen journalist resource

June 27, 2009 • Top video sharing site YouTube opened the YouTube Reporters' Center, a resource that provides some basic how-to information for the potential citizen journalist.

What's Now | What's Next main banner Historic photographs and videos are increasingly coming from cell phones and low-resolution point and shoot cameras; and with streaming services such as Qik, we can already watch live, unfiltered news happen right in front of us. With this technology available to practically everyone, anybody equipped with a phone could be the next Abraham Zapruder.

Now, YouTube has made helpful video tips available which can help improve the overall quality of citizen reports, including tips on interviewing by Katie Couric, investigative journalism tips from Bob Woodward, and other videos such as "How to Capture Breaking News on your Cell."

NewTeeVee said Monday that mobile video uploads have increased 1700% in the last six months, and the post-electoral upheaval in Iran clearly illustrated the riveting news that comes when everybody is "at the right place at the right time."

IPhone backs getting toasty

The last seven days • Just because people buy a marshmallow-colored iPhone doesn't mean they want it toasted, but that's apparently happening with some of the new 3G S units. Brian Chen at Wired says faulty battery cells may be the problem, and speaks to one expert who predicts a recall of us to hundreds of thousands of units. Erika Morphy at MacNewsWorld, on the other hand, says it's not clear yet that anything's happening, let alone anything necessitating a recall on that scale. Stay tuned.

Teenager explores ancient technology: a Sony Walkman

It was 30 years ago... • Scott Campbell is 13, and before a few weeks ago he thought of the iPod as the norm in portable music. Somehow, the BBC reports, his father Alan convinced the lad to carry a first-generation cassette Walkman around for a week -- the iconic artifact is turning 30, believe it or not -- and compare it to his usual player.

The result is wonderful, funny ("It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.") and wince-inducing ("Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?"). The kid's hamming it up in spots -- no, dear, the eject button doesn't generally lead to eye injuries -- but it's just too much fun to miss.

Outsourcing in of the news

May 26, 2009 • This story's slightly venerable, but if your organization is grappling with the thought (or the aftermath) of outsourcing, check out what happened when the Hartford Advocate outsourced an entire edition of its weekly paper. Will you surprised to hear that it was neither as cost-saving or as trouble-free as outsourcing advocates would have you believe? The staff tells the story.

In his grief, a turn to Twitter

Sunday and Monday • Losing a parent unexpectedly is a surreal experience, and that's what Billy May III is going through in the wake of the death of his pitchman dad. Over the past couple of days, he's been tweeting as he goes along, and the thread has been an amazing thing to see. Attend if you will.

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Analysts: Tech economy will get better while it gets worse

Fall 2009 > Here's the outlook for the US tech economy, as forecast by Forrester analysts yesterday, and let's play this out because maybe it makes sense: The firm revised its prediction for the overall downturn in business technology spending down a few ticks for the year 2009, from 3% to 5%, acknowledging that businesses' declining investments are a bit worse than they thought.

But then the firm is improving its outlook for 2010, using this theory: Once businesses realize the economy isn't as bad as they thought it was, they'll reinvest at such a rate that the tech economy will grow by 7% next year. So let's back this up: Things are worse than we thought, but not as bad as businesses thought. Is that what we're supposed to be reading into this forecast?

Producers: Tech economy is already getting better, but may get worse

July 2009 > Meanwhile in Taiwan, where a huge chunk of the world's semiconductors are being produced, one of the world's largest build-to-order chip makers, SMIC, is revising its business outlook for Q2 2009 upward -- and not just by a few ticks, either -- based on, get this, robust demand.

In other words, businesses and consumers are, um, investing.

What's going on? Well, the fear is that when tech device manufacturers reduced their orders for parts late last year, they over-estimated the downturn in demand (which sounds a lot like Forrester's theory, applied to production). So as demand did not slip by as much as folks thought it would, inventories reduced too quickly, and now manufacturers' orders are picking up to fill the void. But analysts (not with SMIC) are actually worried about this trend, because they believe that once suppliers and manufacturers over-purchase to fill inventory gaps, they'll reduce their purchases down the road to compensate.

Can studying macro-economics make one seasick?

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Tuesday's tech headlines

Technology Review

• Researchers in Dresden have an idea for improving magnetic storage media -- both information density and functional lifespan. It's all in the theoretical stage right now, but if you dig materials science, you'll like this piece.

• Simson Garfinkel, calling privacy an inalienable right even in the Facebook era, puts for a long and detailed argument for smarter protections, including clearly articulated federal policies (makes sense) and a strong electronic identity system (say what?).

• Robert Lemos delves into Content Security Policy, the tech Mozilla helps will finally quash cross-site scripting attempts when it turns up in Firefox in 6-12 months.

TechCrunch

• Jason Kincaid expects word today of new Call-to-Action overlay technology, which allows paid advertisers to put a link to any site they wish directly on a video.

• Michael Arrington looks at a financial battle shaping up between VC and the company's founder and employees at Mochi Media, the advertising and payments network for developers of Flash games. It's not likely to end well however it ends. Do these things ever?

New York Times

• Leslie Kaufman looks into the rise of recycling centers for consumer electronics. Currently a patchwork of state laws governs the process, much to the frustration of manufacturers (and just about everyone else, really).

• That wily Palm Pre -- recipient of yet another firmware upgrade yesterday, by the way, including mysterious security fixes -- is starting to make certain skeptics feel more warmly toward its parent company. Matt Richtel explains how that plays out for one analyst.

San Jose Mercury-News

• Intel showed off some futuristic new stuff from its research department at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View recently. Steve Johnson saw devices getting better at touching delicate objects, aiding the prosopagnosia (face-blind) community, and spatial navigation.

• The annual Cybernet Expo was held in San Francisco last week, and the vendors at the adult-services conference agreed on one thing: You know the recession is for real when even boobies aren't selling. Video web sites are also cutting into profits, attendees told John Boudreau.

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

What's Now | What's Next main banner 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.

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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.

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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.

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AFTER THE JUMP: Tech headlines from around the Net...

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px 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.

What's Next: Britain rises up against cyber-terrorism, slowly

Publié: juin 26, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner On a difficult day for many of us to be talking about high technology and protocols and gadgets, when we'd rather be singing and remembering how lucky we are to be alive and to have friends and people we love, Betanews would like to take a moment -- just one moment -- to ask for blessings for the memory of a lady who used her public platform to make one of the first true public demonstrations that domestic abuse is wrong, and that anyone being abused has the right to fight back, and fight hard. And for giving us the honor of helping her fight her last battle in spirit. Thank you, Farrah. We appreciate you.

The UK's new cyber-terrorism crackdown heads up What's Next this morning, but first, a look at the last 24 hours...

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Palm revenues down, spirits up

Afternoon of Thursday, June 26, 2009 • Palm's earnings call for Q4 '10 (and the fiscal year) included a nice testimonial to departing CEO Ed Colligan, a not-so-nice loss of 78 cents/share, and a suggestion by new CEO Jon Rubenstein that a pushy analyst look something up on Wikipedia. On the analyst's own Pre, no less.

This was of course the last set of quarter earnings before Pre sales are reflected in earnings, and the tone of the call was very much forward-looking. Rubenstein sounded downright ebullient (for a tech CEO in 2009), and he spoke repeatedly of his confidence that WebOS has legs to carry the company forward for the better part of the next decade. And there's room enough for everyone in the smartphone market, he said -- "vigorous competition" and high consumer expectations are part of the game from here on out, as well as greater cost-efficiencies as the new OS builds out.

And yes, Rubenstein really did suggest Citi's Jim Suva go look up "late summer" -- as in the calendar region when one might expect wide release of the WebOS SKD -- online. Suva wanted to know if "late summer" meant "before Labor Day;" Rubenstein said, "I would look it up in Wikipedia. Go on your Pre, type in 'summer', and search on Wikipedia." Any flashbacks to Goodfellas, Joe Pesci, and his #@!&% shinebox are probably just some problem your reporter was having.

International entities criticize Green Dam; Solid Oak pestered?

June 25, 2009 • The Wall Street Journal reports that 22 international industry and trade associations have expressed their concern over the Green Dam filtering-software situation to the Chinese government -- directly to premier Wen Jiabao, in fact. Back in Silicon Valley, ZDNet's Richard Koman says that someone may be attempting to disrupt operations at Solid Oak, the conmpany that makes CyberSitter -- the software on which Green Dam appears to be based. Hmm.

Google Voice says hello to first beta testers

June 25, 2009 • At last, the Google Voice (nee GrandCentral) beta invitations are rolling out. Google made the announcements on Twitter and in its blog, and Boy Genius Report has video of a demonstration on the one-number-for-all service as seen on The Today Show. Over at PC World, JR Raphael has mixed feelings about the service and has five reasons to use it, and five reasons not to.

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It takes one to catch one

Summer 2009 > Over the coming season, the UK Parliament will coordinate an effort to build a formal national cybersecurity strategy. (Now would be a good time.) This after the publication yesterday of recommendations by government minister Lord West for a comprehensive national counter-terrorism plan, which puts fighting the war in Afghanistan and cybersecurity on equal footing with one another.

"The report covers the different 'domains' in which security challenges must be addressed, and identifies cyberspace as one increasingly important domain in which individual, commercial and state security can be threatened, whether by other states, or terrorist or criminal networks," reads a statement from Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office yesterday. The PM added that Cheltenham will become the center for a national Cyber Security Operations Centre, which will become the nucleus of the UK's new Office of Cyber Security.

In a speech yesterday, Mr. Brown said, "Just as in the 19th century we had to secure the seas for our national safety and prosperity, and in the 20th century we had to secure the air, in the twenty first century we also have to secure our position in cyberspace in order to give people and businesses the confidence they need to operate safely there."

Some publications were aflutter yesterday over the UK government's pledge to chase down potential cyberwarfare attacks . It's unclear whom the BBC in particular thinks would be better suited to the job -- pastry chefs, life coaches, the cast of EastEnders? -- but your reporter for one would sure like to be there when the unnamed reporter who wrote the BBC's coverage hears about Kevin Mitnick, Frank Abnagale, Jeff Moss, most of the interesting people at L0pht / @stake / Symantec, or any of the thousand other cases of hat-switching in the security community. And we know Kim Zetter at Wired knows better; it's possible that the chance to use "naughty boys" in a headline was simply too much to resist there.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Friday's tech headlines

San Jose Mercury-News

• Yahoo's annual meeting on Thursday didn't attract much attention, did it. But Elisa Ackerman went, and heard Carol Bartz asking shareholders not to compare the company to one of the other two funny-named search sites -- "this direct comparison model to Google is not fair and is frankly not relevant."

• Meanwhile, Google had a roomful of developers hanging on its words as attendees at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference got a few inside tips on the site's ceaseless quest for speed, and the startling effect of waiting the blink of an eye for a page to load. The company also unveiled a site with tutorials and performance tools for Web developers.

Bloomberg

• A milestone is quietly passed as Nielsen announces that certain shows such as The Simpsons and CSI: Whatevertheheck are pulling higher ad rates online than they do on TV. Brett Pulley and Andy Fixmer at Bloomberg News have the details.

• A battle between eBay and the founders of Skype is messing with the proposed IPO -- and has Skype's attorneys telling a court on London that they may have to pull the service (!) if things don't clear up.

TechFlash

• Jawad Khaki, Microsoft's corporate VP for the Windows Hardware Ecosystem Group, is off to "start a new phase of his life," as Todd Bishop puts it, more likely bringing his considerable philanthropic interests to the fore. You can do that stuff at 51 it you've been with Microsoft since dirt was invented the Windows 95 era. Best to luck to Mr. Khaki in whatever awaits.

• RealNetworks quietly trimmed a few jobs in the Seattle-based media software group. That's the unit responsible for RealPlayer SP.

• What's Amazon doing with that new patent for an electronic pen that could synchronize notes between print and electronic copies of a document?

Valleywag

• Ryan Tate (settling in nicely as head Wag) recaps the Chris Anderson plagiarism kerfuffle from earlier in the week, and adds some pretty convincing thoughts as to why the Wired e-in-c should maybe consider spending less time on books and more time getting his magazine's house in order.

• Did 23andMe lay off seven employees recently? The privately held genetics firm recently picked up $13 million from Google (whose co-founder, Sergey Brin, is married to 23AndMe head Anne Wojcicki), but Tate's tipster sounds pretty confident.

The Register

• Take that, Microsoft Hohm; avast, Google Power Meter. An engineer on the Isle of Wight has wired his house to keep him abreast of its power usage... via Twitter.

• Cade Metz was at Structure '09 this week, and noticed that Sun CTO isn't quite as ga-ga over enterprise cloud computing as many of the other marquee executives attending. Does he know something about Oracle's plans, she wonders?

• Amid all the notable deaths, The Reg's Sarah Bee speaks of a small one that threatened the subject's Wikipedia entry. It doubles as an elegy (brief) for a friend.

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Up Front: NSA would have central role in military cyber command

Publié: juin 24, 2009, 2:31pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Defense secretary creates cyberspace military command

Morning of Tuesday, June 23, 2009 • As expected, DoD secretary Robert Gates has announced the creation of a new military command dedicated to cybersecurity and focusing on the .mil domain. The Washington Post reports that Gates will recommend that President Obama designate that the post be held by the director of the NSA; that would currently be Lt. Gen. Keith Anderson, who would likely be awarded a fourth star to do the job. Gates wishes the command to be launched by October and under full steam within one year.

The NSA, seriously? As Siobhan Gorman and Yochi Dreazen at The Wall Street Journal point out, it was the NSA's expanding role in federal cybersecurity that led former National Cyber Security Center head Rod Beckström to leave that job back in March. Officials at DHS, which houses the NCSC, were unavailable for comment.

That bright light shining on Oracle isn't Sun, yet

June 23, 2009 5:00 pm EDT • The word "Sun" only emerged from Larry Ellison's lips once, and not during his prepared remarks, during yesterday afternoon's Oracle quarterly conference call with analysts. (Seeking Alpha has the proof.) The company's acquisition of Sun last April did not officially close during its prior quarter (its fiscal Q4 2009) and it won't close during the next one, so the subject was practically off-limits.

That's a shame, because the question of how Oracle integrates Sun has everything to do with its present and future. Sun Microsystems gives Oracle the hardware it needs to make it competitive in providing "out of the box" installations for customers, and that was the subject of Ellison's sole reference to Sun yesterday in response to an analyst's question. But Sun's Java is also the engine behind two of Oracle's principal software product lines: its Fusion middleware and its Java application servers from BEA Systems (from a late 2007 acquisition). Oracle absolutely needs Java, but to get Java whole and intact and healthy, it needs Sun's people...and Oracle isn't a company that's known for acquiring the people behind its targets.

The only hint that Oracle would be willing to invest in those people who would either find themselves Sun employees or Sun rejects, came from Co-President Safra Catz. Referring to Oracle's record margins of 51%, which enabled revenues to rise to $6.9 billion for the quarter even while service-related revenue plummeted, Catz gave this little glint of guidance: "Obviously the Sun acquisition will change the margin story for a while, but it will improve also over time."

Boxee's big night includes Apps Dev Challenge winners

Morning of Tuesday, June 23, 2009 • Boxee for Windows? Boxee and Major League Baseball? Boxee and a Digg-for-TV project? Boxee with a capital "B," even? Tuesday was indeed a big day for the media-browser-slash-television service, which unleashed everything from alpha of that Windows software to a list of winners of the company's Apps Dev Challenge. Interactive TV Today has a fine summary, as does Boxee's own blog. The Industry Standard takes a closer look at the apps-dev community -- 120 and growing -- and the winners of the contest.

The Associated Press asks journalists to control their friends

June 18, 2009 • Editor and Publisher has the text of a social-networking policy that instructs employees of the Associated Press to not only to watch what they say online, but what their friends say on AP staffers' Facebook walls: "It's a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn't violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted." Needless to say, not everyone's wild about the new "editing responsibilities."

Mashable's Ben Parr was forthright, calling it a social-media policy gone too far, saying, "What others post on your social profiles should not be grounds for punishment." TechFever Network wondered if the news organization had lost track of the "fine line between social exposure and social engage[ment]."

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China digs in on Green Dam

July 1, 2009...no fooling > Complaints are increasing, protests are being planned, threats of lawsuits are in the air, and security researchers are having a field day, but little things like those aren't deterring the Chinese government from holding fast to the July 1 deadline for manufacturers to add the Green Dam filtering software to machines sold in that country.

Wikileaks on Monday posted an exploit targeting the software, which Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng cheerfully described as "thereby giving the entire world the ability to mess around with the software once it hits Chinese computers in just over a week." Reuters has been keeping abreast of calls inside China to boycott the filter. People's Daily Online, meanwhile, said yesterday that widespread reports of a formal US complaint about the filtering situation were inaccurate.

Microsoft has a pull date for the Win7 release candidate

Windows 7 Professional retail packaging August 15, 2009 > Have you been putting off that Win7 RC download? Get on the stick, because the end is nearing. Microsoft expects to release Windows 7 to manufacturing in July, and the company announced on Tuesday that it will pull the download off of its servers on August 15.

By the way, here's something you may only see right here and nowhere else in your life...not even if you own the thing: It's Windows 7's retail package, which Microsoft unveiled last night. It's a little plainer looking than Vista's, but it keeps the "dog-eared" look on one corner. Dozens upon dozens of folks will rush to their retail software outlets to get their hands on one. (You wonder just how many operating systems are sold in boxes any more.)

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What's Now | What's Next main banner Wednesday's tech headlines

Wall Street Journal

• Kindle users would like you to be a Kindle user too, and Geoffrey A. Fowler reports that thousands of them are volunteering to meet with strangers to show off their own personal Kindles. Amazon is amused but has no formal role in this.

• Philip Kaplan, whom we all once obsessively read back when he was helming F'edCompany.com in the early years of the decade, is now an entrepreneur-in-residence with Charles River Ventures. Feel the age creeping up on you.

• In your daily dose of earnings news, Oracle on Tuesday posted a revenue decline for the first time since 2002. They also reported their highest margins ever and said that the Sun acquisition should close in the quarter ahead. Ben Worthen reports.

Technologizer

• Fearless Technologizer leader Harry McCracken spent some time with RealPlayer SP, the beta of the next version of that media player, and tested its ability to grab YouTube (or other Flash) video and convert it to formats friendly to your iPod, your BlackBerry, your xBox, and so on.

• Mr. McCracken also got a look at HP's Mini5105, the company's "latest and most lavish netbook, " just announced. It's not an official review, but he seems to have liked what he saw.

San Jose Mercury-News

• Once upon a time, Steve Jobs bought a beautiful, historic home built in 1925 by George Washington Smith. Then he got tired of it and wanted to build something else, and he sort of let it fall apart while he bickered with the city of Woodside over whether he should get to tear it down. Eight years later, the house has a buyer, Jobs will pay to have the house taken away, and all is calm in Woodside. Now, what about Hangar One?

• The Merc-News says the recession's hitting home for Silicon Valley brides this year. Your reporter says it's simply not possible the news day was that slow in Silicon Valley that this is newsworthy.

Reuters

• Bangladesh officials have signed an agreement with two mobile operators there to send early-warning messages to subscribers in two disaster-prone regions of the country. These are no ordinary SMS messages; they'll jump right onto the main screen of the phones instead of going to inboxes.

• Twitter users like music and music lovers like Twitter, according to a new NPD Group report. Active Twitter users buy 77% more music than non-users, and 12% of people who say they've purchased a digital download in the last three months also used Twitter.

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Up Front: DHS shelves domestic spy satellite program

Publié: juin 23, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner Privacy advocates on Monday applauded plans by the Obama administration to kill a spy satellite program that would have pointed the cameras at domestic targets. Meanwhile, the company running the nation's biggest "Registered Traveler" program, intended to whisk customers through TSA lines, is out of business.

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DHS shelves domestic spy satellite program

Afternoon of June 22, 2009 • The US Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday it's dropping the planned National Applications Office after asking state and local law enforcement how useful they'd find such imagery, and hearing back not really.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Los Angeles police chief William Bratton, writing on behalf of the 64-member Major Cities Chiefs Association, told DHS head Janet Napolitano, "Were the program to go forward, the police chiefs would be concerned about privacy protections and whether using military satellites for domestic purposes would violate the Posse Comitatus law, which bars the use of the military for law enforcement in the US."

The LA Times spoke with Rep. Jane Harman (D - Cal.), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee's intelligence and terrorism risk assessment subcommittee, who cited grave privacy concerns with the proposed surveillance.

Brill is less content, and the future is less "Clear"

Monday, June 22, 2009, 11:00 PDT • Clear, formerly known as Verified Identity Pass, posted a notice on its site stating that the service would cease operations.

Grant Martin, who reviewed the service earlier this year for Gadling.com, is sorry to see it go: "It's always sad to see a company fail, but in this case, it seems a bit more personal." Over at Wired, Ryan Singel was more arch, commenting that co-founder Steven Brill had already moved on to the Journalism Online project: "If Brill can't get enough corporate travelers to pay for airport convenience, it's not clear how he thinks he'll get enough people to pony up online news subscriptions to save online journalism." And Scott McCartney at The Wall Street Journal shrugged that the service didn't amount to much of a convenience for anyone in the end.

Biggest CAN-SPAM case yet elicits guilty plea

Morning of June 22, 2009 • Guilty pleas in a Detroit federal court Monday from five men facing charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act settled the largest CAN-SPAM prosecution to date, according to the Department of Justice. Alan M. Ralsky, Scott K. Bradley, John S. Bown, William C. Neil, and James E. Fite were accused of running a "pump-and-dump" stock-inflation operation in conjunction with several other men, three of whom have already pled guilty. Three more people await trial.

The takedown of Ralsky, called by some a "spam king," sat well with the Detroit Free Press' Ben Schmitt, who wrote, "On Monday, Alan Ralsky took on the new title of convicted felon." The 64-year-old could face up to six years in prison, as might Bradley, his son-in-law. (Happy Father's Day?) Much of the tech underpinnings of the scam were based in Fresno, and the Fresno Business Journal has its own take on events.

Dunkin' Donuts releases iPhone app

Around coffee break • The office pastry run is to be made easier for patrons of Dunkin' Donuts, who now have an iPhone app for coordinating their trips to that shop. Being at the epicenter of the Dunkin-Donuts-is-edible cult, Boston reporters went predictably hysterical over the app, with Kerry Skemp at Bostonist hyperventilating that "The new Dunkin Run web site and iPhone app will change your life." (Your reporter speaks for all of Seattle when she says it's cute that you East Coasters think that's coffee. You people cook with Betty Crocker ovens too?)

Jennifer Van Grove takes a calmer look at the new offerings, and Matthew Shear at the Christian Science Monitor advises us all not to bother.

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Palm's WebOS SDK won't be finalized 'til late summer

August or so > Though Palm Pre users are expected to download their 1,000,000th application from the Apps Store late this week, developers are still waiting for the release of the software development kit. A post on the Palm Network Developer Blog confirms rumors that Palm hopes to make the SDK available to everyone by the end of summer, with a push starting now to get more people into the early-access program.

Meanwhile, Palm's encouraging the faithful to "explore other public WebOS resources, including the Rough Cuts edition of Mitch Allen's upcoming book and the sites run by our great community of enthusiasts."

Sascha Segan notes that in the meantime, Palm is remaining calm about various "jailbreak" efforts, making the geekish case that formal offerings will be technically superior. IntoMobile caught the Palm team in another moment of candor over the weekend, spotting a tweet that acknowledged the Pre's slightly annoying habit of adding apostrophes to whatever it thinks is a contraction.

FTC looks into blogger 'payola'

Later this summer, maybe > The Federal Trade Commission is reported to be working out a set of guidelines that would give bloggers legitmacy on a level with other publishers -- by requiring that they, too, abide by rules concerning false claims, conflicts of interest, or "gifts" from companies seeking coverage.

Peter Kafka at All Things D made the phone call, and the answer to the obvious question is yes, this does includes affiliate relationships. (In other words, if a site runs a book review and provides a link to Amazon, and if buying the book through that link would earn the review site a few cents, they have to say so. Which, frankly, a lot of sites already mention as an encouragement to potentially supportive readers.) Aaron Brazell is likewise interested in what it all means for affiliates, but points to a fiery Queen of Spain post by Erin Kotecki Vest spotlighting recent drama over the tendency of some bloggers to accept freebies without telling their readers they've done so. And One Fine Jay took a look at recent developments and is doing what a lot of bloggers are apt to do in the next few days and weeks: Write and post a disclosure policy.

The pain of regeneration, but all for a good cause

November 2009...and beyond! > All eleven Time Lords -- yes, including the new guy; yes, including the newer guy; yes, including Hartwell, Troughton, and Pertwee -- will appear in a new Doctor Who special benefiting charity.

As the Daily Mirror first reported, "Viewers will see the Time Lords regenerating and emerging one by one from the Tardis, each with their own quirky opening line." Sort of like the way John Madden used to introduce his picks for the "All Madden Team," only with time lords. Even the late actors' lines will be recreated using earlier footage.

AFTER THE JUMP: Tech headlines from around the Net...

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Tuesday's tech headlines

Ars Technica

• The prospect of a German law requiring mandatory ISP-level filtering for child porn sends a Bundestag member of the Social Democrats into the arms of the Pirate Party, sort of. But don't wave the flag just yet; Jörg Trauss has a complicated history with CP.

• Jacqui Cheng tests the iPhone 3GS and says the camera's not great, but the speed is all Apple has claimed.

• Kevin Timmons makes the jump from Yahoo, where he was vice president of operations, to Microsoft, where he'll be a general manager of the Global Foundation Services team.

TechCrunch

• And there goes the other shoe at MySpace: Michael Arrington reports that the company will lay off 2/3 of its international staff.

• Is the iPhone's screen more crack-prone than those of other phones? No, says Jason Kincaid, examining the statistics. Are falls a particular menace to the device? Signs for to yes.

• MG Sigler noticed a former Bush administration official suggesting that the founders of Twitter ought to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for what the service has helped accomplish for Iran. Say it with us, Laugh-In fans: Very interesting, but...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• Beware of e-mail concerning an alleged critical update to Microsoft outlook and Outlook Express: It's a more-convincing-than-average malware attempt.

• Nick Eaton opines on the "Microsoft subsidy bill" just passed by the Washington state legislature, which would give international workers at some companies the right to in-state tuition rates at universities. Thirteen other states have similar measures on the books.

• A blogger in Connecticut with a history of suggesting to readers that they "take up arms" against lawmakers has been arraigned on a felony charge of inciting injury to persons. Is it free speech, or is it yelling "fire" in a crowded (albeit virtual) theater?

Up Front: Jammie's still not sure what the 'Z' in 'KaZaa' stood for

Publié: juin 22, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner Perhaps you've noticed that the world is becoming more global? It seems that everywhere you go these days, you're reminded that America is no longer necessarily the center of the universe. This morning's WN|WN takes you through Taiwan where Acer may become the world's #2 PC supplier, through mainland China where our emissaries would like a word with the government about filtering, through Iran where a lady named Neda has instantly become the symbol of a revolution thanks to technology (though we may have to revoke our thanks from Nokia), and back to a little out-of-the-way part of the planet called Bozeman, Montana.

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Jammie Thomas-Rasset: The aftermath

Morning of June 20, 2009 • Jammie Thomas-Rasset's sticking with her story about never hearing of KaZaA before this whole RIAA mess blew up. Speaking to reporters from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in the aftermath of her trial, she spoke of how it feels to have a $1.92-million judgment against her for something she claims she didn't do.

So what about that $1.92 million, anyway? CNET's Greg Sandoval thinks that thanks to varying legal interpretations of the word 'willful," bankruptcy just might get her out of this mess if she so chooses. Ars Technica's Nate Anderson breaks down six possible paths for her: Pay the sum, settle, declare that bankruptcy, make a constitutional challenge concerning the damages, appeal, or get the law changed. (Feel free to arrange those in your own hierarchy of unlikelihood.) The recording artist Moby, meanwhile, expresses a lovely thought on his own blog: "i'm so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music. the riaa needs to be disbanded."

Dell's market share slips severely in Q1

Afternoon of June 19 • At this time last year, when the bad economy started to turn worse, it looked like Dell's recovery plan was succeeding, pulling close to even with PC market leader HP in the US. But that trend began unraveling later in the year, and now as hardware analyst iSuppli has confirmed, Dell's market status is in free fall.

For the first time this century, Dell is in danger of slipping to the #3 position worldwide behind Acer, which is absorbing Dell's losses along with Toshiba. While HP's PC shipments in Q1 2009 remained about flat on the year at just over 13 million units, Dell shipped about 2 million units less worldwide, losing about 1.7% in global market share.

All this while all the world's manufacturers combined shipped 8.22% fewer PCs in the previous quarter than the year before -- 66.5 million versus 72.3 million. You could say it's the bad economy (in fact, iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins did blame the economy) but three of the world's top five suppliers weathered the storm fairly well this past quarter. Number 5 Toshiba gained 0.9% of market share at 5.2%, and #3 Acer has found happiness in the double digits with a 1.8% share gain. But HP held onto the lion's share with 49.2% more units shipped worldwide than Dell, which eked out below 8.8 million units compared to Acer's 7.4 million.

US wants a word with China about filtering

Afternoon of June 19 • Because we haven't got enough drama in Asia right now, the United States has lodged an official complaint with China about its new Green Dam filtering efforts. The Financial Times reports that representatives of our embassy met with Chinese officials from the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

FT also notes that China executed a classic misdirection campaign as unrest about the filtering increased, accusing Google China of linking to porn and such and demanding that the site suspend international searches. (The paper goes on to say that Baidu, the Chinese-grown site, links to the same stuff.) The People's Daily has a nice recap of what's happening, including tales of a government intern's attempt to discredit Google by blogging about how one of his classmates got into the pr0ns and went all wrong.

Montana town doesn't need applicant passwords after all

June 19, 12:00 pm PDT &bull We mentioned Friday morning in this space that the city of Bozeman, Montana was asking job applicants for their usernames and passwords on a wide variety of online services. Well, that's over now -- after word got out and the tide of public opinion washed over the town of about 30,000, city officials have thought better of the idea, saying in a prepared statement, "We appreciate the concern many citizens have expressed regarding this practice and apologize for the negative impact this issue is having on the City of Bozeman."

Bozeman's own KZBK has details and the full statement from City Manager Chris Kukulski, who frankly does sound genuinely embarrassed about the whole thing...but, as the Bozeman Daily Chronicle's Amanda Ricker points out, it's really just suspending the practice pending "a more comprehensive evaluation." (Fun comments area on that story, by the way.)

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New Android phone misplaces its keyboard

July 2009 > Hello summer, hello more smartphones: T-Mobile's finally announced a followup to the "Android" G1. The myTouch 3G will be ready for pre-order in July and on sale in August... and it appears to have lost its keyboard.

AndroidCommunity.com's Chris Davies immediately identified the handset as the HTC Magic. At CNET, Marguerite Reardon (who didn't get the best of her editor's attention on this piece) recaps some of what's expected for the phone, and attracts a number of comments from people who are less than pleased at the "step backward" represented by the virtual keyboard.

Morning of June 22, 2009 > Today's the kickoff day of the AJAXWorld conference (there's an entire world of AJAX now) in New York City. The keynote speaker this year is a guy who's familiar to folks who deal with Fusion middleware: Oracle's Ashish Mohindroo, Senior Director of Product Marketing. But what will be especially interesting to hear from Mohindroo this year is the degree to which he incorporates Sun Microsystems technologies -- now becoming part of the Oracle portfolio -- in his discussion on Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and collaboration.

Most specifically, will he touch more on Java (the foundation of Oracle Fusion) or Solaris (believed to be one of the key elements in the company's collaboration vision). Expect to see an updated roadmap for Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA), and the part that will be most interesting is, what gets integrated most: Solaris or Java?

AFTER THE JUMP: Monday's tech headlines from around the net...

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BBC News

• A joint endeavor by Siemens and Nokia was instrumental in helping the Iranian government develop its massive Internet surveillance program, confirms correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. In the second half of last year, the pair jointly sold the Iranian government something called "Monitoring Centre" (at least they didn't cloak it in some Orwellian euphemism), which a spokesperson for the venture described as "a standard architecture that the world's governments use for lawful intercept." The plurality of that last statement, along with the implied dismissive tone that everyone else is using it, so why can't Iran...also tends to sound more 2001 than 1984.

• Moves to incorporate digital downloads into the top-40 music charts are detailed in two BBC pieces. Ian Youngs has an overview of how online streaming services have affected the numbers, while the newsdesk reports that Hit40UK is going entirely digital -- for here on out, disregarding CD sales when compiling its figures.

• Wireless connectivity is still a fragile flower -- you can slave away on your perfect home Wi-Fi hookup, only to have the thing nuked by the neighbor's baby monitor, or your own Christmas decorations. Bill Thompson lays out the standards situation in the UK.

Wall Street Journal

• Some of the tech giants that have traditionally resisted offering online applications -- Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and so forth -- find the recession pushing them in that direction, according to Ben Worthen and Justin Scheck. (subscription required)

• Lauren Goode tested an tabletop HD radio -- the TEAC HD-1 -- and found it appealing for folks who are already inclined to buy a non-portable radio. Except for the alarm clock. That part of testing apparently didn't go so well.

San Jose Mercury-News

• Steve Wozniak spent Sunday at a rubber-ducky race. He rode in on his Segway and stood in a creek amidst the yellow ducks. There's a photo. Don't resist.

• Jessica Mintz (writing for the Associated Press) looks at Redbox, that DVD-kiosk system one sees around. It's a very different model from netflix, says founder Mitch Lowe (who spent six years at the Temple of the Red Envelope), but there's no reason the two can't co-exist.

• Troy Wolverton says we're entering a "golden age" of the Web browser. True story: 45 seconds after your reporter clicked on the story, her browser crashed. She suspects it was because it (Chrome) was barely mentioned in the piece.

Wired

• Brian X. Chen covers the rising call for closer scrutiny of Apple's approval process for its iPhone apps store, which they say raises net-neutrality issues.

• No one reasonable wants to test the Army's Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense missile system or the SBX x-band radar system against actual North Korean missiles, but as long as Korea's led by nutburgers, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is getting the gear into position.

New York Times

• In an unsigned editorial, the Times calls for the federal government to move on a bill offered by Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) that would ban the use of paperless e-voting machines in the November 2010 elections. Rep. Holt's own site has a press release listing the bill's 75 (!) co-sponsors.

• Can haz free speech? Noam Cohen suggests that it's not blocking access to controversial online material that enrages the citizenry; it's messing with their lolcats. Your reporter thinks this is both very likely -- bread and circuses, etc. -- and a remarkably chilly thing to point out today.

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Up Front: Ballmer says Bing may be worth investing 10% of Microsoft's income

Publié: juin 19, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner The Bing marketing push has been a short-term success for Microsoft in that it got people to trying out its search engine, including several of the features Windows Live Search actually already had for a year or more and just never tried...because it was Windows Live Search. But in a speech last night, the man at the top of Microsoft presented what looked like a "moral," like at the end of a bedtime story, the message we're all supposed to have learned...as if Bing's success is a fait accompli. Sometimes when Steve Ballmer starts talking like Tom Osborne, you have to start worrying...and not always for Microsoft.

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Search mavens: They've just like us!

Evening of June 18, 2009 • Microsoft's in the search game for the long haul with the deep pockets, and Steve Ballmer wants you to know that. In a talk before the Executives' Club of Chicago, as cited by Dow Jones this morning, the Microsoft CEO said that "in our industry, the No. 1 mistake that people make is that they quit too early" -- and that he thinks Microsoft should have gotten serious sooner about search.

Reuters, meanwhile, caught that he's willing to invest 5-10% of the company's operating income in search for up to five years. (Hope you weren't bored with those Bing ads yet!) Meanwhile, The Guardian's Jemima Kiss has a chat with Sergey Brin, who runs some other search site.

Thomas-Rasset over; Tenenbaum trial orthogonal

Evening of Thursday, June 18 • The verdict (and jaw-dropping jury award) in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case are probably not the end of that story, though stalwart observers such as Copyright and Campaigns' Ben Sheffner (writing this time for Billboard) are effectively recapping this portion of the proceedings. Meanwhile, Sony v. Tenenbaum -- the Massachusetts case in which Harvard prof Charles Nesson has taken a very, active active interest -- gets quietly, progressively weirder.

Ars Technica, which did work on the Thomas-Rasset trial that far outstripped any of the more traditional media outlets, has this story in check as well, explaining that Dr. Nesson has taken to recording calls and conversations connected to the case and posting them online in an act of "radical transparency." You could also call it "ticking off the judge," who warns that "the Court's indulgence is at an end" on this situation. It's possible you could also call it "crazy like a fox," sinc eit's accomplished some practical good for the case -- for instance, the possibility of raising fair use as a defense. Copyrights and Campaigns has a few excerpts to give you the flavor of what's happening, and Recording Industry vs The People has housekeeping material such as upcoming court dates 9the trial's now slated for a late-July start).

RIM's Q1 nice, but just you wait

Evening of June 18, 2009 • The market didn't like Research in Motion's outlook for the upcoming quarter, even though the company returned $1.12/share, well over analysts' estimates, for this quarter. And, said co-CEO Jim Balsillie, the company's got some "spectacular" products on tap for the latter half of the year.

No, they're not named iPhone or Pre, but that's fine; the company's report indicates that the company's increased its share of the US smartphone market from 40% to 55% in the last six months. Jamie Sturgeon at the Financial Post does a good job of covering the call, and Andrew Horowitz at Seeking Alpha lays out why amid all that optimism, the stock got spanked in after-hours trading following the release of the numbers.

Google learns another lesson about playing nicely with others

Evening of June 16, 2009 • One of the things Google will experience for itself as Chrome comes into full fruition as a Web browser is how difficult it is to maintain a community of developers for plug-ins that have to cooperate with each other. In the meantime, the company's own Apps Sync plug-in for Microsoft Outlook isn't behaving well with a handful of other prominent plug-ins, including Adobe's PDF Maker Toolbar (which a lot of Acrobat users have), Apple's Outlook Change Notifier (part of its suite of synchronization tools that includes Bonjour for Windows), and Microsoft's Outlook Connector which links users to Hotmail and Windows Live Mail.

Some of the things that make these plug-ins blow up in one another's face has to do with the fact that these others make use of Microsoft's Search services. In a blog post earlier this week, a Google product manager explained exactly what happens (Google turns that service off...I suppose that's a public service from Google, thank you very much) and what users should do about that (leave the service off and not use the other folks' plug-ins).

Or, as he put it directly, "Windows Desktop Search will not properly index Google Apps Sync data files, so in order to stop indexing from running indefinitely, the Google Apps Sync installer disables it. We recommend using the default Outlook search."

Anyone who's ever used the default Outlook search knows that's one of the most ridiculous suggestions anyone can ever make.

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Microsoft anti-malware basics coming Tuesday

June 23 > Microsoft will release a limited public beta of Microsoft Security Essentials (a.k.a., Morro), an anti-malware package targeting viruses, spyware, rootkits, and trojans. The first 75,000 visitors to download a copy from this site on Tuesday get to play.

If you try that site now, you won't get much except an ironic little message: "The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred."

The company has played with the idea of presenting a basic anti-virus toolkit, either bundled with Windows or downloadable, ever since 2003 when it acquired a small security company, and then at the very least made a home for "Security Essentials" in the original incarnation of Security Center for Windows XP.

The most recent incarnation of Security Center is Action Center for Windows 7, and it's likely that the final build of that product will contain a link to a page that lets the user download the installer -- the same file that will be directly accessible from the Microsoft site on Tuesday. From there, the user will most likely be able to select options and download the final package.

Meet Collecta, a new real-time search... but not just yet

Give it a few more days > Another day another drama search engine. Collecta, the brainchild of AOL and Reuters alumni, searches fast-twitch sites such as Twitter, Flickr, and so forth in very nearly real time, and it's designed to support multiple searches running continuously, giving the thirsty newshound what amounts to his own news ticker.

That's the theory, anyway; when CNET's Josh Lowensohn dropped by Thursday afternoon, the search was having a bit of a meltdown, searching continuously without actually returning results, and we found it much the same early this morning. Over at The Register, Cade Metz delves into how the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) powers the site. When it's working. Get well soon, Collecta!

AFTER THE JUMP: Friday's tech headlines from around the Net...

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Friday's tech headlines

Wired

• Remember the TJX breach? The "hacker" accused of masterminding the thing lived large on the proceeds, but his trusty programmer -- the guy who coded the notorious "blabla" sniffer -- is broke, banned from touching computers, and awaiting sentencing. Poor pookie.

• In other breach-aftermath news, the 11th Circuit has dismissed most of a class-action suit filed by veterans whose data was on a hard drive stolen from the Veterans Administration back in 2007.

• Bruce Schneier has an essay on how science-fiction writers can provide insight on potential security risks to the Department of Homeland Security. Turns out that it's related to how we analyze risk-management data.

Ars Technica

• The city of Bozeman, Montana is requiring that job applicants hand over information on any site for which they have an account -- not just usernames, but passwords.

• The lawsuits may rage around it, but Google Books is still attending to details such as usability. A nice assortment of upgrades makes searching and direct linking much easier.

Guardian (UK)

• A recent ruling by a UK court allowed The Times to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger -- a policeman who'd written an award-winning blog about the travails of the job. The information meant a written reprimand for the officer and the deletion of his blog from the Net. Jean Seaton, who chaired the Orwell Prize committee that gave Detective Constable Richard Horton that award, comments on the distressing implications for blog anonymity. To illustrate the value of anonymous work blogs such as (the late) NightJack, Alexandra Topping compiles a list of six gripping examples; get 'em while you can.

• Twitter and other non-linear, multi-thread content systems are changing our outlook on narrative. In other words, if you think movies like Duplicity and Memento were confusing, you're not going to like where things are headed. Paul Schrader backs that up with further examples.

• Keith Stuart has a nice look at the "virtual community" -- specifically, the folks who flipped out when the keepers of Left 4 Dead announced a swift sequel. Ranting, perspective-impaired people can form a community too. Or, you know, so we've heard.

New York Times

• PC manufacturers say that while China may be backing off the requirement that its citizens use the Green Dam filtering software, they're cutting PC manufacturers no slack on including it on systems sold ther.

• The Flip camera made shooting video easier for anyone capable of pushing one button and lifting their arm; Ashlee Vance looks at a fun new Windows program called Super LoiLoScope MARS that promises to do much the same for the video-editing process.

Wall Street Journal

• Tor for the democracy win! The venerable onion-routing anonymizer lends a hand in Iran.

• The battle over taxing online sales continues. Just two days ago Amazon told affiliates in North Carolina that if their state government didn't drop the idea of having the site collect the state's 4.5% sales tax, they'd drop all the affiliates. Amazon believes the taxation to be unconstitutional.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• You say you're interested in this Twitter craze but you don't know where to jump into the fray? You'd read it if you could find anything useful in there? A couple of former Microsofties have a new site that might be able to help, called CrowdEye. Nick Eaton has details.

• Speaking of Twitter, users are having way too much fun mocking Congressman Pete Hoekstra's tin-eared comparison of various House political antics with the uproar in Iran. Alejandro Martinez-Cabrera picks some choice examples from Pete Hoekstra Is A Meme.

DaniWeb

• During his campaign, President Obama called on all Americans to volunteer in our communities. If you're ready for "the summer of service" but aren't sure where you might be of assistance, that "CraigsList for service" he was talking about has finally come to pass.

• Online advertisers get their shorts in a bunch over clickthrough, but a new study indicates that clickthrough matters less than engaging content that's related to the rest of the page. Ron Miller has more.

• Ken Hess, who apparently ran into some annoyance with community managers for certain Linux distros, gets a little feisty and suggests a whole new business model.

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Up Front: Should broadband providers offer customers tiered service?

Publié: juin 18, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner Eric Massa, a freshman congressman from New York's 29th District, introduced a bill yesterday that would keep ISPs -- including those providing mobile service -- from abruptly changing usage rules on accounts or slapping undocumented "we know it when we see it" overage caps on so-called "unlimited" accounts. The Broadband Internet Fairness Act (HR 2902) would require most large ISPs to submit plans to the FTC and undergo hearings if they wishes to institute metering-based plans.

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House of Reps examines usage-based caps

Morning of June 17, 2009 • A first draft of Rep. Massa's bill (PDF available here) would stipulate, in long and explicit language, that any broadband service provider wishing to offer service tiers to consumers must provide explanation to the Federal Trade Commission first as to how it breaks down the need for such tiers. The FTC, then consulting with the FCC, would then decide whether that breakdown is valid.

The bill would not ban service tiering -- such a move might be viewed as too much government regulation, you see. But you can't have too much government bureaucracy, thus the need for an expensive analysis on a per-case basis...which cable providers probably would find taxing on their calendars, at least, resulting in a kind of de facto ban on tiering.

"Cable providers want to stifle the Internet so they can rake in advertiser dollars by keeping consumers from watching video on the Internet," Rep. Massa stated yesterday. "But so long as Americans can't choose which cable channels they want to pay for, I don't think cable operators should be able to determine consumers' monthly Internet usage. Additionally, charging based on a bandwidth usage is a flawed model when the cost of usage is totally out of line with the price. Consumers are much better served by plans based on the speed of the connection rather than amount of bandwidth used. Competition is crucial to our economy and I refuse to let monopolistic corporations dominate the market and gouge my constituents."

Voicing its opposition to the bill is the American Cable Association, naturally, whose member CATV providers happen to provide the most cable modems. ACA's argument, voiced by its president and CEO Matthew Polka, is that the bill would preclude its members from being able to offer competitive pricing options to its customers.

"Consumption-based billing plans will give consumers the ultimate control over how much they spend each month for their Internet access," reads Polka's statement. "Rep. Massa's bill would have a chilling effect on broadband operators offering these types of consumer-friendly options. During his Senate confirmation Tuesday, Federal Communications Commission member Robert McDowell noted that Americans today are watching a staggering 17 billion online videos each month, a use of the Internet that he said is growing at 16% per month. With these increases coming, Internet usage payment models will allow broadband providers to better manage their networks by imposing higher costs on the heaviest users who often are the ones responsible for slowing speeds for all users on the Internet.

Today, John Timmer at Ars Technica explains why Massa, whose district covers an area in western New York including Rochester, is in a prime location to be "exquisitely sensitive to the US broadband market."

Microsoft's got a Bing thing going

Afternoon of June 17, 2009 • The claims that Microsoft's new search has Google running scared seem painfully overblown (and really, a little paranoia -- the fiber in a corporate culture's diet -- couldn't hurt the search giant), as PaidContent's Joseph Tartakoff points out. But comScore's got numbers for the second week since Bing's launch, and the numbers are certainly interesting, with Microsoft's share of search results up 3% in the past 14 days.

Wired allows how a gain like that isn't likely to be giving Sergey Brin nightmares, but that the gains are "nice improvements for Microsoft's perpetually sub-10 percent share, third-place search engine." (We do not speak of Carol Bartz's nightmares, as the Yahoo CEO is presumably made of sterner stuff; it's possible in fact that nightmares have Carol Bartz.) Mashable pokes at the numbers and notices that though the number of searchers is up, the number of queries per user is down. Passing fad or better results? Time will tell.

Broadband popularity is up -- and so is its price

June 17, 2009 • The Pew Internet and American Life Project continues to compile longitudinal data about how we live with the Net, and their latest study indicates that we love our broadband -- so much so that we're tolerating stiff price increases. Broadband adoption is up 15% over last year, and up $4.50 (about 13%) in price as well.

The Associated Press cast its coverage around the accelerated adoption by traditionally slow adopters (elderly people, poorer households), and noted that people pay less for broadband where there's competition (surprise). EWeek noted that respondents said they'd be more likely to cut back on cable or cell phone (!) plans than to give up broadband. And the wonderfully named Daily Yonder (motto: "Keep it rural") really dug into the numbers, looking at the correlations between their demographic and what the numbers tell us.

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RIM earnings report

June 18, 2009 5:00 pm EDT > Analysts expect the handset manufacturer to report earnings per share of around 94 cents for Q1 2010.

So long, Centrino (sort of)

Q1 2010 > Confused by Intel's convoluted product lines? You're not the only one, and in a blog post on Wednesday, Intel's Bill Calder explains how the company means to simplify that. The "hero" Core brand is the core, with high-, mid- and entry-level chips called the i7, i5 and i3 respectively; below the Core line is Pentium (still officially a brand, representing all those old pre-sub-micron processors still in inventory), Celeron is below that, and then there's the Atom line for netbooks and such. And leaving the pack altogether is Centrino, off PCs and onto Wi-Fi and WiMax products starting next year.

Our Scott Fulton takes a nostalgic look at Centrino this morning, while dutifully noting that there's some shrewd anti-AMD reasoning behind the brand change, too. Also, Xbit Laboratories does a nice job of breaking it down to bullet points, and AnandTech breaks it down to cores, threads, and nanometers.

AFTER THE JUMP: Thursday's tech headlines...

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ReadWriteWeb

• Two economists -- one from Harvard, one from the University of Kansas -- have jointly released results of a study that indicate that weaker copyright protections do more good than harm to society. In fact, though 65% of respondents said they'd passed on buying a CD because they'd downloaded a free copy of the desired song, 80% bought a CD because they'd gotten a taste. Frederic Lardinois does a nice summary and links to the study itself (in PDF format).

• Facebook's working on a real-time search for the site, says Sarah Perez, and she repeats the VentureBeat rumor that the site's backing off the March site redesign as well.

Ars Technica

• Jacqui Cheng reports on a successful effort to have a foolishly issued software patent revoked. The Hoshinko patent has been under review since 2007, but the EFF's Patent Busting Project dredged up prior art dating back to 1998.

• The Las Vegas Review-Journal is dealing with a federal grand-jury subpoena thanks to unruly commenters, who posted threatening remarks concerning the prosecutor and jury in a federal tax-fraud case. The original request asked for identification info on everyone who commented on the article, but prosecutors will settle for two. The paper's ready to cooperate; the ACLU of Nevada would rather have the request declared unconstitutional.

New York Times

• Ashlee Vance accurately describes the ongoing struggle for laptop manufacturers to get a reliable, trustworthy battery-life test in place as "equal parts encouraging and sad."

• Brad Stone has an article on domain squatting, and yet my calendar still says 2009. Twitter and Facebook, of course, provide the new angle.

Chicago Tribune

• Here's a file-sharing dustup you don't see every day: It's over a book, specifically the latest Dungeons & Dragons handbook, released in March. Three suits name eight defendants in the matter.

• Jon Yates, the paper's consumer-watchdog guy, describes what happened when Google incorrectly listed an ordinary citizen's mobile-phone number as the line for an office at the Illinois Secretary of State.

Los Angeles Times

• Ben Fritz and Dawn Chmielewski examine Hollywood's failure to get Web-video studios up and running. Disney, HBO, NBC, AOL and Turner Entertainment have all pulled the plug on projects to produce ads-supported original shows for the Web. (This reporter suggests a consultation with Dr. Horrible. And, naturally, more cowbell.)

• More than a third of teenagers surveyed recently by Common Sense Media say they've used a mobile phone to cheat in school; about 38% say they've plagiarized material from the Web.

Up Front: Google may take a tiny step toward better security

Publié: juin 17, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner Certain Web standards have been in place since the mid-1990s, since there was a Web. And certain companies rose to prominence by promoting their use. But when it comes time to evaluate which is more convenient, a few microseconds of delay or private communication in the clear, suddenly it's Google that's hiding behind a wall of public relations. Google's listening to its users now, and yesterday it demonstrated that fact, but why all the fuss about this privacy kick everyone's on?

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Google considers defaulting to encrypted connections

Afternoon of Tuesday, June 16 • An open letter sent recently to Google CEO Eric Schmidt signed by 38 high-profile security figures including noted researcher and BT Group CSO Bruce Schneier, urged Google to consider the simple act of using Secure Sockets Layer to encrypt communications between its applications and its servers (Wired has the PDF).

Yesterday, in a post to the Google Online Security Blog indicates the company may experiment with the concept to see if this encryption thing actually works, and if it does, to provide default privacy protection for Gmail, Docs, and Calendar.

"Support for HTTPS is built into every Web browser and is widely used in the finance and health industries to protect consumers' sensitive information. Google even uses HTTPS encryption, enabled by default, to protect customers using Google Voice, Health, AdSense and Adwords," the letter read. "Rather than forcing users of Gmail, Docs and Calendar to "opt-in" to adequate security, Google should make security and privacy the default."

This HTTPS thing could really go somewhere, says Google Engineer Alma Whitten in her blog post yesterday. "We're planning a trial in which we'll move small samples of different types of Gmail users to HTTPS to see what their experience is, and whether it affects the performance of their e-mail. Does it load fast enough? Is it responsive enough? Are there particular regions, or networks, or computer setups that do particularly poorly on HTTPS?"

Google doesn't want to adversely impact anyone's online experience -- perhaps a 0.1% slower connection is not worth the privacy breach. Whitten adds that secure connectivity has always been an option for Gmail users, who are certainly free to opt in. Underscoring that she's proud of her company's security record, she noted in an update that the PhD.s in the letter took a swipe at Google's competitors: "Google is not the only Web 2.0 firm which leaves its customers vulnerable to data theft and account hijacking. Users of Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, and MySpace are also vulnerable to these attacks. Worst of all, these firms do not offer their customers any form of protection. Google at least offers its tech savvy customers a strong degree of protection from snooping attacks. However, due to the fact that HTTPS protection is disabled by default and only enabled via an obscure configuration option, most regular users are likely to remain vulnerable."

Genachowski FCC hearings a convivial gathering

Morning of Tuesday, June 16 • A sparse but friendly group of Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee members had nothing but love for Julius Genachowski on Tuesday as the Senate prepares for hearings to confirm his appointment as head of the FCC. Most observers expect that process to be concluded by the Independence Day break -- perhaps even today, according to the Washington Post's Cecilia Kang.

PC Week's Roy Mark points out that nine Republican members of the committee were "boycotting" the hearing, leaving just two, Kay Bailey Hutchinson (TX) and Mike Johanns (NE). Mr. Johanns also took the day off after giving a brief statement saying, "If you aren't qualified, then I don't know who is." The Post's Amy Schatz noted that Genachowski, who has served at the FCC in two other administrations, supports using stimulus money to extend broadband service to underserved areas, and does not support resurrecting the "Fairness Doctrine" that some fear would stifle political speech.

Click fraud against Microsoft was a family affair

Monday, June 15 • Erika Morphy at E-Commerce Times reports that when Microsoft filed a civil claim on Monday against a trio of Canadians who allegedly used botnets to mess up advertising revenues for certain sites using Microsoft's ad platform, they didn't have to cast a wide net: The perpetrators are all family. Melanie Suen is the mother of Eric and Gordon Lam, and the three of them are accused of the click fraud, which Microsoft says cost over a million in reimbursements. The company seeks at least $750,000 in damages -- and a legal precedent. Cadie Metz at The Register has a good basic explanation of how this particular fraud worked and how the practice is affecting the industry.

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Apple tells Pre users no one in particular it may cut off iTunes integration

From now on, most likely > Apple didn't mention any specific "unsupported third-party digital media players" by name, but commenters around the Web were pretty quick to infer that the company was dropping a hint to Pre Media Sync users with a support bulletin warning that "because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple's iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players."

"Apple designs the hardware and software to provide seamless integration of the iPhone and iPod with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and tens of thousands of apps on the App Store," the warning reads. "Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple's iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players."

PreCentral points out that it's "mighty silly, given that all of the music in the iTunes Store is now DRM-free and Apple has no reason to be kicking people out of their happy little ecosystem." Macworld's Philip Michaels took a different view, saying that Apple has a history of making good on such warnings, and cautioning, "take note, Palm Pre owners -- that next iTunes update could be a doozy."

And CrunchGear notes an odd poll, which apparently indicates that two-thirds of respondents think Apple should have the right to block people from putting music on whatever devices they will. Devin Coldewey has some fun with it: "The willingness of the Apple crowd (and I'm typing this on a Mac so don't start a flame war, kids) to knife themselves in the back is astounding. Apple's products may be the future, but that's only if the fanboys let the future get here in the first place."

Jammie Thomas, day 3

All day today > More trial. More error. See our separate article for a recap of Tuesday's two most wince-inducing moments -- one for each side.

AFTER THE JUMP: Your tax dollars at work...

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Wednesday's tech headlines

The New York Times

• Congress would like to know why the NSA's domestic surveillance program is so much larger than the agency previously admitted. In particular, your representatives are wondering about the scope of domestic e-mail surveillance efforts, which analysts connected to the agency have confirmed scrutinize large amount of citizens' e-mail without a warrant. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau have coverage.

• As Iran roils, Michael Wines has a nice story from China about how citizen expressions of mass displeasure are actually doing some good -- though it gets a little mob-justicey now and then.

Ars Technica

• Animations in PowerPoint aren't just stupid, ugly, annoying and generally ill-conceived. John Timmer reports that a recent study indicates that adding animations torpedoes viewer comprehension.

• Canonical, light of the world which tends Ubuntu distribution, has plans to tidy up a bunch of little annoyances with its One Hundred Paper Cuts project. It's slated to finish up operations before the planned launch of karmic Koala in October. And yes, even you can contribute your pet Ubuntu annoyances; in fact, developer David Siegel suggests that would be a good way for n00bs to get involved in the community.

• Sun may be canceling its high-end Rock server chip.

Wall Street Journal

• Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang has some big ideas about GPU computing, a process that would shift a great deal of your computer's numbers-crunching off the CPU and onto the graphics subsystem. And Nividia can help, since "Doing graphics only is a disservice to humanity" according to Mr. Huang. Don Clark has details.

• The IRS is changing its mind about stepping up enforcement of 20-year-old tax laws concerning the personal use of employer-provided cell phones.

• Uh-oh: Some students might be using Wolfram Alpha to avoid actually doing their math homework. Dr. Wolfram's okay with that, but a lot of educators aren't.

• Recapping Tuesday's tech earnings reports, Best Buy made money during its Q1, while Adobe's Q2 declined, but both stocks fell (by 7.3% and 2.3% respectively). If you want advances, you need Palm (up 1.6% after analysts gazed favorably upon the Pre) or Microsoft, which rose even as Yahoo declined, and for the same rason -- the increasing unlikelihood of a Microsoft-yahoo search collaboration. Rob Curran wraps these things up so tidily.

The Register

• SCO has a deal with an investment firm called Gulf Capital Partners. The firm was previously expected to be dissolved in a Chapter 7 hearing this summer; if the deal goes through, it would keep alive SCO's unending Unix-licensing claims against IBM and Novell. Austin Modine eschewed the obvious undead / zombie / Jason-from-Friday-the-13th cracks and went with a nuclear holocaust / roaches motif for this article. The commenters fixed that for him, throwing in a Rasputin-assassination reference for good measure.

• On October 1, IBM will roll out a "Software Secure Support via USA Citizens" package, for commercial and federal customers who need not to discuss their computers' little tantrums with foreign entities.

TechCrunch

• Michael Arrington takes up the issue of whether Facebook ought to get rid of its the Holocaust-denial groups, a controversy that heated up over the weekend. The writeup is gripping -- apparently most Facebook employees support the retention of those groups -- but the very, very long comments section could cause retinal bleeding. (Though it's a great deal more intelligence than the groups themselves, but I didn't need to tell you that.)

• Look for Facebook to start beta on an "everyone button" next week. The site hopes to encourage people to share their information and photos not just with friends but with the whole world. (Shades of Twitter, yes.)

• MG Siegler really doesn't like a promotional campaign Microsoft has going for IE down in Australia right now, feeling that its incompatible-browser message was rude and kind of mean to Mac folk (who, of course, haven't got an IE browser and thus cannot go on Microsoft's $10,000 treasure hunt).

San Jose Mercury-News

• A successor to silicon? Scientists at Stanford say that bismuth telluride has some intriguing electromagnetic properties that could make it a new-gen successor to the material we currently know and love.

• A study conducted by the Association for Computing Machinery says that while 45% of high-school boys think it would be "very good" to major in computer science, just 10% of girls think so. The stats for tech jobs are split about the same, with 38% of boys and 9% of girls thinking that sounded like an appealing path. Chris O'Brien jumped to the same initial conclusion your reporter did: Damn those Disney princess movies.

Up front: Will Windows get 'smart' with ARM chips?

Publié: juin 3, 2009, 2:30pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner Three years ago, there was some talk about whether Microsoft would help define the small, portable device category by making a version of Windows for it. That's when we learned that devices at that level will not -- perhaps ever -- be defined by their operating systems. When Microsoft started marketing a concept called "Origami" by answering consumers' questions with a question, "What Am I?" customers in large numbers resoundingly responded, "We don't care." Now, there's yet another new class of small devices supposedly in the works, and reporters this morning are asking, will it be defined by a new version of Windows? Time once again to wake up and smell the history.

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Windows for smartbooks?

Morning of June 3, 2009, Taipei time • As promised yesterday afternoon, Microsoft Corporate VP for OEMs Steve Guggenheimer told a keynote audience at the Computex trade show that October 22 would be the ship date for Windows 7 to the general public. There's only one ship date this time, it appears, unlike the skewed "businesses first, regular people later" affair that marred the Vista premiere.

Now, small devices are huge in Taiwan, because that's where a huge number of them would be assembled. So one of the big questions on reporters minds there concerns a clever new niche for handhelds and portables called "smartbooks," which would be smaller than netbooks and which, by virtue of which chips they use, consume less power. These use ARM processors, which vendors literally design on a mix-and-match basis to their exclusive specifications. There's been reports of manufacturers porting Windows XP to ARM processor-based systems in the laboratory.

With Windows Starter Edition likely to run on netbooks later this year, folks are wondering, will it run on smartbooks also? Last March, the executive in charge of the company that funds ARM asked that question rather directly himself, in an interview for Computerworld's Eric Lai. And the answer to that question from Guggenheim was an emphatic...what was that question again? As IDG News Service cites him, Guggenheim actually sidestepped the question (despite the headline), simply stating that it would be hard to create yet another category of small device just for Windows.

Maybe. But then again, there is this little fact: There actually already is a version of Windows for ARM processors. Okay, so it's not the same code base exactly, but Windows Embedded CE is a branded Microsoft operating system that is designed to be customized through Visual Studio and deployed to small devices in a vendor-exclusive fashion, which is what smartbook manufacturers actually want anyway. And if those small devices can use the same documents and be otherwise interoperable with Windows, perhaps that's all they need anyway. Maybe it would be a good thing to talk with those OEMs making the smartbooks first, and ask them what they want and what they are planning...because it won't be Microsoft that defines smartbooks either. And that's a good thing. More on that in What's Next.

AMD endorses instant-on Linux for its own netbooks

8:30 am EDT, June 3 • Meanwhile, the netbook (as opposed to the smartbook) is coming unto its own as a market sector (and we can say "netbook" now without fear of lawyers, isn't that nice?). Just as ARM device makers prefer a way to easily assemble their designs, and notebook manufacturers love the idea of Intel's Centrino platform, netbook makers want there to be a preferred way to put parts together.

AMD is assembling its next generation netbook platform, and today for Computex, the company sent word that it will have an embedded instant-on operating system as its preferred choice. Yes, it's an embedded Linux, specifically Phoenix Technologies' HyperSpace. That means you power on your system, and before you go to whatever operating system you go to (if you do), you'll get instant functionality provided by the likes of...the Opera Web browser, which will come pre-installed.

Eric Brown heads into the PR breach at Yahoo

5:45 pm PDT, June 2 • All Things D, where internal memos go to not-die, has the scoop from a Yahoo insider on the hire of Eric Brown as the new SVP of global communications. Brown was previously with NetApp and before that at Adaptec -- two very business-oriented firms to be sure. Ought to be interesting, Kara Swisher points out, to see how life at a general-consumer concern like Yahoo suits him.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Wednesday's tech headlines

The New York Times

• Online newsletter publishing fail: A federal newsletter covering secrecy revealed on Monday that a 266-page report with "highly confidential" status had somehow made its way to the Government Printing Office, where it could be reviewed by the general public. The Times looked into the matter and now the report on civilian nuclear sites and programs is offline. One really cannot wait to see the letters to the editor in the next edition of Secrecy News, can one.

• Is multitouch more than just a curiosity? Ashlee Vance reports on various companies who hope that consumers who like the interface on their phones will love it on their computers.

Ars Technica

• If the judge bars file-sharing evidence acquired by MediaSentry from being introduced in Jammie Thomas' retrial, that long-running prosecution ends. Her new lawyer, Kiwi Camara, is giving that tactic a try. Ms. Thomas' retrial begins June 15.

• Jon Stokes summarizes two separate reviews of AMD's six-core "Istanbul" chip. The results are mixed, but all the tests so far were done on two-processor systems; he's curious (and so are we) to see how the server processor behaves on systems where it's handling four processors, as intended.

• Users of Hotmail via three offline email clients -- Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage -- are reminded to get right with the demise of the DAV mail protocol, which is happening within the next three months. The post includes guidance for updating configurations for each of those three user bases. Warn your mom.

WebWare

• CNET's web-apps blog spends quality time with Google's Wave, calls it "weird and quite wonderful," though set-in-their-ways e-mail users are in for a jolt.

• Do you need a Twitter-centric phone? Doubtful, but an under-$140 offering from the UK's INQ Mobile points the way toward a world in which smartphone users do not have all the social-networking fun. That's good news for the social nets, but getting other phone manufacturers on board that train could be interesting.

The Wall Street Journal

• Larry Ellison, purveyor of netbooks? The Oracle head suggested at JavaOne yesterday that mobile device offerings are a possibility once Sun has been digested.

• The government's about to spend $7 billion to improve broadband access in rural areas, but the biggest provider of the maps that tell where the money needs to go is partially underwritten by -- you guessed it -- the big telecom companies that stand to benefit the most by telling the administration where the money ought to go. There's been precious little oversight in the creation of Connected Nation's maps, critics say, and other says that the organization's data-collection methods are dubious.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• A bunch of people found a way to defraud Microsoft's Live Search cashback program, and now Microsoft's suing 10 John Does under the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The program is now the Bing cashback service.

• The P-I's Geek of the Week is the guy who runs the official @starbucks twitter feed. Brad Nelson, a former barista at the Twitchy Mermaid, fancies himself quite the Rain City rebel ("odd duckling") for being a lifelong Mac aficionado. (Confidential from AG to BN: Dude, you work for Starbucks. The Fremont Starbucks. If you were any more echt-Seattle you'd grow gills.)

• The P-I republishes a story from KING-TV reporting that after the Seattle Police Department spent over $1 million last year on new laptops, most of the gear is barely used. Officers blame the clunky Seattle Police Information Dispatch and Electronic Reporting software on those laptops for actually making their jobs harder -- and maybe even more dangerous.

Los Angeles Times

• Jon Healey once again crosses over from the Op-Ed section to talk tech. He's got a good in-depth look at whether eMusic's pricing plan still makes sense in the current iTunes/Amazon era. Protip: When the writer's drawing a comparison between the service and those old-school record clubs, you may have a problem.

• NBC Universal -- the people working to turn your brains into alien-nourishing goo with Hulu -- are preparing a full lineup of Web-only shows that will have even more product placement than an average episode of Chuck or 30 Rock. The article doesn't say how that law of physics will be broken, but the first shows will turn up on Hulu and other services over the summer.

WHAT'S NEXT? Microsoft steps back from an OS battle...

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Microsoft steps back from an OS battle

Are you out and about today? You could be: The 19th annual Computers Freedom and Privacy conference is on in DC, and E3 continues to ... well not exactly rage ... in LA. Because there's nothing most of us want to do more at the beginning of summer than tramp around a convention in business-casual mufti.

There's Computex, of course, where Microsoft has just made official the news that Win7 will be available on October 22. It's expected that Steve Guggenheimer, speaking from Taipei, will have news on a "Windows Upgrade Option" program designed to get recent Vista buyers out of that operating system and into a comfy Win7 setup at little or no cost.

So why no love for netbooks or smartbooks (or books, for that matter)? If there truly is no "Windows 7 for smartbooks" in ARM's future, there's a feeling that Microsoft's winning to cede the space to the likes of Linux and -- especially -- Google's Android platform, even while they're charging hard at Google on the search front with Bing.

The competition between Microsoft and Google has seemed rather Rovian lately. Back when Karl Rove was lionized as "Bush's Brain," the political strategist operates on a policy of attacking his enemies' strengths rather than their weakness. By engaging an adversary on a topic they believe they own, the attacker focuses the adversary's energy into a relatively narrow band of effort. Bing makes much more sense when you think of it challenging Google's bread-and-butter search functionality; likewise, Google was taking it to Microsoft's wheelhouse with Android.

Microsoft has of course been making sallies at this little-bitty-notebook thing literally longer than Google has existed, as owners of any of the mid-90s "subnotebooks" will know. They waded into tablets, too, and that hasn't worked out to more than a niche market (yet). Is Microsoft simply sitting this iteration out? And -- if so -- what are the chances that they'll be that guy who gets bored and leaves the baseball game early, only to miss the late-inning play that changes everything and makes the highlight reel for years to come?

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You can say 'netbook' now, the Supremes will look at patents, Tetris turns 25

Publié: juin 2, 2009, 2:35pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner Usually when a company coins a term or a phrase, or attempts to, it checks around to see whether someone else has thought of it first. But in the case of "netbook," it seemed to be a term that entered the popular vocabulary just before marketers got a hold of it. Or so we thought. But this story turns out all for the better, as we can all say "netbook" now with confidence.

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Psion tells Intel it can use "netbook"

Afternoon of Monday, June 1 · Perhaps you've noticed how Microsoft had been gingerly avoiding the use of the term "netbook," and other manufacturers followed suit, including Sony. The reason is that Psion Teklogix, a long-time components producer, had a trademark on the term, and it had been using it for a line of notebook computers up until 2003. Early in the year, after Psion made a case about Intel's use of the term (which, you have to admit, sounds a lot better than "MID" or "UMPC"), Intel fought back the way Intel's been known to do, claiming that Psion's claim to the trademark had passed since it had been out of use for six years.

Things were starting to get nasty, as we began to hear questions about whether anyone had ever heard of a Psion Netbook (capital "N") in the first place. Well, yesterday afternoon, the companies apparently reached a decision that it's just not the right economy these days to be conducting a street brawl over what's now a pretty common term. Psion will withdraw its trademark registrations for the word, it announced (Dell had some as well, which were withdrawn a few months ago), and it will hold harmless any and all third parties from ever having said the word.

Now, you begin to wonder whether "Starter Edition" is just the right phrase for Microsoft to be using for its netbook SKU of Windows 7.

Supreme Court agrees to look at business-method patents

Morning of Monday, June 1 · For the first time in over a quarter-century, the Supreme Court will examine standards for what business methods may be patented. An appeals court has previously ruled that only methods that involve actual machines or physical transformations can be patented -- a tightening of the previous "new, useful and not obvious" definition so disliked by many software firms. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and Financial Times all have good summaries. (More on this development in What's Next.)

Prime View buys E Ink (by the barrel)

Morning of Monday, June 1 · The digital-ink tech that underlies the Kindle and the Sony reader will now be the property of the Taiwanese OEM that makes the displays. Prime View International has announced that it will buy the Massachusetts-based E Ink Corporation, which which it has partnered over the years, for $215 million.

The acquisition makes Prime View the muscle in the nascent e-book market by most accounts; Reuters' coverage stated boldly that "The future of e-book readers, at least most of them on the market today, now lies with" the firm. GigaOm's looked at the market numbers, though, and cautions that that's not necessarily a good thing, or a good sign for the venture firms backing the development of various e-book readers.

Tetris turns 25, which makes you... old

Tetris 25th Anniversary logo June 1984 · A quarter-century ago this week, Alexey Pajitnov stayed up late and turned the well-known Pentamino Puzzle into a computer game for Electronika, a Russian computer system. The rest is brain-wave-altering history, with over 125 million copies sold (and untold millions more downloaded, in original and clone versions). The San Francisco Chronicle takes a look back.

The cultural impact is being celebrated in, among other things, dishware and tattoos and fanciful photography. And what's the legendary Alexey doing these days? Well...

Waiting on a Pre

Monday morning, too early · Tinycomb has the first known photos of a fellow allegedly waiting on line for a Palm Pre, due Saturday. The site didn't identify the guy or even the location of the store, but it's not at all out of the realm of possibility; over the weekend, Craigslist was already aflower with people offering to sit on line, people claiming they had Pre access such that they could avoid the line, and the usual incoherent bleating about wanting stuff cheap, no questions asked. On behalf of the rest of the world, *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Tuesday's tech headlines

Wired

· The CIA's using tiny radio-frequency chips to guide killer drones to Taliban targets in Afghanistan. Impressive tech, but getting the chips near the right people can be very dangerous work, as the article details.

· Billion-year data storage? It's theoretically possible, according to new carbon nanotube research at Berkeley. Information density could be as high as 10^12 bits per square inch -- equivalent, the article says, to nearly 25 DVDs in the space of a postage stamp. The story is based on an article previously appearing in ScienceNOW.

· Security consultants take note: In the wake of the CardSystems Solutions breach back in 2004, their auditor, Savvis, is getting sued because they said that the company was CISP-compliant when, as the hackers proved, they weren't. (All the security folk in the house who have been "asked" to rubber-stamp compliance by a client or a boss, say AAAA!)

The Wall Street Journal

· The Anita Borg Institute points out that persons of African, Hispanic, or Native American heritage are remarkably underrepresented at tech companies. Persons of color accounted for just 6.8% of tech staffers at the seven large Silicon Valley companies surveyed. The study is available as a PDF.

· (subscription required) EMC and netApp are going to fight over who'll acquire Data Domain. EMC says it's ready to pay around $2 billion, or $30 per share, from the de-duplication specialist. netApp already announced plans last month to pay $1.5 billion (or $25 per share) for the firm. Cue hijinks.

· Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg recap their recent All Things D conference.

The New York Times

· Stephanie Clifford has a fine article on how older folk are using social networking. Are you ready for your grandmother to see what's on your Facebook page?

· Seth Schiesel covers the latest version of The Sims, launching today. It's less a review than a meditation on what we're really doing when we create our individual characters, but not a bad read for all that.

PC World

· Matt Peckham, on the other hand, does review The Sims 3 itself. He liked it so much we're not quite sure how he managed to stop playing enough to review it: "Want the year's most compulsively playable, demographically far-flung PC game? You've found it." Come to think of it, we're not sure how he managed to quit customizing his Sim long enough to play -- his description of "traits" and of the insane level of configuration granularity would be daunting if we weren't ourselves frantic to get started.

· The PCW staff has clearly been logging too many flight miles, as they have banded together to review some of the weirder tech products one sees in the Skymall catalog. In case you'd ever wondered about the USB Roll Up Drum Kit, here's your sign.

WHAT'S NEXT? Clearing the patent-guideline fog...

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The Supremes take on the fog around patent awards

US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC The Supreme Court wasn't necessarily expected to grant the a certiorari for Bilski v. Doll, a case involving a denied patent application for a method of using masses of data, specifically weather data, to predict movement and hedge bets on the commodities market. That they did agree to look at the case indicates that we may, very soon, see the definitive close of an ugly period in patent law as it applies to technology.

The patent system itself, developed for a different era, hasn't been made well-suited to the non-physical nature of code, and so we floundered. For years there was the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" metric derived from the State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group case, decided in 1998. Before State Street, it was commonly believed that one couldn't patent a simple method of doing business, just as one can't patent an idea. After State Street, chaos, an explosion of software and business-method patents, the rise of the "patent troll," and other things one shouldn't have to have seen outside a Sam Raimi movie.

Enter Bilski, which described a commodities trading method that, though requiring computers to deal with its sheer complexity, was still an abstract idea in its nature. The patent examiner rejected the application, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences backed her/him up, and the Federal Circuit upheld the ruling (PDF available here) last October -- tossing the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" concept and stating that a patent can only be granted if the claim is tied to a particular machine or if it transforms something into a different thing or different state. (Patently O wrote a terrific explanation of the ruling when it was released.) The decision blew away State Street -- as Michael Risch at ProfsBlawg so memorably put it, the ruling "effectively wiped out the last 10 years of patentable subject matter jurisprudence -- it's like Bobby stepped out of the shower on Dallas."

And now the Supremes are stepping up to the mic. Lawyers for the plaintiffs say it's not right that an industrial-era system hasn't been revamped to handle our current age, and some observers say that smaller firms with smarts but little development muscle will suffer if they can't protect their work. On the other hand, a number of tech firms -- Microsoft and IBM among them -- like the machine-or-transformation idea, and prefer, if nothing else, a sharper line between what can and cannot be patented. And then there are constituencies who'd like to see software patents all but history; for instance, some segments of the open-source movement.

Your reporter is (dammit, Jim) not a lawyer, but she certainly spends a lot of time untangling what lawyers do. Law.com this morning has a great blog post handicapping what the Court review of Bilski might accomplish. As for us non-JD'ed tech folk, what the Gang of Nine hears, sees and asks when they take this case up next term will without a doubt shape how many of us earn our living and advance the industry.

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Betanews contest: Re-doing Bing, or, 'Name That Search Engine'

Publié: mai 29, 2009, 7:37pm CEST par the Betanews Staff

By the Betanews Staff, Betanews

Bing, Zing, Fring, Sling....oh dear....

Some of us would admit, Bing is a better choice for a big search engine name than "Kumo," which was apparently a serious candidate. But if Microsoft was truly listening to its customers to the degree it has been with Windows 7 of late, would it have come up with an even better brand? Could you Name That Search Engine in four notes or less?

We thought we'd give you a shot at it. Here's your chance to out-ping Bing. The Betanews staff will judge your submissions for a possible better name. But we're going to throw a monkey wrench in the equation: Along with your name, we're challenging you to create a 140-character-or-less tagline, which you would imagine would appear on the front page of the site to replace Windows Live Search, as well as in TV, radio, and Internet display ads.

Submit your entries in comments to this article. Next Friday at this time, we'll announce whose entries have earned them a place in would-be history.

First Prize: The four-disc Batman Begins / Dark Knight Blu-ray combo pack, plus a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Second Prize: A copy of Gears of War II for Xbox 360, plus a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Third Prize: A copy of Office 2007 Home/Student Edition.

Bing Crosby autographed picture

Verizon gets the Pre... Sparring over the cyberczar... The next HDMI spec

Publié: mai 29, 2009, 2:42pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner With hours (if not minutes) to go before President Obama reveals the results of a comprehensive study of federal cybersecurity, consumer gadgets take the stage on a sleepy Friday to cap off a noisy week. We now know, for instance, just how long Sprint's exclusivity over the Palm Pre will last in the US. Did anyone have dibs on six months? No, not even that.

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It's no longer the "Sprint Pre"

Evening of May 28, 2009 · In a special conference call with reporters yesterday, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam announced that the nation's largest wireless carrier will offer the Palm Pre as part of its broader lineup of smartphones. The sequel to the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm will also be in that lineup, said McAdam in comments cited by Reuters this morning.

"Over the next six months or so you will see devices like Palm Pre and a second generation Storm," Reuters quotes McAdam as saying.

Though it may be too early at this stage to gauge reactions, the announcement could only be a major blow to Sprint, more for Verizon's ability to announce it now than for any other reason. While Sprint's network quality in the US has been perceived as improving, it has had to rise from the absolute bottom of the well. Consumers considering a Palm Pre purchase next month have been weighing whether investing in Sprint's network long term will be worth it.

So consumers who do make the jump next month will be those willing to overlook Verizon's leadership in network quality, who are impressed by Sprint's "Everything" calling plan, and who don't want to wait until near-Christmas to own what could still be the coolest device of the summer. But all of a sudden, there are a lot more "if's" for consumers to consider, and Sprint cannot be happy.

Attention shoppers: Empty your wallets

Morning of May 28, 2009 · The consortium that sets the standards for HDMI would really, really appreciate it if you would spend some money already. The group has announced the HDMI 1.4 specification, which adds an Ethernet channel to the cable's capabilities, increases the data-exchange rate, and introduces the ability for the cable itself to optimize the TV image based on the content type. Of course, 1.4 will only work with a bunch of sets and boxes that aren't even on sale yet, so if you want the functionality you should prepare to lay out money for an all-new setup. Fast Company's excited, but the Associated Press could barely stifle a yawn and BusinessWeek's Cliff Edwards correctly notes that many erstwhile shoppers will simply wait until their old gear "conks out."

There's money in computing, we hear

12:43 pm EDT, May 28, 2009 · Via The Consumerist, a report reaches us from St. Louis that a Best Buy customer who dropped his PC off with the Nerd Herd Geek Squad for repairs somehow forgot that he left approximately $10,000 in cash wadded up inside it. Best Buy called the cops, who confirmed that the money was legit. Your reporter suggests that maybe if Scrooge McDuck hadn't used his tower case as a wallet, perhaps the computer wouldn't have needed "repairs" in the first place.

What's Now | What's Next divider 600 px Friday's tech headlines

The New York Times

· As your reporter waits (and waits and WAITS) for the White House to finally announce its cyberspace security plans and who the czar will be, the Pentagon's already making plans for a military command for cyberspace. (More on this in What's Next, below.)

· Today's financial-report gloom is brought to you by Ashlee Vance, who digs into Dell's 63% drop in quarterly earnings.

· Everyone's awfully excited about that New Yorker cover the artist created on his iPhone. Gadgetwise looks at four iPhone programs that will let you make art of your own, though a cover spot... let's just agree it's still a long shot.

Los Angeles Times

· Joe Flint and David Sarno deliver a nice analysis of what the AOL-Time Warner breakup means from an entertainment-industry perspective.

· Op-Ed writer Jon Healey detours to the site's tech blog to opine on a new study from the Digital Watermarking Alliance, which presents a case for watermarking as an alternative to DRM technology. That's a dubious tech proposition for various reasons, but Healey cites some interesting stats and links to the report itself if you're curious.

The Register

· Mmm, fresh steganography. Researchers in Warsaw have found a way to send nearly undetectable messages through the Internet by manipulating a design glitch in how TCP confirms packet receipt.

· Wikipedia puts the hammer down in its long-running battle with certain overzealous 'editors" from the Church of Scientology, banning all contributions from IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and associated entities. (No, not EarthLink. Stop that.)

· We missed the golden anniversary of monkey spaceflight? We're really just living all wrong here at Betanews. Able and Miss Baker went up and came back (take that, Laika-murdering Russkies!) fifty years ago Thursday.

Wired

· Are you easily distracted, or do your powers of concentration awe and frighten your co-workers? New research indicates that one's ability to focus depends on separate areas of the brain being able to fire in unison. The neuroscience could lead to new treatments for schizophrenia and ADHD.

· Nate Ralph got his product-reviewing hands on the upcoming Sims 3 port to the iPhone, and it looks pretty good. He wishes it had more interaction with the PC version, though.

Technologizer

· Harry McCracken wants to know if we should go ahead and expect Google's Wave to emerge as bloatware.

· Who knew that big hair is verboten in video games? And who knew that this would be a serious problem for video companies hoping to turn famous humans into onscreen characters?

WHAT'S NEXT? Security, as written in the czars...

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Security as written in the czars

The story of Google Wave will unfold over the next few months, and down the road we'll all know whether Google's baby is bloatware or the next big revolution in how we compute. Up next, though, you're about to watch the tip of a very large iceberg float by.

Sometime today, the White House will reveal the results of Melissa Hathaway's (more or less) 60-day examination of the current state of federal cybersecurity, and it's believed that today President Obama will name his long-awaited cyberczar. (Your reporter's money is on Hathaway, as long as promptness isn't in the job description.)

If certain agencies of our federal government had applied as much effort to actually doing national cybersecurity as they've put toward fighting over jurisdiction over it, we'd be several orders of magnitude safer today. The two main battlers have been the military and the NSA, in part because the latter agency is forbidden to do spying on US soil but in part because this is Washington and that's what people do.

Neither Mr. Obama's announcement nor the Pentagon's announced plans for a military cyberspace command are going to terminate this turf war, unfortunately. The White House effort is primarily concerned with certain forms of government and civilian infrastructure -- the networks that are too big to fail, if you like. There's no thought that the White House post will involve itself in any sort of offensive cyber-actions.

Which leaves us, again, with the uniforms and the spooks slapping each other around. A concerned observer can't help but be conflicted here. On the one hand, cyberwar is going to operate a lot more like spies do and a lot less like soldiers do, or at least like soldiers have done in the past. A functional cybercommand needs to be light on its feet and flexible in its structure. On the other hand, American spy agencies shouldn't be conducting large-scale warfare; that isn't who we are as a country (note to self: if you believe that, it may be time to re-read A Legacy Of Ashes). And I'm not in favor of the Gordian-knot idea of subsuming the NSA into the military; the prospect reminds me, oddly, of the old Prodigy online service, which wags held to have combined the tech acumen of Sears and the consumer-friendliness of IBM, its two not-so-proud parents.

The NYT article linked above points out that the NSA has most of the current expertise on digital warfare, but the military's becoming extremely serious about wargaming its way to understanding. Today you'll see the tip of that political iceberg float by as the White House nominates its cyberczar, but be aware that a sustained, complex, and bitter struggle for power glides just below the waterline.

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The end of Time Warner + AOL... White MacBook gets bolder... Windows 1, Linux 0

Publié: mai 28, 2009, 2:38pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

What's Now | What's Next main banner It's a term first popularized by R. Buckminster Fuller just after World War II: synergy. I could present his own definition here, but you wouldn't have time to read it. But it's essentially the idea that, at least in nature, all living, breathing entities were designed to exist in a kind of interdependent harmony (his "Synergetics" was the study of how that worked). That term was leveraged by Steve Case's AOL and Jerry Levin's Time Warner repeatedly, to discuss the reason for their little get-together. This morning, that term is finally proven to have been a misappropriation of the highest degree.

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Time Warner minus AOL

8:05 am EDT May 28, 2009 · AOL will become a completely free and independent company, in a deal "jointly" announced this morning. Ironically, it was Google that helped keep this marriage together, and that will help put it asunder.

Back in 2005, you'll recall, Google purchased a 5% stake in AOL, originally so Google could get an inexpensive channel for keywords on AOL's service. But it never seemed worth the investment. Now, with Google one of the largest shareholders in AOL, it was a key player in the breakup arrangement. According to this morning's "joint" press release, Google will sell its 5% stake back to Time Warner in the third quarter. This way, Time Warner can then effectively redistribute AOL shares among its shareholders.

This way, shareholders become the "acquirer" of the entity. Time Warner shareholders will also be AOL shareholders, and what they do with those shares becomes their own business.

This morning, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes read aloud the handwriting on the wall: "We believe that a separation will be the best outcome for both Time Warner and AOL. The separation will be another critical step in the reshaping of Time Warner that we started at the beginning of last year, enabling us to focus to an even greater degree on our core content businesses. The separation will also provide both companies with greater operational and strategic flexibility. We believe AOL will then have a better opportunity to achieve its full potential as a leading independent Internet company."

Apple juices up its white MacBook

8:30 am EDT May 27, 2009 · Quietly, Apple has upped the specs on its low-end White MacBook. The 13-inch model, available at the moment for $999, gets boosted to the 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, the 800 MHz 2 GB / 4 GB DDR2 SDRAM, and a 160 GB hard drive. In addition, not that most college students are even out of the previous year's classes yet, but those who are ready to order next year's computer can get a free 8 GB iPod touch with their new machine. There are discounts now, too. Doesn't Cupertino handle its sales slowdowns elegantly?

McAfee pinpoints the "most dangerous" search terms

Morning of May 27, 2009 · Looking to make some extra cash in tough times? Watch out -- the searches you execute in pursuit of that cash could wreak havoc on your machine. According to research undertaken by McAfee, clicking on search results that include the word "free" runs you a 21.3% chance of infecting your machine with some variety of malware. And searches seeking work-from-home gigs -- "free work from home," for example -- can be as much as four times riskier than average, the study says.

"Teaching Copyright" curriculum heads for the schools

Morning of May 27, 2009 · The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it has compiled a teaching packet designed to counterbalance information from the RIAA, MPAA, and other entertainment-industry groups that might now have the best interests of Fair Use or digitally savvy kids in mind.

The "Teaching Copyright" curriculum, as EFF activist Richard Esguerra put it in a written statement, "encourages inquiry and greater understanding. This is a balanced curriculum, asking students to think about their role in the online world and to make informed choices about their behavior" when downloading, remixing content, or engaging in other digital pursuits. The "Think First, Copy Later" packet, in contrast, has attracted widespread criticism for overstating the reach of copyright controls, in one memorable instance comparing downloading music to stealing a bicycle.

ATDT 1964 (a buzzy blast from the past)

The video making the rounds of a lovely 1964-vintage acoustic coupler modem in action is not to be missed. The Livermore Data Systems "Model A" box -- literally, it's a wooden box -- actually predates the Hayes command set referenced in our headline, but Kenneth Budd, to whom the pretty thing was entrusted by the widow of an IBM engineer, gets it talking to a Linux box just fine. Special bonus cameo appearance by the Lynx browser. (Don't act like you aren't feeling all warm and nostalgic right now.)

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Thursday's tech headlines

The New York Times

- David Pogue didn't like the Cool-er e-book reader as much as he likes the Kindle. Elsewhere on the NYT, Brad Stone got an early glimpse of e-readers from Plastic Logic.

- Farhad Manjoo has a nice roundup of note-taking programs -- including one that works on multiple platforms, a major reason some of us haven't committed to a digital notepad. (And then again some of us just like paper and pen.)

The Wall Street Journal

- Steve Wozniak says Steve Jobs is sounding "healthy" and "energetic" a month before his return to Apple.

- Nick Wingfield, filling in for Walt Mossberg, says he's been testing an assortment of Linux-running netbooks and they're just not as functional as netbooks running Windows.

- (subscription required) Smartphone manufacturers are working to roll out midrange phones geared toward social networking. The challenge is building sufficient memory and processing power into cheaper gear. (The article doesn't mention it, but battery life is also a serious concern; more on that in What's Next.)

CNET

- The browser is the computer is the desktop is the walrus... something like that, as Eric Schmidt kicked off Google I/O 2009 by describing what online life will be like with HTML 5's newer functionalities, such as canvas tags, video tags, geolocation, and better database handling. Koo-koo-ka-choo.

- IBM's suing David Johnson, its former head of mergers and acquisitions, to keep him from jumping ship to Dell with (potentially) Big Blue's vast cerulean trade secrets.

- The March shutdown of SpiralFrog hasn't ended the troubles associated with that ad-supported music site, Greg Sandoval reports. Investors say that the company's assets are being dumped for well below market value, while former users are angry that they lost access to their tunes post-shutdown.

- Your daily earnings-call dose: TiVo reported a loss of $4.1 million, or four cents per share, on Wednesday's Q1 '10 call; larger losses are expected next quarter. This time last year the DVR pioneer was finally making a profit.

- At a tech showcase in Seattle Wednesday, Josh Lowensohn grabbed icanhazcheezburger's Ben Huh for five questions. I have a sixth: Seriously, cheezburger night at Safeco Field? Is this a shark I see before me?

Wired

- Christopher Null gives MSI's X340, built to be a "MacBook Air killer," eight dots out of ten, calling it "an amazingly credible knockoff."

- Lifelock, that outfit with the commercials with the trucks with the Social Security numbers on the side? A federal judge just ruled that their fraud-alert service operates illegally, dumping hundreds of thousands of alerts into the credit-bureau system even if no fraud has actually been reported on a specific accounts.

- OH NOES HACKERZ IN TEH LIGHT SWITCHES!!!1 Except no, they weren't -- the video of two crews purportedly seizing control of two Munich office buildings was an ad produced some time ago. That didn't stop a McAfee blogger from publicly using the video a springboard for grumbling ominously about potential hacks on utility systems. (No security person is saying those systems aren't getting owned up on a regular basis, but dude, way to trivialize the problem.)

- A California videogame developer hand-built an 8-bit CPU from 1,253 pieces of wire. It's just so beautiful.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

- Send boatloands of money, kthx: Brian Chin blogged Carol Bartz's talk at the D7 conference, in which the Yahoo head explained to Kara Swisher what it would take to make a deal happen between Microsoft and the beleaguered search site. And there's video, so you can see for yourself that she really did say BOATloads. This time.

- Ready for another mobile browser? Ryan Kim takes a quick look at Skyfire 1.0, available for Windows Mobile and Symbian. (Your reporter will wait 'til the BlackBerry version leaves alpha to try her hand.)

- The tragic and messy Amanda Knox trial is apparently developing a sideline in engendering cyber-bullying investigations. Basically, take every unkind thought you've ever had about online discussion threads and add a pretty coed murder suspect.

WHAT'S NEXT: Too-smart phones?

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Stand by for smartphone mission creep leap

Today's WSJ article on midrange smartphones getting social-networking capabilities is just the tip of the iceberg. You may personally wish you didn't have to know about Twitter, Facebook, and such, but not only will the rest of the world not shut up about them, soon your phone won't either.

The manufacturers certainly see where the money is (isn't that easier when there's so little money around?), and the providers your mobile provider works with are hustling to bulk up their offerings. Good Technology, for instance, announced yesterday that they've acquired Intercasting Corporation. That combines a major enterprise push mobility provider (the guys who very likely make your e-mail and data accessible through your mobile phone; they were part of Motorola until earlier this year, and when Visto acquired the division it changed its name to match) and the purveyors of the ANTHEM platform, which specializes in mobile social networking and has deals in place with the usual MyTwitFace suspects.

We talked yesterday about how information currently wanted to be particulate, real-time, and connected to the reputation of the source. It only makes sense that smartphones are going to be a big part of that, and today's news fragments start to fill that picture in. I'm concerned, though, that I'm not hearing more from the power-management guys where these things are concerned, as I mentioned above.

For instance, the Sidekick LX 2009 I tested last week had some sweet social-networking apps integrated into the operating system. The alerts were great. The interface was great. The go-everywhere functionality was great. And the battery life was horrid. With my Twitter feed set to update regularly, my battery drained in about 14 hours. I was warned by T-Mobile that that might happen, as users of other smartphones are warned about similar apps on other handsets.

But warnings aren't going to be enough. No one who uses a mobile phone these days is going to accept radically diminished battery life as the price for any feature -- not even social-networking-anywhere access. Keep an eye on developments in this space, but don't get too excited until you see big movement from the guys who keep the juice flowing.

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Switzerland sides with Microsoft...Facebook's $240 M payday...Digg shouts up

Publié: mai 27, 2009, 1:54pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

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Welcome to What's Now | What's Next. Our objective is to present the news that people will be talking about today, and insight into what they'll be thinking about tomorrow.

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Red Hat takes Switzerland to task for lack of neutrality

Morning of May 26, 2009 · An announcement from Red Hat may not change the way some think about Microsoft, but it could affect your view of geopolitics. You don't typically think of Switzerland as a bastion of bias or favoritism, or as a place that tends to side with one party or philosophy over the other. But in an undeniable signal that everything now truly has changed, Switzerland is being accused of giving unfair treatment to Microsoft, in a new legal request filed last week with the Swiss Federal Administration Court, on behalf of itself and 17 other software companies that had intended to bid.

As Red Hat's spokespersons have stated and as eWeek Europe first reported, the legal brief is not a lawsuit, contrary to other reports -- Switzerland is not being sued. But the brief does charge the country's Bundesamtes für Bauten und Logistik (Bureau for Building and Logistics) with awarding a three-year renewal contract last February for workstations, software, and support to Microsoft without a public bidding process. Red Hat states that the BBL stated that the decision not to hold an auction was because no real alternative existed to Microsoft software, and that statement appears to have been confirmed by a Radio Switzerland report over the weekend. As it turns out, companies such as these may have been locked out of the bidding process for numerous federal contracts, but last February's incident was the final straw.

Red Hat's request asks the court to reverse the Bureau's decision, and open up the contract process to fair bidding. Exactly how the court would determine which companies would be qualified to bid and what assurances they must give beforehand, has not been suggested.

Germany asserts #3 spot on supercomputer list

JUGENE, the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer unveiled by the Julich Supercomputing Center in Germany.

Evening of May 26, 2009 · It's a shame that all this processor power being amassed for academic supercomputers hasn't really been put to work. Apparently the Jýlich Supercomputer Center in Germany came to that conclusion -- maybe a little late -- as it announced yesterday it will be leasing out services for what's believed to be Europe's fastest supercomputer, an IBM BlueGene/P contraption named JUGENE with 65,536 cores.

But in making that claim, Jýlich claimed it had the world's third fastest supercomputer. If it does, it's because JUGENE has had some...enhancements since last November, when the last Top 500 list was scored. Officially, JUGENE stands at #11, behind the Top 9 machines -- all American -- and the #10 machine in Shanghai. The newest version of the list comes out in just a few weeks, and maybe Europe's preparing us now for a little surprise...or perhaps to be surprised, assuming everyone else in the competition stands still. Which they generally don't.

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Former NBC News managing editor Tom Brokaw, speaking 2/27/08 before the Microsoft 'Heroes Happen Here' launch event. [A note from the ME before we continue: I want to take a moment to thank the person who essentially created this new regular feature on Betanews: Tom Brokaw set the standard for managing editors in the field of electronic journalism, and he suggested to me the concept for this feature back in 2000.

Brokaw was a stand-in at a technology conference, if you can believe it, for Gen. Colin Powell, who had just been nominated as Secretary of State and couldn't appear. At the keynote, I asked Brokaw if he were to be ME for one of our publications for one week, what change would he make right away? Here's how he responded: "It takes a lot more effort to cover those [technology] stories effectively and well, and what you have to do is stand back from the rush to the obvious story of the day, and say, 'What best serves my audience, the people who are tuning into this Web site? And how can I connect to them in a way that will give them relevant, useful information, of not just what's going on in their life today, but what is likely to happen to them tomorrow and beyond?'

"News is a two-cycle engine -- now/next, now/next. What's happened now, what happens next," Brokaw continued, rocking a little back and forth and making a pancake-flipping gesture with his right arm. "And there's been too little emphasis on the 'next' part, too much emphasis on the 'now' part."

It's about time I took his advice. So thank you again, sir. And by the way (an inside joke in case he's reading this morning)...Good evening!]

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What's Now | What's Next main banner Tech headlines from around the net

The New York Times

- Claire Cain Miller pokes at the $200 million Russian investment in Facebook that the social-networking site and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies announced Tuesday. That outlay buys Digital Sky a 1.96% stake in the company; in contrast, Microsoft got just 1.6% when they threw in $240 million in 2007. (Though truthfully, it would probably be bigger news if Microsoft didn't get the fuzzy end of any given investment lollipop.)

- Did AT&T skew the results for the latest American Idol showdown by providing phones for free texting and lessons for Kris Allen fans looking to cast blocks of votes for the not-Adam-Lambert singer? Will you care about any of these people in a week? We thought not.

The Wall Street Journal

- Regional electronics stores are thriving even as the carcasses of giants like Circuit City are picked clean. (Story available to subscribers only.)

- A poker game for the wild at heart? Jamin Brophy-Warren looks at the logic of Texas Cheat 'Em, which builds in unsavory behavior choices such as peeking at opponents' cards, stealing chips, and replicating desirable cards in one's own hands. All this talk of "the zeitgeist of cheating," as Wideload games honcho Scott Corley puts it, is swell, but Brophy-Warren wins the day with a comparison of the game's cheerful duplicity to the rules of Calvinball.

- Keep WSJ reporter John Kell in your heart this morning; you have no idea what sort of toll these depressing earnings reports can take on a reporter's nerves. The latest bad news comes from Take-Two, which lost $10.1 million last quarter and will delay the releases of Mafia II and Red Dead redemption until after the end of its fiscal year in October. Kell quotes the company as saying it's a quality-and-sales-potential issue.

Reuters

- Intel's new "Nehalem EX" server chip hits the manufacturing facilities in the second half, increasing the number of cores from six to eight and designed each of those eight cores to handle two threads, not just one. (And discretion being the better part of valor, Reuters' reporter throws to the Intel press release rather than attempt further annotation.)

- IBM's plowing billions into smart-infrastructure projects; first the company announced $2 billion to be spent in the US, and this morning they've revealed another $2 billion in earmarks for projects in Europe and $1 billion for Asia-Pacific. Big Blue's efforts are, an IBM official told Reuters, complementary to and faster-moving than government funding.

- Steve Ballmer is driving a new light-blue Ford Fusion Hybrid, hand-delivered by the Ford CEO right to the front door of the Redmond campus. It almost makes sense: Mulally's an old Seattle hand from his decades at Boeing, while Ballmer's dad was a Ford employee who raised his family in Detroit.

The Register

- The Reg runs the numbers and figures that Facebook's value is now $10 billion, down from $15 billion when Microsoft bought shares in 2007. They've got other impressive stats, too, including a link to a piece in Data Center Knowledge that figures the site is spending between $20 million and $25 million per year just on data center space.

- The far-right British National Party is claiming they were knocked offline in "in [the] largest cyber attack in recorded history" by those damned dirty Marxists, so give them money. Problem is, the BNP is claiming that other sites were also DDoSed, but those other sites say that didn't happen. You, uh, don't think a group of white supremacists and Holocaust deniers would lie about stuff, do you?

- Microsoft didn't get a renewal on a government-wide purchasing deal it has had in place with New Zealand's State Services Commission since 2000.

Elsewhere:

- NewTeeVee is among the first to report that Satish Menon, vice president of the Consumer Platforms Group at Yahoo, is leaving. Yahoo's video teams have been hit hard by recent layoffs. The NewTeeVee coverage has interesting details on just how chaotic Yahoo's video efforts look from inside the hamster wheel; if you load the page and hold your ear against the screen, I'm pretty sure you can hear Carol Bartz cussing.

- Tell your grandmother to hand over the handset: PhoneScoop reports that Samsung has voluntarily announced a recall for two models of their oldster-friendly Jitterbug, which urgently needs a software update to allow connection to 911 services when users roam out of their defined calling areas. Users can take their phone to a service center for updating, or they can ship it straight to Samsung, which will do the update and send it back in about a week.

- Digg is dropping Shouts, its "blog this" feature, claiming low legitimate usage. Digg has replaced the feature with e-mail, Facebook and Twitter sharing options.

WHAT'S NEXT? How fast can the news move and still be reputable?

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How fast can the news move and still be reputable?

Afternoon of May 26, 2009 > Digg's move to drop shouts (see item above), which was announced at a town hall on the site earlier in the month, brings to a close an unfortunate passage in the site's social-networking story. It also signals that the social-networking sphere, like the Web before it, is leaving its Wild West phase behind.

Shouts must have seemed like a good idea at the time, allowing users to alert their friends when they had a hot story posted to the site. It goes without saying that spammers took the idea and turned it into something filthy and unnatural -- in this case, a tool for both putting their stories on blast to zillions of "friends" and gumming up the Digg system with junky stories, with little or no penalty for doing so. Various users made recommendations for putting things right, but in the end the patient could not be saved.

Digg's decision to let Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail relationships do the heavy lifting on shout-type recommendations is an important moment in the growth of the social-networking ecosystem. By requiring that would-be shouters use their Twitter or Facebook or personal e-mail accounts to do their thing, Digg promotes a soft of confederacy of social-networking reputation, one that requires the shouter to stake not just his Digg reputation but his bona fides on another service.

Reputation and social networking have always been closely related of course -- from the days of Usenet through Slashdot's moderation systems to StumbleUpon, Delicious and their ilk. And the idea of federated identity is a major concern for those among us to think about things like Facebook Connect and OAUTH for a living.

But Digg's change advances the conversation by advancing the idea of selecting and promoting news stories in real-time, or something like it. Kevin Rose has said that speeding up to Twitter time -- "living and breathing," as he says -- is a priority for his site. Making news items shift in prominence and popularity in real time is powerful stuff; it would potentially make Digg as powerful as any news aggregator (you hear that, Google News?), and would -- if Twitter's sheer numbers started coming to bear regularly on Digg vote tallies -- have the potential to drastically change what we mean by the daily news cycle. (Which, let me tell you, isn't a nice thought on Day One of a feature devoted to sussing the daily news cycle. Damn you, Rose!)

The implications of real-time, reputation-dependent news feeds touch just about every field of human endeavor that touches the net. Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall Street touched on a few salient points yesterday in a fine post, noting that the combination gives certain industries (marketing, stock trading) quite enough rope to hang themselves. (He also touches on some public-service applications for which I think the fail Whale-prone Twitter isn't now and may never be suited, but isn't that the post of blogging?)

Or maybe you don't have to go far off the beaten track at all to see where this trend's headed. The New York Times, an excellent index of the trailing edge in technology, just introduced its very first "social media editor." Jennifer Preston, who formerly edited the regional editions of the paper, announced herself to the world by Twittering, but other reports indicate that she'll also be doing a certain amount of reining in the troops.

It's hard to imagine a news organization with a more parochial approach than the Times has to doing things, just as it's hard to imagine a media company working harder to stay on the bleeding edge than Digg. Somewhere between the two, you might catch a glimpse of the future of reputation and reliability online.

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Publié: juin 23, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: juin 22, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: juin 19, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: juin 18, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: juin 17, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: juin 3, 2009, 2:30pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: juin 2, 2009, 2:35pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: mai 29, 2009, 7:37pm CEST par the Betanews Staff

Publié: mai 29, 2009, 2:42pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: mai 28, 2009, 2:38pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

Publié: mai 27, 2009, 1:54pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff