- Microsoft offers video download service for mobile devices
- Microsoft Releases Security Update For Windows Server 2003
- Making blogging mobile
- Supreme Court gives file-sharing a hearing
- HP names Hurd CEO to steady the course
- Adobe's Creative Suite is just the tip of the iceberg
- Fingerprint Sharing Alliance formed by telcoms, ISPs to stop attacks
- Microsoft accepts EU name for Windows without Media Player
- SunGard goes to private investor group
- SunGard to be bought by investment groups for $11.3 billion
March 31, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft offers video download service for mobile devices
Microsoft is launching a service that lets users download videos to mobile devices to watch daily television programming, including news, sports, and other content from MSNB.com, FOX Sports, the Food Network and other content providers.
Hoping to fill what it perceives as a void for video content on cell phones and other mobile devices, Microsoft is offering MSN Video Downloads with a low-cost one-year fee of $19.95.
Videos can be downloaded to Windows Mobile-based devices such as Portable Media Centers and select Smartphones and Pocket PCs, Microsoft said in a statement on its Website. Last fall, Microsoft announced the launch of its Portable Media Center. More than 20 content partners, including MSNBC.com, MSN Music, MTV Networks Music, Napster, and SnapStream Media and TiVo have agreed to make video available online specifically formatted for Windows Mobile-based multimedia devices.
"The launch of Portable Media Centers in 2004 began a new era of portable en-tertainment, and (the) announcement solidifies the continued momentum we've seen for portable video," said John Pollard, director of Windows Mobile Applications and Services Marketing at Microsoft, said in a statement. "With content from some of the most recognized brands in entertainment, MSN Video Downloads helps bring this vision to life, allowing people to take their favorite television shows with them whether they are on the train, waiting for a doctor's appointment, or keeping the kids occupied in the back seat of the car."
"Readily available digital video content remains a key driver for the portable multimedia player market," Josh Martin, associate research analyst at IDC, said in a statement on Microsoft's Website. "The proliferation and growth of video service providers will serve to fill the existing video content void and increase adoption of portable multimedia players such as Windows Mobile-based devices."
Still, some question the ultimate size of the market for TV videos.
"Virtually everyone with handheld technology is convinced that people want to watch TV on their devices. I'm less convinced," said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst for The Enderle Gourp. "If people were really excited about watching TV on handhelds, handheld TVs would have sold well. Handheld radios do well. Comparatively, handheld TVs like those from Casio in the 1990s never sold well.
"Steve Jobs talked about it and said that with a radio, you can put it in your pocket and do other things like walk or ride a horse," Enderle said. "With TVs you have to watch it. Also, portable DVDs are doing OK but they have not been a huge success. I will say that Microsoft is emphasizing short segment stuff like news and sports which have the most likelihood of success."
People subscribing to the premium service will be able to select the content they want to receive from the Web site. Digital videos are downloaded daily to a Windows Media Player 10 library, ready to be synchronized with Portable Media Centers and other devices. The video content is compliant with PlaysForSure devices that play video, and is optimized for Portable Media Centers and compati-ble with Smartphones and Pocket PCs that support Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 31, 2005 05:04 PM
March 31, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft Releases Security Update For Windows Server 2003
Microsoft sent to manufacturing late Wednesday the first service pack for its two-year old Windows Server 2003 that is heavily flavored with security enhancements designed to make it easier for corporate users to lock down their servers.
One of the more important features in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), now available for download from Microsoft's Web site, is the Security Configuration Wizard, designed to reduce the product's "attack surface" by collecting data about specific server roles and then automatically blocking all services and ports that are not needed to carry out those roles.
SP1 also contains Microsoft's Windows Firewall that permits network wide control though Group Policy. The firewall, which was also released with Windows XP Service Pack 2, can serve as a host firewall around each client and server on the network, according to company officials.
"This is now the second release of Windows Server to go through the intense security screening we have through out Trustworthy Computing initiative. We spent a lot of time not just implementing existing security fixes but also changing some of the root cause behaviors. Users can't get enough security and so two years after the first release (of Windows Server 2003) we are turning up the volume on security again, said Samm DiStasio, Director of Product Management in Microsoft's Windows Server Product Management Group.
One analyst, at least, feels the company has done a thorough job in addressing the range of security problems that keep many IT administrators up at night.
"We consistently find that customers look forward to a first service pack after a product release to bolster the security the security of the Windows environment. In the case of SP1 it looks like Microsoft has brought forward not just the normal collection of updates, but several tools that promote more secure network configurations," said Al Gillen, Research Director for System Software for IDC.
Other security improvements in the release include Internet Information Services 6.0 Auditing, which allows administrators to better identify potential malicious users in case a data store becomes corrupted. The company has also added Network Access Quarantine Control components that let administrators isolate out-of-date virtual private network assets.
Separately, Microsoft announced on Thursday that it will make the first Service Pack available for its Small Business Server within the next 60 days. That package will roll up all the latest service packs and updates available for the product, including built-in and customized integration capabilities that make installing the product less complex.
The company also announced it will send its Windows Server 2003 x64 and Windows XP Professional x64 Editions to manufacturing. Those products will be available in late April, according to company officials.
Posted by Ed Scannell on March 31, 2005 09:01 AM
March 31, 2005 | Comments: (0)
The next big thing in blogging may just be the ability to blog from a mobile phone, at least if a company called Intercasting gets its way.
The company plans to release in April an application, called Rabble, that will enable users to blog directly from a cell phone and, according to a Mercury News atricle, a major wireless provider will offer the service.
Intercasting says Rabble is about more than blogging. Here is the marketingspeak from the company's Web site:
Rabble enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create. It’s like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you. Through bits of location-tagged media, find and interact with other people and get information you won’t find in the yellow pages. Part blogging, part location-based personal networking, Rabble connects mobile consumers with the world around them through a unique and intuitive way by turning users into producers and creating a marketplace for mobile user-generated content.
I've read terms like mobile blogs, mobile media revolution, personal publishing platform, and content with local relevance, to describe Rabble, but it's too early to predict any revolutions, technological, social or otherwise.
At first blush, though, Rabble seems like one of those products that someone should have created already. Presuming that inputting blog posts and images is easy enough via mobile phones to make the process worthwhile, the notion of posting via a phone seems to be something of a gimme.
The Mercury News story also quoted a Yankee Group analyst saying that Rabble will face competition from the likes of Yahoo in the near future.
Intercasting's president Derrick Oien has a blog of his own.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 31, 2005 08:06 AM
March 30, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Supreme Court gives file-sharing a hearing
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments this week that technology companies may shy away from inventing new products that could be used to violate copyright laws if the U.S. entertainment industry can sue the distributors of the Grokster and Morpheus P-to-P (peer-to-peer) software packages for their users' actions.
The landmark case is pitting copyright advocates from the recording and movie industry associations against those who say P-to-P file sharing in particular and technology innovation in general is in danger of being stifled if Grokster and Morpheus lose.
During oral arguments in the MGM vs. Grokster case, justices peppered a lawyer for the entertainment industry with questions, saying a move away from a 21-year-old standard on technology and copyright could have major effects on the U.S. technology industry, IDG News Service reported.
Donald Verrilli Jr., representing the music and movie industries in the case, told justices that Grokster and Morpheus distributor StreamCast Networks built their business plans around copyright violations, and the vast majority of files traded with the Grokster and Morpheus software violate copyright law. The Supreme Court's 1984 Sony Betamax ruling exempts makers of technology from secon-dary copyright liability lawsuits when their technology has "substantial nonin-fringing uses," but Grokster supporters can point to just a few hundred thousand legal files among the 2.6 billion traded with P-to-P software each month, he said.
"That's the whole business," Verrilli said. "What they're talking about as lawful is a tiny, teeny little fraction."
Verrilli called Grokster and Morpheus a "gigantic infringement machine that was built on inducement" of copyright violations.
But Justice Stephen Breyer questioned how the court could draw the line between Verrilli's assertion that P-to-P software enabled "substantial" infringements and the Betamax ruling, the news service reported. If the court recognized a new standard penalizing technologies enabling substantial copyright viola-tions, the copying machine, the VCR and the Gutenberg printing press might not be legal, Breyer said.
Using the same logic, the entertainment industry could argue that Apple Computer’s iPod also encourages copyright violations, added Justice David Souter. "If I can get music to the iPod without buying the CD, I'm not going to buy the CD," he said. "How do we know in advance on your test anything that gives the inventor or ... the developer the confidence to go ahead?"
Grokster supporters said they were encouraged by the justice's questions during the hearing. "I thought the justices asked exactly the right questions," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Founda-tion and lawyer for StreamCast Networks in this case. "Is it right that the en-tertainment industry should be in charge of the nation's technology sector?"
A Supreme Court decision is expected in about three months.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 30, 2005 04:44 PM
March 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)
HP names Hurd CEO to steady the course
The selection of Mark Hurd, currently president and CEO of NCR, to take the HP helm is getting an initial thumbs up from industry analysts who say the company needs an accomplished executive who can keep HP poised for success.
After reviving NCR, Hurd now has another project on his hands, but industry watchers say he will bring steadiness to the company.
Hurd is a 25-year veteran of NCR, a supplier of retail point-of-sale hardware and software. He was named president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Dayton, Ohio, company in 2003 after serving as head of the company's Teradata division, IDG News Service reported. Teradata provides data warehousing and customer-relationship management software to businesses.
His experience running a company with multiple businesses will serve him well at HP, said Sam Bhavnani, an analyst with Current Analysis in La Jolla, Calif.
"If you look at the track record, he took a company that was floundering and took it around to where it's a very healthy company. HP's board is looking to him to do something similar here, because he's had success executing on strategies," Bhavnani said.
Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, said Hurd will help the company right itself, providing he continues to emphasize HP's founding prtinciple of innovation.
"At this point in HP's history, Mark Hurd is the right man for the CEO job at HP," he said in a Web posting. "Without a doubt, he is also the safest choice the board could have made. Given the high profile role Carly Fiorina had given herself and her resulting downfall, HP's board could ill afford to bring in someone who was a potential prima donna and risk having the company focus on the cult of a new CEO instead of getting back to work and executing on what I still believe is a solid strategy. In fact, his hire reinforces the fact that their current plans are still valid and his history of being able to turn a company around without causing too much disruption appears to be at the heart of the board’s decision to make him their new CEO. And his proven ability to execute on strategy is one of his strong points.
"By all accounts, Hurd is a loyal, pragmatic leader that understands the importance of company culture and the value that employees bring to the future of a company's growth," Bajarin said. "And, more importantly, he really understands that a company is only as good as its people. Unlike Fiorina, who alienated many long time employees from the start, Hurd is known for team building and for having a keen sensitivity to employee needs. This should endear him to the somewhat battered emotional state of HP's current staff and evoke a better climate around HP's campuses around the world."
Rob Enderle, founder and principal analyst of The Enderle Group, also said Hurd will bring stability to HP, at least for the short term.
"The selection of Mark Hurd is consistent with a stay the course strategy from HP and one that suggests that Vyomesh Joshi (VJ), HP's head of personal computers and printing and imaging is clearly on a fast track for the top job," Enderle said in a Web posting. "Hurd's tenure should be no less then 3 years but no more then 5 allowing for the critical time necessary to groom VJ for the job and for VJ to groom his successor.
"Expect Hurd to focus on the basics, making HP more efficient, eliminating extra waste and carrying out the strategy in place while helping train VJ for the position," Enderle said. "The company break up appears to remain solidly off the table and increasingly unlikely with this change and customers should feel comfortable that they won't, yet again, have to get to know the 'new HP.'"
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 29, 2005 05:17 PM
March 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Adobe's Creative Suite is just the tip of the iceberg
According to reports circulating on the Web this week, Adobe Systems next month plans to update its Creative Suite package of graphics software that includes the popular Photoshop and Illustrator applications.
In an interview on Tuesday at InfoWorld's offices, Adobe President and COO Shantanu Narayen said that while the company is best known for its Creative Suite and digital imaging product lines, Adobe is aggressively pursuing a larger vision of enterprise document services.
According to the IDG News Service, a press release detailing the new Creative Suite products was inadvertently posted to Adobe's Web site over the weekend. The posted statement said Creative Suite 2 will be announced April 4, and will include the Photoshop CS2 application, which will ship in May. New features in Photoshop CS2 include improved support for working with "raw" digital camera images, according to IDG News service.
Narayen was reluctant to confirm the Creative Suite reports, but he did acknowledge that product updates are in the pipeline.
"There are rumors to that effect. We are not announcing any new products today but we will be making an announcement shortly about the Creative Suite," he said.
Over the past five years, Adobe has diversified its product lines, Narayen said.
"What people know us best for is what we've done with the creative professional customer. That business continues to grow, [but] our largest business opportunity and where the growth is now is in our intelligent documents business," he said.
The business automation trend hasn't completely left documents behind, Narayen explained.
"The amount of information being shared is increasing. Documents are still is where that currency is represented and where the information resides," he said.
Adobe is focusing on the new category of document services that can help enterprises bridge the gap between what knowledge workers are using on the front end and what enterprises are using to automate their back end, according to Narayen.
"We are looking at the lifecycle of a document, how it is generated all the way to archiving for Sarbanes-Oxley and [other] reasons," Narayen said.
The company envisions an entire platform spanning desktop offerings to servers.
The necessary parts to this platform are a universal reader, an intelligent document, and related document services, which address specific business problems such as compliance reporting or cost reduction efforts, Narayen said.
Adobe already has a lineup of products addressing these areas, such as its Acrobat line and enterprise server offerings, and will announce new products this year addressing the document lifecycle issue, according to Narayen.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on March 29, 2005 04:46 PM
March 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Fingerprint Sharing Alliance formed by telcoms, ISPs to stop attacks
Some of the world's biggest ISPs, telcos and networking companies have banded together in the "Fingerprint Sharing Alliance" to fight network security threats in an organized fashion.
The companies, including Cisco Systems, EarthLink, Asia Netcom, British Telecommunications, and MCI will share detailed profile information on attacks launched against their networks. Information to be shared will include the source of at-tacks, IDG News Service reported. The alliance will make it easier for ISPs and network operators to crack down on global Internet attacks more quickly, according to Tom Schuster, president of Arbor Networks which launched the new alliance.
One security said the alliance formalizes and strengthens the information activities of security experts at many of the leading companies had been sharing.
"It's clearly a good thing to look at bringing automation and the network effect to a process already in place among some of the big carriers," said Jim Slaby, a senior analyst for security solutions and services at the Yankee Group.
"I think the security guys at the big ISPs informally talk to each other about security threats," Slaby said. "This is bringing communication of new threats among all participants instead of ad hoc communication that goes on over the phone mostly. Suddenly you have most of the major carriers and ISPs in the world participating is a great step forward in preventing these attacks."
The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance uses technology from Arbor called Peakflow to spot network attacks and automatically generate a profile, or "fingerprint" of the attack in a standard data file format called PCAP, the news service said. That fingerprint information is passed along to other service providers closer to the source of the attack, which can then block the source of the traffic, he said.
Arbor wrapped features that support the Fingerprint Alliance into the last re-lease of Peakflow, which came out at the beginning of 2005. Alliance members have been using Peakflow to share attack fingerprints since then, Schuster said.
The alliance replaces an ad hoc system of e-mail messages and phone calls that operators of large networks use to coordinate their response to attacks and threats, Arbor said. Because communication has been cumbersome, ISPs, and net-work owners have had no incentive to share attack information.
The alliance will make it easier for them to cooperate, which will also lower the threshold that attacks must pass to get the attention of ISPs, so that even attacks on small ISP customers prompt response from large infrastructure providers. Peakflow also scrubs the data in fingerprints, so alliance members cannot use them to sniff sensitive information on competitors, according to Schuster.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 29, 2005 02:22 PM
March 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft accepts EU name for Windows without Media Player
Microsoft said Tuesday that it can live with the European Commission's designation for a name of the version of Windows without a media player.
The EU, in a decision issued on March 24, 2004, said Microsoft is required to make available a version of the Microsoft Windows operating system without Windows Media Player in Europe. Late last week the Commission instructed Micro-soft to name this product "Windows XP Home Edition N" and "Windows XP Professional Edition N."
Two months ago, Microsoft provided the EU with nine possible names and offered to adopt any name chosen by the EU from this list, Microsoft said in a statement on its Website. Late last week, the EU told Microsoft that, based on market testing, that all of the names that the company had suggested were unacceptable.
"While we are disappointed with that determination and have some misgivings that the Commission’s designated name may cause confusion for consumers, we will adopt the Commission's name in order to promptly move forward and accelerate the pace of the implementation process," Microsoft said.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 28, 2005 05:29 PM
March 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)
SunGard goes to private investor group
A group of private investors has purchased SunGard Data Systems, a provider of financial and educational software and disaster recovery services, for a cash-and-debt deal valued at $11.3 billion.
The deal will be the largest private purchase of a technology company and also the largest leveraged buyout since Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. snapped up vanilla wafer and tobacco giant RJR Nabisco in 1989 for $31 billion.
SunGard has made a business of buying companies for almost 20 years, since it was split off from an energy company in the 1980s. In November of last year, the company announced it would split into two parts. One company would provide financial and educational software and the other would focus on disaster recovery services.
A consortium of seven private equity firms, led by Silver Lake Partners, were in on the deal. The other members of consortium include Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital, the Texas Pacific Group, the Blackstone Group, Providence Equity, and the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs. The private equity consortium did not announce if they would stick with the plan to split and sell the company, but SunGard officials said they did not expect the consortium to split the company.
This is not the only recent high-technology bid by the Texas Pacific Group. There were reports a few months back that Texas Pacific was a suitor for IBM's personal computer business that ended up going to Lenovo Group, China's largest computer manufacturer. Lenovo, which is partially owned by the Chinese government, agreed last December to pay $1.25 billion for IBM's PC business, which lost money in the last three-and-a-half years.
But don't count Texas Pacific out on that deal either. No one is commenting publicly, but The Wall Street Journal reported recently that three private-equity firms -- Texas Pacific Group, General Atlantic LLC and the Newbridge Capital LLC affiliate of Texas Pacific and Blum Capital Partners -- are close to taking a stake in Lenovo. If the deal plays out, the end result is that Texas Pacific will likely lend its restructuring expertise to the venture to manage the IBM assets.
It would also give the world's PC business a decidedly Lone Star flavor. Market leader Dell is based in Austin, HP's PC unit is headquartered in Houston and Texas Pacific has offices in Fort Worth.
Posted by Bob Francis on March 28, 2005 04:29 PM
March 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)
SunGard to be bought by investment groups for $11.3 billion
In a move that could present targets for technology companies seeking to shore up their product portfolio with new purchases, SunGard, a conglomerate which sells integrated software and processing products for financial services and provides information availability services, has agreed to be bought by a consortium of investment companies in a deal valued at $11.3 billion.
Although Sungard officials said the company will remain intact, questions have been raised about whether the company will be sold in pieces as separate businesses. Sungard's multiple software businesses or its disaster recovery and business continuity services, offering security and man-aged hosting of storage would make attractive targets for buyers.
Due to the acquisition, the board of directors of SunGard said it would not implement the previously announced plan to spin off SunGard's Availability Services business, which compete with IBM.
The acquiring consortium was organized by Silver Lake Partners and includes Bain Capital, The Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P., Providence Equity Partners and Texas Pacific Group.
In a conference call, Cristóbal Conde, president and chief executive officer of SunGard, said the deal was not designed to be able to split up the company.
"This transaction offers great value to our stockholders and represents an en-dorsement of our business model, industry leadership and financial strength. Our customers and employees should know that it is business as usual, now and following the completion of the transaction," he said in a prepared statement before the conference call. "The new investors in SunGard are world-leading pri-vate equity firms. They have a long-term view towards growing the businesses in which they invest and an excellent track record of working in partnership with management to build great companies."
Mr. Conde continued, "This transaction would not have been possible without the hard work of all our employees. They should be assured that the success of the transaction will depend on growing the business rather than eliminating jobs or reducing service levels. Upon completion of the transaction, our current senior management team will continue to lead the company, with corporate headquarters remaining in Wayne, Pa."
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 28, 2005 04:29 PM
March 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Landmark P-to-P case gets Supreme Court hearing Tuesday
When the motion picture and recording industry associations face off against two peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software vendors Tuesday in the U.S. Supreme Court in a fight over copyright protection, many believe the outcome could significantly impact future technological innovation.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs - Motion Picture Association of America, the National Music Publisher's Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America - say they're simply trying to get the court to recognize that the Grokster and Morpheus P-to-P software packages were created primarily to encourage users to illegally trade copyright songs and movies, IDG News Service reported. The lawyers argue that while users are responsible for copyright violations, P-to-P vendors share a secondary liability.
The issue before the Supreme Court in the MGM vs. Grokster case focuses on a relatively narrow question: whether movie and music companies should be able to sue the P-to-P distributors for the copyright violations of their users.
Critics of the entertainment industry's position, including some technology trade groups, say the case has much broader implications: If copyright owners are able to sue inventors of new technologies for the sins of their users, few tech companies would be safe.
"Demanding that innovators guess how people use a new technology, and holding them liable retroactively if they fail to anticipate what users will do ... is a radical new definition of secondary liability that will chill innovation," said Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer rights advocacy group. "The tyranny of copyright risk and the liability it will bring will make innovators timid in inventing new communications technologies."
If the Supreme Court allows entertainment companies to sue P-to-P vendors, it will overturn its own 21-year-old ruling that has balanced the rights of copy-right owners with those of the creators of innovative new technologies such as the VCR, the copying machine and the MP3 player, said critics of the entertainment industry's position.
"This case is not just about peer-to-peer, it's fundamentally about trying to change the rules for all of the technology industry," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and lawyer for Morpheus distributor StreamCast Networks in this case.
The case centers around the Supreme Court's 1984 Sony Betamax ruling, in which judges rejected claims of a movie studio brought against Sony, maker of the Be-tamax VCR. The court ruled against Universal City Studios, saying that makers of technologies with significant uses other than infringing copyrights were not liable for their users' copyright violations.
The entertainment industry has lost its previous attempts to sue Grokster and StreamCast Networks. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, citing the 1984 Betamax decision, ruled in August that the p-to-p vendors were not liable for their users' copyright violations.
Lawyers for the entertainment industry say they're not trying to overturn the Betamax decision, but want the court to recognize that the Grokster and Morpheus software is designed specifically to allow users to steal music and movies. Many P-to-P vendors have designed software that doesn't track the files users are trading and refuse to make changes that would filter out copyright files, said Charles Ortner, a lawyer representing the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 28, 2005 11:10 AM
March 25, 2005 | Comments: (0)
P-to-P file swapping declines in popularity as method for accessing music and video files
E-mail, IM and MP3 players are replacing peer-to-peer (P-to-P) technology as the preferred way of downloading songs and video, according to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The study was released one week before the U.S. Supreme Court is to hear arguments in MGM vs. Grokster, a case that pits technology trade groups and consumer advocates against the entertainment industry, with technology companies arguing that P-to-P software, like many other technologies, has legal applications that should be allowed, IDG News Service reported.
The tough stance taken by the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Industry Association to file lawsuits against downloaders of their products seems to be paying off as users look for other ways to access content, the Pew study suggests.
"Current file downloaders are now more likely to say they use online music services like iTunes than they are to report using P-to-P services," the study said. "The percentage of music downloaders who have tried paid services has grown from 24 percent in 2004 to 43 percent in our most recent survey. However, respondents may now be less likely to report peer-to-peer usage due to the stigma associated with the networks."
The survey of 1,421 U.S. adult Internet users found that informal file-sharing networks are used by 19 percent of music and video downloaders, with MP3 players, e-mail and IM (instant message) products popular mediums for transferring files between friends and family, the news service said.
Around 27 percent of Internet users surveyed by Pew said they downloaded either music or video files over the Internet, and 48 percent of all those who downloaded said they use sources other than P-to-P networks or premium online services, such as Apple Computer's iTunes, to get music or video files. Pew estimates that about 18 million Americans are swapping files using nontraditional means based on the survey results.
Approximately 19 percent of the adult Internet users in the survey admitted to downloading files using an MP3 player, such as an Apple iPod. That translates into about 7 million adults, and is surprising, because products like the iPod are not designed to support file sharing between devices, said Mary Madden, a research specialist at Pew who wrote the report.
Exchanging music and video files over e-mail or IM networks was even more common. Twenty-eight percent of downloaders, or an estimated 10 million adult Internet users in the U.S., said they got files that way. Other alternative sources included music and movie Websites, blogs and online review sites.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 25, 2005 12:56 PM
March 25, 2005 | Comments: (0)
The Mozilla Foundation has issued a patch for a previously undisclosed hole in its popular Firefox Web browser and is encouraging Firefox users to download the software update as soon as possible.
Gee, that sounds like some other company, I know that also starts with the letter "M." Who could that be?
The nonprofit organization released Firefox 1.0.2 to fix a buffer overflow vulnerability in a Firefox feature for processing GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image files. The patch is the second security patch issued in less than a month, but the foundation reassured users that the browser's open source platform is secure, and said it does not know of any active exploits for the hole.
That's the trouble with success; suddenly everyone wants to punch you out for no reason than you are a success. Hackers are basically like bullies, they pick on the weak. But that's okay; at least there is some healthy competition for Microsoft's Internet Explorer - holes and all.
Posted by Bob Francis on March 25, 2005 11:36 AM
March 24, 2005 | Comments: (0)
AMD's dual-core processor plans
I sat down and had a chat with Ben Williams, vice president, commercial server/workstation business, Microprocessor Business Unit, at AMD on Thursday.
While a bit short on details Williams did give me a peek at AMDs plans for multi-core processors.
A dual-core 64-bit Opteron processor with each core running at 1.8GHz will be available by mid-year. Currently, the fastest chip AMD makes is a 2.6GHz Opteron.
Williams believes AMD will beat Intel by as much as a year in offering a server-based processor.
Intel for its part said it would have an Itanium dual processor by the end
of the year. Well, no matter who's right that is at least a six month head start for AMD.
The AMD dual core chips will be plug compatible with current 90 nanometer chip size. This means that IT could pop out the old chip and plug in a new dual core and everything would run as before, only, it is hoped, faster.
The only change would be an upgrade to the BIOS firmware.
This obvisouly makes migration much quicker than staging new boxes with new motherboards.
The Opteron architecture also uses direct connects from the processor to memory and I/O rather than a front side bus architecture used by Intel.
Power consumption, an important consideration in the data center is also less than used by a single core chip. The AMD dual-core product will consume 95 watts which includes the I/O and memory as opposed to 110 watts for a single core chip plus another 20 watts power consumption for the I/O and memory.
So, by the end of the year dual cores will certainly be here from both AMD and Intel. Data centers will get more computing performance per rack and at least in AMDs case, more compute power per watt as well.
AMD promises to also introduce desktop multi-core processors, a gaming processor when the gaming market creates games that can take advantage of the power and further down the road, quad cores and beyond.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on March 24, 2005 03:46 PM
March 24, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Dell launches lower-cost PowerEdge database servers
Dell announced two database servers which promise to give enterprise users high-end performance for less cost. The company introduced four-processor PowerEdge 680 and 685 servers, along with software and services designed to help users build data centers with the new hardware.
"With the launch of the PowerEdge 6800 and PowerEdge 6850, we have effectively lowered the barrier to entry for customers looking to deploy a high-performance, four-processor server for database environments," Jeff Clarke, senior vice president of the Enterprise Product Group, said in a statement. "While our cus-tomers continue to look to us for low cost, the real value we're offering is a tightly integrated solution of high performance hardware, certification with leading applications, complete management software and the professional services to ensure optimal installation and usage in their data center."
The servers will use Intel's Truland platform, which brings new technologies such as the PCI Express interconnect technology, 64-bit capabilities, a 667MHz front-side bus and support for DDR2 memory to multiprocessor servers using the E8500 chipset, IDG News Service said. These features are available on PCs and low-end servers, but Intel tends to gradually introduce upgrades to server technology because of the long process of testing and validating new chips and chip-sets for enterprise servers.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 24, 2005 03:02 PM
March 23, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Novell's Linux Desktop is poised for takeoff
Novell is clearly excited about what it's cooking up for desktop Linux. Next year the company will release Desktop Linux 10, a substantial upgrade to the desktop OS and application suite that will be ready to take on Microsoft Windows, Novell executives said this week.
Novell has been diligently working to establish Linux in corporate data centers, workgroups, and ultimately on the desktop, said David Patrick, vice president and general manager of Linux and open source platforms for Novell.
"Linux's strength started from the server market and worked down to the desktop. Microsoft is a desktop player working up into server based workloads," he said.
Today Linux is ready for desktop usage, but it has not yet been presented as a general purpose environment. All that will change with Linux Desktop 10, Patrick said.
"There will be huge strides in the next release. The platform will be much more robust, [with] more applications and more compatibility with applications," Patrick said.
Novell's Linux Desktop offering includes a desktop operating system, Novell's edition of OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, Mozilla Firefox, a multi-network IM client, Novell Evolution open source collaboration client, and support.
The major missing ingredient for Linux to thrive on the desktop is application support, according to Patrick and other executives at Novell.
"We need more applications, and we are working aggressively with the ISV community to port applications to support Linux Desktop," he said.
Now that large, well-known enterprise vendors are standing behind Linux, companies like Delta Airlines subsidiary Comair appear to be ready to embrace Linux throughout the stack. Comair is in the process of migrating about 20 servers from NetWare to Novell's Open Enterprise Server, which combines NetWare and Linux.
"For me it wasn't even remotely risky going with Linux. I've been using Linux since 1998," said Roger Fenner, infrastructure services manager at Comair.
"The original concern at Comair was support for Linux. Once Novell acquired Suse Linux we knew we could count on Novell for quality support," Fenner said.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on March 23, 2005 03:23 PM
March 23, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Yahoo takes e-mail storage to 1GB
As Yahoo raises storage capacity for its free Web mail service to 1GB, the competition intensifies among internet content and service providers such as Google and Microsoft to offer more attractive services.
Yahoo announced its third increase in inbox capacity in nine months, passing Microsoft's Hotmail and matching Google's Gmail, IDG News Service reported.
Keeping up with user demands is important because Web mail service plays a big role in people's overall consumption of Yahoo content and services, Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's vice president of communications products, told the news service.
Yahoo's Web mail has become a very important starting point for engaging users, said Charlene Li, a Forrester Research analyst. "The big three doorways (to Yahoo) are the homepage, My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail," she said.
David Freund, information architectures analyst with Illuminata, said services such as Web mail are becoming increasingly important as both consumers and corporations grow accustomed to using them. "They gain acceptance by the end users, and it's the end users who often wind up deciding what gets used (in corporations)," he said.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 23, 2005 03:03 PM
March 23, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Dell Unveils Multi-Processor Servers For Database Environments
Hoping to attract those corporate users interested in consolidating older RISC-based servers, Dell on Wednesday rolled out two of its lowest-priced, Intel-based, four-processor systems that company officials contend are best suited for data base, consolidation and virtualization strategies.
Along with the new systems, Dell also unveiled new data management software, and a data center environmental assessment service, the latter intended help corporate users better evaluate a data center's thermal and power requirements.
Fueled by Intel's 64-bit Xeon processor, the Dell PowerEdge 6800 and 6850 both include DDR-400 ECC memory and PCI Express I/O, which contributes to making the systems 32 per cent faster than the company's previous four-processor systems, company officials said.
The new servers mark the first time that PowerEdge servers can be configured for application-specific performance optimization. The units can be bought in two different configurations, one with an 8 mbyte level three cache, or one with a level 2 cache but with a faster processor, giving IT administrators a choice to pick the system that best fits their application requirements.
Both the Models 6800 and 6850 have been tested and certified for 32-bit versions of Oracle's Database 10g and Database 9i, Real Application Clusters, as well as Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, running under Windows Server 2003 64-bit Edition. The servers have also been certified to work with Red Hat's 64-bit Enterprise Linux operating system. Dell officials said they plan to offer the 64-bit operating systems on the new servers sometime later this year.
Dell has included an improved version of its OpenManage management software, called Version 4.3, which contains a number of security and change management enhancements, simpler monitoring capabilities and improved deployment tools.
Scheduled to be available "in the coming weeks," according to company officials, the PowerEdge 6800 and 6850 carry a starting price of $3,999 and $4,899 respectively.
More technical information on the servers, management software, and assessment service can be seen at www.dell.com/servers.
Posted by Ed Scannell on March 23, 2005 10:51 AM
March 23, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft tackles tough data model problem
Microsoft will have its hands full trying to forge a technology that makes it easier to build applications using the varied data representations based on object, relational and XML models. But the company is forging ahead anyway, with its Comega project.
Still a research endeavor, the effort has elicited some interesting feedback.
"It's going to change a lot before it will have promise but it's a step in the right direction," said Sahil Malik, a .Net consultant at the National Cancer Institute who has fiddled with Comega. He described previous attempts at tackling the data model gap as "lame."
Product plans, if any, have yet to be determined for Comega. But if Microsoft is able to produce a mature, working technology, the company's .Net development platform would get a major shot in the arm at a time when some in the Java community are already questioning the strength of Java vs. Microsoft's development technology.
Things could get interesting.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 23, 2005 10:37 AM
March 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Phishing, hacking attacks increase
You hear about it all the time - some company or organization has been hacked and personal data has been stolen. The most recent was today's announcement that hackers attacked computer servers at California State University and may have gained access to the personal information of 59,000 people affiliated with the school.
The school is busy alerting students, former students, prospective students and faculty that their personal information, including Social Security numbers, may have been compromised in the attack three weeks ago.
And Symantec has just released its biannual Internet Security Threat Report . The report said "phishing" attacks are growing rapidly. In a phishing attack, computer users are lured to Web sites that appear to be owned by banks or other firms and dupe them into to giving passwords, credit card numbers or other key information.
Phishing was up 366 percent in the six months to December 31 compared with the prior six months, according to the report.
There is not much anyone can do when their information is in someone else's database and phishing attacks depend on the user being misled. For your own protection, of course, everyone should keep their anti-virus and anti-spyware software locked, loaded and updated.
There is a company offering a slightly different take on security. GreenBorder has launched its network security product which is designed to secure computers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook products, two popular products with gaping security holes.
GreenBorder Professional Edition is designed to protect against malicious content arriving in Internet Explorer and Outlook by forcing untrusted content to execute in a virtualized protected "timeout" environment, where it is kept isolated from the local host or trusted network.
GreenBorder differs from most security software is that most untrusted content, malicious or not, is allowed to execute and reside in the seamless virtual environment, but any subsequent host modifications can be discarded. In other words, viruses, worms or other bad apples can land on your computer all day and you can discard them at the end of your IT or Outlook session. Anyone who has had to modify their registry after some unwanted content made a home there knows what a pain it is to change things after a worm or virus has already done its damage.
Of course, Microsoft has indicated it is going to beef up security in the next version of IE, but GreenBorder officials say their product will still offer better protection and that the company is working with Microsoft to offer additional security features.
Posted by Bob Francis on March 22, 2005 08:41 AM
March 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
One bidding war over, another still underway
Oracle bested rival SAP in the battle for Retek and announced that it plans to acquire the retail software provider for $11.25 per share.
SAP confirmed that it is dropping out and cited a desire to practice "financial discipline" as the chief reason.
While the Oracle vs. SAP skirmish is over, another is breaking out in the telco sector. The New York Times reported this morning that both Qwest and Verizon want to buy MCI, and each penned a letter proclaiming itself the most appropriate suitor for the troubled telecom.
Verizon's chairman, in fact, wrote in his letter that any cost savings Qwest might gain by swallowing MCI were "modern fiction," The Times reported.
InfoWorld's own Ephraim Schwartz posted a blog entry explaining one of the reasons that SAP and Oracle were fighting over Retek. Retek is the key for reengineering the supply chain for real-time manufacturing and integrating that with real-time demand retailing, Schwartz wrote.
The difference between the two bidding wars may turn out to be that Retek sold for the highest offer, while it seems MCI may not be taking Qwest's bid all that seriously. But we might not even know that until March 28, the date MCI's board said it would respond to Qwest.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 22, 2005 07:16 AM
March 18, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Oracle continues bidding war with SAP for Retek
Oracle appears ready to do whatever is necessary to win its takeover fight with SAP for retail software maker Retek.
Oracle increased its bid for Retek to $11.25 per share late Thursday, again outbidding rival SAP in the tug-of-war for Retek, IDG News Service reported.
The deal makes sense because gaining traction in vertical markets helps Oracle expand sales of its database and business applications. Retek sells software to retailers, including applications for operations management, supply chain planning and execution, merchandise planning, and product demand forecasting, the news service said. It has more than 200 customers in 20 countries.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison spelled out Oracle's plan plainly in a statement on the company's Website:
"Our North American applications business is larger than SAP's," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "We intend to defend our number one position. Customers have told us they want Oracle to buy Retek. Retek's applications are built on Oracle's technology platform. And Retek and Oracle share a vision of applications built using industry standards like Java, not proprietary programming languages like SAP's ABAP."
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 18, 2005 12:29 PM
March 17, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft steps to the table with paid search
Microsoft leaped into the paid-search online advertising world Wednesday with the introduction of the beta of MSN adCenter, which will provide advertisers with demographic usage profiles linked to keywords.
Analysts say Microsoft will be able to bring much to the still-developing field of paid ad search by leveraging its Passport, Hotmail and other services that require registration.
"We've done something that's pretty unique with our technology," Yusef Mehdi, a senior vice president of MSN, said. "We've taken the breadth of information we know about our customers on MSN, through registration data when people sign up for a Hotmail account, or an instant message account, or they customize their homepage. We enrich that data through third-party sources, so that we can over-lay wealth index and demographic information, and then we map that to the key-words."
Apparently, Microsoft feels secure that the use of information from Passport won't draw criticism from users and privacy advocates, as it has in the past. The company says personal information will be kept private from demographic data they supply to paid search advertisers.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 17, 2005 04:53 PM
March 17, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft "marketing" bashed at tech conference
Apparently, tolerance for perceived marketing pitches at technical conferences is at an all-time low.
An audience member at the SD West 2005 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. took exception to the showing of a video Wednesday during a presentation entitled, "Personal Productivity with Visual Studio 2005." The video featured Microsoft users talking up the company's development technologies and it hadn't been running for more than one or two minutes.
"Excuse me, can we get off this marketing stuff and get on to what we came for," exclaimed the audience member, who wore a press badge like the one I was wearing. (Me, I prefer to mix into the background at these events and not thrust myself into the spotlight.)
Yes, these conferences are always marketing to a degree. And Microsoft presentations - I've seen many - tend to be overpolished and lack spontaneity. But I felt bad for the presenter, Craig Symonds, general manager of Visual Studio at Microsoft, who immediately after the protest had the video stopped. He then continued with what was basically a pitch for Microsoft's tools platform mixed in with some demos.
Public speaking is intimidating enough without open hostility from the audience adding to the situation. I'd even use the word rude to describe the audience member.
FWIW, we press people get complimentary passes to these events that the rest of you pay 4-figure fees to attend, with show producers hoping we'll write something about their event. Maybe if a paying attendee had been doing the yelling, I might have had more sympathy for him.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 17, 2005 09:16 AM
March 16, 2005 | Comments: (0)
HP Labs unveils RFID solutions
At a visit to the HP Labs in Palo Alto on Tuesday I met with the guys in the white coats, Salil Pradhan, chief technologist, RFID technology, HP Labs, Cyril Brignone, Research Scientist, HP Labs, and Craig Sayers, Research Scientist, both in the Sentient Environments Department, at the Labs.
The scientists demonstrated a very practical IT asset tracking solution for data centers designed around RFID technology.
What they did was put an RFID tag on every rack mounted server and used multiple antennas on a single RFID reader, also mounted inside the door of what they call a "smart rack."
The idea is to know where all the servers are at all times. Theft is not the issue here. Rather, the problem HP is trying to solve is the case of "now where did I put that thing?"
As you probably know, many from first hand experience, IT folks are constantly taking servers out, servicing them or perhaps switching them into different slots and different racks all the time.
Unfortunately, unless meticulous records of where the server was put back are kept, when someone needs to find the right server with some particular application on it or with the right hardware component, it's gone.
Using the software created by HP, IT folks can review the history of what
happened to the asset and how long it has been in each location. Each time a server is taken out or put back the reader gets a signal from the tag on the server.
The software presents a visual that shows the racks and servers with the current location highlighted. Now, everyone can have an historical record of where the server was and where the server is.
Even with bar coding, there never has been an easy way of automating this process before. The HP folks recounted the usual horror tales of managers searching a data center for an entire day until they found the server they were looking for.
This asset tracking solution is already being sold by HP services, according to Frank Lanza, the worldwide director of RFID for the services arm.
Another neat RFID solution combines GPS and video to both identify an item and its location. For example, it can track objects as they move around in a warehouse.
The code name is SeVit for Sentient Video Tracking.
Like a time machine, you can search and see back in time to where and when an item passed through a particular location.
Because all these boxes look alike, the RFID tag helps determine which box it is. Using GPS and video as cross references, the accuracy rate of knowing what box was where is extremely high.
Yes, this system can also track movements of people. But for better or worse, RFID is here to stay.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on March 16, 2005 02:00 PM
March 16, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Two companies that were once fierce competitors during the dot-com heyday will join forces, as Akamai Technologies on Wednesday announced plans to purchase Speedera Networks.
Both vendors made their mark in the late 1990s in the CDN (content delivery network) space, which aimed to speed the delivery of static and dynamic Web content through an overlay network of servers.
Under terms of the deal, Akamai will acquire Speedera in a stock-for-stock merger valued at about $130 million.
As the market for delivering static and dynamic content dried up in recent years, both companies pushed into delivering Web applications and on-demand services.
The joining of Akamai and Speedera is shocking given the protracted, and often ugly, legal skirmishes between the two companies.
In 2002, Akamai sued Speedera, alleging that Speedera co-founder and CTO Richard Day stole Akamai trade secrets from a database maintained by Web performance testing company Keynote Systems.
Part of the lawsuit claimed that Speedera officials broke into a secure database to gain private Akamai customer prospects and other technical information.
Speedera, in turn, filed suit against Akamai for unfair competition and trade libel.
In the press release announcing the merger, Akamai officials said that all pending litigation between the companies is stayed upon signing of the deal and will be formally dismissed when and if the deal is closed.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on March 16, 2005 10:53 AM
March 15, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Hacker gets jail time for WebTV virus
A prison sentence ordered for a Louisiana man for sending a malicious program using e-mail that caused Microsoft WebTV customers to call the 911 emergency service points out the wide variety of security threats recently in circulation.
David Jeansonne, 44, pled guilty in February to charges of intentionally causing damage to computers and causing a threat to public safety, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte ruled he will and will have to spend an additional six months of home detention and pay $27,100 to Microsoft after he is released, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
WebTV, which is now known as MSN TV, is a Microsoft service that allows subscribers to browse the Web and connect to the Internet through their television sets, IDG News Service said.
Jeansonne, in July, 2002, sent out e-mail messages to about 20 WebTV subscribers with an attachment that he claimed would change the WebTV display colors when opened. The attachment was actually a computer script that reprogrammed the recipient's WebTV box to dial 911 instead of the local telephone number to access Microsoft's WebTV servers.
Around 10 users fell for the ruse, and local police departments around the country responded, sending officers to the homes of WebTV users in response to the 911 calls.
Jeansonne was caught following an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and prosecuted by the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) Unit of the United States Attorney's Office.
The CHIP unit is involved in several security-related prosecutions. For example, on March 11, the U.S. Attorney's Office announced that Robert Lyttle, 21, of Pleasant Hill, Calif. pleaded guilty in federal court in Oakland to hacking into government computers and then defacing government Websites with material illegally obtained from those intrusions.
Lyttle, known as one of the members of the self-titled hacking group, called "The Deceptive Duo," admitted that he unlawfully accessed computer systems of various federal agencies in April 2002, including the Department of Defense's Defense Logistic Information Service, the Office of Health Affairs, and NASA's Ames Research Center.
In particular, Lyttle admitted that he: gained unauthorized access to a computer at NASA's Ames Research Center located at Moffett Field, Calif., and obtained information from that computer for the purpose of defacing a Website hosted on the computer.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 15, 2005 04:15 PM
March 14, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Mozilla stays focused on Firefox
The Mozilla Foundation is marshaling its resources for a browser battle with Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. Last week, the foundation announced it was moving away from support for development of its Mozilla Application Suite, known as Seamonkey.
Instead, the focus will be on the Firefox bowser and Thunderbird e-mail client.
"The 1.7.x line will be the last set of Seamonkey products released and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation," the foundation said on its Website.
"The Mozilla Foundation will provide infrastructure for those interested in working on the 1.7.x releases, which we expect will include a number of vendors who provide these products to their customers," the foundation said. "We've committed to support the 1.7 branch some time ago. If we ship 1.8 we'll need to support that as well, and we just can't manage supporting that many versions as well as Firefox and Thunderbird releases."
Firefox has grown rapidly with more than 25 million downloads. However, Microsoft captured the world's attention last month when Bill Gates announced a new version of Internet Explorer would available by mid-year. Firefox is taking the right path by concentrating on Firefox development and not waiting for Microsoft's forthcoming browser update, said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research.
"It will be interesting to see what Microsoft's response will be in IE 7," he said.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 14, 2005 05:14 PM
March 14, 2005 | Comments: (0)
BlackBerry offers Yahoo, AOL IM to go
RIM (Research in Motion) on Monday struck separate deals with Yahoo and America Online to bring instant messaging to the RIM BlackBerry handheld devices.
Under the Yahoo deal, the companies plan to pre-install full color Yahoo Messenger clients on BlackBerry devices in the coming months. In addition, Yahoo and RIM plan to offer an enhanced version of Yahoo Mail for BlackBerry. The availability of the Yahoo Mail release was not announced.
RIM also teamed with America Online to bring AIM, ICQ, and mobile AOL Mail to BlackBerry devices. As part of the arrangement, RIM joined AOL's Mobile Developer Program.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on March 14, 2005 04:13 PM
March 14, 2005 | Comments: (0)
In a bold move, the Federal Trace Commission has temporarily shut down a software vendor that used allegedly false scare tactics to build up sales. Bold, that is, if they had taken the action, oh say, five years earlier.
The FTC says that the makers of the product Spyware Assassin tried to scare consumers into buying software through a variety of pop-up ads and e-mails that warned consumers their computers had been infected with malicious monitoring software.
The company, MaxTheater, produced evidence of spyware even on systems that were clean and, even more galling, its $30 program did nothing to actually remove any spyware. It's a little like the exterminator that crawls under your house, comes up with a board covered with bugs, then sprays with water and hands you a hefty bill.
A U.S. court has ordered the company to suspend its activities until a court hearing on Tuesday. The court could compel the company to give back all the money it made from selling Spyware Assassin.
The FTC also recently issued a report that boldly - there's that word again - identifies spyware as "a real and growing" problem. To repeat: bold, that is, if they had taken the action five years earlier.
Several months after holding a spyware workshop, the FTC released a report with the findings and a transcript of the workshop.
The report recommends government and industry actions and asks the business community to come up with a working definition of spyware, to distinguish it from adware. It's a start.
Posted by Bob Francis on March 14, 2005 12:27 PM
March 11, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft takes a strategic leap with Groove
Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks and the installment of Groove founder Ray Ozzie as CTO gives Microsoft a key peer-to-peer technology to enhance its Office applications while bringing the promise of future innovation to workplace technology, IT research and consulting company Gartner said Friday.
Once the deal is approved, which is expected to be done by June, Groove will become part of Microsoft's Information Worker Business unit and will continue to be based out of its Beverly, Mass., InfoWorld.com reported.
Gartner said Microsoft has taken a significant creative leap with the acquisition. "This deal, coupled with Microsoft's real-time collaboration product launch, signifies a greater focus on collaboration than Microsoft has previously shown," Gartner said in report on its Website. "Microsoft's vision goes beyond any specific technology, to define how people do work.
"Microsoft is promoting empowerment of the information worker and blurring the lines between enterprise and consumer work," Gartner analysts Betsy Burton, David Mario Smith, and Tom Austin wrote.
Attention will now be focused on Microsoft Office as the company positions it to greater advantage. "With a focus on ubiquitous network computing, Microsoft is leveraging Office dominance to encourage users to drive buying deci-sions, without help from IT departments," Gartner said. "Microsoft views per-sonal knowledge networking (PKN) as a critical marketplace dynamic. Like Office, PKN expands through grass-roots adoption within virtual teams and communities, rather than through systems under IT department control."
Groove's peer-to-peer collaboration technology gives Microsoft ready-made experience in supporting shared team workspace applications - a relatively weak offering within Microsoft's SharePoint, Gardner said. Ozzie, Groove's founder, was the chief architect of IBM's Lotus Notes and is a leading visionary on collaborative work.
Gartner also said Microsoft's move is also aimed at hurting rival IBM. "Microsoft might be buying Groove to block IBM from buying it," Gartner said.
Microsoft is also facing challenges to reconcile Groove's peer-to-peer architecture with its won SharePoint Portal and Windows architecture, and must determine how or whether to continue supporting the current Windows SharePoint Services shared workspaces.
Microsoft also needs to bring its disjointed collaboration products into a more cohesive workplace offering, Gartner said.
Dana Gardner, an analyst with The Yankee Group, said the acquisition is a major plus for small- and medium-size businesses that will see Microsoft Office applications enhanced with peer-to-peer technology without having to pay for upgrades to back end servers and other components.
"Microsoft has been investing in its own communication and collaboration technology but for small and medium businesses that rely on Office for their front end business processes, but this (deal) could be a result in a much richer set of services without having to install BizTalk Server or other back end components," Gardner aid. "A lot of SMBs are reluctant to upgrade unless they really have to. This is a way for them to bring a richer set of functions into SMBs without having to do so."
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 11, 2005 05:29 PM
March 11, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Computer viruses taking to the air
It's not just Paris Hilton's problem anymore. Computer worms and viruses are increasingly sprouting wings, taking to the air, and nesting in wireless phones, PDAs and other devices. If you're looking for some tips on how to prepare for this new world of airborne viruses, check out our recent online feature story on the subject.
And, if none of these assailants have found way into your users' devices and data or if you think you're smarter than Paris Hilton, think again. It's likely just a matter of time before you find yourself facing the problem.
According to a recent survey sponsored by RSA Security, this new breed of worms and viruses will find the going pretty easy.
The RSA Survey, conducted in New York City, San Francisco, London and Frankfurt, found that more than one third of wireless business networks were unsecured - 38% of businesses in New York, 35% in San Francisco, 36% in London and 34% in Frankfurt.
The survey also revealed that many businesses failed to take basic security precautions such as reconfiguring their default network settings. This means that wireless network access points could still be broadcasting valuable information that could be used by potential hackers and assist them in launching an attack.
In London 26% of access points still had default settings; 30% in Frankfurt; 31% in New York and 28% in San Francisco.
In addition to the business security issues, researchers also found an explosion in public access wireless hotspots: 12% of all wireless network access points in London fell into this category, compared with 24% in Frankfurt, 21% in New York and 12% in San Francisco.
Posted by Bob Francis on March 11, 2005 11:22 AM
March 10, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft grabs Groove and its guru
Microsoft, in announcing its intention to buy Groove Networks and to make Groove founder Ray Ozzie a CTO, is taking bold step toward expanding its collaboration strategy and embracing Grove's peer-to-peer technology that helps users work together over the Internet, industry analysts say.
The deal calls for Microsoft to add Groove's products into Microsoft's Office System lineup of products and services, along with bringing over Groove's core management and development team. Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, will report directly to Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates.
While Microsoft executives declined to discuss a roadmap for what and when they might integrate Groove with any of its collaboration products, Gates, in a late morning press conference on Thursday, said Microsoft will be looking to stitch in several of Groove's capabilities into Longhorn, the follow up to Windows XP, Ed Scannell of InfoWorld.com reported.
"We will bring together the peer-to-peer and authentication capabilities Groove has built into their application with the equivalent things we have been incubating at Microsoft to strengthen the platform," Gates said. "Clearly, a big thing with Longhorn is its peer-to-peer capabilities, and Groove will help us pull that together."
"Groove has some fantastic and unique features we want to fit into the entire Office offering," Gates added.
Integrating Groove should enhance Microsoft's Office System strategy on the desktop, one of the company's largest revenues generators, although again officials declined to say how and when.
By combining Groove with its existing collaboration products, including Office, SharePoint server products, and Live Meeting Server, Microsoft officials believe they have achieved a collaboration "trifecta."
"The combination of realtime server-based, and peer-to-peer communications will clearly be a significant enhancement, so you can expect that as part of our product planning for the next major wave. We are expecting to use it very broadly," said Jeff Raikes, group vice president in charge of Microsoft's Information Worker Business unit.
Currently, Microsoft has Office SharePoint Portal Server line and Windows SharePoint Services that allow IT shops to create and manage shared spaces for groups of information workers within an IT-based network. Just this past week the company introduced Office Live Communications Server and Microsoft Office Live Meeting that together reportedly offer a unified communications infrastructure for information workers.
The acquisition not only enlivens the strategic vision of Microsoft but gives to IBM, which now owns Notes, one analyst said.
"Microsoft has been on a strategic path to turn Office and .NET into the next generation of collaborative systems but has never been able to capture the momentum that Ray Ozzie did for Lotus," said Rob Enderle, founder and principal analyst of The Enderle Group. "The world that Microsoft resides in just got a whole lot interesting and IBM executives just got a very rude wake up call this morning."
However, the timing of the acquisition seemed to come at a difficult for both companies to integrate its complementary technology into two critical releases scheduled for late 2006, namely the long-awaited follow up to Windows XP, code-named Longhorn, and the next version of Office, which is designed to fully exploit Longhorn.
"Microsoft has two big releases coming next year in Longhorn and Office 12, which are radically different from their predecessors. They both have millions of lines of code, hundreds of developers, and programming teams well into their development phases. It is going to be hard to take a step back and stitch new technology and strategies into those products," said said Nate Root, a vice president at Forrester Research.
Groove makes a wide range of software and development tools that allow geographically dispersed workers collaborate over the Internet, IDG News Service reported. The company's Virtual Office product allows workers to communicate and securely share information such as files, calendars, sketch pads, task lists, Web links and photos over the Internet.
Microsoft has twice invested in Groove, Gates said, and he has long thought about whether Microsoft could hire Ozzie, who has "made a huge contribution in terms of giving us feedback about (Microsoft's) platform," and whose ideas have "influenced" the Word user interface.
Ozzie is particularly skilled at thinking about the problems and needs of workers and "building the technology in a simple way that can help people become more productive," Gates said.
Groove's Virtual Office helps users across an enterprise, or outside that en-terprise, to work together over secure Internet connections, IDG News Service reported. The product uses a peer-to-peer architecture that allows individual PCs to communicate directly with one another and to share documents or communicate via instant messaging.
"The PC has come to stand for the Personal Communicator, and so we have optimized Groove for a specific usage model that is very synergistic with how people use Office documents and tools on a day-to-day basis. This is why it is very important to view [Virtual Office] as part of the Office system of products," Ozzie said.
Gates said Ozzie will be on the company's Senior Leadership Team and will be helping to shape and influence many of the technical pieces of the company's collaboration strategy. Some observers agree that Ozzie's lofty position sends a signal that his role will be much more than that of shepherding the deal to completion followed by retirement.
"It looks like they want Ray to be around for the long haul to make some other paradigm changing inventions like Notes and Groove. You can imagine some pretty far out conversations over a cup of coffee or a beer between those two," Root said.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 10, 2005 04:59 PM
March 10, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Chicago becomes latest city to join continuing saga of municipal Wi-Fi
The Windy City is now considering instituting a municipal Wi-Fi network.
A city task force is doing the due diligence and will study the best way to offer wireless throughout the city, The Chicago Tribune reported.
As is the case in Philadelphia, service providers and carriers are trying to prevent Chicago from moving forward with its plan.
In Chicago, the advocates are saying municipal Wi-Fi could generate revenue, while the opponents claim that, based on other cities' experiences, it could result in a loss.
A similar argument is brewing in Philadelphia, though it seems from news reports that the debate is further along in Philadelphia. In the City of Brotherly Love, Mayor Street is driving the initiative and claiming that municipal Wi-Fi could help to bridge the digital divide, and also be used by the city's existing services, such as the police force.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 10, 2005 09:18 AM
March 10, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft To Buy Groove Networks
Hoping to boost its collaboration software strategy, Microsoft on Thursday announced its intention to acquire Groove Networks, naming Groove founder Ray Ozzie as the company's CTO.
The deal calls for Microsoft to add Groove's products into Microsoft's Office System lineup of products and services, along with bringing over Groove's core development team. Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, will report directly to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.
Once the deal is approved, Groove will become part of Microsoft's Information Worker Business unit, and will continue to be based out of its Massachusetts headquarters. Company officials declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal.
In a prepared statement Microsoft group vice president in charge of the company's Information Worker Business unit, said the deal makes sense because the companies have a shared vision for collaboration. He said Groove complements Microsoft's collaboration products "by helping us better serve businesses with mobile workers and remote offices," and will assist Microsoft in being able to offer both small and large companies more integrated collaboration software and services.
Currently Microsoft has Office SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services that allow IT shops to create and manage shared spaces for groups of information workers within an IT-based network. Just this past week the company introduced Office Live Communications Server and Microsoft Office Live Meeting that together reportedly offer a unified communications infrastructure for information workers.
The two companies are scheduled to hold a press conference later today to spell out more of the details of the agreement.
Posted by Ed Scannell on March 10, 2005 07:31 AM
March 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft unveils IM client, outlines Office vision
Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates outlined a new vision this week for leveraging Microsoft's collaboration and instant messaging technology for enterprise use within the Office System product lineup.
Gates introduced a new IM client and enhancements to the company's IM server and Web conferencing application.
He unveiled a new real-time communications client, dubbed Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, and explored the role of communications technology in Office applications, Cathleen Moore reported for InfoWorld.com.
"Our ambition for Office is very broad," Gates said at a conference in San Francisco. "[It is] to change the way people communicate, meet, and share information. A key area [in Office development] is a breakthrough in communication."
A major part of the evolution of Office is to inject real-time capabilities into the platform in a deeper way, Gates said. The goal is to break down silos of information and to improve information navigation, business intelligence, online meetings, and collaboration within multiple Office applications, InfoWorld.com reported.
"This is an evolution of Office way beyond when it was about a single worker doing a spreadsheet or word processing," Gates said.
One analyst said Microsoft is attempting to use ubiquitous IM and collaboration technologies to enhance enterprise assets. "Collaboration provides one of the greatest potentials for companies to leverage a lot of resources," said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst for The Enderle Group. "The issue has not been so much the technology but behavioral considerations (where executives have been reluctant to embrace it)." That is changing as it's value is increasingly recognized, he said.
Drilling into specifics, Gates unwrapped Office Communicator 2005, formerly code-named Istanbul, and announced that the product will be available by the middle of the year. The Communicator client integrates presence technology, IM, voice, video, telephony, and access to Web conferencing. In addition, the client features enhanced integration into Office applications such as Outlook, Share-Point, and Live Meeting. One key feature of Office Communicator 2005 is the ability to integrate traditional PBX telephones into the IM client.
"VoIP is exploding," Gates said. "We want to enable the software richness on the PC to connect out to traditional PBXes."
Gates also introduced an update for Live Communications Server 2005. The update will be available via a service pack that delivers support for Communicator; connectivity to public IM networks; improved IM spam, or spim, control, and support for enterprise-to-enterprise federation.
Microsoft's Live Meeting Web conferencing service also gained improvements. The new release of the hosted service features the ability to launch a meeting from within Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, and Communicator. In addition, the service gains VoIP support and integrated audio controls that let participants be called directly to join a meeting.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on March 9, 2005 05:24 PM
March 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
What's behind SAP, Oracle fight to buy Retek
As SAP and Oracle slug it out over acquiring Retek, a retail application software vendor, the real story is obviously not about who wins the prize but what's inside the box. The answer is that Retek is the key for reengineering the supply chain for real time manufacturing and integrating that with real time demand retailing.
For example, SAP is behind ISA S95, an interoperability standard between real time applications on the plant floor and ERP systems. Companies like Retek that offer a suite of software that covers just about the entire operational side of retailing are vital to make that integration happen.
Ellison has had his eye on Retek for quite some time.
"We were a bit distracted with the PeopleSoft integration process," he said, according to IDG News Service. "When SAP made their bid, we decided to counter."
By talking to their customers, what both Oracle and SAP have come to understand is that you can no longer run a company by forecasting the long range demand for a product.
Companies may still call it forecasting demand but how can it be forecasting when manufacturers have to schedule and produce goods based on weekly, daily and hourly fluctuations in the market?
This will be done by integrating demand at the retail level with manufacturing and materials handling operations.
While the loser of the battle for Retek may say it is not really significant, look for the loser, whoever it is, to make another acquisition of a company with similar technology.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on March 9, 2005 03:11 PM
March 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft casts shadows over Java lovefest
I went to hear a Java panel and a Microsoft .Net panel broke out.
That was the case at TheServerSide Java Symposium this past Saturday morning. (That's no typo - it was Saturday morning. Developers are fortunate in that they enjoy their jobs so much they sacrifice a Saturday morning in Las Vegas for more shop talk, to further hone their craft.)
Anyway, what I thought would be a Java lovefest turned into a "How do we fend off Microsoft?" debate.
The consensus was that .Net is a strong technology but that Java provides the advantages and disadvantages of more community participation. While more amenable to community contributions than perhaps .Net is, it is thus more difficult to build a consensus on improvements than the monolithic .Net platform, which is controlled by Microsoft.
Both platforms have advantages in attracting developers.
Although Microsoft's desktop domination is naturally is going to bring developers to its camp, Java is perhaps more open source-friendly, even if it technically is not open source. Thusly, developers can fiddle around more with the platform than they could with .Net. The incidence of "Java rebel frameworks" attests to the experimentation being done on Java.
For the time being, both Java and .Net shall remain the dominant platforms. There may not be a victor, but continued coexistence for years to come.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 9, 2005 11:59 AM
March 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
New CommWarrior virus infects cellphones
Security experts are monitoring the spread of the first mobile phone virus that uses Mobile Messaging Service (MMS) to circulate among mobile phone users with Symbian Series 60 mobile phones.
The virus, named CommWarrior, when opened places copies of itself on vulnerable mobile phones and uses the phone's address book to send copies of itself to the owner's contacts using MMS, IDG News Service reported. Antivirus experts believe CommWarrior, which has been spreading slowly among cell phone users since January, is not yet a serious threat.
CommWarrior, however, could herald a new age of malicious and fast-spreading cell phone threats, antivirus experts said.
The virus can replicate locally through Bluetooth wireless technology, the means by which mobile viruses like Cabir and its variants have thus far been spreading, antivirus company F-Secure said in a statement Tuesday.
Unlike Cabir, CommWarrior is capable of propagating via short text messages carrying sound, video or photos, meaning the virus has promise to attack many cellphone users.
CommWarrior, in fact, has the potential to spread globally. "So far it has failed to do so and is replicating slowly - an anomaly being carefully investigated by the F-Secure Anti Virus Research Team," F-Secure said. "First indications suggest that the virus is Russian in origin."
"The situation is not critical since we have not received a lot of reports from our customers," F-Secure director for Mobile Operator Solutions, Antti Vihavainen said. "However, CommWarrior creates unwanted billing for the owners of infected phones by sending MMS messages without user interaction. The phones can be easily protected by using common sense. None of today's mobile viruses can install themselves without the user accepting the standard security warnings."
MMS is a popular text messaging technology that is closely related to SMS (Short Message System), but allows mobile phone users to send multimedia content, such as sound files or photos, between MMS compliant mobile phones, the news service reported. The technology is popular, especially outside of the U.S. where phone users have widely adopted newer-generation cell phones that support multimedia features and MMS messaging.
When victims open the attached virus file, CommWarrior is installed on the phone and begins randomly sending MMS messages with copies of itself to numbers in the phone book. Complicating matters, CommWarrior can also spread between phones using Bluetooth wireless connections, said Victor Kouznetsov, senior vice president of mobile solutions at McAfee, IDG News Service reported.
Those who do get infected with CommWarrior can easily shut the virus down by pressing and holding the menu button on their cell phone, then selecting the CommWarrior from the list of applications that appears and pressing the "C," or "Clear" button, Kouznetsov said. Once the virus is disabled, mobile phone owners can use file management tools on the phone to locate and remove the virus files.
McAfee and F-Secure both posted bulletins listing the folders where the CommWarrior virus is installed on infected phones.
F-Secure is testing the sample of CommWarrior. However, the virus is difficult to test. Its ability to spread via wireless and MMS messages makes containment hard, Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure said, IDG News Service reported.
Mobile phone viruses are a recent development, but could be a major threat in years to come, as mobile devices become more powerful, according to Hypponen and others.
-- By Jack McCarthy
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 9, 2005 07:07 AM
March 08, 2005 | Comments: (0)