Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff | July 2006

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July 2006

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Dell is on fire again, and not in the good sense. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that another laptop ignited and turned into a flamethrower.

The newspaper's Web site said that a reader who asked that he not be identified said his Dell laptop, supplied to him by his company, had burst into flames last November.

The man said he was working late in the office when the computer suddenly began to make "popping noises".

"It wasn't quite an explosion, but white smoke began to pour out of the machine, completely filling up the room, and there were flames coming up the sides of the laptop," he told smh.com.au.

This latest report follows a flaming Dell laptop that was captured on film in Osaka, Japan last month, and another Dell that was reported to have burst into flames at an office in Illinois just last week

Dell owners, are you concerned? We'll see if we can get Dell to comment. More to come.

Talk back to us.

Posted by Mike Barton on July 31, 2006 04:23 PM

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Craigslist Craig's news play named

The Craig Newmark-backed online news play may be as secretive as ever but at least it has a name to Google for more info as it comes out: Daylife.

Reports said Monday that Jeff Jarvis, in writing about another news site, NewAssignment.Net, said: "Daylife will gather, analyze, organize and create a new, distributed platform for the world's news."

The TechWeb report said the site would provide technical and distribution help to NewAssignment, which aims to encourage "smart mobs" of regular citizens to submit ideas and report the news through a process they're calling "open source journalism."

If Daylife rattles publishers' news interests like Craigslist has their classifieds interests, it should get interesting.

I hope it turns up the heat competition-wise rather than leading to more newspapers going downhill or out altogether.

Having worked at a major daily newspaper, I have great respect for papers' role, and for the teams of people who work tirelessly to put them together day-in and -out.

Posted by Mike Barton on July 31, 2006 03:52 PM

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Glitch sends Google stock tumbling

The Nasdaq is looking into an incident that sent Google's stock plummeting by $350 a share last week, The New York Sun reported Monday.

The report said:

The incident, which some Street pros contend is a blunder of major proportions by Nasdaq, surprisingly managed to escape the eyes of the financial press and was never reported even though the decline -- an astonishing drop of nearly $350 a share in a mere 10 minutes -- was the greatest ever in the history of the stock market in after-hours trading -- and undoubtedly in regular trading, as well.
Here's what happened. On Thursday, trading in Google wrapped up the day at $387.12 a share at the usual closing time of 4 p.m. A minute after the close, Google announced its second-quarter results: better than expected earnings, but decelerating revenue growth from the prior quarter.

At 4:02 p.m., in after-hours trading, Google's shares got creamed, initially tumbling to as low as $364, down more than $23 a share from its close, but then rallying back to $391, for a gain of nearly $14.

At about the $391 price point, an order originated on Instinet-ATS (a Nasdaq company) that triggered trades between 4:10 p.m. and 4:12 p.m. at a price as low as $38 (representing a drop of almost $350 a share from the close). In brief, someone from a Nasdaq member firm punched in an erroneous figure to commence a trade.

That led to a host of subsequent trading at $38, as well as at $37.81, $37.82, $37.99, $38.02, $38.03, and $38.05.

Posted by Mike Barton on July 31, 2006 03:17 PM

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

MyHeritage.com puts a new face on face recognition

The celebrity I most resemble is Dominic Monaghan -- at least according to the Web site MyHeritage.com. The site calculates that resemblance at 68%, mind you. OK. I can see it. Maybe I have Hobbit blood. (I guess I should add that I also bear a reported 62% resemblance to Jerry Bruckheimer.)

Launched in its beta form two weeks ago, MyHeritage.com is built atop the company's face-recognition software, with a nifty Flash UI. One of the site's clever tricks is, it lets you upload a mugshot of yourself (or anyone, for that matter; the pic should be large, and the subject should be forward-facing. The site recommends the subject should not be smiling, but my girlfriend reports getting preferable results with a smiling shot).

Once the picture is uploaded, the application analyzes it, then searches through an extensive database of some 3,200 famous people of past and present. Within moments, it delivers the names and photos of those you (or whoever's photo you uploaded) most resemble. (Proceed with caution; it can be a little addicting.)

Mind you, the purpose of the site isn't to shatter your ego by pointing out your 97% resemblance to Steve Buscemi (whose work I very much enjoy, by the way) or Carrot Top (no comment); as the company's name suggests, MyHeritage.com is intended for family history research. Here's how Gilad Japhet, the CEO of the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company, explains it: "Teach the system what your relatives look like by providing a few examples, and we may just find additional photos of your ancestors that other users have contributed, including photos you've never seen before. We may even find photos of your ancestors, based on facial similarity to your family members."

Another possibility: "We'll just find someone on the other side of the globe who looks just like you." Very useful; you may finally be able to prove that it was, indeed, your evil twin who was getting you in trouble all along.

Of course, being the enterprise-technology-minded InfoWorlder that I am, I wondered how face-recognition techonology is coming along for more enterprise-oriented applications, like security. Are we nearing the point that a company can run cameras throughout HQ, making sure the wrong people aren't going where they're not supposed to? Can airport security keep an automatic watchful eye at the ticket counter to discover whether one of America's most wanted is booking a flight to Guatemala?

Not quite, says Japhet. Though face-recognition technology has been in the works for some seven years, "it has several known problems in the security and law enforcement markets: It works well in lab conditions but not so well outdoors in uncontrolled environments with inconsistent lighting. It works well on frontal faces, but it is not very successful with angled, posed faces, and with facial expressions. It is prone to false positives. It is also not difficult to reduce its effectiveness by changing facial hair and glasses. This is why there still isn't massive and widespread use of this technology for security and law enforcement and face recognition cameras are still seldom seen in many crowded locations."

OK, fair enough. The consumer-oriented uses, such as simplified photo-sorting, are still useful. I just have to face the reality that, for now, when I go to the airport, I'm still going to be stuck carrying around that driver's license with the god-awful photo. (My resemblance to Dominic Monaghan just isn't strong enough to paste his pic over mine.)

But perhaps through MyHeritage.com, I can find someone out there who's in the same boat.

Posted by Ted Samson on July 31, 2006 01:44 PM

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Tapped by Boeing, Wind River shares the wealth

There's some interesting news blowing out of Alameda, Calif.-based Wind River today which could spell big things for the company as well as the open-source community as a whole.

First off, the company has landed a deal with Boeing through which the aerospace and defense behemoth will use Wind River's open-source Platform for Networking Equipment, Linux Edition, for the P-8A Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft (MMA) mission system. The Wind River platform includes Wind River Workbench, the company's Eclipse-based device-software development suite.

The P-8A is a state-of-the-art aircraft, designed for long-range anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, intelligence, surveillance, and recon.

No matter your feelings on the tools of war, you can't help but be impressed that Boeing has given the nod to Wind River's platform to serve as the heart of the P-8A's advanced mission system.

The Boeing deal undoubtedly means some nice additional cashflow for Wind River, and the company is giving something back to the open-source community: specifically, 300,000 lines of code to the Eclipse Foundation.

The Wind River contributions are going toward four projects: the C/C++ Development Tools Project; the Platform Project; and both the Target Management and Device Debugging subprojects within the Device Software Development Platform Project.

"With this contribution, Wind River is demonstrating our belief in the long-term benefits of guiding the DSO [device software optimization] industry towards an open development tools framework," said Steven Heintz, director of product management for developer tools at Wind River.

By no small coincidence, undoubtedly, the code Wind River handed over to Eclipse is derived from the latest version of Wind River Workbench, version 2.5, released just today. Wind River reports that Version 2.5 includes "enhancements to help customers rapidly develop and test devices back on [the company's] Linux-based platforms. With Wind River Workbench, developers can 'see inside' a running target device and assess system behavior and performance."

Wind River Workbench Version 2.5 is downloadable at evaluations.windriver.com.

Posted by Ted Samson on July 31, 2006 12:34 PM

July 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Big Brother eyes data centers

An innocuous piece of legislation, Senate Bill 3684, is looking at data center power consumption. The bill would authorize the EPA to study electricity use and encourage the use of energy-efficient servers.

Although it is only a study that is how the EPA started when it looked at air quality. Now, thanks to further legislation we actually have cleaner air to breathe.

Who knows where this study of servers and data centers will lead. If the government gets it right it might be a good idea. But what do senators know about data centers and about how to make them more efficient?

Maybe they'll decide all you need is two processors in every server. Highly unlikely but there is one company, Azul, that is offering 96-way and 384-way processor cores that are more power efficient by an order of magnitude over traditional Intel and AMD processors.

While a traditional two-way server might use up to 1000 watts, an Azul 96-way uses 700 watts and the Azul 384-way uses 2500 watts, according to Stephen DeWitt, president of Azul.

The processors are used to run managed code environments like Java.

Grid computing, if used improperly can actually waste more energy than save, according to Kevin Esptein at Scalent.

If you organize a grid so that it has a bunch of computers always at the ready in case more compute power is used, the grid may raise the efficiency of computer cycles on each server but at the same time there will be far too many in standby mode wasting watts.

Scalent designs data center software that is able to turn on and off servers and delegate applications on the fly.

Meanwhile, AMD is spearheading, along with other equipment manufacturers, the effort to build green servers and data centers. You can go to their site thegreen-grid.orgto see more.

Here's the bottom line from Congress

"It is the sense of Congress that it is in the best interest of the United States for purchasers of computer servers to give high priority to energy efficiency as a factor in determining best value and performance for purchase of computer servers."

I couldn't have said it with more redundancy myself.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 28, 2006 03:00 PM

July 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Vista's security now: Here's how

With Microsoft making more wiggle room for further delays for Vista yesterday it seems entirely appropriate to undermine it altogether by pointing out a guide on how to tune XP to have the same security as Vista, since security is its main selling point.

If the first four options don't quite cut if for you, you could take the final tip from TechWeb's guide: Get a Mac.

From TechWeb:

More than a few analyst have made the connection between Vista's UAC and the long-available security and rights model used by the Mac OS X (and Unix and Linux). On the Mac, for example, you're always running as a limited user, but at times -- like when you're installing software -- you have to provide an administrator username and password.

If Vista's UAC is a copy of Mac OS X's approach, why not stare in the horse's mouth.

It means a new computer -- and Apple's Intel-based Mac minis, iMacs, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros are not cheap, no matter what Apple's fans say -- as well as another licensed copy of Windows XP and some virtualization software, but it could be the best of both worlds.

Here's how it might work.

On an Intel-based Mac, install Parallels Desktop for Mac, the $80 virtualization program that lets you run Windows XP and its applications alongside Mac OS X.

Run the most vulnerable software -- browser and e-mail client, perhaps instant messenger client as well -- on the Mac, where they're not only safer because of the system's security strategy, but also safer because threats and exploits against OS X are rare compared to the number that Windows faces.

Work with everything else in the Windows virtual machine (VM).

Copy and paste information, and share files between Mac OS X and the Windows VM using Parallels.

Note: This won't work with Apple's own dual-boot creation too, Boot Camp, because it requires that you shut down one operating system before using the other, and doesn't allow for any file or data sharing between the two.

Need it be that drastic? Talk back to us.

Posted by Mike Barton on July 28, 2006 02:44 PM

July 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Reports say India may snub $100 laptops

The One Laptop Per Child [OLPC] idea, to offer a $100 laptop to school systems in underdeveloped countries may have hit a snag if reports out of India are true.

According to the IDG News Service story by John Ribeiro the Indian education secretary is questioning its value despite what by American standards would be a very low price.

"India's education secretary Sudeep Banerjee is reported to have written last month to the country's Planning Commission that the case for giving a computer to every single child is pedagogically suspect, and may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child, according to a report this week in The Times of India, the country's largest newspaper.

In the letter to the Planning Commission, cited by the newspaper, Banerjee wrote that if the Planning Commission has the kind of money that would be required for the OLPC scheme, it would be appropriate to utilize it for spreading secondary education in the country…"

The answer to the questio of whether or not a laptop is more valuable than a pencil and paper and textbooks revolves around whether or not a laptop is just a fancy tool or is it more than that?

I come down on the side of it being more than just a tool.

My guess is Mr. Banerjee does not use a computer. More than likely he has a secretary who does all his correspondence, including emails.

If there isn't a similar program here in the U.S. there should be.

Intel, Apple, Microsoft should be more than willing to support such an effort if for no other reason than to create future customers loyal to their products.

They should support it despite the fact that the current $100 laptop runs on Linux. Why can't Apple and Microsoft donate their OS if it pleases them.

Not only do computers open up the knowledge of the world but it opens up the mind and spirit to the truth that it is okay to dream and if you do anything is possible.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 27, 2006 03:16 PM

July 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)

HP and Mercury: Here's why

Why did HP acquire Mercury? Because it's absolutely crucial to HP's Adaptive Enterprise initiative, which purports to connect IT assets to business value. Before, HP could only make this connection at the network and systems level with OpenView -- here's the chunk of data center resources you need for this particular job and here's how it's running.

Now, with the Mercury acquisition, that visibility extends into application monitoring and portfolio management, which needs to happen in order to tie together business outcomes and technology spend in any meaningful way.

Thomas Hogan, HP's senior vice president of software, told me that Mercury's software portfolio and project management in particular filled a critical gap in HP's offering. "It gives us access at a strategic level to the CIO. Instead of being viewed as a killer server company and a killer printer company, now we're engaged at the CIO level to talk about running his organization as a business and optimizing business outcomes."

The big question is whether HP is capable of succeeding with software at any layer higher than that of OpenView. Consider the words of HP's CEO, Mark Hurd, who told analysts: "We think we have a chance for software to be truly one of the crown jewels of Hewlett-Packard."

After witnessing several big HP software fiascos -- the failure to capitalize on its early eSpeak Web services innovations, the acquisition and later abandonment of Bluestone and its excellent J2EE app server technology -- I have to wonder how big that chance may be.

I can see Mercury's runtime monitoring software extending more-or-less seamlessly from OpenView. But what does HP know about software testing, Mercury's bread and butter? Will that fall through the cracks?

That question extends to professional services as well. Mercury has a small services footprint for a software company its size, yet as I see it HP's Adaptive Enterprise initiative is essentially a professional services play. Will Mercury be adequately represented as HP consultants pitch CIOs on the vision? Or will Mercury's stuff be an afterthought or even a separate proposition?

It all comes down to how effectively HP can integrate Mercury's portfolio into the vision and the on-the-ground value proposition to customers. If HP can do it, it's a big win -- and gives retroactive meaning to the amorphous Adaptive Enterprise pitch. If it can't, then add Mercury to HP's software deadpool.

Posted by Eric Knorr on July 26, 2006 01:39 PM

July 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)

In the year 2020 -- the death of locality and other predictions

I had a talk with Hossein Eslambolchi, former president of AT&T Labs and CTO for the company. He ran down for me, ala David Letterman top ten style, his predictions for high tech in the next decade.

Number 10 --
Next generation speech recognition and Natural Language Understanding [NLU] will redefine human machine interface.

As speech recognition and NLU improve they will become the medium for the creation of the so-called Semantic Web.

According to most, the semantic Web seeks a "common framework that will allow data to be shared and reused across multiple boundaries."

At least that's how Wikipedia puts it.

In order to do this machines, not necessarily people, need to understand the meaning and context of the data which it stores.
Eslambolchi believes speech recognition and NLU are the mediums to achieve this.

Number 9
Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business
By 2010 individual databases will store 5 terabytes to 10 terabytes of data. By 2020 Eslambolchi says a single database will contain 100 petabytes of data.

Something has to change. "Normal indexing won't work," says Eslambolchi.

Number 8
Open source components at network edge will dominate
Stuff that sits on the edge now, like security and XML messaging will be integrated into the heart of the network and new things will appear at the edge.

Number 7
Broadband will be common -- death of locality.
This is a beauty. See my upcoming column on August 1st for my take. I think the death of locality could lead to the emergence of more localized services filling in the gaps where online doesn't work.

Number 6
e-collaboration and P2P will dominate the workplace
Maybe

Number 5
Sensor networks will proliferate
Yes, if you sneeze into a tissue there will be a sensor on the tissue and you'll find an email in your inbox when you get home asking if you want to reorder.

Number 4
Wireless Internet Access will grow exponentially
Sounds obvious but Eslambolchi says currently we have connections down the superhighway but not on the smaller country roads so to speak and that will be filled in over the next gen.

Number 3
Networks will become personal
Wireless IP networks will create a new class of personal devices and services. A network dedicated to you. I suppose its like a personal portal on steroids.

Number 2
Security requirements will continue to increase
Maybe even Microsoft will get it right. That's me not Eslambolchi talking.

And the number 1 technology change we will see by the year 2020 is --
Emerging networks and the Internet will be ready for the "sextuple" play.
Voice, video, data, wireless, gaming and sensory information.

Okay, go forth and build a business around one of these. You can't lose.

Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on July 26, 2006 11:01 AM

July 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Firefox snubbed at new Microsoft.com

The snazzy new preview of microsoft.com snubs Firefox and Opera users, who ~~get the rude message: "We're sorry, the page you requested could not be found",~~ are redirected to the old-school MS page, minus all the bells and whistles.

The preview includes a new interface and one-click access to Software and Services, Download & Trials, and Security, but only for IE users.

~~However, Opera 9 loaded the preview up nicely, so what gives?~~

Opera 9 has the same problem.

~~Is this a conspiracy?~~ I think Microsoft should develop its pages to work with all modern browsers, not just its own. After all, the U.S. government at one point told people to switch to Firefox for security's sake.

Talk back to us.

Posted by Mike Barton on July 25, 2006 01:43 PM

July 24, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Will Microsoft's Zune be a better iPod?

Apple loyalists who scoff at the idea that anyone, including or especially Microsoft, can take marketshare from Apple's iPod, are forgetting a very basic business truth.

Articles like the one in IT Wire are typical of the hubris of some Apple fans.

What the loyalists are forgetting is the fact that unlike a relatively small cadre, albeit in the millions, of shoppers who will buy nothing but Apple products, the mass market, hundreds of millions, does not work like that.

The iPod will own the market as long as no other company comes out with a better product. If Microsoft can design something that looks cooler and does more and is simpler to use, the iPod will become history.

Of course, it remains to be seen if Microsoft can do that. It took years for their handheld manufacturing partners to erode Palm handheld sales. With so much overhead built in the Win CE handhelds were clunkier and less efficient, unable to run native Office applications on a handheld better than Palm did with an Office simulator.

Now all handheld sales are declining as cell phones do almost everything a handheld can.

Final word to all of those Apple adherents, and to Apple as well. Don't be complacent. The market is a fickle place.

Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on July 24, 2006 10:10 AM

July 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Anti-net neutrality campaign viral

Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition.org, who faced-off against Craigslist founder Craig Newmark on NPR last month over net neutrality, wrote to tell us: "We thought the time was ripe to produce another flash video on net neutrality, because they are such a fun and effective way to communicate what is really going on in this net neutrality debate."

His jab comes at the same time that net neutrality advocates are stepping up their pressure on lawmakers.

Cleland says of his group's video, A Royal Fable:

When the dominant online giants: Google, Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and IAC, first funded and named "Itsournet.org," their pro-net neutrality lobbying coalition, we needled them here for their "Freudian Slip" in claiming they "owned" the Internet. We suggested to them that it might be more forthright and neutral to "share" ownership of the Internet with the rest of America and rename their coalition: itseveryonesnet.org. Alas they did not take our advice.
Thus, we thought their elitist sense of Internet ownership and entitlement was worthy of a new flash video.

Clelland says Netcompetition's first flash video has been seen over 2500 times on youtube.com.

There must be some pro-net neutrality videos out there to counter this viral campaign. Be the vector and send us youtube.com or other links.

And, talk back to us below.

Posted by Mike Barton on July 21, 2006 11:42 AM

July 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Is your Web site a malware spewing mess?

Web based "dummy proof" tools are all the rage, it seems. Why, in just the last week we've seen a Web based malware discovery tool, courtesy of H.D. Moore at the Metasploit Project (and *ahem* Google). Now security startup SocketShield has their own Web based offering: LinkScanner. The idea: feed it a URL and it will scan the Web site for you to determine whether it's a malware spewing mess. SocketShield is a Version 1, 0day protection software from the folks who developed the PestPatrol (now part of CA) antispyware program back in the day. This Web based scanner links to the SocketShield exploit database, which is populated by a network of researchers, automated probes, honeypots, as well as information gleaned from other SocketShield clients.

With drive by downloads a major headache for enterprise IT, it shouldn't be surprising that SocketShield isn't the first company to take on the drive by/0Day protection problem and everybody has a different take on the problem. Earlier this week, Bit9 announced a new version of their Parity software that uses a database of application profiles and security policies to prevent unknown, modified or unauthorized .exe's from executing on desktops.

So have fun. I tried out LinkSpace on InfoWorld.com (we're clean -- phew!) as well as a bunch of URLs harvested from my phishing emails in my spam account inbox. Surprisingly, all of them checked out with SocketShield. A sample malicious domain provided by the SocketShield folks (I won't bother to link to it for obvious reasons)did show the scanner flagging a malware spewing site. Let me know if you find any using LinkScanner.

Posted by Paul Roberts on July 20, 2006 11:49 AM

July 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Opera gets widgety wid it

Opera Software has unveiled Opera Widgetize! to ease creating widgets for its Opera 9 browser.

The tool, available for RSS and ATOM feeds, is very simple. Here's how, according to Opera: Name your widget, enter the address of your site, choose how you want it to look, and it's done.

Opera Widgetizer! creates a link and buttons to place on a blog or Web page, and the widgets are stored on Opera's servers.

"Many of our users wanted to create their own widgets, but didn't want to spend hours learning how to code," said Hakon Wium Lie, the company's CTO. "So we created a service that does all the work for them. It's the easiest way to have all the fun of widgets without all the hassle."

Posted by Mike Barton on July 19, 2006 04:11 PM

July 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)

WinTernals buy is bittersweet

There's a bittersweet quality to the news that Microsoft is acquiring WinTernals Software, the brainchild of Windows guru's Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. On the one hand, you're happy for Mark and Bruce, who will become esteemed members of Microsoft's development staff. Mark, in particular, will become one of only 14 Microsoft Technical Fellows, taking his place alongside legends like Windows NT guru Dave Cutler and Jim Gray. On the other hand, you're sad to see the end of a project like Sysinternals, which has provided free tools like Process Explorer, Autoruns, and Filemon to millions of Windows users and net admins -- free -- for going on a decade now. Sure, I know Sysinternals was the fun side of the business and Mark/Bryce are gonna have to get their kids' teeth straightened just like the rest of us. But the tools they created and then gave away -- dozens and dozens of them -- are incredibly adept at cutting through the layers of administrative UI gobbledgy gook and making important features easy to access and use. I often found myself wondering "Why did Winternals have to do this?" Did MS need a third party developer to tell them that it would be nice to be able to view and edit the programs that start up with (and often slow down) Windows? With the turf wars, competing agendas, release schedules and institutional torpor that often settles on large companies, the short answer is "Yes."

Unfortunately for us, the future for Sysinternals is, as the Magic 8 Ball would say "cloudy." Mark promises to keep the site running "for the time being while Microsoft determines the best way to integrate it into its own community efforts, and the tools will continue to be free to download." I don't know what that means, exactly, but I'm not too hopeful.

In the big scheme of things, though, we'll all benefit. Mark's probably best known for putting the word "rootkit" into the common parlance after he uncovered Sony's tricky DRM stealth technology back in October, 2005. But his technical expertise extends well beyond rootkit technology. Off the bat, he will be working closely with MS staff on issues like scaling in multicore environments, virtualization and creating a more manageable application model for future versions of Windows. Judging from his tireless morning and evening presentations on rootkits and kernel security at Teched 2006, Microsoft will get their money's worth out of him.

Beyond that, things get fuzzy. Bill Shelton, group product manager for Windows Server, said Microsoft isn't ready to talk about how the Winternals/Sysinternals software might be integrated with Microsoft's existing products, and won't be ready for a few months. But he did make it clear that Mark and Bryce are moving to Redmond "immediately." The goal, said Shelton, is to use the Winternals and Sysinternals wares to reduce the "TCO" (total cost of ownership) of Windows.

For his part, Mark said that working for Microsoft will give him much more leverage to improve the lives of Windows users than Winternals and Sysinternals ever could. "If I have an idea for a utility now, we can make it available to everybody that uses Windows, or get it in embedded in Windows and that will make peoples' lives better."

I sure hope so. Good luck Mark and Bryce!

Posted by Paul Roberts on July 18, 2006 01:12 PM

July 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

BEA offers Workshop tool upgrade

BEA Systems on Tuesday is announcing availability of its Workshop 3.2 developer tool release, featuring support for the Eclipse 3.2 platform and the Eclipse Web Tools Platform 1.5.

Also featured is updated support for the Spring Java framework, including automatic generation of Spring artifacts from object-relational mappings, and improved support for the Kodo persistence framework. The final Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 persistence specification also is supported.

A new JavaServer Pages tutorial is included, as is upgraded documentation.

Posted by Paul Krill on July 17, 2006 05:23 PM

July 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

SOA Link gets more members

Four testing and quality assurance vendors, Mindreef, Solstice Software, Parasoft and iTKO, this week joined SOA Link, an industry initiative geared toward SOA governance.

SOA Link is driven by Infravio and also has featured members such as Hewlett-Packard, Iona and JBoss.

Mindreef intends for its products to help assure service quality and reliability as part of SOA Link. The company offers Mindreef SOAPscope Server, a solution for SOA system component testing.

Parasoft offers automated error prevention products for software development and is looking to SOA Link to assist in boosting quality. The company offers an "SOA-aware testing framework," called Parasoft SOAtest.

Solstice Software provides Solstice Integra Suite, for end-to-end integration and testing. The company plans to identify governance and testing use cases as part of SOA Link.

SOA testing vendor iTKO also joined SOA Link.

A debate ensued at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco last month questioning the need for two industry initiatives for SOA governance, with SOA Link pitted against the Governance Interoperability Framework, led by Systinet.

Posted by Paul Krill on July 14, 2006 03:55 PM

July 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Phishing with two factors -- What's really changed?

There's been a lot of heavy breathing in recent days about phishing attacks that target two factor authentication technology used by banks and financial services companies. While this is clearly a new wrinkle in the phishing epidemic, I don't think its anything anybody should be peeing down their leg over. First of all, as the good folks at the SANS ISC pointed out months ago, two factor authentication isn't a magic bullet, its just another roadblock for fraudsters to have to navigate around. In fact, in an excellent research note on phishing with two factors SANS ISC handler Jason Lam predicted the very same man in the middle attack that's now being used against Citi. Namely: fradusters set up a Phishing site to be a Web proxy, passing the OTP and challenge response information to and from the actual bank customer, then ride into the online banking session on top of his or her credentials. The only thing that's surprising about the Citi phish is that fraudsters were so quick to try to break the OTP technology rather than just moving on to an easier mark (i.e. a bank that doesn't require OTP), as Lam predicted they would.

That said, two factor authentication is far from obsolete just because phishers have figured out one way to trick banks that use it. True, most banks are implementing it because the government is telling them to, but the technology will be a major improvement in security for most online banking customers, first and foremost because fraudsters can now only steal credentials for a single online banking session, not permanent credentials that can be used in perpetuity.

Couple the "one time only" access with antifraud features that many banks (including, I would bet, Citibank) use to flag and block unusual activity and you have a much more thorough defense than the recent reports let on. For example, many banks will look at traffic being proxied from a server in, say, China, and flag that. Couple the "geolocation" flag with a behavioral flag ("Why is this person suddenly requesting a wire transfer of the balance of their account?") and you've probably got a frustrated and unsuccessful phisher.

So two factor isn't a silver bullet, but its also not like this is the only thing banks are doing. In addition to OTP technology, there are lots of other technologies that banks are throwing at fraud, from antiphishing and brand protection services like MarkMonitor, RSA(EMC?)/Cytoa, and Cyveillance, to behavioral biometrics that companies like FairIsaac can use to determine that you are who you say you are. As with network security, antifraud is one of those problems where layered security works best. Tricking OTP technology is just one piece

Posted by Paul Roberts on July 14, 2006 08:33 AM

July 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Symantec Warning of PowerPoint hole

It was just Tuesday that Microsoft patched up a slew of holes in Office and Exchange. Now it looks like they've got another Office-related security problem on their hands: a previously unknown and unpatched (0day) vulnerability in the PowerPoint presentation software.

According to Symantec, researchers on the company's DeepSight Threat Analyst Team have found examples of an attack using the PowerPoint 0day hole on the Internet.

The company doesn't know if the exploit is widely circulating, or if its just being used in targeted attacks, nor does it know what the source of the vulnerability, Symantec said in an alert.

According to DeepSight, the exploit arrives as a Microsoft PowerPoint document attachment to an email message, sent from a Google email account and containing Chinese characters in the subject line. When a user launches the PowerPoint document, the vulnerability is triggered, dropping a Trojan horse program called PPDDropper.B, which in turn downloads and installs a backdoor program called Bifrose.B. That file actually overwrites the infected Powerpoint file with a clean file, in an attempt to fool scanning programs. That's a technique, Symantec points out, used by whoever was behind a string of Excel-based 0day attacks in recent months.

Symantec is posting details of the PowerPoint vulnerability here.

Posted by Paul Roberts on July 13, 2006 09:49 AM

July 12, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Firefox 2.0 beta stokes browser wars

Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 today, our sister publication PC World reports.

It says that according to developer docs, all the new features for version 2.0 should be in this version. But it's by no means finished: Mozilla says you shouldn't expect your 1.x extensions and plugins to work properly, and there are certainly bugs.

Get Firefox 2.0 beta 1 here, and read more about it in PC World's first look.

I'm thinking Opera 9 takes the cake for most improved, but I keep coming back to trusty Firefox 1.5 with lo-fi theme for my own taste of less is more.

Talk back to us on IE7 vs. Opera 9 vs. Firefox 2.0...

Posted by Mike Barton on July 12, 2006 09:06 PM

July 11, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Tuning in to Microsoft's iPod killer

Information is finally starting to come in about Microsoft's forthcoming wireless media player, reports Engadget.

The project, called Argo, will apparently spawn at the very least one device, which Engadget reports it saw yesterday.

Microsoft faces an uphill battle in its efforts to take on Apple Computer, which shipped 8.5 million iPods in the second quarter of 2006 alone, marking a 61 percent increase from its sales for the same quarter in 2005, we've reported.

But to get people to trade their iPods in for Microsoft's Wi-Fi enabled media player, Microsoft says it will let users download for free any songs they have already bought from the iTunes Music Store.

"They'll actually scan iTunes for purchased tracks and then automatically add those to your account," Engadget reports.

So Microsoft shoulders the cost for the songs, but how else to pry an iPod out of Gen X and Y's fingers.

Microsoft's new player sounds promising, but what is even moreso is some competition, what with Apple simply dominating players much like Microsoft does with Windows.

If Microsoft is successful in stealing away any masses with its next big thing in digital music, Apple may have to come out with the next, and so on.

I'd be happy with my OS X-powered iPod dream gadget.

But will the masses? With the verdict still out about converged devices vs separate phones, PDAs etc, for example, would converging a music player and mini PC all-in-one even fly?

Talk back to us...

Posted by Mike Barton on July 11, 2006 02:38 PM

July 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Lotus Notes on Linux: Time to bite?

Officially, a version of IBM's Lotus Notes client for Linux wasn't supposed to arrive until "Hannover," the planned next release of the Notes platform. But IBM surprised customers today with the announcement of a Linux version of Lotus Notes 7.

It's available now for the latest edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, according to IBM, with support for Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 expected shortly after that product ships.

The new version of Notes gives Linux users a full-featured alternative to Microsoft's Exchange enterprise messaging environment, something that's become increasingly important as companies rely more and more on messaging for their daily business. But IBM may be late to the game, as many Linux users have already begun moving toward other products, such as Evolution, Scalix, and Zimbra.

The Notes client for Linux won't be a freebie, either, which means it's unlikely to win IBM any new customers from among the Linux faithful, many of whom are cost-sensitive above all else. Still, more telling is the fact that existing Notes licenses will be fully transferable -- a workstation that's running Notes on Windows today can re-install with Red Hat and the Linux version of Notes for no additional charge.

We're seeing the begininng of a concerted effort on the part of companies like IBM and Novell to challenge Windows for a piece of the corporate desktop. The question that remains is whether the uncertainty around Windows Vista is enough to persuade customers to bite.

Posted by Neil McAllister on July 10, 2006 10:54 AM

July 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)

SOA Link bulks up with iTKO

iTKO said Monday it had joined SOA Link, what it called "an initiative for the purpose of making multiple SOA product vendors' offerings interoperable".

The move bulks up SOA Link, which includes companies such as AmberPoint, HP, Infravio, IONA, JBoss, NetIQ, Parasoft, and webMethods. Rival group Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) includes companies such as Actional, Hewlett-Packard, and Reactivity.

Panelists from technology companies in the governance space debated whether two groups were needed at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference last month.

By joining SOA Link, iTKO, which provides complete testing solutions for SOA, said in a statement it plans to promote the concept "that everyone should own quality and should be working to enhance the quality of SOA applications".

It said SOA Link participants benefited by having the ability to publish services and policy in a standardized way, and by being alerted to changes.

"SOA Link gets to the heart of what we have been trying to accomplish," said Jim Mackay, chief marketing officer, iTKO, Inc.

"While the current standards enable widespread adoption of SOA, supporting the ever-growing set of integration points between the elements of the infrastructure increases the complexity and risk of enterprise development.

"SOA Link ensures that all of these organizations work together for interoperability so the end user will be able to better integrate Service Oriented Architectures into their businesses. It is a win-win for everyone involved."

The company said that a customer buying SOA Link solutions can be assured they will work together to solve the problem of end-to-end SOA Lifecycle Governance.

Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio, Inc. (organizer of the SOA Link initiative), said: "The more quality vendors that we can get to work together and publish services, the more widely adopted SOAs will become."

But, despite the bulking up, no standard remains for SOA interoperability as long as two groups operate independently. As one panelist at the conference last month said, "It doesn't benefit to have a standard that is not a standard."

Can't we all just get along, SOA players? Talk back to us...

Posted by Mike Barton on July 10, 2006 10:45 AM

July 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Friendster patents social networking

Friendster has said it received a patent that covers online social networks, one the company had applied for long before its decline and recent recapitalization, reports Red Herring.

The report said:

The U.S. patent, which was awarded June 27, is extremely general, and would seem to cover the activities of many other sites, especially those like LinkedIn that allow people to connect within a certain number of degrees of separation.

Naming Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, who has left the company, as inventor, the patent refers to a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks."

"It's way too early to say" whether the company would pursue licenses and litigation from its competitors, Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told RedHerring.com.

But he said: "We'll do what we can to protect our intellectual property."

This patent highlights just how ridiculous the patent system is in the U.S., also recently highlighted in Neil McAllister's Patent overload hinders open source innovation.

There are some interesting comments in our Talkback, Are patents killing innovation?

But patenting social networking takes the cake. Let me restate, Friendster now has a patent on any "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks."

Talk back to us below.

Posted by Mike Barton on July 7, 2006 02:56 PM

July 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Eclipse IDE downloads top 220,000 in first week

A week after releasing its Callisto project, the Eclipse Foundation has had 221,900 downloads of the new Eclipse IDE released as part of the effort.

Callisto featured the release of 10 sets of open source Eclipse technologies for download all on the same day, June 30. Although the organization does not have download figures for all of the projects, Eclipse did register 221,900 downloads for Eclipse 3.2, which features the new IDE, as of 2 p.m. EST on Friday.

Eclipse had 1 million downloads of its previous IDE in the first 40 days of its release, which occurred in June 2005.

Posted by Paul Krill on July 7, 2006 02:43 PM

July 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)

To google or not to google?

The recent announcement that "Google" will be added to the next edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a verb raises interesting questions about the future of everyone's favorite search brand. For many Internet users, "to Google" is already so synonymous with the act of searching the Web that you might as well use a lowercase G, but lawyers at the search engine might see it differently.

Trademark law in the U.S. requires companies to defend their marks against unauthorized use or else lose exclusive control over them. For example, if you don't work for the Xerox corporation your document equipment makes photocopies, not Xeroxes. In one of the more famous cases of trademark neglect, the word "aspirin," once a trademark of the Bayer corporation, has long since lapsed into public-domain status.

Will inclusion of capital-G "Google" in the dictionary bring the company's brand one step closer to becoming lowercase-G "google"? It's entirely possible. In fact, Google actually raised the possibility of losing protection for its trademark in last year's annual report. To prevent unauthorized use, Google will ultimately have to take legal action -- but can you really sue the dictionary and still not be evil?

Posted by Neil McAllister on July 6, 2006 05:07 PM

July 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Google OS speculation rebooted

Could Eric Schmidt's denial of a Google OS be akin to Steve Jobs's denials of a video iPod? Slate gives the idea of Net-based OSes a run, with the alpha YouOS held up as the proof-of-concept that such an Internet OS is within reason.

Slate writes: "Dollar for dollar, network-based computers are faster. Unless you're playing Grand Theft Auto or watching HDTV, your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them. Home computers are marketed with slogans like "Ultimate Performance," but the truth is they're engineered to run cool, quiet, and slow compared to commercial servers."

However, there are some potential stumbleblocks, the article notes, including the desire to own things; the requirement for fast, flawless networks; and, the trust-deficit when putting personal information on web-based applications.

Check out the discussion on Slashdot here.

With Vista a bloated behemoth of an OS, apparent with the belt loosening coming from the move from CD to DVD to ship, the concept of an OS as software-as-a-service sounds great if performance is good.

Would you welcome Google OS? Could a network-computer be as fast or faster? Talk back to us...

Posted by Mike Barton on July 6, 2006 03:59 PM

July 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Frustrated contractor sentenced for hacking FBI to speed deployment

So you get caught hacking into a server at FBI headquarters, making off with hashed passwords for thousands of Bureau employees, including FBI Chief Robert Mueller, then use L0phtcrack to decode them and gain unauthorized access to still more restricted Bureau systems. What's the penalty? Five years in prison? Ten years? Twenty? Try 12-18 months, plus around $40K in damages.

Not too bad, you say? Well, in the recently settled case of Joe Colon, there are what you could call "extenuating circumstances." Colon, who was sentenced on June 29 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wasn't some wily hacker, or an Al Qaeda operative. He was just a poor slob working as a contractor for BAE Systems and given the thankless job of trying to deploy the hardware infrastructure to support the FBI's now legendary, $500 million software boondoggle known as "Trilogy."

Countless Congressional and government oversight groups have already weighed in on the disastrous, unbelievably expensive piece of vaporware, which was more than four years in the (un)making. The system was supposed to enable FBI agents to integrate intelligence from isolated information silos within the Bureau. (Read "Stop 9/11.") Most recently, the GAO in May said that the Trilogy project failed in its core mission of improving the Bureau's investigative abilities and was "plagued with missed milestones and escalating costs, which eventually totaled nearly $537 million." The malfeasance included loose or nonexistent internal controls of payments to contractors, payments for questionable contractor costs, and little accountability for assets purchased with Trilogy project funds.

Totally devoid of accountability and even basic project oversight at the top, the FBI appears to be entirely overmanaged and moribund at the bottom, where IT staff try to perform their jobs in what sounds like a bureaucratic hell worthy of a Terry Gilliam movie, even for a contractor like Colon, who came to the job with Top Secret govt. clearance from an earlier stint in the Navy, according to court documents.

To quote from a memorandum filed prior to his sentencing:

"During the (Trilogy) conversion process it became apparent to Mr. Colon and the FBI’s Springfield IT department that the conversion was being bogged down by a 'ticket' procedure. This procedure
required a 'ticket' to perform such routine and mundane tasks as setting up workstations, printers, user accounts and to move individual computers from one operating system to another. Obtaining a ticket involved making a written request to and receiving authorization from the DC Field Office of the FBI. The 'Ticket' process could take between 1 and 3 days."

Hey -- we've all been there, right? You need to add a printer or get access to a server and the network admin just isn't around. Your cube buddy offers you his credentials to "make it happen" and voila! You're in.

Unfortunately, the higher ups at the FBI didn't see it that way, and Colon's efforts to cut through the FBI red tape, in service of an ultimately futile goal (implementing "Trilogy") landed him a choice interview with the FBI's Computer Intrusion Squad. To quote (from that same memo):

"With respect to the element of punishment, we would submit that the actions of the Computer Intrusion Squad of the Washington DC Field Office - in isolating Mr. Colon without food or breaks while subjecting him to repeated polygraph examinations - peppered with threats of life in jail for treason- quite frankly scared this young man out of his wits."

Ouch!

Posted by Paul Roberts on July 6, 2006 10:12 AM

July 05, 2006 | Comments: (0)

OS X on an iPod?

Forget Microsoft's Origami-based UMPCs. Engadget writes: "The new hotness is running 'Leopard Mobile' on your iPod, which is no small feat considering the devices' sub-100MHz processors and lack of a touchscreen or Internet access..."

See the YouTube video here.

"We were a bit skeptical at first too, but just click on the Read link and see for yourself -- as we all know, YouTube won't host a video until it's been verified as completely legitimate."

OK, so this is obviously a fake, but how hard would it be to get a touchscreen on the friendly iPod and tweak OS X for a mobile version? Add a phone and you have the next must-have tech gear purchase.

One can always dream. I'm not terribly impressed with the current state of the smartphone market after promises how great they'd be by now. PalmOne's Treo is getting tired and the trusty BlackBerry is too "square" for the trendy gadget set.
Motorola's Q is a step forward, but it is not as elegant as a touchscreen iPod running OS X Mobile could be.

I reckon only the iPod has the brand power, and Apple the design smarts, to make smartphones mainstream.

Talk back to us...

Posted by Mike Barton on July 5, 2006 11:40 AM

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