Industry Standard News and Predictions

US court rejects IBM appeal in executive's move to Dell

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:21:04 -0700

A U.S. court has rejected an IBM appeal to bar David Johnson, the company's former chief of mergers and acquisitions, from working at rival Dell over concerns regarding trade secrets.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit late Wednesday upheld a circuit court ruling from last week that allows Johnson to perform his full duties as senior vice president of strategy at Dell. Johnson worked at IBM for 27 years and directed the company's mergers and acquisitions strategy. He was hired by Dell in May.

In earlier court filings, IBM argued that Johnson could hurt the company because he had knowledge of the "most sensitive confidential strategic information." IBM accused Johnson of violating a noncompetition agreement after he joined Dell.

Judge Stephen Robinson of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York last week ruled that IBM's case wasn't strong enough and questioned whether Johnson had entered into a such an agreement. Johnson did not possess "the sort of information that is considered quintessential trade secret information -- detailed technical know-how, formulae, designs, or procedures," Robinson said.

In 2005, IBM required executives to sign noncompetition agreements to continue receiving benefits. Johnson argued that he signed the document on the wrong line as a sign of disagreeing with certain conditions specified in the agreement. IBM then discovered that the signature wasn't properly executed and sent him a new noncompetition agreement, which he never signed, Johnson said. IBM alleged that Johnson had indeed signed the agreement.

IBM in early June won a ruling that allowed Johnson to begin limited work with Dell, but prohibited him from disclosing any confidential IBM information. Johnson was ordered then to keep a log of specific daily activities at Dell that could be supplied to IBM's lawyers on request.

iPhone 3GS heats up, DOJ takes aim at Google

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:25:10 -0700

The iPhone scored quite a few headlines related to overheating problems with the 3GS this week. Depending on whom you believe, those issues are either real, exaggerated, the fault of users or some combination of the three. Otherwise, as warm weather takes hold above the equator and Bostonians contemplate whether it's time to brush up on our ark-building skills (rain, rain go away), we find this week's IT news offerings cover a broad range.

1. Apple admits iPhone 3GS heat problems, iPhone 3GS tips to prevent overheating, from Apple and AT&T says iPhone 3GS is hot in a good way : Apple offered tips to avoid overheating the iPhone 3GS, but the tip list is written as if to suggest that users are more at fault than the hardware. Meanwhile, a supposed AT&T memo talks about how hot the iPhone has been in terms of sales. Keep reading for yet more iPhone news ...

2. Jailbroken iPhones leave users more vulnerable: Jailbreaking iPhones -- or altering them so that applications not digitally signed by Apple can be installed on them -- may let users feel they have more control over their handsets, but jailbreaking could well give miscreants the upper hand. Jailbreaking removes most of the security protections from iPhones, a security researcher warned this week.

3. DOJ officially opens investigation into Google Book Search: The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that it has officially opened its investigation into a settlement involving Google Book Search in what will undoubtedly be a closely watched antitrust probe.

4. XHTML 2 language dumped for HTML 5: The World Wide Web Consortium will provide more resources toward development of the HTML 5 specification and will discontinue development of XHTML 2. HTML 5 is out in draft form, with a focus on multimedia for browser-based applications. It could be big competition for browser plug-in technologies such as Adobe Flash.

5. Oracle's European workers facing axe: Although Oracle's European performance was a highlight of its most recent quarterly financial report, the company could be about to lay off as many as 1,000 employees in Europe, according to a French labor union.

6. Mozilla launches Firefox 3.5, starts kill clock for older 3.0 and Review: Firefox 3.5 makes browsing faster, easier and more fun: After months of delays, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 and more than 2 million users downloaded the updated browser within a few hours of its launch. Early reviews were mostly positive.

7. Microsoft pulls projectile-vomiting IE8 ad from Web: We're puzzling over why it seemed like a good idea to create an online advertisement for Internet Explorer 8 that showed a woman projectile vomiting after borrowing her husband's laptop and seeing his Web browsing history. Microsoft pulled the ad, but not before one Internet wag opined that using IE is enough to induce vomiting. Undoubtedly, that isn't what Microsoft had in mind.

8. IT salaries, perks continue to shrink and Wall Street Beat: After a strong Q2, what's next for IT?: Companies continue to cut IT salaries while available jobs also have been reduced because of the recession. But amid the cost-cutting efforts, IT companies led all others when it comes to how shares are holding up in stock markets. While a weak third quarter could be in the offing, at least some analysts continue to forecast strong PC sales (relatively speaking) before the year is out.

9. Suit over China's Web filter to target Lenovo, Acer, Sony: Solid Oak Software plans to take legal action against Lenovo, Acer and Sony to keep the companies from shipping Web filtering software in China. Solid Oak contends that its programming code was stolen to develop the program, called Green Dam Youth Escort.

10. Judge temporarily dismisses MySpace cyberbully case: A U.S. District Court judge dismissed a jury verdict on misdemeanor charges against Lori Drew, the Missouri woman accused of assuming a fake MySpace identity to taunt a neighborhood teenager in suburban St. Louis. The teenager, Megan Meier, hanged herself after one of the three people involved in the fakery posted a message that the world would be better off without the girl. Prosecutors had argued that violating MySpace terms of service for the purpose of harming someone else was legally tantamount to illegal access to a computer. The judge said that the conviction could set a precedent that any violation of MySpace terms of service could be a misdemeanor.

San Francisco misses the NextBus

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:52:36 -0700

I live in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. If you've visited San Francisco you may know it as the Italian district, where Joe DiMaggio learned to play baseball and where beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg forged their countercultural vision of the American dream. If you live here, though, you also know that it's the worst place in the city to try to find a parking spot.

In the dog-eat-dog world of San Francisco parking, information is power. My friends Tom and Mary know this. When Tom comes home from work, he calls Mary from the car and Mary goes out to their eighth-floor balcony to scope out the surrounding blocks for parking spaces.

Things may get a bit easier for Tom and Mary over the next few years, though, as the city's transit agency experiments with a new system called SFPark. The city is installing new smart parking meters with wireless sensors that can tell when a parking spot is free. The city wants to share that information with drivers, in theory giving them (or their passengers -- texting while driving is illegal in California!) a way to find a parking spot via their mobile phones.

Brilliant technology, but let's hope that it rolls out a little more smoothly than another cutting-edge system we use here in San Francisco to predict when city buses will arrive. San Francisco is one of several dozen cities that use a system called NextBus.

NextBus is cool, too. It uses a wireless network and GPS to figure out where San Francisco's buses are and, most importantly, how long it will be until the next one shows up at the nearest bus stop.

The problem is that nobody seems to know for sure who owns the data. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) says it's theirs, but Apple disagrees. Last month Apple killed off a cool little iPhone app called Routsey that used the NextBus data and the iPhone's GPS capabilities to direct people to the nearest bus stop and tell them when the next city bus is due.

Routsey's creator, Steven Peterson, says his app got pulled because a company called NextBus Information Systems (NBIS) told Apple that it had the exclusive right to distribute the NextBus data, which is freely available on the Web. That was good enough for Apple to pull the plug. It's told Routsey and NBIS to work things out. Until then, Routsey is out of the AppStore.

NBIS was looking for a $1 per download licensing fee, but Peterson says that when he really looked into things, it's not clear that NBIS has the right to do this. (He initially charged US$2.99 for the software, but now says he'll give it away, if he can just get Apple to let him publish his app.)

That's because the SFMTA says that it owns of the data and it's totally fine for Routsey to use it. "We're looking at making all of our data as public as possible," SFMTA spokesman Judson True told me.

The saga hasn't played too well in San Francisco, where many are up in arms. San Francisco paid around $10 million to set up the system. Why is a private company now preventing anyone from using this public data in a useful way?

Peterson told me that he feels he's being shaken down. NextBus Information Systems has said it has a legitimate claim to the data, which the SFMTA, in turn, thinks it owns. Apple won't touch the whole mess with a 10-foot pole.

If the SFMTA has some kind of contract that clearly spells out who owns what, it's not producing it. And neither is NBIS.

So in the meantime, riders miss buses, and San Francisco, one hopes, learns a lesson: It's the data, stupid. Keeping it open isn't just good for business, it's a public service.

True says that the situation is "causing us to evaluate our policies and practices." That's a good thing, because governments sit on a huge amount of data, and technologies like the iPhone and Google Maps are giving us new ways of processing and visualizing this information, just so long as legal wrangling doesn't get in the way.

Windows 7 promises reduced power consumption

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:12:07 -0700

By building more intelligence and tools into the operating system and working more closely with its hardware and software partners, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is promising significantly reduced power consumption when its Windows 7 OS debuts this fall.

The improvements in Windows 7 build on the significant strides around power management made in Windows Vista said Elliot Katz, Windows Client product manager for Microsoft Canada. It starts with making entering and exiting sleep mode more reliable, which along yielded sizable power savings.

"With Windows 7 we've gone a lot further, focusing on core innovation to enable energy efficiency, when both in use and in idle mode," said Katz. "And not only have we focused on the OS, but we continue to be engaged directly with our hardware and software partners to continue to improve the efficiency. The whole world is looking at being more energy efficient, and with Windows 7 we've taken some strong steps on delivering that from an OS perspective."

For the channel, Katz said there is a strong opportunity around helping businesses leverage many of the power savings in Windows that the typical SMB might not even know exist. Group policies, for example, are one way of generating power efficiencies that many smaller organizations often overlook.

"Irrespective of size, but more importantly in the SMB, the partner play is helping customers understand what the impact of rolling-out energy group policies can be," said Katz. "Partners play a huge role in helping to educate customers, and it's a focus of our partner communications and education."

Katz said power savings can be realized with Windows 7 in a number of areas. New IT management and troubleshooting capabilities have been built into the OS to address power consumption, and new and existing tools help IT managers effectively deploy power management policies and troubleshoot problems. The power config tool has been expanded with the ability to produce reports on common problems, gather information on the network, and predict which PCs will be running into issues. Diagnostics can also help determine which devices or applications are causing power troubles.

"Notebook batteries get less efficient over time, and this report can determine when batteries are degraded enough to need replacement," said Katz.

Most businesses will likely be updating their PCs to the new OS over time, and while these new tools will work in a mixed-OS environment, to leverage many of the advanced features, Katz said Windows 7 is necessary.

Additional power savings have been realized through more efficient idle-time management. Even between keystrokes, Katz said there's idle time that can be leveraged. The screen is dimmed, processors idled and hard drive speed reduced during idle times to save power.

"PCs are idle for long amounts of time and short amounts of time, and idle efficiency is critical because that's where you gain a lot of power savings," said Katz. "When it's one of those days where you have lots of meetings and you forget to bring your power supply, these kinds of features really help your battery go a lot further."

With much of the power savings in Windows 7 relying on Microsoft's partnership with its ecosystem partners, Katz said the latest hardware will definitely generate the greatest power efficiency. But even PCs purchased within the last few years, and upgrading from Windows XP or Vista, will see savings.

World's 1st presentation of Win 7 RTM set for Poland

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:06:29 -0700

This year's Microsoft Technology Summit in Poland is set to become a stage for two major events - the world's first presentations of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in their RTM (ready to manufacture) versions.

"We want to show the history of Windows operating systems. We are going to establish a session in which Windows 7 development process would be shown as well as several other sessions dedicated to Windows 7 security, productivity, management and integration with Windows Server 2008 R2.", said Piotr Kaniowski, a spokesman for Microsoft Poland. According to him the exact number and subject areas of Windows 7-related sessions are still to be determined.

Microsoft Technology Summit is an annual conference taking place in Warsaw, Poland, that highlights the latest Microsoft technologies, innovations and products. The conference is addressed specifically to IT and business professionals and technology enthusiasts as well. Summit's guests will have an opportunity to attend as many as 100 different sessions lead by 60 IT experts, including Microsoft Poland representatives and foreign professionals.

Sessions are divided into several categories, such as Microsoft application platform, client and server operating systems, security, cloud computing, virtualization, mobile devices, communication and collaboration, data management and programming. Lectures will be accompanied by additional "hands-on labs" and so called Experts' Zone.

MTS 2009 will take place September 29-30 so there's still some time left to register.

More information at http://www.mts2009.pl website.

U.S. memory vendor doubles down in Canada

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:58:10 -0700

While this U.S.-based memory module and flash memory company already does business in Canada, Paul Jones, CEO of Patriot Memory, wants to double his company's Canadian market share by the end of this year with help from channel partners and new product releases.

Patriot Memory, a Fremont, Calif.-based company, sells its products through distribution channels in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In Canada, the company distributes its products through distributors, Tech Data and Supercom, in addition to other retail shops, e-tailers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). The company sells NAND flash memory products, DRAM solutions for PCs and PC applications and also SSD (solid state drive) products.

Jones said for Patriot Memory, the Canadian market is a very important part of the business. Although the company has no sales offices in Canada, it does have Toronto-based company, Three Sixty Management, helping out with its marketing and brand representation.

"From a North American aspect, our Canadian market share is in the double digit number and growing," Jones said. "Most of our sales come from the U.S. and we want more market share in Canada. We hope to increase our market share in Canada by the end of the year to double (it)."

Jones says he's satisfied with the amount of Patriot Memory product representation in the country now, noting that the company's products are currently in several hundred locations across the country.

For its branded DRAM products, Jones said the company has both integration and upgrade customers. When it comes to servicing the needs of end-users, Jones says Patriot Memory relies on its channel partners to make the sales. Whereas for integration sales, the company will sell to companies like Dell.

The company has various products coming down the pipeline, with its new 128GB USB product shipping this month.

"This is a portable drive and you can carry around motion video or large storage files," Jones said. "It's like carrying a hard drive in your pocket and the retail price will be US$499."

For the channel, Patriot Memory offers various incentives such as volume rebates for partners to take advantage of.

Partners can also earn up to 30 per cent margins on Patriot Memory's USB drives, Jones added.

Right now, Jones' goals for Canada include continuing to develop more strategic, long-term partnerships with channel partners to increase the company's market share. Longer-term goals include having a technical office in Canada to help get Patriot Memory's products out quicker to market as the company's Canadian presence grows.

Weetabix swallow stage one of supply chain progect easily

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:50:23 -0700

Weetabix has completed the first stage of a supply chain systems rollout, improving the accuracy of stock control.

It has moved to the Manhattan Associates Warehouse Management software at its site in Northamptonshire. The software takes data from RFID tags to track goods.

The new system also delegates tasks to pickers according to where they are in the warehouse, avoiding forklifts being unused for long periods of time.

There is only a 0.1 per cent error margin in stock tracking and picking compared to 10 per cent a year and a half ago, when the company relied on legacy systems and paper-based processes.

George Perry, head of Supply Chain at Weetabix, said the two warehouses at the Northamptonshire site "hold a total of 35,000 pallets and serve clients throughout the UK".

Knowing the exact location of the goods was "impossible with the previous legacy system which Weetabix had simply out-grown", Perry said.

The next stage of the rollout will involve a third warehouse, dedicated to goods for export, at the same site.

Archos 9 tablet PC runs Windows 7

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:49:45 -0700

Archos has announced that its Windows touchscreen tablet PC - the Archos 9 - will hit the UK this autumn for £450.

The Windows Vista version will be available in September, while a Windows 7 alternative will likely hit the market shortly after the operating system's official launch on October 22.

Sporting a 9in screen, the Archos 9 is designed for both entertainment and work. It includes twin TV tuners capable of picking up Freeview channels, while an onscreen keyboard is designed to cater for office apps. A 'reverse mouse' - operated by rolling a finger over a trackball - sits to the right of the screen.

A stand at the rear of the tablet can be adjusted so the screen is angled appropriately for whichever application is running - while sitting back and watching videos Archos envisages users adjusting the screen to a more upright position; when typing emails and writing documents the screen is more likely to be flatter to the table.

The 16mm-thick tablet includes a 1.2GHz Intel Atom processor, and either a 60GB or 120GB hard drive. The latter will add a £50 premium to the Archos 9's £450 base price.

Archos has also launched a new range of portable media players.

First off is the Archos Clipper, a £20 iPod shuffle competitor that weighs just 20g and hold 2GB worth of music.

Also new is the Archos 2 Vision, an 8GB music player with a 2in colour touchscreen that'll cost £50 and the Archos 3 Vision, a more powerful media player with a 3in touchscreen, 8GB capacity, and shipping with a composite cable for TV hook-up. The Archos 3 Vision will cost £90.

All three products are scheduled to become available in August.

Ken Frakes is new digital director at Start

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:46:30 -0700

Branding and digital agency Start Creative has announced that interactive-media guru Ken Frakes will join its team as digital director.

Frakes will be responsible for digital strategy, developing relationships with existing clients, and building new business both locally and internationally. He will work with Start's offices in the UK, Dubai, and Hong Kong.

Frakes has a 20-year career in the digital sector. He has won honours including a Cannes Digital Grand Prix for his leadership on UnZip, the UK's first CD-only magazine, and a Precision Marketing Grand Prix for a Virgin Atlantic campaign he masterminded while at Zinc.

He has worked for agencies including twentysixlondon, and Radley Yeldar, which he is leaving to join Start.

Frakes says: "Start is pioneering an integrated brand and digital model and I am very much looking forward to working with them to push the boundaries even further. Start is in the unique position of being able to help brands create awareness, engage their customers and build compelling relationships online. In addition, Start's associate company Judge Gill is at the forefront of Brand Experience Retailing, and I am really excited about furthering the work to date in building digital communities around customer experiences."

Start's managing director, Jen McAleer, says: "Ken's appointment will ensure that Start will remain at the cutting edge of digital innovation and provide a platform for further successes, with both existing clients and new business. We are delighted to have Ken on board and he will be a great asset to the business as we continue our international expansion."

Outback communities get $7m Internet access boost

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:42:15 -0700

The Rudd government has announced it will spend $7 million over four years on improving public Internet access facilities in remote Indigenous communities.

Part of the Closing the Gap initiatives, the announcement was made at the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) event in Darwin, to enable the states and the Northern Territory to better meet the needs of their remote communities.

Greg Moo, CIO of the Northern Territory's Department of Education and Training, is pleased with the extra funding.

"In the nine communities where this program will be implemented, the department will be assisting in the provision of Internet access and computers," Moo said.

"This initiative capitalises on the past and ongoing investment that the NT government has made in computers and networks in remote schools."

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said improving public Internet access in remote Indigenous communities was a key recommendation of the Glasson Review of regional telecommunications.

"Internet access is an increasingly important tool for communication, education, and economic opportunity and it is important that Indigenous people in remote parts of Australia have access to these benefits," Conroy said.

The COAGc endorsed National Partnership Agreement on Internet Access and Training Services is expected to begin in early 2010.

Up to 120 communities are expected to benefit from the services over the life of the agreement.

HeyZap's Looking For A Strong Software Engineer In SF

Fred Wilson — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:04:07 -0700

Our newest portfolio company, HeyZap, is looking for the fourth member of their team. HeyZap is a platform for game developers to get wide viral distribution for their flash games and monetize them.

They are looking for:

a talented engineer with extensive experience; hopefully you have made
one or more sites that clearly illustrate your capabilities. You should
be a technical generalist, meaning you are comfortable and eager to
work on what is needed and learn what is necessary, in a fast-moving, dynamic environment.

The job spec is here and if you are interested please email them at jobs@heyzap.com.

Web site for China Mobile's application store appears

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:14:07 -0700

A Web site for China Mobile's upcoming mobile application store appeared online on Friday, giving a preview of what free and paid downloads the carrier will offer to its more than 480 million subscribers.

The Web site for what the carrier calls the Mobile Market is split into game, software, music, video and theme download sections.

But the site appeared to be in a testing phase. Download links were broken, and a China Mobile spokeswoman said the market had not opened. She said more information about its opening would be available around September.

The platform may make China Mobile the world's first carrier to operate its own application store. It follows the opening of other paid download platforms inspired by the success of the iPhone App Store, including Google's Android Market and the Ovi Store run by Nokia.

China Mobile, the largest carrier in China and the world by subscribers, previously said it aimed to open the store this year and that independent developers would be free to sell applications through it.

But China Mobile might not split revenue with application developers as favorably as other download store owners have. The carrier will take half of the revenue from downloads, leaving the other half for developers, according to local media. Apple takes 30 percent of the proceeds from App Store downloads and leaves the rest for developers.

This year China Mobile is also expanding coverage for its 3G mobile network, which uses a domestically developed standard and but has attracted few subscribers so far.

Suit over China's Web filter to target Lenovo, Acer, Sony

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:05:39 -0700

A U.S. company will seek legal action against Lenovo, Acer and Sony next week over their shipment in China of controversial software that the company says stole its programming code.

Solid Oak Software may also take action against other PC makers that have started shipping the software, a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail late Thursday. She declined to give details of the action, but the company previously said it might seek a U.S. court injunction to stop PC vendors from shipping the program.

The software, an Internet filtering tool that blocks pornographic and political content, copied files from Solid Oak's own Internet content control product, according to the company.

In recent weeks China ordered domestic and foreign PC makers to bundle the software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, with all computers sold in the country. It postponed the requirement just hours before the original deadline this week, but said it did so only because PC makers needed more time to ship the program.

Lenovo, Acer and Sony have all started shipping the program despite the postponement. Lenovo is providing Green Dam pre-installed or on an enclosed disc for most of its computers that support the program, a spokeswoman said.

Sony is including a setup file for Green Dam on its machines that users can choose to activate or remove, a company spokeswoman said. An Acer representative confirmed the company is also including the program with new machines.

Acer and Lenovo were the world's third- and fourth-largest PC vendors in the final quarter last year, according to IDC.

All three companies declined to comment on Solid Oak's plans for legal action.

China says it mandated Green Dam to protect children from "harmful" information online. But critics and foreign industry groups have voiced concerns about the program ranging from free speech and user privacy to security and system stability. Users, however, can choose to remove the program.

Whether China will set a new deadline for PC makers to offer the software remains unclear.

Apple may patch serious SMS vulnerability on iPhone

IDG News Service — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:41:55 -0700

Apple may be working to fix an iPhone vulnerability that could possibly allow an attacker to remotely install and run unsigned software code with root access to the phone.

The theoretical attack in question exploits a weakness in the way iPhones handle text messages received via SMS (Short Message Service), said security researcher Charlie Miller, during a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore on Thursday. He didn't provide a detailed technical description of the SMS vulnerability.

Miller, the principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, is an authority on MacOS X security, and is a co-author of The Mac Hacker's Handbook. He and another security researcher, Colin Mulliner, discovered the SMS vulnerability together.

An SMS flaw might allow an attacker to run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator's network. In Miller’s case, it appears he used the flaw he found to remotely crash an iPhone, a sign that a more serious attack might be possible.

"I don't have a working exploit for it, just a suspicious looking crash," Miller said.

If so, the malicious code could theoretically include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet, Miller said

Miller reported the vulnerability to Apple, hoping it will get fixed. He plans to discuss the flaw further during a presentation at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas.

Despite the SMS vulnerability, the stripped-down version of MacOS X used in the iPhone makes it more secure than computers running the full-blown operating system, Miller said.

For starters, the stripped-down version of the OS presents fewer options for attackers, removing applications and features such as support for Adobe Flash and Java, which they might otherwise be able to exploit for vulnerabilities. In addition, the iPhone includes hardware protection for data stored in memory and the phone is designed to only run software code that has been digitally signed by Apple.

The iPhone also requires applications to run in a sandbox, a security feature that isolates them from other applications and limits their access to the phone's capabilities. But SMS offers a way for attackers to get greater access to the phone's capabilities, Miller said.

"SMS is a great vector to attack the iPhone," he said.

Most often used to send brief text messages between cell phones, SMS can also send binary code to an iPhone, which then processes the code without any user interaction. Each SMS message is limited to 140 bytes, but longer sequences can be sent to the phone as multiple messages that are automatically reassembled.

This feature allows larger programs to be delivered to a phone, Miller said.

In addition, vulnerabilities found in the iPhone's SMS function give an attacker root access to the handset, Miller said. That's not the case for the iPhone's other applications, such as its browser, where vulnerabilities only give an attacker access to the application's sandbox.

"The iPhone is more secure than OS X, but SMS could be a critical vulnerability," Miller said.

Apple may be exempt from China's Web filter mandate

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:21:55 -0700

Apple appears to be exempt from China's mandate that a controversial Internet filtering program be shipped with all computers sold in the country.

Computers that do not meet the software's technical requirements are excluded from the mandate, according to one PC maker.

China in recent weeks ordered foreign and domestic PC makers to package Green Dam Youth Escort, a program that blocks pornography and some sensitive political content online, with all computers sold in the country.

While China postponed the requirement from its original deadline this week, state media cited an official as saying the mandate will still eventually be enforced.

Green Dam is not being bundled with machines at the Apple store in Beijing because the software has no Mac version, a sales representative said Friday.

Meanwhile, a Lenovo spokesman said the Ministry of Industry and Information and Technology is not requiring non-Windows systems to come with the program

Lenovo will ship the software only with "applicable" PCs, meaning those that support Windows and other technical requirements, the spokesman said. Lenovo PCs that use Linux will not come with the program, he said.

Apple will still pre-install the program in accordance with the government mandate if a Mac version comes out, the sales representative said.

It is unclear if Green Dam will be released for other operating systems. A service representative at a sister company to Green Dam's main developer, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, said the company is testing the software on non-Windows platforms and will release an updated version if compatibility is added for other OSes.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

DOJ officially opens investigation into Google Book Search

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:17:03 -0700

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed on Thursday that it is investigating a settlement involving Google Book Search for possible antitrust violations, following months of speculation that the agency had its eye on the service.

In a filing to the judge overseeing the settlement of a lawsuit filed by The Authors Guild against Google, the DOJ informed the court that it has opened an investigation into the proposed settlement after reviewing public comments of concern. Those comments suggest that the agreement might violate the Sherman Act, a U.S. antitrust law, the DOJ said.

"The United States has reached no conclusions as to the merit of those concerns or more broadly what impact this settlement may have on competition. However, we have determined that the issues raised by the proposed settlement warrant further inquiry," the letter reads.

It also says the DOJ has already demanded access to documents and other information from parties in the litigation and expects to have ongoing discussions with them as well.

The court has a hearing scheduled for Oct. 7, during which it will discuss the proposed settlement. Judge Denny Chin, who is overseeing the case, invited the DOJ to submit its opinions in writing in advance and also appear at the hearing.

Authors and publishers initially filed the suit against Google, charging the search giant with copyright infringement for scanning books without always getting the approval of authors and publishers. Google allowed authors to opt out of the program.

As part of the proposed settlement, Google would pay US$125 million toward funding a Book Rights Registry that would locate and register copyright owners. The money would also help settle existing claims by authors and publishers. In exchange, Google would be able to display larger chunks of in-copyright books, rather than just snippets.

Also, Google would let people buy online access to the books, and universities and other institutions would be able to buy subscriptions to the books.

The proposed settlement has had its critics. Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that the proposed settlement is in essence a way to monetize so-called orphan works, and that it is questionable whether the deal represents the best interests of the authors of such works. Orphan works are those for which no one claims ownership, because either the author is dead or the publishing house no longer exists.

Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit group, argues that the proposal gives Google special protections against lawsuits over the orphan works. Those special protections would discourage potential Google competitors from entering the digital book business unless they could negotiate a similar protection, the group argues. Consumer Watchdog has urged the DOJ to examine the settlement.

Judge temporarily dismisses MySpace cyberbully case

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:25:30 -0700

A U.S. judge on Friday overruled a jury verdict and dismissed a case against a Missouri woman convicted last November in a cyberbullying case that led to a teenager's death.

U.S. District Court Judge George Wu granted a defense motion for a directed acquittal of Lori Drew, 50, who was convicted last November on three misdemeanor counts of unauthorized computer access. After reviewing transcripts of the case, Wu overturned the jury's verdict, saying that if Drew were found guilty then anyone who violated MySpace's terms of service could also be found guilty of a misdemeanor.

Prosecutors had argued during the trial that violating the terms of service of the social-networking site in order to harm someone else was the legal equivalent of hacking a computer.

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California last November convicted Drew on charges related to taking on a false MySpace identity and taunting a 13-year-old neighbor, Megan Meier, who ultimately hanged herself. Wu was scheduled to sentence Drew on Friday.

Drew was convicted on three counts of illegally accessing a computer system by creating a MySpace account under an assumed name. The jury acquitted her on felony charges and a count of conspiracy.

She was accused of setting up a MySpace account along with two other people using the name of "Josh Evans," who was supposedly a teenage boy, for the purpose of luring Meier into an online relationship in 2006. Drew and the others sought to get Meier to discuss Drew's daughter online with the fictitious boy. After a month of flirting, "Josh" ended the relationship on Oct. 16, 2006, with Meier, and one of the three who created the persona told the teenager that the world would be better off without her. Meier hanged herself the next day in her family's home in a St. Louis suburb. The Drews lived on the same block.

Prosecutors in Missouri investigated the matter, but found that Drew had not violated any state laws. However, the case was pursued by the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, which indicted Drew for accessing MySpace servers illegally. MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, California, so the case was heard there.

The case has drawn a lot of attention, as well as criticism from groups and legal scholars who contended that the government was misinterpreting the U.S. antihacking law to prosecute Drew.

Nonprofit organizations including the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with some individuals, in August filed an amicus brief arguing that the court should dismiss charges against Drew because the MySpace terms-of-service violations do not constitute crimes under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which bars unauthorized access to a computer.

"Regardless of whether Drew could be held criminally liable under a different theory, EFF argued that the theory pursued by prosecutors was inappropriate," wrote EFF senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman in a blog entry.

Online ad groups release new behavioral ad principles

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:35:35 -0700

Online consumers should get more information about what information is being tracked and collected for the purposes of behavioral advertising, and they should have more control over what data is being collected, according to new privacy principles released Thursday by four advertising trade groups.

Online advertising networks should also "maintain appropriate physical, electronic, and administrative safeguards" to protect data collected, and they should retain the data "only as long as necessary to fulfill a legitimate business need, or as required by law," the principles said.

The principles were endorsed by American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A's), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), plus the Council of Better Business Bureaus (BBB), a group focused on building trust between consumers and businesses.

The principles come out as some U.S. lawmakers and privacy groups have questioned whether self-regulatory approaches are adequate to protect consumers when online advertising networks and broadband providers can track Web users' surfing habits across the Internet. In mid-June, several members of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee called for new laws regulating the use of consumer data collected online.

But members of the advertising trade groups defended this latest effort. The principles show trade groups working together to "advance the public interest," Randall Rothenberg, IAB's president and CEO, said in a statement. "Although consumers have registered few if any complaints about Internet privacy, surveys show they are concerned about their privacy," he said. "We are acting early and aggressively on their concerns, to reinforce their trust in this vital medium that contributes so significantly to the U.S. economy."

In addition to data security and transparency for consumers, the new principles also call for consumer education efforts and for online behavioral advertising organizations to obtain consumer consent before implementing any material changes to their data collection policies.

Privacy advocates sounded less than impressed with the new principles.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy and civil liberties advocacy group, is encouraged to see all the advertising groups work together, but action is what's needed, said Alissa Cooper, CDT's chief computer scientist. CDT will continue to push Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation, including rules for online data collection, she said.

Online ad networks "haven't been very active on the self-regulatory side in the past," Cooper added. "What we're really looking for now is implementation. We have been talking about self-regulation for a long time."

The test of the principles will be how they work in practice, Cooper said. "You say that you want to be more transparent, and you want to provide notice outside of a privacy policy -- what is that actually going to look like? The day we see these links and icons outside of the privacy policy ... is the day when we really get to judge."

The principles are an effort to avoid legislation or regulation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, added Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy and civil liberties advocacy group. He called the principles "way too little and far too late."

"The principles are inadequate, beyond their self-regulatory approach that condones the 'fox overseeing the digital data henhouse approach,'" Chester said in an e-mail. "Effective government regulation is required to protect consumers. Online marketer self-dealing 'principles' won’t provide the level of protection consumers really require."

The principles treat certain health and financial data as sensitive, allowing "widespread" data collection of some health and financial records, Chester added. The principles also don't address the privacy of teenagers, he added.

"The so-called notice-and-choice approach embraced by the industry has failed," he said. "More links to better-written privacy statements don’t address the central problem: the collection of more and more user data for profiling and targeting purposes."

But others defended the principles. The Better Business Bureau and Direct Marketing Association will work on an enforcement process between now and 2010, when the principles are expected to be implemented, said Pablo Chavez, Google's managing policy counsel.

"I think the end result will be even more transparency and choice for Internet users about how their information is used," Chavez wrote on the Google Public Policy Blog. "One of the key strengths of the principles is the fact that they apply to a broad range of companies participating in online advertising -- advertisers, publishers, and ad networks. Of course, for any self-regulatory effort to be effective, there has to be some kind of enforcement process."

Ensuring you get pizza with sync tools

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:10:54 -0700

How often have you had to repeatedly copy files from one place to another either to create a backup or to synchronize two locations, and finally resorted to writing some dumb batch files to do the job? Of course, as your batch files have no real intelligence, you could well find your ad hoc solution has failed you.

This will typically be discovered at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon when you are just starting to wrap up for the day and are looking forward to a nice evening of, oh, say, beer, pizza and "CSI Las Vegas" (not that lame "CSI Miami" with the insufferable David Caruso). Better still, when this happens you know the lost files will be something the CEO wants now. Say goodbye to beer, pizza and TV. As you might hope, I have a couple of Windows products for avoiding this scenario (who's your daddy?).

The first is a utility that I covered some time ago called GoodSync from Siber Systems that is one of the best tools of its type I've come across.

The latest release of GoodSync (version 7.8.1.1) is very sophisticated with support for synchronizing between Windows resources (including Windows Mobile devices), as well as via FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 and WebDAV.

GoodSync has a clear, albeit busy, interface and provides a lot of reporting of what it's doing when it works. One of its strongest features is the ability to run a job in "analyze" mode to see what will happen without actually making any changes to either the source or destination.

GoodSync supports encryption and can perform chained synchronization to ripple changes from one source to a sequence of destinations. This is particularly useful for propagating changes from, say, your home PC to a nerd stick (USB drive), to your work machine. The program supports locking to prevent multiple copies of GoodSync competing to simultaneously make changes in a folder.

Goodsync is also able to handle copying from locked files on Vista and XP using the Windows Volume Shadow service.

The standard desktop version of GoodSync is free but limited to three active jobs, while the Pro version ($30) supports unlimited jobs. You can also purchase GoodSync bundled ($40) with GoodSync2Go, a version of the program designed to run from a USB drive.

There are also enterprise versions of GoodSync which include a workstation license ($40) and a server license ($995) for all versions of Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The enterprise licenses also include a command-line-only version of the product.

GoodSync has a huge number of features and having used the latest couple of versions for an extended period I think this may be the best synchronizer on the market. I give GoodSync a rating of 5 out of 5.

Of course, GoodSync as a desktop utility is not for everyone given that it is fairly technical. Another synchronization product worth looking at is Second Copy 7, published by Centered Syste0s.

SC7 has a decent user interface that lets you set up synchronization jobs ("profiles") using either a wizard or expert mode , and a lot of additional advanced options (although, it must be said, less than GoodSync). Only local storage and FTP servers are supported.

The one big gotcha with SC7 is the lack of support for handling locked files, making the utility more suitable for either interactive use or as part of your start-up or shutdown routine. I give Second Copy 7 ($30) a rating of 3 out of 5.

So, there you have it: Two choices in your quest to ensure that what holds you back on Fridays from beer, pizza, and "CSI Las Vegas" won't be missing files. Now, we just need to figure out how to get around the other million things that could get in the way.

Ask.com bets on semantic search, targeting special audiences

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:31:26 -0700

In the past eight months, Ask.com has unfurled a set of changes to its search engine that the IAC unit calls a success, although its share of U.S. search queries has actually shrunk during that time period.

In October 2008, Ask.com announced it had sharpened the relevance of its search results, made the engine faster, simplified the site's layout and boosted its ability to handle queries in natural language through semantic search technology.

In January of this year, it struck a broad marketing and technology deal with NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) intended to attract its more than 75 million fans to Ask.com.

However, Ask.com's share of U.S. search queries dropped from 4.5 percent in May 2008 to 3.9 percent in May of this year, while market leader Google grew its share from 61.8 percent to 65 percent, according to comScore.

Things looked brighter for Ask.com several years ago. For example, in November 2005, Google handled almost 40 percent of all U.S. queries, while Ask.com placed fifth with 6.5 percent, according to comScore.

Scott Garrell, president of Ask Networks, views things from a different perspective, pointing out that Ask.com's queries are growing. The search engine handled 486 million U.S. queries in May 2008 and 555 million in May of this year, according to comScore. "In a very tough and competitive market, we're holding our own," he said in an interview.

Garrell also points out that Ask.com and the other sites that make up the Ask Network, like Dictionary.com, are collectively the sixth-largest Web property in the U.S., ahead of powerhouses like eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon, according to comScore.

Garrell is particularly encouraged by Ask.com's advances in semantic search and in its attempts to attract specific audiences like NASCAR fans to the search engine.

Semantic search is a problematic term because different search providers define it in various terms. In general, it refers to search technology that lets an engine understand the meaning of text, whether in a query or in a search result, so that users can phrase queries in natural language instead of keywords.

"People don't talk in keywords," Garrell said.

Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, when Ask.com was known as Ask Jeeves and the world hadn't heard of Google, Ask.com was a leading search engine, known for encouraging people to type in queries in the form of regular questions.

According to Garrell, that perception persists, although after the dot-com bubble burst, Ask Jeeves abandoned the consumer search market for several years to focus on enterprise search, before reversing course in 2003.

"We get more queries in the form of a question than the industry average, and we get queries that are longer," he said.

Consequently, Ask.com considers it essential to be the best search engine at semantic search, which is why it has invested much time and effort in its question-and-answer search engine. Introduced in October, this Q&A engine uses semantic search technology to interpret questions and return relevant answers found on the Web. Last month, Ask.com announced that the engine has a database of 300 million question-and-answer pairs.

In addition, Ask.com has reaped very good results from its collaboration with NASCAR, which included the selection of Ask.com as NASCAR.com's official search engine, the launch of a NASCAR-branded browser toolbar and the sponsorship by Ask.com of a racing car, he said.

Garrell thinks Ask.com can pursue this "audience-centric" strategy with eight to 10 vertical markets per year, having seen that it's an effective and interesting approach to promoting and growing usage of the search engine.

It remains to be seen whether these and other initiatives will allow Ask.com to grow its share of queries in a market so vastly dominated by Google.

HP Advances Scale-Out Computing with Data Center Solution

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:12:18 -0700

HP launched the Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio designed to deliver a new magnitude of cost and resource savings for businesses involved in Web 2.0, cloud and high-performance computing.

The HP ExSO portfolio, claims the vendor, would help customers reduce costs, improve facility efficiency and dramatically accelerate time to market on a massive scale. At the core of the HP ExSO portfolio is the HP ProLiant SL server family, which uses a "skinless" systems architecture that replaces the traditional chassis and rack form factors with an extremely lightweight rail and tray design. HP claims that with the ProLiant SL portfolio, customers can cut acquisition costs by 10 percent and power draw by 28 percent, while doubling their compute density.

"Customers with scale-out business models need solutions that make every dollar, watt and square foot in the data center count," said Rajesh Dhar, Director, Industry Standard Servers, Technology Solutions Group, HP India. "The HP ProLiant SL offers pioneering customers like these the most significant design innovation since the blade form factor, allowing them to achieve an economy of scale never before possible," he added.

The solution offers customers certain benefits which include energy savings, modular configurations and reduced cost-to-scale.

In addition to this, The HP Datacenter Environmental Edge solution reportedly offers a complete visual mapping of environmental variables so customers can quickly identify and take action on data center inefficiencies. HP Datacenter Environmental Edge uses a system of wireless sensors placed throughout a data center to monitor a variety of variables, such as temperature, humidity, air pressure and power utilization.

Additional new services for ExSO environments reportedly provide customers with a customized engagement experience through their entire technology lifecycle. ExSO services include scheduled on-site repair options, on-site seed inventory of parts and installation services specifically designed for environments that support thousands of servers. These services can be customized to match customer needs.

Search Party: Why Security Pros Should Master Google

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:00:52 -0700

One of the reasons security is fun and interesting is that it requires a constant upgrade of your skills and knowledge.

Here is a skill that you may not have realized you need, but you need it: Become a master of Internet search.

Obviously I'm talking about a lot more than tossing a few words in the Google box and pushing the search button.

I'm talking about understanding how to run very specific searches to find information leaks within your company and outside of it, whether intentional or accidental. Such leaks might come in the form of intentional, outright posting of sensitive information by ex-employees. Or they might be misconfigured or forgotten Web applications that weren't supposed to be publicly accessible.

Other searches will help you find websites using your organization's trademarks for nefarious purposes, or selling counterfeit or grey-market products in your name. (See CSO Senior Editor Joan Goodchild's look at brand protection, which offers examples of CSOs playing a key role in this fight.

Still, other searches might turn up scraps of information on your own website that reveal information that hackers use to footprint your systems. Overly informative file-not-found error messages, for example.

* How good are you at Web search?

* Do you know how to find Excel spreadsheets posted on the Web?

* Do you know how to find documents that include key intellectual property phrases?

* Do you know how to winnow broad search results down to just the important ones?

* Do you know how to use Google news alerts and blogging tools to see what's being said about your company?

* Do you know how to find publicly available information as part of an employee background check?

Happily, there is a lot of advice about search on the Web. You don't have to take out a student loan and go back to school to learn this skill.

Here is a wonderful tutorial on basic searches, provided by Google itself.

Here is an older CSOonline.com article that provides four searches you should run on your own company.

More recently investigations manager Brandon Gregg noted the importance of search in his article 5 Free Ways to Track Information Online.

Why not fire up your browser and find other good resources yourself?

Cloud control systems tame the ether

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:56:01 -0700

Signifying a formless haze of computing power and storage that is somewhere "out there," computerdom's current buzzword is as difficult to get one's arms around as a real cloud. A seemingly limitless pool of processors and memory and disk space, and you just scoop out what you need. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Of course, it's not that simple. You don't just grab a handful of virtual computers and toss them after your data. They have to be configured. If you need an n-tier system, you'll have to assemble the virtual networking components to tie them all together. In short, managing a herd of virtual systems in the cloud is no less difficult than managing a herd of physical computers.

[ Is your head in the clouds? Don't be fooled. See InfoWorld's Busting the nine myths of cloud computing and What cloud computing really means. ]

The four products in this roundup are designed to simplify the life of a cloud-based virtual-machine wrangler. To varying degrees, and in varying environments, each provides tools for creating, deploying, and managing collections of cloud-machines.

The products are the AppLogic platform from 3tera, the Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) from Enomaly, the Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD) system from Kaavo, and RightScale, from the company of the same name. The 3tera and Enomaly offerings are tools for building your own private or hosted clouds. The Kaavo system works with third-party cloud services such as Amazon EC2. And RightScale works with both private clouds and third-party cloud services.

3tera AppLogic

The 3tera AppLogic system is its own cloud. That is, you do not run it on a third-party cloud provider such as Amazon EC2; you run it on hardware hosted by 3tera, or you provide the hardware and 3tera builds the cloud. AppLogic is referred to as a "meta-operating system." At its heart, it is Red Hat Linux running a specially configured Xen hypervisor. More precisely, it is a cluster of interconnected systems running Red Hat Linux, Xen, and the AppLogic orchestration system.

AppLogic can run on a remarkably spare piece of hardware. Minimum requirements are a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 80GB of disk storage. Of course, this is the barest of beginnings; a single backbone of an AppLogic system can consist of up to 128 machines, and backbones can be combined to form overall networks of thousands of machines. Assuming you don't have the space in your basement for your own AppLogic system, 3tera already has datacenters in North America, South America, Europe, Japan, and Singapore. (Quantities and locations are changing; you should check 3tera's Web site for the latest details.)

Though AppLogic's core is Linux, it can host virtual machines running Linux, Solaris, and Windows Server 2003. But the fundamental building block of a multitier AppLogic system is not simply a guest operating system; it is the duo of virtual machine (running the guest operating system) and application -- such as Apache or MySQL. This combination is called an "appliance," and it is a unique feature of AppLogic that, in an appliance, the application takes precedence over the containing OS. You create a cloud application by wiring together applications, and the fact that each application is running in its own OS is merely incidental.

This is a powerful paradigm, because it insulates you from the details of a particular OS; the OS is merely a container, a runtime environment for the application. Configuring and tuning the application are what counts, and this focus on application construction becomes apparent when you step inside AppLogic's management console.

[ Cloud computing offerings differ in depth, breadth, style, and fine print. See Cloud versus cloud: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid. ]

Log onto AppLogic's management console, and you are presented with the tool's Dashboard, where in-flight instances are displayed, accompanied by each instance's basic usage statistics: CPU, disk, and memory. Click the Applications tab, and you're shown a list of your account's applications; the list includes the application's state (stopped or running), a description, and associated CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources. Finally, the Support tab is a jumping-off point for 3tera's documentation, release notes, and support forum.

All the action is on the Applications tab. Select an application and the AppLogic editor opens. The application is represented as a network of nodes on a canvas. Each node is an appliance, populated with input and output connection points called "terminals." If you want, say, a Tomcat appliance to send database queries to a MySQL appliance, you drag and drop each onto the canvas, then drag a connection line from the output terminal of the former to the input terminal of the latter. It's a lot like wiring circuit components. An "appliance palette" waits to the side, from which you can drag new appliances onto the canvas and wire into your application. Right-click on an appliance, and you can configure its property values and attributes.

To actually configure or tweak the internals of an appliance, you log onto it. (Remember, an appliance is an OS running an application.) A secure shell window opens, from which you can execute Linux commands to your heart's desire.

The glue that cements appliances into applications is ADL, the Application Description Language. ADL is very much like XML, but less repetitive and devoid of brackets. It is used to describe all the components (appliances) that comprise an application, as well the structure of the appliances themselves. A complete description of the language is available on 3tera's AppLogic wiki.

3tera's version of cloud services is a "virtual private datacenter" (VPDC), executing on hardware hosted by 3tera itself. Pricing for a VPDC depends on a mixture of factors -- CPU, RAM, and storage requirements. Or, if you already have hardware in place and want to construct your own AppLogic installation, you can purchase an Enterprise AppLogic License. In either case, you should contact 3tera for details.

Enomaly ECP

Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) is not a tool for deploying to existing clouds such as Amazon Web Services. Like AppLogic, Enomaly ECP is a tool for building your own clouds. It is erected on a set of open source virtualization applications and APIs. You can construct your own cluster of systems, install ECP, and use its UI to manage the configuration, storage, and deployment of virtual machines. At its core is Enomalism, a virtual-machine management system written in Python that uses MySQL as back-end storage.

[ Ready to take a step into AWS but not sure where to begin? Read InfoWorld's "Inside Amazon Web Services" and "Hooking your apps into Amazon Web Services."]

The ECP user interface is a console that operates the mechanics of the tool's underlying system, which is, in turn, undergirded by the open source libvirt virtualization API. libvirt is a C toolkit that allows applications to communicate with the Linux kernel's virtualization capabilities, and thereby control hypervisors running on the system. The hypervisor is the virtualization software that allows a computer to host one or more OSes -- each in its own virtual environment. Currently, libvirt supports Xen, QEMU, KVM, VirtualBox, and others. (For more information, see libvirt.org.)

Currently, there are three versions of ECP: the free, community edition (which I tested); the Enterprise edition; and the new Cloud Service Provider edition, which adds usage accounting and billing integration to the user interface. Check the Enomaly Web site for details of the editions' differences.

ECP's management console is arranged along the same lines as the other consoles in the roundup. It is browser-based, with tabs for each of the major functions. The console opens to the obligatory Dashboard, which is really a transaction monitoring page. All operations performed in the console are transactions. They can be issued asynchronously, and some may take minutes to complete, so the Dashboard lets you monitor their progress.

The Virtual Infrastructure tab leads to three control areas. First, the Infrastructure control provides a navigation pane for all the clusters in your cloud. Select a cluster, and you can view all its assigned virtual machines. Buttons across the top let you start, stop, pause, or delete a virtual machine within the cluster.

Next, the Virtual Network Manager control panel assists in creating and managing virtual networks within your clusters. (This control is not in the community version; it was in a testbed system that Enomaly gave me temporary access to.)

Finally, the Elastic Valet is a control panel for provisioning machines. You select a target cluster for the machine, and specify launch parameters. The Elastic Valet will determine which physical machine in the cluster is the best destination to "park" the virtual machine -- hence the tool's name.

[ Application development has taken to the skies. See the InfoWorld Test Center reviews, "Windows Azure Services Platform gives wings to .NET" and "Google's high-flying cloud for Python code." ]

Another important component of the ECP control panel is the Repository, which is a storage management system for OS images and plug-ins for the Enomaly system itself. (The latter is typically supplied as Python eggs.) The Repository recognizes both local and "remote" machine images. Remote images are available from Enomaly's central servers; you can select a remote image and have it downloaded to your local system. At the time of this writing, there were about 10 images, including Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, and others.

Hard-code developers will enjoy the Enomalism API selection from the Admin tab. This provides a list of the REST-style APIs that Enomalism supports. Select an API, and you're provided with a structured definition of the parameters and data types for that API.

ECP is simply not there yet. Or, if it is, it hides the fact behind its meager documentation. Though I was able to install and run the community edition on Ubuntu, whenever I got something to work, I could never be certain whether I had done the right thing or had simply stumbled into a solution. More importantly, ECP appears to be lacking in tools that assist in the configuration of machine instances. That is, it has nothing analogous to RightScale's RightScripts or Kaavo's system definition file. For now, it appears to be good for managing virtual machines in a cluster of networked hardware, but provides little support for applications on those virtual machines. Hopefully, this capability will appear in a future release.

Kaavo IMOD

Kaavo's Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD) seeks not only to abstract the individual servers running on cloud-based system, but -- as much as possible -- to erase the boundaries between tiers. That is, with IMOD, you can work with a multitier application as though it were a monolithic application, without losing the ability to fine-tune constituent parts.

All the information needed to deploy an application is gathered into a single file, called the system definition file. Crack the file open, and you'll find what looks like a description of a state machine. The IMOD engine executes this file, booting the different tiers of an application in proper order. The file can also specify corrective action to be taken if a tier somehow fails to boot. Each tier specified in the system definition file consists of one or more servers. When you configure a particular tier, you specify the number of servers on that tier, and IMOD lets you manage them as though they were a single system.

The system definition file contains two major sections. One defines the static artifacts of an application (tiers, servers). The other is a flow control section that specifies the actions that the IMOD engine is to perform when the application is being launched. These actions are defined in the form of Velocity templates -- Velocity being a scripting technology that allows you to embed Java classes in a script file, so you can create scripts that are not only descriptive, but executable as well. It is this "descriptive executability" that permits IMOD to roll everything it needs to know about a system into a single file.

[ Simple, hosted, database-driven Web apps: See the InfoWorld Test Center review of Caspio Bridge, "A Web-based app builder with a Microsoft twist," and "Application builders in the sky." ]

IMOD's user interface is a three-tabbed control panel. Foremost on the list is the N-Tier tab, where you can view available templates and systems (the latter being the configured and executable form of the former). Select a system, and you can view it either in graphical, "run-time" form, or as a text-only XML file (the system definition file mentioned above). You can also open a tree view of the system, which shows the state of each of its Amazon Machine Images (running/terminated), its instance identifier, firewall rules, and more. Click the "start system button," and the selected system is deployed and launched in accordance with the system definition file.

Kaavo provides a number of prebuilt templates that you can use to jump-start your own applications. These include a variety of JIRA configurations (JIRA is a popular issue-tracking system), a MySQL cluster system, a template for the PHP-based collaborative project management system phpCollab, and more.

Other entries on the control panel include the Profile tab, where you can configure your account. This tab also includes billing and user management. From the Accounting tab, you can review your service usage over a selectable time range.

IMOD's system definition file is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it keeps everything in one place, and that bookkeeping advantage should not be underrated. Also, if something goes wrong, you pretty much know where to look. On the other hand, it's one more language's syntax you have to learn. Because it depends on Velocity, an understanding of Java is a definite advantage. Nevertheless, Kaavo's documentation is good enough that even new users can find their way around with few bruised noses.

If you want to go it on your own, Kaavo has a self-serve plan that begins with a 30-day free trial. After that, you pay a fixed monthly fee for a fixed number of CPU hours. Exceed the available hours, and you fall into a pay-as-you-go scheme for any additional time. Users who need guidance will want the Enterprise Solution, which provides 24/7 support and training; contact Kaavo for pricing. Currently, Kaavo supports only Amazon's EC2, but expects to add support for other cloud providers in the near future.

RightScale

RightScale takes a non-intuitive approach to preparing and managing cloud-based systems. Rather than preconfigure a machine image, the RightScale methodology is to launch a "bare" image and have that instance configure itself by executing pre-installed scripts. Such scripts are called RightScripts, and they are the essential ingredients of a RightScale-powered cloud system.

A RightScript can be written in any of the well-known scripting languages: shell script, Python, Perl, or Ruby, to name a few. The language is unimportant. What is important is the fact that RightScripts can include parameters, and those parameters can be programmatically filled in by the RightScale system at runtime. RightScripts are therefore reusable, so a RightScript that installs MySQL, for example, can work on any cloud server that needs a MySQL installation.

There are three types of RightScripts, each designed to run at a specific point in a machine image's lifetime. Boot RightScripts execute just after the machine image is booted. Operational RightScripts execute once the image is running. And a decommission RightScript will execute just prior to the image being shut down. RightScripts can be used for just about any operation imaginable, but typically they install, configure, and start applications on the machine image they occupy.

To be accurate, RightScale images aren't completely barren. First, RightScale images include a small piece of software that, at boot time, contacts the RightScale system and basically asks: "I just booted, what am I supposed to do?" The RightScale system then begins feeding the image whatever RightScripts it is configured to use. And, of course, the necessary scripting languages are pre-installed on RightScale images. For example, RightScale pre-installs Ruby; I was told by a RightScale engineer that they use Ruby "extensively." These modifications convert a basic machine image into a "RightImage."

Ultimately, a RightScript will end up as part of a ServerTemplate. A ServerTemplate is a base server image, associated with the RightScripts that configure the server to do its assigned work. For example, an Ubuntu-based MySQL ServerTemplate would consist of an Ubuntu machine image and all the RightScripts needed to install, configure, and launch MySQL. RightScale provides a number of prebuilt, application-specific ServerTemplates. To create your own, you merely clone a copy of the original, add or modify the associated RightScripts, and save the result in your local repository.

You control your RightScale-based systems via a Web-based management console. You begin at the Dashboard, from which you can view currently defined deployments -- a deployment being a collection of machine instances, typically working together for a single purpose. For example, an Apache Web server, Tomcat application server, and MySQL database server, combined to provide a shopping cart application, could be saved as your custom-built Shopping Cart Deployment.

Down the tool chain is the Management screen, for creating and configuring servers, arrays of servers (for those times when the number of servers must grow or shrink based on changing workloads), and deployments. Select a deployment from the list, and you can configure its internals, or launch it and monitor its status.

The console also has tools for managing important Amazon Web Services cloud resources such as SSH keys, security groups, and machine images. RightScale's console excels at context-sensitive help, as well as comprehensive onscreen documentation (that can be turned off, once you've become expert at the system).

RightScale offers five different editions, ranging from the free Developer's Edition to the feature-rich Enterprise Edition. Of course, the free edition includes no support and lacks add-ons available with the paid editions. The feature combinations of the various editions are extensive enough that you need a matrix to comprehend it all; such a matrix can be found on RightScale's Web site.

In the clouds

When it comes to cloud tools, one certainly cannot complain about the assortment. If you've already settled on Amazon EC2 as your cloud provider, then head on over to RightScale or Kaavo. If you'd prefer to build a cloud system yourself, check out 3tera or Enomaly.

The name of the game is the reduction of complexity. Configuring, launching, and monitoring a multitier cloud-based application is a process of many steps. There are OSes to choose, applications to install, connections to establish, security permissions to worry about, and on and on. And launching a multitiered system is an essentially asynchronous process; if something goes wrong, it is not altogether easy to figure out where the problem is. Each tool here tried to make that easier; each succeeds on different fronts to different degrees.

3tera's AppLogic excels at representing an n-tier system as a collection of interoperating applications, rather than a collection of interoperating virtual OSes running applications. Abstracting out the OS is a powerfully simplifying force.

Kaavo's user interface is well laid out and easy to navigate. It is impossible to get lost with Kaavo, and it's easy to figure out where in the UI you need to go to perform a particular task.

[ Stay on top of cloud developments from an IT professional's perspective in whurley's Cloud Computing blog. ]

RightScale's approach is finer-grained -- focusing on individual machine instances -- and more demanding of the cloud architect, but its abundance of pre-written RightScripts, in-line help, and copious examples goes a long way to lowering the learning curve. In addition, RightScale's RightGrid feature provides a prebuilt grid architecture for lashing together clusters of virtual machines in a "producer-consumer" structure, making it easy to build large-scale processing systems without getting bogged down in the details.

Finally, I can only recommend Enomaly's ECP for the technically savvy. The engineers at Enomaly were extremely helpful in answering questions, and I applaud any system based on open source technology. I would heavily encourage involvement in Enomaly's community edition. But the lack of substantial documentation and missing application configuration capabilities leaves me reluctant to advocate ECP for production deployment. A new release is expected this summer, and perhaps the added features will erase my doubts.

Cloud management systems

3tera AppLogic

Release: 2.4.8

Platforms: Private and hosted AppLogic clouds

Pros and cons:

+Graphical "wiring" of applications is easy to work with.

+Lots of pre-built applications.

+Application-centric view of system.

-ADL requires a modest learning curve.

-Built on proprietary AppLogic runtime system.

Bottom line: 3Tera's graphical user interface captures your application's architecture in an easy-to-manage form. Its treatment of components as appliances also simplifies system construction. But it locks you into 3Tera's AppLogic environment.

Enomaly ECP

Release: 2.2.3

Platforms: Private and hosted ECP clouds

Pros and cons:

+Built on open source technology.

+Freeware version available.

+Runs a variety of virtual machines.

-Documentation is seriously lacking.

-No visible tools for managing applications on target OSes.

Bottom line: You can't argue with Enomaly's price tag: free is as good as it gets. And you are not tied to any proprietary software or cloud infrastructures. But Enomaly has a way to go before deployment is as simple as with the other tools.

Kaavo IMOD

Release: 1.4.5

Platforms: Cloud service providers including Amazon EC2

Pros and cons:

+Excellent control panel UI.

+Graphical view of application is easy to manipulate.

+Lots of pre-built appliances.

-Currently only supports EC2.

-Some configuration steps not readily apparent.

Bottom line: Kaavo's bundling of an application's descriptive and executable information into a single System Definition file unclutters application management, and allows for easy transfer of an application from one installation to another. However, it does require study of the underlying XML and Velocity syntax.

RightScale

Release: April 21, 2009

Platforms: Private clouds and cloud service providers including Amazon EC2

Pros and cons:

+Excellent documentation.

+Free version available.

+Large selection of RightScripts and machine images.

-Machine-centric view, rather than application-centric view.

-RightScripts require understanding of scripting language.

Bottom line: Where some of the other tools abstract the underlying structures of a cloud-based application, RightScripts require you to develop at the level of those structures directly. This produces some significant starting friction. Nevertheless, once mastered, RightScripts are phenomenally flexible and powerful.

Rick Grehan is contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center.

Five reasons your family doctor isn’t using EMR

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:35:12 -0700

Roughly 30 per cent of family physicians in Ontario utilize electronic medical records (EMRs), according to OntarioMD Inc., a subsidiary of the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC).

OntarioMD recently completed phase one of its Physician IT project, which provided EMR funding to 3,000 out of an estimated 10,500 family practitioners in Ontario.

"It's about 30 per cent," said OntarioMD CEO Brian Forster. About four million Ontarians would be covered by those emergency medical records, which is approximately 25 per cent of patients, because roughly one million patients in Ontario don't have family physicians, he explained.

Despite recent funding scandals related to eHealth programs in Ontario, OntarioMD exceeded its target for the $150 million it received in government funding, noted Forster.

"The initial program we've executed over the last four years had a limited amount of funding. That funding was actually targeted at 2,900 physicians, but we were able to fund 3,000 because of the way we were able to optimize what we've done during those four years," he said.

OntarioMD is currently in discussions with eHealth Ontario, which is now responsible for a number initiatives from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, for funding that will support the next phase of the program over the next three years.

Under the old program, which expired in August 2008, physicians were eligible for a maximum $28,600 to implement an EMR system. "The new number hasn't been finalized at this point and once it has, which we are hoping will be shortly, it will be announced," said Forster.

But there are still obstacles to widespread adoption.

Cost and funding

Cost is still the major obstacle to EMR adoption for physicians, according to Dr. Stephen McLaren, a family physician based in Markham who belongs to an 18-physician group that began developing an EMR system in 1998.

The funding that was sent out was only partial, he pointed out. "It does not completely pay or continue to pay for what you need to do, so it's nice to receive that partial funding, but I don't think we should mix it up with it being complete funding because it's not," said McLaren.

Physicians looking at EMR realize there are a lot of costs outside the funding envelope, so they are going to have to make a business case for it, he said. "For some people, they find it a difficult business case to make, although in our case, we live the value of EMR and it has been a very good investment for us," he said.

Another problem lies within the old funding model itself, according to McLaren, because it went to two different styles of practice and physicians had to align their offices with a payment scheme in order to receive the funding.

"So there's two change management pieces that happen at once," he said. "I'm not sure if in the second round of funding they will remove that obstacle or not," he said.

Limiting funding to family physicians has contributed to interoperability problems, such as a lack of intercommunication between family practices and specialists, according to Moshe Pinhas, president of Toronto-based clinical management system software provider P&P Data Systems Inc.

"The funding should be more uniformly distributed to those who want to implement it as opposed to practice or specialty ... we don't have funding in the province, for example, for specialists so specialists aren't automating it at the same rate as the family physicians," he said.

But Forster suggested looking at the objectives behind the funding.

"By 2015, they wanted Ontarians to have electronic medical records. The whole premise of the initial phase of the program was to target family health teams who are working with large bases of patients. If we get the family physician automated first, we then get records for all the patients electronically and then when we start to hook the specialist up, we've got the record that the GP then refers to them," he said.

OntarioMD doesn't expect this limitation will exist in the next phase of the program.

"The first phase was really just to prove the investment was a sound one, which I think we can definitely demonstrate because of the survey we did last year. As well, there are solutions other than just EMRs that are quite appropriate and are very suitable to specialists as well, so they may not need an EMR per say, although they need an electronic tool in order to exchange the information between the GP and the specialist," said Forster.

Workflow and training

While funding is a barrier to EMR adoption for physicians in Ontario, Forster said another large obstacle is the change to the way they practice.

"Physicians use paper records at this point. Changing to electronic medical records means there is an impact to the workflow in their office, so reengineering that workflow is a key aspect of the functionality of the EMR," he said.

OntarioMD is working on improving the circuit deployment so physicians can get the EMR up and running faster as well as training physicians on how to use them productively, he noted.

Part of OntarioMD's Transition Support Program is the Peer-to-Peer Network, which was established by Canada Health Infoway and OntarioMD along with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to connect physicians with colleagues to support their adoption of EMRs.

"The network is composed of peer leaders who are physicians experienced in using electronic medical records to improve practice efficiency and patient care. Peer leaders are mentors who support their physician colleagues in selecting and implementing an EMR system," said Canada Health Infoway.

The Transition Support Program and Peer-to-Peer Network are very good projects, according to McLaren. "But the person still has to roll up their sleeves and do the end work as far as implementing ... there's a fair bit of work there and as you know work means you've got to devote some time, and getting time from physicians is a real challenge," he said.

Providing incentives for physicians to use EMR systems is a critical part of the process, according to Pinhas. "The question has always been whether or not doctors view EMR as having a reward or not," he said.

Another major obstacle, according to Pinhas, is that doctors don't realize the workflow benefits. Electronic systems eliminate errors and call backs from the pharmacists, for example, which reduces the interruptions in the day of the physician, he pointed out.

"Physicians are by and large in the business of providing professional time," said Pinhas.

EMR has to either help physicians treat patients better in the same amount of time or allow them to reduce the amount of time to treat patients at the same level of care or provide more time to increase the patient load, he suggested.

OntarioMD doesn't have numbers on whether EMR systems increase the number of patients doctors can see in one day. "What we've been hearing is that's not the issue," said Forster. "They aren't looking for this productivity boost, but better healthcare. What they're able to do when they're a team is work more effectively with the team."

In a survey of physicians using EMR through funding from OntarioMD, 68 per cent of physicians said their patient safety had improved, 62 per cent said continuity of care improved and 57 per cent reported an increase in the quality of care, Forster pointed out.

Benefits include the ability to monitor patients, such as when patients are due for annual tests; access to patient records remotely and securely, for example, when located in a hospital performing specialist work; and submission anonymous patient information for research, which helps identify preventative care.

Who gets what

The question is whether or not you want to speed up EMR adoption, said Pinhas. "I think overall there needs to be a step back in terms of what the system provides to physicians and increasing that," he said.

While EMR provides benefits to doctors, the majority of the benefit of using the EMR flows to the system and not to the individual physician who is required to purchase and use them, according to Pinhas.

What often happens is government wants EMR to take care of things like increasing emergency visits and problems with drug interaction, which the physicians would agree with, but the individual benefit to the physician's office from a workflow standpoint has to be looked at, he said.

"Studies we've seen suggest that the system in general benefits about 70 per cent and the physician benefits about 30 per cent. The reason for that is the health information is captured at the point of care, which is in the physician's office. Most patient visits are done to the community physicians, so it's captured and then sent in an electronic format to all the other health-care providers that want to use it as well as for secondary use" like research, Forster said.

Interoperability

"Some physicians won't proceed forward with an EMR unless their hospital is going to transmit all the data stored in the hospital system. But for a hospital to actually send out the data, they need a fairly expensive interface," said Pinhas.

A number of systems don't communicate with each other and there are a number of standards that exist but haven't been adopted, he said. Doctors are not willing to use an EMR if 60 to 70 per cent of the information they receive is still on paper.

"There are a lot of chicken-and-egg problems," said Pinhas.

More than 90 per cent of physicians are using EMR to write and renew prescriptions, which is a huge benefit because it does drug-to-drug interaction and allergy checking, Forster noted. But hospital discharge summaries, consultations, requests and reports among physicians are for the most part still paper-based, he said.

Efforts are underway to change this. OntarioMD is currently working with RVH and the Barrie Family Health Team to define an interface, which will provide more value as they plan to implement further abroad later this year, and two EMR projects being used for early adopter prescribing are taking place at Sault Ste. Marie Group Health and the Georgian Bay Family Health Stream, he pointed out.

"If you take a look at other countries, the physicians have adopted it more because they do get hospital discharge, they are able to get the lab results -- which is what OLIS is -- they are able to do referrals and they are also able to do electronic prescribing completely as well. We have a lot of the benefit of the prescribing, but it doesn't fully get delivered to pharmacies today," said Forster.

The Ontario Lab Information System (OLIS) is one example of a large-scale project that has tremendous benefit to physicians who use EMR, but the project is several years behind schedule, Pinhas pointed out.

OLIS would allow physicians access to all patient lab data, regardless of which lab did the work and whether it occurred in a hospital or public lab, whereas right now, they have to establish a one-on-one relationship with each individual lab in order to get the data transmitted, Pinhas explained.

"Expediting [OLIS] would say to a physician, 'Now my external data is all coming to me electronically. I really need to get going on this computer thing,'" he said.

McLaren's group heard about OLIS years before they implemented EMR in the 90s. But more than a decade later, there's still no deliverable on the project to EMRs in the community, he said.

"In the last few years, they've been accepting labs from hospitals and from private labs and making a central repository, but it's not a functional interface down to EMR, so that many people who do implement their EMR have a real difficult time actually getting electronic lab data to flow into the EMR," said McLaren.

Selecting the right EMR system

Another major obstacle, according to McLaren, is choosing the right EMR system. This requires defining needs, what problems the EMR is going to solve, and what processes must evolve in terms of workflow and actually getting value from the system, he explained.

"That whole problem-solving exercise becomes a big obstacle for most groups," said McLaren. "They get a little lost in the technical presentation of EMR and the glitz and the sexiness and very often lose sight of how they are trying to solve the problems of the paper world with electronic medical records so they can deliver better care."

One large challenge for a group practice in the paper world was keeping the filing up to date, said McLaren. "If a computer prints out a piece of paper and they send the paper to us and we put it back in our computer, that's not acceptable. We wanted other computers to populate our electronic medical records," he said.

McLaren's group interfaced with a local hospital and a local lab, which allows the group to receive lab results in near real-time and have patient records automatically updated every two hours. "The computer in the hospital pushes out all that data to me and our computer system pulls it in and electronically files it with a little pass through our electronic in basket to sign off on all the incoming data," he said.

"We've done our best not be an electronic island in a sea of paper. Unfortunately, I think we are quite unique in Ontario and in Canada. The ability to do what we've done -- there's far too many obstacles for most people to overcome," said McLaren.

Pinhas anticipates a lot of success by 2015 and a considerable amount of adoption. "But I think it's because the physicians will see a benefit to EMR, not so much because of the funding models that exist," he said.

Microsoft removes projectile-vomiting IE8 ad from Web

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:28:41 -0700

An online ad for Internet Explorer 8 that showed a woman projectile vomiting has left such a bad taste in viewers' mouths that Microsoft has decided to remove it.

The ad, which features American actor Dean Cain and shows a woman vomiting after seeing her husband's Web browsing history, is still available via YouTube. However, Microsoft has removed it from the IE8videos channel on YouTube and the BrowsefortheBetter.com site. That site is part of Microsoft's campaign to promote IE8.

The ad was meant to promote Microsoft's InPrivate browsing feature of its new Web browser, which allows people to erase their history so other people can't see where they've been on the Web. However, it instead provoked widespread revulsion from many viewers, some of whom doubted the video could have been made by Microsoft because it was so disgusting.

"This must be a fake," read one comment by a user called "originalrecipes" on YouTube. "Probably made by some Apple crazy fans. This is not made by Microsoft. No way."

"Bad taste," wrote another YouTube user called "CUTV." "Microsoft, I try to like you, but you make it so hard."

Others, however, found the ad humorous, and some even used it to poke fun at Microsoft. "I'd puke too if I was using IE," was the comment from the user called "lucarescigno."

In the ad, a man passes his PC to his wife when she asks to borrow it. After she sees what he's been viewing, she loses her breakfast at the table and then vomits on him after he's slipped and fallen on what she has expelled.

Actor Cain provides a commentary about suffering from "Oh my God I'm going to puke" (OMGIGP) when sharing a computer with someone who may be viewing offensive Web sites.

In a statement sent via e-mail Thursday, Microsoft confirmed it removed the ad -- one in a series to promote IE8 -- based on viewer feedback, and meant no harm in it.

"We make a point of listening to our customers," according to Microsoft. "We created the OMGIGP video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it."