Industry Standard Breaking News

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."

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.

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."

Vista Ultimate users fume, rant over Windows 7 deals

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:21:54 -0700

Consumers running Windows Vista Ultimate, who have blasted Microsoft for breaking promises to deliver a host of extras, are now knocking the company's upgrade plans and discount pricing for Windows 7.

Users commenting on several recent Computerworld stories about Windows 7 have let Microsoft have it, especially over the limited-time discount Microsoft is offering on pre-orders of Windows 7 Home Premium ($49.99) and Professional ($99.99).

"I think it's lousy that Microsoft is offering nothing during the current short-term promotion in terms of a discounted upgrade for Windows 7 Ultimate for customers who bought Vista Ultimate," said one of many anonymous commenters. "Nice way to take care of your customers who've already paid you the absolute most money..., folks."

"Hello everyone, my name is Dan, and I bought Windows Vista Ultimate -- the upgrade," said another user named, not surprisingly, "Dan," in another comment. "I was a fool. I not only bought Vista Home Premium, I spent additional money on what I hoped was going to be a better OS with some very unique added benefits. Fooled me once, Microsoft. Even fooled me twice. Never, ever, again. At any price."

As the commenters pointed out, Microsoft has not cut the price of Windows 7 Ultimate, which like the other retail editions, can be pre-ordered from the company as well as some select retailers, including Amazon.com. Instead, the top-end SKU is priced at $219.99 for an "Upgrade" and $319.99 for the "Full" version.

Others complained about the price, discounted or not. Although Microsoft dropped the suggested list price of Windows 7 Home Premium by 8% to 17% when compared to Vista's price, it left Ultimate (and Professional) unchanged.

"I find it simply outrageous Microsoft is charging me $219 to 'upgrade' to Windows 7," added an anonymous commenter who claimed he was also a Microsoft stockholder. "This pricing structure makes no sense at all and is already backfiring. As a stockholder I'm writing a letter to the Steve Ballmer board to change this pricing before it's too late. Heads should roll on this one.

"Those suckers that bought Vista Ultimate, myself included, are screwed," said yet another commenter. "There isn't a chance in hell that I am paying $219 for what should really be Vista SP2. We were promised 'extras' which we never got, now we are being excluded from the pre-order special. Anyway even at $49, it is still too much to pay."

The extras that commenter mentioned refer to "Ultimate Extras," one of the main features Microsoft cited in the months leading up to the 2007 release of Vista Ultimate to distinguish the operating system from its lower-priced siblings. According to Microsoft's marketing, Extras were to be "cutting-edge programs, innovative services and unique publications" that would be regularly offered only to users of Vista's highest-priced edition.

But users soon began belittling the paltry number of add-ons Microsoft released and the company's leisurely pace at providing them. Just five months after Vista was launched, critics started to complain.

Earlier this year, Microsoft dumped the feature, saying that it would instead focus on existing features in Windows 7 rather than again promise extras.

The furor over Vista Ultimate has even reached analysts' ranks. In May, Michael Cherry of Directions on Microsoft urged Microsoft to give Vista Ultimate owners a free upgrade to Windows 7. "It would buy them a lot of good will, and I don't think it would cost them much," Cherry said at the time.

Some of the commenters in the latest Computerworld stories about Windows 7 echoed Cherry.

"I am running Vista Ultimate and feel ripped off by Microsoft because ... [we] never received the extras we paid good money to get," said "Hellfire" in a long comment. "The very least that they should do is offer a heavily-discounted upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate to those that have lost money by purchasing Vista Ultimate."

Cisco looks to accelerate virtualization deployments

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:11:04 -0700

Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their data centers, company officials said at a Cisco customer event this week.

10 must-have virtualization tools

Demand for virtualized data centers is high, they said, due to the complexity of managing and provisioning physical resources, securing that environment, maximizing utilization of assets, numerous network connections, and the rising costs of facilities and energy usage.

“Power is increasing at a faster rate than the top line revenue of your company,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s data center, switching and services group. McCool spoke at the Cisco Live conference in San Francisco.

Virtualization removes the logical view of an infrastructure from the physical underpinnings, thus making data center resources transparent to an application and enabling that application to move, McCool said. Cisco itself was faced with a “$100 million server” issue – it needed the server but didn’t have enough room for it in a current data center and faced an expensive build out of a new facility just to house it.

But virtualization let Cisco pocket that stash. Virtualizing its data centers reduced its cable plant by 4,800 cables, McCool said, made room for 50% more physical servers and increased virtual machine capacity fourfold.

In another example, a New Jersey financial institution opening an office in Bangalore opted to host applications in New Jersey and implement virtual desktops in India with Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services and Application Control Engine products to save money, McCool said.

But virtualization makes the mobile VM difficult to monitor and track, he said, and thus hard to manage. That’s why Cisco developed VN-Link, software that allows the network to become VM-aware and map policies to a VM as it moves across physical ports.

VN-Link is intended to provide full visibility to VMs for the network administrator and VM management for the systems administrator, says Ed Bugnion, Cisco’s CTO for the server access and virtualization business unit.

VN-Link is integral to Cisco’s Nexus 2148T fabric extender to provide network interface virtualization, which provides a “direct, consistent view of VMs and the (data center) operational model” by divorcing VMs from their physical interfaces.

This, combined with a unified switching fabric supporting Ethernet and Fibre Channel, simplifies and provides greater and more consistent visibility into all data center operations, Bugnion said. The environment can be managed from a network perspective or from a server perspective, he said.

Cisco’s platform for enabling all of this, of course, is the Unified Computing System. UCS is intended to be a single point of data center management through its ability to discover, view and configure resources, such as servers, and apply and enforce service profiles on those servers.

“Our strategy (with UCS) is to accelerate virtualization through increased visibility and control,” Bugnion said. “We’re focused on that part of the data center in which the network plays a central role. Management and energy efficiency is not an afterthought.”

To date, Savvis and Thomson Reuters are two publicly announced potential customers for UCS. They note significant results from using or trialing virtualization and UCS.

Researchers design wind turbine kites to fly at 30,000 feet

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

If you want to produce a lot of energy using wind power, it only makes sense to go where the winds are the strongest.

And that's what a group of researchers at Stanford University are trying to do.

The researchers are working on designs for high-altitude wind turbine kites that fly so high that airliners would have to fly around them, according to Stanford. Flying an expected 30,000 feet above the Earth, the tethered kites would be able to reach powerful jet streams that can flow 10 times faster than winds closer to the ground.

The turbines' spinning rotors would capture and convert the wind's power into electricity and send it down a wire to a distribution grid on the ground.

"If you tapped into 1% of the power in high-altitude winds, that would be enough to continuously power all civilization," said Ken Caldeira, an associate professor at Stanford and a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in a statement. He added that to generate the same amount of power, similar solar cells on the ground would have to cover roughly 100 times more area than a high-altitude wind turbine.

Stanford's design efforts come on the heels of a myriad of different alternative energy research projects.

Late last year, scientists at MIT announced that they are working to boost the output and efficiency of solar cells while lowering the cost of solar power.

The team of MIT physicists and engineers said they have been able to boost the output of solar cells by as much as 50% by changing the makeup of the silicon films on the cells. The research team said the advancement could dramatically reduce the cost of using solar power because the amount of pricey high-quality silicon traditionally used is slashed down to 1% of the usual amount.

A few months before that announcement, another team of MIT researchers reported that they had made an energy storage breakthrough that could transform solar power from an alternative energy source to a mainstream source. By figuring out a way to more efficiently harness solar energy, the scientists said they've made a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

For Stanford's wind project, researchers calculated that winds at altitudes near 32,000 feet above the Earth's surface have the greatest power density and that corresponds to how much wind energy would flow over the turbines.

According to Stanford, scientists found that the highest wind densities are found over Japan, eastern China, the eastern coast of the U.S., southern Australia and northeastern Africa.

Wind turbine kites are not in use yet.

Reports: Microsoft will sell Windows 7 'Family Pack'

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:37:57 -0700

Microsoft will offer a multi-license "family pack" for Windows 7, according to a pair of bloggers who cite details in the end-user licensing agreement (EULA) of a recently-leaked build.

The EULA for a post-Release Candidate build of Windows 7 includes a clause that refers to an upcoming family pack, said Kristan Kenney and Ed Bott, the latter a well-known Windows blogger for ZDNet.

Under a section titled "Installation And Use Rights," the EULA states: "If you are a 'Qualified Family Pack User', you may install one copy of the software marked as 'Family Pack' on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there. Those computers are the 'licensed computers' and are subject to these license terms. If you do not know whether you are a Qualifised [sic] Family Pack User, visit go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?Linkid=141399 or contact the Microsoft affiliate serving your country."

The link included in the EULA clause currently redirects to Microsoft's home page.

According to Bott, the Family Pack clause exists only in the EULA for Windows 7 Home Premium, the edition Microsoft's designed as the de facto consumer choice. It's also included in the EULA for Windows 7E Home Premium, the special version Microsoft's created for European customers that omits Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Three weeks ago, Microsoft announced the Windows 7E -- "E" presumably stands for "Europe" -- as a unilateral move to head off EU antitrust regulators, who are thinking about forcing the company to offer users a "ballot screen" choice of multiple browsers, including those from rivals, when they first fire up Windows.

In the past, Microsoft declined to either confirm or deny that it would offer a multi-license bundle for Windows 7. ""We expect to have other great offers in the future as we lead up to and beyond general availability," a spokeswoman said via instant messaging last week. "[But] we have nothing to announce at this time."

The company sold a two-license Family Pack for Vista Home Premium for $159 for six months in 2007. The caveat then: The customers had to have purchased a full or upgrade edition of Vista Ultimate, the most-expensive SKU in the line.

Not surprisingly, Windows 7's EULA said nothing of any criteria such as Ultimate ownership.

Microsoft did not respond today to a request for comment or confirmation on a Windows 7 Family Pack.

Analysts, such as Stephen Baker of the NPD Group, have taken Microsoft to task for not mimicking Apple, which offers a five-license family pack for its Mac OS X operating system. Apple, which has charged $199 in the past for its multi-license bundle, said earlier this month that it will price the upcoming Mac OS X 10.6, aka "Snow Leopard," Family Pack at just $49.

Bott suspected that Microsoft would undercut the usual Apple Family Pack price by marking its Windows 7 three-license bundle at $189. If so, Microsoft's Family Pack would undercut the price of a full-package edition of Home Premium ($199) as well as the price of the upgrade editions of Professional and Ultimate ($199 and $219, respectively).

If Microsoft uses a pricing model similar to the three-license Office Home and Student 2007, however, it could price a Family Pack anywhere from $74 to $136. (Microsoft prices Home and Student at $149, 62% of the upgrade price of Office Standard 2007; applying that same percentage to the upgrade prices of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate results in $74, $124 and $136, respectively.)

Neither Kenney or Bott specified the build that contains the EULA with the Family Pack clause. Leaked copies of post-Release Candidate editions, however, have continued to pop up on file-sharing sites such as Mininova.org, a popular BitTorrent tracking site.

One just-posted build, labeled Windows 7 Build 7264, leaked to the Web last Monday. Several commenters on Mininova.org have noted that product activation keys for RC do not work on this build, leading them to speculate that it's a version of the so-called "Release to Manufacturing," or RTM, build that Microsoft has promised it will wrap up this month.

Bing beats Google to the punch, launches Twitter search

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:37:54 -0700

Microsoft Corp.'s Bing has beaten Google Inc. to the punch.

Google has been rumored to be casting an eye toward creating a tool for searching social networking sites, like Twitter. But today, Bing came out and did it.

Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, said in a blog post yesterday that the company is integrating more real-time data into its search results. To kick off their effort, Bing will be picking up tweets from only the more prominent Twitters, such as former Vice President Al Gore and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest. From the technology side, Bing will pull from Twitterers like Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, and Kara Swisher, a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

"There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter," wrote Suchter, who was formerly Yahoo Inc.'s vice president of search technology. "We've been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space ... We're not indexing all of Twitter at this time... We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets."

When someone does a search on Bing for Al Gore in association with Twitter, for instance, the user should see Gore's latest tweets come up among the search results.

If online chatter succeeds, Bing won't be alone for long in offering this Twitter-search feature.

A possible Google microblogging search service that would focus on finding Twitter posts has been the subject of online chatter in recent weeks. A Google spokesman wouldn't confirm or deny the rumors.

Hadley Reynolds, an analyst at research firm IDC, said in a previous interview that it would be a smart move for Google.

"Google wants to be the single storehouse for the world's information, and Twitter has to be part of that conversation," he said. "Twitter's own search tool has gotten mixed reviews. Google has been working on this kind of thing for 10 years and Twitter hasn't. There is a learning curve there."

Online scams up as more Africans use the Internet

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:31:50 -0700

Online scams targeting the financial sector are on the rise in Africa as more people access online banking services and mobile banking.

Phishing attacks are mainly occurring in South Africa where online banking is common, while mobile money theft is common in other parts of Africa where Internet penetration is still low. As a result of the increase, South Africa's Absa bank, the largest in Sub Saharan Africa announced Tuesday that its Internet banking customers can download security software to curb cybersecurity attacks.

A phishing attack aimed at Absa customers features a plain, yet clever unsolicited message instructing them to follow a link and confirm their account information as a way for criminals to obtain passwords and user IDs.

Absa's online customers can download Trend Micro's Internet Security Pro 2009 for free, said Christo Vrey, managing executive of Absa Digital Channels.

The software is expected to protect home or office computers against viruses, spyware and other malicious threats. The phishing attacks have risen since 2005 when Barclays Bank bought Absa.

South African consumers are exposed to more phishing attacks because it is the only Sub Saharan country with a developed online banking service. Other countries do not offer full-fledged online banking services and most of the population lacks bank accounts, but cybercriminals have not spared them either.

The Communications Commission of Kenya has set out on an exercise to educate consumers on cybercrime and other threats posed by the expected increase in Internet usage as a result of cheaper bandwidth. The East Africa Marine System and SEACOM cables are expected to start testing service in a month as the region prepares for cheaper connectivity. Expensive connectivity has limited the region's Internet penetration and electronic commerce is nonexistent, so cybercriminals have not targeted that area as much as South Africa.

However, cybercriminals in East Africa have used mobile phone-based tricks in which subscribers receive fake messages informing them that they have won money and are asked to transfer a certain amount via the phone as a "processing fee."

"The criminals normally they use Tanzanian or Ugandan telephone numbers, which work across the region. It's interesting how mobile phone operators and authorities have not arrested the criminals," said Tyrus Kamau, online security consultant based in Nairobi.

In Nigeria, the scams started with the infamous "419" e-mails that promised millions of dollars left behind by Africa's former dictators such as Sani Abacha and later evolved to promises of lucrative oil contracts. After officials cracked down, 419 e-mails slowed, but criminals shifted to mobile technology, which makes it hard to trace them.

"Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the crime has evolved just like other countries, but the problem is the inability of most GSM operators to create unique profiles for their customers. In many countries, the 98 percent of GSM users are prepaid and unidentifiable," said Fola Odufuwa, senior partner at Praxis Partners LLC

Greed and ignorance have been cited as the reasons many people in Africa fall prey to the scams as the criminals' Web sites are built to entice and make people fill out even the most intimate details.

Although Kenyan banks offering elementary online transactions have been keen on security, Kamau says that the banks have not done enough to protect consumers.

"Transactions can be easily intercepted if there are weak Secure Sockets Layer certificates and signatures which may render online transactions very vulnerable. Continuous assessment of these channels of commerce is paramount for emerging technology sectors in Africa," said Kamau.

Apart from the financial sector, cybercriminals are targeting popular Web sites providing online transactions, especially those selling FIFA World Cup tickets, to be held next year in South Africa.

Recently, the Sport and Recreation South Africa (SRSA) was the target of hoax e-mails informing ticket buyers that the organization was giving away more than US$2 million in an online lottery connected to the FIFA World Cup.

"While SRSA plays a key role with regards to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it is neither running any competition nor supporting any agency running a competition relating to 2010 World Cup or the Lottery," the SRSA said in a statement.

When your phone rings, the copyright police may come calling

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:02:31 -0700

A digital rights group is contesting a U.S. music industry association's assertion that royalties are due each time a mobile phone ringtone is played in public.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) filed suit against AT&T asserting that ringtones qualify as a public performance under the Copyright Act. ASCAP, which has 350,000 members, collects royalties and licenses public performances of works under copyright.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), however, asserts that copyright law exempts performances made "without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage," which would include a ringtone heard in a restaurant.

The organization further argued that the move by ASCAP could jeopardize consumer rights and increase costs for consumers. The EFF filed an amicus brief for the case on Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Knowledge also joined the brief.

"These wrongheaded legal claims cast a shadow over innovators who are building gadgets that help consumers get the most from their copyright privileges," the EFF said in a blog post.

ASCAP's suit highlights efforts by the music industry to aggressively assert its influence in dealing with new digital media. ASCAP wants mobile operators to pay royalties or be held liable for the so-called public performances of the ringtones. The organization has indicated that it would not pursue claims against individual consumers but rather the operators.

Operators such as AT&T and others that sell ringtones already pay royalties to songwriters for use of their material. ASCAP rejects the argument that ringtones fall under the exemption and that performances can still infringe even if there is no commercial gain.

On June 12, ASCAP filed a document opposing a motion from AT&T asking for a summary judgment in the case, which the EFF has posted on its Web site.

Court orders spammers to pay $3.7 million

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:01:52 -0700

A U.S. district court has ordered members of an alleged international spam ring to give up US$3.7 million that they made while sending out illegal e-mail messages pitching bogus weight-loss products and human growth hormone pills.

The operation, with key players located in Canada and St. Kitts, used spammers to drive traffic to Web sites selling an extract of the hoodia gordonii plant that the sellers claimed would cause significant weight loss and a "natural human growth hormone enhancer" that sellers claimed would reverse the aging process, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.

The FTC, in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, called the claims false or unsubstantiated and charged the defendants with violations of the FTC Act and the CAN-SPAM Act. For the first time, the FTC also used powers granted under the U.S. Safe Web Act, a law passed by Congress in 2006 that enhances the agency's ability to exchange information with foreign counterparts and helps protect consumers from cross-border spam and other Internet fraud.

The FTC's complaint, filed in October 2007, charged eight defendants -- Spear Systems, three other corporate defendants, and four individuals.

The commission settled with three defendants in the case -- Spear Systems and two individuals, one in the U.S. and one in Australia -- in May 2008.

The FTC was unable to reach settlements with the remaining five defendants, and they are subject to the order announced Thursday. Those defendants are Xavier Ratelle and Abaragidan Gnanendran, both of Quebec, Canada; and corporate defendants 9151-1154 Quebec, 9064-9252 Quebec and HBE.

Green IT to be an antidote for CIOs

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:54:30 -0700

The ongoing economic recession can help drive adoption of green IT within the data centre, according to a report from Datamonitor.

"The downturn has resulted in green IT trends for data centres, client devices and asset lifecycle management, as well as re-shaped return on investment (ROI) models," Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Datamonitor and the author of the study, Can Green IT Bloom in an Economic Downturn.

Green IT that eliminates the need for capital expenditure, such as data centres virtualisation, data centre design and layout, and asset lifecycle management, has become increasingly important as IT budgets remain constrained. While IT budgets are likely to remain flat this year, cost-effective green IT is likely to increase in demand, according to Datamonitor.

Restrained IT budgets also mean that green ROI models are becoming compulsory and shorter. In order for green IT vendors to satisfy new ROI requirements, they are being forced to develop more efficient and greener IT solutions.

Also, organisations that face critical data centre limitations, such as a shortage of floor or rack space, are looking to software or outsourcing alternatives to building new data centres or upgrading existing facilities. Those alternatives include IT leasing, managed services, virtualisation software, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

However, the greatest demand for data centres green IT will be for data centre virtualisation, according to Datamonitor. Data centre virtualisation is becoming more holistic, whereby various assets, including servers, storage, communications infrastructure, and business applications, are being virtualised across a pool of data centre hardware.

Green IT gains momentum amidst crisis

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:45:34 -0700

In the wake of the global financial crisis, green IT and cost-effective IT has lost its mutual exclusivity, independent market analyst Datamonitor reported recently.

In a report entitled "Can Green IT Bloom in an Economic Downturn?," the analyst said that due shrinking IT budges across the globe, investments in green IT are currently being driven by legal compliance and cost savings, effectively causing a paradigm shift to IT solutions that are both green and cheap.

"The global economic recession has spurred a paradigm shift in the way organizations evaluate, budget for and deploy green IT," said Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst, Datamonitor and the report's author. "The downturn has also resulted in green IT trends for datacenters, client devices and asset lifecycle management, as well as re-shaped return on investment (ROI) models."

The firm said that as companies face critical datacenter limitations, IT managers turn to the cloud, virtualization and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) in order to keep their organizations running efficiently.

"The greatest demand for datacenter green IT will be for datacenter virtualization," Datamonitor said. "Datacenter virtualization is becoming more holistic, whereby various assets are being virtualized across a pool of datacenter hardware." The company added that the industry will see an increase in demand for cloud computing, which theoretically falls under the green IT banner.

This significant change in outlook, Datacenter predicts, bodes well for green IT vendors, but only if they forge more efficient and greener IT solutions in order to satisfy the change in ROI (return on investment) requirements of companies, whose budgets are becoming more restrained as the economy remains at a standstill.

Weetabix supply chain rollout eliminates error

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:23:45 -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 percent error margin in stock tracking and picking compared to 10 percent 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.

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Couple gets prison time for Internet obscenity

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:13:18 -0700

Husband and wife owners of a California company that distributed pornographic materials over the Internet have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

Extreme Associates and owners Robert Zicari, also known as Rob Black, 35, and his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden, 32, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the Internet. They were sentenced Wednesday.

The couple, in their plea agreement, acknowledged distributing three videos through the mail and six video clips over the Internet to western Pennsylvania. They forfeited the domain name, Extremeassociates.com, as part of their plea agreement, in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The company is now defunct.

"Extreme Associates produced and distributed sexually degrading material that portrayed women in the most vile and depraved manner imaginable," U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, of the Western District of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "These prison sentences affirm the need to continue to protect the public from obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy material, the production of which degrades all of us."

The DOJ began cracking down on Internet-based pornography in 2003, and the agency established an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005.

Extreme Associates was the subject of a PBS Frontline documentary entitled "American Porn," which aired nationwide in February 2002. That program showed nonsexually explicit portions of the filming of a video. Undercover U.S. Postal inspectors then visited the Extreme Associates Web site and purchased videotapes. Inspectors also downloaded several obscene video clips, the DOJ said.

In August 2003, a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh returned a 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates for violating federal obscenity statutes. In January 2005, a district court judge dismissed the indictment, saying that the federal obscenity statutes were unconstitutional. The government appealed, and Buchanan argued the case in October 2005 before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

In December 2005, the appeals court reversed the decision of the district court and held that the federal statutes regulating the distribution of obscenity do not violate any constitutional right to privacy. The case was then remanded back to the district court.

Market research vs. gut instinct

Venture Beat — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:59:47 -0700

Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing and the inventor of the Palm Pilot, knows a thing or two about innovation. In this segment, from Stanford University’s Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lectures, Hawkins discusses how to balance market research with your intuition.

Focus groups can only take you so far. Listening to customer wishes and demands helps more. But sometimes, you simply need to ignore what the data is telling you and follow your gut.

Windows 7 May Get Family Pack Discount

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:56:53 -0700

Microsoft may be introducing a Family Pack for Windows 7 Home Premium, with a shared license for three computers in the same household. The license details in the latest build of Windows 7 have the following clause under 'Installation and Use Rights': "If you are a 'Qualified Family Pack User', you may install one copy of the software marked as 'Family Pack' on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there," according to ZDNet's Ed Bott.

The Family Pack for Windows 7 Home Premium would fall in line with similar licensing Microsoft already has for the Home & Student Edition of Microsoft Office 2007. There's no word on Family Pack pricing yet, but Bott's guess is that we'll see a Family Pack with a $189 price tag. Although he doesn't explicitly state this, Bott suggests that a price of $189 would be used since it undercuts by ten dollars Apple's comparable Family Pack that gives you five OS X licenses for $199.

That may seem reasonable, but I'm doubtful since I don't see why Microsoft would feel the need to compete with Apple on boxed software. When you buy a copy of Windows you can throw the OS on almost any computer with enough horsepower, but OS X requires a Mac. Yes, I know all about the Hackintosh community where you install OS X on a Windows machine, but PCs running OS X is not a big enough market to cause Microsoft concern.

Let's face it, when you buy a boxed copy of OS X, you are installing the OS on a Mac not a Dell. People simply aren't going into a store and weighing the pros and cons of buying OS X or Windows software. Sure, when it comes to buying a new computer there's a big rivalry, and in those instances people are weighing the pros and cons of a Mac versus a Windows machine. But when it comes to a software upgrade or fresh install, the type of computer you have at home has already made your software choice for you (unless you're switching over to a Linux build of course).

The other problem is a $189 Family Pack undercuts the $199 price tag already established for the standalone version of Windows 7 Home Premium. What are they going to do, have Best Buy interrogate you to make sure you're really going to use the cheaper Family Pack for one household? What is more likely, in my view, is that anyone who buys a Home Premium edition of Windows 7 will automatically have three licenses, just like with the comparable edition of Microsoft Office 2007.

There would probably be widespread abuse with that pricing model since it would encourage single people and students to split the $199 cost three ways. But then again, that's a great way to put your new software within reach of almost everyone, and it also gives XP and Vista users a bigger incentive to make the switch to Windows 7. I can imagine a lot of people talking it over and saying, "Sixty-six bucks each for the new Windows? Sure, why not?"

Of course there's also the possibility that Microsoft could pull the Family Pack clause before Windows 7 officially hits store shelves on October 22. But as former PC World editor-in-chief, Harry McCracken points out on Technologizer, people have been waiting for a Windows Family Pack for a long time. So the Family Pack in Windows 7 Home Premium Edition is most likely on its way, but how Microsoft will structure Family Pack pricing is anybody's guess.

Connect with Ian Paul on Twitter (@ianpaul).

Downturn driving green IT into data centres

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:43:12 -0700

The recession is driving green IT into data centres, and organisations that are facing continued pressure on their budgets and data centre resource, are now actively investigating software and outsourcing alternatives.

So says analyst house Datamonitor in its Can Green IT Bloom in an Economic Downturn, report published today.

"The global economic recession has spurred a paradigm shift in the way organisations evaluate, budget for and deploy green IT", said the report's author, Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Datamonitor.

The report said current green IT investments are being driven by compliance with environmental legislation and cost savings. In particular, the report suggested 'green IT' that also eliminates the need for capital expenditure (capex), such as data centre virtualisation, data centre design and layout, and asset lifecycle management, has become increasingly important as IT budgets remain constrained.

Indeed, Datamonitor says that its research shows IT budgets are likely to remain flat in 2009. This view was backed up when Gartner recently confirmed the gloomy outlook for the IT industry.

"IT budgets will be largely flat in 2009, with only a slight improvement in 2010," Ascierto told Techworld. "IT is saying it is now all about optimising existing resources, rather adding or building new data centres."

Interestingly, Ascierto believes there will be a slowdown in data centre builds, with a corresponding increase in the use of green IT, with virtualisation the main beneficiary.

"Data centre virtualisation is becoming more holistic, whereby various assets, including servers, storage, communications infrastructure, and business applications, are being virtualised across a pool of data centre hardware," she said.

She feels that organisations that are facing critical limitations with their existing data centres, such as a shortage of floor or rack space, are now looking at options such as IT leasing, managed services, virtualisation, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Ascierto also believes that business applications will start evolving. "Cloud computing will absolutely see an increase in one to five years because of constrained IT budgets," she said. "Business applications are the next frontier of data centre virtualisation, as applications will themselves become virtualised."

And Ascierto was also clear that the ROI model for green IT is now compulsory and much shorter. "What has really shifted nowadays is the ROI model of green IT," she said.

"Before the downturn, enterprises had a vague notion of what ROI green IT would deliver," she said. "It was not necessarily quantified, and there was not a lot of disciplined return on investments. But in today's environment, those vague ROI notions have gone, and all capex, and increasingly opex (operating expenditure), has to be justified because of constrained IT budgets."

"Vendors are now much more focused on cost efficiencies and shorter ROI time frames," she said. "Typically, they used to be content with a ROI in three to five years, but now it is 12 months."

Sweden aims high for creation of a single EU patent system

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:59:48 -0700

Sweden took over the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union this week, promising to push hard for an agreement among the 27 member states on the creation of a single E.U.-wide patent.

The creation of the so-called Community Patent has eluded policy makers for over 30 years but a Swedish diplomat said progress was possible.

In parallel, Sweden hopes to secure agreement on the creation of a unified patent litigation area that spans the E.U., and they want to lay the basic structures for a patent court system.

"We have prepared a lot of bilateral meetings with the more sceptical countries to try to win them over," the diplomat said, on the usual condition of anonymity.

"We are aiming high but these goals can be achieved," she said.

Spain has traditionally been the most opposed to the Community Patent, especially in recent years when the idea of automated translations of patents for all but the three official languages of the European Patent Office (English, French and German) has been accepted by a large majority of E.U. countries.

Sweden's readiness to push for a breakthrough both on the Community Patent and the single litigation area was both welcomed and dismissed by lobby groups following the issue.

"The Swedish Presidency's commitment to move the E.U. Community Patent forward is a breath of fresh air," said Jonathan Zuck, President of the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), in a statement.

He added that success in Sweden's negotiations was important to the small firms ACT represents. "With Europe increasingly moving to a knowledge-based economy, the development of a Community Patent will boost and consolidate European competitiveness and innovation capabilities," he said.

Many followers of the European patent regime believe now is the right time for a breathrough in the long-overdue reforms of the system. Amid the economic downturn, innovation-related policies are taking centre stage because innovation is seen as a way out of the recession, some people argue.

However, opponents of a unified patent system say just the opposite.

"With the financial crisis and climate change as looming priorities, the Swedish presidency is going to be hard-pressed to move forward an agenda that has been mired in deep political fights for the last thirty years," said Benjamin Henrion, president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII).

The FFII argues that a Community Patent will make it easier to pass software patents in Europe, and it says a single patent litigation area is merely a way to circumvent the legal authority of the European Court of Justice, which it trusts could safeguard the E.U. from software patents.

"While large US software firms keep up their hopes for cheap enforceable software patents in Europe, the facts on the ground suggest that this debate will crawl, not run," Henrion said.

Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement

Fred Wilson — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:44:58 -0700

I love Hacker News (aka news.ycombinator.com). I read it at least once a day and it sends this blog more traffic than anything other than Google and Twitter. This is the refer log for AVC for the past month.

But like every great web service out there, it's the community at Hacker News that makes it so great.

This morning I read a Computer World article about the "NoSQL" movement. It was interesting to me because we have an investment in this market sector, an open source cloud based document store called MongoDB (which is mentioned in the computer world story).

There are three comments at Computerworld.com and there's 43 comments on the story at Hacker News. If you are interested in database issues, you'll find the discussion at Hacker News interesting and informative.

The SQL vs NoSQL debate is important, serious, and deeply technical. I am not going to even attempt to weigh in on it (other than to say we've got an investment in a NoSQL data store). But plenty of people are weighing in on it at Hacker News right now.

Of course there are other tech communities out there where discussions like this one have been going on for years. I am not saying they aren't vibrant and important. But Hacker News brings that together with a "techmeme style" blog aggregator and focuses very much on the startup entrepreneur (which is why it drives so much traffic to this blog).

Hacker News is a great service. If you are involved in tech startups and you don't read it regularly, you should.

Jailbroken iPhones leave users more vulnerable

IDG News Service — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:30:13 -0700

Jailbreaking an iPhone leaves users vulnerable to attack by stripping away most of the handset's security protections, a security researcher warned Thursday.

"If you care about security, don't use a jailbroken iPhone," said security researcher Charlie Miller, speaking at the SyScan security conference in Singapore on Thursday.

Jailbreaking is a term used to describe the process of stripping away the protections that prevent a user from installing applications on an iPhone that have not been digitally signed by Apple. Jailbreaking tools have been popular among users in the U.S. and elsewhere who do not want to be tied to a specific operator, or who want to add software or capabilities to the phone that Apple doesn't offer.

The process removes around 80 percent of the security protections built into the phone's software, making it more vulnerable, Miller said.

Overall, the stripped-down version of Mac OS X used in the iPhone makes it more secure than computers running the full version of the operating system, Miller said.

Many capabilities contained in the full version of the operating system, like support for Java and Adobe Flash, are not available on the iPhone. In addition, the iPhone doesn't support many of the features contained in PDF files, which have proved to be a fertile source of Mac OS X vulnerabilities. This gives attackers fewer options when looking for vulnerabilities to exploit, he said.

In addition, iPhones are limited to running applications that have been digitally signed by Apple, which means that an attacker cannot simply install and run their own software on the handset. The iPhone also has hardware protections for data stored in memory.

Jailbreaking an iPhone disables these two security functions, making the phone more vulnerable to an attack, Miller said.