Hi-tech flow

Sony Ericsson C 905: Charisma And Technology Combined

2008-08-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

By Kaitlin Dasia

The Sony Ericsson C 905 can be considered to be a novelty in the range of mobile phones of its grade. There are some special features that is seldom found in other sets. Sophisticated research and development has led to the building of this mobile phone. Most advanced technologies are brought to use in order to make this phone gain in its present form.

It is not just technology but also fascinating looks that go into making this set an ideal mobile to buy. The handset has dimensions of 104 x 49 x 18-19.5 mm and within this dimension one finds every latest mobile features incorporated. The light weigh of the handset is also what makes it easy for people to carry the phone. This feature rich phone weighs 136 gms.

Sony Ericsson C 905 has a large 2.4 inch TFT screen. Users normally bring to use this amazing screen to watch videos, pictures and play games. The fascination of this large screen increases when people use it to surf the net. The WAP browser comes to one's aid and help users penetrate into various sites in order to avail everything that is required by the user in order to entertain himself or to remain updated with information. This gadget is GSM enabled and so it is possible for users to remain connected with internet anywhere in the world. Moreover, as the mobile is 2G and 3G facilitated so it is possible to access every new functions on this mobile phone.

This C 905 connects with so many alternatives besides its main service provider. These include connectivity options such as GPRS, EDGE, 3G, WLAN, Bluetooth and USB port. These options allow people to connect with other gadgets easily. Bluetooth is used for wireless connection and the USB port is mainly used to connect with cable cords. So, sharing of files become simple with this gadget. This handset can also efficiently use messaging services to remain connected. SMS, MMS, Email and Instant Messaging are brought to use. Emailing is possible only when the device is connected to the internet. With emails one can send attachments of any form and these attachments can be easily retrieved and viewed with the help of the document viewer.

The mobile can be used for entertainment reasons also. Sony Ericsson C 905 has 8 MP camera with 3264 x 2448 pixels resolution power. This camera can be used to auto-focus on images and also simultaneously be used as a secondary camera for making video calls. Users find this camera very efficient for it serves all their photography needs. Pictures captured by this camera can be edited with the help of software such as picture editor. This mobile also has a music player capable of playing scintillating songs and music in the popular music formats. Music can also be heard on the FM radio that is known to play channels of every frequency possible. So, entertainment is guaranteed with this FM radio. This radio is also used for information purposes.

The memory of the gadget is awesome as it can be extended to 2 GB space. This space is used to store images, pictures, ring tones and wallpapers. In fact all downloaded items and captured videos and pictures can be stored in this memory. The mobile serves as an excellent device for the storing messages and entertainment files for a long period without having to delete them. The users are guaranteed to make use of it for long hours as its battery gives 380 hrs of standby time and 9 hrs of talk time.

source

Mobile footy sim kicks off

2008-08-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

Tim Green Aug 18 2008, 6:01pm

Sanco has launched a mobile football management sim to co-incide with the new UK footy season.

Mobile Club Manager is being touted as the first ‘ever-present’ massively multiplayer game, in which users can compete against real people rather than a machine. It is not necessary for individual ‘managers’ to stay connected in order for their role in the game world to continue to exist.

Matches are scheduled over a 38-game season with the aim of each team to become the first ‘MCM League Champions’. During each match, users can choose to receive Premium SMS messages providing real-time information on the game as it progresses – including goals, substitutions and bookings.

In addition, four training games will be available from launch, designed to allow managers to improve key aspects of player and team performance throughout the season, including Shot Stopping, Ball Control, Shot Accuracy and Strength.

source

Free 37 inch LCD TV with Mobile Phones – Enjoy two things at the price of one

2008-08-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

By Jacob Marshal [ 18/07/2008 ]

In this age of consumerism, people prefers those deals which gives them more benefit than the others. They always find out the best possible, cheap and most lucrative deals. Keeping in mind these factors, the retailers and vendors are coming with new and innovative tactics of selling their products, by which they can make huge rush at their stores and ultimately survive in this cut-throat competitive market.

With a free gift you(as a user) are receiving something at no extra cost as an addition on when you purchase a certain product or services. These type of deals can be ideal one if you are planning to purchase the main product being sold. But in this kind of deal it should be kept in mind that you should purchase a product which you really need. If you wants the product which comes as free and just go for the deal for the free product that will not be beneficial to you.

It has been seen that several vendors are offering numerous deals to the customers. In this modern age where everybody is struggling for making a better position in the market, as a result new and innovative selling tactics are arising everyday. One of the most popular tactics taken by the vendors nowadays is the free gift offer. They provides customers free gift with every purchase. When it comes to mobile phone this free gift can be a LCD TV, a gaming console, free subscription, cash back offer or a Laptop. There are few retailers who provides Free 37 inch LCD TV with mobile phones. This free offer of with mobile phone is one of the best provides by various retailers and vendors by which they try to win the minds of the customers. This type of deal is being made with the contract deals. But one should only go for those retailers which are reliable which will ensure the quality of the purchased product and the free gift.

The fundamental reason behind offering these kind of free deals is the motto of enhances the customer base of the retailer. The rise of customers will help retailers in growth in their business. These kind of offers are nothing but a selling tactics.

Source

60m app downloads for iPhone

2008-08-12T08:31:00.000-07:00

Tim Green Today, 11:39am

Consumers have downloaded over 60 million applications for the iPhone.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the Wall Street Journal that most of the downloads were for free apps, but that the company has still sold an average of $1 million worth of software per day.

He’s now forecasting eventual sales of half a billion dollars.

"Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time. I've never seen anything like this in my career for software," Jobs said.

Nokia N-series music Edition: Music focused handsets

2008-08-06T18:43:00.000-07:00

In this latest technology world, we want to own the most latest handset and satisfy our diverse needs. A latest phone should not only possess communication features but also entertainment features. As a mobile phone expert, I have seen the latest phones with a music player, digital camera, business organizer, etc. are preferred by users worldwide. People ho have passion for photography consider camera phones and those who like to listen to high quality opt for music phones.

The latest Nokia N-series is offering a blend of looks, style and functionalities. These phones carry some spectacular features in sleek and smart devices. The number of advanced features and technologies included in these N-series phones include an innovative 3G technology, state-of-the-art high resolution mega pixel cameras, EDGE, GPRS, Carl Zeiss Optics, dedicated music players, connectivity features, etc. These multimedia phones of Nokia are supported by hi-end utilities, sophisticated looks and design. The cutting-edge features of these devices make them one of the most preferred devices among the users.

The music phones of Nokia have become a craze with their music focused features. When it comes to innovation, Nokia scores high on it.

The Nokia N73 Music Edition is one of the popular music phones in the market that is encased in a sleek design. Besides the powerful music player, the FM radio is also a source of entertainment. The music capabilities of the phone include stereo speakers, play lists and equalizer. One of the key features of the phone include a 3.2 mega pixel camera with 20 x digital zoom, viewfinder, auto focus, flash, Carl Zeiss Optics Tessar lens. Enjoy capturing good quality of images and recording high quality video footages with this stunning phone. Store the captured images and recorded videos in the massive memory of the phone.

The Nokia N73 Music edition is an all rounder phone with amazing list of features. The handset supports an inbuilt memory of 40 MB, a 2 .4 inches QVGA TFT colour display, 3G, Bluetooth, Infrared, and USB. The various messaging features of the phone include text messages, instant messages, multimedia messages and email. Music can be played with the music player and FM radio. Listen to excellent music and built-in stereo speakers that offer high quality sound.
One can take away this Nokia music phone with great deals and offers. Browse through the online mobile phone shops and compare the rates offered by different retailers and find the deal that suits you the most.

About the author:
Andrena Markley is the webmaster of onlinemobilephoneshop.co.uk and deals in latest mobile phones. For updates on Nokia Phones, BlackBerry Phones and Pay as you go phones visit the site.

Article Source: http://www.Free-Articles-Zone.com

FCC discloses logic behind its approval of XM-Sirius merger

2008-08-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

FCC discloses logic behind its approval of XM-Sirius merger

By Matthew Lasar | Published: August 06, 2008 - 09:56AM CT

It's yesterday's news that the Federal Communications Commission has, by a 3-2 majority, given the go-ahead for Sirius satellite radio to acquire XM. But now the FCC has issued its complete Order, which sweats the details of the deal and discloses the agency's reasoning.

To recap the basics of the union: the Commission has accepted a series of "voluntary commitments" from the new entity: most notably a three-year cap on prices. The new broadcaster will provide à la carte programming to consumers. Four percent of its channels will go to noncommercial programmers; another four to "certain Qualified Entities," which probably means one or more minority broadcasting groups.

The merged entity pledges to roll out an interoperable receiver that can access both broadcasters within nine months of its union. There's also that "open device" requirement. Receiver manufacturers will be allowed to add other features: iPod integration, broadband, AM/FM, or HD Radio. Some parties wanted the FCC to require any tuner that includes AM/FM to also include HD Radio. The Commission says it will launch a Notice of Inquiry on the HD question, which Ars guesses means that the proposed extra rule is on the long list of the FCC's priorities.

It won't harm terrestrial radio

But why did the FCC's three Republicans approve the merger? Essentially, the Commission defends the union on the grounds that these voluntary commitments override any potential anticompetitive harm. Some of these pledges, especially à la carte radio, will be particularly good for consumers, the FCC says. The agency also found unconvincing warnings of harm to terrestrial radio.

The Order doubts studies sent to it which argued that satellite and free radio compete with each other, therefore the merger represents a threat to AM and FM broadcasters. "We find that the record evidence is insufficient to define precisely the relevant product or geographic markets," the FCC concluded. "Without defining the relevant product and geographic markets, we cannot perform a structural analysis to predict the likelihood of anticompetitive harms."

In so many words, the Commission said it couldn't divine from the data the extent to which free radio listeners won't listen to AM and FM because of a merged Sirius/XM. As for fears that the new company may raise prices, that's easy: they won't because they've promised not to for three years.

The FCC also rejected warnings that a united Sirius/XM will be better able to "steal" talent away from terrestrial radio, as in the case of Howard Stern's migration to Sirius. What would be wrong with that, anyway? "Indeed, the merged firm's ability to negotiate better terms for expensive talent could benefit consumers via lower rates," the Order observed, "and it would not be in the combined company's interests to negotiate deals that harm the quality of content, especially while seeking to increase subscriber penetration and so move to profitability."

The agency did agree with various commenters that a married Sirius/XM could leverage unfair power over manufacturers for interoperable receivers. But the new company's open device pledge will "adequately mitigate the potential harm presented by this transaction," the FCC says.

Finally, it's obvious from the FCC's Order that the agency sees a big selling point in Sirius and XM's commitment to provide à la carte programming. "The proposed à la carte system will allow consumers to, in effect, 'block' unwanted or objectionable content that would otherwise be delivered to consumers' SDARS devices," the Commission predicts. À la carte will give listeners "greater control" over programming. And they'll be able to pay lower prices for the services they receive.

No spectrum return

Some commenters asked the FCC to require Sirius/XM to give back a percentage of their spectrum in order to create one or more new satellite radio companies. This would require an unacceptably complex overhaul of Sirius and XM's networks, the FCC claimed. "Furthermore, in addition to the harm to existing SDARS customers from a partial divestiture," the Commission wrote, "it is not clear to us that a new competitor would have sufficient spectrum to emerge as a significant competitor to the newly merged entity, nor is it clear that a new SDARS operator could overcome the regulatory and business hurdles required to offer service."

Many parties will probably be disappointed that the FCC has added no specific enforcement mechanism to this Order. Public interest groups, politicians, and the National Association of Broadcasters charged that Sirius and XM's violation of the agency's terrestrial repeater rules, and failure so far to create an interoperable receiver, showed a lack of trustworthiness. Echoing these concerns, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein proposed some kind of watchdog entity be created to ensure XM and Sirius's compliance (that is, before he decided to vote no on the deal).

Sirius and XM have entered into a Consent Decree to make amends and pay restitution for their "variant" repeaters, as the agency calls them. Beyond that, there's no watchdog in this Order. Just a promise:

We will rigorously monitor Applicants' compliance with the conditions of the Consent Decrees and the conditions specified herein and believe that the mechanisms put in place in those Decrees will fully serve to ensure compliance on an ongoing basis. Moreover, we will not hesitate to take prompt and effective enforcement action if these conditions are not satisfied.

Further reading

The FCC's Memorandum and Order on the Sirius/XM merger

Google AdSense went down

2007-06-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

Google AdSense went down.

Hey, Google, come back!

The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.
We apologize for any inconvenience.

Google AdSense の web サイトは一時的にご利用いただけません。後で再度お試しくださいますようお願いいたします。
お手数をおかけいたしますことをお詫びいたします。

Die Google AdSense-Website ist vorübergehend nicht verfügbar. Bitte versuchen Sie es später noch einmal.
Wir entschuldigen uns für eventuell enstandene Unannehmlichkeiten.

Le site Google AdSense est temporairement indisponible. Veuillez réessayer plus tard.
Nous vous prions de nous excuser pour le désagrément occasionné.

El sitio web de AdSense de Google no se encuentra disponible en estos momentos. Por favor, inténtelo de nuevo más tarde.
Disculpe las molestias.

Google AdSense 网站暂时无法浏览。请您稍候再尝试。
对于造成您的不便我们感到抱歉。

Il sito AdSense di Google è temporaneamente non disponibile. La preghiamo di provare più tardi.
Ci scusiamo per il disagio.

De website van Google AdSense is tijdelijk niet beschikbaar. Probeert u het later opnieuw.
Onze excuses voor het eventuele ongemak.

Google AdSense Sayfası geçici olarak hizmet dışıdır. Lütfen, daha sonra tekrar deneyin.
Bu geçici sorundan dolayı özür dileriz.

O site do Google AdSense não está disponível no momento. Tente novamente mais tarde.
Pedimos desculpas pelo inconveniente.

The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.
We apologise for any inconvenience.

Witryna programu Google AdSense jest chwilowo niedostępna. Prosimy spróbuj później.
Przepraszamy za wszelkie niedogodności.

Веб-сайт Google AdSense временно недоступен. Попробуйте, пожалуйста, еще раз через несколько минут.
Мы приносим свои извинения за причиненные неудобства.

Google AdSense webbplats är för tillfället inte tillgänglig. Försök igen senare.
Vi ber om ursäkt för eventuellt besvär.

Google AdSense-webstedet er ikke tilgængeligt i øjeblikket. Prøv igen senere.
Vi beklager ulejligheden.

Google AdSense 웹사이트를 일시적으로 사용하실 수 없습니다 . 나중에 다시 시도해 보십시오 .
불편을 끼쳐드려 죄송합니다 .

Google AdSense-webområdet er midlertidig utilgjengelig. Prøv igjen senere.
Vi beklager eventuelle problemer dette medfører.

Google AdSense 網站暫時無法瀏覽。請您稍候再嘗試。
對於造成您的不便我們感到抱歉。

A Google AdSense oldal jelenleg nem elérhető. Kérjük, látogasson vissza később.
Elnézést kérünk az esetleges kellemetlenségekért.

Google AdSense –sivusto ei väliaikaisesti ole saatavilla. Yritä myöhemmin uudelleen.
Pahoittelemme tämän aiheuttamaa hankaluutta.

Stránka Google AdSense je dočasně nedostupná. Zkuste to později.
Omlouváme se za způsobené nepříjemnosti.

Stránka Google AdSense je dočasne nedostupná. Skúste neskôr, prosím.
Ospravedlňujeme sa za spôsobené nepríjemnosti.

Google AdSense sučelje trenutno je nedostupno. Molimo Vas pokušajte kasnije.
Ispričavamo se za neugodnosti.

إن موقع Google AdSense غير متوفر وقتيا. يرجى تكرار المحاولة لاحقا. نعتذر عن أي إزعاج.

אתר Google AdSense איננו זמין כרגע. אנו מצטערים על אי הנוחות. אנא נסה שנית מאוחר יותר.

Google AdSense уебсайта е временно недостъпен. Моля опитайте по-късно. Извиняваме се за неудобството.

Η ιστοσελίδα του Google AdSense δεν είναι διαθέσιμη προς το παρόν. Παρακαλώ δοκιμάστε αργότερα. Ζητούμε συγγνώμη για την ενόχληση.

Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains

2007-05-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains

By NOAM COHEN

Published: May 21, 2007

IF the open-source software movement were an upstart political campaign, Chris Messina would be one of its community organizers — the young volunteer who decamps to New Hampshire, knocking on doors, putting up signs.

Enlarge This Image

Lonni Sue Johnson

In 2004, Mr. Messina, a 26-year-old Web entrepreneur from San Francisco, found his dream candidate in Firefox, the open-source Internet browser that is a rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Unlike the other candidate he volunteered for that year, Howard Dean, Firefox is still racking up victories. And unlike Mr. Dean, the people behind Firefox have a dilemma: what happens — and what is owed to volunteer contributors — when an open-source project starts to become successful?

Some 1,000 to 2,000 people have contributed code to Firefox, according to the Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the Firefox browser. An estimated 10,000 people act as testers for the program, and an estimated 80,000 help spread the word.

In 2004, with the release of version 1.0, Firefox became the dream of techies like Mr. Messina. Much in the way he helped coordinate supporters for Mr. Dean online, he got behind Spread Firefox, a campaign to rally the open-source base behind the browser.

That effort culminated in a fund-raising drive to advertise Firefox in The New York Times. The ad, a double-page spread designed by Mr. Messina, ran on Dec. 16, 2004.

“It was 10,000 people, putting in like 5 bucks to — I don’t know what the highest was,” he said. “It was in the spirit of the Howard Dean campaign.”

The Firefox campaign has been very successful, according to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that directs the project.

“The best we can figure, 75 to 100 million people are using Firefox,” she said. “Those people did not get it in a box. That is 75 million decisions, somewhere around the world to put this piece of software on someone’s machine.”

According to outside estimates, Firefox has about 15 percent of the market, Internet Explorer has more than 78 percent, and Apple’s Safari a little less than 5 percent. Mozilla has 90 employees and revenue of more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing. But a windfall came in the form of a royalty contract with Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in the search bar. In the last two years, the deal has brought in more than $100 million. (Google has a similar placement with Apple’s Safari.)

So far, no one has figured out how to balance keeping an open-source or collaborative project fully financed while remaining independent and noncommercial. Wikipedia, for example, holds occasional fund-raisers, while its leaders debate if it should take steps toward some sort of sponsorship or advertising.

Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year. The foundation plans to increase its work force, and to add some engineering capability. In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, also led by Ms. Baker, mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract. (The foundation’s 2006 tax return has not yet been made public, but Ms. Baker said the Google revenue will remain about the same.)

She described the decision to align with Google as an organic one that predates the official release of Firefox. “We had Google in a beta version for a long time, so we approached them first,” she said.

Mitch Kapor, who is on the Mozilla board, said that accepting a deal with Google was a no-brainer. “Always on my mind, in all my involvement is, how is it going to be sustainable?” he said. “I am a big believer that begging is not the right business model. When it began to become clear there was a business opportunity, in monetizing search in the browser, I saw this as a great opportunity.”

But with opportunities came changes. By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of “its arrangement and agreements,” Mr. Kapor said. (Google declined to comment for this article.)

Because transparency is one of the principles of the so-called Mozilla manifesto released in February, Mr. Kapor said, there was “some tension around getting the deal done and disclosure.”

Another complication for Mozilla, some critics say, is that it could be perceived as acting as an extension of Google. For example, they note that one of Google’s growth areas, Web-based software applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

The exact nature of Mozilla’s relationship with Google has been good fodder for bloggers. When Mr. Messina recently posted a 50-minute video of his thoughts about Firefox development, the comments included a back and forth between Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Corporation, and a commentator on the blog named Corey.

When Corey wrote that “it seems like half” of the top contributors to Mozilla “work directly for Google,” Mr. Dotzler responded harshly, dismissing the claim outright: “No one who has looked at the actual development of Firefox recently could say with a straight face that Google employees are top contributors to Mozilla.”

Finally, there is the problem of what Mozilla should do with the money, at least the portion that isn’t being reinvested in the Firefox. Throwing money around among volunteers can backfire, Ms. Baker said, though the foundation has been quietly assisting contributors who are hampered by poor equipment.

Instead, Mozilla’s solution is to put money into what Mr. Kapor calls “community purposes.” To that end, the foundation is looking for a new executive director who would focus on worthy projects, although no decisions on what constitutes a worthy project has been made. “We go out and ask,” Ms. Baker said, “and even the community is not actually clear where large amounts of money should go.”

Much Ado About Apple’s iPhone

2007-05-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

Much Ado About Apple’s iPhone

By THOMAS CRAMPTON

Published: May 21, 2007

PARIS, May 20 — Few mobile phones have created more buzz before becoming a reality than Apple’s iPhone — even in Europe and Asia, which will not see the talked-about handset for many months.

Apple says that sales of iPhones will begin in the United States in late June, in Europe later this year and in Asia next year. But the company has been silent on how the iPhone will be distributed in Europe, prompting speculation about operator alliances and retail partnerships.

The approach in the fragmented European market is widely expected to be different from the one employed in the American introduction, which is AT&T’s exclusively.

For European and Asian mobile service providers, the stakes could be high because of Apple’s strong brand loyalty.

Almost half of current iPod owners would consider the iPhone as their next mobile phone, according to a survey of 2,000 Europeans by Canalys, a research firm based in Reading, England. And an online poll conducted in April by the British online publisher Shiny Media found that 25 percent of those surveyed would be willing to switch service providers to own an iPhone.

A determining factor in which mobile carriers offer the iPhone in Europe will be whether it includes the “third generation” mobile network technology that service providers across the Continent have spent so much money to license and build. Apple has said its United States handsets would not employ 3G technology.

If iPhones in Europe support 3G, the two most likely beneficiaries would be 3, a Hutchison Whampoa mobile network that has 3G licenses in Austria, Britain, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Norway and Sweden, and T-Mobile, which has 3G licenses in Austria, Britain and Germany, analysts said.

“Both these operators are the most forward-thinking in how 3G telephones should be brought to consumers,” said Carolina Milanesi, a mobile phone analyst for Gartner in London. “They have the appropriate and futuristic business models necessary for the iPhone already in place.”

Ms. Milanesi cited 3’s new X-Series package, which offers a flat rate for data transmission. T-Mobile, meanwhile, has abandoned the “walled garden” approach to selling services that requires customers to use proprietary products, choosing instead to use the Internet itself and Google as service and content providers, Ms. Milanesi said.

The largest service provider in Europe is Vodafone, but Ms. Milanesi said that Vodafone’s underlying business model might not dovetail easily with the Apple universe. Vodafone uses its own service, Vodafone Live, to sell songs to mobile phone users, and iTunes from Apple could be viewed as a direct rival.

If the iPhone does not initially support 3G in Europe, Apple may combine a range of service providers, said Thomas Husson, an analyst for Jupiter Research in Paris.

That would require Apple to balance the discounts operators give on the phones against Apple’s own sales. “Too large an operator subsidy would kill Apple’s own highly profitable retail sales,” he said.

Most Common Passwords

2007-05-10T19:12:00.000-07:00

Most Common Passwords

Gina Hughes
The Techie Diva

There are many articles on Yahoo! Tech regarding password security, but no matter what advice we get or receive, we're all most likely to choose a password we can remember. Unfortunately, cyberthieves know this weakness all too well, and try to hack into accounts just by using the most common passwords online first.

PCMagazine says these are the most commonly used passwords, so if yours is on the list, I recommend you change it immediately.

password
123456
qwerty
abc123
letmein
monkey
myspace 1
password 1
blink182
(your first name)

I admit, I've used at least two of these passwords on my low-security accounts (newsites mainly), because as a rule of thumb, I don't ever give up important passwords even on these sites.

Becky Worley put together this password makeover post full of tips to help you choose a memorable password that will also keep the bad guys out of your accounts. She recommends sorting all your online accounts into three security levels (high, medium, low) then assigning appropriate passwords to each group. Obviously, the high-security password should be the hardest to crack since it gives you access to financial accounts. Remember to always avoid using your social security number or home address as a password. It may be easy to remember, but that also means it's easy for thieves to crack.

Chris Null gives us more good advise on how to pick a genuinely secure password on this post, and has a link to a database of more common passwords. Again, if your password is on the list, it's time for a password makeover.

A Greener Apple: LEDs to Replace Bulbs

2007-05-10T19:11:00.000-07:00

A Greener Apple: LEDs to Replace Bulbs

Robin Raskin
The Boomer

Apple took some public flogging when it nearly topped the list of Greenpeace's most "ungreen" PC manufacturers. Greenpeace's parody web site "Green My Apple" attempted to shame Apple into more responsible behavior.

Shame worked. In an open letter to the public, Steven Jobs vowed that Apple would phase out its use of the worst chemicals in its manufacturing process and in Apple products. He said that brominated fire retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) would be eliminated by 2008 (beating out the other PC vendors' announced schedules).

Equally important, Jobs announced the beginning of a transition to new type of display screen in the MacBooks that would eliminate both arsenic and mercury. Apple, he said, is on track to introduce displays using arsenic-free glass in 2007.

As for the mercury, the company will begin the transition toward using LED backlighting for Apple's LCD screens. Today most LCD screens are lit with a type of fluorescent bulb (called cold cathode fluorescent (CCFL) backlights) that contains mercury. LED bulbs don't contain mercury, and also provide a more even light. iPods already use LED backlit display, and Apple plans to switch to LEDS in notebooks as quickly as the manufacturing process transition allows. The agressive transition schedule would put Apple ahead of others like Dell and HP, among the first PC manufacturers to start talking green.

Lead, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, ether…Job's letter about Apple's environmental initiatives reads like a chemistry class in toxic waste. By spelling out, toxin by toxin, what Apple (and other companies) are doing about the problem, we're reminded that being green is about a lot more than just shutting off your computer. The RoHS (Removal of Hazardous Substances) movement to produce toxic-free electronics is one to watch. (No surprise that Europeans (and Californians) are far ahead of the U.S. when it comes to enforcing these standards.)

How to Access the Internet on Your Phone

2007-05-10T19:09:00.000-07:00

How to Access the Internet on Your Phone

Ben Patterson
The Gadget Hound

If you've been blissfully unaware that your phone can probably surf the mobile Web—or if you're already maxed out simply answering calls on your confusing new phone—rest assured, accessing the Internet on your handset is far easier than it looks. In fact, if you bought your phone anytime after 2005, I can virtually guarantee you that your handset has a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) browser installed. These WAP browsers are essentially stripped-down versions of the browser on your home PC, and they're designed to access Web sites that have been optimized for mobile phones. Many of the big Web sites we all use have pared-down WAP versions, including Yahoo!, Google, CNN, Amazon, and The New York Times, and they make it easy to perform Web searches, find nearby restaurants, check movie listings, scan neighborhood maps and even buy products.

Before you start surfing gleefully on your mobile browser, keep in mind that your friendly carrier will, of course, charge you for accessing the Net on your phone, and those charges can add up quickly unless you have the right plan. Check with your carrier to see if you have an Internet access package on your plan; if you don't, here are some of the basic Web surfing options you can get (note that these are for standard, post-paid monthly plans, as opposed to pre-paid phones, which have their own access fees and charges):

AT&T: The $10-a-month MEdia Basic bundle gets you 400 text messages and 1MB of Internet access (you'll pay a cent for every kilobyte of Web usage over the first MB), which might be a good option if you're only planning on checking your Web browser once or twice a week; otherwise, try the $20/month Media Max 200 plan, which gives you 200 messages and unlimited Web access.
Sprint: Get the Sprint PCS Vision Pack (or Power Vision, in the case of speedy 3G phones); for $15 a month, you'll get unlimited Web browsing.
T-Mobile: Sign up for the carrier's Tzones plan, which delivers unlimited Web access for $6 a month—compared to the other big U.S. carriers, it's a great bargain.
Verizon Wireless: The carrier has a $5/month Mobile Web plan that gives you access to the Internet; however, each kilobyte of surfing will cost you minutes depending on your calling plan (check with customer service for details). You can also sign up for the V Cast VPak, which offers unlimited mobile Web browsing for $15 a month.

Once you've signed up for the right plan, you're ready to start browsing. How you launch your phone's WAP browser depends on the phone and your carrier; for instance, AT&T/Cingular uses should select "MEdia Net" from the main menu, while Sprint subscribers should have a "Web" icon, and T-Mobile has a "Tzones" option. Verizon Wireless users will have to do a little digging: from the main menu, select Get It Now, then News & Info.

Got your browser fired up? Now it's time to try some mobile WAP sites. There should be a Menu option in the bottom corner of the screen; select it by tapping the appropriate soft key, and then select "Go to URL" (or something similar). Using your keypad, type in "m.yahoo.com" and select "Go." Within a few seconds, Yahoo! Mobile should load up; from the main page, you can click on a variety of options, including News, Mail, Movies, Driving Directions, and Weather. Google fanatics can type in "mobile.google.com" to check their Gmail or perform local searches, while news hounds can type "mobile.nytimes.com" for the latest headlines. (Hint: if you want to see if your favorite site has a WAP version, try typing "mobile" in the URL, as in "mobile.mypage.com"; not every site has a mobile version, but you might get lucky.)

Feeling more confident? Try some handy mobile downloads to make your browsing experience more fun. For example, software developer Opera makes a browser called Opera Mini that's considerably more robust than typical WAP browsers. Meanwhile, both Yahoo! and Google have their own downloadable apps that make it a snap to check your e-mail, read the latest headlines or check local maps (Yahoo! Go, Gmail Mobile and Google Maps). You can also check your carrier's mobile home page for links to downloadable games, applications and ring tones.

One last note: some Internet-enabled phones double as modems that you can tether to your laptop via USB, allowing you to access the Net while you're on the go. However, don't try this unless you have a "phone-as-modem" plan from your carrier, or you may rack up some jaw-dropping data charges on your next bill. Most phone-as-modem plans cost in the neighborhood or $50-80 a month; call your carrier for details.

Free Computer System Recovery Tools

2007-04-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

Free Computer System Recovery Tools

Your data's trapped on a dead computer. You lost your login password. You never wrote down the product key on a non-working Windows installation. Your Mac won't start.

Don't pay the extortionists at the computer repair shop 800 bucks to get your data back or start up your dead computer. Plenty of free tools can help you and are available for download right now. Today we've got our top 10 system recovery picks which span operating systems but all cost the same: exactly nothing.

Which one of these tools is right for you depends on your skill level, operating system and particular problem. Do yourself a favor and burn yourself a disc with a couple of these before the terrible day when you need 'em happens.

Lifehacker's Top 10 Free System Recovery Tools

Got any tales of victory or defeat with a free system recovery tool? Tell us about it in the comments. — Gina Trapani

Six Must-Know HDTV Facts

2007-04-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

Six Must-Know HDTV Facts

Ben Patterson
The Gadget Hound

Disappointed by how fuzzy CNN looks on your new HDTV? Wondering why Jack Bauer looks so soft and plump on your new flat-screen? Maybe it's because you're not really watching HD on your high-def TV.

According to Audioholics, almost half of the 24 million homes with HDTVs lack an HD cable or satellite feed, and about a quarter of those surveyed didn't even know they were still watching non-HD signals. Why such big numbers? Actually, it's not hard to understand; I can't tell you how many times I've watched salespeople at TV stores push HDTVs on hapless shoppers, going on and on about the razor-sharp picture and surround sound, but not bothering to tell them how to get HD signals into their living rooms.

The Audioholics story ticks off six things you need to know before you buy an HDTV, and it's a must-read if you're in the market for your first high-def set. Here's a brief summary of some of the pointers, along with some thoughts of my own:

Your new HDTV needs an HD feed: Just plugging your regular cable or satellite box into your new HD set won't get you a high-def picture. You'll need to contact your cable or satellite provider and ask for an HD set-top box (satellite subscribers may also have to upgrade their dishes), and you may want to sign up for an HD subscription plan, as well (which typically offer channels like Discovery HD Theater and HDNet). Still watching TV using an over-the-air antenna? A good, properly aligned rooftop antenna may still do a good job of pulling down HD signals, but unless your HDTV has a built-in HD tuner (many don't), you'll have to buy a separate high-def tuner box to go with your set.
Your HDTV/set-top box/cables must be configured properly: First, make sure you're using the right inputs when connecting your HD set-top box to your HDTV. You must use either the component-video inputs (a trio of RCA-type plugs, marked "Y," "Pb," and "Pr") the DVI input or the HDMI input. The composite and S-Video connectors on your TV can't receive HD signals, so if the cable guy starts hooking those inputs up, time to raise the red flag. Also, your cable or satellite HD box must be set to send an HD signal to your display; go to the set-top box menu and look for the display settings, and select either 720p or 1080i (depending on the native resolution of your HDTV). Finally, once you're ready to watch HD, make sure you're watching the right channel. If you're used to watching ABC on, say, cable channel 7, that's only the standard-def version of ABC; the HD version is probably much further down the dial, usually in the 700s. Check your programming guide.
Most TV programming is still in standard definition: I'm still amazed by how many people think that an HDTV will display all their shows in high definition. Now, if you're only watching scripted (i.e., non-reality) prime-time shows on the major broadcast networks, then yes, there's a good chance that most of those shows are in HD (save a few holdouts, like "Scrubs" on NBC). But the vast majority of programming that's out there, ranging from "Queer Eye" and "Regis and Kelly" to "Pardon the Interruption" and "Sesame Street", is produced in standard definition, and your HDTV won't magically convert SD shows to HD. Check out TitanTV to see what's in HD in your area.
SD typically looks terrible on an HDTV: Standard-def shows can look remarkably bad on a 50-inch display. Imagine taking a grainy Polaroid picture and blowing it up to monster size. If you miss how CNN used to look on your old 27-inch direct-view set, keep in mind that you were watching it on a much smaller screen.
HDTV screens are wider than SD pictures: Because HDTV screens have a wide 16:9 aspect ratio, your new set will stretch the boxy 4:3 shape of a standard-definition show to fill the screen, which will make everything look short and squat. You have two choices: either live with the short-and-squat look on your SD channels, or dig into your HD set-top box settings and add sidebars to the SD channels. Yes, you'll have to deal with black bars on the left and right sides of the screen, but at least the picture won't look like a circus fun-house mirror.
An upconverting DVD player doesn't turn standard DVDs into HD: I'm a big fan of DVD players that upconvert standard-def DVDs to 1080i or even 1080p, but make no mistake; because the source DVD disc is standard definition, you're still watching an SD picture (albeit, one that's been extrapolated to HD proportions). If you want true HD images from your DVD player, you'll have to pony up $400 or more for a Blu-ray or HD DVD drive.

Still confused? Then check out the Audioholics story, which goes into much greater detail.

Related:
Are You Sure You're Watching HDTV? [Audioholics]
Deciphering the Basic Roadmap for HDTV Connections

MPAA: We are committed to fair use, interoperability, and DRM

2007-04-26T00:46:00.000-07:00

MPAA: We are committed to fair use, interoperability, and DRM

By Nate Anderson | Published: April 26, 2007 - 12:15AM CT

At a LexisNexis conference on DRM this week, MPAA boss Dan Glickman said the movie studios were now fully committed to interoperable DRM, and they recognize that consumers should be able to use legitimate video material on any item in the house, including home networks. In a major shift for the industry, Glickman also announced a plan to let consumers rip DVDs for use on home media servers and iPods.

Unfortunately, this plan is not yet well developed. In his speech to industry insiders at the posh Beverly Hills Four Seasons hotel, Glickman repeatedly stressed that DRM must be made to work without constricting consumers. The goal, he said, was "to make things simpler for the consumer," and he added that the movie studios were open to "a technology summit" featuring academics, IT companies, and content producers to work on the issues involved. He also pointed to the $30 million MovieLabs project that the studios are currently funding as proof of their commitment to interoperability.

Speaking to Ars after the speech, Glickman acknowledged that the plan was still in the early stages. I asked him specifically about DVDs, which are currently illegal to rip under the DMCA, and how the law would square with his vision of allowing consumers to use such content on iPods and other devices. "You notice that I said 'legally' and in a protected way," Glickman responded, suggesting that some form of DRM would still be required before the studios would sign off on such a plan. He noted, however, that no specific plans have been made.

The MPAA does recognize that progress on DRM needs to be made soon, or impatient consumers will increasingly turn to unauthorized sources for content. "We're working on this right now, trying to find ways to make it interoperable," he said, but added that pricing and business models for such a system are "way beyond my pay grade."

Dean Garfield, VP of Legal Affairs for the MPAA, told me that he has confidence in the market to sort all of these issues out. "You have to give some thought to how young the digital distribution market is," he said. "I suspect that the issues confounding people today won't be the issues challenging the industry six months from now."

But will consumers sit idly by, twiddling their thumbs while content owners and consumer electronics manufacturers get their act together? Garfield recognizes that consumers are impatient, which means that "we also have to be impatient."

In his speech, Glickman said that the industry needs "a collective philosophical commitment" to move forward on issues of interoperability and authorized use, and said that the MPAA has now made that commitment. He called on other companies in the industry to sit down and work out a solution. Though he never mentioned Apple by name, it's clear that the Cupertino-based company was number one on the list of companies that need to get involved; whether interoperable DRM and legitimate DVD ripping actually mesh with Apple's own business priorities is another question, though.

Despite the lack of specificity, Glickman's speech marks a step forward for the MPAA, which says it is now committed to allowing content to play on any device, from any manufacturer. As other presenters at the conference made clear, this is largely a result of self-interest: consumers are frustrated with current limitations, and movie studios aren't thrilled about having to sign off on Apple's terms in order to get content onto iPods. Still, hearing Glickman speak with conviction about consumer rights to use material in "fair ways" and to wax eloquent about interoperability was an encouraging sign—even if he views DRM as a necessary "enabling tool" that's not going away anytime soon.

Display and solar cell device

2007-04-25T03:37:00.000-07:00

Display and solar cell device - Patent 7206044

Cell phone battery life has been one of the top problems since its inception. Motorola was there at the beginning, and is at least exploring smart solutions.

Motorola recently received a patent for combining an LCD screen and a solar cell on a wireless device. While the cost of such a concept makes the iPhone seem like a bargain, the concept of having a display that also can have a dual purpose of receiving light for recharging the battery makes a lot of sense.

Moto’s patent notes that this technology is better with black-only LCDs achieving up to a 75% light let-through rate. In the market, thin film solar cell development has come a ways since this technology was filed. In thin-film processing of solar cells, Wikipedia notes:

Many new solar cells use transparent thin films that are also conductors of electrical charge. The dominant conductive thin films used in research now are transparent conductive oxides (abbreviated “TCO”), and include fluorine-doped tin oxide (SnO2:F, or “FTO”), doped zinc oxide (e.g.: ZnO:Al), and indium tin oxide (abbreviated “ITO”). These conductive films are also used in the LCD industry for flat panel displays. The dual function of a TCO allows light to pass through a substrate window to the active light absorbing material beneath, and also serves as an ohmic contact to transport photogenerated charge carriers away from that light absorbing material. The present TCO materials are effective for research, but perhaps are not yet optimized for large-scale photovoltaic production. They require very special deposition conditions at high vacuum, they can sometimes suffer from poor mechanical strength, and most have poor transmittance in the infrared portion of the spectrum (e.g.: ITO thin films can also be used as infrared filters in airplane windows). These factors make large-scale manufacturing more costly.

The concept has been of interest for a number of years by a few different players including Seiko, Minolta and Sharp. Motorola’s experience in solar leading to this patent has been a bit scattered over the past thirty years.

Convenient and eco-friendly, now we just need to see more of it in the market.

Clarifying What Windows XP Going Off Market Means

2007-04-25T02:36:00.000-07:00

Clarifying What Windows XP Going Off Market Means

Christopher Null
The Working Guy

I originally wrote this post about Windows XP going off the market in January 2008 in order to clear up confusion about its availability. Based on comments and emails, people out there are more confused than ever. So let's take a stab at clarifying, again, what's going to happen by answering some frequently asked questions about it.

Will Windows XP really no longer be on sale after the end of the year? Sorry for the double negative, but no. You'll still be able to find copies online for the foreseeable future, and likely the unforeseeable one, too. But hang on to your copy of Windows XP. You may need it down the road.

Will I be forced to upgrade to Vista in 2008? No. It will get harder and harder not to, though.

Will my XP machine stop working in January? No, but Microsoft will stop releasing non-security software updates to the masses on April 14, 2009. But XP will continue to "work" even after this point.

Will Microsoft shut off product activation for XP after the end of the year? No, that would be crazy. While no one has said if this will happen, it's conceivable that Windows could shut down product activation for XP but that would only happen after it reaches its end-of-support term. The good news for you: That happens in 2015, plenty of time to get the kinks worked out of Vista... or switch to a Mac. Bottom line: Your copy of XP will work, totally legally, at least for eight-plus more years.

What about after 2015? Well, that's unclear, but I think it's likely XP will stop being installable at that point. However, two things come to mind: 1) Even the most die-hard XP enthusiast will probably be ready to upgrade at that point (as XP will be nearly 15 years old; your PC will be dead by then, I'm sure), and 2) even if Microsoft shuts off product activation, dozens of tools will certainly be made available by the hacker community to disable product activation, letting you continue to use it with abandon. Fret not.

Can I install XP on a PC that has Vista already on it? Yes, you can delete any partition with any OS on it (and reformat it) during the installation of XP. You can even run both OSes at the same time by setting up a dual-boot machine if you're feeling brave.

Whew! Does that clear everything up? Feel free to continue sending your queries and comments, if not... and remember, 264 days to go until XP is "gone!"

First President of Russia Boris Yeltsin died suddenly in Moscow yesterday

2007-04-24T02:02:00.000-07:00

First President of Russia Boris Yeltsin died suddenly in Moscow yesterday

It's not about the theme of my blog but I can not pass it over. Really great man has died and the whole political era has died with him. Rest In Peace, Boris!

Boris Yeltsin, the first president of an independent Russia, has died at the age of 76, reportedly of heart failure. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, son of Siberian peasants, began his career building machines and ended up reshaping a nation. Yeltsin was not born to money or influence. He was born to hunger, on February 1, 1931, in the village of Butka, in Russia's Sverdlovsk Oblast.

But Boris Yeltsin's ambition helped him survive that harsh decade as well as World War II. His charisma and working-class background won him a place at the Urals Polytechnic Institute's engineering faculty. After graduation, Yeltsin quickly rose from construction foreman at a local machine-building plant to chief engineer of the Yuzhgorstroi.

Early Riser

He joined the Communist Party in 1961, at the age of 30. Yeltsin spent the next two decades rising through the ranks of Sverdlovsk's Communist Party organization, becoming first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Region's Communist Party Committee in 1976.

In 1985, the same year Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Yeltsin was brought to Moscow and made a member of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee. He soon joined the Kremlin's inner sanctum, becoming first secretary of Moscow's Communist Party Committee and a member of the Politburo. But Yeltsin retained a populist touch, which presaged Gorbachev's own democratization campaign.

He rode the subways from time to time, and was fond of turning up at Moscow markets to sample farmers' produce. Just as the first winds of perestroika began to blow, however, Yeltsin broke with his Kremlin mentors.

In October 1987, Yeltsin delivered a scathing criticism of top party leaders before a plenary meeting of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee. He was immediately removed from his post as Moscow party boss and kicked out of the Politburo. Gorbachev shunned him. But Yeltsin got his revenge two years later with his election to the Soviet Union's first democratically elected parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies. In May of 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Republic's Supreme Soviet. A month later, the Russian republic declared its sovereignty within the Soviet Union. The following month Yeltsin terminated his Communist Party membership. A year later, he was elected president of the Russian republic by popular vote.

Moscow was now the capital of two states: Russia and the Soviet Union. But the rivalry would not last long. Yeltsin's defining moment came in August of 1991, when Gorbachev's closest advisers tried to depose the Soviet leader in a ineptly-staged coup. Yeltsin summoned the resistance from atop a tank in Moscow, in the name of the Russian people.

"On the night of August 18 to August 19, 1991, the legally elected president of the country was deposed from power," Yeltsin told the crowd. "Regardless of the reasons used to justify this act, what we are dealing with is a genuine, reactionary, unconstitutional coup. Despite all the difficulties and hardships that our people have known, the democratic process in our country has become broad-based and is irreversible. The people of Russia are becoming masters of their own fate."

The coup was put down, and a humiliated Gorbachev brought back to the Kremlin to preside over the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Hero Of The Nation

Yeltsin, flush with victory, addressed supporters: "Most of the leaders of the world's countries yesterday, overnight, and this morning, telephoned and said: 'An enormous thank-you to all the people of Russia, to Russia, to Russians, for saving democracy, for saving the union, for saving the peace."

But Yeltsin, who used the power of democracy to propel himself to power, soon began to rule Russia like a benevolent autocrat. He unveiled a series of presidential decrees that launched Russia into a program of crash economic liberalization. Led by a team of young economists, the "top-down "economic reform freed prices, lifted restrictions on foreign investment, and introduced piecemeal privatization in a matter of months.

Wrenching economic adjustment followed, as real wages and domestic production plummeted, and inflation skyrocketed. Shops filled with goods, but mostly for the new rich, who often turned out to be old party bosses, cashing in on their connections. Russia's borders were opened and a free press flourished, but social tensions increased.

The Russian parliament, still dominated by former Communists, increasingly began to oppose the president. In a bid to eliminate this rival center of power, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament by decree in September 1993. But legislators barricaded themselves inside the parliament building, known as the Russian White House, eventually calling for the government's overthrow. Yeltsin sent in tanks to crush the rebellion. The White House was shelled into submission and rebellious legislators arrested.

Yeltsin rewrote the constitution to give him broad powers, ensuring that the next parliament could not oppose him. He also cut deals with several regional governors, granting them special exemptions from federal taxes and controls to retain their favor.

The end of Yeltsin's first term was marked by greater economic stability but also a disastrous decision to send troops to the secessionist Caucasian Republic of Chechnya. As the bodies of dead Russian soldiers continued to pile up, the Kremlin sank deeper and deeper into a guerilla war that was sapping its international prestige and draining financial resources.

The war took a personal toll on Yeltsin, who became increasingly remote and began to spend more and more time in hospitals or at sanatoria. Rumors of Yeltsin's drinking and heart problems dominated international headlines. The Kremlin once again became of place of intrigue and power struggles.

Yeltsin appeared to make a miraculous recovery as he campaigned for a second term as president against Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. Yeltsin crisscrossed the country and used all available resources to marshal Russia's fractured society to his side. He was reelected in July of 1996 and immediately disappeared from public view, his aides speaking of his "postelectoral exhaustion." The resolution of the war in Chechnya and the running of the country's economy were left to his entourage.

Health Problems Surface

As Yeltsin's absence lengthened, his advisers confirmed the rumors of heart trouble. Yeltsin underwent quintuple bypass surgery in November of 1996, under the supervision of leading U.S. heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. The operation breathed new life into the Russian leader and once again, a long period of withdrawal from the public eye alternated with a brief period of frenetic activity. But it did not last long. Yeltsin ended 1997 much as he had 1996 -- in a sanatorium, recovering from a series of what aides described as "bad colds."

Meanwhile, the country lurched from crisis to crisis, with unpaid workers regularly striking and key reform promises remaining unfulfilled. Yeltsin made one final attempt to forge ahead with reforms in the spring of 1998, by removing long-time Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin from power. He replaced him with the young and ambitious Sergei Kiriyenko, who promised rigid belt-tightening measures and crafted plans to collect taxes from Russia's most powerful companies. But the "oligarchs" -- whose economic and political influence had grown much as Yeltsin's powers had ebbed, revolted.

As the summer of 1998 came to a close, Russia plunged into its most serious economic crisis since emerging from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in 1991. And as panicked Russians rushed out to convert their rapidly devaluating rubles into any solid commodity and the communists and nationalists openly called for the president's resignation, Yeltsin remained holed up in his dacha, a shadow of his former self.

Yeltsin left Russia with a very mixed legacy. The larger than life leader brought Russia independence. He offered bravery and presence of mind, inspiring the nation at defining moments. He unleashed economic reforms.

But Yeltsin, like Gorbachev before him, succumbed with old age to the habits of a party apparatchik, insulating himself from the outside world with a coterie of advisers while his associates grabbed chunks of Russia for their own personal profit, leading the country to the edge of bankruptcy.

Surprise Resignation

On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin stunned the nation by announcing his immediate resignation during a televised New Year's address.

"Today, I am addressing you for the last time as Russian president," Yeltsin announced. "I have made a decision. I have contemplated this long and hard. Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am retiring."

The mantle of leadership was passed on to Yeltsin's hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin used his farewell address to apologize to the tens of millions of Russians for whom prosperity remained as distant and unrealized a promise as it had under the previous decades of communism.

"I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true, because what we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult," Yeltsin said. "I ask to forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the gray, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich, and civilized future in one go."

In the end, whether the new Russian society Yeltsin helped to create will evolve into an economically stable democracy is still up to history's judgment.

Suit Against Google Stands

2007-04-18T23:47:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO, April 18 (Reuters) — A federal judge refused on Wednesday to dismiss a lawsuit contending that Google’s AdWords program abuses trademarks.

Judge Jeremy D. Fogel ruled that the public had an interest in whether AdWords, the company’s popular pay-per-click advertising system, violated trademark law.

American Blind and Wallpaper Factory, the top American retailer of window blinds, charged that Google had abused trademarks by allowing rivals of a company to buy ads that appear when users search the Web for information on its business.

Chinese Political Prisoner Sues in U.S. Court, Saying Yahoo Helped Identify Dissidents

2007-04-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

Chinese Political Prisoner Sues in U.S. Court, Saying Yahoo Helped Identify Dissidents

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: April 19, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, April 18 — A Chinese political prisoner and his wife sued Yahoo in federal court Wednesday, accusing the company of abetting the commission of torture by helping Chinese authorities identify political dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.

The suit, filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, is believed to be the first of its kind against an Internet company for its activities in China.

Wang Xiaoning, who according to the suit is serving a 10-year prison sentence in China; his wife, Yu Ling; and other unnamed defendants seek damages and an injunction barring Yahoo from identifying dissidents to Chinese authorities.

“I hope to be able to have Yahoo promise that in the future they will stop this kind of wrongdoing,” said Ms. Yu, speaking through an interpreter in a telephone interview from San Francisco.

Yahoo said it had not yet seen the suit, filed in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, and could not comment on the allegations.

“Companies doing business in China are forced to comply with Chinese law,” said Jim Cullinan, a Yahoo spokesman. When government officials present the company with a lawful request for information about a Yahoo user, he said, “Yahoo China will not know whether the demand for information is for a legitimate criminal investigation or is going to be used to prosecute political dissidents.”

Several American Internet companies, including Cisco Systems, Google and Microsoft, have come under fire, with some politicians and human rights groups accusing them of helping the government monitor and censor the Internet in China.

But Yahoo has come under particularly sharp criticism. Human rights groups say that Yahoo has helped identify at least four people, including the journalist Shi Tao in 2004, who have since been imprisoned for voicing dissent in cyberspace.

“Our concern is that Yahoo, as far as we know, is continuing this practice,” said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA and a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

According to the suit, Mr. Wang distributed online several journal articles calling for democratic reform and a multiparty system in China. He did so anonymously by posting the articles in a Yahoo Group in 2000 and 2001. The suit contends that Yahoo HK, a wholly owned Yahoo subsidiary based in Hong Kong, provided police with information linking Mr. Wang to the postings.

Mr. Cullinan of Yahoo disputed those claims. “Yahoo HK does not exchange info with Yahoo China or give information to mainland Chinese security forces,” he said. Yahoo transferred its mainland China operations to Alibaba.com in 2005, and owns a minority stake in that company, which is based in China.

On Sept. 1, 2002, Mr. Wang was arrested by Chinese authorities, according to the suit, which says he was later kicked and beaten and was detained until September 2003, when he was sentenced to 10 years.

The suit says that the Chinese court’s judgment noted that Yahoo HK told investigators that the e-mail account used to disseminate the postings belonged to Mr. Wang.

The Alien Tort Claims Act, enacted in 1789, lets foreigners sue in American courts for fundamental violations of international law, like torture and genocide. It has been used in recent years to sue people who have violated basic human rights.

But legal specialists say that Mr. Wang and Ms. Yu face significant hurdles.

Allen S. Weiner, a professor of international law at Stanford, said it was unclear whether the law would apply to a company like Yahoo, which is only accused of having contributed indirectly to Mr. Wang’s predicament. Further, Professor Weiner said that Yahoo might be excused by courts by virtue of its obligation to comply with Chinese law.

The Torture Victims Protection Act, which was enacted in 1991, allows plaintiffs, including foreign citizens, to file civil suits in the United States. Under either law, the plaintiffs would have to prove that Mr. Wang was subject to torture, Professor Weiner said.

“The plaintiffs in this case have a lot of barriers to overcome,” he said.

Vista, IE7 help Microsoft boost search market share

2007-04-18T23:39:00.000-07:00

Vista, IE7 help Microsoft boost search market share

By Eric Bangeman | Published: April 18, 2007 - 11:46PM CT

In a rare bit of good news for Microsoft on the search front, web metrics firm comScore reported that for the month of March, Microsoft's search engines saw their first market share increase in nearly a year. Microsoft's search market share jumped 0.4 percentage points from February to March, giving it 10.9 percent of the total market.

One month does not a trend make, but the increase is good news for the software giant. More importantly, it may show that increasing adoption of Vista and Internet Explorer 7 are helping Microsoft's search efforts. comScore senior vice president James Lamberti told Ars that his company is seeing increased traffic to Live.com.

"Growth from Live.com is outpacing Microsoft's overall search traffic growth," Lamberti told us. "Live is the integration point for Vista, and it looks like Live.com is beginning to have an impact."

Whether Microsoft's March increase is a blip or the start of a trend is something we won't know for a few more months. However, Lamberti does believe Microsoft's bleakest days in the search market may be a thing of the past. "I think we're comfortable with the notion that Microsoft has bottomed out," he said. If traffic to Live.com continues to grow, it will mean that Microsoft's strategy of making Live.com the default search engine in IE7 and a focal point for Vista will be paying off, and we should see continued growth as Vista adoption grows.

The last year has been challenging for Microsoft's search efforts. When we looked at search engine trends a few weeks ago, we noted that the company had been seeing its market share slip away, while Google's steadily increased and Yahoo's remained more or less stagnant.

Speaking of Microsoft's competition, comScore reported yet another month of gains for Google. Its market share saw a modest, 0.2 percentage point increase during March, bringing it to 48.3 percent. comScore's news for Yahoo was not as good, as it was the only one of the top five search engines to see a decrease in market share last month. Yahoo's share of search traffic dropped to 27.5 percent from 28.1 percent, its lowest level in over a year.

Cellcom offers ad-funded games

2007-04-18T04:09:00.000-07:00

Cellcom offers ad-funded games

10:15, Apr 18th 2007 by Tim Green

Cellcom has launched an ad-funded mobile games service offering free downloads supported by McDonalds, Adidas, Walt Disney and others.

Israel's largest mobile operator hired innerActive to power the service, which offers users free games in exchange for exposure to ads embedded in them. The ads are injected into the games as product placement.

Adi Cohen, VP of marketing at Cellcom, said: "The trial confirms our view...that when you offer the consumer very targeted and relevant campaigns, you get a high ROI for the advertisers."

The campaigns were built by major agencies such as McCann Digital, Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO and others using innerActive's web campaign management tool, InFlare. The dynamically inserted ads are targeted in real time according to user profiles and generated according to user behaviour.

Big Brother and 1984 meet at Mount Holly

2007-04-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

Big Brother and 1984 meet at Mount Holly

John Naughton
Sunday April 15, 2007
The Observer

The future, as the novelist William Gibson observed, 'is already here - it's just not evenly distributed'. One place where it might be found is Mount Holly, Berkeley County, South Carolina. I've just flown over it (courtesy of Google Earth), and you'd never think it was a place where our destiny lies. The terrain is flat and wooded and includes some magnolia plantations. There's a highway and what looks like a railway line (the image resolution isn't great). The nearest town is Goose Creek, a settlement of 30,000 souls.

So why is this obscure spot a pivot of the universe? Because Google is to locate one of its server farms there. The decision was announced at a pork barbecue held on 6 April for 300 dignitaries. Google executives gave a short presentation, announced a $407,000 donation to the community and invited questions. The idea that these might require answers did not occur to the Googlers, but that is the Company Way.

For example, one question concerned the plant's consumption of electricity and water. (Server farms require massive quantities of the former, and a good deal of the latter for cooling purposes.) 'No comment,' was the response, later expanded by Rhett Weiss, Google's head of strategic development to: 'We're in a highly competitive industry and, frankly, one or two little pieces of information like that in the hands of our competitors can do us considerable damage.'

South Carolina politicians and officials bent over backwards to persuade Google to build at Mount Holly. 'The governor, department of commerce, and Berkeley county officials have been wonderfully helpful during our evaluation,' said Lloyd Taylor, Google's director of global operations. State governor Mark Sanford responded: 'Given the stature of this company and the magnitude of this investment, this is a real win for South Carolina that will have a tremendous impact on the local and state economy'.

As a token of its appreciation, 'the state legislature updated the state tax code to exempt the electricity and the capital investment in equipment necessary for this kind of facility used in the web search portal and internet service provider industries from sales tax, just like what is done for the manufacturing sector'. Except that Google doesn't make anything - except money.

The scenes at Mount Holly are being replicated across the US and other parts of the world. Along with Yahoo and Microsoft, Google is breeding gigantic server farms wherever there is reliable electricity, cheap water and appreciative politicians. On 27 March, Microsoft opened a 470,000 sq ft one in Quincy, Washington State, not far from one Google has already built in Oregon.

The Microsoft site has nuclear-style security, but an enterprising journalist was allowed a brief visit. 'It's easy to get lost inside Microsoft's main building,' he reported, 'which contains long halls with a tile floor and a maze of rooms centring around five 12,000 sq ft brain centres that contain tens of thousands of computer servers. Each server room has two adjoining rooms lined with refrigerator-sized air-conditioning units to keep the temperature between 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Another room contains row after row of batteries to kick in for 18 seconds if a power failure should occur before the trucksized back-up generators fire up.'

Already there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of such centres around the world. This is the bricks-and-mortar reality of Web 2.0. 'The network is the computer' is the mantra underpinning this brave new world. The problem is that the network can only be the computer if it has thousands of server farms. Behind the airy dreams of Web 2.0, in other words, is a grisly reality of colossal computing installations consuming vast quantities of electricity and water, simply to prevent them melting.

And behind that nightmare lies another. If the rush to web services continues, in 10 years all our personal data - emails, documents, photographs, music, movies - will reside in these server farms. Of course, the companies will swear blind they will defend our privacy to the last. Until, of course, the government arrives with an injunction, a revised Patriot Act, or our own dear Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Welcome to 1984, folks. It's been a bit delayed, but we're getting there.

The scoop on The Coop: an early review of Mozilla's social networking tool

2007-04-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

The scoop on The Coop: an early review of Mozilla's social networking tool

By Ryan Paul | Published: April 10, 2007 - 11:55PM CT

An early prototype of The Coop, Mozilla's new social networking component for Firefox, is now available for user testing. Announced earlier this week, The Coop is designed to integrate support for social networking features directly into the Firefox browser interface. At the present time, the available prototype is extremely limited and simplistic, but it provides insight into the potential of The Coop.

Although The Coop will eventually communicate with a multitude of social networking services, the current prototype only works with Facebook. Deployed as a Firefox plug-in, The Coop provides a new right-hand sidebar interface that will display a list of your Facebook friends after login. The Coop specification says that Facebook status information will eventually appear in the friend display, but right now it only shows the names of your friends. When you click on any of the people in the friend list, the interface changes to show only that friend, but no additional information appears. Next to each user in the friend list, three icons are displayed: a web page, a camera, and a film reel. In the current prototype, those icons appear to have no function or significance.

To send content to a friend, you can drag links, tabs, and images and drop them onto the image of the recipient in your friend list. This will open a new window with the Facebook sharing page, which will allow you to add additional recipients as well as a comment. In all of our tests, the sharing feature worked correctly.

Obviously, The Coop is still little more than a technical experiment right now. Since there are already existing Firefox extensions that provide roughly comparable functionality, The Coop isn't really useful for regular end users yet. Open source software developers generally believe in releasing early and often, so it's important to keep in mind that the current prototype's weaknesses are indicative of its nascent status rather than poor programming. The current interface clearly has some holes that need to be filled, but it seems relatively straightforward and intuitive.

I often find myself saving links to share with friends, and The Coop's simple drag-and-drop interface makes that easy. With sufficient support for additional social networking services and a more complete interface, The Coop could be come very useful. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are amongst some of the most heavily trafficked web sites on the Internet. For many of the youngest technology enthusiasts, social networking sites provide a nexus for communication and social interaction. As these services continue to increase in relevance, integrated browser support will become a compelling and desirable feature.

What Does Your Phone Say About You? : Gina Hughes : Yahoo! Tech

2007-04-11T05:32:00.000-07:00

What Does Your Phone Say About You? : Gina Hughes : Yahoo! Tech

I've featured many phones here on Yahoo! Tech, most of them created to appeal to a younger, style-conscious generation that wants both form and function packaged in a good looking phone. After all, phones are an extension of our personality and the reason we pay a lot of moolah to have them covered in Swarovski crystals. That's not to say we solely judge a phone by its cover. This generation of tech-savvy consumers has all the shopping comparison tools they need to make an informed decision. Add tech blogs, forums, and techie friends to the mix, and young consumers will have enough reasons to think twice before plunking down $300 on a phone, just because it's cute.

A recent survey conducted by Nielsen Media Research confirms what we long suspected: cell phones do say a lot about our personality. According to Nielsen Media Research associate director Mr. Jody Loughlin, "The type of mobile you're seen with could even be more important than whether you're with...one of the other major carriers." Most of us know that mobile phone companies will do anything to get their phones into celebrity hands as a tactic to make them more desirable. Forbes recently shed some light on a practice called "celebrity seeding" where companies gift actors with their products hoping to garner media attention in return. Nothing new here, but lately I've seen celebs pictured with more than two gadgets in their hands, sometimes even three. Blogs like Geeksugar never fail at keeping us guessing what phones celebs are sporting on their regular column called "Match The Celeb with the Cell Phone."

So I've combined what Nielsen Media Research and Dawn Bratton say about phone stereotypes, and added a little celebrity phone sightings to find out if what they say is true. What do you think?

Do you fall into any of these categories:

Motorola Magenta RAZR: Fashion conscious, under 24, fun seekers, individualistic.The "It" girls must have phone.
Celebrities who have one: Maria Sharapova, Paris Hilton, Denise Richards, Nicole Richie, Rachael Bilson, and Mischa Barton.

Dolce & Gabbana V3i RAZR: Only 1,000 of these were made so this phone screams "I'm One of a Kind."
Celebrities who have one: Sharon Stone, Hillary Duff, Reese Witherspoon

Chocolate LG Pink: Favorite with moms/stay-at-home parents, success driven, harmony seekers.
Celebrities who have one: Rihanna, Mariah Carey, Jessica Alba, Snoop Dog, Hugh Hefner, Girls Next Door.

Sidekick 3: You can be exclusive and you like to have people wonder what you are doing at all times.
Celebrities who have one: Hillary Duff, Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan

Nokia: Family-minded, middle aged managers, balance seekers, health conscious.
Celebrities who have one: Jennifer Lopez, Mary J. Blige

Sony Ericsson: Ambitious young men, professionals, success driven, individualistic
Celebrities who have one: Robbie Williams, Helena Christensen

Samsung: Young women, career focused, success driven, fun seekers
Celebrities who have one: Leonardo DiCaprio, Allison Janney

Blackberry: You are into all of the tech things and like new things. Carrying a PDA also means you may be demanding but only because you are a multi-tasker. You are extremely organized.
Celebrities who have one: Jaime Fox, Britney Spears, Lauren Conrad, Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Simpson, Adrian Grenier, and Tina Fey.

Treo: You are into all of the tech things and like new things. Carrying a PDA also means you may be demanding but only because you are a multi-tasker. You are extremely organized.
Celebrities who have one: Mathew Broderick, Peter Gabriel

Could the stereotypes be true? What phone do you have?

The Perfect Bacon Sandwich Decoded: Crisp and Crunchy

2007-04-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

The Perfect Bacon Sandwich Decoded: Crisp and Crunchy

By ALAN COWELL

Published: April 11, 2007

LONDON, April 10 — Should it be slithery or scrunchy, glutinous or grilled? The answer, British scientists say, may be divined by a formula: N = C + {f_b(c_m) · f_b(t_c)} + f_b(T_s) + f_c · t_a.

Researchers at Leeds University found that crisp bacon on white bread makes the perfect bacon sandwich.

That is the scientific answer to the question: what makes the perfect bacon sandwich?

And, no, it is not April 1.

Researchers at Leeds University spent more than 1,000 hours testing 700 variants on the traditional bacon sandwich, which many Britons refer to as a bacon butty (eschewing the term sandwich, said to have been coined to honor the fourth Earl of Sandwich’s habit of eating meat between slices of bread around 1762).

For Britons, butties come in a variety of guises — chip butties (French fries between slices of bread), crisp butties (ditto with potato chips) or even sugar butties, which are self-explanatory. None are viewed as especially healthful.

There are some finer points in the language, if not the cuisine. A sandwich containing sausages, for instance, is likely to be referred as a sausage sarnie, while sausages served with mashed potatoes are called bangers and mash.

There is no easy explanation for this.

Even the bacon butty, though alliterative, is sometimes etymologically challenged, as in a recent posting on the Web site of The Yorkshire Post relating to the study at Leeds University.

“Perhaps another few minutes on research would have told them that a butty is a slice of buttered bread with a topping; a bacon sarnie is what they are describing,” said a contributor who signed himself Joey Pica.

But Graham Clayton, who led the research, said the endeavor had been an earnest attempt, commissioned by the Danish Bacon and Food Council, the British subsidiary of a Danish pig producers’ organization, to determine what degree of crispiness and crunchiness made the perfect sandwich.

The company’s announcement of the research last Sunday made no reference to other criteria like cholesterol, carbohydrates or other dietary attributes of the perfect butty. Chloe Joint, a spokeswoman for Danish Bacon’s public relations company, Porter Novelli, declined to say how much the study cost.

The research combined four types of cooking, using grills, pans and ovens, three kinds of oil and four types of bacon — smoked, unsmoked, streaky and thick cut — to establish the preferences of 50 tasters in such matters as the butty’s tactile and aural crunchiness. The study also considered a broad range of condiments (like ketchup and brown sauce) and spreads.

It concluded that the best bacon butties were made with crisply grilled, not-too-fat bacon between thick slices of white bread.

Eureka!

“We often think that it’s the taste and smell of bacon that consumers find most attractive,” Dr. Clayton said in a news release. “But our research proves that texture and sound is just, if not more, important.”

In a telephone interview, he also acknowledged that tasters made comments about fat. “If there was too much fat from the cooking process, that was a turnoff for people,” he said. Leathery bacon was a no-no, too, he added.

“We are programmed to avoid leathery food as old and not very good,” he said. That wisdom does not seem to prevail, however, among some of the more basic vendors of bacon butties at roadside halts or cafes known generically as greasy spoons to denote their customary modes of cooking and hygiene.

In the experiment, some of the tasters sampled between four and six bacon sandwiches a day for three or four days.

And so the formula evolved to establish the amount of force in the bite, expressed in newtons, and the level of noise, expressed in decibels, to make the perfect crunch.

Ideally, Danish Bacon said, 0.4 newtons should be applied to crunch the sandwich, creating 0.5 decibels of noise. The formula uses these values: N = force in newtons; f_b is the function of the bacon type; f_c is the function of the condiment or filling effect; T_s is the serving temperature; t_c is cooking time; t_a is the time taken to insert the condiment or filling; c_m is the cooking method and C represents the breaking strain in newtons of uncooked bacon.

“It’s not a hoax,” Dr. Clayton said, acknowledging that, a few days ago — on April 1, to be precise — it might have been taken as one.

A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs

2007-04-09T00:36:00.000-07:00

A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs

By BRAD STONE

Published: April 9, 2007

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself.

“If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

The code of conduct already has some early supporters, including David Weinberger, a well-known blogger (hyperorg.com/blogger) and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway,” he said.

But as with every other electrically charged topic on the Web, finding common ground will be a serious challenge. Some online writers wonder how anyone could persuade even a fraction of the millions of bloggers to embrace one set of standards. Others say that the code smacks of restrictions on free speech.

Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly were inspired to act after a firestorm erupted late last month in the insular community of dedicated technology bloggers. In an online shouting match that was widely reported, Kathy Sierra, a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly, reported getting death threats that stemmed in part from a dispute over whether it was acceptable to delete the impolitic comments left by visitors to someone’s personal Web site.

Distraught over the threats and manipulated photos of her that were posted on other critical sites — including one that depicted her head next to a noose — Ms. Sierra canceled a speaking appearance at a trade show and asked the local police for help in finding the source of the threats. She also said that she was considering giving up blogging altogether.

In an interview, she dismissed the argument that cyberbullying is so common that she should overlook it. “I can’t believe how many people are saying to me, ‘Get a life, this is the Internet,’ ” she said. “If that’s the case, how will we ever recognize a real threat?”

Ms. Sierra said she supported the new efforts to improve civility on the Web. The police investigation into her case is pending.

Menacing behavior is certainly not unique to the Internet. But since the Web offers the option of anonymity with no accountability, online conversations are often more prone to decay into ugliness than those in other media.

Nowadays, those conversations often take place on blogs. At last count, there were 70 million of them, with more than 1.4 million entries being added daily, according to Technorati, a blog-indexing company. For the last decade, these Web journals have offered writers a way to amplify their voices and engage with friends and readers.

But the same factors that make those unfiltered conversations so compelling, and impossible to replicate in the offline world, also allow them to spin out of control.

As many female bloggers can attest, women are often targets. Heather Armstrong, a blogger in Salt Lake City who writes publicly about her family (dooce.com), stopped accepting unmoderated comments on her blog two years ago after she found that conversations among visitors consistently devolved into vitriol.

Since last October, she has also had to deal with an anonymous blogger who maintains a separate site that parodies her writing and has included photos of Ms. Armstrong’s daughter, copied from her site.

Ms. Armstrong tries not to give the site public attention, but concedes that, “At first, it was really difficult to deal with.”

Women are not the only targets of nastiness. For the last four years, Richard Silverstein has advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace on a blog (richardsilverstein.com) that he maintains from Seattle.

People who disagree with his politics frequently leave harassing comments on his site. But the situation reached a new low last month, when an anonymous opponent started a blog in Mr. Silverstein’s name that included photos of Mr. Silverstein in a pornographic context.

“I’ve been assaulted and harassed online for four years,” he said. “Most of it I can take in stride. But you just never get used to that level of hatred.”

One public bid to improve the quality of dialogue on the Web came more than a year ago when Mena Trott, a co-founder of the blogging software company Six Apart, proposed elevating civility on the Internet in a speech she gave at a French blog conference. At the event, organizers had placed a large screen on the stage showing instant electronic responses to the speeches from audience members and those who were listening in online.

As Ms. Trott spoke about improving online conduct, a heckler filled the screen with personal insults. Ms Trott recalled “losing it” during the speech.

Ms. Trott has scaled back her public writing and now writes a blog for a limited audience of friends and family. “You can’t force people to be civil, but you can force yourself into a situation where anonymous trolls are not in your life as much,” she said.

The preliminary recommendations posted by Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly are based in part on a code developed by BlogHer, a network for women designed to give them blogging tools and to guide readers to their pages.

“Any community that does not make it clear what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who is welcome to join the conversation is at risk of finding it difficult to help guide the conversation later,” said Lisa Stone, who created the guidelines and the BlogHer network in 2006 with Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardins.

A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors. They say that bloggers should also have the right to delete such comments if they find them profane or abusive.

That may sound obvious, but many Internet veterans believe that blogs are part of a larger public sphere, and that deleting a visitor’s comment amounts to an assault on their right to free speech. It is too early to gauge support for the proposal, but some online commentators are resisting.

Robert Scoble, a popular technology blogger who stopped blogging for a week in solidarity with Kathy Sierra after her ordeal became public, says the proposed rules “make me feel uncomfortable.” He adds, “As a writer, it makes me feel like I live in Iran.”

Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

LG Electronics and Google Team Up to Enhance the Mobile Experience

2007-03-30T19:06:00.000-07:00

LG Electronics and Google Team Up to Enhance the Mobile Experience

LG Electronics (LG), a leading worldwide provider of advanced wireless handsets and accessories, and Google today announced a global collaboration to pre-install Google’s services on millions of LG mobile phones. Mobile users around the world will now be able to easily search for information, find locations, update blogs and manage email while on the move.

“Building on our efforts to set new standards for wireless handsets, we are excited to partner with Google to offer extra value to consumers with enhanced mobile Internet experiences,” said Mr. Paul Bae, Vice President of the Product Planning Team at LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “LG’s mobile devices, combined with Google, will provide consumers with easy access to their favorite Internet services even without a PC and make it easy for them to stay connected while in motion.”

Select LG handsets, pre-installed with Google™ products and services will be shipped globally including North America, Europe and Asia starting in the second quarter of 2007. These handsets will create a more dynamic user experience, including one click access to Google search through an icon in the application menu. More features of LG-Google handsets include:

- Google Maps™ for mobile, an application that enables users to view maps and satellite imagery, find local businesses, and get driving directions
- Gmail™ for mobile, a Java-based application that brings more speed, convenience and functionality to the mobile Gmail experience
- Blogger™ Mobile, an application to upload/download images and text to blog from mobile devices (www.blogger.com), keeps avid bloggers upwardly mobile.

“We’re pleased to work with LG to make it easier than ever for mobile internet users to have powerful applications and personalized information at their fingertips,” said Deep Nishar, director of product management, Google. “Users around the world now have more options for accessing information while on-the-go through search and Gmail. With applications like Blogger, users are now free to express themselves from wherever they are in the world.”

Through this new partnership, LG and Google will jointly market LG-Google handsets, then further extending their collaboration to develop digitalized home in the future. LG plans to launch mobile handsets pre-installed with Google and products and service for the next few years with at least ten new handsets in 2007.

Attached File :

LG Electronics and Google Team Up to Enhance the Mobile Experience_0328_Final.doc (132608 Bytes)

Microsoft Live Labs: Deepfish

2007-03-30T19:04:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Live Labs: Deepfish

Take Deepfish for a Swim

We are excited to announce public availability of the Deepfish technology preview from Microsoft Live Labs. Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens. Deepfish's unique interface enables you to zoom in and out of page, quickly getting to the areas you are interested in without screen length after screen length of scrolling. And because the layout is preserved, navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines, and other elements that might have been bent so thoroughly to fit the usual single column layout that they were no longer legible can now be browsed simply and easily. A consequence of Deepfish's multi-resolution approach to browsing pages is that it loads a thumbnail of pages initially and then only what is needed for more detail when requested or in the background as you browse the initial the view, resulting in substantially quicker load times for most pages.

The preview is available for download now for Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices. There are a limited number of slots available, and they will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis. So, give it a try, and don't forget to let us know what you think about Deepfish.

Sound familiar? Deepfish has surfaced briefly before through videos of an earlier build, but now is the first time you can try Deepfish for yourself. As a technology preview, it is important to note that Deepfish is not a complete implementation of what you would expect of a shipping mobile browser--it does not support cookies or javascript for instance--however, it does provide for a great experience on most sites. We have more information on how to use Deepfish and other details in our overview and FAQ.

The Deepfish Technology Preview enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. Our zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are.

Note : Deepfish is currently only available by invite only to a small number of beta users. Please visit http://labs.live.com/deepfish page to keep informed of future updates and availability.

Deepfish is a lightweight client application that leverages a powerful server side technology for delivery of content such as web pages to a Windows Mobile device. Content is displayed in a familiar desktop format that requires no additional work by the content or site author.

Deepfish provides:

A familiar look and feel of web pages on mobile as seen on desktop.
Bandwidth optimized rendering for faster content delivery.
Address bar web navigation.
Intuitive zooming, panning and cue map for quick navigation and browsing.
Support for simple link navigation and form submission.

Current Limitations

As a technology preview, Deepfish is early in its development cycle (still a few releases from beta quality). As a result some features are not implemented or are only partially implemented. Currently, the technology preview does not support ActiveX controls, AJAX, cookies, Javascript, and HTTP POST.

Currently, the Deepfish technology preview is available only on a limited basis. Access to the technology preview is provided on a first come, first serve basis and the technology preview will be closed to new participants once our initial limit is reached. We may increase the size of the preview over time to gather additional feedback and preview new features. If you were unable to get access to the first round and would still to try Deepfish, please stay tuned to the team blog for updates.

How to Back up Your iPod — Without iTunes

2007-03-30T01:22:00.000-07:00

How to Back up Your iPod — Without iTunes

Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:54PM EDT

Your precious iPod—your friend, your status symbol, your companion during good times and bad. It comes with you wherever you go; until one day, it disappears without a trace. Here's a cautionary tale, plus some tips on how to preserve your tunes if this nightmare scenario happens to you.

For me, there's no better time for cranking my iPod than while cruising at 35,000 feet; nothing whiles away the hours faster than dialing up a few podcasts or the odd TV show. But what if you leave your ice-white buddy on the plane? Not good. Unfortunately, it just happened to Shiny Shiny editor Susi Weaser, who had about 3,000 tracks on her iPod that weren't saved on her PC and now faces the task of rebuilding her extensive music collection from scratch. Ouch.

The moral of the story, of course, is to back up your iPod. Now, most of us essentially do just that every time we sync our iPods using iTunes, but if you're a power user like Weaser and you have untold thousands of songs on your iPod from multiple sources, the standard iTunes sync won't cut it. Luckily, The Gadgets Page has compiled a thorough list of iPod backup utilities that promise to keep your music safe and sound. Even better, these apps can transfer songs from your iPod back to your PC if, say, the hard drive on your system suffers a meltdown (which happened to me last year).

Just remember that these backup programs aren't sanctioned by Apple, and that using them to rip songs from your buddy's iPod to your PC or Mac is, of course, a no-no.

Mickey Mouse's new web strategy rakes in the cheese

2007-03-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

Mickey Mouse's new web strategy rakes in the cheese

By Nate Anderson | Published: March 28, 2007 - 11:30PM CT

When you serve more than one billion pages a month, redesigning your web properties is a Big Deal™. Disney recently completed a year-long revamp of its site at the direction of Bob Iger, the company's CEO. Eric Freeman, the company's VP of Technology, said that getting the project done nearly killed his team, but the results have already been spectacular.

Speaking at the ETech conference here in San Diego, Freeman laid out the stats: 100 million videos now streamed each week, page views are up 10 percent, six million unique broadband visitors a month, and a ten-fold increase in site registrations. As Mickey would say, "Gosh!"

Disney's grinning mouse has morphed into a giant online rodent, trampling all competitors in its quest to find more cheese (users). Disney.com is already the number one web destination for kids and families, with more than 25 unique users a month. It's not hard to see why: the company has an enviable archive of characters and content to draw on, much of which is "long tail" material that is no longer viable at retail. The brand is trusted by parents and kids alike, and is known for offering "clean" content that parents don't need to monitor.

On the other hand, the company faces the same legal and contractual issues that have bedeviled rights-owners across the world who have attempted to put old content online. Older contracts contained no provisions for web publication, and clearing rights to use material is the sort of task that can drive teams of interns to drink. The trust that Disney has earned from parents also comes at a price; it means that the company is expected to build a completely controlled environment that's still entertaining for kids to use.

Disney addressed the challenges by building the new site around five key principles: community, remixing content, user-generated content, online video, and story-driven experiences. The site is now organized around characters and stories rather than around Disney's org chart, and the transition has proved popular with users. More than 40 percent of visitors now navigate the site by the Flash-based "character wheel" at the bottom of the main screen, showing that many people like to access different Disney franchises instead of generic categories like "video clips" or "merchandise."

The need to keep kids safe is nowhere more obvious than in the chat functionality, which is pervasive throughout the site. Initially, the chat is "clean": kids can only select chat dialog from a string of menus ("Your avatar is really cool!"). Open chat is available, but parents can be notified about every friend who is added to the open chat list and must approve the names first.

The ideas aren't cutting edge among the technorati, but Disney's Paul Yanover has previously called them "right on time for mainstream America." They are well-implemented, though, and seem to be paying dividends. Next up on Disney's plate, according to Freeman, is increased personalization, more character channels, more long tail content, and true cross-platform features, such as making video available both to PCs and mobile phones, as well as integrating chat between all of Disney's properties. It's a good time to be a web-enabled Mouse.

Child Predators: Waiting, Watching, and Engaging on Social Networking Sites

2007-03-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

Child Predators: Waiting, Watching, and Engaging on Social Networking Sites

Virtual Community Article | Author: Etienne A. Gibbs | Submitted: 2007-02-19

MySpace and other social networking sites offer thriving communities where young people engage in countless hours of banal chatter and photo sharing. Not coincidentally, these social networking sites also have become hangouts for child predators, child pornographers, and other cybercriminals.

To stay one step ahead of authorities, these cybercriminals use tricks to conceal their identities online. One of the most common is lying about their ages, claiming to be younger than they are. And to hide their IP addresses and locations, predators and other cybercriminals often piggyback on Wi-Fi connections or use proxy servers. They use decentralized peer-to-peer networks to prevent material from being tracked to a specific server. They also use encryption to allow them to keep online chats private from those policing the Web. When law enforcement, ISPs, and others take down the websites of these pedophiles, predators, and cybercriminals, it's not long before they're back up, hosted by a different service.

Skillful with their cell phones, instant messaging accounts, and with access to personal computers at home and school, young people are easy targets for sexual predators. Too many of them are ready and willing to share personal information online without a thought to how it might be misused by others. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that one in five kids online has been solicited or enticed. Reports of child pornography on the center's CyberTipline have increased six of the last seven years.

Business and technology professionals may think of online child safety as a family issue, but it's a workplace issue, too. Social networks aren't just a teen phenomenon. A recent survey by Web filtering company, Websense, found that 8% of respondents visit social networking sites while at work. Companies can use Web filters to limit access to the sites, though Websense says its customers don't seem overly concerned. Whiling away company time on social networks is a productivity issue; luring children for sex is a criminal one.

There's little evidence that sexual predators are trolling from workplace personal computers, but it's been known to happen. In 2003, a Cincinnati-area police chief admitted to soliciting sex from someone he thought was a 15-year-old, using his work computer. And a deputy press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, arrested in March for attempting to seduce a child, had his workplace computer seized as part of the investigation and gave the number to his government-issued cell phone to a police office posing as a 14-year-old girl.

Child porn stored on company computers and servers has been a bigger problem. Filtering and blocking can help keep the images off networks, though it's not failsafe. Keyword and URL-based filters have spotty coverage. Other software scans images for limbs and skin tones and blocks pictures it identifies as porn, but skin often takes up too little of the photographs, and innocuous material can be inadvertently blocked.

The Internet Crimes Against Children program last year investigated 2,329 cases of enticement and of predators traveling to meet minors, and 252,000 cases of child pornography. Yet those numbers provide just a glimpse of the activity, since many local police forces are too small to investigate child porn. "It's absolutely overwhelming," says Brad Russ, director of Internet Crimes Against Children's training and technical assistance program, which trains 1,000 officers each year. "The scope and the scale of the problem far exceeds our capacity." Intensifying the epidemic is that more than half the world has no laws dealing with child pornography.

Vigilante groups are fighting back. In January, NBC's Dateline featured a report about one such group, Perverted-Justice.org, which set up a sting that resulted in 51 men being busted in three nights. The group hasn't seen one acquittal from those it's helped bring to justice, and nearly all of its work is done with law enforcement. Yet some in law enforcement are wary of such efforts. "We certainly take any information that anyone has regarding an offender," says Randy Newcomb, an investigator with the New York State Police in Canandaigua, N.Y. However, vigilantes expose themselves to liability for entrapment or possession of child porn and might not properly maintain digital evidence, Newcomb says.

Putting filtering and monitoring software on kids' computers provides some protection. SearchHelp's Sentry line, for example, blocks Web sites based on keywords and creates a log of visited sites. It also lets parents and other guardians monitor a child's activity from other computers. Parents can be notified of violations via E-mail or cell phone. Sentry also monitors IM conversations, using expertise culled from law enforcement to flag phrases commonly used by predators. Any IT pro knows of the limitations of such tools. The filters don't work perfectly, and even if kids post and browse safely, social networking sites present a new set of problems. Profiles on the sites often link to other online information sources, providing the type of data a fixated predator might use to locate a child, such as a school name, says Michelle Collins, a unit director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Investigator Newcomb recently spoke to an auditorium of elementary schoolers in western New York. He asked kids in the audience how many of them had more than 200 friends on their online buddy list--a bunch of hands shot up. Out of those, he asked how many have only friends on that list they can put a face to, and half of the hands remained raised. Finally, he asked if any of the kids had ever gone and met someone they'd got to know online, and a few hands were raised. "That's just totally frightening to me," Newcomb says. "The superintendent looked like his eyes were going to pop out of his head."

It may take a village to raise a child, but in a world of online social networking, decentralized networks and servers, and increasingly tech-savvy child predators, it's going to take a united effort among government, industry, and families to keep them safe. To protect your child, you need an Internet security team of experts making sure that you, your family, and your business computer are always safe and secure.

The best protection you can have in today's rapidly changing world of cyber-attacks is to have expert support for all your Internet security needs that will provide technical support without any hassles and without charging you extra fees. It will become even more critical than it is today as time goes on. You need to find your own personal team of experts to rely on. If you ever have a security problem, you will want to have a trusted expert you can call for professional help, without any hassles and extra costs!

Etienne A. Gibbs, Internet Safety Advocate, recommends to individuals and small business owners the protection (including free lifetime technical support and $25,000 identity theft insurance and recovery) package he uses. For more information, visit www.SayNotoHackersandSpyware.com/.

Apple Cult Becoming a Religion

2007-03-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

Apple Cult Becoming a Religion

By DAN MITCHELL

Published: March 24, 2007

APPLE will not release the iPhone until June, but Leander Kahney, the writer of “The Cult of Mac” blog, posited this week on Wired News that the new phone is already partly responsible for a major change in how the company is perceived (wired.com). After nearly three decades, Apple is finally being taken seriously not just by the true believers, but by just about everybody.

Alex Eben Meyer

According to Mr. Kahney, this shift has taken place in the last few weeks, as both the iPhone and, more recently, Apple TV, have quickly become “must have” products. “A lot of people thought Apple got lucky with the iPod,” Mr. Kahney wrote. “It was a one-hit wonder, a fluke not likely to be repeated.” But the iPhone is already thought of as an “industry-changing smash hit,” and Apple TV, which at first drew shrugs, now may even eclipse the iPhone, according to the predictions of some (though by no means many) people (ipodnn.com).

Apple TV, which began shipping this week, stores up to 50 hours of video, which can be wirelessly beamed from a computer to a television set. Like several other competing products from the likes of Sony, Microsoft and TiVo, it aims to capitalize on the increasing availability of downloadable movies and TV shows.

Apple’s decision to move to Intel processors is another big reason for what Mr. Kahney says is “a cultural shift that’s changing the way people think about the company.” The Mac’s ability to run both Apple’s operating system and Microsoft’s Windows (by using BootCamp software, which is still in beta), means some organizations are able to save money by using more-expensive Macs. Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, for example, recently dumped all its Windows-only machines in favor of Macs because the university now can do just as much with fewer computers (computerworld.com).

The “dual boot” functionality also means that it is far easier to find needed software. “The old argument against Macs is moot,” Mr. Kahney writes. “New Intel Macs can run Windows software as well as any PC.” And technology managers like the Mac’s relative protection against computer viruses and security breaches.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Mr. Kahney points to Apple’s steadfastness in keeping its products proprietary as a main reason for its success. Apple for decades has weathered criticism that the reason it was marginalized by the likes of Microsoft was its refusal to allow third parties to develop related products. But “Apple’s traditional closed system,” Mr. Kahney writes, “is now a selling point.”

The popularity of the iPod and iTunes, he writes, shows that consumers seem to prefer buying “products and services from one company that are guaranteed to work well together.”

Financial Wisdom Get-rich-quick schemes abound in the personal finance sections of bookstores, encouraging everyday people to play the derivatives market or promoting “no money down” real estate investing.

But hidden among the sillier works are helpful volumes. J. D. Roth presents 25 of what he says are the best of them on his blog, Get Rich Slowly (getrichslowly.org). Some are well known, others less so. There is “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey and “Miserly Moms” by Jonni McCoy. They emphasize saving, avoiding too much credit, and living well but simply. None, Mr. Roth writes, “go into much detail about any one subject, but they provide motivation to get started. And that’s what’s most important.”

Google: Not Worried SearchWithKevin.com promises that “every time you search the Web, you stand a chance of winning a prize from Kevin Federline. It’s that simple. Really.”

Simple, indeed. The Yahoo-powered site features a photograph of Britney Spears’s estranged husband playing poker, smoking a cigarette and apparently enjoying some kind of brown liquor over ice. The company behind the site, Prodege, offers prizes including Mr. Federline’s autograph on an 8x10 glossy, his latest CD and a T-shirt bearing his carefully cultivated bad-boy visage. DAN MITCHELL

EU Commissioner says Microsoft continues its market abuses

2007-03-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

EU Commissioner says Microsoft continues its market abuses

By Joel Hruska | Published: March 23, 2007 - 12:31PM CT

It's no secret that Microsoft's relationship with the European Union has been anything but cozy. Over the past three years, the EU has been after Microsoft for antitrust violations, forcing the company to make unspecified changes to Vista, and recently demanding that the Redmond, WA-based company alter its server protocol pricing. In a speech yesterday to the European Parliament, top EU antitrust official Neelie Kroes fired yet another shot across Microsoft's bow by accusing Redmond of continuing to abuse its position as market leader and of having gained market share as a result of doing so.

"Microsoft is constantly gaining market share and that is what is worrying me in the workgroup server operating market," Kroes said according to Reuters. "As a consequence of your abusive behavior you are getting positive results for the company—that's not acceptable in my opinion."

According to the European Commission, Microsoft's share of the workgroup server market has grown from 35-40 percent in 1999 when the EU began its investigation to 70-75 percent today. Kroes' own comments imply the EC has been ineffective at stopping Microsoft abuses. If Microsoft has continued to grow solely (or even primarily) due to abusive behavior, it has done so in spite of all the fines, penalties, and demands of the EU.

Although the EC has held that Microsoft's product edge exists because the company is unwilling to share information with its competitors, the direct line between cause and effect isn't nearly as simple or clear-cut. Based on Kroes' rhetoric, the EC appears to be on the verge of stating that Microsoft has only gained market share as a result of illegal, abusive behavior. That would be a strong statement, especially when dealing with a company as large and complex as Microsoft. There's a fine line between preventing abuse of monopolistic power and implying that Microsoft has only been "dealt with" appropriately when the company ceases to grow its market share, or even loses share to a competitor's products.

Intel, Already With Operations in China, Appears Ready to Build a Chip Plant There

2007-03-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

Intel, Already With Operations in China, Appears Ready to Build a Chip Plant There

By LAURIE J. FLYNN

Published: March 23, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22 — Intel appears set to build a chip fabrication plant in northern China, a move that would mark a major milestone in the countries’ trade relations and could improve Intel’s competitiveness as it moves operations closer to its biggest customers.

Intel officials in Santa Clara, Calif., declined to comment Thursday on the possibility of such an agreement. The company confirmed only that it had scheduled a news conference Monday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing with Paul S. Otellini, Intel’s chief executive officer, who will discuss “Intel’s commitment in China.”

“We have long said we’d be interested in building a fab in China,” said Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman. “But we have nothing more to say about it at this time.”

China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planning agency, said this month that it had approved Intel’s building of a $2.5 billion chip fabrication plant in the northeastern city of Dalian. That announcement, posted on the agency’s Web site, has since been removed.

Reports that Intel would open a fabrication plant, called a “fab” in chip industry parlance, have circulated for several years. But the Bush administration’s tightening of controls on technology exports to China in recent years has led many analysts to conclude that such a move might be challenged in Washington.

Adam Segal, a senior fellow on China studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, said the company could face resistance if it tried to bring its state-of-the-art technology to China.

“The further behind the technology is, the less chance they have of encountering opposition,” Mr. Segal said. For that reason Intel might agree to use the 90-nanometer manufacturing process, which will soon be considered obsolete in the American market.

The Chinese commission’s announcement said that the approved plant would have a monthly capacity of 52,000 chips and would use 90-nanometer technology.

Today, Intel makes chips using 65-nanometer technology. Production using next-generation 45-nanometer technology — where the transistors on the chips are so small that 30 million of them can fit onto the head of a pin — is set to begin later this year. That means that by the time an Intel plant in Dalian is up and running, 90-nanometer technology would be at least two generations behind the state of the art for Intel.

Furthermore, the plan calls for Intel’s China plant to make chipsets, the technology that serves in a supporting role to the main microprocessors, rather than the microprocessors themselves.

Dean McCarron, an analyst at Mercury Research, said that using older processes, combined with lower labor costs in China, could mean a greater profit margin for Intel.

Intel’s move to increase its presence in China signals the growing need of chip makers to find new ways to meet the demand for chips for cellphones, MP3 players and personal computers. Many of Intel’s largest customers do their manufacturing in Asia, including Dell.

Intel already has two assembly test sites in China, along with two research and development centers, employing about 5,000 people.

Mobile Phone Protection

2007-03-25T07:26:00.000-07:00

Mobile Phone Protection

Author: jennifer lopez [ Website ]

A big controversy is using mobile phones while driving. This is because you cannot concentrate on two things at a time and conversations on the cellphone while driving may take your attention off the road

Today, mobile phones have become an essential part of our everyday lives. They allow us to communicate with our friends, family and customers in a flexible way at any time and place. Mobile phone safety has been a serious concern nowadays. You spend a lot to buy a mobile phone to fulfill your needs and to get the useful features and add on accessories which come along with it like mobile games, ringtones, wallpapers, etc. After buying a mobile phone, the difficult task is the safety concern.

There are two kinds of mobile phone safety: first one is the practical mobile phone safety which addresses the safest ways to use your mobile phone and the other one is are the health risks to the mobile phone users. A big controversy is using mobile phones while driving. This is because you cannot concentrate on two things at a time and conversations on the cellphone while driving may take your attention off the road. This can even lead to accidents. In fact, in many places, use of mobile phones in cars is banned. So you should try to avoid the use of mobile phones while driving. However, if you wish to make or receive an important call, make use a hands free kit. It is a good choice as it allows you to maintain your attention on the road. But still you should ensure that your conversation is not intense and is as quick as possible. Another safest way to handle calls while driving is to let your voice mail pick up the call.

According to researchers, mobile phones can cause adverse health effects. But it has not been proved yet. It is believed that cancer, headaches, memory loss, high blood pressure can also be caused by excessive use of mobile phones. As we know that mobile phones use radio frequencies to make and receive calls, there is a serious risk of radiation emissions from your phone into your ear which can damage your health.

During the use of mobile phone, the antenna of the handset is very close to the user’s head, so there is a concern about the level of microwave emissions to which the brain is being exposed. The exposure levels decrease rapidly with increasing distance from the antenna. Low emissions have not been proven to cause any health risks. So amount of exposure to radiation can be minimized by holding your phone at the bottom. This probably won’t block your antenna. You can also try to increase the distance between the phone’s antenna and your head by using a hands free kit.

Another serious concern is loss of mobile phones due to thefts. The only way out is to take care of your phone and get it insured. So, only buying a mobile phone is not the end, there are a lot of other things to be taken care of. Therefore, you need to be a responsible, safe and a considerate mobile phone user.

Blogger Help : On the Go with Blogger Mobile

2007-03-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

Blogger Help : On the Go with Blogger Mobile

By Biz Stone

Optional: Claiming Your Blog

We will name your blog "My Mobile Blog" and insert some text in the sidebar as a reminder that you can claim your blog. The text will read:

Claim your blog at go.blogger.com so you can change the style and colors, edit previous posts, or activate aditional features. Note: You'll need the claim code that was sent to your phone.

You don't have to claim your blog. In fact, you could never sit down in front of a PC again and just keep sending content from your phone to the Web. However, when you sign in and enter your token at go.blogger.com, that note about claiming will be replaced with your profile block and once you claim your blog, you have full access to all your settings so you can change the template and modify your account to your heart's desire.

Optional: Switch Your Mobile Posts to Another Blog

Another part of the claiming process is the ability to switch to an existing blog that you'd rather have your mobile posts sent to. For example, if you already have a blog and think it would be cool to occasionally send a post from your mobile phone in addition to posting normally. Once you make that switch, both existing and future posts will be sent to the blog of your choosing instead of the blog that was automatically set up for you when you sent that first message to go@blogger.com.

Note to users whose blog address does not contain blogspot.com: Once you make the aforementioned switch, new mobile posts will be published to your chosen blog but mobile posts published prior to the switch will not be moved over automatically. So, if you plan on publishing mobile posts to your non-blogspot.com hosted blog, we recommend you claim and switch early thus avoiding a potential nuisance.

What Services Does Blogger Mobile Support?

The initial launch of Blogger Mobile will work with your phone if you are a US customer of Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile. We will be expanding that list so if your provider is not on there yet, check back with us here.

Use It Your Way

There was an article on the BBC's web site a couple weeks ago by a guy who was using his camphone and a blog to create what he called "digital postcards" to the web so his friends and family could follow along on his trip across the United States. That's the stuff! There's even a professional photographer traversing the US snapping photos exclusively with his camera phone. He's got a web team building his site—all you need for yours is Blogger Mobile.

Setting up a great looking web site that is yours to customize as you please and using a mobile phone to keep it updated is not as futuristic as your own personal jet pack, I appreciate that. In fact, when I was back in middle school watching Mr. Miller talk on his car phone I figured that by 2005 we'd have personal jet packs. We don't. However, if I see someone flying around in a jet pack I will blog it with my camphone. That is most definitely something. We're getting there.

Biz Stone works at Google on Blogger and writes books about blogging.

ICANN proposal would shield contact info in Whois record

2007-03-22T21:56:00.000-07:00

ICANN proposal would shield contact info in Whois record

By Eric Bangeman | Published: March 21, 2007 - 04:10PM CT

An ICANN Task Force has recommended some changes to the domain registration process that would allow registrants to more easily shield their identities. A report released by the Task Force on Whois Services suggests that registrars make it easier for domain name owners to shield their identities.

The Task Force is recommending that domain name owners be permitted to list third-party contact information instead of their own. Administrative and technical contacts would be no longer displayed within the whois system, with their information being supplanted by an "operational point of contact."

An operational point of contact would be responsible for resolving—you guessed it—operational issues themselves, or passing on data to the actual owner of a domain.

Domain name owners who have seen their personal data plucked from whois records and used by spammers, along with privacy advocates, will likely welcome the change. Other constituencies aren't so happy about it. Cybersquatters and other scam artists could more easily hide their identities from law enforcement, while others with a legitimate need to discover the identity of a domain owner would find it much more difficult.

Currently, there are a handful of proxy registrars that provide third-party registration services, and are popular with astroturfing organizations such as the Advanced Technology Alliance. Those, too, have come under criticism, with some countries—like the US—prohibiting their top-level domains from being registered by proxies.

One alternate proposal from the ICANN task force would force domain owners to disclose their identities with the exception of "special circumstances," domains that are used for noncommercial purposes and where the owners can demonstrate a "basis for concern that public access to specific data about themselves that would otherwise be publicly displayed in Whois would jeopardize a concrete and real interest in their personal safety or security that cannot be protected other than by suppressing that public access," according to ICANN. The Netherlands uses a similar model for its .nl TLD due to its privacy and data protection laws.

The Task Force findings will be considered by ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization Council at a meeting in Lisbon later this month, where there will also be public hearings on the topic. The GNSO Council will then make a policy recommendation to the ICANN Board or reconvene the task force to revise its recommendations.

Google Tests an Ad Idea: Pay Only for Results

2007-03-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

Google Tests an Ad Idea: Pay Only for Results

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: March 21, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, March 20 — Google is experimenting with a new proposition for advertisers: if you don’t get results, you don’t pay.

The company said Tuesday that it would expand a test of a system that allows advertisers to pay only when an ad spurs a consumer to take an action, be it purchasing a product, subscribing to a newsletter or signing up to receive a quote from a mortgage broker or car dealer.

The vast majority of advertisers now pay Google when a user clicks on ads that are displayed alongside its search results or on other Web sites, while some are billed based on how many people view the ads.

“We’re optimistic that it will be something that will be very compelling for advertisers,” said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google. Ms. Wojcicki said the system would also give participating Web publishers a wider choice of ad types for their sites.

Under the “cost per action” system, advertisers decide what they are willing to pay for a specific action, like a purchase or a software download. Armed with that information, Web site publishers then choose whether to run a specific ad or group of ads on their sites.

Many advertisers find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk, since they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. The model has long been used online by “affiliate marketing” companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds or thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.

But many other companies are using cost-per-action ads in different ways. They include the search-engine start-up Snap, which displays cost-per-action ads next to search results, and Turn, a network that matches advertisers and publishers interested in cost-per-action ads.

“We think it is a model that all the large players in search will be embracing over time,” said Tom McGovern, the chief executive of Snap.

For the time being, Google is not putting cost-per-action ads next to search results, limiting them to publishers’ Web sites and essentially creating its own affiliate marketing network. Industry insiders said Google’s entry into the market was likely to accelerate its growth.

“This is a big market at an early stage,” said Ellen Siminoff, chief executive of Efficient Frontier, a search marketing firm.

Cost-per-action ads have another advantage: They virtually eliminate the problem of click fraud, a scam in which people or computers generate clicks on ads for the sole purpose of getting a payment.

While the appeal of the cost-per-action model to advertisers is clear, some analysts believe publishers may be more reluctant to embrace it, at least for now.

“For publishers, it increases the complexity of their business,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup. Publishers have limited space for ads and need to maximize the revenue they generate. A cost-per-click model is risky, since it provides no guarantees that a publisher will receive any payment for a given ad.

Mr. Mahaney said Google could make the system more effective and appealing if it figures out an automated way to predict how much revenue each ad is likely to generate. Advertising.com, a unit of AOL, uses such a system to determine the right placement for cost-per-action ads on publishers’ sites.

For now, the affiliate marketing business remains relatively small. ValueClick’s affiliate marketing unit, the industry’s largest, had sales of $112 million in 2006, while Google’s revenue topped $10 billion.

Google’s test is limited to about 75 advertisers and 75 publishers. A test last summer had about 30 advertisers and 30 publishers.

MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users - New York Times

2007-03-21T02:34:00.000-07:00

MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users - New York Times

News Corporation is too greedy! (by viewer)

By BRAD STONE

Published: March 20, 2007

Some users of MySpace feel as if their space is being invaded.

MySpace, the Web’s largest social network, has gradually been imposing limits on the software tools that users can embed in their pages, like music and video players that also deliver advertising or enable transactions.

At stake is the ability of MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, to ensure that it alone can commercially capitalize on its 90 million visitors each month.

But to some formerly enthusiastic MySpace users, the new restrictions hamper their abilities to design their pages and promote new projects.

“The reason why I am so bummed out about MySpace now is because recently they have been cutting down our freedom and taking away our rights slowly,” wrote Tila Tequila, a singer who is one of MySpace’s most popular and visible users, in a blog posting over the weekend. “MySpace will now only allow you to use ‘MySpace’ things.”

Ms. Tequila, born Tila Nguyen, has attracted attention by linking to more than 1.7 million friends on her MySpace page. To promote her first album, she recently added to her MySpace page a new music player and music store, called the Hoooka, created by Indie911, a Los Angeles-based start-up company.

Users listened to her music and played the accompanying videos 20,000 times over the weekend. But the Hoooka disappeared on Sunday after a MySpace founder, Tom Anderson, personally contacted Ms. Tequila to object, according to someone with direct knowledge of the dispute. She then vented her thoughts on her personal blog.

MySpace says that it will block these pieces of third-party software — also called widgets — when they lend themselves to violations of its terms of service, like the spread of pornography or copyrighted material. But it also objects to widgets that enable users to sell items or advertise without authorization, or without entering into a direct partnership with the company.

A MySpace spokeswoman said yesterday that the service did not remove anything from Ms. Tequila’s page. “A MySpace representative contacted her and told her that she had violated our terms of service in regards to commercial activity,” the spokeswoman said. “She removed the material herself, after realizing it was not appropriate for MySpace.”

Ms. Tequila and her representatives would not comment.

But Justin Goldberg, chief executive of Indie911, said MySpace’s actions undercut the notion that the social networks’ users have complete creative freedom. “We find it incredibly ironic and frustrating that a company that has built its assets on the back of its users is turning around and telling people they can’t do anything that violates terms of service,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t they call it FoxSpace? Or RupertSpace?” Mr. Goldberg said, referring to the News Corporation’s chief, Rupert Murdoch.

The tussle between MySpace and Indie911 underscores tensions between established Internet companies and the latest generation of Web start-ups. Without a critical mass of visitors to their sites, many of these smaller companies are devising strategies that involve clamping on to sites like MySpace and Facebook and trying to make money off their traffic.

MySpace, meanwhile, is trying to show that it can generate stable revenue. Google will pay it at least $900 million over the next three years to serve ads to the site’s users. And last fall, MySpace announced a partnership with Snocap, a San Francisco-based company, to sell music.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this year, MySpace blocked widgets from Revver, a video-sharing site that embeds advertisements in its clips, and Imeem, a music buying service.

“Our users weren’t happy,” said Dalton Caldwell, Imeem’s chief executive, who was nevertheless ambivalent about the MySpace ban because he thought the move might encourage his users to visit his site directly. “If MySpace isn’t really ‘their space’ after all, maybe users will think about things differently.”

In the past, MySpace executives have said that the service failed to block companies like YouTube that began successful businesses from MySpace’s pages.

“We probably should have stopped YouTube,” Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media, a part of the News Corporation, said in an interview in late February. “YouTube wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for MySpace. We’ve created companies on our back.”

MySpace and its corporate parent say they want to find ways to support and exploit the growing widget economy. Last year, Fox Interactive Media introduced a service called Spring Widget. The service provides tools to help developers create widgets for use both on computer desktops and online networks like MySpace.

In a recent use of its technology, the studio behind the horror film “Dead Silence” used a Spring Widget tool on its promotional MySpace page to count down the minutes until the film’s release.

Fred Wilson, a New York-based venture capitalist who invests in social media companies, said the strategy showed that the News Corporation was trying to take advantage of growing interest in widgets while also trying to carefully control what made it onto MySpace.

But that could be a dangerous strategy, Mr. Wilson said.

“Every attempt everyone has ever made to try to dictate what a person’s Internet experience will be has ended up coming up empty,” he said. “You have to accept the fact that you are never going to be the be-all and end-all of everyone’s experience. They are one click away from everyone else on the Web.”

As for Ms. Tequila, who wrote on her blog that she was a personal friend of Mr. Anderson, the MySpace co-founder, she wrote that she felt bad about blasting the site but that she could not stay silent.

“You guys used to be so cool,” she wrote of MySpace. “Don’t turn into a corporate evil monster.”

oneSearch™ on Yahoo! Mobile Web. Search for anything from anywhere.

2007-03-21T02:05:00.000-07:00

oneSearch™ on Yahoo! Mobile Web. Search for anything from anywhere.

Get instant answers

Finally mobile search that works! Yahoo! oneSearch is now available for internet—enabled phones. oneSearch results are delivered to you in a new, breakthrough format that redefines search for the mobile phone. It’s all about getting instant answers with just one click—no need to sift through a bunch of links to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Looking for a new camera? oneSearch gives you what you need to make the best choice including product reviews, images of different models and where to buy. Tracking a hot stock? oneSearch gives you the important info you need to stay up to date including stock quotes, company news and the latest products.

oneSearch results are easy to read, scroll through, and expand when you want more information—like more images to view—with a single click. You don’t have to “feel lucky” to be lucky every time with oneSearch!

Find practically anything

Yahoo! oneSearch gets you the answers you seek for just about anything you need: driving directions, maps, movie showtimes, sports, upcoming events, news, weather, celebrities, images, shopping—you name it.

And, oneSearch gives you results based on where you are. For instance, searching for a movie title will give you local theaters and showtimes. Searching for a city name will give you the latest weather, traffic reports, local news and more for that city.

Your way to the entire Web

oneSearch also makes it easy to get to any website. Simply type in the name of a website you want to visit in the search box (like eBay), and oneSearch returns the website link. Click the link and you’re there.

* Available on internet enabled phones

ViewSonic's iPod Projector

2007-03-21T01:38:00.000-07:00

ViewSonic's iPod Projector

by Gina HughesThe Techie Diva
Mon Mar 12, 2007 11:56PM EDT

Sick of iPod accessories yet? The iPod accessory overload is far from being over, and Viewsonic's iPod projector is going to make a lot of iPod owners very happy. Remember when we thought how great it was to finally be able to download videos to the iPod? That feeling soon faded after watching hour-long TV shows on the tiny 2.5 inch screen. Then we spotted the ViewSonic ViewDock, and thought, "Aha! now we can watch those videos on a bigger screen." Unfortunately, that didn't work either because videos couldn't be played straight from the iPod; and yes, we're all still wondering what the whole point of an integrated iPod dock on an LCD screen was all about.

Let's hope Viewsonic finally gets it right with the PJ258 Video iPod DLP projector. A dock sits on top of the glossy projector ready for some plug-and-play action that doesn't require the need for a computer. I can see how this could prove useful to executives who know how to load presentations to their music player. As far as entertainment goes, the PJ258 has a resolution of 1024 x 768 that magnifies TV shows on the big screen. Laptop Magazine reviewed the projector, and thought the image was quite clear even when it was blown up on a 60-inch screen, but the projector itself was a little distracting throughout the movie due in part to a noisy fan. Sounds like a nice idea, but at $1,400 I'd recommend you stick to an LCD display for entertainment purposes.

Ipod Music Download

2007-03-19T22:54:00.000-07:00

Ipod Music Download

In a world fastly changing in tehnological wonder, it is comforting to know that all this technology still delivers to us the basic comforts and conveniences of everyday life. Such is the case with ipod and the benefits and conveniences of ipod music download. It wasn't long ago, that the Walkman in audio and video format was the rage and wonder technology of its time.

Ipod is a great leap forward in digital entertainment. Whether your desire is in movies of all types or you are like me, a music lover, ipod delivers! Ipod is truly a wonder of the current technology generation. You can easily and quite simple take your favorite movies, classic television shows, sporting events or music with you wherever you go - whenever you want.

With ipod, you can have unlimited movie downloads and unlimited and staggering amounts of ipod music download. The best ipod download services allow you to find and download movies, music and TV series (even old-time favorites). With some of the better services, you get instant access to dvd quality music, mp3s and more!

You can now have premium quality music and movies while you travel, jog, even while flying on a plane. I travel, work and relax with my own ipod music download and video downloads constantly. I find the sound and visual quality truly awesome and an outstanding bargain with the premium service I own.

Speaking of ipod music download and video download services, I highly recommend searching out and finding a premium service for your ipod ownership experience. As stated above, a premium service brings endless hours of entertainment, joy and benefits to your life.

The best services will offer you many services and benefits including things like unlimited access to movies, music, TV shows, music videos and more. Also, look for a service that offers a "No Pay Per Download" feature.

Millions of people own and use ipods to bring state-of-the-art digital quality entertainment to their lives. Ipod is convenient, fun, affordable and a great way to take your entertainment with you, wherever you go. If you own or you are considering buying an ipod, I strongly suggest signing up for an ipod music download service to greatly enhance your ipod ownership experience.

ipod Music Download

By: David Chenault

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

To learn more about ipod music download check out my new site @ ipodmusicdownload1.blogspot.com.

http://hitechflow.blogspot.com/2007/03/ipod-music-download.html

You may distribute this article in any form as long as you leave this bio box intact as is.

Month of MySpace bugs coming?

2007-03-19T22:29:00.001-07:00

Month of MySpace bugs coming?

With equal doses of satire and self-denigration, two anonymous hackers announced a plan last week to make April a month of daily MySpace vulnerability disclosures.

The duo--who use the online names "Mondo Armando" and "Müstaschio"--outlined the plan to release daily flaws in MySpace's online social networking software on their Web site, while poking fun at the whole Month of Bugs phenomenon. Calling the effort MOMBY for "Month of MySpace Bugs, Yuss," the two hackers stated that the effort is less motivated by security concerns and more designed to head off thoughts of any future Month of Bugs projects.

"If it ends up being just as lame as the Month of Apple Bugs, then we haven't really missed the mark," wrote "Mondo Armando" on the site. "If it's funnier, then great. If it kills this Month of Whatever fad, then hurray for everyone, it's over."

The effort, if indeed it happens, will be the fifth Month of Bugs in the last year. In July, security researcher HD Moore started the trend with a Month of Browser Bugs, in November came the Month of Kernel Bugs, followed by the Month of Apple Bugs in January and the Month of PHP Bugs in March.

Beseiged MySpace has become a popular target for security researchers and malicious coders. Two Web worms have infected users of the social-networking site: The Samy worm spread quickly in October 2005 and the Quickspace worm wended through the company's servers last December. MySpace has also come under fire over fears that sexual predators are using the site to find young victims online and has irked security researchers with some of its aggressive tactics.

The Month of MySpace Bugs will focus on relatively easy to find cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, the hackers said. XSS flaws were by far the most common software vulnerability found in 2006.

by: Robert Lemos

Boost for web content labelling

2007-03-19T22:29:00.000-07:00

Boost for web content labelling

Jemima Kiss
Monday March 19, 2007
MediaGuardian.co.uk

Internet searching: Users can not usually identify the suitability of web content just from search results, said Segala chief Paul Walsh

Technology firm Segala is spearheading an initiative to help internet users identify trusted web content through a comprehensive labelling system.

Irish-based Segala has been developing content labels for more than two years and is now in talks with major web organisations and publishers to roll out the service for a number of applications.

Different content labels could be developed for different uses, although three of the most significant applications could be for labelling sites that meet accessibility standards for web users with disabilities; blogs that have signed up to a set of agreed editorial standards; and adult content.

Sites that have signed up to agreed editorial standards would display a small logo in search results and different content labels would have different logos. The logo could also be displayed on the site itself.

Segala co-founder and chief exectutive Paul Walsh, who is running the content labels operation as a separate non-commercial project, said that users can not usually identify the suitability of web content just from search results, so end up clicking through to sites that may not be appropriate.

The scheme has already been approved by W3C, the global body that develops guidelines and standards for the web.

W3C's semantic web education and outreach group has agreed to formally back and promote content labels, and Mr Walsh has also had interest from telecoms firm Verisign, AOL and Microsoft.

Mr Walsh added that the content labels scheme will reach mass adoption within the next two years.

"Today, you have to land on a site before you see a trust mark but content labels can be detected by search or by the browser," he said.

"This isn't about policing the internet, it's about enabling users to make an informed choice."

Dermot O'Mahony, the head of online content for T-Mobile, described content labels as "the holy grail" the web sector has been looking for.

"Everyone with a website wants to be seen as legitimate service provider. For businesses, this enables them to build trust and ensure that they don't get lost in the noise of the internet. For the user, it means a real feeling of control," Mr O'Mahony said.

The main hurdles to mass adoption are awareness among consumers and integration with search and web browsing tools, he added.

"Search companies need to take ownership of this and take a stand to make sure that content is safe and responsible," Mr O'Mahony said.

At the moment, web users need to install the "search thresher" extension for the Firefox browser to identify sites with content labels.

Ultimately, that function is likely to be combined in all web browsers although as more sites adopt labelling, search engines will begin to include a content label field in search options.

Mr Walsh is also talking to UK blogging platform Terapad about creating an approved accessibility free blogging service, as well as helping to develop an ethics committee for blogging services.

The labelling system could also work for medical websites, which could sign up to a code of conduct and professional practice with verification by a medical authority.

A UN-funded Swiss organisation, the Health on the Net Foundation, already provides free, independent verification of medical websites.

The chancellor, Gordon Brown, last week unveiled a separate scheme by Ofcom to classify digital media output that will aim to help parents identify unsuitable content.

Password Makeover : Becky Worley : Yahoo! Tech

2007-03-15T19:49:00.000-07:00

Password Makeover : Becky Worley : Yahoo! Tech

Passwords are a hassle to make and remember, but they keep us all safe. And it doesn't really have to be a hassle: a strategic password plan can keep the bad guys out and keep you from forgetting your passwords.

Start Your 30 minute Password Makeover
Commit to writing down all the websites or networks where you use a password. Only write down the name of the site, and your user name, NOT your passwords. A master list of passwords is an open invitation for someone to access your accounts: roommate, co-worker, burglar, kids.

Security Levels: High, Medium, and Low
Once that list is done, divide the sites into three categories: high-security, medium-security and low-security.

High-security logons should include anything associated with money or sensitive personal information: financial brokerages, online banking, PayPal, travel sites that store your credit card numbers, any site that has your social security number (school site, medical insurance site, tax site), and your work network.

Medium-security logons should include anything of a personal nature: your email accounts, your ISP account at home, your alumni network, instant messaging logons.

Low-security logons can consist of email groups, news sites that require a logon, or random sites that require you provide a password.

Assign a password to each group
To cover the requirements for all logons, make your passwords eight characters long and a combination of numbers, letters (including at least one uppercase letter), and a symbol, like an *, %, or #. One tip for creating a memorable password is to script it like a vanity license plate: Pr3t3nd$ (Pretends), W8ing4U2 (waiting for you two).

Change your passwords
Now go through your list of high-, medium-, and low-security sites and networks and change the passwords of your accounts. On your master list of accounts and user names, instead of writing the password next to the account, just indicate which security class it's in: high, medium, or low. You know those three passwords by heart (this is the challenge here—you have to memorize those three passwords).

Where to Use Your Passwords
Access your high-security passwords only from home or on trusted computers, never on a public computer that might contain a key-logger. Key-loggers are software programs that record every stroke typed on the computer including every user name and password you enter.

Use your medium-security passwords based on your own judgment—in an Eastern European Internet Café? Not a good idea. In your university's computer lab? That's a better gamble.

Low-security passwords can be used on any public account; if someone gets access to your New York Times log-in? That's not a big deal.

Good luck, stay safe, and hopefully you'll never be locked out of your own accounts again.

IBM and Cisco Alliance Value Proposition

2007-03-13T23:47:00.000-07:00

IBM and Cisco Alliance Value Proposition

Together, IBM and Cisco are the proven resource to seamlessly and rapidly integrate business processes, industry knowledge, information technologies, and the intelligence of the network, thereby maximizing our clients' ability to envision, design, and innovate to exceed their business objectives.

Executive Perspectives on the Alliance

"The Cisco and IBM Strategic Alliance provides customers with a resilient, end-to-end infrastructure and industry-oriented solutions designed to meet the needs of today's competitive environment. Our partnership helps enable our customers to spend less time worrying about technology issues, and spend more time as a customer-focused, on demand business."

Sam Palmisano, Chairman & CEO, IBM Corporation

"Cisco and IBM, combining our long-standing industry expertise, are committed to helping our customers by implementing Internet business solutions that can help position them for success in today fast-paced business environment."

John Chambers, President & CEO, Cisco Systems

Cisco and IBM Expand Global Services Alliance to Collaborate on Maintenance Services in 46 New Countries

2007-03-13T23:46:00.000-07:00

Cisco and IBM Expand Global Services Alliance to Collaborate on Maintenance Services in 46 New Countries

Expanded Relationship Provides Mutual Customers with Single Source for Product Maintenance Services

SAN JOSE, Calif. & ARMONK, NY, March 12, 2007 - Cisco® and IBM today announced the expansion of their Global Services Alliance and their collaboration to provide product maintenance services for mutual enterprise customers in 46 new countries. This collaboration builds on the success that IBM and Cisco have seen within the United States and means that IBM customers who purchase Cisco networking technology solutions will now get a globally consistent level of IT infrastructure support. The collaboration includes IBM's extensive service-delivery capabilities and Cisco's technical expertise in one integrated support offering.

"This is a significant evolution in our Global Services Alliance," said Karl Meulema vice president, Cisco services marketing and channels. "Providing a collaborative maintenance service offering means our mutual customers will no longer need to choose between Cisco networking skills or IBM multivendor systems integrator capabilities. Instead customers get the collective expertise of both companies, combining the best of both worlds."

"We have been working together on these service offerings in the United States for the past three years and are excited to offer a broader global customer experience by expanding our efforts into additional markets around the world," said Robert Kritzer, vice president, IBM-Cisco Strategic Alliance, IBM Global Technology Services. "Our relationship with Cisco allows us to provide our customers with a single resource to seamlessly and rapidly integrate business processes, industry knowledge, information technologies and the intelligence of the network."

"The 'IBM managed maintenance solution for Cisco products' provides us with a single escalation point for maintenance services across multiple vendor products that comprise our global reservation system," said Charlie Majane, director of technical services at Carey International, a leading global provider of limousine services and luxury ground transportation. "Our clients count on Carey's reservations specialists and customer care representatives 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. IBM and Cisco's collaborative service relationship has simplified our billing and service delivery processes spanning 65 countries."

IBM will market and sell this services offering under the name "IBM managed maintenance solution for Cisco products," while collaboratively delivering the service with Cisco. IBM will provide the customer with consolidated call management for all networking devices and will retain responsibility for resolving customer issues. Technical support will be provided via IBM Technical Support Centers by highly experienced network specialists, trained by Cisco, who have access to IBM's technical support resource base. Cisco will provide, through IBM, such benefits as worldwide, 24x7 escalation to the Cisco Technical Assistance Center, access to cisco.com, ongoing operating system updates, advance hardware replacement, and tools and best practices to address network issues. Specific details regarding the "IBM managed maintenance solution for Cisco products" offering can be found at: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/its/a1002560.

Cisco Global Services Alliances

The Cisco Global Services Alliance program has been in place for three years and is intended to increase customer success with Cisco networking technology. The program promotes greater collaboration and alignment between Cisco and its Global Service Alliance partners in order to deliver a consistent level of IT infrastructure support across the network lifecycle.

Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

For more information on IBM (NYSE: IBM), please visit www.ibm.com.

# # #

Cisco, Cisco Systems, and the Cisco Systems logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. This document is Cisco Public Information.

Tor hack proposed to catch criminals

2007-03-08T19:58:00.000-08:00

Tor hack proposed to catch criminals:

Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2007-03-08

The Tor network--a distributed system of computers that anonymizes the source of network traffic--has a slew of beneficial uses: Human-rights workers, the military and journalists all use the system. However, the anonymity of Tor has also attracted seedier elements as well: digital pirates, online criminals and, quite possibly, child pornographers.

“ Mr. Moore's solution will not solve the problem he is trying to solve, and in the process, he will hurt a lot of people that he should be helping. ”

Now, one security researcher aims to make the distributed network less of a haven for the shadier side of the Internet.

HD Moore, the lead developer of the Metasploit Project, has created a rough set of tools that allows anyone operating a Tor server to attempt to track the source of network data. Moore originally created the software to block file sharers from eating up his computer's bandwidth, but soon targeted potential child pornographers who appeared to be using the network, he said.

"I don't want my network connection to be used to transfer child pornography or pictures of child models," Moore wrote in an e-mail to SecurityFocus on Thursday. "I don't want my server confiscated by law enforcement because of some Tor user who thinks they are anonymous."

The tools, which Moore dubbed "Torment," use a number of known techniques to link content handled by the exit servers--the computers that manage the border between the Tor network and the Internet--to their source.

The Tor Project uses a method known as onion routing to obfuscate the source of data. (Tor originally stood for "The Onion Router.") Data from a user is encrypted in layers using keys from each of the servers that will handle the data--or "cell"--and delivered to an entry node into the Tor network. The data is passed to one or more servers, each removing a layer of encryption until the cell reaches the exit node. Thus, only the exit node sees the data fully decrypted.

Moore's Torment code modifies the normal Tor proxy server software to implement the necessary functions, resulting in a poisoned proxy server.

However, the techniques also rely on the targeted Tor user taking risky actions, such as allowing Javascript to run in their browser. The Tor documentation specifically warns users to use a browser with stripped down functionality when visiting Web sites using the anonymizing network.

Unsurprisingly, Moore's actions have stirred up controversy. Tor operators have criticized the project as endangering the vast majority of legitimate Tor users to pursue a smaller number of bad actors.

"This is a general-purpose attack tool--there's no reason it can't be just as useful for identifying the IPs of misconfigured Tor users looking for information on democracy in China, or for the nearest VD clinic, or for information on how to run for office, or whatever," said one poster to the Onion Routing Talk (OR-Talk) mailing list. "Snoops everywhere should be pleased."

Shava Nerad, executive director of the Tor Project, agreed that any technique that could be used by law enforcement to track down criminals, could also be used by authoritarian regimes to track down democracy activists or by the United States' enemies to track down the military intelligence officers that use the network.

"Mr. Moore's solution will not solve the problem he is trying to solve, and in the process, he will hurt a lot of people that he should be helping," Nerad said.

Moreover, Moore's reliance on keywords to identify potential illegal transactions would likely have a high false positive rate, Nerad said.

The Torment project, which Moore first unveiled at a meeting of the Austin Hacker's Association in August, consists of modified client code, a domain name service (DNS) server, and SQL schema. The current version of the code is based on an outdated version of Tor, he said. A ZDNet blog first reported on the project on Wednesday.

In an e-mail to SecurityFocus, Moore explained how his system--basically a form of Web bug--works.

The modified server software uses scripts to process data before sending it back to the targeted Tor user. The patched software, dubbed Torment, uses the Ruby scripting language to match certain parameters and then allows, modifies or drops the packet.

When specific keywords are detected, the Torment software will inject some HTML into the Web request, causing the browser to load an applet on the targeted user's computer to help identify that user. The code includes a unique identifier to track the users. The code requests that the victim's browser resolve a unique host name containing the identifier, a request that will end up being sent to the DNS server run by the attacker, and in so doing, disclose the victim's Internet service provider.

The piggybacked Javascript also loads an applet that attempts to determine the internal network address of the targeted machine and to send a raw UDP packet to the attacker's DNS server to identify the external Internet address of any router that--by using network address translation (NAT)--may be obfuscating the user's address.

"The only difference between this and a standard IMG (image) tag is the multiple correlation points that it uses to identify users," Moore told SecurityFocus. "By combining standard HTTP requests with a custom DNS server, a Java applet, and a database, it can abuse client-side information leaks to pinpoint a user's real IP address."

The attack also relies on the attacker's ability to have its server become an exit node for the Tor network. Exit nodes are key servers that act as the drop point for encrypted data cells from the Tor network, which are translated into unencrypted network packets and sent out to the Internet. Responses are processed by the same server, translated back into data cells, and sent through the Tor network back to the user.

In a paper released in February, computer scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder outlined a method to dramatically increase the chance of a malicious server being selected as an exit node by the Tor network's algorithms. However, the technique would leave recognizable fingerprints that the Tor service could identify, the Tor group stated in a blog post at the time.

And, that's not the only hurdle that Moore's attack would have to leap.

Tor servers meet the definition of an Internet service provider, which means that operators are not required to know what data passed through the server, said Kevin Bankston, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which hosts the Tor Project's site. While it is possible for the operator of an exit node to see the data, it would likely increase their liability, because if the operator became aware of illegal activity, they would have to report it, he said.

"In the ordinary course of operation of a Tor node, there is no reason for someone to become aware of what content is traversing that node," Bankston said. "If you do become aware of specific child pornography images transiting your network, you do face a legal obligation to inform the authorities, but that does not translate to some over-duty to monitor your customers' communications."

Moreover, anyone who implement's Moore's tools could be violating federal wiretap laws, Bankston said.

For his part, Moore intends to turn the tools over to law enforcement for their own use, he said.

"I agree that evidence collected in this fashion may not be admissible in court, but my end goal is to provide a software package to law enforcement, not stream evidence directly to the agencies," the researcher said in an e-mail to SecurityFocus.

The Tor Project has already taken steps to inform its users. On Thursday, the project added a warning to its documentation and further outlined what users need to do to protect their anonymity online.

"Tor by itself is NOT all you need to maintain your anonymity," the site read. "There are several major pitfalls to watch out for."

The list of threats is not small: misconfigured applications, using any of a number of browser plugins, visiting sites that have set cookies, and a lack of encryption from the Tor network to the destination server.

If nothing else, the list underscores that, in the digital world, anonymity is not easy.

Too Few Friends? A Web Site Lets You Buy Some (and They’re Hot)

2007-02-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

Too Few Friends? A Web Site Lets You Buy Some (and They’re Hot)

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

Published: February 26, 2007

Popularity was never easily measured, until the advent of social-networking sites. Now, prospective employers and others can gain some insights into an applicant’s lifestyle and character by looking at a person’s social-networking page, including the roster of friends.

So what if a job applicant’s networking page lacks friends?

Enter FakeYourSpace.com, a business founded by Brant Walker, which offered users of MySpace.com and similar sites a way to enhance their page with photographs and comments from hired “friends” — mainly attractive models — for 99 cents a month each.

FakeYourSpace was doing very well, attracting 50,000 hits a day, until a service that provided the photographs of the models, iStockPhoto.com, noticed that use and objected to it.

Kelly Thompson, iStockPhoto’s vice president for marketing, said its licensing agreement did not allow Web sites to post photos that might lead the average person to “think that the model endorses” the product, Web site or person in question.

IStockPhoto’s network of 30,000 photographers police the Internet for such contractual infractions. When they noticed how FakeYourSpace was using the photos, they reported it to iStockPhoto, which asked Mr. Walker to stop using the photographs.

He complied, and FakeYourSpace, while still viewable online, will not be fully operational again until Thursday. Mr. Walker is searching for models through agency and online auditions to replace those that had been provided by iStockPhoto, which was recently purchased by Getty Images.

But is FakeYourSpace’s business legal? The site certainly misrepresents people, but Mr. Walker, 26, said he thought that its intent was more altruistic than fraudulent.

A graduate of Platt College, a graphics and multimedia specialty school in San Diego, Mr. Walker runs the site from his San Diego home with two employees. He said the idea came to him when he noticed, while browsing MySpace pages, that “some people would have a lot of good-looking friends, and others didn’t.”

His idea, he said, was “to turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets” by providing fictitious postings from attractive people. The postings are written by the client or by Mr. Walker and his employees, who base the messages on the client’s requests. FakeYourSpace says it does not post any messages that are threatening, pornographic or illegal.

MySpace and other social-networking sites appear to have no rules prohibiting Mr. Walker’s idea. The leading sites, MySpace, Friendster and facebook, did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Walker’s business is a variation on a growing phenomenon that Bruce Schneier, a blogger at InfoWorld.com, a Web site for the business technology magazine InfoWorld, refers to as “the social network reputation hack.”

MobileAlibi.com and PopularityDialer.com offer similar services, using fake cellphone calls scheduled in advance to provide an excuse to escape a tedious situation, like a bad date, or to make the subscriber appear in demand.

While they may be less than honest, FakeYourSpace and similar sites are currently legal, as long as the content they post is legitimately licensed. Mr. Walker said his second business, a Web site called BreakYourSpace.com that removes unwanted friends from a user’s profile by third-party messenger, had yet to have any legal trouble.

Microsoft to Buy Health Information Search Engine

2007-02-27T06:02:00.000-08:00

Microsoft to Buy Health Information Search Engine

By STEVE LOHR

Published: February 27, 2007

Microsoft’s drive into the health care market is just getting under way, but the company signaled yesterday that one important ingredient in its plan will be a specialized search engine tailored to deliver useful medical information to consumers.

Microsoft is buying Medstory Inc., a small start-up in Foster City, Calif. Its search software applies artificial intelligence techniques to medical and health information in medical journals, government documents and on the Internet.

The terms of the Medstory acquisition were not disclosed.

The Medstory purchase, said Peter Neupert, vice president for health strategy at Microsoft, was a first step in a broader company strategy to assemble technologies that would “improve the consumer experience in health care.”

“Clearly,” Mr. Neupert said, “search is a critical part of that better end-to-end experience for consumers.”

The acquisition follows Microsoft’s purchase last year of Azyxxi, a clinical health care software system that retrieves and quickly displays patient information from many sources, including scanned documents, X-rays, M.R.I. scans and ultrasound images.

The Microsoft move comes at a time of increased investment in online health ventures, rising traffic at consumer health sites on the Web and profits at the most popular sites. Last month, a venture firm headed by Stephen M. Case, the former chief executive of America Online, introduced an ambitious new consumer health site, RevolutionHealth.com.

WebMD, the leading health-related site, last week reported strong quarterly profit of $8.9 million on revenue of $80.6 million, surpassing Wall Street’s expectations. The stock price of WebMD — an Internet pioneer in health information that struggled for years — has surged in the last year.

In health-related search, Healthline Networks, a start-up in San Francisco, reports rising traffic on its Web site and a growing string of deals to provide the search engine for sites of other companies, including Merck and PacifiCare. At Google, Adam Bosworth, a vice president for engineering, is leading the effort to develop a health-information offering.

These companies and others are seeking ways to build businesses on the Internet that profit from what is called consumer-driven health care. The notion is that shifts in demographics, economics, technology and policy will inevitably mean that individuals will want to, and be forced to, make more health care decisions themselves.

Aging baby boomers, accustomed to personal choice and to technology, tend to want a say in their treatment decisions. And the Internet is already an important source of health information. Eight million people in the United States go online for health information every day, according to a study last year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit group.

Financially, the pressure by Medicare and private health insurers to hold down costs and shift more of the burden to individuals, analysts say, will force people to make more health care spending choices.

In Medstory, Microsoft is acquiring “some of the best deep technology” in the emerging field of medical search, said Esther Dyson, an industry analyst who is also an investor in Medstory. That technology, Ms. Dyson said, is “not so much a search engine, but an ontology engine,” with a capability to find and identify concepts in health and not just sort through words and Web links.

The longer-range goal, Mr. Neupert said, is to link personal information like age, sex, drug regimens, family history and even genetic markers to search. The ideal is that search results are tailored individually, identifying treatments, drug interactions and medical journal articles of interest.

“Health search could be way more relevant,” he said. “You don’t need to see thousands of results. What you want to know is, what does this mean to me personally?”

Dr. Alain T. Rappaport, the founder and chief executive of Medstory, said he was impressed by the importance Microsoft placed on “intelligent search” in health care and by the promise that Microsoft’s global reach and resources could accelerate the spread of the technology his team developed.

Microsoft had talked to Healthline recently about using its health search service, said West Shell III, the chief executive of Healthline. “This means Microsoft has decided to go it alone,” Mr. Shell said.

Mozilla fixes Firefox bugs

2007-02-24T22:29:00.000-08:00

Mozilla fixes Firefox bugs

Among the browser updates is a patch for a security vulnerability that could allow an attacker to manipulate cookie information

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
February 23, 2007

The Firefox 2.0.0.2 release includes a fix for a bug disclosed by security researcher Michal Zalewsky last week. That flaw can be exploited by attackers to manipulate cookie information in the Firefox browser, making it probably the most important fix in the update, according to Window Snyder, Mozilla's head of security strategy.

"The potential to compromise a user's account is almost as serious as compromising their machine," she said Friday via instant message. "Since the details of how to exploit the vulnerability are publicly available, the risk to users is increased."

The updates also include a fix for a previously undisclosed memory corruption flaw in the browser that could be exploited to run unauthorized software on a Firefox user's computer.

This flaw could also affect Thunderbird users who have configured their mail client to run JavaScript automatically, something that Mozilla does not recommend. Thunderbird is Mozilla's free e-mail client.

The patches were released on Friday afternoon and should soon be delivered via Firefox's automatic software update mechanism, Snyder said.

Mozilla has patched a total of seven Firefox bugs and is also addressing two bugs in Thunderbird.

The latest browser release also includes enhancements to make it run better with Windows Vista as well as support for the Afrikaans, Belarusian, Georgian, and Kurdish languages.

News @ Cisco: Cisco and Apple Reach Agreement on iPhone Trademark

2007-02-22T22:57:00.000-08:00

News @ Cisco: Cisco and Apple Reach Agreement on iPhone Trademark

SAN JOSE & CUPERTINO, Calif. – Cisco® and Apple today announced that they have resolved their dispute involving the "iPhone" trademark. Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the "iPhone" trademark on their products throughout the world. Both companies acknowledge the trademark ownership rights that have been granted, and each side will dismiss any pending actions regarding the trademark. In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications. Other terms of the agreement are confidential.

MP3 Patents in Upheaval After Verdict - New York Times

2007-02-22T22:56:00.000-08:00

MP3 Patents in Upheaval After Verdict - New York Times

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: February 23, 2007

Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury yesterday to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 format, the technology at the heart of the digital music boom. If upheld on appeal, it would be the largest patent judgment on record.

The ruling, in Federal District Court in San Diego, was a victory for Alcatel-Lucent, the big networking equipment company. Its forebears include Bell Laboratories, which was involved in the development of MP3 almost two decades ago.

At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet. If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel.

Microsoft and others have licensed MP3 — not from Alcatel-Lucent, but from a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute, a large German research organization that was involved, along with the French electronics company Thomson and Bell Labs, in the format’s development.

The current case turns on two patents that Alcatel claims were developed by Bell Labs before it joined with Fraunhofer to develop MP3.

“Intellectual property is a core asset of the company,” said Joan Campion, a spokeswoman for Alcatel-Lucent. “We will continue to protect and defend that asset.”

Thomas W. Burt, the deputy general counsel of Microsoft, said the company would most likely petition the judge in the San Diego case, Rudi M. Brewster, to set aside or reduce the judgment. If she does not, Microsoft will probably take the case to the federal appeals court in Washington, which hears patent cases.

Microsoft argued that one patent in question did not apply to its MP3 software and that the other was included in the Fraunhofer software that it paid to license.

Moreover, it argued that the damages sought by Alcatel were unreasonably high, pointing out that it paid Thomson, which represented the consortium in its dealings over the patent, a flat $16 million fee for the rights to the MP3 software.

“We think this is just plain wrong,” Mr. Burt said. “They told the jury to measure damages, not on the value to Microsoft of one of the 10,000 features in Windows, but on the value of the entire computer.”

Alcatel argued that the damages should be based on a royalty of 0.5 percent of the total value of Windows computers sold.

John M. Desmarais, a partner with Kirkland & Ellis who represented Alcatel, said the proposed damages were consistent with patent law. He said it was not appropriate to compare them with the $16 million Microsoft paid Thomson because the rights to the Bell Labs patents were far more valuable.

“It’s like going to the supermarket and paying $1 for a bar of soap,” he said. “That lets you use the soap. We were offering the equivalent of the right to make soap any way they wanted.”

The jury supported Alcatel’s arguments on every count except one. It deadlocked on the question of whether Microsoft willfully infringed on the Bell Labs patents. If the jury had found that it did, Microsoft would have had to pay triple damages.

“Microsoft has been and to some degree continues to be at a competitive disadvantage, as it did not file for patents for many, many, many years,” said Jack Russo, a patent lawyer with Russo & Hale in Palo Alto, Calif.

That makes it harder, he said, to work out deals with other large companies in which they exchange the rights to each other’s patents.

Large companies like AT&T and I.B.M. “have huge patent portfolios and that represents large and unpredictable risks for companies like Microsoft,” he said.

The judgment is part of litigation by Alcatel to enforce claims related to Bell Labs patents. The case was initially brought against Dell and Gateway, which make computers using Microsoft software. Other trials are pending for technology related to speech recognition, user interfaces and video processing.

Microsoft has countered with a claim, filed with the International Trade Commission, that Alcatel is violating its patents related to messaging technology.

The largest award for a patent infringement case to date was the $909 million that Kodak was ordered to pay in 1990 to Polaroid for violating patents related to instant cameras. That case also forced Kodak to exit the instant photography market and recall its cameras.

Mr. Burt said the appeals process might take another year or two. He said he did not expect that the courts would force Microsoft to remove the MP3 functions from Windows.

Ms. Campion of Alcatel declined to comment on whether that company would pursue similar claims against makers of MP3 players, like Apple.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment. A Thomson spokesman did not return calls or e-mail messages requesting comment.

If the judgment is affirmed, the damages payment would make only a modest dent in Microsoft’s cash hoard, which totaled almost $29 billion at the end of last year.

News of the ruling surfaced just before the regular close. Microsoft’s shares closed at $29.39, up 4 cents, and fell 11 cents after hours.

Alcatel-Lucent American depository receipts, each representing one ordinary share, rose 7 cents, to $13.14, in regular trading, and 34 cents after hours.

Money for nothing

2007-02-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

Money for nothing

Leader
Friday February 16, 2007
The Guardian

The internet is supposed to be entering a golden age of creativity, with unprecedented opportunities for users to generate their own content. So far, however, they are getting little reward for their efforts. Now some of the bigger ones are getting restless. This week Google lost the latest round of its dispute with Belgian newspapers over the right to link to news stories without paying, but the much wider argument about who should pay for content generated by users on the web is only just starting.

The main focus at the moment is on YouTube, a site that claims well over 100m downloads a day, ranging from home-made movies to clips from films or TV shows that are covered by copyright. No one worried when it was a loss-making site run by a couple of backroom entrepreneurs but now that it has been bought by Google as a vehicle for advertisements, all hell has been breaking loose, with media companies from Disney to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation claiming compensation because Google has been selling ads next to pirated movie clips (unless they are ones for an upcoming film or TV show, when they are rather glad of the pre-publicity).

But wait. Isn't this the same News Corporation that owns MySpace, which is making a mint by attracting ads to go alongside content uploaded by tens of millions of users for which it doesn't pay a cent? The main difference is that MySpace's users are difficult to organise. They are not corporations that can reach for a lawyer. Sooner or later, though, consumers will wake up to the new network monopolies springing up on the web which are making zillions on the back of other people's hard work. They include the likes of MySpace, Cyworld and Bebo, where users have invested so much work (such as videos, music collections, contact lists) that they are loth to move elsewhere. Google is different, despite its near-monopoly status, because if someone else produced a better search engine it could lose its users overnight.

Should companies which make money distributing other people's work pay for the right to do it? Not many do so at the moment. Even where there are revenue-sharing schemes, such as the mobile-phone network 3's pioneering SeeMeTV (where people upload their own video clips which others pay to view), the actual share is small. Other mobile operators charge users heavily for downloading from their mobile, but resist demands from content providers for decent payments.

Doing something for nothing is part of the founding spirit of the internet. But if intermediaries cream off the profits without rewarding the creators, the whole creative revolution could be stopped in its tracks.

Yahoo goes live with mobile display ads - www.mobile-ent.biz

2007-02-20T20:57:00.000-08:00

Yahoo goes live with mobile display ads
Feb 16th by Tim Green

Yahoo! has launched a display advertising platform from its mobile home page in 19 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Advertisers including Hilton's Embassy Suites, Infiniti, Intel, Nissan, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble Asia Pacific and Singapore Airlines will launch the first campaigns. The ads run near the top of the deck and let consumers click through to either call the advertiser or get more info.

The launch is more evidence of Yahoo!’s designs on the space. In November 2006, Vodafone named Yahoo! as its exclusive display advertising partner in the U.K. In the same month the search giant launched display ads on its US mobile site.

Steve Boom, senior VP of mobile and broadband, said: “Yahoo! can offer the world's biggest advertisers the ability to work with one trusted partner to reach a targeted audience of engaged consumers on both their PC and mobile phone."

Bill would require ISPs to track users

2007-02-19T20:52:00.000-08:00

Bill would require ISPs to track users

Published: 2007-02-19

A Republican congressman has introduced legislation that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to keep information about their users' identities and, possibly, their actions online.

Earlier this month, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced a bill (H.R. 837) with a stated purpose of combating child pornography but the legislation also includes a measure that would force ISPs to monitor their users, an item that has long been on law enforcement's wish list. The bill mandates that the U.S. Attorney General determine the exact regulations, but the rules should "at a minimum, require retention of records, such as the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance with court orders."

Needless to say, privacy advocates and Internet industry groups are not pleased.

"The Smith proposal would give the attorney general carte blanche to require service providers to keep all information imaginable on every one of their users," Kate Dean, executive director of the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, told the Washington Post last week.

Other proposed legislation would require that registered sexual offenders give up their online e-mail and Web-site addresses, as they currently must do with their physical addresses. Personal privacy has taken center stage in 2007, following numerous data breaches, worries about government surveillance and the monitoring of employees by corporations.

The bill, H.R. 837, is known as the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2007.

Posted by: Robert Lemos

Hot New Phones Coming to You Soon (We Hope) : Tom Samiljan : Yahoo! Tech

2007-02-19T20:49:00.000-08:00

Hot New Phones Coming to You Soon (We Hope) : Tom Samiljan : Yahoo! Tech

Mon Feb 12, 2007 1:34PM EST

Probably the biggest cell phone show that isn't CES is held every year on the Mediterranean—first it was the French Riviera (Cannes) and now it's the Catalonian coast (Barcelona). That's where the annual 3GSM World Congress—a worldwide gathering for mobile phone manufacturers, carriers, content makers, and assorted technologists—takes place. Sure, it's devoted only to GSM phones (used by Cingular and T-Mobile in the U.S.), but since most of the world uses that standard....

I went last year and got a lot out of it. The show has been growing in importance and prominence, similar to the way cell phones have over the last five years become indispensable in our daily lives. At any rate, I'm here in India, which happens to be the world's largest cell phone market (and growing)—increasingly the focus of the emerging-market strategies of cell phone manufacturers and providers (because there's no room to grow in established cell phone markets like Europe and the U.S.) That's a long-winded way of saying I'm not in Barcelona at the show, alas, but that hasn't stopped me from salivating over all the news and new phones.

There's likely to be loads of news over the next couple of days, but here are some of the hotter new phones on display at the show (culled from reports, of course, since I can't be there myself, alas). Note that none of these phones were on display at CES.

Motorola RIZR Z8: Leave it to RAZR-creator Motorola to come up with a totally new phone form. The RIZR Z8 is a curvy slider that's supposed to fit your face better. It's got 3G-quality HDSPA capability, a Symbian OS, a two-megapixel camera phone, and the latest Bluetooth profiles for music.

Nokia E90: This update to Nokia's high-end keyboard phone is way updated, with Wi-Fi, GPS, HSDPA (3G), and a 3.2 megapixel camera, making it sort of like the N93 but with a serious keyboard.

Nokia E61i: If you liked Nokia's Q-killer E61, you'll love the E61i, which has a two-megapixel camera, works with pretty much all corporate email systems, and is slimmer.

iPAQ Voice Messenger: There are hotter Windows Mobile 6 phones, but most of them won't come out in the States (yet). This candy-bar shaped iPAQ will be coming out in the U.S. this Spring. It looks just like a regular phone—unusual for an iPAQ—but runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard. Unfortunately, it's EDGE, so no 3G just yet, but since it has Wi-Fi and VOIP capability, you'll be okay as long as you're in a hotspot.

Samsung SGH-F520 and Samsung F700: The F700, an iPhone-killer with a touch screen and a keyboard, was announced last week, and it's just as non-3G/EDGE-enabled as the Apple offering. The F-520, a smaller and slicker phone, also with a keyboard, was announced today and has 3G capability. No word on whether either will make it to the U.S.

More to come over the next few days, but the above phones are the ones that are whetting my appetite. How about you?

Virtual war helps US soldiers deal with trauma

2007-02-19T20:46:00.000-08:00

Virtual war helps US soldiers deal with trauma

James Randerson, science correspondent
in San Francisco
Monday February 19, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

An image from the virtual war used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers. Photograph: University of Southern California

A "virtual Iraq" simulation that allows soldiers to re-live and confront psychological trauma has produced promising results for the initial handful of patients treated using the system.

The trial of the software, which recreates the sights, smells, sounds and jolts of the battlefield, has now been extended to a few dozen US service personnel who have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since returning from war in Iraq.

The treatment is a more powerful version of imagination therapy, a traditional technique in which a therapist asks a patient to imagine scenarios connected with a traumatic event. With the software technique, patients talk through their trauma with a therapist while wearing goggles that immerse them in a virtual reality battlefield. The therapist can increase the strength of the scenario by adding elements such as roadside bombs or attacks by insurgents.

"This is not a passive therapy where they simply sit back and are exposed to war scenes," the psychologist Skip Rizzo told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Francisco.

"It is a very interactive and engaging experience that the patient goes through where they tend to re-live their experience but in a safe supportive environment ... We are not in the business of retraumatising people by any means, we take it very very cautiously."

PTSD can take weeks or even years to develop after returning from battle. Sufferers can experience a range of symptoms including flashbacks, nightmares, a constant feeling of being on edge, emotional numbness and an inability to continue normal relationships with loved ones. Patients are often unable to work or leave their homes.

On one internet support site for soldiers with PTSD and their families, the girlfriend of a sufferer who calls herself Worlddream2 wrote: "I'm so desperate 'cause this situation has changed him so much and he became a complete stranger to me ...This situation is destroying me and I don't know what to do anymore."

A course of the virtual reality therapy might begin with the patient standing next to a Humvee vehicle in the virtual world - which is based on the popular computer game Full Spectrum Warrior. Once they are comfortable with that, the therapist might ask them to get into the vehicle, start the engine and pull away.

"Over the course of the sessions we gradually have them do things that are closer to their traumatic memory," said Professor Rizzo, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "We start adding in guns, bombs, insurgents, debris on the road, being attacked and so forth. We do this in a very measured and progressive fashion based on what the client can handle."

Sounds and smells seem to evoke the most powerful memories. "I think the visuals simply set the stage ... the sound definitely produces specific emotional reactions," he said.

Sounds such as car bombs were accompanied by vibrations from a "base shaker" - a powerful sub-woofer speaker - underneath the patient's seat.

Currently eight smells are used, including gunpowder, cordite, burning rubber, Iraqi spices, barbecued lamb and body odour.

"Don't laugh because body odour is quite relevant when you are in an environment where you have got a lot of people who can't necessarily shower every day," Prof Rizzo said.

The team was also looking into replicating the smell of blood and burned flesh. "I'm not sure we need to go to that level of intensity ... but it is something that we are considering and exploring," he said.

Even if the virtual world was not entirely accurate, patients often became so involved in re-living experiences that they subconsciously added items to the scene from their own memories, Prof Rizzo said.

The treatment consists of two sessions a week lasting up to 90 minutes. In between sessions, patients are asked to listen to a recording of their description of events during the therapy.

So far the PTSD symptoms of four patients had been reduced by the therapy. Another five patients had dropped out during treatment for various reasons.

Prof Rizzo said he was experimenting with using the virtual reality technique in other medical situations. For example, he had used virtual worlds to distract children during painful medical procedures such as chemotherapy.

He had also used it to help people recovering from a stroke to practice exercises to help regain movement. Practicing repetitive movements was boring, he said, so patients often lost interest and didn't repeat the exercises as often as they should. Using a virtual reality handball game, for example, to encourage them to reach for a ball numerous times, was more likely to keep them interested.

What is post-traumatic stress disorder?

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a psychological and physical condition caused by extremely frightening or distressing events, such as military combat, natural disasters, serious accidents, terrorist attacks and rape.

PTSD can affect people of all ages and around 5% of men and 10% of women will experience it at some time in their life. Symptoms include reliving the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, problems concentrating and sleeping, and feelings of isolation and detachment from life. These symptoms can be lasting and severe enough to significantly impair the person's daily life.

Previously called "shell shock" and "battle fatigue", PTSD was not formally recognised until after the Vietnam war.

A 12-Gigabyte Hard Drive That Slips Easily Into Your Pocket - New York Times

2007-02-15T00:56:00.000-08:00

A 12-Gigabyte Hard Drive That Slips Easily Into Your Pocket - New York Times

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

Published: February 15, 2007

Small on the outside and big on the inside, U.S.B. pocket drives have become a common choice for toting hefty files. The latest version of Verbatim’s Store ’n’ Go U.S.B. Drive holds 12 gigabytes of file storage on a device less than 3 inches high by 1.4 inches wide.

The Store ’n’ Go keeps data on a 1-inch hard drive and connects to the computer with a flip-out U.S.B. plug. The drive is priced at $179 and is expected to arrive in stores in the next few weeks. It works with most Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems.

Windows users also get Mobile Launchpad software, which can store and run programs right from the portable drive itself without requiring them to be installed on the host computer; details are at www.verbatim.com/hddrive. Some of the programs that you can take with you include Skype, AOL Instant Messenger and the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail program, so you can communicate from just about any place you can find a PC with an Internet connection.

J. D. BIERSDORFER

Nokia To Offer Intellisync Mobile E-Mail Server

2007-02-15T00:27:00.000-08:00

Nokia To Offer Intellisync Mobile E-Mail Server

A year after acquiring the wireless e-mail provider, Nokia is expected to announce Monday the availability of the Intellisync Mobile Suite 8.0 for enterprise. The Intellisync platform is compatible not just with Nokia phones, but up to 120 standard handsets and full-feature smart phones based on the Java-based J2ME platform. The e-mail service is already offered on some Nokia smart phones. The Finnish handset maker purchased the San Jose, Calif.-based Intellisync in February 2006 for $430 million.

There are two levels of service available. The professional version has a one-time fee of $129 per user and includes unlimited e-mail access, as well as calendar and contact syncing. The basic model is available for an unlimited number of users and has a one-time fee of $2,999. It includes unlimited access to basic e-mail services--users can receive, write and send e-mail, but it doesn't include calendar or contact list access or handle e-mail attachments.

Nokia is taking a populist approach to wireless e-mail, pitching its mobile e-mail platform as functional enough for corporate executives, but cost-effective enough for businesses to equip lower-level employees with access to wireless e-mail. The company is hoping the strategy will spur wider adoption of mobile e-mail. "If there are 700 million corporate e-mail boxes, why is it that only 14 or 15 million are mobilized?" asked Dave Grannan, General Manager of Mobility Solutions for Nokia Enterprise Solutions.

The advantages of the device-agnostic e-mail server are that it doesn't force a company to buy all new phones, the interface will be for any phone, and it can be scaled to include applications like device management and file synchronization, Grannan said.

Nokia's announcement is timed with the opening of the 3GSM World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona.

Microsoft Reveals New Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone Software, Improves World’s Fastest-Growing Mobile Operating System: Latest software to feature new m

2007-02-13T23:13:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Reveals New Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone Software, Improves World’s Fastest-Growing Mobile Operating System: Latest software to feature new messaging tools, tighter security and improved productivity features; devices to begin shipping worldwide by second quarter of 2007.

BARCELONA, Spain — Feb. 12, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Windows Mobile^® 6, the newest version of its mobile software platform. By improving usability and adding support for Microsoft^® Office features previously available only on PCs, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 delivers to the small screen a familiar and rich experience that meets the needs of work and life while on the go, all with a single device.

Pieter Knook, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded Devices Division, demonstrating the new Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone software at the 3GSM World Congress 2007. Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 12, 2007.

Click here for high-res version

“A work force that is both mobile and connected is becoming essential for business success,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “That’s why we’re integrating innovative mobile technologies into all our key products, with Windows Mobile as the centerpiece.”

Windows Mobile 6 delivers the ability to view e-mails in their original rich HTML format with live links to Web and SharePoint^® sites, which means text and images are displayed as they would be on a PC, and are available from a corporate e-mail server such as Exchange Server 2007, from Web-based accounts such as Windows Live™ Hotmail or from a myriad of other popular service providers. Windows Mobile 6 also includes Windows Live for Windows Mobile, which provides customers with a rich set of Windows Live services. For example, now through Windows Live Messenger, people can chat with more than one person at one time, express themselves through animated figures, quickly send a file or image, or record and send voice notes.

The newest version of the platform offers the most genuine Microsoft Office system experience in the mobile versions of Office Outlook^®, Office Word, Office Excel^® and Office PowerPoint^® by bringing capabilities once available only on the PC versions of these products to the small screen. This allows users to neatly view, navigate and edit Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in their original formatting, without affecting tables, images or text, and to view PowerPoint presentations on their device.

All Windows Mobile 6 powered devices include Direct Push Technology for up-to-date e-mail delivery and automatic synchronization of Outlook calendars, tasks and contacts through Microsoft Exchange Server. Windows Mobile 6 also offers a set of important device security and management features that include the capability to remotely wipe all data from a device should it be lost or stolen, helping ensure that confidential information remains that way.

Broad Industry Support to Result in Broader Choice of Devices

By the second quarter of this year, the world will see the first Windows Mobile 6 powered devices available on the market. In Europe, Orange plans to deliver the SPV E650 smartphone from HTC, and in Japan, SoftBank Mobile Corp. will offer new devices from Toshiba and HTC. And in the United States, the popular T-Mobile Dash will be updated with Windows Mobile 6 and be available in the coming months. Current T-Mobile Dash owners will also be able to upgrade existing devices with Windows Mobile 5.0 to Windows Mobile 6.

Scores of additional mobile operators and device makers from around the globe, including Cingular Wireless, now the new AT&T, Chunghwa Telecom, Dopod International Corp., HP, LG Electronics, Motorola Inc., Palm Inc., Samsung, SingTel, Sprint, Telefónica, Toshiba, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone and Willcom, plan to ship Windows Mobile 6-based devices this year. Many of these partners are expanding large existing portfolios of Windows Mobile powered smartphones.

“In a highly sophisticated mobile market such as Japan, people are turning to powerful and intuitive mobile devices to stay competitive in the business world,” said Ted Matsumoto, executive vice president of technology and chief strategy officer at SoftBank. “We continue to work with Microsoft to equip SoftBank Mobile customers with the most cutting-edge tools in mobile technology and are excited that they will be able to experience the enhanced features and functionality of Windows Mobile 6 on two new smart devices from Toshiba and HTC.”

Information Management Made Easier

Users of the Microsoft Office system on the PC — of which there are nearly 400 million worldwide — will feel right at home with the new mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint available for Windows Mobile 6 powered devices. Windows Mobile 6 addresses extensive user feedback and makes information management easier and more convenient through the following improvements:

•	Better-looking e-mail. Users view e-mail the way it was intended with its original pictures, tables and formatting, whether from a corporate e-mail server such as Exchange Server 2007, Web-based accounts such as Windows Live Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail, or a wide range of other service providers.
•	Ease of viewing and editing of Office system documents. The new Office Mobile suite, built for all Windows Mobile powered devices, gives users a truly familiar and powerful experience with rich viewing and editing capabilities, without having to worry about the deletion of critical formatting and images.
•	E-mail management and setup with fewer clicks. Nine new one-click options have been added, including Reply All, setting a flag, moving a message to a subfolder, and, of course, Delete. Users can set an automatic out-of-office reply while on the road when using a Windows Mobile 6 powered device and Exchange Server 2007.
•	Synchronization with Windows Vista. Windows Vista™ and the Windows Mobile Device Center take the guesswork out of managing a device and swapping music, pictures, movies and Outlook information between PC and the device.
•	Smart calendar bar. This innovative new feature gives users the ability to understand at a glance the day or week ahead and quickly determine open time on their schedules. With Exchange Server 2007, they can see who is attending a meeting and forward or reply to meeting requests.
•	Web search, e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and blogging all together. Windows Live for Windows Mobile will provide customers with a rich set of services including Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Live Search and Windows Live Spaces, uniquely designed to work with Windows Mobile software. Users can also find all their contacts in one unified list and see presence information on their Windows Live Messenger contacts.
•	Contacts with context. Call history is now placed where it belongs, in each individual contact card, so people spend less time searching and more time communicating.

“T-Mobile is excited to make it even easier for our customers to stay connected to the people that matter most with the increased functionality delivered by Microsoft Windows Mobile 6,” said Cole Brodman, senior vice president and chief development officer at T-Mobile USA. “The T-Mobile Dash is already one of our best-selling smartphones, so we’re thrilled to improve on an already great communications experience for our customers.”

The Best Platform for Business

Windows Mobile efficiently works with existing Microsoft business technology investments and offers users a familiar software experience, making it the smartest mobile solution for businesses to deploy:

•	Security options. The platform offers a variety of security options, giving IT departments ways to help secure a device, including new Exchange Server policies and certificate options, storage card encryption, and continued support for remote and local device wipe.
•	Protected content. Organizations using Information Rights Management (IRM) technology to help control the viewing, storing and printing of confidential information on PCs can now extend those capabilities to Windows Mobile 6 powered devices, a feature not available on any other mobile phone platform.
•	Line-of-business applications. Powerful, new mobile versions of the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework and Microsoft SQL Server™ are built into Windows Mobile 6, making it even easier to create and access sales tools, inventory tracking and many other applications from a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone.
•	Internet sharing. A new built-in application makes using a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone as a laptop’s high-speed modem “one-click easy” with either a Bluetooth wireless or cable connection.
•	Communication alternatives. Windows Mobile 6 makes it easier for operators and device-makers to integrate a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) solution into devices they are building. British Telecom in Europe, as well as HP, will be among the first to provide smartphones with new VoIP offerings for their business customers.

“As the first operator to ever release a Windows Mobile Smartphone, Orange has always had a strong relationship with Microsoft, and the launch of Windows Mobile 6 is a natural continuation of our story together,” said Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of Orange. “Now more than ever our customers can enjoy a straightforward mobile working experience with fast access to e-mail and business applications. The increased security removes barriers to mobile working, allowing more people to experience the benefits of having their office with them on the move.”

Windows Mobile 6 comes fresh on the heels of a successful year that saw Microsoft’s worldwide converged mobile device shipments grow 135.3 percent (year over year) in 2006, according to leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC. The industry is fast taking notice of Microsoft in the wireless arena and realizing the business benefits of Windows Mobile devices, resulting in IDC’s expectation that Windows Mobile will experience the largest growth of any mobile operating system worldwide, at 75.6 percent, through the year 2010.*

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

News @ Cisco: Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire Five Across

2007-02-12T19:37:00.000-08:00

News @ Cisco: Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire Five Across

Five Across technology to help enhance Cisco customers' website experience

SAN JOSE, Calif., February 9, 2007 - Cisco Systems, Inc., (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Five Across, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif., a leading vendor in the social networking marketplace.

The Five Across platform, Connect Community Builder, empowers companies to easily augment their websites with full-featured communities and user-generated content such as audio/video/photo sharing, blogs, podcasts, and profiles. These user-interaction functions help companies improve the interaction with their customers and overall customer experience on their websites. Social networking functions are of unique interest to media companies, sports leagues, affinity groups and any organization wishing to increase its interaction with its online constituency.

"Cisco believes the network is the platform for organizations to connect with their constituents and for individuals to connect with each other," said Dan Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG). "With the acquisition of Five Across, Cisco is taking an important step towards helping its customers evolve their website experience into something more relevant and valuable to the end-user."

Five Across was founded in 2003 and has 11 employees in San Francisco, Calif.. Upon close of the transaction the Five Across team and product portfolio will be integrated into CMSG led by Scheinman.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to close in the third quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2007, ending April 28, 2007.

For more information about the Cisco Media Solutions Group, go to: http://www.cisco.com/go/media.

2.4GHz technology to take hold in wireless mice, keyboards - 1/24/2007 - Electronic News

2007-02-12T01:40:00.000-08:00

2.4GHz technology to take hold in wireless mice, keyboards - 1/24/2007 - Electronic News

By Ann Steffora Mutschler
Electronic News, 1/24/2007

The wireless human interface device (HID) market -- which includes wireless mice, keyboards, and remote controls -- has historically been dominated by products operating in the 27MHz band but 2008 looks set to be a crossover year in which shipments of 2.4GHz-based products outstrip those running at 27MHz, thanks to wholesale product changes by major OEMs, according to market researchers at ABI Research.

The firm expects that by 2011, 2.4GHz products will account for triple the number of 27MHz products shipped.

While some wireless HID products may use other communication methods such as Bluetooth, ABI Research director Stuart Carlaw notes that Bluetooth still does not have price points low enough to allow it to penetrate much outside of its present territory: products aimed at smartphones, and mice for use with Bluetooth-enabled laptops.

“The narrowing cost differential between 2.4GHz and 27MHz ICs and the improved range of 2.4GHz mean that 2.4GHz products are well positioned to take advantage of the growing need to support media center PCs with rich navigational solutions such as Vista's Side Show,” Carlaw explained in a statement.

The firm forecasts the total market for wireless HID to grow from just more than 100 million units in 2005 to more than 168 million units in 2012, at a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent with a respectable share of that growth claimed by companies such as Nordic Semiconductor and TI, which stand to profit from the shift to 2.4GHz products.

At the same time, a wildcard in the development and growth of this market is Wibree, the new low-power wireless local area network technology.

“While Wibree is interesting and may have significant potential, it is still very new, and the jury remains out on the question of whether it can make significant inroads in the wireless HID market,” Carlaw concluded.

The brain scan that can read people's intentions

2007-02-10T20:22:00.000-08:00

The brain scan that can read people's intentions

Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 9, 2007
The Guardian

Using the technology is 'like shining a torch, looking for writing on a wall'. CT image: Charles O'Rear/Corbis

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.

The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.

"Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall," said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

The research builds on a series of recent studies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked to lying, violent behaviour and racial prejudice.

The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuroscience is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues surrounding future uses for the technology. If brain-reading can be refined, it could quickly be adopted to assist interrogations of criminals and terrorists, and even usher in a "Minority Report" era (as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg science fiction film of that name), where judgments are handed down before the law is broken on the strength of an incriminating brain scan.

"These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we're not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared," Professor Haynes told the Guardian.

The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Prof Haynes. "We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence."

During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen.

Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy.

The study revealed signatures of activity in a marble-sized part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that changed when a person intended to add the numbers or subtract them.

Because brains differ so much, the scientists need a good idea of what a person's brain activity looks like when they are thinking something to be able to spot it in a scan, but researchers are already devising ways of deducing what patterns are associated with different thoughts.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University, said the rapid advances in neuroscience had forced scientists in the field to set up their own neuroethics society late last year to consider the ramifications of their research.

"Do we want to become a 'Minority Report' society where we're preventing crimes that might not happen?," she asked. "For some of these techniques, it's just a matter of time. It is just another new technology that society has to come to terms with and use for the good, but we should discuss and debate it now because what we don't want is for it to leak into use in court willy nilly without people having thought about the consequences.

"A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty."

Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, said: "We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions.

"Some of that is extremely desirable, because it will help with diagnosis, education and so on, but we need to be thinking the ethical issues through. It adds a whole new gloss to personal medical data and how it might be used."

The technology could also drive advances in brain-controlled computers and machinery to boost the quality of life for disabled people. Being able to read thoughts as they arise in a person's mind could lead to computers that allow people to operate email and the internet using thought alone, and write with word processors that can predict which word or sentence you want to type . The technology is also expected to lead to improvements in thought-controlled wheelchairs and artificial limbs that respond when a person imagines moving.

"You can imagine how tedious it is if you want to write a letter by using a cursor to pick out letters on a screen," said Prof Haynes. "It would be much better if you thought, 'I want to reply to this email', or, 'I'm thinking this word', and the computer can read that and understand what you want to do."

· FAQ: Mind reading

What have the scientists developed?
They have devised a system that analyses brain activity to work out a person's intentions before they have acted on them. More advanced versions may be able to read complex thoughts and even pick them up before the person is conscious of them.

How does it work?
The computer learns unique patterns of brain activity or signatures that correspond to different thoughts. It then scans the brain to look for these signatures and predicts what the person is thinking.

How could it be used?
It is expected to drive advances in brain-controlled computers, leading to artificial limbs and machinery that respond to thoughts. More advanced versions could be used to help interrogate criminals and assess prisoners before they are released. Controversially, they may be able to spot people who plan to commit crimes before they break the law.

What is next?
The researchers are honing the technique to distinguish between passing thoughts and genuine intentions.

Hi-Tech Surveillance Firm Prospers

2007-02-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

Hi-Tech Surveillance Firm Prospers
Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2003-03-13

If you're under FBI surveillance, there's a good chance your phone calls and Internet traffic are traveling over the equipment of Verint Systems -- a company that's doing very well these days.

If IntelliFind sounds like something that would normally be found on a supercomputer humming in an NSA basement, there's a reason. Behind business intelligence offerings like IntelliFind, and a line of networkable video cameras, Verint is a leading maker of electronic surveillance equipment and software for the United States and other governments. And it turns out that while other technology firms are struggling in a down economy, the business of helping governments with their spying may be a growth industry. In quarterly results announced Wednesday, Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, posted record sales of $42 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2002 -- the company's third straight quarter of growth since going public in May 2002.

"During the year we believe that a greater interest in gathering intelligence to prevent criminal activity by government and law enforcement agencies resulted in greater demand for our communication interception solutions," said company president Dan Bodner in a conference call for analysts. "Over the past year we enhanced our competitive position by entering new markets, expanding our customer base, and introducing new capabilities for the analysis of content and culled data collected from wireline, wireless and data networks."

Among those new markets was an unnamed country "in the Latin America region" whose government recently placed a multi-million dollar order for communications interception systems, said Bodner.

Bodner didn't say what the Latin American government bought with that money, but the mainstay of Verint's electronic surveillance business is its "STAR-GATE" and "RELIANT" products, which operate on the supply and consumption sides of domestic spying respectively. The RELIANT system acts as a government agency's big ear, collecting and managing intercepted voice, e-mail, fax, SMS, data, chat, and Web browsing -- all on a single platform. On the delivery side, STAR-GATE does the actual wiretapping, and is primarily marketed to telephone companies trying to comply with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires telecommunications carriers to keep their networks wiretap friendly for the FBI. An ISP version of STAR-GATE lets Internet providers conduct lawful surveillance of their customers and send the intercepted data to law enforcement over private networks.

PATRIOT Profits
With recent legislation and court decisions granting U.S. law enforcement agencies greater spying powers than they've had since the Nixon administration, government surveillance solutions look like a good bet, and other technology companies are getting in on the game. Last Fall, VeriSign launched its "NetDiscovery" service -- a turnkey CALEA solution for telephone companies that sends intercepted communications to law enforcement over a national IP-based network, using Verint STAR-GATEs for the taps. And last August, computer security company Network Associates got into the Carnivore business with its acquisition of Utah-based Traxess, makers of the "DragNet" Internet spy tool.

And for every company that makes the news with a surveillance system, there may be countless more that nobody's ever heard of. When the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center recently obtained a list of companies vying for a piece of the Defense Department's "Total Information Awareness" computerized spying project, the list of bidders included nearly as many obscure companies as it did brand name defense contractors. "It looks like there's this whole world of these little security technology companies that are probably doing well these days," says EPIC attorney David Sobel.

But Gartner analyst John Pescatore isn't convinced that there's big money in domestic surveillance. Instead, he says, the real opportunities are in helping the U.S. perform surveillance internationally. Indeed, according to its quarterly report, Verint has a subsidiary that provides communications interception solutions to what's described demurely as "various U.S. government agencies." The subsidiary's offices hold a facility security clearance from the Defense Department, and are located in Chantilly, Virginia, a stone's throw from most of America's intelligence agencies.

"Certainly with the USA-PATRIOT Act and all this homeland security stuff, there's been more effort in domestic collection," says Pescatore. "But the domestic type money has been a lot slower to start flowing than the national intelligence stuff... There's been definite growth there."

BSI Corporation: Hi-Tech Articles: Warrior Wisdom for Business and Investment

2007-02-08T18:47:00.000-08:00

BSI Corporation: Hi-Tech Articles: Warrior Wisdom for Business and Investment

by David James

The teachings of two great warriors of ancient times, the Japanese samurai Miyamoto Musashi and the Chinese general Sun Tsu, have long provided inspiration and guidance not only in martial arts but in business and investment as well. Their classic books, Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings,” written in 1643, and Sun Tsu’s “The Art of War,” written around 400 B.C., are insightful studies of conflict and strategy, and they are as relevant to competition and success today as they were centuries ago. Translated copies of their books are available in most public libraries and can be purchased through many booksellers.

Key principles for success in business and investment today can be extracted from the writings of each of these great warriors. For Musashi, the dueler and sensei, who writes in detail of state of mind, focus, footwork and rhythm, it is the principle of disruption of the opponent or the battlefield. For Sun Tzu, the commander of armies, it is the principle of maneuver and understanding.

Each writes with great specificity about the conflicts and weapons of their day, but the following few quotes from their writings clearly indicate the relevance these two key principles today:

From Musashi on disruption:

“Do not forget about the possibility of disorder in times of order.”
“Fluster an opponent with unexpected moves.”
“Disrupt others’ defenses.”
“Always contrive to put your adversary at a disadvantage. Seize the initiative.”
“The science [of martial arts] is all about how to win by getting your opponent to take the initiative, using tactical ploys as your basis, launching various preliminary blows, and shifting strategically.”
“In a stand against many opponents, attack the first who comes forward. Do not wait.”

From Sun Tzu on maneuver and understanding:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
“What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.”
“To ensure that you withstand the brunt of the enemy’s attack and remain unshaken, use maneuvers direct and indirect.”
“There are armies that must not be attacked, positions that must not be contested.”
“If [the enemy] is in superior strength, evade him.”
“He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent, and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.”
“Avail yourself of any helpful circumstances over and beyond the ordinary rules and modify your plans accordingly.”
“Attack [the enemy] where he’s unprepared, appear where you are not expected.”
“The skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting.”

There are many examples of successful application of these two principles. One is Skype, the provider of phone services with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a technology that is disrupting the long distance sector of the telecommunications industry. Another is SouthWest Airlines, which has made profits in the dismal airline industry by offering services that do not compete directly with the major airlines.

Talk is Cheap

Skype, a variant of VoIP, is a peer-to-peer software-based phone system that connects users directly via the Internet using their computers, cell phones, PDAs or other devices. The Skype software is downloaded for free, and users talk for free when connected Skype-to-Skype.

Skype commenced operations in August 2003, and one year later it had more than 9.5 million users with at least 500,000 connected at any given time. Michael Powell, a Skype user and then the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, said at a telecom conference in 2004, “I knew [the traditional telephone system] was over when I downloaded Skype . . . . The world will change now inevitably.” Today Skype has more than 100 million users with at least three million of them connected at any given time.

Skype utilized a Musashi stratagem – employing a disruptive technology to seize a critical advantage in a rapidly changing industry, and it is moving swiftly to provide services that will actually earn it money, such as enabling users to connect to land lines for as little as two cents per minute (“SkypeOut”). Seeing Skype’s potential, eBay acquired Skype for a breathtaking $2.6 billion in October 2005.

Friendly Skies

SouthWest Airlines launched its operations in 1971 with a strategy of avoiding direct competition with its many stronger and larger rivals. Its business model focused on short haul, high frequency, point-to-point routes, with low fares and friendly service but few luxuries (no first class or business class seats and no in-flight meals).

Herbert Kelleher, now SouthWest’s chairman, started the airline with this notion: “If you get your passengers to their destinations when they want to get there, on time, at the lowest possible fares, and make darn sure they have a good time doing it, people will fly your airline.” This folksy statement was a rather simplistic variation of a Sun Tzu stratagem: win by understanding the opposition and avoiding direct competition with stronger rivals.

SouthWest Airlines has been a profitable investment for its founders and shareholders alike. While many airlines have failed or entered bankruptcy in recent years, in 2005 SouthWest completed 33 consecutive years of profitability and was named by Fortune magazine as one of “American’s Most Admired Companies” for the ninth year in a row.

Skype and SouthWest Airlines are two prominent examples of these principles, but there are many others. Indeed, Musashi’s and Sun Tzu’s principles are applied every day as businesses are formed and managed and as investments are made.

Care Package

Consider Doctors' Choice, a homecare business serving senior citizens in the San Francisco, California, Bay Area. In 2004, Philip Lee, its founder and operations director, made the strategic decision to narrow the company’s focus to serve one of the most difficult types of patients to care for: senior citizens with Alzheimer’s or dementia. “In an industry that is all about individual care, we've found that customers won't settle for a big company trying to be all things to all people,” says Lee. “By specializing, we may never be the biggest homecare provider, but our high scores on customer satisfaction, retention, and word-of-mouth growth speak for themselves. We expect to continue to have healthy growth and satisfied customers for a long time to come.”

An additional benefit Lee found in narrowing his company's focus was an ability to better understand his customers' unique needs. This in-depth knowledge has allowed his company to develop proprietary approaches that larger companies often fail to see or have trouble justifying investment in. One such proprietary approach, using technology to collect relevant data, helps to coordinate and optimize the efforts of family members, doctors and healthcare professionals in caring for patients. “Our proprietary and patent-pending technologies are proving disruptive in what continues to be a staid, archaic and fragmented industry,” Lee says.

Easy Pay

In another example of Musashi’s and Sun Tzu’s principles applied to the present day, Finpago Inc. of Conshohoken, Pennsylvania, is taking advantage of disorder in the healthcare and electronic payment industries, and using knowledge of those industries, to create a service of potentially broad application.

The focus of Finpago’s service is the process of clearing specific healthcare products and services for payment with consumers’ pre-tax funds under employers’ Flexible Spending Account plans (FSAs) and the government’s Healthcare Savings Account plans (HSAs). These plans permit consumers to buy qualifying healthcare products and services with pre-tax monies, deducted from their paychecks or contributed to an HSA, which would otherwise be taxed as income. The bottleneck is sorting out and accounting for what qualifies for credit or reimbursement under the plans.

Finpago has developed a patent-pending service – “FSAok” – that serves as a clearinghouse for the collection and application of purchase data that qualify consumers for credit or reimbursement under their FSA or HSA plans. Finpago’s technology collects from participating merchants (typically leading pharmacy, grocery and mass merchant retailers) the necessary data about product qualification and enables consumers to use their FSA or HSA accounts to make eligible healthcare purchases from merchants without later having to submit paper receipts to their FSA/HSA administrators for reimbursement. This service even obviates the chore of having to separate eligible products from non-eligible products in the cashier’s check-out line.

According to Fred Hawkins, the founder and CEO of Finpago, more than 11 million households are using FSA or HSA accounts and buy more than $30 billion eligible products annually, but currently systems that use FSA/HSA debit cards to automate those purchases are unable to automate 30 percent of qualifying purchases and typically do not even work for many eligible over-the-counter products. Moreover, consumers presently use their FSA/HSA debit cards for less than 50 percent of eligible prescription purchases and only seven percent of eligible over-the-counter products. “As consumer awareness grows, and as more merchants and FSA/HSA administrators utilize Finpago’s technology, this will be a huge market,” says Hawkins. “We expect that Finpago will have a big piece of it.”

Hawkins attributes Finpago’s promising potential to a thorough understanding the relevant industries and to application of a disrupting technology. Finpago’s technology is all the more disruptive, he says, because it cuts across many different markets and industries – consumers, merchants, providers and manufacturers.

Virgin Territory

Finally, consider an inspiring example in the manufacturing industry – MBA Polymers Inc. of Richmond, California. This company manufactures three important plastics used in the durable goods and electronics industries, and it does so using less than five percent of the oil used by companies that produce plastics from scratch, the “virgin plastics producers.” It also gets rid of discarded junk in the process. With patented processes, it extracts these plastics (polypropylene, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene – ABS, and polystyrene) from thrown-away computers, cell phones, TVs, VCRs, refrigerators, and various broken or obsolete products that are otherwise filling up dump sites these days.

Mike Biddle, the CEO of MBA Polymers, points out that most recyclers of plastics merely produce a simple product, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), from plastic bottles and the like. “The opportunities for us are immense. Less than four percent of the complex plastics found in discarded products are recycled, compared with 95 percent for steel and aluminum,” he says. “We are using disruptive technologies to take business away from the big virgin plastic producers. There’s no point in competing directly with them.”

The World Economic Forum in Davos named MBA Polymers one of its 2005 Technology Pioneers. MBA has an R&D and demonstration center and pilot line in Richmond, California, and world-scale recycling plants in Guangzhou, China, and Kematen, Austria. These plants are built for less than $23 million, which is less than half the cost of a typical virgin plastics plant, and they are twenty times as energy-efficient.

Martial Arts Rewards

These companies – Skype, SouthWest Airlines, Doctors’ Choice, Finpago and MBA Polymers – are just a few of the businesses that are benefiting from application of the principles of Miyamoto Musashi and Sun Tzu, two of the greatest martial arts teachers of all time. Founders, managers, employees and investors of all businesses, who follow these principles and who practice in their own business lives the precepts of martial arts – study, harmony, character building, discipline, self-control, respect and compassion – will become rich and successful by all measures.

Vishing, A New Kind of Threat : Gina Hughes : Yahoo! Tech

2007-02-08T00:22:00.000-08:00

Vishing, A New Kind of Threat : Gina Hughes : Yahoo! Tech

Fri Jan 26, 2007 11:58PM EST

With the popularity of Internet telephony, comes a new scam called Vishing. The gals over at Blogher, wrote a good conversation starter about it. Vishing is a phone scam that uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to trick you into divulging personal or financial information over the phone. Criminals use this new technique to randomly dial customers in hopes of obtaining their credit card number complete with security codes, expiration date and other information. It's extremely important for VoIP users to be extra vigilant when receiving mysterious calls or emails that "alert" them of fraudulent activity on their credit card.

If you receive a call prompting you to dial a toll-free number, think twice before offering sensitive information, especially over an automated system. The call may appear legitimate, but what unsuspecting card holders don't know is that this new breed of criminals have software that can recognize telephone keystrokes, and any information they enter is being recorded. Once criminals get this information from you, they will not think twice about cleaning out your account. The scary part about this type of scam is that victims are often unsuspecting because the crime is being conducted offline. Since this is still a new type of technology, there is not much you can do in terms of installing software or some sort of encryption method. The best thing you can do is use common sense. It's better to call your credit card provider or bank if you suspect any illegal activity on your account.

How Phishing Sites Work
The Attack of the Big Phish
How to Spot a Phishing Scam

Help! Too Much Technology : Dory Devlin : Yahoo! Tech

2007-02-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

Help! Too Much Technology : Dory Devlin : Yahoo! Tech

Help! Too Much Technology

Sun Jan 28, 2007 7:10PM EST

Does this scenario sound familiar? Prices on HDTVs have fallen to a place where you think, "Let's do it. We can always save money by installing it ourselves!" Only to find several hours and many frustrating rants later that it's not as easy as you'd hoped.

If it rings a sad little bell, you're in good company. Dr. Donald Norman, an enormously competent engineer who helped set up the technical standards for high-definition TV in the United States, didn't even try to set up his HDTV by himself. He hired professional installers. Technology changes so fast and the competitive pressure is so intense, Norman says in this CBS 60 Minutes episode called Get Me the Geeks, that many electronics products are pushed quickly to market before engineers have time to simplify them.

"Someone complained to me, you need a degree, an engineering degree, from MIT to work this damn thing," Norman tells 60 Minutes. "Well, I have an engineering degree from MIT, and I couldn't work it."

Sometimes, the technology we crave (and hope will make our lives better) is, simply, too much. We often get more than we need, want, and can easily figure out on our own with each new device we bring into our lives. Even after we pour through inch-thick manuals, and give it to our kids to tinker with.

Tell the truth: Do you really know how to work all the settings on your newest digital camera? Or do you point and shoot 98 percent of the time? And do you honestly know all the things you can do with your sleek new cell phone besides make calls, send text messages, and take photos? Tech manufacturers are doing a great job of marketing all these must-have add-ons, but often fall short of making all the functions intuitively easy to find and use.

I've got a Palm Treo 700p, and I make calls, get my email, surf the web, and record calendar items on it. But I know I haven't come close to mastering its full functionality and using all that I paid dearly for.

In the 60 Minutes segment, New York Times columnist David Pogue theorizes that many tech troubles often can be traced to the fact that there are so many cooks in the tech kitchen. Different companies make the computers, software, and drivers that need to work together for your one camera, for example. So odds are, there will be trouble at some point, followed by frustration.

Where are you on the too-much-tech meter? Have you gotten caught in a vortex of complicated tech setups and troubleshooting sessions? Or is all the new technology you've added at home and the office truly making life more fun and work more efficient? Step right up and unload your tech frustrations below!

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Password Makeover : Becky Worley : Yahoo! Tech

IBM and Cisco Alliance Value Proposition

Executive Perspectives on the Alliance

Cisco and IBM Expand Global Services Alliance to Collaborate on Maintenance Services in 46 New Countries

Expanded Relationship Provides Mutual Customers with Single Source for Product Maintenance Services

Cisco Global Services Alliances

Tor hack proposed to catch criminals

Too Few Friends? A Web Site Lets You Buy Some (and They’re Hot)

Microsoft to Buy Health Information Search Engine

Mozilla fixes Firefox bugs

News @ Cisco: Cisco and Apple Reach Agreement on iPhone Trademark

MP3 Patents in Upheaval After Verdict - New York Times

Money for nothing

Yahoo goes live with mobile display ads - www.mobile-ent.biz

Yahoo! has launched a display advertising platform from its mobile home page in 19 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Gina Hughes
The Techie Diva

Robin Raskin
The Boomer

Ben Patterson
The Gadget Hound

Ben Patterson
The Gadget Hound

Christopher Null
The Working Guy