Is Privacy Where It's At?

In 2000, the mobile industry's dream was, "You're passing a Starbucks, and your mobile phone pings with a coupon for 50 percent off a latte." In 2008, the reality will be, "You're lost, but your cell phone knows where you are -- and will get you outta there." Location-based mobile services, or LBS -- mobile data applications that use information about your location derived from GPS, cell tower triangulation or your own input -- can provide a crucial link between emergency workers and people in trouble. They can also be a lot of fun, assisting in finding friends or simply navigating around town. LBS may really take off in 2008, thanks to a new generation of GPS chips, according to ABI Research analyst Shailendra Pandey. "One of the biggest hurdles for integrating GPS into handsets was that the chipset cost was very high," he said. Today, "prices have come down, and the manufacturers are also taking care of some of the technology issues like signal strength. Now, operators also seem to be more optimistic about the market for location based services." While consumers happily embrace services that make life safer, easier and more fun, some privacy experts worry that proliferating GPS-enabled handsets will take us further down the path toward a totally monitored environment. For instance, the consumer advocacy group Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has warned that consumers should only subscribe to services that offer maximum user control. It also said location-based functions should be opt-in, rather than opt-out, to avoid abuse. That concern isn't new. In 2000, the wireless industry association CTIA petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to codify rules of notice and consent for using location information. The association suggested LBS providers should be required to inform consumers about their data collection and use practices before they can use or disclosing their information, allowing consumers to choose whether to participate. In 2002, the FCC declined to issue rules, saying existing laws were enough. Evidently, however, recent events suggest that further scrutiny might be needed. Last month, the Washington Post reported that law enforcement officials routinely get court orders requiring mobile network operators to help track suspects. They used to do this by regularly pinging suspects' cell phones; the job has been made even easier with the arrival of GPS in phones. While this practice could save a life -- for example, helping to locate a kidnapping victim -- some judges don't require law enforcement to show probable cause that a crime is being committed. According to the Post, one judge reasoned that since a suspect was voluntarily carrying a tracking device, no warrant was necessary. In August, a New York City employee was fired from his job after the GPS on his city-provided phone showed that he'd been at home before his shift ended on 83 occasions, according to the New York Post. The judge in that case, according to the report, said an employer "is not expected to notify its employees of all the methods it may possibly use to uncover their misconduct." Similarly, LBS service provider TeleNav offers TeleNavTrack, a tool promising to employers that they can, according to the company, "See where your workers are and what they're doing." The service from TeleNav, which claims 14 carrier partners, is only operable when an employee is clocked in. But the company advises employers to inform staff upfront about the service. "There are more benefits %26#91;for employees%26#93; at the end of the day," TeleNav co-founder Sal Dhanani told InternetNews.com.. "They don't have to go back to the yard to clock out, and they get navigation help when they need it." Google found itself in a privacy flap in November with its Maps for Mobile service, which lets users search for businesses nearby and get directions without keying in their address. Saul Hansell of the New York Times reported, "Google figures out which cell towers are where by secretly enlisting the help of a million of its mobile maps users who happen to have phones with built-in GPS devices that are not locked by the carriers." The search and advertising Goliath has since posted information about its location collection practices. A Google spokesman told InternetNews.com. that many of the company's products, including Google Maps for Mobile's My Location, have opt-out features. In the case of Google Maps for Mobile, users must go to the help menu and opt out of the feature. He pointed out that because Google doesn't know the names or phone numbers of its Maps for Mobile users, the company would be unable to aid law enforcement in tracking suspects. When parents track minor children, consent isn't an issue. Sprint Nextel, Disney Mobile and Verizon Wireless all offer services that let parents discover where their kids' cell phones are. Verizon Wireless Chaperone, launched in June 2006, has two options, both available for the Migo, a phone designed for kids. Chaperone's Locator lets parents find the whereabouts of a child's Migo via a Web site. The service's Child Zone feature, meanwhile, lets them establish predetermined areas in which a child can travel with the phone -- automatically alerting them when they leave the zone. When it unveiled the Chaperone services, Verizon emphasized in a statement that it had taken steps to prevent misuse of the tracking tools: Chaperone would be sold only by verified retail agents or telesales companies, and only to people with "family"-level wireless plans. Next page: Wireless games lead the charge in privacy.

Business Intelligence's Feeding Frenzy

Despite concerns about a potentially weak 2008 for software companies, there's one sector of the business that continues to draw startups and acquisitions at a brisk pace: business intelligence software. "Business intelligence is no longer a back-office, nice-to-have application," said Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson. "It's the next business differentiator." Variously called corporate performance management, profitability management, and a host of other names, business intelligence tools help companies look deep into their customer and transactional data to make decisions about how to run more effectively. Increasingly, businesses are finding the ability to make those decisions highly desirable. "Companies used to compete by being more productive," Evelson said. "But it's very difficult to compete today based just on price and services." As a result, BI specialists have become prey in a mounting surge of consolidation. Beginning with Microsoft's purchase of ProClarity in April 2006, many of the independent BI software companies have since been snapped up in an rush of acquisitions. "In that sector, there almost aren't any names left anymore -- they're all gone," said Robert Johnson, associate director of technology coverage at investment research firm Morningstar. In March, Oracle acquired Hyperion Solutions for about $3.3 billion. In October, SAP upped the ante with its acquisition of Business Objects for $6.7 billion. And the next month, IBM announced its intention to acquire Cognos for $5 billion. The remaining players, including SAS, MicroStrategy and Teradata, are likely to be in the sights of larger companies looking to cash in on what has become a full-fledged boom, according to analysts. The reason for the consolidation isn't that BI software is being commoditized. Rather, it's becoming a major competitive advantage for both vendors and customers, according to industry watchers. "The way %26#91;companies%26#93; compete today is, when I create a campaign, if my analysis of who my target customers are is better than yours, I'm going to get more customers," Evelson said. "That's a process run by BI applications." The biggest business gains for customers is going to be in BI apps," he said, which is why the big software players -- "the Oracles, SAPs and IBMs" -- are acquiring BI companies. According to a Gartner Research study published in November, Oracle's Hyperion was the market share leader in what Gartner labels the "corporate performance management" sector, with 20 percent of the overall software licensing revenue in the space in 2006. But taken from a broader view -- online analytical processing tools as a whole -- Microsoft represents the largest player in the market, according to 2006 market share numbers from the Business Application Research Center. Next page: Still plenty of room to grow.

More Legal Woes for Vonage

The hits just keep coming for Vonage. Last week, Nortel Networks tagged the VoIP (define) provider with another lawsuit, alleging Vonage violated the Canadian network-equipment maker's patents related to Internet phone services such as 911 and 411 calling as well as its click-to-call feature. Unlike the other patent infringement litigation that has consumed Vonage in the past few years, this lawsuit is actually in response to one Vonage filed against Nortel earlier this year, charging the network-equipment maker had violated a trio of patents it had acquired from Digital Packet Licensing (DPL) in 2006. DPL originally filed suit against Nortel in 2004 for violating three patents related to multiplexed digital-packed telephone systems and packet-switching communications systems. Charles Sahner, a spokesman for Vonage, on Friday told the Associated Press the company plans to hold its ground%26#151;at least for now. "Litigation is ongoing, and both parties have filed%26#151;and will continue to file%26#151;papers supporting their case," he said, adding "we always prefer to settle disputes amicably whenever possible." Settling is something the Holmdel, N.J.-based company has mastered so far this year. In November, Vonage announced it had reached a settlement agreement with AT%26T less than a month after it accused Vonage of infringing on patents that let users make VoIP calls using standard telephone devices. In October, it worked out a settlement agreement with Verizon under which it will pay a maximum of $120 million for infringing on three of Verizon's patents, and agreed to pay Sprint Nextel $80 million for similar transgressions. In March, a Virginia jury found Vonage had infringed on the Verizon patents and awarded the company $58 million in damages plus a royalty on future sales of its Internet-based telephone service. While the company still claims more than 2.5 million subscribers are connecting their phones to their broadband connections using a Vonage adapter, the legal uncertainty combined with the hefty settlement fees have conspired to erode sales growth as well as the company's stock price. On Tuesday, its shares closed off 1 cent per share, or less than 1 percent, to $2.01 per share, down more than 72 percent for the year. "As an industry, it's important for Vonage to keep fighting," Brett Azuma, an Ovum analyst, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "It's an independent that built a noticeable customer presence. I don't profess to study their finances, but %26#91;the litigation and settlements%26#93; has to hurt." Azuma said, lawsuits aside, Vonage has a distinct advantage over Skype and other VoIP providers. "Most of Vonage's users are paying customers," he said. "And the people who use Vonage are very happy with it."

Liberty Alliance Unveils Improved SAML Certification

The Liberty Alliance announced Tuesday that the Tower of Babel just got one story shorter now that five IT providers have passed a unified test to insure single sign-on interoperability. The Alliance is a consortium focused on identity management in Web services and the development of a number of specifications related to identity and single sign-on. It has proposed extensions to the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an XML standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains. In previous SAML (define) testing, two companies could claim compliance with the SAML 2.0 spec if they passed the test when communicating among themselves, but there were no promises that they would interoperate with anyone else. So while the list of companies that were SAML-compliant was lengthy, there were no promises that they actually could interoperate with anyone%26#151;only with two companies on the list%26#151;and the list didn't specify which companies. Thanks to a new full-matrix interoperability testing methodology from The Drummond Group, HP, IBM, RSA, Sun Microsystems and Symlabs can claim full interoperability with each other and every other company that passes the Drummond tests is guaranteed to work with all of the previously certified vendors. "The old list didn't go as far as the random nature of a real world deployment," Roger Sullivan, president of the Liberty Alliance and vice president of Oracle Identity Management told InternetNews.com. "In a real world deployment, the vendors with whom I'm going to interoperate with could be anyone. That's the point. I want my test to be as comprehensive as possible so customers who see the list know that the companies all work together." There was also a change in how the tests are conducted. Previous compliance tests were done in a lab, but now they were done on the open, public Internet, "like in a real business environment, competing with traffic from all around the world," said Sullivan. Jason Rouault, CTO of Identity and Security Management for HP Software, had high praise for the new testing methods. "The standards around federation (define) were created and designed to achieve interoperability," he said. "We couldn't do things like a single sign-on or attribute sharing because every vendor was doing it totally different." The single sign-on certification will be a big help for HP, he said. "It will really bring the customer costs savings and assurance in value," said Rouault. These tests took about six weeks to validate compared to the only one week required by the older tests. But it insures that SAML messages can be passed back and forth among all parties, and that they meet the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) requirements for SAML 2.0 compliance. In October the GSA began to mandate passing SAML 2.0 interoperability testing as a prerequisite for participating in the federal government's E-Authentication Identity Federation. The U.S. and 21 other nations had adopted SAML 2.0 for their secure sign-on, so any firm wanting to do business with these nations needs to pass the full-matrix test. "SAML is the de facto protocol requirement around the world for federation," said Sullivan. "With the GSA endorsing this and making this testing as a prerequisite for their environment, we expect this program will accelerate even faster. But time will tell."

Pressure Mounts on Google/DoubleClick

With a decision from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the Google/DoubleClick merger imminent, two groups warning of privacy concerns with the combined company are ramping up their efforts to stamp privacy measures on the deal. Speaking in a joint telephone press briefing, the heads of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) said the commissioners are duty-bound to look at privacy concerns in their review of the merger between the two leaders in their respective sectors of online advertising. After their call for Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras to recuse herself from the inquiry because of a potential conflict of interest was rejected, the groups are now exploring legal options to force the recusal. Majoras used to work for Jones Day, the law firm that DoubleClick has retained to advise it in the merger proceedings. Majoras' husband is currently a non-equity partner at the firm. DoubleClick and the FTC have said that Jones Day is not involved in the U.S. government's consideration of the matter, and has never appeared before the FTC on behalf of DoubleClick. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC, said that the groups are moving quickly to mount a legal challenge against Majoras' decision not to recuse. They are currently trying to decide the best venue in which to seek a judicial review, on what law they would base their claim and whether they should file the challenge immediately, or, given that a decision from the FTC on the merger could come as early as this week, whether they should wait until after the announcement is made. Irrespective of the recusal issue, CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester said that the groups would call on Congress to intervene should the FTC approve the merger without significant privacy safeguards. "Dealing with new media mergers in this part of the century, you cannot separate the data collection of online business and privacy," Chester said. "Truly in my mind, it's one of the most important media mergers ever." The privacy concerns arise from the prospect of combining the cookies that DoubleClick places on users' computers with Google's server logs, the repositories of all searches users maker through the company's search engine. Google's algorithm-based AdSense serves up clickable links based on search queries, while DoubleClick places banner ads on Web sites. The FTC began its review in May. Rotenberg believes that the FTC is likely to incorporate some of the privacy protections the petitioners called for into its final approval of the merger. Top on their list is language that would require Google to be more transparent with its data collection, limit the amount of time that it retains users' information and keep its server logs segregated from DoubleClick's cookie jar. Less optimistic, Chester said he is already looking ahead to the tougher fight the merger is facing in Europe, where it is under review by the European Commission. Yesterday, European lawmakers called for the regulators to hold a meeting next month to take a closer look at the privacy concerns. The meeting will be held Jan. 21 in Brussels; Rothenberg will be one of the participants. The EC is scheduled to complete its review by April 2. "What doesn't get addressed here is likely to get another examination over in Europe," Chester said. In practice, the companies could not begin operating as a combine until both the EC and FTC approved the deal, according to Rebecca Arbogast, principal at research and analysis firm Stifel Nicolaus. That means that the EC review could present the biggest obstacle for the acquisition, since even if Majoras (who supports the merger) bowed out, the vote among the remaining four commissioners would likely be tied 2-2, which by FTC rules would be enough to approve it. In the United States, one of the fundamental issues at play is whether privacy considerations should even factor into FTC merger reviews, which typically focus on anticompetitive concerns. Rotenberg said that the FTC's legal obligation to investigate privacy concerns involving the merger is rooted in section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which gives the Commission the mandate to prevent unfair or deceptive business practices. EPIC, CDD and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group submitted a petition to the FTC in April calling for a full review of the proposed merger. In the complaint, the groups suggest that the two companies do not put forth sufficient effort to protect the data they collect, and that the merger could be injurious to consumers. Therefore, they argue, the language of the FTC Act that gives the agency a mandate to prevent "unfair or deceptive acts or practices" also requires it to insert significant privacy safeguards into approval of the merger. To Google, the argument that does not hold. Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for the company, has told InternetNews.com that while Google is committed to protecting its customers' privacy, the Commission has already said that privacy will not be a factor in the review. Kovacevich was referring to a comment by Commissioner Jon Leibowitz, who said that the review "can't be about privacy, per se." When asked about Leibowitz's comment, the CDD's Chester suggested the reporter ask the commissioner if he still feels that way, calling the statement "premature." Chester said that the FTC commissioners are all deeply concerned about the privacy implications of a Google/DoubleClick combine - specifically the merging of the two companies' usage logs - but that so far they have been hemmed in by "timidity and legalistic narrowness," and have been "ducking the issue." "If the commissioners fail to act in what they personally believe it will be a violation of trust," he said.

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Microsoft, Viacom in $500 Million Ad Deal

Microsoft and cable giant Viacom announced Wednesday they've inked a deal aimed at providing content to Microsoft's Web sites, as well as making Microsoft into Viacom's preferred Web site display ad service provider, and letting the software company sell unsold display advertising for Viacom Web properties. "Microsoft%26#146;s Atlas division will become the ad server for Viacom%26#146;s U.S. Web sites and Microsoft will have the exclusive right to sell remnant display advertising inventory on Viacom%26#146;s U.S. Web sites," a statement by the two companies said. The Redmond software titan won the Atlas AdManager graphical ad serving technology when it acquired aQuantive for $6 billion last summer. Under the terms of this week's deal, Microsoft will get non-exclusive access to long and short-form TV and theatrical content for use on Microsoft properties such as MSN and Xbox 360. Among the content sources being licensed are MTV, Comedy Central, BET and Paramount Pictures. The companies said that the five-year deal is worth roughly $500 million, although they declined to disclose details of the monetary portions of the agreement. Despite the talk of a half a billion dollars changing hands, however, don't expect the deal to make much of a contribution to Microsoft's bottom line any time soon, cautions one long-time observer of the company's foray into online advertising. "I don't think we're going to see a ton of progress %26#91;towards profitability%26#93; this year %26#91;2008%26#93; because they're still investing," Matt Rosoff, lead analyst for consumer technologies at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. "This deal is about Microsoft getting a big-name reference customer for its Atlas ad serving platform," Rosoff said. Why is that important? "They're in an important battle with Double-Click," said Rosoff. Indeed, although Microsoft has many irons in the fire when it comes to online advertising, this deal addresses a key strategic area. In order to continue to expand its money-making opportunities in online advertising, and thus continue to grow as a company, Microsoft has to do more than just sell ads on its own sites. "You need to link big publishers with big advertisers," Rosoff said. That was one of the reasons for the aQuantive purchase in the first place %26#150; and this deal represents a significant first step along that path. In another part of the deal, Microsoft will buy advertising on Viacom broadcast and online networks over the life of the contract. The companies will also collaborate on promoting and sponsoring awards shows on both MTV and BET Networks. Additionally, Microsoft gets the right to sell unsold Viacom display ad space, largely through DRIVEpm, another of the properties it acquired when it bought aQuantive. DRIVEpm provides services that match advertiser campaigns up with publisher ad inventory. Microsoft will sell and serve unsold Viacom display advertising inventory via Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions and DRIVEpm, with the two firms sharing the revenue.

Oracle, Accenture Deliver the Goods

The tech sector got some welcome news late Wednesday, when Oracle and Accenture delivered quarterly results that topped Wall Street forecasts. Shares of both companies were trading higher after hours, but it remains to be seen whether the good news will be enough to boost a market buffeted by a global credit crunch. Oracle's November quarter sales were up 28% to $5.3 billion, well ahead of the $5 billion Thomson Financial consensus estimate, and earnings of 31 cents a share were four cents ahead of forecasts. New software license revenues, an important indicator of future growth, were also strong, up 38%, Oracle's best quarter in a decade. Database and middleware new license revenues were up 28% and applications new license revenues were up 63%. The company also took pains to point out that it is outgrowing rivals SAP and IBM. Oracle also said it doesn't think it can work out a deal to acquire BEA Systems. Accenture, meanwhile, posted 19% sales growth to $5.67 billion and earnings of 60 cents a share, both better than expected, and the company raised guidance too. Oracle shares were up 4% in late trading, and Accenture shares gained 3%. The good news came after another volatile day for the stock market, which ended the day mixed on persistent credit market concerns. Palm fell 7% on its second warning in a month, and Rambus shares were off 4.5% after lowering guidance. AMD finally broke its losing streak, gaining 4%. Sprint slipped 2% on a new CEO. ADC telecom fell 13% on a $400 million debt offering. Leap Wireless was up 18% on no apparent news. The Nasdaq gained 5 to 2601, the S%26amp;P slipped 2 to 1453, and the Dow lost 25 to 13,207. Volume declined to 3.39 billion shares on the NYSE, and 1.9 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by an 18-14 margin on the NYSE, and 15-14 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 43% on the NYSE, and 49% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 28-278 on the NYSE, and 55-249 on the Nasdaq.

Why Seniors Say "When" Too Soon

By Benjamin Lester
ScienceNOW Daily News
17 December 2007

Thirsty old folks drink less water than parched whippersnappers because their brains are more easily satisfied, according to a new study. The findings suggest that the brain's satiation mechanisms malfunction as we age and might help explain why seniors are at greater risk for dehydration.

Feelings of thirst stem from two main changes in the blood: a higher concentration of salts and a lower concentration of water. Ordinarily, the feeling of thirst prompts us to drink enough water to restore a balance. However, researchers have known for several years that older people tend to drink less, and the reason has remained unclear.

Curious about whether the fault lay in the brain, a team led by neuroscientists from the University of Melbourne in Australia induced thirst in 10 men in their 20s and in 12 men in their 60s or 70s by injecting them with a salty solution. The scientists then spied on the subjects' brains using positron emission tomography, which measures changes in blood flow.

The salt cocktail prompted similar feelings of thirstiness in the young and old subjects, as well as similar changes in cerebral blood flow. However, the older men drank nearly 50% less water than did the younger men. A possible explanation showed up in the brain scans. In the older subjects, blood flow to a brain region called the anterior midcingulate cortex--a regulatory area that was previously linked to feelings of thirst--decreased much more per sip than it did in the younger group. According to the team, the observed difference might mean that in older people, the brain misinterprets signals from the digestive tract about how much water has been drunk, leading to a false sense of satiation, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nina Stachenfeld, a physiologist at Yale University, says previous studies had hinted that the phenomenon might have a cerebral explanation and that the scanning information "adds significantly to the field." However, she notes that the team made some potential errors, such as allowing the subjects to drink for only 8 minutes. The 8-minute window was sufficient to study brain function, she says, but it may not tell the full story. "In our studies," she says, "we found in this early period, the older subjects drank less than younger subjects, but they quickly caught up."

Answers Elusive in Kessler Firing

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
17 December 2007

Key questions remain unresolved in the firing of dean David Kessler by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine last week. Kessler and the university had been at odds over "financial irregularities" Kessler says he discovered shortly after taking the post in 2003.

In a 17 December statement, the university said that Chancellor J. Michael Bishop asked Kessler in June to hand in his resignation by the end of the year. With no resignation forthcoming, Bishop formally dismissed him on 13 December. "The reasons for Dr. Kessler's dismissal ... cannot be discussed, as they represent personnel matters that are held confidential in compliance with University policy and state law," the statement read. As ScienceNOW went to press, the university had not made Bishop or other university leaders available for media interviews.

Kessler and UCSF had a long-running disagreement involving the amount of discretionary money available to him as dean for research and educational initiatives, faculty recruitment, renovations, and other uses. Kessler says there turned out to be far less money flowing into the dean's office than he was led to believe when UCSF recruited him away from his previous post as dean of Yale School of Medicine. At that time, Kessler says, UCSF gave him documents showing a gross income of $46.4 million for the most recent fiscal year (2001-2002), resulting in a $9.9 million surplus for the dean's coffers after expenditures. Kessler says this level of funding--which the university projected would continue in future years--was an important factor in his decision to move to UCSF. "With an income of $46 million, you could do the things you needed to do."

But when Kessler asked Jed Shivers, then vice dean for administration, finance, and clinical programs, to conduct a review in late 2004, the numbers didn't match--even for fiscal years that had already come to a close. For 2001-2002, for example, Shivers's analysis showed income of just $28.3 million and a deficit of $7.8 million, which would deplete the dean's account within a few years. Kessler says he was baffled. "For the same closed year, how can you have two different revenue numbers?"

The answer to that question is devilishly hard to pin down. Shivers, now associate dean of finance and administration at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City, says his financial team at UCSF was never able to square the numbers Kessler was originally given: "To this day, we can't figure out how that data he received could be reconciled to the books of the university." Yet according to statements issued by UCSF, the university auditor completed a report in June that found no financial irregularities; neither did two additional reviews, one by a group of senior financial officers and another by an outside accounting firm.

In 2005, just as Kessler was beginning to delve into the dean's office finances, an anonymous letter surfaced, accusing him of lavish and irresponsible spending. (Auditors later concluded that the allegations were unfounded.) In its 17 December statement, UCSF "categorically denies" that Kessler "was dismissed in retaliation for his allegations about financial irregularities in the UCSF School of Medicine."

Prior to his post at Yale, Kessler was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 1990 to 1997, where he spearheaded a major investigation into the tobacco industry and instituted limits on tobacco advertising directed at children. He plans to retain his post as professor of pediatrics/epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF. The university has named Samuel Hawgood, chair of the department of pediatrics and physician in chief of UCSF Children's Hospital, as interim dean of the medical school.

E-Commerce Sales, Outlook Less Than Fantastic

Online retailers got a shot in the arm last Monday and Tuesday, but growth in overall sales this season is well off from last year, according to new figures from online metrics firm comScore. Last Monday, total online spending reached $881 million %26#150; a 33 percent jump from the same day a year ago. In that sense, "Green Monday" %26#150; the name eBay has given to the second Monday in December when online shopping is heaviest %26#150; lived up to its hype. Tuesday was no slouch either, with online shoppers spending $819 million. That was the third day this year when spending broke the $800 million mark, following Thursday, Dec. 6, when online retailers posted $803 million in sales. Considering that following Cyber Monday and the Thanksgiving crush, comScore was predicting that peak one-day spending this season would come close to $800 million or move only slightly past that mark, last Monday was a blockbuster day. "Despite the strong surge in spending we observed at the beginning of last week," comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement, "the remainder of the week saw more modest spending." So far, comScore has reported that total online spending this holiday season %26#150; at $22.67 billion as of Dec. 14 %26#150; has grown 18 percent over last year. At the same point in 2006, e-commerce spending was up 26 percent from 2005. This year, comScore is predicting a 20 percent rise in online spending for the months of November and December compared with the same period last year. Total e-commerce spending this season has been weighted down by lower-income households. This holiday season, households with incomes below $50,000 have only spent 10 percent more online than they did last year, comScore has reported. By contrast, households with incomes over $100,000 have increased online spending this season by 28 percent. That sales are falling off among lower-earning households suggests that a darkening economic picture is finally hitting e-commerce. comScore Senior Analyst Andrew Lipsman told InternetNews.com that growing economic uncertainties that put the brakes on overall consumer spending could temper growth rates for online retailers, but to a much lesser extent than their bricks-and-mortar counterparts. With the free-shipping offers guaranteeing delivery by Dec. 24 expiring on many retailers' sites Tuesday, comScore is predicting another lift in online spending. Whether that uptick will be enough to meet comScore's prediction of 20 percent growth for the season remains to be seen, but the message heading into the new year is clear enough: The belt tightening has already begun.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Ready for Download

Microsoft announced Monday that it has released to manufacturing the long-awaited update to its Dynamics-branded customer relationship management software (CRM). Previously codenamed "Titan," the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM actually has two names in its final form. For on-premise, customer-hosted, as well as partner-hosted deployments, the product has been dubbed Dynamics CRM 4.0. The company will also be offering the package on-demand in a Microsoft-hosted environment that it has named Dynamics CRM Live. Existing and new customers will be able to download the update when it's released on the Web this week, a Microsoft official told InternetNews.com. The Microsoft-hosted version, however, continues to run under the early access program that the company began in September. Microsoft plans to take that version live during the first half of 2008, said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "%26#91;In the meantime,%26#93; more than 100 customers are using %26#91;CRM Live%26#93; at this point," Wilson added. The release of Dynamics CRM 4.0 comes two years after version 3.0 shipped. CEO Steve Ballmer demonstrated CRM Live %26#150; a.k.a. CRM 4.0 -- during his keynote at the company's Convergence 2007 conference in March. Probably the most notable feature in CRM 4.0 is its so-called "multitenant" architecture, which enables a hosting partner, for instance, to run only one copy of the server but support multiple customers simultaneously and securely. CRM 4.0 also features support for 25 different languages and multiple currencies, although not all will be available immediately, according to a company statement. Among other additions, the package adds business process automation based on Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation. It also provides new collaboration capabilities with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, such as real-time presence indicators within the CRM application, the statement said. With the move to two different names for the same code base, the company is aiming to differentiate its Microsoft-hosted Live version from the partner hosted version partly by pointing customers who need custom application work and support to those partners. At the same time, however, CRM Live is another step in Microsoft's emerging "software plus services" initiative %26#150; meaning that the company has to be careful not to step too much on partners who both sell the package to on-premise customers as well as host it for customers. Wilson emphasized that its CRM partners have much more expertise in deploying and supporting Dynamics CRM, particularly in vertical markets. Additionally, Microsoft's CRM Live offering targets "small, five to 50-user deployments," at least so far, he added. According to Microsoft, the English language pack will be available within seven days and another nine language packs will be released next month. The company plans to deliver the additional 15 language packs at a rate of four or more per month after that.

Topping Hollywood: Software's Frenzied Year

If and when striking Hollywood writers finally get back to work, they might want to consider drawing upon some of the intriguing storylines that dominated the enterprise software industry in 2007 for inspiration. While there was no shortage of villains, upstarts and old familiar faces to entice viewers, "Software 2007" seems like a can't-miss proposition. Then again, how would they sell advertisers and viewers on a project that reads like a soap opera, looks like an Ultimate Fighting cage match and, at times, sounds more far-fetched than any child's fairy tale? Imagine this pitch: "It's kind of like 'Wall Street' meets 'Where's Waldo?' with a little bit of 'The Amazing Race' sprinkled in. You know, billionaires circumnavigating the globe in yachts and tricked-out 767s searching for cheap labor, Shai Agassi and anyone who can provide the authoritative definition of SOA." Even if that would-be producer isn't immediately laughed out of the room, he or she still won't have an ending to the story. Instead, we'll have to wait until next year just to find out what happens next. Until then, here's a look back at some of the most significant software subplots for 2007:
The SaaS model gets some respect Rather than locking themselves into never-ending license service contracts -- to say nothing of the months or years it takes to complete an on-premise software implementation -- companies of all sizes are increasingly turning to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (define) for their daily business applications. This has been good news for providers like Salesforce.com and NetSuite. Salesforce.com during the year extended its lead in the sector. The company reported strong earnings, customer wins (including many wins against on-premise competitors) and the launch of its platform-as-a-service offering, Force.com, for developers to build and deliver any application they want, on demand. Cisco Systems' $3.2 billion purchase of WebEx in March now positions the network-equipment maker as serious threat to top-tier enterprise software vendors servicing corporate customers that are increasingly enamored with the SaaS model for unified communications and collaboration. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to launch its CRM Live on-demand product early next year. Oracle in November announced plans to beef up its Siebel CRM On Demand service with a slew of social networking features. But the strongest vote of confidence for the SaaS model may have come in fall, when SAP -- the world's largest business application vendor -- jumped on the bandwagon with its first on-demand service, Business ByDesign. In announcing what amounts to a sea change in the German company's strategic direction, CEO Henning Kagermann stepped up the rhetoric when he called Business ByDesign "the most important announcement I've made in my career." That a company of SAP's size and stature would spend more than $500 million to launch what can only be viewed as a direct challenge to Salesforce.com makes it perhaps the most resounding endorsement of the SaaS model. Believe it or not, Salesforce.com, which eclipsed the 1 million-subscriber threshold in 2007, is pleased by the turn of events. "I feel like sending Henning Kagermann a fruit basket today," Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com's vice president of corporate strategy, said in an interview with InternetNews.com in September. "This is a fantastic thing. What SAP is doing is confusing their customer base and opening minds and markets for the SaaS model." And then there's NetSuite. On Dec. 6, the company finally formalized its initial public offering, filing to sell 6.2 million shares for between $13 and $16 a share. NetSuite, which is majority-owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, hopes to raise almost $100 million to pay down some debt and build a second datacenter. Despite being an early mover, the company has yet to turn a profit, however. And SaaS isn't a sure-fire win for SAP, either. The model may have received the nod from the software giant, but it still represents a gamble. Business ByDesign "is a big bet for SAP," Gartner analyst Dan Sholler said in an interview with InternetNews.com in August. "This has to succeed or they will have a whole host of business challenges ahead of them. No one has ever proven they can sell this type of business technology this way. SAP is betting the profitability of the company that it will be able to do it." Continued on Page 2: The SAP-Oracle war rages on.

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Remote Lake May Be Treasure Trove of Climate Data

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 December 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA--A million years ago, a large meteorite smashed into what is now northern Quebec and created a crater that may become an unprecedented repository of data with which to study long-term climate change, researchers reported here this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Canada and the northern United States are dotted with tens of thousands of lakes, most of them formed by meltwater at the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. Sediments at the bottom of those lakes hold chemical and biological evidence of how the planet's climate has varied for even longer periods, over many ice ages and interglacial cycles, and how those variations have affected the local ecosystems. But almost all of these sediments have been bulldozed repeatedly by glaciers as the giant rivers of ice have advanced and retreated over the last 2 million years, scrambling the geological record.

Pingualuit Crater in northern Quebec seems to have escaped this fate. Its 3.7-kilometer-wide, nearly circular lake not only is deep enough--nearly 270 meters--to have avoided the glacial pummeling but also has remained sequestered from any other body of water during its entire history. So the sediment that has collected on the lake's bottom has preserved a pristine record of the climate and biological activity in the lake for more than a million years--much longer than any similar climate data source currently available. Until recently, however, the technology necessary to retrieve samples from the bottom, without disturbing the samples or contaminating the lake's ultraclear water, did not exist.

So, paleolimnologist Sonja Hausmann of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and colleagues employed a new type of coring rig devised specifically for obtaining delicate samples. Last May, after trekking across the then-frozen lake on foot without the aid of potentially polluting snowmobiles or sled dogs, the team deployed the bottom-dwelling rig, which is suspended from a Kevlar cable, and spent 2 weeks carefully extracting cores from the top 10 meters of Pingualuit's estimated 150 meters of sediment. Those samples are beginning to provide a treasure trove of data going back at least 250,000 years.

"We think the samples span at least two [interglacial] cycles," Hausmann says. They include diatoms--microscopic algae whose silicate shells can provide exquisite historical portraits of the lake's water quality and climatic conditions--as well as trace metals and pollen that have fallen from the atmosphere. Other records can be compiled from sources such as the ice cores in Greenland and the sea beds, she says, but the Pingualuit cores are the only ones available from the North American land that contain the skeletal remains of climate-sensitive algae.

"Collecting this core was no small endeavor," says paleolimnologist John Smol of Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. "Many of us had previously assumed that the last Ice Age had obliterated older sediment records," he says, but Pingualuit's cores show that "there is a remarkable history book still present."

HP Snaps Up Another Print 2.0 Play

HP on Monday announced it would pony up $117.5 million to buy NUR Macroprinters, an Israeli maker of industrial wide-format digital inkjet printers. The purchase is part of HP's Print 2.0 strategy of next-generation printers designed to position it ahead of the curve in its bread-and-butter market. NUR Macroprinters is a leading supplier of UV-curable and solvent inkjet printers for displaying graphics, serving commercial printing companies, screen printers, media and billboard companies as well as photo labs and digital print service providers. "This acquisition marks another milestone in HP's growth strategy to ignite the transition from converting analog pages to digital pages," Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing unit, said in a prepared release. "The large-format print service provider market is growing rapidly, and with the acquisition of NUR, HP is strategically building an even stronger portfolio of products and will continue to drive innovation and growth with our industrial wide-format printers," he added. In August, HP launched its Print 2.0 campaign, a strategy that includes a mixture of online and offline services and new printers for consumer and business customers. For the much-coveted small- and mid-sized businesses (SMB), Print 2.0 features tools to build their brands and also free customizable templates to print business cards, letterhead and brochures. Its Designjet T1100 MFP targets graphic arts and technical professionals while its Scitex XL2200, featuring the printhead technology needed to increase print speeds and lower the total cost for high-volume commercial markets, is geared for commercial and industrial customers. In September, HP acquired MacDermid ColorSpan, another maker of wide-format digital inkjet printers. HP said once the deal closes, NUR Macroprinters will be folded into its Large Format Printing Business unit and will allow it to offer additional midrange UV platforms and print technologies. HP shares inched up 21 cents, or less than 1 percent, to close at $51.96 a share in Monday trading.

Alcatel-Lucent Shift: Web Services Security

By its own admission, networking giant Alcatel-Lucent has not been seen in the marketplace as a security player. It's a perception the networking/hardware provider is now trying to change. With the release of a new Web Services gateway and network access control (NAC) partnership, Alcatel-Lucent is beefing up its security offerings as part of its strategic goal of becoming a true networking security player. "What we want to do is move away from the situation where security is mainly an adjective to a situation where security is also a noun," Michel Emelianoff, vp of enterprise security solutions, told InternetNews.com. "We want to be delivering security solutions that bring value and help us to grow and expand on the enterprise market." The new OmniAccess 8550 WSG (Web Services Gateway) is one such "noun" that Alcatel-Lucent is floating into the marketplace. At a basic level, the 8550 proxies all the sensitive data that flows out of an organization's Web Services SOA infrastructure and it ensures that it only gets into the right hands. Cliff Grossner, product manager for the 8550 at Alcatel-Lucent, explained that the gateway is typically installed in a data center. When a user clicks on a URL, an information request message is sent that is intercepted by the 8550. It then unpacks the message, looks at the credentials and the type of request, checks against the information directory to make sure the user has a valid right and then provides policy in a stateful (define) way. Grossner claimed that the stateful application of policy to Web Services traffic is a real game changer. "Now it becomes possible for policy to be applied that looks at how many records are accessed in, say, an hour versus looking at individual transactions," Grossner said. The use of stateful policy also provides a user-centric approach for audit trails as well. Securing Web Services is not something that Alcatel-Lucent itself has invented. But the company is making use of the existing WS-Security specification and adding on to it. "We follow standards for securing the individual Web services, which is what WS-Security addresses, but we also have extended it on the user side to have additional policy for stateful sessions," Grossner added. Initially, Alcatel-Lucent is focusing the 8550 at the Health Care industry. Expect other markets to be part of its focus in 2008. Alcatel-Lucent is also expanding its security offerings in the realm of network access control (NAC). But, unlike the 8550, which was developed directly by Alcatel-Lucent's own resources, for NAC, the networking vendor is leveraging a new partnership with NAC vendor InfoExpress. Under the partnership Alcatel-Lucent will resell InfoExpress' NAC solutions. Emelianoff commented that InfoExpress provides a pre-admission endpoint integrity check solution that is very flexible and that helps Alcatel-Lucent to deal with all types of users and use cases. The InfoExpress solution will complement Alcatel-Lucent's support for the 802.1x protocol which provides port based security and is often used for NAC. The partnership with InfoExpress replaces an earlier partnership that Alcatel-Lucent had for NAC with a vendor called Sygate. Alcatel-Lucent's new security moves follow the launch of the OmniAccess 3500 Nonstop Laptop Guardian last year. Emelianoff noted that the nonstop guardian which provides laptop data security has been a successful product to date and Alcatel-Lucent plan on further expanding the devices sales in 2008.

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Google, Ask.com Weigh In On The Year In Search

It's that time of year when the major search companies take a look back at what search terms and categories were popular this year. Yahoo released its list of the most popular search terms to date for this year earlier this week, headed by YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and iTunes. MySpace headed Ask.com's list as most popular search term, and now Google has released its own list, with a twist; it lists the top ten "fastest rising" search terms as opposed to the most popular. Google's complete top ten overall for fastest rising terms in the U.S is as follows:

• 1. iphone
• 2. Webkinz
• 3. tmz
• 4. Transformers
• 5. YouTube
• 6. Club Penguin
• 7. MySpace
• 8. Heroes
• 9. Facebook
• 10. Anna Nicole Smith

No surprise to see iPhone on the list (the Apple device also made Yahoo's list) for the year. Of course iPhone wouldn't have been anywhere near a top search term last year when only rumors of its release were being discussed. If you don't have little kids you might be scratching your head over Webkinz, a popular stuffed animal that also has a virtual online counterpart. Linux fans don't account for Club Penguin's placement on the list; in fact, it's a virtual world for kids acquired by Disney earlier this year. Google's vice president of search products %26 user experience, Marissa Mayer, said some terms shoot to the top based on events or movie treatment. For example, Transformers is a decades-old toy and TV series that shot back into public consciousness after the release of the movie by the same name. Google's list of "Fastest Falling" search terms includes: World Cup; Mozart; Fifa; Rebelde; Kazaa; Xanga; webdetente; sudoko; Shakira and MP3. At Ask.com, MySpace was the only social networking site to make its top ten list for the year which was otherwise made up of generic-sounding terms save for, all things, the term Google:

• 1. MySpace
• 2. Dictionary
• 3. Google
• 4. Themes
• 5. Area Codes
• 6. Cars
• 7. Weather
• 8. Games
• 9. Song Lyrics
• 10. Movies

Ask.com's Top Presidential Candidate Searches for 2007 was headed, in order, by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, John Edwards and Mitt Romney. No big surprises in the first part of the company's list of Top Sports Team Searches for the year: Boston Red Sox; Dallas Cowboys; New England Patriots and Colorado Rockies, but some fans might raise an eyebrow or two at the Chicago Bears at number five, edging out the New York Yankees. On the celebrity front Ask.com narrowed it's list to the "Top Celebrity Search of Pregnant Stars" with Jennifer Lopez; Salma Hayek; Christina Aguilera; Julia Roberts and Halle Berry in the top five.

Nielsen Unveils Online Video Tracking Service

It may have been a fun ride while it lasted, but sooner or later, everything gets monetized -- including shared online video. That's the hope of the Nielsen Company, which today announced a new service enabling content producers to track, manage and, yes, monetize the distribution of their videos over the Internet. Nielsen joined up with Digimarc, a technology provider that specializes in identification security, to develop the new Nielsen Digital Media Manager service. When it goes live in mid-2008, the service's focus will be to help TV networks rein in digital distribution of their programming and create a working business model for online video. The system will employ digital watermarking and fingerprinting technologies to help content owners regain control over copyrighted videos that at present are ricocheting around the Internet on social networking sites, peer-to-peer services and, especially, user-generated content (UGC) sites like YouTube. The system will allow media companies to track how many people are viewing their video content and on which sites those videos appear. "The purpose of this service is to give the industry confidence that a secure system exists so that %26#91;television companies%26#93; feel comfortable distributing their content on the Internet," Dave Harkness, Nielsen's senior vice president of strategy and business development, told InternetNews.com. Ultimately, Nielsen expects the service to create an industry-wide standard for copyright compliance. At the same time, it could provide content owners with a more accessible path to making money from their videos through sales, ad-pairing and royalties. "Until now, the lack of an independent, industry-accepted identification tracking service has limited the transactions that allow the delivery of media content over the Internet," Nielsen Chairman and CEO David Calhoun said in a statement. The service could become the technological solution to a problem that Viacom has been unable to resolve in court. In March, Viacom filed a suit against Google, claiming that the company's video-sharing site YouTube had engaged in "massive intentional copyright infringement." The suit came after YouTube failed to respond to Viacom's demand that it take down 100,000 video clips from shows that had aired on MTV, Comedy Central and other networks. In such instances, Nielsen's Digital Media Manager could provide content companies like Viacom with an automated instrument for enforcing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The service would notify media owners of where and how people are accessing, sharing and editing their videos, enabling them to block usage on specific sites if they detect copyright violation. The company said that under that scenario, usage permissions would be governed by pre-existing rules, so that when a user attempts to upload a clip from a TV show to a site, the action would be automatically blocked if the site did not have a business relationship with the content owner. Continued on Page 2.

Faulty Wiring in the Aging Brain

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
5 December 2007

Even seniors fortunate enough to avoid the horrors of Alzheimer's disease typically experience some declines in memory and other cognitive abilities. Little is known about why this happens, but a new study suggests that cognitive declines in healthy older adults may result when brain regions that normally work together become out of sync, perhaps because the connections between them break down.

A team led by Harvard neuroscientists Jessica Andrews-Hanna and Randy Buckner used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity in 38 young adults, mostly 20-somethings, and 55 older adults, age 60 or above. The researchers focused on a "default" network of brain regions that are active when the brain is just idling, not working on any particular task (ScienceNOW, 18 January). The fMRI scans revealed coordinated activity in the default network in younger subjects: For example, two particular brain regions in the network tended to be active at the same time even though one is at the front of the brain and the other is near the back. In the older subjects, however, activity in these areas was poorly coordinated. In nine older adults, the researchers also performed a positron emission tomography (PET) scan that can detect amyloid protein in the brain--a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The PET scans were negative, suggesting that an out-of-sync default network is a part of normal aging, not a sign of disease, Buckner says.

Additional experiments using a method called diffusion tensor imaging revealed evidence of deteriorated white matter--the cables of axons connecting one brain region to another--in older adults whose default network activity was poorly coordinated. Although the role of the default network in cognition is poorly understood, coordinated activity made a difference in how people performed on tests of memory and other mental skills. Those with the least coordinated default network activity tended to get the lowest scores, the researchers report in the 6 December issue of Neuron.

"I think it's a great contribution to the field of cognitive aging," says neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco. The findings, he notes, add to previous hints that the cognitive declines that happen with age result from changes in the way brain regions interact. Deteriorating white matter may turn out to be the root problem, breaking down communication links between brain regions and impairing their ability to work in a coordinated manner, says Gazzaley.

Red Hat Finally Nears Real-Time Linux Launch

For the last several years, Red Hat has been pushing forward the development of real-time enhancements for Linux. Yet the company has made no formal product announcement of how it would attempt to productize its real-time Linux innovations. That changed today, with the announcement of the Red Hat MRG (Messaging, Real Time and Grid) platform. The product is expected to be available as a public beta this month, with a generally available release set for early 2008. The product's real-time enhancements provide deterministic performance for the kernel that enables actions to occur within the same amount of time, every time -- a feature critical for a number of industries including telecommunications, the military, healthcare and financial services. But Red Hat MRG goes farther, aiming to better appeal to enterprises by adding two more features to the mix: messaging and grid computing. "Red Hat sees a lot of synergies in combining real-time and grid technologies together," Bryan Che, Red Hat Product Manager for MRG, told InternetNews.com. "It's an extension of Red Hat's automation strategy of 'any application, anywhere.' What MRG adds is incredible scalability, performance and reliability." Red Hat rolled out its Linux Automation strategy early last month, with new on-demand, virtualization and appliance offerings for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). At the core of the new MRG offering is Red Hat's Real-Time Linux kernel, which supplants the stock RHEL kernel. Bryan Che, Red Hat Product Manager, told InternetNews.com that the new kernel is just a replacement, so if an enterprise is already running a RHEL-certified application, it will continue to work. In April, Tim Burke, director of emerging technologies at Red Hat first talked about Red Hat's real-time efforts for RHEL 5 in a product that he dubbed "RHEL Real Time Edition," which was under development. Che explained that the new MRG platform is what RHEL Real Time Edition has evolved into for enterprise consumption. Real-time features alone didn't seem to be enough of a selling point, however. As a result, Red Hat bundled in messaging and grid capabilities, he said. "Enterprises aren't looking for deployment of real-time on its own, but rather in conjunction with other needs like reducing network latency, " Che said. "Real-time doesn't just come out of a separate need, it needs to integrate with enterprise workloads." The new messaging components of MRG are intended to leverage real-time to provide low-transaction latency communications. Such a feature could prove critical in scenarios like financial services trading environments, where transactions need to be executed at a deterministic rate (that is, the same rate every time). The grid side of MRG provides Red Hat users with the ability to scale up computing power to handle workloads. The MRG grid isn't just for servers -- it will enable what Che referred to as "cycle stealing" from desktops. So if an enterprise has idle desktops, whether Linux or even Windows, Red Hat MRG can take advantage of the CPU power on those machines as part of a larger grid computing effort. The technology behind Red Hat's cycle-stealing grid is from a University of Wisconsin effort called "Condor." Under a deal with Red Hat, Condor will soon be available under an open source license, and Red Hat will be working jointly with the university to further develop the technology. "The technology has been around, but you haven't seen it adopted pervasively in open source because of licensing," Che said. "From an enterprise point of view, it wasn't adopted because it had been mostly used by academia and because it lacked enterprise capabilities." To use the cycles of idle Windows boxes, Che said MRG will install a virtualization client on each Windows desktop, which can then run a Linux workload. The real-time kernel at the heart of Red Hat MRG includes patches that are not yet in the mainline kernel.org Linux kernel. Nevertheless, Che said it has always been Red Hat's goal to get true real-time features into the mainstream kernel. He added that to date, nearly two-thirds of the patches in the company's real-time implementation have already been merged into the main kernel.org kernel. Even when all of Red Hat's real-time patches are part of the mainline kernel, Che still expects that MRG will remain a needed, standalone product, since it offers more than just real-time. Red Hat's real-time platform announcement comes barely a week after rival Novell released its Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Real Time 10 software. Che said the timing was coincidental, and that Red Hat has been working on Real Time for years. He went on to note that Novell's latest offering actually uses technology originally developed by Red Hat. "With their latest release, Novell has moved to the Red Hat-developed real-time patch set," Che said. "If you look at it from a technology standpoint, Novell has moved to a version aligned with what Red Hat is doing. It validates our approach that you have to work with the upstream Linux kernel."

Ears Too Big? It's All in Your Head

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
3 December 2007

People with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) hate the way they look. Even though they are as normal in appearance as anyone else, they are obsessed with features such as their skin, their noses, and their hair, which--to them--never look right. Now, the first brain-imaging study of BDD patients shows that the condition is not just an emotional problem. Rather, their brains are presenting them with skewed images of themselves.

Psychiatrist James Feusner and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, asked BDD subjects and controls to scrutinize images of faces while their brains were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Each face was presented in three versions: One was an unaltered photograph; one included only low-spatial-frequency information, resulting in a blurred image that yielded just a general impression of the face; and the third contained only high-frequency information, which exaggerated the lines of the face (see picture).

Previous research has shown that different neural pathways process high- and low-frequency information. When the image is blurry, the normal brain analyzes the face as a whole, whereas with high-frequency data, it zeroes in on details. The scientists found that the control subjects used a more holistic, right-brain strategy for the unaltered face and the low-frequency one. They only moved to the high-detail strategy for the high-detail face. In the BDD group, however, subjects failed to look at the figure as a whole, instead using left-brain channels that dwell on details for all three faces.

Feusner says the people with BDD don't have defective vision, as shown by the fact that there were no differences between the two groups in the activity of the occipital lobe, the brain's primary visual area. The differences show up in their "extended visual processing network," indicating that perceptions get twisted beneath the level of emotion or conscious thought, says Feusner, whose report appears in the December issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Sanjaya Saxena, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, says that as a rule, psychiatrists have assumed that the distorted perceptions of people with BDD only related to how they view themselves. This study indicates that these distortions go deeper to include perceptions of others, he says. That helps explain why the disorder seems so "ingrained," Saxena says, and suggests that in addition to measures to reduce anxiety and depression, people with BDD might benefit from behavioral therapy aimed at "retraining" their visual processing. Feusner's team is now enrolling patients for the next stage of the study: seeing how patients react to altered and unaltered pictures of themselves.

Microsoft Issues Domain-Related Security Alert

Microsoft on Monday issued a warning concerning a vulnerability in how Windows resolves hostnames, and is offering steps for systems administrators to work around the problem until a fix is issued. The issue affects hostnames that do not include a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). A fully qualified domain name is a domain name that specifies the node's position in the DNS tree hierarchy and is often used for sub sections of domains or for functions. A fully qualified domain is distinguishable by a period after the top-level extension, like ".com." This means third-level domains or deeper are vulnerable, such as mail.domainname.com or us.dbase.domainname.com. There are, however, mitigating factors, as detailed on the Microsoft Security Research Center alert page. Microsoft has also issued several suggested workarounds until a patch is issued. These include creating a Proxy Auto-Configuration file, disabling Automatically Detect Settings in Internet Explorer, disabling DNS devolution and configuring a domain suffix search list. Microsoft has not received any reports of customers being impacted by the vulnerability. It said it will decide what steps to take upon completion of its investigation. This could include issuing an out-of-cycle security update or simply waiting until Patch Tuesday, depending on customer needs. The next Patch Tuesday will be December 11.

IBM Simplifies Mainframe Management

IBM on Wednesday announced a significant update to one management tool, and talked up another that it recently shipped. Both products are aimed at simplifying management of the company's System z mainframes. The announcement came at the 2007 Governance and Risk Management Summit in Sanya, China. The new and updated products are part of IBM%26#146;s five-year, $100 million "Mainframe Simplification" initiative, according to company officials. The simplification initiative, which was announced just over a year ago, aims to make IBM's System z mainframes easier to use and to speed the roll out of applications, making the computers more popular with new and existing customers. "The main point is lowering the cost of ownership for customers," John Steigerwald, director of market management at IBM Tivoli, told InternetNews.com. Targeted for availability in December, Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Version 6.1 monitors, manages and controls the Web services layer of IT architectures. It is designed to help locate bottlenecks and failures and to identify which services consume the most time or resources in composite SOA applications. Composite Application Manager for SOA identifies Web service performance problems, alerts administrators and provides metrics for comparison. The tool is a core component of IBM's SOA Foundation Management Essentials, a combination of software, best practices, patterns and skills resources for service-oriented architectures, according to IBM. Version 6.1 adds support for WebSphere Message Broker, AXIS 1.2, SAP NetWeaver, IBM WebSphere CE and SCA infrastructure, JBoss and DataPower proxy and Web browser launch, the company said. Although it was originally released in July, Tivoli Omegamon XE for CICS Transaction Gateway is a new addition to Big Blue's Omegamon XE line of System z monitoring products. It is designed to aid customers in managing "critical workloads and resources while increasing productivity and safeguarding data security," company statements said. Additionally, it demonstrates IBM%26#146;s commitment to make System z mainframes easier to use and manage, Steigerwald said. The product provides automatic discovery of active CICS Transaction Gateway regions, identifies them by their job names and helps administrators identify transactions and their associated transaction servers. It provides statistics and monitors the activity of IBM's CICS Transaction Gateway for z/OS as well as provides a central point of management control for administrators. Earlier this month, IBM also announced a series of updates for its Rational line of developer tools as part of the simplification initiative. IBM's moves towards simplifying System z management are welcome, according to one observer. "Mainframe administration is not quite rocket science but it's not like managing a bank of x86 servers either," Charles King, principle analyst at analysis firm Pund-IT Inc., told InternetNews.com. "This aims to take some critical mainframe management practices and make them easy to manage."

Curt Schilling Pitches Software

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. %26#150; It's very much the early innings for star pitcher Curt Schilling's latest endeavor. The Red Sox ace said he plans to build his upstart 38 Studios into a billion-dollar entertainment powerhouse over the next ten years. That, to put it mildly, is an ambitious goal for a company that doesn't expect to release its first product for at least another two years, but Schilling's not one to back away from a challenge. Curt Schilling
Source: 38 Studios "I didn't want to do the restaurant thing or the normal stuff" pro athletes often pursue outside of their sports career, Schilling said this week here at VentureWire's Consumer Technology Innovations conference. In fact, Schilling noted he's already deviated from his original plans for entrepreneurship. "This was supposed be my last season" with the World Series champion Red Sox, he said. "But I'm not intelligent enough to go out on top." Instead, the 41-year-old Schilling signed for another year with the Red Sox while remaining heavily involved with 38 Studios, the company he initially called Green Monster Games. Taking a cue from baseball, Schilling said he's assembled an all-star lineup of developers, designers and marketing pros to build the company. The heavyweight roster, which Schilling describes as giving him an "unfair advantage," includes Todd McFarlane, creator of the Spawn comic book as art director. It also includes fantasy author R.A. Salvatore as creative director and video game veteran Brett Close as CEO. For now, the company is tight-lipped on specific titles or the categories it intends to go after, aside from indicating that it's focused on the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) fantasy role-playing genre. "We'll have Web 2.0, episodic, graphical content for wireless and console products that all tie into the online world," CEO Close told InternetNews.com. "No one's put it all together yet." The opportunity to get a piece of the action currently dominated by such MMO heavyweights as Blizzard (with "World of Warcraft," or "WoW") and Sony Online Entertainment (which produces "EverQuest") is huge. Schilling admits to being "a huge WoW player" and a fan of Sony and military simulations. "We're not looking to knock off WoW or beat the MMO space, but flush out this unbelievable intellectual property we have and converge the audiences of Salvatore and Todd over the next four or five years, so hundreds of millions of people will come across our Web site," said Schilling. "We'll succeed or fail on our own merit." The London-based research firm Screen Digest said the MMO market reached $1 billion in subscription revenue for Europe and the Americas for the first time in 2006 ($576 million in North American and $299 million in Europe.) Subscription revenue accounted for 87 percent of that market, but Screen Digest noted the growing importance that in-game advertising and virtual sale items (such as weapons) have made. Screen Digest forecasts that by 2011, more than 10 million subscription accounts will generate $1.5 billion in consumer spending. It's a big market, but 38 Studios faces plenty of challenges from established players as well as new ones coming out of left field, even if they lack a baseball pedigree. "Assuming they have the resources and experience, two years is still a long time," Gartner analyst Mike McGuire told InternetNews.com. "It's a gamble they create something that's compelling enough to get consumers to stop doing less of something they're already investing time in. I don't buy into this idea that we'll all just continue to invest more and more time with online media." On the other hand, McGuire said 38 Studios has the right idea in focusing on community. "Whether it's games, news, music or new business opportunities, everything has to be geared to communities, not individuals. That's the old model -- you target, say, 15- to 34-year-old males. No -- now you go for online communities to get at individuals." Another challenge for 38 Studios (which was named for Schilling's jersey number) might be location. Suburban Maynard, Mass., is hardly a gaming mecca, and Schilling said he was told he'd lose talent basing the company in Boston. "But my view was if being in Boston means we lose you, then it wasn't meant to be, they don't buy into the vision of what we're doing," he said. Schilling said the people he's brought in to the self-funded 38 Studios thus far have a common vision, and he's getting up to speed leading the enterprise. "Before last year, I thought 'burn rate' was my fastball velocity," Schilling joked to the room full of venture capitalists. "When I'm on the mound sixty feet away, I'm going to beat you," he added. "In this I'm not the smartest guy in the room and I'm okay with that, but I want to have a clue when they're talking about how they want to work the pipeline or the poly count for a game." Now that Schilling can talk more of the talk, he's on the hunt for investors. "We've done a lot of work already, now we're looking for someone who gets us," he said. "We're going to make someone other than us filthy rich." Schilling in legendary in baseball circles for the preparation he does before games and plans to bring that same dogged attitude to the games business. "You can save yourself hundreds of millions of dollars now that you might not realize you didn't have to spend until it's too late," he said. As a manager, Schilling added that he takes a personal interest in all his employees. "You'll never work for someone who cares more about you and your family." But his employees shouldn't get too comfortable -- the other side of Schilling's approach is an insistence you adhere to two rules: "Show up on time and bust your ass."

Dell's Decline Leads Tech Stock Dip

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave the market a boost with Thursday's hints at a possible interest rate cut. But the enthusiasm didn't last as today's big mid-day gains in the Dow Jones Industrial Average were more modest by close. Bernanke's comments couldn't help the mood in the tech sector as the Nasdaq ended the week on a down note, thanks in large part to a bad day for Dell. At one point today, the Dow climbed 150 points, but closed the day up 60 points (to 13,372) after it was dragged down by the technology-heavy Nasdaq, which fell 7.17 points (to 2,661). The S%26amp;P gained 11.57 points to close to 1,481. While Bernanke's encouraging words caused the market to start the day off with happy thoughts, the reality of Dell earnings was a sobering factor, pushing the PC maker's stock down $3.60 to $24.54. Yesterday Dell reported that its third-quarter sales rose to $15.65 billion, a 9 percent jumped over the same quarter last year. However, while it beat $15.34 billion estimates, pro forma earnings of 35 cents a share only met Wall Street estimates, raising pricing concerns. Also among today's technology losers were Google, IBM and Brocade. The search giant's stock fell $4 to $693. The company announced it intends to bid in the government's 700MHz spectrum auction in January. Big Blue fell to 105.18, a 2.16 percent decline. Brocode dropped 5.81 percent to close at $7.29. But the news wasn't all bad for tech stocks. Among advancers were Motorola. The mobile phone maker gained more than 2 percent to close at $15.97 on news today that CEO Ed Zander plans to step down at year's end to be replaced by Chief Operating Officer Greg Brown. Analysts and some shareholders had been calling for Zander's resignation for months as the company's financial performance and stock price continued to deteriorate. Also closing on the plus side were Internet bellwethers Yahoo and Amazon.com. Yahoo ended at $26.81, up 16 points. And Amazon closed up almost 1.6 percent to end the session at $90.56.