Juniper Makes The Switch

For the last 12 years, Juniper Networks has been edging its way toward becoming a leader in the enterprise networking space. Yet it has also been missing a key element offered by its primary competitor, Cisco Systems -- namely, a switch portfolio. That changed today. In a launch event Webcast on Juniper.net, the company's founder and CTO, Pradeep Sindhu, literally pulled the sheet off the company's new switching portfolio. Juniper CEO Scott Kriens said the product launch marked the beginning of a transcending chapter in Juniper's history, declaring, "The switch is on." Juniper's new switching portfolio is called the Ex series and was built entirely by Juniper. "We've heard the questions of why aren't you in switching or who are you going to buy?, " said Hitesh Seth, an executive vice president at Juniper. "We've been listening and the results are on this podium. We made a conscious decision to build versus buy." Three key products will make up the Ex series at launch: the EX 3200, EX 4200 and EX 8200. The EX 3200 is a fixed-configuration device available in 24- and 48-port configurations for 10/100/1000BASE-T connectivity. The EX 4200 includes what Juniper calls "Virtual Chassis" technology, which enables expansion up to 480 10/100/1000BASE-T ports. At the high end is the EX 8200, which is available in an eight-slot, 1.6 terabit configuration, as well as a 16-slot, 3.2 terabit chassis. The unit is also optimized for 10GbE routing. Juniper also said every slot on the EX 8200 is ready for 100GbE, once the standard is actually finalized. A key unifying theme for Juniper's new switch portfolio is the fact that the EX 3200, EX 4200 and EX 8200 all run the same JUNOS operating system used by the rest of the company's networking equipment. Having a single operating system provides many benefits, Seth said. "We're delivering simplicity though JUNOS," he said. "For the first time, routing and switching infrastructure can run on the same OS. We will also have a common management system that will deliver operational benefits to enterprise customers." JUNOS is the same operating system that powers Juniper's high-end terabit carrier router. One key feature of JUNOS is that it enables new services to be added seamlessly to the network. Additionally, other elements of Juniper's networking infrastructure, including its UAC access control solution and intrusion prevention security systems will work with EX switches from day one. "What we're doing with our switching portfolio is we are advancing the economics of networking," Seth said. "The time has come for the network to catch up with applications and for customers to expect and get a network that is fast, reliable and secure." "With the combination of routing security and now switching ports, we are in position to deliver an end-to-end infrastructure, so finally customers can have a vendor that delivers a high-performance network to them," he added. Juniper's switching news comes the day after Cisco announced its own big switching news -- the launch of the Nexus 7000 as its new, high-end switch. While Juniper uses JUNOS throughout its portfolio, Cisco created a new OS, the NX-OS, for its new switch.

Microsoft: We're Open (Source) For Business

For years, the poster child of the anti-open source movement was Microsoft, with its proprietary software model. In recent years, however, the company has changed its views, starting an open source software lab to work on interoperability issues. It's even become a purveyor of its own open source-approved licenses. What do these efforts mean? For Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of open source technology strategy, they indicate the company is "open" for business. "The strategy is founded on meeting people where they are," Ramji told InternetNews.com. "Independent of whether or not the application programming layer is a Microsoft technology, we really look at ourselves as being an infrastructure layer, and our job is to support the workload and the development styles that people want to use." Among the key efforts of Ramji's strategy is the work that Microsoft is doing with PHP. Microsoft and Zend (the lead commercial sponsor of PHP) work together to enhance PHP for Windows . "Our goals first and foremost were looking for performance parity with Linux for PHP workloads," Ramji said. "This is putting our best efforts into PHP." Beyond just making key open source technologies such as PHP run well on its platforms, Microsoft is also bringing new open source skills into the company itself. Crispin Cowan, a key developer behind Novell's AppArmor Linux security effort, is among Microsoft's recent open source hires. Ramji also said Tom Hanrahan now leads the Linux interoperability work in Microsoft's Open Source Lab. Prior to joining Microsoft, Hanrahan had been the director of Linux engineering at the Open Source Development Labs, or OSDL, as it's more commonly known. "People talk about bringing in new blood, and we need to have the people that embody the practices we hope the company to have," Ramji said. "If you want to execute change, you need to have change agents." Ramji is also optimistic about Microsoft's Open Source code efforts with the Microsoft Public License (known as Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (or Ms-RL), which have been officially approved by the nonprofit Open Source Initiative (OSI) since October. "I'm humbled and grateful to the OSI for approving the licenses," Ramji said. "It cements their moral authority and shows some optimism that we can bring our models together." Since gaining OSI approval, Ramji said Microsoft's CodePlex open source code development effort has undertaken 30 new projects. In total, there are now 190 projects on CodePlex using either the Ms-PL or Ms-RL. Though Ramji sees positive momentum for open source at Microsoft, he also sees many challenges lie ahead. Among them is helping others at Microsoft determine when and where open source makes sense. He says that effort will entail figuring out what part of a product needs to be open source and modifiable, as well as which part needs to be visible and understandable for debugging purposes -- but not changeable. In addition, Ramji says, the company needs to decide what should remain closed source, not visible and only modifiable by Microsoft's own developers. "We're conducting internal briefings and training sessions on what are the policies and how do you think through the legal implications," Ramji said. "The other component is working with product groups on how you go to market and the revenue model." "At the end of the day, for this to be sustainable for any company, there has to be a consistent way that additional effort produces additional revenue," he adds.

Microsoft Breaks Earnings Records, Again

UPDATED: The go-go days of Microsoft's double-digit growth may not be over after all. Microsoft reported Thursday that it brought in $16.37 billion in revenues and $6.48 billion in operating income, yielding diluted earnings per share of $0.50, for its second fiscal quarter of 2008, ending Dec. 31. That comes on the heels of its best first fiscal quarter in years, which it reported in October. "Revenue of over $16 billion this quarter exceeds our previous record by $2 billion," Chris Liddell, chief financial officer, said in a company statement. Financial analysts had expected a strong quarterly showing, but Microsoft's second quarter results even topped its own aggressive guidance from last quarter. Further, as the company has gotten bigger, its pace of growth has slowed. As the company gets ever larger, every percentage point gain in sales becomes a much larger number for Microsoft to reach. "It's a huge quarter. This has been the strongest two-quarter performance for Microsoft this decade," Matt Rosoff, lead analyst for corporate news at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com in an e-mail interview. "For the second quarter in a row, they significantly beat their most optimistic expectations and raised full year guidance," he added. In comparison, second fiscal quarter 2007 revenue totaled only $12.54 billion, although that figure had been affected by a reserve of $1.63 billion the company set aside last year to cover "technology guarantees" for replacing the high number of defective XBox 360 consoles. Those guarantees served as reserves to cover free upgrades to Windows Vista and Office 2007 for customers who bought PCs prior to official delivery of those products last January. Without the reserve deduction, Microsoft would have brought in $14.18 billion in fiscal 2007's second quarter. "Compared to the year-ago period, these figures represent growth of 30 percent, 87 percent and 92 percent for revenue, operating income and diluted earnings per share, respectively," Liddell said. Microsoft's latest sales and profit records came in part due to strong sales of Windows client software, including both Windows Vista and XP. The company reiterated what chairman Bill Gates had said during his keynote speech at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month -- that Microsoft has sold some 100 million units of Vista. However, a spokesperson said at the time that figure did not include Christmas sales of shrink-wrapped Vista and new PC sales. Other products contributing to Microsoft's latest record-setting performance include the company's flagship offerings in productivity and gaming. For instance, Microsoft Business Division revenue grew 23 percent on strong sales of Office 2007, as well as Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, officials said. "SharePoint is over a billion dollar business now," Liddell said on a conference call with analysts after the results were released. Continuing aggressive sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming consoles -- which are now up to a total of 17.7 million sold -- also helped. Executives are not as bullish on the third fiscal quarter, which ends March 31. They're projecting revenues of $14.3 to $14.6 billion, operating income of $5.6 billion to $5.7 billion, and diluted earnings per share of $0.43 to $0.45. For the full fiscal year, ending June 30, however, the company is expecting what some might term spectacular results. On the heels of breaking the $50 billion barrier in fiscal 2007, officials said Microsoft is on track to bring in revenue in the range of $59.9 billion to $60.5 billion. Executives also said Microsoft's full-year operating income should total $24.2 billion to $24.4 billion, with diluted earnings of $1.85 to $1.88 per share. While that doesn't directly translate into smooth sailing, it certainly bodes well for the company's near-term prospects. "The company%26#146;s massive scale and breadth %26#151; in geographies, markets, and product segments %26#151; should help it weather any impending economic downturns," Rosoff said.

VIA Launches Low-Power, 64-Bit Chip

VIA Technologies has announced Isaiah Architecture, its newest processor technology. The x86-compatible processor is designed for the low power markets where VIA plays best, but with a lot more kick than older VIA chips. VIA has been in the x86 clone market for some time, making chips that run considerably slower than those from Intel and AMD but requiring far lower power usage. Just last August it introduced the Eden processor, which consumed one watt of power under a full load. Eden was a 32-bit, 500MHz, in-order execution chip with a 133MHz bus, definitely not a Vista-capable processor. Isaiah is considerably more powerful. It has a 64-bit superscalar, speculative out-of-order execution architecture, runs at 2GHz and has a front side bus scalable from 800MHz up to 1333MHz, plus a 1MB L2 cache. It is a single core processor, however. VIA is primarily a chipset company; Isaiah comes from VIA's U.S. subsidiary Centaur Technology, which specializes in processor design. The Isaiah line will be pin compatible with the VIA C7 low-power family, such as Eden, so system builders can use the chip in existing designs. "Today is an exciting day for everyone at Centaur," said Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, in a statement. "With a team of less than one hundred first-class engineers, we have created from scratch the world's most power-efficient x86 processor architecture with state of the art features, outstanding performance, and flexible scalability for the future." With its faster performance and improved floating point support, Isaiah is optimized for the mobile and desktop computing and personal electronics devices markets. This includes Ultra Mobile PCs and Ultra Mobile Devices with rich multimedia and wireless broadband capabilities, as well as small form factor Green PCs and digital entertainment centers. As a processor company, VIA's position has been very small, around one percent market share according to IDC, because its emphasis has not been on a complete product line or high performance or even mainstream performance, noted Shane Rau, program director for IDC's Computing, Networking, and Storage Semiconductors business. "Their emphasis has been low cost, lower power processors in the value space, and market trends may be going their way," he told InternetNews.com. "In both desktop and mobile, the price bands continue to migrate downward. Add to that low power chips inside light, handheld devices, that's going in VIA's direction as well." Rau feels VIA is in position for to take advantage of trends toward low price, low power systems like the OQO and FlipStart. And VIA has put its main emphasis on other, emerging countries, rather than the US, so the regional trend may also be in its favor. But then there's the problem of the 800 pound gorilla that is Intel and the 200 pound gorilla that is AMD. "Given their relative lack of resources compared to Intel, %26#91;VIA%26#93; won't be the ones with more bucks, so that will be a disadvantage," said Rau. Mike Feibus, president of TechKnowledge Strategies, agreed the Isaiah chip could help VIA stand up to Intel and AMD, but it will not be an easy fight. "Intel has its eye on %26#91;the low power%26#93; segment with Silverthorne. AMD has designs on it as well. So the big boys are coming. VIA has done a lot to carve a path out of this sector. This processor is the next step to make them more attractive as they start to meet the big boys," he said. VIA said it will begin shipping the Isaiah processor in the first half of this year.

Technical Analysis: Stocks Snap Back

At this week's lows, the market has been as oversold as any in the last 70 years, just based on the depth of the decline in a short amount of time. A weekly close below 11,847 on the Dow would be even better, giving us that oversold reading on a weekly closing basis, but stocks appear to be too stretched to the downside for that, at least for now. Still, there are other ways to spot bottoms, and we'll be on the lookout for them. For starters, we expect a lengthy basing period after the decline we've had. One good sign of a bottom would be a higher low and higher high in the rate-of-change indictor (ROC at the bottom of tonight's charts below), a sign that momentum has turned back upward. In fact, it's hard to find a major low that hasn't had that positive divergence. Another would be continued buying by commercial futures traders. But given the depth of the panic %26#151; multiple front-page bearish headlines just about everywhere you look today and yesterday %26#151; the credit crisis may largely be priced into stocks at this point. Still, a retest of the lows, and possible lower lows, with positive divergences, may still lie ahead. 1364-1370 on the S%26amp;P 500 (first chart below) remains the biggest hurdle for the bulls, with 1350 up first. The first test of that level will likely prove tough. Support is 1320, 1310 and 1270, with 1225-1250 possible below that. The Dow (second chart) barely held onto yesterday's low (11,635) today, stopping at 11,644. 12,092 is first support before 11,750-12,000 gets tested again, while 12,400-12,500 looks tough to the upside. The Nasdaq (third chart) faces resistance at 2323, 2350 and 2387-2400, and 2250, 2221 and 2200 are support. Paul Shread is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and member of the Market Technicians Association.

IBM Adds AptSoft to SOA Portfolio

IBM on Wednesday acquired privately held AptSoft, a Burlington, Mass.-based developer of software used to identify and alert businesses to emerging trends and events, which are culled from real-time queries of data stored on all their disparate software applications. Along with identifying a pattern or potential problem -- say a black boot is dramatically outselling other colors of the same model and there's not enough black boots for distributors and retailers to meet demand -- the software initiates a trigger to warn employees of the impending shortage. Manufacturing, sales and marketing staffs can then adjust their inventories, ramp production and tailor their sales and marketing campaigns accordingly. IBM's service-oriented architecture (SOA) (define) software helps companies make sense of this data and, more important, get an analyzed and actionable plan to employees so they can respond to rapidly changing business conditions -- without writing any new code. Sandy Carter, IBM's vice president of SOA and WebSphere marketing, strategy and channels, said adding AptSoft's Director application to the existing business process management (BPM) functionality in its flagship WebSphere middleware suite will strengthen IBM's SOA and BPM portfolio and give customers the "most intuitive tools for business-led authoring and event management." "AptSoft elevates event processing to the business level instead of at the deep technology level," Carter said during an conference call announcing the acquisition. "It's bringing event processing to the business," she added. "Today, typically, only engineers understand these events. We want business to be able to leverage these business signals." IBM said AptSoft's software will be embedded into its WebSphere platform by "early summer," and the company outlined exactly how and when the integrated product will be available during its Impact 2008 conference in early April. AptSoft, founded in 2002, is one of several providers of complex event processing (CEP) programs that apply rules to pinpoint patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed by IT administrators. Like Coral8, StreamBase and Aleri, AptSoft develops applications that dig through legacy data to help predict what business events might occur in the near future. Aite Group, a Boston-based research firm for the financial services industry, estimates that companies will spend more than $1 billion on CEP-related software and services by 2010. "I see this as a sign that the event-processing market is heating up and that IBM is determined to not miss the boat," Roy Schulte, an analyst at Gartner, told InternetNews.com. "IBM has done event processing in the background for years, although it was not a first mover in terms of really promoting this field," Schulte said. "Oracle, Tibco and numerous smaller event-processing specialists have been more visible in the market for several years," he added. Carter said AptSoft's products will complement IBM's existing portfolio of BPM and CEP offerings, including WebSphere Event Broker, WebSphere Business Monitor, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Real-Time Insight and Tivoli Netcool. "This move has put IBM ahead of its largest competitors%26#151;Microsoft and SAP -- while also drawing attention to the products that IBM has quietly offered for a while," Schulte said. "Expect to hear more about event processing in 2008 from IBM and others." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. AptSoft currently has about 19 customers, including the likes of Georgia-Pacific and New Plan Excel Realty Trust.

IBM's Web 2.0 Platform Mashes Up Business, Social

For anyone who's ever had to answer to a boss worried about company time being spent socializing instead of on business, IBM has come up with a simple answer: "Can't it be both?" Today IBM unveiled its revamped Web 2.0 platform, a suite of collaborative services for enterprises to capitalize on the snowballing trends of online content and social networking. Among the new products are Lotus Mashups, a mashup creator geared for businesses, and Lotus Connections 2.0, a revamped version of Big Blue's enterprise-oriented social networking software. "We want to put the tools in the hands of people so they can do their job better," said Chris Lamb, product manager for IBM Lotus Connections. The announcement is one of many coming this week from Orlando, Fl., where IBM is holding its annual Lotusphere convention. IBM's plans for Lotus Mashups first surfaced in October. The application is designed with non-technical users in mind, so any employee would be able to build a mashup of company data and information pulled from the Web to help improve workflow. For instance, a logistics coordinator could use Lotus Mashups to link real-time traffic data with delivery routes for outbound warehouse shipments. Lotus Mashups will offer a browser-based navigation tool for point-and-click mashup creation. The product also will come with ready-made widgets for building new mashups, as well as a server-based catalog to serve as a hub for finding and sharing existing ones. Additionally, Lotus Connections, which IBM introduced at last year's Lotusphere, is celebrating its first birthday with several new features. Version 2.0 of the Connections software -- which is still in a pre-beta stage -- is designed to help professionals build and maintain their social networks through a variety of Web 2.0 features. The new edition will feature a widget-based homepage that integrates Lotus Mashup technology to provide a customizable view of the five core features of Connections: profile directory, communities, blogs, the Dogear social bookmarking applications and the activities hub. Lamb said that an administrator could create the default Connections homepage, and employees would be able to drag and drop widgets to customize it to their preferences. The widgets could also tie into data from external social networks, such as the professional social networking site LinkedIn, which announced last month that it was opening its platform to select business partners. IBM is also adding wikis, discussion forums and collaborative-editing features to the communities section of Lotus Connections. The company plans to launch the beta version of Lotus Connections 2.0 in the first half of this year. At Lotusphere, IBM also previewed the 8.1 version of Lotus Quickr, the collaborative-work application available on the Web or as a desktop plug-in. The new version uses enhanced Web 2.0 applications to improve data sharing. It will include blogging applications, wikis, team discussion forums and shared content libraries. IBM also plans to integrate Quickr with its Content Manager and FileNet P8 enterprise content management systems, it said. Big Blue isn't alone in its mashup of the social and business worlds. Other enterprise-oriented companies, including Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, have all unveiled similar initiatives to court a workforce with the social value of technology. Lamb said that when IBM first started developing social applications for business, many were skeptical. Critics asked, "Is this a real market, can you make money at this?" Lamb said. "Lotus Connections is one of the fastest-growing products we've ever introduced."

Hurt an Organ, Help a Disease?

By Jennifer Couzin
ScienceNOW Daily News
24 January 2008

Researchers report that by injuring an animal's pancreas, they have found a population of cells that naturally become insulin-producers. It's not clear whether the find will impact diabetes patients, but researchers are intrigued by the discovery and what it might reveal about the transformative ability of pancreatic cells.

In people with diabetes, insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, called beta cells, have been destroyed or may behave sluggishly. This leaves the body unable to regulate its blood sugar. Coaxing the pancreas to make new beta cells is one of the great goals of diabetes research. Scientists debated for years whether the pancreas holds stem cells that could replenish beta cells, but in 2004, biologists led by Douglas Melton at Harvard looked for these stem cells in the pancreas of mice and failed to find them. His team instead reported that existing beta cells could multiply to form new ones (ScienceNOW, 5 May 2004).

Harry Heimberg of Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium, wondered whether there were additional sources of new beta cells. Earlier experiments in rats had found that clamping a pancreatic duct and stopping digestive enzymes from entering the small intestine roughly doubles the mass of beta cells in the pancreas. But which cells in the pancreas were generating these extra beta cells?

Heimberg and his colleagues caused the same severe injury in mice. Then they searched for pancreatic cells that might somehow turn into beta cells. To do this, they focused on the genetic marker neurogenin 3, which appears in cells slated to become beta cells when they're just beginning to develop in an embryo. Within 3 days of injury, the scientists found cells with this gene. Furthermore, preventing the gene's expression reduced beta-cell proliferation, the group reports in the 25 January issue of Cell. When these neurogenin 3 cells were taken from an adult mouse and injected into a pancreas removed from a mouse embryo, they developed into beta cells and produced insulin, suggesting that the cells were developing into new beta cells in the injured animal. Further studies found that the neurogenin 3 cells weren't making insulin before the injury. That means beta cells hadn't bolstered the beta-cell supply by themselves, as Melton had shown was possible in normal animals.

Many questions remain. Where do the cells come from, for example? The cells sit along the ducts of the organ, so they could originate as mature ductal cells that revert to an embryonic state after the injury and then become beta cells. Or, says Heimberg, they could be progenitor cells, which unlike stem cells cannot self-replenish. Other big questions are whether the neurogenin 3 cells can be coaxed to come forward in the normal human pancreas without damaging the organ, and whether they can be turned into insulin producers.

Melton suspects the cells began as mature pancreatic cells, likely from the ducts, as they don't have many characteristics of stem cells. The study, he says, shows that there's another mechanism to keep beta cells coming, which might offer a new cell source to consider in the hunt for ways to replenish beta cells.

Related sites

Information on beta cell regeneration

Beta Cell Biology Consortium

Scientists Synthesize a Genome From Scratch

By Elizabeth Pennisi
ScienceNOW Daily News
24 January 2008

Researchers have rebuilt an entire genome from scratch, they report online today in Science. Although the team has yet to demonstrate that this DNA can substitute for the real thing, the work paves the way for customized bacteria that could efficiently produce drugs, biofuels, and other molecules useful to humankind.

Ever since his group decoded the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, a parasitic bacterium that lives in the human urogenital tract, sequencing maverick J. Craig Venter has wanted to remake the bug's genome in the lab. At just under 600,000 bases, M. genitalium sports the smallest known genome for a free-living organism, and Venter hoped that an artificial genome could be modified to turn the bacterium into a living chemical-manufacturing plant.

Last year, Venter and his colleagues developed a technique for replacing M. genitalium's genome with another natural genome from a different species (Science, 3 August 2007, p. 632). But synthesizing the M. genitalium genome from the ground up proved challenging, in part because long strands of DNA are quite fragile.

Japanese researchers have built a large genome from two existing bacterial chromosomes. But Venter, Hamilton Smith, and their colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, started with short pieces of DNA that a company had manufactured base by base. About 6000 bases long, these pieces represented overlapping bits of the microbe's only chromosome. Some of the pieces also contained "watermarks": a few extra or different bases here and there that distinguish an artificial chromosome from a natural one.

To link the pieces, Smith and Venter's team used enzymes that allowed them to join longer and longer DNA strands until they had just four, each representing one-quarter of the genome. Finally, the team inserted these quarters into yeast, which copied and combined them into a complete chromosome. The researchers sequenced their newly constructed genome and, except for the watermarks, it matched M. genitalium's exactly. The work is "a technical tour de force" and a "monumental effort," says yeast biologist Jef Boeke of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. However, to be sure this genome works as it should, the researchers must still put it into a DNA-less M. genitalium, notes Eckard Wimmer, a molecular virologist at Stony Brook University in New York state: "Proof is biological function, and that's missing in this paper."

Related sites

More on synthetic biology

Watchdog group concerned about synthetic biology

Document exploring options for guidelines for synthetic biologists

Internet Explorer 8 Tries New Compatibility Solution

For Web developers and surfers who discovered that Internet Explorer 7.0 "broke" some (or many) of their favorite Web sites, there may be good news. Now, Microsoft is working to avoid that problem in version 8 by letting Web site developers signal to IE how standards-compliant it ought to be with their pages, according to a blog post on Microsoft's IEBlog this week. At the heart of the problem lies Web standards compatibility -- and, sometimes, the lack thereof -- in different releases of IE over the years. In one move to improve the situation, Microsoft last month announced that an early version of the pre-beta code for IE 8.0 had successfully passed the so-called Acid2 browser compatibility tests. "Acid2 is a test of modern browsers that determines how well a browser works with several different Web standards," the company said at the time. However, few Web sites actually depend on browsers being Acid2 compliant, so that status may be less important than advertised. The company also said it has additional plans for IE8's standards compliance to further ease Web site developers' pain and make sites appear a lot more consistent for Web surfers. It's unclear at present what those plans might be. The longstanding issue facing IE's developers is how it should display both content that doesn't meet Web standards as well as content that does. Throughout the more than a decade that IE has been in service, it has been subject to repeated bashing for its lack of full compliance with common Web standards. That concern, in fact, was part of Opera Software's complaint to the European Commission last month. In claiming that Microsoft behaves anti-competitively, Opera said Microsoft intentionally limits IE's Web standards compliance to hurt less-popular browsers with better compliance. Microsoft in the past has at least said it's interested in improving IE's standards compliance. However, the results have been a mixed bag. For instance, IE7, which shipped in October 2006, increased the browser's compatibility with Web standards -- particularly in the area of Cascading Style Sheets, which help organize and apply design elements to Web pages. "Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly to us ... many of those changes made IE incompatible with content that was already part of the Web," IE Platform Architect Chris Wilson wrote in the blog post. In an effort to avoid a repeat performance, Microsoft said it has decided to add a new, optional, "super" compatibility mode to IE8. IE already features two modes of behavior -- one called "quirks" mode and another dubbed "standards" mode -- that can be used to display Web content. Quirks mode lets the browser display non-standard, typically older content. Standards mode, naturally, enables display of more standards-compliant pages. However, standards compliance on the Web can be a moving target, as Microsoft has discovered. "We realized that 'Don't Break the Web' should really be translated to 'Don't change what developers expect IE to do for current pages that are already deployed'," Wilson wrote. "With this painful and unexpected lesson under our belt, we worked together with %26#91;standards advocacy group%26#93; The Web Standards Project ... on this problem." What the IE team has decided to do, he said, is to enable Web page designers to insert a "meta" element, or tag, that tells IE8 (or a subsequent update of the browser) to use the highest level of compatibility available. "We think this approach allows developers to opt in to standards behavior on their own schedule and as it makes sense to them, instead of forcing developers into a responsive mode when a new version of IE has different behavior on their current pages," Wilson wrote. The first beta test copies of IE8 are due out in the first half of this year.

Health Drives iMedix

SAN FRANCISCO %26#150; Technology startups often say they create products to address a need in the marketplace. In the case of iMedix, its two founders saw a direct personal need. The two Israelis had health related issues they thought Internet technology could help with. Amir Leitersdorf suffered from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) throughout his childhood and wasn't diagnosed correctly until adulthood. His friend and co-founder, Iri Amirav, was struck by shrapnel from a bomb while serving in the Israeli army. "It was hard to find people to talk to with the same kind of head injury," he recalls. Tech veterans of other ventures, the pair saw an opportunity to help connect people with the same health-related issues and launched iMedix last month. "We realized healthcare is a lonely business, but it doesn't have to be. It can be collaborative," said Amirav, chief marketing officer of iMedix; Leitersdorf is CEO. WebMD is probably the granddaddy and the biggest site for consumers to research health and medical conditions. But there are also a number of newer big Internet players going after various parts of the consumer healthcare market including Microsoft. There are also plenty of community sites and social networks where people can exchange information about their condition. iMedix marries research, including an extensive database of freely available medical information, with a social network that lets users share their experience in a live chat or via a private email system. You can also post your photo for chat, or choose from a selection of avatars. iMedix has several new features in the works. Currently, when you look on the site for, say, "headaches", you will get a list of relevant sites for more information. In addition, there's a separate list showing people who put headaches in their profile who you can ping online or e-mail to ask a question or start a conversation. But there's also a rating system in the works where users will be able to rate how helpful someone's advice was. The higher the ranking and community involvement, the higher on the list these active users will appear as a first point of contact. "We're not replacing physicians. This is complementary," said Leitersdorf at a briefing here with InternetNews.com. "When a patient leaves the doctor, they often have many questions they think of later. iMedix provides a way to connect with others with similar issues such as 'How did you feel after surgery?'" Leitersdorf said iMedix has several patents pending for the search engine it developed. Results are ranked based on user ratings of the result, such as clicking on a simple thumbs-up icon. A unique twist is that iMedix said its technology analyzes patterns from the small percentage of users who rate a site (typically around one percent), to make a more comprehensive ranking. For example, the site takes into account users who are often more compelled to give a site a negative rank when they feel it's wrong than credit it for being right. "We analyze the information in creative ways," he said. Time will tell whether iMedix has the right online prescription for consumer's health and medical needs, but the opportunity is large. A 2006 study by Jupiter Research found that only 16 percent of adults who searched online for health information were satisfied with their findings. Another Jupiter Research study said that 34 percent of US adults connected with others online, or with the online content created by others, for health reasons. In addition to its main site, the company offers a widget that lets other Web sites embed iMedix search and drive traffic back to iMedix which relies on advertising for revenue.

Publishing Company Settles Software Suit With SIIA

A New York-based publishing firm has agreed to pay $500,000 to resolve a copyright infringement suit filed by the Software %26 Information Industry Association on behalf of several prominent software vendors. Whittiker Legal Publishing on Wednesday signed off on settlement to resolve a lawsuit brought against it in federal district court in the Eastern District of New York. In addition to the cash settlement, the company agreed to destroy all unlicensed copies of the Adobe, FileMaker and Symantec applications in its possession. According to the SIIA, Whittiker executives claimed the violations brought to its attention were accidental and that it was unaware that it was infringing on the various software firms' copyrights. Using fully licensed software is a basic corporate responsibility," Keith Kupferschmid, SIIA's senior vice president of intellectual property policy and enforcement, said in a release. "Businesses such as Whittiker are not absolved of responsibility simply because they are not aware of their infractions. Like all businesses, Whittiker had an obligation to ensure they were using only legitimate software." Whittiker Legal Publishing officials were not immediately available for comment. In its lawsuit, the SIIA accused Whittiker of installing and using multiple copies of the association's member companies' software without proper licenses. "We need to devote sufficient resources and time to ensure our firm's future compliance with out software licenses," Dawn Polewac, business manager for Whittiker said in a release accompanying the announcement. "We didn%26#146;t know we had done anything wrong, but now we will certainly be more careful to check the licenses of software installed in our offices." The SIIA was tipped off to Whittiker's illegal use of software through its Corporate Anti-Piracy program, which provides rewards of up to $1 million for tipsters who alert the association to illegal software use and pirating. In October, Florida Benchmark, a mortgage survey company, agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against it by the SIIA on behalf of Autodesk. Kupferschmid said the SIIA has paid out more than $39,500 in cash to 14 sources who have reported instances of software piracy through its Anti-Piracy reward program. The trade association offers rewards ranging from $500 for a settlement of $10,000 to $1 million for cases with settlements of more than $20 million to whistleblowers who report alleged software piracy through its Web site. Kupferschmid said the SIIA and its attorneys follow up on tipsters through various investigative techniques before contacting the executives at the offending companies. If the companies don't come clean and settle up, SIIA attorneys pursue litigation on behalf of the software companies. Currently, the SIIA has between 200 and 250 cases pending, he said. "To be frank, we don't litigate all that often," Kupferschmid said in an interview with InternetNews.com in October. "We'll litigate maybe two of them. Most of the companies do cooperate and work with us to become software compliant. It's fairly painless." SIIA investigators, after discerning whether or not an online tip has any merit, go to the company's Web site looking for clues to support the allegation. They call around to other SIIA member companies to see if and how many software licenses they have for other applications. They dig through classified advertisements for IT workers to see what software skills they're looking for and what applications they're running. The SIIA provides free, downloadable audit programs for accused companies to inventory all their applications. Sometimes the CIO or CEO doesn't even know the illegal versions of the software are being used. Once a company or individual is caught, confronted and confesses, a settlement arrangement is worked out between the company and the SIIA. Typically, Kupferschmid said, the company will pay about triple the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) to the SIIA. After the attorneys take their cut, a portion of the settlement payment is returned to the aggrieved software vendor and the remainder is left to finance the SIIA's anti-piracy endeavors. Kupferschmid said the SIIA collects "millions" in settlement payments each year.

Dell Back to Strong Growth

Dell returned to double-digit percentage growth in global PC shipments in the fourth quarter as its new retail sales strategy began to pay off, while rival Hewlett-Packard's growth slowed, technology research firm IDC said on Wednesday. Overall, global PC sales rose a healthy but less-than-expected 15.5 percent in the fourth quarter, and economic concerns were likely to cut into future demand, IDC said. Dell shipped 17.1 percent more PCs in the fourth quarter than in the same period in 2006, for a total of 11.3 million units and 14.6 percent of the global PC market, IDC said in its quarterly PC market-share survey. The PC maker, based in Round Rock, Texas, remained in the No. 2 spot despite these gains. A year ago, Dell's worldwide shipments shrank 8.4 percent, according to IDC. In the United States, Dell sold 15.2 percent more PCs than a year earlier, well ahead of overall U.S. market growth of 8.8 percent and faster than HP's 9.8 percent. HP kept the No. 1 spot with a market share of 19 percent, but growth slowed to 23.3 percent from 33 percent in the third quarter as demand lessened in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and competition increased in the United States, IDC said. "Having struggled through the past year, Dell is starting to turn around," IDC reported. "The company's rapid expansion in retail also has helped boost volume and address competition from other leading players." Dell lost the top spot in the PC market to Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP in 2006, as consumers bought more laptop computers in stores, where HP had an advantage. Dell last year abandoned its 23-year-old direct-only sales model and started selling PCs at Wal-Mart stores in the United States and Carrefour locations in Europe, among other retailers. Dell has been expanding in retail, cutting costs and making acquisitions since founder Michael Dell returned to take the CEO position a year ago. HP and Dell appeared to feel the impact of Taiwan-based Acer's aggressive expansion, including the October purchase of Gateway in the United States. Acer's PC shipments surged 60.3 percent after the Gateway purchase. Acer held 9.6 percent of the worldwide PC market, up from 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006. Investors have been watching for signs of whether the PC market would deteriorate in the face of a possible recession in the United States, fears that were fanned on Tuesday by disappointing results from chipmaker Intel. But fourth-quarter U.S. PC unit sales rose 8.8 percent, topping IDC's 6.9 percent forecast. Researchers said global sales missed the IDC target of 16.7 percent because of relative weakness in Western Europe. But the slowing economy was not to blame for the European deceleration. Rather, consumers slowed purchases from a PC buying frenzy in the third quarter. Japan also recovered from recent declines, growing about 10 percent in the quarter, and notebook computers continued to drive growth worldwide. "Fourth-quarter results show a very healthy PC market," said analyst Loren Loverde in a statement. "Despite fourth-quarter strength, projections for the next couple years anticipate slower growth. Rising concerns about economic growth are likely to reduce expectations further." IDC analyst David Daoud said that the industry had weathered recessions without major impact in the past. But no recession has occurred since the industry had matured, he said. "We projected a 12.2 percent growth for 2008, projections that could be challenged by the potential economic downturn, in the U.S. in particular," he said. Recent U.S. growth was fueled by Dell's and Acer's rapid expansion, he added. Sales of Apple computers surged 30.9 percent in the fourth quarter, giving it 5.7 percent of the U.S. market. Rival researcher Gartner said that fourth-quarter global sales rose 13.1 percent, led by HP. Gartner said that Dell had shown signs of recovery at the end of the year.

IBM Skips Past 4Q Estimates

IBM on Thursday delivered stellar fourth-quarter earnings, posting a profit of $3.96 billion, or $2.80 a share, on sales of $28.9 billion. Analysts were expecting IBM to earn only $2.60 a share on sales of $27.8 billion. IBM CFO Mark Loughridge credited the company's global services and software units for much of the upside surprise. In the quarter, Big Blue's services business surged 17 percent from the year-ago quarter to $14.9 billion. Software sales, buoyed by strong demand for applications used in service-oriented architectures (SOA), (define) checked in at $6.3 billion, up 12 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007. Middleware sales rose 15 percent from the year-ago quarter while its WebSphere applications grew 19 percent for the full year. "We're seeing tremendous growth in our global applications management business," Loughridge said during a conference call with analysts. "Revenue was up in all sectors and geographies. We had exceptional performance in our services and software businesses. We expanded our growth margins and are very well positioned heading into 2008." Hardware sales slipped 4 percent in the quarter (which included the divestiture of its printing division) to $6.8 billion. IBM's services business locked up $15.4 billion worth of new contracts in the quarter%26#151;many of which Loughridge said were signed at the last minute%26#151;which was down about 13 percent from the year-ago quarter. However, IBM's services unit exited the year with a backlog of more than $118 billion in services contracts. That IBM managed to deliver such tremendous results in the fourth quarter while other top-tier technology and financial services firms have disappointed is, according to Loughridge, a testament to the company's strong foothold in emerging markets. He said IBM will continue "aggressively investing" in high-growth markets while taking a more "measured approach" to established markets including the U.S. "We have an uncertain economic environment that we're working through along with the rest of the business world," he said. "But we have a strong tailwind behind us heading into 2008. We have a strong geographical mix including a good 50 countries where we had double-digit growth for the quarter. That's a real advantage for us." For the full fiscal year, IBM pocketed $10.4 billion, or $7.18 a share, on sales of $98.8 billion, up from a profit of $9.5 billion, or $6.11 a share, on sales of $91.4 billion in 2006. Last quarter, IBM tiptoed past the consensus estimate, earning $2.36 billion, or $1.68 a share, despite lackluster hardware sales, particularly in its mainframe and server business units. Loughridge told analysts that despite murky economic conditions in the U.S., the company remains on track for fiscal 2008 earnings of between $8.20 and $8.30 a share and remains committed to its goal of delivering earnings-per-share of between $10 and $11 a share by 2010. "We enter 2008 with an outstanding operating and financial position," he said. IBM shares rallied up $2.80 a share, or 3 percent, to $103.92 in after-hours trading after closing off 53 cents to $101.10 ahead of the earnings report.

ATI Write-Down Costs AMD $1.68 Billion

Well, no one can say AMD didn't warn of impending pain from the write-down of assets related to the ATI acquisition. It just didn't tell us how bad the pain would be. For the quarter ended Dec. 29, the company posted a net loss of $1.77 billion. That sum includes the approximately $1.68 billion ATI write-down, as well as the write-down of its share in Spansion, a flash memory joint venture with Fujitsu. The shame of it all is that excluding the ATI charge, AMD would have had its best quarter in some time. In terms of operating loss -- which doesn't include taxes and other one-time charges -- AMD's loss would have been a mere $9 million. After the ATI write-down, Spansion, taxes and interest income and expense, the company saw a quarterly net loss of $1.77 billion. Excluding the total ATI costs, AMD would have posted a slim loss of $97 million. A year earlier, it posted a $576 million quarterly loss. For fourth quarter 2007, AMD also reported revenue of approximately $1.77 billion -- essentially even with the $1.77 billion it reported in the fourth quarter of 2006. For the year, AMD saw revenue of $6.013 billion, a 6 percent improvement over the $5.649 billion it reported in 2006. The net loss for fourth quarter made up half of the year's losses of $3.77 billion -- far worse than the $166 million loss AMD saw during its 2006. The one consolation for AMD is that the ATI write-down, while a diminishing of its assets on the balance sheet, does not impact cash flow. In fact, the company ended the year with $1.889 billion in cash on hand, up from $1.541 billion in cash last year. That sum is largely attributable to a $622 million investment from a UAE firm late last year. On the conference call with analysts to discuss the results, CFO Bob Rivet pointed out that the company had seen record unit shipments in desktop, server and notebook processors. Those included 400,000 quad-core desktop and server shipments, which was consistent with guidance given earlier in the year. Rivet's forward guidance was modest. He said only that the first quarter of 2008 would see a decrease in revenue "in line with seasonality," and that operating expenses would be up about 5 percent. The company undertook a few cost-cutting measures -- such as a forced shutdown at the end of the year -- which Rivet also said would not be repeated this year. CEO Hector Ruiz said there would be no change in any of the information and projections given last month during AMD's New York analysts meeting. "We were determined to fix Barcelona quad-core issues as soon as we could," he said. "I'm very pleased to report silicon has been out of the factory with the fixes that we've put in place and we're really thrilled with all of the work that's been done. We expect within two to three weeks we will begin providing our customers the samples that they will then put in servers platforms beginning at the end of the quarter." The priority for first quarter is getting the triple-core and low-power Phenoms to market, which AMD recently moved to the head of the line. When asked about the current worries of an economic slowdown that many companies are factoring into their guidance, Ruiz appeared optimistic. "I have to say we are in a unique segment of the market, the microprocessor market, where the need to drive the economic engines of growth in all the segments of the world ... are in such a need of infrastructure growth and economic growth that even if those markets slow down from 10 percent to eight percent growth, we're still talking about a significantly strong and healthy growth," he said.

New Office For Mac Finally Sees Daylight

Users tired of waiting for Office 2008 for Mac can finally buy the package Microsoft officials announced Tuesday at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Originally slated for shipment in the second half of 2007, the company delayed its release in early August, saying it had wanted to ensure the product's quality was up to snuff. When Microsoft officials announced the delay, they set a new schedule that targeted the suite's final ship date as today's Macworld Expo. They made it. However, even with the extra time allotted to complete the work, it wasn't easy meeting the new deadline. "Office 2008 is the product of four years of our lives: many months of take-out dinners and delayed vacations, too much time away from family and friends, endless fire drills and triage meetings, and the occasional break for Nerf gun fights and 1336 sticky notes," wrote Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac business unit (Mac BU), on Microsoft's Mac Mojo blog. The release provides Mac users with the new graphics engine that was introduced in Office 2007 for Windows last year. Office 2008 for Mac also features an updated user interface, similar to Office 2007's Ribbon UI, named the Elements Gallery. The package also adds features that will be on the Mac first, as well as some that will only be available on the Mac edition. One example is a publishing layout view that provides layout capabilities for newsletters, fliers and brochures. A ledger sheets capability also provides pre-built worksheets for common home and small business financial functions. Office 2008 for Mac also supports Microsoft's controversial Office Open XML file formats, though the older binary formats -- .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT files -- are also supported. The suite runs on both Intel and Power PC-based Macs. Additionally, Microsoft said the suite offers a new stand-alone application, My Day. The product "allows users to track professional and personal priorities to stay on top of daily activities regardless of which application they are working in," according to a statement. The new suite package is available in stores now, with volume licensing for corporate customers scheduled to begin Feb. 1. Microsoft offers three editions of the new Office suite. The core suite, which lists at $399.95, provides Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage along with Microsoft Exchange Server support and Automator tools. Customers with any previous version of Office for Mac can get the new release at a discounted cost of $239.95. Meanwhile, the home and student edition costs $149.95, comes with three licenses, and provides Word, Excel, PowerPoint and a non-Exchange Server-enabled version of Entourage. Meanwhile, a Special Media Edition includes Microsoft's Expression Media digital asset management system as well as Exchange Server support and Automator tools. The retail price is $499.95, or $299.95 for the upgrade, the company said.

Sun to Nab MySQL For $1 Billion

UPDATED: In a surprise move, Sun Microsystems today said it's acquiring privately held open source database vendor MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion. The move is a bold one for Sun, which analysts note has been under pressure to make money from its Solaris enterprise software since it began offering it as open source. MySQL is arguably the most widely deployed open source database in existence, with over 100 million installations and about 50,000 new copies downloaded daily. "Sun has been struggling to build a recurring software maintenance revenue stream with its open source software releases, and this acquisition should help considerably in building out this business," 451 Group Analyst Raven Zachary told InternetNews.com. During a morning conference call with press and analysts, Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz described the deal with MySQL as "the most important acquisition Sun has made in the history of the company." The acquisition also makes Sun a database player in earnest. To date, the company's efforts in the field have included working with the open source PostgreSQL database in the past, as well as serving as an Oracle partner. "We're entering the $15 billion database market by acquiring the fastest-growing and leader of the open source database market," Schwartz said. He added that Sun sees the future of the database market as being in open source. Between MySQL and PostgreSQL, Sun will have a large portion of the market covered, he said. Executives positioned the deal as a boon for both Sun and MySQL. In Schwartz's view, Sun can help better sell the database to customers, since he said the single biggest impediment to MySQL's growth has been concerns by large, global businesses about its suitability for mission-critical uses. "That peace of mind is what we can deliver and that's what we'll be focused on immediately as we put the companies together," he said. Schwartz also said MySQL would likely bring new business to Sun, both on the software side and potentially on the hardware side as well. He noted that databases are always attached to servers and storage, which presents new upsell and cross-sell opportunities. "We're building a business that spans as broadly as the Internet reaches," Schwartz said. "This is all really about one thing -- reaffirming Sun's position at the center of the Web. We view ourselves as a platform for the Web economy and this will certainly add to the portfolio." Schwartz also was quick to note that neither PostgreSQL nor Oracle should feel slighted by Sun's acquisition of MySQL. "We have been one of the earliest backers of PostgreSQL, and we are reaffirming that commitment today in part by saying we believe in the future of open source databases so much that we just put a billion dollars behind one of them," Schwartz said in response to a question from InternetNews.com. "We're committing to figuring out the ways we can optimize and integrate innovations across the two communities." Rich Green, executive vice president of software at Sun, said the move is all about providing choice for customers. Green said Sun would continue to invest in and drive opportunities to PostgreSQL as well as the JavaDB effort that Sun also backs. As for Oracle, he described its relationship with Sun as complementary, noting that Sun has spent many years in partnership with the database giant. "Oracle is not just a technology that runs on Sun's technology," Green said. "We have hundreds of engineers that work closely with that organization to optimize our systems and software to perform at a world class level." "We're going to keep investing in that, it's vital to our business," he added. "But we can also use and share that experience to similarly optimize MySQL." The deal is expected to close in late first or early second quarter next year. Of the $1 billion sum Sun is offering, it will shell out approximately $800 million in cash to acquire all of MySQL's shares while paying about $200 million in options. The Sun acquisition also wards off what many observers had expected to happen to MySQL sooner or later -- namely, an IPO. "There were a number of potential pre-IPO suitors for MySQL AB, Sun being one of them," 451 Group's Zachary said. Additionally, with one major open source deal now in motion, the stage could be set for further drama in the space -- giving more reason for open source companies to pair off with potential suitors to talk deals. "2008 looks to be an exciting year for open source M%26A," Zachary said.

Stocks Follow Intel Lower

Merger mania in the tech sector, tame inflation data and a rally in financial stocks were almost enough to rescue the stock market on Wednesday, but weaker than expected results from Intel proved too much to overcome. Intel shares plunged 12% after the chip giant missed estimates and lowered revenue guidance. The surprise was that the rest of the sector gained: chip equipment stocks like Novellus and KLA-Tencor rose sharply after Intel raised capital spending guidance, and AMD jumped 7% on a Divx licensing agreement a day ahead of its quarterly results. Nvidia was left out of the chip rally, falling 11% on a downgrade, and Sandisk lost 3.6% on Intel's comments about the flash market and competition from Samsung. Oracle and Sun gained 3% each on a pair of acquisitions. Sun grabbed MySQL, while Oracle finally prevailed in its bid to acquire BEA Systems, which gained more than 18%. Still, despite an encouraging earnings report from JP Morgan and a tame consumer inflation report that left the Federal Reserve room to cut interest rates again in two weeks, stocks finished modestly lower in volatile trading. Apple continued to come under pressure after its Macworld announcements came in largely as expected, losing another 5%. The Nasdaq fell 23 to 2394, the S%26P lost 7 to 1373, and the Dow lost 35 to 12,466. Volume rose to 5.44 billion shares on the NYSE, and 3.5 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a few shares on the NYSE, and by a 16-14 margin on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 53% on the NYSE, and 56% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 36-387 on the NYSE, and 54-350 on the Nasdaq.

A Particularly Nasty Week For Malware

This is turning into quite a week for computer security. Microsoft issued a rare out of band security alert concerning Excel; BusinessWeek's home page has been the victim of a hack and more than 400 banks are the targets of a new Trojan. If that wasn't enough, the one year anniversary of the Storm worm is approaching, with the associated Trojan(define)%26NBSP; looking to rear its ugly head again. Plus, Apple today issued its own set of fixes for QuickTime. First up was the Microsoft alert; something the company rarely does outside of Patch Tuesday unless the threat is severe. It issued an alert late on Tuesday that older versions of Excel, from Excel 2000 to Excel 2003 with Service Pack 2, are affected by security. People who open a malicious e-mail attachment or visit a Web site hosting malicious code may find that their systems are compromised and remote code is executed on their system. Microsoft said that so far the exploit is not being used widely, but for "specific targeted attacks" and it is investigating further. The vulnerability does not affect Microsoft Excel 2003 Service Pack 3, Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac. Computers with administrative privileges are more vulnerable to the exploit. The primary workaround for now is to not open Excel files from unknown sources. That's not the only problem facing the Internet today. Symantec has noted a new banking Trojan, called Trojan.Silentbanker, which the company found worrying by even its seen-it-all standards. More than 400 banks in the U.S. and worldwide have been targeted. The Trojan can intercept transactions that require two-factor authentication and can silently change the user-entered destination bank account details to the attacker's account details instead. All of this is done without presenting anything unusual to the victim. The Trojan intercepts all of this traffic before it is encrypted, so even if the transaction takes place over SSL, the attack is still valid. It's not just confined to banks. The Trojan can steal FTP, POP, Web mail, protected storage, and cached passwords. "Then we start to see the capabilities of this Trojan," wrote researcher Liam Omurchu. Staying with trusted sites won't even keep you safe any more, as Trend Micro noted with its report on a compromised page at BusinessWeek. A week earlier, the security products page for CA was compromised with an IFrame (define) exploit. Paul Ferguson, a network architect for Trend Micro, first spotted the malicious code in the BusinessWeek page and alerted the company. He said that in a recent Google search of malicious JavaScript code used in SQL injections, Trend found more than 100,000 infected sites. "The days of being able to put a page up and not constantly maintaining that site and not applying underlying patches, those days are long gone," he told InternetNews.com. "There's some basic security features not being adhered to. An SQL database should not be reachable from the Web interface. A lot of these issues are finally coming to a head because they are actively being exploited by the bad guys." Trend, Symantec and the Internet Storm Center all noted that the durable Storm worm is rearing its ugly head again, this time in the form of Valentine's Day exploits. ISC noted that the ever-mutating Storm worm was only detected by four of 32 anti-virus programs, but since that post was made the major players have updated their signatures. Still, Ferguson said you need more than signatures. "You can't do just antivirus detection because they will get so far ahead, you will lose. So we use domain reputation and URL filtering and bad domain lists in our products," he said.

Oracle Digs Deep to Snare BEA

It didn't come easy and it didn't come cheap but Oracle on Wednesday finally got its hands on BEA Systems after agreeing to pay more than $8.5 billion for one of the last significant independent middleware vendors still standing. Oracle, which had its initial "friendly" takeover bid of $6.7 billion, or $17 a share, rebuffed in October, agreed to pony up $19.375 a share in cash to close the deal. The 14 percent premium values the acquisition at roughly $8.5 billion, or $7.2 billion net of BEA's cash on hand of $1.3 billion. BEA shares stormed up $2.88 a share, or 18 percent, to close at $18.46 after the deal was announced while Oracle shares moved up 61 cents, or 3 percent, to finish at $21.92. The acquisition instantly makes Oracle%26#151;along with IBM%26#151;a premier provider of middleware software used for service-oriented architectures (SOA) (define) in the enterprise. "I think the first most important thing to Oracle is the opportunity to make a move on the high end of the market, and go more head-to-head with IBM there," Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research, told InternetNews.com. "And that's not just high-end transaction processing, it's also events, virtualization, scale-out and other area where BEA has been innovating ahead of the market. In November, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told analysts that if Oracle were to make another offer for BEA, it would for less than the $17 a share it originally offered. Apparently, he and the rest of Oracle's board of directors had a change of heart. "I think they needed to get the deal done in time for the anniversary of the %26#91;Hyperion%26#93; deal and it was worth $2 to $4 %26#91;more per share%26#93; to them," Cowen %26 Co.'s Peter Goldmacher wrote in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. "I am disappointed but it's good for the stock and %26#91;paying an additional%26#93; $7 billion is mouse nuts relative to the hit the stock may have taken had they had a bad top-line comparison." Another factor contributing to BEA's eventual acceptance of Oracle's sweetened offer was the green light given by activist investor Carl Icahn, the company's largest shareholder, who initially chided BEA executives for playing hard to get. Icahn originally called on BEA's board to sell the company, arguing that it was worth more to potential buyers than as a stand-alone company. With Icahn now on board, BEA executives managed to extract a decent premium above what many analysts considered a generous first offer from Oracle. "Over the past several months, our Board of Directors, with the assistance of independent financial and legal advisors, has reviewed various ways to maximize stockholder value, including engaging in discussions with third parties about a possible sale of the company," BEA CEO Alfred Chuang said in a release. "This transaction is the culmination of that diligent and thoughtful process, and we believe it is in the best interests of our shareholders." Yefim Natis, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said the merger makes sense for both companies. "It's not a surprise," he said. "What's different between now and when Oracle first announced its offer is that nobody stepped up to compete. Oracle is buying BEA with the knowledge that it's not buying it away from another vendor. Oracle's motivation is not technology, though BEA has excellent technology. Now Oracle really becomes equal to IBM in the high-end of the market and it's also very strong at the lower end with developers where its platform is already widely used." Oracle CFO Safra Catz said the deal is expected to add between 1 cent and 2 cents a share on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. The deal is expected to close by mid-year. Also Wednesday, Oracle announced it had acquired Captovation, a leading provider of document capture software that streamlines the process of capturing mission-critical content for access within business applications and processes. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Transformers: Scanner to Communications Hub

Motorola is expanding its enterprise mobile tool kit with the launch of a device that combines wireless bar code reading, Voice over Internet Protocol telephony, high-speed data network access and walkie-talkie capabilities. The CA50, priced at $540 and available this April, clearly reflects the technology marriage of Motorola and Symbol Technologies, the scanner company acquired for $39 billion in September, 2006. Users can scan product bar codes to get information such as price and inventory levels, dial other agents for help, reach out to staff with the walkie-talkie function and pull up data off back-end systems with just a few clicks. Target markets are hospitality, retail and healthcare environments, though Motorola clearly sees other opportunities as well. "This unique device converges all these capabilities -- turning the scanner into a mobile computer. It will help companies boost customer service as it provides access to needed information whichever way it%26#146;s available," Charles Laforge, director of advanced data capture for Motorola's enterprise mobility business, told InternetNews.com. Industry analyst Jack Gold doesn't dispute that contention. Describing the CA50 as a very interesting device that's more of a communications tool than a scanning device, Gold said it illustrates how the merger between the two vendors is propelling Symbol's legacy ahead. "What Motorola is able to provide Symbol is greater manufacturing capabilities and a better opportunity to produce good ergonomic and usability aspects in products," he said. That said, Gold doesn%26't believe the 3.7-ounce gadget is the perfect device for every sales or service environment. "It's still fairly expensive, though the price will drop fast in volume purchase, and it's not everything for everyone. You need that back-end to tap into so it's likely not a value proposition for the Mom and Pop shop," he added. Last June, Motorola debuted the third generation release of the MC17, a handheld kiosk that not only provides customers with look-up product data, but can send affinity data to customers who swipe their shopping card in the device.

High Prices Just Feel Good

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
ScienceNOW Daily News
14 January 2008

When diners order an expensive wine from a restaurant menu, they usually find that it tastes exquisite, harmonious, elegant--in short, much better than the $8 Cabernet they drink at home. A new study suggests that the high price tag could be fooling them into feeling that way by manipulating the brain's pleasure centers.

Previous studies have shown that savvy marketing can change how we feel about a product. For example, branding a perfume as classy somehow makes it smell more appealing. Curious about how such marketing affects the brain, researchers led by Antonio Rangel, an economist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of 20 volunteers as they sipped what they thought were five kinds of Cabernet Sauvignon. In reality, the researchers gave the subjects three wines with retail prices of $5, $35, and $90. The cheapest wine was served twice but disguised in one of the servings as a different label costing $45. The $90 vintage also made two appearances, once with its real price and once with a price of $10.

The faux marketing worked. Volunteers reported liking the cheap wine better when it had a higher price attached to it and the expensive wine less when it was marked cheaper. What's more, when sipping wines tagged with a higher price, the volunteers showed greater activity in their medial orbitofrontal cortex--a part of the brain believed to be responsible for judging pleasantness of experiences--than when they sipped the cheaply marked wines. The findings, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that marketing actions such as pricing can have a placebo effect on the brain in the same way that dummy pills have been shown to relieve pain.

"We think that the effect is driven by expectations," says Rangel. "Subjects believe that more expensive wines are likely to taste better. These expectations end up influencing their actual experience." The findings raise questions about the ability of consumers to make sound choices amid the dizzying whirl of marketing campaigns that characterize today's economy, he says.

Rajneesh Suri, a marketing professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, calls the study an example of how consumers use pricing information as a proxy for quality. "Price can serve as a quality cue that guides enjoyment of a product, especially when one does not know enough about it," he says.

Related site

Wine Tasting Association

Moka5 Brings LivePC to the Mac

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF -- Moka5, a startup virtualization services company, is releasing Macintosh support at this week's Macworld Expo extending availability of its LivePC library already available for Windows. Moka5 leverages virtualization software (currently VMware, though support for other providers is planned), to provide a secure computing environment with features such as self-healing, data protection and automatic updates. Mobility is a key benefit of Moka5. A user's computing environment (applications, OS, data files and documents) can be loaded on a USB flash drive that can be plugged into another system for a virtual re-creation of the original desktop in a separate, secure partition. The free Mac version of Moka5 requires VMware's Fusion virtualization software ($80 or free 30-day trial); Windows users also need the VMware client which is free and MokaFive bundles. There are a number of LivePC applications at Moka5's Web site for free download including Fearless Browser for surfing anonymously on the Web; the classic Quake II video game and even the operating system for the One Laptop Per Child notebook that you can run on a Mac or PC with MokaFive. "We store the applications, the operating system, the entire image in a compressed format on the flash drive that's in its own partition so you're not exposed to malware," John Whaley, founder and principal engineer at Moka5, told InternetNews.com in a briefing here at company headquarters. Moka5's LivePC software automatically installs the latest drivers, security patches and other updates whenever it's connected to the Internet. "But all the user data, your document files and so forth, are persistent; it stays protected in the original format," said Whaley. Also, Moka5's LivePC works offline as well but you don't get any updates until the system is reconnected. Whaley said the goal of Moka5 is to make it easier for individual users and small-to-medium size business who don't have a large, or any, IT department, to run their computers in a simpler, safe way akin to a consumer electronics product. In a demo, Whaley launched Excel but also loaded a macro virus that froze the system. The solution? Shut down, restart and a fresh Live PC window with the original settings and data loads%26#151;minus the virus. For enterprise customers, Moka5 is developing a management console and other features designed to help IT administer the software over multiple machines. The management software is now in beta and set for release about the middle of this year when pricing will also be announced.

Outsourcing Market Will Remain Robust in 2008

IT outsourcing deals don't garner the splashy headlines they did just two or three years ago, but that doesn't mean enterprise customers are suddenly averse to turning to outside providers for help with their most important technology projects. In fact, according to Gartner, worldwide outsourcing spending will grow about 8.1 percent this year to $441 billion, up from $408 billion in 2007. But rather than locking themselves into multi-year contracts with one vendor like IBM, Accenture or EDS, more and more CIOs are taking a buffet approach, signing several smaller-sized deals with multiple providers that can deliver specialized products and services that address specific business objectives. The emergence of the software-as-a-service model (SaaS) (define) is also playing a pivotal role in changing the way companies evaluate their sourcing needs, giving companies a viable alternative to traditional outsourcing providers and forcing these same vendors to either partner with or develop their own on-demand delivery model. "SaaS is still in its infancy but it's fast becoming a viable option for a portfolio of services and software people are using," Kurt Potter, an analyst at Gartner, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "We're finding that many companies are looking to SaaS options to minimize the customization that traditional outsourcing vendors and projects typically require. They're testing and adopting it in areas that don't conflict with other core architecture areas." Gartner surveyed IT executives at 191 small-, mid- and enterprise-sized companies in North America to find out not only how much they plan to spend on outsourcing in the coming year, but how they're sourcing strategy and priorities have changed in recent years. Most telling, according to Potter, was the fact that 65 percent of the companies queried now say they have a formal enterprise sourcing strategy in place. In 2005, Gartner found that only 35 percent of companies had developed a disciplined process and method for determining how, where, when and what to outsource for its disparate business units. "That's a big increase," he said. "Basically, it all starts with each company's strategy. It defines how you're going to get these services. And we've found that it's more about the process than the price. If a company doesn't have the sources and needs them, it doesn't really matter what it costs. You still need it." Developing strong IT governance structures and properly aligning either outsourced and SaaS-based projects with business objectives is crucial remain the biggest challenges for companies of all sizes. "%26#91;We're%26#93; seeing our clients set up internal processes and applications to create a service model for other internal organizations to leverage," Hemant Ramachandra, managing director of BearingPoint's Technology Solutions unit, wrote in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. "This can be software-as-a-service or even application as a service. Setting up the right governance structure is critical to ensure that outsourcing is leveraged appropriately." Last year, IBM extended its leadership position in IT outsourcing market share with 8.1 percent, followed by EDS and ADP at 5.3 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. Among vertical markets, the financial services companies outpaced manufacturing, government and health care, spending more than $186 billion in outsourced services and equipment in 2007. "It's clear that outsourcing is a business tool that's not going away," Potter said. "But it may not be right for everybody."

Is 'Tru2Way' True Two-Way TV?

Remember the days of three network channels? Then came cable TV with 50 channels, then more. Now, the next horizon in television is looking more like true two-way connectivity like the Web or the Internet. Brian Roberts of Comcast corporation stepped up to this bold announcement during a keynote address at CES by noting the beginning of yet another revolutionary moment in communications. He called it Comcast 3.0, but in truth, the next version of cable and on demand content is built on the DOCSIS 3.0 (define) standard, which sets downstream traffic transfer rates between for cable providers. Roberts and Comcast call it Tru2way technology, a set of tools and services for the cable network, and a new term for cable internet speed: Wideband. This may be more than just a new blend of acronyms; it could create a new generation of interconnected media devices. If adopted by the industry, Tru2way will be the language of cable television just as HTML is the language of the Internet and allow the equivalent of surfing Comcast content. The ability to do this comes down to new Comcast IP infrastructure, called the DOCSIS 3.0 standard. It would utilize a new cable modem, which increases from 1 channel of analog TV dedicated to data up to to 4 channels delivering up to 100 megabits per second. Thus an HD movie can be delivered to the home in as little as 4 minutes. Comcast's future is a three step process. First, the company is announcing a new infrastructure and connectivity model to access and deliver content to the home. Next, the number one cable provider plans to offer a much higher data rate architecture to deliver that content. Finally, a new Web portal is to be unveiled, which will combine all the services that Comcast provides. Comcast is borrowing a move from a playbook of a certain penguin: open source. Tru2way is the new name for the "OpenCable Applications Platform" (OCAP). This represents a huge move away from the closed set top boxes that today act as a sort of firewall between the user and the content offered by Comcast and other cable companies. By making the cable box an open standard, it can be embedded into televisions, set top boxes, DVRs like Tivo, and other electronic devices to give consumers new ways to enjoy movie and video content anywhere, anytime. Viewers will no longer need a special remote and tangle of wires to enjoy all that cable has to offer. With the cable box effectively built into the TV and other components, consumers will simply bring the TV set home from the store and plug it in to begin receiving all available cable channels and interactive services. Once such a device was announced by Panasonic: a product called Anyplay, which is a dockable combination of DVR and DVD integrated into a portable player. But Tru2way goes beyond a simple cable box decoder: in the future, providers from well known media giants down to startup and entrepreneurial companies can deliver services and choices that we can%26#146;t even imagine today. Companies can develop applications and devices that integrate the Tru2way network into what Roberts calls the "Media Center Eco-system." Applications will work on all compatible cable systems in the United States as well as in other countries adopting the standard. Comcast is promising Tru2way by the end of this year and LG, Samsung, Motorola and Panasonic are already on board, with more to follow. Microsoft, for example, will enable Tru2way on future releases of Windows Media Center and the Xbox. Panasonic is working to develop a "plug and play," interactive-digital-cable-ready TV set, with Tru2way technology inside. Comcast has delivered 6 billion on-Demand movie views since 2003, six times more than movies rented on Netflix in it's first 8 years, Roberts told attendees at CES. Comcast is focused on expanding its on-demand offerings dramatically. Further, a project called "Infinity" has a very ambitious goal: delivering over 100,000 and eventually millions of titles to the consumer. As Brian stated "you're never going to want to get off the couch." This new cable system architecture delivers content directly to the viewing device, such as the TV itself. "We want to provide every piece of video content that a producer wants to put on TV," he added, "any conceivable kind of video...with all kinds of content creators large and small." The content owner would get to decide if this access would be free, supported by ads, subscription based or pay-per-view. By adding user supplied content from sources such as YouTube, the choices would grow from hundreds of thousands to millions of choices. Finally, the Web portal Fancast will allowing access to everything that Comcast does provide, will provide, and beyond to even include brick and mortar cinemas, other web resources like iTunes, and even to competitors such as Netflix. At its launch, Fancast.com is offering 3000 hours of streaming video, 10,000 movie trailers, 50,000 celebrity photos and over 11 million pages of video entertainment. What if you PVR is not made by Comcast or you are not in the Comcast network? Not problem: Fancast is other-vendor friendly. One issue remains: how will Comcast will manage the digital rights that have stymied this type of open access in the past? SonicBlue, then maker of ReplayTV (initial competitor of Tivo) was sued out of existence by a coalition of 28 media companies because it introduced commercial skip and online internet sharing features. ReplayTV also encouraged the open source community to create tools that allowed recorded content to be shared with laptop PCs so, for example, someone flying to Hong Kong could catch up on Boston Legal episodes. This is the very type of functionality that Comcast is claiming as "new and improved" yet it has been around for over five years already. How can Comcast hope to open cable's content when this act was brutally punished by the media companies in the past? Perhaps Comcast will avoid commercial skip and peer to peer Internet sharing. (ReplyTV still exists as both a stand-alone unit and PC hardware/software application, owned by D%26M holdings). From 50 channels to project infinity, and beyond. For many, now that the cable network has a language, who will teach it to speak, and, more importantly, what will they teach it to say?

Hitachi's 'Monster' of a Disk

Hitachi may be exiting its smallest hard drive disks but it's got big plans for a gigantic 500 Gigabyte drive, which it plans to ship next month. Along with that announcement, Asus, a key motherboard and laptop OEM manufacturer in Taiwan, said it would also release a high end (desktop replacement) laptop that would include this drive, and an upgraded unit that could optionally hold two drives for a total of 1 Terabyte (define) of storage. (The Tera prefix comes from the Greek for 'monster'.) The M50 will be available next month. The M70 is slated for release in March. With the release of the big disk, Hitachi envisions a future where the laptop would be the personal center of entertainment for everyone -- from a busy traveling executive to a student, or a mom's kitchen. To this end, this drive will hold over 1,000 full length uncompressed albums. Using mp3 compression, the numbers are staggering: over 100,000 songs typically. For video, over 150 full length DVD encoded movies with all features can be included. That would allow users to watch movies every waking minute for a full lunar mission, perhaps even longer. Hitachi isn't just concerned with packing in the bits. The company also made provisions for protection of that data. Due to vibration from some high-end subwoofers squeezed into laptops today, hard drives have a hard time tracking during moments of pounding base: low end vibrations can send heads into a frenzy, trying to stay in a lane as vibrations move the surface of disk up and down as well as side to side. Like a van trying to stay in a lane with a strong cross wind, standard hard drives simply can't take the abuse and simply retry the request for data until it is successful. Unfortunately, this reduces the life of the disk, and of course, the data as well. Enter Hitachi's Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS), not new to their disk drives but only recently available on notebook drives, where, frankly, it is needed more than a desktop. RVS senses vibrations and automatically compensates by stabilizing the heads to allow for continuous data flow, allowing the deep bass from your digital music to continue vibrating the disk as well as your eardrums while your spreadsheet crunches. It is clear that Hitachi is concerned about keeping your data safe. Along those lines, the 5K500 also features Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) on its slower 1.5 Gb/s SATA (define) drives. Although the data is safely stored on the drive, without the encryption key, the data is almost useless. So retasking a laptop no longer has to involve complicated data-erase procedures; simply deleting the key renders the data inaccessible. So, a stolen laptop cannot be simply disassembled and the drive accessed from another computer. Without the encryption key, the data is safe. Unfortunately, this disk isn't coming to a standard laptop near you all that soon. This drive is 12.5mm high, beyond the current 9.5mm standard. That means only the bulkier, specially-designed desktop replacements, usually heavier units with large screens, can feature this drive. This is due to the fact that the drive has three internal disks instead of the usual two. Perhaps with the thought in mind of dual-disk systems, these drives are also providing data while sipping at the battery, at only 1.9 watts during standard read/write performance, comparing to the 2.5 watts many of the older generation drives use, both Hitachi and other manufacturers that have only two platters. Many current and next generation drives operate below the 2 watt threshold. With the release, Hitachi has created a secure, reliable and rugged drive that is light on power but large on size and heavy on the pocketbook, in quantity around $400. It's targeted to users not looking at the price tag, only the performance. For now, it looks like students and moms will have to wait.

First 'Patch Tuesday' of 2008 Proves Modest

Microsoft's first "Patch Tuesday" of 2008 was fairly unexceptional as the company's monthly vulnerability fixes go, focusing on two security bulletins, only one of which is labeled "Critical," the most severe category. The Critical bulletin, MS08-001, warns of two separate vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP stack used in all versions of Windows. According to the bulletin, an attacker exploiting the holes could take complete control of an affected system, install new applications, change or delete data or create new accounts with full user rights. Don Leatham, director of business development for Lumension Security, formerly PatchLink, said this is a fairly serious vulnerability. "The critical patch deals with remote code execution and the vulnerability is at the kernel level," he wrote in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. "This means that if someone exploits the vulnerability, they could take complete, unlimited control of a machine." Leatham said one of the methods that could be used to exploit this vulnerability might be video or audio streams such as IP-based teleconferencing or streaming media. "We suggest that organizations block IP multicasting at the perimeter firewall and the Vista firewall (which is not an option in XP) while testing and rolling out the patch ASAP," he wrote. The second fix, MS08-002, is labeled "important" -- less severe, but still a vulnerability that users and admins should address promptly. The bulletin addresses a problem in the Windows Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS), which would allow an attacker to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges and take complete control of an affected system. "We strongly recommend that administrators test and deploy both patches as quickly as possible," Leatham said. Microsoft also issued Security Advisory 943411, detailing an update to the Windows Vista Sidebar that offers new protections against malicious widgets inadvertently installed in the Vista Sidebar. Additionally, as is tradition, Microsoft updated its Malicious Software Removal Tool, this time to recognize the Win32/Cutwail family of Trojans. Microsoft will hold its usual Webcast to discuss the fixes tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific time.

Wi-Fi Networks Face Virus Threat?

Researchers at Indiana University are raising alarms about the potential vulnerability of Wi-Fi networks to malware attacks. In their report, the researchers said they were able to simulate the vulnerability of Wi-Fi networks in several U.S. cities to the spread of malware, (define) the malicious software worm or virus that the study said could spread rapidly from one wireless router to another. The researchers state most of the simulated attacks show tens of thousands of routers infected in as little time as two weeks, with the majority of the infections occurring in the first 24 to 48 hours. However, several conditions would have to be met for an attack of such magnitude, chief among them, unprotected routers. Further, the report discusses how such an attack might be quickly contained or the spread of infection reduced. One way is to force users to change default passwords, which many fail to do. Second is the adoption of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) (define), the cryptographic protocol meant to replace Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) (define) that is more easily broken. WEP's shortcomings have been widely documented and a major security weakness identified by the university researchers. Richard Rushing, Chief Security Officer for wireless security vendor AirDefense, said the report is another good reminder that users need to be pro-active because the default settings on many wireless systems are sub-par if not out-of-date. "If you go to any support site for your router, I guarantee you it'll have an update that's newer than what you have installed," Rushing told InternetNews.com. But Rushing thinks the disaster scenario laid out by the Indiana researchers is less of a threat than more traditional virus attacks on computer users in general and wireless networks in particular. He notes there would have to be a significant number of active users with unprotected routers for a virus to spread quickly and software like AirDefense's own monitoring tools would notice such anomalous behavior right away and issue an alert. In a more traditional malware attack, an individual unknowingly downloads a Trojan (define) or rogue program that steal passwords, credit card info, etc. Unprotected wireless systems are at risk to these kinds of attacks. Rushing said this is the low hanging fruit for the bad guys since so many users don't bother to install the right protection. He noted many vendors are doing a better job of providing better security out of the box than in years past when encryption and other protections had to be proactively enabled, but it's still user's responsibility to make sure the latest security is in place. But networks are very different than PCs in that they are more often left continuously online and thus are a more tempting target for would be attackers. The researchers also assert a large number of users do not change their password from the default established by the router makers. Since these default passwords are easily obtainable, it gives the bad guys easier entry. Again, this is another case where pro-active steps like installing a unique password, would better protect a wireless system.

SOHO Storage Needs Grab Titans' Attention

Saying the words 'home office' and 'EMC' in the same sentence and something just doesn't seem right, does it? But the storage titan, along with some other well-known brethren in the industry, is targeting the small office-home office (SOHO) market with a vengeance, though each are navigating a different route to what they all hope will be a revenue Mecca. EMC's vessel is LifeLine OEM Software, which promises to help small home office users centralize, organize and secure digital files and anything from Excel payroll documents to family photos and everything in-between. What's unique is that while EMC is aiming at the SOHO user, it's not a direct sell. Instead, the vendor's working with SOHO device manufacturers/partners such as Intel, which just pushed out the Intel Entry Storage System SS4200-E this week at CES featuring the Lifeline application. According to an EMC spokesperson, the OEM partner model gives EMC "the broadest technology portfolio from which to create offerings for these markets." Iomega has also jumped on the Lifeline bandwagon with CEO Jonathan Huberman stating in a release that his company is partnering with EMC on a new line of Iomega-branded network storage products for the consumer and SMB market. The LifeLine software is browser-based and managed through game consoles as well as desktops. It supports Windows and Macintosh and provides data protection capabilities including RAID and EMC's Retrospect backup software. The application even takes in 'greening' concerns as the built-in disk drive offers up a spin-down function. But it's not just all about preserving family memories and cherished video clips. The Lifeline product also offers advanced file sharing, data management and data protection features. For example, users can search inside file content using keywords and there's even a printer server. EMC, however, isn't alone in vying what could be a lucrative low-end storage market. This past September, Dell debuted its MD3000i as a cost-effective alternative to Fibre Channel storage options. The device runs on iSCSI over an Ethernet network. In December Dell gobbled up iSCSI specialist EqualLogic as well as UK-based storage consultancy The Networked Storage Company (TNWSC). Late last year IBM debuted a first entry-level storage product, The System Storage DS4200 Express, aimed at SMBs with less than 1,000 employees, and announced a partnership with Network Appliance to produce systems built on the partner's unified and open network-attached storage and iSCSI/IP SAN products. Online storage providers are also kicking down SMB doors these days, offering efficient, less-IT intensive alternatives to running network attached forays. As one analyst explained in a recent InternetNews.com article, "Online backup services are particularly attractive to the SMB market, as this meets some of their unique needs." The scrabble to grab big chunks of the SOHO storage pie won't be dying down anytime soon, given that SOHOs continue to grow in numbers with nearly 35 million home office households up and operating in 2005 according to an IDC research report. No wonder EMC (and likely every other vendor in play) views it, and the consumer storage market, as "growth opportunities for the future."