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IE7's do no evil approach
Looks like Microsoft got it right with its IE7 browser that was made available as a public beta today.
The first time a user launches the application, he is presented with a welcome screen asking him about three settings: phishing, language and quality feedback. The first and last one send information back to Microsoft, and therefore are switched off by default. So even if you're too lazy busy to read the page, you'll still get the most privacy conscious settings available.
Microsoft also deserves credit for making Yahoo and not MSN Search the default search engine. But for some reason you need to manually add Google to the search options before you can make it the default engine. And I wouldn’t be surprised that the MSN becomes the default engine as soon Microsoft marketing gets involved.
Lastly, the second page you visit (the one after the configuration screen) has an html error (error box displayed below). It's on Microsoft.com. Oops.
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Update 5:49 pm.
I had to uninstall the application because it failed to work with our webbased content management system (CMS).
That brings forward the most important set-back about this application: you can't run IE6 next to IE7: one will overwrite the other. And since IE7 is in beta, that sucks because you'll effectively lose you stable browser if you want to test the unstable one.
Yet another related problem was that the CMS kept acting up even after I uninstalled IE7. Only after clearing out the chache and browser history would it function properly.
Privacy by default (click image for larger version)
But the html on the ie7 tour page still needs some work. (click image for larger version)
Tags: internet explorer, ie7, microsoft
Starforce joins the laughable lawsuit squad
StarForce, a Russian firm developing a poorly engineered anti-copying application that is used by some game distributors, is pretending to be threatening BoingBoing for exposing the application for its crappyness.
The megablog earlier today received an email from "PR-manager" Dennis Zhidkov:
"I urge you to remove your post from [link]because it is full of insults, lies, false accusations and rumors. Your article violates approximately 11 international laws. Our USlawyer will contact you shortly. I have also contacted the FBI , because what you are doing is harassment."
Sigh… Why don't I ever get such amusing emails? I'd love to violate approximately 11 international laws. Or see how the FBI would get involved in a case that is clearly outside of its jurisdiction. But then, how would a Russian like Zhidkov know?
And the most amusing fact is that Zhidkov's email will only backfire now that he has exposed his company as being completely clueless about the law and point even more people to the questionable reputation of its software.
Starforce actually has a history of leashing out against people that dare to criticize its anti piracy protection in computer games. And it's PR policy is about hitting first and ask ing questions later.
Boingboing was spot-on about StarForce software messing with users operating systems. As one experienced gaming journalist wrote in October last year in an email to Mr. Zhidkov:
"Myself and my peers have come across many games with StarForce, among other systems, installed and as much as one or two problems might be considered circumstantial evidence against the system, consistent and regular problems following the same patterns I would view as concrete beyond reasonable doubt."
Zhidkov's only reply back then: "I respect your opinion".
The company meanwhile is waging a PR war to disarm some of the more serious claims about the software containing rootkits or disabling CD-Rom drives.
But the company addressed widespread complaints about its device drivers causing system instability and computer crashes.
Game over for Starforce?
Tags: starforce, boingboing, frivolous lawsuit
180solutions fails to follow through on its threats – again
Adware maker 180solutions has dropped it’s lawsuit against security vendor ZoneLabs.
The vendor's ZoneAlarm application labelled 180solutions' software as malware that monitors user keystrokes and mouse movements. That is wrong, 180solutions claimed, and they are actually right. 180solutions makes a malicious application that presents users with pop-up ads and is nearly impossible to remove. Tar and feather them for that, but not for committing identity theft.
The company claims that it's dropping the suite because "ZoneAlarm downgraded its classification of 180solutions' S3-enabled search assistant software."
180solutions' lawsuits are starting to look like paper tigers. The company last year also sued a group of seven former distributors who illegally installed the 180solutions software on computers they had hacked and by doing so collected plenty of affiliate fees. That suit too was soon dropped.
It seems like the company doesn't want to spend the money to actually pursue its legal claims. Instead it's using the court system to generate PR and create the impression that it is an honourable business.
Honour however is deserved through outstanding customer service and by delivering a product that consumers actually want. 180solutions fails to qualify for either one.
Tags: 180solutions, adware, spyware
Spyware coalitions everywhere
A new industry consortium has been formed to improve the battle against spyware.
The group is a who's-who in the world of computer security, including McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, ICSA Labs and Thompson Cyber Security Labs.
It's all jolly great that vendors are trying to kill the spyware pest, but what's up with all these groups and alliances? Last week we saw the creation of the Stopbadware.org programme, spearheaded by the universities of Oxford and Harvard and funded by Sun Microsystems and Google, among others.
And then there is the anti-spyware coalition, whose members among others include McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro and ICSA Labs.
From the looks of it, the Coalition and the new consortium are doing about the same work. But as things go, a smaller group moves faster than a big one. Add the fact that three of the world's largest security vendors are involved in the new consortium, and they are in a good position to force their will upon their peers this way.
Tags: spyware, anti spyware coalition, badware
Vista schedule stays the undefined course
For a product that is ridden by launch delays and features being pulled, it's no surprise that Windows Vista's beta release schedule too is being changed on a regular basis.
The much expected beta 2 of the application is no longer scheduled to be released, Microsoft has disclosed. In stead the company will stick to releasing its CTPs: community technology previews.
The CTPs too are subject to changes however. When Microsoft first started talking about the releases, they were supposed to be released on a monthly basis. But Microsoft skipped the November release and now is forfeiting on the January release too.
Microsoft has a lot to learn when it comes to setting expectations and living up to them.
Where did the $10bn Itanium pledge come from?
The Itanium Solutions Alliance on Thursday beat its PR drum and came up with a stunning figure that would be invested into the platform over the next five years: 10 billion dollars. The money is earmarked for marketing and the creation of software and hardware that will work with the servers.
But as it turns out, the alliance simply wrapped an old stone in some shiny gift-wrap. Because the $10bn adds up to what the alliance members are already investing anyway.
For starters, the figure isn't as impressive as it might seem. The alliance has nine members including HP, Intel, Fujitsu and SGI, and the investment is spread out over 5 years, making for $220 per member company per year. HP alone is investing about $1bn a year in Itanium at this moment, analyst Nathan Brookwood with Insigh 64 told vnunet.com, and Intel too is pulling more than just its weight in trying to salvage the high end server chip.
Unfortunately the big money pitch takes away the attention from the important news. The nine members will also ensure that applications work across systems, fostering the Itanium ecosystem. Practically, if one of the vendors ports over an application to Linux on say HP, users can easily repeat that for an SGI or Bull system. More applications makes for a more attractive platform.
Tags: itanium, intel, SGI, HP, itanium solutions alliance,
The truth about Windows Vista? It's vapourware
Bill Gates earlier this month had the opportunity to show off Windows Vista to the world. His keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show was actually the first time that the Microsoft chairman demonstrated the forthcoming operating system to an audience outside Microsoft – no developers or hardware engineers.
Surely a company will show the best features in a demonstration of this year's most important product launch at the world's most important consumer electronics show, before partners, competitors and a gathering of media from all over the world?
The pictures from his keynote show perfectly well what those features are:
A way to scroll through your applications in 3D – and while alt-tabbing your movies will be able to see your movies still playing and preview documents;
Next came sidebar, the idea that Microsoft stole from Apple's Dashboard, which stole it from Konfabulator.
What about the new photo editing tools? It allows Windows to do what Google's free Picasa application has been doing for years: organise photos.
And certainly don't forget the new user interface for your windows and applications like Windows Media Player. Because, really, its shiny black interface is the main thing that a user will see when he boots up Vista, and the only feature that's really new about the operating system. All the other "new" features are just rip-offs of existing applications that Microsoft copied. In the end, Vista won't do anything that Windows XP can't do already with a little help from third party vendors.
As a user, would these features make you stand in line to purchase a copy, some night in November when Microsoft chooses to launch Windows Vista?
Even Windows boss Jim Alchin seems to realise that his offering has become extremely weak. So in trying to justify he five years that his team spent on delaying developing the product, he is now touting safety and security as Vista's big feature.
"Even if [people] are not into home entertainment or in any of the specialty areas, they are just going to feel safer and more secure by using [Vista]," Alchin told Zdnet.
Cynicism has taken over in Redmond. Microsoft has taken five years to finally make a secure operating system and now wants us to pay for it. After Microsoft pulled every feature in the software, all that's left now are under the hood adjustments.
Put it in a box and slap a price on it, because Microsoft's monopoly days are far from over.
Windows Vista loses by knock-out (pictured: Bill Gates beats Steve Ballmer in a computer game at CES
Tags: jim alchin, bill gates, Microsoft, windows vista
Cingular claims it invented emotions
The US mobile operator Cingular is trying to patent emoticons on mobile phones.
Let us remember that patents are there to protect inventors from copycats, allowing them to earn back the hard work that they put into their inventions.
Emoticons are the little cartoon drawings that are displayed in IM or SMS conversations, expressing the author's emotions. The Cingular patents doesn't cover the emoticon itself but "a method and system for generating a displayable icon or emoticon" on a mobile device. Or to put it in plain English: a shortcut to creating emoticons.
It remains unclear exactly what innovation Cingular has brought to the concept of mobile shortcuts to display emoticons, other than that it ripped of the emoticon and the shortcut – none of which were Cingular inventions – and applied it to the field of mobile phones.
I don't pretend to know much about patents, but this one has the stench of "prior art" hanging over it like smell of a run over skunk.
Tags: cingular, emoticon, patent, patent reform
GPL3 is going too far
GPL3 is about to alienate many of the people that made it a success.
So today Linus Torvalds launched a full-out assault against the proposed revisions of the premier open source license. He said that he wouldn't adopt the license for the Linux kernel because of its controversial statements about digital rights management technology (DRM).
The controversy is centred around a provision in the license draft that would prevent developers from using a GPL3-licensed application together with DRM. Practically TiVo would be unable to use Linux to power its digital video recorder boxes (as it does today) if Linux would adopt GPL3. The same would go for GPS navigation devices, media adapters, etc. etc.
The draft for version 3 of the GPL was in part drafted by Richard Stallman, and the battle against DRM is one of his pet projects.
Needless to say that a GPL3 governed Linux would be a gift from heaven for Microsoft (or Sun Microsystems, in pushing OpenSolaris), as very few organisations would be able to use it without violating the license.
Linux is the premier example of a GPL application. The GPL in fact governs the vast majority of all "open source" software, even though there are about 70 different open source licenses.
The inclusion of the DRM provision would effectively render GPL3 useless for the vast majority of this world's users. It could be that the Free Software Foundation really wanted to create a license that takes open source to the furthest most extreme, making it more of a political statement than a practical tool.
In that case the GPL2 will be around for many years to come.
Stallman protesting Sony's DRM
Tags: GPL, richard stallman, linus torvalds
Con of the day proofs: you have zero privacy
Next at eleven: a con that has the cellular business up in arms and why your personal phone records out in the open.
That's probably how a local television news station would advertise the news of the latest con that is going around in the cellular sector.
Websites like eFindOutTheTruth.com and locatecell.com are selling individual's phone records. Pay about $100, give the site a name and a (mobile) phone number and soon you'll receive a list with all the numbers that have been dialled from that number.
It turns out that the con works ridiculously easy. An employee for one of the sites calls a carrier's customer service claiming to be the owner of the number, armed with information such as address and sometimes even a social security number. Or they pretend to be co-workers or field technicians, anything that gets them the records.
Customer service easily lets go of the security protocol and coughs up the information.
Cingular yesterday won an injunction against one of the websites. But the real problem here are flawed security policies and a lacking privacy legislation.
As a consumer, you can only be extremely paranoid about your privacy and assume that you have none. Prepare for the worst, and hope that things will turn out for the better.
Tags: mobile phone record, privacy
The Inquirer joins VNU
VNU, the parent company of vnunet.com, has acquired the Inquirer for an undisclosed sum.
The Inquirer is run by Mike Magee, who previously founded The Register.
Welcome to the family!
From the gossip pages: Yahoo buying Digg?
The credibility for this story is about zero, but the J. Botter Weblog is claiming that Yahoo! has put in a bid to buy Digg.com for $35m.
Baseless as the rumours may be, it does make sense for Yahoo or Google to snap up the company. Yahoo! last year acquired deli.icio.us which is very similar to Digg, except that Digg has a better design and user interface and gets more visitors.
Tags: digg, yahoo, del.icio.us
In battling Cnet, Jupiter Research leaves out one disclaimer
Jupiter analyst Joe Wilcox in a blog posting takes on a Cnet news article.
The Cnet story cites research by an analyst firm NPD about retail sales of productivity software and then jumps to the conclusion that Apple's iWorks has surpassed WordPerfect as the leading alternative to Microsoft Office based on US retail sales. It also claims that the software is a rival to Microsoft office.
As Wilcox points out, iWorks is far from an Office competitor, offering only a desktop publishing tool and PowerPoint alternative. Looking solely at retail sales too is at least odd, because it leaves out direct sales to enterprises (Word Perfect's stronghold) and internet sales.
But the one issue here is that Joe Wilcox himself in the past has worked for Cnet as reporter. It could explain the harsh stance he takes against the news website. I have no knowledge of his past at the site, but he could feel sorry that such a fine online publication is making this mistake, or he could have a grudge against the site because he left with a fight.
"I rally to Corel's defense because this CNET News.com story is spreading, across blogsites and other news sites. There was too much bad technology reporting in 2005. There's no reason 2006 has to be the same way," Wilcox wrote in his blog posting. But in the interest of full disclosure he should also mention his past relation with the site.
Tags: wordperfect, iworks, jupiter, cnet
Steve Jobs dons Mickey Mouse ears
Disney has bought Pixar for $7.4bn.
Pixar is not only the breeding ground for blockbuster hit movies such as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, but also was co-founded by Apple's Steve Jobs – who is set to make about $3.7bn from the sale and will gain a seat on Disney's board of directors.
While it's obvious that Disney can use the studio to kick-start its struggling animation movie division, what does Jobs gain from this deal?
Although a nice ego booster, he doesn't need the money. Forbes last year pegged his net worth at $3bn.
In his new job as Disney board member, Jobs is much further removed from the actual business then when he was Pixar CEO. He did however have to divide his time between the CEO jobs at Pixar and Apple.
Now that Apple has become the dominant player in the portable media market and the world of digital entertainment is gearing up for a battle over which company gets to provide the digital rights management (DRM) technology of the future, Apple needs Jobs' undivided attention.
Apple and Disney already have a closely knit relationship that ties Disney's television shows to the iTunes music store. Today's announcement can only strengthen those bonds. And in the process strengthen both Apple and Disney in the emerging digital video war.
Jobs' dollar sign just got a lot bigger
Tags: apple, Disney, pixar, steve jobs
Hit back at Bush's search engine data quest
Are you worried about the ease at which the Bush administration thinks it can demand confidential data from search engines about its users' search queries?
Then the Graigalog has the tool for you. "Craig" has crafted a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that will automatically submit bogus Google search queries every time you visit a regular Google page.
In practice, Google will not only log your actual search query, but also several fake ones to soil Google's log files.
I doubt that Google will be too thrilled if everybody starts using this tool, as it will increase the load on their servers. So as a cautionary sign: use this with caution and stop using it if Google wins the court case.
Tags: Google, greasmonkey
Apple's hiring to fix RSS
Apple is looking to hire an "RSS engineer", according to a posting in the jobs section of the Apple.com website (free registration required).
Interestingly enough, the opening was posted right after the news emerged that the RSS feature in iPhoto deviates from common practices in the RSS community, preventing users of some feed readers to access photos published by the applications. It further supports the theory that iPhoto's broken RSS feeds were the result of poor programming and testing rather than a conscious plan to break away from the common RSS standard.
According to a comment left on Dave Winer's blog, the job was first created last year. But it either wasn't filled or the person that got it either left or was fired after the iPhoto screw up.
Jobs explains the photocasting feature at MacWorld in San Francisco earlier this year
tags: apple, rss, iphoto, photocast
OpenOffice beats Microsoft to Intel Macs
OpenOffice developers have created a version of the open source productivity suite for Apple's new Intel powered Macs.
There is no word yet on when Microsoft plans to unveil its Office suite for Intel Macs.
The current OpenOffice build might still be experimental, but it supposedly is working and it shouldn't take long for an official release to come out. The suite is simply set to beat Microsoft to the new platform.
Running the current Microsoft Office version through Rosetta will result in 50 per cent performance decline relative to the last PowerPC models because the software isn't designed for Intel processors. The performance gap could be just what the doctor ordered for users to start looking into OpenOffice and give the suite some added momentum.
Via: Simon Phipps
Tags: openoffice, microsoft, microsoft office, apple, intel mac
Freehold N.J. gets big brother schools
Schools in the Freehold Borough School District in Freehold, New Jersey have been turned into digital fortress. As part of a study, the district has equipped the schools with Iris scanners and a tailgate detection system.
All this is designed to "improve overall school and student safety".
The system will acts as a gatekeeper for school employees, parents, guardians and visitors, but the press release doesn't mention students. The tailgate detection system monitors the frequency at which an individual holds the school door open for another individual.
Apparently the district has a major problem with individuals sneaking into the school to kidnap children, steal supplies or sell drugs – otherwise I don't see why they need to install an expensive security system using iris scanning technology.
But will turning the school into a fortress really solve the problems if these threats still lurk outside its walls?
Tags: iris scan, biometrics, freehold
Time running out for online fraud fighting
Banks have to come up with an effective solution to tackle internet fraud or guarantee their online services, a new study claimed. Failure to do so could result in 77 per cent of online banking customers cancelling their accounts, claims the UK's Financial Services Authority.
The study sends a reminder of a keynote that president Bush's cyber security czar Richard Clarke delivered early 2002 at the RSA Conference in San Jose. Back then he warned that the lack of security could cripple e-commerce and might just result in unwanted government regulations. Clarke warned for the "dialogue of death" where developers are overlooking security because customers refuse to pay for it.
Clarke has since stepped down, but his scenario has largely become a reality. If only government would step in an hold software developers and enterprises for patches and the inability to patch.
Then we can finally move on to the next generation of computing where we take away the burden of patching from the end user. It's called thin clients and Sun will be very happy to sell you some. Or Google for that matter, if there is any truth to the rumours.
Richard Clarke
Tags; richard clarke, rsa conference, security, Financial Services Authority
Enterprise software market ridden with lies
Market research firm Stratascope is angry at Oracle for misrepresenting its data in a marketing campaign. The vendor claimed that Stratascope data proofed that retail organisations running its software are more profitable, where that claim in fact isn't supported by the Stratascope data.
This is a common strategy for Oracle, SAP's Jeff Nolan claims. He might have a bias against Oracle, but history has showed that there is some truth to his claims.
SAP however isn't exactly a saint either. The firm itself used a Stratascope study last year to claim that organisations running SAP are 32 per cent more profitable than non-SAP customers.
While the claim in itself is true, SAP wrongfully suggests that the two are related.
It's all to easy to draw wrong conclusion from research, and marketing departments have turned that trick into an art. The best solution is to simply ignore any "independent" views relayed by vendors.
Even if they have the best of intentions (which they will never have), they can be simply wrong, as this example illustrates.
Beer drinkers generally more often suffer from excess weight than wine drinkers. Must be that beer drinkers consume more, taking in more calories, right?
.Wrong, claimed a Danish study last week. Beer drinkers also tend to eat ready cooked dishes, sugar, cold cuts, chips, pork, and soft drinks. Wine drinkers however consume healthier foods such as olives, fruit and vegetables, poultry, cooking oil and low-fat cheese.
Tags: oracle, SAP, Stratascope
Forrester dumps publication
Forrester Research has discontinued its Forrester magazine, a monthly publication that was launched only a year ago.
It's always puzzled me what the publication aimed to achieve, other than being an average sponsored publication that serves as a corporate cheerleader.
The publication had editorial independence sure enough, but Forrester found that the market for technology and strategy publications is still non-existent. Editorial independence doesn't really pay the bills there.
Tags: forrester research
Comdex changes hands once again
CMP Media has acquired Media Live, an organiser of tradeshows and owner of the defunct Comdex tradeshow.
I know… this was actually announced more than a week ago, but the announcement got snowed under in the all Macworld and CES news.
CMP published trade publications including Information Week.
Media Live, formerly known as Key3media, was once a large organiser of trade shows including Interop, JavaOne and of course Comdex. As the IT market collapsed in 2001, Key3media too went down.
The company in 2003 was bought by Thomas Wiesel investment bank for about $150m. They made a bad decision. CMP is said to have paid only $45 million.
The big question remains if the new owner will dare to bring back Comdex. Most industry insiders doubt it: the event lacked any focus and was the poster child for all that was bad in the internet hype. Bringing back Comdex would amount to commercial suicide.
Tags: comdex, cmp, ces, medialive, key3media
Roof advertising mostly hype
Rooftop advertising might be the next big thing, if you ask Roofshout.
The company is currently auctioning a sample on Ebay. That's right: sample. The auction's description is extremely vague on details but it appears that the ad will only run on a sample picture on Roofshout.com's website – the company doesn't say that it has any actually rooftops available.
Roofads allegedly are the latest thing now that Google, Microsoft and the likes are making satellite image available through their mapping services.
Except that… they aren't. This picture shows a logo for the Target retail store located close to Chicago's O'Hare airport. It was put their for air travellers, not Google Maps users.
Tags: roofads, google maps, satellite
Via: Jeff Clavier's Software only
Intel Mac speed turns out to be a myth
Macworld (the publication, not the conference) took the new Intel powered iMac to the test, and found that the speed gains are... well... disappointing.
Steve Jobs claimed that the new models would achieve a 2x improvement in speed. Performing several compute intensive tasks such as rending movies however showed far less impressive results, Macworld demonstrated.
Pitching a 2.0Ghz Intel Core Duo iMac against a 2.1Ghz iMac G5 resulted in a speed gain of roughly 10 to 25 per cent, with some exceptions getting an 80 per cent performance gain. That's far less than the promised 200 per cent.
And things get worse: the "Rosetta" technology that enables applications designed for the PowerPC chips to run on Intel will come to a screeching halt, running at about only half the speed.
It's actually typical for applications to run at a slower speed with emulators such as Rosetta, but Steve Jobs had promised that this wouldn't be the case. "Most users will not even know that it is running," he said when he first announced the switch to Intel chips last June.
Intel Macs speed record demystified
Tags: apple, intel, intel mac, steve jobs
Apple turns a blind eye to RSS standard
It appears that Apple cut some corners when it designed the Photocasting feature in the new iPhoto. Instead of adhering to industry standard version of RSS, the computer maker decided to introduce some new elements to the standard that prevent photocasts from working in some feed readers.
So Apple CEO Steve Jobs wasn't exactly telling the truth when he told delegates at the MacWorld conference that: " We use industry standard RSS. And so anyone can subscribe. You don't even need a Mac."
Photocasts allow users to share photos with friends or family. The service will automatically upload pictures to the .Mac service (that'll be $99.95 per year) and publish an RSS feed. Grandma points her copy of iPhoto or her feed reader to that feed and will automatically receive new photos they are added.
Except that not all feed readers actually work, because Apple isn't using standard RSS but more or less created its own incompatible derivate. (read all the technical details here)
Why did this happen?
Theory one: Apple hired the wrong programmer to build this feature. He or she simply didn't properly understand RSS. Given Apple's limited testing procedures, his sloppy work didn't get exposed until real experts got to take a look at it.
Theory two: Apple did this on purpose to limit interoperability and prevent any non-Apple applications from working with the Photocasting feature. That would make Steve Jobs a liar, promising compatibility where there is none.
You pick.
Jobs explains the photocasting feature at last week's MacWorld in San Francisco
Tags: iphoto, photocast, apple, steve jobs, dave winer
Oracle's big Fusion show
Oracle on Wednesday put up a big Oracle Fusion show at San Francisco City Hall, pounding its chest about the forthcoming application suite.
The message that Oracle sent was as clear as it was obvious: everything is on track and this thing will be the best enterprise application suite ever and totally kick SAP's ass.
But should we buy that?
The public was presented with a fair share of smoke and mirrors.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison couldn't make it because he was ill, but co-president Charles Philips conveniently failed to mention that little detail until the very end of the 2.5 hour long presentation. Most people would probably have left far earlier as the event slowly turned into a granular dissection of niche applications that will be part of the suite.
Fusion is due out by 2008 and was first presented in January 2005. Even though we are one year into the three year development cycle, Oracle had the audacity to claim that it is "halfway to Fusion". As proof the company showed off its middleware, which is in fact done.
Middleware might be Fusion's foundation, customers don't buy the suite because of the middleware but because they want to solve real problems inside their businesses. That's where the actual applications come in. Oracle said close to nothing about those, even to the extent that the senior vice president in charge of applications spent most of his speech talking about middleware.
It's obvious that Oracle needs to give periodic updates about the progress towards fusion, if only to fend of the attacks staged by SAP. But Oracle at yesterday's event only succeeded at showing Fusion might be still alive but has a long way to go.
Oracle co-president Charles Philips filled in for CEO Larry Ellison who was hit by the flu.
Tags: oracle, sap, larry ellison, charles philips, fusion
Google stands up for its users
Imagine, you get a phone call from your bank asking you to give all the phone numbers of your friends who make over one million dollars. Would you honour their request or would tell them that's none of their business?
From the bank's point of view this is valuable data because they want to study it and contact those friends to sell them services. So the bank goes to court, trying to force you to hand over the data.
Sounds silly, right? Now replace 'bank' and 'you' with 'US government' and 'Google'.
Because the Bush administration yesterday filed a lawsuit against the search engine demanding that it hands over one week of search queries and one million random internet addresses. It needs that data, it argues, to investigate the role of porn on the internet.
Why? The US Supreme Court in 2004 threw out a law that seeks to prevent underage children from accessing adult content on the internet. It could prevent legitimate users from accessing such data, the judges argued, which boils down to a restriction of free speech rights.
Google told the government to go to hell. If it wants to build its case to appeal the Supreme Court ruling, it'd better find its data elsewhere. We need some process before handing over confidential information, after all.
But sadly enough Google is by itself. Other search engines complied with the request no questions asked. Their names aren't disclosed but we can all guess which ones they are (and I guess we could sue the government for this information, because we need it to build our case).
This boils down to your relationship with your search engine. Google acts like you're a customer that needs to be courted and treated with respect. The unnamed others are like the old fashioned monopolist telephony providers, telling you that: "No, we don't care about you. We only care about your money."
Where would you take your business?
--
Update: Turns out that Yahoo, MSN and AOL didn't have any trouble handing over the data.
Photo: Helmut Wattrott
Build a wall around your internet and fail
There is a lot of talk lately about providers looking to limit the openness of the internet.
As consumers get a taste for high bandwidth content such as video and subscription music services, providers end up paying the bill for delivering the bandwidth that they promised in the first place.
The solution therefore would be to charge online services that consume lots of bandwidth: "Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover," BellSouth's CTO Bill Smith told marketwatch.com.
The alternative would be that services would be delivered at a lower speed, or not at all.
But would BellSouth really get away with charging say Google for to privilege to reach its subscribers? Google for one thinks it won't.
If the search engine has the stamina to call Bellsouth's bluff, consumers will hopefully vote with their feet, switching to competing providers. Just like they left the "fenced off" corner of the internet that AOL is still failing to sell to its subscribers. Capitalism has its ways to deal with weird business ideas. If Bellsouth stays its course, it will soon find out.
Tags: Net Neutrality, bellsouth, google
A portable first aid kit for computers
Korean USB key maker Iocell has the perfect gift for the sysadmin in your life: a USB memory key with build-in security software. Plug the device into your computer and it will automatically scan the system memory and processes for spyware and computer worms, as well as download the latest malware signatures.
The security software comes from Huari, a Korean AV-vendor.
The device is compatible with anti-virus software that is already installed on a system. Computer systems typically are unable to simultaneously run multiple anti-virus engines.
After my recent experience trying to rid a computer system of the despicable Zango software made by 180solutions, I completely see the market for a device like this.
If you're one of those people who befriend geeks so they help you maintain your computer system, you are morally obliged to get them one. Not because they need it, but because they need it to help you.
A 1Gb model goes for 120,000 Won ($120), the 128Mb model costs 35,000 Won ($35) - buy them here.
The key has been around for almost a year already and was launched in Korea on 7 March 2005. So it isn't excatly "new" or recently launched, as Aving.com claims.
Tags: iocell, Vaccinedrive, anti virus, spyware, security
Salesforce as a platform is far different from the application
Salesforce is setting out to once again change the software industry. First the company's founder Marc Benioff proved that enterprise software doesn't have to be an expensive asset by creating a hosted CRM and in the process killing Siebel Systems. Today the executive kicked off what he refers to as the "business web".
Salesforce's CRM relates to the business web as Windows does to DOS: you simply move up the application on abstraction level, turning the application into a platform, Benioff argued.
Saleforce's business web is essentially an online database and development environment where developers can create and host applications. And it happens to offer a hosted CRM application.
Take out the CRM and you're left with hardware running Solaris and an Oracle database. Throw in a scripting language and web server and you've got the equivalent for hosted LAMP: Linux, Apache (webserver) MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python – the most popular stack of open source applications currently in use and the basic set of software applications (middleware) needed to run a business.
The trick is that Salesforce hopes that users will pay a monthly fee to get access to this set of hosted middleware. But the risk is that there are some pirates on the horizon.
The most obvious candidate is Google. It has APIs (application programming interfaces) for its services but doesn't offer a development platform or application hosting, at least not yet. But it does have all the other components in place: Google Base (database) and a vast hardware grid to run the software.
Microsoft too has aspirations to launch a hosted software platform through its Microsoft Live initiative – although as it goes with Microsoft the details are still fuzzy and products for now are limited to existing offerings.
You also shouldn't rule out IBM or SAP and Oracle for that matter.
Salesforce might have a head start, but it is also likely to be held back by its limited customer base. It's relatively small customer base doesn't affect its chances in the CRM market, but makes the company less attractive as a platform provider.
Benioff selling
Tags: benioff, salesforce.com, appexchange
Benioff talks up the "business web"
Salesforce.com chief Mark Benioff this morning got to do what he does best: sell his software... ahem... service.
Salesforce isn't just about hosted CRM anymore, but is building a "business web", mimicking what has been done on the consumer web with Google, Ebay, Craigslist or the iTunes music store: allowing users to integrate and acquire data from a slew of sources without having to worry about the underlying technology.
The underlying idea is that consumers can use and create services like housingmaps.com that bundle data from Craigslist and Google Maps, so why can't business?
Benioff's vision therefore, is to build an online platform (he tends to call it an operating system) for the business web that allows enterprises to combine services - either paid or free of charge services.
Google Maps is an obvious candidate in mapping out sales data. Benioff also had Skype on stage, showing off the ability place Skype VoIP calls directly from the Saleforce.com application and show online presence information in the application's address book.
There is of course one catch: you need a subscription to the Salesforce.com service at a per person fee monthly fee. The Skype plugin is available free of charge, other will be available at a fee.
Mark Benioff
Tags: benioff, salesforce.com, appexchange
Brush up your online ego
There is a new website around for all you bloggers who want to know how you're doing online:
egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.
We, the publishers of this here internet thing, need the occasional massage, the odd stroke. We aren't paid. We aren't recognised. Our sites hit count used to be enough, but no longer.
That's how the service describes itself in its FAQ. I couldn't have said it any better.
Egosurf.org checks how many of the top Google search results for your name actually refer to you by checking for links to your website. Searching Google for Silicon Valley Sleuth will get you a series of results. The top results is this blog, but the number five result points to some real estate website. The more links you score, the more points you get. Higher links too get more points, and direct links get more points than indirect referrals.
If you don't do well, you can take comfort in the fact that egoSurf is far from perfect and will skip some results. In some cases the service counted Google results where it disqualified the same Yahoo result. Also, you can enter more than one domain to look for, but that will get you penalty points.
In the end it all depends on having the right first name or name for your blog. If your site is called John Johnes' Blog, you have to compete with far more people that if you're some dude called Mathias Woloski writing for Southworks. Using a more rare search query allowed me to crank up the Ego points score for this blog to 10,735, accidentally landing in the top 50. Me landing in the top 50, doesn't that say enough to prove this service's flaws?
Tags: egosurf
Plugging hybrid cars
In one of president Bush's wiser decisions, the US on 1 January started offering tax incentives to consumers who purchase a new hybrid vehicle.
Any plan to reduce the West's dependency on foreign oil and fossil fuels should be applauded. And Bush's plan is actually extra nice because it could stimulate car makers to introduce hybrid vehicles.
The subsidy will be no more than $3,400, based on the relative fuel savings of a hybrid vehicle. In practice most car buyers will get only half of that. But that still is a nice start to offset the added costof a hybrid relative to a regular gasoline vehicle.
The wit of the plan is in the detail that subsidies are limited to the first 60,000 hybrid vehicles sold per brand. This will not only limit the cost to taxpayers, but will also promote new entrants to the market.
Toyota, maker of the most popular Prius hybrid car, will likely take only months to use up its share. But that will only be a further incentive for new brands to create hybrid vehicles, as they can use the subsidy to try and grown their market shares.
A hybrid car has both an electric and gasoline engine. When breaking, it converts the kinetic energy to electrics and stores it to a set of batteries in the back of the vehicle. By using the electric engine for low speeds and switching to gasoline for higher speeds, users can achieve fuel savings of up to 50 per cent.
Hybrids do have three disadvantages however. Even with the subsidies, they are more expensive to buy than fuel vehicles and users will probably never recoup the additional costs through fuel savings. You also shouldn't expect to use your car for more than 7 years, because the batteries will probably run out by then. We'll just have to see what this does to a hybrid's trade-in value.
Toyota Prius hybrid crash test
Tags: hybrid, toyota prius
NetApp and IBM? Not very likely
Rumours about IBM buying Network Appliance are highly overrated, industry analysts argue.
The idea started floating around earlier this week and is said to have caused a spike in NetApp's stock price.
But the whole thing is most likely the work of stock market speculators, as there is about zero rationale for such a deal.
The storage vendor would be rather expensive, selling at roughly $12.2bn. Secondly, IBM in 2003 sold most of its storage business to Hitachi.
Sure enough, the IBM is a reseller for NetApp appliances. But that's about the only rationale for a purchase.
Depicted in photo: NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven
Tags: network appliance, IBM, acquisition
Microsoft chokes on XP support
Microsoft had to rush out an update for its website, after the company had claimed that it would end support for Windows XP Home and Media Centre Editions on 31 December 2006.
That would mean no more updates and patches for the operating system, mere months or weeks after projected launch of Windows Vista.
The date most likely reflected the initially scheduled release date of Windows Vista in 2004. Microsoft typically continues support for consumer versions of its operating systems for two years after the release of a new version. Professional products (including Windows XP Pro) get five years of support.
Tags: Microsoft, support, windows vista, windows longhorn