Margaret Walsh

Hewlett-Packard is building collaboration software with video, application-sharing and 3-D graphics support into several of its workstation models, giving the high-definition conferencing market an option well below the cost and scale of telepresence. It needs only an Internet connection of 400Kb per second, plus a VPN (virtual private network) to connect to systems outside an enterprise firewall. The HP SkyRoom software, which was set to be announced on Tuesday, works on systems with a fairly modest set of requirements, starting with a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent processor.

With the software, users can click on the name of a contact to start up a SkyRoom session with them. Multiple users can join in to these sessions and see the host presenter's desktop as if they were using their own machines. With another click, they can share rich media or what's happening on their desktops. The software supports display of any type of application on a Windows XP or Vista PC, including streaming video, according to HP. HP says SkyRoom is based on video and image compression algorithms it developed over the course of three years. SkyRoom saves work by updating only changes in screen appearance, not the whole screen, HP said.

It can deliver a high level of performance on relatively modest systems and networks by compressing and encrypting data before it's sent to participants. The company named digital content teams, animation production houses and global financial teams running live economic models as possible users of the software. It's another thing to describe it over video," Germanow said. The software should be an ideal tool for teams that design physical things, because it will let one designer show others what's wrong with the item, such as a corner that's too sharp, said IDC analyst Abner Germanow. "It's one thing to describe a design problem over e-mail. Telepresence, which typically involves dedicated rooms or purpose-built systems, would be overkill for these kinds of sessions, he said.

SkyRoom is available worldwide as a free, preinstalled feature of HP Z800, Z600, Z400 and xw4600 workstations. SkyRoom is strictly software, with lower network requirements and no special service fees, and engineers may use it for all-day sessions, he said. Some premium business PCs and laptops coming from HP in the next few months will offer the software on a 90-day trial basis. In addition to the Core 2 Duo or equivalent processor, those systems will need at least 2GB of RAM, a webcam and XP or Vista. The software is also available for purchase for an estimated U.S. street price of US$149 and can be used on workstations and PCs from Dell, Lenovo and Sun, HP said. HP is also offering the HP SkyRoom Accessory Kit, which includes a high-resolution webcam and headphones or speakers, for $119.

Mozilla plans to let people running rivals' browsers use Firefox's new plug-in update service, company officials said today. The service, which relies on a Web page users must steer to manually, is part of the company's effort to prod people into upgrading potentially-vulnerable add-ons, such as Adobe Flash Player, which have become a major target for attackers. After a week of testing , Mozilla late Tuesday launched a Web-based service that checks for outdated Firefox plug-ins. The check scans for installed plug-ins, identifies those for which updates are available and provides a link to the vendor's download site.

In fact, the service already detects plug-ins when the page is accessed by some browsers, such as Apple's Safari, although it isn't able to tell which plug-ins are outdated. Although the service currently works only in Firefox , a pair of Mozilla managers said that the company wants to open the plug-in check to other browsers. "Right now, this page only works with Firefox, but we care about all of you and we're working to support those of you on other browsers as well," said Asa Dotzler , Mozilla's director of community development, in a post to his blog yesterday. However, other browsers, including Microsoft's market-leading Internet Explorer (IE), can't use the page: When IE8 reaches the check-in page, the message "No plugins were detected" appears. Firefox 3.6, which is slated to launch in beta next Wednesday, will warn users when they visit a Web site that relies on an outdated plug-in. Johnathan Nightingale, the manager of the Firefox front-end development team, declined an interview request Wednesday, but today confirmed Dotzler's comment about future plans for the service. "Right now, we're focused on expanding our plug-in coverage and trying to bring greater consistency to the way this information is reported," Nightingale said in an e-mail today. "Longer term, we'd like to make the page as universal as possible, both in terms of the plug-ins we check and the browsers people can use when they visit." According to another Mozilla blog , the plug-in checking service can also be called by any external site using a JavaScript API. Mozilla has already promised to add more plug-in checking functionality to the next version of its browser.

The plug-in check service detects more than a dozen different plug-ins, but isn't always able to tell whether one is outdated. Mozilla kicked off its campaign to eradicate out-of-date plug-ins last month, when it shipped a Firefox update that included detection for only Adobe Flash Player. Adobe's plug-in to render PDF documents within the browser, for example, was detected on a Computerworld system running Windows XP, but the checker said it couldn't sniff out the version number. Later, Mozilla said that the Flash check had prompted more than 10 million users to go to Adobe's Web site to download the newest version of Flash.

Unisys announced Monday software and services that will enable organizations to deploy and run their own internal private clouds, as part of its strategy to offer customers a variety of cloud computing options. In a poll of customers conducted in June by the company, 72 percent said security was their biggest concern about moving workloads to the cloud. The private cloud offering addresses the requirement of organizations that prefer a private cloud for mission-critical applications that use sensitive data, so they can retain greater control over their own and their customers' information, Rich Marcello, president for Consulting and Integration Solutions at Unisys Technology, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. Although there is no technical reason for this, some customers are still not convinced that an external cloud is reliable or robust, and are likely to move in stages, Marcello said.

The company also plans to launch next year a hybrid cloud that combines private and public cloud capabilities. The new Unisys Secure Private Could Solution, which will be available from next month, follows the company's introduction earlier this year of technology and services for a managed cloud service on shared IT infrastructure that is hosted by Unisys. Customers will be able to run many of their applications unchanged in a private cloud, and Unisys is also offering these companies services to help move their workload into the cloud, Marcello said. Organizations of any size can set up their private clouds with an up front investment of US$50,000 for the management server, software, and services, Marcello said. Customers can also use their own hardware, or buy hardware from Unisys, he added.

The software will include provisioning, virtualization, and management software that provides for features such as a self-service portal, he added. Unisys' Stealth technology, that cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication, encryption, and bit-splitting into multiple packets, is also available for private clouds though at an extra price, Marcello said. Ongoing maintenance will involve extra fees for hardware and software support and updates. He did not however expect customers to deploy Stealth on private clouds, as they would have their own firewalls and other security mechanisms in place. Unisys has also announced that its managed cloud service will support new platforms including Microsoft's .Net, IBM Websphere, and Oracle software platforms from this month, so that customers can move their applications that were developed on these software stacks unchanged to the cloud. Stealth is a key component of Unisys' managed cloud service.

When the service was launched earlier this year it supported only Java, Marcello said. This new service provides business continuity and disaster recovery services on a subscription basis, it added. The company has also added disaster recovery as a service for customers of its managed Secure Cloud Solution.

Social networking site MySpace.com announced today that it has switched from using hard disk drives in its servers to using PCI Express (PCIe) cards loaded with solid state chips as primary storage for their data center operations. MySpace said the solid state storage uses less than 1% of the power and cooling costs that their previous hard drive-based server infrastructure had and that they were able to remove all of their server racks because the ioDrives are embedded directly into even its smallest servers. "We looked at a number of solid state solutions, using many different kinds of RAID configurations, but we felt that Fusion-io's solution was exactly what we needed to accomplish our goals," Buckingham stated. The PCIe cards, from Fusion-io Inc., have allowed MySpace to replace multiple server farms made up of 2U (3.5-in high) servers that had used 10 to 12 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel drives each with 1U (1.75-in high) servers using a single ioDrive . "In the last 20 years, disk storage hasn't kept pace with other innovations in IT, and right now we're on the cusp of a dramatic change with flash technologies," said Richard Buckingham, vice president of technical operations for MySpace, in a statement. MySpace's new servers also have replaced its high-performance hosts that held data in large RAM cache modules, a costly method MySpace had been using in order to achieve the necessary throughput to serve its relational databases.

Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io claims the ioDrive Duo offers users unprecedented single server performance levels with 1.5GB/sec. throughput and almost 200,000 IOPS. The system can reach such performance levels because four ioDrive Duos in a single server can scale linearly, which provides up to 6GB/sec. of read bandwidth and more than 500,000 read IOPS. The cards come in 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities. MySpace said its new servers using the NAND flash memory modules give it the same performance as its older RAM servers. A 1.28TB card is expected in the second half of this year. "Social networking sites and other Web 2.0 applications are very database dependent. Ethernet pipe," David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io, said in an interview. Our 320GB ioDrive can fill a 10Gbit/sec.

The H1N1 pandemic is pushing companies to upgrade their secure remote access capabilities in order to enable more employees to work out of their homes and other remote locations in an emergency. What they are doing is planning for scale," he said. Vendors of remote access technologies are reporting an unexpected increase in demand for their products over the past several months as a result of H1N1-related concerns. "What companies are really looking for is the ability to provide secure, remote access to more of their employees," said Michael Oldham, CEO of Portcullis Systems, a Marlborough, Mass.-based vendor of secure access appliances. "Most companies already have mobile workforces. Much of the increased interest has come from government agencies and larger enterprises, Oldham said. "They are the ones that seem to be more aware of the need for planning.

Secure access technologies such as those offered by Portcullis and other vendors provide teleworkers with secure access to enterprise applications from any location, using a broad range of devices. We have seen a number of these organizations purchasing lately with H1N1 in mind," Oldham said. They enable IT administrators to enforce security and information usage policies. Such tools can be vital to enabling business continuity during a pandemic, said Sam Curry, vice president of product management and strategy at RSA, the security division of EMC Corp. These security enhancements are used to make sure that any devices connected to a corporate network from a remote location meets internal security requirements. Last spring, when H1N1 pandemic fears were at their peak in Mexico, RSA saw a massive spike in demand for its SecurID authentication tokens from companies with operations in that country, Curry said.

The RSA tokens enable a company to implement two-factor authentication for accessing enterprise networks and applications. One company, which is among the largest producers in the food and beverage industry, placed an order for nearly 50,000 tokens to be delivered in a single day, he said. "They were fork-lifting thousands of these things directly to their operations in Mexico," to ensure they kept running through the worst of the crisis, Curry said. Many companies provide these tokens to workers who log in to company networks from remote locations. But most other companies would need to do some advance planning to quickly expand their remote workforce, Curry said. The Mexican company, which he would not name, already had a well-established infrastructure in place and easily implemented the additional tokens, he said.

As part of an effort to help companies support more teleworkers in a hurry, RSA recently introduced an on-demand authentication system that companies can use to enable workers to securely log in from remote locations. A worker logging in from home would go to a self-service Web site and request a one-time password to be sent to his mobile phone. Instead of hardware-based tokens, workers get one-time passwords sent via SMS (short message service) to their mobile phones. That password can then be used to securely log-in to the company's network. SonicWall, a vendor of secure SSL (secure sockets layer) VPN appliances has recently added a 10-day "spike license" option for large customers that need to temporarily support more employees working out of their homes and other remote locations. Though the SMS-based approach is less secure than RSA's hardware tokens, they are ideal for when companies need to quickly support an expanded remote workforce, Curry said.

The license allows companies that are running SonicalWall VPN appliances to temporarily increase the number of users that are licensed to log in remotely via VPN. For example, a company that might have purchased a 500-user license would temporarily get the ability to support 2,000 users, by using the spike license option. We have seen them alter their (business continuity and DR) plans in preparing for H1N1," he said. SonicWall has been offering a 30-day and a 90-day spike license option for some time, but decided to add a 10-day option to address requests from customers planning for the H1N1 outbreak,said Chris Witeck, director of product management at SonicWall. "We have definitely seen larger organizations expressing much more interest in incorporating pandemic planning into their disaster recovery plans. SonicWall has seen greater interest in its spike licenses after the company introduced the 10-day option, Witeck said, and the interest is not limited to the U.S. market. H1N1-related planning exercises have resulted in increased demand for SonicWall's products especially in Japan where concern over the pandemic seems to be especially high, he said.

Network World's DEMO conference always features a wide range of flashy new consumer and enterprise technologies and this fall's show is no exception. In this article, we'll run through 13 of the new technologies generating the most buzz and highlight some of the innovations on display at the show. Products from DEMOfall '09 run the gamut, from cloud video surveillance technology to Web 2.0 patent databases to software that helps you scope out your dates for sketchy Internet activity.

Get an overview of the products Company: Third Iris Corp. The company's package includes video cameras that users can manage from a central Web site and that use "intelligent camera" software to provide analytics. Product: VIAAS With IT video surveillance becoming increasingly more complex, Third Iris Corp. has developed the Video Intelligence-as-a-Service (VIAAS) system that outsources analysis to the Third Iris cloud. Company: Armorize Technologies, Inc.  Product: Armorize HackAlert This software-as-a-service automatically scans Web Sites for injected malicious codes and links and also provides users with real-time alerts if their computers are visiting a site containing malware. Company: Intelius Product: DateCheck This is a mobile application that allows you to check up on your potential date any place where they have a presence on the Web.

According to DEMO, this product has had success in Asian markets in recent years and is coming to the U.S. for the first time this year. So for instance, if you have their e-mail address or phone number and their e-mail address or phone number is linked to their Facebook and Twitter accounts you can check up on them to see if they are who they say they are or to find out if they have any sleazy interests. The HP SkyRoom video conferencing service aims to change that by providing high-definition videoconferencing technology that HP says can support "up to four people using rich media content over standard business networks." DEMO says that while the system shouldn't be seen as a strict replacement for high-end conference room equipment, it does provide improvement for people working at individual stations who want to collaborate more easily on projects. The slogan that the company is using for the app is (we're not making this up): "Look up before you hook up." Company: Hewlett-Packard Product: HP SkyRoom If you want to participate in a video conference from your office computer, you typically have to use a puny Web camera that provides low resolution and high jitter. Company: Hashwork Product: Hashwork This is a sort of Twitter for your workplace that can integrate Google Calendar and Twitter to give workers a hub they can monitor throughout the day to see what their coworkers are up to. Company: dotSyntax, LLC Product: Digsby One annoying feature of having multiple accounts with different social networking and instant messaging protocols is the need to keep multiple windows open at once if you want to keep track of them all.

The folks at DEMO claim that Hashwork has become a staple in their daily work environment. Digsby is a program that aims to consolidate all these protocols by merging all instant messaging screen names onto one single messenger and by merging social networking sites to give real-time updates on all of them simultaneously. Company: Article One Partners, LLC  Product: AOP Patent Studies The goal of this technology is to apply Web 2.0 collaborative technology to the field of patent research. For instance, if you had accounts with MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, Digsby would serve as a one-stop hub that would tell you every time a friend wrote something on your wall or responded to your tweets. In other words, if you are a company looking to see if your patent claim will hold up in court, you can use AOP's community of patent advisors to help you out. The application is now available for the iPhone and it will let iPhone users sync with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal and Entourage for Macs.

Article One says that it charges clients for an annual subscription that will give them "real-time access to validity evidence" and communication "with AOP's scientific community… to optimize their research."~~ Company: Tungle Corp.  Product: Tungle for iPhone Tungle, which debuted last year at DEMO, is a planning application that helps friends and coworkers share their calendars and create schedules for meetings based on availability. Company: Waze, Inc.  Product: Waze Waze combines the open-source editing capabilities of Wikipedia with the real-time immediacy of Twitter to provide users with fast-breaking updates on traffic conditions. This technique can also be used to flag areas that have speeding cameras or areas that are well-known police speed traps. Essentially it works like this: If you're stuck in a traffic jam, you send an update explaining your location and the density of the current traffic. This mobile app is available on Android phones, the iPhone, RIM devices and Windows Mobile devices.

Product: Micello We all love Google maps for helping us get from one place to another on the road. Company: Micello, Inc. But what happens when we're inside a large building such as a stadium and we're looking for a particular restaurant or souvenir shop? This application supports user-generated maps of large public places that will eventually help you find a public restroom no matter where you are. That's where Micello comes in. Company: Piryx, Inc.  Product: Piryx Think of Piryx as sort of a PayPal for politics.

DEMO praises the Piryx platform for bringing "smart payment processing technology to the $300+ billion non-profit sector." Company: Answers Corp. It essentially lets users send contributions to political candidates, action committees and non-profit groups. Product: Answers.com Answers Corp, which already maintains the popular WikiAnswers, is launching this new Web site as a way to provide "one-stop answers about anything, combining the world's best licensed and user-generated content." The site will incorporate similar features to WikiAnswers, where users ask questions and rely upon a team of open-source writers and editors to answer them. Product: Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud This is new approach to cloud storage that Symform describes as a "storage potluck." When users sign up for the Cooperative Storage Cloud, they can get as much storage space as they want within the cloud as long as they contribute an equal amount of storage space on their own premises for Symform to use as storage for other customers. DEMO says that the new site's strength is that it integrates "the depth of ReferenceAnswers with the breadth of WikiAnswers." Company: Symform, Inc.

As Kevin Brown, the vice president of sales and marketing for Symform, explains it, the customer "contributes what they consume." So for example, Brown says that a customer "can contribute from an internal drive or some external drive, e.g., a $100 USB drive, and backup an unlimited amount." This cooperative approach to storage makes Symform's cloud storage cheaper than other kinds of cloud storage.

With quarterly IT sales results pouring in, vendors including IBM, Google, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel appear more confident than ever that the global recession's depressing effects on the tech market are lifting. IBM, the second-biggest IT company in the world behind Hewlett-Packard, reported better-than-expected third-quarter results Thursday. Major U.S. market indexes including the tech-heavy Nasdaq dipped Friday, however, as investors absorbed mixed macroeconomic news.

Though revenue dropped 7 percent from a year earlier to US$23.6 billion, it rose 1 percent sequentially from the second quarter and bested the $23.4 billion consensus forecast of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. The company reported its third-quarter net earnings rose to $3.2 billion from $2.8 billion a year earlier. IBM's diverse portfolio of services and its global footprint helped it weather the economic storm this year. More important - in terms of signs of recovery - is that Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge, in a conference call, forecast a return to revenue growth in the fourth quarter. IBM shares slipped by $5.80 to $122.18 in midday trading Friday, however, as investors questioned the extent to which foreign exchange rates factor into the revenue figures.

Revenue increases are often seen as the real signal of growth for any company, since earnings can be boosted by cost cuts. Google, also reporting results Thursday, said revenue for the quarter ending in September jumped 7 percent to $5.94 billion - the Internet ad giant's fastest sales growth rate so far this year. Google, which generates more than 90 percent of its revenue from search-related advertising, is widely seen as a barometer for Internet commerce. It said net earnings were $1.64 billion, a 27 percent jump from last year and on a per-share basis, higher than analyst expectations. "The worst of the recession is clearly behind us," proclaimed CEO Eric Schmidt in a company statement. Google shares bucked the downward market trend Friday, hitting a 52-week high for the company at $554.75 in midday trading. Analysts have for several months forecast a return to growth for the hardware sector.

On the hardware components front, AMD said Thursday that revenue fell in the third quarter, but that it expects sales in the last three months of the year to rise "modestly." Revenue in the quarter dropped 21.3 percent to $1.4 billion from a year ago, but beat the $1.26 billion expected by analysts. IDC said Wednesday that global PC shipments in the third quarter did in fact rise 2.3 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, to 78.1 million units - the first quarter this year in which PC shipments increased compared to 2008. Gartner also said this week that PC shipments rose during the quarter. Rising PC sales are boosting the fortunes of chip companies. Though Gartner's estimate of a 0.5 percent year-over-year growth was smaller than IDC's, its figure for total shipments was higher, at 80.3 million units. "These are good results especially given that PC shipments for the third quarter of 2009 are being compared to a very strong third quarter from 2008," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, in the report. Intel on Tuesday reported strong quarterly results and forecasts that beat industry expectations. Intel forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $10.1 billion "plus or minus $400 million," while analysts had been expecting $9.5 billion. "The timing of Windows 7 is favorable for the industry due to expected economic improvements and an overdue hardware replacement cycle," Gartner's Kitagawa noted.

Intel's revenue of $9.39 billion was up by $1.4 billion compared to the prior quarter, though it was lower than the $10.2 billion in the third quarter last year. Not all vendors are upbeat, however. Though Nokia now expects global, industrywide mobile-device sales to fall by only 7 percent this year - compared to its prior forecast of 10 percent - CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo injected a note of caution in an otherwise upbeat earnings week. "Let's be clear, uncertainty in end-consumer demand remains," said Kallasvuo on a conference call. Nokia on Thursday reported a third-quarter loss of €559 million (US$833 million) mainly due to charges related to its Nokia Siemens networking infrastructure business, which has been losing market share. That uncertainty spooked investors Friday, as markets tumbled.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped by 67.9 points to hit 9997.35 in midafternoon trading, while the Nasdaq Composite dipped 13.08 to 2160.21. IT companies have been riding a wave of optimism recently. Though most tech leaders were upbeat this week, news about financial and consumer companies - including disappointing earnings results from Bank of America and General Electric - spooked investors. Shares of Nasdaq computer companies are as a group up by 38.25 percent from a year ago, when the U.S. financial sector was crumbling. Whether this trend continues will depend to a large degree on quarterly results from other tech leaders such as Microsoft, BMC, Yahoo and AT&T in the next few weeks. Nasdaq telecom shares are up 32.74 percent from a year ago.

Connected TVs, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray Disc players aren't new, but they continue to make new connections with Web sites and services, from YouTube and Netflix to Amazon and Internet radio sites. Some offer a lot more than others, but all are building up their portfolios of Web video and interactive services. The definition of "connected" varies widely between consumer electronics vendors.

Some of the newest entries were on display last week at the CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association) event in Atlanta. Available on networkable Bravia sets, the video service will also appear on a new networkable Sony Blu-ray Disc player, the BDP-N460, which will ship later this fall priced under $250. (Sony Bravia TVs also offer Web content such as stocks, weather, and Twitter, via their Bravia Widgets.) LG Electronics, meanwhile, announced the addition (via a firmware upgrade later this month) of the Vudu on-demand service to the Netcast Entertainment Access service on its $399 BD390 Blu-ray Disc player. Sony, which already offers movies, TV shows, and music from some two dozen partners, including Amazon movies on demand, Slacker radio, and YouTube, announced that it will add Netflix to its Bravia Internet Video lineup later this fall. The service already offers access to CinemaNow, Netflix, and YouTube content. And Samsung's networkable Blu-ray Disc players, including the BD-P1600, BD-P3600, and BD-P4600, will add YouTube access to the existing Pandora and NetFlix services.

Samsung's Internet@TV service, which already had a dozen Yahoo widgets, now offers on-screen access to Rallycast fantasy sports applications, including Facebook messaging and access to team stats. Pioneer, meanwhile, demo'd a new platform for connected electronics. The prototypes at CEDIA featured everything from video-on-demand services to backup. Code-named Project ET, it is designed to allow device designers and/or consumers to choose the content and services they want by clicking on menu buttons in the service's Web portal. Pioneer officials said the platform could exist on a set-top box of its own or on a Blu-ray Disc player or other networkable device (one demo setup featured a Blu-ray player with 1 terabyte of built-in storage. The company hopes to show a product based on the platform within the next few months.

To better safeguard the personal data of its students, the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has adopted a specialized data-masking technique in its application development work that effectively can hide data in plain sight by mixing it up. 10 of the Worst Moments in Network Security History Data such as students' first and last names can be switched around to camouflage the real names, and sensitive information such as student identification numbers also undergoes a gentle jumbling so what appears to the eye is not the true number. Steve McCabe, associate director of information in UC Berkeley's residential and student services program, says the advantage in using the dataguise tool is it significantly reduces security risks around personal, sensitive data. "Student IDs paired with names becomes restricted data here," says McCabe, describing some of the data-privacy rules that the university must follow. It's done with a tool called datamasker from dataguise. But the challenge has been how to enforce restrictions in a software-development environment where constant work by several developers is ongoing to support UC Berkeley's home-grown Web-based applications for SQL Server, such as the housing and assignment system.

Though the actual production database has to be protected through other means, the risks associated with data exposed to developers and testers in the course of their work has been vastly reduced since UC Berkeley started using the tool about half a year ago. McCabe says the data-masking approach, in which the dataguise tool mixes up names, sensitive numbers and other data prior to developers seeing it (dataguise calls it "de-identification"), has worked out well because the data columns maintain the necessary structure but the content is effectively concealed to the naked eye. "We do a lot of application development and handling large volumes of student information, and we wanted a way to restrict that data," McCabe says. "So we randomize the IDs, and first name, last name, date of birth, and so forth." While one main copy of a production database is preserved, with the genuine student information, developers can freely work on copies that have undergone the dataguise data-masking treatment in what McCabe calls a "sanitized version" without concern of a potential data breach. "It maintains the relationship and updates with scrambled data," McCabe says. UC Berkeley, like many universities, has suffered consequential data breaches. In May of this year, UC Berkeley acknowledged a data breach in which it said hackers broke into its health-services databases, compromising health-related information on about 160,000 individuals.

Oracle is planning an aggressive fight with European regulators if its attempt to take over Sun is slapped with a statement of objections in the coming week, said people close to the company Wednesday. The European Commission declined to comment on the reports, but confirmed that if such a step was to be taken it would have to be taken soon, in order to allow enough time for procedures leading up to the Jan. 19 deadline for a ruling. "The ball game would change dramatically if the Commission issues a statement of objections," said one person familiar with Oracle's thinking who insisted on anonymity. Unsourced news reports that a statement of objections is imminent surfaced earlier Wednesday. He added: "Oracle has been holding back until now, and contrary to what the Commission says it has addressed the substance of the Commission's concerns about the deal in huge abundance." When the Commission opened an in-depth probe of the Oracle-Sun deal at the beginning of September, it said it was concerned about the deal's impact on the market for software that runs corporate databases.

Oracle is unwilling to sell off MySQL because it is "a strategic imperative of the deal," the person said. Sun owns MySQL, an open-source challenger to the big three makers of proprietary database technology: IBM, Microsoft and the market leader, Oracle. Oracle needs MySQL in order to compete with Microsoft in markets such as the one for small and medium-size corporate clients, he said. "This deal is the most transformational deal in the history of the IT industry. The frustration with European competition regulators is palpable, she said. It will enhance competition, not erode it, by creating a more viable counterweight to Microsoft," another person close to the merging companies said, also on condition that she wasn't named. The European Commission was notified of the deal at the beginning of August - a time when many Commission officials are away on holiday.

It can send a review off in the wrong direction. The chances of getting a quick thumbs-up in Brussels were not strengthened by the timing, as less-experienced officials were left to handle the notification, she said. "It's not ideal to have your deal handled by the B-team at the start. It looks like that's what has happened with Oracle/Sun," this person said. In reference to the most controversial merger ruling by the Commission in recent years, he said the transatlantic political storm that would be unleashed if the Commission blocked Oracle/Sun "would be like GE/Honeywell on steroids." General Electric's planned takeover of aeronautics firm Honeywell was cleared in the U.S., just as the Oracle/Sun deal was. If the Commission does issue formal objections to the deal it will mean war, said the person familiar with Oracle's thinking. But it was blocked in 2001 by the European Commission.

Although the political landscape has shifted dramatically with the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the person close to Oracle said the political fallout from a European prohibition of the Oracle/Sun deal would be even more intense. "While GE was arguing with the Commission, not one job at Honeywell was lost. During the buildup to that ruling, senior U.S. politicians including President George W. Bush intervened to try to save the deal. Sun has lost thousands and faces going out of business if this deal fails," the person said, pointing out that GE/Honeywell happened when the U.S. economy was strong, unlike now, when unemployment has reached almost 10 percent in the U.S.. "Senior politicians including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi are ready to intervene on Oracle's and Sun's behalf but have been asked to hold fire for now," he said. Pelosi has close political and personal ties with Sun's hometown of San Francisco. "If the Commission issues an SO (statement of objections) in the coming week it will be gloves-off time - no more holding back," the person close to Oracle said.

With quarterly IT sales results pouring in, vendors including IBM, Google, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel appear more confident than ever that the global recession's depressing effects on the tech market are lifting. IBM, the second-biggest IT company in the world behind Hewlett-Packard, reported better-than-expected third-quarter results Thursday. Major U.S. market indexes including the tech-heavy Nasdaq dipped Friday, however, as investors absorbed mixed macroeconomic news. Though revenue dropped 7 percent from a year earlier to US$23.6 billion, it rose 1 percent sequentially from the second quarter and bested the $23.4 billion consensus forecast of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

The company reported its third-quarter net earnings rose to $3.2 billion from $2.8 billion a year earlier. IBM's diverse portfolio of services and its global footprint helped it weather the economic storm this year. More important - in terms of signs of recovery - is that Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge, in a conference call, forecast a return to revenue growth in the fourth quarter. IBM shares slipped by $5.80 to $122.18 in midday trading Friday, however, as investors questioned the extent to which foreign exchange rates factor into the revenue figures. Revenue increases are often seen as the real signal of growth for any company, since earnings can be boosted by cost cuts.

Google, also reporting results Thursday, said revenue for the quarter ending in September jumped 7 percent to $5.94 billion - the Internet ad giant's fastest sales growth rate so far this year. Google, which generates more than 90 percent of its revenue from search-related advertising, is widely seen as a barometer for Internet commerce. It said net earnings were $1.64 billion, a 27 percent jump from last year and on a per-share basis, higher than analyst expectations. "The worst of the recession is clearly behind us," proclaimed CEO Eric Schmidt in a company statement. Google shares bucked the downward market trend Friday, hitting a 52-week high for the company at $554.75 in midday trading. Analysts have for several months forecast a return to growth for the hardware sector. On the hardware components front, AMD said Thursday that revenue fell in the third quarter, but that it expects sales in the last three months of the year to rise "modestly." Revenue in the quarter dropped 21.3 percent to $1.4 billion from a year ago, but beat the $1.26 billion expected by analysts.

IDC said Wednesday that global PC shipments in the third quarter did in fact rise 2.3 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, to 78.1 million units - the first quarter this year in which PC shipments increased compared to 2008. Gartner also said this week that PC shipments rose during the quarter. Rising PC sales are boosting the fortunes of chip companies. Though Gartner's estimate of a 0.5 percent year-over-year growth was smaller than IDC's, its figure for total shipments was higher, at 80.3 million units. "These are good results especially given that PC shipments for the third quarter of 2009 are being compared to a very strong third quarter from 2008," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, in the report. Intel on Tuesday reported strong quarterly results and forecasts that beat industry expectations. Intel forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $10.1 billion "plus or minus $400 million," while analysts had been expecting $9.5 billion. "The timing of Windows 7 is favorable for the industry due to expected economic improvements and an overdue hardware replacement cycle," Gartner's Kitagawa noted.

Intel's revenue of $9.39 billion was up by $1.4 billion compared to the prior quarter, though it was lower than the $10.2 billion in the third quarter last year. Not all vendors are upbeat, however. Though Nokia now expects global, industrywide mobile-device sales to fall by only 7 percent this year - compared to its prior forecast of 10 percent - CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo injected a note of caution in an otherwise upbeat earnings week. "Let's be clear, uncertainty in end-consumer demand remains," said Kallasvuo on a conference call. Nokia on Thursday reported a third-quarter loss of €559 million (US$833 million) mainly due to charges related to its Nokia Siemens networking infrastructure business, which has been losing market share. That uncertainty spooked investors Friday, as markets tumbled. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped by 67.9 points to hit 9997.35 in midafternoon trading, while the Nasdaq Composite dipped 13.08 to 2160.21. IT companies have been riding a wave of optimism recently.

Though most tech leaders were upbeat this week, news about financial and consumer companies - including disappointing earnings results from Bank of America and General Electric - spooked investors. Shares of Nasdaq computer companies are as a group up by 38.25 percent from a year ago, when the U.S. financial sector was crumbling. Whether this trend continues will depend to a large degree on quarterly results from other tech leaders such as Microsoft, BMC, Yahoo and AT&T in the next few weeks. Nasdaq telecom shares are up 32.74 percent from a year ago.

Despite a lagging economy, many workers will shop online while at work this coming holiday season, according to a survey conducted on behalf of ISACA, a nonprofit association of information technology (IT) professionals. Among those polled, the mean amount of time employees planned to spend shopping online was14.4 hours, nearly two full working days. The second annual "Shopping on the Job: Online Holiday Shopping and Workplace Internet Safety" survey found that fully half of those surveyed plan to use their company's computer to shop, putting a strain on employers' systems and potentially compromising an organizations sensitive information and security.

One in 10 plans to spend at least 30 hours shopping online at work. Survey participants also bank online (51 percent), click on e-mail links redirecting them to shopping sites (40 percent) and click on links from social network sites (15 percent). Yet nearly one in five says they are not concerned that their online shopping habits may affect the safety of their organization's IT infrastructure (See what CSO blogger Dan Lohrmann has to say about Cyber Monday). The survey also found that more than one in 10 Americans who use a mobile work device such as a BlackBerry or iPhone plan to use it for holiday shopping, further opening the door for additional security issues and exposure to data loss for a company, according to ISACA. ISACA officials also found there is a large reality gap between employees and the IT department. Most planned to do their shopping in early to mid-December. "The potential danger of shopping online is that it can open the door to viruses, spam and phishing attacks that invade the workplace and cost enterprises thousands per employee in lost productivity and potentially millions in destruction or compromise of corporate data," ISACA officials said in a statement on the findings (Read last year's report here). ISACA also noted that employees who shop online using a work computer are also likely to engage in other high-risk behaviors. A separate ISACA survey of more than 1,500 IT professionals who are ISACA members conducted during the same time period revealed close to half (48 percent) of those in IT believe employees will spend just over one work day, or nine hours, shopping online from a work computer. One in four IT professionals estimated that their company will lose US $15,000 or more per employee in productivity during this year's holiday season.

Dell has agreed to buy Perot Systems for around US$3.9 billion in cash, and intends to make the company its global services delivery division, the companies said Monday. It will also allow Dell, in the future, to address customer demand for next-generation services including cloud computing, said CEO Michael Dell in a conference call with analysts. The deal will allow Dell to expand its range of IT services, and potentially allow it to sell more hardware to existing Perot customers, it said.

Dell is counting on its international reach to turn Perot into a global services company, Dell CFO Brian Gladden said during the call. Around 25 percent of revenue comes from government customers, he said. Perot Systems is one of the largest services companies serving the health-care sector, from which it derives about 48 percent of its revenue, its CEO Peter Altabef said during the call. Perot is already working at increasing its international revenue: on Friday it announced a 10-year deal to outsource IT operations for Indian hospital group Max Healthcare. Over the last four quarters, Dell and Perot together had revenue of $16 billion from enterprise hardware and IT services, with $8 billion coming from enhanced services and support, Dell said. Dell's rival Hewlett-Packard expanded its own global services unit with the acquisition of EDS for $13.9 billion in May 2008. EDS was founded by H. Ross Perot, who sold the company to General Motors before going on to found Perot Systems, of which his son is now chairman.

Perot's contribution to that is relatively small: In 2008, the company reported total revenue of $2.78 billion. In after-hours trading, the stock traded at $29.70 early on Monday morning. At $30 per share, Dell's offer represented a significant premium over Friday's closing price of $17.91 for Perot Systems shares. The boards of Dell and Perot agreed to the terms of the transaction on Sunday, they said. Dell expects that overlaps between the two companies will allow it to cut Perot's costs by between 6 percent and 8 percent, Gladden said during the conference call. Dell expects to complete the deal in its November-to-January fiscal quarter.

Upon completion of the acquisition, Dell plans to make Perot Systems its services unit, and will put Altabef in charge of the unit. The services unit will fit alongside Dell's existing divisions for selling to large enterprises, government customers and small and medium-size businesses. It also expects Ross Perot Jr., chairman of the Perot Systems board, to be invited to join the Dell board of directors. Dell created the three divisions in a major reorganization of its business sales teams last December, shifting from a geographic structure to one aligned with customer types.

Symantec Corp. unveiled a new application that that the company promises can help companies build internal highly scalable, high-performance file-based cloud storage systems using commodity server hardware and the arrays of most storage vendors. Derrington provided few details of the new cloud service, but did note that it will to scale to tens of petabytes for corporate users. At the same time, Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability services at Symantec, disclosed that the company also plans to launch an online object-based file storage service, code-named S4, over the next year.

The S4 service is similar in name to to of Amazon.com's S3 cloud-storage service , which enables its resellers to set up SaaS offerings of their own using Amazon's grid-based backend storage architecture. Meanwhile, Symantec said that the new FileStore software product is being pitched as a tool to help enterprise-class companies economically build onsite cloud infrastructures using commodity x86 server hardware as well as any configuration of backend storage systems, including JBOD. For the past several months, Symantec has been using FileStore as the file-based storage architecture in the cloud services it offers to consumers. Similarly, Symantec's S4 is will enable companies to provide public cloud services to their customers. The service currently has some 40 petabytes of online storage for more than nine million active users. The software also integrates natively with Symantec's Endpoint Protection security software and Symantec's Enterprise Vault e-mail, file and instant messaging archive application, he added. "We've designed this to support diverse workloads - applications that have requirements for hundreds of millions of really tiny files like ringtones or tens of millions of larger files, like online auction sites," Derrington said. "It can scale from the low-end to the high end with near linear scalability. Derrington said that FileStore lets users add or remove storage logical unit numbers (LUNs) dynamically without taking systems offline and without disruption to applications.

The server nodes on the front end of FileStore are all actively participating and sharing the load." A single FileStore system can support up to 16 storage nodes, and two petabytes of storage capacity, Derrington said. "On the backend you can use anybody's storage that you want to. FileStore is available immediately and is priced per CPU, regardless of how many cores exist in each processor. All the major storage vendors we support with Veritas Storage Foundation are supported with FileStore," he added. For example, a server with two CPUs, will cost the same whether they're duo- or quad-core processors. A two node configuration of FileStore will start at $6,995.

Scientists at MIT have have used a combination of silicon and gallium nitride, a hard material frequently used in LEDs, to create a hybrid microchip that they say is smaller, faster and more efficient than today's processors. The predicted upgrades have continued since then, though some observers have long predicted that leakage and energy consumption could keep Moore's Law from continuing at some point. Researchers around the world have been working for decades to create such a hybrid microchip that could help chipmakers keep Moore's Law alive . The more than 40-year-old prediction by Gordon Moore holds that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years.

However, if scientists can find new ways to increase efficiency while continuing to make the chips smaller and faster, then the law stands a much better chance of holding true for years ahead. "We won't be able to continue improving silicon by scaling it down for long, so it's crucial to find other approaches," said Tomas Palacios , an assistant professor at MIT, in a statement late last week. Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat, said the new hybrid chip is important because it shows that the industry is moving beyond a singular silicon focus. "We're really in a situation where we're now playing with the entire periodic table and experimenting with different combinations of materials," McGregor said. "The silicon is the basic building block that we put everything on. He added that besides microprocessor chips, the new integrated technology also could lead to more efficient cell phone designs, for instance, by combining the functionality of several different chips onto one. We've been messing around with the silicon and now we're adding something to it ... so we can change the properties and do things with the chip that we couldn't do before." McGregor said he suspects that MIT's hybrid chip design could reduce leakage and thus increase chip performance. "Chipmaking is becoming the ultimate chemistry and physics experiment," McGregor added. "We're using more and more parts of the periodic table and we're down to nanometers and looking at how many electrons can flow from transistor to transistor. Instead, they embedded it into the silicon substrate, which is an underlying layer.

It's important for the entire industry, which is focused on this type of research." MIT noted that Palacios, along with student researcher Will Chung, didn't add the gallium nitride as a layer on top of the silicon. Because the semiconductor industry already uses the same type of silicon substrate, MIT contends that the hybrid chip could be made using today's manufacturing processes, which would be less costly than using different substrates. "We are already discussing with several companies how to commercialize this technology and fabricate more complex circuits," said Palacios, adding that it could take several years before the technology is ready to be commercialized. The nanotubes should someday be used to replace the copper wires that connect the transistors and also may even replace the transistors themselves even further down the road. The move was the latest in a series of recent chipmaking announcements by MIT. Last week, the university announced that researchers there have found a new way to grow carbon nanotubes that could be used by manufacturers to build smaller, faster computer chips. Last year, MIT announced that a research team at the school had created a new chip design that could be 10 times more energy efficient than processors now used in mobile devices. The design is intended for use in portable electronics, like cell phones, PDAs and even implantable medical devices.

There are a lot of reasons why Dell Inc. agreed to buy Perot Systems Corp. for $3.9 billion, but Congress' vote earlier this year to appropriate billions of dollars to spread the use of electronic medical records may be a key one. Even before today's announcment that Dell plans to buy Perot, the PC maker and IT services firm had agreements in place develop platforms dedicated to electronic health care applications. Perot, which says that about half of its $2.8 billion in annual revenue is derived from health care projects, is in a good position to gain a significant chunk of the $36 billion the federal government is poised to spend on IT related health care projects. During a conference call with reporters today, Michael Dell, CEO and chairman of Dell, called the move "the right acquisition" for his company, and that the two Texas-based firms share several similar characteristics. "Our products, services and structures are overwhelmingly complementary," Dell said.

EDS was spun off in 1996 as an independent firm and remained that way until it was acquired last year by Hewlett-Packard Co. for $13,9 billion . Ross Perot founded Perot Systems in 1988. Harry Greenspun, chief medical officer for Perot Systems' health care group, told investors garthered at an industry conference this month that there's tremendous opportunity for companies like Perot in the health care market. "Most hospitals, most physicians' offices are very immature in their adoption in their technology," he said, according to an archived recording on Perot's web site. Ross Perot, the chairman emeritus of Perot, added, "We saw this as a cultural match, and we saw what we could do together, and I think that made it a lot easier to jump on Michael's vision to build Dell," Perot founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962 and sold it to General Motors Corp. in 1984 for $2.5 billion. Dell hopes to complete the deal by year's end, just after the federal fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, which is when federal spending on electronic records is set to begin in earnest. Dell and Perot are already jointly offering what Greenspan called a "dumb box" without ports of disk drives. The demand for help in implementing new health care IT projects should come quickly - Under the law, health care providers have to start upgrading e-health systems by 2015 or face federal penalties. The Software-as-a-Service system delivers electronic records to virtual desktops that charge customers on a subscription basis. "This is a different way of delivering this service," said Greenspun.

Bendor-Samuel said improved revenue from health care projects should be a strong side effect of the merger, but contended that Dell's primary interest is gaining access to a broader base of enterprise customers. "It's great to be a dominant player in the fastest growing segment of the economy, but I view that as a nice thing to have," he said. The purchase of Perot Systems will also give Dell some credibility among large users as a service provider, said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of Everest Group, an Dallas-based outsourcing consultancy. "It both significantly improves their delivery capability and tremendously improves their credibility," he said. Dane Anderson, an analyst at Gartner Inc., believes that the deal shows only that Dell is finally embarking on a services strategy. It has not offered the broader consulting and integration services provided by IT services firms like Perot Systems, he added.. "Really, where the opportunity is in the nearest term is to bring more capabilities to the table for that Dell installed based of clients, he said. Dell's support operation has traditionally focused on providing services to meet the needs of existing users. Anderson said that he doesn't expect Dell to quickly gain new services contracts due to the acquisition of Perot.

Enterprise aren't likely to exit existing contracts with other services providers.

Avaya has emerged as the winning bidder for Nortel's enterprise business, reportedly beating out Siemens Enterprise Communications over the weekend. Avaya will also contribute an additional pool of $15 million for an employee retention program. The firm will pay $900 million for the unit, Nortel's Government Solutions group and DiamondWare Ltd., a Nortel-owned maker of softphones. That price is nearly twice what Avaya was initially said to be buying the enterprise business for back in July before auction bidding kicked in.

Telecom carrier Verizon, however, is expected to contest the sale on the grounds that Avaya does not plan to retain customer support contracts between Nortel and Verizon. Slideshow: The rise and fall of Nortel Avaya has sought Nortel's enterprise business in hopes of boosting its share of the enterprise telephony and unified communications markets, and getting more customers to migrate to its IP line of communications products.  The sale, expected to close later this year, is subject to court approvals in the U.S., Canada, France and Israel as well as regulatory approvals, other customary closing conditions and certain post-closing purchase price adjustments. Nortel is confident the sale will go through without any snags. "We do not expect the Verizon interaction to impact court approval or the close of this deal," said Joel Hackney, president of Nortel Enterprise Solutions. "We will continue to go forward in supporting customers." Hackney would not say whether Nortel is engaged in the negotiations between Avaya and Verizon on the future of certain customer support contracts, mentioning only that Nortel supports Verizon as a customer as well as the carrier's customers. Nortel customers hope the deal works out in their interest. "Nortel earned the trust of our user group members by delivering innovative, reliable communications solutions and ensuring high-levels of service and support, " said Victor Bohnert, Executive Director of the International Nortel Networks Users Association, in a prepared statement. "With the announcement of today's purchase by Avaya, we look forward to extending that relationship forward to serve the business communications needs of our constituency base across the globe." Nortel will seek Canadian and U.S. court approvals of the proposed sale agreement at a joint hearing on September 15, 2009. The sale close is expected late in the fourth quarter. Hackney also said there were two bidders for the enterprise unit but would not identify the second suitor.

In some EMEA jurisdictions this transaction is subject to information and consultation with employee representatives. As previously announced, Nortel does not expect that its common shareholders or the preferred shareholders of Nortel Networks Limited will receive any value from the creditor protection proceedings and expects that the proceedings will result in the cancellation of these equity interests.

Hewlett-Packard is building collaboration software with video, application-sharing and 3-D graphics support into several of its workstation models, giving the high-definition conferencing market an option well below the cost and scale of telepresence. It needs only an Internet connection of 400Kb per second, plus a VPN (virtual private network) to connect to systems outside an enterprise firewall. The HP SkyRoom software, which was set to be announced on Tuesday, works on systems with a fairly modest set of requirements, starting with a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent processor.

With the software, users can click on the name of a contact to start up a SkyRoom session with them. Multiple users can join in to these sessions and see the host presenter's desktop as if they were using their own machines. With another click, they can share rich media or what's happening on their desktops. The software supports display of any type of application on a Windows XP or Vista PC, including streaming video, according to HP. HP says SkyRoom is based on video and image compression algorithms it developed over the course of three years. SkyRoom saves work by updating only changes in screen appearance, not the whole screen, HP said.

It can deliver a high level of performance on relatively modest systems and networks by compressing and encrypting data before it's sent to participants. The company named digital content teams, animation production houses and global financial teams running live economic models as possible users of the software. It's another thing to describe it over video," Germanow said. The software should be an ideal tool for teams that design physical things, because it will let one designer show others what's wrong with the item, such as a corner that's too sharp, said IDC analyst Abner Germanow. "It's one thing to describe a design problem over e-mail. Telepresence, which typically involves dedicated rooms or purpose-built systems, would be overkill for these kinds of sessions, he said. SkyRoom is available worldwide as a free, preinstalled feature of HP Z800, Z600, Z400 and xw4600 workstations.

SkyRoom is strictly software, with lower network requirements and no special service fees, and engineers may use it for all-day sessions, he said. Some premium business PCs and laptops coming from HP in the next few months will offer the software on a 90-day trial basis. In addition to the Core 2 Duo or equivalent processor, those systems will need at least 2GB of RAM, a webcam and XP or Vista. The software is also available for purchase for an estimated U.S. street price of US$149 and can be used on workstations and PCs from Dell, Lenovo and Sun, HP said. HP is also offering the HP SkyRoom Accessory Kit, which includes a high-resolution webcam and headphones or speakers, for $119.

Fund Formed for Chinese Start-ups BEIJING - Kai-Fu Lee, who resigned as president of Google Inc.'s China operation earlier this month, has founded an angel investment fund and plans to help out three to five new Chinese high-tech companies annually. Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube Inc., is also an investor in Innovation Works. The fund, dubbed Innovation Works, launched with some $115 million (U.S.) provided by several IT vendors, including Taipei-based Foxconn Electronics Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. The new company said the funds will be used to train young entrepreneurs and help them build Internet, mobile Internet and cloud computing companies. - Owen Fletcher, IDG News Service Telecom Firms Plan Joint Venture LONDON - Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom SA plan to form a joint venture that would oversee their respective U.K. mobile communications networks - T-Mobile U.K. and Orange U.K. The combined company would have about 28.4 million customers, or 37% of U.K. mobile subscribers, leapfrogging current market leader O2 U.K. Ltd., which reported 20.7 million customers at the end of June, the companies said.

Ombudsman P. Nikiforos Diamandouros said he will rule on the complaint later this month. - Agam Shah, IDG News Service The venture is expected to realize overall savings of more than £3.5 billion ($5.7 billion U.S.) by, among other things, closing some stores and "optimizing" the companies' customer service staffs. - Peter Sayer, IDG News Service Briefly Noted The European Union has confirmed that its ombudsman received a complaint from Intel Corp. in July alleging that "procedural errors" were made by the European Commission during an antitrust investigation that led to a record fine of €1.06 billion ($1.44 billion U.S.) against the chip maker.

Cybercriminals worldwide are amassing domain names to keep their botnet and phishing operations a step ahead of authorities America's 10 most-wanted botnets To obscure their tracks, the criminals register the domain names using phony information, pay with stolen credit cards and hack into legitimate domain-name accounts. The target is usually "a consumer in America." Accredited by ICANN for the .info generic top-level domain (gTLD), Afilias helped organize the Registry Internet Safety Group to find ways to improve security. Adding to the problem of domain-name abuse, some rogue registrars often look the other way as the money rolls in. (See related story, "Domain-name abuse proliferates; rogue registrars turn a blind eye")  Today's cosmopolitan criminals might use "a registrar in China and a Web-hosting company in Russia and a registry in Ireland," says Ram Mohan, CTO at Dublin-based registry services provider Afilias. Mohan says Afilias has seen about 250,000 domain names taken down in the past 2.5 years because they were deemed to be maliciously used.

In the past, standard contracts between ICANN and registrars didn't address domain-name abuse head-on. (Mohan estimates there about 2,000 registrars and retail channels for domain names globally today.) But Afilias successfully lobbied to have the standard contracts amended so that stringent actions against domain-name abuse could be taken, he says. At first the registrars Afilias works with were not too happy to see domain names suspended, but many have come around to see the wisdom in taking action to stop perceived criminal activity, he says. Registry services provider Neustar (accredited by ICANN for the .biz gTLD) is also a big believer in tackling domain-name abuse, which after all, hurts the bottom line. Under its contracts with registrars and ICANN, Neustar can proactively say to a registrar, with a full report, "you have 12 hours to take down that domain name or we will do it," he says. Three years ago, Neustar hired a legal team to handle domain abuse questions and set up an internal, isolated networking lab to make determinations to a "near certainty" about a domain name being used for objectionable purposes, says Jeff Neuman, vice president of law and policy at Neustar. ICANN has a more informal process for trying to curb domain-name abuse, but that may eventually change, Neuman believes.

For instance, .cn, the country-code domain for the People's Republic of China, has emerged as a popular choice for domain-name abuse. Many security researchers today are inclined to blame a lot of domain-name abuse on "rogue registrars" around the world that are said to look the other way when dealing with criminals. For country-code top-level domains, each country through a designated organization directly accredits registrars for the ccTLD, though those registrars may also be accredited by ICANN for gTLDs like .com and .info. ICANN says complaints it received related to inaccurate or missing Whois database information and Beijing Innovative - which initially failed to respond to ICANN inquiries in a timely manner - led ICANN to issue the Chinese registrar a "notice of breach" decision last September, and a remediation plan. Two ICANN-accredited registrars, Beijing-based Xin Net Technology Corp. and Beijing Innovative Linkage, among other registrars based in China, have gained reputations in some circles as rogue registrars because of the large amount of malicious domains being traced to them over the past year.

Mohan says it's important do the analysis to understand the source of domain-name abuse, but critics should also consider evidence that Chinese registrars are being targeted because there's a lot of growth in China and "criminals are hiding in that growth." Mohan was in Beijing just a month ago discussing cybercrime for three hours with Mao Wei, the director of China Internet Network Information Center, the state-run registry for .cn, which is under the control of the Ministry of Information Industry. Just this week, McAfee touched on the China question in a report about e-mail spam that found high-volume, Chinese URL-based "Canadian Pharmacy" spam has started getting blocked amazingly fast, something McAfee never saw happen before. Mohan also spent time with Chinese registrars. "The Chinese government is very strongly aware of this problem," Mohan says. This newsletter-looking spam has used about 1,235 domains on .cn each day in fast-flux mode, but it's "getting black-holed as soon as they come in," says Adam Wosotowsky, principal engineer in messaging tactical response at McAfee. Nonetheless, some say it's hard to escape the impression that around the world, there are places where registrars and others providing domain names look the other way. This countermeasure makes the spam dead-on-arrival with no Web URL to use. "We're guessing it's Chinese government influence," Wosotowsky says, adding he thinks the pharmacy spam is being used to sell pharmaceutical knock-offs out of Hong Kong.

Even governments may be ignoring it, as money changes hands in the lucrative domain-name business. "The moment the bad guys find out something is going on, they move from Estonia to Ukraine,'" says Mohan by way of example. "The kingpins aren't identified. There must be advance notice going to these criminals, or compromised law enforcement." It's big money, big business.

BP has awarded contracts in the area of application development and maintenance to IBM, Accenture, and three top Indian outsourcers.

BP was earlier outsourcing these services to 40 service providers, and decided to rationalize the number to five, a BP spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

The five providers selected were already offering services to BP, she added.

The total contract value is £1.5 billion (US$2.5 billion) over five years, which was 500 million pounds lower than BP had budgeted for the contract.

IBM and the three Indian outsourcers - Wipro, Infosys Technologies, and Tata Consultancy Services -said separately on Wednesday that they had been selected by BP for five-year contracts, for an undisclosed amount.

IBM said it had bagged the largest among the contracts awarded by BP at the end of a 12 month program by the British oil and gas company to consolidate its application development and maintenance vendors. The BP spokeswoman declined to discuss the share of each vendor in the total contract value.

Like its Indian competitors, IBM is likely to deliver a significant portion of the work for BP from its Indian operations, according to informed sources. This strategy would have enabled IBM to compete on price with Indian providers, the sources said.

An IBM spokesman in India declined to comment beyond the company statement.

Indian outsourcers have a dominant share of about 40 percent of the global market for outsourced application development and maintenance services, Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy, Technology Partners International (TPI), said on Wednesday.

Indian outsourcers have been increasingly focusing on the European market to reduce their dependence on the U.S. market.

The federal government is spearheading a major cloud computing push that demands vendors meet strict uptime and service requirements.

The U.S. General Services Administration last week issued a request for quotations (RFQ), a 19-page document that details the qualifications cloud computing vendors must meet to offer services to the federal government.

"Cloud computing is a major feature of the president's initiative to modernize information technology," the document says.The government is looking for cloud-based virtual machines, storage and Web hosting capabilities, and spells out several dozen requirements. For example, the GSA is demanding service availability of 99.95% per month, a level met by some but not all service-level agreements (SLA) currently offered by cloud vendors.

Amazon's cloud-based Simple Storage Service offers only 99.9% uptime, for example. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, its virtualized server offering, promises 99.95% uptime, but calculates uptime based on the whole year rather than individual months. That means uptime could fall below the promised level for an entire month without customers becoming eligible for service credits.

GoGrid, another vendor that offers virtual servers and storage capacity over the Web, has an SLA promising 100% uptime.

The RFQ defines cloud computing as "a model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services)."

The request is part of an initiative to build a "cloud computing storefront" site, which will let government users buy infrastructure-as-a-service offerings through a common Web portal managed and maintained by the GSA.

The government wants to start out with "low impact" systems, rather than mission-critical applications.

In addition to high uptime, the government is looking for extensive self-service attributes, saying users should be able to "unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service's provider." Users should be able to provision and release cloud services with minimal management effort, in other words.

The services should also be available on mobile phones and PDAs, in addition to PCs, laptops and thin clients, the RFQ states.The RFQ says cloud vendors should meet several security requirements, including data isolation in a multi-tenant environment, disaster recovery capabilities, and allow the government to remotely control the service's firewall.

"The contractor shall implement a firewall policy that allows the government to administer it remotely, or the contractor shall administer a firewall policy in accordance with the government's direction, allowing the government to have read-only access to inspect the firewall configuration," the document states.

The government is also looking for extensive monitoring capabilities, including "automatic monitoring of resource utilization and other events such as failure of service."

The federal government's cloud push started ramping up in May when the National Institute of Standards and Technology published a working definition of cloud computing.

The GSA previously issued a request for information to vendors in May, and received responses from 38 companies, according to a Federal News Radio report. Bids in response to last week's RFQ are reportedly due by Aug. 12.

Telework advocates working with the Commonwealth of Virginia hope to encourage people across the country to work from home or another remote location on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009, in an effort to support green efforts and take the strain off the transportation infrastructure.

Taking a look at telework 

Telework Day, according to Telework Exchange, is a joint project by the organization, Telework!VA and Virginia government officials to galvanize the state's work around green initiatives, designed to both help the environment and reduce costs. The campaign to establish a designated day for telecommuting builds on Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine's June 2009 executive order to reduce energy consumption and increase efficiencies at branch agencies and institutions. The state government hopes Telework Day will prompt private employers to also offer telework programs to their employees.

"Telework allows employees to conduct work away from their primary workplace in the case of an emergency or natural disaster. We encourage organizations to 'stress test' their business continuity plan and infrastructure during Telework Day," said Karen Jackson, Deputy Secretary of Technology, Commonwealth of Virginia, in a press statement.

Not only can telework help companies green their processes, but it can also pay off in productivity savings. For instance, Cisco recently reported it was able to save some $277 million in employee productivity costs alone by sending employees home to work.

"Telework Day is an important opportunity to advocate telework as a business strategy that can have a positive impact on the bottom line and improve organization efficiency," said Jennifer Thomas Alcott, program manager for Telework!VA. "Telework is one of the most effective ways for people to greatly reduce their work-related carbon footprint and demonstrate that 'work is something you do, not a place you go.'"

Telework Day advocates are encouraging individuals, organizations and businesses to support the effort here. 

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Soon after he took office, President Obama asked for a wide review of the federal IT security landscape. The review's purpose: to assess what laws and regulations exist, how effective they are, what needs to be changed and how government can work with corporations to protect the country and share technology ideas.

The review, released in May, found 250 points to address in areas ranging from simply educating the public about cybersecurity to the more-complex and politically contentious issues of building a secure identity management system and devising a "cyber incident response" policy similar to how the White House monitors terrorist attacks and natural disasters. At a press conference to release the review, Obama defined the digital infrastructure as a "strategic national asset," the defense of which should be a national priority.

To read more, see Moving Target and System Security: 5 Ways to Improve Your Defenses Against Attack.

A privacy and civil liberties official should be added to the National Security Council, the review also advised. And to promote U.S. use of "game-changing technologies," more shared government-private sector research and development should be done.

The review didn't bowl over many security experts who have been calling for similar changes for years. Indeed, the Center for Strategic and International Studies released a report in December saying much the same thing, done by fewer people in less time. The big news was Obama's creation of the position of Cybersecurity Coordinator, reporting to him and belonging to both the national security staff as well as the National Economic Council.

It's the cross-agency reach and Obama's pledge to work closely with the private sector that will make the "cybersecurity czar" (who had not been named at press time) successful, says Eugene Schultz, CTO of consultancy Emagined Security. "Odds are higher that we will have sane management of this."

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The European Commission is seeking to strengthen cooperation between law enforcement and private industry worldwide as well as increase penalties for those engaged in cybercrime, a senior official said on Wednesday.

Countries such as Estonia and Lithuania have been victimized by cyberattacks, but officials in those countries have complained they didn't get support fast enough from other nations, said Radomir Jansky, one of the top cybercrime officials within the Commission's Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security.

"Large-scale attacks are on the rise, and we need to deal with them," Jansky said at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group meeting in Amsterdam. The conference is attended by ISPs and industry professionals who discuss issues such as spam, e-mail marketing issues and botnets.

In April and May 2007, Estonian Web sites belonging to banks, schools and government agencies fell under denial-of-service attacks after a World War II memorial to Russian soldiers was moved from a public square. Georgia experienced cyberattacks in August 2008 as Russia invaded Georgia's South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions.

The Commission is updating the Council Framework Decision on Attacks Against Information Systems, which went into force in 2005, Jansky said. European Union countries are not bound by law to abide by the framework, but it is recommended that they follow it.

The update, which has not been published yet, will likely recommend that countries across Europe increase the sentences for those convicted of cybercrime since there doesn't appear to be much of a deterrent effect now, Jansky said.

Sentences now range from one to three years, but countries such as Estonia, France, Germany and the U.K. have longer ones, he said.

The updated framework may also recommend that countries respond to a request for help in a cybercrime investigation from other countries faster, such as within eight hours. Now, there is no time limit, Jansky said.

There is also a need for a unified system that enables E.U. countries to report cyberattacks, prosecutions and other criminal reports. The data would help create a more complete picture on the scope of cybercrime, Jansky said. Countries also need to agree on an acceptable format for reporting that data.

"We need to have more data," Jansky said.

In March, the Commission published a draft of a second framework under revision, the Council Framework Decision on Combating the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Child Pornography.

That framework is seeking to tackle new scenarios of concern regarding Internet-related child abuse. The framework will likely recommend new criminal offenses related to grooming, the viewing of child pornography without downloading images and allowing the use of covert tools during investigations, Jansky said.

The framework will likely be published by the end of the year, as the Council of the European Union is still working out the details, Jansky said.