Zoho invites more cloud app users by embracing more IM protocols
For a number of reasons, some of them indeterminate, despite all the evolutionary pressure to move it to the next level of its evolution, instant messaging hasn't evolved as an application. One reason I've always suspected is that it's difficult for developers to find the impetus to devote the amount of effort required to evoke revolutionary change, on a platform that's offered to most customers for free. The counter-argument to that is that SMS isn't free, and yet it's stuck even further in the Stone Age.
If IM does resemble one ongoing revolution in application architecture, it's "the cloud" -- the nebulous, always-on service built to respond to user requests from wherever. Whereas at the beginning of the decade, services like AOL, Yahoo, and MSN used their respective IM platforms as weapons against one another, today's strategies -- which now includes Google -- have them opening up those platforms for generally unencumbered use by others. That hasn't exactly made Trillian for Windows and other multi-protocol IM clients the most perfect of applications just yet, but week after week, those of us who work in widely-dispersed offices do manage to get by somehow.
FCC's Copps renews call for a network non-discrimination principle
As first reported by Broadcasting & Cable and confirmed by multiple other sources, in a breakfast-time speech last Friday before a conference of cable TV executives, the acting chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission called once again for the drafting of an amendment of sorts to its 2005 policy framework (PDF available here), adding one new principle to its existing list of four. The "Fifth Principle," as it may come to be known for years hence, would explicitly mandate that carriers provide non-discriminatory Internet access to all available services and applications.
The origins of the "Fifth Principle," as well as the belief that one was needed in the first place, dates back to the debate over the 2006 re-merger of AT&T with its own former "Baby Bell," BellSouth. While many lawmakers were debating how best to avoid the topic of addressing the efficacy of the merger, some were drafting proposed laws that would prevent the merged entity from disabling access to competitive services through its own network.
Online columnist in trouble for reviewing pirated movie
There's continuing debate in entertainment circles today over the seemingly simple matter of whether Roger Friedman, a movie reviewer for FoxNews.com, was fired for having written and published a review of an unreleased film he admitted to having pirated online.
In his review of the upcoming Wolverine prequel to the X-Men series -- which the site has since deleted -- Friedman bragged about what he considered a time-saving measure, writing, "It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer. I could have downloaded all of it but really, who has the time or the room?...It's so much easier than going out in the rain!" 20th Century Fox is both the producer of the film and the sister company of Friedman's publisher -- both are co-owned by News Corp.
Should AT&T be obliged to enable Skype for the iPhone?
With the P2P voice communication service Skype now available for Apple's iPhone, eBay's venture into the telecommunications field now is now deployed on the world's most prominent handset. Apple is supporting the application by making it available on the iTunes App Store; reports tout Skype as the single most downloaded free application on iTunes.
That's a problem for carrier partners such as AT&T, because the business model on which the iPhone is based presumes customers will be placing calls on the carrier's network, not through the Internet. Last Friday, AT&T fired a shot across Apple's bow, with its senior executive vice president for legal affairs, Jim Cicconi, stating for USA Today, "We absolutely expect our vendors...not to facilitate the services of our competitors."
Senate will debate one more Obama 'czar,' this time for cybersecurity
Yesterday, the US Dept. of Homeland Security issued a statement that was intended to soothe the public's fears regarding the impending payload activation of the dreaded Conficker worm -- a piece of malware whose impact on this week's news cycle easily outweighed its impact on networks. That statement made news in itself, though, by referring to a sophisticated free tool for securing networks based on the latest research, but noting that tool was being released only for government agencies and their direct partners.
It revealed the priorities of DHS in a world that's legitimately threatened by malicious developments with far more potentially serious repercussions than Conficker. Now, a bill introduced today in Congress by Sens. Olympia Snowe (R - Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D - W.V.) -- one which was being drafted two weeks ago -- would relieve DHS from the responsibility of reacting to Internet threats, and most likely relocate the US-CERT response team to another node of the executive branch.
BlackBerry applications finally become a real business
It may not really have the look and feel of a "world" just yet, but let's face it, Research In Motion is a late enough entry into this field that all the really good metaphors have already been taken. Today -- no fooling -- is the first day of BlackBerry App World, which is an application in itself that enables a market for other usable features, for a brand name that does find itself playing catch-up to its rivals these days.
The most appropriate word for the application shopping experience for BlackBerry up until yesterday has been "painful," but this is coming from someone who has built up quite a resistance to being impressed by software. Carriers prefer to set up users' browsers so that the application purchase process goes directly through them, often through their default home pages. So business relationships with major carriers such as Verizon Wireless, more than any other reason, have kept RIM from mounting a respectable challenge to Apple and others up to now.
After a 12-year downhill slide, SGI is no more
The former Silicon Graphics, Inc., which has officially gone by the name SGI for several years, will sell its entire assets to Rackable Systems, the low-power data center server producer, for a mere $25 million, according to an SEC filing this morning.
Of the many heroes that graced the landscape of microcomputing during its formative years, few were more outspoken and more endearing -- in that particular way that entrepreneurs can be -- than the once high-profile CEO of SGI, Ed McCracken. Throughout the 1980s, McCracken championed the ideal of producing an original architecture for graphics workstations, at a price that (hopefully) folks could afford. At a time when there were big conferences every month and keynote speakers were everywhere, McCracken was one of the biggest, speaking not only about technology but about leadership strategy and executive conduct.
Microsoft to offer bare-bones Windows Server 2008 through OEMs
Despite the rapid growth of networking in the home, recent studies have informed Microsoft that a vast multitude of single-office businesses -- on the "far left" side of the SMB scale -- still work with either single PCs for their principal applications, or peer-to-peer networked clients. The company's research has drawn the conclusion that this market may be best served by an "all-in-one solution" -- one where business users simply buy the server and have it plugged in for them, and they don't even install the operating system.
For this reason, there's no fancy plastic box for the newest SKU for Microsoft's server OS announced this morning, called Windows Server 2008 Foundation. Instead, this very-basic rendition will come pre-installed on OEM and partner systems, the first of which are likely to premiere this month. Look for likely brand names such as HP, Dell, IBM, and Acer to top the list of manufacturers offering new, simple half-tower units at lower prices.
EU consumer commissioner calls for user profile security standards
In a speech on the eve of an important Consumers' Summit to take place in Brussels, European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs Meglena Kuneva told a roundtable convened to discuss data security policy that personally identifiable data (PID) -- the stuff advocacy groups fear could end up in the wrong hands -- may not be the biggest privacy problem Internet users face. As long as Web services maintain profiles of their users, even without associating those profiles with names or addresses, the misuse or misappropriation of that data, Comm. Kuneva said, may still endanger Internet users.
"No one in the digital space really cares about our actual names or exact physical addresses. What traders want is a description of who we are and a way to reach us," Kuneva told the roundtable (PDF of speech transcript available here). "They want to know that the person behind the number 1234 is young, sporty, drives fast cars and travels frequently and that as a trader you can show up on his screen at your convenience. This is fine. But what about the person behind number 456, unemployed, in debt and about to lose his home? He is a target for predatory loans and fraudulent financial and yes, personal, advice."
YouTube wins out in the race against Hulu for ABC content
In a move which may have forestalled a deal that may have accelerated arch-rival Hulu's "evil plot" to assimilate consumers' brains, YouTube has made an extended deal with Disney Media Networks -- parent company of the American ABC and ESPN channels -- that not only gives ABC its own branded YouTube channel, but enables Disney to manage its own in-stream advertising.
This afternoon, a hastily-produced preview video was posted to ABC's new channel in a format that could not be embedded elsewhere, contrary to the usual YouTube methodology. And a two-and-a-half minute clip from a recent SportsCenter serves as a placeholder for future content on ESPN's new YouTube channel. ESPN already has a full-featured sports news and video highlight service on Disney's own Go Network, its homebase since 2004 after Disney and Microsoft's MSN terminated their deal.
DHS releases its Conficker tool...for the public sector
In the wake of yesterday's discovery that the Conficker worm can give hints to its presence on a system in a Windows-based network by changing the network signature of that system, the US Dept. of Homeland Security released what the chief of its US-CERT division says is "the most comprehensive [tool] available for enterprises like federal and state government and private sector networks to determine the extent to which their systems are infected by this worm."
But its use, says a DHS statement published yesterday, is limited to computers -- including network infrastructure systems -- operated by the federal government and its private sector partners. For that reason, DHS says, it's distributing this detection tool only through its secured channels. Specifically, government sources may acquire the tool through the Government Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (GFIRST) portal; and private sector partners may contact their designated Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC).
HP's latest effort at giving admins insight into the cloud
The whole point of drawing the mass of interconnected processors and storage units as a "cloud" in the first place was to give customers the impression that they didn't have to bother themselves with the configuration or the administration or anything whatsoever about the texture of where their services were being housed. But when those customers have customers of their own, the notion that a business' processes, logic, and vital data are being housed in some distant and texture-less nebula tends not to inspire confidence.
So businesses that want to deploy cloud services of their own are faced with two competing pressures: the need to cut costs and reduce overhead, and the need to ensure security and privacy. While the whole cloud metaphor does seem comfortable on the surface, the disconnect between a company and the resources it entrusts to the cloud may be the source of some stress.
Virginia anti-spam law now dead after Supreme Court rejects appeal
After losing a unanimous decision by the state's Supreme Court last September, the State of Virginia appealed to the US Supreme Court to breathe new life into an anti-spam law that was intended to put serial spammers behind bars. A constitutional rights appeal by convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes, convicted in 2005 and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment, met with overwhelming victory, but state lawmakers saw the nation's highest court as their last chance.
It was not to be. Though the high court's Web site has yet to carry the news (sometimes it takes a few hours or even a day to update), the Associated Press is reporting that the court has refused to hear the State of Virginia's appeal. The State Supreme Court had earlier ruled that the Virginia law failed to explicitly distinguish between "commercial spam" and "personal spam," and in so omitting, traversed the boundaries of professional conduct by limiting free speech.
Now Western Digital enters the SSD market with SiliconSystems buyout
Last spring, Western Digital -- which duels with Seagate for top market share -- began pushing hard disk drives with very fast RPM speeds (20,000, versus the conventional 5,600 and 7,200 RPM) as a way of answering the challenge of solid-state drive technology. See, even though sustained transfer times for HDDs have surprisingly stayed competitive with SSDs (which are made of flash memory, after all), what's always impressive about SSDs are their seek times -- how fast they can access the first bit of data.
Meanwhile, catering specifically to the enterprise market, Aliso Viejo, California-based SiliconSystems had been countering WD and Seagate with an argument that truly does have some weight to it: the idea that mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) estimates for HDDs showing them more reliable than SSDs, didn't take real-world operating conditions into account.
New Nvidia GPUs geared to work with multiple physical, virtual systems
The one thing you typically cannot do well with a virtual system is graphics, mainly because the GPU's typical channel to the outside bus is through the physical CPU. Getting 3D accelerated performance to pass through to the virtual level is practically impossible, because there hasn't been a way for the physical graphics driver to cede some performance time to a virtual graphics driver.
Beginning today for business users, that changes with Nvidia's refresh of its Quadro FX professional graphics card line. As a feature that distinguishes Quadro FX from Nvidia's GeForce consumer graphics line, SLI Multi-OS will be a firmware/driver combination that enables systems using Intel's VT virtualization technology to push graphics processing to virtual systems. The GPU maker listed Parallels as the first hypervisor producer to take advantage of this functionality.
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