A series of comments filed yesterday with the US Federal Communications Commission on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters and the TV industry's technology research laboratory, the Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV), came to the conclusion that educating the American consumer about the existence of the digital TV broadcasting switch (now set for June 12) is no longer a serious problem. Much more serious, they condend, is the real possibility -- one which broadcasters are apparently just now addressing -- that certain viewers including those on the outskirts of analog broadcasting signals' coverage areas may suddenly find themselves without service.

"To strike an appropriate balance, stations that are predicted to lose two percent or more of their analog viewers as a result of a change in their geographic coverage area should have the flexibility to design the best way to communicate information, over-the-air, of this potential loss to their viewers, and, importantly, how to obtain specific information," reads the comments of the two industry leading groups (PDF available here). "We would support having these stations include in weekly on-air consumer DTV initiatives of their choosing a notice, such as: 'a small percentage of current viewers using an antenna to view this analog station may have problems receiving this station's digital signal; you can go to www.AntennaWeb.org to determine this and to see what outdoor antenna type will best serve your specific geographic location.'"

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UPI reports that a civilian employee of the New York Police Department has been charged with burglary, grand larceny, and computer trespass after disabling security cameras and stealing eight backup tapes from a warehouse on Staten Island. Anthony Borelli, the accused, is the former director of communications for the NYPD pension fund, and the tapes found in his home contain Social Security numbers and direct-deposit information for 80,000 current and retired officers.

The police potentially affected are receiving letters warning them that their personal information may have been violated. Leaving aside the wisdom of stealing from 80,000 cops, the department could have spared itself a great deal of grief simply by encrypting the data. As Credant senior VP Michael Callahan pointed out Thursday, "Eight backup tapes with heavily encrypted data on them have a resale value measured in tens of dollars, whereas with 80,000 identity theft kits on them in readable format, the value starts to skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars category."

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At the Greener Gadgets Expo last week in New York City, executives for Dell and Intel touted a variety of "green" benefits for newer computer processors and laptop screens. But in another session, a product designer took the computer industry for to task for forcing users into frequent and costly replacements of PCs and software, whether for the sake of "green computing" or other reasons.

Processors such as Core 2 Duo that use Core Microarchitecture produce substantial energy savings for customers over the old Pentium 4 CPU, while also reducing carbon footprints, contended Stephen Harper, Intel's director of environment and energy policy.

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It is now well-established that social network Facebook was built up from the idea (if not the actual code) of HarvardConnect, which later became ConnectU. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sued for stealing the idea of Facebook from HarvardConnect, which he briefly worked on as a student.

So when Facebook announced yesterday that interface changes would soon be rolled out, which will turn the user's page into a real-time update feed of his friends' activities, many assumed this move was to replicate some of the more popular functionality of microblogging service Twitter, and remove some of the luster from that popularity. This idea is largely due to repeated rumors of an attempted Twitter buyout by Facebook.

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While Palm announced yesterday that its Treo Pro will be coming to Sprint on March 15, Alltel Wireless announced a day later, though it gets the device first. The number five US mobile operator, now owned by Verizon, began offering the 3G Windows Mobile 6.1 Treo today as a web site-only purchase. As with Sprint, Alltel's Treo Pro will cost $199.99 with a two-year contract and related rebates.

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Last year, leading analysts including IDC gave the PC industry a baseline number on which to base its growth projections. That number, at about this time last year, ironed itself out to about 12%. By the spring, it looked like the real number would be 15%. But projections like these almost always presume that the same factors that impact the industry in the current quarter, will be carried on into the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.

As we all know now, the tremendous decline in both business and consumer orders resulted in 2008 ending up pretty much where it began, almost as if there wasn't a year's worth of data at all: flat for the year after a shipment decline of more than 11% in just the fourth quarter.

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Known as HP Insight Remote Support, Hewlett-Packard's new software, announced this morning, connects small to medium-sized businesses directly to their HP solution providers for automated event monitoring and fault detection, also generating requests for support service dispatch.

The software is aimed at small information technology environments that do not require more advanced management systems, such as HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) or HP Operations Manager.

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In a mobile device market being driven by capacitive touch-optimized operating systems, Windows Mobile has been forfeiting stature, and the enterprise sector has taken note. At the annual US Public Sector Chief Information Officer summit yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked up the forthcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 release, and almost immediately pushed it to the side.

"We have a significant release coming this year -- not the full release we wanted to have this year -- but we have a significant release coming this year with Windows Mobile 6.5...we still don't get some of the things that people want on the highest end phones. Those will come with Windows Mobile 7 next year."

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AMD's gamble to create the processor production foundry to which it will outsource its own projects, in an effort to scale down while maintaining some measure of control over its production methods, is now offically under way. Global Foundries is the official name of "The Foundry Company," formed by a vote of approval by AMD's shareholders last month.

Its CEO is Doug Grose, previously AMD's Senior Vice President of Manufacturing. His opening message on GF's Web site yesterday put a very thin veil over the reason for his new company's existence: "Who we are and what we do is a direct reflection of trends in the semiconductor industry. Seismic changes in the business, driven by global economics and technology, make the timing right for this new approach to the foundry business."

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The latest commercial edition of Firefox, version 3.0.7, is said to address three "critical" security issues. But a close look at the list itself shows that a myriad of similar issues were grouped together as one, making the total list of high-level issues as high as six.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0.7 for Windows from Fileforum now.

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There's a plaintive subhead in the draft of the Consensus Audit Guidelines (CAG) that sums up how the writers of the document must feel about their work to improve governmental IT security. It's right there on page 3: "Why this project is so important: Gaining agreement among CISOs, CIOs and IGs." See? pleads the subtext See, information security offices and information officers and federal inspectors general? You can't possibly ignore this very important information if we address you by your title... can you?

Oh, but they can. This is, after all, information security, where people regularly spend more energy circumventing a system than following it. The guidelines are a mighty attempt to ease government and private-sector organizations into embracing good security controls. It remains to be seen if this time will finally prove the charm.

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It's report-card time again for government agencies as the Office of Management and Budget released its fiscal year 2008 report to Congress on Wednesday in accordance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

The report (PDF available here) covers 25 major and dozens of small and independent agencies and includes, as usual, qualitative and quantitative testing. Area measured include certification and accreditation, controls testing, and contingency plan testing, along with privacy protection.

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In recent days, consumers are being deluged with economy-related terminology and newspeak. There's almost nowhere for them to turn to avoid the onslaught. Every current event is being presented in the context of the economy, which now seems to be providing the backdrop for our everyday life. The other day I saw an ad for "Recession Proof Recipes."

So yes, when market research group NPD released its findings that the US smartphone market is growing, that bad-news backdrop couldn't be avoided even then. NPD said this growth is taking place "despite recession conditions."

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YouTube's probably not running scared just yet, but the Flickr community has finally gotten general access to video-posting capability. The Pro (paid-user) community has been uploading 90-second "long photos" to the service last year, but now any registered user can post to two standard-definition videos each month on the service.

According to Yahoo's Yodel Anecdotal blog, which announced the change earlier this week, the limit is in addition to the usual 100MB/month cap on photo uploads for non-paying users. Paying users also get a service boost, allowing them to upload HD video. And all hands are free to browse videos through the odd-but-amusing Flickr Clock, which sorts the clips by time.

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"You can pay with a credit card, and only pay for what you use," noted Forrester Research analyst James Staten, as he outlined a number of ways in which clouds are being implemented already, during a presentation about implementing cloud applications across international borders.

Clouds allow companies to rent applications for short-term use, without investing in servers, software, or other infrastructure. Businesses can also pay for temporary access to computing resources -- such as data centers in other countries, for example -- without inking long-term contracts, according to Staten, speaking in a webcast sponsored by 3Tera, a competitor to cloud providers ranging from Amazon's EC2 to GoGrid and GridLayer.

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