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The top of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii is quite a contrast with the beaches and warm water that surround this island in the Pacific. Here at 13,800 feet there's still a deep covering of snow, and temperatures plunge below zero as soon as the sun goes down.

Those certainly aren't the kinds of conditions that draw millions of tourists to Hawaii each year, but the clean air and clear night skies at the top of Mauna Kea attract astronomers, both amateur and professional. With 13 telescopes, the volcano top makes up the world's largest observatory for optical, infrared and submillimeter wave astronomy.

The technology at the volcano top amid the harsh weather reminded me of the differences the Internet has made to many lives in the past 15 years.

Flashback to FTP

Back in 1993 when I first logged onto the Internet, it was, of course, quite different from today. Never mind the hours it took me to configure Trumpet Winsock networking on Windows 3.1 so it would connect to a TCP/IP network– connections were slow, PCs were slower, and Yahoo was a few thousand pages of links. But that didn't stop me from logging on.

In those days, some of my favorite destinations were the U.S. FTP and telnet services that allowed access to satellite weather images and pictures from the types of telescopes that sit atop Mauna Kea today. There was something so cool about logging onto those sites so far away and downloading the images onto my own computer. It made me feel like I was a hacker in some futuristic movie or something.

Today, cell-phone signals can be received at the top of Mauna Kea, so a hook-up with a laptop computer means it's possible to directly access images coming from some of the telescopes. After light travels millions of light years to reach Earth and the image sensors in the telescope, electrons carry that image through servers, and then after a quick hop across the cellular network, it's in my PC.

The contrast was bouncing around in my head thanks to research I recently completed about the early days of Yahoo. Checking out old home pages through the Internet Archive brought back a flood of memories of my first couple of years accessing the World Wide Web through the NCSA Mosaic Web browser and the pages I used to visit.

Reach Further

Certainly, the romance is gone these days, and the Internet has turned into a utility that we expect almost everywhere– at least in rich, developed nations.

A report published last month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) underlined the contribution to our lives that the Internet has made and the potential contribution it and other communications systems can make to the billions of people who remain off the grid. Around 80 percent of the world's population lacks Internet access, but people are quickly coming online. As a result, the average daily salary of new users is about US$2, said the Paris-based organization.

The stage is now set for these people to take advantage of the same benefits the Internet and other communications have brought in the past decade.

Back up on the top of Mauna Kea, as the sun set, amateur astronomers got ready to enjoy a night of stargazing. Despite all of the advances the Internet has brought, giving us access to the heavens courtesy of the bigger telescopes here, there's nothing like the view in person.

A German company wants to bring customer loyalty cards to the Internet while also making it easier for people to log in into multiple Web sites.

Fun Communications' idea is to offer a portal for retailers to create virtual loyalty cards to supplement plastic ones using Microsoft's CardSpace, an authentication feature that ships with Windows Vista, said general manager Stefan Bamberg.

CardSpace lets a person store identity information on a computer in virtual cards, which the user clicks to submit information to CardSpace-enabled Web sites. “Self-issued” cards store identity information on a user's PC, while “managed” cards are stored by an identity provider. When logging in to other Web sites, the user can ask the identity provider to vouch for them, which saves having to remember a slew of different passwords, a concept known as single sign-on.

Loyalty card programs offer customers incentives based on repeat purchases in a network of merchants. For example, a customer may earn bonus points for purchases and those points can be used at other retailers participating in the loyalty card program. This drives business to noncompeting retailers within the network.

Fun Communications hopes to sell the portal to identity providers, which in turn would sell the system to retailers with a loyalty card network. The company will initially offer use of the portal free starting April 22, Bamberg said at the Cebit show in Hanover, Germany.

The virtual loyalty card system would be used in concert with plastic loyalty cards, Bamberg said. Purchases will be tracked, and then customers can be offered incentives redeemable online or in stores, Bamberg said. What customer data will be shared will be up to the businesses in the network and subject to consumers' consent.

Data on the virtual cards is valuable for retailers. Businesses can run e-mail marketing campaigns based on metrics such as age or type of purchases, Bamberg said. The information can also be tightly integrated with businesses' CRM (customer relationship management) systems and generate other valuable behavioral data, Bamberg said.

But a large barrier remains. CardSpace ships with Windows Vista, Microsoft's newest operating system, but isn't on Windows XP, which is still more widely used. CardSpace can be added to XP, but consumers have to download additional software.

Also, no company has stepped forward to be an identity provider for CardSpace. Microsoft has decided not to be one since consumers do not trust the company to hold their information, said Christian Klasen, senior business development manager in the Developer Platform and Strategy Group for Microsoft Germany. However, Microsoft is in discussions with companies to fill that role and increase the use of CardSpace, Klasen said.

Fun Communications, based in Karlsruhe, hopes a large telecommunications operator or free e-mail provider that has the confidence of consumers will become the identity provider. That would also make it more attractive to businesses to use the system on their Web sites, he said.

Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza last week for the first time publicly slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.

Speaking on a panel at the MIX 08 conference in Las Vegas, de Icaza said that Novell has done the best it could to balance open-source interests with patent indemnification. However, if he had his way, the company would have remained strictly open source and not gotten into bed with Microsoft. Novell entered into a controversial multimillion dollar cross-patent licensing and interoperability deal with Microsoft in November 2006.

“I'm not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community,” de Icaza said. He was speaking on a panel that also included representatives from Microsoft and open-source companies Mozilla and Zend.

De Icaza is a well-known technology prodigy from Mexico City who cofounded the GNOME open-source project and whose company Ximian was purchased by Novell in 2003. He remains one of the company's most well-respected and best-known open-source proponents.

De Icaza's comments came as he received questions from an audience member about the Moonlight project, Novell's open-source project to bring Microsoft's Silverlight to Linux. Silverlight is cross-browser runtime for building and delivering applications on the Web.

During the discussion, de Icaza explained that while anyone who downloaded Moonlight from Novell was protected by the company's licensing of Silverlight codecs from Microsoft through the company's own cross-licensing agreement. Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering from Mozilla, then raised the question that if he downloads and then distributes the code for Moonlight, would he get the patent protection?

“There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell,” answered de Icaza, who then acknowledged that “as to extending the patents to third parties– you have to talk to Microsoft.”

This answer led Schroepfer to point out the inconsistency between having products that are called open source but are “patent-encumbered.” “There are a lot of complicated IP patent-licensing restrictions,” he said. “Even if you have open-source [products], you can't get the end result you're interested in.”

Schroepfer said that Mozilla does not have any patents or any form of indemnification for anything in its products that may violate other company's patents– something de Icaza said certainly must be the case.

“We are as protected or unprotected as anyone else,” Schroepfer said. “It's a fairly equal scenario.”

De Icaza shot back that it was “unfair” of Schroepfer to paint Novell as the only company protected by patent covenants, as many companies have signed licensing agreements not only with Microsoft, but also with other companies such as IBM that have a large patent portfolio.

He also said that while it's commendable that Microsoft is attempting to be more open by allowing other companies more access to application programming interfaces, discussion and haggling over OSes and patents slows the industry as a whole's move to fully take advantage of new Web 2.0 business models, as Google has.

“The patent piece is such a small piece of it,” de Icaza said. “I don't think Windows and Linux are relevant in the long term. They might be fantastic products… but Google has shown itself to be a cash cow. There is a feature beyond selling corporate [software] and patents… it's going to be owning end users.”

Microsoft touts Silverlight as a cross-platform technology that will run on any browser or OS platform– such as Windows, Mac or Linux. However, instead of offering a version for Linux itself, it has chosen to let Novell do it through the Moonlight project.

Keith Smith, director of product management for Microsoft, said that Microsoft decided to let Novell port Silverlight to Linux rather than do it themselves because of Novell's expertise with the Linux OS. Novell already had the Mono open-source.NET implementation project as well, which also factored into the decision, he said.

The choice has drawn ire from open-source diehards who were displeased with Novell's decision to sign a cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft in the first place. A Web site called “Boycott Novell” decried Moonlight as a Microsoft “pet project” and criticized the company's decision not to port Silverlight to Linux itself.

Two brothers were sentenced Friday to multiyear prison terms for selling what the U.S. Department of Justice called “massive” amounts of pirated software online, the DOJ announced.

Maurice A. Robberson, 48, was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay US$855,917 restitution, while his brother Thomas K. Robberson, 55, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $151,488 restitution, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

On Nov. 7, Maurice Robberson pled guilty to conspiracy and felony copyright infringement, while Thomas Robberson pled guilty to a single count of felony copyright infringement.

Thomas Robberson made more than $150,000 selling software with a retail value of nearly $1 million through Bestvalueshoppe.com and TheDealDepot.net, the DOJ said. Maurice Robberson grossed more than $855,000 selling software with a retail value of nearly $5.6 million through CDsalesUSA.com and AmericanSoftwareSales.com. Both men have agreed to forfeit all their proceeds from the businesses, the DOJ said.

“People who steal the intellectual property of others for their personal financial gain, while defrauding consumers who think they are buying legitimate products, will be punished for their crimes, as today's sentences prove,” Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher said in a statement.

Two other people who conspired with Maurice Robberson to commit copyright infringement have already been sentenced, the DOJ said. Danny Ferrer, 39, was sentenced to 72 months in prison Aug. 25, 2006, for selling more than $4 million in pirated software with a retail value of nearly $20 million on BuysUSA.com. Alton Lee Grooms, 56, who helped start some of the businesses and gained more than $150,000 in profit, was sentenced on Jan. 18, to one year and one day in prison, after he cooperated with the government's investigation.

From late 2002 to October 2005, the men sold counterfeit software from companies such as Adobe Systems, Autodesk and Macromedia at discount prices, the DOJ said. These counterfeit items were manufactured by their businesses and included labels that featured trademarks and service marks of the legitimate software companies.

After receiving complaints from software copyright holders about BuysUSA.com, an undercover U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent made a number of purchases of business and utility software. Law enforcement authorities found a network of sites selling pirated software, the DOJ said.

FRANKLIN, Tenn. - Nissan wants to talk about more than a way to drive at its soon-to-be-finished Americas headquarters.

The Japanese automaker is showing off “green” features of the $100 million project as a kind of image signpost for car and truck buyers increasingly focused on environmental concerns.

The 10-story, S-shaped, headquarters opens in July, eventually for about 1,500 employees. Nissan North America, which increased annual sales by 4.5 percent to more than 1 million vehicles and a market share of 6.6 percent in 2007, is moving about 20 miles from a Nashville high-rise to a 50-acre campus with a restored wetland.

After relocating to the South from Southern California, Nissan’s own facilities engineers developed the headquarters with features aimed at showing a concern for the environment beyond stretching miles per gallon and cutting exhaust emissions.

A sci-fi sounding “light harvesting system” automatically dims or turns off interior lights in the 460,000 square feet of offices. Sun shades outside — sort of like reflective visors — with computer-designed blades direct sunlight to reduce glare and heat in the Southern summer.

Air conditioning and heat are controlled through outlets at each work station.

“You heat the people and not the space,” said Rob Traynham, the company’s director of corporate services.

Nissan engineers say the headquarters should consume about 35 percent less energy than a traditionally designed building. Citing fluctuating energy costs, the company declined to estimate how long it will take for savings in energy bills to offset the cost of the environmental features.

Outside the glass-covered building, Nissan is restoring a 2 1/2-acre wetland. Tens of thousands of native Tennessee plants, including iris, button bush and rushes, are already growing there.

And there’s greenery almost everywhere else on space that would have been paved if not for a parking deck tucked at one end of the 400-foot-long building.

David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., says automakers share a zeal to show customers they are “green” on and off the road and a new headquarters is a good place to show off environmental commitment.

“Particularly in the current environment, where it is much more fashionable to be green in everything you do, that’s a big deal,” Cole said.

Nissan isn’t seeking a seal of approval from the U.S. Green Building Council. Traynham said Nissan preferred to spend money to restore the wetland “rather than have a plaque on the wall.”

Green Building Council spokeswoman Ashley Katz described Nissan’s decision as unfortunate.

___

On the Net:

Nissan: http://www.nissanusa.com

Thursday's introduction of an iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) has game developers everywhere excited about the possibilities of iPhone game development, especially after seeing game demonstrations during the event. Developers agreed that Apple is pushing the iPhone as a major portable gaming platform.

“This is the coolest thing I've seen in game development in 15 years, except maybe for the Nintendo Wii,” said Glenda Adams, director of development for long-time Mac game publisher Aspyr Media.

Adams said that iPhone development plays uniquely into Aspyr's strengths: their in-house developers have experience with the core technology that the iPhone uses, such as OpenGL, Cocoa and Apple's user interface. They also have experience developing applications for the mobile space.

Electronic Arts (EA) and Sega both showed off iPhone games in development. EA showed off an iPhone-specific version of Spore, the forthcoming game from Will Wright, maker of The Sims and SimCity, while Sega introduced an iPhone version of Super Monkey Ball, a game that first appeared on Nintendo's GameCube console.

Helping to separate signal from noise

With giants like EA and Sega already staking claims to the iPhone ecosystem, Adams expects that the iPhone game market will quickly fill with titles. She anticipates it'll be a combination of original game development and ports or adaptations of existing intellectual property.

That sentiment was echoed by Brian Greenstone, president of Pangea Software. Pangea's best known for Mac games like Nanosaur and Bugdom.

“Everyone who I talk with wants to write iPhone applications right now,” said Greenstone. “The market is going to be flooded with stuff.”

Familiar surroundings for Mac developers

The iPhone SDK introduction has revitalized Greenstone's interest in developing for Apple platforms. He said he'd put new Mac game development on the back burner for the past couple of years, partly because of what he perceived to be a lack of interest or support from Apple itself for original game developers.

“This is the best thing I've seen Apple do in recent history,” said Greenstone. “I'm elated that they're actually doing it right.”

Greenstone anticipates that developing for the iPhone should be a pretty smooth transition for developers already experienced with creating products for Mac OS X, which will give him and other Mac game developers a leg up on the competition.

“The SDK has most of the basic functionality that programming in Mac OS X does,” he said.

A fair deal

Another aspect of iPhone development that won praise from many Mac game developers is the App Store, Apple's method for offering users iPhone applications. Steve Jobs indicated that developers will be able to sell their games or applications through the App Store for a 70/30 split — Apple will retain 30 percent of the revenue, and won't charge developers anything additionally for bandwidth, credit card processing or marketing.

“I'm amazed they're giving developers that much,” said Bruce Morrison, a producer at Freeverse Software, which has already sketched out in broad strokes its initial plan for iPhone games. “Other systems like that aren't nearly as generous.”

Greenstone also said the 30 percent cut seemed reasonable, especially compared with the exorbitant costs and extraordinary risk associated with getting Mac software on retail store shelves.

Other developers posting their thoughts in blogs and social networking services weren't quite as laudatory, but most felt that the split was acceptable.

Another aspect of the App Store anticipated by Morrison is the prospect of built-in copy protection managed on Apple's side, rather than a home-grown system that developers have to rig — the situation now with Mac applications.

“We're hoping it will help cut down on piracy quite a bit, and put independent developers on equal footing with the big guys,” said Morrison

One aspect of iPhone publication that developers did have questions about involved getting applications onto the App Store itself. Jobs left out any details about the certification process from the presentation on Thursday, except to say that Apple would be weeding out applications that presented security hazards, were bandwidth-hogs or were pornographic.

Freeverse has developed games for Microsoft's Xbox 360 “Live Arcade” system, which enables users to download games over the Internet onto their video game console rather than relying on a store-bought DVD.

“It may be a bit daunting, but I don't think it'll be anything to worry about,” said Morrison of the App Store certification process.

What to expect

Morrison, Adams and Greenstone all expect that at least initially, the market will be flooded with games, and many of these will probably be “me-too” copycats of each other, or retreads of tried-and-true genres that now work on iPhones. Still, everyone expects there to be a lot of innovation, too.

The iPhone's three-axis accelerometer and touch screen is earning the most comparisons to Nintendo's Wii and its remote. To that end, Adams suggests that game publishers — and consumers — may want to take note of what's happened in that market.

“There are a lot of fun, innovative games for the Wii,” she said. “But if you go into a retail store and look at their Wii section, there's a lot of 'shovelware,' too.”

“Shovelware” describes software that's just pushed into distribution with little thought as to its utility or quality. In this respect, Adams is referring to mediocre-quality ports of game titles that have made their way to the Wii.

“Some companies are probably going to license existing brands just to help get above the fray,” said Adams.

Morrison, whose company produces original titles and has dabbled with porting, said that his mind isn't made up — though it's perhaps worth noting that Freeverse's iPhone page shows original games, not ports.

“If you had asked me up until [Thursday], I only wanted original stuff,” said Morrison. “But once the news dropped, that changed. This system appears to have a lot more power even than we thought.”

EA's CEO, John Riccitiello, feels similarly. “”The animation technology in the iPhone OS enables us to build awesome games,” said Riccitiello in a prepared statement. “I think iPhone consumers are going to be blown away by the games we create for this platform.”

Having recently acquired messaging security company Postini, Google now finds itself in the threat-prediction business. And as is the case with just about every other computer security company, Google has research to show everyone how dangerous the online world has become.

Thus we come to the 2008 Annual Google Communications Intelligence Report.

Google's security forecast calls for continued spam-blended virus attacks with an increasing focus on identity theft. The attacks will rely on social engineering, the report says, and will rely on messages that reference current events, like the upcoming Olympic Games and natural disasters.

“Further, virus attacks will target executives at specific companies whose intellectual property is deemed valuable on the black market by the hackers,” the report says. “These attacks will appear to come from legitimate business agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Better Business Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

Google said it expects such incidents will prompt organizations to eliminate live links in customer e-mail communications.

Google also anticipates an increase in the deployment of outbound message monitoring systems, in the adoption of encryption, and in the use of archiving technology.

Identity theft attacks, Google says, will be launched increasingly from sites that let users create and post their own content.

And there's this shocker: Google predicts business will be good. “In addition, hosted solutions (SaaS) will play a major role in reducing the cost and complexity of these products,” the report says.

Surely, it's a coincidence that Google's Postini sells hosted solutions. Oh, and by the way, hosted messaging costs $5,000 to $17,000 annually, compared with $20,000 to $69,000 for traditional servers and software, according to Google's calculations.

Though Google may be biased about this, it's worth considering whether the company might simultaneously be right.

Gartner seems to think so. Last year, Ben Pring, research VP for Gartner, said, “The dysfunction of the client-server era is driving alternative approaches to IT development, delivery and management, which SaaS is the most apparent version of. There is now a widespread consensus among the movers and shakers of the IT industry that SaaS is an important and meaningful issue which can no longer be regarded as the 'lunatic fringe.' ”

Google's report does offer more than reasons to buy Google products. It notes, for example, that spam continues to be one of the top worries at most organizations. And it says that executives blame IT rather than end users for security and compliance.

The message here for IT administrators is teach your users how to be safe online or you'll get schooled by management.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

Later this month, Google plans to begin weighing Web page load time as a factor in assigning search keyword Quality Scores, which influence ad placement on Google and Google Network pages and search keyword bid prices.

This means that ads leading to landing pages that take a long time to load will perform worse than ads linked to svelte pages.

Google said it is making this change to improve the user experience. “Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business,” a Google AdWords team member named Vivian explained in a blog post Thursday. “Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.”

Excessively large Web pages, or Web pages served by slow servers, will also cost more to advertise. Keywords associated with ads on slow-loading pages will require a higher minimum bid than they would if associated with a page that loads quickly.

A Google spokesperson said in an e-mail that Quality Scores are relevant only for advertisers and do not influence organic search placement.

AdWords regularly re-evaluates Web page Quality Scores, so Web publishers should take steps to make sure their pages aren't too large. Options to consider include using fewer redirects and smaller images, giving up interstitial pages, and reducing the use of iFrames, which bring in content from elsewhere.

This change may also make clicking on online ads more secure because it will deter deceptive Web page construction, which often relies on redirection and iFrames to connect searchers with malicious content.

See original article on InformationWeek.com