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SAN FRANCISCO - A security lapse made it possible for unwelcome strangers to peruse personal photos posted on Facebook Inc.’s popular online hangout, circumventing a recent upgrade to the Web site’s privacy controls.

The Associated Press verified the loophole Monday after receiving a tip from a Byron Ng, a Vancouver, Canada computer technician. Ng began looking for security weaknesses last week after Facebook unveiled more ways for 67 million members to restrict access to their personal profiles.

But the added protections weren’t enough to prevent Ng from pulling up the most recent pictures posted by Facebook members and their friends, even if the privacy settings were set to restrict the audience to a select few.

After being alerted Monday afternoon, Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the Palo Alto-based company fixed the bug within an hour.

“We take privacy very seriously and continue to make enhancements to the site,” she said.

The latest lapse serves as another reminder of the perils of sharing sensitive photos and personal information online, even when Web sites pledge to shield the information from prying eyes.

Before the fix, Ng’s computer-coding trick enabled him to find private pictures of Paris Hilton at the Emmy awards and of her brother Barron Nicholas drinking a beer with friends and photos of many other people who hadn’t granted access to Ng.

Using Ng’s template, an AP reporter was able to look up random people on Facebook and see the most recent pictures posted on their personal profiles even if the photos were supposed to be invisible to strangers.

The revealed snapshots showed Italian vacations, office gatherings, holiday parties and college students on spring break. The AP also was able to click through a personal photo album that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted in November 2005.

Some members of social networks like Facebook post photos of themselves or others in potentially embarrassing or compromising situations that include illegal drug use or underage drinking that can cause trouble at school or work. None of the photos reviewed by the AP appeared to fall into this category.

Despite the risks, more people than ever — especially teenagers and young adults — are publishing personal photos and other intimate details about their lives on the Internet.

News Corp.’s MySpace.com, the only online social network larger than Facebook, suffered a security breach that exposed its members’ private photos earlier this year.

The Web site of popular online movie rental company Netflix suffered an outage early Monday morning, the company said.

The Web site went down at 7 a.m. Pacific Time, said Steve Swasey, a company spokesman. The company declined to comment on reasons for the outage. It appeared to be working again Monday afternoon.

It was an unplanned outage, Swasey said.

“It's very rare,” Swasey said. An outage like this hasn't happened to Netflix in a long time, Swasey said.

The outage is even more frustrating as Netflix prides itself on providing customer service to users, Swasey said. About 90 percent of Netflix's customers were satisfied with the company's customer service, according to a Nielsen survey in December 2007.

Netflix offers DVDs and streaming movies to about 8 million customers. The company recently added a movie streaming service for game consoles.

Microsoft is synonymous with the ubiquitous Windows operating system. But its Microsoft Office productivity suite pulls in more revenue than any version of Windows. Competition from Web-hosted productivity applications like Google Docs and Zoho Office has changed the rules of the application-suite game, however, threatening Microsoft's desktop application revenues and forcing it to address the growing popularity of Web-hosted applications with new features and products.

The obvious move would be to offer free, ad-supported, feature-limited online versions of Office's flagship applications designed to compete head-on with Google's and Zoho's word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs. Microsoft's free Office Live Workspace, however, takes a different tack by providing private and public shared online file areas, or workspaces, that are tightly linked to Office's desktop applications via a downloadable plug-in.

Though it lacks advanced workflow, communications, and project management features, Office Live Workspace has more in common with collaborative Web services like Basecamp and Central Desktop than it does with Google's or Zoho's online suites. Currently ad-free, Microsoft says the site may eventually include advertising.

Office Live Workspace anticipates the kinds of jobs you're likely to collaborate on, providing prefab workspace templates geared to specific business, school, and home tasks such as organizing a group meeting, launching a product, writing a term paper, throwing a party, or managing a little-league team. Individual templates contain document templates designed for the task, such as a project proposal outline in Word or a presentation in PowerPoint.

Office Live Workspace supports Excel files, too, though none of the templates available when we reviewed the site were Excel files. On the other hand, the service doesn't support Microsoft's Access database format, which is too bad–Access users looking to delegate data entry and to simplify reporting tasks might benefit greatly from an online database-sharing arrangement.

You can view documents in the three supported Office file types online, but to edit the files, you must download and open them in your local copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, or in a compatible suite such as OpenOffice.org, and then reupload them when you're done editing.

Emulating a handy feature pioneered by Zoho Office, the service also lets you open, edit, and save files directly from your Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 applications to your online folders, using a downloadable toolbar plug-in. Besides working in the supported Office file types, you can create, view, and edit several other types of files–Events, Contacts, Task Lists, and Notes–via the Web interface, and sync these with the corresponding information types stored in your local copy of Microsoft Outlook. The site lets you create one other file type–a spreadsheet-like list–and export it to Excel format if you wish. You can upload other file types, too. The site simply displays an error message if you try to view or edit unsupported file formats.

If you work with only a few collaborators, Office Live Workspace provides just the right combination of file-sharing controls and ease of use. As the workspace administrator, you create a new shared workspace and then invite other users by e-mail to join it, either as viewers (who can see but not modify files) or as editors (who can see, create, and modify files). You can share workspaces with invited users, make them public, or keep them private. Files are easy to move from one workspace to another. Though you can't share individual workspace files, you can share individual files that are stored in the default 'Documents' folder.

Office Live Workspace displays a log of file creation, editing, and deletion activity, and the administrator can retrieve an earlier version of a file if an editing snafu occurs. If you add the SharedView utility, a small download that's still in beta, you can share your screen and its applications with other workspace users–a feature that several other collaboration services offer as well. Only one user at a time can control and edit a document via SharedView, however. If you need tighter controls over file access, or other workflow tools like e-mail reminders of project milestones and due dates, choose a more powerful collaboration service.

You'll also want to look elsewhere if your projects involve lots of large files. While other online storage services–including Google, Zoho, and Microsoft's own Windows Live Spaces–offer gigabytes of free storage, Office Live Workspace gives you just 500MB, with individual file size limited to 25MB. But if you and a few of your coworkers or family members want to collaborate in a lightweight fashion using Microsoft Office apps, Microsoft's unique response to Web-hosted applications could be a free and easy no-brainer.

San Francisco - In an attempt to improve computer performance, Sun is working on technology to let chips communicate using lasers instead of electricity, in what would be a break from conventional computer design.

The company on Monday received a $44 million contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to boost computational performance by using lasers for chips to communicate over silicon optics and to reduce power consumption by placing chips close to each other, Sun said.

Usually, chips are soldered and physically unattached, but with the research, Sun is trying to connect the chips densely in a grid, said Ron Ho, a distinguished engineer at Sun. At close proximity, lasers provide better bandwidth for chips to communicate, which can boost overall system performance. The performance increase could be at up to terabits per second, Ho said.

The research will densely pack hundreds of cores in what Sun calls a “macrochip.” This research's findings could help data centers reduce power consumption and provide more efficient computational cycles for supercomputers in the high-performance computing space. It could help push supercomputing capabilities in areas like weather research and oil exploration.

The grid placement of chips and lower power requirement of optical networking should also reduce operational and manufacturing costs for supercomputers, Ho said.

Sun won't bring out supercomputers or servers based on the research soon, though the technology will start appearing in servers in about three to four years, Ho said.

Many companies are involved in silicon nanophotonics research, which enables high-bandwidth communication networks between chips with thousands of cores to enable computational and power efficiency. Research has been going on for years, but little attention has been given to bringing down power consumption and ownership costs, Ho said. Sun is trying to push research in the area, Ho said.

IBM is looking to replace wires on a chip with pulses of light on tiny optical fibers for quicker and more power-efficient data transfers between cores on a chip. The technology transfers data up to a distance of a few centimeters about 100 times faster than wires and consumes one-tenth as much power. NEC is also working on technology to enable optical data transmission between chips. DARPA is also looking to fund further research efforts in the space.

Sun's research partners for the project include silicon photonics companies like Kotura and Luxtera, and universities including Stanford University and the University of California at San Diego.

LOS GATOS, Calif. - Online DVD rental leader Netflix Inc. is suffering a technology breakdown that’s knocked out its Web site, inconveniencing its 7.5 million subscribers.

The outage could mean some customers will have to wait longer than usual for their next rentals.

Company spokesman Steve Swasey says the trouble blocked access to Netflix’s Web site about 7 a.m. PDT Monday. The site was still down in the afternoon.

Swasey says DVDs that normally would have been mailed Monday may not go out until Tuesday because the problem also has hobbled some Netflix distribution centers.

Netflix is based in Los Gatos.

REYNOLDS, Ind. - This one-stoplight farming hamlet had big dreams in 2005 when it was christened BioTown USA.

Its goal: to become the first U.S. community to meet all electricity and gas needs through renewable energy by using everything from farm waste to sewage.

Industry and government officials led the early charge. BP installed a gas pump offering an ethanol fuel blend, and South Dakota-based VeraSun Energy Corp. started building an ethanol production plant near town.

Former U.S. agriculture secretary Mike Johanns stopped by in support, as did the band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Visitors also included a group of Chilean corn farmers who were touring the Midwest and interested in learning more about biofuels.

But the visitors are long gone, and many say the excitement is too. Money problems, leadership changes and other obstacles have sparked skepticism that Reynolds will ever succeed at moving the state, much less the nation, toward homegrown energy and away from foreign oil.

“I’m not happy about the whole situation, and a lot of people in town aren’t either,” said farmer Tonie Snyder. He helped provide thousands of bales of corn stover last fall that were supposed to be burned using technology that now may never be built.

From the outset, the vision for BioTown was ambitious. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and the state Department of Agriculture wanted to create a model for energy self-sufficiency. No other U.S. community produces all its own energy, and a German village that runs on renewable energy took eight years to develop.

But project officials believed they could turn this community of about 550 people, surrounded by silos and stubbly corn fields, into something special.

“We are taking challenges and turning them into opportunities by developing homegrown, local energy production to become independent from foreign sources,” Daniels said in announcing the project.

The timetable was aggressive. State officials hoped to break ground in November 2006 on a $10 million facility that would house the core equipment needed to turn manure and other biomass material into energy, and start generating electricity for the town by July 2007.

The groundbreaking happened, and General Motors offered deals on flex fuel vehicles to people living in the Reynolds ZIP code. But there has been little other progress, and now BioTown leaders acknowledge they have adjusted their vision. But they insist the project will happen.

“What we try to remind folks all the time is that this project, there’s no manual that you pull out and say, ‘How do you do a BioTown?’” Indiana Agriculture Director Andy Miller said. “We’re kind of inventing it as we go.”

BioTown seemed like a “shot in the arm” to Fred Buschman, a lifelong resident of this community about 80 miles northwest of downtown Indianapolis.

“It was like something you dreamed of but never really believed could happen,” the 77-year-old town council member said.

A couple of restaurants, car dealerships and a gas station make up most of Reynolds proper. But steady streams of truck traffic flow through town each day on state route 43 and U.S. 24, and railroads crisscross the community. State leaders said the infrastructure and surrounding farms made Reynolds an ideal location for BioTown.

“They were going to make this a showtown for the whole world to come in and look at, and I thought it was the greatest thing that ever could happen to the town of Reynolds,” Snyder said.

State officials said private funding would drive the project. The startup firm Rose Energy Discovery Inc. would install an anaerobic digester, a device that converts manure methane into electricity, and a gassifier would be built to create a gas that can be burned for heat or put in a boiler to make steam.

But Rose Energy dropped out last summer after failing to line up enough private investment. In October, VeraSun suspended construction on its ethanol plant due to a steep drop in ethanol prices, which combined with high corn prices has slowed factory construction around the country.

Work has not begun on the Reynolds digester.

Last fall, Snyder and his fellow farmers readied about 5,000 bales of mostly corn stover that was supposed to feed the gassifier. Months later, thousands of the unused bales collect snow and rain as they sit in a field just outside town.

The farmers finally received full payment for the bales earlier this month, Snyder said.

The new technology developer, Energy Systems Group, hasn’t decided whether to install the gassifier, so state officials say the bales will become animal bedding.

BioTown proponents say there’s still plenty going on.

Energy Systems Group, a Vectren Corp. subsidiary, will spend about $10 million on the digester and is still lining up financing for it. President Jim Adams said he hopes to start building within the next month or so and wants to produce power by the end of this year.

“The whole process has gone a little slower than we anticipated, securing the fuel and a power purchase agreement for some of the output,” he said. “But that’s all coming together.”

Most of what they produce will likely be sold to a power company. BioTown leaders learned early that it would be nearly impossible to take Reynolds off an established electricity grid so it could supply its own power.

Miller said the cost to build a grid just for Reynolds would be prohibitive, and the community would still need backup help to prevent service interruptions.

BioTown Development Authority President John Heimlich preaches patience as the project sputters on. Last year, he and other BioTown leaders visited the German village of Juehnde, which runs on renewable energy.

“I think what we see now, maybe as our vision, is kind of an evolving project, so maybe there isn’t a final look so to speak,” he said.

Despite the setbacks, BioTown is attacking global energy problems with local solutions, and that’s the best approach, said Brooke Coleman, director of the Boston-based New Fuels Alliance, a renewable energy advocacy group.

He said the project takes on some steep obstacles like removing a community from an established power grid. Renewable energy developers have tried to do this for years and have long met resistance from power companies.

Aside from that, the slumping economy and falling dollar make investors cautious about renewable energy technology.

“This town is tackling some of the most challenging issues facing the move toward energy independence,” he said.

San Francisco - Google has asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to carve out a set of off-limits channels for proposed wireless devices that could operate in unused television spectrum bands, in hopes that the proposal will help the FCC approve the use of so-called white-space devices.

Google, in a filing to the FCC made late Friday, proposed that the FCC set aside television channels 36 to 38 for wireless microphone use to avoid spectrum interference. Users of wireless microphones and U.S. television stations have been the main opponents to the push by Google, Microsoft, Dell, and other tech companies for the FCC to approve the use of new wireless devices in the unused white spaces in the television spectrum.

Companies asking the FCC to open up the spectrum white spaces see new markets for high-speed wireless devices, or “WiFi on steroids,” in the language of Richard Whitt, Google's Washington, D.C., telecom and media counsel.

The white spaces “offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to provide ubiquitous wireless broadband access to all Americans,” Google's filing said. “This spectrum can provide robust infrastructure to serve the needs of under-deployed rural areas, as well as first responders and others in the public safety community.”

Google filed the proposal with the goal of moving the FCC's white spaces proceeding to a “more constructive tone,” Whitt said. “We believe it's unfortunate that some have preferred the comfort of the past to the promise of the future, and are using their influence to convince policymakers to protect legacy applications at any and all costs.”

The Google proposal also suggests that the FCC could require two spectrum-sensing technologies called geo-location and beacons — the low-cost beacons would have to be added to wireless microphones — to ensure against interference. That portion of the Google filing borrows from a Motorola filing late last year.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has raised concerns that the white space devices would cause interference with television signals. Instead of pushing through the white space proceeding, the FCC should focus on the transition of television stations to digital broadcasts, mandated by Congress to happen by February 2009, the NAB has said. The transition is freeing up spectrum in the 700MHz band for wireless services; an FCC spectrum auction for the band concluded last week.

The Google proposal would create a so-called safe harbor for wireless microphones between channels 36 and 38 in the television spectrum. That safe harbor would also protect medical telemetry devices and radio astronomy services, which use channel 37, Google said.

Google's filing with the FCC said an opening of the white spaces, combined with the

Browsers were all the buzz over the weekend, beginning with the news that the developers of Mozilla Firefox feel their latest build is ready for widespread general use, despite technically being still only a beta. I'm not ready to make the leap full-time yet myself, but I'll definitely be looking at Firefox's new features in the coming weeks.

Firefox has long been my browser of choice; and judging from my own, completely unscientific study, I'm not alone. Access logs for my own sites show some 33 percent of visitors now use the open source browser– an impressive market share for any software.

Apple's Safari browser, on the other hand, accounts for less than 5 percent of the hits. Apple appears determined to up this statistic, but the tactics it has chosen really get my goat– and here again I'm not alone.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly was the first to point out that Apple has now begun offering Safari as an optional download whenever you receive an update to its Quicktime or iTunes software on Windows. It's “optional” in the sense that you don't have to install it, but the installer assumes that you do want it, by default. If you don't want to download and install 50MB of Safari, you need to uncheck the box manually.

This really bugs me. I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, and I see no reason why I should have Apple twisting my arm to load up my system with another browser every time it issues a security update to Quicktime.

And I should point out that it's not just Safari. I made a point to install Quicktime without iTunes on my business PC, and yet I'm still offered “Quicktime + iTunes” every time Apple releases a new update. This is annoying and coercive at best, and at worst it resembles the practices of malware makers.

The shame of it is that Safari is actually a fine browser. Apple should be able to increase its market share on its merits alone, without getting pushy about it.

One final note, though: My unscientific poll shows that around half my hits still come from Internet Explorer, proving that for many of you, these alternative browsers are a non-issue. How about it– with all the reports of security problems and poor standards compliance with IE, what keeps you sticking with it? And what would it take for you to switch?

San Francisco - Codice Software on Monday introduced Plastic SCM 2.0, a software configuration management system that the company said streamlines how applications are assembled.

Plastic SCM can manage parallel development, where multiple developers work on software at once, perhaps from geographically dispersed locations. Featured are version control capabilities, merge tracking, and visualization tools.

“We built Plastic SCM from the ground up to be the mission-critical replacement for other software configuration options, many of which are open source projects,” said Pablo Santos, chief executive officer at Codice, in a statement released by the company. “We have made Plastic SCM with an easy-to-use interface, in a way that is massively scalable and can integrate with a wide variety of development environments.”

Thousands of branches can be managed through a streamlined user interface, Codice said. Plastic SCM can be used by developers working with Java, Microsoft technologies, or other languages. It can work with tools such as Visual Studio, Eclipse or Oracle JDeveloper.

The product will run on Mono, which is an open source version of Microsoft's .Net Framework. It can be integrated with the MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Many customers will use Plastic SCM as a replacement for CVS, Visual SourceSafe, or Subversion, Codice said. Branches and data can be imported from these tools.

A revision management engine wrapped around versioning functionality is featured. Managers can assign a task and attach it to a branch of a given project.

There have been enough problems with the Service Pack 1 update for Windows Vista that Microsoft is offering free tech support to anyone having problems, company representatives said on the official Vista blog.

A new SP1-specific support site says the free, unlimited support is available until March 18, 2009. The site offers e-mail, chat and phone support. As of this writing, the site was reporting one-day delays for e-mail responses and an 18-minute delay for chat responses.

The hours for chat are 5 a.m. to midnight Pacific time weekdays and 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. Phone support, at (866) 234-6020 is 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays and 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekends.

University Says No

The free support is apparently a response to widespread problems users have experienced in installing SP1. And just as with adoption of Vista itself, some enterprises are showing resistance to installing the major update.

The University of Pennsylvania is advising faculty and staff not to install SP1. The school's IT department said it will support Vista SP1 when it comes preinstalled on new systems, but “strongly recommends that all other users adopt a 'wait and see' attitude” toward updating, according to a university bulletin Friday.

Penn users should continue “to use previous versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista until after the initial bugs in SP1 are identified and fixed,” the department said.

Widespread Problems

Meanwhile, Vista users are angrily reporting on Microsoft blogs about problems related to the update.

Writing on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Richard Ingram questioned the quality of Microsoft's support. “One problem of going through the e-mail support is that when you receive a response from the e-mail support and try to reply to the e-mail — you can't, as no e-mail address appears in the To: box,” he said. “I managed to get hold of the person who had contacted me by going through the Net. Not exactly good customer service.” Ingram said he has made 36 failed attempts to install SP1.

Another user, Korn1699, said, “SP1 took away support on at least one piece of hardware on a machine I attempted to upgrade. No drivers will install, and I know that at least one of the ones did with Vista before SP1.”

And user dmckay reported that his organization, running several hundred machines, is likely to seek out alternatives to Windows if they are unable to purchase Windows XP in the future. “The best thing that happened was SP1 blue-screened the Vista machine that my CIO was testing — not once, but multiple times, and then the CFO lost three hours of spreadsheets on a blue screen,” the user wrote.

“No Vista for our machines, ever,” the user added. “If it hadn't been for this, it looked like we were heading for Vista for sure. If we can't get XP on newer machines because Microsoft wants to curtail its release through OEMs, then it looks like we may go to an alternative operating system. MAC OSX works fine on the several hundred systems we have and would be a viable alternative, as would Ubuntu, which we have already tested.”

Despite widespread report of problems, many posters on the Vista blog reported their updates went smoothly. A user named Sold Jedi Knight said SP1 was a “major success on both of my machines.” On a Fujitsu laptop, the user said, SP1 resolved issues experienced under Vista.