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A Colombian man who used keylogging software in a lucrative identity theft scheme has been sentenced to nine years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of US$347,000.

Mario Simbaqueba Bonilla, 40, pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court in January to conspiracy, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. His scheme, which he carried out alone and with a co-conspirator between 2004 and 2007, had more than 600 victims worldwide, including employees of the U.S. Department of Defense, according to the Department of Justice.

Bonilla installed keylogging software on hotel business-center computers and Internet lounges in order to steal passwords and other personal data. Then he and his partner used complex computer intrusion methods to steal money from accounts. After transferring the money to credit and debit cards or cash, Bonilla used it to buy electronics and pay for luxury travel to Hong Kong, France, Jamaica, the U.S. and other places, according to the Justice Department. The court pegged the actual and attempted losses from the scheme at $1.4 million.

Bonilla was arrested by federal agents last August when he flew into the U.S. with a laptop, purchased with stolen funds, that contained personal and financial information on more than 600 people.

In addition to the prison term and restitution, Bonilla was sentenced to three years of supervised release after his release.

San Francisco - Appcelerator has updated its rich Internet application platform to integrate with the Google App Engine, Appcelerator said this week.

Applications built using Appcelerator can be deployed to the Google App Engine, which lets developers have their Web applications hosted on Google infrastructure.

The Appcelerator Platform is an open-source Web platform. It fuses rich Internet applications and SOA. Developers can assemble interactive Web applications without the need for JavaScript or player-based plug-ins, Appcelerator said. Web applications can be implemented using technologies such as Java/J2EE, PHP, Ruby, .Net, Python and Perl.

Appcelerator for App Engine runs on Python, the scripting language supported by App Engine, Appcelerator said. Appcelerator will expand support to other languages as Google does.

“The launch of Google App Engine is an exciting moment for software developers and will unquestionably be a benefit to the open-source Appcelerator community,” said Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, in a statement released by the company. “Our platform enables developers to create rich Internet applications without regard for the back end necessary for deployment, and App Engine is guided by the same philosophy — remove the need for developers to deal with the server side and allow them to put together outstanding software.”

Google App Engine was introduced in a preview version on April 7.

Appcelerator is run by former JBoss officials?? and has JBoss founder Marc Fleury serving as an advisor.

San Francisco - MySQL developers should be able to get their hands on a major update to the open-source database next week when Sun hosts its first MySQL conference since

MySQL developers should be able to get their hands on a major update to the open-source database next week when Sun Microsystems hosts its first MySQL conference since acquiring the company earlier this year.

Sun will use the event in Santa Clara, California, to release MySQL 5.1, an upgrade that adds several new features to make the database more suitable for critical applications at large enterprises.

“5.1, though it sounds like an incremental release, has got some pretty major features,” said Zack Urlocker, vice president for MySQL products at Sun, in a video postedto InfoWorld's Web site this week. “Probably, we should have called it 6.0, because there's so much stuff in there and we've been working on it for a couple of years.”

Among the advances in 5.1 are partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering. They are fairly standard features already offered by rivals IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, but they should help MySQL compete in environments where performance and the ability to scale are critical.

“One thing we're really most proud of is, frankly, we fixed a lot of outstanding bugs in 5.0,” Urlocker said. “So 5.1 has not only greater reliability, but a performance increase of 20 percent. It will be more in some cases and less in others, but there's a significant performance boost and scalability enhancements.”

MySQL had said it would release 5.1 in the first quarter, which ended March 31, and some developers have been getting impatient for the new release. “I'm a little disappointed that Q1 is almost over and there's still no sign of MySQL 5.1,” Andrew Poodle, who runs the MySQL user group in the U.K., said early last month.

Other topics for discussion next week include which transactional engine MySQL developers should focus on as they move forward. Most customers today use InnoDB, but that software was acquired a few years ago by Oracle, and MySQL has been developing an alternative, called Falcon, which is due for release with MySQL 6.0.

At the same time, Michael Widenius, one of the original developers of MySQL, is developing a transactional engine called Maria, an early version of which was released in January.

“The goal of the Maria development team is to make Maria to be the default transactional engine for MySQL by MySQL AB. The Falcon team has the same goal with Falcon engine. Let the best engine win :)” he wrote in a blog post before the Sun acquisition closed.

Developers will also be looking for an updated road map for MySQL, something Sun has not given since it closed the US$1 billion acquisition in February. And some will be looking for evidence that Sun won't interfere with MySQL's open-source development model, something it has pledged not to do.

Sun does appear to be crafting the marketing message around Falcon, however. The software will be “optimized for Web applications in a multi-core, multi-threaded environment,” Urlocker said in the video. Sun has been using similar language in promoting its multi-core, multi-threaded server processors for running busy Web sites.

Still, Poodle was positive about the acquisition. Sun is one of the few big companies that have figured out how to offer free and paid products side by side, and the deal should help MySQL break into the enterprise market, he said. “I'm not saying MySQL is at a level where it can compete with the 'big boys' in those markets, but it's getting there quickly,” he said.

The MySQL Conference & Expo starts Monday. On Tuesday, Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz will give speeches about the future of MySQL.

There is also a panel with representatives from Flickr, YouTube and Facebook on the challenges of scaling MySQL to run busy Web sites. And a member of the Swedish Pirate Party will talk about efforts to fight copyrights on software, which some see as a threat to open-source development.

Nikon announced the Wi-Fi-enabled Coolpix S52c this week, and while it's the latest and greatest consumer-grade camera with embedded wireless networking–9 megapixels, 3x optical zoom, and image stabilization for $299 in June–the company still hasn't overcome the fundamental problem with embedded Wi-Fi. The camera makers feel the need to downsample us and lock us in. A device with Wi-Fi inside can connect to a network access point, and through that point, get onto the Internet. Camera makers apparently have a problem with this. Despite consumer models dating back to 2005 from Canon (the stale PowerShot SD340), Kodak, and Nikon, we're expected to connect with the camera either to software running under Windows or Mac OS X on a local network, or to picture services operate by the camera makers. (Extremely expensive Wi-Fi cameras can connect wherever they like, because they're purchased by media firms and sports photographers who would laugh at a walled garden.)The Nikon S52c, for instance, “emails” photos from hot spots through which it can connect to Nikon's My Picturetown site, which offers 2 GB of free storage, and charges $2.99 per month starting in May for 20 GB of storage. But “email” is a misnomer for these cameras: it's really, “Attach an email address to a picture, and then we upload it to our service in lower-resolution form, and email a message on your behalf.” Camera makers don't like to mention that they downsample these images; I always have to ask a company rep at a trade show or in a briefing, or dig through layers of technical specifications, to discover what resolution “emailed” photos are sent at. The higher levels of compression are typically not mentioned, either. To download the highest resolution images, you either connect the camera via USB to a computer, pull out its memory card and plug it into a PC-based card reader, or, transfer images over a local Wi-Fi network to some host software that runs on a computer. Ostensibly, the camera makers are trying to protect battery life, and reduce your frustration with long uploads. But shouldn't that be my choice, even if it's hidden away in a settings menu I can access if I know enough to care? (All cellphone camera software does the same thing with even less disclosure, by the way. In testing a T-Mobile-branded converged cell/Wi-Fi phone, I was told that I couldn't get the full-resolution pictures off the phone without a special, separately sold USB cable.)Nikon did take a significant step outside the walled garden approach by allowing My Picturetown images to be transferred directly to Flickr, a Yahoo-owned photo-sharing and-storage service. And they moved slightly away from downsampling by offering the option to upload images without a host computer program if you plug in an AC adapter to the camera. These are small measures.An alternative that emerged last year is the Eye-Fi Card, a $100 Secure Digital (SD) card with 2 GB of storage, a Wi-Fi radio, and a tiny computer. The Eye-Fi is configured via a computer (Mac OS X or Windows XP/Vista), and then inserted into any camera that handles SD cards. As pictures are taken, the Eye-Fi transfers them automatically and independently as long as a Wi-Fi network it's configured to access is in the vicinity. Bring home a camera with an Eye-Fi card, power the camera up, and pictures start flowing.The Eye-Fi isn't integrated with cameras yet, but that's coming. They signed a deal with memory-card maker Lexar to embed their technology, and their card works with the Nikon D60's firmware to handle power settings correctly. (The Eye-Fi only works when there's power to a camera, so you have to set a camera to not power down automatically; when integrated with a camera's firmware, the Eye-Fi could tell the camera when it's done.)Eye-Fi still requires a manner of walled garden, though it's more porous than the camera makers. Images are uploaded via the Internet to Eye-Fi's servers, which then transfer them to the photo service of your choice. They're sent at full resolution to Eye-Fi's servers which downsample to the requirements of particular services, if that's needed.What would be ideal in a future Wi-Fi camera is an advanced transfer menu that would enable direct connections via FTP (especially Secure FTP) for people who just want mass transfers; and have regularly updated firmware–updated over Wi-Fi perhaps?–that would let you drop your pictures right into photo galleries of your choice. Until then, camera makers are restricting their market by restricting choices. With dozens of competing photo services, lock in makes abundantly little sense.

San Francisco - Yahoo is weighing its options to accept a buyout by Microsoft or consider tie-ups with other companies, in particular a reported plan to join forces with AOL, as a way to stave off the software giant's advances.

The possibilities for the ending to the story that begin on Feb. 1, when

RALEIGH, N.C. - Computer maker Dell Inc. will keep getting more than $300 million in state and local grants and tax breaks in North Carolina after the state’s Supreme Court declined Friday to hear a lawsuit challenging the incentives.

The North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, a taxpayer advocacy group, sued the company and state and local governments in 2005, saying the subsidies violated the U.S. and North Carolina constitutions because they primarily benefit Dell, rather than a general public purpose.

In exchange for the payments and tax breaks, which are spread over many years, Dell promised in 2004 to create at least 1,500 jobs at its plant near Winston-Salem and to invest at least $100 million in the area over the following 15 years.

The agreement could result in Dell not paying any state corporate income tax for more than 30 more years.

The state Court of Appeals rejected the case last fall, noting that the state Supreme Court had upheld state officials’ right to grant taxpayer-funded incentives. The institute then appealed the case to the state Supreme Court.

Dell’s 750,000-square-foot operation opened in the fall of 2005.

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell could get up to $278 million in state grants and tax breaks if it makes good on its promise, plus a local package worth $37.2 million that covers taxes and startup and other costs.

“While we are disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision, we remain committed to enforcing constitutional limitations on government, including limits on government spending,” Jeanette Doran, an attorney for the institute, said in a statement.

Microsoft has proposed a tiered approach to protecting the privacy of people targeted by online advertising, saying advertisers should get permission before using sensitive, personally identifiable information to deliver ads.

Microsoft filed comments on Friday in response to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's request for comments on its proposed privacy principles that would be self-administered by the online advertising industry. Microsoft's proposal operates under the idea that the greater the risk to privacy, the greater the protection data should receive, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft agrees with the FTC's decision to focus on an industry self-regulatory approach, but the company has also called for Congress to pass comprehensive consumer privacy legislation, noted Frank Torres, Microsoft's director of consumer affairs.

“We're supporting what the FTC is proposing, but we also believe that privacy is important for consumers,” Torres said. “We're not opposed to going even further” than the FTC self-regulatory proposal.

Microsoft's proposals would give consumers control over how their personal data is used, Torres said. “When it comes to online advertising, consumers should be in the driver's seat,” he said.

Among the Microsoft proposals:

– Companies that keep records of page views or collect other information about consumers for the purpose of delivering ads should post a privacy policy on the home page, implement reasonable security procedures, and retain data only as long as necessary to fulfill a legitimate business need.

– Companies that deliver ads or services to unrelated third-party sites should ensure that consumers receive notice of the privacy practices of those sites.

– Companies that develop profiles of consumer activity to deliver advertising across unrelated third-party sites should also offer consumers a choice about the use of that information.

– Third parties should be required to obtain consent from consumers before using sensitive, personally identifiable information, such as health conditions, sexual behavior or religious belief, for behavioral advertising.

Several other companies and groups, including Google, the American Advertising Federation and the Consumer Federation of America, have filed comments on the FTC's proposed rules. Google's filing last week appears to look for a narrower scope to regulations, although it said it has in the past called for a federal privacy law that would penalize offenders. Google suggests that the agency narrow its definition of behavioral advertising and distinguish between personally identifiable information and information that's not personally identifying.

The Consumer Federation of America's filing on Thursday called for stronger rules than the set of self-regulatory principles proposed by the FTC.

“Simply put, there is a fundamental mismatch between the technologies of tracking and targeting and consumers' ability to exercise informed judgment and control over their personal data,” the consumer group said in its filing. “It is clear that after seven years of industry self regulation, neither the voluntary organizations nor the individual companies' approaches to privacy protection are working. Only if consumers are strongly interested, extremely literate, well-informed and highly skilled can they negotiate the opaque, inconsistent morass of opt-out procedures.”

Charles Cooper, a Web user from Illinois, wrote that the FTC's proposals don't go far enough. “I think that most people would rather pay to access certain sites than have to deal with constant ads that remind us that what we do on the Internet is far from private,” he wrote in a filing with the FTC. “The collection of any personal data should be something initiated by the consumer so, at the very least, consumers should have an opt-in option rather than the proposed opt-out.”

But Torres said self-regulation, combined with a watchful FTC, should keep advertising companies focused on good privacy practices. If a company promises privacy protections and fails to deliver, it could face FTC sanctions, he said.

“We hope that just by being transparent about what we do, that folks will see we're serious about this,” he added. “Even in this evolving marketplace, we do believe there are perimeters around privacy and principles and practices that should be put in place.”

However, the threat of real enforcement could make consumers more comfortable with behavioral targeting, according to a researcher involved with a recent study. Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents said they are not comfortable when Web sites like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft use information about their online activity to tailor advertisements to them, said Harris Interactive, which released results of the survey on Thursday.

That number improves to about 45 percent when consumers hear that the sites follow certain privacy and security policies. More people weren't assured by the policies perhaps because they don't trust that the companies will follow voluntary guidelines and because there aren't any regulatory or enforcement mechanisms, said Alan Westin, a professor at Columbia University who helped design the survey.

LOS ANGELES - CBS Corp. executives took an unusual risk last fall before its series debut of “Big Bang Theory” — it offered the entire episode online despite the chance it would sap viewership for the TV premiere.

The show, about two geeky physicists and their beautiful female neighbor, got 90,000 views on CBS.com and other Web sites over a week, followed by a better-than-expected 9.5 million for the Sept. 24 on-air premiere.

“The thought was purely to try to find new eyeballs in a medium that generally appeals to younger demographics, and then drive them to put butts in seats to watch on their beautiful plasma-screen TV when the series takes off,” said Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive. “It was fairly radical, and we’re happy with how it came out.”

Looking to tap new revenue through online ads, attract new viewers and keep loyal fans, broadcast networks are making bigger, riskier bets on Internet delivery of their shows. The challenge is to grow viewership online without cannibalizing traditional ratings and DVD sales while making more money on programming seen on the Web.

But online audiences are still limited, a stumbling block that’s expected to be a hot topic at the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual gathering, which starts Monday in Las Vegas.

According to comScore Media Metrix, ABC.com led the network pack with 8.5 million unique visitors over its entire lineup of shows for the whole month of February, followed by NBC.com with 7.9 million. By comparison, a single episode of CBS’s “CSI” recently took in more than 20 million TV viewers in one night.

Still, there are signs that the online experimentation will pay off.

Networks now charge more per thousand viewers online than they do over the airwaves, where the average for a primetime show is about $25. Analysts put the online rate anywhere from $35 to $50 per thousand, though there are millions more potential traditional TV viewers.

Advertisers pay more online because there is a better accounting of how many viewers see the ads and an extra benefit that an impulse to purchase can be acted on with the click of a mouse.

“For an advertiser, you’re getting a clear performance result,” said Bob Davis, a Web investor and former CEO of search engine Lycos. “No matter what the click-through (rate) they get, it’s infinitely larger than the click-through they get on TV. The click-through they get on TV is zero.”

ABC, which streams “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” on its ABC.com site after airing on TV, is aiming to tweak its formula to make its online ads as lucrative as its TV ones.

“In order for us to drive the number up to what we get on broadcast, we have to do one of two things. We have to either increase the number of ads that you currently see on ABC.com or figure out different ways to generate value for advertisers,” said Albert Cheng, executive vice president of digital media for the Disney-ABC Television Group.

“We are not at parity yet with broadcast, but the goal and everything that we are doing is to drive toward parity,” he said.

The CBS experiment with “Big Bang Theory” was so successful that the network repeated the online-preview formula with two other shows, “Dexter” in February and “The Tudors,” on the CBS-owned pay cable channel, Showtime, in March.

ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Co., expects to explore the effectiveness of localized advertising in test markets in the next several months, because its media player can detect the location of the online viewer, Cheng said.

Technology companies also are working to style ads that will be more interactive, leading to higher sales — such as making products that appear in shows clickable — or targeting viewers based on what kinds of content they have seen recently.

“Ultimately, where the Internet will really become a powerful source of revenue is that all forms of advertising will work in a highly targeted way,” said Steve Mitgang, chief executive of Veoh, a Web site that streams ad-supported shows. For TV shows at least, ad-supported free viewing online has proved more profitable than fee-based video downloads on services like Apple Inc.’s iTunes, said George Kliavkoff, chief digital officer of NBCUniversal.

NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., stopped supplying its hit TV shows to iTunes last year. Instead, it teamed up with News Corp. to launch hulu.com, a Web site that went public last month and streams shows like “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Office” for free with ads.

The NBC Universal-News partnership, as well as CBS, are testing a “ubiquitous” approach, making their content available across dozens of Internet partner sites, including YouTube, rather than drawing viewers to a single destination.

It’s not clear which model of delivery will prevail. None of the networks disclose how much ad revenue they collect from online show streams, but all have made major investments in what is a growing business.

“We’re sort of in the first inning of how some of these digital platforms will develop,” said Kliavkoff. “We still don’t know what the winning business model will be at the end.”

NEW YORK - Eight Florida teenagers charged with beating another teen so they could post the “animalistic” attack on YouTube got exactly what they had wanted — worldwide exposure.

But that doesn’t mean YouTube or any other media company should get the blame, legally or ethically, for the attack, media experts said Friday.

In fact, they have a duty to share the video, said Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“The fact that the video was shot because they were seeking publicity was secondary,” McBride said. “A crime was committed in our community, and if there’s a videotape of it, I want some information. That video was incredibly revealing. It told more truth about what happened than any other form of reporting could have told.”

The teenagers have been arrested on charges that they beat the teen so they could make a video of the attack to post online. One of the girls struck the 16-year-old victim on the head several times and then slammed her head into a wall, knocking her unconscious, according to an arrest report.

“It’s absolutely an animalistic attack,” Sheriff Grady Judd said earlier this week. “They lured her into the home for the express purpose of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet.”

On Friday, a judge set bail for each of the defendants at $30,000 during the teens’ first court appearance. Prosecutors said seven of the girls will be tried as adults in the March 30 attack in Lakeland, Fla. They face charges of kidnapping, battery and witness tampering.

It’s not clear who posted the video on the Internet. But the Polk County sheriff’s office released a clip that has been widely circulating online and on television, including The Associated Press’ video network.

Those who blame YouTube or news organizations should blame themselves first, said Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“The public is culpable as well because they are paying attention,” he said. “There is no medium that forces them to pay attention.”

CNN spokeswoman Barbara Levin said the cable news network has tried to place the video in the proper context.

“In reporting the story, we have gone to great lengths to explain that these young women face severe consequences for their actions, and in fact may be facing harsher sentencing because the videotape provides evidence of the nature of the attacks,” she said in a statement.

YouTube, owned by Google Inc., declined to comment on the video, but said its general policies call for the removal of clips that show someone getting “hurt, attacked or humiliated.”

From a legal standpoint, YouTube and other online service providers are largely exempt from liability because of a 1996 anti-pornography law. One provision says Internet service providers are not considered publishers simply because they retransmit information provided by their users or other sources.

Federal courts have applied that broadly to cover not just Internet access providers, but also video-sharing sites, message boards and other online services.

Even without that provision, there doesn’t appear to be anything illegal about the video, said John Morris, senior counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil-liberties group in Washington, D.C.

“There is no legal reason this video cannot be shown. It is obviously distasteful, abhorrent what the teenagers did to the victim, but it doesn’t really make sense (to ask), ‘Should YouTube have taken it down?’” Morris said.

Even if there were a claim of illegality, he said, the courts should be the ones deciding, not YouTube.

“Many of those assertions are really very difficult, legal determinations that YouTube has no ability to make,” Morris said. “Really, YouTube is not in a position to be a traffic cop.”

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Associated Press Business Writer Seth Sutel contributed to this story.