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QUITO, Ecuador - President Rafael Correa warned Saturday that Mexican telecommunications company America Movil must leave Ecuador unless it boosts an insufficient second bid to keep its mobile phone service contract in the country.

“The first offer they presented us was a real insult to our intelligence. The second isn’t as bad, but it’s still far from what the concession is really worth,” Correa said in his weekly radio address, without revealing the amounts America Movil had offered.

America Movil SAB, Latin America’s largest mobile phone service provider, which is owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, has operated in Ecuador since 1993. Its concession expires in August, but two previous, undisclosed offers to renew its deal were rejected by Ecuador’s government.

No one answered calls at America Movil’s headquarters in Mexico seeking comment on the issue.

Correa in February announced that local units of America Movil and Spain’s Telefonica SA, which operates a rival mobile phone service in Latin America, must pay a combined $700 million to renew operating contracts — 12 times the $58 million they paid for their concessions in the 1990s.

Telefonica on Friday agreed to pay $220 million to extend its contract through 2023, Correa said. He threatened to hold an international auction for America Movil’s concession and exclude the Mexico City-based company from bidding if it doesn’t reach a deal in the next few weeks.

America Movil’s subsidiary, Porta, controls 68.8 percent of Ecuador’s mobile phone market, while Telefonica’s Movistar controls 26.8 percent and state-run Alegro PCS controls 4.4 percent.

About 9.8 million of Ecuador’s nearly 14 million people have mobile phones.

A planned cyberattack against CNN's Web site fizzled out Saturday as the group backing the event called it off.

“Our original plan for 19 April has been canceled because too many people are aware of it and the situation is chaotic,” wrote a group called “Revenge of the Flame,” according to a translation posted on the Dark Visitor Blog. “At an unspecified date in the near future, we will launch the attack.”

Pro-China hackers had called for the attack in protest of the news network's coverage of Tibet, which they believe has been overly critical of China. Participants had been instructed to flood CNN's Web site with Internet traffic in hopes of knocking it offline, something known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.

Some had begun hitting the site ahead of the April 19 attack date.

On Friday CNN reported that it had been attacked Thursday causing the site “to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia.” The net effect of the attack was “imperceptible,” CNN said.

Network monitoring company Arbor Networks observed that www3.cnn.com was hit with a minor 14-MB-per-second attack that lasted about 21 minutes, according to Danny McPherson, the company's chief research officer.

A vulnerability in servers used by EarthLink to handle mistyped Web page requests may have allowed attackers to launch undetectable phishing attacks against any Internet site, according to a noted Internet security researcher.

The bug, which was patched earlier this week, underscores a fundamental security risk in the way that some ISPs are attempting to generate advertising revenue from mistyped Web addresses, said Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing with IOActive, a security consulting firm.

The vulnerability was in a service called Barefruit, which Earthlink has been using since August 2006 to return Web pages with search terms and advertising to customers who mistype a domain name in their browser.

Barefruit, which is based in London, operates a service that works with Domain Name Servers, (DNS) which are used by the browser to translate domain names, such as yahoo.com, into numerical Internet Protocol addresses. Typically, when a browser asks a DNS server for a nonexistent Internet address– adsewrds.yahoo.com for example– the DNS server returns an error message indicating that no such address exists. With Barefruit's servers, the user is told that the address does exist, and is then sent to a Web page that displays advertising and suggested search terms.

Because of a bug in the software used to redirect users to these advertising and search pages, Kaminsky was able to get the pages to run his own JavaScript code. With the browser treating this code as if it were from a legitimate domain, Kaminsky was able to steal users' cookies, create fake Web sites that appeared to be hosted on legitimate domains, and even log into certain Web sites without authorization.

Generating revenue from domain name typos has generated controversy before. In 2003, domain name registrar Verisign was forced to disable a similar system called SiteFinder, which redirected Web surfers who had typed nonexistent domains.

EarthLink is not the only ISP to be testing this system. Kaminsky said he found evidence of Barefruit or similar systems being tested on Verizon, Time Warner, Qwest and Comcast, which outsources some of its network to EarthLink.

“The security of the entire Web for these ISPs is right now limited by the security of some random ad server run by a British company,” he said. “Somebody running an ad server controls the security of whitehouse.gov. This is not a good situation.”

A Verizon spokesman said that his company was not using the Barefruit service.

In a statement, EarthLink confirmed that it had patched Kaminsky's bug, but did not address the broader security concerns that Kaminsky believes are raised by this model.

However, the company did defend its use of the service in 2006, when it was first introduced.

“By presenting users with contextual help based upon the nonexistent domain the user entered, we believe we are improving the EarthLink user experience with a system that will not interfere with other network processes,” EarthLink said in a blog posting at the time. “And DNS error handling presents an opportunity for EarthLink to generate additional revenue as well.”

Originally, Kaminsky hadn't intended to go public with his findings, but after press reports last week that Network Solutions was engaging in a similar practice– redirecting nonexistent subdomains of some of its Web hosting customers to Network Solutions pages containing advertisements– he felt compelled to draw attention to the issue.

News of this Network Solutions policy was sure to encourage attackers to look for cross-site scripting flaws on the company's servers, similar to the bug he had found in Barefruit, Kaminsky said. “If anything happens to those servers, a lot of people are in trouble,” he said.

Kaminsky will present a demonstration of his findings on Saturday at the Toorcon Seattle security conference.

DENVER (Billboard) - Not content to let MySpace, iLike and Facebook take all the online music thunder, Buzznet is roaring into the Music 2.0 market with a vengeance.

In the last few weeks the company has acquired music-focused blogs Stereogum and Idolator, and brought on Universal Music Group as a content partner and equity holder. Additional moves are expected in the weeks to come.

According to GM of music Scott Boyd, this flurry of activity is all focused on a single goal: create an online music destination for the fan, by the fan and of the fan.

“There's a void out there,” he says. “You see music fans jumping from site to site to piece all the information they want together . . . Our goal is to put that all together into one place and have an experience that is largely programmed by the users of the community. Not just user-generated content, but really creating the whole experience.”

That goal stems from the service's roots as a site to upload camera-phone pictures. Users would post and comment on photos that were from concerts that members attended. Buzznet soon evolved into a very music-focused site and began enlisting artists to create their own profiles and tour blogs. For the past three years, it has served as the official online community for the Coachella music festival and has created similar services for the Vans Warped tour.

Just don't call it a social network. The company prefers “social media site.” It combines social networking components like member profiles and “friend” lists with a growing roster of content that members can organize however they like.

Boyd says the newly acquired blogs will remain as stand-alone entities, but will integrate posts from each into the main Buzznet site in order to provide context around individual artist searches and profiles.

“So if you're looking into a particular band, there's a review from Stereogum and a news story from Idolator and there's a photo gallery created by a kid who was at the concert last night,” Boyd says. “We can add value by bringing that content into our bigger community and spreading it around.”

Buzznet's deal with Universal Music adds full-song streaming and music video to that mix of spreadable content. And expect more soon. The company won't comment on it, but Buzznet is believed to be the recipient of $25 million in recent venture funding. During the course of last year, it also brought on a stable of Internet veterans that includes Boyd, who joined last October from AOL Music, as well as several former Yahoo sales executives, and named former Feedster president Tyler Goldman CEO.

It's also been aggressive in reaching out to artists, many of whom host contests on the network, particularly those requiring some sort of media sharing. Avril Lavigne, for instance, launched a model search for her clothing line via the site, while 30 Seconds to Mars invited fans to upload pro-environmental videos and make donations to environmental charities.

It's this kind of hands-on programming and production that Buzznet hopes will set itself apart from the MySpaces of the world.

“I don't think it's that interesting to just do an audio streaming service,” Boyd says. “That's incredibly important, but our users want the editorial around that. They want to create their own programming around that. So that's just one part of the piece, not the end-all, be-all.”

Despite the recent activity, Boyd says the company now offers only 50% of what it ultimately hopes to make available, in terms of services and content. Some of the remaining 50% will come from internal work needed to integrate its recent acquisitions, but expect more label deals and possible acquisitions in the near future.

“The overall strategy is having the best and deepest experience,” Boyd says. “If other sites offer that from an editorial or product end, we'd absolutely consider it.”

Reuters/Billboard

The next release of the MySQL open source database is scheduled for release by the end of the second quarter and will include new partitioning, replication, and event scheduling features.

In addition, the new release will be supplemented with MySQL Workbench, a database design tool built from the open source DBDesigner4 project. Mike Zinner, lead of that project, appeared on stage at the MySQL 2008 Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif. this week to unveil MySQL Workbench as a freely available download from the MySQL site, now branded by MySQL AB's new owner, Sun Microsystems. It's also a stand-alone commercial product available with technical support for $99 a year.

Zinner drew enthusiastic applause from the assembled MySQL database users and independent software vendors when he illustrated how many views of the database can be achieved with a single tool. The workbench portrays data modeling, physical database design, database creation, and change management through a single user environment.

The commercial, or standard, edition (as opposed to the free community edition) has extensions that add plug-ins to allow synchronization between the tool and live databases; built-in validation models, where data in use is validated in the required format; and reverse engineering capabilities. The commercial product also offers documentation for the various database design and modeling views.

Zack Urlocker, VP of products, said a main addition to the upcoming 5.1 release of the core database system is the ability to partition indexes and tables, allowing faster queries by reducing the amount of data that needs to be scanned. For example, a range partition might segment a sales table into the four quarters of the year, providing swifter retrieval from a particular quarter. The 5.1 release will support range, key, list, composite, and hash partitions, all different ways of subdividing data into more manageable segments.

The 5.1 release will also offer row-based replication, which captures and distributes the changes to a row of data without resorting to the SQL statements that produced them. The subsidiary databases can be updated more quickly through the row-update technique than by running on the SQL statements.

Hybrid replication can use traditional SQL statement updates to replicate an original to a secondary database; it can also tap the new row-based replication method, Urlocker explained.

The database's new event scheduler tool will help database administrators execute specific tasks at certain times. SQL-based tasks can be scheduled as needed, such as updates to certain tables or replication to auxiliary databases, he said.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

After nearly four years of spinning its proverbial wheels trying to deploy a municipal Wi-Fi network, the city of Boston has settled for a patchwork of hotspots to deliver free or low-cost high-speed wireless technology to its citizens.

The latest effort was unveiled this week at Roxbury Community College where FreeFi Networks announced the launch of an upgraded advertiser supported Wi-Fi service. The service is a partnership with Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and a Web-based college recruiting platform called Experience.com.

The FreeFi Networks installation follows the launch of another hotspot, powered by BelAir Networks, that was formally switched on as of March 31.

Boston joins a long list of large cities that have tried to deploy citywide municipal Wi-Fi networks, only to pull back when they struggled to gain traction. Early efforts in San Francisco and Sacramento, Calif. failed, for instance, and other attempts in Portland, Ore. and Tempe, Ariz., have been sharply curtailed.

At the same time, however, hotspots — many of them free — have popped up in public libraries and coffee ships throughout Boston. McDonalds and Starbucks, for instance, have both announced plans to offer free service to their patrons.

The Boston plan, which sought an infusion of $20 million, called for private and business donors to pony up funds to build the wireless network, a backhaul system, and fiber cabling for dozens of buildings in the city. The non-profit Boston Foundation, noting that several million dollars had been raised in past years to provide computer services for the city's schools, offered to assist in raising money for a citywide Wi-Fi deployment.

The BelAir installation, serving parts of the Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods in the city, utilized mesh gear that the company has successfully used to deploy large networks in Minneapolis, Minn., Toronto, London, and hundreds of smaller areas. In an interview last week, BelAir's CTO Stephen Raymont noted that the entire city of Minneapolis has been covered with a municipal Wi-Fi network covering 57 square miles.

However, Wi-Fi being Wi-Fi, there are some gaps in coverage and the Minneapolis network deployment initially has some areas — as much as 10% of the covered area — that can't be served. The Minneapolis network got a boost from the city government when it agreed to help support the network rollout, because it also offered 4.9-GHz public safety access.

Boston's longtime Byzantine politics may also have played a role in the failure of the city to roll out a citywide municipal Wi-Fi network. City council member John Tobin, rumored to be a future mayoral candidate, spearheaded the Wi-Fi effort from its beginnings four years ago, but Mayor Thomas Menino, who has also backed plans for the network, later left Tobin off the committee that was promoting the network.

The FreeFi Networks hotspot at Roxbury Community College has been established not just as a prototype for Boston, but also as a model with implications for other college sites. Part of a pilot partnership with Microsoft to evaluate ubiquitous Internet access in education settings, the effort gives students the opportunity to develop hands-on skills for technology careers.

“FreeFi Networks is helping to close this (digital) divide by providing its services to students that may otherwise not have access,” said Terrence A. Gomes, president of the college, in a statement.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

Nintendo sold more high-end video game consoles in the U.S. in the month of March than Sony and Microsoft combined, according to data released Friday by market researcher NPD Group.

Nintendo sold 721,000 Wii consoles in March, according to NPD. Microsoft sold 262,000 Xbox 360 units while Sony sold 257,000 PlayStation 3 systems.

Nintendo Wii sales were sparked by the recent launch of the hit game Super Smash Bros. Brawl — a Wii exclusive. NPD said the game sold 2.7 million copies in March, making it the month's top selling title by far.

Two Xbox 360 titles, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 and Army Of Two, were the second and third top sellers, but neither cracked the one million sales mark.

Wii Play, God Of War: Chains Of Olympus, and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII rounded out the top five games sold in March.

Nintendo also dominated the portable system market. It sold 698,000 Nintendo DS units. Sony's PlayStation Portable counted sales of 297,000.

Sony also sold 216,000 PlayStation 2 systems in March, according to NPD.

Nintendo's dominance of the console market may be spurring copycat efforts in its rivals.

MTV News earlier this month reported that Microsoft is developing a Wii-style remote that would allow Xbox 360 users to physically interact with their games by waving around the controller. That sort of interactivity has proven to be a highly popular feature of Nintendo's Wii system, currently the only platform that supports such virtual play.

MTV also posted a sketch of a rough mock up of the device on its Web site.

Microsoft has declined to comment on the report.

See original article on InformationWeek.com