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WabiSabiLabi, the company best known for building an online marketplace for security flaws, is getting into the hardware business.

The company is working with an unknown Italian company called Oneshield Security to build a unified threat management (UTM) appliance that will integrate the research generated by WabiSabiLabi's network of researchers.

WabiSabiLabi did not say how this partnership will benefit the independent researchers who contribute to the company's marketplace of unpatched “0day” vulnerabilities, but that information will be forthcoming, said founder Roberto Preatoni in a blog posting.

UTM appliances blend several security products into one server. In addition to protecting from the WabiSabiLabi 0day attacks, the Oneshield device can serve as a firewall and antivirus device and will provide protection from many different threats, including denial of service (DOS) attacks.

Since its founding nearly a year ago, WabiSabiLabi has garnered a lot of attention because of its controversial open-market approach to selling software vulnerabilities as well as the legal troubles of Preatoni, who was arrested by Italian police in November on spying charges.

Preatoni, a colorful and well-known figure in security research circles, had worked as a penetration tester for Italy's largest telecommunications company, Telecom Italia. According to news reports, Preatoni helped staff a 10-member “Tiger Team” that has now been accused of hacking and spying on business executives and journalists in Italy.

Last month, Preatoni broke his silence on the case and said that he would stay on with WabiSabiLabi.

By integrating its unique research into a single device, Oneshield is doing the same thing as many larger security companies, said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “It's not unusual for companies to integrate customer premise equipment with threat research that they do,” he said. “The thing that's unusual here is that they're looking to recruit partners to provide these services.”

Oneshield expects to start shipping its appliance at the beginning of June. The company has not said what it plans to charge for the appliance, or for the optional managed security services package that will ship with it.

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc (ERTS.O) unveiled two initiatives on Tuesday to breathe new life into its sports business by making games that are easier to play and customized for Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) popular Wii console.

Key games such as “Madden” football, “NBA Live” and “FIFA” soccer will come out in special versions for the Wii, which has become the best-selling game system by drawing in older and female players with friendly graphics and simple motion-sensing controls.

EA is also starting a sub-brand dubbed Freestyle that will be home to a new set of games not tied to any existing league and therefore free of expensive licensing rights. The first game will be “Facebreaker,” a cartoonish and whimsical boxing game due out in September.

“We can't be blind to the fact that different consumers are coming into games now and shame on us if we can't evolve and develop something for that crowd,” Peter Moore, head of EA Sports, told Reuters.

EA expects to have sold about $1.3 billion worth of sports games in its fiscal year just ended in March, accounting for more than a third of total revenue.

Known for their sharp graphics and attention to detail, EA's sports games are among the industry's best-selling titles each year. But many gamers have criticized them for including few groundbreaking new features and increasingly complex controls that make them tough to play.

Showing off this year's lineup of sports titles at a new conference in EA's Vancouver studio, Moore said the company had not forgotten about its core fans who want the most realistic experience.

“While we have no intention whatsoever of dumbing down the experience that we all love and that drives this multibillion

dollar business … we need to make sports games more approachable,” Moore said.

Caught off guard by the Wii's success following its launch in late 2006, EA tried to adapt its sports games to the Wii, an effort Moore admitted amounted to basically tacking on the motion controls without changing the core game.

Moore, who joined EA from Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) games division to head up the sports business last September, said the new approach to the Wii marked a dramatic rethinking of what those players wanted from a game.

The model was “Wii Sports,” a title from Nintendo included with every Wii that took bowling, baseball, golf, tennis and boxing and reduced them to a handful of simple motions.

“We learned some hard lessons. That was the type of sports experience they were looking for and we saw that and decided we needed to redefine what our sports games were about,” Moore said. This year, EA's top sports games for the Wii will have “All-Play” added to their titles.

While versions for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation 3 will be similar to previous years, the “All-Play” titles will have options to use simpler controls and quicker games.

“It's like how swimming pools have a deep end and a shallow end. EA Sports has really only built a swimming pool with a deep end. It's intimidating for a lot of people to jump right in the deep end. With All-Play, we're building a shallow end,” Moore added.

(Editing by Andre Grenon)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sprint Nextel Corp (S.N) and Clearwire Corp (CLWR.O) are close to announcing a $12 billion joint venture with major cable operators for high speed wireless Internet access for mobile phones and laptops, a source familiar with the talks said on Tuesday.

An announcement is expected to come before the market opens on Wednesday morning, the source said.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news on its website.

Sprint, Clearwire and cable companies including Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) and Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC.N) have been in talks about a joint venture using WiMax that would have investments of about $1.5 billion by the two largest U.S. cable companies, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Comcast is expected to contribute $1 billion, while Time Warner Cable will invest $550 million.

In addition, Intel Corp (INTC.O) is expected to contribute $1 billion, and Google Inc (GOOG.O) $500 million. Bright House Networks, the sixth-largest U.S. cable provider, has also been involved in the discussions, according to the sources, and may contribute up to $200 million.

WiMax is a largely unproven technology that promises to support Internet access at speeds up to five times faster than traditional wireless networks, and can support a range of mobile and video applications.

The cable companies pulled out of a previous wireless phone joint venture with Sprint last month.

Sprint, Comcast and Time Warner Cable declined to comment. Clearwire was not immediately available.

(Reporting by Robert MacMillan, Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew; editing by Braden Reddall, Richard Chang)

On Tuesday, Yahoo and McAfee announced a partnership to make the Yahoo Search experience safer. Launched in beta, the new SearchScan feature, powered by McAfee SiteAdvisor technology, offers always-on alerts for sites with security concerns involving spyware, adware and other malicious software. McAfee SiteAdvisor tests and rates nearly every trafficked site on the Internet.

SearchScan also identifies sites that have shown bad e-mail practices, flooding user inboxes with spam. SearchScan is available for Yahoo Search users in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain.

“The new SearchScan feature from Yahoo Search makes searching the Web even safer than ever before,” said Vish Makhijani, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo Search. “No other search engine today offers this level of warning before visiting sites that can damage or infect a user's PC and cost them valuable time and money.”

Under the Hood

Here's how it works: By integrating McAfee's technology into Yahoo Search, sites that may harm a user's computer just by visiting them will be eliminated from appearing in Yahoo Search results. SearchScan also alerts users to potentially risky sites with a red warning sign in search results, allowing users to proceed with caution. During this beta period, SearchScan displays McAfee alerts optimal for the Yahoo Search user and does not include all McAfee SiteAdvisor red ratings.

After children's safety, 65 percent of Americans online are more worried about clicking unsecured search listings than the threat of neighborhood crime, getting one's wallet stolen or e-mail scams, according to a Decipher Inc Online Security & Web Search consumer survey conducted in March.

“Research indicates that four out of five Web-site visits start with a search, and consumers who use Yahoo Search will now be alerted to high-risk Web sites,” said Tim Dowling, McAfee vice president, Web Security Group. “This protects users from known malicious threats such as browser exploits that will wreck their PC with a single click or spyware that can lead to identity theft.”

Search: The New Security Battleground?

Google already offers some level of site-search security. Google's search results carry warnings about sites that might harm a consumer's computer. However, Andrew Jaquith, a security analyst at Yankee Group, expects to see more robust services continue to spring up online.

“Search Engine Optimization is a big thing right now in Internet marketing. The criminals have discovered SEO also. One of the techniques you see right now is criminals gaming the search system so that a bad site pops up to the top of someone's search results,” Jaquith said.

“Search is definitely a battleground right now,” he continued. “Ultimately the goal is to trick consumers into clicking on links they shouldn't, which just goes to show that you can't take for granted anything you see these days, even if it's from a source you might otherwise trust like a Google or Yahoo search engine.”

A virtual uprising that broke out among developers questioning One Laptop Per Child's commitment to open-source software has prompted an official from the nonprofit effort to play peacemaker.

Doubts about OLPC's commitment to open-source software surfaced after Chairman Nicholas Negroponte criticized Sugar, the user interface that currently works with the Linux-based XO laptops. Negroponte asked developers to extend Sugar's development to Windows, which will make XO laptops more appealing to customers.

Without touching on the subject of Sugar for Windows, Kim Quirk, director of the technical team at OLPC, on Monday quelled any notion of OLPC abandoning open source.

“I'd like to reiterate that we at OLPC are committed to create Sugar as an open-source project, as it provides a great opportunity for both learners and for contributors,” Quirk wrote in an e-mail.

Calling developers the linchpin of the project, Quirk called on the community to fix its communication problem to get the project back on track.

“This is difficult but it is not rocket science. I think we can do it. Sometimes when everyone is overworked, it is much easier to focus on the details of the day than to see the bigger problems,” Quirk wrote.

Quirk is asking developers to focus on development as the public conversation has gotten off-task and off-message, said Wayan Vota, an OLPC observer who runs the OLPC News Web site.

There's a big ideological gap between developers, who espouse the XO laptop as a watershed open-source project, and OLPC, which wants to sell more cheap PCs, Vota said. Quirk is trying to bridge that gap while attempting to keep developers involved in the project.

Developer relations are important for the project's new organization, Vota said. The nonprofit organization recently restructured into four departments– development, technology, deployment and learning– and appointed a new president and chief operating officer, Charles Kane, to run its daily operations.

Quirk is capable of building a good relationship with developers as she has a strong background in implementing practical applications, Vota said.

OLPC's relations with developers went astray after the resignation of Walter Bender, OLPC's former president of software and content, in April, Vota said. Developers began debating XO's possible shift from Linux to Windows after the resignation of Bender, who gained a following in the open-source community by promoting open-source software for the XO despite growing efforts to load the laptop with Windows XP.

The developer community expressed further outrage after Negroponte's criticism of Sugar's development process, also questioning the idea of shifting from Linux to Windows on the XO laptop. Developers called Negroponte's vision “vague” and “demoralizing” for the future of Sugar.

Negroponte needs to clarify his vision to deliver a more sophisticated product, wrote Ivan Krstić, OLPC's former directory of security architecture, in an April blog entry. Krstić resigned in March to protest the organization's restructuring and “radical” change in goals.

If Sugar is a problem, Negroponte has no one but himself to blame, Krstić said. “Nicholas' recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it 'didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way' is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success,” Krstić wrote.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Cisco Systems Inc.’s profit fell 5 percent in its fiscal third quarter but beat Wall Street’s expectations, a sign the turbulent U.S. economy didn’t rattle the world’s largest networking equipment maker as hard as expected.

The San Jose-based company earned $1.77 billion, or 29 cents per share, during the three months ended April 26. That represents a drop of 5.4 percent from the $1.87 billion, or 30 cents per share, that Cisco earned during the same period a year ago.

Stripping out 9 cents per share in one-time charges for acquisition and employee stock-based compensation, Cisco earned 38 cents per share. That’s 2 cents per share above the average estimate on the same basis from analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

Sales were also higher than analysts’ subdued forecasts, coming in at $9.79 billion in the third quarter, a 10.4 percent jump over the year-ago period, when Cisco’s sales were $8.87 billion. Analysts were expecting sales of $9.75 billion in the third quarter this year.

“Our ability to deliver solid financial results, excellent cash flow and a strong balance sheet during a quarter of somewhat uncertain macro-economic conditions illustrates the power of our business model,” Cisco’s chief financial officer, Frank Calderoni, said in a statement.

Wall Street wasn’t expecting fireworks from Cisco in the third quarter because the technology bellwether lowered its sales growth target in February. Cisco blamed weakness in the U.S. economy, which was causing big customers to delay or scuttle big purchases involving Internet infrastructure.

Investors were merely hoping the company, which makes routers and switches that direct Internet traffic, would manage a slowdown in technology spending in the U.S. and at least report in line with expectations.

Cisco’s higher-than-expected results sent the company’s shares up 70 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $27.00 in after-hours trading after the results were reported. The stock had closed up 5 cents at $26.33 during the regular trading session.

San Francisco - Meet this year's JavaOne spotlight technology, the same as last year's JavaOne spotlight technology.

Sun Microsystems executives at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco on Tuesday hailed the potential of the JavaFX RIA (rich Internet application) development and deployment platform, which had been formally unveiled at JavaOne in May 2007. Company executives set forth some firm product delivery dates for JavaFX and touted a couple of development projects: Project Hydrazine for cloud computing and Project Insight for collecting feedback on application usage.

To show Java's prominence in multimedia, rock icon Neil Young made an appearance onstage to promote his video and music catalog offering based on Java and Blu-ray technology. A Sun official also briefly commented on Sun's predicament in trying to put Java on the Apple iPhone, leaving the ball in Apple's court to help make that happen.

With JavaFX, Sun is set to take on rival platforms in the growing RIA space. Rival technologies such as Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash platform also seek dominance.

“We're taking on the marketplace,” with Java, said Sun president and CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

JavaFX enables application deployment across multiple types of interfaces, including devices. A demonstration showed a JavaFX application being moved right from the browser onto the desktop.

“In fact, [JavaFX] runs on all the screens of your life,” said Rich Green, Sun executive vice president of software. JavaFX features components such as a runtime, a media codec framework, and the JavaFX Script scripting language.

Sun set forth a road map for JavaFX:

* In July, Sun will open the JavaFX Desktop SDK Early Access Program * In the fall, JavaFX Desktop 1.0 ships. * In the spring of 2009, the JavaFX Mobile and TV 1.0 variants will ship.

Although Sun could have its work cut out for it positioning JavaFX against rival technologies, a Java developer in the audience was impressed.

“I have not had the chance to look at it [before now], but after these demos they showed, it's definitely something that I want to look at in the future,” said developer Roland Esquivel, a software engineer at defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation.

“It's sexy,” Esquivel said, citing high-definition video and audio capabilities. “It???s something that will catch people's eyes and definitely get their attention,” he said.

Sun officials also detailed Project Hydrazine, for cloud-based services. “It allows you to bring new services together, make them available, [and] provide them in a running cloud environment,” Green said. Hydrazine is due after the release of JavaFX.

Another project on the horizon, Project Insight, enables JavaFX developers to communicate with their audiences via instrumented user action data. It will enable development of new strategies for ad placement.

The instrumentation service will allow developers and other third parties to collect information about how many people are using their applications and also send and receive information about patches and upgrades. Sun says it will be anonymous, meaning it will not collect personally identifiable information about end-users.

“It will be free for some portion of the developer community, and for some portion of commercial users, it will probably not be free,” Schwartz said.

Sun also brought up executives from Amazon and Sony Ericsson, who showed their Java-based multimedia devices, such as Amazon's Kindle book-reading device.

Young, meanwhile, showed off a Blu-ray-based music catalog. He said he had been unable to do this with previous technologies, including DVD. The product features updating capabilities via the Internet.

“You can put your disk in there and the Internet will tell you that there's new material available,” Young said.??

During the post-keynote press conference, Green gave a progress report on Sun's ongoing quest to put Java on the iPhone, something that Apple has not publicly, at least, supported.

Sun, Green said, is well along its way in creating the technology to enable Java to run on the phone, Green said. But he deferred to Apple, which governs which platforms can be distributed with the iPhone. It is Apple's right to decide this, Schwartz added.

Sun officials also repeated mantras about consumer technologies overtaking the enterprise, as they had in a presentation last month.

“Businesses used to drive the technology adoption, but today it is all about consumers,” Green said. Sun plans to leverage JavaFX in the consumer application space.

(James Niccolai of IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate, contributed to this report.)

Microsoft Tuesday released the third service pack for Windows XP to the Web after last week delaying its scheduled release because of an incompatibility with one of its other software applications. It also resumed automatic distribution of Windows Vista, Service Pack 1 (SP1), which had been halted because of a similar problem.

Windows XP SP3 is now available through Windows Update and also on the Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft had expected to release the software on April 29; however, it discovered it conflicted with an application called Microsoft Dynamics RMS. The problem also affected Windows Vista SP1. Dynamics RMS is a retail-chain-management software for small and midsized businesses.

Microsoft still is not offering either service pack to Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers, having put in place a filter on Windows Update to prevent distribution to those customers. The company is still working on a fix it expects to have available later this month, it said.

Microsoft still recommends that Dynamics RMS customers running Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1 contact their Microsoft Customer Support Services for more information.

Microsoft's TechNet Web site also has more information about XP SP3.

To help IT departments prepare for the coming onslaught of data, HP on Tuesday introduced a platform that combines storage and computing in one rack with a single file system and management console.

The HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) is designed for enterprises facing bigger challenges in storage than in computing. Those include Web 2.0 companies such as photo-sharing and social-networking sites, as well as specialized industries such as genetics, oil and gas, said David Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of the StorageWorks division.

Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months, and within five years, Roberson expects to see a “yottabyte year” when the industry as a whole ships one yottabyte, or 1,000 exabytes, of storage capacity. HP is investing heavily in this area because it sees a big opportunity: Enterprises will be putting much of their focus and spending there in the next two years, Roberson said. Currently, 45 percent of all hard drives in the world, from PCs to data centers, are sold by HP, he said.

Managing many terabytes of storage is far different from taking care of a few hundred gigabytes on a PC, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters.

“You reach a point where just the sheer scale of what you're managing becomes the problem,” Peters said.

Many vendors are moving toward this kind of platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup XIV, and EMC, Peters said. But the ExDS9100 promises to be a good solution because of the care HP is putting into it, he said.

“There's nothing huge, bulk, cheap, easy to use, that's already on the market,” Peters said.

The ExDS9100 will help companies scale up their storage and computing capacity and more easily manage that capacity, according to HP. Today, in organizations with large amounts of data, it may take several administrators to manage one petabyte of data. HP wants to turn that around so a single administrator can manage several petabytes, Roberson said.

The platform consists of an HP BladeSystem chassis with room for 16 blade servers, in a rack that also accommodates storage controllers and high-density “storage blocks” with as many as 82 hard drives. A base configuration will consist of four blade servers and three storage blocks, with 246T bytes of storage. Customers will be able to add either type of capacity independently of the other. One rack will hold as much as 820T bytes, but an extra rack of storage can be added for a total of 1.64 petabytes.

Applications that access the storage will run directly on the blade servers, taking advantage of HP file-clustering software. This eliminates a tier of software, according to HP. Both servers and storage can be managed through one management console. In addition, the high density of the platform allows for efficient use of space, cooling and power, according to HP.

The ExDS9100 is scheduled to ship in the fourth quarter. HP predicts it will cost less than US$2 per gigabyte in a typical configuration.

Google has reinstated an open-source project just days after pulling it in response to a copyright-related takedown notice.

The CoreAVC-for-Linux project at Google lets users run the proprietary CoreAVC codec in Linux players. CoreAVC, a high-definition video decoder, was written by CoreCodec and designed for Windows. CoreCodec sells the codec in two versions, one priced at US$7.95 and another at $14.95.

In a letter dated April 30, CoreCodec's CEO issued a formal takedown notice under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Google, charging the search giant with copyright infringement. Google subsequently removed the project from Google Code.

However, by Tuesday the project was available again. A brief note on the Google Code page for the project says: “Yes, we're back. CoreCodec has given their blessing to this project.”

CoreCodec characterized the whole situation as a misunderstanding, although it also admitted that its initial charge was inaccurate. “In the end the counsel's advice on what we were to do was out of scope (including copyright) when we looked at all the great feedback everyone has provided us. The DMCA does allow for reverse engineering for compatibility purposes and hence in the end no matter what the 'other points' are the DMCA takedown request was wrongly sent,” Dan Marlin, CoreCodec's founder and CEO, wrote on the company's forum.

Google, or at least the author of CoreAVC-for-Linux, seemed uninterested in getting into details of the incident. “Regardless of the cause, CoreCodec and I have resolved the conflict, and CoreAVC-for-Linux should be back online soon,” Alan Nisota, the author of CoreAVC-for-Linux, wrote on CoreCodec's forum on Monday, before the project was reinstated.