In 2008, Your Network Will Know Who You Are, What You Want

In 1949, George Orwell published his masterpiece novel 1984. Even if they haven't read it, most people remember the book's key takeaway: Big Brother is watching. Fast forward to 2008 and Big Brother really is watching. The vehicle that makes Big Brother's omniscience possible is the network. The network: that mass of boxes, interface cards, cables and antennae that when combined become a platform for every type of human interaction and collaboration on the planet Earth (and beyond). Let's take a look at how the networking world of 2008 will become all-knowing and all-seeing -- a silicon- and fiber-based Big Brother, if you will.
Network smarts A theme I heard time and again from vendors big and small during 2007 was that the network was getting "smarter." More intelligence is being embedded into the network layer than ever before, with 2008 now poised to be a watershed year for the smart network. Today, networks at a basic level are no longer "dumb" pipes that transport information. The networks of 2008 will build on recent and coming innovations to become application- and user-aware -- they'll know who you are and what you are allowed to do (or what you're prohibited from doing). Intelligence in 2008 will arrive in the form of more Ethernet standards that provide increasing amounts of information about data types. Intelligence will also come in the form of smarter quality-of-service (QoS) and bandwidth-management offerings that intelligently provision the right bandwidth at the right QoS for users and their applications.
Network security The smarter network of 2008 will rely strongly on Network Access Control (NAC). While NAC has been a buzzword for several years, NAC will go mainstream in the coming year thanks to Microsoft. A key component of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is what it terms Network Access Protection, or NAP. The cornerstone of the technology is pre-admission control: A NAP server will first validate the health of an endpoint (a user or machine, for instance) before allowing admission to the network. Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3, as well as Windows Vista, are both ready to serve as NAP endpoints. Due to Windows's massive installed base, Microsoft's NAP will be something that enterprises can activate out of the box to begin to secure their networks. The power of access control for the smart network of 2008 cannot be understated. If hundreds of millions of Windows users are using NAP, it may end up being the single most important security innovation since the invention of the firewall. Imagine: a world where insecure endpoints aren't granted access to do their dirty deeds. What a wonderful world it would be.
Network identity The smart network of 2008 isn't just more secure, it also knows who you are and what you need access to. While directories such as Microsoft's ActiveDirectory have been used for identity for years, they're not enough. The 2008 network will have identity built into the framework of the network itself. The big push for network identity in 2008 will come from Cisco, with its TrustSec initiative. Instead of a user needing to enter multiple passwords for each and every application they need to visit, a TrustSec-powered network essentially will know who they are, what their business function is and where they're allowed to go. From a Big Brother-auditing point of view, TrustSec, and its various competitive implementations from vendors other than Cisco, also will offer a full audit trail of a user's activities at both a network level and the application level. By embedding identity into the network layer, the network will have better understanding and control over what users are doing. Next page: Networks will become faster and more pervasive.

Apple Explores Wireless Commerce, Microsoft-Like DRM

Apple is seeking patents around its two of its recent designs -- the first concerning the nascent mobile transaction space, while the second involves the always-controversial Digital Rights Management (DRM) arena. The company earlier this year filed for a patent on technology first announced in September, in connection with the launch of its iPod Touch and a partnership with coffee chain colossus Starbucks. The technology enables users to purchase music they hear playing in a Starbucks outlet, using their iPod Touch's Wi-Fi connection. Separately, Apple filed an unrelated patent application covering digital rights management technology. The feature bears a striking resemblance to Microsoft's much-maligned Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program, which in essence checks that an application is running on an authorized platform. The first -- and likely less controversial -- patent borrows on technology behind the paid downloading of songs. When a user enters a properly outfitted Starbucks, their Touch tells them what song is currently playing. If the iPod owner likes the song, they could then press a button to make a purchase. Apple's patent application refers to this technology simply as "Wireless communications system". The company filed for the patent in July, well before the release of the Touch, but updated the proposed patent last week. The filing suggests Apple is looking to expand the use of the technology beyond simply buying a song at Starbucks. The revised filing describes a system for placing orders electronically, via a wireless device, and then picking up the ordered product in-store. The customer would receive a confirmation that the order had been received on their device, as well as a notification when they could pick up their merchandise, according to the patent filing. The notification could be displayed as text or an image or be an audio message, such as a voice message, that plays on speakers or earphones. Apple is closed for the holidays and spokespeople were unavailable for comment by press time. However its system is rolled out, it will take time -- judging from the protracted deployment of Apple's work with Starbucks. That deal, although limited simply to MP3s, is not expected to be fully available nationwide until late next year. Of course, it's also not clear whether Apple will ultimately take advantage of the patent in any form, at all.
Windows-esque DRM for the Mac? It's also not certain how Apple intends to make use of its DRM patent filing, No. 20070288886, titled "Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks." That filing describes a system that enables an application developer to add code into their app's runtime instruction stream that would restrict execution to specific hardware platforms. "An authorizing entity (e.g., an application owner or platform manufacturer) authorizes one or more applications to execute on a given hardware platform," the patent filing reads. "Later, during application run-time, code is injected that performs periodic checks ... to determine if the application continues to run on the previously authorized hardware platform." According to the document, if one of these periodic checks fails, "at least part of the application's execution string is terminated -- effectively rendering the application non-usable." The filing also said that the verification check is "transparent to the user and difficult to circumvent." A similar plan -- tying an application to specific hardware and regularly checking that the software is running on authorized hardware -- has been at the crux of Microsoft's efforts to stamp out piracy in a number of its own products. The company's WGA, the technology behind its DRM initiatives, has been applied to products including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Office 2003 and later. It's also long been the focus of controversy for its intrusiveness and false positives. Ironically, Microsoft of late has seemed to be distancing itself from such technology. The company backed off on some of the more aggressive uses of WGA last year, and this year further relented with IE 7. Earlier this month, Microsoft also said it planned to end one of the most controversial features of Windows Vista's WGA implementation -- its so-called "kill switch." That feature had disabled features in Vista copies that failed to pass Microsoft's verification process.

WAN Optimization Market Booming

It should come as no surprise that enterprises want to squeeze as much performance out of their Wide Area Networks (WANs) as possible. The latest data from Infonetics Research found that they're spending ever-increasing amounts to do so. The research firm found that for the third quarter of 2007, sales revenue for WAN optimization appliances nearly doubled from the same quarter in 2006. During the third quarter of 2007 alone, sales of WAN optimization appliances rose by 20 percent compared to second quarter. Infonetics forecasts that the final growth tally for the year will add up to a 65 percent year-over-year increase for WAN optimization appliances, with revenues hitting $700 million. The sector's rapid growth is expected to continue through 2010, during which Infonetics predicts WAN optimization appliance revenues will reach $1.2 billion, according to Matthias Machowinski, the firm's directing analyst. Machowinski explained to InternetNews.com that a few factors are driving the space's staggering growth. Those factors include geographically dispersed workforces, datacenter consolidation and greater numbers of users accessing more applications across the WAN. With such a hot market, a number of firms are vying for leadership in the space. Machowinski said Riverbed, Cisco and Bluecoat occupy the top spots today. Riverbed, which Infonetics identified as the market leader, posted quarterly revenue of $63 million during third quarter, according to Alan Saldich, the company's vice president of product marketing. Riverbed's most recent product release came in October, with new appliances and an updated RiOS (Riverbed Optimization System) update. In addition to leading in Infonetics' study, Saldich pointed out that Riverbed also holds a top position in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant and a top position in the most recent Forrester Wave report. Blue Coat, which Infonetics ranked third during the quarter, had previously been listed as No. 2 in the space by Dataquest/Gartner. "We have the highest growth rate, about three times higher than Riverbed and Cisco," said Steve Schick, senior director for corporate communications at the company. Schick said one of the reasons behind the booming growth is that the WAN optimization market and its offerings are quickly evolving. "The old style of WAN optimization was to simply accelerate what you could across the WAN to fix the slowness associated with file access and enterprise application response time in branch offices," Schick said. "Now companies want WAN optimization that gives them visibility into what is going across the WAN and the ability to accelerate mission-critical applications, stop malware and unauthorized applications and manage everything in between." While new technologies are helping to drive the market, there's still quite a lot of market left to penetrate. According to Riverbed's Saldich, businesses have deployed only about 100,000 WAN optimization appliances to date, versus an estimated market of 4 million branch offices in the U.S. "The market is hardly penetrated -- 100,000 boxes deployed at 4,000,000 branches is 2.5 percent penetration -- and that does not include branch offices outside the U.S." Saldich added that Riverbed expects WAN optimization appliances to become standard equipment for branch offices and datacenters due to the wide array of benefits. He also said businesses may be attracted to the products because they can realize a return on their investment in six to nine months. Despite the optimism, a number of issues could become barriers to adoption for WAN optimization technologies. Among them is the fact that WAN optimization remains a relatively new concept for most IT buyers. "Like any new technology, there is a natural adoption curve, and the %26#91;wide-area data services%26#93; market is no different," Saldich said. "IT architects are becoming more knowledgeable about the limitations of Wide Area Networks and that there is a solution available that can be deployed transparently into their infrastructure." Infonetics' Machowinski also said buyers may initially be dissuaded from buying into WAN optimization appliances because they may need to re-architect applications to ensure better performance across the WAN. The looming threat of a recession could stall growth as well, he said.

A 'Building Year' For Mobile Banking

With the credit squeeze poised to slow growth in technology spending across the banking industry for the first time in years, financial institutions will nonetheless continue to explore new models of conducting their business in the online environment, according to research and consulting firm Celent. Celent had earlier predicted that 2010 will be the year that mobile banking attains a critical mass of customers. Most of the country's very largest banks%26#151;Bank of America, Wachovia, SunTrust, etc.%26#151;have already rolled out mobile services. But looking at the top 50, many still have not. That will change next year, Celent said, calling 2008 a "building year" for mobile banking. Next year, Celent expects most of the top 50 banks to launch some kind of mobile service to make banking applications available on a handset through a variety of channels. To meet the demands of a diverse customer base, banks will make their mobile services available through SMS, a downloadable product or a mobile browser, the firm predicts. Celent looks for a disparity in the extent of services banks will offer in the coming year, with some offering a full suite of options like bill payment and fund transfers, while others will just test the waters with basic services like balance inquiries. Of the U.S. households that bank online (currently there are about 46 million), 10 percent will have adopted mobile banking by the end of next year, Celent predicts. The firm did not revise its earlier projection that the number of mobile-banking household will reach 30 percent in 2010. The firm's research also points to some interesting Web 2.0 possibilities. Banks, heretofore content to hover aloof from the social networking phenomenon, will join the widget parade and start building their own applications for Facebook, MySpace and the others. Celent is also predicting that more banks will try to build a social and community-oriented dimension into their own Web sites.

The Year In Chips And Spam

Moore's Law doesn't just apply to semiconductors, it could rightfully be applied to the rate of innovation in the technology industry. In most cases, that's a good thing, while in some cases, it's truly awful. It's rather sad to see malware writers manage to out-innovate many firms in the Silicon Valley. One wonders what legitimate software they could come up with if they ever decided to emerge from the shadows. While the criminal element keeps the security software in business, other sectors are equally busy. For a sector with essentially two players, semiconductors remains vibrant and exciting. Sun, battling back from the edges of extinction under a new CEO, did the unthinkable and went whole hog into open source, and has been warmly greeted for it by the open source crowd. And "green tech" became one of the buzzwords of the year as energy consumption came to the foreground of every CIO's mind. AMD vs. Intel Eighteen months ago, CNBC's blowhard stock picker/weather vane Jim Cramer was down on Intel, often demanding the firing of CEO Paul Otellini, who was still relatively new to the job and cleaning up the mess left by his predecessor. AMD, on the other hand, had one-upped Intel twice. It came out with 64-bit processors when Intel said no one wanted or needed 64-bit and it was first to market with dual core processors. It entered the server market for the first time with its Opteron processors in 2003 with no major OEMs. By 2006, it had all the tier one vendors: IBM, HP, Dell and Sun. That would make AMD a victim of its own success. Infrastructure and fabrication is as vital to any chip vendor's success as design. Hot chips are no good if you can't make enough of them, and with a vendor like Dell sucking up the supply, AMD couldn't make enough. The result was the company was creamed in Q1 and spent the rest of 2007 recovering. Its $5.4 billion purchase of ATI has yet to pay for itself but may in 2009 with the Fusion project. In the mean time, AMD is being hampered by debt from the purchase, which in turn impeded its ability to expand its manufacturing lines. Intel, on the other hand, streamlined its operations, cut more than 10,000 workers and was aggressive in releasing new chips, both desktop and server, and cutting prices. It beat AMD to market with a quad-core server, although AMD is very quick to point out that the quad-core Xeon is just two dual core chips on the same die. AMD had a genuine quad core server chip in the works known as Quad Core Opteron, a.k.a. Barcelona. It should have been called Godot because a lot of people were waiting around for it, and at this point, still are. Granted, it did show up in August when it was had been due in February but only select customers are getting it. Unfortunately for AMD it showed up fairly slow, with the top clock speed of 2.0GHz. The company was insistent that it would out-perform the 3.0GHz dual core processors. The jury is still out on that. Meanwhile, Intel came out with a whole new means for making chips that eliminated lead and the silicon that gave the Silicon Valley its name. Somehow, "The Hafnium Valley" just doesn't have a ring to it, but it was an important breakthrough none the less. The results were lower voltage desktop and server chips that ran much cooler. Going into 2008, Intel is positioned much better than it was at the beginning of the year, while AMD continues to fall behind. The Year in Malware If they weren't so loathsome, malware writers would be almost admirable in their drive to innovate. This year has seen some incredible advances in malicious code, which is not good news for the rest of us. The year began with an attack that would set the tone for the rest of 2007. On January 19, after severe weather struck Europe, thousands of people received an e-mail with a subject line "230 dead as storm batters Europe." It became known as the Storm worm, a nasty piece of malware officially dubbed W32/Nuwar by Microsoft, McAfee and a few other anti-virus vendors. Storm was nasty because it defied the traditional spam methodology of hub and spoke distribution. A few servers, called command and control servers, would send out their payload and orders to the thousands of millions of infected computers on a botnet (define). Storm, on the other hand, used a store and forward peer-to-peer approach, making it hard to eradicate. There were no central servers to take down, except at the very source, and right now the developer of Storm is the Osama Bin Laden of malware. As a result, it made Storm eradication very hard. The software mutates every 30 minutes, making it impossible to detect it with the usual signature-based security. Other ideas weren't so successful. Spam continues to grow overall, surpassing legitimate e-mail in sheer volume, but spam blocking filters have gotten more effective, sparing us the garbage. So spammers tried new ways to get around them. First was the use of image-based spam, where the information on pump-and-dump stocks, erectile dysfunction medication or mortgage deals was in a graphical image. The filters got better at stopping that, so they tried PDF spam. That proved ineffective, partly due to the fact that PDF is so large it's not efficient for spamming people. Plus, end users had gotten smart about not opening attachments from an unknown source. So PDF spam came and went in a real hurry. The year also saw its first audio spam, featuring a mechanical voice hyping a penny stock that proved more frightening than effective at selling the stock. As the year wore on, a few trends become rather clear: the virus as we knew it was pretty much over, anti-malware software needed to move off signature-based detection, and the primary method of attack was now based on human gullibility. The virus used to be about causing damage to your computer and then taunting you about it. That has really ended, with some exceptions. A virus was making the rounds earlier this year that deleted all of the MP3s on the user's hard drive. But by and large, malware today is about stealth. A bot wants to operate quietly on an infected computer, pumping out spam. A key logger wants to get as much info from you as possible. So they want to keep quiet. Signatures, the venerable method of virus detection, are being viewed as near-obsolete now because this stuff mutates so fast it's impossible to keep up with it. Even though many antivirus products update their signatures multiple times per day, with the Storm worm mutating every 30 minutes, it's impossible to keep up. An effort is underway to move toward heuristics, detecting malicious activity by suspicious behavior, but that has proven a less than perfect science up to now. The business of malware remains, regrettably, healthy. With China and Russia as the primary sources of malicious code and almost no leadership from Washington, Americans continue to be victimized to the tune of $100 to $200 million a year, depending on which report you read. Malware is such a big business the writers even offer service contracts with their software, so if it stops working, they will update it to get around the latest security measures. Next page: The Life of Java

Stocks Rocket on RIM's Results

Better than expected results from Research in Motion and a cash infusion for Merrill Lynch put investors in a festive mood on Friday. Research in Motion soared 11% on better than expected results and guidance, the latest evidence that technology spending is surviving the six-month credit market meltdown. Coupled with Oracle's blow-out results late Wednesday, the Nasdaq posted a two-day gain of 90 points, or more than 3%. Red Hat shares gained 10% on 28% sales growth and a new CEO, and CSC was up 2% on its outlook. NetSuite added another 10% to its stellar IPO, up nearly 50% in two days, and Check Point gained 6% on an upgrade. But the sector had its share of struggles too. Micron shares fell 5% after the company reported a loss that showed that chip pricing remains tough, and Jabil plunged 21% after lowering guidance because of restructuring expenses. Circuit City tumbled 28% on growing losses in a difficult pricing environment. The Nasdaq gained 51 to 2691, the S%26P rose 24 to 1484, and the Dow surged 205 to 13,450. Volume rose to 4.46 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.7 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 25-8 margin on the NYSE, and 21-9 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 84% on the NYSE, and 78% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 100-207 on the NYSE, and 135-185 on the Nasdaq. Note: The Market Close and Technical Analysis columns will return on Jan. 2. Happy holidays, and best wishes for a prosperous 2008.

Are You Violating BusyBox’s GPL Code?

Software licensed under the GPL open source license is considered to be Free Software but that doesn't mean it's free as in beer and that developers don't have rights. As four cases in point in 2007, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed legal suits against four different defendants for alleged copyright infringement of the BusyBox's GPL licensed code. BusyBox is a collection of UNIX utilities that have been optimized for size and are most commonly used in embedded environments. BusyBox is licensed under the GPL which is a reciprocal license and requires that users make the source code available to end users. Will your company be next to get a call from the SFLC lawyers? Do you know if you're using GPL licensed code in your organization properly? Experts note that there are a number of different things that organization can do to protect themselves and to ensure that they are in compliance with the GPL. There are also a few steps that organizations should take if the SFLC or someone else alleges that you're in violation of the GPL. One of the most obvious is to identify where you may have GPL licensed code like BusyBox within your infrastructure or developments. To that end there are at least three different tools available. OpenLogic offers a tool called OSS Discovery which can discover BusyBox as well as 900 other open source products. Doug Levin CEO of Black Duck told InternetNews.com that protexIP, Black Duck%26#146;s flagship product, analyzes both source code and binaries to identify GPL snippets, code segments, blocks and trees. The reports produced identify the license violations and other issues. The report, which Black Duck calls the Bill of Materials, can help engineers and attorneys make decisions about the disposition of the code and code base, license violations and other issues. Palamida is another vendor with a solution for license usage and identification. Theresa Bui Friday, co-founder and VP of Marketing at Palamida said that Palamida software can point customers to the exact place in their code where there is an issue, pointing out where the Busybox resides across their codebase, whether they are using source code, binary files, or any other resources associated with BusyBox. "We should also point out that even when a component is embedded within another component, we can flag it as an issue that should be reviewed," Bui told InternetNews.com. From a legal point of view, a company's responsibility when it comes to open source software usage is quite clear. Jason Haislmaier an attorney with Holme Roberts and Owen LLP is right in the thick of things when it comes to compliance. He is the attorney representing High-Gain Antennas, one of the defendants in the BusyBox suits. Haislmaier's prefaced his comments by noting that he is not commenting specifically on that case. "The bottom line is that companies need to understand their use of open source software and make each use of open source a knowing and compliant use," Haislmaier said. "This starts with implementing and maintaining an open source compliance program to help understand when and where open source is in use in your company so that you can take the proper steps to comply with the open source licenses applicable to that software." The reality is that until the BusyBox cases came along this year, it's likely that many organizations were either not aware of their compliance issues or simply did not take them seriously. The SFLC has filed legal suits against Monsoon Multimedia, Xterasys, High Gain Antennas and Verizon. To date only Monsoon and Xterasys have settled.

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Red Planet Still Packs Surprises

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
20 December 2007

Even though orbiters have eyed it from space and landers have rumbled across its surface, Mars still has more secrets to reveal. Two findings emerged this week: the possibility of an active glacier far from the planet's poles and evidence that sulfur--not carbon--was the element driving the planet's warmer climate long ago. Both discoveries could force some rethinking about martian evolution and dynamics--and maybe even provide insights about Earth's past.

The glacier discovery was announced Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA). A high-resolution stereo camera aboard ESA's Mars Express spacecraft spotted the feature in a region called Deuteronilus Mensae, located in the mid-north latitudes of the planet. The Mars Express science team drew the preliminary conclusion that the material in the feature is water ice and that it accumulated as recently as 10,000 years ago, probably from an underground source. Other deposits of water ice have been mapped at the martian poles, but they're much bigger and are millions of years old. The find is a surprise because the prevailing view is that any water reaching the martian surface from underground quickly evaporates and eventually drifts into space. Yet all of the physical characteristics of the feature are "consistent with that of a glacier," says geologist and team member Ronald Greeley of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Meanwhile, in the 21 December issue of Science, a team from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a possible solution for the curious absence of carbon-based minerals on Mars. A buildup of carbon dioxide in the ancient martian atmosphere supposedly produced enough of a greenhouse effect to allow liquid water to flow for a time on the surface. The problem is that such a process should have deposited ample carbon-containing minerals on the planet's surface--something that hasn't been found. So the researchers have come up with a new explanation: Large amounts of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) in the atmosphere, the result of early volcanic activity, captured enough heat to allow water to flow. This would explain the plentiful distribution of sulfates among martian minerals, as sulfur dioxide fell out of the atmosphere and mixed with the wet surface.

The research suggests that "it is possible to build up enough atmospheric SO₂ to help warm early Mars," says planetary geochemist and lead author Itay Halevy of Harvard. This revelation, he notes, also "might imply that SO₂ played a more important role in Earth's history than previously thought."

Planetary geologist Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who is principal investigator for the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, says the potential glacier is intriguing enough that MRO should also image Deuteronilus Mensae and train the spacecraft's spectrometer on the site to scan for water ice. He cautions, however, that other, similar martian features have turned out to be made of indurated dust, which resembles ice in orbital images.

Related sites

More on Mars Express

New Mars image from Hubble

Toshiba, IBM Team on Chips

TOKYO -- Toshiba Corp said on Tuesday it would join a group led by International Business Machines Corp to develop system chips using 32-nanometre circuitry, as chip makers increasingly team up to cut development costs. The alliance also comprises Advanced Micro Devices, Samsung Electronics, Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Germany's Infineon Technologies AG and privately owned U.S.-based Freescale Semiconductor Inc. Toshiba previously signed an agreement with domestic peer NEC Electronics Corp to jointly work on 32-nanometre technology. That alliance would focus on ways to mass-produce the chips, Toshiba said. The seven companies have agreed to work through 2010 to design, develop and produce chips using tiny circuitry. Using smaller circuit sizes helps boost chip makers' productivity by making smaller chips more powerful, but the move to smaller sizes is becoming too difficult and expensive for a single manufacturer to undergo alone.

Web Phone Development Platform Takes Flight

NEW YORK -- Silicon Valley start-up Ribbit Corp has unveiled a technology platform that will let developers put Web telephony in everything from business software to popular social network sites such as Facebook. As well as planning to sell its own services directly to consumers in the first quarter, Ribbit said it is working with more than 600 outside developers who are using its technology to create their own voice applications. Ribbit software serves as an interface between anything from Web sites, e-mail and instant messaging to mobile or regular phones. Developers do not need to be telephony experts to build services with Adobe's Flash software, which works on most computers. "A developer can take telephony out of our sandbox and bring it to where you live," said Crick Waters, Ribbit's vice president for strategy and business development. For example, he said that about four developers are using Ribbit to build services that consumers could incorporate into their personal pages on Facebook, a popular online hangout. These services could let members make and log calls and check their voicemail in transcript form without leaving Facebook. Ribbit has already built an application that businesses will be able use within Salesforce.com Inc's customer relationship management software. This lets workers dial clients via the Internet from within the application and automatically stores a log of client calls and voicemail transcripts alongside the rest of that client's information. About 30 corporations are testing the service, which will cost $25 a month per person and be available to Salesforce.com users in the first quarter. Ribbit did not disclose financial terms of its agreement with Salesforce.com. For other applications that Ribbit is not directly involved in the third-party developer would also pay Ribbit a subscription based on the number of users of their service. ANDROID FOR WEB TELEPHONY Services such as Vonage and Skype, owned by eBay, already offer Web calling. But Ovum analyst Brett Azuma said Ribbit's openness to outside developers and its plan to offer new types of services could help it stand out. "We're talking about a new type of phone company," Azuma said. "The other Web telephone companies such as Vonage are offering the same old stuff with a different technology." However Azuma said it was less clear that consumers would pay extra to make calls from locations such as Facebook. "I think the business applications will be the ones that are most attractive" because this will save time for users, Azuma said. "The consumer applications are a little less clear. I don't know what consumers are willing to pay for yet." Ribbit's announcement comes as the idea of opening up phone networks -- which have long been tightly controlled by network operators such as AT%26T Inc and Verizon Communications -- for the wider developer community gains momentum. Verizon Wireless, the mobile unit of Verizon and Vodafone Group Plc, promised to open its network next year to any device and software that works on its network. Web Search leader Google Inc is creating an open source mobile phone platform "Android" with support from multiple companies. Ted Griggs, Ribbit Chief Executive and co-founder, described his company as the "Android of Web telephony." He expects Ribbit to be cash-flow positive in the second quarter of 2009. Ribbit raised $13 million funding from investors including Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures. Ribbit did not give full details of its own retail service beyond saying it may include voice recording and "goofy" offers like call logs in the form of a picture of the world with red lines crossing between call origin and destination locations. Ribbit expects in-house services to initially generate the bulk of revenue but marketing executive Don Thorson said the company is expecting enough outside developers will use the service that they will surpass Ribbit brand business. "Over time we think the business model will change and the developers will overtake us," he said.

Adobe Starts Big Earnings Week On An Up Note

Adobe started out a big week for earnings reports on an upbeat note, posting better than expected results and guidance late Monday. Adobe's 34% rise in quarterly sales to $911 million was well above Wall Street forecasts, and earnings of 49 cents a share were a penny better than expected. The company also raised first quarter earnings and sales guidance and said it will buy back an additional 30 million shares, yet Adobe shares were little changed after hours after declining 2.9% during the day. The software maker cited strong sales of Creative Suite 3 for the results. This week will also see earnings reports from Oracle on Wednesday and Research in Motion and Micron Technology on Thursday, plus several important quarterly report cards from some of Wall Street's biggest brokerage firms. RIM and Micron fell more than 5% each Monday on another rough day for stocks, as investors wondered if a Federal Reserve credit auction this week will be enough to stem a credit market meltdown and prevent the U.S. economy from heading into a recession. Investors will know more Wednesday at 10 a.m. Eastern, when auction results will be released. Rambus gained 2.5% on a licensing deal with Toshiba, and Orbitz jumped 12% on a Lehman Brothers upgrade. Amazon fell 4.5% on reports of weaker than expected online sales. The Nasdaq lost 61 to 2574, the S%26amp;P fell 22 to 1445, and the Dow tumbled 172 to 13,167. Volume rose to 3.57 billion shares on the NYSE, and slipped to 1.93 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 27-6 margin on the NYSE, and 24-6 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 79% on the NYSE, and 88% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 28-388 on the NYSE, and 46-330 on the Nasdaq.

One Small Step for Plants

By Elizabeth Pennisi
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 December 2007

As the bright green fuzz on streamside rocks or the living carpet on forest floors, mosses revel in their relative simplicity, lacking the roots, seeds, and flowers typical of most land plants. Yet the first analysis of a moss genome reveals that mosses are surprisingly complex, with 35,000 potential genes--10,000 more than the first land plant sequenced--and a host of unique adaptations not found in other green landlubbers. And because of where mosses fall on the plant family tree, those genes are revealing how plants made their way onto land.

Mosses, along with hornworts and liverworts, are primitive plants called bryophytes. They diverged from the ancestors of flowering plants more than 450 million years ago. Plants got their start in water, and the move onto land by algae-like ancestors was quite challenging, requiring the evolution of the ability to deal with fluctuations in temperature and access to water, as well as to more intense sunlight. Mosses took steps to cope but never evolved certain features, such as vascular tissues that could transport water and seeds that could survive dry spells, that eventually appeared in flowering plants. By sequencing the genome of the extensively studied moss Physcomitrella patens and comparing it to the sequenced genomes of rice, the flowering plant Arabidopsis, and single-cell algae, an international team has been able to look at what the ancestral land-plant genome looked like.

Their first surprise, says developmental biologist Ralph Quatrano of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, was the abundance of genes. Some of these, such as the genes that help mosses come back to life after being dried out, are shared with other land plants and so evolved even earlier in plant evolution. Additional water-stress genes suggest that P. patens has evolved independent ways to deal with water shortages as well, says Quatrano. The moss also has extra genes for DNA repair to cope with damage inflicted by sunlight.

It seems likely that the ancestor of P. patens underwent a whole-genome duplication early in its history, Quatrano notes, possibly freeing up some genes to take on new functions. About 20%26#37; of the moss's genes are new to researchers and likely specific to moss, Quatrano and his colleagues report online 13 December in Science.

William "Ned" Friedman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is excited about the potential of the moss genome to reveal clues about how plants accomplished the transition to land. However, as evolutionary biologist Pamela Soltis of the University of Florida, Gainesville, points out, genome researchers have barely touched the plant family tree. Fish and humans represent about the same evolutionary distance as rice and moss. That means a lot more sequencing needs to be done before the leap from water to land can be fully understood, she says.

Green Grid Gig To Highlight Commonality, Cooperation

The Green Grid is finally getting the ball rolling after a protracted start and will host its first Green Grid General Members' Meeting and Technical Forum in February, one year after its formal launch. The event will be held at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco on February 5-6. The goal of the meeting is to advance the organization's efforts around energy efficiency in the datacenter and to share some of the metrics being developed by the organization, a conglomeration of 110 technology and energy firms. This has been the Grid's mission from the start. One of the challenges facing the group is uniting the many individual efforts around cooling. Each vendor seems to have its own project, whether it's Intel, AMD, Seagate, Micron or IBM%26#151;all of which are Green Grid members. But often these efforts take place in isolation. A memory company like Micron works on its own project while a semiconductor maker like Intel has its own project, and a storage vendor like EMC does its own thing. Together, the individual parts have no idea of what the other is doing or how to measure energy consumption and savings by various hardware components. "It became evident if we want to make changes we can't look at components, we have to look at things holistically. Everyone had their own initiative and there was no commonality. So we structured our technical committee more functionally than on a technology level," said John Tuccillo, vice president of industry alliances with American Power Conversion and director of The Green Grid. Among the companies working together: AMD and Intel, which usually spend their time fighting like cats and dogs. Larry Vertal, senior strategist at AMD and a representative from the board of directors joked, "It's quite surprising and probably not believable to a lot of the world how well the two companies have worked together." He said the reason the Green Grid, after its splashy debut, has been quiet for so long is that members had to resolve a lot of legal issues around intellectual property so they could participate while maintaining a competitive element at the same time. "They will continue in their own direction to a certain degree and leverage the work being done by the Grid, but at the same time there is a real intent to get a baseline," he said. One effort the group has taken is to measure a mixture of hardware components as a whole rather than as separate parts. This is being done now by The Green Grid's Technical Forum and will be a part of the February event. "If we take a good cross match of the industry and breadth of our members%26#151;120 and growing%26#151;if we could come to an agreement on the definitions for energy measurement, then we could have something there," said Tuccillo. Nik Simpson, an analyst with The Burton Group, said this kind of unification is necessary. "Of all the things The Green Grid can do, one of the most important is insuring interoperability between different computing and monitoring systems, because the last thing IT needs is to add any more complexity to their environments," he told InternetNews.com. To an extent, this effort must also be driven by customers. "If customers don't force them to do this, there will be less impetus to insure interoperability. The industry has a habit of saying this will all work just fine if you buy everything from us, but I don't think that's how customers buy stuff," he said. The Grid's first formal event, Plugfest for Independent Hardware Vendors, took place in November. Hardware companies like IBM, Sun, HP and other GG members hauled their big boxes to Dupont, Wash. to have their power efficiency evaluated by an independent third party. Each IHV received evaluations on how their components performed against existing specifications and how to improve. "The event did well enough that people want to do it again," said Tuccillo. "If we can offer feedback in energy efficiency for datacenters as well as componentry, Plugfest works pretty well."

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Red Hat's Open Source IDE

Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product. On Monday, Red Hat officially released JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS), based on the Exadel product as a 100 percent open source IDE (define). The new Eclipse based IDE offering from Red Hat's JBoss division will provide a development environment that will work on both Windows and Linux for Java middleware solutions from JBoss. "Other commercial Eclipse-based offerings leverage open source technology like the Eclipse framework," Bryan Che, product manager at Red Hat told InternetNews.com. "But, they keep all their best stuff proprietary, and that is their incentive for developers to buy a license. Because JBoss Developer Studio is 100 percent open source, we offer developers a different and better value around integration and certification." Among the other vendors that use Eclipse as a base for their IDE is IBM, which uses Eclipse as a base for its Rational IDE products. An IBM spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. Che argued that unlike a pure Eclipse tooling product, when a developer installs JBDS, the developer gets an integrated environment that includes Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling and the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. All of the included components are also certified to work together. "When new versions of technologies come out, the developer can upgrade via JBDS and know that all the new technologies and their dependencies will be certified to work together so that the developer's environment continues to work," Che explained. Though, historically, JBoss users have had other IDE's they could use, Che was optimistic about JBDS and noted that Red Hat has seen substantial interest from JBoss users in JBDS. The first beta of JBDS was released in August and since then, Red Hat claims the IDE has had over 100,000 downloads. Che said the beta process was great for providing feedback around bug reports and desired functionality in JBDS. "We did not make dramatic changes in functionality," Che noted. "However, we did bring in updated features and capabilities in existing tools like additional Seam Tooling options." Another interesting fact that emerged during the beta period was the platform that developers used for the IDE. "The majority of the beta users were on Windows," Che noted. While JBDS currently is available for both Windows and Linux, the plan, according to Che, is to add Mac OS support soon. JBDS is licensed under the GPL version 2 open source license. Developers can download source code from JBoss as well as purchase a subscription-based product. Initial pricing for JBDS is $99.

IDC: Blame 2007's Biggest Trends For IT Spend Slowdown

Just as honeymoons end with new couples facing chores of cooking meals and hauling trash to the curb, global IT will similarly see its afterglow pale as it enters a "post-disruption marketplace" in 2008, according to a new report from research firm IDC. Citing an uncertain picture, IDC forecasts total global IT spending to grow in the range of 5.5 percent to 6 percent -- down from 6.9 percent this year. U.S. IT spending will drop off even more sharply, with the growth rate falling from 6.6 percent in 2007 to between 3 percent and 4 percent in 2008, IDC projects. IDC attributes the slowdown to disruptive forces that had for years been baying at the fringes of IT -- everything-as-a-service, Web 2.0 applications and open development communities -- and which burst into the mainstream during 2007. Through a market adjustment in the year to come, big tech companies will get serious about how to incorporate these changes into their business models, the report said. "These technologies have been creeping into everything from enterprise software and hardware to consumer gadgets and telecom services, forcing vendors to rethink their offerings," Frank Gens, IDC's senior vice president of research, said in a statement. "In 2008, the era of experimentation will end as industry leaders get serious about transforming their products and services to take advantage of -- and meet the challenges posed by -- these new technologies and business models," he said. "The status quo is about to change." The IDC report suggests software companies will focus more heavily on developing markets, redoubling their efforts in the so-called "BRIC" nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), as well as nine other emerging areas with nascent tech economies. The "BRIC+9" markets will see the most dramatic growth in the coming year, IDC said. IDC also expects major IT companies increasingly to adopt online delivery models for storage, servers and other applications as they go after the SMB market. That market represents one of the U.S. market sectors poised for the most substantial growth, the report said. Following the much-hyped releases of Apple's iPod Touch and Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, IDC also said more companies will develop Web-enabled products that bridge the gap between PCs and smartphones. Location-based services, such as those that power personal navigation devices, are one area in particular where IDC expects the Internet to be extended via a new breed of more network-capable products. An early example bearing out this prediction came earlier this week, when Dutch navigation-device maker TomTom announced that its products would be able to link up to a PC to download business addresses from Google Maps. In response to the challenges posed by open-development mobile initiatives like Google's Androud and the Open Handset Alliance, reluctant network operators will give ground and start letting any device run on their networks, IDC also said. Additionally, the research firm said new software applications will appear in 2008 promising to organize, aggregate and interpret the oceans of data that are forming within online social communities. This "Eureka 2.0" software will offer better analytics, "sentiment extraction" and other techniques to identify mass opinion, according to the report. "One of the more profound consequences that will come out of this era of hyper-disruption is the opportunity -- and for some, the critical need -- for IT suppliers to move beyond their old, narrow identities and offerings," Gens said.

New Bill Demands ISPs Report Online Child Exploitation

The U.S. House of Representatives this week passed a new bill putting ISPs on notice they face big penalties for not reporting child pornography and other illegal exploitation of children online. The Securing Adolescents From Exploitation Online (SAFE) Act carries a maximum fine of $150,000 for first-time offenders found guilty of "knowing and willful failure to make a report." Repeat offenders can fines of up to $300,000. The bill passed by a whopping 409-2 with Congressmen Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Paul Broun (R-Ga.) the only ones opposed. Under the legislation, service providers are required to report the illegal activity to the Washington D.C.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) or to that organization's CyberTipLine. The general public is also encouraged to report any instances of online child abuse or exploitation to the CyberTipLine. The bill (H.R. 3791) refers broadly to entities "engaged in providing an electronic communication service or a remote computing service to the public.) as being liable for not reporting illegal content. This wide-ranging reference has raised concern about coffee shops and other local Wi-Fi providers being at risk for facilitating the display of illegal content they are generally not in a position to monitor. But Larry Magid, a board member with the NCMEC, said those fears are unfounded. "The point of these penalties is to provide a bigger stick to force compliance with existence laws," Magid told InternetNews.com. "The major ISPs, to the best of my knowledge, have all been compliant in reporting illegal activity, but some of the smaller ones have not." Earlier this year privacy groups argued against a predecessor to SAFE, the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act of 2007 (SAFETY Act) because it required ISPs to retain specific customer data. Under SAFETY, the U.S. Attorney General would have been required to issue ISP data retention requirements that privacy advocates feared could expand to include a user's most frequently visited Web sites, instant messages and e-mail correspondence. Meanwhile, language in the SAFE Act specifically states there is no requirement that "an electronic communication service provider or a remote computing service provider to monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider." Magid said SAFE "isn't about additional surveillance, but about requirements that ISPs report illegal activities."

In-Flight E-mail, IM Service Takes Wing From JetBlue

JetBlue Airways next week plans to begin testing free wireless Internet access, e-mail and instant messaging for its transcontinental passengers, thanks to a partnership with Yahoo and Research in Motion, maker of the popular Blackberry device. The discount-fare air carrier's service will first debut Dec. 11, with a morning flight from New York to San Francisco aboard a plane dubbed "Beta Blue," a JetBlue spokesperson said. "It's just a value-added amenity we feel our customers would enjoy, and adds to the JetBlue experience," company spokesperson Alison Eshelman told InternetNews.com. "It's another service for our customers to keep in touch with their loved ones on the ground." The service will give travelers access to Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Instant Messenger on notebook PCs, and e-mail and messaging through Wi-Fi-enabled editions of the Blackberry. At present, there are two compatible Blackberry models, the 8820 and Curve 8320. The Web itself, and online services from other companies like AOL Instant Messenger, will not be supported, Eshelman said. Following next week's Beta Blue introduction, JetBlue plans to use the Wi-Fi-enabled plane on other routes, chiefly those flying cross-country. However, it does not yet have firm plans to expand the service to other planes in its fleet. Eshelman said the program may be rolled out more widely, or undergo changes, based on the response from users. "We'll listen to their feedback and develop a plan for a future fleet-wide rollout," she said. The news continues efforts by U.S. carriers to explore the possibility of offering wireless Internet access during flights. Virgin America in September pledged to roll out fleet-wide broadband in 2008. The effort, in partnership with wireless broadband player AirCell, will provide Wi-Fi Internet access for passengers traveling in the continental U.S. American Airlines, among others, also has indicated its interest in testing services similar to JetBlue's. It, too, has partnered with AirCell for the effort. The carriers' plans also may mark a changing attitude toward in-flight Wi-Fi from U.S. carriers. Last year, Boeing retreated from its ambitious Connexion in-flight Internet access service, citing a lack of interest by airlines. However, the difficulties faced by Boeing may also suggest that the efforts by JetBlue, American, Virgin and others could see some turbulence ahead. The aircraft manufacturer warned in 2006 about the "substantial" costs it had incurred in deploying Connexion. Still, the latest crop of plans may differ enough from Connexion that they prove successful. For one thing, Boeing's product was based on offering Internet access to travelers for a fee -- rather than as a free, value-added offering.

Embedded Linux Seen as Ready For Prime Time

It's one thing for a vendor to claim that Linux is ready for the embedded development market. It's quite another to have a multi-year study involving hundreds of projects and over 1,300 developers report it. Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) has revealed in a new report how effective embedded Linux has been for developers to develop projects. The report contrasts the use of non-supported, roll your own Linux, supported Linux efforts, as well as proprietary embedded operating systems like Symbian and Windows CE. The result? The report found that "embedded Linux has achieved design parity with commercial RTOSes (Real Time Operating Systems) for most projects." "Linux has been accepted not only in the industry but among the traditional RTOS vendors as witnessed the promotions by Green Hills and Wind River with their OS agnostic IDEs," Dr. Jerry Krasner, the report's author, told InternetNews.com. Thought the market may be accepting of Linux for embedded development, Krasner argued that market acceptance is distinct and separate from the parameters that determine design outcomes. Furthermore Krasner added that his research did not go looking for an outcome and they had no preconceptions regarding what they might find. That said, Krasner does have some opinions on why embedded Linux is now at parity with commercial alternative. One reason has to do with the demise of the Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) in 2005. "The ELC was a technology-driven association. When an association oversees and supports the same vanilla OS and does not support the member vendors' ability to differentiate themselves, the vendors are bound to feel the impact," Krasner said. "As long as any association creates an environment which is not commoditized it can thrive. If the business becomes commoditized growth will be restricted." Some of the differentiation in the embedded industry today is coming from vendors that until recently were staunch proprietary embedded OS supporters. Wind River which is well known for its VxWorks operating system first jumped into the Linux space in 2004. "At first Wind River's Linux efforts were confusing to the industry and their customers who wondered if Wind was abandoning VxWorks," Krasner noted. "What they were acknowledging is that Linux had a real market potential and that they were going to support VxWorks as well as Linux." The version of Linux that an embedded developer chooses matter, at least in terms of whether it has commercial support or not. Among the key finding in the report is the fact that surveyed developers reported that using a commercially support version of Linux resulted in a more effective outcome than by using a roll your own Linux approach. Among the most popular commercially supported version is MontaVista Linux. Krasner noted that EMF's data statistically reflects what developers report. The survey asked if they: 1)are familiar with a vendor's specific product; 2) have used the product in the past 12 months; 3) have shipped a product based on the vendor's product and; 4) intend to use the product within the next 12 month period. "Based on the data collected in response to these questions, Monta Vista enjoyed a strong representation in the survey," Krasner said. As to where the embedded Linux might be heading in the future, that's up to the embedded developers themselves. "Our data can be crossed tabbed and analyzed in thousands of ways - and we depend on our subscribers to use the data to discover information that is important to their strategic planning and competitive analysis," Krasner explained. "It is very comprehensive and statistically accurate -- and we have year-over-year data going back more than 10 years. We can't pursue every item and market segment. As such we don't plan to reproduce the paper in the immediate future. "

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U.K. Bets Big on Biomedical Research Facility

By John Travis
ScienceNOW Daily News
5 December 2007

The British Public Library may soon have a massive new neighbor. U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown today announced plans to build a %26pound;500 million biomedical research facility, hosting some 1500 scientists, on a plot of land in the heart of London. The research center would be among the largest of its kind in the world.

The new project, which is expected to combine both basic biology and clinical research under one roof, will be developed by an unusual collaboration between the U.K. Medical Research Council (MRC), two medical charities--the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK--and University College London. "Pooling our resources helps us invest in technologies we might not on our own," says Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, which will move more than 40 labs to the planned center.

Paul Nurse, a British biochemist, Nobel laureate, and president of Rockefeller University in New York City, will lead a planning committee to decide exactly what the site will contain by its predicted completion date of 2013. In addition to the Cancer Research UK labs, the World Influenza Centre--a component of MRC's National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR)--will occupy the land. Researchers at NIMR, which currently sits on the outskirts of London, have resisted past efforts to relocate downtown (Science, 4 February 2005), and MRC hasn't detailed how many of NIMR's other labs will be included in the new center.

The planned site is adjacent to the recently reopened St. Pancras terminal that connects the United Kingdom to the rest of Europe via high-speed rail. This aspect was "absolutely critical" for the project, as the transportation links will make international collaborations easier, says Wellcome Trust Director Mark Walport. The trust will contribute %26pound;100 million to the facility's construction. In addition, the proximity to the library will encourage science education efforts, he notes.

A government department sold the site to the collaboration for %26pound;85 million, despite receiving offers from private developers for more than %26pound;100 million. Local residents seeking affordable housing for the site may try to block the new research facility, however, as may those who fear that the new labs could expose London to accidentally released infectious agents.

MySpace The Music (Video) Exchange

MySpace today announced the launch of a new music program that will deliver exclusive videos of performances by popular recording artists. MySpace Transmissions will provide a channel for artists to create and virally distribute their video content to MySpace users. It will also make audio tracks available for purchase through an agreement with Warner Music Group's Atlantic Records. Transmissions will feature a private recording session with the artist that MySpace members will be able to view either through the Transmissions profile or through MySpace TV. Artists will either perform new songs or re-record previously released material. The video sessions will also include interviews with the artists. MySpace will archive all Transmissions content to be available for on-demand viewing. If users like what they hear, they can click a link to purchase the audio of the performance, with the revenue split between the artist and the label according to the terms of their contract. Unlike Apple's iTunes store, MySpace is leaving the pricing of the music up to the artists and labels. MySpace will receive no revenue from the sale of downloadable audio files. MySpace members will be able to add the videos to their own profiles, and virally share content across the site. Atlantic is the only record label with which MySpace is announcing a partnership, though it is in active negotiations with others to broaden the content that it will make available through Transmissions. "We're committed to working with all stakeholders in the industry to develop monetization structures that work for labels, bands and fans," MySpace VP of Programming and Content said in a statement. "Stay tuned %26#150; this is the tip of the iceberg for MySpace Music." Just how deep that iceberg goes is still unclear, though an expansion of the exclusive audio content made available for purchase through partnerships with record labels could be the next leg of MySpace's strategy to turn itself into an online music destination. MySpace says that Transmissions is built for major artists who are looking to reconnect with their fans, not for the legions of obscure bands that use MySpace to promote their music. Transmissions is currently available only to U.S. users, but MySpace says that users in other countries will soon have access to the same videos and be able to purchase the same audio content. MySpace is debuting Transmissions with a performance from James Blunt, the performer of Transmissions keynote performer will be James Blunt, a multi-platinum British singer/songwriter signed with Custard/Atlantic Records. Blunt recorded five tracks exclusively for MySpace Transmissions, including the new single "Same Mistake." The announcement comes just over a year after Universal Music Group (UMG) sued MySpace for "rampant copyright infringement." It also comes on the same day that Universal artist Colbie Caillat posted a note to her fans on her MySpace blog apologizing for a UMG policy that compelled her to replace the streams of full songs on her profile page and replace them with 90 second clips. Full versions of some songs are still available on her own Web page. Bloggers and posters to comment threads have been quick to register their disappointment, characterizing the move as another example of the tone-deaf music industry snubbing the digital audience whose business it desperately needs. However, that portrayal would seem to clash with Universal's expected announcement today that it will offer free music on Nokia phones to stimulate its digital business. It has also been reported that Universal's move does not specifically target MySpace, but rather that the directive issued to its artists is simply enforcing a six-month-old policy limiting the label has had in place to retain control of its streaming content.

A Long, Hard Look at the Early Universe

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
28 November 2007

Astronomers have finally spotted the small and young galaxies that represent the building blocks of full-sized galaxies such as the Milky Way. The findings represent the first examples of what could become a plentiful source of astronomical data about the formation of the universe.

Galaxies don't spring into existence full-sized overnight. In an early era of the universe, tiny versions of the Milky Way coalesced out of gigantic clouds of hydrogen gas that permeated the cosmos. Over the course of a billion or so years, these budding galaxies began merging, with half a dozen or more of them needed to form galaxies the size of our own. At least, that's what the theorists calculated. The problem is that, because they are so faint, such small galaxies have been extremely difficult to detect. The search has been "a hard game," says astronomer J. Christopher Mihos of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

What was needed, it turns out, was patience and a great set of instruments. Astronomers from the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and from the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California, focused two of the world's biggest telescopes on the same tiny patch of sky, near the constellation Aquarius, for a total of 92 hours--practically an eternity of observational time. Voil%26agrave;! By capturing spectra of hydrogen gas clouds, backlit by stars within the galaxies and 10 times fainter than anything seen before, the researchers identified 27 protogalaxies from a time when the universe was only 2 billion years old--and at a distance from Earth of 22 billion light-years. As the team will report in the 1 March 2008 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the chemical signature of the objects' dim light confirms their existence and very young age.

Now that they know that they can find such objects, co-author and Carnegie astronomer Michael Rauch says he and his colleagues will try to learn more about protogalaxies by observing other swaths of the sky. "The beauty is that these new galaxies are so numerous that you can stare anywhere in the sky and find some of these objects, even in a very small field," he says. Before this study, astronomers had assumed that they could detect only the brightest distant galaxies from ground-based telescopes, Rauch notes. That was "the tip of the iceberg," he says. "Now we have dived deep enough to see the bulk of the iceberg itself."

Astronomer Mark Voit of Michigan State University in East Lansing agrees. "People have been searching for objects like these for a long time without success," he says. "It really does open a new window on the process of galaxy formation."

Signs of Lightning on Venus

By Richard A. Kerr
ScienceNOW Daily News
28 November 2007

Given that lightning on Earth isn't shy about attracting attention, it might come as a surprise that the phenomenon has been hard to detect on Venus, especially because spacecraft have visited our sister planet more than 30 times. So scientists seemed almost relieved today to report that the orbiting Venus Express spacecraft has returned "the first definitive evidence of abundant lightning on Venus," according to a team member. Chances for lightning seem dimmer on Saturn's moon Titan, however, where new observations by the Cassini spacecraft have failed to detect the phenomenon.

Lightning can change the chemistry of an atmosphere and give researchers clues to the storm activity of a planet. It's common enough in planets with thick atmospheres. Bolts 100 times more powerful than terrestrial ones crackle on Jupiter, and it has been detected on Saturn, on Uranus, and probably on Neptune. After its 1979 arrival at Venus, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter recorded electrical impulses leaking out of the atmosphere that some researchers took to be a signature of lightning. Later, Galileo swept by and detected noise bursts at much higher frequencies, encouraging more faith in venusian lightning (Science, 27 September 1991, p. 1492). But expectations dimmed with Cassini's failure to detect lightning's distinctive radio static during its two flybys.

With the European Space Agency's Venus Express in the neighborhood, space physicist Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues were looking for the magnetic signals that should accompany the electrical signals observed by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter. In the 29 November issue of Nature, they report that Venus Express detected bursts of 100-hertz magnetic radiation lasting 0.25 to 0.5 seconds and occurring at least half as often as lightning on Earth. "They were pretty much as we'd predicted," says Russell. "Lightning is occurring beneath the spacecraft about 25%26#37; of the time."

"That is one possibility," says a more skeptical space physicist, Georg Fischer of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. As was the case with the Pioneer Venus data, he says, these signals might instead be generated by processes involving the charged particles and magnetic fields draped around the planet. For his part, Fischer has struck out in finding lightning on Titan. In a paper published online 28 November in Geophysical Research Letters, he and colleagues report that Cassini has failed to detect lightning's radio emissions during the spacecraft's first 35 flybys of the moon.

At Venus, at least, Japanese scientists are looking to break the impasse the old-fashioned way: by catching any lightning flashes with a camera. Their Venus Climate Orbiter is due to arrive in 2010.

IDC: Slow Sales For Servers

Worldwide server sales experienced a minor decline in the rate of unit growth, as well as tepid dollar growth in the third quarter of 2007. The numbers reflect a trend of fewer, but more expensive units being sold. For the third quarter of 2007, IDC reported factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew 0.5 percent year over year to $13.1 billion, the slowest rate of growth since the first quarter of 2006. Server unit shipments grew 6.3 percent over the third quarter of 2007, down from the 7.8 percent growth in 2006. Part of the reason is that virtualization is starting to take effect. After months of vendors telling customers that they can do the work of 10 servers with one, people started buying one server instead of 10. "We see it with Dell and IBM," Jed Scaramella, research analyst in IDC's Enterprise Computing group, told InternetNews.com. "They are shipping fewer units but more richly configured." Contrast IDC's findings with those of Gartner, whose third quarter server sales numbers downplayed the impact of virtualization. In the end, Scaramella believes it will slow down the number of physical servers people need to deploy, but there will still be growth. "The amount of servers in the world is going to continue to increase. Our installed base forecasts we're still showing an increase. The rate at which they grow is tempering, and we're seeing that," he said. Another reason for the slow sales is that there was considerable demand for dual-core processors from Intel and AMD in 2006. Scaramella isn't seeing as much demand for the new quad-core processors that have shipped in recent months. "The ramp from dual core to quad core won't be as fast as it was from single to dual core," he said. "There was such a pent up demand for dual that it took off. Quad core will steadily increase in adoption but won't increase as fast because there wasn't the pent up demand and there's a lot of software issues because a lot of apps weren't written for multi-core." Revenue growth for volume systems, those systems available for less than $25,000, grew 8.1 percent year over year, while mid-range systems ($25,000 to $499,000) dipped 2.2 percent and high-end servers, from $500,000 and up, fell 14.5 percent over the same quarter last year, the largest year over year decline in more than five years. Scaramella said that the dip in mainframe sales is due to buyers holding off because of an expected upgrade in IBM's System z mainframes. "With those mainframes, there's a lot of residual value with them. Once you buy a mainframe and a new version comes out, the residual value just drops. You can't just resell them like an x86 server. So the people who need to buy a mainframe will, and those who can put it off will," he said. This led to an 8.5 percent dip in IBM revenues due to weakness in System z and System i, its mid-range systems. Gartner found almost the exact same results in its quarterly report this week. IDC and Gartner were also in agreement that HP is rapidly closing the dollar gap. IBM still leads, with $3.93 billion for the quarter, but HP is hot on its tail with $3.75 billion. Scaramella said HP is gaining market share by cost cutting. "HP has rolled back the average selling prices %26#91;ASPs%26#93; for the last few quarters, whereas Dell and IBM have increased their ASPs," he said. "At the same time, HP has shown monster unit growth rate. That leaves me to believe they are buying footprints." He points out that Dell's revenue grew by 13.5 percent while HP's grew by 10.3 percent, even though HP shipped more units. Dell was in a strong third place position and Scaramella is the latest analyst to say that Michael Dell is turning his namesake company around after resuming control earlier this year. "A lot of people thought they were dead and buried, but they have been growing over the last couple of quarters. They have implemented a new strategy about simplifying IT, which is easy to understand and will resonate over the next year." Sun's fourth-place finish, with a 0.9 percent growth over last year and 10.2 percent of the market, it's a familiar story. "We still see Sun operating within their installed base. The story on Sun shows they are focused on profitable growth. To show higher growth rate they will have to step out of their customer base and get new customers," said Scaramella. Microsoft Windows server revenue was $5.3 billion in Q3 for 40.4 percent of the overall market, a 9.7 percent year-over-year growth in revenue and 4.8 percentage point gain. Linux servers grew by 10.7 percent to $1.8 billion in the quarter, accounting for 13.4 percent of all server revenue. Unix servers also did well, growing 4.1 percent to $4.1 billion and representing 31.1 percent of quarterly server spending. This growth came at the expense of mainframes, with IBM's System z mainframes experiencing a 31.9 decline in revenue. The server blade market continued its rapid growth for the fourth consecutive quarter, with factory revenue growing 41.4 percent year over year. Overall, blade servers of all processor types surpassed $1 billion for the first time in a single quarter and represented 7.9 percent of the overall server market revenue in the quarter. HP led the way with 42.1 percent of the market, and IBM was second with 32.9 percent.

Not Again, Dear. I'm Sperm-Depleted

By Benjamin Lester
ScienceNOW Daily News
29 November 2007

Who says males are always the persistent sex? Female topi--a type of African antelope--become so intent on mating repeatedly with the most desirable partner that males sometimes have to fend off their aggressive advances to avoid running out of sperm, a researcher reports. The study is the first to suggest that sperm depletion causes such a role reversal in a mammal.

Topi are "lek" breeders. For a month and a half each year, males congregate at a mating arena, or lek, to compete for barren patches of about 30 square meters. The biggest, fittest males, known as lek males, command plots in the center of the arena, and females, which come into heat for just 1 day per year, seek them out. These prized bulls mate as many as 36 times in just 30 minutes. A female copulates with about four males during her visit to the arena, usually mating with each male multiple times. Although they prefer lek males, nearly 75%26#37; of females also mate with less hunky males.

The males keep this up for the entire rut, only occasionally nipping off for a bite to eat, says behavioral ecologist Jakob Bro-J%26oslash;rgensen of the Institute of Zoology in London. Bro-J%26oslash;rgensen studies topi in Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve, and the sheer length of the rut interested him in the role that sperm depletion might play. In related species, he says, repeated mating can deplete sperm, meaning that with each additional ejaculation, the male is less likely to fertilize the female.

Bro-J%26oslash;rgensen reasoned that female topi, particularly if they have already mated with a less fit male, should want to mate as many times as possible with desirable males to maximize their chances of conceiving high-quality offspring. Conversely, males, which encounter many different females during the rut, pay an "opportunity cost" if they mate mainly with one female because they might run low on sperm.

As Bro-J%26oslash;rgensen reports online 29 November in Current Biology, lek males with two females on their territory at once tended to focus their attention on the female they'd mated with less. The other female often became aggressive toward the mating pair (see movie), attempting to shift the male's attention back to her. However, her aggression sometimes backfired. Seven percent of the time, the male counterattacked. An aggressive rebuff was particularly likely when she'd already mated with him several times. According to Bro-J%26oslash;rgensen, it's often assumed that males are the pursuers because for them, mating is less costly. However, he says, "In topi, there is a reversal."

According to behavioral ecologist Brian Preston of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, the finding "challenges conventional wisdom that males should mate whenever the opportunity arises." However, says Preston, the work "rests on an untested assumption that males do become sperm depleted. This has been shown only rarely in natural systems."

NIH Criticized for Flawed Review of Biosafety Lab

By Jocelyn Kaiser
ScienceNOW Daily News
29 November 2007

An expert panel today slammed a draft study by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) on the risks of a proposed high-security biology laboratory in Boston, rejecting it as "not sound and credible." The harsh review suggests that NIH has more work ahead before the half-completed $178 million lab can operate at the highest security level.

The proposed Boston University lab in the city's South End, which has $128 million in NIH funding, will include biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) facilities for studying deadly pathogens such as Ebola virus and Lassa fever. In response to lawsuits filed by opponents who think densely populated downtown Boston isn't an appropriate site for the lab, NIH conducted a study of alternative sites outside Boston and of worst-case scenarios in the unlikely event of a pathogen escape (Science, 11 August 2006, p. 747). The agency released a draft report in July that found the risks were quite low: No more than about 100 people would die if, say, Ebola or the Rift Valley fever virus got out into the community. The state of Massachusetts then asked for an independent review by the National Research Council (NRC).

The NRC panel found numerous problems. One is that NIH failed to consider highly transmissible agents such as avian influenza and SARS. The 11-member panel also faulted the modeling--for example, NIH didn't adequately consider uncertainties about how quickly some pathogens move through the population. And the NIH study gives short shrift to issues of environmental justice, such as the higher risks to AIDS patients living in the South End. If the report were an article submitted to a scientific journal, "we would have rejected this," said panelist Gigi Kwik Gronvall of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Biosecurity in Baltimore, Maryland, in a press call.

Boston University environmental health expert David Ozonoff, a critic of the lab, isn't surprised by the review. "It just wasn't a good report," he says. In a statement, NIH says it will consider the NRC review along with other comments on the draft. Construction on the lab will continue, but the pending risk assessment could delay the resolution of federal and state lawsuits opposing operation of its BSL-4 suites.

Meanwhile, three other new BSL-4 labs funded by NIH are moving along without major opposition. All have environmental impact statements, but apparently they did not draw as much scrutiny as NIH's study on the Boston lab.

HP's Acquisition Spree Births IT Automation Suite

A string of high-profile acquisitions may soon pay off for HP, as the world's sixth-largest software company in the world on Thursday debuted Automated Operations 1.0, its integrated suite for automating IT operations across the enterprise. The software-and-services suite, which HP calls "one of the key pillars" of its Business Technology Optimization portfolio, integrates applications from HP OpenView with others from Mercury Interactive, Opsware and Peregrine. Those three firms represented the most significant acquisitions made during HP's frenzied buying spree of the past year and a half. During Oracle's OpenWorld conference earlier this month, HP CEO Mark Hurd made it clear that his company intends to strengthen its software offerings. The focus, he said, would be primarily on applications large companies use to manage, store and access all the disparate applications and information they collect in their datacenters. "We're really focused on this space," Hurd said during the conference. "We want to lead in that category. These datacenters are becoming more expansive. We're focused on network, systems and storage management that's morphing into a new category that's similar to ERP in its needs for the enterprise." Automated Operations 1.0 includes IT service management, business service management and business service automation applications. The suite's promise is to eliminate all the time-consuming manual processes required to coordinate corporate data running on heterogeneous applications and architectures within a datacenter. "We have been aggressively expanding our software portfolio in the last two years to broaden and deepen our capabilities to help customers improve their top and bottom lines," Tom Hogan, senior vice president of HP's software division, said in a statement. The new offering also serves notice to competitors such as IBM and CA that HP intends to make itself right at home in the fast-growing asset management software sector, a market that IDC predicts will swell to more than $1 billion in 2008. HP's software sales last quarter doubled from the year earlier, clocking in at almost $700 million. It expects to record more than $2.3 billion in software sales this year and company officials said software represents the company's fast-growing and most profitable unit. As a result -- and despite spending $4.5 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively, for Mercury Interactive and Opsware in the past sixteen months -- HP is signaling plans to make further acquisitions in the near future. "I think you'll see continued industry consolidation," Hurd said during OpenWorld. "Only a few companies, if you went and did an analysis of all the companies, are well positioned financially and technologically to make significant acquisitions. In the end, math wins. Only a handful%26#151;single digits%26#151;have more than $100 million in cash. We're going to see more consolidation, not less."

Dell Sinks Despite Solid Results

Dell shares fell 7% late Thursday despite much better than expected quarterly sales, as traders focused on margin pressures and a cautious outlook from the company. Dell's third-quarter sales rose 9% from the year-ago quarter to $15.65 billion, well ahead of $15.34 billion estimates. But pro forma earnings of 35 cents a share merely met Wall Street estimates, raising pricing concerns. Dell said it no longer will provide guidance, and the little it gave was cautious: "near-term results could be adversely impacted by a slower decline in component costs and a seasonal shift in mix to U.S. consumer and international regions," the company said. Dell also said it may engage in further restructuring and headcount reduction. Mobility product sales rose 19%, while server and storage sales rose 8%. Desktop sales were off 1%, "as the industry continues to shift towards mobility," the company said. "We embarked this year on a long-term strategy to re-ignite growth, and our Q3 results indicate we're making solid progress through investments in five key business priorities %26#151; consumer, emerging countries, notebooks, enterprise and small/medium business," CEO Michael Dell said in a statement. But Dell's reinvigorated consumer and retail business raised concerns that its business mix could be moving toward lower-margin areas. The company also said it was seeing some caution from financial customers, but that demand remains strong. Stocks posted modest gains during the day, as traders digested Wednesday's huge gains and awaited a key speech Thursday night from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. Sears fell 10% on disappointing results, yet had little effect on the broader market, which remains focused on hopes for more Federal Reserve rate cuts. E*Trade fell 8% despite a $2.6 billion cash infusion and news that its chairman and CEO were both stepping down. AMD lost 2% on company comments that pricing remains competitive. TiVo soared 25% on better than expected sales. VMware rose 3.6% on a Merrill Lynch upgrade, and Sigma Designs gained 10% on an RBC Capital upgrade. The Nasdaq climbed 5 to 2668, the S%26amp;P added 1 to 1469, and the Dow rose 22 to 13,311. Volume fell to 3.5 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.17 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by an 18-15 margin on the NYSE, and 16-13 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 45% on the NYSE, and 50% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 50-142 on the NYSE, and 83-144 on the Nasdaq.