Leo Lastimosa and Kapamilyas

Merlou Gerzon and Merlie Neri

Francis Cabas

Marlon Melgazo

Donna Ocampo

Alan Almendras

iNTouch Ad Features Leo Lastimosa

3-G Phone

Cell phone as PC hard disk? Built-in memory good for three full movies or 700 music files? Samsung launches its latest cellular phone in Korea today. Read more...

VoIP: Internet Phone Revolution

Phone bills in the Philippines and all over the globe should drop by at least 95%, thanks to VoIP. But PLDT, Globe and other telephone companies would not let consumers enjoy the fruits of this revolutionary technology.

Call DYAB Absolutely FREE

DYAB AM is the only radio station in the Philippines which you can call from anywhere in the world absolutely free.  Thanks to DB Edwards' VOIP technology through iNTouch, you can call us from 4 a.m. to 12 midnight (Philippine time), Mondays to Fridays.  All you need is a headset.

 

You can greet your Kapamilyas in Cebu and the Visayas and Mindanao over the AM radio station of ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. in Cebu Philippines .  You can also use our Internet Phone to air public service announcements for your families and friends in the Philippines.

 

Or you can tell us situationers/updates/comments about major news events in your place of work or urgent concerns of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs).  Let DYAB AM serve as your bridge to government agencies which can help you or your loved ones, like the Dept. of Foreign Affairs (DFA), Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), the Office of the President, local government units (LGUs) and private employment and placement agencies.

 

Bawat Pinoy Kapamilya.

 

Tawag Na!

Print IPods

SOMETIMES what appears to be a threat is actually a life preserver.

The poor defenseless music industry cowered - then prosecuted - when the monster of digital downloads came lurching over the horizon. Then the iPod came along and music looks like a business again - a smaller business, eked out in 99- cent units - but still a business.

Cable channels were supposed to gut network television, but instead have become a place where shows like "Seinfeld" and "Law and Order" are resold and rewatched. The movie industry reacted to DVD's as though they were a sign of the imminent apocalypse, and now studios are using their libraries to churn profits.

Which brings us to the last of the great analog technologies, the one many of you are using right now.

The newspaper business is in a horrible state. It's not that papers don't make money. They make plenty. But not many people, or at least not many on Wall Street, see a future in them. In an attempt to leave the forest of dead trees and reach the high plains of digital media, every paper in the country is struggling mightily to digitize its content with Web sites, blogs, video and podcasts.

And they are half right. Putting print on the grid is a necessity, because the grid is where America lives. But what the newspaper industry really needs is an iPod moment.

According to a nifty piece of polling, directed by Bob Papper of Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., and released last week, average Americans spend more time online, on the phone, punching the remote, the radio and the game console than they do sleeping - a total of nine hours a day. And much of the time, they are using more than one medium simultaneously, answering e-mail messages while returning calls with a TV buzzing in the background.

For all the print newspaper's elegance - it is a very portable, searchable technology - it has some drawbacks. A paper is a static product in a dynamic news age, and while every medium is after eyeballs, the industry has to take that quite literally. You cannot read this story while driving in your car - which is how most of America commutes - and you cannot have it on in the background. America is hooked on "companion" media, a pet platform that sits in the corner and pays attention to you when you pay attention to it.

No wonder that print is taking a hit. In the Ball State study, the Internet in all of its incarnations beat out reading print materials in all forms in every age bracket up to 65.

Print's anachronisms, whether it is the last-mile delivery, the slaying of forests, or the sale of thick packages that most consumers use only small slices of, make change inevitable once a better answer is available.

Consider if the line between the Web and print matter were erased by a device for data consumption, not data entry - all screen, no baggage - that was uplinked and updated constantly: a digital player for the eyes, with an iTunes-like array of content available at a ubiquitous volume and a low, digestible price.

Sure, there are tablet PC's and so-called viewpads out there, but they need to boot every time they are used - they are just computers without keyboards. The iPod was not a new kind of CD player, it was a new way of listening to music. And the dangling white headphones became something that brought joy to the ears and also cachet to the wearer.

"There are all sorts of devices coming along," said Dick Brass, who built the first spelling checker that worked and a format for e-books for Microsoft. "When something is good enough and close enough to paper for people to say, 'I want to use this,' then things will change quickly as they have with the iPod."

Newspapers might live long on such devices, but again, there are hurdles, some technical, some economic.

"It looks simple to come up with a tablet that works, but it is not," said Esther Dyson, a consultant on digital issues. "In order to have the power and portability you need, you need power. The screen is the part of the device that uses the most power."

Mr. Brass and others have suggested that superthin lithium batteries will do the trick, or that the power source can be built into the spine of a fold-out two-page device.

But even when such a gadget is finally in a form consumers will glom onto, newspapers will have to fight for space and mindshare. And it is axiomatic thus far that online customers are much lower-margin customers than print customers. Because there is no scarcity of ad space on the Web, you cannot charge nearly so much for a banner ad on a page with millions of hits as you can for a double-page spread in a national paper.

The real peril of the industry has been the uncoupling of the editorial model - still salient if the Hurricane Katrina coverage is any indication - from the business model, which relies in part on classified advertising. The Web gives classifieds a functionality that print will never match. (Thank you, Craigslist.) And everybody knows consumers on the Web do not want to pay for what they can get free, right?

Maybe not. As iTunes has demonstrated, there is a vast swath of consumers who are willing to pay for what they want and avoid the moral taint of unauthorized use.

There is already a crisscross of intention on the part of the current content providers. The primary gesture of Google and Yahoo - search is actually content - is now being woven with video, paid columnists and, ye gads, even some reporters. Television networks are beginning to explore whether people would pay for an on-demand version of their product. Blogs are federating into verticals of quality to be sold to advertisers. Broadcast radio worries about competition from satellite radio while satellite wonders if it can get people to unplug their iPods.

That is the future that newspapers have to prepare for. Readers no longer care so much who you are, they just want to know what you know.

That may sound grim for big media brands, the kind of proposition that will not provide enough cash flow to finance a squad of reporters examining what a hurricane left behind or venturing out onto the streets of Baghdad. But in a frantic age where the quality of the information can be critical, being a reliable news source humming away in everyone's backpack sounds just useful enough to be a business.

Iraq Porn?

CBS News

Army: No Felony in Release of Corpse Pics
Guardian Unlimited 
By ROBERT BURNS. WASHINGTON (AP) - After an initial look at complaints about US soldiers posting photos of Iraq war dead on an Internet site, Army investigators concluded they had too little evidence to pursue criminal charges. ...
Did Soldiers Trade Photos of Iraq Dead for Porn? ABC News
US probes Iraq net body pictures BBC News
Aljazeera.com - CNN International - Ireland Online  - Washington Post - all 165 related »

Smart Phone

Microsoft, partners step up 'smart phone' war

Glenn Chapman
Agence France-Presse

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft has teamed up with mobile computer maker Palm and telecom giant Verizon on a new "smart phone" aiming to grab market share from the popular Blackberry device.

The world's biggest software group and the two partners will combine their marketing clout to take on established "smart phone" devices using the Blackberry platform developed by Canada's Research in Motion.

"Most people carrying a Blackberry today still have a mobile phone," Allen Bush of Palm told AFP. "That idea is just ludicrous to us; that in this day and age, you can't combine that elegantly."

A new "Windows Mobile" telephone that doubles as a hand-held computer with features including being synchronized with popular Microsoft Outlook messaging and scheduling software should be in US stores by early 2006, said Palm's chief executive officer Ed Collie.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called the telephone "more than a milestone" and said it is designed to make users feel as though "Hey, I've got Outlook in my pocket."

Bush predicted it wouldn't be a "winner take all" battle with Blackberry, but that it was more likely to become a market with many competing devices.

"I think the market is converging now," Douglas Smith of Microsoft told AFP. "This a natural step that all things go mobile. This is where it has all been leading."

Users of the new Treo phone developed by Palm will have Microsoft software connected to Verizon's broadband EV-DO network capable of transferring huge amounts of data "lightning fast," said Verizon president Denny Strigl.

"I think we've hit a sweet spot," said Colligan.

Gates, Colligan and Strigl refused to discuss how much the mobile phone would cost or say anything about a radio feature engineered into the device.

Company marketing people said the "smartphone" would likely be priced at the high end of a market currently ranging from 199 to 599 dollars.

The Treo uses a Microsoft operating system to link users to multiple e-mail accounts and even view Powerpoint presentations.

The companies have been developing the telephone for years, using code names derived from 1960s rock bands and children's television program Sesame Street in a project jokingly referred to as "the worst-kept secret in the industry."

"Palm always did great work, so we lusted after some of those things they did well," Gates said. "Likewise, Verizon worked well with most Windows devices online. The strategy is to draw on our strengths."

Company officials said the announcement was timed to give "the 640,000 developers writing applications today" a chance to tailor products and uses for the Windows Treo.

The companies are aiming to capture a major portion of approximately 126 million business people who use Microsoft software to coordinate work, e-mail and scheduling in their work places, Gates said.

Verizon's high-speed network reaches half the nation's population, Strigl said, making it more accessible than the Wi-Fi system used by laptop computers.

"You don't have to go three blocks to find a [Wi-Fi] hot spot," Strigl said.

"I might add you don't have to drink a cup of coffee," he said, taking a jab at cafes that offer wireless computer connections to customers.

Colligan conceded that Palm and Microsoft have competed vigorously in the past.

"Sometimes partners compete and competitors partner," Colligan said. "And that is what is happening here."

Gates said the only problem he expected with the Treo was "keeping it in stock."

Sony's Comeback

Sony chief to outline plan to revive ailing icon

Agence France-Presse

TOKYO -- Sony chief executive Howard Stringer unveils a three-year plan Thursday aimed at reversing a slump at the Japanese electronics icon, in the first major test for the British-born former journalist.

The 63-year-old executive, the first foreigner ever to take the helm at Sony, is expected to focus on the company's core electronics division, which has been mired in losses for the past two years.

While further cost cuts seem likely, analysts say Stringer must also reverse a slump in sales to secure the future of the sprawling electronics and entertainment conglomerate, which was born from the ashes of World War II.

Though it is also known for movies and music, the company which brought the world the transistor radio, Walkman and PlayStation still relies on electronics for 70 percent of its 67 billion dollars in annual sales.

But it is now lagging behind rivals such as Sharp and Panasonic brand-maker Matsushita in the television market and struggling to challenge Apple's lead in the market for digital music players.

Stiff price competition and loss of market share to rivals saw Sony post its first back-to-back quarterly loss in the three months to June and drastically slash its forecast for the year.

"What the market is hoping is that they clearly show concrete steps to improve their electronics business," said Mitsuhiro Osawa, an analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities.

While cost cuts, layoffs and the sale of non-core businesses would help boost profitability, investors also want to know how Sony will boost sales.

"Sony's previous business plan seemed to focus on costs and less on the product line-up," said Osawa.

In 2003 the company announced 20,000 job cuts over three years as part of a "Transformation 60" plan to trim costs and put its media, entertainment and electronics units on the same path ahead of its 60th anniversary in 2006.

The company is now considering floating its financial unit but has denied reports it is planning to sell the subsidiary, as well as a stake in a satellite broadcaster, in a move that could lead to substantial layoffs.

However, Sony declined to comment on reports that it would stop development of new picture-tube television models and reorganize assembly plants in 11 countries abroad, including the United States, to switch to flat TVs.

Welsh-born Stringer, or "Sir Howard" as he is known since being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999, has a hard act to follow.

The only other foreign executive to head a major Japanese company was Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born Frenchman credited with turning around Nissan Motor after his appointment in 1999 when France's Renault took a controlling stake.

At the company's annual general meeting in June, Stringer was asked by a shareholder about his proficiency in Japanese. He replied that he was a foreigner "but first and foremost I am a Sony warrior."

Sony's meteoric rise began almost 60 years ago in Japan's bombed-out capital when Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded a company to repair damaged radios.

Its first product was a rice-cooker. It went on to bring the world myriad other gadgets, becoming a global icon and symbol of Japan's post-war technological might.

Computer Sales

Computer sales in Asia Pacific tipped to grow 15% in 2005

Agence France-Presse

SINGAPORE--Computer sales in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan are tipped to rise by almost 15 percent to 40.03 million in 2005, led by strong demand for notebooks as prices tumble, an industry report said Wednesday.

Growth is expected to continue in 2006 with a projected increase of 12.2 percent to nearly 45 million units, research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) said.

"Notebooks were on fire this past quarter with the spread of low prices and increased awareness in mature and developing countries alike," said Bryan Ma, IDC's regional associate director of personal systems research.

According to IDC, sales of notebook computers in 2005 are expected to increase 35.7 percent, compared with 10.2 percent for desktop computers.

Personal computer (PC) demand will be strongest in the emerging markets of China and India, with other South Asian countries expected to offer significant growth prospects.

"The PC markets in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, though small at the moment, represent burgeoning opportunities in the region, particularly in the business and public sectors," said Andrew Wong, IDC's research manager.

"All of these markets are highly fragmented with a few strong local vendors and a large assembler/whitebox market.

"This represents an opportune time for multinational vendors to respond competitively in order to try to achieve increased penetration in these markets."

China will remain biggest market, with almost 48 percent of the region's sales in 2005 expected to come from the Asian economic powerhouse, IDC said.

Its neighbor India, the second largest PC market in Asia, is expected to clock the fastest sales growth rate of 30.1 percent this year and 25.6 percent next year on the back of buoyant economic growth, IDC said.

For mature markets like Hong Kong and South Korea, computer sales growth rates are expected to be modest, IDC said, without giving specific figures.

International Data Corp.

P.5 B Hike in Phone Bills

Govt’s ‘phone and postage’ bill rose by P.5 B in ‘04
NG cellphone expense up by 50%, LGUs by 124 %

Government’s “phone and postage” bill rose by almost
half a billion pesos in 2004 compared to the previous
year, mostly due to an increase in cellular phone use
by government officials, Sen. Ralph Recto said.

Recto said national government agencies,
government-owned or -controlled corporations, and
local government units spent P3.724 billion for
“postage, landline and mobile telephone use, and
internet, cable, telegraph expenses” in 2004.

This amount, under what is grouped in the government
as “communication expenses,” is P447 million or 14
percent higher than the P3.277 billion it shelled out
for the same purpose in 2003.

Last year, national government agencies racked up a
total of P1.897 billion in communication bills from
P1.666 billion in 2003, while GOCCs added P1.116
billion (2003 : P967 M) and local governments, P710
million (2003 : P644 M).

The increase, Recto pointed out, was largely due to
the rise in mobile phone billings.

Cellular phone use in national government agencies, he
said, jumped by almost 50 percent, thereby increasing
their bill from P168 million in 2003 to P251 million
last year.

Local governments, on the other hand, more than
doubled their mobile phone expense, from P72.6 million
in 2003 to P163 million the following year.

The consolidated Commission on Audit financial report
on GOCCs, which was the basis of Recto’s findings, did
not, however, contain a breakdown of the communication
expenses spent by government corporations.

“But it is safe to assume that our more techno-savvy
friends in the GOCC sector increased their mobile
phone use,” he said.                                  
         

While telephone use has been on the rise, payment of
postage by both NG agencies and LGUs, on the other
hand, has been declining.  NG spent P176 million in
2004, down from P199 million in 2003, and the latter,
following the same downhill trend, from P25 million in
2003 to P21 million last year.

While public offices, like the rest of the nation, are
staying away from post and telegraph offices, more and
more of them are hitting the information highway to
send out communication.

Recto said the cost of LGUs’ internet subscription
tripled to P19 million in 2004, while more NGs are
being wired, as shown by a 25 percent increase, or to
P159 million, in their internet fees.

“Even in the bureaucracy, where manual typewriters
still rule in some pockets, email now beats snail
mail,” he said.

As telephone density increases, Recto expects a yearly
rise in the phone and internet expenses of the
1.3-million strong bureaucracy.

“This is not bad per se, for as long as this form of
technology would increase government productivity,
improve public services and make public officials more
accessible to the people. Who doesn’t want a police
car that is just a text away, or asking for a
government document by a click of a mouse?” he said.

“However, the convenience to the public that
e-governance brings should not be abused by officials
who use government communication resources for their
own private use,” he said.

“This is where the DBM and the CoA should come in by
imposing reasonable ceilings on the usage of a phone
or internet facility by an authorized government
employee without sacrificing efficiency in service,”
he said.

“Computers are not for personal chatting, but for
public service. One should not use his government-paid
cellular phone in checking on the maid at home if the
children had eaten supper,” he said.

IT Youth

Youth congress draws big crowd of knowledge-hungry students

Alexander Villafania
INQ7.net

THE THIRD Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology (Y4IT) has drawn its biggest crowd to date, nearly 7,000 students from high schools and colleges nationwide, one of its organizers said.

Y4IT was held from September 15 to 17, highlighting current events in the IT industry in the field of e-learning, video game development, the contact center business, open source programming, network security, robotics, wireless communications technologies and bio-informatics, among others.

UP assistant vice president for development Jaime D.L. ; said delegates came from as far north as Batanes province and as far south as Tawi-Tawi province. He said the UP Theater where they held the three-day even was unable to accommodate the throngs of students that continued to arrive.

"We had to refuse entry to other students because the UP Theater was already full up to the lobby. These students had to brave the rain just to attend," Caro said, adding that the UP Theater could only sit 2,000.

Caro added that they had almost doubled the number of attendees since they started in 2003.

He attributed the increase to the growing interest of students in IT careers.

"For many of these students it was their first time to see the presentations that we lined up during the last three days so they were really happy to get the big picture about the whole IT industry," Caro said.

Y4IT was organized by the University of the Philippines' Information Technology Training Center, the Department of Science and Technology's Virtual Center for Technology Innovation, and the Diliman Computer Science Foundation Inc.

For next year, Caro said, they might shift the event's format to breakout sessions to allow students to choose which IT tracks to attend. The UP Film Center next to the UP Theater could also be used for next year's Y4IT.

Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology (Y4IT)

Media Technology

Viewpoint : Backward into the future

Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service

NO other province marks, as Cebu does, Press Freedom Week. Come the third week of September, the Cebu media set aside fierce competition to mark together in unique ceremonies the occasion when martial law shackled, 33 years ago, liberty of expression.

"Slavery was the price tag for democratic survival … Ferdinand Marcos told us that fateful night," their 1998 pooled editorial recalled. "Revisiting [this] 'enforced unanimity of the graveyard' can be useful."

"'Salvage' [summary execution] victims and massive corruption … underscored the awesome penalty exacted when propagandists masquerade as journalists," was the shared view of five dailies, 34 radio and eight TV stations. "Today, far too many take freedom of the press as a constitutional given, 'constant as the northern star.'"

The week's activities range from forums on professional issues, journalism films, exhibits, an opening Mass, preceded by a freedom walk, plus socials. Pooled editorials are a fixture.

At the Fernan-Cebu Press Center, the 2005 sessions will cover press councils, radio commentator murders to strained government-media relations. "Three Prisms On A Troubled Craft" has an editor, a foreign correspondent, and a priest assess this complex calling.

A review of past Press Freedom Weeks reflects concerns of newsmen who cover this major metropolis.

Hoodwinking is widespread where power seekers, on front pages and prime time, besiege brittle institutions, noted "An Itch to Stampede," Tuesday's pooled editorial. Targets include the presidency, the military, the Church and local governments.

Parrot-like replays of bogus claims by power seekers flub ethical standards and spawn scandal frenzies. "This erodes our most critical asset: credibility." The editorial quoted Inquirer columnist Solita Monsod: "I want no part of what has to be called the lynch-mob mentality that seems to grip this nation ... and the media are partly to blame."

"Accuracy + balance + completeness + detachment + ethics = fairness" is how Freedom Forum puts the issue. The media must hone their ability to set off patently false public statements with facts and context. "Otherwise, politicians will continue to dupe us."

Value-rooted competence is a constant theme. "Smell the demographics," an earlier commentary suggested. "They tell [us] … a new generation of journalists are moving up the geriatric escalator into key policy posts here. Many are post-martial law baby-boomers. A number are women. Some are better trained than their elders.

"It's also a generation that wonders aloud: In journalism as in other professions, moral shabbiness exudes pus. The stench offends. If we think otherwise, we should have our heads examined."

Restoration of liberty of expression, by people power, is a "gift with strings attached," Press Freedom Week's first editorial said. "But make no mistake about it. This is not constitutional largesse for those who carry a press card. Nor are we just complacent beneficiaries of unbridled reporting or comment."

"We are, first and last, trustees of this gift," it asserted. "As stewards, we're tasked to use the latitude this freedom provides for what is just and good."

The week offers something for the young and for the graying, the 2000 editorial, "Cathedrals Without a Soul," pointed out.

"This counterpoint is deliberate… Our young have patchy memories of the dictatorship. Few recall that ordinary citizens, massed as 'People Power' on Edsa, risked all to return liberty to them. 'Utang na loob' unfortunately doesn't flourish in a vacuum."

But the elderly "bear scars from the trauma inflicted by the 'New Society's' censored rags and gagged stations." The week offers "a chance for quiet recommitment to this fountainhead of other liberties. 'Nunca Mas.' Never Again."

Renewal is anchored in "the resistance set by journalists of a tougher mould": Joaquin "Chino" Roces, Teodoro Locsin Sr., James Reuter, SJ, Jose Burgos, among others. They underscore a dog-eared but often-forgotten truism: "We journalists build on sand, if we work by values less enduring than integrity."

"Building New Cisterns," in 2003, sharply reminds journalists of their debt to forebears. Today's press "basks complacently in liberties that earlier generations of journalists fought for… [But] we drink from cisterns we never built. And we reap from vineyards we never planted."

That debt is partly paid off by unflagging dedication to daily truth-seeking -- a grueling task in a society of skewed privilege. Here, "the powerful exact what they want and the poor grant what they must."

The press must perform as a fair -- and perceptive -- one. "Journalists who come after us will also need cisterns of press freedom. We, too, must replenish that for them."

Technology, meanwhile, radically recasts the tools -- and those who work in it. E-mail and the cell phone, for example, have whittled away at the traditional face-to-face oversight that editors exercised over reporters.

"Thirty years ago, there was no Internet, no cable TV, no online newspapers, no blogs," recalls Richard Posner in his book, "Bad News." "The public's consumption of the news used to be like sucking on a straw. Now it's being sprayed like a fire hose…."

Technology merely underscores the urgency of fostering value-anchored competence in a country where the needy are bought for a pair of sandals. "Affirm that dream in a time of trouble and we need not walk backward into the future."

New Domains

Internet Oversight Board OKs New Domains

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer

 

The Internet's key oversight agency approved a domain name for the Catalan language Thursday while deferring final action on creating a red-light district on the Internet through a ".xxx" suffix.

Creating the ".cat" suffix for individuals, organizations and companies that promote the Catalan language and culture was relatively uncontroversial. Though the language is spoken largely in certain regions of Spain, backers say a domain name could unify Catalan speakers who live in France, Italy, Andorra and elsewhere. The name could begin appearing in use next year.

As for ".xxx," the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers deferred final approval for the second time in as many months.

The board decided to seek changes to a proposed contract with ICM Registry Inc., the Jupiter, Fla., that would run the domain name for voluntary use by the adult entertainment industry. No details were immediately available on the changes sought.

The ".xxx" domain has met with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites, and ICANN postponed a final decision last month after the U.S. government stepped in just days before a scheduled meeting to underscore objections it had received. ICANN had given a preliminary OK in June.

ICM argues the domain would help the $12 billion online porn industry clean up its act. Those using the domain would have to abide by yet-to-be-written rules designed to bar such trickery as spamming and malicious scripts. ICM would charge $60 per name.

Anti-porn advocates, however, countered that sites would be free to keep their current ".com" address, in effect making porn more easily accessible by creating yet another channel to house it.

And they say such a domain name would legitimize adults sites, which two of every five Internet users visited in April, according to tracking by comScore Media Metrix.

Many porn sites also objected, fearing that such a domain would pave the way for governments — the United States or repressive regimes abroad — or even private industry to filter speech that is protected here under the First Amendment.

ICANN was selected by the U.S. government in 1998 to oversee Internet addressing policies, although the Commerce Department retains veto power over decisions. More than 260 domain name suffixes exist, mostly country codes such as ".fr" for France. Recent additions include ".eu" for the European Union and ".mobi" for mobile services.

Although ICANN was to consider the ".asia" domain during Thursday's teleconference board meeting, it took no action on establishing a unified domain for the Asia-Pacific community.

Gates on Google, et al

Gates on Apple, Google -- and Microsoft's future

By TODD BISHOP
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft Corp. is grappling with "a lot of smart competitors," including Google and Apple, who are ahead of the Redmond company in some key markets, Bill Gates acknowledges.

But the Microsoft chairman on Tuesday said his company remains the overall industry leader, and he compared the current rivalries to legendary ones with Lotus, Novell and WordPerfect -- situations in which the Redmond company ultimately overcame steep odds to prevail.

	Gates

"At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something," Gates said in an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, underscoring the fact that it wouldn't be unprecedented to come from behind now.

That was one of the subjects addressed by Gates during the interview at the company's Professional Developers Conference, where Microsoft is seeking to rally support for Windows Vista and Office 12, the next versions of its dominant PC software programs. Among other things, the company showed plans to shift away from traditional drop-down menus to a new "ribbon" of commands across the top of the widely used Office programs.

Gates answered questions on a wide range of topics, including Microsoft's growth prospects in the Seattle region, its ambitions in China, and efforts to shore up the security of its software. Edited excerpts from the interview:

Q: You showed Office 12 here for the first time today. How do you think users are going to react when they see such a different look?

Gates: Well, this is the world's most popular application, and people sit and use it hours and hours a day, and so any advance we make in Office can actually drive up global productivity in a significant way. For years we've had the user interface confined to just these 2-D menus.

As Office has gotten richer, we knew that was a very limiting thing. It just wasn't very visual and so now, what we've done, it is a big deal. If you're a Word user, it should only take you 10 or 15 minutes to see how those things are laid out, so it's not like you're starting over. All the same concepts are there. The capabilities are there, and you will find yourself using more of the product.

You'll hear some people say, "Yikes, this is a change," but pretty quickly you'll hear from people about what a timely and important change it is.

Q: Companies such as Google and Apple have taken the lead in some key areas. Are Windows Vista and Office 12 a chance for you to recapture some of that buzz, and show that Microsoft plans to remain a central figure in the software industry?

Gates: Well, if you look at software very broadly -- productivity software, software tools -- Microsoft is the leader in way more respects than anyone else. Driving the research that will give us speech recognition and vision, and all of those big hard things that you've got to take a long-term approach in.

At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something. Novell was the best at file servers. Lotus was the best at spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best at word processing.

Right now, because of the breadth of what we do, we have that in many areas. Nokia is way ahead of us in phones; we're closing the gap. Sony is ahead of us in video games. We're just on the verge of something (the Xbox 360) that will help us close the gap there. In Web search, Google is the far-away leader. Big honeymoon for them. Even if they do "me, too" type stuff, people think, "wow." And Apple in music has done a fantastic job.

We've got all these areas -- like tablet computing, this Internet connectivity, or taking presentation to a new level, office productivity -- where we're just out there in front and we just need to keep pushing the frontiers.

In those areas where somebody else has done well, that's great. We'll match what they do, we'll bring new things to it, do it better and integrate it in with other things. And so it's very healthy for the consumer. We see that in search, we see it in music. It's not new at all that that's out there.

Q: Are there any features of Windows Vista that the U.S. antitrust settlement is keeping you from including, that you would otherwise want to include?

Gates: We're not being prevented from including features, and that's the strength of the settlement that we reached with the Justice Department and others. There's quite a bit of process we go through to make sure that the way we're putting them in and exposing them to third parties, that we're meeting all the requirements of that. But it's not preventing us from being very, very innovative and making it as rich as we want to.

Q: I wondered, for example, if you might want to build in antivirus protections into Windows if not for the antitrust situation.

Gates: Well, there's a ton of security capability that we are building in to Windows Vista. The whole thing about spyware, malware, phishing, a lot of things that support antivirus. The actual capability of getting updated signatures, that's something you need on an ongoing basis, so you need to ship that separately from the operating system itself and so we will have a way that people sign up from that separate from the operating system.

Q: What will Windows Vista do for computer security, and for Microsoft's security reputation in general?

Gates: Ever since I put out the big security memo talking about that as our top priority, we've been gaining a lot of respect for how seriously we're taking it, and the steps we've taken. People have seen visible progress in terms of the ease of securing their systems, some reduction in the spam that's out there.

Now that doesn't mean that the bad guys aren't always trying to find something new. Phishing is the big thing they're doing right now. And so there will be constant innovation in these areas, invention, the need to educate customers how they set their systems up in the right way.

But in terms of making it something that doesn't really hold the industry back and Microsoft is viewed as a leader in terms of our investments, and our predictability and showing the framework for how we're doing this, we have made immense progress. We can see that when we go out and survey customers. They want more, and we're not done in any way, but they appreciate the progress and the attitude we're showing.

Q: Some people hold Microsoft most accountable for security problems, even though software flaws are exploited by "bad guys," as you said. Is that a fair criticism?

Gates: Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not. As we use the Internet to connect everyone up, then the need to essentially have suspicion and only listen to certain other systems, and if flaws come up to have those updated very quickly, that became a new requirement.

Because Microsoft is the biggest software company and so successful, we should be held responsible for coming up with those things. We've got to push the state of the art, we've got to be the one to solve those problems.

Q: You've said that this will be the most significant release of Windows since 95. Do you have any hope or expectation of recapturing the consumer excitement that accompanied that particular launch?

Gates: I'm sure we'll have some of that. The PC is so broad now compared to back in 1995, it's not quite as radical. Everybody has got a PC. I don't know if we'll use the same kind of midnight madness type things. We're seeing a lot of that in our Xbox world, where when we do a new version of 'Halo,' we do this Xbox 360, because it's very consumer oriented, we see just such mass enthusiasm.

Q: The economy has been rebounding, and Microsoft's hiring has remained steady, but at pretty much the same pace over the past few years. Do you envision that hiring rebounding in the coming years in the Seattle area?

Gates: We have been hiring people in Seattle. We see that continuing, I'm not sure I'd say at any different level than it's been at. The constraints on how many great engineers are there out there to hire will always put a ceiling on that. We're glad that we're adding people, but I wouldn't say we're entering some significantly new phase.

Q: Is outsourcing playing a role there, in lessening the amount of growth in the Seattle area?

Gates: Well, the economy is a very complex thing. We sell way more of our software overseas than we sell internally. That is, the U.S. disproportionately gets our R&D activity relative to the amount of software we sell in the U.S. And so, why has Microsoft ever been able to hire people? Because of world trade. So if people don't believe in letting other countries get rich and buy more U.S. products, if trade liberalization freezes up or goes backwards, that's a very bad thing for an export-oriented company like Microsoft.

We like the idea that China is developing their economy. They've taken more people out of poverty than any country in history over just even the last 10 years. We view those as a good thing. It does mean the world is getting a lot more competitive. We will have competitors arising out of these Asian countries. That's fine.

So I think the advances in the world economy largely have been positive, and we see that in the increasing sales in Asia, and without those our hiring growth couldn't be maintained.

Q: Last week you were scheduled to meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao before his U.S. trip was canceled. How much will China figure into Microsoft's future, and how will you overcome challenges there, such as open source software and piracy?

Gates: China is an amazing country, and I was very disappointed that it didn't work out for the President to come last week. I fully understand why the leaders decided that made sense. I'm very hopeful he'll come back to Seattle. It's going to be great to sit down and talk with him. I got to know his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, and now he's leading China in this new era.

We've been investing there, it's our long-term approach. I think China will set the standard in some ways in terms of efficiency, driving a new wave of companies into the world economy.

Q: One of the big pieces of news this week was Oracle's plan to acquire Siebel Systems. How would that deal affect the competitive landscape for Microsoft?

Gates: We've always had a good relationship with Siebel, and we'll do our best to keep that strong as they become part of Oracle. Oracle we do some things with and obviously compete in the database area. I don't think that acquisition overnight is a dramatic thing. It is part of a trend toward some consolidation that people want to simplify the software they run in their companies.

© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Blog Search Launched

New Google Search Engine Boosts 'Blogging'

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer

 

A new Google Inc. specialty search engine sifts through the Internet's millions of frequently updated personal journals, a long-anticipated development expected to help propel "blogging" into the cultural mainstream.

The new tool, unveiled Wednesday at http://blogsearch.google.com, focuses exclusively on the material contained in the journals known as Web logs, or "blogs."

Mountain View-based Google, the Internet's general search engine leader, first set its sights on blogs with its 2003 acquisition of a small startup called Blogger that makes software to publish and manage the journals.

Since that deal, Google had been expected to build a blogging-focused search engine — a mission finally accomplished by a group of by developers in the company's New York office.

"There really has been a need for a world-class search product to expose this dynamic content to a worldwide audience," said Jason Goldman, who came to Google in the Blogger deal and is now the company's product manager for blogging search.

Over the past two years, blogs have become an increasingly popular vehicle for sharing opinions and information, sometimes breaking news and more often prodding the mainstream media into reconsidering how it has handled some big stories.

First word of Google's new searching tool was, in fact, disseminated by a blog.

A few people have been able to make a living largely off their blogs, or parlay them into book deals. Blogs also have been a source of embarrassment and angst, resulting in the firings of several workers, including a Google product manager, who angered their employers with revelations posted on their sites.

No one knows for certain just how big the so-called "blogosphere" has become. Technorati, the niche's top search engine so far, says it indexes 17.1 million sites spanning about 1.5 billion links.

Goldman declined to disclose the size of Google's blogging index.

Despite blogging's steady growth, its appeal has remained narrow, skewing primarily to younger audiences and technological trendsetters.

But given Google's broad reach, its specialty search engine is expected to provide blogging with additional momentum. Google said to tool would allow searches not just for blogs written in English but also in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and other languages.

The appearance of the new Google tool, which catalogs the latest blog postings by looking at the Web feeds they generate, also makes it more likely that two other tech powerhouses and fierce rivals, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp., will develop a similar feature.

Microsoft's next operating system, Vista, is supposed to feature built-in tools for Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, and Atom — the two most widely used techniques for letting people subscribe to Web feeds to keep abreast of the latest postings on blogs and news sites.

"This sort of feels like 1995 when the Web was just starting to explode. Now it feels like the same thing is happening to blogging," said Bob Wyman, chief technical officer for PubSub, which offers a Web feed subscription service.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN already had been indexing blogs in their general search engines, but the broad approach reaps results that often buries blog links or points to outdated information.

By focusing exclusively on blog feeds, Google theoretically will be able to deliver fresher and more relevant results.

Google's expansion, coupled with the likely invasion of Yahoo and Microsoft, could spell trouble for the early specialty engines that have helped bolster blogging in its early stages. Besides Technorati, this group includes Feedster, IceRocket and DayPop.

Although the pioneers have played an important role in blogging's growth, they remain so small that only Technorati attracts enough visitors to register in the monthly Internet traffic measurements compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings.

Technorati drew 545,000 unique visitors last month, less than 1 percent of the 73.1 million that swarmed to Google's main search page, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

In a Wednesday posting on his blog, Technorati founder David Sifry welcomed Google's competition, describing it as "a validation moment for the blogosphere" and promising to counter with "some tricks up our sleeves."

Yahoo's Blunder

Yahoo Founder Explains China E-Mail Move
HANGZHOU, China -- Yahoo had to comply with a demand by Chinese authorities to provide information about a personal e-mail of a journalist who was later convicted under state secrecy laws and sentenced to 10 years in prison, the company's co-founder Jerry Yang said Saturday.
Yang, responding to questions during an Internet forum in this eastern Chinese resort city, said he could not discuss the details of the case involving Shi Tao, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News.
Overseas-based human rights groups disclosed days earlier that Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd., part of Yahoo's global network, provided e-mail account information that helped lead to Shi's conviction.
Yahoo earlier defended its move, saying it was obliged to comply with Chinese laws and regulations.
The demand for the information was a "legal order" and Yahoo gets such requests from law enforcement agencies all the time, and not just in China, Yang told the forum.
But he added, "I cannot talk about the details of this case."
Other Chinese journalists have faced similar charges of violating vague security laws as communist leaders struggle to maintain control of information in the burgeoning Internet era.
Despite government information sharing requirements and other restrictions, Yahoo and its major rivals have been expanding their presence in mainland China in hopes of reaching more of the country's fast-growing population of Internet users, which now number more than 100 million.
Yahoo paid $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com, host of the Hangzhou conference, last month.
New York-based Human Rights in China and the Paris-based international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter addressed to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who was a keynote speaker at the Internet forum, urging him to bring up Shi's case during his visit to China.
But Clinton only alluded to the risks faced by Internet users targeted by the authorities for whatever reason.
"The Internet, no matter what political system a country has, and our political system is different from yours, the Internet is having significant political and social consequences and they cannot be erased," he said.
"The political system's limits on freedom of speech ... have not seemed to have any adverse consequences on e-commerce," he said. "It's something you'll all have to watch and see your way through," he said.
According to Reporters Without Borders, court papers show that Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. gave Chinese investigators information that helped them trace a personal Yahoo e-mail to Shi's computer.
It says Shi was convicted for sending notes on a government circular spelling out restrictions on the media in his e-mail. He was seized in November at his home in the northwestern province of Shanxi.
The case is the latest instance in which a prominent high-tech company has faced accusations of cooperating with Chinese authorities to gain favor in a country that's expected to become an Internet gold mine.
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo and two of its biggest rivals, Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, previously have come under attack for censoring online news sites and Web logs, or blogs, featuring content that China's communist government wants to suppress.

Google Book

A book that googles Google
Review: 'The Search' offers depth, insight
By Michael LiedtkeAssociated Press

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Google Inc. is such an influential -- and potentially scary -- company that it deserves a book as comprehensive as the Internet search engine responsible for its whirlwind success.
Veteran technology journalist John Battelle comes close with "The Search," a 288-page exploration of the company whose dorm-room invention, initially spurned by dot-com entrepreneurs, is now synonymous with looking up information online.
Providing fresh insights and information about Google is difficult because so much already has been written about the Mountain View-based company since its 1998 inception. (Full disclosure: I've been a part of the media frenzy, having covered Google for the past five years.)
Battelle nevertheless manages to keep things compelling, adding his own trenchant analysis about what Google's rapid evolution and powerful technology might mean for the company and our society as a whole.
He views Google and other major search engines as invaluable windows into the world's interests and desires, a "database of intentions" destined to become the hub of 21st-century capitalism.
It doesn't drop any bombshells. But "The Search" excavates some intriguing new details about Google, culled from interviews with more than 350 people including Google's controlling triumvirate -- Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
That helps Battelle shed some light on the motives driving Google's braintrust.
For instance, the frustrating experiences of inventor Nikola Tesla -- perennially overshadowed by his more renowned peer, Thomas Edison -- inspired Page to develop products with practical applications as he set out to change the world.
Readers also will find out more about the origins of Google's iconoclasm, as well as who came up with Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto (it wasn't Page or Brin).
And there are some anecdotes that seem difficult to fathom now. Like when Page and Brin initially once tried to sell their search engine technology -- then called BackRub -- but couldn't find anyone willing to pay their $1.6 million asking price. Not long after that, they raised their first $100,000 from Sun Microsystems Inc. co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Page and Brin, who are now worth a combined $20 billion, celebrated by treating themselves to breakfast at Burger King.
Security questions
While Battelle obviously admires Google, his book isn't a fawning tribute.
"The Search" tackles such prickly subjects as the serious privacy concerns raised by the reams of data collected by Google's 175,000 computers about the millions of people who use the company's services each day.
At one point, Battelle paints a disturbing picture, sketching out a scenario in which the federal government could demand that Google provide personal information about its users in the name of national security.
If that were to happen, Google would have to notify all the affected parties, right? Not under the U.S. Patriot Act, which specifically forbids companies from making disclosures about government requests for information.
Didn't know that? Don't feel bad. Neither did Brin when Battelle asked him earlier this year about the potential perils of Google becoming a secret tool for the U.S. government.
This book isn't devoted exclusively to Google. It delves into the history of search without bogging down in the technical details likely to bore a mass audience.
Battelle explains how AltaVista might have become what Google is today if its innovations hadn't been mismanaged by Digital Equipment Corp. and Compaq Computer.
And there is an entire chapter devoted to serial entrepreneur Bill Gross, who developed the search advertising model that Google eventually copied and now relies on for most of its profits (Google eventually paid a licensing fee to Overture Services Inc., the company that Gross created and is now owned by Yahoo Inc.)
There isn't much drama in "The Search," but Battelle can't really be blamed.
After all, Google is still too young to have stirred up the tensions and turmoil that have spiced up so many other business sagas.
As Battelle notes, "The only thing Google has failed to do, so far, is fail."

Blog Search

Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search
By Chris Sherman
Google has introduced its long awaited blog search service, becoming the first major search engine to offer full-blown blog and feed search capabilities.
It's been nearly two and a half years since Google purchased Pyra Labs, the company that built the hugely popular Blogger publishing service, and Google has been promising blog search ever since then.
While Google web search has allowed you to limit results to popular blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results for some time, and its news search includes some blogs as sources, Google hasn't had a specialized tool to surface purely blog postings. In fact, while all of the major search engines have been dabbling with blog and feed search, none has done much with blog search until now.
Google's new service (in beta, naturally) is available both at google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com. Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtually real-time, according to Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search.
"We look for sites that update pinging services, and then we crawl in real-time so that we can serve up search results that are as fresh as we can," said Goldman.
Google defines blogs as sites that use RSS and other structured feeds and update content on a regular basis.
Although Google Blog search focuses primarily on content published to the blogosphere, it's not a true full-text search across all sources, according to Goldman. This is because some publishers only syndicate excerpts of content via RSS. Google's blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher's web server.
Google does use information garnered from its crawl of the web to identify potential blog sources, looking at meta data, links and other clues that might point to a feed. However, Google also respects the robots.txt protocol, and will not crawl any content that's disallowed by a publisher.
Google blog search results point primarily to individual blog postings, with a title and snippet from each—strongly resembling Google's web search results. In some cases, links to "related blogs" are presented at the top of search results if a query suggests that the user is looking for a particular blog rather than a specific blog posting.
Results are sorted by date, with recent posts appearing at the top of the list. You can also choose to sort results by relevance. Goldman says that while blog search uses its own unique approach to relevance ranking, it also draws a lot from Google's web search ranking algorithms.
Google blog search has an advanced search page and a number of commands are available. allowing you to limit searches by title, author and date or date range. You can also limit results to a specific language, or apply the Safe Search filter to results.
You can also discover who's linking to a post or blog using the link: command. Unlike Google web search, which sharply curtails the number of results displayed using link: command to discourage abuse by search marketers, the link: command in blog search displays a comprehensive and nearly complete list of sources linking to a particular post or blog.
You can also save a blog search as an alert that gets updated any time new content is posted matching you query. Google blog search allows you to issue a query and then subscribe to that query via your RSS feed reader, with either 10 or 100 results being displayed.
Goldman says that Google is not including news sources in blog search, except in rare cases, so there's little overlap between Google News and Google Blog search.
Google is not offering any means of submitting a blog or feed to the new service. However, if you publish a feed and want to include it in Google blog search, the easiest way to make sure it's included is to make sure your publishing system is set up to notify popular blog pingservers that are monitored by other blog search services. The easiest way to do this is via pingomatic, which can ping more than a dozen popular pingservers, according to Goldman.
Google Blog Search is available in English as well as Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, and Spanish, with additional languages promised soon.
For more information, see the Google Blog Search FAQ.
Now that Google has launched blog search, expect the other major search engines to follow suit fairly quickly. All have been feverishly working on blog search over the past year, and now that Google is first out the gate the others will likely move quickly. I'll circle back and take a closer look at blog search once all of major players have launched their services, most likely by the end of this year.

Blogs: Pluses/Minuses

Blogs can help boost a career or sink it
By Stacey Burling, Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA - Terrence Ryan knew Scott McNulty in passing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where they both work.
But it was McNulty's blog, or Web log, that made Ryan take a harder look. It showed Ryan that McNulty, a systems administrator, really knew computers. More important, it revealed his ``geeky love of technology,'' a personal quality that ``tends to work really well in our department,'' Ryan said.
Because of the blog, Ryan offered McNulty, 28, of Philadelphia, a promotion to systems programmer on a team responsible for information-technology services. McNulty took it.
He still writes his blog -- a blend of his musings on the personal and technical at blankbaby.typepad.com -- knowing that several of his co-workers and his bosses read it. ``It's had a very positive impact on my career,'' he said.
About 10 million Americans now write blogs, ranging from the confessional and edgy to the technical and mundane, estimates Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Thirty-five million read them.
For businesses, blogs and other forms of personal Internet communication constitute a new frontier fraught with promise and peril. On the one hand, companies are scrambling to use them as a recruiting and marketing tool, and are encouraging some employees to blog. On the other, they are wondering how to deal with the damage that current and former employees and dissatisfied customers can do on the Web.
The result is a ``mild level of social panic,'' Rainie said. ``The lawyers and the marketers are, in many cases, at least in covert war with each other.''
For the moment, much of the news falls into the ``cautionary tale'' category. In August, a California automobile club fired 27 workers for posting messages on the Web that offended co-workers. Not long before, a Boston University instructor was fired for blogging about a distractingly attractive student; a blogging nanny was fired for telling too much about herself and her employers, and a New York beauty editor lost a new job because of blogs about the fashion industry.
Andy Fox, a senior investigator who conducts background checks for Investigative Group International, said Internet searches on prospective employees were now commonplace. For high-profile jobs, he said, ``I'll run everything down on Google if it goes to 27 o's.'' Each o in a Google search is worth 10 entries.
Curt Hopkins, a 41-year-old freelance writer in Oregon, began keeping an online list of people whose blogs got them fired, disciplined, or rejected for new jobs after his own blog sidelined his quest for work at Minnesota Public Radio last year.
``It just seemed so antithetical to the notion of free speech,'' Hopkins said.
Michael Skoler, MPR's managing director of news, acknowledged that Hopkins' blog was an important factor in the decision not to hire him. He said he was concerned about Hopkins' use of profanity and name-calling. ``It didn't seem to represent good journalistic judgment,'' Skoler said.
Hopkins and others are now calling on companies to write blogging policies. ``My feeling is, whether you're an employer or an employee, you need to broach the topic,'' said Hopkins, who currently is figuring out how to protect bloggers in repressive countries.
International Business Machines Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have instituted blogging policies. Both focus on helping employees write entertaining blogs without revealing company secrets or offending suppliers and customers. IBM discourages anonymous blogging or covert marketing. Sun urges employees to expose their personalities but warns that ``a blog is a public place and you should avoid embarrassing your readers or the company.''
Tim Bray, Sun's director of Web technologies, said the company realized it needed the new rules as it prepared to encourage employee blogging and discovered an impediment. Sun had a policy ``that no one can say anything publicly without prior legal approval.'' With the new rules in place, more than 1,500 employees now have blogs hosted on the company's computer server.
In Newtown Square, Pa., software maker SAP America Inc., which wants employees to blog, is updating its media policy to include blogging. ``We encourage people to communicate, but to stay within their area of expertise,'' said Steve Bauer, vice president of global communications. As for private blogging, ``anything that would really go against our values as a company would be certainly discouraged.''
Jonathan Segal, a Philadelphia employment lawyer, said that overly restrictive policies or publicity about company attacks on bloggers could hurt a company, particularly if it wanted creative young employees. ``It may have the effect of driving talent away,'' he said.
Some companies have begun monitoring what is said about them in blogs or other Internet sites. But employment lawyers said big companies are unlikely to have the time or desire to regularly read every employee's blog. People are more likely to get in trouble when a meddlesome co-worker or offended customer tells higher-ups.
Still, employment lawyers caution that the 1st Amendment was designed to protect people from the government, not private employers. Only a few states have passed laws preventing companies from reaching into employees' private, legal activities.
All bloggers, they said, would be wise to write as if their bosses, future bosses or grandmothers were reading over their shoulders. While many currently are recommending that bloggers with incendiary messages write anonymously, some experts say that won't work if a company really wants to find out who you are. And it won't look good once you're caught.
``If you didn't think you were doing anything wrong, why did you hide your identity?'' Segal said company lawyers were likely to ask.
Heather Armstrong's Web address, dooce.com, spawned the verb used for someone fired for blogging, as in ``he was dooced.'' Bored and frustrated at work, the Web designer used her name as she wrote what she called ``caricatures'' of co-workers, but never named them or the software company where she worked. Someone sent the link to top executives. At 26, she was dooced.
Increasingly, people familiar with company hiring practices say, job-seekers should expect that the company will do an Internet search on them.
``Anybody who is hiring would be absolutely, totally nuts if they didn't ascertain whether somebody had a blog and, if they do, take a look at it,'' Sun's Bray said.
A blogger himself, Bray (www.tbray.org/ongoing/) knows Sun officials read his work before hiring him. After one interview, he asked, ``Is there anything else you need to know about me?''
``No, you're kind of an open source,'' his interviewer replied.
A fifth of companies currently perform general Internet searches on job candidates, according to a January survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.
Bette Francis, director of human resources for Strategic Products & Services in Cedar Knolls, N.J., started conducting Google searches of job candidates in February. So far, she hasn't found anything bad. The blogs she has seen have given her insight into the candidates' communication styles, work ethic and expertise. ``It's another piece of information,'' she said.
Bray believes that blogs can boost careers. Those who get in trouble for blogging likely have other problems, too.
``Those are the kind of people who would compromise their careers one way or another,'' he said. ``... Perhaps having a blog would speed that up.''
Marlyn Kalitan, senior vice president of career-management consulting at Right Management Consultants in Philadelphia, said blogs were like tattoos. What we think is fun and creative when we're young may be an indelible blemish later.
``You can't take the Internet so lightly anymore,'' said Kalitan, who helps people make career transitions. ``You can't think that this is just a fun toy, because it's not. It's a lasting record of who you are.''
At Wharton, Scott McNulty said his blog had grown more personal as more people he knew read it. But he remains circumspect about work. ``I've said I've had bad days,'' he said, ``but never, `I've had a bad day because Joe is an idiot.' That's not good territory to be in when everyone you work with reads your blog.''

Yahoo Mail Reloaded

Yahoo Launches Test of E-Mail Upgrade
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer
Yahoo Inc. will begin testing a sleeker version of its free e-mail service, shifting to a more dynamic design that mimics the look and feel of a computer desktop application like Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook.
The Sunnyvale-based company plans to invite a "sizable" portion of its current e-mail accountholders to experiment with the retooled service, said Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon, who declined to be more specific.
If the test goes well, all of Yahoo's e-mail users — an audience that spans tens of millions — eventually will be converted to the new system.
Yahoo imported most of the changes from Oddpost, an e-mail startup the company bought for an undisclosed amount last year.
The overhaul, described as the most extensive since Yahoo began offering free e-mail accounts eight years ago, represents the latest salvo in a technological tug-of-war for online traffic.
For the past two years, Yahoo and its main Internet rivals — Google Inc., AOL and Microsoft's MSN.com — have been unveiling a series of upgrades aimed at attracting and retaining their Web audiences so they remain appealing outlets for advertisers.
Google, which runs the Internet's most popular search engine, shook things up in the e-mail market last year by introducing a free service that included 250 times more storage than some of its rivals. Yahoo and MSN subsequently matched Google, which responded by more than doubling its e-mail storage limit to 2.5 gigabytes.
More recently, the major e-mail providers have been introducing other bells and whistles to keep their users happy and coming back for more ads. Yahoo's upgrade follows recent AOL improvements meant to make its e-mail service quicker and easier to use.
"Last year was the year of storage in e-mail, but now the real competition seems to be about who has the coolest user interfaces," Radicati Group analyst Marcel Nienhuis said.
Yahoo's e-mail service is currently leading the pack, with 63.6 million unique U.S. visitors during July, according to the most recent figures from comScore Media Metrix, a research firm. AOL ranked second with 48.7 million visitors followed by MSN's Hotmail (44.4 million), Comcast Corp.'s Webmail (5.6 million) and Google's Gmail (5.4 million).
With its changes, Yahoo's e-mail will look more like a traditional inbox that operates through a software program installed on a computer hard drive instead of being hosted on the Internet. Yet Yahoo's redesigned service still relies on a Web browser and won't require its users to install anything on their computers.
Using "dynamic" html, Yahoo's e-mail accounts will feature an inbox containing all e-mails on the top of the page with a separate pane for reading e-mail below it. The feature is meant to enable users to scroll through an e-mail folder without having to click back and forth between Web pages.
Yahoo's test audience also will use a computer mouse to "drag and drop" e-mails from one folder to another and search all the content, including attachments, stored in the inbox.
"Our competition has been doing some interesting things in e-mail, but we think we have leapfrogged them all with all these new features," said Ethan Diamond, an Oddpost co-founder who works for Yahoo as a director of product management.

Hackers' Haven

Hackers using free online tools to mask locations

Erwin Lemuel Oliva eoliva@inq7.net
INQ7.net

HACKERS are now using free online "tools" to mask the real location of attacks, a scary trend that both system administrators and law enforcer face today, a security expert said in a recent security summit in Manila.

"Hackers are now using spoofed Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to hide their real location," said Bitstop president Wilson Chua at the ManilaCon 2K5, Philippine IT Security Conference.

Hiding the real IP addresses or source of attacks poses a problem for law enforcers trying to pin down malicious hackers, Chua said.

So-called "privacy tools" have recently become available to hackers, Chua said. These tools usually allow anyone to mask their IP address with "proxy servers" available online.

The same privacy tools -- one developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--even randomly picks IP addresses to confuse security experts away from pinpointing the source of attacks, Chua said.

These privacy tools are designed mainly to allow users to mask their locations, especially in cases where their governments have strong censorship policies.

"What is really scary about these tools is that it is now harder to trace back attacks. Some can eve circumvent firewalls, intrusion, detection and preventions software, and other solutions," said Chua.

There are, however, recent ways to mitigate risks of attacks coming from spoofed IP addresses, he said.

Companies could impose so-called "two-factor authentication systems" to prevent unknown IP addresses from being used to launch attacks, he suggested.

There are also recent little programs that were written to unravel spoofed IP addresses. One, written by Lars Kindermann, allows system administrators to discover the real IP addresses of attacks.

With security problems likened to moving targets, there would always be new ways to exploit computer systems, Chua said.

"Online privacy tools can be used in a good or bad way. Right now, IP spoofing is something that scares us today," he said. "But we already have some solutions available to unmask the real locations of attacks."

Nokia 6681

Review of the Nokia 6681
Alexander Villafania INQ7.net
A few months after Nokia introduced the 6680, its first Symbian EDGE phone with dual cameras, the Finnish firm came up with a less ludicrous version, expectedly called the 6681 -- basically the 6680 sans the other camera at the front.
It’s a surprise that this new model happens to be slightly thicker than the 6680 despite the lack of another camera. Still, the unit performs like its 6680 brother in the multi-function market it’s targeted at – yuppies who want a funky fashion phone with some of the functionalities of a personal digital assistant.
Lucky for the 6680/6681, they both come from the success of Nokia’s 6630 smartphone, which has all the basic functions of the new models though slightly larger.
Some happy 6630 users may have difficulty parting with their beloved unit for the 6681 though. At first glance, the 6681 is not as hip as the 7610 nor as elegant as the 8800. In fact, it’s as plain as all Nokia smartphones because it stands between the fashionable and the elegant. Then again, the 6681 is a good mix of form and function.
The first things you’ll notice about the 6681 are the large two programmable function buttons on either side of the four-way round navikey (navigation key) in the middle and under the screen. For some strange reason, Nokia sacrificed the width of the numerical pad to make the two function buttons look symmetrical with the navikey.
It’s quite a challenge to input messages, especially when using the upper three buttons since you’ll constantly press on either the function buttons or the round navikey. Constant users of SMS would find it difficult to do fast text messaging because they might press the wrong buttons or unintentionally hit function buttons and navikey. It’s a bit of a disappointment, especially since the keypad is just soft enough for the newbie phone user and existing phone users, plus the fact that is made of laminated rubber for a see-thru effect.
Another issue is the sliding camera cover at the back of the phone, which keeps sliding off when the unit is placed top first in a pants pocket. The slider automatically switches on the camera and there are no automatic lock mechanisms, either for the cover itself or the camera software. It’s best to keep the phone in its own side-opening belt case.
I’m also wondering why Nokia kept the light sensor (the tiny hole on the upper left side of the phone’s face), which is also present in the 6680, the 6630, and the already obsolete 7650 (technically Nokia’s first Symbian camera phone). The light sensor works by adjusting the strength of the screen’s backlight depending on the ambient light in the surroundings. Although the sensor’s main purpose is to cut down the phone’s power consumption, it’s still irritating to see the 6681’s backlight turning on and off or dimming when in fact you need more backlight.
On the other hand, the 6681 has an impressive list of functions that only the likes of a 9500 Nokia Communicator has, like standard multimedia messaging, email, mobile yahoo chat, and web browsing. Web browsing was particularly trouble-free since the unit could browse through both WAP and xHTML websites.
That means you can enter and access any address. However, the graphics are greatly reduced to fit the screen as well as make the download stream faster. The speed of downloading full websites still depends on the availability of GPRS signals; in my own tests downloads could last between 30 seconds and about a minute. The phone is also ready for EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution), which will allow for video and audio streaming over a cellular network.
The 6681 also has Adobe PDF reader for .pdf files and a read-only version of QuickOffice to enable the user to read Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Another nifty application is the Setup Wizard, which automatically sets up the email and web-browsing function of the phone, without the need to send an activation request to a mobile service provider. Once a SIM card is inserted, the Setup Wizard can activate the rest of the phone’s communications functions.
Another application pre-installed into the 6681 is RealPlayer, which plays not just .RM files but also .WMA, .WMV and of course, MP3 files. The 6681 comes with a 64MB external dual-voltage reduced size multimedia card (DV RS-MMC) and is good for only 5 high-quality encoded MP3s, about 30 high resolution photos.
I tried using a 512MB DV RS-MMC and it works beautifully. The memory card is hot swappable so even if the card slot is opened, the phone automatically stops all applications using the memory card. The only drag is that the MP3 playback skips when a message or call is coming in. There’s also the active desktop feature, which works like the desktop screen of WindowsXP; you can access all your running applications even when you’re at the desktop screen.
The 1.3 megapixel camera is nothing short of amazing and complements the extremely high color resolution of the screen, which also has a very good refresh rate. The resolution can be adjusted depending on the number of photos to be saved in memory. At its highest resolution, the photos are as good as basic color film cameras.
I couldn’t say any better for the video recording but I suppose it’s still better than the 64k resolution cameras in older Nokia models. The unit also has an internal flash, which isn’t really much of use unless you’re taking photos of objects at close range in dim lighting.
The photos can then be printed in different ways; via Bluetooth, using pre-installed printing software in the phone; though the PictBridge printing standard cable; or by saving the photos in the memory card then inserting the card into a PC memory reader slot. The Kodak printing application can also be used to change the print quality and orientation of the photos. You could print thumbnail photos or four R3 size photos in an A4 size photo printer.
The 6681 comes with great new features and inherent problems common to all Nokia Symbian phones. However, it serves its purpose as a mobile yuppie’s alternative to a laptop since it has its own office software functions. The camera function, email, and web-browsing capabilities are more than enough reasons to buy the phone. It may well be useful once local cellular providers start providing bandwidth-intensive cellular services.

eBay Has Skype

eBay to buy Internet telephone firm Skype
Agence France-Presse
NEW YORK--Online auction giant eBay Inc. plans to buy Internet phone service provider Skype Technologies SA for at least 2.6 billion dollars, the companies announced Monday.
The deal calls for eBay to pay 1.3 billion dollars in cash and 1.3 billion dollars in stock, plus as much as 1.5 billion in incentives based on performance of the unit.
Skype, based in Luxembourg, is expected to add 60 million dollars of revenue in 2005 and more than 200 million dollars in 2006, eBay estimated.
Founded in 2002, Skype is among the leaders in Internet telephony, allowing users with an Internet connection to make free or low-cost calls.
EBay expects Skype's operating margins to range from 20 percent to 25 percent.
Skype has 54 million subscribers in 225 countries and territories. EBay also said Skype is adding 150,000 users daily.
Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, will remain with the company.
EBay said in a statement that the acquisition, widely speculated upon last week, will strengthen its global marketplace and payments platform, while opening several new lines of business.

Yahoo Journalist

Internet giant Yahoo hires journalist to report on wars
Agence France-Presse
Yahoo has hired a veteran war correspondent to single-handedly report on every armed conflict on the planet, the company announced Monday.
Video, audio and daily blog entries will be combined to "bring some of the world's most important, yet under-reported" stories to a website called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," according to the US firm.
Sites will spend a year reporting from spots deemed armed-conflict areas by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Yahoo said in a written release.
His first reports from a war zone will be published at hotzone.yahoo.com on September 26.
"This project is the most important thing I will do in my life," Sites said in a statement.
"It's an incredible opportunity to help develop the next step in the evolution of journalism, and to tell a different set of stories more completely."
Sites will travel with a backpack of gizmos ranging from a digital camera in a head band to satellite telephones and a solar electricity generator, according to Yahoo.
News that Sites gathers will be sent to a mission control center in the Los Angeles area. The Hot Zone site was launched on Monday, according to Yahoo.
"Yahoo! News is proud to provide Kevin Sites with the platform to tell these very important stories," said Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo's media group.
Sites is a former correspondent for CNN and NBC television and his experience includes filing footage of a US Marine shooting an unarmed Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque in November of 2004.
The site will also allow visitor feedback and questions, as well as links to resources or organizations working in the areas, Yahoo said.
"We are going to put a human face on every story we cover. Our reporting will be story-driven, like any compelling tale," said Sites.
Yahoo said Sites plans to cover conflicts in six global regions: Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and South America.