Ryan Clothier

In its search for water on the moon, NASA slammed not one, but two, spacecraft into a deep, dark crater on the lunar south pole this morning. NASA successfully nailed a target about 230,000 miles from Earth - twice. It was a precision operation. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, separated into two sections last night.

Four minutes later, the rest of the space probe shot through the miles-high plume of debris kicked up by the first impact, grabbed analysis of the matter, and then it too crashed into the lunar surface. Its empty rocket hull, weighing in at more than 2 tons, was the first of the two pieces to slam into the lunar surface at 7:31 a.m. EDT today. Effectively, it was a one-two punch designed to kick up what scientists believe is water ice hiding in the bottom of a permanently dark crater. NASA said it will issue a report on its initial analysis of the probe at10 a.m. EDT today. With NASA still hopeful to one day create a viable human outpost on the moon , it would be helpful for anyone there to find water rather than haul it up from Earth.

NASA had been promising live images of the impact and resulting debris plume but the live images on NASA TV disappeared moments before impact. The orbiter is expected to send its own analysis of the debris plume back to earth later this morning. The LCROSS spacecraft, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on June 18, went aloft with its companion satellite, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter . As the Atlas V rocket carrying lifted off, a NASA spokesman called it "NASA's first step in a lasting return to the moon." NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , which has been in orbit around the moon since late June, was 50 kilometers above the moon's surface during this morning's impact. The LCROSS spacecraft heavily loaded with scientific gear. The instruments were selected to provide mission scientists with multiple views of the debris created by the hull's initial impact.

According to NASA, its payload consisted of two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer. Before it crashed into the moon, LCROSS was transmitting data back to NASA mission control at 1.5 Mbps, NASA noted this morning.

Start-up Avere Systems has unveiled a tiered network-attached storage product that automatically moves data among four different types of storage to improve performance and minimize wasted disk space. You don't have to set policies. Avere's FXT Series NAS products combine SAS, RAM, SSD and SATA drives into one centrally managed system. "We do tiering on the fly," says Avere co-founder and CEO Ron Bianchini. "It's 100% automatic. We look at the blocks as they're moving between the application and storage server and we determine where they go based on access frequency and data characteristics." Nine data storage companies to watch  One challenge facing customers is that disk drive capacity has been growing faster than performance, forcing them to buy more storage than they need to get the required performance, Bianchini says.

The FXT Series uses RAM for small reads and writes; SSD and SAS for large random reads and writes; and SAS drives for large sequential reads and writes. Utilization rates can be improved by intelligently moving data across different tiers based on changing needs, he says. Archival needs are handled by SATA drives. The customer's normal backup and mirroring processes stay the same, Bianchini says. The FXT system itself includes the RAM, SSD and SAS. Customers buy SATA drives separately, and it all gets managed by the Avere software. Avere was founded in January 2008 and is led by Bianchini, a former senior vice president at NetApp and co-founder of Spinnaker Networks, a storage grid company acquired by NetApp.

List pricing for FXT starts at $52,500. The appliances are available in a 2U form factor and each one features 64GB of DRAM and 1GB of solid-state disk. Avere is backed by $15 million in venture funding from Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. One of the appliances includes 1.2TB of SAS disks and the other includes 3.6TB of SAS.

Hackers have apparently found a way to automate the creation of new Facebook profiles by breaking the challenge-response mechanism used by the site to ensure that only humans sign up for the service. The pages are being used to spam links pointing to malicious sites. Security researcher Roger Thompson, of AVG Technologies, today said his company in recent days discovered numerous Facebook pages that were clearly created in an automated fashion using malware programs. Users who click on the link are prompted to install rogue anti-spyware tools on their systems, he said.

All of the pages contain the same profile picture but with different user names. So far, AVG has noticed a "couple of hundred" Facebook pages that appear to have been created by an automated malware program. From a security threat standpoint, the Facebook break-in doesn't appear to be particularly serious, Thompson said in his blog. Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman, said the company is investigating the report and is working on identifying the fake accounts "so we can disable them en masse." In an e-mail message, Axten said that the URL contained in the profiles has already been blacklisted by major Web browsers and have been blocked from being shared on Facebook. And Facebook is sure to deactivate all the new accounts "as quickly as they find them." Even so, the fact that hackers got past Facebook's Captchas highlights a continuing trend by attackers to try and exploit social networks, he said. The company is using a third-party Captcha company called reCAPTCHA, which was recently acquired by Google and "is about as well-regarded a Captcha provider as there is," he said.

Another possibility is that those responsible for the attack farmed out the Captchas to be solved by humans for a price. "On the education front, we encourage users not to click on strange links and to take appropriate steps if they feel their computer or Facebook account has been compromised," he said. Facebook is trying to understand how the new accounts were created, though it is possible that the sign-up process was manual. In a note posted today , the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which is a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, warned about the trend. According to the IC3, fraudsters are using spam to promote phishing sites or to entice users to download an application or view a video. Fraudsters are continuing to hijack attacks on social networking sites and are using them to spread malicious software, the IC3 warned.

Users visiting such sites or clicking on the videos and photos then get infected by various pieces of malware. Adjusting Web site privacy settings, being selective about friends and what they are allowed to view and disabling options such as texting and photo sharing when they are not being used are all ways users can protect themselves on social networking sites, it said. Often the spam is disguised to appear as if it were sent from a user's 'friend.' Some attackers also plant malicious ads containing malware downloads on social network sites, the IC3 note warned Users of social networking sites need to be aware of such threats and take measures to address them, the IC3 said.

Tens of thousands of customers of Heartland Payment Systems are finding themselves caught in the middle of an escalating war between the payment processing vendor and point-of-sale terminal vendor VeriFone Inc. The dispute is threatening to push back industry efforts to implement new encryption technology for protecting credit and debit card data. Both companies are angrily accusing each other of a litany of misdeeds and have filed a total of four lawsuits in three courts over the past two months.

It has also left thousands of merchants in serious doubt about the quality of support they will receive for their point-of-sale (PoS) systems over the next few months. The technology is designed to enable merchants to encrypt card data from the moment a card is swiped at a payment terminal to the point where it comes to rest at the card issuing bank. At the center of the dispute is an end-to-end encryption technology called E3 that is being developed by Heartland to protect credit and debit card data flowing over transaction-processing networks. Besides offering E3 to other PoS vendors, Heartland is planning on manufacturing its own terminals featuring E3 technology. It's the first major end-to-end encryption effort in the industry.

Heartland launched the encryption effort in the wake of the disastrous systems intrusion last year that exposed data on more than 100 million credit and debit cards. The Princeton, N.J.-based Heartland is one of the largest payment card processors in the country with more than 250,000 merchants using its transaction processing services. Heartland claims that less than 50% of its customers user VeriFone terminals. Of those, about 175,000 merchants use VeriFone's payment terminals. VeriFone sued Heartland in September, claiming infringement of VeriFone's technology in building E3. VeriFone claimed that Heartland was gearing up to be a competitor by manufacturing its own PoS terminals featuring the E3 technology.

In the weeks since filing the lawsuit, VeriFone has mounted a vigorous communication campaign warning Heartland customers about the potential disruptions they could face if they fail to register with VeriFone by Dec. 31. In statements posted on its Web site, press releases and court filings, VeriFone has questioned Heartland's ability to continue supporting VeriFone terminals after Dec. 31. Verifone has also filed a second lawsuit seeking damages for patent infringement. "If Heartland were to be cut from any support, its customers would be forced to reach out directly to VeriFone," a VeriFone spokesman said today in an e-mail. VeriFone said it will discontinue support of all its terminals used by Heartland's customers after Dec. 31 unless each merchant registers separately for free service with the company by then. After Dec. 31, Heartland merchants who do not make other arrangements have no assurance of software updates, troubleshooting or other intervention by VeriFone, the spokesman said. "Heartland certainly cannot by itself update and maintain VeriFone code and to claim otherwise is ludicrous," he said. In a lengthy open letter posted on the company's Web site a few weeks ago Heartland CEO Robert Carr claimed that VeriFone didn't want Heartland to work with other manufacturers to produce E3 terminals and instead wanted to be the sole E3 terminal provider. In a countersuit, Heartland said VeriFone brought the lawsuit only because Heartland wanted to work with other manufacturers - and not just Verifone - to produce E3 terminals. Carr has also accused VeriFone of wanting to "line its own pockets" by seeking to charge merchants an unnecessary fee for implementing E3 technology on VeriFone's payment systems.

In a second lawsuit filed this month, Heartland accused VeriFone of "false claims" and "unethical attempts" to scare customers over service and support issues. Heartland insists that it can support all of its customers who are using VeriFone payment terminals. Carr has also maintained that VeriFone's real reason in getting merchants to sign up for the free support is so that it can compile a customer list which it then plans on giving to Heartland's rivals in return for their business. Carr insisted that the company has the parts, the inventory and alternative sources of supply to continuing support merchants using VeriFone terminals. Speaking with Computerworld today, Carr bluntly accused VeriFone of "lying." VeriFone's claim that Heartland would be unable to support merchants using VeriFone's terminals, is a deliberate distortion of the facts, he said. We don t need their software, we don t need VeriFone at all, Carr said.

Considering how the effort was touted as the "next big thing in the industry, it is a little disheartening to see that there can't be more cooperation," between Heartland and VeriFone, Bokor said. The dispute is likely to having a chilling effect on end-to-end encryption attempts in the payment industry, said Andy Bokor, chief operating officer of Trustwave, a Chicago-based company that conducts security and compliance testing for some of the largest merchants in the country. "Many of us in the payment industry were curious to see how Heartland's end-to-end encryption would work," Bokor said. The dispute highlights the need for payment processors and vendors of PoS systems to work together to implement any kind of end-to-end encryption, he said. Many merchants are hesitant to implement the technology because it offers them no immediate benefit from a compliance standpoint, Litan said. Avivah Litan, an analyst with market research firm Gartner Inc., said the lawsuits will only serve to further confuse merchants about end-to-end encryption efforts. The dispute will only serve to further "stifle efforts and movement in this area" she said. "For now, the main parties that are interested in this technology are the payment processors and terminal manufacturers that are trying to sell it to their clients in order to increase their revenues. "

The U.K. government said Monday it plans to push for a law requiring service providers such as ISPs to retain data about instant messages, e-mail and other electronic communications. Showing the deep concerns about privacy among the British public, some 90 respondents out of 221 did not answer the questions on the basis that they were opposed to any kind of surveillance imposed by the government. The government argues that knowing the participants, timing and method of a communication - but not its contents - is vital in protecting the public from serious crime and terrorism. "It is a highly technical area and one which demands a fine balance between privacy and maintaining the capabilities of the police and security services," according to a statement attributed to David Hanson, minister of state for security, counter-terrorism, crime and policing. "We will now work with communications service providers and others to develop these proposals and aim to introduce necessary legislation as soon as possible." The government formulated its position after it asked public authorities, private companies and the public for their views on how communications data should be collected, under what authority and how it should be stored. Under the plan, the government would require service providers to retain all communications data, even that related to third-party services which are accessed using their networks.

Under that directive, data must be retained for 12 months. "This is a 'third-party' relationship, and the company providing the broadband access has no responsibility under the DRD to retain third-party data," according to the government's response to the consultation. The government says that existing European Union legislation - the E.U. Data Retention Directive - does not go far enough and only covers the services provided by the network provider. The data collected would be stored by the service providers and not in a central database. Government authorities would be able to request data under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000, which mandates rules for accessing communications data. It hasn't been determined how long service providers would be required to hold the data.

It is expected service providers would have to spend as much as £2 billion (US$3.34 billion) to implement technology to comply with a new law requiring data to be retained. "The government will work with communications service providers to develop solutions which minimize the potential disruption to their business," the government statement said. There isn't a fixed date for the next general election but it must take place before June 3, 2010, according to the Electoral Commission. The Labour government's data retention plan, however, could potentially be disrupted by an election. The Conservative Party is expected to pose a strong challenge to Labour, which has been in power for 13 years.

Barracuda Networks has acquired start-up Purewire in an effort to expand its footprint in the market for Web security services. Barracuda Networks, which offers content-security appliances to guard against threats involving e-mail, Web and instant messaging, says the acquisition of Purewire will allow it to expand into the Web security software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. Hottest tech M&A deals of 2009 Launched last year, Purewire offers a managed security service to detect and block malware. Purewire's co-founders will assume management positions at Barracuda.

CTO Paul Judge will become vice president of cloud services and chief research officer. Mike Van Bruinisse, Purewire's CEO, will join Barracuda as vice president of enterprise sales. Judge will be in charge of combining the Purewire and Barracuda Labs research teams to identify and track threats, says Dean Drako, president and CEO of Barracuda, based in Campbell, Calif. Today about 85,000 organizations make use of Barracuda's security products. Current plans call for Purewire to remain in Atlanta. "We have need for more senior management," Drako says, adding that Purewire's co-founders have done a great job developing a new platform at the start-up and have considerable industry experience. "Under their leadership, Purewire has helped to shape the Web security SaaS market in a very short period of time," Drako says.

Some customers deploy the appliances on their own, and others opt to use them in conjunction with cloud-based services, including backup services. Drako also notes that the Purewire service should benefit from Barracuda's extensive sales and marketing group. The addition of Purewire promises to expand Barracuda's services portfolio. The companies did not disclose the value of the deal.

Microsoft today confirmed that exploit code published last week can compromise PCs running older versions of Internet Explorer (IE), but said its security team has not yet seen any in-the-wild attacks. IE6 and IE7 account for more than 41% of all browsers used worldwide, according to the most recent data from metrics firm Net Applications. The attack code, which was posted Friday to the Bugtraq security mailing list , affects both Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and the newer IE7, Microsoft acknowledged. "Microsoft can confirm that the publicly available exploit code affects IE6 and IE7, not IE8," a company spokesman said in an e-mail reply to questions today.

IE8, meanwhile, has an 18.1% market share. According to Danish vulnerability tracking vendor Secunia, the flaw is in IE's layout parser , and could be exploited by hackers to hijack fully-patched Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) machines. Over the weekend , Symantec researchers took note of the exploit code, but said that it was shaky. "The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future," the security company's analysis team said in an entry on a company blog Saturday. Secunia rated the vulnerability as "highly critical," its second-highest threat ranking. Windows Vista, for example, ships with IE7. Windows 7, however, relies on the unaffected IE8. The company also declined to spell out plans for quashing the IE bug. "Microsoft is investigating new public claims of a possible vulnerability in Internet Explorer," the spokesman said, using boilerplate that the company regularly rolls out when it's asked about patching progress. "Once we're done investigating, we will take appropriate action to help protect customers ... [which] may include providing a security update through the monthly release process, an out-of-cycle update or additional guidance to help customers protect themselves." Microsoft will issue its next scheduled security updates in a little more than two weeks on Dec. 8. One security researcher said it's unlikely Microsoft will move fast enough to make that deadline. "Seeing as though they haven't even posted an advisory, and with the holiday this week, I'm doubting a Dec. 8 release," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. Microsoft declined to answer questions about which versions of Windows are vulnerable.

More likely, said Storms, is that Microsoft will offer steps that IE6 and IE7 users can take to defend themselves. To turn off JavaScript, users should select the "Tools" menu in IE, then click "Internet Options," the "Security" tab and the "Internet" content zone. On Saturday, Symantec recommended that users disable JavaScript in IE6 and IE7, a move that could stymie attacks, since the current exploit code requires JavaScript. Next, click "Custom Level" and in the "Settings" box, click "Disable" under "Active scripting." Click "OK" in the current dialog box, as well as the next.

WASHINGTON - One obvious follow-up question to the U.S. government's announcement this month that the federal stimulus has created or saved 30,000 jobs so far is this: How many were IT and engineering jobs? There is no information at Recovery.gov concerning the types of jobs either saved or created from the $16 billion in contracts awarded so far, representing 2% of the $787 billion stimulus. Unfortunately, there isn't an answer.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board that provides Recovery.gov, designed to allow citizens to track funding, is posting only what it gets in reports from recipients. "We are not analyzing it in terms of types of jobs," said a board spokeswoman. "That sort of analysis may be made at a later date, once we get the additional recipient reports on grants and loans posted on the Web site," but there's no time frame for providing it, she said. This barebones information makes a rough guess possible about the quality of jobs based on description of the work, but that's it. "One of the primary reasons for the stimulus money is to create jobs and one of the primary things we would like to know from this data is what kinds of jobs were created, said Tony Fisher, the president and CEO of data management firm DataFlux Corp. The Recovery.gov site includes interactive maps and spreadsheets showing companies that have received the data, the number of jobs created or saved, and a description of some of the work. He blamed the lack of detailed information on an absence of data, a lack of consistency to the data we have and insufficient rules governing how that data is supposed to be collected and displayed. "[Recovery.gov] falls short in a number of respects in helping users understanding spending," said Craig Jennings, a senior policy analyst for OBM Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog group. This prompted the creation this month of the Coalition for and Accountable Recovery, which represents about 30 groups.

Among the problems is site navigation difficulty and an inability to search by recipient. Along with OBM Watch, some of its other members include the Center for Responsive Politics, OMB Watch, Sunlight Foundation, Economic Policy Institute. The stimulus is expected to create IT jobs but there's never been any estimate about how many. The groups criticized the usability of the Web site, and said it needed functions, such as ability to search by recipient. Both IT and engineering jobs have declined in the recession. Mark Loughbridge, IBM's chief financial officer, said this month that public sector was again the fastest growing sector with 2% growth, led by health care and education. "Now I think this is quite logical given the rollout of stimulus spend globally," he said told analysts on a third quarter earnings call this month.

However, IT firms are expecting the stimulus to perk up spending. Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems Inc. said this week it is cutting 3,000 jobs as it awaits the acquisition of Oracle Corp.

Europe's head of competition has criticized Oracle for what she characterized as a lack of cooperation over the investigation of Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a spokesman for the European Commission said. Kroes said the Commission was willing to move quickly toward a final decision but "underlined that a solution lies in the hands of Oracle," according to the spokesman. In a meeting with Oracle President Safra Catz in Brussels on Wednesday, Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes "expressed her disappointment that Oracle had failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or, alternatively, proposals for a remedy to the competition problems identified by the Commission," a Commission spokesman said.

An Oracle spokeswoman said the company declined to comment. The Commission said it was concerned about Oracle, the world's top seller of database software, taking ownership of MySQL, the leading open-source database, which Sun acquired last year. Oracle's proposed US$7.4 billion Sun acquisition was approved by U.S. regulators in August, but two weeks later the Commission announced it would launch an investigation of the deal, citing "serious concerns" about its effects on competition in the database market. Oracle had hoped to complete its acquisition of Sun by now, but the Commission's probe, which could last up to 90 days, has held up the deal and may not be completed until January. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said last month that Sun is losing $100 million a month while it waits for the deal to close.

Meanwhile Sun's sales have been declining as rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard take advantage of the uncertainty around Sun's business with aggressive migration plans. He has also asserted that Oracle's database competes with Microsoft's SQL Server and IBM's DB2 products, and not with MySQL. Sun announced a big round of layoffs yesterday, citing the additional time it is taking to close the deal with Oracle. Oracle is widely expected to make deeper job cuts if the deal closes. The company said it will lay off 3,000 workers around the world over the next 12 months.

Apple will launch a tablet-style device sporting a 9.6-inch display in February 2010, according to sources cited by a Taiwanese Web publication today. The tablet will feature the 9.6-inch screen, the multi-touch user interface made famous by the iPhone and iPod Touch, and a processor created by P.A. Semi, the Santa Clara, Calif. microprocessor design company that Apple purchased over a year ago . Apple's device will also reportedly include a HSPDA (High Speed Download Packet Access) module. The Taiwan Economic News said industry sources have claimed several component suppliers are building parts for an upcoming Apple tablet computer, which will launch in about five months.

HSPDA is the 3G cellular data protocol used by AT&T in the U.S.; AT&T is currently Apple's exclusive carrier partner in the United States. Verizon uses the EVDO Rev. T-Mobile, which is an Apple partner in Germany and Austria, also uses HSPDA in the U.S. If true, it would put the brakes on rumors that Verizon , which has supposedly been in talks with Apple, will replace AT&T on the computer maker's A-list. A (Evolution-Data Optimized) data protocol instead. Talk of such a device, which some analysts have dubbed an "iPod Touch on steroids," has been both brisk and long-running. The selling price for Apple's tablet, said the Taiwan Economic News 's sources, will be between $800 and $1,000. This is far from the first time that tales of an Apple tablet have been told.

In May, for example, Wall Street analyst Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray, used circumstantial evidence and checks with Asian component suppliers to bet that Apple would release a $500-$700 tablet next year. By now, although the continuing chatter makes some sense, it's getting harder to swallow the gossip, said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research who covers Apple. "It makes sense, it hangs together, sure," said Gottheil today. "But I'm starting to think that this is just a bunch of people believing each other, or maybe even an Apple disinformation campaign." What struck Gottheil today was the specificity of the report out of Taiwan. "The sources named the companies and they named the components," he said. "That's not how Apple does business." Rather, Apple goes to great lengths to make sure its suppliers keep mum about the work they're doing for the company, Gottheil maintained. "The signs are there that it makes sense for Apple to be doing something in the 'bigger than an iPod Touch' space, but I'm not sure this report adds any evidence to those signs," Gottheil said. "It's almost starting to look like people [are] just playing with the idea or even having fun with it." Tablet rumors picked up significantly just prior to Apple's annual developers conference in early June, but analysts then predicted - correctly, as it turned out - that the company would not unveil such a device at the time.

Apple has been pretty forthcoming about its environmental policies in recent years, but given the company's high profile, groups such as Greenpeace have continually pushed for even more transparency. Apple has taken flak in this department for trailing behind the likes of Dell and HP, both of which publish their annual carbon emissions, to the tune of 471,000 tons and 8.4 million tons respectively. This week, Apple overhauled the environmental section of its website with more data about its efforts, most prominently featuring an extensive breakdown of the company's annual corporate carbon emissions. Apple, on the other hand, calculates it generates 10.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in a year.

For example, those companies' figures don't take into account the impact their products have on the environment during their lifetime. Although Dell and HP's numbers might sound significantly more environmentally friendly, it turns out that they're limited in what they actually measure. Apple, on the other hand, has explicitly broken down exactly where those 10.2 million tons come from: 38 percent from manufacturing, 5 percent during transportation, 53 percent from product use, 1 percent from recycling, and 3 percent from its own facilities. It would seem the ball is now in the court of competitors like Dell and HP, who will may quickly come under pressure to provide results as extensive as Apple's own. More to the point, the information Apple is now providing about its carbon footprint aims to reframe the debate over what it means to be an environmentally-friendly company.

Some environmental experts have lauded Apple's efforts and are hopeful that the move will spur those competitors to follow Apple's lead. But even the harshest of Apple's critics have acknowledged that Apple seems to be making genuine strides in the direction of environment friendliness. [via BusinessWeek] As always, there are also naysayers who think that Apple is only disclosing selective information that paints it in a positive light.

Security firm Tiversa Inc. has provided the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee with more reasons to ban peer-to-peer networks in government - some 200 sensitive military documents it recently accessed via such technology. One document contained personal data on dozens of soldiers from the Third Special Forces Group based out of Fort Bragg N.C. and included the names and ages of their spouses and children. The documents include personal data on U.S. troops based overseas, details on sensitive military projects and defense contracts and documents that violate International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) rules, according to a Tiversa executive.

The House Committee had asked Tiversa to try to access such data for use in its debate on a proposed bill that would ban the use of P2P technology on government networks. That followed Tiversa's disclosure that it had unearthed details about the Obama's Marine One helicopter on a server located in Iran. The request stemmed from a House hearing in July during which Tiversa had disclosed that it found details on safe house locations for the family of President Barack Obama, presidential motorcade routes and other sensitive data on a government P2P network. Those details were apparently inadvertently leaked to the Iranian system from a P2P network. "In an effort to understand the magnitude of P2P risks, and draft appropriate legislation, the Committee asked us to provide additional examples following the hearing in July," said Scott Harrer, brand director of the Cranberry Township, Pa.-based Tiversa. Most of the documents found by Tiversa were marked "secret" and appear to include information from all branches of the military, Harrer said.

Over the past month, the company submitted more than 200 more examples of P2P network data that it has accessed, Harrer said. The company has reported on its findings to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Army Criminal Investigation Command and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, he added. "We have recently seen these files being downloaded in foreign countries, including China and Pakistan," Harrer said. "We have also seen user-issued searches for this type of sensitive data emanating from outside the U.S., so people are in fact actively looking for it." Tiversa's latest disclosures will likely add to growing concerns about the security of P2P networks. In January, Eric Johnson, a professor of operations management at the Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business disclosed how he had found numerous health-care documents on P2P networks. Numerous others have highlighted similar data leaks as well. For example, Johnson said he found a 1,718-page document containing Social Security numbers, dates of birth, insurance information, treatment codes and other health care data belonging to about 9,000 patients at a medical testing laboratory. In many cases, the software is not installed properly and ends up exposing not just the files that the user wants to share, but also every other file on their computers.

Such leaks typically occur when a user installs a P2P client such as Kazaa, LimeWire, BearShare, Morpheus or FastTrack on a computer for the purposes of sharing music and other files with others on the network. A bill that would make it illegal for P2P developers to make software that causes files to be inadvertently shared over a P2P network without a user's knowledge was passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week. The so-called Informed P2P User Act would also require developers to clearly inform users about files that are being made available for searching and sharing, and would mandate that a user agree to the file-sharing first.

Here's a look back at a busy week in Google news stories:   IBM aims at Google, Microsoft with new Webmail  IBM introduced LotusLive iNotes, an on-demand e-mail, calendaring and contact management system meant to compete with the likes of Gmail and Microsoft Exchange. Similar to a bulletin board system, Google Wave, the brainchild of a pair of twins, lets users create shared, ongoing, real-time conversations called Waves. Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year.   Google Wave invite-only preview sets off Google Wave mania Google on Wednesday sent out more than 100,000 invitations to developers to preview Google Wave, a new communications and collaboration tool that Google plans to release next year. The application makes it easy for users to share videos, photos and maps.

Google removed the site's home page from its search results in response to a complaint it received under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And big applications vendors like SAP and Salesforce.com are already rallying around it.   Google removes The Pirate Bay home page from search results File-sharing site The Pirate Bay was once again in the crosshairs of copyright owners. A search for "The Pirate Bay" Friday turned up a message at the bottom of the first search-results page that said: "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 7 result(s) from this page. Textscape alleges Google is violating a patent that covers a method for managing a body of text on a computer that was granted to the company in 1998. Textscape says Google's Chrome's browser improperly uses the innovation.   Google celebrates 11th birthday PC World writes: "Google has come a long way in its eleven-year history, from its humble beginning as a Stanford University research project in 1998, to the global, multi-billion dollar online presence Google enjoys today."   Google eyeing Firefox with Chrome Frame plug-in? If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."   Google, Adobe sued by Textscape over patents  Google and Adobe Systems have been sued by a New Jersey company for allegedly violating patents used for processing text, according to recent court filings. Computerworld reports that Mozilla's chief engineer says Google might build a Chrome Frame plug-in for the Firefox browser.

Features include an equations editor and a language translator. Separately, Computerworld reported that Mozilla officials said Chrome Frame for Microsoft IE could result in "browser soup."    Google Apps takes aim at students Google hired interns to help it figure out how to make Google Apps more appealing to young people, according to PC World. Google expands search control with new options Google is adding new functionality to a side panel that could provide quicker access to relevant search results. The side panel can be activated by clicking the "show options" button on the search results page. The company is adding options to filter search results by blog and news items to the side panel accompanying search results.

These options will provide users quick access to more relevant sources, said Nundu Janakiram, product manager for search at Google. IDG News Service, PC World and Computerworld contributed to this roundup For more on Google, visit Network World's Google Subnet, an independent Google community.

Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast-moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites. Hyperlinks to the software can then be distributed by pirates via Web sites, instant messages, or social media sites such as Twitter, said Vic DeMarines, CEO of anti-piracy software vendor V.I. Labs. "It's incredibly easy to use. Sites such as RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile let anonymous users upload large files such as cracked software for free. And what you get is essentially your own private FTP server," DeMarines said.

These memberships, such as the 30-day premium access for $6.99 Euros at Rapidshare, let users download files immediately and without any caps on bandwidth. While sites such as RapidShare allow free downloads, they make their money by charging heavy downloaders for premium memberships. Trade in pirated digital goods , whether it is movies, music or e-books or software, is what drives the popularity and business model of firms like RapidShare. A spokeswoman for Cham, Switzerland-based Rapidshare declined to comment on the V.I. Labs report, saying she would need more information. The site told The New York Times earlier this year that it hosted 10 petabytes of data and up to 3 million downloaders at a time . The Association of American Publishers estimates that half of the pirated books found by its members were linked to Rapidshare. "There's a lot of money being made," said DeMarines. "Without hosting pirated goods, I'm not sure what their revenue model would be." According to a recent investigation by V.I. Labs into the availability of pirated software from a sample of 43 vendors, 100% were on RapidShare.

The site is already among the top twenty most popular in the world, according to Alexa. Though Rapidshare has faced lawsuits related to piracy, DeMarines says it and other file-hosting sites are tricky to prosecute legally becuase uploaders are not required to register or identify themselves. Uploads and downloads to Rapidshare account for 5% of all Internet traffic globally, says German networking vendor Ipoque. Also, Rapidshare tries to distance itself from any knowledge of the pirated goods by not filtering or monitoring the content on its servers. "For us, everything is just a file, no matter what," a spokeswoman told The Times in March. The company even grants certain organizations direct access into their service, so that they can go ahead and delete the hyperlinks and pirated files themselves, DeMarines said.

DeMarines said Rapidshare does comply with the Safe Harbor Provisions of the U.S.' Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by quickly taking down pirated files when notified by the copyright holders. Peer-to-peer networking (P2P) does still remain the largest channel for distributing pirated software, movies and other digital content. The most popular network remains BitTorrent , which is used by six out of 10 P22 users, V.I. Labs said. Ipoque said it enables between 43% to 70% of piracy, depending on the region of the world. eDonkey is a distant second, with 20% share, despite hosting almost 900,000 users and 77 million files at any given time.

But file-hosting is growing much faster, Ipoque said, already enabling between 15% to 35% of digital piracy, depending on the region of the world. Once-popular Gnutella is ranked third, with a market-share in the single digits. DeMarines said he expects file-hosting sites to eventually supplant P2P. "P2P is on its way down. Other long-running methods for distributing warez are either stagnant or shrinking. They're too visible, and so the copyright organizations are going to take these BitTorrent tracker sites out," he said. Usenet newsgroups, for instance, have lost popularity due to the large amount of pornography and malware mingled in with the warez, DeMarines said.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is "not favored" as a way to transmit files, though announcements and links on IRC to warez hosted on file-hosting sites is growing, DeMarines said.

It's been a long time coming, but after promises, previews, and unexpected leaks, BlackBerry officially released the desktop Mac client for its popular smartphone platform on Friday. BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac allows users to sync their contacts, calendar, notes, and to-do data between their Macs and BlackBerrys as well as installing and managing applications for the phone. Prior to this application, Mac BlackBerry owners had to rely on third-party software such as Mark/Space's The Missing Sync for BlackBerry, or PocketMac for BlackBerry, which RIM had included along with its handsets. On the Mac side, data can sync with iCal, Address Book, Mail, or any other applications that use Mac OS X's SyncServices, such as Microsoft Entourage.

And if you live in a household that has as many BlackBerrys as I have iPods, then no worries: BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac allows you to sync multiple devices with the same Mac. In addition, BlackBerry owners can also make encrypted backups of their devices and update the BlackBerry system software when new versions are available. Among the most interesting features of BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac is that it lets you sync your music and playlists from iTunes. How did RIM succeed where Palm failed? Your mind might immediately conjure images of Palm and its cat-and-mouse games with Apple.

The key here seems to be that RIM doesn't try to inject support for the BlackBerry into iTunes or have its devices pretend to be something they're not. In fact, RIM released BlackBerry Media Sync, allowing Mac and PC users to sync with iTunes and other media software, in December of last year. Rather, BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac just references the iTunes library stored on your hard disk and shows you your list of playlists in its own application-something Palm could no doubt have done as well, had it been willing to spend the time. BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac is a free download and requires Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later, a BlackBerry running version 4.2 software or higher, and at least iTunes 7.2.

The company behind the new Dell Latitude Z laptop's wireless power charger predicts that its technology will go mainstream next year, with cell phones, MP3 players and Bluetooth headsets featuring the technology at the coming Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Inductive charging, which creates a small-area electro-magnetic field around devices to recharge their batteries, will be slower to emerge on other computers besides Dell Inc.'s new ultra-thin, ultra-premium business notebook, said Bret Lewis, director of Fulton Innovation LLC in Ada, Mich. The long-term vision is for wireless charging pads to become as ubiquitous as electrical plugs are today, enabling users to place their cell phone or laptop down on any pad for quick "snack charges," Lewis said. "You could just charge your device on a pad built into a conference room table, or on a pad you carry [and plug into the wall]," Lewis said. He confirmed that the company is talking to a number of other PC manufacturers.

On the cutting edge of the emerging wireless power industry, Fulton is a subsidiary of Alticor Inc., the parent company of direct-selling company Amway Corp. Fulton is working closely with electronics maker Texas Instruments, which plans to build the charging coils for devices as well as the charging pads. Fulton, which employs about 25 scientists at its central Michigan headquarters, created its "eCoupled" technology several years ago as an outgrowth of research into UV (ultraviolet) -based water treatment systems, Lewis said. The coils could be integrated into devices, which Lewis said shouldn't be much more expensive than conventional power chargers once volumes rise. Fulton's technology is not used in the Palm Pre smartphone, apparently the first cell phone to offer the option of an inductive charger. Or they could embedded into the protective nylon or plastic sleeves for cellphones or MP3 players.

Dell said yesterday that the $199 laptop charging stand add-on kit for its Latitude Z was 70% efficient, making it better than other inductive charging systems. Moreover, plug-in chargers continue to seep between 10% and 20% of a device's normal power draw even when the devices are fully charged or turned off, Lewis said. Fulton's Lewis added to that, saying its technology also compares well with conventional plug-based systems, which he said also run somewhat inefficiently as the electricity travels through its circuits. This well-known "vampire effect" doesn't happen with Fulton's inductive chargers, he said. Fulton's chargers can use other "pinging" technology to turn charging systems off.

The Dell laptop's wireless charger turns off completely when an infrared-based controller signals that the battery is full or the laptop is off, Lewis said. Taking all of that into account, Lewis said that Fulton's charging systems today (download white paper) are "already equal or slightly more efficient" than plug-charging systems. Not only is the energy too weak to harm people, he said, it also eliminates the risk of electrical shocks present from cable-based power. "This is the same technology as your wireless toothbrush. Inductive charging systems also do not hurt electrical components in devices or laptops, Lewis said. We don't think there are any stray fields that will harm you or your devices," he said.

Lewis acknowledged there is no standards group for medium-power devices such as laptops, or high-power devices such as kitchen appliances or electric cars. The company, which also partners with Energizer Battery Inc., is a leading member of the Wireless Power Consortium, which is trying to draw up standards for charging low-power devices (8 to 10 watts) such as cellphones. The electric cars could eventually be recharged by simply parking them over a special pad-equipped parking space while the driver is at work or a meeting, he said. He added, however, that the lack of standards bodies could slow the realization of universal, interchangeable wireless power charging stands that are as omnipresent as wall plugs. "When we still can't figure out whether to put the gas cap on the right or left side of the car, there's a reason to be skeptical" about universal power standards quickly emerging, he said.

Cybercriminals worldwide are amassing domain names to keep their botnet and phishing operations a step ahead of authorities America's 10 most-wanted botnets To obscure their tracks, the criminals register the domain names using phony information, pay with stolen credit cards and hack into legitimate domain-name accounts. The target is usually "a consumer in America." Accredited by ICANN for the .info generic top-level domain (gTLD), Afilias helped organize the Registry Internet Safety Group to find ways to improve security. Adding to the problem of domain-name abuse, some rogue registrars often look the other way as the money rolls in. (See related story, "Domain-name abuse proliferates; rogue registrars turn a blind eye")  Today's cosmopolitan criminals might use "a registrar in China and a Web-hosting company in Russia and a registry in Ireland," says Ram Mohan, CTO at Dublin-based registry services provider Afilias.

Mohan says Afilias has seen about 250,000 domain names taken down in the past 2.5 years because they were deemed to be maliciously used. In the past, standard contracts between ICANN and registrars didn't address domain-name abuse head-on. (Mohan estimates there about 2,000 registrars and retail channels for domain names globally today.) But Afilias successfully lobbied to have the standard contracts amended so that stringent actions against domain-name abuse could be taken, he says. At first the registrars Afilias works with were not too happy to see domain names suspended, but many have come around to see the wisdom in taking action to stop perceived criminal activity, he says. Registry services provider Neustar (accredited by ICANN for the .biz gTLD) is also a big believer in tackling domain-name abuse, which after all, hurts the bottom line. Under its contracts with registrars and ICANN, Neustar can proactively say to a registrar, with a full report, "you have 12 hours to take down that domain name or we will do it," he says. Three years ago, Neustar hired a legal team to handle domain abuse questions and set up an internal, isolated networking lab to make determinations to a "near certainty" about a domain name being used for objectionable purposes, says Jeff Neuman, vice president of law and policy at Neustar.

ICANN has a more informal process for trying to curb domain-name abuse, but that may eventually change, Neuman believes. For instance, .cn, the country-code domain for the People's Republic of China, has emerged as a popular choice for domain-name abuse. Many security researchers today are inclined to blame a lot of domain-name abuse on "rogue registrars" around the world that are said to look the other way when dealing with criminals. For country-code top-level domains, each country through a designated organization directly accredits registrars for the ccTLD, though those registrars may also be accredited by ICANN for gTLDs like .com and .info. ICANN says complaints it received related to inaccurate or missing Whois database information and Beijing Innovative - which initially failed to respond to ICANN inquiries in a timely manner - led ICANN to issue the Chinese registrar a "notice of breach" decision last September, and a remediation plan.

Two ICANN-accredited registrars, Beijing-based Xin Net Technology Corp. and Beijing Innovative Linkage, among other registrars based in China, have gained reputations in some circles as rogue registrars because of the large amount of malicious domains being traced to them over the past year. Mohan says it's important do the analysis to understand the source of domain-name abuse, but critics should also consider evidence that Chinese registrars are being targeted because there's a lot of growth in China and "criminals are hiding in that growth." Mohan was in Beijing just a month ago discussing cybercrime for three hours with Mao Wei, the director of China Internet Network Information Center, the state-run registry for .cn, which is under the control of the Ministry of Information Industry. Just this week, McAfee touched on the China question in a report about e-mail spam that found high-volume, Chinese URL-based "Canadian Pharmacy" spam has started getting blocked amazingly fast, something McAfee never saw happen before. Mohan also spent time with Chinese registrars. "The Chinese government is very strongly aware of this problem," Mohan says. This newsletter-looking spam has used about 1,235 domains on .cn each day in fast-flux mode, but it's "getting black-holed as soon as they come in," says Adam Wosotowsky, principal engineer in messaging tactical response at McAfee. Nonetheless, some say it's hard to escape the impression that around the world, there are places where registrars and others providing domain names look the other way.

This countermeasure makes the spam dead-on-arrival with no Web URL to use. "We're guessing it's Chinese government influence," Wosotowsky says, adding he thinks the pharmacy spam is being used to sell pharmaceutical knock-offs out of Hong Kong. Even governments may be ignoring it, as money changes hands in the lucrative domain-name business. "The moment the bad guys find out something is going on, they move from Estonia to Ukraine,'" says Mohan by way of example. "The kingpins aren't identified. There must be advance notice going to these criminals, or compromised law enforcement." It's big money, big business.

If you're a designer whose inspiration strikes while you're on the go, Pantone has a new iPhone app for you: myPantone. The app provides the sRGB, HTML, and LAB values on each color swatch, and its cross referencing system lets users identify colors across color libraries. The app gives graphic, multimedia, fashion, interior, and industrial designers the tools to capture, create, and share Pantone color palettes while they're riding the bus to work, waiting on line at the supermarket checkout, or anywhere they happen to be. "MyPantone gives designers the freedom to access Pantone colors anywhere, without the need to be in their office or carry around cumbersome guides," said Andy Hatkoff, vice president of technology licensing for Pantone. "Now with myPantone's Portable Color Memory in their pocket, designers no longer need to agonize trying to recall an exact color." MyPantone gives designers access to all the Pantone color libraries, including the Pantone Matching System for coated, uncoated, and matte stock; the Pantone Goe System for coated and uncoated stock; Pantone Pastels for coated and uncoated stock; and the Pantone Fashion + Home Smart Color system. In addition, myPantone facilitates creation of harmonious color palettes by finding complementary, analogous, and triadic combinations for selected colors.

Once you create a color palette, you can view or share it with others. And, the app can extract colors from any image stored in your iPhone's camera roll or let you choose individual colors from an iPhone photo and match them to specific Pantone colors. For viewing color chips, you can use Pantone's slate of built-in backgrounds or you can use one of your own photos as a background. You can attach text notes or voice annotations, as well. Sharing options include sending color palettes via e-mail, sending palettes to other iPhone users, and sharing via Facebook or Twitter.

You can e-mail palettes as color patches, or as application swatch files for use in Adobe Creative Suite, CorelDraw, and QuarkXPress. MyPantone is available for $10 at the iPhone App Store. Designers can also share their color palettes with other designers by sending them to Pantone's hosted Web site. It is compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 or higher and can also be used with the iPod Touch.

Microsoft's acid-tongued covert blogger Mini-Microsoft offered up a report card on Thursday's all-company meeting at Seattle's Safeco Field, giving CEO Steve Ballmer   two zeros and accusing business division president Stephen Elop of "sucking the life out of the stadium." While Microsoft employees provided tepid tweets from the company meeting that pulled 20,000 of them into the baseball stadium and jammed AT&T's cellular network, Mini-Microsoft looked for signs that the company was tuned into the job at hand, understood the impact of thousands of layoffs over the past year, and how Microsoft might stem inefficiencies at the company. He must acknowledge it starkly. The evolution of Microsoft Windows Seven things to love, hate about Windows 7 CEO Ballmer was the first to disappoint, according to Mini-Microsoft, who hoped that the company leader would "come out front first, before any other Microsoft leadership, to speak the truth about the last year and where we are now. We had layoffs.

Ballmer got zeros on both counts. We had inefficiencies." Ballmer, however, didn't appear until the end, slapping hands with employees sitting close to the stage and tearing an iPhone out of an employee's hands and pretending to stomp on it. Elop faired even worse, drawing Mini-Microsoft's wrath for crushing the blogger's hope for short, sweet and powerful demos. "Elop. Baby. Steven.

Dynamics. What did I do to you to have that forced down my eyeballs? ... Geez. XRM. Really? Did anyone give you advice that this was a bad idea? If not, you're seriously lacking good reports willing to give you honest feedback." Mini-Microsoft had blogged before the confab on six hopes for the company meeting.

If so, keep listening to them. In the grading system each hope represented a point and when all was said and done the score was 1.75. "Hey, almost one-third realized," wrote Mini-Microsoft. The other hopes included "practical vision," which Mini-Microsoft graded out at .5, giving Craig Mundie, chief researcher and strategy officer, and Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, props for focusing on "practical aspects of product groups, research, and inbetween the technology transferring power of the labs groups."Mini-Microsoft's hope for short, sweet and powerful demos earned a .5. "Robbie Bach [president of the entertainment and devices division] did okay, but I can't say the demos blew me away," wrote Mini-Microsoft. Ballmer's zeros came from not coming out first to "set the context for the meeting in light of a pretty awful FY09 Q3 and Q4," and one for not giving a serious wrap up. The grade for Mini-Microsoft's hope on getting a good peek at new stuff came up .75. He called looks at Bing, Zune HD and new Laptop Hunter commercials "conservative." And the hope to see a new review system got a zero. And Mini-Microsoft had kind words for Dr. Qi Lu, formerly of Yahoo and now running Microsoft's online services group. "[He] might be my favorite techie right now.

On the up side, Mini-Microsoft said he was surprised to hear COO Kevin Turner, who opened the meeting, admit that the company had over hired. I was impressed with what he's brought together for Bing and what's coming and how he has focused the team and adopted some of the new technology that Satya [Nadella, senior vice president of research and development] was showing. Ever?" Who the hell thought we'd be feeling so good about our search decision engine?

The Palm Pre's WebOS browser is a relatively recent entrant in the mobile browser arena, arriving in early June of this year. The opening screen of the Palm Pre's browser contains your bookmarks and a combination address-and-search bar at the top. But the Pre's new mobile browser comes fully prepared for a battle royale with other leading smartphone browsers.

When you start typing a URL, the Pre's browser will look through your visited sites and try to match the string you're typing to addresses you've typed previously-so with luck you won't have to type the whole thing more than once. After you enter the URL that you want to visit, a persistent loading-progress bubble appears at the bottom right of the screen, which then becomes a reload/stop button. If you enter a search term, the browser asks you whether you want to search Google or Wikipedia, and then it directs you to the relevant results. A back/forward button floats at the bottom left of the screen. The transition during zooming isn't as smooth as on the iPhone, however. The page's title appears in a floating bubble at the top (it disappears when you scroll down). Like the iPhone's browser, the Palm Pre's browser can perform adaptive zooming when you double-tap a given area of the page.

The Pre's browser doesn't display a scroll bar, so it gives you no way of knowing where you are on a page. On the other hand, this method does allow you to load two pages side to side (or in the background). Flicking through browser windows on the Pre works exactly the same as browsing through multiple open applications (also displayed as cards), with virtually no limit to how many pages you can open at the same time. You won't find a button on the Pre for switching tabs either, as Palm's playing-card metaphor requires you to open a new browser window from the menu launcher in order to open a new Web page. You can also flick between open browser windows without being in card mode on the Pre, but only by flicking left/right on the touch-sensitive area underneath the screen (the option must be enabled from device settings). One major shortcoming of the Pre's browser is that it doesn't let you save images. On the iPhone, when you tap and hold an image, the browser prompts you to save it.

Diskeeper Corp. this week disclosed that it has developed of its most significant technological breakthroughs, which it said will prevent up to 85% of all fragmentation from ever occurring in Windows files system. The new software should allow for dramatic system performance improvements, the company said.

"Not only does this eliminate any performance slowdown caused by writing fragmented files but it means little to no system resources or power is later required to remove fragmentation," the company said in a statement.

A Diskeeper spokeswoman would not offer any details on exactly how the product will prevent disk fragmentation or on how it will be packaged. She said the software will be released by the end of 2009.

Disk fragmentation occurs natively in Windows file systems as data is written over time to various sectors of a hard disk drive's platter. A computer's operating system generally does not set aside enough contiguous space to store a complete file, so it places the pieces of a file in whatever available space there is between other files.

Such fragmentation generally slows the performance of a computer because it forces the read/write head to seek out the disparate pieces of data that make up a file in order to deliver it to users. Defragmentation utilities, such as Diskeeper's, reorganizes the data on a disk in order to consolidate it and store the data pieces closer together and contiguously.

For solid state disk drives, defragmentation can be a particular problem because flash memory has a limited number of writes. Thus the defragmenting process can shorten the lifespan of flash drives.

"Even with new storage technologies, the disk still remains the weakest link in system performance. Among a host of other effects, disk fragmentation causes system crashes, slowdowns, freeze-ups and even system failures," Diskeeper said in the statement.

Defragmentation evolved from a time consuming manual operation to scheduled tasks. That lasted for years until it evolved again to automatic and then invisible real time defragmentation in products like Diskeeper.

"It is time to evolve once again by ending fragmentation as we know it," the company stated.

Researchers at MIT have killed ovarian tumors in mice using nanoparticles that deliver killer genes to the cancer cells.

The findings, according to MIT, could lead to a new treatment for ovarian cancer. Considered to be one of the most deadly forms of cancer, it is said to cause 15,000 deaths every year in the U.S. alone.

Daniel Anderson, research associate in the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, said in a written statement that human clinical trials could start as early as a year from now. "I'm so pleased that our research on drug delivery and novel materials can potentially contribute to the treatment of ovarian cancer," Robert Langer, a professor at the institute, said in a statement.

Research teams at various universities have been working on different ways to use nanotechnology, which is the engineering of systems at the molecular level, to battle cancer.

In May, MIT scientists announced that they have developed gold nanoparticles that can target tumors and heat them with minimal side effects to nearby healthy cells. The researchers said tumors in mice that received the gold nanorod treatment disappeared within 15 days. The cancer did not reoccur for the duration of the three-month study.

This news comes just months after MIT announced that a group of scientists had developed nanotechnology that can be placed inside living cells to determine whether chemotherapy drugs used to treat cancer are reaching their targets or attacking healthy cells. Researchers use carbon nanotubes wrapped in DNA so they can be safely injected into living tissue.

And last August, scientists at Stanford University reported that they had found a way to use nanotechnology to have chemotherapy drugs target only cancer cells, keeping healthy tissue safe from the treatment's toxic effects.

And that news came on the heels of a report out in July 2008 noting that researchers at the University of California, San Diego, had discovered a way to use nanotechnology-based "smart bombs" to send lower doses of chemotherapy to cancerous tumors, thus diminishing the cancer's ability to spread throughout the body.

In the MIT research announced today, nanoparticles basically act as self-guided vehicles that deliver genes to the cancerous tumors. The gene produces a toxin that kills cells by disrupting their ability to manufacture proteins, according to MIT.

While the gene therapy has shown to be as effective as chemotherapy, it doesnt have the same debilitating side effects since the gene is engineered to attack the cancer cells but be inactive in other, healthy cells.

Researchers reported that the nanoparticles are built by combining positively charged, biodegradable polymers with DNA.

Scientists believe the nanoparticles could be used to treat prostate cancer and viral infections. And they plan to study whether they also could be used to fight brain, lung and liver cancers, according to MIT.

AT&T says it has successfully demonstrated the ability to recover from a major backbone outage by routing 40G of traffic using mobile trailers equipped with gigabit-speed routers.

Slideshow: Worst moments in network security.

AT&T accomplished this feat during its largest-ever network disaster recovery exercise, which is being held in Washington D.C. this week.

"We're making sure that if a significant backbone link were to fail as part of a disaster because an AT&T office were destroyed, we can roll in our mobile assets and keep the backbone flowing," says Mark Francis, vice president of AT&T's global network operations center.

"If a backbone link goes down, that would impact the flow of all of our data services in this country," Francis explains. "We've certified that at least in our own infrastructure we can flow traffic across the trailers at 40G speeds, and we've also certified that the center that's responsible for managing those components can have vision into the traffic.''

AT&T demonstrated this capability using four mobile trailers equipped with gigabit-speed routers from Cisco, Juniper and Siemens.

The scenario AT&T tested is how it would recover if one of its main switching centers were put out of service for days or weeks as in the case of a hurricane. Now AT&T says it can use trailers with gigabit-speed routers to support the backbone traffic until the center is repaired.

Francis says AT&T's ability to quickly recover from a backbone outage is an important feature for its enterprise customers.

"If you're a CIO of a large corporation and you have a contract with AT&T, you're flowing the majority of your data centers through our IP backbone network. If we have a major bandwidth issue on our network, you're going to feel it in terms of latency or your service will stop working," Francis explains. "So for us to be getting that bandwidth back in line is paramount to our customers' success."

Also as part of this disaster recovery exercise, AT&T is testing pico microcell technology that allows it to put a small satellite dish on top of an SUV-sized vehicle and have mobile cellular service that can support six to eight cell phone users. The pico microcell technology works while the vehicle drives at speeds up to 50 miles an hour, Francis says.

"The pico microcell technology is really just for first responders," Francis says. "It allows people to get in as quickly as they can to a disaster site, assess the situation and then we can send in the satellite trailers. [Federal Emergency Management Agency] is going to like it. Fire departments and police departments are going to like it."

AT&T conducts quarterly network disaster recovery exercise around the globe to test its ability to respond to emergencies ranging from hurricanes to wildfires. AT&T said this week's exercise in Washington, D.C. was its largest-ever and the 54th exercise it has conducted in the field.

Guy Kawasaki - a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was partially responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984 - has almost 140,000 Twitter followers. Many of those followers likely thought it was strange that Kawasaki was suddenly into shilling porn, when a link purporting to host a pornographic video of "Gossip Girl" star Leighton Meester appeared on June 23. Anyone who downloaded the video discovered a virus that ravaged both PCs and Macs.

Anti-virus organization Sophos posted a YouTube video explaining how the attack worked. As the Sophos video shows, the attack affected Macs. It can be taken for granted that the malware also infected PCs, because, well, everything infects PCs.

The malicious link has been disabled and no longer prompts visitors to download viruses.

Kawasaki claimed no responsibility for spreading the malware. He told his followers that his account was not hacked, but rather a page or its feed that he linked to was hacked. Kawasaki's Twitter account is hooked up to NowPublic, a user-contributed news site, and this tasty tidbit was filtered through into his account. Kawasaki also claims to have no idea who Leighton Meester is.

Twitter is no stranger to malware. Earlier this month, Twitter spam spread a worm that crippled Windows-based machines. There were also the Twitter worm attacks of April and May.

Twitter itself does not, and will not, filter links. It's the responsibility of the user and the reader to make judgment calls about whether they'd like to read about the Iran elections or expend kempt-up energy on porn. The difficulty comes in the form of condensed URLs - many users have no idea what they're clicking on, and by the time the mistake has been uncovered, it may be too late. It's particularly troubling when infected links appear on ultra-popular user sites that many people have grown to trust.

The Kawasaki Incident shouldn't tarnish your trust of all Twitter users, especially the megalithic ones. But if Oprah sends you off to scope out a raunchy video of Twilight's Edward Cullen, exercise a little self-restraint.

U.S. protectionism targeting Indian outsourcers may be met by retaliatory measures such as blocking access to Indian markets, India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) said on Tuesday.

Describing the U.S. tax system as "broken", U.S. President Barack Obama said in May that it's a tax code "that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York".

Though the changes proposed to the tax code are not likely to impact the Indian outsourcing industry, the statement by Obama has been widely interpreted in India as targeting the country's large outsourcing industry which gets over 50 percent of its revenue from the U.S.

Legislation introduced in April by Senators Chuck Grassley, (R-Iowa), and Dick Durbin, (D-Ill.) aims to put curbs on the use of H-1B visas, so that the visa program "should complement the U.S. workforce, not replace it".

As unemployment goes up in the countries to which Indian's outsourcing industry exports services, there are likely to be increasing demands for creating jobs in those countries, said Som Mittal, president of Nasscom.

"Once you take protectionist measures, it doesn't stop there," Mittal said. India is a large market for a variety of products including defense equipment, and there could be a trade war, he cautioned.

Nasscom is focusing on conveying to the U.S. and other countries that Indian outsourcing companies can help their companies get more efficient and cut costs in the economic downturn. It wants the Indian outsourcing industry to be identified as "part of the solution and not the problem", Mittal said.

Indian outsourcers are also taking steps to increase services delivery closer to customers, which will mean creation of jobs in countries like the U.S., said Pramod Bhasin, chairman of Nasscom.

Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) companies will have to change their business model in the future to deliver services from multiple locations worldwide, so that they deliver from where the customers want it, he said.

Profit margins will not get affected by the higher costs in those locations, because the work done there will be high-end, he added.

The Indian BPO industry is expected to post a revenue growth of about 15 percent this year, despite the global economic downturn which appears to have bottomed out, Bhasin said.