Top data center challenges include social networks, rising energy costs

Enterprise data needs will grow a staggering 650% over the next five years, and that's just one of numerous challenges IT leaders have to start preparing for today, analysts said as the annual Gartner Data Center Conference kicked off in Las Vegas Tuesday morning. The 650% enterprise data growth over the next five years poses a major challenge, in part because 80% of the new data will be unstructured, Cappuccio said. Gartner buying AMR Research in $64 million deal Rising use of social networks, rising energy costs and a need to understand new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing are among the top issues IT leaders face in the evolving data center, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio said in an opening keynote address.

IT executives have to make sure data can be audited and meet regulatory and compliance objectives, while attempting to ensure that growing storage needs don't break the bank. Many IT shops are seeing storage reductions of 50% to 60% with dedupe, which eliminates duplicate copies of stored objects and files, he said. Technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication and automated storage tiering can help reduce costs. "If you're not doing thin provisioning in storage today, you need to start," Cappuccio said. "It's an easy, logical way to reduce storage consumption." Deduplication is another technology IT officials have to examine. Another money-saving technology is automated tiering, which makes sure data is stored on appropriately priced boxes. Cappuccio listed 10 key issues for IT managers to examine: virtualization; the data deluge; energy and green IT; complex resource tracking; consumerization of IT and social software; unified communications; mobile and wireless; system density; mashups and portals; and cloud computing. As much as 80% of data on high-speed drives is almost never used and should be moved to less expensive storage tiers, he said.

Social networks are coming into the enterprise whether CIOs want them to or not, Cappuccio said. Employees and customers are using wikis, blogs, Facebook and Twitter and "it's affecting you now whether you know it or not." Businesses need to examine Web-based social software platforms because they are transforming interactions with both customers and employees, he said. Twitter use grew an amazing 1,382% in 2008 and the majority of new users were between the ages of 39 and 51, he said. "It is a growing phenomenon which we can't shut down," he said. IT managers are also being forced to look more at energy use, as many organizations are moving the energy bill from the facilities department to the IT department. "What's happening now is CFOs are asking embarrassing questions [about power use]," Cappuccio said. And servers are only growing denser, with new blades that incorporate servers, storage, switches, memory and I/O capabilities. The energy cost of two racks of servers, at full density, can exceed $105,000 a year, he said.

At today's prices, the money spent on supplying energy to an x86 server will exceed the cost of that server within three years, he said. The energy bill has not traditionally been a part of the IT budget but CIOs can expect it to be incorporated into their spending plans soon, he said. IT managers are accustomed to being asked to "do more with less," but that need is taking on new levels of meaning as IT is forced to curtail energy use, Cappuccio said. Energy costs are the main reason businesses are pursuing server virtualization. Gartner analysts noted that there is declining level of trust in the IT market on the heels of the recession, but the research firm expects global IT spending to rise a modest 2.3% in 2010. "There's no denying that it's been a tough year," Gartner analyst Joe Baylock said.

Despite what hypervisor vendors might have you believe, virtualization typically doesn't reduce complexity or management costs but the energy savings from packing multiple virtual machines onto a single box are very real, Cappuccio said. Enterprises are extending the life of old equipment to save money, but this is also subjecting users to higher failure rates caused by aging hardware. Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jbrodkin Future spending growth might be driven by cloud computing, but Gartner analysts are predicting that most cloud spending will initially focus on building private cloud networks rather than outsourcing services to external cloud providers. "We think private cloud services are going to be 70% to 80% of the investments over the next few years," Cappuccio said.

App for avoiding traffic tickets speeds toward smartphones

A smartphone application coming this fall could help drivers use GPS to detect speed traps, cameras at red lights and more than 200,000 related alerts based on a database of locations compiled with updates from drivers. The company is currently taking orders at its Web site and is charging $100 for a lifetime fee for the software and GPS updates. PhantomAlert, based in Harrisburg, Pa., said today it plans to plans to ship its PhantomAlert software for Android devices in early October and for iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia devices before Thanksgiving. The company has been offering the application for use with popular GPS devices from Garmin, Tom-Tom and Magellan since May.

The system works on reports from drivers and spotters who record their findings on the PhantomAlert.com Web site. About 100,000 users have already downloaded the application, CEO Joe Scott said in comments via e-mail. Scott said two people have to verify a speed trap or other location for the warning to stay in a database, and users are asked to comment about whether existing reports are accurate. In one example confirmed by a reporter today in Framingham, Mass., an icon was placed on a map along Route 9 west of Boston where it was first posted in mid-August. Sometimes, the locations of speed traps are left in the database for weeks at a time because they are spots along highways where the speed limit suddenly drops from, say, 55 mph to 35 mph and those locations "lend themselves to police monitoring," Scott said.

Icons on GPS maps are also used to post locations of school zones where speed limits are lower than nearby streets, but the system also records intersections where red light traffic cameras are installed to automatically record violators. PhantomAlert's Web site and press releases say that the system is legal and will help drivers avoid costly tickets by driving safer with the visual and audio alerts offered in the application. "Now, drivers will have an in-car reminder to obey traffic laws and stay alert," a statement from the company says. "As more and more cash-strapped cities are deploying photo radar to generate revenue, PhantomAlert is stepping forward with a service that will quite possibly level the playing field." In still more situations, speed traps and stops for Driving Under the Influence are located.

Moore's Law has decades left, Intel CTO predicts

Moore's Law will keep going strong for decades, Intel CTO Justin Rattner predicts. Predictions of the demise of Moore's Law are routinely heard in the IT world, and some organizations are trying to find a replacement for silicon chip technology. Why we're hard-wired to ignore Moore's LawRead the Intel CTO's take on why machines could ultimately match human intelligence Moore's Law, in force for more than 40 years, says that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every 18 to 24 months.

But Rattner says that silicon has plenty of life left and said there is no end in sight for Moore's Law. "If Moore's Law is simply a measure of the increase in the number of electronic devices per chip, then Moore's Law has much more time to go, probably decades," Rattner said in an interview with Network World. Separately, IBM scientists are building computer chips out of DNA.  Rattner, who is CTO of the world's biggest chipmaker and the head of Intel Labs, the company's primary research arm, predicted that chip architecture will "undergo dramatic changes" in the coming decades but that silicon itself will remain the core element for the foreseeable future. The National Science Foundation is already preparing for a post-silicon world, having requested $20 million in federal funding for research that could improve or replace current transistor technology. Intel is now moving to a 32-nanometer process for chip production, an upgrade over the existing 45-nanometer process. "There's plenty of life left in silicon," Rattner says. "We're well along in our 32-nanometer development and I think we'll show some significant product-level results at 32. Right now, in terms of silicon technology we don't feel like we're at some point of demise in any sense. Beyond the search for ever-greater performance and efficiency, Intel's researchers today are striving to make chips more compatible with server virtualization technologies, such as the VMware and Xen hypervisors. And there are still new approaches to the way we build transistors and devices that will involve silicon and newer materials, like our high-k metal gate silicon technology." The high-k metal gate technology uses hafnium-based circuitry, which Intel adopted to create smaller processors that are faster and more energy-efficient.

Just a decade ago, Intel had a hard time convincing its own chip designers that virtualization was an important feature, but times have changed quickly. "Virtualization has become mandatory," Rattner says. "We had a lot of work to do to convince the chip designers that this was a really important feature. What we think of today as supercomputer applications will ultimately move down to desktops, laptops and even mobile phones, Rattner says. At first they looked at it, kind of squinted and said 'really'? Now it's just about the most important thing in the product." Rattner, who will deliver the opening address at the SC supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., in November, also discussed how supercomputing power is being packed into smaller and smaller form factors. Intel is building many new "system on chip" designs that will add new capabilities to a variety of Internet-connected devices, such as robotics, set-top boxes and various mobile Internet devices. Rattner says "mobile augmented reality" will become a part of everyday life, with cameras that you can point at an object – such as a famous ruin – and instantly receive detailed information about what it is. "That's augmented reality, where you take real world information, and you overlay the virtual information that informs you about the scene," Rattner says. "Beyond that, what we see happening is an increasing amount of what we call perceptual computing tasks, as small form factor machines have richer sensor capabilities."

A fresh start at a company that gets security

This economic recession has cost all of us. I was laid off first in 2007 after six years as the top security manager at a company where I had built the security program from scratch. In my case, it cost me my job - twice.

I was laid off again just recently, after two years during which I first tried to build a new security program, but then had to cut my already very small staff. Needless to say, I think that was a poor decision, and I don't say that because I lost my job. Finally the security program was shut down entirely. Just before the ax fell, I had been working on cost-cutting initiatives. I figured that there had to be a better way to save money than ejecting large pieces of our corporate knowledge base. I had hated cutting my staff, and I was determined to ensure that no more layoffs would be required.

After digging around, I found two very expensive services that the company was paying for while getting very little value in return. But just as I was feeling good about the prospects of this proposal, I was called in to the CIO's office, where I found myself facing our HR director and a bunch of layoff forms. It looked to me as if we could eliminate those expensive and underperforming services, and then use our in-house staff and infrastructure to perform the same work at a lower cost and higher level of quality. Clearly, the company had chosen to go down the well-worn path of cutting staff rather than reducing costs in other areas. But now I have a new position that I'm feeling pretty good about. It was a devastating blow.

My job-loss trauma was thankfully brief, and I can look back and realize that I'm probably better off not working for a company that made such terrible decisions. This time, I don't have to start from scratch exactly; this company has many good security practices ingrained into its processes, mainly because the technical staff is young, smart and savvy - they get security, and its importance. I'm a security manager again, but in a different industry, and in a company with a different culture and work environment. It looks like I won't have a very large staff once again, maybe two or three people, but the rest of the IT staff here is very aware of what constitutes good security practices, and that could make a huge difference. I'll be facing some new challenges here that I hadn't encountered in the previous eight years, but I've also learned some things from my experiences, so when familiar challenges present themselves, I'll react more effectively. With everybody pulling in the same direction, I might not need a lot of full-time employees dedicated to security.

For instance, I had to kick off my last security manager position with a focus on patching, as I tried to turn the steering wheel of a big company toward an effective program of consistently applying security updates to operating systems in a timely fashion. Instead, a collaborative approach with the IT administrators and a focus on getting management to provide the right resources and priorities can be more effective. I had mixed results, but I learned in the process that it doesn't pay to push too hard in the wrong places. That is a lesson that should be applicable in many situations, even though in my new company, patching is recognized as being important. I will need to raise the visibility and priority of the efforts so we can make improvements, but I don't have to try to get everyone to understand why it's needed.

It's being done, though not consistently and not comprehensively. What a relief. Account management is being done fairly diligently, although it could use some improvements, especially in the area of terminations and deprovisioning. It's also good that our IT administrators have a pretty good hardening standard for their Windows and Unix systems, and they seem to be applying it uniformly. Administrative access could use some fine-tuning as well; currently, everyone's an administrator, and there are many shared passwords in use. Overall, I would rate this environment 7 out of 10 in terms of general security practices.

I'll definitely want to address that. My first priority will be to start making small, incremental improvements in the current practices to make things better and introduce more maturity and consistency into the environment. This week's journal is written by a real security manager, "J.F. Rice," whose name and employer have been disguised for obvious reasons. This is a new challenge for me, one that I hope will be fun and exciting as well as successful. Contact him at jf.rice@engineer.com.

Storm8 says phone-number lawsuit lacks merit

On Monday, we covered a pending class-action lawsuit filed against Storm8, developer of numerous popular iPhone games. In an official statement on the company's forum, Storm8 attempts to clarify just why the heck it was gathering phone numbers, and just what the heck it was doing with them. The suit alleges that Storm8's games used "backdoor" methods to snag players' iPhone numbers.

The short version: accidentally, and nothing. Elsewhere in the forum thread, Storm8 claims that said code was removed from its apps in August 2009, that the existing database of phone numbers was destroyed, and that the phone numbers sent by users who haven't yet upgraded to latest versions of the games aren't stored. The long version goes like this: Early in the development process of Storm8's initial games, the company wanted a way to identify specific iPhones connecting to its massively-multiplayer games, so it tried using the device's phone number . Eventually, Storm8 "determined it was more suitable to use the device's Unique Device ID instead." But-and here's the big head-scratcher-somehow, the old number-sniffing code was left in place anyway. On the lawsuit itself, Storm8 makes this key claim: "Storm8 will ask the judge to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety due to the lawsuit's complete lack of merit. To our knowledge, no user has incurred any damage or loss as a result of the matters discussed in the lawsuit." We'll let the courts decide, of course, but if Storm8's claims are to be believed, perhaps the only thing the company is guilty of is especially lousy code review.

We believe that we have always complied with all of the statutes referred to in the lawsuit and never took an action that harmed or impaired users or your devices in any way.

Cisco warns UC users of limited support for Windows 7

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is warning customers of its unified communications products that support for Windows 7 won't be forthcoming until the product's 8.0 release scheduled for the first quarter of 2010. About a dozen more UC products will not support Windows 7 until version 8.5, in the third quarter of 2010 and at that time, only the 32-bit version of Windows 7 will be supported. 7 tools for Windows 7 rolloutsDennis Hartmann on Cisco Unified Communications Only three Cisco UC products among a list of about 50 published by Cisco Subnet blogger Brad Reese specifically promised 64-bit support, and this only through the use of a 32-bit emulator. These products are the Cisco UC Integration for Microsoft Office Communicator, Cisco IP Communicator and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator. One CCIE, who asked not to be identified, is frustrated with the delay. The Communicator products are the client-side multimedia applications used with Cisco Unified Communications. He tells Network World that Cisco became a Windows supplier when it developed desktop UC applications such as the Unified Attendant Console, one of the applications that is not yet slated to support 64-bit Windows 7. The spotty roadmap for 64-bit support makes it difficult to see Cisco's UC as a good fit for companies wanting to upgrade to Windows 7, he says.

However another expressed frustration. One reader posted a comment on Reese's blog that said it is possible to run UC products on Windows 7 right now. This anonymous reader wrote, "I realize many of the Cisco UC products will probably work on Win 7 32-bit. Microsoft 64-bit OS has been available since Win XP although 64-bit processors have only been available for the masses for a few years. I'm concerned about the Cisco UC applications working on Win 7 64-bit.

However, most desktop and notebook computers purchased in the last 2-3 years included 64-bit processors. They provide many applications for the standard desktop computer. Cisco is now a desktop software application vendor. They have a responsibility to support the most current corporate desktop OS!" Microsoft released Windows 7 to manufacturing on July 22, 2009. At that point developers of Windows applications had access to the final code included Windows 7. It was released to the general public on October 22.  According to Microsoft's Windows 7 Compatibility Center, four Cisco desktop Windows applications have been certified as compatible with Windows 7. These are the Cisco VPN client version 5, the Cisco EAP-FAST Module, the Cisco LEAP Module, the Cisco PEAP Module. The Cisco Anyconnect 2.4 SSLVPN client actually does support both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. The Cisco VPN client 5.0.6 supports only the 32-bit version, according to Microsoft's compatibility information. These modules are methods to securely transmit authentication credentials and are used with a VPN. Cisco Subnet blogger Jamey Heary asserts that Cisco is the first major VPN vendor to support Windows 7 (as well as Mac OSX 10.6 clients). Cisco's VPN support for Windows 7 covers both its IPSEC client and SSLVPN client software.

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Hijacked Web sites attack visitors

Here's the scenario: Attackers compromise a major brand's Web site. The issue goes unnoticed until it's exposed publicly. But instead of stealing customer records, the attacker installs malware that infects the computers of thousands of visitors to the site. Such attacks are a common occurrence, but most fly under the radar because the users never know that a trusted Web site infected them, says Brian Dye, senior director of product management at Symantec Corp.

But word can get out, leaving the Web site's customers feeling betrayed, and seriously damaging a brand's reputation. When his company tracks down the source of such infections, it often quietly notifies the Web site owner. Attackers, often organized crime rings, gain entry using techniques such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection and remote file-inclusion attacks, then install malicious code on the Web server that lets them get access to the end users doing business with the site. "They're co-opting machines that can be part of botnets that send phishing e-mail, that are landing sites for traffic diversion and that host malware," says Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer at MarkMonitor. That possibility is one of Lynn Goodendorf's biggest worries as global head of data privacy at InterContinental Hotels Group. "I worry about attacks that use a combination of malware and botnets," she says, adding that she has watched this type of activity increase steadily over the past two years. "That's very scary," says Goodendorf. But because the business's Web site isn't directly affected, the administrators of most infected Web sites don't even know it's happening.

Most victims haven't associated such attacks with the Web sites that inadvertently infected them. The latest versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and Google's search engine detect sites infected with malware, issue a warning and block access to the site. "To me, this is serious online brand damage," says Garter analyst John Pescatore, and it can be disastrous for small and midsize businesses that totally depend on search engine traffic. But that may be changing. The next frontier, says Dye, may be attackers who use these types of exploits against the Web sites of high-profile brands and then publicize - or threaten to publicize - what happened. But Pescatore sees a more fundamental problem: rushing through Web site updates and ignoring development best practices designed promote security. Preventing attacks like SQL injections requires using enterprise-class security tools, such as intrusion-prevention and -detection systems, with a focus on behavioral analysis to spot attacks, Dye says.

Most organizations follow formal processes for major upgrades, but not for the constant "tinkering" that takes place. The result: Vulnerabilities creep into the code. "Security groups often are forced to put Web application firewalls in front of Web servers to shield [these] vulnerabilities from attack," says Pescatore.

Unisys service uses the cloud to manage mobile devices

Unisys is introducing a new service on Wednesday that will allow its customers to better manage, secure and support mobile devices carried around by employees, company executives said on Tuesday. CIOs are concerned about corporate data "roaming the streets," he added. Staff now expect to use their choice of devices anytime and anywhere, and this causes problems for CIOs around cost, the cost of support, and the security of applications and data, said Tony Doye, president of Unisys' Global Outsourcing and Infrastructure Services group, in a telephone interview. The service framework for the new end-user productivity services will support Windows Mobile phones and BlackBerry devices, with support for the iPhone and other devices available in later releases.

Some early-adopter customers, mainly in Central Europe, are already using the mobile-device management framework, he said. Currently organizations generally manage devices with specific technologies that only work with a specific platform, rather than with a consistent framework across a variety of devices, said Sam Gross, Unisys' vice president for global IT outsourcing solutions. The framework is managed by Unisys for customers, and the management and support of the devices is also done from the company's services delivery centers around the world, he added. Unisys is also offering access to standard office suites by subscription through a service called Virtual Office as a service from the Unisys Secure Cloud. The new service will enable CIOs to reduce end-user costs by providing support for different devices, desktop PCs, applications and mobile data access through a mix of traditional, virtualized and secure cloud-based service delivery models, Unisys said.

The Unisys Secure Cloud has technology that protects both data in mobile devices and in storage, using a combination of encryption and dispersion of data. "The model that we are delivering is server-side virtualization services, and in this situation the data never ends up on the end-point," Gross said. Unisys' Unified Communications as a Service, also delivered through Unisys Secure Cloud, offers Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office Communicator applications in a multi-tenant environment. Unisys is also offering generic services such as the ability to destroy the image on a device if it is reported lost, he added. Besides offering these productivity applications, customers can also provide their employees with access to other applications running at the company, through the Unisys cloud, Gross said.

Symantec ties DLP software to third-party security tools

Symantec has updated its Data-Loss Prevention Suite so that if the software finds a data issue that needs fixing, it can apply third-party encryption and digital-rights management controls to the problem. Announced today, Symantec DLP Suite v. 10 adds what's called the "Flex-Response" capability to find sensitive data that has been left unprotected in the enterprise and apply security controls through encryption and DRM products from vendors such as PGP, Oracle, GigaTrust, Liquid Machines and Microsoft. Watch a slideshow of this product. Symantec is also publishing a set of open APIs and a software development kit (SDK) to facilitate support for security controls through additional products, says Rob Greer, senior director of product management at Symantec. "Suppose I scan a file server, finding information not secured, not encrypted.

The data can also be brought under the control of various DRM products so there can be controls placed on viewing, printing or adding to content.  Symantec DLP v.10, expected to ship in December, will have a workflow process that can alert managers to data that's out of compliance with corporate DLP policies; let them choose to apply encryption and DRM; and confirm that security policies have been enforced. For remediation I could apply PGP encryption," Greer says. Other changes in DLP Suite v. 10 are expected to tighten ties with other Symantec products. There will also be integration with Symantec's Control Compliance Suite for risk assessment of operating systems and applications. "You will get a full risk position view," Greer says. For instance, the updated version will be integrated with Symantec Security Information Manager for centralized collection and correlation of event and log data to determine security status.

Symantec has already begun adding ways to trigger policy-based DLP actions on its Symantec Endpoint Protection security software, such as "making [a desktop] a brick" if it's determined sensitive data is at high risk, Greer says. Symantec DLP v.10 starts at $25,000. Other automated actions are also being added to DLP v. 10 to allow interaction between Symantec's DLP and its flagship security software.

TomTom, Navigon update iPhone apps

Navigation vendors TomTom and Navigon this week announced significant updates to their respective turn-by-turn navigation apps for the iPhone. The new version adds a number of oft-requested features, first among them being text-to-speech directions, which allows the app to read aloud the names of places and streets, and an iPhone-app implementation of the company's Advanced Lane Guidance, which gives you detailed, 3-D images of complex intersections for easier navigation. TomTom on Thursday revealed a major update to the company's $100 TomTom US & Canada.

Also included in the latest version are map and safety-camera updates; a new Help menu that provides direct access to emergency numbers and directions to emergency providers; in-app control of iPod playback; and customizable audio warnings for events such as exceeding the speed limit and approaching safety cameras. Meanwhile, Navigon has announced the availability of an update to the company's $90 MobileNavigator North America iPhone app. The free TomTom update has been submitted to Apple for approval. The new version includes several minor enhancements, including an extended-destination search that helps find a destination even if you don't have the full address, and the capability to manually move your destination pinpoint at any time. Available as an in-app purchase, Traffic Live takes advantage of real-time traffic information-gathered from current Navigon iPhone users, commercial fleets, and other GPS systems, as well as data from ClearChannel's Total Traffic Network-to determine the fastest route, update travel times, and warn of accidents, construction, and other incidents. But the biggest new feature is the availability of Navigon's Traffic Live feature.

For the first four weeks of release, the Traffic Live in-app purchase will carry a price tag of $20; the price will then increase to $25. There are no ongoing service charges for Traffic Live, although Navigon notes that if your iPhone service doesn't include a data plan-a possibility outside the U.S.-additional data charges may occur when using the Traffic Live feature.

Microsoft turning configuration management “on its side”

Microsoft is changing up the next version of its System Center Configuration Manager so instead of managing devices it will manage users and their activities across multiple devices. "It will focus on… providing them an appropriate profile for information access based on the job function of the user together with the device they are using," says Bob Muglia, the head of Microsoft's server and tools division. But the change fits into one of Microsoft's recent occurring themes of providing application support across phones, PCs and browsers. While he did not name the version he was talking about, Microsoft is slated to ship the Windows Server-based Configuration Manager 2007 R3 late in the first three months of 2010. Windows 7: 10 Best Features  Muglia admitts that it is a big change for the software that has been around since 1996 when it started life as Systems Management Server. "When I look at the changes we need to do [with Configuration Manager] that is one of the biggest ones that is coming," he says. "It is really turning configuration management on its side and I look at that with both anticipation and a little trepidation because we know it will take customers time to make that key transition." Muglia says Microsoft is gearing up to help customers through that change, although, he did not give details on how that might happen.

And it aligns with the company's intent to provide an integration between security and identity. Muglia said the data center is where things are booming for System Center, now the fastest growing business in the Server and Tools division with 30% improvements year-over-year. In the Configuration Manager case, data access policies could be paired with identity credentials and awareness of the user's current device. He said virtualization is driving growth, as well as, strong uptake with Operations Manager. "Over time what we expect to see is us transitioning our data center offerings to a more complete integrated product which pulls all these things together," says Muglia. "It will help enable these cloud deployments, these on-premise private cloud deployments. You need configuration management, you need operational monitoring, you need virtualization management and you need backup and archiving." Muglia says organizations need all those things together, "and that is sort of the direction in which we are heading." He also says the long awaited System Center Service Manager will finally be out in the first half of next year, but that Microsoft is beginning to take a different angle on that software. We think you need all those components working together.

Service Manager, formerly called Service Desk, helps administrators work through trouble tickets but also anchors automated, pro-active service requests initiated via other system management tools, and can aid in compliance auditing. "We are now really looking at Service Manger as something that deeply integrates across everything to provide business process integration in the context of systems management,"  Muglia says."We look forward to getting the first release out, but the future of that product will be much more around compliance management and policy management associated with business process and business process compliance. That is the direction we will take that over a longer period of time. " Follow John on Twitter

Piracy's global economic impact debated

There's no question that software piracy is a global problem with a heavy financial impact. A May 2009 report by the Business Software Alliance and IDC estimated that 20% of software programs installed in the U.S. last year were unauthorized copies. But just how heavy it is is a matter of debate. Worldwide, the figure is 41%, with an estimated financial impact of $53 billion - a figure based on the retail value of the pirated PC software.

If it were, the BSA's global loss figure of $53 billion would drop sharply, they maintain. "Obviously, not every piece of pirated software will be replaced immediately with legitimate software if underlicensing is addressed or sources of pirated stuff dry up," acknowledges Dale Curtis, the BSA's vice president of communications. But critics of the study say it fails to account for the possibility that pirated software could be replaced with Linux or other open-source options. But he says that over the years, IDC has found "a very strong correlation between piracy rates and software sales. One country that wasn't included is Canada - and that doesn't sit right with Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa. "What the BSA did not disclose is that the 2009 report on Canada (whose piracy rate declined from 33% to 32% in the study) were guesses since Canadian firms and users were not surveyed. In country after country, as the piracy rate falls, legitimate sales go up." A second criticism of the report is that its country-by-country figures are partly based on the results of an annual survey that in 2009 covered 24 countries. While the study makes seemingly authoritative claims about the state of Canadian piracy, the reality is that IDC . . . did not bother to survey in Canada," Geist wrote in a May 27 blog post.

Further, he says Canadian users were surveyed the previous year, and "there is no reason to assume large changes in results from one year to the next." Ivan Png, a professor of information systems and economics at the University of Singapore, says the BSA and IDC should explain how they applied the results from the 24 countries surveyed to all of the other countries not surveyed. "IDC should make the methodology transparent," Png says. Curtis responds that the study "is not a guess, nor is it a scientific measurement, nor is it based primarily on a survey of software users, as Geist suggests." A survey of 6,200 users is only a piece of the model, Curtis says.

Apple pushes unnecessary software to Windows PCs

Apple again used its software update tool to push a program that was previously not installed on a PC, according to Computerworld tests early Monday. Apple's Software Update for Windows - a utility most often installed on PCs when users download iTunes - was offering something called "iPhone Configuration Utility" to Windows users, even to machines that have never connected to an iPhone. Later in the day, however, Apple removed the software from the update list.

Popular Windows blogger Ed Bott first reported on ZDNet that the tool was included in new updates. The tool, chimed in Simon Bisson of itexpertmag.com , is actually an enterprise-grade tool for network administrators, who use it to create and deploy device profiles so users can securely connect to a company's Exchange mail servers. Computerworld confirmed that the 22MB download was offered to PCs, including those running Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) and Vista SP2, that had never been used to synchronize an iPhone. According to Bisson , the iPhone Configuration Utility also adds the open-source Apache Web server software to the PC. "The thing with that iPhone config utility is that it's an enterprise tool for building device profiles. Apple has been criticized in the past for using its software updating service to push unwanted software. It's not for consumers!" Bisson said on Twitter.

Last year, for example, the company came under fire for offering Safari for Windows to users who had not installed the application, going so far as to pre-check the program so that users who simply accepted the default downloads received the browser. Later, Apple quietly changed Software Update so that Safari was unchecked, requiring users to explicitly request the browser. John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla, the open-source developer responsible for Firefox, said Apple's tactic "undermines the Internet" because updates are traditionally used to patch or fix existing software, not install new programs. By 3:30 p.m. ET, Apple Software Update had dropped the iPhone Configuration Utility as a potential update to the same PCs that earlier had indicated the tool should be downloaded. Apple did not immediately respond to questions about why the iPhone utility had been offered, and whether the company had erred in listing it as an update for Windows users.

U.S. house decommissions its last mainframe, saves $730,000

The U.S. House of Representatives has taken its last mainframe offline, signaling the end of a computing era in Washington, D.C. The last mainframe supposedly enjoyed "quasi-celebrity status" within the House data center, having spent 12 years keeping the House's inventory control records and financial management data, among other tasks. How to really bury a mainframe The cost and energy savings contribute to the Green the Capitol program designed to improve efficiency in the halls of Congress. But it was time for a change, with the House spending $30,000 a year to power the mainframe and another $700,000 each year for maintenance and support.

Applications running on the last mainframe have been moved to x86 and Unix servers, many of which are using virtualization technology that first appeared on the mainframe decades ago.  "It's a symbolic transition into the latest and greatest in terms of green technology, virtualization, consolidation and all those things," says Jack Nichols, director of enterprise operations at the House of Representatives. "The mainframe plug was pulled, but it was pulled in favor of something that was started in the mainframe world."  The House had been using mainframes since at least the early 1970s, and at one time had a 13,000-square-foot data center dedicated to mainframe and mainframe operations. The last mainframe was an IBM model in place since 1997, and was situated in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_House_Office_Building ">Ford House Office Building. "It wasn't the fastest box in the world," says Rich Zanatta, director of facilities for the House. "Some of our blades and some of our standard servers have more capability than that entire 8-cubic-foot box has. As mainframes grew stronger, the House moved down to just one machine, in addition to other types of servers. Technology-wise, it's obviously been surpassed." New mainframes are far more powerful and efficient than those built in the 90s, of course. It will be turned over to the U.S. General Services Administration, and could resurface in the used mainframe market.

But the House decided not to buy another mainframe in part because its IT staff has more expertise running x86 and Unix boxes. "We really don't' have those [mainframe] skill sets in house anymore," Zanatta says. "We try not to maintain architecture that we can't support ourselves." The staff for House Chief Administrator Officer Daniel Beard held a ceremony to take the mainframe offline Friday. The House also had a second mainframe in a backup site, the location of which is secret, which was also shut off.  Decommissioning the mainframe involved getting rid of lots of large, bulky cables, not to mention migrating applications to newer systems. But the House staff has been working to move those applications to new servers for the past five years, a process that just ended. The mainframe had been running a half-dozen applications including staff payroll, inventory management, committee calendars and other legislative tasks. Turning off the mainframe is a big step in reducing the House's server footprint. The mainframe was consuming 10,000 to 15,000 watts an hour, and maintenance and support costs were increasing because it was so out-of-date. "As it increases in age, so does the maintenance cost," Zanatta says. "We were starting to hit that threshold of pain."

Already, the House consolidated about 150 test servers down to 20 through virtualization, and consolidated about 120 production servers onto 15 or 20. "Those are dramatic savings for us in the way of power and cooling," Zanatta says.

World of Warcraft players targeted by 'free mounts' phishing scheme

The popular online game World of Warcraft (WoW) is being hit with a new phishing scheme that lets attackers steal players' accumulated "gold" and other treasure by luring players with offers of free "mounts" used in the online game, say security researchers at F-Secure. The link takes the player to a site that looks exactly like World of Warcraft and offers them free "mounts," the fantasy horses that humans would ride or trusted wolf mounts that the Orcs prefer, which have powers like helping move the player more quickly through the game or defend them against monsters. It's an attack that exploits the WoW-based in-game chat to lure a player into clicking on a link.

If the victim falls for the "free mounts" phishing fraud and enters his online credentials, the attacker can take over his account and steal all the "gold" or other treasures the player accumulated in the game's progress. "This is like physical property, it can be traded," said Sean Sullivan, security researcher at F-Secure about the value of the online game's items like "gold" and "mounts," which can bring money in auctions in sites in China, for example. Sullivan added that over two years ago, eBay declared a ban on auctioning WoW items like fantasy "gold," apparently because of the fraud level. The latest phishing scam to hit WoW, which F-Secure describes here, is a new twist on some of the older attacks that made use of malicious banner ads on WoW to try and install trojans on victim's desktops. The current "mounts" phishing scam allows the successful attacker to steal whatever treasures the victim has associated with the WoW account, and then to go after other victims. F-Secure's Internet Security 2010 product recognizes this type of phishing scam and blocks against it, the vendor says.

Sun, Oracle chiefs vow: Sun technologies will live on

Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison both took the stage at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference Sunday evening to offer reassurances that Sun technologies will not go away should Oracle complete its planned acquisition of Sun. As a matter of fact, combining Sun's research and development budget with Sun's presents  "one of the great R&D opportunities of all time," McNealy said. [ Find out why some user are nervous about Oracle owning MySQL. | Relive Sun's storied history in InfoWorld's slideshow "The rise and fall of Sun Microsystems." ] Oracle, for example, intends to spend more money developing Sparc than Sun does now, he said. "That's a good sign for Sparc innovation," McNealy said. "You look at the core technologies that we're developing: They're going to find a nice home in this next chapter," he said, referring to merger. From Java to the Solaris OS to the Sparc CPU platform and Sun storage technologies, Oracle will be good for all of them, the executives stressed at the San Francisco event. Ellison, for his part, took exception with IBM for suggesting Oracle was not committed to Sun's wares, particularly Sun hardware. "We're looking forward to competing with IBM in the systems [business] and we think the combination of Sun and Oracle [is] well-equipped to compete successfully against the giant," Ellison said.

The challenge would be part of a new ad campaign. Ellison said he would give $10 million to anyone - any major company or enterprise - whose existing database application would not run at least twice as fast on Sun gear. But he acknowledged Oracle recently was fined $10,000 for running a recent ad comparing Sun and Oracle to IBM, in which the benchmark evidence had not yet been documented.  His explanation cited overzealousness on Oracle's part. "If IBM wants to compete, we're happy to compete and we made a series of commitments," Ellison said. And with a little more investment, it could be even better," said Ellison. Solaris, meanwhile, is the leading enterprise OS and the leading OS for running the Oracle database, he said. "We said we're not selling the hardware business and we think Sparc is a fantastic technology.

Oracle also plans to increase its investment in the open source MySQL database, Ellison said. MySQL currently is owned by Sun. He added that Oracle already has continued to invest in the Innobase technology it acquired that serves as the transaction engine in MySQL. There had been speculation that Oracle bought Innobase "to kill it," but that has not happened at all, Ellison stressed. IBM had been a rumored suitor for Sun prior to Oracle forging a deal to buy the company nearly six months ago. McNealy said efforts to close the sale were proceeding with authorities. The sale remains held up by the European Union, which is concerned over commercial database giant Oracle owning MySQL.  Recently, Ellison said Sun has been losing $100 million a month waiting for the sale to close.

To argue on behalf of Oracle's commitment to Java, McNealy brought Sun Vice President James Gosling, considered the father of Java, onstage. The JSR process is used to submit modifications to the platform to the community at large. Oracle's product mix features Java and the company has  participated in numerous Java Specification Requests (JSR), Gosling said. Oracle, though, has been a bit unprepared for the volume of activity in the Java world, Gosling, said. "We do 15 million downloads of the JRE (Java Runtime Edition) a week on average," he said. He lauded recent Sun-Oracle performance benchmarks and noted the recently introduced Sun-Oracle Exadata Database Machine Version 2, which combines Sun hardware with Oracle's database and storage management software.  Fowler also announced the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, which integrates 1.6TB of Flash storage into a device that looks like a server.

Also appearing onstage at OpenWorld was John Fowler, Sun vice president of system. "My team is excited about working closely with Oracle because we have been working with Oracle now [for] what's measured in decades," Fowler said. McNealy cited a long list of Sun accomplishments, including the Network File System, the various editions of Java, Sparc's being the first 64-bit volume RISC architecture, and the company's contributions to open source, including its use of Berkeley Unix. "We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix," he said. In a Top 10 list entitled "Top 10 Signs Engineers Have Gone Wild," McNealy  took potshots at Apple for not supporting Java on its iPhone. "Friends don't let friends type on an iPhone especially since it doesn't run Java. In a brief interview after the evening presentation, Tim Bray, Sun's director of Web technologies, would not comment on whether the Sun name would go away as part of the merger with Oracle or whether Sun would become a division of Oracle. Are you listening, Steve," McNealy said, referring to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.  "[The iPhone is] the only device on the planet that doesn't run Java." He also ridiculed President Barack Obama's winning of the Nobel Peace prize last week, without mentioning the President by name. Follow the latest trends for developers, open source, and database management at InfoWorld.com.  

One of the engineering signs on McNealy's list pertained to a Nobel prize for a gas mask bra, leading McNealy to follow the reference with a comment that such an award was "no more ridiculous than some other Nobel prizes that I've heard of." This story, "Sun, Oracle chiefs vow: Sun technologies will live on," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

FBI says trio of terrorism e-mails are scams

The FBI today warned that three separate e-mails making the rounds that promise access to FBI terrorism reports are nothing more than malicious software looking to steal your personal information. Fraudulent e-mails containing the subject line "New DHS Report" have been circulating since August 15, 2009. The e-mails claim to be from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI Counterterrorism Division. Network World Extra: 12 changes that would give US cybersecurity a much needed kick in the pants The three scam-mails are: • Fraudulent e-mail claiming to be from Department of Homeland Security and the FBI Counterterrorism Division. The e-mail text contains information about "New Usama Bin Ladin Speech Directed to the People of Europe," and has an attachment titled "audio.exe." The attachment is purportedly an audio speech from Bin Ladin; however, it actually contains malicious software intended to steal information from the recipient's system. • Fraudulent e-mail message claiming to contain a confidential FBI report titled "New Patterns in Al-Qaeda Financing" has been circulating since August 15, 2009. The e-mail has the subject line "Intelligence Bulletin No. 267," and contains an attachment titled "bulletin.exe." This message, or similar messages, may contain files that are harmful to the recipient's system and may try to steal user credentials. • A fraudulent e-mail, initially appearing around June 16, 2009, claims to contain a confidential FBI report from the FBI "Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate." The subject line of the email is "RE: Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate," and contains an attachment "reports.exe". This message and similar messages may contain a file related to the "W32.Waledac" trojan software, which is designed to steal user authentication credentials or send spam messages.

Such bulletins shall not be released, either in written or oral form, to the media, the general public, or other personnel who do not have a valid need-to-know without prior approval from an authorized FBI official, as such release could jeopardize national security. Below is an example of the fraudulent e-mail message: CLASSIFIEDFEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONINTELLIGENCE BULLETINWeapons of Mass Destruction DirectorateHANDLING NOTICE: Recipients are reminded that FBI Intelligence Bulletins contain sensitive terrorism and counterterrorism information meant for use primarily within the law enforcement and homeland security communities. Link to malicious software (report.exe) The malware warning comes on the heels of an FBI report that fraudsters are targeting social networking sites with increased frequency and users need to take precautions. One involves the use of spam to promote phishing sites, claiming there has been a violation of the terms of agreement or some other type of issue which needs to be resolved. The FBI said scammers continue to hijack accounts on social networking sites and spread malicious software by using various techniques. Other spam entices users to download an application or view a video.

Once the user responds to the phishing site, downloads the application, or clicks on the video link, their computer, telephone or other digital device becomes infected, the FBI stated. Some spam appears to be sent from users' "friends", giving the perception of being legitimate. Another fraudster favorite involves applications advertised on social networking sites, which appear legitimate; however, some of these applications install malicious code or rogue anti-virus software, the FBI stated.

China's Alibaba expects India joint venture this year

Top Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba.com aims to announce an Indian joint venture this year as the company expands its global footprint, it said Friday. A deal in India, where Alibaba.com recently surpassed 1 million registered members, would be the latest in the site's efforts to grow abroad. "I've got a lot of confidence in India," said Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba Group, the parent company of Alibaba.com. Alibaba.com is in talks with an Indian reseller about forming a joint venture, CEO David Wei told reporters at a briefing. Alibaba.com is a platform for small and medium businesses to trade everything from lumber and clothes to iPods and PC components.

Alibaba.com already works with Indian publishing company Infomedia 18, its likely joint venture partner, to promote its platform in the country. Its main member base is in China, but the site also has 9.5 million registered users in other countries and facilitates many cross-border trades. The site also has a joint venture in Japan and recently launched a major U.S. advertising campaign to attract more users there. Ma said Alibaba knows it needs to "do something" in Latin America as well. Ma and other top Alibaba executives visited the U.S. early this year for meetings with potential partners including Amazon.com, eBay and Google. When asked if the company would also seek to expand in Eastern Europe, Ma said, "I will be there." Alibaba will not hold a majority stake in joint ventures it forms, instead taking a share similar to the 35 percent it has in its Japan operation. "Our global strategy means partner with local people," Ma said. "We want partners and we want partners to control their business." Users place total orders of more than US$200 million each day on the Alibaba.com international platform, Wei said.

About 50 percent of those orders go to Chinese exporters, he said.

Moore's Law has decades left, Intel CTO predicts

Moore's Law will keep going strong for decades, Intel CTO Justin Rattner predicts. Predictions of the demise of Moore's Law are routinely heard in the IT world, and some organizations are trying to find a replacement for silicon chip technology. Why we're hard-wired to ignore Moore's LawRead the Intel CTO's take on why machines could ultimately match human intelligence Moore's Law, in force for more than 40 years, says that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every 18 to 24 months.

But Rattner says that silicon has plenty of life left and said there is no end in sight for Moore's Law. "If Moore's Law is simply a measure of the increase in the number of electronic devices per chip, then Moore's Law has much more time to go, probably decades," Rattner said in an interview with Network World. Separately, IBM scientists are building computer chips out of DNA.  Rattner, who is CTO of the world's biggest chipmaker and the head of Intel Labs, the company's primary research arm, predicted that chip architecture will "undergo dramatic changes" in the coming decades but that silicon itself will remain the core element for the foreseeable future. The National Science Foundation is already preparing for a post-silicon world, having requested $20 million in federal funding for research that could improve or replace current transistor technology. Intel is now moving to a 32-nanometer process for chip production, an upgrade over the existing 45-nanometer process. "There's plenty of life left in silicon," Rattner says. "We're well along in our 32-nanometer development and I think we'll show some significant product-level results at 32. Right now, in terms of silicon technology we don't feel like we're at some point of demise in any sense. Beyond the search for ever-greater performance and efficiency, Intel's researchers today are striving to make chips more compatible with server virtualization technologies, such as the VMware and Xen hypervisors. And there are still new approaches to the way we build transistors and devices that will involve silicon and newer materials, like our high-k metal gate silicon technology." The high-k metal gate technology uses hafnium-based circuitry, which Intel adopted to create smaller processors that are faster and more energy-efficient.

Just a decade ago, Intel had a hard time convincing its own chip designers that virtualization was an important feature, but times have changed quickly. "Virtualization has become mandatory," Rattner says. "We had a lot of work to do to convince the chip designers that this was a really important feature. What we think of today as supercomputer applications will ultimately move down to desktops, laptops and even mobile phones, Rattner says. At first they looked at it, kind of squinted and said 'really'? Now it's just about the most important thing in the product." Rattner, who will deliver the opening address at the SC supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., in November, also discussed how supercomputing power is being packed into smaller and smaller form factors. Intel is building many new "system on chip" designs that will add new capabilities to a variety of Internet-connected devices, such as robotics, set-top boxes and various mobile Internet devices. Rattner says "mobile augmented reality" will become a part of everyday life, with cameras that you can point at an object – such as a famous ruin – and instantly receive detailed information about what it is. "That's augmented reality, where you take real world information, and you overlay the virtual information that informs you about the scene," Rattner says. "Beyond that, what we see happening is an increasing amount of what we call perceptual computing tasks, as small form factor machines have richer sensor capabilities."

Piracy's global economic impact debated

There's no question that software piracy is a global problem with a heavy financial impact. A May 2009 report by the Business Software Alliance and IDC estimated that 20% of software programs installed in the U.S. last year were unauthorized copies. But just how heavy it is is a matter of debate. Worldwide, the figure is 41%, with an estimated financial impact of $53 billion - a figure based on the retail value of the pirated PC software.

If it were, the BSA's global loss figure of $53 billion would drop sharply, they maintain. "Obviously, not every piece of pirated software will be replaced immediately with legitimate software if underlicensing is addressed or sources of pirated stuff dry up," acknowledges Dale Curtis, the BSA's vice president of communications. But critics of the study say it fails to account for the possibility that pirated software could be replaced with Linux or other open-source options. But he says that over the years, IDC has found "a very strong correlation between piracy rates and software sales. One country that wasn't included is Canada - and that doesn't sit right with Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa. "What the BSA did not disclose is that the 2009 report on Canada (whose piracy rate declined from 33% to 32% in the study) were guesses since Canadian firms and users were not surveyed. In country after country, as the piracy rate falls, legitimate sales go up." A second criticism of the report is that its country-by-country figures are partly based on the results of an annual survey that in 2009 covered 24 countries. While the study makes seemingly authoritative claims about the state of Canadian piracy, the reality is that IDC . . . did not bother to survey in Canada," Geist wrote in a May 27 blog post.

Further, he says Canadian users were surveyed the previous year, and "there is no reason to assume large changes in results from one year to the next." Ivan Png, a professor of information systems and economics at the University of Singapore, says the BSA and IDC should explain how they applied the results from the 24 countries surveyed to all of the other countries not surveyed. "IDC should make the methodology transparent," Png says. Curtis responds that the study "is not a guess, nor is it a scientific measurement, nor is it based primarily on a survey of software users, as Geist suggests." A survey of 6,200 users is only a piece of the model, Curtis says.

Lenovo founder shares slogans, tells tales of 1980s China

The chairman of Lenovo, the world's number four PC maker, shared Chinese revolution-spirited slogans and the unlikely story of his company's growth out of a government-managed economy in a motivational speech to Chinese small business owners on Friday. Lenovo faced tough odds even though its founders were from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Chinese state-controlled institute for national research projects. Liu Chuanzhi, one of 11 former government researchers who founded the predecessor to Lenovo in 1984, recalled how the company fought through trade barriers, high component prices and domination by foreign brands in a talk that highlighted how fast China's economy has grown in the last three decades. "In 1993 almost the whole market was foreign-branded computers," Liu said at the forum for small and medium businesses in Hangzhou, a scenic city in eastern China.

The academy gave the company founding capital of 200,000 yuan, or about US$30,000 today. Things only grew worse when the company was scammed out of two-thirds of the money, he said. "When we came out, we not only lacked funds but also had no idea what to do," Liu said. That sum, far from enough, would not have been enough to buy three computers in China in the 1980s, Liu said. Lenovo, formerly called Legend Group, was founded early in China's process of market economic reforms and had to work in a tightly regulated environment. The low quality of components such as hard drives in China also hindered the company, he said.

China tried to protect domestic PC makers in the 1980s by charging a massive 200 percent tariff on foreign computers, said Liu. "The result of this protection was that foreign computers were very difficult to get into China and could only be smuggled, but China also could not make its own computers very well," he said. Lenovo's first PC did not reach the market until 1990. Lenovo struggled with low margins even as it built market share against foreign brands like IBM and Compaq in the 1990s. Government regulation also continued to slow the industry's growth. Lenovo's global presence gained a huge boost when it bought IBM's PC unit in 2005. The company's sales in developed markets have since slumped in the global economic recession and it has restructured to bring its focus back to China and other emerging markets. Chinese residents had to register with the government to become Internet users even late in the decade, said Liu. Lenovo today is the top PC vendor in China. Liu also emphasized the importance of company culture, describing Lenovo's as an example. "Make the company's interests the top priority, seek truth in forging ahead, take the people as the base," Liu said.

To succeed like Lenovo, companies must "love to battle, know how to battle, and conduct campaigns with order," Liu said, using language reminiscent of "The Art of War," an ancient Chinese book on military strategy by Sun Tzu. Chinese president Hu Jintao has promoted the slogan "take the people as the base" as a part of socialist theory. Liu attended a Chinese military college in the 1960s and worked on a Chinese farm during the Cultural Revolution, a chaotic period when many graduates were sent to the countryside for re-education.

19 Free Web Services That Keep Saving You Money

Sifting through all of the free sites and services available on the Web, you've probably come up with some favorites, such as instant messaging tools or video streaming sites like Hulu. Those are great, but what about freebies that displace something for which you usually pay? Think beyond free antivirus software and other no-cost PC utilities-how would you like free long-distance calling, MP3 downloads, e-books, and text messaging? I'll show you how to score those and more.

Some of these offerings, such as free services for making and receiving faxes, are for an introductory level of a paid product. Others are ad-supported or public services. But each one is a compelling way to get something, for free, that ordinarily costs you money. In many cases you'll get just as much as what you used to pay for-or more.

Make Free Long-Distance Calls

Sure, you can voice-chat around the world through Skype and other services. But Talkster lets you reach out and touch an actual telephone in addition to online calling options.

Free long-distance and international calls are worth putting up with a couple drawbacks. The service requires you to perform a convoluted dialing procedure: It gives you a special local number to reach a faraway friend, and your pal gets a local number too. You dial your local number, after which you have 10 seconds to tell your buddy to call back on their local number. You stay on the line and wait while they hang up and dial back.

You might hear an ad while waiting to connect again, but the two of you can talk as long as you want after the hook-up is complete. I thought calls sounded good, although one call recipient questioned the quality.

Send and Receive Faxes, No Fees Involved

Do you need to send faxes just once in a while? Ditch the fax machine and the trips to Kinko's, and use free-to-try online services such as Qipit and FaxZero.

Qipit lets you send up to five faxes each week for free. You can upload JPEG images or even send them directly from a camera phone. Free faxes include a header banner that mentions Qipit.

FaxZero limits you to two faxes of three pages each day, and its transmissions include a FaxZero-branded coversheet. But instead of sending images, FaxZero takes PDFs and Word documents, making it a better choice for PC-based use.

You can even cancel your dedicated incoming fax line and have people send physical faxes to you online. eFax Free handles everything, digitizing faxes and routing them to your e-mail account. You get a free phone number that is connected to eFax and is always listening for incoming calls.

eFax Free has a few limitations, however. You don't get to pick an area code for the incoming number, and you can't receive more than 100 pages each month. Plus, you have to read faxes in an eFax application, in its proprietary .efx format. (Paying subscribers can select an area code, receive more faxes, and read them as PDFs.) But for moderate use, eFax Free works well.

Videoconference for Free

Most chat and videoconferencing programs are free when your conversation remains between two people, but they charge you to add more. Instant messaging and videoconferencing tool TokBox blasts past that limitation, restricted only by your bandwidth.

When you begin a videoconference in TokBox, you can automatically add contacts who are on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and other supported services. Even better, however, your contacts can join the videoconference in a Web browser, just by following a URL. They don't need to install an application, and the TokBox Web site automatically interfaces with each PC's Webcam. Just start a conference, and click Invite, Share Link to get the URL.

Make Free Conference Calls

Running a meeting on a shoestring? Just want to organize a family call across the country? Rondee provides free conference calls for up to 50 people, and it offers several great extras.

You can launch a conference call immediately, simply by notifying your participants and giving them a Rondee PIN. But if you plan a call in advance, the service will send calendar-compatible e-mail invitations (with all call-in details) and make a list of replies. It'll even provide a nonspeaking access code, too, so that you can invite people to listen but not talk.

You can activate voice recording for calls planned in advance, as well. After everyone hangs up, participants receive e-mail instructions for downloading the meeting as an MP3 file.

Use a No-Cost Directory-Assistance Service

Does your mobile phone carrier gouge you for directory-assistance calls? Instead of dialing 411, try Google 411. Dial 800/466-4411 (800/GOOG-411). The voice-recognition tool looks up numbers, addresses, nearby businesses, and more for free.

Next: Free Services for Taking Notes, Working With Files, and Grabbing E-Books and MP3s

Automatically Transcribe Voice Notes for Free

You probably have your phone handy more often than you have paper and a pen nearby. If inspiration hits, you could thumb-in text notes on your handset-or, better yet, try reQall for automatic voice transcription.

You call a special phone number and speak your message (up to 30 seconds), and reQall writes it down. Depending on what you say, it will even store your notes contextually, adding items you want to buy to a shopping list or scheduling meetings in your calendar, for example. But I like it just as much for recording my random notes and automatically e-mailing them to myself-or my contacts-without having to type.

Turn Scanned Docs Into Text, at No Cost

OCR (optical character recognition) turns pictures of text into a document that you can edit. For example, you could read a photo of a book page, but OCR software lets you perform searches on that page's contents or make changes to it in any text editor. Typically you have to pay for such software or get it bundled with a scanner you purchase, but you can access free OCR tools online.

OCR Terminal can import 20 pages of documents each month for free. Just upload your items as PDFs or JPEGs, or in other image formats, and it will convert them to Word, text, and other document formats. Then you simply download the best format for your needs, and use it as you would any other document.

Read Free E-Classics

Because copyrights eventually expire, anyone can (re)publish works by William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and countless other writers. In general, if you're paying for material that was written before 1923, you're being fleeced. Instead, download thousands of classics for free, for use on your computer, phone, Kindle, or other device.

Project Gutenberg houses 30,000 free e-books and includes links to a total of 100,000 hosted on other sites. Just search the site for a title, or browse the top 100 downloads to get a sense of the catalog. Download books in a format that your device can read, and transfer them over. You'll gain access to a deep library without paying a cent.

Beat the Text-Messaging Swindle

Stop paying to send text messages. Several free options can transmit them from your PC or phone; just make sure to keep your missives under the 160-character limit.

Within AIM, you can send a message just by chatting with the country code and mobile number of a friend. For example, you can send text to the number of a pal in the U.S. in the format +12223334444. Your friend can reply, and the text will route to your chat program. It works even if you're chatting directly on a phone's mobile client.

In a Web browser, try txtDrop or Krypton. For the former, you just enter your address and the recipient's number. For the latter, you need to know the recipient's carrier, but the iPhone-friendly formatting looks great on many handsets.

If you know your friend's carrier, you can also send a text through e-mail. Enter your friend's mobile phone number and then the domain suffix for the carrier. For example, e-mail messages sent to 2223334444@txt.att.net, 2223334444@messaging.sprintpcs.com, and 2223334444@vtext.com would reach AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, respectively. Visit Wikipedia's list of carriers for details about other services. Note, however, that the recipient might have blocked incoming texts from any of these sources to shut out spam messages.

Store Large Files Online for Free

Most e-mail servers choke on messages that are 5MB, 10MB, or larger. You could sign up for a range of free sites that offer to host bigger files, but Drop.io beats all of those since it hosts files and doesn't make you go through any sign-up process.

You can upload attachments of up to 100MB, and you can even customize the resulting URL. Afterward, simply send the link to your contacts so that they can download the files. (Be sure to click Share, Zip File at the top to make the whole package downloadable at once.) Downloaders can even leave notes and collaborate in other ways.

Download Free MP3s

Downloading an MP3 for free is often perfectly legal. With just a little scrounging, you can score tracks from many legitimate sources.

Check music stores first. Amazon, Rhapsody, and others regularly offer free tracks by familiar musicians.

Music blogs often post free tracks, many of which come from record labels for promotional purposes. Visit Elbows, RCRD LBL, and Stereogum regularly for frequent freebies.

The Internet Archive hosts thousands of live music performances, recorded by and for fans. You'll find old and new favorites, including concerts by Ryan Adams, Andrew Bird, Cowboy Junkies, the Grateful Dead, Smashing Pumpkins, and many more.

IBM gets $16 million to bolster its brain-on-a-chip technology

The quest to mimic the best parts of human brain function on a highly intelligent computer to decypher tons of data quickly is heating up.

IBM this week got $16.1 million to kick up its part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency research program aimed at rapidly and efficiently put brain-like senses into actual hardware and software so that computers can process and understand data more rapidly.

IBM has now gotten $21 million to work on the program known as Systems of neuromorphic adaptive plastic scalable electronics (SyNAPSE) which includes researchers from HRL Laboratories, which got $16.2 million in Oct. 2008, and others such as HP.

DARPA's Top 10 wicked cool high-tech aviation systems

According to DARPA, the SyNAPSE program will create useful, intelligent machines. In DARPA language: the agency is looking to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels. The goal is to develop systems capable of analyzing vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, letting the military or make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact on a given problem or situation.

According to DARPA, programmable machines are limited not only by their computational capacity, but also by an architecture requiring (human-derived) algorithms to both describe and process information from their environment. In contrast, biological neural systems such as human brains, autonomously process information in complex environments by automatically learning relevant and probabilistically stable features and associations, DARPA stated.

As compared to biological systems for example, today's programmable machines are less efficient by a factor of one million to one billion in complex, real-world environments. The SyNAPSE program seeks to break the programmable machine archetype and define a new path forward, DARPA stated.

DARPA goes on to state that realizing this ambitious goal will require the collaboration of numerous technical disciplines such as computational neuroscience, artificial neural networks, large-scale computation, neuromorphic VLSI, information science, cognitive science, materials science, unconventional nanometer-scale electronics, and CMOS design and fabrication.

The agency ultimate envisions work in four key areas:

• Hardware implementation will likely include CMOS devices, novel synaptic components, and combinations of hard-wired and programmable/virtual connectivity. These will support critical information processing techniques observed in biological systems, such as spike encoding and spike time dependent plasticity.

• Architectures will support critical structures and functions observed in biological systems such as connectivity, hierarchical organization, core component circuitry, competitive self-organization, and modulatory/reinforcement systems. As in biological systems, processing will necessarily be maximally distributed, nonlinear, and inherently noise- and defect-tolerant.

• Large scale digital simulations of circuits and systems will be used to prove component and whole system functionality and to inform overall system development in advance of neuromorphic hardware implementation.

• Environments will be evolving, virtual platforms for the training, evaluation and benchmarking of intelligent machines in various aspects of perception, cognition, and response.

While SyNAPSE basically seeks to replicate human brain function, DARPA has another project that seeks to develop an artificial intelligence system that can read, learn and develop knowledge about all manner of digital material in a quick, cost effective way. BBN Technology recently got $29.7 million to develop a prototype machine reading system that transforms prose into knowledge that can be interpreted by an artificial intelligence application.

The prototype is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Machine Reading Program (MRP) that wants to develop systems that can capture knowledge from naturally occurring text and transform it into the formal representations used by AI reasoning systems.

The idea is that such an intelligent learning system could gather and analyze information from the Web such as international technological advances or plans and rhetoric of political organizations and unleash a wide variety of new military and civilian AI applications from intelligent bots to personal tutors according to DARPA.

Analysts pull Mac sales numbers out of a hat

Apple's Mac sales are up. Unless they're down, say analysts.

Second-quarter estimates of Mac sales by Gartner Inc. and IDC split yesterday, with the former saying Apple's numbers were up 2.5% over the same quarter last year and the latter saying they were, in fact, down 12.4% year-over-year.

"We may revisit our numbers next week, and get more aggressive," acknowledged Loren Loverde, director of IDC's quarterly PC sales tracker. Apple is scheduled to present its second-quarter Mac sales numbers and revenue on Tuesday.

According to Gartner, Apple sold an estimated 1.42 million Macs in the U.S. for the quarter ending June 30, a 2.5% bump from the 1.39 million Macs sold in the same quarter last year. If accurate, it would be the first time since the fourth quarter of 2008 that Apple's sales have grown; during the first three months of this year, Mac sales were down 3% from the same period in 2008.

IDC, however, had different numbers, and put U.S. Mac sales at 1.21 million, down 12.4% from 2008's 1.39 million. "The biggest factor is that a year ago Apple was growing by 30-plus points each quarter," said Loverde. "It's very difficult to maintain these high growth numbers."

Wall Street analyst Brian Marshall, of Broadpoint AmTech, meanwhile, said in a research note Monday that he pegs Mac sales at 2.78 million worldwide. Apple, however, sells more Macs in the U.S. than in any other market.

IDC's estimates of Apple's sales dropped the computer maker into the fifth spot, behind Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Toshiba. Acer in particular, and Toshiba to a lesser extent, have benefited from the surge in sales of netbooks, the small, light and inexpensive notebooks, said Loverde. U.S. sales for Acer, for instance, grew 51% last quarter, while Toshiba's jumped 34%.

Apple has no product in the netbook category, a sin of omission in the minds of most financial analysts. Its lowest-priced notebook is the $999 MacBook, a machine priced double or triple that of most netbooks.

"There may be a little pressure here for Apple from Wall Street," said Loverde, "but does Apple have to have a netbook? No, they don't. Apple is a very unique company in a lot of ways, and if you look at their whole history, people are always saying they have to do this, have to do that, but they've struck their own path."

That pressure to so something, anything, may be about to ease, Loverde said, citing projections by IDC that while netbook sales will likely continue to grow at double-digit rates, the continuing freefall in ASPs, or average sale prices, won't outlast the year.

"ASPs are falling about 15% annually now," said Loved, but that type of impact won't stick around past 2009."

Even if IDC's numbers do prove out - and end up closer to Apple's than Gartner's - Loverde said not to spill any tears for the company. "The main point with Apple is that they're very well-positioned. They're not a run-of-the-mill company, and they've done well in the past. There's no reason why that should change."

On the plus side for Apple, Loverde said, is the recent price cuts to its MacBook Pro line. A month ago, the company dropped prices between 6.3% and 28%, with the smallest cuts at the low end for the 13-in. MacBook Pro and the largest for the high-end MacBook Air.

And a so-called "tweener" device - priced between the iPod Touch and the low-end MacBook - may yet boost Apple's sales volume, said Loverde. "It wouldn't surprise me to see that," he said. "But it wouldn't be a run-of-the-mill netbook."

Recent reports out of Taiwan have cited sources in the country's electronics industry that claim Apple has placed orders with a trio of manufacturers for components that will be used to build a small-sized computer or tablet with a 9.7-in. screen that would sell for about $800. The device, which some have dubbed an "iPad," will debut in October, those same sources said.

Europe moves to develop standard mobile phone chargers

Wouldn't it be nice if all our mobile gadgets connected to one universal charger? According to the vice president of the European Commission, Gunter Verheugen, it's not only possible, it's already on the drawing board.Steps are being taken to standardize mobile-phone chargers, though a universal charger for all mobile devices will take longer. The Commission claims some of the credit for the agreement reached among mobile phone makers, which earlier this year said they would pursue a universal charger for all phones.Verheugen welcomed the agreement signed by 10 phone makers, including all the biggest names in the industry that account for more than 90 percent of all Europen mobile phone sales. However, he said that if the industry had failed to reach a voluntary agreement, the Commission would have drafted legislation ordering the standardization of phone chargers. Verheugen said the original plan was to push for a universal charger for all devices. "It would have taken much longer [to get an agreement on one charger for all mobile devices], so we decided to tackle mobile phones first and at the same time we continue to discuss with the industry the other products," he said on Monday.Inventing a small charger that powers a cell phone and a laptop is a challenge, the commissioner said.

Laptops require almost 100 times more electricity to charge than a mobile phone, he said.Energy efficiency and safety issues must be overcome when developing a single charger for all gadgets, Verheugen said. "We are working on that, I hope it is possible," he said.Bridget Cosgrave, director general of Digital Europe, a trade group representing IT manufacturers of a wide range of mobile devices, said it might be possible to duplicate the harmonized phone charger idea for other devices but added that there are no plans along those lines presently.Cosgrave shared the podium with Verheugen a press conference in Brussels. She didn't comment on the idea of one charger for laptops as well as smaller mobile divices.Susan Smith, a spokesperson for Nokia, said the company "is not looking at this as a possibility," and added she isn't sure it would be technically possible given the varying power needs of different devices.Mobile phones require around 1.5 watts while laptops need close to 100 watts. That's why a mobile phone charger is a tenth the size of a laptop charger. Universal chargers for various devices already exist but they are the size of laptop chargers, so they waste a lot of energy if they are used just to charge a mobile phone.There are currently between 350 millon and 400 million active mobile phones in circulation in the European Union, the Commission said. People are replacing their phones at a rate of 180 million per year.The first generation of universal phone chargers will be distributed from around mid next year, Verheugen said. All phones will run off the universal charger within two to three years, the commissioner said.

Symantec, McAfee to pay fines over auto-renewals

Antivirus vendors Symantec and McAfee have agreed to pay the New York Attorney General's office US$375,000 in fines to settle charges that they automatically charged customers software subscription renewal fees without their permission.

Investigators found that the two companies had "failed to adequately disclose to consumers that subscriptions would automatically be renewed and that consumers would be charged," the office of Andrew Cuomo said in a statement Wednesday announcing the settlement. "Companies cannot play hide the ball when it comes to fees consumers are being charged."

In addition to paying the settlement fine, Symantec and McAfee will now make better disclosures about subscription renewal fees when customers sign up, the attorney general's office said.

Security companies have been offering automatic renewals to their customers for nearly a decade now, but in the past few year it's become much more common in the antivirus industry. McAfee and Symantec say that they prevent customers from having out-of-date antivirus software on their computers. That may make customers safer, but it also makes company investors happy because renewal fees keep rolling in.

Symantec began enrolling North American customers in automatic renewal by default in November 2005, and has since expanded the practice worldwide. McAfee began the practice in 2001. Under these programs, customers pay upfront for a one-year subscription and then, a year later, are automatically billed for the next year's service.

The companies say they have been working with the Cuomo's office for the past two years to improve practices and they have now made it easier to understand and opt out of their respective auto-renewal features

For example, Symantec has now modified its online shopping cart to include better disclosures and an explanation of how to opt out of the program.

Norton users who want to unsubscribe from Symantec's program, can do so on their Norton Account Web page, Symantec said. If you're a U.S. McAfee user, you can call customer support at 1 866 622 3911.

Both companies will now refund auto-renewal fees within 60 days of the charge, Cuomo's office said.