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Thursday, July 29, 2010
DOJ files fraud suit against Oracle
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit alleging that Oracle Corp. defrauded the government through a software contract that involved hundreds of millions of dollars, after a company whistleblower stepped forward.
The agreement with the General Services Administration, in effect from 1998 to 2006, required the Redwood Shores software giant to extend its commercial discounts to government customers, the DOJ said in a statement released Thursday. The suit claims Oracle misrepresented its sales practices, leaving the government with far inferior deals.
"We take seriously allegations that a government contractor has dealt dishonestly with the United States," said Tony West, assistant attorney general for the civil division of the DOJ, in a statement. "When contractors misrepresent their business practices to the government, taxpayers suffer."
The Justice Department brought the complaint under the False Claims Act, which encourages private citizens with knowledge of fraud to file suits on behalf of the government. The lawsuit against Oracle was originally brought by Paul Frascella, senior director of contract services at Oracle, the department said.
Oracle didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
| Jul 29 at 01:56 PM
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Facebook debuts new social "Questions" feature
Facebook on Wednesday began rolling out a new beta application, called Facebook Questions, that lets its members pose questions to and share answers with millions of people around the world.
"Facebook Questions helps you tap into the collective knowledge of the more than 500 million people on Facebook," Blake Ross, the company's director of product, wrote in a blog post.
"For example, if you're vacationing in Costa Rica and want to know the best places to surf, you can use Facebook Questions to get answers from nearby surfing enthusiasts," Ross said. "Because questions will also appear to your friends and their friends, you'll receive answers that are more personalized to you."
And, Ross added, "with this new application, you can get a broader set of answers and learn valuable information from people knowledgeable on a range of topics."
For now, Facebook Questions is a beta product being rolled out slowly, starting with about one percent of the Palo Alto company's membership. A spokeswoman said the company wants to evaluate the test feedback before rolling the feature out more widely.
Facebook has been rumored to be working on a new question application for some time, but the official roll out coincidentally started just a day after search site Ask.com of Oakland began promoting its similar social questions model that also lets members seek answers from the community at large.
But unquestionably, Facebook is also going after a larger share of the general search engine traffic dominated by Google. And it's also a challenge to question-and-answer site Quora, a startup founded by former Facebook employees, and to Twitter, whose members can also seek answers from their followers.
I had early access to Facebook Questions, which appeared as a link on the left side of the home page and as a more prominent link above the status feed between "Update Status," "Add Photos" and "Post Link."
It was already filled with questions, including:
Is it possible to be insane in the mind and have a good heart?
Where does the saying 'catch 22' come from? What does it mean?
What is the meaning of life?
Will Mark Zuckerberg go see "The Social Network"?
That last question refers to an uncomplimentary movie coming out this fall about the Facebook co-founder. A Facebook engineer answered, "If I were him I'd wait for it on DVD."
My first question to the community was: Does anybody find this new Facebook Questions feature more useful than Google so far?
There were no immediate replies, but then again, maybe that's an answer that remains to be seen.
| Jul 28 at 04:40 PM
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Disney buys social games maker Playdom in deal worth up to $763 million
The House of Mouse is getting into social gaming.
The Walt Disney Co. announced a deal Tuesday to buy Mountain View's Playdom Inc., maker of social networking games like Sorority Life and Poker Palace.
Disney said the deal is worth $563.2 million to Playdom's shareholders, with up to $200 million more if Playdom reaches certain performance-based goals. Playdom has about 42 million active players per month.
The deal tops the $300 million, plus up to $100 million in performance incentives, that Redwood City's Electronic Arts paid to acquire social games rival Playfish Inc. last November.
Playdom, Playfish and San Francisco's Zynga Game Network Inc. are the three Bay Area firms that led the growth of games on social networks like Facebook and MySpace.
The EA-Playfish deal "now looks like a bargain in comparison" to the Disney-Playdom transaction, analyst Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research for Wedbush Securities, said in an e-mail.
"The price appears a bit high to me, as I thought Playdom had well under $100 million in revenue, and am not convinced that there were other buyers," Pachter said. "I think Disney needed to buy rather than build and valued Playdom's management, so perhaps that justifies the premium. In the absence of other bidders, I am not sure it was necessary to pay this much, but it appears that Disney really wanted them, so they paid up."
In a press release, Disney said Playdom's headquarters would remain in Mountain View, with Chief Executive Officer John Pleasants becoming an executive vice president with the Disney Interactive Media Group.
In a news released, Disney President and CEO Robert Iger also hinted that Mickey, Minnie, Donald or other Disney characters may end up starring in social games.
"We see strong growth potential in bringing together Playdom's talented team and capabilities with our great creative properties, people and world-renowned brands like Disney, ABC, ESPN and Marvel," Iger said.
"This acquisition furthers our strategy of allocating capital to high-growth businesses that can benefit from our many characters, stories and brands, delivering them in a creatively compelling way to a new generation of fans on the platforms they prefer," he said.
Pachter said for Disney, "social games fits nicely with their forays into games, social media with Club Penguin and cell phone games with Tapulous."
But Pachter doesn't believe Disney's move will spur one of its media rivals to go after Zynga, which owns the most popular social game Farmville.
"They don't get much bigger than Disney," Pachter said. "I don't see anyone else buying right now. Fox had a bad experience with MySpace, Warner with Bebo, so I don't see either making a move."
| Jul 27 at 03:15 PM
Ask.com turns to social networking for answers
Ask.com is adopting a social networking model as the search engine changes the way it delivers answers.
The Oakland company on Tuesday began reinventing itself with a new beta service that combines its traditional computerized search engine with a way to pose more complex questions, such as, "Is it cool to starch your shirts," with a network of actual people who might have the answer.
Ask.com President Doug Leeds believes that social searching is the way Ask.com can gain ground in a market dominated by Google.
"If we want grow, we have to get really good at what people come to us for,'' Leeds said.
According to ComScore, Ask.com has 87 million unique monthly users in the U.S.
Going back to its Ask Jeeves days, the site has traditionally relied on searchers who ask entire questions instead of using just key words or phrases. But computer algorithms have a limit for what they can interpret in a question, especially one that might be more complex, Leeds said.
With the new "Ask The Community" feature, which for now is only in beta and available by invitation only (at ask.com/invite), searchers can seek private answers from the Ask.com community. The program can route the question to people whose backgrounds and interests might lend an answer or opinion.
During a demonstration last week, Leeds asked the starched shirt question and within minutes, had several answers. Ask.com also calls upon its index of more than 500 million questions and answers.
Leeds said Ask.com is talking to social networking leader Facebook about an integration that would tap into the profiles its more than 500 million users to get a more accurate match for who might be able to answer a question.
| Jul 27 at 01:30 PM
Monday, July 26, 2010
Cyber-crime hits U.S. companies hard and often, report says
Cyber-crime costs American companies a median loss of $3.8 million dollars a year, according to a study released today by security firm ArcSight and the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research organization.
The study interviewed data protection and IT practitioners from 45 U.S. organizations from different sectors, who shared details on the volume of threats they face everyday. Over a four-week period, these companies experienced 50 successful attacks per week - that is, more than one successful attack per organization per week.
Losses to cyber-crime ranged from $1 million on the lower end to as much as $52 million, the report said.
"Cyber-crime is common, intrusive, and can have a significant impact on an organization's bottom line," the report said.
Cyber-crime threats to corporations include intellectual property theft, bank account compromises, virus distribution, confidential information leaks into the Internet and disruptions to the country's critical infrastructure.
According to the study, responding to Web attacks, exploits through malicious code and malicious insiders accounted for 90 percent of all cyber-crime costs per organization per year. Those costs mostly came from detection and recovery internal activities, which accounted for 46 percent of annual response expenses.
For example, malicious insider attacks took up to 42 days or more to resolve, with the average cost to an organization of nearly $18,000 per day, the report said.
| Jul 26 at 01:51 PM
Friday, July 23, 2010
Apple, No. 1 in security holes, report says
You probably heard Apple surpassed Microsoft as top tech dog in May. Well, here's another area where Apple beat Microsoft this year: security vulnerabilities.
In its recently released half year report, Danish security firm Secunia found that Apple surpassed Oracle this year as the software developer with the most vulnerabilities.
Apple and Oracle were followed by Microsoft, who has held the number 3 spot in Secunia's list since 2006. Others in the top ten list of software vendors with most vulnerabilities were HP, Adobe Systems, IBM, VMware, Cisco, Google and the Mozilla foundation.
Now, to be clear, the number of vulnerabilities does not necessarily reflect on the overall security of one company or another. The report notes:
To assess the "performance" of vendors in terms of vulnerabilities one should rather look at the changes in the type of vulnerabilities, code quality, handling of vulnerability reports, ability to update users, quality of patches, ability to communicate to end users, number of products, complexity of product portfolio, and other factors which cannot be read out of mere aggregate numbers.
The number of vulnerabilities found is also relative to the number of people looking for them, Secunia pointed out.
Renowned Apple hacker Charlie Miller said Apple's security problems have grown along with the brand's popularity, but the company has done fairly okay in patching the holes in its products.
"Ironically, even though Apple has many more vulnerabilities than other vendors, you still don't see many actual attacks in the wild," Miller said. "This is a function of their relatively low market share compared to, say, computers running Microsoft Windows. At this point, it makes more economic sense for attackers to focus on the 90% of computers their encounter, namely, those running Windows."
Secunia, which has looked at 29,000 software products from 4,000 software vendors since 2005, also found that despite software developers' hefty investments to improve the security of their products, vulnerabilities are still as abundant as they were five years ago.
However, the company noted the number of vulnerabilities affecting average PC users doubled between 2007 and 2009, and expects it to almost double again this year.
| Jul 23 at 03:35 PM
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Facebook now has 500 million active members
Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday announced his company has officially reached a major milestone - 500 million members.
Although this milestone has been anticipated for several weeks, half a billion is still a huge number. Consider this - the population of the United States is about 190 million less than the entire Facebook nation, which spans the globe.
"The growth for them is nearly all in developing and Asian countries now," analyst Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research said in an e-mail. "They can't get much bigger in North America, and they are winning rapidly in Europe."
And Facebook only announces the number of active members, defined as those who log on at least once a month. A spokeswoman for the Palo Alto social networking firm said the company doesn't disclose the total number of people who have registered accounts.
Then there's Facebook's meteoric rise in membership, which left social networking competitors MySpace, Friendster and Bebo in the dust.
While it took Facebook about five years to reach the 175 million active member mark, by the company's sixth anniversary in February, it had topped 400 million.
According to research firm eMarketer, online advertising has also shifted to Facebook -- worldwide online ad spending increased 39 percent to $605 million for Facebook from 2009 to 2010, even as spending on MySpace declined 21 percent to $385 million.
And now Facebook has added 100 million in just five months. So much for that "Quit Facebook Day" campaign in May.
In a company blog post announcing the milestone,Zuckerberg said the company was compiling a "collection of stories you've shared with us about the impact Facebook and your friends have had on your lives."
The app is called "Facebook Stories.'' It includes stories of a high school student who used Facebook to help rebuild a Kentucky theater, the Danish prime minister who jogged with 100 Facebook fans and an Arizona mother who credited a friend's status update with helping her diagnose her breast cancer.
"Our mission at Facebook is to help make the world more open and connected," Zuckerberg wrote. "Stories like these are examples of that mission and are both humbling and inspiring. I could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started 6 years ago."
| Jul 21 at 12:20 PM
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Blog and forum sites abruptly, mysteriously shut down by feds
Under mysterious circumstances and with unusual abruptness, two websites used to create blogs and message boards were taken down on the behest of U.S. investigators earlier this month, baffling users and commentators on the Web alike.
Both Blogetery.com, which claimed to host around 70,000 blogs, and online forum site IPBFree.com were taken offline in early July.
It is not entirely clear why the two sites were removed, but at least in Blogetery's case, the shutdown seems to involve a federal investigation on al-Qaeda online communications.
The initial cryptic responses to users' questions about what happened added to the confusion. Both IPBFree administrators and Burst.net, Blogetery's Web host, deeply apologized for the incident but said they were barred by law to provide any specific information.
But Burst.net later stated that they had voluntarily decided to take down Blogetery after investigators approached them.
Burst.net gave PC World the following statement:
On the evening of July 9, 2010, BurstNET received a notice of a critical nature from law enforcement officials, and was asked to provide information regarding ownership of the server hosting Blogetery.com. It was revealed that a link to terrorist material, including bomb-making instructions and an al-Qaeda 'hit list', had been posted to the site. Upon review, BurstNET determined that the posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous activities, specifically violated the BurstNET Acceptable Use Policy. This policy strictly prohibits the posting of 'terrorist propaganda, racist material, or bomb/weapon instructions'. Due to this violation and the fact that the site had a history of previous abuse, BurstNET elected to immediately disable the system.
It is still unclear who hosted the IPBFree site, why it was taken down or if the action was related to the Blogetery case.
Web site takedowns that result from law enforcement investigations usually take some back-and-forth before they actually happen, which is why the out-of-the blue shut down of services with tens of thousands of users has confounded many.
Users of the websites received no prior warning of the shutdown, which right now seems to mean they have permanently lost access to all their content in those sites.
| Jul 20 at 04:30 PM
Google overhauls image search
Google has overhauled its popular image search service, adding a number of features that should allow consumers to more quickly and easily find online pictures and art. But some of the changes may raise concerns among publishers.
The Mountain View search giant showed off the redesigned Google Images, going live to users in batches throughout the week, during a press conference this morning at its San Francisco offices.
Google also introduced Google Image Search Ads on Tuesday, enabling the company's advertisers to insert pictures into the ads that show up within image search results.
The images results page will now feature up to 1,000 images, allowing consumers to quickly browse without having to click from page to page. This so called "infinite scroll" feature has been available in Microsoft's Bing search engine for some time (though in fairness, Google remains well ahead of the software behemoth in a number of other important image search areas, as we wrote about here).
Other key changes include the ability to hover over images to bring up additional information about them from the original publisher's site. Clicking on the thumbnail brings up the full-size image, which now appears in front of the original site. Users have to click again to get to that page.
Previously, clicking on the image brought users directly to the publisher's page, with a Google banner at the top that allowed them to click through to the full image.
This subtle difference could be important in the eyes of online publishers. Before, users could only see a thumbnail before visiting the site where it first appeared. Now the entire image can be viewed or downloaded without ever leaving a Google URL.
Asked if this potentially exceeds the boundaries of fair use, the doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission, Google executive Marissa Mayer responded no.
"When you look at the page you do get the Web page inside the image," said Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience. "The Web page and the full size image (are) in a single view."
But users won't necessarily see or be able to click on any of the ads that the original site might have posted adjacent to their images, unless they first click through to the page. And if all they were looking for was the image, why would they need to?
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2003 that the use of thumbnails by a search engine is "fair use," but called for further proceedings on the question of full-size images.
In the case of Perfect 10 v. Google, a district court also stated that there were certain limits to fair use for thumbnail images.
The adult publisher sued the company for indexing and making low-resolution thumbnails of copyrighted photos that appeared on unauthorized sites. The court said Google's protections were limited in the case in part because it could "share ad revenues from the infringing sites, thanks to AdSense," the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted at the time.
Still, sticking to thumbnails generally provides a solid fair use defense for search engines, said Corynne McSherry, senior staff attorney with EFF.
"It's easy to see that's not a substitute for the original," she said. "In almost every context, it's just not the same thing."
But it's only one factor among many that courts use in determining whether a practice is protected under fair use, including whether or not it serves a valuable public purpose. Google is clearly betting its new use of images, if tested, would still hold up, she said.
The new picture-embellished ads in Google Images could sell for a slight premium over Google's traditional text-only version, said Ben Ling, director of search products. The company may explore rolling them out to the general search product in the future, he said.
| Jul 20 at 11:05 AM
Monday, July 19, 2010
New virus targets plants and factories, aims to steal industrial secrets
Electronics and electrical engineering titan Siemens has identified a new virus that, according to security experts, seems to be targeting the systems of manufacturing and utility companies.
IDG News Service reported that the apparent purpose of the highly sophisticated virus is to steal top-secret and competitive information.
Scott Borg, director and chief economist at the non-profit U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, told manufacturing technology site Managing Automation that the criminals may want the information to find out how the targeted companies run or use the information to extort them.
"This is very much the kind of thing that we've been watching gradually grow in prominence and in frequency over the last few years," Borg said.
Cyber-security specialists like Borg have expressed concern in the past that such attacks could cause enormous disruptive economic damages. Losing corporate secrets that cost big-dollar figures to research and develop could put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. In the worst case scenario, a breach could result in a potentially catastrophic case of corporate sabotage.
IDG reported that Siemens issued a warning on Friday saying the virus targets clients using Simatic WinCC, one of the company's industrial control system software offerings that runs on Windows. The virus strikes at a recently discovered Windows bug that affects every Microsoft operating system, including the recently released Windows 7.
The virus transmits itself through infected USBs. When the USB is plugged into a computer, the virus copies itself into any other connected USBs and, if it recognizes Siemens' software, it tries to log into the computer using a default password.
| Jul 19 at 03:09 PM
News and views from the digital frontier.
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