October 31, 2004
Google plugs hole exposing Gmail mail-boxes
By Joris EversGoogle Inc. has fixed a security flaw in its Gmail Web-based e-mail service that allowed attackers to hijack users' e-mail accounts. "Google was recently alerted to a potential security vulnerability affecting the Gmail service. We have since fixed this vulnerability, and all current and future Gmail users are protected," Google spokesman Nathan Tyler said.
Tyler declined to discuss the nature of the problem, but a source close to Google confirmed that the flaw allowed an attacker to gain complete control over a user's account.
The problem was in the way Gmail authenticated users. An attacker could steal a so-called cookie file identifying the user by making use of a seemingly innocent link to Google's own Web site, according to a report on the Web site of the Israeli publication Nana NetLife Magazine on Thursday.
The cookie allowed an attacker to sign on to Gmail as the victim from any computer without having to enter a password. The attacker would continue to be able to access the Gmail account even if the password were changed, according to Nana NetLife, which cited an Israeli hacker named Nir Goldshlagger.
An investigation by Google found that only a handful of Gmail users were victimized, the source close to the Mountain View, California-based company said.
Google announced Gmail in April, grabbing headlines because of the massive 1G-byte storage space provided with a Gmail account. The service is still officially in beta testing and Internet users can only get accounts after receiving an invitation from a current user. Google does not disclose how many Gmail accounts it hosts.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:45 PM
October 29, 2004
Wiki startup JotSpot draws crowd for product beta
By Joris Evers, IDG News ServiceA Silicon Valley startup aiming to catapult wikis into the mainstream and transform the editable Web sites into an application development platform has attracted a flood of interest for its product beta. Nearly 3,000 companies, small and large, have signed up for free beta test accounts with JotSpot Inc. of Palo Alto, California. "A lot more than we expected, it shows there is a real interest in the category," said Joe Kraus, chief executive officer (CEO) of the company, which operated under the radar until its official launch three weeks ago.
Wiki is a term derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and describes Web sites that can be accessed and changed using a simple browser-based user interface. Especially popular among tech-savvy people, probably the most visible wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by thousands of people.
JotSpot seeks to make wikis more accessible by adding a "what you see is what you get" editor that even novice users should be able to work with. Additionally, to make wikis more useful as a collaboration tool, JotSpot gives each wiki page that it hosts an e-mail address, allowing users to add an archive of e-mail messages to pages.
Along with its efforts to make wikis more useful and user-friendly, JotSpot is turning wikis into Web-based applications for tasks such as lightweight project management, trouble ticketing and recruiting. The company offers several pre-built applications that users can change, just like wiki pages can be changed.
"We looked at the wiki space and thought it was kind of like the Internet in 1993, what I would call the land of the nerds, useful, but for a limited crowd. We think that wikis are useful to a much broader audience," Kraus said. Also, wikis should not only be about documents, but also about applications, he said.
Though JotSpot is still in its early days, with a growing need for collaboration tools the expanded wikis could ultimately rival collaboration products from giants including IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp., said Burton Group Senior Analyst Peter O'Kelly.
"JotSpot will be used within organizations and it will displace other collaborative product offerings in places. Ultimately it is going to be competition with the more established players such as IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint and to a certain extent could even compete with the content and document management vendors," he said.
JotSpot's product has been called Lotus Notes for the Web, an analogy O'Kelly, who once worked at Lotus, agrees with. "It can do the same types of document-oriented applications that Notes can do and certainly ones that do things like document-based workflow or information collection," he said.
Early JotSpot customers have found different uses for the product, which is offered as a hosted service. One uses JotSpot's wiki service to run a call center application, while others use it to create a collaborative Web space to work with local or remote colleagues, Kraus said.
In the Detroit offices of Dickson Allan, part of Accretive Solutions Inc., senior consultant Nikki Beaver is using JotSpot's technology to launch an intranet site for herself and 140 Detroit area colleagues at Dickson Allan and at another Accretive Solutions unit called Horn Murdock Cole. She learned about JotSpot because it is a customer of the company's California office.
"We have no infrastructure as of right now to communicate -- except for e-mail and voice-mail -- and (we) are using JotSpot to create an intranet," she said.
Beaver likes JotSpot because of its simplicity and low cost. "The editor is built right into the tool. We can give a number of people different pieces of the Web site to manage and they can do so without additional software and without extensive training," she said. Alternatives would have required the company to hire Web developers, Beaver said.
Future uses of JotSpot at Dickson Allan may include freestyle collaborative Web spaces, the original concept of a wiki, and simple applications, such as contact management and recruitment, Beaver said.
Wikis are surprisingly popular, Burton Group's O'Kelly said. "There are a lot of people who are using wikis for collaborative workspace-oriented tools," he said. However, support for wikis typically does not come from CIOs (chief information officers) at large corporations, said JotSpot CEO Kraus.
"Wikis are bottom-up technologies, generally speaking. They tend to get adopted at the workgroup level and then spread," Kraus said. That is also reflected in registrations for the JotSpot beta. "This is not the CIO of a Fortune 500 company registering (for the beta), for example; it is a workgroup leader registering," Kraus said.
JotSpot is backed by US$5.2 million in capital from venture capital firms Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures. Additional investors include Kraus and Graham Spencer, chief technology officer and co-founder. Kraus and Spencer are two of the original founders of Excite.com, a search engine.
JotSpot is still taking applications for its beta at http://www.jot.com/request_beta/index.php.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:09 PM
Internet service providers file more spam lawsuits
By Joris Evers, IDG News ServiceIn a second round of lawsuits announced on Thursday, four major U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs) are taking on senders of e-mail spam and unwanted commercial messages sent via instant messaging. Microsoft Corp., America Online Inc. (AOL), EarthLink Inc. and Yahoo Inc., each filed new lawsuits in U.S. federal court. The suits in Virginia, Georgia, California and Washington, charge named and unnamed alleged senders of spam with violating the federal CAN-SPAM Act, along with other state and federal laws.
It is the second time that the ISPs, united in the Anti-Spam Alliance, are taking legal action against spammers. In March the companies sued more than 220 alleged spammers responsible for sending out hundreds of millions of pieces of unsolicited commercial e-mail.
In the new round of lawsuits, AOL is suing numerous defendants and seeks damages as well as court orders forcing the alleged spam senders to give up their profits and cease their activities. One suit targets spam sent via instant messaging, also known as SPIM, the first such lawsuit, according to AOL.
AOL and EarthLink are aiming at spammers hawking controlled substances, including Vicodin and other prescription drugs. EarthLink's lawsuit also charges numerous unnamed defendants with sending spam advertising mortgages and loans.
Microsoft is charging one named and two unnamed defendants with sending millions of e-mails advertising herbal growth supplements, mortgage services and get-rich-quick schemes. The defendants allegedly spoofed, or faked, the origin of their e-mail messages to show it came from Microsoft, AOL, EarthLink or Yahoo accounts.
Yahoo filed suit against East Coast Exotics Entertainment Group Inc. and Epoth LLC, charging the companies with disguising their identity and sending sexually-explicit messages that were designed to circumvent spam filters.
By suing top spam senders, the Anti-Spam Alliance members hope to make the spam business less attractive. Although many senders of spam are unknown, the group has said in the past that they plan to use the law enforcement tools available under CAN-SPAM to identify the unnamed defendants, and shut them down.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:08 PM
Webmail leaves Windows for open source platform
By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News ServiceWebmail.us, which provides hosted e-mail service for small and medium-size businesses, will announce next week a raft of improvements to its service, including a major migration of its core e-mail platform from Microsoft Corp. Windows to an open source platform. Webmail.us, whose outsourced e-mail service is aimed at companies that have between five and 500 employees, adopted open source software to gain scalability, said Patrick Matthews, co-founder and chief executive officer of Webmail.us and of its parent company Excedent Technologies Inc. in Blacksburg, Virginia.
"Using open source software allows us to tap into the open source community and move faster than with commercial manufacturers," Matthews said. "It helps us with long-term scalability, which is important because we're growing rapidly."
Excedent, founded in 1999, launched Webmail.us about a year ago. The subsidiary sells the service directly to customers and already has about 3,500 companies as clients.
From a platform based on Windows running in-house applications, Webmail.us has moved to Red Hat Inc.'s Linux operating system with open-source e-mail applications such as PostFix, SquirrelMail, Courier, and Clam A/V. Coupled with infrastructure enhancements to its data center, Webmail.us now offers clients a guaranteed uptime of 99.99 percent, Matthews said. Webmail.us also supports IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol Version 4) and POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) and features antivirus protection.
Along with this platform revamping, Webmail.us now has a new Web mail interface designed to resemble Microsoft Corp.'s familiar Outlook; options of larger mail-boxes (100M bytes or 1G-byte); a message-preview pane; improved search capabilities; an advanced HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) editor; multilingual support for the spell-checker; expanded ability for importing and exporting addresses; and an auto-complete address feature.
While the new Web interface and the guaranteed up-time are fine features, Chicago Internet Inc. sticks with Webmail.us primarily because of its spam filtering and blocking capabilities, said Mike Biersma, Chicago Internet president. "Webmail.us is right on the leading edge of blocking spam," Biersma said.
When Chicago Internet, a Web and print design firm, switched to Webmail.us in mid-May, about 97 percent of the e-mail that Biersma received was spam, and he estimates he spent about an hour each day cleaning out his in-box of unsolicited messages. His employees also were affected by a daily spam avalanche. "We were getting buried with spam," he said.
Since the eight-person company began using Webmail.us, the spam problem has become a minor nuisance. "The occasional spam gets through, but now mostly I only get good e-mail. I've gained about an hour a day. It has been a huge difference in my business and for my employees," said Biersma, who has begun referring clients to Webmail.us.
Webmail.us also offers a control panel for clients to manage their accounts, add and delete mail-boxes, change passwords, view statistics and configure spam filter settings.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 10:02 PM
Antivirus companies warn of new Bagle variants
By Paul Roberts, IDG News ServiceNew versions of the Bagle worm rolled onto the Internet Friday, prompting antivirus companies to warn customers about the threat and to push out software updates to spot the new worms. Three new versions of Bagle have been seen by antivirus companies, each similar to earlier forms of the worm, which first stormed onto the Internet in January, spreading through infected e-mail file attachments. McAfee Inc. rated two of the new worms "medium" threats. Other antivirus vendors, including Symantec Corp. and Sophos PLC also reported intercepting many samples of the new worms and advised customers to update antivirus signatures as soon as possible.
McAfee's AVERT (Antivirus Emergency Response Team) spotted its first sample of Bagle.bb, one of the new variants, at 11:30 p.m. Thursday Pacific Coast Time. Since then, the company has received about 200 reports of the virus and intercepted two more variants, dubbed Bagle.bc and Bagle.bd, according to Vincent Gullotto, vice president of McAfee AVERT.
McAfee rates Bagle.bb and Bagle.bd "medium" threats, based on the number of submissions they received for each, Gullotto said.
The new variants are almost identical to each other, but use slightly different versions of a compression program, known as a packer, to shrink the size of the virus, creating a different profile or "signature" that can fool some antivirus programs, he said.
At Sophos, virus researchers have had "thousands" of reports of the Bagle.bb virus, which Sophos labeled Bagle.au, by customers since early Friday, according to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
Sophos has also captured copies of the two new Bagle variants, he said.
The first Bagle worm appeared on Jan. 19. Since then, more than 40 different versions of the worm have appeared, according to Cluley.
Like the first worm, all subsequent versions target systems running Windows, harvest e-mail addresses from infected machines and use their own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send virus-infected e-mail to addresses it captures. Bagle can also spread over P2P (peer-to-peer) networks, planting files disguised to look like pornography or software in shared folders used by the networks, he said.
The new Bagle variants arrive in e-mail messages with forged or "spoofed" source addresses and vague subjects such as "Re:Hello," "Re: Thank you!" and "Re: Hi," according to McAfee.
The new variants don't break any new ground in the world of virus design or "social engineering," the use of clever messages and e-mail subject lines to entice recipients to open the infected virus file, Cluley said.
Despite the large number of copies of the virus, Sophos reported few customer infections, he said.
The large initial showing from the new Bagle worms could be due to a big distribution of the virus, or "seeding," through networks of compromised machines, Gullotto said.
After the initial "blip," reports of the new Bagle worms should fade quickly as customers update antivirus signatures and clean up infected machines, he said.
In addition to updating antivirus software, users need to update their knowledge of proper e-mail hygiene, Cluley said.
"You can patch your antivirus software, but you can't patch peoples' brains. Users have to understand that you don't double click on a file attachment and start thinking before they launch a file on their computer," he said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 07:13 PM
October 28, 2004
ICANN moves closer to approving .post, .travel
By Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News ServiceInternet users may soon see two new domain name suffixes in their browser window: ".post" to identify the postal community and ".travel" for travel industry associations and organizations. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees technical matters related to the Net, said this week that it has moved forward in its negotiations to approve the two new sponsored top-level domains (sTLDs).
ICANN said it has entered into commercial and technical negotiations with the two candidate registries, while the status of eight other applicants, including ".jobs," ".asia," and ".mobi," is still pending. The advancement of ".post" and ".travel" in the applications process follows positive results from an independent evaluation process, it said.
The Internet overseer made the call for new sTLD proposals late last year as part of an effort to expand the number of communities addressed by the Net's domain name system. When fully approved, the new sTLDs will join the likes of existing sponsored domains such as ".aero" for the aerospace industry and ".museum."
The ".travel" domain is being sponsored by New York-based The Travel Partnership Corp., an industry group created to champion acceptance of the new sTLD. The group hopes that by creating a unique domain for the travel industry, it will be able to increase the profile of the global travel community as well as increase its adoption of Internet technology and links with customers, according to its proposal.
The .post domain, meanwhile, is being sponsored by the Universal Postal Union, an international organization based in Berne, Switzerland. It wants to offer its sTLD as for national postal agencies, such as "usa.post", as well as for regional and commercial postal operators and organizations, and for regulated services, it said in its application.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:13 PM
Mobile, broadband boost France Télécom in Q3
By Laura Rohde, IDG News ServiceFrance Télécom SA's revenue for the third quarter was slightly up on last year's figure, it reported Thursday. The strongest gains were in Internet access and mobile telephony, while revenue from its traditional fixed-line telephony business appeared to have stabilized somewhat. The Paris-based company does not report net income on a quarterly basis.
Revenue for the quarter rose to €12 billion (US$14.8 billion as of Sept. 30, the last day of the period being reported), up 3.5 percent on the figure of €11.65 billion reported a year earlier.
Currency exchange rates had a negative impact on results, decreasing them by €9 million, the company estimated.
France Télécom forecast 2004 sales will grow between 3 percent to 5 percent, excluding takeovers, disposals and currency movements.
The company's mobile telephony division, Orange SA, contributed third quarter revenue of €5.2 billion, up 10 percent year-on-year when it reported revenue of €4.71 billion.
The growth at Orange is being driven by increased user numbers, more of whom are contract customers generating higher average revenue per user figures, the company said. By the end of September, Orange had over 52.2 million mobile subscribers, an increase of 1.3 million new customers, or 11.2 percent, from the third quarter of last year.
By the end of September, 60.6 percent of Orange subscribers in France had monthly contracts, compared to 57.4 percent a year earlier, and their average annual spending had risen to €390 per customer, up 3.4 percent on the previous year. In the U.K. during the third quarter, the number of contract customers rose from 33.3 percent to 32.5 percent over the year, and average annual spending per customer rose 1.5 percent to £274 (US$444).
Wanadoo SA, the Internet access and directories division, generated revenue of €733 million, an increase of 8 percent year-on-year in the third quarter.
In France, 2,541 of Wanadoo's 4,770 customers now subscribe to broadband services, an increase of 62.5 percent when compared a year earlier. By the end of September, broadband clients accounted for 53 percent of the customer base, inside and outside of France, compared with 35.8 percent in the third quarter of last year.
Fixed-line services still contribute the largest part, €5.37 billion, of France Télécom's revenue. Revenue from this sector fell 1.3 percent overall in the third quarter when compared to the same quarter last year. However, France Télécom asserted that it had slowed down the decline and stabilized the sector, primarily through the increase in revenue from ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) services, which rose from a total of 2.6 million ADSL access lines by the end of September last year to 5.3 million ADSL access lines this year.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:13 PM
AMD, VSNL to sell Net Communicator device in India
By John Ribeiro, IDG News ServiceAdvanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has teamed with Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL), a leading Indian telecommunications and Internet services company, to market its Personal Internet Communicator (PIC) to consumers in India, the companies said Thursday. AMD also announced distribution partnerships for the device in Mexico and the Caribbean. In one example, the Sunnyvale, California, manufacturer has linked with Cable and Wireless PLC, which is deploying the PIC in the Carribean to support disaster relief efforts.
The PIC was developed by AMD as part of its "50 X 15" initiative, which aims to provide affordable Internet and computing capabilities to 50 percent of the world's population by 2015. The PIC is designed to be an easy-to-use, affordable consumer device that provides basic Internet and computing capabilities such as a browser, e-mail and productivity tools.
In India, the PIC will be offered by VSNL as part of the Tata Indicom Broadband Services, as a bundled Internet service including both hardware and software. VSNL is part of the Mumbai-based Tata Group.
"The Internet in India has so far touched very few people because of the non-availability of an affordable device and a high speed Internet connection," according to Shashi Kalathil, head of the broadband business of VSNL. The combination of AMD's device and Tata's broadband service will help change that, he said.
The PIC, bundled with Internet services, will be sold to VSNL's broadband users at between US$6.50 to $21.70 per month, depending on the service, according to Kalathil. VSNL, which has 50,000 broadband subscribers, aims to have two million PIC users in India over the next two years, he said. The key constraint will be the speed of deploying broadband connections in the country, he added.
"We chose to offer this device because, unlike conventional computers that are over-architected for these applications, the AMD device has been dressed down to a price point that makes it affordable to a large number of people," Kalathil said.
But while the offering may expand Internet use among relatively well-off urban Indians, at the proposed pricing the service is unlikely find takers in urban slums or among the masses in the country's villages. These under-served segments of the market have typically been addressed by NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and government agencies that recognize the need for subsidizing Internet costs and by amortizing costs by making the Internet a community asset.
AMD's suggested system price is $185 for a configuration with a keyboard, mouse and preinstalled software. A configuration with a monitor would cost about $249. The PIC will be branded and sold by local service providers such as telecommunications companies and government-sponsored communications programs. Pricing to the consumer will be determined by the service provider, which may offer a variety of subscription, microfinancing options and bundling packages, according to a statement from the companies.
Solectron Corp., an electronics manufacturing services company in Milpitas, California, announced Thursday that it will be manufacturing the PIC. Under a global agreement, Solectron is supplying manufacturing, assembly, testing and distribution for several markets in the Asia-Pacific and the Americas. Solectron will initially provide services through its manufacturing plant in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:12 PM
Yahoo search goes mobile
By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News ServiceYahoo Inc. for the first time is letting mobile phone users query its search engine, giving them access to conventional Web results, local business listings and related information, as well as images, such as pictures and maps, the company said Wednesday. The service will launch Wednesday on several U.S. carriers. Users can access the services from a data-enabled phone by going to mobile.yahoo.com.
Yahoo had previously provided mobile-phone access to its e-mail and instant messaging services.
Earlier this month, rival Google Inc. introduced a service for mobile phone users to tap certain parts of the Google search index via SMS (short messaging service) text messaging. Google also supports other mobile modes of accessing its search engine, such as WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and i-Mode.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:11 PM
Ballmer: Windows is better than Linux
By Ed Scannell, InfoWorldIn the face of growing competition from Linux, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered a four-page memo to customers on Wednesday outlining the economic and security advantages Windows has over Linux, the potential dangers of open source involving indemnification, and the intent to aggressively convince Unix shops to migrate to Windows. In his lengthy e-mail, Ballmer contended that the increasingly higher prices companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and Novell charge for technical services and support, along with costs associated with indemnification, now outstrip the financial advantages of free open source software.
"It’s pretty clear the facts show Windows provides a lower total cost of ownership than Linux. The number of security vulnerabilities is lower on Windows, and Windows responsiveness on security is better than Linux, and Microsoft provides uncapped IP [intellectual property] indemnification of their products. [There is] no such comprehensive offering available for Linux or open source," he wrote.
According to the memo, Microsoft last year took a closer look at its volume licensing contracts in order to see what else the company could do to increase customer satisfaction. He said the top issue users discussed by customers was patent indemnification, which Microsoft then capped at the amount the customer paid for the software. Consequently, he wrote, Microsoft lifted that cap for volume licensing customers who are often the target of IP lawsuits.
"No vendor today stands behind Linux with full IP indemnification. In fact, it is rare for open source software to provide customers with any indemnification at all. We think Microsoft’s indemnification already is one of the best offered by the leading players in the industry for volume licensing customers, and we’re looking at ways to expand it to an even broader set of our customers," Ballmer wrote.
Backing up his assertion, Ballmer cited Regal Entertainment Group, the world's largest movie theater chain, which made the move to Red Hat Linux in 2001. After evaluating Linux for several months, they migrated to Windows for multiple reasons including lower TCO, more reliability and manageability, and because they felt they were more fully indemnified with regards to IP.
Microsoft pledges to do a better job educating corporate users about issues surrounding indemnification, spelling out the financial ramifications for their businesses, according to other Microsoft officials.
"I do think you are going to hear more about indemnification and IP issues going forward. As people move Linux servers from the edge of enterprises to further up the chain to mission-critical tasks, they are asking, 'Well, how exposed am I if someone comes after us, and what will a Linux vendor do for us and what will Microsoft do for us?'" said Martin Taylor, Microsoft's chief Linux strategist.
What inspired Ballmer's memo, in part, were almost identical conversations that Ballmer, Taylor, and Kevin Johnson, the head of Microsoft's worldwide sales and marketing, were having separately with corporate users. Those conversations started inevitably with TCO, which led to security issues, and then indemnification.
"It was almost comical how all of these separate conversations had the same pace and flow among those topics. So Steve [Ballmer] figured if we are having these conversations, then everyone else must be so he decided to send out a note to everyone sharing some data points and things they should consider," Taylor said.
In the memo Ballmer emphasized another item high on the company's list of strategic initiatives for the next 12 months, namely Unix migration. He referenced the recent one-year anniversary of the company's "Get The Facts" campaign (see " Microsoft steps up efforts to nab Unix migrations") that has attempted to lay out in a no-frills fashion for Unix users the technical and cost benefits of choosing Windows over Linux.
In his memo Ballmer advises IT and other business decision makers to migrate ERP systems from more expensive Unix environments to Windows. He said an independent survey of shops that have completed a migration of their SAP or PeopleSoft ERP systems from Unix to Windows found more than a 20 percent reduction in the numbers of servers required compared with Unix.
He cited as one example the Raiffeisen Bank Group, Austria's largest bank, which was running its shop with Unix and did an extensive evaluation comparing Linux and Windows. The bank finally chose Windows Server 2003 because it believed the Microsoft server offered the most economical solution as well as better performance.
Finally, Ballmer contended that Windows can provide corporate IT shops with superior security over competitive Linux servers, saying the company has made software security "a top priority the last three years." He said Microsoft has invested heavily in a multi-pronged initiative to improve software quality and a number of development processes.
"But still, Linux has often been touted as a more secure platform. In part, this is because of the 'many eyeballs' maxim of open source software that claims a correlation between the number of developers looking at code and the number of bugs found and resolved. While this has some validity, it is not necessarily the best way to develop secure software. We believe in the effectiveness of a structured software engineering process that includes a deep focus on quality, technology advances, and vigorous testing to make software more secure," Ballmer wrote.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:10 PM
RIAA files 750 new file-trading lawsuits
By Grant GrossThe Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Thursday announced it has filed 750 new lawsuits against alleged file-traders using peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software. The 750 new lawsuits were against "John Doe" defendants not yet identified by the RIAA. In addition to those new lawsuits, the RIAA filed another 213 lawsuits against named defendants who declined or ignored RIAA efforts to settle their cases. Among the 750 new lawsuits were 25 P-to-P users on 13 university campuses. The lawsuits were filed against users of P-to-P software such as Kazaa, Grokster and LimeWire.
The new round of RIAA lawsuits follow 762 lawsuits filed Sept. 30. The RIAA has filed more than 6,200 lawsuits against alleged file-traders since September 2003.
RIAA estimates that 58 million music tracks have been downloaded from a licensed music service in the first half of 2004. "In order for legitimate services to continue their growth, we cannot ignore those who take and distribute music illegally," Cary Sherman, RIAA's president, said in a statement. "There must be consequences to breaking the law or illegal downloading will cripple the music community's ability to support itself now or invest in the future."
Lawsuits against named defendants were filed in federal district courts in California, Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, New York, Michigan and Washington.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 07:11 PM
October 27, 2004
Google buys digital mapping company
By Stacy Cowley, IDG News ServiceSearch enabler Google Inc. said Wednesday it acquired digital mapping company Keyhole Corp. for an undisclosed sum. Keyhole maintains a multiterabyte database of digital images of geographic locations, culled from satellite and aerial snapshots. Users can enter an address and pull up an image of the specified area; they can also create flyover animations of locations such as venues and neighborhoods.
Three-year-old Keyhole covers thousands of cities and claims to be the largest 3D, commercial imagery database available online. Its images vary in age from two months to three years, and its image resolution in some areas is a fine as 0.5 foot (0.15 meters).
Google said it is not ready to discuss how it will integrate Keyhole's technology with its other services, which include its flagship search engine. However, the company immediately slashed the price tag on Keyhole's consumer-aimed Keyhole 2 LT downloadable software from US$70 to $30. Keyhole also offers a more expensive Keyhole 2 Pro application, which allows more extensive data manipulation.
Keyhole and Google are both based in Mountain View, California. Keyhole is the second company Google bought this year, and the first it acquired since its August IPO (initial public offering). In July, Google bought digital photo management company Picasa Inc., also for an undisclosed amount.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:12 PM