Web problems hit release of al Qaeda 9/11 video

By Firouz Sedarat

al QaedaSeptember 11 attacks

The delay of the much-touted 87-minute video, caused in
part by the main Islamist websites crashing, has thwarted al
Qaeda's yearly celebration of its attacks on U.S. cities in
2001.

But the full version hit websites on Friday, eight days
after the anniversary.

On it, senior al Qaeda commander Mustafa Abu al-Yazid vowed
that Western forces in Afghanistan would face "more large-scale
attacks ... where they least expect it" and called for
militants in Pakistan to step up their fight.

"In order for jihad in Afghanistan to continue and be
victorious, you must stand with your Mujahideen brothers in
Afghanistan and ... strike the interests of Crusader (Western)
allies in Pakistan," said Abu al-Yazid, a commander of al Qaeda
fighters in Afghanistan.

A suicide car bomber attacked the Marriott Hotel in the
Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday, killing at least 40
people and starting a fire that swept through the hotel.

Al Qaeda has marked the anniversary of September 11 in the
past with releases including a tape on September 7 last year in
which its leader, Osama bin Laden, appeared on video for the
first time in nearly three years, addressing the American
people.

It was unclear why the websites normally favored by al
Qaeda had gone down. By Saturday, the two most popular were
still out of action.

TONGUE-IN-CHEEK

Some suspected they had been targeted by hackers. India's
Hindustan Times pointed the finger at intelligence websites
that track militant sites on the Internet, which responded in
tongue-in-cheek fashion.

Rusty Shackleford of My Pet Jawa (www.mypetjawa.mu.nu)
denied his web group was behind any cyber-attack on the
websites. "But if I was responsible I'd deny it," he said.

Aaron Weisburd of www.internet-haganah wrote: "The
actual reasons for this are not known to me (and I would say
that even if I actually knew what was going on)."

This further delayed the release and unnerved al Qaeda
sympathizers, one of whom wrote: "May God bless you my
brothers, but the password is wrong."

The video also showed al Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman
al-Zawahri accusing predominantly Shi'ite Muslim Iran of taking
part in a Western "crusade" against Islam.

The closure of the Sunni websites coincided with a
widespread cyber attack which shut down some 300 Shi'ite sites,
Iran's semi-official Fars news agency said. Fars blamed this on
hardline Wahhabi Sunni hackers in the United Arab Emirates.

www.sistani.orgGrand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistaniyoutube

(Editing by Elizabeth Piper)

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Suspect Nabbed in Palin E-mail Hack

Steve Bosak, newsfactor

Vice Presidential candidateSarah PalinWeb sleuths

According to reports in Knoxville's Tennessean, Democrat State Representative Mike Kernell admitted that his son, David Kernell is being questioned by authorities in connection with the crime. The Secret Service and the FBI launched an official investigation on September 17.

Kernell, 20, is a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Rep. Kernell refused to disclose any further information about his son, including his whereabouts.

Not-So-Secure Security

In a message on a Web site frequented by hackers, a poster who identified himself as 'rubico' explained how he cracked Palin's Yahoo! account. The hacker tracked Palin's Yahoo! e-mail address from materials posted in the media, and then used the 'password reset' function to get into the account.

Analysts, of course, note that such security questions are less than secure. The hacker continues in his message to express frustration over his inability to download all the material. He then posted the password to the board after leaving screen captures of a few messages, family pictures and the inbox on the Wikileaks Web site, and asks other hackers to check out the material.

Alarmed by the message, another anonymous message board member logged into the Palin account, changed the password again, then contacted the Palin family with the new password and a warning that someone had hacked the account.

Tracking the Hacker

After determining that 'rubico' had used a proxy server in an attempt to cover his tracks, it appears that the Ctunnel proxy service, operated by Gabriel Rumuglia, cooperated with FBI investigators to track the elusive IP address of the culprit by turning over IP cache records. The trail allegedly leads back to David Kernell.

It appears Kernell's YouTube, MySpace and e-mail addresses have been terminated; one email address began with 'rubico10.' Kernell apparently used variations on the 'rubico' handle on other Web groups he belongs to, such as a chess group and other e-mail accounts. Bloggers such as Michelle Malkin and the Register were instrumental in tracking down leads to the perpetrator and tracking the path of the hacker through a proxy service.

Other fallouts from the hack are continued allegations in major newspapers that Palin was violating ethics standards by using a private e-mail count to conduct state business and the refusal of the Associated Press to turn over e-mail communications with the hacker. Some Web sites posted the e-mail addresses of Palin's family members and even posted Crystal Palin's cell phone number.

The hacker Web site that 'rubico' posted on, 4Chan.org, was most recently in the news when some members coordinated an online information blitz and attack on the Church of Scientology.

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin begins blogging

GoogleSergey BrinParkinson's Diseasegenetic testing

While Brin is no stranger to news-making webcasts and online press announcements, he made a blogging debut Thursday by sharing personal musings in a post at the Blogger weblogging website Google bought in early 2003.

Brin wrote of his mother being diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and how testing by 23andMe, a company started by his wife Anne Wojcicki, shows he has a gene mutation that "markedly" increases his chances of getting the illness.

"This leaves me in a rather unique position," Brin wrote.

"I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds. I also have the opportunity to perform and support research into this disease long before it may affect me."

Brin told of working with The Parkinson's Institute and the Michael J. Fox Foundation to combat the disease and provided links to the organizations' websites.

"I feel fortunate to be in this position," Brin wrote.

"Until the fountain of youth is discovered, all of us will have some conditions in our old age, only we don't know what they will be. I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine and I have decades to prepare for it."

Brin wrote of comparing his genes with those of relatives and of checking whether his DNA links him to others with his family name.

Founded by Wojcicki and Linda Avey two years ago, California-based 23andMe offers genotyping for a price of 399 per person.

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Comcast details changes for managing Web traffic

Comcast CorpWeb traffichigh speed Internet network

The move comes after the Federal Communications Commission
voted last month to uphold a complaint that Comcast had
violated the regulator's open-Internet principles by hindering
peer-to-peer traffic from applications such as BitTorrent.

Comcast said on Friday that under the plan designed to give
all users their "fair share" of bandwidth it would focus on
managing the traffic of customers who are using most bandwidth
when the network is congested.

It said it will use software on its network to determine if
particular subscribers have been the source of high volume of
traffic and will temporarily give traffic from those
subscribers a lower priority status.

It said that when a subscriber's traffic is assigned a
lower priority status its traffic could be delayed if the
network is congested but would not be delayed if there is no
congestion.

Comcast said it expect to have the new traffic management
system in place across its network by the end of December.

U.S. Internet service providers such as Comcast have been
overwhelmed by the rapid growth of online services including
peer-to-peer applications as well as online video, music
downloading and photo-sharing, and are seeking ways to
cost-effectively avoid network congestion.

Comcast, which has more than 14 million high-speed Internet
subscribers, had previously said it was changing its network
management practices to ensure all Web traffic is treated
essentially the same.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Anshuman Daga)

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Comcast: No complaints on new Internet management

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer

Comcast CorpInternet trafficcable modemtrial runs

The new system is set to replace the current one, which drew a sanction from the Federal Communications Commission, for all Comcast subscribers by the end of the year.

In its filing Friday, the cable company said the new system kicks in only when Internet traffic in the area approaches congestion. It then identifies which customer accounts are using the greatest amounts of bandwidth and slows down their Internet traffic until the traffic jam eases.

"Customers will still be able to do anything they want to online, and many activities will be unaffected, but they could experience things like: longer times to download or upload files, surfing the Web may seem somewhat slower, or playing games online may seem somewhat sluggish," the company said in a filing with the FCC Friday.

In a precedent-setting ruling, Comcast was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission in August to institute a new traffic management system, and provide details on its workings by Friday.

Under its older system, still in place for the majority of subscribers, Comcast blocks or delays some forms of Internet file-sharing to prevent traffic jams. In its August ruling, a divided FCC sided with consumer groups who had complained that in discriminating against certain forms of traffic, the system violated the FCC's guidelines on the openness of the Internet and the unwritten principle of "Net neutrality."

Months before the FCC's order, Comcast responded to the investigation by saying it would institute a new management system that treats different traffic types equally by the end of the year.

The new system has been tried out in: Colorado Springs, Colo.; Warrenton, Va.; Chambersburg, Pa.; Lake City, Fla.; and East Orange, Fla.

The trials show that less than 1 percent of customers have their traffic slowed on a typical day, Comcast said.

"Comcast did not receive a single customer complaint that could be traced to this new congestion management practice, despite having publicized the trials and notifying customers involved in the trials via e-mail," it said.

While complying with the FCC's ruling, Comcast has also challenged it in a federal appeals court, saying it was legally inappropriate and unjustified.

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Google ramps up defense of Yahoo ad search deal

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET

Googlesearch advertisingYahoo

The Internet search giant posted an FAQ on its proposed partnership and its affect on advertising prices on its public policy blog Thursday and followed it up with another posting Friday on it's potential affect on competition.

In both cases, Google makes the argument that the deal would not harm competition nor lead to increased advertising prices.

But the blog postings were only part of its busy week. On Wednesday, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters during a press conference that the company planned to proceed with the deal, in absence of any challenge from regulators. The companies expect to move forward with the deal in the second week of October to mid-October, one source familiar with their plans said.

But what Yahoo and Google have not made clear is what their plans will be should the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, or a multi-state task force, announce plans to challenge the deal by filing a lawsuit to block it, or should regulators seek a temporary or permanent injunction. The companies, for example, could demonstrate their resolve and still move forward with the partnership, despite knowing it would wrap them in legal wrangling with regulators.

Google, however, said in a statement:

"When we announced our deal with Yahoo we agreed to give the Department of Justice several months to review the deal before we began implementing it, and we continue to cooperate with regulators as that process continues. Ultimately we have confidence that they'll be able to conduct their review within that time period and allow us to move forward."

"When we announced our deal with Yahoo we agreed to give the Department of Justice several months to review the deal before we began implementing it, and we continue to cooperate with regulators as that process continues. Ultimately we have confidence that they'll be able to conduct their review within that time period and allow us to move forward."

And on Tuesday, Google's chief economist Hal Varian disputed reports of potentially higher advertising costs should his company do its advertising search partnership with Yahoo in his blog.

Such efforts by the Internet giant follow a couple of events last week which may not bode well for its nonexclusive partnership agreement with Yahoo. The Association of National Advertisers announced its opposition to the Google-Yahoo deal. And, on top of that, word began to spread that the Department of Justice had hired seasoned antitrust litigator Sandy Litvack to assess whether a case could be won in trial against the partnership.

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Online pharmacies may face stricter regulation

By Stephanie Condon, CNET

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Financial Web sites get busy amid turmoil

By BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writer

Wall Street

Online brokerage Scottrade Inc. saw its highest-volume trading day ever on Thursday. The two previous days were also among the eight busiest Scottrade has ever had, spokeswoman Kelly Doria said, and overall, orders were up 60 percent from the same week last year. She said the service suffered no loss of availability.

Some online trading sites saw a slowdown from all the activity. In some cases Thursday, the sites were performing as much as 12 times slower than normal, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that measures Web site performance.

The company did not specify which sites performed the slowest, though it cited online brokerage E-Trade Financial Corp. as one that held up well.

Some trading sites' performance slowdowns meant they were operating at only 95 percent availability — meaning 5 percent of users couldn't complete what they wanted to do. And in one case Friday morning, a trading site showed only 78 percent availability. But by later in the day, it and other trading sites with significant problems detected by Keynote were back to normal.

The week has been extremely volatile, beginning with massive losses Monday as investors woke up to two storied financial firms gone in a buyout and a bankruptcy. There was a rebound Tuesday, another plunge Wednesday and rallies on Thursday and Friday.

Charles Schwab Corp., the nation's largest discount brokerage, "definitely saw higher-than-usual traffic this week," said spokeswoman Sarah Bulgatz in an e-mail. But she added that efforts to add capacity "seemed to have paid off" — with the exception of "some minor issues" at the market open Friday due to very heavy volume. These issues have since been resolved, she added.

At investment management company Vanguard Group, online activity was busy Thursday, about what the company sees during tax season, said spokeswoman Rebecca Cohen. She said investors log on to the site to check their accounts "any time there is volatility" in the markets.

Hitwise, an Internet traffic-monitoring service, said visits to online broker-dealers and financial news Web sites like Yahoo Finance have been up by about a third this week, with attention steadily increasing as the week progressed.

The financial turmoil didn't appear to be causing online versions of runs on banks. Keynote's index of banking sites — which include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citibank as well as troubled Washington Mutual Inc. — did not show any significant issues or slowdowns, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations.

___

AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson and Business Writer Eileen AJ Connelly contributed to this report.

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Democracy of language in new Internet dictionary

definition of words

Wordia offers everyone the chance to record and upload
a video of themselves defining their chosen word in a complete
democratization of the language that will have Samuel Johnson,
the compiler of the first dictionary, turning in his grave.

Another offering is "nascent" which suggests that wordia is
a nascent technology that "takes something quite dull like a
dictionary and makes it not quite as dull."

The organizers hope their new online audio-visual
dictionary will become a living language archive. Time will
tell.

(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Paul Casciato)

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eBay looking to unload StumbleUpon?

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET

eBayStumbleUpon

According to a report in TechCrunch, eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to handle a sale of its Web site discovery service StumbleUpon, which it acquired a little over a year ago for roughly $75 million.

StumbleUpon takes a gander at the Web sites that people have visited and makes recommendations about other sites and videos that they may like.

In the report, TechCrunch cites a source who says that eBay is hoping to use Deutsche Bank to land the "right buyer," though the asking price is unknown and uncertainty exists whether the online retailing giant will be able to get what it paid, or will have to run the proverbial blue light special.

According to the report:

In July, StumbleUpon had 1.3 million worldwide visitors and 25 million page views. Twelve months earlier, the service attracted 4.4 million visitors and 31 million page views (ComScore).

StumbleUpon currently has more than 6 million registered users.

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Cisco to buy messaging software company Jabber

Cisco Systems Incinstant messaging software

The two companies did not disclose financial terms.

Denver-based Jabber provides open instant messaging
technology that supports different devices and applications,
and allows users on separate networks, such as Google Talk or
Yahoo Messenger, to connect with each other.

"With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend
the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand
the capabilities of our collaboration platform," Doug
Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration
Software Group, said in a statement.

Cisco said it expects the deal to close by the end of
January.

(Reporting by Tiffany Wu; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

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Clip strategy links Lionsgate, YouTube

By Andrew Wallenstein

YouTubeGoogle

As many as six multi-minute clips from individual Lionsgate
films including "3:10 to Yuma," "Good Luck Chuck," "Cooler" and
"Akeelah and the Bee" are aggregated at the Lionsgate Shop
Channel. A banner on the page leads to Lionsgateshop, where
the films highlighted in the clips are available for purchase.
That e-commerce site, which has been up since January, could
see a significant traffic boost with YouTube.

Lionsgate Shop is the most aggressive move a studio has
made to monetize YouTube beyond advertising on the site or
posting film trailers.

The channel is still a work in progress. Each individual
video player page carrying Lionsgate video eventually will
carry a link leading to a relevant purchase opportunity at
Lionsgateshop.

"This is a propeller airplane version of this service,"
said Curt Marvis, president of digital media at Lionsgate.
"We're hoping to get it to supersonic jet phase in the next six
months with more clips and a more engaging experience."

Marvis indicated that he also is in talks with other online
video hubs about creating similar arrangements with Lionsgate.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

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Google's U.S. share of Web search reaches 63 percent

Google Inc

Yahoo Inc, the No. 2 player in the U.S. Web search market
saw its share of the business drop 0.9 percent to 19.6 from
July while Microsoft, the No. 3 U.S. player, slipped 0.6
percent to 8.3 percent, according to comScore Inc.

IAC InterActiveCorp's Ask grew 0.3 percent to retain
its fourth-place ranking while Time Warner Inc's AOL edged up
0.1 percent to 4.3 percent, according to August monthly data
published by the market research firm said.

Google's growing share of Web search and, by extension, its
even larger role in the related market for Web search
advertising, has lead rivals and some industry trade groups to
complain to competition regulators in the United and Europe.

ComScore estimates that the number of searches performed by
U.S. Web surfers on the five top search engines was virtually
unchanged at 11.75 billion searches compared with July. The
figure excludes searches users perform for mapping, local
directory information or user-generated videos, it said.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

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Canadian Western Bank looks east via Internet

By Lynne Olver

stock prices

Canadian Western Bank, which operates primarily in the
provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and
Saskatchewan, did a "soft launch" of its online bank this week,
President and Chief Executive Larry Pollock told Reuters on
Thursday.

"We're just testing the market," Pollock said, noting that
the online bank had been planned for six or eight months.

"I guess there could never be a bad time or a good time,
it's just something we're testing for now," he said.

"We don't know how much money we're going to get ... we
don't really know what to expect."

Called Canadian Direct Financial, it offers savings
accounts and guaranteed investment certificates. New customers
need a bank account at another Canadian financial institution
to get started.

"It will give us access to geographical markets that we're
not in," Pollock said. "We're in the four Western provinces
only, so by using the Internet we can access markets right
across the country."

The Edmonton, Alberta-based bank already operates online in
its direct-to-consumer home and auto insurance unit, where
Pollock said half of all auto policies are now sold online.

Various Internet banking options have sprung up in Canada
in the past decade, with insurance companies, retailers and
credit unions getting involved. Many of them lure customers
with high interest rates.

But customers can switch in and out of high-interest
savings accounts very quickly, Pollock noted, and if the
financial institution pays a high rate to customers while
investing the funds in low-yielding securities, "how do you
make money?" he asked.

"If we launched this and got C$2 (billion) or C$3 billion,
we wouldn't know what to do with it, we'd be earning a negative
spread on it as well," Pollock said.

However, the beauty of online deposit-taking is that growth
can be controlled, he added. Really good rates will attract
lots of money and low rates won't.

"It's a convenient way to supplement your liquidity if you
need to ... you can crank the rate up, get some money, turn it
down, stop it," he said. "It's sort of like turning the tap on
or off."

Canadian Western, the country's seventh-largest bank by
market value, has reported a 16 percent rise in net income in
the nine months ended July 31, but it is the country's
worst-performing bank stock in 2008.

($1=$1.06 Canadian)

(Reporting by Lynne Olver; editing by Rob Wilson)

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EFF sues U.S. over NSA surveillance program

By Steven Musil, CNET

Electronic Frontier FoundationBush administrationAT&T

In addition to suing the National Security Agency, the nonprofit Internet advocacy group also names President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as well as others.

"For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T's domestic networks and databases of customer records," senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston said in a statement. "Our goal in this new case against the government, as in our case against AT&T, is to dismantle this dragnet surveillance program as soon as possible."

The EFF said the evidence it would present is the same evidence central to a class-action lawsuit it filed in 2006 accusing AT&T of opening up its telecommunications facilities to the NSA for use in spying on the phone calls and e-mails of "millions of ordinary Americans." Such a practice violates free speech and privacy rights spelled out by the U.S. Constitution and also runs afoul of federal wiretapping law, the EFF claimed.

The ACLU won a brief victory in a similar case filed against the NSA when a federal judge ruled in 2006 that the NSA's surveillance program "ran roughshod" over Americans' constitutional rights Americans and violated federal wiretapping law. However, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit in 2007 on narrow procedural grounds without addressing the legality of the program. The suit effectively died earlier this year when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in an appeal.

In July, the Senate approved a bill that would rewrite federal wiretap laws by granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies as long as the government claims the request was "lawful" and authorized by the president.

After the EFF's 2006 lawsuit was filed, reports of a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco surfaced and have become central to the nonprofit group's litigation.

Although EFF's lawsuit was filed before allegations about the room surfaced, reports of its existence have become central to the nonprofit group's attempts to prove AT&T opened its network to the NSA. Former AT&T employee Mark Klein released documents in 2006 alleging the company spliced its fiber optic cables and ran a duplicate set of cables to Room 641A at its 611 Folsom Street building.

The deleted portions of a legal brief accidentally released in 2006 sought to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. (AT&T has publicly neither confirmed nor denied cooperating with the National Security Agency.)

Initial details of the surveillance program surfaced in late 2005 in a Los Angeles Times article that quoted an unnamed source as saying the NSA has a "direct hookup" into an AT&T database that stores information about all domestic phone calls, including how long they lasted.

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Internet group sues Bush for electronic eavesdropping

by Glenn Chapman

President George W. Bushtelephone calls

The suit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which took the administration to task for what it argued is "illegal surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans."

EFF lawyers filed a suit against AT&T in 2006 charging the US telecoms giant had opened up its network to National Security Agency (NSA) agents without proper court-approved warrants.

This year Congress passed legislation granting US telecommunications firms immunity from domestic spying lawsuits.

Wrangling about the constitutionality of that act has stalled the AT&T lawsuit as well as a slew of similar litigation aimed at other telecommunications firms.

EFF lawyers said Thursday the new lawsuit is aimed squarely at government officials, thereby sidestepping the immunity act.

"Our goal in this new case against the government, as in our case against AT&T, is to dismantle this dragnet surveillance program as soon as possible," said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston.

"For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T's domestic networks and databases of customer records."

The suit names Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as attorneys general, the NSA director and 100 "john does" yet to be identified.

It accuses them of personally violating the US constitution and a host of federal laws by helping orchestrate or carry out illegal snooping of Internet and voice communications.

The lawsuit asks the court to order federal officials to account for and then destroy information illegally-obtained from AT&T databases and to pay unspecified cash damages.

Bankston said the EFF had ample evidence that the NSA "is vacuuming up millions upon millions of ordinary AT&T communications."

EFF attorneys expect federal officials to argue to the court that a "state secrets privilege" protects them from the litigation because information revealed while defending themselves could threaten national security.

Bankston dismissed such a defense, saying the EFF is not interested in exposing what US spies may have found but only whether they had proper legal authority to snoop on US citizens' telephone and Internet communications.

The US District Court judge presiding over the suits against the telecom firms earlier rejected the "states secret" argument by government lawyers who have appealed his decision.

Consideration of the appeal has been suspended pending resolution of whether the granting of immunity to telecoms companies forces the dismissal of the cases in the lower court.

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Sergey Brin starts blog, tells of Parkinson's risk

By Stephen Shankland, CNET

GoogleSergey Bringenetic mutationParkinson's disease

The inaugural post on Brin's blog, too.blogspot, is titled "LRRK2" after the gene that he found carries a mutation called G2019S, which, "while rare even among people with the disease, accounts, in some ethnic groups, for a substantial proportion of familial Parkinson's," Brin said in the blog post.

"It is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson's in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20 percent to 80 percent, depending on the study and how you measure," Brin said.

Brin's mother and her aunt both have Parkinson's, and recent research has uncovered a genetic link in some cases of the disease, Brin wrote. And through the services of start-up 23andMe, co-founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and Linda Avey, he found that he carries the same mutation. The research is still early, though, he said. And he had an optimistic take on the news.

Brin said the knowledge gives him some power.

"I know early in my life something I am substantially predisposed to. I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds (e.g. there is evidence that exercise may be protective against Parkinson's). I also have the opportunity to perform and support research into this disease long before it may affect me," he said. "And, regardless of my own health, it can help my family members, as well as others."

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Google snags 63 percent of searches in August

Google InccomScore Inc

Google accounted for 63 percent of searches by U.S. surfers in August, up from 61.9 percent in July and 56.5 percent in August last year.

The increase came at the expense of the second- and third-largest players in the market, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo's share fell to 19.6 percent from 20.5 percent in July and 23.3 percent a year ago.

Microsoft's share was 8.3 percent, down from 8.9 percent in July and 11.3 percent a year ago.

ComScore's report excludes searches for mapping, local directory and user-generated video sites.

The measures rely heavily on online recruitment techniques dismissed by more traditional pollsters, and the company was criticized several months ago for a separate report on paid search clicks, which relies on a similar panel as the data on search market share.

Lehman Brothers analyst Douglas Anmuth said the report suggested that Google's strength in search is intact, and the company remains a top pick.

Google shares rose $24.59, or 5.9 percent, to close Thursday at $439.08.

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Yahoo starts web page makeover

Yahoo

The pioneering California Internet firm is letting randomly chosen users in Britain, France, India and the United States test a "next generation design" of a homepage used by more than 400,000 people worldwide.

"We're working on a new homepage that will help you get more out of the Internet, make more of your precious time, and make sense of all the things going on in your world," Yahoo vice president of Front Doors said in an online posting.

Yahoo seeks feedback on the redesign before rolling it out to all users in coming months.

The new look is part of a website overhaul that includes opening the platform so users can plug-in mini applications created by outside software developers.

The revamped Yahoo homepage has a "dashboard area" featuring tools for people to check weather forecasts, local events, and Web-based email accounts from Yahoo, Google and AOL without leaving the website.

Yahoo claims more than 500 million users worldwide but has been struggling to cash-in on its popularity.

Yahoo's sagging fortunes and Google's ascension as Internet advertising king prompted Microsoft on January 31 to offer to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion dollars in a half-cash, half-stock deal.

Microsoft was eager to combine online resources with Yahoo in order to better battle Google.

Microsoft walked away from negotiations May 3 after Yahoo rejected an offer it raised from 31 dollars to 33 dollars per share, which amounted to 47.5 billion dollars.

Yahoo subsequently made a deal with Google to put its online advertising expertise to work on Yahoo websites. That deal is to take effect later this year if it passes muster with US anti-trust regulators.

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Hacker: impersonated Palin, stole e-mail password

By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

Republican vice presidential candidateSarah Palin

The hacker guessed that Alaska's governor had met her husband in high school, and knew Palin's date of birth and home Zip code. Using those details, the hacker tricked Yahoo Inc.'s service into assigning a new password, "popcorn," for Palin's e-mail account, according to a chronology of the crime published on the Web site where the hacking was first revealed.

The FBI and Secret Service launched a formal investigation Wednesday. Yahoo declined to comment Thursday on details of the investigation, citing Palin's privacy and the sensitivity of such investigations.

The person who claimed responsibility for the break-in did not respond Thursday to an e-mail inquiry from The Associated Press.

"i am the lurker who did it, and i would like to tell the story," the person wrote in the account, which circulated on the Internet. What started as a prank was cut short because of panic over the possibility the FBI might investigate, the hacker wrote.

Investigators were waiting to speak with Gabriel Ramuglia of Athens, Ga., who operates an Internet anonymity service used by the hacker. Ramuglia told the AP on Thursday he was reviewing his own logs and promised to turn over any helpful information to authorities because the hacker violated rules against using the anonymity service for illegal activities.

"If you're doing something illegal and causing me issues by doing this, I'm willing to cooperate," Ramuglia said. "Obviously this is the most high profile situation I've dealt with."

The break-in of Palin's private account is especially significant because Palin sometimes uses non-government e-mail to conduct state business. Previously disclosed e-mails indicate her administration embraced Yahoo accounts as an alternative to government e-mail, which could possibly be released to the public under Alaska's Open Records Act.

At the time, critics of Palin's administration were poring over official e-mails they had obtained from the governor's office looking for evidence of improper political activity.

Details of this week's break-in, if authentic, were consistent with speculation by computer security experts who said Yahoo's "forgot-my-password" service almost certainly was exploited. The mechanism allows customers to retrieve or change their password if they can verify their identity by confirming personal information such as birthdate, zip code and the answer to a "secret question," such as a childhood pet's name or school mascot.

Palin's hacker was challenged to guess where Alaska's governor met her husband, Todd. Palin herself recounted in her speech at the Republican National Convention that the pair began dating two decades ago in high school in Wasilla, a town near Anchorage.

"I found out later though (sic) more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on 'Wasilla high'," the person wrote.

The McCain campaign issued a statement describing the hacking as an invasion of Palin's privacy.

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Sarah Palin's E-Mail Hacked, Personal Mail Posted

Steve Bosak, newsfactor

Republican vice presidential candidateAlaska Gov. Sarah Palin

Tracing the Hacker

The alleged screenshots were published on the Wikileaks Web site, which publishes leaked government, corporate and religious documents and protects the identity of the sources. From there, the e-mail spread throughout the Internet.

Hacking into an e-mail account may be punishable by up to five years in prison under federal law. Local statutes may also have been broken.

According to a report in the Register, a proxy server operated by Ctunnel in Fairbanks, Alaska, was used to anonymously attack the Yahoo account. IP addresses from incoming users are allegedly held in cache on the Ctunnel server at another facility in Chicago and could identify the hacker.

In fact, in a post discovered on a hacker-oriented Web site, a user named "rubico" posted, "THIS [hack into Palin's account] was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one ... I didn't know how to [download] all that stuff, so I posted the pass[word], and then promptly deleted everything."

Getting to the Chicago server may not be problematic for the FBI or Secret Service. Charles Silverman, a Chicago-based attorney, said it all depends on whether the government wanted a warrant or a subpoena. "The main difference being that warrants need probable cause, whereas subpoenas merely need reasonable suspicion," he said.

Legal consequences for the hacker may be dire. Silverman said, "If the e-mail search or release was done in a threatening manner, or seemed designed to intimidate or release potential security information, then the Secret Service could make an arrest. If this was done for embarrassment and/or political gain, then it would be solely FBI jurisdiction. I suspect that the Secret Service is part of the investigation to see if there was an attempt to find security information, then the perpetrators would be guilty of the inchoate crime of attempted harm and/or conspiracy to harm."

When we contacted the Chicago facility, an associate at FDC Servers, Peter Karl, had no knowledge of any authorities requesting access. "We have over 3,000 servers here," Karl said. "The authorities would have to contact the server owner. We have no access to their data."

Worth the Time?

Much scrutiny has been focused on Gov. Palin since her nomination to be the running mate of Republican presidental candidate Sen. John McCain. Last night the McCain campaign released a terse statement condemning the hack.

Reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Associated Press have speculated about Palin's use of a private Yahoo account to conduct Alaska business, yet the posted e-mails appear to be personal, with no government content. Family photos were also posted on the Internet.

"rubico's" post concluded, "I read though the emails ... ALL OF THEM ... before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped."

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Microsoft Visual Studio upgrade eyed

Paul Krill

MicrosoftVisual Studiocompany's software development environment

The software development platform focuses on four main "pushes," according to a blog post this week by Jeffrey Schlimmer, a program manager at Microsoft. The blog reflects on a presentation delivered at the Visual Studio Extensibility Conference by Microsoft Principal Product Unit Manager Paramesh Vaidyanathan and Rico Mariani, Microsoft architect, in Redmond, Wash. this week.

The four pushes include experience, in which Visual Studio is intended to become the developer's favorite application; customer focus, with an emphasis on small-to-medium business developers; platform, offering the latest technologies; and architecture, to improve infrastructure.

A Microsoft representative confirmed that Visual Studio 10 is the codename for the next version of Visual Studio but said the company has not announced a release date. The company also plans a new version of Visual Studio Team System for application lifecycle management dubbed "Rosario."

Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2008 upgrade last November.

Extensibility capabilities in Visual Studio 10 include a new text editor based on Microsoft's WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) technology, as well Microsoft Extensibility Framework capabilities and support for multiple languages.

Later plans for the platform call for macros and other end user extensibility via VSTA (Visual Studio Tools for Applications) as well as more add-ins that can be built in managed code. A common project system is anticipated as well as richer types and protocols for discovery, activation, and manipulation. A visualization model also is on the agenda.

Modernization features in Visual Studio 10 include enabling a WPF-based look and feel of the shell. A full WPF shell is planned for later on, according to Schlimmer's blog. Other improvements slotted as happening later include extensive use of a parallel framework to utilize multicore hardware to boost Visual Studio responsiveness.

Scalability plans for Visual Studio 10 include improvements in Visual C++ performance and the elimination of quadratic algorithms in C# and Visual Basic project systems. A new editor is planned also. Subsequent to Visual Studio 10, Microsoft is eying a common/scalable project system and common low-level storage in language services.

Visual Studio 10 also uses Live Search and integrates community ratings. Developers with multiple machines can synchronize using Live ID/Mesh technology. Instant Messaging at some point will become an integral part of the small team development experience in Visual Studio, according to Schlimmer.

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Finland to offer high-speed broadband for all by 2016

"I have estimated that building fibreoptic cable networks in areas where they would not be built commercially will cost around 200 million euros, of which the government could pay a maximum of one third, so around 67 million euros (97 million dollars)," Harri Pursiainen, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Transport and Communications, told AFP.

He added that telecom operators, regions, municipalities and financial support from the European Union were expected to cover the remaining two-thirds of the price tag.

Communications Minister Suvi Linden said earlier the government was committed to helping finance fibreoptic networks in remote areas but would decide later this year on specific details.

The government hopes to offer a connection speed of at least 100 megabytes per second to all households by 2016, but in a first step it aims to secure broadband of at least one megabyte per second by 2010.

"More than 99 percent of households are expected to have access (by 2016). A couple of thousand households are situated in areas where getting a fibreoptic connection to two kilometres (1.2 miles) from the house is impossible," Linden said.

The Finnish communications regulatory authority (FICORA) said in June there were some 1.92 million broadband subscriptions in the Nordic country, which has a population of 5.3 million.

High-speed Internet connection is seen as necessary to provide more efficient data transfer for companies and households, which would enable more Finns to work or run small businesses from home and would secure access to online services in remote areas.

"We are strongly committed to developing an information society and we want to promote productivity and efficiency," Linden said.

She cited as an example some regions in northern Finland where there are vast distances between towns and where video link-ups and other services requiring Internet connections faster than one megabyte per second were a necessary part of daily life.

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US blogger sentenced to three months in Singapore jail

"I think I will appeal," Gopalan Nair, 58, said in a brief telephone interview with AFP.

An official with the Supreme Court did not provide details but confirmed the sentence, which was issued Wednesday.

Local newspapers said Nair was given until Saturday to settle his affairs before he is taken to prison.

"I'm going to serve the sentence," Nair said, adding he has no regrets. "I only wrote a blog. I didn't go out and kill anybody."

In his blog, Nair had criticised a legal hearing at which Singapore founding father Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, testified in a defamation case they filed against an opposition party.

Nair was charged with insulting Justice Belinda Ang Saw Ean by saying she was "prostituting herself during the entire proceedings, by being nothing more than an employee of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his son and carrying out their orders," a court document said.

Justice Ang presided over the defamation hearing. Nair, a former Singapore lawyer and now a US citizen, had denied the charge of insulting a public servant.

"You have scandalised and attacked Justice Belinda Ang, the judiciary, and the system of administration of justice in Singapore," Justice Kan Ting Chiu said in sentencing Nair, according to a report in The Straits Times.

"The rights of freedom of speech and expression are qualified and... do not entitle you to insult Justice Ang in the way that you have done."

While he had no regrets, Nair told AFP that maybe his language could have been "a bit moderated."

Nair could have been jailed for up to one year and fined 5,000 Singapore dollars (3,500 US) on the charge of insulting a public servant.

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Sentence scrapped against blogger critical of Moroccan monarch

King Mohammed VI

The appeals ruling in Agadir overturned the sentence by a lower court, finding that certain procedural measures in the country's press code had not been respected.

"I am very satisfied by the Agadir appeal court's decision which was fair," Erraji told AFP.

"In all my writings I never sought to attack the king," he added.

Earlier this month a lower court in Agadir found Erraji guilty of criticising the Moroccan monarch on his blog, www.hespress, ordered him jailed for two years and fined him 5,000 dirhams (440 euros, 630 dollars).

In the article, Erraji wrote that "the king encourages his people to 'al-Ittikal'," an Arabic word that means to rely on handouts.

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Malaysian blogger detained for displaying upside down flag: report

national flag

Syed Azidi Syed Aziz, better known as Sheih Kickdefella, was arrested by police late Wednesday under the Sedition Act at his home in opposition-held northern Kelantan state, The Star daily reported.

"We were informed that the police were looking for us on Tuesday and waited for them but they didn't show up," his wife Bariah Ishak told the paper.

"We thought the worst was over but they came looking for him and so he surrendered," she added.

Syed Azidi, known for his links to the opposition conservative Islamic PAS party, had recently organised a nationwide Internet campaign to fly the Malaysian flag upside down in a sign of protest over the country's political and economic turmoil.

The campaign caused outrage in the conservative Muslim-led country, with Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi ordering a police investigation into the matter.

Yap Swee Seng, director of the rights group Voice of the Malaysian People (Suaram), condemned the arrest.

"It is a violation of freedom of expression. It is aimed to strike fear against those who criticise the government. It will have a chilling effect on bloggers and other Internet users.

"Clearly it is aimed to curtail dissent against the current leadership," he added.

Syed Azidi is the second blogger to get in trouble with Malaysian authorities over website content.

Prominent blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin, who has targeted government figures on his website, was arrested last Friday under the Internal Security Act (ISA).

Raja Petra, founder of the controversial Malaysia Today website, has already been charged with sedition and defamation after linking Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife to the sensational murder of a Mongolian woman.

Rights groups say about 63 people are being held under the ISA, which allows for renewable two-year periods of detention without trial and is normally used against suspected terrorists.

The act has also been used to lock up opponents of the government. Five Hindu rights activists were detained last year under it after mounting a protest against government race policies.

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Video game industry bullish on Asia despite financial turmoil

video game expo

The Asia-Pacific region accounts for 15 billion US dollars of the gaming industry's global turnover of 50 billion dollars, said Seto Lok Yin, assistant chief executive officer of Singapore's Media Development Authority, a government agency.

"This figure is expected to increase to 25 billion dollars in the next few years," Seto said in a speech to open the Games Convention Asia 2008 conference and exhibition.

The three-day gathering, now in its second year, features 118 exhibitors from 13 countries and is expected to attract about 100,000 visitors, organisers said.

Major exhibitors include industry giant Electronic Arts (EA) and Ubisoft, both which are games publishers, along with hardware manufacturers Asus and Logitech.

Hands-on stations where visitors can test online games take up a large chunk of the exhibition space.

"The industry is doing very well and we are happy to be part of it," Jon Niermann, president of EA Asia-Pacific, told a news conference.

EA announced it was launching its popular multi-player fantasy combat game, Warhammer Online, in Asian markets on Friday.

The company publishes a number of leading titles, the latest versions of which are soon to be released worldwide. These include: FIFA 09, NBA Live 09 and Need For Speed: Undercover.

Also set for release in the region is EA's much anticipated music simulator Rock Band, as well as the company's stable of games designed for the Apple iPhone, which was recently launched in Asia.

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Stanford Places Engineering Courses Online

Geoff Fox - PC Magazine

Adding to an ever growing list of free online courseware is Stanford University's "Stanford Engineering Everywhere."

Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world, according to the university.

"Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online," Stanford said in a statemrnt. "A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience."

Like a late night infomercial, however, there is some fine print: "SEE courses cannot be taken for credit and do not include access to Stanford-restricted computers, libraries, or services. Content may not include all the material used in the campus offering and cannot be used for commercial purposes."

In other words, this is education for education's sake, not education for a degree's sake. You will not be allowed to walk-on for football tryouts.

Here's the starting lineup, sure to be expanded if/when SEE is a hit:

Programming Methodology CS106A
Programming Abstractions CS106B
Programming Paradigms CS107
Introduction to Robotics CS223A
Natural Language Processing CS224N
Machine Learning CS229
The Fourier Transform and its Applications EE261
Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems EE263

Convex Optimization I EE364A
Convex Optimization II EE364B

On top of making the courses available to students, Stanford is making these courses available to educators to modify and reuse through the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. That means a little Stanford engineering goodness is about to spread itself around-the-world.

Oh, and if you're wondering whether Stanford's educational skills have ever produced anything worthwhile, you could Google it.Originally posted on AppScout.

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Morocco scraps blogger's two-year jail sentence

Last week, Mohamed Erraji was jailed and fined 5,000
dirhams ($626). He was later released on bail pending the
appeals court ruling.

"The case is not acceptable and the case was abandoned and
thrown out of court," said Ahmed Belouch, presiding judge at
the appeals court in the southern city of Agadir.

Erraji wrote in online newspaper Hespress that Morocco had
been destroyed by the practice of handing out charity or gifts
such as taxi licenses to a lucky few, which encouraged people
to beg.

"This has made the Moroccans a people without dignity, who
live by donations and gifts," he wrote in reference to the
King's charity work.

Judge Belouch cited flaws in prosecuting the case of the
29-year-old blogger, including the failure to summon him to
attend trial 15 days before he actually appeared in court and
his unlawful detention ahead of the trial.

Family members and human rights groups said police arrested
Erraji on September 5 and his trial last 10 minutes. He had no
defense lawyer.

"The ruling today showed the situation of human rights has
changed in Morocco and there is improvement in court dealings
with cases related to rights of opinion and free press," said
Abdellatif Ouammou, who was Erraji lawyer. (Reporting by Lamine
Ghanmi; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

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Amazon tees up content delivery service

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET

AmazonAmazon CTO Werner Vogels

Amazon is in the midst of creating a new content delivery service aimed at developers and businesses that it expects to launch by year's end.

According to an Amazon Web services blog posted Thursday:

This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels wrote in a separate blog that his company is "expanding the cloud" with this service: "Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access."

Amazon's service will allow customers to store their content in an Amazon S3 holding tank and then mark it as publicly readable when its ready. According to Amazon, customers will then "make a single API call to register the bucket" and have a domain name assigned for their content. When clients "request the object via the returned domain name they'll be routed to a nearest edge location," which aims to deliver content at high speeds.

Amazon's content delivery service is hoping to make its money by allowing customers to pay as they go when using the service. Pricing has not been made public.

GigaOm's Om Malik said that Amazon's service will be disruptive to content delivery network (CDN) incumbents, such as Akamai and Limelight Networks:

Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like an brokerage firm in the 1980s. Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book. Amazon executives told me that company is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of long-term contracts current players foist on their clients.

Seeking Alpha's Dan Rayburn agrees, with one caveat:

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6 Internet providers disclose Web tracking for ads

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer

Bresnan Communications LLC

Bresnan's test involved about 6,000 customers in and around Billings, Mont., from April 1 to June 26. The company notified customers by sending e-mails to customers' Bresnan addresses and posting notices on its site. Customers were given an opportunity to decline, or opt out, of targeting, and 18 people took advantage of that option.

Cable One Inc.

Cable One, a unit of The Washington Post Co., conducted a test in Anniston, Ala., with about 14,000 customers for six months starting Nov. 20. The company did not provide specific notice of the trial, nor did it let customers opt out of participation. It said tests are routinely conducted and fall under general notices and agreements posted on the company's Web site and mailed to subscribers annually. The company said it would have sought affirmative consent, known as opt in, had it continued with full deployment.

CenturyTel Inc.

CenturyTel's trial had 20,000 customers, mostly in and around Kalispell, Mont. The trial ran from November to June. The company sent e-mail notifications of an updated privacy policy, to which a paragraph on NebuAd was added. The company said 82 subscribers opted out during the trial. Before suspending a broader launch, CenturyTel started informing customers of it via e-mail and bill inserts.

Embarq Corp.

The nation's fourth-largest traditional phone company, Embarq conducted a test this year with 26,000 subscribers in the Gardner, Kan., area. The company did not directly inform customers of the test but included a general notice within its privacy policy posted online. The company said 15 people opted out.

Knology Inc.

Knology's trial covered an unknown number of customers in West Point, Columbus and Augusta, Ga.; Panama City, Fla.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Huntsville, Ala. Tests began in West Point in January and expanded until the company stopped all trials on July 14. The company says customers were informed through a service agreement posted on its Web site, and subscribers who happened to see it had a chance to opt out of participation. The company did not say how many did.

WideOpenWest

From early March until July 8, WOW used NebuAd's system on its 330,000 customers in its entire service area, which covers Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, Evansville, Ind., Chicago and Detroit. Besides Web postings, WOW notified customers after the fact via e-mail and physical mail and reminded them on billing statements to review privacy notices online. The company said it received 3,355 opt outs, though an unknown number came from the same customer.

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Russia Web site owner killed after arrest

By Steven Musil, CNET

Russia

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the www.Ingushetiya.ru Web site, was arrested at Nazran airport in southern Russia after disembarking a flight, according to a statement by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Yevloyev was later found dumped on the side of the road, suffering from a gunshot wound to the head, the news site's deputy editor, Ruslan Khautiyev, told the Associated Press. Yevloyev later died at a hospital, Khautiyev said.

Yevloyev had angered the region's Kremlin-backed administration with bold criticism of police treatment of civilians in the region, the AP reported. A court in June accused him of spreading "extremist" statements and ordered him to close his site, but it reappeared under a different name.

The Russian prosecutor general's office said it would open an investigation into the "incident."

"While police officers were attempting to transfer M. Yevloyev to an Interior Ministry office, an incident occurred," said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigative committee of the prosecutor general's office, according to the Interfax news agency. "M. Yevloyev received a gunshot wound to the temple area."

A lawyer for Yevloyev ridiculed the explanation and said police dumped Yevloyev on a road after shooting him.

"It was in no way a mistake," the lawyer, Kaloi Akhilgov, told Reuters.

Reporters Without Borders said it was "outraged" by Yevloyev's death.

"His death must not go unpunished," the media group said in a statement. "It is vital that the international community, especially the European Union, should demand to know what really happened and who was responsible."

Yevloyev is the latest high-profile journalist to be killed in Russia in recent years. Anna Politkovskaya, who covered the war in Chechnya, was shot to death in the entryway to her Moscow apartment in 2006.

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Ad targeting based on ISP tracking now in doubt

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
15 minutes ago

A slow-building privacy storm moved in on NebuAd Inc., the Silicon Valley startup that can facilitate the Web tracking. And its potential partners, the Internet service providers, failed to make the case that they should be in the ad business at all, rather than simply being the pipes that pass Internet traffic back and forth.

One by one, cable and telephone companies that had conducted trials using NebuAd's ad-serving system have indefinitely suspended expansion plans. In interviews, executives at the Internet access providers blamed an unfavorable climate as Congress considers tightening federal oversight.

"A bunch of them have dropped (NebuAd) like hot potatoes," said Gigi Sohn, president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Annmarie Sartor, a spokeswoman for broadband provider CenturyTel Inc., said the company was ready to proceed until "Congress started questioning privacy."

"We were going to launch this summer," she said. "The trial from our viewpoint was successful."

Bresnan Communications LLC, The Washington Post Co.'s Cable One Inc. and Knology Inc. also have ended trials without immediate plans to move forward, joining the previously disclosed suspensions by Embarq Corp. and WideOpenWest. Charter Communications Inc. dropped plans for a summer pilot because of the scrutiny.

Although NebuAd claimed late last year that Internet providers representing millions of customers run NebuAd's system, it's unclear how many, if any, partners remain.

NebuAd, whose chief executive, Bob Dykes, freely spoke with The Associated Press about its plans several months ago, declined comment for this story. Spokeswoman Janet McGraw said via e-mail, "We do not have any specific business updates at this point."

Across the Atlantic, a similar company called Phorm Inc. has also faced complaints since its February announcement of partnerships with three access providers reaching 70 percent of Britain's broadband market — BT Group PLC, Virgin Media Inc. and Carphone Warehouse Group PLC's TalkTalk.

Shares in Phorm have declined about 75 percent since peaking 11 days after the announcement. A company representative said Phorm CEO Kent Ertugrul, who earlier praised his own company's commitment to privacy, was traveling and unavailable for an interview.

Both systems work with Internet service providers to scan customers' Web traffic for patterns. Then NebuAd or Phorm determines which advertisements are likely to interest those customers.

If you've visited several sites on golf, for instance, NebuAd could label you a golfer. Then Web sites that participate in ad networks created by NebuAd can be triggered to show you an ad for golf clubs or golf resorts, while someone else who frequents sites on Jaguars might see an ad from an auto dealer instead.

The thinking is that Internet users are more likely to pay attention and find advertising less annoying if the pitches are relevant to them. That's why Web sites or the networks that deliver online ads can charge advertisers more for running targeted ads, even when they use cruder methods for trying to discern people's interests.

For Internet service providers, the rise of NebuAd or Phorm means they could share in ad revenue now going mostly to the networks of Web sites affiliated with Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.

"Naturally if there is a way to take a meager slice of that revenue in some way, it's something which companies will want to look at," said Adam Liversage, a spokesman for BT Group, which plans to start trials "pretty soon" with Phorm.

Both NebuAd and Phorm say their systems do not register visits to sites related to "sensitive" subjects like health or sex, nor do they read e-mails or track consumers by name.

CenturyTelUnited Online Inc

Yet Front Porch's promotional material continues to circulate. Its promise: "New FREE Revenue for Broadband ISPs!"

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Want IE8 Beta 2? You May Have To Jump Through Hoops

Mark Long, newsfactor

MicrosoftInternet Explorer

For Windows XP users with IE8 Beta 1 already installed, Windows XP Service Pack 3 and IE8 Beta 2 would become permanent, said Jane Maliouta, the deployment product manager for IE8 at Microsoft. "You will still be able to upgrade to later IE8 builds as they become available, but you won't be able to uninstall them," she said.

Incompatibility Issues

Developers will need to be careful because IE8 Beta 2 will not work with several key services, applications and add-on programs, including certain versions of the Windows Live Mail. IE8 Beta 2 users also are currently unable to view movies on demand from Netflix, though Microsoft said the two companies are working to resolve the compatibility issue as quickly as possible.

Maliouta strongly encouraged those who have already downloaded IE8 Beta 1 to follow several steps before installing the new Beta 2 version. First uninstall the Beta 1 version and SP3 for Windows XP, followed by reinstalling SP3, and only then install IE8 Beta 2.

"If you have IE8 Beta 1 installed, the IE8 installer will automatically uninstall any earlier versions and then install the latest version of IE8 Beta 2 for you," Maliouta said. "You will be prompted to reboot twice. The first reboot is to remove IE8 Beta 1 from your machine and the second one to complete the IE8 Beta 2 installation."

According to Microsoft, IE8 Beta 1 was only intended for use by developers. Consumers running Windows XP need not worry about downloading IE8 Beta 2 so long as they did not install Beta 1.

However, consumers testing IE8 Beta 2 on their Vista-enabled machines must jump through a few hoops should they decide to revert to IE7. According to Microsoft, they'll have to click the Start button, type "Programs and Features" in the Start Search box, and click Programs and Features in the Programs list. Then in the Tasks pane, they'll need to click "View installed updates," select IE8 Beta 2 and then click "Uninstall."

Dueling Releases

The relatively unpolished state of IE8 Beta 2 is not all that unusual. Early versions of Firefox 3 likewise were subject to various compatibility issues and performance limitations.

Both Mozilla and Microsoft are doing all they can to gain browser market share. For example, Mozilla's recent release of its "experimental" Ubiquity plug-in is an attempt to steal some of the thunder from some new features destined for IE8, called Accelerators and Web Slices. For its part, Microsoft has already added several new capabilities to IE8 Beta 2 that mimic what Firefox 3 already has on tap, including the rival browser's so-called "AwesomeBar."

Mozilla's campaign to set a world software-download record for Firefox 3 earlier this year has increased the pressure on Microsoft to turn the tide. Though the software giant has stabilized its market-leading share of the browser market in the last three months, Microsoft's numbers have fallen seven percentage points in the past 12 months, and 24.5 percentage points since August 2005, according to a new global survey conducted by Janco and the IT Productivity Center.

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Comcast Limits Homes To 250GB in New Public Policy

Steve Bosak, newsfactor

Comcastnetwork congestion

The new policy was posted on Comcast's Web site early Friday, and the meter starts running on Oct. 1.

Charlie Douglas, director of corporate communications for online services, said, "The amount of data measured is aggregate monthly usage of uploads and downloads."

The amended service policy states in part: "It's no secret we've been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time." The threshold is high for the majority of Comcast users.

Examples of what a 250GB limit equates to are cited in the amendment, such as sending 50 million e-mails, downloading 62,500 songs, 125 standard-definition movies, or uploading 25,000 high-resolution digital photos. The policy says the median monthly usage for residential Comcast customers is 2GB to 3GB per month.

Bandwidth Hogs

Some observers say Comcast has a reasonable argument. The company has expanded rapidly into business and residential phone service, meanwhile maintaining its large cable-television enterprise. There is only so much available bandwidth at any given time.

Comcast is moving data, voice and television and high-definition video over the same pipes. It only takes a few peer-to-peer file-sharing applications to cause unexpected congestion.

Making Policies Public

Comcast's previous efforts to address the problem brought a rebuke from the Federal Communications Commission. Comcast was caught throttling down the connections of BitTorrent P2P users on its network without their knowledge.

When the matter came before a congressional subcommittee, Comcast admitted to the practice and was ordered to stop gating individual connections. The FCC and Congress felt the targeting of individual accounts without notification was the main issue.

In its new policy Comcast is not limiting bandwidth on the sly, nor is it keeping its policies private. In fact, the company is posting a banner ad on its home page and sending flyers detailing the new policy to each of its customers in September. The company has also posted suggestions for using download-metering software that will track usage, much like the minute counters on cell phones.

Douglas emphasized, "This does not affect our commercial customers." Comcast has been aggressively moving into unified data services for commercial accounts, and some, especially those involved in backup and disaster recovery, could go over the 250GB limit, but that service is separate from residential accounts, said Douglas.

"We need to remember that the amount of usage we are talking about, more than 250GB a month, does not apply to more than 99 percent of our customers. So the less than 1 percent who are notified today receive a phone call from Comcast asking them to moderate their usage, which the vast majority of them do voluntarily," Douglas said.

Other broadband providers are also likely to publicize limits.

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Microsoft buys ciao.com to boost e-shopping search

By Georgina Prodhan

MicrosoftciaoEurope

"We call it 'instant answers'," said John Mangelaars, head
of Microsoft's consumer and online business in Europe. "I hope
it's getting very clear that we've very serious about EMEA," he
added, speaking to Reuters by telephone.

Internet search is dominated by Google, which has 62
percent of the global search market and 79 percent in Europe,
according to Web usage tracker ComScore.

Microsoft has a 2 percent market share in Europe and 9
percent worldwide, behind both Google and Yahoo. In Europe,
Microsoft is also outranked by online auction site eBay and
Russia's Yandex.

But Mangelaars said buying ciao was an important step
in Microsoft's attempt to distinguish itself by providing
search results more useful to consumers, particularly shoppers,
than those thrown up by a Google search.

For example, results of a Microsoft search for a particular
camera model could include which prices were available from
which retailers, and maps of where those retailers were, rather
than just links to the manufacturer's and retailers' websites.

The acquisition follows those of Norwegian enterprise
search company Fast for about $1.2 billion early this year and
shopping-and-auction site jellyfish for an undisclosed sum
last year.

CASH BACK

Caio is active in seven European countries and attracts
19.6 million unique visitors per month in Europe, more than
twice as many as rival kelkoo, according to ComScore,
thanks to its large network of members who contribute product
reviews.

To attract more users, Microsoft also plans to reward
consumers who buy products through its shopping sites by giving
them cash back, extending a trial started in the United States
a few months ago.

"Google's trying to do all your search needs. What
Microsoft is doing with this kind of acquisition is saying:
'We're going to be very good at the commercial side of search,
the shopping'," said Forrester principal analyst Rebecca
Jennings.

Herve le Jouan, ComScore's managing director, Europe,
agreed. "Doing this shopping thing, I think, is a good move,"
he said, but cautioned that acquisitions alone would never
bring Microsoft close to Google's market share in search.

"Nobody is able to compete right now with Google so there
is nobody to buy to compete with Google," he said.

Microsoft's Mangelaars acknowledged the distance Microsoft
had to cover, especially given the commercial edifice rapidly
being built by online advertisers whose models depend on
Google's particular view of the Web.

"It's a race," he said, "but we also believe it's very
early days in search technology."

Microsoft's offer of $17.50 per share betters an earlier
proposal by media-focused U.S. buyout firm Quadrangle Group to
acquire the company for $15.50 a share, and represents a slight
premium to Greenfield's closing price of $17.25 on Thursday.

share pricemarket researchers

(Additional reporting by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty in
Bangalore; Editing by Quentin Bryar and Sue Thomas)

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Veoh Decision May Not Let Google Off the Hook

Jennifer LeClaire, newsfactor

copyright lawsU.S. District CourtSan Jose

IO Group's suit is not unlike Viacom's $1.6 billion lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube. In fact, MySpace, MP3tunes, Hi5, Stage6 and several other sites are facing similar battles over user-generated content.

Could this ruling be a boon for these sites? Or is the ruling merely an isolated incident in a California trial court? Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are betting on the former.

Web 2.0 Required Reading

EFF Legal Analyst Fred von Lohman said the ruling should be required reading for the executives of every Web 2.0 business that relies on user-generated content. The key to Veoh's victory, he said, was its scrupulous attention to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbors.

"Veoh responded to compliant DMCA takedown notices on a same-day basis, it notified users of its policies against copyright infringement, it registered a copyright agent with the copyright office, it terminated users who were repeat infringers and blocked new registrations from the same e-mail addresses, it used hashes to stop the same infringing videos from being uploaded by other users," von Lohman wrote in the EFF blog.

As von Lohman sees it, Judge Lloyd's ruling debunks some of the favorite arguments of entertainment-industry lawyers and gives YouTube a boost in its billion-dollar battle against Viacom.

YouTube's Repeat Infringer Dilemma

But the Google case is a little different. While the California court did spell out that there is no affirmative obligation for service providers to track users or police their sites, the context of that quote was based on tracking down repeat infringers.

To qualify for safe harbor, Web sites are required to cancel the accounts of users who repeatedly submit infringing content. The court did not address to what level a Web site is required to affirmatively look for repeat infringers.

User-generated content sites could terminate a user's ID, but that user can simply register under a different screen name. Untangling the issue can be difficult, according to Mary Jane Frisby, a partner in the Indianapolis, Ind., office of Barnes & Thornburg LLP and a member of the firm's intellectual property department.

But there is a dividing line in safe-harbor provisions.

"If infringement is rampant right and left and anyone ought to be able to see it, but you don't do anything about it, then maybe you don't have safe harbor," Frisby said. "These clips on YouTube are from 'South Park' and 'Saturday Night Live.' Things that one can simply look at and say 'that must belong to somebody'."

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Microsoft to drop $486 million for European shopping site

By Mike Ricciuti, CNET

Update at 5:58 a.m. PDT:Ciao is based in Munich, Germany. Greenfield Online is based in Wilton, Conn.

Microsoft said Friday it has reached a deal to acquire Greenfield Online, the owner of consumer shopping sites, for about $486 million.

Greenfield's properties include Munich, Germany-based Ciao, one of the leading price-comparison and online-shopping sites in Europe. Ultimately, Microsoft said, Ciao's technology platform, online community, and merchant relationships will be integrated with Microsoft's Live Search.

Ciao features consumer reviews and ratings. Microsoft said that, according to ComScore, Ciao has more than 26.5 million unique visitors per month across seven countries, who have generated more than 5 million product reviews.

The deal calls for Microsoft to commence a cash tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of Greenfield for $17.50 per share, or roughly $486 million.

Wilton, Conn.-based Greenfield, which acquired Ciao in 2005, also owns an Internet survey business, which Microsoft plans to sell off. Microsoft said it has already secured an unnamed buyer for that unit.

Both transactions are expected to close during the fourth quarter.

Microsoft's offer for Greenfield trumps an earlier deal. In June, Greenfield said it was in takeover discussions with the Quadrangle Group and had secured an agreement to be acquired for $15.50 per share.

In a press release issued on Friday, Greenfield said that "immediately prior to entry into the merger agreement with Microsoft it had terminated its previously announced merger agreement with affiliates of Quadrangle Group LLC."

In connection with the termination of that deal, Greenfield said it is required to pay Quadrangle a $5 million fee.

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