For starters, the big advertising networks have been scooped up. Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, and Microsoft picked up aQuantive for $6 billion in cash. Microsoft’s lust for Yahoo is in a similar vein. Google has 60 percent share of search market, and it keeps growing, and a Microhoo is the best offense from Microsoft’s point of view.

CEO Steve Ballmer understands that Microsoft’s dominance, gained primarily in the 20th century, is eroding. While Microsoft revenue continues to climb across its various business units, it trails in the online world. And, the online world of ads and subscription services is the future engine of growth and prosperity.

The future of the way people consume information, the way people socialize and connect is going to change a lot more in the next 10 years even than in the last 10. How you find information, how you consume it, how you share it and connect with your friends while you’re in the middle of that, how it gets paid for using advertising and other techniques, dramatic changes. We are absolutely committed to be the leading player in that endeavor.

Since 2005, Oracle made more than 40 acquisitions, totaling more than $20 billion. Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco Systems have each made dozens of acquisitions in the same time frame.

In the Internet era, the consolidators want to be the data center infrastructure providers to the giant Web colonizers–Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, eBay, Amazon, etc.

In this saga, it’s difficult to tell who is the white knight for whom. The two companies are concerned about the Google juggernaut. But Yahoo is considering getting in bed with Google, allowing its rival to sell ads on its service, as a way to avoid Microsoft’s embrace. On the other hand, Yahoo appears to welcome Microsoft’s embrace for the right price.

Yahoo would add scale and expertise to Microsoft’s online initiatives, and some interesting ways to build a social layer into the Microhoo fabric of somewhere between 600 million and 800 million unique users (which will certainly get flagged by regulators if the deal happens). The alternative for Microsoft is to go it alone, but that strategy so far hasn’t yield the desired results. Hence, the consolidation route.

In his talk with Microsoft employees on May 1, Ballmer said:

Consolidation is a sign of the mature phase in an industry, in which the biggest players stake out more territory as a way to increase share of wallet from customers by fusing together more complete solutions. It’s the proverbial “one throat to choke” approach to enterprise computing.

The commercial Internet is relatively young, rearing its head with Netscape in the mid-1990s. But consolidation is already taking place, driven by Google’s meteoric rise with search and advertising revenues. Instead of one throat for CIOs to choke, the Internet giants aspire to dominance in online ad serving and want to serve as the home base for billions of Web users on the planet.

At the close of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the tech industry experienced a massive consolidation, culminating 40 years of market and technology development, from the mainframe to client/server computing and now the Internet.

In the most recent quarter Google has $5.19 billion in revenue from its ad and search business. Microsoft had less than $1 billion for its entire online business, and Yahoo less than $2 billion, including a $401 million gain from its Alibaba investment.

But the deal has to be based on more than just price. If they don’t get along and share the same vision, they will both suffer the consequences of a bad marriage, and Google wins anyway.

There’s already an active community of Swurlers using the service. Advanced users should also not shy away from what seems like a very simple tool; you can drop in custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), tweak the colors, and look and feel of your page to a very high degree.

Swurl turns your social activity stream into both a blog and this handy timeline. Here you can see shared pictures on Twitter, links on Delicious, and Twitter tweets–all on the same page.

Besides aggregating your news feed, Swurl has a social component that lets you do the same with others. You can follow other users just like you would with Twitter or Tumblr, and their streams of information will show up in chronological order in the friends tab. You’re also able to see their friends list, and dig into their timelines to view their past activity.

Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social-media services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator, you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your usernames on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Yelp.

One thing missing is a way to create entirely new posts through Swurl, so it’s definitely not attempting to take over standard blogging platforms. FriendFeed, which essentially does the same thing as Swurl, will aggregate your business from all these networks and also manages to add its own publishing tool to boot. There is no such system on Swurl at the moment, but there should be.

[via Lifehacker]

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The social shopping niche is crowded with start-ups like ThisNext and StyleHive, as well as M&A buys like ShopStyle (purchased by Sugar Inc.) and Kaboodle (snapped up by Hearst Corp. last year). There has, at least until this point, been no clear front-runner in the space.

The company additionally operates a Facebook application that has been installed by 500,000 users (overall, not active users). That pales in comparison with the 2.5 million who log into Slide’s FunWall daily, but it’s just slightly under the approximately 570,000 who play that horrifically controversial Facebook game, Scrabulous, each day. Basically, the application reaches a fairly decent number of eyes.

The start-up, based in Cambridge, Mass., plans to use the $2 million to hire more employees.

StyleFeeder, a social shopping site that aims to do for the retail sector what StumbleUpon did for browsing or Last.fm did for music, has announced that it’s pulled in $2 million in Series A venture funding from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital.

“For the filtering work we are able to verify the actual functionality,” said Rob Faris, research director for the Berkman Center. “It’s just about impossible to document surveillance with the same level of confidence.”

Cisco’s Service Control Engine series boasts of conducting “deep packet inspection” and “detection and control of virtually any network application, including: Web browsing, multimedia streaming, and peer-to-peer (P2P).” WireShark, free software for intercepting and decoding traffic, can record and display what’s taking place on a network. And most modern routers can block or log access to Web sites based on a list of Internet addresses or domain names.

The company’s denial comes as protests over Iran’s disputed election enter their second week, amplified by Twittering from the Iranian diaspora and cell phone videos showing ongoing street conflicts and the apparent death of young Iranian woman called Neda.

More recent reports
suggest that Iranian Internet providers have developed or adapted their own Web filtering technology, but shed little light on the question of surveillance.

Jay Botelho, WildPackets’ director of product management, said the best way for an Iranian Internet provider to monitor its customers would be to use one bank of monitoring equipment for e-mail, another for Web browsing, a third for VoIP calls, and so on. “Using our product, the easiest way to monitor everything is to hook onto an (extra port) port off your main switch,” Botelho said. “The problem is that depending on the traffic, that could overload an appliance. But if you slowed everything down, you’d get everything.”

Roome argued that, whatever its faults, even Iran’s wiretap-ready mobile phone network has proven vital in spreading word about the political upheaval unfolding amid widespread protests. “Mobile networks in Iran, and the subsequent widespread adoption of mobile phones, have allowed Iranians to communicate what they are seeing and hearing with the outside world,” he said. “The proof of this is in the widespread awareness of the current situation.”

A joint venture of Siemens AG and Nokia Corp., two large European technology firms, is denying reports that Iran uses its Web-monitoring technology to censor and spy on its citizens’ online activities.

“I don’t know how one could actually determine” what Iran is using for surveillance, said Tony Barbagallo, vice president of marketing at WildPackets of Walnut Creek, Calif., which sells Internet monitoring tools including OmniPeek Network Analyzer. “It’s pretty easy to conceive that they could be using homegrown technology.”

Complicating the matter is the difficulty of identifying the technology used. It’s relatively easy to figure out which Web sites that are off-limits–groups like Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society have made a practice of compiling such lists–but much harder to know what hardware or software is being used to monitor Internet links.

“The lawful intercept capability is purely for local voice calls,” spokesman Ben Roome said in an interview. “We don’t know who may have provided other Internet technologies to Iran.”

But Roome, the Nokia Siemens Networks spokesman, said that the newspaper’s report was incorrect. He said in a blog post, “Unfortunately, I was unable to clarify for the Wall Street Journal the limited scope of the lawful intercept capability (voice calls only) and rule out…deep packet inspection and Web filtering.”

That’s not a problem in Iran, which has limited connectivity to the outside world, and where download speeds are far slower than what many other countries enjoy. Some Iran watchers have speculated for years that those sluggish connections represented a form of social control–it dramatically curbs Web video usage, for instance–and point to a 2006 decree saying that Internet connections should be limited to 128 Kbps (kilobits per second).

This echoes the argument that Nokia Siemens Networks has made: that selling voice-only lawful intercept gear to Iran is acceptable because built-in wiretappability is required in the United States and Europe. Ever since the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, U.S. telephone companies have been legally required to make sure their networks can easily be wiretapped by police; in 2006, a federal appeals court upheld the Bush administration’s decision to extend those rules to Internet providers.

Compared with a few years ago, traffic analysis and inspection have become more common for Internet providers; their legitimate purposes include detecting malicious activity, prioritizing online phone calls over e-mail, and for mobile providers, charging different fees for different types of data.

The largest Internet provider in Iran is Tehran-based Pars Online, which claims to employ over 400 people. It claims to have three satellite stations that can send data at 155 Mbps (megabits per second), amounting to the size of the virtual pipe connecting much of Iran to the outside world. By contrast, Verizon’s FIOS service offers each home subscriber a connection of 50 Mbps for downloads and 20 Mbps for uploads.

McAfee now owns Secure Computing and sells the software as McAfee SmartFilter. A product description boasts of “a proven repository of more than 25 million blockable websites across more than 90 categories.”

In terms of Web blocking, a Berkman Center report compiled in 2005 said that Iran used Secure Computing’s SmartFilter. It quoted the company’s chief executive, John McNulty, as saying: “We have been made aware of ISPs in Iran making illegal and unauthorized attempts to use of our software. Secure Computing is actively taking steps to stop this illegal use of our products.”

Images and video clips trickling in from the streets of Tehran–even ones whose authenticity may never be established–have electrified the West and demonstrated the limits of power that the government is able to wield. Because foreign correspondents are being pressured by authorities and forced to leave, according to journalist advocacy groups, the country’s relatively tiny Internet pipe to the outside world is offering a unique glimpse of the situation on the streets.

Nokia Siemens Networks said Monday that it has sold telecommunications systems to the Iranian government but that any built-in monitoring technology was for voice communications and not the Internet.

“We have never seen any direct evidence or hard proof that Iran has ever used any McAfee or Secure Computing product,” McAfee said in an e-mailed statement on Monday. “McAfee complies with all export laws and regulation applicable to its products. Rigorous due diligence was conducted prior to the acquisition of Secure Computing and there was no indication of any contract in Iran or support being provided in Iran.” (A U.S. economic embargo restricts trade with Iran.)

The source of the surveillance technology used by Iran’s Internet service providers remains an unresolved political question that could prove an embarrassment for any Western company linked to Tehran’s censorial regime. Few technology executives have forgotten the spectacle of Washington politicians calling Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to a hearing and denouncing him as “spineless” for doing business in China, or Cisco being dubbed as “collaborating with the Chinese government” for supplying Internet switches and routers.

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Iran’s Internet restrictions are no secret, of course. As CNET News reported last week, Web sites including Facebook, YouTube.com, and the BBC have been deemed off-limits by government censors, and there have been recurring reports that Twitter.com and Yahoo Messenger have been blocked as well. Except for some hiccups, though, Iran’s Internet authorities have chosen not to pull the plug on the nation’s connections to the outside world.

“Our products are used in the United States and elsewhere specifically for lawful intercept,” Barbagallo said. “We’ve actually developed extensions to our products to make it easier to do lawful intercept. Any of our customers with a maintenance contract can download the same products the governments are using.”

On the other hand, the United States and Europe tend not to imprison people for criticizing their respective governments, something that responses posted on Nokia Siemens Networks’ blog pointed out on Monday. One response asked: “What happens when your ‘lawful intercept’ capability is sold to regimes which are likely to use it a way which would be considered unlawful under European and U.N. Human Rights conventions — say to suppress freedom of speech?”

Hector Ruiz accomplished many important things during his tenure as the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, but no executive can escape the bottom line.

“A lot has changed at AMD since then,” an AMD representative wrote in response to e-mailed questions about Ruiz’s expectations last year. One thing that hasn’t changed since then is the company’s continued pattern of losses. But AMD has laid off thousands of workers and revamped its executive circle, which has strengthened the team around Meyer to the point where the board of directors feels the timing is now right for the succession, according to the representative.

All four major server vendors (Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, and Sun Microsystems) have a relationship with AMD. Just about every major PC vendor in the world has a product based on AMD’s chips, with the notable exception of Apple. Corporate purchasing departments don’t shake their heads in confusion at seeing AMD’s name on a purchase order, and consumers are quite used to seeing AMD-based systems on the store shelves at Best Buy and other stores alongside Intel systems.

Once it was also clear that Intel had regained its footing after botching the Itanium strategy and the switch to dual-core processors, AMD panicked and spent $5.4 billion it didn’t have on ATI Technologies in order to find its next big thing in graphics technology.

But his tenure was chaotic, a roller coaster ride up and down the stock market charts that saw AMD arrive on the world stage and fall just as quickly off to the side. Running the No. 2 company in an expensive, fast-moving industry dominated by an American institution is not an easy job, and Dirk Meyer will have his hands full during the next several years. Ruiz will remain at AMD as chairman, but he’s leaving a day-to-day role at the company at a time when it is trying to get back to basics, to focus on execution and discipline rather than trying to take down giants.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News)

Ruiz was right, in a sense: graphics technology is going to be an ever-increasing part of a PC’s arsenal and will probably one day end up getting integrated into the main processor like so many other discrete components from the past. Intel and Nvidia know this, and are spending tons of time and money improving the performance of their graphics products and finding new ways to unlock that performance.

Ruiz’s greatest legacy to the processor industry might still be off in the future. His decision to file an antitrust lawsuit against Intel in 2005–and work a short rant about illegal monopolies into just about every speech since–has the larger chip company on the run around the world as governments take a closer look at Intel’s business practices during the past decade. Any trial resulting from that case in the U.S. still appears to be years away, however.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News)

AMD's CEO Hector Ruiz is stepping down from his CEO spot; he'll remain the chairman of the company.

In short, Ruiz made AMD relevant to a much wider segment of the computer buying population than it was before he became the company’s CEO, and for sticking to his guns with AMD’s bet-the-farm strategy for its Opteron chip. For that, he deserves credit. But the events that led to his demise are equally easy to chronicle.

But with Thursday’s results, AMD has now written off $2.5 billion of goodwill related to that ATI purchase, basically admitting that it can’t attach that $2.5 billion to anything of value related to the acquisition. That’s an awful lot of money, and it has to come from somewhere, forcing AMD to raise capital from outside investors to keep the lights on.

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AMD)

It insisted on an integrated quad-core design for its third-generation Opteron processor, claiming that its customers were eager for such a design. But the project suffered from countless delays, and AMD allowed Intel to have the quad-core segment of the server market all to itself for more than a year, destroying the hard-earned pricing value that AMD had attached to Opteron for several years.

So perhaps it’s fitting to remember the words of football legend Bill Parcells when assessing Ruiz’s legacy: “You are what your record says you are.”

In just more than six years with Ruiz as the leader of AMD, the chip company has lost a staggering $6.3 billion according to generally accepted accounting principles. He announced plans to step down Thursday as part of what the company is calling a planned succession to new CEO Dirk Meyer, even though Ruiz was under the impression as recently as December 2007 that he would be around this entire year.

Ruiz introduces AMD's Barcelona processor in September 2007. Already very late, Barcelona wouldn't ship for another six months due to a separate problem.

Leaders are judged on many things after their moment in the sun passes. Ruiz brought some stability to AMD–at least in the public eye–after decades of swashbucklin’ quote-makin’ Jerry Sanders. His personal story, rising from a poor town on the Texas/Mexico border to lead a Fortune 500 company, is inspirational both on its merits alone and on Ruiz’s stubborn reluctance to play up his ability to overcome adversity as if he was filming a segment for Dateline.

Despite all the setbacks, it’s still possible to argue that Ruiz leaves AMD a better place than it was before he took over. Sure, investors might have preferred to lose a little bit less than $6 billion in six years, but AMD is a brand that corporate executives know just as well as hard-core gamers, AMD’s main audience prior to 2002.

Ruiz with Dell's Michael Dell in 2006, just after the companies signed their historic agreement to partner on servers.

If your computer is vulnerable to the problem, see A cheatsheet for defending against the DNS flaw.

Update July 31:The above screen shot from Internet Explorer 7 is from an instance with the phishing filter turned off. When this filter is turned on, IE7 works much like the tweaked copy of Firefox 3, that is, the address bar turns green and there is an extra button on the right with additional information about the secure page.

A secure web page displayed with Internet Explorer 7

A secure web page displayed with Firefox 3

Markoff warned about the potential danger of the DNS flaw with:

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

If you prefer to think of green as good and yellow as a warning, then you can read Make Firefox 3 use green for secure web pages where I explain how to change the secure page color in the address bar from yellow to green.

Firefox 3 users have a much better chance of being informed about misdirections as a result of the DNS flaw – if, they are willing to tweak the browser a bit.

For an online test that tells you if your computer is vulnerable to the DNS flaw see The best test for vulnerability to the DNS flaw. The fact that there are online vulnerability tests wasn’t even mentioned in the newspaper.

Below is the same web page displayed in Internet Explorer 7. Something such as the missing “S” in the protocol name, which flags a secure web page, can be easily missed.

The front page of the New York Times today had a story by John Markoff, With Security at Risk, a Push to Patch the Web, about the recent bug in DNS. Being a newspaper, the focus of the story was on news rather than practical advice. In contrast, this Defensive Computing blog focuses on practical advice.

In Firefox 3 gotcha: No more yellow address bars, I wrote about how to restore the yellow address bar to indicate a secure web page. This was a feature in
Firefox 2 that got dropped in version 3.

For another introduction to the problem see What you need to know about the latest DNS flaw.

The end results is an address bar that looks like the below for secure web pages. If this is how secure web pages display, it makes it much harder for the bad guys to fool you by mis-directing you to a scam copy of a website.

“It could allow a criminal to redirect Web traffic secretly, so that a person typing a bank’s actual Web address would be sent to an impostor site set up to steal the user’s name and password. The user might have no clue about the misdirection… “

As you can see in this screenshot, there are no stars for rating anywhere to be seen. I’m sure that Netflix will be correcting this problem shortly, but I just wanted to point it out in the meantime.

Being a Netflix subscriber, I’ve been checking the site all day to see if it is back up and running. There has been coverage of this problem throughout the day and the site is finally back up, but I have noticed a fairly glaring problem: Netflix’s movie ratings are broken.

Before investors use these data points to hedge their bets over whether Microsoft will pay more to acquire Yahoo, keep in mind that the Internet search pioneer is slated to report its earnings April 22.

The report, released Tuesday, showed that while search-marketing dollars rose 28.5 percent in the first quarter over the previous year, the results within the three-month period appeared less encouraging. Sequentially, search-related advertising dollars fell 47.6 percent in January over the previous month, while February declined 33.5 percent and March 19.1 percent.

And the search giant also outperformed the market during the same period, Imran Khan, a JPMorgan Chase analyst, said in a research note Tuesday.

While the first-quarter sequential month-to-month decline could be expected, in part, due to seasonality issues, such as the marketing bonanza that happens in December, and the recovery and regrouping mode of advertisers in the New Year, SearchIgnite found an interesting statistic among the search players in the first quarter.

But Google outperformed Yahoo on paid clicks for the month of March, according to a ComScore report.

Google, while still retaining its huge lead over Yahoo and MSN, saw its market share drop to 70.4 percent in March from 74.5 percent in December. MSN’s share declined to 5.4 percent from 5.9 percent during the same period.

Citing the ComScore results, Khan noted that Google’s paid-click growth rose 2.7 percent in March, compared to year-ago figures, while the overall market declined 1.5 percent in the same period.

Yahoo’s paid clicks also declined in March, falling 3.1 percent in comparison to year-ago figures, and MSN suffered a whopping 15.1 percent drop during the same period.

Yahoo increased its share of the search-advertising pie at the end of the first quarter, while Google and MSN were left with smaller slices, in comparison to what they all had at the close of the fourth quarter, according to the report.

As Google gears up to release its first-quarter results on Thursday, investors may find that its slice of the search-advertising pie shrunk in relation to Yahoo, according to a SearchIgnite report.

Among the updates, you’ll find fixes for iLife stability, an iTunes update, and a patch that lets you share the Open Computer’s CD or DVD drive with a MacBook Air. Each comes as a straightforward download, hosted directly by Psystar, which also says that it will ship all new OS X-based Open Computers with these updates preinstalled.

In our review of the Psystar Open Computer, a non-Apple-sanctioned desktop that ships with Apple’s OS X pre-installed, we reported that Psystar planned to issue an ongoing series of software updates to address any incompatibilities that might arise. As reported by Information Week, those updates are now live, and available from Psystar for download.

We’re sure anyone who purchased an Open Computer is glad to know that Psystar remains committed to its maverick desktop. But although they offer excellent price-performance compared to any other sub-$1,000 Apple system (basically just the Mac Mini), these systems are not for the technically faint-of-heart due to their continued potential to lose functionality themselves or to stop working with your Apple-made accessories via an errant software update. That said, we also still think that the Open Computer must look very enticing to tech savvy enthusiasts looking for a more affordable OS X-based system.

Psystar launched a series of software updates for its OS X-based Open Computer.

(Credit:
CNET)