Google takes heat over Android tablet OS - Computerworld

IDG News Service - Android device makers around the world are anticipating great things from the next version of Google's mobile software, and they need the boost. Apple has a strong head start with sales of its popular iPad, while the App Store and iTunes give it apps and content, to boot.

But after a year of prodding Google, device makers think they've finally won with the upcoming "Honeycomb" upgrade to Android, which is expected by the end of the first quarter and is supposed to be the first version of the software designed for tablets instead of smartphones.

Earlier this year, for example, Samsung Electronics, had to fight to have the Android Market app, which connects users to the software's online treasure trove of over 150,000 apps, on its Galaxy Tab, according to one executive who asked not to be named due to his company's close relationship with Google.

At the time that Samsung was developing the Galaxy Tab to use Android, Google was struggling to decide if it wanted to put its upcoming Chrome OS in tablets and make Android exclusive to smartphones. The Chrome OS better fits Google's Cloud strategy, the executive said.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the issue.

Google's decision to make a tablet-friendly version of Android became a must after Apple launched its groundbreaking iPad, analysts say.

"Earlier in the year, Google probably thought that Chrome OS might be the right platform for tablets. However, the importance of the compatibility of apps across smartphones and tablets, evident from the iPad experience, has created the need for Google to ensure that the commercial success of apps can be preserved in the tablet proposition," said Martin Bradley, an analyst at Strategy Analytics.

Apple sold nearly 8 million iPads through the end of September, making it one of the hottest products of the year. (That tally is from official Apple figures from its quarterly earnings conference call and doesn't include holiday sales.)

By being first, Apple has set the tone for the entire market. Tablet makers need to put out the same OS for their smartphones and tablets so apps can be shared on either device. Even more important, apps specifically designed for tablets need to be made available, to take advantage of the larger screens, more powerful processors and expanded memory on board.

Of the 300,000 or so apps available to Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users, 40,000 are specifically designed for the iPad, and they are marketed that way on Apple's App Store.

By contrast, Google's Android Market does not offer any tablet-only apps to users, only smartphone apps. However, upstart Appslib is filling the void with its own tablet-only app store for Android lovers. Appslib is not affiliated with Google.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Microsoft's holiday bonus: Fixes for 40 flaws - Computerworld

Computerworld - Microsoft today patched 40 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Office, SharePoint and Exchange, including nine pegged "critical."

Five of the 17 security updates -- Microsoft calls them "bulletins" -- fixed long-standing flaws that could be used by attackers to plant malware on a PC by tricking Windows into thinking a malicious DLL (dynamic link library) was actually a legitimate part of the OS.

Only two of the 17 updates were judged critical, Microsoft's top-most threat ranking in its four-step scoring system. Another 14 were marked "important," the second-highest rating, while the remaining update was labeled "moderate."

Microsoft put the spotlight on the two critical bulletins, as did several security experts.

"Both MS10-090 and MS10-091 are pretty critical, I think," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Security. "Microsoft's evaluation seems in line with what I would expect, and shows that they're giving a pretty fair and balanced representation of priorities."

Amol Sarwate, manager of Qualys' vulnerabilities research labs, agreed with Storms, putting those updates at the top of his list, too.

MS10-090 patches seven vulnerabilities in IE, six of them critical and one marked moderate. All supported versions, including 2009's IE8, are affected by one or more of the bugs. IE9, which is still in beta testing, does not harbor any of the seven vulnerabilities, Microsoft said in its advisory.

Among the patched IE bugs were three that had been publicly disclosed before today, and one that hackers have been exploiting for at least the last six weeks.

Microsoft confirmed the latter on Nov. 3 in a security advisory, but was unable to craft and test a patch in time to make it into that month's security update.

MS10-091, which in Microsoft's eyes is a Windows update, also affected browsers -- but not IE directly.

Instead, attackers could exploit the three vulnerabilities in the update -- all rated critical -- through non-Microsoft browsers that support the open-source OpenType font format by simply tricking users into visiting a malicious site.

Microsoft did not list the affected browsers, but the other four of the top five -- Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera -- all support OpenType fonts.

It's unclear today whether those browsers need to be patched separately, and if so whether they have been patched. For its part, Microsoft said it had reached out to the other browser makers to let them know about the OpenType bugs it was addressing.

Opera Software, whose security team co-reported one of the three OpenType vulnerabilities to Microsoft, said that other browsers did not need repair.

"The patch for Opera is the referenced Microsoft [MS10-091] patch, as it is not possible for the [browser] to protect itself against the problem, except by disabling webfonts, since the problem is in the OS's handling of fonts," said Thomas Ford, an Opera spokesman.

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Google vs. Amazon: Clash of the booksellers - Computerworld

Computerworld - Are you a fan of those 1960s Japanese monster movies like Mothra vs. Godzilla, where two enormous animals battle insanely while the tiny human onlookers scream in horror?

Well, if your favorite film isn't available on Netflix or Hulu, you can still enjoy a clash of the Titans this week, as Google pits its new e-reading application, Google eBooks -- and its new retail venture, the Google eBookstore -- against Amazon.com's huge inventory.

For a while, there has been some speculation that Google was going to come out with its own e-reader device, like Amazon's Kindle or Borders' Kobo. Instead, Google made headlines on Monday with a strictly software-based strategy: a bevy of applications for Android devices, the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod Touch, desktop/laptop Web browsers, and two specific e-book readers, the Nook and the Sony Reader. (Other e-book readers can also access books from Google's eBook collection if they can read either the ePub or PDF formats.)

Amazon, for its part, today announced its own desktop Web e-reader, which has been in beta since September and which, according to Amazon, should be available sometime during the next few months.

Like Microsoft with its Windows Live offerings, Google is using similar (and somewhat confusing) names for its related services. The general Google listing of free and non-free books that are available to browse, sample and review is called Google Books. The library of books that an individual reader collects, whether free or paid, and can then read on any device is called My Google eBooks.

The place where that reader can purchase new books using Google Checkout? That's the Google eBookstore. (None of these have anything to do, by the way, with Google Reader, which is Google's RSS service.) Google account holders can access all of those services by going to Books.Google.com.

I first checked out Google's browser-based e-reader, which works on any browser (unlike Amazon's current desktop e-reader, which is a separate application and must be installed on a Windows PC or a Mac).

You access it from the main Google Books page by clicking on the "My library" link. This brings you to the main page of My Google eBooks, where you can choose which book you want to read.

On the My Google eBooks page, you can choose one of your downloaded books to read.

The e-reader has a plain look that offers very few distractions from the text -- I was quite favorably impressed. Clickable arrows on the left and right let you page forward and back. Discreet gray icons on the upper left side of the page allow you return to the home page and see a table of contents.

You can change settings such as typeface, type size, line height and justification. You can also switch from "flowing text" (in other words, straight computer text) to scanned pages (images of the pages exactly as they appear in the printed book). There are also icons for search, information about the book (such as where to find a hard copy and user reviews) and help.

The reading interface for a Google eBook is clean and easy to adjust.

However, users of Google's Web e-reader may also need to exercise some patience in trying to navigate the huge and varied Google interface. For example, if you search for a book on the main Google Books page and click on the "Add to My Library" link, you will not find the book in "My Google eBooks" when you go back to your main "My library" page. Instead, you will need to scroll down a page that contains several other "bookshelves" with names like "Purchased," "Reviewed," "Recently Viewed" and so on. I finally found the "Reading now" category (which is how I'd classified a new book I'd chosen) just under "Favorites."

If you want the book to be part of your Google eBook collection -- and therefore accessible on all of your devices -- you have to click on the book and then click on the "Get it now" link on the right side of the book's screen.

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SAP's HANA will speed real-time data analytics - Computerworld

Computerworld - SAP's High-Performance Analytic Appliance, or HANA, which started shipping on Wednesday, should give its customers a much faster, more flexible way to analyze large volumes of data in real-time, analysts said.

Much of the performance gains come from HANA's use of an in-memory computing technology which allows data to be processed in a system's RAM as opposed to reading it off I/O disks. The in-memory approach enables much faster data processing and should allow companies to run far more sophisticated data analytics applications compared to conventional relational databases.

"Any enterprise that is a user of large data sets for data analytics," will find HANA interesting said Frank Scavo, manging partner of the IT consulting firm Strativa. "HANA represents a large improvement not only in processing speed but in flexibility and cost of data analytics."

HANA's ability to let large data sets be manipulated in memory will enable enterprises to run more ad hoc queries against business data, and reduce the need for pre-define cubes and queries, he said.

Companies will be able to take a large dataset and decide what questions they want to run against it, in real time. "It adds a lot of flexibility to the whole process of data analysis," Scavo said.

In contrast, with most conventional data warehouses where data is stored in static tables "you have to predict the sort of questions you will ask about the data so you can architect it accordingly," Scavo said.

SAP said that during pilot tests with a consumer goods company, HANA's in-memory computing engine enabled the company to run arbitrary, complex queries on over 450 billion records in a matter of seconds, compared with the hours it would have taken previously.

Such capabilities are becoming increasingly useful, especially in industries such as the retail sector, health care, scientific analysis and financial services, Scavo said. "There has been an explosion in the amount of structured and unstructured data that organizations have been able to collect," and are looking to mine, he said.

SAP is not the first one with such technology, said David Menninger, an analyst with Ventana Research. Vendor interest in in-memory technologies has been growing over the past few years, at least in part because of the widespread availability of relatively low cost 64-bit hardware and operating systems, as well as low cost storage, he said.

Other vendors with in-memory technologies include QlikView, Tibco, Tableau, TM1 which IBM acquired through its purchase of Cognos, and Quantrix, he said.

HANA's difference lies in its scalability and the fact that it is being offered by a vendor that also owns a lot of the ERP, CRM and other data that companies are looking to analyze, Menninger said. "SAP has an advantage the others don't have," Menninger said. "They have access to the data from the sources systems."

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Google Editions e-book venture to launch by year's end - Computerworld

Computerworld - After months of delays, Google will launch its e-book retail business, now being called Google Editions, in the U.S. before the end of the year, a spokesman for the company confirmed today.

The spokesman gave no reason for the delay and declined to offer other details. A Google executive had said in May that the company planned to sell digital books last summer.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the venture had cleared some technical and legal hurdles and that Google Editions would launch in the U.S. by year's end and internationally in the first quarter of 2011. A federal court recently gave preliminary approval to a settlement agreement between Google and authors and publishers, which apparently has provided further impetus for the Google e-book concept.

Under the Google system, independent booksellers are expected to be able to sell e-books through Google Editions -- and they have received contracts to make that happen, according to the WSJ report. Independent booksellers would benefit the most from Google's concept.

As early as May, Google was saying that it would allow people using a variety of devices to buy books from a broad range of Web sites. Google will compete against Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and Apple, among others, but it could distinguish itself by providing access to a diversity of e-book sources and supporting multiple reading platforms.

Google is expected to allow people to make e-book purchases through Google accounts that they would access through a Web browser. Many smartphones, computers and tablets access the Web through a variety of Web browsers.

Google already offers a service called Google Book Search, which allows people to search and preview millions of books from libraries and publishers globally. The new Google Editions would allow users of Book Search to buy a digital copy of a book, and Google would allow book retailers to sell Google Editions books on their own sites.

It appears that Google Editions is moving forward now in part because of a U.S. District Court in New York's preliminary approval on Nov. 19 of a settlement between Google and authors and publishers. Google has described the agreement on its Web site.

Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen, or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed. His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.

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Bartz: Yahoo developing content optimization service - Computerworld

IDG News Service - Yahoo is developing technology to help publishers personalize their websites, in much the same way that it helps them to populate their sites with ads, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said on Tuesday.

"We're looking at helping people manage their content," Bartz said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, during a keynote appearance in which she was interviewed on stage by conference co-chairman John Battelle.

When Battelle asked her if the content management service she was describing existed as a product already, she answered that it doesn't. Once it's ready, Yahoo will be able to help Web publishers with both ads and content, she said.

The "content optimization" tool would focus on helping publishers personalize their content offerings and target it better for their site visitors, a process that requires automation, algorithms and data crunching at a scale that can't be done manually, she said.

For example, Yahoo serves up 6 million variations of its home page every day, varying the content it displays and the placement of items, based on what it determines will be the best experience for different users, she said.

Part of that knowledge comes from what Yahoo knows about signed-in users, from machine-learning insights and, also, from human-driven editorial decisions, Bartz said.

To be a successful content provider, Web publishers need to strive for "intense personalization," and one thing that hurt Yahoo was that it kept its content pages "static too long," she said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Yahoo announced new and enhanced local search and social media tools and features, including broader integration with Twitter and Zynga, a new beta version of Yahoo Messenger with more social-networking capabilities and local search improvements.

Yahoo also announced a program called Local Offers, in which Yahoo will aggregate offers, coupons and special deals from local merchants through partners including Groupon, LivingSocial, DealOn, Zozi, Tippr, Coupons.com and Valpak.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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SAP: Court lops $500M off Oracle's potential damages - Computerworld

IDG News Service - Oracle's potential damages in its corporate-theft lawsuit against SAP have been reduced by US$500 million following an order from Judge Phyllis Hamilton, SAP said on Tuesday.

"The ruling of the Court has an immediate and demonstrable impact on Oracle's damages presentation, reducing the total by $500 million from $2.2 billion down to $1.6 billion," SAP said in a brief statement to reporters.

"This is the second such reduction by the Court and we are confident that, when the jury hears our case presentation, the outcome of the case will reflect the actual damages the limited actions of TomorrowNow had upon Oracle," it said.

A spokeswoman for Oracle declined to comment.

Oracle sued SAP after it learned its TomorrowNow division had been downloading Oracle software illegally from a customer support website and using it to win over Oracle customers. SAP has accepted liability and the trial is about how much damages it must pay.

Hamilton issued a "minute order" on Monday saying Oracle can't claim damages for money it lost from "cross-sell" and "up-sell" opportunities -- in other words, additional software it might have been able to sell to customers that it lost to TomorrowNow because of the stolen software.

Oracle can still claim for profits it lost as a direct result of the theft, and it can still ask for its "hypothetical license" -- the money SAP would have had to pay if it licensed the software from Oracle legally. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison testified in court Monday that Oracle could have charged $4 billion for the license.

SAP says it should only be liable for the profits Oracle lost as a direct result of the theft, not for the hypothetical license. It claims Oracle lost very few customers because of TomorrowNow and that SAP should have to pay only tens of millions of dollars.

The trial, in its second week at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is expected to conclude by the end of the month.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Skyfire browser brings Flash video to iOS - Computerworld

Macworld - iOS users, long accustomed to working around the platform's notorious lack of Flash support, could be in for a breath of fresh air with the recent approval and release of the Flash-video-playing Skyfire Web Browser for iOS.

The Skyfire Web Browser, by Skyfire Labs, lets you browse the Web much like Mobile Safari, but its main appeal lies in its unique ability to display Flash videos on iOS devices.

To circumvent Apple's strict anti-Flash policies, Skyfire makes use of some clever server-side assistance. When you visit a site with an embedded Flash video, Skyfire's remote servers download, render, and convert the video into the iOS-friendly HTML5 format, making it viewable on your device.

Considering the vast amount of media on the Web that is still Flash-based, the Skyfire Web Browser has the potential to dramatically improve the iOS Web browsing experience by giving users access to numerous music- and video-streaming sites that have previously been off-limits.

Keep in mind, however, that while Skyfire supports most Flash video content, Flash games and apps are not supported, nor is Hulu.

Skyfire costs $3 and requires iOS 3 or later running on an iPhone or iPod touch.

Reprinted with permission from Macworld.com. Story copyright 2010 Mac Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Italy probes Google Street View service - Computerworld

IDG News Service - Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into Google for allegedly violating the country's privacy laws through the data collected for the Internet company's Street View service, newspapers reported Thursday.

The investigation, being handled by Rome public prosecutor Eugenio Albamonte, was opened at the request of the national Privacy Authority and on the basis of information provided by Google.

Google spokesman Marco Pancini apologized for the privacy breach Wednesday. "The accidental collection of Wi-Fi data by Street View cars was an error for which we are deeply sorry and for which we apologize. We reiterate our willingness to collaborate with the authorities," Pancini said in a statement.

Privacy Authority Chairman Francesco Pizzetti confirmed that the request for the investigation came from his office. "The problem does not so much concern the images taken by the cars as the fact that Google has also captured signals transmitted by wireless networks, including fragments of communications," Pizzetti told the ANSA news agency. It was illegal to intercept data transmissions without authorization, he said.

Google owned up to the privacy breach in a blog posting on its website a week ago. "In May we announced that we had mistakenly collected unencrypted Wi-Fi payload data using our Street View cars. We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we're acutely aware that we failed badly here," Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research, admitted in the posting.

Examination of the data revealed that "while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," Eustace wrote.

Eustace said the company wanted to delete the data as soon as possible and pledged to improve its internal privacy and security practices.

In an article for an Italian online magazine, legal expert Fulvio Sarzana di S. Ippolito argued that the magistrates should really be investigating illegal interception of communications rather than "illicit interference in private life," as is currently the case. The choice of which possible offense to investigate could have a bearing on how voluntary Google's conduct was deemed to be and influence the outcome of a possible trial, he said.

Earlier this week the Privacy Authority issued detailed instructions on how Google was required to publicize the activities of its Street View cars, taking the lead on the issue in Europe thus far.

The cars' visits were to be announced at least three days in advance, with advertisements in two local newspapers, on the radio and on Google's website. The cars must also be clearly identified, so that citizens can avoid being filmed, the Authority said. Failure to comply could lead to fines of up to €180,000 (US$250,000).

Writing on the La Repubblica.it website, blogger Vittorio Zambardino said Google should be given credit for owning up to the privacy breach.

"The case that is opening in Rome risks introducing a conflict between innovation and the pre-existing culture, between the judiciary and the technology industry, which leads judges to deal with 'borderline issues' and where it is difficult to establish the frontier between sensible laws and interference in technological development," Zambardino wrote. "Given that no one can dispute the beauty and utility of the Street View service."

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Lawmakers hit Facebook CEO with privacy questions - Computerworld

Computerworld - Two members of the U.S. Congress Tuesday hit Facebook with a series of questions about the latest privacy issues surrounding the site's most popular applications.

U.S. Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Edward Markey, D-Mass., co-chairmen of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier today seeking information on Facebook security features and on reports earlier this week that some of most popular applications made for the social network, such as FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille, have been sending users' personal information to dozens of advertising and Internet monitoring companies.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that, based on its investigation, the personal information of tens of millions of users, even those whose privacy settings are at the strictest levels, has been exposed through their use of the Facebook apps.

In their letter, Barton and Markey said that "Given the number of current users, the rate at which that number grows worldwide, and the age range of Facebook users, combined with the amount and the nature of information these users place in Facebook's trust, this series of breaches of consumer privacy is a cause for concern. As I am sure you are aware, the Committee on Energy and Commerce is the primary House panel responsible for oversight of consumer privacy. As I am sure you also are aware, comprehensive privacy legislation is currently pending before the Committee."

The lawmakers' letter directed 18 questions at Zuckerberg.

For instance, Barton and Markey asked the CEO when the company was aware of the problem, and whether affected Facebook users have been notified that their personal information has been breached.

The lawmakers said thay also want to know what procedures the social networking site has in place to detect or prevent third-party apps from breaking the site's privacy policy.

The letter also requests that Zuckerberg disclose to the committee any agreements between Facebook and third-party app developers.

The Wall Street Journal investigation found that 10 of the most popular Facebook apps are leaking unique "Facebook ID" numbers of users to the third-party companies.

The newspaper also noted that the highly popular Farmville app, which has some 59 million users, also transmits personal information about friends of affected users to the advertising and monitoring companies.

While acknowledging that some Facebook apps transmitted user information, the company also emphasized this week that executives care about user privacy.

"We are dedicated to protecting private user data while letting users enjoy rich experiences with their friends," wrote Mike Vernal, a Facebook engineer, in a blog post Monday. Vernal also contended that the media has "exaggerated" the issue.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

Read more about Web 2.0 and Web Apps in Computerworld's Web 2.0 and Web Apps Topic Center.

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Google, Facebook battle for 'future of the Web' - Computerworld

Computerworld - Microsoft advanced its partnership with Facebook this week, a move that could represent the biggest threat to Google's search standing yet.

Microsoft and Facebook announced that they're teaming up to make Internet searching more social. Now when someone uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her Facebook friends liked. It will now be easier for searchers to get their friends' opinions before they make purchasing decisions.

Industry watchers said this was an interesting development for search in general, but it also holds big implications for Google in particular. What's notable is that Facebook turned to Microsoft for this deal and not to the search market leader, Google.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the press conference on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash., on Wednesday, said there was a specific reason he wanted to go with Bing.

"They really are the underdog here," Zuckerberg said. "They're incentivized to go out and innovate. They have all these smart people and are trying to do all these new things."

Google, not surprisingly, dismissed the notion that the deal may have any far-reaching implications and said it welcomes the challenge.

"We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice," said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman, in an e-mail to Computerworld. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space. It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

But industry analysts said this Microsoft-Facebook partnership could spell trouble for Google, despite the fact that the search giant handled 72.15% of all U.S. searches last month.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have thrown stones at Google, but nothing has yet chipped its hefty search lead. When the two companies combined their search engines in August, the dominant search company barely blinked. So, if Microsoft couldn't rattle Google when it teamed with Yahoo, which is No. 2 to Google in terms of search market share, why might Microsoft's new partnership with Facebook have Google executives looking nervously over their shoulders?

"Let's face it, Bing has been a big disappointment, but this could act as a differentiator," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research. "People prefer Google to Microsoft, but they prefer Facebook to Google. If the partnership makes Facebooking better, then it could pull users away from Google."

In other words, a major social network, like Facebook, could end up being Google's Achilles' heel.

Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, said the partnership announcement was less about Facebook and Microsoft than it was about Facebook vs. Google.

"The real importance of [this week's] announcement is that it highlights the growing strategic conflict between Facebook and Google," Valdes said. "There is a battle for the future of the Web, and it is not about search engines, but about the social Web. The competition is between the new and the old -- between Facebook as the early leader in the social Web, and Google as the dominant player in the content Web. Everyone else, such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Twitter, will play a secondary role, and will start lining up on one side or the other."

And what could make this situation more interesting is that Google is reportedly working on launching its own social network. Rumored to be dubbed Google Me, it's considered to be Google's shot at creating a Facebook killer.

Google hasn't had a lot of luck in the social networking arena. Its Google Wave social networking service was shut down in August and reviews of Google Buzz were lackluster. But the company has learned from its failures and may be ready to try to pull some of those advertising dollars away from Facebook.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research, said there's a big battle brewing between Google and Facebook, and Microsoft may have found a way to use that conflict to chip away at Google's massive market lead.

"[The Microsoft-Facebook partnership] moves some searches from Google to Bing," he added. "For major Facebook users, I believe 'social search' is attractive, and many are likely to switch to Bing for all searches... Not only does [Google] lose users, but they lose young users."

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

Read more about Web 2.0 and Web Apps in Computerworld's Web 2.0 and Web Apps Topic Center.

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Google on new path, developing self-driving cars - Computerworld

Computerworld - Picture sitting in your car, maneuvering through busy downtown traffic while talking on your phone or sending a few texts.

This isn't a scene of illegal texting or phone use. Why not? Because the car in this scenario is driving itself, leaving the passengers inside free to use their mobile phones. (In Google's ideal scenario, you'd be talking on an Android phone.)

This is Google's image of the future. The company known best for its search engine announced this past weekend that its engineers are working on developing technology for cars that can drive themselves. Autonomous cars may be a bit far afield from Google's normal work in search, browsers, operating systems and maps, but the company is looking to head down a new road.

"Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard," wrote Sebastian Thrun, a distinguished software engineer at Google, in a Saturday blog post. "They've driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research."

Thrun also noted that the cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to virtually "see" other cars and the basic traffic flow. The company that introduced Google Maps and Google Earth also used mapping technology to navigate the roadways, and it took advantage of Google's massive data centers to hold and process all of this information.

While the autonomous cars were on the road, they were occupied by a "trained safety driver," as well as a software engineer who could monitor the vehicle's software operations.

"We've always been optimistic about technology's ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today," Thrun wrote. "While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting."

So why would Google, a company whose name is a verb for Internet searching, set its sights on autonomous vehicles?

One reason is because it can, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at research firm Gartner.

"The long answer is that likely there are multiple reasons," Valdes said. "This may have been an offshoot of the Street View mapping in Google Maps, and that took on a life of its own. Probably the project was not killed because it is cool, had support of senior management, and there is some potential reward further down the road, so to speak."

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School district settles webcam spying suit for $610000 - Computerworld

Computerworld - A suburban Pennsylvania school district accused of spying on students using school-issued laptops has agreed to pay $610,000 to settle litigation stemming from its controversial practice.

Under the proposed settlement, the Lower Merion School District will pay $185,000 to two high school students who had sued the district earlier this year for allegedly snooping on them. The remaining $425,000 will go to attorneys fees.

The proposed settlement was approved by the district's school board of directors Monday. It results from a "lengthy, court-ordered mediation" between all concerned parties, board President David Ebby said in a statement.

"Though we would have valued the opportunity to finally share an important, untold story in the courtroom, we recognize that in this case, a lengthy, costly trial would benefit no one," Ebby noted. The statement did not elaborate on what untold story Ebby was referring to.

The school district, in Ardmore, Pa., has been at the center of a huge controversy over its use of a specialized embedded software product for tracking stolen, lost or missing school-issued laptops. The district provided laptops to about 1,800 of its high school students, but did not inform them about the embedded tracking software, which could be used to remotely activate Webcams on the laptops.

In February, Blake Robbins, a district high school student, and his parents, filed a lawsuit against the school district accusing it of spying on him in his home. The lawsuit charged Lower Merion with remotely activating the Webcam on Robbins' laptop to take thousands of pictures of Blake and others members of his family, including some of Blake in his bedroom partially undressed, and some of him sleeping.

The lawsuit was filed after a school official accused Blake of selling drugs and taking pills based on a photograph captured by the school computer at his home. In court documents, lawyers for Blake accused Lower Merion officials of taking thousands of webcam photos and screenshots of numerous other students, many of whom had never reported their laptops as being missing or stolen.

An investigation conducted on behalf of the district later found that school-issued laptops had taken more than 30,000 photographs, using the activated tracking software.

In July, a second individual , Jalil Hassan, a former high school student from the same district, also sued, claiming that his laptop had snapped close to 500 photographs of him over a two-month period.

The school district itself vigorously denied it had spied on the students and claimed that the only reason it had installed the tracking software was to help it locate laptops reported as lost, missing or stolen.

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Microsoft plans colossal Patch Tuesday next week - Computerworld

Computerworld - Microsoft today said it will deliver a record 16 security updates next week to patch a whopping 49 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Office and SharePoint.

Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Security, called the massive update "daunting, again."

Four of the 16 updates were tagged with Microsoft's "critical" label, the highest threat ranking in its four-step scoring system. Another 10 were marked "important," the second-highest rating, while the remaining pair were labeled as "moderate."

Nine of the updates could be exploited by attackers to inject malicious code into vulnerable PCs, Microsoft said in its usual bare-bones advance notification of the updates scheduled for release Oct. 12. Microsoft often labels remote code executable bugs -- the most dangerous -- as important when the vulnerable components are not switched on by default or when other mitigating factors, such as defensive measures like ASLR and DEP, may protect some users.

Next week's Patch Tuesday is a record on almost every count.

The 16 updates -- Microsoft dubs them "bulletins" -- are a record, beating the count from August 2010 by two. The 49 individual patches easily exceeds the single-month record of 34, which was first set in October 2009 and repeated in this past June and August.

Microsoft has been shipping alternating large and small batches of fixes, with the larger-sized updates landing in even-numbered months, so October's big numbers shouldn't come as a shock. In August, for example, the company issued 14 bulletins patching 34 vulnerabilities. September's batch, however, included 9 bulletins that fixed 11 flaws.

"I have a theory about the large October updates," said Storms, pointing out that Microsoft released 13 bulletins and patched 34 vulnerabilities in the month last year, and issued 12 updates and fixed 21 flaws in October 2008. "It's the year-end financial and retail push by most companies, which go into lockdown mode the last two months of the year, when they don't update their systems," he said.

Twelve of the 16 bulletins are aimed at Windows, either the desktop or server editions, or in some cases both. Two from next week's slate affect Office -- Word and Excel, specifically -- and are likely patches for one or more file format vulnerabilities in those applications, said Storms.

One of the bulletins will address a problem in SharePoint, Microsoft's enterprise-grade collaboration server software. According to the advance notification, the SharePoint update will be related in some way to Office Web Apps, the online editions of Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications.

Other than the sheer number of updates users will have to apply, Storms also noted that several apply to the newest versions of Microsoft's operating system, Windows 7 on the desktop and Windows Server 2008 R2 on the server side.

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