InformationWeek Daily - Thursday, July 3, 2008

Interview With 'Net Pioneer Vint Cerf Vint Cerf said this week that he never intended to seriously propose that the U.S. government should nationalize the Internet. But he does think the Internet is seriously broken, with an economic system that discourages competition and innovation and encourages harmful monopolistic practices. He argued that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which governs Internet service providers, is obsolete and needs to be revised. Cerf, who is VP and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and sometimes called the "father of the Internet," told a TechCrunch reporter recently that "the Internet should be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways." But after I blogged about the TechCrunch article, Cerf posted a comment here, saying nationalizing the Internet "was not intended as a serious proposition." I talked to him about his ideas on Monday. To read my interview with Vint Cerf, click here. Mitch Wagner mwagner@cmp.com www.informationweek.com
"Information is the currency of democracy." -- Thomas Jefferson
Microsoft Launches Office Subscription Service Microsoft is working with Circuit City to offer a consumer software subscription service that includes its Office, Windows Live OneCare, Messenger, and Photo Gallery applications and services. Related Stories: Microsoft's Ballmer In Firing Line As Gates Departs Powerset Deal Latest Example Of Microsoft's 'Not Invented Here' Strategy How to Virtualize A Server: Step-by-Step Follow the steps in bMighty's 3-part series to set up a test environment for your physical Windows server as a virtualized server. Google-Yahoo Deal Faces Justice Department Review When the deal was announced, Google and Yahoo said they had agreed to delay it for three months to allow the Department of Justice time to review the arrangement. AT&T-Dish Break Signals Cloudy Weather For Satellite TV As AT&T rolls out its own IPTV offering, it may see its satellite TV partnerships as insignificant to its overall strategy. India Sees No Security Threat From BlackBerry India's telecoms ministry does not see any security risk from Research In Motion's popular BlackBerry e-mail service and has no plans to shut the service, a top government official said Wednesday. L.A. Drivers To Get Real-Time Info From Traffic Cams TrafficLand will use up to 190 traffic cameras to show drivers the status of major highways. VMware Completes Acquisition Of B-hive Networks B-hive Conductor will allow VMware to add proactive management of applications running in virtual machines. Google Search Identifies Citibank PIN Number Thief FBI agents were able to cross-link surveillance video with ICQ info to arrest a man in a dark baseball cap emblazoned with the words "Top Gun" and a star and wings symbol. RFID Can Have "Hazardous" Impact On Hospital Equipment A recently published study could prompt the medical industry to re-evaluate its growing use of RFID. Hardware Platforms With Thousands Of Cores Coming An Intel researcher's blog said software developers need to consider major changes in their code base to prepare for many-core computing. IBM Settles Mainframe Lawsuit By Acquiring Clone Manufacturer Platform Solutions Inc. was bought out by IBM for an undisclosed sum. IBM said it will integrate PSI's mainframe technology into its own offerings. OpenMoko To Release Linux-Based Smartphone The "Neo FreeRunner" touchscreen device will be fully modifiable and features integrated Wi-Fi, assisted-GPS, and Bluetooth capabilities. Abacus Lands NASA Space Center Contract Worth Nearly $900 Million The IT services company will provide support for all information management and communications services related to launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center. Sony PlayStation Site Hacked With 'Scareware' The site runs a script that pretends to do an online security scan of your computer and presents a bogus warning message that your PC is infected with malware, researchers said. All Our Latest News See InformationWeek's daily breaking news on your mobile device, visit mobile.informationweek.com and sign up for daily SMS notifications.	Google-Yahoo Deal Faces Justice Department Review AT&T-Dish Break Signals Cloudy Weather For Satellite TV India Sees No Security Threat From BlackBerry L.A. Drivers To Get Real-Time Info From Traffic Cams VMware Completes Acquisition Of B-hive Networks Virtualization At The Desktop? Examine how more than 250 companies plan to adopt server virtualization technology in this recent InformationWeek Research report, Server Virtualization. The BI Explosion Examine the business intelligence strategies of 500 companies, including deployment drivers and challenges, spending plans, and vendor selection, in this recent InformationWeek Research report. Chrysler's In-Car Web Access Shifts Mobile Into Gear Chrysler has announced an initiative to introduce in-car Internet access as an option in all of its 2009 models. While this isn't a new idea, it's the first broad-scale implementation, and should bring to light some innovative new mobile services and applications to people on the go. Google Brings Full-Album Downloads To Picasa Google's photo sharing site, Picasa, is one of the many Google services I take advantage of to share my pictures with friends and family. Often there are times when someone wanted to be able to download an entire album, rather than snag each image one by one. Before today, that was not possible. Now it is. Greener Grass In Financial Services As my colleague Marianne Kolbasuk McGee pointed out in a recent blog, while the financial services industry is under a dark cloud these days there appears to be green grass in some organizations (literally and figuratively), at least in terms of IT positions. Take a look at Fidelity Investments, which just hired two new tech chiefs away from competitors. Openmoko In The U.S. -- And Maybe In My Hands, Too Looks like Openmoko's open source phone, the Neo FreeRunner, will be available in the United States as well as India and Europe. I can't wait to snap one up, but I might have to. Are You An 'Emotionally Intelligent' Leader Or A Dimwit? Recession or no recession, dot-com boom or bust, bull or bear market, it doesn't seem to matter. For as long as I've been covering tech career trends (about 15 years,) employers have complained about shortages of IT professionals who have the right balance of "people skills" and tech-skills du jour. However, now there's a new skill shortage developing--a scarcity of "emotionally intelligent" IT leaders. Have you tapped into your emotional intelligence today? Study: Text Messaging Number One Feature For Cell Phone Shoppers A new survey says that the majority of people, nearly three-quarters, seeking a new cell phone list SMS capabilities as the No. 1 must-have feature. The Internet and mobile e-mail aren't far behind. My favorite part of the study is that only 0.5% listed battery life -- without which cell phones are merely blocks of plastic and metal -- as the most important feature. Firefox 3 Video Tour: Faster Bookmarks In Firefox 3, developers completely revised the way bookmarks and history were handled, making them much more useful to contemporary Web users. You can use tags to organize your bookmarks more flexibly, and save searches to help you find groups of bookmarks again and again. This video walks you through what's new in bookmarks and history. TV Jumps Shark For Generation Net It can't really come as a surprise, the item the other day in Variety, reporting that the median age of viewers of broadcast-network television is 50. Here's the question, though: Have the young'uns deserted TV because the Internet is so much more compelling or because the former is even more unwatchable than episodes of Tila Tequila? The GPLv3, One Year On It's been a year since the GPLv3 was introduced to the open source world -- so how's it doing? That's the subject of two surveys currently being conducted to track open source license usage and conversion. Why Are So Many People Freaking Out About The Unlocked iPhone's $700 Price Tag? Yesterday, AT&T announced pricing for the iPhone. The most important nugget buried in the news release was that an unlocked and contract-free version will become available at some point in the future. People who want an unlocked iPhone will have to pay the full retail price of $700. Guess what? That's what cell phones actually cost. Out Of Band Data Movers Another form of data mover is the out-of-band data mover. Unlike Global Namespaces or agent-based data movers, these data movers crawl selected servers when doing their analysis. As they access each file, they analyze it to see if meets any criteria that you might have set for data movement. Since this crawl is merely a scan of the file system, as long as the out-of-band data mover supports the type of network file system that your servers use, then it will work. Not surprisingly, most of the players in the space support both NFS (for Unix systems) and CIFS (for Windows systems). Companies that offer this type of solution include Enigma Data Solutions with its Smartmove product and Arkivio's Autostor (recently acquired by Rocket Software). Real-World SOA: Definition, Implementation and Use of SOA with CentraSite Web services are having a dramatic impact on improving enterprise architecture and application development practices. This paper highlights three sample case studies illustrating how Fujitsu's CentraSite delivers SOA solutions. Forrester Consulting: Unified Communications Delivers Global Benefits This Forrester Consulting study shows how Unified Communications (UC) makes it simpler to contact others over any device in any location, enhancing business agility, cutting costs, and boosting employee productivity. Forrester finds that UC is already delivering major savings for organizations around the world in retail banking, manufacturing and education. Download the full report for free. Software as a Service Research Report No longer a niche software delivery model, software as a service (SaaS) can help small and midsize companies get access to enteprise-class software functionality without having to commit enterprise-level capital resources. Download the full report for free. The Internet & the Developing World The evolution of the Internet has been full of surprises - surprises that have sometimes resulted in radical changes in the commercial landscape, such as the arrival of Amazon, eBay, Google, YouTube, and Skype. Could one of the next big surprises turn out to be linked to developing countries? Read the full report for free from InternetEvolution.com Featured Jobs: Toshiba Medical Research Institute seeking Analog ASIC Specialist in Vernon Hills, IL UC Berkeley seeking Remedy Administrator/Developer in Berkeley, CA Lowe's seeking DC Systems Administrator I in Cheyenne, WY Protingent Staffing seeking UI Designer in Costa Mesa, CA Graduate School of Library and Info Sci seeking Asst Dean for Infrastructure in Champaign, IL For more great jobs, career-related news, features and services, please visit our Career Center. Try InformationWeek's RSS Feed Discover all InformationWeek's sites and newsletters Recommend This Newsletter To A Friend Do you have friends or colleagues who might enjoy this newsletter? Please forward it to them and point out the subscription page. Not a current InformationWeek magazine subscriber? Apply now for your FREE subscription to InformationWeek. 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