LAS VEGAS — The open source Mozilla Firefox Web browser is potentially at risk from design flaws that could allegedly let attackers take whatever they want from users’ computers. Radware Security researcher Itzik Kotler is alleging that he can exploit Mozilla Firefox, and he’s going to demonstrate how at Black Hat.

Kotler’s exploit framework for Firefox is called Jinx, and it utilizes JavaScript to enable an attacker to read anything from a user’s hard drive. Jinx could potentially put millions of users at risk if Kotler is correct in his risk assessment. Mozilla is concerned about the issue, though it isn’t certain of what the risk actually is to users.

Kotler admitted to InternetNews.com that he specifically targeted Firefox to find vulnerabilities. “People are hacking Internet Explorer every day, and if I did the same thing on IE people would just say it’s just another IE vulnerability,” he said.

“I wanted to do something different,” Kotler explained. “People say that it’s Firefox — it’s not supposed to be as bad, and it’s supposed to be safer and more secure so I took it as a challenge.”

Kotler explained that his intention was to create a form of malware that didn’t rely on virtualization or SQL injection but rather is completely dependent on the browser itself.

“The basic thing that Jinx implements is that it will download files from your computer and send it to a remote Web site,” he said.

Kotler argued that Jinx goes beyond a basic cache reading exploit of the type that was discussed at Black Hat in 2006. Jinx is a full hard drive read allowing the attacker to access anything on the drive.

Reading a user’s hard drive contents alone wasn’t enough for Kotler who claimed that function alone bored him after a period of time.

“I got bored with it so I made it into a bot and interactive, so I can manage multiple Jinx instances,” Kotler said. “We end up having a complete framework all in JavaScript in the browser without code injection or virtualization. It’s just you, Firefox and us.”

To execute the Jinx framework, Kotler explained that he uses a file URI (define) handler as a way to dig into the target system. Mozilla had a number of high-profile issues with URI handling in the last year. In fact Mozilla rearchitected Firefox 3 so that it would not be at risk from the same sorts of issues that plagued Firefox 2. The third iteration was released earlier this year.

As it turns out, Kotler admitted that Jinx in its current implementation only affects Firefox 2 and not Firefox 3 specifically because of how Firefox 3 handles URIs. That said, he did note that he is confident that if he spent more time on research he could figure out a way to attack Firefox 3 or any other browser.

“I would say that if I would have the target and the time, I’m pretty sure it’s portable and that this could work on any other browser that has Ajax support,” Kotler said.(Ajax (define) stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.)

Kotler claims that he e-mailed his presentation to Window Snyder, Mozilla’s chief security officer to disclose the issues he had discovered.

Snyder told InternetNews.com that she had received an e-mail from Kotler only last Friday about the presentation.

“My concern is that Firefox 2 is still in use and even though the same functionality isn’t in Firefox 3, anything that could potentially hurt our users is a concern,” Snyder said. “We’re very concerned about this.”

Snyder argued that Kotler did not give Mozilla enough time to evaluate the security issues prior to disclosing them.

“It would have been great if they contacted us before hand, before they released the information so we could evaluate it and see how it might affect our users,” Snyder said. “Giving us the opportunity to protect our users before it’s available to attackers is always preferable.”

That said, the fact that Kotler may well have discovered a security flaw within Firefox is actually a positive thing for Mozilla overall.

“We always appreciate when people work on Firefox security because it does help us,” Snyder said. “Once we know about it, we can fix it, but it’s easier to protect our users when we have time to fix an issue before it’s available publicly.” from internetnews.com

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) had good news for technology investors late Tuesday, posting better than expected earnings and revenues and suggesting that the downturn may be shorter than feared.

Cisco said its July quarter sales grew a better than expected 10% to $10.4 billion, and earnings of 40 cents a share were a penny better than analysts anticipated.

The critical U.S. enterprise market grew 13%, more than double the previous quarter’s performance. The company forecast growth of 8-8.5% for the next two quarters, slightly lower than expected, but comments from CEO John Chambers that the downturn will likely be a “relatively short challenge going forward” cheered investors worried about a prolonged downturn.

Cisco shares rose 3% in late trading, on top of a 3% gain during the day.

Routing and advanced technologies sales were strong, but Cisco said service provider spending remained mixed.

Also in late trading, Priceline (NASDAQ: PCLN) tumbled 17% despite beating estimates.

Stocks surged during Tuesday’s trading session on falling oil prices and a better than expected services sector reading — and a Federal Reserve interest rate policy statement that was more market friendly than traders had hoped for.

The Nasdaq rose 2.8%, and its biggest names posted gains of 3% or more, including Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL).

But Rackable Systems (NASDAQ: RACK) plunged 16% after missing estimates.

The Nasdaq surged 64 to 2349, the S&P gained 35 to 1285, and the Dow soared 331 to 11,615. Volume rose to 5.51 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.43 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 25-8 margin on the NYSE, and 19-9 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 81% on the NYSE, and 86% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 56-114 on the NYSE, and 61-115 on the Nasdaq.

from internetnews.com

With its open source and proprietary rivals proliferating and shoring up their positions, the Linux-based LiMo Foundation is pulling out all the stops in its bid to establish itself as the preeminent mobile platform.

LiMo, an alliance of major handset vendors and carriers developing a Linux-based smartphone operating system, this week revealed a number of new handsets boasting sought-after features. Today at the LinuxWorld conference, its members unveiled the Motorola EM 30.

The new device, sporting GPS, advanced music features and other enhancements, joined seven additional handsets announced on Monday — including Motorola’s (NYSE: MOT) Motozine zN5, four NEC handsets and two Panasonic Mobile Communications devices. The new handsets, which also tout improved display resolution and video streaming, are built on LiMo’s 2.0 Linux mobile platform, set to be published later this year and completed in early 2009.

With the number of LiMo devices standing at 22, and now including models with capabilities like GPS navigation, mobile television and high-speed 3G connectivity, the group said it’s pushing hard into the marketplace. “The [device] announcements this week show that LiMo is a very real and tangible platform that’s being embraced aggressively,” Andrew Shikiar, LiMo’s director of global marketing, told InternetNews.com.

Yet the moves come amid increasing competition among handset makers. While striving to grab both greater market share and wireless carriers’ attention with richer features and customized applications, handset players are also struggling with lower price points and growing needs to entice stronger developer interest.

While LiMo includes big names like Motorola, Samsung and Verizon Wireless — which jumped onboard in May — and even after adding 11 new members this week, it still faces an uphill struggle against entrenched rivals, including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Research in Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry.

According to a March IDC study, the Symbian platform led worldwide in 2007, with a 62.9 percent share of the market. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Mobile and Linux platforms were neck and neck, each controlling just over 11 percent.

RIM’s (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry platform accounted for 9.8 percent of the total smartphone market, and Palm’s proprietary OS held a 1.8 percent share. According to a recent Canalsys research report, Apple’s iPhone accounts for 7 percent of smartphone platforms in use in 2008.

In addition to a slew of rivals, LiMo will soon find itself facing another major competitor, the Google-backed Android project.

Despite the challenges, LiMo continues its growth. With its latest additions — handset maker Cellon, Freescale Semiconductor, Telecom Italia and wireless base station manufacturer ZTE — LiMo’s backers now total 52 companies. Additionally, Shikiar said the foundation expects that figure to grow, as it absorbs the members of its folded predecessor, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) group.

That’s not to mention the group’s technological underpinnings.

According to Shikiar, “LiMo offers a very substantial technology platform,” he said, describing the new handsets as “proof points” of its proliferation.

Shikiar added that enterprises are likely to gravitate toward LiMo devices, since they offer what he described as the needed security and compliance features businesses require.

Others are seeing proof of LiMo’s growth, as well. Jay Lyman, open source analyst with The 451 Group, said the group’s contributions are finding traction in the mass market as well as the workplace.

“Depending on the applications, it may mean more Linux-based smart phones and similar devices in the enterprise,” Lyman told InternetNews.com.

Still, it’s unclear how much of a dent the recent efforts will make.

“At present, I’d say LiMo handsets are not too much of a threat to the leaders,” Lyman said. “But given these announced handsets featuring bigger names, I see the competitive threat getting greater.”

A good deal of what LiMo is banking on is that the group believes an open development environment will drive faster Web application capabilities and overall device efficiencies.

However, LiMo is far from the only open source game in town.

Nokia in June surprised the industry when it said it would open source Symbian, the world’s dominant mobile OS — potentially allowing Nokia to co-opt open development to improve its software while undermining efforts like LiMo.

At the same time, Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) foray into wireless also looms over the mobile space. Development of the as-yet-unreleased software, called Android, is officially overseen by the Open Handset Alliance, a group that claims more than 30 well-known industry players, including handset makers HTC, LG Electronics and Motorola and carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile.

“At this point, we have yet to see code or handsets out of Google and the Android effort,” Lyman added. “However, it is Google, and will certainly be significant when it does arrive.”

While all three open source players are seeking to steal market share from proprietary systems like RIM’s Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile and the fast-growing Apple iPhone, it’s unclear whether competition against each other could lead to fragmentation and thwart open source’s aspirations for growth.

LiMo, at least, believes that the answer comes down to it being the one to drive collaboration and consolidation.

“The industry needs one true platform, with actual code, software and devices,” Shikiar said.

from internetnews.com

Yahoo Inc on Tuesday released a recount of the vote for its board that sharply altered the results, revealing a strong protest vote against five of nine directors including CEO Jerry Yang.

The Internet company said revised vote tallies showed 33.7 percent of votes withheld for Yang, the company’s co-founder, with 66.3 percent in favor of him remaining on its board.

It was originally thought that Yang had been reelected with 85 percent of the vote.

Yang has been under pressure for months over failed attempts by Microsoft Corp to buy the company and over questions about his leadership, but Friday’s shareholder vote had suggested the tide was turning in his favor. The initial tally showed 85 percent of votes going to Yang.

The stunning new twist in the saga of Yahoo came after one its largest and most critical shareholders, Capital Research Global Investors, called on Monday for a probe of last week’s shareholder vote after finding discrepancies in the results.

Yahoo said it had been informed by Corporate Election Services, the company’s inspector of elections, that Broadridge Financial Solutions, a proxy voting intermediary for major investors, had made significant errors in reporting votes at its annual shareholder meeting.

Three other directors, including Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, also had strong protest votes, with nearly 40 percent of votes withheld for Bostock, 38 percent withheld for director Ron Burkle and 32 percent withheld for Arthur Kern.

The three are members of the company’s compensation committee and have born the brunt of criticism for the company refusing to do more to link executive pay to performance as corporate governance critics have demanded.

A fifth board member, Gary Wilson, the former chairman of Northwest Airlines, had 28 percent of votes on his reelection withheld.

The remaining four board members — Vyomesh Joshi, Eric Hippeau, Robert Kotick and Mary Wilderotter — all received strong endorsements, with each winning more than 90 percent of votes in favor of their reelection.

Ahead of the August 1 meeting, Kotick said he planned to resign shortly after the meeting as part of a settlement deal with proxy challenger Carl Icahn in which Icahn and two members of a slate proposed by the billionaire investor would join an expanded board of 11 members instead of the previous nine.

Gordon Crawford, whose Capital Research Global Investors owned 6.2 percent of Yahoo as of early June, said in May he was “extremely angry” at Yang over the breakdown of talks with Microsoft.

Critics of corporate voting technology have called for a system overhaul, said the counting process was complicated and lacking in transparency.

In a statement, Broadridge acknowledged the error, but said it was an isolated incident and that it did not change the outcome of the election of the company’s directors.

“Upon review, it was determined that there was a truncation error in the final printout sent to the tabulator,” said Chuck Callan, Broadridge’s senior vice president of regulatory affairs. “This resulted in the under-reporting of shares withheld for certain directors,” he said.

Shares of Yahoo gained 2.3 percent to $19.82 in regular session trading on Nasdaq amid wide gains in the broader market but edged down 3 cents to $19.79 in extended trade following announcement of the revised title.from internetnews.com

IBM is expanding its Linux solution set today with a new initiative together with Red Hat, Novell and Ubuntu for Microsoft-free PCs.

After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM (NYSE: IBM) continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet.

“The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while,” Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. “We’re just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen.”

The Microsoft-free PC effort involves the Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) and Ubuntu Linux distributions in a broad effort to displace Microsoft technologies. Kuznetsova declined to comment on the financial details that IBM has determined with its partners at this point, but she was clear on what IBM’s role in the initiative will be.

“Our role is more on evangelizing and providing the necessary software for corporate needs,” she said. “I think the need for alternatives to the Microsoft-dominated personal computing environment are there.”

Kuznetsova commented that she’s heard customers tell IBM that they have saved money by moving to a Linux desktop and away from Microsoft. As part of the Microsoft-free PC effort, IBM will ship preloaded versions of Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and Lotus Sametime with each of the participating Linux distributions.

IBM is also taking aim at Microsoft’s installed base in the small-business market as well with a new independent software vendor (ISV) appliance toolkit.

“We’re providing the toolkit to ISVs who will work with mid-market and small customers and allow them to package their applications with Linux and the necessary middleware,” Kuznetsova explained.

The idea behind the toolkit is to allow mid-market ISVs and users to avoid the details of Linux installation and to just get an easy-to-install appliance that they can run.

“We’re viewing this as an alternative to the Microsoft Small Business Server group of products,” Kuznetsova commented. “Rather than talk about virtualization technology for an appliance, we’re talking about something that is simple and has a small footprint,” she said, adding that the product could even run from a USB stick.
Open source stack

In addition to targeting Microsoft, IBM is also expanding its High Performance Computing (HPC) offerings for Linux with a new open source stack. The stack includes the Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (xCAT) used for managing HPC clusters.

“A lot of IT shops lack the experience to quickly deploy a Linux-based cluster,” Kuznetsova said. “By making this software stack available we’re trying to make cluster deployment faster.”

IBM is also bolstering its Linux middleware solutions with the latest release of its Websphere Community Edition (CE) version 2.1, which is based on the Apache Geronimo Web server. Since Websphere CE’s initial release it has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times. The latest release offers new usability and configuration functionality.

“One of the new features is that it allows you to build custom servers,” Kuznetsova explained. “So users will only have the components that are necessary for running their particular application, and this adds tremendously to the agility and flexibility of the system,” she said. “There are also additional server monitoring tools included and overall deployment and system management has been streamlined.”

In addition to all the Linux news IBM is announcing, Kuznetsova herself is also celebrating an anniversary of her own. It was a little more than a year ago that she took over the top Linux executive job at IBM from Scott Handy. By and large she noted that things have gone well for her and IBM’s Linux initiative, though at least one thing did surprise her.

“I think what I was surprised at the most is how far Linux gets into the datacenter, how deep it gets and how complex the projects are that customers implement, Kuznetsova said, adding that many of them wouldn’t be possible without Linux.

from internetnews.com

In a presentation to be delivered at the Black Hat security conference, Stracener will explain in gory detail how gadgets can be used to attack other gadgets and ultimately end users. The impact could range from a loss of confidential information to arbitrary code execution. Google argues, however, that though any gadget could be a target for malware, the company is already actively taking precautions to protect users.

“One of the things that really characterizes Web 2.0 is the high interactivity between the user and other users as well as the application in sharing information,” Stracener told InternetNews.com prior to his presentation. “These little microapplications like Google Gadgets are ideal for that. On the other hand if someone creates a gadget that is designed to trick the user, that’s easy to do.”

Google Gadgets can run on a user’s iGoogle home page. They can also be put on any Web page and run on Google Desktop. Stracener has identified scenarios under which each type of gadget implementation — whether running on Windows, Linux or a Mac — could be exploited for malicious intent.

One scenario where a gadget could be harmful is if it is used as a platform for a phishing attack, in which the user is somehow lured to click on a bad link. There is also the potential for using gadgets for Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.

Stracener explained that the CSRF attack on gadgets involves a scenario where a user submits a form within one application, and it ends up taking an action on another Web site the user was not intending to take.

He noted that a CSRF attack could be particularly harmful if the user is logged in to a social networking site while running the malicious gadget. In that scenario the gadget could potentially steal the user’s login credentials for the social networking site.

from internetnews.com

A key House committee is expanding its probe into the privacy implications of the behavioral targeting of online advertising, calling on more than 30 leading Internet companies to detail how they collect information and the steps they take to safeguard consumers’ identities.

The leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to executives at many of the nation’s largest broadband providers and Web companies on Friday, asking for specifics on “the growing trend of companies tailoring Internet advertising based on consumers’ Internet search, surfing or other use.”

The letter comes as the latest step in the escalating scrutiny among lawmakers into the practice of behavioral ad targeting. Most recently, the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing focusing on the controversial practice of deep-packet inspection, or DPI, a technique the ad firm NebuAd has been using in partnership with Internet service providers to improve targeting.

In that hearing, Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass) likened the practice to the post office opening individuals’ mail, and lambasted NebuAd CEO Bob Dykes for not structuring the system so that users would have to opt in for their information to be collected. Dykes has repeatedly insisted that NebuAd’s technology does not collect any information that can be traced to an individual’s identity.

While the new letter (available as a PDF here) expands the congressional inquiry beyond just broadband providers, Markey indicated that DPI is still at the top of his mind.

“Privacy is a cornerstone of freedom,” Markey said in a statement about the letter. “Online users have a right to explicitly know when their broadband provider is tracking their activity and collecting potentially sensitive and personal information.”

The letter revisits the main pivot points in the debate over online privacy, asking the companies what information they collect on sensitive topics such as health and finance, what kinds of notification they provide consumers and how long information is stored.

It also asked the companies to provide details on any legal analyses they have conducted to determine whether their behavioral targeting practices are lawful.

One consumer advocacy group, the Center for Democracy and Technology, has produced a legal analysis concluding that broadband providers using DPI could run afoul of federal and state wiretapping laws.

The 33 recipients included large ISPs such as Comcast and AT&T, as well as Web companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice told InternetNews.com that the company is examining the language of the letter. She said that she expected to respond by Friday, Aug 8, as the representatives requested, and said that Comcast does not use DPI to facilitate ad serving.

AT&T (NYSE: T) spokesman Michael Balmoris said he expected a prompt response from his company to the committe’s request. Spokespeople for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) also said that they were reviewing the letter and preparing their responses.

A spokesman for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) declined to comment on the letter.
Law to apply to all industries

The letter revisits the issues of consumer profiling and behavioral targeting that were the subject of a Senate hearing last month, where representatives from Google and Microsoft both expressed support for a baseline national privacy law. That law, as they envision it, would apply to all industries, rather than enshrining specific requirements for online advertisers. AOL has previously indicated that it supports that position.

The Federal Trade Commission has also taken up the issue of behavioral targeting. Much to the disappointment of privacy advocates, the commission has opted for a set of self-regulatory principles that it hopes will widely adopted among the industry.

At the July Senate hearing, Lydia Parnes, the FTC’s director of consumer protection, testified that she did not think that a federal online-privacy law was necessary.

State legislators in New York and Connecticut have introduced bills that seek to set boundaries on how Internet companies collect and use consumers’ data.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — TV cameras and other media massed outside the Fairmont hotel before the start of Yahoo’s shareholder meeting here today. But they weren’t huddled around embattled CEO Jerry Yang or other Yahoo officials.

Rather, it was maverick shareholder Eric Jackson who was holding court, detailing his displeasure with current management and why he still is in favor of the Internet giant doing a deal with Microsoft.

Jackson leads a group of 146 investors who jointly hold 3.2 million Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) shares, he said, seizing the opportunity to reiterate his displeasure over Chief Executive Jerry Yang and the current board of directors.

“I’m frustrated and it’s not just about Microsoft,” he said. “We’ve been asking for a plan for the past four years, but there’s no indication the company can execute. I don’t think [Yang] is the right CEO. They need an outsider and new people around the table.”

During the question-and-answer portion of the shareholder meeting, Jackson continued criticizing Yahoo management, at one point telling Chairman Roy Bostock he should “do the honorable thing” and step down.

Jackson’s position didn’t appear to ruffle too many feathers on Yahoo’s board: Yang elicited a few laughs by greeting the tough-talking investor with, “Good to see you again, Eric.”

Jackson also said that during the last board election, 34 percent of shareholders declined to vote in favor of Bostock’s reinstatement, Yahoo’s chairman responded that he looked more positively on the fact that 66 percent did vote in his favor.

Later in the afternoon, after the meeting, Yahoo reported its board received a strong vote of confidence from investors. CEO Yang was re-elected with an 85.4 percent vote tally. Chairman Bostock was re-elected with 79.5 percent of the votes. The lowest vote total came in for board member Arthur Kern, who was still easily reelected, garnering 77.9 percent of the votes for reelection.

Shedding some light on talks with Microsoft

Considering the hoopla surrounding Yahoo’s recent history — Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) abortive acquisition and activist investor Carl Icahn’s attempts to launch a proxy war to oust Yahoo’s leadership — vocal shareholders like Jackson were few in number at the meeting, however.

In fact, with the most recent drama over Icahn’s threatened proxy war now over, it seemed that the meeting had attracted relatively few of Yahoo’s shareholders, filling only a small portion much of the cavernous hall here at the Fairmont.

After being spurned by Yahoo, Microsoft tried to rekindle a deal with the help of dissident shareholder Ichan, in a plan to either buy Yahoo in full or its search business. Finally, the software giant all but gave up when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that his company was no longer actively pursuing a deal.

  The board controlled the process of dealing with Microsoft. We called the shots.

Shortly afterward, Yahoo cut a deal with Icahn to invite him and two of his hand-picked choices to join its board of directors, staving off the threat of a proxy battle.With the dust now seemingly settled, Bostock made a point today of saying he didn’t know why Microsoft walked away from negotiations and that the Yahoo board, including CEO Jerry Yang, was committed to pursue any deal that would enhance shareholder value.

“I want to be clear that the board controlled the process of dealing with Microsoft,” Bostock said. “We called the shots and were deeply involved.”

As part of the negotiation process, Bostock said Yahoo asked Microsoft for details regarding how the companies might deal with what was likely to be complex regulatory approval in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

“They never really engaged with us on that,” he said. “To this day, I cannot tell you why they withdrew their offer to acquire us.”

Contrary to reports Microsoft upped its initial offer from $31 per share to $33 for Yahoo, Bostock said $31 was the only written proposal.

Special Report

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Battle Heats Up
The search titan’s feeling the heat from Microsoft’s $44 billion bid for Yahoo — and its effort to nab more of Google’s market share.

However, he added that at one point, a Microsoft official said to one of Yahoo’s management, “There may be a few more dollars on the table.”"There was never anything given to the board in writing,” Bostock said. He also noted Microsoft’s stock value dropped subsequent to the initial offer, reducing the proposed deal to $28 per share.

Microsoft, which has to date discussed little of the negotiations with Yahoo, later fired back at Bostock’s comments.

“Yahoo! is attempting to rewrite history yet again with statements that are not supported by the facts,” the company said in a statement.

In any event, Yahoo’s board ultimately provided little in the way of further hints on where things stood with Microsoft — potentially leaving investors like Patrick Sheridan disappointed.

Before the meeting, Sheridan said he had traveled to the board meeting to check in on his investment.

“I’m hoping for closure on the Microsoft transaction,” he told InternetNews.com. “I still believe there’s something there to be gained. I want them to buy Yahoo.”

Yang condemns Chinese government actions

Yang and board also faced heat over the company’s human rights record, including cooperation with the Chinese government that led to the jailing of a dissident who had been critical of the authoritarian regime online.

Yahoo later reached a settlement with the jailed citizen’s family, and Yang today insisted the company has gone to great lengths to improve its human rights policies and promote a more enlightened code of conduct for the industry.

“I think Yahoo is a leader in Internet human rights efforts,” he said. “We’ve done right with the families and I’ve been personally involved. We have a lot more work to do. We’ve condemned the Chinese government for blocking people’s use of the Net and set up a fund for Internet and any human rights abuses around China.”

Yahoo shares fell less than half a percent on Friday, finishing down 9 cents at $19.80.

from internetnews.com

Intel has taken the wraps off its entry into the graphics processor market, offering up the first technical hints of “Larrabee,” its attempt to take on nVidia and ATI/AMD in the highly competitive graphics processor space.

In a briefing with journalists ahead of its presentation at the Siggraph show later this month in Los Angeles, three engineers on the team went into great technical detail on the structure of the chip, but declined to give much product specification.

What they would say is that initially, Larrabee will be available as an add-in card, just like nVidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and ATI (NYSE: AMD) cards are now. Other potential uses or the form factors of the cards were not discussed. Product won’t appear on the market until late 2009, if not 2010.

Larrabee is built on the old Pentium technology, but heavily modified and modernized for graphics processing. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) would not say how many cores would constitute a Larrabee processor, beyond the nebulous promise of “dozens.” The cores all communicate through a wide “ring” bus that allows for fast inter-core communication and sharing of data, as well as sharing cache data. The L2 cache is partitioned among the cores, allowing for data replication and sharing.

Each Larrabee core is a complete x86 core capable of context switching and preemptive multitasking with support for virtual memory and page swapping. The main difference between Larrabee and other GPUs is that Larrabee will be much more flexible in the steps through what graphical data is processed.

Existing GPU architectures require data to be passed through a battery of processors, from a vertex shader to a pixel shader to a rasterizer, even if a particular processing job doesn’t require it. As such, Intel believes that there is no such thing as a “typical” workload.

“The problem with designing a GPU is how much performance to put into the different segments to balance out variations in the load,” said Larry Seiler, senior principal engineer in the visual computing group at Intel.

So Intel’s solution is to not have fixed function stages in the pipeline. “You are entirely in control of how processing happens,” said Seiler. “You can change scheduling, how each stage is handled, you can modify it to handle the characteristics of your workload, or change the rasterizer for your workload.”

However, Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, said Intel’s solution is not necessarily better nor worse. “There are fixed functions and logical steps one has to go through in a GPU, but those things are in there for a very good reason. Those are the most efficient ways to do graphics programming,” he told InternetNews.com.

What Intel is doing is adapting its strategy, the x86 architecture, to graphics, Peddie added. “This is really a multi core CPU. What makes it different from the x86 we are using in our computers is this ring communication for interprocessor communications. That is one of the main differentiators between Larrabee and Nehalem.”

That said, Peddie thinks the “ring” for inter-core communication is a big revolution. “I think it’s fantastic that Intel has done this, because this is the first innovation in computer graphics architecture since the GPU was introduced almost ten years ago. So they get a lot of credit from me for being brave enough to do it,” he said.

The ring “gives you a really fat communication path for every processor to talk to every other processor. That’s something they have that neither ATI nor nVidia have,” said Peddie. “nVidia and ATI have an order of magnitude more processors, but are built in groups or gangs and communicate from group to group. So processor 004 can’t talk directly to processor 794.”

Seiler said that the flexibility of Larrabee is not limited to the hardware, but the software as well. “If a developer finds something in the API that limits them, they can create their own,” he said. “We want to insure developers the freedom to run in Larrabee as they need.”

That also means possible forking as developers improvise their own fixes, the same problem that made Unix so incompatible after many years of proprietary fixes. Intel is aware of that. “We want to give them freedom but we are wary of the potential for splintering. So it’s a balancing act,” said Seiler

Intel has been heavily romancing major computer graphics experts at universities all over the world and all of the major game developers. The paper being presented at Siggraph, along with many Intel engineers, includes Stanford engineers as contributors as well as Mike Abrash, one of the best known gaming graphics programmers.

So Intel is making a full court charge on Larrabee, a big change from its less-than-stellar integrated graphics products. “Don’t judge Larrabee by Intel’s current graphics products,” said Peddie. “[Intel CEO] Paul Otellini has taken the handcuffs off the guys at Intel who know how to do graphics. Not only has he taken the cuffs off he’s given them the checkbook to get some staff and IP behind it. As a result, Intel is going to do it right.”from internetnews.com 

Netizens have uncovered a Dell trademark for the term “cloud computing,” uncorking fears of another attempt at co-opting a popular industry term. In 2006, for example, CMP Media and publisher Tim O’Reilly acquired a service mark for the popular term “Web 2.0,” then tried to enforce it with a cease and desist letter to an Irish trade show. CMP backed off after a huge backlash on the Internet.

Like O’Reilly, which was trying to protect its own trade property, the Web 2.0 Summit, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) said its goal is to clearly define a part of its product line called Cloud Computing Solution

The trademark filing was made on March 23, 2007, but attention to the trademark didn’t come until last week, when Sam Johnston, a European technologist based in Paris, first posted on the subject to a Cloud Computing group on Google Groups.

Johnston noticed the “TM” being used in Dell press materials and did a little poking around in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Web site. Sure enough, “cloud computing” was registered to Dell.

Not surprisingly, this is causing an uproar on places like Slashdot and other online sites where Johnston posted.

A prior trademark had been awarded to NetCentric Corp., a defunct telecommunications firm, in 1997. That trademark is now expired, as is NetCentric.

Dell’s basis for the trademark is the Cloud Computing Solution, which it announced in March 2007. The trademark application was filed soon after.

“At that time, the term [”cloud computing”] was not a common one and Dell wanted to protect it as it applied to our offering. So, we made application to register the trademark,” said Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn in an e-mail sent to InternetNews.com.

The time period to object to the trademark has since expired. “We now have six months to file our statement of use for the trademark, and will decide what we will do during that time,” said Blackburn. “We have and will continue to conduct appropriate due diligence around adoption and use of this trademark to ensure we do not infringe on anyone else’s intellectual property.”

He went on to say that “A registered trademark on this term would not give Dell the exclusive use of it. It would protect us from others using the term specifically as it relates to our solution.” from internetnews.com