Jackson Rocco

Lotus Software GM Bob Picciano has grown tired of the "hot wind" blowing out of Redmond carrying claims that Exchange is displacing Notes and is singling out CEO Steve Ballmer and COO Kevin Turner as the main culprits spreading "ridiculous and fabricated" information. They are still utilizing capabilities from other aspects of the Lotus portfolio," said Picciano. Exchange alternatives: Front ends and back endsA look at Exchange 2010 "Microsoft is making claims in the marketplace around 4.7 million people have exchanged e-mail from Notes to Exchange and that is just a ridiculous fabricated figure," said Picciano, who took the reins at Lotus in 2008. "Every time they sell a [client access license] they count that as a competitive migration." "People need to recognize that Kevin Turner and Steve Ballmer have blown a lot of hot wind from Washington and there is not much substance or truth to what they are espousing in the marketplace," Picciano said. "They were so bold as to say there are entire countries that have migrated off of Notes and that is utterly ridiculous." Picciano says all the talk has "got me pretty worked up that they would be so bold to make such erroneous statements and not be challenged." The Lotus Software GM says many of the reference companies cited by Microsoft when it made its "4.7 million people" comment in July "are still licensing Lotus Notes technology and still utilizing e-mail and applications from Lotus.

At Microsoft's annual meeting this summer for financial analysts, Turner heaped on more numbers during his presentation at the event. "We've taken out almost 13 million Lotus Notes [seats] the past three years. … Now, the thing that I would tell you is there's still 15 — we count — there's still 15 million out there." He cited SharePoint Server as the "fastest-growing, hottest product in the history of Microsoft," and pegged it as a catalyst in the fight against IBM. Picciano said the counter was last week's news that U.S. Bank was replacing Microsoft's SharePoint platform by standardizing on the Notes 8.5 client and would roll out Lotus Connections social networking tools, the Sametime real-time platform and Lotus Quickr, which is IBM's alternative to SharePoint. He said PNC Bank and Continental Tire are joining U.S. Bank in getting rid of Microsoft's Exchange, Office and SharePoint. On Tuesday, Picciano threw out his own numbers saying a total to 15,421 companies have picked IBM over Microsoft since 2008 in the worldwide integrated collaborative environment market as defined by IDC. In addition, Picciano says customers are expanding their investment in Lotus software and he cited as examples Accenture, BASF, Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Continental AG, Finishline, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Gruppo Amadori, KBC Bank, Nationwide, Novartis, Phillips Electronics and PNC Bank. In January, Picciano said more than 12,000 new companies in 2008 bought their first Notes/Domino licenses. People understand what Kevin's motivation is and the prancing around in front of partners and talking about this.

And he said half of the Fortune global 100 are Notes/Domino users. "It's important to put [Microsoft's claims] into perspective and call it what it is, a bunch of fabrication," Picciano said. "Kevin is feeling that he is under a bit of pressure. It's duplicitous and overshadows the real truth." Follow John on Twitter.

A Palm Pre user is suing Palm and Sprint Nextel, alleging they caused him to lose most of the data from his phone, and he wants to turn the suit into a class action. Palm and Sprint last month said "a small number of customers" had had trouble transferring their data from Palm Profiles to new Palm devices and that they were working on a solution. The suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in San Jose, is the latest black eye for the Palm Profile cloud-based synchronization service, which debuted with the company's webOS on the Pre earlier this year. The system is designed to let users back up contacts, calendars, memos and other data from their webOS devices to Palm's servers once every 24 hours.

There is no built-in mechanism for backing up to a PC. Jason Standiford of San Francisco filed suit on Friday, claiming that he had returned a defective Palm Pre to a Sprint store last month and expected to get all of his contacts, memos and Internet bookmarks back from his Palm Profile online after synchronizing the replacement device. That data is supposed to be available for downloading to a new device if necessary. It was the fourth time he had returned a defective Pre, according to the complaint (PDF). When he synchronized the replacement device with his Palm Profile, only four contacts were left of the hundreds that had been on his previous phone, the suit alleges. Palm Profile restored only three of his memos and none of his bookmarks, the suit says. Two of those were for Sprint customer service and two were recently added entries. Returning to the Sprint store the next day, he found they still had his old phone and asked them to restore the data stored on it, but the attempt failed and deleted all the data on that device.

The data on the defective Pre was the only backup of Standiford's original information because Palm always overwrites the previous day's backup, the suit alleges. Sprint later tried again to restore the data to the new phone and was able to produce some of it, but not all, the suit says. The suit charges Palm and Sprint, as well as 50 unnamed individuals, with breach of contract, negligence and violation of three California business laws. It also alleges the companies failed to invest in the hardware, software, procedures, security and other resources needed to make sure the system would perform reliably. "Despite the confidence Palm and Sprint have placed in their backup systems and Palm's servers, numerous WebOS users have suffered catastrophic data loss as a result of failed backups or overwriting of previously stored data," the complaint says. The companies deceived consumers by concealing the potential problems caused by inadequate preparation for server problems, according to the complaint. Standiford and his attorneys want the court to certify the suit as a class action on behalf of all users of webOS devices, including the Pre and Palm Pixi, as well as the set of users who have lost data because of Palm's synchronization problems.

Representatives from Palm and Sprint did not immediately respond to requests for comment. They are seeking monetary and injunctive relief.

PHOENIX - While hosted cloud computing may be all the rage for reducing cost of ownership and management, IT managers say hosted storage services present dramatic security challenges and legal implications that need to be considered. For example, many confuse cloud computing with pure server and storage virtualization or simply backing up data to a remote site. Arthur Lessard, chief information security officer at toy manufacturer Mattel Inc., in El Segundo, Calif., said during a presentation at Storage Networking World on Wednesday that cloud computing is appealing, even if many end users don't know what the word "cloud" means.

True cloud services should be characterized by grid-architected hosts with central management, applications that can be ported seamlessly from system to system, capacity that is easily provisioned and significant data redundancy, he said. "We're talking software as a service," Lessard said. The lack of auditing capabilities may affect the ability to record user logins, administrative actions and data writes, Lessard said. "What I can't find out is who has been reading the data files, and ... depending on what business you're in, that might be important," he said. When storage is hosted offsite in a virtualized server and disk array environment, cloud computing presents real limitations around authentication, and auditing - especially auditing of logging. There is also not usually any indication of login anomalies, such as repetitive attempts to log into your site under an incorrect name and password. With respect to authentication, or who sets up the accounts and what control you have over accounts and how they're provisioned, most vendors offer self-registration into your applications, "and that can have holes," Lessard said. "Most authentication in a cloud environment is done through user name and password only, so if I had a nifty two-factor authentication set up or biometrics, it's no longer offered," he said.

That information is kept by the vendor and is usually part of a contract negotiation process. Most service provider also have restrictions against penetration testing of the cloud by their customers. "To be honest, I can't blame the vendor because by doing penetration testing against their environment for your applications, it could impact someone else's applications," he said. "Remember, it's a cloud, and you don't have a lot of control over where my stuff is running or where it sits." Hackers can also exploit security holds associated with hardware and software cloning in virtual server environments. When operating systems are cloned in virtual environments, where new servers and software are stamped out to meet user demand, service providers may use pseudo-random number generators, which will pass back values that look random and for the most part are spread out over a range, but they aren't random and can be predictable, Lessard said. Most operating systems have unique or personalized components when they're installed on hardware, and the OSes rely on the hardware to generate random numbers for public and private encryption key pairs and user IDs, even when they're being cloned onto new systems. At the last Black Hat hackers convention, there was an attack proposed that would exploit resources in the cloud based on pseudo-random number generation. "If you have multiple systems, and they're all cloned and you have some idea of when a particular instance was cloned and created, you can start making some pretty good guesses about the pseudo-random number generator in that operating system, and that means you can start making some pretty good guesses about public and private key pairs that got generated when an operating system got cloned." One of the stickier legal ramifications of storing data with a cloud service provider falls under the government's right to search and seize that information during the course of a criminal investigation.

Because one company's data may be kept on the same disk as another's by a service provider, a criminal investigation could expose your data to authorities or simply limit your ability to access data through that cloud service provider, Lessard added. "Essentially, you're losing your right to answer warrants served by the government," he said. "To use a technical term, cloud computing is probably going to give your legal department the heebie jeebies." Other IT managers also had security concerns about cloud services, some of whom overcame them after becoming SaaS customers and others who weren't convinced the security around such services is sufficiently mature. According to Lessard, the U.S. government has also asserted that it has a right to serve a warrant to a third party service provider in order to see your data on their systems and not notify that provider's customers that it has served the warrant prior to the search. Gordon Peterson, director of information technology for the city of Carlsbad, Calif., recently began using Microsoft's Live Mesh cloud computing service to host collaborative applications, such as Exchange, Office Communicator and Live Meeting in order to spend less time on maintaining back office systems and more time on technology innovation. A trip to Microsoft's hosting facilities helped alleviate those concerns. "Their procedures are very similar to ours," he said. "They told me that if they mess up, the online community is unforgiving." Norton Healthcare Inc., a private, nonprofit hospital system based in Louisville, Ky., is in the middle of rolling out virtualized servers, desktops and storage to serve four acute care hospitals and other health care facilities in Kentucky and southern Indiana. Peterson, who has a staff of 25, said he definitely had security concerns, mainly around Microsoft employees who would be able to see internal e-mail traffic. "We do have justice system traffic, after all," he said. "But I think what helped was realizing somebody else can probably do security better than I can." Peterson said his main concern was Microsoft's hiring and firing procedures and whether employee background checks were thorough.

Brian Comp, associate vice president of technology at Norton Healthcare, said cloud computing, with its ease of use is definitely in the hospital's future, just not the near future. It's about having data offsite. Comp said over the next five years, as cloud computing providers and the technology mature, it will become more reliable and secure, allowing him to put non-clinical systems on a distributed architecture. "I wouldn't say I'm uneasy about security in the cloud, but I do have reservations about it. I just want certain assurances. Nobody wants to be on the front page of a newspaper because of security problems," he said. "But I do think cloud vendors will work that out over time."

California TV shoppers are going green - whether they like it or not. However, not everyone is excited about the regulation's possible impact. On Wednesday, the California Energy Commission voted unanimously to apply a new standard requiring TVs up to 58-inches in screen size sold in the state to eat up 33 percent less electricity than they do currently by 2011 and 49 percent less by 2013. The move is a first-ever clamp down on TV set sales in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Representatives for the consumer electronics industry have blasted the measure saying that the new rules will drive up the cost of HDTVs for state residents, result in the loss of California-based jobs, and limit the number of innovative HDTV features available to California TV owners. The California regulation takes effect Jan. 1, 2011. Despite the lingering energy crisis, California is the first state to take action of this kind. The new regulation does not impact TVs currently on retail shelves. Although the U.S. government has guidelines such as Energy Star in place for PCs and other computers, there is no federal energy efficiency standard for TVs. Impact on Sales and Price Unclear Since the new energy rules have just been passed, many of its future implications remain unknown. What loopholes might exist?

How will flat panel TV makers such as Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic handle compliance with the California law? Can California residence buy a power hungry TV over the Internet that doesn't meet California's standards and get away with it? TVs with screen sizes larger than 58 inches now account for no more than 3 percent of all TVs sold, according industry statistics. Will manufacturers try to elude the law by focusing sales and promotions on larger TVs with screen sizes greater than 58 inches. Most significantly, how much will it cost TV makers to obey the energy efficiency regulations, and how much of those costs will be passed along to consumers? Instead of allowing customers to choose the products they want, the Commission has decided to impose arbitrary standards that will hamper innovation and limit consumer choice.

Not Everyone Excited The Consumer Electronics Association, which member include some of the biggest TV makers, says this new regulation is "unprecedented and unnecessary." Jason Oxman, CEA's senior vice president of industry affairs blasted CEC in a statement released to its Web site Wednesday: "Simply put, this is bad policy-dangerous for the California economy, dangerous for technology innovation and dangerous for consumer freedom. It will result in higher prices for consumers, job losses for Californians, and lost tax revenue for the state." You can read CEA's entire statement here. According to California's energy commission, state residents are expected to save $8.1 billion in energy costs over a 10-year period as a result of the regulation. What the CEA fails to do in its attack against the California Energy Commission is explain how jobs will be lost, why consumers will pay more for HDTVs, and what innovative features will be missing from HDTVs sold in California. Additionally, California commission says the new restrictions will be like taking 500,000 cars off its roads by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million metric tons a year. (PC World's Tom Spring contributed to this report)

A smart people smack-down is set to start next week where thousands of university computer researchers will pit their brains and machines in a grueling battle of logic, strategy, and mental endurance. Layer 8 Extra: 15 genius algorithms that aren't boring During the competition, ten to twelve problems are attempted in a five hour period. The 34th annual IBM-sponsored Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Contest (ICPC) pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a nerve-wracking five-hour deadline.

The problems are of varying difficulty and flavor. The goal is that every team solve two problems, that every problem is solved, and that no team solve them all, according to ACM. Contests in the past have included problems that searched for a missing boat at sea, triangulated the location of a faulty transmitter, computed golf handicaps, stacked pipe of varying diameters in a fixed width bin, coded or decoded messages, printed braille, sought an exit to a maze, processed satellite images and solved a math problem. ACM says it wants two problems that could be solved in an hour by a first or second year student, two that could be solved in an hour by a third year student, and two that will likely determine the winners. Problems are presented with no more than a page of text, a helpful illustration, a sample input set with and accepted output set, ACM states. And judging is relentlessly strict, IBM says.

Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build smart software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. The students are given a problem statement, not a requirements document. Each incorrect solution submitted is assessed a time penalty. They are given an example of test data, but they do not have access to the judges' test data and acceptance criteria. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner. Some problems require a knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms.

For a well-versed computer science student, some of the problems require precision only. Still others are simply too hard to solve - except for the world's brightest problem-solvers, according to IBM. The Battle of the Brains is the largest and most prestigious computing competition in the world, with more than tens of thousands of students from universities in approximately 90 countries on six continents participating. Previously, the 2009 ACM-ICPC World Finals took place in Stockholm, Sweden, where a team from St. Petersburg University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics in Russia emerged as the world champion for the second year in a row. Since IBM began sponsoring the contest in 1997, participation has grown from 1,100 to more than 7,100 teams. Regional bouts will begin in the United States on October 18 and continue through December, sweeping from continent to continent.

Only 100 three-person teams will advance to the World Finals on February 5, 2010 hosted by Harbin Engineering University in Harbin, China. "The ACM-ICPC affords students the opportunity to showcase their talents and gain exposure among top recruiters," said Dr. Bill Poucher, ICPC Executive Director and Baylor University Professor. "The contest is also a forum for advancing technology in an effort to better accommodate the growing needs of the future."

China called for a cleanup of mobile porn Web sites on Wednesday, blaming their rise on high-speed mobile data services, deployment of which has otherwise been a point of pride for the country. This year the country has also closed thousands of Web sites and arrested dozens in a campaign against online pornography that is increasingly shifting focus to mobile Web sites. "Lawless people have begun using the full commercial deployment of 3G and its faster download speeds for pictures and videos... to spread obscene and pornographic content," Su Jinsheng, an engineer in China's IT ministry, said in a speech, according to a transcript on the ministry Web site. China issued 3G (third generation) mobile network licenses to its three mobile carriers early this year, and the number of 3G users in China has slowly climbed since then. A cleanup is needed to "protect the healthy growth of the next generation and purify the social environment," he said.

But owners of mobile porn Web sites have been able to evade authorities through technical tactics such as frequently switching domain names and IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, Su said. China sees its long-delayed rollout of 3G services as a step toward its goal of becoming a global technology power. Counter-tactics being used by authorities include a blacklist to prevent pornographic Web sites from reappearing online and the design of content-filtering technology to help network operators themselves block obscene content, he said, giving a rare official glimpse into how Chinese regulators control information on the Internet. Earlier this year Google had a row with Chinese authorities over pornographic search results that ultimately led to Google.com and other Google services being briefly blocked in the country. Pornography is illegal in China and authorities have long seen it as a scourge on the country's culture.

Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast-moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites. Hyperlinks to the software can then be distributed by pirates via Web sites, instant messages, or social media sites such as Twitter, said Vic DeMarines, CEO of anti-piracy software vendor V.I. Labs. "It's incredibly easy to use. Sites such as RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile let anonymous users upload large files such as cracked software for free. And what you get is essentially your own private FTP server," DeMarines said.

These memberships, such as the 30-day premium access for $6.99 Euros at Rapidshare, let users download files immediately and without any caps on bandwidth. While sites such as RapidShare allow free downloads, they make their money by charging heavy downloaders for premium memberships. Trade in pirated digital goods , whether it is movies, music or e-books or software, is what drives the popularity and business model of firms like RapidShare. A spokeswoman for Cham, Switzerland-based Rapidshare declined to comment on the V.I. Labs report, saying she would need more information. The site told The New York Times earlier this year that it hosted 10 petabytes of data and up to 3 million downloaders at a time . The Association of American Publishers estimates that half of the pirated books found by its members were linked to Rapidshare. "There's a lot of money being made," said DeMarines. "Without hosting pirated goods, I'm not sure what their revenue model would be." According to a recent investigation by V.I. Labs into the availability of pirated software from a sample of 43 vendors, 100% were on RapidShare.

The site is already among the top twenty most popular in the world, according to Alexa. Though Rapidshare has faced lawsuits related to piracy, DeMarines says it and other file-hosting sites are tricky to prosecute legally becuase uploaders are not required to register or identify themselves. Uploads and downloads to Rapidshare account for 5% of all Internet traffic globally, says German networking vendor Ipoque. Also, Rapidshare tries to distance itself from any knowledge of the pirated goods by not filtering or monitoring the content on its servers. "For us, everything is just a file, no matter what," a spokeswoman told The Times in March. The company even grants certain organizations direct access into their service, so that they can go ahead and delete the hyperlinks and pirated files themselves, DeMarines said.

DeMarines said Rapidshare does comply with the Safe Harbor Provisions of the U.S.' Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by quickly taking down pirated files when notified by the copyright holders. Peer-to-peer networking (P2P) does still remain the largest channel for distributing pirated software, movies and other digital content. The most popular network remains BitTorrent , which is used by six out of 10 P22 users, V.I. Labs said. Ipoque said it enables between 43% to 70% of piracy, depending on the region of the world. eDonkey is a distant second, with 20% share, despite hosting almost 900,000 users and 77 million files at any given time. But file-hosting is growing much faster, Ipoque said, already enabling between 15% to 35% of digital piracy, depending on the region of the world.

Once-popular Gnutella is ranked third, with a market-share in the single digits. DeMarines said he expects file-hosting sites to eventually supplant P2P. "P2P is on its way down. Other long-running methods for distributing warez are either stagnant or shrinking. They're too visible, and so the copyright organizations are going to take these BitTorrent tracker sites out," he said. Usenet newsgroups, for instance, have lost popularity due to the large amount of pornography and malware mingled in with the warez, DeMarines said. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is "not favored" as a way to transmit files, though announcements and links on IRC to warez hosted on file-hosting sites is growing, DeMarines said.