Jackson Rocco

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.

The popular online game World of Warcraft (WoW) is being hit with a new phishing scheme that lets attackers steal players' accumulated "gold" and other treasure by luring players with offers of free "mounts" used in the online game, say security researchers at F-Secure. The link takes the player to a site that looks exactly like World of Warcraft and offers them free "mounts," the fantasy horses that humans would ride or trusted wolf mounts that the Orcs prefer, which have powers like helping move the player more quickly through the game or defend them against monsters. It's an attack that exploits the WoW-based in-game chat to lure a player into clicking on a link.

If the victim falls for the "free mounts" phishing fraud and enters his online credentials, the attacker can take over his account and steal all the "gold" or other treasures the player accumulated in the game's progress. "This is like physical property, it can be traded," said Sean Sullivan, security researcher at F-Secure about the value of the online game's items like "gold" and "mounts," which can bring money in auctions in sites in China, for example. Sullivan added that over two years ago, eBay declared a ban on auctioning WoW items like fantasy "gold," apparently because of the fraud level. The latest phishing scam to hit WoW, which F-Secure describes here, is a new twist on some of the older attacks that made use of malicious banner ads on WoW to try and install trojans on victim's desktops. The current "mounts" phishing scam allows the successful attacker to steal whatever treasures the victim has associated with the WoW account, and then to go after other victims. F-Secure's Internet Security 2010 product recognizes this type of phishing scam and blocks against it, the vendor says.

While it used to be common for every enterprise to have its own data center for delivering and receiving Web traffic, a new study from security vendor Arbor Networks suggests that this is no longer the case. For instance, Arbor estimates that Google alone accounts for 6% of all Internet traffic in the world. 12 cool ways to donate your PC's spare processing power Arbor Chief Scientist Craig Labovitz says that there are several reasons for this migration of traffic from individual enterprise data centers to "hyper giants" such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, including the rising costs and recourse demands of maintaining a data center and the aggressive efforts by large companies to buy up video, mail and other Web service companies. In its Internet Observatory report, Arbor notes that consolidation of content providers has led to the rise of  "a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers" that generate and consume an estimated 30% of all Internet traffic. Additionally, he says companies that built their own data centers years ago found them quickly outdated and that they didn't have the money to properly upgrade them. "Until a few years ago, there had been an overabundance of data centers," he says. "The data centers built five years ago are now out of date and there are entire generations of data centers where there's no way to upgrade them." The solution for companies, he says, has been to consolidate their infrastructure through virtualization or to outsource many of their IT operations to the cloud. "Starting with outsourced Web e-mail, we have seen a large migration of Web traffic out of small enterprise data centers and toward these large players," Labovitz explains. "The cost of data centers had started to affect companies' bottom lines and that has set the stage for what's starting to happen in the transit market." Arbor says that another consequence of content providers and content delivery networks becoming larger has been the decreasing importance to Tier-1 transit providers such as Verizon Business, AT&T and Level 3 in delivering Web traffic.

This price competition drove down IP wholesale market prices and forced many Tier 1 networks to pursue higher-value product offerings such as CDN, cloud computing and a greater focus on private enterprise offerings." Arbor conducted its study of global traffic patterns by analyzing nearly 3,000 peering touers across nine Tier-1, 48 Tier-2 and 33 consumer and content providers in four different continents. And because these companies have lost some of their profitability in the transit market, Arbor says that they've turned themselves more toward value-added services. "Over time, IP connectivity services became indistinguishable from one provider to the next," says Arbor in its research brief. "In response, providers started competing chiefly on price. Arbor said that at its peak, "the study monitored more than 12 terabits-per-second of offered load and a total of more than 256 exabytes of Internet traffic."

Starting in 2012, users of certain GPS devices will no longer get traffic updates, weather reports and other data because Microsoft is discontinuing its MSN Direct service. That program was the first to use the MSN Direct service to send information like news headlines, stock quotes, weather and traffic information to special wristwatches. Microsoft has posted a notice on its MSN Direct Web site informing users that the service will be available only until Jan. 1, 2012. MSN Direct is most often associated with Microsoft's Smart Watch program.

MSN Direct uses FM radio frequencies to deliver the data. GPS makers Garmin and Pioneer sell a range of units that can receive MSN Direct data. But Microsoft says that there are better ways to send such information today. "Leveraging unused FM radio spectrum to broadcast data represented a step forward in 2004, however, many choices today including WiFi, cellular, FM RDS [Radio Data System] and other digital networks are now readily available and are continuing to grow in popularity," according to the MSN Direct Web site. "Despite good initial MSN Direct adoption, these alternatives have significantly reduced demand for MSN Direct service." After it launched the watch program, Microsoft began marketing the MSN Direct service to other devices, including GPS units, weather stations and even coffee makers. Garmin did not immediately reply to a request for comment about whether it will try to replace the MSN Direct information service. Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, seemed to be a big fan of the watches, launching the program at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Microsoft said that products that support the service will continue to be available "for some time." Some people may be able to return a device because of the impending end of service, however. "If service beyond 01/01/2012 is a concern, please see your retailer for information on device returns," Microsoft wrote on the Web site. In 2004 after MSN Direct first launched, a Microsoft executive said there were thousands of people subscribing to it for their watches. However, the Smart Watch never really took off.

Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison both took the stage at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference Sunday evening to offer reassurances that Sun technologies will not go away should Oracle complete its planned acquisition of Sun. As a matter of fact, combining Sun's research and development budget with Sun's presents  "one of the great R&D opportunities of all time," McNealy said. [ Find out why some user are nervous about Oracle owning MySQL. | Relive Sun's storied history in InfoWorld's slideshow "The rise and fall of Sun Microsystems." ] Oracle, for example, intends to spend more money developing Sparc than Sun does now, he said. "That's a good sign for Sparc innovation," McNealy said. "You look at the core technologies that we're developing: They're going to find a nice home in this next chapter," he said, referring to merger. From Java to the Solaris OS to the Sparc CPU platform and Sun storage technologies, Oracle will be good for all of them, the executives stressed at the San Francisco event.

Ellison, for his part, took exception with IBM for suggesting Oracle was not committed to Sun's wares, particularly Sun hardware. "We're looking forward to competing with IBM in the systems [business] and we think the combination of Sun and Oracle [is] well-equipped to compete successfully against the giant," Ellison said. The challenge would be part of a new ad campaign. Ellison said he would give $10 million to anyone - any major company or enterprise - whose existing database application would not run at least twice as fast on Sun gear. But he acknowledged Oracle recently was fined $10,000 for running a recent ad comparing Sun and Oracle to IBM, in which the benchmark evidence had not yet been documented.  His explanation cited overzealousness on Oracle's part. "If IBM wants to compete, we're happy to compete and we made a series of commitments," Ellison said. And with a little more investment, it could be even better," said Ellison. Solaris, meanwhile, is the leading enterprise OS and the leading OS for running the Oracle database, he said. "We said we're not selling the hardware business and we think Sparc is a fantastic technology.

Oracle also plans to increase its investment in the open source MySQL database, Ellison said. MySQL currently is owned by Sun. He added that Oracle already has continued to invest in the Innobase technology it acquired that serves as the transaction engine in MySQL. There had been speculation that Oracle bought Innobase "to kill it," but that has not happened at all, Ellison stressed. IBM had been a rumored suitor for Sun prior to Oracle forging a deal to buy the company nearly six months ago. McNealy said efforts to close the sale were proceeding with authorities. The sale remains held up by the European Union, which is concerned over commercial database giant Oracle owning MySQL.  Recently, Ellison said Sun has been losing $100 million a month waiting for the sale to close.

To argue on behalf of Oracle's commitment to Java, McNealy brought Sun Vice President James Gosling, considered the father of Java, onstage. The JSR process is used to submit modifications to the platform to the community at large. Oracle's product mix features Java and the company has  participated in numerous Java Specification Requests (JSR), Gosling said. Oracle, though, has been a bit unprepared for the volume of activity in the Java world, Gosling, said. "We do 15 million downloads of the JRE (Java Runtime Edition) a week on average," he said. He lauded recent Sun-Oracle performance benchmarks and noted the recently introduced Sun-Oracle Exadata Database Machine Version 2, which combines Sun hardware with Oracle's database and storage management software.  Fowler also announced the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, which integrates 1.6TB of Flash storage into a device that looks like a server.

Also appearing onstage at OpenWorld was John Fowler, Sun vice president of system. "My team is excited about working closely with Oracle because we have been working with Oracle now [for] what's measured in decades," Fowler said. McNealy cited a long list of Sun accomplishments, including the Network File System, the various editions of Java, Sparc's being the first 64-bit volume RISC architecture, and the company's contributions to open source, including its use of Berkeley Unix. "We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix," he said. In a Top 10 list entitled "Top 10 Signs Engineers Have Gone Wild," McNealy  took potshots at Apple for not supporting Java on its iPhone. "Friends don't let friends type on an iPhone especially since it doesn't run Java. In a brief interview after the evening presentation, Tim Bray, Sun's director of Web technologies, would not comment on whether the Sun name would go away as part of the merger with Oracle or whether Sun would become a division of Oracle. Are you listening, Steve," McNealy said, referring to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.  "[The iPhone is] the only device on the planet that doesn't run Java." He also ridiculed President Barack Obama's winning of the Nobel Peace prize last week, without mentioning the President by name.

Follow the latest trends for developers, open source, and database management at InfoWorld.com.   One of the engineering signs on McNealy's list pertained to a Nobel prize for a gas mask bra, leading McNealy to follow the reference with a comment that such an award was "no more ridiculous than some other Nobel prizes that I've heard of." This story, "Sun, Oracle chiefs vow: Sun technologies will live on," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.