Eideard

The capital of Wisconsin is buying 600 iPads this spring and plans to buy another 800 this fall, all paid for using funds from the state’s settlement with Microsoft related to consumer lawsuits claiming the company overcharged customers for its software…

Smojver added that the new iPads will enable students to wirelessly share their work and enable schools to replace textbooks with digital apps or ebooks, referring to Apple’s recent announcement related to iBooks 2, iBooks Author and digital textbooks as a “significant development.”

District deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp noted that Madison administrators had been impressed by the results of an iPad trial by Chicago Public Schools, which found the tablets were successful in keeping students more engaged in the classroom.

Wisconsin’s iPads are being paid for through $3.4 million of the nearly $80 million settlement Microsoft agreed to pay the state to settle claims that it has systematically cheated consumers into paying too much for its software…

Har! Something somewhere in there about karma.

Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies…

Although such companies try to keep their users’ information private, their business models depend on exploiting it to sell targeted advertising, and when governments demand they hand it over, they have little choice but to comply…

But the vast amount of personal information that companies like Google collect to run their businesses has become simply too valuable for police and governments to ignore, delegates to the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi said.

“When the possibility exists for information to be obtained that wasn’t possible before, it’s entirely understandable that law enforcement is interested,” Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Reuters in an interview. “Then the issue would be, what’s the right policy? And that, of course, engenders a lot of debate,” said Cerf…

Demands from governments for Internet companies to hand over user information have become routine, according to online privacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian, who makes extensive use of freedom-of-information requests in his work.

“Every decent-sized U.S. telecom and Internet company has a team that does nothing but respond to requests for information,” Soghoian told Reuters…

Soghoian estimates that U.S. Internet and telecoms companies may receive about 300,000 such requests in connection with law enforcement each year…

“Now, one police officer from the comfort of their desk can track 20, 30, 50 people all through Web interfaces provided by mobile companies and cloud computing companies,” he said.

I realize some of my regular readers are already paranoid about what companies like Google and Facebook are doing with the information they gather about users. Anonymized or not.

Now, it’s becoming more and more clear that the cost to governments of tracking your every movement and thought – is a bargain at any price.

The U.S. EPA estimated that servers and data centers were responsible for up to 1.5 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption, or roughly 0.5 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, in 2007. With companies such as Apple and Google strongly pushing the move to cloud computing, that figure is likely to increase significantly in the coming decade. Since a lot of energy is consumed keeping the computer systems cool, colder climates are seen as more favorable sites for data centers. But a new paper from Microsoft Research proposes a different approach that would see servers, dubbed Data Furnaces, distributed to office buildings and homes where they would act as a primary heat source.

The Microsoft Research paper says that at around 40-50°C the temperature of the exhaust air from a computer server is too low to regenerate electricity efficiently. However, this temperature is perfect for heating purposes, such as home/building space heating, clothes dryers and water heaters. So the researchers argue that placing servers used for cloud computing operations directly into homes and/or office buildings would turn heat generation from a problem into an advantage.

The Data Furnaces (DFs) would be micro-datacenters on the order of 40 to 400 CPUs that would be connected to the Internet and integrated into the house/office building’s heating system in the same way as a conventional electrical furnace. By leveraging the home’s existing infrastructure and doing away with the need for dedicated real estate and construction of new facilities, DFs would significantly reduce the cost per server when compared to conventional data centers.

Additionally, such a setup would also provide lower network latency as the storage and computation systems can be located closer to areas of high population density and therefore those using them.

The DFs would be managed remotely and the researchers suggest that cloud computing service operators could provide free heat to host families in return for occasionally replacing air filters or, in extreme circumstances, turning servers off and on…

RTFA. Farfetched? Maybe not. We could certainly benefit from a proposal like this – we have the space in a detached building that still would allow heated air to be ducted into the house in cold weather. The data center owners would have the benefit of one or two resident geeks.

Cripes – I’ll be among the first to volunteer.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

China’s Baidu is to partner with Microsoft for English-language search, giving the U.S. software giant a chance to expand its tiny Web presence in a market Google has stepped back from, and helping the Chinese company’s international ambitions.

The tie-up will direct English searches from Baidu to Microsoft’s Bing, which will deliver the results back to Baidu’s Web pages…

Baidu has about 80 percent of the search market in China — a nation with almost half a billion Internet users and still only about 30 percent penetration — after Google left mainland China in a high-profile fallout with Beijing over censorship.

Bing — which filters out results in China relating to controversial subjects, such as political dissidents, Taiwan or pornography, to be able to operate in the country — has a negligible share of the market, while Google has nearly 20 percent counting visits to its offshore sites…

The new tie-up, due to be launched later this year, builds on existing cooperation between Baidu and Bing on mobile platforms and page results.

Bing is one of the few software packages that Microsoft hasn’t managed to screw-up with complexity. The usual outcome for their products that just work well – and need little touching up over time – is that they get bored with it and drop it. Microsoft MONEY being the best example of that practice.

Clarification: I own enough Baidu shares to buy half a Yaris.

Google’s bids for a pool of wireless patents were based on mathematical constants, say sources.

The portfolio of 6,000 patents was auctioned to realise some value from the assets of bankrupt telecoms firm Nortel. During the sale, Google’s bids were based on pi, other constants and the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Google lost the auction as a consortium including Apple and Microsoft made the winning bid of $4.5bn…

The sale of the patent portfolio started as a five-way scrap between two separate consortia and individual firms including Google and Intel. Initial estimates suggested the portfolio would attract around $2bn but the four days of intense bidding saw the total rise sharply.

During its bids, Google picked numbers including Brun’s constant and Meissel-Mertens constant that were said to have “puzzled” others involved in the auction. When bids from rivals hit $3bn, Google reportedly bid pi, $3.14159bn, to up the ante.

“Either they were supremely confident or they were bored,” Reuters’ source said.

It is not clear what inspired Google to draw on obscure mathematics for its bids. However, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is widely acknowledged to be a maths prodigy and the bids may reveal his influence…

Ultimately the portfolio was being fought over by two groups: Google and Intel on one side and the Microsoft/Apple-led consortium on the other.

Reuters completely missed the Third Force analysis, which is – Google is often guided by a sense of humor reflecting the attitudes of the founders.

 
If you remember “Clippy” — that googly-eyed paper clip that once hopped out of the corner of the computer screen to “help” with Microsoft Office tasks — chances are you don’t remember him fondly.

Many Office users cringed when the Microsoft cartoon delivered cheerily obvious messages like: “It looks like you’re writing a letter…”

Well, like it or not, Clippy is back.

But there’s good news: You don’t have to deal with him if you don’t want to.

After killing off the cartoon paper clip, Microsoft decided to revive him (I guess it’s a him?) in limited fashion as part of a learn-how-to-use-Office game called “Ribbon Hero 2: Clippy’s Second Chance.”

The game is just something you download to get better at using Office, if you want to. Clippy takes people through challenges in this game, but he doesn’t show up automatically in Word, PowerPoint or Microsoft’s other Office apps…

“Yes, we turned Office into a game! If you’re going to spend time immersed in the inner workings of Office, by golly it should be fun.

That’s about as much as I can take.

Rustock, purveyor of more e-mail spam than any other network in the world, was felled last week by Microsoft and federal law enforcement agents.

A lawsuit by Microsoft that was unsealed at the company’s request late today triggered several coordinated raids last Wednesday that took down Rustock, a botnet that infected millions of computers with malicious code in order to turn them into a massive spam-sending network.

“This botnet is estimated to have approximately a million infected computers operating under its control and has been known to be capable of sending billions of spam mails every day,” Richard Boscovich, senior attorney in the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post today.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that it was Microsoft’s digital crimes unit, working in concert with U.S. marshals, that raided seven hosting facilities across the country and seized the command-and-control machines that ran the network. Those are the servers that send instructions to the fleet of infected computers to dish out spam messages hawking such items as phony lottery scams and fake and potentially dangerous prescription drugs.The takedown was known internally as Operation b107.

Shutting down Rustock could put a huge dent in spam worldwide. Tech security giant Symantec estimated last year that Rustock was responsible for 39 percent of the world’s spam. Global spam levels dropped 12 percent after Dutch authorities took down a Trojan horse named Bredolab last November.

Rock on, Microsoft. Cleaning up the ethically-diseased flavor of hacker is always worthwhile.

No doubt there will be a new rationale for script kiddies – or the occasional “honest” crook – who will rejoin the scumsuckers of spam. Their relationship to ordinary folks who simply wish to avail themselves of modern communications will continue to be parasitic.

A memo speech, subsequently posted on Nokia’s internal blog, from Nokia’s new chief executive Stephen Elop warning the staff that it is “standing on a burning platform” has leaked from the company and indicates that the former Microsoft executive is planning radical action to revive the company’s fortunes…

The memo post likens the company’s situation to that of a man standing on an oil platform in the North Sea and facing a raging fire on multiple fronts – who has no choice but to jump into freezing water to survive…

Elop is expected to make a significant announcement this Friday about what Nokia will do to stem the loss of market share, notably in the smartphone market, where despite being the biggest player it has been unable to compete with incomers, notably Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS…

Elop points to a number of problems for the company…

• the “battle of devices has become a war of ecosystems” (such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Marketplace) and “our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem”

• “Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.”

• “we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us” – from Apple, Android, and from Chinese competitors that can produce a device “much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, ‘the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.’ They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.”

• “we’re not fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.”

RTFA for the text of the whole speech, details of the internal criticism.

Yes, you will probably see me use it, again, discussing American politics.

Google has filed suit against the U.S. government, alleging that the process by which a government agency evaluated a request for a new software suite unfairly gave preference to Microsoft.

In 2009 the Department of the Interior sought a new collaboration and messaging suite for its approximately 88,000 employees. Google sought to join the process, but was allegedly rebuffed by the bureaucratic process.

Because of Microsoft’s long history of providing government solutions, the suit alleges that the DOI established Microsoft Office as a departmental standard, which was affirmed in an updated decision in July 2010…

Microsoft had submitted its Microsoft BPOS-Federal Suite, consisting of hosting services, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online. Google wished to challenge Microsoft with its Google Apps, a hosted service that Google said could be implemented more cheaply and effectively than Microsoft’s service. In July, Google won FISMA certification for Google Apps for Government, a hosted version of Google Apps that Google said met the DOI’s requirements.

Google asked the court to bar the Department of the Interior from going forward with the requisition process, including a planned 5,000-user pilot process for Microsoft’s products.

Bid-rigging is a time-honored part of American government. How dare Google challenge our traditions?

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp’s departing software chief, has asked the company to move on from its roots as a computer-oriented company to imagine a ‘post-PC world’ that relies on wireless devices and the Internet to function.

The call from Ozzie, who announced his retirement from Microsoft last week, is meant to galvanize the company, which has fallen behind Apple and Google in the rapidly growing phone and tablet computer sector that many now see as key to the future.

“Close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur,” wrote Ozzie in a memo posted on his personal blog on Monday. “Those who can envision a plausible future that’s brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead.”

The message comes almost exactly five years after Ozzie made his initial mark on Microsoft with his ‘Internet Services Disruption’ memo, which is regarded as Microsoft’s manifesto for moving toward “cloud computing,” where data and software are supplied over the Internet rather than installed on machines…

He goes on to praise competitors for “seamless fusion of hardware and software and services,” which appears to be a nod to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phone system, which are proving more popular with consumers than Microsoft’s own offerings…

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said there are no plans to appoint a new chief software architect when Ozzie retires.

Is that supposed to be a surprise? Ozzie must have driven him round the bend every day.

BTW, wander through some of the development notes and suggestions from Windows 1.0 in 1985 – at Ozzie’s blog.