dimeperclick.com

It is correct that the reason I did not give the talk was due to various nondisclosure agreements; however, Apple was, to my knowledge, not aware of the talk, and there was no contact between them and myself, nor between them and anyone from my company, 318, in regard to the talk prior to my asking to be removed from consideration.

In comments to CNET News, which have been edited for readability, Edge had a lot to say:

When this story first came to light, it was The Washington Post who contacted me, asking why the talk had been removed from consideration–and not I who contacted them. I had not, in fact, discussed the talk with anyone between the time that I rescinded the talk and the time I received the call from The Washington Post, and…their source (remains unclear).

Last Thursday, researcher Charles Edge told Brian Krebs of The Washington Post that a talk on a previously disclosed flaw within the encryption for Apple FileVault had to be canceled because of a signed agreement with Apple.

The story had the individuals at Black Hat who handle the Call for Papers–the process by which a researcher submits a request to make a presentation and then waits to hear back from the conference–scrambling. Edge, who goes by the nickname “Krypted,” is a well-known Apple security researcher who has previously presented at both Black Hat and its Defcon sister conference.

This post has been updated with Charles Edge’s response.

LAS VEGAS–On the eve of this year’s Black Hat Briefings here, officials disputed a researcher’s claim that his talk had to be canceled. They say the talk never even existed.

Click here for full coverage of Black Hat 2008.

Meanwhile, a Black Hat representative confirmed that a panel discussion titled “Meet the Apple Security Experts” was canceled by its moderator. The panel still appears in the printed schedule for the conference because the cancellation came too late to change the printing. All other references have been removed.

But on Tuesday, two different Black Hat officials told CNET News that Edge never submitted a paper for this year’s conference.

I submitted the talk, and later sent a second submission using the same system to then ask to be removed from consideration. As an alumni speaker, I know from experience that the entire Black Hat organization is run extremely well. Why they cannot find me in their system, I cannot speak to.

If it was by some error on my part that the talk was not submitted properly, then this further underscores why this issue is not a big deal. Submitting and then rescinding it has a similar effect to not having submitted at all. If the abstract never made its way into the CFP system, then it simply narrows down the list of people who I need to touch base with that could have been Brian’s initial source.

The group has received reports of a new variant of the Storm worm that targets people interested in the May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people and left 5 million homeless. Some of the e-mails also have subject lines that deal with the Olympic Games that China is hosting.

In the e-mail is a link that sends a recipient to a malicious Web site, US-CERT says. Opening the purported video link on the site runs executable code that infects the computer with malicious code that can be used to turn the machine into a zombie on a spam botnet.

If you want information about the earthquake in China get it from a news site and not from a link to a video that arrives in your e-mail inbox.

As always, computer owners and administrators are urged to install and update antivirus software and to not follow unsolicited Web links received in e-mail messages.

That’s the message from the US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) on Thursday.

Previous versions have used April Fools’ Day and Valentine’s Day themes, as well as masqueraded as a fix for another worm to lure victims to sites.

And while it’s nice to have the young users on your site, “They do grow up,” Bartz said. People in their late 20s are “much more interested in Yahoo Finance. They don’t have all day to put pictures up and chat because guess what, they’re off the dole,” she said.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

In defense of Yahoo
She continued with the assertive tone set in her introductory press conference just two weeks ago, coming out guns-a-blazin’ as a strong Yahoo advocate, someone who’s willing do what’s right rather than come up with potentially damaging quick fixes.

“It’s my job to make sure that as a company we look at anything that makes sense long-term for the company and creates shareholder value. It’s very easy to have different shareholder interests. Some are short-term so they can jump out, and some (are) long term. It’s our job to make sure we’re looking at the bell curve of shareholder value,” she said. “Everything is on the table.”

Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s brand-new CEO, revealed her first public assessment of embattled Yahoo on Tuesday, arguing the company is stronger as a whole than as the sum of its parts.

Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen also went into some detail about the search business.

But not all is well. Google last week was relatively bullish about its search-ad business, reiterating its argument that the directly measurable return on advertising investments make it stronger during times of economic trouble. Jorgensen, in contrast, offered a note of caution that the economy means people aren’t searching for things to buy as often. “We’re tending to see cost-per-click growth, but click yields and fewer commercial queries are starting to impact revenues in general,” Jorgensen said.

The sober tones seemed present more to assure the audience that she wasn’t a pollyanna. Overall, it seemed outweighed by the kind of optimistic tone one might expect from a new CEO. Twice she said Yahoo’s prospects look better from within the company than from the gloom-and-doom press view she got in 2008.

“We’re building off the road map, first with Panama (Yahoo’s search ad sales system) and now with our continued innovation with Search Assist, SearchMonkey. It’s helped us stabilize the share,” Jorgensen said. And Yahoo’s numerous and often high-traffic properties help keep search ticking, he added.

Specifically, she said she’s not going to put the interests of short-term shareholders looking for a stock pop ahead of the long-term investors who are more patient for the company to improve its operations.

There were some encouraging statistics for Yahoo’s search business. Revenue increased 11 percent globally and 18 percent in the United States, Jorgensen said. In the United States, search queries increased 10 percent compared with the year-earlier quarter. Overall, revenue per search grew in the high single digits, he said.

“I didn’t come here to sell the company,” she asserted.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

The stock market responded with a collective optimism to Bartz’s debut and the financial results, pushing the stock up 59 cents, or 5 percent, to $11.93 in after-hours trading.

The obvious question is what that means for the possibility of selling the search business to Microsoft, a possibility that emerged last year, though the companies couldn’t agree to terms. Bartz wouldn’t rule out that transaction nor declare it a great idea, but her tone left the impression she’ll need more convincing.

Bartz has a lot of work ahead of her and didn’t pretend otherwise. Specifically, she pointed to communication problems within the company, a muddy presentation of its strategy, slow decision-making, and a lack of focus. She’ll “move swiftly” to right these wrongs, she said. And of course the economy is dismal.

Whither search?
She shared a smidgen of thinking about the search business specifically, though she qualified it with the comment that Yahoo would have to invest in it regardless of whether the company wanted to keep it or sell it. For one thing, it’s “extremely useful” to understand users’ intent through searches. For another, query growth, stemmed market share losses to Google, and faster introduction “increases the value of the product. It’s good for our brand and our shareholders, no matter what our long-term plan.”

There was no question who’s in charge of the company now. Former CEO Jerry Yang was present during the conference call, but for whatever reason didn’t make so much as a peep during the question-and-answer session.

“If we have strong products, we will attract the audience that just beats everything,” she said. “It’s not just about search. It’s about people coming for content and information.”

Wooing younger users
Microsoft isn’t the only company Bartz is monitoring. Facebook, too, with its younger users, also is on the list. As the mother of a 20 year old, “I’m very familiar with Facebook,” Bartz said.

“This is a fantastic Internet property, and it doesn’t deserve everybody trying to pick it and pull it apart,” Bartz said in a conference call after Yahoo reported mixed fourth-quarter results. Looking at statistics such as how many people use Yahoo, how long they stay on the site, and how they value its properties, she said, “This is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens.”

And, she added, that age group is easily jaded. “Just as MySpace was hot and it moved to Facebook, who knows what’s next? We have a lot going on. We’re dabbling in it with Yahoo Open Strategy. I was surprised. We have a demographic that serves the entire Web. I think we can get some growth in other areas,” she said, mentioning that aging baby boomers are less technically intimidated than today’s senior set.

“We understand that is a requirement,” said Charles Rule, an attorney for Microsoft. “The delays have not been as a result of Microsoft taking a lackadaisical attitude,”

In June, regulators said that the “overview documents” Microsoft prepared did not sufficiently enable third-party licensees to create software interoperable with the company’s operating systems. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Microsoft had to create a set of additional “system” documents that would give more information on the interaction between the protocols in a number of scenarios.

Muglia said the development of the system documents will undoubtedly go through next year, but that he could not present a final schedule for the project until the final template is completed. He said he could present a final schedule at the next status conference, slated for late January 2009.

Kollar-Kotelly urged all parties to resolve their differences to finish the system documents by November 2009, when the consent decree is set to expire.

“What we have today is the (technical committee) and its staff spoon-feeding the world’s biggest PC company,” he said. “Something about that just isn’t right.”

The comments were made during a status conference meeting held to asses Microsoft’s compliance with the consent decree.

WASHINGTON– Microsoft has made some progress developing a set of documents required as part of its antitrust consent decree, but the work could be accomplished much more quickly if the company took on a less grudging attitude, state and federal antitrust regulators said Thursday.

“Something’s missing here, and I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what it is,” she said.

Still, Kollar-Kotelly questioned Microsoft’s commitment.

“I have to express my concern with this attitude that they’re behaving as a volunteer,” said Jay Himes, the antitrust bureau chief for the New York attorney general’s office. “It fosters this sort of grudging commitment to get the system documents done.”

Microsoft has been working with a court-appointed technical committee to create a set of templates for the system documents. So far, they have reached an agreement as to what the first template–which encompasses most of the system documents–should look like.

Representatives for Microsoft said the company is very committed to finishing the templates and the system documents. The company has assigned a significant number of senior engineers on the template project, said Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior vice president of servers and tools.

However, the complicated process of finalizing the templates is taking longer than anyone expected. As stated in a status report released last week, the technical committee had to submit its own template design to Microsoft to work with because it was concerned the Redmond, Wash., company’s template was not well-designed.

“I do appreciate that these things are complex, but I think it’s interesting the (technical committee) is able to do what’s necessary and bring Microsoft along, and not the other way around,” she said.

He said the technical committee’s implementation group has been called off all other tasks to support the template effort, and the committee dedicated more than 150 hours to meetings about the templates just last week.

“When we look at the envirnonment, IT and software spending continues to look healthy,” she said. “From where we sit, the economy is looking good from an IT and software spending standpoint.”

She also said that Microsoft continues to see a strong market for software, despite rumblings about the economy.

For several quarters, Microsoft has been seeing a drop in piracy rates, which has been helping fuel improved business in its Windows unit. In the just-reported March quarter, however, Microsoft saw an increased rate of piracy, an executive told CNET News.com on Thursday.

In an interview, Colleen Healy, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations, said that the number of unlicensed PCs, particularly in Asia, increased during the company’s third quarter. That was one of the factors that caused the Windows unit to come in shy of what the company had forecast.

Healy said that the company expected the piracy reduction trend to return in the current period, the company’s fourth quarter, which runs through June.

“Q3 was a tough quarter on the unlicensed front,” Healy said. “We had been making gains there for the past several quarters.”

Weakness in the Windows unit and the Microsoft Business Division, which includes Office, was offset by higher-than-expected sales in the Entertainment and Devices unit, which includes
Xbox, Healy said.

“We saw the PC market take a different mix,” Healy said. “Emerging markets on the PC hardware came in a little stronger; mature markets came in a little weaker.”

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Overall, Healy said the PC market came up about a percentage point shy of Microsoft’s growth forecast.

Colleen Healy, Microsoft's general manager of investor relations

E-mail discipline

(Credit:
Mozilla)

Procrastato

Gmail “e-mail goggles” and “take a break” labs add-ons

Along the lines of MeeTimer and Email Discipline, LeechBlock lets you organize sites you probably shouldn’t be going to in sets. You can prioritize each set, and block yourself out of using them down to certain times of day, or how much time you’ve already spent using them. Consider this something similar to the parental settings on a TV, keeping you from accessing content you shouldn’t be looking at when you’re supposed to be working.

E-mail discipline bars you from using certain sites until you get work done.

If you want the nagging features of Google or Yahoo calendar with some level of anonymity there’s always HassleMe. The site will send you a friendly reminder e-mail to do something, be it to take out the trash, reply to a certain e-mail, or finish a project. You get to pick how often it sends these messages, and it promises to change up the times ever so slightly so you cannot anticipate when it will arrive.

HassleMe

ReminderFox

Trying to get work done is tough if you have an Internet connection. The constant urge to take a peek at a video on YouTube or check your personal e-mail is a siren song that for many simply cannot be ignored. Luckily, there are several sites and browser add-ons that can help keep us in line, be it with basic productivity or making sure we do not stumble in moments of weakness.

Any we missed? Leave them in the comments.

Likewise, the “take a break” labs add-on can make you stop whatever work you’re doing to go enjoy the finer things in life. It keeps tabs on how long you’ve been working in Gmail and will give you a pop-up that requires doing something else for 15 minutes before coming back to your in-box. This is recommended if you don’t want to install one of those ergonomic nag programs on your machine.

Want to send that e-mail at 4 a.m.? Unless you’re up early, and getting a jump start on the work day, Google’s Gmail thinks you’re drunk and will wisely make you do the math problems to prove you’re not. Of course, if you really want to outsmart the machine you can simply turn this Gmail labs add-on off from the settings menu, which requires no math whatsoever.

MeeTimer

If pop-up nags aren’t your thing, and you don’t feel like being scolded for bad online behavior, worth checking out is MeeTimer. Once installed it simply keeps tabs on how long you’re spending on each site and breaks it up into percentages–including how much of that was done during “work” time. Consider it the browser equivalent of parental guilt trip. It’s not mad at you, just disappointed that you spend 29 percent of your working day on Facebook.

Don’t drink and e-mail.

See how your daily browsing is broken down with MeeTimer. You might be shocked.

Want to hop on Facebook or check your personal e-mail for a little while while drudging away at work? You’ll need to earn it with E-mail discipline. This
Firefox add-on keeps you from visiting nearly 20 different sites including MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter without doing a little bit of work between sessions. As long as you ignore these places for two hours at a time it lets you browse for a short while, before putting up a nag screen that tells you to get back to it. Users are able to override the nag screens at any time by clicking the “cheat” button.

If clogging up your e-mail in-box with reminders sounds less than desirable, check out ReminderFox. This Firefox add-on puts a to-do list on the side of your browser. You can set deadlines for each task, along with reminders that will pop up, and can be acknowledged, ignored, or delayed, just like in Microsoft Outlook.

(Credit:
Mozilla)

Like E-mail discipline, Firefox add-on Procrastato works off a blacklist of sites you probably shouldn’t be visiting. Once you’re on one of these sites (which you add in manually) it starts a timer in the background. If you’re there past your allotted amount it gives you a pop-up message telling you to get back to work.

LeechBlock

Built in are a few tools like a Delicious bookmark viewer that opens up your saved bookmarks in the canvas while allowing you to hop back to open others. There’s also an Add This sharing tool integrated in the top corner along with a search tool that replaces the one in your browser. It’s the only way the service gets its cash (the same way your browser does), but it’s also in there so you can do a search without getting jettisoned off the Spickr interface.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Spickr lets you surf a large directory of categorized sites quickly and easily without leaving the directory. And there's nothing to install either. (Click to enlarge)

The screenshot below really doesn’t do the service justice. You can give it a go with this page by clicking here.

Competing link repositories like Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop and Original Signal have had similar efforts for a while now, however, both of those let you see headlines and small scraps of stories. Spickr’s approach is simply the links and a simple way to come back to the directory in case you get lost. It ends up being a great way to explore new sites you may have never heard of. My only qualm is the categorization, which is all over the place. The tech section in particular has subcategories that I think could be done a little better. That said, there are in excess of 400 sites, which is quite a bit to sort through. Hopefully, in the future users will be able to help edit and shape the categories and even get rid of sites they don’t use.

Spickr is a strange take on the browser sidebar. These creations usually require you to install a small extension into your browser that will give you a new menu on the left or right side of your browser (see Yoono, gDocs Sidebar, et al). Instead, Spickr’s solution is to run everything inside top and side IFrames that contain a slew of links to various news and entertainment sites. Clicking on any of those links will load it up inside your browser while the Spickr interface remains.

Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.

The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning’s way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style “compliments” now in the mix.

There are also 70 “sponsored” Wetpaint wikis, like the fan wikis created by cable network Showtime for each of its programs.

Long version: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It’s Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven’t heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it’s positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.

Hosting company GoGrid suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack Monday afternoon that affected approximately half of its thousands of customers, co-founder David Hecht said on Tuesday.

The company is continuing to investigate the issue and asks its customers to run a traceroute to their servers’ IP address and report it to GoGrid’s support staff, should they encounter connectivity problems.

The DDoS attack hit Monday afternoon, slowing customers’ Web sites, creating latency issues, and making clients’ Web sites inaccessible, Hecht said.

GoGrid determined that the problem apparently was centered on a routing issue, with some of its networks failing to properly announce GoGrid routes. The routing issue was resolved late Tuesday morning.

On Monday night, GoGrid spent hours rebooting its servers and developing a long-term game plan to solve the ongoing issue, but by morning, the company continued to be inundated with customer calls that their Web sites were not reachable from certain parts of the Internet.

In the end, the decision was made to proceed with the maintenance because this capacity expansion had been planned for several months and would give us more flexibility in ensuring low utilization across our infrastructure. In hindsight, this may have been a poor decision because the maintenance took longer to complete, and the maintenance window had to be expanded by several hours.

The maintenance, which required GoGrid to take its portal down and troubleshoot support queries over the phone, was designed to expand its capacity, deploy minor bug fixes, and add additional improvements to the service.

Although GoGrid was able to stabilize the situation by late Monday afternoon, getting most of its customers’ sites back online, the company faced a decision whether to stay on course with a scheduled maintenance later that night or reschedule for another date.

In its notice to customers, GoGrid stated:

The blog also notes: “It was never really in the cards to do away with the XPS gaming products early, but instead to integrate the development teams from both Alienware and XPS…The XPS isn’t going away, though it may go in new directions as hinted by the XPS One and the slimline XPS m1330.”

A Wall Street Journal report had stated that Dell would quickly kill off its XPS line, which Dell later denied.

The starting prices for two featured Dell XPS M1730 notebooks are about $600 and $1,100 more than the starting prices for two featured Alienware systems on Dell’s notebook gaming page.

(Credit:
Dell)

Dell Web page features new Alienware game notebooks

“The Alien invasion has continued, with the addition of the Area-51 m9750 to the Dell gaming laptop Web site lineup,” according to the post. The 17-inch notebook offers two 512MB GeForce 8700m GT cards as an option.

Dell is taking steps to promote Alienware PCs on its Web site as the PC maker tries to collaborate more–rather than compete outright–with its Alienware unit.

Dell has added the Area-51 m9750 to its gaming laptop Web site, according to a Dell company blog.

An Area-51 m9750, for example, starts at $1,399. But add a 17-inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 screen, an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 2.33GHz processor, another gigabyte of memory (for a total of 2GB), and a 160GB 7200 RPM hard disk drive, and the price jumps to $2,524.

This brings the Alienware notebook a lot closer to the Dell 17-inch XPS M1730 World of Warcraft Edition in price ($2,599) and features. Interestingly, the Alienware m9750 notebook is not available with 45-nanometer Intel T8300, T9300, T9500 (or X9000 Extreme) processors. Dell does offer these processors.