Web Development

Multiple sources are confirming that the Chinese/Israeli startup behind the Maxthon Browser has sold a minority stake to Google. The total investment size is rumored to be around $1 million. We are also hearing that this investment is part of a “much larger strategic deal” between the two companies.

Maxthon has had over 80 million downloads of its browser, and over half of its users are in China. Maxthon-originated searches may account for up to 25% of total Baidu traffic, according to one source.

At the very least we expect the strategic deal to involve replacing the default search option in the browser from the Baidu search engine in China and Yahoo in other countries with Google search. The deal may also go beyond search and involve integration with other Google services directly into the browser. Maxthon would then be promoted on Google as a preferred browser.

The deal was apparently done at least two months ago, but the companies have delayed releasing the news. We’ve contacted Netanel Jacobsson at Maxthon about this story, but he has declined to comment. We also have an email into Google PR for comment.

Maxthon has raised less than $6 million prior to this investment. Seed financing came from Morten Lund and WI Harper in March 2005, and CRV invested around $5 million in the company in March 2006.

Microsoft says that it’s dropping DRM from some of the catalog in the Zune store. This is the other shoe-drop we’ve all been waiting for since Apple announced last week that it would sell the entire EMI catalog (albeit at a 30% higher price) without DRM through the iTunes Music Store. Interestingly, Microsoft seems to be implying that it’s going to sell DRM-free tracks from labels other than EMI.

“The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple,” said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels “for some time now” about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.”Consumers have made it clear that unprotected music is something they want,” Asher said. “We plan on offering it to them as soon as our label partners are comfortable with it.”

Google threw a new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market.

Goog-411 can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The product is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for additional or clarifying information. You tell it your city and state, and then ask for a specific business or business category. In my tests the product was excellent. Although the voice recognition was only working at about 70% efficiency, I just said “back” and retried when it didn’t understand what I said. Results are spoken back or text messaged back to you, and you are automatically put through to the phone number requested.

GOOG-411 is using Google’s normal local business information available on Google Maps and elsewhere. Businesses that want to add or correct data can do so here.

The product competes head on with Jingle Networks, which has taken 6% market share in the U.S. 411 business over the last year. AT&T is also experimenting with free 411 calls. None of these products come anywhere close to as good as TellMe’s rich client business information tool for mobile phones, but few phones support TellMe at this time (TellMe was recently acquired by Microsoft).

The paid 411 market is so dead. I’m betting these free alternatives take at least 50% market share within a couple of years.

Update: This is actually a product that Google’s been testing in various formats for some time. Steve Poland (a regular contributor here) is pointing me to some posts (and here) by Greg Sterling from last year that discuss this. The earliest reports on this are from October 2006, and the service may be from an acquisition of 1-877-520-FIND. More information here

By Peter Buxbaum
April 5, /2007/

The Army may follow the Air Forces lead in setting up a cyber command.

Cyber war is emerging as just as important as kinetic war, some say more
important, said Vernon Bettencourt, the Armys deputy chief information
officer at the recent AFCEA Belvoir chapter/Program Executive Office
Enterprise Information Systems industry day in Bethesda, Md.

We are looking at what the Air Force has done and we keep asking
ourselves, Are there any ideas the Army should be adopting?? Bettencourt
added.

The Air Force announced it would create a cyber command last November
that would be located at the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base,
La. The service named Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, commander of the 8th Air
Force, as the commands first chief. The command is scheduled to begin
operations in May and be fully operational by October 2009.

Bettencourt said the establishment of the Air Force entity represented a
restatement of that services mission.

The Air Force did not just create a new command, he said. The Air Force
changed its mission statement to say that it fights in three domains:
air, space and cyberspace. A development like that is worthy of our
assessment.

To that end, a high-level Army delegation recently visited the Air Force
Cyber Command.

They have amalgamated some capabilities together, Bettencourt said. They
have consolidated network operations and defense on a global basis.

He added that the Army already has done some of the same by co-locating
parts of its Information Operations Command, its computer emergency
response teams and its Network Enterprise Technology Command together at
Fort Belvoir, Va.

Bettencourt also said the Army is leading the fleet in the use of common
access cards.

It is an important part in defending our huge network, he said. In the
very near future, we wont be using passwords anymore.

Col. Tom Hogan, the infrastructure deputy program director of PEO-EIS,
said there was at least one exception to that rule.

We will continue to honor passwords for retirees, Hogan said. We will
maintain a way to get into system for all those dont get CAC cards.

Bettencourt went on to admonish the defense industry audience not to
offer equipment or software to the Army that is not CAC-enabled.

Another Army priority that has emerged is the encryption of data at
rest, especially because it has been distributing more laptop computers.

As a result, were having more computers stolen and lost, Bettencourt
said. We have issued a policy requiring that any computer taken out of
the office must be labeled as authorized for travel and that its data
must be encrypted. Even if the machine is CAC-enabled so a thief cant
pull out the hard drive and read all of its data if it is lost or
stolen.

Bettencourt said the ultimate decision to stand up an Army Cyber Command
will come down to how to best provide cyber capabilities to warfighters.

We are assessing what it means from a command perspective, he said. How
do we take information operations capabilities and organization and
provide them the combatant or joint force commander?

Buxbaum is a freelancer writer in Bethesda, Md.

From http://www.fcw.com/article98157-04-05-07-Web

By Matt Hines
April 05, /2007/

A new report filed by federal security auditors finds that that the
Internal Revenue Service has had almost 500 laptop computers lost or
stolen over the last three years, many of which were loaded with
sensitive taxpayer information.

In a memo authored by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for
Audit, Michael R. Phillips, investigators maintain that the IRS is not
adequately protecting taxpayer data on laptops and other portable
electronic media devices. The report contends that between 2003 and 2006
the IRS had some 490 laptops lost or stolen in 387 individual incidents.

In the missive, originally filed to IRS leaders on March 23, the
auditors said 176 of those incidents did not involve the potential
exposure of taxpayer data, but noted that the information of at least
2,300 individuals was stored on the other missing laptops.

The investigators said that they were unable to deduce whether taxpayer
information was exposed via 85 of the reported device losses, however,
it was confirmed that the personal information of at least 3,359
taxpayers was misplaced in the other incidents.

While chilling, the report does in fact show signs that the IRS has
slowed the loss of computing devices over the last few years. In Jan.
2002, the IRS admitted in a similar audit that it had lost or misplaced
some 2,332 laptops, desktops and servers over the previous 36 months.

According to the report, a large number of the missing laptops were
stolen from employees’ vehicles and residences, with an additional 111
of the incidents occurring within IRS facilities.

Perhaps the most notorious loss of a laptop in the federal sector came
in May 2006 when a contractor working with the Department of Veterans
Affairs had a computer stolen from his home that carried the personal
data of an estimated 26.5 million people. The laptop was eventually
recovered by law enforcement officials.

In addition to failing to properly secure their devices in and out of
the office, the auditors said that some of the IRS’ 100,000 employees
were not properly encrypting data on their machines or utilizing
adequate password protections.

Further, the auditors said that they conducted a test on 100 laptop
computers currently in use by IRS employees and determined that 44 of
the devices contained unencrypted sensitive data, including taxpayer
data and employee personnel data.

The IRS requires usernames and passwords on its laptops, but 15 of the
44 computers with unencrypted sensitive data also contained security
vulnerabilities that could allow for circumvention of those tools.

“As a result, we believe it is very likely a large number of the lost or
stolen IRS computers contained similar unencrypted data,” the inspectors
wrote in the report. “Employees did not follow encryption procedures
because they were either unaware of security requirements, did so for
their own convenience, or did not know their own personal data were
considered sensitive.”

The auditors also observed other computer devices, including as USB
flash drives, CDs, and DVDs on which sensitive data were not always
encrypted, and found in a test on the agency’s off-site storage back-up
operations that at least four of the sites lacked sufficient data
encryption.

At one location, non-IRS employees had full access to the storage
infrastrucutre and the agency’s backup media, the report said. In
addition, envelopes and boxes with backup media onboard were left open
and not resealed.

At another back-up facility, a retired employee still retained full
access rights to sensitive data. and inventory controls for backup media
were found to be inadequate.

“We attributed these weaknesses to a lack of emphasis by management,”
the auditors wrote.

Another problem isolated in the report is a lack of consistent reporting
of device losses to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s office
and the IRS Computer Security Incident Response Center (CSIRC), both of
which are required to be notified in such incidents. Inadequate
coordination between the two groups made it harder to determine what
types of information were on each of the missing computers, according to
the report.

In their final recommendations, the auditors recommend that IRS leaders
refine their incident response procedures to ensure for better
understanding of any potential data exposure and more frequently remind
employees to use proper device security measures. The report also
contends that the agency should consider implementing a “systemic disk
encryption solution” on its laptops that does not rely on employee
interaction to protect sensitive information.

Phillips writes that IRS management agreed with all of his office’s
findings, and most of its recommendations.

Original: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/05/HNirslostlaptops_1.html

With more details emerging about the Xbox Elite, we’re finding that the provided HDMI isn’t quite the Holy Grail—at least according to one AVS forums Microsoft “insider.”While you already know that the new Xbox Elite will feature HDMI like its PS3 counterpart has since launch, the Elite’s HDMI will be slightly gimped, running at the 1.2 standard instead of the 1.3. What does this mean for you? Neither of the newest Lossless formats (Dolby Digital+ nor True HD) can be passed through its HDMI (not that you’d notice in most TV audio setups).This is not to say I wouldn’t still trade my 20GB model for the Elite—I’d just be a bit less pleased with the whole experience. On the plus side, a Spring update should bring 1080p IRE-level adjustments to the VGA port on all 360 models. – Mark Wilson

Source: Xbox Elite is Really Just OK

UK Home Secretary John Reid has said that Sony’s PlayStation 3 will not be allowed in jails.

The decision was made based on fears surrounding the PS3’s Wi-Fi functionality and its ability to share data with Sony’s handheld PSP.”Advice was issued to all prisons in December 2005 that the Sony PlayStation 3 was barred from the prison estate because of the equipment’s ability to send and receive radio signals,” said John Reid, in a response to shadow secreatery David Davis’ recent querying of Home Office regulations concerning the use of games consoles.
Back in June 2006, it was reported that PS2s had been banned from UK prisons due to inmates watching porn.