Review: Canon Pixma MX922 has great small-office features and pricey ink

A moderately busy small or home office is the target audience for the Canon Pixma MX922, a $200 (as of 06/28/2013) color inkjet multifunction that can handle every office chore from automatic two-sided scanning and printing, to faxing and printing optical media. Output quality and speed are good, too. But the party ends with the ink costs: The MX922 ships with low-capacity starter cartridges, and the regular and larger cartridges are no great bargain.

Well-rounded design

The Canon Pixma MX922 is a well-rounded multifunction inkjet printer, literally as well as feature-wise. It has Canon's signature rounded corners, a beveled top and bottom, and the same wrap-around front panel and small flip-open ink access lid as its Pixma MG6320 cousin. However, it retains Canon's dodgy, last-generation controls, with the three action buttons and separate four-way cursor. The issue with these is that some functions are available only via the action buttons, and some only via the contextually lit cursor/okay buttons. It's confusing, inefficient, and—if you use the panel often enough—aggravating. On the plus side, the button grid transforms into a keypad when you need to use the unit's fax capabilities.

Installing is MX922 is easy, if a wee bit tedious. There are quite a few dialogs to click through, but the install routine found the printer on the network quickly and there were no other glitches. We used Wi-Fi, but you may also connect directly to a PC via the unit's USB 2.0 port, or wire it to your network via ethernet. The software is the usual efficient Canon bundle, with its veteran scanning utility, Image Garden for organizing and editing photos, and a solid driver. There are also the usual remote and email printing features.

As mentioned, the MX922 automatically prints and scans in duplex. Paper capacity is good for a small office multifunction: 250 sheets, which reside in a bottom-mounted cassette that extends to handle legal-sized paper. Directly above the cassette and revealed when the front panel drops are a 20-sheet tray for 4-by-6-inch photo media and a feed for printable optical media. As with most Canon printers, the front panel drops automatically, so you can keep it closed for appearances yet not have to worry about a paper catastrophe if you print without checking the machine first.

Nice overall output quality, especially text

The pages emerging from the MX922 have the typical Canon look. That means sharp text, decent plain-paper graphics, and very nice photos. By default, the latter tend to look a tad light compared to the competition, but the color palette is essentially accurate, gradients are smooth, and details in dark areas are nicely defined. They photos are not quite up to what you'll see from high-end photo printers, but for a $200 MFP they're excellent.

Speed-wise, the MX922 fell in the middle of the pack, but it's certainly fast enough for a small or home office. Text and monochrome newsletters with mixed graphics print at 8.6 pages per minute on the PC and 8.1 ppm on the Mac. Full color photos print about one every two minutes to glossy stock, but nearly 3 a minute to plain paper. Copies arrived at about 6.1 per minute, a very good pace.

More ink choices, but worse ink prices

When we reviewed this printer's predecessor, the Pixma MX892, we complained about the lack of high-yield inks to cut printing costs. Canon apparently listened—this new model has them—but the costs didn't improve much. Color isn't bad, but black is high. With the standard size cartridges (the PGI-250 black and CLI-250 colors including a photo black), black pages cost around 5 cents and four-color pages, 16.6 cent per sheet. Using the XL cartridges drops a black page only to 4.6 cents, and four-color pages, 12.8 cents. There's an XXL black, but it only drops the price of pages another 0.2 cents. We also noticed that while the new inks have lower prices compared to the MX892's they also have lower page lives.

Canon's warranty for the Pixma MX922 lasts a single year—better than the 90 days you get with entry-level MFPs, but not as nice as the three years you'll get with business-class inkjet MFPs such as the HP OfficeJet Pro 276dw. Canon did not provide a recommended or real-world monthly duty cycles, but judging from the quality of the construction, 250 to 500 pages might not be out of line. If you're printing or copying any more than that, you should be looking for something with cheaper inks.

The $200 competition is tough

The Canon Pixma MX922 is a good MFP for the small office with moderate-volume copying and printing needs. The duplexing and output are sweet, and the fax is a bonus for those that need it. But we're not fans of the control panel. At the time of this writing, the MX922 was available for considerably less than the retail price we list here. It's a lot more appealing at around $150 than at $200, where it has to compete with the likes of the faster, more economical HP Photosmart 7520 e-All-in-One and the Epson WorkForce 845.

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Hewlett-Packard touts viability, courts customers in China

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman stressed her company's future viability as HP tried to win Chinese business customers at an event in Beijing last week.

"Believe me, HP is here to stay," Whitman said in a keynote at the HP World Tour in Beijing. "We've come a long way since I joined Hewlett Packard 20 months ago."

HP has made the rapidly-growing Chinese market a strong international focus. Whitman and other HP officials took their case directly to Chinese businesses at a two-day event, which for businesses focused on storage, big data, cloud and printing.

The speech marked Whitman's third trip to China. She said she has spoken to 525 Chinese customers and 225 partners in the last year.

"The first thing I heard is you have to have confidence in HP's future," Whitman said. "Done—we've strengthened our financial performance, we have a healthier balance sheet, strong cash flow, and we stabilized our business."

Customers have also demanded innovation from within HP, she said. "Today, we are investing more in R&D than ever before. While we have more work to do, we're making great progress."

HP sees great opportunity in China, according to Anneliese Olson, HP vice president of computing solutions for Asia-Pacific and Japan.

"There's no question that China is going to be the largest PC market in the world at some point in time," she told journalists. "China is at the center of what we're doing."

In her keynote, Whitman said the IT industry is at a "major inflection point" driven by cloud, security, big data, and mobility.

"The shift also changes the way technology is consumed, delivered and paid for," she said. And this shift demands what we call the new style of IT, which in reality is a new style of business that is powered by IT."

Meg Whitman

Whitman pointed to a data explosion as a major driver for change in the IT industry. "Data is being generated and created by cameras, by sensors, phones, GPS-enabled devices, and transaction systems. Thinking about the data centre alone, you know that we are on a path that is not sustainable in terms of energy, space and cost."

Large cloud and Web services will have an installed base of 8 to 10 million servers over the next three years, Whitman said. "If laid end to end, the space that these servers will occupy will be the equivalent of the distance between Tiananmen Square to the Summer Palace in China. And to build these data centers will cost anywhere between $10 and $20 billion U.S. dollars."

In separate remarks, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said that consumers are driving business IT.

"The opportunity that HP sees in front of it is to deliver consumer-quality experiences without compromise in the enterprise," Veghte said.

The IT shift provides opportunities for businesses to save money while increasing speed, agility and simplicity, Whitman said.

"IT is no longer just about keeping computers running, is it? It is now a critical strategic factor in determining whether your organization will win or lose in the marketplace," she said. "You're no longer down in the engine room. You're up on the bridge consulting with the captain."

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'Comment Crew' hackers resurface, security firm reports

The suspected China-based hackers known as the "Comment Crew" are back at it again, a development likely to contribute to continued tensions between the U.S. and China over cyberattacks.

The security community has had the group under its watch for a number of years, but in February, its activity was exhaustively detailed in a report from computer security vendor Mandiant.

Mandiant's report said a specific Chinese military unit called "61398" waged a seven-year hacking spree that compromised 141 organizations. The report added to other long-running research from security companies and organizations into suspected state-sponsored hacking.

The Comment Crew laid low for a while following the report but is back hacking again, said Alex Lanstein, senior researcher for FireEye.

"They took a little breather, and they started back up," Lanstein said.

Following the intense attention in February, the group stopped using much of its command-and-control infrastructure. Instead, they started from scratch, directing malware at new targets.

"We didn't see them take control of any of the systems they had previously compromised," Lanstein said. "They started fresh with a whole new round of attacks."

The group, while skilled, has made mistakes, many of which were picked up by Mandiant. Continuing analysis of the Comment Crew's methods have also revealed another mistake the group made, which conceivably makes it easier to link together attacks to a single source.

Lanstein said FireEye found the Comment Crew made an error when compiling their malicious software programs. When an application, including malware, is written in a programming language, it must be compiled, or translated into machine-readable code.

In many instances, the Comment Crew forgot to remove the name of their particular coding project, called "Moonclient," evident when a program was decompiled, or reverted back to its original programming language.

Lanstein said the error showed that "you are dealing with humans on the other side of the keyboard," who are prone to make mistakes. "This is a mistake made over and over again," he said.

FireEye decided to release information on the error since so much had already been released on the Comment Crew, and it would make little difference now for computer security researchers tracking them since their tactics have changed.

"It's more difficult to track them now," Lanstein said.

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Google's future Office killer now available in Chrome OS dev channel

Google now offers the ability to edit Office documents within Chrome OS, although the new feature is currently far less capable than the document-editing capabilities of Google's own Google Apps.

However, there's one reason why this is worth checking out: the service is the first time that Google's QuickOffice has made an appearance.

In June of 2012, Google bought QuickOffice, an office suite for Android and iOS, for an undisclosed sum. "Today, consumers, businesses, and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyonem, and on any device," Google Engineering Director Alan Warren explained then in a company blog. "Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we'll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite."

That sums it up quite nicely: for now, Google Apps provides the functionality and QuickOffice provides the compatibility aspect. Since the purchase, Google has worked to bring the QuickOffice technology to its other properties, namedly Chrome OS.

Over time, analysts have suspected that QuickOffice will become the face of Google Docs. Before the Google I/O developers conference in May, Google sources said that the company has been "dog fooding," or internally deploying, QuickOffice within a browser.

Sundar Pichai, Google's Chrome chief, said at the launch of the Google Chromebook Pixel. that it would take two to three months to add QuickOffice to the Chrome OS-powered Pixel, but that it would eventually arrive. That time, apparently, is now.

Microsoft has already taken aim at what it perceives as compatibility problems with Google Apps, even before Microsoft released Office Mobile for the iPhone.

What makes QuickOffice such a threat to Office? If QuickOffice comes close enough to the functionality that Microsoft Office itself offers, users may begin to question why they're paying hundreds of dollars for dedicated Office suites or for an Office 365 subscription.

Google isn't close at all to this point yet. Not only is QuickOffice available in the unstable "developer" channel of Chrome OS, but the functionality is far behind what even Google Docs offers. It sure looks pretty, though.

Compare this QuickOffice screenshot:

Google QuickOfficedocument editing within the Chrome OS Chrome browser.

with the standard Google Apps screenshot:

A standard Google Docs document.

You'll notice immediately that Google Apps contains many more editing options than the current QuickOffice version, which lacks support for tables and graphs, as well as support for scripts.

Users can also view and edit Excel documents within the browser, according to The Next Web, which earlier reported the news, citing developer Francois Beaufort as the original source. So far, PowerPoint compatibility has not been included.

To try it yourself, you'll need to own a Chromebook or Chromebox. Make sure you're on the dev channel, with version 29.0.1547.2 or later. (Note that the dev channel is considered "unstable," so odd things could happen if you use it. Then type in "about://flags" (no quotes) into the URL line, which should bring up a long list of options. "Enable document editing" will allow you to edit the documents after a quick restart.

Eventually, these changes should come to the main (stable) channel of Chrome, meaning that most users will be able to natively edit Office documents. At that point, if Google increases QuickOffice's capabilities, look out.

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Yahoo kills a dozen more products to sharpen its focus

Yahoo is slimming itself down again by axing 12 of its products, part of an ongoing effort to sharpen its focus on services it thinks people need in their daily lives.

The list includes AltaVista, the granddaddy of search engines, and Yahoo RSS Alerts. The other products, including Yahoo Axis, Citizen Sports and Yahoo Browser Plus, are less well known.

"Today we're shutting down a few products so we can continue to focus on creating beautiful products that are essential to you every day," said Jay Rossiter, executive vice president of platforms at Yahoo, in a blog post Friday afternoon.

Yahoo ditched numerous other products in April, such as Deals and SMS Alerts, touting similar goals around "sharpening our focus."

Here's the full list of services being killed off, in order of their planned closure dates:

• Yahoo Axis, a browser plug-in (June 28)
• Yahoo Browser Plus, a service for Web app developers (June 28)
• Citizen Sports, a sporting news and stat service (June 28)
• Yahoo WebPlayer, a media player for websites (June 30)
• FoxyTunes, a plug-in for controlling different media players (July 1)
• Yahoo RSS Alerts (July 1)
• Yahoo Neighbors Beta, for helping people find out what's going on in their neighborhood (July 8)
• AltaVista (July 8)
• Yahoo Stars India, a celebrity news aggregator (July 25)
• Yahoo Downloads Beta, an application for third-party downloads (July 31)
• Yahoo Local API, which gives developers access to local business information (Sept. 28)
• Yahoo Term Extraction API, for extracting terms and keywords from websites (Sept. 28)

With AltaVista soon officially no more, Yahoo is encouraging users to visit the regular Yahoo Search page. Earlier on Friday, it announced a new feature for setting up search alerts.

Yahoo is highlighting other products to help fill the gaps elsewhere. Citizen Sports may be gone, but Yahoo says people can still get the latest sports news on the Yahoo Sports homepage, play fantasy sports like Fantasy Football, and stay up-to-date on the go with its mobile Sports app.

In recent months, Yahoo has said it is focused on products and services geared toward daily habits, such as email, weather, sports, finance, and photos.

In some of those areas it's not doing badly. Yahoo's new mobile weather app, for instance, has a 4.5-star rating in Apple's App Store, based on about 4,000 reviews.

During the company's annual shareholder meeting earlier this week, CEO Marissa Mayer said she likes to think of Yahoo as a big startup.

"We are making investments, and we're going to continue to make investments, because that's what drives growth," she said.

Yahoo recently paid more than $1 billion to buy social blogging site Tumblr.

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Review: Canon Pixma MX922 has great small-office features and pricey ink

A moderately busy small or home office is the target audience for the Canon Pixma MX922, a $200 (as of 06/28/2013) color inkjet multifunction that can handle every office chore from automatic two-sided scanning and printing, to faxing and printing optical media. Output quality and speed are good, too. But the party ends with the ink costs: The MX922 ships with low-capacity starter cartridges, and the regular and larger cartridges are no great bargain.

Well-rounded design

The Canon Pixma MX922 is a well-rounded multifunction inkjet printer, literally as well as feature-wise. It has Canon's signature rounded corners, a beveled top and bottom, and the same wrap-around front panel and small flip-open ink access lid as its Pixma MG6320 cousin. However, it retains Canon's dodgy, last-generation controls, with the three action buttons and separate four-way cursor. The issue with these is that some functions are available only via the action buttons, and some only via the contextually lit cursor/okay buttons. It's confusing, inefficient, and—if you use the panel often enough—aggravating. On the plus side, the button grid transforms into a keypad when you need to use the unit's fax capabilities.

Installing is MX922 is easy, if a wee bit tedious. There are quite a few dialogs to click through, but the install routine found the printer on the network quickly and there were no other glitches. We used Wi-Fi, but you may also connect directly to a PC via the unit's USB 2.0 port, or wire it to your network via ethernet. The software is the usual efficient Canon bundle, with its veteran scanning utility, Image Garden for organizing and editing photos, and a solid driver. There are also the usual remote and email printing features.

As mentioned, the MX922 automatically prints and scans in duplex. Paper capacity is good for a small office multifunction: 250 sheets, which reside in a bottom-mounted cassette that extends to handle legal-sized paper. Directly above the cassette and revealed when the front panel drops are a 20-sheet tray for 4-by-6-inch photo media and a feed for printable optical media. As with most Canon printers, the front panel drops automatically, so you can keep it closed for appearances yet not have to worry about a paper catastrophe if you print without checking the machine first.

Nice overall output quality, especially text

The pages emerging from the MX922 have the typical Canon look. That means sharp text, decent plain-paper graphics, and very nice photos. By default, the latter tend to look a tad light compared to the competition, but the color palette is essentially accurate, gradients are smooth, and details in dark areas are nicely defined. They photos are not quite up to what you'll see from high-end photo printers, but for a $200 MFP they're excellent.

Speed-wise, the MX922 fell in the middle of the pack, but it's certainly fast enough for a small or home office. Text and monochrome newsletters with mixed graphics print at 8.6 pages per minute on the PC and 8.1 ppm on the Mac. Full color photos print about one every two minutes to glossy stock, but nearly 3 a minute to plain paper. Copies arrived at about 6.1 per minute, a very good pace.

More ink choices, but worse ink prices

When we reviewed this printer's predecessor, the Pixma MX892, we complained about the lack of high-yield inks to cut printing costs. Canon apparently listened—this new model has them—but the costs didn't improve much. Color isn't bad, but black is high. With the standard size cartridges (the PGI-250 black and CLI-250 colors including a photo black), black pages cost around 5 cents and four-color pages, 16.6 cent per sheet. Using the XL cartridges drops a black page only to 4.6 cents, and four-color pages, 12.8 cents. There's an XXL black, but it only drops the price of pages another 0.2 cents. We also noticed that while the new inks have lower prices compared to the MX892's they also have lower page lives.

Canon's warranty for the Pixma MX922 lasts a single year—better than the 90 days you get with entry-level MFPs, but not as nice as the three years you'll get with business-class inkjet MFPs such as the HP OfficeJet Pro 276dw. Canon did not provide a recommended or real-world monthly duty cycles, but judging from the quality of the construction, 250 to 500 pages might not be out of line. If you're printing or copying any more than that, you should be looking for something with cheaper inks.

The $200 competition is tough

The Canon Pixma MX922 is a good MFP for the small office with moderate-volume copying and printing needs. The duplexing and output are sweet, and the fax is a bonus for those that need it. But we're not fans of the control panel. At the time of this writing, the MX922 was available for considerably less than the retail price we list here. It's a lot more appealing at around $150 than at $200, where it has to compete with the likes of the faster, more economical HP Photosmart 7520 e-All-in-One and the Epson WorkForce 845.

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Myanmar selects two telecom licensees, paving way for affordable mobile phones

Myanmar is a step closer to offering affordable mobile services after selecting two international carriers to launch telecommunications networks in one of Asia's last untapped markets.

Norway's Telenor and Qatar's Ooredoo were named the winners in a government tender that is opening Myanmar's once tightly regulated mobile services sector. The carriers will help provide badly needed telecommunications infrastructure in a nation of 60 million, where only about 5 percent of the people use mobile phones.

Both carriers plan to roll out new networks in Myanmar once the nation's government finalizes the licenses, the companies said in statements posted online. The licences are expected to be awarded to the two successful applicants pursuant to the new Telecommunications Law which the Parliament is expected to adopt in the current session, the Myanmar government said in a statement.

Telenor will bring 3G HSPA and 4G LTE technologies, and plans to launch commercial mobile services in both voice and data in 2014. Ooreddo said its investment will create new jobs.

The networks are expected to help Myanmar reach its goal of raising mobile penetration to 75 and 80 percent over the next three years. In the past, mobile services were not only tightly regulated by the country's then military rule, but also expensive. SIM cards, alone, once could cost US$250, or more.

But since 2011, Myanmar's new civilian government has ushered in new democratic reforms that promise to modernize the country. Starting this year, the nation began offering a limited supply of SIM cards for the low price of $1.50.

By awarding the licenses, the government hopes to make cheap SIM cards and affordable mobile service plans a norm in the country. Already, smartphones makers such as Samsung and HTC have entered the nation's market, and many local handset dealers have set up new shops in Yangon, the country's largest city.

More mobile handsets also means that Myanmar's Internet penetration could dramatically rise over the next few years. Only about 1 percent of the population currently go online, and many people do not own PCs or know how to use them. Cheap smartphones, however, could bring millions in Myanmar to the Web, according to local industry leaders.

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Intel's CTO Justin Rattner stepping down

Intel's CTO and director of its labs Justin Rattner is stepping down to meet a requirement under the company's bylaws that employees cannot serve as corporate officers after the age of 65.

Rattner will, however, return to Intel at a later date in an as yet undetermined role after taking personal leave immediately to deal with a "pressing family matter," Intel said.

The company did not immediately announce a successor to Rattner, whose exit on account of the age limit would have been expected within the company. Intel Labs will report to Intel president Renée James until further decisions related to its leadership are made, the company said.

Intel could not be immediately reached for comment.

The company has found it difficult to make a large impact on the smartphone and tablets markets, which have been dominated by chips built around the ARM architecture.

Intel's new CEO Brian Krzanich admitted in May that the company has been weak in smartphones and tablets, but aims to improve by advancing chip and manufacturing technologies. Intel's main focus is to produce more power-efficient chips, as it also adds features for connectivity and security. Intel's upcoming chips based on its Silvermont architecture aim to outstrip ARM chips on both performance and power-efficiency.

Krzanich has thanked Rattner, who joined Intel in 1973, for "his leadership in creating one of the leading research organizations in the high tech industry", according to a statement from Intel Thursday.

Rattner was named Intel's first principal engineer in 1979, its fourth Intel Fellow in 1988 and was in the first group of Intel Fellows to be named Senior Fellow in 2001.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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US regulator shuts down 1,677 Internet pharmacies

More than 1,600 websites selling pharmaceutical products, including some spoofing CVS and Walgreens pharmacies, were shut down this week in a sting involving 99 countries, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.

Close to 8,000 more were warned against selling unapproved drugs or those without a prescription. The FDA said many of the websites were part of an organized criminal network that runs sites under the "Canadian Pharmacy" banner.

Called "Operation Pangea VI," the enforcement action ran for a one-week period through Tuesday, and investigators seized US$41 million worth of illegal medicine, the FDA said.

At least of the two of the websites purported to belong to the CVS pharmacy chain and Walgreens, using slight spelling and punctuation variations of those brands in domain names.

The targeted websites displayed bogus licenses and certifications in order to convince U.S. shoppers that their products were approved by the FDA.

In one instance, the FDA said a pharmacy marketed drugs for erectile dysfunction called "Levitra Super Force" and "Viagra Super Force," which both are modified names of FDA-approved drugs. But the medicines were claimed to contain dapoxetine, which is not approved by the FDA.

In 2009, the FDA shut down 90 Web sites hosted in the U.S. that sold unlicensed or misbranded drugs while also warning other ISPs, website operators and domain-name registrars.

Since 2007, the website LegitScript has vetted more than 300,000 health-related websites and those selling drugs. Of more than 34,000 online pharmacies, only 270 are considered legitimate with another 1,492 "potentially legitimate."

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk

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Google-backed O3b launches satellites to offer Internet connectivity

O3b Networks, a company backed by Google and other investors, has launched its first satellites that aim to provide low-cost and high-speed connectivity to parts of the world that do not have fiber infrastructure.

The company's first four satellites, launched Tuesday aboard the Arianespace Soyuz launch vehicle from French Guiana, made first contact with O3b's gateway in Hawaii, O3b said. The launch was delayed by a day reportedly because of weather conditions.

The O3b system aims to combine the wide reach of satellite with the speed of a fiberoptic network, targeting customers and businesses in nearly 180 countries with lowcost, highspeed and low-latency Internet and mobile connectivity.

O3b uses MEO (medium earth orbit) satellites as an alternative to more expensive geostationary satellites. Satellites in geostationary orbit offer the logistical advantage of remaining at the same point over the Earth at all times, enabling a single satellite to continuously serve a large geographic region. But geostationary satellites require a high altitude of over 35,000 kilometers above the earth in order to maintain their stationary position, according to O3b documents. This distance decreases their ability to provide the low latency required by most business applications.

Operating in MEO, the O3b satellite constellation will provide full country coverage within 45 degrees of latitude north and south of the equator, with a round trip latency of less than 150 milliseconds, according to O3b.

The Jersey, Channel Islands company aims to provide IP trunking and mobile backhaul services to ISPs and mobile operators in the equatorial region. Its O3bCell service, for example, connects cell site towers and the core mobile network, with support for 2G, 3G and 4G-LTE voice and data services, offering seamless upgrade to packet switched networks.

A second group of four O3b satellites will be launched in September to complete the first phase constellation of satellites. The first O3b customers will be able to begin using the service early November.

O3b did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A total of 12 O3b satellites are to be put into orbit by Arianespace in groups of four, with missions planned for later this year, and another in 2014, the commercial satellite launch company said.

O3b's many investors include satellite operator SES, Google, and Liberty Global. It raised US$1.3 billion to cover the cost of building and launching the first 12 satellites and running the business until it becomes operational and starts to generate revenue. O3b has already signed deals with telecom providers and ISPs including Malaysian telecommunications provider Maju Nusa and West Africa Telecom in Liberia. It has also tied with Royal Caribbean Cruises to provide broadband access service to passengers on its cruise ship.

Google announced recently its Loon project which involves the use of a network of balloons floating in the stratosphere, around 20 kilometers above the earth's surface, to provide Internet service "to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill coverage gaps, and bring people back online after disasters." Project Loon started in June with a pilot in New Zealand. People will connect to the Internet using a special antenna on top of buildings.

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Samsung LTE-Advanced phone launches on 150Mbps network in Korea

South Korean operator SK Telecom said it launched an LTE-Advanced network on Wednesday, offering speeds of up to 150Mbps on an upgraded version of Samsung's Galaxy S4 handset.

The operator said the service is the first in the world and went live in Seoul, parts of 42 other cities, and 103 universities. It has plans to extend coverage to 84 cities. Currently the only compatible phone is the new version of the Galaxy S4, but SK Telecom said it will offer a total of seven LTE-A handsets this year.

The operator said the new offering is twice as fast as its existing LTE network. It will use the faster speeds to launch services like the world's first full HD video streaming service, which will go live next month on its paid TV service, "Btv mobile."

The carrier used a technology called Carrier Aggregation, which can combine different frequencies on a mobile network, to create an effective 20MHz spectrum band by combining two smaller channels. Much faster speeds are coming - the current standards allow for up to five 20MHz bands to be combined.

LTE-Advanced is the successor to LTE, which has become the industry standard for current high-speed networks. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo developed and proposed the standard, and says it will launch a 1Gbps LTE-A service in 2015. DoCoMo's current LTE network provides downloads of up to 112.5Mbps. Other carriers worldwide, such as Sprint and AT&T, have said they plan to launch LTE-A networks this year.

SK Telecom said it won't initially charge extra for its faster speeds. The company said it has been rolling out base stations since last year that can be upgraded to LTE-A with software upgrades.

Samsung's Galaxy S4 LTE-A handset is similar to the original S4 launched in April, but has a faster Qualcomm 2.3GHz quad-core processor. The Korean version also features new software that can find and play video related to images viewed by users and has the ability to play high-resolution digital broadcasts of live television programs and sporting events.

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Suspected China-based hackers 'Comment Crew' rise again

The suspected China-based hackers known as the "Comment Crew" are back at it again, a development likely to contribute to continued tensions between the U.S. and China over cyberattacks.

The security community has had the group under its watch for a number of years, but in February, its activity was exhaustively detailed in a report from computer security vendor Mandiant.

Mandiant's report said a specific Chinese military unit called "61398" waged a seven-year hacking spree that compromised 141 organizations. The report added to other long-running research from security companies and organizations into suspected state-sponsored hacking.

The Comment Crew laid low for a while following the report but is back hacking again, said Alex Lanstein, senior researcher for FireEye.

"They took a little breather, and they started back up," Lanstein said.

Following the intense attention in February, the group stopped using much of its command-and-control infrastructure. Instead, they started from scratch, directing malware at new targets.

"We didn't see them take control of any of the systems they had previously compromised," Lanstein said. "They started fresh with a whole new round of attacks."

The group, while skilled, has made mistakes, many of which were picked up by Mandiant. Continuing analysis of the Comment Crew's methods have also revealed another mistake the group made, which conceivably makes it easier to link together attacks to a single source.

Lanstein said FireEye found the Comment Crew made an error when compiling their malicious software programs. When an application, including malware, is written in a programming language, it must be compiled, or translated into machine-readable code.

In many instances, the Comment Crew forgot to remove the name of their particular coding project, called "Moonclient," evident when a program was decompiled, or reverted back to its original programming language.

Lanstein said the error showed that "you are dealing with humans on the other side of the keyboard," who are prone to make mistakes. "This is a mistake made over and over again," he said.

FireEye decided to release information on the error since so much had already been released on the Comment Crew, and it would make little difference now for computer security researchers tracking them since their tactics have changed.

"It's more difficult to track them now," Lanstein said.

FireEye is due to release a report on Wednesday covering how researchers can track malware campaigns by looking for hacking mistakes, including keyboard layouts, embedded fonts and overuse of bogus DNS (domain name system) registration details.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk

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New privacy bill aimed at reforming FISA and the Patriot Act introduced in the Senate

New legislation aims to reform the Patriot and FISA Amendments Acts to apply greater oversight and control to the government's surveillance programs.

The bill, the FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act of 2013, comes following dramatic revelations about how the National Security Agency collects certain types of data about U.S. residents. One surveillance program of concern is Prism, an NSA data collection program that supposedly accesses the servers at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and other tech companies to mine people's personal data like emails and photos. Another is a phone call metadata collection program.

"The recent public revelations about two classified data collection programs have brought renewed attention to the government's broad surveillance authorities, and they underscore the need for close scrutiny by Congress," Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, said in a statement after introducing the bill.

The details about how the programs specifically work are fuzzy, but national intelligence director James Clapper has acknowledged that some form of both programs are conducted under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, for phone call metadata, and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISA), for data content collection. Leahy's bill, which was introduced Monday along with support from a bipartisan group of senators, takes aim at these provisions to "strengthen privacy protections, accountability and oversight related to domestic surveillance."

The bill proposes multiple reforms. One measure, for instance, seeks to narrow the scope of Section 215 Patriot Act orders by requiring the government to show both relevance to an authorized investigation and a link to a foreign group or power. Section 215 has been criticized by privacy advocates who claim that the government has used it to obtain private information about people who do not have a direct link to terrorists.

Letting people challenge nondisclosure or "gag orders" in court, and expanding public reporting on the use of national security letters, are also proposed in the legislation.

The bill also aims to advance the sunset date for the FISA Amendments Act from June 2017 to June 2015, "to ensure timely re-examination of how these authorities are being utilized," Leahy said. The 2015 FISA sunset will also align with the Patriot Act sunsets, "enabling Congress to address these FISA provisions all at once, rather than in a piecemeal fashion," he added.

Finally, the bill would also increase oversight by requiring the inspector general of the intelligence community to conduct a comprehensive review of the FISA Amendments Act and its impact on the privacy rights of Americans, Leahy argued.

"These are all commonsense, practical improvements that will ensure that the broad and powerful surveillance tools being used by the government are subject to appropriate limitations, transparency and oversight," he said.

Senator Leahy pushed for a shorter sunset and greater transparency of the FISA Amendments Act last year, which the Senate rejected.

Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com

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Western Digital to acquire sTec to expand in enterprise SSDs

Western Digital plans to acquire sTec to boost its presence in the market for enterprise solid-state drives.

The two companies have signed a definitive agreement under which sTec will be acquired by HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital, for about US$340 million in cash.

The sTec acquisition will enable HGST to accelerate its participation in enterprise SSDs, Western Digital said Monday.

STec in Santa Ana, California, will be integrated with HGST which already has a SSD product line. HGST will continue to support existing sTec products and work with customers to understand their future requirements.

HGST had earlier indicated that it would like to get into the PCIe segment of the enterprise SSD space, and the acquisition will likely help HGST in this connection. STec has already developed SSD products with a broad set of interfaces including PCIe and SAS, which will complement HGST's own line developed with technology from Intel, Western Digital said. HGST will also continue to deliver SAS-based SSD products with Intel under a joint development program.

SAS or Serial Attached SCSI is positioned as an interface for enterprise storage, while PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is an I/O interface between various peripheral components in a system.

STec currently has about 55 issued patents and 78 patent applications pending. All these patent rights are included in the transaction.

The transaction is expected to close, subject to customary conditions, in the third or fourth quarter of this year.

Western Digital may look at further mergers and acquisitions as it looks to expand in cloud storage, solid state storage and other high growth areas. It believes that both SSDs and its traditional hard disk drives business will continue to have a place in tiered storage for the data center, with HDDs storing 75 percent of all data, either in the cloud or locally, by 2020.

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US ITC begins pilot to speed up disposal of patent cases

The U.S. International Trade Commission has launched a pilot program to test whether early rulings on identified crucial issues in some investigations could limit unnecessary litigation, saving time and costs for all sides.

One such "dispositive" issue, though not the only one, could be the existence of a domestic industry for a product, which often comes up later in the investigation.

Complainants should also be prepared to prove their case without extensive discovery on the issues, the ITC said Monday.

The move comes in the wake of concerns about unnecessary and sometimes frivolous patent disputes by "patent assertion entities," popularly known as patent trolls, whose main business is to collect licensing fees and damages from technology companies.

The administration of President Barack Obama issued earlier this month five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations designed "to protect innovators from frivolous litigation." Among the legislative recommendations was the need to change the ITC standard for obtaining an injunction.

Technology companies like Google's Motorola Mobility and Samsung Electronics have also approached the ITC to keep competitors' products out of the U.S. market.

Section 337 investigations conducted by the ITC under the Tariff Act of 1930 most often involve claims regarding intellectual property rights, including allegations of patent and trademark infringements by imported goods, and can lead to the ban on their imports into the U.S.

Noting that the majority of complaints filed under section 337 involve patent infringement allegations, the ITC said that under the pilot program, the commission "will identify, at institution, investigations that are likely to present a potentially dispositive issue."

An administrative law judge will be assigned to rule on that issue early in the investigation through expedited fact-finding and a shortened hearing limited to the identified issue.

The initial ruling on whether a domestic industry exists or is in the process of being established in the U.S. has typically come relatively late in an investigation, often after several months of litigation, including an evidentiary hearing, when the ALJ issues his initial determination on whether there is a violation of section 337. The pilot program aims to reduce the time for an initial ruling to 100 days, with a limited extension for good cause.

The pilot program is not limited to the issue of domestic industry, which was only provided as an example of how the pilot will work, ITC said. The pilot procedure may be made permanent after evaluation, and will currently be used for certain designated investigations, it added.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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Bitcoin Foundation warned by California financial regulator

A foundation created last year to shepherd Bitcoin's software development has received a stern warning from a California financial regulator.

The state's Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) warned the Bitcoin Foundation in a May 30 letter that it is a violation of state and federal law to be involved in money transmission without registering with the U.S. Treasury or California's Commissioner of Financial Institutions.

DFI oversees banks, credit unions, money transmitters and issuers of payment instruments.

The letter, signed by Senior Counsel Paul T. Crayton, does not accuse the Bitcoin Foundation of violating laws but says the regulator thinks it "may be engaged" in a money transmission business without a license.

Entities lacking a license could be fined up to US$1,000 per violation or $1,000 per day under California law and face criminal prosecution, the letter said.

Wide interest in the virtual currency has raised questions how handling bitcoins intersects with existing financial regulations, which often do not directly address virtual currencies.

In March, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is part of the U.S. Treasury Department, said companies that allow people to sell and buy virtual currencies are required to register. Users of virtual currencies, however, are exempt.

The Bitcoin Foundation, which is based in Seattle, was established to promote the currency and help guide the development of software programs. It sells individual and corporate memberships for the foundation, but it does not sell or trade in bitcoins.

The warning from the regulator, posted Sunday on Forbes by Jon Matonis, who is secretary of the Bitcoin Foundation, shows the keen interest regulators are beginning to take in Bitcoin even though its economy is still small.

Efforts to reach the Bitcoin Foundation were not immediately successful, but Matonis wrote that "one activity that the foundation does not engage in is the owning, controlling or conducting of money transmission business."

The foundation's warning comes just over a month after the largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, had its U.S. account seized.

Mt. Gox, which is based in Tokyo, was the target of a seizure order issued by the U.S. District Court in Maryland for failing to register as a money-transmitting business. The exchange used an account linked with Dwolla, a payments company, to transfer money from U.S. citizens to Japan, although Dwolla was not accused of wrongdoing.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk

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Microsoft investing over $670 million in Iowa data center

Microsoft is investing US$678 million in the expansion of its data center in West Des Moines, Iowa.

The plan, dubbed Project Mountain, was awarded tax benefits and is expected to create 29 new jobs, the board of the Iowa Economic Development Authority said in a statement on Friday.

Other tech companies are also setting up data centers in Iowa. Facebook said in April its data center in Altoona, Iowa, will be its fourth owned and operated data center, and its third in the U.S. The company plans to break ground this summer and expects to begin serving user traffic in 2014. Google opened a data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 2009. In November 2012, it announced that it would expand its data center operations in Iowa, taking the total investment to over $1.1 billion.

Microsoft has run a data center in Iowa to support its operations since 2009. It could not be immediately reached for comment on the proposed investment.

Greater Des Moines Partnership, which focuses on providing resources for moving or expanding a business to Greater Des Moines, said the project was the culmination of a year's collaborative effort by Microsoft, the partnership, the city of West Des Moines and the state of Iowa.

Iowa has been attempting to attract data centers to key cities in the state. Under the state incentives, Microsoft will be eligible to receive up to $20 million in tax credits, including $15 in a sales and use tax refund paid during construction and a $5 million investment tax credit, for completing the $677.6 million capital investment project in West Des Moines.

The project expansion will house servers, networking equipment and office space needed to operate Microsoft's cloud services, Greater Des Moines Partnership said in a statement. Necessary infrastructure improvements to the West Des Moines location requiring additional capital investment will support the expansion, such as fiber and roads, it added.

Microsoft operates a large number of data centers in many parts of the world. For its Windows Azure service, for example, it offers services from data centers in Singapore and Hong Kong in Asia, Ireland and the Netherlands in Europe, and from Illinois, Texas, Virginia and California in the U.S.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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Qualcomm invests second $60 million in Sharp for next-gen displays

Japan's Sharp said Monday that it has received a second US$60 million investment from Qualcomm, as the two companies work together to mass produce low-power, high-performance displays for mobile devices.

Qualcomm, through subsidiary Pixtronix, has teamed with Sharp to mass produce displays based on its MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) technology, the pixels of which are based on tiny mechanical shutters that flash open and closed to display colors. The technology has the potential for much faster response times and uses a fraction of the power required by LCDs, but cost-competitive manufacturing has proven difficult.

"We are moving toward eventual commercialization," said Sharp spokeswoman Miyuki Nakayama. The companies are still in the research phase and have announced no target dates.

In a deal first announced in December, Qualcomm agreed to invest $120 million in Sharp in two blocks, the first of which was paid later that month. The second half was to be made in March if Sharp met certain guidelines for financial health and sufficient progress was made on the research, but that was postponed until this month.

Traditional LCD screens have a white back light that sits behind an array of liquid crystal pixels, each paired with a color filter to allow light of a certain color to pass. MEMs screens use a back light that cycles through a sequence of colors, synchronized with an array of tiny shutters that serve as pixels, flashing open briefly to let certain colors through.

The MEMS shutters have a faster reaction time than LCD pixels, and don't require color filters so the back light needs less power to operate. Qualcomm has been trying to popularize the technology for years, and also sells a variety under the Mirasol brand with no backlight that relies on reflectivity.

The deal makes Qualcomm one of Sharp's largest shareholders, with a 3.5 percent share in Sharp. That is slightly more than Samsung Electronics, which invested $110 million in Sharp in March in exchange for a steady supply of LCD panels made for large screens. Sharp has made a series of deep losses and is seeking partnerships to steady its finances.

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Microsoft's $100,000 bug bounty: Read the fine print

Microsoft is offering up to $100,000 for vulnerabilities found in Windows 8.1 that are paired with exploits, but it's pretty much up to Microsoft to decide who gets paid how much based on a set of subjective criteria.

In order to pull down the full amount, a submission must be novel, generic, reasonable, reliable, impactful, work in user mode, and be effective on the latest Windows OS, according to details of the new bounty program. Each of those criteria is subject to interpretation.

Fair contest?

It will be up to Microsoft to convince potential participants in the program that their submissions will be treated fairly, says Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering for Rapid7.

"A lot of people don't trust them," Barrett says. Microsoft could find an attack technique good but not novel, and then patch the vulnerability without paying. "That's paranoid, maybe, but that kind of paranoia tends to be par for the course in this industry," he says.

"If I were Microsoft I would make a point of making sure that somebody gets this [$100,000]. It would do wonders for their reputation. It's more about community relations."

It's also about economics, because $100,000 is "an almost insane amount of money" that will be hard to ignore, says Amol Sarwate, director of vulnerability labs at Qualys. In countries with weaker economies that amount would be even more significant, he says.

The sum is likely even more than researchers could make selling such exploits on the black market, he says, and submitting to the program doesn't run the risk of getting caught by law enforcement.

Bounty programs successful

These cash bounty programs have work pretty well since TippingPoint (now part of HP) set up its Zero Day Initiative in 2005, Sarwate says, with others forming similar programs. Google's vulnerability program, for example, has paid out more than $800,000 since it started in 2010.

Many researchers are satisfied getting public credit for finding vulnerabilities, he says. Sarwate says this recognition is valuable to them—so much so that citations of these credits routinely show up on the resumes of researchers who received them.

The effectiveness of Microsoft's big-payoff program is in luring in "ethically neutral" researchers who have discovered exploits and want credit for it immediately, says Barrett. For many researchers that is the true prize. But they may not want to take the option of responsible disclosure in which they submit the vulnerability to the company and wait for perhaps months for it to issue a patch and give credit because the process takes too long.

Instead, they may disclose irresponsibly—posting the vulnerability to a public site where they get immediate credit, but the vulnerability is also available for criminals to exploit. It is these impatient researchers Microsoft can hope to attract, Barrett says; they may be willing to wait for credit if they are paid as well.

"It's aimed at people who go straight to the press with their exploits, and it tries to win them over," he says.

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Google quietly updates local search with an image carousel

It's hard to keep track of new Google features. They can show up as Google trial balloon and surprise you one day. And then the next day poof they're gone. But one big addition to Google search—introduced with little fanfare over the past couple days—has been a carousel of images served up when making local search requests.

If you've searched Google for something local recently there is a good chance you've seen what I'm talking about. Google's local carousel showcases images of nearby business or attractions related to your search query (see image above). The new layout has been rolling out to the public over the last couple days.

 

Try searching for "coffee spots near me" or "museums near Chicago" and there is a good chance you'll see a strip of images of businesses or points of interests presented horizontally across the top of the Google search results page. A small Google Maps window will appear just below to the right of the carousel. Hover over an image in the carousel and a corresponding Google label lights up on the Google Map showing you where the business or attraction is located.

The new layout is an update to Google's integration of local search results and Google Maps. It's also an expansion by Google beyond just mapping restaurants and hotels on Google Maps. According to the site AutoRevo , Google's new carousel works with 54 different queries such as nightlife, hiking, soup, and dog parks.

The layout is far superior to the old way Google tied local search results to Google Maps. Before Google delivered the names of businesses on the left and a Google Map on the right. You used letters of the alphabet to match business "A" with the "A" on Google Maps.

Google's local search results now are more engaging and more informative. Google's local carousel not only includes images but also integrates Google's own version of user reviews and its Google/Zagat reviews. Just click on a business listed in the carousel and Google delivers an information card with directions, address, a phone number, and has links to read or write reviews.

The feature isn't perfect. In my quiet corner of Boston I don't see a local carousel for much beyond the obvious. A search for "dog parks near me" doesn't trigger the carousel to appear and neither does "liquor stores near me." When local search fails it reverts back to the old way Google delivered local results.

This new local search carousel plays right into Google's big Maps update announced last month. Google Maps now encourage much more social interaction with maps and prods users to rate, review, and add comments to local landmarks and businesses within the app. Local search will both exploit Google Maps more efficiently and help it get better. Listen to Google describe how we all will help Google Maps (and in turn local search) improve over time:

 

"As you search the map, star places you like and leave reviews, the map starts to adapt and can suggest things like restaurants you might enjoy or the quickest way home. In other words, the more you use the new Google Maps, the more helpful it becomes."

Put a different way, Maps and local search will get better as Google watches over our shoulder as we plot local nightlife, hiking, soup, and dog parks on its maps. I guess there ispower in numbers—and soon more advertising profits for Google.

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Google's Waze acquisition gets FTC scrutiny, reports say

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked Google for information related to its Waze acquisition, as the agency reviews the deal, according to reports published on Saturday.

The FTC wants to look into possible antitrust issues stemming from the deal, the New York Post first reported on Saturday, quoting anonymous sources. The Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD technology blog later got a confirmation from Google about the probe.

Neither Google nor the FTC immediately responded to a request for comment.

Earlier this month, Google announced it had acquired Waze, a crowdsourced mapping application developer based in Israel, saying it wanted to add more real-time navigation tools to its Maps product.

According to the New York Post, Google didn't voluntarily submit the deal for FTC review because Waze's U.S. revenue was less than $70 million.

The FTC is reportedly getting involved because, with the deal, Google, a dominant player in the online mapping market, swallowed one its few viable competitors.

The companies didn't disclose financial details of the deal, but various reports at the time put its value at anywhere between $1 billion and $1.3 billion.

The Waze mobile app lets users share reports about road and traffic conditions in real time, so that other motorists can make route adjustments.

"We're excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google's search capabilities," Brian McClendon, Google's Vice President, Geo, wrote in a blog post announcing the deal on June 11.

McClendon also said that the Waze development team would remain in Israel and operate separately "for now."

Before Google swooped in and snapped up Waze, other companies had reportedly been interested in the company, including Facebook and Microsoft.

The application had about 50 million users at the time of the Google deal, Waze said in its own blog post about the deal.

Waze leaders decided against taking the company public, and then evaluated "many options" before agreeing to the Google deal, Waze CEO Noam Bardin wrote in that blog post.

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Civil liberties advocates call for more oversight of NSA surveillance

Congress should press for privacy protections and more information about surveillance programs at the National Security Agency, some technology and civil liberties activists said Friday.

After recent news leaks about two broad surveillance programs at the NSA, it's clear that congressional and court oversight of the agency is lacking, representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told congressional staffers during a briefing on the NSA programs.

Oversight of the surveillance programs by the Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees has been "pretty feeble," Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said at a surveillance forum hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

The limited number of lawmakers and the judges that are supposed to check the NSA programs appear to have fallen victim to a form of a governmental phenomenon called "regulatory capture," when a body that is supposed to regulate an industry begins to "serve its interests," Sanchez said.

Lawmakers outside the intelligence committees need to provide oversight of the programs, added Michelle Richardson, the ACLU's legislative counsel.

"So far, Congress has allowed the intelligence committees to do secret oversight of secret programs allowed under secret court orders, and it has led to the collection of every American's phone calls," she said. "This cannot continue. The secret oversight is not working."

Representatives of both intelligence committees didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the criticism from Sanchez and Richardson.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a broad swath of U.S. telephone records, there's no opposing attorney, Richardson said.

"No one is representing the interests of the people whose records are collected," Richardson added. "It is just the government before a secret court, and no one is representing the other side."

Richardson and other speakers at the event called on Congress to add transparency to the surveillance court process.

The mass collection of data on U.S. phone calls and Internet communications under the two programs represents a "dangerous shift" in the way the government views the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protecting U.S. residents from unreasonable searches and seizures, Sanchez said. There appear to be fewer prohibitions on the government collecting data and more mass collection, with some restrictions on how intelligence agencies can access the data they have collected, he said.

"Analysts themselves have the discretion to select which things are going to be queried for search," he added. "Back-end restrictions on what you do [with the collected data] last only until you decide to change them, and the record so far suggests we won't necessarily know if they decide to change them."

While four of the five speakers at the event said they were troubled by the surveillance programs, lawyer Michael Vatis, a former official at the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, said he wasn't overly concerned about reports of the NSA collecting Internet communications from nine Web service providers.

The Prism collection program, as described, appears to give the NSA little new surveillance power than it has always had, said Vatis, now a partner in the Steptoe & Johnson law firm. The NSA's longtime mission is to provide surveillance on overseas communications, and the Prism program appears to be an extension of that, he said. The NSA is targeting U.S. Web companies because much of the Internet's traffic routes through the U.S., he said.

Vatis said he had some concerns about the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. phone records, but he takes some comfort that the agency is collecting phone numbers and not the content of phone calls.

If the NSA and DOJ have strong procedures in place to protect privacy, as they say, then the data collection can help protect U.S. residents, Vatis added. "In the worst-case scenario, when an individual brings a suitcase nuke onto Wall Street and detonates it, the questions are going to be, 'The government had this technical capability to keep track of people, but didn't use it,'" he said. "That will be the scandal."

Critics of the data collection were surprised about the "breadth of the order" allowing the NSA to collect all Verizon phone traffic, countered Alan Davidson, a visiting scholar in the Technology and Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former public policy director at Google.

The data collection raises not only civil liberties and privacy concerns but also business concerns, Davidson added. "If people don't trust these services, they're not going to use them," he said.

Vatis discounted the business concern. "Have many people stopped using Gmail or Yahoo?" he said.

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British intelligence tapping fiber-optic cables for massive amounts of data

More secret National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian suggest that the U.S. agency's British counterpart intercepts petabytes worth of communication data daily from fiber-optic cables.

The operation codenamed "Tempora" by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been going on for at least 18 months and involves the use of "intercept probes" attached directly to transatlantic fiber-optic cables landing on British shores from telephone exchanges and Internet servers in North America.

Commercial companies, described in the documents only as "intercept partners," were secretly used to attach the intercepts on behalf of the GCHQ. The companies, whose identities have been concealed in the documents, were apparently obliged by law to cooperate with the GCHQ and in some cases paid for their effort.

The intercepts have allowed GCHQ to scoop up and filter huge volumes of data, including email content, records of phone calls, Facebook entries and Internet browsing histories. "For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fiber-optic cables that ring the world," the Guardian noted.

As of May a year ago, 300 analysts from the GCHQ and 250 from the NSA had been assigned to sift through and analyze the data for terrorist threats and signs of other criminal activity.

Each set of analysts, however, was operating under different rules, with those at the NSA appearing to have more stringent guidelines about how they use the data.

Details of the GCHQ operation are likely to fuel new fears about the nature and scope of the data surveillance activities by the NSA. The concerns first surfaced when Snowden leaked two documents describing a couple of surveillance programs to the Guardian and the Washington Post. Since then, there have been several other disclosures pertaining to surveillance activities by the NSA and the FBI and the authority under which it is being done.

The Obama Administrationand U.S. intelligence agencies have insisted that everything is being done under proper authority and oversight. They have downplayed concerns about U.S. persons being illegally spied on and have maintained that the surveillance activities are crucial to national security.

Even so, the sheer scale of the efforts, at least as described by the documents that the Guardian claims to have obtained from Snowden, is sure to heighten calls for more transparency into the data collection programs.

According to the Guardian, the GHCQ has been expanding its data interception capabilities steadily over the past five years. As of last year, the agency was capable of handling 600 million telephone "events" a day and was able to process data from at least 46 of the more than 200, 10Gbps fiber-optic cables on which it placed intercepts.

The agency applies a series of filters to the data it intercepts to reduce the volumes. For instance, the first filter throws out all high-volume, low-value traffic such as peer-to-peer downloads, reducing traffic volumes by up to 30% right away, the paper noted.

Numerous other filters pull out information that is of specific interest to the NSA or GCHQ. The NSA uses a total of 31,000 specific search terms, including specific phone numbers, email addresses and other identifiers to keep an eye on communications being carried out by persons or entities of interest. The GCHQ uses about 40,000 such terms to filter the information it intercepts.

The technology allows GCHQ to store certain information of interest for up to three days and phone call metadata for up to 30 days. Such data interception and filtering has apparently allowed the agency to identify potential terrorist threats, child exploitation networks and cyber threats.

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U.S. charges Edward Snowden with espionage, report says

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked information about U.S. government mass surveillance programs, has been charged by the U.S. with espionage, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Snowden (above) and are seeking to have him arrested in Hong Kong, according to the Post, which cited unnamed U.S. officials. He is charged with espionage, theft, and conversion of government property, the report says.

By bringing the charges, the U.S. has begun a process by which it can try to have Snowden extradited to the U.S. to face trial. Snowden can fight the effort in the Hong Kong courts, however, in a process that could last several months, the Post said.

Snowden sparked a furor this month after he leaked details about two U.S. surveillance programs to the Washington Post and the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. One program, called Prism, gives the National Security Agency access to customer data collected by large Internet firms, and the other provides access to U.S. phone call records.

Snowden has been both vilified as a traitor and hailed as a champion of the public's right to privacy. He flew to Hong Kong last month after leaving his job as a contractor at an NSA facility in Hawaii and is thought to still be located in the Chinese territory.

U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, have defended the programs, saying they have helped to disrupt numerous terrorist plots in the U.S. and overseas. And they say the programs are subject to rigorous oversight.

Snowden has since expanded his accusations, saying NSA analysts can access the contents of a U.S. target's phone calls and emails without a court order.

The complaint against Snowden was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction where Snowden's former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, has its headquarters, the Post reported.

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Wi-Fi's fast 802.11ac standard may pay off big in mobile

The emerging IEEE 802.11ac wireless LAN standard will be able to deliver faster connections wherever it's used, but the biggest benefit may come at public hotspots—eventually.

On Wednesday, the Wi-Fi Alliance started certifying pre-standard 802.11ac products for interoperability with other Wi-Fi gear. Assuming nothing unexpected happens in the standards process, that means all products the Alliance approves as 11ac gear will work with each other and with older versions of Wi-Fi.

The Wi-Fi Alliance claims 802.11ac can offer two or three times the speed users get on most of today's networks, though real-world results can vary because of a wide range of factors. A second wave of 802.11ac, which the group isn't certifying yet, is expected to offer even higher speeds.

The new standard boosts performance through several improvements, including wider channels and better modulation techniques. But one reason 802.11ac can go faster is that it operates only in the 5GHz spectrum band, which has more channels and less competition for airspace than the 2.4GHz band most frequently used in Wi-Fi.

The 5GHz band is nothing new in Wi-Fi, and manufacturers can implement it with the current 802.11n standard. But in handsets, they usually don't. The iPhone 5, with dual-band 802.11n, and Samsung's Galaxy S4, which already has prestandard 11ac built in, are exceptions. Even many laptops aren't equipped to use the higher band, analysts say. Adding frequencies costs money, and device margins are slim.

Just as most mobile devices haven't tapped into the 5GHz band, Wi-Fi hotspots that serve those devices often don't either. But the performance boost promised by 11ac, combined with growing demands on Wi-Fi hotspots, may prove too enticing to pass up.

"It's running on a completely different set of channels than most hotspots are currently ... so the capacity is more than doubled for the user devices there," said Greg Ennis, technical director of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Capacity is key for mobile operators, especially in crowded locations with many heavy users of mobile data. Carriers are picking up some additional frequencies through expensive auctions of private spectrum, but Wi-Fi networks running on free, unlicensed spectrum are a key element of their strategies. In busy places with heavy mobile users, such as airport lounges, the 2.4GHz band is starting to fall short, according to Yankee Group analyst Ken Rehbehn.

"The older Wi-Fi bands are just hideously overcrowded right now," Rehbehn said.

The 5GHz band, by contrast, has 25 distinct channels totalling about 500MHz of spectrum. It hasn't been used as heavily for Wi-Fi and isn't as crowded with other technologies, such as Bluetooth.

It takes both network operators and device makers to embrace a new technology. The carriers, primarily, will drive adoption of 11ac in mobile, Rehbehn said. "That's where the bets are being made," he said. Most manufacturers will follow cautiously, when it's clear there are places where users will benefit from it, he said. AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, the U.S. carriers that have invested most heavily in Wi-Fi, were not able to share any information about the types of infrastructure deployed in their hotspots.

Before consumers will commonly be able to go to Wi-Fi hotspots and take advantage of 11ac speeds, the technology upgrade process may get even more complex. There's likely to be a chicken-and-egg problem, said analyst Peter Jarich of Current Analysis.

"I have no interest in upgrading my infrastructure in my hotspots to ac if the devices don't support it," Jarich said. "On the other hand, if I'm a device vendor, do I care about putting ac in a device if the hotspot infrastructure isn't out there?"

Mobile Wi-Fi is likely to tap into the additional speed and capacity of 11ac on a case-by-case basis instead of wholesale adoption, they said. High-demand venues and high-end devices will kick it off, and even for them, it may take two or three years, Rehbehn said.

"This is not going to be driven by the number of ac-enabled hotspots out there," he said. "It's going to be driven by something a little bit more subjective, which is, how vital is it for end-user satisfaction to be able to hop on those networks when they come across them?"

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Oracle, Microsoft to announce new partnership Monday

Microsoft and Oracle are set to reveal details of a new partnership on Monday, one of a "startling series" of announcements Oracle CEO Larry Ellison promised next week around the Oracle Database 12c.

Oracle will be announcing next week technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS (software as a service) companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud, who will be committing to Oracle technology "for years to come," Ellison told analysts during an earnings call on Thursday. He added that Oracle will announce partnerships with companies like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft, but did not provide further details.

Many of the SaaS vendors, including NetSuite and Salesforce.com, have long used Oracle's database to build their services, and will likely upgrade to 12c. Microsoft offers its competing SQL Server database in many markets. A preview of SQL Server 2014 will be available by the end of the month and the full production version will be available for purchase in early 2014.

The company now expects the 12c to be the "foundation of a modern cloud" with multi-tenancy capability at the database layer, thus avoiding the overhead of getting multi-tenancy through virtual machines or security issues that arise from a multi-tenanted application architecture. Some companies built multi-tenancy into the application to run a lot of customers' data on a small number of servers, and do that economically, he said. The multi-tenancy capability in 12c will be a separately priced option.

Oracle's president Mark Hurd, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, Microsoft's president for the server and tools business, are slated to address the press teleconference on Monday. Microsoft hosts its developer conference in San Francisco next week.

Oracle reported Thursday that its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of US$10.9 billion was flat year-on-year, while profit rose 10 percent to $3.8 billion.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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U.S. inventor of DRAM tech honored with Japan award

A U.S. researcher at IBM who invented the basic building block of the modern DRAM has been honored with a prestigious Japanese award and a US$500,000 prize.

Robert Dennard was given the Kyoto Prize in the electronics category on Friday, awarded by the Inamori Foundation. The first DRAM chip that used his technology went on sale in 1973. DRAM at that time had less storage than current versions -- it was sold in 1k and 4k varieties.

Dennard's invention involved combining a field-effect transistor and capacitor in a single cell to store a charge that represented a single bit of data. Cells were then arranged on a grid structure, allowing them to be accessed in random order, as opposed to sequential storage like tape.

This random access memory was called "dynamic" because the charge on each cell gradually fades over time and must be periodically recharged. The recharge cycle is short enough to allow for quick reads and writes, on the scale of nanoseconds.

Dennard's U.S. patent, for the technology, granted in 1968, is titled "Field-Effect Transistor Memory." The patent describes how "a random access memory is provided in an integrated circuit structure" so that "a very large memory including many cells can be built on a single substrate and operated at very high speeds."

The researcher was also part of a team that developed guidelines for greatly reducing the size of such transistors, leading to modern integrated circuits.

"These achievements by Dr. Dennard brought about remarkable developments in integrated circuit technologies, which provided the essential foundation for tremendous progress in information and communications equipments," the Inamori Foundation said in a press release announcing the award.

The prize, first awarded in 1985, includes a ¥50 million ($514,000) award and a gold medal. Other recipients this year included Cecil Taylor, a U.S. jazz musician, and Masatoshi Nei, an evolutionary biologist. Among last year's recipients was Ivan Sutherland, who is considered to be the father of computer graphics for contributions like the Sketchpad program in 1963, which allowed a pointing device to interact and manipulate objects shown graphically on screen.

The group that awards the prize is named after its founder, Kazuo Inamori, a famous Japanese businessman who also started Kyocera, a large component manufacturer based in Kyoto. Inamori has also founded other firms including mobile operator KDDI and has led the ongoing recovery of Japan Airlines.

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3-D printer maker Stratasys to acquire desktop rival MakerBot

3-D printer company Stratasys is acquiring desktop 3-D printer maker MakerBot for over US$400 million in an all-stock deal, to shore up its consumer presence.

Privately-held MakerBot has sold more than 22,000 3-D printers since it was founded in 2009, and its printers are increasingly used by a class of "prosumers" that includes individuals using the devices for professional purposes as well as for personal applications, Stratasys said in a statement Wednesday.

MakerBot has also set up a portal Thingiverse.com for the sharing of user-generated digital design content to promote system usage. The portal has more than 90,000 3-D product files available for sharing, and generates more than 500,000 unique visitors and 1 million downloads each month, Stratasys said.

In the transaction, Stratasys will initially issue about 4.76 million shares in exchange for 100 percent of the outstanding capital stock of MakerBot in Brooklyn, New York. The proposed merger has an initial value of $403 million based on Stratasys' closing stock price of $84.60 as of Wednesday. MakerBot shareholders are also entitled to performance-based payouts of more shares or cash.

The MakerBot business will operate as a separate subsidiary, with its existing brand and management. Bre Pettis, CEO and co-founder of MakerBot, will continue to head the operation.

The companies have estimated that between 35,000 to 40,000 desktop 3-D printers were sold in 2012, which is expected to double this year, as prosumers increasingly adopt desktop 3-D printers for a broad range of applications. MakerBot generated $11.5 million in total revenue in the first quarter of 2013 compared to $15.7 million for all of 2012.

Stratasys, with dual headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Rehovot, Israel, was formed in 2012 by the merger of 3-D printing companies Stratasys and Objet. It manufacture 3-D printers and materials for prototyping and production. MakerBot recently opened a new manufacturing facility in Brooklyn.

3-D printing, which has a variety of applications, recently came to the attention of some U.S. legislators who want to regulate the use of the devices to print firearms. An organization Defense Distributed fired in early May a handgun made with 3-D printing technology, and said it would distribute its drawings online. It later brought down the files on orders of the U.S. State Department, but not before the drawings were downloaded by a large number of people.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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