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This is an unfortunate report, these all represent issues that have been raised in a campaign that includes innuendo and supposition, leaving out inconvenient information and language and ignoring the same, similar, or less attractive, language that exists for ODF.

Microsoft is awaiting the results of a crucial vote, expected by March 29, from representatives of national standards bodies.

Update 5:30 p.m. PDT: A Microsoft representative pointed to previous statements on the intellectual property and Open XML. In a blog in January of this year, Jason Matusow, the company’s director of corporate standards, said that there are no intellectual property issues with Open XML, dismissed claims that there are, and listed the steps Microsoft has taken to clear up any concerns regarding Open XML.

Most open-source software advocates have opposed Microsoft’s effort to standardize Open XML and the SFLC is no exception.

Specifically, the SFLC concluded that the patent protections only apply to current versions of the specifications; future versions could not be covered, it noted.

But the SFLC said that the OSP is not to be trusted. It said that it did the legal analysis following the close of a recent Ballot Resolution Meeting held to resolve problems with the Open XML specification.

The SFLC on Wednesday published a legal analysis of Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP), a document written to give developers the green light to make open-source products based on specifications written by Microsoft.

A Microsoft representative was not immediately available for comment.

Prominent legal counsel the Software Freedom Law Center said that the legal terms covering Microsoft’s Open XML document formats pose a patent risk to free and open-source software developers.

Update 9:00 a.m. PDT, March 13: Gray Knowlton, group product manager for
Microsoft Office, published a detailed rebuttal of the SFLC’s analysis, saying that Open XML’s terms are the same or more liberal than rival document standard OpenDocument (ODF), which is supported by Microsoft foes IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Finally, the SFLC said that OSP-covered specifications are not compatible with the General Public License (GPL), which covers thousands of free and open-source products.

Also, software developers who write code based on a Microsoft-derived specification, such as Open XML, could be limited in how that code is used. “Any code that implements the specification may also do other things in other contexts, so in effect the OSP does not cover any actual code, only some uses of code,” according to the analysis.

While not attempting to clarify the text of the OSP to indicate compatibility with the GPL or provide a safe harbor through its guidance materials, Microsoft wrongly blames the free software legal community for Microsoft’s failure to present a promise that satisfies the requirements of the GPL. It is true that a broad audience of developers could implement the specifications, but they would be unable to be certain that implementations based on the latest versions of the specifications would be safe from attack. They would also be unable to distribute their code for any type of use, as is integral to the GPL and to all free software.

As the final period for consideration of OOXML by ISO elapses, SFLC recommends against the establishment of OOXML as an international standard and cautions GPL implementers not to rely on the OSP.

The OSP is meant to allay concerns over violating Microsoft patents that relate to Open XML, Microsoft’s document specifications that the company is trying to have certified as a standard at the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). For example, a company could create an open-source spreadsheet or server software that can handle Open XML documents.

For those early few, look to open source. It’s the best way to try for free, tweak to individual needs, and pay for actual value delivered.

I spent some time checking out the competition to benchmark our messaging and functionality. I was struck by how thoroughly undifferentiated the pitches were. Everyone was giving essentially the same demo, talking about the same functionality and use cases.

At present, all this “Build your own community!” and “Make your own companywide Facebook!” sound interesting but also a bit odd: Facebook remains a noisy, hustle-bustle of frantic friend-making followed by…tedious time-wasting. If that’s your aim, bravo! But if you have a job…it’s still not very effective at enabling you to do it better.

Not that there isn’t promise in all this 2.0 hoopla. There is. We just haven’t figured out what, precisely, it is. This is why it’s particularly useful to have open-source social applications like those from Ringside Networks, Drupal, and increasingly Alfresco (where I work). Few can afford to fork over millions of dollars on a promise that “social” will turn into cash. Open source allows experimentation with minimal capital investment. This is as it should be.

commentary

Walking around the exhibition floor, it looked like everybody was offering
very similar stuff–big focus on “communities”–creating them, managing
them, etc.

Until the money steps in, I think we’re going to remain in a curious limbo where “shiny baubles” (a colleague’s favorite term) get rolled out widely but for which few pay because no one on the enterprise side has really connected the dots between community, user-generated content, and enterprise productivity/business value.

Over the next year we’re going to see the hype around Enterprise 2.0 reach a fever pitch, and many are going to be lost in disillusionment when it fails to turn to gold. However, in the mishmash there will be a few who finally figure it out, and the rest of the enterprise world will follow in due course.

Internally, I heard from Jean Barmash on the Alfresco consulting team who echoed Jeff’s comments:

It would appear that the Enterprise 2.0 world is still recycling the same froth in an attempt to stand out. Here’s what Whatcott had to say:

It feels like we’re in the early stages of Enterprise 2.0. Let’s call it Enterprise 1.8 where everyone is showing the right slideware and demos, but few, if any, really know how to put it all to productive business use.

I didn’t attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this year, but judging by Jeff Whatcott’s commentary, I’m not sure I missed much.

Plus, the two companies tend to be strong in different regions. In Europe, for example, Yahoo tends to be weaker and Microsoft stronger. In the U.S., the two companies tend to attract different audiences with their mail products–Yahoo Mail appealing to younger and more savvy users, while Windows Live Hotmail has strong roots as an e-mail service for non-techies.

Johnson said that Microsoft has learned a great deal from its acquisitions of Tellme and Aquantive, though he acknowledged the significant size difference between swallowing Yahoo and buying those smaller companies.

Differences such as these are important to consider when one is planning to fork over $44 billion. Now obviously, Microsoft faces a number of hurdles (winning approval from Yahoo’s board and shareholders, gaining the antitrust OK) before it even gets to this point. But these are the kinds of challenges that Microsoft should be, and probably is, trying to solve.

The folks in Redmond are known for being hard-charging and competitive, both internally and externally. Yahoo, meanwhile, tends to be more collaborative, sometimes to the point of inefficiency.

The company didn’t tip its hand too much, but Microsoft executives said on the call that Windows Live was an important brand, as more of the operating system’s duties move online. Office Live, for similar reasons, is also important. Microsoft also praised the Yahoo brand.

When you look at the cultural differences between Microsoft and Yahoo, you don’t need to look much further than a floor plan.

“I recognize the fact the Yahoo brand is a strong brand,” Johnson said in an interview, echoing comments made on the call. MSN, notably, didn’t get such an endorsement.

One of the big differences is the amount of overlap between Yahoo and Microsoft on the product side. Both companies have their own advertising platforms as well as competing home pages, instant messaging programs, e-mail programs and content sites.

Microsoft has been a company of offices, where workers toil individually at their piece of a collective project. Yahoo, by contrast is a Silicon Valley archetype where workers sit in cubicles and tend to work collaboratively.

And, clearly, many of Microsoft and Yahoo’s businesses would benefit from greater scale a point Johnson brought up frequently in the interview and on a conference call with financial analysts. The companies already have instant messaging that is interoperable, but a single product would doubtlessly be more attractive. In search, in ad-serving and in content, a combined company would be a larger rival to Google.

In an interview, Microsoft division president Kevin Johnson talked about the common “passion for innovation” at the two companies. That’s probably true, but all companies, at least all good ones, can be defined by their passion. Both companies have also been accused of suffering from an identity crisis.

But each time the company picks a technology to go with, it creates winners and losers and the potential for animosity builds. Microsoft was quick to say that it would be a team of people from both companies that will need to make decisions, but it also gave the strong sense that it has done significant planning work already.

“Certainly the process is the same,” Johnson said, “This will be a more complex integration planning effort than Tellme and Aquantive.”

There are philosophical differences as well. Yahoo has been a huge proponent of open source, Microsoft a reluctant one.

Now, overlap can be both a good thing and a bad thing. On the positive side, choosing one company’s technology over another allows talent to be freed up to work on other projects.

The vulnerability is in Microsoft’s Jet Database engine, which can be exploited through Word. Microsoft is investigating whether other applications can also exploit the vulnerability.

Customers running Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2,
Windows Vista, and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 are not vulnerable to the buffer overrun being attacked, as they include a version of the Microsoft Jet Database Engine that is not vulnerable to this issue.

According to Microsoft’s security alert:

Overall, Microsoft said, it believes the vulnerability’s risk is limited because its requires people to take multiple steps for the hack to be successful. Microsoft said it is only aware of targeted attacks that take advantage of the flaw.

Microsoft is looking into a vulnerability that could affect Word, the company said Monday.

People who believe they have been attacked can go to the Microsoft Web site for support.

Customers using Microsoft Word 2000 Service Pack 3, Microsoft Word 2002 Service Pack 3, Microsoft Word 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Word 2003 Service Pack 3, Microsoft Word 2007, and Microsoft Word 2007 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 are vulnerable to these attacks.

SiOnyx Brings “Black Silicon” into the Light; Material Could Upend Solar, Imaging Industries - Xconomy
New company formed from Harvard-discovered method for making silicon more receptive to light, potentially making solar cells far more productive.
Bloom Energy Licenses Modine’s Fuel-Cell Tech - Earth2Tech
Bloom Energy, backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is making a highly efficient 5-kilowatt fuel cell for buildings.

(Credit:
SiOnyx)

Energy Biz Boosts GE, Solar Stocks Still Battered - Greentech Media
A look at the market tumble’s impact on public energy companies.
Financial Fallout: Market Tumbles Shake Nuclear Clean-Up Funds - Environmental Capital - The Wall Street Journal
Here’s a fallout from the financial crisis you probably didn’t think of: the clean-up funds for retiring nuclear-power plants.
Will the Momentum for Renewables Wither? - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com
The price of oil is way down from just half a year ago, when some were predicting $200 a barrel. No clear answers yet, but if a biofuel start-up counted on $90 oil, it may be in trouble.
Chevron venture capital arm pursues clean tech - East Bay Business Times:
Part of a bigger trend of incumbent fuel and energy companies investing in new technologies.
DHL reveals clean-tech incubation unit - BusinessGreen
As part of DHL’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions, it has found that it needs to invest in clean-tech start-ups to stimulate the market for low-carbon products.

The look of altered, "black" silicon.

They also found forums and sites dedicated to ATM “skimming.” Skimming is the physical use of secondary readers and keypads on ATMs used to capture account numbers and PINs. Often the ATM transaction goes through, and the customer doesn’t realize the account has been compromised until later.

Once they found a compromised Web server, they then wondered: how hard is it to create an authentic-looking phishing site? Dhanjani and Rios found kits online, prepackaged with images and forms from Bank of America, Citibank, and PayPal, among others. Just install one of these kits on a compromised server and you’re in business.

In a talk titled “Bad Sushi: Beating Phishers at their own game,” Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios found not a sophisticated gang of elite coders, but hundreds of bad coders all copying one another, and often stealing from each other.

Looking deeper into the code used in these kits, they found that one kit had been copied many times, with different images. Moreover, the creator of the kit was skimming off the people using the kit; every time someone fell for a phishing site, their personal data not only went to the phisher who put up the site, but also to the author who wrote the kit.

With personal information flowing in, what does the average phisher do next? Dhanjani and Rios googled to find sites trading personal data–not a surprising find. What they found was that U.S. and U.K. IDs often sold for much less than European and Asian data. They could not account for the difference.

They followed one of the servers that had shown up on one black list multiple times. What they found was a poorly configured Internet-facing server, one that was easily compromised, and therefore hosting several phishing sites.

Dhanjani and Rios suggested that site administrators should lock down their sites so that phishing kits don’t take root. They also suggested that sites require more security in order to raise the bar. By requiring a customer to use two-factor authentication, or a persistent cookie, many of the financial phishing sites would cease to be effective, they said.

Washington D.C. — On Wednesday, in a talk at Black Hat D.C. 2008, two researchers set out to see whether phishing sites were created by the “Einsteinian, ninja hackers that the media makes them out to be.”

Dhanjani and Rios expressed disapproval of antiphishing products that use black lists to block known phishing sites. One, because some legitimate server admins might have their compromised account password visible on such lists. Two, because the researchers were able to open those lists and see the servers that were being compromised.

Microsoft’s motivation, however, is clear, at least as Bartz sees it. “They have Google envy, and they really have to stop that money machine because that money machine is coming back on desktop apps.”

• “Yahoo is swimming in tchotchkes. If I see another T-shirt I’m going to throw up.” Bartz came to Yahoo with a reputation as a slash-and-burn cost cutter from her days at Autodesk. She is indeed trying to tighten spending on what she called “discretionary” items such as yet another purple T-shirt, but said that Yahoo will continue to spend quite a bit of money on IT needed to keep its sites up and running.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz kibitzed with a luncheon of Wall Street analysts Wednesday as part of a free-wheeling discussion of Yahoo’s past sins and future opportunities.

• “We’re not a search company.” Bartz has previously said that search is an important part of Yahoo, but seems to think that the hoopla over Yahoo’s search position between Google and Microsoft distracts from what Yahoo is all about. Ninety-eight percent of Yahoo’s searches come from people who are already on the site, she said. That means Yahoo has to keep finding ways to bring in users to its content sites–such as sports, finance, and local news–and let searches conducted by those additional users drive its ad business rather than fighting the external search branding issue against Google, as Microsoft is trying to do with its new Bing search engine.

At the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Technology Conference, analyst Justin Post noted the “much more open policy” that Yahoo has implemented with regard to the financial world since Bartz’s arrival at Yahoo, and that openness definitely applies to Bartz’s willingness to candidly discuss Yahoo’s situation regarding Google, Microsoft.

• “This is like me trying to buy Office from Steve. This is not a minor issue.” Bartz handled the inevitable questions about Yahoo’s on-again, off-again romance with Microsoft by recognizing that while there are some compelling opportunities if Yahoo and Microsoft were to enter into a search partnership, there are more than a few issues, as well.

“Do we trust them to do the technology right? Would we save money?” she wondered. Bartz thought offloading Yahoo’s search business would save about $500 million–far less than analysts had estimated–including data-center and employee costs, but there would be lost revenue to factor in, of course.

The hope is that Yahoo can translate its strength in display advertising to lure revenue from chief marketing officers at big companies thinking about moving a chunk of their advertising spending from television to the Web. For those folks, “your brand is not defined by 20 keywords. You have to put a persona out there,” she said, referring to the need for display and/or video advertising. In order to do win that business, however, Yahoo has to take a lot of “friction” out of the Internet ad sales process that just isn’t there in the television business.

• “An extroverted engineer looks at your shoes when they are talking to you.” Bartz got her biggest laugh of the day with an old joke about engineers, and how she prefers spending time out making sales calls with Yahoo’s sales force. This is a key area of differentiation for Yahoo: it says it wants to focus on “high-touch” sales, rather than the algorithmic model that prints money for Google.

A revamped home page coming “later this fall” will help, Bartz said. One feature of that home page will involve getting Twitter messages right onto the page; “everything is flowing in, and we help you flow out.”

• “Yahoo has way too much infrastructure. For everything you can do in three steps, Yahoo does it in 22.” Along those lines, a lot of the cutting Bartz has tried to implement has more to do with processes and sites that had basically been “abandoned,” she said. Some Yahoo properties that were launched during the previous regime stagnated, and therefore gave off a poor impression of Yahoo to a visitor that stumbled upon them. Cleaning up Yahoo’s myriad properties–in a much faster way than currently possible–seems like a priority for Bartz.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

Bartz let fly with a few of her trademark zingers, but otherwise had little new to say about Yahoo that hadn’t already been covered at events like last week’s D: All Things Digital conference or Yahoo earnings calls. Nonetheless, here’s a selection of Bartzisms that shed a little more light on Yahoo’s efforts during her first six months on the job:

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Apple has switched on its Genius recommendation engine for videos, two weeks after releasing the latest version of iTunes (download for Windows and Mac) without the promised feature.

When iTunes 8.1 shipped earlier this month, the company initially said the video Genius feature would be available in the release notes for that software, but it was not active. At the time, an Apple representative promised the company would activate the feature “in the coming days.”

iLounge spotted the new Genius feature, which recommends movies or television shows you might be interested in purchasing from the iTunes Store based on your current video library. Apple unveiled a similar feature for music last year, but one notable difference with the video version is that it only seems to work with videos that have been purchased from Apple, according to iLounge’s early testing.

Another contemporary thin subnotebook is the Toshiba Portege R500, which boasts dimensions (WxDxH Front/H Rear) of 11.1″ x 8.5″ x .77″(front)/1.0″(rear) and comes with a 12.1-inch screen, an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.20GHz U7600 processor, a 64GB SSD, 2GB of memory, and a fixed DVD rewritable drive. The weight is 2.4 pounds, beating the Air (though with a smaller screen). It also trumps the Air with extra ports, including 3 USB, one 1394, and an Ethernet jack. It starts at $1,999. The CNET review (July 2007) is here.

The Lenovo X300 has received so much press already that it is almost redundant to mention it here. Suffice to say, it has a large 13.3-inch screen like the Air, is slightly thicker at 0.73 inches, packs Intel X3100 graphics, and uses a 64GB SSD. CNET review here.

Digital Equipment HiNote Ultra CS475, announced 1994

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

NOTE: This is not an official CNET review. Official CNET product reviews are here.

(Credit:
ume-y)

Mitsubishi Pedion

The MacBook Air focused global attention–for the first time with prolonged intensity–on a small, thin notebook. Until now, this kind of design simply wasn’t on many users’ shopping lists. (Particularly Americans who choose performance over portability.) Here’s a brief look at this notebook category, both past and present.

At the top of the blast-from-the-past utrathin notebook list is the Sharp Actius MM20P. This model is listed with a height of 0.62-inch. That’s thin–though it doesn’t taper to 0.16-inch like the Air. It comes with the Transmeta Efficeon TM8600 (Intel-compatible) 1GHz processor, a 10.4-inch screen, a 20GB hard disk drive (no solid state drive option), and 512MB of memory.

Sharp Actius MM20P in dock

Next up: the HP 2510p. Unbeknownst to many, Compaq (which HP purchased in 2001) has a long history of delivering excellent ultraportables. These designs emerged after Compaq bought Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in 1998. At that time, DEC was shipping the HiNote Ultra line, which was a sensation when hit the market in 1994. The HiNote didn’t hit with the impact of the MacBook Air, but it was close. Only one-inch thick (again, this is 1994) and weighing four pounds, it seemed absolutely razor thin at that time. The CS475 model also came with a cutting-edge floppy-drive slice–that snapped on the bottom–and a multimedia docking station. Back in my early days at CNET, I wrote about the HiNote.

The problem–as the specifications indicate–is that it’s dated (and discontinued). Sharp did show, however, that thin notebook designs were viable long before the Air. A progenitor of the Actius is the Sharp Muramasa. This measured 0.54 inches thick. Here’s the CNET review of the Actius MM20P.

The Mitsubishi Pedion, announced in 1997 (reincarnated as the Hewlett-Packard OmniBook Sojourn), is even more dated–and a milestone design too. It was 0.7 inches thick, 3.1 pounds (about the same as the Air) had a 12.1-inch screen, and came with a 233-MHz Pentium MMX processor. It retailed for a whopping $6,000. But the notebook never seemed to be a finished product and was plagued by user complaints. One of the biggest problems–with the initial version–was the Chiclet keyboard.

(Credit:
Sharp)

Asus U1E

HP 2510p

A few prefatory notes: Because I use a MacBook Air, the topic of ultraportables has taken on more importance for me. But the impact of this category of notebooks goes much further than personal interest. Ultraportables now contain fast Core 2 Duo processors, snappy solid state drives (SSDs), and better screens, which makes them more usable and mainstream than ever before. Price is still the limiting factor. This will change, however, as SSD prices fall and more ultraportable competition creeps in at the low end from the likes of Asus and Everex.

The current HP 2510p comes from this bloodline. It’s slightly thicker (at 0.97 inches) than some of the others but there’s a reason for the extra plastic: an integrated optical drive. It also packs an Intel “Santa Rosa” GM965 chipset with X3100 graphics. (The Toshiba R500–see below–uses an older 945GMS chipset and 950 graphics.) The 2510p weighs 2.8 pounds, more than the R500 but less than the Air. Otherwise, it outclasses the Air in almost exactly the same areas as the R500. More ports, an integrated 10/100/1000 gigabit network adapter, and built-in DVD rewritable drive. The 2510p starts at $1,499. CNET review here.

(Credit:
Mitsubishi)

Toshiba R500

Other notable entries in this category include the Asus (maker of the Eee PC) U1E which has an 11-inch screen and gets as slim as 0.7 inches and the LG X series with a 10.6-inch display.

(Credit:
Toshiba)

(Credit:
Asus)

(Credit: The Digital Bits)

When Warner Bros. announced it was becoming a Blu-ray exclusive studio, most observers of the format war agreed that it was a mortal wound for HD DVD. The only remaining question was, how long is HD DVD going to last? Well, according to the latest NPD data (as compiled by Bill Hunt at The Digital Bits), not very long. During the week of January 5 to 12–the first week the market had to respond to the Warner announcement–Blu-ray absolutely trounced HD DVD in hardware sales, grabbing 92.53 percent of the high-def disc-player market. That’s pretty ugly for the HD DVD camp, but it only gets worse. The most damning aspect of these numbers is that they do not include the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive–only standalone players. We previously thought HD DVD’s only road to victory was by selling tons of cheap standalone HD DVD players, so the fact that relatively expensive Blu-ray players are starting to sell makes it seem like this format war has been officially declared over–by the consumers.

Of course, Toshiba slashed prices on its HD DVD players just a few days after this data ends–and we’re very interested to see what kind of impact that has on hardware sales–but it’s going to be hard (if not impossible) to overcome Blu-ray’s momentum. Blu-ray also continues to outsell HD DVD in software sales, largely because of the
PS3 user base. We’ll be weighing all these new developments in our next update to our Quick Guide to HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, which will go up early next week.