bendramoksliai.com

Still, to me, there’s something inherently eerie having such personal, revealing data about our physical selves readable by who-knows-how-many over such a network. Being confined to a bed with a multitude of hook-ups restricts mobility and comfort, sure, but this sophisticated monitoring has me wondering whether I’d use my newfound mobility toward its obvious end: throwing back Victory Gins at the Chestnut Tree.

“GE Healthcare applauds the FCC’s NPRM proposing to create a dedicated radio frequency band that will help remove a major obstacle to the adoption of wireless medical Body Sensor Networks,” said Munesh Makhija, general manager of GE Healthcare Systems and Wireless. “We will continue to collaborate with industry, the FCC and other regulatory agencies to ensure the proper allocation of spectrum enabling next generation wireless monitoring devices.”

GE Healthcare is developing a Body Sensor Network (BSN) that consists of sensor devices that collect patient-specific data, from body temperature and pulse-oximetry to blood glucose levels and respiratory function. The real-time information will be transmitted to doctors, nurses, caregivers, etc., to enable far more efficient body monitoring from any location, which in turn provides the most current patient information and treatment option evaluations.

Body sensor networks are a logical evolutionary step in monitoring health, as Nathaniel Sims, a physician at Mass General Hospital, points out. Moreover: “Body-worn sensors could free patients from the limitations of stationary bedside monitors, improving quality of care.”

Furthermore, the need for easier, more efficient monitoring will only increase; the U.S. is expected to have a shortage of 1 million registered nurses by 2020, thanks in large part to our aging Baby Boomers, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

GE’s proposal (PDF) requests that the FCC allocate frequencies 2360 to 2400 MHz on a secondary, licensed basis for low-power, short-range, wireless medical devices such as BSNs. “These new frequencies will provide a protected spectrum for wireless medical BSNs and reduce the potential of interference from ubiquitous unlicensed radio devices such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, or Wi-Fi,” according to their press release.

The network that would support the wireless sensors monitoring what is going on inside a patient’s body will be called the Medical Body Area Network Service, or MBANS for short.

The FCC has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking for the MBANS, which has left GE positively giddy:

But with all this past and projected merger of the open-source world into the proprietary world, should we be concerned that “open source” will lose its meaning?

Take Microsoft’s announcement about a new bridge it built between open-source PHP and .Net. No talk of “the American way” or anything cool like that. All the talk was about technology working together.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It’s likely to get even lonelier.

Take Microsoft. Microsoft used to be able to conveniently label open source as “un-American” and “an intellectual-property destroyer.” Now that open source is a core part of its strategy, however, Microsoft’s soundbites on open source won’t be nearly as potent or pithy.

Customers win in the process. IBM’s Savio Rodrigues writes: “It was/is inevitable that any software vendor with a budget to worry about will choose to consume open-source components versus building from scratch when the customer value point is higher up the stack.” This means less money spent reinventing the wheel, and more on customer value.

As open source has become big to businesses, it has also become big business, with Gartner predicting that vendors will increasingly maintain the leading open-source projects. Vendors, and predominately “proprietary vendors,” dominate open source today. Given this assimilation of open source into the proprietary software fabric, has open source won? Or lost?

In 2007 Tim O’Reilly predicted that “virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company.” Red Hat still stands independent, though there is good reason to believe it could make an attractive target, but it increasingly stands alone as a pure-play open-source company.

Take Zenoss, for example. The company recently registered its one-millionth download, with an active community and user base. If you’re a proprietary network management vendor stuck in the old model of high-cost sales, why wouldn’t you buy into Zenoss’ success? Sure, you will generally pay a premium, as it’s not cheap to build successful open-source companies, but I’ve yet to hear a company complain about an open-source acquisition.

IBM, in other words, understands that open source is not “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to meeting customer requirements and ensuring its business is sound (so that it can scale its ability to meet more customer requirements). IBM is an open-source advocate without being an open-source polemicist.

Unfortunately, for the next year or two, we’ll remain in transition. I’ve called it “commercial open source’s awkward teenage years,” but it’s awkward for more than just traditional open-source vendors.

I don’t think so. Gartner’s Brian Prentice is absolutely correct to suggest that “we are rapidly moving to the point where all software companies will, to some extent, be an open source company.” It’s simply a matter of degree (Red Hat sells more open source than Microsoft) and revenue model (Open core versus open complements versus…).

This is the model going forward. It doesn’t fit into convenient taxonomies, but it’s arguably the right way to think about an “open-source company.”

How boring is that?

If you’re an enterprise CIO, this is what you’ve been waiting for: the war between open source and proprietary software to end and simply work together. CIOs can’t afford to be dogmatic. They like open source for its flexibility, low-risk evaluation, etc. They couldn’t care less about open source as a religious coda.

The 451 Group’s Matt Aslett suggested 2009 was to be the year of open-source mergers and acquisitions. While that hasn’t yet materialized, it’s just a matter of time before the best open-source vendors are scooped up by proprietary vendors.

Indeed, I suspect that IBM is really the best model for an “open-source company” going forward. IBM has invested heavily in open source and uses it throughout its product line, but also competes aggressively with open source (Ask a member of IBM’s Unix team whether a customer should use Linux or Unix).

Still, nearly every major antivirus vendor offers a free online malware scan. It’s best to stick with well-known brands in this regard because the scanner will access many sensitive areas of your PC. Some such scans are more intrusive than others, and most will detect but not necessarily remove malware.

The cold, hard reality of the computer world dictates that most of us require multiple layers of protection from malware. Last week, I described how I removed dozens of Trojans and viruses from the family PC. The free program I used, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, is intended to be used in conjunction with a real-time antivirus program. Based on several comments, this point wasn’t clear in the original post.

Another commenter suggested I write about online virus-scan services. I did that very thing back in May 2008 in “Your one-stop shop for online virus scans.” I was glad to see that most of the services I linked to in that post are still available and still free. Unfortunately, you now have to register to view the results of Virus Bulletin’s most recent tests of antivirus apps.

One of the “Five simple PC security tips” I wrote about last June was to use antivirus software. The two freebies I cited in that post are Avast Home Edition and Avira AntiVir.

Some longtime PC users have never bothered with antivirus software, see no need for such programs, and have never encountered a virus. Some of these people even use Windows.

Maybe if I didn’t have to use Windows I wouldn’t have to bother with all this security stuff—maybe. But I do have to use Windows, and I do have to use the Internet, so taking precautions is just part of the workday. Fortunately, if you do it right, it doesn’t have to be a big part of it.

More disappointing was that the PC Flank scanning service I described appears to have gone belly up last month. When I returned to the site, Norton Safe Search identified it as dangerous. According to discussions on various forums, such as one on DSLReports.com, PC Flank went dark sometime this summer.

“And if you’re an innovator,” he continued, “where DVDs are concerned, it’s very dangerous to innovate without asking the studios’ permission first.”

Apparently, the only good news to come out of this for those in favor of fair use is that U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, in her RealDVD decision, did leave open the question of whether consumers have the legal right to make copies of their DVDs for their own personal use.

The one-two punch in the courts is likely to rock the technology community. Techies had already begun bitterly criticizing the decision by Patel to halt sales of RealDVD and the Kaleidescape-like player from Real, code named Facet.

For the second time in two days, Hollywood has racked up another major legal victory over DVD-copying devices the studios charge are illegal.

Kaleidescape, which had won a rare court victory over the film industry two years ago, saw a California appeals court overturn the ruling on Wednesday. The decision comes a day after a federal court placed a preliminary injunction on the sale of RealDVD. Both Kaleidescape and RealDVD enable users to make digital copies of movies and store them to a hard drive.

Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users and technology firms, said late Tuesday evening that Patel’s decision is a setback for innovators and consumers.

“We’re obviously disappointed by the court’s decision”" said Michael Malcolm, Kaleidescape’s CEO. “Our plan is to go to the Supreme Court of California. We’re confident that were not in breach of our contract with the DVDCCA and until then our products remain fully legal and licensed.”

Update 4:15 p.m.: To include comments from Kaleidescape.

(Credit:
Kaleidescape)

In 2004, Kaleidescape was accused in a lawsuit by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), of agreeing to abide by the terms of the Content Scramble System (CSS) license, which it said forbade the copying of DVDs.

The film industry has always maintained that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was designed to protect innovation as well as the rights of content creators. A balance was sought and in pursuit of that, provisions were made to protect antipiracy controls, such as DVD CSS, from being circumvented.

Kaleidescape, a company that enables users to copy DVDs and store them on its system, lost an important court decision Wednesday.

What this says to consumers is that if you want to make a digital backup of a DVD, no problem. Go ahead. But beware if you build a tool that actually helps people make those copies. In that case you’re breaking the law.

In a statement, the DVD CCA said: “The Appellate Court recognized what we have maintained all along, Kaleidescape had agreed to a complete contract that mandated certain requirements with which devices must conform in order to be Content Scramble System (CSS) compliant. We look forward to returning to the trial court to obtain an injunction requiring Kaleidescape to comply with its contractual obligations under the CSS License Agreement and Specifications.”

“This is yet another example of the way the DMCA harms innovation without doing anything to stop what the studios call piracy. This enables the studios to take consumers’ fair use rights and sell them back to them one DVD at a time.” — Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

“It may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on that individual’s computer,” Patel wrote, “a federal law (the DMCA) has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies.”

Kaleidescape argued there was nothing in the license that banned copying and Judge Leslie C. Nichols agreed in a ruling issued in March 2007. RealNetworks, which makes RealDVD, also argued that there was nothing in the DVD CSS license that prevented them from designing a DVD-copying feature.

“This is yet another example of the way the DMCA harms innovation without doing anything to stop what the studios call piracy,” von Lohmann said. “This enables the studios to take consumers’ fair use rights and sell them back to them one DVD at a time.

Then, if someone falls for the ruse and provides credit card and other billing information, the scammers have sensitive financial data that can be used for identity fraud.

On his blog Input & Output, Seven Scale CEO Troy Davis offers an analysis of the scareware ad that appeared on NYTimes.com.

Typically, the site hosting the rogue alerts has been compromised, or a worm, like Conficker, distributes the alerts directly to computers.

“This isn’t uncommon,” said Michael Caruso, founder and chief executive of Clickfacts. Scammers “come in looking like one thing. They spoof the email addresses, even get good references for their credit and run a car ad. It happened with a Lexus ad a couple of weeks ago…They change the content out at the content delivery network.”

“The problem really is with Web sites handing over control of some of their content to third parties.” –Graham Cluley, security researcher, Sophos

Several news organizations were targeted in the rogue ad scam, according to a New York Times statement.

One of them was SFGate.com, the site for the San Francisco Chronicle, a Chronicle spokeswoman told The New York Times. (Calls from CNET News were not returned on Monday and Tuesday.) “We did get hit with something over the weekend,” Kelly Harville, a vice president of marketing at the newspaper, is quoted as saying.

ClickFacts, which started out helping advertisers defend against click fraud, also offers an ad scanning service for Web sites and ad networks that audits ad content for things like malware. For instance, ClickFacts is monitoring the ads that appear on News Corp.’s Fox site, which previously was hit by rogue scareware, Caruso said.

(Credit: Troy Davis)

By sneaking fake ads onto a high-profile site, the scammers are likely to net more victims than by targeting smaller sites.

“Identity theft is the purpose behind the ads,” said Caruso.

The rogue ad on NYTimes.com was delivered by an unknown ad delivery firm after the newspaper agreed to run an ad for a week from a company posing as Internet telephony provider Vonage, according to New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty. Initially, a legitimate-looking ad was running, but that was switched with the fake antivirus alerts, possibly on Friday, she said.

Many ad networks are scanning ads manually, but ad content can easily be changed after a manual scan is done, Caruso said. In addition, he said, a malicious ad “could be placed in anywhere” because sites often have other companies sell their ad inventory.

“We proactively scan the ads before they are delivered and then continuously scan them from many IP ranges around the world to make sure they’re not launching adware,” he said.

“I think there is a problem with ad networks, in general,” said Graham Cluley, a Sophos security researcher. “The problem really is with Web sites handing over control of some of their content to third parties.”

It happened just days ago, for instance, to the Web site of The New York Times. The newspaper company informed readers on Sunday about a rogue ad that was popping up on its site. The ad warned visitors to NYTimes.com that their computer may be infected with a virus and redirected them to a site that purports to scan the computer and offers to sell antivirus software.

“In the future, we will not allow any advertiser to use unfamiliar third-party vendors,” McNulty is quoted as saying. (McNulty did not respond to e-mail questions posed by CNET News on Monday and Tuesday.)

Instead of hacking into major online sites to embed malware, malicious hackers are going in through the front door by exploiting security holes in systems for delivering ads.

This is common behavior for what is known as fake security alerts, or “scareware,” designed to trick people into paying for something they don’t need. Use of this type of scam is on the rise.

The rogue ads pose a number of problems. First, they can download malware to a computer once the ad is clicked on. The malware can include Trojans, back doors, and keystroke loggers and can be used by the scammers to commandeer the computer to send spam or launch attacks on other computers, according to Cluley.

For example, two years ago Trojan horse software was discovered in banner ads that an ad network was serving up via Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange to MySpace, Photobucket, Bebo, and other high-traffic sites.

For the quarter ended June 30, the business software giant netted 423 million euros ($600 million) compared with 408 million euros for 2008’s second quarter. The company attributed the gain to cost cuts and to stronger growth in its profit margin, the net difference between sales and earnings.

Though the company didn’t offer sales and earnings estimates for the full year, it did boost its forecast for operating margin for 2009. Excluding nonrecurring expenses, SAP now expects its annual operating margin to range from 25.5 percent to 27 percent, up from its earlier estimate of 24.5 percent to 25.5 percent, which it provided in its first-quarter report.

The company has also been trying to expand its reach through acquisitions. In May, SAP picked up carbon management firm Clear Standards. Last week, it announced it would acquire SAF AG, a provider of global forecasting software for the retail market.

“Despite the challenging economic conditions, the strength of our business model combined with a strong cost discipline has proven itself once again by enabling us to report another quarter of strong operating margin growth,” said SAP Chief Financial Officer Werner Brandt.

As part of its cost-cutting efforts, SAP announced earlier this year that it would slice about 3,000 jobs globally by the end of 2009.

SAP on Wednesday reported a 4 percent gain in earnings for the second quarter despite lower sales.

(Credit: SAP)

Hurt by the global downturn, overall revenue dropped 10 percent to 2.6 billion euros from 2.9 billion euros a year ago. Software sales were hit especially hard, falling 40 percent to 543 million euros from 898 million euros in the year-ago quarter. SAP noted that 2008’s second quarter was prior to the current economic recession.

It sounds like a simple business but it’s expensive to do well. Without extensive and reliable data you won’t get repeat customers. But data about money and credit has always been valuable. Cortera has raised $19 million for this venture and CEO Jim Swift believes he can take D&B head-on — though not initially. He hopes to get small businesses hooked on his service first and then work up the food chain, eventually undercutting D&B’s prices so much he puts them out of business. Swift doesn’t believe D&B can compete on price without murdering its own stock price.

Swift says the company’s site has already attracted a million visitors thanks to its search engine optimization efforts. The biggest market so far for the eCredit data, he says: companies in the construction business.

Cortera will ask small businesses to rate their business customers on how quickly and consistently they pay their invoices; it will also at some point be able to take in data automatically from accounting applications. This data will then be leavened with Yelp-style reviews of companies as business partners. The goal is to make available to small businesses the kind of intelligence that large companies have had about each other for years, to help even small businesses work with companies in their supply chain more deliberately and effectively.

I think I just found the dullest company at DemoFall 09 to write about. But you know how these things go: Often it’s the block-and-tacklers that find huge success while the science-fiction dreamers end up manning ski lifts.

Jim Swift, Cortera's ambitious CEO

Cortera is taking on the old, stodgy Dun & Bradstreet credit rating company and launching its new crowdsourced competitor to it. Through an earlier and expensive ($10 million plus) acquisition of eCredit, the company gets the “trade tapes” of payments made on credit terms to many major companies. This is largely the same data D&B uses to establish its ratings. But Cortera’s strategy is to focus on small businesses that can neither afford D&B services, nor that submit data to credit rating companies for analysis.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The company will charge $3 for a full report (some data will be available for free), or, for heavy users, $49 a month for a subscription. D&B reports range from $39.99 to $179 each.

Kotaku says the reason listed is “For the manufacturer” — or at the maker’s request” and that “the notice also notes that all in-store displays for the 80GB model are to be taken down.”

Since the 160GB PS3 isn’t sold in Japan and all the other PS3 models (20GB, 40GB, 60GB) are discontinued, the speculation is that indeed something new is coming, quite possibly the rumored PS3 Slim.

According to a report by a Japanese blog that Kotaku turned into English, 7-Eleven will no longer be taking “pre-orders” for black, white and silver 80GB PS3 after Sunday, August 9. (The document this information is based on is referred to as a “notice”).

Via Kotaku

Also fueling the fire is a separate report yesterday from Taiwan’s DigiTimes, which is at the center of a lot of these rumor stories, that Sony has recently “placed significant orders for key Sony PS3 components” from local manufacturers that were double the amount it usually orders.

With all this talk of a new PS3, the big question remains whether Sony will drop the price on the entry-level model of the console to $299 to spur demand. The most likely answer remains yes.

Comments?

The rumors of the impending arrival of a new PlayStation 3 are growing more fierce as new hints seem to turn up almost daily in the blogsphere. The latest discovery to pop up is what appears to be an internal document from 7-Eleven–which sells games in Japan–that suggests Sony may be about to discontinue the 80GB PS3 in its home country.

In Japan, the PS3 comes in silver, black, and white.

(Credit:
Sony)

I could use some updates.

The Windows version is in public beta (get it here). A Mac version should be out soon.

Back in the old days of CNET, we had a product I loved called CNET Catchup. It scanned your computer and told you which software on it had updates available. I’m happy to report that we’ve brought the function back, in a completely new product called TechTracker.

This is not an impartial expert review. We don’t review our own apps. This is a pure pitch. I like TechTracker and I’m proud of the team here that built it. So go get it and tell the folks who made it what you think.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

It’s a free app. It will scan your PC (at regular intervals if you like) and tell you what you have that’s old or out of date. It gives you links to updates as well as user reviews of the apps. Updates come to you from our Download.com site, so you know they’re safe and spyware-free.

Anti-Linux rhetoric

(Credit: Screenshot-Dave Rosenberg)

Anti-Linux rhetoric

(Credit: Screenshot-Dave Rosenberg)

Just when it seemed like Microsoft was content to bag on Google and Apple, screenshots of anti-Linux training materials hit the Internet a few days ago. If these are fakes, someone certainly spent a lot of time making them look and sound a lot like previous Microsoft training materials.

Presumably this campaign is related to Netbooks and laptops, a space in which Linux has feature parity, if a lack of interest from consumers. It would be interesting to see how Microsoft will evolve its anti-Apple message. The laptop hunters ad series focused on the expense of Apple products, but it certainly can’t beat iTunes and other Apple software for compatibility and ease of use.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

According to the anonymous source, Microsoft has been sending Best Buy retail staff training material that deliberately attacks and distorts Linux. And from the screenshots below (originally posted on Overclock.net forum) it’s clear Microsoft is threatened by Linux–if for the wrong reasons.

Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the screenshots. Similarly, Electronista wrote that Microsoft has neither confirmed or denied the legitimacy of the materials.