Pitka, director of product marketing at Telus, in a telephone interview.

Mowlem, vice-president for marketing and alliances at Ensim Corp., in a telephone interview.

<P style=””TEXT-ALIGN: ” align=center center\?><SPAN style=””FONT-SIZE: ” FONT-FAMILY: black; COLOR: Verdana\? 8.5pt;>© The <SPAN style=””FONT-SIZE: ” FONT-FAMILY: black; COLOR: Verdana\? 8.5pt;>Vancouver<SPAN style=””FONT-SIZE: ” FONT-FAMILY: black; COLOR: Verdana\? 8.5pt;> Sun 2005

Tiger is on the prowl today in Vancouver, and that could be the initial sign that things might be about to change in personal computing habits forever.

At 6 p.m. on Friday, in stores across the Lower Mainland, Apple unleashed the latest version of its OS X operating system — really just plain old 10.4, but called Tiger because, well, that’s a heck of a lot sexier than just using a number.

Inside Tiger is a feature that Microsoft has been promising Windows users for years in its long-delayed new operating system, Longhorn: a built-in rapid and almost universal search system called Spotlight.

Spotlight is search on steroids, somewhat akin to Google for the PC.

What Apple’s Spotlight does is take the search term you’ve given it and then poke its nose into such things as address books, e-mail, photos, documents (including Word, Excel and Powerpoint files), tunes and the like.

Then it coughs up everything relevant (and neatly categorized) including that obscure file about raising chinchillas you last remember seeing in the summer of 2002.

Because it looks at content, not just the name of the file, users won’t have to be so careful — if they ever were — about what they call things when they save them. And they won’t have to waste time muddling around in folders hoping to find what they want.

“The ability to search within documents and PDF Files, that’s going to be a huge time saver for people in a business environment,” said Michael Carman, manager of Mac Station’s Vancouver store in Yaletown.

Both Mac Station and another major Apple retailer, Simply Computing, have geared up for the launch.

Two live tigers will be on hand at the Yaletown Mac Station from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today — a bit of an upgrade from the single panther on hand the last time Apple launched an OS upgrade.

At Simply Computing stores they’re giving away gifts with copies of Tiger, along with chances to win an iPod Shuffle.

Simply Computing’s Langley store had, as of Friday, advance orders for almost all the 50 copies of Tiger they had on hand at $149 a pop. In Vancouver they have 200 copies to meet the demand.

Now, all this hype should mean nothing to Windows users, who outnumber Mac computer afficionados by a margin of something more than 10 to one, except that Spotlight could be a vision of things to come in computing when Microsoft finally delivers its new operating system sometime in 2006.

Along with Spotlight, both Carman and Tony Barker, manager of administrative services at Simply Computing, believe the Dashboard — featuring mini-programs, called widgets, that pop up, either singly or together at a keystroke — will be a well-used feature.

The widgets do things like show users the weather and provide stock tickers and flight schedules. Dashboard was preceded on the Mac and on Windows by a similar program called Konfabulator.

We couldn’t end this without just a tiny bit of Windows and Microsoft bashing from Carman, who said: “Panther was so far ahead of what they have and Tiger just pushes that to the forefront even more.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

This is TV Turnoff Week, and couch potatoes are being urged to stash the remote and find something better to do.

But what about the TVs you can’t controlNULL ones in the airport lounge, waiting room, restaurant or local bar?

A clever little device called TV-B-GONE may do the trick.

Launched in 2004, this keychain remote-control gizmo is designed to fit in a palm and shoot a beam containing more than 200 codes to switch off almost any blaring monitor within 15 metres.

It can be ordered from www.tvbgone.com or www.adbusters.org for about $15.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

MONTREAL — Online chatting may be at the boundary between conversation and writing, but there is a literacy component to the popular phenomenon and it has a place in the elementary classroom, a new Canadian study concludes.

Researchers at Montreal‘s McGill University studied the content of Internet chat sessions between students in Grade 3 and 4 in two Quebec schools during a school year, and found that this “emerging literacy place” has some academic merit.

Despite the “apparent superficiality associated with the medium,” there are more advantages to including it as part of writing activities than there are advantages for its exclusion, Sandrine Turcotte and Alain Breuleux argue in new study presented Monday at the American Educational Research Association conference.

Students in the two elementary classrooms in different rural communities used web-based learning assignments with a chat component to talk to one another in real time as part of learning activities. The initiative is part of a larger project called Remote Networked Schools, funded by Quebec‘s Ministry of Education.

The McGill team acknowledge that “chat is a highly motivating communicative activity for young learners, while it has very low cultural relevance to most adult teachers.”

There is also a stigma attached to the practice. In addition to its association with the growing problem of cyber-bullying, online chatting is often linked to a mangled form of English. The emphasis on speed and brevity sometimes means kids drop proper punctuation and spelling and replace it with short forms, like “HAND” for “have a nice day” and “h2cus” for “hope to see you soon.”

Still, the McGill team found that these young students were capable of using online chat to communicate efficiently with each other — both for task-oriented dialogue during school hours and day-to-day conversation after school.

Turcotte and Breuleux challenge educators to incorporate online chatting into learning activities, but caution them to monitor the exercises closely and provide clear direction.

“Excluding chat presents the risk of marginalizing students and their emerging practices,” they argue.

In a separate study on incorporating online learning in a Grade 9 class, also presented Monday at the conference, Richard Schmid, an education technology specialist at Concordia University, and graduate student Sharon Peters tracked how students took to the blended approach.

They found that while most students enjoyed it, the most academically successful students reported enjoying it the least, while the average and learning-challenged students reported the most enjoyment and desire to use online environments in the future.

VANCOUVER SUN
A brave new language
Online chat and instant messaging have helped spawn an online language comprising mainly acronyms for commonly used phrases and emoticons to help convey nuance.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

CREDIT: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun New Kodak digital cameras and accessories now available include a picture viewer and a camera dock with remote that connects to your computer and can make prints.

Like a brontosaurus feeling a bitingly cold breeze for the first time, the traditional film business has gotten its first real glimpse of its demise. Just ask imaging goliath Eastman Kodak, which has the most to lose from the industry’s looming ice age.

— Forbes Magazine, Feb. 2002

– – –

Just a few years ago, Eastman Kodak Co., it seemed, was an imaging dinosaur, too locked into its lumbering film-based ways to see the digital camera menace headed its way.

Online, where the buzz about the coming of digital was the highest, there were headlines like “Kodak: The Next Polaroid?”

Japanese companies like Sony, Canon, Olympus and Nikon were already flooding the market with their digital offerings, and the media were devoting their time to topics like the “megapixel wars”.

But then comes the spring of 2005, and who should be the North American market leader in digital photography — with 21.9 per cent of the market — but the photo brontosaurus itself, Kodak, which shipped 4.88 million point-and-shoot digital cameras in 2004 and recorded a profit in that market for the first time.

According to IDC, a New England research firm that tracks such things, last year Kodak surged ahead of former leader Sony (19.4-per-cent market share), Canon (16.1 per cent), Olympus (10.4 per cent), HP (8.1 per cent), Fuji (8 per cent), and Nikon (6.2 per cent).

So what happened? Well, according to Kodak — which once upon a very old time had as its slogan “You press the button, we do the rest” — went back to exactly the kind of consumer-friendly basics it was touting in the 1890s.

It not only produced solid digital performers in the low to medium range of the market, but it decided to make things all about sharing photos with family and friends — hence the Kodak Easyshare name which stretches across its consumer camera line.

And it aimed its pitch at women.

“With digital, we’re moving into the mass markets now, moving from the male to the female in terms of digital photography,” said Greg Morrison, Kodak Canada‘s digital capture and home printing marketing manager. “And the females are the ones who print.”

Men, it seems, liked the concept of digital cameras in a kind of gadgety-guy way, but weren’t all that eager to share. Seventy per cent of their images just sat on their computer, unseen.

“But now its more than just about capturing — it’s about capturing and sharing your images,” said Morrison.

Each of the cameras from Kodak comes with a “share” button, allowing users to tag a picture for printing, or tag it to be put in a favourites folder on a computer, or to be tagged — with an actual address stored in the camera — to be sent in e-mail.

“I come home from my work and my wife has taken 40 pictures of our little girl, and she’s already e-mailed some to her family, to her friends at work,” said Morrison. “Then she can print some out, put some on the fridge, and take some over to her aunt who doesn’t use a computer.”

Much of this is possible because of another Kodak success story — its various models of Easyshare printer docks, which were were the best-selling line of snapshot photo printers in the United States in 2004.

Either connected to the computer, or as a stand-alone, the relatively small printer docks allow for instant printing at home or even at parties.

“The objective is to make it simple and easy for the consumer, especially the female consumer, to get pictures out of her camera,” said Morrison. “A big barrier around this technology stuff is, how do I get the images to my computer and how do I print them.”

The dock can even be connected to a TV set to allow for slide shows, and, if someone likes a particular shot, it can be printed out on the spot. The next step is a WiFi card that will allow photos to be sent from the dock to a computer on a home wireless network.

And the Easyshare cameras allow users to carry small versions of their images to show people on the camera’s LCD screen.

Soon Kodak will be releasing its tiny fits-in-the-palm Easyshare Picture Viewer with a 2.5-inch LCD screen and enough built-in memory to store up to 150 pictures. Add a memory card, say one gigabyte, and its capacity becomes huge.

Although Morrison wouldn’t comment on future plans by Kodak to go up in the consumer market from its present top-of-the-line Z series cameras (like the six-megapixel, 10x optical zoom Z740), there are rumours in the industry that the next few months could see exactly that happening.

However, Morrison does say that there’s still plenty of opportunity for Kodak in the lower-end three-megapixel markets where its C-series cameras are.

“The latest research, in January, shows that three-megapixel cameras still have a 30-per-cent share,” said Morrison.

[email protected]

KODAK DIGITAL STRATEGY PAYS OFF BIG:

In the fall of 2003, when the naysayers were predicting Eastman Kodak was headed for the dumper, the company announced a digital strategy that charted a course for the company to have $16 billion US in revenues by 2006, and $20 billion by 2010.

It had a three-pronged strategy to hold its own in the consumer products market, while basically doubling its business in the commercial imaging and health areas.

To do this, Kodak went on a $3-billion spending spree, which ended recently with the acquisition of Vancouver-based Creo Inc. for $1.2 billion.

Now, with sales of $13.5 billion in 2004, Kodak, appears to be on track to achieve the $16 billion revenue figure by 2006.

“The key message in all of this is that Kodak has truly become a digital company, we’ve proven that we can do it,” said Bruce Horsburgh, Kodak Canada‘s director of corporate communications.

KODAK MOMENTS:

Kodak point-and-shoot digital cameras shipped in the U.S. in 2004: 4.88 million, 66 per cent more than it did in 2003.

Share of North American market: 21.9 per cent, up from 17.9 per cent in 2003 and 13 per cent in 2002, putting it first according to research firm IDC.

Shopping spree: Kodak spent $3 billion US in acquiring digital companies, including Vancouver-based Creo Inc., for $1.2 billion Cdn.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft Corp. can trot out numerous statistics showing that its record for computer security has improved, but the technology giant admits it still has a big social-engineering job to do to complete the loop.

Social engineering is the term often given to the strategy used by “Phishers” or other online scammers to trick people into surrendering passwords or other bits of personal information.

At a media briefing yesterday at its headquarters here, a Microsoft official said the key is looking at security in a holistic way.

“You have to beef up your computer’s defences and that will take care of certain problems,” said Jacqueline Beauchere of Microsoft’s Safety, Technology and Strategy Group.

“You have to have safe online habits and be informed as a consumer. There’s a piece of technology and a piece of street smarts — and you have to use them together.”

Beauchere said the company’s new Windows XP Spam Blocker product currently blocks 3.2 billion spams per day — the sheer numbers clearly indicating the volume of the problem.

But she said a global survey of 15,600 individuals in December that asked about Phishing — the sending of a fake e-mail that attempts to fool recipients into giving up sensitive personal data — found that awareness of this tactic was shockingly low.

In the U.S., 64 per cent were aware of it, but in the 17 other countries surveyed — Canada was not included — just 15 per cent knew were familiar with Phishing.

“These criminals seize on the fact they are going to excite you or get your attention saying things like accounts expiring or you’ve won a contest,” said Beauchere.

“Even clicking the link could install a key stroke logger and you’re done. Think first before you click.”

Microsoft’s strategy for security has a strong consumer education component. There are several information pages within the company’s website at www.microsoft.com

© The Vancouver Province 2005

CREDIT: Jason Payne, The Province Ryan Purita is a forensic examiner and security specialist with Totally Connected Security Ltd. in Vancouver. He says that people don’t realize how vulnerable their information is to scammers every time they use a bank website or punch in their credit card number.

Major Canadian bank websites are vulnerable to hackers who use them to steal customers’ credit-card numbers and personal information, says one of B.C.’s top cyber-sleuths.

“Most people assume it’s safe,” says Ryan Purita, one of three court-certified forensic computer experts in B.C. “I can only say, it’s horrible.”

Purita works out of an office on Southeast Marine Drive, home to Totally Connected Security Ltd. He works with police cracking computer hard drives in criminal cases ranging from industrial espionage and drugs to child pornography.

“I’ve done audits for banks and found vulnerabilities. I come back a year later and that vulnerability is still there. It hasn’t been fixed. It hasn’t even been looked at.”

Purita is one of only three “EnCase Certified Skilled Examiners” in B.C.

EnCase certification is recognized by Canadian and U.S. courts, by law-enforcement agencies and governments as the top credential in computer forensics.

And he’s an expert when it comes to the cyberspace underworld of hackers and scammers who rip off unsuspecting owners of credit cards and bank accounts.

Purita says that when a major bank’s personal-banking website goes down for “maintenance” in the middle of a business day, it’s a sure sign that someone has compromised the security of the system.

“Do you really think it’s maintenance?” he asked. “Think about that . . . The only time banks go down for maintenance is Sundays at three o’clock in the morning.

“Next time you go to your bank [site] and you can’t log in because ‘the system is currently unavailable,’ think real hard about what’s happening. I can assure you it’s not ‘daily maintenance.'”

To prove his point, Purita takes The Province to the company’s “forensic lab,” where shelves of computers boasting 22,000 gigabytes of memory can crack the most obstinate hard drive.

He logs on to mIRC, an Internet chatroom, and connects to a server called Undernet, where “they trade credit cards like hockey cards.”

He finds a site called CCpower, where 191 people are logged in.

“We’re going to sit here and watch credit cards fly past the screen,” he says. “You’ll get the name, address, credit card number, ‘CVV’ number — that number on the back that’s supposed to be known to only you — phone number, social security number, AOL screen name, password, EBay password. It just screens by.”

He said an experienced user can get 10,000 credit card numbers in a 24-hour-period.

“You’ll get a guy who just hacked into a website and is posting a credit card every minute,” he adds. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Purita logs on to a site called International Agency for the Advancement of Criminal Activity, which boasts things like “the best spyware you can buy on the Internet” and “cards with CVV and full info, SS# lookups.”

“I send him my $50 and I pull up your life,” he says. “I get your credit report, your social insurance, credit card numbers with CVV — all for $50.”

Purita finds someone who’s posted a request “looking for Ebay accounts, scam pages.”

He finds another who’s offering classic, gold and platinum credit cards for the U.S., Canada and Europe, with 95 per cent approval.

“They can also create the actual stripe that you can clone a card with,” he says. “You can run a blank or change an existing credit card to reflect a different account. I take in my card and it’s not taking it out of my account but someone else’s.”

Purita points to someone offering to “cash out banks, Wells Fargo — private message me.”

He says “cashing out” means you give the person a bank account number and the scammer will withdraw it for a percentage.

“If you have a $20,000 credit limit, I give him your account number, he sucks it dry, takes $19,800, and then wires it to a Latvian bank where it’s untraceable,” he adds. “He’ll do it for a small percentage.”

Another scammer guarantees credit cards that are “100-per-cent fresh.”

“What he means is he’s just compromised a website,” says Purita. “This is the underground part of the Internet that most people don’t know about. It’s scary what’s out there.”

Purita insists banks are not interested in stopping credit-card theft.

If someone rips off a credit card, the merchant has to refund the money and pay a “charge-back fee” to the bank, which can be between 50 cents and $25, Purita says.

“The banks make money out of credit-card fraud.”

[email protected]

THE TRAIL YOU’RE LEAVING

Everyone who uses a computer leaves behind a trail of evidence, says digital detective Ryan Purita.

Simple things like driving your car, printing a document or using your camera phone can also give police details of your behaviour, he says.

-Cars: “If you get into an accident, it might record the last speed and how hard you were hitting the brakes.”

–Cellphones: “If you use it as an organizer, it has lots of information you didn’t save which you can’t see. If I was to forensically go through my cellphone, I might be able to pull up a deleted picture or a voice recording or a phone number on a contact list that I deleted.”

-Printers with a hard drive: “They are one of the scariest ones. Our printer broke down. I saw the hard drive and took a look. I was able to pull up documents that were printed on that printer two years ago.”

-Laser printers: “All laser printers embed a code on each page that’s printed. If you put an ultra-violet light on it, you can determine the manufacturer of the printer and where it was sold and you can call them and they have a database of who they sold it to.”

-Computers: “If you click on a file and delete it and go to the recycling bin and empty it, that file is still on the computer. People have no clue of how many trails they leave behind just by clicking on that Explorer to open it up. The time they clicked it, the website they went to, any cookies that they picked up.”

© The Vancouver Province 2005

Internet users can now search a vast library of satellite and aerial images that lets them zoom in on digital snapshots of an area.

Google Inc., which started as a search engine but after meeting with phenomenal success expanded into other areas, announced the service Tuesday as an upgrade of its existing map service linked to local business listings.

Google Maps users can now select either a satellite or aerial photograph rather than a map. Requesting the location of a specific business that is listed with Google will result in its location being pinpointed on the photograph.

See http://maps.google.com.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

With incidents of identity theft on the rise and concerns about safeguarding personal data online at an all-time high, a Vancouver technology entrepreneur is developing a new paradigm of a universal digital identity.

One of the keynote speakers at yesterday’s Techvibes Massive 2005 technology conference, Dick Hardt said the current model is in dire need of an update both for security and ease of use reasons.

“Right now you have online identity, but it’s in a one-on-one relationship,” Hardt said.

“There’s a lot of software out on the web where you have to fill in things to identify yourself over and over again. We want a user-centric model.”

Hardt founded software company Active State in 1997 but, after it was sold two years ago to U.K. security vendor Sophos for $23 million US, he has concentrated on a new project, called Sxip Networks [www.sxip.com].

Sxip (pronounced “Skip”) is a service that will provide a single sign-on for users and will release as much or as little information as the user wants.

The Sxip network carries data between the user, the website that asks for personal information and a trusted “homesite” –which would be hosted, for example, by a major portal such as Yahoo! or a bank.

Several companies are on the trail of such a service — including tech giant Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Hardt has been in conversations with all of them.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

Pssst, wanna buy a slice of a supercomputer?

Starting today, businesses will be able to access the formidable computing power of Blue Gene, the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

As part of the unveiling of its new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Centre in Rochester, Minn., today, IBM announced it is making Blue Gene available to customers through a secure Virtual Private Network.

It’s the supercomputer version of heading down to your local tool shop to rent a power washer for the weekend. IBM is making Blue Gene time available for as little as $10,000 US, with a $5,000 annual membership fee in IBM’s capacity-on-demand centre.

If that seems a bit pricey consider that Blue Gene, which is sold in racks, costs a minimum of $2 million US for a one-rack machine, which offers the computing equivalent of 2,000 desktop or laptop computers.

“I can start selling you slices of that machine for as little as $10,000 [US],” said David Gelardi, IBM’s vice-president for deep computing capacity on demand. “Now all of a sudden I have taken this very expensive technology and compartmentalized it down to what you might be able to afford in a normal budget.”

Or at least the normal budget for a company or organization involved in such applications as pharmaceutical development, weather forecasting, disease research, petroleum discovery, automotive crash-testing simulation.

IBM says the concept is a first.

“We have been selling more traditional technology for a little over the last 18 months on this pay-as-you-go model, but this is the first time I can think of where anyone in the industry has taken something more exotic — not mainstream, a supercomputer — and made it available on a newly emerging pay-as-you-go model,” said Gelardi.

“I think it is an innovation on top of an innovation.”

Gelardi said that adding Blue Gene to the computing capacity on demand model puts supercomputing power within reach of companies that otherwise couldn’t afford it, or only need it for specific periods of times.

“The nature of the machine really exploits some computer science, and normally a machine like that would be in a national lab and incredibly smart people with PhDs would be running algorithms that can save the world,” said Gelardi. “We are saying you don’t have to worry whether you can afford a machine of your own, we are going to make computing power available to you in a more granular way.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005