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Woodcrest chip is faster and uses less electricity

Agence-France Presse
Province

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. computer-chip maker Intel began shipping yesterday a speedy, power-efficient processor it claimed would turn the tables on arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices.

“We’re back to a position we are used to having — undeniable leadership in the area of performance,” Intel vice-president Tom Kilroy told a briefing of analysts and the press in San Francisco.

“It’s an exciting day. Our end customers were waiting for this.”

Kilroy touted its freshly released Xeon 5100 series chips as the “fastest dual-processor ramp” in Intel’s history.

The chips, branded Woodcrest, outperformed the best competitor AMD had to offer while using less power, according to Intel.

The Woodcrest was up to 60-per-cent faster than competing chips and got as much as 80 per cent more performance per watt, Kilroy said, citing results gotten by “seed companies” that have tested the processors.

“This is really mind-boggling performance with energy savings as well,” Kilroy said.

During an onstage demonstration in a hotel conference room, a system powered by a Woodcrest processor was pitted against one with AMD’s top Opteron chip.

The Intel system completed a complex financial-risk computer application quicker and used less electricity. Kilroy conceded that Intel has struggled to stave off competition during the past 18 months but said the Silicon Valley company has held on to its relationships with business customers.

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Symantec Corp. is launching the first security software that addresses the growing problem of social engineering, cyber attacks that lure computer users into revealing personal and financial secrets that are used to empty their bank accounts and credit cards.

Norton Confidential, due to be released in October takes traditional anti-virus and firewall software a step further, aiming to put itself between computer users and fraud artists that pose as legitimate businesses.

It also tries to save people from themselves by blocking the inadvertent downloading of crimeware on computers, downloads that can carried out without the user’s knowledge and are triggered by such seemingly harmless activities as clicking through Web sites.

“We as a company saw the need to fill that gap and go beyond what the existing products deliver,” said Oliver Schmelzle, group product manager for Symantec. “We believe this is a different approach. It is an ideal complement to the existing security software.

“Our goal is the social engineering aspect because that goes a bit beyond the attacks we have seen before.”

Schmelzle said the new software was prompted by customer concern over online transactions and by the shift from large-scale cyber attacks launched for notoriety to more targeted attacks for financial gain.

“It is a fear of doing business online,” said Schmelzle. “There is also a general fear of a broad spectrum of identity theft.”

Attackers also capture vital data such as passwords and codes by surreptitiously placing malicious software on computers, software that can track online activities through such means as logging key strokes and picking up other information without alerting the computer user to the breach.

While anti-virus software can automatically detect and discard viruses that attempt to download onto computers, cyber criminals have been able to circumvent that by manipulating computer users into either giving away information or inadvertently opening their computers to malicious downloads.

In the case of phishing scams, bogus emails are sent out purporting to be from a legitimate business like a bank or eBay and warning customers that they must log onto the business’s web site and update their sign in information. The link in the email takes the user to a fraudulent Web site where the log in information or other personal data, such as credit card numbers or codes goes straight to the fraud artists who either cash in themselves or sell the stolen numbers online.

“Norton Confidential is a product for consumers who are concerned about conducting business transactions online,” said Schmelzle. “It is for those users who have an uncomfortable feeling when they go to a Web site and put in a user name and password or credit card information.”

The new software utilizes a number of methods to protect computers and their users, including fraud site identification to alert users if they click on a phishing Web site. That way, even if a user responds to a phishing email and clicks through on to a bogus Web site, he or she will be alerted to the danger before revealing any passwords or account numbers.

Schmelzle said the fraud site list is updated, just as with virus definitions, but the software also can identify new phishing Web sites that it has never encountered before.

“This tells the user if he is at the site he wants to be at,” said Schmelzle. “In the real world, if you walk into a bank you can be fairly sure it is your bank.

“That reassurance is missing on the Internet.”

Schmelzle said the software also has a ‘behaviour blocker,’ component, an additional layer of protection that goes beyond anti-virus software. It is designed to stop users from triggering crimeware that Schmelzle said may not yet have been seen by the security company.

The software, which will be offered as a stand-alone product, will work with Symantec’s anti-virus software as well as anti-virus software put out by Symantec’s competition.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

Peter Wilson
Sun

Think about being able to download a copy of Superman: The Return over the Internet in a couple of seconds.

And then think about what that kind of blazing speed — up to 10 gigabits a second, certainly faster than Superman’s traditional speeding locomotive — could do for collaborative research between scientists in Canada and California working in areas like genetics, nanotechnology and fuel cells.

Just such a network, set to be fully up and running by January 2007, was given its first test between Ottawa and San Diego last week and will mean that scientists at the University of British Columbia and other top Canadian institutions will be able to connect in real time and exchange huge amounts of data.

“Most of the research being done now is collaborative, so we really need to connect institutions,” said Susan Baldwin, senior director of operations of CANARIE, Canada’s advanced Internet organization.

“Secondly, the amount of data itself is staggering. So to be able to transmit high-quality images and massive amounts of data, you have to have the kind of capacity that this offers.”

Baldwin, who said the network was part of CANARIE’s plan for the next-generation research network for Canada, gave the example of researchers working in real time in the genomics area.

“They could be looking at some of their data and talking at the same time, so they can say ‘what if you tweak it this way? What will happen?’

“And then they can be manipulating some of that data and see it in real time. So in working collaboratively they can accelerate their research.”

John Hepburn, vice-president for research at UBC, said that the network will help solidify the relationships that scientists and researchers in both B.C. and California have with one another.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

Sun

Lexmark X3470 All-in-1 one printer, $130. As is
   typical with printers these days, prices drop and features improve. This single-cartridge colour printer is the top-of-theline model of three new printers (which also include the X2470 at $99, and the X1270 at $80). Both the X3470 and the X2470 include the new Lexmark Web Toolbar that makes it easy to print from the Web. One of the best features is its ability to eliminate advertising and reproduce only the print sections of a Web page and do that only in black ink, so there’s a real saving in both paper and colour ink.
   Microsoft Wireless
   2 Laser Desktop set for
   Mac, $130, available this summer. While Macs only have a small fraction of the market that Windows machines have, there must be something happening in that segment or Microsoft wouldn’t bother with a wireless keyboard and mouse specifically designed for Apple products. Not only is the layout consistent with previous Mac keyboards, but also features a zoom slider, customizable favourites keys, an eject key and hot keys for e-mail, chat, music, photos and the Web. The laser mouse has a tilt wheel for quick and easy navigation of documents and spreadsheets.
   Sharp Aquos LC57D90U
   3 57-inch LCD Television,
   $17,000. One of the knocks on LCD television is that the low refresh rate of previously available models means that hockey games and fast-moving movies are not seen to their best advantage. However, the new 47-inch Aquos offers both a true contrast ratio of 1500:1 and a response time of four milliseconds. A new backlight system also provides deeper reds and more vibrant greens than were offered before. Of course, all of this comes at a price likely to lure only early adopters and leave the rest of us waiting a bit longer for this kind of LCD performance.
   Toshiba HDA1 and
   4 HDXA1 HD DVD players, $700 and $1,000, respectively. The fever for highdef inition television sets is expected to rise as a new generation of DVD players arrives. These ones come from the HDDVD camp with others on their way from the rival Sony-led Bluray group. If you thought movies looked good on HD sets before, well, the new players from Toshiba are capable of 720p or 1080i output that should make movie viewers extremely happy.

A two-tier system could create ‘dirt roads’: Competing visions of the future are front and centre as governments tackle Internet neutrality

Alex Hutchinson, Ottawa Citizen
Sun

OTTAWA — It used to be, not so long ago, that forwarded jokes were the common currency of the Internet — endlessly recycled, and partially obscured by the forest of “>>>” that accumulated with each forwarding.

Now, Internet laughs arrive in the form of links to video clips posted online: A teen in Trois-Rivieres, Que., mimicking Star Wars lightsabre moves with a golf club, comedian Stephen Colbert lambasting George W. Bush at the National Press Club dinner in April, even Ottawa Senators tough guy Brian McGrattan breaking Tie Domi’s nose last fall.

The trip from novelty to necessity has happened staggeringly fast. The video-hosting site Youtube.com, credited with finally making it easy and hassle-free for amateurs to share their clips, had its official launch in December. Just six months later, the numbers are staggering: six million unique visitors and 50 million videos downloaded every day, with another 50,000 new videos being added daily.

That’s a lot of bandwidth. With VoIP spreading rapidly and IPTV just arriving (telephone and television, respectively, transmitted over broadband Internet), industry insiders are starting to worry: will video kill the Internet?

One of the videos on Youtube, posted earlier this month, features the musician Moby in a mock-melodramatic four-minute clip titled Save the Internet. The video is the latest salvo in an increasingly heated battle over how Internet service providers will handle the impending bandwidth crunch. The debate centres on a concept known as “Net [as in network] neutrality.” Its advocates affirm the principle that all Net traffic, from videos to e-mail to e-commerce transactions, should be treated equally by ISPs.

But although net neutrality sounds like a motherhood-and-apple-pie concept that no one would oppose, a powerful lobby headed by major telecom companies in the United States is lining up on the other side, framing the debate as a case of excessive government regulation of the market.

Here is a choose-your-own-ending scenario that illustrates the dilemma:

Internet TV takes off, VoIP phones replace land lines, and other high-bandwidth applications — teleconferencing, online gaming, clips of Tie Domi beatings — continue to flourish. The current infrastructure starts bursting at the seams, so telecom companies invest millions to upgrade networks and run fibre-optic cable to every home. To recoup their costs, they begin offering premium service to websites (as opposed to consumers, who can already choose to pay for different levels of service): Youtube pays the ISPs to ensure its videos download quickly, Google pays to keep its searches snappy.

Ending A: The improved network provides better overall service for everyone, and the providers earn back their investment — plus a healthy profit — from the premium-service payments. They use the money to reinvest in the network, and to innovate in ways we haven’t even thought of yet, resulting in an Internet that just keeps getting faster and better.

Ending B: Google, Amazon, and the rest of the Internet giants pay the “protection money” demanded by ISPs to keep their traffic flowing. But smaller companies, and especially startups, are increasingly relegated to a second-tier “dirt road” network cursed by sluggish speeds and poor reliability. Consumers spurn these startups, innovation sputters to a halt, and the Internet becomes an oligarchy, a pale shadow of its once-exuberant self.

These two competing visions of the future are front and centre in an ongoing U.S. legislative battle. A motion to guarantee net neutrality — and thus outlaw the premium-service payments in the above scenario — was defeated 269-152 in the House of Representatives two weeks ago. The Senate is now considering a similar motion.

On this side of the border, the debate has been been much quieter.

The much-vaunted Telecommunications Policy Review, completed in March, focused most of its attention on reducing regulation and increasing competition in the telecom sector. But buried in the 392-page report was a recommendation that the Telecommunications Act be amended to “confirm the right of Canadian consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice by means of all public telecommunications networks providing access to the Internet.”

Last week, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier tabled in Parliament a policy directive endorsing the main findings of the policy review — chiefly, a hands-off commitment to “regulate telecommunications services only when necessary.” Conspicuously absent was any mention of Net neutrality.

The minister’s lack of urgency raises an interesting question: Is the big bandwidth crunch really just around the corner?

It’s hard to tell, because network operators are playing their cards very close to their chest, partly for competitive reasons.

There are a number of ways that neutrality, in its strictest definition, can be compromised without creating an explicitly two-tier Internet. “Traffic-shaping” involves giving priority to certain kinds of traffic — Shaw Communications, for instance, promises to prioritize VoIP calls for an additional $10 per month.

The fear, Geist says, is that Shaw could choose to waive the fee if it decides to offer its own VoIP service, creating an unfair playing field in the VoIP market for Shaw customers.

Rogers is taking the opposite approach, using traffic-shaping to restrict the bandwidth allocated to peer-to-peer file sharing. Although the company initially denied it was traffic-shaping, it has since admitted the practice started more than a year ago.

Site-blocking is another, more direct possibility. Last year, the U.S. Federal Communications Commissions fined Madison River, a small North Carolina ISP, $15,000 US for blocking access to Vonage and other VOIP providers.

In Canada, Telus temporarily blocked access to a website supporting a union representing its own workers in a bitter labour dispute last summer. While fair competition wasn’t at stake in that case, it showed that Telus was willing to act unilaterally as a gatekeeper, rather than a strictly neutral gate to the Internet.

In the short history of the Internet so far, net neutrality has been the rule, only now being threatened by a wave of deregulation in both Canada and the United States.

As a result, net neutrality advocates say, we’re living in a golden age of Internet-fuelled innovation, which has allowed companies like Google and Amazon to emerge from nowhere and become multibillion-dollar giants in a single decade, and which still permits shoestring outfits like Youtube to grow to six million users in six months.

But the story of Internet innovation isn’t quite that simple, Hajnal says: big companies had to invest heavily even in the early days of the Internet. And just like in the traditional business world, new players that emerged did so on the strength of large-scale ambition and investment.

“Amazon didn’t start as a huge company, but it started intending to be big, and was looking to make a huge impact.”

With that in mind, the fear that a pay-to-play Web model will stifle new businesses may be unfounded, Hajnal says. “Whatever space is created, however it’s regulated, there will always be somebody who’s creative and trying to take advantage of it as a small player.”

There is more to it than just business and innovation, however. Musicians ranging from Moby and the Dixie Chicks to the rapper Q-Tip have signed up to defend net neutrality, both for practical reasons — preserving the ability to distribute music independently over the Web — and for more philosophical reasons. The “egalitarian” spirit of the Internet should be preserved, Moby said at a press conference earlier this month.

“Here we have a system that works fine,” he said. “Why do we want to change anything?”

Summing up the dilemma, Dale returns to the archetypal analogy of the Internet as an “information superhighway.”

The question is whether a two-tier Internet will create a poorly maintained dirt road for the have-nots, or instead add a superior toll-road without degrading the existing system.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

Sun

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc., the most-used Internet search engine, is testing a form of online advertisements where clients pay only when Web surfers click on an ad and buy a product or generate a sales lead.

So-called “cost-per-action” ads are being tested on the Google AdSense advertising network, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google said Wednesday. AdSense is a program that lets third-party publishers, such as writers of Web logs, show ads sold by Google on their sites.

Adding cost-per-action pricing may help companies more effectively track whether their online ad spending is generating sales. The approach may also assuage concerns from some advertisers about click-fraud, a practice whereby users maliciously click on ads to raise costs for competitors or line their own pockets.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

Jim Jamieson
Province

In the near future, your mobile phone or wireless-capable laptop will be able to signal hop with such ease that you’ll never be without a connection or the speed to make it work.

Such a statement will surely be met with skepticism by the heavy users out there who are well familiar with dead spots. But a developing technology called software-defined radio — SDR — is poised to make it all happen.

The goal is to enable a single device to be a cordless phone, cellular phone, Blackberry, wireless laptop or even a GPS unit. Such a device — and one’s not yet invented — would be able to jump between radio frequencies and standards that are now incompatible.

“It’s called ubiquitous communications,” said David Murotake, president of Nashua, N.H.-based SCA Technica, one of several international firms in Vancouver this week to attend the SDR Forum to discuss industry issues.

“We’ve got a ways to go yet, but the idea is that you’ll be able to go anywhere and communicate with anyone you need to communicate with, whenever, and with the quality you need.

“It means being able to communicate with a wi-fi network or a cellular network or through a satellite if you need to. As a consumer, you don’t know anything about it — it just works.”

The technology is already being used by the U.S. military and is within two years of deployment in the emergency response industry — where a loss in communications can cost lives.

“If you look at [disasters] such as Hurricane Katrina, one of the challenges is a number of different responders are on different radio systems,” said Fred Frantz of Rome, N.Y.’s L3 Communications. “We are looking at multi-band radios as a first step.”

Kevin McGinnis of the U.S. National Association of State EMS Officials said communications technologies used by paramedics have improved over the years, but always suffered from dead spots.

“If somebody has a cardiac arrest, the last thing I want to do is have to pick from numerous devices to talk to the doctor at the hospital,” he said.

“All I want is one device that has a button that says Doctor X or Hospital Y and it’s programmed to check the available signals and pick the appropriate one.”

Consumers can expect to see the technology fully implemented in the next five to 10 years after issues such as software and hardware design, security and billing protocols have been solved.

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

Faronics saw 2005 sales of $16 million, expects 30 per cent more this year

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Deep Freeze has turned into a hot commodity for a Vancouver software company that is safeguarding corporate computers from outside attacks as well as internal mishaps.

Faronics Corp. is riding a crest of growth that saw $16 million in sales last year, forecast to rise another 30 per cent this year and a hiring rate that is adding 20 employees a year to its new digs in downtown Vancouver.

Its flagship product Deep Freeze is protecting more than five million workstations worldwide. It is backed by Anti-Executable and a lineup of current and upcoming products that are being welcomed by public sector and corporate users looking for an affordable and effective way to keep their computer workstations running reliably.

Faronics clients include: the Vancouver Public Library; the University of B.C.; a lineup of banks and credit unions across the U.S.; and Best Buy stores.

Fifty-nine of B.C.’s 61 school districts use Faronics software and the Vancouver school board found an unexpected side benefit to it. Along with keeping machines free of the downloads student users might be tempted to add, Deep Freeze also has a shutdown feature that saved the board $200,000 a year in electricity bills by automatically turning off idle computers.

“It’s a resiliency story,” said sales manager Dennis Boulter. “Especially for corporations, downtime is measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.

“IT [information technology] is so critical now you can’t run a business without it.”

Just like the folks who get an alarm installed after they’re broken into, many Faronics customers call when they have suffered a disruptive and costly collapse of their systems.

“We have casinos coming out of the woodwork,” said Boulter. One company that had all its machines go down found Faronics “and loaded up on every product we sold,” said Boulter.

Deep Freeze runs on PCs and also has a Mac version that recently earned a 41/2 mice out of five rating from Macworld magazine. It lets companies and organizations freeze their computer workstation configurations, so users can’t inadvertently or malevolently modify them.

In combination with Anti-Executable, software that prevents the installation or launch of any unlicensed or unwanted programs, the Faronics lineup presents a formidable defense against both external and internal attacks. And unlike anti-virus software, it doesn’t have to be updated to remain effective.

That is a lifesaver for harried IT departments. They can be overrun with problems that range from staff downloading poker software to remote workers who bring back virus-laden notebooks to plug into the company’s system to outsiders looking to load a hidden program that could bring down the business.

It’s a far cry from the computer selling business that Frid Ali and Vik Khanna started in Coquitlam back in 1996. Looking to increase sales, they targeted school districts. A couple of blocks away in their neighborhood, Hyper Technologies was a hardware customer and it suggested to Khanna that he might try out the software they were developing, an early version of Deep Freeze.

“Within an hour, I said, ‘forget me helping you out, give me the rights to sell it,’ ” said Khanna. “I was just floored by the technology.”

Within six months, the company had sold $350,000 worth of the software and by June 2000, it acquired the non-exclusive rights to sell in the U.S.

“Sales just went up and up,” said Khanna.

By 2003, Faronics bought Hyper Technologies with Khanna and Ali joining Hyper Technologies partners Randy Lomnes and Denis Kirk with the four each holding a 25 per cent ownership stake.

Even before the takeover, Khanna said Faronics stopped selling computers “cold turkey,” but kept every one of its then 16 employees who turned their attention from hardware to software.

Many of the original employees can be found among the 88 staff at Faronics now. Some, like Igor Zagoruchenko and Rehan Rizvi who used to build computers, made the transformation from hardware to software specialists and became software developers in the newly reconstituted company.

Word of mouth is accounting for much of the popularity of Faronics software. It’s extolled on mailing lists and discussion groups on the Web. Help desks find they are becoming like the Maytag repairman, spared the long hours of cleaning up behind users who would mess up machines faster than they could keep up with them.

Corporate users are finding it so effective at the office that they are downloading the consumer version, available only on the website at www.faronics.com to safeguard home computers.

The price of $220 US for the server product and $30 a seat with volume discounts and “extremely education friendly” pricing also puts Deep Freeze within reach of many customers.

“They go into shock when they find it’s not $20,000 a server and $250 a seat,” said Boulter.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

How long can the price plunge go on?

Peter Wilson
Sun

Way back in the misty depths of time — in 2004 to be exact — if you wanted to leap into the world of big-screen televisions, you would have needed plenty of extra jingle in your jeans.

At that time, a Panasonic 42-inch plasma flat-screen would have set you back a breathtaking $7,000 (well, $6,999, if that would have made you feel any better about it). Today, thanks to technology improvements and a strong Canadian dollar, a similar Panasonic model, with a far better picture, is a mere $3,500.

And, London Drugs president Wynne Powell said in an interview, if you wait until Christmas it might just be down to $3,000, especially if our dollar stays where it is.

The same price plunge has been happening with LCD TVs.

Powell also pointed out that when digital cameras first made their way into general consciousness, in 2001, you could have bought a 2.1-megapixel Digital Elph with a two-inch LCD screen for $800.

Now Canon’s Elph, at six-megapixels and with a three-inch screen and plenty of other extra features, is $500.

Even more startling, a four-megapixel Olympus in 2001 was $1,300. Currently, at six-megapixels, the equivalent is $300. Now, if you were to pay anywhere near $1,300, it would be for an Olympus digital SLR with two extra lenses.

Why?

Two reasons, said Powell. The first is that as technology improves, prices go down, generally, and the features go up.

“Number two, we’re benefiting from the increased value of the Canadian dollar,” said Powell. “So these factors are going hand-in-hand.”

And the evidence of this is across the board. All-in-one printers — with the capability of scanning, copying and faxing — were in the $200 to $300 range in 2002. Now you can get solid performers for under $100.

And Apple’s five-gigabyte iPod sold for $479 in 2002, with the 10-gigabyte model at $629 and the 20-gigabyte at $799. Head to the store today and you can pick up a 30-gigabyte iPod, with video capability, for $350, and the 60-gigabyte model at $460, while the four-gigabyte nano is $300.

In the PDA space, a Palm Tungsten was $800 in 2002, and now sells for about $400.

In the computer field, according to Statistics Canada, the average prices paid in 2006 by consumers for laptops are now nearly a quarter of what they were in 2001. Basic models these days are in the $800 range.

On the surface of it, the main lesson of these dropping prices seems to be: Leap in early and just a couple of years later you have a doorstop or a paperweight. But Powell disagrees. He believes that there’s a tipping point where the improvements in technology have reduced the price to a point where any further drops are going to be much smaller.

And this, he says, is where the market is with high-definition TV sets. A $500 drop in the next six months may look big, but not compared with the $3,000 plunge in the last two years.

“Yes, you’ll see the prices fall in the future, but it’s not going to be the same kind of erosion because there’s not that much left to erode.”

So this could just be the year that expectation meets pricing for television, he believes.

“There’s another thing that’s happening as well: High-definition satellite and cable availability have dramatically fuelled the customers’ desire for these products,” said Powell.

And, he added, new high-definition DVD players — in two formats, HD-TV and Blu-ray — are arriving. That means that the viewing experience of those who buy and rent movies will be even better than before, although they may pay anything from $700 or more for them (and these prices are also sure to drop).

“When these come out, we think that’s even going to fuel up more,” said Powell, who points to industry projections of an 18-per-cent increase in sales this year and 22 per cent in 2007.

Even with competing formats available, he still sees this as the time when people decide to grab a new television set.

“It’s a constantly dynamic market, so what I advise people when they’re thinking about it is that if they’re comfortable with the price point today and if they like the product they see, they should buy it and enjoy it.

“Something better will always come along, but you’ll never have it, because you’ll always be waiting.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2006