Glen White

Those toiling on a skunkworks project called Phoenix had no idea in 1997 that it would be them putting the pressure on Microsoft instead of Netscape, which at the time had the browser market locked up. And much of that reason is because Firefox never looked at Microsoft as the target, what it wanted was to build a better browser. 20 great Firefox extensions|10 Firefox add-ons for better browsing Four year ago Blake Ross, one of the co-creators of Firefox, told Network World, "' Firefox is not a war on Microsoft; it is a war on complexity. Fast forward a dozen years and Phoenix, now Firefox, has turned 5, Netscape's mushroom cloud of implosion is long gone and even though Firefox has earned only a quarter of the browser market there is no doubt that leader Microsoft is looking over its shoulder. I never look at this as a 'browser war.'" As Microsoft let Internet Explorer rest on its laurels, Firefox sat down to innovate with features such as tabbed browsing, session restore and antiphishing capabilities that were once a Google supplied add-on.

You will see the values of Mozilla's public benefit mission reflected in our product choices in these areas to make users safer and help them understand what it means to share data with Web sites. "It's a prediction for a lofty position on the technology landscape considering Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9, 2004, and had earned a barely detectable slice of the browser market. Now the next level is the goal. "The browsers that are on the horizon aren't just incremental changes - they represent the pieces to build the next-generation Web - rich with standards-based graphics, new JavaScript libraries and full blown applications," wrote Christopher Blizzard, an open source evangelist with Mozilla, on Mozilla's Hacks blog.   "Over the next five years everyone can expect that the browser should take part in a few new areas - to act as the user agent it should be," Blizzard wrote. "Issues around data, privacy and identity loom large. The second version came in 2006, in 2008 Version 3 was released and this year Version 3.5 brought a host of under-the-cover features including a new JavaScript engine that juiced performance, support for new Cascading Stylesheet innovations, video and audio support as defined by HTML 5, and a fresh new logo. The future holds a mobile version, offline support and a multiprocess project called "Electrolysis" similar to features of Google's Chrome and Internet Explorer 8, according to the development team at Mozilla, which develops the browser. The 3.6 version is in its testing phase and is slated for release next month with its Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine. And now, five years since its introduction, Microsoft looks to be nearing an end to its battle with the European Commission over bundling Windows and IE, On Friday, consumers, OEMs, developers and "other interested parties" will get a forum to speak about Microsoft's revised "browser ballot" in Windows that lets users pick the browser of their choice.

And dare anyone say it, a new round of browser wars. If the ballot technology passes muster, it likely will start the next chapter in the history of the browser. Follow John on Twitter: twitter.com/johnfontana

Intel Corp. will release a $120 solid-state disk (SSD) drive positioned as a server "boot drive" with only 40GB of capacity, but the drive could also be used in low-end laptops PCs and netbooks. Intel's current line of enterprise-class drives, the X25-E series , have capacities of 32GB and 64GB. The 120GB X25-V SSD, known internally as the Glen Brook drive, uses lower-cost multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash chips. Intel is also planning a new line of enterprise-class SSDs with 50GB, 100GB and 200GB capacities, which would more closely mimic the capacities of high-end hard disk drives used in servers today, an Intel representative said. The drive is currently being shipped in sample volumes among computer equipment makers and is expected to be generally available in January, said Jon Peracchi, a marketing manager at Intel.

For example, the new 50GB drive is expected to have an MSRP of $350. The new enterprise-class drives are expected to ship as samples to equipment manufacturers in April and are expected to be generally available in July, 2010. In other SSD news, STEC Corp. plans to begin shipping next week a new enterprise-class ZeusIOPS SSD with serial-attached SCSI interface. Peracchi, who was speaking at a SSD Seminar sponsored by Bell Microproducts Inc. in Westford, Mass. said the new enterprise-class SSDs, which are based on single-level cell NAND, would represent a 40% price cut or about $6.50 per gigabyte over its current X25-E SSD prices. The new drive would have a 6Gbit/sec SAS interface compared with the current 3Gbit/sec SAS SSD, according to an STEC representative. The company is also planning a new follow-on to its Mach8 SATA SSD, which will double the interface throughput to 3Gbit/sec and include support for native encryption. The new ZeusIOPS SAS SSD will support sequential read rates of up to 350MB/sec and write rates of 300MB/sec. The Mach16 SSD drives are expected out in the second quarter of 2010, and will support read rates of 250MB/sec and write rates of 225MB/sec.

NASA officials this morning said the agency is not retreating from human space flight . The agency was responding to critics who contended that President Barack Obama's proposed 2011 budget, released yesterday, would end all such programs and thus result in a serious decline in the United States space program. We're probably on a new course but human space flight is in our DNA. We are not abandoning human space flight by any stretch of the imagination. The space agency had announced yesterday that Obama's plan would scrap NASA's latest plan to return humans to the moon by 2020. The budget instead aims to turn NASA's immediate attention to developing new engines, in-space fuel depots and robots that can venture out into space - paving the way for future missions that would return humans to the lunar surface. "The future is unfolding before us now and its exciting," said NASA administrator Charles Bolden. "We're not abandoning anything. We have companies telling us they're excited to get humans off this planet and into orbit.

Bolden said he supports the new Obama administration budget plan, which calls for NASA to hire private companies to build space taxis that would shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station. I think we're going to get there and perhaps quicker than we would have done before." The Obama administration plan does call for cancelling the Constellation moon landing plan that was hatched in 2005 by the administration of former President George W. Bush. The old Constellation plan, which already has cost $9 billion, was behind schedule, and was projected to ultimately be over budget. "I am convinced this approach is the right approach for this time, these challenges and these opportunities," said Bolden during a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. "It is not a retreat for human space flight but an investment in new ideas and new technologies. Debate has blossomed over whether the plan will speed NASA's progress in space exploration or if it will throw the agency permanently off course. We're excited to have new direction from president." NASA and the president's plan for it prompted significant online chatter in the 24 or so hours since the budget proposal was announced. Congressman Bill Posey (R-Fla.), issued a statement late yesterday contending that NASA's new mission ends America's leadership in human space exploration. "By failing to set a clear vision and provide sufficient resources, this represents a giant step backwards," wrote Posey on his Web site. "Many of us had hoped that a stronger budget commitment to space might have been included, but this budget simply falls far short of what is needed for a robust human space flight program.

What suffered was earth science, robotic space exploration , science. I am concerned that this budget represents a slow death to our nation's human space flight program." Bolden spent a good portion of his time before the National Press Club today refuting such claims. "You could say we've been bashed a little bit over the past few days," he noted. "Tough budget choices in the past have led to decades of under-development. And we would have cut short the life of the International Space Station at the height of its potential. Our goal is to revitalize NASA and lay a long-term foundation for the agency's continued excellence and success." Bolden also publicly thanked the people who worked for several years on the Constellation project. "They are not hobby shoppers as some in the media have called them. A fundamental re-base lining is needed.

They are dedicated people with dreams of bold exploration," he added. "To people who have worked on the Constellation program, this is like a death in the family. This is part of the life of being in NASA. Every time we manage to pull through it and we manage to recover and we go on to do great things." Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld . Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin , send e-mail to sgaudin@computerworld.com or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Read more about government in Computerworld's Government Knowledge Center. We need to give them time to grieve and then give them time to recover.

A longtime agreement in which the U.S. Department of Commerce has oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is due to expire Wednesday, but that may not be the end of the relationship. This new type of agreement would allow ICANN to become more independent, while addressing concerns from several other countries that the U.S. has too much control over ICANN, said Michael Palage, a former ICANN board member. While ICANN isn't talking, some observers expect a new type of agreement to be announced as soon as Wednesday, with the U.S. government sharing oversight of the nonprofit organization that controls the Internet's domain name system with other countries. The new agreement would create several oversight boards, with international representation, Palage said.

What it's also doing is ... it's putting in some accountability mechanisms." Palage hasn't heard all the details about the new agreement, including how people will be appointed to the new oversight panels. The Economist reported last week that a new agreement, called an affirmation of commitments, will replace the existing pact between the U.S. government and ICANN. The Department of Commerce and ICANN have operated under a series of agreements laying out expectations for the nonprofit since November 1998. The new agreement "will tell them what it should do, but it can't legally bind them," much like past agreements, said Palage, now a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It gives the appearance in the global community that the U.S. government has recognized that ICANN has done what is was supposed to do. He's also concerned about whether private entities will have the same representation as governments. Many critics of ICANN have complained in recent years that the organization has moved forward with plans to expand services without widespread agreement. While not perfect, the new agreement being talked about would be an improvement over the existing agreement, he said. "Now while the devil will be in the detail, the only concern I have is that the private sector be on equal footing with the public sector in being able to hold ICANN accountable," he said. "If ICANN is to remain a public-private partnership that is founded on the principles of openness, transparency, inclusiveness, accountability and bottom-up coordination, then both the private and public sectors should have equal confidence in the accountability mechanism available to them." Under the latest agreement between the Department of Commerce and ICANN, the nonprofit reaffirmed its commitment to maintaining the security and stability of the domain name system, or DNS. ICANN also promised to stick to the principles of competition, bottom-up coordination and representation.

In particular, ICANN's board in June 2008 voted to allow an unlimited number of new generic top-level domains, such as .food or .basketball, but trademark owners have complained that new gTLDs would force them to register many new Web sites to protect their brands. Asked this week about what happens after the current agreement expires, an ICANN spokeswoman said the Department of Commerce has asked ICANN officials not to comment until Wednesday. Last week, several members of a U.S. Congress subcommittee urged ICANN to back off the gTLD plan until concerns could be resolved. A representative of Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of the information society and the telecom industry, also declined to comment until "the situation in the U.S. has been officially confirmed." Reding has called for more international oversight of ICANN. But Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, an e-commerce trade group, said he expects a "new formal review process looking at security, consumer trust, and the interests of global Internet users." DelBianco expects that government and private stakeholders will be represented in the new review process, he said. "Prodded by public comments and encouragement from Congress, I'd expect to see a new arrangement that delivers what the global Internet community has wanted: an independent ICANN that preserves private-sector leadership with increased accountability to its core mission," he said. "The tricky part is how to give governments a well-defined role while preserving ICANN's private-sector orientation." An important part of the oversight going forward will likely be on cybersecurity, added DelBianco, a critic of ICANN's gTLD plan. "I'd expect to see explicit accountability for ICANN to make sure the DNS stays up 24-7 and around the world, even as we see increased cyber attacks and a significant expansion of top-level domains," he said. Heather Greenfield, a spokeswoman for the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), said the trade group expects the U.S. government to stay involved in ICANN. CCIA has also heard that oversight panels, involving the international community, will provide ICANN oversight going forward, she said. "We expect ICANN will retain some type of long-term relationship with the United States, while expanding the involvement of other countries," she added. "Ahead of this agreement ending, ICANN has been making a real effort to respond to past criticism about not being transparent enough."

A new service designed to let Twitter users make short, tweet-like phone calls to one another begins its beta testing period today. It's set up to allow Twitter users to launch two-minute, two-way voice chats with any other Twitter user - even without knowing the other person's phone number. Jajah, Inc. , an IP communications company based in Mountain View, Calif., launched the free service, called Jajah@call today.

To use the new service, people have to be users of both Twitter and Jajah, the person receiving the call has to be a Twitter follower of the person making the call. That will certainly be something to behold - and perhaps a sign of the apocalypse." Social networking seems to be leaving the realm of text-online behind. In a statement, Jajah said the system should work on any Twitter platform - from a computer to a mobile phone. "Essentially, this is adding Skype-like functionality to Twitter," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "This is certainly a valid extension for the Twitter platform, but the one-to-one nature of the feature as it is now is a bit different than the existing Twitter model. "If this catches on," he added, "further developments might include the ability for Twitterers to call all of their followers, which would certainly make it a lot easier for them to stream their every thought and activity without even having to take the trouble to type. Earlier this week, Vivox, a Boston-based company, announced that engineers there are working on an application that should enable Facebook users - whether individuals or groups - to have voice chats online. Vivox said it's looking to add a new dimension to online reunions or meetings. "With Facebook adding much the same functionality, it looks like social networking is moving away from typing all of a sudden," added Olds. "These new mechanisms will be used, but voice probably won't prove to be a must-have feature for most users."

Micello is mapping the great indoors. The only way to chart new territory, they've found, is to start making maps detailing the innards of manmade buildings and complexes. Unlike the mapmakers of yore, who toiled for years perfecting maps of oceans, continents, and mountain ranges, today's mapmakers have found their outdoor frontiers taken away from them by satellite imaging.

Demo's biggest stars of all time13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 And this is where Micello comes in. This way, if you're stranded in an airport and craving a cup of coffee or are at a university looking for a particular lecture hall, you'll be able to look up your location on Micello and find out where you need to walk. The company's goal is to become the Google Maps of indoor spaces as its staff of six people is doggedly mapping large public indoor spaces in the United States such as shopping malls, airports and universities. The maps the company is developing even include a search engine, so you can type "coffee" into a box and have the map point out all the locations in your vicinity that sell coffee. You said today that you're making about 10 maps a day.

In this Q&A with Micello founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal, we discuss his company's passion for mapping, the use of crowdsourcing to make maps and where he plans to take Micello in the future. How many people do you have working on these maps nationwide? In all it takes someone about four hours to get one map done and each person would do around three or four maps a day. Have six people total, three people in design work and three people doing data collection using our tools. We're primarily mapping the [San Francisco-Oakland] Bay Area to start with and our initial focus has been on Bay Area colleges and shopping malls. We get the floor plan of a particular place, whether it's from someone going and taking a picture of it or the building itself gives it to us.

Where do you get your data for building these maps? We then convert the floor plan to a geo-coded, dynamic, personalizable interactive map, so that when you go to a shopping mall, the floor plan on the Micello map will interact with you. That's a somewhat basic version of the interactivity we'll be shooting for in the future. You saw in our demonstration today that we typed 'shoes' into the search engine and it found all the stores in the mall that sold shoes. In the next generation of search we're planning on making it really smart so it can get information on specific brands and models if you type them into the search engine.

For the time being we are designing the indoor maps ourselves. How does crowdsourcing play into your strategy of building these maps? Crowdsourcing comes in for updating information on the maps we've built. People can submit content describing who happens to be coming to give a lecture at a particular hall on campus, for instance, or Macy's can let people know that they're having a two-hour sale some afternoon by flagging it on the map. So people can share stories about what's happening in different locations on the maps.

Looking to the future, how do you plan to monetize this application? In the short term we plan to monetize this application through premium content. We have a short-term and a long-term focus. So to use the Macy's example again, so you want to promote a two-hour sale, you could pay to have information on it pushed out to all Micello users in the area whose profiles show they'd be interested in shopping at Macy's. In the long term we see ourselves as becoming the go-to company for designing interactive indoor maps.

A large number of problems with new iMacs, especially the top-of-the-line 27-in. model, has prompted one user to create a site that tallies issues ranging from cracked screens to flickering displays. Core i7-based iMac arrived with a broken screen. Canadian Web designer Scott Pronych created the Apple iMac (Fall 2009) Issues site to track the problems, in part because his new 27-in.

By digging through Apple's support forum, Pronych identified 343 different users who had reported problems with their new machines. On Apple's support forum, customers have reported receiving iMac displays with shattered glass, most of the time in the lower left corner of the screen. Cracked screens have garnered the most attention from bloggers and the media. The bulk of the cracked-screen problems have been reported by people who purchased a new iMac equipped with Intel's Core i7 quad-core processor . Apple unveiled the quad-core iMacs, along with revamped dual-core models in both 21.5- and 27-in sizes, on Oct. 20 as part of a broad product refresh that also debuted a redesigned MacBook and a new Mac mini-based server. Screen will go completely black for a second and then come back on. The cracked screen issue was actually low on the list, with just 54 incidents out of the 343, or 16%. The most widespread problem was a screen that flickered, "tore" or just went black: 179 cases, or 52% of the total. "That shocked me, too," said Pronych today. "But the thread is huge." The support thread Pronych referred to had more than 1,000 individual messages as of early Monday, with a view count of over 144,000, easily the most read of those on the iMac forum discussing problems. "I have been experiencing some problems with the all new iMac 27-inch display," said Jan Sampermans , who kicked off the thread on Oct. 27. "Screen distortion/flicker somewhere random in the screen (feels like it is more in the lower part) that looks like a horizontal bar of about 2-3inches just popping in and out of the screen.

Sometimes 2-3 times in a row." Although many users who reported the flickering said Apple had exchanged their iMacs, some noted that they had gone through as many as three machines before getting a defect-free system. In the first place, the best reason why I wanted iMac 27-in is the screen, so without this, why the **** would I spend money on this?" Kim was eventually given a third iMac, but that one sported shattered glass. Others complained about the solutions Apple support had suggested, or said they had run into roadblocks. "[The second] iMac had dust underneath the glass and a dead pixel," said Minsoo Kim Sunday on the "New iMac 27inch screen flickering/tearing/shutoff" thread. "Since it was a cluster of dust, I had a valid reason for it to be swapped and again, drove 40 minutes to the Apple Store. "There, the genius told me that without saying sorry for any inconvenience I may [have] had, 'Apple will not exchange any further iMac for minor screen problem like this.' I was shocked. Pronych, however, remained a loyal Mac user. "I got a replacement, and it's worked fine," he said. "I haven't encountered any of the other problems people have been reporting." The flickering display problem is not limited to the quad-core iMacs; of the 179 total cases Pronych documented, 94 involve dual-core iMacs, while 85 involve an i5- or i7-powered iMac. iMac have been posted on Apple's support forum.

More than 81% of all the problems he cited, however, were for the 27-in. model; relatively few reports of issues with the smaller 21.5-in. According to Pronych's analysis, more-recent iMac production runs have not exhibited as many problems as the Week 46 and Week 47 batches. Customers can log their problem with Pronych's Web site by filling out an online form . Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the iMac issues that Pronych collated.

Do you wish your iSight were more like the unblinking, ever-vigilant Eye of Sauron? RemoteSight can act as an integrated camera source for Ben Software's SecuritySpy, which aggregates video feeds from multiple cameras into a heads-up multi-video display. Then you might be interested in Ben Software's new RemoteSight, an application that turns an iSight camera into a CCTV-style security camera, accessible over a network via Web browser. RemoteSight captures both audio and video from the host Mac's iSight camera (or any attached video input device), and streams it out through an integrated Web server; video is accompanied by a live timestamp.

Any Web browser has the ability to connect to the Web server across an internal network, and Internet remote viewing should be possible if the nonstandard additional ports used by the Web server are opened on the router to allow this traffic. The Web server also provides an option to remotely view what is happening on the Mac's monitor as well. Administrative users can turn off monitoring feeds individually, and you can protect all connections to the Web server by username and password registration. RemoteSight costs $27, and a fully functional demo is available as well, so you can give it a try. RemoteSight runs as a faceless application, with no indication in the Dock that it is operating; however, a menu-bar item appears that cannot be easily removed, and (where available) the iSight LED light is turned on to indicate that the camera is in use.

System requirements call for OS X 10.4.11 or later, 512GB of RAM (I'll assume that's a typo and you only need 512MB), and a video input device, such as a built-in iSight camera or external FireWire or USB camera.

Microsoft late last week said it won't patch Windows XP for a pair of bugs it quashed Sept. 8 in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The news adds Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and SP3 to the no-patch list that previously included only Windows 2000 Server SP4. "We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible," said security program manager Adrian Stone during Microsoft's monthly post-patch Webcast , referring to Windows 2000 and XP. "An update for Windows XP will not be made available," Stone and fellow program manager Jerry Bryant said during the Q&A portion of the Webcast ( transcript here ). Last Tuesday, Microsoft said that it wasn't patching Windows 2000 because creating a fix was "infeasible." The bugs in question are in Windows' implementation of TCP/IP, the Web's default suite of connection protocols. In the revised advisory, Microsoft explained why it won't patch Windows XP, the world's most popular operating system . "By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability," the company said. "Windows XP SP2 and later operating systems include a stateful host firewall that provides protection for computers against incoming traffic from the Internet or from neighboring network devices on a private network." Although the two bugs can be exploited on Windows 2000 and XP, Microsoft downplayed their impact. "A system would become unresponsive due to memory consumption ... [but] a successful attack requires a sustained flood of specially crafted TCP packets, and the system will recover once the flood ceases." Microsoft rated the vulnerabilities on Windows 2000 and XP as "important" on Windows 2000, and as "low" on XP. The company uses a four-step scoring system, where "low" is the least-dangerous threat, followed in ascending order by "moderate," "important" and "critical." The same two bugs were ranked "moderate" for Vista and Server 2008, while a third - which doesn't affect the older operating systems - was rated "critical." During the Q&A, however, Windows users repeatedly asked Microsoft's security team to explain why it wasn't patching XP, or if, in certain scenarios, their machines might be at risk. "We still use Windows XP and we do not use Windows Firewall," read one of the user questions. "We use a third-party vendor firewall product. All three of the vulnerabilities highlighted in the MS09-048 update were patched in Vista and Server 2008. Only two of the trio affect Windows Server 2000 and Windows XP, Microsoft said in the accompanying advisory, which was refreshed on Thursday.

Even assuming that we use the Windows Firewall, if there are services listening, such as remote desktop, wouldn't then Windows XP be vulnerable to this?" "Servers are a more likely target for this attack, and your firewall should provide additional protections against external exploits," replied Stone and Bryant. Windows Server 2000 SP4, for example, is to receive security updates until July 2010; Windows XP's support doesn't expire until April 2014. Stone's and Bryant's answer: "We will continue to provide updates for Windows 2000 while it is in support unless it is not technically feasible to do so." Skipping patches is very unusual for Microsoft. Another user asked them to spell out the conditions under which Microsoft won't offer up patches for still-supported operating systems. According to a Stone and Bryant, the last time it declined to patch a vulnerability in a support edition of Windows was in March 2003 , when it said it wouldn't fix a bug in Windows NT 4.0. Then, it explained the omission with language very similar to what it used when it said it wouldn't update Windows 2000. "Due to these fundamental differences between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and its successors, it is infeasible to rebuild the software for Windows NT 4.0 to eliminate the vulnerability," Microsoft said at the time.