Consumer confidence drags Wall St down

The Conference Board's index of consumer sentiment fell to 47.7 in October and revealed consumers are increasingly concerned about conditions in the US job market.

That news sent retail and consumer discretionary shares lower.

Profit-taking has also dominated overnight, after the market's recent run-up.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 14 points to 9,882.

The S&P 500 lost three points to 1,063, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq gave up 26 points to close at 2,116.

Shares in Britain ended slightly higher with a rally in the energy sector offsetting weakness in banking and mining stocks.

BP's third-quarter profits halved, but it beat market forecasts by a fairly wide margin and its stock gained almost 5 per cent.

The pharmaceutical sector made reasonable gains ahead of third-quarter earnings from a number of big companies later this week.

A survey revealed British retail sales volumes grew at their fastest pace in almost two years this month.

The poll also showed retailers are feeling more optimistic about their prospects than at any time since July 2007.

By the close, London's FT 100 Index had gained nine points to 5,201.

The local share market is expecting a soft start - in futures trading, the Share Price Index 200 is down 21 points to 4,743.

The Australian dollar has eased to 91.5 US cents.

On the cross-rates shortly before 7:30am (AEDT) it was buying 0.6186 euros; 84 Japanese yen; 55.89 pence Sterling; and was worth $1.23 in New Zealand.

Spot gold has edged down to $US1,038.90 an ounce and West Texas crude oil is lower at $US78.80 a barrel.

Windows 7 is an all-ages show

My great aunt is 92 and, as of Friday, she's a Windows 7 PC.

Now, Hilda is already not your typical nonagenarian. She is frequently online, does her finances in Quicken and recently abandoned AOL for Gmail (something I still haven't gotten my parents to do).

Unfortunately, while her mind is quick as ever, her Windows XP PC had slowed dramatically over the past few years, becoming nearly unusable. It's one of those things that many find so irksome about Windows PCs.

In any case, Hilda (I'm sparing her some spam by not including her last name) decided she needed a new computer and I offered to help. It was just a day after Windows 7 had made its debut and we headed to a local computer store. I found her a basic PC, monitor, and printer for $450 after rebate. She didn't really need the monitor, but it helped me a great deal as I transferred all of her files from her old PC to the new one.

If it were still the Windows Vista days, I might have been tempted to downgrade her new computer to Windows XP, so she wouldn't have to adjust to the new operating system.

But, with Windows 7 working so well, I actually felt comfortable she could make the switch, even though she's at the other end of the age spectrum from Kylie.

It took me almost no time to set up the new computer, but several hours to transfer over her settings and documents and then re-install Quicken and her other programs.

Amazing techie that she is, it took her almost no time to adjust to Windows 7's new look and feel. It's a few days in and I'm glad to report that things have continued to be smooth.

"It really is not very different from the XP I used before," she told me in an e-mail this week.

Heritage Things

Heritage Things

Sonata inaugurates Microsoft offsite facility

Sonata Software, a provider in software services, today announced the opening of Sonata's second Offsite Facility (OF) for Microsoft at Sonata's new Global Village facility in Bangalore.

The new development center has been designed keeping in mind flexible, scalable and independent operations, said a press release.

The facility would provide design, development, testing, production and maintenance of Microsoft's products.

A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Sonata engages with Microsoft over multiple engagement models, technologies, platforms and geographies. With Sonata's wide array of service offerings, the state-of-the-art facility promises to deliver high-impact solutions for Microsoft.

Inaugurating the facility, Hal Howard, general manager, Microsoft Dynamics, said, "Sonata has been a key partner for Microsoft in our commitment to provide best-of-breed 'People Ready' solutions to our customers. Sonata's deep domain knowledge and technical skills help us ensure accelerated development cycles, improved time-to-market and increased competitive agility."

B Ramaswamy, president and managing director, Sonata Software, stated, "We continue to invest aggressively to build capacity in order to serve our customers. This strategy allows us to quickly scale our organization, support the business demands of our global customer base, and further establish our leadership position in Software Product Development services."

He added that their relationship with Microsoft is an intrinsic component of Sonata's growth strategy and continues to provide significant synergistic opportunities for both companies.

Source & Credit: news.ciol.com

AT&T to allow VoIP iPhone apps on 3G network

AT&T on Tuesday said it has made the necessary changes to enable voice over IP iPhone apps to run on its wireless network.

Before Tuesday, VoIP apps would only work over a Wi-Fi network. In other words, if you wanted to use Skype to call a friend, you had to be connected to a regular Internet wireless network. Once you were out of range of that network, the call would end.

AT&T said it informed Apple and the Federal Communications Commission of its decision Tuesday afternoon. For its part, Apple was quick to react and make its own changes.

"We are very happy that AT&T is now supporting VoIP applications," Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris said. "We will be amending our developer agreements to get VoIP apps on the App Store and in customers' hands as soon as possible."

There are already quite a few VoIP apps available in the App Store, like Skype, Vonage, and Truphone, but they only work over Wi-Fi. Developers will need to enable the apps to work over AT&T's wireless network and then re-submit them to the App Store.

Of course, the application that everyone will be wondering about is Google Voice. Tuesday's decision may not have much of an effect on that situation because Google Voice isn't really a VoIP application. Google's app still uses your wireless network minutes, but the service does offer other benefits like receiving calls to a single number in multiple places.

Source & Credit: news.cnet.com

Amazon goes global with new Kindle

Amazon announced late Tuesday that it was introducing a new version of its Kindle e-book reader that can wirelessly download books in the United States and more than 100 countries.

The new device, which is expected to ship on October 19, is physically similar to the previous Kindle with a six-inch display. However, the new e-reader will be capable of downloading books and periodicals via wireless networks belonging to AT&T and its international partners.

"We have millions of customers in countries all over the world who read English-language books," Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "Kindle enables these customers to think of a book and download it wirelessly in less than 60 seconds."

The online retailer also announced that it would cut the price of its U.S. Kindle by $40 to $259, bringing it more in line with Sony's Reader Pocket Edition, which sells for $199. The price cut is the second for Amazon's e-reader in four months: in July, the price of the Kindle 2 dropped from $359 to $299. Amazon also sells a larger version called the Kindle DX for $489.

The Seattle-based e-tailer said international customers will have access to about 220,000 book titles at its Kindle Store compared with the 350,000 titles available to U.S. customers. Publishers involved with the store include Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet, Harlequin, Penguin, Bloomsbury, and Hachette.

With the announcements, Amazon is attempting to position itself for a boom in e-reader sales that Forrester Research expects in the U.S. over the next few years. In a report to be released Wednesday, Forrester Research raised its 2009 forecast for e-reader sales in the United States to 3 million units from its previous prediction of 2 million sales. Forrester Research also expects Amazon's Kindle to command about 60 percent of the e-reader market in 2009, compared with 35 percent for Sony's Reader.

"This holiday season, eReaders will be one category that's a breakout success," Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said in the report. "Lower prices, more content, better distribution, and lots of media hype are contributing to faster-than-expected adoption of eReader devices in 2009."

Source & Credit: news.cnet.com

IE overall usage slips, but IE 8 gains

All four of Internet Explorer's main rivals gained a larger share of users worldwide from August to September, new statistics show.

According to Net Applications, which tracks browser usage globally through a network of 40,000 Web sites and some statistical processing, IE slipped from 67 percent to 65.7 percent of users.

Firefox has steadily won over more users since version 1.0 arrived nearly five years ago, and it continued the trend with an increase from 23 percent to 23.8 percent. Apple's Safari rose from 4.1 percent to 4.2 percent, Google Chrome from 2.8 percent to 3.2 percent, and Opera from 2 to 2.2 percent. Although a few tenths of a percent may sound small, multiplied by the millions of browser users over the Internet, it can mean a large absolute number of people.

Firefox passed an important milestone over the month-long period, with the newer Firefox 3.5 replacing version 3.0 as the leading version. The newer version furthers Mozilla's ambitions to upgrade Web technologies with new features such as faster JavaScript and built-in video.

Microsoft has restarted what had been a somewhat dormant browser developer program, releasing IE 8 earlier this year. But IE 6 still is the leading version of Microsoft's browser, followed by IE 7 in second place.

In a bright spot for Microsoft, though, IE 8 usage increased from 15.1 percent to 16.8 percent, as IE 6 and IE 7 dropped.

Macs and PCs found shacking up

While the number of Apple-owning households continues to grow, the vast majority of those Macs are sharing space with at least one Windows-based PC, according to a new study.

The NPD Group said Monday that its online survey found that 12 percent of households with a computer have at least one Mac, up from 9 percent a year ago. Nearly 85 percent of those with a Mac, though, also have at least one Windows-based PC.

Overall, Mac owners tend to have more computers and more electronic devices than non-Mac owners. Two-thirds of those with an Apple machine have three or more computers, compared with 29 percent of Windows-only houses.

Houses with Macs also tend to be home to twice as many gadgets, including more iPods and GPS systems than are present in non-Mac abodes.

That makes me feel a bit better about my own domicile, which is home to several Macs and PCs, not to mention more gadgets than I care to admit. There's another reason, though, why Apple owners tend to have more digital gear than their non-Mac-possessing counterparts.

"While Apple owners tend to own more computers and more electronics devices, there is also a high correlation among Apple owners and more affluent consumer households," NPD analyst Stephen Baker said in a statement. "Thirty-six percent of Apple computer owners reported household incomes greater than $100,000, compared to 21 percent of all consumers. With a higher household income, though, it's not a surprise that those consumers are making more electronics purchases."

NPD compiled its results from 2,300 responses to its online survey.

Yahoo to shut down Xoopit for Gmail users

Yahoo on Friday noted to users of Xoopit that the Gmail integration of its service would soon be disintegrated.

Xoopit, which aggregates media files from users' Gmail accounts, was acquired by Google rival Yahoo in late July and has since been integrated into the company's own Web mail service.

Users of Xoopit will have until November 13 to grab any media from Yahoo's servers, after which it will no longer be available. Doing this is necessary only for users who have deleted the source file from their Gmail account, as Xoopit simply copies over the media, leaving the version on Google's servers intact. Yahoo will continue to hold on to all users' data until next February to comply with its 90-day data retention policy, it said.

In Yahoo's note, the company says one of the main reasons for the shutdown of Gmail compatibility is to enable the team to focus on making a better version of its product for Yahoo Mail, which only began working with the Xoopit service in December. It also said that discontinuing resources into tools designed to improve competing Web mail providers would leave Gmail users with a "lousy experience."

Along with access to Xoopit, Yahoo is also discontinuing its Firefox add-on and Facebook integration for Gmail.

The browser add-on has let users view attachments and other media in their Gmail accounts as a file explorer--functionality that has since been replaced by some of Google's Gmail Labs add-ons. Users with the browser add-on installed could also connect with Facebook to see and view status updates from within Gmail, a feature that will also become unavailable.

Google: Pirate Bay booted off search by mistake

Google said on Friday that an error caused the search engine to remove The Pirate Bay from its search pages.

"Google received a (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down request that erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed from the Google search index," Google said in a statement. "We are now correcting the removal, and you can expect to see Thepiratebay.org back in Google search results this afternoon."

Later, Google updated it's statement: "The removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request."

Separately, The Pirate Bay's site appeared down Friday afternoon at 1:15 p.m. PT, at least in many U.S. areas.

Google didn't provide any details about what caused the error but at this point it doesn't seem to be some kind of orchestrated effort to bring down The Pirate Bay--at least on Google's part. According to Google, it was just a goof.

The DMCA's safe-harbor provision is designed to shield Internet service providers from being held liable for copyright infringement committed by users. But the provision has a certain set of requirements that ISPs must meet, and one of them includes promptly removing infringing material.

The case is a bit ironic, in that it's well-established that The Pirate Bay does not store any unauthorized copies of films, music, TV shows, or other content.

Indeed, the service can help people find pirated content, but so can a lot of search engines, including Google. The notion that the Pirate Bay would be pulled down because of a single copyright claim is sort of humorous.

If that's all that was needed to have the site kicked off, it would have happened years ago. The music and film industries, as well as other copyright owners, have complained about The Pirate Bay for years.

Peter Sunde-Kolmisoppi told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagblated that The Pirate Bay's attorney sent a letter to both Google and the companies that are suspected of being behind the allegations and demanded that the Pirate Bay be returned to Google's index. The Pirate Bay accused Google of censoring a competitor and of stifling free expression, the paper reported.

DataCore partner deploys virtualization, disaster recovery, BC solution at two California hospitals

DataCore Software Corp., a provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, announced on Thursday recent deployments of one of its West Coast partners – Far West Technologies, a systems integrator, reseller and provider of information technology, telephony, compliance and virtualization-based solutions.

Understanding business continuity, in terms of the compliance mandates required of hospitals, as well as the technology available to make these compliance objectives possible, has enabled Far West to obtain marquee hospitals in southern California as new customers.

With an understanding of policies and procedures within healthcare and domain expertise in terms of disaster recovery (DR), Far West has built a practice in tailoring technology solutions to foster compliance in relation to the required policies and procedures within the healthcare and other highly regulated industries, by leveraging technology to meet requirements as stipulated in a variety of compliance standards including PCI, HIPAA, SOX, 17a-4, and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance standards.

“We appreciate the budget constraints hospitals are facing,” stated Eric Lissoy, chief technology officer, Far West Technologies. “What we try to do is leverage their existing systems – so these organizations do not have to engage in a drastic ‘rip-and-replace,’ while bearing in mind just what new technologies are out there – that can help meet today’s business objectives – and may be added to the infrastructure non-disruptively.”

Understanding what is required in terms of the business continuity side of things (as far as compliance regulations) as well as the latest in virtualization technologies has served as a “nexus of opportunity” for this service provider, which serves as a ”virtual CIO” for its client companies.

“Many companies have CTOs or CFOs, but they do not have someone who truly understands how to build in ROI and integrate multiple facilities under a cohesive DR strategy based on leveraging high availability environments, which meet compliance objectives,” commented Lissoy. “Companies fail to achieve their business continuity objectives because they typically have a fragmented approach, where certain people are on the network side, others are on the systems side, others are on the database side, and another group understands the phone system. Far West understands all of these facets. We always make the point that we serve to integrate all of these technology elements into a comprehensive infrastructure that delivers on business objectives.”

Far West Technologies was brought in by AHMC Inc. & AHMC Healthcare Inc. (AHMC) to do systems migration and integration that was necessary in its merger and acquisition (M&A) of Anaheim Memorial Medical Center. Part of the architectural design that was required as part of the acquisition, had to do with meeting the requirements for specific amounts of “horsepower” for the new network.

Knowing that certain servers were not going to be able to be deployed in a timely enough fashion, Far West used DataCore’s SANmelody to create the backend infrastructure for a virtualization environment in order to get the databases and infrastructures migrated without losing performance over to the new architecture.

“AHMC, which was acquiring Anaheim Memorial Medical Center from its previous owner Memorial Care, gave us five days to evaluate everything and migrate from one complete infrastructure to another, while keeping the hospital up and running,” explained Lissoy. “It was a massive undertaking. DataCore’s SANmelody enabled us to build an infrastructure for Anaheim Memorial in less than five business days to support an architecture that was necessary in the acquisition of the hospital by AHMC Inc. & AHMC Healthcare Inc.”

Anaheim was using EMC CLARiiON when Far West Technologies first came on the scene. The firm knew that the hospital was coming up on end-of-life on some of its CLARiiON boxes and sought to provide a solution where Anaheim Memorial Medical Center would not encounter proprietary, end-of-life scenarios. Far West was able to run both old and new system code at the same time with SANmelody serving as the backbone of everything. The initial size of the data pool that SANmelody supported was 8 TB (terabytes).

The management at San Gabriel Valley Medical Center wanted to move to a virtualization environment in order to reduce the size of their existing footprint within their data center. The goal was to eliminate legacy systems and the hospital was poised to deploy an HP storage area network (SAN), utilizing HP blades.

Far West Technologies showed the IT staff at San Gabriel Valley how flexible DataCore would be for them, without getting stuck with proprietary hardware, which was the case with a traditional SAN. “When I was able to show the decision-makers at San Gabriel Valley Medical Center that there would be no degradation in performance with a DataCore software-based SAN – it was a real eye-opener for them.”

By working with the IT and operations staff at San Gabriel Valley Medical Center and showing them how DataCore’s SANmelody can deliver high availability, while using some of the hospital’s existing hardware, Far West Technologies found this solution ideal. After doing an onsite presentation and building a base model of the SANmelody system, in less than 24 hours the system was sold and Far West Technologies was able to do the full installation of the SANmelody-powered SAN.

The new SAN supports Exchange and SQL databases as well as legacy Linux systems in a high availability environment. When Far West Technologies built the SANs for these two hospitals, they were 100 percent integrated to either VMware or Citrix XenServer. Far West migrated core systems over to the virtualized environment, fulfilling on the promise of a smaller footprint within the data centers and ensuring high performance, while delivering on high availability.

Both hospitals not only have fully integrated server and storage virtualization environments, the SANs are integrated to serve as LUNs to other servers that provide space for back-ups. Far West was able to put the CLARiiON servers behind SANmelody and use the LUNs of SANmelody to take snapshots or to have disaster recovery (DR) built into those machines that are hitting end-of-life. When those machines get decommissioned, the SAN is not connected to the production machine that is using SANmelody as a front-end.

“I give credit to DataCore for giving systems integrators and solution advisors the means by which we can move their software-based SANs to other hardware without incurring other expenses,” commented Lissoy. “You buy or re-purpose hardware and DataCore lets you move the license for the SAN to new, faster hardware – without any upgrade fee or penalty. This is a refreshing change – and it is certainly not the norm with proprietary, hardware-based SANs.”

America has its roots in India of Mahatma Gandhi: Obama

WASHINGTON: As the world celebrates International Day of non-violence, US President Barack Obama on Thursday said America has its "roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi."

"His teachings and ideals, shared with Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1959 pilgrimage to India, transformed American society through our civil rights movement," Obama said on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Americans owe enormous gratitude to Gandhi, he said.

"The America of today has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent social action movement for Indian independence which he led," Obama said in a statement.

On behalf of the American people, Obama said he wants to express appreciation for the life and lessons of Mahatma Gandhi on the anniversary of his birth. "This is an important moment to reflect on his message of non-violence, which continues to inspire people and political movements across the globe," he said.

"We join the people of India in celebrating this great soul who lived a life dedicated to the cause of advancing justice, showing tolerance to all, and creating change through non-violent resistance," Obama said.

As the world remembers the Mahatma on his birthday, Obama said: "We must renew our commitment to live his ideals and to celebrate the dignity of all human beings.

Last month Obama had said that if given a chance he would love to have dinner with Mahatma Gandhi.

Obama expressed his desire in response to a question from a student Lilly during his discussion with 9th graders at Wakefield High School in Arlington Virginia where he, accompanied with the Education Secretary, gave a national speech welcoming students back to school.

Obama called for students to take responsibility and to learn from their failures so that they succeed in the end. "Hi. I'm Lilly. And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be," Obama was asked by one of the students.

"Dinner with anyone dead or alive? Well, you know, dead or alive, that's a pretty big list," Obama responded amidst laughter. The next moment he was serious. "You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine,"

Obama said. "Now, it would probably be a really small meal because he didn't eat a lot," he said amidst laughter. But Mahatma Gandhi is someone who has inspired people across the world for the past several generations, he said.

IBM takes on Google in business Web-mail market

BOSTON (Reuters) - IBM is introducing an inexpensive Web-based corporate email service that will compete with Google Inc's Google Apps, which has recently suffered several high-profile outages.

International Business Machines Corp will likely try to capitalize on the damage that those outages have caused to Google Apps over the past year. Last month millions of business users could not access email for almost two hours.

An IBM spokesman said on Thursday that the company will start selling its LotusLive iNotes next week. The lightweight email service will cost $36 per user per year, about 25 percent less than what Google charges for a more robust product.

IBM's offering does not have as many bells and whistles as Google's, but the technology giant could attract more customers because it has decades more experience serving the business market. Its products include Lotus Notes, one of the world's two most widely used email programs.

Google, on the other hand, generates the bulk of its revenue from advertisements placed on free search products targeted at consumers. It is just getting into the business of selling to businesses.

"The IBM brand will help a lot," said Forrester Research Inc analyst Liz Herbert.

iNotes will also compete with a Web-based email service from Microsoft Corp that costs about $120 per user per year, according to the software maker's website.

Banking Trojan steals money from under your nose

Researchers at security firm have discovered details of a new type of banking Trojan horse that doesn't just steal your bank log in credentials but actually steals money from your account while you are logged in and displays a fake balance.

The bank Trojan, dubbed URLzone, has features designed to thwart fraud detection systems which are triggered by unusual transactions, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan, said in an interview on Tuesday. For instance, the software is programmed to calculate on-the-fly how much money to steal from an account based on how much money is available.

It exploits a hole in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, IE7, IE8, and Opera, and it is different from previously reported banking Trojans, said Ben-Itzhak. The Trojan runs an executable only on Windows systems, he said. The executable can come via a number of avenues, including malicious JavaScript or an Adobe PDF, he added.

The specific Trojan Finjan researchers analyzed targets customers of unnamed German banks. It was linked back to a command-and-control server in Ukraine that was used to send instructions to the trojan software sitting infected PCs. Finjan has notified German law enforcement authorities, Ben-Itzhak said.

"It's a next generation bank trojan," he said. "This is part of a new trend of more sophisticated Trojans designed to evade antifraud systems."

Finjan researchers were able to trace the communications from the code on an infected machine back to the command-and-control server, which was left unsecured, according to Ben-Itzhak. On that server, they saw the LuckySploit administration console and were able to see exactly what types of rules the Trojan was written to follow and statistics on victims.

About 90,000 computers visited the sites housing the malware and 6,400 of them were infected, a 7.5 percent success rate, he said. Of those whose computers had the Trojan installed, a few hundred had money stolen from their bank accounts, he added.

During the span of 22 days in mid-August, the criminals behind the Trojan stole the euro equivalent of nearly $438,000, according to the security company.

The Trojan code includes detailed instructions on how the trojan should calculate how much to steal from a victim's bank account.

(Credit: Finjan)

Here's how the trojan works:

Potential victims get their computers infected either by opening an e-mail and clicking on a link to a Web site created to distribute malware or by visiting a site that has been compromised and malware hidden on it.

In this case the malware, a toolkit called LuckySpoilt, exploits a known security hole in the browser, affecting the major browsers, and installs the Trojan on the computer. When the Trojan notices the computer user visiting the site of a targeted bank it springs into action.

While the computer user goes about his or her business on the site, the Trojan looks at the available balance and figures out how much money to steal. The Trojan is given a minimum and a maximum range that is below the amount that triggers antifraud systems and to leave a certain percentage in the account, Ben-Itzhak said.

After performing the calculation, the Trojan then makes the transaction, communicating with the bank site through the browser without the computer user knowing.

"The Trojan is sending requests to the bank and getting replies that your browser doesn't display," Ben-Itzhak said. "You are looking at your account and you don't see any of it."

The Trojan has the money sent to the bank account of a money mule, someone who has an account set up to receive the funds. Money mules are typically people recruited online as "independent contractors" or "financial managers" whose sole purpose is to wire the money placed into their account to someone else, typically out of the country, in exchange for a commission. Because their accounts are used only once or twice, they often do not realize the ruse immediately, Ben-Itzhak said.

Meanwhile, the Trojan hides the theft by erasing it from the report of account activity displayed to the computer user and shows a fake balance--what the amount would be if not for the theft. The victim will not notice something is wrong until a different, uncompromised computer is used to access the account, an ATM is used, or a transaction is denied because of insufficient funds.

The Trojan also keeps a log of the victim's bank account log in credentials, takes screenshots, and snoops on the user's other Web accounts, such as PayPal, Facebook, and Gmail, according to the Finjan report.

This is the first Trojan Finjan has come across that hijacks a victim's browser session, steals the money while the victim is doing online banking, and then covers its tracks by modifying information displayed to the victim, all in real time, Ben-Itzhak said.