Google's Google+ gambit: The Madman theory

Let me tell you a story about Richard M. Nixon and the Cold War--and yes, I promise it's relevant to a blog post about Google's controversial move to integrate its Google+ network deeply into the Google search engine.

In October 1969, President Nixon secretly elevated the U.S. military to full global readiness alert and ordered bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to fly near the Soviet border. If that sounds like an impulsive and dangerous move--well, that's because Nixon wanted the Soviet leaders to believe that he was so impulsive and dangerous that he might do anything. He called his theory the Madman strategy, and hoped that it would scare the Soviets into forcing the North Vietnamese to make concessions and thereby end the Vietnam war.

Nixon's scheme was too clever by half, and it didn't work. But I thought about it when I read Danny Sullivan's interview with Google search honcho Amit Singhal on the present and future of Search, Plus Your World (SPYW), the Google feature that melds Google+ and search.

Singhal says that real people--unlike, ahem, tech pundits--are pleased with SPYW. He says critics need to give it more time and see where Google is going with it. And when Sullivan asks him questions about why other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, aren't part of SPYW, Singhal says Google+ gets so much emphasis because other social networks won't give Google the access to their data that it needs. He also complains obliquely about attract the attention of antitrust regulators.

What if Google's strategy for ending the stalemate with Facebook and Twitter involves a Nixonian decision to intentionally come off as impulsive and dangerous, in hopes of pressuring them to come to the negotiating table?

Google isn't just griping about Twitter not providing data--it's rolling out SPYW features that look incomplete because Twitter data is absent. And by making Google+ content so prominent in the world's most popular search engine, it's threatening Facebook's dominance of social networking in a unique way. One that might leave Facebook wanting to be part of SPYW, too.

If you're Facebook or Twitter and are concerned about SPYW's current features, you're probably even more alarmed by other actions Google might theoretically take to bolster Google+ and shut out other services. And you might conclude that its behavior so far suggests that it's capable of even more drastic measures.

I have no inside info on Google's thought processes, and I'm certainly not arguing that its executives sat around a conference table at the Googleplex and decided "let's be like Nixon!" But in the end, the company wants Facebook and Twitter to conclude that it's best if they share at least some of their social data. If it decided to impress that point on them in the boldest manner possible--rather than by asking politely--it might bring those companies to the negotiating table more swiftly.

As Singhal says, you can't judge Search, Plus Your World's potential based on this initial version. Machinations between Google, Facebook, and Twitter will play a huge part in shaping its future--and it'll be fascinating to see what it looks like a year or two from now.

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Gates sent dying Jobs a letter he kept bedside

Here's just the latest reported evidence that the late Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had a strong relationship at the time of the Apple icon's death.

Microsoft's co-founder told The Telegraph that yes, the two had some stormy days as fierce competitors. But things changed around 2007 when Gates left Microsoft to set up his foundation and the two did an event together (presumably referring to the D Conference in 2007, pictured right). Before Jobs' death in October, Gates said he paid the Apple co-founder a long visit. "We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future."

And Gates told The Telegraph he later wrote Jobs a letter to tell him "how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know." After his death, Gates got a call from Jobs' wife, Laurene, who said Jobs appreciated the letter and kept it by his bed. "She said; 'Look, this biography really doesn't paint a picture of the mutual respect you had," Gates said.
The letter was not meant to be conciliatory, The Telegraph points out.

"There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness."

Earlier this week, Gates reflected on his friendship with Jobs in an interview with Yahoo and ABC. "We'd talk about the other companies that have come along. We talked about our families and how lucky we'd both been in terms of the women we married. It was great relaxed conversation."

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Mark Zuckerberg finally comes out against SOPA

Although Facebook has been public about its opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally silent on the matter. Until now.



Today, Zuckerberg came out against SOPA and PIPA with postings on both Facebook and Twitter. In the case of Twitter, it appeared to be Zuckerberg's first tweet in nearly three years.

On Facebook, Zuckerberg was very clear about his position:

 The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Today, of course, was a perfectly symbolic day for the Facebook CEO to go public with his views on SOPA and PIPA.

All across the Internet, anti-SOPA and PIPA protests are attracting huge amounts of attention. Sites like Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and Reddit are blacked out, while Google has covered up its logo, and many other sites have taken anti-legislation action. Twitter is bursting at the seams with tweets about the protests, and now, Zuckerberg has joined the chorus. (See CNET's FAQ on SOPA.)

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iPad 3 to get February intro, March release?

We could be a few weeks away from getting a peek at Apple's next iPad, if a new report is to be believed.

Citing an Asian supplier and "a source in United States," Japanese Apple blog Macotakara says that Apple is cooking up a special event in "early February" to take the wraps off its next iPad, with a formal launch of the product taking place sometime the following month.

Why the delay? Macotakara says that the Chinese factories involved with the production if iPad 3 units will be celebrating the Chinese New Year, which kicks off at the beginning of next week.

It's not unusual for Apple to delay the sale of a product from its formal introduction, however that time period has only been a week or two for new iterations of existing products. In the case of the iPad 2, the product was unveiled at an event on March 2, 2011, with a release on March 11. With the original iPad it was considerably longer, with Apple unveiling the product on January 27, 2010 and not putting it on sale until April 3.

That same timing held true with some of the latest iPhones, with the device shipping about a week and a half after its introduction. For its predecessor, the iPhone 4, that turnaround time was a little more than two weeks.

This is the latest report to suggest that Apple's aiming for a March release for the iPad 3, and the second to come from Macotakara. In October, the blog suggested Apple was planning on a March release, and making use of a new type of dock connector that would be considerably smaller from the one on current iOS devices. A story from Bloomberg last week also claimed March would be the time when the product hits shelves.

One thing worth pointing out is that a March launch would further move the iPad's release cycle closer to the beginning of the year. That's an impressive feat from a technical standpoint, but also one that could affect sales of the product during the holiday shopping season, with buyers potentially holding off on a purchase in anticipation of Apple delivering a new model just a couple of months later.

Those kind of expectations left a notable mark on iPhone sales during Apple's fourth fiscal quarter last year, with the company selling fewer iPhones than most of Wall Street expected. The big difference in that case was that the product's refresh ran longer than usual.

On the event front, Apple is set to hold its first one of the year with an education-themed announcement in New York next week. While no hardware is anticipated, the event is said to involve the iPad with additions to the company's iBookstore and iTunes U initiatives.

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Wikipedia, Google blackout sites to protest SOPA

Three of the Internet's most popular destinations--Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist--launched an audacious experiment in political activism this evening by urging their users to protest a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright laws.

Wikipedia's English-language pages went completely black at 9 p.m. PT, with a splash page saying "the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet." The online encyclopedia's blackout, intended to precede next week's Senate floor vote on the legislation, is scheduled to last 24 hours.

Craigslist and Google have taken a more modest approach. Unlike Wikipedia, the sites will remain online during Wednesday's virtual protest, but the home pages now feature exhortations to contact members of Congress and urge them to vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate version called Protect IP. Craiglist's snarky note: "Corporate paymasters, KEEP THOSE CLAMMY HANDS OFF THE INTERNET!" (See CNET's FAQ on the topic.)

It's a novel experiment in grassroots-outreach-by-the-millions that could, if successful, derail SOPA and Protect IP, which have come under increasing criticism since last fall. Their authors -- Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) -- responded in the last week by offering some changes. But Smith said in a statement today that, one way or another, a House committee vote will be held in February.

CNET predicted the protest in a December 29 article that said opponents of the bills may "simultaneously turn" their home pages "black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress."

This is "classic Hollywood trying to do heavy handed legislation to protect its business interests," Casey Rae-Hunter, deputy director of the Future of Music Coalition, told reporters this morning.

Among the other Web sites that, in one way or another, have joined the blackout: Metafilter, the Consumer Electronics Association, BoingBoing, OpenDNS, WordPress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and what is almost certainly the Internet's most popular dinosaur comic strip. Some physical protests are also planned tomorrow.

Because Web companies are typically reluctant to involve their users in political spats, nothing exactly like today's protest has ever been tried before, and it's difficult to predict how it will affect Congress' willingness to proceed. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated on Sunday that he expected the floor vote on Protect IP to happen as scheduled.

But Google.com is the most popular Web site in the world, according to Alexa, with about half of global Internet users visiting it per day -- meaning that if only a small percent sign the company's petition against SOPA and Protect IP, the total number of voters lodging protests could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. (Google pointedly refrained from asking its users to call the U.S. Capitol's switchboard at (202) 224-3121, which likely would have overwhelmed the system within minutes.)

In a blog post this evening, Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, predicted that Protect IP and SOPA "will censor the Web," "risk our industry's track record of innovation and job creation," and ultimately be unsuccessful in curbing piracy.

SOPA, of course, represents the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore Web sites. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet service providers, and other companies, forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish. It's opposed (PDF) by many Internet companies, users, and civil liberties groups.

Some Internet companies including Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo have expressed concerns about the bill but have not said they would join the blackout. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote that "closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."

In one early sign that the blackouts and protests are having an effect, the MPAA today characterized them as "stunts." The group's chairman, Chris Dodd, took a thinly veiled swipe at Wikipedia by denouncing the protests as "an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services." News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to offer similar thoughts.
Tomorrow's protest was originally designed to coincide with a hearing that SOPA foe Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had scheduled on the measure's technical aspects, especially the portions relating to Domain Name System, or DNS, blocking. Issa said over the weekend that the Republican leadership had promised him that a floor vote would not happen "unless there is consensus on the bill," a rather implausible scenario. As a result, Issa postponed the hearing.

"There's a lot of sort of technologically ignorant language in" SOPA and Protect IP, said Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit, which has become a focal point of anti-SOPA activism and can probably claim credit for convincing GoDaddy to flip-flop on the legislation. Both bills, he said, were "done without a lot of thought about the impact and the execution and without a lot of knowledge technically about how the Internet operates."

Mozilla will join the protest at 5 a.m. PT (8 a.m. ET) tomorrow in what it's calling a "virtual strike" against SOPA and Protect IP. It will black out the default start page for Firefox users and ask them to take action.
"SOPA makes all of us potential criminals if we don't become the enforcement arm of a new government regulatory and policing structure," Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post today.

The protest had a few hiccups. For the first 20 minutes or so, Google's initial sign-this-petition Web page delivered this message: "Error: Server Error / The server encountered an error and could not complete your request."

Not all of Wikipedia's pages are blacked out. Entries for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are still visible. More than a few users of the encyclopedia seemed confused.

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For Intel, Windows 8 is key talking point

The fate of ultrabooks is intimately linked to Windows 8, as CEO Paul Otellini has made clear in recent talks--and as he is expected to reiterate at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.
Ostensibly, CES for Intel and the PC crowd is about the crush of new Windows 7 ultrabooks hitting the market. But internally, Intel is keen on Windows 8 as a vehicle to close the yawning gap with Apple's mobile devices, particularly the iPad.

Otellini got a rude reminder of how important ultramobile devices are in 2012 and beyond when an analyst at a Credit Suisse Technology Conference in November challenged Intel's laptop strategy by asking the CEO, "But how many people in this room have iPads?"
That was a rhetorical question, of course. The bottom line is that Intel will not be strong in phones--at least not for a while. Even with the introduction of phones running on its new Medfield chip.

 But it can succeed quickly in tablet-like devices via Windows 8. Many of those newfangled devices will be labeled ultrabooks but be indistinguishable from tablets.
"Windows 8 is one of the best things that's happened to our company," Otellini said at the Credit Suisse conference.

Windows 8 duality: The flexibility of jumping in and out of tablet mode--aka the Metro interface--on Intel-based devices will be key for Intel. "There's...Metro [But] for Intel-based machines, there's also one button that takes you back to your classic Windows experience," he said at the conference.

Otellini continued. "That's a software button essentially. You're running one manifestation of the operating system with two different GUIs, it's not running virtual machines. It's one manifestation. This gives [Intel's] x86 a unique advantage as x86 comes to market...we can take advantage of all of the legacy that was ever written plus all of the drivers."

To drive this point home, Otellini said there are more than 6 million apps written for x86, dwarfing any other platform.

All of this, of course, is a counterpoint to Window 8 on ARM (WoA): for the first time, mainstream Windows will run on both Intel's x86 and devices with ARM chips from companies like Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and Nvidia.

Windows 8 touch development: A lot of the key ultrabook development that is tied to the $300 million ultrabook fund is focused on touch technology for Windows 8, as Otellini pointed out the Intel Capital Global Summit earlier in November.

To hit the volume price points, Intel needs to have ultrabooks priced as low as $699 next year, he said. "To do that, we have to get touch to a lower cost. This is particularly important, as we move to the launch of Windows 8. The iPad and the iPhone have made touch a paradigm," he said.

So, how important is touch to Intel and PC makers? "Our view is that in the ultrabook lines, touch is a pretty critical enabler. When users see that new Windows [8] interface, they're going to want to touch it. If the screen does nothing, you have disappointed [the] consumer," Otellini said.

A lot of PC makers are already working on these devices, according to Otellini. "A number of our customers will bring out [models] for Windows 8 that have touch enabled on devices. A lot of folks are working on convertible, removable form factors," he said at the Credit Suisse conference.

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Trendnet shrinks its Powerline AV 500 adapter

If you're hesitating to upgrade to the 500Mbps Powerline AV networking standard due to the size of its adapters (like the colossal Netgear XAV5501), well I have some good news.

Trendnet announced today what it's claiming is the world's smallest Powerline AV 500 adapter: the 500 Mbps Compact Powerline AV Adapter TPL-406E. The company says that it will be demoing this unit at CES 2012.

Judging from the photo that shows how the new adapter fits right in your palm, it's indeed the smallest Powerline AV 500 adapter I've ever seen. Trendnet says the TPL-406E comes with a power-saving feature that allows the unit to consume 70 percent less energy in standby mode.

Despite the compact size, the adapter is capable of turning your home's electrical wiring into a computer network with a data rate of up to 500Mbps, five times that of a regular Ethernet connection. You'll need at least two adapters to form the first power-line connection. For this reason, the TPL-406E comes both as a single unit or in a kit of two units, model TPL-4062K.

The new tiny 500Mbps Powerline AV adapter is compatible with other Powerline AV and HomePlug AV adapters and will be available for purchase by April this year with an estimated price of $40 each.

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Toshiba to debut 64GB USB 3.0 Flash drive

Toshiba will introduce new USB 3.0 flash drives next week at the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Las Vegas, as products using the faster USB interface begin to trickle out.

"SuperSpeed" USB 3.0 is about 10 times faster than current USB technology and will become standard in virtually all laptops when Intel's Ivy Bridge silicon begins shipping this spring.

Toshiba says its TransMemory-EX flash drive will deliver speeds up to 22 times faster than previous models. That's read and write speeds of 220 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 94 MB/s, respectively. That compares to USB 2.0 drives with 34 and 30 MB/s read-write speeds, respectively.

Storage options will be both 32GB and 64GB.

Pricing should be about $102 for the 32 GB TransMemory-EX drive $150 for the 64 GB version, according to a report.

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Keylogging threat could lead to more attacks, say researchers

A new threat is looming for browsers and it's not related to JavaScript.

Security researcher Mario Heiderich reported to the maker of Firefox last year that he had found an unusual vulnerability in the browser and two other Mozilla products that run on the Gecko engine, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. Based in the relatively new technology that allows for animated complex vector graphics in the browser, called SVG animation, the vulnerability allowed for a malware writer to detect key strokes even when JavaScript was disabled.

Basically, he found a way to turn innocuous Web pages into keyloggers. Mozilla patched the vulnerability in Firefox 9, Thunderbird 9, and SeaMonkey 2.6. Then, as is standard operating procedure, they announced to the public what the threat was and that it had been fixed. But the real threat may lie in what the threat wasn't: it wasn't based in JavaScript.

"The basic premise of my research currently is scriptless attacks, meaning attack vectors working in a post-XSS world," Heiderich said in an e-mail. He defined a "post-XSS" world as one where the cross-site scripting attack had been more or less minimized by technologies like sandboxed iFrames, Mozilla's e-mail client Thunderbird and Firefox's Content Security Policy, the JavaScript blocking browser add-on NoScript, and Windows 8.

"The desired goal was to do keystroke logging in the browser, doing so without necessitating JavaScript, so even if you turned off JavaScript it would work," said Jeremiah Grossman, Chief Technical Officer at computer security research firm White Hat Security. "All the browser developers are fixing cross-site scripting. What half a dozen researchers are exploring is what you can do attack-wise in a browser without JavaScript. They're discovering that there's still quite a lot you can do in the browser."

This particular SVG keylogging attack was quite nasty, said Chris Eng, vice president of research at Veracode, a computer security research firm. "The way [it] works is that [the bad guy] binds the letter "a" to an action that causes the browser to sliently issue a request for http://evil.com/?a. Pressing "b" would trigger the browser to silently issue a request for http://evil.com/?b. By "silently" I mean that there's no visual cues to the user that anything is happening--if you were monitoring the network you would see the requests. As long as the attacker controls evil.com and can access the web server logs, he can piece together what the victim is typing, one character at a time."

Eng noted that this kind of problem always erupts whenever new standards are rolled out, especially with "extremely detailed and sometimes difficult to understand" attributes. You don't have to go far to find evidence of this, either. Both Mozilla and Google offer hefty bounties for bug-hunters. Eng both cautioned against screaming that the sky was falling and said that this kind of attack was inherently more interesting to researchers.

As unlikely as Eng said it is for an average browser user to fall victim to these atypical but hard to implement attacks, Heiderich warned that it's not anomalous. "The SVG keylogger is just one example of many, and by far not the most impact ridden one," said Heiderich.

Another factor is that the major browser makers, including Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, and Opera, are all fairly responsive to fixing these threat vectors when discovered, said Grossman. But that doesn't mean that there aren't steps for the home user to take.

One way to minimize the risk from this kind of modern threat is to compartmentalize your risk, he said. "The best way [to protect yourself] is behavior, not product. Whether in Firefox, IE, or Chrome, I would use any one of the major browsers for secure browsing, such as banking or Facebook. For promiscuous browsing, such as news surfing, I use a different browser.

Eng concurred and said that there aren't many defenses against attacks that don't rely on JavaScript. "You usually have to just wait for the browser bugs to be fixed. So my options are more limited--either don't use that browser at all, use a completely separate browser for trusted sites versus untrusted ones, [or] stay off the Internet."

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Worm steals more than 45,000 Facebook logins

A nasty bit of malware making the rounds on Facebook has reportedly made off with the usernames and passwords of more than 45,000 users.

Most of those affected by the worm--called Ramnit--are from France and the United Kingdom, according to a bulletin issued by security researchers at Securlet. It is capable of infecting Windows executables, Microsoft Office, and HTML files, according to McAfee.

"We suspect that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to log-in to victims' Facebook accounts and to transmit malicious links to their friends, thereby magnifying the malware's spread even further," Securlet said in its bulletin. "In addition, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fact that users tend to use the same password in various web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, etc.) to gain remote access to corporate networks."

The worm was first discovered in April 2010 stealing sensitive information such as stored FTP credentials and browser cookies. In August 2011, after malware developers borrowed source code from the Zeus botnet, Ramnit "went financial." With that added strength, Ramnit was able to "gain remote access to financial institutions, compromise online banking sessions and penetrate several corporate networks." Approximately 800,000 machines were infected between September 2011 and the end of the year.

The security researcher has notified Facebook and provided the social-networking giant with all the stolen credentials found on Ramnit's server.

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