Microsoft to IE6: Dead browser walking!

Known in the past for taking a soft touch when it comes to forcing users to update their browsers, Microsoft's pulling off the kid gloves and going for a bullet to the head.

Come January, the company will start forcing people to update from older versions of Internet Explorer. If you have Automatic Updates enabled in Windows Update, Microsoft says that the update will occur in a seamless, Chrome-like experience.

The company already provides security updates to Internet Explorer through Windows Update, but this means that legacy browser users will see a full-point jump. Windows XP users on Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 will be upgraded to version 8, and Windows Vista users will be pushed up the stairs to Internet Explorer 9. IE9 doesn't work on Windows XP.

 "As we've talked to our customers about our approach [to upgrading,] everyone benefits from an up-to-date browser," said Ryan Gavin, Senior Director of Internet Explorer for Microsoft. "But from a security perspective alone this is important. Ninety percent of infections that were attributable to a security vendor had a patch out for more than a year," he added.

Security problems are a tough stair to climb for legacy browsers. The latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is just the latest in a long line of papers indicating that socially engineered malware is the biggest kind of threat facing computer users today, and that the malware often goes after security holes in browsers. These findings are based on data collected from more than 600 million computer systems in more than 100 countries. It's neither easy nor cheap to keep a team of dedicated security researchers and coders on a legacy browser.

"The security mitigations for newer versions of IE have proven to deliver consistent security improvements. Starting with IE8 and continuing with IE9, every new version of Microsoft's browsers has delivered a more secure browsing experience. We'll all be happier and more secure when we don't have to depend on users to install the most recent patches," said Andrew Storms, director of Information Technology at nCircle Network Security.

At first, the forced update will be rolled out only to Windows users in Brazil and Australia. Those countries were chosen, Gavin said, because people there use a broad spread of IE6, IE7, and IE8. "We're going for a slow ramp-up," not unlike how Microsoft rolled out Internet Explorer 9. Private individuals and businesses alike have been unanimously supportive, he noted, but added that Windows Update will allow people to roll back the upgrade.

Microsoft is keen to avoid the upgrade brouhaha that Mozilla created for itself earlier this year. "Business, particularly large ones, test patches before they are released to their employees and this process doesn't bypass that," Rob Enderle, a technology analyst with the Enderle Group, said in an e-mail to CNET. "The issue appears to be that most people just don't seem to be aware they need to manually update their browser (Microsoft doesn't market the updates heavily) or simply assumes it is updated automatically. All browsers age badly and need to be regularly updated to remain adequately secure against threats."
For business and individuals that don't want the upgrade, perhaps to maintain in-house custom tools,
Microsoft provides automatic update blocker kits for IE8 and IE9
The change in update policy will affect some aspects of how Internet Explorer has updated in the past, but not all. The update will continue to respect a person's default browser choice and default search engine, and users who have disabled Windows Update won't see an IE version bump. On the one hand, this is very polite of Microsoft, but it's also a tacit acknowledgment that there's little the company can do about people running cracked copies of its operating systems unless Windows Update is running.

Microsoft maintains a site, IE6Countdown.com, to track the worldwide decrease in Internet Explorer 6 use across all operating systems. Right now, less than 1 percent of northern Europe uses IE6, but more than 23.6 percent of China does, and worldwide percentage stands at around 8.3 percent.

Interestingly, Microsoft could tumble and find itself burdened with the same legacy problem in a few years. Not only does Internet Explorer 9 not work on Windows XP, but the company has no plans to make Internet Explorer 10 compatible with Windows Vista. IE10 will launch on Windows 8. So it's entirely possible that in late 2012, you'll have Windows XP users on IE8, Vista and some Windows 7 users on IE9, and the rest of the Windows 7 users and Windows 8 users on IE10. While that's not directly analogous to the fiery, flaming security hellmouth that IE6 and, to a lesser degree, IE7, have become in recent years, it's an eventuality that restricted backwards compatibility makes hard to avoid.

Enderle said that this is a problem endemic to companies that build the browser as part of the operating system. "IE is one of the features of the OS so when Microsoft sunsets the OS, they sunset support for all of the features. XP has reached end of life. The other guys don't have to support the entire OS, and it gives them an advantage to go where Microsoft won't. On the other hand, Microsoft can better tune their bowser for the new platform so that offsets. In a way it helps keep alternative browsers viable. Apple pretty much behaves the same way with Safari."

Still, Gavin makes a solid point about updates that's hard to argue with. "If you're running a 10-year-old browser, it's not good for the web and it's not good for the consumer. Getting more and more users onto a modern HTML5 browser is good for everyone."

Read more »

FAA gives nod to iPads in cockpits for American Airlines

Starting this Friday, American Airlines is expected to start using iPads in all phases of flight operation, replacing hefty paper charts and manuals.

That's according to a report today from CNET sister site ZDNet, which says that American has received U.S. Federal Aviation Administration approval to use Apple's tablets at any time during a flight.

According to a ZDNet source:

 On Friday, American Airlines is the first airline in the world to be fully FAA approved to use iPads during all phases of flight. Pilots will use iPads as electronic chart and digital flight manual readers. The airline will begin iPad operations on B-777 aircraft, and then implement across all other fleets. By using electronic charts and manuals, the safety and efficiency on the flight deck is significantly enhanced. Both the iPad I and the iPad II have been approved for use. Other airlines such as United, Alaska, and UPS are also reviewing this potential, but none have been approved to conduct flight operations in all phases of flight except American. This FAA approval cumulates the results from a 6-month test period whereby American flew thousands of hours with iPads to test and evaluate the product.

The certification by the FAA comes several months after American completed tests of pilots using iPads in the cockpit. "American pilots started testing iPads as electronic flight [manuals] last year," reported the Seattle PI in June, "replacing paper manuals. Now, they have [FAA] approval to test iPads with electronic charts."

American Airlines spokesperson Andrea Huguely confirmed the FAA's move and said that the federal agency had certified the airline as the first to be able to use iPads from "gate to gate."

That means, Huguely said, that American pilots will be able to use their iPads from before leaving the gate all the way through the flight and until reaching the destination gate. Crucially, that means they can use the tablets--though without connecting to the Internet--during takeoff and landing.

Huguely also said the iPads will allow American's pilots to discard the huge paper manuals they have traditionally had to carry around with them--and update every 14 days. Now, they'll be able to push a single button on the iPad and update automatically.

Even better, Huguely said that once the iPad program is rolled out across American's entire fleet--it is currently being used on Boeing 777s and will soon be on Boeing 737s--it could save the airline as much as 500,000 gallons of fuel a year, simply from the lack of the paper manuals, which she said can weigh up to 40 pounds.

In May, Alaska Airlines announced that it was starting to roll out the use of iPads as a way of replacing its pilots' paper manuals, a process it said at the time could help pilots avoid having to carry 25 pounds of paper when they fly.

"This follows a successful trial by 100 line and instructor pilots and Air Line Pilots Association representatives who evaluated the feasibility of using iPads as electronic flight bags this past winter and spring," Alaska wrote in a release.

Read more »

Rocket system could lower cost of access to space

SEATTLE--Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan have teamed up on a new winged rocket that would be carried aloft by a gargantuan twin-fuselage mothership and then dropped from 30,000 feet for the climb to orbit, they announced today.

The new rocket will be funded by Allen through a new company known as Stratolaunch Systems and built by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, of Hawthorne, Calif.

The 1.2-million-pound six-engine carrier aircraft, with a wingspan of 385 feet, will be built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., a company founded by Rutan and now owned by Northrop Grumman. Dynetics of Huntsville, Ala., will provide program management and engineering support, along with the hardware used to attach the rocket to the carrier plane.

Allen, who funded Rutan's development of a small piloted spaceplane built by Scaled that won a $10 million prize in 2004 for becoming the first private-sector manned craft to reach space, said his goal is to lower the cost of launching payloads -- and eventually people -- into low-Earth orbit.

"Our national aspirations for space exploration have been receding," he said during a news conference here. "This year saw the end of NASA's space shuttle program. Constellation, which would have taken us back to the moon, has been mothballed as well. For the first time since John Glenn, America cannot fly its own astronauts into space.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, left, and aircraft designer Burt Rutan describe the new Stratolaunch commercial rocket company to reporters in Seattle.
(Credit: William Harwood/CBS News)

"With government-funded spaceflight diminishing, there's a much expanded opportunity for privately funded efforts...Today, we stand at the dawn of a radical change in the space launch industry. Stratolaunch will build an air-launch system to give us orbital access to space with greater safety, flexibility, and cost effectiveness, both for cargo and for manned missions."
While saying the company faces technical challenges, "by the end of this decade, Stratolaunch will be putting spacecraft into orbit," Allen said. "It will keep America at the forefront of space exploration and give tomorrow's children something to search for in the night sky and dream about."

The 120-foot-long two-stage SpaceX rocket will weigh about 490,000 pounds at launch and will be capable of boosting about 13,500 pounds to low-Earth orbit, roughly the same throw weight as a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket.

In the near term, the rocket can be used to launch medium-class commercial, NASA, and military satellites into orbit. Eventually, company officials envision using the new system to launch manned capsules into orbit.
"Certainly at some point ... there is the capability of this vehicle to loft a medium-size crew, say six people," said Mike Griffin, former NASA administrator and a member of the Stratolaunch board. "This vehicle has the inherent capability to do that. Whether they would visit the space station or visit another yet-to-be-developed facility or just go into space for a few days and come back, I think those scenarios are not laid out yet."

By launching the rocket in mid air, Stratolaunch will be able to avoid weather delays and ground-processing issues, sending satellites to virtually any desired orbit.

But getting a half-million-pound rocket to an altitude of 30,000 feet will require a truly gargantuan carrier aircraft, a twin-fuselage plane that will be one of the largest flying machines ever built.
The Russian Antonov AN-225 cargo plane, the largest operational aircraft in the world, has a wingspan of 290 feet and weighs 1.3 million pounds. Howard Hughes' flying boat, the "Spruce Goose," had a wingspan of 320 feet.
The carrier aircraft envisioned by Scaled Composites will have an even larger wingspan and incorporate systems taken from two 747 jumbo jets. It is similar in appearance to a vastly scaled-up version of the carrier plane designed by Rutan to launch SpaceShipOne as part of the Ansari X-Prize competition.
After winning the X-Prize, Rutan designed a larger version of SpaceShipOne for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which hopes to begin carrying paying customers on relatively short up-and-down sub-orbital flights next year.

Some 500 well-heeled would-be astronauts have reserved seats with Virgin, at $200,000 a ticket, looking forward to the adrenalin rush of launch, five to eight minutes of weightlessness and an out-of-this-world view before re-entry and landing at a New Mexico spaceport.

"Paul and I pioneered private space travel with SpaceShipOne, which led to Virgin Galactic's commercial suborbital SpaceShipTwo program," Rutan said in a statement. "Now, we will have the opportunity to extend that capability to orbit and beyond...We are well aware of the challenges ahead, but we have put together an incredible research team that will draw inspiration from Paul's vision."

Rutan will serve as a member of the Stratolaunch board of directors, acting in an advisory capacity. While the carrier aircraft is based on design studies he carried out over the past two decades, he does not plan to take an active role in the new aircraft's construction.

"I did concept work myself and preliminary design work myself for the last 23 years or so," he told reporters today. "However, I'm not the responsible designer. I've actually retired. I don't even show up at work anymore!"

Asked to provide specifics about the aircraft's capabilities, Rutan declined, saying "I don't think it's wise for this program...to give the competition our technical numbers."

"It doesn't make sense to me that we would share our technical information with folk who might be competitors of ours until we have to share it," he said. "We have to share it after it's flying, but we don't have to now."

Allen believes the Stratolaunch rocket is a potential game changer, to use NASA Administrator Charles Bolden's pet phrase for the Obama administration's commercial space policy, offering an alternative route to orbit for private companies, universities, and, eventually, space tourists.

NASA is partially funding a competition to develop new private-sector launch systems to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Critics, including Griffin, have questioned whether NASA's commercial space initiative can succeed in the absence of a clearly defined business plan. NASA only plans two or three flights a year to the space station and it's not clear how companies can profit with such a low flight rate in the absence of any other destinations.

One of the competitors -- Boeing -- hopes to eventually use the CST-100 spacecraft it is developing for NASA missions to carry researchers, tourists, and others to a commercial space station planned by Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas. Having a second destination is viewed as critical to the program's long-term success, allowing a higher flight rate.

But the Stratolaunch venture is fundamentally different, Griffin said in an interview, in large part because Allen brings the long-term financial commitment necessary to weather failures.

"Why do I think this venture can be a success? I think the crucial factors for any putative commercial space venture are the necessary financial wherewithal to sustain what will inevitably be a lengthy development process relative to other typical market items, and the vision and the resolve to fly through the developmental failures, which inevitably occur," Griffin said.

"I think Paul Allen has demonstrated already...both of those qualities. I think that makes the crucial difference. In the end, the business case will be dominated by the long-run market and I think it remains for all of us to see what the market for space transportation could be when the operations are more cost-effective."

The carrier aircraft will be built by Scaled Composites in a new hangar at the Mojave Spaceport that is already under construction. The aircraft will need a 12,000-foot-long runway and it will have the ability to fly some 1,300 miles to reach an appropriate launch site.

"Scaled is all about achieving milestones and pursuing breakthroughs, and this project offers both -- building the largest airplane in the world, and achieving the manufacturing breakthroughs that will enable Scaled to accomplish it," Doug Shane, president of Scaled Composites, said in a news release.

"We are thrilled to be a part of this development program. We anticipate significant hiring of engineering, manufacturing, and support staff in the near and medium term."

As for the rocket, SpaceX already holds contracts valued at some $1.6 billion to deliver cargo to the space station using the company's Falcon 9 booster and Dragon capsules. A second test flight is planned for February 7, with the start of routine cargo deliveries expected later next year.

SpaceX also is competing to build a manned spacecraft as part of a NASA competition to develop private-sector access to space in the wake of the space shuttle's retirement.

That effort is independent of the Stratolaunch initiative. The new rocket is a less-powerful version of the Falcon 9 used for NASA missions and does not compete for the same family of payloads.

Read more »

Why Microsoft suddenly wants its software on the iPad

Microsoft has launched software for Apple's iPad at a blistering pace of late, and there's some consternation about whether these moves are wise.

First, Microsoft realizes that it doesn't dominate computing anymore--especially the mobile world. That reality is running into another key fact: Microsoft applications are everywhere.
In other words, Microsoft's plans to launch iPad versions of OneNote, Lync and SkyDrive, which isn't optimized for Apple's tablet, is just smart business. Simply put, the killer app on a single platform days are over.

Mary Jo Foley noted:

My contacts seem somewhat divided as to the wisdom of Microsoft's decision to deliver many of its key software and services for non-Windows platforms -- and especially for Apple's platforms. Microsoft is a software vendor, and has shown increasing interest in porting its wares to many of the leading platforms as a way to make money and appease customers who aren't Microsoft-only shops/households. Some maintain that Microsoft should keep its crown jewels as Windows/Windows Phone-only products to keep users from having yet another reason to defect.

I am in the former camp. I believe the days of killer apps running on a single platform are over, though the Windows team seems intent on trying to revise this business model with Windows 8.

Going forward, Microsoft should go crazy on Android, too. It should be on every platform that has a lot of users. There are no guarantees that Windows 8 tablets will be a hit. Should Microsoft flop at tablets it'll at least have a presence on the major platforms. If the single platform integration dance works on tablets for Microsoft, that's just swell. If that approach fails, at least it'll have its bases covered.

This item first appeared on ZDNet's Between the Lines blog under the headline "Microsoft's iPad software barrage: Reality meets business savvy."

Read more »

NTSB calls for stricter bans on cell phone use while driving

The National Transportation Safety Board is recommending that states ban the use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices while driving.

The five-member board unanimously agreed to the recommendation today, according to a press release. Specifically, the agency is recommending that the ban apply to both hands-free and handheld phones. Several states have already passed laws restricting text messaging while driving and many require drivers use hands-free devices while talking on the phone. The NTSB's recommendations go far beyond these current restrictions.

The NTSB doesn't have the authority to actually impose restrictions, but its recommendations often influence federal regulators as well as congressional and state lawmakers.

The Associated Press reported that the board's recommendations were prompted in part by a deadly highway accident in Missouri last year in which two people were killed and 35 people were injured. The 19-year-old driver who caused the accident had sent or received 11 text messages in the 11 minutes immediately before the crash, the AP reported. He collided into the back of a tractor trailer while traveling at 55 mph, the news report indicates.

The AP also reported that the NTSB has investigated several other incidents in the past few years involving distracted drivers, train conductors, and airline pilots. There was a commuter rail accident that killed 25 people in California in which the train engineer was texting. In Philadelphia there was an accident involving a tugboat pilot who was talking on his cell phone and using a laptop. And the agency also investigated a Northwest Airlines flight that flew more than 100 miles past its destination because both pilots were working on their laptops, according to the AP.

While there has been an outcry from some lawmakers and agencies to impose stricter bans on the use of cell phones while driving, there are now new reports that indicate previous studies that showed links between cell phone use and accidents may have been overstated.

Reuters recently reported that a study from Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit has found that two previous studies that have shown a high correlation between cell phone use while driving and car accidents might have overestimated the risk.

Still, other researchers say even if some studies have overstated the potential risk, distracted driving remains an important issue for policy makers. A study published last year from University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth examined data from a government database that tracks deaths on U.S. public roads. According to that study, traffic accident deaths believed to have been caused by distracted driving rose 28 percent between 2005 and 2008, according to Reuters.

Fernando Wilson, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, who published that study told Reuters that several other studies suggest that cell phone use, especially text messaging, is hazardous.

"Most of the conventional thinking is that we need to do something to reduce" distracted driving, he told Reuters. "It's possible that the (earlier) study findings were overstated. But it's difficult to know by how much."

That said, overall traffic related deaths appear to be declining. Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation released a report that shows highway fatalities fell again in 2010, as they have done steadily since the 1980s. In fact, the report indicated that highway fatalities in 2010 fell to the lowest level since 1949, even as Americans drove more and even as they use more technology.
Despite the hype surrounding distracted driving, the report also indicates that a greater number of people die from alcohol related automobile accidents each year than from distracted driving. According to the data, only nine percent of highway fatalities in the U.S. in 2010 were caused by distracted driving, compared to 31 percent of deaths linked to alcohol.

Read more »

CERN physicists find hint of Higgs boson

Researchers at the CERN particle accelerator have found "intriguing hints" of the Higgs boson, a moment of major progress in years of previously unfruitful searching for the elusive subatomic particle.

The search for the Higgs boson is the top priority of CERN's massive and expensive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Its Atlas experiment showed a statistically suspicious increase in activity that indicates the Higgs could be pinned down with a mass of 126 giga-electron-volts, and showing some important agreement, its independent CMS experiment found a possible result nearby at 124GeV.

"We observe an excess of events around mass of about 126 GeV," CERN physicist and Atlas leader Fabiola Gianotti said in slides presented today at a CERN seminar to physicists who applauded her results. That equates to about 212 quintillionths of a gram; by comparison, a proton is more than 100 times lighter with a mass of 0.938GeV.

Her small sentence carries big import for physics. That's because the Higgs boson, thought by some to endow other particles with mass, is a key missing ingredient in physicists' understanding of what makes the universe tick. It's predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, but no one has been able to confirm its existence or nature.

"The Higgs could be the first link in a chain of discovery. This is what we hope," said Guido Tonelli of the Universita degli Studi di Pisa and leader of the CMS project, in a news conference after the seminar. Another year of continued data gathering should be enough to provide a conclusive answer on this particular matter, the physicists said.

Gianotti called the findings "beautiful results" at the seminar, but stopped well short of declaring victory because there's not enough data for statistical certainty. "It's too early to draw definite conclusions...We believe we have built a solid foundation on the exciting months to come."

Finding the Higgs boson is essentially a matter of checking for a variety of events--or their absence. The LHC's detectors have been gradually ruling out ranges of possible mass for the Higgs boson.
"The window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller," and today we saw "intriguing hints" of its possible nature, said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "We have not found it yet. We have not excluded it yet. Stay tuned for next year."

1-2 of
Scroll Left
Scroll Right
The Higgs boson isn't observed directly, but rather is detected by extremely rare side effects of collisions between protons smashing into each other. To increase the likelihood of collisions, the LHC operators have been gradually increasing the beam intensity.

Gianotti also said the CMS results predict with a 95 percent confidence level that the Higgs boson has a mass between 115.5GeV and 131GeV.

Another experiment, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), also helped narrow down the possible mass of the Higgs boson. Its results showed with a 95 percent confidence level that the particle can't be between 127GeV and 600GeV, Tonelli said.

The CMS experiment also found "a modest excess of events" that could be evidence of the Higgs boson between 115GeV and 127GeV, Tonelli said in a presentation at the seminar. "The excess is most compatible with a Standard Model Higgs hypothesis in the vicinity of 124GeV and below, but the statistical significance is not large enough to say anything conclusive."

One of the big mysteries that physicists hope to plumb with the Higgs is an idea called supersymmetry. The Standard Model predicts a wide range of particles, of which the Higgs is the last to be pinned down. But with supersymmetry, each of the conventional elementary particles in the standard model, including the Higgs, has a companion. If there's only one Higgs boson, it's part of the Standard Model. But with supersymmetry, there have to be at least five Higgs bosons. Supersymmetry would double the number of particles to resolve physics problems in a similar way that the prediction--and later discovery--of antimatter did decades ago.

If the Higgs boson weighs about 125GeV, it would match many physicists' general expectations--but also carry some importance. That's because it's at the light end of the range of possibilities, and physicists believe a particle that light needs another particle from the sypersymmetry collection to anchor it.

"Our expectation is that you have something heavy. It could be something related to SUSY," Tonelli said, referring to the nickname for supersymmetry theory. "Or maybe not," he added.

When it comes to mass, physicists liken the Higgs boson to groupies at a party. Heavy particles interact strongly with Higgs bosons, equivalent to a lot of people swarming a celebrity and making it harder for the famous person to start moving and, once moving, harder to stop. Particles with little mass are those that interact weakly with Higgs bosons, making them more fleet-footed.

"A heavier particle is nothing more that one than has more interactions with the Higgs particle as it passes through the vacuum," said Lawrence Sulak, chairman of Boston University's physics department.
If the Higgs boson is precisely measured in the next year, the LHC can be used to look further down the same pathway, Tonelli added, possibly finding supersymmetric particles--"if they are in the energy range of the LHC."
Such particles would likely be vastly heavier--many thousands, perhaps millions, of GeVs, he said.
That would be quite a coup: supersymmetric particles are a possible explanation for dark matter, material that in the universe outweighs the ordinary matter of which we're made but that generally interacts with ordinary matter only through gravitational pull.


To find harder particles, CERN plans an LHC upgrade that will let protons be smashed together at twice today's energy level. "Hopefully we'll explore a large region of masses," Tonelli said. And then, the supersymmetry work can begin in earnest. "A lot of parameters are still open, a lot of SUSY models are still open and are waiting to be excluded or confirmed," he said.

The LHC is a huge, phenomenally complex instrument built in a circular subterranean tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference. It can accelerate protons fast enough that, when they collide, they reproduce energy levels found only in the earliest moments of the universe after the Big Bang.

Read more »

New version of SOPA copyright bill, old complaints

A new version of the Stop Online Piracy Act appears to be no more popular than the last one was.

In an effort to head off mounting criticism before a vote on the legislation this Thursday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today announced a series of tweaks (PDF) to SOPA, which is backed by Hollywood and major record labels but opposed by Internet firms and the Consumer Electronics Association.

But Smith, who heads the House Judiciary committee, stopped short of altering the core of SOPA--meaning that allegedly piratical Web sites could still be made to vanish from the Internet. Deep packet inspection could still be required. (See CNET's FAQ on SOPA.)

"There are still significant problems with the approach," said Public Knowledge attorney Sherwin Siy. The revised version of SOPA "continues to encourage DNS blocking and filtering, which should be concerning for internet security experts and human rights activists alike," he said. DNS stands for the Domain Name System.

Ryan Radia, associate director of technology studies at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, says SOPA v2.0 is "better than the old one, and more carefully written in several places." But, Radia says, "it's still a very bad bill."

The changes streamline and narrow other portions of the bill, especially those that allow copyright and trademark holders to file their own private lawsuits against suspected pirates. Now their target must, in some but not all cases, actually be "offering goods or services in violation" of U.S. intellectual property laws, a change from the previous wording that was more vague. The target also must be offshore.

SOPA v2.0 also takes more careful aim at Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and other search providers. Previously the definition included a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information," which could have included thousands, or perhaps millions, of other Web sites with search boxes as well.

"Our staff and Chairman Smith have been working closely with stakeholders and other members over the past few weeks to strengthen the bill and address legitimate concerns from groups who are interested in working with Congress to combat foreign rogue websites," an aide to Smith wrote in an e-mail message circulated obtained by CNET. "The below changes reflect many of those conversations and result in a bill with even broader industry and bipartisan support."

The Recording Industry Association of America, a staunch SOPA supporter, applauded the changes in a press release from Chairman Cary Sherman:

    This legislation is now more focused on the bad actors and provides additional safeguards for legitimate operators. These changes are reflective of the cooperative efforts led by the chairman's office and exercised by the creative communities and responsible intermediaries who all agree that overseas rogue sites cause serious damage to American innovation and jobs, and who recognize that the status quo is simply not working. For those who continue to blindly criticize or suggest ineffective alternatives, it's becoming ever more apparent that they simply want to defend the status quo because it helps their bottom line.

Other changes that have been made to SOPA v2.0:

• An ad network or payment processor forced to cut off service previously was guaranteed the ability to "determine the means to communicate such action" to its customers. That language has disappeared.

• A committee of federal agencies, which includes the Department of Homeland Security, "shall conduct a study" on how SOPA affects "the deployment, security, and reliability of the domain name system and associated Internet processes."

• The definition of an "Internet site" that could be the subject of legal action for allegedly infringing activities has been altered. The previous wording said a "portion thereof" could be taken offline; now it explicitly refers to "a specifically identified portion of such site," which could mean a URL or subdomain, such as news.cnet.com.

• What Smith's aides are calling a "savings clause." It's in response to criticism from technologists warning of SOPA's impact on DNS, and says that blocking orders should not "impair the security or integrity of the domain name system or of the system or network operated by" the company required to comply.

• Banks and credit unions appear to be exempted from being targeted as a "payment network provider."

Meanwhile, concern over the concept of taking suspected pirate domains offline is growing. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed an article page blackout as a way to put "maximum pressure on the U.S. government" in response to SOPA. This follows a similar protest in October by Wikipedia's Italian site.

Alex Macgillivray, Twitter's general counsel, posted an analysis on his personal Web site about how SOPA could affect average Internet users. If someone uses Web sites to store photos, documents, or blog posts on a Web site that's accused under SOPA of copyright infringement, those files "can be obliterated from his view without him having any remedy," Macgillivray writes.

During a speech in Washington, D.C. today, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt slammed SOPA, according to a report at TheHill.com. "They should not criminalize the intermediaries," Schmidt reportedly said. "They should go after the people that are violating the law."

The Motion Picture Association of America responded in a statement from Michael O'Leary, senior executive vice president for Global Policy and External Affairs, saying: "There is broad recognition that all companies in the Internet ecosystem have a serious responsibility to target criminal activity. This type of rhetoric only serves as a distraction and I hope it is not a delaying tactic."

SOPA represents the latest effort from the MPAA, the RIAA, and their allies to counter what their members view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. The measure would allow the Justice Department to seek a court order to be served on search engines, Internet providers, and other companies.

Two opponents of SOPA, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), have proposed an alternative called the OPEN Act, which targets only Internet ad networks and "financial transaction providers" such as credit card companies. It's not without its own critics: Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, has posted a lengthy critique.

Smith, the House Judiciary chairman, is planning a committee vote on SOPA this Thursday. The next step would be for the bill to go to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives for a full vote, which would happen next year at the earliest.

Read more »