opensprings.org

Monster’s database of user account information–which includes user IDs, passwords, e-mail addresses, names, phone numbers, and some demographic data–was illegally accessed and information was taken, the company said on Friday.

More information on security tips is available on the Monster security Web page.

The information that was stolen did not include resumes or sensitive information like Social Security numbers and financial data. But someone could use the data that was breached to contact Monster users and use social engineering to trick them out of their information.

Job sites are a likely target during an economic downturn, security firm AppRiver said in a recent report on spam and other Internet security threats.

Monster is urging its users to visit the site and change their password. As a matter of policy, Monster does not send unsolicited e-mail asking users to confirm usernames and passwords or to download anything.

(Credit:
Monster)

User information, including passwords, has been stolen from job site Monster, the company has announced.

FreeRange, based in Portland, Ore., markets a mobile publishing platform that aims to allow media and content publishers the ability to create a branded channel on a mobile device.

Handmark announced Thursday plans to acquire FreeRange Communications, in a move to expand its mobile applications to include a publishing platform.

With the acquisition, Handmark is also looking to add FreeRange’s RSS Web reading capabilities to its mobile offerings.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The companies expect to complete the transaction in the coming weeks, following shareholder approvals.

Sprint, the third-largest wireless operator in the U.S., said it lost about 1.3 million subscribers during the fourth quarter. It now has about 49.3 million subscribers. The majority of the losses came from the highly coveted contract-customers, of which Sprint lost about 1.1 million.

Sprint has already said it will cut about 8,000 jobs. But the CEO has said the company will not lose workers who deal directly with customers since he is determined to improve the company’s customer service.

First, the good news: Sprint narrowed its losses considerably, compared with a year earlier. For the fourth quarter, Sprint lost $1.62 billion, or 57 cents a share. This is certainly better than the $29.45 billion, or a whopping $10.36 a share, it lost during the fourth quarter of 2007. The previous year’s losses were due to some large write-downs the company was forced to take related to its merger with Nextel. This time around, Sprint only had about $1 billion in write-downs.

There was good news and bad news in Sprint Nextel’s fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday. But mostly it was bad.

UPDATE at 5:17 a.m. PST: Comments added from the company’s conference call.

Overall, Hesse said he is pleased with the company’s progress as he and his team work toward improving the company’s financial fundamentals and subscriber losses. He added that the economic downturn hasn’t made his job of turning around Sprint any easier, but said the company is in a good position to weather the storm.

The company’s prepaid brand, Boost Mobile, has also been trying to win over customers who are looking to lower their cell phone bills. It recently started offering a $50 a month flat rate plan.

And with the U.S. recession, there is even more pressure on Sprint to maintain its current customers and grow its base. The company’s strategy right now seems to be to compete on value. Last year, it started offering a $99 Simply Everything plan that includes national calling, unlimited SMS/MMS, data, text, e-mail, and Web surfing. This week, it announced it is adding laptop 3G data service to the plan for an extra $50 a month.

Hesse said during the company’s conference call with analysts and investors that the company’s messages will take time to resonate with customers.

Sprint has steadily been losing customers for the past several quarters as many former customers complain of poor customer service. Dan Hesse, who took over as CEO in 2007, has made big efforts to improve the company’s image. He has even appeared in several of the company’s TV commercials and in marketing materials. But the efforts seem to be making little difference as the company continues to shed subscribers.

Now for the bad news: Sprint is still losing customers. And as a result, its quarterly revenue declined about 14 percent to $8.43 billion.

It should come as little surprise that Sprint’s churn rate, or the rate at which customers ditch its service, was up slightly to 2.16 percent. The previous quarter it had been about 2.15 percent, much higher than its competitors.

“Subscriber losses and revenue declines are still unacceptably high,” he said. “But it takes time for perceptions about our customer care and financial stability to catch up to the reality.”

“In 2009, we expect both both post-paid and total subscriber losses to improve,” he said. “And we will continue to generate free cash flow. I still believe the wireless industry is relatively well positioned in this weak economy.”

Sprint’s continued customer loss comes as bigger rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless add customers. AT&T reported last month that it added 2.1 million subscribers during the fourth quarter, while Verizon Wireless added 1.4 million.

While AT&T and Verizon Wireless appear to be weathering the economic storm rather well, Sprint and T-Mobile USA, are struggling to win new customers and keep old ones from leaving.

I can guarantee that the State of Florida is not running a 30-year-old mainframe. And “won’t take many more technical improvements”? What on earth do they mean by that? That the application is holding a picket sign and threatening to march on the state capitol building, angrily knocking on the doors of legislators?

The press that deals with technology topics on a regular basis has (mostly) gotten hip to the fact that the world doesn’t begin and end with small x86 servers and that “Big Iron,” in its various guises–whether mainframes, RISC/Unix, or scalable x86–still has a big role to play.

It wouldn’t shock me at all to hear that the state of Florida is running old and poorly documented applications written in some language with which few of their developers are familiar. But that is fundamentally an obsolete application issue largely orthogonal to the question of the platform on which it’s running.

I got an early-morning laugh out of this post on Timothy Sipple’s Mainframe blog:

Will the popular press ever get it right about mainframe-hosted applications? I’m still waiting, after seeing this one: “…the computer mainframe handling unemployment claims is 30 years old and won’t take many more technical improvements.”

Good grief, this is lame, Florida. Go appropriate some funds and develop whatever improvements you want already. Want to write new functions in Java (to pick something at random)? Go for it–you already have it (on that not-30-year-old mainframe). Geez!

Outside of tech industry media, however, one often still sees the mainframe term used to conjure up antique computing a la Desk Set.

Comparisons have been made to Zotob, an RPC worm that spread like wildfire in 2005. Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) allows programmers to run code either locally or remotely; a flaw within them is ideal for creating a worm.

“The potential is certainly there,” Greenbaum said, adding that modern day attackers are “looking to create as much revenue for themselves as possible, and part of that equation means avoiding detection. What we’re likely to see is that this will be added to a wide variety of attack tool kits already available.”

Since the patch came out Thursday morning, Symantec has seen increased scanning on ports 139 and 445, ports that exploits of MS08-067 would use.

There are some mitigating factors. Most firewalls, with default settings in place, should not allow an exploit of this penetrate that firewall, he said. However, home networks with File and Printer Sharing could fall victim to a bundled attack using this exploit.

“It’s likely we’re going to see this packaged with some other attack.”
said Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager at Symantec. “A Web-based attack, for example. We’re looking out for are exploits of this being bundled with client-side exploits or Trojans so that the worm can get past corporate firewalls and get behind that firewall into the internal network.”

“It’s possible–but it’s not likely–that we’ll end up seeing a purpose-built worm that only exploits this one vulnerability,” he said.

While Microsoft has labeled Thursday’s emergency patch MS08-067 as “critical” and provided a rareout-of-cycle fix because its exploit could easily be used as worm on a compromised network, one security researcher doesn’t think it will happen that way.

The greatest danger is to systems running Windows XP and Windows 2000; Microsoft has ranked the patch as critical for these systems. On Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or
Windows 7 pre-Beta, if the firewall is disabled, and File and Printer sharing enabled, an anonymous user could use this exploit to connect but would do so only at the lowest possible integrity setting, which would prevent successful exploitation, Greenbaum said. Microsoft has rated the patch only as important for those operating systems.

Unlike with display ads on mobile devices, search ads work the same. “Because the G1 and iPhone has full Internet browsers, you’ll be able to display your standard AdWords ads and landing pages on these devices without having to modify them,” Kenin said.

By using the “iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers” option in AdWords, advertisers also can exclude this class of devices from their ad campaigns, Kenin said.

Google now can show search ads on the iPhone's browser.

The
iPhone and T-Mobile G1 come with pretty much full-fledged Web browsers, and Google now is according them that status by showing search ads on the phones.

(Credit:
Google)

Advertisers bidding for search ads through Google’s AdWords service now can choose to have ad campaigns run exclusively on iPhones and the T-Mobile G1, the first phone with Google’s Android operating system, which also has a robust browser. Alexandra Kenin, product marketing manager for Google’s mobile ads team, announced the move on the company’s Google Mobile Blog Monday.

Shares of Foundry Networks soared more than 17 percent in premarket trading Thursday, after the company announced last evening that its merger with Brocade was still alive but at a lower purchase price.

Foundry shares rose as high as 17.8 percent, to $15.32 a share, in premarket trading, giving its stock a much needed lift after it suffered a blow last week, when the company adjourned its special shareholders meeting to vote on the initial deal.

Under the revised agreement, Brocade reduced its purchase price for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based switching and routing provider to approximately $2.6 billion from its initial agreement of $3 billion. Foundry shareholders are entitled to receive $16.50 a share in cash for every share of the company they own, verses $18.50 a share in cash and 0.0907 shares of Brocade common stock in exchange for each share of Foundry common stock under the prior agreement.

The companies, however, have pushed back the special shareholder meeting to November 7, in order to allow time to finalize the agreement’s documentation. The shareholder meeting is now scheduled to reconvene at 4 p.m. PDT.

At the time, Foundry’s shares plummeted 26 percent, to $12.67 a share, when the company adjourned its meeting on Friday and rescheduled it for Wednesday. The company’s proxy allowed for an adjournment of the meeting if it failed to get enough shareholder votes.

Amid all the speculation involving Jobs’ health this year, Apple may have decided that enough was enough following reports predicting its CEO’s imminent demise, according to Patrick McGurn, special counsel at RiskMetrics Group’s ISS Governance Services.

One way Apple could avoid having to go down that road is by making its succession plan clearer, Lorsch said. Apple hasn’t shared any details, but has hinted that it has a plan in place to deal with Jobs’ eventual decision to leave the company.

Now that Apple has acknowledged Steve Jobs' health issues, it may have to do so repeatedly in the future.

Rumors involving Jobs’ health are an easy weapon for those types of speculators, given his importance to Apple and clear evidence of weight loss this year. Apple has chosen different strategies over the course of the past six months in handling those rumors.

So, now what? Investors seemed satisfied on Monday, sending the company’s shares up more than 4 percent on a day in which the broader market was down. But how long will that keep them satisfied?

Jobs himself then reached out to The New York Times’ Joe Nocera to confirm (off-the-record) a story written by Nocera’s colleague John Markoff that Jobs had undergone a surgical procedure to treat an unspecified issue that was causing weight loss. That prompted some heated discussion of whether a surgical procedure really counts as a common bug, but the speculation largely died down as Jobs made public appearances later in the year in which he didn’t appear any worse off, if not better.

“I think this is a situation where this issue is so public now, there’s going to be a regular need to provide disclosures and updates to the public,” McGurn said. “Fair or not, fairness doesn’t come into play in this instance, it’s what the market demands.”

And clearly, this famously reticent company must now tread carefully. Jobs had more than a “common bug” plaguing him in 2008, and while Apple deftly avoided linking his absence from Macworld with his hormone imbalance in Monday’s open letter, it seems hard to believe his health played no role in that decision.

That is, until Apple announced in mid-December that Jobs would not be giving the Macworld keynote. Apple refused to answer any questions about Jobs’ health at that time, pointing instead to Apple’s decision to end its association with Macworld as the reason for Jobs’ absence.

We’ve written this many times as we’ve covered the issues surrounding Jobs’ health and Apple’s handling of the situation, but it bears repeating: there are no legal guidelines for companies to follow in making decisions about how and what to disclose involving the health matters of their executives.

Apple will no longer be able to say that it has decided Jobs’ health is a private matter by choosing to comment on it in such a fashion Monday. “Having said it once, they’ve created a situation where if they don’t say it again, people are going to think the worst,” said Jay Lorsch, a professor of human relations at Harvard Business School.

The company first told The Wall Street Journal in June on the day of Jobs’ appearance at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference that he was suffering from a “common bug,” but after the speculation increased Apple modified its stance to declare that Jobs’ health “is a private matter.”

We now know, through Monday’s announcement, that Jobs decided “a few weeks ago” that determining why he was continuing to lose weight was his highest priority. Apple has not said that particular decision was linked to the decision to have Phil Schiller deliver the keynote, but it’s not hard to imagine the two decisions were at least somewhat related.

Now that it has cleared the air and addressed the state of Jobs’ health, Apple may be forced to give regular updates, according to corporate governance experts. And, they add, the company will need to be very careful, as it was on Monday, about how it words those statements.

Jobs said he expected to regain much of the weight he lost by late spring: will Apple have to issue an update to that effect to quell speculation that he’s suffering from something worse? Will they have to make another update late in 2009 after predictable rumors grow that Jobs is once again losing weight?

Now may be the time to make that plan known, Lorsch said. This is a tricky decision, because announcing such a plan has the potential to create internal competition for the role or tension among those who were not chosen. Still, if anything happens to Jobs and Apple seems seems ill-prepared, questions will be raised regarding whether the board is doing its job.

By finally deciding to talk about Steve Jobs’ health, Apple may have opened a Pandora’s Box.

The disclosure was clearly painful for Jobs, who wrote in an open letter, “So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.” That might not be so simple.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

The intense interest in anything related to Apple in the tech industry makes it ripe for disinformation, which seems to have cropped up time and time again with the rumors that Jobs was dying. The most likely sources of that kind of information are hedge funds or speculators looking to make a quick buck by short-selling Apple’s stock, or finding ways to drive the stock down as to profit from its fall.

After insisting for months that Jobs’ health was a private matter, Apple changed its tack in the face of widespread speculation regarding its CEO’s weight loss. On Monday, the company issued a statement that Jobs was suffering from a hormone imbalance that was “robbing” proteins from his body. That news cheered Apple investors, who dreaded far worse news regarding Jobs’ health after a report last week that his health was “declining rapidly.”

“It’s sort of unhealthy for the company to go through these repeated news cycles,” McGurn said, believing that Apple likely should have said something earlier in the year when concerns over Jobs’ health first surfaced.

Click here for more Macworld Expo
coverage from CNET News.

Dealing with the issues surrounding Jobs’ health during the last six months has presented quite a minefield for Apple. It has had to walk a fine line between the privacy concerns of its indomitable founder and the damage caused by those trafficking in The Steve Jobs Deathwatch.

But in twice declining to directly address concerns over Jobs’ health–first in June, and then in December–and then going public in such a fashion Monday, Apple has set itself up for ongoing discussions regarding Jobs’ health. In the future, it will be hard pressed to claim Jobs’ right to privacy when new questions arise.

Study finds renewables could provide 40 percent of global electricity by 2050 - BusinessGreen
That sort of increase in renewable energy from wind and solar would only happen with different policies, lots of investment, and a more flexible grid, study authors say.
Easy To Install Solar Panels Are City Friendly and Affordable - TreeHugger
It’s a bit pricey ($400 or $600), but this sort of self-installed, small solar panel for city dwellers could be a hit with eco-minded folks. I’ve already got a foldable solar panel at home that charges gadgets and batteries.
Survey shows huge challenges for ’smart grid,’ efficiency efforts - Greenwire
Cost remains a barrier to getting smart meters into the field, even with government subsidies, according to Oracle survey of utility execs.

Jay Leno’s take on the Mini-E - Luxvelocity
Jay Leno compares his 1909 Baker Electric to the Mini-E which goes 100 to 120 miles on a battery charge.
5 ‘Must Dos’ for the Green Home - The New York Times
Start with the vampire loads and programmable thermostat and work your way up to the gray-water system.
SynapSense gets $7 million to make data centers more energy efficient - VentureBeat
The company uses sensors to gather temperature and energy usage info in data centers.
National Semi CEO shifts from gadgets to megatrends - San Jose Mercury News
Days before 25 percent layoffs at his company, CEO Brian Halla lays out a number of intersections between the chip industry and energy: SolarMagic chips that optimize solar panel production when shaded, the power electronics to extend the Tesla Roadster’s driving range, and energy-harvesting sensors.
IBM, Dassault Systemes Help European Automaker Create Digital Design Infrastructure to Speed Up Delivery of Fuel Efficient Cars - press release
IBM says that standardizing on design software application allows it to share efficiency techniques on different motors–diesels, fuel cells, etc.
IEA’s Report on 1st- to 2nd-Generation Biofuel Technologies - Renewable Energy World
This is a bit wonky but worth a read if you’d like to find out where first- and second-generation biofuels are. In short, cellulosic ethanol technology is still not quite cooked.

A sampling of
green-tech news with quick commentary.

Wouldn't it be better just to have speakers in your earflaps?

So some extremely ingenious Koreans have designed a vest-like contraption, called the Sound Walk, that allows you to enjoy speakers built into your shoulder pads.

(Credit: CC James Cridland)

Somehow, I may be even more reluctant than currently to give some of these bozos right of way.

I am told by those who cycle, jog and rob banks that if you’re wearing an
iPod with earphones, it’s quite hard to be aware of imminent dangers. Like buses and
cars and policemen.

It looks a little like a harness from a children’s army brigade, but you simply slip your iPod,
Zune or other player into a pocket at the front which is wired up to the speakers in your shoulder pads.

I know you’re already wondering how much this vest retails for. Well, in the UK it will be 39 pounds, which at current exchange rate (extremely fluid) is around $55.

Now, if they’re blaring a little M83, Fleet Foxes or, ahem, Duran Duran, then I will, naturally, lay down my cape over any puddle in their path.

A spokesman for the company launching this invention in the UK and Europe told the Telegraph: “Even though the speakers are loud enough for the user, people standing just beside even wont hear much because of where the speakers are placed, below the ear, on the shoulder.”

What I’m already wondering is whether the outside world will soon be assaulted by thousands of extremely noisy runners, bikers, cyclists or even, bless them, hikers, who will be happily polluting the atmosphere with Milli Vanilli, “Twilight” soundtracks, “American Idol” downloads or even, bless him, Wagner.