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Microsoft had indicated even before the second ad debuted last week that a shift was coming.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

An image from the first Seinfeld-Gates commercial.

“That was always the plan,” a Microsoft spokesperson said late Wednesday. That followed a report on Valleywag that Seinfeld and Gates were getting the boot.

In any case, Wednesday’s coverage is more bad news for Microsoft, which is banking on this $300 million ad push to help restore Microsoft’s image after years of bad press for
Windows Vista and relentless attacks from rival Apple.

Reaction to the ads has been largely negative since the first one debuted two weeks ago.

Update: Later on Wednesday, a Microsoft spokesman added this official statement: “We will be executing the second phase of our advertising campaign tomorrow, as planned from the start.”

The next ad in Microsoft’s massive Windows campaign won’t feature Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, but the move is part of a planned shift, Microsoft insisted on Wednesday.

“An increasing amount of mobile malware has been reported over the past several years, which raises concerns for the future, particularly when coupled with the recent trend towards establishing a more open system environment for cellular handheld devices,” the draft says. It also cites a study that estimated that 85,619 cell phones and 21,460 PDAs were left behind in one Chicago taxi firm’s vehicles during a six-month period.

The document cites the range of technology now available for handheld devices, including Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, reduced-sized removable-media card slots, and wireless interfaces. The ubiquitous gadgets that most people are literally attached to the hip to are vulnerable to theft, spam, and eavesdropping, among other problems listed in the guidelines.

The draft includes guidelines for both organizations and individuals using cell phones and PDAs. It suggests organizations deploying cell phones address security issues in advance, disable unnecessary services and providing central management and oversight of the devices. Individual users are encouraged to take steps such as using pin numbers or passwords and installing malware prevention software.

The increasing capabilities of handheld devices create risks that regular consumers–not just corporate customers or government employees–should be watching out for. Prepared for federal agencies but available for anyone to use, the draft guidelines from NIST are open for public comment through Friday.

Mobile devices today are far more capable, and capacious, than the analog bricks of decades past. That also creates new security risks, which the feds are asking the public to address in comments due Friday.

“Mobile devices are expected to continue to become more powerful and communicate at higher speeds, eventually giving people the power and functionality of a full desktop,” the National Institute of Standards and Technology says in its draft of Guidelines on Cell Phone and PDA Security. “Besides increasing productivity, such improvements are rapidly turning cell phones into extensive data reservoirs capable of holding a broad range of personal and organizational information.”

Comments on the draft document can be submitted via email to 800-124comments@nist.gov with “Comments SP 800-124″ in the subject line.

Many people are worried about hackers stealing their data when they buy things or bank online, but it’s turning out that even an innocent trip to a restaurant or supermarket can be risky.

The men gained unauthorized access to the cash register terminals and installed packet sniffer software that captured credit and debit card data as it moved from the terminal to the company’s corporate headquarters and the data processor’s computer system. The hackers then sold the stolen data to others who used it to make purchases and resold it, officials said.

The victims were losing an average of $1,000 from their bank accounts, the MSNBC report said.

Visitors to the site were redirected to the site of a state-owned Sunday newspaper, and headlines were replaced by the word “Gukurahundi,” which refers to a campaign of atrocities Zimbabwe’s government has been accused of committing after independence, the report said.

In other hacker-related news, attackers shut down the Web site of Zimbabwe’s state-owned Herald newspaper for three days, Reuters reported.

One location alone captured data for about 5,000 cards, leading to losses of at least $600,000 to financial institutions, the DOJ said.

Updated 4:30 p.m. PST with news of the hacker attack on the state-owned Zimbabwe newspaper

Three men from the Ukraine, Estonia, and Miami, were indicted on charges related to stealing credit card data by hacking into cash register terminals at nearly a dozen Dave & Buster’s chain of restaurants around the country, according to the Department of Justice.

Earlier this month, California police said a credit and debit card reader in a checkout aisle at a Lunardi’s supermarket in Los Gatos, Calif., was switched and more than 100 customers had their data stolen as a result.

Panasonic’s Tru2way-enabled VIERA HDTV is in the certification process at CableLabs. Panasonic expects to deliver Tru2way-enabled VIERA HDTVs to the market in time for the holiday season.

Of course, the company’s expectation does not equal a guarantee that we’ll see the product on store shelves before the end of the year. But it does represent an affirmation that Panasonic is actively working to address the alleged issues that cropped up during the CableLabs certification process. That’s certainly a contrast from the “no comment” we received Thursday.

Despite reports of setbacks, Panasonic is still aiming to have its Tru2way TVs on store shelves by the holidays.

Previous Tru2way coverage:
The rocky road to Tru2way
Can Tru2way succeed where CableCard failed?
Sony commits to Tru2way

(Credit:
Panasonic)

Panasonic has confirmed to CNET that it still intends to deliver Tru2way TVs to the market before the end of 2008. A company representative e-mailed us with the following statement:

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

•This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

•It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Here is the text of the letter Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent to Yahoo chief Jerry Yang after talks broke down on Saturday.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

•In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

•Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

•First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

Dear Jerry:

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Sincerely yours,

Gentry said there are no leads in the case, but the police will be inspecting video surveillance tapes from adjacent stores. Hervey said the party is taking extra precautions to prevent any further break-ins.

He said that over the weekend a string of thefts of political signs–both Republican and Democratic–were reported in the area as well.

First Gov. Sarah Palin’s e-mail account was hacked, and now a laptop with strategic information to help the Republican ticket in a critical swing state has been stolen.

“There are several businesses in that little mall, and there are other businesses that have more valuable things in them,” Gentry said. “This is a predominantly Democratic county, and there are a lot of hot-heads on both sides, as usual.”

A Dell laptop belonging to the Republican party’s regional coordinator in Independence, Mo., was stolen on the night of September 30 out of the party’s “Kansas City Victory Office.” The Independence-based office supports Republican party operations at all levels, from the presidential ticket down to candidates for regional state representative seats.

The break-in, incidentally, took place the night before Sen. John McCain spoke in Independence and Michelle Obama made an appearance in Kansas City, Mo. With 11 electoral votes up for grabs, Missouri is a critical swing state in the presidential race.

Tom Gentry, the public information officer for the Independence police department, said a digital recorder and a satchel were also reported missing. Police arrived at the campaign office, which is located in a strip mall, just before 6 a.m. on October 1. A window had been broken, and a desk drawer had been ransacked, Gentry said. However, 22 Eee PCs were left behind in the office.

“As of today across the state there’s a noticeable security presence upgrade at all of our offices,” she said.

Both Hervey and Gentry said the incident did not appear to be a random break-in.

The laptop contained “information you’d expect the coordinator for a GOP national campaign to have,” such as information on areas to target for support, said Tina Hervey, communications director for the Missouri Republican party. Hervey could not say whether the information on the computer, issued by the Missouri Republican party, was encrypted or not.

“One of the tiny, white computers was actually removed from the table where it was sitting and placed on the desk where the Dell was,” Hervey said. “Somebody clearly had some time and was able to move things around.”

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