Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Quebec provincial police conducted raids on Wednesday, breaking up a hacking ring that police say is responsible for an estimated CDN$45 million (US$44.3 million) in damage to computer systems.
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The hackers installed remote-controlled "botnet" software on victims' computers in order to run phishing and spamming operations, said Capt. Frederick Gaudreau, of the Surete du Quebec, in a videotaped press conference posted to the police agency's Web site. "The hackers managed to install botnets on the victims' computers, which permitted them to control at a distance the victims' computers," he said. "These said computers were then used to attack Web sites in order to steal victims' data."

If convicted of computer hacking charges, the accused could face 10 years in prison, he said.

Although the hackers operated from about a dozen towns all over Quebec, their botnet network was international in scope, infecting 39,000 computers in Poland, 28,000 in Brazil, and 26,000 in Mexico-- the top three countries affected by the group. In all, they hacked into more than 100,000 computers in 100 countries.

The accused range in age from 17 years old to 26 years old, but police did not release the names of the accused. Three of them are minors, Gaudreau said.

This is the first time that Canadian authorities have dismantled such a network, he added. The investigation was done in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Source: Yahoo News

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) - Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin called Microsoft Corp.'s takeover bid for Yahoo Inc. an ''unnerving'' maneuver that threatens innovation on the Internet.

Brin reiterated the Internet search leader's position that a merger could violate antitrust laws and harm Internet users.

Brin made the comment after an event at the Mountain View-based company's headquarters for the Google Lunar X Prize, a race to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon.

''The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies,'' Brin told The Associated Press after the event. ''And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving.''

Shortly after Microsoft unveiled its surprise $44.6 billion unsolicited offer for Yahoo earlier this month, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond argued in a company blog posting that a merger between companies that control the Internet's two most heavily trafficked Web portals could lead to abuses. Those could be limiting users' ability to easily access competing products, from e-mail to instant messaging to Web-based services such as those Google offers.

Microsoft has argued that it's committed to protecting innovation on the Internet and that scuttling the deal would allow Google to become even more dominant on the Internet than it already is.

Source: The New York Times

By BRAD STONE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — More than three decades after the last Apollo astronauts roamed the lunar surface, disparate universities, open-source engineers and quixotic aerospace start-ups are planning to start their own robotic missions to the Earth’s barren cousin.

The return to the moon is part of the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition sponsored by Google with $30 million in prizes for the first two teams to land a robotic rover on the moon and send images and other data back home.

At Google’s headquarters here on Thursday, 10 teams from five countries announced their intention to participate in the competition. They include a team led by William L. Whitaker, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and renowned roboticist; an affiliation of four universities and two major aerospace companies in Italy; and one group that is a loose association of engineers coordinating their efforts online.

At the event, the new lunar explorers shared some high-minded goals, like reigniting moon exploration and jump-starting an age of space commerce.

“This is about developing a new generation of technology that is cheaper, can be used more often and will enable a new wave of explorers,” said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.

Addressing the X Prize teams and journalists, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, compared his company’s support of the competition with other companies’ sponsorship of yacht races. “The idea we can help spur the return to the moon and maybe even do it more quickly than some of the national plans is really exciting to me,” Mr. Brin said.

Google will pay $20 million to the first team that lands on the moon, sends a package of data back to Earth, then travels at least 500 meters and sends another data package. The second team to accomplish the goals will win $5 million. Bonuses are offered for feats like visiting a historic landing site and finding and detecting lunar ice, but the prize money starts to shrink if the mission is not accomplished by 2012.

Dr. Whitaker of Carnegie Mellon is leading a team that includes the University of Arizona and Raytheon, the military contractor. He said he planned to use kerosene and oxygen to fuel his rocket, and once it is on the moon, to send a rover to the site of the first moon landing in the Sea of Tranquillity. “Our extravaganza will be at Apollo 11,” he said.

The overall effort could cost tens of millions of dollars, he said, easily exceeding the size of the prize purse.

Fred J. Bourgeois, the head of Frednet, the group of engineers who are collaborating online in the manner of open-source software developers, said that his team was building a toaster-size lunar lander that, once on the moon, would unleash a cellphone-size rover. “We think it’s a lot cheaper to put a cellphone on the moon than an S.U.V.,” Mr. Bourgeois said.

NASA has announced plans to return astronauts to the moon as early as 2020. Though robotic missions are easier to achieve, the X Prize competitors still face formidable challenges, not to mention extravagant costs. Generating the rocket thrust to escape Earth’s gravity is expensive and risky. Once on the moon, robotic rovers may have to survive temperatures that can drop to 250 degrees below zero.

There was some discord at the event. A video produced by the X Prize Foundation, promoting reasons to revisit the moon, described the mining of silicon, which is abundant in the lunar soil. The video claimed that the material could be used in space to construct solar-powered satellites that would transmit cheap and abundant energy to Earth.

In a question-and-answer session, Dr. Harold A. Rosen, an inventor of the geostationary satellite who is heading his own X Prize team, called that claim “one of the most outrageous ideas I’ve ever heard.” He added: “I can think of about a hundred thousand more efficient ways of getting energy on Earth than that.”

The X Prize Foundation is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit group that also managed the Ansari X Prize, a race between teams to send a manned rocket craft into suborbital space.

A team led by the aerospace designer Burt Rutan won that competition in 2004.

Source: The New York Times

By STEVE LOHR

Seeking to satisfy European antitrust officials, Microsoft said on Thursday that it would open up and share many more of its technical secrets with the rest of the software industry and competitors.

Microsoft executives, in a conference call, characterized the announcement as a “strategic shift” in the company’s business practices and its handling of technical information. They also portrayed the moves as only partly a nod to the continuing challenge Microsoft faces from Europe’s antitrust regulators.

The broader goal, they said, is to bring Microsoft’s flagship personal computer products — the Windows operating system and Office productivity programs — further into the Internet era of computing. Increasingly, people want a seamless flow of documents, data and programming code among desktop PCs and the Internet, especially as they make the shift from using software on a PC to using services on the Web.

“These steps are being taken on our own,” said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. The move, he said, was a recognition of Microsoft’s “unique legal situation,” but it was also the company’s effort to adapt to “the opportunities and risks of a more connected, more services-oriented world.”

Microsoft’s first step will be to put on its Web site 30,000 pages of technical documentation detailing how its Windows desktop and Microsoft server programs communicate and share information. Until now, that information was treated as a trade secret and was available only under a special license.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said that by sharing more information, Microsoft would make it easier for others to write Internet programs that tap into personal information on a PC.

That, Mr. Ozzie added, should bring new sets of Web services that, for example, might match a person’s calendar information with a doctor’s schedule. Then smart software could make an appointment. At home, he noted, someone’s digital collection of music, movies and family photos would be more easily shuffled to different devices and screens.

“The Internet opens up a world of potential innovation,” Mr. Ozzie said. “And I think we’ve just scratched the surface.”

Microsoft announced other plans to open up its technology, like allowing developers to add more non-Microsoft document formats to its Office word processing and spreadsheet programs. Microsoft also made commitments to increase its support for industry standards and work with open-source software developers.

European regulators and others have long accused Microsoft of using its dominance in PC operating systems and software to lock out competitors. Last October, after a nine-year confrontation and a ruling against the company by Europe’s second-highest court, Microsoft agreed to share information with rivals on terms it had long resisted. Then, after fresh complaints from Microsoft’s competitors, the European antitrust regulators last month announced that they were opening new investigations of the company.

The new inquiry focuses partly on whether Microsoft has withheld essential information from competitors that want to make products that work smoothly with its Office programs. The Office products were not part of the previous European action against Microsoft.

After the Microsoft announcement on Thursday, the European Commission issued a skeptical statement. The commission said it “would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability,” or allowing software programs from different companies to work smoothly together. But the commission noted that “today’s announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability.”

Asked about the commission’s statement, Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said that the company’s moves were “qualitatively and quantitatively different from anything we’ve done in the past.”

“People will test us not just by our words but by our actions,” Mr. Smith added.

The industry is taking a wait-and-see stance on Microsoft’s plan. Linux, an open-source competitor to Windows, stands to benefit from Microsoft’s more open posture. Regulators and competition are “forcing Microsoft to change the way it does business,” said James Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium.

The change comes as Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo, a huge deal that, if it proceeds, will be closely scrutinized by antitrust officials worldwide. The European regulators typically take a harder line than their American counterparts in challenging takeovers.

“To get the deal approved, Microsoft has to convince the European regulators that it has changed its spots on interoperability, no longer acting like a proprietary monopoly,” said Ken Wasch, president of the Software and Information Industry Association, a trade group that includes Microsoft competitors like I.B.M., Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Red Hat.

Microsoft is also trying to win approval from an international standards body for its new document format, Office Open XML. Microsoft contends its format is “open,” meaning files in the format can be created and read by anyone.

A different format standard for Internet-based computing, the Open Document Format, is supported by I.B.M., Google, Oracle and other Microsoft rivals. They assert that the proposed Microsoft standard is complex and layered with the company’s own features, making it effectively a corporate standard instead of a truly open one.

Last September, Microsoft failed to win enough support for its standard from the International Organization for Standardization. But the standards body will review that decision in proceedings that begin next week.

Source - New York Times

The Apache Geronimo project, an open source alternatives to create runtimes, has announced the release of v2.1. This release represents the latest open source Java Enterprise Edition 5.0 application server from the Apache Geronimo project, and continues the evolution of the Apache Geronimo server by adding new features and capabilities to a certified Java Enterprise Edition 5.0 suitable for everything from a development environment to enterprise-level deployments.

Various changes in this release includes custom server assembly capabilities, a more flexible Administration Console, a command-line processing environment, enhanced clustering support for web applications and a server monitoring plugin.

Apache Geronimo v2.1 has passed the Sun Microsystems’s JEE5 certification test suite. Downloads are provided for both Windows and Unix including Linux, Mac OS X operating systems. Each Geronimo package includes one of two possible Web containers, Tomcat or Jetty. They both are fully supported in Geronimo.

Apache Tomcat is the servlet container that is used in the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. The Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages specifications are developed by Sun under the Java Community Process.

Jetty is an open-source, standards-based, full-featured web server implemented entirely in Java. It is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is therefore free for commercial use and distribution.

Source - JAXmagazine