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How’s this for a helluva endorsement for Windows security over OS X? Today, Microsoft acknowledged falling prey to “similar security intrusion” as Apple and Facebook. They got nabbed by a Java exploit affecting Apple’s OS.

“We found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit that, were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations”, says Microsoft security chief Matt Thomlinson.

Apple made similar admission on February 19 and Facebook a week ago. Apple issued an OS X fix removing Java, while Facebook disabled the tech. Microsoft disclosed no such action for its users. Party line: No data was taken.

Facebook offers the most details on what happened: “After analyzing the compromised website where the attack originated, we found it was using a ‘zero-day’ (previously unseen) exploit to bypass the Java sandbox (built-in protections) to install the malware. We immediately reported the exploit to Oracle, and they confirmed our findings and provided a patch on February 1, 2013, that addresses this vulnerability”.

My question: Who among the big companies discloses next? Surely these three aren’t the only ones running Macs and Java.

Microsoft’s full statement:

As reported by Facebook and Apple, Microsoft can confirm that we also recently experienced a similar security intrusion.

Consistent with our security response practices, we chose not to make a statement during the initial information gathering process. During our investigation, we found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing.

This type of cyberattack is no surprise to Microsoft and other companies that must grapple with determined and persistent adversaries (see our prior analysis of emerging threat trends). We continually re-evaluate our security posture and deploy additional people, processes, and technologies as necessary to help prevent future unauthorized access to our networks.

Matt Thomlinson
General Manager
Trustworthy Computing Security

Photo Credit: Jirsak/Shutterstock

What’s the end of February without some scare tactics? Gartner warns that one-quarter of distributed denial of service attacks this year will be against applications. Really? That low? I’m surprised the number isn’t higher. After all, as enterprises shore up the network perimeter, HTTP remains open wide enough to drive a freight train through and for that long duration.

The attacks seek to overtax CPUs, disrupt applications and, ultimately, distract IT and security personnel. While they look over there, the bad boys are work over here. Gartner sees DDoS attacks as part of a larger trend singling out financial institutions.

“A new class of damaging DDoS attacks and devious criminal social-engineering ploys were launched against U.S. banks in the second half of 2012, and this will continue in 2013 as well-organized criminal activity takes advantage of weaknesses in people, processes and systems”, Avivah Litan, Gartner vice president, says. He emphasizes there is a “new level of sophistication in organized attacks against enterprises” and that “they will grow in sophistication and effectiveness” this year.

These attacks increase in intensity — blasting some financial institutions with up to 70 Gbps of “noisy network traffic”, via ye old Internet pipes. 5 Gbps are more typical.

“To combat this risk, enterprises need to revisit their network configurations, and rearchitect them to minimize the damage that can be done”, Litan says. “Organizations that have a critical Web presence and cannot afford relatively lengthy disruptions in online service should employ a layered approach that combines multiple DoS defenses”.

I guess unplugging the Internet isn’t the answer. How will we do online banking?

Photo Credit: Seleznev Oleg/Shutterstock

For those of us who remember AMD as the alternative to Intel in our desktops, or as the also-ran to Intel in servers, it’s time to think of the new AMD. Like a Beyonce dumping Destiny’s Child, the chipmaker is ditching its sole reliance on x86 and embracing new architectures such as graphics processors and ARM-based cores. And scoring the processor inside the latest generation PlayStation console is the perfect example of the new AMD.

AMD has built a custom chip for the PS4 that combines a graphics processor with a CPU core creating what AMD calls an APU, or accelerated processing unit. AMD calls these APUs, and it has been working toward a win in this area since it purchased GPU firm ATI all the way back in 2006. The PlayStation 4 is quite a win, with a few hundred million of the consoles sold in its history.

The PS4 chip is also the first public design win out of a new group inside AMD, the Embedded and Custom Semi group, which AMD estimates will generate a fifth of its sales in 2013. That group will be responsible for building out custom chips for clients that will sell at massive volumes.

In the case of the PS4, AMD combined its next generation 8-core Jaguar CPU with its next generation GPU. Another way to look at this is to realize that Sony’s PS4 isn’t just limiting the graphics processor to graphics. That chip is likely handling elements of the compute as well.

The PS4 chip is the first chip for the Embedded and Custom Semi group, but not the first custom effort for AMD. It also made custom versions of graphics processors for the WiiU and the Xbox consoles. But AMD hopes the business will continue to grow, especially as AMD looks beyond its traditional PC market. Not only has it put more focus on graphics and its APU strategy, but it also last year took a license for the ARM architecture and said it plans to use the upcoming 64-bit ARM architecture to build chips for servers.

John Taylor, the VP of product marketing with AMD, said he can’t share the exact volumes that would entice AMD to design a custom chip, and upon further questioning it appears that the number of chips may not be the sole deciding factor.

When asked about combining GPUs or even ARM cores in the server business for example, he said, “Well you know that in the server market the chips generally have higher average selling prices than those in the consumer space, so it may not necessarily be that we will demand a 1 million unit run to build these chips. It will be a business decision.”

Yet Taylor’s hypothetical example of a good customer for the custom semi business was a smart TV manufacturer, one that had already designed portions of a chip that it wanted to combine with computing and/or graphics processors from AMD. However, he acknowledged that AMD now has several architectural options and plans to build a business combining those options for customers outside of AMD’s traditional lines of business.

Such a commitment isn’t for the faint of heart. The development of a core can take years of forethought, while the combination of cores onto a single system on chip, such as the one offered in the PS4, can take up to a year. As the web and application side of the technology world speeds up, chip firms are still stuck planning for a future that is years out and hoping they can get it right.

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Maria Vlachopoulou, an engineer at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has been recognized as IEEE/IEEE-USA’s 2013 New Faces of Engineering honoree during National Engineer Week (Feb. 17-23, 2013).

The honor highlights the impact and contributions of engineers age 30 or younger. Vlachopoulou was one of 13 engineers recognized for this international honor and was featured in a full-page ad in USA Today on Feb. 18.

Moe Khaleel, director of PNNL’s Computational Sciences & Mathematics Division, says Vlachopoulou’s research in energy systems, statistical and mathematical modeling, optimization and software engineering is supporting the transition of the U.S. power grid to a more secure, efficient and robust system. “Maria’s work directly impacts two national priority areas — securing our long-term energy security and reliability while reducing our dependence on foreign sources of oil,” he said.

Vlachopoulou earned master’s degrees from Purdue University in 2010 in electrical and computer engineering, and in industrial engineering. She also has multiple publications related to her work on novel algorithms for energy forecasting — a vital component of power grid reliability.

The New Faces of Engineering honor also recognizes each recipient’s work within their communities. Vlachopoulou is the founding chair of the IEEE Women in Engineering group in Richland, Wash.; and in the Tri-Cities, Wash. community, she volunteers with local high school and middle school students to cultivate interest in careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, areas.

All 2013 New Faces of Engineering honorees and their contributions are featured at the National Engineers Week Foundation website.

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IEEE-USA advances the public good and promotes the careers and public policy interests of more than 205,000 engineering, computing and technology professionals who are U.S. members of IEEE.

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In eight days, harmful automatic cuts — known as the sequester — take effect, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cutting vital services for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and women in uniform.

To prevent a costly, self-inflicted wound to our economy and middle class families, President Obama put forward a plan to avoid these cuts and reduce the deficit by cutting spending and closing tax loopholes. Now it's up to Congress to act. Learn more about President Obama's plan here.

Still have questions about what the sequester is, and why American famillies and our national economy face this threat? We've put together the explainer below using some helpful background information President Obama laid out in a statement on Tuesday. Check it out:

$2.5 Trillion in Deficit Reduction

"Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce our deficits by more than $2.5 trillion. More than two-thirds of that was through some pretty tough spending cuts. The rest of it was through raising taxes — tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. And together, when you take the spending cuts and the increased tax rates on the top 1 percent, it puts us more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need tostabilize our finances."

 

 

 

So What's the Sequester? Why Now?

"Now, Congress, back in 2011, also passed a law saying that if both parties couldn’t agree on a plan to reach that $4 trillion goal, about a trillion dollars of additional, arbitrary budget cuts would start to take effect this year. And by the way, the whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing taxloopholes and so forth. And so this was all designed to say we can't do these bad cuts; let’s do something smarter. That was the whole point of this so-called sequestration."

"Unfortunately, Congress didn’t compromise. They haven't come together and done their jobs, and so as a consequence, we've got these automatic, brutal spending cuts that are poised to happen next Friday."

read more

We’ve described a number of times at paidContent how publishers large and small are looking for alternative sources of revenue as traditional advertising declines in value, and how some sites — including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed and Gawker — are experimenting with new ad formats such as sponsored content or “native advertising,” as well as affiliate links. On Friday, Google engineer Matt Cutts reiterated a warning from the search giant that this kind of content has to be treated properly or Google will penalize the site that hosts it, in some cases severely.

In his post on the official Google blog, entitled “A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank,” the Google staffer notes that the company has repeatedly warned about the dangers of links — including those on advertorial pages — that are designed to pass some of the hosting site’s PageRank (in other words, its status in Google’s search index) to the company paying for the links:

“Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations.”

Sites that host such content can be penalized

The penalties for doing this, Cutts says, including “losing trust in Google’s search results,” as well as a reduction of the site’s PageRank status, and lower rankings for the site in Google’s search results. The proper way to avoid this kind of penalty is to use what’s called a “nofollow” tag at the end of the URL for a paid link, which tells Google not to assign any PageRank to the page on the other side of that link.

According to Search Engine Land, the Google post may have been triggered in part by the behavior of a number of British local newspaper sites such as the The Worcester Standard and This Is Dorset, which were hosting advertorial content from an online flower-delivery service called Interflora. Even though the posts clearly say “ad features” and “advertisement,” the links to the company’s website and other related links don’t have the nofollow tag attached.

David Naylor, a consultant who specializes in search-engine optimization or SEO, described in a post of his own how the Interflora content had broken the rules, and how the company’s own PageRank had declined sharply as a result — and he also noted that the PageRank of the local news websites that posted the content hadn’t just declined, but had actually dropped to zero. According to Naylor, such a massive drop for a single infraction is unusual.

Sponsored content is growing in popularity

The Atlantic has been in the news recently for its experiments with sponsored content, including a large feature on the Church of Scientology that was widely criticized. The magazine later apologized for the piece and said it was amending its rules on sponsored content, but it’s not clear whether those rules include adding “nofollow” tags (the Scientology piece has been removed). A survey of some of the Atlantic’s recent sponsored content showed no links at all.

BuzzFeed is also known for its sponsored-content program — in fact, the site carries no traditional advertising whatsoever. The use of this kind of advertorial sparked a critical post from blogger Andrew Sullivan at his Daily Dish site, in which he suggested that blurring the line between editorial and advertising the way BuzzFeed does is unethical and disturbing (Note: We’ll be discussing alternative monetization methods with Justin Smith of the Atlantic, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed and Andrew Sullivan, among others, at paidContent Live in April).

All Google really seems to care about, however, are the links in this kind of content: in one of the sponsored posts that Sullivan criticized, about the launch of Sony’s PlayStation 4 console, a link to a contest Sony is running did not have a nofollow tag attached, but — like the Atlantic — many of the other sponsored posts we looked at on the BuzzFeed site contained no links at all.

In a post on Twitter, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said that all of the paid content that appears on the site goes through Google’s DART system (which is part of its Doubleclick advertising unit) and therefore doesn’t pass PageRank.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Brian A Jackson and David Naylor

Upcoming: paidContent Live, Apr. 17, 2013, New York, Save $100, Register by 3/22 More upcoming conferences.

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If you think the $899 Surface Pro is too rich for your blood, don’t sweat it: there are plenty of cheaper quality alternatives out there. Consumer Reports has been testing out several low-cost Windows 8 laptops and has found that they aren’t just priced well but that they perform well too. Among the winners were ASUS’s (2357) S56CA-DH51, a 15-inch laptop that costs $650 and that Consumer Reports praises for “very good performance and excellent ergonomics”; Sony’s (SNE) VAIO SVT-13122CXS, a 13-inch ultrabook that costs $625; and Acer’s (2353) M5-581T-6807, a $600, 15.6-inch laptop that Consumer Reports says has “excellent performance and respectable battery life.” With so many quality laptops priced under $700, Consumer Reports hopes that it’s a sign that “more inexpensive touch screen laptops are coming soon.”

When you think about the term “hot startup,” you generally don’t think of wireless infrastructure. In a world of Pinterests and Instagrams, companies specializing in byzantine telecom protocols and arcane mobile standards don’t really sound that exciting. But Bessemer Venture Partners has shown there is money to be made in the mobile networking world.

Last month, Cisco Systems scooped up Israeli self-optimizing network outfit Intucell, one of Bessemer’s key portfolio companies. The networking giant paid $475 million for the company just two years after Intucell raised its $6 million Series A round. But that wasn’t a fluke investment. Bessemer has made mobile infrastructure a significant pillar in its investment strategy.

While Bessemer is perhaps best known for its investments in LinkedIn and Skype, its most spectacular exit in the mobile networking space was Flarion Technologies, a pioneer of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) technology that is now at the heart of all 4G networks. In 2006, Qualcomm bought Flarion for $600 million.

Its current portfolio includes mobile data traffic shaper Vasona Networks, 4G chipmaker Altair Semiconductor and network API developer Twilio, but after the exits of Intucell last month and Traffix Systems last year (bought by F5 Networks), Bessemer is looking to reload. One of the places Bessemer hopes to find to find its next wireless darling is at the world’s largest mobile trade show, Mobile World Congress.

Next week in Barcelona, Bessemer’s lead wireless partner Bob Goodman is wading into a miasma of LTE-Advanced, HetNet, diameter signaling, envelope tracking and self-optimized networking. Before the show, I had a chanced to talk to Goodman about what exactly he’s looking for at MWC and about Bessemer’s wireless strategy in general.

Wireless has been a tough on the investor

Investment in telecom infrastructure startups has plummeted in recent years even as investment in services and applications has recovered since the last recession, according to Ovum. In the 12 months ending in June, new money going into networking companies was just $270 million, compared to $796 million two years before.

There’s a reason VCs are reluctant to invest in telecom, Goodman said: It’s such a stratified market. While there are hundreds of carriers around the world they tend to buy their equipment from just a handful of vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and Cisco. Small players have traditionally found it extremely difficult to get on a carrier’s radar unless you had a big vendor at your side.

After Flarion’s sale in 2005, Bessemer stopped investing in wireless players for several years. Not only were the economics difficult for small companies, but the mobile industry seemed to be going nowhere. 3G networks went up, but they were primarily used for voice. The mobile data revolution we had been promised simply didn’t happen.

But a few years ago, Bessemer jumped back into the infrastructure space. According to Goodman, several trends converged to make the market much more attractive. First, there was the iPhone, which reinvigorated the smartphone and drove a deluge of mobile data traffic over carriers’ networks. Operators were looking not only for technologies to add capacity to those networks, but also technologies to manage and optimize that traffic flow.

While data usage was exploding, the big infrastructure incumbents were fighting a massive price war over international borders. “Huawei and ZTE drove costs down, which led the vendors to chop their investment in R&D,” Goodman explained. So just as carriers needed new innovation, their suppliers weren’t in a position to deliver it.

Finally and most recently, the old carrier-vendor ties began to break down. “The carriers have changed their tune,” Goodman said. “They used to want as few vendors as possible, but now that those vendors are all suffering, they have started looking beyond them.”

Intucell is a good example of how startups are taking advantage of that trend. Goodman and fellow Bessemer wireless specialist Adam Fisher introduced Intucell — then an eight-employee company — to AT&T in 2011. After working with the company’s technology for nine months, first in AT&T’s new Innovation Lab in Israel and then in live trials over AT&T’s 3G networks, Ma Bell committed to a system-wide deployment across its 3G and 4G footprints.

Goodman is convinced that much of the new innovation in mobile is going to be done by small startups in places like Tel Aviv and London, not in the big vendor labs in Stockholm or Helsinki. And now that carriers are willing to work directly with startups — AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint have all opened innovation labs for just that purpose — there’s even more incentive for entrepreneurs to attack the mobile networking market.

What Bessemer is looking for in a startup

If anyone understands the dynamic between carriers and small infrastructure players, it’s Goodman; he’s played for both sides. Before joining Bessemer in 1998, Goodman founded Celcore, a distributed cellular networking company that was bought by Alcatel, and Boatphone, a mobile operator out of the Caribbean. That gives Goodman a perspective on what to look for among the thousands of companies and entrepreneurs converging next week in Barcelona.

I asked Goodman what criteria he was using to evaluate the companies he meets. (As you might expect, he wouldn’t reveal who he plans to talk to.) He boiled his approach down to three things:

• Software: While Goodman isn’t ruling out hardware companies, he still favors companies that write code versus companies that build boxes.
• No straw men: Goodman is looking for a company that has identified a very specific problem carriers face and has developed a very specific solution to address it.
• Speed to market: The telecom industry has tirelessly long development cycles with some technologies taking nearly a decade to make their way through the standards process and into commercial networks. Goodman wants technology that carriers could feasibly deploy as soon as it is developed.

“We want to find a carrier problem — an immediate problem — that a really talented group of people can identify and can solve relatively quickly,” he said. “We also want to be able to go directly to the carrier. You don’t want someone else standing between you and the customer.”

There’s evidence that Goodman is willing to bend some of those rules, though. You could argue Goodman’s most successful investment venture broke all of the rules. Flarion built a base station box, which ultimately didn’t sell because it emerged at a time when mobile data use was insipid. Ultimately its OFDMA technology wound up in Qualcomm’s LTE architecture, but only after a long process of standardization.

There are always going to be exceptions if a company is building something exceptional, Goodman said: “I would never rule anything out completely.”

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Analysts wouldn’t generate new business without something fresh to sell. So they create new categories to tabulate, or dream up strange labels to describe them. Few quarters back, IDC rolled up PCs, smartphones and tablets into the “smart-connected devices” segment. Four things counted separately became something new, which also give schmoes like me something else to write about.

Yesterday, while my heart nearly failed writing about Chromebook Pixel, IDC released numbers for the segment, claiming 28.3 percent growth for fourth quarter and 29.1 percent for all 2012. Samsung nudged ahead of Apple to top the category for the quarter, with slightly wider lead for the year. Considering that smartphones make up 60.1 percent of the segment, the top-five ranking makes sense: Lenovo, HP and Dell follow the leaders. The two bottom-feeders mostly sell PCs, which lost share year over year.

Samsung actually snatched the top spot from Apple, with share rising to 21.2 percent from 14.6 percent for the quarter and to 20.8 percent from 12.3 percent for the year. The fruit-logo company moved up to 20.3 percent share from 20.1 percent in Q4 and to 18.2 percent from 16.3 percent for all 2012. However, Apple’s quarterly nudge, which seemingly is nothing, hides more dramatic changes from earlier in the year.

“The fourth quarter market share numbers showed a fairly dramatic resurgence for Apple” Bob O’Donnell, IDC program vice president, explains. “After falling well behind Samsung early in 2012, Apple came roaring back in final quarter of the year thanks to its latest hits — the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini — and reduced the market share gap to less than a single percentage point. The question moving forward will be whether or not Apple can maintain its hit parade against the juggernaut of Samsung”.

Both vendors largely benefited from smartphones and tablets — the latter accounted for 10.7 percent of smart-connected device shipments last year. Smartphone shipment rose 46.1 percent and tablets 78.4 percent year over year in 2012. Meanwhile, desktop PCs fell by 4.1 percent and laptops by 3.4 percent.

“Smartphones and tablets are growing at a pace that PCs can’t realistically keep up with because of device prices and to some extent disposability”, Ryan Reith, IDC program manager, says. “The average selling price for a tablet declined 15 percent in 2012 to $461, and we expect that trend to continue in 2013. However, smartphone APSs are still lower at $408. We expect smartphones to continue to carry a shorter life cycle than PCs for the years to come based on price, use case, and overall device size”.

In other words, phones will dominate the category for some time to come.

Photo Credit:  CLIPAREA l Custom media/Shutterstock

That’s life, as Frank Sinatra once sang. Microsoft Azure Storage was named the world’s best public cloud storage service on Tuesday, then crashes and burns on Friday.

Here are a few of the posts to the Windows Azure status dashboard: 

22-Feb-13  ·  9:45 PM UTC

Access Control v2, Service Bus, WindowsAzure.com and WebSites services are impacted by Storage service degradation worldwide. We are actively validating the recovery steps to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

22-Feb-13  ·  8:44 PM UTC

We are experiencing an issue with Storage Worldwide and this is impacting all dependent services. We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

Folks on Twitter and elsewhere attributed the snafu to the lack of a new SSL certificate. If such a certificate does expire, users cannot authenticate against their various services: No authentication, no access.

I’ve asked Microsoft for comment and will update this when they do. Whatever the cause of the snafu, it’s been an up-and-down week for Windows Azure. On Tuesday, Nasuni, a company that manages cloud storage for business customers, said Windows Azure storage outperformed all four other cloud services — including Amazon S3 —  in rigorous performance testing. Despite Azure’s performance, Nasuni said it would stick to S3 as its primary supplier, citing its maturity. Looks like that may habe been the right call.

Windows #Azure Blob Storage service is down due certificate issue. Check update at Windows Azure Service Dashboard:
windowsazure.com/en-us/support/…—
Avkash Chauhan (@avkashchauhan) February 22, 2013

Well, as Sinatra sang: “Riding high in April, shot down in May.” Web time just accelerates the process.

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Since taking office, President Obama has made clear that his Administration is committed to Open Government—that the Nation is made stronger by making the Federal Government accountable to citizens and by giving those citizens opportunities to participate in their government. 

That’s why, in September 2011, President Obama, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, and the leaders of six other governments launched the global Open Government Partnership – a global effort to encourage transparent, effective, and accountable governance driven by citizens and civil society around the world.  Demonstrating the Nation’s domestic commitment to the Partnership, President Obama launched the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government that same day, saying:

“We pledge to be more transparent at every level — because more information on government activity should be open, timely, and freely available to the people. We pledge to engage more of our citizens in decision-making — because it makes government more effective and responsive. We pledge to implement the highest standards of integrity — because those in power must serve the people, not themselves. And we pledge to increase access to technology — because in this digital century, access to information is a right that is universal.”

In just over a year, the Administration has made significant progress toward implementing the National Action Plan, working closely and in partnership with American citizens and organizations. 

For example, with the launch of the White House's "We the People" petition platform, citizens now have a more powerful voice in government. With the passage of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, and President Obama’s landmark directive extending whistleblower protections to the intelligence and national security communities for the first time, Federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government will receive the protection they deserve.  And, through innovative, accessible platforms like data.gov, the government is unleashing more information than ever before to fuel innovation and entrepreneurship. But we’re not stopping there.

As part of our ongoing commitment to Open Government, the United States Government will publish a Self-Assessment Report this spring, that outlines our significant progress to date and highlights areas where there is more work to be done.  And, in the true spirit of Open Government—we want you to participate in the process.

Many of the best ideas that helped shape the National Action Plan on Open Government were suggested from citizens and outside groups. Starting today, for the next two weeks, we want to hear from you, as we work to develop our Open Government self-assessment report. 

Here’s how: You can share your ideas and feedback through Q&A site Quora, or through a web form on WhiteHouse.gov. Specifically, we’d like to hear from you about:

• What Open Government commitments need the most additional work in the near term?
• How can we be more responsive to your feedback?
• How can we work more closely with the public to enhance the Government’s effectiveness?

Your feedback will inform our upcoming Self-Assessment Report on Open Government and ensure that your voice is heard as we continue working together toward increased openness and transparency. We look forward to hearing from you.

Lisa Ellman is Chief Counselor for the Open Government Partnership and Senior Advisor to the Chief Technology Officer and Nick Sinai is Deputy Chief Technology Officer.

Dish’s (DISH) commercial-skipper DVR dubbed “Hopper” has taken a lot of heat from major networks, several of which sued the company last May. Fox Broadcasting Company was counted among the networks that sued, and it argued that by automatically skipping the commercials aired during primetime shows recorded on the Hopper’s DVR, Dish is “destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem.” Now, Fox is back and it’s asking the district court in Los Angeles to block Hopper sales again, this time due to the box’s in-built “on the go” feature that allows users to stream content over the Web from their home TV.

Continue reading…

Microsoft today revealed that a huge sale on Xbox LIVE Games on Demand titles will take place next week.

Over on his blog, Director of Programming for Xbox LIVE Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb revealed that the “Xobx Ultimate Game Sale” will begin on February 26 and run until March 4. During the sale, games could be on sale for “up to” 75% or 80% off.

Different games will be on sale each day of the week, and Hyrb will be tweeting out each day’s sale games through his Twitter account. Hyrb listed 61 games that will be going on sale sometime next week, but suggested that they were not the only ones. The games confirmed to be going on sale include some of the biggest titles of 2012, including Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Borderlands 2, and Halo 4.

What follows is the full list of titles already announced for the sale:

Assassins Creed, Assassins Creed 2, Batman Arkham Asylum, Batman Arkham City
Bioshock, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Brotherhood (Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood), Call of Juarez, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Code Veronica, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements, Dead Island, Dirt 2, Dishonored, El Shaddai Ascension of the Metatron, Fable III, Fallout 3, Fallout 3 New Vegas, GRID, Halo 3, Halo 4, Halo Reach, Halo Wars, Kane & Lynch Dead Men, Left for Dead 2, Max Payne 3, Metal Gear Solid HD, Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat vs. DCU, Orange Box, Portal 2, Raccoon City, Rainbow Six Vegas, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 6 , Red Dead Redemption, Revelations (Assassin’s Creed Revelations), Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution, Street Fighter IV, Street Fighter X Tekken, Super Streetfighter IV Arcade Edition, TC’s H.A.W.X., Tekken 6, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, The Darkness, The King of Fighters XIII, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Tomb Raider Legend , Virtua Fighter 5 , and World at War (Call of Duty: World at War)

Chris Hardwick, who some may know from hosting MTV’s Singled Out or appearing in Rob Zombie’s House Of 1,000 Corpses, but is better known these days as the Nerdist guy, appeared on Conan O’Brien (which also featured Google Ass). He had this to say about YouTube comments:

It’s Friday, and that means that the Injustice Battle Arena gets another two amazing match ups. The past few weeks have been incredibly exciting with match ups between the likes of Batman and Bane, and The Joker and Lex Luthor.

This week’s first match up is between Aquaman and Cyborg. The recently revealed King of Atlantis has quite a formidable move set. I might also mention that his special has him feeding Cyborg to a shark.

It should be noted that Injustice got Khary Payton, the voice of Cyborg in Teen Titans, to reprise his role in Injustice. Oh, and don’t worry, his trademark “Booyah” is still present.

The second match up is between Green Lantern and Solomon Grundy. Grundy puts up a terrific fight, and is even a little disgusting to boot. Hal Jordan came out victorious, however, after smashing Grundy with a fleet of buses and jet fighters summoned by the ring.

We’re almost at the end of the semifinal fights. After that, we can get on to the quarter finals. I can’t wait to see the match up of Batman and Wonder Woman.

Want to call up your friends, but don’t have their cell number? Now as long as you both have the updated Facebook app it won’t matter — you’ll be able to talk to each other through Facebook. The social network had previously been testing a feature that would let users place calls to their friends through its Messenger app, and on Friday it updated the main iOS app to support calling functionality.

To access the calling feature, users can tap on the right-hand bar that supports messaging in the iOS app, select a person they want to call, and then check to see if that person has the “free call” feature listed under their profile (that can be found through the “i” information button next to their name).

Facebook’s support for placing calls over Wi-Fi is somewhat of a closed system since it’s limited to people who’ve downloaded the particular app, as my colleague Stacey Higgenbotham pointed out. But Facebook’s adoption of voice communication could have an impact on the current carriers if suddenly 1 billion users have a new way to talk to each other.

The company began testing the idea in Canada in January, and then added voice calling to Messenger in the United States a few weeks later.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Tablets wars: Apple is from Venus, Amazon is from Mars
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Not too long ago, the United States generated roughly 50 percent of its electricity from coal, 20 percent each from nuclear and natural gas, and 10 percent mainly from hydroelectric power and other renewable energy sources. But the electric power energy mix has changed dramatically so that coal now represents less than 40 percent of our electricity production and natural gas represents around 30 percent. So, why is this change an issue?

Source: Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review, http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec7_5.pdf

Coal is almost exclusively dedicated as a fuel for electricity generation while natural gas has numerous uses in the United States. As a result, over the last few weeks, New England saw electricity prices skyrocket, increasing four to eight times higher than normal, as the region’s reliance on natural gas for electricity and demand for heating fuel collided due to extremely cold temperatures. Many coal-fired plants in the region have been shuttered or mothballed and cannot be put into service quickly enough to meet spikes in demand. The huge increase in the demand for natural gas increased its price dramatically.

In 2012, natural gas provided 52 percent of New England’s electricity, and that share is expected to grow due to low natural gas costs (when supplies are not stretched due to insufficient pipeline capacity), the inability to build new coal-fired power plants over the last 10 years because of the northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and new federal regulations which make running coal-fired units more expensive. As a result, many coal-fired power plants have been shuttered. Lower natural gas fuel costs are also spurring the retirement of nuclear reactors in several parts of the country, including New England.

In a 2010 study, the American Public Power Association warned that natural gas demand is outpacing the delivery capacity of the gas infrastructure. Nearly half of the current delivery capacity was built after the previous peak natural gas demand of 22 trillion cubic feet achieved in 1972. Estimates of new pipeline capacity required range from $106 billion to $163 billion. Further, if all coal-fired generating capacity were to be replaced by natural gas capacity, the cost would be $348 billion.[i]

New England’s Reliance on Natural Gas

Due to New England’s large dependence on natural gas for electricity generation and gas’ constrained deliverability, during a cold spell last November, electricity prices rose to $103.20 per megawatt-hour (normally, $30 to $50 per megawatt-hour) and natural gas prices rose to $12.37 per MMBtu (normally, less than $4 per million Btu). Then, on January 24, when temperatures dropped 15 to 20 degrees below average, natural gas prices rose to $31.20 per MMBtu at Algoquin Citygate, an area near Boston where natural gas is traded, resulting in a megawatt-hour price of more than $200.[ii] According to the independent system operator of New England’s electricity market, early in February, a megawatt-hour cost about $150, while a year ago, it was $30—a five-fold increase.[iii] Luckily, New England has been able to import electricity from Indian Point, a nuclear plant on the Hudson River in New York. However, the State of New York is interested in closing the plant.[iv]

It is clear that gas pipeline capacity in New England is inadequate to keep prices steady in times of high home heating demand. Further, it seems that the natural gas market and the electric market mesh poorly because the natural gas generators have not been able to start up when needed in early morning hours. For example, during a storm early in February that knocked out transmission lines, the independent system operator asked some natural gas-fired generators to start-up, but found that they could not obtain the natural gas during the overnight hours.

Although about 30 percent of the generators in New England burn coal and oil, those generators produce less than 1 percent of the electricity because they are seldom run, requiring startup periods of 24 hours to be brought on line. And, a number of coal- and oil-fired plants have shut-down in New England in the last few years, including:

• AES Thames, a 214-megawatt, coal-fired unit near Uncasville, Connecticut, closed in 2011;
• Somerset Station, a 174-megawatt, coal-fired plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, closed in 2010;
• The Salem Harbor plant in Salem, Massachusetts with four coal and oil units and a capacity of 745 megawatts, closed 2 units and will probably close the other two next year, where the company is building a 630-megawatt natural gas-fired plant to replace it.

Natural Gas Impacting Nuclear Units

Fixed costs for nuclear plants run about $90,000 per megawatt compared to about $15,000 per megawatt for new natural gas plants and about $30,000 per megawatt for coal plants. Nuclear plants have high costs due to security and other safeguards, and because they handle radioactive material and operate at high temperatures, their equipment costs are higher than those for other kinds of generating plants. In many areas of the United States, nuclear and coal-fired power plants compete directly with natural-gas fired plants where deregulated markets exist. About 40 percent of nuclear reactors sell power in deregulated markets. Small nuclear plants are less able to compete against low-cost natural gas plants than bigger nuclear units because they make less electricity than the bigger nuclear plants make and thus have less output over which to spread their fixed costs.

Nuclear generation is already showing some signs of weakness with a 2.5 percent decline in output in the first 11 months of 2012 compared with a year earlier. In comparison, generation from natural gas plants increased 24 percent. 

Source:http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323644904578272111885235812.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories&mg=reno64-wsj 

Nuclear plants considered vulnerable include:

• Exelon Corporation’s 25-year-old Clinton plant in Illinois and its 43-year-old Ginna plant in New York
• Entergy Corporation’s 40-year-old Vermont Yankee plant in Vermont and 38-year-old FitzPatrick plant in New York.
• Edison International’ San Onofre plant in Southern California, which is idled
• Duke Energy Corporation’s Crystal River plant in Florida, which is idled
• Dominion Energy Resources Inc.’s Kewaunee nuclear plant in Wisconsin which will be retired in mid 2013 even though it still has 20 years left on its operating license
• Exelon Corporation’s Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey, which is planned to be shut down in 2019, 10 years before its license expires.

With the switch from coal-fired electricity to natural gas-fired electricity, the electric power industry has been able to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions since natural gas generation emits about half the emissions that coal generation emits. Since nuclear plants are the largest source of carbon-free electricity, closing them will make it harder for the electric power industry to continue to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

Conclusion

The six states that comprise New England are experiencing vulnerability due to their overreliance on natural gas with electricity prices 4 to 8 times higher when extreme cold or storms hit the region than under normal conditions. That vulnerability is heightened by a shortage of natural gas pipeline capacity that was identified in 2010. Other parts of the country, such as the Midwest, could face similar problems in the future. While increasing the natural gas pipeline infrastructure would help alleviate the problem, diversity of electric generating supply would also help. But, low natural gas prices and excessive regulations are causing the closure of coal-fired and nuclear power plants across the country.  If these plants are closed and replaced with natural gas, the price of electricity will depend increasingly upon hydraulic fracturing, which is under attack from opponents of fossil fuels and under threat of increased regulation by the Obama Administration, despite strict regulation of its practices by those familiar with its application at the state level.

As Jay Apt, executive director of the Electricity Industry Center at the Carnegie Mellon University has stated, “It is certainly true that a region like New England that relies on a single fuel source like natural gas for the bulk of its power does leave itself open for more disruptions than a region with a more diverse fuel mix. It’s not a knock against natural gas; it’s a knock against a single fuel source.”