It’s a crisis even worse than the Twitteresque redesign, even worse than the terms of service contretemps.

I don’t like to alarm anyone, but might I suggest this research be given an incomplete?

But I have a suspicious and entirely unscientific feeling that all this research may tell us so far is that bookwormy, people-uncomfortable types do well in school tests.

If the researchers had suggested that with every hour you spend on Facebook, your GPA sinks proportionately, then perhaps parents might be entitled to put controls on social networking and demand that their children get rid of their 5,000 closest chums.

Aryn Karpinski, one of the Ohio State education department researchers, was quoted in the Times of London as saying: “Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon.”

(Credit: CC flikr/Flickr)

Yes, researchers at Ohio State University have delved deep into the habit that is Facebook and concluded that those who express their membership regularly do worse in school tests.

"Oh, no. If only I hadn't updated five times a day."

In fact, they say, the majority of those who Facebook daily do worse by as much as one whole grade.

Karpinski will be presenting her findings this week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

So nothing’s changed, right?

Some 68 percent of the Facebookers among the 219 young things questioned enjoyed a significantly lower GPA than those who eschewed friending and poking.

I know, I know. I’m the most generous Dodgers’ fan ever, right? Besides being eminently appropriate, and just plain awesome-looking, this asterisk is actually useful. Especially if Barry has, say, a MacBook Air.

This asterisk is a four-port USB hub created by industrial designer Joel Escalona. It’s also bright red, and very sleek.

(Via Ubergizmo)

(Credit: Joel Escalona)

(Note: depending on where your sports loyalties lie, this gift can also work for Roger Clemens, Bill Belichick, or any member of the New England Patriots.)

A big, fat asterisk.

He argued that the offering will make EnterpriseDB more competitive against MySQL, the leading open-source database provider which is widely used by Web companies. MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion earlier this month.

The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative.

Potential customers are either enterprises that have custom applications that run on EntrerpriseDB or Web 2.0 start-ups that only want to pay for computing power as needed, Zurek said. He said tests show that application performance over the Internet does not degrade substantially.

Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications.

EnterpriseDB has not announced pricing, but the company is looking at usage models in which customers pay for use of the database by the hour or by the month.

EnterpriseDB has ported its Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL database to a new platform: Amazon.com’s hosted compute cloud.

On the other hand, Microsoft is doing just fine in its current set of businesses, which are coming under a little stress as the cloud inhabited by Google, Yahoo, Salesforce.com, and others affects the perception and future of the Windows and Office franchises. For its fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, Microsoft is expecting revenue in the range of $59.9 billion to $60.5 billion, and operating income in the range of $24.2 billion to $24.4 billion.

Whether Microhoo can stop Google’s growth is questionable, the two could be a very large No. 2. Shareholders want a resolution. Will it be AOL + Yahoo with a little help from Google, or some other combo, or Microhoo? Perhaps Google’s continued dominance in the Web era will be a tipping point for Microsoft to sweeten its offer.

During the earnings call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt referenced the ad “test” his company is doing with Yahoo: “It’s nice working with Yahoo and we like them very much,” he said. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Yahoo is getting closer to a deal to outsource its core ad search business to Google.

(Credit:
Google)

Google-DoubleClick skated through its quarterly earnings call, with a healthy $5.19 billion in revenue for the quarter ending March 31, and operating income of $1.55 billion. At this rate Google is on track to top $25 billion in annual revenue. The company has a nest egg of over $12 billion in cash. The stock price is up $76 (about 17 percent) in after-hours trading as of 3:30 p.m. PDT. And, Google’s search share in the U.S. is nearly 60 percent. All is well at the Googleplex.

While some pundits don’t see the deal as the right strategy to attack Google, Microsoft’s exec team appears to be wedded to the idea. And, Ballmer and company are nothing if not persistent and relentless when they want something.

Yahoo has a good, profitable business, but Google did $4.83 billion just for its fourth quarter in 2007. In essence, Google is pummeling Yahoo, and Microsoft, in the lucrative ad/search space.

In view of Google’s revenue, profit, and romancing of Yahoo, how does this make Microsoft feel? Jealous and angry, I presume. The longer the mating dance lasts, and Google continues to print money and Yahoo plays hard to get, you might expect that Microsoft is more motivated to get the deal done. Microsoft covets Google’s business model and its growth potential, so it makes good sense to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to join up with Yahoo to stop Google from taking over the world, as Microsoft did with Windows and Office.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Because of the ongoing forest clearance projects in areas with deep peat soils, experts warn that the region’s carbon emissions will likely climb. (In the last quarter century, companies working in the province have cleared about 10.5 million acres of tropical forests and peat swamp.)

Turns out that Riau, Sumatra, a province in Indonesia, has the dubious honor of producing more average annual greenhouse gas emissions “from deforestation, forest degradation, peat decomposition, and peat fires between 1990 and 2007″ than does the Netherlands. That’s due to the local practice of supplying global paper giants and palm oil plantation with raw materials processed from forests and peat swamps.

WWF

The report was jointly published under the auspices of Hokkaido University, the World Wildlife Fund, and Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH.

I was poring through a university research paper Tuesday afternoon on the connection between the use of corn-based ethanol in the U.S. and greenhouse gas levels. That was just a grim appetizer for the big eco-news du jour later in the afternoon.

“How can we possibly infringe this patent–we’re just doing what people have done for years.” This familiar refrain is what’s known in the patent law as the practicing the prior art defense. But, other than a narrowly defined exception for business methods, the “practicing the prior art defense” has been squarely rejected by the courts. See Tate Access Floors Inc. v. Interface Arch. Res. Inc., 279 F.3d 1357 (Fed. Cir. 2002). Why do the courts reject such a seemingly reasonable argument?

The answer lies in the burden of proof in patent cases. To prove infringement, a patent owner must convince a jury that, in light of all the evidence, it is more likely than not that the defendant infringes. At trial, the jury will see the patent and the accused product, and will hear testimony from experts on both sides of the case to inform its decision. Jurors realize that most of the witnesses they hear from have some bias in the case, so they rely on their judgment to decide which side is telling the truth. On the other hand, when the validity of the patent is challenged, the jury is asked to question the judgment of the Patent Office–which the jury knows is unbiased. To prove invalidity, the defendant must prove by the much higher “clear and convincing evidence” standard that the patent is invalid. In other words, the jury must decide that the Patent Office clearly made a mistake.

What people really mean when they say they are practicing the prior art is that they are not doing anything new. In other words, if the patent claims cover what they are doing, then they must be invalid because they read on the prior art. So why does it matter whether the issue is infringement or validity?

During the past 12 months, the U.S. Patent office issued approximately 182,000 utility patents containing millions of patent claims. Many of them are very likely invalid. But, they are all presumed valid until proven otherwise. Given the choice between convincing a jury that the U.S. government got it wrong in any particular case and proving that the plaintiff has it wrong, most of us would rather take on the plaintiff, which is why lawyers and their clients continue to argue the “practicing the prior art” defense.

“We’ve never seen Apple as the target,” Proofpoint’s Andrew Lochart told Computerworld on Tuesday. “It’s probably indicative that the bad guys see Apple’s online presence as large enough to be a target.”

In general, if you receive an e-mail with a link to a site requesting personal financial information, be very cautious about proceeding. Bookmark or type in the URLs for sites containing financial information, such as your bank or e-commerce sites like iTunes. Never link directly from an unsolicited e-mail.

We’ve seen banks, even eBay and PayPal, all targeted by phishers. Now they’ve turned their attention to iTunes, creating a bogus site that reportedly looks like an iTunes billing page asking for current credit card information.

When most people think of military hotlines, it is safe to say, the Cold War movie images of a red telephone sitting at the ready in the White House and the Kremlin still dominates. As China and the United States move to set up a line between militaries, the real question is: how is a hotline technically different from a telephone?

News reports refer to a “direct dial” telephone between military establishments. Are we talking here about a dedicated line? Does the telephone use regular undersea cables? Is there a military satellite link being used for this purpose? Are the Pentagon and the People’s Liberation Army just trading private phone numbers? If reporters are asking, no one’s answering.

What if these hotlines use the regular undersea cables, either by regular encrypted phone transmission or IP-style networks?
Someone working on a Tomorrow Never Dies-style war could cut a line or two, and with the right intelligence, they may be able to cut off contact. Presidents and generals would be reduced to calling each other’s switchboards, which though less secure would probably work quickly to get each other on the phone.
What if they lay a new wire, an unlikely if intriguing idea?
It would be even easier to sever the ties, but if general communications went down the unique connection would still work.
What if, as with the last implementation of the U.S.-Soviet hotline, military satellites were used (seemingly a lot more likely)?
This is where the modern era gets interesting. This only works so long as no one blows the satellites out of the sky. It seems to me a weakness in a strategic communications plan if for instance one or both sides decided to blast some military satellites as a precursor to any terrestrial war. Worse yet, if something like terrorism makes it to space, more Tomorrow Never Dies trouble could result from a third party severing the link. Heads of state would still probably want the option of talking to each other in hopes of preventing a full blown mutual destruction.

The first generation of the hot line had no voice element at all; the memorandum called for a full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit, based on the idea that spontaneous verbal communications could lead to miscommunications and misperceptions. This circuit was routed Washington - London - Copenhagen - Stockholm - Helsinki - Moscow. The Washington - London link was originally carried over the TAT-1, the first submarine transatlantic telephone cable. A secondary radio line was routed Washington - Tangier - Moscow.

Let’s do the what if game for a minute, realizing that I’m coming up with some pretty absurd situations:

The key is the redundant link, and keeping facilities guarded. Keeping a terrestrial radio line open may be the only reliable fall-back in an age of spy movie paranoia.

Which leads me to my proposal: Follow the lead of the first implementation of the Soviet-U.S. line (as explained at Wikipedia).

Already, there has been a direct phone between U.S. and Chinese heads of state since the 90s, and between the U.S. secretary of state and the Chinese foreign minister since 2004, according to AFP.

“Generally speaking, when you only have something like 25 percent or less who are updated with the current patches and Best Practices in AV software, it doesn’t really matter. You can be caught up with the latest AV fix, but if other people aren’t really applying it, it doesn’t really matter.”

Nazario blamed fresh spam and incomplete antivirus protection on users’ desktops for the new botnet infections.

The FBI is warning that Valentine’s Day e-mails you see this year might be coming not from loved ones, but from the Storm worm botnet. In a press release Tuesday, the FBI warns users to be on the lookout for e-mail that “directs the recipient to click on a link to retrieve the electronic greeting card (e-card). Once the user clicks on the link, malware is downloaded to the Internet-connected device and causes it to become infected and part of the Storm worm botnet.”

Dr. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks said the authors of Storm have launched a carefully orchestrated series of lure campaigns to bring new members into the network. One of them is Valentine’s Day-themed. Nazario said the creators of Storm have in recent weeks “grown the network by as much as 50 percent.”

Shown above are the stats for Windows users of the radio station’s website. The percentages are surprisingly similar to the Javatester site - 82% of Windows users ran XP and 10% ran Vista. Next up was Windows 2000 at 5% and Windows 98 at 1%.

The most popular site that I can get stats for is a radio station in New York City. In January 2008 the site averaged 3,092 visits/day, 14,514 page views/day and 71,457 hits/day according to AWStats.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

Considering Vista just had its first birthday, this seemed like a good time to look at some statistics to get a feel for just how popular it is.

Slightly off-topic, but an interesting read: A computer shop’s sales pitch: ‘We remove Vista’ by Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Microsoft issues sales figures for Vista licenses, but they have a vested interest and a corporate history that makes trusting them difficult. Market researchers come out with numbers based on surveys but the sample size is always small. That leaves usage statistics, specifically website usage.

I’ve said before that I think Windows XP is the better choice for Windows users than Vista.
Apparently, many of you agree with me.

Reporting software, such as AWStats*, reads the log file, examines the user agent field and can determine the operating system running on the computer that requested each web page.

Put another way, for every Vista user there were eight Windows XP users.

Shown above are the stats for “hits” by Windows users of the website**. Simple division shows that XP accounted for 80% of the traffic and Vista accounted for 10%.*** Next up, were Windows 2000 at 4% and Windows Server 2003 with 3%. Amazingly, someone is still using Windows 3.1.

The software that runs a web site is called a web server, the most popular programs being Apache and IIS. In addition to serving up web pages, every web server program also creates an activity log that includes information about visitors to the website. When a web browser requests a web page, it also sends information about itself to the web server in a character string called the “user agent”. You can see the user agent string for your web browser here.

My most popular website is javatester.org. It offers a free service, reporting on the version of Java being used by your web browser(s). In January 2008 the site averaged 1,859 visits/day, 3,682 page views/day and 26,734 hits/day according to AWStats.