Windows Embedded signage platform sports Core i5 CPU

American Industrial Systems (AIS) announced a digital signage device that runs Windows Embedded Standard 7 on a 2.4GHz Intel Core i5-520M processor. The DSK-i5XPC includes DisplayPort, DVI-D, HDMI, and VGA video outputs, a 2.5-inch hard disk drive, and 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking, the company says.

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AIS' new DSK-i5xPC appears more or less identical to the Winmate DSEK-10 that was announced last month, though we can't say whether the device is actually manufactured by Winmate. In any case, the DSK-i5XPC again offers a platform that has been "validated" by Microsoft and Intel, and was said to "address the [digital signage] market's need for a more streamlined, high-performance, and highly reliable solution."

Like the Winmate version, the American Industrial Systems device will ship with Microsoft's Windows Embedded Standard 7. A preinstalled OS image -- in a 120-day evaluation version optimized for digital signage usage -- is included along with a recovery DVD, AIS says.

The AIS DSK-i5XPC

According to AIS, the DSK-i5XPC uses Intel's Core i5-520M, one of the embedded-specific CPUs launched by the chipmaker in January. The CPU has a base clock speed of 2.4GHz and Turbo Boost speed of 2.93GHz, dual cores, and a 35-Watt TDP. It's teamed here, as intended, with Intel's QM57 Express chipset.

AIS says the DSK-i5XPC has 4GB of DDR3 memory, supplied via two SODIMM sockets, plus a 2.5-inch SATA hard disk drive of unspecified capacity. Intel-supplied components also provide gigabit Ethernet and 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking, the latter via a Mini PCI Express module (WiMax is orderable, the company says).

Ports on the DSK-i5XPC
(Click to enlarge)

The DSK-i5XPC's front panel (pictured above) includes audio jacks (mic in, line in, line out) and two USB 2.0 ports, says AIS. The rear panel (also above), meanwhile, has two more USB 2.0 ports, the gigabit Ethernet port, and four video outputs: DisplayPort, DVI-D, HDMI, and VGA. (The company does not cite potential resolutions nor how many of these outputs may be used at once.)

Features and specifications listed by AIS for the DSK-i5XPC include:

* Processor -- Intel Core i5 520-M clocked at 2.4GHz
* Chipset -- Intel QM57 Express
* Memory -- 4GB of DDR3 RAM via two SODIMM slots
* Storage -- 2.5-inch SATA hard disk drive
* Expansion -- Mini PCI slot (occupied by WLAN card)
* Networking:
o LAN -- 1 x gigabit Ethernet
o WLAN -- 802.11a/b/g/n
o WiMAX (optional)
* Other I/O:
o 4 x USB 2.0 (2 front, 2 rear)
o Audio -- mic in, line in, line out
o DisplayPort
o DVI-D
o HDMI
o VGA
* Power -- 12VDC via external AC adapter
* Operating temperature -- 32 to 104 deg. F (0 to 40 deg. C)
* Dimensions -- 7.24 x 4.92 x 1.96 inches (184 x 125 x 50mm)

Yahoo, Facebook and Google to IETF: Where are the IPv6 users?

Meeting of Internet standards body indicates shift in IPv6 debate from content to carriers

QUEBEC CITY -- Where are the users? That's what popular websites including Yahoo, Google and Facebook are asking the Internet engineering community when they are questioned about their long-range plans to deploy IPv6.

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These popular websites -- and tens of thousands of others -- participated in a successful, 24-hour trial of IPv6 on June 8 dubbed World IPv6 Day. Sponsored by the Internet Society, World IPv6 Day was a large-scale experiment designed to test the readiness of IPv6 to replace IPv4, which has been the Internet's main communications protocol since its inception 40 years ago.

The Internet's largest players are providing detailed analysis about their experiences on World IPv6 Day and they are discussing next steps for IPv6 deployment at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) being held here this week.

BACKGROUND: World IPv6 Day: Tech industry's most-watched event since Y2K

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What's evident at the IETF meeting is a shift in focus on the IPv6 debate from content to carriers. The Internet engineering community appears to be ratcheting up the pressure on ISPs, particularly residential broadband providers, to enable IPv6 to home users as the next step to IPv6 deployment.

"The focus is absolutely on the access networks," said IETF Chairman Russ Housley. "What World IPv6 Day showed is individuals who wanted to participate from home could not get IPv6 support from their ISPs. They had to set up their own [IPv6-over-IPv4] tunnels, and the average user doesn't have the knowledge to do that."

Yahoo said it deployed dual-stack IPv6 and IPv4 proxy servers at seven locations worldwide and created a special infrastructure to improve the performance of the 6to4 tunneling protocol for World IPv6 Day. Yahoo also modified its geolocation and ad-targeting code to be IPv6 aware, and it over-provisioned its IPv6 servers as an extra precaution.

On World IPv6 Day, Yahoo served IPv6 content to more than 2.2 million users, representing a peak of 0.229% of the overall traffic on 30 different Yahoo-affiliated sites. Yahoo hailed World IPv6 Day as a success but turned off IPv6 support after the event.

"IPv6 is not a wide deployment," said Igor Gashinsky, a principal architect with Yahoo. "That was a lot of work for 0.229%. We need more IPv6 access. Can we break single digits, please, and then we can talk about leaving it on?"

Similarly, Facebook served content to more than 1 million IPv6 users on World IPv6 Day. But this represented only a small fraction -- 0.2% -- of Facebook users that are IPv6 capable. Of those Facebook users, 0.16% had native IPv6 access and the other 0.04% used 6to4 tunneling.

"There are some people who are very, very passionate about IPv6 ... but it's difficult for most people to understand," said Donn Lee, a member of Facebook's network engineering team. "It's very much a concept of, 'I have restored my Internet connection.' That's what the user cares about. The user doesn't care about if it's IPv6 or IPv4."

The IETF created IPv6 a decade ago because the Internet is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.

How big is Microsoft gambling with Windows 8?

Although Windows 8 will run all traditional 32-bit or 64-bit software that now runs on Windows 7, Microsoft will also push developers to craft apps using HTML5, JavaScript and other Web-standard technologies, in a way aping the kind of online apps that Google markets.

Others were even more bullish on Windows 8's chances, and saw the transition as not so much a gamble by Microsoft, but the very best choice available.

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"It would be a risk not to do what they're doing," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. "I see a risk by doing nothing."

Epps ticked off three elements to Windows 8 she believes are critical to the operating system's future relevance, including bringing Windows to devices powered by ARM's low-powered processor architecture, the touch-first model and the stress on new applications written with HTML5.

Continuing coverage: Windows 8

"Those three elements of Windows 8 support the behavior changes taking place in PC use," Epps said. "I don't see the PC as going away, but the PC is going to change."

And from her point of view, Windows 8 is the right move by Microsoft to stay abreast of those changes.

"Windows 8 will help stave off the defections from both Microsoft's partners and its customers," Epps argued. "Microsoft is transforming Windows as its defense against defection."

Directions on Microsoft's Miller seconded Epps, to a point.

"I think what they did was to play the best hand that they had," Miller said, referring to Microsoft's need to retain the desktop OS market while tossing its hat in the tablet ring. "This is as good an opportunity as they have, and one of the boldest strokes they've taken in a long, long time."

Gartner's Silver chimed in, too. "Microsoft needs to remain relevant on the desktop, but it's not really just about the desktop anymore, is it?" said Silver.

But with so few details known about Windows 8, and so many questions unanswered, skepticism remained a theme among analysts.

"I'm more positive about this release now than I was before, but lots of questions remain," said Miller.

"Until they can tell us how legacy apps will run on Windows 8 on ARM, I'll have to be bearish on their chances," said Gillen. "That's my biggest concern....Will legacy software run on ARM, [and] if so, how? So far, we don't have any idea, and it's not because we haven't asked."

That's not the only question analysts have that Microsoft hasn't answered about Windows 8. For Miller, the toughest chore Microsoft has is just explaining its Windows 8 strategy in a clear, concise way that everyone can understand.

"Microsoft's biggest challenge between now and RTM [release to manufacturing] will be to clarify for press and analysts the idea of 'two modes' -- touch and the desktop -- of Windows 8," Miller said.

Microsoft's Gamble: Metro UI as the New Face of Windows

The tile-based Metro user interface that runs on Windows Phones will soon be the look and feel of all devices in Microsoft's ecosystem. Is this smart streamlining or a foolish consistency?

At its Worldwide Partner Conference last week, Microsoft strongly implied that the Metro user interface that adorns its Windows Phones will become the standard design across the PC, phone and Xbox 360 when Windows 8 arrives.

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Microsoft did not formally announced this as such, but showed an image at WPC 2011 (below) that has the tile-friendly Metro design plastered on a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone and on an HD television via Xbox 360.

At WPC, CEO Steve Ballmer referred to the image above and alluded to Metro as the new face of Windows.

"We're moving in a great direction in terms of a common and coherent design language and user interface across phone, slate, PC and TV."

This was not surprising, as Microsoft has already displayed the Metro UI within Windows 8 at All Things Digital's D9 conference in late May. But it was almost startling to see the myriad Metro-based devices together in one image. Windows is soon going to look … different.

As for the Metro design itself, it grows on you. Aesthetically, the tile-based look is not going to win any awards, but it does organize lots of information simply and efficiently.

Nevertheless, it's still a bold move for the software giant in that Metro will be a different interface experience for traditional Windows PC users. In addition, even though Metro has been somewhat successful as a small-screen UI on Windows Phone 7, it has no history as a big-screen PC interface design. Users will be able to opt out of Metro and run a traditional desktop interface with Windows 8, but Metro on a PC will introduce confusion.

ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes had these strong words for Metro in a blog post: "Shoving the same UI on devices that are used in different ways is either lazy or hubristic … and it disturbs me."

You could argue that Microsoft is fixing something that isn't broken. But although the Windows 7 PC experience is not broken, the rapidly approaching post-PC era will demand that the Windows experience be more fluid and flexible. And right now, Windows is fragmented.

Currently, Microsoft has: successful client OS Windows 7 running on traditional PCs and netbooks, a struggling Windows Phone with a completely different UI than Windows 7, and no tablets to speak of other than "Windows 7 tablets", which run about as smoothly as a broken-down lawnmower. So Microsoft will surely need streamlined branding and a consistent look and feel as Windows expands outside of the traditional PC.

Sure, it's a risk to trust an unproven small-screen UI as the one size that fits all. But as PC sales continue to dwindle, Windows needs to be seen as one OS that floats around every device. A common interface will help create that important perception.

What do you think of the Metro UI as the new face of Windows? Love it or hate it?

Should CIOs have a foreign policy?

With business operations entangled in the unpredictable and sometimes volatile global scene, the answer is a resounding 'yes' (and the more detailed, the better).

Computerworld - In July 2005, a series of suicide bomb attacks in London's transit system killed 56 people and threw the city into a state of confusion. The U.S.-based CEO of a multinational financial company with offices in London posed what to him seemed a simple and essential question: "Are all our people OK?"

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In fact, a significantly global operation is likely to be affected by local disruptions -- somewhere -- on a very regular basis.

"There are events happening almost constantly at any time in different parts of the world, whether a bombing in Jakarta or an uprising in Egypt or an earthquake in Japan," says Michael Shea, executive vice president for IT at International SOS, a company that provides medical and security services to travelers and has operations in 70 countries. With so many locations -- many of them in emerging markets and other politically or economically unstable areas -- operating through a crisis is business as usual. "We have to activate one of our business continuity plans about every three to four weeks," Shea says.

Even if you have few operations in unstable areas, it's wise to consider what events could disrupt your overseas operations, affect your overseas data or threaten your overseas employees. A well-thought-out foreign policy should be part of every CIO's toolkit. But how can you effectively prepare for whatever disasters the world might throw at you? Here are some ideas that might help.
Don't Plan for Everything Everywhere

In omnia paratus --"Ready for anything!" This might seem like a good approach to protecting your IT operations from all perils overseas. And indeed, some IT leaders take the position that, since there's no way to predict what might happen next in any geographic location, the best strategy is to be ready to meet absolutely any threat anywhere it may arise.

There's only one problem with this approach: It's impossible to do. "Trying to prepare for everything everywhere leads you down one of two paths, neither of which is good," says Dan Blum, an analyst at Gartner. "One path is saying that whatever you're doing will have to be good enough, since you can't know everything. The other is the path of being too paranoid and exhausting yourself chasing phantoms, and no organization can do that for very long. CIOs or chief information security officers who attempt to create and maintain the same very high level of preparedness everywhere will find their credibility eroding and their influence declining over time."

On the other hand, it can be very hard to see even a short distance into the future. Consider Orange Business Services, the business communication arm of one of Europe's largest mobile providers. The company has four major support centers in Egypt. One day last winter, Paul Joyce, senior vice president of international customer service and operations, paid a routine site visit to the company's facility near Cairo. With protests sweeping through nearby Tunisia, Joyce asked the company's local staffers whether they anticipated civil unrest in Egypt as well.

Microsoft revs dump-XP campaign, says 'time to move on'

Reminds users that the most popular OS on the planet has about 1,000 days to live

Computerworld - Microsoft on Monday made its most aggressive move yet to convince customers to drop Windows XP and adopt Windows 7, telling them that there were only 1,000 days of support life left in the older operating system.

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Stephen Rose, IT community manager for the Windows commercial team, noted the 1,000 days remaining for Windows XP support in a post to a Microsoft blog.

"Windows XP had an amazing run and millions of PC users are grateful for it. But it's time to move on," Rose said, adding that the operating system exits security support in "less than 1,000 days."

The 10-year-old XP actually has a little longer to live than that: Microsoft has promised to patch XP through April 8, 2014, 1,002 days from Monday.

"Bottom line, PCs running Windows XP will be vulnerable to security threats" after that date, said Rose. "Furthermore, many third-party software providers are not planning to extend support for their applications running on Windows XP, which translates to even more complexity, security risks, and ultimately, added management costs for your IT department."

According to usage statistics and research firm surveys, Microsoft has its work cut out for it in moving users off XP.

Web metrics firm Net Applications now has Windows 7's usage share at 27%, for example, but XP still powers 51% of the world's personal computers. If the trends of each over the past three months continue, Windows 7 usage won't surpass that of XP until the second quarter of 2012.

Businesses are even more reliant on Windows XP, said Forrester Research, when it recently estimated the aging operating system's share at 60% of enterprise PCs.

Monday's blog post wasn't the first time Microsoft has portrayed XP as yesterday's OS. Earlier this year, executives on the Internet Explorer team called XP the "lowest common denominator" as they explained why the OS wouldn't run IE9 or any future browsers.

And the company has taken firm steps to kill off other products it considers obsolete. Since mid-2009, Microsoft has urged users to give up IE6, the browser that shipped shortly before XP. Four months ago, it upped the ante by launching a deathwatch website that highlights IE6's dwindling usage share.

The push to abandon XP coincided with the opening of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, the company's annual reseller meeting. CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off WPC by celebrating another Windows 7 milestone: selling 400 million licenses for the OS.

Tami Reller, head of product marketing for the Windows group, cited that number to compare Windows 7's uptake with XP's in the same span of time.

"That is three times the pace of Windows XP," Reller said.

Vista's Incredible Vanishing Act

Microsoft is so anxious to kill of Windows Vista, it made the OS vanish. Now it wants you to do the same.

Steve Ballmer pulled off a great trick the other day. He made Windows Vista completely vanish. Well, he'd like to, but he needs your help to make it go away like the bad idea it was.

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I've seen some impressive keynotes, but few can top the sight of the Staples Center filled to capacity for the opening keynote in Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference. With a small stage in the middle, CEO Steve Ballmer addressed a crowd typically only seen for Lakers games and concerts by major stars (and I don't think he needed a microphone to be heard, either).

It was a bit of a letdown that we got no preview of Windows 8. That, we were told, will come at the Build show in September. Instead, the message from Tami Reller, CFO and corporate vice president of the Windows division, was simple: Dump Windows XP.

It's rather comical that for the second time in a year, Microsoft has launched an initiative to get people to stop using one of its products. But like IE 6, XP stayed on the market too long and became too deeply embedded to get rid of it that easily.

Reller offered both a carrot and a stick as incentives to migrate. The carrot Reller offered was savings. She cited the example of the city of Miami, which saved $90 per year for each of its 2,500 PCs just from improved power management. The stick was that Windows XP will hit the end-of-life stage, where Microsoft will not provide any more fixes, in about 1,000 days.

She said that of the 1.2 billion Windows licenses worldwide, 400 million were Windows 7 and the rest were Windows XP, which immediately begged the question of where's Vista? I can't fault them for wanting to forget Vista ever happened but it's still a large portion of the ecosystem.

The fact is, Vista is in limbo, which is as good as dead in this business. On the one hand, it's an abandoned operating system that customers and Microsoft alike want nothing to do with it. On the other hand, it routinely falls into the same bucket as Windows 7 because it uses the same device driver and app model. You often see this in device drivers: Windows XP or Vista/7.

As reviled as Vista was by consumers, it has gained significant share. It was on the market for three years and on average, about 200 to 300 million PCs are sold every year. Many shunned Vista but a lot did not. Steam, the online games sales software, does some interesting analytics. Now I'll preface this by saying its profile is of home users/gamers, not enterprises. That said, as of May, 32-bit and 64-bit Vista combined accounts for 24 percent of systems running Steam software. Windows 7 64-bit topped the list at 38 percent.

There are other places where XP is embedded and not easily replaced: emerging markets, where XP is an advanced operating system; netbooks, which ran XP until Windows 7 shipped; and companies delaying a rollout for one reason or another. It could be they have custom apps that are still not certified on Windows 7 or maybe they plan to make Windows 7 part of a bigger app rollout (along with Office 2010. for instance) and it's taking longer to stage.

I realize that the migration away from XP is likely slowed due to the economy and people won't replace an XP or Vista machine until it finally dies. The bottom line is, you XP and Vista users are rapidly being abandoned. Mainstream support for XP is over, end-of-life is in 2014. Mainstream Vista support ends in April 2012 and end-of-life is April 2017, but really, you want to get off XP and Vista a lot sooner than that.

The 6 Hottest New Jobs in IT

IT job seekers have real reason to hope. No fewer than 10,000 IT jobs were added to payrolls in May alone, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, reflecting a steady month-over-month increase since January. And in a June survey by the IT jobs site Dice.com, 65 percent of hiring managers and recruiters said they will hire more tech professionals in the second half of 2011 than in the previous six months.

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According to Nie, data science jobs will require workers with a spectrum of skills, from entry-level data cleaners to the high-level statisticians, yielding a range of opportunities for newcomers to the field. As the business world gets increasingly social, the demand for people to plumb the depths of all that social networking clickstream data will only increase. The cliché going around is that "data is the new oil." A career in refining that raw material sounds like a good bet.

Hot IT job No. 3: Social media architect

Social Web tools and services are now entering business at every level, from back-office IT communications to top-floor business collaboration, partner-connected workflow, and public-facing customer support. As the complexity of social business grows, companies need specialists to make it all work.

Social media no longer means just Facebook and Twitter. IBM, Jive, and Yammer are now the companies to watch, offering social tools for public and private clouds that redefine the role of social media for business. This creates a demand for IT pros with the specialized knowledge to build secure communities within a business network and between businesses and customers.

"In 2010, we saw the growth of a new middleware layer to protect intellectual property while opening things up with social tools," says IDC analyst Michael Fauscette, who researches social business trends. "You're starting to see that kind of thing because companies want the benefits of the social Web without the risks of putting their business in the hands of [Facebook and Twitter]."

In the enterprise, says Fauscette, social tools need to work together securely while offering transparency to the business. The clickstream data and other user intelligence that these tools produce need to be accessible and searchable inside the business, yet impenetrable from outside the business.

In large companies, a given company's social infrastructure tends to include multiple social platforms. Designing an infrastructure in which all these apps can work together will require IT pros focused explicitly on social business.

Because social business is still in its infancy, the range of emerging job titles varies widely, but at least they've matured beyond the generalized, marketing-centered monikers like "social media strategist" and "social media manager" that first appeared. In our conversations with analysts, leaders at IT job sites, and socially driven companies, we've seen an array of more specialized titles, ranging from director of social business technology to director of enterprise collaboration strategy to, most commonly, social media architect.

IT jobs: Winners and losers in the cloud era

We survey the cloud's effects on nine classes of IT jobs: Architects and sys admins win, middle managers and tech specialists lose -- what about you?

Consultant Cramm expects the demand for developers to remain strong in a cloud-oriented enterprise -- it's just that less of the development will be done internally and more by outsiders. "If you can get what you need externally, in terms of enterprise applications, why build it yourself?" she asks. "Someone still has to do that programming; it's just not you."

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Losers: IT middle managers If there is one class within IT that will suffer from wider adoption of cloud and virtualized systems, it is those between the hands-on supervisors and the managers who work directly with the CIO. "Think about it," says Gartner's Wolf. "If you have sys admins doing networking and applications and storage and there's a lot of reaching across among silos, why do you need a separate manager for each silo?"

He adds, "There's an overall flattening of management within IT as a lot of those silos become obsolete, and so it becomes more important to be a generalist who can do a lot of things than to remain a specialist at any one thing."

Losers: Technical specialists Specialized skills -- in networking, security, storage, or any other IT discipline -- has been the best guarantor of a job or chance for advancement in many IT organizations, says 451 Group's Hackett. Not any more.

IT people working with applications based in the cloud need to know about networking, storage, security, user interfaces, and all the other parts of the infrastructure that application touches. "IT doesn't require skilled resources at the lower levels to maintain a data center. It requires a guy who can go over to a rack, pull out a bad board, put another one in, and slap it back in the rack," Hackett says.

That means IT needs more people able to do a lot of things and not as many who can do a very few things very, very well, consultant Olds says. "Increasingly what we're seeing is that companies are willing to hire those [specialized] skills from outside on a temporary basis. So you end up with IT being populated much more by IT generalists, but they're generalists with a lot higher level of skills than before. That's good internally because you're hiring experienced people, but it makes getting that first job or two harder for people right out of school or who are very early in their careers. There's a higher barrier of skills to climb."

Uncertain implications: IT support and help desk Predicting the demise of the help desk and direct IT support role is risky because users always need more help than IT can afford to give, analysts agree.

As enterprise applications become more intuitive and Web-oriented, and as corporate applications become available in an app store that users can browse to find the applications or resources they need, the need for hordes of support people living on the phone or walking into business units to repair someone's laptop decreases.

"If you can put all your apps in a Web interface, so they live in the cloud, and the desktops are either remote-managed or provisioned via VDI virtual desktop infrastructure, it's more possible to fix a problem by closing out the VM and relaunching a virtual desktop for that user, or to log in remotely, fix things, and log out," Olds says.

Who are all these hacker groups?

They go by names like Anonymous, Lulz Security, Zeus, Night Dragon, Green Army Corp, Inj3ct0r Team; their goals, methods, effectiveness vary

Hacker groups that attack or steal — some estimates say there are as many as 6,000 of such groups online with about 50,000 "bad actors" around the world drifting in and out of them — are a threat, but the goals, methods, effectiveness of these groups varies widely.

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Malicious activity alert: Anonymous hack-school grads come online in 30 days

When they're angry, they hack into business and government systems to steal confidential data in order to expose information about their targets, or they simply disrupt them with denial-of-service attacks. These are the hackers with a cause, the "hacktivists" like the shadowy but well-publicized Anonymous or the short-lived Lulz Security group (which claimed to have just six members and just joined forces with Anonymous).

Over the years, Anonymous is believed to have hit targets that include the Church of Scientology, the Support Online Hip Hop website, the No Cussing Club website, and posted pornographic videos disguised as children's videos onto YouTube. It's said to have joined with Iranians protesting the results of the June 2009 Iranian presidential election. It's tied to taking down the Australian prime minister's website in 2009 because of the government's plans there to have ISPs censor porn on the Internet. Anonymous has taken up the cause of piracy activists fighting copyright law by launching denial-of-service attacks against anti-piracy groups and law firms. The group is supporting WikiLeaks, which publishes confidential information, including the U.S. State Department cables allegedly leaked by U.S. Army soldier Bradley Manning, now in a military jail awaiting trial.

Anonymous, perhaps tied to the Sony hacking incidents, has launched distributed DoS attacks against Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and others when the card-payment groups refused to process donations to WikiLeaks. Anonymous has sprung into conflicts, such as this year's uprisings in the Mideast, hitting the websites of the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan governments. The group recently let the world know its chief focus these days is going to be targeting governments and corporations.

But hacktivists like Anonymous are just one type of hacker group. Others are out for financial gain, well-organized to steal payment-card numbers and personal financial data, or pillage bank accounts. And there are groups that focus on intellectual-property theft or steal valuable information for national interests, or money, or both.

Here's a look at what's known about some of them — including the ones that unlike the hacktivists, seldom "Tweet" the world about what they do.
The Zeus gangs

The malware called ZeuS is designed to plunder victims' PCs to steal financial information and execute fraudulent high-dollar Automated Clearinghouse (ACH) transfers in corporate bank accounts, resulting in many millions of dollars in fraud against businesses, church groups and government agencies.

The Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) and international law-enforcement partners in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the Ukraine managed to disrupt one of the six main ZeuS hacker groups last fall in a sweep that netted about 100 suspects tied to $70 million in U.S. bank heists. But the leader of what's called "JabberZeus" (because the specific variant of ZeuS used Jabber instant message to tell gang members when a victim's online banking credentials were stolen) is still believed to remain at large. And according to Don Jackson, senior security researcher at Dell SecureWorks. which has worked with business and the FBI, there are still five other separate ZeuS hacker groups very active across the world. These Zeus hacker groups have now been connected to "a billion dollars in losses," says Jackson.

Microsoft Rolls Dice Hopes For (Windows) 7 And (IE) 8

After taking a lot of flak for Windows Vista, Microsoft has recently released beta versions of two of its most popular products–Windows and Internet Explorer–in an attempt to recover lost ground.

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IE 8 is equally impressive in terms of features and functions, but is likely to face an uphill task in the face of competition from the likes of Opera, Firefox, Safari and now, Google’s Chrome, all of which update versions far more frequently than Microsoft does. Our brief look at IE 8 showed it to be a capable browser, if a trifle too stacked with features, resulting in making it less than intuitive to use. But it allows you to do pretty much everything that every other browser lets you do, from smoothly accessing your favourites to easy bookmarking. And there are some features that others do not have, such as Accelerators (which let you get stacks of information without having to key in URLs) and Web Slices (that allow you to get regular updates from specific sites without your having to go to them). Also, the fact that it will come bundled with Windows 7 (no, we have no intention of stirring up that controversy here) means that it will have a fair degree of popularity among users, who will use it as their default Internet browsing option.

But the real challenge for Microsoft will be to convince users to move up not just from Vista but from XP. How it does this is going to be interesting. We are sure the overall approach will be a lot more subtle than Steve Ballmer’s warning that users expect the latest operating systems in their work environment, and might be dissatisfied if asked to work on older systems (see ‘They Said IT’ on Page 12). Whatever happens, 2009 is going to be an interesting year for Microsoft, with the company also readying a new version of its Windows Mobile OS, version 6.5. Will these products get the Redmond giant back on track? Or will they accelerate its (perceived, we hasten to add) decline? Stay tuned…

Let's face it: HTML5 is no app dev panacea

Don't believe the hype: building serious applications still takes more than mere Web markup

4. Building platform-specific HTML apps makes no sense
But let's say you don't care about targeting every device or platform. Let's say you're just building an app for iOS or for Windows 8 -- fine. But why on Earth would you pick HTML to build an application for a single platform? The whole point of HTML and its related technologies is that they are open, cross-platform standards.

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What's more, both iOS and Windows already have SDKs that mitigate many of the drawbacks of building apps the HTML way. They do give you a standard set of widgets that allow you to build consistent UIs. They give you access to APIs that let you run algorithms at native processor speed. They allow you to integrate your app with core OS features, ones that aren't present on other platforms (which were presumably why customers chose those platforms to begin with). And you'd give all that up, why? Because coding Web apps is "easier"? Even if that were true, try putting it on your résumé.

5. Limiting developers to Web technologies is wrong
There's no surer way to start a catfight on a Web development forum than to ask what's the "best" programming language. Developers can be passionate about their tools, and there certainly is a wide range to choose from.

The Web narrows that range, however. Building Web apps means coding in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We all learned them because we had to learn them. That doesn't mean we have to love them.

But because everybody knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, those languages have a huge installed base of developers. That's the real reason why vendors are so quick to claim that developing for their new platform is "as easy as coding in HTML5." By doing so, they get to assert there are millions of developers who already know how to work with their platform -- even though that's never strictly true, because every OS and platform has its own idiosyncrasies.

So vendors will continue to tout how much you can do with Web technologies, and they'll continue to bolt SDKs based on HTML and JavaScript to their existing operating systems -- because it's good marketing. I just wish they wouldn't. Such tools are almost never as powerful as they're cracked up to be, and they're never really popular with professional developers (as opposed to casual "HTML programmers"). In the end, they're merely a distraction from the many, many other tools that might be more powerful, more elegant, or better suited to the task at hand. Enough already!

Why is it so hard to push good .Net patches?

June's 'Black Tuesday' patches to Windows' .Net Framework library have admins hopping mad -- again

Why can't Microsoft turn out decent patches for its sprawling .Net Framework? That's what I -- and about a million admins all over the world -- want to know.

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Last month's Black Tuesday .Net patches, MS11-039 and MS11-044, set new lows, even for Microsoft, even for .Net patches. There's a list of known problems with MS11-044, documented in KB 2538814, that's as long as your arm. As long as Michael Jordan's arm, for that matter -- and those are just the problems Microsoft has fessed up to.

Susan Bradley updates a lot of different Windows systems and, as a Microsoft MVP for Small Business Server, catches a lot of flak from other admins who are trying to keep their boxes running. She puts it succinctly: "I think Microsoft ought to be ashamed of how difficult it is to keep .Net updated. I don't come to this conclusion lightly."

Indeed -- in the past year, Microsoft has published seven Security Bulletins for .Net Framework 3.5 or 4 (MS10-041, MS10-060, MS10-070, MS10-077, MS11-028, MS11-039, and MS11-044). Most of the Security Bulletins have at least a handful of acknowledged, documented problems. MS11-028 was withdrawn and re-issued. MS10-077 was re-issued with a "detection change"; in other words, the installer didn't work right; Microsoft pulled the patch and then posted a different version. MS10-070 was pulled and re-issued; the documentation is now up to version 4.1 and counting. MS10-041 was pulled, re-issued, then pulled and re-issued again. You get the picture.

Why is it so incredibly difficult to issue reliable patches for .Net?

For starters, .Net isn't a nice, neat bundle. It's a spread-out mess of issued, updated, and redacted components. In many cases, admins have to keep old versions around because new versions can break old apps. It isn't unusual to find Windows PCs running three or more different copies of .Net Framework. I've seen versions 1.1, 2.0 SP 1, 2.0 SP 2, 3.0, 3.0 SP 2, 3.5, 3.5 SP 1, 4 Client, and 4 Full on fairly recent machines.

My production machine is currently running .Net Framework 2.0 SP 2, 3.0 SP 2, 3.5 SP 1, 4 Client, and 4 Full. That's five different versions of .Net, all installed on the same Windows 7 PC. I don't dare remove any of them manually, for fear of breaking an application that relies on a specific version.

One of the problems is so common -- receiving a Windows Update error code 0x643 or Windows Installer error code 1603 -- that Microsoft points people to a single Knowledge Base article that describes how to dislodge the automatic update mechanism and try again. The Knowledge Base article says the trick works with .Net 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5. One can only wonder why it took Microsoft so long to fix the faulty installer logic.

Ultimately, the problem stems from the fact that .Net is more like an operating system within an operating system -- a collection of sometimes-conflicting libraries and protocols that have evolved significantly over the past 10 years, with hooks deep into every nook and cranny of every Windows version. Still, if Microsoft can produce somewhat reliable patches to the Windows kernel, why does it keep dropping the ball with .Net?

While many of us wonder how Microsoft will support .Net in Windows 8 (see Joab Jackson's analysis in Developer_World), experienced admins also question how in the world Microsoft will patch it. Immersive apps with the new Windows Division-written CLR sure sound nice, but who's going to keep the bloody thing working?

Curious about which versions of .Net are running on your computers? Download and run the .Net Framework Setup Verification Utility, no installation necessary. The drop-down box lists all of the detected versions.

The Network Performance Management Challenge

When it comes to server virtualization and cloud computing, network performance management may be an Achilles' heel.

There is no question that server virtualization can help organizations reduce costs while streamlining operations. I constantly hear stories about server provisioning going from weeks to hours now that it is as simple as spinning up a new VM. In theory, this will get even easier as IT develops applications on top of cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, and Google App Engine while leaving all of the infrastructure gorp for others to deal with.

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Unfortunately, there is a catch to this Polyanna tale. Server virtualization drives higher utilization of servers, more network I/O, and can distribute workloads that need to communicate. What's more, VMs are mobile by nature. All of these things -- higher density, more I/O, server-to-server traffic, and VM mobility make performance tuning an absolute bear. One VP of network engineering told me, "we are tuning the network all the time," while another stated, "we did a deep dive on network flows and traffic analysis to understand how server virtualization was impacting network performance. We knew things were running slow but it took a lot of work to figure out why."

This is a big problem. According to a recent ESG survey, 25% of organizations say that performance management is one of their biggest server virtualization challenges. Hybrid clouds? Burstable applications? Unless we figure out basic performance management in a virtual server environment, the cloud will remain a vision.

How do we address this problem? First, we need visibility up and down the stack -- in real-time. Second, we need a better baseline understanding of network behavior. Note that I didn't say "normal" behavior as nothing will be normal when infrastructure is shared across diverse workloads. We will need to extract operations data from virtualization and cloud platforms (like vCenter or Eucalyptus) and we will also need to store more packet capture data and marry network performance management with big data analytics. Finally, we will need standard ways to share and exchange network behavior data with cloud providers and ISPs.

Some of this work is in progress already -- companies like NetScout, Opnet, and SolarWinds recognize IT requirements and are moving quickly to capitalize on the market opportunity. Riverbed may also have an interesting play here with a combination of Cascade and Wireshark. Vendors that are making progress understand that network dynamics are changing rapidly. Keeping up with these changes means capturing and analyzing data to a far greater degree than past LAN/WAN performance management efforts.

When it comes to cloud computing, everyone talks about security as being the biggest impediment. That may be true, but network performance management must become more virtualization aware and cloud-ready before the cloud computing show plays on Broadway. This IT challenge creates a huge market opportunity.

Diving Deeper with NetFlow Tips and Tricks

Templates, sFlow versus NetFlow, what DNS requests can tell you and other secrets from analysis experts

Readers have told me that they like blog posts with technical tips and tricks. So I asked SolarWinds to write an article about making the most out of NetFlow. The following is a guest post written by Denny LeCompte, SolarWinds VP of Product Management and Mav Turner, SolarWinds Product Manager. SolarWinds makes the popular Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) that analyzes Cisco NetFlow, Juniper J-Flow, IPFIX, & sFlow data. Got more questions about NetFlow? Leave them as a comment and we'll see if we can get them answered for you.

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This article will provide you with some insight on how to take your NetFlow skills to the next level and provide you insight on some of the more important aspects like templates and what you can do with them. It will also explain how to dissect all of that data you are collecting and how to get on the right path if you want to go full guns a-blazin’ and create your very own NetFlow tool.

When Cisco introduced NetFlow v1 for its routers and switches, it was really onto something. By the time v5 came around, it set the stage to become a ubiquitous traffic monitoring solution, and it is a wonderful tool for collecting critical information on network traffic.

Best of all, NetFlow v5 can be enabled on most network devices, making it easy to deploy and configure across the network. And if a vendor isn’t using NetFlow, chances are they are using something similar called sFlow. So, you should have your bases covered. When deployed correctly, NetFlow provides you with a crystal ball of information that lets you know how your network’s bandwidth is being utilized.

Why would you want to analyze Netflow and, more importantly, why would you want to dive deeper? Well, if you are experiencing a network slowdown, it could be a symptom of something more serious, like bandwidth hogs using YOUR network to torrent movies or host large personal files that are shared out to the world. You could be experiencing network configuration problems, security breaches/attack, or a botnet … oh my!