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Steve Gillmor and Nik Cubrilovic, the hosts of the new TechCrunchIT site, snagged an interview with salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff after the announcement of Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs. Benioff gives a lengthy commercial for his platforms-as-a-service strategy to remake the software industry and create a multi-billion dollar software company.

I covered the announcement today in my post “Marc Benioff’s mantra: Anything but Microsoft”.

When asked about the challenges for older enterprises, Benioff said, “I don’t have time or patience for the status quo…for people who are trying to control innovation or stop the future.” He included Microsoft, as well as unnamed vendors, partners, journalists and other parties on his list of those who are holding onto the past and getting in the way of innovation.

“Thank god for Google,” he added, citing his ally in the battle against Microsoft and the cloud-forsaken Luddites. It’s shaping up to be an interesting battle. Salesforce.com could also find itself as an acquisition target.

Amid an escalating debate over just how kid-safe social-networking sites are, Texas authorities on Wednesday announced the arrest of a sex offender accused of using MySpace in violation of his parole.

The use of social networks by sex offenders has become a hot topic. Attorneys general claim the sites are not kid-safe if so many registered sex offenders are on there, while a recent report finds that those concerns may be overblown.

“The safety and security of our users is a top priority for MySpace. We have removed and preserved the MySpace profile of this offender,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer, said in a statement. “We employ a best of breed solution that we continue to improve on an ongoing basis in an ever changing environment. We hope that the remaining 29 states, including Texas, quickly pass e-mail registration legislation so that offenders can be punished for providing false information online.”

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott

The MySpace home page of convicted sex offender Jesse Scott, arrested for allegedly violating his parole by using MySpace.

(Credit:
Texas Attorney General's office)

Sentinel, the technology provider MySpace uses to find sex offenders on its site, accused Facebook this week of having 9,000 registered sex offenders on its site in what looks on the surface to be a ploy to drum up business.

The arrest announcement comes one day after MySpace handed over the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders found on its site to the Connecticut Attorney General’s office, which had subpoenaed the social-networking site last month for the data.

Jesse Clay Scott, 33, of Seguin, Texas, is just the latest of about 30 convicted sex offenders arrested to date by the Texas Attorney General’s Fugitive and Cyber Crimes units for allegedly accessing MySpace in violation of parole conditions. Four others were arrested for allegedly using the social-networking site to meet and sexually proposition undercover agents posing as minors under the age of 15, the Texas Attorney General’s office said in a statement and videotaped news conference.

(Credit:
Texas Attorney General's office)

Scott, arrested last week, allegedly used both his home computer and cell phone to access his MySpace account. He was paroled in 2008 after serving five and a half years in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl, the statement said.

A MySpace representative said the News Corp.-owned social network is doing everything it can to keep sex offenders off the site.

All MySpace users will, by default, get OpenIDs when the project is turned on at some point in the near future. If they don’t use the OpenID login from other sites, they will not notice any changes to their MySpace login experience.

While these initiatives are powerful and important for MySpace, and are good for users, neither implementation is, yet, fully open, since they’re both one way. As I said, MySpace is not yet allowing users to login to the service with OpenIDs obtained elsewhere, nor is it allowing Data Availability partners to write data into MySpace profiles. Benedetto told me, “It would be very beneficial to us to have data coming in,” but that the company needs to take a phased approach to supporting data sharing. “We’re stepping in to uncharted territory,” he said. Previous sharing projects in the industry have failed, he said.

(Credit:
MySpace)

Data Availability is a powerful concept. It makes it possible to take your profile page and your social network created in MySpace, and push them into another service. Like MySpace’s OpenID initiative, this project is part of MySpace’s plan to become a hub of identity.

MySpace today is announcing support for the OpenID identify platform. This means users of services that let you log in to them with OpenID will be able to use their MySpace credentials for the login. As TechCrunch pointed out, though, this appears to be a “land grab for user identities,” since MySpace isn’t allowing users to log in to MySpace with an OpenID account from another identity provider.

MySpace's Data Availability program allows other sites to import MySpace profiles. Eventful shown here.

Full and open synchronization with other identify platforms and social networks would be much more complex than the current initiatives, and would likely confuse users at first, but ultimately this is what users are going to want: Truly portable social network data. It’s the only way users can end up owning their online identities.

Jim Benedetto, MySpace VP Technology, says that he is not opposed to letting users login to MySpace from other OpenID parties. The current initiative, he says, “is step one.” “We’re looking at down the road becoming the relying party,” (a site that recognizes other OpenID logins) he said.

The company is also announcing today that two implementations of its Data Availability program are going live. It’s showing how profile data from MySpace can be imported into user accounts in Eventful and Flixter.

In the future, Benedetto says, the OpenID and Data Availability projects will merge. Users will be able to use their MySpace OpenID to access their profile and network, “even when they are not on MySpace.” Supporting OpenId will allow users to “login to the long tail of the Internet” via MySpace. Data Availability could make their profiles ubiquitous.

With a focus on technology and government, the debate is being moderated by Time magazine blogger Anna Marie Cox. The McCain campaign is represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign is represented by Mike Nelson, a Georgetown University professor who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.

The latest in debate 2.0 is a campaign face-off on Twitter sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum that started Friday and is expected to go on at least through the end of the organization’s annual conference on Tuesday night.

And we thought the YouTube and Facebook presidential debates were all that.

It’s yet another interesting use of technology to engage voters in the campaign, so long as they don’t mind sorting through posts that while succinct (Twitter has a 140-character limit for individual Tweets), are already plentiful. And we can only hope that the geek community’s beloved Twitter doesn’t crash amid the traffic.

Engadget points out that Intel will likely have low-voltage and ultra-low voltage Penryn-class chips out fairly soon, in line with Intel’s historical product segmentation. That would ease some of the power concerns, although the lower voltage chips have historically underperformed their standard counterparts.

Rumors of new Apple notebooks have been all over the place this summer, given the length of time since the last redesign of the MacBook and Intel’s new Montevina chips. But Phone News believes that the MacBook Air will also get a new Penryn chip that will improve performance at the cost of battery life.

Apple’s MacBook Air could be getting a fresh new look–inside at least–in the coming weeks.

(Credit:
Apple)

The problem is the standard Penryn chip consumes more power than the chip currently used inside the MacBook Air. Phone News thinks Apple will compensate for the increased power draw with a larger battery and a more powerful charging adapter.

The MacBook Air’s performance doesn’t really compare to that of the rest of the MacBook lineup, but it was designed to be thin and light, not as a gaming rig. Still, adding one of the new Penryn chips to the MacBook Air could help improve performance for things like video playback, noted by some as an issue with the early MacBook Air units.

The MacBook Air could be getting a new chip in short order.

“I would ask the committee to recognize demanding accountability from law enforcement agencies is essential to our security,” he said, emphasizing the need for metrics. “If we can’t measure how effective these programs are, then we shouldn’t fund them.”

Protections of the Fourth Amendment
There is also the danger that, as counterterrorism programs solicit more and more help from traditional law enforcement, the protections of the Fourth Amendment will be encroached upon. The Fourth Amendment has already “been rendered a paper tiger in the area of data mining,” Cate said.

The collection, retention, and dissemination of this information has dangerously escaped public oversight and congressional scrutiny, public sector experts warned Congress on Wednesday. If the next Congress and administration do not take steps to rein in these programs that are bloating the federal government, they said, it will come at the expense of both civil liberties and national security.

Policy experts laid out their concerns to the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, which hosted a series of roundtable discussions on privacy and civil liberties. Too many loopholes exist in the Privacy Act, government data mining programs are ineffective, and information-sharing programs are growing without any accountability, they said.

Not only are these programs ineffective, but there are few legal limits to how information can be used once it is collected, breeding in people “a fundamental distrust and contempt” of the government, Cate said.

Sparapani said the committee should do everything in its power to enact legislation explicitly shutting down predictive data mining.

“Enormous quantities of data are being acquired,” Sparapani said. “We know all it does is create noise in the system.”

It is well founded that the government runs data-mining programs through which they monitor some people’s activities in search of unusual information that may indicate terrorist activity is at work. However, there is “massive overclassification” of such national security programs, said Michael German, national security policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Panelists also urged the Homeland Security Committee to hold a hearing to review the Information Sharing Environment, which Congress established in 2004 in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. President Bush issued privacy guidelines for the ISE in 2006, but they are insufficient, they said.

About 60 fusion centers have been established in a number of states–without proper congressional oversight, German said.

The federal government has been too secretive about predictive data mining, said Fred Cate, director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, because “the lesson from the (Total Information Awareness) debacle is just don’t say what you’re doing, and you won’t get the pushback.”

Increasingly, Murphy said, the Homeland Security Department refers to the goals of preventing crime and preventing terrorism interchangeably when providing guidance to its “fusion centers” across the country, where state and local law enforcement share intelligence with federal agencies.

There should also be statutory limitations to how long such information can be retained, the panelists said.

Americans leave behind countless digital footprints from everyday activities like making a phone call or using a credit card–footprints government agencies regularly track as part of their counterterrorism efforts.

“The truth is, we cannot do everything, so we have to set priorities that maintain the values of a free society,” said Laura Murphy, president of Laura Murphy & Associates.

“Predictive data mining is akin to alchemy or astrology in its relationship to science,” said Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU.

Policy experts on Wednesday criticized the secretive nature of government information collection programs.

“The ISE was enacted without any hearings on the civil liberties aspects on its creation,” said Kate Martin, the director for the Center for National Security Studies. “If we’re no longer going to have a government limited in how much information it collects, it should be limited in what it can share.”

The Homeland Security Committee should take more steps to hold data-mining programs publicly accountable, panelists said, particularly predictive data-mining programs, which aim to predict terrorist activity based on previously established patterns.

There would be pushback, panelists said, because there is zero evidence predictive data mining has ever or would ever be effective for combating terrorism.

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

SanDisk has a production joint venture with Toshiba, which also makes solid- state drives.

Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. “We have very good internal controller technology, as you know…That said, I’d say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment,” he added.

“Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we’ll start sampling end of this year, early next year,” Harari said.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are used instead of hard disk drives in select high-end notebook PCs today such as the Apple MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege R500.

SanDisk said Monday that
Windows Vista is not optimized for solid-state drives, delaying the delivery of optimized drives until next year.

Speaking during SanDisk’s second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid-state drive makers. “As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk,” he said.

The next generation of SSDs will use multilevel cell (MLC) technology, which will require a more sophisticated controller–a crucial component in solid-state drives. These drives will have capacities ranging up to 128GB, 160GB, and later, 256GB. MLC drives are expected to appear in a wider selection of notebooks later this year.

In the very low-end of the market, however, this is not an issue. “In very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs, existing controllers can get the job done for 8-, 16-, and 32-gigabyte storage because these are relatively unsophisticated…requirements,” he said.

(Credit:
SanDisk)

This is due to Vista’s design. “The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,” he said.

(Credit:
Psystar)

Once a copyright owner consents to the sale of particular copies of a work, the owner may not thereafter exercise distribution rights with respect to those copies. See, e.g., Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339, 350-51 (1908) (recognizing more than 100 years ago the concept of first sale and the limitations imposed upon a copyright owner in light thereof). Psystar acquired lawful copies of the Mac OS from Apple; those copies were lawfully acquired from authorized distributors including some directly from Apple; Psystar paid good and valuable consideration for those copies; Psystar disposed of those lawfully acquired copies to third-parties.

The problem with this argument is that courts have rarely agreed that the first-sale doctrine applies to software, considering software a product that is licensed, not sold, and can therefore have restrictions attached. There was a case involving Adobe that concluded otherwise, but for the most part courts have tended to side with the software developer.

Apple and Psystar are scheduled to meet next week to discuss the case and the latest arguments.

Psystar is pursuing a new legal argument in its uphill fight against Apple.

Psystar is still tilting at legal windmills in its battle against Apple, this time asserting its right to do whatever it wants with products obtained legally from Apple.

After a judge rejected Psystar’s antitrust argument–considered its best chance of continuing to sell its Open Computers with
Mac OS X preinstalled–the Florida clone maker was allowed to amend its claims against Apple to include other arguments. It has already suggested that Apple is abusing its copyright on the operating system, and now it plans to argue that since Psystar legally purchased its copies of Mac OS X from Apple and resellers, it has the right to do basically whatever it wants with that software under the first-sale doctrine.

Computerworld spotted court filings to that effect submitted by Psystar last week. Here’s a key passage:

For a while, it made sense to not port titles to the Wii. More often than not, games developers like EA were creating were simply too advanced for Nintendo’s console and moving a button control scheme to hand-waving isn’t exactly simple. But now that the Wii has solidified its place in the industry, the number of options available to EA and the rest are small and they’re forced to innovate.

Regardless of whether or not EA actually is fine, don’t you think the company should have admitted this long ago? And let’s also not forget that EA isn’t alone in this. Countless other developers have denigrated the value of the
Wii and even today, most of them don’t want anything to do with it even though it’s selling like gangbusters.

How wrong they were. Unlike Nintendo, which chose innovation over all else, developers never believed that people would actually want to play a video game that didn’t include some sort of killing, stealing, or action that was controlled by their own movement. Instead, they hitched themselves to two companies that tried to stay true to tradition and pretend that Nintendo wasn’t a competitor or even a major force in the space.

It’s easy for developers to ignore the Wii when it’s not available in stores, but they can’t do it anymore. As development costs continue to rise and Wii sales easily outstrip its competitors, developers need that third source of revenue and it’s in their best interests to support the consoles that consumers covet the most.

But all that needs to change. The reality of the situation is that Nintendo is the leader and it doesn’t look like it will slow down anytime soon. And if developers want to turn a profit in this era of expensive games and multi-platform titles, they’re going to be forced to embrace the Wii and either develop unique titles for the platform or go through the process of porting it to the console, no matter the cost.

Isn’t it unfortunate that only after the Wii forces these companies to innovate that we will see some unique titles? Granted, not all Wii games from third parties will be innovative and some will be ports, but I don’t see any other option. If nothing else, Wii owners have shown that the games like Wii Fit, Wii Sports, and Wii Play are coveted above all else and ported titles from EA and the rest aren’t usually the best-selling.

It needs to stop. Instead of clinging to the faulty belief that only Sony and Microsoft matter in the software space, developers need to start focusing more on the Wii and develop games that are not only innovative, but more in the vein of those titles they’re creating for the competing consoles. And in the end, I think we’ll all win.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed!

I don’t think that’s asking for too much.

As Riccitiello pointed out, most developers severely downplayed the significance of the Wii before it was made available. I can hear it now: “A console from Nintendo that doesn’t use a traditional controller and lets people throw their hands around to control the on-screen action? No way.”

In an interesting interview last week with the San Jose Mercury News, EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello said although his company is doing quite well in the video game space, it committed a major blunder earlier on in this generation and now it’s trying to play catch-up.

And although some like to make the argument that developers don’t really want to get into the Wii game because of its poor attach rate, I’m not so quick to agree. On average, the Wii has a 5.3 attach rate according to NPD, which is just 2 games behind the Xbox 360. Granted, many of those games are Nintendo titles, but I’m not willing to concede that Nintendo is leading in the Wii software space because it’s a first-party. Instead, I think it’s leading because developers have been so slow to make games for the console.

“One thing that’s different [this generation] is we typically figured out who the market leader was going to be before the start of the cycle and bet with our development resources on that platform,” Riccitiello told the Mercury News. “We made the wrong call there (by betting on the
PlayStation 3 and
Xbox 360), which made this transition harder than it would otherwise be. But now we’re catching up, and I think we’re fine.”

It’s time we demand more from developers and make them realize that although they’re perfectly fine developing games for Sony and Microsoft, it’s time they focus more on the Wii and bring about some change in an industry that’s lacking the kind of innovation we’ve come to miss.

Both services are designed to help boost the sagging music-subscription market. The music industry is attracted to phone-based music because people already pay for a host of services, such as data and text messaging. The recording companies hope phone users won’t mind paying a monthly fee for music.

Sony Ericsson will launch the PlayNow service in a few weeks and then roll it out in other countries beginning in 2009.

According to a report from Dow Jones, Martin Blomkvist, Sony Ericsson’s manager of content acquisition said PlayNow Plus users can keep 100 DRM-free songs for each six months of their PlayNow contract. In comparison, Nokia allows users to download as much music as they want for the 12 months and keep those songs forever. The music is indeed swaddled in copy-protection schemes.

PlayNow Plus will compete with Comes with Music, the music service launched by Sony Ericsson rival Nokia earlier this year. And out of the gate, PlayNow can offer a more complete music library than Nokia’s offering. EMI has yet to join Comes with Music.

Mobile phone company Sony Ericsson announced Tuesday that it will launch a new music service called PlayNow Plus, which will feature unlimited music downloads.

But Sony Ericsson may not give away as much music as Nokia. According to the press release, Sony Ericsson will eventually offer users 5 million songs, which will be wrapped in digital rights management software, and keep them for the length of their contract. After their contract ends, the company will allow them to keep “a number” of DRM-free songs.

As first reported by CNET News, the new service will be powered by British music-download firm Omnifone, and will feature music from all four of the largest recording labels, the company said in a press release.