bwhitedesign.com

(Credit:
BitTorrent)

According to the BitTorrent statement:

Chief Technology Officer Eric Klinker, who has “two decades of networking, content delivery, and management experience” under his belt, according to a statement from BitTorrent, has been named as Walker’s replacement and has joined the company’s board of directors. Walker had left Alias Systems to take the CEO role just more than a year ago.

Klinker has…been instrumental to the continued development of the BitTorrent client, BitTorrent’s Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) content delivery service, BitTorrent’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and BitTorrent’s proprietary advanced congestion control technology. The latter has been at the center of BitTorrent’s influential discussions and well-publicized collaboration with Comcast Corporation, as it seeks to deploy a protocol-agnostic network management solution.

Eric Klinker

Those keeping track of high-profile tech companies highly affected by the economic downturn can add BitTorrent to their list.

BitTorrent, the focus of much attention this year, with respect to Net neutrality and copyright infringement, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The San Francisco backer of the popular open-source file-sharing protocol on Friday gave pink slips to about half of its staff–18 people–according to a source cited by The New York Times’ Brad Stone, and replaced CEO Doug Walker. The company had already endured a 22 percent layoff in August, which reportedly affected its entire sales and marketing department.

The Times report also said the company plans to shut down its media store, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network.

Warrior joined Cisco in 2007 after serving as CTO and then executive vice president at Motorola, where she oversaw an R&D budget of more than $3 billion and a team of 26,000 engineers. She was a part of Motorola, an Illinois-based company, for 23 years, and shares some ties with at least one Chicago-based Obama team member. Both Warrior and senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett sit on the board of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

It is still unclear exactly what role the CTO would play in the federal government.

“He’s charismatic and smart,” Steve Moore, the president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., Economic Partnership, told CNET in an interview earlier this month. “He’s a constant adviser for us on technology and what our priorities should be.”

“There are different ways to define a CTO’s role, but along with the appointment, there may be some clarification of what exactly the role will be,” Felten said.

(Credit:
Cisco Systems)

Kundra’s office declined to comment on the speculation, but the CTO has been praised for making Washington’s bureacratic system more efficient and encouraging the development of the city’s tech sector.

With reports all but confirmed that President-elect Barack Obama will be nominating Julius Genachowski to lead the Federal Communications Commission, speculation continues to grow over whom the incoming president may choose to be his chief technology officer.

Padmasree Warrior

A report from BusinessWeek maintains that the choice has come down to two people who already hold the title of CTO: Padmasree Warrior, of networking giant Cisco Systems, and Vivek Kundra, who works for the city of Washington, D.C.

Anther possible contender for the national CTO position is Edward Felten, a computer science and public affairs professor at Princeton University and the founding director of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Felten declined to comment on whether he is under consideration for the job.

“Cisco is committed to working closely with the Obama administration on their plans to deploy digital infrastructure to grow our economy and create jobs,” the spokesperson said.

An Obama transition team member would not confirm Genachowski’s nomination but did not deny it. The transition team member could not say, however, whether the president-elect is any closer to naming a CTO.

Representatives of Cisco could not comment on whether Warrior is under consideration for the role, though a Cisco spokesperson did say the company is a fan of Obama’s plan to appoint a CTO.

Many energy solutions are not relevant at the scale that matters. (Vinod Khosla)

EmTech08 gave me lots to mull–and I’ll roll that mulling into more in-depth pieces down the road. For today, though, I’m just going to expand a bit on a few statements and thoughts I ran across in the course of the two days that particularly caught my attention.

People choose killer apps. (Craig Mundie, Microsoft)

The state of the market for tools in parallel computing is abysmal. (Marc Snir, University of Illinois)

One of the ironies of the digitized world is that it’s a potential enabler for an unprecedented level of preservation but, in practice, it often ends up opening the door to huge amounts of content vanishing in an instant. At the consumer level, photos offer an illustrative example. The combination of external hard drives and online services can far better protect digital photos from mishaps than is possible with negatives, slides, and prints. But, in practice, most consumers don’t have good backup systems and can easily lose everything with the crash of a hard disk. Long-term preservation is an even bigger problem, both online and off. What happens as companies are purchased or go out of business to the content that they create or host?

Web technologies are the best platform for mobile development. (Kevin Lynch, Adobe Systems)

Craig Mundie spoke at length about many of the characteristics that he saw such an application as having. He used terms like context- and location-aware, immersive, and personal. The general theme was “client + cloud,” the idea being that this level of realism and immersion requires huge processing power and function at the client even if the data and orchestration takes place in the network someplace. He didn’t really specify a specific next-generation application though. I’m not sure killer “app” is really the right term though. The original PC had a true killer app–the spreadsheet. But subsequent generations have really had interaction models–first the GUI and then the browser. The next generation will probably be something similar, exposing an even more varied set of applications but in richer ways. (CNET News’ Dan Farber has an in-depth post on Mundie’s keynote.)

I spent the past couple of days attending Technology Review’s EmTech08 conference at MIT. Lots of interesting speakers and ideas, some in areas of tech that I follow day-to-day (such as cloud computing) and others that I follow more in the vein of an interested observer (alternative fuels, open voting systems). In many respects, it’s a refreshing change of pace from the events I commonly attend that tend to be more focused on today’s immediate IT concerns.

The
iPhone hype (or, indeed, the babel that surrounds Apple in general) can be wearing. However, one thing that the iPhone has really accomplished is to crystallize the notion that the browser is a viable interface for mobile phones–at least high-end mobile phones. Kevin’s contention that Adobe’s AIR runtime is also necessarily part of the mix is more debatable, but the general concept that mobile applications will tend to center around the same mobile technologies that are used on “PCs” seems sound. (I tend to think that the mobile device will be a smartphone rather than a separate “Mobile Internet Device” (MID) but that’s a separate debate that centers more around form factors and networks than programming models.)

Finally, a sizable chunk of the conference was devoted to “green” and energy. Unsurprising given how it’s a hot (if also overhyped) topic in IT and elsewhere. It’s also an area that lends itself to transformative innovation–which fits well with the general focus of EmTech. Which is what venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is really talking to with that statement. It’s not that incremental changes aren’t desirable. They are. Indeed, a lot of power efficiency work in technologies such as microprocessors is a sort of whack-a-mole game of accumulating small wins. However, from a macro and policy perspective, big wins don’t come from the niches. They come from making substantial impacts on substantial use cases.

Ephemerality of the Web is something that needs to be addressed. (Web 2.0/3.0 panel)

There seems to be a default assumption around the IT industry today that, as processors evolve to more cores and more heterogeneous processing (and as computing architectures get more distributed), the software will evolve apace. Changes will be required, of course, but nothing to really worry about. I’m not so sure. Even if one discounts the most dramatic doomsayers, lots of researchers and IT executives see serious gaps in both tools and training to deal with highly threaded processing. Consider that several of the panelists in the Parallel Programming session spoke warmly of the potential for functional languages. Yet it’s very early days for the likes of Haskell and Fortress and, in general, language development and adoption is a very long process.

The company said that the flaw had already been identified during routine code maintenance and corrected in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2.

Microsoft on Monday denounced reports that a vulnerability exists in Windows Media Player that could pose a security risk for users.

Along with its denial, Microsoft criticized Gaffie for publishing his claims without first contacting the software giant:

The investigation followed claims published Wednesday on the Bugtraq security mailing list by researcher Laurent Gaffie that a vulnerability existed in Windows Media Player 9, 10, and 11. Gaffie said the vulnerability would allow a hacker to create a malformed WAV, SND, or MIDI file to create a denial of service, and included a proof-of-concept code.

Updated: at 10 a.m. January 5 to correct alleged vulnerability to denial of service.

The security researcher making the initial report didn’t contact us or work with us directly but instead posted the report along with proof of concept code to a public mailing list. After that report, other organizations picked the report up and claimed that the issue was a code execution vulnerability in Windows Media Player. Those claims are false. We’ve found no possibility for code execution in this issue. Yes, the proof of concept code does trigger a crash of Windows Media player, but the application can be restarted right away and doesn’t affect the rest of the system.

Microsoft said in a company blog post that it had investigated reports that surfaced on the Internet last week and found them to be “false.” The flaw is “reliability issue with no security risk to customers,” the company said on its Security Vulnerability Research & Defense blog.

One big change: to activate the Google Maps feature, you drag the “Pegman” character off the top of the zoom slider and drop him where you want to see. It’s a lot faster than enabling Street View through a drop-down then clicking where you want to go.

(Credit:
Google)

Street View's split screen, when it's working.

The Street View's mascot, Pegman, gets some new prominence for using Street View.

Next, the view itself is larger, filling the whole screen instead of just a window. The higher resolution lets you zoom in more closely. And it works: one trouble spot I use for reference–a dark restaurant sign near my house that I once couldn’t read with Street View when trying to give a friend directions–now is visible.

Google has given Street View a major new look.

For details–and a miniature Pegman gallery that shows various holiday-themed Easter eggs–check Google’s Lat-Long blog post from programmer Stephane Lafon and user experience designer Andy Szybalski on Tuesday.

(Credit:
Google)

Also, I don’t know if this is new, but I just discovered keyboard shortcuts (one of my all-time favorite things). You can pan the view left and right with the A and D keys and tilt up and down with W and S.

(Credit:
Google)

Street View's split screen, when it's broken in Chrome.

Well done except for one thing: with either the mini-map or the split screen, the Street View goes black on me when I’m using the latest version of Chrome, 0.4.154.25. (See screenshots below for what it looks like initially and after breaking.) It works fine in
Firefox 3.1 beta 1. Is it just me? Comment below if you’re seeing problems.

In the lower-right corner of the Street View, there’s now a mini-map, and clicking on its upper-left corner zooms the map into a nifty split-screen view with the map below and Street View above.

The HP Pavilion s3500t is a sleek, ultracompact desktop that you can configure to your liking at Hewlett-Packard’s online store. For an extremely limited time, HP is offering a $100 instant rebate on the s3500t
or $400 off with coupon code DT1158. You can use the latter only when your config hits $999–but getting there is half the fun.

If you’re in the market for a powerful media-center PC, here’s your chance to save some big bucks on a sleek, compact system. Note that you can’t apply the coupon (which expires after 900 uses, so act fast!) until you get to the payment page.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

That, my friends, is a pretty killer load-out. I didn’t even mention the 500GB hard drive that comes standard. Shipping is free, though you may have to pay sales tax.

There's an embarrassment of riches inside this compact case.

Starting with the base configuration, I selected Vista Home Premium 64-bit (!), the Intel E4700 processor, 4GB of RAM, the 256MB Nvidia video card with HDMI, and the Blu-ray player. To inch the total up to $999, I also added the HP 2.1 speakers with remote and HP multimedia keyboard with HP optical mouse. (Note: monitor not included.)

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HP)

“It is necessary to warn society that an IT (information technology) giant is openly violating privacy rights, which are important rights that the citizens have, through this service,” he said.

Citing privacy concerns, a group of Japanese lawyers and professors have asked Google to shut down its Street View feature of Google Maps in the country, according to a Reuters report.

“Street View only features photographs taken on public property and the imagery is no different from what a person can readily see or capture walking down the street. Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world. We are committed to respecting local laws and norms in each country in which we launch Street View,” the page says. “We make it easy for users to ask to have photographs of themselves, their children, their
cars or their houses completely removed from the product, even where the images have already been blurred.”

Google began blurring faces in Street View in May.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

“We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have,” said Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of constitutional law at Sophia University in Tokyo and head of the Campaign Against Surveillance Society, in an interview with Reuters.

Google didn’t immediately comment on its plans for Japan but directed attention to its Street View privacy site, which says the service respects people’s privacy.

Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

“Actually, this isn’t hard. The technology exists. It doesn’t have to be invented. It needs to be applied. It needs to be priced for carbon and things like that. This can happen,” Immelt said.

GE and Google will work on utility software to make the grid more efficient, and on software for home smart-grid equipment, Immelt said.

Their policy partnership will call for beefed-up transmission capacity so renewable sources, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, can be further deployed.

But Immelt said that the renewable energy business needs a 10-year tax credit, which would serve as a catalyst for the industry and could then be phased out.

Updated with link to Google.org blog and YouTube video of interview.

“I’m a lifelong Republican. I’m a believer in free markets,” he said. “I think we worship false idols over time. There is no such thing–in all the businesses we do–that government doesn’t play a role as a catalyst.”

Wind power is far ahead of other renewable energy sources in being reliable and cost-competitive with fossil fuel power plants, Immelt said. GE’s wind business, one of the largest in the world, will bring in more than $7 billion this year.

Similarly, the two firms will develop software to help utilities better control plug-in hybrid
cars, which can be used to deliver power onto the grid during peak times. A flexible power grid is important because some researchers have concluded that an onrush of plug-in vehicles could strain the grid and lead to construction of more power plants.

Last year, its Google.org philanthropic arm launched a program called RE<C (for renewable energy less than coal) to make clean energy more cost-competitive.

Smart-grid technology lets utilities more efficiently manage electricity on the grid. And through smart meters and in-home displays, it lets consumers better understand and control home energy use.

Schmidt last week said there was “a total failure of political leadership” in addressing climate change, and on Wednesday said that government spending should target socially responsible programs.

“If we really want to drive renewables to where it could be, we are going to need more transmission capacity, and the government is going to have to (intercede) to make that happen,” Immelt said.

“GE and Google will be advocating in Washington for the new and smarter grid,” Schmidt said.

(Credit:
Google)

Schmidt said that the two companies will push for government programs to modernize the electrical grid, which would enable broader use of renewable energy.

However, wind farms are often placed away from the centers of high electricity use. To greatly expand wind energy, which now makes up less than 1 percent of U.S. power generation, more transmission lines are needed.

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt

GE executives have lobbied regularly in Washington for the extension of the renewable energy tax credit. The company is invested in several different energy businesses, including natural gas, so-called clean coal, and nuclear.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Both Schmidt and Immelt said that the government needs to play a more active role in setting an energy policy that promotes diverse energy sources and environmental protection.

Google’s green gene
Although it’s not directly related to its core search business, Google and its top executives have been active in the renewable energy business.

Technical collaboration
On the technology side, the two companies intend to develop smart-grid technologies, plug-in hybrid vehicles, and enhanced geothermal systems, where underground heat is converted into electricity.

Immelt noted that the energy business typically spends about 1 percent of revenues in research and development, compared to 7 percent in health care.

During the Google Zeitgeist conference in Mountain View, Calif., Google CEO Eric Schmidt interviewed GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt onstage about the maturity of renewable energy technologies and current policies.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET News)

GE, which touts its Ecomagination green-technology initiative, is heavily invested in energy, water, and energy financing.

So far, Google.org has invested altogether tens of millions of dollars in wind, solar, and enhanced geothermal start-up companies. Last year, it filed a patent for a floating data center that would be powered primarily by wave energy.

In the area of geothermal, GE and Google will create visualization software and power conversion technology. Google recently invested in an enhanced geothermal systems start-up, while GE does not have a large business in this area now.

Right now, renewables other than hydroelectric power represent only a few percent of the overall electricity generation in the U.S. Immelt said that getting 20 percent from renewable sources by 2020 would be possible to achieve.

Congress is currently debating measures to open up more oil and gas drilling off the coast of the U.S. this week. But existing tax credits for investments in renewable energy projects are set to expire at the end of this year, which energy executives say is slowing the industry and pushing renewable energy companies to other countries.

Public-private line
In discussing policy and technology, Immelt and Schmidt said that the clean-energy field has been underserved.

General Electric and Google on Wednesday announced a collaboration to lobby for renewable energy policies and to jointly develop clean technologies.

“There’s no way to prevent it,” Zdziarski said of the screenshot caching, according to a Wired report. “I’m kind of divided on it. I hope Apple fixes it because it’s a significant privacy leak, but at the same time it’s been useful for investigating criminals.”

The screenshots are presumably deleted after the application is closed, but they can be recovered with forensics techniques just like data deleted from most any storage device can be reconstructed for purposes of law enforcement, he said in a Webcast on Thursday in which he demonstrated how to break into password-protected iPhones.

The device records screenshots of a user’s most recent action so that it can achieve that cool effect of applications fading away when the home button is clicked, according to Jonathan Zdziarski, who wrote the forthcoming book iPhone Forensics: Recovering Evidence, Personal Data, and Corporate Assets.

Apple representatives did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this story.

The
iPhone is recording everything users see and do on their devices for caching purposes, an iPhone hacker says.

Meantime, breaking into a passcode-locked phone took him nearly an hour to demonstrate and required creating a custom firmware bundle, the report said. The issue is different from a security hole discovered last month that allowed people to get access to e-mail, text, and voice messages on password-protected phones.

The advancement is important because NAND flash–like all silicon chasing Moore’s Law–is facing challenges to increase densities “even at two bits and three bits per cell,” he said. (NAND is the type of memory used in flash cards and solid-state drives.)

(Credit:
SanDisk)

Despite these advancements, SanDisk is still a laggard in the emerging solid-state drive market, where companies like Samsung, Toshiba, Micron Technology, and Intel are the early leaders. SanDisk announced at CES in January that it would deliver a 240GB SSD by mid-year.

In addition to the memory chip, the die also includes an X4 controller–which manages the data flow. The memory and controller “will be sold as an integrated solution,” Quader said. Controllers are the secret sauce used by flash card and solid-state drive suppliers to boost performance. The importance of controllers increases as flash chip densities increase because higher densities require increasingly sophisticated controllers to deliver the necessary performance.

The Milpitas, Calif., company’s X4 technology will pack four bits of data into each memory cell. To date, flash memory chipmakers typically stored one bit or two bits per cell.

A SanDisk paper at the ISSCC will discuss the performance of the X4 technology. Data speeds will hit 7.8 megabytes per second, Quader said. “This is comparable to what others are producing at lower bits per cell,” he said.

SanDisk–the largest supplier of retail flash cards–is making the disclosure jointly with Toshiba at the 2009 International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The two companies will use 43-nanometer manufacturing process technology to make the chips.

SanDisk will also present a paper on 32-nanometer X3 technology–three bits per cell–for use in thumbnail-size microSD cards (even smaller than SD cards) that boast capacities up to 16GB. X3 will also be used in solid-state drives, SanDisk said.

“It is a 64-gigabit single die (chip), which is 8GB (per die), the highest capacity point in the industry,” said Khandker Quader, senior vice president, memory technology & product development, SanDisk, in a phone interview Monday.

The memory technology itself–the 4 bits per cell 64-gigabit memory–is co-developed and co-owned by SanDisk and Toshiba. The X4 controller technology is solely owned by SanDisk, Quader said. SanDisk and Toshiba also have joint manufacturing facilities in Japan.

SanDisk is disclosing at a San Francisco technology conference Tuesday that it will begin mass production of memory chips that will allow consumers to store up to 64GB of data on tiny flash cards.

X4 technology, which SanDisk got when it purchased M-Systems in 2006, will yield tiny Secure Digital (SD) flash cards that hold 64GB of data. Currently, mainstream SanDisk SD cards top out at 16GB, though pricey 32GB cards are also on the market.

X4 flash cards will be available commercially in the first half of 2009, according to Quader.

SanDisk X4 memory chip packs in four bits per cell