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Skype 4.1 for Windows

Skype for iPhone

Updated on July 2, 2009, at 9:02 a.m. PT with more from Skype regarding push notification for the
iPhone/iPod Touch app.

Screen sharing initiates a video call, using the technology to broadcast a recording of your screen–either a portion or the full screen–to one other viewer. Screen sharing has some limitations: you can’t simultaneously see a video of your buddy and their desktop, and since only one viewer at a time can peep at your screen, you can’t use it as a free replacement for collaborative Web conferencing. It doesn’t help that the picture quality is still choppy and fuzzy, in both partial-screen and full-screen view modes.

In the future, we’re looking forward to what Skype might do with video calls now that the iPhone 3GS has its shiny new video recorder.

Skype 4.1 beta brought back features like accessibility, birthday reminders, and the capability to send a contact record to another contact. These had been left out when Skype first updated its interface to the 4.0 style, the company citing a wish to get core features out the door before piling on the extras. It’s these extras that users nevertheless clamored for. This minor point update also contains a major new feature that was first introduced in Skype 4.1 beta: screen sharing.

There are a few visual tweaks, also, which gloss up the look and feel of a few screens, most notably the dial pad. To top off the changes, this iPhone update pours on multilingual support, making it available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, and Traditional Chinese.

Skype for iPhone still has far to go if it’s to get all of the extra features that round out the Skype experience–games and conference calling are but two. Push notification is another that Skype users are now asking for. Skype told CNET that they wanted to first integrate SMS and voice mail, the two most-requested features. As for push notification, Skype isn’t making any commitments at this point, but a representative from the company vaguely stated, “Where we’re able to use functionality provided by the iPhone OS to support a rich Skype experience on the iPhone platform, we will endeavor to do so.” Still, it’s a fair guess that a future version could notify you when someone is calling.

(Credit:
CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)

Skype 1.1 for iPhone and
iPod Touch reintroduces the capability to listen to Skype voice mail and to send and receive SMS messages. These features had been available on the desktop version, but were not activated when Skype first came out for iPhone.

Make no mistake, though: it’s a great feature that we’re happy to see added, but we’ll be even happier to watch it improve.

In addition to screen sharing, Skype 4.1 lets you feed a contact search from outside address books, including those in Gmail, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook, and a host of other players. If you have it installed, the Web toolbar will highlight phone numbers within contact lists so you can call them through Skype.

Skype is certainly on a roll this week. Just yesterday it converted the latest beta of its Windows Mobile phone software into a full-fledged release. On Tuesday, the VoIP company did it again for Skype 4.1 for Windows. In addition, Apple green-lighted Skype 1.1 for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which you can download now.

The red border indicates your recording field.

“We recently became aware of an industrywide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for Web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts,” a Google representative told me in an e-mail.

Google’s admission that Gmail users were affected by the phishing scheme comes on the heels of Microsoft acknowledging that over 10,000 Live Hotmail accounts were compromised by the scam. The passwords apparently first hit the Internet on October 1.

Hotmail users aren’t the only ones who’ve been hit by a phishing scheme over the past week. Google told BBC News on Tuesday that Gmail users have also been affected by the hackers who posted passwords online.

In an e-mail to CNET, a Google representative said that the company had to reset the passwords on fewer than 500 Gmail accounts so far. However, that figure could change.

The representative said that Google immediately “forced passwords resets on the affected accounts.”

The problem is far more widespread than was disclosed on Monday, possibly affecting Yahoo and AOL e-mail accounts as well, according to BBC News.

Updated at 9:10 a.m. PDT
to include Google’s comments.

Despite Google’s and Microsoft’s awareness of the problem, it doesn’t seem that users are out of the woods just yet. Google’s representative told CNET that it will continue to force password resets on any newly affected user accounts.

Google described the issue as an “industrywide phishing scheme.” BBC News said it has seen two lists posted online with “more than 30,000 names and passwords” from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail, and other service providers.

Like Microsoft, Google was quick to point out to the BBC that the phishing scheme was a “scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers” and not an internal security issue. It didn’t say how users fell victim to the scheme.

Facebook responded later in the morning on Thursday with a statement. “Earlier this morning, we encountered issues within our network that resulted in a short period of degraded site experience for some visitors,” the statement read. “No user data was at risk and the matter is now resolved for the majority of users. We’re monitoring the situation to ensure that users continue to have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

Problems at Facebook, too
Some features of Facebook were also experiencing uptime issues on Thursday–one reader speculated that log-in servers may have been down–which raises the issue of whether a hosting company problem is to blame. Alternately, a denial-of-service attack could have been targeting both high-profile companies.

CNET News’ Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

A massive series of DoS attacks hit the Web a decade ago, long before either Facebook or Twitter was remotely close to existence. They hit the likes of CNN.com, Amazon, E*Trade, eBay, and Buy.com, and were such a serious problem that the FBI held a series of press conferences to address concerns.

Way back when, Twitter outages were so commonplace that it was worth reporting when it didn’t crash–as when it stayed afloat during the entire South by Southwest Interactive Festival in 2008. Now, a few million dollars of venture capital later, the service is far more stable.

But the Facebook outages were not on the same scale as Twitter’s by any means, said Ben Rushlo, a senior consulting manager at performance firm Keynote. “There’s been a few slow data points but you couldn’t even put them in the same sort of stratosphere of comparison,” Rushlo told CNET News.

Judging by the timeline of my TweetDeck client, it looks like the problems started right around 6 a.m. PDT.

Twitter was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic time-outs (and more outright downtime). The company is blaming an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack but has not said anything further. Facebook has also confirmed that it was targeted by a DoS attack that rendered some of its features slow or non-functional.

Denial-of-service attacks are actually waning these days as bot herders rent their botnets to those who want to use them to send spam or host malicious software that can be used to compromise other computers, said John Harrison, group product manager of security response at security software company Symantec.

Watch CBS Videos Online

“Often there is collateral damage” during a denial-of-service attack, Cluley said. “Other servers can begin to fall over.”

Oh, snap! I'm not even getting a fail whale!

Then, around 7:49 a.m. PT, the company posted, “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack and will update status again shortly.”

“Organized crime and other groups have gone off to other things. It’s more lucrative for them to use the Internet, not to take the Internet away,” Harrison said. Using a botnet in a denial-of-service attack can reveal computers to be part of a botnet, for example when an administrator notices high network traffic from a compromised machine, so keeping a low profile can save the botnet for use another day.

DDoS attacks can be motivated by people seeking ransom money or seeking to make a political statement, but Cluley suspected that’s not the case in this particular attack. “My guess is this is most likely some kid in a back bedroom who has access to a large botnet and is showing off to his friends what he can do,” Cluley said.

Twitter is unusual in that much of its use comes not through its Web site but through an application programming interface (API) that lets software such as TweetDeck interact with the service. API access also suffered during the outage.

Botnets, bot herders, and DDoS attacks
DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks typically come from a collection of compromised computers called a botnet, said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Internet security firm Sophos. The botnet computers can inundate a Web site’s servers with communication requests, legitimate or malformed to cause extra trouble.

Around 8:15 a.m., the status blog post was updated with “The site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.” (I still was unable to access Twitter.)

One security expert thinks he may have found a connection. “Today’s outage is happening at the same time a new version of the Koobface malware has been found in the wild that is using both Twitter and Facebook messages to send invitations that are designed to lure potential victims to fake AV web pages,” an e-mailed statement from Paul Henry, a security analyst at the firm Lumension, explained. “The speculation is that the onslaught of bogus messages that are directing users to malicious pages may in fact be overwhelming Twitter.”

Publishing site LiveJournal also appears to have been affected by attacks on Thursday.

About an hour later, the company revised the statement to confirm that a denial of service attack was involved. “Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” the updated statement read. “No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

Botnet-based DDoS attacks are difficult to deal with because it can be hard to distinguish legitimate communications from those that are part of the attack. And just blocking access from the IP addresses of offending computers poses complications: “You don’t want to block legitimate users. The computers probably sending (the DDoS) traffic to Twitter belong to legitimate people,” Cluley said.

More to come when we hear it. Last updated at 12:10 p.m. PT.

To keep a PC from becoming part of a botnet, Harrison recommended keeping the operating system, browser, browser plug-ins such as Adobe Systems Flash and Reader, and other software up to date, and naturally to install antivirus software. “All it takes is one vulnerability to potentially have malware installed,” he said.

Twitter wants to establish itself as a communications standard rather than just a social-media brand. It’s been a crucial platform for information exchange in the face of global events where more traditional means of broadcasting have been inaccessible or blocked.

There has been no indication that a single party, or groups of hackers in tandem, was responsible for the Facebook and Twitter attacks, or whether there was any connection to the other DoS attacks on smaller sites earlier this week. But it’s probably not a coincidence that they all happen to coincide with the annual Defcon hacker convention.

“We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly,” Twitter’s staff posted at 6:43 a.m. PDT on the service’s status blog.

There have been a notable number of DoS attacks recently in the social-media space: On Wednesday, URL shortener Trim claims that one such attack rendered its truncated URLs inaccessible for some time; earlier in the week, blog network Gawker Media was downed by an attack that targeted The Consumerist, a property that it recently sold but still hosts on its servers.

Perfomance monitoring firm AlertSite says that Twitter’s home page went down at 6:05 a.m. PT and was showing 40 percent availability at 8:04 a.m. PT, but that timeouts were continuing from most of its monitoring locations at 8:30 a.m.

While many would agree that more competition is needed in the wireline broadband market, where most consumers have access to at most two broadband service options, many would disagree that competition does not exist in the wireless industry.

Broadband providers such as AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon Communications have opposed regulation or new laws that would dictate how they could run their networks. Up until this point, the Internet has been free of any regulation. And these companies would like to keep it that way.

He argues that wireless networks differ from wireline broadband networks because bandwidth is more limited on a wireless network. And he said that imposing new rules on how carriers operate their wireless networks would stifle investment.

At the end of the day, Net neutrality supporters say regulation is needed to keep the Internet open because there is simply not enough competition in the market to ensure that service providers play fair.

(Credit:
LaunchBox Digital)

That said, the nation’s two biggest phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, have accepted the principles outlined by the FCC, when it comes to their wired broadband networks. Even though they don’t think additional regulation is needed, they have agreed in principle with keeping their broadband networks open.

This is a sentiment echoed by the CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association. The group argues that the open network provision in the 700 MHz spectrum auction caused many operators to stay away from the auction. In the end, only two companies bid for the C Block licenses: Google and Verizon. And the group notes that these licenses “sold for significantly less” than other licenses in the auction.

“If consumers had a wide choice of broadband service providers, preserving an open Internet might not be such a critical issue,” Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, wrote in a blog post he published Monday. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans have few (if any) choices in selecting a provider. As a result, these providers are in a position to influence whether and how consumers and producers can use the on-ramps to the Internet–and we’ve already seen several examples of discriminatory actions or threats that impair openness.”

In the second quarter of 2009, AT&T added 1.4 million new wireless subscribers, for a total of 79.6 million subscribers. Verizon Wireless also added 1.1 million new subscribers during the second quarter, for a total of 87.7 million subscribers. Meanwhile, smaller competitors such as Sprint Nextel lost subscribers.

But the FCC is already investigating the state of competition in the wireless market. Even though there are four major nationwide carriers–AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile USA–the majority of the market is controlled by two carriers. And their dominance is increasing.

But the regulation that Genachowski is proposing will not apply to just wireline broadband networks, such as DSL and cable modem service. It will also apply to wireless services. And this is where the major phone companies will likely focus their opposition to the FCC’s plans for new regulation.

“If your definition of a competitive market is based on what we see in the wireline market, where there are two competitors, then yes, wireless is a competitive market,” Scott said. “But if you look at the wireless market comprehensively, and you aren’t just counting providers, then you’ll see the market power is very concentrated.”

Indeed, services such as Skype, which allows users to make free and low-cost phone calls over an Internet connection, and Google Voice, which allows users to use to a single phone that follows them, regardless of which voice network they use, have been blocked by certain carriers. The FCC is already investigating why Google’s voice service was rejected by Apple for the popular iPhone.

While incumbent wireless providers may oppose regulation on wireless Internet access, newer players support it. Clearwire, which is building a nationwide 4G wireless network, using spectrum from Sprint Nextel, and investment from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Google, and Intel, fully supports the FCC’s efforts.

Verizon, which ended up winning the C Block auction in that auction, also believes that regulation is unnecessary. The company’s vice president of regulatory affairs, David Young, said in a panel after Genachowski’s speech that these rules will be difficult to implement in the wireless market because of the capacity constraints on wireless networks.

But Net neutrality supporters say it is critical for the new regulation to apply to wireless, as well as to wireline, services because in the future, most people will access the Internet via wireless devices. And as wireless operators launch new 4G networks that increase capacity and network download speeds, even more mobile devices will become Internet-enabled.

The wireless industry is gearing up to fight new Net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission is formulating to keep the Internet open.

“AT&T has long supported the principle of an open Internet and has conducted its business accordingly,” Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior vice president of external and legislative affairs, said in a statement. “We were also early supporters of the FCC’s current four broadband principles and their case-by-case application to wired networks.”

In addition to making sure that network operators cannot prevent users from accessing lawful Internet content, applications, and services of their choice, or attaching unharmful devices to the network, Genachowski wants to add two more rules.

Still, consumer advocates applaud Verizon’s attempts at openness. But they point out that other wireless providers have not taken similar steps.

But Cicconi went on to say that the principles and new legislation should not apply to the wireless market.

On Monday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave a speech at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., outlining plans to turn the agency’s principles for open Internet access into official regulation.

While it is true that Verizon has made its 3G network more open, it still requires device manufacturers to “certify” their products for the network, which means that Verizon still has the ability to accept or deny devices that run on its network. As for new applications, Verizon is still in the practice of disabling some features, such as Wi-Fi, on certain phones that operate on its nonopen traditional 3G wireless network.

Young said Verizon is committed to providing open access on its wireline broadband network, as well as its wireless network. He pointed to the fact that Verizon is now building a new 4G wireless network using the C Block spectrum it acquired in the 700 MHz auction. And as required by the FCC, it will allow users to attach any device and access any application on this new network. In effort to show Verizon’s commitment to open access, Young also highlighted Verizon’s efforts to open its 3G cellular network through its open development initiative.

The first would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management. The second principle would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.

“Our customers want an open experience,” he said. “They want more choices, which is why we allow third-party developers and are providing developers complete access to our network. But our concern is that these new regulations, which apply regulation to the Internet for the first time, could have unintended consequences.”

“We are concerned, however, that the FCC appears ready to extend the entire array of Net neutrality requirements to what is perhaps the most competitive consumer market in America: wireless services,” he said.

” I’d like to give credit to Verizon,” Ben Scott, policy director for the consumer group Free Press, said during the panel discussion at the Brookings Institute event. “They have made a lot of positive steps toward openness. But that is not universally true of all carriers. Skype (and other applications) are still blocked on other carrier networks.”

“I recognize that if we were to create unduly detailed rules that attempted to address every possible assault on openness, such rules would become outdated quickly,” he said. “But saying nothing–and doing nothing–would impose its own form of unacceptable cost.”

“On a wireline broadband network, you know where your customer is,” he said. “So you can build capacity to handle the peak demands. But on a wireless network, you have a crowd converge on a site that suddenly has 10 times or 100 times the users competing for the same resources. “

“Clearwire applauds the chairman’s efforts to safeguard an open Internet and his desire to strike a balance between consumers’ need for open, rich access to the Internet and appropriate network management practices,” Mike Sievert, chief commercial officer for Clearwire, said in a statement. Clearwire’s 4G WiMax technology, business model, and operations embody openness for access, applications and devices.”

“Unlike the other platforms that would be subject to the rules, the wireless industry is extremely competitive, extremely innovative, and extremely personal,” Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association, said in a statement.

Verizon and AT&T, which operate the nation’s largest and second-largest cell phone networks, respectively, say the rules should not apply to wireless Internet access.

Julius Genachowski

During his speech, Genachowski addressed this issue.

By the way, I don’t think VMWare is the only company that can achieve this vision. As noted in the earlier quotes, Microsoft is in a great position to allow a similar story for its developers, assuming it partners with the right systems companies to push dynamic configuration beyond Hyper-V into the physical infrastructure layers. .Net and the Microsoft tool set are already quite capable of delivering significant coordination between application development and deployment. Citrix and Red Hat, by contrast, do not yet seem to have such a sophisticated vision.

These technologies are a combination of declarative descriptive configuration policies and automated software and systems that can interpret those policies and respond as required. Contrary to Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s well-read New York Times OpEd piece, developers would keep control over their application environments.

Follow James Urquhart on Twitter.

I have been working closely with VMWare for some time now, and I know a little bit about how the company sees its role in the cloud. The acquisition of the commercial open-source middleware/framework company makes perfect sense to me.

VMWare’s acquisition of SpringSource this week is a significant development in the history of the Java development platform.

Oh, and VMWare got cloud monitoring powerhouse Hyperic in the deal as well. More on that in a later post.

This goes to the vision that has me most excited about the future of cloud computing right now. I think that there are technologies evolving for both public and private clouds that actually give developers and solutions architects just as much control over every element of how their applications are built, deployed, and operated as they have had in the past.

When (colleague Michael) Cote and I met with SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson at OSCON a few weeks ago, one of the primary topics of discussion was the development experience. This could wind up one of the unheralded benefits of the acquisition: Rod gets the tooling story. He understands that Microsoft, again, is setting the bar for the development experience by allowing its developers to localize the cloud environment via Visual Studio. With VMware’s virtualization capabilities, the tooling story for SpringSource could get very interesting vis a vis cloud development and deployment.

I’d love to hear your opinion of the VMWare’s acquisition of SpringSource. Is it as important as the cloud pundits and I say it is, or is there little excitement to be found here?

Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady thinks it’s not just about the development and integration, but also about tooling:

SaaS offerings could allow for customization at levels of granularity unthinkable before Spring demonstrated dynamic instantiation. Custom applications deployed to IaaS offerings could declare that they require a isolated networks for backplane communication, connectivity to two different storage systems by name (perhaps even one in the cloud and one through FCoE), or provide monitoring through specific protocols.

VMware has a bigger agenda SpringSource helps to fulfill making vCloud bigger than simply an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) alternative and keeping Microsoft at bay. Enterprises are already demanding that cloud environments and internal cloud solutions support their hypervisor standard VMware. So it wasn’t going to be a stretch to get vCloud adopted, assuming it delivered as promised. But the battle isn’t IaaS, it’s becoming the equivalent of the operating system for the next generation data center and you can’t achieve that aim without applications; and you can’t become application-relevant without being relevant to developers.

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a Platform as a Service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

Much of the early analysis of this acquisition has focused on how it plays as a counter to Microsoft Azure, which–when combined with the Hyper-V virtualization platform–threatens VMWare’s dominance in the enterprise. Forrester Research’s James Staten thinks it’s much more than that, however:

SpringSource gives VMWare a development “platform,” of sorts, to deliver in VMWare-based cloud services and a unique declarative environment in which to define both application construction and deployment architectures. The vision painted by SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson speaks to an environment in which developers can declare not only how objects should connect with one another, but how they should be packaged into virtual machines and deployed into the virtualized infrastructure:

The 29-person panel, which includes representatives of Internet companies, academia, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies appointed in April by U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, offered recommendations ranging from self-protection to cyberbullying prevention. The common themes: exhibiting the same self-awareness and outward sensitivity online as you would offline, and proactively counseling youth exhibiting risky offline behavior.

This post is an adaptation of one that first appeared on Larry Magid’s SafeKids.com.

My favorite comment came from a middle-school student who said, “The only person who can protect you on the Internet is you.” Based on what the adult presenters later said, she was quite right.

Willard pointed out that sexual exploitation resulting from contact by someone a young person knows only through the Internet is extremely rare, especially compared to the far more likely peer-to-peer problems such as cyberbullying. She hopes to see federal funding for Department of Education-administered prevention programs that include educators, health professionals, and risk prevention experts, along with law enforcement.

Gonzalez’s comments were followed by a discussion that included contributions from Steven Sheinberg of the Anti-Defamation League (a leader in advocacy against hate speech), Whitney Meagher of the National PTA, and Judi Westberg Warren of Web Wise Kids. All agreed that Internet safety must include teaching respect for oneself, one’s peers, and the broader community. Whether dealing with ethnicity, sexual preference or anything else, they concluded that there is a real connection between hate speech and cyberbullying.

Kids with somewhat higher-risk profiles, who may have less parental involvement or exhibit early problem behaviors, need “secondary prevention,” Agatston said, such as adolescent therapists and other professionals to help them deal with addictive behaviors involving Internet use, pornography, sexual risk taking, or offline high-risk activities, including substance abuse, self mutilation, eating disorders, or gang activity.

These higher-risk youth, Agatston said, can benefit from “prevention programs that often involve mentoring, decision-making skills, goal setting, and peer education.” As she pointed out, kids who take risks online typically also take risks in their offline lives; the problem is less about technology and more about youth behavior.

Jenkins, who has studied online gaming, fan sites, and other areas where young people interact, noted that while cyberbullying is a serious problem, people in these communities will often self-regulate by isolating and criticizing those who exhibit antisocial behavior.

Finally, University of Southern California media professor Henry Jenkins wrapped up the day with a look at how young people use social media and how, over time, online communities can have self-regulating and protective effects on their members.

Working Group reports to Department of Commerce's NTIA

Another speaker, Alan Simpson of Common Sense Media, told the group that digital citizenship and media literacy are essential components to online safety. How kids treat themselves and others, as well as their ability to critically evaluate what they see and do online and offline, can have an enormous impact on their personal safety and the safety of those with whom they interact.

Much of school-based Internet safety education to date has been funded by the Justice Department, which tends to view the world in terms of preventing and solving crimes rather than dealing with risky (yet not necessarily criminal) behavior. Willard said law enforcement needs to continue to be involved, but not as the sole voice in the discussion.

Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use talked about the current state of Internet safety education, telling the group that much of today’s school-based messages continue to reinforce the discredited notion that kids are in serious danger from adult predators.

Jessica Gonzalez of the National Hispanic Media Coalition talked about the online component of hate speech, especially as it pertains to Latinos caught in an immigration debate. While Gonzalez welcomes a spirited debate on immigration issues, she warned about hate crimes against Latinos–including citizens and legal residents–as well as Web sites that may encourage such crimes.

Mike Donlin of Seattle Public Schools described his district’s cyberbullying program, which trains students on techniques to protect themselves and their fellow students from bullying and harassment. Consistent with other experts, Donlin said online bullying is typically associated with offline bullying. Problems that start in school often migrate online, and it’s not uncommon for the bullies and victims to know each other in the real world.

As an appointed representative of SafeKids.com and ConnectSafely.org, and head of the group’s Net safety education subcommittee, which ran the meeting, I got a front-row seat. Below is an overview of the discussion.

Patti Agatston, a risk prevention expert from Georgia’s Cobb County schools, talked about the need for safety messages tailored to a young person’s specific risk profile. Drawing on health care messaging, she pointed out that all kids need what she called “primary prevention”: general messages about how they can stay safe, treat each other respectfully, and protect their reputations.

The first set of presenters was a group of public-school students here who gave a frank appraisal on the state of Internet safety education from the front lines. Although members of this student panel were quite familiar with incidences of cyberbullying and sexting (students sharing naked pictures of themselves), none had any horror stories to report, and all seemed to understand the basics for staying safe and maintaining their privacy on social-networking sites.

WASHINGTON–When the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, established via the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, last week held a meeting at the U.S. Department of Commerce to discuss how to best protect kids online, members may not have been expecting to talk so much about offline behavior.

The next presenter, Stephen Balkam of the Family Online Safety Institute, outlined some of the safety messages social-media and Internet companies are offering, including site-specific advice and tools, as well as and supporting nonprofits that provide safety advice. “Millions (of dollars) are being spent,” Balkam said, “but more can be done.”

Usenet.com is a company that enabled users to access the Usenet network and it too lost on a discovery sanction.

“United States copyright laws do not reach acts of infringement that take place entirely abroad,” Wilson, wrote in his order.

File-sharing sites haven’t had a great year, especially in court, but on Wednesday they received a smidgen of good news.

A spokeswoman for the MPAA did not immediately have a response.

Some of the cases that have gone against BitTorrent or file-sharing sites Sweden-based BitTorrent search engines, The Pirate Bay, was brought up on criminal misconduct charges and TorrentSpy’s case was decided on a discovery sanction. Some of the issues in the Usenet.com case closely resemble Isohunt and TorrentSpy’s, although the company is not a BitTorrent tracker or search engine.

Rothken is hoping to argue Isohunt’s case before a jury, something that no other BitTorrent sites have managed to do.

Ira Rothken, Isohunt's attorney

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET News)

The significance of the judge’s order, at least from the point of view of Ira Rothken, Isohunt’s attorney, is that MPAA’s investigators have struggled to draw specific examples of infringement occurring in the U.S.

Most of these companies claim to do nothing more than help people locate files. One question often asked by readers is how is this different than what Google offers? One can find plenty of infringing content using the behemoth search engine.

“I believe the difference is that for one reason or another courts seem to place greater social importance on the Google search engine,” Rothken said. “Courts also tend to frown on search engines created to find specific file types like .torrent files. And other than that there is no difference (Isohunt and Google).”

“I believe there has not been a single case in U.S. law where there has been a decision on the merits of a Torrent search engine,” Rothken said. “We’re cautiously optimistic Judge Wilson will deny plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment and ultimately there will be a trial on the merits.”

The Motion Picture Association of America asked a federal court to rule that Isohunt was liable for copyright violations committed by its users, but the judge in the case was unconvinced. In his order, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson said the studios had yet to prove that the Isohunt’s users had broken U.S. law.

Lawyers for the MPAA, the trade group representing the six major Hollywood film studios, are trying to convince the judge that Isohunt encouraged and contributed to the infringing activity of users. Wilson gave the MPAA until Sept. 15 to file a brief that convinces him direct infringement at the site was committed by those in the U.S. Apparently, Wilson has questions about whether U.S. residents have pirated content using Isohunt.

“Our view is that it would be difficult if not impossible,” Rothken said, “to be able to trace any direct infringement to the users of the Isohunt’s site in a manner that would hold Isohunt responsible for the infringing conduct. I think the judge’s order will hopefully demonstrate to the court that Isohunt, besides lacking knowledge of direct infringement, can’t possibly be held liable for users conduct, especially since any such conduct occurs after they leave the site.”

MetroPCS, which has recently expanded its prepaid wireless service offering to several large cities throughout the U.S., has just lowered its unlimited monthly plan to $40 a month for voice, texting and Web access.

The company also offers a $50 a month unlimited plan for smartphone users, which includes unlimited HTML Web browsing.

MetroPCS’s cuts could spark a price war, which could further drive down how much revenue is generated per user. In a market that already relies on heavy customer volumes and super low cost structure to reach profits, further pricing pressure will only make it more difficult for these carriers to make money with prepaid services. But the good news for consumers is that they will get access to some very good deals in wireless if the choose to take the prepaid wireless route.

The new lowered prices ushers in a new era of competition in the prepaid market, which is heating up as Sprint Nextel announces this week its intent to buy Virgin Mobile USA for $483 million.

MetroPCS, a regional prepaid operator, is now adding unlimited email, navigation and social networking to its $45 a month unlimited plan. This is in addition to unlimited voice, texting and Web access. These plans are now $5 a month less than they were before the price cut was announced.

The move is a clear indication that MetroPCS is ratcheting up the pricing pressure to compete more aggressively in the crowded prepaid market. TracFone, which is the largest prepaid carrier in the market, offers a $45 a month unlimited plan for voice, text messaging and 30 MB of data. And Sprint’s Boost Mobile prepaid brand started offering a $50 a month unlimited plan in January. Executives are attributing the recent growth in its prepaid customer base to this new service.

The other categories were “news” (3.6 percent), “spam” (also lower than I’d expect, at 3.75 percent), and “pass-along value” (8.7 percent). Granted, sometimes there’s plenty of gray area (is linking to a blog post you wrote “pass-along value” or “self-promotion”? shouldn’t tweeting about breakfast too often be considered spam?) but it’s pretty cool regardless.

That might be a bit of a buzzkill for Twitter’s team, which is pretty vocal about wanting the service to be a ubiquitous communication standard. Regardless, the news about the relatively low levels of spam is interesting–for some perspective, about 90 percent of e-mail is spam.

“We thought the news category would have more weight than dead last,” the report read, “since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the new source of news and events.”

There’s some interesting stuff in there. Despite some Twitter critics’ insistence that the microblogging service is loaded with self-promoters, Pear Analytics only classified 5.85 percent of tweets as “self promotion.”

Surprise! A full 40.5 percent of posts on Twitter–or tweets, as they’re called–can be classified as “pointless babble,” according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was “conversational,” which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets.

Pear Analytics published its investigation, which was conducted through a series of random samplings from the Twitter public timeline, into the different species of tweets on Wednesday. That means that only public tweets were indexed; the numbers could be different if friends-only accounts were taken into consideration as well. (Obviously, that would be much tougher to analyze.)

All of which should help Bandwidth.com. Barr told me that the key to innovation is better linkage to network functionality. Because of its network, Bandwidth.com is in a position to drive innovation through FreePBX, faster. The more FreePBX adoption, the strategy goes, the more consumption of Bandwidth.com services.

This shouldn’t be surprising, given the increasingly intertwined fates of proprietary and open-source software. But it’s interesting to watch Bandwidth.com–a 10-year-old company that sells business voice and data services–incorporate open source into its strategy. After all, the company recently built its own, nationwide CLEC IP voice network. It has a lot riding on that proprietary network, including 4 billion minutes of voice traffic in 2009.

With the preview release of FreePBX version 3 on Tuesday, FreePBX now supports FreeSWITCH (and soon Asterisk, as well), making it completely engine agnostic. Not only does this expand the footprint of open source in telephony, it also gives customers choices, so they can pick the right engine for their use case.

As an example, Bandwidth.com already has a contextual “store” in beta that allows FreePBX users to turn-on dial-tone and get phone numbers right from the interface.

It also turns open-source telephony inside out, setting up FreePBX as the focal point for future innovation in open-source telephony. I suspect that FreePBX’s new modular architecture and standards-based frameworks may inspire application developers to target new telephony applications to FreePBX to be able to run with any “engine”.

Why? Why is Bandwidth.com spending so much money developing software that it has no interest in selling?

FreePBX is mostly invisible: not many people know about it but it just happens to be the basis for the interface that you see if you’re using AsteriskNOW or Trixbox CE, and many other open-source PBX distributions. In total, FreePBX is running on over 300,000 phone systems (with 3 million downloads, to date)…with virtually no one knowing they’re even using it.

As Barr puts it, FreePBX, backed by Bandwidth.com, is about lowering the overall cost of telephony for customers and having better open-source technology that encourages new network-aware application development.

This is an impressive level of adoption for an independent open-source project. Now Bandwidth.com, and the FreePBX community, are investing in the next generation of FreePBX.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Bandwidth.com launched a Developer Sandbox Program on Tuesday that aims to give developers enhanced access to its VoIP network features. The idea is that developers can now make use of open-source software and open access to network functionality and develop a new generation of applications that function seamlessly with the voice network.

In 2008, Todd Barr left Red Hat to try his hand at an open-source start-up. Now, one and a half years later, Barr is doing just that, hoping to turn the telephony world upside down at Bandwidth.com, a company that operates a proprietary voice network, but is betting a great deal on the open-source FreePBX project.

Bandwidth.com’s interest is in selling network services, not software. But that software provides the basis for a larger community’s interest in Bandwidth.com’s network services. The FreePBX community, in turn, benefits from having access to Bandwidth.com’s network features, but for the most part, it focuses on technology innovation that benefits other communities such as Asterisk and FreeSWITCH.

Or, to make an analogy to Linux, FreePBX is like Gnome or KDE, and the open-source telephony engines (Asterisk and FreeSWITCH) are like the kernel. While the kernel makes the operating system function, the user experience and key tools for the application development environment is really driven by the user interface, as with FreePBX.

It’s a classic razor/blade model, as Bandwidth.com heavily invests in open-source complements for its network services core. The model seems to be working for Bandwidth.com. Can 4 billion voice minutes be wrong?

So why bother with FreePBX, an open-source graphical user interface for managing Asterisk, the leading open-source telephony engine? That’s the question I took to Barr. His answers are instructive for anyone hoping to leverage open source into their business.