Exchange Server 2010: Microsoft Explains It All 1 comments

Exchange Server 2010 is all about new levels of control. The Transport Protection Rules system enables administrators to designate the extent to which the recipient of a message can utilize its contents. The dreaded Access Control List has been replaced with something better, and the archiving process can be completed in the background.

The biggest change to Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange Server 2007 was supposed to have been the introduction of something called "Unified Communications" -- the introduction of a singular console for the handling of all forms of digital communication, wrapping voice mail, instant messaging, and email into a single delivery system. History may yet vindicate UC as the product's singular achievement.

However, in the near term, administrators credit Exchange more for what it gives them than the world at large. In that light, the inclusion of PowerShell as not only the underlying language of the system but as its engine as well, changed everything for the admin. It may very well be why the product has surged to a two-thirds market share, by some estimates, over once formidable competition such as Lotus Notes.
Short Functionality Gap

So learning a lesson from history, the message from Microsoft with regard to Exchange Server 2010, which went on sale last week, is about new levels of control. The idea that email, or any kind of communication, once sent unto the vast Internet is out of the sender's hands -- like a paper sailboat launched from a river pier -- is what the Exchange team has been working to combat. During a beta program which Microsoft says involved dozens of universities, signing up some 10 million participants worldwide, the company has completed development of a browser-based endpoint for ES 2010-delivered email that is not only more manageable than Outlook 2007, but that has beaten Outlook 2010 -- the product it's supposed to be derived from -- to market by perhaps eight months.

What that means is, hopefully for a short time only, there will be a functionality gap between what the new Outlook Web App -- hosted by ES 2010 -- can deliver compared to what Outlook 2007 provides. If Julia White, Microsoft's marketing Download Free eBook - The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales director for Exchange, has anything to say about it, that gap will be shorter rather than longer, but it's not unnoticed.

White spoke with Betanews from Berlin, where she had just completed a TechEd Europe demonstration along with Corporate Vice President Stephen Elop. "Obviously Outlook Web Apps comes with Exchange, so they can use that today; when Outlook 2010 comes out, they can use that," said White, "and we are absolutely planning support for Outlook 2007 in the roadmap here. So it's on the agenda, and we will actually be getting to it."

Much of what Exchange 2010 will deliver absolutely depends on this upgrade to Outlook 2007, as you'll see. We asked White for her take on what she would consider the top three enhancements to administrator functionality in ES 2010.
#3: Transport Protection Rules

Number three on this list is the Transport Protection Rules system. It enables the administrator to designate the extent to which the recipient of a message can utilize its contents, based upon rules that enable Exchange to analyze the content itself. "In the demo this morning, I set a Transport Protection Rule based on a keyword. But actually another aspect of that is, those rules can be set based on the sender, the recipient, or even contents of an attachment," White told Betanews.

"Any of those things can be triggered; and having the ability to centrally decide what gets encrypted and what doesn't, is a really powerful tool. With end users, it's hard for them to keep up with corporate policy, pay attention to it, or know about it. So oftentimes it's unintended, versus intended, when information isn't protected. Having that essentially managed brings peace of mind, for the users as well as the IT pros."

The ability to analyze an attachment takes place on a granular level, White told us. If a PowerPoint presentation, for example, were to contain the words "Microsoft Confidential," that fact alone would trigger a rule that automatically encrypts the message outgoing, and that restricts the recipient from being able to pass it on.
#2: Role-Based Access Control

One of the least loved features of Exchange, or anything Microsoft has ever done, disappears in ES 2010: The Access Control List is a Registry-based system for designating which identified and authenticated user had permissions to control specific objects. It has often been a ridiculous concept that starts one off with the assumption that everyone has rights to everything, and that ACLs provide the exceptions.

Exchange Server 2010 replaces this entirely with a concept that is much more rooted in Active Directory. Now, the administrator starts off in a universe where nothing is allowed until groups of users are added into the pool of permissions. Those groups that are added in are called "management role groups," with the concept being that a predefined set of roles exist (a concept made popular by Windows Server 2008), and that groups of users or individual users are delegated those roles.

Julia White demonstrated how Role-Based Access Control enabled an otherwise unprivileged user to search for emails through multiple mailboxes on the company's behalf (in this case, Microsoft's usual fictitious firm, Contoso). Her system was delegated a role that let her perform the search, without having to delegate other responsibilities and privileges of a much higher administrative order. "A compliance officer might get that level of capability," White explained to us, "but a help desk might have the rights to increase mail box quota size. Maybe HR would be given the ability to update contact information on behalf of employees. Extending all the way down to end users, even that same roles-based administration capability -- end users can now create and manage their own distribution groups within Exchange. That no longer requires a call to the IT pro ... usually that's a lot of overhead."
#1: Integrated Archiving

During the late 1980s and into the '90s, Microsoft liked to centralize things, thinking that if everything were in one big pile -- as Arlo Guthrie put it -- that would beat two or more little ones. The System Registry is, and remains, one big pile. Another -- which can stink just as bad -- is the .PST file, the single personal folder file that is created on the client side by Outlook.

It is every Outlook user's nightmare, especially since Office buries this file typically in a black hole within a hidden directory inside each user's Documents folder. For individuals who receive hundreds of thousands of emails per year (I'm on that list, believe me), the archiving process has cost users many a weekend.

With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft marketing director Julia White told Betanews, is the ability to perform this process completely in the background. However, in addition, the archived items remain indexed and available, still listed as part of "Personal Folder" but stored separately.

"Today, the vast majority of email actually sits on the local hard drive on those .PST files," White remarked. The end users love it because they can file as much as they want in there, and they have access to it when they're on their PC. But from an administrator's perspective, they don't like them because they're very expensive to discover, they get lost, they get corrupted, it's a liability and a lot of overhead for the IT organization.

"So with integrated archiving ... it doesn't have any change to the end user experience," she continued. "That Personal Folder appears, but the archive shows up and it looks just the same, it's another folder in your file directory, it looks like a secondary Inbox...The benefit is, it's all sitting on Exchange, so it's not going to get corrupted or lost. It's very easy to discover -- that time comes down dramatically. And as a user, you get access to it through Outlook Web App, [as opposed to] on the local hard drive."

Here, White took the bold step of proclaiming OWA as superior to Outlook, in that users still get full access to their mail (albeit with transport restrictions), but without having to keep those multi-gigabyte .PST files locally:

"What got us into this in the beginning was when we talked to our Exchange customers as we were planning [ES] 2010, and we found out that 20 percent of Exchange mailboxes have an archive on them today, but over 60 percent said it was important to them. It's scary, because there's not a mailbox out there that shouldn't be archived for one reason or another. What we heard from them was, 1) the cost and overhead of maintaining and managing another system -- new tools to learn -- was too expensive; and 2) the end-user experience. Oftentimes you have an archive today, you have to go to a different UI to retrieve the mail, or the performance is really poor on the archived mail. Because what they do is called 'stubbing,' which means they literally just leave a little bit of the email in the Inbox, and the rest of it sits out on a third-party system. So the performance has to go bounce between multiple systems, so it's very slow.

"If end users don't adopt it, it doesn't work," White remarked. "So this clears the hurdle of both the end user experience as the IT pro cost and management perspective."
That 70 Percent Cost Savings Claim

During the presentation at TechEd in Berlin, Microsoft CVP Stephen Elop made the staggering claim that within a group of 100 companies testing Exchange Server 2010 over the last year, some were able to cut their administrative costs over earlier versions of Exchange by as much as 70 percent.

As is Betanews' custom (and as is the custom of Betanews readers who see anything in double-digits beside a percentile mark), we asked how that figure was obtained. For instance, we've seen companies in the past that said the expenditure to do something this year was X percent lower than the expense to do something in the past, and that typically refers to the fact that memory or storage or processor power is just that much cheaper. That's not really savings; that's a factor of the economy.

So what is this 70 percent savings a factor of? "A big cost driver is storage," responded White. "We know the storage aspect of email, it's a lot of information and it can get expensive. Traditionally, Exchange was deployed always on a storage-area network, which was fine back in the day when you had a 200 MB mailbox. Obviously, that's not sufficing anymore, and 10 GB is becoming more of a standard. Supporting that kind of mailbox storage size on a SAN becomes cost-prohibitive.

"So what we've done in Exchange 2010 is two things: First, we dramatically improved performance, tenfold over Exchange 2003. When I say that, I mean the time it takes to read and write information to the disk. What that enables is world-class support of low-cost storage options -- direct-attached storage, SATA, even in a JBoss configuration. So big, slow disks, you can run Exchange without any performance or reliability impact." NEC (Nasdaq: NIPNY) Philips (NYSE: PHG), for example, was able to increase its storage capacity by a factor of eight, while simultaneously reducing costs by a factor of four, White said; and Germany-based hosted service provider Elabs was able to reduce its storage costs by 70 percent.

Isn't that saying that the expenditure this year is 70 percent or so less than the expenditure for a similar service in 2003? Yes, according to White, but that's in terms of operating cost run-rate, which is figured according to time and not total investment, especially since companies don't always purchase storage capacity all up-front.

Betanews also learned that Microsoft's SMB Windows Server bundles, Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008, will not be updated immediately with Exchange Server 2010. Those bundles may continue to be sold with Exchange Server 2007 for at least several more months down the road.

Apple Seals iPhone's SMS Security Leak 0 comments

Security researchers have apparently motivated Apple to kick out a patch that plugs an SMS hole in the iPhone's operating system. As demonstrated in a Thursday presentation at Black Hat, an iPhone flaw allowed hackers to launch malicious attacks through text messages. On Friday, Apple served up a fix.

Could something as simple as an SMS More about SMS text message turn your own smartphone against you, allowing a hacker to listen in on your private conversations or direct you to a malicious Web site?

It can be done, according to security experts presenting their findings Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

News of the now exposed flaw generated quite a buzz, especially because the researchers said they had notified Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Apple Store Discount on Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition . Click here. More about Apple about the iPhone's susceptibility to the attack, but the vendor had not released a fix at the time it was revealed at the conference.

However, the iPhone maker on Friday rushed out with an iPhone OS update that it says addresses the flaw.

Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google Android operating system is also affected by an SMS flaw, but the Internet search giant has fixed it.

The danger of SMS flaws is that they let attacks spread widely very fast and have the potential to take phishing and cyberfraud to new heights.
News of the iPhone SMS Flaw

At Black Hat, Charlie Miller, a researcher from Independent Security Evaluators, and University of Berlin Ph.D. candidate Collin Mulliner demonstrated that hackers can break into an iPhone through the SMS protocol to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack or take control of a user's device.

They showed that hackers can launch malware attacks through a victim's iPhone or implement other types of attacks common in the PC world, such as installing information-stealing Trojans.

That's because smartphones, with their flash memory, operating systems and other capabilities, are essentially very small computers. iPhone hackers and crackers have been able to turn the phone into what could arguably be called a desktop. The Java-based Open Office suite can be ported to the iPhone and, because the iPhone has a connector on its base for video output, it can be hooked up to a large screen. Add a keyboard, and you have a computer with at least 16 GB of disk space, 128 MB of RAM and a 600 MHz processor that can run any Linux application.

Miller, who formerly worked at the National Security Agency, released the first remote exploit for the iPhone back in 2007 and has made a career out of breaking Apple's security. He made it to Popular Mechanics' Top 10 Hackers list in 2008.
Apple Issues Update

The duo publicized the flaw at Black Hat because Apple did not initially respond to their requests to fix it, they said.

On Friday, after news of the attack had been widely reported, Apple introduced iPhone OS 3.0.1, which it claims patches the SMS flaw.

Apple's exclusive carrier in the U.S., AT&T (NYSE: T) More about AT&T, said it's working hard to maintain security. "AT&T takes all security threats seriously, and we have controls and mitigation capabilities in place that block and identify attempts to breach the security of our network," spokesperson Jeannie Hornung told TechNewsWorld.
iPhone Users Upset

News of the flaw sparked the creation of a topic on how to disable SMS on Apple's iPhone forum.

"In light of the recently announced hack of iPhone's SMS, I'd like to turn the feature completely," dan-the-red wrote on the forum. "Once there's a permanent solution ... well, I'd like to leave it off. Frankly, I can't stand it. How can I kill it, short of turning off the iPhone?"
What Is SMS and Why Is It Flawed?

SMS, part of the GSM series of standards, uses standardized communication protocols to let mobile phone users send and receive messages of up to 160 characters.

GSM has several vulnerabilities, some of which carry over into SMS. However, SMS has additional vulnerabilities because of its store-and-forward feature and because it can be conducted over the Internet.

Back in 2005, researchers at Pennsylvania State University presented a paper on SMS' vulnerabilities at the 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Titled "Exploiting Open Functionality in SMS-Capable Cellular Networks," this paper said that connections between mobile phones and the Internet through SMS could let hackers kill voice service to large metropolitan areas with a cable modem. The hackers could target the entire United States with a medium-sized zombie network.

SMS traffic can be used to create a denial-of-service (DoS) attack by simply sending enough of them to flood control channels. "It would be theoretically possible to knock out cellular service for the continent with a data rate of approximately 370 Mbps," the paper stated.
The Danger of Thinking Big

Hackers have not launched wide-scale attacks through SMS so far perhaps because they would first have to collect data on the phones available in a given area. However, that can be done over the Internet.

"Evidently, the bad guys haven't been able to figure out how to do it effectively yet," Randy Abrams, director of technical education at security vendor ESET, told TechNewsWorld.

However, when the hackers do figure it out -- if they manage to work around the patch Apple delivered -- it could be big trouble. "The iPod touch and iPhone share the same operating system, so if I can infect your iPhone and use it to infect all other iPhones in your address book, that could spread like wildfire," Carl Howe, director, anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld.

The iPod touch would be a good vector to help spread the infection because it uses WiFi and can drop off the network after pulling or sending malware. Yankee's research shows there are more than 40 million iPhones and iPod touches worldwide.

"This could parallel the swine flue pandemic with the rapidity of its spread," Howe said.
Google Plugs the Leak

The Android operating system also suffered from an SMS flaw, but it's different from the Apple flaw, according to Android security engineer Rich Cannings.

The Android flaw would let attackers temporarily knock mobile phones off the cell network but would not let them gain control of the devices, Cannings told TechNewsWorld.

Miller and Mulliner had notified Google about the flaw at the end of June, and Google fixed it within days, Cannings said. "We made the fix available to carriers and OEMs for use in updating their customers, and have updated open source Android," he added.

Android users who update their systems will see that the update includes a security fix.
Taking CyberFraud to the Max

Security fixes are essential because SMS spoofing could take cyberfraud to new heights, ESET's Abrams warned.

"I just got an e-mail from a stranger claiming she's stranded in London and has lost her wallet and passport and asking me to send her money," he said. Such messages are a common tactic for scammers who break into a victim's email account and then steal money from that person's friends.

"That sort of fraud will be even more effective on cellphones than it is on e-mail when it appears to come from your friend, because people trust their cellphone messages even more than they trust e-mail," he said.

Cheaper Solar Thermal Power 0 comments

A simpler design could reduce the cost of solar power generated by concentrating sunlight on Stirling engines.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

The company is currently building a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit demonstration plant that will use the company's latest design. Stirling expects to finish that project by the end of the year. It also has contracts with two California utilities to supply a total of 800 megawatts of solar power in Southern California. The first of the plants that will supply this power could be built starting the middle of next year, pending government permits and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The projects are part of a resurgence in what's known as solar thermal power. Various solar thermal technologies were developed starting in the 1970s, but a breakdown in government funding and incentives caused them to stall before they reached a scale of production large enough to drive down costs and allow them to compete with conventional sources of electricity. "It was a classic problem with solar. The market support to bring solar to high volume wasn't there," says Ian Simington, the chairman of SES and chief executive of the solar division of NTR, a company based in Dublin, Ireland, that bought a controlling share of SES last year.

Recent state mandates and incentives for renewable energy have led to a new push to commercialize the technology. There are over six gigawatts of concentrated solar power under contract in the southwestern United States right now, says Thomas Mancini, program manager for concentrated-solar-power technology at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. That's equivalent to about six nuclear-power plants. BrightSource Energy has contracts to provide 2.6 gigawatts of solar power with concentrated solar power (a previous version of this story cited only one of two 1.3 gigawatt contracts), and Solar Millenium has announced a project that would generate nearly one gigawatt of power.

Stirling Energy Systems technology uses 12-meter-wide mirrors in the shape of a parabolic dish to concentrate sunlight onto a Stirling engine. The difference in temperature between the hot and cool sides of the engine is used to drive pistons and generate 25,000 watts of electricity. The first phase of the company's large-scale projects will use 12,000 of these dishes to generate 300 megawatts of power. Simington expects electricity from the systems to cost between 12 and 15 cents per kilowatt hour, higher than the cheapest sources of electricity--such as coal-fired power plants--but competitive in many markets, especially in the afternoon, when prices are highest.

Earlier this month the company unveiled its production design. Compared to several prototypes that have been tested for several years at Sandia National Laboratory, the new design cuts about two metric tons from the weight of each dish and reduces the number of mirrors in each from 80 to 40. The simplified design can be built in large quantities using equipment in existing factories for automobiles.



The company's design has certain advantages over other approaches to concentrated solar power. In other systems, heat is collected over a large area and used to drive turbines in a central facility. These turbines require large amounts of water for cooling, Mancini says, whereas the SES system uses a closed-radiator system that doesn't consume water. Water use is an important consideration for solar thermal technologies, Mancini adds, since they work best in areas with a lot of direct sunlight--that is, in deserts. (These concentrated-solar-power systems are quite different from solar water heaters used in homes.)

Another advantage of the SES system is its modularity. With other approaches, the entire solar collection and generation system has to be in place to start generating electricity. With the Stirling engine system, power can come online as the dishes are installed, and more generating capacity can easily be added by building more dishes, without any need to enlarge a central generating plant.

But the system also has a significant disadvantage. Other solar thermal power plants collect heat in a central place where it can easily be stored, making it possible to generate electricity when the sun isn't shining. "There's no obvious way to do this with the dishes," Mancini says.

Although there has been a resurgence in contracts for solar thermal power, obstacles to the plants being built still remain. The new projects could be stalled by slow action from the government. Permits originally thought to be ready by the end of this year are now expected no sooner than next May. What's more, the current economy has made financing hard to come by, says Sean Gallagher, SES's vice president for market strategy and regulatory affairs. That has forced his company and others to rely on Department of Energy loan guarantees. But, Gallager says, although the DOE has promised to speed up its process for issuing these, it has yet to issue even the rules for applying for the guarantees included in February's stimulus package.

US Reputation for Scientific Achievement Flagging 0 comments

Americans no longer believe the U.S. leads the world in scientific accomplishments, suggest the results of a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. Further, many Americans do not agree with scientific consensus on a variety of issues, such as the role of humans in global warming and the evolution of species. Scientists blame the media, in part, for the disconnect.

U.S. science, medicine and technology were under the microscope in the latest survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and one finding that's generating headlines is that only 17 percent of the public participants held the belief that American scientific achievements are the best in the world.

However, the people who write those headlines and do the reporting on science, medicine and technology -- the media -- also got low grades from the scientists who were surveyed. Their view was that newspapers and television news oversimplify science coverage and don't do enough to separate sound science research from that which is not.

That particular insight comes at a time when many major media organizations at the local and national level are cutting back on science, health and technology reporting, laying off or offering buyouts to experienced science journalists.

Those cutbacks don't bode well for a clear-headed examination of science issues that are getting more mainstream news attention, such as climate change or stem-cell research, suggested the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which bills itself as the country's largest general scientific society.

"That's, of course, of tremendous concern to us, because the science journalism community has done a wonderful job in helping convey to the public not only the importance of science and the content of science, but also the excitement of science," Alan Leshner, PhD, told TechNewsWorld. "I think that's really scary."
Media Impact on Public/Science Opinion

The AAAS took part in the Pew survey with a sample of 2,533 members answering questions; 2,001 members of the public responded to the survey, conducted between April and June.

The Pew Center neither takes positions on its findings nor suggests solutions to any problems discussed in the surveys, said Scott Keeter, director of survey research. Yet he does see some linkage between the results and the media; for example, an overwhelming 85 percent of the scientists surveyed expressed the belief that the public has a lack of basic scientific knowledge, which can pose a problem for science overall.

"Clearly, the combination of facts that the public is not particularly knowledgeable about science and that scientists feel that coverage by the media is partly responsible suggests that there is a bridge to be built there," Keeter told TechNewsWorld.

Forty-nine percent of the scientists also held the view that the public has unrealistic expectations about the speed of achievements in science.

"You might also put that back at the feet of the media," Keeter said. "The public expects solutions to problems too quickly, and that can be triggered by news coverage that suggests recent medical breakthroughs will lead to cures in the short run."

The media will give plenty of attention to hot-button issues like climate change and local controversies over the teaching of evolution in schools. Reporters covering those particular issues have already done some harm, said Leshner.

"Scientists for a very long time have complained about what's called 'the balance issue,' where journalists feel compelled to present both sides or all sides of an issue," he noted.

If there's no scientific disagreement, Leshner continued, reporters find somone to present a contrary political or ideological view. The public may not discriminate between a lay person and a scientist when watching the coverage.

"Stem cells is an issue where there's a great disconnect between the public and scientific views," observed Leshner.
Media Not Solely to Blame

If scientists are going to be quick to blame the media for sloppy reporting or faulty public perceptions, "they also need to blame themselves," Leshner suggested, "because there's a tremendous need, an obligation, and an opportunity for scientists to reach out to the public, and they need to do it far more than they ever have in the past."

Other Pew survey findings highlight his point regarding areas of science that have generated headlines and controversy:

* While 84 percent of the scientists surveyed were convinced human activity like burning fossil fuels is causing higher global temperatures, just 49 percent of the public agreed;
* 87 percent of scientists maintained that humans have developed via evolution and natural selection; only 32 percent of the public agreed.
* 93 percent of the scientists favored animal testing in science research; 52 percent of the public agreed;
* 93 percent of scientists surveyed wanted the government to fund embryonic stem-cell research; just 58 percent of the public survey respondents thought federal funds should be used.

Some of the survey's other findings:

* Only 12 percent of the public viewed space exploration and the 1969 moon landing as the greatest scientific achievement of the past 50 years. In 1999, 18 percent of those surveyed had that opinion.
* 27 percent of the public viewed scientific advancements in general as one of America's greatest achivements, down from 47 percent 10 years ago;
* 84 percent of the public respondents indicated a "mostly positive" view of scientists;
* 70 percent of the public believed scientists contribute "a lot" to society's well-being;
* No surprise here: More than 80 percent of scientists viewed a lack of funding as a serious impediment to scientific research and progress.

Ectaco iTRAVL: A Talking Travel Companion and More 0 comments

Not since the days of the Grand Tour taken at the turn of the last century has travel to numerous countries on a single trip been so popular. Part of the reason lies in the fact that travel budgets have been reduced so that making the most out of any trip you take now makes good financial sense. But having the language skills necessary to communicate freely in the countries you need or want to visit is another matter entirely.

Now, thanks to the Ectaco iTRAVL, a remarkable new award-winning travel handheld, everyone has instant access to the resources needed to travel in comfort and style. Using an advanced combination of native-speaker voice narration, advanced speech recognition and speech synthesis, iTRAVL understands and speaks up to several million words and phrases instantly to save precious time when seconds really count.

Perfect for use in hotels, restaurants and shops, on the street when asking for directions, iTRAVL delivers the detailed facts you need and includes a translating Dictionary, Talking PhraseBook and Travel Guides to put the power of complete understanding to work for you.

But iTRAVL isn’t only great on the road, it even lets you increase your knowledge of foreign languages before and after your trip with a built-in Language Teacher system that uses speech recognition modules and learning games to let you speak like a local in no time at all. An Mp3 player for your favorite audio files and AudioBooks lets iTRAVL inform and entertain on long journeys. And with a talking calculator to perform instant currency conversions, you can easily check for the best exchange rates and save money while having the time of your life.

Coleto Pilot Hi-Tec-C Pens 0 comments

I have never considered myself a pen snob. I have happily written page after page in my personal journal with a lowly Bic Pen. In fact, for years, my favorite pen was the Bic 4-Color Pen. That was until I was introduced to the Coleto Pilot Hi-Tec-C Pens.



They come in 3-Color and 2-Color sizes, so you can have three colors in one pen, which is very nice if you like to write in a variety of colors. More importantly, the pens come EMPTY and you can CHOOSE the color of ink that you put in them.



When you use up all the ink in one color, changing it is easy. You just lift the lid, remove the empty ink cartridge and replace it with a new one.



In fact, since I’ve started using these pens, I’ve refused to use any others while writing in my journal. I love the color selection. The gel ink NEVER skips and the pens are easy to hold. The only problem with these pens is that they aren’t readily available in Utah. I can’t just run over to Office Depot to get refills.

Top Tech Companies Sued for Using...Icons? 0 comments

A Michigan company is suing tech giants Microsoft, Google, and Apple for patent infringement for using thumbnail icons to represent files.

Michigan's Cygnus Systems, Inc., a company focused on networking support and development, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit (PDF) against Microsoft, Apple, and Google for&mash;get this—using icons to represents files. But not just any icons: representational thumbnails that reflect the onscreen display of a particular document or file. Such miniaturized thumbnails are now a common feature of many software products, including Apple's Finder and iTunes software (think Cover Flow), Windows Explorer, and Google's Chrome browser—and if Cygnus is willing to go after those three companies, they might be considering action against Adobe and Opera (which have products with similar interfaces) and even Web-based music and photo services like Amazon's MP3 Store and Flickr which, after all, offer thumbnail representations of files.

Cygnus applied for the patent, number 7,346,850, way back in June, 1998, but it was only granted in March of 2008. Since then, presumably, the company has been trying to get companies (like Apple, Google, and Microsoft) to license the patent, but apparently no agreements could be reached, so the company has filed suit. Cygnus Systems is seeking an injunction to prevent other companies from infringing on its patent, along with damages and fees. Interestingly, the company is seeking damages back to the date the infringement began, which in many cases would land substantially before Cygnus's patent was granted.

If the case goes to trial, industry watchers expect the legal teams of the targeted companies will attempt to have Cygnus's patent invalidated on the basis of prior art: numerous instances of representational thumbnail icons for files existed on numerous operating systems prior to Cygnus's 1998 patent application, and the technique was employed by several companies including Apple and Adobe.

Apple and Microsoft declined to comment on the suit; Google and Cygnus Systems could not be reached for comment.