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Twitter fended off a series of clickjacking attempts last month in which users were tricked into sending out spam tweets.

This is the malicious tweet that links people to a dubious Web site, Trend Micro says.

A new attack was hijacking Twitter users Friday, with at least 700 accounts being compromised in two hours beginning at about 11 a.m. PST (7 p.m. GMT), security researcher Rik Ferguson wrote on the Trend Micro blog.

“It appears that there is a rash of Twitter account hijacking going on this evening,” Ferguson wrote.

Stone urged people to use strong passwords for their Twitter accounts and not to share passwords with anyone.

(Credit:
Trend Micro)

. Updated 4:25 p.m. PST with Twitter comment.

Twitter users looking for a little entertainment on a boring Friday may want to go elsewhere to get their fix.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed the attack and said the company had reset the passwords of the compromised accounts and removed the “spammy updates.” “Today we discovered about 750 Twitter accounts were broken into and had a link to a webcam site posted on the accounts,” he wrote on his blog. It appears other sites and services have been affected by a similar attack.

“Obviously we recommend against clicking on this link, it leads to a porn Webcam portal which looks to have been designed with credit card harvesting in mind,” he wrote. “Affected users should change their password to a secure one as soon as possible.”

Victims are clicking on a link in a tweet that lures them with the promise of chatting with a 23-year-old woman on a Webcam.

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I’m therefore hugely impressed by Novell’s Suse Studio, an innovative way to enable both standardization and customization of a Linux distribution.

Suse Studio is a new, innovative Web-based service to enable (independent software vendors), developers, and the community to quickly and easily “mass customize” Linux. Suse Studio is the first tool to enable users to create fully supported, customized variants of Suse Linux Enterprise and OpenSuse, add additional software, and test the resulting image–all in one simple and easy-to-use interface.

In 2000, my company, embedded Linux vendor Lineo, figured out how to enable our customers to “mass customize” Linux with our software development kit. What we didn’t figure out, and what no one after us has, until now, was how to fully support the output of that SDK.

We didn’t achieve mass customization of
cars until Ford thought up the assembly line. We need the equivalent of the assembly line in the (operating system) world: tools that provide rapid, fully supported mass-market efficiency, reliability, and consistency, while allowing for individuality.

One of the great promises of software is its infinite malleability: software can be whatever you want, so long as you have the skills necessary (and legal rights) to modify it.

“Mass customization.” The idea is sheer brilliance, and the execution of it may be just as good. Novell’s senior manager for Suse Studio, Matthew Richards, hit many of the high points of Suse Studio in a Network World article released on Thursday:

Novell has now cracked the supportability code. I asked Justin Steinman, Novell’s vice president of solution and product marketing, how Novell will support the wide variety of tailored Suse Linux distributions its customers will create, and I got the following response:

Why? Novell explains:

Since then, Novell has not said much publicly about the alpha-stage product. That’s too bad, as this may well be one of the industry’s most exciting and transformational software releases in years.

Nat Friedman, Novell’s chief technology and strategy officer for open source, has been working on Suse Studio for some time, but it was at VMworld in September that Novell first publicly demonstrated the product.

Even so, Richards largely glossed over the most important (and seemingly impossible) aspect of Suse Studio’s myriad customizations: they will be fully supported.

Despite this promise, software has long sought to replicate physical goods: mass-produced with customization, if any, coming post-sale by a system integrator or other consultant. This has helped churn out billion-dollar software companies such as Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, but it has failed to satisfy customer demand for a tailored fit.

It really is a fantastic idea, which, if emulated by others in the open-source world, should make open source the de facto choice for enterprise IT, original equipment manufacturers, and others. This could be a very big deal.

We will build a “supportability algorithm” into Suse Studio. If your “customized (Suse Linux Enterprise)” passes the algorithm, then we will support it. If your “customized SLE” doesn’t pass the algorithm, then we tell you what needs to be added to your “custom distro” for it to be supported.

Zoho has written a demo of Zoho’s CloudSQL that runs on Google’s App Engine.

The service is free for now. Zoho spokespeople say they’ll be looking at usage and uptake before they “decide if we need to charge for this.” Not exactly a cost structure one can budget for, but it’s early days for everyone.

Data stored in Zoho services–so far, only Zoho DB & Reports–can be accessed now not just via APIs, but from standard SQL drivers like JDBC and ODBC. Support for these traditional client/server technologies should make it easier for developers to transition to cloud-based data, should they be moving in that direction.

Zoho on Tuesday is rolling out CloudSQL, a layer of code that allows corporate developers to access their Zoho application data through a number of different dialects of the SQL database access language.

This charting app is running on Google App engine.

I have not tested the performance of this new middleware layer into Zoho’s systems, so I don’t know if it’s a workable solution. But it is a cool tool for companies that want to test the waters with cloud-based apps and storage.

(Credit:
Zoho)

Intel asked the FBI and the Justice Department to intervene after learning about Pani’s job at AMD from another Intel employee. The FBI said there is no evidence that AMD knew of or encouraged Pani’s actions or ever received the confidential Intel files. Pani is no longer employed by AMD, his attorney told the Globe.

The FBI has charged an engineer with stealing trade secrets from Intel, his former employer, after taking a position with rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, The Boston Globe reported Friday.

Pani was ordered to surrender his passport, but he was not taken into custody.

Representatives from Intel and AMD could not be reached immediately for comment.

Pani admitted to the FBI during a July 23 interview that he obtained the files but only out of curiosity and to aid his wife, also an Intel employee, prepare for a transfer to a new Intel plant.

Pani turned in his resignation to Intel in May, stating he would continue working there through June 11, according to an affidavit filed with the criminal complaint. However, he began working for AMD on June 2, while he still had access to his Intel laptop and the company’s computer network. The affidavit said Pani collected the sensitive information from Intel for its competitive value to his new employer.

A search of Biswahoman Pani’s home in Worcester, Mass., on July 1 turned up more than 100 pages of sensitive Intel documents, including 13 “top secret” files with designs for future processor chips, the FBI charged. A criminal complaint against Pani, which was unsealed Tuesday, was filed by the FBI in late August in U.S. District Court in Boston.

I was therefore gratified to see John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, weigh in on the subject with his excellent “Lessons from Mozilla” talk at Heise in Nuremberg, Germany, this week. With more than 220 million users and 40 percent of its code contributed by developers that don’t work for Mozilla, the company behind the
Firefox browser is an excellent example of open-source success.

Open source is very popular these days, but it remains a bit of a mystery how to actually build a successful open-source project. I once reviewed some research on how to create winning open-source projects, but delivering results against basic principles remains a crap shoot of sorts.

Lily cites seven lessons that can be derived from the Mozilla experience. (I’ve added some context based on his presentation.)

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Excellent counsel, and a reminder that while open source is not easy, it can have powerful effects. Mozilla’s Firefox would not be the same, if it were just another proprietary browser. It would just be Opera, which has struggled to be relevant in part because it has resisted open source.

(Credit:
John Lilly)

Superior products matter. Apache, Firefox, WordPress, Wikipedia, etc. What’s the common theme? “All are known for being best-in-class for users.” If the code is weak, the project will be weak. Period. Open source is an accelerant: it either makes poor code die faster or great code thrive faster.
Push (most) decision-making to the edges. The important thing is to have “high agreement on core values,” while simultaneously allowing developers closest to the code/problem to make independent decisions as to how to resolve issues.
Communication will happen in every possible way (so make sure it’s reusable). To eliminate wasteful re-explanation of why things were done in X manner, and to disseminate information on how or why decisions were made, it’s critical to have open communication and the ability to revisit that communication after the fact.
Make it easy for your community to do important things. Things like localization need to be easy in order to encourage adoption and use. If the community has to go back to the mother ship for every little thing, those little things will not happen.
Surprise is overrated. Lilly states that “surprise is the opposite of engagement,” and therefore Mozilla’s goal is to “increase the ‘inner circle’ of participation.” By allowing more people to participate in “core” decisions, the core grows, and the friction to actually get things done by a growing body of people grows along with it.
Communities are not markets: members are citizens. It’s therefore important to treat them like active, valuable participants in open source, not consumers thereof because, as Lilly notes, such citizens “don’t just make products better. They make them what they are.”
The key (to successful open-source project building is) the art of figuring out whether and how to apply each of these ideas.

Even so, Lilly was quick to warn people away from a cookie cutter approach to open-source success. While he was slated to discuss “how to bring an open-source project into the mainstream,” he called out three serious caveats to that premise:

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Given that there is no One True Way to do open source, what are some key principles for aiding, though not ensuring, the success of a project?

Capossela’s comments came following the launch of Microsoft Online, the company’s hosted versions of Exchange and Sharepoint.

SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft’s forthcoming Office Web Applications will allow users to create and edit spreadhseets, presentations and Word documents through a browser–but only so long as there is an active Internet connection.

Google has been working to add an offline ability to Google Docs, while Zoho was even earlier to add the ability to work within a browser while offline.

“In the first generation we are certainly looking at having them be connected,” he said. “For offline usage of course the Office suite is incredibly powerful.” (See YouTube video below for his full comments on the matter. Apologies in advance for the bad sound quality.)

In an interview Monday, Microsoft senior vice president Chris Capossela said that, at least initially, the browser based versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint won’t have an offline mode.

Microsoft confirmed at last month’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles that it was bringing to market browser-based versions of its Office applications. The company has said that a technology preview version should be available still this year.

(Via Bill Crow)

“The committee expects the JPEG XR International Standard to be published later this year,” the group said.

Last, it’s easy with JPEG XR to decode just a portion of an image, making it faster to zoom in on an image, and Microsoft designed the technology to work well baked into camera image processors’ circuitry, not just to run in software.

Microsoft hopes JPEG XR will become widely used, but it faces a huge challenge in displacing conventional JPEG. It’s taken the first steps, though: Windows Vista supports the format on which JPEG XR is based, called Windows Media Photo and later HD Photo. Microsoft also has released HD Photos support for Photoshop and Mac OS X

Another advantage of JPEG XR is that it uses a more efficient compression algorithm that provides either twice the image quality as JPEG at the same file size, or half the file size for the same quality, according to Microsoft. And unlike JPEG, setting JPEG XR to record at its highest quality level loses no information to compression artifacts.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group, which standardized the original and still ubiquitous JPEG format, sent JPEG XR to the “final phases of standardization” after a vote at a January meeting, the group said Thursday. That means the standard’s future is more certain.

JPEG XR, an image format created by Microsoft that promises a number of advantages over JPEG, has cleared a key standardization hurdle.

JPEG uses 8-bit encoding that provides 256 gradations, but JPEG XR can use 16 bits or more for finer distinctions and more editing flexibility. Newer digital SLRs typically record 14 bits data, and the hobbyist practice of combining multiple shots into a single high-dynamic range image also benefits from more bit depth.

JPEG XR offers a few advantages over JPEG, according to Microsoft. For one thing, as the XR “extended range” abbreviation suggests, it offers greater dynamic range–the span between the brightest brights and darkest darks in a photo.

The recent collapse of the financial sector has seriously challenged the Chicago economic school of thought, which advocates for minimal government intervention in the market, giving policymakers a rare opportunity to institute regulations that favor consumers over business interests, Savage said.

Friedman said it would take government intervention in the form of carrots and sticks in order to develop a lead in the energy technology sector. He described the state of innovation in the United States as a spaceship.

Without electricity, people are prohibited from performing a variety of regular tasks, “but most importantly, you can’t get to Google,” he said.

“Elect the right people–there’s really no substitute for that,” said Chris Savage, an attorney for Davis Wright Tremaine who specializes in Internet and telecommunications. “If that doesn’t happen, you’re hosed. That said, it is going to take a certain amount of time (to challenge) the orthodoxy of the market.”

“Energy technology is, I am sure, going to be the next great industrial revolution,” he said.

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/ CNET Networks)

Now is the time for regulatory reform, both men said at the two-day conference about the emerging Internet economy.

“We have on the order of six to 18 months to figure this out,” he said. “Timing matters–over time, any regulatory agency will come to be highly adapted to the large, rich interests it regulates.”

If the United States wants to lead the next technological revolutions, Friedman and others said at the Freedom to Connect conference here, the right leaders are needed to establish the proper incentives, along with smart regulations.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on Monday spoke about the need for government-provided incentives for green technology.

Unlike the information technology sector, he said, the energy technology sector faces competition from cheaper, dirtier energy alternatives.

As Internet access increasingly empowers people, the rules regulating the Internet should be adjusted with the input of the public, some speakers said.

“When Marc Andreessen invented the second browser, there were not dirty browsers already in existence,” he said. “That is not true with the ET revolution. Without a price signal, we will not get a green revolution.”

“Reaching the most democratic solutions will require making the Internet policy process as interactive as the Net,” said Nathan James, the program and outreach manager for the Media and Democracy Coalition, an affiliation of consumer, public interest, and labor groups.”If we don’t hear from a diversity of perspectives now, how will we ever know we charted the best course?”

Fostering growth in that sector is critical, he said.

Acquiring electricity is the first step to accessing information and an education, the speakers at the conference agreed.

WASHINGTON–To start a green revolution, “change your leaders, not your light bulbs,” the New York Times’ columnist Tom Friedman said Monday.

“In our case, the booster rocket, Washington, D.C., is cracked, and the pilots are fighting over a flight plan,” Friedman said.

Among other things, clean energy technology will be sorely needed to bring the world’s poor a reliable, sustainable source of electricity.

Those losing their jobs will get severance and a crack at other openings at the Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which had 20,222 employees at the end of December.

“Google has grown very quickly in a very short period of time. When companies grow that quickly it’s almost impossible to get everything right–and we certainly didn’t. In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process. That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time,” Kordestani said.

Google has shaken up even Silicon Valley with its fast growth in revenue, size, and ambition, but it’s not immune to the global economic woes, and it’s been trying to improve its profitability by cutting underperforming projects such as a print advertising initiative. Last year, Google started paring back its contractor workforce, and this year, Google cut 100 recruiters and 40 in a canceled radio ad effort.

Google is eliminating about 200 sales and marketing jobs, the company said in a blog post Thursday, blaming the move on overlapping areas and overhiring during a more optimistic time.

“Today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally,” said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, in the blog post. “We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business.”

Of course, you’ll probably be able to plug a keyboard into any of these yet-to-be-released tablets (see the Always Innovating tablet Netbook), but you’ll pay extra for the hardware and it’ll mean more gear to keep track of and prop up on your desk.

But what you can do with a screen-only computer gets really limited when you expand the device beyond pocket size. There are two big limitations. First, you need a keyboard for doing real work. At least most people do. Perhaps a generation of kids will grow up that are as speedy on a virtual keyboard as they are on a real one, but until then anyone who does more than write quick e-mails and Twitter messages on a computer will want to take a keyboard with them. And typing on the screen, even if you can do it, is an ergo disaster. Either you have to keep your hands up in the air (if the computer is mounted vertically in front of you) or you have to hunch over your screen to see it. Maybe it’s the national chiropractors association that’s pushing this form factor. See also: Jeremy Toeman at Live Digitally.

More:
Anaylst views Apple tablet
Our Apple table wish list
Name that netbook
CrunchPad tablet allegedly revealed

For specialized applications, tablet computers can and do work. The Aeryon spybot uses a tablet computer to control it. And in the consumer space, Amazon’s Kindle, a tablet by form factor even though it has a vestigial keyboard, works because it but does things no other device can do at all: it can buy books instantly, almost anywhere, and display them on a screen nearly as easy to read as a printed page.

I love beautiful and elegant tech toys as much as any other geek, but geek love isn’t enough to make a real market. Tablets need to cost a lot less and do a lot more before they establish a foothold in the consumer market.

Rumors have it Apple is a month away from announcing a tablet computer. Another tablet, the Crunchpad, is also due for imminent release. These and other fine keyboardless computers get great play on gadget blogs (including our own Crave), but in the real world, I believe this whole category is a nonstarter. Why we keep waiting for the killer tablet computer is beyond me. Few people really want one, especially at the prices that they will have to sell for.

While a tablet may be great for browsing the Web and viewing media, it’s too big to replace a phone and too limited to carry around as a work computer. People will need their keyboarded Netbooks and notebooks for real work. Tablets, like other tweener devices, ultramobile PCs and Netbooks, are accessories to real computers. You can’t do enough on them to justify the price, although they’re sure nice to have if you have extra money for a gizmo that sits between your big computer and your phone, both in size and function.

So as an accessory, tablets are too expensive. If Apple releases a tablet in the rumored $700 to $800 price range, it will die. Not because people won’t love it and lust for it, but because they won’t be able to justify it.

I actually have higher hopes for the Crunchpad due to its Web focus and its lower price. But even then, at the rumored $400 price point, I still believe it’s too dear for real human beings on a real budget, and it will reportedly lack local resources (storage) to make it a workable solution in a world of spotty connectivity (see also: Silicon Alley Insider). Geeks might like it, and buy them as living room couch Web-surfing computers, but for families looking to address real technology needs, a Netbook like a $200 Acer Aspire One offers a better bet: it has a real keyboard, its own storage, and you can take it on the road and do real work on it, like a notebook computer or a Netbook.

Tablet computers–elegant slates that you operate with a touch screen–are attractive if you’re a sci-fi fan. There’s something functionally beautiful about a computer that’s all screen and nothing else, and where your interaction is directly through that screen, not an intermediary like a keyboard or mouse. And the concept works great on smartphones.

Not really the Apple tablet.