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Microsoft’s next browser release will make it easier for people to delete and control information about their Web browsing history.

By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
August 25, 2008  Copyright: infoworld.com

Microsoft on Monday described some new privacy features that will come with IE8, the next release of its browser. The features are designed to make it easier for people to delete and control information about their Web browsing history.

With InPrivate Browsing, one of the new features, a user launches a new InPrivate Browsing window to go online. When the users closes the window, IE doesn’t store any cookies, passwords, words typed into the address bar, search queries, temporary Internet files or form data from the browsing session.

[ Are browsers becoming extinct? Read Do new Web tools spell doom for the browser? ]

Another new feature aims to address a shortcoming in the way the current version of IE lets people delete their browsing history. When a user deletes their browsing history today, they also get rid of cookies that are used to save preferences tied to Web sites that they might visit often.

With IE8, users can delete their browsing history but retain the cookies for frequently visited sites. The implementation for this will be a bit clunky for users, however. To make sure cookies are retained for certain sites, users will have to add those sites to their Favorites list. After that, the cookies for those sites will be retained when the browsing history is deleted.

Microsoft also hopes to help users better control the type of information that Web sites might share about them with third parties. Companies that provide content to Web sites often collect information about people who visit those sites, but end users sometimes don’t know the information is being collected, Microsoft said. If the content provider supplies content to multiple sites, it can compile valuable browsing information about users who visit those sites.

A feature in IE8 called InPrivate Blocking keeps a record of when those content providers collect browsing information about the user, and will automatically block providers who have collected information about a user on more than 10 sites. Users can also choose which content they block or allow, and learn more about third-party content.

Microsoft is expected to release another beta of IE8 this month and release the final code before the end of this year.

Copyright: infoworld.com

Google Inc. is reportedly close to a deal with Verizon Communications Inc. that would give the Web search giant a prominent role in mobile search activity over Verizon’s vast wireless network.

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Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

At Share conference, IBM executive cites impending growth, energy issues for datacenter management

Virtualization, SOA, and cloud computing are keys to accommodating the anticipated growth of datacenters in an energy-conscious environment, an IBM official stressed Monday. 

In a keynote presentation and subsequent interview at the Share conference in San Jose, Calif., Helene Armitage, vice president of systems software development in the IBM systems and technology group, emphasized substantial growth projections for datacenters. She also noted concerns about whether the power grid can handle this growth. Industries such as medical imaging and financial services are experiencing rapid growth, Armitage said.

“Thirty percent of the world’s storage in the next two years is going to be these medical images,” she said. Meanwhile, there are 5 billion messages occurring in the financial trading realm each day with the number projected to grow to the 130 billion per day in the next two years, she said.

Adding to the situation, storage capacity in datacenters is doubling every 18 months.

Datacenters will be spending as much on energy as they do on hardware, said Armitage. Based on the current trajectory, 10 new power plants would be needed in the United States in the next few years to accommodate growth, she said.

[ For more tips on conserving energy in the datacenter, see "The three principles of datacenter energy efficiency." ]

A conference attendee said the presentation was on the mark in terms of global energy initiatives. “I was rather surprised in terms of some of the numbers that datacenters were using in terms of energy,” said the attendee, Mark Potter, vice president of corporate information security at Wachovia Small Business Capital.

IT users next year will spend $200 billion on systems such as interconnects, networking, SANs, fabrics, switches, and enterprise routers, up from $30 billion a few years ago, said Armitage. “All of this requires us to take a new approach,” she said.

Datacenters were not designed to handle current growth levels, she said. “I really think where we are headed is to create true architectures for our datacenters,” Armitage said.

She advocated virtualization coupled with SOA, citing IBM’s experience. Cloud computing also factors into IBM’s strategy.

“We’ve been virtualizing on the mainframe for 35 years. We’re just talking about bringing that out into all the other environments as well,” she said.

IBM has reduced downtime at Japan Airlines, for example, by using virtualization, said Armitage. Nationwide Insurance is on track to save more than $15 million during a three-year period with virtualization, she added. The company was moved from 250 individual Linux servers to two IBM z/9 mainframes. Volkswagen went from 76 individual Linux servers down to six, according to Armitage.

“Virtualization changes everything,” she said. But it does bring additional complexity, said Armitage.

“It’s not like there’s a silver bullet. The issue in implementing virtualization is doing the end-to-end architectural thinking around SOA,” she said. Virtualization can involve taking many small operations and consolidating them on a mainframe or taking small operations and making them work together as a single operation, sharing capabilities such as I/O and storage, Armitage said.

Cloud computing, in which user sites leverage the capacity of a third party’s computers, offers a way to acquire IT capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis, Armitage said. Benefits also include cost savings, resource scalability, and flexibility.

Armitage also cited energy savings redistributing of heat and cooling around the datacenter. This can save 20 percent in energy use, she said.

Also at the Share event, CA announced a plan to release a range of enhancements to its mainframe management software for the z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM platforms. The products introduced include CA SymDump Batch r8, to bolster z/OS management; CA Spool r11.5, offering IPv6 support and remote printing support for z/OS; CA Datacom r11 SP4, for near-real-time replication of data for z/OS; and CA Dynam for z/VSE 7.1, for simplified z/VSE tape management.

Also unveiled were CA ACF2 r12 and CA Top Secret r12 SP2, for additional security attribute sharing and compliance reporting for z/OS.

LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y. - Automotive dealer software manufacturer DealerTrack Holdings Inc. slashed its full-year earnings and revenue projections Monday, saying a challenging credit environment and slowdown in new car sales would impede performance.

Its shares tumbled 16 percent in after-hours trading, shedding $2.54 to $13.25 after closing the regular session down 21 cents at $15.79.

The Lake Success-based company said it expects to earn between $9.4 million and $12.8 million in 2008. That would be earnings per share of between 22 cents and 30 cents.

The company previously expected to earn between $21 million and $22.6 million, or 48 cents to 52 cents per share.

DealerTrack executives said they expected revenue of $246 million to $253 million — down from earlier estimates of $268 million to 272 million.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial expect the company to earn 98 cents per share on revenue of $260 million for the year.

“We continue to expand our product offerings and to invest in our existing products,” DealerTrack Chairman and Chief Executive Mark O’Neil said in a statement. “We believe we can continue to grow through this economic downturn. It would be shortsighted of us to stop development of new projects; instead, we remain focused on growing DealerTrack by providing our customers with the solutions they need to be more efficient.”

The company said its new outlook doesn’t assume a recovery in the nation’s auto lending environment this year.

Separately Monday, DealerTrack said its second-quarter profit fell 51 percent to $3.06 million, or 7 cents per share, in the quarter ending June 30. That’s down from $6.28 million, or 15 cents a share, during the same period last year.

This week we’re publishing several blog posts dedicated to helping you with one response code: 404.

Response codes are a numeric status (like 200 for “OK”, 301 for “Moved Permanently”) that a webserver returns in response to a request for a URL. The 404 response code should be returned for a file “Not Found”.

When a user sends a request for your webpage, your webserver looks for the corresponding file for the URL. If a file exists, your webserver likely responds with a 200 response code along with a message (often the content of the page, such as the HTML).

So what’s a 404? Let’s say that in the link to “Visit Google Apps” above, the link is broken because of a typing error when coding the page. Now when a user clicks “Visit Google Apps”, the particular webpage/file isn’t located by the webserver. The webserver should return a 404 response code, meaning “Not Found”.

Now that we’re all on board with the basics of 404s, stay tuned 4 even more information on making 404s good 4 users and 4 search engines.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Cryptography is notoriously hard to get right and if improperly used, can create serious security holes. Common mistakes include using the wrong cipher modes or obsolete algorithms, composing primitives in an unsafe manner, hard-coding keys in source code, or failing to anticipate the need for future key rotation. With these risks in mind, we’re pleased to announce the open-source release of Keyczar.

Keyczar is a cryptographic toolkit that supports encryption and authentication for both symmetric and public-key algorithms. It addresses some of the aforementioned issues by choosing safe defaults, tagging outputs with key version information, and providing a simple application programming interface. Keyczar’s key versioning system makes it easy to rotate and revoke keys, without worrying about backward compatibility or making any changes to source code.

We look forward to working with the open source community and continuing to make cryptography safer and easier to use. To download Keyczar or for more information, please visit our Google Code project and discussion group.

Have you ever been traveling and suddenly realized that you didn’t know how to ask the taxi driver to take you to your hotel? It’s happened to us too, so the mobile team has put together an iPhone interface for Google Translate, our machine translation project. Read more about it on the Google Mobile blog.

Posted by Allen Hutchison and David Singleton, Software Engineers

According to eWeek.com, former Google engineers have launched a new search engine that could index even more sites than that of Google. The name of the search engine is Cuil (pronounced “cool”) and has already gone live.

Cuil is said to index sites online faster and cheaper than that of Google, but that is yet to be seen. Can a new engine in the market really compete against Google? Yahoo which is the 2^nd largest search engine in the U.S. is having a very tough time competing with Google in search, thus an agreement has been made public with both companies forming a partnership within the search sector, having Yahoo outsource search to Google.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

As eWeek describes it, “Cuil clusters the results of each Web search performed on the service into groups of related Web pages. It sorts these by categories and offers various organizing features to help identify topics and allow the user to quickly refine searches.”

Doing a search for traffic on Compete.com, it looks like in July, the traffic of cuil.com was a little over 2 million visitors. Forget about competing with Google, look at the other two giant search engines, you also have to compete against them.

Also not show on the chart above, Ask.com had over 26 million visitors in the month of July.

While Cuil does have a unique way of displaying search results (in a plain fashion for now though), it has an uphill battle ahead.