Ellison's team pulls off stunning America's Cup comeback

He may have angered his customers in the process, but Larry Ellison's Oracle Team USA completed a stunning comeback on Wednesday to snatch the America's Cup sailing trophy from New Zealand in the last race of the competition.

The U.S. team had been seven races behind at one point last week in a contest that is decided by the first to win nine races. It clawed its way back with eight consecutive wins on the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay. Oracle Team USA actually won 11 races but began with a two-race deficit because it was caught cheating in a preliminary round.

The victory coincided with Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, which might have pleased Ellison had the penultimate race not fallen at the same hour as his closing keynote speech on Tuesday. Ellison gave his spot to a deputy and stayed on the water, irritating customers who had lined up to hear him speak.

He's probably not worrying about that today, having pulled off perhaps the biggest comeback in America's Cup history. Emirates Team New Zealand, whose fans were already celebrating their expected win last week, will be devastated by its loss.

Ellison is a keen sailor, and this is the second time in a row he has helped to fund and support a winning America's Cup team. He fought hard for the competition to be brought to San Francisco and selected a new class of sophisticated, high-speed catamaran to be used for the race. A wealth of technology goes into their design and operation.

The cost of designing and maintaining those boats, however, meant only four teams ended up taking part, which reportedly angered sponsors and city officials. The race was also marred by the death of British Olympian Andrew Simpson, who was killed when his team's boat capsized in training.

The Kiwis will be lamenting at least two possible missed chances for victory. Last Wednesday, when they needed one race to win and still had momentum behind them, the last race of the day was cancelled due to high winds. Oracle began its comeback the next day.

Then on Friday, the Emirates team crossed the finish line well ahead of Oracle, but too little wind meant it couldn't complete the course within the 40-minute time limit. Oracle regrouped again and the New Zealand team never won another race.

Oracle won the final race by 45 seconds, completing the roughly 12-mile course in 23:24. Its top speed was 51 mph, to the Kiwis' 53 mph.

James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com

Not online? That's because the Internet is irrelevant and too technical, survey says

The information superhighway is not for everyone. Fifteen percent of adults still don't use the Internet, primarily because it's not relevant to them or it's too difficult to use, a recent Pew survey said.

Of American adults ages 18 and older who do not use the Internet, 34 percent said the Internet was not relevant to them, according to the results of a survey released Wednesday. By that they meant they're not interested, they don't want to use it, or they have no need for it.

Another 32 percent of non-users said it was too difficult or frustrating to go online. Fear of spam, spyware and hackers also kept people from logging on, according to the report.

The percentage of people who don't go online because it's too hard to use the Internet is a bit higher than in earlier surveys. In previous years, offline adults cited usability as a deterrent less than 20 percent of the time.

Irrelevance is a commonly cited reason why people abstain from the Internet, said Kathryn Zickuhr, a research associate at the Pew Research Center's Internet Project. But in recent years, what Pew has seen is that while fewer people have said they can't get access to the Internet, more have said that the Internet is too complicated, she said in an interview.

The short answer, she said, is that most offline adults don't have much experience with the Internet and need assistance when they try to use it. Among non-users, more than 40 percent said they have asked a friend or family member to help them look something up online, the survey said.

"We've found that most offline adults either don't see the Internet as relevant to them, or feel that it would be too difficult to start," Zickuhr said.

Another interesting finding is the number of people who have quit the Internet. Fourteen percent of offline adults said they once used the Internet but have since stopped for some reason. It's not clear why these people went off the grid, because Pew did not conduct any follow-up questionnaires, Zickuhr said.

The survey's findings were based on telephone interviews with more than 2,000 U.S. adults conducted earlier this year.

Besides apathy, other reasons people gave for not using the Internet included the expense of owning a computer or paying for the service, or being too old.

Three percent of non-users cited privacy, spyware and hacking concerns.

Overall, the percentage of people who do use the Internet has remained relatively steady over the past several years. The 85 percent of U.S. adults who use the Internet is up only moderately from 75 percent in 2008, Pew said. Ten years ago, just over 60 percent of adults were online, according to Pew.

Meanwhile, dial-up access is still being used, albeit only by 3 percent of connected adults, the survey said.

Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com

Stanford researchers develop first computer using only carbon nanotube transistors

Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated the first functional computer built using only carbon nanotube transistors, according to an article published Wednesday on the cover of scientific journal Nature.

Scientists have been experimenting with transistors based on carbon nanotubes or CNTs as successors to silicon transistors, as silicon is expected to meet its physical limits in delivering the increasingly smaller transistors required for higher performance in smaller and cheaper computing devices that are less power-consuming. Digital circuits based on the long chains of carbon atoms are expected to be more energy-efficient than silicon transistors.

The rudimentary CNT computer, developed by the researchers at Stanford, is said to run a simple operating system that is capable of multitasking, according to a synopsis of the article.

Made of 178 transistors, each containing between 10 and 200 carbon nanotubes, the computer can do four tasks summarized as instruction fetch, data fetch, arithmetic operation and write-back, and run two different programs concurrently.

As a demonstration, the researchers performed counting and integer-sorting simultaneously, according to the synopsis, besides implementing 20 different instructions from the MIPS instruction set "to demonstrate the generality of our CNT computer," according to the article by Max Shulaker and other doctoral students in electrical engineering. The research was led by Stanford professors Subhasish Mitra and H.S. Philip Wong.

"People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon," said Mitra, an electrical engineer and computer scientist in a press release issued by Stanford University. "But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology. Here is the proof."

Carbon nanotubes still have imperfections. They do not, for example, always grow in parallel lines, which has led researchers to devise techniques to grow 99.5 percent of CNTs in straight lines, according to the press release. But at billions of nanotubes on a chip, even a small misalignment of the tubes can cause errors. A fraction of the CNTs also behave like metallic wires that always conduct electricity, instead of acting like semiconductors that can be switched off.

The researchers describe a two-pronged approach called an "imperfection-immune design". They passed electricity through the circuits, after switching off the good CNTs, to burn up the metallic nanotubes, and also developed an algorithm to work around the misaligned nanotubes in a circuit.

The basic computer was limited to 178 transistors, which was the result of the researchers using the university's chip-making facilities rather than an industrial fabrication process, according to the press release.

Other researchers are also working on CNTs as they worry about silicon hitting its physical limits. IBM said last October its scientists had developed a way to place over 10,000 transistors made from the nano-sized tubes of carbon on a single chip, up from a few hundred carbon nanotube devices at a time previously possible. This density was, however, far below the density of commercial silicon-based chips, but the company said the breakthrough opened up the path for commercial fabrication of "dramatically smaller, faster and more powerful computer chips."

'Viceroi' algorithm improves detection of click fraud

A group of researchers have devised an algorithm they say could help advertising networks better detect fraudulent clicks.

Fraudsters have developed sophisticated ways to perpetrate click fraud, which involves using various methods to generate fake clicks on advertisements, defrauding advertisers. Digital marketing revenues are rapidly growing and exceeded US$36 billion in 2012 in the U.S., according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Advertising networks are secretive about the technologies they use to stop click spam. Often, it involves filtering out attacks, such as if thousands of clicks on an advertisement are coming from a single IP address. But defensive moves still miss attacks, wasting advertisers' money.

The researchers' algorithm, called Viceroi, is free and can be used by advertising networks. Viceroi looks for publishers who have abnormally high per-user revenues, which may be an indication of fraud. For their experiment, Viceroi was tested with a major ad network, flagging several hundred publishers as suspects out of tens of thousands, according to their research paper.

Vacha Dave, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California at San Diego and co-author of the paper, said in interview Thursday that per-user revenue rates at some publishers were way higher than those collected by Google or Microsoft.

Viceroi works because of the economics of click spam. In one variation of the fraud, a click spammer may pay someone else a per-install fee to distribute a dodgy search toolbar designed to direct people to their advertisements.

The toolbar's search results page is stuffed with advertisements since the click spammer wants to exploit the user as much as possible before the tool is uninstalled. But the rising per-user revenue on a publisher's site would be spotted by Viceroi.

To beat Viceroi, the "click spammers must reduce their per-user revenue to that of an ethical publisher. At which point, without the economic incentive to offset the risk of getting caught, the net effect is a disincentive to commit click spam," the paper said.

Not all publishers are necessarily at fault if they have abnormally high per-user revenues. There is a lot of traffic brokering on the Internet, and it is often hard to tell where user traffic originated from, said Saikat Guha of Microsoft Research India, who co-authored the paper. Advertising networks learn from Viceroi which publishers to investigate.

"Some of the publishers are definitely being take advantage of," Guha said. "Our job is to help them find the bad traffic."

The research paper, also authored by Yin Zhang of the University of Texas at Austin, will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Berlin, which will be held Nov. 4-8.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk

New US bill aims to curb NSA collection of phone and other records

A bipartisan group of four U.S. lawmakers has introduced legislation that will prohibit bulk collection of phone records of Americans.

Called the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act, the bill introduced by Democratic Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Richard Blumenthal, and Republican Senator Rand Paul will also provide for the creation of a "constitutional advocate" to argue against the government in significant cases before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It will also set up a process for making significant FISC decisions public.

Former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, disclosed through newspaper reports in June that the NSA was collecting phone metadata from Verizon customers in the U.S. as part of its surveillance, which was said to also include collection of data from Internet companies. The Internet companies denied reports that the NSA had real-time access to content on their servers for its surveillance.

Under the proposed amendments in the new bill to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the government would still be able to obtain records of anyone suspected of terrorism or espionage, or anyone in contact with a suspected terrorist or spy. But the bulk collection of "records of law-abiding Americans with no connection to terrorism or espionage will no longer be legal," according to an explanatory brief of the proposed legislation.

An amendment to section 702 of FISA also aims to close a "back-door searches" loophole by prohibiting the government from searching through communications collected under the section to deliberately conduct warrantless searches for the emails and other communications of specific Americans. Section 702 of FISA is designed "to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the United States," according to the government.

The bill also aims to strengthen a prohibition against "reverse targeting," the alleged ruse employed by surveillance agencies of targeting a foreigner in order to acquire without warrant the communications of an American who is known to be communicating with the foreigner.

The bill is just one of a number that aim to curb NSA's powers in the wake of Snowden's revelations. The U.S. House of Representatives narrowly defeated in July an amendment to a defense spending bill that would limit spending on mass surveillance by the NSA.

The amendment, proposed by Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan, would limit spending only to orders by the FISC that collect phone and other data only of a person who is the subject of an investigation. The administration of President Barack Obama had earlier said that it opposed the "effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community's counterterrorism tools." Obama has appointed a panel of experts to review NSA surveillance.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

Citrix aims for VMware, Amazon with new cloud strategy

Citrix has updated its cloud computing strategy, saying that its platform which is based off the Apache CloudStack project - can span both private on-premises deployments and public clouds and is the only one in the market that takes an application-centric approach to architecting clouds.

Citrix officials say that the company's chief competitors, VMware and Amazon Web Services, "pigeon-hole" users into architecting clouds a certain way. VMware is ideal for virtualised legacy applications, but not new, cloud-native apps, Citrix says. AWS, on the other hand, is perfect for these new apps that were born to run in the cloud, but not legacy applications. Citrix's cloud platform, by being "application-centric" caters to both legacy and new-age apps, says Krishna Subramanian, vice president of marketing for Citrix's cloud platform.

Citrix's cloud platform is built on Apache CloudStack an open source project the company spun out of work in the OpenStack community. Unlike the OpenStack backers though, the project is more closely aligned to AWS APIs. The newest version of Citrix's cloud platform lets customers set up regions and zones, similarly to how AWS is architected. Customers have the ability to control policies for each of these zones. So, for example if legacy bare-metal apps are running in one zone, it will use a certain architecture. If cloud-native apps are running on virtualised servers in another zone, they can have different characteristics. Elastic block storage spans all regions.

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Forrester analyst James Staten is buying into the application-centric approach, calling it a differentiator for Citrix. "The fact that you can use a single cloud architecture to set up a legacy apps pool and right next to it (logically) a modern app pool is definitely unique in the market," he wrote in an e-mail. "Nearly all the rest of the IaaS cloud software solutions out there are optimised for one environment or the other."

Citrix CloudPlatform 4.2 is the control plane for deploying clouds, and the updated version comes with new integration with VMware and Cisco UCS equipment; it starts at $1,400 per socket for a license. Citrix also released CloudPortal Business Manager, which allows customers to set up web portals for users.  

Citrix may call itself application-centric, but Gartner analyst Chris Wolf says the platform still has a ways to go. Unlike VMware, Citrix does not have tight integration with tools like Chef, Puppet and Salt that help users automatically deploy and manage virtual machine templates. "Citrix needs to show turnkey integration ... with application performance monitoring in order to meet customers' application-centricity demands," Wolf wrote in an e-mail.

Even so, Wolf says it's still early days in the cloud computing market, and there's plenty of time for Citrix to continue to advance its strategy, and specifically compete with the likes of VMware and Amazon. "Citrix has a capable platform and has over 200 customers using it, but the challenge it will face will be building a cohesive third-party ecosystem. Ecosystem partners such as management, backup, and security vendors are gravitating toward OpenStack, AWS, and vCloud." Citrix could more fully embrace the OpenStack community that has developed, but ever since CloudStack left OpenStack two years ago, Citrix has been moving away from the community rather than gravitating toward it.

Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW. Read his Cloud Chronicles here.

Patent trolls will gain from a single European system, vendors warn

The creation of a pan-European patent system will help spread abusive patent litigation to Europe and could lead to E.U.-wide sales bans on products, leading tech vendors have claimed.

Tech giants including Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Yahoo, Intel and BlackBerry sent an open letter to European officials on Thursday outlining their concerns about the formation of a new unified patent court system in the E.U.

While the unified system has been heralded as simplifying the patchwork of rules that currently exist across the single European market, vendors say it also brings the threat of a one-stop-shop for quick region-wide sales bans. And allowing cases to be split up, with the validity of a patent decided in one court while infringement issues are decided in another, can expose product vendors to penalties even before the patent in question is declared sound, they claim.

The proposed rules of the new system could favor the practices of Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), popularly known as patent trolls, the companies wrote. PAEs are individuals and firms that own patents but do not directly produce goods or services using the patented innovations and instead assert their intellectual property rights against companies that do.

The current draft rules create "strong incentives for abusive behaviors and harm the innovation that the patent system is designed to promote," the companies wrote in the letter. The letter was signed by 14 companies and two industry associations, among them Adidas, Bull SAS, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, the European Semiconductor Industry Association (ESIA) an the French Syndicat de lIndustrie des Technologies de lInformation (SFIB), a French IT industry association.

To mitigate potential abuse, PAEs should not be allowed to use sales injunctions for the sole purpose of extracting excessive royalties from operating companies that fear business disruption, they wrote. Also, when granting injunctions courts should be required to assess proportionality -- in practical terms, that a proposed measure is no more onerous than is necessary to achieve the immediate objective.

PAEs could also abuse a system that allows courts to separately deal with the questions of whether a particular patent is valid and whether it has been infringed, the companies wrote.

The unified patent agreement allows the validity and the infringement questions to be decided in different courts in the same case.

Splitting those decisions into separate cases is known as bifurcation. A similar system is currently used in Germany, which makes Germany an attractive country for European patent litigation because in some cases it can allow plaintiffs to obtain a quick infringement ruling while the validity case drags on for years.

If this system was to be introduced for most of the European market, it could lead to quick E.U.-wide injunctions, barring products from the European market, before any determination of whether the patent in question is actually valid, the companies said.

"Given the drastic impact of such an injunction on the defendant, unprincipled plaintiffs would be able to extract substantial royalties (through settlements or verdicts) from European and other companies based on low-quality, and potentially invalid patents," they added.

In the case of bifurcation, the companies' argument is not good, said Willem Hoyng [cq], a member of the Preparatory Committee, in an email.

"The companies do not understand that the future bifurcation possibility is different from the present German system," Hoyng wrote. While Germany requires splitting cases, in the new system the court does not have to split up the validity and infringement cases, said Hoyng.

Bifurcation can only do harm if, as in Germany, the invalidity court is slower than the infringement court, Hoyng said.  "It is clear from the Rules of proceedings that should not happen in the new system," he added.

Hoyng also indicated that he thinks the companies' fear of patent trolls is overstated. "I do not understand this fear because the new system is not different from what is [currently] the situation in almost all European countries," he said.

In extreme cases the court can apply general concepts of law such as misuse of right, he said. "However it is totally unacceptable when a University would be unable to enforce a valuable patent because it does not exploit such patent. Valid patents should be respected," he said.

And even if there are weak patents, they do not survive in a court of law manned by good judges, Hoyng wrote.

There is an Oct. 1 deadline for offering written comments on the draft rules. After the consultation period is closed, the Preparatory Committee will ask the Drafting Committee to evaluate the contributions received and to make proposals and comments ensuing from the public consultation.

A public hearing on the draft rules is scheduled to take place in early 2014.