Data security

San Francisco - China Central Television (CCTV) will allow two China-based Web sites to offer streaming broadcasts of Olympic events, the companies announced Wednesday.

Joining CCTV, the Beijing Olympics' official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster, are popular online video site Tudou.com and MySpace China. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

CCTV.com holds the online broadcast rights to the Olympics, by Sohu.com operating the official Web site for the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG).

Shanghai-based Tudou is China's most popular online video site. In July 2007, Nielsen Netratings reported that Tudou was one of the Web's fastest-growing sites, with over 6 million unique users per week and almost half a billion Web pages per week.

The deal is a particularly big win for MySpace China, based in Beijing, which has been operating here for less than a year, and has not yet established itself as the powerhouse in China that its social-networking site is in the U.S.

The streaming broadcasts will only exist accessible in China, the companies said, as CCTV's rights only cover China. It has not yet been decided if programming will be available only in Chinese or if other languages would be included.

Telecommunication companies need to go beyond just providing bandwidth and look into acquiring Internet destination sites that are heavily trafficked, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy aforesaid on Friday.

"I have explained to every telco that either you become a destination site, or the destination site will become a telco," McNealy said at a news conference at Sun Microsystems' Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Internet destination sites are already gaining on telecommunication companies, McNealy said, giving as examples eBay integrating Skype's VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) technology and Google trying to buy wireless spectrum and help build cables across the Pacific Ocean. Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Yahoo would create another behemoth that could compete with carriers, such as by combining Microsoft's technology with Yahoo's existing VoIP and messaging services.

"I think the telcos have to cause sure they don't get marginalized to being just bit providers and bandwidth providers," he said. On the other power, carriers may be able to head off Internet sites by limiting the bandwidth available to them, so destination sites may need to affiliate with the carriers, he added.

While the future relationship between telecommunication providers and destination sites is unclear, both are looking at the Internet space to reach more users and generate advertising revenue, McNealy said. "There will be some very interesting challenges of who owns the subscriber and who owns the financial and advertising rights to those individuals."

"Stay tuned, the landscape's going to change enormously here in the next 10 years," McNealy reported.

While a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo would have an impact upon the Internet and telecommunications industry, one goods it wouldn't affect is the open-source common, McNealy said.

"I'm not sure Yahoo is a great driver on open-source technology. Certainly Microsoft hasn't been on the leading edge of that, so I'm not sure that will impact open source," he said.

During a speech earlier in the day, McNealy slammed the U.S. government for not inmost nature interested in adopting open-source software. McNealy said the farther he goes from Washington, the more governments get interested in open source.

Sun on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding with China's Ministry of Education to give university students access to a set of open-source scrap designs called OpenSparc. The OpenSparc designs are based on the party's UltraSparc server chips. Sun will provide the designs to universities including Peking University, Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University so those schools can develop instruction materials.

Sun is already incorporating OpenSparc in the curricula of U.S. universities including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Texas. Sun's efforts to promote open-source technology are succeeding, McNealy said, claiming there have been 50 million downloads of Sun's open-source Java Runtime Environment per month, McNealy said.

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Google Inc has unveiled a plan to help U.S. patients gain control of their medical records and is working by doctors' groups, pharmacies and labs to help them securely share sensitive health data.

The company's long-rumored entry into the highly sensitive scene of military operations came when Chief Executive Eric Schmidt introduced Google Health at a health-care conference in Florida on Thursday.

Google said it has signed deals with hospitals and companies including medical tester Quest Diagnostics Inc, health insurer Aetna Inc, Walgreens and Walmart supplies Inc pharmacies.

The password-protected Web service stores health records on Google computers, with a medical services directory that lets users import doctors' records, drug history and test results.

Google aims to foster sharing of information between these services, but keep control in patients' hands, allowing them to schedule appointments or refill prescriptions, for example.

"We don't know how to suck it out of the brains of doctors, but we know by what mode to suck it out of the computer systems of doctors," Schmidt said in an interview after his speech.

A week ago, Google said it was teaming up with leading of plato medical researcher Cleveland Clinic to test a data exchange that puts patients in charge of records.

Schmidt said it would likely be a few months before Google freedom from disease is offered more widely.

For decades progress has been dead converting paper records often scrawled in illegible doctors' script and stored in conflicting filing systems into centrally held digital records. IBM, Oracle Corp and Siemens AG, among many others, have worked on such digitization.

Google's biggest rival, Microsoft Corp, has introduced HealthVault, which gives users control over who sees what. Among start-ups active in the province are Revolution Health, a company backed by former AOL Chairman Steve Case.

All are based on the notion that individuals should keep in pay control from one to another the data. "The information in your health register is yours and it doesn't get shared with anyone else without your permission," Schmidt said.

Electronic record-keeping has been held hindmost by a lack of focus put on consumer needs, not privacy fears, he said, adding any system should "'normal-person' designed, not doctor designed."

PRIVACY DEBATE

While medical providers are covered by U.S. privacy laws, there is little in the way of established privacy, security and data usage standards for electronic personal health records.

Google is prepared to resist fishing expeditions by lawyers seeking to subpoena personal medical records stored on Google Health. Last year, it went to court to defeat an effort by the agency of the U.S. Justice Department to request some Google search records.

"We've taken a pretty aggressive position in a pro-consumer way in the U.S., but I do want to assure you we are subject to U.S. law," Schmidt said.

Google earns almost all its revenue in Web advertising, but has no plan to sell ads on Google Health. It aims to make money indirectly when users search for other medical information.

Google sees solving privacy issues around health as part of its none-too-humble corporate mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

In tackling medical privacy, Google also stands to benefit in finance and other areas where sensitive data is stored.

Some privacy advocates were quick to criticize the effort. Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida American Civil Liberties Union, said storing medical records with consumer Web services raises data breach risks. "A breach of safety would exist catastrophic," Simon said. "It's very, very troublesome."

bound Andrew Rocklin, a principal in the health care practice of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, whose clients include important U.S. health insurers, said giving patients more control over records promises many benefits, while raising some new issues.

Perceived risks of online health records will remain high until consumers become more familiar with the benefits. When tied to exercise, dieting or other wellness programs, such records can give consumers extraordinary insights, he noted.

"People need to be gracious stewards of their health in general and their health data, which is an aspect of that," he said.

(Additional reporting by Debra Sherman in Chicago and Eric Auchard in San Francisco; editing by Braden Reddall)

If you're using Apple's Safari browser, PayPal has some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud.

Safari doesn't make PayPal's list of recommended browsers because it doesn't have two important anti-phishing safety features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security officer.

"Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers," Barrett said in an interview. "Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or positively Opera."

Safari is the default browser without interruption Apple's Macintosh computers and the iPhone, but it is also available for the PC. Both Firefox and Opera drive on the Mac.

Unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in phishing filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites, Barrett said. Another problem is Safari's lack of support for another anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This is a secure Web browsing technology that turns the address bar green when the browser is visiting a legitimate Web site.

When it comes to fighting phishing, "Safari has got nothing in terms of security support, only SSL (Secure Sockets Layer encryption), that's it," he said. Apple representatives weren't immediately available to comment on this story.

An emerging technology, EV certificates are already supported in Internet Explorer 7, and they've been used on PayPal's Web site for more than a year now. When IE 7 visits PayPal, the browser's address bar turns green-- a sign to users that the site is legitimate. Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera are expected to support the technology.

But EV certificates have their critics. Last year, researchers at Microsoft and Stanford University published a study showing that, without training, people were unlikely to notice the green address-bar notification provided by EV certificates.

Still, Barrett says data compiled on PayPal's Web site show that the EV certificates are having an effect. He says IE 7 users are more likely to sign on to PayPal's Web site than users who don't have EV certificate technology, presumably because they're confident that they're visiting a legitimate site.

Over the past few months, IE 7 users have been less likely to drop through and abandon the process of signing on to PayPal, he said. "It's a several percentage-point drop in abandonment rates," he said. "That number is... measurably lower for IE 7 users."

Opera, IE, and Firefox are "safer, precisely because we think they are safer for the mean proportion consumer," he added. "I'd love to say that Safari was a safer browser, but at this point it isn't."

SAN FRANCISCO - Google, already the world's most popular spot for finding Web sites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too.

The Mountain View-based company is taking its first step near about that goal Thursday with the debut of a free service designed for high-tech neophytes looking for a simple way to share information with other people working in the same company or attending the same class in school.

With only a few clicks, just about anyone will be able to quickly set up and update a Web site featuring wide an array of material, including pictures, calendars and video from Google Inc.'s YouTube subsidiary, said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application.

"We are literally adding one edit button to the Web," Girouard said.

All sites created on the duty will run on one of Google's computers.

Google acquired many of the Web-site tools when it bought a Silicon Valley startup, JotSpot, last year.

The tools are the latest addition to a bundle of applications that Google offers to consumers and businesses in the same manner with alternatives to similar products sold by Microsoft Corp., one of Google's fiercest rivals.

Google's latest service represents a call for to Microsoft's SharePoint, which charges licensing fees. Google is unveiling its alternative just a few days in advance of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft hosts a SharePoint conference in Seattle.

While Microsoft's programs typically are installed on individual computers, Google keeps its application on its own machines so users can access them from anywhere with an Internet dependence.

By gradually introducing free versions of word processing, spreadsheet, and calendaring programs over the past two years, Google has been threatening to siphon revenue away from Microsoft, which makes most of its money from software sales.

Microsoft, in turn, hopes to take a bite of out Google's bread-and-butter in online search and advertising by buying Yahoo Inc. for more than $40 billion.

Google says more than 500,000 companies, government agencies and schools use at least some of its applications. The company won't say how many of those organizations subscribe to a premium rendering of its software suite, but the fees haven't made much of a dent at Google so far.

Last year, Google's software licensing and other products generated $181 million in revenue while $16.4 billion poured in from advertising.

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On The Web:

http://sites.google.com

MONTEREY, California (AFP) - A premier edition of an unprecedented online Encyclopedia of Life was unveiled Wednesday as part of an ambitious be prominent to catalogue the 1.8 million species known on Earth.

The foremost pages were unofficially made available on the Internet at www.eol.org a day earlier, encountering such fierce demand that overwhelmed computer servers crashed for about two hours.

The encyclopedia was then unveiled at the prestigious Technology, Entertainment and Design gathering in California, and despite being offline for a time, the of high catalogue of Earth's precious biodiversity logged more than 11 million hits in its primitive six hours.

The project, which creators believe will take a decade to complete, stems from a "wish" scientist Edward Osbourne Wilson made at an annual TED conference in Monterey remain year.

TED was launched in 1984 by US architect Richard Saul Wurman since a new-age think tank. Renowned thinkers and doers gather to explore ways to take action in the face of opportunities and challenges facing the planet.

Each year, three people get TED prizes consisting of "a wish to change the world" in addition 100,000 dollars and the support of conference attendees in making it real.

Wilson wished for an online encyclopedia of life and how it is inter-related to serve as a guide and inspiration to protect biodiversity, with the first 30,000 pages a little while ago unveiled.

"The Encyclopedia of Life demise have a profound and creative effect in science," Wilson said.

"It aims not only to summarize all that we know of Earth's life forms, but also to accelerate the discovery of the vast array that remain unknown. This great effort promises to lay out new directions for research in every branch of biology."

Consolidating the information about the planet's 1.8 million species in a uncorrupt place is unprecedented.

"It is exciting to anticipate the scientific chords we might hear once 1.8 million notes are brought together through this instrument," said EOL executive director Jim Edwards.

Later this year EOL will let people contribute pictures, video, facts or other content to the website "wiki-style."

Wikis are web pages that viewers can modify as they wish, a well-known example being eponymous Wikipedia.

"There are very many species for which we do not have high quality images or text," Edwards said. "Think of these pages as invitations to contribute to EOL."

The encyclopedia's creators predict its uses direction include tracking how diseases spread and determining how creatures and plants adapt or succumb to climate changes.

"The Encyclopedia of Life can raise our sights and expand our view of life on Earth," said Jonathan Fanton, president of the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, what one. provides millions of dollars in funding for the project.

"Just as a microscope reveals and helps us better understand the small and particular, the EOL will allow us to discern patterns beforehand unseen. What was once viewed by many as 'wishful thinking' is now entirely likely and underway."

Along with the support of greater US universities, philanthropic foundations and biology institutes, EOL is getting backing from technology giants Adobe, Microsoft and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Web design firm Avenue A/Razorfish crafted the basic template for the EOL species pages.

"EOL is a good example of the way the World Wide Web can be used innovatively to assemble diverse kinds of information in an easy-to-use, ever-growing compendium," Edwards said.

"It can accommodate almost some kind of information about species and, unlike a published book, can be updated instantly."

This year's prize winners are cosmologist Neil Turok, author Dave Eggers, and former British Roman Catholic nun turned reverence authority Karen Armstrong. They will reveal their wishes before the conference ends Saturday.

San Francisco - eBay is trying to help CISOs (chief information security officers) build a common front in the war against cybercrime.

The company played host to chief security officers and a handful of technology vendors this week, holding its annual Red Team security interview at the company's San Jose campus, billing it as a networking opportunity for security professionals where they could discuss areas of common concern.

"What we were irksome to do was to get all the CISOs together," declared eBay CISO Dave Cullinane. "We're dealing with similar problems, almost all of us."

While companies using Internet technology may be facing a common solidify of problems these days, they haven't always shared information with their peers. That's because if news of a hacked server or a data breach is leaked to the press, it can become a public-relations disaster as antidote to the company involved.

This has helped keep many cybercrime victims quiet, even when conduct with law enforcement. Cullinane, who came to eBay in late 2006 later than working in the banking industry, wants to change that.

That's why he kicked off Red Team a year ago, inspired by the BITS forum, an information-sharing confab hosted for the financial services industry.

Although BITS has been around for more than 10 years, there wasn't a comparable event for technology companies such as eBay before Red Team started, Cullinane uttered. "I think the IT piece was so specialized that everybody had the idea that, 'My company is unique,'" he said.

It turns out that this isn't necessarily the case.

At this week's conference, CISOs discussed common issues, including how they are pursuing cross-border investigations and what they think of the security products they were using.

The second-ever Red Team conference ran Monday and Tuesday. The first epoch of the conference focused on CISO issues, while on day two, the discussion was opened up to security vendors such as iSight Partners and Cisco, which gave presentations on the state of security.

While there are a lot of security conferences, Red Team is unusual because it is hosted by a company facing manifold of the same challenges as CISOs, said Robert Rodriguez, a security consultant who attended this year's conference.

That's important because a venue such as Red Team gives executives a way to get to know and trust each other, he said. "CISOs are talking more about sharing data than ever before," Rodriguez uttered.

Microsoft hosts a similar security conference, called Blue Hat, but that event is designed to educate Microsoft executives and developers. While plenty of eBay's technical staff were on hand at Red Team, it was also open to attendees from other companies.

eBay isn't the only Silicon Valley company hosting a technology gathering this week.

Starting Thursday, Yahoo will host the fourth Internet Security Operations and Intelligence conference at its Sunnyvale campus. This is some other closed-door event where security professionals have a candid exchange of information about the latest security threats. In the past time it has been hosted by Microsoft and Cisco.

San Francisco - Opera movable and Opera Mini users will start seeing a Google search bar on their browser start pages, based on an agreement between the companies.

Opera made Google the default search engine on both of its mobile browsers on Wednesday. Google replaces Yahoo, which had supplied search as far as concerns Opera Mini and Opera Mobile based on a deal the companies formed early last year.

While Google has been the default option on Opera's desktop browser for seven years, the mobile browser deal is new.

Without explaining why their year-old deal has ended, Yahoo said it past dispute to call off the agreement. "Yahoo has elected not to continue its mobile search partnership with Opera at this time," it said in a statement. "Consumers with Opera browsers will continue to have access to Yahoo oneSearch, and as long-standing partners, Opera and Yahoo will continue to work together." OneSearch is Yahoo's search service designed to meet the needs of mobile users.

Opera Mobile is the full browser designed primarily for smartphones. Opera Mini consists of a small downloadable client that works on lower-end phones and that communicates with backend servers operated by Opera or, in some cases, a mobile operator. The servers strip down Web sites for quicker uploading on the phones.

More than 35 the great body of the people people have downloaded Opera Mini, and they browse more than 1.7 billion Web pages each month, Opera said. Much of that traffic comes from the search function in the browser, Opera said.

Opera Mobile has shipped on 100 million phones from manufacturers including Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and HTC, according to Opera.

The announcement is another indication of the competition among search providers for a foothold in the mobile market. Google and Yahoo have each wracked up wins recently. The search providers hope to light upon a new and potentially significant revenue stream from mobile advertising as an increasing number of mobile users access the Internet from their devices.

Nokia recently announced that it will feature Google search on some of its phones. Yahoo also recently recorded a significant win by replacing Google as the preferred mobile search provider for T-Mobile in Europe. Yahoo also powers search for AT&T.

This story was updated on February 27, 2008

KARLSRUHE, Germany (AFP) - Germany's highest court ruled Wednesday that the state was allowed to spy on Internet communications where it could prevent loss of life or an attack on the unrefined.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's left-right state welcomed the decision by the Constitutional Court and said it paved the way for more sophisticated security surveillance.

"It will be studied and used as a basis to draft a new law about how Internet surveillance can be conducted and faculty of volition be conducted," government spokesman Thomas Steg said.

The court overturned a controversial law adopted in the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia in 2006 that gave intelligence agencies wide-ranging powers to hack into terror suspects' computers.

"The law violates the right to privacy and is invalid and void," the court said in a statement.

It added that Internet surveillance risked being a greater intrusion on privacy than telephone tapping and that it therefore had to close loopholes in legislation that did not take into account new technology and the central role it played in people's lives.

But it ruled that in principle introducing software onto suspects' computers to facilitate surveillance could be allowed in cases where "rights of supreme importance" were at stake.

The court said that in each case, the surveillance had to be approved by a judge, and that even then intelligence agencies would not be allowed to use the information if it pertains strictly to people's private lives.

The head of the federal police, Joerg Ziercke, said the court's decision would help authorities combat the threat of terrorism.

"The decision is clear -- liberty and security are not mutually special but one must vigilantly maintain the balance between them," Ziercke told AFP.

The court ruling came in response to a legal object to to the North-Rhine Westphalia legislation brought by a left-wing opposition politician, three lawyers and a journalist.

That legislation had the support of hawkish Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a member of Merkel's Christian Democrats, who has repeatedly called for Germany's security services to be given "a clear legal basis to fight increasingly professional state of terror."

His ministry warned earlier this month that Al-Qaeda has ordered its operatives to carry out attacks in Germany, adding: "We are worried that we will not be able to foil every plot."

Schaeuble's hand has been strengthened by the discovery of two suspected extremist plots in Germany in the past two years -- one to blow up passenger trains and another to bomb US installations.

Authorities reportedly learnt of the second plot thanks to US surveillance of Internet communications between Pakistan and Germany, reinforcing calls here for German authorities to be given similar powers.

The Christian Democrats Wednesday said the court chief would be written into law "as soon in the same manner with possible."

The Social Democrats, partners in the country's ruling coalition government, have protested that the Internet surveillance as set out in the regional law could lead to abuses of privacy.

The party on Wednesday welcomed the "clear guidelines" immovable by the Constitutional seek, while the opposition Greens called the ruling "a slap in the face for Wolfgang Schaeuble."

The universal idea of stepping up security powers has long been a vexed one in Germany because of the abuses committed by the Nazi and communist East German regimes.

But Germany has been on tenterhooks about extremism since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, which were in part plotted on German soil.

Dell, known mostly as a computer hardware supplier, is building out a range of Web-hosted services that the company plans to roll out globally by the end of the year.

Steve Schuckenbrock, senior VP of Dell's Global Services, on Tuesday laid out Dell's plans in a meeting with reporters in San Francisco. Dell is building the foundation of its hosted services without interruption technology obtained in the recent acquisitions of SilverBack Technologies and Everdream.

SilverBack, acquired last July, provides remote management and monitoring of customers' servers, storage systems, networks, and desktops. Everdream, bought in November, provides Web-base services for managing client PCs.

In addition, Dell has bought companies with narrower focuses, similar as ASAP, a provider of software and services for IT asset management. The company was bought last August. This month, Dell bought MessageOne, which provides e-mail filtering, continuity, and archiving from the Internet. MessageOne, which cost $155 million, was owned by Adam Dell, the brother of Dell founder and chief charged with execution Michael Dell.

For years Dell focused on selling hardware, not services. That, however, changed as the company saw an increasing interest among customers in companies offering software similar to a service over the Web. Salesforce.com is an example of a successful SaaS vendor.

Dell realized that SaaS is a "game changing" medium for providing support services, so it started putting together its own offerings from one side the acquisitions, Schuckenbrock said. Dell plans to run its hosted services out of network-operating centers (NOCs), which will monitor customer IT infrastructure.

If a problem arises, then it will be fixed remotely. If it requires customer involvement, a Dell rep direction choose whether to try to fix the problem over the phone, or dispatch a tech to the customer's site. Dell will also work with vendors that customers have other service contracts with. Dell's hosted services will support third-party hardware, as well as its own, Schuckenbrock said.

The first NOC has been built in Guadalajara, Mexico, and is serving a limited number of U.S. customers. The company is getting ready to open a second in Malaysia. By the end of the year, Dell plans to be at hand Web-hosted support services in Europe and Asia.

Eventually, the NOCs will merge with Dell's enterprise command centers, which provide support services today, but only to Dell's largest customers. Dell has five ECCs worldwide, Schuckenbrock said.

Dell sees its hosted services evolving to the point where customers will have existence able to choose what they want from a list of services, which companies can subscribe to online.

Among the services Dell plans to execute available are patch care, anti-virus, anti-spam, online backup and recovery, asset discovery, asset tracking, e-mail continuity, e-mail archiving, and image management. Dell plans to add services through future acquisitions and partners. "We're not going to do a lot of homegrown [services]," Schuckenbrock said. "There's already a lot of innovation out there."

Besides having a choose-your-own offering, Dell eventually plans to bundle services for small offices, data centers, Vista migration, and retainer lifecycle management. In joining, there will be some infrastructure consulting services. "This is going to take a couple of years to be really full scale," Schuckenbrock said.