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“This partnership allows advertisers with our papers to reach not only local real-estate consumers who live in particular markets, but also consumers who may be moving to particular markets, via their searches on Zillow.com,” Lincoln Millstein, a Hearst Newspapers senior vice president, said in a statement.

Zillow.com, which in November 2007 teamed up with a consortium of newspapers to carry their listings on its real-estate site, has now expanded that deal to include the sale of ads on each other’s sites.

The launch of the advertising network comes at a time when the real-estate industry is facing a steep decline in home prices, driven by a tightening credit crunch.

The newspaper consortium includes 11 major newspaper companies, including the Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, and E.W. Scripps.

Under the Zillow Advertising Network agreement, the consortium’s advertisers can tap into Zillow’s user base of more than 5 million unique monthly visitors, while Zillow’s advertisers will have access to readers of the newspapers’ online real-estate content.

If you’re worried about this threat or the possibility of nosy border guards rummaging through your files, unmount your encrypted volumes when you’re not using them or, better yet, completely power down your computer.

This collection of utilities will be of special interest to security researchers and computer forensics specialists in law enforcement or working for police. (A Justice Department conference that starts Monday, for instance, includes two panels on computer forensics.) It allows police to seize a computer with an encrypted volume mounted that may be asleep or locked with a screensaver, plug in a UPS, and eventually extract its memory and encryption keys.

A team of computer scientists has published source code that can in some circumstances bypass encryption used in Microsoft’s BitLocker and Apple’s FileVault and be used to view the contents of supposedly secure files.

We reported in February on their research, which describes how the contents of a computer’s memory could be dumped to a hard drive and the encryption keys forcibly extracted.

As more people use encryption–FileVault is built into all recent versions of OS X–finding ways to respond to it will become more of a challenge for law enforcement. In December, a federal judge ruled a man charged with transporting illegal images could not be forced to turn over his PGP pass phrase.

The source code includes tools for imaging the target computer’s memory through USB and Netboot, and analyzing the memory image to extract AES and RSA encryption keys, even if they’re partially degraded. It was published to coincide with the Last HOPE
hacker conference over the weekend in New York, where research team member Jacob Appelbaum gave a presentation.

The series is hosted on the domain renwu.baidu.com; “renwu” means “historically important person.”

A cartoon version of Obama is depicted next to a donkey, the Democratic party emblem. He’s holding a net as though casting it, and attached to the end of the net is a computer mouse–get it? It’s the Internet.

Nor was it clear whether the Obama campaign would react positively, considering the tense relationship between the U.S. and China. Calls to the campaign’s press office for comment were not immediately returned.

Chinese-language search engine Baidu has an unusual new mascot atop its home page: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

“State and world affairs have become the most popular topics of concern for Internet users,” a translation of part of Baidu’s page about Obama reads. It doesn’t seem to mesh particularly well with the Chinese government’s rigid stance on the spread of information, particularly political rhetoric, on the Web.

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama appears in cartoon form on the logo of Chinese search engine Baidu.

(Credit:
Baidu)

While the biography of Obama on Baidu is largely celebratory, this is not a formal endorsement of the candidate. It is, however, an endorsement of his Web-savviness. Clicking on the Obama-adorned logo on Baidu redirects to a Chinese-language biography of the candidate and links to various media; the central talking point is Obama’s status as a young politician who has successfully leveraged digital media and the Web to rise to fame. Of particular note, according to his Baidu page, is his speech about race in Philadelphia that soared to the YouTube stratosphere after appearing on television earlier.

But of more local relevance, the Baidu site about Obama also highlights the high volume of Chinese search queries for both Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Charts and graphs detail politics-related searches both Chinese and international. There are also information resources pertaining to what the U.S. presidential election means to China, and what Chinese citizens think about it.

This is part of a “person of the month” feature that Baidu has instituted since November, the blog Shanghaiist explains. Each month, Baidu selects a real-life or fictional personality who has ranked high in its search queries. As Shanghaiist explains, it’s “a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis.” Barack Obama is the sixth installment in the series.

At the same time, Take-Two Interactive Software’s Grand Theft Auto IV has dropped off the best seller lists with about 10.6 million copies sold, which means that Nintendo’s Wii Fit should surpass it in sales.

A blockbuster franchise for nearly a decade, Grand Theft Auto’s fantasy world of antisocial behavior has helped solidify a stereotype of gamers as 18-34 males, but the market has expanded far beyond that sector. Wii Fit’s success is the most prominent, emblematic example of that shift. And an ironic one at that: Every edition of GTA has aroused complaints over its portrayal of women. Yet this year, it’s women consumers who will help steal Grand Theft Auto IV’s thunder.

Wii Fit has already sold more than 8.7 million units worldwide and has maintained a shockingly high sales run rate of about 225,000 units per week for the last few months.

A number of casual game makers I have spoken with told me that their audience is primarily women. Maybe Nintendo has cracked the code for an emerging market.

What’s driving this? Women. Nintendo realized that there was an untapped audience of “women and moms” (their words, not mine) that would allow it to expand the brand. This is counter to the traditionally male-dominated world of video games.

Link to GigaOm: Wii Fit on track to outsell GTA IV this year

Wagner James Au nails the irony of Wii Fit versus GTA:

Verizon Wireless, which is jointly owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone, announced its plan to buy regional operator Alltel earlier this year, in a deal that will make it the largest wireless operator in the U.S. The phone company won approval for the deal from the U.S. Department of Justice last week.

As part of a compromise, Verizon agreed to keep its roaming rates the same for the next four years.

The FCC’s original agenda for the November 4 meeting had been packed full. But over the past two days, the FCC has managed to whittle down the agenda, approving three minor issues and tabling one controversial issue. Of the original seven agenda items, only three remain, including an item that deals with opening up “white space” spectrum for unlicensed use.

In addition to keeping roaming rates the same, the FCC is also requiring Verizon to divest service in a total of 100 markets. It is also requiring e911 accuracy and Universal Service Fund contributions.

For more on the FCC meeting, check back later when more updates will be posted.

The Federal Communications Commission approved the $28 billion acquisition between Verizon Wireless and Alltel on Tuesday after a four hour delay in which commissioners negotiated terms of the deal.

The delay was attributed to discussions among commissioners and Verizon to hammer out a deal that satisfied concerns over roaming conditions put on the deal.

The meeting was supposed to start at 11 a.m. EST. But didn’t actually get under way until nearly 4 p.m. EST.

The FCC had also been expected to approve the merger. But like the Justice Department, which is requiring Verizon to sell off assets in 22 states, the FCC was also expected to put its own conditions on the merger.

During the meeting, the two Democratic commissioners on the FCC, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, expressed concern that combining Verizon and Alltel will limit the number of roaming partners that smaller carriers in rural markets could work with. And as a result, they say this will limit competition and drive up prices for consumers.

Q: Intel said that WiMax has to deliver from 5 to 10 times the performance over existing products in the market to be successful, but mobile WiMax doesn’t necessarily do this.
Maloney: The performance–I disagree about this. And you’ll get to find out about that very soon because the network is going to start to roll out very soon. And you’re going to see extremely good performance. And I’m certainly confident we’re going to hit the design goals on performance. So, the argument on that one is going to get resolved real soon.

Sean Maloney

On the time it’s taken…Actually, 16e (802.16e)–the global standard for mobile WiMax–was finalized at the end of 2005. We’re now in 2008. So, it’s a relatively quick period of time for this revision. 16d, which is the previous standard, is an older, slower technology, which didn’t have as broad support. 16e has very broad international support. Subsequent to the standard being finalized, it’s actually moved along pretty quickly.

I don’t see one technology replacing another. You’re going to want to use whatever technology is available. Certainly, we’re confident that there’s going to be a big build-out of WiMax over the next three years. But people are going to carry on using the 3G infrastructure where it is. Or 2G infrastructure. Nobody rips these communications (infrastructures) and throws them out. They carry on being used.

We have over 200 networks in trial or being deployed. And we’re very comfortable with the progress.

We’re about 10 years behind the cell phone in that pattern. Where the cell phone is now, it is very much matured in terms of growth in most markets. Even in countries like Angola and Mozambique, there is heavy penetration. The computer industry and the notebook industry is a decade behind that.

The traffic growth is very, very high. We’re still looking at 50 percent per year traffic growth. Those are really big numbers and we’re going to need a lot of bandwidth and a lot of technology to supply that.”

(Regarding) LTE (Long-Term Evolution, a competitor to WiMax). LTE is pretty similar technology (to WiMax) in many, many ways. It’s some way off. We’ll see what happens with that. As far as EV-DO is concerned, it’s not a technology that’s available in Europe or Africa or pretty much anywhere in South America and very little in Asia. Wideband CDMA is generally available but much slower.

All these technologies are useful. If I can’t get a signal, I love EV-DO, I use EV-DO, I use all these things. But we’re comfortable that WiMax is going to augment these things by being a lot quicker. We still feel comfortable it was the right program and we’re making progress on it.

On the (current) 3G services, the attach rate on notebooks is very low. Actually, low single digits. The computer industry has a history of only integrating things when you get up to 50 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent of people wanting the feature. We are there with Wi-Fi now. (Editors’ note: As to why Wi-Fi is still discrete, Maloney repeated that it’s a business decision, not a technology decision.)

Q: Intel has been successful at integrating key technologies, such as Wi-Fi and graphics into its chipsets. What’s the next big step in integration?
Maloney: More shorter term, the industry’s concerned about multicore and integrating more of the conventional I/O and graphics capabilities. I think people are going to tend to keep the radio (Wi-Fi or other wireless communications technologies, including WiMax) discrete (as separate silicon) for a little while longer. But I think it’s more of a business decision not a technology decision.

Q: In the consumer segment, netbooks (typically ultra-small notebooks priced below $600) are catching on in a big way, what do you see as the reason for that?
Maloney: Previously, someone in an emerging market, just went to a cybercafe. Now they can afford to get online themselves. In the mature markets, (it’s people) who can’t afford a notebook, like 8-year-olds to 12-year-olds. Or someone who wants to take something out in the evening but doesn’t want to drag along a 16-inch notebook. The underlying driver is Web access. People spend much, much more time on the Web every day than they do on their cell phones. And yet you don’t have that portability, so that pushes (consumers) in that direction.

Maloney, an executive vice president of Intel and the chipmaker’s chief sales and marketing officer, has seen waves of technology come and go since joining the company back in 1982. Recently, he got the additional responsibility of coordinating company strategy, which he said has “a good deal to do with the rapid pace of our global development.”

Q: What are the biggest challenges for Intel going forward?
Maloney: If you look at the notebook market it’s growing very rapidly. The notebook has gone through the same pattern as the cell phone went through in ‘97, ‘98. The notebook is becoming heavily driven by the consumer market. The computer industry has largely been dominated by business computing since the 1940s. Consumer is now dominating computing.

(Credit:
Intel)

It’s potentially a threat. But we’re fairly relaxed about it. We don’t expect to be the only supplier. On the other hand, we’ve announced very large manufacturing facilities inside of China. We are a big player in the Chinese market ourselves.

Ask Sean Maloney about Intel’s biggest challenges and biggest opportunities for growth and he’ll mention the same thing: WiMax, the company’s chosen broadband technology.

Maloney also discussed how the shift in global notebook sales is transforming Intel into a consumer product company, and how Intel will respond to competitors in China and elsewhere.

I had the chance to talk with him last week. Maloney initially touched on how the consumer notebook market is tracking the cell phone market. Just as cell phones are now driven heavily by consumer demand, so will notebooks be primarily driven by consumer demand in the years to come, according to Maloney.

Q: How does Intel respond to a chip like the Chinese Godson processor that has government backing?
Maloney: There’s a long history of this in Japan, of state-sponsored computer research. And Europe, the same thing. It’s not surprising (in this case) because many people see the microprocessor as the essential building block of IT. That’s not surprising that governments want to put money in there.

Q: Intel has repeatedly touted WiMax as critical to Intel’s mobile future, if not its future overall. So, how important is WiMax to Intel?
Maloney: It’s very important to the computer industry, period. Because, if you look at the projections for the industry in the next 10 years, they are heavily predicated upon mobile computing and broadband in emerging markets. And even in the U.S., you still have sizable percentages of the population who still don’t have broadband. In countries that are going to generate growth in the industry in the next decade, you don’t have copper, you don’t have fiber. So, you’ve got to have a way to get low-cost broadband. That was the design goal of the program. It was to be a low-cost, high-speed broadband network.

The percentage of our business that’s in the U.S. has shrunk radically in the last 10 years and shrunk radically in Europe. The emerging markets are now the dominant markets.

If broadband doesn’t happen…industry growth will eventually slow down. If it does happen, growth will continue and new services will come along. It’s an old story. Back in the ’80s, we spent a decade trying to get Ethernet established. (As a result) we got client-server computing. We did the same thing with Wi-Fi, 1999 through 2002. There’s been a long history of the computer industry needing standardized, high-speed communications. It’s been a big piece of the computer industry’s history.

(Credit:
GAO)

Some of the price increase kicked in when DNDO sponsored the development of the next-generation, advanced spectroscopic portal (ASP.) These new portals not only detect radioactive material but also identify the source, thereby minimizing missed threats and greatly reducing false alarms, according to DNDO. The cost of these units has nearly doubled from around $576,400 to $800,000.

This is not first time GAO, (the nonpartisan audit and investigative arm of Congress,) has come down on DNDO, a relatively new agency establishment under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2005.

DNDO did not follow Department of Homeland Security cost-estimating methodology or bother to document the estimating approach it did use, according to GAO. Further, when the GAO requested detailed documentation of DNDO’s billion dollar portal monitor strategy, all it received was a one page spreadsheet of summary information, the report notes.(pdf)

Soaring cost estimates for protecting US borders against nuclear smuggling arrived at by the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) are unreliable and could result in “significant” overruns, according to a Government Accounting Agency (GAO) report.

How significant? The projected cost to implement the Radiation Portal Monitor Program has gone from $399 million in 2003, when the Customs and Border Protection was in charge of the project, to $1.3 billion when DNDO took over in 2005. In 2007 the cost of equipping US ports with portal monitors was $1.7 billion. It’s now $2.1 billion. But this latest estimate fails to take into account several major “cost elements”. The true cost will be about $3.1 billion, but could go as high as $3.8 billion, according to the GAO.

Preventing nuclear and radioactive material from being smuggled into the United States became a major security concern after 9-11. A common fear is that the stuff could be used by terrorists in a nuclear weapon or a “dirty bomb”, even though that possibility remains highly theoretical.

In 2007, the government watchdog accused the office of using biased methods to enhance performance results in testing the new detection portals. When preliminary tests were conducted, the defense contractors who were bidding on the job were allowed access to the results, allowing them to adjust their systems accordingly, GAO charged.

The collection is whimsical. Many of them are not what one might consider a robot, but each seems to speak to a philosophical topic currently being discussed in the technology community.

Keny Marshall’s installation is officially called a “prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices,” but has also been nicknamed Crickets for short. The robots are all connected by wires and send or receive signals to each other to play their wooden blocks or keep quiet. The system is programmed to follow Dr. John Conway’s rules for the mathematical game, The Game of Life.

Mower, a robot designed by Osman Khan, a visiting assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, can be found on the grass at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. The pet/autonomous lawnmower is an allusion to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The ideal Mower robot would include navigational and obstacle avoidance sensors, according to Khan. Hmmm…Sounds like the Auto Mower from Husqvarna, only not as cute.

(Credit:
Robot 250)

(Credit:
Robot 250)

(Credit:
Robot 250)

Famous Pittsburgh landmarks are the backdrop for BigBots, 11 giant robotic art installations.

This isn’t just a giant 12-foot tall foam hand. The You’re #1 robot by Ian Ingram atop the Andy Warhol Museum is connected to a series of stations around Pittsburgh. When someone walks up to a station and touches a smaller version of the foam finger, the giant one on the roof points directly at them whether it’s a block or miles away.

The robotic art pieces, which went up on Friday, will be displayed through July 28 as part of Robot 250, one of this summer’s festivals celebrating Pittsburgh’s 250-year anniversary.

The Reach, Robot installation at PPG Plaza by Grisha Coleman allows people in and around the giant overhead web to create ambient music in the plaza through their movements. The sounds played are based on Pittsburgh’s African-American music history. The kinetic sculpture works from laser and pressure sensing devices attached to the web (made from PPG-manufactured continuous strand fiber glass) that respond when people move under it or congregate in particular areas of the plaza.

(Credit:
Robpt 250)

With all the benefits plants give us humans, shouldn’t they have some fun? To raise awareness of just how much green roof architecture gives back to the environment, artists Greg Witt and Joey Hays built the Green Roof Roller Coaster as a thank-you gift of sorts. While adults have been scratching their heads, children seem to have no problem figuring out that the installation atop the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is simply a roller coaster for plants, Hays said at a press conference. While providing “fun” for the plants, the roller coaster roof still maintains the usual functions of a green roof such as collecting rain water.

Robot percussion by Keny Marshall.

Reach, Robot by Grisha Coleman.

(Credit:
Robot 250)

Mower by Osman Khan.

Here are some highlights.

You're #1 by Ian Ingram.

Green Roof Roller Coaster by Joey Hays (right) and Greg Witt (left).

On the input side, Greener One is a structured wiki. Consumers who want to add information to the database are directed to look up certain info on products, and there’s a database of enviro contacts at major consumer companies, with a list of pre-written e-mail templates for gathering info that’s not evident in a product’s packaging or on its Web site.

Greener One, now in early beta, is a very interesting and timely idea. The CEO, Zoli Piroska, wants to build a “crowdsourced database of green attributes for consumer products.” The benefit for consumers is that they’ll be able to tell what the environmental impacts are of products they are considering, from TVs to laundry detergents–and users will be the ones to build the database of attributes.

The system encourages users to contribute data from which the score is calculated.

Greener One isn’t going to open up its own testing lab (there are plenty already) because, “it doesn’t scale,” Piroska says. He believes a dedicated cadre of users and activists will do the heavy lifting.

Most consumers won’t enter information, of course. They’ll just consume it. What they’ll get from the service is a green rating, and data underneath it, that will tell them the comparative impact of the product they’re looking at. The database will consider the entire lifecycle of the product, from raw materials used to recyclability, and will also include include environmental issues that pop up during a product’s use (for example, outgassing due to chemicals used during manufacture). The data isn’t just about a product’s carbon footprint, as it also considers safety issues.

Each product gets its own green rating.

Piroska is convinced that this user-generated green database will be a game-changer in consumer behavior, especially since, as he told me, the price of an item does not correlate with its environmental impact. Expect, perhaps, in the case of Apple: The MacBook Air, he said, is one of the first laptops that doesn’t use heavy metals in its screen; and Apple as a company is “greener” than most computer manufacturers. Overall, Piroska said, the manufacturer of a product is a good indicator of greenness: In mobile phones, Nokia is generally good. Motorola is not.

Ultimately, Piroska would like the Greener One rating stamped on product boxes or running alongside reviews (like those on CNET). He thinks most consumers will get exposure to the concept from such relationships, that a small number will dive into the Web site for deeper details, and that an even smaller number will contribute. Given the growing awareness of green issues and how they impact consumer safety, cost, and climate change, I would not be surprised to see this idea get some traction.

The debate over whether Web companies should be held liable for what their users post is hardly new: It’s been at the heart of some of the most bitter legal battles in the last decade. Those involve recent free-speech cases involving FriendFinder, Craigslist, and Roommates.com. Viacom’s pursuit of YouTube through the court system is in a slightly different category because it involves intellectual-property law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The extent to which trademark law restricts auction listings has been, until now, somewhat unclear.

On Monday, Judge Sullivan put an end to that argument: “As a factual matter, there is little support for Tiffany’s allegation that a seller listing five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry is presumptively trafficking in counterfeit goods.” In addition, Sullivan concluded that eBay always removed listings promptly after receiving notification from Tiffany, and noted that eBay delayed listings of Tiffany products by 6 to 12 hours to provide time for a manual review.

For its part, eBay says it spends $5 million a year in maintaining its fraud search engine, which has 13,000 rules that are designed to identify counterfeit listings based on words such as “replica” or “knock-off.” Listings flagged by the search engine are manually reviewed by customer service representatives.

It’s not an insignificant problem: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says counterfeiting is an “economic pandemic” that costs the U.S. economy more than $200 billion a year. Counterfeit goods may be manufactured domestically or imported through fraudulent shipping documents.

In addition, eBay offers a Verified Rights Owner (”VeRO”) program that lets trademark owners report and remove infringing listings. Tiffany is one of more than 14,000 companies and individuals participating in the VeRO program.

Making matters tricky is that it’s perfectly legal to resell noncounterfeit Tiffany jewelry, with or without the famous blue boxes. And because eBay doesn’t review the actual merchandise, which is exchanged directly between buyer and seller, it may not be able to identify illicit merchandise based only on the information provided in the auction listing.

Because eBay is trying to compete with Amazon.com (with an enviable stock price performance over the last two years, compared to eBay), by working with larger sellers, it may not have taken precisely the same hard line, if those letters from Tiffany had arrived today.

Tiffany attorney James Swire, a partner at Arnold & Porter, said he would be surprised if his client did not appeal. Swire said “the purpose of trademark law is to prevent consumer confusion and to protect the trademark owner…and I don’t believe that purpose was honored by the judge’s ruling.”

In 2003, Tiffany’s lawyers contacted eBay and said that because their client uses no third-party vendors, “any seller” of “five pieces or more of purported ‘Tiffany’ jewelry is almost certainly selling counterfeit merchandise” and the listing should be automatically deleted. eBay replied: “What you have asked us to do is to consider listings ‘apparently infringing’ simply because the seller is offering multiple Tiffany items. That we are not prepared to do at this time.” A year later, Tiffany asked eBay to ban the sale of all silver “Tiffany” jewelry; eBay refused.

In what could become a landmark case for auction Web sites, the court said trademark law cannot be used to force eBay to shoulder the burden of examining individual auction listings for possible counterfeits.

For now, though, the decision relieves eBay–and companies such as Amazon.com, Yahoo, and Google that provide auction listings or product search results–of what would have been a significant financial burden and legal uncertainty. In the last few years, French courts have ordered eBay and Google to pay fines for trademark breach; a decision last month led to a $61 million fine for eBay that went to fashion giant LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the southern district of New York, is not about whether counterfeit goods will be permitted on eBay (they’re not, and trafficking in counterfeit goods is even a criminal offense). Rather, the debate is about whether the product manufacturer or the auction site should bear the cost of policing eBay listings for fakes.

“There is no dispute that eBay was generally aware that counterfeit Tiffany jewelry was being listed and sold on eBay even prior to Tiffany’s initial demand letter,” Sullivan wrote. But he said that because “eBay does not continue to supply its services to those whom it knows, or has reason to know, are infringing Tiffany’s trademarks,” generalized knowledge is not enough to make the auction site liable.

There is one irony in this hard-fought legal battle, which has involved top-tier law firms and has almost certainly cost both sides millions of dollars in fees. Tiffany filed suit four years ago, when the auction site remained primarily focused on small sellers and before its new deal with Buy.com that has angered the eBay faithful.

“The court is not unsympathetic to Tiffany and other rights holders who have invested enormous resources in developing their brands, only to see them illicitly and efficiently exploited by others on the Internet,” wrote U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan. “Nevertheless, the law is clear: it is the trademark owner’s burden to police its mark.”

eBay cannot be forced to police its auction listings to identify counterfeit Tiffany & Co. products, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a lawsuit brought by the iconic 171-year-old jewelry company.