cynergygroup.com

Update September 12, 2008: Two more of these came today. Neither even bothered hiding the EXE file inside a zip file. I sent one of them to VirusTotal and, again, they had seen it before, this time about 20 hours prior to my uploading it. Initially, 17 out of 37 anti-malware products (46%) detected it as suspicious. When I requested VirusTotal to scan it again, 17 out of 36 products (47%) detected it as malicious. Beats me what happened to that missing anti-malware product.

Civilians (meaning someone not involved in law enforcement) cannot reliably trace an IP address to a city, let alone an exact address. However, tracing it to a country is, I believe, reliable: the message came from Korea.**

The interesting thing here is the constant struggle of anti-malware companies to keep up with the latest malicious software.

For the second time in the last few days, I received a phony e-mail message purporting to be from the package delivery company UPS. A skeptical person would have deleted the message, and good thing too, because odds are that anti-malware software on a Windows* computer would not have protected the trusting or inexperienced user that believed the scam.

Subject: Problems with delivery

Unfortunately we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on September the 1st in time because the recipient’s address is not correct. Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office

Thank you for your attention!
Your United Postal Service
http://www.ups.com

The attached file, ups_invoice.zip contained a single file, ups_invoice.exe.

Yes, this message was amateurish and a number of things give it away as phony. However, the next one may not be so obvious and anti-malware software will always be imperfect. Thus, skepticism may be your best defense.

*As is the norm,
Mac and Linux users would have been protected as the malicious software was Windows based.
**The message initially passed through an e-mail server run by servage.net, which was probably innocent in all this.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

I sent the EXE file to Virus Total and they had already seen it. Of the 36 anti-malware products they scanned it with, only 14 (39 percent) correctly flagged ups_invoice.exe as something to avoid. Among the free anti-malware programs, Avira’s AntiVir correctly flagged it as bad, but Avast and AVG did not. McAfee missed it, as did NOD32, Panda, PC Tools, Sunbelt and Trend Micro.

The first thing to be skeptical of is the From address. Never trust the From address in an e-mail message, it is easily forged. Digging into the e-mail headers showed that the message, shown below, actually came from a computer at IP address
121.139.93.144.

On the Internet people lie to you all the time. Back in April, I wrote that the most important aspect of Defensive Computing may very well be skepticism.

(Credit:
CNET)

Flickr has made significant efforts at improving its mobile interface over the last year, and has just put out a useful update for
iPhone and Android users which builds on that. Through the wonders of the latest iPhone firmware update, the built-in
Safari browser can finally acquire the user’s location information and pass it off to sites that request it. Google’s Android platform has had this as well, but with both operating systems now supporting it, Flickr has gone ahead and added a pocket-sized version of its nearby photo viewer.

I’m hoping future iterations of this will let you do some of the filtering and exploration you’re able to do in the main site. I’d also like to see a pocket-sized version of Flickr’s places pages which aggregate photos of landmarks and cities.

Now, whenever visiting the site you can view photos within a few blocks of where you are. Although unlike Flickr’s main site, you can’t see where each photo has been taken. Instead, it simply narrows you down into a general radius and shows thumbnails of the most recent ones.

I use this feature all the time on Flickr’s main site which incidentally you can still use, and have it locate you from either phone’s browser. However, I found this new version to do a far better job at narrowing down precisely where I was, as well as loading photos that were properly sized and optimized to stream in over the air.

Flickr mobile is now location aware if you're an Android user, or an iPhone owner running the latest firmware.

Unsure as to what he was evaluating–my beauty out of 100, perhaps?–I turned toward him very slowly.

“So you trust your iPhone to tell you precisely when to stop?” I asked.

“Yeah. I loved them. But I just couldn’t take it any more. If I’d stayed another 5 years, I would never have had to work again. But I couldn’t do it. So one day I just walked,” he said, a curiously guilty joy in his eyes.

(Credit: CC Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr)

“So you were at the mercy of the machines?” I wondered.

“I just couldn’t do it any more. All the things I really wanted to do, I couldn’t. Because the machines always took priority. The machines always had to be looked after. Without the back end systems, nothing at Apple could have happened.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I was one of them for 25 years. In fact, I hadn’t been anywhere near a computer for a year until I got this iPhone.”

“I love metal,” he said. “And so for my song, I chose Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’.”

“Your drink is an 8. Normally they pour you a 6,” he said.

“You see, I’m running an app on my iPhone that tells me how much I can drink before I get into my
car. And the lady behind the bar has poured you 8 ounces, not 6.”

“That’s an 8,” he said.

“What’s a calorie app?” I said, dumbly.

“It’s an app that tells me exactly how much I should eat every day,” he replied. “But it’s a bit of a problem to be honest, because when it tells me I’m 300 calories under my limit, I then order a dessert, even though I don’t actually feel like eating a dessert.”

“Er, excuse me?” I muttered, squinting at the man’s long, straggly hair and rather kind-looking face.

Oliver said he was heading up north because he’d never really been there.

I grabbed at my now 6 ounces of pinot noir a little too hastily as I listened to him explain: “I worked at Apple for 25 years. Huge machines. Back end stuff. Loved working with those machines. Loved being able to tell them what to do.”

I had just been poured a drink at a bar Saturday night, when the man to my left tapped me on the shoulder.

“How did it go?” I asked, three ounces in my hand.

“So what are you doing now?” I asked.

As we said our good-byes I asked Oliver again whether he really needed those iPhone apps to tell him how much to eat and drink.

“I’m trying to find a life beyond the one I used to have,” said Oliver. “I’m traveling, seeing things, having new experiences, learning to play the guitar. I’ve got a great new business idea, too.”

As he thought about it, he told me that he had gone to a music school which, at the end of the course, gets its students to form a band and gets them to play live at a San Francisco venue.

“So what happened?” I asked, becoming increasingly fascinated by Oliver’s openness.

“So you let these apps tell you what to do and how to live?” I asked, feeling a weird frown forming above my shades. “Don’t you realize that half of this techy stuff was designed by people who barely see the light of day, adore only numbers and secretly want you to be a little more like them?”

My silence must have appeared somewhat noisy to him, as Oliver (not his real name) picked up his
iPhone and began to explain:

“Oh, yeah. I also run a calorie app,” said Oliver, a little too enthusiastically.

“The best feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” he said.

Still sober, at least according to his iPhone app, he said: “Information is fun, isn’t it? But I guess I’m traveling to see what else is fun in this world.”

You can listen to it here:

He wouldn’t be alone. IDC is seeing a massive uptake in Linux adoption because (surprise, Mr Ballmer!) it’s a highly cost-effective solution in bad economic times. U.S. retailer The Gap, for example, just dumped Microsoft Windows for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of its positive return-on-investment and superior flexibility.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

All of which leaves Microsoft squeezed by high-quality, high-volume strategies being used by Apple and by open-source vendors like Red Hat. It’s not a battle he’s going to win through soundbites. He’s been trying that for years, and the market is waiting for Microsoft to learn to compete again, to build real value and to sell it.

With
Windows 7, Microsoft appears to be back in action. This is welcome. Time to let your products speak louder than your hype and FUD, Mr. Ballmer.

Incidentally, these same vendors make up a significant ecosystem around Linux, the very same ecosystem that Ballmer suggests won’t form due to a lack of incentives. Apparently he didn’t talk to his closest partner, Intel, which is now the No. 2 contributor to the Linux kernel. I guess he didn’t realize that there’s a lot of money to be made around Linux, and it’s money that doesn’t have to be shared with Microsoft.

In talking up Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo, Ballmer couldn’t restrain himself from talking about Apple or Linux:

Microsoft may have been able to get Novell to “put a price on Linux” through intellectual property scare tactics, but it hasn’t worked for the market leaders, Red Hat and Canonical (Ubuntu). Nor has it worked for the leading hardware and software vendors that depend on Linux, e.g., IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc.

It’s bad enough that Ballmer completely botches his math on Apple’s strategy. Maybe he didn’t get the memo that Windows-based PC shipments have been declining even as Mac shipments continue to rise, and that even his Pyhrric victory in Netbooks is costing Microsoft money. He also seems to have missed the fact that Apple’s iPhone has doubled its market share in the past year even as Windows Mobile stalls.

Unfortunately, he’s zero for two in his at-bats with this interview, because his attempts to discredit Linux also fall flat. Like it or not, Linux is free. He may not like that fact, but he can download Linux for free from a variety of sources. Here’s Ubuntu: try it.

We say we want big market share, but with big market share you take the lower price.

Whenever Microsoft starts to look like a company that is ready to play fair with open source, along comes its CEO, Steve Ballmer, to ruin all the goodwill the rest of the company has created.

commentary

Linux. It’s all about Linux. We’ve been competing with Linux for a number of years. I want to describe our value proposition. We are a high-volume player. We do not, like Apple, believe in low volume, very high prices. Apple’s a great company, does a fine job, but their model says high margin, high quality, high price, that’s kinda how they come to market.

So a model like ours, which is high volume and high value but low priced but not free. You could say are you guys in the middle ground or are you where you want to be? And I say we’re exactly where we want to be.

Well, along comes Linux, and they say, “we have no price,” which of course, we know for IP and other reasons, of course they have a price. But they say “we have no price.” The problem you have with these so-called free alternatives is there’s also not the incentive to a lot of the hard work to build out the ecosystem to support the hardware vendors that is required.

Ballmer says, in other words, that Macs are about “high quality and low volume,” but the market says “high quality and ever increasing volume.” But then, Ballmer is usually wrong when he attempts to discredit Apple.

Several months back I wrote about Microsoft’s Songsmith video that hit all the wrong notes. It was a weird (to say the least) attempt to humanize software that failed so terribly I still find it hard to believe it was real.

Maybe all the pressure to make Windows 7 successful has removed all sensibility to marketing efforts that seem like good ideas until they are actually created.

Enter the latest
Windows 7 launch video, which looks like the Food Network threw a cooking party only to have it geek out and go completely sideways.

Books that do not get claimed by their rights holders will have 20 percent of their pages displayed as a preview.

If you participate in the settlement, you’ve also authorized Google to use your book for non-display purposes that include internal testing and bibliographic information unless you specifically request otherwise when you claim your payout.

If your book is out-of-print, it’s a little trickier. As a result of the settlement Google has to offer you the opportunity to decide how, or if, you’d like that book displayed in Google Books, as well as whether you want to claim compensation for Google’s digitization of your works as a member of the class.

Is Google the only place that’s going to offer this kind of service?
No one really knows, but nobody else is scanning books on this scale, and few are believed to have the financial resources to attempt such a project.

Do I get to set the price for my book?
You have two choices: you can set your own price or allow Google to set the price using one of its famous algorithms to figure out where your book will make the most revenue.

What happens if the settlement is rejected?
Who knows. Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York will review all the filings in support or objection to the settlement following Friday’s deadline, and oversee a final hearing in October to determine the fate of the settlement. The Justice Department is also reviewing the settlement for possible “anticompetitive practices.”

Why does Google have a copy of my book?
Google entered into book-scanning projects with several publishers and universities around 2003 with the goal of transforming dusty old books into searchable sources of data. Google believed it was within its rights under fair-use laws to scan books that were out-of-print but still protected by copyright law so as long as it only presented a snippet of each book within Google Search. In cases where Google has cut deals with publishers, it’s allowed to show a much broader portion of the book if the rights holder gives consent.

If they don't opt out of Google's settlement with book publishers and authors by Friday, authors will have to make decisions about how to display their content in Google Book Search.

The settlement has drawn attention and criticism from groups such as library ethicists and academics for the way it concentrates control of this potentially wondrous public good in the hands of a for-profit company. The Department of Justice is also taking a look at the settlement, which has the potential to throw a large roadblock ahead of the project.

What if I don’t want Google to display my entire book?
You have several choices under the settlement regarding how Google is allowed to display your book. You can ask Google to display the whole thing and charge for online access to the book, ask Google to display just a preview copy with links to bookstores where it can be found, have just a few snippets included, or exclude your books entirely from Google Book Search.

You’re also entitled to 63 percent of both the revenue that Google makes from the sale of your book through Google Books, as well as 63 percent of the ad revenue linked to that book. That revenue can be claimed at any time, and will be held by the Books Rights Registry set up as part of the settlement to distribute payments to authors until it is claimed.

The Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers disagreed with Google’s interpretation of copyright laws, and filed a class-action lawsuit in 2005. The parties settled in October with an agreement that could give Google the right to display books it has already scanned in a variety of ways depending on the status of the book and the wishes of rights holders.

How do I know if I’m affected by this settlement?
If you’ve written a book since 1923 that was published in the U.S., you’re probably eligible if you hold the copyright license (some “for-hire” authors cede this to publishers, such as with multi-author technical manuals and the like). Check with your publisher to be sure, but note the settlement only covers books published on or before January 5, 2009.

If your book is still in print, Google has had to ask you or your publisher for explicit permission to scan and display your book. Several publishers have cut deals with Google to display and distribute books. Check with your publisher to see if you’re a member of the Partner Program and how your work is displayed.

Google has scanned over 10 million books since 2004 in participation with libraries and publishers in hopes of creating a unique digital library and storefront, and if its pending settlement with books rights holders is approved next month at a hearing, Google will be able to make a far greater portion of those works available through its search engine. Friday is the deadline for authors to decide if they want to participate in the settlement.

Google’s rights under the settlement are nonexclusive, in that anyone can negotiate for scanning and display rights with the nonprofit Books Rights Registry. But no one has stepped forward as of yet, and there’s only a handful of tech companies with the cash resources and business models (Microsoft? Yahoo? Apple? Amazon?) that would allow them to consider such a project: Microsoft has scaled back its book-scanning efforts in recent years.

What do I get if I participate in the settlement?
If you fill out a claim form at the Web site set up to administer the settlement, you’ll get $60 per work that Google has already digitized as well as options as to how that work will be displayed in Google Book Search. Claims for the cash payments must be submitted by January 5, 2010.

The issues surrounding Google’s Book Search settlement are among the most complex surrounding the company this year: what do authors need to know about their rights and responsibilities?

It seems pretty obvious that if the settlement is thrown out, rights holders won’t be bound by the terms of the settlement. What seems likeliest is that the Authors Guild and other groups will renegotiate a settlement on different terms, but the issue could conceivably wind up back in court, delaying the project indefinitely while Google continues to scan books.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Authors, however, have a few choices to make as they ponder Friday’s deadline. Here’s a sampling of what they need to know:

I don’t want anything to do with this settlement. How do I tell Google?
If you wish to completely opt out of the settlement, you have to let Google know by Friday here. Opting out of the settlement allows you to sue Google for digitizing your out-of-print book. You can also ask Google to avoid scanning your book if it already hasn’t (at least until April 5, 2011) as well as remove any instances of your book from Google Book Search.

I can’t believe anybody would pay money for that old book I wrote, but why not? How do I sign up?
You can claim your books here. You must claim the books by January 5, 2010 if you want the $60 per book, but you’ll be automatically included in the settlement class unless you opt out by Friday.

Why should I keep my book in Google Books?
The project has the potential to dramatically reinvent the concept of what it means to be a book. Books that are searchable and that can link to one another could pay enormous dividends for researchers, who will get access to the catalog of books as part of the settlement.

It could also mean a little bit of money in your pocket and extend the life of an older book that is gathering dust on a library shelf.

Updated at 8:05 am PDT
with a slideshow and some first impressions of the Windows Marketplace for Mobile app store, at 4:25 pm PT with a correction about Marketplace reviews, and at 12:10 am PT on 10/7/09 with an update about the availability of Marketplace on other Windows Mobile platforms, and details on the My Phone service.

As in the beta, My Phone limits you to 200MB in media storage. According to Microsoft, fewer than 5 percent of the current users hit that ceiling.

There’s also a self-service return policy that gives you a full refund from unwanted apps within a 24-hour period. There’s a caveat, of course. You’ll be limited to one refund per month to avoid abusing the system. The app store launches in 29 countries on Tuesday.

In our pre-release demo, we found the app store to be a little visually boring, though serviceable. Following a proven app store model, Windows Marketplace for Mobile has a search bar, a featured apps showcase, and a list of browseable categories. In them, you’ll only see applications that work on your phone model and in your country. There’s also an personalized screen that helps you manage the apps you have. As with iPhones and BlackBerrys, if you switch devices, you can easily re-download the apps you installed through the Marketplace. You’ll sign on with your Windows Live ID. We heard before the launch that you won’t be able to create your own reviews until the second phase, but in truth, rating and reviews are fully functional today.

We’ve heard plenty about both services in the days and months leading up to this release. The much-anticipated Windows Marketplace for Mobile has a well-thought out model that will eventually include both a Web and on-phone storefront, and a flexible billing system that lets you purchase apps using either a credit card or your monthly phone bill (depending on the carrier). According to Microsoft, the PC catalog isn’t available now but is planned to be released before the year’s end.

Microsoft didn’t tell us how many apps were expected in the app store Tuesday morning, but with 82 games ready to download, there are at least 100 apps altogether. We already see Facebook, Netflix Mobile, Zagat to Go, Windows Live, and the Midomi music app. Most app prices range so far from free to about $10, though the most expensive one we spotted so far is a $25 golf calculator. We saw quite a few $20 games as well.

View the full gallery

The premium My Phone features are available at launch in the Unites States, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Netherlands, Greece, Poland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. The Map Current Location feature is U.S.-only right now.

The new features are mostly premium, and center on remotely finding and securing your phone. If you’re in the U.S., you can force your phone to ring even when it’s turned to silent or vibrate. You can remotely lock the phone, map it–this wakes up the phone and plots it on a map–and can erase the contents remotely, the most extreme measure. My Phone will show you the handset’s last known location for free.

My Phone

Who gets it?
Windows Marketplace for Mobile launches on Tuesday in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Unlike the application Marketplace, the My Phone backup and media sharing service is well known from its public beta. Through its online dashboard, you can access and manage contacts, calendar, texts, and photos and videos (no e-mail or apps). At launch, you’ll be able to post photos to Windows Live, Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace, with bulk uploads and captioning to come later on.

My Phone is treated like application package and can be downloaded in the Marketplace for Mobile. The premium features can be purchased through the online dashboard. Until November 30, Microsoft is offering a free trial of My Phone’s commercial capabilities.

Brand new to 6.5 phones are Windows Marketplace for Mobile–an application storefront like that found on
iPhone, BlackBerry, and every other major mobile OS–and a Web-based backup and sharing service called My Phone.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile–screenshots

Manage My Phone online.

On Tuesday morning, as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 phones hit the market, two of its mobile services are officially launching.

If you’re not planning to pick up a Windows 6.5 phone yet, Marketplace should also be available to download to 6.0 and 6.1 phones before the end of 2009. That’s been the official word, but at least one of our readers has gotten it to work on a 6.1 phone. Download at your own risk.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Firefox 3.6, code-named Namoroka, has a variety of changes, but it’s not as dramatic a departure as 3.5 was from 3.0. Among the 3.6 features are faster JavaScript, the Web programming language Firefox executes with its TraceMonkey engine; faster page-rendering speed; some new features for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology for controlling some of the look of a Web site; and a feature called the compositor that handles complicated layout circumstances better.

Mozilla has released the first alpha version of
Firefox 3.6 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, a browser with speed improvements and new features the organization hopes to finalize faster than its predecessor.

Download links for the first Firefox 3.6 alpha are at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Performance is a big issue with browsers these days as people spend more time using them and programmers create more sophisticated sites and applications that live on the Web. All major browser makers are emphasizing performance improvements in their newest versions.

“Unlike the year that passed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5, we expect that this 3.6 release will be released in a small number of months,” Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard said in a blog post Friday.

It takes real work to pare back a user interface without impairing software’s utility. But until the day arrives when my screen is displayed on an entire office wall or directly on my retina, I’ll hoard every pixel that browser developers can give me.

Another change came with Safari 4 from Apple. Like Chrome, it added the two-button menu icons toward the upper right. Unlike Chrome, it sports a traditional menu bar as well, though with the Windows version it can be hidden to free up some real estate.

But it’s not simple to redesign the browsers. Users can be confused when interfaces change, some controls are essential, and hiding them can cause problems.

Microsoft’s case is illuminating. Its Internet Explorer 7 hid the menu bar, though it could be revealed by pressing the Alt key, but IE 8 shows menus by default. (It can be hidden again by default if people choose, and I do.)

Reclaiming real estate
There’s been some work in this area for years. For example, hitting the F11 key in Windows puts Firefox into a full-screen mode, hiding title, menu, address, and tab bars. And Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 hid the menu bar, though it could be revealed by pressing the Alt key; IE 8 shows menus by default again, though it can be hidden again by default if people choose, and I do.

The Web app era
How all these changes will shake out isn’t clear yet. But what is clear is that influential developers believe thin frames are better than thickets of icons, menus, bars, and boxes.

Now factor in the Web application future–Picnik for photo editing, Zoho for office productivity, Bespin for programming, even Microsoft Office soon. These applications are increasing in number, sophistication, and importance, even if they aren’t replacing desktop applications as soon as Google Chrome OS developers might hope.

This Firefox 4.0 mock-up shows a very Chrome-like interface.

A little bit of screen real estate saved in the browser is multiplied many times over across this range of applications. And of course, conventional Web browsing can benefit, too, offering the possibility of more information and less scrolling to get to it.

Mozilla’s ultimate goal is to make the user interface step into the background as much as possible–indeed, the mobile-phone version of Firefox now under development has no visible user interface until it’s needed. “Every time a user has to think about how to do something, instead of what we want to do, we as software creators have failed,” said Aza Raskin, Mozilla’s leader of user interface work.

Safari 4 lets you hide the menu bar–but between the beta and final versions, Apple moved the tabs to the more conservative position immediately above the browser Web page.

Shortly afterward came the Firefox 4.0 mock-ups, moving the tabs to the title bar in one option that’s even more Chrome-esque.

Consider for a moment Microsoft Word. Especially when the newer version’s ribbon of icons is active, it requires a fair amount of area to house its controls.

Missing at launch was a full-screen mode, but Google rapidly filled in that gap. This max-screen ethos is one reason that Chrome, at present at least, is my default browser.

An example of Chrome's latest interface on Windows.

The Web application trend is one reason this trend is important.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

So I’m happy to report that browser makers are paying new attention to the issue. It’s important to me for reading Web sites, but it’s really important to me for the new generation of Web applications. A row of pixels saved once in the browser is returned again with each Web-based application.

In the same vein, those who were enamored of the Firefox 3.7 mock-up look can try it themselves in the real world with a three-step change LifeHacker put together.

One of the big assets Firefox has is its extensions system, which can be used to customize the browser. One I like is autoHideStatusbar, which reclaims the status bar real estate except when I need it in order to see where a link on a Web site leads. I also use Tree Style Tab to move tabs off to the left; I typically need vertical space more than horizontal.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

With the dash to release Firefox 3.5 now over, developer attention again focuses on the future. Last week, mock-ups of Firefox 3.7 arrived to trigger discussions of what the final interface should look like. On display were two Chrome-like characteristics: the two menu icons and the missing menu bar.

I’m one of those people who wants every bit of display real estate I can get. The more I can see of the document I’m writing, the in-box I’m scanning, and the photo I’m editing, the happier and more productive I am.

The next move comes from Mozilla, which leads development of the Firefox browser.

(Credit:
Mozilla)

Chrome wiped out the title bar altogether and arrayed its browser tabs in the newly freed space. It also wiped out the menu strip and tucked the options into two drop-down menu buttons to the right of the address bar. Information that would show in a status bar, such as the actual URL of a Web address you’re hovering your mouse over, appear in a temporary box that appears on the lower left. When you search a Web page, another small window appears in the upper right. (Chrome looks somewhat different on Mac OS X, which always uses a menu bar at the top of the screen that’s detached from the browser Window itself.)

The maximize button is my friend. Toolbars are my enemies.

Chrome on the Mac can't free up the menu bar real estate, so it looks different than on Windows.

Now consider Google Docs, which must add its word-processing user interface elements with those already present for the browser itself. Those using the application must bear a double burden. It’s like going back to the era of 800×600-pixel displays.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

But now the pixel reclamation effort is taking off in earnest. The big statement came in September 2008, when Google revealed its Chrome browser–ironically named because it aims to move the user interface elements, called chrome, as much into the background as possible.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, Apple backed off from another change between the Safari 4 beta and final version. Initially, the browser sported tabs in the title bar, like Chrome, but Apple later moved them into the more conservative position immediately above the Web page.

“The challenge to reducing UI (user interface) is in recognition versus recall. People generally use what they see,” Raskin said. “How can we provide one-click access to everything possible on the Web without also cluttering the screen? That’s a question we are still answering.”

I’d personally like to offer browser makers my gratitude for realizing that my screen isn’t big enough.

Greene says that the service can let companies “in real time, find out what the kids are saying about your product and all your competitors’ products…I can’t tell you who said it, I can only just tell you that a lot of kids said it.”

Box shot of Sentry Parental Controls from company Web site

A software product sold to protect children from predators, cyberbullying, and visiting inappropriate Web sites is also collecting information about what the kids are saying, and its publisher is selling that data–in aggregate form–to other companies for marketing purposes.

In an interview, Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene said that the company doesn’t collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children. “We never, ever, ever can identify who the kid is who is saying it. In fact, we don’t have any information about the individual child,” he said.

The company’s Sentry Parental Control Software, according to Greene, is designed to warn parents if a child is engaged in inappropriate online behavior by analyzing a database of 29,000 words including what he calls “Weblish,” slang terms like POS (parent over shoulder) that kids use as short cuts in instant messaging and chat rooms. To do this, said Greene, it’s necessary for the company to capture this information so “we can monitor these kids and the conversations they are having and the things they are seeing and all the words that are coming to them and all the words they’re sending out, so we can make decisions and identify questionable activities and let mom and dad know about it right now–in real time.”

Listen to my interview with Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Taking Greene at his word, and assuming that the company carefully avoids sending out identifiable information, I still can’t shake the creepy feeling that I get about any product that collects any information from children, especially in the name of child protection.

(Credit:
Echometrix)

Spyware?
David Perry of TrendMicro, which includes parental control tools in some of its security products, said he isn’t aware of any other parental control products that capture this type of information. “This is a severe case of what we used to call spyware,” he said. Perry worries that even though the software may not collect the names of the children, “those names could be included in some of the chat messages.”

Greene said that the company does provide a disclosure to parents as well as a way for parents to opt out, but the information in its end-user license agreement is written in the typical legalese and is a bit contradictory. In one section, it says “SearchHelp (recently renamed Echometrix) does not read or disclose private communications except to comply with a valid legal process such as a search warrant, to protect the company’s rights and property,” but in another it says “We have a parent’s permission to share the information if the user is a child under age 13. Parents have the option of allowing SearchHelp to collect and use their child’s information without consenting to SearchHelp sharing of this information with people and companies who may use this information for their own purposes.”

In addition to notifying parents if their kids are doing something questionable, the company also sells summary data based on this information–in the aggregate–to other companies. A press release on its Web site describes a product called Pulse “that reads digital content from multiple sources across the Web, including: instant messages, blogs, social environment communities, forums, and chat rooms.” The company says that it delivers the unsolicited raw conversations in real time. It gives marketers immediate, unique information about what teens are saying in their own words.”

At my request, the company provided a link to a Web page where parents can opt out of the collection process.