hbjzrc.com

As for the companies, it’s time to move on to Plan B. I took a look at Microsoft’s Plan B over the weekend, while Shankland did the same for Yahoo. But I’m curious to hear what others think. Was Jerry Yang crazy to say no? Should Steve Ballmer be thanking his lucky stars?

Well, the decision to end talks is a full employment act for talking heads, including yours truly.

Yahoo shares, meanwhile, got their expected pummeling, with many investors still shaking their heads over how Jerry Yang could “just say no.”

Monday morning meant back to reality for both Microsoft and Yahoo, after talks between the two sides collapsed over the weekend.

So, what now?

Both companies have maintained they had a strategy independent of the other, but now the two sides will have to prove it. The companies are likely still in dealmaking mode–just not with each other. Yahoo is still pursuing deals with Google and AOL, a source tells CNET News.com, while Microsoft has indicated that it will also look at other business deals. AOL could be on Microsoft’s short list as well.

I recorded a video with News.com Editor in chief Dan Farber in which the two of us discuss the matter, while Stephen Shankland and I took up the same topic on Monday’s News.com daily podcast. If you want still more, I’ll be on the public radio show Marketplace Monday afternoon taking up the topic again.

The contest is a singing one, not an impersonation one, but I’m presuming there will be plenty of video entrants decked out in sunglasses and gold-studded leather jackets. Let’s hope they welcome contest entrants in Elvis regalia a little more warmly than they do with the media.

The News Corp.-owned social network, best known for attracting a demographic for whom the King has always been dead, announced Monday that it will be hosting an official Elvis karaoke competition for “Elvis Week 2008,” which runs from August 9 to 17. It’s in partnership with Elvis Presley Enterprises, and members can enter through August 4 by submitting videos of Elvis song performances to MySpace’s karaoke site. Elvis Presley Enterprises, for that matter, has launched an official MySpace page as well.

There’s going to be an Elvis karaoke contest on MySpace. That is not a joke. I can’t seem to figure out whether it’s trying to market Elvis to a younger generation or MySpace to an older one–or if it’s just for kicks.

The winner gets to perform live onstage at Elvis’ historic Graceland home, backed by entertainers who actually performed with Elvis himself. Ten second-place winners get a DVD of Viva Las Vegas as well as some variety of MP3 player loaded with Elvis songs. Third-place prizes, of which there are 20, are one-year memberships to an “Official Elvis Insiders” club.

The AMP pitch comes as Yahoo faces increasing pressure in an unsolicited takeover bid by Microsoft. On Saturday, Microsoft threw down the gauntlet, telling Yahoo it has three weeks in which to “sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement.” Failure to comply would spur Redmond to launch a proxy battle for control of Yahoo’s board and could bring a lower bid than the initial $31 per share.

Updated 9:27 PM PDT to reflect the actual announcement from Yahoo.

A report Sunday in The New York Times took a somewhat pessimistic view of the timing, saying the system is “still months away from being ready” and pointing to Yahoo’s newspaper partners getting going with AMP “in the late summer or in the fall.”

AMP, previously known as the Advertiser and Publisher Exchange, or Apex, is a combination of technologies developed in-house and through acquisitions such as that of Right Media.

Full coverage
Microsoft’s big bid for Yahoo Click here for the latest on the software giant’s attempt to buy the Net pioneer.

(Credit:
Yahoo, via SEC)

The last time Yahoo worked on a major ad platform, it struggled. The search ad platform known as Panama, eventually debuted about a year ago, and Yahoo executives have expressed satisfaction with its real-world financial returns. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has between 500 and 700 engineers working on AMP, according to a newspaper partner.

Later this year, Yahoo expects to have in place the first phase of a new system intended to generate greater revenue from graphical online advertising.

The message was eminently clear in this slide, which was one of many Yahoo filed with the SEC in mid-March: Happiness comes to those who adopt Yahoo's display ad platform.

The new ad management platform, Yahoo said in its press release, “will deliver a faster, easier, and more automated and integrated way to create, buy, and sell advertising and do so across a transparent global marketplace.”

AMP is supposed to make it simpler for Yahoo’s partners–newspaper and otherwise–to sell online ads across a range of outlets and to focus those ads by say, geography or demographic profile. Eventually it is expected to expand beyond display advertisements to other types of ads, including search and video.

A number of times in the weeks since Microsoft launched its courtship, Yahoo has claimed that the software giant has undervalued Yahoo’s worth. Never was that more apparent than in mid-March when Yahoo filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying it would double its cash flow by 2010–in part because of the strength of its online advertising efforts.

The system, called AMP, is expected to become available in the third quarter of 2008 for newspapers participating with Yahoo in an online ad consortium. But that’s just the initial phase. Yahoo says it “plans to extend the functionality of the platform as well as participation to additional publishers, advertisers, agencies, and ad networks through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.”

Automation still plays a part: The service can be set to automatically add to “My Contacts” anybody you send e-mail to more than five times.

Google announced the move on its Gmail blog on Thursday.

Google has revamped the contacts section of Gmail to let users decide who’s on their A-list.

Gmail adds a contact entry for every e-mail you use, and previously showed either the full list or the “Most Contacted” subset Google chose. Now the service divides contacts into a “My Contacts” list that users can define and a “Suggested Contacts” list with everyone else.

DefCon 16 will be held August 8-10 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.

A new contest to be held at this year’s DefCon in Las Vegas in August hopes to prove that signature-based antivirus is dead, a move that one leading antivirus researcher says is “not a good idea.”

But Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee Avert Labs, said: “Encouraging research that results in better evasion techniques for malware writers is not a good idea. How many identities will be lost and how much data will be stolen from users as a result of the new techniques and evasions that are created? Security research should center around bettering detection not evasion.”

Reverse engineering and code analysis is fun.
Not all antivirus is equal and poorly performing antivirus vendors should be called out.
Signature-based antivirus products can be easily circumvented.
It’s easier to modify malicious software than it is to write signature protection for it. Signature-based antivirus is dead. Antivirus is just part of the larger picture, you need patching, firewalling and sound security policies to remain virus free.

The goal of the Race to Zero is simple: obfuscate a malicious code so that it evades well-known antivirus engines.

Contestants will be given a sample set of viruses and malicious code that they must modify and then upload through the contest portal. Once accepted, the sample will be sent through a number of leading antivirus engines (perhaps using VirusTotal.com to provide real time test results). The first team or individual who manages to evade all the antivirus engines wins that round. The organizers promise that each round will increase in complexity.

On the contest site, organizers list six reasons for hosting this event:

If you want to license U.S. patent 7,389,403, you should contact Sun. If you want to talk about even more modern ways to design a microprocessor, drop me a note.

Update– also issued since this post: US patent 7,412,570

I’d like to thank Bennett Smith and Korbin Van Dyke at PatentVentures, our patent agents, for this and many other Montalvo applications. Smith and Van Dyke are highly experienced microprocessor architects, and I think there’s no better team in the industry for developing advanced microprocessor patents. It was a great pleasure working with them.

Working with three of us from Montalvo–myself and chief architects Greg Favor and Peter Song–Don took the lead in preparing a set of related patent applications describing a new way to design microprocessors.

During my years at Montalvo, I came up with quite a few ideas and participated in brainstorming sessions that yielded more ideas. Most of these sessions were limited to Montalvo’s own people, but there was one person I brought in to help us as a consultant–Don Alpert, who was the principal architect of Intel’s Pentium processor and, possibly less significantly, a member of the editorial board at Microprocessor Report.

I’ve been inventing things for almost 20 years now, but Montalvo Systems was the first company I worked for that took intellectual property seriously. (That was no coincidence; it was also the first company I worked for where I helped develop the intellectual-property strategy.)

Finally, I can call myself an inventor.

The ACE architecture was not part of Montalvo’s first-generation product plans, but it represents a more flexible, and potentially a more effective, way to take advantage of the increasing transistor counts available to designers.

The first patent from this set was officially issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on June 17: U.S. patent number 7,389,403, titled “Adaptive computing ensemble microprocessor architecture.” So now I’m an inventor de jure, not merely de facto.

This patent belongs to Sun Microsystems now, the first ripe fruit of that company’s acquisition of Montalvo’s assets. I have no idea what will happen with the rest of the pending Montalvo applications, or with the disclosures we prepared that hadn’t yet been filed with the Patent Office. It’s unlikely that Sun will pursue all of these ideas, and it’s fairly certain that they won’t all turn into issued patents, but I’ll be watching to see what happens.

Compiled here is a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Each one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.

Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you’ve put in the addresses there are quick links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don’t know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it’s in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly quickly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he’s hoping to build an
iPhone application that makes use of the device’s GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.

Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he’s got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.

The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they’re visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a little extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunct
Muxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.

A posting on the Windows Live OneCare Team Blog has a detailed FAQ for customers.

Microsoft on Tuesday said it is changing its strategy for offering PC antivirus software, with plans to discontinue its subscription-based consumer security suite and instead offer individuals free software to protect their PCs.

“I’m all for a free tool but given that I just paid for it…we’ll see,” he added.

Microsoft had been selling Windows Live OneCare for $49.95 per year, which covered up to three PCs and offered centralized backup and optimization features in addition to security capabilities.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said the news doesn’t impact his security firm because it focuses on the enterprise market.

“Consumers have voted; OneCare, in its two years on the market, has achieved less than 2 percent market share,” he said in an interview. “Microsoft is giving up and has defaulted to a dressed-down freeware model that does not meet consumer security needs. This is good news for McAfee.”

Microsoft decided to switch to a free product because there are still so many PCs out there that lack any antivirus software.

The news frustrated OneCare customer Cas Purdy who complained on Facebook: “I just paid for OneCare. I’m kind of bitter.”

The software maker has also started selling its Forefront line of security software for businesses and indicated at its Microsoft Online launch on Monday that it plans to expand its lineup of hosted security services.

CNET News’ Ina Fried contributed to this report.

Morro, which will be available for download over the Internet, will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and the upcoming
Windows 7.

Updated at 6:15 p.m. PST with Microsoft and McAfee comment, at 5:30 p.m. with Sophos comment, and at 4:40 p.m. with customer comment.

Microsoft started selling OneCare in May 2006, three years after signaling its intent to enter the security software market with its purchase of Romania’s GeCad.

Although OneCare received only mixed reviews, it significantly shook up the security software market, resulting in generally lower prices.

Barzdukas dismissed the notion that Microsoft was responding to market share or competitive pressures. “If the current approach isn’t working… (as far as protecting consumers broadly) we need to go with a new approach,” she said.

Purdy, who heads up public relations at security firm Websense, said in a follow-up phone interview that he paid for his OneCare subscription a few weeks ago for his home laptop. Websense does not compete with Microsoft on consumer software.

“I think this announcement may cause some sleepless nights for the chiefs at McAfee and Symantec–they’ve always done well out of the consumer anti-virus market, and with tougher financial times ahead of them (they) won’t be pleased to see the possibility of that evaporating further,” he wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

Windows Live OneCare logo

Asked why the company wouldn’t just offer both the free and subscription versions, Barzdukas said: “Having core anti-malware at no charge for consumers, we believe, we will protect more consumers that way.” Consumers who want more than the features Morro will offer have “fine alternatives from third parties” to buy, she added.

Representatives from Symantec could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Code-named Morro, the new offering will be available in the second half of 2009 and will protect against viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans, the company said in a statement.

With the arrival of Morro, Microsoft plans to stop selling the Windows Live OneCare service, although the two services are not identical. Morro lacks OneCare’s non-security features, such as printer sharing and automated PC tuneup. Morro will, however, use fewer resources than the subscription-based offering, making it better suited to low-bandwith systems and less powerful PCs.

Despite the fact that McAfee stands to lose paying customers to Microsoft’s new free software, McAfee spokesman Joris Evers said the news signaled a defeat for Microsoft.

Windows Live OneCare will continue to be sold for Windows XP and Vista via retailers through June 30, 2009, and direct sales will be gradually phased out as Morro becomes available. “Microsoft will ensure that all current customers remain protected through the life of their subscriptions,” the statement said.

Asked if Microsoft would ever consider bundling the security features into Windows, Barzdukas said: “I can’t foresee such a time.”

“Because they’re not concerned about malware, the number of people who don’t have antivirus software or don’t keep it up to date exceeds 50 percent in developed markets, and it’s worse in emerging markets,” Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft, said in an interview. “Live OneCare was tailored for developed markets with broadband…and it’s not meeting the needs of a lot of customers.”

Microsoft’s Barzdukas said customers should contact customer support if they have a concern. “We will absolutely do the right thing by our customers, and if the customer wants to call our free phone support line we’ll make sure they are happy,” she said.