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“The spammers spreading this virus are preying on Internet users and making their computers an unwitting part of criminal botnet activity,” said the FBI in a press release. “We urge citizens to help prevent the spread of botnets by becoming web-savvy.”

The FBI is warning users not to respond to spam e-mail and not to open attachments or links provided within such e-mail, and advising them to validate the legitimacy of the e-mail by typing the organization’s Web site address directly into a browser window, rather than clicking on a provided link.

The e-mail uses the the phrase “F.B.I. vs. Facebook” in its subject line and contains a link to view an article about the FBI and Facebook, a popular social networking website. Clicking on the link downloads malicious software onto the victim’s computer.

On Wednesday, the FBI and its partner, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), warned against a new e-mail campaign being used by the creators of the Storm Worm botnet.

Rive has a thriving business installing solar panels on California homes but is working overtime to try to ramp up the supply of solar technologies to meet demand, which illustrates Khosla’s scalability issue: prices are way, way too high.

CORONADO, Calif.–Looming energy problems present noteworthy challenges for the world, but big thinkers in science, business, and technology know they have to compete with the status quo without a helping hand.

Carbon-trading markets have a bad reputation because many people feel they don’t work to actually offset carbon production and give carbon producers ways to feel better about their production without really solving the problem. Morris’ co-panelist, Erik Blachford of TerraPass, agreed that carbon-trading markets aren’t perfect, “but they work.”

Martin Tobias of Ignition Partners, Erik Blachford of TerraPass, and David Morris of EcoVerdance talk about carbon-trading systems.

As such, the early talk at the Hotel Del Coronado is all about alternative energy, whether that’s cellulosic biofuels, photovoltaic panels, and carbon-reduction strategies. Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures kicked off the conference Tuesday night with an after-dinner speech urging the technologists, venture capitalists, and entreprenuers in attendance to focus on greener technologies that make economic sense, rather than crowd-pleasers like hybrid
cars or Sheryl Crow’s toilet-paper reduction strategy.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

Morris’ company is working on carbon trading by allowing businesses to purchase credits for a chemical called Accele-Gro-M, which is then given away to farmers in developing economies. This “all-natural plant growth enhancer,” according to EcoVerdence’s site, is used to boost crops yields; 1 gallon can treat 12.5 acres, Morris said. The increased yields not only improve the food supply in those areas, the additional plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Khosla is plunging his dollars into technologies like enhanced geothermal, cellulosic ethanol, and efforts to improve the efficiency of products we already use, like engines and light bulbs. The key investment decision, in his mind, is whether these alternative technologies can work at utility-grade levels.

“(Alternative fuels) have to compete with the cost of fossil fuels without subsidies,” he said, and they also have to be scalable. Technologies like food-based ethanol, wind power, and regular geothermal aren’t scalable to meet the needs of a huge energy provider like PG&E, but if we could perfect ways to create ethanol from non-food sources, effectively store the energy generated by wind power, or drill geothermal plants anywhere on the surface of the planet, that goal of scalability comes into sight.

Morris agreed. “The most costly thing we can do is nothing,” he said. The FIRe conference runs through Friday, and several more panels will discuss the energy opportunity from several different points of view.

Khosla is betting on the future, but he thinks that significant changes could arrive in the energy market as soon as five years from now. Other presenters on Wednesday morning discussed their current businesses, such as Lyndon Rive of SolarCity and David Morris of EcoVerdance.

Stephen Evans of the BBC, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and Lyndon Rive of SolarCity (left to right) discuss solar power.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

The other goal is that alternative sources of energy have to be price-competitive with current sources of energy such as oil, coal, and natural gas. The public will embrace cleaner, sustainable energy sources as long as they don’t have to pay for it, Khosla said.

The Future in Review conference has always been about sketching a picture of the technology and business landscape five years into the future. But this year, attendees and presenters are focused on a more pressing issue: the need for alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels sooner, rather than later.

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

The 2.6-pound HP 2133 Mini-Note uses the Via C7 processor.

“We just started shipping to customers last week and this week–literally right now,” Henry said.

On the upside, Nano can be plugged directly into a design that uses the older C7 processor. “One of the very interesting things about the Nano is that it’s plug compatible with our current C7s. You can plug the part into the same socket.” Though some adjustments must be made: A BIOS upgrade is necessary and “more importantly the part has a different power-versus-megahertz (paradigm) compared to the current part because it’s running benchmarks two times faster,” Henry said.

The Nano processor is seen as the only real competition for Intel’s popular Atom chip, which is used in Netbooks from a long list of companies including Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Dell.

There is one crucial difference with the Atom. Nano has a thermal envelope of 5 watts at 1GHz. Though this is low compared with a standard Intel Core 2 mobile processor (typically drawing 25 watts to 35 watts), this is higher than Intel’s single-core Atom chip for netbooks which tops out at just 2 watts. At 1.3GHz, Nano has a thermal envelope of 8 watts, approaching that of Intel’s dual-core Atom.

(Credit:
Via Technologies)

He said products using the Nano processor will not appear immediately. “No product that actually uses this is for sale to the end customer (yet). So the parts we’re shipping are going into the (customer’s) manufacturing process or development process.”

Why the difference? Nano uses a more sophisticated superscalar, out-of-order design, while Atom has a more simple “in-order execution” architecture. Because of Nano’s more complex design, it may deliver better performance than Atom in some cases.

And what about a Via dual-core processor? “We’re working on it. When you see it, who knows. We’re implementing it but it’s not near at hand,” Henry said.

In an interview, Glenn Henry, the head of Via Technologies subsidiary Centaur Technology, said that Via has just begun commercial shipments of its Intel-compatible, power-sipping Nano processor. Centaur headed up development of the Nano processor.

Are Netbooks ripe to be resized? Via Technologies thinks so. The Intel-compatible chipmaker says larger Netbooks are on the way.

Though Henry refused to talk about design wins, he did say that there is interest from major companies. “We’ve given them (HP) samples,” he said. Though Henry qualified this by saying that Via has given samples to a lot of potential customers. “There’s a great deal of interest in the part from people whose name you would recognize,” he said.

Henry said there is a lot of demand for larger form factors. “Everyone wants to build a (Netbook) of some variety these days. Most of the interest we see from customers is for a larger screen than the HP (2133). There’s a lot of demand to move those things up to higher screen sizes. I’ve heard customers say they want to build 12- or 13-inch notebooks,” Henry said.

(Note: There are several ways to categorize a design as a netbook. One is screen size. Typically netbooks have 7-, 8-, or 9-inch screens. But this definition is in flux with, for example, the newest Atom-processor-based Eee PC 1000 that sports a 10-inch screen. So, as netbooks get redefined upward, the silicon inside–and other hardware–becomes the defining factor, i.e., low-power, low-performance processors and graphics that dictate how the computer should be used: primarily as a Net-centric device for Web browsing and email. Prices will also typically be lower than standard notebooks.)

The thermal envelope, however, is important because it can influence the design of a Netbook-type device. Typically, parts with lower thermal envelopes can go into smaller devices.

Via’s most illustrious customer is Hewlett-Packard, which currently uses the older Via C7 processor in its 2133 Mini-Note PC.

Via Nano processor

“There are millions of people who are using Facebook just on mobile devices, and location is a big part of that,” was as specific as he would get.

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

He spoke much more concretely, probably because of the developer-heavy audience, about the “openness” issue. Standards like OpenSocial have been developed in the wake of Facebook’s generally closed-off policies with its code and platform, and so far, Facebook has declined to support these or other standards like OpenID. Zuckerberg still would not rule it out.

LONDON–These are tough times for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The economy is in the tank, Madison Avenue still doesn’t have full faith in the social network’s ability to generate ad revenue, and entertainment-industry analysts estimate that in a few years the 24-year-old CEO could be in danger of losing his title of “world’s youngest billionaire” to pop singer Miley Cyrus.

“There is the rumored Facebook payment system,” he added with a bit of cheek. “Who knows when it’ll be ready…(There’s) definitely nothing to announce yet.”

“The audience is packed with people who build Web apps,” Carson said as he kicked off the talk. “What’s it like to grow your company and build a popular Web app?”

“With the new design we’re trying to do that with the profile,” Zuckerberg explained when talking about sharing. “When we launched (the) platform, a lot of apps just focused on getting a box to be installed on the user’s page. The issue with that is the app may never have been used by the user again,” he said. Facebook aims to “incentivize” apps that encourage real interaction.

“I don’t know if I’d frame it as a concrete thing we haven’t chosen to do; I would maybe say that there’s a trend in terms of how things play out and we haven’t done it yet,” Zuckerberg said. “Openness is clearly a very good thing.”

In terms of advice for developers, Zuckerberg declined to really elaborate on what he’d do differently if he were starting the company now, or what mistakes he’s acknowledged he’s made along the way. But he did say that he prides himself on having a workforce that’s largely staffed by people with technical and engineering backgrounds. “A lot of the people (at Facebook), even if they’re not in technical roles, they have technical backrounds,” Zuckerberg said. He added that the company’s chief financial officer is one of them. “I think credibility is external but DNA is internal. I don’t know that having a CFO that has a more technical background gives us more credibility, but I think it could help us make better decisions.”

Zuckerberg (right) speaks with FOWA organizer Ryan Carson.

He also talked more candidly than usual about the shortcomings of the platform, and how it soon became a hub for goofy viral applications that users quickly started to find annoying. The redesigned look of Facebook pages relegates many of those apps to a separate “boxes” tab, which has irked many developers, but Zuckerberg implied that if apps are seeing a decline in use because of the redesign, they probably aren’t the sorts of apps that Facebook envisioned as part of its platform in the first place.

Carson asked Zuckerberg what he does to unwind when he goes home.

But Zuckerberg lucked out on Friday with his keynote “fireside chat” at the Future of Web Apps conference. Interviewed onstage by conference organizer Ryan Carson, Zuckerberg wasn’t subject to any particularly difficult questions (after all, he answered the “profitability” one this week), heckling from the audience a la South by Southwest, or otherwise awkward moments. The point of the talk, really, was just about what it means to be a developer.

Carson’s questions were, for the most part, not particularly challenging for the PR-groomed Zuckerberg. But he did prod the young founder into mentioning the longstanding rumors that Facebook wants to institute a payment system for its users and has been working on it for some time.

“I don’t go home that often,” Zuckerberg replied.

But he had some critical words for Facebook’s open-source rivals. “For the developer platforms, in terms of the supposed ‘open’ stack and then the Facebook one, right now the feedback we get from developers is that people prefer a lot of our interfaces,” he said. Eventually, though, he said that Facebook would extend its APIs so that third parties could implement the massive amounts of data on the site in one form or another.

Zuckerberg, wearing sneakers and his trademark North Face fleece, said that it was his first trip to London since junior high and talked extensively about Facebook Connect, the data-portability technology that had just been demonstrated onstage by his colleague Dave Morin. “Facebook Connect is basically the next evolution of Facebook Platform, and the thing that I’m most excited about it is that it basically brings into parity what people can do on Facebook.com with the rest of the Web,” he said.

More than anything, he continually stressed, Facebook is about sharing information and content.

It’ll launch in full in the “next few months,” he said.

“Someone could build that, and there are definitely a lot of platform apps that have business models that are based on payments,” he said and then paused.

But the company is releasing Facebook Connect, which is now in beta, more cautiously than with its platform predecessor, which had a wildfire debut that left the company “floored, in a positive way,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re having a little bit of a different process in terms of rolling it out because it involves people taking their information offsite. We want to make sure that the privacy and everything else is in order.”

When talking about the central importance of sharing to Facebook, Zuckerberg described how members are now willing to share much more than they were when the site launched four years ago. He compared it to Moore’s Law, suggesting that the “exponential” rate of sharing could be charted and predicted when it came to future features that Facebook could add. One of those things could be location-awareness, which Carson asked about and which Zuckerberg implied in his Moore’s Law analogy that the alleged exponential curve simply hasn’t reached yet.

The whole thing is not really that far-fetched an idea. When lines started forming outside Apple Stores in New York long before the launch of the iPhone 3G, rumors circulated that it was actually a prank on behalf of culture jammers Improv Everywhere. It seemed more than plausible. Turns out the lines were real, due to rationing of the first-generation iPhones in anticipation of the still-unannounced 3G.

“We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,” the company told Reuters. The company has not said how many people were hired, how long they had to wait, or how they would be compensated.

That’s what’s happened in Poland, where mobile phone operator Orange has admitted to Reuters that nearly two dozen stores in the country were manned with a line of actors in anticipation of Friday’s
iPhone launch.

Regardless, it could be funny to see how an out-of-work comedian reacts to an overlong in-store activation process.

But I certainly hope they got to keep the iPhones for free.

In New York, some Apple fans were miffed that the first people waiting in line for the iPhone 3G were activists hoping to stir up publicity for a cause. But don’t you think they would’ve been even more ticked off if those first spots in the line were taken up by paid actors?

(Credit:
Apple)

The Facebook application

Apple has launched the latest version of its iTunes Store a day earlier than anticipated.

The download appears to have some quirks: for this user, the version number remained at 7.6.2, and no direct link to the App Store was available, but it could still be reached by linking here.

(Credit:
Apple)

The App Store has 27 pages of applications, including games like FreeCell and Sudoku, as well as applications for Facebook, MySpace, The New York Times, Pandora, PayPal, and Twitter.

The newest version of the iPhone is due out Friday. The App Store will be preinstalled on the new
iPhone 3G, but it will also be available as a download for owners of the current iPhone.

iTunes version 7.7, available now for Windows and Mac, includes the App Store, a method for delivering third-party iPhone applications.

CNET Reviews will have more on the new applications shortly.

Apple's new App Store

Update 8:46 a.m. PST: Google confirmed it’s begun activating the offline support. It will be available for customers using the free, ad-supported Standard Edition of Google Apps and the Premium Edition, which costs $50 per user per year, Google said.

As with offline Gmail, the offline Calendar support uses Gears, browser plug-in software developed by Google that enables data to be stored on a person’s computer so Web applications can be used even while offline.

The folks at Lifehacker got the offline Calendar update and offered some views of the synchronization process that stores a copy of your calendar on your local machine.

“Offline Calendar currently works on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6 and 7,
Firefox 2 and 3, and
Safari 3. Support for other browsers is coming soon,” according to the FAQ.

Also as promised, people using their calendars while offline can only read existing entries, not create new ones. For details, check Google’s Offline Calendar FAQ page.

The company said offline Google Calendar would arrive soon after its launch of offline Gmail last week. However, while offline Gmail is for anyone who installs the experimental feature, offline Calendar only works with Google Apps customers whose administrators have enabled their users to activate experimental features.

Google declined to say when read-write access will arrive or when offline calendars will arrive for ordinary Google Calendar users. “We’ve seen the strongest interest in this feature from our enterprise users, so we’re bringing it to them first,” spokesman Andrew Kovacs said.

As promised, Google has begun releasing offline calendar support for Google Apps customers, a move that makes Google’s online tools a bit more competitive for business users.

Update 8:59 a.m. PST: Joyce Sohn, Google Apps marketing manager, discussed the offline Calendar move at the Google Enterprise blog.

The debates should be in the public domain because they “are for the benefit of the public,” the letter says. “Therefore, the right to speak about the debates ought to be ‘owned’ by the public, not controlled by the media.”

What can liberal commentator Arianna Huffington and Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich agree on? At the very least, that the presidential debates should be more Internet-friendly.

The letter points out that while ABC, NBC, and CNN agreed to release their video rights during this campaign season’s primaries, FOX threatened legal action when McCain used some of its footage in a campaign ad.

A diverse group of people and organizations that span the political spectrum have signed a letter calling for presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama to commit to more open debates in this election season. The letter makes two specific requests: footage from the presidential debates–which supposedly start Friday night–should be dedicated to the public domain. Also, “town hall” questions from the Internet should be chosen by the public via “bubble-up” voting technology.

At the “town hall” debate scheduled for October 7, the questions are already promised to be from the audience or people on the Internet–not the moderator. Even so, the debate organizers should choose the top 25 questions that “bubble up” on the Internet “to ensure that the Internet portion of this debate is true bottom-up democracy,” the letter says. CNN’s YouTube debates “put too much discretion in the hands of gatekeepers,” the letter says, since producers chose which videos were shown.

While viewers have an array of options for commenting on the debates, from Twittering to participating in polls on MySpace’s debate page, bloggers still need to be wary about posting clips of the footage online.

Issued Friday, the letter’s signatories include Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; Stanford law professor and copyright reform advocate Larry Lessig; the directors of MoveOn.org; Mitt Romney’s former online director; Huffington; and David Kralik, the director of Internet strategy for Gingrich’s organization American Solutions.

Users of the AIR app TweetDeck will get PeopleBrowsr immediately. Like TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr lets you open up multiple Twitter streams at once. You can see, for example, the Twitter stream from your friends, the stream of people replying to you, the stream from a continuously running search. PeopleBrowser displays three streams side-by-side. If you add more you have to scroll horizontally to see them, no matter how wide your monitor is.

PeopleBrowsr is a new service that can show you all your activity streams from various social sites and nanoblogs, like Twitter and Friendfeed. It also adds additional features to Twitter, such as grouping your contacts. It solves some real problems, but I found it clunky to use.

The service also lets you see PeopleBrowsr-specific profiles of the people in your streams. If you click on a name you can see everything the person wrote, as well as related links (which I assume the service picks up from reading their activity streams). You can tag people, and you’re supposed to be able to create groups. But I could not find a way to sort contacts by tag nor a way to add people to groups.

PeopleBrowsr puts three personal feeds into one window.

PeopleBrowsr isn’t limited to Twitter. You can also set up streams from Friendfeed, YouTube, Flickr, Seesmic, LinkedIn, and other services. You can have as many running as you like. PeopleBrowsr also lets you merge feeds together, so you can see, for example, all the activity in your YouTube and Flickr accounts in one single feed.

See also: Power.com (review), Meebo, Twhirl.

The service is extremely rough right now. It’s hard to use, slow, and its features are obscured under too many different non-standard interface elements (horizontally scrolling navigation menus? Come on). I generally will forgive a service a lack of refinement if its developers say it’s still in alpha testing, as is the case for PeopleBrowsr. But I got the feeling, after talking to CEO Jodee Rich, that PeopleBrowsr fairly represents his design philosophy and aesthetic, and that we won’t be seeing too many changes in the layout. I believe he’s trying to cram too much of his vision into one browser window, and that an AIR app might be a better delivery mechanism. Rich clearly told me has a “no download” philosophy, though.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz

Developers, at least so far, aren’t terribly concerned about Sun’s involvement.

“They seemed to have already embraced the open-source mindset for quite some time,” said Eric Reeves, a developer from Houston, Texas. “I think everybody is hoping that there will not be a big change. Unless they take too violent a turn, there’s too much community behind (MySQL). Sun would only be shooting itself in the foot.”

During a break, I ran into a Sun employee who told me the question really wasn’t whether Sun would change MySQL but just the reverse.
“It’s MySQL thats changing Sun’s culture,” said the employee, who didn’t want to speak for attribution. “In the past, we had all these silly fights by being proprietary. But that’s history.”

In particular, he noted that many more big corporations are showing interest in trying MySQL. At the same time Mickos reported that the community had reported 386 bug fixes so far this year, compared to 997 for all of 2007. In the past, there were questions about MySQL’s performance in maintaining its code base.

When Sun Microsystems paid $1 billion to buy MySQL, perhaps the biggest question facing the merger was the apparent culture clash. For years Sun had been a closed-source software company and the deal raised concerns within some quarters of the open-source community about how things might play out. But on Tuesday Sun sought to dispel any questions with a choreographed love-fest at the first big gathering of MySQL developers since the deal closed in January.

“You want to know our secret plot? It’s to serve (the open-source) community,” he said. “Each one of those folks represents an opportunity for Sun.

Schwartz also went out of his way to play up similar cultural backgrounds of the 11,000 engineers working at Sun. Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, who preceded Schwartz on stage, was similarly upbeat about the development progress registered since the completion of the merger.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com) “So…enough of this free software stuff,” Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz joked during his appearance at the MySQL Conference & Expo. After getting the expected round of laughter, he quickly sought to reassure the developers attending the standing-room only gathering that Sun would continue to abide by open-source traditions.