Mono 2.0 lets .Net apps run on Linux

Mono 2.0, an open-source runtime enabling .Net-based applications to run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix, is being released Monday, featuring capabilities for a number of .Net technologies.

Considered a major upgrade, the open source Mono 2.0 runtime leverages Microsoft's .Net Framework 2.0 programming model. With Mono, developers can build desktop and server applications using Microsoft-based environments and deploy them across multiple platforms, including Windows. Novell is leading the Mono effort.

"The existing apps you build on Windows, you can now run those applications on Linux or MacOS 10. Different people have different reasons for doing so," such as platform consolidation, said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms at Novell and Mono project maintainer.

Mono 2.0 supports the C# 3.0 language and LINQ (Language Integrated Query) for querying of data across databases, objects, and XML content, de Icaza said. Also, users can move over server applications built for .Net and client applications built with Windows Forms.

Version 2.0 of Mono, however, lacks support for key .Net 3.0 and .Net 3.5 APIs, specifically Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows Presentation Foundation. These are not currently supported because they were not amongst the most requested technologies sought by early users of Mono, de Icaza said.

Also featured in Mono 2.0 is MoMA (Mono Migration Analyzer), a tool to assess the readiness of Linux environments for migration of .Net applications.

Former Spam King Scott Richter To Pay MySpace $6 Million

A Colorado man has been ordered to pay US$6 million in damages and legal fees for spamming thousands of MySpace.com users.
Scott Richter of Westminster, Colorado, must pay MySpace $4.8 million in damages and $1.2 million in legal fees, a court-appointed arbitrator ruled on Thursday.

Richter, who was once accused of pumping out more than 100 million spam messages per day, had been sued by MySpace in January 2007 in connection with an August 2006 campaign in which MySpace members were hit with unsolicited messages promoting a Web site called Consumerpromotionscenter.com. The messages were sent from phished MySpace accounts, according to the findings of Philip Boesch, the court-appointed arbitrator in the case.

The messages were sent to a MySpace community that was ill-equipped to deal with any security problems. At the time, "MySpace only employed two relatively junior staff employees to deal with these issues," Boesch wrote. The company's security staff has now grown to about 40, he added.

MySpace had been seeking a court ruling in the case, but in August 2007, U.S. District Judge George King of the Central District of California granted Richter's request to assign the matter to arbitration. Terms of the award were made public on Monday.

In a statement, Richter said that he and his company, Media Breakaway, were happy to have this matter behind them, noting that the arbitrator's award was 95 percent less than the amount sought by MySpace.

"We respect the decision of the arbitrator and we're not going to appeal it," said Steven Richter, the president and general counsel of Media Breakaway and father of Scott Richter. "We're going to pay the money he awarded."

This is not the first time a Scott Richter company has had to cough up millions of dollars to fight spam charges. In 2005, his previous company, Optinrealbig.com, paid $7 million to settle similar charges brought by Microsoft.

Scott Richter was removed from anti-spam organization Spamhaus' list of known spammers that same year.

Media Breakaway, which has no other spam cases pending, is doing everything it can to build a compliance team and make sure it is acting within the law, Steven Richter said.

MySpace said the Richter award was the latest in a series of steps it has taken to combat abuse on its Web site. In May, the company was awarded a $230 million antispam judgment against Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines.

"This award reflects MySpace's continued momentum and holistic approach to ridding the site of spammers and phishers," MySpace said in a statement. "We will continue to do our part in cleansing the Internet of this invasive onslaught of spam."

Logo Design Studio Pro improves SVG support

Macware on Friday announced the release of Logo Design Studio Pro 1.8, an update to their logo design software for Mac OS X users. It costs $59.99, though updates for registered users are free.

Logo Design Studio Pro helps users looking for a creative logo to add to their stationery or corporate letterhead with more than 500 pre-designed logo templates. It sports Bezier curve-based editing tools, Boolean operations, more than 100 filters, alignment tools and other capabilities suitable for design environments.

New to this release is improved support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), with more than 1,300 pre-designed SVG logo objects; a new browser to preview each SVG object in categories; and some bug fixes and enhancements.

System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.4 or later, 256MB RAM and 550MB hard disk space.

Verizon expands fast DSL to more areas

Verizon Communications Inc. on Thursday expanded the availability of its fastest DSL service to 3.4 million lines in 20 states.
The service, with downloads of 7 megabits per second, was available on 400,000 lines when it launched in January. In other areas, Verizon's fastest DSL service is at 3 mbps.

The 7 mbps plan costs $42.99 per month with an annual contract.

Verizon has not been putting much investment behind DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line technology, focusing instead on drawing fiber-optic lines that can provide even faster Internet access, plus cable-TV service. In the first quarter, it added a net of just 4,000 DSL customers, compared with 262,000 FiOS Internet subscribers.

Several other phone companies, including AT&T, provide top DSL speeds of at least 10 mbps in some areas. Qwest Communications International Inc. introduced 20 mbps service in April.

AT&T looking at charging heavy Internet users extra

AT&T Inc., the country's largest Internet provider, is considering charging extra for customers who download large amounts of data.
"A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week.

The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half.

AT&T doesn't have any specific plans or fees to announce yet, Coe said.

Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month. Time Warner Cable started a trial earlier this month in Beaumont, Texas, under which it will charge subscribers who go over their monthly bandwidth cap $1 per gigabyte.

Cable companies are at the forefront of usage-based pricing because neighbors share capacity on the local cable lines, and bandwidth hogs can slow down traffic for others. Phone companies have been less concerned about congestion because the phone lines they use to provide Internet service using DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line technology, aren't shared between neighbors, but AT&T is evidently concerned about congestion higher up in the network.

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail use little data and have scant reason to pay attention to traffic caps. But those who download movies or TV, particularly in high definition, can hit the caps imposed by cable companies.

Download caps could put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video to a TV set for as little as $8.99 per month.

New and Improved Firefox to be released on Tuesday

A new version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release Tuesday with improvements in security, speed and design.
Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new "Places" feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven't bookmarked.

There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what's already available on Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process.

In a nod to the growing use of Web-based e-mail, the browser can be set to launch Yahoo Inc.'s service when clicking a "mailto" link in a Web page, the ones you might come across clicking on a name or a "contact us" link. Previously such links could only open a standalone, desktop e-mail program.

Yahoo is the only Web service initially supported. To use rivals like Google Inc.'s Gmail and Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail, developers of those services will have to enable that capability first.

Firefox also will start blocking rather than simply warning about sites known to engage in "phishing" scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. The new version adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.

The list of suspicious sites come from Google Inc. and StopBadware.org, a project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities.

Security researchers who need access to problem sites can manually turn the feature off.

Firefox 3 also offers speed and design improvements — the back button is now larger than the forward button, for instance, because people tend to return to a previous page more often, said Mike Schroepfer, the project's vice president of engineering.

Firefox is the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. It comes from Mozilla, an open-source community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products.

Mozilla has been developing Firefox 3 for nearly three years and has been publicly testing it since November for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

Its supporters are organizing launch parties around the world next week, and Mozilla is trying to set a world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.

Microsoft is currently testing Internet Explorer 8, while Opera Software ASA released Opera 9.5 on Thursday.

Yahoo Wants Appraisal On Current Offer From Microsoft

Yahoo is not opposed to a deal with Microsoft but Microsoft should pay more than $31 a share if it wants to buy the company, Yahoo plans to say in a letter to Microsoft, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
n the letter to be sent on Monday, Yahoo is also expected to reject Microsoft's suggestion that its business is deteriorating, the person said.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer in a letter to Yahoo's board on Saturday threatened to lower his company's bid and mount a proxy campaign if the Internet company does not agree to a deal in the next three weeks.

Yahoo details plans for new online ad sales system

Yahoo Inc on Sunday detailed plans for its forthcoming Web advertising management system that gives its ad sales-partners access to online ad space both on Yahoo and other major sites.

The widely anticipated system, known as AMP!, aims to simplify the process of buying and selling online ads for advertisers, ad agencies, fast-growing ad trading networks and Web site publishers.

The ad management system seeks to capitalize on Yahoo's strength as a Web site publisher that reaches 500 million Web users monthly and recent efforts to sell ads off of Yahoo through major partnerships or specialized ad-sales networks.

The planned advertising system, formerly code-named Apex, is the lynchpin of the company's strategy to reach outside its own base of users and increase its position as the "must buy" location for online advertisers.

While the strategy remains in its early stages, AMP! is one of the products which Yahoo management believes will help propel the Web pioneer's next wave of growth. It is also one factor behind Yahoo's reluctance to accept Microsoft Corp's unsolicited takeover bid currently valued at $42.4 billion, which executives believe undervalues the company's assets.

"This is really about creating a massively networked advertising ecosystem," Yahoo advertising executive Mike Walrath said in an interview. Walrath founded Right Media, an ad sales exchange, in 2003 and sold it to Yahoo last year.

AMP! will be introduced in stages starting in the third quarter of this year, Yahoo said. It aims to give individual sites the capacity to sell ads across the Web, replacing single-site systems that still use e-mail and even faxes.

The move also is a response to major competitors Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, which have each acquired major competitors in the market for sales of online display ads used by corporate brand marketers. Google closed its $3.4 billion acquisition of ad sales management firm DoubleClick last month. Microsoft paid $6 billion for aQuantive last May.

AMP! is a suite of tools that offers precise geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting across a vast network of Yahoo sites and ad sales deals Yahoo has struck with more than 600 newspapers, Comcast and eBay Inc

It also includes niche Web sites such as WebMD, Forbes, the major ad networks, and thousands of smaller sites on the Web.

In its initial stages, AMP! is designed to expand the reach of dedicated sales forces at newspapers or sites such as WebMD to allow them to reach many times larger audiences outside of their own sites, where they can cross-sell their advertising.

Yahoo promises to 'amp' up ad platform

Yahoo Inc. believes it's poised to revolutionize online advertising after years of being outmaneuvered by rival Google Inc.

But the slumping Internet pioneer might not get the chance to show off the latest improvements to its online advertising platform unless it can convince increasingly impatient investors that the new approach will produce a bigger payoff than Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited offer to buy the Sunnyvale-based company for more than $40 billion.

Hoping to gain wiggle room, Yahoo is releasing more details about its effort to become a one-stop shop for selling and distributing online display ads — the Internet's equivalent of billboards.

The upgrade, called "Amp," won't be available until some time this summer, and then only on a limited basis among more than 600 newspaper publishers trying recover some of the revenue that the Internet has siphoned from their print editions.

Nevertheless, Yahoo will begin promoting Amp on Monday with an online video demonstration of a system that the Sunnyvale-based company promises will make it easier for advertisers to aim their messages at specific demographic groups across scores of Web sites.

"This is a revolutionary approach that will allow marketers and publishers to deliver a more compelling experience for consumers," said Hilary Schneider, Yahoo's executive vice president of global partner solutions.

Those remarks echo similar boasts that Yahoo's top two executives, Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, made at an online advertising conference in late February. At that time, the new system was still operating under the code name "Apex," short hand for Advertiser Publisher Exchange.

Amp will rely heavily on data that Yahoo collects about people's preferences at its own Web site as well as other online destinations. The practice, known as "behavioral targeting," has raised privacy concerns, but Yahoo — like rivals using similar tracking technology — believes consumers will appreciate seeing more ads tailored to their individual interests.

Yahoo's new platform will be competing against similar technology recently acquired by Google and Microsoft. Google bought DoubleClick Inc. for $3.2 billion primarily so it would have a better vehicle for selling display ads. The same objective drove Microsoft's $6 billion purchase of aQuantive.

Amp didn't cost Yahoo nearly as much. Besides relying on engineering developed by its own engineers, Amp draws on technology that Yahoo picked up by buying online ad service Right Media and Blue Lithium last year for a total of $781 million.

Selling advertisers on Amp may prove to be easier than convincing Yahoo's shareholders that the new platform is a better bet than selling to Microsoft, whose unsolicited takeover offer was initially valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 per share.

Yahoo maintains its franchise is worth a lot more, partly because of promising new advertising ideas like Amp.

But investors have reason to doubt Yahoo's judgment after two years of disappointing results.

"They have a little bit of a credibility problem right now," Jupiter Research analyst David Card said.

In a sign of the skepticism dogging Yahoo, Wall Street hasn't embraced the bullish optimistic outlook that the company released last month to illustrate why its board of directors rebuffed Microsoft's bid.

Yahoo projected its 2009 revenue, after subtracting ad commission, will total $7.1 billion, up 25 percent from this year. The company expects its 2010 revenue to climb another 25 percent to $8.8 billion.

Analysts have much lower expectations, with their average revenue estimates standing at $6.4 billion for 2009 and $7.4 billion for 2010.

Amp isn't the first advertising upgrade that Yahoo has touted as a financial catalyst. Last year, the company rolled out a much ballyhooed formula called "Panama" that was designed to do a better job of displaying text-based ads alongside online search results.

Although most advertisers applauded Panama as an improvement over the previous system, it wasn't enough to lift Yahoo out of the financial doldrums that have depressed its profits since 2005. The downturn opened the door for Microsoft's bid.

Just how much longer Yahoo can fend off Microsoft remains uncertain.

On Saturday, Microsoft said that if a deal was not reached by April 26, it would launch a hostile takeover at a less attractive price. If Microsoft pursues that option, Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting will be the most likely forum for the showdown. Yahoo must hold the meeting by July 12, right around the time Amp is supposed to debut.