Oracle Wants More Money From SAP

Oracle is appealing the damages awarded from SAP that it was granted and is pushing for more.

The news has disappointed SAP, according to a German newspaper, and the firm is worried that the appeal will draw out the five year long legal battle even longer.

“We are disappointed that the lawsuit Oracle pulls further out,” said a SAP spokesman to the German newspaper Mannheimer Morgen.

“We had agreed on a sensible arrangement, because we believe that this case has gone on long enough. We remain committed to bring this dispute to an end.”

Neither firm has commented yet, but the appeal follows SAP’s admission of liability in the Tomorrownow affair.

SAP pleaded guilty last year and acknowledged that its Tomorrownow subsidiary had done wrong. Tomorrownow was accused of downloading information belonging to Oracle, including software and customer information related to Peoplesoft users.

Oracle was initially awarded $1.3bn in damages but this was knocked down to $306m by a judge who told it that it had two options, accept that sum or take SAP back to court.

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Microsoft Silent On Windows 8 Pricing

With just two months remaining before the retail launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has yet to provide pricing on its new OS.

Analysts today blamed Microsoft’s attempt to accommodate both desktops and tablets with Windows 8 for the lack of information.

“The delay in releasing pricing is all about uncertainty around the PC market and competition from Apple,” argued Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. “Microsoft needs to price Windows in a way that looks smart versus Apple’s OS X, doesn’t leave money on the table with commercial PC customers, and enables OEMs to compete better with the iPad.”

The delay in pricing Windows 8 is real: During the Windows Vista and Windows 7 cycles, Microsoft unveiled retail prices weeks before each OS made the RTM, or “release to manufacturing,” milestone, and four or more months before retail sales started.

Microsoft disclosed Vista prices 58 days before that edition’s RTM, and 148 days before retail availability. Windows 7′s prices were made public 28 days before RTM and 120 days before its on-sale date.

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Woman Sues LinkedIn

An Illinois woman has filed a $5 million lawsuit against LinkedIn Corp, claiming that the social network violated promises to consumers by not having better security in place when more than 6 million customer passwords were stolen.

The lawsuit, which was introduced in federal court in San Jose, California, on June 15 and seeks class-action status, was filed less than two weeks after the stolen passwords turned up on websites frequented by computer hackers.

The attack on Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, an employment and professional networking site with more than 160 million members, was the latest massive corporate data breach to have attracted the attention of class-action lawyers.

A federal judicial panel last week consolidated nine proposed class-action lawsuits in Nevada federal court against online shoe retailer Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com, over its January disclosure that hackers had siphoned information affecting 24 million customers.

The LinkedIn lawsuit was filed by Katie Szpyrka, a user of the website from Illinois. In court papers, her Chicago-based law firm, Edelson McGuire, said LinkedIn had “deceived customers” by having a security policy “in clear contradiction of accepted industry standards for database security.”

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Twitter Wants To Email You

Twitter will begin delivering a weekly email digest to highlight for users of the micro-blogging site the tweets they are most likely to be interested in, the company stated on Monday.

The feature marks a departure for a social network that typically emphasizes real-time delivery of information.

How will Twitter determine which tweets a user may want to see? Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks said the digest will feature the tweets that the “people you’re connected to on Twitter are engaging with the most.”

From the email digest, users will be able to see the conversation about a particular tweet, follow shared links and send out their own tweets. The digest will include tweets not just from a user’s own feed but also from the feeds of people he or she follows.

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Jury Finds Google Liable

A jury has found Google liable for copyright infringement in its use of Java in Android, but so far has not decided whether that infringement was protected by rules governing “fair use.”

The verdict, delivered Monday after a week of deliberations by the jury, is a partial victory for Oracle in its lawsuit against Google. But Oracle will have to wait longer — possibly for a retrial — to see whether Google will escape liability by claiming fair use.

Google’s attorney, Robert Van Nest, immediately told the judge that Google would file for a mistrial. Google’s argument will be that the same jury must decide both the copyright infringement and fair use issues.

The jury also decided that Sun’s public statements about Java might have suggested to Google that it did not need a license for Java.

But in another setback for Google, it decided there was insufficient evidence to show that Google relied on that information.

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Maryland Bill To Ban Employers From Facebook Snooping

The practice of employers requesting job applicants to provide their account login information for Facebook and other social media sites will soon be a think of the past, as Maryland is poised to be among the first states to ban the practice. The state’s General Assembly has passed the bill, which now awaits the signature of Gov. Martin O’Malley, reports The Baltimore Sun.

O’Malley is expected to sign the bill into law, reports The Gazette.

Melissa Goemann, who directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative efforts in Maryland, tells the Sun, “this is a really positive development, because the technology for social media is expanding every year, and we think this sets a really good precedent for limiting how much your privacy can be exposed when you use these mediums.”

Goemann says the ACLU took up the case of Maryland Corrections Officer Robert Collins, who had been asked to give his Facebook login and password to Corrections officials during a recertification interview.

As news spread of similar cases, legislators at the state and federal level vowed to take action and ban the practice, on the grounds that it is an unreasonable invasion of a job-seeker’s privacy. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal say they asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether the practice is illegal.

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WordPress Attacked By Hackers

Security outfit Websense said that more than 200,000 infected pages that redirect users to websites displaying fake antivirus scans have been created. The latest compromises are part of a rogue antivirus distribution campaign that has been going on for months, the Websense researchers said.

Cybercriminals gangs have switched to drive-by download attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in outdated browser plug-ins to automatically download and install their rogue software. The large number of infected Web pages seen in this campaign is an indication that these scams still work. Vulnerable websites are a rich source of opportunity for cybercriminals. More than 85 percent of the compromised sites were located in the US, but their visitors were geographically dispersed.

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Is Twitter Selling Your Tweets?

Twitter users are about to become major marketing meat, as two research companies prepare to release information to clients who will pay for the rights to mine that data.

Boulder, Colorado-based Gnip Inc and DataSift Inc, based in the U.K. and San Francisco, are licensed by Twitter to analyze archived tweets and basic information about users, like geographic location. DataSift announced this week that it will release Twitter data in packages that will encompass the last two years of activity for its customers to mine, while Gnip can go back only 30 days.

“Harvesting what someone said a year or more ago is game-changing,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. As details emerge on the kind of information being mined, he and other privacy rights experts are concerned about the implications of user information being released to businesses waiting to pore through it with a fine-tooth comb.

“As we see Twitter grow and social media evolve, this will become a bigger and bigger issue,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for British-based Internet security company Sophos Ltd. “Online companies know which websites we click on, which adverts catch our eye, and what we buy … increasingly, they’re also learning what we’re thinking. And that’s quite a spooky thought.”

Twitter opted not to comment on the sale and deferred questions to DataSift. In 2010, Twitter agreed to share all of its tweets with the U.S. Library of Congress. Details of how that information will be shared publicly are still in development, but there are some stated restrictions, including a six-month delay and a prohibition against using the information for commercial purposes.

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Big Boys Sign Consumer Privacy Pact

Six of the world’s top consumer technology companies have agreed to provide greater privacy disclosures before customers download applications in order to protect the personal data of millions of consumers, California’s attorney general said on Wednesday.

The agreement binds Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Hewlett-Packard — and developers on their platforms — to disclose how they use private data before an app may be downloaded, Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said.

“Your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is,” said Harris.

Currently 22 of the 30 most downloaded apps do not have privacy notices, said Harris. Some downloaded apps also download a consumer’s contact book.

Google said in a statement that under the California agreement, Android users will have “even more ways to make informed decisions when it comes to their privacy.”

Apple confirmed the agreement but did not elaborate.

Harris was also among U.S. state lawmakers who on Wednesday signed a letter to Google CEO Larry Page to express “serious concerns” over the web giant’s recent decision to consolidate its privacy policy.

The policy change would give Google access to user information across its products, such as GMail and Google Plus, without the proper ability for consumers to opt out, said the 36 U.S. attorneys general in their letter.

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Future PCs Will Be Constant Learners

Tomorrow’s computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which in turn will aid them in providing users with more appropriate information, predicted the software mastermind behind IBM’s Watson system.

Computers in the future “will learn through interacting with us. They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need,” said IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, who was IBM’s principal investigator for Watson technologies. Ferrucci spoke at the IBM Smarter Computing Executive Forum, held Wednesday in New York.

“This notion of learning through collaboration and interaction is where we think computing is going,” he said.

IBM’s Watson project was an exercise for the company in how to build machines that can better anticipate user needs.

IBM researchers spent four years developing Watson, a supercomputer designed specifically to compete in the TV quiz show “Jeopardy,” a contest that took place last year. On “Jeopardy,” contestants are asked a range of questions across a wide variety of topic areas.

Watson did win at its “Jeopardy” match. Now IBM thinks the Watson computing model can have a wide range of uses.

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