Facebook Goes Ten

Facebook plans on celebrating its 10th birthday today, an occasion likely to spur an outpouring of reflection on its past and speculation about its future.

Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” from his dorm room at Harvard University on Feb. 4, 2004. The site was conceived as a way to connect students, and let them build an online identity for themselves.

It has since expanded to cover a large swath of the planet, with more than 1.2 billion people — one-seventh of the world’s population — using its site on a monthly basis, according to the company’s own recent figures.

Zuckerberg reflected on the 10-year milestone at an industry conference in Silicon Valley this week. Not surprisingly, at the start he never envisioned Facebook becoming so large or influential. After launching the initial version, “it was awesome to have this utility and community at our school,” he said at the Open Compute Project Summit.

He figured at the time that someone, someday would build such a site for the world. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be us,” he said.

Since then, Facebook’s site and its business, now a public company, have changed dramatically. There are now more than a trillion status updates, text posts and other pieces of content stored within its walls — the company is trying to index them as part of its Graph Search search engine.

The company was slow to react to the important mobile market, and when it went public in 2012 investors were skeptical it would be able to monetize its service on smaller screens. But this week it reported that more than half its ad revenue now comes from mobile devices.

All the while, Facebook is making its ad business smarter, using targeting tools to show ads it deems most relevant.

The company is also experimenting with new ways to present content. Next week it will release Paper, an iPhone app that provides a new way to share photos and published articles.

It’s part of a larger effort Facebook hinted at this week to release a variety of standalone apps for different tasks.

The company is also trying to bring the Internet to more people in the world, an effort that’s part philanthropy and part business sense as Facebook aims to reach its next billion users. Asked this week why he launched the project, called Internet.org, Zuckerberg suggested he feels a weight of responsibility.

“There aren’t that many companies in the world that have the resources and the reach that Facebook has at this point,” he said.

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vmWare Buys Airwatch

VMware will buy mobile management and security startup outfit Airwatch for $1.54billion.

The firm announced today that the deal has been approved by both companies’ boards and is forecast to close by the end of this quarter.

The deal will see VMware, which also announced estimated revenue of $1.48bn for the fourth quarter of 2013, pay $1.175bn in cash and $365m in installment payments.

Airwatch has nine offices worldwide with a workforce of 1,600 people and lists over 10,000 global customers.

The acquisition, which will help redefine VMware’s product portfolio and bring it more up to date with the industry’s threat landscape, will see the integration of Airwatch staff into the company’s End-User Computing Group, with the team working from its Atlanta base. VMware said it will continue to answer directly to Airwatch founder and CEO John Marshall, who will report to ex-Intel executive and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

VMware EVP and GM of the End-User Computing group Sanjay Poonen said that the company plans to expand Airwatch’s Atlanta offices to become the centre of its mobile operations.

“Our vision is to provide a secure virtual workspace that allows end users to work at the speed of life,” he said. “The combination of Airwatch and VMware will enable us to deliver unprecedented value to our customers and partners across their desktop and mobile environments.”

Almost a year ago, VMWare announced a two percent increase in quarterly profits despite an impressive 22 percent increase in sales, and announced 900 job cuts.

The visualization specialist is one many firms to acquire security companies over the past year. Advanced threat specialist Fireeye announced plans to buy end-point protection firm Mandiant earlier in January for $1bn.

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Is SAP Searching In The Clouds?

Esoteric business software maker, which no one is really certain what it does, SAP is debating whether to accelerate moving more of its business to the cloud.

The move would be a change in strategy which might initially have only a small impact on its sales. Co-chief executive Jim Hagemann-Snabe said the change would generate more sales by 2017 particularly in markets like the US where there is a big push onto the cloud.

Talking to a Morgan Stanley investor conference this morning, Hagemann-Snabe said that this would have impact on the 2015 level, I don’t expect enormous impact but it would have some impact because you are delaying some revenues. In the long term however it makes a lot of sense, which is not the sort of thing people expect from SAP.

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Twitter Tightens Security

Twitter Inc said it has put in place a security technology that makes it harder to spy on its users and called on other Internet firms to do the same, as Web providers look to thwart spying by government intelligence agencies.

The online messaging service, which began scrambling communications in 2011 using traditional HTTPS encryption, said on Friday it has added an advanced layer of protection for HTTPS known as “forward secrecy.”

“A year and a half ago, Twitter was first served completely over HTTPS,” the company said in a blog posting. “Since then, it has become clearer and clearer how important that step was to protecting our users’ privacy.”

Twitter’s move is the latest response from U.S. Internet firms following disclosures by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden about widespread, classified U.S. government surveillance programs.

Facebook Inc, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc have publicly complained that the government does not let them disclose data collection efforts. Some have adopted new privacy technologies to better secure user data.

Forward secrecy prevents attackers from exploiting one potential weakness in HTTPS, which is that large quantities of data can be unscrambled if spies are able to steal a single private “key” that is then used to encrypt all the data, said Dan Kaminsky, a well-known Internet security expert.

The more advanced technique repeatedly creates individual keys as new communications sessions are opened, making it impossible to use a master key to decrypt them, Kaminsky said.

“It is a good thing to do,” he said. “I’m glad this is the direction the industry is taking.”

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SAP To Stop Offering SME

The maker of expensive esoteric software which no-one is really sure what it does, SAP has decided to pull the plug on its offering for small businesses. Business weekly Wirtschaftswoche said SAP would stop the development of a software dubbed Business By Design, although existing customers will be able to continue to use it.

SAP insists that development capacity for Business By Design was being reduced, but that the product was not being shut down. Business by Design was launched in 2010 and was supposed to generate $1 billion of revenue. The product, which cost roughly 3 billion euros to develop, currently has only 785 customers and is expected to generate no more than 23 million euros in sales this year.

The Wirtschaftswoche report said that ever since the SAP product’s launch, customers had complained about technical issues and the slow speed of the software.

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Oracle Goes After SAP’s HANA

Oracle has upped its game in its fight against SAP HANA, having added in-memory processing to its Oracle 12c database management system, which it claims will speed up queries by 100 times.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison revealed the update on Sunday evening during his opening keynote at the Oracle Openworld show in San Francisco.

The in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c is designed to ramp up the speeds of data queries – and will also give Oracle a new weapon in the fight against SAP’s rival HANA in-memory system.

“When you put data in memory, one of the reasons you do that is to make the system go faster,” Ellison said. “It will make queries go faster, 100 times faster. You can load the same data into the identical machines, and it’s 100 times faster, you get results at the speed of thought.”

Ellison was keen to allay concerns that these faster query times would have a negative impact on transactions.

“We didn’t want to make transactions go slower with adding and changing data in the database. We figured out a way to speed up query processing and at least double your transaction processing rates,” he said.

In traditional databases, data is stored in rows, for example a row of sales orders, Ellison explained. These types of row format databases were designed to operate at high speeds when processing a few rows that each contain lots of columns. More recently, a new format was proposed to store data in columns rather than rows to speed up query processing.

Oracle plans to store the data in both formats simultaneously, according to Ellison, so transactions run faster in the row format and analytics run faster in column format.

“We can process data at ungodly speeds,” Ellison claimed. As evidence of this, Oracle demoed the technology, showing seven billion rows could be queried per second via in-memory compared to five million rows per second in a traditional database.

The new approach also allows database administrators to speed up their workloads by removing the requirement for analytics indexes.

“If you create a table in Oracle today, you create the table but also decide which columns of the table you’ll create indexes for,” Ellison explained. “We’re replacing the analytics indexes with the in-memory option. Let’s get rid of analytic indexes and replace them with the column store.”

Ellison added that firms can choose to have just part of the database for in-memory querying. “Hot data can be in DRAM, you can have some in flash, some on disk,” he noted. “Data automatically migrates from disk into flash into DRAM based on your access patterns. You only have to pay by capacity at the cost of disk.”

Firms wanting to take advantage of this new in-memory option can do so straightaway, according to Ellison, with no need for changes to functions, no loading or reloading of data, and no data migration. Costs were not disclosed.

And for those firms keen to rush out and invest in new hardware to take advantage of this new in-memory option, Ellison took the wraps off the M6-32, dubbed the Big Memory Machine. According to Ellison, the M6-32 has twice the memory, can process data much faster and costs less than a third of IBM’s biggest comparable machine, making it ideal for in-memory databases.

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FCC To Auction Spectrum

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will sell 10 megahertz of spectrum in the 1900MHz band for commercial mobile services in an auction set to start on Jan. 14, the agency announced.

The agency on last  Friday set a minimum price for licenses in the so-called H block of $1.56 billion, with some of the money funding the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), a government board building a nationwide broadband network for public safety agencies.

The auction will help mobile providers address a predicted spectrum shortage, said Mignon Clyburn, the FCC’s acting chairwoman. The auction “will help close the spectrum gap as well as contributing to the goal of making mobile broadband available to our nation’s first responders,” she said in a statement.

Congress, in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, required the FCC to license 65 megahertz of spectrum, including the 10 megahertz in the H block, by February 2015.

The FCC has considered auctioning the 1915-1920MHz and 1995-2000MHz spectrum in the past, but concerns about interference with a nearby PCS block kept the commission from moving forward. An FCC order adopted in June created technical rules to keep the H block from interfering with PCS signals.

Commissioner Ajit Pai praised Clyburn for scheduling the auction. The spectrum “will help deliver bandwidth-intensive mobile services and applications” over mobile networks, he said in a statement.

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FTC Warns Google And FB

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has promised that her organisation will come down hard on companies that do not meet requirements for handling personal data.

FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez gave a keynote speech at the Technology Policy Institute at the Aspen Forum. She said that the FTC has a responsibility to protect consumers and prevent them from falling victim to unfair commercial practices.

“In the FTC’s actions against Google, Facebook, Myspace and others, we alleged that each of these companies deceived consumers by breaching commitments to keep their data confidential. That isn’t okay, and it is the FTC’s responsibility to make sure that companies live up to their commitments,” she said.

“All told, the FTC has brought over 40 data security cases under our unfairness and deception authority, many against very large data companies, including Lexisnexis, Choicepoint and Twitter, for failing to provide reasonable security safeguards.”

Ramirez spoke about the importance of consumer privacy, saying that there is too much “shrouding” of what happens in that area. She said that under her leadership the FTC will not be afraid of suing companies when it sees fit.

“A recurring theme I have emphasized – and one that runs through the agency’s privacy work – is the need to move commercial data practices into the sunlight. For too long, the way personal information is collected and used has been at best an enigma enshrouded in considerable smog. We need to clear the air,” she said.

Ramirez compared the work of the FTC to the work carried out by lifeguards, saying that it too has to be vigilant.

“Lifeguards have to be mindful not just of the people swimming, surfing, and playing in the sand. They also have to be alert to approaching storms, tidal patterns, and shifts in the ocean’s current. With consumer privacy, the FTC is doing just that – we are alert to the risks but confident that those risks can be managed,” she added.

“The FTC recognizes that the effective use of big data has the potential to unleash a new wave of productivity and growth. Like the lifeguard at the beach, though, the FTC will remain vigilant to ensure that while innovation pushes forward, consumer privacy is not engulfed by that wave.”

It’s all just lip service, of course. Companies might be nominally bound by US privacy laws in online commerce, and that might be overseen by the FTC, but the US National Security Agency (NSA) collects all internet traffic anyway, and makes data available to other US government agencies and even some private companies.

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Oracle Issues Massive Security Update

Oracle has issued its critical patch update advisory for July, plugging a total of 89 security holes across its product portfolio.

The fixes focus mainly on remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in four widely used products, with 27 fixes issued for the Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, the Oracle and Sun Systems Product Suite and the MySQL database.

Out of the 89 security fixes included with this update, the firm said six are for Oracle Database, with one of the vulnerabilities being remotely exploitable without authentication.

Oracle revealed that the highest CVSS Base Score for these database vulnerabilities is 9.0, a score related to vulnerability CVE-2013-3751, which affects the XML Parser on Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 and 11.2.0.3.

A further 21 patched vulnerabilities listed in Oracle’s Critical Patch Update are for Oracle Fusion Middleware; 16 of these vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without authentication, with the highest CVSS Base Score being 7.5.

As for the Oracle and Sun Systems Products Suite, these products received a total of 16 security fixes, eight of which were also remotely exploitable without authentication, with a maximum CVSS Base Score of 7.8.

“As usual, Oracle recommends that customers apply this Critical Patch Update as soon as possible,” Oracle’s director of Oracle Software Security Assurance Eric Maurice wrote in a blog post.

Craig Young, a security researcher at Tripwire commented on the Oracle patch, saying the “drumbeat of critical patches” is more than alarming because the vulnerabilities are frequently reported by third parties who presumably do not have access to full source code.

“It’s also noteworthy that […] every Oracle CPU release this year has plugged dozens of vulnerabilities,” he added. “By my count, Oracle has already acknowledged and fixed 343 security issues in 2013. In case there was any doubt, this should be a big red flag to end users that Oracle’s security practices are simply not working.”

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Oracle Changing Berkeley

Oracle has changed the license of its embedded database library, Berkeley DB. The software is widely used as a key-value store within other applications and historically used an OSI-approved strong copyleft license which was similar to the GPL.

Under that license, distributing software that embedded Berkeley DB involved also providing “information on how to obtain complete source code for the DB software and any accompanying software that uses the DB software.”

Now future versions of Berkeley DB use the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). This says “your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network … an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version.”

This will cause some problems for Web developers using Berkeley DB for local storage. Compliance has not really been an issue because they never “redistributed” the source of their Web apps.Now they will have to make sure their whole Web app is compliant with the AGPL and make full corresponding source to their Web application available.

They also need to ensure the full app has compatible licensing. Practically that means that the whole source code has to be licensed under the GPLv3 or the AGPL.

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