Microsoft hopes to beef up online privacy with the acquisition of the U-Prove technology, the company announced on Thursday.

U-Prove was developed by Stefan Brands at Credentica as technology that allows Internet users to disclose only the minimum amount of personal information when conducting electronic transactions as a way to reduce the likelihood of privacy violations. U-Prove also employs cryptography to prevent systems from pulling together information about users from various sources.

Microsoft did not disclose a purchase price for the technology. Brands has joined Microsoft's Identity and Access Group along with his colleagues from Credentica, Greg Thompson and Christian Paquin.

Microsoft plans to integrate U-Prove into Windows Communication Foundation and CardSpace. WCF is built on the .Net framework and allows programmers to build and run connected systems. CardSpace is also technology built on .Net that developers use to build software and Web sites that are less susceptible to common identity attacks like phishing. CardSpace is used in sites that support shopping, banking and bill payment.

In a blog post, Brands said that since he developed the U-Prove technology in the 1990s, he has turned down many buyout offers and venture capital investment opportunities because he thought the business model behind the technology wasn't strong enough. However, the demand for this type of security technology has grown, he said. In addition, Microsoft makes an ideal driver of the technology because it can influence both the client and the server sides of applications, he said.

U-Prove may be particularly interesting in medical applications, military systems, and identity outsourcing, wrote Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief architect of identity and access, in a blog post. U-Prove "is the equivalent in the privacy world of RSA in the security space," he wrote.

The European Commission is expected to approve Google's planned acquisition of Internet advertising company DoubleClick in the coming weeks, according to people following merger reviews by Europe's top competition authority.

The Commission ruling on the deal is the last remaining obstacle, after shareholders approved it and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission gave its go-ahead in December.

The Commission has until April 2 to reach a decision on the deal, so there doesn't appear to be time to block it now. If officials conducting the investigation of the deal were planning to block or substantially change it, they would have to send Google an official statement of objections. The company would then have the opportunity to propose remedies to meet the concerns of the regulators. If that failed, Google would be invited to argue its case face-to-face with Commission officials; then the Commission's planned ruling would have to be discussed at a meeting of national competition regulators from the 27 member states.

"If they had problems with the deal, they would have sent Google formal notice of the fact by now. There doesn't appear to be time to go through all the motions needed in order to block a deal," said one lawyer who has had hands-on experience with European merger reviews.

Neelie Kroes, the commissioner in charge of competition, said last month that privacy concerns raised by the deal would not be considered by her team of officials investigating the deal, and she stressed that the deal would be judged purely on how it may impact fair competition.

When it notified the European competition authority about the deal last September, Google claimed that its activities didn't overlap at all with DoubleClick's. Google described itself as a provider of online advertising space, and DoubleClick was described as a "supplier of technology for the delivery, management, and reporting of display ads to advertisers, ad agencies, and web publishers."

Nevertheless, the Commission opened an in-depth probe of the deal last November to see whether without this transaction, DoubleClick would have grown into an effective competitor to Google in the market for online ad intermediation.

Competition spokesman at the Commission, Jonathan Todd, declined to comment on the investigation Thursday.

Google wasn't immediately available to comment.

Apple unveiled on Thursday the iPhone SDK at a special event at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Apple executives said the SDK provides developers with the same tools it uses to develop applications for the iPhone.

[ What are developers saying about the iPhone SDK? Ephraim Schwartz reports.]

Applications for the iPhone will be built on a Mac using Xcode, the same development tool used to build Mac OS X applications. Using the tool, developers can monitor memory usage and other ways that applications can affect the iPhone hardware.

Apple also introduced a new development tool called iPhone Simulator. This tool runs on a Mac and simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone OS. Apple said that you can run your iPhone application in the simulator, which gives developers an incredible turnaround time on development.

[ InfoWorld Chief Technologist Tom Yager weighs in on Apple's iPhone software strategy ]

Scott Forstall, Apple's vice president of iPhone software, explained that Apple had to build a version of its development framework, Cocoa. Dubbed Cocoa Touch, the new development tools are based on the touch interaction with the iPhone instead of the keyboard and mouse interaction users have with a desktop computer.

Forstall said the SDK is made up of several Core technologies. Much of what you find in the iPhone operating system is the same as what you would find in the Mac, except power management, which is even more robust on the iPhone, according to Apple. Core Services, Core Location, and Core Audio will also be available to developers.

[ From app dev to security, discover how to frame your iPhone strategy with this special report. ]

"So we have a fantastic set of tools, in addition to the amazing set of frameworks that make up the iPhone OS," said Forstall.

Apple also took some time to show off some of the newest Web apps that run in Safari. Forstall highlighted sites such as Facebook and Bank of America during his talk.

More information on the SDK will be posted as it becomes available.

If you've watched "The Lord of the Rings" or many other visual effects-driven Hollywood films, you've seen Massive Software's 3-D animation software at work.

The New Zealand company's technology is the reason why the hordes of orcs and warriors who cross swords in the screen versions of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic tales do so in such a remarkably lifelike, non-uniform way.

The software allows developers and designers to give 3-D characters -- dubbed "agents" in Massive's parlance -- the ability to react to their surroundings based on factors including sight, touch, and hearing. When scaled into a crowd, the agents interact with each other, creating a more realistic result.

The company is showcasing its software at Cebit in Hanover, Germany, this week. The appearance at Cebit represents the company's "soft launch" into new potential areas of business, which for now include engineering, architecture, and robotics, according to CEO Diane Holland.

Massive sees the software being used for safe-building design, disaster scenarios, traffic and municipal planning, and possibly for scientific research into the behavior of species.

At heart, the software is an "AI authoring system," Holland said. "There is no actual, wired-in AI that comes in Massive. It's a blank canvas, because we wanted to use it for any kind of character and didn't want it to be constrained whatsoever by some predetermined AI."

A number of the program's tools center on 3-D design tasks like the characters' appearance, but the agents' AI characteristics get fined-tuned through a node-based interface called a "Brain Editor."

Massive also employs fuzzy logic to make characters' reactions more natural "than the on/off robotic results of binary logic," the company's Web site notes, as well as "rigid body dynamics," which the site describes as "a physics-based approach to facilitating realistic stunt motion such as falling, animation of accessories, and projectiles."

Massive claims it can run simulations using hundreds of thousands of simple agents. "Large numbers of more complex agents, such as typical humanoid agents, can be done in multiple passes, by simulating agents in groups of about 10,000 to 20,000, with each subsequent group able to see and react to the previously simulated groups," its site states.

Anticipating its push into new verticals, the company added a "memory" capability to its software, Holland said. Agents running within a short film or TV clip don't need to recollect much, she said, "but when we're talking about a 45-minute fire-evacuation scenario, you've got to have them be able to remember 'what was the exit I came in, where did i come from, what sign did I see,' and that sort of thing."

While Holland stressed the extensibility of the Massive platform, the company sees a need for some prebuilt agents. They will have a "pedestrian" model ready for market within a year, she said.

"We realized that architects don't have the time to build all these characters and put them in," she said. "They can certainly modify it, but we've got some basic behaviors that are already built in."

It's unclear how many markets Massive's technology could serve, according to Holland. "If you can accurately simulate what we as human beings think and do, [the possibilities are] absolutely endless."

For example, someone planning a grocery store could build a simulation using the behavior and motion patterns of retail customers to determine how best to place certain products on the shelves, she said.

In the meantime, the software is helping power a robot, Zeno, now in development as a consumer product.

As the volume of Internet traffic grows explosively, driven by factors like rampant demand for online video, a new question is arising: Who will get the bill for the megasized data pipes of the future?

A panel of industry executives and analysts mulled that question and related issues during a keynote event Thursday at the Cebit conference in Hanover, Germany.

[ See related story: "FCC hearing weighs net neutrality" ]

"One person's broadband is somebody else's narrowband. ... What was classified as broadband just a few years ago is definitely narrowband today," said Dan Bieler, an IDC analyst who moderated the discussion.

Observers have predicted that while the Web's infrastructure is quickly becoming more robust, richer, higher-traffic content will accordingly help fill the additional bandwidth.

In fact, the amount of information created, captured, and replicated on the Internet will grow to nearly 1,000 exabytes over the next several years, from less than 200 exabytes in 2006, according to a slide Bieler showed. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

The situation has led to tensions between providers of bandwidth-munching services -- as well as p-to-p (peer-to-peer) file-sharing networks -- and the network providers who build out the underlying infrastructure. The long-simmering "net neutrality" debate has centered on whether all types of traffic should be treated equally by network providers.

Nadahl Shocair, CEO of Boomtel Networks -- a company working on an Internet-based telephone system, complete with its own numbering system and prefix of "100" -- suggested there is a fundamental shift occurring on the planet, one that goes well beyond a tussle over costs between related industries.

"Humanity is binding together into a complex ecosystem ... a connected, planetary community," he said, and it "keeps demanding better, faster, and free."

"I think the carriers in about 10 to 15 years will turn into pure gatekeepers. They own the pipe, they own the network," Shocair added at one point. "Who will pay for this at the end of the day? The consumer will, in one way or another."

Frank Rosenberger, chief marketing officer of Vodafone, the mobile telecom, suggested something has to change.

"I think there are fair ways to distribute this cost between the benefactors on the one side and those who provide the benefit on the other side," Rosenberger said. "How many videos would YouTube have distributed if they needed to charge customers for these videos?" he asked.

Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo's Connected Life division, predicted a mutually beneficial outcome for service and infrastructure providers, and said his company already has relationships with more then 50 telecoms, including Vodafone. "When you have a partnership, everyone should focus on their strengths. Yahoo is not going to run a network or go into billing," Boerries remarked.

"Yes, we have tough questions to tackle," he added. "The same questions happened with move from dialup to broadband. I am confident those questions will be answered."

A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has stripped out a provision in a copyright enforcement bill that would have increased fines for compilation CDs containing pirated music by 10 times or more.

Critics of the original version of the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act had complained that one provision would assess fines for each separate copyright work on a compilation work such as a CD, meaning the fines for a 10-song compilation CD would range from $7,500 to $1.5 million, instead of the current $750 to $150,000. But the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property voted on Thursday to approve an amendment that stripped out the controversial provision.

Critics, including online civil rights group Public Knowledge, had complained that the compilation provision in the original bill would have gone too far with new penalties. The compilation provision would have treated each song on a compilation CD as a separate copyright violation, instead of treating the entire CD as one copyright violation, as is the practice now.

"We are pleased that the subcommittee deleted from the bill the section ... that would have allowed multiplied damages for infringement of a compilation far beyond any reasonable levels," Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn said.

The compilation provision in the original bill raised too many questions, said Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat and subcommittee chairman. Lawmakers need "more time to identify the appropriate legislative solution," he said during a hearing to amend the bill.

Several lawmakers, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat representing part of Silicon Valley in California, praised sponsors of the bill for removing the compilation provision. "I was concerned that [the compilation provision] would stifle innovation by exposing American business to uncertain, and potentially crushing, liability," she said.

The PRO IP Act would still increase other penalties for copyright infringement, including a doubling of damages in counterfeiting cases, with the maximum penalty for a counterfeiting offense rising to $2 million. The bill would create an Office of U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative in the White House, and would create an intellectual-property division in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Lofgren and Rep. Robert Scott, a Virginia Democrat, said they still have concerns about the bill. The White House intellectual-property office's mandate is unclear, and could end up going after legitimate businesses, Lofgren said. The amendment approved by the subcommittee softened a provision that would allow for forfeiture of devices and property used to create counterfeit goods, the bill could still allow law enforcement authorities to seize devices that were used without the owner's consent, Lofgren said.

The forfeiture provision also appears to create a new form of seizure, in civil lawsuits involving copyright claims, Scott added. Scott had no objections to property seizure in criminal copyright cases, where the defendants have been charged and convicted, but the new civil forfeiture provision "starts to raise flags," and could result in overly aggressive seizures of property, he said.

Public Knowledge's Sohn said she was happy to that the forfeiture provision was amended to require that the U.S. Department of Justice show a "substantial connection" between the property it wanted to seize and the infringing activity. "This change would protect against a defendant having property taken by the government, such as a car or a home, which has only the most tangential relationship to infringing activity," she said.

Several lawmakers praised the bill, saying stronger penalties and better coordination of intellectual-property enforcement are needed in the U.S. Intellectual property makes up about 45 percent of the gross domestic product in the U.S., and protecting intellectual property is critical to maintaining a strong U.S. economy, said Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican.

Copyright violations are "easy and massive" and cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars each year, Smith said. "Our response to these losses must be proportionate to the harm inflicted," he said.

Google's Android team isn't worried about wireless carriers building Android distributions that are incompatible with one another, Google developer Dan Morrill said Wednesday at the O'Reilly ETech conference on emerging technology in San Diego. He also said security problems on Android-powered smartphones will be minor compared to the potential benefits. 

Android is Google's open source mobile operating system and software stack for building smartphone applications. Some observers have said the open source initiative could prod wireless carriers to open their devices to more third-party applications; others worry it will lead to numerous versions of Android that lack interoperability or that handset vendors might prevent Android apps from being used on their phones.

[ Get the whole scoop on Google's Android platform in  InfoWorld's special report ]

Morrill took an optimistic view when asked by an audience member whether he is worried about carriers distributing incompatible versions of Android.

"In the past, that problem has essentially been solved by contractual approaches," he said. "The holder of the platform won't license it to another company unless they agree to a certain set of compatibility rules. I view that as the stick approach, and we prefer the carrot approach. We believe that this open mobile thing is a very powerful concept. We don't think anybody will necessarily have an incentive to build an incompatible platform."

Though Google has trumpeted the open nature of Android, the platform uses the Apache open source license, which allows some restrictions. As a result, mobile vendors will be able to make changes to Android code without contributing those innovations back to the open source community, the Google-led Open Handset Alliance states on its Web site. 

Morrill touched on several other Android topics during his ETech session, titled "Connecting your life to the Web with Android."

Security was one point of discussion. The vendor Core Security this month said it found multiple vulnerabilities in the Android SDK. In response, Google noted that the current version of Android is an early-look release and that it will undergo a full security review before applications running on the platform get in the hands of users (compare security products).

Morrill acknowledged that Android-powered phones will inherently be more susceptible to attack than phones without full Web interfaces, but said the risk will be small and outweighed by the advantages of a rich Web-surfing experience. He was responding to an audience member who asked whether Android applications could crash a phone or crash programs on the phone, such as emergency-call applications. "[Android] will probably expose users to a little more risk than they currently are exposed to," he said. "It's a trade-off. You do incur a little more exposure and risk in exchange for a vast amount more potential."

Morrill also was asked whether it will be possible to port Android to Apple's iPhone. It could happen, he said. "We're not paying attention right now to existing devices," he said. "It's really up to anyone who wants to do the work." It's even possible Android could be used on a mobile device that's not a phone, he said.

Android phones are expected to hit the market this year, but the Android SDK is still in an early stage, Morrill noted. As Google makes improvements, the company wants to make sure applications are easy to build and don't suffer from the browser quirks that sometimes affect programs built using Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (AJAX) scripting components. "We're trying to take the best aspects of development and leave the worst behind. This isn't just AJAX on a phone," he said.

Morrill, a wine enthusiast, says he maintains an online spreadsheet of various wines and their prices and quality to help inform his purchase decisions. He's looking forward to using an Android-powered phone to examine and update his wine spreadsheet during future trips to the wine aisle of a supermarket.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Version 2.0 of ExpressCard is on the way, with maximum speeds doubling to 5Gbps.

The upcoming standard is based on PCI Express 2.0 and USB 3.0, and is being developed by industry organization Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA).

ExpressCards slot into PCs and can contain memory, modems, wireless transmitters, or interfaces for connecting other devices.

When the standard will be set is dependent on when USB 3.0 is finalized.

"We will be ready when that happens, either late this year or early 2009," said Manny Pitta, marketing committee chair at PCMCIA.

SATA 2.0 adapters, video adapters, and storage products based on flash memory will all be able to take advantage of the increased speed, according to PCMCIA.

At the Cebit show in Germany, several companies also showed new products using the existing version of ExpressCard standard.

Users who want to hook up external displays to a laptop can use ViDock Gfx, an external graphics box from Village Tronic.

A future version of the product will take advantage of ExpressCard 2.0. "It will take graphics performance closer to desktop class," said Ascanio Orlandini, chief technical officer at Village Tronic.

But even with ExpressCard Version 1.2, Village Tronic can support resolutions of up to 2,560 x 1,600 pixels on the Pro and Mac versions of its ViDock Gfx, which each have two dual-link DVI ports.

The Pro version is compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista -- including Aero. The Mac version supports Quartz Extreme.

Both will ship in April, and cost about $400. A simpler Business version, for Windows as well, will also be available, and cost $100 less.

Other ExpressCard offerings at Cebit include backup product FlashBack Adapter from SanDisk and ExpressCard-to-serial range from Brainbox.

Researchers from a German university have developed a model to predict programming errors in applications.

The method has the potential to save software companies money by allowing them to isolate parts of their code that need more rigorous testing, said Kim Herzig, a researcher at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, who wrote his master's thesis on the project.

"We try to find which aspects of code correlate to defects in the past," Herzig said.

Software companies rarely test every single line of code in their software. Testing is expensive, and companies are under pressure to release products. But fixing bugs after a product has been released is also expensive and inconvenient for customers, Herzig said.

The model is tailored to a specific software program undergoing an upgrade. The program's version history and bug reports are analyzed. The source code is also examined to find out how modules within the software interact with each other.

The model also looks at how the developers communicated with one another, examining their e-mail, instant message conversation and discussions on forums.

"We try to mine these sources and find out if there are certain patterns and behaviors of the developers that correlate with defects," Herzig said.

Researchers then use statistical analysis to build the predication model. It does not uncover the number of defects or precisely where those defects may be in the code. Instead, the model will indicate, for example, that a section of code has a 70 percent probability of containing a defect, Herzig said.

The university's work has gained the attention of software giants SAP and Microsoft, both of which have invited researchers to test the model on their software. Since the work involves looking at source code -- which is considered highly valuable intellectual property -- the university's researchers went to the companies' facilities and signed nondisclosure agreements, Herzig said.

The invites are welcome, as the model still needs fine tuning, Herzig said. Other interest has come from IBM, which gave the researchers $25,000 to see how the model can be applied to Jazz, a project focused on building a collaboration platform for software development, he said.