Developers of Android, the Linux mobile platform spearheaded by Google, are asking security experts for input.

The latest software development kit for Android was released earlier this week and plans are for the 1.0 version of the operating system to be shipped on mobile phones later this year .

[ See the related story Android SDK update arrives from Google at last. ]

Security is a priority. "As you may expect, building and maintaining a secure mobile platform is a difficult task," wrote the Android Security Team.

"While we have found and fixed many of our own bugs as well as flaws in other open-source projects, we realize that the discovery of additional security issues in a system this large and complex is inevitable," the team wrote, in a message on the Android security announcements section of the Google Groups site.

The invitation means the Android platform will likely get a thorough review from developers outside the Android Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of companies contributing to the platform's development.

Proponents of the open-source development model -- where code can be analyzed by anyone -- argue it results in more secure and stable products in contrast to proprietary software, where the master code is a closely guarded secret by software companies.

The Android Security Team wrote that it hopes security analysts will privately forward bugs since the operating system will eventually be deployed on many different devices that will "require a large amount of coordination to patch."

Mobile devices have not been afflicted by malicious software to the extent of desktop OSes, but experts have said they expect that to change.

Symbian's Series 60 OS was targeted in 2005 by Comwar, a worm that spread via Bluetooth and MMS (multimedia messaging service).

In 2006, researchers found the first for-profit mobile malware, called Redbrowser. When activated, the malware sent SMS (short message service) messages to a phone number that charges around $6 per message.

It targeted devices running the J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition) software, which is included on some 1 billion devices from vendors such as Nokia, Motorola and Research in Motion.

Mozilla said today that it was preparing to offer Firefox 3.0 to users still running older versions of the open-source browser, and might trigger the update within the next week.

Firefox 3.0.1, the most-up-to-date version, will be offered to users running 2.0.0.16, the latest edition of Mozilla's 2006 browser line, in the near future, said Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox. He would not set a date, however.

[ Read the related InfoWorld Test Center review: Firefox 3 comes out sizzling. ]

"There are a couple of precursors to us making the offer," said Beltzner. "One is we want to make the offer in the native language of the build that you're running, and we're having text localized and translated now."

Notes from Mozilla's weekly status meeting yesterday hinted that it would be soon. "[We're] refocusing efforts on delivering a Firefox 2->3 major update within the next week," the summary read. Beltzner said Mozilla might have a better idea of a timeline within a few days.

When Firefox users receive the update offer, they will be able to choose between accepting the update, postponing it 24 hours or declining it. The latter, however, doesn't necessarily mean the offer won't be repeated down the road. "We reserve the right to make the offer again," Beltzner said, adding that the offer would not reappear for at least several weeks.

"We're pretty committed to user choice, but we're also pretty ardent that Firefox 3.0 is a good product," said Beltzner, explaining why Mozilla won't take'No' for an answer.

Unlike Microsoft, which usually crafts blocking tools that let companies bar a major update, including a new version of Internet Explorer, from reaching their machines, Mozilla takes a more hands-off approach. "You can decline the update [when it's offered] if you if don't want it," said Beltzner. "We think that's the best approach." Mozilla doesn't offer similar blocking tools, Beltzner acknowledged.

Most users should see the update offer within a few days of Mozilla pulling the trigger, Beltzner said. As with past major updates, the offer will be made to a limited number of users at the onset, he said. "We'll start and make sure the mirror network is not overloaded.

The last time Mozilla pushed out a major upgrade through Firefox's built-in update mechanism was June 2007, when it offered Firefox 2.0 to users still running its predecessor, Firefox 1.5. The several-month delay between Firefox's 2.0's 2006 debut and the mid-summer offer the next year was largely due to the time it took to craft patches to Firefox 1.5, so that it could handle the automatic update.

Mozilla extended support for Firefox 1.5 beyond an earlier-announced deadline precisely to account for one final fix in late May that enabled the auto update.

The delay led to questions from users, Beltzner said. "One thing we heard from users was whether there was a problem with Firefox 2.0" when the upgrade wasn't triggered soon after the new version went final, he added. Offering Firefox 3.0 "sooner, relative to its release," became an important goal, he said.

"People are generally ready for Firefox 3.0," Beltzner said. "There's been a good buzz around it, and for people who have gotten Firefox 2.0, it's been a while since they've had a major update."

According to the most recent data available from Web metrics vendor Net Applications Inc., Firefox owned 19.2 percent of browser market share at the end of July. Firefox 2.0 users currently outnumber those running version 3.0 by better than 2-to-1.

Mozilla will discontinue support for Firefox 2.0 in mid-December 2008.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Intel's next-generation platform for laptops will provide more visually stunning graphics and better power management features, the company said on Tuesday.

The company's next mobile platform, code-named Calpella, will be released in 2009. It is a follow-up to Intel's Centrino 2 mobile platform released last month, Intel officials said at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

[ Find out more about new business laptops that support  the recently launched Centrino 2. And stay ahead of all the advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

Calpella will include chips based on Intel's upcoming Nehalem microarchitecture, which is expected to reach consumers in the second half of 2009. Packing two and four cores, Nehalem-based laptop chips will be an upgrade from Intel's current Core 2 chips, which are used in notebooks and desktops. Nehalem cuts bottlenecks from the Core microarchitecture to deliver better system speed and performance-per-watt.

Intel is integrating the memory controller and graphics core into the CPU for Nehalem-based laptops, which should boost system and graphics performance, according to the company. That should also reduce the need of integrated graphics capabilities, though gamers may need a discrete graphics card for high-end graphics performance.

Calpella will also feature better manageability and security features for business and home users, said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president at Intel, during a speech. Perlmutter did not provide further details about the platform, saying the company would detail it as the release date comes closer.

The first Nehalem chips will reach high-end desktops, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president at Intel, during a speech at the IDF. Intel's first Nehalem chip has been branded Core i7 and will ship in the fourth quarter this year. The Nehalem-based server products, code-named Nehalem-EP, will go into production later this year, and will be followed up by another version, code-named Nehalem-EX, which will go into production in 2009.

With between two and eight cores, the speed of Nehalem chips will be enhanced with QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology, which integrates a memory controller and provides a faster pipe for chips and system components to communicate. Nehalem will support DDR3 memory and include shared 8MB of shared L3 cache for local cores to better execute threads. Each core will be able to execute two software threads simultaneously, so a server with eight processor cores could potentially run 16 threads simultaneously.

The new chips will also feature Turbo Mode technology, which improves power efficiency of the chips by disabling inactive cores to prevent power leakage.

"The key idea in power management is quite simple -- to shut things off when not in use," said Rajesh Kumar, an Intel fellow during a presentation at the forum.

This is an improvement from Intel's earlier power-saving technology, which wasn't efficient in dealing with power leakage from inactive cores, Kumar said. The Turbo Mode technology has been around for a decade but was hard to execute. It required the development of a whole new process technology to make the technology possible. Several sensors measure power in real time, and a new microcontroller has been included to work on power management, he said.

Processing power could also increase with the technology, Kumar said. All cores may not be needed to perform a given workload, so the technology reassigns power from inactive cores to boost performance of operational cores. The more power constrained you are, the more performance will increase, heye said.

Turbo Mode technology will be implemented in future chip architectures, Kumar said.

With its new JavaFX technology for rich Internet applications, Sun Microsystems hopes to leverage the strength of the Java development base and Java's ubiquitous presence on devices to make a strong run in a race in which it is a very late entrant.

Indeed, Sun will have its work cut out for it, taking on giants such as Adobe and Microsoft in the rich Internet development space. If this competition can be likened to a race between Olympic runners, it might be broadcast like this:

"In Lane 1, we have Adobe with its Flash and attendant Flex technologies, downloaded millions of times and popular on high-profile sites like YouTube."

"In Lane 2, it's AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the popular RIA technique used in countless Web sites."

"In Lane 3, its up-and-coming newcomer Silverlight, backed by software giant Microsoft and now being leveraged by NBC's prominent Olympics Web site."

"And in Lane 4, we have Sun's JavaFX used by Web properties such as - well, it's still in development."

It is from this set of circumstances that Sun intends to make JavaFX a player.?

"This isn't the type of market where only one technology is going to win," said Sun's Jacob Lehrbaum, senior product line manager for JavaFX. But Lehrbaum acknowledged the hill Sun must climb.

"Clearly, we do have to compete for developer mindshare," Lehrbaum said.

Developers and industry analyst Jeffrey Hammond think Sun has a shot, especially in the burgeoning market for applications running on mobile devices.

"I think Sun has the opportunity to catch up very quickly in that space," said Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester.

"I would say that the JavaFX platform looks very good. It has a lot of potential," said Andres Almiray, a software developer at Oracle and a blogger.?

"It probably should have been announced three, four, five years ago," Almiray said. "The good thing is that it's finally here."

An anonymous blogger identified only as "geekycoder" lauded the technology: "Technically, JavaFX enables me to leverage [the] Java skill set and Java technology that I am more comfortable with to deliver a compelling RIA solution. Because synergy between JavaFX and Java is excellent and the fact that JavaFX is built on the Java platform means that I can ensure that I have one of the best and supportive platforms to work in. In addition, JavaFX will enable me to be more productive in making it easier and quicker to create RIA solutions," for Web 2.0.

First revealed at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in May 2007, JavaFX still is a work in progress. The official JavaFX Web page describes the project as "a powerful client technology for creating rich Internet applications with immersive media and content across the multiple screens of your life." It features the JavaFX Script scripting language for building rich Internet applications for desktop, mobile, TV and other consumer platforms.

"JavaFX Script, the language of JavaFX, doesn't replace Swing, the core Java GUI toolkit, but provides an alternative way of programming that hopefully will bring Java technology to the masses," according to geekycoder.

A preview version of a software development kit for JavaFX for desktop applications, supporting Windows and Macintosh, was released late last month. (InfoWorld has reviewed this SDK.) Further deliverables are planned. JavaFX for Desktop 1.0, featuring a profile for desktop and browser deployments and a general-release SDK, is due this fall. JavaFX for Mobile 1.0, adding mobile support, is planned for spring 2009 release. TV support also is planned.

The JavaFX runtime is to be distributed with the Java VM. Licensing plans for device manufacturers also are to be revealed next spring. When manufacturers license Java Micro Edition, they will get the JavaFX mobile runtime.

JavaFX offers plug-in capabilities similar to Flash and Silverlight but also has a standard runtime -- the Java Virtual Machine -- to run applications outside a browser, Lehrbaum said. Other plug-in technologies will enable developers to use existing tools such as NetBeans or design tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator with JavaFX.

With JavaFX, Sun looks to build on momentum including the presence of Java on more than 2 billion handsets. "JavaFX takes that momentum and the advantages we have with Java but makes it much easier to create rich interactive and immersive experiences," Lehrbaum said.

Java, he said, has had great capabilities but has been difficult to use. JavaFX Script offers a declarative scripting language for developers to build interfaces in the way that they think about them, Lehrbaum said. "It matches the way they think about interfaces in their head and is very intuitive," he said.

JavaFX also revives the notion of client-side applets, which had been envisioned as the big win for Java in the mid-1990s but Java instead emerged as a dominant server-side technology. Applets could be built for applications such as widgets for information access or a stock ticker.

The revival of applets will be enabled both by JavaFX and the upcoming Java Standard Edition SE 6 Update 10 release, due this month. "[The update] provides a much faster loading process for the applets," Lehrbaum said. Also with the update, developers can write a single version of an application and run it on the desktop or in a browser. JavaFX, meanwhile, makes it easier to build rich immersive experiences, he said.

An early user of JavaFX said Java SE 6 Update 10 and JavaFX solve deployment issues for Java. The update, said Jim Weaver, president of Java trainer jMentor, enables a Java or JavaFX application to begin executing before the entire Java Runtime Environment has been downloaded.

Weaver described JavaFX and the update as a "one-two punch." The update enables rich client Java to become a reality, Weaver said. JavaFX Script, meanwhile, provides a simple scripting language, he said.

JavaFX compiles down to byte code and runs anywhere the JVM runs. "You can use any Java classes within JavaFX," said Weaver. "You can leverage your Java skills with JavaFX."

Jumpstarting Java on the desktop is a key goal of JavaFX. Java on a desktop did not gather the momentum Sun had hoped for, Lehrbaum said. Also, JavaFX basically makes it easier for developers to create the applications they want so they don't have to consider another technology," such as Flash, Lehrbaum said.

"The platform promises a lot of new APIs and new abstractions to make the harder things simpler and the simpler things very easy," Almiray said. For example, APIs and libraries would take care of responsibilities such as establishing the correct order of a drawing on the screen, he said. Almiray anticipates success for JavaFX particularly in the mobile arena, saying it will be tough to compete with Flex in rich Internet applications.

JavaFX Script does offer some features not in Java such as data-binding into the language, Almiray said. But some Java features such as annotations, generics, and inner classes are lacking in JavaFX, he said.

Sun is being quiet about plans to make money off JavaFX. The company is looking at this issue and has not yet announced specific monetization plans, Lehrbaum said. Opportunities include commercial licensing and partnerships, he said.

JavaFX initially was proclaimed to be a fully open source effort. But Sun has backed away from that stance somewhat. A FAQ page on a Sun Web site was found this spring to have reported that tools such as the compiler, runtime engine, player and tools currently under development would not be open source.

The compiler, however, has been open-sourced as have parts of the graphics libraries and some tools. Sun plans to further discuss its open source strategy for JavaFX with the Desktop 1.0 release, Lehrbaum said.

Microsoft said Wednesday it would purchase up to $100 million in coupons for Suse Linux support from Novell, furthering a controversial 2006 partnership aimed at customers who run both Windows and Linux in their server environments.

Further investments will also be made to enhance the tools, support and training that Novell offers customers to provide better interoperability between Windows Server and Suse Linux Enterprise Server, the companies said.

[ Learn more about the details of Microsoft's original interoperability pact with Novell. ]

The companies called it an "incremental investment" that builds on the five-year interoperability pact they announced in November 2006. As part of the original deal, Microsoft purchased $240 million in Novell coupons to sell to its customers. Within 18 months of the deal about $157 million of the coupons had been redeemed, the companies said.

The alliance between Novell and Microsoft was an unusual and unexpected one that brought together a fierce opponent of open source with one of its leading advocates. The companies said at the time they were making the pact for the good of their customers, but observers also saw other motives.

For Microsoft, the deal was a recognition of the significant role that Linux plays in enterprises, but also provided a way to show the European Commission, which was hounding it at the time about anticompetitive practices, that it was open to working with the open-source community.

For Novell, the deal gave it an advantage over open-source leader Red Hat at a time when Novell was struggling financially. It allowed it to offer customers the advantage of better interoperability with Windows. Customers that have taken advantage of the deal include Wal-Mart, HSBC, Renault, Southwest Airlines, and BMW.

Microsoft and Novell have a joint laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is dedicated to researching interoperability issues associated with virtualization, identity federation and systems management, among others.

Part of Novell's deal with Microsoft also provided customers using Suse Linux indemnity against intellectual property claims by Microsoft. That assurance raised the possibility that Microsoft would launch lawsuits against Linux vendors who refused to make similar agreements, as well as against their customers. The fears were fueled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's claims shortly after the deal was announced that Linux "uses our intellectual property."

Those comments and the agreement with Microsoft angered some of the open-source programmers who helped to develop Novell's software. The deal was seen as a tacit agreement from Novell that Microsoft holds patents on Linux, although Novell strongly refuted those claims.

The decision to invest further in the deal shows that customers have been taking advantage of the program and that some of the gloomy predictions made after the partnership was announced have not come true, said Laurent Lachal, a senior analyst who heads open-source research at Ovum.

Combined with its own restructuring efforts, the deal with Microsoft appears to have strengthened Novell against its main rival, Red Hat, in the enterprise Linux market.

"Novell has also done its own homework," Lachal said. "Part of its success is due to Microsoft helping it, but part of it is also due to Novell's own efforts."

Subscriptions for Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise server grew 38.6 percent between 2006 and 2007, compared to 20.9 percent for Red Hat, according to an IDC report from April.

Red Hat's market share during that period declined to 62.1 percent from 64.2 percent, in part due to Novell's success, the report said. Novell's server market share was 29 percent in 2007, up from 26.1 in 2006.

As even more businesses adopt Linux alongside Windows, Microsoft is now less likely to "launch a frontal attack against Linux" in court, Lachal said.

James Niccolai in London contributed to this report.

Intel Tuesday outlined the roadmap for its upcoming line of solid-state drives that will use flash-based solid-state memory to store data - and replace hard drives in some computers.

Dubbed the Intel High-Performance SATA Solid-State Drive product line, the data storage devices are aimed at mobile and desktop clients, as well as enterprise server, storage and workstation applications. The first products in the new line are slated to be available by mid-September.

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

The announcement was made Tuesday at the company's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

"This is a good move for Intel, and it's good for customers that Intel is making the move," said Dan Olds, principal analyst for the Gabriel Consulting Group. "It will speed development of solid-state drive (SSD) technology and drop the cost. Smaller PC manufacturers will be able to buy pre-integrated SSD drives that will seamlessly slide right into current laptop and desktop designs, which means no additional redesign or development cost."

Olds added that SSDs definitely have an advantage over traditional hard drives, but there are disadvantages as well.

"On the plus side, they are faster, smaller, and can take less power. They aren't mechanical and are thus more reliable than regular hard drives," he noted. "The downside is that currently they are more expensive. Over time, the price of SSDs will come down, but I believe most users will eventually have systems that utilize both SSDs and traditional hard drives. A decent sized SSD will give a speed boost, while the regular hard drive will store the bulk of the data."

The Intel X18-M and X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drives are geared for laptops and desktops. According to the company, the new drives, which are based on Intel's multi-level cell flash memory, save up to 30 minutes in battery life. They also are designed to improve the input/output bottleneck to the CPU.

The X18-M and the X25-M drives are expected to be available in 80GB and 160GB models. The 80GB drive is currently sampling with production slated within the next 30 days, according to Intel. The 160GB drive is expected to sample in the fourth quarter with production in the first quarter of 2009.

On the enterprise server, storage and workstation side, the Intel X25-E Extreme SATA is based on Intel's single-level cell NAND flash memory and is designed to maximize the input/output operations per second.

Intel X25-E Extreme drive is sampling in 32GB capacity with production expected in the next 90 days. Intel noted that the 64GB is expected to sample in the fourth quarter with production estimated for the first quarter of 2009.

While the company only has a 10 percent share of the search market with its Live Search technology, Microsoft has big plans to enhance its platform regardless of what happens with its now-dormant proposal to buy Yahoo.

At the Search Engine Strategies 2008 conference in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, vice president of the company?s search, portal, and advertising platform group, discussed the company's goals for search but did not want to talk about the company's Yahoo plan. That planned acquisition has not panned out. ?

"At this point we're focused on building our organic strategy," Nadella said when asked about Microsoft's current interest in Yahoo.

Nadella emphasized that search has become easy but there is room for improvement.

"The ability to talk to a search engine is perhaps the simplest it's ever been," Nadella said, adding that search has become a $15 billion market in the United States. More than 50 percent of search sessions are more than 30 minutes long, Nadella said.

The questions now are whether search will change and improve, he said. Nadella cited three trends affecting search: user intent and the ability to understand user intent better; content and context and the ability to understand these better and drive individual search experiences and, lastly, what is the frontier for advertising efficiency and yield for publishers.

"Those are the three things that I believe are going to cause search to change," Nadella said.

Search experiences could be more optimized, he said. Microsoft is doing work to understand search patterns, he said.

He also cited a goal to understand user Internet experiences, analyze them, and come up with search behaviors and patterns. This information could be used to shape the search the experience and help publishers and advertisers looking to do targeted advertising.

Another search trend cited involves the growth of content, including the proliferation of multimedia images. Search engines also are expected to understand more about time and location. User intent and context must be understood by search providers, Nadella said.

Microsoft looks at what advertisers and publishers are saying about what they want from a search engine. Search providers can be expected to invest in capabilities such as correlation of offline and online capabilities, openness and correlation of display and search functionality. Black-box search engine ad systems will be opened up for more efficiency,

With its Microsoft Live Search technology, Microsoft wants to deliver the best search results, simplify key tasks, and innovate the business of search, according to Nadella. The company's acquisition of Powerset, which provides semantic search technology, fits in with its plans to improve relevance of searches in Live Search, Nadella said.

To simplify tasks, Microsoft plans to understand search patterns and build experiences that fit those patterns. "You can see that today in what we have done with image search what we have done with video search," Nadella said.

Microsoft also is looking to expose search capabilities in Windows properties such as MSN, he said. Nadella acknowledged Microsoft is a media company. "To say that we're not a media company would be hypocrisy," he said, adding that Microsoft's place in the media value chain is in search, portal and communication tools, not in providing content of its own.

An audience member interviewed after the presentation said he tried out Microsoft Live Search and found it was something different.

"Actually, I've been looking for a camera," said Otis Maxwell, a freelance copywriter. "I've not been successful in finding the right price and the right camera on Google," he said.

Maxwell said he then tried Live Search but still did not find the right camera. "I could see [Live Search] was different. The fact that it's different I think means it's going to have some potential," he said.

Microsoft at the event also cited its release of adCenter Add-in for Excel, which is a keyword research and optimization tool based in Excel that now is in a beta format. The company on Wednesday announced a public beta program for its AdCenter for Publishers technology, in which a Web publisher can leverage Microsoft Live Search to run ads on its site and share these ad revenues with Microsoft.?

A study this week has revealed just how slow is the rate of adoption for IPv6, the next version of the Internet's main communications protocol, and some experts say black markets where companies trade unused IP addresses may be only a few years away.

The report, from Arbor Networks, claims to be the most comprehensive study of IPv6 use to date. It includes few surprises for those who follow the area closely, but the results provide a sobering measure of how just slowly the technology has been adopted.

[ Keep up on the latest networking news with our Networking Report newsletter. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

"At its peak, IPv6 represented less than one hundredth of 1 percent of Internet traffic" over the past year, Arbor Networks' Craig Labovitz wrote in a summary of the findings, adding wryly: "This is somewhat equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water."

Arbor said it put together the study over the past year, working with the University of Michigan and almost 100 ISPs and content providers, including a quarter of the biggest ISPs in the U.S. and Europe. It used commercial traffic probes to monitor about 2,400 peering and backbone routers and 278,000 customer and peering interfaces.

"We believe this is the largest study of IPv6 and Internet traffic in general to date (by several orders of magnitude)," Labovitz wrote.

IPv6 is the successor to the current version of the Internet's underlying protocol, IPv4. Its adoption is important because IPv4 can support only about 4 billion IP addresses and they are fast running out, while IPv6 will be able to support many trillions more (2 to the 128th power). It also offers advantages in security and network management.

Some experts say the supply of IPv4 addresses will run out in the next few years. Matthew Ford, a principal researcher with BT's Networks Research Centre in the United Kingdom, operates a Web site that counts down the days until IPv4 addresses are used up. As of Tuesday, it predicts that the central registry of addresses will be exhausted in 904 days.

Few people expect disaster to ensue. The Arbor report notes that IPv6 adoption is growing, albeit at a slow pace. Since July last year IPv6 traffic has grown by nearly a factor of five, to an average of 100Mbps per day. "Though not a landslide of adoption, it is still something," the report says.

What's more, there are already creative ways to get around the shortages, like using network address translators, or NATs, which essentially allow many computers to share the same IP address. There are also many addresses that were allocated to organizations and are not being used.

That's why some, including Labovitz, expect companies to trade unused addresses with each other, on a black market if the activity isn't officially sanctioned. "I think an IPv4 market is inevitable," he wrote.

BT's Ford said he wasn't surprised by the results, but he cautioned that the figures may not be completely accurate. Arbor acknowledged that it did not distinguish between native and tunneled IPv6 use, he noted, and the figures may also be skewed toward what's happening in the U.S., where many of Arbor Networks' customers are.

"The U.S. has historically been quite sluggish, and most IPv6 research and implementation has been in Europe and Asia," said Ford, who previously chaired the IPv6 Cluster of the European Commission.

Nevertheless, the adoption has clearly been slow and the study should be a further wake-up call that widespread adoption of IPv6 needs to begin quickly, Ford said.

"Two or three years ago you could make the argument that [the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses] is far enough away that we don't need to make the investment," he said. But given that widespread adoption will take about two years to implement, "now is the time for large ISPs and content providers to begin their migration."

Arbor Networks said money is the main reason for the delay. The U.S. Department of Commerce has estimated it will cost $25 billion for ISPs to upgrade to native IPv6. "This massive expense comes without the lure of additional revenue, since IPv6 offers diminishingly few incentives nor new competitive features to attract or upsell customers," Labovitz wrote.

Ford said enterprises may be among the earlier adopters because they can suffer the most from having to use IPv4.

"They can suffer problems through corporate mergers, because both parties might be using the same address space, or they find they have a lot of network address translators, which can make it challenging to deploy new applications. IPv6 helps both those problems," he said.

In addition, deploying IPv6 within the enterprise can be easier than it is for ISPs, which have to make more connections to outside networks.

"While it is easy to poke fun at predictions of the 'Imminent Collapse of the Internet', the eventual exhaustion of IPv4 allocations is real," the Arbor report states. "We need to do something. And IPv6 is our best bet."

A U.S. District Court judge on Tuesday dissolved a gag order against a trio of MIT students who said they found flaws in the Massachusetts transit authority's ticketing system.

Zack Anderson, Russell "RJ" Ryan, and Alessandro Chiesa had planned to present details of their findings at the Defcon hacker conference before a judge imposed the gag on Aug. 8 following a motion by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

The students are being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco organization that advocates for civil rights in the high-tech world.

EFF legal director Cindy Cohn argued Tuesday that the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act concerns the transmission of information to protected computers, not speech to other people, in this case the students' planned speech at Defcon.

In addition, the students have no intention of releasing "key" pieces of information that would allow others to hack the system, Cohn said.

MBTA attorney Ieuan-Gael Mahoney had asked for a five-month continuation of the restraining order, saying that was how long the MBTA has determined it will take for the organization and its vendor to fix vulnerabilities in the MBTA Charlie Ticket system.

Mahoney praised a security analysis the students had prepared for the agency, saying the information in it convinced them of the vulnerability.

But U.S. District Judge George O'Toole sided with Cohn following a roughly 90-minute hearing.

While the 10-day temporary restraining order was set to expire Tuesday, O'Toole said that under the law, weekends do not count, meaning it is still in effect until Friday.

FiveRuns and Morph Labs on Tuesday will announce they are partnering to provide free application performance testing for Ruby on Rails applications, with the goal of bolstering applications running in the cloud.

The companies will run the FiveRuns TuneUp application profiling tool on the Morph AppSpace platform-as-a-service offering for Web applications. Also part of the plan is FiveRuns Manage, for monitoring the performance and availability of Rails applications. Developers gain insight in application performance and can make decisions on code optimization via a managed hosting platform.

"Our goal is to provide a forum for focused collaboration to solve interesting and difficult performance problems. TuneUp gives developers deep visibility and relevant information to debug and improve the performance of their application and a community setting to collaborate with others to solve tough problems," said Steve Sanderson, vice president of development and Technology at FiveRuns, in a statement released by the company.

Morph uses virtual infrastructure to provide an environment for Web applications that can be provisioned and scaled.

Developers can subscribe to Morph AppSpace for free and select the version that integrates FiveRuns TuneUp. They also can participate in a secure group or open community to share performance information and advice.

FiveRuns Manage will be offered as a fee-based production option for Morp AppSpace and will enable monitoring of the health of applications within an AppSpace subscription. This integration between Manage and AppSpace is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year. FiveRuns Manage costs about $40 per managed server per month.

Massachusetts startup uTest is launching an on-demand service that weds application testing to social networking through a community of more than 8,000 professional testers in roughly 130 countries.

Users provide uTest with a link to their application and select a test team from the community with the appropriate skill-sets and demographics for the job. Customers communicate with testers through the uTest platform, which also integrates with in-house bug-tracking systems such as Bugzilla.

The company offers two payment models. The "on-demand" option is for companies that need testing services periodically, not continually. Customers that choose this option buy a $2,000 credit minimum for their accounts. The cost of an individual fix depends on factors like the type of application and how many testers are engaged. Customers pay only for approved bugs. For companies that require testing on a regular, continuous basis, uTest offers an annual subscription option, which includes a discount for approved bugs and requires a monthly payment.

It's not always cost-effective for smaller companies to hire QA teams, and larger enterprises that want to do some outsourcing might have to sign a long-term contract, said CEO Doron Reuveni.

"QA testing is a peak business," he added, with teams stretched near the end of release cycles. An adjunct like uTest can help customers handle those peaks efficiently, he said.

Also, the community model affords customers a great deal of granularity in choosing testers, such as a German-speaking one for Macintosh applications or an English speaker with ample experience in testing games, Reuveni said.

The largest number of testers are in India (32 percent), followed by the U.S. (27 percent) and U.K. (9 percent). "We do not have a huge presence in China or the Pacific Rim," Reuveni said.

The system is working out for customers such as Doron Shavit, testing director in the technology division of online gaming company 888.com. Shavit has used uTest as a supplement to his internal teams, particularly to determine how their systems interact with a wide variety of client machines. "As a B-to-C company, we have to have a better understanding of what our end-users are using," he said.

At one point, 888.com's uTest team discovered that some sound files in an application weren't compatible with certain sound cards, Shavit noted: "That's something we could never have found out in our labs."

TippingPoint is beta-testing a Web portal that lets customers view Internet-threat intelligence the company has gathered from around the globe, as well as polls of how other customers are dealing with those threats.

Called ThreatLinQ, the portal presents data from its three-year-old Lighthouse network of about 20 customer intrusion-prevention systems (IPS) in regions around the world. Lighthouse originally was set up to generate threat intelligence for TippingPoint's internal use. (Compare IDS/IPS products.)

Other vendors including McAfee and Symantec also have portals detailing threats of the type their products can combat.

ThreatLinQ presents data from the management consoles of TippingPoint customers, data gathered as part of a program that customers can opt into. The idea is to give customers an idea of how their peers are configuring their machines to deal with threats.

The portal presents the kinds of attacks that are occurring and the IP addresses where they originate. Alongside each threat, the portal lists the number of which TippingPoint filter or filters will deal with the problem. It also tells whether that filter is turned on as a default on TippingPoint's IPS so customers can figure out more easily whether they need to make a change.

Visitors to the portal can click on a continent, region and country to get a representation of the most prevalent attacks. One feature is a list of Movers and Shakers, threats that have experienced 400 percent growth over the past two weeks.

ThreatLinQ has no option to post questions to other customers, but TippingPoint says it plans to add a forum to the portal later. It also plans to turn the portal into an add-on to its IPS service for a fee.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Apple is offering a 60-day extension to MobileMe accounts to make up from problems users have suffered since the service's launch. This is the second such extension that Apple has offered; in mid-July, the company offered a free 30-day addition.

MobileMe replaced .Mac, Apple's subscription-based online service. Users are given custom e-mail addresses, a Web site address, Web publishing and file sharing tools and syncing technology that works with Macs, PCs and iPhones.

[ Read the related stories on how the MobileMe service recently went dark and also how users fell prey to a phishing scam. ]

Apple launched MobileMe at the same time as the introduction of iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store, and the launch was fraught with difficulties -- users could not access e-mail, a large initial downtime, issues related to syncing and more.

MobileMe's launch was problematic enough that Apple CEO Steve Jobs sent an internal memo to Apple employees calling the service "not up to Apple's standards." Jobs also indicated that Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes, was to take over management of the service.

"We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make," reads the new e-mail. "To recognize our users' patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension."

Apple indicates that the 60-day extension is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received.

"We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe's launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around," read the e-mail.

Apple has posted a new Web page on its support site with details about the 60-day supplemental extension.

Macworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Microsoft will begin alpha testing the next version of Office in November or December, according to a blog posting by a Microsoft employee that was later pulled from the Web.

According to the blog posting, by Hayley Rixon, who works on the Microsoft business intelligence team, Microsoft is calling for people to be part of a technology adoption program (TAP) that will give them an early opportunity to test the monitoring and analytics components of Office PerformancePoint Server.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

The TAP for this product will be a part of the TAP for Office 14, the alpha test of which will begin in the "November/December timeframe this year," according to the blog posting. Office PerformancePoint Server is business performance analysis software that will be a part of the Office 14 release.

While the blog posting was live on Microsoft's Technet site on Monday afternoon Eastern time, by afternoon on the West coast the Web site was no longer working. The post also no longer appears on Rixon's blog.

Microsoft could not be reached for comment Tuesday about the site no longer being active. However, on Monday through its public relations firm Microsoft said that while the Office team is working on the next version, "it is too early to discuss specific features, capabilities or timing" for the product.

The deadline for submissions to be a part of the Office PerformancePoint Server TAP is Aug. 28, according to the post.

Office is the most widely used productivity software in the world, though competitors such as Google and IBM are competing with Microsoft by offering free office productivity applications.

With the latest version, Office 2007, Microsoft has begun to expand business versions of Office to include collaboration and business-intelligence capabilities, as well as links to Microsoft's enterprise applications and database. Though Microsoft has divulged few details about Office 14, the company probably will expand these features and links in the next release.

Apple updated the iPhone's software Monday afternoon, but according to first reports posted to the company's support forum, the new 2.0.2 firmware has not fixed users' 3G reception problems.

As it did two weeks ago when it released iPhone 2.0.1, Apple gave no details of Monday's update contents, stating only that it included "bug fixes."

[ Learn why iPhone 2.0 won't yet rule the roost in the enterprise. ]

Users expecting to see a fix for long-running 3G reception issues, however, were mostly disappointed. The majority who posted messages on the subject to Apple's support forum after installing iPhone 2.0.2 said that the update had not solved their problems, which included dropped calls, weak signal strength and slow surfing speeds.

"I just finished downloading the new 2.02 software and I do not see a difference," said a user identified as "jay25cent" on the longest thread about 2.0.2 and 3G.

"I can't see any improvements," echoed "curveball," who said he lived in Sweden. "Same crappy signal."

"Still no 3G here (O2 UK) for me," added "musicvan" on the same thread. "Disappointed. So unless the 3G network is down at my so-called 100% coverage area, then nothing has changed."

Users have been complaining about 3G network problems almost since the July 11 debut of the iPhone 3G. More than 2,000 messages have been posted to the phone's support forum since then, detailing difficulties making calls from areas supposedly covered by a 3G network, and griping about weak signals and slower-than-promised data download speeds.

Although Apple has not publicly commented on users' complaints or said whether it would come up with a software fix, some sources have claimed that the company is working on a firmware update that would solve the problems.

A few of the users who contributed in the support thread said that they believed the 2.0.2 update had improved their 3G reception. "Now showing 4 bars, not 0-2, which looks better," said "vegasj."

And at least one user was just unsure. "I think there has been an attempt to correct the 3G issue but not sure if it has," said "whatsinitforme."

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Yahoo has expanded its "Buzz Up" content recommendation service to include many more publishers, stepping up its challenge against Digg.

Almost any publisher can now add a Buzz Up button to its Web site, Yahoo said. If a Web site doesn't have a button, users can also submit a link to the content via Yahoo.

[ Find out more about how Yahoo aims to lasso the 'Buzz' with its Digg clone. ]

Since its launch in February, Yahoo slowly built up the number of publishers participating in the service from 100 to 400. It has now opened it to almost any publisher -- although it said the service is "currently focussed on the U.S. only."

The change means that users will be able to "buzz up" more types of content, including the news, video and blogging sites that helped drive the popularity of Digg and similar sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon.

Buzz Up has its own Web page, and Yahoo said some of the most popular content there could end up on its main home page.

Publishers can benefit from the "social content voting" because a less-trafficked site could see a surge in visits if an item is highlighted by enough visitors. That can mean more clicks or page views for advertisements, which increase a Web site's revenue.

Check Point is introducing a version of its VPN-1 software that runs on VMware ESX or ESXi to protect virtual machines from one another when they are running on a single piece of hardware.

The software runs on the same machine hosting the virtualization software, between the hypervisor and the virtual machine, Check Point says.

[ Read related story on VMware's new low-footprint ESX hypervisor. ]

In addition to protecting virtual servers from each other the software can perform network address translation between the virtual servers and the external network, obscuring their actual IP addresses from the outside, the company says.

VPN-1 Virtual Edition contains all the features of the conventional VPN-1 including unified threat management, so it can extend more than just VPN and firewalling to the virtual machines. (Compare UTM products.)

Check Point suggests that businesses might install VPN-1VE on a single hardware server along with e-mail and Web servers to create a device to support remote offices, rather than resort to multiple servers and security appliances.

The software can be managed centrally via Check Point's SmartCenter platform.

The current version of VPN-1 Virtual Edition is focused on protecting virtual machines, but as more VMware APIs are made available, Check Point says it plans to write a version that will also protect the hypervisor itself.

Licenses for VPN-1 VE cost the same as for the traditional VPN-1. A package of licenses to protect five virtual machines costs $7,500. Customers with spare VPN-1 licenses can apply them to VPN-1 VE, the company says. The new software is available for download from Check Point's Web site.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Two new search engines that have garnered attention in the press as possible Google slayers continue to trail the world's most popular search engine by a long shot.

Wikia Search, a highly anticipated search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales that debuted officially in January, held a 0.000079 percent share of the search market in the U.S. at the end of last week, according to Internet researcher Hitwise.

[ Read related stories on ex-Google employees' recent launch of the Cuil new search engine and Wikia Search's aim to bring more transparency to users. ]

Cuil.com, which launched just a few weeks ago, has fared better with a 0.0070 percent share of the search market in the U.S. at the end of last week, but Hitwise attributes a portion of that share to the sharp rise in searches on the Web site that came from fanfare from its launch.

Cuil's search share is trending down now, according to Hitwise. Cuil hit the spotlight in news reports in part because some of its top people are former Google search engineers.

Google, by contrast, accounted for 70.77 percent of all online search engine queries in the U.S. for the four weeks ending July 26, according to Hitwise. The figure is Google's 10th consecutive record high in monthly search share, and up from the 64.35 percent share it took in July of last year.

Despite lagging in the distance, Wikia Search at least continues to move forward.

On Monday, Wikia Search released the latest update to its Grub tool, which crawls the Web indexing pages. The company's search engine is based on the idea to get people involved to aid in its development by ranking Web sites and downloading Grub so the Web crawler can make tap into unused bandwidth on their PCs.

Wikia Search also early this month launched an official version of the Wikia toolbar that can be downloaded and added on to the Firefox Web browser.

IBM on Monday said it had invented technology that could reduce power consumption and speed up performance of processors used in PCs, servers and other devices.

The company has shrunk the smallest features in test memory chips used in CPUs to 22 nanometers, which could enable processors to have more features and perform more quickly while consuming less power.

[ Learn more about power-saving strategies for the IT workplace at the Sustainable IT blog. ]

The memory chips, called static random access memory (SRAM) cells, are part of a CPU where data is temporarily stored before being processed.

Reducing the memory cell's size is one step in shrinking the entire microprocessor, said Mukesh Khare, project manager at IBM. The company hopes to see CPUs manufactured using the 22-nm process by 2011, Khare said.

With the smaller features, IBM could put more functions on a smaller chip, such as adding 3-D graphics or animation capabilities, or put graphics chips inside microprocessors, Khare said.

"As the number of cores (in CPUs) increases, the demand for more and more memory inside microprocessors grows dramatically. Making sure that we can continue to grow memory on microprocessors is a basic requirement for scaling," Khare said.

A nanometer equals about one billionth of a meter. In chip manufacturing, the figure refers to the smallest features on chip surfaces.

Chip manufacturers are constantly upgrading chip manufacturing technologies for power savings and speed gains. Intel, a rival to IBM for some kinds of chips, manufactures chips using a 45-nm process, with plans to switch to a 22-nm process by 2011. IBM has said it will switch to the 45-nm manufacturing process this year.

"We can continue the scaling or miniaturization of the circuits for several more generations. There is still a lot more room for development," Khare said.

Research on the SRAM cell was done by IBM and its partners, including Advanced Micro Devices, Freescale, STMicroelectronics and Toshiba, at the University of Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. A small manufacturing unit there produced the test SRAM chips.

Following some developer complaints of slow progress, Google on Monday released an updated version of the Android software development kit as well as a timeline for future releases.

In addition to fixing "tons of bugs," the update includes a "ton" of user interface changes, according to a blog post written by Dan Morrill, developer advocate at Google. It also includes new applications such as an alarm clock, calculator, camera, music player, picture viewer and messaging application.

[ For more on Google's Android, see InfoWorld's special report. Also, read up on one of its biggest potential competitors: Apple's iPhone 3G.  ]

Since Google first issued a preliminary SDK last November, it has worked closely with companies that are members of the Android Open Handset Alliance to further develop the Linux-based operating system, Morrill wrote. Now the companies are close to completing the first version of Android, which will be loaded onto devices shipping in the fourth quarter, he wrote.

Google also laid out a general timeline for future releases. In September, it could release additional SDK updates if necessary, and it expects to launch the final Android 1.0 software and SDK in either the third or fourth quarter. Also in the fourth quarter, Google plans to release the source code.

The updated SDK and timeline follow the recent submission to Google of an online petition signed by more than 200 developers. The developers asked Google to provide more information about when they might expect an update to the SDK, which they said was long overdue.

Google has angered some developers who say the company hasn't provided enough information about Android updates and accidentally revealed that it was offering an updated SDK to a small group of contest winners.

Separately on Monday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission released documents approving HTC's Dream phone, a device widely rumored to become the first Android phone, for sale in the U.S. The phone could hit the market before mid-November.

Although no operator has publicly announced a definitive launch date for an Android phone, rumors have pegged T-Mobile as the first to sell such a phone.

Developing with the popular AJAX technique for Web applications is the focus of product releases Monday from both WaveMaker and Genuitec.

WaveMaker released Monday Visual Ajax Studio 4.0, an open source, browser-based development tool intended to provide a point-and-click paradigm for building Web applications.

"The most significant changes are that we've kind of taken a step forward in the amount of functionality that you can deliver in a very short period of time," WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene said. The company, formerly called ActiveGrid, seeks to provide a PowerBuilder-like visual environment for building AJAX applications on the Web, Keene said.

"You can drag and drop widgets and then connect them visually to back-end data or back-end Web services," Keene said.

Developers can construct AJAX-based mashups with the Live Forms capability in version 4.0. Also featured is a skin for the AJAX Dojo toolkit that provides a Mac-like look to Web applications.

The new product eliminates "forms hell" by enabling a developer to build a form to create, read, update, and delete database information with a single click, WaveMaker said. A built-in "oops" button can undo page designer changes. Auto-discovery of Web services is featured to hide complexity, the company said.

WaveMaker MVC and binding interfaces resemble Apple's Xcode development environment. Also, developers can install either the PostgreSQL open source database or the EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus distribution as part of a WaveMaker installation.

Visual Ajax Studio is available either through a commercial license or the GNU Affero General Public License. Applications developed using WaveMaker deploy as standard Java WAR (Web application archive) files to Java servers. The commercial product, featuring role-based security, costs $5,000 per server per year. The open source license, featuring customer support, costs $599 per year per developer.

WaveMaker sees itself competing with Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight but argues that its leveraging of prominent open source projects such as Hibernate and Spring is an advantage.

Genuitec announced availability of the first milestone release of MyEclipse 7.0 Blue Edition IDE, offering IBM WebSphere developers AJAX tooling, reporting, and Eclipse 3.4 platform support. Eclipse 3.4 was featured in the "Ganymede" release of Eclipse technologies in June.

MyEclipse 7.0 Blue Edition also supports the Maven 2 build manager, Enterprise JavaBeans and Spring IDE for MyEclipse. Users can acquire Blue Edition via the Genuitec's Pulse software profiling and Eclipse plug-in management service.

Genuitec also released MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 7.0 milestone 1, the company's general purpose IDE based on Eclipse. Also offered through Pulse, it features AJAX tooling for Java Enterprise Edition and application lifecycle management capabilities for Eclipse 3.4.

General availability for the two Genuitec products is expected in October.

Microsoft will begin alpha testing the next version of Office in November or December, according to a blog posting by a Microsoft employee.

According to a blog posting by Hayley Rixon, who works on the Microsoft business intelligence team, Microsoft is calling for people to be part of a technology adoption program (TAP) that will give them an early opportunity to test the monitoring and analytics components of Office PerformancePoint Server.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

The TAP for this product will be a part of the TAP for Office 14, the alpha test of which will begin in the "November/December timeframe this year," according to the blog posting. Office PerformancePoint Server is business performance analysis software that will be a part of the Office 14 release.

Microsoft's public relations firm did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

The deadline for submissions to be a part of the Office PerformancePoint Server TAP is Aug. 28, according to the post.

Office is the most widely used productivity software in the world, though competitors such as Google and IBM are competing with Microsoft by offering free office productivity applications.

With the latest version, Office 2007, Microsoft has begun to expand business versions of Office to include collaboration and business-intelligence capabilities, as well as links to Microsoft's enterprise applications and database. Though Microsoft has divulged few details about Office 14, the company probably will expand these features and links in the next release.

Google hopes a new Web site will help convince the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to allow a new generation of wireless broadband devices to connect via unused television spectrum.

Google on Monday launched the Free the Airwaves campaign, in an effort to drum up public support for new wireless devices to use the so-called white spaces, empty wireless spectrum in bands controlled by U.S. television stations.

[ Your source for the latest in government IT news and issues: Subscribe to InfoWorld's Government IT newsletter. ]

Google and several other tech vendors are now engaged in a public-relations battle with TV stations and makers of wireless microphones, who have raised concerns about possible interference from white spaces devices.

The goal of the new Web site is to help the U.S. public better understand the issues, said Minnie Ingersoll a product manager with Google's alternative access team. "Now is an important time for people who care about the future of the Internet to make their voices heard," she said. Most U.S. residents are "unfamiliar" with the white spaces debate before the FCC, she added.

Google and other tech vendors have called on the FCC to open up the white spaces as a way to create wireless broadband networks nationwide. All U.S. TV markets have some unused spectrum controlled by television stations, and white space spectrum would allow broadband signals that travel farther and have faster speeds than current Wi-Fi, white spaces supporters say.

But the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and wireless microphone vendors such as Shure have opposed the effort to open up the white spaces to new devices. Many wireless microphones now operate in the white spaces without FCC licenses, and microphone makers, as well as TV stations, suggest makers of prototype white spaces devices haven't shown that their devices won't cause harmful interference.

FCC tests of prototype white spaces devices have yielded mixed results so far. Between mid-2007 and March, devices failed three times in FCC tests, and earlier this month, a prototype device failed to sense wireless microphone signals at a preseason National Football League game.

However, a prototype device tested at the Majestic Theatre in New York City did perform correctly, according to the Wireless Innovation Alliance, a group of tech companies pushing for new uses for the spectrum.

The NFL tests "conclusively show that spectrum sensing white space devices will cause harmful interference to wireless microphones during live events," Mark Brunner, Shure's senior director of public and industry relations, said in a statement. "Simply stated, the prototype devices were unable to consistently identify operating wireless microphones or distinguish occupied from unoccupied TV channels."

The prototype device at the football game also failed to detect when wireless microphones were switched on, "an occurrence that takes place multiple times during any NFL game," Brunner added.

Google officials disputed Shure's description of the NFL test, saying the tests were successful. The problem at the football game was "more an issue with that specific device," said Richard Whitt, Google's Washington, D.C., telecom and media counsel. One device tested didn't sense wireless microphones because those microphones were using spectrum already occupied by digital TV signals, meaning the device found "false positives," he said.

"The device did not operate in terms of transmitting a signal, because it found that particular channel was occupied," Whitt said. "There would be zero chance of causing any interference to the signals, because in that situation, there certainly would not be a transmission of the signal in the first place."

During a Google press conference Monday, two men representing rural areas called on the FCC to approve the white spaces devices, saying large broadband providers have ignored their residents. Native Americans in Southern California do not have the same access to broadband as neighboring communities, said Matthew Rantanen, director of technology for Tribal Digital Village, based in San Diego.

"There's a serious broadband problem in rural America," added Wally Bowen, executive director of the nonprofit Mountain Area Information Network, based in Asheville, N.C.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released documents on Monday that may indicate that the first Android phone will hit the U.S. market in November.

The documents show that the FCC has approved the sale of HTC's Dream phone, a device widely rumored to become the first to run Google's Linux-based Android software.

[ For more on Google's Android, see InfoWorld's special report. Also, read up on one of its biggest potential competitors: Apple's iPhone 3G. ]

HTC asked the FCC to keep some of the details of its filings, including photographs and the user manual, confidential until Nov.10. That may mean that the phone will come out around that date.

Neither HTC nor Google has confirmed that the phone will run Android, and the available FCC documents do not reveal the software that will be included on the handset. But blogs have been abuzz for months with rumors that the Dream will run Android, complete with videos and photos purporting to be of the device.

The available FCC documents include information about how the Dream fared in technical tests measuring radio frequency emissions and reveal only minor details that might be of interest to hopeful users. The phone will include Wi-Fi, a camera, and Bluetooth, and it will run on third-generation wireless networks. It will also have a "jog ball," a small trackball-like device for navigating and selecting phone features.

The filings also refer to a "slider," which could indicate that the phone will have a keyboard that slides out, a common feature on HTC smartphones.

Mobile enthusiasts eagerly await the first Android phone, in part out of curiosity over how the phone will compare to Apple's iPhone, first released over a year ago. Apple and Google are rare new entrants in the mobile phone market, long dominated by companies like Nokia that have been making phones and phone software for many years.

Despite rumors of delays with Android, Google says the software is on track and that the first phones running it should appear this year.

Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile are members of an Android industry group, and some industry observers expect T-Mobile to be the first operator to offer Android phones. Both carriers currently sell HTC phones.

More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to the older Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, a performance and metrics researcher said today.

According to Devil Mountain Software, which operates a community-based testing network, nearly 35 percent of the 3,000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP.

[ Get the analysis and insights that only Randall C. Kennedy can provide on PC tech in InfoWorld's Enterprise Desktop blog. And download our free Windows performance-monitoring tool. ]

"Either these machines were downgraded by [sellers like] Dell or HP, or they were downgraded by the user after they got the machine," said Craig Barth, the chief technology officer of Devil Mountain. "In any case, these machines are no longer running Vista."

Barth used data provided by users to Devil Mountain's exo.performance.network -- which it kicked off last year and has expanded by partnering with InfoWorld, a Computerworld sister publication -- to come up with his numbers. By collating such things as the vendor and system model number with manufacturers' catalogs, Barth was able to identify machines that were probably shipped in the last six months, a period when virtually every new PC was offered with Vista preinstalled.

"The 35 percent is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base," Barth said. "People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights."

By the terms of Microsoft's end-user licensing agreement (EULA), Vista Business and Vista Ultimate can be "downgraded" to XP Professional; businesses that purchase Vista Enterprise can also downgrade to XP.

Although Microsoft retired Windows XP from mainstream availability at the end of June -- it stopped shipping the seven-year-old operating system to retail and large computer makers -- some OEMs have continued to offer new PCs with XP preinstalled by doing the downgrade at the factory. Hewlett-Packard Co., for example, has promised it will offer the downgrade option on its business-class desktops, notebooks, and workstations through July 2009.

"Vista's installed base certainly doesn't equal the number of Vista licenses [that Microsoft's] sold," Barth said, citing the exo.performance.network data as proof. "We're seeing this a lot in the financial sector."

Devil Mountain's primary product, the DMS Clarity Studio performance analyzing software, is installed in large numbers at several major financial firms. "One client is not doing Vista at all, but they're refreshing their entire platform this year," Barth said. The company, a nationally known securities firm, is instead downgrading to the 64-bit version of Windows XP.

Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance testing tools, and concluded that XP was much faster. Barth said things hadn't changed since then. "Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn."

Even when stripping Vista down to core components to make it as close in functionality to XP as possible, Vista was 40 percent slower, Barth claimed, citing recent tests Devil Mountain's done. "Vista's performance had been an ongoing problem, and the only thing that's saving Microsoft's bacon is the faster processors and more RAM on today's PCs.

"Moore's Law is always on their side."