Microsoft hopes to beef up its security capabilities with the acquisition of Komoku, a developer of rootkit detection products, announced on Thursday.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Microsoft plans to add Komoku's technology into its Forefront and Windows Live OneCare products. Forefront is Microsoft's suite of enterprise security software that includes malware protection for PCs, security tools for Exchange and SharePoint servers, and gateways that secure remote access to corporate data.

OneCare is a package of security software for PC users that scans for viruses and spyware, backs up files and helps with network management.

Komoku, a Maryland company founded in 2004, develops products that detect rootkits, malicious software that can take control of a computer in a way that often evades detection by other antimalware software. The company has served organizations with high security requirements, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will hire William A. Arbaugh, the president and CTO of Komoku, who is also an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. He spent many years working at the National Security Agency where he did research in information security and networking.

Microsoft's statement said that the majority of Komoku's staff will join Microsoft's Access and Security Division. Komoku's simple Web site calls the company a small business and lists three workers, including Arbaugh.

Microsoft doesn't plan to keep the Komoku name or product line. The deal was completed on Wednesday.

Verizon Wireless has won a nationwide block of spectrum that could be used to create a wireless data network, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced Thursday.

Verizon was the winning bidder in the 22MHz band of spectrum called the C block in the FCC's 700MHz auction, which concluded Tuesday. The company bid $4.7 billion for the spectrum, which covers nearly all of the United States, while the high bids on the entire 700MHz auction totalled nearly $19.6 billion.

The FCC put so-called open-access provisions on the C block, meaning Verizon must allow outside devices such as mobile handsets from other carriers and must allow users to run outside applications on the network. Verizon originally filed a lawsuit against the FCC's open-access rules, but dropped out while trade group the CTIA continued with the lawsuit.

Google, which had expressed interest in the C block, did not win any of the C-block licenses.

Verizon said it was "very pleased" with the auction results. "Specifically, we were successful in achieving the spectrum depth we need to continue to grow our business and data revenues, to preserve our reputation as the nation's most reliable wireless network, and to continue to lead in data services and help us satisfy the next wave of services and consumer electronics devices," the company said in a statement.

Among the other winners in the 700MHz auction was AT&T, which won spectrum covering the metropolitan areas of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Dallas, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and dozens of other large cities. Qualcomm won spectrum covering New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, and other areas.

Public Knowledge and Free Press, groups that had pushed for the open-access rules, gave mixed reactions to the auction's results.

"We are not surprised" at the auction's results, said Art Brodsky, Public Knowledge's spokesman. "We look forward to the company working within the letter and the spirit of the open-access policies the commission approved," he added."Perhaps they could even persuade CTIA to drop their court challenge to the auction."

The spectrum auction raised more than the $10 billion budgeted by the U.S. Congress, but failed to provide a public safety network and failed to create a new wireless competitor to cable and telecom-based broadband providers, said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press.

"The auction also failed to produce a much-needed competitor to the phone and cable giants," Scott said in an e-mail. "Since Verizon -- winner of the C Block -- is already a dominant provider of DSL, the prospect of a genuine third pipe from the wireless world is now slim to none."

On Thursday, the FCC voted to de-link the so-called D block from the rest of the auction results. The D block was a 10MHz block that was to be paired with another 10MHz controlled by public safety agencies, and the winning bidder would have been required to build a nationwide voice and data network to serve both public safety and commercial needs. But the FCC failed to receive its $1.33 billion minimum bid for the D block, with the lone $472 million bid coming from Qualcomm.

The FCC has no plans to immediately reauction the D block, a spokeswoman said. Instead, the agency "will consider its options for how to license this spectrum in the future," the FCC said in a news release.

Many members of Congress pushed for a public safety network after emergency responders couldn't communicate with each other during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and more recent disasters. Police and fire departments in neighboring cities often use different communication devices on different blocks of spectrum.

Many telecom experts see the 700MHz spectrum, which U.S. television stations are required to abandon by February 2009, as optimal for long-range wireless broadband services. Wireless signals in the 700MHz band travel three to four times farther and penetrate obstacles such as buildings more easily than wireless signals in higher-spectrum bands.

Other auction winners included Triad 700, a Silicon Valley startup, which won spectrum covering Alaska, Puerto Rico, eastern Maryland, and northwestern Pennsylvania. Frontier Wireless, a Colorado-based subsidiary of EchoStar Communications, and Cavalier Wireless, which has bid in past FCC auctions, won several licenses in small cities and rural areas.

In the latest of many legal setbacks for Qualcomm, a federal court has turned down the company's request to postpone an injunction against sales of some of its mobile-phone chips.

The injunction was ordered late last year after a lower court found that Qualcomm violated three Broadcom patents. Qualcomm is appealing the case and requested a stay of the injunction while it goes through that process. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Washington, D.C., rejected that request. As a result, the injunction is in immediate effect, according to Broadcom, although Qualcomm is allowed to keep selling certain infringing products until Jan. 31, 2009.

Cellular pioneer Qualcomm, based in San Diego, is embroiled in a series of legal disputes with Broadcom, a relative newcomer to the mobile processor market based in nearby Irvine, California. In this case, Broadcom sued Qualcomm in May 2005 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and won the case last May, when a jury awarded it $19.6 million in damages. The district court judge entered the injunction on Dec. 31.

"We are gratified that the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected Qualcomm's motion for a stay, leaving in force the injunction against Qualcomm's infringement issued by the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana," Broadcom said in a statement attributed to David Dull, senior vice president of business affairs and general counsel.

"Although our motion for a stay was denied, the Federal Circuit has recognized the need for speedy resolution of the many issues raised by the verdict and remedy in this case, and has therefore granted Qualcomms motion for an expedited schedule for briefings and oral argument," Qualcomm said in a statement.

According to Broadcom, the three patents cover technology for improved video performance in mobile phones, for accessing more than one network at a time and for "push-to-talk" capability. The push-to-talk technology is used in Qualcomm's QChat, a system Sprint Nextel is counting on to extend the walkie-talkie capability popularized on Nextel's legacy iDEN network to its larger CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) service.

Sprint had moved to intervene on Qualcomm's side in the district court but was turned down last August. On Tuesday, the appeals court rejected Sprint's appeal of that decision. The carrier filed its appeal too late, the appeals court said.

REFERENCES:Federal judge orders stop to Qualcomm chip sales, Dec. 31, 2007

The concept of UTM (unified threat management) and the devices that fit into the product segment are at long last finding a home in some enterprise IT environments.

Roughly five years after analysts first coined the UTM moniker to help define an emerging class of network appliances that offered integrated security applications on the same box, the technology and the market finally appear to have evolved to a point where large businesses are ready to buy, proponents of the tools maintain.

Ill-performing products, bad timing, and customer preferences for standalone, best-of-breed technologies traditionally prevented UTMs from winning over many large customers, but some experts say that the tide has turned and adoption of the devices is happening now.

And UTMs -- which typically include a firewall, anti-virus tools, e-mail and Web filters, and an intrusion detection system -- aren't just catching on inside the branch office environments of widely-distributed companies, experts maintain, but also in central corporate operations.

"When UTMs first came around, one of the biggest problems was the added overhead that it put on the connection. You put the device in line, and things would noticeably slow down," said Ray Turilli, network services manager for ASA Tires Systems, which makes software tools used by tire distributors and automotive e-commerce companies. "But now that you have devices with multi-core processors, they can do their job without causing connection speed problems," he said. "I think it's definitely worse now to try to deal with all the individual applications on their own, so you have the combination of more powerful technology and ease of use as drivers for taking another look."

In addition to building applications for use by its customers, ASA also hosts the software programs for some of its clients, including e-mail and electronic point-of-sale systems. As part of that business, the company has also found itself recommending UTMs to some of companies seeking to alleviate performance problems brought on by the security technologies they've been using, Turilli said.

"Even our larger customers are getting the message, and we're noticing more and more customers in general coming to us and asking about the best way to handle these [security performance] issues," he said. "They may not even know what a UTM is coming in, but when they see what it can do, they're interested because the last thing these companies want is to be bogged down by security."

ASA is using UTM technology supplied by SonicWall, which has been marketing the appliances to SMBs for a number of years but has retooled its product lineup in recent months to focus more of its efforts on the enterprise.

In late February, the company, which helped establish the firewall market, launched its new E-class of UTM devices aimed specifically at larger enterprises.

"The whole UTM concept was probably guilty of being over-hyped several years ago, especially in the sense of moving into larger environments, but even those customers are moving away from older standalone firewall technologies to devices that offer deep packet inspection and other functions," said John Cuhn, director of marketing for SonicWall. "A lot of this shift is about the available technology today, now that there are vendors like us balancing the features across multiple processing cores instead of a single processor or an ASIC the traffic moving through the device can be handled a lot better," he said. "Now that [UTM] can offer the ability to do full inspection across all the security functions without hitting traffic, I think we'll see UTM being pulled into a lot of different devices and into more enterprises."

Rebranding unified threat management In addition to products that won't cripple performance once all their features have been turned on -- one of the most common complaints made about earlier integrated security appliances -- vendors are also attempting to lure larger customers by eschewing the UTM banner for their systems.

Crossbeam, identified as a leader in the UTM market by IDC researchers, recently announced that it is moving away from the product terminology because the name has a "connotation that is tied to low-end solutions" built for SMBs. The company is instead marketing its high-end UTMs under the wording of "next generation security platforms."

Even analysts at Gartner are now labeling the tools traditionally positioned as UTMs as "next-generation firewalls."

At Fortinet, another vendor of UTM and network security appliances, company officials admit that they are seeing a better response in selling the multi-purpose security gateways as "consolidated security devices" when it comes to larger customers.

"Ultimately, people generally seem more confident today in the UTM-like approach, but the label has a bit of a distaste attached to it, so it works better to play up consolidation," said Anthony James, vice president of product management at Fortinet. "I think it's a bit of a misnomer, based mostly on the fact that the SMB is where UTM took off first, and the appeal is pretty much the same, but using the alternative positioning does seem to be accelerating interest with larger customers."

James also concedes that the UTM products of today are far more appropriate for use in massive computing environments than some of their forbearers.

A more significant concern for companies in the UTM space than re-educating customers around just what the products bring to the table is likely the competition that independent network security device makers face from giant rivals like Cisco Systems that are pushing aggressively into the space, some experts contend.

However, James said that it has yet to be proven that customers ultimately will be pushed to buy more of the security tools from such networking specialists, who he said are still struggling to piece together all the different elements of the products that they have acquired in recent years.

Any attempt to understand the promise of UTM in the enterprise, and any discussion of the technology in general, leads back to Charles Kolodgy, the IDC analyst credited with coining the term itself.

Kolodgy disputes the notion that UTM was ever truly considered a "dirty word" among enterprises and said that earlier products simply weren't architected to appeal to administrators of larger IT environments. Like many other IT trends, the UTM concept took something of a beating because it was over-hyped by the media and used by a large number of security companies selling different types of products under the name.

"I never saw it as a dirty word, it was more of a case of some perhaps putting too much into it, some that were too narrow, those were the initial complaints vendors," Kolodgy said. "The initial use cases and deployments were mostly fine; I think any negativity was related more to vendors using the term a lot and misconceptions of what these devices were supposed to entail."

The analyst said that today's UTM vendors, Fortinet and SonicWall in particular, have created UTM devices that should appeal to larger customers because they have the capability to handle more traffic and offer benefits from consolidation among the onboard security applications.

"[Consolidation] is one of the big drivers now, more people than ever are talking about reducing the number of vendors they have and the need for centralized management," Kolodgy said. "As much as the products getting better, those items are driving this renewed interest as much as anything."

Promises, promises. When a new mobile phone appears on the market or a new wireless standard emerges, the pundits and prognosticators chime in about all the game-changing possibilities.

WiMax will change the world! Apple's iPhone is the second coming of portable gadgets!

Yet, in the daily grind of computing, we just need to get our jobs done. We'll believe the promise of a new technology if it really does solve a nagging problem.

Consider this the companion piece to my earlier article, "10 broken technology ideas -- and how to fix them": Six promising technologies and how they can actually deliver on the promise.

1. Light-as-air laptops I mentioned in the broken-technology writeup how ultramobile PCs and mobile internet devices aren't nearly as useful as a good smartphone.

Stepping up a bit in size to notebook PCs, we've come a long way from models like the massive Toshiba Protege from a few years ago -- the one with a 17-in. display. (It was touted as a "desktop replacement," which even sounds heavy.)

And even the popular Dell Latitude models from not so long ago were heavy enough -- at about five or six pounds -- that they weren't exceptionally mobile.

But smaller, more recent offerings such as the ultraportable Asus EEE aren't getting it right either. Sure, it's light, but it's not packed with many of the features we've come to expect on our portable computers.

But the new MacBook Air and the ThinkPad X300 really are game-changing, even though many reviews of the MacBook Air haven't been all that positive.

A 3-pound laptop with a big screen is really the ultimate goal, and both Apple and Lenovo achieved it. (I also like the Sony Vaio SZ, even though it weighs 4 lb. and the "profile" measures 1 in.) So, what's so promising? As laptops get lighter, you'll be more likely to grab one and go -- at home, at work, and anywhere.

Soon, more light-as-a-feather laptops packed with features will finally get it completely right, which means they won't stay on the desktop for very long -- and the desktop PC might not exist for long, either.

2. Mobile broadband in laptops I had an interesting conversation with a Verizon spokesperson about three years ago. The marketing rep told me that I had it wrong: Mobile broadband was not intended as a Wi-Fi competitor. Oh no, it's merely another option for the mobile user.

Yet, as WWAN (wireless wide-area network) capability is more widely available as a standard on notebooks, the connection speed approaches or exceeds 2Mbps, and the data signal becomes ubiquitous even in rural areas, WWAN will encroach into and possibly take over the 802.11 market. That's a good thing, especially if you have tried to connect to a hot spot in a crowded airport, from a parking lot in a shopping mall, or in a small town where they think a hot spot is a popular hangout.

WWAN is also gaining because WiMax is just not happening as fast as everyone thought it would. Case in point: The Lenovo X300 I mentioned earlier comes with Wi-Fi (of course) and WWAN (thankfully) but also has the chip set for WiMax, even though there is no actual service available. One is a lessening reality, one is a promise, and one is a letdown.

3. Wireless USB In-Stat estimates that 21 million wireless USB (also known as ultrawideband) devices will ship this year. Now that's promising! The reason: We're all getting strangled by too many USB wires -- such as for digital cameras, printers, fax machines, scanners, and external drives. I'm looking at eight cables at my desk right now.

There are just too many USB devices out there. There are USB toy rocket launchers, coffee-cup warmers, and even one for doing pottery. WUSB completely eliminates this entanglement. The only catch is that most recent products from Belkin and IO Gear require that you install a driver, so it's more complicated than just plugging in a wire.

Fortunately, as the wireless protocol becomes more common -- guess what? It's built into that Lenovo X300 I've mentioned for the third time now -- you won't have to install drivers.

4. PC home theaters Here's the biggest promise of the past 10 years, one that has failed again and again as consumers have become confused by the connections and lack of interoperability among consumer electronics gear and computers. Besides, no one has invented a keyboard and mouse you can actually use comfortably on a sofa.

But the time is coming -- maybe this year, or next -- when a PC finally establishes a permanent place in the living room. It will only happen when a home-theater PC starts looking like it belongs there. The round, glossy, stylish Sony Vaio VGX-TP25E/B is a step in the right direction. I like where Denon is going with the AVR-5308CI -- it's not actually a home-theater PC, but it accepts wireless media streams and looks like a receiver.

Also, the Onkyo APX-2 is a big step forward. It's a PC aimed at audiophiles that uses Pure Audio technology to bypass Windows Vista's poor audio handling. The APX-2 is for audio only and -- alas -- Japan only, but it points to a promising home-entertainment trend.

5. Robotic appliances Today, the leading robotics company -- iRobot, based near Boston and one of the best companies to come out of MIT in the past 20 years -- has sold about 2.5 million robots to date. Its popular Roomba vacuum cleaner is a miracle of engineering when you consider it can clean under your bed or behind a corner hutch with ease.

Yet, 2.5 million robotic appliances equals about 1 percent of the U.S. population. But iRobot is on a rampage lately, introducing pool- and gutter-cleaning robots that work just as well as the Roomba. And, yes, robots were supposed to be doing all of our housework by now, so this promise has a long legacy of underdelivering.

The real reason robots will finally transform from cute pets (like the Pleo robot dinosaur) to useful aids has to do with a groundswell of dedicated amateurs who finally have the tools they need, such as Microsoft Robotic Studio, to make their own creations. There's no telling what a couple of guys in a garage can come up with -- just remember Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

6. GPS on a cell phone The BlackBerry 8820 and Nokia N95 are two incredibly popular smart phones that just happen to have built-in Global Positioning System receivers. This makes them game-changing in ways that the iPhone is not, even though the iPhone trumps them for music, movies, Web, and many other functions.

GPS on a cell phone works quite well -- I used the 8820 in Boston recently and never even looked at a map. GPS doesn't drain the battery as much as Wi-Fi. The voice prompts work just as well as an in-car navigation system, and the maps look clear and bright on the screen (brighter and clearer than some dedicated GPS handhelds).

But here's the killer feature: When GPS is built into the device you use all day anyway, you start relying on it even more. I use one to go for walks (it can measure speed and distance) and even find my way to meetings in a large building (for example, by heading northwest to a corner office). I previously wrote about some other uses for GPS.

If you have some promising ideas of your own in mind or disagree with my choices, please weigh in below in the article comments section -- we'd love to hear what you think (as this blog post points out).

John Brandon is a freelance writer and book author who worked as an IT manager for 10 years.