No matter where in the world the President travels, if he flies in an Air Force jet, the plane is called Air Force One. Technically, Air Force One is the call sign of any Air Force aircraft carrying the President. In practice, however, Air Force One is used to refer to one of two highly customized Boeing 747-200B series aircraft, which carry the tail codes 28000 and 29000. The Air Force designation for the aircraft is VC-25A.
Air Force One is one of the most recognizable symbols of the presidency, spawning countless references not just in American culture but across the world. Emblazoned with the words “United States of America,” the American flag, and the Seal of the President of the United States, it is an undeniable presence wherever it flies or docks.
Capable of refueling midair, Air Force One has unlimited range and can carry the President wherever he needs to travel. The onboard electronics are hardened to protect against an electromagnetic pulse, and Air Force One is equipped with advanced secure communications equipment, allowing the aircraft to function as a mobile command center in the event of an attack on the United States.
Inside, the President and his travel companions enjoy 4,000 square feet of floor space on three levels, including an extensive suite for the President that features a large office, lavatory, and conference room. Air Force One includes a medical suite that can function as an operating room, and a doctor is permanently on board. The plane’s two food preparation galleys can feed 100 people at a time.
Air Force One also has quarters for those who accompany the President, including senior advisors, Secret Service officers, traveling press, and other guests. Several cargo planes typically fly ahead of Air Force One to provide the President with services needed in remote locations.
Air Force One is maintained and operated by the Presidential Airlift Group, part of the White House Military Office. The Airlift Group was founded in 1944 as the Presidential Pilot Office at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For the next 20 years, various propeller driven aircraft served the President. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy became the first President to fly in his own jet aircraft, a modified Boeing 707. Over the years, several other jet aircraft have been used, with the first of the current aircraft being delivered in 1990 during the administration of President George H. W. Bush.
Microsoft says it made an accounting error when it laid off some employees last month and now feels the best way to correct the error is with what will likely add up to a public relations blunder.
The software giant, which recently laid off 1,400 employees, sent letters this week to some of those former workers letting them know that their severance payouts were a bit too "generous" and respectfully requested that the former employees pay back that money, according to a report last week on TechCrunch.
"An inadvertent administrative error occurred that resulted in an overpayment in severance pay by Microsoft," the letter states. "We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you."
Microsoft told ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET that it was looking into the matter, but a Microsoft spokesman reportedly confirmed the authenticity of the letter to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, calling it a "private matter between the company and the affected people."
The company declined to specify how many of these letters were sent out, and it's unknown how much the overpayments total, but it did indicate that some laid off employees were also undercompensated.
The letter failed to provide an explanation for the accounting error but did manage to add--with underlined emphasis--a veiled threat of monetary punishment if the money wasn't repaid, at least in the form of a tax impact.
Feature phones, which are essentially low-end mobile phones without any smartphone features, are widely used in both established and emerging markets. OneApp will give users access to mobile applications most often found on smartphones, including social networking, messaging and banking apps.
Microsoft's OneApp is a mobile application meant for feature phones rather than smartphones. It allows the user to access several different applications for things like messaging, banking and social networking, all by putting a very lightweight client app on the phone and doing most of the heavy lifting using the carrier's servers.
OneApp takes a client/server approach to mobile apps. It has a lightweight client of about 150 Kb that sits on the user's feature phone. The server side will be deployed on wireless carriers' networks.
Wireless carriers offering OneApp will have the option of hosting it in Microsoft's Azure cloud service.
The apps are small -- about 30 Kb. Currently, there are 12 apps, including an RSS feed, mobile banking, Windows Live messenger, news, sports and stocks. More will be rolled out in the future, and Microsoft's carrier partners will decide which apps to make available to their customers.
OneApp dynamically launches the parts of an app that a person wants to use. The apps are updated automatically when the user turns on the phone.
Apps run between the phone and the server, so users don't have to download individual apps. OneApp is designed to minimize the load on phones and carrier networks, according to Microsoft.
OneApp runs on several Nokia (NYSE: NOK) phones, including E-series and N-Series models. It also runs on the Samsung U900 Soul and various Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERICY) models, including several models in the W series and the C510, C902 and C905.
Starting the Dance Card
Microsoft is launching OneApp in South Africa with wireless carrier Blue Label Telecom. OneApp is available through Blue Label's "mbili" service at no charge.
The tie-in with Blue Label comes as no surprise to Julien Blin, CEO and principal analyst of JBB Research, who has just written a report on the South African user-generated content market. "Microsoft owns 12 percent of Blue Label," he told TechNewsWorld.
OneApp will be launched in more countries within the next year, Microsoft said. However, it declined comment when approached by TechNewsWorld.
Still, its move into emerging markets could be lucrative. "Over 80 percent of the world's population of nearly 6.8 billion people reside outside of North America and Western Europe," Laura DiDio, principal at ITIC, pointed out.
"If Microsoft doesn't target the developing world, its competitors will," she told TechNewsWorld. "Microsoft is quite literally following the money."
The World Cup Card
The African wireless market could be especially rewarding because it is a fast-growing and underserved market, Blin said. "Sales to the African region will help offset the decline in developed markets such as Western Europe and North America, and Microsoft understands that Africa presents huge potential for them," he said.
That potential will be even bigger than normal through next year, when the World Cup soccer championships will be held in South Africa.
There are 50 million wireless subscribers in South Africa today, and the nation is Africa's second largest wireless market after Nigeria, which has 67 million subscribers, Blin said. He expects the mobile user-generated content market to grow, especially as the World Cup nears. Mobile user-generated content consists of mobile chat and mobile blogging, Blin said.
Clever Choice of Apps
With the strong emphasis on mobile chat and mobile blogs, Microsoft's selection of apps was strategically dictated.
For example, Windows Live Messenger, which is one of the apps offered in OneApp, may see growth. "OneApp should help drive the adoption of Windows Live Messenger," Blin said. However, that is not likely to pose a threat for MXit, the leading mobile Internet messaging service in South Africa today, he said. MXit has 12 million subscribers.
Microsoft's selection of Facebook was also a clever move. Facebook is the most mobile blogging service in South Africa, according to Blin.
Its choice of mobile banking is also a good one. "Mobile banking has the biggest growth potential in Africa ,as it fits the needs of most Africans, who don't have a bank account and who have low income," Blin said. "Mobile banking has become the next gold rush in Africa."
That gold rush is luring other large competitors to Microsoft, including Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) "Google is currently working with local content providers in South Africa to offer local content on its Android app store," Blin said. "Apple is likely to follow
At four minutes and 15 seconds, a public service announcement produced in Wales, UK, clocks in at an unusually long running time, as TV spots like this one go.
It's one thing to tell people not to text while driving; it's another to show them, in drawn-out and gory detail, the possible consequences of the action. A new PSA produced in the UK is drawing controversy for the lengths it goes to show the results of a dramatized texting-related accident. Some say it's over the top; other say its shock value is necessary to make an impact.
However, its length is not likely to be the reason why it sticks in viewers' minds. The video, produced by the Gwent Police Department to warn against the dangers of texting while driving, is a graphic, bloody dramatization of the aftermath of a car accident caused by texting while driving -- and some might say, over the top.
The video starts out with three teen girls driving a car, distracted by a text they are sending. They hit another car head-on, then are hit by a car that was following them, resulting in the apparent death of one of the girls. The drivers of the other cars are also seriously injured or worse -- as depicted by their young daughter in the back seat asking why mommy and daddy won't wake up. The rest of the video depicts the aftermath of any serious accident with bystanders and first responders racing to the scene and close ups of the fear, tears and blood of the survivors.
Banning the Practice
There is little doubt that texting while driving is dangerous -- critics of the practice liken it to driving while intoxicated; a stance supported by a number of studies. One of the more recent comes from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which found that truck drivers who texted while driving were 23 times more likely to have an accident.
While most jurisdictions have laws forbidding driving while distracted in general, a number of states have specifically banned the practice, including Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington and the District of Columbia. Several senators in Congress have a proposed a federal ban as well.
Laws, though, only curb user behavior by so much -- especially when it comes to things like using seatbelts, wearing bicycle helmets and not throwing litter out the window of a moving car. It may be difficult to remember now, but a few decades ago such behavior was common -- until, that is, public service announcements began to change people's behavior.
It is not surprising, then, that public safety advocates are focusing on texting while driving.
"These types of ads have a long history of working," David Johnson, principal of Strategic Vision told TechNewsWorld. Johnson has produced several PSAs, including one illustrating the dangers of meth abuse.
However there is a fine line between a hard-hitting but effective PSA, and one that has overreached, as the Welsh ad may have done.
"Eventually, a backlash will form against what you are trying to accomplish," Johnson said. "It makes people angry and they decide to do whatever the behavior is, just to 'show' you."
That is particularly so among teens and young adults, he added -- a constituency that appears to be the very target of the PSA in question.
PSAs that do work usually depict something that is "real," Johnson said -- for instance, a person who caused an accident while drunk and then is talking about the effect of the accident.
Larger Goal
With some careful thought, it is easy to produce an effective PSA, Tim O'Brien of O'Brien Communications told TechNewsWorld.
"The goal of many PSAs is to tap an emotional nerve to make a connection with the viewer. Because PSAs are usually centered on some issue related to the benefit of larger society, this is oftentimes achievable," he said.
However when PSAs depict extreme, violent situations, they run the risk of desensitizing the audience not only to the violence but also to the message, O'Brien said. "The third or fourth time the viewer sees the same PSA, the shock value is lost and the message becomes part of the media wallpaper."
Still, advocates of hard-hitting ads say they are necessary to get a message heard through the larger marketing din.
"With the overall saturation of ads, sometimes the only way consumers will listen is if they are hit upside the head with a message which makes them pause and take notice," Robb Hecht, principal with IMC Strategy, told TechNewsWorld.
"We should applaud the campaign, for although it may come across as bloody, it's better for consumers to see visually what could become of them" if they try to text while drive, he said.
Symantec is providing a fix for customers who got error messages after a patch deployment went awry for some Norton users, the company said on Tuesday.
This is the error message users got after the Norton patch failed to install properly.
The problem started last Wednesday when Symantec deployed patches for Norton AntiVirus 2009, Norton Internet Security 2009, and Norton 360 v3 via LiveUpdate. Some customers received error messages saying that there was a problem with the Symantec Service Framework.
The patch, which is supposed to communicate with the hardware to ensure that it is correctly installed, did not handle the response from the hardware properly after it was installed, a company spokeswoman said.
The problem affected a small number of users, or fewer than 1 percent, and most of the customers reporting a problem are using PCs that have been specially configured or customized and are not "out-of-the-box" PCs and "only after reboot," the spokeswoman said.
There were more than 630 messages on the Norton user forum about the topic, a number of which expressed frustration with Symantec and accused the company of not doing enough to keep customers informed about the problem.
"This is insane. I'm looking for other antivirus options now and will soon remove Norton from all three of my machines. Next I'm going to post a review on Epinions advising others to stay far away," wrote one user. "This is garbage and I've had more than enough."
Another user wrote: "Well I just used the Norton Removal Tool for likely the last time. When the browser window with the Norton reinstallation instructions popped up, I chuckled as I closed it out and navigated to a competitor site were I promptly downloaded another AV product."
The company first learned of the problem from posts to the forum last Wednesday and posted messages the next day saying it was investigating the problem. It then provided an official response on Friday saying the problem had been identified, according to the spokeswoman. The fix was posted on Symantec's knowledge base and the forum on Saturday, she said.
Symantec also set up a link on Tuesday through Microsoft WinQual to help users locate a fix and will make the fix available to customers automatically via LiveUpdate this week, according to the spokeswoman.
The problem comes less than six months after Symantec released a diagnostic patch for some of its older Norton products that did not identify its origin and thus triggered alerts on firewalls. The company blamed human error for the release of the unsigned patch, a program dubbed "PFST.exe."
I have seen the future of toys, and it is augmented reality.
That was my conclusion Monday after seeing Mattel's i-Tags, new technology that will be included with action figures the company will make for "Titanic" director James Cameron's new film, "Avatar."
For those not familiar with augmented reality, it's an overlay of digital information or imagery on top of real-world objects. AR, as it's known, "is a field of computer research that deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time," according to Wikipedia.
Or, as Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Needham & Company in New York called it, AR is "jet fuel for the imagination."
In the case of the "Avatar" action figures, AR is being implemented in the form of small plastic cards--the i-Tags--that kids can hold up in front of any Webcam. When they do, a fully 3D digital image is superimposed over the card on the screen. This can be anything from a simple set of information about a character from the film to a full-on, five-on-five shooting battle involving large military helicopters and flying dinosaur-like creatures called Leonopteryx.
The i-Tags, along with the "Avatar" action figures they're based on, will be released in October in advance of the December 18 release of Cameron's film.
There are five levels of i-TAGs, each of which corresponds to a specific level of interactivity with the AR. At level one--which will cost $8.95 per toy--kids who hold the card up to their Webcam will see some information on their computer screen about the character. At higher levels, though, they'll be able to "push" buttons on the card, allowing them to manipulate the digital character or vehicle that pops up.
While AR is beginning to show up in many arenas, from video games to movie advertising to baseball cards to exploratory toys, Mattel said that the i-Tag is the first-ever retail toy implementation of the technology.
And let's be honest about Mattel's implementation: it's cool, if fairly limited. At its best, two kids with Level 5 i-TAGs could put their "Battle Packs" to the test and watch as five warriors pop up on both sides of the screen and proceed to battle it out in, seemingly right in front of the kids.
And to be sure, for a 6-year-old, or even a 10-year-old, this could be pretty exciting. But I'm willing to bet a 15-year-old is going to get the maximum out of this system pretty quickly.
Augmented reality has already made it to some markets, as in the case of Topps baseball cards. The Topps implementation was also done by Total Immersion, which is behind the technology in the Mattel i-Tags.
(Credit: Topps)
But to me, this isn't about today. This is about what's coming down the line, and what i-Tags and augmented reality making it to the retail market now means for the future of toys. And that's because this, as first-generation technology, is just scratching the surface of what's going to be possible in a year or two when growing public awareness of AR meets lower R&D costs and motivates developers the world over to see what's possible with this new medium.
"It's a very important thing, because the evolution of toys has been about solitary action," McGowan said. "We've had Web sites that interact with toys, but we've been missing the feedback with the toy...We've seen interactive toys 1.0, but nothing that goes back to the toy. I think augmented reality is creating a loop that makes two plus two equal five."
Think about it. The possibilities are just about endless, and could mean a whole new life for the kinds of toys that kids at first play with a lot, and then quickly abandon. By embedding special software in imagery that can be placed just about anywhere on a toy, toy makers will now have an incredibly wide range of virtual things to add to their physical toys.
Whether it's battling aliens or dancing dolls or branded pets, the sky's pretty much the limit for what could be done with AR and toys. And it's not about Mattel at all. Or at least not entirely about Mattel. It's really about the entire toy industry and the imaginative ways that toy designers figure out to build AR into their creations.
Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that, assuming the market is proved out quickly, the only limitations to how to deploy AR in or with toys could be what toy makers can think of.
Instructions on the side of an augmented-reality-embedded toy from Mattel's 'Avatar' collection.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)
To McGowan, there really is no limit to what can happen with this technology, but he thinks that it's important that a company like Mattel is taking the step of introducing AR to the market. Yet he also applauds the company for being subtle about AR in its marketing. In part, that's because of the state of the economy.
"Mattel is being smart, and downplaying" AR, McGowan said. "They're not trumpeting it as the hottest thing. They're not saying it's going to set the toy industry on fire. Why set it up that way?"
Yet this is extremely new technology and, so far at least, people don't seem to be putting a lot of energy into embedding AR into toys. Which isn't, of course to say that the technology won't be the next big thing.
McGowan believes there isn't any corner of the toy industry that won't benefit from new technologies like this, whether it's dolls or airplanes or anything else.
"With the concept of play, going back to the stone ages, kids emulate what they see in the world, and emulate what they see adults doing," he said. "It's their imagination that makes things real. And that imagination can be augmented...Every kid has always taken a little paper airplane and imagined they've been flying through the sky. Now that can happen a lot more realistically."
Sony on Tuesday announced its first e-book reader with built-in wireless capability. The new Reader Daily Edition offers an integrated 3G wireless connection, allowing it to access Sony's online bookstore as well as yet-to-be-announced newspaper and magazine subscriptions. The unit--which boasts a 7-inch touch screen (displayable in portrait or landscape mode)--will sell for $399 when it debuts in December. Wireless service is provided by AT&T with no direct charge to the customer.
The Reader Daily Edition joins the already announced Touch Edition PRS-600 ($299) and Pocket Edition PRS-300 ($199), both of which should be available within the next couple of weeks. With the exception of the wireless connection and larger screen, the specs of the Reader Daily Edition are otherwise in line with that of the Touch Edition: it offers an E Ink Vizplex electronic paper screen with 16 shades of gray.
Sony used the launch event at the New York Public Library to highlight some notable new features of its e-book platform. Most notable is the expansion of support for library loans to the Sony Readers. If your local library supports electronic lending, members will be able to download the borrowed books and transfer them to the Reader for 21 days (after which the files expire). Sony is partnering with Overdrive.com to make it easier to search for available books at participating libraries.
Also of note is the launch of version 3.0 of Sony's eBook Library software, which now offers support for Macs (as well as Windows). The software is used to move purchased files (as well as other supported content, such as a PDF and Epub files) from the computer to the Reader. (While supported, the PC step won't be required for the Reader Daily Edition, which can access online content directly.)
Sony also highlighted its new "open" Epub format, which the company is moving to from its former proprietary BBeB format. While the Epub books at Sony's store will still be encoded with DRM, it will allow the Sony Reader to also work with files purchased from BooksOnBoard, NetGalley, Powells.com, and any other retailer that adopts the Adobe-backed standard. (Notably, that does not include Amazon (which has its own proprietary Kindle standard) nor Barnes & Noble (which is working on its own Epub flavor for its forthcoming Plastic Logic reader).
Companies can spend money fixing coding errors or invest millions in the latest and greatest security technologies, but still leave the business at risk to a major security breach if employees aren't properly trained and appropriate policies aren't set and enforced. he biggest mistake leading to a data security breach is often pinpointed by investigators as a fundamental security error, according to a panel of experts who discussed the topic of data breaches Wednesday. The panel discussion, sponsored by security vendor, Bit9 Inc., included Bob Russo, general manager of the PCI Security Standards Council, Rich Baich, partner at Deloitte and Touche and former CISO of ChoicePoint and Tom Murphy, chief strategist of data protection vendor, Bit9.
"As an industry we look for exceptions and look for holes, but we end up focusing on holes so much that we don't pay attention to the foundation," Murphy said. "We need to build that foundation of security across all infrastructure."
Data security breaches have come back to the forefront this week with the federal grand jury indictment of a Miami man and Two Russian hackers for their alleged role in pulling off the biggest data security breach in U.S. history. More than 130 million credit and debit cards were stolen from Heartland Payment Systems Inc., Hannaford Brothers Co., 7-Eleven Inc. and two unnamed companies. While the breach, which according to the indictment, involved a SQL injection attack, the expert panelists warned that simple employee mistakes often lead to data leakage.
"The weakest link in the chain is and always has been the people," Russo said. "While malware and exploits tend to get creative, the way they get introduced into the network is really not so creative."
Deloitte's Baich, who served as CISO of ChoicePoint when a breach in 2004 exposed the personal data of 145,000 people, said the apparent rise in breaches is likely associated with the increase in breach notification laws and an increased vigilance of security teams. ChoicePoint's breach may never had been known if it wasn't for California's landmark Security Breach Information Act, SB 1386.
The lesson learned from the ChoicePoint breach and many others since, is to keep an eye on how breaches are occurring, Baich said. In the case of ChoicePoint, someone beat the company's credential verification process and set up phony accounts to pilfer thousands of records.
"It's not just traditional technology and hacking," he said. "Individuals can and will circumvent the business process … No matter how much money and effort could be spent, it wasn't going to mitigate the risk associated with someone potentially being able to do the same thing in the future."
The company ended up exiting the $20 million business it created, Baich said.
Still, it was ChoicePoint's fraud detection systems that discovered an anomaly and in the case of later breaches, companies could have avoid problems and caught cybercriminals in the act if they just paid attention to their logs, Russo said.
"People are concerned with running their business and making a profit and doing what they need to do and security, unfortunately, often takes a back seat," Russo said. "All of the stuff we're seeing out there is generally captured in the logs."
Russo believes the minimum standards outlined by PCI help companies get their security programs in check, but he pointed out that compliance and security are two different things.
" I don't' think there's ever going to be a silver bullet," Russo said. "Our standards are quite prescriptive and a lot of people use it as a springboard … an opportunity to get security as the foundation of everything they do … but It's about security, not about compliance."
The panelists called on companies to tap into the wealth of security information in the form of guidance documents put together by special interest groups in specific technical areas. Don't just have a security policy and process documentation, but enforce it and educate end users about it, the y said. Murphy touted his company's application whitelisting approach, which enables IT to set clear policy on what employees can download and install on their machines. If an application is not on an approved list, then it is not allowed to run, he said.
"It takes away some of burden and ambiguity over whether something is in policy and out of policy and puts to work stuff that people struggle with – how to educate people to let them know what's allowed and what's not allowed," Murphy said.
WASHINGTON – Nearly half of US employers research the online profiles of job candidates on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn, according to a new survey.
Forty-five percent of the employers surveyed for CareerBuilder.com, the largest US online job site, said they use social networking sites to check on job candidates, up from just 22 percent in a survey conducted last year.
Another 11 percent said they plan to start using social networking sites for screening.
"As social networking grows increasingly pervasive, more employers are utilizing these sites to screen potential employees," CareerBuilder said in a statement.
It said job seekers should "be mindful of the information they post online."
CareerBuilder said that of those who conduct online searches as background checks on job candidates, 29 percent use Facebook, 26 percent use LinkedIn and 21 percent use MySpace.
Eleven percent search blogs while seven percent follow candidates on micro-blogging service Twitter.
Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they have found content on a social network that caused them not to hire a candidate, CareerBuilder said.
Examples included "provocative or inappropriate photographs or information" or content about drinking or using drugs.
Other reasons cited were badmouthing a previous employer, co-workers or clients, poor communication skills, making discriminatory comments, lying about qualifications or sharing confidential information from a previous employer.
Information found on social networking profiles was not always a negative factor in finding a job.
Eighteen percent of employers said they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate, CareerBuilder said.
Some profiles "provided a good feel for the candidate?s personality" or supported their professional qualifications while others demonstrated creativity or solid communication skills.
Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, recommended that candidates "clean up digital dirt" before beginning a job search by removing photos, content and links which could hurt their chances.
The survey of 2,667 hiring managers and human resource professionals was conducted by Harris Interactive between May 22 and June 10. It has a sampling error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points.
Symantec has unveiled a list of 100 "worst of the worst" websites, nearly half of which used porn to lure people to pages booby trapped with viruses.
The US computer security titan's list of "Dirtiest Web Sites" discovered in recent months included names such as firstsexyteen, schoolbad, and cheatsarchive.
Videogame players sometimes search online for "cheats," software secrets that let them change game play.
While 48 percent of the websites on the list featured adult content, the remaining tainted online locales ran a gamut of topics including deer hunting, catering, figure skating, legal services, and retail electronics.
People visiting the websites face risks of having their computers infected with malicious software that could mine personal data or give cybercriminals control of machines, according to Symantec.
"There has been exponential growth in the number of online threats that are constantly evolving as cybercriminals look for new ways to target your money, identity or assets," said Symantec consumer business unit senior vice president Rowan Trollope on Thursday.
"Armed with this information, consumers are empowered to make informed decisions about which sites to visit."
Websites that made Symantec's "dirtiest" list were crammed with "staggering" numbers of virus threats, according to Trollope.
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