Morin shrugged the question off saying simply “It’s pretty interesting. We’ve made some pretty interesting commitments to openness as well.” Not to cut off the chances of Facebook joining the project in the future, Morin followed by saying that Facebook would continue to “evaluate OpenSocial and Facebook’s potential place in it.” Audience members let out a few sighs and Morin ended the Q&A session immediately.

An audience member in the back called Morin out on preaching openness despite the fact Facebook is one of the largest social networks not a part of OpenSocial, an initiative that was designed to compete with Facebook’s system by letting user data cross-pollinate between sites and services using a single API.

Coming back to what Morin said about OpenSocial, I honestly don’t expect Facebook to join the newly created OpenSocial Foundation or movement anytime soon. The company has a very powerful upcoming strategy of letting people spend money quickly and easily with micropayments (a la iTunes), and spreading the Facebook’s presence internationally with the help of users who are willing to do the work for them when it comes to translation.

So what’s next for the platform? Commerce. More specifically, integrating a payment system into the developer tools so application developers would be able to get cash from users instead of just advertisers. Morin says the tools will be in the hands of developers within the next two quarters. Facebook users have already been christened into the idea of giving Facebook money with its first-party gifts service, which lets users spend real world money on virtual gifts friends can display on their walls. The service represents a very early play on what developers would be able to do with their applications using upcoming commerce tools.

Also in the works is application localization for different countries. Facebook’s grand scheme is to use specialized markup tags to let users localize applications by language without having to do any of the translation themselves. The result would be making one application work in every country Facebook can be found. The company has already been using a similar system on its own international sites by having users do the heavy lifting when it comes to translation. Morin didn’t give a time frame on this feature, but noted that it would come later on.

There was a strange moment this afternoon at the Snap Summit 2.0 in San Francisco. Dave Morin, Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager was fielding some audience questions after spending the better part of an hour giving a very broad overview of Facebook’s development efforts to a room full of mostly developers. For many, the event was the highlight of the day in a conference whose very promotional materials were made to emulate the look of a Facebook profile page.

Opening up Facebook user to data, or giving up the system that’s clearly been working very well isn’t in the company’s interest at the moment. In the meantime it’s worth watching developers of both platforms closely, as they’ve got two big platforms to launch applications, and the opportunity to attract users and make money is only getting bigger.

There is another site called SeatGuru.com which lets you view the seating on specific airplanes so you can avoid being in the exit aisle or last row, but it doesn’t offer all the other features InsideTrip.com does.

There’s a fun little visual itinerary bar for the flights too, that allows you to get more details on a flight, say arrival time, by hovering the mouse over it.

The site offers up a Trip Quality Rating and assigns a rating, on a 100-point scale, based on how many of the criteria are met. You can customize the criteria if you don’t care about certain things, like aircraft type or aircraft age, and those factors won’t be weighed in the results.

As I sat in the back row on a cross-country US Airways flight a few nights ago, with the engine roaring outside the window, the bathroom directly behind me stinking, and unable recline my seat at all, I wondered how I could have avoided the unfortunate situation I was in.

(Credit:
InsideTrip.com)

Help is on the way in the form of InsideTrip.com, which launches in beta on Tuesday. The site not only includes JetBlue and Virgin America in its flight results, but it offers an interesting way to help you figure out the best flight taking into consideration things other than price.

I’ll definitely give InsiderTrip.com a try before I fly again. But price will still be the biggest factor, unless of course, it’s a work trip.

For instance, it factors in number of stops, duration, and on-time statistics about the flights, as well as what the security wait time may be, how much legroom you would have, and what percentage of seats are filled. It also looks at how the flights rank for lost bags, where the gate location is, and how long you have to connect to the next flight. That would have been handy for me to know as I had to run to catch my connecting flight to San Francisco across what seemed like the entire Phoenix airport.

Most of the time, these user revolts never really go away. Sexism on MetaFilter, for example, remains controversial. “I have enemies on MetaFilter,” West explained and said that she’d made a promise to change her MetaFilter username to the racy slang term “cooter” if the site went a month without any “I’d hit it” remarks. “That’s been in place since November and I’m not worried,” she said.

Trapani’s account of a user revolt was a bit different; she talked about what happened when a toiled company bought ad space on Lifehacker. “Their ad campaign involved butts. Smiling butts,” Trapani said bluntly, and said that she received several dozen e-mails from readers who weren’t particularly happy about seeing, um, naked behinds. Many were concerned about what might happen if the ads showed up at the workplace or if readers’ children happened to be within viewing distance.

Finally, there are “high-profile people claiming to speak for a larger community in a public forum,” like the open letter that a small group of Digg users posted to criticize new changes to the site and ultimately was part of the reason why executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose kicked off a series of “town hall” discussions with users. Alternately, there’s the controversy over Facebook’s Beacon advertisements that resulted in loads of high-profile press on behalf of liberal activist group MoveOn.org but ultimately flew under the radar of many of the huge social network’s users.

The overall gist of the panel seemed to indicate that user revolts can be extremely annoying and difficult to manage, but ultimately an important part of a social-media site’s evolution. Dwsigalski said the CopyBot controversy “led to greater transparency from the company to the community because people were demanding to know how changes impacted the (Second Life) economy.”

“We have this kind of hippie trust thing going on,” Jessamyn West said of MetaFilter, a moderated group blog with 35,000 users that lets anyone contribute for a $5 registration fee. Since the community is overwhelmingly made up of young white males, sexism issues have become high-profile, from “I’d hit it” remarks about pictures of female users to more serious harassment issues that have caused some users to ditch the site entirely. “I wake up every morning and I tell boys on the Internet to stop calling each other names,” West joked.

“Second Life is kind of built for user revolts,” Dzwigalski said, explaining that there are all kinds of rebellions in the virtual world, but that the most visible are the ideology-fueled demands like the “revolts” that took place in 2003 when Linden Labs attempted to tax Second Life users and the 2006 controversies over a piece of software called CopyBot in which many in-world retailers shut down their businesses for a day.

Such was the theme of the discussion at a South by Southwest Interactive panel on Saturday afternoon called “Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting.”

Then discussion of the “smiling butts” started to overtake comment threads, and Trapani finally negotiated to have the ads removed from Lifehacker–though they remained on Gawker Media’s racier sites. “We didn’t feel good about mooning our readers all day long,” Trapani commented.

“What happens when people on a social network or who are part of some kind of Web service become disgruntled or pissed off with the people who are running that service, and how can they make themselves heard in a way that is effective and nondestructive?” Newitz asked semi-rhetorically. The hour-long panel aimed to touch upon both how users can effectively mobilize and how online community organizers can deal with it. Ultimately, it focused primarily on the latter.

Newitz explained that there are at least three very separate kinds of users revolts on social-media sites. First, she said, there are “anarchist-style pranks” like the one she once rigged on social news site Digg as fodder for a Wired magazine story. “I wanted to find out if I could buy votes on Digg and get something really stupid on the front page,” she related, talking about how she paid a shady company to power a fake blog she created to the front page of Digg “to show how easy it would be to buy votes on Digg.”

The all-female panel (a rarity in the tech world!) was moderated by Annalee Newitz, editor of the Gawker Media-owned science fiction blog IO9.com, and consisted of Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, Gina Trapani of fellow Gawker Media blog Lifehacker, and Jeska Dzwigalski of Linden Labs, creator of virtual world Second Life.

AUSTIN, Texas–If you run a social media site, from a blog to a virtual world to a network like Facebook, you’re going to have to deal with angry users, and that’s a fact of life.

She also talked about “grassroots rebellions,” like the mass chaos that ensued when Digg users posted the crack key for high-definition DVDs’ digital rights management technology and the site’s executives pulled it down. They then retracted their decision in the wake of user protests that crippled the site’s servers. “I would call that a genuine grassroots result,” Newitz said.

Discussion briefly touched the debate surrounding the Anonymous hacker group, which has used many social media sites to promote an agenda critical of Scientology. West talked about that sort of debate on MetaFilter, and said that debate was welcome but that zealots who couldn’t talk about anything else were not. “We had Tom Cruise’s lawyers after once us,” she said.

There are more than 3,000 programs or databases in the federal government that hold personal information–Social Security numbers, addresses, fingerprints, and so on–yet the government is only beginning to develop a plan for collecting, protecting, and using such information.

“You have a lot of duplication of data” among various agencies, said Duane Blackburn, a policy analyst in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Moreover, he said, privacy controls and security measures vary from agency to agency.

At a forum here Tuesday hosted by the Information Technology Association of America, representatives from the federal government and the tech industry discussed how the government conducts identity authentication–either for federal employees or regular citizens–and how it can improve.

Blackburn helped establish an Identity Management Task Force that examined the government’s current identity management architecture and how to consolidate the personal information collected.

Chartered by the National Science and Technology Council’s subcommittee on biometrics and identity management, the task force released a report (PDF) in September. The report offers a set of recommendations, including possibly creating a position within the executive branch that would be responsible for coordinating identification management across all agencies.

Blackburn said the report presents “a vision–it’s not a policy.”

The task force’s report–the first of its kind–was produced after a six-month analysis of information management across all departments and agencies.

This image represents the vision of a federated ‘network of networks’ laid out in the Identity Management Task Force’s recent report.

(Credit: Office of Science and Technology Policy)

The government’s current IT architecture consists of standalone repositories, many of which duplicate what is dubbed PII, or personally identifiable information.

“As such, differences exist in the ways the same PII and other information are retained, portrayed, weighted, and valued across the total data architecture,” the report says. “Further, the existence of these duplicative and nonstandard data increases opportunity for data exploitation and unauthorized access.”

To address those weaknesses, the task force presented the idea of a federated “network of networks,” with cross-organizational and cross-domain interoperability. The task force breaks down PII into two categories: “basic information” and application-specific data. The architecture laid out by the task force would support the basic information, but not application specific data.

An agency, such as the Defense Department, would retain application-specific data (such as a special clearance) itself and would not share it across the network. However, it could access basic information–now often duplicated across agencies–in the supported data stores using a predefined querying process.

There will always be privacy concerns when personally identifiable information is being collected, the task force acknowledges. The “basic information” about an individual would be supported by the network, conceivably accessible to any government agency.

Blackburn maintained, however, that such information would be more secure with standardized privacy stipulations and methods of access. He also reiterated that information required for specific applications would only be accessible to the relevant agencies.

“It cannot be emphasized enough that this centralized data store approach is NOT being recommended,” the report says. “The applications supported by this architecture will be enormously diverse, as will the nature of the content-specific data they use and retain. At the same time, the scale of the object architecture will be global and massive, as needed to support the full range of federal government activities and enrolled participants.”

To approach this vision, the task force recommends tackling a number of issues, such as standards and guidelines that would have to be in place to support a federated network, the appropriate technologies to use, and how to best coordinate interagency efforts.

Blackburn said the task force stayed away from policy prescriptions because “if you try to specify that now, you run the risk of someone trying to do it now when it’s not fully thought through–you run the risk of these recommendations being politicized.”

Government agencies will face a test in the development of coordinated authentication programs on October 27, when every federal employee and contractor is expected to have a government “smart card,” as required by a presidential directive.

With no common authentication system within the federal government, employees currently may have four or five credentials to gain access to various buildings and may only be expected to flash those credentials at a security guard. By contrast, the smart cards will be equipped with microchips, will hold biometric data like fingerprints, and will eliminate the need for multiple credentials.

“If you don’t use the cards to change the way you do business, we have all wasted a lot of effort and money to produce cards people stick in their desk,” warned Mary Dixon, director of the defense manpower data center for the Defense Department.

Microsoft and the Attorney General’s office in Washington state said on Monday they have filed a handful of lawsuits over pop-up ads that scare consumers into paying for software that supposedly fixes critical errors on a PC.

The lawsuit filed by the Attorney General’s office alleges a Texas firm sent incessant pop-up ads that falsely claimed the computer had critical errors in its registry and directed people to a Web site where they could download free scanning software to find the problems.

This is an example of the pop-up that consumers received from a Texas firm sued for allegedly spreading "scareware."

(Credit:
Washington Attorney General's office)

The software then reports 43 critical problems and offers to sell a fix for $39.95. However, the software, dubbed “Registry Cleaner XP,” does nothing but lull the consumer into a false sense of security, officials said.

It’s a “blatant rip off of consumers,” Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna said in a news conference. Consumers were “duped into downloading a fake scan (of the computer) and then duped into paying for software they don’t need.”

The pop-ups take advantage of a function called Windows Messenger (not to be confused with Microsoft’s instant-messaging program Windows Live messenger) that was designed to allow network administrators to send alerts to Windows PCs on a network. The functionality was turned off in Windows XP Service Pack 2, said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement Team.

The messages often would be displayed repeatedly, with one IP address receiving more than 200 in one day, the complaint alleges.

That lawsuit, which includes claims of misrepresentation, harassment, and high pressure sales, names as defendants Texas companies Alpha Red and Branch Software, and their owner James Reed McCreary. McCreary did not return a call seeking comment.

Microsoft filed five new lawsuits and amended two previous complaints against SMP Soft and Registry Update, all relating to programs that allegedly falsely alert consumers to problems on their computers and offer to sell software fixes. The programs listed include Scan & Repair, Antivirus 2009, MalwareCore, WinDefenderXPDefender.com and WinSpywareProtect. Most of the defendants are listed as “John Doe” because investigators do not yet know the identities of the people behind the programs.

The lawsuits were enabled by a broadening of Washington’s Computer Spyware Act, which was amended earlier this year to outlaw misrepresentation of the source of a message to a computer user in order to scare the person into installing software.

Consumers can file complaints on their own, officials said. Meanwhile, the defendants face penalties of up to $2,000 per violation plus restitution and attorney fees.

Microsoft has brought 17 spyware-related legal actions since the Computer Spyware Act was enacted in 2005.

To protect themselves against these and other threats, computer users should keep their operating system, antivirus, firewall and antispyware software updated, Microsoft said.

More information and a link to the complaint against McCreary is on the Washington Attorney General’s Web site.

The RegistryCleanerXP software supposedly finds 43 critical errors, even on machines that have no problems, officials say.

(Credit:
Washington Attorney General's office)

Updated 1:15 p.m. PT with more details on Microsoft lawsuits.

Myfotowall takes any of your own photographs and turns them into wallpaper. The company, based in West Yorkshire, England, says it can take any image and blow it up 16 times larger than the original without compromising the quality.

Photos as wallpaper by Myfotowall.

(Credit:
Myfotowall)

Myfotowall uses inkjet printing technology to put your chosen image onto paper-backed vinyl. The company charges 45 pounds Sterling per square meter, or about $90 per 10 square feet. You get to hang the paper yourself with spatula and glue after they print it.

The photos will stay bright for three years, but after that, there’s no guarantee against fading, Myfotowall says.

Bummer if the idea of redoing your wallpaper every third year doesn’t send you leaping for joy.

(Via Red Ferret via Oh Gizmo)

Such was the theme of the discussion at a South by Southwest Interactive panel on Saturday afternoon called “Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting.”

The all-female panel (a rarity in the tech world!) was moderated by Annalee Newitz, editor of the Gawker Media-owned science fiction blog IO9.com, and consisted of Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, Gina Trapani of fellow Gawker Media blog Lifehacker, and Jeska Dzwigalski of Linden Labs, creator of virtual world Second Life.

“What happens when people on a social network or who are part of some kind of Web service become disgruntled or pissed off with the people who are running that service, and how can they make themselves heard in a way that is effective and nondestructive?” Newitz asked semi-rhetorically. The hour-long panel aimed to touch upon both how users can effectively mobilize and how online community organizers can deal with it. Ultimately, it focused primarily on the latter.

Newitz explained that there are at least three very separate kinds of users revolts on social-media sites. First, she said, there are “anarchist-style pranks” like the one she once rigged on social news site Digg as fodder for a Wired magazine story. “I wanted to find out if I could buy votes on Digg and get something really stupid on the front page,” she related, talking about how she paid a shady company to power a fake blog she created to the front page of Digg “to show how easy it would be to buy votes on Digg.”

She also talked about “grassroots rebellions,” like the mass chaos that ensued when Digg users posted the crack key for high-definition DVDs’ digital rights management technology and the site’s executives pulled it down. They then retracted their decision in the wake of user protests that crippled the site’s servers. “I would call that a genuine grassroots result,” Newitz said.

Finally, there are “high-profile people claiming to speak for a larger community in a public forum,” like the open letter that a small group of Digg users posted to criticize new changes to the site and ultimately was part of the reason why executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose kicked off a series of “town hall” discussions with users. Alternately, there’s the controversy over Facebook’s Beacon advertisements that resulted in loads of high-profile press on behalf of liberal activist group MoveOn.org but ultimately flew under the radar of many of the huge social network’s users.

“Second Life is kind of built for user revolts,” Dzwigalski said, explaining that there are all kinds of rebellions in the virtual world, but that the most visible are the ideology-fueled demands like the “revolts” that took place in 2003 when Linden Labs attempted to tax Second Life users and the 2006 controversies over a piece of software called CopyBot in which many in-world retailers shut down their businesses for a day.

The overall gist of the panel seemed to indicate that user revolts can be extremely annoying and difficult to manage, but ultimately an important part of a social-media site’s evolution. Dwsigalski said the CopyBot controversy “led to greater transparency from the company to the community because people were demanding to know how changes impacted the (Second Life) economy.”

“We have this kind of hippie trust thing going on,” Jessamyn West said of MetaFilter, a moderated group blog with 35,000 users that lets anyone contribute for a $5 registration fee. Since the community is overwhelmingly made up of young white males, sexism issues have become high-profile, from “I’d hit it” remarks about pictures of female users to more serious harassment issues that have caused some users to ditch the site entirely. “I wake up every morning and I tell boys on the Internet to stop calling each other names,” West joked.

Most of the time, these user revolts never really go away. Sexism on MetaFilter, for example, remains controversial. “I have enemies on MetaFilter,” West explained and said that she’d made a promise to change her MetaFilter username to the racy slang term “cooter” if the site went a month without any “I’d hit it” remarks. “That’s been in place since November and I’m not worried,” she said.

Trapani’s account of a user revolt was a bit different; she talked about what happened when a toiled company bought ad space on Lifehacker. “Their ad campaign involved butts. Smiling butts,” Trapani said bluntly, and said that she received several dozen e-mails from readers who weren’t particularly happy about seeing, um, naked behinds. Many were concerned about what might happen if the ads showed up at the workplace or if readers’ children happened to be within viewing distance.

Then discussion of the “smiling butts” started to overtake comment threads, and Trapani finally negotiated to have the ads removed from Lifehacker–though they remained on Gawker Media’s racier sites. “We didn’t feel good about mooning our readers all day long,” Trapani commented.

Discussion briefly touched the debate surrounding the Anonymous hacker group, which has used many social media sites to promote an agenda critical of Scientology. West talked about that sort of debate on MetaFilter, and said that debate was welcome but that zealots who couldn’t talk about anything else were not. “We had Tom Cruise’s lawyers after once us,” she said.

See more stories in CNET News.com’s coverage of SXSWi (click here).

AMD is shipping the quad-core Barcelona Opteron to channel and distribution partners this week, according to an AMD representative on Thursday. System vendors such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard are readying systems for shipment in the second quarter.

(Correction: AMD is shipping samples of the Barcelona processor to channel and distribution partners not production versions of the chip.)

AMD is shipping the B3 version of the processor that fixes a TLB bug. Large vendors such as Dell, HP, and IBM have been waiting for this version of Barcelona to arrive before they begin shipping systems.

HP ProLiant DL585 G2 Server

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

“We expect to start shipping systems in early Q2,” HP spokesman Eric Krueger said Thursday. “We are anxious to get these systems moving soon,” he added. HP has had documentation on its site for almost a month describing the HP ProLiant DL585, which Krueger confirms will carry the Barcelona processor.

“Look for us to expand our portfolio (of systems) too,” Krueger added. A Dell representative confirmed that his company is also on track for shipment in the second quarter.

Barcelona was launched back in September and has faced repeated production and bug-related delays. Earlier “B2″ versions of Barcelona have been going to sophisticated, high-performance computing (HPC) customers who know how to work around the bug.

Indeed, contestants from around the world mined the deepest recesses of their imaginations to create highly unexpected and often stunning works that celebrate the boundless potential of digital artistry. For a look at the top submissions, announced Monday, see this CNET News.com photo gallery. Winning works will also be displayed at the San Jose Museum of Art in Silicon Valley through February 8.

Speaking to a small gathering of tech and media reporters at CBS’ New York headquarters Thursday, Smith gave a firm “no” when asked if Joost–which requires a software download and has slipped from the Web video radar since its buzzworthy debut–was dead in the water. “(Mike) Volpe knows what he’s doing,” Smith said of the Cisco Systems veteran who serves as the start-up’s CEO. “It’s got a good team.”

Smith did add that he thinks Joost should be Web-based, not a download.

And with regard to Hulu, the joint Web-video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. that has turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise, Smith would not rule out the possibility that CBS might jump on board, presumably by adding Hulu to its list of Audience Network distribution partners–which include AOL, Bebo, Microsoft, Sling Media, Veoh, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com. He said that there are no technological barriers to bringing CBS’ video content to Hulu and that CBS Interactive’s “door is always open.”

Regarding Hulu’s team, Smith said, “We talk to them all the time.”.