In June, it was reported that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission had opened a formal investigation into the chipmaker’s business practices.

The new charges, which could come as early as Thursday, allege that Intel offered inducements to European retailers in return for not buying processors from rival Advanced Micro Devices, the paper reported.

“We are continuing to cooperate and really don’t know what the commission will do,” Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told the paper when asked about the possibility of new charges. “We believe we operate within the law.”

Intel has also been under intense scrutiny in other parts of the world, especially in Europe, South Korea, and Japan, but it has faced little objection to its business practices in its native United States in recent years, other than in a recent investigation launched at the state level by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

The expected charges are the latest chapter in Intel’s antitrust battle with regulators in the U.S. and abroad.

Microsoft said on Tuesday that it has released its first update to Office 2008 for
Mac, fixes that should boost stability and performance in some areas, while closing some security holes.

Microsoft also issued an update Tuesday for the older Office 2004 for Mac product. “This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code,” Microsoft said on its Web site, referring to the
Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.4.1 update.

In an e-mail, Microsoft said that version 12.0.1 adds “suite-wide stability and performance improvements,” along with the security fixes.

On its Web site, the company offered a little more detail, adding, “This update fixes critical issues in Office 2008, including issues that might cause Office 2008 applications to stop responding or quit unexpectedly.”

Earlier this week, Canadian researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published a report in which they said that “TOM-Skype was censoring and logging text chats that contain specific, sensitive keywords and may be engaged in more targeted surveillance.”

“(The security breach) does not affect communications where all parties are using standard Skype software,” he said. “Skype-to-Skype communications are, and always have been, completely secure and private.”

“We were very concerned to learn about both issues and after we urgently addressed this situation with TOM, they fixed the security breach,” he said. “In addition, we are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM.”

But he tried to reassure Skype users that Skype’s computer-to-computer voice calls are completely secure.

Skype’s president said that the company was largely unaware of a major security breach affecting Skype users in China.

The report also said the service was logging and capturing millions of records that include personal information and contact details for any text chat and voice calls placed to TOM-Skype users, including calls from Skype users. In addition, TOM was storing this information in a way that was inadequate in protecting the privacy of TOM-Skype users, the report said.

He said the company knew that instant-messaging chats were monitored by the government, as all communications in China are. And he explained that Skype disclosed this to users in 2006, explaining that a text filter was being used to block certain words in chat messages. But he added that his understanding was that messages deemed unsuitable were “simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere.”

In a blog published Thursday, Josh Silverman, Skype’s president, explained he did not realize that TOM-Skype, Skype’s partner in China, was logging and storing users’ instant messages that were deemed offensive by the Chinese government.

“It was our understanding that it was not TOM’s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords,” he writes in the blog. “And we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed.”

Silverman pointed out in his blog that TOM, like all other ISPs in China, is required by the Chinese government to monitor all communication. And he said it is “common knowledge that censorship does exist in China.” Keywords that triggered action included words related to Taiwanese independence, the banned religious group Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s basically a “square-peg-in-a-round-hole-type argument. That is, patents don’t make sense for software because software is too different from the other things, like new chemicals and machines, that patents were originally designed to protect

Assuming there is a problem as some argue, maybe the solution is making patent law a better fit for software. One idea mentioned yesterday at the 23rd Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference of the American Bar Association was shortening the lifespan for software patents.

There are a lot of strong opinions with respect to software patents. Many people are highly critical of them because they feel that copyright alone is enough protection for software. The argument goes that copyright is a better fit than patent law.

For example, copyright is self-executing. That means that you get a copyright in your program as soon as you write it. In contrast, a patent is obtained only after filing and prosecuting – and in the process spending a lot of money on – a patent application.

Moreover, copyright is supposed to protect a specific expression – not broader ideas found in that expression. One major argument against software patents is, that in order to maintain the lightning pace of software innovation, developers must to be free to use general concepts pioneered by others so long as they don’t copy the actual code.

That type of change would have to come from the legislature – not the court system. But Judge Newman’s comment is still interesting. Given the short product life for software, does it make sense to shorten the patent life for software inventions?

Zoho, which makes an online productivity suite, is now allowing the import of files from Google Docs.

Thursday’s announcement is a bit of a canard, though, because Zoho doesn’t read files from Google. Rather, if you follow these steps, you can get your Google docs in Zoho:

Log in to your Google Docs account and choose the documents that you need to export to Zoho
Click on More actions -> Save as HTML (zipped) to your desktop
In Zoho Writer, click on Import -> Import Google Docs, select the zipped file path and click Import
All the Google Docs documents in the zip file will be imported into your Zoho Writer account and will be displayed in the left panel.

In real Zoho news, the company’s word processor does have two real new features. First, it’s gotten an equation editor. Second, you can export documents in LaTex format, useful for academics and some engineering specialties.

(Instructions quoted verbatim from Zoho)

Meanwhile, when she wasn’t providing extensive analysis of the G1 on Tuesday, Associate Editor Nicole Lee composed this photo gallery of the G1 in all its glory.

The T-Mobile G1 will go on sale October 22. We’ll have a review just as soon as we can get a phone in our hands.

The pricing for QX “Extreme” processors, such as the QX9775 (3.2GHz, $1,499), remains unchanged from the pricing list published on July 15, when the Centrino 2 mobile processors were introduced.

The desktop Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz) got the largest cut, from $266 to $183 (31 percent) on the new pricing list, dated July 20.

The quad-core Q6600 was cut from $224 to $193.

The next biggest price reduction was the desktop Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.53GHz), reduced 15 percent, from $133 to $113.

Other price cuts include the popular quad-core Q6600 (2.4GHz). It drops 14 percent, from $224 to $193. The desktop Core 2 Duo E8400 (3GHz) falls 11 percent, from $183 to $163.

Intel has cut processor prices up to 31 percent, though overall cuts are limited in number and degree.

The problem? It won’t run on my iPhone:

In sum, the news is bittersweet. Mobile Firefox is coming, but it’s deployment will be hobbled (for me) by Apple.

It will be hugely disappointing if Apple forces the world into its Safari browser. I like Safari and used to prefer it (until CNET forced me to use Firefox, much to my belated delight), but I’d prefer to use Firefox on my mobile device, just as I do on my
Mac. Long term, Firefox is going to be where the innovation is.

For the
iPhone, Apple’s licence can not install software to have an interpreted language. But Firefox includes JavaScript, which makes it legally impossible to carry on the iPhone….For Android, Webkit is integrated into the OS, and only Java applications can run. And Firefox is not written in Java. So that’s why [Fennec will not run on Android]. However, in both cases, things may change in future, but it does not depend on Mozilla.

commentary

The only way to verify the location is to ask the bank. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Update July 7, 2008: Attacking the registrar for a domain is one way to redirect people to phony websites. See this July 7th ComputerWorld article for a recent example: ICANN blames June site hijack on registrar

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

On July 3rd, I contacted eight banks asking where their websites were physically located. In some cases I emailed, in other cases I filled in a form on their website. In each case I pointed to my previous blog posting and asked for a comment. The banks I contacted were: Citibank, Chase, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Wachovia, HSBC and Capital One.

But, IP addresses are for computers not for people. Humans are better off dealing with countries, states and cities. Capital One credit card customers would, I’m sure, prefer to remember McLean, Virginia rather than the IP address 208.80.48.53.

Flagfox determines the country based on the IP address of the website. Every computer on the Internet is reachable by a unique number called an IP address (a single IP address often front-ends multiple computers, but that’s another topic).

The problem is verifying the physical location of legitimate websites.

It is impossible for the computer(s) running a website to hide their IP address. Just as the Flagfox extension displays it, so too can any Internet-aware software that cares to do so. And, just like you can learn the IP address of a website, the website also knows your IP address. To see this in action, go to ipchicken.com.

For example, on my computer, Flagfox reports that the login page for Capital One credit cards is in McLean, Virginia. Is this the real site, or, has my computer been compromised such that I’m looking at a phony copy?

Thus, one way to detect scam websites would be for financial companies to publicize the IP address(es) of their website. Customers could put a yellow sticky on their monitor with the IP address and verify it with Flagfox before logging in to the website.

When banks explain why their websites are safe and secure, they focus on the SSL encryption used to transmit data over the Internet. That’s only part of the puzzle however. We can encrypt data and send it to the bad guys too. That’s where Flagfox can help.

The Bank of America did just that. They wrote back that their website uses these three IP addresses:
  171.161.161.173
  171.159.193.173
  171.159.65.173

If I learn anything from these companies, I’ll pass it on. If you do financial transactions online, try asking your financial institution. Can’t hurt.

This can be important because there are many ways to be tricked into thinking you are at, for example, a bank website, when you are really viewing a well-crafted, scam copy designed to steal personal information. Flagfox can go a long way toward verifying that you are really looking at the website you expect. Anyone doing financial transactions online would be well served to use it.

It has been two days since I contacted the eight banks (yes, it’s a holiday in the U.S., but bank websites don’t do holidays). Three haven’t responded at all. Four responded with canned messages that failed to address the topic. Only Bank of America seems to have read the question.

About IP Addresses

The companies have definitely taken notice, but what are they saying behind closed doors? Which of these responses would you most like to hear from the gaming behemoths?

View results

CNET News Poll OnLive fallout
Which response to OnLive would you most like to hear?

This week at GDC 09, we learned about OnLive, a new “cloud”-based on-demand video game and entertainment service. It promises high-quality streaming of first-run major publisher games to many Macs and PCs, and it could threaten the traditional console model for gamers that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have built their game businesses around.