claytongunshow.com

If you feel like keeping your stuff, but maybe making a little cash on the side, use a service such as Zilok (review) which lets you rent your stuff to other people. Be sure to set this up in advance though–it might take a while for someone to bite.

If you’re on a budget, also worth checking out is Craigslist’s move/haul section under the services category. You’ll find a slew of single day truck rentals from companies that rent out their trucks to people who are moving on the weekend for much lower costs than U-Haul and others.

When moving there comes a time when you need to get rid of things. Besides Craigslist and eBay (which are great), we recommend Freecycle. Freecycle has more than 5 million users who are taking each others free stuff. If it’s gadgets you’re getting rid of, you might also be able to scrap together some cash with services such as BuyMyTronics. We wrote about this back in November, so go read about it there.

U-Haul is for newbies (unless you have furniture). If you’re just in need of a truck, check out Zipcar or if Northern California–CityCarShare.org that will let you rent one for about $5 an hour, depending on where you live. You can even set it all up without having to talk to a human. If you really want to keep it simple and rent through U-Haul, avoid its site like the plague and call in, as the site won’t give you a specific pick-up time which can be crucial if you’ve got people coming to help you or time lines to keep.

Parse through Craigslist listings on a map with HousingMaps.com

Getting the job done

Better yet, bribe your friends to help out with customized “I’m helping (your name) move” personalized T-shirts from CafePress or Zazzle that will let them get sweaty and not stink up their own clothes. For a laugh, wear them out so people know why you’re stinking up whatever restaurant you’re taking them to. You might even get better service and faster water refills from your server too.

Don't sit around hitting refresh on Craigslist. Use Yahoo Pipes and an RSS notification service to give you alerts.

Oops, you’re temporarily homeless. What to do:

Know before you go

After having just finished, I know I could have done some things better, and I thought this would be a good chance provide a focused collection of tips and tricks for each stage of a move. Something useful for any would-be movers who have never used the Web to hunt for a new place, then get the job done by selling excess junk, and finding the right equipment to get from point A to point B. I’ve also nixed using just Craigslist, as a balanced attack using several best-of-breed Web services will save you time and money.

Hopefully this has given you the inside track on how to use Web 2.0 services to help make moving less of a pain, and more of a tactical and rewarding experience. If you’ve got tips of your own, leave them in the talkback.

Ditching your old stuff

How 'walkable' is your new place? Scope it out with WalkScore, which rates your home on what businesses and amenities are near by.

The same thing goes for boxes. Don’t shell out money for new boxes. Chances are someone who just moved it trying to ditch their own. Here’s an advanced tip though: don’t bother sitting by your computer hitting refresh to wait for the newest giveaways to show up. Instead, set up a work flow in Yahoo Pipes that will do it for you. I’ve created an example feed that does this here. To tweak it to match the Craigslist in your area, just do a search in free stuff for “Moving Boxes” and dump in the RSS feed in the top pipe, then hit save and refresh. Then subscribe to the feed you’ve created and keep an eye on your RSS reader to be apprised of the latest freebies.

To see how “walkable” the area is, give Walk Score (review) a whirl. Just plug in the address of the place you’re looking at and it will give you a map of what’s close based on grocery stores, eateries, coffee shops, schools and transportation. The one thing it doesn’t take into account is how close you are to freeways and large elevations–which might hinder said walking. For that, use Google Earth’s elevation feature to zoom into your neighborhood and check out the topography.

Bribe your friends with customized T-shirts. They might forgive you for having them help move your metric ton of junk.

We recommend Shifd (review), which works on your desktop as an Adobe Air application, or on your mobile phone while synchronizing them in both places. We like Shiftd the best because it mashes up maps into your notes, so if you’re trying to chart out some places or things that need remembering you can view them on a map right away, which can be immensely helpful.

Before and after the move: make a list, check it wherever

Equipment

If you were using Trulia, or Google Maps, hop on Street View and check out the outside of the place you’re looking at as well as the surrounding area. There’s a big chance your place isn’t on there, which isn’t a problem if you live in the same city and have checked the place out in person–but what if this is somewhere else? This would have been the perfect situation to use the now defunct GoSee4Me to hire someone else to take photos. Otherwise, hop on Facebook and see which one of your friends lives in that city and ask if they’ll snap some shots for you.

Movers

To take it a step further, set up e-mail or SMS alerts when a new item is added using a service such as RSSFwd or Pingie. Just don’t be surprised if the person who posted the ad is a little freaked out that you contacted them within a minute or two of it going live.

Another mash up that existed before Mash Maker, but that’s still accessible without the installation of the plug-in is HousingMaps, which mashes up Google Maps with Craigslist housing listings. You’re not going to find some of the most up-to-date listings from just an hour or so ago, or be able to search through them like you can on Craigslist, but using the filters it’s simply a fantastic way to check out a bunch of places with less text and more topography.

Continue reading to learn about research tools, finding movers, and what to do if you find yourself temporarily homeless…

So your new lease doesn’t start for a week or two and you need a place to crash. Out of vacation hours and patience? There’s hope for you yet. You can simply try Couchsurfing which is a network of people who let folks stay in their house while traveling. You’ll never have to tell anyone about it, and it’s certainly cheaper than staying at a hotel or imposing on your friends and family.

Getting stuff from point A to point B takes a lot of physical work as much as it does mental. Save some brainpower by keeping a list of things you need to do before, and after the move including small or large items to need to buy. Your best bet for this is a to-do list application because little pieces of paper get lost.

How much will you be paying compared with your neighbors? Rentometer.com knows. Just plug in your rent and how big your building is, and it does the rest.

Miscellaneous tips:

Also worth doing is giving your neighbors a once over. Go on StreetAdvisor and Rotten Neighbor (review) to see if you’re living next to some potentially volatile neighbors. Then go check out the registered sex offenders database.

Speaking of Google Earth, try out the YouTube viewer (also in Google Maps) to see if there’s been anything cool or outright insane going on in your area. If you see a lot of news reports about murders and drug use that have been geocoded to your block–you might want to steer clear. If you’re moving to Oakland, there’s also Oakland Crime Spotting, which was put together by the guys at Stamen Design. It’s one of the more beautiful ways to see bad guys on a map.

Once you’ve found the place of your dreams it’s time to scope it out. If you’re looking to make sure you’re not going to get stuck paying too much, check out Rentometer (review) which will analyze how much your rent is compared with others in your area. Better yet, check out Hotpads (review), which gives you a overlay controls for population density, the median age, and general income so you can avoid moving into a retirement neighborhood or the student overflow from a local college (unless you’re seeking out either of those things).

Sometimes I feel like people might think we talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk when it comes to using some Web services. Believe me when I tell you we use this stuff every day, and over the last month, nothing has been more useful to me than Craigslist. Why? I was moving, and I did 95 percent of it using a single service to find movers, boxes, people to buy and take away old furniture, and most importantly–a place to live.

Finding a place

Craigslist is full of people who can schlep your stuff, but getting recommendations on which companies or folks are trustworthy and careful is even better if you care about your stuff. If your job has a “spam” list or newsgroup set up, ask around. Also, visit Yelp and check out reviews of local moving services. You’ll find most are either terrible or fantastic, but it’s a far better way to get a lay of the land.

If you’re trying to buy a house, there are some even better services that bring a lot more depth to the table. Trulia and Zillow offer simple and deep services that give you a lot of information and put you in touch with real estate folks or homeowners without you even needing to leave your house.

Trulia has the most eye candy of the two, with a time line viewer called HindSight that will show you growth and other housing trends by geography. It’s really only useful in a few cities, unlike Trulia’s core service which will let you hunt for houses with a high level of ease. Fellow housing search tool Zillow is also great for potential homebuyers, and ties in things such as a mortgage finder and a great map tool that includes homes for sale, recently sold homes, and even places people are just thinking about selling and just waiting for the right offer to get out.

Mash Maker (review) from Intel is a very slick tool for parsing through Craigslist’s myriad of listings and making the data accessible in ways that Craigslist does not provide for. There are a few “plug-ins” for Craiglist in the Mash Maker gallery. The most useful ones are the tables plus maps one that will let you see pricing, move in dates, and more in an easy to use chart that can be sorted. There’s also a great one that will give you the price versus subregion that will tell you the average price of apartments based on each neighborhood you’re looking at.

The social network has announced its support for Google Friend Connect, which launched in full last week, and is using the standard to help power a new set of tools called the MySpace Open Platform. In conjunction, MySpace has ditched the distinctly unsexy moniker of “Data Availability” in favor of the new sobriquet “MySpaceID” for its universal log-in project. The Open Platform, in addition to MySpaceID, encompasses its OpenSocial-compatible app platform and the Post To MySpace sharing feature.

Along with Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID was built with open standards OAuth, OpenSocial, and OpenID. MySpace, as well as Google, is one of the founding partners of the OpenSocial Foundation.

As part of the Le Web conference in Paris, News Corp.’s MySpace announced that it has taken a deeper plunge into the data portability pool.

Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect both launched last week, spurring a return to the social-networking turf wars and power struggle for control of the almighty “social graph.”

MySpace also announced the first two partners for MySpaceID: European mobile giant Vodafone and personalized home page service Netvibes. It still hasn’t yet rolled out log-in credentials for the original Data Availability launch partners–Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo–but product manager Max Engel says those are still in the works.

Right now, with MySpaceID, members can log in to partner sites with their MySpace usernames and find which of their MySpace friends use those partner sites. In the future, it’ll also synchronize feed activity much like the rival Facebook Connect and allow MySpace members to register for third-party site accounts with their MySpace URLs.

3:00 p.m. PDT: Microsoft plans to continue to invest (read: lose money) in online services.

3:10 p.m. PDT: Liddell said he won’t be taking questions on Yahoo, but he did go over the elements of its latest proposal and added, “We continue to believe our proposal is a compelling one.”

Microsoft said it won’t be deterred by either the current weakness or its failure to strike a deal with Yahoo. “Regardless of what happens with Yahoo, it’s a space we are committed to.”

On to Q and A:

The company sees some of the challenges it saw in the online services business continuing, although Liddell said the company hopes that some of its investments will start to pay off later in the fiscal year.

2:45 p.m. PDT: Healy noted that the PC industry saw 12 percent to 14 percent in the quarter, ahead of Microsoft’s forecast, with Microsoft seeing its client revenue growing even faster as it returned to making piracy gains after a dip last quarter.

Pressed by analyst Heather Bellini on when Microsoft might see the business shift away from being a drag on overall margins, Liddell said, “I can’t promise you you are going to see a massive turnaround in the short term.”

2:47 p.m. PDT: As for the online business, Healy said that page views and search queries came in as expected, but noted that “monetization lagged.”

Microsoft has kicked off its earnings conference call, after posting quarterly results and outlook that were below what some analysts were projecting.

Asked about the macroeconomic economy, Liddell said. “We are clearly cautious like everyone is,” but added that for Microsoft’s products, the company is feeling good overall. He did note that the company was seeing slowness in online advertising. “It was weak in the fourth quarter,” he said. “There is a direct impact and we are not immune to that in the online space.” That weakness is expected to continue, at least in the current quarter, he said.

“We remain focused on the factors in our control,” Liddell said.

Turning to Yahoo, Liddell said the company made the decision to shift gears during the quarter as a deal with Yahoo seemed less likely and after Yahoo made its deal with Google. Of the increased spending plans, Liddell said two-thirds are related to driving increased search business.

2:54 p.m. PDT: Liddell is back. The company expects 12 percent to 14 percent growth in the PC market, but Windows client unit revenue to only climb 9 percent to 10 percent for the year. Slower growth for Microsoft is because of the continuation of a few key trends, he said. Emerging markets growth will continue to outpace mature markets, while consumer segment growth is seen exceeding business growth. Also, more PCs are being sold by large computer makers as opposed to smaller “system builders.”

2:52 p.m. PDT: Expenses came in $500 million higher than expected, on higher sales of Xboxes and Microsoft consulting services, both of which have a higher cost of sale, Healy said.

He noted disappointment in Microsoft’s share price given its results, saying it reflected both general uncertainty and Microsoft-specific issues, such as the uncertain Yahoo issue.

He again pointed to the company’s planned investments in areas like distribution deals as well as new business models, like Live Search Cashback. “In the short term that is not going to make the division profitable,” he said.

Hiring improved, with Microsoft closing more open positions, Healy said.

He noted the market is projected to be $80 billion by 2012, making it one of largest growth areas for the company.

It’s plans include more toolbar programs with computer makers, deals with other software makers and Internet service providers as well as a faster roll-out of its Live Search Cashback program. The company will also look at more vertical acquisitions, he said.

“We do not make these investments lightly,” Liddell said, noting that the loss will be “a drag” on the rest of the company. However, he said Microsoft views a further several hundreds of millions of dollars is worth the cost given the size of the online advertising market is measured in tens of billions of dollars.

2:49 p.m. PDT: The company sold 1.3 million
Xbox consoles in the quarter.

Update: 2:40 p.m. PDT: CFO Chris Liddell speaking, noting that, since its last conference call, Microsoft has decided to invest more in both acquisitions and in in its own online services business.

I’ll update this blog once there’s more to report. For now, Microsoft is just going through the formalities. (And the sound quality, at least here at CNET, is terrible, with investor relations chief Colleen Healy barely audible).

As I’ve written about previously, the provisions in the GPL, and many other open-source licenses requiring that modifications and enhancements to source code be contributed back to the public, often don’t apply in a cloud-computing world. That’s because accessing software in the form of a service over the network isn’t “distribution,” the event that triggers the requirement to make source code available.

In a similar vein, there are just so many accumulated examples of different approaches that have succeeded. Yes, Linux is successful, and it uses GPL 2. But the very popular Apache Web server uses a much more permissive license (in the sense that enhancements don’t need to be contributed back to the commons). The
Firefox Web browser uses a license that’s somewhere in between.

What’s striking to me is how few people seem to really care about the AGPL and the supposed problem it’s trying to solve. Yes, there are the zealots who go apoplectic at the thought of open source being used for profit-making purposes. And there’s a fair bit of discussion about how to best protect portability, privacy, and so forth in a cloud-computing world.

If the license wars aren’t over, they’ve certainly muted.

Depending on whom you ask, clauses concerning ideological sticking points such as digital rights management were either narrowed in scope or defanged almost completely. And it seems entirely possible that Linux, perhaps the best-known open-source project licensed under the GPL, may never move to the new license version.

Some view this state of affairs as a loophole, one that a variant on the GPL 3–the Affero GPL (AGPL)–explicitly plugs by expanding the definition of distribution to encompass the delivery of services over the network. The AGPL effectively remaps the rules from the original Unix-like environment in which the GPL was born into a network computing one.

There’s also no small degree of what might be best called social or community pressure on large cloud vendors such as Google to make meaningful contributions to open-source projects. But forcing all this through licenses? Not so much.

More broadly, I just don’t feel that there’s a whole lot of interest, much less passion, out there in the various open-source communities for fighting license battles. That’s not to say that everyone agrees that there is one perfect approach to licensing. Not all all! But there is, for the most part, a pragmatic understanding and a realization that the license for a given open-source project has to match up with its governance, collaboration, and even business model. It’s just one piece of the puzzle.

None of this is to say that lawyers and license geeks don’t sometimes get into squabbles over how various licenses interact, and so forth. But, in the grand scheme of things, these are micro issues, not macro ones.

The adoption of the new version of the General Public License, used by Linux and many other open-source projects, was a long, loud, and contentious process. But after all the sturm und drang, it’s not clear to me what real impact GPL 3 will have.

We’ve also accumulated a lot of evidence that open source is simply a pretty effective development model that can bring a lot of benefits to those who use it. As a result, there’s less of a sense that open source needs protection through a restrictive license.

I think the best evidence for the winding down of the license wars comes from what’s happening around cloud computing, which I define generally as software and infrastructure accessed in the network.

The latest update: Pausch’s doctors say that he’s added a extra tumor (his 11th). The good news is that he’s now off chemo and expects to be back on a bike within the next couple of weeks. Peddle up a storm, bro.

An expert in video game and virtual-reality technology, Pausch was diagnosed with cancer a year earlier. But his struggle to stave off a death sentence didn’t lead to a morose farewell. (Though he did confess to experiencing a deathbed conversion: “I just bought a Macintosh.”)

Two years ago, I lost my best friend to pancreatic cancer. So when I heard about Randy Pausch, a celebrated professor of computer science battling the same disease, and his amazing “last lecture” at Carnegie Mellon, I had more than passing interest in what he had to say.

(Credit:
Randy Pausch)

Instead, what the audience at Carnegie Mellon heard was a passionate celebration of life, however short, and lessons learned. (Here’s a link to the video.)
Pausch broke the ice by asking rhetorically if there were one last lecture to give before you die, what would it be? He then proceeded to deliver one of the most powerful disquisitions I’ve ever seen on what it means to be human. The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Zaslow, whose tender profile brought Pausch to national notice, has now co-authored a book with the professor expanding on that singular lecture. The publication date is next week.

DDR3 memory modules use less power and double the data prefetch buffer
to 8 bits from 4 bits per cycle. DDR3 also operates at higher clock rates (1600 MHz), among other improvements.

He also talked about other factors–beyond faster processors and graphics chips–that affect system performance, particularly for consumers who have limited budgets. “If I was looking to invest in one component over another,” Diana said, “I would probably invest in a really good motherboard,” and after that, a dual-core processor and a midrange graphics card such as Nvidia’s 8800GT or ATI’s X2 card.

The most obvious limitation of 32-bit operating systems and applications is a cap–4GB–on how much memory an operating system can use. And some applications can’t even use the entire 4GB. “Who cares about DDR3 memory? What about giving me 4GB?” Diana asked.

(Credit:
Alienware)

New DDR3 memory is also becoming more of a factor. DDR3 memory is offered in two Alienware platforms. “It is the highest-performing memory now on the market. But I’m not so sure it’s quite there yet. The cost is very high,” he said. “Six months from now it will start making a lot more sense (economically) than it does right now.” Because of this, DDR2 memory is still widely used.

Fast silicon is hitting a wall in game PCs, according to Alienware, which is looking for ways to boost game PC performance.

Alienware’s Marc Diana believes optimizing systems for the 64-bit world would allow game PCs to make big strides in performance. In effect, today’s 32-bit environments are putting a crimp on PC-based gaming.

Alienware Area-51 m9750 notebook

Much of the software in the PC world is still 32-bit, including most copies of Windows XP and Vista. In fact, Diana said Alienware doesn’t offer 64-bit operating systems because “we don’t feel comfortable shipping a system to a customer with the 64-bit driver support that’s out there in the industry.”

Parent company Dell vowed on Tuesday to pour more resources into the game PC unit and invest in “product development, design, and engineering.”

“I think that would make sense now,” Diana said emphatically.

“They’re building (software) for something that is inherently very old technology,” he said. “We (need) drivers that are very healthy in the 64-bit space. I’m not saying that 64-bit drivers don’t exist. I’m just saying there’s not enough software development and support on that end to warrant companies like us to move to 64-bit operating systems.”

“So many people are caught up in this hardware race. Dual-core, quad-core this and that,” said Diana, who is Alienware’s product marketing manager for desktops. “If these companies–Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, ATI, and AMD–if they’d just sit down and realize the performance benefit of optimizing their drivers and software for 64-bit.”

In a press release, FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director James E. Finch said, “What this report does not show is how often this type of activity goes unreported.” So the amount in losses could be much higher than that reported.

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is a partnership among the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and publishes annual statistics on the complaints it receives throughout the year. It offers assistance to victims and Web sites affected by Internet crime. The information collected by the project also supports active investigations, trend analysis, and public outreach and awareness efforts.

The IC3 report for 2007 states that the category with the most complaints was online auction fraud, followed closely by non-delivery. But in terms of dollars lost, investment fraud ranked No.1, reporting an average $3,547 per complaint, as opposed to the dollar losses associated with auction fraud, a mere $438 per complaint.

Worried about online auction fraud? If you’re a man you should be, according to the latest Internet Crime Complaint Center report (in PDF). On average, men lost more money to online fraud than women in 2007. Men also perpetrated most of the online crime, accounting for 75 percent of the total reports last year. And while the overall number of complaints declined when compared with previous years, the total dollar value in losses rose to a record high of $239 million in losses in 2007. That’s $40 million more than in 2006.

But now, according to EA, EA Land will allow players to make their own things.

In fact, there are, to this day, whole communities of people in Second Life and There.com that began in TSO.

Note: My wife now works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

One of the major reasons why TSO never took off is that it really didn’t give players very much opportunity to create their own content. And that was particularly frustrating to many players, because The Sims creator Will Wright had promised that TSO would offer open content creation.

“Like in the original Sims game, the goal is to let you customize the game completely,” EA wrote in a note to former TSO subscribers, “but in EA Land, you can see and buy the customizations of the other players.”

That means, of course, that there will continue to be–as there was in TSO–a functioning economy. But because players will be able to make more content, that economy could, in theory, have more complexity and depth than that of TSO.

And while TSO, as it came to be known, never got the massive audiences of its single-player antecedent, The Sims–which came out of nowhere to become the best-selling PC game of all time–it did usher in and initiate a lot of people to virtual worlds.

But you never know. Perhaps the biggest question will be how much marketing effort EA puts into EA Land. If it allows the game to exist on its own without a lot of backing from corporate, then it may wither away with as much fanfare as it arrived. But if EA gets behind it full force, it could be something some day.

My guess is that EA Land will have a hard time making too much of a dent in the virtual world space. That’s partly because it is hard to see exactly where it fits into the mix. Second Life is well established, though it does not have a huge audience; There.com also has a substantial audience; and then there are the kids’ virtual worlds, such as Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, and the like.

For anyone familiar with The Sims Online, the poorly-received virtual world launched by Electronic Arts in 2002, take note: EA is relaunching it under a new name and for a new price: free.

It’s probably too early to tell how EA Land will do, but I do have to say that it’s unfortunate EA couldn’t come up with a better name.

This is a rather momentous move by EA, since it means it is bringing back from the dead–at least as far as perception goes–a game that, while it never really got off the ground, was extremely important in the overall development curve of 3D social virtual worlds with economies.

Born as The Sims Online, it will now be called EA Land.

(Credit:
Electronic Arts)

On Monday, Electronic Arts announced ‘EA Land,’ the latest iteration of ‘The Sims Online,’ an online version of its massive hit, ‘The Sims.’ However, ‘The Sims Online’ never achieved much success and became overshadowed by other online virtual worlds with economies.

In a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft said Monday that the next minor update for Windows Server will be the server version of Windows 7, which will be known merely as Windows Server 2008 R2.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft said on Monday that the server version of
Windows 7 will not be a major release and will bear the name Windows Server 2008 R2.

The software maker confirmed its naming plans, following a report by ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley. Initially Foley reported that Microsoft was skipping its minor R2 release and moving straight to its next major release. However, Microsoft clarified that it indeed sees Windows 7 on the server side as a minor release.

Microsoft declined to discuss what will be in Windows Server 2008 R2, but a spokesman confirmed that it is the server version of Windows 7. The release is due sometime in 2010, Microsoft said.

If you are having trouble reconciling Microsoft’s server and client positions, you are not alone. I pressed Microsoft’s server side for more details on how this could be understood, but didn’t get much help. I’ll also check in with some folks on the desktop Windows team and see what I hear back.

The server move calls into question just how different Windows 7 is going to be from Windows Vista on the desktop side. Steven Sinofsky, the head of development for the desktop version of Windows, has said that Windows 7 on the PC side would not make major changes to things like the kernel and driver model, but has maintained that it would be a major release of Windows.

Microsoft has said it will share technical details on Windows 7 at its Professional Developers Conference in late October in Los Angeles.

On its server roadmap page, Microsoft describes its minor, or update releases this way:

The move is surprising, given that in the past, Microsoft has used R2 monikers to signify a product with a few new features, as opposed to major changes to a product.

Update releases integrate the previous major release with the latest service pack, selected feature packs, and new functionality. Because an update release is based on the previous major release, customers can incorporate it into their environment without any additional testing beyond what would be required for a typical service pack. Any additional functionality provided by an update would be optional and thus not affect application compatibility or require customers to recertify or retest applications.

Microsoft has said that the desktop version of Windows 7 would include a new multitouch interface, but has not talked about other features.

The question is, if Windows 7 Server needs no more testing than a service pack, is it really possible for the desktop team to add enough features on top of it to make Windows 7 a big improvement upon the oft-criticized Windows Vista.

When I met up with Check Point Software’s CEO Gil Shwed to talk about the SanDisk relationship as well as the wider security arena, he was predictably upbeat in describing another advance in safeguarding portable data. But, he added, the ultimate success depends upon guaranteeing that the information will be “secure and protected.”

“And now you have critical business and government information exposed, and people realize there’s an underground economy involved in trading stolen data,” Thompson told me. “Also, you have nation states (digitally) attacking each other for competitive edge in a global economy. And so the government realizes that now is the time to act. But when you talk about best practices and thinking holistically, or extending responsibility to more than just the IT heads, that’s not new.”

“The (best practices) concept is good but it’s gotta be in your face,” said Schmidt, now heading his own consultancy, R & H Security Consulting.

Secure and protected. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that line walking the show floor or in meetings the last couple of days. It’s a great tech cliche these days. The rub is that no matter how good the technology offered by Check Point or any other security provider, we remain creatures of habit–and when it comes to security, bad habits, mostly. Every security expert I spoke with agreed that your typical computer user inadvertently functions as the bad guys’ best friend. That was the other takeaway from the conference. Security professionals are at wit’s end when it comes to persuading the rank-and-file to do the right thing.

The product, developed in conjunction with Check Point, lets you copy a protected version of your apps and then plug into any client machine. When you’re done, the “virtualized” version of your desktop disappears after logging out.

DHS has requested $192 million to spend on cyberdefense in the next fiscal year, up from the current $115 million. Given the other budgetary demands related to digital security, that doesn’t leave a lot of shekels to foster public education. The implicit message is that Uncle Sam is waiting for the private sector to pick up the tab. I suppose it’s just as well that individual companies fill the breach before they suffer the Big One.

Schmidt’s right but we’re a long way from attaching DefCon 1 importance to the topic. I could go on for another 1,000 words enumerating the why’s and wherefore’s but suffice to say that society has been lulled into a false sense of assurance about digital security. Maybe it will take a concerted cyberattack to shake that lethargy. (Estonian government and business Web sites last year suffered denial-of-service attacks protesting the move of a World War II statue in Estonia. Meanwhile, the Arabs and the Israelis have been engaged in low-level cyber skirmishing for several years.) John Thompson of Symantec drew an analogy with the Smokey Bear campaign in the 1960s and 1970s, when the government sought to reduce forest fires through public education. Clearly, he said, it had had an impact.

(Credit:
Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

Shwed and others say it’s a matter of enforcing best practices. When Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff spoke on Monday, he pounded away at that theme. I heard the same thing from Howard Schmidt, who previously served as vice chair of the president’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and as the special adviser for cyberspace security for the White House.

My hunch is that this concept is going to continue to gain popularity, especially given the ongoing advances in “cloud storage.” By the way, MokaFive is already out with software that lets you fit an operating system and application stack on a USB iflash device. U3 also gained attention a couple of years ago. Kate Purmal, the former president of the company, is now a VP at SanDisk. There are a few others that I can’t think of right at this moment.

It’s fashionable to dismiss trade shows as so 1998, but there’s usually always something that makes it worthwhile if you look hard enough. So it was, the coolest thing I saw at the RSA 2008 conference this week was a prototype portable virtualization technology that SanDisk will begin selling in the second half of the year.

Howard Schmidt, R & H Security Consulting