Lisa Evans

Microsoft Corp.'s July announcement that it would change IE8's installation process was sparked by a complaint filed with U.S. antitrust officials, the company said.

In one of the regular status reports filed with U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, Microsoft, the Department of Justice and state antitrust watchdogs said that Microsoft's modifications to IE8 emanated from a May complaint.

"May of 2009, the State Plaintiffs and the [Technical Committee] received a complaint, and observed published reports, regarding how the most recent version of Internet Explorer ('IE'), IE 8, was being installed on PCs running Windows XP and Vista," according to the report to Kollar-Kotelly, who oversees Microsoft's compliance with a 2002 antitrust settlement the company struck with federal and state antitrust agencies.

The report didn't name the companies or groups that complained, but in early May, both Opera Software and Mozilla Corp., makers of the Opera and Firefox browsers respectively, had carped about how Microsoft offered IE8 to customers running the older IE6 and IE7 editions.

Opera and Mozilla accused Microsoft of hijacking users' default browser settings when it pushed the IE8 upgrade via Windows Update. In May, Microsoft defended the practice, saying that, "users continue to have complete control over IE8 settings and behavior throughout the first-run experience and ongoing use."

Last month, however, Microsoft reversed itself and said it would alter the IE8 installation process so that its browser did not replace a PC's default browser when a user selects the already-checked "Use express settings" option in the setup screen.

Computerworld and analysts linked the move to continued pressure by EU antitrust officials. Today, however, it was clear that the decision had been prompted, at least in part, by filings with U.S. regulators.

"We got feedback from a variety of people and groups that indicated we needed to make the [IE8 installation] procedure simpler and clearer," Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said today when asked if the Opera and Mozilla complaints in May had driven the change.

Opera spokesman Thomas Ford said he knew of no complaint his company had filed in the U.S, while Opera Chief Technology Officer Hakon Wium Lie added that his company has not been in contact with U.S. antitrust officials.

Mozilla did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

In the status report delivered to Kollar-Kotelly last Friday - a prerequisite for an Aug. 13 status conference - Microsoft agreed to the IE8 installation changes and said it would make the modifications as of tomorrow to Windows XP and Vista. The changes would also be delivered to users who later this year install IE8 on Windows 7 or upgrade PCs to the new operating system.

Last month, Microsoft said it would not re-release IE8 to modify the browser's setup process, but instead would "use dynamic updates in order to deliver this change." Then, it scheduled those updates to occur around the middle of this month.

When the change is put into place, users who select "Use express settings," which is the first of the two setup choices, will next see a frame asking, "Do you want to make Internet Explorer your default browser?" Previously, that dialog box only showed up when users picked the "Choose custom settings" option during IE8 setup.

Tuesday is also Microsoft's monthly security patch day. Last Thursday, it warned customers that it was planning to issue nine vulnerability updates, five of them critical, to address eight problems in Windows and another in Office Web Components.

This wasn't the first concession on IE8 that Microsoft's made to regulators. Late last month, the company announced it would add a "ballot screen" to EU customers, letting them choose from at least five browsers, including IE8, Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome, when they first boot a new PC.

Two of China's most popular technology news Web sites went offline Tuesday after carrying news reports that linked the son of China's president to a corrupt African deal.

The technology news sections disappeared for several hours from major Chinese portals Sina.com.cn and NetEase.com early Tuesday afternoon, when they started redirecting viewers to general news pages. Both tech sections had carried reports on a state-owned company accused of bribing Namibian officials in the last day, but those reports were missing when the Web pages reappeared.

The suspensions appeared to be a government penalty against the companies for reporting on a sensitive political issue.

"I'm impressed by the bravery of Sina and Netease in attempting to report this at all," said Rebecca MacKinnon, a Hong Kong-based expert on the Internet in China, in an online message.

Information on top leaders' children has always been off-limits in Chinese media, though the Internet has made it more difficult to control discussions on such topics, MacKinnon said.

Chinese police heavily patrol the Internet, and Internet companies run rigorous screening to prevent sensitive information from appearing on user forums or in search results on their sites. Companies can be punished if that process fails to catch certain political or pornographic content.

"This is not particularly surprising or different from long-standing censorship patterns," MacKinnon said.

A story posted on the NetEase tech page the night before its suspension cited English broadcaster BBC as saying that Nuctech, a Chinese company, was suspected of bribery in a deal to provide scanners for airports and ports in Namibia. The BBC report had said Namibian authorities wanted to question Hu Haifeng, the former company president and son of Chinese president Hu Jintao, but did not suspect him in the case.

The NetEase story did not mention Hu, but said Namibia wanted to question "relevant" Nuctech executives.

Sina's tech page carried a similar article the next morning, hours before the sites went down. After the tech sections returned to the portals, visiting the URLs of the scandal reports returned messages that they could not be found or had been deleted.

An employee who answered the phone at NetEase Tuesday said its tech section was down for tests. Sina did not respond to a request for comment.

Nuctech's parent company, Tsinghua Holdings, controls a range of other technology companies including Chinese PC maker Tsinghua Tongfang.

Red Hat has launched a new partner program to make sure its enterprise Linux and JBoss software are core components of a cloud-computing infrastructure, and to guarantee that Red Hat-based applications will run reliably and safely in the cloud.

The new Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program unveiled this week certifies cloud-computing providers to offer applications and infrastructure based on Red Hat software, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and JBoss Java middleware, according to Red Hat.

Amazon Web Services, which already has a technology partnership to run RHEL as part of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering, has signed on to become the first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Partner.

Red Hat considered the various constituencies interested in cloud computing - end-users and independent software vendors among them - and decided to set up a new program to work with cloud-computing providers to serve them all, said Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development at Red Hat.

Different Red Hat customers have different interests and needs when it comes to the cloud, he said. Enterprise customers want to know that their applications that run on Red Hat in their own data centers will run safely and reliably in the cloud, while ISVs want to ensure that the applications they've built can be extended to the cloud without too much hassle, Evans said. Red Hat believes that it serves both by ensuring that companies providing cloud-computing infrastructure can handle the technical and logistical complexities of transferring Red Hat-based applications to the cloud, Evans said.

Although Red Hat unveiled the new program this week, it won't reveal the specific requirements of the program until August, when it also will reveal other partners, he added.

Through the program, Red Hat will work with cloud-computing infrastructure providers to technically enable customers to move RHEL and JBoss subscriptions from their in-house environments to the cloud, Evans said. The company also will help technically enable by-the-hour, pay-as-you-go versions of RHEL and JBoss, and provide joint technical support with the cloud-computing provider. Red Hat wants to ensure customers will get the same level of support from Red Hat after moving applications to the cloud that they do before the move, Evans said. Red Hat also will plan coordinated marketing and sales efforts with its Premier Cloud Provider Partners, he added.

Currently, there are a handful of large companies in the cloud-computing market - Google, Rackspace, Verizon, IBM, Salesforce.com and Microsoft among them - but he anticipates there eventually will be 50 to 100 cloud-computing providers when all is said and done.

"I call this the 'goat-herding' phase of cloud computing," he said. "It's the wild West right now. We're trying to bring some sanity and safety [to the market] and give customers more options."

The list of cloud-computing providers is still being decided, so the move for businesses to take their applications to the cloud is still in the early stages of adoption. While the recession has slowed the move to cloud computing, analysts expect the market for cloud-based IT services will continue to grow. Research firm IDC predicts that spending on cloud-based IT services will reach US$42 billion by 2012 and account for 25 percent of IT spending growth that year.

Believing a supercomputer would help create jobs, New Mexico paid for and built a massive supercomputer named Encanto to spur economic development.

In the fall of 2007, at its birth, New Mexico's supercomputer was ranked No. 3 in the world. It's now ranked No. 12 and when the latest Top500 ranking comes this month, it may fall some more.

As with most supercomputers, fame is fleeting, and so now is patience of the government that funded Encanto.

A state Legislative Finance Committee report released last month was skeptical about the $36 million project's future. The report pointedly said the group that runs the project was a worry. "[New Mexico Computing Application Center's] ability to continue as a going concern is in question."

It's too early to know if New Mexico's experiment will spur high-tech economic growth, which is the ultimate goal of the system. But when New Mexico decided on this approach, it aimed big. Encanto has 14,500 Intel Xeon processors running on a Silicon Graphics Inc. system.

SGI was recently sold at a fire sale price of $25 million to Rackable Systems Inc., another source of legislative ire. But what hasn't changed is center's access to the engineering talent at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, as well as several universities.

The state would like this system, which became fully operational in January 2008, to earn some $59 million over a six year state commitment, as well as cover the initial investment by renting out cycles, grants and other sources. It is projected to only make $2 million in the next fiscal year beginning July 1.

Reaching the larger goal "is going to be a challenge," said Tom Bowles, the science advisor to Governor Bill Richardson and chair of the board of directors of NMCAC.

Part of the problem has been political. It wasn't until this week that the center received all the legal approvals to operate as an independent entity to get the freedom it needed to enter into contracts. But it recently announced a deal with a state-based firm, Cerelink Digital Media Group, for digital media work and is expected to create 160 jobs in three years.

Bowles said other projects are in the pipeline, including grants and federal stimulus funds tied to smart grid development. He believes the state's real competitive advantage is its access to the national labs for development help. "If it was just a computer, we wouldn't be any different from any other system in the country," he said.

New Mexico is part of small movement of states to attempt to democratize high performance computing capabilities, and improve the ability of smaller companies to use faster design and testing processes to compete against nations that rely on low wages to manufacture goods.

It's difficult to create a state sponsored computing model that is "cash-in and cash-out," or pay for itself, Stacey Simmons, associate director of economic development at Louisiana's State Universities Center for Computation & Technology. The goal of the center is build the talent pool of people who can work with in high performance environments. Success is "reaching a level of expertise of how many people can use the resources and use meaningfully."

Louisiana wants to build a talent base of people who can work in large parallel environments, said Stacey Simmons, associate director of economic development at Louisiana's State Universities Center for Computation & Technology. Success is "reaching a level of expertise of how many people can use the resources and use meaningfully."

Louisiana's focus on HPC prompted Electronic Arts Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based developer of computer games and other interactive entertainment software, to announce last August a plan to create a test center in Baton Rouge that will eventually have 200 employees.

Despite the initial challenges, Bowles said he is talking to genomic and medical research firms and others about New Mexico's system. He believes that there is "growing awareness of the role supercomputing plays in economic development," and its range of applications is expanding.

Oracle is planning to finally release its long-simmering Fusion Middleware 11g portfolio during a July 1 launch event in Washington, D.C.

Company President Charles Phillips and Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian will deliver keynotes, and sessions are scheduled for WebCenter Suite 11g, the company's portal platform; Identity Management 11g and SOA Suite 11g. Oracle is also planning to discuss WebLogic Suite 11g, its application server, as well as its application grid technology.

Oracle discussed Fusion Middleware 11g at its OpenWorld conference in November 2007 and since then released a number of developer previews, but the suite's general availability date has been in question as Oracle worked over the past year to integrate the array of middleware technologies it acquired by buying BEA Systems.

The July 1 event may shed light on how Oracle plans to reconcile overlaps between its middleware portfolio and software it would acquire if it successfully completes its pending deal to purchase Sun Microsystems. Sun has an application server, GlassFish, as well as identity management software.

Still to come, though, is an announcement of another anticipated product, Oracle Database 11g Release 2. During a recent conference call, Phillips said 11g R2 should be released in the first quarter of Oracle's fiscal year, which started in June.

Meanwhile, Oracle middleware users reacted quickly to the launch event news Wednesday.

"For those of us that inhabit the Oracle ecosystem, the Fusion Middleware 11g release is an enormous shifting tectonic plate," said Jason Jones, who works for an Oracle systems integrator, in a blog post.

Jones is eagerly anticipating the release, but added that it poses a certain challenge: "As exciting as all the new shiny toys are, at what point do we put our relationships with our clients on the line by recommending 11g over 10.1.X? Such is the life of an Oracle SI."