Tech 101 - Episode 1

CourseCast of the Week

Episode 0074, 11/08/2008

Title/Description: The Social, Spam Slapped Back, IT Woes, News Briefs

Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the week, Episode 75, recorded November 15th, 2008. This is Ken Baldauf bringing you this week's technology news and information. This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.cengage.com/coursetechnology for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions.

Story 1 - Welcome to The Social

Microsoft has unveiled a host of new online services at its WindowsLive Web site. The result is a Web site that acts as a hub for most popular Web activities – kind of a Microsoft-style Facebook meets Google Apps. From windowslive.com, users can access their e-mail, calendar, contacts, and Messenger – Microsoft’s IM service. But that's just the start! WindowsLive users can also access Office Live, OneCare, their SkyDrive online data storage, and new social networking apps that include a personalized home page, user profile, friend updates and comments, photo and media sharing, files sharing and collaboration tools, a number of social Web 2.0 styles applications, and content from 50 Web 2.0 sites including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, Twitter, WordPress and Yelp. When you consider Microsoft's announcement of their plans to take Word, OneNote, Excel, and PowerPoint online next year, you begin to see a very powerful cloud computing platform that Microsoft says will run in all popular browsers on all popular operating systems including the iPhone. With Microsoft's dominance in productivity applications, and its popularity with businesses, this platform is sure to give Google a run for its money.

Microsoft turns Windows Live into a social network [Computerworld]
Microsoft: Office Web will be available from Mac, Linux, iPhone [Computerworld]
Windows Live Update Will Provide Single Data Location [NewsFactor]

Story 2 - Spam Slapped Back

You may have noticed a drop in the amount of spam in your e-mail inbox this week. In fact the amount of spam on the Internet dropped 58 percent Tuesday. The spam relief is due to the shut-down of a California-based Web hosting company named MoColo. An investigation of the company found that as much as 75 percent of all spam was being distributed from MoColo servers. Also, the company played host to command-and-control servers that controlled the world’s largest botnets including one that stole 500,000 online bank and credit card accounts. McColo's clients included cybercriminal groups that ran some of the biggest spam-spewing and malware-spreading botnets, along with child pornographers, scam artists, and thieves.

Unfortunately, the Internet security agencies that shut down the hosting company believe that it won't be long before those responsible for the crimes will have set up shop on other servers elsewhere on the Internet, and spam will return to its usual annoying amounts.

Hosting firm shutdown forces botnets to relocate [Computerworld]
Spam plummets after Calif. hosting service shuttered [Computerworld]
Spam sees big nosedive as rogue ISP McColo knocked offline [Ars Technica]

Story 3 - Gloom, Despair, and Agony On IT

The tech headlines were full of economic moans and groans for the tech industry again this week. Sun Microsystems announced that it will lay off 18 percent of its workforce – that’s 6,000 jobs. This raises the total number of technology-related job cuts announced so far this year to more than 140,000 – most occurring over the past few months.

There were a couple of articles that made an effort to look on the brighter side of the economic turmoil. A Computerworld article points out that job losses are nowhere near the 700,000 jobs lost in the tech sector in 2001 during the .com bust. Analysts point out that the IT market is still growing, albeit at a very small margin. Certain areas in tech have been affected far less than others. Telecom, wireless, and cell phones are areas that are secure and should not be hit as hard as other areas of tech. People aren't about to give up their cell phones and wireless notebooks. Also, corporate data storage will continue to increase. Businesses depend on their information systems and data to compete and cannot afford to neglect their IT infrastructure. New IT markets will continue to emerge, although more slowly than in the past.

Most analysts expect the next 18 months to be very difficult for the IT industry, but predict that the industry will pull out its slump and be back on track in four years.

With Sun's job cuts, tech sector layoff toll in '08 hits 140,000 [Computerworld]
8 reasons tech isn't dead ... yet [Computerworld]
IDC: Grim economy means slowed IT spending for next four years [Computerworld]
On Wall Street, bad news gets worse for IT [Computerworld]

And that brings us to News Briefs.

Microsoft has opened an online store at www.WindowsMarketplace.com where consumers can purchase and download Microsoft software and order hardware directly from Microsoft.
Boxed software's days look numbered with Microsoft's new online store [Computerworld]
Google has shown that it is able to predict flu activity in specific regions of the country two weeks faster than the federal Centers for Disease Control. By analyzing flu-related search patterns in Google's search data, along with location information, Google is able to map the spread of the flu and predict its movements and intensities.
Google uses search patterns to accurately estimate flu activity [Computerworld]
The iPhone 3G has overtaken the Razr as the hottest selling handset in the US.
iPhone overtakes RAZR as top-selling handset [Computerworld]
CircuitCity has filed for bankruptcy.
Struggling Circuit City files for bankruptcy [Computerworld]
The recent attacks on computer systems at the White House, the Obama presidential campaign headquarters, and the McCain campaign headquarters, have been tracked to their sources in China. It is unclear whether they were government-sponsored or not. E-mail from government officials was accessed from the White House, and files were accessed from the presidential campaigns.
Cyber-Attacks Reported at White House, Campaigns [Washington Post]
Google has announced that it will soon release a cell phone application that will allow the user to ask a question verbally into the handset and Google's search engine will supply the answer. The app will roll out for the iPhone first.
Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone) [NewYorkTimes]
American Airlines is starting a cell phone ticketing service. Rather than printing out a ticket, a barcode image is sent to the customer's cell phone which is scanned by the gate agent at boarding.
Cell phone boarding passes coming to an airline near you [Ars Technica]
Google has added voice and video chat to its Gmail service. Watch out Skype!
Gmail gains voice and video chat via Mac and PC plug-in [Ars Technica]
The Reference Extract project is hoping to out search Google by using librarians and scholars to provide search results.
Using crowdsourced librarians to outsmart Google [Ars Technica]

That's it for this week's CourseCast. Links to this week's stories and many more news and information resources are provided at the CourseCast Web site at coursecasts.course.com. E-mail us with your suggestions for the show at course.coursecasts@cengage.com. Until next time, have a great week and be sure to take advantage of the Power -- of Technology!