Monday, September 26, 2005
Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina
Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.
Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.
'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'
Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness. 'The question is, were these dolphins made secure before Katrina struck?' said Sheridan.
The mystery surfaced when a separate group of dolphins was washed from a commercial oceanarium on the Mississippi coast during Katrina. Eight were found with the navy's help, but the dolphins were not returned until US navy scientists had examined them.
Sheridan is convinced the scientists were keen to ensure the dolphins were not the navy's, understood to be kept in training ponds in a sound in Louisiana, close to Lake Pontchartrain, whose waters devastated New Orleans.
The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.
Criticism from animal rights groups ensured the use of dolphins became more secretive. But the project gained impetus after the Yemen terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Dolphins have also been used to detect mines near an Iraqi port.
source: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1577753,00.html
Nanowires for detecting molecular signs of cancer
A paper describing the work will appear in October in the journal Nature Biotechnology and is now posted on the journal's web site.
"This is one of the first applications of nanotechnology to healthcare and offers a clinical technique that is significantly better than what exists today," says author Charles M. Lieber, Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "A nanowire array can test a mere pinprick of blood in just minutes, providing a nearly instantaneous scan for many different cancer markers. It's a device that could open up substantial new possibilities in the diagnosis of cancer and other complex diseases."
Lieber and his colleagues linked slender nanowires conducting a small current with antibody receptors for certain cancer markers -- such as prostate specific antigen (PSA), PSA-a1-antichymotrypsin, carcinoembryonic antigen and mucin-1. When these telltale proteins come into contact with a receptor, it sparks a momentary change in conductance that gives a clear indication of the marker's presence. The detectors differentiate among various cancer markers both through the specific receptors used to snag them and because each binds its receptor for a characteristic length of time before dislodging.
"Our results show that these devices are able to distinguish among molecules with near-perfect selectivity," Lieber says, adding that the risk of false readings is minimized by the incorporation of various control nanowires.
The scientists also fitted some nanowires in the arrays with nucleic acid receptors for telomerase, an enzyme inactive in most of the body's somatic cells but active in at least 80 percent of known human cancers. In testing of extracts from as few as 10 tumor cells, these receptors allowed real-time monitoring of telomerase binding and activity.
Lieber says nanowire arrays could easily be scaled up to detect many different cancer markers -- more of which are being found all the time, thanks to the current boom in proteomics. Widespread use of these cancer markers in healthcare will ultimately depend upon the development of techniques that allow rapid detection of many markers with high selectivity and sensitivity.
"Genomics and proteomics research has elucidated many new biomarkers that have the potential to greatly improve disease diagnosis," the scientists write. "The availability of multiple biomarkers is believed to be especially important in the diagnosis of complex diseases like cancer, for which disease heterogeneity makes tests of single markers inadequate. Patterns of multiple cancer markers might, however, provide the information necessary for robust diagnosis of disease … [and] detection of markers associated with different stages of disease pathogenesis could further facilitate early detection."
While initial rounds of cancer testing today identify only whether or not cancer is present, nanowire arrays have the potential to immediately fill in details on exactly what type of cancer is present. Nanowires could also track patients' health as treatment progresses. Because the arrays detect molecules suspended in fluids, drops of blood could be tested directly, in a physician's office, without any need for biochemical manipulation.
Lieber's co-authors are Gengfeng Zheng, Fernando Patolsky, Yi Cui and Wayne U. Wang, all of Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Biophysics Program and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Cancer Institute.
Steve Bradt
steve_bradt@harvard.edu
617-496-8070
Harvard University
harvard.edu
source:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/printerfriendlynews.php?newsid=31091
The Hunt Is On:A practical guide to Internet reconnaissance.
Sometimes thirty-two bits are all you need. This is a guide to Internet reconnaissance - a guide to finding out as much as you can concerning a target via the Internet. Utilizing publicly available resources, we can quickly learn a good deal about a suspicious host, such as its service provider and originating country. Coupled with real-world knowledge, we can assess the threat posed by a would-be attacker and react accordingly. Along with a good idea of where to start, this requires some basic working knowledge of the Internet and the communication for which it provides.
The Internet is a cloud. Not literally, of course, but it is often pictured this way due to its vague nature. From the outside, it appears as a single entity, but from within it is impossible to determine its boundaries. The Internet is constantly changing, and there is no giant map to help us get a bearing on where we are. Instead, we rely on routed protocols - specifically IP - for transportation over and between networks.
Now, as with everything, this has good points and bad points. The seemingly infinite size and redundancy of the Internet generally provide for reliable sustained communications. Even though the routes taken by traffic may change, an end-to-end connection appears constant to its users. However, by its very nature, the Internet is an incredibly complex network of networks. It is impossible to consider the Internet as a detailed whole. But with a little know-how, we can traverse this uncharted territory with relative ease.
Hostile Territory
On the routed Internet, we lose certain luxuries taken for granted on local networks. Most obviously, we lose all second-layer functionality (see the OSI Model for a better understanding of the layered anatomy of a network). Any hardware information, such as MAC addresses or interface ID's which would typically prove invaluable on a switched network aren't worth squat outside the border router. We also give up any control we might have had otherwise, such as administrative access to network devices.
To make things even more complicated, we might also have the added limitations of Internet service providers to deal with. Some ISPs filter certain types of traffic in the interest of security or - more often - economy. This is very common among university and corporate networks, and even some less reputable residential providers. One such common practice is to disable ICMP traffic on infrastructure devices, effectively making ping useless. Similarly, this may also result in abridged or never-ending traceroutes, as with the following IP[1]:
C:\>tracert 68.57.30.45
Tracing route to pcp04991434pcs.benslm01.pa.comcast.net [68.57.30.45]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 11 ms 11 ms 10 ms nv-67-77-38-1.sta.sprint-hsd.net [67.77.38.1]
3 11 ms 12 ms 11 ms nv-208-13-128-45.sta.sprint-hsd.net [208.13.128.45]
4 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms host114.eseg2.sprintnetops.net [63.164.47.114]
5 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms sl-gw23-ana-0-4.sprintlink.net [144.228.170.89]
6 16 ms 17 ms 17 ms sl-bb20-ana-3-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.1.45]
7 18 ms 17 ms 16 ms sl-bb22-ana-14-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.1.177]
8 19 ms 17 ms 17 ms sprint-gw.la2ca.ip.att.net [192.205.32.185]
9 19 ms 18 ms 19 ms tbr2-p012101.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.123.29.6]
10 71 ms 73 ms 70 ms tbr2-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.13]
11 70 ms 70 ms 71 ms tbr2-cl7.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.10.45]
12 71 ms 71 ms 70 ms tbr1-cl2.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.9.133]
13 85 ms 87 ms 84 ms tbr1-cl1.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.10.1]
14 84 ms 83 ms 83 ms gar5-p300.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.123.3.9]
15 84 ms 84 ms 84 ms 12.118.149.18
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 137 ms 120 ms 101 ms pcp04991434pcs.benslm01.pa.comcast.net [68.57.30.45]
Trace complete.
The above is an example of an incomplete traceroute - you can see the local hops on the target end have been masked. This can make troubleshooting difficult at times, but some ISPs will restrict ICMP as a measure to mitigate certain types of denial of service attacks. In addition, there may also be limitations placed on other protocols via up-channel firewalls, but these generally won't interfere with our current investigation.
Dissolving the Cloud
So we're reviewing our firewall's intrusion attempt logs one afternoon and one IP in particular stands out from the rest. We see repeated, random attempts at compromising an FTP server. The variations in timing and syntax lead you to believe this to be more than just another virus-infected zombie; the attacks seem to stem from a human source. This certainly warrants investigation, but all we have is an IP: 24.145.180.82. Where do we start?
The first thing we want to do is get an idea of who might be attacking us. Is this just a residential connection, or corporate network, or might it even be coming from a compromised third-party server? A quick reverse DNS lookup should help us out.
C:\>nslookup 24.145.180.82
Server: nv-208-13-143-36.sta.sprint-hsd.net
Address: 208.13.143.36
Name: user-0c93d2i.cable.mindspring.com
Address: 24.145.180.82
We can determine from the lookup that the IP belongs to Mindspring, a provider of Earthlink's broadband Internet service. So, if this turns out to be a malicious attacker, we can at least find out who to contact about a possible Terms of Service violation. This happens to be a United States ISP, but for out-of-country providers, check IANA's top level domain listings at http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm[2].
Sometimes reverse lookups may not be so helpful, or we require further information. The most reliable sources of IP registration info are the four global IP registries. ARIN serves North America and southern Africa, RIPE serves Europe and northern Africa, APNIC serves Asia and Australia, and LACNIC serves South America. Use your regional registry's WHOIS search to look up the target address. ARIN, for example, returns the following information:
Search results for: 24.145.180.82
Earthlink, Inc. ERLK-CABLE-TW-CENTRAL (NET-24-145-128-0-1)
24.145.128.0 - 24.145.255.255
EarthLink, Inc. ERLK-TW-INDIANAPOLIS01 (NET-24-145-178-0-1)
24.145.178.0 - 24.145.181.63
However, if we were to WHOIS this address from another registry, it would refer us back to IANA, as that registry would not be responsible for this address block. IANA provides a list of the top-level IP allocation blocks. Your IP may be listed under a specific registry; otherwise, you'll have to check each registry manually until you find the appropriate one.
In our example above, we receive two entries. The first is for a clump of 128 C-blocks[3] allocated to Earthlink, Inc. The second provides greater detail, specifying a more limited range used only in the Indianapolis, Indiana metropolitan area. We're starting to get a clearer picture of our attacker. We now know his general geographic location as well as his service provider. Given this information, we can make an informed decision whether or not to continue the search.
Let's look at another example. This one is purposefully more complicated, in an effort to stress the importance of detail. Our new target IP is 211.23.250.99. Checking IANA's list of IP blocks, we see that our first octet (211) falls under APNIC, so we head on over to http://www.apnic.net/ and WHOIS the IP:
inetnum: 211.23.0.0 - 211.23.255.255
netname: HINET-TW
descr: CHTD, Chunghwa Telecom Co.,Ltd.
descr: Data-Bldg.6F, No.21, Sec.21, Hsin-Yi Rd.
descr: Taipei Taiwan 100
country: TW
admin-c: HN27-AP
tech-c: HN28-AP
remarks: This information has been partially mirrored by APNIC from
remarks: TWNIC. To obtain more specific information, please use the
remarks: TWNIC whois server at whois.twnic.net.
mnt-by: MAINT-TW-TWNIC
changed: hostmaster@twnic.net 20001106
status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE
source: APNIC
We can see from the above that the IP is registered under Chunghwa Telecom Co., of Taipei, Taiwan. However, this is a very broad listing, whose range is composed of an entire B class - 65,536 IP's. Note that our WHOIS actually returns two separate queries, the second of which is much more localized:
inetnum: 211.23.250.96 - 211.23.250.103
netname: TAIWAN-GUAN-SI-P-KH-TW
descr: CHTD, Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd.
descr: Data-Bldg. 6F, No. 21, Sec. 21, Hsin-Yi Rd.,
descr: Taipei Taiwan
country: TW
admin-c: JJ308-TW
tech-c: JJ308-TW
mnt-by: MAINT-TW-TWNIC
remarks: This information has been partially mirrored by APNIC from
remarks: TWNIC. To obtain more specific information, please use the
remarks: TWNIC whois server at whois.twnic.net.
changed: fkchung@ms1.hinet.net 20040108
status: ASSIGNED NON-PORTABLE
source: TWNIC
The second range spans only eight IPs, but still lists the same parent company. One important detail to note in this case is the addition of administrative comments in the remarks section, indicating that this entry has been mirrored from the local registry of Taiwan, TWNIC. Some countries have elected to run their own national registries due to political or other motivations. By performing a WHOIS on the same IP at http://whois.twnic.net/ we are provided yet more detail about the address range, including its current owner, Taiwan Guan Si Paint Co.
Putting it All Together
At this point we have a very solid lead for pursuing our investigation. What you decide from this point on should be based on outside information, and relies largely on what your original motive was anyway. The next logical step, should you decide to investigate further, would be target enumeration; port scanning and platform/service analysis. Be aware however that these are proactive steps. Once attempted, you have entered the game and should take appropriate cautions.
The whole WHOIS process is pretty simple, and you should be able to perform every necessary step above and arrive at an answer in just seconds once you're accustomed to it. Keep in mind that the information you find might not always be 100% accurate, or might in fact describe a third-party host an attacker is using as a proxy en route to you. Still, you'll gain a much better footing once you have the means to personify your target. Given a few key pieces of information, the shroud of the Internet begins to thin and makes further progress that much easier.
[1] I would like to stress that the IP addresses provided for demonstration are merely that; several hapless hosts chosen at pseudo-random. When performing traces of your own, try different IP's.
[2] The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a non-profit organization charged with administering high-level Internet functions. This includes assigning IP address space, TCP/UDP port numbers, etc.
[3] IP addresses are traditionally broken into several distinct classes, which were used to manage routing tables in the early years of the Internet. Each class contains a varying degree of networks versus hosts per network.
source: http://www.whitedust.net/article/37/The%20Hunt%20Is%20On/
Yahoo Email Delivers That Desktop Feel Most Users Expect
Web-based email programs, like Yahoo Mail, have long been inferior to email programs that take the form of standard applications installed on your computer. The Web offerings have been short on features, short on email storage and clumsy to use.
Lately, however, that has begun to change. A number of major Web-mail providers have introduced versions that offer much more of the ease of use and power of desktop email programs like Microsoft Outlook. Yet they still retain the core advantage of Web-mail services: They can be accessed from any computer, Windows or Mac, with your settings and preferences always present. All you need is an Internet connection and a Web browser.
Google kicked off the trend last year with Gmail, which for the first time offered to store, free, a huge volume of old email messages -- 1 gigabyte, which was raised to 2 gigabytes or more. Other Web players boosted their free storage limits.
Now, the Web-mail competition has taken a new turn, going beyond storage. Yahoo, EarthLink and AOL all have recently introduced versions that lift their functionality well beyond the old model of Web mail. All are using new programming techniques that turn them from simple Web pages into something resembling the fluidity of desktop applications.
For instance, these new email offerings allow you to drag and drop items, and do most things without waiting for a Web page to refresh or a new page to open. That's a big change from the old system, where any significant action was performed in circuitous ways and required the Web page containing the email program to tediously reload.
This is a major breakthrough, and one that will extend beyond Web mail. More Web sites will be revamped to look and work like regular desktop programs, hastening the day when most applications may reside online.
I've been comparing the new version of Yahoo Mail, which claims to be the leader in Web mail, with Gmail, the challenger Yahoo most fears. My verdict: The new Yahoo Mail is far superior to Gmail. Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience most serious email users have come to expect. Gmail, by contrast, is quirky and limited. Its only advantage is its massive free storage, which exceeds what most people will ever need.
Both products are officially in "beta," or test, status. Neither is easy to obtain and use. If you want a Gmail account, you have to be invited by an existing account holder, or go through an odd sign-up process using your cellphone. Yahoo's new version, just a week old, is -- for now -- available only to Yahoo Mail account holders the company selected, though the user pool will be expanded later this fall.
The new Yahoo Mail retains the basic terms of the current version. You get 1 gigabyte of mail storage free of charge, and the program displays ads. For $20 a year, the storage doubles to 2 gigabytes, and the ads disappear.
The new version is radically easier to use. For example, there's a preview pane, just as in desktop programs, that allows you to view the contents of an email without opening it. You can open multiple emails at once. You can drop messages into folders you create. You can right-click on various items to see short menus of useful tasks, like "add sender to address book." You can delete multiple messages at once by selecting them and clicking on a trash-can icon.
By contrast, Gmail has none of these new, fluid, desktop-like features. You can't scroll through all of your messages' headers without loading a new Web page. And there's no preview pane, only a feature that shows a snippet of the content of an email.
To delete groups of messages, you have to wait for multiple consecutive pages to load, showing new headers. You can't drag and drop. And Gmail's address book, unlike Yahoo's, doesn't allow you to collect contacts into group addresses.
But Gmail's limitations go beyond this. On several key issues, Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice.
Gmail doesn't allow folders, only color-coded labels, as an organizing technique. It forces you to view all of your email in groups of related messages called "conversations," instead of viewing them individually as they arrive. Other email programs also allow such grouped views, but they permit users to choose. Not Gmail, where "option" is a term too rarely employed, except in reference to employee compensation. (Yahoo plans to add an optional grouped view soon.)
Similarly, Gmail forces you to view ads alongside your emails. Unlike Yahoo, it offers no paid option to avoid the ads.
I'm sure Gmail will get better and better, and will eventually adopt the new programming techniques that allow desktop-like ease of use. But I'm not sure Google's arrogance will ever make room for user preferences on things like folders or ads, or how emails are grouped.
Yahoo's new email program would blow Gmail away if it were widely released today. That's partly due to its features, but also to its respect for user choice.
http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050922.htmlsource:
Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality
http://news.com.com/Microsofts+nightmare+inches+closer+to+reality/2100-1012_3-5877197.html
Story last modified Fri Sep 23 04:00:00 PDT 2005
As early as May 1995, three months before Netscape Communications' initial public offering sparked the dot-com boom, Microsoft executives were worried that the nascent World Wide Web could one day become a significant threat to the Windows franchise.
In an extensive memo called "The Web is the Next Platform" that was introduced as evidence in Microsoft's antitrust trial five years ago, Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka described a "nightmare" scenario for the software giant.
"The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote.
What's new:
A decade ago, Microsoft worried that the Internet could become a software platform that threatens Windows. Ten years later, that amorphous nightmare has a name: Google.
Bottom line:
Microsoft isn't in danger of falling apart anytime soon: The Windows monopoly, Office desktop suite and Exchange e-mail system give the company plenty of money to battle the threat. But it's fair to say Microsoft's hammerlock is loosening.
Microsoft, however, didn't heed the warning. Instead, it embarked on a strategy--championed by Jim Allchin, who today heads up development of the next version of Windows--that was fanatically focused on the operating system.
Fast-forward 10 years: The nightmare is inching closer to reality and Microsoft execs are apparently paying attention to the decade-old alert. As part of a management shuffle, Microsoft said Tuesday it would make hosted services a more strategic part of the company and fold its MSN Web portal business into its platform product development group, where Windows is developed.
Another memo, called "Google--The Winner Takes All (And Not Just Search)," is also making the rounds. This internal memo, written in 2005, argues that Google threatens Microsoft and the company's crown jewel, Windows.
Just about the only thing that's changed over the last decade is that Microsoft's amorphous nightmare has a name: Google.
The MSN shuffle and that familiar-sounding memo come just as Google is poised to become the biggest threat to Microsoft's hold on the tech industry since Netscape shipped its first browsers. More than a few analysts believe that Google, with its massive array of networked computers and Web-based software, is rapidly expanding beyond its traditional search business and is about to collide with Gates & Co.
Google has about $7 billion in the bank to fund this fight. And it's already stealing the tech limelight from Microsoft--and significant mindshare from developers. Indeed, Google even managed to snag some top employees away from Microsoft, a trick Microsoft performed on its rivals countless times in the 1980s and '90s.
The MSN shift also brings full circle an argument that began inside Microsoft a decade ago: If the Web, not the PC, is indeed the next computing platform, should Microsoft embrace it wholeheartedly, or do everything in its power to ensure that Windows stays at the center of the computing universe?
A group of pro-Internet "doves" led by then-executive Brad Silverberg and Slivka argued in the mid-1990s that instead of digging in on the PC, Microsoft should beat its rivals by becoming the dominant platform for Internet computing, according to the book "Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft," by David Bank.
Ultimately, executives such as Allchin, who plans to retire once Windows Vista is shipped, won that internal debate. The Internet Explorer browser was folded into Windows; a separate unit dedicated to Web development tools was merged with other product groups; and nearly all of Microsoft's Web technology development was tied to the Windows platform.
It's hard to say, given what happened in the following years, that it was a bad decision. A badly bruised Netscape was acquired by America Online. AOL, back then a major threat, lost its importance. And from fiscal 1997 to the end of fiscal 2005 in June, Microsoft's annual revenues grew from $11.36 billion to $39.79 billion. Net income nearly tripled to $12.25 billion annually.
What those executives couldn't have seen back in 1997, however, was that a search engine recently developed by graduate students in a Stanford University dorm room would by 2005 become Google, a Net powerhouse on its way to doing better than $4 billion per year in business.
"Microsoft is facing a whole new slew of competitors in the 21st century that weren't around five to 10 years ago," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Gates on Google
Today, Google is taking a page from the Microsoft playbook for tech dominance. It's wooing the third-party software developers who for years have written their programs for Windows--and increasingly are Google's Internet services as part of their Web applications. It's also luring some of Microsoft's top minds, including the controversial Kai-Fu Lee, an expert in speech recognition technology, and Adam Bosworth, a former Microsoft programmer extraordinaire who came to Google by way of BEA Systems.
Microsoft, it seems, is faced with a classic "innovator's dilemma," as author Clayton Christensen put it in his groundbreaking book that defined why tech giants usually miss the next wave of innovation. Microsoft execs made what looked like the right decisions at the time. As a result, the cash came in. The core product, Windows, became bigger and more complicated, and getting updated versions became harder to get out the door.
Plotting the counter-offensiveThe burden of that success, as the theory in the book goes, makes it harder to respond to the next generation of tech innovators. Years ago, Microsoft and Apple rattled IBM. Now Google, some believe, has a chance to rattle Microsoft by providing a cheaper, easier-to-use alternative. "Every other time Microsoft was attacking from below," said one former executive. "Now (Microsoft) is being attacked from below and they don't know how to deal with it."
The Microsoft reorganization makes it clear just how seriously CEO Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates take that threat-–even if they won't exactly say it. "We've had lots of competitors in their honeymoon phase," Gates said about Google in a recent interview with CNET News.com. "But I'd say, in some ways, this is the biggest honeymoon I've ever seen."
Yet MSN's new prominence makes it clear that Redmond is focused on bringing a Web platform closer than ever to the operating system, analysts said.
MSN could be what Windows could never be: a Net platform that allows developers to write and distribute their code quickly. Patches and upgrades that take weeks or longer to distribute with traditional software can be done overnight, simply because they're all under the same umbrella. By comparison, the successor to Windows XP, introduced in 2001, isn't due until next year.
Redmond's grip looseningIn fact, MSN has already been used as a vehicle for shipping Windows features, said Rob Helm, director of research at the independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. The search service in Windows Vista, for example, shipped earlier as MSN Desktop Search. In addition, Internet Explorer features, like tabbed browsing, and protection against phishing techniques--in which online scammers entice unwitting Internet users to log on to fake Web sites that steal their information--shipped first through MSN, Helm added.
Search and destroy
Not all that long ago, Microsoft execs were saying Internet Explorer updates were inextricably tied to Windows updates. But the most recent version of the browser shipped ahead of Windows Vista so, some analysts believe, Microsoft could keep pace with the upstart Firefox browser.
"MSN has become, bit by bit, a channel to get stuff out from a Windows organization that otherwise was kind of blocked by their rather difficult delivery process" that can be slowed by traditional sales channels, he said.
Of course, Microsoft isn't in danger of falling apart anytime soon. The Windows monopoly, the Office desktop suite and the Exchange e-mail system give Microsoft plenty of money to fix the problem. And it's not as though tech giants disappear into the night: IBM, after several years of scuffling, reinvented itself as the tech services king.
But it's fair to say that the hammerlock Microsoft has had on tech for better than a decade may finally be loosening. Increasingly, Web surfers are finding alternatives to the PC for their Net access. And no competitor, not even Netscape, has captured the public's imagination the way Google has.
The memo now circulating shows that Microsoft execs are well aware of the search giant's impact. "Google threatens Microsoft's position on the Internet, and could potentially lock Microsoft out of its existing distribution channels and reduce the value of Windows," the memo said, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal first reported on the memo Thursday. Microsoft, the memo said, was playing "an expensive game of catch-up."
Now the battle is intensifying, and MSN is an ideal launch pad for Redmond's counter-offensive. Last week, rumors swirled that Microsoft would acquire AOL or enter into a partnership that could have AOL using MSN's search engine and effectively swiping Google's single biggest source of revenue. Neither company has confirmed the rumors.
"MSN will be higher profile, and it will also be better leveraged," said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner. "There is a lot of good technology and a lot of assets over there that can be leveraged."
Up to now, MSN has struggled to find its niche within Microsoft. It started out in the Windows group when Windows 95 launched. Later, it was positioned as a competitor to AOL's proprietary service and bundled dial-up Internet access. It even once featured MSN TV.
"Few products at Microsoft have gone through so many strategic identity shifts over the years as MSN has," said Jupiter's Gartenberg.
MSN finally reached operating profitability two years ago because of an increase in online advertising, particularly keyword search sales. That brings it to where it is today: a well-traveled property whose time may have finally come.
While analysts praised Microsoft's new MSN vision, they said the devil will be in the details that Microsoft hasn't offered many of yet. Gartenberg predicted that MSN's instant-messaging service, for one, will become part of the Windows environment.
"There is no doubt that whatever Microsoft will be offering vis-à-vis MSN, and how MSN goes forward, it is going to be strongly integrated back into the whole Windows platform," he said.
Added Gartner's Smith, "I think you are seeing the beginning of Microsoft kind of getting themselves set for the redefinition of platform--the era we are calling the second Web revolution."
What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft is able to do battle with Google as successfully as it did with Netscape.
