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Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is expected to officially declare her candidacy for governor of California on Tuesday.

Whitman stepped down as CEO of eBay in March 2008, a decade after she transformed the company from a tiny auction site to an Internet icon. During her tenure, the company’s split-adjusted share price leaped from just over $1 to a 2004 peak of almost $60, before plummeting to a recent price of under $14.

Whitman, who has never served an elected public office, will announce her bid for the Republican nomination in 2010 during a speech in Fullerton, Calif. She will reportedly campaign on a platform of cutting state spending by $15 billion and reducing the state’s workforce by 17 percent.

Likely contenders for the Democratic nomination include Attorney General Jerry Brown, who was already governor 30 years ago, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Possible primary rivals include State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a former Silicon Valley exec who founded SnapTrack, a cell phone locating company, and sold it to Qualcomm for $1 billion in January 2000. Another GOP rival is expected to be Tom Campbell, a former U.S. congressman and dean of the business school at University of California at Berkeley.

Whitman, 53, will become a leading Republican candidate to succeed outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will retire because of term limits.

In the past year, the billionaire Internet executive has taken a more high-profile role in the Republican Party. Whitman served as an adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and endorsed him during a speech at the party’s convention in St. Paul, Minn., last year.

Meg Whitman

(Credit:
eBay)

Facebook’s rapid growth made it pretty much inevitable that it would surpass the News Corp.-owned MySpace, once the clear leader in social networking. But even when Facebook passed MySpace in worldwide traffic, MySpace still had a pretty big edge in the U.S. Ultimately, Facebook passed MySpace in U.S. usage earlier than some thought it would.

Facebook now has more than 250 million active users worldwide.

MySpace has launched its own universal log-in product, MySpaceID, backed by partnerships with Google and Yahoo. But it’s Facebook Connect that has caught on among both the Web-going public and the marketing world.

And that growth spurt was what made it the biggest site of its kind in the U.S., according to the numbers. The social network officially surpassed MySpace in U.S. traffic during the week of May 30, Hitwise estimated.

“A clear benefit of Facebook Connect is the ability of the user to use a single portable identity–and most importantly, one password, rather than logging into multiple accounts across the network of Web sites,” Dougherty wrote. “Participation from Web sites in Facebook Connect also has strong implications to appear more often in the search results executed on Facebook resulting from member postings as search becomes a more prevalent activity within this large audience.

If Hitwise’s numbers are accurate, it’s a big testament to the success of Facebook Connect, which launched in full last December.

Traffic firm Hitwise says Facebook eventually overcame MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic as a result of the launch of its Facebook Connect universal log-in product, according to a post from analyst Heather Dougherty.

“The number of Web sites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 Web sites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others,” Dougherty’s post read. “And what is really interesting is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook, because there is a clear uptick in the growth rate following the launch of Facebook Connect.”

Two companies–respectively (I believe) the smallest and largest makers of graphics chips–announced on Sunday that they are developing new standard APIs (application programming interfaces) specifically for ray-traced computer graphics.

I’ll have more analysis of these announcements later, but I didn’t want to miss this chance to break some significant industry news.

James McCombe (founder and CTO of start-up Caustic Graphics) and Austin Robison (a research scientist with Nvidia) made their announcements in presentations during the Hot3D session I chaired at the High Performance Graphics conference in New Orleans over the weekend. The big Siggraph 2009 conference opens here this week.

Caustic Graphics introduced CausticGL, an API designed to leverage the best aspects of OpenGL, the most widely supported 3D API on the market. CausticGL ties in with Caustic’s accelerator chips and boards, which the company says can deliver some 20X the ray-tracing performance of a conventional CPU.

The third presentation in the session was from Larry Seiler, a senior principal engineer with Intel, who described new details of how Intel is optimizing 3D-rendering software for its forthcoming Larrabee GPU.

Nvidia offered OptiX (pronounced like “optics”), a name designed to resonate with PhysX, the physics API acquired last year when Nvidia bought Ageia, a company that was developing both the software API as well as a companion accelerator chip. (Nvidia doesn’t have a Web page on OptiX yet; I’ll update this post when one appears.) (The OptiX page is now online.)

Web Gateway Security’s dashboard offers a nearly real-time look at users’ activity across the entire network at a glance.

Sure, there’s potential for companies to take “Big Brother” to a new level. But the executives at Trend Micro pointed instead to the ability to identify a problem at a company-approved site. If a particular user is using an excessive amount of bandwidth, for example, but isn’t visiting any out-of-the-ordinary sites, it may be the result of a problem at one of those sites.

Companies have long reserved the right to monitor or restrict Web surfing activities for the sake of protecting the network and sensitive company data. In a recent survey of IT executives by Trend Micro, 75 percent said they were concerned about unauthorized online activities at work and that nearly 70 percent would consider prohibiting access to certain sites, such as shopping or social-networking properties. But the company also highlights another statistic–42 percent say they’re willing to accept the risks of social networking on office computers because they see social networking as something that will benefit the company in the long run.

Today, the seedy side of the Internet comes in many different forms and from many different sources. Stop for a moment and think about the new places where malware might be buried, hidden, released, and shared–a legitimate site that’s been hacked, a bit.ly link on Twitter, or even an image on a Facebook friend’s page. Now, think about how many of these links you’ve clicked on from within the corporate network.

It’s a tool that gives companies the ability to monitor for unusual activity and track it–nearly in real-time–to a particular site or particular user. No more waiting for reports the next morning to make some sort of discovery or identify the root of a problem.

The company on Monday also announced a virtual appliance, which allows companies to either dedicate their own standardized hardware to the app or install in a VMware environment with other apps.

(Credit:
Trend Micro )

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

It used to be that an IT administrator could warn employees about opening attachments from unknown sources or clicking on links from unknown e-mail senders as the first line of defense against spam, malware, and other bad stuff on the Internet.

Trend Micro, in an effort to fight a modern-day Internet security war, is announcing Monday the launch of its Web Gateway Security, a product that does more than just enhance URL filtering or expand the database of trouble spots, red flags, and other information used to keep its customers safe. The product also comes with tools that provide IT administrators with detailed information about who on the network is doing what, when and from where–even just a few moments ago. The dashboard (pictured below) gives the administrator a nearly real-time look at the users, the traffic, and the sites being downloaded across the entire network with just a glance.

I’d hate to be the person who pressed the Go button on that, but Sprint told John Paczkowski at All Things Digital that it will honor the service to anyone who purchased the deal while the offer was live. Obviously, this doesn’t look good on Sprint’s part but it seems the carrier has been making strides as of late. Do you agree or disagree?

Sprint has since pulled the offer, saying the promotion was posted in error and issuing this statement:

Earlier on Tuesday, Sprint published an enticing deal to customers of competing carriers by offering a $100 service credit to anyone who bought a Palm Pre and ported his or her old number to Sprint. Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, it would have been had it lasted.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET)

After further internal review today, the offer of a port-in service credit of $100 to new customers who buy the Palm Pre has been pulled because it was put into the system in error.

Research into those topics–as well as studies finding that diamonds could be created from tequila and giant panda feces are good for composting–received Ig Nobel Prizes in a ceremony on Thursday night at Harvard University.

Have you ever worried that knuckle cracking will give you arthritis or wondered why pregnant women don’t tip over? Me too.

There were also awards for findings that came of less research. The economics prize was awarded to officials from four Icelandic banks “for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa–and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.”

And finally, the prize for literature was given to Ireland’s police service for writing more than 50 traffic tickets to “the most frequent driving offender in the country–Prawo Jazdy–whose name in Polish means “Driver’s License.”

The Ig Nobel Prize for peace went to a group at the University of Bern in Switzerland for its bar room brawl-related research. The doctors, several of whom are forensic pathologists, had been asked to testify in court cases whether a skull can be broken by smashing a beer bottle on someone’s head–and whether that is more easily accomplished with a full bottle or an empty one.

“On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case,” the researchers wrote in an abstract for their paper, “Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production.”

The physics prize went to researchers from the University of Cincinnati, the University of Texas, and Harvard for “analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over” in their paper “Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins.”

The public-health prize was awarded to inventors who received a patent for a brassiere that can be converted into a pair of gas masks.

And in a modern-day alchemy experiment, researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico received the chemistry prize for turning tequila into diamonds. Well, maybe not exactly diamonds, but diamond films that could be an economical component in electrical insulators.

Asked whether certain beer brands might be more dangerous than others, Bolliger said, “The brand of the bottle is irrelevant, as the major breweries in Switzerland all use the same, recyclable half-liter bottles.”

The prizes, awarded to scientific achievements that “cannot and should not be reproduced,” are presented in the week before the real Nobel prizes are announced and are sponsored by the science humor magazine “Annals of Improbable Research.”

A Thousand Oaks, Calif., doctor won the Ig Nobel medicine prize for his firsthand research into arthritis in fingers. As a child and in adulthood, Donald Unger’s mother, several aunts, and mother-in-law warned him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis in his fingers. To test that theory, he cracked the knuckles of his left hand, but not the right hand, every day for more than 60 years.

The research paper concludes that because half-liter beer bottles present “formidable weapons” in a fight, “prohibition of these bottles is therefore justified in situations which involve risk of human conflicts.”

“This result calls into question whether other parental beliefs, e.g., the importance of eating spinach, are also flawed,” he wrote. “Further investigation is likely warranted.”

In Switzerland, the half-liter refillable beer bottle is commonly used as a weapon in bar fights and can crack a skull, researchers said.

“Full and empty bottles suffice in breaking the skull. However, the likelihood of such fractures is greater in blows with an empty bottle. Empty beer bottles are therefore more dangerous,” Dr. Stephan Bolliger wrote in an e-mail response to questions on Friday.

The mathematics prize went to the governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank for “giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers–from very small to very big–by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from 1 cent to 100 trillion dollars.”

“There was no arthritis in either hand, and no apparent differences between the two hands,” Unger wrote in a letter to the editor in Arthritis and Rheumatism, Vol. 41, No. 5, in 1998, after he had completed only 50 years of his study.

In Japan, researchers turned to a beloved animal for help in home waste reduction. A team at the Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara won the biology prize for “demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90 percent in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.”

His conclusion? The cracking has no effect. (A chiropractor in San Francisco previously agreed with that notion in a very unscientific survey conducted by me.)

Meanwhile, other Ig Nobel-honored research suggests that farmers can benefit from improved human-bovine relations. Researchers at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom won the veterinary-medicine prize for their work showing that “Bessie” is likely to produce more milk than “No. 5863329.”

(Credit:
Stephan Bolliger/Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine)

Could Google be adding mortgage information to its real-estate search pages?

Google played it coy, telling the Times that “we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.”

(Credit:
Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

LendingTree believes that Google is planning to launch the service in late August or early September–basically now–according to the complaint. Google is supposedly going to offer mortgage information and even quotes for home loans. You can already search for home listings on Google Maps, so this would perhaps make an interesting addition.

The New York Times noticed a lawsuit pending between LendingTree, an online mortgage quote service, and a company called Mortech, which helps LendingTree run its site. The connection to Google is that apparently, Mortech is gearing up to sell that technology to Google, which LendingTree thinks is a breach of the deal between Mortech and LendingTree.

Add Google Mortgage to the list of potential services that might soon appear on Google’s Web site.

There, IE’s fate is tied largely to broader patterns of Windows adoption. Barzdukas said most businesses won’t move to a new version of IE unless they move to a new version of Windows that has a newer browser built in. So as many corporations have stuck with Windows XP, so too have they stuck with IE 6.

It’s been roughly eight years since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6, but in many ways the company is still very much tied to the aging product.

“Many PCs don’t belong to individual enthusiasts, but to organizations,” Internet Explorer chief Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting this week. “The people in these organizations responsible for these machines decide what to do with them. These people are professionally responsible for keeping tens or hundreds or thousands of PCs working on budget.”

One of the biggest things that could help Microsoft, Barzdukas said, is if more people understood that there were better browser options available from Microsoft. She has taken part of that task upon herself, making a pest of herself when she is at friends’ houses for dinner–checking to see what version of the browser they are using.

Beyond the question of adoption of later versions, there is also the question of whether IE doesn’t need an even more radical facelift, particularly in the era where the browser is used as an engine to run applications as much as it is a tool to move from Web site to Web site.

For many, Internet Explorer 6, is still the face of Microsoft's browser, even though the product has been updated twice in recent years.

Even with that work, though, IE 6 remains not only the most widely thought of version of Internet Explorer, but also the most widely used version of the browser, at least by a narrow margin. According to Net Applications, IE 6 accounts for 27 percent of the browser market, compared to 23 percent for IE 7. Microsoft’s new IE 8 has more than 12 percent of the market, while Firefox 3.0–the most widely used version of that product–has 16 percent (See chart below).

(Credit:
Net Applications)

In large part, that’s because many of Internet Explorer’s users are the ones who tend not to change the browser that comes with their operating system–either because that’s the type of consumer they are, or because they are working on a work machine in which they are not able to upgrade to a later version of IE or switch to another browser.

“I think this is the right way to go and I think this can be practical,” Wang said. “It will also take a lot of work.”

But that’s frustrating, particularly since Microsoft has invested a fair amount of effort in the last couple of years trying to rebuild IE after letting it languish for several years. Microsoft added things like tabbed browsing and a phishing filter back with Internet Explorer 7, which debuted in October 2006, and earlier this year launched Internet Explorer 8, with anti-malware features as well as a private browsing option and improved standards support.

Amy Barzdukas, the general manager for Internet Explorer, said in an interview this week that Microsoft’s perception is “being built by a browser that was fine technology eight years ago or a decade ago.”

Microsoft is also at least exploring the possibility that the browser might need a more significant overhaul. Its research unit has a prototype called Gazelle. In an exclusive interview last month, researcher Helen Wang told CNET News that browsers need to act more like an operating system, taking a greater role in determining which Web processes get priority in accessing a computer’s resources.

Overall, Microsoft has been losing ground for several years to Firefox and other browsers. After reaching near ubiquity in the post-Netscape era, IE’s global market share is now less than 70 percent. However, Barzdukas is hopeful that the trend is starting to shift with the release of IE 8.

In large part, the shifting nature of the browser is what led Google to develop its Chrome browser, and now its Chrome OS, which posits that most computing tasks these days can be done from within the browser.

While in many ways, Microsoft would like that too, it is a bit of a double edged sword, since some number of IE 6 users might consider a rival if they were to switch browsers at all.

For her part, Barzdukas was mum on where Microsoft is headed with Internet Explorer 9 and beyond.

Although Microsoft has released two major versions of Internet Explorer in the past couple of years, for many, the face of Internet Explorer is still IE 6 in all its tabless glory.

A growing chorus of Internet users have asked Microsoft why, if it really wants people to move to IE 7 or IE 8, it doesn’t just end support for IE 6. After all, there have been plenty of calls for the death of IE 6, particularly from Web developers, who are weary of the work required to make their sites work in multiple versions of Internet Explorer, as well as Safari, Firefox, and other browsers.

But Microsoft officials insist they simply can’t end support for IE 6, since it shipped as part of Windows XP and Microsoft has pledged to business customers that it will support that operating system–and its components–for some years to come.

“As is the case with much work (Microsoft Research) does…they are often pushing us to think in new ways, which is part the reason we have them around.”

“To the extent that IE was losing share over the winter, any rate of loss has substantially slowed since we came out with IE 8, and in some geographies IE overall has actually gained significant share,” Barzdukas said.

Adobe Systems is discontinuing Photoshop Album Starter Edition, the lowest rung on its ladder of image-editing software products, and the company is nudging its users toward the online Photoshop.com site.

The move reflects the growing importance of Web-based applications even for software powerhouses such as Adobe. Web applications, even when using relatively sophisticated technology such as Adobe’s Flash, are typically primitive compared to what can run on a computer, but they offer advantages in sharing, maintenance, and remote access from multiple computers and mobile devices. And of course the Web is gradually growing more sophisticated as a foundation for applications.

So what’s the alternative? In a customer note, Adobe puts its online service front and center.

Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.

Adobe launched Photoshop Album Starter Edition in 2003 as a free, bare-bones image cataloging and editing package. Adobe discontinued the line, though, and support for it ended June 30.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

It should be noted that Adobe’s note also encourages customers to “consider an upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7,” the consumer-oriented software that right now costs about $37 including a $20 rebate on Amazon. Adobe also sells the combination of Photoshop Elements 7 and a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership for $90. The Plus membership offers subscribers up to 20GB of storage, tutorials, album templates, and “creativity-inspiring ideas.”

“As part of our commitment to providing customers with a free photo-editing solution, we have created Photoshop.com, an exciting new online service that lets you upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free), and share your photos,” the note said. Afterward is a list of steps for exporting photos from the software to the Web site.

“This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit,” Neumayr continued, “we’ve issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone. Contrary to what’s been reported, no one has been able to take control of the iPhone to gain access to personal information using this exploit.”

The security flaw involved malicious SMS messages that could allow hackers to take control of an iPhone. The flaw could have let them make calls, send text messages, or almost anything they wanted on the victim’s iPhone.

Apple on Friday fixed an SMS-related security flaw in the iPhone that had been at the center of one of the most talked-about exploits at this week’s Black Hat security conference.

Security researchers Collin Mulliner and Charlie Miller showed the flaw in action at Black Hat earlier this week. Miller said the flaw could take control of the iPhone because of the way the device handled the SMS message. Researchers at Black Hat also showed how SMS-related vulnerabilities can affect Windows Mobile smartphones including those from HTC, Motorola, and Samsung.

Miller said that Apple was first notified of the flaw six weeks ago.

The update is available by plugging your iPhone into your computer and clicking on the Check for Update button in iTunes.

According to Apple, the iPhone 3.0.1 update released today improves the device’s memory handling, essentially fixing the exploit.

“We appreciate the information provided to us about SMS vulnerabilities which affect several mobile phone platforms,” Apple representative Tom Neumayr told CNET.