James Williams

As the end of 2009 creeps up upon us, the search engines are starting to release some interesting data. Ask has just published its top search questions of 2009, taking into account all the actual queries typed into that little white box. Google, AOL, and Yahoo all recently revealed Michael Jackson to be the top search term of 2009. Other hot search commodities for the year included "Facebook," "Twitter," and - thank you, fellow gentlemen - "Megan Fox." Now, thanks to a newly released list by Ask.com, we're getting even more entertaining insights.

So what's the world been wanting to know? How do I get pregnant? Here's an intriguing (and at times disheartening) glimpse into our collective curiosities. I think we can all agree: If you have to search the Internet for the answer, you probably shouldn't be trying in the first place. Step 1: Put down the sticky bun and get your lazy arse off the computer. How can I get a six-pack fast?

What is a 3G network? What is love? I'll take questions asked by AT&T for $500, Alex. Think they were wanting a literal answer, or just searching for a clip from Night at the Roxbury? And what kind of Web sites have you been visiting lately, pal?

How do I delete my cookies? Eh? Eh? How do I make a Web site? Nevermind. Just head over to Geocit...oh, wait. Who am I? For the sake of the last guy, let's hope you're a Web designer.

Um, do you really have to ask? Is Adam Lambert straight? Does my crush love me? Is he Adam Lambert, and are you a girl? That all depends. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Quick, someone call Sergey. Sounds like one of those cryptic Google interview questions. When will the world end? NOW. No? Oh well. Right... Was worth a shot.

Ninety-seven percent of those searches were made by that guy from the Spin Doctors. What time is it? Why is the sky blue? Last I checked, it was 1-800-STOP-STALKING. When should I give my child a cell phone? Close runner-up: "Why is the screen of death black?" What is Miley Cyrus' phone number?

Not until he stops trying to track down Miley's number...the perv. Okay, this last one wasn't actually on the list. Where the hell is Jeeves? But I'd really like to know. You can keep up with him on Twitter: @jr_raphael. JR Raphael is co-founder of geek-humor site eSarcasm.

The FCC convened this morning and voted to move forward with formalizing net neutrality guidelines. The FCC has already imposed net neutrality principles in past decisions such as banning broadband Internet provider Comcast from throttling peer-to-peer networking traffic. The vote was unanimous, including Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker, and initiates the process of debating the proposed rules before any net neutrality policy is actually implemented. Without a formally sanctioned set of rules though, such decisions could be seen as arbitrary or capricious.

Of course, in Washington DC today there are distinctly partisan battle lines involved in where to eat lunch or what color the sky is, so I suppose that should come as no surprise. When FCC chairman Julius Genachowski first announced his intention to pursue formalizing net neutrality, it did not take long to see that there are distinctly partisan battle lines involved. Still, it was a little shocking that within hours of Genachowski's statement regarding net neutrality GOP lawmakers had already filed an amendment (later retracted) to prohibit the FCC from pursuing it. This week AT&T was accused of astroturfing- creating a fake grassroots movement- by encouraging employees to voice their concerns on the FCC web site using their own personal email addresses. In the weeks between Genachowski's initial statement and today's vote the lobbying pressure and the rhetoric in the media have been relatively constant from net neutrality opponents. Proponents of net neutrality were not as vocal until more recently.

Verizon didn't completely defect, but it did break ranks with other broadband and wireless providers when it issued a joint statement with Google expressing agreed upon common ground for governing net neutrality. A coalition of 30 tech-focused venture capitalists, under the banner of the Open Internet Coalition, sent an open letter to Genachowski just yesterday urging support for net neutrality rules. Perhaps it's a reflection of the new partnership forged between Verizon and Google to develop Android-based mobile handsets like the upcoming Droid. Canada upheld the right of providers to 'manage' the traffic on their networks, but within certain guidelines. Just yesterday the Canadian government ruled on its version of net neutrality. It also stipulated that traffic throttling should be a measure of last resort.

Comcast talked about how the Internet has thrived without net neutrality, while tacitly admitting that it is only because of the threat of net neutrality that it has played by the rules. I maintain that net neutrality rules are essential. AT&T reversed its position on allowing VoIP over its wireless network and pointed to that decision as evidence that the industry can police itself, while not-so-subtly demonstrating that the new policy was a direct attempt to influence the net neutrality debate. If they thought they could act with impunity, they would. The bottom line is that the providers only treat consumers right and do the right thing because of government oversight or the threat of it.

Comcast is rumored to be pursuing a stake in NBC- would that give them the right to provide preferential bandwidth to NBC web content and throttle the other networks? Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. There is simply too much convergence and overlap creating conflicts of interest to allow the industry to police itself. He tweets as @PCSecurityNews and provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at tonybradley.com.

In the beginning there was e-mail. The network was devoid of PCs. So all e-mail was accessed via a terminal and a command line interface. And e-mail was run on a Unix server.

E-mail management a mighty struggle for US agencies So, by some current definitions, e-mail began as a "cloud" application. And, since network-based storage was expensive and local storage was inexpensive, thus began a logical move to downloading e-mail from the network and storing it on local devices/media. Then came the PC. And along with the PC, came local storage. Now, many of us use our e-mail archives as a primary record-keeping mechanism, and our historical e-mail files are perhaps our most precious resource. Whether your primary e-mail is a part of a corporate network or simply your personal copy, odds are darn good that you have your e-mail set to delete the messages from the server as soon as they are downloaded to the PC. And even a copy of the e-mails may still exist somewhere in the bowels of the IT department, recovering these e-mails is a major issue.

But what happens if the e-mail files are not backed up regularly? This issue hit really close to home this week when one of our associates had a crashed hard drive on an almost-new notebook. At this point, we could start yet another rant about how we all need to have current backups, and how corporate networking departments need to somehow enforce a policy of regular backups for all materials on the users' notebooks. And, of course, all of the e-mail archives were on that disk – with no recent backup. But that would simply be "preaching to the choir." Instead, we would like to offer a different solution. This has the advantage of potentially recovering not only the correspondence itself, but also the vast majority of important files.

Had our associate been using a network-based service, such as Gmail, then all of the e-mail would be "safe." In fact, this is exactly how our associate is now rebuilding everything. After all, virtually every file of any import is sent and/or received via e-mail. In the meantime, we invite you to join the discussion of this topic at TECHNOtorials. In the next newsletter, we'll look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of public and/or private "cloud" services for e-mail. Com.

It couldn't have happened at a worse time. The up-and-down day for Twitter mirrors the service's bigger struggles as it grapples with technical SNAFUs, a business model, and its blockbuster success. Micro-blogging service Twitter suffered an outage Thursday, just as it reportedly was negotiating a licensing deal with either Google or Microsoft.

First the Downs For much of Thursday, users could post tweets to their own streams, but updates from their followers were scarce at best. It explained in vague terms that "timelines remain stale for users." It wasn't until sites such as TechCrunch started speculating that Twitter had fallen victim to a DDOS attack that Twitter posted an official statement explaining: "The problems this morning were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter." At precisely 3:54 pm on Thursday, Twitter was reporting that "Most users are seeing freshly updated timelines. After admitting to a totally unspecified "unplanned site outage" late Wednesday, Twitter waited until almost 2 p.m. ET Thursday to elaborate on the problem. However, due to the previous problems, users of our SMS service may experience some missing tweets." As of about 10 pm ET on Thursday, Twitter hadn't updated its status any further. Now the Ups Meanwhile All Things Digital reported Thursday that Twitter is in talks with both Google and Microsoft about the prospect of multimillion deals to integrate Twitter in some way with outside search engines. A search of Twitter.com under the "outage" search term on Thursday night yielded no new reports of user issues.

News agency Reuters chimed in with a report stating Twitter's discussions with Microsoft and Google are taking place separately, and that if negotiations work out, the potential partners would be able to incorporate Twitter tweets into Internet search results. As I see it, only if the search engines were discriminating enough to combine useful information feeds from Twitter with other search results, while screening out less pertinent data about "what you're doing right now." Still, some type of real-time Twitter trending of topic popularity could help search engines deliver more relevant results. Would users actually benefit from a Twitter partnership with a major search engine? By pairing hot tweet topics with topical search results Bing, for example, could boost relevancy in its search results. The Search for a Business Model, Can Google Help? For example, nobody cares what one individual thought of a movie last night, but if a search engine could generate an instant movie thumbs up or thumbs down based on millions of tweets that could help the movie going public find a movie to see.

The search for some type of practical business model has been a cloud hanging over Twitter's head for some time now. Would service outages plague Twitter if it subsisted on a shoestring budget? Many wonder if the popular service can sustain itself without generating significant revenue. I suspect yes. Huh? Twitter has no fully-disclosed revenue model, yet places its total valuation at about $1 billion.

Meanwhile investors are dumping more money into the service. Flying in the face of conventional business wisdom, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone denied that the company will take on any advertising this year when speaking at 140 Twitter conference in September. It is reported venture capitalists poured $100 million into Twitter recently. He didn't comment on whether ads might appear next year. For many, Twitter has turned into a crucial business and social resource. Twitter Too Big To Fail?

If that is the case, does Twitter deserve a financial rescue should it be in danger of failing? Jay Scott, former content director at COXnet, the Internet arm of Cox Newspapers, points out that many businesses today rely heavily on Twitter and other social networks for promoting products and delivering customer service. Some suggest that the answer is yes. Twitter outages carry social, political, and entertainment ramifications, according to Scott, who is now an independent social networking consultant. On the other hand, depending too much on a single social network has significant drawbacks. Twitter played a significant role in helping Iranian protesters this summer both organize and communicate with the outside world.

If everyone from Madison Avenue advertisers to Iranian revolutionaries become too reliant on one communication tool, what will happen to the world if Twitter never discovers a workable business model?

A former research scientist at DuPont USA who is already facing civil charges for allegedly attempting to steal corporate secrets from the company, has been hit with a federal criminal complaint on the same charges. Meng, a Chinese national with permanent resident status in the U.S., was arrested Oct. 2 and appeared before Magistrate Judge Mary Pat Thynge. Prosecutors charged Hong Meng with exceeding his authority to access a protected computer when he downloaded certain documents from his DuPont-issued laptop computer to an external thumb drive and then onto his home computer.

He was released on the condition that he establishes a permanent address in Delaware by Oct. 16, from where he can be electronically monitored. The federal complaint sheds some light on what led to the charges against Meng, who joined DuPont in 2002 and worked at the company's Central Research and Development facility in Wilmington, Del. DuPont in September filed a lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court accusing Meng of stealing data on a new, thin-computer display technology called "organic light emitting diode" or OLED. DuPont claimed that Meng planned to use the stolen information to commercialize products using OLED technology with Peking University in Beijing, which is developing similar technology. During the course of his work at DuPont, Meng had extensive access to cutting edge OLED research information which was considered by DuPont to be trade secret information. In June, Meng informed DuPont officials that he was resigning from the company and to join DuPont in China. The OLED research data was stored by DuPont in three separate Lotus Notes databases and could only be accessed by a limited number of employees using two-factor authentication.

During a meeting with his supervisor, Meng asked for permission to transfer files from his company laptop to systems in DuPont China. Nearly 550 of those files were later found on his home computer, which Dupont investigators inspected with Meng's permission. Though he was denied permission to do so, Meng in August allegedly went ahead and copied nearly 600 files from his company-issued computer onto an external storage device. A forensic analysis of the home computer also showed that more than 175 of the DuPont files had been opened using the Internet Explorer browser, suggesting that Meng had accessed or sent these documents using a personal e-mail account, according to court documents. Meng is also alleged to have downloaded a Microsoft Word document with information on a specific procedure invented by DuPont to improve stability and performance of organic electronic materials, court documents said.

The majority of the incriminating documents allegedly found on Meng's computers originated from DuPont's protected Notes databases and related to DuPont's OLED research priorities and evaluation of the commercial viability of the technology. According to court papers, DuPont has spent millions of dollars and put in more than 17 years of research into developing OLED technology. Meng had taken the job without informing DuPont as he was required to. DuPont investigators also found evidence on Meng's computers that he had accepted a position at the department of advance materials and nanotechnology at Peking University's College of Engineering. Papers filed in connection with the civil complaint against Meng described Peking University as a rival in the area of OLED research. He has also maintained that the documents never left his control, the complaint noted.

Meng himself claimed that he considered the information he had downloaded to be "reference materials" for his job at DuPont in China. This is the second time in recent years that DuPont has been involved in an incident involving an alleged compromise of its trade secrets. Min is serving an 18-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to the theft. In February 2007, Gary Min, a former research scientist at DuPont, admitted to stealing proprietary information valued at $400 million from the company.

Ever since its launch this summer, Google Voice has presented carriers with some potentially thorny issues. Google Voice was designed in part to make it easier for users to change mobile carriers without sacrificing their phone numbers and also to give users several add-on features that are not offered by carriers. The biggest potential pitfall for carriers is that widespread adoption of Google Voice could render their networks "dumb pipes" that don't offer users any value-added services. For example, Google Voice can provide simultaneous ringing for both landline and wireless devices using the same phone number and it can serve as a hub for SMS as it lets users send text messages from any of their devices or even right over the Web on their computer.

However, America's top two wireless telcos this week indicated that they had no problem supporting Google Voice on their networks. Net neutrality proponents such as the media advocacy group Free Press have met Google Voice with enthusiasm, as they think it could give users the ability to seamlessly switch carriers if their current carrier is too restrictive of what they can and cannot use on their mobile devices. During a joint press conference with Google on Tuesday, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that all Verizon phones based on the open-source Android platform would give users access to the Google Voice application. How Google Voice could change the wireless industry Although AT&T didn't mention Google Voice specifically as an application that it would allow onto its network, it's very likely that Google Voice will soon be available to iPhone users since it doesn't present the direct threat to cellular service revenues that other VoIP applications and services do. AT&T, meanwhile, said Tuesday that it was changing its tune and allowing iPhone users to utilize VoIP applications such as Skype on the AT&T 3G network. The reason for this is that when you make a call using Google Voice, it initially goes through the standard public switch telephone network to the Google cloud, where it is then sent out as a VoIP call.

But even if Google Voice won't harm carriers' ability to charge users for cell phone minutes, Gartner analyst Peggy Schoener does think it could harm carriers' profitability if users come to rely upon it for services. "It is a threat to their business model to some degree," she says. "But right now the demand for openness is trumping that. So while Google Voice will enable users to save money on typically expensive long-distance calls, it won't be an alternative to using up minutes from your standard wireless carrier in the way that Skype is. Carriers are looking at how the world is shaping up and they have to demonstrate openness and cooperation with industry newcomers." FCC action in the background While neither Verizon nor AT&T will say it out loud, one factor in their decision to allow Google Voice onto their networks could be the more active approach that the Federal Communications Commission has taken this year under new chairman Julius Genachowski. More recently, Genachowski has also proposed new network neutrality rules that would bar carriers from blocking or degrading lawful Web traffic and that would force carriers to be more open about their traffic management practices. For example, this summer the FCC asked Google, Apple and AT&T to explain why the Google Voice application was not yet been made available for the iPhone. ABI Research analyst Jeff Orr thinks that the government's more aggressive stance toward regulating the wireless industry has been a key factor in the telcos' decision to allow Google Voice on their networks despite whatever misgivings about the application they may have. "I think that they're looking at the talk going around at the FCC looking for net neutrality, and they figure that they'll need to back off and pick the battles they want to fight," he says. "By allowing Google Voice and other VoIP applications onto their networks they say to the FCC that they can monitor their own practices and that there's not a need for legislation mandating net neutrality." Schoener agrees that FCC action is part of the reason why carriers are showing more openness on their networks right now, but she also thinks that carriers are being forced by market trends to embrace more openness as well.

For instance, the past decade has seen large Internet companies such as Google and Skype become major market players with the clout to push for net neutrality regulations. "There's not a direct cause and effect between the FCC's actions and the carriers' decisions," she says. "But the FCC's stance is a part of the current trend that openness is better, and the telcos figure they can be better off in the long run if they embrace it rather than playing hardball."

Lotus Software GM Bob Picciano has grown tired of the "hot wind" blowing out of Redmond carrying claims that Exchange is displacing Notes and is singling out CEO Steve Ballmer and COO Kevin Turner as the main culprits spreading "ridiculous and fabricated" information. They are still utilizing capabilities from other aspects of the Lotus portfolio," said Picciano. Exchange alternatives: Front ends and back endsA look at Exchange 2010 "Microsoft is making claims in the marketplace around 4.7 million people have exchanged e-mail from Notes to Exchange and that is just a ridiculous fabricated figure," said Picciano, who took the reins at Lotus in 2008. "Every time they sell a [client access license] they count that as a competitive migration." "People need to recognize that Kevin Turner and Steve Ballmer have blown a lot of hot wind from Washington and there is not much substance or truth to what they are espousing in the marketplace," Picciano said. "They were so bold as to say there are entire countries that have migrated off of Notes and that is utterly ridiculous." Picciano says all the talk has "got me pretty worked up that they would be so bold to make such erroneous statements and not be challenged." The Lotus Software GM says many of the reference companies cited by Microsoft when it made its "4.7 million people" comment in July "are still licensing Lotus Notes technology and still utilizing e-mail and applications from Lotus. At Microsoft's annual meeting this summer for financial analysts, Turner heaped on more numbers during his presentation at the event. "We've taken out almost 13 million Lotus Notes [seats] the past three years. … Now, the thing that I would tell you is there's still 15 — we count — there's still 15 million out there." He cited SharePoint Server as the "fastest-growing, hottest product in the history of Microsoft," and pegged it as a catalyst in the fight against IBM. Picciano said the counter was last week's news that U.S. Bank was replacing Microsoft's SharePoint platform by standardizing on the Notes 8.5 client and would roll out Lotus Connections social networking tools, the Sametime real-time platform and Lotus Quickr, which is IBM's alternative to SharePoint.

He said PNC Bank and Continental Tire are joining U.S. Bank in getting rid of Microsoft's Exchange, Office and SharePoint. On Tuesday, Picciano threw out his own numbers saying a total to 15,421 companies have picked IBM over Microsoft since 2008 in the worldwide integrated collaborative environment market as defined by IDC. In addition, Picciano says customers are expanding their investment in Lotus software and he cited as examples Accenture, BASF, Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Continental AG, Finishline, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Gruppo Amadori, KBC Bank, Nationwide, Novartis, Phillips Electronics and PNC Bank. In January, Picciano said more than 12,000 new companies in 2008 bought their first Notes/Domino licenses. People understand what Kevin's motivation is and the prancing around in front of partners and talking about this. And he said half of the Fortune global 100 are Notes/Domino users. "It's important to put [Microsoft's claims] into perspective and call it what it is, a bunch of fabrication," Picciano said. "Kevin is feeling that he is under a bit of pressure.

It's duplicitous and overshadows the real truth." Follow John on Twitter.