Richard Nicholson

If you really, really need to make sure those precious photos of yours last virtually forever - or at least longer than the average two- to five-year lifespan of consumer-grade DVDs, then start-up Cranberry LLC has the answer for you: a DVD that literally lasts a millennium. DiamonDiscs contain no dye layers, adhesive layers or reflective materials that could deteriorate. Cranberry's DiamonDisc product holds a standard 4.7GB of data, which roughly amounts to 2,000 photos, or 1,200 songs, or three hours of video, but the media is unharmed by heat as high as 176 degrees Fahrenheit, ultraviolet rays or normal material deterioration, according to the company. While only future generations may be able to prove DiamonDisc can last 1,000 years - never mind that DVD players will probably have been long forgotten by then - Cranberry claims its technology has been proved by researchers using the ECMA-379 temperature and humidity testing standards to outlast the durability of competitors that claim a 300-year shelf life.

However, instead of a silver or gold reflective surface, its disc is transparent, with no reflective layer. The Ferndale, Wash.-based company this week announced their product, which it says uses the same format as standard DVDs to store data. According to the company, unlike standard recordable DVDs, which use a 650 nanometer wavelength laser diode to etch a small pit into a disc's media surface, the DiamonDisc uses a higher-intensity laser to more deeply etch data into the "diamond-like" surface of its synthetic stone disc. The company is in talks with the U.S. government and the military, which are looking for archival media. "For the military, there's no heat, light, magnetic waves or environmental abuse that will have an impact on these discs," said Joe Beaulaurier, Cranberry's chief marketing officer. The DiamonDisc technology was invented by researchers at Brigham Young University and was first brought to market by Springville, Utah, startup Millenniata . While Millenniata performs the R&D on the product, Cranberry does the sales and marketing.

The company is also working on developing a Blu-ray version of their DVD product, Beaulaurier said. Cranberry performs the data-write for customers on the DiamonDisc they purchase. Photos, videos or other content that consumers want to store can be uploaded directly to Cranberry's Web site or mailed to the company. When compared to other consumer archive DVDs, such as Kodak Gold Preservation Write-Once DVD-R , which costs around $6, DiamonDisc carries a premium . A single DiamonDisc costs $34.95, two or more individual discs go for $29.95, and a five-pack is $149.75. Beaulaurier said prospective customers should factor in not only the longevity of the product, but the services provided. You burn a DVD once and it eliminates costs and energy down the road." Of course, the company is also happy to sell you its burner, but that will set you back $4,995. But, for $5,000 you get 150 DiamonDiscs to burn away until to heart's content. Cranberry checks the burn of each disc to ensure the quality of the finished product. "So [the consumer doesn't] need to monitor the burn process and make sure it took," he said. "This is also very green technology.

The burner plugs into any standard USB port and uses any standard DVD burning software, Beaulaurier said.

Microsoft is working on a tablet-style computer that could compete with Apple's rumored device, and may be in the final stages of prototyping, according to multiple reports on the Internet yesterday. Other features include the ability to use either a stylus or multi-touch gestures to operate the Courier, as well as a camera embedded in the device's case. The device, which Gizmodo first reported on, has been dubbed the "Courier" and resembles a book more than a traditional tablet, as it sports dual 7-inch screens that face each other when the system is opened. Gizmodo posted a concept video demonstration of the Courier as well as several images - although not photographs - of the device on its site Tuesday.

Others have confirmed the Gizmodo account. According to Gizmodo, the Courier is in the "late prototype" stage, and is being created by Pioneer Studios, a group within Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices division, which is also responsible for the Xbox, Zune and Windows Mobile. "Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies," said "The Paperboy," an anonymous writer for Gizmodo. CNET's Ina Fried , for example, said sources told her the Courier is legitimate, although it's only one of several design prototypes being explored by a team led by long-time Microsoft executive J. Allard, the Entertainment & Devices group's chief technology officer. "Very interesting idea," said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "It combines a lot of technology that's been proven, including the Kindle, and the touch interface of the iPhone seems to be there." Krans noted that the Courier seems to blend several past and present Microsoft technologies, including its attempts at promoting pen-style computing in the 1990s and its much newer gesture-based, tabletop "Surface." But the reason why something like the Courier makes sense now - as opposed to the aborted efforts by Microsoft to back pen computing, and this decade's lackluster Tablet PC concept - is because of the company's rival. "The iPhone really changed the way that people interacted with a device like this," said Krans today. The latest round of speculation about Apple's entry came last week, after a Taiwanese publication cited industry sources who claimed that several component suppliers are building parts for an upcoming Apple tablet computer , which will launch in February 2010. Those sources said the Apple device would sport a 9.6-in. screen - considerably less display real estate than the Courier's two 7-in. screens - and will rely on a processor created by P.A. Semi, the Santa Clara, Calif. microprocessor design company that Apple purchased over a year ago . "The Courier looks like a really nice way to do this form factor," said Krans. "It won't have the screen limitations of an iPhone, and would be larger than Apple's rumored tablet." A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to react today to the Courier reports, saying, "Microsoft makes it a practice not to comment on rumors and speculation." Apple has also been the target of talk about tablets.

China called for a cleanup of mobile porn Web sites on Wednesday, blaming their rise on high-speed mobile data services, deployment of which has otherwise been a point of pride for the country. This year the country has also closed thousands of Web sites and arrested dozens in a campaign against online pornography that is increasingly shifting focus to mobile Web sites. "Lawless people have begun using the full commercial deployment of 3G and its faster download speeds for pictures and videos... to spread obscene and pornographic content," Su Jinsheng, an engineer in China's IT ministry, said in a speech, according to a transcript on the ministry Web site. China issued 3G (third generation) mobile network licenses to its three mobile carriers early this year, and the number of 3G users in China has slowly climbed since then.

A cleanup is needed to "protect the healthy growth of the next generation and purify the social environment," he said. But owners of mobile porn Web sites have been able to evade authorities through technical tactics such as frequently switching domain names and IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, Su said. China sees its long-delayed rollout of 3G services as a step toward its goal of becoming a global technology power. Counter-tactics being used by authorities include a blacklist to prevent pornographic Web sites from reappearing online and the design of content-filtering technology to help network operators themselves block obscene content, he said, giving a rare official glimpse into how Chinese regulators control information on the Internet. Earlier this year Google had a row with Chinese authorities over pornographic search results that ultimately led to Google.com and other Google services being briefly blocked in the country.

Pornography is illegal in China and authorities have long seen it as a scourge on the country's culture.

DENVER - Is cloud computing inevitable? FAQ: Cloud computing demystified Michael Dieckmann, CIO at the University of West Florida, thinks otherwise and the two spent Wednesday at the annual Educause conference debating the hype vs. the hope around commercial cloud computing that promises to cut IT costs and provide efficiencies. Maybe, but IT still has a lot of questions to ask before floating away on its promises, according to Melissa Woo, director of cyberinfrastructure and network and operations services at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Woo's contention isn't so much that the cloud won't emerge as an option, but that IT still has a lot of questions to ask before floating away on its promises. "Why is the conversation always when, why are we not asking why," she said to a packed Educause session that with a raising of hands showed the audience of higher-ed IT pros are on the fence over cloud computing. "Gartner has cloud computing at the peak of inflated expectations on its hype cycle," she said. This week, cloud provider Rackspace reported its third outage since June. Woo noted recent reports of outages by large providers should grab attention. Last month, Microsoft reported it lost the data stored by users of T-Mobile's Sidekick service before eventually recovering most of the data. Where is that data being stored? And Google, which provides e-mail services for students, faculty and staff on Dieckmann's campus, has had numerous outages that have frustrated users so much that Google developed a Google Apps Status Dashboard and pumps updates to users via RSS. "And what about the privacy risks, security risks?

Where is research data being stored? Dieckmann countered that the cloud question is most relevant for commodity services, but the tricky part is that the definition of commodity services is constantly changing. "To many people e-mail is e-mail," he said. "Storage is becoming more of a commodity. How do you handle identity and access management, what happens if the cloud service falls out from under you?" Woo said. When that service can come externally just are reliably and with the same service levels we can provide why do we need to spend significant resources to run it in-house?" But on the cost issue, Woo's contention is that most universities don't have a true handle on costs and therefore can't determine if the cloud is saving money. "Another thing to think about is are we just cost shifting. But Dieckmann compared the cloud with what has been happening internally in IT over the past few years in terms of centralizing servers into data centers and adding virtualization for added efficiencies and benefits.

Are we throwing things over the wall for others to worry about," said Woo, who wonders about the burden put on legal and purchasing departments. "We are not just looking at saving IT costs but costs across the institution." Dieckmann, in part, conceded Woo's point, saying he spends more time now with UWF's general counsel than he did before venturing out into the cloud. He said many of the same arguments IT made for centralization are now being turned against them via the cloud debate. "Part of what is uncomfortable here is that it is our apple cart that is now being upset," he said. "But we need not approach this as a poison pill. What if the cloud provider breaks the SLA, do we know how to measure harm if our storage disappears," she said. "We need to come to grips with the inevitability of the cloud," Dieckmann says. There are many advantages and we should be leading here rather than following." Woo contends the transfer to centralized IT has been based on trust, but questioned whether that same trust exists in the cloud. "Can we negotiate good service-level agreements (SLA). We don't have the maturity to negotiate those. The massive economy of scale involved in cloud computing can make it the most cost effective way to provide services for higher education, he contends. "Cost is not a minor concern today." When evaluating cloud services, he says users must focus on how the cloud alters the parameters on the old notion of outsourcing, an idea that was hot nearly a decade years ago but lost its sizzle for technological and other reasons.

He concedes the debate has many layers, but he points out that end-users have their own cloud choices now and that could eventually mean less IT control. "Our clients are voting with their feet," he said, in reference to students and faculty who go out on their own to online services. "Our challenge will be to combat the choices users make and to keep coherent IT enforcement," he said. "The next evolution of this is academic departments deciding to using the cloud and they are not doing that with IT or general counsel input. The cloud has benefits that can't be ignored, Dieckmann says, such as delivering infrastructure as a service, support for massive sharing, flexibility and a pay-as-you-go model. In some cases we have no control. We need to show some leadership." Follow John on Twitter.

There's no question that software piracy is a global problem with a heavy financial impact. A May 2009 report by the Business Software Alliance and IDC estimated that 20% of software programs installed in the U.S. last year were unauthorized copies. But just how heavy it is is a matter of debate.

Worldwide, the figure is 41%, with an estimated financial impact of $53 billion - a figure based on the retail value of the pirated PC software. If it were, the BSA's global loss figure of $53 billion would drop sharply, they maintain. "Obviously, not every piece of pirated software will be replaced immediately with legitimate software if underlicensing is addressed or sources of pirated stuff dry up," acknowledges Dale Curtis, the BSA's vice president of communications. But critics of the study say it fails to account for the possibility that pirated software could be replaced with Linux or other open-source options. But he says that over the years, IDC has found "a very strong correlation between piracy rates and software sales. One country that wasn't included is Canada - and that doesn't sit right with Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa. "What the BSA did not disclose is that the 2009 report on Canada (whose piracy rate declined from 33% to 32% in the study) were guesses since Canadian firms and users were not surveyed.

In country after country, as the piracy rate falls, legitimate sales go up." A second criticism of the report is that its country-by-country figures are partly based on the results of an annual survey that in 2009 covered 24 countries. While the study makes seemingly authoritative claims about the state of Canadian piracy, the reality is that IDC . . . did not bother to survey in Canada," Geist wrote in a May 27 blog post. Further, he says Canadian users were surveyed the previous year, and "there is no reason to assume large changes in results from one year to the next." Ivan Png, a professor of information systems and economics at the University of Singapore, says the BSA and IDC should explain how they applied the results from the 24 countries surveyed to all of the other countries not surveyed. "IDC should make the methodology transparent," Png says. Curtis responds that the study "is not a guess, nor is it a scientific measurement, nor is it based primarily on a survey of software users, as Geist suggests." A survey of 6,200 users is only a piece of the model, Curtis says.

Healthcare providers and others handling sensitive patient data are now finding the stakes raised if they suffer a data breach because of a new law known as the "Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act," or HITECH Act. Depending on whether a data breach arises from a simple mistake to willful theft, fines will range in tiers from as low as $100 per violation for a slip-up regarding unencrypted data to $1.5 million or more for knowingly and willfully violating the data-breach rules, say those familiar with the HITECH Act. "Under the HHS rule, you have to figure out if you had a data breach," says Rebecca Fayed, attorney-at-law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal's healthcare group division in Washington, D.C.. But the new rules, which cover both electronic and paper formats, are far from simple.  Healthcare organizations find IT cures for identity and security  The HITECH Act, devised by Congress primarily to address electronic medical records, is being noted for its impact in adding a tough data-breach notification requirement to the long list of long-existing Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) security and privacy rules. Passed by Congress in February, the HITECH Act is now coming into enforcement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which each have been given a role to play under the law, potentially levying punishments and fines on organizations that stumble in protecting personal health information.

Like HIPAA, the HITECH Act covers healthcare providers, insurers, clearinghouses and also business associates handling personal information about patient health, as well as other protected information, including name, Social Security number, address and insurance account numbers. If the data breach "is only five people, HHS doesn't want you calling them," though you will have to inform the individuals impacted. Fayed says there's often the misperception that the HITECH Act will require public disclosure of any data breach of unencrypted personal health information (PHI) but the fine print actually says the data breach has to have impacted at least 500 people in one state. "Then you have to notify the media," she says. And it appears there's no need to report an employee unintentionally accessing a record by mistake in the course of doing his  job. The HHS guidelines set forth two basic ways to secure that data, "encryption" for electronic data and "destruction" applied as a means to destroy electronic data or paper. A lot of the talk about HITECH is centering on encryption because the breach notification only applies to "unsecured PHI," Fayed says.

When it comes to encryption and stored data security, guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology are referenced, including NIST's FIPS 140-2 for certification of encryption products. So, the bottom line is the HHS-issued guidelines, now an interim final rule that went into effect Sept. 23 (though it won't be enforced until February 2010 by the office of civil rights at HHS), is a game-changer. Though encryption isn't mandatory under HITECH Act, just by bringing encryption technology into the discussion of a data breach the federal government is raising the bar about what's implied about best practices, Fayed notes. Wes Rishel, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, calls the HITECH Act ground-breaking. "This is the first time there's been a federal regulation for data breach," Rishel says. Although there are now far fewer known instances of data breaches involving PHI than credit cards, for example, it doesn't mean that these cases don't happen, many say. It changes the balance in terms of security and puts an emphasis unknown before on encryption because a data breach of encrypted data is not going to have to be reported.

Fraud involving stolen patient healthcare data, primarily Medicare/Medicaid identity theft for making money off submitting fraudulent claims, is not uncommon, Fayed says. "The reason you haven't heard about these is because people haven't had to report these yet," she says. But encryption use to protect stored data is not typical today among HIPAA-regulated organizations and they are going to be struggling to encrypt and decrypt effectively among business partners. "Encryption can create a big mess, too." The HITECH Act has more healthcare providers crafting encryption strategies.  "They should be deploying encryption," says Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna.

Google Docs received an overhaul this week that makes it easier for users to share items, upload documents, and stay organized. Shared Folders One of Google Docs best features is its ability to let you share and collaborate on documents with other users. The new tweaks also brought a slight change to the Google Docs homepage with a more uniform and simpler look. In the past, if you had multiple documents you needed to share with one workgroup, Google Docs required you to send out multiple sharing notices for each document.

Just drag and drop the files you need to share into a folder, and then click "share this folder" and invite members of your workgroup. The new shared folders feature solves this problem, by allowing you to set up sharing permissions for one folder. The people in your workgroup will get an e-mail notifying them you've shared this folder. The new feature is handy, but there is one few quirk you should keep in mind. Once they've logged on to Google Docs, members of your workgroup can see the files you've added to the folder, and also drop files into your folder to share with the same group.

Even though a document is in a shared folder, the access permissions for that document are attached to the folder-not the file. Managing Your Workflow Back by popular demand is the "Items Not In Folders" filter that allows you to see any documents you have that are not organized into folders. So if you pull a document that you own (i.e. you created it) out of the shared folder, your workgroup will no longer be able to access the document. Google brought back the feature because some people were using this as a workflow tool. Then you can move a document into a folder once it's ready for prime time.

One way to take advantage of this filter is to use it as a tool for tracking documents in draft stage. There is one detail you should be aware of when using this feature: Let's say John shares a report directly with Mary, but John doesn't have that report in a folder. The "Items Not In Folders" filter can be accessed under the "More Searches" menu in the left hand navigation pane. If Mary puts it into one of her folders, John will see the report has a folder tag, but it will still show up when John filters his documents by "Items Not In Folders." That way, Mary's actions don't interrupt John's workflow. Google Docs will also let you upload multiple files at once. You'll also notice Google Docs has a slightly different look.

Just select all the files you want using the "shift" or "ctrl" ("command" on a Mac) keys, and then start your upload. The new layout is a little boxier, and the visual icons (like starred, share, upload and delete) have been removed in favor of a text-only look. Live Mesh, launched last year, allows you to create a network of devices and sync folders between them. Sharing Alternative If Google Docs isn't for you, Microsoft also has two document sharing options. Live Mesh also gives you your own online desktop, called Live Desktop, where you can share folders with people outside of your network or Mesh.

Live Mesh works on both PC and Mac systems. To use Live Mesh you have to download a small program, but people you share items with only need to sign up for the Live Desktop. Microsoft's other alternative is its online storage space called Skydrive. However, Skydrive's sharing permissions are a little too complicated, so I recommend going with Live Desktop and Live Mesh if you are a Windows Live user.