Nikon CoolPix P7000

Nikon has refreshed its flagship CoolPix camera, adding the company's latest image-processing engine to the lightweight point-and-shoot model. The CoolPix P7000, which replaces the P6000 released in September 2008, is a 10-megapixel camera with a 7.1X optical zoom. The camera is built with enough shooting functions to take it close to the more advanced digital SRL cameras used by professionals and photo enthusiasts.

New features in the P7000 include Nikon's latest image-processing engine, called the Expeed C2. The technology delivers faster image processing and richer tones in high-resolution images than the P6000. The P7000 is also equipped with several new functions, including zoom memory and a tone level information display that provides greater control over shooting. The zoom memory function allows the user to specify a preset focal length for faster switching from a wide-angle position.

The latest flagship CoolPix also has a 1/1.7-inch CCD image sensor behind the zoom lens for a broader range of shooting options. The camera is the first CoolPix to have a built-in neutral density filter, which enables the user to apply slower shutter speeds when shooting in bright surroundings. In addition, the P7000 has more options that its predecessor for better shots in low-light conditions. Finally, the camera can take record high-definition video at a resolution of 720p at 24 frames per second. The P7000 is scheduled to ship in late September at a price of $500.

Nikon on Wednesday also introduced two other CoolPix cameras, the S8100 and S80.

The S8100, which replaces the S8000, is a pocket camera with a 10X zoom lens and a better CMOS image sensor for nighttime shooting. The 12-megapixel camera has a 3-inch LCD display and is capable of recording 1080p high definition video. Other features include motion detection technology that automatically adjusts shutter speed and ISO sensitivity to compensate for camera shake and subject movement. The S8100 is scheduled to ship in late September at a price of $300. Available colors include black, red and gold.

The S80, which replaces the S70, is equipped with a 3.5-inch OLED touch screen that offers more vivid images and faster operational response than its predecessor. The 14-megapixel camera is about a half-inch thick and has a 5X zoom lens. Nikon has added a new user interface that simplifies operation of the point-and-shoot camera for the novice photographer. The camera also takes 1280-x-720-pixel video and is equipped with an HDMI mini connector for playback on an HDTV. The S80 is scheduled to ship in the fall at a price of $330. The camera will be available in black, blue, gold, pink, red and silver/brown.

Nikon last refreshed CoolPix cameras in mid-August, when it introduced a new version of its projector camera, the CoolPix S1100pj. Nikon added features applicable to business users as much as consumers.

By Antone Gonsalves
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HP said on Tuesday that it had filed a civil lawsuit against former CEO Mark Hurd in response to news on Monday that Hurd had been hired by Oracle as President and had joined the database company's board of directors.

"Mark Hurd agreed to and signed agreements designed to protect HP's trade secrets and confidential information," HP said in a statement. "HP intends to enforce those agreements."

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Hurd was forced to resign in early August following an internal investigation of sexual harassment claims brought by a former HP contractor and revelations of expense accounting irregularities. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a friend of Hurd's, called HP's decision to fire Hurd "the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago."

Ellison declared his support for Hurd more directly on Monday in a statement announcing Hurd's hiring as Oracle's President. "Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle," said Ellison.

That's a view shared by some observers of the industry.

HP's complaint says that Hurd signed agreements not to disclose HP trade secrets and confidential information three times during the past three years and that his new position at Oracle puts him in "in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP’s trade secrets and confidential information to others."

According to the complaint, the agreements Hurd signed obligate him not to provide services to a competitor for 12 months. However, this stipulation applies only to services that involve the sharing of confidential information while Hurd remains a resident of California, which limits covenants that restrict employment.

The legal filing claims that Hurd's public statement on Monday that "...Oracle’s strategy of combining software with hardware will enable Oracle to beat IBM in both enterprise servers and storage" represents a deliberate effort to downplay the competitive significance of his move to Oracle.

"As Hurd well knows, IBM and HP are competitors of Oracle in the enterprise servers and storage business," the complaint says. "Hurd's clear effort to avoid mentioning HP is telling in light of Oracle's own SEC filings identifying HP as a competitor."

HP is seeking injunctive relief and written guarantees to ensure Hurd's compliance with the agreements he signed. It is also seeking monetary damages for "willful and malicious conduct."

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

Such lawsuits are common when high level executives move between companies. In October, 2008, IBM sued former executive Mark Papermaster when he joined Apple. The suit was settled in January, 2009 with the requirement that Papermaster delay his employment with Apple until April and that he continue to certify his compliance with his IBM employment agreement for several months.

Microsoft filed a similar lawsuit in July, 2005 when Google hired former Microsoft employee Kai-Fu Lee. That lawsuit was settled in December of that year.

By Thomas Claburn
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U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is not taking even the most basic security measures to protect its financial system, according to the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) inspector general. An independent audit (PDF) conducted by KPMG for the DHS found that between 2008 and 2009, the CBP has not addressed problems in protecting its financial data that were observed in a 2008 audit of the system, resulting in a "significant deficiency for financial system security."

Some parts of the report were redacted for security reasons. However, the report makes it clear that the CBP has not implemented even some of the most basic security -- such as installing anti-virus software on desktops -- to protect financial data. According to the report, the CBP does not maintain a current inventory of desktops with access to its financial system, nor does it conduct third-party review of changes made to system users' access rights.Moreover, a control option to limit the number of failed log-on attempts for system users is not configured correctly, according to the report. The CBP also has not configured its security system with parameters for mainframe audit and system utility logs to collect appropriate data for its financial system; audit logs are not being reviewed on a regular basis, and the agency does not maintain authorizations for personnel that have administrator access to the system.

There was some good news in the report. The CBP has taken some action to improve some deficiencies the inspector general found previously. For instance, the agency has made improvements to the tracking of security awareness completion, the controlling of emergency and temporary access to the system and the recertification of National Data Center (NDC) Local Area Network (LAN) accounts, according to the report. Still, the Inspector General has made more than 25 recommendations to the CBP to improve the security of its financial system. The agency agrees with the findings and recommendations, and is developing a plan to address them, according to the report.

By Elizabeth Montalbano
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Slideshow: Top 10 Tech Newsmakers Of 2010

Google on Friday said that it has simplified its privacy policies in an effort to make them easier to understand and to operate with greater transparency.

The revised policies don't mark any change in the company's privacy practices. Rather, Google is updating its privacy policies to communicate more clearly and concisely -- the new main privacy policy has over 400 fewer words -- and to reflect the growing integration of Google's services.

Whether anyone will notice remains to be seen. Most Internet users do not read online privacy policies because they're "long, complicated and lawyerly," as Google associate general counsel Mike Yang concedes in a blog post. But the thought counts for something.

Yang says that Google is making two types of improvements. The first involves the deletion of 12 product-specific privacy policies, a consequence of service convergence. As an example, Yang notes that contacts are shared between services like Calendar, Docs, and Gmail. So it makes sense for these services to share a single privacy policy.

The second involves editing, specifically rewriting legalese in clear, readable prose, and omitting the obvious, like statements advising users that sites not owned by Google have their own privacy polices.

In conjunction with this new push for clarity, Google is expanding privacy articles in its Help Center.

The company has also created a new privacy tools page that assembles links to Google's various privacy tools in one place.

Google's updated privacy policy takes effect October 3, 2010.

Also on Friday, Google settled a privacy lawsuit filed in April over the February launch of Google Buzz, a social networking service that created controversy for exposing users' e-mail contacts.

The settlement recognizes changes to Buzz that Google made in response to the initial controversy as a good faith effort to address complaints. It also "...requires that Google undertake wider public education about the privacy aspects of Buzz" and "...provides for the creation of an $8.5 million Settlement Fund."

After deducting legal fees, the balance will be paid to various Internet privacy groups.

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Google on Thursday offered some additional details about the fate of Google Wave, the real-time communications platform that the company discontinued last month.

Google Wave software engineer Alex North said in a blog post that the Wave team is planning to release "Wave in a Box," a complete package of Wave server and client software.

Wave in a Box will be open source code and will expand upon on the existing 200,000-plus lines of code already available at waveprotocol.org.

North said that the project won't duplicate Google's version of Wave. But it should allow developers and businesses to run their own Wave servers and clients using their own hardware.

Wave in a Box will include the application bundle, supporting real-time collaboration between servers and clients, a Wave panel for threaded conversations in the client, persistent Wave storage and search capabilities, improved client-server protocols, support for gadget, robot, and data APIs, and support for both Wave data importation and Wave federation.

In a post to the Wave protocol developer forum, North said that the Wave team aims to make the specific improvements mentioned in his blog post by the end of the year.

As Google steps back from Wave, enterprise software providers like Novell and SAP are keeping the flame alive. When Google announced that it would end Wave development in August, Novell reaffirmed its commitment to Pulse, its Wave-based collaboration product.

Wave's key innovation, its operational transformation technology, is already showing up in other Google services. On Tuesday, for example, Google said that Docs users can now follow edits being made by document collaborators through highlighted text, a real-time capability similar to editing in Wave.

By Thomas Claburn
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Slideshow: Top 10 Tech Newsmakers Of 2010

The Wireless Power Consortium launched its Qi 1.0 charging station standard Thursday and reported the first products certified with Qi.

Qi is aimed at ensuring interoperability among Qi devices using any Qi-certified charging station. The Consortium has predicted that interoperability can help the wireless battery charging market scale up over a period of years from 100,000 units to 100,000,000 units annually.

The consortium said Qi can empower mobile phone manufacturers to integrate wireless power receivers and the semiconductor industry to incorporate the functionality into their chipsets. The Consortium also expects infrastructure providers will build chargers in homes, offices, and automobiles.

"As an interoperable standard, Qi will have profound impact on the user experience of wireless power," said Patrick Heyer, manager of Texas Instruments' charge management product line, in a statement. "This will enable the consumers to conveniently charge or power their electronic devices wherever they go, without having to worry about various power cords and adaptors."

The consortium has more than 55 members representing a broad swath of mobile phone, consumer electronics, battery, semiconductor, and component industries. Now that the charging station's standard has been developed, the organization is working on a wireless power standard for medium power devices like netbooks, laptops, tablet computers, and power tools.

"Qi can now be integrated into products," said Menno Treffers, chairman of the consortium. "It took us only 18 months to develop the Qi standard, and less than one month to see the first products certified."

The new standard was hailed by a representative of Nokia, the world's largest provider of mobile phones. Calling the new low power standard a "significant milestone," Nokia's director of mobile solutions research and development Petri Vuori said: "For full user benefit, a standard ensuring cross-compatibility between different manufacturers' products is required."

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The meltdown scenario is a common one among Internet companies. The executive summary goes something like this: Launch a great new service or feature. See usage surge. See the service fail.

That's more or less what TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington says happened with Google Voice following Google's integration of Google Voice with Gmail last week and the opening of Google Voice to the general public in June.

In a post published on Monday, Arrington reports that Google Voice's service in the past week has become "spotty at best, and unusable at times." He also says that based on conversations with multiple sources, Google hasn't invested enough in its core infrastructure to allow Google Voice to scale effectively.

Dozens of posts in the Google Voice help forum echo this view. A post by a Google employee acknowledges that the company has received a number of call quality complaints and asks users to report poor call quality.

The thread had 122 replies at the time this article was written, many of which present complaints similar to Arrington's.

"Things have definitely fallen off a cliff in the past 10 days when it comes to voice quality!" writes a user posting under the name "binxwalker." "This issue needs to fixed asap or [Google Voice] will be abandoned by most users. Most calls that I have made or received via [Google Voice] over the past 10 days have suffered from constant drop outs, garbled audio and one-way audio."

But the discontent is not universal. A significant number of people commenting on Arrington's post report having no trouble with Google Voice.

According to Google, the problem isn't as bad as critics suggest.

"Right now, there are no known widespread issues or outages with Google Voice," a company spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. "We are looking into reports of people experiencing some trouble with the service, but these are isolated problems and not related to the increase in usage we've seen recently."

By Thomas Claburn
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