US POST WILL GUARANTEE SECURE E-MAIL AND COMMERCE

The Online REPORTER

WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT

October 21-October 25 1996 Issue No 21


US POST WILL GUARANTEE SECURE E-MAIL AND COMMERCE

The US Postal Service (USPS) is planning to offer a full range of electronic postal and commerce services in electronic form over the Internet.

The USPS, America's fourth largest company, will launch an electronic commerce system next year, aiming to provide sender and recipient authentication to individuals, as well as businesses. It will use security technology from Cylink Corp and archiving from Aegis Star Corp.

It will involve registering a public digital signature with USPS after presenting identification at the Post Office and getting a certain class of digital certificate, depending on the quality of your identification, whatever that may come to mean. Initially the certificate is likely to be handed over the counter on a disk.

Cylink and USPS are in the last stages of finalizing a multi-year contract for Cylink to provide the technology infrastructure for this to work. After the certification process, about 30 electronic postal services are planned, starting with electronic postmarking.

This will prove that a document existed at a particular time, has not been modified since and will add protection against postal fraud. Aegis Star's technology will send the message to the user, which will have to use Postal Service Mail Reader software to read and authenticate the message and postmark. The USPS reckons it will cost about one third of current first class postage rates.

Other services planned include bonded mail, registered mail, return receipts, archiving and so on. The archiving will be sufficiently secure to use in legal cases, and will have to be kept for at least seven years. The digital ID certificates will be based on the X.509 v3 standard. Cylink will build and test the system running from a Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc 2000 server in its basement in Sunnyvale. The USPS Web site is likely to be the starting point, when the service is formally announced some time in the next few weeks. The electronic postmarking will start later this year, with a full service planned for next year. www.usps.gov


NETSCAPE SHIFTS FOCUS TO E-MAIL AND GROUPWARE

Netscape Communications Corp believes integrated e-mail and groupware will be the killer application of 1997 in the same way the Web and intranets dominated 1995 and this year respectively, it says. But the obvious difference is that the Web and intranet concepts were actually new, whereas e-mail and groupware clearly are not.

Last week the company announced its Communicator client and SuiteSpot 3.0 server products which it will pitch against market leaders Microsoft BackOffice and Lotus Notes beginning in the first quarter.

Communicator is a coming-together of Navigator 4.0, the Galileo version, conferencing, e-mail, calendaring, a Collabra groupware client, Composer HTML development tool and AutoAdmin, a centralized user management tool, though Calendar and AutoAdmin are not part of the standard offering, which costs $49.

A professional edition including those two will cost $79. Navigator 4.0 will not be available separately. Netscape executives were hinting at further enhancements to the client software to be announced at Comdex Fall in November, but wouldn't provide any details.

The new components mean Communicator will require more memory than Navigator, but the company did not want to say how much more. The functions of Communicator cannot be stripped out during installation: it's all or nothing, according to the company. Any version of Communicator for network computers will be handled by Netscape's Navio subsidiary.

So, the browser is dead, long live the integrated client. Ironically, it was Bill Gates that first predicted the end of the browser as a standalone application last December when Microsoft decided that it was an Internet company after all, but Netscape has beaten him to it, not that he will be too worried.

Netscape estimates that about 11m users currently use Navigator for e-mail purposes as well as browsing, but that's impossible to quantify. Netscape Mail hasn't got a reputation as a reliable alternative to the myriad of specialized e-mail packages available today, and anyway the majority of those users never paid a cent for Navigator, despite Netscape's claims to the contrary last week.

The company reckons the big difference this time is the ability to handle HTML documents in e-mail. That probably will not be sufficient to persuade millions of corporate users - for that's who Netscape is almost exclusively after - to throw away their current e-mail clients, Notes, Novell GroupWise or other groupware, any conferencing or calendaring software they might have and pay once more, although probably less, for Netscape's offering.

The move led some observers last week to compare Netscape with Apple. It has taken Apple almost 20 years to falter badly and look doomed, but this being Internet-time, it's only taken Netscape two years, the somewhat unkind comparison goes. Netscape's goal is to win 50% of an intranet market which is estimated to reach $10bn by the end of the decade.

The new SuiteSpot 3.0 server applications include Collabra 3.0 group collaboration based on a Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) version of the CollabraShare technology Netscape bought last year; Media 1.0 audio streaming using the Progressive Networks real-time streaming protocol; and Calendar 1.0 scheduling software.


NETSCAPE DROPS BORLAND JIT COMPILER FOR SYMANTEC

Symantec Corp has displaced Borland International Inc as the Just-In-Time (JIT) Java compiler supplier of choice for Netscape Communications Corp's platform.
Borland had provided its JIT compiler for use in Netscape Navigator 2.x and 3.0, but it was dumped last week in favor of Symantec's Java JIT compiler 2.0 for the Navigator 4.0 component Netscape Communicator (see story above). Symantec was also giving away free copies of its Visual Cafe Java development environment to attendees of the Netscape Developers Conference in New York last week.


COMMERCENET FINALIZES  BOARD OF DIRECTORSÉ

As promised (OR 15), the CommerceNet consortium of financial, computer and information service companies has spewed forth its plan of action and announced its board of directors.

It's taken its time though, as CommerceNet was formed way back in April 1994. The consortium's chairman and CEO is Marty Tenenbaum and he is joined on the board by the chairmen or CEO's of BBN, Borland International Inc, Open Market and CyberCash, as well as senior representatives from Wells Fargo Bank, Marshall Industries, EDS and Federal Express.

Tenenbaum is the former CEO of a company called Enterprise Integration Technology, that VeriFone acquired. Financial software company Intuit Inc announced it was becoming a sponsor-member of CommerceNet.


...AS W3C, COMMERCENET SET WEB PAYMENT HANDSHAKE

The World Wide Web Consortium and CommerceNet have completed their Joint Electronic Payments Initiative (JEPI) which they expect will provide a standard way for Web clients and servers to negotiate payment transactions.

They're not defining a payment system like the Mastercard/Visa SET electronic transaction protocol, rather a mechanism for different payment instruments and protocols to exchange information.

Currently when a consumer wants to buy goods over the Web he or she must use that vendors' payment method rather than their own preferred method of paying like they'd do if they bought goods in a store.

Microsoft, IBM, Open Market, Xerox, DEC, BT and others have helped develop the spec and will now implement the system within products.

W3C expects the vendors to show demo versions of several run-time scenarios in November and will begin a program to get the spec more widely adopted by January. It expects the technology to be in widespread use in time to make all those Christmas 1997 purchases over the Web.


CHECK POINT ADDS SCREENING, BALANCING AND ENCRYPTION

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd has announced the third version of its flagship FireWall-1 with a whole bunch of new and enhanced content security features. These include such things as anti-virus protection, URL screening, connection load balancing, high availability enterprise management, network usage accounting and a bunch of newly-supported security and encryption protocols. Also new is the Content Vectoring Protocol API, for which third parties can write content screening plug-ins.

Supporters of this include Cheyenne Software, now part of Computer Associates, McAfee Associates, which wanted Cheyenne but was fended off, Symantec Corp and Trend Micro Inc.

The URL screening facility in version 3 has been enhanced with the integration of NetPartners Internet Solutions Inc's WebSense screening system. WebSense works from a database of 40,000 URLs to shut out undesirable sites, split into 26 categories. The categories may be turned on or off as the user requires.

On the Java security front, Check Point, with help from Sun and Netscape has added software to check and block the most common and known Java attacks.

The ConnectControl module dynamically balances the load on the server or servers, whether they are geographically dispersed or in the same location. The software also enables multiple FireWall-1 installations on the network to share the same state tables, so if one connection fails, a back-up FireWall can take over. This version also includes increased network usage and accounting facilities and a Motif interface across all Unix environments and other interface tweaks.

Version 3.0 adds three encryption techniques in the shape of Sun's Simple Key Management for Internet Protocol (SKIP), manual IPSec and Check Point's proprietary FWZ. Check Point has also added authentication standards from Radius and AssureNet.

Meantime, Check Point has opened northern and southern European offices in Cambridge, England and Paris respectively: its first direct presence in Europe. FireWall 3.0 and the ConnectControl module, available separately, will be out before the year-end, when pricing is also promised.


VISUALAGE FOR JAVA DATE SLIPS

IBM Corp's used JavaSoft's Java Beans announcement as the jumping off point for rounding up its somewhat confusing component object product strategy.

Big Blue, one of JavaSoft's partners on development of the Java Beans specification, will be creating a Java bridge to the ActiveX-compatible OpenDoc component software architecture in conjunction with the only other major OpenDoc supporter, Apple Computer Inc. Whether there's a business model to sustain OpenDoc development very much farther into the future, when it seems Java can do what most of OpenDoc can do and more seems dubious, though not to IBM which now describes OpenDoc as its high-level object development system. It claims 5,400 members of the Club OpenDoc supporters group - 1,200 corporate and 1,500 commercial - and 13 shipping OpenDoc components (now termed Live Objects) with another 40 due by year-end.

The focus of IBM's Java application development effort is the Java version of its VisualAge graphical programming system, customer shipments of which have slipped into the first quarter of next year, though betas will be available in December.

VisualAge for Java will go up on Windows 95, NT and OS/2 initially. AIX and other IBM operating system versions will follow, but there's no timescales. The environment will include a just-in-time compiler and a ProjectView partition tool that will update and keep client and server elements synchronized. Additional Java technologies the company has include its Arabica suite that includes Java Beans, IBM's own Java Beans-based components, plus the Java-to-OpenDoc bridge.

IBM says Arabica will eat and produce Java Beans components though it hasn't determined out how it'll be packaged. The same packaging issue is also true of Tazza, its dynamic Java component assembly environment which is described as a tool which will allow webmasters to create web pages using reusable Java Beans.(OR 4).

IBM's grand design is to get mainframe data onto middle-tier servers that can
prepare information for delivery on to Windows and OS/2 desktops via OpenDoc or out to networked environments using Java.


AFTER DARK BEATS POINTCAST TO MAC ONLINE SCREEN SAVER

Screensaver pioneer Berkeley Systems Inc, whose After Dark product still dominates the Macintosh screensaver market, has followed PointCast Inc in extending the screensaver concept towards Web publishing and broadcasting.

The latest version, After Dark 4.0, includes After Dark Online, which provides stock quotes and financial information from Data Broadcasting Corp, and feeds to publications such as Sports Illustrated Online, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and Ziff-Davis' ZDNet for computer news. There are also 20 new animated displays.

After Dark Online is available on the $30 After Dark 4.0 CD, which also includes AT&T WorldNet Service software and Netscape Navigator. But it's also available free over the Web from www.afterdark.com. After Dark 4.0 and Online are available in both Mac and Windows 95 versions, but given PointCast's Inc's delay in bringing out Mac versions of its own software, that's where the biggest market opportunity must lie for Berkeley. A Mac version of PointCast was due to go into beta this fall, but hasn't done so yet.


ORACLE PLAYS CATCH-UP WITH E-COMMERCE SERVERS

Oracle Corp chose to add to last week's crowded agenda with a raft of electronic commerce announcements, in attempt to catch up with Netscape Communications Corp, Microsoft Corp and other vendors that already have similar server offerings.

The dramatically-named Project Apollo is Oracle's forthcoming merchant server for small businesses to get a presence on the Internet. The Oracle Payment Server, which comes either with Apollo or on its own, a variety of electronic payment methods, including CyberCash, VeriFone and First Data.

All three have Web cartridges - objects that comply to Oracle's Network Computing Architecture (NCA) to do this. VerfiFone's vPOS merchant software is also to be bundled with Oracle's Project Apollo and its vGate Internet gateway product will work with Oracle Universal Server. Oracle's  Security Server 1.0 authentication software will be out by the year-end.

Oracle has also inked electronic commerce-related deals with Hewlett-Packard Co and Quark Inc. Quark and Oracle will integrate the former's QuarkXPress and QuarkImmedia - its recently released multimedia delivery package - with Oracle WebServer and Universal Server.

The first project, code-named Martini, is a database connectivity tool to link QuarkImmedia to Universal and WebServer. Martini is then expected to be joined with the Project Apollo merchant server so transactions can be performed from within the QuarkImmedia Viewer. Oracle and HP will integrate WebServer and the Web Request Broker API with HP's VirtualVault security package by early next year. The Oracle software will then be the platform for e-commerce applications to be built on top of VirtualVault.

Finally, Oracle promised that its entire applications line will be Web-enabled and integrated with Project Apollo by the end of next year.


VISIGENIC'S CAFFEINE CORBA COMMUNICATIONS

The Netscape Communicator software (see font page) includes a bundled run-time version of the Visigenic Inc VisiBroker for Java object request broker (ORB).

It means that when a user clicks on a link to an OMG Corba object or applet they don't have to wait for a run-time ORB to be downloaded from the applet's host server and a new TCP/IP link opened using Corba's IIOP transport before the object or applet can be displayed. There's an additional development tool called Caffeine developed jointly by Visigenic and Netscape that enables VisiBroker for Java developers to write Corba objects in Java rather than having to learn OMG's Interface Definition Language.

Caffeine's being integrated into the Netscape ONE development toolset. Other ORB and object development vendors are developing similar mechanisms for use with their Java products. Visigenic said next up in this area is a URL naming tool to access Corba objects via URLs. It said the standard Corba naming services can't cope with this.


PROGRESSIVE NETWORKS PUTS ITS STREAMING CASE TO IETF

Following the introduction of its RealMedia Architecture for streaming audio and video over the Internet last week (OR 20) Progressive Networks Inc decided to go all the way and submit its underlying technology to the Internet Engineering Task Force as a proposed standard.

In collaboration with Netscape Communications, and with support from 40 other companies, Progressive proposed a protocol its calling the Real Time Streaming Protocol, or RTSP. With Apple Computer, Autodesk's Kinetix unit, Cisco Systems, DEC, HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems and Macromedia in the Netscape gang, RTSP has some strong backing - except that neither Microsoft nor Intel have been included.

The proposed Real Time Streaming Protocol is a standard for governing the flow of multimedia content that can be displayed as soon as it arrives, rather than the user having to download the entire complex file before watching and listening to the material.

RTSP evolved from work done at Progressive Networks, based in Seattle, and at Netscape. The key point is that it incorporates aspects of the International Telecommunic-ations Unions H323 videoconferencing standard - which is supported by Microsoft and Intel - and runs on top of standard internet protocols such as TCP/IP and UDP, while taking advantage of Internet and intranet infrastructure improvements such as the IP Multicast, RTP and RTCP real-time control protocols. It can be implemented across multi-platforms.

The first draft was submitted to the IETF on October 9th. Progressive says that it's still possible Microsoft will adopt the technology for the new protocol, while an Intel spokesperson told us it was still considering its position. The irony is that Microsoft and Intel proposed a very similar sounding initiative last March, with 100 companies, including Progressive, in support. Their list of standards included H.323, T.120 data conferencing RTP/RTCP and RSVP protocols. It sounds as if the proposals are close enough for a consensus to be reached.


BACKWEB PROMISES TO PUSH DOWN TO CLIENTS POLITELY

There have been so many companies releasing Marimba-like server-push/client-pull software in the past few weeks, a trend is in danger of developing. Latest we've seen is BackWeb Technologies Inc, with its eponymous software that delivers news or other types of information in the background, but without interrupting the operations of the client, claims the San Jose, California-based company.

Information providers install the BackWeb Channel software on their servers, as Ziff-Davis, the Wall Street Journal, Mecklermedia's iWorld and General Motors, among others have done, and the client software is downloaded free from the Web. The client end defines what it wants, and the server sends down alerts in the form of animations, screensavers, wallpapers or software upgrades as so-called BackWeb InfoPaks.

BackWeb alerts the user of the presence of new InfoPaks, which can then be viewed. If the browser isn't open, clicking on the InfoPak will do that. BackWeb reckons the clever bit is its so-called Polite Agent protocol. It's a UDP protocol that sits underneath the IP layer and uses the idle time between the users' Internet connections to download the InfoPaks, pausing as necessary when the user requests something from the Web. It then resumes from where it left off.

BackWeb's initial investor was Jerusalem, Israel-based BRM Technologies Ltd, which also has a stake in firewall specialists Check Point Software Ltd. Softbank Holdings Inc and Broadview Associates also have stakes. BackWeb Channel server is available now for Sun Solaris 2.4.x and later, on Sparc or Intel. A Windows NT version will be in beta by the year-end. The BackWeb client runs on  Windows 95 right now, but betas for Windows 3.1, NT and Macintosh are planned by the year-end.


PRODIGY FINALLY MAKES IT TO THE WEB

Prodigy Services Co has duly launched Prodigy Internet 1.0 at the magic $20 per month unlimited access price point. It's been all dressed up to suit Microsoft's Internet Explorer, at the expense of Netscape Navigator (OR 20). Explorer is the default browser for use with Prodigy.

Some of the Prodigy content uses ActiveX technology that Netscape doesn't support yet. Prodigy also signed with Progressive Networks to integrate its RealAudio streaming stuff into Prodigy Internet. It's either $10 a month for 120 hours' usage, with additional hours costing $2.50 each, or $20 for unlimited access. Prodigy's aiming it at net-virgins.


Netscape developers reckon it won't be dangerous playing outside Java sandbox
Posting to newsgroups last week, Netscape Communications Corp developers shed more light on the work the company is doing to extend the Java "sandbox" to which applets are currently confined, dubbed object-signing (see Netscape story on page 7).

Expanding the sandbox will allow downloadable Java applets to add functionality by reconfiguring or extending parts of the client machine. Netscape employees posting to the net believe there are extremely few cases where an applet would need full control over your machine.

They say you can deny this, and still allow applets to read and write individual files, use client-side storage and to connect to specific hosts. A system based on executing native code cannot do this. They say there's no reason why anyone would need full access in order to write a complete wordprocessor, for example "because in that case you probably only need to use private storage, files specified explicitly by the user via Load and Save dialogs, and the clipboard."

The company's also using a mechanism which should make it easier to check for mistakes in library code that uses privileges gained by signing (the same model is used by Netscape's API implementation, and Java-enabled plug-ins).


SECURITY FLAWS

Each method that uses its privileges must first execute a call that puts the thread in a state where these privileges are enabled - this allows security-critical code to be isolated and checked more thoroughly. The state is terminated automatically when the method is left.

The possibility of mistakes in trusted code is also reduced, Netscape says, by using a safe language, and an API that was designed with security in mind. C, C++, COM and the Win32 API were not designed with these constraints.

For example, it asks, does each ActiveX control check for buffer overruns in its parameters, or when parsing the data files it uses, in case they are supplied by a hostile third party? As a user or administrator, how would you check this? It notes Java virtual machine implementations do have security flaws, but in that case there is publicly available source code for a reference implementation, and browsers are updated with security fixes quite frequently. Nobody is going to voluntarily do an independent security review of each ActiveX control, even if the source were available, it believes.

Responding to claims that the ActiveX model provides traceability, Netscape observes that if a control does something undesirable that has no visible effect (for example, collecting data for marketing purposes, or scanning your hard disk/network drives for keywords and returning the relevant files), the user would not necessarily know that an attack had taken place. It's then simply a matter of whether the attacker can get away with this, without being spotted.

Even if the effects are visible, the culprit is not necessarily the control that is currently being run; it could be any control that was run since you started using ActiveX - or since you last reformatted your disk, and maybe your network disks, from clean media - it says. Virus scanners do not help here; they cannot detect code that is newly written for a particular attack (this is true even for scanners that try to detect 'suspicious' activities).


SCRIPTACTIVE

"Even if ActiveX is ported to Unix (not to mention Mac, Win16, NT 3.51, OS/2, and non-PC devices - and how many variants of Unix exactly?), separate binaries will be needed for each supported platform. Emulation of x86 and Win32 would not be practical or economic for all the platforms supported by Java." It says each site will also need to have the cross-development tools needed to compile these binaries (or, more likely perhaps, the vast majority of ActiveX controls will be Win32 4.0+, x86 only). Microsoft, it observes, claims ActiveX supports Java, but Java plus COM has almost all the security and portability disadvantages described above for native code, it believes.

Meantime, Bob Lisbonne, VP client product marketing at Netscape says a ScriptActive Plug-in permits ActiveX controls to function as components within Netscape's LiveConnect framework. He says it gives Netscape developers the opportunity to build Web-based applications that integrate Plug-ins, ActiveX controls and Java applets all within Netscape Navigator. His understanding is that Navigator users can obtain a plug-in that lets them see ActiveX controls, so ActiveX content is not actually "inaccessible" to Navigator users - just not as convenient as with Explorer.


MICROSOFT'S EXPLORER STARTER KIT AIMED AT NEW WEB USERS

Microsoft Corp launched an Internet Explorer 3.0 Starter Kit last week, aimed at new Internet users. The kit offers cross-platforms versions of the Internet Explorer browser (Microsoft cross-platforms, that is), with Explorer 3.0 for Windows 95 and NT Workstation 4.0, though Windows 3.1 and Macintosh users will have to make do with the earlier Explorer

There's an Internet Connection Wizard for all the platforms except NT 4.0, providing step-by-step sign-up instructions, a month's free connect time for the Microsoft Network or MCI Internet, an ActiveX Gallery with ActiveX Internet controls from 36 companies, a Personal Web Server that allows users to share HTML pages, a trial version of the Hellbender multiplayer Internet-enabled game, and a trial version of Spyglass Corp's SurfWatch content filtering software.

If you want to try before connecting, sample content from 23 Web sites is also included on the CD-ROM version. The kit costs $25 as a standalone CD, but is also available as part of the Windows 95 retail box, an incentive, Microsoft hopes, for users of MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows versions to upgrade to 95.


SUPERSCAPE WINS MICROSOFT'S AFFECTIONS, BUT LOSES MONEY

Superscape VR Plc's aggressive growth strategies have required heavy investment, and rewards have not been instant, but the company looks set to fly on the back of a deal just signed with Microsoft Corp.

The UK-based company has inked a worldwide licensing deal with Microsoft that will see Superscape's 3D Web browser Viscape bundled with Microsoft's Internet Starter Kit. The kit in turn is to be merged in to Windows 95, giving Superscape access to what CEO John Chiplin described as "distribution levels beyond our wildest dreams." Superscape's revenues grew 145% in the year to July at £3.9m, losses were up to 2.9m from £1.7m last time. www.superscape.com


HARBINGER OFFERS SPACE ON ITS SERVER FOR ONLINE TRANSACTIONS WITH TRUSTEDLINK

Harbinger Corp has revved its TrustedLink INP (Instant Net Presence) electronic commerce software with a version aimed at small to medium-sized businesses wishing to offer their customer on-line ordering services.

TrustedLink 1.1 is a package including Web site builder, Navigator, Internet access and secure Web site hosting on Harbingers' servers. The service is offered through Harbingers' year-old joint venture with Bell South Corp, called Harbinger Net Services, which is split 75-25 in favor of Harbinger.

Users get 5MB of disk space for $50 per month and unlimited access. The difference between this and the previous version is the online ordering and secure credit card transactions facilities offered.

Businesses use the TrustedLink Web site builder for Windows 95 to build their site by answering a series of questions about their requirements, and then send it to Harbingers' server. Orders are sent back to the user in a standard EDI-format purchase order, e-mail, HTML or ASCII. There's an initial $195 set-up fee and then it costs $50 per month.


US ROBOTICS HAS MODEM WITH 56KBPS ONE WAY

US Robotics Corp, Skokie, Illinois is ready with a 56Kbps analog modem - and Wall Street is going wild at the prospect.

America Online Inc, IBM Corp's Global Network division, MCI Communications Corp and UUNet Pipex were at the party saying they would be using the new modem. But for a 56Kbps connection over phone lines, dedicated hardware is required at both the end user's site and at the Internet service provider - and the 56Kbps channel will be one way from Internet providers to the user, but there are ways round that (see related story below).

USR submitted a proposal for 56Kbps standards to the ITU-T last month, but that will have to be battered out with competitors such as Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc and Rockwell International, who are also working on the technology. So the US Robotics tools currently rely on the firm's x2 proprietary technology.

The cheerleading service providers are all users of USR's network hubs, making it easy to upgrade to the new technology. Hayes, more cautious, says it plans to introduce 56Kbps products next year, and says it will work closely with Rockwell and others to establish standards.

Hayes agrees that 33.6Kbps will remain the most suitable option for two-way, information sharing transmissions. The faster speed, taking advantage of high-speed digital connections to the telephone network that Internet service providers and corporations already have, will "easily double the speed of downloading information ", it said.

Last week Rockwell signed a deal with Ascend Communications for Ascend to incorporate Rockwell's 56Kbps modem technology into its MAX line of remote access hubs.


TEXAS HAS MODEM CHIPSET COMPATIBLE WITH USR

Texas Instruments Inc to the rescue! The company jumped up to announce immediate availability of modem chip sets compliant with 56Kbps "x2" technology from US Robotics, stealing what could prove a decisive march on Rockwell International Inc, which has announced its own chip set but cannot ship it yet.

USR has been able to get the jump on its rivals because the higher speed is effected in software, by re-programming the Texas chip set, which is why Texas is able to make sets available almost immediately.

Existing 28Kbps USR modems can be reprogrammed - for a "nominal fee," so that even if the US Robotics option comes to be seen as a kludge, few will mind paying for the upgrade while they wait for "true" 56Kbps modems to arrive. Texas's operating-system-independent, and Windows-based modem chip sets are built around one of the company's TMS320 signal processor cores. The sets cost $75 if you commit to 10,000.

Lucent Technologies Inc says it will be shipping its first chip implementing 56Kbps operation by the end of the first quarter, and Motorola Inc has also said it plans to introduce the new technology in 1997. But USR, which is expected to start shipping its Sportster modems to end users in February, and will offer upgrades in January, is thought to have a six-month lead.


SUN FINISHES GRINDING JAVA BEANS EARLY

With the help of its partners, including Apple, Borland, IBM, Oracle and Netscape, Sun's overworked JavaSoft division has published the specification for its Java Beans component architecture a couple of months ahead of schedule.

Java Beans define APIs for creating software components with the Java language that will run on any platform supporting Java, and are focused primarily at the application development market.

Java Beans includes the definition of an OCX bridge that will allow Microsoft  ActiveX, COM and OLE application components to work alongside Java applets or for Java Beans components to control ActiveX components. JavaSoft will build this bridge using publicly available specifications which have yet to be defined by the Open Group, the organization to which Microsoft recently transferred some measure of control of the future definition of ActiveX specifications.

Other partners will build bridges allowing Java Beans components to interact with OpenDoc components, and Netscape Communications Corp will build a bridge to its LiveConnect environment to link Java applets with plug-ins.

Java Beans architect Graham Hamilton envisages Java Beans will be used to build three types of components; drag-and-drop graphical user interface components; invisible components that run on servers; and Java pairs, components that have visual and back-end elements. By keeping those pieces of Java Beans needed for design environments separate from the bits required at run-time, JavaSoft hopes to encourage the creation of a Java after market for components similar to that for Microsoft OCX controls.

JavaSoft expects to ship a production implementation of Java Beans by the end of the first quarter of next year, though early builds will be made available to partners and developers in November and January. Other vendors, such as IBM Corp, will be creating their own versions. Java Beans will support
three distributed network computing mechanisms: JavaSoft's own remote method invocation scheme; the JDBC Java database protocols; and Java IDL, which will allow Java Beans clients connect to servers using Object Management Group's Corba Interface Definition Language.

Borland International Inc says that 50% of its Latte Java application development environment has been written in Java, using Java Beans specifications wherever it can.


BORLAND RESTRUCTURES AGAIN, LOSES ANOTHER TO REDMOND

Borland International Inc is to cut another 125 jobs, 15% of its workforce, in the latest restructuring at the still not stable Scotts Valley, California software development tools developer.

The cuts come in the wake of expectations that it will make a fiscal second quarter loss of $0.32 to $0.36 per share. The company attributed the losses to the slow rate of its transition from desktop markets into corporate markets.

The cuts should save $15m to $17m a year and help the company return to profitability in fiscal 1998, said CEO Whitney Lynn. Sales for the quarter are expected to be about $36m, down from $53.8m this time last year. The reorganization is intended to simplify the company's operations and to eliminate some overlapping functions.

But late Thursday, Borland lost another of its prominent employees to Microsoft, with the departure of Anders Hejlsberg, chief architect of its Delphi development environment, and one of the original Borlanders. Paul Gross, Borland's VP research and development was lured to Redmond last month.


RATS PAY FOR VALLEY INTERNET OUTAGE WITH THEIR LIVES

Many Silicon Valley companies, including Sun, Apple, and Intel, were without Internet access for hours recently due to rats apparently chewing through power cables leading to a switch at Stanford University, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

Power was lost at Stanford, the lights went out, but so did the hub at nearby BBN Corp, which uses the switch at Stanford. This in turn hit BBN customers Intel, HP, SGI and Apple. Apple had backup, which meant outsiders could still get on to its Web sites, but Apple staff lost e-mail and Web access.

But Sun had no back-up, and was cut off, with only the internal network operating. BBN had battery backup, but it ran out. Stanford chooses to generate its own power, but the switch failure prevented Stanford from making a back-up connection to the local utility company Pacific Gas & Electric.


OMG HITS BACK WITH SIX ACTIVEX MYTHS

While they sort things out over at the Open Group, the Object Management Group, rival to the Active Group, appears to be rousing itself to do battle.

It's got a draft of a white paper it calls "Debunking the ActiveX Myths" that it's getting ready to put out. There are six. Myths, that is, and it's hoping to shore up, if not invigorate, its Corba base by pointing them out.

Myth One is that ActiveX is a well-defined object technology. OMG figures the simple retelling of how OLE got to be ActiveX by way of COM and DCOM and their various recastings should disabuse anyone that we know what ActiveX actually is - which, if truth be told, we don't.

Myth Two is that it has cross-platform support. OMG points out that the only ActiveX-DCOM implementations are on Windows 95 and NT and it claims that no matter what else happens Windows will always be the reference implementation. Corba of course isn't like that.

Myth Three is that it has cross-language support. OMG says COM and DCOM are married to C++ and it fails to see how Microsoft will support Java or even good old-fashioned  Cobol like Corba does let alone Ada, Smalltalk and Eifel which Corba also supports.


RETRO-FITTED

Myth Four is that it's a mature technology. COM and DCOM specifications are still only available in draft form.

Myth Five is that ActiveX controls are a viable alternative to Java. ActiveX, it says, is based on binary code which means every browser platform - and they will be legion - telephones, televisions, NCs are only a few - will need its own version of the ActiveX control. Which will mean that Microsoft's thousands of ActiveX controls will have to be recompiled, possibly into some sort of "fat binary" format that contains a separate code segment for each supported platform - a heavy criticism up against Java's simple elegance.

Myth Six is that it will scale to support Internet applications. ActiveX-DCOM, OMG contends, was never designed to work across large-scale networks such as the Internet that's why it uses reference counts and keepalive messages for resource control. OMG says "simply adding a DLL for DCE RPC to COM does not create an architecture for distributed applications, but rather a recipe for disaster. Distribution cannot be retro-fitted onto an existing product in this way. Unfortunately Microsoft will be learning this lesson at their customers' expense over the coming months and years."


MICROSOFT, INTEL PAIR ON NETMEETING AND NET PHONE

Partners Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp have shown the first fruits of their agreement to work together on Internet video, voice and data communications standards by pairing Microsoft's newly announced NetMeeting 2.0 beta software with Intel's Internet Phone beta applet.
NetMeeting 2.0, available free from Microsoft's Web site, builds on Microsoft's original NetMeeting product, a real-time communication client that allowed two users to share data over the Internet using standards-based multi-point data conferencing.

The new version adds support for the ITU's H.323 audio conferencing standard, and runs on Windows 95 or Windows NT. The work was done jointly by Microsoft and Intel, which means that it is interoperable with Intel's Internet Phone beta applet, allowing users of each beta offering to communicate with each other.

According to Intel VP Pat Geisinger this is "the first time that users of two Internet 'phone applications can find, click and connect to each other." The open platform the two are proposing, with backing from the International Mutimedia Teleconferencing Association, includes the H.323 standard, and RTP/RTCP and RSVP specifications.

Intel said it was "still looking" at Progressive Networks' RTSP Real Time Streaming Protocol submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force last week.


SUN'S MCNEALY BANGS DRUM FOR ITS THIN CLIENT PARADIGM

Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy is not doing his network computing paradigm any favours by saying that he expects the annual cost per user for a 20,000-user network will be $5,000.

Most users find it hard to believe that Windows PCs cost so much more than that - the number cited is $8,000 to $13,000 per desktop - but so many computer support departments are also involved in other unaccountable activities such as Web page maintenance and the odd bit of programming.

McNealy did say last week that he hoped to get the cost per user down to $2,500 a year. McNealy confirmed that Sun plans to introduce its own product with a whole set of systems designed built around Java, at a New York briefing on October 29. He said the $5,000-per-year per-desktop figure was a calculation based on total costs of the equipment used under an internal trial by Sun, and that it includes costs of hardware depreciation and software amortisation as well as system administration fees.


SOFTWARE MODEMS WILL KILL CHIP MODEMS SAYS MOTOROLA

Motorola Inc has announced more details of its plans for modems that are simply software that runs on the processor.

The company says the first products will be host-based software running on Windows 95 personal computers, to be launched later this year.

According to Mike Tramontano, the company's product manager for information systems, they will be marketed through OEM deals; he said the technology is currently being demonstrated to a number of PC manufacturers.  Motorola expects the devices to be incorporated in devices such as Personal Digital Assistants and television set-top boxes.

Although there is a hardware component in the form of a transceiver to interface with the phone line, the company says its software modems will work out cheaper and lighter than current versions, as well as being more readily upgradeable.

Tramontano denied the devices would be any less advanced than their hardware brethren, claiming: "We fully intend to have our software communications products keep pace with the features and function set of hardware-based modems." He claimed they would eventually make traditional modems redundant.

Modem manufacturer Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc was unfazed by Motorola's plans  and said it is planning its own version of a "soft modem" possibly for release in 1997.


Netscape is shipping Application Methods' Starter Application set with its LivePayment technology. LivePayment is a financial payment solution that supports real-time credit card transactions processing over the Internet using the retailers' existing bank accounts . The Starter Application integrates LivePayment into a merchant's web site, secures credit card transactions and enables the merchant to conduct back-office functions. LivePayment with the Starter Application set costs $4k.


America Online has made AirMedia's  Live Internet Broadcast Network, which has been shipping with Global Village's NewsCatcher, available to its subscribers. It alerts subscribers about breaking news even when they're off-line. AOL and AirMedia's plans include notification of arriving e-mail, delivery of AOL news and events and cross-marketing opportunities, all due this quarter. Newscatcher costs $150 from computer retail stores.


BlueStone  released its Sapphire/Web V2.1 application server and plans to unleash its 3.0 version sometime this quarter. The V2.1 uses Java and ActiveX database applications to strengthen client-side processing.


Higher research and development and sales and marketing expenses ate into Macromedia's margins during the last quarter, causing the Shockwave Internet animation company to report a drop in second quarter earnings. Macromedia Inc reported second quarter net profits down 14.9% at $4.6m, against a period including a $400,000 merger-related charge, on revenues up 13.6% at $31.0m. Net profits for the six months to September 30 were up 19.2% at $11.7m, on revenues up 29.1% to $66.0m. Net earnings per share fell 20% at $0.12 in the quarter and up 7.4% at $0.29 in the half.


Er, back in OR 8 we reported that the price Excite Inc had to pay to get its logo on Netscape's home page and be designated a "premier Partner" cost it a cool $5m to its second quarter figures. Well, its another quarter, and another charge. Now make that $10m. The Internet search engine company charged that to its bottom line, resulting in very heavy nine month losses. Nobody was available at the company to tell us if there was more of this to come. It also felt the affects of the acquisitions of the McKinley Group, that added the Magellan NetGuide to the Excite Network. But cash and equivalents at the end of September were still at $30.4m, so that's alright then. Excite Inc reported third quarter net losses of $9.4m, after a $2.3m merger-related hit, up from $1.7m losses last time, on revenues up to $4.0m, from $37,000 last time. Net losses for the nine months to September 30 were $30.4m, after a $2.4m merger charge and a $10m second quarter charge for Excite and Magellan to be designated as Netscape "Premier Providers,", up from $3.0m losses last time, on revenues that rose to $8.2m, from $378,900


Another search engine provider sitting on a pile of cash is Infoseek Corp, that turned in third quarter net losses of $3.7m, up from $667,000 losses last time, on revenues that rose to $4.0m, from just $278,000 previously. For the three-quarter Infoseek made net losses of $12.0m, up from $1.7m a year ago, on revenues up to $9.0m, from $327,000 last time. Cash is a healthy $50.6m at the moment.


Memco Software Ltd, the Tel Aviv-based security software company that last year managed to wriggle free from Platinum Technology's acquisitive grasp is coming to Nasdaq with an initial public offering of 3.4m shares, all new, at a target price of $15 per share. Memco's SeOS security software secures operating systems by disabling super user privileges and shifts responsibility to individual users. Platinum had to make do with a small stake in Memco, and its other partners include fellow-Israeli firewaller Check Point, Tivoli and CyberSafe. Lehman Brothers will lead manage.


FINANCE IN BRIEF

LOTUS PLANS DOMINO WEB APPLICATIONS FOR RENT

Lotus Development Corp is developing a new family of collaborative Web applications based on its Domino Internet Server, and hopes to persuade Internet Service Providers to host them. The first to agree is Netcom, with which Lotus has signed "a strategic relationship".

Domino SPA Service Provider Applications are extensions of existing Lotus Domino applications that have been modified so that they can be rented from service providers. Typically, they will be ready-to-use applications for anything from building a Web page to creating "virtual private communities" for collaborative working among partners, customers and suppliers.

Lotus thinks they'll be of interest to those users "with little or no technical expertise to create on their own a secure, interactive, collaborative Web site using a Web browser", including small and medium-sized companies,
home office users and consumers. ISPs would charge users for the applications as an additional service.

The applications can be integrated into the billing, registration and systems management setup of an ISP, and once set up, won't need human intervention when a customer wants to download and configure the applications they want.

The core component application is Domino.Collaboration SPA, which will enable the creation of private, password protected collaboration sites by users themselves, for discussion, document libraries, project-oriented calandering and schedule and project management.

Domino.Action, a Web-site creation application, was being demonstrated at Internet Expo last week. Lotus expects the tools to be available at other service providers, through telecoms companies and through telecoms providers supporting Lotus Public Networks by the first quarter of 1997. Existing Notes applications should be adaptable as an SPA.


DOT Gossip


Oracle will unveil the Intel Corp x86-based version of its network computers at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, which starts on November 4. They are likely to cost about $700 and be aimed at business users. They will have 8MB RAM, keyboard, a CGA monitor and a 33.6Kbps modem, but no hard disk. The ARM RISC version will be around also, but it's "Larry's thing," according to the company, so there's no knowing quite what he's planning.


Demonstrating that the real money lies in providing the service rather than the products, NetCom has bundled 13 applications together that it claims are worth more than $400, and is selling them for a tenth of the price, aimed at business users. The package includes such things as Netscape's Navigator 3.0, Qualcomm's Eudora e-mail, VocalTec's Internet Phone software and Macromedia's Shockwave. For $40 users can get the software, a month's Internet access, three-month subscriptions to NetGuide and Home Office Computing magazines and a NetCom guide to using the net, plus a month's Internet access. And $5 buys 'lite' versions of much of the software and doesn't include the Internet access.


CompuServe Corp has appointed Frank Salizzoni as its chairman, replacing interim chairman Henry Frigon, who in turn replaced then-chairman and CEO Dick Brown, who left in June to head Cable & Wireless Plc (OR 4). Bob Massey remains as CompuServe's president and CEO. To complete the picture, Salizzoni has had his interim position as parent company H&R Block Inc made permanent.


Shock Horror! The Internet is dominated by US culture. This startling revelation comes to us by way of an organization called Online Marketing. The Broadview, Illinois company feels the Europeans and Asians are enlightened enough to be lectured to about this thing we call the Internet and is trotting off to Manchester and Paris to tell advertising executives from those regions how to flog the idea more effectively to their clients - as if they haven't realized already that it's US-centric.


Symantec has a free beta of the PowerMac version its Visual Cafe Java RAD tool up on its Web site. It'll cost $200 when its released sometime in the Fall. Go take a look see at http://cafe.symantec.com.


Sounds like quite a row: Pacific Bell has pushed out the president of its Internet division, Richard Hronicek to another part of the company and chief financial officer Greg Straughn resigned saying his departure was related to Hronicek's enforced move. Pacific Bell's Internet division has garnered 51,000 residential customers in California, but only 500 business users since starting up in May, and it is future direction that's said to be behind the rumpus.


Another Silicon Graphics Inc executive leaves the roost for more intimate surroundings: Kirk Loevner, the former SGI VP and general manager of applications has joined The Internet Shopping Network, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Home Shopping Network Inc as its president and CEO.www.isn.com.


Is this the future? Corel Corp has a free preview version of its WordPerfect for Java suite up at http://officeforjava.corel.com. You'll have to be patient, no matter how fat your pipe is, but it does work.


Microsoft Corp has got the beta of the ActiveX SDK for the Macintosh out so developers can create ActiveX control for the Mac version of Internet Explorer 2.1. It's at www.microsoft. com/intdev/sdk/mac/.


Easynet Group Plc says that the talks it has been holding with Internet service company UK Online Ltd were not expected to result in a takeover of Easynet, but there's no other details as to what they're talking about.


Sun Microsystems Inc reckons the average cost of a telephone line-based transaction is $2 compared with $0.20 per Web transaction.


It all seems a bit irrelevant now, but Netscape is ecstatic over the results of a browser "shoot-out" run by KeyLabs Inc in which Navigator 3.0 outgunned Redmond's Explorer 3.0 in every test of how fast the two browsers could download HTML files from both Netscape and Microsoft servers running on NT Server 4.0. KeyLabs says Navigator was 200% faster on small and medium files and 30% faster on large files. Netscape did overlook one little detail. Both browsers were a tiny bit faster when the files were being delivered by Redmond's Internet Information Server than with Netscape's server.


Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp plans to start a low-cost Internet access service in December for individual users in Tokyo. The Open Computer Network service will allow Internet access over existing phone lines for up to 15 hours a month for $20, less than the cost of most other such services available in Japan. It also plans to lay dedicated lines for low-speed computer network transmissions from December, a service that'll first be offered in two regional cities, but will be expanded early next year to 11 other cities, including Tokyo. It will cost $333 a month, about half the cost users now pay for a dedicated line.


Casio Computer Co reckons it will be first onto the US market with a hand-held personal computer that runs the new Windows CE operating system. Priced at around $500, it should be in the stores for Christmas.


The Microsoft Network has turned to Legato to back up its voluminous files. It has up to 3m  files on each of more than a hundred NT servers. MSN has been using nine backup servers and 14 tape drives, all of which are to be consolidated into one four-way Compaq 4500 running Legato's NetWorker for NT which will feed data to a single ADIC Scalar 458 library unit, with DEC supplying the FDDI.


Computer Reseller News says Intel is creating development teams to evaluate doing NCs and quote Intel CEO Andy Grave as its source. He's come a long way, baby, from his resolute PC-only position of a year ago.


Apple, IBM, JavaSoft, Motorola, Netscape, Nortel, Novell, RSA and SGI have announced support for something called Platform-Independent Cryptography API (PICA), to build upon RSA's Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS). They'll hold open development meetings before the year-end. The only difference between this and the five-year-old PKCS group, which includes Microsoft, is that this one will look to co-ordinate its efforts with the W3C and IETF.


Sun Microsystems Inc appears to be losing it slightly at the prospect of its Java WorkStation announcement in New York City on October 29. It declares that "Independence Day this year falls on October 29." And we all know who it wants us to be independent from, don't we?


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