The online REPORTER
WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
June 10 - June 14 1996 Issue No 02
RED DOG TO HAVE MSN ENTRAILS
Microsoft is re-selling the technologies used to build MSN to other online service providers. The announcement of the "Normandy" bundle of technologies was accompanied by the news that CompuServe is the first customer. Two weeks ago CompuServe announced its "Red Dog" initiative, designed to replace its proprietary architecture with one based upon Internet standards. Bob Massey, CEO of CompuServe described Normandy as "a major step in the initiative". Users will see the initial impact of Normandy in the fall, with the majority of the work completed by the year end, he said.
CompuServe is acting as something of a beta tester, and is being given the source code, as well as early access to the package.
Microsoft previewed the stuff to various network operators, cable companies and ISPs at its Redmond campus last week, but Normandy is not scheduled to be broadly available to ISPs until the fourth quarter. However a "special preview program" will be running from August.
The loose bundle of code comprises eight components of which Mail, News and Chat are fairly self explanatory. There is also a Security Component based on Microsoft's recently announced Internet Security Framework; an Information Retrieval Component provides an indexing and search engine; a White Pages Component handles user directories across multiple servers, and the Personalisation Component lets ISPs create dynamic, customised content for individual users, based on ActiveX.
But the heaviest component and the one that ISPs will be most eager to get their hands on (apart from security) appears to be the Replication Component designed to replicate "multiple gigabytes" of content across multiple remote servers. This forms the guts of the scalable online service and is transaction-based, able to carry out selective updates or roll back to a previous version of the content if a problem is encountered.
COMPUSERVE'S RED DOG TO BE STUFFED WITH MSN ENTRAILS
US export controls on encryption are damaging US industry and should be relaxed, according to a two-year study carried out for Congress by the National Research Council. The committee report found that products that incorporate 56-bit DES for confidentiality should be made "easily exportable" and that "the threshold of easy exportability...should be adjusted upward periodically as technology evolves." The report further warns that overly restrictive export controls threaten the US's lead in encryption technology, increasing "the likelihood that significant foreign competition will step into a vacuum left by the inability of US vendors to fill a demand". The committee of 16 also came out against immediate "aggressive promotion" of key escrow encryption; the basis of the Clinton administration's controversial 'Clipper' scheme, though it agreed that it would be worth running some pilot projects.
Committee chair Kenneth Dam, a law professor at the University of Chicago says in the report's preface that the US government is embroiled in a crisis of policy, rather than "a technology crisis, an industry crisis, a law enforcement crisis, or an intelligence-gathering crisis".
In total the report, titled Cryptography's Role In Securing the Information Society (CRISIS) makes six major recommendations, the broad thrust of which is that the US government needs to foster broad use of cryptographic technology, start an open debate and bring policy in line with market realities.
The first debate of the report will take place on June 12 when the Congressional Commerce Committee's subcommittee on Science, Space and Technology begins a series of public hearings. The subcommittee is chaired by Senator Conrad Burns, principal co-sponsor of the pro-CODE bill (S.1726) designed to free-up use of encryption technology in the US. Report excerpts, and a recommendation overview can be found at www2.nas.edu/cstbweb/28e2.html
Netscape Communications reacted to Sun's API and component architecture announcements by simply stating that it would support all of them... despite the nebulous state of many of the Java Beans (component architecture) and API announcements. So LiveConnect - the new Netscape technology for linking plug-ins, Applets, JavaScript and HTML - will at some point be merged with Java Beans connectivity. Netscape's Commerce Extensions (so far represented by the LivePayment software) will get the proposed Java merchant APIs grafted on. On the security side, SSL 3 will support the Java security APIs and the Netscape administration kit will support the Java admin APIs. Netscape is also promising support for Java's remote method invocation - which allows a piece of Java code on one machine to run Java code on a remote workstation.
There are no time scales on all of this, for one thing the Java Beans and Java extension APIs are not expected in draft form until this summer. The swift acceptance of Java Beans does call into question the long-term future of Netscape's plug-in architecture. Netscape director of technology Martin Haeberli acknowledged that replacing plug-ins with Java Beans "seems like a logical progression", although it is a "long-term" aim.
CONGRESSIONAL STUDY URGES EASING US ENCRYPTION EXPORT REGS
L JAPAN'S EXPORTABLE RSA
The government of Taiwan has set up a 'Java Alliance'. Under the umbrella of Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs, it encompasses Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and Institute for Information Industry (III) as well as 22 Taiwan companies. Most notable is Acer Peripherals, which recently hinted it wouldn't build Java boxes. The alliance will establish a Java Center and Java Lab and press for broad deployment of JavaOS, the HotJava class libraries, the base Java platform and SunSoft's Java WorkShop. It's worth remembering that Taiwan tends to leap on new technologies - it did a similar job when the PowerPC chip came out. Other companies involved include Ares, Mitac, Tatung and Wyse Technology Taiwan.
NETSCAPE TO USE ALL JAVA APIS
Sun chairman Scott McNealy told the 4,000 or so folks at his JavaOne keynote that a rumour's going around that Sun is already putting out early versions of its network computer to customers - there is now.
Java byte-code is two or three times smaller than the RISC code generated by a C++ compiler, says Sun Microelectronics as it tries to convince manufacturers of embedded devices to build using the forthcoming picoJava chips.
Digital Equipment Corp was a late entrance to the show - a month ago it didn't know it was going to have a stand there. Still, there it was, showing a pre-release version of the Java Virtual Machine, courtesy of OSF's Research Labs. It also had an early research prototype of a Just In Time compiler on show - well we say on show, in fact all it was capable of doing was displaying a series of dots in a terminal window - indicating how fast it was solving a Tower of Hanoi problem. Despite DEC's 'Whatever It Takes' Internet slogan, the company hasn't signed a Java licence yet. The sticking point appears to be price. Tony Schofield, business development manager at the company's Palo Alto-based Unix Software Group is looking after DEC's Java introduction at the moment and says to expect more news towards the end of the month.
Ports of the Java Virtual Machine are popping up all over the place. The Amiga is getting one courtesy of Vince Hodges, of TVI Interactive Systems Inc in Burnaby, British Columbia, while the AS/400 port is progressing courtesy of Tom Gall, development programmer at the machine's Rochester home.
The Object Database Management Group is putting together a Working Group to develop an object database specification for Java. The group apparently first got together in February, and is now promising that the first ODMG-compliant databases for Java are "a matter of months away". The workgroup is being headed by Rick Cattell, JavaSoft distinguished engineer and chair of the ODMG www.odmg.org
Internet Profiles Corporation (I/PRO), purveyor of web-measurement and auditing tools, is adding the ability to track the usage of Java applets. However Java developers will need to add two lines of code to their applets to let Java Count track the begin and end times well as any user interaction. The technology will be available in the "second quarter" - ie, soon, from http://www.ipro.com
Want to know more about Java? There are now 110 books published or in preparation about the language, says John Gage, director of Sun's Science Office.
Ah, how history is re-written. Arthur Van Hoff, one of the departed JavaSoft members who formed the start-up Marimba, claims he once tried to convince Java inventor James Gosling that the language had to be released to the public domain to become truly ubiquitous. Gosling resisted, he says, saying in effect that some control had to be maintained so that Java didn't become Unix-fied and spawn dozens of variations. Ironically, Gosling devoted much of his keynote speech to enumerating how free-distribution model had been responsible for Java's success.
Oof - The announcement of JavaOS took some of the wind out of new start-up Zydecom Inc which went to the show to announce the development of a real time operating system for Java. Zydecom is a spin-out from Industrial Controls Corporation (ICON) of Shreveport, Louisiana. The company hopes to have the OS, called I-97, ready for the start of '97. Program manager Bob Martina acknowledged that JavaOS "certainly makes potential customers look in their direction", but reckons that I-97 will be sufficiently different to capture a niche. Zydecom is aiming squarely at the desktop video-conferencing and video on demand markets and the OS is designed to run on PC-class machines, rather than on small embedded devices. http://www.zydecom.com.
Borland International Inc has announced a JDBC gateway for its Interbase cross-platform SQL database. So far, so standard, except that "InterClient" has been written entirely in Java and contains both client and server elements. The claim is that product combines the best of the Web with a client-server architecture. A pre-release version will be made available this summer for Windows 95/NT and Solaris.
Novell Inc finally unveiled its plans for Java in the form of the Virtual Machine implemented in a series of Netware Loadable Modules. The Netware Software Development Kit is due in beta this Fall and will also contain Netware-specific class libraries letting developers use Netware functions, such as NDS. Novell says it is working with JavaSoft to expand the Java class libraries to include naming and directory services.
Java applets that roam the net are the latest thing to emerge from IBM's Tokyo Research Labs. Aglets (lightweight Agents) arrive at a computer and "present their credentials" before being given access to local services and data. Possible applications include aglets that move through the network searching for data and then reporting back to base. IBM is making the APIs and technology free. First beta release should be available next month.
Metrowerks plans to introduce full support for the JavaOS into its Codewarrier for Embedded Systems in the fourth quarter. The compiler will support 68K, PowerPC, MIPS and x86 processors. The development environment will run on Macs, Windows 95 and NT. Prices have yet to be decided. http://www.metrowerks.com
Penumbra Software Inc says that Mojo - its Java coding environment - will be released on June 30th for $495. The package consists of a GUI designer - a visual app-builder - and Coder, for "organising and editing the Java code". The system will run on Windows 95 and NT. www.penumbrasoftware.com
Object Design Inc will have "Java binding," or native Java support, for its ObjectStore ODBMS product this summer.
JavaSoft sees Corel's planned Java office suite as critical to sell the enterprise on Java-powered NCs and therefore isn't leaving Office JV entirely up to WordPerfect's less-than-stellar execution reputation. It says it's been helping WordPerfect - which first ran into trouble by not completing a Windows 95 version in time - to do some of the Java work.
Corel came to JavaOne with a fairly sophisticated working model of the 600 KB suite and claimed it'll have product by year-end, possibly at 30-40% less than the conventional version's price. Corel said Larry Ellison's office suite had little chance of catching on in the corporate world and is talking to Oracle about licensing Office JV.
Scott McNealy hinted last week that Corel's Java-based WordPerfect office suite is only the tip of the iceberg: "It would blow people away to learn of the major software vendors with Java initiatives," he told InfoWorld [ital], saying that they've stayed silent to avoid alienating customers using current versions. techweb.cmp.com/iw
McNealy made a typically rambunctious keynote - launching an attack on surprise, surprise - Windows and conventional PCs. Though all good clean, knock-about fun, McNealy's speech seemed strangely antithetical to the rest of JavaOne which concentrated on building bridges - even with Microsoft. Having predicted the death of the PC in the keynote, he immediately back-tracked in a subsequent briefing to say that the future of the PC and the workstation was secure at the high-end. "He's very schizophrenic about this" one Sun high-up later explained - "but no more so than anyone else in the business... part of him likes the idea of things just happening on the 'net - but part of him is an engineer" o
JAVAONE IN A NUTSHELL
NETSCAPE'S CLARKE BLASTS NON-STANDARD JAVAOS
Netscape chairman Jim Clark is trying to put the evil eye on Kona. He says the JavaOS is doomed simply because it comes from Sun. OEMs won't trust a fellow hardware maker to come up with a truly vendor-neutral OS. "You're not going to get a standard OS if it comes from a systems company," Clark insisted in remarks following his Comdex keynote last week. "Trying to make a software company out of a hardware company is like trying to change the stripes on a Zebra with paint."
Netscape executives tried to tone down Clark's comments after he had left by explaining Kona could be a great niche OS for things like videophones and such. Interestingly, Clark spent most of his keynote going after Lotus Notes, a change from the usual Redmond-bashing. Between Netscape's Collabra acquisition and the creation of the SuiteSpot suite, Clark argued that Netscape can now duplicate essentially all the tasks Notes is used for. The big difference between them, he contended, was Notes' closed architecture compared to Netscape's use of standard protocols, HTML and JavaScript.
Clark figures Netscape software costs about half the price of Notes which he said was for e-mail more than anything else.
NASA AND THE NC
A little 25-man start-up in San Mateo, California by the name of iTV Corporation says it's been working on the notion of something akin to an NC for two years. It thought it had time to tinker around until it started hearing tales of other folks doing the same thing and that was before Larry Ellison started mouthing off about $500 widgets.
iTV's nameless consumer device, which it reckons will come in under $300, has high-falutin' antecedents. It's based on a chip, developed and owned by iTV, that will be used for NASA spacecraft. In fact, iTV is a spin-out of NASA's Ames Technology Commercialization Center at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley which is dedicated to incubating companies that transfer space technology to commercial uses. The chip was designed to handle the massive streams of data required in satellite imaging of planet surfaces, yet consumes very little power.
iTV calls the construct a Minimal Instruction Set Computer (MISC) - and no, it's not a simple controller, it's an MPU - we asked. It's a cheap single chip with nearly all the requisite co-processors on the 2mm by 4mm die. The central processor runs at 400 MIPS but of course the memory can't access that fast so, according to marketing and sales director Joe Medanich, it's basically the equivalent of a fast 486. One can talk about it being 100MHz but the measurement, he says, isn't relevant. It needs very little DRAM. The target device for the chip, distinctive in not being Java based yet, will connect a TV set, phone line and keyboard to provide Internet access, e-mail and browsing. iTV is adamant it's not an NC, since it doesn't meet the requirements recently laid down by the NC Reference Profile, and calls it an Internet converter. It can't download programs yet. One of iTV's co-founders is Chuck Moore, the inventor of the programming language FORTH, which some have structurally compared to Java.
The device, now in prototype, includes a dedicated non-portable operating system based on FORTH. Production quantities are expected before the end of the year but not enough to saturate the market in time for Christmas.
CLICKABLE VIDEO FROM ILLINOIS
The University of Illinois, Mosaic's birthplace, has followed up its most famous offspring with a sibling. Vosaic - or Video Mosaic - is a joint effort with a Chicago company and allows high-quality video streaming with embedded hyperlinks.
Developed by the systems research group of the university's vaunted computer sciences department and marketed by Digital Video Communications, Vosaic integrates video and audio into HTML so they're no longer considered external data types. It allows, for example, embedded hyperlinks within the video stream so that moving objects are clickable and lead to other documents. Audio files can be used as background music.
Its streaming capability lets users view arbitrarily large files, regardless of disk space available, and play on demand specific segments of the video by frame level or playing time. As well as standard UDP network protocols, Vosaic runs on top of a new protocol, Video Datagram Protocol (VDP), which adapts to client-side CPU and bandwidth conditions.
It delivers most video and audio standards to the desktop. At 2-3 frames per second on a 28.8kb/s modem in demonstrations at Comdex, however, it still requires some fine-tuning to be a low-bandwidth solution. Vosaic will come to market as a plug-in for Netscape and Spyglass browsers.
Asymetrix claims its 5 times faster than the fastest JIT
Asymetrix Corporation is the latest entry in the wide-open Java tool field with a C++-performance-level interactive development environment it says will shake up the early frontrunners, Borland and Symantec.
The SuperCede tool set, comprised of a virtual machine and an interactive development environment, is powered by the Flash Compiler, a device that Asymetrix claims runs Java code five times faster than the fastest JIT compiler and 50 times faster than interpreted Java code.
Flash Compiler, the brainchild of engineers recruited from NT father Dave Cutler's team at DEC, was developed in a three-year "secret project" for C++ and can now compile both Java and C++. SuperCede product manager Peter Kellogg-Smith claims it's "not a JIT" compiler, and compiles all code at machine level where JITs use a hybrid approach.
Asymetrix is poised at the confluence of the two Internet movements, the Microsoft and Sun camps. It's one of those rarest of birds, a profitable Paul Allen company, and after living up to its name for years with unfocused efforts that included developing screen savers, it was set on the Internet development tools path by a new management team headed by CEO Jim Billmaier, former VP and general manager of Sun's Network Products Division. The SuperCede virtual machine is in beta as a Netscape plug-in, with release July 22 as an OEM product, the only way the company figures it'll make money on it. The IDE will beta in July with release in October.
Meanwhile, we couldn't help but notice how many Sun personnel - including CEO Scott McNealy - were clustering around the Asymetrix booth at JavaOne watching SuperCede demos. And we don't think it's just because they're all old friends.
ONLINE SERVICES PROPOSE SELF REGULATION POLICY...
The online industry made a play to voluntarily police itself for abuses of privacy with a proposal given to the Federal Trade Commission last week.
The proposal, drafted by the Interactive Services Association as well as the Direct Marketing Association, is supposed to protect Internet users from acts such as the monitoring of Web activities and the sale of personal credit histories.
In addition to preventing such abuses of technology, the guidelines would curtail unsolicited marketing and e-mails, with online messages requiring clear identification both of content and of sender. Critics of the proposal, however, are calling for government regulation, saying that the abuses will continue unchecked as long as the monitoring is optional.
...AS COMPUSERVE MINDS ITSELF
CompuServe Inc announced that all of its corporate-owned Internet content will be rated by July 1, a self-censorship move that builds on software filtering packages already in place. CompuServe will also support the PICS Platform for Internet Content Selection, and the Recreation Software Advisory Council's labeling system.
Netscape claims over 130 plug-ins - 60 shipping, 70 under development - for its Navigator product and over 30 million users, well over half of which it says use Java-enabled versions.
A tiny communicaions company in Westlake Village, California, Franklin Telecom Corp, has embarked on a joint venture with Starcomm to make a modem-less Internet Point of Presence (POP) facility possible. Franklin claims the initiative could reduce Point of Presence set-up costs by over 50% just through eliminating the hundreds of modems needed to make one work.
The NCSA has announced the results of its first-round firewall security certification, granting its "NCSA certified" logo to 16 of the Internet's biggest players, including CheckPoint Software, Raptor Systems, DEC, Sun, NEC and IBM. Information on the criteria required for version 1.0 can be found at www.ncsa.com. The criteria for round two certification will be announced on September 30.
Adobe Systems has set up a Web site it calls Project Cool Acrobat Developer's Zone, which despite its ungainly name is designed to help developers build sites around Acrobat 3.0 and PDF. Project Cool will evangelize new developers and provide tips for building with the Adobe technology.
A new cyberservice, NetBox, eliminates at least one of the headaches of switching jobs by providing a P.O. box forwarding e-mail sent to previous addresses to at least three other addresses for $2 a month.
PC Expo is embracing the Internet explosion by offering the Web.X Internet event at its June 18-20 show in New York City. PC Expo is run by Blenheim Corporation.
IBM is planning a 32-bit PowerPC embedded controller, the 401GF, priced at $13 in 10,000-unit quantities it says will be ideal for Internet terminals. It'll come in 25MHz (2.5 volts), 50MHz, 75MHz and 100MHz versions (all at 3.3 volts), delivering 1.05 MIPS/MHz. All but the 100 will sample in Q3; the 100 in early '97.
Microware Systems Corporation of Des Moines, Iowa is readying a set of Internet software for embedded devices such as pagers and cellular phones that includes Java support and browser software.
ICS CLAIMS FIRST WITH COMPLETE JAVA GUI BUILDER
Motif GUI leader ICS Inc aims to be the first user interface company with a complete Java GUI Builder product in a market populated by crude or unfinished products, often from newcomers to the field.
ICS, capitalizing on four generations of Unix experience, is readying a Java version of its XCessory Builder product. The ICS VP of marketing Mark Hatch says the Internet market, still lacking mature tools, needs it: "We've seen a lot of products that could be called point seven beta products." The ICS product, however, will have WYSIWYG functionality and established GUI builder layout capability. XCessory Builder 4.0 will target the ICS installed base of developers.
Although the Java GUIs built in XB will run cross-platform, Hatch says ICS has no intention of taking the toolset to other platforms like NT, or to take on PC leaders like Symantec who have a big base and "have to be considered carefully." XCessory Builder is in beta now and will ship in August.
INSTANT COFFEE, ANYONE?
Visual Edge Software Ltd of Quebec, Canada, is offering a way for users of its UIM/X graphical user interface builder to create complex Java front-ends or reverse re-engineer existing application interfaces into Java. Release 2.0 of the Cross-Platform Toolset which includes its Instant Coffee Java code generator.
Visual Edge says Instant Coffee used in conjunction with UIM/X provides a more comprehensive Java interface development environment than general-purpose offerings from SunSoft Inc, Imperial Software Technology Ltd or Active Software Inc, because developers can work at the level of application objects rather than with individual controls.
JAVASOFT PONDERS JAVA- LEGACY APP CONNECTION
SunSoft is rounding out Sun's selection of caffeinated beverages with a middleware prototype called Ice Tea that connects Java clients, applets and objects to back-end legacy applications over TCP/IP networks. Sources at SunSoft described Ice Tea, only two months in development, as an "idea or thought" that could become a product if market need materializes for it but added that at the moment the company does see a need for the technology.
Unlike SunSoft's previous middleware release, JOE, Ice Tea doesn't rely on Corba. It's a Java-based set of class libraries that facilitates connections and communications over a standard TCP/IP network. The middleware is needed for Java to become widespread in the enterprise world, where IT shops have to deal with existing code and applications as well as Java. The technology comes from the developer tools group, headed by VP and general manager Larry Weber and may harden into a real product within a couple of months.
JAVA PERKS UP SOLSTICE
Vowing that soon all of its products will be laced with Java, SunSoft's Solstice group unveiled at JavaOne Solstice WorkShop, a toolkit embracing the new Java Management API that lets developers build Internet-based management applications.
Solstice WorkShop, essentially Java Workshop with a simple black-box database and support for the API - also announced at JavaOne - helps management application-building ISVs to avoid the pitfalls of cross-platform support. Any agent built in the new toolkit will work across all supported Java platforms, meaning that developers won't have to toil over new windowing systems and pay for porting costs across platforms.
Solstice WorkShop features downloadable agents, unlike SNMP agents that stay constantly at particular devices. Although constantly downloading agents could exact performance tolls, Solstice product manger Brian Biles said it ensures that the agent at each device is always the latest rev. The Java WorkShop base allows fine-grained control of objects so they can be interleafed on several layers.
Sun says the product, which like Java WorkShop will have a browser user interface (BUI in SunSpeak) will ship in Q2 with pricing to be announced then.
NETSCAPE BUYS INTO OBJECTS
Netscape's bought a small piece of Visigenic Software, which is itself aquiring Postmodern Computing. In the process Netscape gets hold of Postmodern's all-Java Corba-compliant IIOP Object Request Broker.
It's thought that Netscape will use the ORB in Navigator and its Internet servers. The move could give the Object Management Group, Corba and its Internet InterORB Protocol (IIOP) a definite boost while posing problems for Microsoft, DCOM and ActiveX.
Ironically, Visigenic holds an exclusive to put ODBC on non-Windows platforms. Netscape was reportedly doing its own IIOP ORB, something called DOP, now apparently canned.
Terms were not disclosed but it's believed Netscape's paying the lion's share of an $8m third-round investment in Visigenic that Cisco and Platinum Technology are in on too. Cisco wants to use PostModern's C++ ORB called ORBeline, to create a new class of intelligent routers that do the work of servers and pass object around the network. It doesn't know how it'll do it yet.
New York computer retailer, RCS Computer Experience, says that over 10% of its total sales will be from its online site.
A recent survey conducted by a small-business lending firm says that for two-thirds of the United States small business market, the Internet has had no effect on their overall success. KeyCorp, a bank holding company, interviewed over 400 small firms Of those who did cite an impact, only 7% said the Internet.
Jupiter Communications, in a study to be published this month, claims that most Internet users don't object to Web advertising, although those who access the Web from consumer online services are more likely to object because the graphics downloading is done "on the clock."
An ActivMedia Web marketing survey says Internet sites are more profitable than intranet sites. Well, duh. Seems that as unprofitable as Web sites are, companies will make even less money on the internal corporate sites themselves unless they're hawking goods to their own employees.
CyberCash Inc's Internet payment technology has received a substantial endorsement from the National Bank of Canada, which will offer secure credit card payment services to merchants and the CyberCash Wallet to customers. The Wallet allows a number of credit cards to be used and will support the Visa/MasterCard SET standard.
The Internet is making inroads in Arab states, Business Week reports, loosening some of the strict controls on public discourse. An ISP in Jordan has opened up a forum where local residents can talk to senior government officials (putting about 5 years ahead of the UK) while the Arabia Online Web site published in Amman gets 40,000 hits a day.
Despite all the hype it generated during its JavaOne developer conference, Sun's stock fell $3.25 largely due to the formation of the Marimba company started by tireless Kim Polese, Arthur Van Hoff and the gang. We can't see what all the fuss was about, since the Marimba group left Sun four months ago.
Printer and fax company Okidata says that the paperless, Internet-only society is still far off; it sponsored a survey of small businesses, 91% of whom said they use printed materials to market themselves.
BOND PLAN TO GUARANTEE CYBERSTORES DELIVER THE GOODS
A bunch of bonding specialists from the Corporation for International Business have come up with the idea of selling companies that do business over the Internet what amounts to an insurance policy guaranteeing customers that cyberstores actually deliver ordered products.
The Internet Bonded Business Trust (IBBT), which has set up shop in New York City's World Trade Center and on the 'net at www.ibbt.com, started selling its performance bonds last week.
For a $30 application fee, $300 annual membership fee and $500 bond premium that Connecticut Surety underwrites cyber businesses get an Internet Bonded Business logo on their web site. It's supposed to ease fears customers may have but the bonds only cover up to $50k in claims by all cybershoppers as a group.
GAMELAN TO PEDDLE APPLETS
EarthWeb LLC, leveraging the success of its Gamelan Java registry Web site, has launched an electronic marketplace where applet developers can sell their wares. The Sun-endorsed Gamelan Direct, to premier in July, will be part of the Gamelan Web site, which EarthWeb claims is one of the top 25 Web sites in the world and gets 25 to 30 million hits monthly. EarthWeb beta tested the online store with its own EarthWeb Chat applet, netting over 5,000 licensees in one month. The New York City company will get a cut on each applet sold, with most of the revenue going back to the developer.
Gamelan Direct will likely be joined as a Java applet broker by JavaSoft, who's made similar plans, but EarthWeb marketing VP Nova Spivack insisted that having two separate sources would make the market more viable. The service will support several transaction forms, such as digital cash.
Gamelan, which lists over 2,500 Java resources including 2,000 or so applets, has become such an Internet fixture that one of Earthweb's partners quipped at JavaOne that it should be an interview question for Java developers: "If you don't know Gamelan, you're not a Java developer."
MCI, NEWS CORP DREAM FADES
MCI Communications Corp and News Corp Ltd have wised up and revamped the goals of their year-old Internet alliance, with MCI dropping its electronic shopping malls and News Corp abandoning its idea of funding the development of content for a mass consumer market on the Internet.
MarketplaceMCI already had 20 retailers signed up and waiting for business. Michael Rowny, MCI vice-president for ventures and alliances, telling Reuters that the content market is slim, said the two parties will leave development to companies like Microsoft. The main thrust of the alliance will now be the provision of satellite television services.
PIPPIN FINDS EUROPEAN HOME
It may not be the flood of licensees for which Apple had perhaps once hoped, but at the very least it's found a European home for its Pippin Internet-enabled Web device. Bringing the Pippin licensee total to two, Katz Media AS, a Norwegian digital media and electronics company, will ship a CD-based Pippin along with approximately 100 CD-ROM titles to European markets in the fall.
The company, which plans to make a $25 million investment in the product, will bundle it with a keyboard, modem and hand-held controller and will make Zip drives, floppy drives and hard disks available. It's working on an infrared keyboard as well. www.katz.no
ENGINE DUMPS ALPHAS FOR INTEL
Open Text Corp, the Waterloo, Ontario-based text retrieval company that offers a free service on the Internet, is dumping the four DEC Alpha uniprocessor systems the service runs on in favour of an as yet unannounced Pentium Pro multi-processor from Intel Corp.
The timing of the move is particularly odd, since only two months ago the company launched a new 64-bit version of its LiveLink Search full-text search engine.
The new Intel box won't be able to take full advantage of the 64-bit version until 1998 at the earliest, when 64-bit NT comes out running on the next-generation P7.
PEPPERING UP GROUPWARE
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, online begetter of Mosaic can hardly contain its excitement over its next trick. The lab, at the University of Illinois campus. Habanero, an extension toJava is designed to enable the development of real-time collaborative applications
The proponents, argue that whereas current groupware environments such as Notes operate in what is effectively on-line batch mode rather than real time - Habanero, named for the hottest chili, will enable people in widely scattered locations interact in real time. Its detractors point out that it is exactly this ability to communicate asynchronously with colleagues that makes groupware so powerful.
As with Mosaic, Habanero will be distributed free, only requiring a licence if they use it to create a commercial application. It is currently in prototype, and should be ready by year-end.
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Habanero/
BUSINESS IN BRIEF
NTT DEVELOPS 1024-BIT EXPORTABLE RSA CHIP
It looks like the encryption genie may be out of the bag: NTT in Japan has implemented 1024-bit RSA and triple DES on a two-chip chip-set will be freely exportable. NTT has had support from, and the blessing of, RSA Data Security Inc's Nihon RSA Japanese subsidiary. But Kurt Stammberger, RSA's US-based technology marketing manager said the implementation was independent of any US technology, with NTT's Japanese cryptographers working from the well-understood algorithm.
As such, the implementation, which is expected this summer, is free from US import/export restriction. NTT is paying an undisclosed sum for the use of the algorithm which is patented in the US and the chip-set will be available in the US as well as overseas.
Whether NTT is tempted to issue a software implementation of the encryption algorithms remains to be seen: Stammberger said he could not comment on the details of the patent licence agreement.
JAVA SECURITY APIS STYMIED
All bets are off as to when the Java Security API might ship. Rather than relying on a one-size fits all security model, the proposed Java security API is based upon the idea of 'pluggable' security packages. So, as better implementations or better algorithms come along, these can be written into a package that can be transparently 'plugged in' to the java.security class library. So since the API and the application is are separate from the actual security package, they can be freely exported right? Wrong. Benjamin Renauld, Javasoft security expert said at JavaOne: "when you make a call to this API it suddenly becomes 'radioactive'".
The way that the security packages are designed means that overseas crypto fiends can't just write their own either. Each package must be authorised with a digital signature before being acceptable to the Java security software. Exactly who gets to do the signing and how the packages get authorised is still being debated with the US authorities says JavaSoft security specialist Marianne Mueller, adding that "I don't know how this will play in the worldwide market." Because of the legal restrictions, Renauld told the conference he couldn't say when the work would actually ship: "it's very hard for us to have a technology driven schedule" he said.
Mueller says the scheme is similar to a signing system that Microsoft has already got agreed for its own CryptoAPI package. We were unable to confirm Microsoft's arrangements as we went to press.
Overall Javasoft is impressed with Microsoft's crypto approach. Sun Microsystems science office director John Gage calls it "well written" and there is no doubt that Microsoft will be invited on board to discuss Java's own security APIs.
SKIP APPLET ENCRYPTION ENDORSED BY 5 FIRMS
Sun Microsystems Inc said its SKIP Simple Key Management for Internet Protocol has been endorsed by Bay Networks Inc, BBN Corp, Premenos Inc, Milkyway Networks Inc and VPNet Inc. SKIP uses cryptography to enhance Java's security by distributing Java applets in an encrypted form. Therefore the person receiving the applet can be sure it wasn't tampered with en route as it can only be read by the user with the appropriate decryption key, or so the theory goes.
Sun promised additional endorsers this summer and a SKIP product from a number of endorsers, including an unnamed pair from the five mentioned. Sun will not be producing the software itself. It said Java applets have never been encrypted before; the method is based on the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange principles. Jon Kannegaard, JavaSoft Inc's vice-president of software products attempted to hijack the WYSIWYG acronym to mean What You Seek is What You Got to describe SKIP's effect. SKIP, or something like it, will obviously be crucial in the promised world of millions of Java applets flying across the world's networks.
MICROSOFT PULLS OUT THE STOPS WITH SECURITY FRAMEWORK
Microsoft Corp has announced its Internet Security Framework, which the company describes, with no hyperbole as "a comprehensive set of security technologies for electronic commerce and online communications that supports Internet security standards."
The framework bundles in several new security technologies, including certificate management, authentication and serving, support for client authentication, and a "wallet" standard for storing users' personal information.
Previously announced cryptograph and code signing technology is also being poured into the framework, as well as an implementation of Visa/Mastercard's Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol for credit-card transactions. Add to that, support for secure sockets layer (SSL) and private communications technology (PCT) protocols and not much is left out.
The various bits will be phased in over time, so, for example currently the Internet Explorer beta and Windows NT 4 beta both support CryptoAPI 1.0 which gives system level access to various cryptographic functions and the RSA cryptosystem. In the third quarter, version 2.0 of the API will be launched, claimed to provide a complete public key infrastructure, including certificate management. Full certificate serving including certificate-based authentication services installation and configuration of different certificate issuance policies should follow in the fourth quarter.
Of the other technologies, it is worth noting that SET support is due out in beta in the 3rd quarter. All these timings are for Windows 95: the company is saying that the stuff will also be available on Macintosh and Unix but there are no timescales given.
Full details of the technologies and the implementation schedule can be found at www.microsoft.com/intdev/security/
CHECKPOINT TURNS BAY NET'S ROUTERS INTO FIREWALLS
CheckPoint Software Technologies Ltd has signed an agreement with Bay Networks Inc to integrate its firewall in every network router, meaning that networks can have security at more points than just the outer wall.
The integration, aimed at corporate intranets, places security - err, well, checkpoints for access control, authentication and encryption - between departments and sites so that information isn't passed around incorrectly within companies. Traditional outer firewalls only control security for Internet usage.
Checkpoint director of business development Asheem Chandna says the solution, pushed through initially by one of Bay's large financial customers, will appeal to vertical industries, ISPs and companies with multiple sites.
Bay, who will also resell Checkpoint's server management console, will embed firewalls in everyone of routers which lie dormant unless the customer activates them and Checkpoint will charge per router activated.
The router firewalls will be jointly developed and are due on the market in the fourth quarter. Chandna says the agreement's not exclusive, so it can make similar pacts with other network companies.
www.checkpoint.com
MARTINI NOT INCLUDED
The James Bond computers we longed for in adolescence may not be that far away: Philips Electronics is developing a wrist video telephone that offers access to the Internet, says the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute. Called a wrist communicator, it is expected to appear in 2002. It includes a small camera, a microphone, a display and speaker, with the whole thing appearing as a flat panel.
SEVEN MORE TAKE JAVA CHIPS
The next raft of licensees for Sun Microelectronics Inc's Java chips have raised their heads above the parapet, following Northern Telecom Ltd's declaration a few weeks back. Sun is keeping the microJava and ultraJava chips to itself for the time being, but the picoJava instruction core on which they are built looks like ending up in everything from toasters to aircraft.
Sun is licensing the picoJava core to LG Semicon Co Ltd, Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc, NEC Corp, Rockwell International Corp, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Xerox Corp. The company's aim is to get as many Java chips with picoJava cores out there as possible, added Chet Silvestri, president of Sun Microelectronics.
Rockwell's Collins Commercial Avionics division said its AAMP processors have a very similar instruction set to Sun's implementation of the Java Virtual Machine in the picoJava core, and it has used those in embedded applications from global positioning systems to avionics, so we can expect similar things with the Java chips it develops. And Samsung will embed the core in its consumer electronics products, computers, semiconductors cellular phones and much, much more.
MITSUBISHI DOES PORT TO EXISTING RISC, SHOWS PDA
Of all the semiconductor companies, Mitsubishi Electronics Corp has gone further down the Java-on-silicon road than any. At the show, the Japanese firm showed its M32R/D multimedia processor running Java apps, and implied that a similar device with a picoJava core was an attractive proposition
The M32R/D combines 2Mb of dynamic and 2Kb of cache static memory on a 32-bit RISC processor, as well as signal processing capability, a memory controller and peripheral circuitry. At the show the company also showed modified versions of its rather swanky 'Amity' PDA, running Java. It coyly suggested that a Java device, based on Amity should appear by the year-end.
Fujitsu Microelectronics Inc's embedded control business unit is implementing JavaOS and Java for its Sparclite processors, which, given that Java was developed on Sun's Sparc chips, gives it a considerable time advantage, Fujitsu believes. On whether it will challenge Sun's own picoJava core processor, there was a firm "no comment."
LSI Logic Corp has already licensed JavaOS, the Java Virtual Machine and the HotJava browser and will be using JavaOS in conjunction with its CoreWare custom system-on-a-chip program. The company is working with Sun "on a number of other developments that we can't talk about right now," according to Gary Meyers, director of Internet marketing at LSI. And National Semiconductor Corp is preparing reference designs and architectures and said Java and JavaOS are important to the company for connecting analogue and mixed signal offerings in particular.
NAT-SEMI BUILDS JAVA PHONES
National Semiconductor plans to embed Java into a set of Internet-ready devices, including a full-featured telephone, the iPhone, with built-in access to Internet services. The devices will be aimed at electronic manufacturers that want to build a new generation of products that can be controlled, monitored and reprogrammed remotely over a network.
Other potential applications for the technology include consumer products, communications devices used to connect whole cities or geographic regions, multifunction office equipment and modems. National Semiconductor is designing the iPhone with InfoGear Technology Corp, a company it just spun off. InfoGear, Redwood City, California, has a development base in Raanana, Israel.
BANDWAGON ROUNDUP:
Whether Oracle's plans to take JavaOS spells the end for its use of Acorn's RISC OS, nobody is saying, but Acorn does not seem too bothered and said it will continue to work with Oracle and Sun.
Some of Oracle's original 15 Network Computer manufacturing partners had something to say about JavaOS too. SunRiver Data Systems Inc has licensed JavaOS for its network computers. SunRiver was the only US company intent on making network computers to sign up to the Network Computer Reference profile recently. Tatung Co is incorporating JavaOS into its network computers, personal digital assistants and other consumer electronic devices, as are Lite-On Technology Corp and Wyse Technology Corp, both of which will use the JavaOS kernel in their Network Computers.
Wyse plans to bring out an extension to its x86-based Winterm terminals. However, although listed as one of Oracle's 15 manufacturing buddies, the company will be sticking with x86 architecture to build its Network Computers.
Away from Oracle's Network Computer cohorts, Acer Inc, which was at first lumped in with the Network Computer crowd and then issued a disclaimer saying it was having nothing to do with it, now says it will use JavaOS in its "consumer-based information appliances." Toshiba Corp plans to release devices complying with the Network Computing Reference Profile while Xerox Corp is planning to use JavaOS to connect its document management stuff to the Internet. Hyundai Electronics America Inc is putting it into Internet access terminals, due before Christmas in the US and early next year in Korea. Alcatel NV wants to use it in "future interactive smart phones," and Omron Corp of Japan has the PDA and factory automation markets staked out. Mitac Inc will use JavaOS in an Internet set-top box.
TUMBLING DUKE'S EARLY LIFE
James Gosling's Keynote at JavaOne revealed that 'Duke' the trademark tumbling Java icon first made an appearance over five years ago in the experimental *7 (pronounced Star Seven) machines. Java's lead architect demo'd one of the remaining *7 boxes - a touch-screen PDA's incorporating a small SPARC-station motherboard and cobbled together to explore the issues behind portable, networked computing.
Java, or Oak as it was then called, was simply the language that Gosling and co. designed to build the tools for the project. Existing language tools simply broke, he says. Judged by the brief demo, the *7's graphical user interface was absolutely knock-out. But having been touted around the cable TV industry for a while, the GUI was shelved and is now gathering dust in the labs. The Java team have other things on their mind.
Microsoft is re-selling the technologies used to build MSN to other online service providers. The announcement of the "Normandy" bundle of technologies was accompanied by the news that CompuServe is the first customer. Two weeks ago CompuServe announced its "Red Dog" initiative, designed to replace its proprietary architecture with one based upon Internet standards. Bob Massey, CEO of CompuServe described Normandy as "a major step in the initiative". Users will see the initial impact of Normandy in the fall, with the majority of the work completed by the year end, he said.
CompuServe is acting as something of a beta tester, and is being given the source code, as well as early access to the package.
Microsoft previewed the stuff to various network operators, cable companies and ISPs at its Redmond campus last week, but Normandy is not scheduled to be broadly available to ISPs until the fourth quarter. However a "special preview program" will be running from August.
The loose bundle of code comprises eight components of which Mail, News and Chat are fairly self explanatory. There is also a Security Component based on Microsoft's recently announced Internet Security Framework; an Information Retrieval Component provides an indexing and search
Dot Gossip
And so, Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 3.0 made it to beta as predicted, but without support for Java. The company is now promising it in the next beta, which must be released soon, since the finished product for Windows 95 is scheduled for the beginning of July. A Java-enabled version was on show at JavaOne, complete with integral Java Just In Time compiler which is claimed to run applets around 10 times faster than Netscape Navigator. Meanwhile the browser sans Java is picking up generally good reviews - though its JavaScript implementation is idiosyncratic in some areas.
CompuServe/Microsoft's Normandy announcement was accompanied by the hint that two companies have "agreed in principle" on a new corporate market alliance that would be announced in a few weeks. Sources suggest that CompuServe is likely to set itself up as a Normandy systems integrator, serving the corporate market. The company already has 982 corporate clients.
James Gosling; Java's chief architect is in no doubt that Internet-mediated peer review has been key to Java's success. Not that it doesn't take a bit of getting used to:"You can send your bug reports to USA Today - that says something pretty weird about the whole experience", he says.
Although Microsoft's Jakarta Java developer toolkit has been mocked in the Java arena, developers who've actually played with the early versions tell a different story. Arthur Van Hoff, an early Java team member who left to form Marimba, said "Their implementation will be quite amazing. It'll even be compatible." Crowds rivaling even JavaSoft's surged around the Microsoft booth at JavaOne to watch Jakarta run, and a technology demonstration Redmond hosted was standing-room only.
Watch this space: Intel's recent New York analyst meeting gave some watchers reason to expect that Intel would start introducing content providers to its Intercast television-plus-Internet technology.
Price Waterhouse LLP has acquired an equity stake in NetCount LLC, a company that tracks and measures Web site usage for advertisers and marketers.
OK, IBM's CICS is Internet enabled; the proof can be found at: ncc.hursley.ibm.com/ javainfo/latest/jlcomps.html
Like O'Reilly's dog Intel will go a little bit of the road with anyone. So it'll countenance Oracle and Sun coming up with a skimpy Intel-based Network Computer but, minding which side its bread is buttered on, it's got an alternate strategy called the "Connected PC" we're bound to hear a lot about. It's a P6, maybe a Pentium, that seamlessly combines online and built-in data. It'll be touted as having Internet, multimedia and videoconferencing built in.
Although JavaSoft told us that its object frame work would roll out as the Java Component Architecture, when the architecture actually emerged it was JavaBeans that stuck. JavaSoft said conceptual its object model "is right on the money." but it's also enlisted the help of IBM to perform OpenDoc/Java integration and Borland to do Windows and ActiveX. It will open the spec to public review by September to be finalized by year-end.'
Microsoft, trying to level the Internet server playing field it shares with Netscape, is building a search engine code named Tripoli that it will integrate with its Internet Information Server. According to C|Net, Tripoli will let companies perform text retrieval and content indexing on their own Web sites, not the whole Internet. Tripoli will beta this quarter on the Internet. The product connects to IIS through the Internet Server API, a more direct link than CGI. Netscape has embedded Verity's Topic search engine in its Enterprise Server, which will be available this quarter.
What do you mean a publication called Online Reporter, should have a web site? It's in beta test now and can be found, surrounded by its sister publications at www.computerwire.com/online/ Its a bit rough and ready, but subscribers can now read their issues in pixels as well as pulp.
About 6% of Japanese companies have bought Web servers, compared with 10% of US firms, according to a survey by researchers IDC Corp, which queried 1,288 firms. 8% of Japanese companies with more than 300 employees use the Web; the figure is 40% in the US.
There's an internal debate going on between Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications as to what to do with JavaScript, the Netscape-originated browser scripting language. JavaScript has been the subject of adverse comment over its security model. Some within Sun are now arguing that JavaScript 2.0 should be completely re-written to use a virtual machine ˆ la Java itself. Javasoft security expert Marianne Mueller favors the rebuild approach
Silicon Valley has a new mantra. Because of Internet time, "Speed is God and time is the devil," in the words of David Hancock, CEO of Hitachi PC Corporation. A company is supposed to go from start-up to exit strategy in 18 months these days.
Microsoft claims it has signed over 700 ISPs to distribute Microsoft Explorer. Each of those, we suspect, could be potential Normandy purchasers in the future.
What's the point of Java in silicon? The Microprocessor Report has looked at early Java benchmarks - Pentominoes, Linpacks and CaffeineMarks - and reckons dedicated Java chips will have little advantage over general-purpose MPUs. The tests indicate that with JITs Java integer code on a standard microprocessor is only about a factor of two slower than optimized C code. As JITs mature, the divide will narrow.
Buy Internet shares! Big-time venture capitalist John Doerr, a prime mover in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who backed Sun, Intuit and Netscape, says it's possible the Internet is underhyped and predicts money will flow this year to corporate intranets, Java apps and systems for expanding home connections to the 'net.
Alternatively - sell! sell! sell! "It's insanity," Michael Metz, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer & Co told the Barrons financial newsletter- "there's no rational way to value some of these companies - people are buying them because they're going on the presumption that they will keep going up; the really critical question is how long this lunacy lasts; it may last weeks or months or longer; my feeling is that it'll be a wild summer and then it'll be over," he says.
online REPORTER, a sister publication of Unigram.X and ClieNT Server News, is published weekly in Europe by:
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WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
June 10 - June 14 1996 Issue No 02
RED DOG TO HAVE MSN ENTRAILS
Microsoft is re-selling the technologies used to build MSN to other online service providers. The announcement of the "Normandy" bundle of technologies was accompanied by the news that CompuServe is the first customer. Two weeks ago CompuServe announced its "Red Dog" initiative, designed to replace its proprietary architecture with one based upon Internet standards. Bob Massey, CEO of CompuServe described Normandy as "a major step in the initiative". Users will see the initial impact of Normandy in the fall, with the majority of the work completed by the year end, he said.
CompuServe is acting as something of a beta tester, and is being given the source code, as well as early access to the package.
Microsoft previewed the stuff to various network operators, cable companies and ISPs at its Redmond campus last week, but Normandy is not scheduled to be broadly available to ISPs until the fourth quarter. However a "special preview program" will be running from August.
The loose bundle of code comprises eight components of which Mail, News and Chat are fairly self explanatory. There is also a Security Component based on Microsoft's recently announced Internet Security Framework; an Information Retrieval Component provides an indexing and search engine; a White Pages Component handles user directories across multiple servers, and the Personalisation Component lets ISPs create dynamic, customised content for individual users, based on ActiveX.
But the heaviest component and the one that ISPs will be most eager to get their hands on (apart from security) appears to be the Replication Component designed to replicate "multiple gigabytes" of content across multiple remote servers. This forms the guts of the scalable online service and is transaction-based, able to carry out selective updates or roll back to a previous version of the content if a problem is encountered.
COMPUSERVE'S RED DOG TO BE STUFFED WITH MSN ENTRAILS
US export controls on encryption are damaging US industry and should be relaxed, according to a two-year study carried out for Congress by the National Research Council. The committee report found that products that incorporate 56-bit DES for confidentiality should be made "easily exportable" and that "the threshold of easy exportability...should be adjusted upward periodically as technology evolves." The report further warns that overly restrictive export controls threaten the US's lead in encryption technology, increasing "the likelihood that significant foreign competition will step into a vacuum left by the inability of US vendors to fill a demand". The committee of 16 also came out against immediate "aggressive promotion" of key escrow encryption; the basis of the Clinton administration's controversial 'Clipper' scheme, though it agreed that it would be worth running some pilot projects.
Committee chair Kenneth Dam, a law professor at the University of Chicago says in the report's preface that the US government is embroiled in a crisis of policy, rather than "a technology crisis, an industry crisis, a law enforcement crisis, or an intelligence-gathering crisis".
In total the report, titled Cryptography's Role In Securing the Information Society (CRISIS) makes six major recommendations, the broad thrust of which is that the US government needs to foster broad use of cryptographic technology, start an open debate and bring policy in line with market realities.
The first debate of the report will take place on June 12 when the Congressional Commerce Committee's subcommittee on Science, Space and Technology begins a series of public hearings. The subcommittee is chaired by Senator Conrad Burns, principal co-sponsor of the pro-CODE bill (S.1726) designed to free-up use of encryption technology in the US. Report excerpts, and a recommendation overview can be found at www2.nas.edu/cstbweb/28e2.html
Netscape Communications reacted to Sun's API and component architecture announcements by simply stating that it would support all of them... despite the nebulous state of many of the Java Beans (component architecture) and API announcements. So LiveConnect - the new Netscape technology for linking plug-ins, Applets, JavaScript and HTML - will at some point be merged with Java Beans connectivity. Netscape's Commerce Extensions (so far represented by the LivePayment software) will get the proposed Java merchant APIs grafted on. On the security side, SSL 3 will support the Java security APIs and the Netscape administration kit will support the Java admin APIs. Netscape is also promising support for Java's remote method invocation - which allows a piece of Java code on one machine to run Java code on a remote workstation.
There are no time scales on all of this, for one thing the Java Beans and Java extension APIs are not expected in draft form until this summer. The swift acceptance of Java Beans does call into question the long-term future of Netscape's plug-in architecture. Netscape director of technology Martin Haeberli acknowledged that replacing plug-ins with Java Beans "seems like a logical progression", although it is a "long-term" aim.
CONGRESSIONAL STUDY URGES EASING US ENCRYPTION EXPORT REGS
L JAPAN'S EXPORTABLE RSA
The government of Taiwan has set up a 'Java Alliance'. Under the umbrella of Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs, it encompasses Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and Institute for Information Industry (III) as well as 22 Taiwan companies. Most notable is Acer Peripherals, which recently hinted it wouldn't build Java boxes. The alliance will establish a Java Center and Java Lab and press for broad deployment of JavaOS, the HotJava class libraries, the base Java platform and SunSoft's Java WorkShop. It's worth remembering that Taiwan tends to leap on new technologies - it did a similar job when the PowerPC chip came out. Other companies involved include Ares, Mitac, Tatung and Wyse Technology Taiwan.
NETSCAPE TO USE ALL JAVA APIS
Sun chairman Scott McNealy told the 4,000 or so folks at his JavaOne keynote that a rumour's going around that Sun is already putting out early versions of its network computer to customers - there is now.
Java byte-code is two or three times smaller than the RISC code generated by a C++ compiler, says Sun Microelectronics as it tries to convince manufacturers of embedded devices to build using the forthcoming picoJava chips.
Digital Equipment Corp was a late entrance to the show - a month ago it didn't know it was going to have a stand there. Still, there it was, showing a pre-release version of the Java Virtual Machine, courtesy of OSF's Research Labs. It also had an early research prototype of a Just In Time compiler on show - well we say on show, in fact all it was capable of doing was displaying a series of dots in a terminal window - indicating how fast it was solving a Tower of Hanoi problem. Despite DEC's 'Whatever It Takes' Internet slogan, the company hasn't signed a Java licence yet. The sticking point appears to be price. Tony Schofield, business development manager at the company's Palo Alto-based Unix Software Group is looking after DEC's Java introduction at the moment and says to expect more news towards the end of the month.
Ports of the Java Virtual Machine are popping up all over the place. The Amiga is getting one courtesy of Vince Hodges, of TVI Interactive Systems Inc in Burnaby, British Columbia, while the AS/400 port is progressing courtesy of Tom Gall, development programmer at the machine's Rochester home.
The Object Database Management Group is putting together a Working Group to develop an object database specification for Java. The group apparently first got together in February, and is now promising that the first ODMG-compliant databases for Java are "a matter of months away". The workgroup is being headed by Rick Cattell, JavaSoft distinguished engineer and chair of the ODMG www.odmg.org
Internet Profiles Corporation (I/PRO), purveyor of web-measurement and auditing tools, is adding the ability to track the usage of Java applets. However Java developers will need to add two lines of code to their applets to let Java Count track the begin and end times well as any user interaction. The technology will be available in the "second quarter" - ie, soon, from http://www.ipro.com
Want to know more about Java? There are now 110 books published or in preparation about the language, says John Gage, director of Sun's Science Office.
Ah, how history is re-written. Arthur Van Hoff, one of the departed JavaSoft members who formed the start-up Marimba, claims he once tried to convince Java inventor James Gosling that the language had to be released to the public domain to become truly ubiquitous. Gosling resisted, he says, saying in effect that some control had to be maintained so that Java didn't become Unix-fied and spawn dozens of variations. Ironically, Gosling devoted much of his keynote speech to enumerating how free-distribution model had been responsible for Java's success.
Oof - The announcement of JavaOS took some of the wind out of new start-up Zydecom Inc which went to the show to announce the development of a real time operating system for Java. Zydecom is a spin-out from Industrial Controls Corporation (ICON) of Shreveport, Louisiana. The company hopes to have the OS, called I-97, ready for the start of '97. Program manager Bob Martina acknowledged that JavaOS "certainly makes potential customers look in their direction", but reckons that I-97 will be sufficiently different to capture a niche. Zydecom is aiming squarely at the desktop video-conferencing and video on demand markets and the OS is designed to run on PC-class machines, rather than on small embedded devices. http://www.zydecom.com.
Borland International Inc has announced a JDBC gateway for its Interbase cross-platform SQL database. So far, so standard, except that "InterClient" has been written entirely in Java and contains both client and server elements. The claim is that product combines the best of the Web with a client-server architecture. A pre-release version will be made available this summer for Windows 95/NT and Solaris.
Novell Inc finally unveiled its plans for Java in the form of the Virtual Machine implemented in a series of Netware Loadable Modules. The Netware Software Development Kit is due in beta this Fall and will also contain Netware-specific class libraries letting developers use Netware functions, such as NDS. Novell says it is working with JavaSoft to expand the Java class libraries to include naming and directory services.
Java applets that roam the net are the latest thing to emerge from IBM's Tokyo Research Labs. Aglets (lightweight Agents) arrive at a computer and "present their credentials" before being given access to local services and data. Possible applications include aglets that move through the network searching for data and then reporting back to base. IBM is making the APIs and technology free. First beta release should be available next month.
Metrowerks plans to introduce full support for the JavaOS into its Codewarrier for Embedded Systems in the fourth quarter. The compiler will support 68K, PowerPC, MIPS and x86 processors. The development environment will run on Macs, Windows 95 and NT. Prices have yet to be decided. http://www.metrowerks.com
Penumbra Software Inc says that Mojo - its Java coding environment - will be released on June 30th for $495. The package consists of a GUI designer - a visual app-builder - and Coder, for "organising and editing the Java code". The system will run on Windows 95 and NT. www.penumbrasoftware.com
Object Design Inc will have "Java binding," or native Java support, for its ObjectStore ODBMS product this summer.
JavaSoft sees Corel's planned Java office suite as critical to sell the enterprise on Java-powered NCs and therefore isn't leaving Office JV entirely up to WordPerfect's less-than-stellar execution reputation. It says it's been helping WordPerfect - which first ran into trouble by not completing a Windows 95 version in time - to do some of the Java work.
Corel came to JavaOne with a fairly sophisticated working model of the 600 KB suite and claimed it'll have product by year-end, possibly at 30-40% less than the conventional version's price. Corel said Larry Ellison's office suite had little chance of catching on in the corporate world and is talking to Oracle about licensing Office JV.
Scott McNealy hinted last week that Corel's Java-based WordPerfect office suite is only the tip of the iceberg: "It would blow people away to learn of the major software vendors with Java initiatives," he told InfoWorld [ital], saying that they've stayed silent to avoid alienating customers using current versions. techweb.cmp.com/iw
McNealy made a typically rambunctious keynote - launching an attack on surprise, surprise - Windows and conventional PCs. Though all good clean, knock-about fun, McNealy's speech seemed strangely antithetical to the rest of JavaOne which concentrated on building bridges - even with Microsoft. Having predicted the death of the PC in the keynote, he immediately back-tracked in a subsequent briefing to say that the future of the PC and the workstation was secure at the high-end. "He's very schizophrenic about this" one Sun high-up later explained - "but no more so than anyone else in the business... part of him likes the idea of things just happening on the 'net - but part of him is an engineer" o
JAVAONE IN A NUTSHELL
NETSCAPE'S CLARKE BLASTS NON-STANDARD JAVAOS
Netscape chairman Jim Clark is trying to put the evil eye on Kona. He says the JavaOS is doomed simply because it comes from Sun. OEMs won't trust a fellow hardware maker to come up with a truly vendor-neutral OS. "You're not going to get a standard OS if it comes from a systems company," Clark insisted in remarks following his Comdex keynote last week. "Trying to make a software company out of a hardware company is like trying to change the stripes on a Zebra with paint."
Netscape executives tried to tone down Clark's comments after he had left by explaining Kona could be a great niche OS for things like videophones and such. Interestingly, Clark spent most of his keynote going after Lotus Notes, a change from the usual Redmond-bashing. Between Netscape's Collabra acquisition and the creation of the SuiteSpot suite, Clark argued that Netscape can now duplicate essentially all the tasks Notes is used for. The big difference between them, he contended, was Notes' closed architecture compared to Netscape's use of standard protocols, HTML and JavaScript.
Clark figures Netscape software costs about half the price of Notes which he said was for e-mail more than anything else.
NASA AND THE NC
A little 25-man start-up in San Mateo, California by the name of iTV Corporation says it's been working on the notion of something akin to an NC for two years. It thought it had time to tinker around until it started hearing tales of other folks doing the same thing and that was before Larry Ellison started mouthing off about $500 widgets.
iTV's nameless consumer device, which it reckons will come in under $300, has high-falutin' antecedents. It's based on a chip, developed and owned by iTV, that will be used for NASA spacecraft. In fact, iTV is a spin-out of NASA's Ames Technology Commercialization Center at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley which is dedicated to incubating companies that transfer space technology to commercial uses. The chip was designed to handle the massive streams of data required in satellite imaging of planet surfaces, yet consumes very little power.
iTV calls the construct a Minimal Instruction Set Computer (MISC) - and no, it's not a simple controller, it's an MPU - we asked. It's a cheap single chip with nearly all the requisite co-processors on the 2mm by 4mm die. The central processor runs at 400 MIPS but of course the memory can't access that fast so, according to marketing and sales director Joe Medanich, it's basically the equivalent of a fast 486. One can talk about it being 100MHz but the measurement, he says, isn't relevant. It needs very little DRAM. The target device for the chip, distinctive in not being Java based yet, will connect a TV set, phone line and keyboard to provide Internet access, e-mail and browsing. iTV is adamant it's not an NC, since it doesn't meet the requirements recently laid down by the NC Reference Profile, and calls it an Internet converter. It can't download programs yet. One of iTV's co-founders is Chuck Moore, the inventor of the programming language FORTH, which some have structurally compared to Java.
The device, now in prototype, includes a dedicated non-portable operating system based on FORTH. Production quantities are expected before the end of the year but not enough to saturate the market in time for Christmas.
CLICKABLE VIDEO FROM ILLINOIS
The University of Illinois, Mosaic's birthplace, has followed up its most famous offspring with a sibling. Vosaic - or Video Mosaic - is a joint effort with a Chicago company and allows high-quality video streaming with embedded hyperlinks.
Developed by the systems research group of the university's vaunted computer sciences department and marketed by Digital Video Communications, Vosaic integrates video and audio into HTML so they're no longer considered external data types. It allows, for example, embedded hyperlinks within the video stream so that moving objects are clickable and lead to other documents. Audio files can be used as background music.
Its streaming capability lets users view arbitrarily large files, regardless of disk space available, and play on demand specific segments of the video by frame level or playing time. As well as standard UDP network protocols, Vosaic runs on top of a new protocol, Video Datagram Protocol (VDP), which adapts to client-side CPU and bandwidth conditions.
It delivers most video and audio standards to the desktop. At 2-3 frames per second on a 28.8kb/s modem in demonstrations at Comdex, however, it still requires some fine-tuning to be a low-bandwidth solution. Vosaic will come to market as a plug-in for Netscape and Spyglass browsers.
Asymetrix claims its 5 times faster than the fastest JIT
Asymetrix Corporation is the latest entry in the wide-open Java tool field with a C++-performance-level interactive development environment it says will shake up the early frontrunners, Borland and Symantec.
The SuperCede tool set, comprised of a virtual machine and an interactive development environment, is powered by the Flash Compiler, a device that Asymetrix claims runs Java code five times faster than the fastest JIT compiler and 50 times faster than interpreted Java code.
Flash Compiler, the brainchild of engineers recruited from NT father Dave Cutler's team at DEC, was developed in a three-year "secret project" for C++ and can now compile both Java and C++. SuperCede product manager Peter Kellogg-Smith claims it's "not a JIT" compiler, and compiles all code at machine level where JITs use a hybrid approach.
Asymetrix is poised at the confluence of the two Internet movements, the Microsoft and Sun camps. It's one of those rarest of birds, a profitable Paul Allen company, and after living up to its name for years with unfocused efforts that included developing screen savers, it was set on the Internet development tools path by a new management team headed by CEO Jim Billmaier, former VP and general manager of Sun's Network Products Division. The SuperCede virtual machine is in beta as a Netscape plug-in, with release July 22 as an OEM product, the only way the company figures it'll make money on it. The IDE will beta in July with release in October.
Meanwhile, we couldn't help but notice how many Sun personnel - including CEO Scott McNealy - were clustering around the Asymetrix booth at JavaOne watching SuperCede demos. And we don't think it's just because they're all old friends.
ONLINE SERVICES PROPOSE SELF REGULATION POLICY...
The online industry made a play to voluntarily police itself for abuses of privacy with a proposal given to the Federal Trade Commission last week.
The proposal, drafted by the Interactive Services Association as well as the Direct Marketing Association, is supposed to protect Internet users from acts such as the monitoring of Web activities and the sale of personal credit histories.
In addition to preventing such abuses of technology, the guidelines would curtail unsolicited marketing and e-mails, with online messages requiring clear identification both of content and of sender. Critics of the proposal, however, are calling for government regulation, saying that the abuses will continue unchecked as long as the monitoring is optional.
...AS COMPUSERVE MINDS ITSELF
CompuServe Inc announced that all of its corporate-owned Internet content will be rated by July 1, a self-censorship move that builds on software filtering packages already in place. CompuServe will also support the PICS Platform for Internet Content Selection, and the Recreation Software Advisory Council's labeling system.
Netscape claims over 130 plug-ins - 60 shipping, 70 under development - for its Navigator product and over 30 million users, well over half of which it says use Java-enabled versions.
A tiny communicaions company in Westlake Village, California, Franklin Telecom Corp, has embarked on a joint venture with Starcomm to make a modem-less Internet Point of Presence (POP) facility possible. Franklin claims the initiative could reduce Point of Presence set-up costs by over 50% just through eliminating the hundreds of modems needed to make one work.
The NCSA has announced the results of its first-round firewall security certification, granting its "NCSA certified" logo to 16 of the Internet's biggest players, including CheckPoint Software, Raptor Systems, DEC, Sun, NEC and IBM. Information on the criteria required for version 1.0 can be found at www.ncsa.com. The criteria for round two certification will be announced on September 30.
Adobe Systems has set up a Web site it calls Project Cool Acrobat Developer's Zone, which despite its ungainly name is designed to help developers build sites around Acrobat 3.0 and PDF. Project Cool will evangelize new developers and provide tips for building with the Adobe technology.
A new cyberservice, NetBox, eliminates at least one of the headaches of switching jobs by providing a P.O. box forwarding e-mail sent to previous addresses to at least three other addresses for $2 a month.
PC Expo is embracing the Internet explosion by offering the Web.X Internet event at its June 18-20 show in New York City. PC Expo is run by Blenheim Corporation.
IBM is planning a 32-bit PowerPC embedded controller, the 401GF, priced at $13 in 10,000-unit quantities it says will be ideal for Internet terminals. It'll come in 25MHz (2.5 volts), 50MHz, 75MHz and 100MHz versions (all at 3.3 volts), delivering 1.05 MIPS/MHz. All but the 100 will sample in Q3; the 100 in early '97.
Microware Systems Corporation of Des Moines, Iowa is readying a set of Internet software for embedded devices such as pagers and cellular phones that includes Java support and browser software.
ICS CLAIMS FIRST WITH COMPLETE JAVA GUI BUILDER
Motif GUI leader ICS Inc aims to be the first user interface company with a complete Java GUI Builder product in a market populated by crude or unfinished products, often from newcomers to the field.
ICS, capitalizing on four generations of Unix experience, is readying a Java version of its XCessory Builder product. The ICS VP of marketing Mark Hatch says the Internet market, still lacking mature tools, needs it: "We've seen a lot of products that could be called point seven beta products." The ICS product, however, will have WYSIWYG functionality and established GUI builder layout capability. XCessory Builder 4.0 will target the ICS installed base of developers.
Although the Java GUIs built in XB will run cross-platform, Hatch says ICS has no intention of taking the toolset to other platforms like NT, or to take on PC leaders like Symantec who have a big base and "have to be considered carefully." XCessory Builder is in beta now and will ship in August.
INSTANT COFFEE, ANYONE?
Visual Edge Software Ltd of Quebec, Canada, is offering a way for users of its UIM/X graphical user interface builder to create complex Java front-ends or reverse re-engineer existing application interfaces into Java. Release 2.0 of the Cross-Platform Toolset which includes its Instant Coffee Java code generator.
Visual Edge says Instant Coffee used in conjunction with UIM/X provides a more comprehensive Java interface development environment than general-purpose offerings from SunSoft Inc, Imperial Software Technology Ltd or Active Software Inc, because developers can work at the level of application objects rather than with individual controls.
JAVASOFT PONDERS JAVA- LEGACY APP CONNECTION
SunSoft is rounding out Sun's selection of caffeinated beverages with a middleware prototype called Ice Tea that connects Java clients, applets and objects to back-end legacy applications over TCP/IP networks. Sources at SunSoft described Ice Tea, only two months in development, as an "idea or thought" that could become a product if market need materializes for it but added that at the moment the company does see a need for the technology.
Unlike SunSoft's previous middleware release, JOE, Ice Tea doesn't rely on Corba. It's a Java-based set of class libraries that facilitates connections and communications over a standard TCP/IP network. The middleware is needed for Java to become widespread in the enterprise world, where IT shops have to deal with existing code and applications as well as Java. The technology comes from the developer tools group, headed by VP and general manager Larry Weber and may harden into a real product within a couple of months.
JAVA PERKS UP SOLSTICE
Vowing that soon all of its products will be laced with Java, SunSoft's Solstice group unveiled at JavaOne Solstice WorkShop, a toolkit embracing the new Java Management API that lets developers build Internet-based management applications.
Solstice WorkShop, essentially Java Workshop with a simple black-box database and support for the API - also announced at JavaOne - helps management application-building ISVs to avoid the pitfalls of cross-platform support. Any agent built in the new toolkit will work across all supported Java platforms, meaning that developers won't have to toil over new windowing systems and pay for porting costs across platforms.
Solstice WorkShop features downloadable agents, unlike SNMP agents that stay constantly at particular devices. Although constantly downloading agents could exact performance tolls, Solstice product manger Brian Biles said it ensures that the agent at each device is always the latest rev. The Java WorkShop base allows fine-grained control of objects so they can be interleafed on several layers.
Sun says the product, which like Java WorkShop will have a browser user interface (BUI in SunSpeak) will ship in Q2 with pricing to be announced then.
NETSCAPE BUYS INTO OBJECTS
Netscape's bought a small piece of Visigenic Software, which is itself aquiring Postmodern Computing. In the process Netscape gets hold of Postmodern's all-Java Corba-compliant IIOP Object Request Broker.
It's thought that Netscape will use the ORB in Navigator and its Internet servers. The move could give the Object Management Group, Corba and its Internet InterORB Protocol (IIOP) a definite boost while posing problems for Microsoft, DCOM and ActiveX.
Ironically, Visigenic holds an exclusive to put ODBC on non-Windows platforms. Netscape was reportedly doing its own IIOP ORB, something called DOP, now apparently canned.
Terms were not disclosed but it's believed Netscape's paying the lion's share of an $8m third-round investment in Visigenic that Cisco and Platinum Technology are in on too. Cisco wants to use PostModern's C++ ORB called ORBeline, to create a new class of intelligent routers that do the work of servers and pass object around the network. It doesn't know how it'll do it yet.
New York computer retailer, RCS Computer Experience, says that over 10% of its total sales will be from its online site.
A recent survey conducted by a small-business lending firm says that for two-thirds of the United States small business market, the Internet has had no effect on their overall success. KeyCorp, a bank holding company, interviewed over 400 small firms Of those who did cite an impact, only 7% said the Internet.
Jupiter Communications, in a study to be published this month, claims that most Internet users don't object to Web advertising, although those who access the Web from consumer online services are more likely to object because the graphics downloading is done "on the clock."
An ActivMedia Web marketing survey says Internet sites are more profitable than intranet sites. Well, duh. Seems that as unprofitable as Web sites are, companies will make even less money on the internal corporate sites themselves unless they're hawking goods to their own employees.
CyberCash Inc's Internet payment technology has received a substantial endorsement from the National Bank of Canada, which will offer secure credit card payment services to merchants and the CyberCash Wallet to customers. The Wallet allows a number of credit cards to be used and will support the Visa/MasterCard SET standard.
The Internet is making inroads in Arab states, Business Week reports, loosening some of the strict controls on public discourse. An ISP in Jordan has opened up a forum where local residents can talk to senior government officials (putting about 5 years ahead of the UK) while the Arabia Online Web site published in Amman gets 40,000 hits a day.
Despite all the hype it generated during its JavaOne developer conference, Sun's stock fell $3.25 largely due to the formation of the Marimba company started by tireless Kim Polese, Arthur Van Hoff and the gang. We can't see what all the fuss was about, since the Marimba group left Sun four months ago.
Printer and fax company Okidata says that the paperless, Internet-only society is still far off; it sponsored a survey of small businesses, 91% of whom said they use printed materials to market themselves.
BOND PLAN TO GUARANTEE CYBERSTORES DELIVER THE GOODS
A bunch of bonding specialists from the Corporation for International Business have come up with the idea of selling companies that do business over the Internet what amounts to an insurance policy guaranteeing customers that cyberstores actually deliver ordered products.
The Internet Bonded Business Trust (IBBT), which has set up shop in New York City's World Trade Center and on the 'net at www.ibbt.com, started selling its performance bonds last week.
For a $30 application fee, $300 annual membership fee and $500 bond premium that Connecticut Surety underwrites cyber businesses get an Internet Bonded Business logo on their web site. It's supposed to ease fears customers may have but the bonds only cover up to $50k in claims by all cybershoppers as a group.
GAMELAN TO PEDDLE APPLETS
EarthWeb LLC, leveraging the success of its Gamelan Java registry Web site, has launched an electronic marketplace where applet developers can sell their wares. The Sun-endorsed Gamelan Direct, to premier in July, will be part of the Gamelan Web site, which EarthWeb claims is one of the top 25 Web sites in the world and gets 25 to 30 million hits monthly. EarthWeb beta tested the online store with its own EarthWeb Chat applet, netting over 5,000 licensees in one month. The New York City company will get a cut on each applet sold, with most of the revenue going back to the developer.
Gamelan Direct will likely be joined as a Java applet broker by JavaSoft, who's made similar plans, but EarthWeb marketing VP Nova Spivack insisted that having two separate sources would make the market more viable. The service will support several transaction forms, such as digital cash.
Gamelan, which lists over 2,500 Java resources including 2,000 or so applets, has become such an Internet fixture that one of Earthweb's partners quipped at JavaOne that it should be an interview question for Java developers: "If you don't know Gamelan, you're not a Java developer."
MCI, NEWS CORP DREAM FADES
MCI Communications Corp and News Corp Ltd have wised up and revamped the goals of their year-old Internet alliance, with MCI dropping its electronic shopping malls and News Corp abandoning its idea of funding the development of content for a mass consumer market on the Internet.
MarketplaceMCI already had 20 retailers signed up and waiting for business. Michael Rowny, MCI vice-president for ventures and alliances, telling Reuters that the content market is slim, said the two parties will leave development to companies like Microsoft. The main thrust of the alliance will now be the provision of satellite television services.
PIPPIN FINDS EUROPEAN HOME
It may not be the flood of licensees for which Apple had perhaps once hoped, but at the very least it's found a European home for its Pippin Internet-enabled Web device. Bringing the Pippin licensee total to two, Katz Media AS, a Norwegian digital media and electronics company, will ship a CD-based Pippin along with approximately 100 CD-ROM titles to European markets in the fall.
The company, which plans to make a $25 million investment in the product, will bundle it with a keyboard, modem and hand-held controller and will make Zip drives, floppy drives and hard disks available. It's working on an infrared keyboard as well. www.katz.no
ENGINE DUMPS ALPHAS FOR INTEL
Open Text Corp, the Waterloo, Ontario-based text retrieval company that offers a free service on the Internet, is dumping the four DEC Alpha uniprocessor systems the service runs on in favour of an as yet unannounced Pentium Pro multi-processor from Intel Corp.
The timing of the move is particularly odd, since only two months ago the company launched a new 64-bit version of its LiveLink Search full-text search engine.
The new Intel box won't be able to take full advantage of the 64-bit version until 1998 at the earliest, when 64-bit NT comes out running on the next-generation P7.
PEPPERING UP GROUPWARE
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, online begetter of Mosaic can hardly contain its excitement over its next trick. The lab, at the University of Illinois campus. Habanero, an extension toJava is designed to enable the development of real-time collaborative applications
The proponents, argue that whereas current groupware environments such as Notes operate in what is effectively on-line batch mode rather than real time - Habanero, named for the hottest chili, will enable people in widely scattered locations interact in real time. Its detractors point out that it is exactly this ability to communicate asynchronously with colleagues that makes groupware so powerful.
As with Mosaic, Habanero will be distributed free, only requiring a licence if they use it to create a commercial application. It is currently in prototype, and should be ready by year-end.
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Habanero/
BUSINESS IN BRIEF
NTT DEVELOPS 1024-BIT EXPORTABLE RSA CHIP
It looks like the encryption genie may be out of the bag: NTT in Japan has implemented 1024-bit RSA and triple DES on a two-chip chip-set will be freely exportable. NTT has had support from, and the blessing of, RSA Data Security Inc's Nihon RSA Japanese subsidiary. But Kurt Stammberger, RSA's US-based technology marketing manager said the implementation was independent of any US technology, with NTT's Japanese cryptographers working from the well-understood algorithm.
As such, the implementation, which is expected this summer, is free from US import/export restriction. NTT is paying an undisclosed sum for the use of the algorithm which is patented in the US and the chip-set will be available in the US as well as overseas.
Whether NTT is tempted to issue a software implementation of the encryption algorithms remains to be seen: Stammberger said he could not comment on the details of the patent licence agreement.
JAVA SECURITY APIS STYMIED
All bets are off as to when the Java Security API might ship. Rather than relying on a one-size fits all security model, the proposed Java security API is based upon the idea of 'pluggable' security packages. So, as better implementations or better algorithms come along, these can be written into a package that can be transparently 'plugged in' to the java.security class library. So since the API and the application is are separate from the actual security package, they can be freely exported right? Wrong. Benjamin Renauld, Javasoft security expert said at JavaOne: "when you make a call to this API it suddenly becomes 'radioactive'".
The way that the security packages are designed means that overseas crypto fiends can't just write their own either. Each package must be authorised with a digital signature before being acceptable to the Java security software. Exactly who gets to do the signing and how the packages get authorised is still being debated with the US authorities says JavaSoft security specialist Marianne Mueller, adding that "I don't know how this will play in the worldwide market." Because of the legal restrictions, Renauld told the conference he couldn't say when the work would actually ship: "it's very hard for us to have a technology driven schedule" he said.
Mueller says the scheme is similar to a signing system that Microsoft has already got agreed for its own CryptoAPI package. We were unable to confirm Microsoft's arrangements as we went to press.
Overall Javasoft is impressed with Microsoft's crypto approach. Sun Microsystems science office director John Gage calls it "well written" and there is no doubt that Microsoft will be invited on board to discuss Java's own security APIs.
SKIP APPLET ENCRYPTION ENDORSED BY 5 FIRMS
Sun Microsystems Inc said its SKIP Simple Key Management for Internet Protocol has been endorsed by Bay Networks Inc, BBN Corp, Premenos Inc, Milkyway Networks Inc and VPNet Inc. SKIP uses cryptography to enhance Java's security by distributing Java applets in an encrypted form. Therefore the person receiving the applet can be sure it wasn't tampered with en route as it can only be read by the user with the appropriate decryption key, or so the theory goes.
Sun promised additional endorsers this summer and a SKIP product from a number of endorsers, including an unnamed pair from the five mentioned. Sun will not be producing the software itself. It said Java applets have never been encrypted before; the method is based on the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange principles. Jon Kannegaard, JavaSoft Inc's vice-president of software products attempted to hijack the WYSIWYG acronym to mean What You Seek is What You Got to describe SKIP's effect. SKIP, or something like it, will obviously be crucial in the promised world of millions of Java applets flying across the world's networks.
MICROSOFT PULLS OUT THE STOPS WITH SECURITY FRAMEWORK
Microsoft Corp has announced its Internet Security Framework, which the company describes, with no hyperbole as "a comprehensive set of security technologies for electronic commerce and online communications that supports Internet security standards."
The framework bundles in several new security technologies, including certificate management, authentication and serving, support for client authentication, and a "wallet" standard for storing users' personal information.
Previously announced cryptograph and code signing technology is also being poured into the framework, as well as an implementation of Visa/Mastercard's Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol for credit-card transactions. Add to that, support for secure sockets layer (SSL) and private communications technology (PCT) protocols and not much is left out.
The various bits will be phased in over time, so, for example currently the Internet Explorer beta and Windows NT 4 beta both support CryptoAPI 1.0 which gives system level access to various cryptographic functions and the RSA cryptosystem. In the third quarter, version 2.0 of the API will be launched, claimed to provide a complete public key infrastructure, including certificate management. Full certificate serving including certificate-based authentication services installation and configuration of different certificate issuance policies should follow in the fourth quarter.
Of the other technologies, it is worth noting that SET support is due out in beta in the 3rd quarter. All these timings are for Windows 95: the company is saying that the stuff will also be available on Macintosh and Unix but there are no timescales given.
Full details of the technologies and the implementation schedule can be found at www.microsoft.com/intdev/security/
CHECKPOINT TURNS BAY NET'S ROUTERS INTO FIREWALLS
CheckPoint Software Technologies Ltd has signed an agreement with Bay Networks Inc to integrate its firewall in every network router, meaning that networks can have security at more points than just the outer wall.
The integration, aimed at corporate intranets, places security - err, well, checkpoints for access control, authentication and encryption - between departments and sites so that information isn't passed around incorrectly within companies. Traditional outer firewalls only control security for Internet usage.
Checkpoint director of business development Asheem Chandna says the solution, pushed through initially by one of Bay's large financial customers, will appeal to vertical industries, ISPs and companies with multiple sites.
Bay, who will also resell Checkpoint's server management console, will embed firewalls in everyone of routers which lie dormant unless the customer activates them and Checkpoint will charge per router activated.
The router firewalls will be jointly developed and are due on the market in the fourth quarter. Chandna says the agreement's not exclusive, so it can make similar pacts with other network companies.
www.checkpoint.com
MARTINI NOT INCLUDED
The James Bond computers we longed for in adolescence may not be that far away: Philips Electronics is developing a wrist video telephone that offers access to the Internet, says the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute. Called a wrist communicator, it is expected to appear in 2002. It includes a small camera, a microphone, a display and speaker, with the whole thing appearing as a flat panel.
SEVEN MORE TAKE JAVA CHIPS
The next raft of licensees for Sun Microelectronics Inc's Java chips have raised their heads above the parapet, following Northern Telecom Ltd's declaration a few weeks back. Sun is keeping the microJava and ultraJava chips to itself for the time being, but the picoJava instruction core on which they are built looks like ending up in everything from toasters to aircraft.
Sun is licensing the picoJava core to LG Semicon Co Ltd, Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc, NEC Corp, Rockwell International Corp, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Xerox Corp. The company's aim is to get as many Java chips with picoJava cores out there as possible, added Chet Silvestri, president of Sun Microelectronics.
Rockwell's Collins Commercial Avionics division said its AAMP processors have a very similar instruction set to Sun's implementation of the Java Virtual Machine in the picoJava core, and it has used those in embedded applications from global positioning systems to avionics, so we can expect similar things with the Java chips it develops. And Samsung will embed the core in its consumer electronics products, computers, semiconductors cellular phones and much, much more.
MITSUBISHI DOES PORT TO EXISTING RISC, SHOWS PDA
Of all the semiconductor companies, Mitsubishi Electronics Corp has gone further down the Java-on-silicon road than any. At the show, the Japanese firm showed its M32R/D multimedia processor running Java apps, and implied that a similar device with a picoJava core was an attractive proposition
The M32R/D combines 2Mb of dynamic and 2Kb of cache static memory on a 32-bit RISC processor, as well as signal processing capability, a memory controller and peripheral circuitry. At the show the company also showed modified versions of its rather swanky 'Amity' PDA, running Java. It coyly suggested that a Java device, based on Amity should appear by the year-end.
Fujitsu Microelectronics Inc's embedded control business unit is implementing JavaOS and Java for its Sparclite processors, which, given that Java was developed on Sun's Sparc chips, gives it a considerable time advantage, Fujitsu believes. On whether it will challenge Sun's own picoJava core processor, there was a firm "no comment."
LSI Logic Corp has already licensed JavaOS, the Java Virtual Machine and the HotJava browser and will be using JavaOS in conjunction with its CoreWare custom system-on-a-chip program. The company is working with Sun "on a number of other developments that we can't talk about right now," according to Gary Meyers, director of Internet marketing at LSI. And National Semiconductor Corp is preparing reference designs and architectures and said Java and JavaOS are important to the company for connecting analogue and mixed signal offerings in particular.
NAT-SEMI BUILDS JAVA PHONES
National Semiconductor plans to embed Java into a set of Internet-ready devices, including a full-featured telephone, the iPhone, with built-in access to Internet services. The devices will be aimed at electronic manufacturers that want to build a new generation of products that can be controlled, monitored and reprogrammed remotely over a network.
Other potential applications for the technology include consumer products, communications devices used to connect whole cities or geographic regions, multifunction office equipment and modems. National Semiconductor is designing the iPhone with InfoGear Technology Corp, a company it just spun off. InfoGear, Redwood City, California, has a development base in Raanana, Israel.
BANDWAGON ROUNDUP:
Whether Oracle's plans to take JavaOS spells the end for its use of Acorn's RISC OS, nobody is saying, but Acorn does not seem too bothered and said it will continue to work with Oracle and Sun.
Some of Oracle's original 15 Network Computer manufacturing partners had something to say about JavaOS too. SunRiver Data Systems Inc has licensed JavaOS for its network computers. SunRiver was the only US company intent on making network computers to sign up to the Network Computer Reference profile recently. Tatung Co is incorporating JavaOS into its network computers, personal digital assistants and other consumer electronic devices, as are Lite-On Technology Corp and Wyse Technology Corp, both of which will use the JavaOS kernel in their Network Computers.
Wyse plans to bring out an extension to its x86-based Winterm terminals. However, although listed as one of Oracle's 15 manufacturing buddies, the company will be sticking with x86 architecture to build its Network Computers.
Away from Oracle's Network Computer cohorts, Acer Inc, which was at first lumped in with the Network Computer crowd and then issued a disclaimer saying it was having nothing to do with it, now says it will use JavaOS in its "consumer-based information appliances." Toshiba Corp plans to release devices complying with the Network Computing Reference Profile while Xerox Corp is planning to use JavaOS to connect its document management stuff to the Internet. Hyundai Electronics America Inc is putting it into Internet access terminals, due before Christmas in the US and early next year in Korea. Alcatel NV wants to use it in "future interactive smart phones," and Omron Corp of Japan has the PDA and factory automation markets staked out. Mitac Inc will use JavaOS in an Internet set-top box.
TUMBLING DUKE'S EARLY LIFE
James Gosling's Keynote at JavaOne revealed that 'Duke' the trademark tumbling Java icon first made an appearance over five years ago in the experimental *7 (pronounced Star Seven) machines. Java's lead architect demo'd one of the remaining *7 boxes - a touch-screen PDA's incorporating a small SPARC-station motherboard and cobbled together to explore the issues behind portable, networked computing.
Java, or Oak as it was then called, was simply the language that Gosling and co. designed to build the tools for the project. Existing language tools simply broke, he says. Judged by the brief demo, the *7's graphical user interface was absolutely knock-out. But having been touted around the cable TV industry for a while, the GUI was shelved and is now gathering dust in the labs. The Java team have other things on their mind.
Microsoft is re-selling the technologies used to build MSN to other online service providers. The announcement of the "Normandy" bundle of technologies was accompanied by the news that CompuServe is the first customer. Two weeks ago CompuServe announced its "Red Dog" initiative, designed to replace its proprietary architecture with one based upon Internet standards. Bob Massey, CEO of CompuServe described Normandy as "a major step in the initiative". Users will see the initial impact of Normandy in the fall, with the majority of the work completed by the year end, he said.
CompuServe is acting as something of a beta tester, and is being given the source code, as well as early access to the package.
Microsoft previewed the stuff to various network operators, cable companies and ISPs at its Redmond campus last week, but Normandy is not scheduled to be broadly available to ISPs until the fourth quarter. However a "special preview program" will be running from August.
The loose bundle of code comprises eight components of which Mail, News and Chat are fairly self explanatory. There is also a Security Component based on Microsoft's recently announced Internet Security Framework; an Information Retrieval Component provides an indexing and search
Dot Gossip
And so, Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 3.0 made it to beta as predicted, but without support for Java. The company is now promising it in the next beta, which must be released soon, since the finished product for Windows 95 is scheduled for the beginning of July. A Java-enabled version was on show at JavaOne, complete with integral Java Just In Time compiler which is claimed to run applets around 10 times faster than Netscape Navigator. Meanwhile the browser sans Java is picking up generally good reviews - though its JavaScript implementation is idiosyncratic in some areas.
CompuServe/Microsoft's Normandy announcement was accompanied by the hint that two companies have "agreed in principle" on a new corporate market alliance that would be announced in a few weeks. Sources suggest that CompuServe is likely to set itself up as a Normandy systems integrator, serving the corporate market. The company already has 982 corporate clients.
James Gosling; Java's chief architect is in no doubt that Internet-mediated peer review has been key to Java's success. Not that it doesn't take a bit of getting used to:"You can send your bug reports to USA Today - that says something pretty weird about the whole experience", he says.
Although Microsoft's Jakarta Java developer toolkit has been mocked in the Java arena, developers who've actually played with the early versions tell a different story. Arthur Van Hoff, an early Java team member who left to form Marimba, said "Their implementation will be quite amazing. It'll even be compatible." Crowds rivaling even JavaSoft's surged around the Microsoft booth at JavaOne to watch Jakarta run, and a technology demonstration Redmond hosted was standing-room only.
Watch this space: Intel's recent New York analyst meeting gave some watchers reason to expect that Intel would start introducing content providers to its Intercast television-plus-Internet technology.
Price Waterhouse LLP has acquired an equity stake in NetCount LLC, a company that tracks and measures Web site usage for advertisers and marketers.
OK, IBM's CICS is Internet enabled; the proof can be found at: ncc.hursley.ibm.com/ javainfo/latest/jlcomps.html
Like O'Reilly's dog Intel will go a little bit of the road with anyone. So it'll countenance Oracle and Sun coming up with a skimpy Intel-based Network Computer but, minding which side its bread is buttered on, it's got an alternate strategy called the "Connected PC" we're bound to hear a lot about. It's a P6, maybe a Pentium, that seamlessly combines online and built-in data. It'll be touted as having Internet, multimedia and videoconferencing built in.
Although JavaSoft told us that its object frame work would roll out as the Java Component Architecture, when the architecture actually emerged it was JavaBeans that stuck. JavaSoft said conceptual its object model "is right on the money." but it's also enlisted the help of IBM to perform OpenDoc/Java integration and Borland to do Windows and ActiveX. It will open the spec to public review by September to be finalized by year-end.'
Microsoft, trying to level the Internet server playing field it shares with Netscape, is building a search engine code named Tripoli that it will integrate with its Internet Information Server. According to C|Net, Tripoli will let companies perform text retrieval and content indexing on their own Web sites, not the whole Internet. Tripoli will beta this quarter on the Internet. The product connects to IIS through the Internet Server API, a more direct link than CGI. Netscape has embedded Verity's Topic search engine in its Enterprise Server, which will be available this quarter.
What do you mean a publication called Online Reporter, should have a web site? It's in beta test now and can be found, surrounded by its sister publications at www.computerwire.com/online/ Its a bit rough and ready, but subscribers can now read their issues in pixels as well as pulp.
About 6% of Japanese companies have bought Web servers, compared with 10% of US firms, according to a survey by researchers IDC Corp, which queried 1,288 firms. 8% of Japanese companies with more than 300 employees use the Web; the figure is 40% in the US.
There's an internal debate going on between Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications as to what to do with JavaScript, the Netscape-originated browser scripting language. JavaScript has been the subject of adverse comment over its security model. Some within Sun are now arguing that JavaScript 2.0 should be completely re-written to use a virtual machine ˆ la Java itself. Javasoft security expert Marianne Mueller favors the rebuild approach
Silicon Valley has a new mantra. Because of Internet time, "Speed is God and time is the devil," in the words of David Hancock, CEO of Hitachi PC Corporation. A company is supposed to go from start-up to exit strategy in 18 months these days.
Microsoft claims it has signed over 700 ISPs to distribute Microsoft Explorer. Each of those, we suspect, could be potential Normandy purchasers in the future.
What's the point of Java in silicon? The Microprocessor Report has looked at early Java benchmarks - Pentominoes, Linpacks and CaffeineMarks - and reckons dedicated Java chips will have little advantage over general-purpose MPUs. The tests indicate that with JITs Java integer code on a standard microprocessor is only about a factor of two slower than optimized C code. As JITs mature, the divide will narrow.
Buy Internet shares! Big-time venture capitalist John Doerr, a prime mover in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who backed Sun, Intuit and Netscape, says it's possible the Internet is underhyped and predicts money will flow this year to corporate intranets, Java apps and systems for expanding home connections to the 'net.
Alternatively - sell! sell! sell! "It's insanity," Michael Metz, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer & Co told the Barrons financial newsletter- "there's no rational way to value some of these companies - people are buying them because they're going on the presumption that they will keep going up; the really critical question is how long this lunacy lasts; it may last weeks or months or longer; my feeling is that it'll be a wild summer and then it'll be over," he says.
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