Keep tabs of terms of service with TOSBack.org

TOSBack.org Web site.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

It's the closely printed (or displayed in very small font size at a Web page) pieces of text that most of us don't bother to read before we agree to them. Yet it's something that shouldn't be ignored at all. It's called terms of service, or TOS for short.

Remember the time that AT&T sneakily changed its TOS and banned users from streaming media from third-party sites via its cellular network? Thanks to the media outcry (CNET News included) the company retracted the changes a few days later only to reinstate them again, at a later date, in a different language.

If anything, this was a lesson on how important it is to keep track of these terms of service.

And the lesson was really learned Thursday with the introduction of TOSBack.org. This is a new site designed to track changes in policies imposed by popular Internet Web sites such as YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook, Google and so on, with the intention of helping users spot potentially harmful changes.

Currently, TOSBack.org tracks 44 popular sites' policies (unfortunately AT&T is not yet included) and allows for comparing word by word and highlight changes between different versions. The site is capable of noticing any modifications within hours of an update.

TOSBack.org is a project of the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Going forward, the site plans to add more companies, including banks, credit card companies, and so on to its tracking repertoire.

Personally I find this site really helpful as often time many Web sites change their terms of service without notifying their customers, who are entitled to know under what conditions the service is provided to them.

It would be even more helpful, however, if the site provided translation of these terms of service into layman's terms, as not everyone has the legal background to really understand what they mean.

For the companies, hopefully, this will deter them from changing the terms of service on their own account, regardless of users' consent.

TOSBack is a nonprofit membership-funded organization, so if you think this is a useful service, feel free to make adonation or consider becoming a member.

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PayPal and Picnik come to Yahoo Mail

New applications for Yahoo Mail, such as this one from PayPal, let you send money right from your inbox without having to visit PayPal's site.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo has added new applications for its users in another step toward giving its users more and more to do from within Yahoo.

The company plans to announce the limited beta of three new Yahoo Mail applications from PayPal, Picnik, and Zumo Drive on Friday. Yahoo Mail users who have indicated an interest in signing up for Yahoo's beta programs will be the first to get a crack at the new services, with the applications coming to the wider user base over the next several months.

It's all part of Yahoo's Open Strategy, designed to let outside developers tap into the company's properties and offer their wares inside Yahoo's network of sites. It's becoming an old story, but the trend these days in the Internet world is the proliferation of large sites like Yahoo, Google, and Facebook as development platforms unto themselves, with application developers spending more and more time writing programs that run on those sites, rather than traditional operating systems.

For example, PayPal's application will let Yahoo Mail users send money to another user by opening a window like a tab in a browser. Picnik, a popular browser-based photo editing tool, will bring that feature to Yahoo Mail in a similar way, letting you open the service right from an e-mail message.

Yahoo is also expanding the Open Strategy to other parts of its portfolio of sites. Wordpress bloggers will be able to post to their blogs from their MyYahoo page, and manage their money with Mint.com's services. And Yahoo TV Widgets will now support searching and viewing of archrival Google's YouTube video collection.

It's taken Yahoo quite some time to put these applications together, first announcing the Yahoo Open Strategy in April 2008 but not taking it live until last December, when it unveiled the first set of applications for Yahoo Mail and the MyYahoo start page. It also appears the company plans to wrap these applications along with forthcoming ones into a redesign of its homepage, which CEO Carol Bartz said this week would arrive "later this fall."

The idea is convenience: letting users get everything they need and want in one place. But the upshot is that by providing incentives to stick around on Yahoo, the company is making it more likely that you'll stumble upon something else at Yahoo, such as an ad or another service that drives a search query: 98 percent of Yahoo's searches come from people who are already on the site.

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Swedish researchers to unravel secrets of solar storms

Solar storms that can threaten satellites, power lines, and communications are to be monitored in a large-scale study at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and Uppsala University starting Thursday.

The organizations will use stream-computing technology to analyze data from sensors that track high-frequency radio waves, the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) said in a statement.

"Over the next year, this project is expected to perform analytics on at least 6GB per second or 21,600GB per hour--the equivalent of all the web pages on the Internet," said the IRF statement.

The organizations will use IBM InfoSphere Streams software to analyze the data. IBM said in a statement that the data will be collected using antennae designed to monitor radio waves in three dimensions to sample high-frequency emissions from space.

The Swedish scientists wish to study plasma eruptions on the sun, as those eruptions can trigger high-energy storms that disrupt electronics and electrical systems in orbit and on Earth. One of the key aspects of the study is the amount of data being collected using the recently developed antennae, which will be filtered and analyzed.

"We've embarked upon an entirely new way of observing radio signals using digital sensors that produce enormous amounts of data," Bo Thidé, professor and head of research, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, said in the IBM statement. "With this type of research, you have to be able to analyze as much data as possible on the fly."

IBM InfoSphere Streams software allows multiple sources of streaming data to be filtered, classified, transformed, and correlated, according to an IBM white paper. High-volume structured and unstructured data can be fed through input connectors to heterogeneous, multiscale or commodity hardware. Operations performed on that streaming data are determined by high-level system components that enforce user requirements onto running applications, said the white paper.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

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Sprint CEO says Pre deal is longer than six months

NEW YORK--Verizon Wireless's claims that it will be offering the Palm Pre within six months are not accurate, says Sprint Nextel's CEO Dan Hesse.

"They need to check their facts," Hesse said in an interview at a press event here to launch the Palm Pre. "That just is not the case. Both Palm and Sprint have agreed not to discuss the length of the exclusivity deal. But I can tell you it's not six months."

Last week, Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Wireless was quoted by Reuters as saying that over the next six months consumers could expect to see devices "like the Palm Pre and a second-generation Storm" on its network.

AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson also said last week that he hoped to have the Palm Pre on the AT&T network when the exclusivity deal with Sprint ended.

The Pre, which was announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is expected to be Sprint's flagship smartphone. And the company has high hopes that the device, which will be sold only on Sprint's network starting Saturday, would help the troubled carrier improve its image and retain customers who might be tempted to defect to AT&T for the iPhone. Early reviews of the product have been positive with many reviewers, including CNET's own Bonnie Cha, calling the phone a good alternative to iPhone.

But claims that the Pre exclusivity deal with Sprint would only last six months had thrown cold water on expectations for what the Pre could do for Sprint.

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Disk storage vendors hit by sales drop

The disk storage market is the latest casualty of the recession. Worldwide sales for storage vendors in the first quarter of 2009 dropped 18.2 percent to $5.6 billion from $6.8 billion a year ago, according to a report from research firm IDC.

The market includes vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell, which sell complete disk storage systems to enterprise customers. IDC blamed the decline on the overall downturn in total server sales.

Among the top five vendors, HP fared the worst, hit with a 25.8 percent drop in sales to $975 million from $1.3 billion a year ago. IBM saw its disk storage revenues sink 21.7 percent $811 million from $1 billion. Dell was next on the list with sales of $660 million, 17.2 percent lower than $797 million the previous year.

The news wasn't all bad, noted IDC, since total disk capacity used by companies worldwide shot up 14.8 percent to 2,146 petabytes.

"The disk storage system vendors are really seeing the impact of the global economic downturn in the first quarter revenues," Steve Scully, research manager for enterprise storage at IDC, said in a statement. "However, while total revenues declined year over year, the overall storage capacity shipped continued to grow. These contrasting results are due to a combination of currency implications, lower overall sales, shifts in product mix, and aggressive pricing actions."

Despite the sour economy, companies still need disk storage, notes the report, but are opting for systems in the low and middle price tiers.

"Entry-level price bands ($0K - $14.99K) showed 9.9% year-over-year growth and the midrange price band ($15K - $49.99K) was flat year over year," Liz Conner, an IDC research analyst, said in a statement, "supporting IDC's belief that storage products are still in demand, with customer spending trending towards more modular, price point options."

The disk storage market is in the midst of another battle, with vendors EMC and NetApp fighting to acquire Data Domain. A top supplier of deduplication systems, Data Domain has been one of the few companies in its industry doing well despite the global downturn.

The report was put together by IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, which analyzes the global disk storage market each quarter.

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Carbon software company claims broad patent

Verisae, a small Minnesota-based company, has received a patent for a system to track and report greenhouse gas emissions with software, a business attracting a growing field of companies.

The company on Wednesday said that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent to Verisae for a method for calculating a corporation's emissions. The patent, filed in May of 2007, describes a business process for gathering corporate emissions data, generating reports, and managing carbon credits.

Verisae is already offering hosted carbon accounting software focused primarily on retail companies, basing its tracking and reporting on the protocols established by the nonprofit Climate Registry, which sets guidelines for emissions reporting.

"This is a shot across the bow to others building this stuff," said Verisae product manager Daniel Stouffer. "This is a big story for those venture capital companies which might be spending money with firms that might be building solutions that might already be covered."

Verisae's hosted software compiles the greenhouse emissions data from a corporation's different assets. For example, a refrigerator in a store has emissions associated with its energy use and the refrigerant which is a powerful greenhouse gas, Stouffer explained.

The company is also working on a way for businesses to monetize incentives to reduce emissions, Stouffer said. Businesses can make money by participating in demand response programs, where the utility reduces the electrical load of the business--such as turning down lights in a supermarket or cooling in a building--during peak times.

Reason for worry?
The patent disclosure comes at a time of heightened interest around carbon emissions-related software. Investors expect that this year will see a lot of activity in software for tracking and reporting greenhouse gases, sometimes called carbon accounting software.

On Monday, start-up Hara Software, backed by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, announcedits Web-based software. SAP purchased another carbon accounting company, Clear Standards, earlier this year in a sign of consolidation among providers.

The claims of Verisae's patent appear to describe a fairly general method for managing a business' greenhouse gas emissions. But how broadly it can be enforced is unclear, said patent attorney Eric Lane in the clean-tech practice at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps.

The claims on the patent include a number of different processes, noted Lane, who examined the patent and some related documents. That means that another carbon software company could develop a product that doesn't combine all of Verisae's claims.

Still, Lane said that the patent is worth noting for the growing number of carbon accounting software companies.

"Whether other companies ought to be worried is hard to say. Should they be aware of this? Yes," Lane said. "They have a nice package."

Growing field
Patents around different forms of carbon accounting have seen a surge in the past year, according to a recent study. In programs designed for trading carbon permits, there were six patent familes in 2000, nine in 2002, and 15 in 2006.

A significant case likely to affect carbon software is a decision by the federal appeals court that made it harder to claim business process patents often implemented in software applications, Lane said.

Part of the reason for the uptick in carbon accounting software is the expectation that heavy polluters in the U.S. will be need to comply with looming regulations to cap greenhouse emissions.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 bill calls for the creation of a cap-and-trade program to limit emissions. But the earliest a bill would pass is next year and caps on carbon emissions would be phased in over many years.

Even before a national U.S. mandate, companies are investing carbon-tracking software as part of corporate sustainability programs or to administer energy efficiency initiatives.

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Nintendo's Fils-Aime takes aim at rest of world

Nintendo president and COO Reggie Fils-Aime talks about the company's latest iteration of its motion-sensitive controller, the Wii Motion Plus, at its E3 press briefing in Tuesday in Los Angeles.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

LOS ANGELES--Although the video games industry has begun to take some hits--suggesting it may not berecession-proof after all--Nintendo has managed to maintain a solid financial performance.

Its sales are up 19 percent year-over-year, according to the company, which would be impressive in any year, but is particularly so in the current economic climate.

At E3 here this week, Nintendo made a few bold moves, but tended to play it relatively safe. It unveiled a new version of its mega-hit exercise game, "Wii Fit Plus," and showed off the next-generation of its motion-sensitive controller, the Wii Motion Plus.

Nintendo President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Overall, however, there was the impression that the company was sitting on its lead. For while Microsoft has had some very impressive sales numbers and Sony has picked up its pace over its early PlayStation 3 stumbles, Nintendo's Wii has managed to stay on top of the sales charts. Similarly, the Nintendo DS has also had sky-high sales, and continues to defy expectations, more than four years after its launch.

At E3, CNET News' Daniel Terdiman had a chance to speak with about the video game industry as a whole, and about how Nintendo plans to go after the few demographics it hasn't already captured with the Wii and the DS.

Q: What's your feeling about where the video game industry is right now?
Reggie Fils-Aime: The video games industry is not just at the center of the entertainment industry, but is driving the entertainment industry, not only economically, but from a cultural impact standpoint. Having said that, consumers are having to make tough economic choices today. Nintendo's in a very fortunate place. The industry through April is down about 4 percent, but we're up about 19 percent. So consumers are voting for us with their wallets, which is a great place to be, especially when so much of our best content will be coming in the second half of the year.

Can Nintendo sustain that performance if the economy worsens?
Fils-Aime: Consumers are looking for ways to entertain themselves. In tough economic times, certain parts of the entertainment business have always done well. Whether or not the industry or Nintendo can sustain where we are really comes down to the experiences we're offering. And based on E3 and the smiles I see from people playing Wii Sports Resort, or Zelda DS, or Mario vs. Donkey Kong, I believe that as long as we continue to bring great, innovative entertainment, consumers will continue to choose us.

Speaking of Donkey Kong, I was thinking about the attempt at E3 on the world-record Donkey Kong score, and about how well the game and other classics like Pac-Man and Frogger and others from that era have held up. Are there current games that 20 or 30 years people will still be playing and appreciating?
Fils-Aime: It would be wonderful to see. If you look at something like Super Mario 64, that was a launch title for DS, 53 months ago, and continues to sell exceptionally well, as does Super Mario Galaxy for Wii. I do think there will be some key titles that folks will look back on 10 or 20 years from now, and say, "Boy, I would have loved to be a gamer when these games were launched."

Was there a design philosophy in the 1980s that designers could learn from today?
Fils-Aime: I think actually (Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata) touched on this during our press conference. He talked about games like Donkey Kong or Space Invaders presenting an incredible challenge but also being inviting at the same time. And that duality is something that is really tough to do from a game design standpoint, and as we think about Wii Sports Resort, or Super Mario Galaxy 2, we're also trying to find that great balance.

Nintendo is currently selling both the DS Lite and the DSi. Is that not confusing to some consumers?
Fils-Aime: I don't think so, because a consumer walking in the door is going to be compelled by the plethora of great titles for DS. Then it's going to come down to, "Do I want a DS Lite or a DSi?" The first thing they'll see is that there's a price difference, so that will drive people one way or the other. The other thing they'll say is, "How important is it to me to download games. How important are the two cameras. And as we showed yesterday, with a million DSis sold in two months, and 400,000 DS Lites. And I think consumers are making their choice based on a number of factors. We have some who are saying, "I want pink." To little 8-, 9-, 10-year-old girls, features don't matter, It's, "I want the pink one." And having that available just for DS Lite is driving it that way.

"We're not going to be satisfied just picking up that existing gamer. We have to reach beyond and get that consumer who doesn't game. That's the only way we'll be able to continue growing as a company and as an industry."

Do you think all the innovation we're seeing in accessories for Wii, Xbox, and PS3 is making a rush to the next generation of consoles unnecessary?
Fils-Aime: We certainly believe there's a lot more Wii volume to be done, and a lot more games for the Wii. And that's not just what we've been able to do with accessories like the Balance Board, or future accessories like the Wii Motion Plus, Vitality Sensor, confidence -- Tuesday, Jun 2, 2009" href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10254524-1.html" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 67, 127); text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer; ">Vitality Sensor. It's also what we're able to do with Wii Motion Plus, from an archery standpoint, or what we're doing with ping-pong, in putting this big spin and curve on the ball. Who would have thought that possible three or four years ago? Nintendo's driving a focus on innovation that maybe wasn't in our industry four or five years ago. I think that's where the major difference is.

One of the things that has driven the mystique of the Wii has been how hard it has been to buy one. But now it's available anywhere, anytime. Does that take away the mystique?
Fils-Aime: I don't think so. From the start, we wanted to reach out to people who did not consider themselves gamers. The only way to reach them is for the product to be readily available, because they won't sleep out in front of a store to buy a Wii. We had to get to the point of having massive availability. We're selling 300,000 or 400,000 units a month, 30 months after launch, and that's never been done before. We've blown past the PlayStation 2 sales rate after 30 months.

How did you solve the availability issue?
Fils-Aime: We've been manufacturing it at a rate that's never been seen before.

But why were there still shortages last holiday season?
Fils-Aime: The fact is, we've been producing at this rate for a year. It's taken us that long to satisfy all of that pent up demand. Now we can do some outreach to people who in the past were saying, "I might be interested in the Wii, but I'm not going to go sleep out in front of a retailer."

With their announced new motion-sensitive control systems, Sony and Microsoft seem to be planning to aggressively go after the elusive mainstream audience. But perception-wise, at least, Nintendo maybe has the opposite problem: You've got the mainstream. How do you reach that core gamer?
Fils-Aime: We have near-term, mid-term and long-term opportunities. The near-term opportunity is the consumer who owns an PS3 or an Xbox 360 and has been bad-mouthing Wii to their friends. We can reach that consumer with games like The Conduit or Tiger Woods with Wii Motion Plus. The mid-term opportunity is the more mainstream consumer who saw Wii at a friend's house but just needs a little extra incentive to get into our game. That's what Wii Motion Plus and Wii Fit Plus and new Super Mario Bros. Wii will hopefully achieve. And the long-term opportunity is that person who currently says, "I don't play video games and I have no interest in playing video games."

What about the Halo audience?
Fils-Aime: We think we win over the Halo audience with something like The Conduit, a multi-player, online, shooting experience, or Dead Space Extraction. And you know what? Once those people buy into Wii, they'll go buy Mario Kart or Wii Fit Plus. We're not going to be satisfied just picking up that existing gamer. We have to reach beyond and get that consumer who doesn't game. That's the only way we'll be able to continue growing as a company and as an industry.

That's not an unlimited audience, right?
Fils-Aime: It's not. And actually the challenge increases the further you dip into this group. Two years ago, theoretically, there were ten consumers who said, "I would never play video games." We picked them off one at a time with Wii Fit or Brain Age 2. Now maybe there's five left, but now the bar is substantially higher for how to get them. Which is why we're looking to push the envelope with something like the Vitality Sensor, and why we have to make current gamers say, "Huh? What is that?" But that's exactly the type of reaction we got a couple of years ago when we first talked about "Wii Fit," and look where we are now.

You just announced the multi-player Super Mario Bros. Wii. How important is that for broadening your Mario audience?
Fils-Aime: I think Super Mario Bros. Wii will first appeal to the traditional Mario fan. But I think we'll also appeal to the consumer who first bought a Wii to play Wii Fit or Wii Fit Plus, who maybe has felt that platforming games are a little too challenging. We'll get that consumer because it's Mario, and because they can play with other people, whether competitively or cooperatively. That's exactly what happened when we launched Super Mario Bros. DS. Initially it was the Nintendo fan. But the only way it's been able to stay in the top ten month after month is because we've reached beyond the Nintendo fan into the brand-new consumer who's picked up a DS for the first time.

Can you talk about what you saw from Microsoft and Sony when it comes to the motion-sensitive controllers. It will be a sort of a new arms race.
Fils-Aime: The only thing I'll say is a rhetorical question. Is it fun? If it's fun, then I tip my hat and say, "Well done." But what's happening sounds to me a lot like, "Who's got the prettiest picture. Who's got high-definition. Who has the best processing power?" It sounds like technology, when the consumer wants to be entertained. Our focus is how do we take active play and make it entertainment. And that's what we're going to continue to focus on. And I think we've done a great job with Wii Motion Plus, and the Balance Board. And we're going to continue to push the envelope in ways to make it more fun.

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