Bosch says the future is the Internet of Things

German appliance maker creates separate firm to design sensors for its own products and for the market as a whole

Bosch, a company best known as a maker of appliances, including stoves, dishwashers, washing machines and coffee makers, is increasing its focus on the Internet of Things.

Germany-based Bosch has created a new firm, Bosch Connected Devices and Solutions, "for the Internet of things and services."

The Internet of Things will deliver its benefits gradually, one appliance upgrade at a time.

Sensor rich devices monitoring Web-enabled apps can put the worried homeowner at ease. 'Did I remember to turn the stove off before leaving the house? Is the refrigerator door open?' The Internet of Things will provide the answer.

The Internet of Things will automate many actions. For instance, a smart home can be tied into weather reporting and use the information to automatically close windows and shutters in advance of a storm.

The new Bosch firm will develop sensors and actuators. The latter can convert electric signals from sensors or control units into physical action, the company said.

A goal of the new firm is to supply "compact electronic products and software expertise" intended to make devices and objects "intelligent and Web-enabled."

Bosch is also a tech company that makes MEMS, or microelectromechanical systems. MEMS can detect changes in an environment, such as motion. An accelerometer, used in smartphones to sense when the device has been rotated, is such a sensor.

Bosch says it is the world's largest supplier of MEMS sensors in terms of revenue.

Bosch will be demonstrating some its ideas at next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

"The introduction of MEMS sensors in automotive electronics in the 1980s and 1990s marked the first wave of growth. The second major wave has been their widespread incorporation in smart phones, tablets, and games consoles since the beginning of the 21st century - and the Internet of Things and services now heralds the third wave. We're convinced that it will far surpass the first two waves," said Volkmar Denner, chairman of Robert Bosch GmbH, in a statement.

"Sensors, signal processing, batteries, and transmitters have become so small, energy efficient, and inexpensive - even as all-in-one units - that they can be used in their billions. And at the same time radio networks are now available almost everywhere," he added.

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Why 2014 is the 'year of smart glasses'

Raise your glass to the coming wave of face-top computing gadgets. You'll see: There's something for everybody.

In the technology press, every year is the year of this and the year of that. Much of this kind of prediction is based on expectations or wishful thinking and is essentially meaningless.

But the fact is that more than a dozen smart glass products are expected to ship in the first half of next year, ranging in price from $79 to $3,000.

Oh, and Google Glass will probably ship, too.

The hype around Google Glass has inspired a division of opinion. The people who want Google Glass and smart glasses are probably in the minority, with most people saying: "No way!"
Google glasses project
Google's Glass digital eyewear will likely ship this year. (Image: Google)

They say this because Google Glass looks weird or dorky, they're too expensive or they're thought of as creepy invasions of privacy.

But the wide range of smart glass products coming next year may change a lot of minds. Some of them don't look, function or empty wallets like Google Glass does.

Here's what's happening now and over the next year in the incredible new world of smart glasses.
Google Glass

Thanks to the personal investment of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as well as massive investment by Google, the invitation-only Google Glass product has by far the leading mindshare among all smart glasses competitors.

With a current user based of a several thousand people and a price of $1,500, Google Glass is hardly "mainstream." Still, it gets a lot of press and attention.

Google itself decided that allowing a face-recognition app would be rejected by the public as too "creepy," but a development group called Facial Network unveiled this week a face-recognition app for Google Glass called NameTag. Another app claiming face recognition, called MedRef, became available earlier this year.

Google announce a long list of powerful new Google Glass features recently. For starters, a MyGlass app was published for iOS devices on the Apple App Store. While not quite as full-featured as the Android version, it nevertheless provides connectivity and control options for Glass from an iPhone.

Google also enables Glass users to simply command the playing of any song with a voice command (as long as they have a Google Play Music account). This works nicely with recently announced stereo headphones sold by Google for Glass.

Google rolled out a wink-to-take-a-picture feature. It works even when Glass is in "sleep" mode, but only for the newer Google Glass 2.0 hardware.

Google also unveiled some new "Glassware" -- Google Glass apps -- including an RSS feed reader called Winkfeed and others.

Google Glass gets a lot of press. But don't think Google's is the only "smart" glass. In fact, the category has more than a dozen new entrants.
Epiphany Eyewear

Epiphany Eyewear from Vergence Labs starts at $299 and is mostly for pictures and video. The content is livestreamed to your PC via Wi-Fi or USB. One of the best things about Epiphany is that the headset looks a lot like regular glasses, and they can be fitted in some circumstances with prescription lenses, according to the company. But that comes at a price -- Epiphany has no display, so you can't see what you're filming until later. Vergence says Epiphany Eyewear may ship as early as January.

GlassUp

A company called GlassUp makes $299 glasses that show you, in their Google-like glasses headset via Bluetooth, what's displayed on your smartphone screen. Conceptually, it's just like a Bluetooth earpiece, but for your eye instead of your ear. GlassUp intends to release apps, and has already released an SKD, but these will be smartphone apps that optimize the experience of using a phone while looking at it through the GlassUp glasses. The biggest difference with Google Glass is that GlassUP has no camera, so it will be spared criticism for invading privacy. It's supposed to go on sale in February.
Meta 1

Meta believes that smart glasses can replace smartphones and even laptops in the future. They make glasses that are not only "augmented reality" -- a screen superimposed onto the natural field of view like most smart glasses -- but in 3D via two 1280 x 720-pixel LCD displays, creating the illusion of a hologram. The Meta 1 glasses also have two cameras for capturing 3D images and enabling Kinect-like in-air gestures, and stereo sound. They also have far more powerful electronics (Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM in an included pocket computer which is connected by a physical cable) which enables processing on the headset, rather than relying on a smartphone. They have a powerful price, too: $3,000. Meta 1 glasses are expected to ship to developers only in February, then to the public in June. The company also hopes to have up to 300 apps available by launch.
Oakley Airwave 1.5

Sunglasses maker Oakley is also getting into the smart glasses game. Their $649 Airwave 1.5 product is optimized for use on the slopes while snowboarding or skiing. It gives route maps and current speed, and the battery is designed to withstand the cold. In fact, they're really ski goggles. On the plus side, they're also shipping.
Optinvent ORA-S AR
Optinvent's ORA-S AR smart glasses will sell for $300.
Optinvent ORA-S AR

A company called Optinvent makes Android-based glasses the company claims give you a larger and brighter screen than Google Glass does. The sub-$1,000 product ships to developers in January with a $300 consumer version coming next summer, according to the company. The ORA-S has a comparable list of features to Glass, including support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a microphone, a speaker and a front-facing camera. One cool feature is something called "Flip-Vu," which enables you to position the display above, below or in the middle of your field of view -- or flip up the glass so everyone can see you're not using it.
ION Glasses

ION Glasses are crowd-funded glasses that look like ordinary sunglasses ($99) or prescription glasses ($79 for the frame), but have a blinking light in your peripheral vision and sound to alert you to incoming messages or other events on your smartphone. You can program it with colors so that, for example, a blue light means a Facebook message and a red one means a Google+ notification. It also lets you control a PowerPoint presentation, and will alert you if your smartphone is out of range. The company expects to ship in February.
Recon Jet

Android-based Recon Jet glasses are expected in September but the company will take your $599 now. Unlike Google Glass, Recon shows you the screen at the bottom of your vision. It's got an HD video camera and microphone and pairs with your smartphone. Recon Jet is optimized for sports, and an early app tracks speed and other data useful for athletics. The company offers an SDK for developers.

Vuzix M100

Vuzix's smart glasses have an important feature that Google does not offer: It's shipping now to consumers -- sort of. For about $999, Vuzix will sell you its M100 glasses. (They're backlogged, though, so expect a few weeks for delivery.) The M100 runs Android, and offers a 5MP camera, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, a speaker and microphone and many of the other features found in Google Glass.
Atheer Glasses

Another crowd-funded project from a Silicon Valley-based company called Atheer is expected to result in relatively low-cost 3D smart glasses, one costing $850 for developers and shipping in a few months, and another priced at $350 for consumers and expected to ship "late next year." Atheer has two screens for 3D input and two cameras for in-air gesture control.
Technical Illusions CastAR

Technical Illusions' CastAR augmented reality glasses use two screens to create 3D views of data and objects. It's especially optimized for gaming where the virtual objects look like they exist as holograms in the real world. Unusually, the company uses RFID tracking to interact with physical gaming objects. The company is in its early stages, and raised $1.5 million on Kickstarter. Their web site says they intend to ship to consumers "sometime in 2014."
Icis

Icis "smartspecks" are designed to look and work like regular glasses (in three styles and they fit prescription lenses), but they connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth. They're optimized for social network notifications and turn-by-turn directions, taking pictures and video and more. The pre-beta product is expected in "mid-2014" for $400 a pair.
Lumus DK-40

Lumus has been in the heads-up display business for years (mostly for the military). Now the company is getting into the consumer smart glasses racket. Lumus DK-40 smart glasses, which run Android, are expected to debut with an SDK at CES next month but won't ship to developers until the end of the first quarter. They're also seeking out OEMs to manufacture them.
And more

Tech giants Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Baidu and Samsung are rumored to be working on smart glass headsets, too. If these rumored products come to fruition they may not ship in 2014.

I'm not big on "The Year Of" proclamations. But I do know that a whole lot of companies intend to ship a whole lot of smart glass products in 2014. The range of prices and features are very broad, with some models priced competitively with "dumb" glasses and sunglasses.

I think that many of the smart glasses naysayers are going to be tempted by some of these new products. After all, if smart glasses look like regular glasses and are priced like regular glasses, why not get a pair?

It's going to be a tempting year.

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As Unix fades away from data centers, it's unclear what's next

Linux is gaining ground today, but a cloud OS or some other new technology may become more important in time

LAS VEGAS - Gartner says that its clients have started planning to migrate from Unix.

For some of them, it may take two or three years, and for others, five years. A few may still be running Unix 10 years from now, but nonetheless, Gartner believes the operating system is on a path to insignificance.

But predicting the end of something means having to show some insight into the future -- and identifying the operating system or other technology that will replace Unix in the data center. It is here that Gartner analysts, and its clients for that matter, struggle.

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The obvious replacements to HP-UX, Solaris, AIX and other Unix variants today are Linux, Windows and mainframe operating systems. But that conclusion assumes that the tech world will continue as it is now.

"What constitutes the OS of the future?" asked George Weiss, a Gartner analyst at the firm's Data Center Conference here this week.

The OpenStack cloud computing platform, the Hadoop big data framework, and emerging cloud operating systems are increasingly the direction for data centers building massively scalable, big data cloud environments, he predicts. "Can you see a Unix role in those environments?" he said.

An IT manager at major financial services company, who asked that his name and company not be disclosed, said he doesn't expect his firm to abandon Unix any time soon. The operating system runs many of the company's core mission critical systems.

"A 10-year exit strategy off Unix is probably more realistic," he said. "There is not a huge panic to get off what we're using."

But the IT manager did agree that the entire data center architecture could see a major shift in the coming years. "The whole cloud OS is going to shake everything up," he said.

Unix revenue has clearly been shrinking for more than a decade. According to IDC, worldwide Unix revenue in 2012 was $8.5 billion, or 22.8% less than the year earlier total of $11.1 billion.

In the just reported third quarter of this year, IDC says that Unix server revenue of $1.3 billion was 31% less than the year-earlier total, making the latest period total "the lowest quarterly Unix server revenue ever reported by IDC."

Matt Eastwood, an IDC analyst, said the Unix market is feeling pressure for two primary reasons.

First, data centers continue moving workloads such as business applications, online processing transaction systems, data warehousing and analytics tox86 servers running Linux. "This is primarily being done to lower costs and introduce more standardization into data centers worldwide," he said.

The second driver encouraging a shift from Unix are spending constraints. "Weak economic conditions accelerate the trend towards 'good enough' computing and low cost tends to win out over somewhat more expensive platforms that would have won the business during good economic times," said Eastwood.

The state of California supports every variant of Unix, along with most other systems, said Ron Hughes, chief deputy state CIO of the state's Dept. of Technology, who spoke at the conference. As long as his customers want Unix support, Hughes said his operation will provide it.

Looking at a longer term, though, Hughes notes that the biggest customer demands are for open systems. Users are also interested in engineered systems such as Oracle's Exadata appliance. Mainframe training is also in demand.

Georgia State University began migrating its ERP and other mission critical systems from Solaris-based servers to Linux after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2009. The move was prompted by the ending of deep discounts available to educational institutions after the acquisition closed, said Keith Campbell, director of technology engineering at the university.

The university's Linux migration "was probably going to happen anyway because the bottom line is that the commodity x86 hardware was getting to where it could do the job," said Campbell. The decision was also aided by the fact that VMware virtualization tools were getting "more and more attractive," he said.

The university still runs Solaris to support some older applications that aren't being upgraded. Those will probably get replaced over the next year, said Campbell.

The university also runs some IBM AIX systems because of the capabilities of the vendor's Power 7 chip, which "for the right types of research are a very good fit," said Campbell.

Does he miss Solaris? "At the end of the day I've been through a lot of OS migrations, and there's always little things you miss, but there's not a huge difference between Red Hat and Unix," said Campbell.

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2013 computer crime blotter

Anonymous, LulzSec members and plenty of others sent to the slammer for exploiting technology and human flaws

Prisons around the world this year made way for techie criminals alongside the more garden variety murderers, thieves and schemers.

Here’s a rundown of those who got sent to the slammer this year for tech-related crimes (based on a compilation of reports from the IDG News Service and Network World’s other sister sites):

• Hacker sentenced to 18 months for peddling computer access to US national security lab
A Pennsylvania man who hacked into multiple corporate, university and government computer networks and tried to sell access to them, including supercomputers from a U.S. national security laboratory, was sentenced in December to 18 months in prison.

Andrew Miller, 24, pleaded guilty in August to one count of conspiracy and two counts of computer fraud for actions committed between 2008 and 2011, when he was part of the Underground Intelligence Agency hacking group, the U.S. Department of Justice said. Miller asked an undercover FBI agent in 2011 for $50,000 in exchange for access to two supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, according to the DOJ.

*Man who hacked celebrity email accounts sentenced to prison
A man who admitted to illegally accessing email accounts belonging to more than four dozen celebrities to steal their private photos and confidential documents was sentenced in December to 10 years in federal prison by a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles.

Christopher Chaney, 36, of Jacksonville, Fla. was also ordered to pay a fine of more than $66,000 as restitution for his crimes. Chaney was arrested in November 2011 and has been in custody since March, when he pleaded guilty to nine felony counts, including unauthorized access to computers and wiretapping. He faced a maximum of more than 120 years in prison.

+ Also from Network World: Businesses offer best practices for escaping Cryptolocker hell +

According to the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles, Chaney gained access to the email accounts of Mika Kunis, Scarlett Johansson, Renee Olstead and dozens of other celebrities by resetting their passwords using the "forgot your password" feature. Chaney apparently used publicly available information on the celebrities to correctly answer the security questions needed to reset the passwords on the Gmail, Apple and Yahoo email accounts they used.

(via Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld)

*Wisconsin man sentenced for participating in Anonymous DDoS
A man from Wisconsin was sentenced in December for participating in a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack by hacker group Anonymous on a Kansas company.

Eric J. Rosol, 38, is said to have admitted that on Feb. 28, 2011, he took part in a denial-of-service attack for about a minute on a Web page of Koch Industries -- Kochind.com, using software called a Low Orbit Ion Cannon Code, which was loaded on his computer. LOIC is a popular DDoS tool used by Anonymous and other online attackers to overload websites with requests and disrupt the target server.

*Judge sentences Anonymous hacker to 10 years in prison
A member of the hacker group Anonymous was sentenced in November to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a geopolitical analysis firm. Jeremy Hammond, 28, in May pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced by Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska during a hearing at the federal district court for the Southern District of New York in New York.

Hammond, of Chicago, was arrested in March 2012 and charged with hacking into the computer system of analyst company Strategic Forecasting, also called Stratfor, and obtaining subscriber and credit-card information and emails, among other data. Ultimately, credit-card details, emails and cryptographic representation of passwords were leaked. The credit cards were used to make $700,000 in purchases.

* Two sentenced to prison for point-of-sale credit card theft
Two Romanian men were sentenced in September to serve prison sentences for remotely hacking into hundreds of U.S. merchants' computers and stealing payment card data, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Adrian-Tiberiu Oprea, 29, of Constanta, Romania, was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison, and Iulian Dolan, 28, of Craiova, Romania, was sentenced to serve seven years in prison during proceedings in U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire. The two men were charged with hacking into hundreds of point-of-sale (POS) computer systems and stealing payment card data, with co-conspirators compromising cards belonging to more than 100,000 customers, the DOJ said in a press release. The compromises caused losses of more than $17.5 million in unauthorized charges and remediation expenses, the DOJ said.

*Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years for classified document leaks
A military court judge sentenced U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison in August on charges related to his leaking a large store of classified documents to Wikileaks, according to a number of published and broadcast reports.

Manning had faced a maximum potential sentence of 90 years. The judge in his case reduced the maximum sentence from 136 years earlier this month. Manning was also dishonorably discharged from the military.

* 'Western Express' credit-card fraud prosecution ends
The last member of a $5 million global credit-card fraud ring was sentenced in August in New York state court, ending an eight-year investigation and prosecution.

Douglas Latta, 40, was sentenced to between 22 and 44 years in state prison, according to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in a news release on Thursday. Latta was part of a wide-ranging scheme that stole and sold more than 95,000 credit card numbers online as part of a group known as the "Western Express."

* Pirate Bay co-founder sentenced to two years in prison for hacking
Gottfried Svartholm Warg
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, the co-founder of Pirate bay, is pictured in Stockholm, February 16, 2009. (Reuters)

Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was sentenced in June to two years in prison by a District Court in Sweden for multiple data intrusions, attempted aggravated fraud and aggravated fraud. An appeal reduced the sentence to one year.

The data intrusion charge is related to the hacking of a mainframe belonging to Logica, now CGI, an IT firm that provided tax services to the Swedish government, and a mainframe of Nordea bank. The fraud charges stem from a number of attempted money transfers from accounts at Nordea, of which one was successful. Two of the attempts that were part of the case were dismissed. The receiving bank couldn't find a record of one transfer attempt, and the other transfer was interrupted, according to prosecutor Henrik Olin.

* Phishing gang jailed for plundering woman's $1.6 million life savings
A heartless phishing gang that stole and frittered a British woman's entire $1.6 million life savings on items including "gold and cheeseburgers" was handed heavy sentences in May by a judge at London's Southwark Crown Court.

Nominal ringleader, Nigerian national Rilwan Adesegun Oshodi, was sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay back $1.6 million under the Proceeds of Crime Act, although this might prove difficult given that the stolen money has reportedly already been spent.

The man who phished the victim's bank account details and then sold the information to Oshodi, Egyption Tamer Hassanin Zaky Abdelhamid, was sentenced to six years and ordered to pay a heavy fine under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

* Four former LulzSec members sentenced to prison in the UK
Four British men associated with the LulzSec hacker collective received prison sentences in May for their roles in cyberattacks launched by the group against corporate and government websites in 2011.
Mustafa al-Bassam
Mustafa al-Bassam arrives at Southwark Crown Court in central London May 15, 2013. (Reuters)

Ryan Cleary, 21, Jake Davis, 20, Ryan Ackroyd, 26, and Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, were sentenced Thursday in London's Southwark Crown Court after previously pleading guilty to charges of carrying out unauthorized acts with the intention of impairing the operation of computers.

Davis, who was known online as "Topiary," received a two-year prison sentence. He acted as a spokesperson for LulzSec, writing some of the hacker group's announcements and managing its website and Twitter account.

*Operator of German file-sharing site sentenced to almost four years in prison
A 33-year-old man was sentenced in May to three years and 10 months in prison by a German court for running the torrent site torrent.to between December 2005 and April 2008. He was sentenced by the local court of Aachen on April 30 for the commercial and unauthorized exploitation of copyrighted works, said the German Society for the Prosecution of Copyright Infringement (GVU) in a news release.

The man, who was only identified by the GVU as Jens R., was the former owner of torrent.to, a site that continues to operate under a new owner since 2008, and the GVU still aims to take down.

* Former LulzSec member gets prison sentence for Sony Pictures hack
Cody Andrew Kretsinger, a 25-year-old man from Decatur, Illi., was sentenced in April to one year in federal prison for his role in a May 2011 breach of a Sony Pictures website and database.

At the time of the intrusion Kretsinger, who used the online alias "recursion," was a member of a hacker group called Lulz Security, or LulzSec, that went on a hacking spree during the first half of 2011. The group was affiliated with the international Anonymous hacktivist collective.

* AU Optronics executive sentenced for LCD price-fixing
A former executive with AU Optronics was sentenced in April to serve two years in prison and pay a $50,000 fine for participating in a worldwide LCD screen price-fixing conspiracy, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Shiu Lung Leung, former senior manager of AU Optronics' desktop display business group, was sentenced for price fixing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. AU Optronics, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and its U.S. subsidiary, AU Optronics America, headquartered in Milpitas, Calif., were found guilty in March 2012, for participating in the thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) price-fixing conspiracy, after an eight-week trial.

*Romanian citizen sentenced to five years in phishing scheme
A 28-year-old Romanian man was sentenced in March to five years in prison for his role in a phishing scheme, as part of a seven-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Cristian Busca, who was sentenced in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., pleaded guilty last November to one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, the DOJ said in a news release. He was extradited to the U.S. in December 2011. Prosecutors alleged that Busca possessed more than 10,000 stolen debit or credit card numbers in his email accounts.

Busca was part of a group based in Craiova, Romania, that amassed victims' payment card details, PINs and Social Security numbers. They used the information to make fraudulent withdrawals from people's accounts by creating counterfeit payment cards and taking out lines of credit.

* AT&T hacker 'Weev' sentenced to 41 months for iPad leak
Alleged hacker Andrew 'weev' Auernheimer in March was given an unforgiving prison sentence of 41 months for his part in the hugely embarrassing 2010 compromise of 114,000 iPad-using AT&T customers.

Found guilty in November of 2012, 26-year-old Auernheimer’s prison sentence is likely to become only the latest contentious chapter in complex story that has sharply divided opinion. As part of the 'Goatse Security' group, Auernheimer styled himself as a security researcher who did nothing more untoward than reveal a weakness on AT&T’s website that was of its own making.

(via John Dunn of Techworld)

* Dutch man sentenced in US to 12 years in credit card scam
A 22-year-old Dutch man who sold credit card details online was sentenced in February to 12 years in a US prison in a fraud prosecutors alleged caused more than $63 million in damages, according to the Department of Justice.

David Benjamin Schrooten, who was extradited from Romania last June, was part of a team that stole more than 100,000 credit card numbers and sold the details to other criminals on Kurupt.su, a so-called "carding" website or underground marketplace for stolen payment card data. He was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, a DOJ news release said.

*Steve Jobs' house burglar gets seven-year sentence
The man who broke into the Palo Alto, Calif., home of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and stole laptops, iPads and other possessions was sentenced in January to seven years in a California state prison.

Kariem McFarlin, 35, was arrested in August last year by officers from the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a Silicon Valley-based high-tech crime unit formed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.
REACT officers found McFarlin with help from Apple security, which tracked where the stolen devices were being used by matching their serial numbers with connections to Apple iTunes servers. The IP address in use matched a line in McFarlin's apartment in nearby Alameda that was also being used by an Apple device registered to a member of his family, according to a police report.

* Internet piracy group leader sentenced to five years in prison
The leader of a U.S. online piracy group that covertly recorded movies showing in theaters and offered them online was sentenced in January to five years in prison.

Jeramiah Perkins headed a group that called itself "IMAGiNE," which used camcorders as well as FM and infrared receivers to capture video and audio of movies, according to an indictment filed April last year in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he was sentenced. The captured files were then uploaded to the group's servers and later pieced together and edited to reproduce the movies.

* Two former Anonymous members jailed in UK for PayPal, Visa DDoS attacks
Three men were sentenced in the U.K. in January for their roles in a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks launched against financial and music industry organizations in 2010 by the Anonymous hacktivist collective.
Christopher Weatherhead, 22, of Northampton and Ashley Rhodes, 28, of Camberwell, London, received prison sentences of 18 months and 7 months respectively for conspiracy to impair the operation of computers, a representative of the Southwark Crown Court Clerk's Office in London said Friday.

Another co-conspirator, Peter Gibson, 24, of Hartlepool, received a six-month prison sentence suspended for two years and 100 hours of community service, the court's representative said.

The conspiracy charges brought against the three men were in connection with DDoS attacks launched in 2010 against PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the Ministry of Sound record label and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. These attacks were part of an Anonymous DDoS campaign called Operation Payback.

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The worst IT project disasters of 2013

The Healthcare.gov rollout leads a pack of painful projects

Trends come and go in the technology industry but some things, such as IT system failures, bloom eternal.

"Nothing has changed," said analyst Michael Krigsman of consulting firm Asuret, an expert on why IT projects go off the rails. "Not a damn thing."

"These are hard problems," he added. "People mistakenly believe that IT failures are due to a technical problem or a software problem, and in fact it has its roots into the culture, how people work together, how they share knowledge, the politics of an organization. The worse the politics, the more likely the failure."

Here's a look at some of this year's highest-profile IT disasters.

Healthcare.gov: By now everyone knows about the health insurance shopping website's problems upon the Oct. 1 go-live, when many users couldn't access the system and only about 30 percent were actually able to sign up for health care.

Following a frenzied effort to fix bugs in the system, U.S. officials said Healthcare.gov had been stabilized as of Dec. 1. But the work is not yet complete. Last week, officials said 25 percent of applications sent from Healthcare.gov to private insurers contain errors that were caused by the website.

Yet to come is a final fix, as well as a full accounting of why the Healthcare.gov launch stumbled.

Krigsman is skeptical that fallout from Healthcare.gov will lead to any major reforms. But the controversy has had one effect, he added. "IT failures have really hit the mainstream media in a way they never did before."

Queensland Health payroll system: The government of Queensland, Australia, announced in August that IBM would no longer be allowed to sign new consulting contracts with the state after its "bungle" of a payroll system project that reportedly could cost taxpayers up to AUS$1.2 billion (US$1.1 billion).

"It appears that IBM took the state of Queensland for a ride," Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said at the time.

Last week, Newman's administration began pursuing a lawsuit against IBM, according to published reports.

It's not clear how that effort will play out, given that a 264-page analysis of the project commissioned by the government concluded earlier this year that due to past agreements, "there was no means by which the State may seek damages from IBM for breach of contract."

For its part, IBM has maintained that the project's issues were out of its hands, and that the state failed to properly scope the project and define its requirements.

MyCalPAYS: In February, the state of California terminated its contract with SAP in connection with a massive payroll project called MyCalPAYS. More than US$250 million has been spent on the project, which dates to 2005. SAP, which says it isn't to blame for the problems, came aboard after the state fired original contractor BearingPoint.

Last month, California Comptroller John Chiang filed suit against SAP, seeking compensation. California has paid SAP $50 million for its work on the project, but it's not clear how much money the state will get back even if its lawsuit is successful.

Marin County, California, sued SAP and Deloitte over a different ERP project. The case was settled but reportedly netted the county only $3.9 million, after it spent $5 million on legal fees and more than $30 million on the system, which will be replaced with a different product.

Royal Bank of Scotland: Computer system woes continued this year for RBS, including an outage on Cyber Monday that left account holders unable to make payments or get cash.

The Cyber Monday failure was "unacceptable," RBS CEO Ross McEwan said in a statement. RBS has failed to properly invest in its IT systems for decades, but a plan is under way now to change that with details coming next year, he added.

Last year, RBS suffered an IT failure that led to delays in wage and tax credits being paid into customer accounts.

Deloitte's unemployment system woes: Deloitte found itself under fire in California, Florida and Massachusetts this year over problems with unemployment compensation systems built by the consulting firm.

The problems resulted in delayed payments to thousands of job seekers. Deloitte principal Mark Price told Massachusetts lawmakers during a public hearing in October that the state had "a successful, working system today," and only a "relatively small percentage" of jobless people had been affected. The problems stemmed from "very specific data issues" in the state's legacy system, he said. Price also said the reports of problems with Deloitte's projects in Florida and California were overblown.

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Microsoft's new volume-licensing scheme could simplify buying, managing products

Microsoft service include a new Web site that offers a new set of options for making purchases and keeping track of agreements easier

Midsize companies should get ready this month as Microsoft introduces a new purchasing scheme that changes the way it deals with its volume licensing customers.

The company says the purpose of the new Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA) is to make buying and managing volume licenses easier, according to a blog by Richard Smith, the general manager of Microsoft’s World Wide Licensing & Pricing.

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MPSA replaces Microsoft Business and Services Agreements, Select Plus Agreements and Microsoft Online Services purchasing terms and conditions. The program will include a new Web site that offers a new set of options for making purchases and keeping track of agreements easier, according to Smith.

An online seminar on the MPSA is scheduled for Dec. 10 for U.K. customers, according to the blog Software Ruminations.

Customers using hybrid clouds based on Microsoft products want more flexible licensing to accommodate their unique needs, Smith writes in his blog.

The contract structure for volume licenses changes under MPSA so there will be one agreement covering all of a customer’s organizations and individual entities in a way that “delivers the best overall value based on total volume,” as Smith describes it.

Buying all Microsoft software and online services as a single package means fewer terms and conditions to manage, he writes. MPSA will include Web-based tools for choosing payment options and give customers an overall view of what they’ve bought and licensed. Eventually the tools will be expanded to gather business intelligence to help customers plan future purchases, he says.

Microsoft has piloted MPSA during the past year, and this month becomes available in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada, with more to come next year.

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