Brian King

ProMOS Technologies may soon sign a deal to work on DRAM manufacturing technology with Taiwan Memory Company (TMC), the government-sponsored entity designed to take over debt-ridden DRAM makers in Taiwan. "We have reached a mutual understanding to start working with them," ProMOS vice president Ben Tseng said by phone on Monday. ProMOS has been manufacturing DRAM in Taiwan since 1996 and was the first company on the island to run a factory making chips on 12-inch wafers. The cooperation will begin with research and development work, but Tseng says ProMOS is hopeful it will turn into a manufacturing partnership as well. "It only makes sense," he said. "Once the R&D is done, then you do the manufacturing on the same site." TMC could not immediately be reached for comment.

TMC is a brand-new company designed by the government to bail out its heavily indebted DRAM makers. DRAM prices have rallied over the past several months, recently hitting profitable levels for most DRAM companies. Taiwan's five big DRAM makers ran into financial trouble amid the global recession and after suffering two years of losses caused by a massive chip glut. Before ProMOS and TMC can enter an agreement, TMC needs to finalize its funding plans. The company slashed production as the DRAM downturn bit, and is currently producing chips on fewer than half of its production lines.

The Taiwan government has discussed investing NT$30 billion (US$925.9 million) in the new company, while TMC chairman John Hsuan has said private investors will also be invited to put money into TMC. ProMOS needs money to move forward. It has used up most of its cash paying off debt. The coming launch of Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 7, has stirred demand for new PCs and they need DRAM chips inside. New funds from TMC would help ProMOS reopen closed factories just as DRAM prices are hitting profitable levels. Tseng said his company must also soon decide whether to invite workers back full time after keeping some on unpaid leave for months due to the global recession. Once the company ends the unpaid leave, however, it will have to start paying full salaries again.

Under Taiwanese labor law, companies putting workers on unpaid leave must do so for fixed periods of months at a time, but ProMOS may need them back quickly to ramp up factory lines if it signs a deal with TMC soon.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will move to create formal net neutrality rules prohibiting Internet providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content and applications, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Monday. It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet." The notice of proposed rulemaking will look not only into net neutrality rules on traditional wired broadband networks, but also explore whether to impose new rules on broadband networks offered by mobile phone carriers, the FCC said. Genachowski announced a notice of proposed rulemaking, a process to formalize a set of broadband policy principles that the FCC has embraced since August 2005. In addition to the four policy principles, Genachowski called for two additional principles to be included in a formal set of net neutrality rules. "The Internet is an extraordinary platform for innovation, job creation, investment, and opportunity," Genachowski said in a speech before the Brookings Institution. "It has unleashed the potential of entrepreneurs and enabled the launch and growth of small businesses across America.

Genachowski said he wants all six principles to apply to all platforms that access the Internet. The FCC has enforced the existing broadband policy principles on a case-by-case basis, but it has never made formal net neutrality rules. Mobile broadband services offered by carriers such as Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile have not been subject to the FCC's net neutrality principles. Broadband provider Comcast filed a lawsuit challenging the FCC's authority to enforce the principles after the agency ruled last August that Comcast had to stop slowing peer-to-peer traffic in the name of network management. Comcast argued that the FCC needs to create a rule or get authority from the U.S. Congress to enforce net neutrality. The Comcast lawsuit was filed late last year, and a ruling is pending.

In addition to Genachowski's new rulemaking, a bill pending in the U.S. Congress would give the FCC that authority. But Genachowski said there have been examples in recent years of broadband providers blocking or slowing applications, including peer-to-peer software and VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service. Several broadband providers have opposed formal net neutrality rules, saying they could hamper provider efforts to roll out new services and manage their networks, and to protect against attacks and bandwidth hogs. There has been one example of a broadband provider blocking political content, he noted. "Notwithstanding its unparalleled record of success, today the free and open Internet faces emerging and substantial challenges," he said. "The rise of serious challenges to the free and open Internet puts us at a crossroads. Or we could take steps to preserve Internet openness, helping ensure a future of opportunity, innovation, and a vibrant marketplace of ideas." A Comcast spokeswoman said the company would comment soon. We could see the Internet's doors shut to entrepreneurs, the spirit of innovation stifled, a full and free flow of information compromised.

Representatives of AT&T, Verizon Wireless and CTIA, a trade group representing mobile carriers, weren't immediately available for comment. In addition, Genachowski proposed two new principles. There are four existing broadband principles that would be formalized: - Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice. - Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement. - Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network. - Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers. The first would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management. Genachowski will seek to launch a notice of proposed rulemaking during the FCC's October meeting. The second principle would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.

The notice will ask the public and interested companies for feedback on the proposed rules and their application, such as how to determine whether network management practices are reasonable, what information broadband providers should disclose about their network management practices and how the rules apply to differing platforms, including mobile Internet access services, the FCC said.

Scammers tricked the New York Times' Digital Advertising department into placing a malicious ad for fake antivirus software on the NYTimes.com Web site over the weekend, the company confirmed Monday. According to the Times, the scammers initially claimed to be Internet phone provider Vonage, and had placed what appeared to be legitimate Vonage ads on the Web site. The newspaper had warned of the scam advertisement Sunday, after receiving about 100 e-mails from concerned readers.

However, sometime over the weekend, they switched these ads for aggressive pop-up advertisements that tried to trick victims into thinking that their computers were infected. When the complaints started pouring in, the Times first suspected that the ad had been unauthorized, and pulled third-party advertisements from the site. The point of the scam was to sell worried computer users a product called Personal Antivirus, a fake "scareware" product that bombards victims with popup ads until they either hand over their credit card information or somehow manage to remove the program. But on Monday spokeswoman Diane McNulty confirmed that the ad had been submitted directly to the company's online ad department. "The culprit masqueraded as a national advertiser and provided seemingly legitimate product advertising for a week," she said via email. "Over the weekend, the ad being served up was switched so that an intrusive message, claiming to be a virus warning from the reader's computer, appeared. " Technology executive Troy Davis was hit with the ad after he clicked on a Times story about Dubai on Saturday night. This gave the criminals a way to include embedded Web pages in their copy that could be hosted on a completely different server, outside of the control of the Times. After his antivirus software warned him not to visit the article, he performed an analysis of the site and discovered that the Times was allowing advertisers to embed an HTML element known as an iframe into their advertisements.

Apparently the scammers waited until the weekend, when it would be hardest for IT staff to respond, before switching the ad by inserting new JavaScript code into that iframe. It was, of course, all just a fake. That code redirected Davis's browser to the Web site that served a pop-up ad designed to look like a Windows system scan that had found security problems on his system.

Microsoft has cofounded and is providing the funding for a new foundation aimed at bringing open-source and proprietary software companies together to participate side by side in open-source projects.

According to its Web site, the new CodePlex Foundation "will complement existing open source foundations and organizations, providing a forum in which best practices and shared understanding can be established by a broad group of participants, both software companies and open source communities."

CodePlex has for some time been the name of the site on which Microsoft hosts open-source projects.

The group is a nonprofit whose interim president will be Sam Ramji, who's currently senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, in charge of the company's open-source endeavors. It's not clear if the move means Ramji is leaving his duties at Microsoft. The new foundation plans to hold a press conference on Thursday afternoon to provide more details about its formation.

A board of directors supporting Ramji is comprised mainly of Microsoft employees, including Bill Staples, Stephanie Boesch and Britt Johnson. The only non-Microsoft employees on the board are longtime open-source guru Miguel de Icaza of Novell and Shaun Walker, cofounder of DotNetNuke.

Ramji and the board will search for a permanent executive director of the foundation, which now only has a deputy director, Mark Stone, formerly of O'Reilly and VA Linux (now SourceForge), according to the Web site.

Microsoft historically has had a thorny relationship with the open-source community, but in the past couple of years Ramji's Platform Strategy Group has been trying to work more closely with open-source companies.

At the same time, however, Microsoft has continued to pose a litigation threat to open-source companies over patents it claims to hold for technologies incorporated in open-source software, including Linux. Microsoft has consistently and quietly been striking patent deals with Linux distributors. Some of the deals call for the companies to pay Microsoft to license patented technologies.

One case did go to court earlier this year, when Microsoft brought a patent suit against GPS device maker TomTom over patents included in the Linux implementation TomTom uses in its devices. TomTom eventually paid Microsoft out of court to settle the case, which Microsoft claimed was a patent case and not an attack against Linux.