So what, exactly, are they doing together? Well, we already know Dell provides servers for Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook, but what other plans the two have hatched together beyond that is unclear.
The event is scheduled for next Tuesday, but other than sending out a nicely worded invitation, the only thing the companies are saying about the partnership is that it involves “the next generation of cloud computing.”

Facebook amasses billions of photos, friend connections, and status updates and stores them up in “the cloud,” and Dell is working on being one of the main providers of the infrastructure–servers–that makes the cloud possible.

Two of the biggest names in tech are teaming up on a cloud computing project that they plan to announce at a special event next week.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: There are 80 different kinds of memory cards?! Well, if you count up all the variants of the major formats and, um, carry the one… hmm, I still don’t get anywhere near 80. But better safe than sorry, right? This could be the last card reader you’ll ever need–until those pinheads come up with yet another format (MiniMicro SD, anyone?).

The card reader is compatible with Windows and
Mac systems and supports USB 2.0 and 1.1. It’s available in black or white. [via Gizmodo]

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Over the years I’ve amassed a diverse collection of memory cards, from moldy old SmartMedia to brand-spankin’-new microSD. The iMONO 80-in-1 High Speed Card Reader accommodates them all–and then some. You can pick one up for a mere $17 plus shipping.

I spend most of my day meeting and talking to companies in the cleantech sector. And those of you who know me know I have opinions on who is doing it right, and who is doing it wrong. So I thought it was about time to initiate the Cleantech Blog Power 10 Ranking of cleantech companies doing it right. Eligibility for inclusion in the ranking requires meeting a 6 point test. Suggestions for inclusions in future volumes are welcome. The 6 point test:

I have included cleantech companies big and small. Volume I surprisingly ended up with a lot more solar companies than I would have guessed, and no biofuels. Perhaps I really am a closet solar fanatic.

1. The company is energy or environmental technology related. 2. I like their products. 3. The market needs them. 4. The company is smart about building their business. 5. I’d like to own the company if I could (for the right price, of course!). 6. It is not already one of mine (my apologies to my friends Zenergy Power).

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is Chairman of Cleantech.org, and a blogger for CNET’s Greentech blog.

10. Schott - Long a major player in crystalline silicon photovoltaics, amorphous silicon photovoltaics and concentrated solar thermal, where they are one of the top manufacturers of solar thermal receivers. That balance is unique, and exciting.

8. First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) - Lowest cost producer in the photovoltaic business. Guaranteed to make the list until dethroned.

5. Fuel Tech (NASDAQ:FTEK) - I wrote about them in 2007. The CEO John Norris is a long time friend and an excellent operator. Cleaning up coal is a huge business that needs to be done, and they do it well.

4. Applied Materials (NYSE:AMAT) - The future of photovoltaics lies in scaling thin film manufacturing process. Who better to do this than the dean of semiconductor capital equipment. I broke the story of Applied’s entry to solar in the blogosphere in 2006, and if anything underestimated how hard they were pushing. The whisper mill has been whirring that the installations of their plants are not on track. Not only do I have faith they will get there, I think it is critical to the industry that they do.

7. Smart Fuel Cells (XETRA:F3C.DE) - I wrote about them recently. I helped create a fuel cell business in 2002. This is the first fuel cell company in 5 years that has intrigued me. They actually ship product with solid gross margins. That is a start.

3. IBM (NYSE:IBM) - What IBM is doing in smart grid is very exciting. They are part of a large proportion of the smart grid implementations that are in process, and a huge proponent of open standards. Smart grid is to electricity what fiber is to telecom. It underpins everything.

2. Det Norske Veritas - DNV is a massive 150 year old risk management firm. Their auditors underpin roughly half of the carbon markets. In carbon, audit and verification is everything. I could not leave them off.

6. Fat Spaniel - Distributed power, solar included, is a ticking time bomb without independent monitoring. Fat Spaniel does it the best.

1. Sharp Electronics - In solar, still the biggest, and still growing. Enough said.

The e-mails have subject lines like “Virtual iPhone games!” and “Apple: The most popular game!” The attachment is called “Penguin.Panic.zip,” which refers to the iPhone game of the same name.

The Trojan has been identified as Troj/Agent-HNY, Sophos said.

Sophos has not yet seen versions that run on
Mac OS X, the Apple iPhone, or other mobile devices.

(Credit:
Sprint)

Last month at the fall CTIA show, Sprint assured us that it was not forgetting its Nextel fans. The carrier promised that by the end of the year it would release four iDEN-only phones for the push-to-talk-loving masses. We’ve already reviewed the Motorola i365, we’re still waiting for the already announced Motorola i576, and we know that an iDEN BlackBerry is on the way. That leaves the new Motorola i775 has the final model in the quarter.

Announced Monday by Motorola and Nextel, the i776 has a flip-phone design in silver with touches of dark red. As expected, the durable design should withstand a few blows but it also is one of the slimmest Nextel flip phones at 3.39 inches by 1.8 inches by 0.8 inches.

Features include a VGA camera, stereo Bluetooth, Nextel’s second-line service, a personal organizer, a speakerphone, GPS, messaging and the full slate of Nextel Direct Connection services. The i576 is available now for $79.99 with service. Alternatively, it is $99.99 with Boost Mobile’s pay-as-you-go plan.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $79.99
View the latest prices for Motorola i776 - silver (Sprint)

Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they’re there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It’ll also let you compare it with other videos (even if they’re not yours).

In case you’re already entrenched in YouTube, a built-in tool called YouClone will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.

The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three 5 cent credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked, and tracked. If you’re a videographer looking to get a video out there it’s not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth.

If you’re a cheapskate like me, there’s also a free video stat-tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services, though, you’re on your own.

Hey!Spread - Video Distributing Web Service from Bruno Celeste on Vimeo.

Victor Rook, an indy filmmaker who was once wrongly accused by Viacom of copyright violations, is happy a judge has reminded media companies to think twice before calling someone a pirate.

In February 2007, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove Rook’s documentary about a professional wrestler, accusing him of using some of the company’s copyright material. The conglomerate was mistaken. None of the video or music Rook included in his film belonged to Viacom. Executives at the company apologized but the filmmaker still had to wait three weeks before the clip was reposted to YouTube, which he says hurt his efforts to market the film.

The entire episode would have never occurred had “Viacom ever looked at the video,” Rook claims.

“YouTube and Google have adopted a policy that forces copyright owners like Viacom… to shoulder the entire burden of monitoring for copyright infringement.” — A letter to YouTube user from Viacom

Copyright owners, such as NBC Universal, Warner Bros., and Viacom, were put on notice Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that they must not order video be removed from Web sites indiscriminately. Before taking action against a clip, copyright owners, must form a “good-faith belief ” that a video is infringing, according to Corynne McSherry, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

EFF represents the Pennsylvania woman who sued Universal Music Group for demanding that YouTube remove her clip, which featured her infant son dancing to 30 seconds of the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy.” EFF has always argued that the video was a “textbook” example of fair use and Universal Music should have recognized that.

The music label, the largest of the country’s four top recording companies, has indeed acknowledged that the clip doesn’t violate their copyright and the clip has been reposted to YouTube. But Universal Music also argued before Fogel that it’s not up to copyright owners to determine fair use.

Fogel disagreed. In his 10-page decision, he reminds Universal Music that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already requires copyright owners to make a determination about fair use prior to sending take-down notices. “A consideration of the applicability of the fair use doctrine simply is part of that initial review,” Fogel wrote.

But for copyright owners, Fogel’s decision may further complicate an already arduous process of tracking and removing pirated clips.

A Viacom spokesman said Thursday that the company has sent 350,000 take-down notices to YouTube. Each of the offending videos is first reviewed by Viacom staff before the notices are sent. The media power has acknowledged making mistakes but less than 1 percent of the time.

Perhaps Viacom’s position on handling take-down notices was best explained in the company’s letter to Rook.

Mark Morril, Viacom’s deputy general counsel, wrote to Rook: “Having reviewed the video, we acknowledge that its inclusion in the take-down notice was an error and the error however was completely unintentional. We sincerely regret that this error affected your video. We note that YouTube and Google have adopted a policy that forces copyright owners like Viacom or yourself to shoulder the entire burden of monitoring for copyright infringement on the YouTube site.

“Viacom has no alternative accept to repeatedly search the entire YouTube library,” the letter continued, “and send take-down notices…This is a massive effort. We have manually reviewed over 1.7 million clips on YouTube and have identified more than 187,000 pirated clips of our copyrighted content. In an effort of this scale, some inadvertent error is inevitable.”

Rook has little sympathy for the big media companies. He’s skeptical about their review process and whether Viacom employees eyeball all the videos. He said that had anyone actually seen his video, there could have been no way they would have accused him of copyright infringement. Rook also said that a year before Viacom sent the take-down notice, one of Viacom’s companies, MTV, had requested a viewing copy of his documentary.

“If that doesn’t prove that Viacom knew my film wasn’t their material I don’t know what can,” Rook said.

Mark Litvack, an entertainment lawyer with the Los Angeles law firm of Reed Smith, says that while it’s good for the judge to remind media companies to take a hard look at material before making accusations, he doesn’t think the lawsuit brought by the Pennsylvania woman is necessary.

“The DMCA absolutely anticipated this very scenario,” Litvack said. “Universal said she infringed on her copyright and sent a take-down notice. She then has an opportunity to appeal to YouTube (counter-notification remedy), which is what she sought and the video was restored.”

But McSherry of EFF argues that the counter-notification remedy doesn’t protect people from unfounded claims and puts the onus on them to prove their innocence. She remembers that before the DMCA, a media company that wanted someone to remove allegedly infringing material would first have to convince a judge and then obtain a temporary restraining order.

“The DMCA streamlined the process but the law also tried to balance it,” she said. What she is referring to is the DMCA’s requirement that companies first form a good-faith belief that material is infringing before trying to remove videos.

Fogel agreed and the wrote: “The unnecessary removal of non-infringing material causes significant injury to the public where time-sensitive or controversial subjects are involved and the counter-notification remedy does not sufficiently address these harms.”

Google is working with a titan of traditional journalism to help promote citizen journalism.

YouTube announced Monday that it has partnered with the Pulitzer Center to create a journalism contest designed to unearth the best news videographers.

Contestants have until October 5 to submit news clips three-minutes long or less that must focus on stories largely overlooked or ignored by traditional media. The Pulitzer Center will judge the competition and plans to trim the contestants down to 10 finalists following the initial round.

YouTube viewers will eventually choose the winner.

The winner will receive a $10,000 grant for travel abroad and the opportunity to work with the Pulitzer Center. When the field of contestants gets down to five, they will be given Sony cameras to work with.

David Wagner, computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, led a state of California-commissioned study last year of the three major electronic voting systems. The study found serious vulnerabilities in each system that would allow someone with access to just one of the machines to spread a virus that would infect all the other machines in the system and essentially control the outcome, he said in a panel discussion electronic voting.

The systems have architectural weaknesses, implementation flaws, and defects, similar to problems in commercial software that isn’t designed with security in mind, according to Wagner.

“This puts our election officials in a terrible position,” he said, adding that officials are stuck using the machines. As a result, audits are the only solution.

The audits should be public and they should be done automatically, as they are in California, which requires a paper trail, Wagner said. He praised the California audit methodology in which paper ballots are manually counted in a random sample of precincts.

Other researchers are coming to similar conclusions. At a conference in February, Princeton graduate student J. Alex Halderman suggested using machine-assisted auditing. And Ronald Rivest, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said during a cryptographer’s panel on Tuesday at RSA 2008 that voting systems should not depend on the software to capture the vote, but use paper or some other means.

The problem is, not every state that uses electronic voting equipment has a paper trail and many states don’t do audits, even if they have paper ballots to count, Wagner said.

Hugh Thompson, chief security strategist at corporate security training firm People Security, who has researched flaws in e-voting systems, was pessimistic about whether audits will be widely adopted any time soon.

“If an election is close, in a lot of cases an audit, even if you have a paper trail, isn’t conducted,” he said. “In Florida, the election officials told us at the time that (in the event) they were suspicious, they didn’t have authority to institute a recount.”

Also in Thursday’s podcast: IBM affirms a positive outlook for the year and predicts a good quarter ahead, and Digg founder Kevin Rose sits down with CNET to talk economics and what needs to change at Digg. Plus, Apple sends an invitation to a notebook event next week, and Microsoft unveils its overhaul to
Xbox Live.

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

The tech downturn: How long and how bad?

It’s official: Apple to talk laptops on Oct. 14

Amid gloom, IBM sees sunny forecast

Getting global with Digg’s Kevin Rose

Introducing the new Xbox Live ‘experience’

Solid-state shift in Seagate’s future