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Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

Of course, you’ll have to be proficient in running Python scripts to use the technology. But it could get easier soon: Google said the scripts can be hosted on Google App Engine, its service for running Web-based applications written in Python, so perhaps somebody will set up some tools to make blog migration easier for the non-programmers out there.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it’s rough going. Information isn’t necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Future versions of the technology will support the BlogML data format and a mechanism to synchronize blogs with services that have an API (application programming interface) for accessing data but not import-export abilities.

That means that a person could convert an exported file into a format another blog system comprehends, permitting the data to be imported into the new system. That could make it easier for a person to move to Google’s own service–but also to move off it.

Google, which actually has a “data liberation team,” announced the Blog Converters project to deal with the situation. It released a collection of libraries and scripts, written in the Python language, that converts between the export formats of LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, and Google’s own Blogger service, said J.J. Lueck of the team in a blog posting about the Blog Converters project.

Google added an import-export feature to Blogger in December. The company’s “don’t be evil” slogan got its start in a discussion about the company’s commitment not to lock up people’s data such as e-mail archives.

“Traditionally Democrats would be less open to free trade, but these days it’s very hard to predict what a political party is going to do,” Gornick said. “I wish Ron Paul were running.”

“From what I understand from CEA interactions in Denver, the interesting takeaway is the number of policy makers who say they agree on trade, but report how difficult the political environment is,” said Tom Galvin, a partner for 463 Communications, a consulting firm assisting the CEA in its efforts. “Hopefully, once the political season is over we’ll see a less charged environment and the trade agreements can be considered at that time.”

The technology platform provided on Obama’s Web site says that “Barack Obama supports a trade policy that ensures our goods and services are treated fairly in foreign markets. At the same time, trade policy must stay consistent with our commitment to demand improved labor and environmental practices worldwide.”

“The expansion of trade and global supply chains has undoubtedly played a role” in dropping prices, said Dan Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

It’s a message that should resonate with politicians: The consumer price index (CPI) for imported electronic machinery and TV and sound equipment has dropped by 11 percent since 2000, even as the overall CPI has increased by 28 percent.

DENVER–Technology companies are here at the Democratic convention this week to highlight more than just their new products–they’re pushing an agenda as well.

“Admittedly we are shifting in the kinds of jobs, but generally they are higher paying jobs,” she said. “The biggest reason jobs go away is not because of free trade but advances in technology that change the way we do things.”

The Consumer Electronics Association, a lobbying firm that represents 2,200 technology companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Hitachi, brought its 28-state “America Wins with Trade” bus tour to Denver this week to convince Democrats that free trade benefits the tech industry, as well as consumers. Groups with opposing views are taking a high profile at the convention, however, and the conflicting interests in the party are apparent from its mixed messages on trade.

The convention proceedings on Tuesday night included remarks from no less than five union members, including John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. His union earlier in the year committed $53.4 million for pro-Democrat campaigns in battleground states–part of an unprecedented $200 million effort from various labor groups.

It is, in fact, a message that the Democrats’ new leadership could very well embrace. “There is no doubt that globalization has brought significant benefits to American consumers,” Barack Obama wrote in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope. “It’s lowered prices on goods once considered luxuries, from big-screen TVs to peaches in winter, and increased the purchasing power of low-income Americans.”

Gornick’s business, which designs and builds high-performance loudspeakers, would benefit from lifted non-tariff trade barriers in countries with large middle-class populations like South Korea. She said the efficiencies created by free trade would, counter to common belief, create new jobs.

“There’s a saying that no two countries that support the golden arches have ever been at war,” said Kathy Gornick, president of Thiel Audio, which is represented by the CEA.

The interests of the CEA are directly at odds with those of the major unions that heavily support the Democratic Party. Leo Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers, has had a ubiquitous presence at the convention, urging state delegates to support Obama because he would protect American jobs from “rotten trade deals.” He spoke to bloggers on Tuesday in the Big Tent about “some misguided Democrats” who support free trade deals, “leading to a trade deficit.”

Meanwhile, Congress has given no indication it will approve any of the three trade deals in question.

The poll was conducted by Zogby International from August 12 to August 14 and has a margin of error of 1.7 percent. It surveyed 3,440 people, including more than 1,200 Democrats. Corresponding poll numbers on Republican perceptions about free trade will be released next week during the Republican convention.

Gornick of Thiel Audio demurred to say whether she favored an Obama or McCain presidency.

Interested in getting Democratic leadership to revive stalled trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and Korea, the CEA unveiled poll numbers Monday indicating that Democrats are becoming more accepting of free trade: 62 percent of Democrats said they benefit from free trade, and 69 percent said it was a “good thing” that trade and global manufacturing have reduced the costs of consumer electronics sold in the United States.

How many of these small cores (which Intel calls mini-cores) will Larrabee have? Heise says that Larrabee will have 32 processing cores.

Larrabee, due in 2009-2010, is a high-end graphics chip with many processing cores targeting market segments that Nvidia and AMD-ATI now dominate.

The technology Web site, ARS Technica, is also saying that Larrabee is based on the P54C Pentium core.

Here’s the starting point for the Larrabee-is-a-Pentium theme. The Web site Custom PC cited an article from German-language Heise, in which Custom PC says–via a link to a Babel Fish translation of the Heise article–Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger discusses Larrabee and Pentium.

Intel has been casting doubt on the reports in an attempt, apparently, to keep the information under wraps. Intel said this Tuesday: The Heise “story does not say that Pat (Gelsinger) confirmed anything. Neither number of cores, not the type of cores. The Babel Fish translation is misleading.”

Larrabee has been ridiculed by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang as nothing more than a “PowerPoint slide” since few tangible particulars have yet to emerge about the processor though Intel mentions the future chip often.

The cores in Larrabee will have a “basic commonality” with the P54C Pentium, the source said. The P54C was introduced back in 1994.

Intel currently offers a dual-core Pentium processor; Intel will use a core based on older Pentium technology in Larrabee.

The “rumor” is true: Intel’s future Larrabee graphics chip does use processing cores based on the company’s venerable Pentium chip.

(Credit:
Intel)

Though Intel is refusing to confirm the report, the Heise article is true, according to a source who has accurate data about Larrabee.

Update at 9:00 a.m. PDT July 9 adding new information that links Larrabee cores to Pentium technology

Intel is expected to provide further details on Larrabee at upcoming conferences including Siggraph next month in Los Angeles.

Slashdot link here: Larrabee Based On a Bundle of Old Pentium Chips.

Peters’ video, shown below, addresses the Iraq war, the environment, health care, and other issues. It will be shown during the Democratic convention, where Peters will get to record a video documenting Barack Obama’s activities for a day.

Viewers chose Peters’ video out of five finalists presented in YouTube’s video contest posing the question, “Why are you a Democrat in 2008?” The Democratic National Convention Committee picked the five finalists from hundreds of submissions. The Republican National Committee is hosting a corresponding contest, “Why are you a Republican in 2008?” but a winner has yet to be announced.

Rich Peters of Iowa City, Iowa, explained why he’s a Democrat in a simple video with a few scene changes, a dog as a prop, and straightforward analysis– and now YouTube will fly Peters to the Democratic Convention in Denver to present his video and travel with the press pool for a day.

Interest in the party conventions has waned in recent years: Nielsen Media Research showed 15.5 million homes tuned in to the Democratic convention in 2004 and 16.8 million watched the Republican convention, compared with around 20 million who watched both parties’ conventions in 1992. The parties are turning to the Internet to bolster public engagement in the formal nominating processes, using Google Maps to answer questions, and podcasts to give updates on convention preparations.

John Cardillo, the CEO of Sentinel, gave an interview to TechCrunch in which he said thousands of those who were banned from MySpace can now be found on Facebook–not yet one of Sentinel’s clients.

MySpace announced on Tuesday that it has deleted 90,000 accounts owned by registered sex offenders. It’s good news for families, for MySpace, and for the state attorney general of Connecticut, who demanded last month that the News Corp.-owned social network turn over a roster of names.

What we would prefer to see is a more pragmatic and methodical policing of social networks for ongoing threats. Shock-and-awe press tactics aren’t the way to go, especially because threats on the Web are much more complicated than they may appear.

Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, also described in a reaction to the story how Facebook monitors its service to protect minors. “We have not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook,” he said in a statement.

Let’s all take a deep breath and remember that this is about the safety of kids everywhere, not about marketing or selling a product, or looking better in the eyes of the world than your industry competitor.

It’s especially good news for Sentinel, the security company that MySpace used to track down the accounts. And now Sentinel appears to be trying to take advantage of its success with MySpace into a PR campaign partly aimed at getting Facebook into signing a contract as well.

Facebook’s representatives weren’t thrilled by the “safe haven” allegation, to say the least.

Unfairly accused? With the headline of the TechCrunch post referring to sex offenders on Facebook as “refugees,” and Cardillo calling the Palo Alto-based social network a “safe haven” for them, you’d think that there was some kind of mass creation of Facebook profiles on the part of sex offenders who had seen their MySpace profiles axed. There is, however, no evidence of that. Millions of people have profiles on both social networks, so it’s safe to assume that sex offenders probably do as well.

“For a company that has a mission to keep kids safe, we find it irresponsible that they wouldn’t share this with us,” representative Barry Schnitt told TechCrunch in an addendum to the tech blog’s original post. “Or, if not with us, how about with law enforcement? This could have been an announcement that Sentinel and Facebook removed 8,000 potential sex offenders. We still don’t have the information on who they are. If you are willing to share that with us, we will investigate immediately.”

“As the first and only social-networking site to use state-of-the-art technology to identify and remove registered sex offenders from its site, MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections,” a statement from MySpace read. “As part of our long-standing partnership with law enforcement and state attorneys general, we will continue to readily provide information on these removed offenders for their investigations.”

PR scuffles between Facebook and MySpace are nothing new. In this case, however, it appears that a third party, Sentinel, is using its success with one client (MySpace) to force another (Facebook) into signing up for the service as well–and is doing so by manipulating media coverage to back Facebook into a corner.

Later, Schnitt told CNET News that while about 4,600 of the 8,000 names on Sentinel’s list were directly tied to Facebook user IDs and have now had the corresponding accounts disabled, the rest only matched up to names. One of the names on the list, for example, was “Aaron Smith”–which has more than 500 member matches on Facebook.

Publishers currently in the Yahoo Publisher Network will benefit from Google’s advertising technology, potentially increasing the revenue they earn from their sites.

This does not remove a competitor from the playing field. Yahoo will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating. Even during this agreement, Yahoo! can use our technology as much or as little as it chooses.

The Internet is a healthy, competitive environment where content creators, advertisers and users come together to access information, communicate and create new business opportunities. We think this deal extends these benefits–it’s good for users, advertisers and publishers and good for the industry.

Advertisers will have new ways to reach their target customers online more efficiently.

This does not let Google raise prices for advertisers. Google does not set the prices manually for ads; rather, advertisers themselves determine prices through an ongoing competitive auction. We have found over years of research that an auction is by far the most efficient way to price search advertising and have no intention of changing that.

Kordestani said that Google has already been in touch with antitrust authorities. “We have been in contact with regulators about this arrangement, and we expect to work closely with them to answer their questions about the transaction,” he said. “Ultimately we believe that the efficiencies of this agreement will help preserve competition.”

This is not a merger. Rather, we are merely providing access to our advertising technology to Yahoo through our AdSense program.

Microsoft has yet to comment, but it has previously indicated that it sees any deal that Google might strike with Yahoo as potentially anticompetitive.

Consumers will see more relevant ads when they are looking for information and browsing the Web. And with interoperability between IM services, users will have easier access to even more of their contacts.

“Quite simply, we think it is good for users, advertisers and publishers,” Omid Kordestani said in a blog posted on Thursday. “By offering Google’s industry-leading technology to Yahoo, the whole system becomes more efficient, and everyone benefits.”

Why did we make this agreement? Quite simply, we think it is good for users, advertisers and publishers. By offering Google’s industry-leading technology to Yahoo, the whole system becomes more efficient, and everyone benefits:

With Microsoft and others certain to raise antitrust challenges over its pact with Yahoo, Google attempted to make its case Thursday for why the deal should be viewed favorably.

“We will closely examine the joint venture between Google and Yahoo announced today,” Senator Herb Kohl, Democratic chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said in a statement. “This collaboration between two technology giants and direct competitors for Internet advertising and search services raises important competition concerns. The consequences for advertisers and consumers could be far-reaching and warrant careful review, and we plan to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of this deal further in the Antitrust Subcommittee.”

We have been in contact with regulators about this arrangement, and we expect to work closely with them to answer their questions about the transaction. Ultimately we believe that the efficiencies of this agreement will help preserve competition.

It is important to say what this agreement is not:

We are proud of the advertising technologies we have built, which show users a relevant ad whether they are searching for a specific item or browsing the internet. This arrangement extends those benefits to Yahoo and its many users, advertisers and publisher partners. We currently provide similar services to sites like AOL and Ask.com as well as many other partners, and we work closely with all of our partners to ensure that our partnership drives their long term success.

We also think this is good for competition. The truth is, this kind of arrangement is commonplace in many industries, and it doesn’t foreclose robust competition. Toyota sells its hybrid technology to General Motors, even though they are the number one and number two
car manufacturers globally. Canon provides laser printer engines for HP, despite also competing in the broader laser printer market. Google and Yahoo will continue to be vigorous competitors, and that competition will help fuel innovation that is good for users.

This does not prevent Yahoo from making similar arrangements with others. This arrangement is not exclusive, meaning that Yahoo could enter into similar arrangements with other companies.

One U.S. Senator, meanwhile, urged the deal get a close look.

This does not increase Google’s share of search traffic. Yahoo will continue to run its own search engine and advertising programs, and the agreement will not increase Google’s share of search traffic.

Today, we announced a non-exclusive advertising agreement that will provide Yahoo with access to our AdSense for search and AdSense for content advertising programs on their U.S. and Canadian web properties. In addition, we will work to enable interoperability between our respective instant messaging services allowing users better, broader communication online.

Here’s the full text of Kordestani’s blog:

O’Grady at RedMonk, too, argued that Google should open-source portions of its infrastructure or offer an API (application programming interface) to its data store that would ease portability to other databases.

Updated at 8:45 a.m. PT with information from Google App Engine blog on planned data migration tools.

But Google? The search giant is hosting a Web development conference next month, not to sell more software stacks or subscriptions, but to encourage more apps–and people–to move to the Web, it says.

But it’s also possible that this is one more sign that one of the big guys is forgetting the principles–the Internet as a platform (not “my company as a platform”), harnessing the power of user contribution (which, as John Musser pointed out, means that you always “pay the user first”), small pieces loosely joined–that brought their success in the first place.

Still, O’Reilly takes Google to task for the lack of application portability–at least in this first iteration of Google App Engine.

Tim O’Reilly dissected whether Google’s App Engine is a lock-in play on Monday, and RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady hit the issue head-on with his excellent Q&A on what Google App Engine actually is.

Google appears to already be on the case of data portability. On the Google App Engine Blog, software engineer Kevin Gibbs said that one planned feature is large-scale data import and export.

“With Google App Engine, you own all the data in your app. As stated in our terms, you always have the right to get your data out of Google App Engine at any point. We wouldn’t have it any other way,” Gibbs wrote.

Think his concerns are overblown? He’s not the only one.

As people get their heads around Google App Engine, they see some things they may not like. Namely, the dreaded “lock-in.”

“Now, it may be that this is a temporary oversight, and that Google does intend, long-term, to make it easy for developers to export their applications. After all, Eric Schmidt says he reminds his employees all the time, “Don’t fight the Internet.”

Given that we’re at an early point in platform-as-a-service offerings, I’d say lock-in, to some degree, is inevitable. Most people consider Salesforce.com’s Force.com closed, as it’s based on the company’s database and query language.

Developers for years have been clamoring for more openness and standards. They are tenets of the open-source movement.

One thing both Amazon and Google could do to really show they are serious about their platforms is open up their data engines, which are really the core of most Web applications–open-source BigTable and SimpleDB. This would really reduce lock-in and make development easier, and it might even lead to some help improving their services.

It’s likely that Google will allow applications written with other languages, like JavaScript. But the nub of online-platform lock-in comes from the data store, Bosworth said.

But as more application development moves to hosted platforms, does data and application portability get lost in “the cloud”?

But it’s good to see these issues raised and for developers to push for more openness. After all, standards, portability, and interoperability have been good to the Web.

Within a few days of its release, programmer Chris Anderson wrote some open-source software, called AppDrop, that shows that you can conceivably run an instance written for Google App Engine on Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon’s hosted server platform.

Developer Alex Bosworth listed lock-in as his top concern with Google App Engine.

Once again, Google gets tongues a-waggin’, even when it isn’t the first to a party.

The organization, which is known for taking positions on issues like privacy, asked Kohl to press antitrust regulators to address potential privacy issues arising out of the search advertising partnership, as well as concerns about the deal reducing competition in the market. According to the letter:

Earlier this month, the Association of National Advertisers expressed similar concerns as the Digital Democracy, relating to potentially rising advertising prices and reduced competition in the marketplace over time.

The letter to Kohl also notes that the group had already issued its complaints to the Justice Department last July.

It is crucial that the U.S. do everything it can to promote competition in the key digital advertising market, especially given its emerging core role as the principal means supporting online editorial content. Unless action is taken–the deal opposed or, at the very least, meaningful conditions imposed, serious competitive harm will be inflicted on this vital sector of the U.S. economy.

Yahoo! has made clear that it will still use its own system to serve ads, and it will use extra revenue from this deal to improve its ad platform. The arrangement covers only the U.S. and Canada, and excludes the fast-growing mobile segment. Yahoo! also has an economic incentive to keep serving as many of its own ads as possible, since it gets to keep all of the revenue from those ads, while receiving only part of the revenue from ads served by Google.

The Center for Digital Democracy also cited concerns that the transaction may undermine competition and could ultimately reduce payments to newspaper publishers, which receive revenue from the two companies’ online search ads and related services.

Neither Google nor Yahoo! set ad prices. Ads are priced by an auction where an advertiser only bids what an ad is worth to them. And because of the wide variety of keywords and ads it is impossible for anyone to predict with certainty what might happen to prices for individual queries or even across the board. Furthermore, ad price is only one part of the story. A more important measure for advertisers large and small is the return on investment of their advertising dollar. The Google-Yahoo! agreement will help advertisers convert more clicks into customers by showing more relevant ads on Yahoo!, giving advertisers a better return for every dollar they invest.

Under the proposed deal, Google’s paid ads would appear on Yahoo’s search pages, an arrangement through which Yahoo expects to generate an additional $800 million in revenues within the first year. In terms of the competitive landscape, Google holds a substantial lead over its competitors Yahoo and Microsoft in the market for search advertising.

Google announced Thursday that it has launched a Web site about its deal with Yahoo to serve as a FAQ.

In its FAQ, Google addresses the pricing issue by noting:

The Center for Digital Democracy asked Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), to call on the Department of Justice to oppose the partnership between the two companies, or at a minimum establish “meaningful safeguards” to the arrangement.

And Google offered this perspective on whether Yahoo will eventually outsource an increasing volume of its ads to Google to the point where it would cease to be in that line of business:

But Yahoo, according to a letter (PDF) obtained by CNET News, had its U.S. executive vice president, Hilary Schneider, respond to the ANA concerns with this:

This is exactly the opposite of our business goals in pursuing this agreement. The essence of our strategy is to 1) enhance the search user experience by showing the most relevant ads, and 2) show ads that deliver the most value to advertisers and to Yahoo! For example, the agreement allows us to provide more valuable results to queries where we have no coverage or are under‐covered, and importantly to use the proceeds to develop products and services that scale and will strengthen our own marketplace.

Update at 10:43 a.m. PDT: Additional information added relating to Google’s FAQ Web site.

Federal antitrust regulators have recently narrowed their focus on the proposed transaction to whether it will lead to increased prices for advertisers in the short term and, in the longer term, lead to Yahoo exiting the online search advertising market altogether. Privacy is not a topic of interest for the antitrust regulators, much to the dismay of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Google and Yahoo’s controversial search advertising partnership deal took another hit Thursday, as consumer and public interest group Center for Digital Democracy fired off an opposition letter (PDF) to the chairman of the Senate antitrust committee.

In the coming days and weeks, it will become more clear whether the Department of Justice shares those views.

Google, meanwhile, is not standing still as various organizations weigh in on its proposed transaction with Yahoo.

On blogging site MetaFilter, an attacker could have exploited the vulnerability to take control of a user’s account.

(Via IDG News Service.)

“We take the security of our site and our users very seriously and act quickly to address any vulnerabilities,” she said in a statement. “The issues outlined in the report have been resolved. We were notified last year by Ed Felten about ‘E-mail This’ and fixed the problem he outlined then within days. On Tuesday, we were alerted to a more complicated variant of the same problem (in their blog post) and we closed that security hole immediately.”

The YouTube hole could have allowed an attacker to add videos to a user’s “favorites,” join the user’s “friend” or “family” list, send messages on behalf of the user, flag videos as inappropriate and share video with the user’s contacts, among other things.

The report says The New York Times site had not been entirely fixed. However, a New York Times spokeswoman said it now has been.

A new report from researchers at Princeton University reveals serious Web site security holes that could have been exploited to steal ING customers’ money and compromise user privacy on YouTube, The New York Times’ Web site, and MetaFilter.

The sites have all fixed the holes after being notified by the report’s (PDF) researchers, William Zeller and renowned security and privacy researcher and Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten.

“These attacks have been called the ’sleeping giant’ of web-based vulnerabilities, because many sites on the Internet fail to protect against them and because they have been largely ignored by the web development and security communities,” Zeller and Felten wrote.

(Credit:
William Zeller and Edward Felten)

On the ING site, the vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to open an account on behalf of a customer and transfer funds from the customer’s legitimate account into that account.

The vulnerability arises from a coding flaw that could allow someone to do a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack in which a “malicious Web site causes a user’s Web browser to perform an unwanted action on a trusted site,” according to the report.

And The New York Times site vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to harvest e-mail addresses of people who use a feature on the site to e-mail articles to other people. The victim’s e-mail address could then be used for spamming.

The researchers suggest fixes that Web sites can make on their servers to close the security hole and they released a
Firefox plug-in that can protect consumer PCs even if sites have not fixed the vulnerability.

Updated at 1:30 p.m. PDT with the New York Times saying they fixed the hole.

In this illustration of a cross-site request forgery attack, a malicious Web site causes a user's browser to send a request to a trusted site. The trusted site sees a valid, authenticated request from the browser and does what is asked. "CSRF attacks are possible because Web sites authenticate the web browser, not the user," the report says.

On Tuesday, Check Point Software Technologies announced support for the Apple iPhone through its Virtual Private Networking (VPN) software tool VPN-1.

Using the
iPhone’s embedded Layer 2 Transport Protocol (L2TP) client, VPN-1 is able to provide secure, encrypted access for iPhone users communicating with enterprises currently running Check Point’s VPN-1 gateway.