'Aaron's Law' could have unintended consequences

The suicide of Internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz has prompted a variation on the classic "there-ought-to-be-a-law" response to tragedy. In this case, it's, "There ought to be an amendment to the law," to prevent what critics have called overzealous prosecution and vastly disproportionate sentencing guidelines.

The law in this case is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), invoked by federal prosecutors to bring a 13-count indictment against Swartz, 26, after he used the MIT computer network to download more than 4 million academic articles from the online archive JSTOR, allegedly without legal authorization, in violation of MIT's terms of service.

U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) filed a bill this week she called "Aaron's Law," that would exclude terms of service violations from the CFAA and wire fraud statutes. In a post on Reddit, the Internet forum that Swartz cofounded, Lofgren wrote that "using the law in this way could criminalize many everyday activities and allow for outlandishly severe penalties.

"A simple way to correct this dangerous legal interpretation is to change the CFAA and the wire fraud statutes to exclude terms of service violations," she wrote.

But several Internet security experts, while expressing sympathy for Swartz's family, say it is not so simple, and that Lofgren's proposal could end up being yet another example of the law of unintended consequences.

[Bill Brenner in Salted Hash: I support 'Aaron's Law' -- for now]

Jody Westby, an attorney and CEO of Global Cyber Risk, said Swartz's death could be blamed on overly zealous prosecution "that crushed a young man." But she said that the proposed amendment to the CFAA "is another form of overkill that would have terribly detrimental consequences."

"[The CFAA language regarding terms-of-service violations]Ã'Â is absolutely essential in arresting insiders who steal or misuse confidential or proprietary data they were not given access to, and also criminals who hack into computers or plant malware to steal credentials or exfiltrate data," Westby said.

Randy Sabett, an attorney with ZwillGen and an expert in information security and intellectual property, said: "To isolate this law as the showpiece cause of a terrible tragedy, and therefore wipe out an entire remedy for criminal activity and intent is not the way to go."

Swartz, the founder and director of Demand Progress, co-author of RSS and a former research fellow at Harvard's Center for Ethics, was an outspoken crusader for making information free on the Internet, and prosecutors say he had planned to make the articles he obtained available to the public for free, as a political statement about access to knowledge.

He was scheduled to go to trial in April, and could have faced as many as 35 years in prison and as much as $1 million in fines, although the U.S. Attorney's office had reportedly offered a plea bargain that would have resulted in six months of jail time.

However, since his death, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz has faced a firestorm of criticism, including a petition demanding her removal, which this week reached 25,000 signatures, however the White House has increased the theshold for a response from 25,000 to 100,000 petitions.Ã'Â

Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in a blog post earlier this week that the CFAA is indeed badly flawed. "The government should never have thrown the book at Aaron for accessing MIT's network and downloading scholarly research," she wrote. "However, some extremely problematic elements of the law made it possible."

One of them is that the law doesn't clearly define what "authorization" to access protected computers means, she wrote. "Creative prosecutors have taken advantage of this confusion to craft criminal charges that aren't really about hacking a computer but instead (to) target other behavior the prosecutors don't like," she said, adding that a second major problem is that sentences for hacking crimes are far too severe.

Westby said there might be a need for the law's language to be more precise, and for sentencing guidelines to be adjusted. She suggested that Lofgren's bill should, "serve as a basis for Congressional hearings on what guidelines exist for prosecutors in handling CFAA cases."

But she said simply exempting terms-of-service violations from criminal penalties would be disastrous. "It would leave all businesses, individuals, and governments unable to use the CFAA to prosecute cybercriminals in circumstances where the perpetrator was violating terms of use, contractual obligations, or company policies."

"I do not say this with a hard heart. I lost a very close friend who committed suicide over extreme prosecutorial conduct over a relatively minor securities violation," she said. "What happened is that four boys lost their father. There are bounds of decency in prosecutorial conduct and certainly looking at damage should be a factor."

Sabett said if the penalties are indeed disproportionate, that is what should be changed. "Change the remedies," he said. "But don't wipe out a whole provision of the law. Any deterrent effect it would have against criminals would no longer exist."

A terrible tragedy should not eliminate the ability to bring charges for criminal behavior, he said. "Even if you say you're doing it for the common man -- that it is OK because it is for the greater good -- if it is a crime, then it is still a crime."

Read more about access control in CSOonline's Access Control section.

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Tech hotshots: The rise of the UX expert

Roberto Masiero vividly remembers the moment in 2011 when it became clear to him that designing a mobile application was a considerably different effort than designing a desktop application.

As head of the innovation labs for ADP, the $10 billion payroll services firm, he managed the engineering team tasked with creating ADP Mobile, the company's version of its human capital management application for mobile devices.

"We started out with a list of 100 features that we thought were awesome," Masiero remembers, but his team's enthusiasm ran smack into the collective disdain of the user experience designers they'd brought in from an outside agency, who deemed feature after feature irrelevant for mobile users, arguing that so many options would just confuse them.

By the time the designers were done, they had whittled the list of features down by 80%. "Their message was simple," says Masiero. "Less is more." In a mobile application, it is better to cleanly provide the 20 most important pieces of information than force people to navigate through 100 that they might never use. "We learned that you have to drop completeness in the name of usefulness."

What's more, Masiero, like a lot of other tech leaders, realized that in this age of mobility and user-driven technology, IT shops that don't have a user experience expert onboard need to get serious about begging, borrowing or stealing one -- an increasingly difficult proposition.

Developers with user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) expertise are hot these days, according to Shane Bernstein, managing director of QConnects, a Culver City, Calif.-based digital recruitment firm. And it's a fairly recent phenomenon, he says. Between 2010 and 2011, QConnects saw a 25% increase in the number of requests for UX designers; between 2011 and 2012, the increase was 70%.

Salaries are going up as well. Recruiters cite starting salaries ranging from $70,000 to $110,000, with the upper end hitting $150,000 and up. The Creative Group, a division of Robert Half Technology that specializes in design, marketing and interactive talent, began tracking UX designers separately in its annual salary survey in 2011. Salaries went up 6.2% in 2012 and it expects another 4.8% increase in 2013.

"And be prepared for a local variance factor," says Donna Farrugia, executive director of The Creative Group. "If you live between San Francisco and San Jose, add 30%."

Thanks to Apple, users expect perfection

In design parlance, the user interface (UI) is what the user sees; the user experience (UX) is how the application behaves. Both recruiters and practitioners stress that designers need to know the latter as much as the former. That is, they need to concentrate not only on how a design looks, but on the whole "wireframe" of the application, and where their requests are going into the back-end of the system.

What's driving the demand for such skills? Many people in the industry lay the credit -- or perhaps blame -- on Apple, with its near-fetishistic attention to how design, hardware and interface intersect. "Now people expect everything they interface with to have the ease of use of the iPhone," says Matt Miller, CTO of Irvine, Calif.-based technical recruiting firm CyberCoders.

"Apple forces everybody to match their aesthetic," agrees Masiero. "The image of your brand is at stake in your mobile application now. Companies that have great design, whether they're a restaurant chain or a car manufacturer, have a more valuable brand," and the same standards apply internally, he says.

Moreover, as mobile computing explodes, a company's client base becomes both broader and more demanding of a consumer-like product experience. As Masiero notes, 10 years ago his company's sole target audience was the human resources department. That's no longer true.

"With mobile devices becoming ubiquitous, we have to serve 30 million users, from somebody on a construction site to an airline pilot to a hotel manager. And you have to create a design so that the experience is accessible to everyone, while still providing them with a sense of uniqueness," he says.

High tech, high touch

With design at the forefront of everyone's mind, UX experts are suddenly in high demand and short supply. One reason they're hard to find is that the position spans multiple disciplines: design, programming and human behavior. "When you find that person, let me know," jokes Masiero.

"We do a little bit of market research, a little bit of psychology. We're synthesizers, pulling bits and pieces of different methodologies together," says UX designer Whitney Quesenberry, who runs her own agency in High Bridge, N.J. and has done work for Novartis, Siemens, Dow Jones and Eli Lilly among other companies. "UX is like programming -- there's not just one job involved."

Why UX designers love their jobs

The job description is amorphous and challenging -- to understand a given app's interface requirements, user experience context and back-end machinations. But the pay is mighty attractive -- between $70,000 and $110,000 to start, recruiters say -- and the perks associated with a UX (user experience) position sound like the halcyon days of the Internet boom: stock options, signing bonuses, flexible work hours.

One recruiter reported seeing one company offering liquor in its vending machines, and one employer offered designers unlimited time off (in return for results, of course).

And UX designers themselves say there are other, intangible benefits to the position. "Money only takes you so far," says Michael Beasley, a designer for Internet marketing agency Pure Visibility in Ann Arbor, Mich. "The work has to be interesting, not the same things over and over again. I like having fresh problems to tackle and the feeling that I'm making a difference for our clients."

Whitney Quesenberry, a UX designer who runs her own agency in High Bridge, N.J., says, "The real perk is meaningful work. Why would anybody want to work on something where you spend the first six months writing about requirements and the next six arguing about them?"

Quesenberry's advice for becoming a highly prized designer with both technical depth and design breadth? Check out one of the multiple masters' programs, such as the one at the University of Michigan, aimed at people already in the workforce, or talk your way onto one of the hybrid design teams that are becoming more prevalent within IT departments and learn all you can.

The Creative Group's Farrugia insists that the more cross-disciplined a designer is, the better, with the ability to combine good design and layout background with technology skills encompassing HTML coding and JavaScript. "The ideal is this hybrid person who's both right-brained and left-brained, high tech and high touch."

That pretty closely describes Michael Beasley, a designer for Internet marketing agency Pure Visibility in Ann Arbor, Mich. He got a BA in both English and music from the University of Michigan, and then stayed to get his masters' degree in Human-Computer Interaction from its School of Information in 2005.

"That's where I got my approach to interface design," Beasley says. "The multidisciplinary approach taught me design, human cognition and usability principles and methods. I also got a good understanding of how organizations work and information flows. That made me a pretty well-rounded person."

That kind of background sits well with IT managers like Masiero, for whom good design goes deeper than rounded corners on icons. "I want you to be a wizard of understanding the mental model of the user and translating that into the behavior of the application. You have to always think about making the user comfortable, about not creating any friction between what the user expects to happen and what the application expects from the user."

"Designers who understand human interaction are one step ahead of everyone else," agrees Farrugia. "They are rare and precious commodities."

Grow your own UX team?

With so much in the business world dependent on the success of mobile applications these days, most companies feel they can't forego development until colleges or vocational schools churn out more graduates with the ideal mix of design and coding sensibilities.

In the meantime, they cope by forming multidisciplinary teams to stand in for one perfect UX expert. "A designer might not be able to program, but they should be able to have a reasonable conversation with a programmer so they understand the impact of a design decision," says Quesenberry.

Farrugia has seen these hybrid design teams form more frequently over the past few years. "We've been coaching people in the design world to learn interaction and Web and digital skills, so they've been adding to their portfolio. Vice versa, people on the technical side are interacting more frequently with the front-end team to understand usability, personas and usage scenarios."

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EU Commissioner Kroes won't be bullied on net neutrality, says spokesman

Europe's digital agenda commissioner will not succumb to pressure on the issue of net neutrality, her spokesman said via Twitter on Friday.

In response to allegations by digital rights organization La Quadrature du Net that Commissioner Neelie Kroes had caved in to telecoms operators and was giving up on net neutrality, her spokesman Ryan Heath tweeted, "anyone thinking @NeelieKroesEU would let herself be bullied into diff opinions by any company/NGO, well, that just isn't her #NetNeutrality".

In her blog on Thursday, Kroes said consumers should be free to make their own choices about their Internet subscriptions, but that this "does not preclude consumers from subscribing to more differentiated, limited Internet offers, possibly for a lower price."

La Quadrature du Net interpreted this to mean that "Kroes supports the creation of a fragmented Internet, banning innovation and opening the door to unacceptable censorship."

"By deliberately ignoring that such offers would change almost nothing for operators in terms of cost, but would allow them to avoid investing in the development of network capacity while restraining possibilities for citizen participation, Neelie Kroes takes into account only short-term private interests that run contrary to public interest," the organization said in a press statement.

Kroes responded in an emailed statement, saying: "Make no mistake: I am in favor of an open Internet and maximum choice. That must be protected. But you don't need me or the E.U. telling you what sort of Internet services you must pay for."

The Commissioner had pointed out that opting for blocking ads or requesting privacy via do-not-track mechanisms "may mean you don't get access to content for free."

"The Internet does not run on its own. The network, content and Internet access all have to be paid for by someone. Many smaller web operators exist on the basis of innovative advertising models. There are various ways consumers pay for content, including by viewing advertisements before or during their access to content. Businesses should accept that different consumers will have different preferences, and design services accordingly," Kroes said.

Follow Jennifer on Twitter at @BrusselsGeek or email tips and comments to jennifer_baker@idg.com.

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Megaupload successor to offer 50GB free storage

A year to the day after his Megaupload sites were shuttered by the U.S. Department of Justice for copyright infringement, Kim Dotcom unveiled plans for a new file-sharing site offering 50GB of free space to members.

Dotcom posted the announcement on Twitter this week, saying that he also hopes to transfer all data from his defunct Megaupload site to the new site, Mega. Mega will be listed under the New Zealand-based domain Mega.co.nz

In his initial tweets, Dotcom wrote that it will have "very generous limits for free users. For example you get 50GB storage for free ;-)."

Dotcom plans to launch Mega on Jan. 20 during a news conference.

Dotcom posted screenshots of the new service on Twitter, showing a file tree-style user interface.

Mega screenshot

The free storage being offered by Mega far exceeds that offered by other current online consumer cloud storage and file-sharing sites such as Dropbox, Carbonite, Google Drive and Microsoft's SkyDrive, which offer from 2GB to 7GB of free capacity on signup.

Additionally, Dotcom tweeted that he is working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in court in the hopes of being able to migrate data from his defunct Megaupload site to the new Mega site.

Mega screenshot

Mega was initially announced in October 2012. At that time, the DOJ filed an opposing motion, andindicated that a new file-sharing site might violate the terms of Dotcom's bail, meaning he could face new criminal charges.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

See more by Lucas Mearian on Computerworld.com.

Read more about cloud storage in Computerworld's Cloud Storage Topic Center.

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Lands' End, software vendor at contract impasse after 20-year relationship

Lands' End is at legal loggerheads with its longtime payroll software vendor over how much longer the clothier can lawfully use the application, with US$1 million in potential fees hanging in the balance.

Lands' End signed a 20-year contract with Genesys Software Systems in January 1993, but the software didn't go live until Oct. 28 of that year, according to its complaint filed this week in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. Genesys was acquired by PeopleStrategy in 2010.

Now Lands' End is moving to another software vendor, and in August "reached out to Genesys to attempt to clarify and, if necessary, extend the license to cover the expected transition period."

Early discussions were "productive" but Genesys later broke off talks, according to the complaint. On Jan. 9, the two companies held a conference call during which Genesys officials said that Lands' End's license would be terminated on Jan. 19.

In addition, "reneging on previous offers, informed Lands' End that it only would extend the license if Lands' End paid Genesys approximately $1 million," according to the complaint.

That was apparently because Genesys' licensing policy had changed sometime during the companies' 20-year relationship.

"We no longer offer term licenses, but our perpetual license is currently priced at $999,950," wrote Colin Macdonald, director of finance at PeopleStrategy, in an email to Lands' End dated Jan. 9. Lands' End included the email in its court filing.

Genesys attorneys sent Lands' End a letter on Jan. 14, demanding that it uninstall the software and "send written certification of these activities" by the end of Jan. 19, the complaint adds. Genesys also "threatened to seek a temporary restraining order and all fees in connection with such action if Lands' End does not comply with these demands."

Lands' End, however, is maintaining that it has the right to keep using Genesys' software until Oct. 28 of this year, which would be 20 years after the go-live date, not the effective date of the agreement. "The License Agreement provides for twenty years of 'use' of the Genesys Software," the complaint states.

"For Lands' End to prematurely cease using the Genesys software and to expedite its transition to a new software vendor would cause Lands' End considerable and unnecessary damage and expense," it adds. Lands' End is asking the court for a declaratory judgment stating that it has the right to continue using the software and that the license term doesn't expire until Oct. 28.

PeopleStrategy didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. As of Friday, it had not filed a response to Lands' End's complaint.

"I would love to hear the story from the Genesys side," said analyst Frank Scavo, president of the consulting firm Strativa. "Unless there are mitigating factors not mentioned in this lawsuit, it would appear that Genesys has a gun pointed to the head of Lands' End. If this was standard language in Genesys' contract 20 years ago, I have to wonder if other customers have run up against this problem and how they have resolved it."

Whatever the outcome of the case, there's a lesson to be learned for all software customers, according to Scavo.

"Twenty years may seem like a long time when you are signing a software agreement, but when you are signing a software agreement, you need to assume you will reach the end of any license period," he said.

"I would advise buyers to negotiate a perpetual license agreement whenever possible," Scavo added. "I would advise buyers to avoid limited term licenses to avoid situations like the one that Lands' End now appears to be in. If the vendor insists on a limited license period, buyers should at least negotiate the terms of extending the license agreement beyond the termination period."

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

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CA upgrades workload automation software

CA Technologies has released the latest update to its Workload Automation software (WLA) featuring more powerful analytics tools, a streamlined user interface and expanded functionality for managing business processes throughout the enterprise.

CA competes with IBM, BMC and others on workload automation. The newest release expands support for SQL Server and has enhancements to the variety of job types that can be managed with the system. New reporting capabilities allow IT managers to centrally track business processes, too.

"WLA is one of our largest product lines because of its ability to orchestrate business services in production environments to deliver value across the spectrum of IT services," says Mark Combs, distinguished senior vice president for CA's mainframe business.

Torsten Volk, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, says CA, as well as other competitors, are increasingly attempting to expand workload automation to be more tightly integrated with business requirements. The hope is to create systems management solutions that can automate and orchestrate entire business processes. Workload automation tools integrate with other enterprise software, such resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and content management systems (CMS). "Workload automation ties all of those things together to ensure they all deliver the right information to the right place at the right time," Volk explains.

Take an example such as a supermarket chain: A cash register system may be connected to an inventory management system, which would be connected to a product ordering system to ensure the shelves are appropriately stocked.

As organizations continue to look to cloud computing models, this process becomes more complex, and the business process awareness of tools such as CA's WLA becomes essential. "Automation and orchestration is the backbone of cloud," Volk says.

CA has competition in the WLA market, though. Volk says IT shops that have existing relations with CA are most likely to stick with CA, and the company has made that easy to do. Graceful upgrades allow IT managers to pick and choose which portions of the WLA package are upgraded at any given time, so previous versions of WLA will work with the new one.

In addition to the SQL Server compatibility, the newest release also includes other new features such as a remote execution agent, which allows up to six remote systems to be handled under a single license. Improvements were also made to further support Oracle and PeopleSoft.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

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Violin Memory buys Gridiron for fast flash storage access

Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has acquired Gridiron Systems for an undisclosed sum and plans to use the company's application acceleration smarts with its flash arrays.

Gridiron's operations units have already been integrated into Violin. The two companies are set to formally announce the deal on Monday. Both companies are privately held.

Gridiron sells an appliance that slots in between an enterprise's storage and servers and speeds up access to data in existing storage arrays. It uses flash, memory, software and proprietary hardware and can make databases and applications run 10 times faster, according to Gridiron's website.

Violin plans to use Gridiron's algorithms, which learn about I/O traffic patterns and cache the active dataset of an application, in its flash storage arrays. Gridiron's technology is well-suited to online transaction processing, data warehouses, virtualization and big-data analytics, according to Violin.

Violin also plans to continue selling Gridiron's appliances, eventually making merged products, said Ashish Gupta, Violin's director of product marketing.

Gridiron is based in Sunnyvale, California, while Violin is located in nearby Mountain View.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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Jobs' house burglar gets seven-year sentence

The man who broke into the Palo Alto, California, home of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and stole laptops, iPads and other possessions has been sentenced 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.

(See: "How police tracked down Steve Jobs' stolen iPads")

The burglary happened between the evening of July 16 and morning of July 17 last year while renovation work was being carried out on the Jobs house, which is now occupied by Jobs' wife.

McFarlin jumped over a construction fence and entered the house through its garage. Once inside, he stole two iMacs, three iPads, three iPods, one Apple TV box, a diamond necklace and earrings, and several other items.

McFarlin admitted to the burglary under questioning by Palo Alto police and said he had stolen from other homes in the San Francisco Bay Area, including two homes in Marin County, four homes in San Francisco County and one home in Alameda County.

He admitted keeping hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of property from those burglaries at his home and at a storage locker. The property included computers, jewelry, furniture and a solid silver bar, according to the Santa Clara District Attorney's office.

At the time of his arrest, he apologized for his crimes and said he had taken to crime because he had money problems and was desperate.

He didn't dispute the charges in court. He was also ordered to pay restitution to the victims of his crimes.

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address ismartyn_williams@idg.com

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5 PC industry omens hidden in Intel's financial statements

Multiply the joy of watching paint dry by the sheer pleasure of watching grass grow, and you'll get a decent idea of how exciting it is to parse the average corporate earnings report.

But everything changes when those numbers come from Intel. Don't get me wrong: Intel's Thursday afternoon earning's call was still soul-suckingly boring. But as one of the cornerstones of the old Wintel homogeny, Intel's yearly results and estimates serve as an unofficial barometer for the PC industry as a whole. As Intel goes, so goes the entire desktop ecosystem, and hidden deep in the company's newly released financial statements are five portents for the PC industry of 2013--and beyond.

1. The PC is not dead

This one's easy: Next time a pundit tells you the PC is going the way of the dodo, tell him to stuff it. Sure, general PC sales were down slightly in 2012--3 percent in the case of Intel's PC Clients Group, and an estimated 3 to 5 percent for the industry overall--but desktops and laptops still do tremendous business.

"If you're looking at 350 million units (shipped in 2012), that is not a dead market," says Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. "The PC industry may be slowing, but it's certainly not dead."

As a whole, Intel managed to snag $53.3 billion--yes, billion with a "B"--in revenue in 2012. That's more than $1 billion week in and week out. Oh, and while Intel's PC revenues were down 3 percent in 2012, actual unit volume was only down 1 percent. Dead? Hah.

2. ...but the focus is changing

No, the consumer PC hasn't given up the ghost, but its days of epic growth have definitely stalled. Intel only expects sales revenues to increase in the single digits in 2013 after the down year of 2012.

Intel sees the writing on the wall and is working hard to diversify its lineup to match industry trends--starting, of course, with those pesky tablets. During his intro to Intel's earnings conference, CFO Stacy Smith spent as much time waxing poetic about the company's 2013 mobile initiatives as he did talking up Ultrabooks and desktop processors. That itself follows a new trend for the company: At CES, Intel's Bay Trail tablet processors and Lexington smartphone processors enjoyed just as much limelight as the upcoming Haswell CPUs.

The company is also placing a bigger focus on business customers, and, yes, the now-ubiquitous cloud. Intel's server-focused Data Center Group was the only division that saw revenues increase in 2012, and Intel expects DCG's revenues to grow in double digits this year. The new focus on servers and mobile technology give Intel a unique chance to double-dip the market.

"Data center and cloud are Intel," Moorhead says. "Their big boosts in sales were driven by that. Every handset and tablet that gets sold connects to the cloud, and Intel is providing the cloud. People forget that their hardware is driving the cloud right now."

ARM, the 800-pound gorilla in the mobile world, is also turning its attention to the cloud, with 64-bit ARM processors expected to hit server racks in 2014. In fact, the entire PC industry has shifted a lot of focus to the business arena, emphasized by Dell and HP's attempted reinventions as enterprise-focused companies.

3. Blurring lines and blending uses

The future, to hear Intel CEO Paul Otellini tell it to investors, lies in hybrids. (That shouldn't come as a surprise if you've been paying attention thus far.)

The first round of Windows 8 hybrids hasn't exactly taken the world by storm, but Otellini expects mobile technology to split into two distinct camps going forward: tablets and phablets in the 5- to 7-inch range, and larger 10-inch-plus offerings. Otellini expects those larger hybrids to offer PC-like performance in a slim, tablet-like form factor thanks to power improvements found in the Haswell and Broadwell processors slated to launch over the next two years. Patrick Moorhead agrees.

"All points converge on 2014," Moorhead says. "In 2014, you'll be able to have a very high performance, 9mm thin, fanless, low-cost tablet based on Haswell technology. At 10 inches and above, you'll be able to slide it right into a keyboard dock. Why on earth would you buy a separate tablet? Because you're not compromising as a notebook, and you're not compromising as a tablet, there really won't be a market for stand-alone 10-inch tablets." That doesn't sound good for Windows RT--or for notebooks, really.

Intel's already laying the base for the flipping, sliding, and oh-so-versatile future of laptops. At CES, the company announced that any laptops powered by Haswell processors will need to sport a touchscreen in order to also sport the Ultrabook name.

4. Racing towards the top

One thing about hybrids, though: They're more expensive than their less-flexible counterparts. Despite recent howls for cheap touchscreen notebooks to boost Windows 8 sales, we're more likely to see manufacturers futzing around in the high end rather than duking it out for low-cost supremacy.

Sales of touch-enabled Windows 8 models in the fourth quarter have convinced Otellini that "people are willing to spend a little bit more to get a more capable product. That's certainly been true in the Apple model for many, many years, and I think there is a model of getting paid for innovation." Get ready to whip out your checkbooks, folks.

NPD data from the holiday season found that the average selling price of an Apple laptop was $1,419--exactly $999 more than the $420 selling price of the average Windows notebook. Meanwhile, sales of Windows notebooks under $500 dropped 16 percent, while sales of $500-plus laptops grew by 4 percent. OEMs aren't dumb. They want in on that gravy train, and we've already seen manufacturers likeDell and Acer dump low-end products to focus on Ultrabooks and other products with higher margins, though that didn't exactly pay off in 2012's down economy.

But fear not, budget-minded PC fans: Cheap laptops aren't quite ready to doddle off into the sunset quite yet. "Intel's not saying they won't participate in the low-end market. In fact, they have parts like Atom and Pentium that prove that they will," Moorhead says. "What they're saying is that they're going to put their focus into new usage models that require higher performance and drive even better experiences."

Those better experiences, Moorhead says, will culminate in Intel's " Perceptual computing" initiative, which blends computer control with human senses. Speaking of innovation...

5. Racing towards the top, part II: Moore continues laying down the law

Consumer PC sales may be slowing, but Intel's focus on creating smaller, better, more efficient processors hasn't wavered. The company is still building towards a bright PC future, spending a whopping $18.2 billion--again, that's billion with a "B"--on R&D and acquisitions last year. That number's expected to jump to $18.9 billion in 2013.

Intel isn't just funding killer company parties with all that cash, either. The company plans to start production on the 14nm chip-making manufacturing process in 2013. "This puts us significantly ahead of the competition," CFO Smith said during the earnings conference. Intel's current Ivy Bridge chips are built using a 22nm manufacturing process, while AMD's processors have been stuck at 28nm.

Expect 14nm Haswell chips to start showing up in 2014, but that's not all Intel has up its sleeve. In 2013, the company also plans to start initial work on the 10nm manufacturing process, the 2016 die-shrink "tick" following the new Skylake "tock" architecture planned for 2015.

But while Intel's chips are getting smaller and smaller, the company's working hard to increase the size of the silicon wafers those chips are cut from. Current wafers measure 300mm, and Intel wants to move to 450mm. Bigger wafers mean lower production costs, which might--just maybe--result in lower CPU prices in the future. Although the move to larger wafers isn't expected to really start ramping up until the latter half of the decade, Intel has already begun investing in the transition process. Yep, Chipzilla thinks long-term.

A key 2012 investment could pay off for both of those initiatives. In July, Intel gave ASML Holdings $3.3 billion to stimulate the development of both 450mm wafers and extreme ultraviolet lithography, a next-gen technology candidate that could help Intel make chips using ever-smaller CMOS manufacturing processes. Intel expects the immersion lithography process used to make current day chips to become ineffective in sub-10nm chips.

Intel has said it doesn't expect the EUVL technology or 450mm wafers to be ready for the 2016 roll-out of 10nm "Skymont" chips, but Otellini declined to provide an update about 10nm chips and the possible use of EUVL when asked about it during the earnings conference.

To infinity, and beyond!

Sure, Intel's operating income may be down a bit in 2012, but taken overall, the company's earnings point to a vibrant, cutting-edge future for PCs, and hundreds of millions of PCs at that. That future might look different than the present we recognize, with more blurring of the lines and segmented niches, but the PC's outlook has never looked brighter--or more utterly transformative.

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Wouldn't it be nice if you could always access your data from anywhere?

A business idea starts simply enough: You identify a need, and then you fill it. It seems that a number of innovative entrepreneurs have identified the need to access data from mobile devices no matter where it's stored, and we're seeing an explosion of solutions designed to address that need.

Where is your data? Mine is all over the place. I have data stored locally on my PCs and tablets, and data stored on external USB hard drives, and data stored across various cloud-based services including iCloud, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and possibly others I've forgotten about. Some of the data is redundant--duplicates of data stored elsewhere--and I do my best to consolidate the data I really need in one place, but there's still an opportunity there for a provider to give me a tool that just lets me access all of it no matter what device or platform I'm using.

Box is certainly striving to achieve such a vision. It may be viewed at face value as a cloud storage service, but the underlying philosophy that drives Box is the idea that people should be able to access and share their content from anywhere. Box is arguably closer to that goal than any other--providing access to data from Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and pretty much anything or anywhere with access to the Web. Box is also one of the first big players to develop an app for Windows 8.

I'm a huge fan of Box, and I use Box on most--if not all--of the platforms it's available on. It is my primary repository for the data I need access to. However, Box is a Box-centric solution. I only have access to the data that I have stored in the appropriate folder to be automatically synced, or that I have taken the time to manually upload to the cloud. If I need a file that I saved to the desktop of my MacBook Air while I'm away from my desk, Box won't help me.

Younity recently saved me in this exact situation. Younity scans the data on your Windows and Mac OS X PCs, and makes that data seamlessly available to your iPhone and iPad via an iOS app. Younity is limited, though, in that it only scans local drives--so data on my external drives is not indexed, and the app is strictly iOS, so it won't help Android or Windows Phone users.

There are a couple new approaches in the works that promise more ubiquitous cross-platform access to data. First, there's Documents.Me. Documents.Me is also iOS-centric. It claims to provide access to data from your computer, as well as data stored in Dropbox or Google Drive, and it will scan your email, too. It has slightly broader application than Younity, but not by much.

YouSendIt has its eyes on a bigger, "cloud-nostic future" as the company has dubbed it. YouSendIt already offers a data storage and file-sharing platform a la Box, and the company recently acquired Found Software. Found develops technologies to enable users to find and discover their files and data across devices and cloud services. Blending YouSendIt with the capabilities acquired with Found could be a big step toward a more platform-agnostic approach.

In a perfect world all of your data would be available to you no matter where you stored it, and no matter what operating system or mobile device you're trying to access it from. We're not there, but it seems there are some startups that are at least trying to keep us heading in that direction.

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The Week in iOS Apps: What a Crock

What a Crock!

If you are a lover of slow-cooked foods, we have the finest-ever iOS app ever created, just for you this week.

Crock-Pot Recipes

If your household is anything like mine, you'll probably agree that the $4 Crock-Pot Recipes app for iPhone and iPad--the first official Crock-Pot cooking app!--is the finest, most-anticipated offering in the App Store's history. And every month, you can make an in-app purchase of new recipe collections, meaning this is a cookbook that never goes stale.

Digisocial

Think of the free Digisocial as a talking Instagram. You take photos, add effects, and upload them to Facebook and Twitter--but you can add voice commentary to each of your photo uploads.

Fly Delta

Delta Airlines has brought its free Fly Delta app to the iPad. The "Glass Bottom Jet" feature lets you see photos of the area you're flying over, and you can alter travel arrangements, upgrade flights, and even download the in-flight magazine.

Inaugural 2013

The free Inaugural 2013 app for iPhone is built mainly for people who will be in Washington D.C. to attend President Obama's swearing-in ceremony on Monday--it lists a schedule of events and alerts to nearby happenings. It also includes a live feed of these events as they happen, so out-of-towners can keep up.

Merge Records

ReaddleDocs has become Documents by Readdle ... Dolphin Browser for iPad now lets users clip items directly to Evernote ... Rolling Stone is finally available on the iPad.

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Google sees one password ring to rule them all

Google thinks it might have found an answer to the vexing problem of forgotten or weak passwords: "physical" passwords, which might come in the form of a piece of jewelry such as a ring.

In a research paper, two of its engineers write that current strategies to prevent the hijacking of online accounts, including the two-step identity verification system, are insufficient, partly due to the constant threat of attacks that exploit new bugs.

Google highlights phishing, in which hackers dupe account holders into revealing sensitive information by making them sign into a fake account login page, as one of the biggest security threats of today.

"It's time to give up on elaborate password rules and look for something better," the authors say. The research paper, by Google's Eric Grosse and Mayank Upadhyay, is to be published Jan. 28 in the publication IEEE Security & Privacy. It was first reported on by Wired earlier Friday.

At the core of Google's proposal is an idea it says has been used by businesses but has found little success among consumers: an encrypted USB-like device that people would use to log into password-protected websites and online accounts.

Google says it is working on an internal pilot with an experimental USB device that users first register with multiple websites where they have accounts. A compliant browser would make two new APIs (application programming interfaces) available to the website to be passed down to the attached device.

"One of these APIs is called during the registration step, causing the hardware to generate a new public-private key pair and send the public key back to the website," the paper explains. "The website calls the second API during authentication to deliver a challenge to the hardware and return the signed response."

The method wouldn't require any software to be installed, though users would need to be using a Web browser that's compliant with the effort, Google said. The registration and authentication protocols would be open and free, and the device would connect with a computer's USB without needing any special OS device drivers.

Basically, the Googlers envision a single device that people can slide into a USB slot and then use to log into any number of online accounts with a single mouse click.

Because carrying around another device may not prove popular among consumers, Google suggests the authentication device could be integrated into a smartphone or even a piece of jewelry. The device would be able to authorize a new computer for use with a single tap, even in situations in which the phone might be without cellular connectivity.

The technology aims to improve upon the company's current, optional two-step verification system. With that system, when users want to log into a Google service from a new computer, they're prompted to enter a code sent to their preregistered mobile phone, granting them access to the site.

The company says its experience with that system has been good, though it too can be abused by account hackers. After they steal a password and break into an account, they sometimes set up a two-factor authentication using their own phone number, "just to slow down account recovery by the true owner," the Google engineers wrote.

Google admits its proposed USB key approach is "speculative" and that it will need to be accepted on a wide scale. But the firm said it is eager to test the device with other websites.

"User device registration with target websites should be simple and shouldn't require a relationship with Google or any other third party," the engineers write. "The registration and authentication protocols must be open and free for anyone to implement in a browser, device, or website."

Google didn't say if or when the experimental system might make it into use. "We're focused on making authentication more secure, and yet easier to manage. We believe experiments like these can help make login systems better," a spokesman said via email.

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