News briefs: SETI@Home shuts down

Along with "The Howard Stern Show," another radio endeavor involving alien life forms went off the air last week: The Search for Extra Terrestrial Life at Home (SETI@Home), a grid supercomputer project for detecting signs of extraterrestrial life from deep space, officially ended Dec. 15. SETI@Home harnessed idle CPU cycles from Internet-connected PCs across the globe to analyze data collected from massive radio telescopes. More than 5 million users downloaded the software and, although the program ran as a screensaver, the collective computing power was enormous: 2 million years of accumulated CPU time and more than 50TB of data. The project will live on in another form, however. It's being moved to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, an open source grid project using the same principles as the original project. BOINC will continue the search for E.T. radio signals, but a new client will allow users to devote spare CPU power to other research projects.

A California man who operated a Web site selling millions of dollars worth of pirated software has pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal copyright infringement, the U.S. Department of Justice says. Nathan Peterson, 26, of Antelope Acres, Calif., pleaded guilty last week in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Peterson was owner of iBackups.net, "the largest for-profit software piracy site ever shut down by law enforcement," U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty said in a statement. Peterson faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. Sentencing is scheduled for April 14. With $5.4 million in restitution included, the penalties may be the highest ever imposed on a software pirate, according to the Software & Information Industry Association. The trade group alerted the FBI in 2003 of possible copyright violations at iBackups.

The SANS Institute has achieved its first milestone in obtaining the full accreditation that will let it award master of science degrees in information security engineering and information security management. The Maryland Higher Education Commission has approved SANS' application to establish a degree-granting academic institution, and according to SANS Director of Research Alan Paller, the next step is regional accreditation, a process that can't begin until SANS has graduated its first class. That is expected to happen in 18 to 24 months. SANS has a distance-learning program and onsite training for information security, and operates the Internet Storm Center, an Internet early-warning system.

The IT Governance Institute in Rolling Meadows, Ill., which publishes the influential risk-management document "Control Objections for Information and Related Technology," has a fourth edition of COBIT ready for circulation. The first update in five years, COBIT 4.0 doesn't invalidate COBIT 3.0, according to the institute, but pays more attention to business goals and how they link to IT processes. Copies of COBIT 4.0 can be obtained for free download or purchased in print for $190. The COBIT guidelines are frequently cited as a technical baseline for enterprises seeking to comply with the federal Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.

The University of California, Berkeley last week announced it is launching an Internet research laboratory with the help of some very wealthy friends. Google, Microsoft and Sun will contribute $7.5 million over five years into the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed systems laboratory, dubbed the RAD Lab. The National Science Foundation and others will also contribute. The idea behind the lab is to help entrepreneurs and inventors bring a new wave of Internet technologies to the public, partly by exploiting newer, faster ways of developing software. The researchers at Berkeley say any software emerging from the lab will be made freely available to the public via the Berkeley Software Distribution license. David Patterson, Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, is founding director of the RAD Lab.

Visto has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft , accusing the company of improperly using patented Visto technologies in its software for accessing e-mail from phones and other wireless devices. The action kicks off another legal battle in the wireless e-mail market. Research in Motion is currently defending a suit brought by NTP, which says RIM used NTP technology patents illegally in its BlackBerry device. A Microsoft spokesman was unavailable for comment.