Group seeks answers from DHS on delay of privacy report

A privacy rights group is pressing the U.S Department of Homeland Security to disclose when it plans to release its annual privacy report to Congress. The letter also noted that Callahan is obligated by law to prepare an annual report to Congress detailing activities at the agency that have an impact on privacy. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on Tuesday sent a certified letter to Mary Ellen Callahan, DHS's chief privacy officer, noting that the department's last privacy report was released more than a year ago, in July 2008. "As it has been over a year since the publication of the last report, we would like to know when the current report, concerning the activities of your office, will be made available to the public," the letter states.

The report also needs to detail complaints of privacy violations, implementation of the Privacy Act of 1974, and internal privacy controls within the DHS, the letter states. Lillie Coney, EPIC's associate director, said the privacy report was "significantly tardy enough" to merit sending the letter to DHS. "We'd like to know what the agency has been doing regarding privacy," Coney said. A copy of the DHS letter was sent to the chairman and the ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. EPIC needs to be sure that the DHS' privacy officer is sufficiently focused on her obligation to release the report in a timely fashion, Coney said. The DHS could not be immediately reached for comment. The annual report, which has been issued since 2003 chronicles the privacy issues that the DHS is focused on and shows whether it is fulfilling its constitutional obligations for privacy and civil liberties, Coney said. "It gives us an idea of the way the DHS has been prioritizing privacy issues and what resources it has made available" to address the issues, she said.

This is not the first time EPIC has pressed DHS to release its reports in a timely fashion. As one of the largest federal agencies, the DHS is involved in several projects that privacy groups such as EPIC keep a close eye on. The group sent a similar letter to the DHS last year after the report's release was delayed. Examples include Einstein 2.0, a network monitoring technology that improves the ability of federal agencies to detect and respond to threats, and the Real ID identity credentialing initiative . The DHS's terror watch list program, its numerous data mining projects , the secure flight initiative, the proposed use of body imaging technologies and its searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders are also all being closely followed by privacy groups.

Analyst: AT&T likely to keep iPhone exclusive deal

Despite widespread speculation that Apple Inc. will open the iPhone exclusive arrangement with AT&T Inc. to include Verizon Wireless after 2010, one analyst firm is predicting AT&T's exclusive deal as the wireless carrier will be extended beyond then. The main reason Apple is likely to stick with AT&T beyond 2010 is the relatively wide usage and growth expected for the HSPA air standard used by the carrier for 3G data." It appears iSuppli reached it conclusions without any direct knowledge of what Apple will do regarding the exclusive deal. In a report, iSuppli Corp. said that its main reason for expecting an exclusive extension is based on its analysis of a growth in usage of a faster wireless standard at AT&T known as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA). The global growth in HSPA usage will far outstrip growth in usage of EVDO (Evolution Data Optimized), a different standard used by Verizon, iSuppli said. "Speculation is rife that Apple will end its exclusive U.S. iPhone service deal with AT&T when the current contract expires in June 2010, and begin to offer phones that work with the Verizon network," said Francis Dieco, an iSupply analyst, in a statement. "However, iSuppli doesn't believe this will be the case. AT&T and Apple have been mum on the issue for months, and were again today.

Many analysts have speculated that Apple would want to work with more than a single carrier in the U.S. just to expand the opportunities to sell the iPhone. Gartner Inc. analyst Ken Dulaney agreed that AT&T will "definitely extend their deal" for exclusive sales of the iPhone. "AT&T would be crazy not to sell iPhone," he said in an e-mail, but added that Apple will also support Verizon, possibly with a different type of unit. "If you are beholden to stockholders to make money, there is no easier money than in your home turf through a carrier desperate for this type of device," Dulaney added. Today, Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, said that Apple would more likely want to open the exclusive deal for both AT&T and Verizon, the two largest carriers in the U.S. Gold said he didn't agree with iSuppli's conclusions, primarily because there isn't that much incentive for Apple to stay with AT&T "unless AT&T throws a lot of money at Apple." Gold rejected the analysis of growth in HSPA as a sufficient rationale to stay with AT&T, partly because adherence to a wireless standard doesn't fully determine how data throughput occurs. Many AT&T customers using the iPhone have been outraged about service interruptions and slow downloads, which may occur because a tower might not be nearby due to buildings or terrain, Gold and others have noted. "Raw speed with a wireless standard doesn't mean anything." Gold added. "It's important to realize, when three people are on a tower, that's no big deal, but when you have 300 people on a tower in downtown Boston or downtown L.A., that's huge." The analysis from iSuppli predicts that Verizon might get Apple products to sell other than the iPhone. A major factor in what a user experiences is determined by the number of users on a single cell tower, and how many towers are located in dense areas, he noted.

Dieco based that prediction on his finding that there's no information indicating that Apple is prohibited from pursuing a relationship with Verizon for non-iPhone products, such as another phone model, tablet computer, netbook or an enhanced iTouch. In 2009, there were 269 million HSPA subscribers globally, a number expected to soar to 1.4 billion in 2012. For EVDO, there were 145 million subscribers globally in 2009, a number expected to reach 304 million in 2013. Verizon has undertaken a program to move to faster LTE wireless in the 2011 to 2013 timeframe, and some analysts have assumed future iPhones could work over LTE, assuming Apple strikes an agreement with Verizon. Part of the reason iSuppli relied on the growth projections for HSPA versus EVDO to make its predicion is that HSPA growth globally will be so much bigger.

Start-up releases uber-fast, efficient enterprise-class SSDs

Pliant Technology Inc. today released its first series of enterprise-class solid state disk (SSD) drives based on a proprietary ASIC design that the company claims can handle - without using any cache - more than twice the input/output operations per second (IOPS) as the top competitive drives. The 3.5-in. drive can produce up to to 500MB/sec sustained read or 320MB/sec write rates and the 2.5-in. up to 420MB/sec read and 220MB/sec write rates, Pliant said. "Put it on a log application and write to it as hard as you want for five years - it will run 24/7 for at least that long," said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing at the three-year-old startup. The first two two enterprise flash drive (EFDs), the EFD LS and EFD LB models, are 3.5-in. and 2.5-in. drives that can produce up to 180,000 IOPS and 140,000 IOPS respectively.

Pliant also claims there is no limit to the number of writes that can be performed to the drive and that it will work without slowdown for at least five years. In an enterprise environment, that's one of the major concerns: The wear out of the SSD." Most enterprise-class SSD companies today use Fibre Channel connectivity. The drives are aimed at equipment manufacturers such as EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Data Systems and Sun Microsystems Inc., the company said. "They're able to claim some pretty solid performance numbers on read and writes and they're also able to claim unlimited program and erase [write/erase] cycles," said Joseph Unsworth, research director for NAND flash semi-conductors at Gartner Inc. "That's big. Pliant's first products use serial-attached SCSI (SAS), which most industry observers believe is the interconnect of the future for servers and storage arrays. "You don't want to saturate your [server] CPU cores and then find out we have this great SSD but the bottleneck is now the interface," Unsworth said. "It's all about speed." SAS currently supports 6Gbit/sec data transfer speeds and its roadmap indicates 12Gbit/sec rate by by 2012. Fibre Channel drives are currently capable of 4Gbit/sec data transfer speeds, and while Fibre Channel switches and interface cards are now emerging with 8Gbit/sec speeds. STEC Inc., the top provider today of enterprise-class SSDs, recently announced its own SAS model. SAS is eclipsing those speeds at the device level. "Six gigabit SAS in terms of data throughput is going to be the performance leader," said Jeff Janukowicz, a flash memory analyst with IDC in Framingham, Mass.

But even that next-generation product produces a maximum of 80,000 IOPS compared with Pliant's 180,000 IOPS. Pliant's SSD controller architecture is not vastly different from those of other high-end SSD manufacturers. The drives are configured as RAID 0 for increased performance and the controller. It has twelve independent I/O channels to interleaved single level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips from Samsung Corp. Most enterprise-class SSDs today also use a general purpose field programmable gate array (FPGA) controllers as opposed to Pliant's custom controller, which is programmed specifically to address SSD issues, such as wear leveling (spreading writes more evenly throughout the memory) and write amplification (reducing the number of operations required for a write), according to analysts. Also, the lack of any DRAM cache, which can store data writes more quickly, laying them down on the NAND flash chips during non-peak performance periods, is also unique to Pliant's enterprise-class product. Also unique to Pliant's controller is the use of a triple redundancy error correction code algorithm to ensure that meta data - which is used to locate data on the drive - is saved even if two copies of it become corrupted.

Some of today's more popular server-class SSDs, like those from Intel, use serial ATA interfaces, which has a half-duplex interface as opposed to SAS, which like Fibre Channel, is full duplex. Single-port half-duplex allows for one or the other. The difference between the two is that full duplex is dual ported, allowing for reads and writes at the same time. Pliant, based in Milpitas, Calif., released its new SSDs for beta testing last year and plans to make them generally available later this month. And, based on Pliant's claims, they see to have addressed many of those important issues." The company refused to release a suggested retail price for the drives. The company raised $15 million in Series C funding in March, which was used to ramp up production of the SSDs, the company said. "I think with Pliant's announcement we're starting to see some of the true promises of SSD coming to market," Janukowicz said. "A lot of these applications are demanding, mission critical, 24/7 applications and they require high reliability, efficiency and predictable performance.

However, it did note that the drives will be more expensive than Intel's X25-E SSD , which sells for $780 for a 64GB SATA model, and less expensive than STECs Zeus SSD , which sells for about $6,000 for a 73GB Fibre Channel model.

Time ripe for $700 MacBook, says analyst

Amid talk that Apple will kill the iPod Classic and add a camera to other models of its music player tomorrow, one analyst has a different prediction: Apple will roll out a retooled MacBook for $700.

"The rumors of a less expensive MacBook have real potential," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "It could drive up Apple's share further and quite possibly increase the margins on Macs, even at the very attractive price of $700."

Gottheil's rumor reference was to stories two weeks ago, particularly by AppleInsider , that said sources had reported Apple would soon revamp the design of its 13-in. white, plastic-enclosed MacBook.

The white MacBook, which currently sells for $999, is the only model remaining in the line. In early June, Apple shifted its two "unibody" MacBook configurations into the MacBook Pro lineup, swapping out the user-replaceable battery for an integrated battery and adding a backlit keyboard to both models. The 13-in. MacBook Pro starts at $1,199.

Gottheil has pushed the idea of a less-expensive MacBook before as an easy way for Apple to dip a toe in the netbook waters.

"This would close the gap between the entry-level prices of PCs and Macs," he said today, speaking of the current difference between Windows-based netbooks, some of which sell for under $300, and the $1,000 price point of today's MacBook.

From his spot in the peanut gallery, Gottheil thinks that Apple could lower the price of the MacBook and retain its traditional high profit margin, by backpedaling the laptop's technology to circa-2006 components, which are considerably cheaper than when the notebook debuted that year.

"Apple could position the MacBook as just as good [in performance] as two years ago, or even better, since it would drop in Snow Leopard ," Gottheil said.

The original MacBook - the first of that line to sport an Intel processor - debuted at $1,049, and included a 1.83GHz Core Duo CPU, 512GB of RAM and a 60GB drive.

Unlike AppleInsider, however, Gottheil said it made more sense to stick with the existing enclosure mold, another way Apple could cut costs to drop the price by $300. He also said he would expect Apple to offer the cheaper MacBook in several configurations, probably three - the company's sweat spot, it seems.

"It's the right time to do this, assuming, of course, that a tablet won't be released this year," Gottheil said. "The lack of a netbook entry can't go on forever. And earlier, when sales were soft, Apple wouldn't have wanted to appear weak," he added, talking about the first calendar quarter of this year, when Apple said Mac sales had fallen 3%, year-to-year , the first such decline since 2003.

"Now they can do [a reduced-price MacBook] from a position of strength," said Gottheil. "And it would give them some additional [sales] volume."

In the quarter that ended June 30, Apple sold 4% more Macs than in the same period the year before, reversing its one-quarter sales downturn.

Apple's San Francisco event, which will kick off at 1 p.m. ET tomorrow, is expected to focus on its iPod business , but the company has a history of tossing in unexpected announcements at virtually any opportunity. For example, Apple revised the MacBook Pro line, adding the 13-in, aluminum-cased notebooks formerly part of the MacBook family, during its annual developers conference in early June.