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Facebook confirms that Ben Ling will be leaving the company in the coming weeks to pursue other interests. We wish him well and appreciate his great contributions to the early success of Facebook Platform.

At the Graphing Social Patterns: East conference in June, Ling confirmed that Facebook would be launching a widely rumored payment system for application developers, but declined to provide a time frame at the conference. Before joining Facebook last fall, Ling was the head of Google Checkout.

Benjamin Ling, leader of Facebook's developer platform product marketing team, plans to leave his job at the social-networking site.

Benjamin Ling, who was recruited from Google to lead Facebook’s developer platform product marketing team, plans to leave his job at the social-networking site, the fourth key executive to depart in recent months.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News)

From Facebook’s statement on the departure:

Ling, who told his staff about his departure Tuesday, told Swisher that he was leaving the social-networking site to pursue “another opportunity.” He added, “Facebook is a tremendous organization and I would not leave it if it were not for a great opportunity.”

Ling’s move to Facebook was followed by that of Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google. Apparently there was some speculation that Ling wasn’t happy with Schrage being installed over him at Facebook, but Ling denied that rumor to Swisher, saying, “I have huge respect for Elliot and work well with him.”

Ling’s departure, which was reported by VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon and BoomTown’s Kara Swisher, was confirmed by Facebook in a statement Tuesday.

Other key executives who have left Facebook in recent months: Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s chief revenue officer and vice president of operations, announced his departure in February; Matt Cohler, Facebook’s No. 5 employee, left for venture firm Benchmark Capital in June; and Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s chief technology officer, announced in June he was leaving the company to take some time off.

Microsoft is aware that exploit code has been published on the Internet for the vulnerability addressed by this advisory. Our investigation of this exploit code has verified that it does not affect systems that have had the workarounds listed below applied. Currently, Microsoft is not aware of active attacks that use this exploit code or of customer impact at this time.

Not affected by this issue, Microsoft said, are systems with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Service Pack 4, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Microsoft said it was unaware of any active attacks utilizing the exploit code.

From Microsoft’s advisory:

The vulnerability affects Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000), Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (WMSDE), and Windows Internal Database (WYukon).

The advisory comes less than a week after Microsoft released a critical security patch to plug vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer amid malicious attackers taking advantage of the security flaws.

Microsoft issued an advisory late Monday confirming a remote code execution vulnerability affecting its SQL Server line.

In addition, due to the mitigating factors for default installations of MSDE 2000 and SQL Server 2005 Express, Microsoft is not currently aware of any third-party applications that use MSDE 2000 or SQL Server 2005 Express which would be vulnerable to remote attack. However, Microsoft is actively monitoring this situation to provide customer guidance as necessary.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Schott had served as senior vice president of marketing and vice president of corporate development at Agile Software, which Oracle acquired in 2007.

Disclosure: As noted above, I am an adviser to MuleSource.

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MuleSource, the company behind the top open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) and a leading open-source service-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor, has been without a chief executive for some time, having lost the services of CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg in September. On Monday, the company announced the appointment of Greg Schott as its new CEO.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Schott is a good fit for engineering-heavy MuleSource. He has technical chops, and a wealth of marketing and operations experience. I’m biased, as I’m an adviser to the company, but I’m also a good friend of Rosenberg, MuleSource’s former CEO and co-founder.

At SpringSource, Schott led the company’s rebranding efforts from Interface21 to SpringSource, as well as the complete overhaul of the company’s marketing, a difficult feat in a start-up with such impressive engineering chops as SpringSource has.

Schott joins MuleSource at a good time. The company has delivered 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth and now counts more than 2,000 enterprise deployments at major enterprises like Wal-Mart Stores. The company just completed its best quarter ever, and it named MySQL sales executive Mark Burton to its board of directors.

Schott may familiar to those who follow the sometimes-incestuous open-source talent pool. That’s because Schott joins MuleSource from SpringSource, where he was senior vice president of marketing.

“The reason why we haven’t seen as many of these over the years is savvy dealmakers are making it so it won’t appear as a sale of all or most of a company’s assets,” Hurt said.

Under Section 271 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, companies are required to seek shareholder approval for any sale of “all or substantially all” of the corporation assets.

The asset being sold has to represent a pretty big chunk of the business before the Delaware Chancery Court will hear the case, said Randall Thomas, a professor of law and business at Vanderbilt University who estimates about one such case goes before the court each year.

Investors, many of whom are still holding out hope that Microsoft will buy the Internet search pioneer lock, stock, and barrel, could potentially use Section 271 to bust up a sale of Yahoo’s search assets to the Redmond giant. Yahoo, which is incorporated in Delaware, would likely fetch a lower sales price for selling just its search business, rather than selling the entire company.

The criteria the courts will weigh as to whether Section 271 applies and needs a shareholder vote is two-fold when it comes to the “substantially all” argument.

And of that pie, Yahoo’s search business represents a $21 billion slice, or approximately 45 percent, said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Collins Stewart.

But if Yahoo only issues a short-term lease of its search business, or issues a license, thereby retaining full ownership of its assets, Yahoo investors will have to cool their heels.

Over the years, shareholders have occasionally tried this tactic with varying success. And in Yahoo’s case, chances are slim that investors would prevail in such an effort, said Christine Hurt, a University of Illinois associate law professor.

Based on other metrics, Yahoo’s search business accounts for 35 percent of Yahoo’s total revenues, or 44 percent of earnings before the deduction of interest, tax, and amortization expenses (EBITA).

For starters, “substantially all” needs to be quantitative. And usually that means the asset has to account for a certain percentage of the company’s total assets, or revenues, earnings, or sales, for example. In some cases that has translated into an asset that generated 50 to 75 percent of total revenues, legal experts said.

Creative crafting of deal transactions has also made pushing Section 271 lawsuits more difficult.

While search is a significant part of Yahoo’s business, it has other areas it can leverage for growth, Aggarwal noted.

Precedence mixed
Law firm Potter Anderson & Corroon has a comprehensive paper on the Section 271 issue, citing several past cases.

Yahoo investors who feel their hands are tied while sitting on the sidelines of a potential Microsoft-Yahoo search transaction may find a crack in the door to weigh in on the deal, legal experts say.

“After a sale of its search business, it’s not like Yahoo will be a completely different company. There’ll still be Yahoo e-mail, messenger, and groups, for example,” Hurt said.

Yahoo is valued at nearly $48 billion, based on Microsoft’s sweetened offer of $33 a share for the Internet search pioneer.

“The reason why we haven’t seen as many of these over the years is savvy dealmakers are making it so it won’t appear as a sale of all or most of a company’s assets.” –Christine Hurt, University of Illinois associate law professor.

“Of the two, the quantitative test is easier for plaintiffs to prove. It’s pretty cut and dry…the basic question is, ‘are we selling the guts of the company?’” Thomas said. “For the qualitative, it may not be a big percentage of the company, but it may be a real important part of the company.”

The other criteria that comes into play is the qualitative importance of the asset. For example, the asset, while a small slice of the overall revenue pie, may play an extremely important role in the strategic direction and future growth of the company, said J. Travis Laster of Abrams & Laster, a Delaware attorney.

In Katz v. Bregman, the Delaware Chancery Court found a proposed sale of the company’s Canadian operations and related shift to a plastic drums manufacturer from a steel drum maker warranted a shareholder vote. The defendant’s Canadian operations represented 51 percent of its assets and generated nearly 45 percent of its revenues. It also accounted for 52.4 percent of its pre-tax operating income.

And of the few cases that do go before the court, about 9 out of 10 get shot down, Thomas estimates, noting it’s because the quantitative and qualitative standards are tough to meet.

“This is not a bright-line test, but a multifactor test,” Laster said. “Let’s say you have three buildings, and two are losing money and the third is making a lot of money and you sell the third one. You could have a potential for a (Section 271) lawsuit.”

She added that they’re structuring the deal to appear as a merger, rather than a purchase of assets, or entering into joint ventures or partnerships–all in a move to avoid triggering a shareholder vote.

But even in partnerships or joint ventures, a shareholder vote could potentially be triggered if the companies are actually transferring ownership to the new entity, Hurt noted. If, for example, Microsoft and Yahoo transfer some of their assets into a joint venture and Yahoo holds less than a 50 percent stake in the new entity, Yahoo investors may seek to get the Delaware courts to rule that a shareholders vote is needed.

“If they sell their search business, they could focus on display ads, where growth is accelerating, their communications assets and international business and investments,” Aggarwal said.

The Delaware court, however, had a different view in the Gimbel v. Signal Cos. lawsuit. An investor group sought to block the sale of Signal’s wholly owned subsidiary, Signal Oil and Gas. The subsidiary accounted for 26 percent of total assets of the parent company, accounted for 41 percent of its net worth, and generated 15 percent of total revenues.

The “substantially all” is a squishy phrase that Yahoo and Microsoft attorneys will have to tread through carefully, should they wish to avoid shareholder revolt if they pursue a deal that calls for the sale of Yahoo’s search business to the Redmond giant.

That crack, albeit small, could give Yahoo shareholders the right to vote on whether the Internet search pioneer would be able to sell its search business, say legal experts.

Then, it was on to the F-35 Lightning II. More of the same. I did well enough to earn a few compliments from the kind folks who held my hand through the simulation.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

I seemed to be doing OK, with Freeman praising my flying, until he told me try to land it. Disaster.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

“As he goes through,” Freeman said, speaking of a soldier, “they throw curveballs at him. As he drives around (in the simulated city) they can throw things at him, like mortar (attacks). That kind of adds to the stress level….We’re not trying to teach them what to think. We’re trying to teach them how to think.”

“We acknowledge that technologies are great for training, but they may not always be the answer,” Tourville said. “We’re trying to improve the performance of the human.”

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

I grip the controls and struggle back toward the aircraft carrier I launched from. The voice in my left ear becomes a little alarmed as I approach the landing strip and just about as I’m about to cartwheel into the sea, I manage to land.

A map of Baghdad that shows various areas of that war-torn city is used as part of the Lockheed Martin simulation and training facility’s Incident Management System. This allows commanders to put soldiers through scenario training that tasks them with solving unexpected problems.

As a result, Lockheed Martin is emphasizing repeated practice in simulation environments with plenty of accompanying feedback. And that, Tourville said, has traditionally been the missing link.

Another system Freeman showed me was the so-called Deployable Virtual Training Environment.

Next up, I was ushered into the seat of a simulated Apache helicopter cockpit. I thought someone would show me how it works, but instead, I was told to “fly” the helicopter around a digital Baghdad, searching for enemy trucks to shoot.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Even stranger, perhaps, was when one of the Lockheed Martin staffers climbed up on top with me and told me to pose in one of those iconic photos where soldiers grin and brandish their weapons. I put on my best smile and looked at the camera.

The idea, essentially, is to train soldiers to think on their feet and to follow proper standard operating procedure, even when confronted with scary or stressful conditions.

A situational awareness view gives a commander the ability to see both the planned flight path of a UAV and the view in front of it as it flies.

The Deployable Virtual Training Environment is a system run with off-the-shelf computer components that allows Marines to work on skills that can degrade while not in the field.

“We try to stress them out,” Freeman said. “If they’re doing well,” we can make the situations harder.

As Road Trip 2008 continues, please be sure to follow my progress on this blog, as well as on Twitter and on my Qik channel.

I was curious about this, but then I was instructed to climb into the Hummer and to grab a real M-4 rifle. I was told to lean out the window and shoot the rifle at Iraqis that appeared on the screen. This was a very strange instruction for me to follow, given my feelings about war and guns, but I decided to pretend I was in a video game.

This, explained Freeman, is a system built from off-the-shelf computer components that is designed to give Marines a way to work on their combat skills while not in the field. It works by putting them through the paces of various battle scenarios involving any combination of friendly and enemy vehicles, weapons systems, and aircraft.

Using what’s known as a situational awareness view, a soldier can control as many UAVs as they can comfortably monitor. And the system allows the UAV’s director to see both the vehicle’s planned flight path, as well as what’s in its visual path.

Next, Freeman demonstrated GUSS, the generic unmanned supervisory segment, which puts military personnel in the position of controlling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the drones that fly over war zones, attacking under the direction of someone behind a computer far away.

I fire twice, and off shoot a couple of missiles, screaming toward their target. Victory is mine. As long as I don’t lose control of my own fighter and go plummeting into the ground.

As I got closer to the ground, as displayed on the computer screens in front of me, the Apache accelerated, and terra firma seemed to be approaching faster and faster. As Freeman exhorted me to recover, I crashed. Not good.

Despite vanquishing my foes, the militaries of the world are probably lucky that I won’t be fouling their skies anytime soon.

As it happens, Orlando is home to some of the world’s leading simulation technology, and that’s largely due to the fact that the U.S. military has a huge training presence here. And that’s why Lockheed Martin’s predecessor, Martin Marietta, set up shop here in the 1960s.

Today, Lockheed’s Orlando simulation facility is a giant campus with some of the widest hallways I’ve ever seen. And because it is playing host to training technology that is intended to help soldiers heading off to Iraq perform better, it has seen nearly 100,000 military personnel come through and partake of its simulation facilities.

ORLANDO, Fla.–I’m sitting at the controls of an F-35 Lightning II and my missiles are locked in on a couple of nearby enemy fighters.

After a couple of minutes, I was told to climb into the turret of the Hummer and to fire away with the machine gun on top. It took me a minute to get the hang of that, but pretty soon I was blasting away at a series of enemy soldiers on-screen, mowing them down with ease. This was a very strange situation.

One of the first things Freeman showed me was an array of three connected computer monitors attached to a simulation system known as the Combat Leadership Environment (CLE). This, he explained, is used to put soldiers into the middle of daily missions and helps commanders teach them how to move through those missions while encountering unexpected difficulties.

An Apache helicopter training simulator. I was allowed to try to fly the Apache, attacking ememies on the ground and then attempting, without much success, to land it.

This was my latest stop on Road Trip 2008, during which I’m driving around the South writing stories on some of the region’s most interesting destinations, attractions and technology.

This is the philosophy that, since soldiers have been given more and more complex weapons, vehicular, and other systems to work with while in combat situations, they have a harder and harder time mastering them and therefore, are becoming more and more overwhelmed when in the field.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Instead, under Freeman’s patient tutelage, I managed to keep the helicopter afloat for a while. He instructed me on using a pair of foot pedals to keep the aircraft from spinning out of control and in using a pair of joysticks to maintain a steady altitude and speed.

Before I left the Lockheed Martin facility, program manager and senior training systems analyst Steven Tourville came in and talked about what he said really differentiates the company from its competitors: an emphasis not just on giving soldiers the best technology, but on what he called Human Performance Engineering.

After all, that is pretty much what this was: a video game that just happens to have a slightly more meaningful purpose than, say, Call of Duty 4.

And of course, no one actually let me get behind the rudder of any eight-figure planes. Rather, I spent part of my Thursday at Lockheed Martin’s Simulation, Training and Support facility here, getting a look at some of the latest military training equipment being employed today.

Given my past performance at various flight simulators, I was sure that the very first thing that would happen would be that I would crash the Apache.

One screen of three that are part of the Lockheed Martin combat leadership environment (CLE) training simulation system. This is designed to help commanders teach platoons and batallions how to perform their daily missions.

No matter. Except for the little problem with landing, Freeman said I had done well. My head swelled, and I think I’m ready to fly Apache missions now. Or perhaps not.

The last simulator I was shown was the Virtual Combat Convoy Trainer, a faux-Hummer housed in a room surrounded almost entirely by big screens on which is projected a digital representation of an on-the-ground scenario in Iraq.

Because this Lockheed outpost contracts its services to both the U.S. and some foreign governments, as well as other “customers,” and performs more then 300 simulation systems demonstrations a year, it employs three dedicated systems engineers, as well as 52 strategic product engineers and 20 others who help out in various capacities, according to senior systems engineer Joe Freeman.

Even though I have dropped a lot of jaws by showing off the instantaneous video highlights that MLB.com’s iPhone app provides, it is certainly lacking in the statistics department. ScoreMobile picks up the slack. The application gives live standings, lineups, and a variety of other statistics. Even though it doesn’t have video highlights like MLB’s app, the statistics provided here are much more robust.

Have you ever been forced away from watching your favorite sports team because of some prior obligation, only to find yourself sneaking away to the nearest TV to check on the score? Well, then ScoreMobile’s new iPhone app is for you. Essentially, ScoreMobile has taken its already killer iPhone web app and translated it over to a nice downloadable package. Right now, ScoreMobile offers real-time scores and stats for MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, NCAAF, NCAAB, and even CFL for our Canadian readers.

Even after trading for Ken Griffey Jr., my White Sox are struggling against the Royals.

The lack of sports applications that are available for the
iPhone is really amazing to me. There is certainly a large market of sports fans out there, waiting to be tapped into. Despite the apparent void of good sports applications, ScoreMobile’s app for iPhone is clearly the best available right now. It serves up rich and timely statistics and has a slick UI. The best part is that it’s free, so it’s worth your click to download it at the very least. You can give it a try here.

India’s security agencies have been pushing RIM to allow it to intercept e-mail that travels across its secure network. Under Indian law, the government has a right under certain circumstances to intercept electronic communications for security purposes. The Indian government believes that it needs access to these mobile e-mails to help thwart terrorists, who are increasingly using the Internet and e-mail to communicate with each other.

India is an important market for RIM and other handset makers. As the North American and European markets mature and reach saturation, developing markets such as India will provide substantial growth in the coming years.

Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry smartphones, will meet with Indian officials again Thursday to hash out an agreement over security concerns, Reuters reported Wednesday.

According to Reuters, Andimuthu Raja, India’s telecommunications director, said last week that RIM had assured the government that it is working on a solution. But late last week, the company said that it wouldn’t be able to “accommodate” any such request, the story said.

BlackBerry service is being offered by four service providers in India: Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone-controlled Vodafone Essar, and BPL Mobile. Currently, there are 114,000 BlackBerry subscribers in India.

Additional features of Photobucket’s group albums, which have a 1GB storage limit, include the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of updates, create a slideshow, and if you’re the group owner, get e-mail notifications when new photos or video are added.

Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media last year, is expected to launch a “group albums” feature on Wednesday.

Group administrators also can create their own easy-to-remember URLs, for example, photobucket.com/cuteboyswithnoshirts.

Basically, these are collaborative media-sharing albums much like the “groups” feature in Yahoo’s Flickr. Photobucket’s release suggests that they could be used to pool photos and videos of weddings, graduations, concerts, and the like. You could also create groups for pictures of dogs on skateboards, superhero-inspired Halloween costumes, or whatever else you might want, but keep in mind that Photobucket likes to keep things squeaky-clean.

“Group Albums are designed to offer a simple way for colleagues, friends, and families to collaborate on creating photos and video collections where the entire group can contribute, access, and enjoy them,” Photobucket President Alex Welch explained in a statement Tuesday. Photobucket released its first developer application program interface (API) last month.

commentary

Like Facebook’s Thrift messaging protocol, Cisco’s open sourcing of Etch probably has less to do with any corporate love for open source than with a realization that the most viable way to take on an incumbent in an established software market is with open source. Open source enables a company to potentially disarm competing technologies through a bottom-up infiltration of the market.

The biggest part of the release, however, is that it will be open source.

Proprietary software is a way to guard one’s position. Open source is a way to create a new position. Cisco’s Etch is just one more reminder that many, if not most, new entrants to a crowded market will be open source. Whether they remain as such, however, is an entirely different question.

CIO.com’s James Turner has reported on a big, new development from Cisco Systems: the announcement of Etch, a “messaging protocol intended to allow developers to integrate client/server applications without the overhead of traditional protocols such as SOAP.”

According to a Monday report in DigiTimes, Google is using Intel SSD technology combined with Marvell controller chips in servers at the company’s headquarters. The technology is due to ship late this quarter, the report said.

Solid-state disks, which use flash memory instead of spinning magnetic platters to store data, may have just won an endorsement from a demanding, high-prestige customer: Google.

Google, Intel, and Marvell didn’t comment on the report.

It’s interesting to note that it appears from the report that Google appears to be buying raw ingredients more than finished products. Google is famous for building and maintaining its own hardware and software.

Given the increasing maturity of SSDs, it would be surprising if Google weren’t testing them. What’s unclear is whether the company is planning some broad deployment of the technology. A couple sources I’ve run this past have suggested the report is off base, though.

SSDs offer energy consumption and performance advantages over conventional drives, but they can’t match the earlier technology on capacity so far. Google, with thousands of servers, is very sensitive to all those issues.