VoIP services like Skype and Vonage radically changed the US communication landscape years ago and ignited a telecom race to catch up. The most powerful business lobbying group in Russia, partnering with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's political party, is hoping to avoid the same fate with "legal safeguards" for home turf competition. Lobbyists also cite national security concerns, hinting that Russia should join China by spying on conversations over Skype and similar services.

Called the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE), the 1,000-member strong business lobby organization recently announced that it wants government restrictions on IP telephony services from foreign countries like Skype and ICQ. RUIE believes that the VoIP market is now growing faster than traditional telecoms, estimating that by 2012, 40 percent of Russia’s voice conversations will travel through Internet tubes. Unsurprisingly, the group—composed of telecom executives and other members of private and state-run businesses—wants to "protect domestic producers in [the telecom market]," reads a loose Google translation of RUIE’s official statement. 

"Physicalization" is an awkward name for an approach to server consolidation that seeks to offer a hardware-based alternative to virtualization by cramming multiple, low-power processors into a small amount of rack space. These processors are invariably mobile processors, designed for power-sensitive mobile products, and server vendors are building very small, modular server nodes around them and packing them as densely as possible into rack units.

It's too early to tell if this trend has legs, but ever since we've started covering it, something about it has been bothersome: in short, it seems to go against Moore's Law. But more on that in a moment.

Hackers don't have to work very hard to steal information from people and organizations—people are pretty willing to give it away. Social networks and other Web 2.0 sites are making it ever easier for Internet users to accidentally share too much information or become victim to phishing scams, leading to security research firm Sophos to warn IT admins on how to handle employee use of these services.

A majority of sysadmins—63 percent—told Sophos that they worry about employees sharing too much information on social networking sites. This could potentially put the corporate infrastructure at risk, especially if they reveal too much about the company, not to mention details about their personal identities. According to Sophos' research, this worry is justified—33.4 percent of business users have been spammed on a social networking site and 21 percent have been phished there. (23.6 percent and 27.9 percent, respectively, said that they had no idea either way. That should really inspire some confidence.)

Windows Azure is the cloud operating system that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform. The July 2009 Community Technology Previews (CTPs) of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (8.2MB) and the Windows Azure Software Development Kit (4.0MB for 32-bit and 4.3MB for 64-bit) are now available on the Microsoft Download Center. The first download, which includes the second anyway, is probably the one you want since it extends Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable Web applications and services on Windows Azure.

Microsoft has rolled out another major update to Office 2008 for Mac that it's calling Service Pack 2. Bringing Office 2008 up to version 12.2.0, the update includes a number of bug fixes, performance improvements, and feature additions. It also includes a new Document Connection tool that makes working with Microsoft Office Live Workspace and SharePoint better, enabling easier cross-platform collaboration.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage all got stability fixes, and Word and Excel specifically received several performance improvements. Word users should see quicker performance when using outline view, scrolling, and using Japanese characters with styles. Even launching Word is quicker. Excel should see improved performance when opening files from a networked server, using Pivot Tables, and when performing calculations.

New Zealand is hopping on the child porn filtering bandwagon after it apparently went over so well in Australia (*cough*). The proposed scheme will involve filtering at the ISP level, comparing Internet requests against an unpublished blacklist maintained by New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs.

The department announced earlier this week its official plans to launch the Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System, though it had begun discussing the system earlier this year. The program has been tested in trials across the country, and now a number of major ISPs are looking into the implementation. This list includes TelstraClear and Vodafone—when combined, these ISPs cover some 93 percent of New Zealand's Internet connections. Use of the blacklist is voluntary.

Last Wednesday, terminal vendor Wyse Technology unveiled its latest salvo in the "thin" vs. "fat" client wars, the Virtual Desktop Accelerator. While Wyse still makes terminals, it has also gotten into the virtualization-based thin client game, but of course the main weakness in the thin client model is the connection—specifically, connection latency. For real-time interactive applications, latency is a much bigger problem than throughput, because high latencies degrade the user experience.

At this year's Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced pricing and the naming for its Forefront security solution (codenamed Stirling), the company's next version of a comprehensive protection solution across endpoints and servers. Stirling will be officially known as Forefront Protection Suite (FPS) and will include the products in the current suite, plus the Forefront Protection Manager (formerly known as the Stirling management console) and the Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Security Service. 

Here's how the naming scheme changes:

Windows Vista was well-known for the poor adoption it saw in the business sector, even though consumers were choosing it over XP more often than not. Will the situation change with Windows 7? A new survey by ScriptLogic, a company that helps other companies manage their Windows systems and security, claims the majority of corporations have no plans to quickly move to Windows 7. Relax, it's not as bad as it may seem at first glance.

At this year's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), Microsoft announced that Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 have reached the Technical Preview stage. As announced in May, Microsoft is giving tens of thousands of people the opportunity to test Office and Visio. All WPC attendees (cost of entry is $2,000) will receive invitations to participate in the Technical Preview program, as will hand-picked testers. 

Microsoft acknowledged that the reason Office 2010 is not ready for a public release is that this release is not yet feature complete and is solely being made available to garner feedback for the engineering team.

In addition, Microsoft announced that the Web versions of its applications will be available in several flavors, including a free, ad-supported version.

The technology world's attention shifted to Sprint-Nextel this week with the company's announcement that it would hand off management of its wireless and wireline networks to Ericsson. Some time around or after September, 6,000 Sprint employees will begin working the system under the Swedish mobile maker's supervision, the new partners say. Sprint will pay Ericsson about $4.5 to $5 billion for its work over a seven year renewable contract.

But how will Ericsson manage one of the nation's largest wireless networks? The company's recent comments provide some clues.

On Wednesday, manufacturing giant GE announced a partnership with Tendril, a company that provides smart grid software and services. The agreement will see see GE work to incorporate monitoring and reporting capabilities into its consumer appliances and ensure that they communicate properly with Tendril's software. Tendril will focus on ensuring that the data the devices provide is communicated back to utilities. The two companies will also cooperate in developing load management algorithms that can help utilities remotely adjust the appliance's performance based on demand and available electric resources.

The promise of a smart grid depends on the degree of sophistication of the hardware and software involved. In its simpler form, a smart meter can provide consumers with a basic outline of their electricity use, which can help identify activities that draw the most power. More sophisticated versions involve having individual pieces of consumer hardware participate in a local network, allowing fine-grained analysis of power use.

Yesterday's announcement of Google's Chrome OS plans were met with plenty of discussion about what it might mean for the future of computing. The OS is essentially a lightweight version of Linux designed to run the company's Chrome browser to access Google's (or other third-party) cloud computing services, such as Gtalk, Gmail, Google Docs, and more. While there are numerous benefits of using such cloud services—like data persistence across multiple machines—what happens when the servers that run those services run into trouble, burn down, or lose power?

Unfortunately, it seems, there aren't any new answers since we examined this issue almost one year ago. In the last week alone, there have been several high profile outages at data centers that host sites, such as video site DailyMotion, credit card authorization service Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Even the Google App Engine—a platform for third-parties to run their own cloud services—experienced performance issues that resulted in high latency and even data loss.

Google is working on an experimental project called Native Client (NaCl) that aims to provide support for securely executing native code in Web browsers. Google released its NaCl prototype under the open source BSD license last year and launched a contest to encourage security researchers to look for vulnerabilities. The contest results, which were announced on Tuesday, uncovered several security issues that Google is working to resolve.

NaCl provides a sandboxed runtime environment for portable x86 binaries. Google also makes available a custom build toolchain based on GCC that can be used to compile existing C code into NaCl executables. These executables can then be embedded in Web content to make their functionality accessible through JavaScript. The value of NaCl is that it lets Web developers use native code on the client side for performance-sensitive operations, such as video encoding, that are too heavy for JavaScript. Google contends that NaCl's advanced code validation features and sandboxing make it significantly more secure than similar technologies, such as ActiveX.

Microsoft Hohm (think Home + Ohm), an online service that allows users to track their energy use, has become available after a few minor launch problems as a public beta for US home owners. The Web service takes advantage of smart grid data on energy use when it's available, but even when it's not, Hohm allows users to input their own details and share the results of their efficiency efforts. The whole point is to save energy and money by better understanding home energy usage and by offering recommendations on how to conserve energy.

If you fit the criteria (a homeowner in the US with a Windows Live ID), make sure to take the service for a spin and let us know in the comments what you think.