Has a slow Web been getting you down lately?

Just imagine if your multibillion-dollar business depended on it, as Google’s does. Then imagine the glee in Google’s corridors at a significant new victory in the company’s attempt to build a Web-accelerating technology it calls SPDY into the Internet.

Earlier today, Mark Nottingham, chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group, announced support for SPDY in an overhaul of one of the networking foundations of the World Wide Web. That foundation is HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and Google hopes SPDY will open up some of its bottlenecks.

The HTTPbis group, part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), has been been sprucing up the 1999-era HTTP 1.1 for several years. But Nottingham said it’s now time to look to the future.

“There seems to be broad agreement that the time is ripe to start work on a new version of HTTP in the IETF, and that it should happen in this Working Group,” Nottingham said. When work refurbishing HTTP 1.1 began, there wasn’t interest in a new version of HTTP, but SPDY and its adoption shows there’s interest now, he said, proposing completion of a draft of HTTP 2.0 by May and finish the work by July 2013.

Speed boost
In Google’s research, SPDY accelerates page-load times by 28 percent to 43 percent over a 2Mbps DSL line and 44 percent to 55 percent over a 4Mbps cable broadband connection.

Standardization is often a drawn-out, painstaking affair, but it can pay off by making a particular technology easier to incorporate in a wide range of products. A neutral industry standard can be technically, politically, and legally easier to embrace.

Tinkering with the basic workings of the Web is a tricky business given the immense variety of browsers, servers, and network gear in between. Google has made progress with SPDY, though, since unveiling SPDY in 2009 and then building it into its Chrome browser.

SPDY is a high-profile element of Google’s “make the Web faster” effort. Yesterday, the company also detailed proposed improvements to TCP an even more fundamental Internet technology. The Transmission Control Protocol governs how a huge amount of data is sent over the Net despite problems such as network congestion or lost packets of data.

Google is in many ways perfectly positioned to rebuild the Net. It’s got the world’s most-trafficked Web sites and measurements that show that speed means profits. It’s got the No. 3 browser, Chrome, so it can experiment with technology that works hand-in-hand with its Web sites. And it’s got an army of research-minded engineers encouraged to think big.

Those assets don’t always equate to success, though, when it comes to rewiring the Web–in particular given that Google’s self-interest means that its ideas can raise competitors’ hackles. Microsoft and Mozilla, for example, while sharing Google’s interest in making the Web a better foundation for programming, are leery of Google’s Dart programming language that competes with the incumbent JavaScript.

SPDY milestones
One earlier milestone was SPDY’s inclusion in Amazon’s Silk, the browser on its Kindle Fire tablets. A more recent one is that Firefox 11 introduces SPDY support, too.

“I think with Firfox on board with SPDY, it’s got legs,” said Mike Belshe, who along with Roberto Peon invented SPDY at Google. (Belshe since has moved to a start-up, Twist. “We’ll get it (or its derivative) standardized in 2012 for sure.”

Technical details and a SPDY white paper show how it works and what it offers. It employs a number of tricks to speed up Web page transfers, including compression, prioritization of important Web page elements, and a way to sidestep today’s limits on opening multiple network connections.

One technical detail that historians might be interested in is what exactly SPDY stands for. The answer: nothing. “It doesn’t stand for anything,” Belshe said, “but it sounds like ‘speedy.’”

Adding SPDY isn’t the only possible way to improve HTTP, and Nottingham acknowledged that it will be a “tightrope walk” to admit some HTTP improvements without getting bogged down in massive rework of the technology.

FreeBSD programmer Poul-Henning Kamp was unenthusiastic about Nottingham’s proposal, though, because he sees it as too narrow in scope. He also asked where in Nottingham’s proposal there is room for evaluating other suggestions

“In my mind, the effort [Nottingham] sketched out would be correctly titled ‘Beatify the SPDY protocol as a carrier of HTTP/1.1 traffic,’” Kamp said in his “devil’s advocate” response. “HTTP/2.0 would in my mind be an attempt to actually improve the protocol.”

Source

The FBI has busted the alleged operators of Internet locker service Megaupload, which had become one of the most popular video destinations on the Web, according to a statement from the U.S. Justice Department and FBI.

Seven people have been named in an indictment and four suspects have been taken into custody, according to the statement today. They have been charged in Virginia with crimes related to online piracy, including racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, and conspiring to commit money laundering.

The suspects face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, the government said.

According to the statement, the indictment alleges that Megaupload is led by Kim DotCom, aka Kim Schmitz, a German with a colorful history who was once convicted of a felony but who has repeatedly denied engaging in piracy.

DotCom and three others were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand police, “who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States,” the Justice Department said. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the arrest.

Along with DotCom, Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand was also arrested. Authorities say that DotCom founded Megaupload and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.

“This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” the statement said. The action “directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.”

In August, CNET profiled DotCom, a free-wheeling former street racer and computer hacker, after he was sued by a porn studio for copyright violations. At about the same time, film industry sources told me that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had complained to law enforcement officials numerous times that Megaupload was getting rich by helping millions of people store and distribute pirated films and TV shows.

DotCom allegedly rents cyberlockers to the masses, and nobody disputes that many millions of people from across the globe use them to store and access unauthorized copies of TV shows, feature films, songs, porn, and software. The question is whether DotCom and the other suspects can be held responsible for the piracy.

Some of the services DotCom is said to operate are MegaPorn, MegaVideo, MegaLive, and MegaPix.

If you’re wondering if the Obama administration didn’t go after Megaupload as a way to placate the film industry in the wake of White House criticism of the Stop Online Piracy Act, I can only tell you that my sources said the feds began looking at the service months ago.

Nonetheless, the timing of the arrests is kind of curious, considering the indictment had been around for two weeks.

The arrests occurred with many in the entertainment and media sectors feeling betrayed by Obama. According to a story in Deadline.com, some studio chiefs are planning to cut off donations to Obama’s re-election campaign after he failed to support antipiracy legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and Senate (the Protect IP Act).

That’s bound to hurt as Hollywood has long been a rich area for Democrats seeking campaign contributions.

Obama has said for years he supports stronger antipiracy laws but on Saturday issued statements that were critical of the bills, which are heavily supported by a large number of copyright owners.

The laws would make it easier for authorities to cut off access in the United States to foreign-based sites accused of piracy, which essentially describes Megaupload’s situation.

That leads us to the big question I’m trying to get answered: if the feds can have an accused pirate arrested and brought to this country for trial, why do we need SOPA and PIPA? I’ll update as soon as I get that answered.

Update 2:05 p.m. PT No sooner than I posed that question than Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) and the man who drafted PIPA, release a statement:

“Today’s action by the Department of Justice against the leaders of MegaUpload.com shows what law enforcement can do to protect American intellectual property that is stolen through domestic websites.”

Domestic?

DotCom was arrested in New Zealand and is a German national. His servers have long been rumored to be in Hong Kong. According to Leahy’s office, Megaupload’s servers are located in Virginia. Apparently that gives U.S. officials jurisdiction.

This thing is just starting and DotCom is known for his publicity stunts and tweaking the noses of law enforcement all over the world. We’re sure to being hearing more about this.

Source

Hackers have targeted the US government and copyright organisations following the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing website.

The Department of Justice (DoJ), FBI and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) among others have been bombarded with internet traffic.

Web links have been been distributed which, when clicked, make the user’s computer part of the attack.

A statement attributed to Anonymous claimed responsibility. >>more

Information Technology Services | IT Services

Three of the Internet’s most popular destinations–Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist--launched an audacious experiment in political activism this evening by urging their users to protest a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright laws.

Wikipedia’s English-language pages went completely black at 9 p.m. PT, with a splash page saying “the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” The online encyclopedia’s blackout, intended to precede next week’s Senate floor vote on the legislation, is scheduled to last 24 hours.

Craigslist and Google have taken a more modest approach. Unlike Wikipedia, the sites will remain online during Wednesday’s virtual protest, but the home pages now feature exhortations to contact members of Congress and urge them to vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate version called Protect IP. Craiglist’s snarky note: “Corporate paymasters, KEEP THOSE CLAMMY HANDS OFF THE INTERNET!”

It’s a novel experiment in grassroots-outreach-by-the-millions that could, if successful, derail SOPA and Protect IP, which have come under increasing criticism since last fall. Their authors — Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) — responded in the last week by offering some changes. But Smith said in a statement today that, one way or another, a House committee vote will be held in February.

CNET predicted the protest in a December 29 article that said opponents of the bills may “simultaneously turn” their home pages “black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress.”

This is “classic Hollywood trying to do heavy handed legislation to protect its business interests,” Casey Rae-Hunter, deputy director of the Future of Music Coalition, told reporters this morning.

Among the other Web sites that, in one way or another, have joined the blackout: Metafilter, the Consumer Electronics Association, BoingBoing, OpenDNS, WordPress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and what is almost certainly the Internet’s most popular dinosaur comic strip. Some physical protests are also planned tomorrow.

Because Web companies are typically reluctant to involve their users in political spats, nothing exactly like today’s protest has ever been tried before, and it’s difficult to predict how it will affect Congress’ willingness to proceed. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated on Sunday that he expected the floor vote on Protect IP to happen as scheduled.

But Google.com is the most popular Web site in the world, according to Alexa, with about half of global Internet users visiting it per day — meaning that if only a small percent sign the company’s petition against SOPA and Protect IP, the total number of voters lodging protests could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. (Google pointedly refrained from asking its users to call the U.S. Capitol’s switchboard at (202) 224-3121, which likely would have overwhelmed the system within minutes.)

In a blog post late Tuesday night, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, predicted that Protect IP and SOPA “will censor the Web,” “risk our industry’s track record of innovation and job creation,” and ultimately be unsuccessful in curbing piracy.

And then Wednesday morning, Google’s home page featured a big, black block over the colorful “Google” logo that dominates the page, and a stark message under the search window urged: “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” Both the blacked-out logo and the “Tell Congress” line linked out to a page entitled “End Piracy, Not Liberty” with an option for users to sign a petition to Congress.

SOPA, of course, represents the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore Web sites. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet service providers, and other companies, forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish. It’s opposed (PDF) by many Internet companies, users, and civil liberties groups.

Some Internet companies including Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo have expressed concerns about the bill but have not said they would join the blackout. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote that “closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

In one early sign that the blackouts and protests are having an effect, the MPAA today characterized them as “stunts.” The group’s chairman, Chris Dodd, took a thinly veiled swipe at Wikipedia by denouncing the protests as “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services.” News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to offer similar thoughts.

Tomorrow’s protest was originally designed to coincide with a hearing that SOPA foe Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had scheduled on the measure’s technical aspects, especially the portions relating to Domain Name System, or DNS, blocking. Issa said over the weekend that the Republican leadership had promised him that a floor vote would not happen “unless there is consensus on the bill,” a rather implausible scenario. As a result, Issa postponed the hearing.

“There’s a lot of sort of technologically ignorant language in” SOPA and Protect IP, said Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit, which has become a focal point of anti-SOPA activism and can probably claim credit for convincing GoDaddy to flip-flop on the legislation. Both bills, he said, were “done without a lot of thought about the impact and the execution and without a lot of knowledge technically about how the Internet operates.”

Mozilla will join the protest at 5 a.m. PT (8 a.m. ET) tomorrow in what it’s calling a “virtual strike” against SOPA and Protect IP. It will black out the default start page for Firefox users and ask them to take action.

“SOPA makes all of us potential criminals if we don’t become the enforcement arm of a new government regulatory and policing structure,” Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post today.

The protest had a few hiccups. For the first 20 minutes or so, Google’s initial sign-this-petition Web page delivered this message: “Error: Server Error / The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.”

Not all of Wikipedia’s pages are blacked out. Entries for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are still visible. More than a few users of the encyclopedia seemed confused.

Source

Next year is one of those years that can’t come soon enough for Microsoft.

It’s not that 2011 was a particularly difficult year. The company posted record revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30. And its 2-year-old PC operating system, Windows 7, hit 500 million copies sold, further embedding it as the most widely used operating system in the world. But 2011 had few big product launches at the company, Office 365 and Internet Explorer 9 notwithstanding.

Next year will be altogether different. Microsoft is prepping the big kahuna of its product arsenal, Windows 8. The company hasn’t set a date, though most analysts expect the flagship operating system to debut before the end of the year, and perhaps in time for back-to-school shopping. From that product, much else from Redmond flows.

So here are five things to look for from Microsoft in 2012:

1. Windows 8 tablets

Windows 8 is one of the boldest bets Microsoft will make, radically changing the interface on the operating system to the company’s tile-based Metro look, first used by Windows Phone 7 last year. The familiar desktop photo covered with application and file icons will be available to PC users who want it. But Microsoft is pushing the new touch-friendly interface to convince consumers to buy tablet computers that will run it.

It won’t be an easy sell. Microsoft will be coming to the tablet market more than two years after Apple iPad launched and quickly became a commercial success. And this holiday season, Amazon debuted its Kindle Fire, which became the first non-Apple tablet to gain a meaningful foothold. Market analyst Forrester recently reported that consumer interest in Windows tablets is waning.

As the core of computing moves beyond the PC, Microsoft needs Windows 8 tablets to succeed. It’s all the more pressing as PC growth sputters and the tablet computer market soars.

The market muscle of Microsoft and its partners will help propel Windows tablets at their debut. But unless Microsoft can convince developers to create tablet-specific apps that users can’t live without, the devices will have a hard time making a dent in iPad’s massive lead.

2. Xbox moves farther into live TV

Even in its earliest days, Microsoft’s video game console business was pegged as a Trojan Horse to bring the company’s technology from the office to the living room. But the brains behind Xbox knew they had to make a great gaming experience job No. 1. Now, leading the United States in console sales in 2011, Xbox is pushing in earnest beyond gaming.

Microsoft just brought the first hint of live TV to Xbox consoles with an updated look to its Xbox Live service earlier this month. In addition to introducing the Metro-style look to Xbox, it also let customers of Verizon’s Fios cable television service choose from 26 different live TV channels–Comedy Central, HBO, and Nickelodeon. A handful of other partners are offering live programming through Xbox as well.

That’s clearly just the start for Microsoft. The company is moving toward the goal of getting consumers to fire up their Xbox whenever they flip on their TVs, not just when they want to play a game. Next year will see more live television content come to Xbox Live. It’s a foundation that Microsoft will build out as it readies the next version of the Xbox console, something a source on the Xbox team says will happen in 2013.

3. Windows Phone: We’re No. 3

It may be a measure of the decade-long struggle to succeed in mobile telephony that, for Microsoft, a victory would be grabbing the third place spot in terms of smartphone market share for its Windows Phone software. While the company has wrestled to arrive at a winning formula, rivals Apple and Google have introduced mobile-phone operating systems that have seized business that Microsoft had hoped to grab.

Microsoft rebooted its phone effort at the end of last year, introducing a passel of new phones from partners running its brand new operating system, Windows Phone 7. The slick-looking software, refreshed in September with an update dubbed Mango, has won plaudits from reviewers for its animation and app integration.

While the technology is catching up with rivals, Windows Phone’s market share hasn’t. According to market research firm Gartner, just 1.5 percent of the smartphones worldwide run Microsoft’s operating system. And rivals aren’t standing still. Apple’s new iPhone 4S has outsold every other mobile phone since its debut in October. And despite the market fragmentation of Google’s Android, with different handset manufacturers running different versions of the mobile operating system, it continues to pull ahead in the marketplace.

There’s little doubt that Windows Phone share will grow, if only because of the marketing push Microsoft and partners, particularly Nokia, will make, coupled with the tiny toehold it currently has. But it’s most likely to grab customers from Research In Motion’s foundering Blackberry business rather than established Apple and Google customers.

4. Patent litigation aggressor

The ground Microsoft hasn’t been able to take away from Android in the marketplace may well be covered by the revenue it’s able to generate through the threat of litigation. The software giant has persuaded several handset makers–including HTC, Wistron, and Compal– to pay it a vig for each Android device they sell to settle allegations that the mobile operating system violates Microsoft’s patents.

The Android device makers that don’t pay? Microsoft’s taking them to court. Two high profile cases will move toward resolution next year– Microsoft’s suit against Barnes & Noble, whose Nook e-reader runs Android, and a separate suit against Motorola. (Google is in the process of acquiring Motorola Mobility.)

The tactic has proven so successful that in 2011, Microsoft started collecting fees from companies that make devices running Google’s Chrome operating system as well, including Acer and ViewSonic. Expect Microsoft to continue to press device makers that use its rival’s technology. Likewise, count on those manufacturers, particularly the smaller ones, to pay up rather than face Microsoft in the courthouse.

5. Growing search through social

Like the mobile-phone business, Microsoft has bounced from one strategy to the next in a bid to be more relevant in Internet search. It’s re-branded its search engine a few times, added key partners, and cycled through senior executives, and still significantly trails market leader Google.

There’s one Microsoft partnership that could start to pay off in 2012, and it’s not the deal to handle search queries from Yahoo. It’s Microsoft’s deal with Facebook. In May, Microsoft began including recommendations from Facebook friends into its Bing search engine, creating customized results by elevating the ones that receive a “like” from someone in the searcher’s Facebook network. So when someone is looking for a Thai restaurant in Seattle, for example, a spot that earned a like from a Facebook friend will rise in that person’s particular search rankings.

Google is on to the same formula too, creating its Google+ social network to infuse its search results with customized answers to Web surfer queries. But in social networking, Facebook remains king. Using Facebook “likes” are just the first step. Microsoft clearly plans to add more social signals to Bing in 2012. And while that won’t topple Google, it does offer the opportunity to grab a large slice of the search business by providing more relevant results.

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Percento Technologies

Here’s a New Year’s resolution that you’ll want to keep: pay less for nearly everything you buy for your business. I’m talking computers, printers, tablets, hard drives, software–the works!

Easier said than done, right? Wrong. There’s actually a ridiculously simple, but little known, way to save money on most online purchases: start them at a cash-rebate site.

It works like this: Suppose you’re planning to order one of HP’s spiffy Pavilion dm1z laptops. The base configuration starts at $399.99, and because it’s a brand new model (well, newly refreshed, anyway), there are no deals to be found online.

All you have to do is head to a site like BigCrumbs. Or Ebates. Or FatWallet Cash Back. Search for HP, click “Shop Now,” and then make your purchase like you normally would.

In about 90 days, you’ll get back a percentage of your purchase. It might be 8 percent, or 5 percent, or even just 2.5 percent (the amount varies from store to store and rebate site to rebate site), but it’s still money back.

And think about it: if you save 5 percent on a $400 purchase, that’s $20. If you’re buying 10 new laptops, that’s $200. All for just a few extra clicks when you start your online shopping trip. Kind of a no-brainer, right?

Of course, I haven’t told you the catch yet. That’s because I haven’t really found one. I recently used Ebates to order the aforementioned Pavilion dm1z, and everything worked like a charm. I was even able to use a promo code to get a discount on the laptop (which, granted, lowered my rebate a bit, but I still came out way ahead).

Indeed, I’ve become something of a cash-back convert. Although it takes a few months to get your rebates (which, depending on the site, can come in the form of PayPal or an honest-to-goodness check in the mail), the percentage points do add up. My take: why not use one?

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Claiming that the timing of the event meshes poorly with the company’s product launches, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications Frank X. Shaw announced on Tuesday that after CES 2012, Microsoft would no longer deliver a keynote address or have a large booth at the annual trade fair. CES’s organizers, the Consumer Electronics Association, confirmed that the 2012 keynote would be Microsoft’s fourteenth and last.

Shaw’s explanation appeared to make sense. Microsoft’s major consumer product launches tend to fall in the second half of the year, and next year’s big release—Windows 8—isn’t going to buck that trend. There’s an outside chance that Microsoft might talk Xbox 720 at CES 2012, but that too won’t be launching any time soon. The company’s presence at CES has traditionally been big and expensive, and the company no longer feels it yields a valuable return on that investment.

After the 2011 keynote earlier this year, this was hardly surprising. The 2011 keynote was dominated by a mix of products already on the market—Kinect, Windows Phone—and the Windows-on-ARM processor announcement. Though significant, this announcement had no relevance to consumers or indeed 2011. Windows-on-ARM products will only ship in 2012, and most consumers have little interest in the vagaries of instruction set architectures or system-on-chip designs.

But intrigue was added to this apparently straightforward announcement when GigaOM reported that according to people “inside Microsoft,” the withdrawal was due to CEA refusing to allow Redmond to make the keynote presentation beyond next year. In other words, it wasn’t the software giant’s decision at all. In retaliation, Microsoft pulled its future booth plans.

The story took another twist when The Verge reported said that its sources backed Shaw’s original explanation. CEA tried to get Microsoft to sign on for another three years of keynoting after 2011, but Microsoft refused, signing on for only a single additional year (2012)—showing that the company’s plans to leave the event are long-standing. CEA did want more money for future keynotes, which helped push Microsoft away, but ultimately the decision to leave was Microsoft’s.

Microsoft will still be at future CES events in some capacity to connect to partners, press, and the general public. But big reveals and launches of major products will in the future be made at Microsoft-organized, Microsoft-specific events. Events that happen when Redmond says they should happen, and that make Microsoft products the star of the show.

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Texting, emailing or chatting on a cellphone while driving is simply too dangerous to be allowed, federal safety investigators declared Tuesday, urging all states to impose total bans except for emergencies.

Inspired by recent deadly crashes — including one in which a teenager sent or received 11 text messages in 11 minutes before an accident — the recommendation would apply even to hands-free devices, a much stricter rule than any current state law.

The unanimous recommendation by the five-member National Transportation Safety Board would make an exception for devices deemed to aid driver safety such as GPS navigation systems

A group representing state highway safety offices called the recommendation “a game-changer.”

“States aren’t ready to support a total ban yet, but this may start the discussion,” Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, said.

NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman acknowledged the recommendation would be unpopular with many people and that complying would involve changing what has become ingrained behavior for many Americans.

While the NTSB doesn’t have the power to impose restrictions, its recommendations carry significant weight with federal regulators and congressional and state lawmakers. Another recommendation issued Tuesday urges states to aggressively enforce current bans on text messaging and the use of cellphones and other portable electronic devices while driving.

“We’re not here to win a popularity contest,” she said. “No email, no text, no update, no call is worth a human life.”

Currently, 35 states and the District of Columbia ban texting while driving, while nine states and D.C. bar hand-held cellphone use. Thirty states ban all cellphone use for beginning drivers. But enforcement is generally not a high priority, and no states ban the use of hands-free devices for all drivers.

A total cellphone ban would be the hardest to accept for many people.

Leila Noelliste, 26, a Chicago blogger and business owner, said being able to talk on the cellphone “when I’m running around town” is important to self-employed people like herself.

“I don’t think they should ban cellphones because I don’t think you’re really distracted when you’re talking, it’s when you’re texting,” she said. When you’re driving and talking, “your eyes are still on the road.”

The immediate impetus for the recommendation of state bans was a deadly highway pileup near Gray Summit, Mo., last year in which a 19-year-old pickup driver sent and received 11 texts in 11 minutes just before the accident.

NTSB investigators said they are seeing increasing texting, cellphone calls and other distracting behavior by drivers in accidents involving all kinds of transportation. It has become routine to immediately request the preservation of cellphone and texting records when an investigation is begun.

In the past few years the board has investigated a train collision in which the engineer was texting that killed 25 people in Chatsworth, Calif.; a fatal accident on the Delaware River near Philadelphia in which a tugboat pilot was talking on his cellphone and using a laptop computer, and a Northwest Airlines flight that sped more than 100 miles past its destination because both pilots were working on their laptops.

Last year, a driver was dialing his cellphone when his truck crossed a highway median near Munford, Ind., and collided with a 15-passenger van. Eleven people were killed.

The board said the initial collision in the Missouri accident was caused by the inattention of the pickup driver who was texting a friend about events of the previous night. The pickup, traveling at 55 mph, hit the back of a tractor truck that had slowed for highway construction. The pickup was rear-ended by a school bus that overrode the smaller vehicle. A second school bus rammed into the back of the first bus.

The pickup driver and a 15-year-old student on one of the buses were killed. Thirty-eight other people were injured. About 50 students, mostly members of a high school band from St. James, Mo., were on the buses heading to the Six Flags St. Louis amusement park.

Missouri had a law banning drivers under 21 years old from texting while driving at the time of the crash, but wasn’t aggressively enforcing the ban, board member Robert Sumwalt said.

“Without the enforcement, the laws don’t mean a whole lot,” he said.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported earlier this year that pilot projects in Syracuse, N.Y., and Hartford, Conn., produced significant reductions in distracted driving by combining stepped-up ticketing with high-profile public education campaigns.

Before and after each enforcement wave, NHTSA researchers observed cellphone use by drivers and conducted surveys at drivers’ license offices in the two cities. They found that in Syracuse, hand-held cellphone use and texting declined by a third. In Hartford, there was a 57 percent drop in hand-held phone use, and texting behind the wheel dropped by nearly three-quarters.

However, that was with blanket enforcement by police.

The board’s decision to include hands-free cellphone use in its recommendation is likely to prove especially controversial. No states currently ban hand-free use although many studies show that it is often as unsafe as hand-held phone use because drivers’ minds are on their conversations rather than what’s happening on the road.

Hersman pointed to an Alexandria, Va., accident the board investigated in which a bus driver talking on a hands-free phone ran into a bridge despite his being familiar with the route and the presence of warning signs that the arch was too low for his bus to clear. The roof of the bus was sheared off.

The board has previously recommended bans on texting and cellphone use by commercial truck and bus drivers and beginning drivers, but it had stopped short of calling for a ban on the use of the devices by adults behind the wheel of passenger cars.

The problem of texting while driving is getting worse despite a rush by states to ban the practice, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said last week. In November, Pennsylvania became the 35th state to forbid texting while driving.

About two out of 10 American drivers overall — and half of drivers between 21 and 24 — say they’ve thumbed messages or emailed from the driver’s seat, according to a survey of more than 6,000 drivers by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

However, the survey found that many drivers don’t think it’s dangerous when they do it — only when others do.

At any given moment last year on America’s streets and highways, nearly one in every 100 car drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the Web or otherwise using a hand-held electronic device, the safety administration said. Those activities were up 50 percent over the previous year.

Driver distraction wasn’t the only significant safety problem uncovered by NTSB’s investigation of the Missouri accident. Investigators said they believe the pickup driver was suffering from fatigue that may have eroded his judgment. He had an average of about five and a half hours of sleep a night in the days leading up to the accident and had had fewer than five hours of sleep the night before the accident, they said.

The pickup driver had no history of accidents or traffic violations, investigators said.

Investigators also found significant problems with the brakes of both school buses involved in the accident. A third school bus sent to a hospital after the accident to pick up students crashed in the hospital parking lot when that bus’ brakes failed.

However, the brake problems didn’t cause or contribute to the severity of the accident, investigators said.

Another issue involved the difficulty passengers had getting out of the first school bus after the accident. Its doors were unusable and passengers had to exit through an emergency window. The raised latch on the window kept catching on clothing as students tried to escape, investigators said. Escape was further slowed because the window design required one person to hold the window up in order for a second person to crawl through, they said.

It was critical for passengers to leave as quickly as possible because a large amount of fuel underneath the bus was a serious fire hazard, investigators said.

“It could have been a much worse situation if there was a fire,” Donald Karol, the NTSB’s highway safety director, said.

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The proliferation of large-scale data sets is just beginning to change business and science around the world, but enterprises need to prepare in order to gain the most advantage from their information, panelists said at a Silicon Valley event this week.

So-called “big data” is both a challenge to manage and a tool for competitive advantage, according to speakers at a Churchill Club event on Wednesday night in Mountain View, California. The discussion at the Computer History Museum followed the launch of EMC Greenplum’s Unified Analytics Platform, which lets business and IT staffs analyze both structured and unstructured data.

New networked devices and applications are collecting more data than ever and more organizations are holding on to it, creating huge demands for storage. In the second quarter of this year, storage companies shipped 5,429 petabytes of disk capacity, up 30.7 percent from last year’s second quarter, IDC reported last week.

“Data growth is already faster than both Moore’s Law and … network growth,” said Anand Rajaraman, senior vice president of Walmart Global E-Commerce and head of @WalmartLabs. His lab has developed tools for Walmart to take advantage of the new types of data being generated, including applications that collect and analyze information from sources such as Twitter and Facebook to gauge trends and individual consumer preferences.

The benefits of big data stretch beyond business to earth sciences, biology, psychology and other fields, Rajaraman said.

“Science has become more and more about collecting large amounts of data and doing analysis,” he said.

Big data can be any volume of data that requires new tools to analyze, said Luke Lonergan, chief technology officer and co-founder of Greenplum, which EMC acquired last year. For example, it would take 27 hours to run a logistic regression algorithm, which can be used to predict the probability of an event, on 30G bytes of data, Lonergan said. If run on 32 computers, the process takes 60 seconds, he said.

“‘Bigger than previous-generation, non-parallel infrastructure could handle’ might be a useful definition. Anything that blows you out of the old way of doing things,” Lonergan said.

Analyzing data also has gotten harder not only because there is more of it but because it comes from new sources, panelists said. Blogs, Web comments and other information comes in the form of unstructured data, which can’t be crunched the way relational databases are. The need to mine different types of content has led to new data analysis platforms, most notably the open-source Hadoop framework that was pioneered by Google and Facebook.

The market for new tools to manage and exploit big data is still growing, said Ping Li, who heads the Big Data Fund at venture capital company Accel Partners.

“A lot of the applications that ride on top of these new data platforms have yet to be invented,” Li said. Traditional business intelligence and ERP (enterprise resource planning) platforms are being adapted to deal with big data, but what’s needed are native applications developed specifically for the new world, he said.

Developing countries are active participants in this process, sometimes because companies there have skipped over legacy systems that are ingrained in first-world enterprises, Li said.

Trying to get value out of big data today is like creating an online store in the early days of e-commerce, said Walmart’s Rajaraman, who helped develop Amazon.com’s marketplace business. Amazon had to invent its own systems for payment, fraud detection and other tasks, each of which later spawned independent vendors that specialize in each area, he said.

It’s important for an enterprise to understand the implications of big data and how the new tools work before embarking on a big-data initiative, panelists warned.

“Those who are just standing up Hadoop as is, with no management framework, writing directly to it … there’s going to be some real disillusionment there,” said Keith Collins, senior vice president and chief technology officer of SAS.

Big-data tools such as Hadoop can’t create value out of information by themselves, Collins warned in an interview at the event. Enterprises have to know what they want to find out from their data and then deal with how to get that out of their data. “The data issues come after the question,” he said.

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