Backing for Fiscal Panel?s Plan Grows

The commission did not formally vote because while 11 of 18 members backed the plan, that was short of the 14-vote supermajority required to send the plan to Congress for action under the terms of Mr. Obama?s executive order last February establishing the commission. Even so, panel members of both parties, and opponents of the plan as well as supporters, said as they expressed their views that the package should serve as ?a template? for future action, in the words of Representative Xavier Becerra, a Democratic opponent from California.

?This plan deserves a vote and this president needs to make sure that by the State of the Union he also has his own plan and his own leadership because this is the issue of our time that must be solved,? said one of those who voted against the package, Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union who was a major supporter of Mr. Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Mr. Obama issued a statement supportive of the committee?s report without embracing any of its specific recommendations for spending cuts or tax increases. While he said his immediate goal is creating more jobs ? a nod to the rise in the unemployment rate announced Friday morning and the political pressure that sustained high levels of joblessness has put on him - he hinted that he might use some components of the plan as the basis for his own proposals to address the nation?s long-term fiscal imbalances.

?The commission?s majority report includes a number of specific proposals that I ? along with my economic team ? will study closely in the coming weeks as we develop our budget and our priorities for the coming year,? Mr. Obama said in a statement distributed by the White House as the president met with troops in Afghanistan.

?I don?t doubt our ability to meet this challenge, but our success depends on our willingness to engage in the kind of honest conversation and cooperation that hasn?t always happened in Washington,? Mr. Obama said. ?We cannot afford to fall back on old ideologies, and we will all have to budge on long-held positions. So I ask members of both parties to maintain an open mind and a commitment to progress as we work to lift this burden from the shoulders of future generations.?

The committee?s deliberations and the reactions to its proposals highlighted deep splits in Washington and the nation over how urgent the fiscal problem is, how it should be balanced against the economy?s more immediate needs and how it should be addressed.

The plan written by Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson ? representing the view that chronic deficits and the mounting debt must be dealt with aggressively ? would make deep cuts, mostly starting in 2012 given the economy?s fragility, in both domestic and military spending. It would overhaul the tax code, eliminating or reducing the $1 trillion a year in popular tax breaks for individuals and corporations and using the revenues mostly to slash income tax rates but also to reduce deficits. And to make Social Security solvent for 75 years, it would raise payroll taxes for the affluent and reduce future benefits, including by slowly raising the retirement age for full benefits to 69 from 67 by 2075.

Administration at work on Mr. Obama?s State of the Union address and annual budget release in January said there is interest in borrowing the commission?s calls for overhauling the tax code and fixing Social Security?s long-term finances.

Several Republicans also expressed a desire to see the plan serve as the basis for debate soon, especially on overhauling taxes. Senator Michael D. Crapo, a Republican of Idaho, called for ?immediate and aggressive action.?

Mr. Stern, the former labor leader, was the only one of the six private citizens whom Mr. Obama named to the panel to vote against the plan, citing its failure to invest in such areas as education and infrastructure even as it cut spending elsewhere. As the week began, people close to the commission privately predicted that few of the 12 elected officials on the panel would vote yes, reflecting the hesitance among lawmakers who must face the voters to compromise ? Republicans on taxes in particular and Democrats on domestic spending.

But in the end, after days of private one-on-one conversations by the chairmen ? Erskine B. Bowles, the president of the North Carolina University system and a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader of Wyoming ? and revisions to the package?s mix of spending cuts and revenue increases, six of the 12 elected officials on the commission supported the chairmen?s recommendations. Two senior lawmakers on Congress?s budget committees are retiring, however, taking them out of the mix for any future legislative action.

Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the chairman of the House Budget Committee who lost his reelection bid in November, joked that as he struggled to decide to vote yes, ?I thought frequently, thank God I?m not running again.?

Turning serious, Mr. Spratt said it was ?an irony? that the commission was proposing such far-reaching and painful remedies for the coming decade when the White House and Congressional leaders simultaneously on Friday were negotiating how long to extend the soon-to-expire Bush-era tax cuts. As Mr. Spratt noted, an extension for the rates for all income levels would cost more than $4 trillion over the coming decade ? slightly more than the amount that the commission plan would cut from the deficits projected in that time.

The 11 supporters were split between the parties, with five Democrats and five Republicans, along with a political independent, Ann M. Fudge, the former chief executive of Young & Rubicam.

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US companies losing billions of dollars on lost laptops

Based on an Intel-funded study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, US businesses are losing billions of dollars a year on missing laptops. The survey discovered that in a one-year period, the 329 companies polled lost 86,455 notebooks, which averages out to 263 per organization.

It's suggested that the total economic impact of losing that many laptops is around $2.1 billion, which includes expenses like lost intellectual property and productivity, as well as legal, consulting, and regulatory fees. The average value of one lost notebook is said to be $49,246.

"Looking at these results, you can barely fathom the significant financial impact of missing laptops," said Intel. "More astonishing, considering the vulnerability of laptops and their data is that the majority of these companies aren't taking even basic precautions to protect them."


The study found that most companies don't take simple security measures such as encrypting and backing up data. Some 46% of the lost machines contained confidential information, but only 30% of those systems were encrypted and a mere 29% were backed up.

So, where are all the notebooks going? Surprisingly, only 25% of the systems are believed to be stolen (though thieves are suspected to be responsible for another) 15%. The remaining 60% simply vanished into the ether apparently, with the devices generically logged as 'missing'.

Some 40% of all the lost laptops disappeared in seemingly safe off-site locations, such as homes and hotel rooms. A third were lost while traveling via airports and so on, while 12% were misplaced in workers' offices. Only 5% of the missing notebooks are ever recovered.

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Obama in Unannounced Afghan Visit

Mr. Obama arrived at Bagram Air Base after a secret overnight flight. Bad weather and high winds forced the White House to drop plans for Mr. Obama to fly by helicopter into Kabul to meet with Mr. Karzai, who has complained vocally about American military tactics in recent weeks. Technical difficulties then kept the two leaders from speaking by videoconference, officials said, but they later spoke by phone.

Mr. Obama also consulted with his commanding general and visited American troops who are heading into another holiday season far from home.

?As we begin this holiday season, there is no place I?d rather be than here with you,? Mr. Obama said, speaking to thousands of troops in a hangar at Bagram after awarding Purple Hearts to five injured service members. Many of those in the audience at the hangar were from the 101st Airborne Division ? now on its fourth combat deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

?Thanks to your service, we are making important progress,? he said.

Administration officials told reporters during the flight that Mr. Obama was not carrying any particular message for Mr. Karzai, with whom he met several weeks ago during a summit meeting in Lisbon.

Wrapped in a tight security cocoon, Mr. Obama was scheduled to be on the ground for only a few hours, in his second trip in nine months to a country ravaged by war. But his arrival came at critical juncture, as he and other NATO allies put in place a transition plan meant to hand over control of the battlefield to Afghan forces. The intention is to formally end foreign combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Mr. Obama?s administration is also in the midst of its own review of the counterinsurgency strategy he approved a year ago, when he ordered the latest increase in troop strength. That step brought American forces in the country to about 100,000, or roughly triple the number there when he took office 22 months ago.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of American and NATO forces, has highlighted signs of progress, but others have expressed skepticism. General Petraeus and the United States ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, met Mr. Obama when he stepped off Air Force One on Friday after the 13-hour flight. Those two as well as Mr. Obama?s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, and Douglas Lute, a national security aide, met with the president for 40 minutes during the visit.

The president?s visit came at a time of renewed tension between American and Afghan allies. Mr. Karzai has spoken out lately against special-operations raids that American officers believe have proved especially effective in rooting out insurgents. Mr. Karzai?s government is also embroiled in a conflict over fraud in recent parliamentary elections that Western diplomats had hoped would show improvement in a flawed democracy.

Mr. Obama?s plane touched down even as State Department cables obtained by the group WikiLeaks and made available to a number of news organizations laid out a devastating portrait of a society awash in corruption and graft that has been fostered by Mr. Karzai?s own government. The cables questioned whether Mr. Karzai will ever be ?a responsible partner? and depicted him as ?erratic? and ?indecisive and unprepared.?

But unlike his March trip, when Mr. Obama pressed Mr. Karzai over corruption, the president arrived this time intent on working around the frictions between the two governments. The White House shifted its approach to Mr. Karzai after that March trip, concluding that public differences were doing more harm than good.

Mr. Obama began talking with Mr. Karzai by videoconference every six weeks or so. And even after Mr. Karzai lashed out at the American military last month, Mr. Obama played down the dispute when they met shortly afterward at the NATO summit meeting in Lisbon.

?We have to make sure that we understand our objectives are aligned; the endpoint that we want to reach is the same,? Mr. Obama said in Lisbon. Of Mr. Karzai?s concerns, the president said ?we should be sensitive to them and we will be listening to him.? But he added, ?At the same time, he?s got to be sensitive to our concerns.?

As has become customary under both Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush, the trip to Afghanistan was carried out in clandestine fashion. Mr. Obama slipped out of the White House on Thursday night after presiding over a Hanukkah celebration, and boarded Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base for the flight.

Many White House officials were kept in the dark about the journey, as was the Afghan government. The president?s published schedule for Friday listed him meeting with advisers in the Oval Office and then making a public statement on the latest jobs report, with the schedule reporting that ?the location of the statement is T.B.D.,? or to be determined.

He left Washington at an exceptionally busy moment, as he struggles with Congress over a host of issues like tax cuts, arms control, gays in the military and immigration during an abbreviated lame-duck session. A bipartisan advisory commission he appointed was scheduled to vote on a plan to curb the deficit on Friday.

Mr. Obama?s trip was his third outside the United States in the month since the mid-term elections, when his party lost control of the House and saw its majority trimmed in the Senate. No foreign policy challenge is as risky or central to his presidency as the war in Afghanistan.

While he has escalated forces in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has sought a way to end the American war effort there. When he ordered the latest 30,000 troops to the war zone last December, he vowed to begin withdrawing forces in July 2011, a deadline intended to force Afghan authorities to step up while reassuring Americans that the war was not endless. Mr. Obama reasoned that if the modified counterinsurgency strategy was not working by then, it would be time to change course anyway.

The deadline, though, roiled the region. Many players interpreted it as a sign that the Americans were on the way out, and began looking to cut deals for what would come next. To emphasize that the beginning of a withdrawal did not mean that Americans would leave all at once, Mr. Obama and other NATO leaders in Lisbon laid out a four-year transition plan.

Starting in the new year, NATO troops will begin thinning out its forces in specific regions, and gradually handing them over to Afghan security forces. NATO troops may still operate in a supporting role in those regions, and will keep control much longer in the most turbulent areas, like Kandahar. If circumstances allow, the Afghans will take the lead throughout the country by the end of 2014.

But if the troop buildup was supposed to do the Taliban enough damage to push the enemy to the bargaining table for a political reconciliation, the effort suffered a setback recently when Afghan and foreign officials discovered that a supposed high-ranking Taliban figure engaged in secret talks was actually an imposter.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 3, 2010

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Gen. David H. Petraeus as Petreaus.

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Rumor: Google-branded Chrome OS netbook on December 7

The Google-branded Chrome OS netbook (think Nexus One) will be officially unveiled during some Google event on Tuesday, December 7, according to multiple sources cited by Engadget. It's not clear if it will be a live event, a webcast, or something else entirely but it sure seems that the Atom-powered laptop is coming.

Google will also be launching its Chrome Web Store, which will let shoppers browse Flash and HTML5 apps, on the same day, according to All Things Digital. The store is already supported by Chrome 8, which was released earlier this week. The apps are going to be a large part of the Chrome OS, so it makes sense for Google to reveal their home at the same time.

We've already heard rumors that the hardware would reportedly launch this month for Google's closest "friends and family," the netbook would be aimed at the development and enthusiast community (since the OS isn't yet complete), and 75,000 units were being manufactured by Taiwan ODM Inventec. In other words, that Chrome OS will officially be unveiled this year, but the majority of actual devices and the final version of the mobile operating system will be out next year.

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Osfoora for Mac Sneak Peak-Desktop Twitter Clients Still Hot [TNW Apple]

According to MacStories and some screen shots of ?a pre-alpha? version, iOS Twitter client Osfoora is making the jump to the desktop:

In a world dominated by a few big Twitter clients (TweetDeck and HootSuite come first to mind), Osfoora making a jump to the desktop (soon after Weet for Mac emerged in beta form) is a good sign that developers think they can offer something new and interesting to the Twitter apps market.

I think Twitter apps are going to quickly fall into two categories: those for people like us at TNW and other info junkies (following lots of people or lots of lists) who need columns and tabs and as much info in front of us as our screens and eyeballs can handle; and those for the majority of Twitter users who follow a few hundred people at most and a nice, clean Twitter client one their desktop will beat using the website.

So, sure, I couldn?t live in a one column, one account, no tabs world, but a lot of people I know could and might like to try an app for Twitter.

If the price is right. No word on how much Osfoora might cost, but the iOS apps are $3 for iPhone and $4 for iPad/HD version. Would you buy a Twitter app? Would ad-supported or freemium be more to your liking?

Ah, the challenge that faces all developers.

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Microsoft: Google is failing in the enterprise

Microsoft says that Google is failing in the enterprise space and that the search giant is "akin to Microsoft maybe 20 years ago." Google has been trying very hard to lure companies and governments to its cloud-computing options but many, including Microsoft, point out that Gmail and Google Apps are less complete and less reliable than Microsoft's offerings. Microsoft is preparing to launch Office 365, the company's latest cloud productivity package. It looks like the software giant wants to go on the offensive beforehand.

"I would say that they're failing, yes," Tom Rizzo, senior director of Microsoft Online Services, told ComputerWorld. "I would say that the results have not shown that they're successful in the space. We've had customers who've gone to Google and have come back to Microsoft."

Google this week has had some success: the US General Services Administration, which manages the federal government's property and technology, announced it is switching its 15,000 employees to Gmail and Google Apps. It is the first full agency to embrace the cloud.

Rizzo decided to post on his own blog in response to this news. "There's no doubt that businesses are talking to Google, and hearing their pitch, but despite all the talk, Google can't avoid the fact that often times they cannot meet basic requirements," he wrote. "For instance, in California, the state determined that Google couldn't meet many of their basic requirements around functionality and security. Rather than address deficiencies in their product by developing a more robust set of productivity tools, Google cried foul instead of addressing these basic needs."

Google recently filed a lawsuit against the US government because it allegedly only considered Microsoft solutions. Apparently only Redmond's offerings met the requirements for consideration, and Mountain View's simply did not.

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Finally. A high quality video of the Playstation Phone. [TNW Mobile]

We?ve seen it on video before but never as clear as the video that Engadget got a hold of today. What you see above there is Sony Ericsson?s upcoming device that is right now codenamed, Zeus Z1 aka the PlayStation Phone. Inside the video, you can see the PlayStation branding as clear as day, so that should put to rest any doubts any of you might of had about its capabilities.

Other than that little tidbit though, not much else is revealed.

Now that this video is out though, don?t be surprised to see this thing pop up all over the place in the near future.

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FBI arrests Russian man responsible for a third of spam

The FBI has arrested Oleg Nikolaenko, who is allegedly behind the Mega-D botnet, which at one point accounted for nearly a third of all of the spam on the Internet. He was arrested in Las Vegas in early November while attending a car show, and was carrying $4,000 in cash. Nikolaenko worked with affiliates in several countries around the world to push products through spam, including fake watches and herbal supplements, according to JSOnline.

An affidavit filed by the FBI in the US District Court in Wisconsin says agents got onto Nikolaenko's trail after one of his alleged associates, an Australian man named Lance Atkinson, agreed to plead guilty and eventually began telling authorities about his dealings with others in the underground. He filled them in on a spam and affiliate marketing scam that Nikolaenko (whom he called Docent) was involved in.

The FBI worked with the FTC and others to investigate and shutdown a large spamming operation known as Affking. "In the interview, Atkinson explained his involvement in the Affking and related enterprises, including Affking predecessor companies Genbucks and Sancash," FBI agent Brent Banner wrote in his complaint against Nikolaenko. "Specifically, he recalled that two of his largest Russian spamming affiliate used the online monikers 'Docent' and 'Dem'."

The FBI eventually got access to e-mail accounts involved in the payment chain of the affiliate marketing program via a federal subpoena. One of them belonged to Nikolaenko and a search warrant gave them access to the e-mails themselves, as well as a conversation between Nikolaenko and Atkinson, in which the two discussed spam operations. The FBI also found e-mails which contained the executable file for the Mega-D malware. When the botnet was taken down, Banner says in his complaint that Nikolaenko was in the US but left the country two days early, likely to go home and fix the damage.

Nikolaenko is being held in Wisconsin; he could face up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. The Russian has pleaded not guilt, according to Reuters.

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Android to pass iOS before iOS catches up to BlackBerry

60.7 million people in the US owned smartphones during the last quarter, up 14 percent from the preceding three month period. The number of smartphone owners who use Google's Android OS is about to pass the number of users on Apple's iOS, but the number of Americans on RIM's BlackBerry OS is still ahead of both. Based on the data provided by tracking firm comScore, Android saw a huge sales jump while iOS gained a little and BlackBerry dropped quite a bit.

In the three months ending in October, RIM dropped from 39.3 percent to 35.8 percent. Apple's share rose less than a single percentage point, going from 23.8 percent to 24.6 percent. Meanwhile, the share of Google users rose sharply from 17.0 percent to 23.5 percent.

If iOS and Android were neck and neck a month ago, it looks like the latter will pass the former in the current quarter, especially given that it includes the 2010 holiday season. BlackBerry should remain in first this year, but that lead won't last for long.

Microsoft's share dropped from 11.8 percent to 9.7 percent of smartphone subscribers. Palm's numbers fell from 4.9 percent to 3.9 percent. Despite losing share to Android, most smartphone platforms are still gaining users because the smartphone market overall continues to grow.

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