Filed under: Industry, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Marketing and advertising, Private equity

So what do you do if your company produces mostly heavy, inefficient vehicles as gas soars past $4 a gallon? Some might state you should produce more efficient vehicles. But not Chrysler, which has instead opted to make gas cheaper, guaranteed!

This day, Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli announced that anyone crazy enough to purchase a heavy, high-horsepower, low-mileage Chrysler product before Might 31 will be able to purchase gas for no more than $2.99 a gallon for three years. Just take your shiny new Aspen or PT Cruiser to the gas station and use your special gas card; Chrysler will pick up the cost over $2.99 a gallon.

Some critics are calling this plan a cheap gimmick. But there is no denying that Chrysler is at a disadvantage relative to General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Ford (NYSE: F) when it comes to offering new automobiles that get decent mileage. And it is light years behind the auto design leaders, Toyota (NYSE: TM) and Honda (NYSE: HMC). So it needs some kind of gimmick to help its dealers clear out the cobwebs that are quickly forming on their lots.

In recent years, Chrysler has relied heavily on trucks and SUVs for sales, and its hot new automobiles like the Challenger are gas guzzlers. (Hey, your Hemi sure is fast! Sorry about the 11mpg!) Its lineup is in desperate need of an overhaul and products that offer decent mileage. But developing new vehicles is difficult and very pricey, and it’s not clear that Chrysler’s owner, Cerberus Capital Management, has the money to do it. The alternative — advertising and sales gimmicks, long favorites in Detroit — is cheap by comparison.

This promotion might work, at least for a few weeks. But it points to much more massive problem: Chrysler doesn’t have the goods to compete right now, and it’s not clear when it will, if ever.

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Presto Vivace sends news of a server found by security firm Finjin that contained a 1.4-GB cache of stolen data, accumulated over a period of less than a month from compromised Computers around the world. The “crimeserver,” as Finjin dubs it, “provided command and control functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data harvested from compromised computers… The stolen data consisted of 5,388 very special log files including 1,037 from Turkey, 621 from Germany, 571 from the United Says, 322 from France, 308 from India and 232 from Britain.” Oddly enough, the data was stored in the open, with not even basic auth to protect it. Finjin notes in their press release that this huge trove of data gathered over a short period of time indicates that the crimeware problem is far bigger than most observers have been assuming.

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QtPi writes “Trolltech has announced the availability of Qt 4.4, the cross-platform software development framework. Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the release, which include an integrated WebKit-based HTML rendering engine, the new Phonon multimedia framework, support for Windows CE, and significant improvements to the QGraphicsView system. ‘Qt 4.4 brings a lot of rich new capabilities to the toolkit that are sure to please open source and commercial software developers. It sounds like Trolltech already has some nice plans for Qt 4.5, and we’ll hopefully get to hear more about the long-term roadmap after Nokia completes its acquisition.’”

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LinucksGirl writes “Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it’s apt to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system.”

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jcatcw writes “Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks about the dissimilarities between malware of yore and current infiltrations as we approach the 20th anniversary of the William Morris worm. Modern malware apps curl up and make themselves at home in your system, where they wait for a chance to snatch an important password or a credit card number. Welcome to the era of capitalist hacking. Any self-respecting malware program today is polymorphic, making signature-based antivirus approaches difficult. Heuristics and virtual sandboxes offer alternatives, but all such methods are reactive. Unfortunately, monitoring lists and networks is about the only current alternative.”

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StarEmperor writes “Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. The article presents their insights about game design, evaluating gameplay, and generally what makes for a fun game.”

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An anonymous reader writes “Krugle, a software search company, had some time on its hands — it compared frequency of mentions in open source code of presidential candidates, Beelzebub and yes, Britney Spears.” I wish they’d link to a nice long list of the other terms this revealed — there are probably a lot of subtler funny references and asides.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “The RIAA is going to have to face the music in Tampa, Florida, and answer the charges of extortion, trespass, conspiracy, unlicensed investigation, and computer fraud and abuse that have been leveled against them there. And the judge delivered his ruling against them in in pretty unceremonious fashion — receiving their dismissal motion last night, and denying the motion this morning. The RIAA’s unvarying M.O., when hit with counterclaims, is to make a motion to dismiss them. It did just that in one Tampa case, UMG v. Del Cid, but the judge upheld 5 of the 6 counterclaims. The RIAA quickly settled that one. When a new case came up in the same Tampa courthouse before the very same judge, and the same 5 counterclaims were leveled against the record companies, I opined that ‘it is highly unlikely that the RIAA will make a motion to dismiss counterclaims,’ since I knew they’d be risking sanctions if they did. Well I guess I underestimated the chutzpah — or the propensity for frivolous motion practice — of the RIAA lawyers, as they in essence thumbed their nose at the judge, making the dismissal motion anyway, telling District Judge Richard A. Lazzara that his earlier decision had been wrong. The judge wasted no time telling the record companies that he did not concur (PDF).”

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SeeSp0tRun writes to remind us of Blizzard’s lawsuit against MDY Industries over the Glider cheat. It seems that Blizzard is pushing it even further. They’re trying out the legal theory that a software creator retains complete control over how a program is used, meaning that anyone who uses it in a different way could be found guilty of copyright infringement, at $750 a pop. The EFF and Public Knowledge are among the organizations trying to assure that the court doesn’t set a really bad precedent here.

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Doug Lederman writes “As colleges receive exploding numbers of complaints from recording companies about alleged illegal downloading of music files, theories abound about whether the industry is changing its criteria, aggressively targeting users who merely make downloaded music available to others rather than actual infringers. But after weeks of silence, the president of the RIAA states No: Better technology, he asserts, is merely resulting in better enforcement.”

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