USA > History > 2010 > Internet (I)

Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On

December 30, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN DIEGO — Some people go to court hoping to win millions of dollars. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have already won tens of millions. But six years into a legal feud with Facebook, they want to give it back — for a chance to get more.

The Winklevosses — identical twins and Harvard graduates — say that they, along with another Harvard student, Divya Narendra, had the original idea for Facebook, and that Mark Zuckerberg stole it. They sued Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg in 2004, and settled four years later for $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook shares.

They have been trying to undo that settlement since, saying they were misled on the value of the deal. But it has not been an easy decision.

As recently as Thursday, the brothers considered dropping their effort to unwind the agreement, and went as far as drafting a statement to that effect, according to people close to the case. They decided, though, to keep fighting.

Their argument is that Facebook deceived them about the value of the shares, leaving them with far less than they had agreed. Whatever their value at the time of the deal, Facebook’s shares have soared since, putting the current worth of the settlement, by some estimates, at more than $140 million.

Next month, the twins and Mr. Narendra plan to ask a federal appeals court in San Francisco to undo the deal so they can pursue their original case against Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg, and win a richer payday. They could, though, lose it all.

Still, they say it’s not about the money, it’s about the principle — and vindication.

“The principle is that they didn’t fight fair,” said Tyler Winklevoss during an interview at a pub here recently. “The principle is that Mark stole the idea.”

His brother, Cameron, chimed in, “What we agreed to is not what we got.”

Facebook denies it did anything improper and says the Winklevosses simply suffer from a case of “settlers remorse.”

To make matters more complicated, the twins are also at war with the lawyers who helped them win the settlement. The brothers fired them, accused them of malpractice and refused to pay them. A judge recently found for the lawyers, and ordered the twins to pay the 20 percent contingency fee, or $13 million. For now, the money and shares remain in an escrow account.

Yet their battle with Mr. Zuckerberg is what has had them riled up. When they talked about him, and told their version of the founding of Facebook, they helped finish each other’s sentences, easily reciting every last detail of a tale they have evidently told time and again.

“It shouldn’t be that Mark Zuckerberg gets away with behaving that way,” Cameron Winklevoss said.

The company declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg available for an interview, and Andrew Noyes, a spokesman, said Facebook would have no comment “beyond was is already in our appellate briefs.” In the past, Mr. Zuckerberg has denied he stole the Facebook idea from the Winklevosses, saying they planned a dating site, not a social network.

The twins, who are 29, recently told portions of their story in a “60 Minutes” interview for CBS. They grew up in affluence in Greenwich, Conn., were varsity rowers at Harvard and competed in the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. They now live here in San Diego, where they are training for the 2012 London Olympics.

They are as physically striking and imposing as they appeared in the film, “The Social Network, where they were portrayed by one actor, Armie Hammer. They are 6-foot-5 , and their frames are lean and muscular, shaped by years of rowing.

For the interview, they wore hoodies and jeans, and only the variation in the hoodies — one zippered with a Ron Jon Surf Shop emblem, one a pullover with a Quicksilver logo — helped to tell them apart.

As they talked about the Facebook case, no detail was too small to omit, from where they first met Mr. Zuckerberg (the Kirkland House dining room) to the layout of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room, to the content of the e-mails he had sent them after they asked him to do computer programming for a Web site called Harvard Connection. They recited arcane facts about the valuation of private companies and even quoted from the Securities Act of 1934, which they say Facebook violated when it drew up the settlement.

In addition to a bigger payday, the twins say they want a court to reconsider their original claims about Facebook’s founding, pointing to instant messages on the subject sent by Mr. Zuckerberg to various friends. The messages have come to light since the brothers signed the deal. But they say Facebook executives and board members have known about the messages since 2006, and played dirty by concealing them when they negotiated the settlement.

“If you take all those documents, it is a dramatically different picture,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

Facebook declined to comment on the messages. In prior interviews, Mr. Zuckerberg said he had regretted sending some of them.

While the Winklevosses could end up losing their settlement, the risks for Facebook are high as well. If the court unwinds the agreement, the company will have to decide whether to offer them a richer settlement or face a trial. Recent trades on a private exchange suggest that Facebook, which is not a public company, now is worth around $50 billion, and the company may not want the negative publicity associated with a trial, especially if it decides to move forward with a stock offering.

The roots of the original dispute date to 2003, when Mr. Zuckerberg, then a Harvard sophomore, said he would help the Winklevosses and Mr. Narendra program Harvard Connection, later renamed ConnectU. But Mr. Zuckerberg delayed work on Harvard Connection, and when pressed for answers, stalled, according to the Winklevosses. In February 2004 he released TheFacebook, which eventually became Facebook.

After ConnectU and its founders sued, Facebook countersued in 2005.

The settlement, which gave Facebook ownership of ConnectU, was supposed to resolve all claims.

The details of the new dispute, which erupted almost immediately, are less known, in part because the parties reached the settlement after a confidential mediation. But according to court documents, the parties agreed to settle for a sum of $65 million. The Winklevosses then asked whether they could receive part of it in Facebook shares and agreed to a price of $35.90 for each share, based on an investment Microsoft made nearly five months earlier that pegged Facebook’s total value at $15 billion. Under that valuation, they received 1.25 million shares, putting the stock portion of the agreement at $45 million.

Yet days before the settlement, Facebook’s board signed off on an expert’s valuation that put a price of $8.88 on its shares. Facebook did not disclose that valuation, which would have given the shares a worth of $11 million. The ConnectU founders contend that Facebook’s omission was deceptive and amounted to securities fraud.

They refuse to say how much they would ask for in a new negotiation, but they said that based on the lower valuation, they should have received roughly four times the number of shares. At today’s price, that would give the settlement a value of more than $500 million.

In its brief, the company says it was under no obligation to disclose the $8.88 valuation, which was available in public filings. Facebook describes it as one of many that it received and as “immaterial” to the calculations of ConnectU founders and their battery of lawyers and advisers.

“There was no chance that that one valuation would have affected the decision of these sophisticated investors and their entourage of advisers,” Facebook wrote in its brief.

In marketplaces that match buyers and sellers of the shares of privately held companies, Facebook’s shares have soared to more than $100 in recent trades, after adjusting for stock splits.

So far, Facebook’s arguments have won the day in multiple court rulings.

The brothers are hoping for better luck next month, before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Unless they decide to give up.

Last year, the Winklevoss brothers completed coursework for a masters in business administration at Oxford. Cameron helped to start Guestofaguest.com, a Web site that offers information about “people, places and parties” in New York, Los Angeles and the Hamptons.

“We are moving forward and trying to be productive individuals,” Cameron said.

When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” They added that Mr. Zuckerberg deserved some credit for “not screwing up” and expanding Facebook into a community of 500 million users. But they believe the fame and fortune is undeserved.

Tyler Winklevoss said: “Mark is where he is because we approached him to include him in our idea.”

    Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On, NYT, 30.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/business/31twins.html

Online Sales Rose 15% This Holiday,

Beating In-Store Growth, Report Says

December 23, 2010
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Online sales increased more than 15 percent this holiday season, according to data released Thursday, the latest confirmation of the growing importance of Internet commerce during retail’s most lucrative time of the year.

Retailers online took in $36.4 billion from Oct. 31 to Dec. 23, compared with $31.5 billion in the period a year ago, according to MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, which tracks all forms of payments for purchases, including cash and check.

The growth of online purchases is expected to surpass in-store sales this Christmas, though it still represents a small percentage of total sales. The National Retail Federation said last week that it expected sales in November and December to increase 3.3 percent this year, up from 2.3 percent a year ago, to $451.4 billion.

Much of the online increase came in apparel sales, SpendingPulse said, which took in $7.3 billion since Oct. 31, up 25.7 percent from a year ago.

Over all, apparel purchases online accounted for 18.9 percent of the total clothing sales this holiday, SpendingPulse said, up from 16.9 percent a year ago.

Cold, wet weather across much of the country in the last several weeks led consumers to stock up on warm clothing, which has been a boon to retailers, said Michael McNamara, vice president for research and analysis at SpendingPulse. The inclement weather has led many to shop at home.

“What is driving this is that apparel sales online are doing well in general, represented by a shift from brick-and-mortar stores,” Mr. McNamara said. “The cold weather has helped, too. Retailers are saying this is the season of the sweater.”

Department stores saw an 11 percent increase in online purchases. Sales of electronics goods increased 12.2 percent. Jewelry had a comparatively modest 4.5 percent increase online, according to SpendingPulse.

This year, six days surpassed the $1 billion mark, led by Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, which each had about $1.1 billion in sales.

One three-day period — Dec. 14, 15 and 16 — each had sales of more than $1 billion. Last year, only three days had $1 billion in sales or more.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, which was Nov. 29 this year, many online retailers offered discounts and other deals to attract shoppers. The result was $99.3 million in sales — a 25.3 percent increase rate from a year ago. Online deals on the Friday after Thanksgiving spurred a 34.5 percent increase in online sales, to $597 million.

    Online Sales Rose 15% This Holiday, Beating In-Store Growth, Report Says, NYT, 23.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/business/24retail.html

Music Web Sites Dispute Legality of Their Closing

December 19, 2010
The New York Times
By BEN SISARIO

When federal authorities shut down five Web sites last month on suspicion of copyright infringement, they gave no warning and offered no details of their investigation, and they have not filed any criminal charges since.

But after the seizure warrant used in the operation was released last week, the operators of several of the sites said in interviews that they were innocent of infringement, and criticized the investigation for misrepresenting how their sites worked.

In a 69-page affidavit seeking the warrant, an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the unit of the Department of Homeland Security that did the investigation, said the five sites — rapgodfathers.com, torrent-finder.com, rmx4u.com, dajaz1.com and onsmash.com — were used “to commit or facilitate criminal copyright infringement.”

The agent also said the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade groups for the major film studios and record labels, had confirmed that the music and movies on the sites had not been released with the authorization of their copyright holders.

Yet after being shown the affidavit, the operator of dajaz1.com — a widely read hip-hop blog that posts new songs and videos — disputed many of the warrant’s examples of what it called copyright infringement. He said that, like much of the material on his site, the songs had been sent to him for promotional purposes by record labels and the artists.

As proof, the operator, a Queens man who declined to give his real name but is known online as Splash, showed The New York Times several e-mails from record label employees and third-party marketers offering songs mentioned in the affidavit.

“It’s not my fault if someone at a record label is sending me the song,” Splash said.

In describing what it contends are the infringing aspects of onsmash.com, the affidavit mentions a post with a link to new music by the rapper Kid Cudi, with a line telling readers, “You can pre-order the album on iTunes tomorrow and receive a bonus track on the day of release.”

Waleed A. GadElKareem, an Egyptian who operated torrent-finder.com, said his site was essentially a search engine for BitTorrent — a decentralized file-sharing system that can be used for any data — with results that are easily found elsewhere on the Internet.

“Google and Yahoo still link to them,” he said. “Why can’t I?”

(Torrent-finder.com, like several of the seized domains, has relocated; it is now fully operational at torrent-finder.info.)

The sites were shut over the Thanksgiving weekend as part of “Operation In Our Sites,” a crackdown on 82 domains, or Web addresses, suspected of copyright infringement and selling counterfeit handbags, sunglasses and other consumer goods. The investigation is continuing. Unlike most previous similar government crackdowns, the domains were seized with no warning.

The move has drawn criticism among many bloggers and Web advocates who see it as a preview of a controversial bill in Congress, the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act, which would extend the attorney general’s power in pursuing Web sites believed to be “dedicated to infringing activities.”

“There is tremendous concern about the climate of fear and uncertainty this is going to create,” said Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. “It’s a troubling situation where basically any Web site that the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t like and is convinced has too much infringing material on it can just disappear overnight.”

    Music Web Sites Dispute Legality of Their Closing, NYT, 19.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/media/20music.html

Social Networks Meant for Social Good, but at a Price

December 19, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

Over the last year or so, there has been an explosion of online intermediaries promising to help nonprofit groups raise money and awareness.

Crowdrise, Jumo, Causecast, Causes on Facebook and others try to use social networking and crowdsourcing to build interest in charities and causes, and to help them attract donations.

“2010 has really been the year of the social network for social good,” said Katya Andresen, chief operating officer at Network for Good, a nonprofit that handles processing and other administrative chores for many of the new sites.

In a recent study of online giving, Network for Good found that the experience when donating online is important to people. “I think many of these new sites are trying to make online giving, which is rather transactional in nature, an experience of greater intimacy, and that’s valuable,” Ms. Andresen said.

But to many in the nonprofit world, the value of the sites remains to be seen. For one thing, they hand partial control over charity brand names and trademarks to users who are often unknown to the nonprofit groups they support. And virtually all of them ask users to pay to donate.

“I think of them as disintermediaries because they stand between a nonprofit and its supporters, and what most of our clients’ value is establishing that direct connection,” said Gene Austin, chief executive of Convio, a company that provides technology to help nonprofits manage relations. “It’s especially concerning if they’re taking a cut.”

To Mr. Austin and others, the new sites operate on a model that evokes memories of the United Way a decade ago. It began to lose ground when donors questioned why they should make donations through United Way — and give it a percentage of the money — when they could give directly to a charity.

“Moving toward a more donor-driven, pass-through model didn’t raise more money,” said Brian Gallagher, chief executive of the United Way of America.

Now, the United Way raises money around three core issues, which it addresses with proprietary programs. Its “pass-through” business, Mr. Gallagher said, has remained stagnant for the last five or six years.

“What we learned is that folks will pay you if they think they’re getting more value for what you’re offering,” he said.

The young entrepreneurs behind the new sites say their organizations are more than middlemen. “Saying the people can donate on an organization’s Web site misses the fact that nonprofits have to advertise to get people there, do marketing in various places to convince them to donate, cover credit card fees and pay for technology associated with their Web site and payment processing,” said Matthew Mahan, a representative of Causes.

Chris Hughes, the founder of Jumo, said his site was primarily about helping people connect with one another and with organizations around social missions, not about fund-raising.

“Jumo makes it easier for people to find an organization and stay in touch with it,” said Mr. Hughes, who is also a founder of Facebook. “That has a value.”

Crowdrise pitches itself as a tool to improve an individual’s fund-raising campaign, whether that is a celebrity like Barbra Streisand, who is raising money for the Cedars-Sinai Women’s Heart Center, or a person like Christine (Crowdrise users usually use only their given name), who is using the site to raise $60,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

“To us, Crowdrise is a complement or additive to whatever users are already doing,” said Robert Wolfe, a founder. “We don’t see this as a place for a charity to raise money for operational funds. It’s more for projects.”

Several online intermediaries serve as conduits to projects that cannot otherwise be supported directly. For example, United States Artists, a nonprofit that works to raise awareness of artists and their work, recently turned part of its Web site into a social network that allows everyday donors to support specific arts projects. It charges an 18 percent fee, but there is no other simple way to contribute as directly to those projects.

Similarly, GiveLocally, a new donation service started by Andrew Young III, who goes by Bo and whose father is the civil rights leader Andrew Young, allows donors to support people in need by providing money to pay for things like someone’s overdue electric bill.

The business — it is not a nonprofit — does not just transfer money to the recipients featured on its Web site. Rather, it makes payments or purchases using the money that donors offer, taking an 18 percent cut of each donation for what Mr. Young calls “a keep-the-lights-on fee.”

He said none of the company’s executive team receive a salary. “What we’re doing is a lot more personal than what other sites are offering,” he said. “We’re linking individual donors to individual recipients and providing all the necessary vetting.”

Virtually all of the new intermediaries charge 4.75 percent of a donation’s value to cover Network for Good’s administrative charges. The Web site for Causes says that the 4.75 percent fee is “equal to or greater than” what nonprofits pay themselves in credit card processing fees and compares its cost-effectiveness to that of direct mail solicitation.

Experts say, however, that comparisons to direct mail are unfair and that, on average, nonprofits pay 3 percent to 3.5 percent in credit card fees.

Most of the new sites also suggest leaving a “tip” and preselect an amount, though donors can opt out. Jumo, for instance, proposes tipping 15 percent. Thus, a $25 gift would be whittled down to $20.06 once a 15 percent tip and processing charge were deducted, unless the donor decided to add the tip onto the $25. (The donor could still claim a tax deduction for the full amount, however, because Jumo and Network for Good are charities, too.)

Donors to Crowdrise are also asked for a tip, and even if they opt out, fees to cover Network for Good’s charges and Web maintenance would reduce a gift of $100 to $92.75.

Causes also has its hand out, saying, “We’re a small team that relies on the support of generous donors like you to keep the lights on.”

In fact, Causes is a profit-making business, and it recently received $9 million in venture capital financing, bringing its total financing to $16 million. Mr. Mahan of Causes, said, “The purpose of our recent funding round and other revenue streams — including tipping — is to help us deliver more innovative solutions at a faster pace in order to grow activism online, incite more giving and deliver scale efficiently and effectively.”

Mr. Hughes of Jumo said, “I think there’s probably a good conversation to be had about how these sites self-fund.”

    Social Networks Meant for Social Good, but at a Price, NYT, 19.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/20charity.html

Online Stores Start to Wean Shoppers Off Sales

December 19, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

This holiday season, online sales are zooming, even as online retailers offer fewer discounts and turn picky about who shops at their sites.

After two years of relative malaise, online sales grew 12 percent in the first 47 days of the holiday season, according to comScore, to $27.5 billion. That significantly outpaces the growth rate of retail sales over all, which analysts expect to rise 3 to 4 percent this holiday season.

But online retailers are now protecting their margins with careful offers, dispensing with the promotions of the last two holiday seasons that were meant to drive sales and get rid of extra inventory. Gone are the coupons that give shoppers 40 percent off all purchases. Instead, offers go to selected customers, and are specialized: a discount on wool jackets, free hoop earrings when people spend $100, a “mystery” discount amount that is revealed only at checkout.

The promotions try to get customers to behave in a certain way. A coupon may seem straightforward, like Drugstore.com offering $5 off a $30 purchase. In fact, it is encouraging one-time customers to browse through several pages of a site and get to know what a retailer offers as they decide what to buy.

“The reason there’s these different promotions and not just the straight dollar-off or percent-off promotions all the time is there are different incentives,” said David Lonczak, chief marketing officer of Drugstore.com. “You may just need a sale, you may have a product you’re long on and you need to get rid of it, or you may be looking to acquire customers with a higher basket,” he said, referring to the transaction price. “You have to be thoughtful.”

Discounting has declined; in November, retailers’ e-commerce revenue from sales of full-price items rose 52 percent versus November 2009, according to MyBuys, which works on personalization offers for retailers.

But less discounting has not tamped down online sales. On Thanksgiving weekend, more than one-third of purchases were made online, versus about 28.5 percent last year, according to the National Retail Federation.

That is because even staunch in-store shoppers are now comfortable buying online, said Fiona Dias, executive vice president for strategy and marketing for GSI Commerce, which provides e-commerce technology to retailers like Toys “R” Us. And the high demand means that online retailers do not have to slash prices to get customers.

“If anything, we’re running tight on inventory because everyone has sold a lot more than they expected to,” Ms. Dias said of the sites she works with. “That’s why we’re not seeing 50-percent-off promotions.”

Given their strong position, retailers are trying to get customers out of the price-wars mind-set that they adopted during the recession.

“At some point, we have to stop and try to go back to where we were because if everyone continues to offer 20 percent, 50 percent off, it’s going to change the market on a long-term scale that it would be too hard to get back from,” said Melissa Joy Manning, who runs an online jewelry store bearing her name. She has stopped discounting, but is giving a pair of silver hoop earrings to customers who spend $100 or more. “We don’t have unlimited resources, so we do try to be as creative with them as we can,” she said.

Like Ms. Manning, other retailers are getting creative with unusually specific offers.

“It’s about margins,” said Andy Dunn, the chief executive and co-founder of Bonobos, a men’s clothing site. While last December, about a third of his revenue came from promotions, this year it’s down to about a quarter, even as he expects his revenue to nearly triple for the month. “There’s less of a need to be highly promotional,” he said. “At the same time, we feel we need to get better at the laser-beam promoting.”

So he is whittling down offers, sending, for instance, a 20 percent offer on suit elements to people who have bought wool pants but not a jacket.

“We don’t have to treat everyone the same,” he said.

Drugstore.com also changes its approach depending on the customer.

That offer for $5 off any purchase over $30 may prompt people to explore the site. “So if a new Drugstore.com customer doesn’t know I sell toys and games, would you think I’d sell a Razor scooter?” he said. “I have to incent you to shop around.”

He would use a percent-off coupon, he said, when he wants to drive overall sales. And he tends to avoid offers like “$10 off your purchase,” because “I would get a whole bunch of people coming in, they would find the product that was 10 dollars and one cent, they would get it and I would never see them again,” he said.

Other retailers are trying to stand out in crowded in-boxes. Bloomingdales.com had a “mystery savings” event last week, in which customers on its e-mail list were sent a code that called up discounts of between 10 and 40 percent at checkout.

“People are going, ‘Well, maybe I’m going to be the one who hits the jackpot,’ ” said Bruce Berman, president of Bloomingdales.com and chief financial officer of Bloomingdale’s. “So they open it at a higher rate.” The tactic helped the store stand out, he said. The day after the Bloomingdale’s e-mail went out, Saks Fifth Avenue also sent one promoting a “mystery sale” online. Saks declined to comment on the promotion.

For Bloomingdale’s, Mr. Berman said, “It worked out to our advantage because whoever shops both will say, ‘I already did that.’ ”

Sometimes, a retailer can be too successful with an online sale, and have to shift tactics on the fly to keep profit up.

At the Gap Inc. sites, which include Banana Republic and Old Navy, the plan was to do heavy discounts on the four days after Thanksgiving. But Friday sales “exceeded our forecast — it was too hot, it was too strong,” said Toby Lenk, the president of Gap Inc. Direct. “So we pulled back on our promotions for Cyber Monday.”

And other retailers have had to devise new tactics after vendors instructed them to stop offering discounts on their brands.

“With the discounting in the last years, the perception from our vendors is that we were discounting their products,” said Pete LaBore, director of customer retention at Backcountry.com.

So the company came up with a new offer — “on our dime,” Mr. LaBore said — that gave $20 off on the site. “It’s totally free money,” the offer said. But customers did not seem to believe it, and Backcountry.com sent another e-mail two days later with the subject line, “Seriously — It’s Free.”

The offer went only to people who had bought, in the past, certain brands or categories in which Backcountry.com now had too much stock, or to people who usually spent enough that “we weren’t just going to have somebody coming in buying a three-dollar pair of socks,” Mr. LaBore said.

It seemed a smart approach; so far, the offer has been profitable, with most people spending much more than $20, Mr. LaBore said.

“We’re trying to get away from the ‘sale, sale, sale’ message, and this is a different way to do that,” he said.

    Online Stores Start to Wean Shoppers Off Sales, NYT, 19.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/20ecommerce.html

Facebook Wrestles With Free Speech and Civility

December 12, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, likes to say that his Web site brings people together, helping to make the world a better place. But Facebook isn’t a utopia, and when it comes up short, Dave Willner tries to clean up.

Dressed in Facebook’s quasi-official uniform of jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, the 26-year-old Mr. Willner hardly looks like a cop on the beat. Yet he and his colleagues on Facebook’s “hate and harassment team” are part of a virtual police squad charged with taking down content that is illegal or violates Facebook’s terms of service. That puts them on the front line of the debate over free speech on the Internet.

That role came into sharp focus last week as the controversy about WikiLeaks boiled over on the Web, with coordinated attacks on major corporate and government sites perceived to be hostile to that group.

Facebook took down a page used by WikiLeaks supporters to organize hacking attacks on the sites of such companies, including PayPal and MasterCard; it said the page violated the terms of service, which prohibit material that is hateful, threatening, pornographic or incites violence or illegal acts. But it did not remove WikiLeaks’s own Facebook pages.

Facebook’s decision in the WikiLeaks matter illustrates the complexities that the company grapples with, on issues as diverse as that controversy, verbal bullying among teenagers, gay-baiting and religious intolerance.

With Facebook’s prominence on the Web — its more than 500 million members upload more than one billion pieces of content a day — the site’s role as an arbiter of free speech is likely to become even more pronounced.

“Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University who has written about free speech on the Internet. “It is important that Facebook is exercising its power carefully and protecting more speech rather than less.”

But Facebook rarely pleases everyone. Any piece of content — a photograph, video, page or even a message between two individuals — could offend somebody. Decisions by the company not to remove material related to Holocaust denial or pages critical of Islam and other religions, for example, have annoyed advocacy groups and prompted some foreign governments to temporarily block the site.

Some critics say Facebook does not do enough to prevent certain abuses, like bullying, and may put users at risk with lax privacy policies. They also say the company is often too slow to respond to problems.

For example, a page lampooning and, in some instances, threatening violence against an 11-year-old girl from Orlando, Fla., who had appeared in a music video, was still up last week, months after users reported the page to Facebook. The girl’s mother, Christa Etheridge, said she had been in touch with law enforcement authorities and was hoping the offenders would be prosecuted.

“I’m highly upset that Facebook has allowed this to go on repeatedly and to let it get this far,” she said.

A Facebook spokesman said the company had left the page up because it did not violate its terms of service, which allow criticism of a public figure. The spokesman said that by appearing in a band’s video, the girl had become a public figure, and that the threatening comments had not been posted until a few days ago. Those comments, and the account of the user who had posted them, were removed after The New York Times inquired about them.

Facebook says it is constantly working to improve its tools to report abuse and trying to educate users about bullying. And it says it responds as fast as it can to the roughly two million reports of potentially abusive content that its users flag every week.

“Our intent is to triage to make sure we get to the high-priority, high-risk and high-visibility items most quickly,” said Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer.

In early October, Mr. Willner and his colleagues spent more than a week dealing with one high-risk, highly visible case; rogue citizens of Facebook’s world had posted antigay messages and threats of violence on a page inviting people to remember Tyler Clementi and other gay teenagers who have committed suicide, on so-called Spirit Day, Oct. 20.

Working with colleagues here and in Dublin, they tracked down the accounts of the offenders and shut them down. Then, using an automated technology to tap Facebook’s graph of connections between members, they tracked down more profiles for people, who, as it turned out, had also been posting violent messages.

“Most of the hateful content was coming from fake profiles,” said James Mitchell, who is Mr. Willner’s supervisor and leads the team. He said that because most of these profiles, created by people he called “trolls,” were connected to those of other trolls, Facebook could track down and block an entire network relatively quickly.

Using the system, Mr. Willner and his colleagues silenced dozens of troll accounts, and the page became usable again. But trolls are repeat offenders, and it took Mr. Willner and his colleagues nearly 10 days of monitoring the page around the clock to take down over 7,000 profiles that kept surfacing to attack the Spirit Day event page.

Most abuse incidents are not nearly as prominent or public as the defacing of the Spirit Day page, which had nearly 1.5 million members. As with schoolyard taunts, they often happen among a small group of people, hidden from casual view.

On a morning in November, Nick Sullivan, a member of the hate and harassment team, watched as reports of bullying incidents scrolled across his screen, full of mind-numbing meanness. “Emily looks like a brother.” (Deleted) “Grady is with Dave.” (Deleted) “Ronald is the biggest loser.” (Deleted) Although the insults are relatively mild, as attacks on specific people who are not public figures, these all violated the terms of service.

“There’s definitely some crazy stuff out there,” Mr. Sullivan said. “But you can do thousands of these in a day.”

Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, which advises parents and teachers on Internet safety, said her organization frequently received complaints that Facebook does not quickly remove threats against individuals. Jim Steyer, executive director of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, also said that many instances of abuse seemed to fall through the cracks.

“Self-policing can take some time, and by then a lot of the damage may already be done,” he said.

Facebook maintains it is doing its best.

“In the same way that efforts to combat bullying offline are not 100 percent successful, the efforts to stop people from saying something offensive about another person online are not complete either,” Joe Sullivan said.

Facebook faces even thornier challenges when policing activity that is considered political by some, and illegal by others, like the controversy over WikiLeaks and the secret diplomatic cables it published.

Last spring, for example, the company declined to take down pages related to “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” an Internetwide protest to defend free speech that surfaced in repudiation of death threats received by two cartoonists who had drawn pictures of Muhammad. A lot of the discussion on Facebook involved people in Islamic countries debating with people in the West about why the images offended.

Facebook’s team worked to separate the political discussion from the attacks on specific people or Muslims. “There were people on the page that were crossing the line, but the page itself was not crossing the line,” Mr. Mitchell said.

Facebook’s refusal to shut down the debate caused its entire site to be blocked in Pakistan and Bangladesh for several days.

Facebook has also sought to walk a delicate line on Holocaust denial. The company has generally refused to block Holocaust denial material, but has worked with human rights groups to take down some content linked to organizations or groups, like the government of Iran, for which Holocaust denial is part of a larger campaign against Jews.

“Obviously we disagree with them on Holocaust denial,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But Rabbi Cooper said Facebook had done a better job than many other major Web sites in developing a thoughtful policy on hate and harassment.

The soft-spoken Mr. Willner, who on his own Facebook page describes his political views as “turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” makes for an unlikely enforcer. An archaeology and anthropology major in college, he said that while he loved his job, he did not love watching so much of the underbelly of Facebook.

“I handle it by focusing on the fact that what we do matters,” he said.

    Facebook Wrestles With Free Speech and Civility, NYT, 12.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/technology/13facebook.html

Spam Downloads Surge Among WikiLeaks Supporters

December 10, 2010
Filed at 11:11 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) — WikiLeaks supporters on Friday downloaded increasing amounts of the spam-shooting software used to attack companies seen as hostile — a development that could challenge even Internet giants such as PayPal and Amazon.com during the crucial Christmas shopping season.

U.S. data security company Imperva says downloads of the attack program used to bombard websites with bogus requests for data have jumped to over 40,000, with thousands of new downloads reported overnight.

"It's definitely increasing," Imperva Web researcher Tal Be'ery said in a telephone interview from Israel.

The freely available software is a critical part of the campaign by "hacktivists" seeking to take revenge on sites they believe have betrayed WikiLeaks, the group that has outraged American officials by publishing hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables and military intelligence reports.

Users who download the software essentially volunteer their computers to be used as weapons that volley streams of electronic spam at targeted websites. The more computers, the greater the flow of data requests, and the better chances are of overwhelming the targeted website.

The cyberguerillas, who gather under the name Anonymous, have generally been successful in foiling their enemies. Attacks directed at the main pages of Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. succeeded in making them inaccessible, in MasterCard's case for several hours. Attacks on online payment company PayPal Inc. have periodically rendered part of its website inoperative. Moneybookers.com, another targeted site, was inaccessible Friday.

All four sites have severed their links to WikiLeaks, often citing suspected "terms of use" violations, hurting the group's ability to accept donations. The moves angered WikiLeaks supporters and alarmed free speech advocates, whom claim the companies are caving in to U.S. pressure to muzzle the controversial website.

WikiLeaks has been careful to distance itself from Anonymous, saying "we neither condemn nor applaud these attacks."

A press release circulated under the Anonymous name Friday said the group was acting "to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair WikiLeaks' ability to function."

Imperva said Friday that it had monitored Anonymous supporters boasting about bringing in huge numbers of extra computers to back the attacks — something it said might challenge Amazon.com — another site that cut its ties to WikiLeaks — at one of the retailer's busiest times of the year.

But Be'ery stressed the boasts were unconfirmed, and the Anonymous statement said its members did not want to alienate the public by causing online havoc over the holidays.

"Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones would be in bad taste," the Anonymous release said.

Dutch police said Friday they were investigating whether hackers were responsible for taking down the websites of police and prosecutors in the Netherlands after the arrest of a 16-year-old suspected cybercriminal and alleged WikiLeaks supporter.

In Australia, WikiLeaks supporters held rallies Friday in Brisbane and in Sydney, where more than 500 people gathered outside Town Hall, some waving signs that read, "Hands off WikiLeaks, We deserve the truth," and "Don't shoot the messenger."

One man sealed his mouth shut with tape on which the words "NO LEAKS" was written.

Among the most recent newsworthy WikiLeaks revelations was a claim that drug maker Pfizer Inc. hired investigators to dig up dirt on Nigeria's former attorney general in a bid to stop action over a 1996 drug study, and that the U.S. considered taking military action against an arms-laden Ukrainian ship after it was hijacked by Somali pirates two years ago.

The U.S. Department of Justice, meanwhile is considering whether to charge those behind the leaks under the espionage act or other laws, while U.S. diplomats, deeply embarrassed by WikiLeaks' disclosures, have struggled to contain the fallout.

"The deplorable WikiLeaks disclosures put innocent lives at risk, and damage U.S. national security interests," U.S. Ambassador to London Louis Susman wrote in an editorial Friday in The Guardian newspaper. "There is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends."

The U.S. may soon be facing more than WikiLeaks as an opponent.

A former WikiLeaks spokesman plans to launch a rival website Monday called Openleaks that will help anonymous sources deliver sensitive material to public attention. Daniel Domscheit-Berg made the claim in a documentary by Swedish broadcaster SVT airing Sunday but obtained in advance by the AP.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remained in a U.K. jail ahead of a Dec. 14 hearing where he plans to fight Sweden's request to extradite him to face sex crimes allegations.

___

Kristen Gelineau in Sydney, Michael Corder in The Hague and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm contributed to this report.

    Spam Downloads Surge Among WikiLeaks Supporters, 10.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/12/10/world/europe/AP-WikiLeaks.html

Web Attackers Find a Cause in WikiLeaks

December 9, 2010
The New York Times
By NOAM COHEN

They got their start years ago as cyberpranksters, an online community of tech-savvy kids more interested in making mischief than political statements.

But the coordinated attacks on major corporate and government Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, which began on Wednesday and continued on Thursday, suggested that the loosely organized group called Anonymous might have come of age, evolving into one focused on more serious matters: in this case, the definition of Internet freedom.

While the attacks on such behemoths as MasterCard, Visa and PayPal were not nearly as sophisticated as some less publicized assaults, they were a step forward in the group’s larger battle against what it sees as increasing control of the Internet by corporations and governments. This week they found a cause and an icon: Julian Assange, the former hacker who founded WikiLeaks and is now in a London jail at the request of the Swedish authorities investigating him on accusations of rape.

“This is kind of the shot heard round the world — this is Lexington,” said John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization that advocates for a freer Internet.

On Thursday, the police in the Netherlands took the first official action against the campaign, detaining a 16-year-old student in his parents’ home in The Hague who they said admitted to participating in attacks on MasterCard and Visa. The precise nature of his involvement was unclear, but in past investigations, the authorities have sometimes arrested those unsophisticated enough not to cover their tracks on the Web.

Meanwhile, a lawyer for Mr. Assange, 39, said he strongly denied that he had encouraged any attacks on behalf of WikiLeaks.

“It is absolutely false,” the lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in London on Thursday. “He did not make any such instruction, and indeed he sees that as a deliberate attempt to conflate hacking organizations” with “WikiLeaks, which is not a hacking organization. It is a news organization and a publisher.”

Although Anonymous remains shadowy and without public leaders, it developed a loose hierarchy in recent years as it took on groups as diverse as the Church of Scientology and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The coordination and the tactics developed in those campaigns appeared to make this week’s attacks more powerful, allowing what analysts believe is a small group to enlist thousands of activists to bombard Web sites with traffic, making them at least temporarily inaccessible. Experts say the group appears to have used more sophisticated software this time that allowed supporters to repeatedly visit the sites at a specific time when the command was given.

The Twitter account identified with the Anonymous movement contained messages with little more than the words “Fire now.”

The attacks thus far have been of limited effect, shutting down the MasterCard Web site, not its online transactions.

But to security experts and people who have tracked or participated in the Anonymous movement, they indicated a step forward for cyberanarchists railing against the “elites” — corporations and governments with power over both the machinery and, critics increasingly argue, the content on the Web.

“In the past, Anonymous made quite a lot of noise but did little damage,” said Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, a California-based security technology company. “It’s different this time around. They are starting to use the same tools that industrial hackers are using.”

Despite the name, Anonymous can be found in many locations and formats. Members converse in online forums and chat rooms where friendships and alliances often build.

“It’s the first place I go when I turn on my computer,” said one Anonymous activist, reached on an online chat service, who did not want to be named discussing the structure of the organization.

Groups of these friends, who form new conversations, or threads, sometimes decide on a topic or an issue that they feel is deserving of more attention, the activist said.

“You post things, discuss ideas and that leads to putting out a video or a document” for a campaign. In the case of WikiLeaks, the activist said, it appears that two groups decided almost simultaneously to mount a concerted effort against the site’s enemies.

“I got e-mailed these two links on Sunday or Monday,” he said. Denouncing “what’s being done to Julian and WikiLeaks,” he said, he decided to join in.

These ideas bubble up, but ultimately a small group decides exactly what affiliated site should be attacked and when, according to a Dutch writer on the Anonymous movement, who writes a blog under the name Ernesto Van der Sar. There is a chat room “that is invite only, with a dozen or so people,” he said, that pick the targets and the time of attack.

He described the typical Anonymous member as young; he guessed 18 to 24 years old.

While Anonymous has recently had success with attacks on sites related to copyright infringement cases, the WikiLeaks cause has brought a much greater intensity to its efforts.

The campaigns are part of Operation Payback, created in the summer to defend a file-sharing site in Sweden that counts itself part of the mission of keeping the Internet unfettered and unfiltered and that was singled out by the authorities.

“We could move against enemies of WikiLeaks so easily because there was already a network up and running, there was already a chat room for people to meet in,” said Gregg Housh, an activist who has been involved in Anonymous campaigns but disavows a personal role in any illegal online activity.

The software used to coordinate the attacks is being downloaded about 1,000 times per hour, with about one-third of those downloads coming from the United States. Recently the software was improved so that a command could be sent to a supporter’s computers and the attack would begin — no human needed.

But even Mr. Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation appeared to have second thoughts about where such escalation could lead: On Thursday, he said that the Anonymous group members represented “a stunning force in the world.

“But still,” he said, it is “better used to open, not to close.” He added that he opposed denial-of-service attacks on principle: “It’s like the poison gas of cyberspace. The fundamental principle should be to open things up and not close them.”

Things were hardly so serious when Anonymous first made a name for itself. The group grew out of online message boards like 4chan, an unfiltered meeting place with more than its share of misanthropic behavior and schemes.

Mr. Housh said of Anonymous: “It was deliberately not for any good. We kind of took pride in it.”

That changed when Mr. Housh and a few dozen others were incensed by the Church of Scientology’s attempt to use copyright law to remove a long video in which the actor Tom Cruise had spoken about church beliefs.

With its work on behalf of WikiLeaks, Anonymous has found a much more high-profile cause. As the campaign expands, many fear a more contentious Internet as governments and businesses respond to more serious attacks by activists who benefit from improvements in bandwidth and readily available hacking tools.

“Home field advantage goes to the attacker,” said Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research at Damballa, an Atlanta-based firm that specializes in Internet protection. “With a little bit of coordination and growing numbers of participants, these things will continue to happen regularly.”

Reporting was contributed by John Markoff and Ashlee Vance from San Francisco, Ravi Somaiya from London and Marlise Simons from Paris.

    Web Attackers Find a Cause in WikiLeaks, NYT, 9.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/world/10wiki.html

Hacker Threatens More Attacks on WikiLeaks Foes

December 9, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA

LONDON — In a campaign that had some declaring the start of a “cyberwar,” hundreds of Internet activists mounted retaliatory attacks on the Web sites of multinational companies and other organizations they deemed hostile to the WikiLeaks antisecrecy organization and its jailed founder, Julian Assange.

Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies,” as defined by the organization’s impassioned supporters around the world, caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly on Wednesday.

Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the Web site of MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Mr. Assange’s group. Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the Web sites of the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct are the basis of Sweden’s extradition bid.

On Thursday, Gregg Housh, an activist with the loosely affiliated group of so-called hacktivists, said the group was redoubling its efforts to bring down PayPal, which is better protected than some other sites. PayPal, an online payment service company, said the attacks had slowed its Web site “but have not significantly impacted payments.”

No other major Web sites appeared to be suffering disruptions in service early Thursday, however, suggesting that the economic impact of the attacks was limited.

The Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described “cyberanarchists,” antigovernment and anticorporate activists who have made an icon of Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian.

The speed and range of the attacks Wednesday appeared to show the resilience of the backing among computer activists for Mr. Assange, who has appeared increasingly isolated in recent months amid the furor stoked by WikiLeaks’s posting of hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Assange has come under renewed attack in the past two weeks for posting the first tranche of a trove of 250,000 secret State Department cables that have exposed American diplomats’ frank assessments of relations with many countries, forcing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to express regret to world leaders and raising fears that they and other sources would become more reticent.

The New York Times and four other news organizations last week began publishing articles based on the archive of cables made available to them.

In recent months, some of Mr. Assange’s closest associates in WikiLeaks abandoned him, calling him autocratic and capricious and accusing him of reneging on WikiLeaks’s original pledge of impartiality to launch a concerted attack on the United States. He has been simultaneously fighting a remote battle with the Swedish prosecutors, who have sought his extradition for questioning on accusations of “rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion” made by the Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the cases.

American officials have repeatedly said that they are reviewing possible criminal charges against Mr. Assange, a step that could lead to a bid to extradite him to the United States and confront him with having to fight for his freedom on two fronts.

The cyberattacks in Mr. Assange’s defense appear to have been coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely affiliated group of activist computer hackers who have singled out other groups before, including the Church of Scientology. Last weekend, members of Anonymous vowed in two online manifestos to take revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks.

Anonymous claimed responsibility for the MasterCard attack in Web messages and, according to Mr. Housh, the activist associated with the group, conducted waves of attacks on other companies during the day. The group said the actions were part of an effort called Operation Payback, which began as a way of punishing companies that tried to stop Internet file-sharing and movie downloads.

Mr. Housh, who disavows a personal role in any illegal online activity, said that 1,500 supporters had been in online forums and chat rooms organizing the mass “denial of service” attacks. His account was confirmed by Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., firm that tracks malicious activity on computer networks.

Most of the corporations whose sites were targeted did not explain why they severed ties with WikiLeaks. But PayPal issued statements saying its decision was based on “a violation” of its policy on promoting illegal activities.

The sense of an Internet war was reinforced Wednesday when netcraft, a British Internet monitoring firm, reported that the Web site being used by the hackers to distribute denial-of-service software had been suspended by a Dutch hosting firm, Leaseweb.

A sense of the belligerent mood among activists was given when one contributor to a forum the group uses, WhyWeProtest.net, wrote of the attacks: “The war is on. And everyone ought to spend some time thinking about it, discussing it with others, preparing yourselves so you know how to act if something compels you to make a decision. Be very careful not to err on the side of inaction.”

Mr. Housh acknowledged that there had been online talk among the hackers of a possible Internet campaign against the two women who have been Mr. Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case, but he said that “a lot of people don’t want to be involved.”

A Web search showed new blog posts in recent days in which the two women, identified by the Swedish prosecutors only as Ms. A. and Ms. W., were named, but it was not clear whether there was any link to Anonymous. The women have said that consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual when he stopped using condoms.

The cyberattacks on corporations Wednesday were seen by many supporters as a counterstrike against the United States. Mr. Assange’s online supporters have widely condemned the Obama administration as the unseen hand coordinating efforts to choke off WikiLeaks by denying it financing and suppressing its network of computer servers.

Mr. Housh described Mr. Assange in an interview as “a political prisoner,” a common view among WikiLeaks supporters who have joined Mr. Assange in condemning the sexual abuse accusations as part of an American-inspired “smear campaign.”

Another activist used the analogy of the civil rights struggle for the cyberattacks.

“Are they disrupting business?” a contributor using the name Moryath wrote in a comment on the slashdot.org technology Web site. “Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.”

John Markoff and Ashlee Vance contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    Hacker Threatens More Attacks on WikiLeaks Foes, NYT, 9.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/world/10wiki.html

Hackers Give Web Companies a Test of Free Speech

December 8, 2010
The New York Times
By ASHLEE VANCE and MIGUEL HELFT

A hacking free-for-all has exploded on the Web, and Facebook and Twitter are stuck in the middle.

On Wednesday, anonymous hackers took aim at companies perceived to have harmed WikiLeaks after its release of a flood of confidential diplomatic documents. MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, which had cut off people’s ability to donate money to WikiLeaks, were hit by attacks that tried to block access to the companies’ Web sites and services.

To organize their efforts, the hackers have turned to sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has drawn these Web giants into the fray and created a precarious situation for them.

Both Facebook and Twitter — but particularly Twitter — have received praise in recent years as outlets for free speech. Governments trying to control the flow of information have found it difficult to block people from voicing their concerns or setting up meetings through the sites.

At the same time, both Facebook and Twitter have corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as ad platforms for other companies. This leaves them with tough public relations and business decisions around how they should handle situations as politically charged as the WikiLeaks developments.

Some internet experts say the situation highlights the complexities of free speech issues on the Internet, as grassroots Web companies evolve and take central control over what their users can make public. Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet and teaches at New York University, said that although the Web is the new public sphere, it is actually “a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech.”

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “Any Internet user who cares about free speech or has a controversial or unpopular message should be concerned about the fact that intermediaries might not let them express it.”

She added, “Your free speech rights are only as strong as the weakest intermediary.”

The problem came into relief on Wednesday, through an effort called Operation Payback, organized by a group calling itself Anonymous. The group spent much of the day posting notes on Facebook and Twitter that told followers which companies to single out and that documented hacking successes.

But Facebook banned one of the group’s pages, saying that using the site to organize hacking attacks like that violated its terms of use. The group went on Twitter to complain.

A Facebook spokesman issued a statement saying that the company was “sensitive to content that includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and threats of violence” and would “take action on content that we find or that’s reported to us that promotes unlawful activity.”

In an interview Wednesday morning, Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer, addressed WikiLeaks’s own presence on the site. He said the company had not received any official requests to disable pages or accounts associated with the WikiLeaks organization.

Facebook generally resists requests by governments or advocacy groups to take down material if that content is not illegal or does not violate Facebook’s terms of service, which prohibit attacks on individuals or incitements to violence.

“Facebook is a place where people come to talk about all sorts of things, including controversial topics,” Mr. Sullivan said. It was not clear whether anyone had asked Facebook to take down the Operation Payback page.

Twitter allowed the Operation Payback account to stay active most of Wednesday. But the group’s account was disabled late in the day, after it posted a link to a file that provided thousands of consumer credit card numbers, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.

A Twitter spokesman declined to discuss the details of the situation. “We don’t comment about the specific actions we take around user accounts,” he said.

The company is not overly concerned about hackers’ attacking Twitter’s site, he said, explaining that it faces security issues all the time and has technology to deal with the situation.

Twitter is in a particularly delicate situation because its founders have celebrated their service’s role in political protest and free speech. They have not been shy about trying to capitalize on the good will engendered by playing that role.

WikiLeaks’s own Twitter account remains active, and it is the group’s main channel for reaching supporters and the media.

Last week, Amazon.com fell into a similar position when it decided to stop storing files for WikiLeaks. Advocates of WikiLeaks complained that Amazon.com was bowing to political pressure to cut the organization from its Web services. An Amazon.com spokesman said the company was simply banning an organization that had violated its terms of service by trying to distribute documents it did not own.

The last week has given rise to a hacking war in which groups have blocked access to WikiLeaks’s Web sites by bombarding them with requests.

And now the WikiLeaks supporters have responded in kind, flying the freedom of speech banner as the motivation for their actions.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.

    Hackers Give Web Companies a Test of Free Speech, NYT, 8.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/technology/09net.html

WikiLeaks Struggles to Stay Online After Cyberattacks

December 3, 2010
The New York Times
By RAVI SOMAIYA and J. DAVID GOODMAN

LONDON — An American provider of Internet domain names withdrew its service to the WikiLeaks Web site late Thursday after a barrage of attacks by hackers threatened to destabilize its entire system. But within hours, WikiLeaks had registered its domain name in Switzerland, and it was back online by early Friday morning.

Shortly after the action by EveryDNS.net, which provides domain names for about 500,000 Web sites, the French government began seeking measures to keep the whistle blowing organization from being hosted in France. The moves follow a decision on Wednesday by Amazon.com Inc. to expel WikiLeaks from its servers. The organization remains on the servers of a Swedish host, Bahnhof.

WikiLeaks appears increasingly engaged in a game of digital Whac-A-Mole as it struggles to stay online after publicizing a huge array of some 250,000 leaked State Department documents relating to American foreign policy around the globe.

The Web infrastructure that supports WikiLeaks is deliberately diffuse and difficult to track, with servers spread through many countries in order to insulate the site from hostile states or companies. But cyberattacks and problems with service providers have kept the site and its founder, Julian Assange, moving.

“Since April of this year, our timetable has not been our own; rather it has been one that has centered on the moves of abusive elements of the United States government against us,” Mr. Assange wrote in a discussion on Friday on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian. “The threats against our lives are a matter of public record,” he added later, saying he and others who work on WikiLeaks were taking “appropriate precautions.” Mr. Assange is being sought for questioning in connection to alleged sex crimes in Sweden, which he has denied the allegations, and his location was not disclosed.

In a statement on its Web site, EveryDNS.net said it terminated WikiLeaks’ domain name at around 10 p.m., Eastern time for violating its terms of service.

The old domain, WikiLeaks.org, “has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks,” the company said. Such attacks usually involve bombarding a Web site with requests for access, effectively blocking legitimate users, and are designed to make a targeted Web site unavailable. When questioned about similar cyberattacks on Sunday against WikiLeaks, American officials vigorously denied any involvement.

According to WhoIs.com, the new domain, WikiLeaks.ch, is registered to the Swiss branch of the Swedish Pirate Party, a political organization that has previously worked with Mr. Assange.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, the Pirate Party’s leader, Rickard Falkvinge, expressed an open offer to host the WikiLeaks site because “our organizations generally share the same values — we value privacy, transparency, democracy and knowledge.” Mr. Falkvinge added that any sharing of Web services between the two organizations would offer “heightened political protection.”

“Any prosecutors will have to target a political party in us, and the price for doing that is much higher,” he said.

WikiLeaks reacted to the domain name switch on its Twitter feed, writing just after midnight on Friday morning: “WikiLeaks.org domain killed by U.S. EveryDNS.net after claimed mass attacks.”

It implored supporters to “keep us strong” and provided a link for financial donations. Hours later, a message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said: “WikiLeaks moved to Switzerland” and provided the new Web address.

In France, Industry Minister Eric Besson asked the French government on Friday to explore measures to “ensure that it is no longer hosted in France” after reports surfaced that WikiLeaks has servers there, according to a letter seen by Reuters. “France cannot host an internet site that violates the secrecy of diplomatic relations and endangers people,” Mr. Besson said.

Earlier this week, Amazon — which rents server space to companies in addition to its online retail business — canceled its relationship with WikiLeaks after inquiries from an aide to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut. The company said the organization was violating the terms of service for the program.

“When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere,” the company said.

Anna Mossberg, Bahnhof’s chief executive, said her company held “two physical WikiLeaks servers in our data hall in Stockholm.” Those servers, she said, have been attacked in recent weeks, though Bahnhof has come under no overt government pressure to abandon them. “But I know we are not the only provider of WikiLeaks’ servers — they are everywhere.”

Ravi Somaiya reported from London, J. David Goodman from New York. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    WikiLeaks Struggles to Stay Online After Cyberattacks, NYT, 3.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/world/europe/04domain.html

Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels

November 28, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ANDREW W. LEHREN

WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted 220 cables, some redacted to protect diplomatic sources, in the first installment of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.

The disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.”

The White House said the release of what it called “stolen cables” to several publications was a “reckless and dangerous action” and warned that some cables, if released in full, could disrupt American operations abroad and put the work and even lives of confidential sources of American diplomats at risk. The statement noted that reports often include “candid and often incomplete information” whose disclosure could “deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.”

The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:

¶ A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”

¶ Thinking about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States.

¶ Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

¶ Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)

¶ A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

¶ Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” the cable said.

¶ An intriguing alliance: American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoyed supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he was undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.

¶ Arms deliveries to militants: Cables describe the United States’ failing struggle to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week after President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group.

¶ Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.”

The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are marked “top secret,” the government’s most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified “secret,” 9,000 are labeled “noforn,” shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.

Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”

The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several hundred thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.

The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate.

They show officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy. They document years of effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon — and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.

Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.

For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is breathtaking.

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had carried out the strikes.

Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s good whiskey.”

Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.

But the cables add a touch of scandal and alarm to the tale. They describe the volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of “his senior Ukrainian nurse,” described as “a voluptuous blonde.” They reveal that Colonel Qaddafi was so upset by his reception in New York that he balked at carrying out a promise to return dangerous enriched uranium to Russia. The American ambassador to Libya told Colonel Qaddafi’s son “that the Libyan government had chosen a very dangerous venue to express its pique,” a cable reported to Washington.

The cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.

Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body.”

The American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that “Eritrean officials are ignorant or lying” in denying that they were supporting the Shabab, a militant Islamist group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed more likely.

As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic leader. The cable called him “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”

The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents, including “260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world.” In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.

Mr. Lamo reported Private Manning’s disclosures to federal authorities, and Private Manning was arrested. He has been charged with illegally leaking classified information and faces a possible court-martial and, if convicted, a lengthy prison term.

In July and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those collections were placed online by WikiLeaks, with selective redactions of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the Iraq reports.

Fodder for Historians

Traditionally, most diplomatic cables remain secret for decades, providing fodder for historians only when the participants are long retired or dead. The State Department’s unclassified history series, titled “Foreign Relations of the United States,” has reached only 1972.

While an overwhelming majority of the quarter-million cables provided to The Times are from the post-9/11 era, several hundred date from 1966 to the 1990s. Some show diplomats struggling to make sense of major events whose future course they could not guess.

In a 1979 cable to Washington, Bruce Laingen, an American diplomat in Tehran, mused with a knowing tone about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred: “Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism,” Mr. Laingen wrote, offering tips on exploiting this psyche in negotiations with the new government. Less than three months later, Mr. Laingen and his colleagues would be taken hostage by radical Iranian students, hurling the Carter administration into crisis and, perhaps, demonstrating the hazards of diplomatic hubris.

In 1989, an American diplomat in Panama City mulled over the options open to Gen. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who was facing narcotics charges in the United States and intense domestic and international political pressure to step down. The cable called General Noriega “a master of survival”; its author appeared to have no inkling that one week later, the United States would invade Panama to unseat General Noriega and arrest him.

In 1990, an American diplomat sent an excited dispatch from Cape Town: he had just learned from a lawyer for Nelson Mandela that Mr. Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment was to end. The cable conveys the momentous changes about to begin for South Africa, even as it discusses preparations for an impending visit from the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.

The voluminous traffic of more recent years — well over half of the quarter-million cables date from 2007 or later — show American officials struggling with events whose outcomes are far from sure. To read through them is to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.

In an era of satellites and fiber-optic links, the cable retains the archaic name of an earlier technological era. It has long been the tool for the secretary of state to send orders to the field and for ambassadors and political officers to send their analyses to Washington.

The cables have their own lexicon: “codel,” for a Congressional delegation; “visas viper,” for a report on a person considered dangerous; “démarche,” an official message to a foreign government, often a protest or warning.

But the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the other and neither is showing all its cards.

Among the most fascinating examples recount American officials’ meetings in September 2009 and February 2010 with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the Afghan president and a power broker in the Taliban’s home turf of Kandahar.

They describe Mr. Karzai, “dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez,” the traditional dress of loose tunic and trousers, appearing “nervous, though eager to express his views on the international presence in Kandahar,” and trying to win over the Americans with nostalgic tales about his years running a Chicago restaurant near Wrigley Field.

But in midnarrative there is a stark alert for anyone reading the cable in Washington: “Note: While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.” (Mr. Karzai has denied such charges.) And the cables note statements by Mr. Karzai that the Americans, informed by a steady flow of eavesdropping and agents’ reports, believe to be false.

A cable written after the February meeting coolly took note of the deceit on both sides.

Mr. Karzai “demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs,” the cable said. “He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities. We will need to monitor his activity closely, and deliver a recurring, transparent message to him” about the limits of American tolerance.

Not All Business

Even in places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for the United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s understanding of exotic places.

In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.

“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”

“After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya,” the diplomat reported to Washington. “We asked why Ramzan did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, ‘Ramzan never spends the night anywhere.’ ”

Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Reporting was contributed by Jo Becker, C. J. Chivers and James Glanz from New York; Eric Lichtblau, Michael R. Gordon, David E. Sanger, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson from Washington; and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels, NYT, 28.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html

Generation Text, Living on a Screen

November 25, 2010
The New York Times


To the Editor:

Re “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” (“Your Brain on Computers” series, front page, Nov. 21):

Cynicism aside: Teenagers are dysfunctional. Anything remotely educational or not associated with “Gossip Girl,” Facebook or the like is seen as pointless — when it’s actually quite the reverse. Dependency on these technological media will result in a shallow and socially inept generation.

The teenage brain has evolved into a vestige — an appendix of sorts. Read. Draw. Go to the museum. Do something that’s not completely mindless. School has stigmatized learning. Of course we’re going to shut off our brains and rot in front of a computer — it’s just easier. YouTubing, watching “Glee,” playing Xbox? These are passive activities with easily attainable yet meaningless highs.

As a 16-year-old, I find that my average text response time is four days. I’ve deactivated my Facebook account and rarely watch TV. I read, run and write for pleasure. I am free — free of all these distractions. A Leisure Vegan — a Legan, if you will.

I can only urge my fellow teenagers to do the same. That is, the three of you reading this.

Katherine Nevitt
Manhasset, N.Y., Nov. 21, 2010

•

To the Editor:

For the last four years I have been presenting “Driving It Home,” on the dangers of driving and using a cellphone, to 300 to 450 teenagers a week. I show photos and video of crash scenes with dead or injured teenagers that were attributable to cellphone calls or texts.

Despite several warnings about keeping cellphones away for the one hour I’m speaking, I almost always have one teenager who is unable to combat the urge and will send a text while I’m talking about cellphones as a distraction.

We should all be concerned about teenagers who can’t leave their phones alone while viewing photos of cellphone-attributed crashes. What happens to any of us when they get behind the wheel traveling 65 miles an hour down the road and a text comes in?

I’ve had to change my presentation style into short snippets of information — any more than that, and I start to lose them. Every day I experience teenagers who have the attention span of a gnat, and it’s sad to watch.

Misty Dailey
Elk Grove, Calif., Nov. 21, 2010

•

To the Editor:

As a psychologist who specializes in treating urban teenagers who have severe emotional and behavioral disorders, I, too, am concerned about attention problems that might be caused by kids “wired for distraction.” Yet I, too, have had to adapt to a new digital world.

At the same time I am comforted by the fact that the same distracting technology in the hands of teenagers also has the potential for them to save their own lives. Look at these examples: a teenager at risk for suicide is able to text me in the evening about a traumatic flashback he had; a parent is able to reach me on a cellphone to calm down her child over the weekend, preventing a 911 call; and finally a teenage patient in the midst of a classroom crisis, borrowing a friend’s cellphone, texts me for an immediate urgent session, thus preventing a violent outburst.

Our new digital technology, whether it be electronic medical records or instant communication between a teenager and his psychologist, has the potential to change lives.

Leonard Davidman
New York, Nov. 21, 2010

The writer is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at New York Medical College.

•

To the Editor:

Having taught art history courses for more than a decade, I have witnessed firsthand the relatively rapid and somewhat disheartening transformation of attentive, questioning college students into the easily distracted, gadget-glued generation so accurately portrayed in your article.

While the lack of focus you mention is certainly a byproduct of the digital environment, more troubling is a corollary phenomenon — a tendency of the digital generation to dispense with nuance and multiple layers of meaning, much like a computer, in favor of immediate and often cursory observations.

Most academic disciplines, however, are learned and truly appreciated only through careful, nuanced and extended readings that require not only focused observation but also focused thought over time, seemingly a nuisance in the age of Twitter.

It is perhaps not a lack of focus but a lack of patience that will ultimately define us.

Brian E. Hack
Brooklyn, Nov. 21, 2010

The writer is an assistant adjunct professor in the art department of Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.

•

To the Editor:

I agree that media multitasking can take away from very important lessons learned through in-person interactions. Balance is critical.

The article, however, lacks any reference to the great benefits media offer youth, especially beyond our country’s borders.

In many developing countries, technological advances have skipped generations, and mobile phone access is ubiquitous and essential.

Text messages offer information about what to do in emergencies, both natural and man-made.

Unlike the American youth featured in this article, teenagers from Port-au-Prince, Nairobi and Jakarta receive messages that go beyond immediate gratification.

Dina L. G. Borzekowski
Baltimore, Nov. 22, 2010

The writer is an associate professor in the department of health, behavior and society, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

•

To the Editor:

Might I suggest that within living memory there was a solution to children who did not do homework, complete assignments and so on: it was known as failure. A child being “kept back” or “retained in grade” used to concentrate the minds of parents wonderfully on what their children were up to. But this, of course, antedated parents’ choosing to finance their kids’ lifestyles.

Robert L. Nielsen
Buffalo, Nov. 21, 2010

The writer is professor emeritus of philosophy at D’Youville College.

•

To the Editor:

Those of us who grew up in the television era proved less literate than our parents. Now, it seems that those who are growing up in the Internet era will be less literate still.

But while television proved a vast wasteland, the Internet provides resources so rich and vast that I find it hard to believe that I once functioned without it.

Perhaps rather than worrying that our children no longer know how to cut quill pens or groom a horse, we should be grateful that they will be at home in the better world to come.

Joshua P. Hill
New London, Conn., Nov. 22, 2010

    Generation Text, Living on a Screen, NYT, 25.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/l26digital.html

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

November 21, 2010
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory.

It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.

The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it.

“I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m using technology to do it.”

The same tension surfaces in Vishal, whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with them. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.

He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site.

But he also plays video games 10 hours a week. He regularly sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school nights, and has such a reputation for distributing links to videos that his best friend calls him a “YouTube bully.”

Several teachers call Vishal one of their brightest students, and they wonder why things are not adding up. Last semester, his grade point average was 2.3 after a D-plus in English and an F in Algebra II. He got an A in film critique.

“He’s a kid caught between two worlds,” said Mr. Reilly — one that is virtual and one with real-life demands.

Vishal, like his mother, says he lacks the self-control to favor schoolwork over the computer. She sat him down a few weeks before school started and told him that, while she respected his passion for film and his technical skills, he had to use them productively.

“This is the year,” she says she told him. “This is your senior year and you can’t afford not to focus.”

It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something changed him.

Growing Up With Gadgets

When he was 3, Vishal moved with his parents and older brother to their current home, a three-bedroom house in the working-class section of Redwood City, a suburb in Silicon Valley that is more diverse than some of its elite neighbors.

Thin and quiet with a shy smile, Vishal passed the admissions test for a prestigious public elementary and middle school. Until sixth grade, he focused on homework, regularly going to the house of a good friend to study with him.

But Vishal and his family say two things changed around the seventh grade: his mother went back to work, and he got a computer. He became increasingly engrossed in games and surfing the Internet, finding an easy outlet for what he describes as an inclination to procrastinate.

“I realized there were choices,” Vishal recalls. “Homework wasn’t the only option.”

Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families. Jacob L. Vigdor, an economics professor at Duke University who led some of the research, said that when adults were not supervising computer use, children “are left to their own devices, and the impetus isn’t to do homework but play around.”

Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment. The Kaiser Family Foundation found earlier this year that half of students from 8 to 18 are using the Internet, watching TV or using some other form of media either “most” (31 percent) or “some” (25 percent) of the time that they are doing homework.

At Woodside, as elsewhere, students’ use of technology is not uniform. Mr. Reilly, the principal, says their choices tend to reflect their personalities. Social butterflies tend to be heavy texters and Facebook users. Students who are less social might escape into games, while drifters or those prone to procrastination, like Vishal, might surf the Web or watch videos.

The technology has created on campuses a new set of social types — not the thespian and the jock but the texter and gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato.

“The technology amplifies whoever you are,” Mr. Reilly says.

For some, the amplification is intense. Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.

Most of the exchanges are little more than quick greetings, but they can get more in-depth, like “if someone tells you about a drama going on with someone,” Allison said. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else.”

But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking for the three B’s on her recent progress report.

“I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”

Some shyer students do not socialize through technology — they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in the bathroom before school.

Escaping into games can also salve teenagers’ age-old desire for some control in their chaotic lives. “It’s a way for me to separate myself,” Ramon says. “If there’s an argument between my mom and one of my brothers, I’ll just go to my room and start playing video games and escape.”

With powerful new cellphones, the interactive experience can go everywhere. Between classes at Woodside or at lunch, when use of personal devices is permitted, students gather in clusters, sometimes chatting face to face, sometimes half-involved in a conversation while texting someone across the teeming quad. Others sit alone, watching a video, listening to music or updating Facebook.

Students say that their parents, worried about the distractions, try to police computer time, but that monitoring the use of cellphones is difficult. Parents may also want to be able to call their children at any time, so taking the phone away is not always an option.

Other parents wholly embrace computer use, even when it has no obvious educational benefit.

“If you’re not on top of technology, you’re not going to be on top of the world,” said John McMullen, 56, a retired criminal investigator whose son, Sean, is one of five friends in the group Vishal joins for lunch each day.

Sean’s favorite medium is video games; he plays for four hours after school and twice that on weekends. He was playing more but found his habit pulling his grade point average below 3.2, the point at which he felt comfortable. He says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit when given the choice. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus, asserting that in another era he would have been distracted by TV or something else.

“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods populated by Internet tycoons. Sean, a senior, concedes that video games take a physical toll: “I haven’t done exercise since my sophomore year. But that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I still look the same.”

Sam Crocker, Vishal’s closest friend, who has straight A’s but lower SAT scores than he would like, blames the Internet’s distractions for his inability to finish either of his two summer reading books.

“I know I can read a book, but then I’m up and checking Facebook,” he says, adding: “Facebook is amazing because it feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway.”

He concludes: “My attention span is getting worse.”

The Lure of Distraction

Some neuroscientists have been studying people like Sam and Vishal. They have begun to understand what happens to the brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch.

In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night playing video games after they finished homework.

On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an exciting movie, like “Harry Potter” or “Star Trek,” rather than playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare the effect of video games and TV.

The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the boys’ ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.

Markus Dworak, a researcher who led the study and is now a neuroscientist at Harvard, said it was not clear whether the boys’ learning suffered because sleep was disrupted or, as he speculates, also because the intensity of the game experience overrode the brain’s recording of the vocabulary.

“When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after that, your brain has to decide which information to store,” he said. “Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating information over the vocabulary.”

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory.

In that vein, recent imaging studies of people have found that major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly active during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.

Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing and setting priorities.

“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”

“The headline is: bring back boredom,” added Dr. Rich, who last month gave a speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics entitled, “Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood from the River of Electronic Screens.”

Dr. Rich said in an interview that he was not suggesting young people should toss out their devices, but rather that they embrace a more balanced approach to what he said were powerful tools necessary to compete and succeed in modern life.

The heavy use of devices also worries Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who is known for research showing that children are not as harmed by TV viewing as some researchers have suggested.

Multitasking using ubiquitous, interactive and highly stimulating computers and phones, Professor Anderson says, appears to have a more powerful effect than TV.

Like Dr. Rich, he says he believes that young, developing brains are becoming habituated to distraction and to switching tasks, not to focus.

“If you’ve grown up processing multiple media, that’s exactly the mode you’re going to fall into when put in that environment — you develop a need for that stimulation,” he said.

Vishal can attest to that.

“I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I’m doing a million things at once, like a lot of people my age,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I can’t.”

“If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d focus more on school and be doing better academically,” he says. But thanks to the Internet, he says, he has discovered and pursued his passion: filmmaking. Without the Internet, “I also wouldn’t know what I want to do with my life.”

Clicking Toward a Future

The woman sits in a cemetery at dusk, sobbing. Behind her, silhouetted and translucent, a man kneels, then fades away, a ghost.

This captivating image appears on Vishal’s computer screen. On this Thursday afternoon in late September, he is engrossed in scenes he shot the previous weekend for a music video he is making with his cousin.

The video is based on a song performed by the band Guns N’ Roses about a woman whose boyfriend dies. He wants it to be part of the package of work he submits to colleges that emphasize film study, along with a documentary he is making about home-schooled students.

Now comes the editing. Vishal taught himself to use sophisticated editing software in part by watching tutorials on YouTube. He does not leave his chair for more than two hours, sipping Pepsi, his face often inches from the screen, as he perfects the clip from the cemetery. The image of the crying woman was shot separately from the image of the kneeling man, and he is trying to fuse them.

“I’m spending two hours to get a few seconds just right,” he says.

He occasionally sends a text message or checks Facebook, but he is focused in a way he rarely is when doing homework. He says the chief difference is that filmmaking feels applicable to his chosen future, and he hopes colleges, like the University of Southern California or the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, will be so impressed by his portfolio that they will overlook his school performance.

“This is going to compensate for the grades,” he says. On this day, his homework includes a worksheet for Latin, some reading for English class and an economics essay, but they can wait.

For Vishal, there’s another clear difference between filmmaking and homework: interactivity. As he edits, the windows on the screen come alive; every few seconds, he clicks the mouse to make tiny changes to the lighting and flow of the images, and the software gives him constant feedback.

“I click and something happens,” he says, explaining that, by comparison, reading a book or doing homework is less exciting. “I guess it goes back to the immediate gratification thing.”

The $2,000 computer Vishal is using is state of the art and only a week old. It represents a concession by his parents. They allowed him to buy it, despite their continuing concerns about his technology habits, because they wanted to support his filmmaking dream. “If we put roadblocks in his way, he’s just going to get depressed,” his mother says. Besides, she adds, “he’s been making an effort to do his homework.”

At this point in the semester, it seems she is right. The first schoolwide progress reports come out in late September, and Vishal has mostly A’s and B’s. He says he has been able to make headway by applying himself, but also by cutting back his workload. Unlike last year, he is not taking advanced placement classes, and he has chosen to retake Algebra II not in the classroom but in an online class that lets him work at his own pace.

His shift to easier classes might not please college admissions officers, according to Woodside’s college adviser, Zorina Matavulj. She says they want seniors to intensify their efforts. As it is, she says, even if Vishal improves his performance significantly, someone with his grades faces long odds in applying to the kinds of colleges he aspires to.

Still, Vishal’s passion for film reinforces for Mr. Reilly, the principal, that the way to reach these students is on their own terms.

Hands-On Technology

Big Macintosh monitors sit on every desk, and a man with hip glasses and an easygoing style stands at the front of the class. He is Geoff Diesel, 40, a favorite teacher here at Woodside who has taught English and film. Now he teaches one of Mr. Reilly’s new classes, audio production. He has a rapt audience of more than 20 students as he shows a video of the band Nirvana mixing their music, then holds up a music keyboard.

“Who knows how to use Pro Tools? We’ve got it. It’s the program used by the best music studios in the world,” he says.

In the back of the room, Mr. Reilly watches, thrilled. He introduced the audio course last year and enough students signed up to fill four classes. (He could barely pull together one class when he introduced Mandarin, even though he had secured iPads to help teach the language.)

“Some of these students are our most at-risk kids,” he says. He means that they are more likely to tune out school, skip class or not do their homework, and that they may not get healthful meals at home. They may also do their most enthusiastic writing not for class but in text messages and on Facebook. “They’re here, they’re in class, they’re listening.”

Despite Woodside High’s affluent setting, about 40 percent of its 1,800 students come from low-income families and receive a reduced-cost or free lunch. The school is 56 percent Latino, 38 percent white and 5 percent African-American, and it sends 93 percent of its students to four-year or community colleges.

Mr. Reilly says that the audio class provides solid vocational training and can get students interested in other subjects.

“Today mixing music, tomorrow sound waves and physics,” he says. And he thinks the key is that they love not just the music but getting their hands on the technology. “We’re meeting them on their turf.”

It does not mean he sees technology as a panacea. “I’ll always take one great teacher in a cave over a dozen Smart Boards,” he says, referring to the high-tech teaching displays used in many schools.

Teachers at Woodside commonly blame technology for students’ struggles to concentrate, but they are divided over whether embracing computers is the right solution.

“It’s a catastrophe,” said Alan Eaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. He says that technology has led to a “balkanization of their focus and duration of stamina,” and that schools make the problem worse when they adopt the technology.

“When rock ’n’ roll came about, we didn’t start using it in classrooms like we’re doing with technology,” he says. He personally feels the sting, since his advanced classes have one-third as many students as they had a decade ago.

Vishal remains a Latin student, one whom Mr. Eaton describes as particularly bright. But the teacher wonders if technology might be the reason Vishal seems to lose interest in academics the minute he leaves class.

Mr. Diesel, by contrast, does not think technology is behind the problems of Vishal and his schoolmates — in fact, he thinks it is the key to connecting with them, and an essential tool. “It’s in their DNA to look at screens,” he asserts. And he offers another analogy to explain his approach: “Frankenstein is in the room and I don’t want him to tear me apart. If I’m not using technology, I lose them completely.”

Mr. Diesel had Vishal as a student in cinema class and describes him as a “breath of fresh air” with a gift for filmmaking. Mr. Diesel says he wonders if Vishal is a bit like Woody Allen, talented but not interested in being part of the system.

But Mr. Diesel adds: “If Vishal’s going to be an independent filmmaker, he’s got to read Vonnegut. If you’re going to write scripts, you’ve got to read.”

Back to Reading Aloud

Vishal sits near the back of English IV. Marcia Blondel, a veteran teacher, asks the students to open the book they are studying, “The Things They Carried,” which is about the Vietnam War.

“Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

She adds: “You can’t become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations.”

As the group-reading effort winds down, she says gently: “I hope this will motivate you to read on your own.”

It is a reminder of the choices that have followed the students through the semester: computer or homework? Immediate gratification or investing in the future?

Mr. Reilly hopes that the two can meet — that computers can be combined with education to better engage students and can give them technical skills without compromising deep analytical thought.

But in Vishal’s case, computers and schoolwork seem more and more to be mutually exclusive. Ms. Blondel says that Vishal, after a decent start to the school year, has fallen into bad habits. In October, he turned in weeks late, for example, a short essay based on the first few chapters of “The Things They Carried.” His grade at that point, she says, tracks around a D.

For his part, Vishal says he is investing himself more in his filmmaking, accelerating work with his cousin on their music video project. But he is also using Facebook late at night and surfing for videos on YouTube. The evidence of the shift comes in a string of Facebook updates.

Saturday, 11:55 p.m.: “Editing, editing, editing”

Sunday, 3:55 p.m.: “8+ hours of shooting, 8+ hours of editing. All for just a three-minute scene. Mind = Dead.”

Sunday, 11:00 p.m.: “Fun day, finally got to spend a day relaxing... now about that homework...”

Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

    Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction, NYT, 21.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html

For Google, the Browser Does It All

November 24, 2010
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — When a Google engineer gave top executives computers running the company’s new Chrome operating system, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, tried to hold on to his computer running an older version.

“I reached to take the old one, and he reaches to grab it,” recalled Linus Upson, the vice president for engineering in charge of Chrome. “Then he realizes, ‘I don’t need it.’ ”

That is because Chrome stores everything that people have on their computers — like documents, photos and e-mail — online, or in tech parlance, in the cloud. In Google’s vision of a world where all computers run on its Chrome OS, anyone can walk up to any computer with an Internet connection and gain access to all their information.

If Mr. Brin was momentarily confused, it is no wonder that Google users and analysts are struggling to wrap their heads around what Google is trying to do with Chrome.

It is all the more confusing because Google already has a Web browser named Chrome. And Google already has an operating system, called Android.

Google says it will become clearer by the end of the year, when the company will introduce to the public a lightweight netbook computer that runs Chrome. Though Google declined to give details of the device, it is expected to be manufactured by another company and branded by Google, similar to the way Google released its Nexus phone, which runs on Android.

Google has high hopes for Chrome, and as the company weathers criticism for relying too much on search advertising for revenue, its executives have been describing Chrome as one of Google’s new businesses with huge potential.

With Chrome OS, Google is stepping once again into the territory of its archrivals, Microsoft and Apple, both of which make operating systems as well as widely used desktop software like Microsoft Office and Apple iPhoto and iTunes.

That software would not work on Chrome computers. Instead, Chrome users would use Google’s Web-based products, like Docs, Gmail and Picasa for word processing, e-mail and photos, or software from other companies, like Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365. Google also plans to open a Chrome app store for software developers to dream up other Chrome tools.

The Chrome browser, which is installed on 8 percent of all PCs, shares a name because the operating system is, essentially, the same thing as the browser. “When people look at Chrome OS, they’re going to be like, ‘It’s just a browser, there’s nothing exciting here,’ ” Mr. Upson said. “Exactly. It’s just a browser, there’s nothing exciting here — that’s the point.”

Computers running Chrome OS will start in seconds, not minutes, and then users will see a browser through which applications and data can be used.

Yet while Google imagines a Web-based future, analysts wonder whether Chrome’s time has passed — before Google netbooks even hit the market.

When Google first talked about Chrome last year, netbooks — small, low-cost laptops with keyboards — were all the rage. But since then, smartphones and tablets — slate PCs with touch screens, like the iPad — have crushed that market.

“When Google made their decision early on with the Chrome OS project, Android was in its infancy and the tablet market didn’t really exist,” said Ray Valdes, a research vice president at Gartner who studies Internet platforms. “Now things have changed, and I think Google is likely recalibrating its strategy and product mix to take that into account.”

Google’s hugely successful Android operating system for mobile phones and tablets adds a level to the confusion. Chrome and Android are built by separate Google teams and the company says there is no conflict between the two. But its executives acknowledge they are not entirely sure how the two will coexist.

“We don’t want to call the question and say this one does one thing, this one does another,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. “So far the model seems to be the Android solution is particularly optimized for things that involve touch in some form and Chrome OS appears to be for keyboard-based solutions.”

But Mr. Upson said that Chrome OS would be a computing platform stretching to hand-held devices, tablets and TVs. “We are starting with laptops and we will expand in both directions,” he said.

“Google hasn’t told a great story about how Chrome and Android live relative to each other,” said Michael Gartenberg, a Gartner research director studying consumer applications. “It’s incumbent upon Google to start telling a story that makes sense. It gets to the point of confusion that you have a lot of folks saying, ‘What’s Steve Jobs’s phone number again?’ ”

Yet another source of puzzlement: even though Google has been promoting both Chrome and Android as new big businesses, they are free and open-source, meaning that hardware manufacturers don’t have to pay Google to use them on devices, and software developers don’t have to pay to use them to build their own operating systems or browsers.

That actually makes perfect sense, said Sundar Pichai, vice president for product management with Chrome, because Google makes almost all its revenue from things people do on browsers.

“These are enablers — platforms on which people use Google services,” Mr. Pichai said. “Both offer benefits in terms of how people can use services easily and increase usage, and that gives them a better experience and over all generates more revenue for us.”

Though some people might worry about storing their private information on Google’s servers instead of their own computers, Google says Chrome is safer because security updates happen automatically and if people lose their computers, their data is inaccessible once they reset their passwords.

Mr. Upson says that 60 percent of businesses could immediately replace their Windows machines with computers running Chrome OS. He also says he hopes it will put corporate systems administrators out of work because software updates will be made automatically over the Web. But the vast majority of businesses still use desktop Microsoft Office products and cannot imagine moving entirely to Web-based software or storing sensitive documents online — at least not yet.

Even if Google missed the netbook craze, it may in fact be ahead of its time in imagining a Web-based future, Mr. Gartenberg said. “Android, where everything is very application-dependent, is a response to the things that are here today,” he said. “Chrome is preparing for a future when everything can be delivered through the Web.”

    For Google, the Browser Does It All, NYT, 24.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/technology/25chrome.html

Google Debuts Fashion Shopping Site

November 17, 2010
The New York Times
By CATHY HORYN

You know how remote and strange the fashion world is when you come to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. For one thing, employees are zipping around the sprawling campus on scooters and bicycles, so that pretty much eliminates platform shoes and minis. And for another, there are way too many snack stations at Google. Fashionistas are funny about food.

But go a couple of blocks from the main building, and the mood and the desk décor are conspicuously more invested in style. One employee, Abigail Holtz, has on an ivory silk mini dress with a plunging neckline and a pair of high heels. A colleague, Marissa Goodman, is more casual—but no less savvy. She used to design women’s clothes for Old Navy and Esprit.

In a deliberate collision between nerds and fashion mavens, Google has created a new e-commerce site that significantly improves how fashion is presented and sold online. The site, Boutiques.com, which is expected to go up Wednesday morning, may also change how people shop for clothes.

Boutiques.com has so many capabilities and components that even Google engineers have a hard time qualifying it. It is a collection of hundreds of virtual boutiques merchandised — or, in the new parlance, “curated” — by designers, retailers, bloggers, celebrities and regular folks. You can shop in the style of, say, the actress Carey Mulligan or Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen — among the celebrities who signed up for the launch — or you can build your own boutique and amass followers who can comment on your taste.

It is a place, then, to show off your fashion acumen, much as millions of Polyvore users already do with their picture collages.

It is also a source of inspiration. In every boutique on the site, there are dozens of additional choices inspired by a designer’s or celebrity’s style — generated by algorithms — with product photos that are much larger and sharper than on other shopping sites. And if you don’t know how to wear the leopard pumps you just bought, there’s a panel of street-style photos on the right side of the site that visualizes the shoes in more expressive modes. Indeed, whatever your style preference — classic, romantic, casual — the inspiration panel automatically adjusts for them, like a support group that can read your mind with surprising precision.

And that may be Boutiques.com’s ultimate game-changer — how precisely it analyzes your preferences to give you what you requested. As many online shoppers know, search engines tend to give you stuff you don’t really want. A request for fern-colored shoes might yield fern shoes, plus fern-print blouses. But, as two experienced online shoppers found when they tested the site earlier this week at Google’s New York office, if you ask for cobalt blue shoes, you get them. And if you refine your preferences with a click or two, you get even more specific styles.

The process at Boutiques.com is accomplished through visual search technology, and what style experts like Ms. Goodman and Ms. Holtz conveyed to Google code writers about the nuances of fashion — from color and pattern to silhouette and what looks good together and what does not.

The technology was actually developed by Like.com, a Silicon Valley company co-founded by Munjal Shah, which Google acquired last summer for a reported $100 million. Before the purchase, Like.com had created a number of fashion e-commerce sites, including Covet.com, and the styling tool Couturious.com.

“I’ve always been impressed with Like.com,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a vice president and retail analyst at Forrester Research, who is familiar with the work on Boutiques.com. “I was just floored by the technology back then and it’s evolved since. They’ve just honed the algorithm.”

Fueled in part by new gadgets like the iPad and more dollars spent by retailers on technology, online sales have generally outpaced brick-and-mortar sales. “I feel e-commerce in the last 12 months has caught a second wind,” Ms. Mulpuru said. According to Forrester, Internet sales of apparel and accessories this year will account for 14 percent, or $25 billion, of the $173 billion that Americans will spend online.

Mr. Shah is the team leader for Boutiques.com, with a left-brain-right-brain group of technicians and tastemakers. As he said in interviews conducted over the past week, “Online fashion shopping has to be universal and curatorial at the same time. This is an answer.”

A number of big companies, most notably Amazon and eBay, have been trying to get a bigger slice of the online apparel pie. But while they have improved the stylishness of their fashion pages, they may be ultimately constrained by their somewhat static platforms. It’s hard to mix DVD players and $900 Christian Louboutin peep-toe pumps.

Meanwhile dedicated fashion sites like Shopstyle.com have gathered fans.

“Shopstyle’s done one of the best jobs in my opinion of creating the right high fashion experience,” Mr. Shah said. “But we think of it as layer one. It’s kind of broken things down, but they didn’t go for a detailed categorization and they didn’t personalize.”

At the time that Mr. Shah and his team at Like.com created Covet.com, a fashion personalization site, they didn’t really have the full picture of all that was possible on the web. “We captured your preferences but we couldn’t analyze the items to see if they your met your preferences,” he said. “We did one half but you need both halves. We achieved the other half only by rebuilding the technology with a whole new way of analyzing patterns and silhouettes.”

In simple terms, what the style experts did was come up with about 500 words for color, shape and pattern — robin’s egg blue, for instance, and gingham — and then the engineers trained the algorithm to know what each was. They would have pictures of what gingham was and what gingham wasn’t. “We did that word by word by word,” Mr. Shah said. The trouble is a lot of sites don’t have, or use, vision technology. They end up stuffing in a bunch of key words and the search engine gets confused. So you get fern-print blouses when all you really want are fern pumps.

Despite the amount of products that a search on Boutiques.com kicks out, the download time is very fast, and choices appear on extra-long pages so you don’t have to keep clicking. Virtually every kind of information is analyzed — price, brand, color and so on. The site also includes a system called “Complete the Look,” for which Ms. Goodman wrote “a ton of rules,” Mr. Shah said, “and our computer vision and machine learning guys implemented them.”

Additionally, there is a good sense of discovery on Boutiques.com; items come to your attention, almost as they do in stores, that you didn’t necessary plan to buy. Seasonal trends, like fall’s military looks, can be boosted on the site. Again, to Ms. Malpuru, “that’s where Munjal gets it—fashion is about discovery.”

Users of the site will have the option to take a personal style quiz, which ranks a broad spectrum of loves and hates, but Mr. Shah is convinced that most people will prefer to find their “style twin” and shop in that individual’s boutique.

Among the designers who signed up are Tory Burch, Oscar de la Renta, and Isaac Mizrahi, who for one plans to offer signature pieces like a plaid cocktail dress and a military coat.

Bloggers include Bryan Boy and Rumi Neely of Fashiontoast. Other celebrities, which Google said it has paid to host boutiques, are Claire Danes, Ashlee Simpson and Nicole Richie. (By the way, Google authenticates the celebrity boutiques, so imposters be warned.) Retailers include Neiman Marcus, Barneys, Shopbop, Net-a-Porter, and Scoop NYC. Potentially, fashion magazines could have boutiques. So could a character from a television show.

“Somebody may come in and built 20 goth boutiques in the first day,” Mr. Shah said.

On Monday, Simone B. Oliver, a Web producer for The New York Times, and Jane Son, a publicist, gave the site a test drive for this article.

As the two women, both avid online shoppers, slowly got used to the site — which they later admitted could be overwhelming — Ms. Oliver said, glancing at the product categories, “I’m curious why you put shoes first.”

Ms. Goodman replied, “Shoes are always one of the most popular categories.”

Ms. Oliver laughed. “Good answer.”

As Ms. Son typed in “duck boots” on her laptop, yielding a bunch of choices, Ms. Oliver searched for cobalt platform pumps and a black leather shift dress, quickly finding things she liked. She skipped over the celebrity boutiques, preferring the blogger and trend boutiques: “I get more inspiration from girls on the street than celebrities.”But, she added, “I think the celebrity choices are useful for body shape. There are some people in the limelight that have a similar body shape to mine, and a certain silhouette would look good on me. And shades of skin tones.”

Mr. Shah nodded. “We could add skin tones to the preferences.”

Both women liked the inspiration panel, and also how refined the search was.“On other sites, you can’t edit your choices as much,” Ms. Son said. “And I need an edited selection.”Ms. Oliver rated the sense of discovery “A-plus,” adding “I just found out about a shoe brand that I had never heard of—Velvet Angels. They’re more in my price range than, say, Yves Saint Laurent. That was fun. I was looking for something else and it popped up.”

She said to members of the team, “I love that you guys have so many options but you also have the options that make sense.”

Yet, after the meeting, both women identified an obvious shortcoming of Boutiques.com: as curated as it is, a lot still comes up in a search. Suggesting that too much information may be a turnoff to inexperienced Web shoppers, Ms. Son said, “It’s going to take some getting used to, that’s for sure.”

Nodding, Ms. Oliver said, “I feel it’s an amazing site but there are a few aspects that are not very intuitive. Some people might go back to the regular Google search and look for their boots.”

Fortunately for them, the site has that option, too.

    Google Debuts Fashion Shopping Site, NYT, 17.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/fashion/18googlefashion.html

Wal-Mart Says ‘Try This On’: Free Shipping

November 11, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

For years, Wal-Mart has used its clout as the nation’s largest retailer to squeeze competitors with rock-bottom prices in its stores. Now it is trying to throw a holiday knockout punch online.

Starting Thursday, Wal-Mart Stores plans to offer free shipping on its Web site, with no minimum purchase, on almost 60,000 gift items, including many toys and electronics. The offer will run through Dec. 20, when Wal-Mart said it might consider other free-shipping deals.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out how we can serve a customer that’s trying to save every penny they can,” said Steve Nave, senior vice president and general manager of Walmart.com. “It’s the most competitive offer out there, and we’re pretty excited about it.”

Even before Wal-Mart’s surprise move, shipping prices were this holiday season’s predicament for online retailers. In a bid for cost-conscious consumers, Target and J. C. Penney introduced their most aggressive free-shipping programs ever, and Sears, Toys “R” Us, Williams-Sonoma and others were trying to match the success of Amazon’s shipping program, offering unlimited two-day shipping for an annual fee.

But given Wal-Mart’s scale and influence in the marketplace, its free pass for shipping sets a new high — or low — in e-commerce. And it may create an expectation among consumers — free shipping, no minimum, always — that would make it harder for smaller e-commerce sites to survive.

Wal-Mart says it will not raise prices to offset shipping and will not press shippers, like UPS and FedEx, to absorb the costs. But Wal-Mart and other big retailers already have low-price contracts with shippers, and the stores maintain distribution centers nationwide that reduce shipping distances and costs.

For smaller retailers and Web sites, which pay regular mail rates and may ship from only one location, free shipping is not nearly as affordable and often must be added into prices.

“You’re trying to compete with the Amazons and the Zappos, who have so many different warehouses that they can significantly reduce transport costs,” said Gary Schwake, director of business development at the Distribution Management Group, a consulting firm that advises retailers like Eddie Bauer.

Retailers say that shoppers have already started to revolt against shipping fees. While consumers are sensitive to what an item costs online, shipping costs can have even more influence, according to market research.

When e-commerce took off a decade ago, free shipping was a rare perk. Now, 55 percent of consumers are at least somewhat likely to abandon their purchase if they do not get free shipping, according to comScore, the online-research firm, and about 41 percent of transactions online now include free shipping (usually with a minimum purchase).

Wal-Mart is throwing itself into the holiday season shipping fray as it tries to revive sales. Even as other retailers’ sales have recovered, sales at Wal-Mart’s stores in the United States open more than a year have fallen for five consecutive quarters. Recently, it has been adding to the merchandise it carries, offering products for under $1 and undercutting Target on toy prices.

The Wal-Mart shipping offer has no minimum. Mr. Nave said an important factor was that an item was likely to be given as a gift. “We looked at the areas we felt were going to be popular in gift-giving this holiday, and went from there,” he said.

Even after the holidays, “I would expect to see us continue to have offerings similar to this in the future in some way, shape or form,” he said.

The Wal-Mart announcement was not public until Thursday, but retailers had already been escalating their shipping programs since last year, when mobile comparison-shopping apps helped make free shipping popular.

Amazon.com has one successful model. Year-round, it offers free shipping on orders over $25. And its Amazon Prime program, in which members pay $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping on almost all purchases, could account for as much as a third of sales, said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus.

“It is making other retailers scramble,” he said.

To fight off Amazon Prime, a month ago GSI Commerce started ShopRunner, a service that bands together e-commerce sites including eBags and the Web site of Toys “R” Us. Shoppers pay $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping from any of the members. This fall, Williams-Sonoma started a service like that for $30 a year, and Sears and Kmart, which introduced a similar program three years ago, are pushing it heavily this season.

Beginning in October, J.C. Penney started offering free shipping year-round, with a minimum purchase of $69 for most of the year. Target is offering free shipping on purchases of $50 and up, on 800,000 items. And in August L.L. Bean began offering free shipping with no minimum, through Dec. 20.

Bigger companies have a big advantage in the battle over free shipping: volume.

According to the Distribution Management Group, air shipping prices for big retailers are about 70 percent less than for a small company. Shipping at Amazon costs about 4 percent of sales, and Amazon loses money on it because it offers marketing benefits, said Aaron Kessler, an e-commerce analyst at the research firm ThinkEquity. But shipping at small sites usually costs about 35 percent of sales, said Mr. Schwake, the retail adviser.

Despite the costs, smaller retailers say they have little choice but to offer free shipping, in some form, these days.

“Everyone does it,” said Michael Mente, the co-founder of Revolve Clothing, a Los Angeles-based women’s clothing site. Asked if he received discounts from the shippers, he said, “Unfortunately not.” At the start-up site ModCloth, which sells women’s clothes, the co-founder Susan Gregg Koger said she couldn’t afford free shipping year round, but she decided to do it for the holiday season. It is a risk, she said.

“That’s really hard to offer and then roll back,” she said.

While Wal-Mart may continue with some free shipping offers after the holidays, even other big retailers like L.L. Bean say they just cannot afford it after Christmas is over.

“We’d love to be able to offer free shipping, but free shipping isn’t free,” said Laurie Brooks, an L.L. Bean spokeswoman. “It does cost a company money."

There are potential downsides, even for Wal-Mart. Physical stores with Web sites run a risk in promoting free shipping, Mr. Rohan said. “They’d much rather you buy that same item in the store for $50 and pick up a hundred dollars of other stuff you wouldn’t even think about,” he said.

    Wal-Mart Says ‘Try This On’: Free Shipping, NYT, 11.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/business/11shipping.html

Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post

November 8, 2010
The New York Times
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

In what labor officials and lawyers view as a ground-breaking case involving workers and social media, the National Labor Relations Board has accused a company of illegally firing an employee after she criticized her supervisor on her Facebook page.

This is the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site are generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements.

The labor relations board announced last week that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service, American Medical Response of Connecticut, that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

Lafe Solomon, the board’s acting general counsel, said, “This is a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act — whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.”

That act gives workers a federally protected right to form unions, and it prohibits employers from punishing workers — whether union or nonunion — for discussing working conditions or unionization. The labor board said the company’s Facebook rule was “overly broad” and improperly limited employees’ rights to discuss working conditions among themselves.

Moreover, the board faulted another company policy, one prohibiting employees from making “disparaging” or “discriminatory” “comments when discussing the company or the employee’s superiors” and “co-workers.”

The board’s complaint prompted Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm with a large labor and employment practice representing hundreds of companies, to send a “lawflash” advisory on Monday to its clients, saying, “All private sector employers should take note,” regardless “of whether their work force is represented by a union.”

The firm added, “Employers should review their Internet and social media policies to determine whether they are susceptible to an allegation that the policy would ‘reasonably tend to chill employees’ ” in the exercise of their rights to discuss wages, working conditions and unionization.

American Medical Response of Connecticut denied the labor board’s allegations, saying they were without merit. “The employee in question was discharged based on multiple, serious complaints about her behavior,” the company said in a statement. “The employee was also held accountable for negative personal attacks against a co-worker posted publicly on Facebook. The company believes that the offensive statements made against the co-workers were not concerted activity protected under federal law.”

The case involves Dawnmarie Souza, who had to prepare a response to a customer’s complaint about her work. Ms. Souza, the board said, was unhappy that her supervisor would not let a representative of the Teamsters, the union representing the company’s workers, help prepare her response.

Ms. Souza then mocked her supervisor on Facebook, using several vulgarities to ridicule him, according to Jonathan Kreisberg, director of the board’s Hartford office, which filed the complaint. He also said she had written, “love how the company allows a 17 to become a supervisor” — 17 is the company’s lingo for a psychiatric patient.

The labor board said that her comments “drew supportive responses from her co-workers” and led to further negative comments about the supervisor. Mr. Kreisberg said: “You’re allowed to talk about your supervisor with your co-workers. You’re allowed to communicate the concerns and criticisms you have. The only difference in this case is she did it on Facebook and did it on her own time and her own computer.”

An administrative law judge is scheduled to begin hearing the case on Jan. 25. Marshall B. Babson, a member of the National Labor Relations Board in the 1980s, said a broad company rule that says one cannot make disparaging comments about supervisors is clearly illegal under labor law. But he said an employee’s criticizing a company or supervisor on Facebook was not necessarily protected activity.

“There will arguably be cases where it is not concerted activity,” Mr. Babson said, suggesting that if a worker lashed out in a post against a supervisor but was not communicating with co-workers, that type of comment might not be protected.

If the Facebook conversation involves several co-workers, however, it is far more likely to be viewed as “concerted protected activity,” he said.

But employees might cross the line into unprotected territory if they disparage supervisors over something unrelated to work — for instance, a supervisor’s sexual performance — or if their statements are disloyal.

Courts often view workers’ statements as disloyal when they are defamatory and are not supported by facts. Mr. Babson cited a case upholding the firing of airline workers who held signs saying their airline was unsafe. But, he said, if employees held signs accurately saying their airline or restaurant had been cited for dozens of safety violations, that would most likely be protected.

    Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post, NYT, 8.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/business/09facebook.html

The Facebook Skeletons Come Out

November 5, 2010
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS and BRIAN STELTER

AMONG the many firsts in the 2010 elections, it is safe to assume that the following words had never before been uttered about a future member of Congress, “This is a candidate who is probably best known for getting drunk and having sex on television.”

The comment, made by the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, was lobbed at Sean Duffy, who overcame his bawdy past as a star on MTV’s “Real World: Boston” in 1997 to ride a wave of conservative discontent into office. Some of Mr. Duffy’s youthful indiscretions that were captured on film and dredged up by his opponents included a drunken toga party and images of him dancing on a pool table in his underwear.

With the ubiquity of technology and social networking Web sites like Facebook that allow — and compel — young people to document themselves drinking, wearing little clothing or putting themselves in otherwise compromised positions, it was a given that a generation of politicians would someday find themselves confronted with digital evidence of their more immodest and imprudent moments.

But who knew it would happen this quickly?

Politics today is rife with examples of candidates having to explain why they were posing shirtless for pictures poolside with a skimpily clad woman (Representative Aaron Schock of Illinois), simulating sex acts on a toy (the Congressional candidate Krystal Ball of Virginia), or carousing on Halloween night dressed as a ladybug (the Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware).

“I think all of us know that politicians would have to confront the Facebook skeletons in their closet, but that it would be in 20 years, not in two years,” said Anil Dash, a technology consultant and pioneer of the blogosphere when it was just beginning in the late 1990s. “By the time the next generation comes into power, they’ll just assume this is how it’s always been.”

And the list of embarrassing moments caught on film goes on. Blake Farenthold, a Republican candidate for Congress in Texas, had to defend himself after pictures surfaced right before the election of him wearing pajamas with little yellow ducks as he stood grinning next to a woman in black lingerie.

A Congressional race in Ohio became awkward after Rich Iott, the Republican candidate, was shown in a photo dressed up as a Nazi for a World War II re-enactment.

The candidates themselves are not the only ones being confronted with images from the past. In 2008, photographs of President Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Rodham Clinton made their way onto blogs. This year, in the Minnesota race for governor, Facebook photos of the Republican candidate’s under-age son drinking alcohol were disseminated, forcing the candidate, Tom Emmer, to put out a statement on the matter. He called the episode “a serious mistake” and said his son had paid the consequences.

With so many examples to point to already, could this mean that drunken Facebook photos of the presidential candidates of 2024 and of the Supreme Court justice nominees of 2040 are already out there?

As the cases of Mr. Schock (29), Ms. Ball (28) and Mr. Favreau (29) suggest, today’s generation of future leaders has grown up in an era when letting one’s guard down for one’s Facebook friends to see is an afterthought.

Ms. Ball, a Democrat, was stunned when she found out that six-year-old party pictures were circulating online. In them, she was wearing a Santa cap and provocative lacy hosiery while holding and putting her mouth around a sex toy. The story went viral, getting attention from news media outlets as varied as Gawker and National Public Radio.

“I think I was the No. 3 most-Googled term in the whole world over some stupid gag I played when I was 22 years old,” Ms. Ball said in a phone interview on Wednesday, the day after she lost her election.

While her opponent already had a comfortable advantage in the Republican-leaning district by the time the pictures came out, Ms. Ball’s experience raises the question of whether American culture will ever evolve to the point where voters tolerate pictures of future leaders in various states of inebriation and undress.

Ms. Ball, a certified public accountant, has used the experience as an opportunity to warn of a potential chilling effect on tomorrow’s leaders. Candidates, she argued, should not be shamed out of a race because of mistakes made in their youth. “I had a whole lot of people who were older than me saying they were feeling grateful that Facebook and digital cameras weren’t around when they were growing up,” she said. “I am not the only person with stupid photos out there, and I would hate to have some young man or young woman think, ‘I can’t run for office because I did something stupid at a party however long ago.’ “

Mr. Duffy, who won his race, used the same argument in distancing himself from his “Real World” days. “I never thought I would run for Congress,” he was quoted by The Washington Post as saying in June. “If you look back at a certain reality TV show, you know that.” His involvement with the show seemed to have little impact on his campaign, despite efforts by his opponents to paint him as a debaucherous lout.

As the Facebook generation ages, time indeed may prove that they are more willing to overlook the indiscretions of their peers out of empathy.

“We’re in kind of a cultural transformation right now,” said James Lull, a professor emeritus of communication studies at San Jose State University, an author and an editor of books on media and culture. “It’s a relatively slow process in political terms. But culturally we’re going to get used to this. So I’m not sure the ‘Oh my God!’ feelings we’re getting today will be the same on down the line. I think there’s going to be an erosion to the impact.”

Still, it seems certain that right now, the aspiring leaders of the United States are busy scrubbing their Facebook profiles of incriminating evidence, looking at those who have learned the hard way. In 2008, Republican handlers failed to clean up the MySpace page of Levi Johnston, the boyfriend of vice- presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol. On the page, Mr. Johnston called himself a “redneck” who didn’t want children; his girlfriend was pregnant at the time.

Still, humans can be as unforgiving as they can be indiscreet. Daniel J. Solove, a professor at George Washington University Law School and the author of “The Future of Reputation,” said a lot of people make the argument that “if everyone’s warts are exposed, hey, ‘Everybody has warts, we’ll live with it.’ ”

“I think that’s overly optimistic,” he added. “That’s not human nature.”

    The Facebook Skeletons Come Out, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/fashion/07indiscretions.html

Facebook Lets Users Interact in Small Groups

October 6, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Facebook is trying to become a bit more like the real world.

The company on Wednesday introduced a feature that allows users to interact with small groups of people, like their family, high school friends or colleagues.

The move is an effort to address a longstanding problem: Facebook friends often span a broad range of relationships that include relatives, classmates, casual professional acquaintances or jogging partners — and not everyone wants all of them to see his or her information.

With the new feature, called Groups, Facebook hopes to encourage users to upload more photos, videos and other information to the site while giving them new ways to control who sees what.

Some privacy advocates welcomed Groups, but others worried that it would give Facebook even more information about users, which it could provide to marketers and others.

In an interview, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, said the feature, which has been in development for months, was not created in reaction to the recent series of privacy mishaps that have forced the company to roll back new features and apologize to users.

“We think about this stuff a lot,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, referring to privacy. “Often people don’t think we think about it as much as we do.”

He said Groups was simple in concept but technically difficult. At a news conference at Facebook headquarters here, he noted that Groups was not the company’s first effort to let users share more selectively.

Facebook has long allowed users to create lists of friends, but that feature has largely failed. Mr. Zuckerberg said only about 5 percent of Facebook users take advantage of the lists.

Groups allows anyone to create a group and include other people. For example, someone’s cousin may create a group for their family and put every family member in it. In that way, Facebook contends that if even a small percentage of users create groups, most people on Facebook will end up in several groups.

“We think this is going to be a pretty fundamental shift for how people use Facebook,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “The amount of sharing will go up massively and will be completely additive.”

Once a group is created, users can upload information only to that group, and can communicate with everyone in the group simultaneously through online chat.

Mr. Zuckerberg said that other applications and services that use Facebook’s technology would be able to use Groups, and that Groups would help improve other parts of Facebook.

“Knowing the groups you are part of helps us understand the people who are most important to you, and that can help us rank items in the news feed,” he said.

Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research, called Groups “a big step forward to allow Facebook to reflect the same social norms that we have in the real world.”

He added: “In the real world, we don’t shout one thing to everyone that we know. With Groups, you have this opportunity to begin to control who hears what.”

Larry Magid, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit group focused on online safety for children, said Groups could protect privacy. “But there is the danger of a false sense of security,” said Mr. Magid, whose organization receives some financial support from Facebook and other technology companies. Mr. Magid said a group member could deliberately or inadvertently allow a stranger into a group, potentially exposing information in the group to an outsider.

Mr. Zuckerberg said he thought the system would police itself because everyone in the group would be notified when a new member joins and would flag someone who does not belong.

But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the new service “double-edged.”

“Yes, it’s good to be able to segment posts for particular friends,” he said. “But you will also be revealing information to Facebook about the basis of your online connections.”

Mr. Rotenberg said he worried about how Facebook would use that information.

On Wednesday Facebook also introduced two other services: one to allow users to download all their Facebook information into one file, and another to let people monitor how third-party applications gain access to their personal data.

    Facebook Lets Users Interact in Small Groups, NYT, 6.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/technology/07facebook.html

Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump

September 29, 2010
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.

Those who knew Mr. Clementi — on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, N.J., at his North Jersey high school and in a community orchestra — were anguished by the circumstances surrounding his death, describing him as an intensely devoted musician who was sweet and shy.

“It’s really awful, especially in New York and in the 21st century,” said Arkady Leytush, artistic director of the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, where Mr. Clementi played since his freshman year in high school. “It’s so painful. He was very friendly and had very good potential.”

The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office said Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.

Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for trying a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional charges.”

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said Wednesday that he considered the death a hate crime. “We are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others’ lives as a sport,” he said in a statement.

At the end of the inaugural event for the university’s “Project Civility” campaign on Wednesday, nearly 100 demonstrators gathered outside the student center, where the president spoke. They chanted, “Civility without safety — over our queer bodies!”

It is unclear what Mr. Clementi’s sexual orientation was; classmates say he mostly kept to himself. Danielle Birnbohm, a freshman who lived across the hall from him in Davidson Hall, said that when a counselor asked how many students had known Mr. Clementi, only 3 students out of 50 raised their hands.

But Mr. Clementi displayed a favorite quotation on his Facebook page, from the song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”: “What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”

And his roommate’s Twitter message makes plain that Mr. Ravi believed that Mr. Clementi was gay.

A later message from Mr. Ravi appeared to make reference to the second attempt to broadcast Mr. Clementi. “Anyone with iChat,” he wrote on Sept. 21, “I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”

Ms. Birnbohm said Mr. Ravi had said the initial broadcast was an accident — that he viewed the encounter after dialing his own computer from another room in the dorm. It was not immediately known how or when Mr. Clementi learned what his roommate had done. But Ms. Birnbohm said the episode quickly became the subject of gossip in the dormitory.

Mr. Clementi’s family issued a statement on Wednesday confirming the suicide and pledging cooperation with the criminal investigation. “Tyler was a fine young man, and a distinguished musician,” the statement read. “The family is heartbroken beyond words.”

The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Mr. Clementi posted a note on his Facebook page the day of his death: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” Friends and strangers have turned the page into a memorial.

Witnesses told the police they saw a man jump off the bridge just before 9 p.m. on Sept. 22, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman. Officers discovered a wallet there with Mr. Clementi’s identification, Mr. Browne said.

The police said Wednesday night that they had found the body of a young man in the Hudson north of the bridge and were trying to identify it.

Officials at Ridgewood High School, where Mr. Clementi graduated in June, last week alerted parents of current students that his family had reported him missing and encouraged students to take advantage of counseling at the school.

The timing of the news was almost uncanny, coinciding with the start of “Project Civility” at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. Long in the planning, the campaign will involve panel discussions, lectures, workshops and other events to raise awareness about the importance of respect, compassion and courtesy in everyday interactions.

Events scheduled for this fall include a workshop for students and administrators on residential life on campus and a panel discussion titled “Uncivil Gadgets? Changing Technologies and Civil Behavior.”

Rutgers officials would not say whether the two suspects had been suspended. But in a statement late Wednesday, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick, said, “If the charges are true, these actions gravely violate the university’s standards of decency and humanity.” At the kickoff event for the civility campaign, Mr. McCormick made an oblique reference to the case, saying, “It is more clear than ever that we need strongly to reassert our call for civility and responsibility for each other.”

Mr. Ravi was freed on $25,000 bail, and Ms. Wei was released on her own recognizance. The lawyer for Mr. Ravi, Steven D. Altman, declined to comment on the accusations. A phone message left at the offices of Ms. Wei’s lawyer was not returned.

Some students on the Busch campus in Piscataway seemed dazed by the turn of events, remembering their last glimpse of Mr. Clementi. Thomas Jung, 19, shared a music stand with Mr. Clementi in the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra.

On Wednesday afternoon, hours before Mr. Clementi’s death, the two rehearsed works by Berlioz and Beethoven. “He loved music,” Mr. Jung said. “He was very dedicated. I couldn’t tell if anything was wrong.”


Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Barbara Gray, Nate Schweber and Tim Stelloh.

    Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump, NYT, 29.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html

U.S. Is Working to Ease Wiretaps on the Internet

September 27, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

“We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts,” said Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”

Investigators have been concerned for years that changing communications technology could damage their ability to conduct surveillance. In recent months, officials from the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the National Security Agency, the White House and other agencies have been meeting to develop a proposed solution.

There is not yet agreement on important elements, like how to word statutory language defining who counts as a communications service provider, according to several officials familiar with the deliberations.

But they want it to apply broadly, including to companies that operate from servers abroad, like Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of BlackBerry devices. In recent months, that company has come into conflict with the governments of Dubai and India over their inability to conduct surveillance of messages sent via its encrypted service.

In the United States, phone and broadband networks are already required to have interception capabilities, under a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act. It aimed to ensure that government surveillance abilities would remain intact during the evolution from a copper-wire phone system to digital networks and cellphones.

Often, investigators can intercept communications at a switch operated by the network company. But sometimes — like when the target uses a service that encrypts messages between his computer and its servers — they must instead serve the order on a service provider to get unscrambled versions.

Like phone companies, communication service providers are subject to wiretap orders. But the 1994 law does not apply to them. While some maintain interception capacities, others wait until they are served with orders to try to develop them.

The F.B.I.’s operational technologies division spent $9.75 million last year helping communication companies — including some subject to the 1994 law that had difficulties — do so. And its 2010 budget included $9 million for a “Going Dark Program” to bolster its electronic surveillance capabilities.

Beyond such costs, Ms. Caproni said, F.B.I. efforts to help retrofit services have a major shortcoming: the process can delay their ability to wiretap a suspect for months.

Moreover, some services encrypt messages between users, so that even the provider cannot unscramble them.

There is no public data about how often court-approved surveillance is frustrated because of a service’s technical design.

But as an example, one official said, an investigation into a drug cartel earlier this year was stymied because smugglers used peer-to-peer software, which is difficult to intercept because it is not routed through a central hub. Agents eventually installed surveillance equipment in a suspect’s office, but that tactic was “risky,” the official said, and the delay “prevented the interception of pertinent communications.”

Moreover, according to several other officials, after the failed Times Square bombing in May, investigators discovered that the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, had been communicating with a service that lacked prebuilt interception capacity. If he had aroused suspicion beforehand, there would have been a delay before he could have been wiretapped.

To counter such problems, officials are coalescing around several of the proposal’s likely requirements:

¶ Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to unscramble them.

¶ Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.

¶ Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.

Providers that failed to comply would face fines or some other penalty. But the proposal is likely to direct companies to come up with their own way to meet the mandates. Writing any statute in “technologically neutral” terms would also help prevent it from becoming obsolete, officials said.

Even with such a law, some gaps could remain. It is not clear how it could compel compliance by overseas services that do no domestic business, or from a “freeware” application developed by volunteers.

In their battle with Research in Motion, countries like Dubai have sought leverage by threatening to block BlackBerry data from their networks. But Ms. Caproni said the F.B.I. did not support filtering the Internet in the United States.

Still, even a proposal that consists only of a legal mandate is likely to be controversial, said Michael A. Sussmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who advises communications providers.

“It would be an enormous change for newly covered companies,” he said. “Implementation would be a huge technology and security headache, and the investigative burden and costs will shift to providers.”

Several privacy and technology advocates argued that requiring interception capabilities would create holes that would inevitably be exploited by hackers.

Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.

“I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”

Susan Landau, a Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study fellow and former Sun Microsystems engineer, argued that the proposal would raise costly impediments to innovation by small startups.

“Every engineer who is developing the wiretap system is an engineer who is not building in greater security, more features, or getting the product out faster,” she said.

Moreover, providers of services featuring user-to-user encryption are likely to object to watering it down. Similarly, in the late 1990s, encryption makers fought off a proposal to require them to include a back door enabling wiretapping, arguing it would cripple their products in the global market.

But law enforcement officials rejected such arguments. They said including an interception capability from the start was less likely to inadvertently create security holes than retrofitting it after receiving a wiretap order.

They also noted that critics predicted that the 1994 law would impede cellphone innovation, but that technology continued to improve. And their envisioned decryption mandate is modest, they contended, because service providers — not the government — would hold the key.

“No one should be promising their customers that they will thumb their nose at a U.S. court order,” Ms. Caproni said. “They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.”

    U.S. Is Working to Ease Wiretaps on the Internet, NYT, 27.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html

Facebook Hopes Credits Make Dollars

September 22, 2010
The New York imes
By MIGUEL HELFT

PALO ALTO, Calif. — For all its success, Google is often criticized for being a one-trick pony. After 12 years, the Internet search company is still struggling to find a significant new revenue source to supplement its lucrative text advertising business.

Facebook, which more than any other company aspires to usurp Google’s dominant place on the Internet, hopes to avoid that problem. Already on the path to becoming an advertising powerhouse, the social networking company is laying the groundwork for its second act: a virtual currency system that some day could turn into a multibillion-dollar business.

Facebook began testing its virtual currency, called Credits, more than a year ago with some popular games on Facebook. This month, Credits passed a milestone when it became the exclusive payment method for most of the games created by Zynga, the No. 1 developer of Facebook applications.

Zynga is expected to have $500 million in revenue this year, according to the Inside Network, which tracks Facebook applications, as millions of users pay real money to buy virtual goods on games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Through Credits, Facebook will take a 30 percent cut.

By the end of the year, Facebook expects that Credits will be used to buy the vast majority of virtual goods sold on Facebook. The fast-growing market is expected to reach $835 million on Facebook this year, according to the Inside Network. To bolster that market, Facebook began selling Credits gift cards at Target stores across the country this month.

For now, Facebook says it simply wants Credits to help foster the growth of virtual goods transactions. But Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, said recently that the company may choose to do “a lot more” with Credits in the future. Over time, the company plans to turn Credits into a system for micropayments that could be open to any application on Facebook, be it a game or perhaps a media company, people with direct knowledge of Facebook’s plans said. They spoke anonymously because the plans have not been announced publicly.

In addition to games, which account for the vast majority of money spent on Facebook, more than a million other applications run on the site. In the future, many of those may choose to charge for access to certain features or to things like music, videos or news articles.

Some analysts and industry insiders say that expanding Credits makes sense and could eventually put Facebook in competition with PayPal, Google, Amazon and others for a slice of the growing pie of online transactions.

“If they can get 50 million registered credit cards, why wouldn’t they use them to pay for your newspaper subscription?” said Alex Rampell, the chief executive of TrialPay, an advertising company that offers free Facebook Credits to people who buy certain products.

Others say the potential for using Credits could extend beyond the Facebook site, through Facebook Connect, a service that allows users to log in to sites across the Web using their Facebook identities.

“There is a huge opportunity for Facebook to use Facebook Connect to offer seamless checkout on other sites,” said Ron Hirson, a senior vice president at Boku, a start-up company that enables online payments using a cellphone. “They are focusing on games and apps now, but it would make sense for them to go into other” product categories.

For now, Facebook prefers to play down talk of its broader ambitions for Credits. Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president for partnerships and platform marketing, talks about the usefulness of Credits while playing Facebook games. Users will have a single currency they can spend on any game, sparing them the trouble of entering the credit card or PayPal credentials multiple times, he says. Currently users can buy Credits with 15 currencies, including the United States dollars, the euro, the British pound, the Venezuelan bolivar and the Danish krone

It works much like Apple’s App Store, which allows users to enter their credit cards or PayPal accounts once and buy applications from any developer. Apple also takes a 30 percent cut of sales on iTunes and its app store.

Mr. Rose said that while some developers might initially see a decline in revenue because of Facebook’s commission, the plan is for Credits to more than offset that loss over time, because Credits will make it easier to spend more in a game.

“We need to be able to grow the total level of money spent,” Mr. Rose said. Facebook is also helping lubricate the system by giving its developers credits that they can give away to users.

Some developers say they already have made gains. “We are seeing the number of paying users increase and the revenue per user increase, and FB deserves a lot of the credit for it,” said Mark Hull, vice president for marketing at CrowdStar, whose Happy Aquarium game is among the most popular on Facebook.

Mr. Rose said that if Facebook succeeded, Credits “could grow it to a size where over time it will become a material revenue generator.” For now, he said, Facebook plans to reinvest revenue from Credits into improving its software for developers.

But Facebook’s ambitions are unmistakable. Credits is backed by a sizable engineering and product team that is full of PayPal veterans.

“It is a lot like PayPal in the early days,” said Deb Liu, a former director of corporate strategy at PayPal who is now product marketing manager for Credits. “We are moving fast and changing the industry.”

For now, Credits is not a rival to PayPal or other payment systems. In February, Facebook signed an agreement with PayPal, a unit of eBay, making PayPal one of the preferred ways to finance Credits accounts. Facebook users can buy Credits using their credit cards and some mobile payments services.

Since Zynga was one of PayPal’s largest customers, Facebook is now a significant customer as well. “Facebook has been a great partner,” Osama Bedier, PayPal’s vice president for platform, said.

But as Credits expands beyond Facebook games, it could collide with a number of others competing for a piece of the growing commerce in digital goods. They include Apple, the leading seller of music and apps; Google, whose Checkout system is used in e-commerce and on the company’s app store for mobile phones; and even Amazon, which is seeking to expand its payment system across the Web.

Analysts said Facebook’s ambitions might well run into the same obstacles that have thwarted Google and Amazon as they have sought to expand across the Web.

“Facebook is a very innovative company, but we have had two large innovative companies, Google and Amazon, that have spent a fair amount of effort on payments,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup. Those companies have yet to gain much traction, he said. “I have to think that the odds against Facebook are steep.”

    Facebook Hopes Credits Make Dollars, NYT, 22.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/technology/23facebook.html

Code That Tracks Users’ Browsing Prompts Lawsuits

September 20, 2010
The New York Times
By TANZINA VEGA

Sandra Person Burns used to love browsing and shopping online. Until she realized she was being tracked by software on her computer that she thought she had erased.

Ms. Person Burns, 67, a retired health care executive who lives in Jackson, Miss., said she is wary of online shopping: “Instead of going to Amazon, I’m going to the local bookstore.”

Ms. Person Burns is one of a growing number of consumers who are taking legal action against companies that track computer users’ activity on the Internet. At issue is a little-known piece of computer code placed on hard drives by the Flash program from Adobe when users watch videos on popular Web sites like YouTube and Hulu.

The technology, so-called Flash cookies, is bringing an increasing number of federal lawsuits against media and technology companies and growing criticism from some privacy advocates who say the software may also allow the companies to create detailed profiles of consumers without their knowledge.

Unlike other so-called HTML cookies, which store Web site preferences and can be managed by changing privacy settings in a Web browser, Flash cookies are stored in a separate directory that many users are unaware of and may not know how to control.

Ms. Person Burns, a claimant who is to be represented by KamberLaw, said she knew cookies existed but did not know about Flash cookies.

“I thought that in all the instructions that I followed to purge my system of cookies, I thought I had done that, and I discovered I had not,” she said. “My information is now being bartered like a product without my knowledge or understanding.”

Since July, at least five class-action lawsuits filed in California have accused media companies like the Fox Entertainment Group and NBC Universal, and technology companies like Specific Media and Quantcast of surreptitiously using Flash cookies. More filings are expected as early as this week.

The suits contend that the companies collected information on the Web sites that users visited and from the videos they watched, even though the users had set their Web browser privacy settings to reject cookies that could track them.

“What these cases are about is the right of a computer user to dictate the terms by which their personal information is harvested and shared. This is all about user control,” said Scott A. Kamber, 44, a privacy and technology lawyer with KamberLaw who is involved with some of the cases. The suits have been filed by firms including Parisi & Havens and the law office of Joseph H. Malley.

One lawsuit contends that Clearspring Technologies and media companies including the Walt Disney Internet Group “knowingly authorized” the use of online tracking devices that would “allow access to and disclosure of Internet users’ online activities as well as personal information.” Others say that the information was gathered to sell to online advertisers.

In August, Clearspring and Quantcast issued statements on their company blogs addressing the suits. Clearspring clarified its use of Flash cookies and said the legal filings were “factually inaccurate.” The company said it used Flash cookies, also known as Flash local storage, “to deliver standard Web analytics to publishers.” The post also stated that data was collected at the aggregate level including unique users and interaction time, but did not include personally identifiable information.

Quantcast’s blog post said that the company “uses Flash cookies for measurement purposes only and not for any form of targeted content delivery.”

Specific Media did not respond to requests for comment. Counsel for the media companies in the cases declined to comment; representatives of companies that had not yet been served with the suits also declined to comment.

Some privacy advocates said that despite the companies’ claims, if enough data is collected over time, advertisers can create detailed profiles of users including personally identifiable data like race and age in addition to data about what Web sites a user visits. They also take issue with the fact that Flash cookies can be used to restore HTML cookies that have been deleted from a user’s computer, circumventing a user’s privacy settings.

“The core function of the cookie is to link what you do on Web site A to what you do on Web site B,” said Peter Eckersley, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The Flash cookie makes it harder for people to stop that from happening.”

According to Adobe, more than 75 percent of online videos are delivered using Flash technology, with media companies also using it to serve games and animation to users. The company says that Flash cookies are intended to be used for basic Web functions like saving a user’s volume and language preferences or remembering where a user left off on a video game.

In a public letter to the Federal Trade Commission in January, Adobe condemned the practice of restoring cookies after they had been deleted by a user. The company provides an online tool on its Web site to erase Flash cookies and manage Flash player settings. At least one suit, however, claims that the controls are not easy to reach and are not obvious to most Web users.

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, 36, one of the authors of a University of California, Berkeley, study about Internet privacy and Flash cookies that has been used in several of the legal filings, said the recent spate of suits pointed to a weakness in federal rules governing online privacy.

“Consumer privacy actions have largely failed,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. The lawsuits, he added, “actually are moving the policy ball forward in the ways that activists are not.”

Complaints about online privacy are now migrating to mobile technology. Last week, a lawsuit was filed by three California residents against a technology company called Ringleader Digital saying that the company used a product called Media Stamp that “acquired information from plaintiff’s phone and assigned a unique ID to their mobile device.”

The suit says that the information collected by the unique ID, using a technology called HTML 5, allowed Web site operators “to track the mobile devices’ Internet activities over multiple Web sites.”

In a statement, Bob Walczak Jr., Ringleader’s chief executive, said, “Our intent since the inception of the company has been to build a mobile advertising platform that users can control.” He added that Ringleader was working on “new ways for consumers to be able to verify for themselves that their opt-outs have taken effect.”

John Verdi, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, faulted the Federal Trade Commission for not being more aggressive on privacy issues, focusing largely, instead, on self-regulation.

“The F.T.C. has been inactive on this front and has failed to present meaningful regulation on this,” he said. “There’s wide evidence that online tracking is not being controlled by self-regulation.”

Christopher Olsen, an assistant director in the division of privacy and identity protection at the agency, said it had hosted a series of roundtable discussions about online and offline privacy challenges from December to March and planned to issue a report in the next few months to address those issues.

The agency is investigating several companies, but Mr. Olson declined to comment on the specifics.

Other efforts to address online privacy are taking place at the Congressional level. In July, Representative Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois, introduced an online privacy bill that would, among other things, require companies to disclose how they collect, use and maintain the personal information on users and to make those disclosures easy for users to understand.

    Code That Tracks Users’ Browsing Prompts Lawsuits, NYT, 20.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/technology/21cookie.html

At Twitter, a Web Site Is Revamped and Simplified

September 14, 2010
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and MIGUEL HELFT

Twitter unveiled a new Web site on Tuesday that it hopes will be user friendly.

The redesigned site, which will be available to all users in the next few weeks, makes it simpler to see information about the authors of Twitter posts, conversations among Twitter users, and the photos and videos that posts link to.

“It’s going to increase the value that people are getting out of Twitter, so in less time you can get more information and value,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview. He had the idea for the redesign and has spent much of his time in the last few months working with Twitter engineers on the site. He has said he was surprised that so many people use the service — 160 million — given how difficult its Web site is to navigate.

That large audience is appealing to advertisers, but the unappealing Web site has not been a welcoming place for them. Twitter, which has raised $160 million in venture capital, has slowly started to run ads called Promoted Tweets that people see when they search the site. Mr. Williams said the new site would improve ads “because there’s going to be more real estate and more engagement.”

Twitter’s new Web site could threaten the many start-ups that build apps, like TweetDeck, Brizzly and Seesmic, to make Twitter easier to use and to provide users with more sophisticated tools.

Even though 78 percent of Twitter’s unique users gain access to the service through its Web site, the site has had some major flaws. Twitter has not been able to funnel resources into redesigning the site until now, Mr. Williams said, because the company has had trouble keeping up with its growth, even struggling to keep its Web site from crashing.

If people want to learn more about the author of a post, for instance, they must go to a new page. It has been almost impossible to follow a conversation between two Twitter users. And while a quarter of the posts contain links, if people post a link to a photo, readers have not been able to see the picture without going to a new site.

On the new Twitter Web site, people see two panes instead of a single timeline of posts. The timeline stays in the left pane. In the right pane, they can see more information about posts — like biographies of authors, photos and videos to which posts link — and conversations that spring from a particular post. This eliminates the need to click back and forth.

Mr. Williams said the new site was not designed for the sake of advertisers, but the experience of viewing ads would improve. For example, when a movie studio puts out a “sponsored tweet” for a film with a link to the trailer, users will be able to see the trailer without leaving the Twitter site.

Borrowing an idea from image searching on Google and Bing, Twitter now shows a continuous stream of posts so people do not need to click “more” to view additional posts.

Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has grown so quickly in part because it opened its technology to thousands of software developers outside the company who have built Twitter tools.

But as Twitter has matured, it has angered many of those developers by building similar tools itself or acquiring the start-ups that built the tools, limiting opportunities for competing app developers. Last spring, for example, it bought Atebits, which made a Twitter iPhone app called Tweetie, and turned it into the official Twitter for iPhone app.

Other start-ups worry that if Twitter builds its own tools, they will go out of business. Indeed, mobile Twitter users now reach Twitter through the company’s own iPhone and BlackBerry apps more than through any others, according to the company.

“We’ve made it pretty clear that we are going to create the best experiences we can with all our clients,” Mr. Williams said. “We made it clear to developers that it’s great for everyone if we make it as good as possible, because that will create more successful Twitter users.”

    At Twitter, a Web Site Is Revamped and Simplified, NYT, 14.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/technology/15twitter.html

YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue

September 2, 2010
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN BRUNO, Calif. — Last month, a YouTube user, TomR35, uploaded a clip from the AMC series “Mad Men” in which Don Draper makes a heartfelt speech about the importance of nostalgia in advertising.

Viewers wouldn’t notice, but that clip also makes an important point about modern advertising — YouTube is an increasingly fruitful place for advertisers.

In the past, Lions Gate, which owns the rights to the “Mad Men” clip, might have requested that TomR35’s version be taken down. But it has decided to leave clips like this up, and in return, YouTube runs ads with the video and splits the revenue with Lions Gate.

Remarkably, more than one-third of the two billion views of YouTube videos with ads each week are like TomR35’s “Mad Men” clip — uploaded without the copyright owner’s permission but left up by the owner’s choice. They are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID that scans videos and compares them to material provided by copyright owners.

Those two billion views, a 50 percent increase over last year, according to the company, are just 14 percent of the videos viewed each week on the Google-owned site. But that’s enough to turn YouTube profitable this year, analysts say.

“YouTube is a big component of our display revenue, and display is our next big business,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in an interview.

In the last year, the video site has become a significant contributor to the family business at a time when Google, which makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from text search ads, is seeking a second act. Though Google does not report YouTube’s earnings, it has hinted that it is hovering near profitability. Analysts say YouTube will bring in around $450 million in revenue this year and earn a profit. Revenue at YouTube has more than doubled each year for the last three years, according to the company.

YouTube’s new profitable relationship with content creators was not always so easy. For a long time, YouTube executives spent their time across conference tables with lawyers worried about copyright violations, said Chris Maxcy, YouTube’s director of content partnerships.

“It was 90 percent lawyers in a meeting and the marketing people faded into the background,” he said. “Now the partners we are working with get checks that get bigger every month. And now when you walk into a meeting there’s almost no lawyers, or there’s a couple of lawyers but they are deal lawyers there to help you get your contract done.”

The shift is also an important development for Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. The video site at first played the role of Google’s profligate son, throwing money at building out bandwidth and storage to handle all the videos but making little money of its own.

Mr. Schmidt said that YouTube’s role began to change about a year and a half ago, when he asked the unit to start focusing on revenue.

The strategy had been to amass “an audience first, then figure out the tools that will create the revenue, then you go to the content partners and say, ‘Hey, look guys,’ ” Mr. Schmidt said. “And I think we’re at that point now.”

Salar Kamangar, YouTube’s co-head, who also co-founded Google’s AdWords search advertising program, started spending his time figuring out how to make money on the video business.

YouTube gives Google the chance to get a piece of the television ad market, Mr. Kamangar said, by bringing videos straight to the television over an Internet connection, or Internet protocol, as the industry calls it. “Ads can be a lot more effective when they’re delivered over I.P. instead of cable or broadcast, because they’re delivered personalized to you.”

YouTube now offers several types of ads, including display ads on its home page and on the video pages, ads that promote videos and ads that run in the video stream or pop up on the bottom of a video.

When someone uploaded a recording of the Eminem song “Not Afraid,” for instance, instead of taking down the recording, YouTube ran pop-up ads that let people buy the song or the ring tone and shared the revenue with the copyright owner.

“Google smartly realized that consumers consume different types of media throughout the day,” said Dave Marsey, senior vice president of media at Digitas, the online advertising agency. “Search is a huge component of that, but there are times when you want some entertainment or you want to solve a problem and going to YouTube makes sense.”

YouTube shares advertising revenue with content partners, who may be big entertainment companies like Lions Gate or amateur videographers who have developed a following. Hundreds of these partners make more than $100,000 a year. Some, like Sal Khan, a former hedge fund manager who now makes math and science education videos, have quit their day jobs.

YouTube’s next challenge is to attract more advertisers by offering more professional, long-form content to supplement the videos of cooing babies and surprised kittens. YouTube is testing a pay-per-view film rental service and broadcasting live events like concerts, and it just signed a deal to show on-demand Major League Baseball games in Japan.

Hulu, the site started by TV networks that streams movies and shows, makes considerably more revenue per stream than YouTube because it has more professionally produced content, said Jordan Rohan, an Internet and digital media research analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. “YouTube is certainly the market leader in terms of streams. They’re certainly the market leader in terms of revenues,” Mr. Rohan said. But only a small percentage of its revenue streams would justify a high ad rate, he said.

YouTube must also follow its viewers as they increasingly watch videos away from their computers, on small mobile phone screens and big TV screens. YouTube now has 160 million mobile views a day, almost triple last year’s number. When Google introduces Google TV later this year, people will be able to watch YouTube videos on Internet-connected televisions.

    YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue, NYT, 2.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/technology/03youtube.html

Neighborly Borrowing, Over the Online Fence

August 28, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNA WORTHAM

THE first time I unboxed my gleaming Roomba, I beamed like a proud new parent as I placed it gently on my hardwood floor.

That evening, I watched it putter around my apartment, sweeping and inhaling dust bunnies. When it gamely bumbled around bulky pieces of furniture, I dashed about, too, lifting the obstacles out of its way. After the Roomba finished its chaotic dance, I put it back into its case and patted the sweet little machine good night. The next morning, I returned it to its rightful owner.

The Roomba was mine for only 24 hours. I had rented it through a service called SnapGoods, which allows people to lend out their surplus gadgetry and various gear for a daily fee.

SnapGoods is one of the latest start-ups that bases its business model around allowing people to share, exchange and rent goods in a local setting. Among others are NeighborGoods and ShareSomeSugar. Other commercial services are springing up, too, including group-buying sites like Groupon, the peer-to-peer travel site Airbnb and Kickstarter, which allows people to invest small sums in creative ventures.

The common thread of all these sites is that access trumps ownership; consumers are offered ways to share goods instead of having to buy them.

Ron J. Williams, co-founder of SnapGoods, based in New York, describes the phenomenon as the “access economy.”

“There may always be certain products that you do need to buy,” says Mr. Williams. “But there is also a growing cultural awareness that you don’t always get enjoyment out of hyperconsumption. The notion of ownership as the barrier between you and what you need is outdated.”

The most obvious reason for all of this is financial. Recession-battered shoppers can test pricey new devices before deciding whether to take the plunge or wait until the next upgrade. (Roombas, for example, can retail for as much as $600 for the newer models. I borrowed mine for a much more palatable $10.)

For all the promise of these new marketplaces, analysts say they aren’t likely to overtake more traditional models anytime soon.

“The holy grails of consumerism are convenience and choice,” says Rachel Botsman, co-author of the forthcoming book, “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.” “This is not the end of the old consumer way. But they could sit side by side. Peer-to-peer could become the default way to share.”

There’s much evidence that this is already happening. Do-it-yourself home improvers can borrow tools for a weekend project, and hobbyist campers can rent equipment per trip, rather than splurge on all-new gear. Travelers looking for inexpensive accommodations can spend the night in someone’s spare bedroom for a fraction of the cost of a hotel room. For people who lend their stuff, it’s a way to make extra money on possessions that are gathering dust.

“My Roomba is on track to pay for itself,” says Luke Tucker, 31, a software engineer who rented me his robotic vacuum cleaner through SnapGoods.

But some experts think that there may be something bigger than thriftiness at play. These services may be gaining popularity because they reinforce a sense of community.

“It turns out to actually be a good way to meet my neighbors,” says Mr. Tucker, who also lists a jigsaw, a digital camera and a wireless keyboard for rent on SnapGoods.

Charlis Floyd, a 22-year-old student, and Nema Williams, a 30-year-old comedian, who rent out their spare bedroom in Brooklyn on Airbnb, say that while the extra income helps — as any little bit does these days — they’re much more interested in the revolving cast of characters they meet.

“We had a couple from England teach us how to make red curry,” says Ms. Floyd.

“Another guy, an artist, promised to paint a mural in our kitchen,” adds Mr. Williams.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it always goes off without a hitch.“Sometimes people can be weird,” says Ms. Floyd. “One girl drank all our milk and another person broke our toilet handle.”

Even so, Ms. Floyd and Mr. Williams still like being in the rental business.

“It’s a win-win situation,” says Ms. Floyd. “You make some extra money and make new friends.”

For entrepreneurs, there’s a payoff in such commerce. Groupon, for example, says it’s on track to generate $500 million in revenue this year; Airbnb has said it is profitable, though it does not provide exact numbers.

Paul J. Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, says that participating in a community like SnapGoods, Kickstarter, Groupon or Airbnb can ease social isolation and flesh out our network of friends.

“There is an underlying notion that if I rent my things in my house, I get to meet my neighbor, and if I’m walking the goods over, I get to meet them in person,” he says. “We’re drawing on a desire in a fast-paced world to still have real connections to a community.”

Mr. Zak says he conducted a preliminary experiment indicating that posting messages on Twitter caused the release of oxytocin, a neurotransmitter that evokes feelings of contentment and is thought to help induce a sense of positive social bonding. He is now testing those ideas in research on a group of 40 people.

The social interaction “reduces stress hormones, even through the Web,” he says. “You’re feeling a real physiological relationship to that person, even if they are online.”

MR. ZAK says Web commerce is moving beyond transactions by individuals and companies and embracing models that encourage social contact and interaction — a hallmark of the already robust social media phenomenon and a throwback to the good old days when people actually spent time socializing at local markets.

“The Web is bringing businesses back down to the individual as the average company becomes smaller, more niche and specialized,” he says. “Paradoxically, the Web is moving us back to a human-centric business model.”

Trust is a big factor in all of this. Otherwise, how can you be sure that someone won’t just rip you off?

Marketplaces like eBay have long relied on ratings and user reviews to weed out unreliable participants. But in addition to safeguards like preauthorizing the price of rentals through PayPal, the latest wave of peer-to-peer systems make use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to engender trust.

If someone wants to rent your iPad or crash on your couch, the person’s online profile leaves a trail of digital bread crumbs that makes it harder to pull off a scam, giving potential lenders and hosts reason to breathe easier.

“This new economy,” says Ms. Botsman, “is going to be driven entirely by reputation, which is part of a new cultural shift — seeing how our behavior in one community affects what we can access in another.”

    Neighborly Borrowing, Over the Online Fence, NYT, 28.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/business/29ping.html

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

August 24, 2010
THe New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”

    Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime, NYT, 24.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/technology/25brain.html

Facebook Makes Headway Around the World

July 7, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

Sergey Brin, a Google founder, takes issue with people who say Google has failed to gain a foothold in social networking. Google has had successes, he often says, especially with Orkut, the dominant service in Brazil and India.

Mr. Brin may soon have to revise his answer.

Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

With his typical self-confidence, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old chief executive, recently said it was “almost guaranteed” that the company would reach a billion users.

Though he did not say when it would reach that mark, the prediction was not greeted with the skepticism that had met his previous boasts of fast growth.

“They have been more innovative than any other social network, and they are going to continue to grow,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “Facebook wants to be ubiquitous, and they are being successful for now.”

The rapid ascent of Facebook has no company more worried than Google, which sees the social networking giant as a threat on multiple fronts. Much of the activity on Facebook is invisible to Google’s search engine, which makes it less useful over time. What’s more, the billions of links posted by users on Facebook have turned the social network into an important driver of users to sites across the Web. That has been Google’s role.

Google has tried time and again to break into social networking not only with Orkut, but also with user profiles, with an industrywide initiative called OpenSocial, and, most recently, with Buzz, a social network that mixes elements of Facebook and Twitter with Gmail. But none of those initiatives have made a dent in Facebook.

Google is said to be trying again with a secret project for a service called Google Me, according to several reports. Google declined to comment for this article.

Google makes its money from advertising, and even here, Facebook poses a challenge.

“There is nothing more threatening to Google than a company that has 500 million subscribers and knows a lot about them and places targeted advertisements in front of them,” said Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital, a venture firm that has invested in Twitter and other social networking companies. “For every second that people are on Facebook and for every ad that Facebook puts in front of their face, it is one less second they are on Google and one less ad that Google puts in front of their face.”

With nearly two-thirds of all Internet users in the United States signed up on Facebook, the company has focused on international expansion.

Just over two years ago, Facebook was available only in English. Still, nearly half of its users were outside the United States, and its presence was particularly strong in Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries.

The task of expanding the site overseas fell on Javier Olivan, a 33-year-old Spaniard who joined Facebook three years ago, when the site had 30 million users. Mr. Olivan led an innovative effort by Facebook to have its users translate the site into more than 80 languages. Other Web sites and technology companies, notably Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, had used volunteers to translate their sites or programs.

But with 300,000 words on Facebook’s site — not counting material posted by users — the task was immense. Facebook not only encouraged users to translate parts of the site, but also let other users fine-tune those translations or pick among multiple translations. Nearly 300,000 users participated.

“Nobody had done it at the scale that we were doing it,” Mr. Olivan said.

The effort paid off. Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the United States. And while the number of users in the United States doubled in the last year, to 123 million, according to comScore, the number more than tripled in Mexico, to 11 million, and it more than quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million.

With every new translation, Facebook pushed into a new country or region, and its spread often mirrored the ties between nations or the movement of people across borders. After becoming popular in Italy, for example, Facebook spread to the Italian-speaking portions of Switzerland. But in German-speaking areas of Switzerland, adoption of Facebook lagged. When Facebook began to gain momentum in Brazil, the activity was most intense in southern parts of the country that border on neighboring Argentina, where Facebook was already popular.

“It’s a mapping of the real world,” Mr. Olivan said.

Facebook is not popular everywhere. The Web site is largely blocked in China. And with fewer than a million users each in Japan, South Korea and Russia, it lags far behind home-grown social networks in those major markets.

Mr. Olivan, who leads a team of just 12 people, hopes to change that. Facebook recently sent some of its best engineers to a new office in Tokyo, where they are working to fine-tune searches so they work with all three Japanese scripts. In South Korea, as well as in Japan, where users post to their social networks on mobile phones more than on PCs, the company is working with network operators to ensure distribution of its service.

Industry insiders say that, most of all, Facebook is benefiting from a cycle where success breeds more success. In particular, its growing revenue, estimated at $1 billion annually, allows the company to invest in improving its product and keep competitors at bay.

“I think that Facebook is winning for two reasons,” said Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a board member of Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Mr. Gordon said that Facebook had hired some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley, and he said that the company’s strategy to create a platform for other software developers had played a critical role.

“They have opened up a platform, and they have the best apps on that platform,” Mr. Gordon said.

With Facebook’s social networking lead growing, it is not clear whether Google, or any other company, will succeed in derailing its march forward.

Says Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog, “Google can’t even get to the first base of social networks, which is people interacting with each other, much less to second or third base, which is people interacting with each other through games and applications.”

    Facebook Makes Headway Around the World, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/technology/companies/08facebook.html

Attached to Technology and Paying a Price

June 6, 2010
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell's workstation.)

While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences.”

Mr. Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and he is a heavier user of technology than most. But researchers say the habits and struggles of Mr. Campbell and his family typify what many experience — and what many more will, if trends continue.

For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects harder to shake.

The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to start a software venture. Mr. Campbell’s life revolves around computers. (View a slide show on how the Campbells interact with technology.)

He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail.

Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.

Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, recently received his first C’s, which his family blames on distraction from his gadgets. Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully tells her father that he favors technology over family.

“I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally engaged,” says Mrs. Campbell, who adds that he becomes “crotchety until he gets his fix.” But she would not try to force a change.

“He loves it. Technology is part of the fabric of who he is,” she says. “If I hated technology, I’d be hating him, and a part of who my son is too.”

Always On

Mr. Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start with technology in Oklahoma City. When he was in third grade, his parents bought him Pong, a video game. Then came a string of game consoles and PCs, which he learned to program.

In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance with Brenda, a cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice. He studied too, with focus, uninterrupted by e-mail. “I did my homework because I needed to get it done,” he said. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

He left college to help with a family business, then set up a lawn mowing service. At night he would read, play video games, hang out with Brenda and, as she remembers it, “talk a lot more.”

In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider. Then he built the start-up that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search engine.

Mr. Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with the latest information. “I want to be the first to hear when the aliens land,” he said, laughing. But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer days when things moved more slowly: “I can’t keep everything in my head.”

No wonder. As he came of age, so did a new era of data and communication.

At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.

As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills.

So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he wondered whether heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a characteristic of the brain long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single stream of information at a time.

Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could barely process two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about them. But Mr. Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might be rewiring themselves to handle the load.

His passion was personal. He had spent seven years in Israeli intelligence after being weeded out of the air force — partly, he felt, because he was not a good multitasker. Could his brain be retrained?

Mr. Ophir, like others around the country studying how technology bent the brain, was startled by what he discovered.

The Myth of Multitasking

The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified as heavy multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they used technology, and those who were not.

In a test created by Mr. Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at a computer were briefly shown an image of red rectangles. Then they saw a similar image and were asked whether any of the rectangles had moved. It was a simple task until the addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects were told to ignore them. (Play a game testing how well you filter out distractions.)

The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones — the irrelevant information.

So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems. (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.)

Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: multitaskers seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming information.

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”

Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said she and other researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.

A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.

Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.

At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.

“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.

There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether technology’s influence on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it is.

“The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “There’s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,” he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past.

Mr. Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, though the impact on analysis and creativity worries him.

He is not just worried about other people. Shortly after he came to Stanford, a professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying full attention and not using a computer or phone. But he recently began using an iPhone and noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his daughter.

“The media is changing me,” he said. “I hear this internal ping that says: check e-mail and voice mail.”

“I have to work to suppress it.”

Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can.

Interrupted by a Corpse

It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr. Campbell has an online conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, called Loggly. It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking and buying patterns of their online customers.

Mr. Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home office, are frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share images with executives at their prospective partner.

But at the moment when Mr. Campbell most needs to focus on that urgent task, something else competes for his attention: “Man Found Dead Inside His Business.”

That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr. Campbell’s array of monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding a laptop and an iPad.

On the left screen, Mr. Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 people, along with instant messages and group chats. The middle monitor displays a dark field filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that allows Mr. Campbell to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video. The monitor on the right keeps e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player.

Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr. Campbell cannot resist the tweet about the corpse. He clicks on the link in it, glances at the article and dismisses it. “It’s some article about something somewhere,” he says, annoyed by the ads for jeans popping up.

The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be fruitful: the partners are ready to do business. A colleague says via instant message: “YES.”

Other times, Mr. Campbell’s information juggling has taken a more serious toll. A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message from a prospective investor. Another time, Mr. Campbell signed the company up for the wrong type of business account on Amazon.com, costing $300 a month for six months before he got around to correcting it. He has burned hamburgers on the grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the bathroom playing video games on an iPhone.

Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and “may have pulled up an e-mail or two.”

The kind of disconnection Mr. Campbell experiences is not an entirely new problem, of course. As they did in earlier eras, people can become so lost in work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family.

Mr. Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may work or play obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword puzzles. But he says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, anytime.

“It’s a mixed blessing,” he said. “If you’re not careful, your marriage can fall apart or your kids can be ready to play and you’ll get distracted.”

The Toll on Children

Father and son sit in armchairs. Controllers in hand, they engage in a fierce video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily watches.

They are playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish animated fight between characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other weapons.

“Kill him, Dad,” Lily screams. To no avail. Connor regularly beats his father, prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow. But there is bonding and mutual respect.

“He’s a lot more tactical,” says Connor. “But I’m really good at quick reflexes.”

Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family’s leisure time. Connor and his mother relax while watching TV shows like “Heroes.” Lily has an iPod Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses to watch videos, listen to music and play games.

Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of unstructured time, which she often spends with her devices. The laptop can consume her.

“When she’s on it, you can holler her name all day and she won’t hear,” Mrs. Campbell said.

Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.

Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

His Web browsing informs him. “He’s a fact hound,” Mr. Campbell brags. “Connor is, other than programming, extremely technical. He’s 100 percent Internet savvy.”

But the parents worry too. “Connor is obsessed,” his mother said. “Kord says we have to teach him balance.”

So in January, they held a family meeting. Study time now takes place in a group setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating. It feels, Mr. Campbell says, like togetherness.

No Vacations

For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif. Mrs. Campbell hoped everyone would unplug.

But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The next night, their first on vacation, “We didn’t go out to dinner,” Mrs. Campbell mourned. “We just sat there on our devices.”

She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium. Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.

Later she found him playing video games.

The trip came as Mr. Campbell was trying to raise several million dollars for his new venture, a goal that he achieved. Brenda said she understood that his pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the accompanying surge in video game.

His behavior brought about a discussion between them. Mrs. Campbell said he told her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii several years ago that they called their second honeymoon.

“What trip are you thinking about?” she said she asked him. She recalled that he had spent two hours a day online in the hotel’s business center.

On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr. Campbell spent the day at the beach with his family. They flew a kite and played whiffle ball.

Connor unplugged too. “It changes the mood of everything when everybody is present,” Mrs. Campbell said.

The next day, the family drove home, and Mr. Campbell disappeared into his office.

Technology use is growing for Mrs. Campbell as well. She divides her time between keeping the books of her husband’s company, homemaking and working at the school library. She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends texts and uses Facebook.

Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher Appreciation Day when her phone chimed in the living room. She answered a text, then became lost in Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them. She started a new batch, but heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those too. Out of ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store.

She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects. Some days, she promises herself she will ignore her device. “It’s like a diet — you have good intentions in the morning and then you’re like, ‘There went that,’ ” she said.

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

    Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, NYT, 6.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html

Video Game Review

From a Forest to a Family, One Tree at a Time

July 6, 2010
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL

No new game company has been more successful over the past couple of years than Zynga. From Mafia Wars to FarmVille, Zynga has essentially defined the latest generation of games on Facebook. It almost goes without saying that Facebook has become a ubiquitous, nigh indispensable element of so many people’s social existence, and it is the rare Facebooker indeed who has not fielded requests and seen status updates from a Zynga title. I played Mafia Wars off and on for at least a year.

Now comes FrontierVille, in many ways Zynga’s most sophisticated project. Like other Zynga games it is brilliantly designed and meticulously executed in its ability to lure you onto a never-ending virtual treadmill. Hardly any electronic code is more purely diverting than a game like FrontierVille.

But I don’t find it meaningful or rewarding. There is no mental stimulation or biomechanical pleasure here. Rather, I find this entire category of games both insidious in their appeal and annoyingly blatant in their attempt to commercialize their users — to turn players into payers.

You see, FrontierVille and its ilk do not feel like games at all. Instead they seem like lucrative business models that are being sold and packaged in the form of a game. There is a big difference. When you talk to most designers of great games they will tell you something along the lines of, “We make the kind of games we would want to play.” That never feels like the case with Zynga games. To me, a game like FrontierVille says, “We make the kind of games we think can best attract and monetize the most number of people with credit cards who don’t mind dropping $10 or $20 once in a while for a virtual tchotchke.”

Obviously, millions of people don’t mind at all, and FrontierVille taps into the same veins of design and recurrence as earlier Zynga games. The setup is that you begin alone in the forest with a couple of chickens and you must tame the wilderness by clearing brush and cutting down trees before you can build a cabin, plant crops, raise animals, attract a spouse, have children and build an Old West-style settlement.

Like other Zynga games, FrontierVille is designed around a few core concepts: keep players coming back multiple times a day, keep encouraging them to invite more friends to the game, and keep giving them reason to pay a few bucks here and there. You can play FrontierVille free and without badgering your friends to come play with you all the time, but your progression will be slow and meager. If you really want to feel like you’re getting somewhere you need to keep inviting more friends or start shelling out some cash, or both. I paid $20 for 170 virtual horseshoes, which I used to unlock advanced farm animals like cows and oxen and better flora like peach trees.

Whether you pay or not, FrontierVille is built to keep you coming back at least a few times a day. You expend energy points to perform actions like feeding pigs, chopping trees or whacking snakes. Once you’re out of energy points you can wait a couple of hours for your pool to replenish or eat virtual food (from your crops), or spend real money to get more energy. That real-time structure is perfectly suited for how people use Facebook, which is to check in now and then (or all day) on what their friends are up to.

In its infectious appeal FrontierVille borrows liberally from the sound and visual iconography of games from Diablo to slot machines. Every time you clear weeds or harvest crops or animals, little stars and loot pop out à la Diablo, and your rewards are tied to how quickly you click to pick them up. The bloops and beeps are straight off a casino floor. FrontierVille is very intelligent in how it gets the player into a rhythm of clicking and receiving little rewards, always with the possibility of hitting the jackpot with a rare item or piece of a collectible set (like the oak-tree collection, or some such).

In the end all great games, like all great entertainments, involve a bit of manipulation — doing things to consumers that they may not be completely aware of on a conscious level. And perhaps Zynga games like FrontierVille are not manipulative at all in the sense that they are so transparent about how they operate.

With other games you pay upfront or with a monthly fee, and then receive access to the whole game. With FrontierVille you never really have access to the entire game. Instead, you continue paying here and there and inviting more and more friends to keep seeing a little bit more of this frontier wilderness that you will never fully master.

But you’ll have fun doing it.

    From a Forest to a Family, One Tree at a Time, NYT, 5.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/arts/television/06frontier.html

Giant Step Into Travel for Google

July 1, 2010
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE and JAD MOUAWAD

New Google tools to help people search easily for flights are now on the runway. It will be up to antitrust regulators to decide whether they can take off.

Google said Thursday that it had agreed to acquire ITA, a 14-year-old flight information software company, for $700 million in cash.

Google said it planned to create flight search tools on Google.com, a move that could upset the entire $132 billion-a-year air travel industry as well as its rival Microsoft.

The deal is another significant step by Google away from how it has traditionally conducted business. Instead of pointing searchers to the most relevant Web sites, the company is increasingly giving information directly to users in categories like shopping or local services like restaurants. Providing information on flights and fares would be a new area for the company.

With 63 percent of the American search market, Google has recently drawn scrutiny from antitrust regulators every time it has moved into a new business. Its acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising firm, won approval by the Federal Trade Commission after an intensive six-month review, and only after a rival, Apple, undermined possible objections by introducing a competing mobile ad network. The government has also examined Google’s scanning of millions of out-of-print and hard-to-find books.

Antitrust enforcers previously reviewed and approved Google’s 2007 acquisition of Doubleclick, and were prepared to block a proposed deal with Yahoo in 2008 before Google walked away.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, predicted a “significant review” of the ITA acquisition. He told analysts and reporters Thursday in a conference call: “We think they will spend a fair amount of time going through it, trying to understand it, both because of size and price. We welcome that.”

Samuel R. Miller, an antitrust lawyer at Sidley Austin, said: “I would think antitrust enforcers will take a very hard look at this. Every time Google makes another acquisition, it only reinforces the argument that they are basically trying to acquire other companies that may present potential competition to their core dominance in paid search.”

Google does not compete directly with ITA, but many of its largest rivals in the travel search market, including Microsoft, use ITA’s data.

ITA was founded in the 1990s by computer scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company revolutionized the ability of consumers to find the cheapest fares by making it easy to compare fares among airlines. It has licensed its product widely, and customers include companies like American Airlines and Continental Airlines. Web sites like Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz and Farecast, which is now part of Microsoft’s Bing search service, also use ITA’s software.

Mr. Schmidt said that Google would honor all existing agreements and seek to add new partners.

“Airline travel and search are a perfect opportunity for more innovation, more investment and more interesting products,” Mr. Schmidt said. “The whole idea is to give people more of what they want, and more information when they are searching.”

Companies that may lobby against the deal include Microsoft, Expedia and Kayak; reservation networks like Travelport, Sabre and Amadeus; and possibly even some airlines. The deal has been rumored in the travel press for months.

Airlines could be concerned “how Google will present this information, how will it appear in Google search and whether they will have to pay for the results,” said Henry H. Harteveldt, an analyst at Forrester Research. “What airlines do not know is whether they will have to bid to have their own Web sites listed against the travel agencies.”

Google declined to predict what kinds of services might result from the acquisition. In the conference call, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, talked about being able to answer more open-ended travel queries, like “Where can I get within seven hours and within this price?”

“Travel is one of the hardest problems around, both in the way people like to address queries and the accuracy and speed which you need to give people the results they are looking for,” she said.

Rick Seaney, the co-founder of farecompare.com, which uses ITA’s technology, said the deal might prompt some antitrust concerns, especially from Microsoft.

“We have got a couple of months to contemplate this,” Mr. Seaney said, citing the expected lengthy review process. “We don’t really know what it all means yet, other than they will continue on with their existing relationships.”

    Giant Step Into Travel for Google, NYT, 1.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/technology/02google.html

Online Bullies Pull Schools Into the Fray

June 27, 2010
The New York Times
By JAN HOFFMAN

The girl’s parents, wild with outrage and fear, showed the principal the text messages: a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats, sent to their daughter the previous Saturday night from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Both children were sixth graders at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J.

Punish him, insisted the parents.

“I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’ ” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.”

Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked.

Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.

What about the police, Mr. Orsini asked.

A criminal investigation would be protracted, the parents had decided, its outcome uncertain. They wanted immediate action.

They pleaded: “Help us.”

Schools these days are confronted with complex questions on whether and how to deal with cyberbullying, an imprecise label for online activities ranging from barrages of teasing texts to sexually harassing group sites. The extent of the phenomenon is hard to quantify. But one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologist who defined bullying as "willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected.

Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge. But many educators feel unprepared or unwilling to be prosecutors and judges.

Often, school district discipline codes say little about educators’ authority over student cellphones, home computers and off-campus speech. Reluctant to assert an authority they are not sure they have, educators can appear indifferent to parents frantic with worry, alarmed by recent adolescent suicides linked to bullying.

Whether resolving such conflicts should be the responsibility of the family, the police or the schools remains an open question, evolving along with definitions of cyberbullying itself.

Nonetheless, administrators who decide they should help their cornered students often face daunting pragmatic and legal constraints.

“I have parents who thank me for getting involved,” said Mike Rafferty, the middle school principal in Old Saybrook, Conn., “and parents who say, ‘It didn’t happen on school property, stay out of my life.’ ”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, although 44 states have bullying statutes, fewer than half offer guidance about whether schools may intervene in bullying involving “electronic communication,” which almost always occurs outside of school and most severely on weekends, when children have more free time to socialize online.

A few states say that school conduct codes must explicitly prohibit off-campus cyberbullying; others imply it; still others explicitly exclude it. Some states say that local districts should develop cyberbullying prevention programs but the states did not address the question of discipline.

Judges are flummoxed, too, as they wrestle with new questions about protections on student speech and school searches. Can a student be suspended for posting a video on YouTube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack?

It’s unclear. These issues have begun their slow climb through state and federal courts, but so far, rulings have been contradictory, and much is still to be determined.

The Cyberdetectives

Benjamin Franklin Middle School conveys an earnest sweetness associated with an earlier era. Its 700 students attend classes in a low-slung building from the mid-’50s, complete with a bomb shelter and generous, shaded playing fields.

During cafeteria lunch duty, a guidance counselor runs a foosball tournament, attracting a throng of laughing, shouting boys. This year’s school musical: “Guys and Dolls.”

For all its charms, Benjamin Franklin, a sixth-through-eighth-grade school in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, also lives bluntly in the present. A sixth-grade girl dashes to class, wearing a turquoise T-shirt with bold sequined letters: “Texting Is My Favorite Subject.” The seventh-grade guidance counselor says she can spend up to three-fourths of her time mediating conflicts that began online or through text messages.

In April, the burden of resolving these disputes had become so onerous that the principal, Mr. Orsini, sent an exasperated e-mail message to parents that made national news:

“There is absolutely NO reason for any middle school student to be part of a social networking site,” he wrote. If children were attacked through sites or texting, he added, “IMMEDIATELY GO TO THE POLICE!” That was not the response that the parents of the girl who had received the foul messages had wanted to hear.

Mr. Orsini sighed, relenting. After all, the texts were angry and obscene, the parents horrified, the girl badly rattled.

“We can certainly talk to the boy,” the principal said.

Investigating a complaint can be like stumbling into a sinkhole. Over the next few days, an assistant principal, Greg Wu; Mr. Orsini; a guidance counselor; a social worker and an elementary school principal were pulled into this one:

The sixth graders had “dated” for a week, before the girl broke it off. The texts she received that Saturday night were successively more sneering, graphic and intimidating.

But the exchanges shown to Mr. Orsini were incomplete. Before handing her phone to her parents, the girl erased her replies.

The boy claimed he was innocent, telling Mr. Wu he had lost his cellphone that Saturday. “Yeah, right,” said Mr. Wu.

The boy insisted he had dropped it while riding his bicycle that April afternoon with his brother and his brother’s friend, both fifth graders.

By Wednesday, the girl’s father called Mr. Orsini. “How is this boy still in school, near my daughter? Why can’t you suspend him?”

The boy was a poor student in language arts classes, yet the text messages were reasonably grammatical. Mr. Wu dictated a basic sentence for the boy to write down. It was riddled with errors.

Next, an elementary school principal interviewed the fifth-grade boys separately.

By Thursday, Mr. Orsini telephoned the girl’s parents with his unsettling conclusion:

The boy had never sent the texts. The lost phone had been found by someone else and used to send the messages. Who wrote them? A reference or two might suggest another sixth grader.

The identity would remain unknown.

Mr. Orsini told the girl’s shaken parents that, aside from offering her counseling, the school, which had already devoted 10 hours to the episode, could do no more. “They were still in so much pain,” Mr. Orsini said. “They wanted us to keep investigating.”

Middle School Misery

Meredith Wearley, Benjamin Franklin’s seventh-grade guidance counselor, was overwhelmed this spring by dramas created on the Web: The text spats that zapped new best friendships; secrets told in confidence, then broadcast on Facebook; bullied girls and boys, retaliating online.

“In seventh grade, the girls are trying to figure out where they fit in,” Mrs. Wearley said. “They have found friends but they keep regrouping. And the technology makes it harder for them to understand what’s a real friendship.”

Because students prefer to use their phones for texting rather than talking, Mrs. Wearley added, they often miss cues about tone of voice. Misunderstandings proliferate: a crass joke can read as a withering attack; did that text have a buried subtext?

The girls come into her office, depressed, weeping, astonished, betrayed.

“A girl will get mad because her friend was friends with another girl,” Mrs. Wearley said.

They show Mrs. Wearley reams of texts, the nastiness accelerating precipitously. “I’ve had to bring down five girls to my office to sort things out,” she said. “It’s middle school.”

Recently, between classes, several eighth-grade girls from Benjamin Franklin reflected about their cyberdramas:

“We had so many fights in seventh grade,” one girl said. “None of them were face-to-face. We were too afraid. Besides, it’s easier to say ‘sorry’ over a text.”

Another concurred. “It’s easier to fight online, because you feel more brave and in control,” she said. “On Facebook, you can be as mean as you want.”

Studies show that online harassment can begin in fourth grade. By high school, students inclined to be cruel in cyberspace are more technologically sophisticated, more capable of hiding their prints. But that is also when older students may be more resilient:

“By high school, youths are developing more self-confidence, engaged in extracurricular activities and focusing on the future,” said Sameer Hinduja, a professor at Florida Atlantic University and an author of “Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard.”

“Their identity and self-worth come from external things that don’t revolve around social relationships.”

But during middle school, he said, “Peer perception largely dictates their self-worth.” With their erupting skin and morphing bodies, many seventh-grade students have a hard enough time just walking through the school doors. When dozens of kids vote online, which is not uncommon, about whether a student is fat or stupid or gay, the impact can be devastating.

While research shows that traditional at-school bullying is far more pervasive than cyberbullying, each type of hostility can now blur and bleed into the other. Jeff Taylor, principal of Frank Lloyd Wright Intermediate School in West Allis, Wis., wades into cyber-related conflicts at school several times each week.

Recently, a seventh-grade girl held a weekend birthday party and her jealous former friend showed up. By Tuesday night, the uninvited guest had insulted the birthday girl’s dress on Facebook, calling it and the girl’s mother cheap. The remarks were particularly wounding, because the birthday girl’s family is not well-off.

By Wednesday, Mr. Taylor said, “There were rumblings about it in the cafeteria. When kids start posturing and switching lunch tables, you can tell.” He and an assistant tried to calm them.

But the posturing continued online. A confrontation at school was planned, and the details were texted. On Friday, during the four minutes between seventh-grade lunch and the next period, 20 girls showed up in a hallway and began shrieking.

At least four adults pulled the girls apart and talked them down.

“We must have spent five or six hours on this, throughout the week,” Mr. Taylor said. “We got to the bottom of that pain and rejection. I don’t consider it a waste of time. But at 3:03 those buses were pulling out and you know that as soon as the girls got home, they’d be blasting away about it on Facebook.”

Though resolving cyberwars can be slippery and time-consuming, some schools would like students to report them at the outset, before they intensify. But experts on adolescence note that teenagers are loath to tell adults much of anything.

Some students think they can handle the ridicule themselves. Or are just too embarrassed to speak up. Others fear that parents will overreact.

If the child is texting at school or has a Facebook page without permission, “and now they’re being bullied on it,” said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, “they can’t admit it to parents. The parents will take away the technology and the kids are afraid of that. Or the parents will underreact. They’ll say: ‘Why read it? Just turn it off!’ ”

The most threatening impediment to coming forward can be the cyberbully’s revenge. Graffiti on a cyberwall can’t be blacked out with a Sharpie.

Mindful of risks to students who report bullies, some school districts have created anonymous tip sites. At Benjamin Franklin, the staff has many ways to give students cover.

“When girls ask their friends, ‘What were you doing in the guidance counselor’s office?’ ” Mrs. Wearley said, “I tell them, just say ‘Mrs. Wearley was fixing my schedule.’ ”

The Legal Battles

Tony Orsini, the Ridgewood principal, learned about a devastating Facebook group last November, two months after it started.

“I had a 45-year-old father crying in my office,” Mr. Orsini said. “He kept asking, ‘Why would someone do this to my son?’ ”

A Facebook page had sprung up about the man’s son, who was new in town. The comments included ethnic slurs, snickers about his sexuality and an excruciating nickname. In short order, nearly 50 children piled on, many of them readily identifiable. “Kids deal with meanness all the time and many can handle it,” said Mr. Orsini, 38, a father of two children. “But it never lasts as long as it does now, online.”

The boy could not escape the nickname. At soccer and basketball games around town, opposing players he’d never met would hoot: “Oh, you’re that kid.”

The boy began missing school. He became ill. After weeks, he reluctantly told his parents.

“We don’t always get to address these problems until the damage is done,” Mr. Orsini said.

Because the comments had been made online and off-campus, Mr. Orsini believed that his ability to intervene was limited.

Rulings in a handful of related cases around the country give mixed signals.

A few families have successfully sued schools for failing to protect their children from bullies. But when the Beverly Vista School in Beverly Hills, Calif., disciplined Evan S. Cohen’s eighth-grade daughter for cyberbullying, he took on the school district.

After school one day in May 2008, Mr. Cohen’s daughter, known in court papers as J. C., videotaped friends at a cafe, egging them on as they laughed and made mean-spirited, sexual comments about another eighth-grade girl, C. C., calling her “ugly,” “spoiled,” a “brat” and a “slut.”

J. C. posted the video on YouTube. The next day, the school suspended her for two days.

“What incensed me,” said Mr. Cohen, a music industry lawyer in Los Angeles, “was that these people were going to suspend my daughter for something that happened outside of school.” On behalf of his daughter, he sued.

Last November, Judge Stephen V. Wilson of Federal District Court found that the off-campus video could be linked to the school: J. C. told perhaps 10 students about it; the humiliated C. C. and her mother showed it to school officials; educators watched it and investigated.

But the legal test, he wrote in his 57-page decision, was whether J. C.’s video had caused the school “substantial” disruption. Judge Wilson ruled in favor of the young videographer, because the disruption was only minimal: administrators dealt with the matter quietly and before lunch recess.

This legal test comes from a 1969 Supreme Court case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, in which a school suspended students for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

The court overturned the suspension, but crafted a balance between a school’s authority and a student’s freedom of expression. When a student’s speech interferes substantially with the school’s educational mission, a school can impose discipline.

The district had to pay J. C.’s costs and lawyers’ fees: $107,150.80.

Judge Wilson also threw in an aside that summarizes the conundrum that is adolescent development, acceptable civility and school authority.

The good intentions of the school notwithstanding, he wrote, it cannot discipline a student for speech, “simply because young persons are unpredictable or immature, or because, in general, teenagers are emotionally fragile and may often fight over hurtful comments.”

The lesson Mr. Cohen hopes his daughter learns from the case is about the limits on governmental intrusion. “A girl came to school who was upset by something she saw on the Internet,” Mr. Cohen said in a telephone interview, “and these people had in their mind that they were going to do something about it. The school doesn’t have that kind of power. It’s up to the parents to discipline their child.”

He did chastise his daughter, saying, “That wasn’t a nice thing to do.”

He describes her video as “relentlessly juvenile,” but not an example of cyberbullying, which he said he did not condone. His daughter offered to remove it from YouTube. But Mr. Cohen keeps it posted, he said, “as a public service” so viewers can see “what kids get suspended for in Beverly Hills.”

The J. C. decision has ignited debate. Nancy Willard, an Oregon lawyer who consults with schools, said that the judge could have applied another, rarely cited prong of the Tinker standard: whether the student’s hurtful speech collided with “the rights of other students to be secure.”

The Supreme Court has not yet addressed online student speech. Lower-court judges in some districts have sided with schools that have disciplined students for posting threatening videos about educators from their home computers.

In two recent cases, students were suspended for posting parodies of their principals. Each case reached the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. But one three-judge panel sided with a school for disciplining a student whose site suggested the principal was a pedophile; another panel sided with its case’s student, whose site suggested the principal used steroids and smoked marijuana. To resolve the contradictory rulings, both cases were re-argued earlier this month before 14 judges on the Third Circuit, whose jurisdiction includes New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and the United States Virgin Islands.

Nationwide, principals have responded to students who demean others online in dramatically different ways.

In January, 28 Seattle middle school students who wrote noxious comments on Facebook about one student received suspensions. The school also held assemblies about digital citizenship.

But when the mother of a seventh-grade boy in Fairfax County, Va., who requested anonymity to protect her son’s identity, sent his principal the savage e-mail messages and Facebook jeers that six boys posted about her son, the principal wrote back that although the material was unacceptable, “From a school perspective this is outside the scope of our authority and not something we can monitor or issue consequences for.”

Many principals hesitate to act because school discipline codes or state laws do not define cyberbullying. But Bernard James, an education law scholar at Pepperdine University, said that administrators interpreted statutes too narrowly:

“Educators are empowered to maintain safe schools,” Professor James said. “The timidity of educators in this context of emerging technology is working to the advantage of bullies.”

Whether suspension is appropriate is also under discussion. Elizabeth Englander, a psychology professor at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts and founder of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, believes that automatic discipline for cyberbullies is wrong-headed.

“We tend to think that if there’s no discipline, there’s no reaction,” she said. “But discipline should never be the only thing we consider in these cases. There are many things we can do with children first to guide and teach them about behavior and expectations.”

Tony Orsini wanted to help his middle school student who was being teased mercilessly on Facebook. But he believed he had to catch the bullies at school.

He alerted teachers. At lunch, they spotted the three ringleaders as they forced the boy from their table.

“I called them into my office,” Mr. Orsini said, “and talked to them strongly about the lunchroom incident. Then I lied. I said I heard that the cops were looking at a Facebook group they had posted.

“It came down the next day.”

He rubbed his face in his hands. “All we are doing is reacting,” he said. “We can’t seem to get ahead of the curve.”

Gathering Evidence

Administrators who investigate students tangled in online disputes often resort to a deft juggle of artfulness, technology and law.

First challenge: getting students to come clean.

Mr. Wu, the assistant principal at Benjamin Franklin, is a former household handyman and English teacher with a fondness for scraps, gadgets and imagination. Hence his lie detector:

It’s really an ancient tuner, connected to a helmet labeled “The Anti-Prevaricator” — the inner webbing from a football helmet refurbished by Mr. Wu, who glued on bells and a keypad from an old telephone.

When students balk or obfuscate, Mr. Wu may suggest they don the Anti-Prevaricator. They answer questions; sparks flash from the tuner.

When sixth graders realize the joke, Mr. Wu said, “they start laughing with relief and we talk about the importance of telling the truth.”

He continues his cyberinvestigations the old-fashioned way, with conversations, confrontations, cajoling and copious handwritten notes.

But the second challenge is gathering the evidence itself: looking at material typed on personal cellphones or online accounts.

School officials have both greater and lesser investigative authority than the police have over students. Certainly they cannot use lie detectors. But though police officers need probable cause and a warrant to search a student’s locker or backpack, school administrators need only “reasonable suspicion” that a school rule has been violated.

The police also need probable cause and a warrant to search social networking sites and cellphones. School officials are uncertain what they need.

“I can’t look into Facebook accounts,” said Jeff Taylor, the middle school principal from West Allis, Wis. If students or parents want him to see something online, “they have to show it to me or bring me a printout.”

But Deb Socia, the principal at Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, Mass., takes a no-nonsense approach. The school gives each student a laptop to work on. But the students’ expectation of privacy is greatly diminished.

“I regularly scan every computer in the building,” Ms. Socia said. “They know I’m watching. They’re using the cameras on their laptops to check their hair and I send them a message and say: ‘You look great! Now go back to work.’ It’s a powerful way to teach kids: ‘I’m paying attention, you need to do what’s right.’ ”

Administrators are skittish about searching cellphones because of the increase in sexting, in which students have sent compromising photos of themselves. Principals fear being caught up in child pornography investigations. In these situations, they generally turn over cellphones to the police.

“The question of searching a cellphone is a gray area,” said Mary Ann McAdam, an assistant principal at Governor Livingston High School in Berkeley Heights, N.J. “We only do it when a student says, ‘so-and-so sent threatening messages.’ Even then, they look through their phones and find it for us. If I felt there might be something on a cellphone, I’d invite parents to go through it with me.”

Legal experts disagree on this issue. Professor James argues that cellphones are like backpacks: if the search’s purpose is reasonably related to a school infraction, like cheating, the principal’s search is legal. Others believe that cellphones belong in another category, protected by electronic communication privacy laws.

While a cellphone search may yield an incriminating text, it may not point to the author.

Last year, an eighth-grade girl at Benjamin Franklin vowed on Facebook that her boyfriend would beat up another eighth grader, a girl she had been bullying throughout middle school. Mr. Orsini called the police.

Mr. Orsini ordered the girls to have no contact at school. Nonetheless, the bullied girl received veiled texted threats at school, sent from a phone owned by a friend of the bully.

“Everyone knows who did it,” said Mr. Orsini, looking miserable. “But I couldn’t prove who really sent them. So I had to punish the girl whose phone was used. The bully was a masterful manipulator. Her friend took the hit for her.”

By now, the targeted girl had become more self-confident. She was furious that the bully escaped punishment. When the bully began picking on a second, weaker girl, she grew further incensed.

One bristling morning, the two girls came to blows, which the bully sorely came to regret. Although teachers quickly broke up the fight, word of the outcome spread more swiftly:

“All the kids chanted the victim’s name,” Mr. Orsini said, “in triumph in the lunchroom.”

The Cybersages

What a difference a few years can make in the life of a tween.

Earlier this month, a proud posse of Benjamin Franklin eighth-grade girls strode into homerooms of sixth graders: inches taller than the 12-year-olds, skin calmer, they radiated a commanding exuberance as they tossed their long, glossy manes. They wanted to offer advice about social networking sites and cyberbullying.

“How many of you have discussed Mr. Orsini’s letter with your parents?” asked Annie Thurston, one of the eighth graders, referring to his admonitions about online activity.

Slumped in their desks, at least a dozen students in one class glumly hoisted their hands.

In April, a parent alerted Mr. Orsini about Formspring, a site on which comments can be sent anonymously to mailboxes, and posted at the mailbox owner’s discretion. Many adults seem confounded at why girls, in particular, would choose to post the leering, scabrous queries; some teenagers say they do so in order to toss back hard-shelled, tough-girl retorts.

The principal found the names of some Benjamin Franklin students on Formspring. As Mr. Orsini later recounted the experience, he couldn’t bring himself to utter even a sanitized version of the obscene posts he had read. His face reddened, tears filling his eyes.

“How does a 13-year-old girl recover her sexual self-esteem after reading that garbage?” he whispered.

It prompted his e-mail message to parents, in which he wrote that no middle school student needed to be on social networking sites. Many parents agreed. But others said that schools and families should work harder to teach students digital responsibility.

These eighth-grade girls thought Mr. Orsini was right: younger students shouldn’t be on Facebook.

They grilled the sixth graders, almost all of whom said they had cellphones.

Do your parents read your texts, they asked.

Only a smattering of palms.

“My mom keeps threatening to get software so she can monitor them,” one boy said, shrugging his shoulders. “But she never gets around to it.”

What impact did Mr. Orsini’s letter have?

“I lied to my parents,” another boy said. “I told them I deactivated my Facebook page. But in two days, I started it again.”

The girls looked solemn.

“If you’re under 13, you shouldn’t even be on Facebook,” said Maeve Cannon, 14. “We think you guys can handle it but you’re still really young. It’s not that necessary, you know. We just want you to be safe.”

The sixth graders were rapt.

“The Internet is a scary place,” said Sabrina Spatz, an eighth grader. “It can really hurt you. Our parents didn’t grow up with it so they don’t really understand it that well.”

So if any of the sixth graders were cyberbullied, the older girls said, “Just come talk to us.”

Then they hesitated. They were, after all, about to graduate.

“You can tell Mr. Wu, he’s awesome!” said Maeve, bubbling over. “Tell your guidance counselor or a teacher.” The other girls nodded eagerly.

“Yeah, go to the school,” Emily Cerrina chimed in.

“The school will make it stop,” she said, “immediately!”

    Online Bullies Pull Schools Into the Fray, NYT, 27.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/style/28bully.html

When Online Grievances Are Met With a Lawsuit

May 31, 2010
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

After a towing company hauled Justin Kurtz’s car from his apartment complex parking lot, despite his permit to park there, Mr. Kurtz, 21, a college student in Kalamazoo, Mich., went to the Internet for revenge.

Outraged at having to pay $118 to get his car back, Mr. Kurtz created a Facebook page called “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing.” Within two days, 800 people had joined the group, some posting comments about their own maddening experiences with the towing company.

T&J filed a defamation suit against Mr. Kurtz, claiming the site was hurting business and seeking $750,000 in damages.

Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp have given individuals a global platform on which to air their grievances with companies. But legal experts say the soaring popularity of such sites has also given rise to more cases like Mr. Kurtz’s, in which a business sues an individual for posting critical comments online.

The towing company’s lawyer said it was justified in towing Mr. Kurtz’s car because the permit was not visible, and that the Facebook page is costing them business and had unfairly damaged the company’s reputation.

Some first amendment lawyers see the case differently. They consider the lawsuit an example of the latest incarnation of a decades-old legal maneuver known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp.

The label has traditionally referred to meritless defamation suits filed by businesses or government officials against citizens who speak out against them. The plaintiffs are not necessarily expecting to succeed — most do not — but rather to intimidate critics who are inclined to back down when confronted with the prospect of a long, expensive court battle.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Mr. Kurtz, who recently finished his junior year at Western Michigan University. “The only thing I posted is what happened to me.”

Many states have anti-Slapp laws, and Congress is considering legislation to make it harder to file a Slapp. The bill, sponsored by Representatives Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, and Charles Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, would create a federal anti-Slapp law, modeled largely on California’s statute.

Because state laws vary in scope, many suits are still filed every year, according to legal experts. Now, with people musing publicly online and businesses feeling defenseless against these critics, the debate over Slapps is shifting to the Web.

“We are beyond the low-tech era of people getting Slapped because of letters they wrote to politicians or testimony they gave at a city council meeting,” said George W. Pring, a University of Denver law professor who co-wrote the 1996 book, “Slapps: Getting Sued For Speaking Out.”

Marc Randazza, a first amendment lawyer who has defended clients against Slapps stemming from online comments, said he helped one client avoid a lawsuit last year after the client, Thomas Alascio, posted negative remarks about a Florida car dealership on his Twitter account.

“There is not a worse dealership on the planet,” read one tweet, which also named the dealership.

The dealership threatened to sue Mr. Alascio if he did not remove the tweets. Mr. Randazza responded in a letter that while Mr. Alascio admitted the dealership might not be the worst in the world, his comments constituted protected speech because they were his opinion.

While the dealership did not sue, that outcome is unusual, said Mr. Randazza, who conceded that sometimes the most pragmatic approach for a Slapp defendant is to take back the offending comments in lieu of a lawsuit.

In the past, Mr. Randazza said, if you criticized a business while standing around in a bar, it went “no further than the sound of your voice.”

Do that now, however, and “there’s a potentially permanent record of it as soon as you hit ‘publish’ on the computer,” he said. “It goes global within minutes.”

Laurence Wilson, general counsel for the user review site Yelp, said a handful of lawsuits in recent years had been filed against people who posted critical reviews on the site, including a San Francisco chiropractor who sued a former patient in 2008 over a negative review about a billing dispute. The suit was settled before going to court.

“Businesses, unfortunately, have a greater incentive to remove a negative review than the reviewer has in writing the review in the first place,” Mr. Wilson said.

Recognizing that lawsuits can bring more unwanted attention, one organization has taken a different tack. The group Medical Justice, which helps protect doctors from meritless malpractice suits, advises its members to have patients sign an agreement that gives the doctor copyright over a Web posting if the patient mentions the doctor or practice.

Dr. Jeffrey Segal, chief executive of Medical Justice, said about half of the group’s 2,500 members use the agreement.

“I, like everyone else, like to hear two sides of the story,” he said. “The problem is that physicians are foreclosed from ever responding because of state and federal privacy laws. In the rare circumstance that a posting is false, fictional or fraudulent, the doctor now has the tool to get that post taken down.”

The federal bill, in the House Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy, would enable a defendant who believes he is being sued for speaking out or petitioning on a public matter to seek to have the lawsuit dismissed.

“Just as petition and free speech rights are so important that they require specific constitutional protections, they are also important enough to justify uniform national protections against Slapps,” said Mark Goldowitz, director of the California Anti-Slapp Project, which helped draft the bill.

Under the proposed federal law, if a case is dismissed for being a Slapp, the plaintiff would have to pay the defendant’s legal fees. Mr. Randazza would not disclose specifics on the legal fees he has charged his clients, but he said the cost of defending a single Slapp suit “could easily wipe out the average person’s savings before the case is half done.”

Currently, 27 states have anti-Slapp laws, and in two — Colorado and West Virginia — the judiciary has adopted a system to protect against such suits. But the federal legislation would both create a law in states that do not have one and offer additional protections in those that already do, Mr. Goldowitz said.

In Michigan, which does not have an anti-Slapp measure, Mr. Kurtz’s legal battle has made him a local celebrity. His Facebook page has now grown to more than 12,000 members.

“This case raises interesting questions,” the towing company’s lawyer, Richard Burnham, said. “What are the rights to free speech? And even if what he said is false, which I am convinced, is his conduct the proximate cause of our loss?”

On April 30, Mr. Kurtz and his lawyers asked a judge in Kalamazoo to dismiss the suit by T&J, which has received a failing grade from the local better business bureau for complaints over towing legally parked cars. Mr. Kurtz is also countersuing, claiming that T&J is abusing the legal process.

“There’s no reason I should have to shut up because some guy doesn’t want his dirty laundry out,” Mr. Kurtz said. “It’s the power of the Internet, man.”

    When Online Grievances Are Met With a Lawsuit, NYT, 31.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/us/01slapp.html

The Doctor Will See You Now. Please Log On

May 28, 2010
The New York Times

By MILT FREUDENHEIM

ONE day last summer, Charlie Martin felt a sharp pain in his lower back. But he couldn’t jump into his car and rush to the doctor’s office or the emergency room: Mr. Martin, a crane operator, was working on an oil rig in the South China Sea off Malaysia.

He could, though, get in touch with a doctor thousands of miles away, via two-way video. Using an electronic stethoscope that a paramedic on the rig held in place, Dr. Oscar W. Boultinghouse, an emergency medicine physician in Houston, listened to Mr. Martin’s heart.

“The extreme pain strongly suggested a kidney stone,” Dr. Boultinghouse said later. A urinalysis on the rig confirmed the diagnosis, and Mr. Martin flew to his home in Mississippi for treatment.

Mr. Martin, 32, is now back at work on the same rig, the Courageous, leased by Shell Oil. He says he is grateful he could discuss his pain by video with the doctor. “It’s a lot better than trying to describe it on a phone,” Mr. Martin says.

Dr. Boultinghouse and two colleagues — Michael J. Davis and Glenn G. Hammack— run NuPhysicia, a start-up company they spun out from the University of Texas in 2007 that specializes in face-to-face telemedicine, connecting doctors and patients by two-way video.

Spurred by health care trends and technological advances, telemedicine is growing into a mainstream industry. A fifth of Americans live in places where primary care physicians are scarce, according to government statistics. That need is converging with advances that include lower costs for video-conferencing equipment, more high-speed communications links by satellite, and greater ability to work securely and dependably over the Internet.

“The technology has improved to the point where the experience of both the doctor and patient are close to the same as in-person visits, and in some cases better,” says Dr. Kaveh Safavi, head of global health care for Cisco Systems, which is supporting trials of its own high-definition video version of telemedicine in California, Colorado and New Mexico.

The interactive telemedicine business has been growing by almost 10 percent annually, to more than $500 million in revenue in North America this year, according to Datamonitor, the market research firm. It is part of the $3.9 billion telemedicine category that includes monitoring devices in homes and hundreds of health care applications for smartphones.

Christine Chang, a health care technology analyst at Datamonitor’s Ovum unit, says telemedicine will allow doctors to take better care of larger numbers of patients. “Some patients will be seen by teleconferencing, some will send questions by e-mail, others will be monitored” using digitized data on symptoms or indicators like glucose levels, she says.

Eventually, she predicts, “one patient a day might come into a doctor’s office, in person.”

Although telemedicine has been around for years, it is gaining traction as never before. Medicare, Medicaid and other government health programs have been reimbursing doctors and hospitals that provide care remotely to rural and underserved areas. Now a growing number of big insurance companies, like the UnitedHealth Group and several Blue Cross plans, are starting to market interactive video to large employers. The new federal health care law provides $1 billion a year to study telemedicine and other innovations.

With the expansion of reimbursement, Americans are on the brink of “a gold rush of new investment in telemedicine,” says Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr., managing partner at Vesalius Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Houston. He has worked on telemedicine projects since he helped build medical systems for NASA during his days as an astronaut in the 1990s.

Face-to-face telemedicine technology can be as elaborate as a high-definition video system, like Cisco’s, that can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or it can be as simple as the Webcams available on many laptops.

NuPhysicia uses equipment in the middle of that range — standard videoconferencing hookups made by Polycom, a video conferencing company based in Pleasanton, Calif. Analysts say the setup may cost $30,000 to $45,000 at the patient’s end — with a suitcase or cart containing scopes and other special equipment — plus a setup for the doctor that costs far less.

Telemedicine has its skeptics. State regulators at the Texas Medical Board have raised concerns that doctors might miss an opportunity to pick up subtle medical indicators when they cannot touch a patient. And while it does not oppose telemedicine, the American Academy of Family Physicians says patients should keep in contact with a primary physician who can keep tabs on their health needs, whether in the virtual or the real world.

“Telemedicine can improve access to care in remote sites and rural areas,” says Dr. Lori J. Heim, the academy’s president. “But not all visits will take place between a patient and their primary-care doctor.”

Dr. Boultinghouse dismisses such concerns. “In today’s world, the physical exam plays less and less of a role,” he says. “We live in the age of imaging.”

ON the rig Courageous, Mr. Martin is part of a crew of 100. Travis G. Fitts Jr., vice president for human resources, health, safety and environment at Scorpion Offshore, which owns the rig, says that examining a worker via two-way video can be far cheaper in a remote location than flying him to a hospital by helicopter at $10,000 a trip.

Some rigs have saved $500,000 or more a year, according to NuPhysicia, which has contracts with 19 oil rigs around the world, including one off Iraq. Dr. Boultinghouse says the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may slow or block new drilling in United States waters, driving the rigs to more remote locations and adding to demand for telemedicine.

NuPhysicia also offers video medical services to land-based employers with 500 or more workers at a site. The camera connection is an alternative to an employer’s on-site clinics, typically staffed by a nurse or a physician assistant.

Mustang Cat, a Houston-based distributor that sells and services Caterpillar tractors and other earth-moving equipment, signed on with NuPhysicia last year. “We’ve seen the benefit, ” says Kurt Hanson, general counsel at Mustang, a family-owned company. Instead of taking a half-day or more off to consult a doctor, workers can get medical advice on the company’s premises.

NuPhysicia’s business grew out of work that its founders did for the state of Texas. Mr. Hammack, NuPhysicia’s president, is a former assistant vice president of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, where he led development of the state’s pioneering telemedicine program in state prisons from the mid-1990s to 2007. Dr. Davis is a cardiologist.

Working with Dr. Boultinghouse, Dr. Davis and other university doctors conducted more than 600,000 video visits with inmates. Significant improvement was seen in inmates’ health, including measures of blood pressure and cholesterol, according to a 2004 report on the system in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In March, California officials released a report they had ordered from NuPhysicia with a plan for making over their state’s prison health care. The makeover would build on the Texas example by expanding existing telemedicine and electronic medical record systems and putting the University of California in charge.

California spends more than $40 a day per inmate for health care, including expenses for guards who accompany them on visits to outside doctors. NuPhysicia says that this cost is more than four times the rate in Texas and Georgia, and almost triple that of New Jersey, where telemedicine is used for mental health care and some medical specialties.

“Telemedicine makes total sense in prisons,” says Christopher Kosseff, a senior vice president and head of correctional health care at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. “It’s a wonderful way of providing ready access to specialty health care while maintaining public safety.”

Georgia state prisons save an average of $500 in transportation costs and officers’ pay each time a prisoner can be treated by telemedicine, says Dr. Edward Bailey, medical director of Georgia correctional health care.

With data supplied by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which commissioned the report, NuPhysicia says the recommendations could save the state $1.2 billion a year in prisoners’ health care costs.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants the university regents and the State Legislature to approve the prison health makeover. After lawsuits on behalf of inmates, federal courts appointed a receiver in 2006 to run prison medical services. (The state now runs dental and mental health services, with court monitoring.) Officials hope that by putting university doctors in charge of prison health, they can persuade the courts to return control to the state.

“We’re going to use the best technology in the world to solve one of our worst problems — the key is telemedicine,” the governor said.

WITHOUT the blessing of insurers, telemedicine could never gain traction in the broader population. But many of the nation’s biggest insurers are showing growing interest in reimbursing doctors for face-to-face video consulting.

Starting in June, the UnitedHealth Group plans to reimburse doctors at Centura Health, a Colorado hospital system, for using Cisco advanced video to serve UnitedHealth’s members at several clinics. And the insurer plans a national rollout of telemedicine programs, including video-equipped booths in retail clinics in pharmacies and big-box stores, as well as in clinics at large companies.

“The tide is turning on reimbursement,” says Dr. James Woodburn, vice president and medical director for telehealth at UnitedHealth.

Both UnitedHealth and WellPoint, which owns 14 Blue Cross plans, are trying lower-cost Internet Webcam technology, available on many off-the-shelf laptops, as well as advanced video.

UnitedHealth and Blue Cross plans in Hawaii, Minnesota and western New York are using a Webcam service provided by American Well, a company based in Boston. And large self-insured employers like Delta Air Lines and Medtronic, a Blue Cross Blue Shield customer in Minneapolis, are beginning to sign up.

Delta will offer Webcam consultations with UnitedHealth’s doctor network to more than 10,000 Minnesota plan members on July 1, says Lynn Zonakis, Delta’s managing director of health strategy and resources. Within 18 months, Webcam access will be offered nationally to more than 100,000 Delta plan members.

Dr. Roy Schoenberg, C.E.O. of American Well, says his Webcam service is “in a completely different domain” than Cisco’s or Polycom’s. “Over the last two years, we are beginning to see a side branch of telemedicine that some call online care,” he says. “It connects doctors with patients at home or in their workplace.”

Doctors “are not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for equipment, so we have to rely on lower tech,” he adds. The medical records are stored on secure Web servers behind multiple firewalls, and the servers are audited twice a year by I.B.M. and other outside computer security companies, Dr. Schoenberg says.

In Hawaii, more than 2,000 Blue Cross plan members used Webcams to consult doctors last year, says Laura Lott, a spokeswoman for the Hawaii Medical Service Association. Minnesota Blue Cross and Blue Shield started a similar Webcam service across the state last November.

Doctors who use the higher-tech video conferencing technology say that Webcam images are less clear, and that Webcams cannot accommodate electronic scopes or provide the zoom-in features available in video conferencing. “If they are not using commercial-grade video conferencing gear, the quality will be much lower,” says Vanessa L. McLaughlin, a telemedicine consultant in Vancouver, Wash.

Last month, Charlie Martin, the crane operator, was back in the infirmary of the Courageous for an eye checkup. In Houston, his face filled the big screen in NuPhysicia’s office.

After an exchange of greetings, Chris Derrick, the paramedic on the oil rig, attached an ophthalmological scanner to a scope, pointed it at Mr. Martin’s eye, and zoomed in.

“Freeze that,” Dr. Boultinghouse ordered, as a close-up of the eye loomed on the screen. “His eyes have been bothering him. It may be from the wind up there on the crane.”

    The Doctor Will See You Now. Please Log On, NYT, 29.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/business/30telemed.html

U.S. Approves Google’s Deal for AdMob

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO — After an intensive six-month review, Google won approval from the Federal Trade Commission on Friday for its $750 million acquisition of the mobile advertising company AdMob.

As recently as last month, F.T.C. workers appeared ready to urge the agency’s five commissioners to challenge Google’s purchase of AdMob in court, on the basis that it would give Google an unassailable position in the nascent market for ads that appear on mobile phones.

But the commissioners voted 5 to 0 to approve the deal, concluding in a statement that the merger was “unlikely to harm competition in the emerging market for mobile advertising networks.”

The surprising endorsement stems from recent developments in the online advertising market. Last December, Apple acquired Quattro Wireless, an AdMob rival. Then last month, Apple announced its own mobile advertising network, called iAd, which will allow large advertisers to run multimedia ads within applications running on the iPhone.

The F.T.C. said in a news release that the combination of Google and AdMob raised “serious antitrust issues,” but those concerns “ultimately were overshadowed by recent developments in the market, most notably a move by Apple Computer Inc.”

Google responded to the decision in a post on its corporate blog. “As mobile phone usage increases, growth in mobile advertising is only going to accelerate,” wrote Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president for product management. “This benefits mobile developers and publishers who will get better advertising solutions, marketers who will find new ways to reach consumers and users who will get better ads and more free content.”

Complicating the F.T.C.’s review of the purchase, several developers of applications for cellphones who were interviewed by the commission publicly detailed those conversations on their own blogs, saying they had told the commission that there were no good reasons to block the purchase.

The F.T.C. staff was “very reluctant to accept my argument that Apple/Quattro was a bigger threat for an iPhone developer like us,” wrote an executive at Naan Studio, which makes Twitter applications for phones, in one such blog account. “One of the staff told me it was irrelevant, and curtailed the discussion.”

Google would have probably submitted such statements to the court as evidence that developers did not believe they would be harmed by the deal.

Not everyone was pleased with the F.T.C.’s decision. Google rivals like Microsoft and AT&T had opposed the deal, and some developers said it would deprive them of options and raise prices for mobile ads.

“This will hurt me,” said Simon Buckingham, chief executive of Mobile Streams, a provider of applications and musical content for cellphones. “It’s going to get incredibly more expensive, I would think, because the No. 1 and No. 2 players aren’t competing against each other anymore, and the No. 3 player, Quattro Wireless, is focused on launching iAds.”

David Balto, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a research organization, and a former antitrust lawyer at the F.T.C., said the agency was hampered by the lack of history in the mobile market.

“The market simply did not exist in a significant fashion a year or so ago. Thus, the past could not testify as to the future harm of the merger,” Mr. Balto said. “More importantly, the rapid pace of change in the market undermined any coherent story by the F.T.C.”

According to people familiar with the government’s legal strategy, the agency was prepared to use Section 7 of the Clayton Antitrust Act, which gives the government discretion to block mergers “where the effect may substantially lessen competition,” even if the market in question is new.

But that would have been a tough case to bring, said David B. Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at the Harvard Business School.

“Although Google may have a dominant position in Internet search advertising, the mobile ad market is still fragmented, embryonic and potentially vulnerable to another company, Apple, dominating the competition,” Mr. Yoffie said. “Ironically, Google might make this market more competitive.”

The decision improves Google’s mixed overall record in Washington. The F.T.C. approved its acquisition of the ad company DoubleClick in 2007, after a long review, while a threatened lawsuit from the Justice Department in 2008 forced Google to walk away from an online advertising partnership with rival Yahoo.

The Justice Department has also twice expressed opposition to Google’s settlement with book authors and publishers over its unauthorized scanning of library books. A federal judge is reviewing revisions to the settlement and is expected to issue a decision soon.

Antitrust regulators “are looking hard at Google,” said Jeffrey I. Shinder, managing partner at the law firm Constantine Cannon, who compared the scrutiny of Google to the attention focused on Microsoft in the 1990s.

“But at the end of the day, Google has not done anything that is so blatant as to set forth a strong antitrust claim, even though there are antitrust issues all over the place,” Mr. Shinder said.

Google announced its intent to acquire AdMob last November, plucking the start-up from the grip of Apple, which was also negotiating to buy it. Apple then turned its attention to Quattro.

    U.S. Approves Google’s Deal for AdMob, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/technology/22admob.html

At YouTube, Adolescence Begins at 5

May 16, 2010
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO — Early this year, the most popular YouTube video of all time — a 2007 clip of a British toddler gleefully biting the finger of his older brother — was supplanted by a brash newcomer.

The upstart was Lady Gaga’s slithering, sci-fi-themed music video for her hit single “Bad Romance.”

The shift was symbolic: YouTube, a subsidiary of the search giant Google, is growing up. Once known primarily for skateboard-riding cats, dancing geeks and a variety of cute-baby high jinks, YouTube now features a smorgasbord of more professional video that is drawing ever larger and more engaged audiences.

“Our biggest challenge is making sure we don’t taste too many things,” Chad Hurley, YouTube’s low-profile and low-key co-founder and chief executive, said in a wide-ranging interview last week.

That cornucopia of content appears to be turning YouTube — considered by many to be a risky investment when it was bought for $1.65 billion at the end of 2006 — into one of Google’s smartest acquisitions. On Monday, YouTube will celebrate its fifth birthday by announcing it has passed two billion video views a day; YouTube said it reached the one billion mark in October.

Bolstering YouTube’s growing audience is the popularity of live broadcasts, like the recent Indian Premier League cricket matches, and the integration of instructional videos directly into Google search results.

YouTube also holds a large catalog of music videos that contain advertisements, thanks to Google’s partnership with three of the four major American music labels in an effort called Vevo.

Mr. Hurley, 33, said YouTube was increasingly focused on showing users what their friends had watched, as a way of helping people navigate the tens of thousands of hours of video uploaded to the site every day. He also contended that more rights-holders were quietly allowing fans to appropriate short snippets of their content for mash-ups and parodies, “though a lot of them might not come out and say it for business reasons.”

Mr. Hurley declined to discuss YouTube’s financial performance, though he cited overall improvement.

Google executives said in January that the site, which has perennially lost money, had increased its revenue, and that ad space on YouTube’s home pages for 20 countries was sold out every day toward the end of 2009. Many analysts say YouTube could break even this year for the first time, after five years of large losses generated by its high bandwidth and storage costs.

YouTube has faced a fight in another regard as well: it has so far failed to persuade major American film studios and television networks to view it as an outlet for anything other than promotional snippets of long-form programming.

In January, YouTube introduced a movie rental store, though its only offerings are from independent film companies and Bollywood studios.

James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said YouTube’s Vevo partnership with music labels “shows what YouTube can accomplish when it works with the media industry. It’s really one of the first legitimizations of YouTube as a commercial platform.”

Mr. Hurley indicated that convincing media companies to embrace YouTube was no longer an important goal, adding that chasing Hulu.com, the joint venture of Fox, NBC and ABC, “may have been a distraction for us.”

Hulu is “starting to have some troubles in terms of their long-term model and relationship with their owners,” Mr. Hurley said, referring to the increasing unease among broadcasters with the practice of streaming programming free on the Web, where ad rates are significantly lower than they are on television.

One possibility is that YouTube would start scouring the rest of the Internet for video, Mr. Hurley said, “indexing more video wherever it may live” and then pointing users to it, even if the video did not reside on YouTube’s servers. YouTube already has the second most popular search engine in the world, according to comScore. (Second, naturally, to Google.)

One factor driving YouTube’s growth is the ever-easier availability of the Internet on the living room television through devices like TiVo and Roku set-top boxes.

Google is planning to back that trend in a big way at its annual I/O developers’ conference this week in San Francisco. The company plans to introduce Google TV, a software platform for the television that it is developing with Sony, Intel and Logitech, according to people briefed on its plans who were not authorized to talk about them publicly.

YouTube is expected to play a prominent role in bringing a variety of video to the Google TV platform, and Mr. Hurley contended that the rise of Web video on the television was inevitable.

“I don’t think there’s going to be much of a difference between a phone, a computer and a television. It’s going to be size and presentation,” he said. Although he might not have gotten the memo about the Google TV efforts, since he added, “Maybe we just have to wait until Apple releases a bigger iPhone that you can strap onto the wall,” he said.

Finally, Mr. Hurley tipped his entrepreneurial hat to a chaotic, controversial and suddenly popular site that resembles the YouTube of five years ago: ChatRoulette. The site, created by an 18-year-old from Moscow, Andrey Ternovskiy, allows people around the world to engage in random, instantaneous one-on-one conversations.

ChatRoulette “demonstrates that there is still so much more that can be unleashed with video online,” Mr. Hurley said, adding that Mr. Ternovskiy, whom he said he would like to meet, “has the spotlight and the opportunity to do great things.”

    At YouTube, Adolescence Begins at 5, NYT, 16.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/technology/17youtube.html

Online Talk, Suicides and a Thorny Court Case

May 13, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

The seemingly empathetic nurse struck up conversations over the Internet with people who were pondering suicide. She told them what methods worked best. She told some that it was all right to let go, that they would be better in heaven, and entered into suicide pacts with others.

But the police say the nurse, who sometimes called herself Cami and described herself as a young woman, was actually William F. Melchert-Dinkel, a 47-year-old husband and father from Faribault, Minn., who now stands charged with two counts of aiding suicide.

Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, whose lawyer declined an interview request on his behalf, told investigators that his interest in “death and suicide could be considered an obsession,” court documents say, and that he sought the “thrill of the chase.” While the charges stem from two deaths — one in Britain in 2005 and one in Canada in 2008 — Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, who was indeed a licensed practical nurse, told investigators that he had most likely encouraged dozens of people to kill themselves, court documents said. He said he could not be sure how many had succeeded.

The case, chilling and ghoulish, raises thorny issues in the Internet age, both legal and otherwise. For instance, many states have laws barring assisting suicide, but rarely have cases involved people not in the same room (much less the same country) or the sharing of only words (not guns or pills).

The case also brings up questions about the limits of speech on the Internet: How does one assign levels of culpability to someone who shares thoughts with people who say they are already considering suicide? And for some who counsel against suicide, it points to a growing area for worry, an online world where the most isolated and vulnerable might be touched in a way that they would not have in the past.

Groups that work to prevent suicide compare suicide chat rooms to “pro-ana” sites, Internet sites that portray anorexia as a lifestyle as opposed to a disease. Anti-suicide advocates say that there has been more than one instance recently where a person killed himself on a Webcam as others watched. Papyrus, a charity in Britain that works to stop young people from killing themselves, says it has tracked 39 cases in that country alone where young people committed suicide after visits to “pro-suicide” chat rooms.

It was the untrained, unpaid Internet sleuthing by Celia Blay, a 65-year-old from a tiny community in Britain, that helped lead to charges in April against Mr. Melchert-Dinkel. “He was practically invisible,” she said. “I tried to talk to any police I could, and most of them would have nothing to do with it. The first one I talked to told me, ‘If it bothers you, look the other way.’ And that really bothered me, because by then I was pretty sure people had died.”

About four years ago, Ms. Blay, who describes herself as a “computer illiterate,” became friends online with a young, depressed woman who had entered into a suicide pact. Ms. Blay persuaded her not to proceed, but the incident sent Ms. Blay searching for the other member of the pact. It was someone who called herself Li Dao, another screen name that the police later said Mr. Melchert-Dinkel used.

Making inquiries on a Web site aimed at people talking about suicide, Ms. Blay said she found at least half a dozen people who had similar pacts with Li Dao, a name that popped up on all sorts of suicide Web sites. She and a friend uncovered Mr. Melchert-Dinkel’s name and e-mail address after setting up a sting in which her friend posed as someone preparing for suicide and was, she said, approached by Mr. Melchert-Dinkel.

By then, the police in Minnesota say, Mr. Melchert-Dinkel had already aided the suicide of Mark Drybrough, 32, of Coventry, England. A coroner’s report found that Mr. Drybrough, who was suffering from a psychiatric illness, hanged himself from a ladder in his home in July 2005. His computer showed that he had posted a question in a suicide chat room about how to hang oneself without access to something high to tie a rope to, and that Li Dao — Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, the police say — had offered details on how to use a door.

In March 2008, Nadia Kajouji, 18, disappeared from her college in Ottawa. The Canadian authorities investigating her disappearance searched her laptop and discovered that she had been talking online with a person who used the screen name Cami. In e-mail messages, the authorities say, the pair agreed to a pact in which Ms. Kajouji would jump from a bridge into a river (to avoid, at Cami’s suggestion, the police say, creating a mess) and Cami would hang herself a day later. In April 2008, Ms. Kajouji’s body was found in the Rideau River.

Around the same time, Ms. Blay contacted the St. Paul Police Department through an acquaintance in Minnesota. By then, she said, she had grown frustrated with what she described as the authorities’ unwillingness to study the huge file she had amassed with the stories of 20 to 30 people who had been approached online. Over time, she said, she had tried to tell the story to a police department near her home, a member of parliament and even law enforcement in the United States.

Since at least the 1970s, many states have barred assisted suicide, though criminal charges are rarely filed. Physician-assisted suicide is allowed under certain conditions in Oregon and Washington.

In Minnesota, 12 charges of aiding suicide have been brought since 1994, when the state began keeping track, and about half of those have resulted in convictions. That state’s law, a felony, applies to “whoever intentionally advises, encourages or assists” another in taking his or her own life; convictions carry sentences of up to 15 years in prison.

Barbara Coombs Lee, the president of Compassion and Choices, who has advocated for laws like the one in Oregon, said she found it “perfectly appropriate” that Mr. Melchert-Dinkel faces such charges. “This is so egregious, so clearly wrong, that I’ll be very disappointed if assisted-suicide statutes do not reach this,” she said. “There is a bright line between aid in dying and assisting in suicide like this.”

Still, legal experts suggested that there may be room for challenges. The Minnesota law itself, some suggested, could be seen as too ambiguous or too broad to include protected speech that falls short of actually leading someone to suicide. The deaths occurred in other jurisdictions, posing potential issues, other lawyers said.

Terry A. Watkins, a lawyer for Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, said it was premature to describe what defense he intends to present but made it clear that he had questions about the law itself, as well as the dissection of causes that lead to any suicide. “As a society, we need to be careful when we start putting together laws that prohibit things like ‘encouragement’ without a really clear definition of what in God’s name you’re talking about,” he said.

Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, who is scheduled to be arraigned on May 25 in Rice County District Court, has had his nursing license revoked. He had held it since 1991, despite a record that included repeated discipline for complaints of leaving a nursing home patient unattended, being too rough, sleeping on duty, failing to take vital signs and failing to track a patient’s medications.

But Mr. Watkins said his client was basically a good person. “This is not a monster,” he said.

Shortly after the police interviewed Mr. Melchert-Dinkel last year, he checked into a local emergency room, state records show, saying that he was dealing with an addiction to suicide Internet sites and feeling guilty over advice he had given to people to end their lives.

    Online Talk, Suicides and a Thorny Court Case, NYT, 13.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14suicide.html

Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline

May 8, 2010
The New York Times
By LAURA M. HOLSON

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

The erosion of privacy has become a pressing issue among active users of social networks. Last week, Facebook scrambled to fix a security breach that allowed users to see their friends’ supposedly private information, including personal chats.

Sam Jackson, a junior at Yale who started a blog when he was 15 and who has been an intern at Google, said he had learned not to trust any social network to keep his information private. “If I go back and look, there are things four years ago I would not say today,” he said. “I am much more self-censoring. I’ll try to be honest and forthright, but I am conscious now who I am talking to.”

He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.

His Facebook account, which he has had since 2005, is strictly personal. “I don’t want people to know what my movie rentals are,” he said. “If I am sharing something, I want to know what’s being shared with others.”

Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.

That mistrust is translating into action. In the Pew study, to be released shortly, researchers interviewed 2,253 adults late last summer and found that people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

Elliot Schrage, who oversees Facebook’s global communications and public policy strategy, said it was a good thing that young people are thinking about what they put online. “We are not forcing anyone to use it,” he said of Facebook. But at the same time, companies like Facebook have a financial incentive to get friends to share as much as possible. That’s because the more personal the information that Facebook collects, the more valuable the site is to advertisers, who can mine it to serve up more targeted ads.

Two weeks ago, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to review the privacy policies of social networks to make sure consumers are not being deliberately confused or misled. The action was sparked by a recent change to Facebook’s settings that forced its more than 400 million users to choose to “opt out” of sharing private information with third-party Web sites instead of “opt in,” a move which confounded many of them.

Mr. Schrage of Facebook said, “We try diligently to get people to understand the changes.”

But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.

Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said.

Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.

Helen Nissenbaum, a professor of culture, media and communication at New York University and author of “Privacy in Context,” a book about information sharing in the digital age, said teenagers were naturally protective of their privacy as they navigate the path to adulthood, and the frequency with which companies change privacy rules has taught them to be wary.

That was the experience of Kanupriya Tewari, a 19-year-old pre-med student at Tufts University. Recently she sought to limit the information a friend could see on Facebook but found the process cumbersome. “I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to limit my profile, and I couldn’t,” she said. She gave up because she had chemistry homework to do, but vowed to figure it out after finals.

“I don’t think they would look out for me,” she said. “I have to look out for me.”

    Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline, NYT, 8.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/fashion/09privacy.html

Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries

May 5, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNA WORTHAM

For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations.

On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.

Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether.

Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.

“Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md.

Mr. Ament said he was so fed up with Facebook that he deleted his account this week after three years of using the service. “Every week there seems to be a new privacy update or change, and I just can’t keep up with it.”

Facebook said it did not think the security hole, which was open a few hours, would have a lasting impact on the company’s reputation.

“For a service that has grown as dramatically as we have grown, that now assists with more than 400 million people sharing billions of pieces of content with their friends and the institutions they care about, we think our track record for security and safety is unrivaled,” said Elliot Schrage, the company’s vice president for public policy. “Are we perfect? Of course not.”

Facebook is increasingly finding itself at the center of a tense discussion over privacy and how personal data is used by the Web sites that collect it, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University.

“It’s clear that we keep discovering new boundaries of privacy that are possible to push and just as quickly breached,” Mr. Katz said.

Social networking experts and analysts wonder whether Facebook is pushing the envelope in a way that could damage its standing over time. The privacy mishap on Wednesday, first reported by the blog TechCrunch, did not help matters.

“While this breach appears to be relatively small, it’s inopportunely timed,” said Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It threatens to undermine what Facebook hopes to achieve with its network over the next few years, because users have to ask whether it is a platform worthy of their trust.”

Over the last few months, Facebook has introduced changes that encourage users to make their photos and other information accessible to anyone on the Internet. Last month its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled plans to begin sharing users’ information with some outside Web sites, and Facebook began prompting users to link information in their profile pages, like their hobbies and hometowns, in a way that makes that information public.

That last change prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, to file a complaint on Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission.

“Facebook continues to manipulate the privacy settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users for a limited purpose and make it widely available for commercial purposes,” Marc Rotenberg, the group’s executive director, said in a letter to the commission.

The extent of the discontent among users is hard to quantify, but one measure is a group created on Facebook to protest the recent changes, which has attracted more than 2.2 million members.

Mr. Schrage said that the company was aware that some users were not happy with the changes, but that the overall response had been positive.

Part of the reason Facebook’s recent changes are upsetting users is that, in contrast to a service like Twitter, most people signed up for Facebook with the understanding that their information would be available only to an approved circle of friends, said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

“Facebook started out with a strong promise of privacy,” she said. “You had to be at a university or some network to sign up. That’s part of how it competed with other social networks, by being the anti-MySpace.”

As the company has changed its approach to privacy, it has introduced new ways for users to adjust their privacy settings. But these tools have grown increasingly convoluted, leaving many users frustrated and unsure of what information is available to whom. They say a site that they joined for the sake of friends and fun has started to feel too much like work.

“At this point, I have no idea how many times I’ve changed my settings,” said Lauren Snead, a 24-year-old student in Murfreesboro, Tenn. “I’ve done it so many times. I’m tired of logging in one day and seeing everything is different and trying to understand what it means.”

In addition, many users are not even aware of the privacy settings, Ms. Boyd said. A recent survey from Consumer Reports found that 23 percent of Facebook users either did not know the site offered privacy controls or chose not to use them.

Mr. Schrage said the company was working to clear up confusion about the settings.

Many frustrated users may not give up on the site because it has become a vital form of communication. Facebook continues to add users at a rapid clip, doubling in size in the last year.

“I’m not going to quit Facebook, because it’s so ingrained in the culture,” said Ryan Scannell, a 26-year-old food scientist in Chicago. “Facebook is not a private place, I don’t expect it to be. But at the same time, I’d like to control what’s accessible to strangers and what’s accessible to family and friends.”

There are financial motives behind the company’s moves. One of the ways Facebook makes money with its free service is by customizing the selection of advertisements shown to individual users. The more information publicly available about users, the more the company can make from such focused ads.

In addition, analysts say Facebook may be eyeing the lucrative market for online search, figuring that its users will be more likely to turn to their friends for advice and information than the wider Web. That opens up more opportunities for advertisers.

“They’re heating up in their battle against Google,” said Sean Sullivan, a security adviser at the Internet security firm F-Secure who analyzes social networks. “If I’m looking for a day care for my 6-year-old, I’m going to put that in my status message, not do a Google search.”

Mr. Schrage of Facebook said the controversy over the site’s changes was indicative of a larger shift online.

“Facebook has been made the center of attention around a really important issue of how technology is changing the conception of privacy, control and sharing,” he said. “People are uneasy about it, but as they start to see the benefits and advantages of it, they start to see the value of the experiences.”

    Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/technology/internet/06facebook.html

On Formspring, an E-Vite to Teenage Insults

May 5, 2010
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

It is the online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw, anonymous gossip.

Formspring.me, a relatively new social networking site, has become a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation.

While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.

By setting up a free Formspring account and linking it to their Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook accounts, young people invite their hundreds of online friends to ask questions or post comments, without having to identify themselves.

In part, Formspring is just the latest place to hang out and exchange gossip, as teenagers have always done. But because of the anonymity, the banter is unvarnished.

Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly — leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits.

“I’d never heard of Formspring until yesterday, but when I started asking kids, every seventh and eighth grader I asked said they used it,” said Christine Ruth, a middle school counselor in Linwood, N.J. “In seventh grade, especially, it’s a lot of ‘Everyone knows you’re a slut,’ or ‘You’re ugly.’ It seems like even when it’s inappropriate and vicious, the kids want the attention, so they post it. And who knows what they’re getting that’s so devastating that they don’t post it?”

Users can choose not to accept anonymous questions, but most young people seem to ignore that option. And some Formspring users say it is precisely the negative comments that interest them.

“Nice stuff is not why you get it,” said Ariane Barrie-Stern, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City. “I think it’s interesting to find out what people really think that they don’t have the guts to say to you. If it’s hurtful, you have to remind yourself that it doesn’t really mean anything.”

Ariane, who has more than 100 posts on her site, said she had not been terribly bothered by anything she has read so far, but she acknowledged that after one comment about a certain pair of leggings, she stopped wearing them.

Her father, Larry Stern, who like most other parents interviewed had never heard of Formspring until a reporter’s call, was aghast.

“It’s just shocking that kids have access to all these things on the Internet and we don’t even know about it,” Mr. Stern said. “And it’s disturbing that what goes on there will influence how somebody behaves. How do you block it? How do you monitor it?”

Even teenagers who do not set up Formspring accounts can peruse their friends’ accounts to see if they are mentioned.

Many families on Long Island became aware of Formspring after the March suicide of Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old West Islip soccer player who had received many nasty messages.

Since it began in late November, Formspring has caught on rapidly. More than 28 million people visit the site each month, 14 million of them in the United States, according to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web traffic.

The company, started in Indianapolis by John Wechsler and Ade Olonoh, recently raised $2.5 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors and moved to San Francisco.

According to Formspring, more than three million questions have been asked and answered on the site. Mr. Olonoh said in an e-mail message that the company did not know what percentage of users were teenagers.

Formspring is not the first site to allow anonymous comments. Some schools say students have been demoralized by comments on Honesty Box, a Facebook add-on. And Juicy Campus, a college gossip site, caused so much grief that some colleges blocked it, and some state attorneys general began consumer-protection investigations. The site shut down last year.

Formspring is one of many question-and-answer Internet sites that are widely used to find, say, the calorie count of avocados. But Formspring spread like wildfire among young people, who used it to for more intimate topics — or flat-out cyberbullying.

Many schools say they have seen students crushed by criticism of their breasts, their body odor or their behavior at the last party.

“There’s nothing positive on there, absolutely nothing, but the kids don’t seem to be able to stop reading, even if people are saying terrible things about them,” said Maggie Dock, a middle school counselor in Kinnelon, N.J. “I asked one girl, ‘If someone was throwing rocks at you, what would you do?’ She said she’d run, she’d move away. But she won’t stop reading what people say about her.”

In some schools, the Formspring craze may already be burning out.

“We all got Formspring about two months ago, when it began showing in people’s Facebook status,” said a 14-year-old from a New York City private school. “It’s actually gone down a little bit in the past few weeks, at least in my grade, because a lot of people realized it wasn’t a good thing, that people were getting hurt, or posting awful comments.”

Some young Formspring users say they strive for a light touch in answering questions about their relationships (hookups, that is, or “hu” in online parlance). Several said they admired friends’ skills at deflecting the often-asked question about how far they had gone, with answers like, “I’ve been to Morocco.”

One mother in Westchester County, N.Y., discovered Formspring when her daughter came to her, sobbing, after reading putdowns of her breasts and her teeth.

“She was very, very upset,” the woman said. “She’s always been self-conscious, and in a way this just flushed out what people might been thinking all along. She worked very hard on figuring out how to answer. But there’s a kind of obsessiveness to it. She still wants to read everything.”

Unknown to her daughter, the woman has learned her password, and occasionally checks her Facebook and Formspring accounts.

“The comments are all gross and sexual,” the mother said. “And yet, of course, this is coming from her friends. I wish I could just erase it, but all of her friends are online, and so much of their social interaction is online that I don’t think I could just take away her Internet access. But I do think this whole online social media thing is a huge experiment on our children.”

    On Formspring, an E-Vite to Teenage Insults, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06formspring.html

Profit Rose 68% at Amazon, Topping Analysts’ Forecasts

April 22, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Amazon.com said Thursday that its first-quarter profit surged 68 percent, showing that consumers are even more comfortable opening their wallets to the online retailer as the economy slowly improves.

Earnings were $299 million, or 66 cents a share, in the January through March period. The amount was 5 cents more than analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected. Amazon had a profit of $177 million, or 41 cents a share in the year-earlier period. Revenue rose 46 percent to $7.13 billion, well above the $6.87 billion analysts had expected.

For the current quarter, Amazon expects revenue of $6.1 billion to $6.7 billion. That would be an increase of 31 percent to 44 percent over last year, but it also means Amazon’s revenue could fall below analysts’ expectations for $6.43 billion.

Amazon shares fell $9.49 to $141 in after-hours trading, after finishing regular trading up $4.06 at $150.49. Earlier in the day the stock hit a high of $151.09, adjusted for splits.

Revenue from books, CDs, DVDs and other media grew 26 percent to $3.43 billion. Electronics and other “general merchandise” revenue increased 72 percent to $3.51 billion.

The first quarter ended right before the arrival of a major competitor to Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, the Apple iPad tablet device. Like the Kindle, the iPad can wirelessly download books.

As in the past, Amazon declined to give details about Kindle sales.

It reiterated that the device is Amazon’s best-selling product, but the meaning of that is unclear, given that the Kindle can be bought only on Amazon’s site. Amazon will start selling the Kindle at some Target stores this month.

    Profit Rose 68% at Amazon, Topping Analysts’ Forecasts, NYT, 22.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/technology/23amazon.html

For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point

April 22, 2010
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Brooks wants the whole Web to know that he spent $41 on an iPad case at an Apple store, $24 eating at an Applebee’s, and $6,450 at a Florida plastic surgery clinic for nose work.

Too much information, you say? On the Internet, there seems to be no such thing. A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

Not that long ago, many were leery of using their real names on the Web, let alone sharing potentially embarrassing personal details about their shopping and lifestyle habits. But these start-ups are exploiting a mood of online openness, despite possible hidden dangers.

“People are not necessarily thinking about how long this information will stick around, or how it could be used and exploited by marketers,” said Chris Conley, a technology and civil liberties fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union.

The spirit of sharing has already run into some roadblocks. Amazon.com was so wary of the security ramifications of Blippy’s idea of letting consumers post everything they bought that, for several months, it blocked the site from allowing people to publish their Amazon purchases.

In March, Blippy sidestepped Amazon by asking its customers for access to their Gmail accounts, and then took the purchase data from the receipts Amazon had e-mailed them. Blippy says thousands of its users have supplied the keys to their e-mail accounts; Amazon declined to comment.

There is no way to quantify the number of these start-ups, but they are the rage among venture capitalists. Although some doubt whether the sites will gain true mainstream popularity — and whether they will make any money — the entrepreneurs involved think they are on to something.

Blippy, which opened last fall, was the first site to introduce the notion of publishing credit card and other purchases. Last month it attracted around 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from venture capitalists. It hopes to one day make money by, among other things, taking a commission when people are inspired to imitate their friends’ purchases posted on the site.

The people behind Swipely, a site soon to arrive and similar to Blippy, are also optimistic.

“We will help people discover a great restaurant or movie through their friends and make it easy to recommend their own purchases,” said Angus Davis, 32, a veteran of Netscape and Microsoft who is testing Swipely with a limited group of users. “I really believe that the lens of your friends is fast becoming the most powerful way to discover things on the Internet.”

Mr. Brooks, a 38-year-old consultant for online dating Web sites, seems to be a perfect customer. He publishes his travel schedule on Dopplr. His DNA profile is available on 23andMe. And on Blippy, he makes public everything he spends with his Chase Mastercard, along with his spending at Netflix, iTunes and Amazon.com.

“It’s very important to me to push out my character and hopefully my good reputation as far as possible, and that means being open,” he said, dismissing any privacy concerns by adding, “I simply have nothing to hide.”

This new world owes its origin to the rampant sharing of photos, résumés and personal news bites on services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, which have acclimated people to broadcasting even the most mundane aspects of their lives.

To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.

DailyBooth, founded in London but moving to San Francisco, asks users to publish a photograph of themselves every day. “It’s the richest and quickest way to share how you are doing and what you are feeling,” said Brian Pokorny, a Silicon Valley investor who recently became the company’s chief executive.

While the over-30 set might recoil from this type of activity, young people do not seem to mind. The site, which gets around 300,000 visitors a month, according to the online research company Compete.com, appears to be largely populated with enthusiastically exhibitionist teenagers.

Still, only two years ago, Facebook members rebelled when the site introduced its notorious Beacon service, which published members’ online transactions back to the site — essentially the same concept as Blippy and Swipely.

A decade ago, Dennis Crowley was trying to get people to share information about their geographic location with a service called Dodgeball. For years, he said, he faced a barrage of questions about why anyone would want an update on where someone was having a beer.

“After we sold the company to Google and they shut it down, we left those questions to Twitter, and they did a great job of answering them,” said Mr. Crowley, who went on to create Foursquare, which Silicon Valley venture capitalists are competing to finance. “This kind of sharing makes people feel connected to each other,” he said.

But there is the worry about identity theft.

“Ten years ago, people were afraid to buy stuff online. Now they’re sharing everything they buy,” said Barry Borsboom, a student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who this year created an intentionally provocative site called Please Rob Me. The site collected and published Foursquare updates that indicated when people were out socializing — and therefore away from their homes.

“Times are changing, and most people might not know where the dangers lie,” Mr. Borsboom said.

The business plans for these start-ups are no sure thing, either.

“These companies are betting they take this data, monetize it or resell it,” said John Borthwick, an entrepreneur based in New York who advises companies like DailyBooth and Hot Potato, which lets people share plans and experiences of live events. “But the assumption that every scrap of data is actually useful to individuals, or even companies, will be tested.”

    For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point, NYT, 22.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/technology/23share.html

Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell

April 16, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).

Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.

The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.

“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.

None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or on coupon Web sites, not its own site.

Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.

Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan.

“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,” Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.

The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web page with a simple address at the top of it.

So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010 deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.

RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.

“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s. “There’s some trickery.”

The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback on how well their marketing is working.

Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.

“We break people up into teeny little cross sections of who we think they are, and we test that out against how they respond,” said Mr. Batsford, who is a partner at 31 Media, an online marketing company.

RevTrax can identify online shoppers when they are signed in to a coupon site like Ebates or FatWallet or the retailer’s own site. It says it avoids connecting that number with real people to steer clear of privacy issues, but clients can make that match.

The retailer can also make that connection when it is offering coupons to its Facebook fans, like Filene’s Basement is doing.

“When someone joins a fan club, the user’s Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser,” Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax’s co-founder, said. “We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code.”

“When the consumer redeems the offer in store, we can track it back, in this case, not to the Google search term but to the actual Facebook user ID that was signing up,” he said. Although Facebook does not signal that Amy Smith responded to a given ad, Filene’s could look up the user ID connected to the coupon and “do some more manual-type research — you could easily see your sex, your location and what you’re interested in,” Mr. Treiber said. (Mr. O’Neil said Filene’s did not do this at the moment.)

The coupon efforts are nascent, but coupon companies say that when they get more data about how people are responding, they can make different offers to different consumers.

“Over time,” Mr. Treiber said, “we’ll be able to do much better profiling around certain I.P. addresses, to say, hey, this I.P. address is showing a proclivity for printing clothing apparel coupons and is really only responding to coupons greater than 20 percent off.”

That alarms some privacy advocates.

Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”

    Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell, NYT, 16.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/media/17coupon.html

After Google’s Move, a Shift in Search Terms

March 28, 2010
The New York Times
By JONATHAN STRAY and LILY LEE

HONG KONG — Chinese searches for politically delicate terms peaked the day Google stopped filtering its search results, but the government pressed on with a campaign to remove online praise of the company.

Searches for “Tiananmen,” “Falun Gong” and “corruption” increased by more than 10 times here on Tuesday, the day that Google began offering uncensored Chinese-language search results.

But searches for censored terms on Google’s uncensored Hong Kong search engine fell off quickly in the next few days in part because most Chinese did not rush to search for politically delicate material and also because the pages newly revealed by Google were still mostly blocked in China.

In tests over the weekend from several Chinese cities, users searching for “Tiananmen” or even the names of Chinese government leaders reliably found the site google.com.hk mysteriously inaccessible for a few minutes. The more frequently used Chinese search engine Baidu, which continues to censor its results, remained accessible no matter what users searched for.

“I heard that Google is leaving China. But I don’t care. Why should I? I’m fine with Baidu,” said Xiong Huan, 27, a software engineer in Shenyang. “And for now, there’s not much change on Google either, as long as you don’t search for sensitive info.”

Nonetheless, a significant number of people took advantage of Google’s newly unfiltered service on its first day of operation. There were about 2.5 million searches for phrases containing “Tiananmen” and about 4.7 million searches for the banned religious group “Falun Gong,” according to estimates based on data from the Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool Box.

But these are tiny numbers compared with almost 400 million Chinese Internet users, and search activity quickly returned to average levels over the next few days.

Searches for “Google” in English and Chinese were far more popular, totaling more than 20 million on Tuesday, suggesting that Google users were much more concerned about their continued access to Google’s search services than their ability to find politically delicate information.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign to eradicate pro-Google sentiments from the Internet.

Comments on social networking sites that are supportive of Google “will be deleted in a couple of seconds,” said Oiwan Lam, 38, an independent journalist and researcher who is an expert on Chinese independent media.

The China Digital Times reported that the Chinese State Council Information Office had ordered all news sites to “carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions” and “clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others that have a different tune from government policy.”

China routinely directs news coverage of delicate topics, but the restrictions relating to Google are particularly severe.

Javen Yang, 27, webmaster of a Guangzhou travel site, said that site’s staff was told on Friday to remove all comments relating to Google. “We have been told to delete posts relating to ‘some American company leaving China’ by the general webmaster, who usually receive notices from the government,” he said.

The State Council Information Office could not be reached for comment.

With domestic chat closely controlled, the contrast between the sentiments on Chinese and foreign networks is striking. The popular Chinese discussion site Tianya.cn had only a few dozen posts mentioning Google on Saturday. All of them were negative or neutral opinions of the company, whereas Chinese Twitter users generally applauded Google’s decision to offer uncensored results. Twitter has been vocal in its opposition to censorship. It, like Facebook and YouTube, cannot be reached from mainland China without special software.

Over all, Google’s move will make little difference in the short run to the average citizen.

Even if the Chinese can reliably access Google’s newly unfiltered search, it will be difficult for them to read pages the government does not want them to see. Domestic Web sites are easily gagged; foreign sites are blocked by a sophisticated firewall.

“Even though Google has stopped censoring, people cannot get access to sensitive news” without firewall circumvention software, said Ms. Lam. “The Great Firewall is still there.”

The government has never admitted the existence of such a firewall, nor the censorship directives issued to news organizations and Web sites. Unlike other nations that filter Internet access, China never gives notice that sites have been blocked — connections just fail, as if there were problems with the network.

Ultimately, indifference may prove more effective than any firewall. “I don’t worry that Google will be blocked in China completely,” said Luo Peng, a Beijing salesman.

“Just like YouTube and Facebook, my life is fine without them. I can always use other similar services that are available.”

    After Google’s Move, a Shift in Search Terms, NYT, 28.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/technology/29googletrends.html

Google Searches for a Foreign Policy

March 26, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — When Google announced last week that it would shut its censored online search service in China, it was doing more than standing up to a repressive government: it was showing that, with the United States still struggling to develop a foreign policy for the digital age, Internet companies need to articulate their own foreign policies.

Google is hardly the first American company to stray into the State Department’s bailiwick. Since the bad old days of the United Fruit Company in Latin America, powerful multinationals have conducted themselves like quasi-states, influencing the foreign lands in which they operate by deciding whether to accommodate or resist the unsavory practices of authorities there.

For Internet companies, that choice has been sharpened by the fact that the World Wide Web is no longer just a force for freedom and diversity but also a tool for repression. Governments use it to spy on dissidents, human rights activists, and other troublesome elements.

This change happened so fast that it left the foreign policy establishment gasping to catch up. It also exposed Washington’s deep ambivalence about information technology: while it champions the free flow of ideas in closed societies like Iran, it fears being a target for cyber-attacks by hostile governments and doesn’t want to export technology that could be diverted into military uses. Conflicted and confused, Foggy Bottom has little to offer Silicon Valley by way of support or even guidance.

”What forces Google to have a foreign policy is that what they’re exporting isn’t a product or a service, it’s a freedom,” said Clay Shirky, who teaches at New York University and writes about the Internet’s social effects. “The question is, ‘Are they going to be United Fruit?’ ” For Google, the sinister side of China’s cyberpolicy eventually came to outweigh the economic attraction of China’s market and the putative benefit of opening the Internet to a vast audience.

If the folks at Google were diplomats instead of “digirati,” one might say their view of the Internet had evolved from Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic notion that independent countries tend toward democracy to the realpolitik understanding that their interests simply differ from your own. But seen another way, the company’s decision to stop censoring pushes it farther away from the moral neutralism of United Fruit, showing that it is no longer willing to collude with a restrictive system in pursuit of profits.

The choice was not easy. Since late 2006, when it entered China, Google argued that a censored search service was better than no search service at all. But after it discovered that its network had been hacked from inside China, and that the Gmail accounts of human rights activists had been infiltrated, that tradeoff no longer seemed defensible. This “goes to the heart of a much larger global debate about freedom of speech,” Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a post explaining the company’s thinking.

As if on cue, the Obama administration made its first major statement on Internet freedom. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Internet could be a force for good or ill and encouraged governments to use it for good, while urging American companies not to knuckle under to censorship. But she left the work of navigating restrictions to the companies.

That navigation gets harder by the day, said Mark Palmer, a former United States ambassador to Hungary who has started independent TV stations in Eastern Europe. “There are more than 40 countries that restrict the Internet,” he said. “The State Department and the Treasury Department have not come to grips with it.”

The Treasury did recently begin allowing firms to export free online services like instant messaging, chat and photo sharing to Iran, Sudan, and Cuba. Having watched the impetus that Twitter and Facebook gave to antigovernment protests in Tehran, the administration wanted more of it. But the difficult-to-jam high-speed satellite Internet service that Iran’s dissidents also crave remains unavailable because of sanctions intended to retard Iran’s nuclear program.

The State Department is encouraging the development of technologies that enable users to circumvent restrictions on the Internet. But advocates for some startups said that the government had not allotted enough money or steered support to the most promising ventures. And the United States lacks a uniform policy for dealing with American companies that export software that governments can use to filter the Internet.

Google’s problems are not just with repressive regimes. Last month, an Italian court convicted Mr. Drummond and two colleagues of breaking privacy laws after a video of an autistic boy being bullied was posted on Google’s network.

Google’s showdown with Beijing, analysts said, is driven in part by its fear of similar lawsuits from China. Google also wants the United States to treat Internet censorship as a trade barrier that influences decisions on foreign aid.

Not all tech companies share Google’s fervor. Microsoft remains in China, running a government-censored search engine. Its founder, Bill Gates, said in January that companies needed to decide if they are going to obey the rules of the countries in which they operate, although Microsoft says that it, too, pushes back.

Mr. Shirky says he sees a generational divide. “It’s no accident,” he said, “that Microsoft was founded during the cold war while Google was founded after the cold war.” While Microsoft has a mentality in which national sovereignty still trumps ethical arguments, he said, Google is trying to balance the rights of sovereignty against its own evolving set of values.

    Google Searches for a Foreign Policy, NYT, 26.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/weekinreview/28landler.html

Social Networks a Lifeline for the Chronically Ill

March 24, 2010
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

A former model who is now chronically ill and struggles just to shower says the people she has met online have become her family. A quadriplegic man uses the Web to share tips on which places have the best wheelchair access, and a woman with multiple sclerosis says her regular Friday night online chats are her lifeline.

For many people, social networks are a place for idle chatter about what they made for dinner or sharing cute pictures of their pets. But for people living with chronic diseases or disabilities, they play a more vital role.

“It’s really literally saved my life, just to be able to connect with other people,” said Sean Fogerty, 50, who has multiple sclerosis, is recovering from brain cancer and spends an hour and a half each night talking with other patients online.

People fighting chronic illnesses are less likely than others to have Internet access, but once online they are more likely to blog or participate in online discussions about health problems, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the California HealthCare Foundation.

“If they can break free from the anchors holding them down, people living with chronic disease who go online are finding resources that are more useful than the rest of the population,” said Susannah Fox, associate director of digital strategy at Pew and author of the report.

They are gathering on big patient networking sites like PatientsLikeMe, HealthCentral, Inspire, CureTogether and Alliance Health Networks, and on small sites started by patients on networks like Ning and Wetpaint.

Sherri Connell, 46, modeled and performed in musicals until, at age 27, she learned she had multiple sclerosis and Lyme disease. She began posting her journal entries online for friends and family to read. Soon, people from all over the world were reading her Web site and telling her they had similar health problems.

In 2008, she and her husband started a social network using Ning called My Invisible Disabilities Community. It now has 2,300 members who write about living with lupus, forthcoming operations or medical bills, for example.

“People have good and bad days, and they don’t know a good day’s going to come Wednesday at 5 o’clock when a live support group is meeting,” Ms. Connell said. “The Internet is a great outlet for people to be honest.”

Not surprisingly, according to Pew, Internet users with chronic illnesses are more likely than healthy people to use the Web to look for information on specific diseases, drugs, health insurance, alternative or experimental treatments and depression, anxiety or stress.

But for them, the social aspects of the Web take on heightened importance. Particularly if they are homebound, they also look to the Web for their social lives, discussing topics unrelated to their illnesses. Some schedule times to eat dinner or watch a movie while chatting online.

John Linna, a pastor in Neenah, Wis., did not know what a blog was when his son suggested he start one after discovering he needed to stay home on a ventilator.

“That day my little world began to expand,” he wrote in a post last year about blogging. “Soon I had a little neighborhood. It was like stopping in for coffee every day just to see how things were going.”

When Mr. Linna died earlier this year, people all over the Web who had never met him in person mourned the loss.

Others use the Web to find practical tips about living with their disease or disability that doctors and family members, having not lived with it themselves, cannot provide.

On Diabetic Connect, a diabetes social network with 140,000 members, people share recipes like low-sugar banana pudding, review products like an insulin pump belt and have discussions like a recent one started by a patient with a new diagnosis. “I don’t like to talk to my family and friends about this,” she wrote. “Honestly I feel helpless. I really just need some advice and people to talk to who might have been experiencing the same things.”

Amy Tenderich is the community manager for Diabetic Connect and writes a blog called Diabetes Mine. “There’s no doctor in the world, unless they’ve actually lived with this thing, that can get into that nitty-gritty,” she said. “I’ve walked away from dinner parties with tears in my eyes because people just don’t understand.”

Patients often use social networks to interact with people without worrying about the stigma of physical disabilities, said Susan Smedema, an assistant professor of rehabilitation counseling at Florida State University who studies the psychosocial aspects of disability.

From her home in Maine, Susan Fultz plays online games at Pogo.com and commiserates with people who are frustrated that they do not have a diagnosis for their symptoms.

“There’s no worry of being judged or criticized, and that is something that I know a lot of us don’t get in our daily lives,” said Ms. Fultz, who has Lyme disease and psoriatic arthritis.

Those with chronic diseases or disabilities, like all Internet users, have to be wary about sharing private health information online, particularly with anonymous users.

Research has also shown that emotions can be contagious, said Paul Albert, digital services librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library in New York who has researched how social networks meet the needs of patients with chronic diseases.

“If you hang out on a message board where people are very negative, you can easily adopt a negative attitude about your disease,” he said. “On the other hand, if people are hopeful, you might be better off.”

Some people also worry that patients might exchange erroneous medical information on the Web, he said. Yet most patient social networks make clear that the information on the site should not substitute for medical advice, and the Pew study found that just 2 percent of adults living with chronic diseases report being harmed by following medical advice found on the Internet.

Instead, the sites are used to share information from the front lines, said Lily Vadakin, 45, who has multiple sclerosis and works as a site administrator for Disaboom, a social network for people with disabilities. For instance, she has discussed with other patients how to combat fatigue by working at home and taking vitamin supplements.

“That’s what the community can give you — a real-life perspective,” she said.

    Social Networks a Lifeline for the Chronically Ill, NYT, 24.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/technology/25disable.html

Google Faces Fallout as China Reacts to Site Shift

March 23, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT and MICHAEL WINES

Google pushed. Now China is pushing back.

The company’s problems in China escalated on Tuesday as its ties to some Chinese partners began to come apart and the government reacted angrily to Google’s attempt to bypass government censors.

The overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, on Wednesday accused Google of collaborating with U.S. spy agencies, Reuters reported.

‘‘For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god,’’ said a front-page commentary piece. ‘‘In fact, Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its cooperation and collusion with the U.S. intelligence and security agencies is well-known."

As for Google's move, the newspaper said: ‘‘All this makes one wonder. Thinking about the United States’ big efforts in recent years to engage in Internet war, perhaps this could be an exploratory pre-dawn battle."

Google, the world’s largest Internet company, once viewed China, the world’s largest Internet market, as a bottomless well of opportunity with nearly 400 million Web users, and an even larger number of potential customers for its nascent, but vital, mobile phone business.

But by directing search users in China to its uncensored search engine based in Hong Kong, Google may have jeopardized its long-range plans.

“I don’t understand their calculation,” said J. Stapleton Roy, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “I do not see how Google could have concluded that they could have faced down the Chinese on a domestic censorship issue,” said Mr. Roy, a former United States ambassador to China.

Google called the move sensible and said it hoped to keep its sales, research and other operations in China.

But some of those other businesses quickly came under pressure. China Mobile, the biggest cellular communications company in China and one of Google’s earliest partners in its foray into smartphones, was expected to cancel a deal that had placed Google’s search engine on its mobile Web home page. Millions of people use the page daily. In interviews, business executives close to industry officials said China Mobile was planning to scrap the deal under government pressure, although it had yet to find a replacement.

Similarly, China’s second-largest mobile company, China Unicom, was said by analysts and others to have delayed or scrapped the imminent introduction of a cellphone based on Google’s Android platform. One popular Web portal, Tom.com, already ceased using Google to power its search engine. The company is controlled by Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong billionaire who has close ties to the Chinese government.

Technology analysts and the business executives said Google might also face problems in keeping its advertising sales force, which is crucial to the success of its Chinese language service on PCs and mobile phones.

In an interview on Tuesday, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said he did not see the company’s decision to serve Chinese search customers from outside China as an act of defiance. He said the move was consistent with Chinese law and with the company’s goal to stop participating in censorship. While it is possible that Google’s prospects in China could suffer, the company has yet to see any concrete business impact from its decision, he said.

“We certainly expected that if we take a stand around censorship that the government doesn’t like that it would have an impact on our business,” Mr. Drummond said. “We understood that as a possibility.”

But Mr. Drummond said that over time, Google would benefit from taking a principled stand in China and elsewhere. “It is good for our business to push for free expression,” he said.

Several analysts suggested that the government could shut down the company’s Chinese search service entirely by blocking access to Google’s mainland address, google.cn, or to its Hong Kong Web site, google.com.hk, though that had not happened as of Tuesday.

Users who went to google.cn were automatically being sent to google.com.hk. Google’s search engine in Hong Kong provides results in the simplified Chinese characters that mainland Chinese use. Chinese in Hong Kong use the traditional characters, which can contain more strokes and are more difficult to read and write. Government firewalls either disabled searches for highly objectionable terms completely or blocked links to certain results. That had typically been the case before Google’s action, only now millions more visitors were liable to encounter the disrupted access to an uncensored site.

Some China experts say they were perplexed by Google’s handling of the crisis, given its stated goals of keeping business operations in China.

David M. Lampton, director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said it was not surprising for China to balk at the idea of an American company using Hong Kong, and China’s own “one country, two systems” policy, as a way around censorship.

“That would be seen as fundamentally politically subversive in China,” Mr. Lampton said. “I am not sure whether it was an attempt by Google to give the Chinese a way out, but instead it magnified the political controversy.”

Others said Google’s move also put Chinese authorities in a difficult situation, as the government might be wary of agitating loyal Google users in China, who tend to be highly educated and vocal.

“To block Google entirely is not necessarily a desirable outcome for the government,” said Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting, a technology research firm in Beijing. “It’s going to boil down to whether authorities feel it is acceptable for users to be redirected to that site without having to figure it out themselves.”

The potential loss of cellphone search customers could prove particularly painful over time, analysts say. As on PCs, Google makes money on mobile phones when people click on its ads. If carriers like China Mobile and China Unicom remove Google as their principal mobile search service, it could cut Google’s mobile business.

Also, the spread of Android phones, which is just beginning in China, was meant by Google to ensure the availability of its services like search and maps on smartphones. Yet this month, Motorola replaced Google’s search on Android phones in China with Bing, Microsoft’s rival service, because of the uncertainty surrounding Google’s fate in the country.

Estimates from analysts and some Google insiders put the company’s annual revenue in China at $300 million to $600 million, a small fraction of Google’s nearly $24 billion in annual sales. But investors were counting on that strategically important business to grow rapidly.

“Having that potential is worth quite a bit to investors,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech.

Google shares have lost nearly 6 percent of their value since the company said in January that it might pull out of China. During the same period, the Nasdaq 100 index rose by nearly 5 percent.

For his part, Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, on Monday held out the possibility that some day Google and China would patch up their differences.

“Perhaps we can return to serving mainland China in the future,” he said.


Edward Wong, Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.

    Google Faces Fallout as China Reacts to Site Shift, NYT, 23.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/technology/24google.html

Google Shuts China Site in Dispute Over Censorship

March 22, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT and DAVID BARBOZA

SAN FRANCISCO — Just over two months after threatening to leave China because of censorship and intrusions from hackers, Google on Monday closed its Internet search service there and began directing users in that country to its uncensored search engine in Hong Kong.

While the decision to route mainland Chinese users to Hong Kong is an attempt by Google to skirt censorship requirements without running afoul of Chinese laws, it appears to have angered officials in China, setting the stage for a possible escalation of the conflict, which may include blocking the Hong Kong search service in mainland China.

The state-controlled Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed official with the State Council Information Office describing Google’s move as “totally wrong.”

“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” the official said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the government will handle the Google case “according to the law,” Reuters reported. The ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said at a regular briefing in Beijing that Google’s move was an isolated act by a commercial company, and that it should not affect China-U.S. ties “unless politicized’’ by others.

Google declined to comment on its talks with Chinese authorities, but said that it was under the impression that its move would be seen as a viable compromise.

“We got reasonable indications that this was O.K.,” Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, said. “We can’t be completely confident.”

Google’s retreat from China, for now, is only partial. In a blog post, Google said it would retain much of its existing operations in China, including its research and development team and its local sales force. While the China search engine, google.cn, has stopped working, Google will continue to operate online maps and music services in China.

Google’s move represents a powerful rejection of Beijing’s censorship but also a risky ploy in which Google, a global technology powerhouse, will essentially turn its back on the world’s largest Internet market, with nearly 400 million Web users.

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on google.cn has been hard,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in the blog post. “The Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a nonnegotiable legal requirement.”

Mr. Drummond said that Google’s search engine based in Hong Kong would provide mainland users results in the simplified Chinese characters used on the mainland and that he believed it was “entirely legal.”

“We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision,” Mr. Drummond said, “though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.” Some Western analysts say Chinese regulators could retaliate against Google by blocking its Hong Kong or American search engines entirely, just as it blocks YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s decision to scale back operations in China ends a nearly four-year bet that Google’s search engine in China, even if censored, would help bring more information to Chinese citizens and loosen the government’s controls on the Web.

Instead, specialists say, Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on the Internet in recent years. In January, Google said it would no longer cooperate with government censors after hackers based in China stole some of the company’s source code and even broke into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates.

“It is certainly a historic moment,” said Xiao Qiang of the China Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. “The Internet was seen as a catalyst for China being more integrated into the world. The fact that Google cannot exist in China clearly indicates that China’s path as a rising power is going in a direction different from what the world expected and what many Chinese were hoping for.”

While other multinational companies are not expected to follow suit, some Western executives say Google’s decision is a symbol of a worsening business climate in China for foreign corporations and perhaps an indication that the Chinese government is favoring home-grown companies. Despite its size and reputation for innovation, Google trails its main Chinese rival, Baidu.com, which was modeled on Google, with 33 percent market share to Baidu’s 63 percent.

The decision to shut down google.cn will have a limited financial impact on Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. China accounted for a small fraction of Google’s $23.6 billion in global revenue last year. Ads that once appeared on google.cn will now appear on Google’s Hong Kong site. Still, abandoning a direct presence in the largest Internet search market in the world could have long-term repercussions and thwart Google’s global ambitions, analysts say.

Government officials in Beijing have sharpened their attacks on Google in recent weeks. China experts say it may be some time before the confrontation is resolved.

“This has become a war of ideas between the American company moralizing about Internet censorship and the Chinese government having its own views on the matter,” said Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.

In China, many students and professionals said they feared they were about to lose access to Google’s vast resources.

In January, when Google first threatened to leave China, many young people placed wreaths at the company headquarters in Beijing as a sign of mourning.

The attacks were aimed at Google and more than 30 other American companies. While Google did not say the attacks were sponsored by the government, the company said it had enough information about the attacks to justify its threat to leave China.

People, inside and outside of Google, investigating the attacks have since traced them to two universities in China: Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Lanxiang Vocational School. The schools and the government have denied any involvement.

After serving Chinese users through its search engine based in the United States, Google decided to enter the Chinese market in 2006 with a local search engine under an arrangement with the government that required it to purge search results on banned topics. But since then, Google has struggled to comply with Chinese censorship rules and failed to gain significant market share from Baidu.com.

Google is not the first American Internet company to stumble in China. Nearly every major American brand has arrived with high hopes only to be stymied by government rules or fierce competition from Chinese rivals.

After struggling to compete, Yahoo sold its Chinese operations to Alibaba Group, a local company; eBay and Amazon never gained traction; and Microsoft’s MSN instant messaging service badly trails that of Tencent.

Google’s departure could present an opportunity for Baidu, whose stock has soared since the confrontation between Google and China began. It could also give a chance to Microsoft, a perennial underdog in Internet search, to make inroads in the Chinese market. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has a very small share of the market.


Miguel Helft reported from San Francisco, and David Barboza from Shanghai. Steve Lohr contributed reporting from New York.

    Google Shuts China Site in Dispute Over Censorship, NYT, 22.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html

F.C.C. Plan to Widen Internet Access in U.S. Sets Up Battle

March 12, 2010
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER and JENNA WORTHAM

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.

The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.

According to F.C.C. officials briefed on the plan, the commission’s recommendations will include a subsidy for Internet providers to wire rural parts of the country now without access, a controversial auction of some broadcast spectrum to free up space for wireless devices, and the development of a new universal set-top box that connects to the Internet and cable service.

The effort will influence billions of dollars in federal spending, although the F.C.C. will argue that the plan should pay for itself through the spectrum auctions. Some recommendations will require Congressional action and industry support, and will affect users only years from now.

Still, “each bullet point will trigger its own tortuous battle,” said Craig Moffett, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

For much of the last year, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman and the plan’s chief salesman, has laid the groundwork for the Congressionally mandated plan by asserting that the United States is lagging far behind other countries in broadband adoption and speed. About a third of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet service, cannot afford it or choose not to have it.

In a speech last month, Mr. Genachowski observed that the country could build state-of-the-art computers and applications, but without equivalent broadband wiring, “it would be like having the technology for great electric cars, but terrible roads.”

The plan envisions a fully Web-connected world with split-second access to health care information and online classrooms, delivered through wireless devices yet to be dreamed up in Silicon Valley. But to get there, analysts say the F.C.C. must tread carefully with companies like Comcast and AT&T that largely control Internet pricing and speeds. Already, there are questions about the extent to which the F.C.C. has jurisdiction over Internet providers.

The F.C.C. says it can make some important changes on its own. They include reforms to the Universal Service Fund, which spends $8 billion a year from telephone surcharges to ensure that rural and poor people have phone lines at home. It also supplies Internet access to schools, libraries and rural clinics.

By reducing the phone subsidies over time, the fund could instead “support broadband access and affordability,” especially in remote locations where private companies have little incentive to build networks, said Colin Crowell, a senior counselor to Mr. Genachowski.

In recent weeks, the most-talked-about idea in the television industry has been a voluntary auction of over-the-air spectrum for future mobile broadband uses. In total, the F.C.C. is hoping to free up roughly 500 megahertz of spectrum, much of which would come from television broadcasters, which would be compensated if Congress acts.

The proposal already faces resistance from the TV industry. Stations say they still serve a valuable public service, especially during emergencies, and say the F.C.C. proposals could cause gaps in signal coverage.

But F.C.C. officials assert that the spectrum changes are necessary given a looming spectrum shortage. “It isn’t a crisis tomorrow, it’s a crisis in five or six years,” Mr. Crowell said, but allocation “literally takes years.”

The plan will advise that some of the spectrum become unlicensed, so it can serve as a test bed for new technologies.

Also notably, the plan will include an initiative the chairman calls 100 Squared — equipping 100 million households with high-speed Internet gushing through their pipes at 100 megabits a second by the end of this decade. According to comScore, the average subscriber now receives speeds of three to four megabits a second.

The government is “setting a stake in the ground by setting a standard for broadband speeds in order to be a competitive nation,” said Dan Hays, director of PRTM, a global management consulting firm in the telecommunications industry.

He said the plan could place “significant pressure” on incumbent providers to improve their networks.

Mr. Genachowski also argues that broadband expansion can be an economic stimulant, a crucial selling point in a time of high unemployment. “Broadband will be the indispensable platform to assure American competitiveness, ongoing job creation and innovation, and will affect nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives at home, at work, and in their communities,” he said Friday.

According to officials briefed on the proposals, the plan will also call for a “digital literacy corps” to help unwired Americans learn online skills, and recommendations for $12 billion to $16 billion for a nationwide public safety network that would connect police, fire departments and other first responders.

In a move that could affect policy decisions years from now, the F.C.C. will begin assessing the speeds and costs of consumer broadband service. Until then, consumers can take matters into their own hands with a new suite of online and mobile phone applications released by the F.C.C. that will allow them to test the speed of their home Internet and see if they’re paying for data speeds as advertised.

“Once again, the F.C.C. is putting service providers on the spot,” said Julien Blin, a telecommunications consultant at JBB Research.

    F.C.C. Plan to Widen Internet Access in U.S. Sets Up Battle, NYT, 12.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/business/media/13fcc.html

Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service

February 13, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy.

As Evgeny Morozov wrote in a blog post for Foreign Policy, “If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government."

Mr. Morozov is a researcher on the impact of the Internet on totalitarian regimes at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University under a fellowship financed by Yahoo. In an interview, he said the flap over Buzz “definitely undermines Google’s credibility when it talks about freedom of expression.”

In an e-mail message, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, said, “Google remains completely committed to freedom of expression and to privacy, and we have a strong track record of protecting both.”

Mr. Jackson defended the setup of the Buzz service. He said that Buzz came with a built-in circle of contacts to provide a better experience to users and that many liked that feature. He said that it was very easy for users to edit who they were following on the service and who could follow them. He also said that anyone could hide their list of Buzz contacts with a single click.

After numerous bloggers complained that the privacy controls were difficult to find and adjust, Google agreed to make changes. In a blog post Thursday night, Mr. Jackson wrote that the company had made it easier for people to hide their Buzz contacts and block followers whose identity was unknown.

“It is still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way,” Mr. Jackson wrote. “We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.”

Mr. Jackson said Buzz had proved popular, with tens of millions of people trying it in the last two days.

But some critics said that Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat correspondence as the basis of a social network was fundamentally misguided. While it is common for social networks to make public a person’s list of friends and followers, those lists are not typically created from e-mail conversations.

“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”

Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive.

In an expletive-laden article that was widely cited on the Web, a blogger who writes about issues related to violence against women complained that Google had made her fearful. She said that she had unexpectedly discovered a list of people, which may have included her abusive ex-husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog, following her and her comments on Google Reader, a service for reading blogs and automated news feeds.

“My privacy concerns are not trite,” wrote the blogger, who uses the pseudonym Harriet Jacobs. “They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up.”

In a further effort to contain the fallout, Google reached out to her and made changes to enhance the privacy of shared comments on Google Reader.

Some privacy experts said that Google had made matters worse by making it difficult for people to hide their lists of Buzz contacts after they realized that those lists had been made public. Some users assumed that they could simply turn off the Buzz service, but that proved inadequate.

“You want to have a simple rollback mechanism, so once things are not what you expected them to be, you can get out quickly and not have to play a game of Whack-a-Mole,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a privacy expert and assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Google said it was planning to address that issue soon.

Google is known for releasing new products before they are fully ready and then improving them over time. But its decision to do so with Buzz, coupled with its introduction to all 176 million Gmail users by default, appears to have backfired.

“It was a terrible mistake,” said Danny Sullivan, a specialist on Google and editor of SearchEngineLand, an industry blog. “I don’t think people expected that Google would show the world who you are connected with. And if there was a way to opt out, it was really easy to miss.”

An earlier version of this article misidentified the name of the blog Evgeny Morozov wrote a post for. It is Foreign Policy, not Foreign Affairs.

    Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service, NYT, 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html

Cyberwar

In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent
 

The New York Times
January 26, 2010
By JOHN MARKOFF, DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER

 

This article was reported by John Markoff, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, and written by Mr. Sanger.

WASHINGTON — On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.

The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation. What’s more, the military commanders noted that they even lacked the legal authority to respond — especially because it was never clear if the attack was an act of vandalism, an attempt at commercial theft or a state-sponsored effort to cripple the United States, perhaps as a prelude to a conventional war.

What some participants in the simulation knew — and others did not — was that a version of their nightmare had just played out in real life, not at the Pentagon where they were meeting, but in the far less formal war rooms at Google Inc. Computers at Google and more than 30 other companies had been penetrated, and Google’s software engineers quickly tracked the source of the attack to seven servers in Taiwan, with footprints back to the Chinese mainland.

After that, the trail disappeared into a cloud of angry Chinese government denials, and then an ugly exchange of accusations between Washington and Beijing. That continued Monday, with Chinese assertions that critics were trying to “denigrate China” and that the United States was pursuing “hegemonic domination” in cyberspace.

These recent events demonstrate how quickly the nation’s escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation.

So far, despite millions of dollars spent on studies, that quest has failed. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the most comprehensive effort yet to warn potential adversaries that cyberattacks would not be ignored, drawing on the language of nuclear deterrence.

“States, terrorists and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” she declared in a speech on Thursday that drew an angry response from Beijing. “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society.”

But Mrs. Clinton did not say how the United States would respond, beyond suggesting that countries that knowingly permit cyberattacks to be launched from their territories would suffer damage to their reputations, and could be frozen out of the global economy.

There is, in fact, an intense debate inside and outside the government about what the United States can credibly threaten. One alternative could be a diplomatic démarche, or formal protest, like the one the State Department said was forthcoming, but was still not delivered, in the Google case. Economic retaliation and criminal prosecution are also possibilities.

Inside the National Security Agency, which secretly scours overseas computer networks, officials have debated whether evidence of an imminent cyberattack on the United States would justify a pre-emptive American cyberattack — something the president would have to authorize. In an extreme case, like evidence that an adversary was about to launch an attack intended to shut down power stations across America, some officials argue that the right response might be a military strike.

“We are now in the phase that we found ourselves in during the early 1950s, after the Soviets got the bomb,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard. “It won’t have the same shape as nuclear deterrence, but what you heard Secretary Clinton doing was beginning to explain that we can create some high costs for attackers.”

Fighting Shadows

When the Pentagon summoned its top regional commanders from around the globe for meetings and a dinner with President Obama on Jan. 11, the war game prepared for them had nothing to do with Afghanistan, Iraq or Yemen. Instead, it was the simulated cyberattack — a battle unlike any they had engaged in.

Participants in the war game emerged with a worrisome realization. Because the Internet has blurred the line between military and civilian targets, an adversary can cripple a country — say, freeze its credit markets — without ever taking aim at a government installation or a military network, meaning that the Defense Department’s advanced capabilities may not be brought to bear short of a presidential order.

“The fact of the matter,” said one senior intelligence official, “is that unless Google had told us about the attack on it and other companies, we probably never would have seen it. When you think about that, it’s really scary.”

William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, who oversaw the simulation, said in an interview after the exercise that America’s concepts for protecting computer networks reminded him of one of defensive warfare’s great failures, the Maginot Line of pre-World War II France.

Mr. Lynn, one of the Pentagon’s top strategists for computer network operations, argues that the billions spent on defensive shields surrounding America’s banks, businesses and military installations provide a similarly illusory sense of security.

“A fortress mentality will not work in cyber,” he said. “We cannot retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls. We must also keep maneuvering. If we stand still for a minute, our adversaries will overtake us.”

The Pentagon simulation and the nearly simultaneous real-world attacks on Google and more than 30 other companies show that those firewalls are falling fast. But if it is obvious that the government cannot afford to do nothing about such breaches, it is also clear that the old principles of retaliation — you bomb Los Angeles, we’ll destroy Moscow — just do not translate.

“We are looking beyond just the pure military might as the solution to every deterrence problem,” said Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, in charge of the military’s Strategic Command, which defends military computer networks. “There are other elements of national power that can be brought to bear. You could deter a country with some economic moves, for example.”

But first you would have to figure out who was behind the attack.

Even Google’s engineers could not track, with absolute certainty, the attackers who appeared to be trying to steal their source code and, perhaps, insert a “Trojan horse” — a backdoor entryway to attack — in Google’s search engines. Chinese officials have denied their government was involved, and said nothing about American demands that it investigate. China’s denials, American officials say, are one reason that President Obama has said nothing in public about the attacks — a notable silence, given that he has made cybersecurity a central part of national security strategy.

“You have to be quite careful about attributions and accusations,” said a senior administration official deeply involved in dealing with the Chinese incident with Google. The official was authorized by the Obama administration to talk about its strategy, with the condition that he would not be named.

“It’s the nature of these attacks that the forensics are difficult,” the official added. “The perpetrator can mask their involvement, or disguise it as another country’s.” Those are known as “false flag” attacks, and American officials worry about being fooled by a dissident group, or a criminal gang, into retaliating against the wrong country.

Nonetheless, the White House said in a statement that “deterrence has been a fundamental part of the administration’s cybersecurity efforts from the start,” citing work in the past year to protect networks and “international engagement to influence the behavior of potential adversaries.”

Left unsaid is whether the Obama administration has decided whether it would ever threaten retaliatory cyberattacks or military attacks after a major cyberattack on American targets. The senior administration official provided by the White House, asked about Mr. Obama’s thinking on the issue, said: “Like most operational things like this, the less said, the better.” But he added, “there are authorities to deal with these attacks residing in many places, and ultimately, of course, with the president.”

Others are less convinced. “The U.S. is widely recognized to have pre-eminent offensive cybercapabilities, but it obtains little or no deterrent effect from this,” said James A. Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies program on technology and public policy.

In its final years, the Bush administration started a highly classified effort, led by Melissa Hathaway, to build the foundations of a national cyberdeterrence strategy. “We didn’t even come close,” she said in a recent interview. Her hope had been to recreate Project Solarium, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower began in the sunroom of the White House in 1953, to come up with new ways of thinking about the nuclear threats then facing the country. “There was a lot of good work done, but it lacked the rigor of the original Solarium Project. They didn’t produce what you need to do decision making.”

Ms. Hathaway was asked to stay on to run Mr. Obama’s early review. Yet when the unclassified version of its report was published in the spring, there was little mention of deterrence. She left the administration when she was not chosen as the White House cybersecurity coordinator. After a delay of seven months, that post is now filled: Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran computer specialist, reported for work last week, just as the government was sorting through the lessons of the Google attack and calculating its chances of halting a more serious one in the future.

Government-Corporate Divide

In nuclear deterrence, both the Americans and the Soviets knew it was all or nothing: the Cuban missile crisis was resolved out of fear of catastrophic escalation. But in cyberattacks, the damage can range from the minor to the catastrophic, from slowing computer searches to bringing down a country’s cellphone networks, neutralizing its spy satellites, or crashing its electrical grid or its air traffic control systems. It is difficult to know if small attacks could escalate into bigger ones.

So part of the problem is to calibrate a response to the severity of the attack.

The government has responded to the escalating cyberattacks by ordering up new strategies and a new United States Cyber Command. The office of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — whose unclassified e-mail system was hacked in 2007 — is developing a “framework document” that would describe the threat and potential responses, and perhaps the beginnings of a deterrence strategy to parallel the one used in the nuclear world.

The new Cyber Command, if approved by Congress, would be run by Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of the National Security Agency. Since the agency spies on the computer systems of foreign governments and terrorist groups, General Alexander would, in effect, be in charge of both finding and, if so ordered, neutralizing cyberattacks in the making.

But many in the military, led by General Chilton of the Strategic Command and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been urging the United States to think more broadly about ways to deter attacks by threatening a country’s economic well-being or its reputation.

Mrs. Clinton went down that road in her speech on Thursday, describing how a country that cracked down on Internet freedom or harbored groups that conduct cyberattacks could be ostracized. But though sanctions might work against a small country, few companies are likely to shun a market the size of China, or Russia, because they disapprove of how those governments control cyberspace or use cyberweapons.

That is what makes the Google-China standoff so fascinating. Google broke the silence that usually surrounds cyberattacks; most American banks or companies do not want to admit their computer systems were pierced. Google has said it will stop censoring searches conducted by Chinese, even if that means being thrown out of China. The threat alone is an attempt at deterrence: Google’s executives are essentially betting that Beijing will back down, lift censorship of searches and crack down on the torrent of cyberattacks that pour out of China every day. If not, millions of young Chinese will be deprived of the Google search engine, and be left to the ones controlled by the Chinese government.

An Obama administration official who has been dealing with the Chinese mused recently, “You could argue that Google came up with a potential deterrent for the Chinese before we did.”

    In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent, NYT, 26.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/world/26cyber.html

China Rebuffs Clinton on Internet Warning

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — The Chinese Foreign Ministry lashed out Friday against criticism of China in a speech on Internet censorship made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, calling on the United States government “to respect the truth and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom question to level baseless accusations.”

Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement posted Friday afternoon on the ministry’s Web site that the criticism leveled by Mrs. Clinton on Thursday was “harmful to Sino-American relations.”

“The Chinese Internet is open,” he said.

The statement by the Foreign Ministry, along with a scathing editorial in the English-language edition of The Global Times, a populist, patriotic newspaper, signaled that China was ready to wrestle politically with the United States in the debate over Internet censorship.

President Obama promised last year to start a more conciliatory era in United States-China relations, pushing human rights issues to the background, but the new criticism of China’s Internet censorship and rising tensions over currency valuation and Taiwan arms sales indicate that animus could flare in the months ahead.

Mrs. Clinton’s sweeping speech with its cold war undertones — likening the information curtain to the Iron Curtain — criticized several countries by name, including China, for Internet censorship. It was the first speech in which a top administration official offered a vision for making Internet freedom an integral part of foreign policy.

The debate over Internet censorship was brought to the fore in China last week when Google announced it might shut down its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, and curtail its other operations in mainland China if Chinese officials did not back down from requiring Google to censor search results.

Until now, the Chinese government had been trying to frame the dispute with Google as a commercial matter, perhaps because officials want to avoid having the dispute become a referendum on Internet censorship policies among Chinese liberals and foreign companies operating in China. On Thursday, He Yafei, a vice foreign minister, had said the Google dispute should not be “over-interpreted” or linked to the bilateral relationship with the United States, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency.

But in the aftermath of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, that attitude could be changing. Mrs. Clinton pointedly said that “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world” and identified China as one of a handful of countries that had stepped up Internet censorship in the past year. (Starting in late 2008, the Chinese government shut down thousands of Web sites under the pretext of an antipornography campaign.) She also praised American companies such as Google that are “making the issue of Internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions.”

The State Department had invited at least two prominent Chinese bloggers to travel to Washington for Mrs. Clinton’s speech, and on Friday the United States Embassy here invited bloggers, mostly liberals, to attend a briefing on Internet issues.

A White House spokesman, Bill Burton, said Friday that “all we are looking for from China are some answers.”

In its editorial, the English-language edition of The Global Times said Mrs. Clinton “had raised the stakes in Washington’s clash with Beijing over Internet freedom.”

The American demand for an unfettered Internet was a form of “information imperialism,” the newspaper said, because less developed nations cannot possibly compete with Western countries in the arena of information flow.

“The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted Internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy,” the newspaper said, adding that the “U.S. government’s ideological imposition is unacceptable and, for that reason, will not be allowed to succeed.”

Articles on the Chinese-language Web site of The Global Times asserted that the United States employs the Internet as a weapon to achieve worldwide hegemony.

One big question is whether ordinary Chinese will, to any large degree, accept China’s arguments justifying Internet censorship. Although urban, middle-class Chinese often support government policies on sovereignty issues such as Tibet or Taiwan, they generally deride media censorship. That feeling is especially pronounced among those who call themselves netizens. China has the most Internet users of any country, some 384 million by official count, but also the most complex system of Internet censorship, nicknamed the Great Firewall.

Except in the western region of Xinjiang, which is only starting to restore Internet access after cutting service off entirely after ethnic riots in July, canny netizens across China use software to get over the Great Firewall while chafing at the controls.

Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.

    China Rebuffs Clinton on Internet Warning, NYT, 23.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/world/asia/23diplo.html

Clinton Urges a Global Response to Internet Attacks

January 22, 2010
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Coupling a salute to Internet freedom with a carefully worded caution to countries like China and Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that countries that engaged in cyberattacks should face consequences and international condemnation.

“In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all,” she said in a speech in Washington. “By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons.”

Mrs. Clinton’s comments came in a speech in which she announced a new $15 million effort to help more young people, women and citizens groups in other countries communicate on the Web.

“Given the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing, we need people around the world to pool their knowledge and creativity to help rebuild the global economy, protect our environment, defeat violent extremism and build a future in which every human being can realize their God-given potential,” she said, according to the advance text of a speech at the Newseum in Washington.

Her remarks came at a time when Internet controls have drawn increasing public attention. Limits on Internet searches led to a dispute made public this month between Google and China, and sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which played a critical role in helping protesters in Iran spread news and images of violent crackdowns on antigovernment demonstrations, have been blocked by the authorities in Tehran.

Foreign companies and millions of Chinese Google users have been watching the matter with keen interest.

Google announced on Jan. 12 that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” search results for its Chinese users, pointing to breaches of Gmail accounts held by human rights activists in China. Tens of other companies had also been targets of hacking, the company found. Google has taken a cautious approach to the dispute, avoiding placing direct blame on the government in Beijing, and the Chinese government has sought to describe the situation as strictly business.

None of the proposals Mrs. Clinton mentioned focused specifically on China or Iran, and the financing is relatively modest.

Still, Mrs. Clinton made an unmistakable allusion to Google and China when she said, “Countries or individuals that engage in cyberattacks should face consequences and international condemnation.

She did not suggest what the consequences should be, though.

Five United States senators, led by Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, have urged Mrs. Clinton to move quickly to support organizations that have tried to make it easier for people in countries like China and Iran to sidestep government restrictions on Internet use.

The senators, in a letter written before the recent Google dispute, urged Mrs. Clinton to quickly spend $45 million earmarked over the last two years for Internet freedom.

Her announcement, while calling for spending just a third that amount, appeared to be otherwise in line with their urgings.

Mrs. Clinton said the new programs would help expand Internet access to women and other groups, put in place programs to train and support civil society groups and nongovernmental organizations in new media technologies; and support pilot projects to increase access, particularly among young people, in the Middle East and North Africa.

Mrs. Clinton paid tribute to the power of the Internet both for opening new forums for the exchange of ideas and for fostering social and economic development. “In this context,” she said, “the Internet can serve as a great equalizer. By providing people with access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create opportunity where none exists.”

Brett Solomon, executive director of the group AccessNow.org, which promotes digital openness, praised Mrs. Clinton’s speech.

“This is a big couple of weeks for Internet freedom,” he said, mentioning both Google’s stand and Mrs. Clinton’s proposal. “Digital activists across the world may now increasingly see their demands for democracy and justice pierce the firewall.”

    Clinton Urges a Global Response to Internet Attacks, NYT, 22.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world/asia/22diplo.html

China Cautions Internet Companies

January 15, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — After Google announced it would quit China unless the nation’s censors eased their grip, the government on Thursday offered an indirect but unambiguous response: Companies that do business in China must follow the laws of the land.

Beijing’s comments, offered by two officials on Thursday, suggested that China was unlikely to give in to Google’s demands that its search-engine results be unfiltered.

In announcing its decision Tuesday to possibly leave the world’s biggest Internet market, Google also cited a series of cyberattacks aimed at breaching the Gmail accounts of human rights advocates.

Several of those who say their e-mail accounts were hacked provided more details about those assaults on Thursday.

After a day of silence on the issue, the Foreign Ministry said China welcomed foreign Internet companies but those offering online services must do so “in accordance with the law.” Speaking at a regular news conference, Jiang Yu, a ministry spokeswoman, did not address Google’s complaints about censorship and cyberattacks, and she simply stated, “China’s Internet is open.”

The remarks, and those of a high-ranking propaganda official who called for even tighter Internet restrictions, may speed Google’s departure and increase frictions between Beijing and Washington. The Obama administration has said Internet freedom and online security are priorities.

“The recent cyberintrusion that Google attributes to China is troubling, and the federal government is looking into it,” Nicholas Shapiro, a White House spokesman, said Wednesday.

Beyond voicing concern, American officials have yet to say how they might respond. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday that the White House had been briefed by Google on the company’s decision. However, he declined to describe a course of action.

If the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s comments were vague, those of Wang Chen, the information director for the State Council, or cabinet, were more pointed.

In a transcript of an interview posted on the agency’s Web site on Thursday, Mr. Wang urged Internet companies to increase scrutiny of news or information that might threaten national stability and stressed the importance of “guiding” online public opinion.

“China’s Internet is entering an important stage of development, confronting both rare opportunities and severe challenges,” he said. “Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty.”

    China Cautions Internet Companies, NYT, 15.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/asia/15beijing.html

In Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cybersecurity

January 14, 2010
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT and JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — Even before Google threatened to pull out of China in response to an attack on its computer systems, the company was notifying activists whose e-mail accounts might have been compromised by hackers.

In a world where vast amounts of personal information stored online can quickly reveal a network of friends and associates, Google’s move to protect individuals from government surveillance required quick action. In early January, Tenzin Seldon, a 20-year-old Stanford student and Tibetan activist, was told by university officials to contact Google because her Gmail account had been hacked.

Ms. Seldon, the Indian-born daughter of Tibetan refugees, said she immediately contacted David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer.

“David informed me that my account was hacked by someone in China,” Ms. Seldon said in a telephone interview. “They were concerned and asked whether they could see my laptop.”

Ms. Seldon immediately changed her password and became more careful of what she wrote. She also allowed Google to examine her personal computer at the company’s request. Google returned it this week, saying that while no viruses or malware had been detected, her account had indeed been entered surreptitiously.

Google confirmed Ms. Seldon’s account of events, but declined to say whether it had notified other activists who might have been victims of hacking.

Mr. Drummond said that an attack originating in China was aimed at its corporate infrastructure.

While the full scope of the attacks on Google and several dozen other companies remains unclear, the events set off immediate alarms in Washington, where the Obama administration has previously expressed concern about international computer security and attacks on Western companies.

Neither the sequence of events leading to Google’s decision nor the company’s ultimate goal in rebuking China is fully understood. But this was not the first time that the company had considered withdrawing from China, according to a former company executive. It had clashed repeatedly with Chinese officials over censorship demands, the executive said.

Google said on Tuesday that that in its investigation of the attacks on corporations, it found that the Gmail accounts of Chinese and Tibetan activists, like Ms. Seldon, had been compromised in separate attacks involving phishing and spyware.

Independent security researchers said that at least 34 corporations had been targets of the attacks originating in China.

Adobe, a software maker, said it had been the victim of an attack, but said that it did not know if it was linked to the hacking of Google. Some reports suggested that Yahoo had been a victim, but a person with knowledge said that Yahoo did not think that it been subject to the same attack as Google.

The decision by Google to draw a line and threaten to end its business operations in China brought attention to reports of Chinese high-technology espionage stretching back at least a decade. But despite Google’s suggestion that the hacking came from within China, it remained unclear who was responsible. Nevertheless, it presented the Obama administration with a problem of how to respond.

Google’s description of the attacks closely matches a vast surveillance system called Ghostnet that was reported in March by a group of Canadian researchers based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto. They found that an automated espionage system based in China was using targeted e-mail messages to compromise thousands of computers in hundreds of governmental organizations. In each case, after the computers were controlled by the attackers, they were able to scan for documents that were then stolen and transferred to a digital storage facility in China.

The researchers stopped short of directly accusing the Chinese government of masterminding the attacks. However, for years there have been reports of attacks planned by so-called patriotic hackers in China, and many American security specialists argue that these are simply irregular elements of the People’s Liberation Army. At the same time, hackers frequently use so-called false flag espionage or denial of service attacks to route their activities through the computers of a third country and hide their identity.

One of the Canadian researchers said that fellow computer security researchers suspected that the attack on Google and other recent intrusions relied on hackers sending booby-trapped documents that were stored in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader format, which then infect victims’ computers. This method was seen in a recent wave of attacks on the Dalai Lama’s computers. “We’ve seen a huge upsurge in attacks using Adobe Acrobat,” said Greg Walton, an editor at Information Warfare Monitor, a publication of the Canadian research group.

A spokeswoman for Adobe said the company was investigating the reports, but could not confirm that the Adobe software was linked to the most recent attacks.

For Google, the attacks appeared to have been the final straw in a series of confrontations with Chinese authorities.

Top Google executives, including the chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, and the co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were ambivalent about the decision to go into China in 2006, which involved agreeing to censor some search results on the company’s local search engine, according to a former executive with knowledge of the discussions. The resistance was strong from Mr. Brin, who had grown up in the Soviet Union.

But after discussions and internal lobbying from Chinese and Chinese-American employees inside Google, as well as some of the company’s sales executives, Google’s top executives came around. They were particularly swayed by the argument that even a censored version of Google’s search engine would provide Chinese people more access to information and help promote free expression in that country.

Once the decision was made, however, Google began expanding its operation in China, which it expected would grow to be one of the largest Internet markets. During Mr. Schmidt’s 2006 visit to China, shortly after Google introduced the company’s China-based search engine, Google.cn, he told reporters that it would be “arrogant” to try to change China’s censorship laws.

But repeated clashes with Chinese authorities caused Google to reconsider its decision on many occasions, the former executives said. Things almost collapsed in 2008, when Chinese government officials asked Google to censor results not only on Google.cn but also on Google.com. the company’s English-language search engine. Google refused, and after the 2008 Olympics, Chinese officials dropped the issue.

Google now says it thinks that its attempt to help bring openness to China has failed.

“We were looking at an environment that is more difficult than it was when we started,” Mr. Drummond said in an interview on Tuesday. “Far from our presence helping to open things up, it seems that things are getting tighter for open expression and freedom.”

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday that the White House had been briefed by Google on the company’s decision. However, he declined to describe what actions the government might take in response to the claims of Chinese-directed Internet attacks.

“The recent cyberintrusion that Google attributes to China is troubling, and the federal government is looking into it,” said a White House spokesman, Nicholas Shapiro. He said that the president had stated that Internet freedom was a central human rights issue on a recent China trip. He also said that the president had made Internet security a national priority.

Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman, said Google’s decision to publicize the attacks was motivated in part by its desire to alert activists that their accounts could have been compromised.

The attacks present a challenge for the Obama administration, which last year debated the role of a federal Internet security adviser. The administration is grappling on how to balance stricter security controls and the freedom of technology companies to innovate.

Several Internet security specialists were quick to point out that a group within the White House led by Lawrence H. Summers, the national economic adviser, had pointed to Google in debates on the appointment as an example of an innovative Silicon Valley company that might be hamstrung by strict new Internet security restrictions.

“It’s ironic that the new economy folks at the White House were pushing back against faster movement on cybersecurity to protect companies like Google from stricter regulations,” said James Lewis, an Internet security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Last year, Mr. Lewis led a bipartisan study calling for the creation of a strong Internet czar reporting directly to the president to combat a rash of new security threats.

The White House said on Tuesday that Robert A. Schmidt, a compromise candidate who was chosen last month to be the Internet security adviser, would not start in the position until later in the month.

Ashlee Vance contributed reporting from Mountain View, Calif., and Thom Shanker from Washington.

    In Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cybersecurity, NYT, 14.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/technology/14google.html