History > 2011 > USA > Internet (II)

Google’s Chief Works

to Trim a Bloated Ship

November 9, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, so hates wasting time at meetings that he once dumped his secretary to avoid being scheduled for them. He does not much like e-mail either — even his own Gmail — saying the tedious back-and-forth takes too long to solve problems.

Mr. Page has never been more impatient than he is now. He is on an urgent mission to pull Google through a midlife crisis that threatens to knock it off its perch as the coolest company in Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1998, Google is not yet 15, but in tech years, it is an aging giant that moves a lot slower than it did when it was a hot start-up. It is losing employees to the new, hotter start-ups, and is being pushed around by government regulators and competitors like Facebook, Apple and Amazon, which are all vying for people’s online time.

So Mr. Page, Google’s co-founder and former chief executive, who returned to the top job in April, is making changes large and small. He dropped more than 25 projects, saying they were not popular enough. He masterminded Google’s biggest deal by billions, the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility bid, a bold move that positions the company to enter the hardware business.

Borrowing from the playbooks of executives like Steven P. Jobs and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, he has put his personal imprint on the corporate culture, from discouraging excessive use of e-mail to embracing quick, unilateral decision-making — by him, if need be.

“Ever since taking over as C.E.O., I have focused much of my energy on increasing Google’s velocity and execution, and we’re beginning to see results,” Mr. Page, 38, told analysts recently.

Naysayers fret that in his rush to refocus the company, and especially in ending projects, he risks squelching Google’s trademark innovation, which bubbles up when engineers are given the time to experiment. “He’s going to lose some people at the end of the day,” said one employee who, like others, agreed to speak only anonymously because the company bars them from talking to the press without prior approval.

“He’s certainly been active,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst covering Google at Citigroup. “Whether he’ll be active and successful, we don’t know.”

His new responsibilities have changed Mr. Page, an engineer by training and personality. Judging by his few public appearances, he has learned to talk the corporate talk to shareholders and analysts, though he still generally declines to speak to the press, including for this article.

He even broke down and hired an administrative assistant, after letting his previous one go years ago. She schedules him for those dreaded meetings. But they are only 50 minutes long, because in one of his first companywide memos after he took the job, he decreed that hourlong meetings must allow time for a bathroom break in between.

Despite the many external pressures on Google, it is dominant in its business and highly profitable. But, when asked at a recent conference about the biggest threat to his company, Mr. Page answered in one word, “Google.”

The problem was that the company had ballooned so quickly — it now has more than 31,000 employees and $27.3 billion in revenue so far this year — that it had become sclerotic. A triumvirate of Mr. Page, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s former chief and current chairman, had to agree before anything could be done. The unwieldy management and glacial pace of decision-making were particularly noticeable in the Valley, where start-ups overtake behemoths in months.

It is different now.

“It’s much more of a style like Steve Jobs than the three-headed monster that Google was,” said a former Google executive who has spoken with current executives about the changes and spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When Eric was there, you’d walk into a product meeting or a senior staff meeting, and everyone got to weigh in on every decision. Larry is much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later.”

The changes began just a week after Mr. Page started the new job. He streamlined Google’s notoriously labyrinthine structure, and sent the e-mail on meetings. He began requiring senior executives to show up at headquarters for an informal face-to-face meeting at least once a week to plow through decisions, an idea he borrowed from Mr. Bloomberg.

Salar Kamangar, senior vice president of YouTube, said Mr. Page forced him and another executive to settle a dispute in person that they had been waging over e-mail. “He called us into the office that day, very principal-style, and made sure we resolved the difference before we left the room,” Mr. Kamangar said.

Although Mr. Page is more attentive to detail than Mr. Schmidt — becoming deeply involved in initiatives as small as giving Gmail’s home page a bigger sign-in box — he is also pushing employees to think big. “He tried to get all of us to step back a little bit and just make sure that the long-term things weren’t getting drowned out by the incremental,” said Alan Eustace, senior vice president for search.

The most significant change at the company is the killing of projects Mr. Page deems unworthy. One of the initiatives he has abandoned is Google Buzz, an ill-fated social networking tool.

Some employees find it frustrating to discover they do not fit into Mr. Page’s plans. “These teams are unfortunate casualties of these types of decisions,” one said.

Google risks losing its next business before it has time to grow, some say. Gmail, for instance, grew out of so-called 20 percent time, which Google gives employees to experiment with new ideas.

That risk is worth it, and signals a more mature Google, Mr. Brin said in a recent interview.

“We’ve launched some weaker services, honestly,” he said. “We don’t want to be left with a complicated array of good-but-not-great services.”

Still, Mr. Page remains popular among the rank and file, not the least because he has “geek street cred,” another employee said.

That does not go over as well with the outside world, and Mr. Schmidt has remained the public face of Google in many instances at conferences and before the Senate. But Mr. Page has showed newfound warmth on earnings conference calls that are obligatory for chief executives. At a recent one, his long speech began, “I’m excited to be on the call.”

He has also been forced to adjust to other aspects of the chief executive job, like near-constant demands on his time.

Some of the only personal posts on his public Google+ account these days are kiteboarding pictures from a trip to Alaska. “These are from a while ago,” he wrote — there is apparently little time for hobbies now.

    Google’s Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/technology/googles-chief-works-to-trim-a-bloated-ship.html

Republicans Embrace Twitter Hard for ’12

October 24, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s image projected from one of the many television screens that hang in Representative Eric Cantor’s office suite, where the president could be seen telling a crowd in North Carolina that he was open to “any serious idea” Republicans offered on jobs.

Within seconds, Brad Dayspring, Mr. Cantor’s Rasputin of retort, was on the case, his fingers ripping across the keyboard as if individually caffeinated. “Obama says he’s open to any “serious #GOP idea,” typed Mr. Dayspring, the aggressive spokesman for Mr. Cantor, the Republican from Virginia who serves as House majority leader, in a message on Twitter. “Here are 15 jobs bills stalled in the Senate to get him started.” A link from Mr. Cantor’s blog was quickly pasted in, the send button was hit, and Mr. Dayspring sat back slightly in his chair, pleased.

Barely a minute goes by between the time Mr. Obama — or a high-ranking member of his administration — makes a speech, holds a news conference or says something to a talk show host, and a team of young Republican House staffers, fueled by pizza and partisanship, punches back.

It’s a bit of a table turn on Mr. Obama, whose 2008 campaign masterfully capitalized on social media in a way that left Republicans bruised and scrambling. Now, after a post-election order from Speaker John A. Boehner that year, House Republicans have embraced Twitter as their karaoke microphone to push their message against the White House bullhorn.

The insta-Tweet has revolutionized rapid response operations that just two years ago relied heavily on cable television, e-mails and news conferences to spread the word of the opposition, which often took a day or two to gain momentum. That time lag could delay the message from taking hold, a result Republicans were eager to undo.

“In the Hill environment, minutes count,” said Mr. Dayspring, whose mad-dash Twitter messaging is supplemented by his colleague Brian Patrick, Mr. Cantor’s blogger and a Twitter expert who is known as Boomer for his ability to pump up Republican crowds.

“It’s far more like a campaign environment now,” Mr. Dayspring said.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama made productive use of Facebook, MySpace and his Web site as tools of outreach and organization. Through social media, money was raised, volunteers were gathered, events were publicized and videos of the candidate went instantly viral. His Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was flat-footed in the same arena (though he has become a devout Twitter believer since). Out of that experience was born a list of roughly 13 million Twitter users, like the famous Republican mailing lists of the past, this one on steroids.

At a January 2009 retreat, as defeated Republicans licked their wounds, Mr. Boehner told his colleagues that they needed to “think about the potential of new media,” according to a copy of his remarks. He urged members and their staff to immediately get themselves on YouTube and Twitter, as he did. Without control of the House floor, it became the Republican’s main messaging tool as they mounted their successful push to capture control of the House. Now, it is their weapon of repetition.

House Republican members have more than twice as many followers as their Democratic counterparts — about 1.3 million versus roughly 600,000 — and are far more active on Twitter with more than 157,000 individual Twitter messages, versus roughly 62,000 for Democrats.

“Once Republicans get their act together, they are really good at organizing,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Media, which studies how technology is changing politics. Republicans in the House are using technology “in order to blunt the power of the White House in a new political media ecology that benefits from speed,” he said.

But if officials at the White House were to apply a hashtag to the opposition’s Twitter efforts, it might be #notimpressed.

“The Republicans in Congress are using new media technology to compete for the attention of Beltway reporters,” said Josh Earnest, the White House deputy press secretary. “We use it to compete for the attention of the American people,” he said, pointing to interactive forums that the White House conducts. “These are two different goals.”

At a daily meeting in Mr. Boehner’s office, the communications staff decides what they should be Twittering and blogging about, said Don Seymour, the speaker’s digital communications director. He sits at a desk with one computer for his e-mail and another monitor for his Tweet Deck, his iPad on his lap and a Coke in one hand. A half-dozen televisions show various stations and the House and Senate floors above, where someone might say something that begs for instant reaction.

If so, there is a quick video playback of what is said, rapid research — sometimes vetted by policy makers, to determine how that might be inconsistent with prior statements — then a response, often within minutes.

These efforts are sometimes coordinated with committee aides when a relevant issue may be the center of the day’s conversation. “What makes it effective is that it works in concert with everything else,” Mr. Seymour said.

Recently when Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said during a committee meeting that Republicans lacked a jobs agenda, Mr. Patrick from Mr. Cantor’s office remembered that Mr. Levin had referred to a bipartisan free trade bill as a “jobs bill” during a floor debate. This became e-mail and Twitter hay in a matter of 15 minutes.

“We scan for statements all day,” Mr. Patrick said. “On the night of Mr. Obama’s big jobs speech before Congress last month, House Republicans blogged, Tweeted and e-mailed before, during and right after the speech. They picked apart numbers, discredited programs and offered areas of compromise, all with links. It created an instant echo chamber, even though it was basically House Republicans talking among themselves at first.

But the goal and hope is that a message will be picked up and re-Twittered by influential reporters, bloggers or, mother lode, the Drudge report.

Staff members tend to have the trust of their bosses to be as professional as they would be in a news release; many of those bosses have their staff members send out Twitter messages under their handle.

And on Monday, Republicans took Mr. Obama’s slogan for his jobs bill, “We Can’t Wait,” and started using the hashtag #WeCantWait to criticize him on Twitter by highlighting House-passed antiregulation legislation that lingers, never to be picked up in the Senate.

Still, Mr. Obama has over 10 million Twitter followers, and his staff, like the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, are known to hit back on Twitter; Mr. Carney’s fight with Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, over Mr. Obama’s jobs plan became the subject of a nightly news report.

Further, left-leaning organizations like Moveon.org and Think Progress are widely viewed, even among Republicans, as surpassing their conservative counterparts on the new media playing field.

As the 2012 campaign heats up, policy fights that used to play out in old-school direct mailings and television advertisements are likely to migrate to Twitter.

“This is the first time that both parties have people on staff who are specifically focused on social media and willing to deploy and use it.” Mr. Rasiej, of Personal Democracy Media, said. “It won’t be tanks against the cavalry this time. Both sides have tanks, both sides have fighter jets and both sides may have nuclear bombs.”

    Republicans Embrace Twitter Hard for ’12, NYT, 24.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/us/politics/after-being-burned-in-08-republicans-embrace-twitter-hard-for-12.html

WikiLeaks Block May Force Its End, Founder Warns

October 24, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said on Monday that his controversial Web site could be forced to shut down by the end of the year because a 10-month-old “financial blockade” had sharply reduced the donations on which it depends.

Calling the blockade a “dangerous, oppressive and undemocratic” attack led by the United States, Mr. Assange said at a news conference here that it had deprived his organization of “tens of millions of dollars,” and warned, “If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade, we will not be able to continue by the turn of the new year.”

Since the end of 2010, financial intermediaries, including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union, have refused to allow donations to WikiLeaks to flow through their systems, he said, blocking “95 percent” of the Web site’s revenue and leaving it to operate on its cash reserves for the past 10 months. An aide said that WikiLeaks was now receiving less than $10,000 a month in donations.

Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had been forced to halt work on the processing of tens of thousands of secret documents that it has received, and to turn its attention instead to lawsuits it has filed in the United States, Australia, Scandinavian countries and elsewhere, as well as to a formal petition to the European Commission to try to restore donors’ ability to send it money through normal channels.

WikiLeaks receives and publishes confidential documents from whistle-blowers and leakers, who are eager to see the site continue with the “publishing” sensations that drew worldwide attention last year. WikiLeaks released and passed to news organizations huge quantities of secret United States military and diplomatic cables on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other subjects. Among the organizations the group worked with were The New York Times; Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine; and The Guardian, a British newspaper.

Mr. Assange held the news conference while on a brief break from his effective house arrest on a country estate 100 miles outside London. Limits on his movements are part of the bail conditions imposed on him last year while British courts decide whether to extradite him to Sweden. The authorities there want him to answer questions related to accusations that he sexually abused two women during a visit to Stockholm in the summer of 2010. A British appeals court ruling on the extradition, pending for months, is expected at any time.

At the news conference on Monday, Mr. Assange said that he and WikiLeaks were victims of a “conspiracy to smear and destroy” them, led by the United States Treasury, American intelligence agencies and “right-wing” forces in the United States, including powerful corporations led by the Bank of America and its Visa credit card division. He said the attack had also included “high-level calls” to assassinate him and other WikiLeaks associates, but offered no specifics to support the allegation.

The finances of WikiLeaks, and of Mr. Assange personally, have been part of the controversy that has swirled around the organization for the past year. Internal disputes have prompted several of Mr. Assange’s closest associates to quit the organization, and one of the issues they have raised concerns the tight, even secretive, control he maintained over its money.

This year, the Wau Holland Foundation, an organization that has operated as a channel for WikiLeaks donations and as a keeper of the organization’s books, issued a report saying that WikiLeaks raised a total of $1.8 million in 2010, and spent slightly more than $550,000, leaving an apparent surplus of about $1.3 million at the start of 2011. A representative of Wau Holland who appeared with Mr. Assange on Monday at the Frontline Club in London said that its work for WikiLeaks had also been halted by the American financial measures. Asked in an e-mail after the news conference for details of WikiLeaks’ current financial status, Wau Holland said it would respond by the end of the week.

A signal that WikiLeaks was in increasing financial distress came last month when a collection of memorabilia associated with Mr. Assange was put up for sale on the WikiLeaks Web site. The items included a sachet of prison coffee he said he had smuggled out of the Wandsworth Prison, where he was briefly held last year before bail was set in the extradition case, and an “exclusive” photograph of Mr. Assange at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, where he has lived since then.

One standout item in the sale was a laptop computer said to have been used in the preparation of the secret American government cables that WikiLeaks released; it was posted at a “buy it now” price of more than $550,000, with the highest early bid coming in at $6,000, according to a BBC report at the time. In a Twitter posting, WikiLeaks vaunted the attractions of the laptop, telling potential buyers, “In this exclusive auction item, you will get the full set of WikiLeaks cables, the WikiLeaks computer and its passwords.”

Mr. Assange responded brusquely on Monday when a reporter asked whether donations to WikiLeaks had been used to finance his extradition battle, with legal bills running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. A posting on the WikiLeaks Web site invites donations to the “WikiLeaks and Julian Assange Defence Fund,” but Mr. Assange said that no money intended for WikiLeaks had been used for his legal defense.

Last month, Canongate Books, based in Edinburgh, published a 340-page biography of Mr. Assange based on 50 hours of interviews he gave to a writer, Andrew O’Hagan, that were initially intended to yield a memoir. Mr. Assange later repudiated his book contract and, according to newspaper reports, refused to return a $650,000 advance; sales of the book have been sluggish.

    WikiLeaks Block May Force Its End, Founder Warns, NYT, 24.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/europe/
    blocks-on-wikileaks-donations-may-force-its-end-julian-assange-warns.html

Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70

October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR

Dennis M. Ritchie, who helped shape the modern digital era by creating software tools that power things as diverse as search engines like Google and smartphones, was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Berkeley Heights, N.J. He was 70.

Mr. Ritchie, who lived alone, was in frail health in recent years after treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease, said his brother Bill.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator.

The C programming language, a shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation, is still widely used today, and successors like C++ and Java build on the ideas, rules and grammar that Mr. Ritchie designed. The Unix operating system has similarly had a rich and enduring impact. Its free, open-source variant, Linux, powers many of the world’s data centers, like those at Google and Amazon, and its technology serves as the foundation of operating systems, like Apple’s iOS, in consumer computing devices.

“The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today,” said Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University who worked with Mr. Ritchie at Bell Labs.

Those tools were more than inventive bundles of computer code. The C language and Unix reflected a point of view, a different philosophy of computing than what had come before. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, minicomputers were moving into companies and universities — smaller and at a fraction of the price of hulking mainframes.

Minicomputers represented a step in the democratization of computing, and Unix and C were designed to open up computing to more people and collaborative working styles. Mr. Ritchie, Mr. Thompson and their Bell Labs colleagues were making not merely software but, as Mr. Ritchie once put it, “a system around which fellowship can form.”

C was designed for systems programmers who wanted to get the fastest performance from operating systems, compilers and other programs. “C is not a big language — it’s clean, simple, elegant,” Mr. Kernighan said. “It lets you get close to the machine, without getting tied up in the machine.”

Such higher-level languages had earlier been intended mainly to let people without a lot of programming skill write programs that could run on mainframes. Fortran was for scientists and engineers, while Cobol was for business managers.

C, like Unix, was designed mainly to let the growing ranks of professional programmers work more productively. And it steadily gained popularity. With Mr. Kernighan, Mr. Ritchie wrote a classic text, “The C Programming Language,” also known as “K. & R.” after the authors’ initials, whose two editions, in 1978 and 1988, have sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born on Sept. 9, 1941, in Bronxville, N.Y. His father, Alistair, was an engineer at Bell Labs, and his mother, Jean McGee Ritchie, was a homemaker. When he was a child, the family moved to Summit, N.J., where Mr. Ritchie grew up and attended high school. He then went to Harvard, where he majored in applied mathematics.

While a graduate student at Harvard, Mr. Ritchie worked at the computer center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and became more interested in computing than math. He was recruited by the Sandia National Laboratories, which conducted weapons research and testing. “But it was nearly 1968,” Mr. Ritchie recalled in an interview in 2001, “and somehow making A-bombs for the government didn’t seem in tune with the times.”

Mr. Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967, and soon began his fruitful collaboration with Mr. Thompson on both Unix and the C programming language. The pair represented the two different strands of the nascent discipline of computer science. Mr. Ritchie came to computing from math, while Mr. Thompson came from electrical engineering.

“We were very complementary,” said Mr. Thompson, who is now an engineer at Google. “Sometimes personalities clash, and sometimes they meld. It was just good with Dennis.”

Besides his brother Bill, of Alexandria, Va., Mr. Ritchie is survived by another brother, John, of Newton, Mass., and a sister, Lynn Ritchie of Hexham, England.

Mr. Ritchie traveled widely and read voraciously, but friends and family members say his main passion was his work. He remained at Bell Labs, working on various research projects, until he retired in 2007.

Colleagues who worked with Mr. Ritchie were struck by his code — meticulous, clean and concise. His writing, according to Mr. Kernighan, was similar. “There was a remarkable precision to his writing,” Mr. Kernighan said, “no extra words, elegant and spare, much like his code.”

    Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70, NYT, 13.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html

Protest Spurs Online Dialogue on Inequity

October 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON

What began as a small group of protesters expressing their grievances about economic inequities last month from a park in New York City has evolved into an online conversation that is spreading across the country on social media platforms.

Inspired by the populist message of the group known as Occupy Wall Street, more than 200 Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have sprung up in dozens of cities during the past week, seeking volunteers for local protests and fostering discussion about the group’s concerns.

Some 900 events have been set up on Meetup.com, and blog posts and photographs from all over the country are popping up on the WeArethe99Percent blog on Tumblr from people who see themselves as victims of not just a sagging economy but also economic injustice.

“I don’t want to be rich. I don’t want to live a lavish lifestyle,” wrote a woman on Tumblr, describing herself as a college student worried about the burden of student debt. “I’m worried. I’m scared, thinking about the future shakes me. I hope this works. I really hope this works.”

The online conversation has grown at the same time that street protests have taken place in several other cities last week, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington. A Web site, Occupy Together, is trying to aggregate the online conversations and the off-line activities.

“We are not coordinating anything,” said Justin Wedes, 26, a former high school science teacher from Brooklyn who helps manage one of the movement’s main Twitter accounts, @OccupyWallStNYC. “It is all grass roots. We are just trying to use it to disseminate information, tell stories, ask for donations and to give people a voice.”

To help get the word out about a rally at 3 p.m. Saturday in Washington Square Park, the group turned to its Facebook and Twitter accounts. “If you are one of the 99 percent, this is your meeting,” the Facebook invitation said. Nearly 700 people replied on Facebook saying that they would be there.

More than 1,000 demonstrators arrived at Washington Square Park for the rally, many of them after marching from the encampment they had established three weeks ago in Zuccotti Park, in Lower Manhattan.

During their march, protesters kept to the sidewalks and out of traffic in a purposeful attempt to prevent arrests. Once at Washington Square Park, they held meetings until the early evening, when the crowd dispersed and protesters made their way back to Zuccotti Park, where they were welcomed with loud cheers.

While people in New York are still dominating the conversation on Twitter, an analysis of Twitter data on Friday showed that almost half of the posts were made in other parts of the country, primarily in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, as well as Texas, Florida and Oregon, according to Trendrr, a social media analytics firm.

Mark Ghuneim, founder and chief executive officer of Trendrr, said the Twitter conversation was producing an average of 10,000 to 15,000 posts an hour on Friday about Occupy Wall Street, with most people sharing links from news sites, Tumblr, YouTube and Trendsmap.

Washington’s National Air and Space Museum was closed after demonstrators tried to enter the building with signs.

“This is more of a growing conversation than something massive as we have seen from hurricanes and with people passing away,” Mr. Ghuneim said. “The conversation for this has a strong and steady heartbeat that is spreading. We’re seeing the national dialogue morph into pockets of local and topic-based conversation.”

In Egypt, the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page was started 10 months before the uprising last January to protest police brutality. The page had more than 400,000 members before it was used to help propel protesters into Tahrir Square. Occupy Wall Street’s Facebook page began a few weeks ago and has 138,000 members.

Yet it represents only a sliver of the conversation taking place on Facebook about the group’s anticorporate message. Unlike in Egypt, where people found one another on one Facebook page, geographically based Occupy Facebook pages have cropped up, reflecting the loosely organized approach of the group.

These Occupy pages around the country are being used not only to echo the issues being discussed in New York about jobs, corporate greed and budget cuts, but also to talk about other problems closer to home.

In Tennessee, for example, there is an Occupy Tennessee Facebook page, as well as pages for Occupy Memphis, Occupy Knoxville, Occupy Clarksville, Occupy Chattanooga, Occupy Murfreesboro and Occupy Nashville, which helped get out the word about a lunchtime protest in Nashville’s Legislative Plaza on Friday that drew several hundred protesters with some bearing signs with the movement’s motto: “We are the 99 percent.”

The center of the movement’s media operation is in Zuccotti Park, where several hundred people have been camping since Sept. 17.

On Friday morning, operation central consisted of a few tables and chairs clustered around a generator, with a few volunteers editing video, posting updates for the group’s social media sites on laptops and staffing the live video feed for a channel called Global Revolution on Livestream.com.

On YouTube, at least 10,000 videos tagged “occupy wall street” have been uploaded in the past month. A video showing female protesters being fencing in and sprayed with pepper spray by the police is the most viewed of the protest, according to Matt McLernon, a spokesman for YouTube.

In addition to the videos posted from New York, Mr. McLernon said, videos have also been uploaded from Boston, Seattle, San Antonio and St. Louis, as well as from Oklahoma and Vermont.

Showing that YouTube can be used by both sides, the New York Police Department has uploaded its own videos of the protests on YouTube, including of the massive demonstration at the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1 that led to 700 arrests.

But the group is not relying exclusively on social media platforms or the Internet to deliver its message. The second edition of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a four-page broadsheet, was published on Saturday.

Al Baker and Anna M. Phillips contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 8, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the movement’s main Twitter accounts. It is @OccupyWallStNYC, not @OccupyWallStreetNYC.

    Protest Spurs Online Dialogue on Inequity, NYT, 8.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/nyregion/wall-street-protest-spurs-online-conversation.html

Poker Inc. to Uncle Sam: Shut Up and Deal

October 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JANET MORRISSEY

JESUS FERGUSON and Howard Lederer (“the Professor”) did not invent online poker. They just took it to new heights — and, according to the authorities, new depths — as their company, Full Tilt Poker, became a gambling palace of the Web.

The poker press routinely described the two pro players as grand masters, and endlessly parsed their styles. Mr. Ferguson, whose official first name is Christopher, was the mathematically minded Ph.D.; Mr. Lederer, the strategic Kasparov of Texas Hold ’Em. As the years went by, Full Tilt became a powerhouse in the cultish world of Internet poker. By 2010, Americans were gambling $16 billion a year through such sites, according to PokerScout.com.

But on April 15, players in the United States went to fulltiltpoker.com and found this message: “This domain name has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Federal authorities had blocked access to Full Tilt and two other top poker sites, Absolute Poker and PokerStars, and accused all three of money laundering and fraud. In poker circles, April 15 became known as Black Friday.

But Black Friday was just the start. A bigger bombshell hit on Sept. 20, when prosecutors asserted that Full Tilt was, in effect, the biggest bluff in poker. In a civil complaint, the Justice Department said certain Full Tilt executives, among them Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Lederer, had defrauded players of hundreds of millions of dollars. Full Tilt, the accusations went, was not just a poker site, but also a vast, global Ponzi scheme.

However this scandal plays out — Full Tilt and its executives have denied wrongdoing — the Internet poker debate is now stretching from the tables of Las Vegas to the halls of Congress. (Absolute Poker and PokerStars are reimbursing American players; PokerStars denies that it broke laws, and Absolute said it would not be appropriate to comment on the case.)

In a bid for legitimacy, poker sites and players are pushing for the federal government to legalize, regulate and tax online poker. Big-name casinos, sensing opportunity, have thrown their weight behind the idea. Pushing back are conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family, which argue that such a step would put a federal seal of approval on Internet gambling, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Could online poker go legit? It might sound crazy, given the uncertain future of online poker in general, and of Full Tilt in particular. (The French investment firm Groupe Bernard Tapie has agreed to buy Full Tilt, provided that the site’s legal troubles are resolved). And yet Big Poker and its fans say the best way to safeguard players would be to give Washington a piece of the action. Prying the game out of the dark recesses of the Web could yield many billions of tax dollars for public coffers, these people say.

The push to legalize the game comes despite a federal law that tried to curtail online gambling in 2006. Banks and credit card companies are basically prohibited from processing payments from online gambling companies to individuals. But many legal experts say the law is murky, and the industry is itching to expand.

Whatever the qualms about online gambling — nightmare situations, real and potential, are many — Uncle Sam is leaving a lot of money on the table. Over 10 years, legal online gambling could generate $42 billion in tax revenue, according to the Congressional Committee on Taxation.

An estimated 1.8 million Americans played online poker last year, and some make a living at it. Because of the legal issues in the United States, online card rooms typically base their computer servers elsewhere, in places like Costa Rica or, in the case of Full Tilt, in the Channel Islands.

Online poker fans, including some with money frozen in accounts at Full Tilt, are among the most vocal proponents of legalization. “It’s the only industry on earth that is clamoring for the U.S. government to impose regulations,” says Bradley Cole, an online poker player in Oxford, Miss. Mr. Cole said he had about $5,000 in his Full Tilt account on Black Friday.

Oddly enough, Internet gambling is already legal in the nation’s capital. Earlier this year, the District of Columbia became the first jurisdiction in the United States to legalize it. Officials there said they hoped the move would bring in $13 million to $14 million a year in tax revenue. But Washington may only be the start. Several bills now working their way through the House of Representatives would give online poker the run of the country.

IN five-card poker, there are 2,598,960 possible hands. A four-of-a-kind is dealt once in about 4,000 hands, a royal flush once in 650,000. And yet aficionados say poker isn’t really a game of chance. Instead, they argue, it is a game of skill — of mathematical probabilities and human psychology, played with artful direction and misdirection. The answer to this one question — chance or skill? — may well set the course of the multibillion-dollar business of online poker.

Alfonse M. D’Amato, the former three-term senator from New York, is a longtime poker buff and chairman of the Poker Players Alliance, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of poker players. In an op-ed article in The Washington Post in April, he sharply criticized the Justice Department for corralling Full Tilt and the other sites. He argued that online poker has never been explicitly outlawed, in part because, unlike, say, craps, the outcome doesn’t depend purely on luck.

His views have been echoed — and amplified — by the online poker world and its friends in Washington.

“It’s not dice,” Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, says of poker. “It’s not just randomly watching where the roulette wheel stops.”

He continues: “It’s people who can think and analyze probability and analyze their opponents.”

Last March, before Black Friday and the scandal at Full Tilt, Representative John Campbell, a California Republican, introduced a bill that would legalize online gambling. But it’s Mr. Barton’s bill, introduced in June, that industry experts believe has the best chance of passing because it focuses specifically on online poker. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, has supported online poker for years. He says that, if anything, the scandal at Full Tilt has only strengthened his resolve to legalize it.

So, despite the imbroglio over Full Tilt and, in many ways, because of it, confidence is building that Washington will deal poker a winning hand.

“It’s no longer a question of if, it’s a question of when it will be passed,” says Jim Ryan, the co-chief executive of Bwin.party, which owns the poker site PartyGaming.com. Groups like Focus on the Family say legalizing online gambling would be a huge mistake. For some people, gambling becomes an addiction, these groups argue, and the Internet makes it easier for many more, including those who are under age, to pick up the habit.

Chad Hills, who analyzes the gambling industry for Focus on the Family, says the skill-versus-chance argument is nonsense. True, players can improve their game with practice and so on — but the cards ultimately determine who wins and who loses.

Not even the best players “can tell you what the next card flipped over is going to be,” Mr. Hills says. “If you regulate it, you’re cracking the door open for one of the largest expansions of gambling ever in the history of the United States.”

But poker advocates question how politicians could say no to billions of dollars in potential tax revenue, particularly in tight economic times. Besides, many states have already embraced gambling, in the form of popular lotteries. “It’s a political no-brainer,” John Pappas, executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, says of legalizing and regulating online poker.

IN recent years, online poker has spawned its own subculture. Some avid players have even turned to the game in the hope of supplementing their income in lean times. Others have made poker their full-time job.

Brian Mogelefsky previously worked at his father’s mortgage brokerage firm in Northport, N.Y. But when the housing market crashed, he turned his poker hobby into an occupation.

At one point, Mr. Mogelefsky says, he was making about $5,000 a month. He uprooted his wife and two small children and moved to Charlotte, N.C., to hold down his living expenses.

Then came Black Friday.

“I was in complete shock,” says Mr. Mogelefsky, who says he has $29,000 frozen in an account at Full Tilt. “I felt completely blindsided.”

Smaller poker sites, such as Bodog, Merge and the Cake Poker Network, have been hoping to pick up players. But Mr. Cole, down in Mississippi, for one, is reluctant to sign up. “I’m worried about the feds going in after another site,” he says.

Others have found creative ways to stay in the game.

Olivier Busquet, who says he has earned about $2.5 million since he started playing poker professionally six years ago, says he had about $100,000 in his Full Tilt account and about $50,000 in PokerStars on Black Friday. PokerStars reimbursed him, but he’s still waiting for his money from Full Tilt.

To get around the American blockade on real-money games, he flew to Toronto, opened a bank account there and leased a furnished apartment. Then he kept playing.

Other diehards are considering similar moves. In fact, one poker player started a new business, PocketFives Poker Refugees, which helps poker players set up temporary residences and bank accounts in countries like Canada and Costa Rica.

For years, the casino industry lobbied against online poker. But its resistance appears to be waning. Wynn and MGM, for instance, are now behind the legalization effort. Several casinos are in discussions to either form their own online gambling sites or team up with existing ones. Wynn has announced a partnership with PokerStars, although the agreement was on hold after Black Friday. There is chatter on Wall Street that Wynn is also eyeing Bwin.party for a possible acquisition.

AND so the poker world now finds itself in a situation many liken to Prohibition. America didn’t stop drinking when the government outlawed alcoholic beverages in 1919. And, in this Internet age, it won’t be easy to prevent people from gambling online, whatever the government says. “It’s a game of whack-a-mole,” says Behnam Dayanim, an expert on online gambling and a partner at the Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider law firm. “They’ve whacked three very large moles, but over time, more moles will pop up.”

    Poker Inc. to Uncle Sam: Shut Up and Deal, NYT, 8.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/technology/internet/in-online-poker-a-push-to-legalize-and-regulate-the-game.html

Factbox: Apple's history and milestones

Thu Oct 6, 2011
9:51am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Here are some of Apple's milestones:

1976 - High-school buddies Steven Wozniak and Steve Jobs start Apple Computer. Their first product, Apple I, built in circuit board form, debuts at "the Homebrew Computer Club" in Palo Alto, California.

1977 - Apple II is unveiled, the first personal computer in a plastic case with color graphics.

1983 - Apple starts selling the "Lisa," a desktop computer for businesses with a graphical user interface, the system most users are familiar with today.

1984 - Apple debuts the Macintosh personal computer.

1985 - Jobs leaves Apple after a power struggle.

September 1997 - Jobs is named Apple's interim CEO after the company records losses of more than $1.8 billion.

November 1997 - Jobs introduces a new line of Macintosh computers called G3, and a website that lets people order directly from Apple.

1998 - Apple unveils the iMac desktop computer.

2001 - Apple introduces the iPod.

2003 - The iTunes Store opens, allowing users to buy and download music, audiobooks, movies and TV shows online.

August 2004 - Jobs announces he underwent successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas.

January 2007 - Apple introduces the iPhone.

2008 - Apple opens its App Store as an update to iTunes.

January 2009 - Jobs takes leave for health reasons. COO Cook leads the company in the interim.

June 2009 - Jobs returns to the company after undergoing a liver transplant.

April 2010 - Apple begins selling the iPad, a 10-inch touchscreen tablet, and has an 84 percent share of the tablet market by year's end.

January 17, 2011 - Jobs announces that he will take another medical leave.

March 2, 2011 - Apple launches the iPad 2.

August 9, 2011 - Apple briefly edges past Exxon Mobil Corp to become the most valuable U.S. company.

August 24, 2011 - Jobs steps down as CEO and is replaced by Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer.

October 5, 2011 - Jobs dies at age of 56 after battle with pancreatic cancer.

 

(Compiled by Paritosh Bansal, Liana B. Baker, Ilaina Jonas,

Matt Daily and Franklin Paul; Editing by Richard Chang)

    Factbox: Apple's history and milestones, NYT, 6.10.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/06/us-apple-history-idUSTRE7950NI20111006

Steven Paul Jobs

October 6, 2011
The New York Times
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

When I heard the news that Steve Jobs had died, my mind flashed back to 1985, when I began my love affair with computers. I was stationed in Moscow for The Associated Press and I ordered an Apple IIc — by Telex — from a department store in Helsinki, Finland. They express shipped it to me, a month later, by train.

The IIc was Apple’s first crack at a “portable” computer, which it sort of was if you didn’t mind a 7.5 pound weight, plus monitor, external floppy drive and all the cables. But it was sleek for its time, about the size of a loose leaf binder.

The K.G.B. officers at the Soviet customs desk at Leningrad Station were annoyed. “Where is the computer,” one asked. “Right here,” I said. He gave me that contemptuous look that border guards all seemed to have: “That is the keyboard. Show me the computer!”

This went on while a clutch of guards conferred over what to charge me. The Soviet Union assessed customs fees on electronics based on size and weight, which seemed guaranteed to maximize their take. We had no clue how Mr. Jobs would change that, along with so many other conventions.

The Apple IIc with its 128KB of RAM, 125KB floppy drive, word processor and spreadsheet application, did everything I could imagine a computer doing, at the time.

But visionaries like Mr. Jobs had no intention of settling for “at the time.” I’ve had a stream of computers — mostly Macs — since, each more incredible than the last. I have sometimes thought the power of computers had exceeded our ability to use them, but Mr. Jobs and his team kept giving us devices that made indispensible things easier in ways you never thought of.

Other computer makers know how machines work and want humans to alter their behavior acordingly. Mr. Jobs and his team labored to understand how humans behave and think and built machines to suit us.

I only met Mr. Jobs once, but like so many others, I carry a piece of him around. When I heard of his death, I thought how delicious it would have been to show those K.G.B. border guards my iPhone.

    Steven Paul Jobs, NYT, 6.10.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/opinion/steven-paul-jobs.html

Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56

October 5, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

A friend of the family said that Mr. Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer, with which he waged a long and public struggle, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.

“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.

Tributes to Mr. Jobs flowed quickly on Wednesday evening, in formal statements and in the flow of social networks, with President Obama, technology industry leaders and legions of Apple fans weighing in.

A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”

Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.

Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.

Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.

It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.

“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”

“Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

Mr. Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007.

To his understanding of technology he brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the ’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said, ”the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there.”

After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.

Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication.

Apple’s very name reflected his unconventionality. In an era when engineers and hobbyists tended to describe their machines with model numbers, he chose the name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary habits at the time.

Coming on the scene just as computing began to move beyond the walls of research laboratories and corporations in the 1970s, Mr. Jobs saw that computing was becoming personal — that it could do more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and business problems — and that it could even be a force for social and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers were boxy wooden affairs with metal chassis, he designed the Apple II as a sleek, low-slung plastic package intended for the den or the kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital lifestyle.

He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Mr. Jobs turned in the late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Mr. Jobs’s genius lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to strip away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.”

Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

 

Early Interests

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, and surrendered for adoption by his biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a graduate student from Syria who became a political science professor. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.

The elder Mr. Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before returning to his original trade as a machinist, moved his family down the San Francisco Peninsula to Mountain View and then to Los Altos in the 1960s.

Mr. Jobs developed an early interest in electronics. He was mentored by a neighbor, an electronics hobbyist, who built Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics projects. He was brash from an early age. As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.

Mr. Jobs met Mr. Wozniak while attending Homestead High School in neighboring Cupertino. The two took an introductory electronics class there.

The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Mr. Wozniak’s mother. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobbyist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illicitly exploring the nation’s phone system.

Mr. Wozniak shared the article with Mr. Jobs, and the two set out to track down an elusive figure identified in the article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken the name from his discovery that a whistle that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whistle next to a phone handset.

Captain Crunch was John Draper, a former Air Force electronic technician, and finding him took several weeks. Learning that the two young hobbyists were searching for him, Mr. Draper appeared one day in Mr. Wozniak’s Berkeley dormitory room. Mr. Jobs, who was still in high school, had traveled to Berkeley for the meeting. When Mr. Draper arrived, he entered the room saying simply, “It is I!”

Based on information they gleaned from Mr. Draper, Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs later collaborated on building and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely used for making free — and illegal — phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort.

After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Mr. Jobs left after one semester, but remained in Portland for another 18 months auditing classes. In a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005, he said he had decided to leave college because it was consuming all of his parents’ savings.

Leaving school, however, also freed his curiosity to follow his interests. “I didn’t have a dorm room,” he said in his Stanford speech, “so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

He returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job there as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. Still searching for his calling, he left after several months and traveled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, who would later become an early Apple employee. Mr. Jobs returned to Atari that fall. In 1975, he and Mr. Wozniak, then working as an engineer at H.P., began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif. Personal computing had been pioneered at research laboratories adjacent to Stanford, and it was spreading to the outside world.

“What I remember is how intense he looked,” said Lee Felsenstein, a computer designer who was a Homebrew member. “He was everywhere, and he seemed to be trying to hear everything people had to say.”

Mr. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product.

In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000. Mr. Wozniak would be the technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple I Computer. Starting out in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, they moved the company to a small office in Cupertino shortly thereafter.

In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensation. Faced with a gaggle of small and large competitors in the emerging computer market, Apple, with its Apple II, had figured out a way to straddle the business and consumer markets by building a computer that could be customized for specific applications.

Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.

The Apple III, introduced in May 1980, was intended to dominate the desktop computer market. I.B.M. would not introduce its original personal computer until 1981. But the Apple III had a host of technical problems, and Mr. Jobs shifted his focus to a new and ultimately short-lived project, an office workstation computer code-named Lisa.

 

An Apocalyptic Moment

By then Mr. Jobs had made his much-chronicled 1979 visit to Xerox’s research center in Palo Alto, where he saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer system that foreshadowed modern desktop computing. The Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of the first computers to employ a graphical video display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the metaphor of an office desktop.

“It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments,” Mr. Jobs said of his visit in a 1995 oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution. “I remember within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn’t require tremendous intellect. It was so clear.”

In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple engineers pursuing a separate project, a lower-cost system code-named Macintosh. The machine was introduced in January 1984 and trumpeted during the Super Bowl telecast by a 60-second commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, that linked I.B.M., by then the dominant PC maker, with Orwell’s Big Brother.

A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief executive, Mr. Sculley was impressed by Mr. Jobs’s pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

He went on to help Mr. Jobs introduce a number of new computer models, including an advanced version of the Apple II and later the Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers. Through them Mr. Jobs popularized the graphical user interface, which, based on a mouse pointing device, would become the standard way to control computers.

But when the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued, and Mr. Jobs lost control of the Lisa project. The board ultimately stripped him of his operational role, taking control of the Lisa project away from, and 1,200 Apple employees were laid off. He left Apple in 1985.

“I don’t wear the right kind of pants to run this company,” he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left, according to a member of the original Macintosh development team. He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans.

That September he announced a new venture, NeXT Inc. The aim was to build a workstation computer for the higher-education market. The next year, the Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot invested $20 million in the effort. But it did not achieve Mr. Jobs’s goals.

Mr. Jobs also established a personal philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple but soon had a change of heart, deciding instead to spend much of his fortune — $10 million — on acquiring Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing company owned by the filmmaker George Lucas.

The purchase was a significant gamble; there was little market at the time for computer-animated movies. But that changed in 1995, when the company, with Walt Disney Pictures, released “Toy Story.” That film’s box-office receipts ultimately reached $362 million, and when Pixar went public in a record-breaking offering, Mr. Jobs emerged a billionaire. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. The sale made Mr. Jobs Disney’s largest single shareholder, with about 7 percent of the company’s stock.

His personal life also became more public. He had a number of well-publicized romantic relationships, including one with the folk singer Joan Baez, before marrying Laurene Powell. In 1996, a sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, threw a spotlight on her relationship with Mr. Jobs in the novel “A Regular Guy.” The two did not meet until they were adults. The novel centered on a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bore a close resemblance to Mr. Jobs. It was not an entirely flattering portrait. Mr. Jobs said about a quarter of it was accurate.

“We’re family,” he said of Ms. Simpson in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. “She’s one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days.”

His wife and Ms. Simpson survive him, as do his three children with Ms. Powell, his daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed; another daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with Chrisann Brennan; and another sister, Patti Jobs.

 

Return to Apple

Eventually, Mr. Jobs refocused NeXT from the education to the business market and dropped the hardware part of the company, deciding to sell just an operating system. Although NeXT never became a significant computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics research center CERN in 1990.

In 1996, after unsuccessful efforts to develop next-generation operating systems, Apple, with Gilbert Amelio now in command, acquired NeXT for $430 million. The next year, Mr. Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser. He became chief executive again in 2000.

Shortly after returning, Mr. Jobs publicly ended Apple’s long feud with its archrival Microsoft, which agreed to continue developing its Office software for the Macintosh and invested $150 million in Apple.

Once in control of Apple again, Mr. Jobs set out to reshape the consumer electronics industry. He pushed the company into the digital music business, introducing first iTunes and then the iPod MP3 player. The music arm grew rapidly, reaching almost 50 percent of the company’s revenue by June 2008.

In 2005, Mr. Jobs announced that he would end Apple’s business relationship with I.B.M. and Motorola and build Macintosh computers based on Intel microprocessors.

By then his fight with cancer was publicly known. Apple had announced in 2004 that Mr. Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer and that he had undergone successful surgery. Four years later, questions about his health returned when he appeared at a company event looking gaunt. Afterward, he said he had suffered from a “common bug.” Privately, he said his cancer surgery had created digestive problems but insisted they were not life-threatening.

Apple began selling the iPhone in June 2007. Mr. Jobs’s goal was to sell 10 million of the handsets in 2008, equivalent to 1 percent of the global cellphone market. The company sold 11.6 million.

Although smartphones were already commonplace, the iPhone dispensed with a stylus and pioneered a touch-screen interface that quickly set the standard for the mobile computing market. Rolled out with much anticipation and fanfare, iPhone rocketed to popularity; by end of 2010 the company had sold almost 90 million units.

Although Mr. Jobs took just a nominal $1 salary when he returned to Apple, his compensation became the source of a Silicon Valley scandal in 2006 over the backdating of millions of shares of stock options. But after a company investigation and one by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was found not to have benefited financially from the backdating and no charges were brought.

The episode did little to taint Mr. Jobs’s standing in the business and technology world. As the gravity of his illness became known, and particularly after he announced he was stepping down, he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.

If he had a motto, it may have come from “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which he said had deeply influenced him as a young man. The book, he said in his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with the admonition “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

“I have always wished that for myself,” he said.

Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 5, 2011

An earlier version of this obituary incorrectly identified the city where Mr. Jobs graduated from high school. It was Cupertino, not Los Altos. It also misstated the year in which NeXT shifted its focus from the education to the business market as 1986. The change occurred in 1993.

    Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56, NYT, 5.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/business/steve-jobs-of-apple-dies-at-56.html

IPhone Gets Its Upgrade, All Under the Hood

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By NICK WINGFIELD

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple introduced its long-awaited new iPhone on Tuesday. But it wasn’t an iPhone 5. That will have to wait.

Instead, the company unveiled something that looks an awful lot like an iPhone 4 on the outside, with an innovative feature that turns the device into a voice-activated mobile assistant for scheduling appointments and performing other tasks.

It’s a measure of how Apple has habituated its legions of fans to regular, eye-catching design changes that the news about the latest version of the iPhone qualified as a disappointment for some. Grumbling about the announcement of the new phone, the iPhone 4S, spread on Twitter throughout the day and the company’s shares fell as much as 5 percent, though they regained most of those losses by the end of trading.

“At the end of the day, there are still going to be long lines for this,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. “They could have been even longer if they’d changed the hardware more.”

The new model of the iPhone, which will go on sale Oct. 14, with preorders starting Friday, is virtually indistinguishable from its predecessor on the outside. But beneath its skin Apple made big changes, packing it with a better camera that shoots crisper pictures and video. The device also includes a more powerful chip, the A5, the same microprocessor that is the brains of the iPad, for producing better graphics and other improvements.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, presided over the event just as Steven P. Jobs had on similar occasions before he left the top job in August. Mr. Cook said that although the iPhone 4 is the best-selling smartphone in the world, Apple believes that the company still has plenty of people it wants to convert.

“We believe over time all handsets become smartphones,” he said. “This market is 1.5 billion units annually. It’s an enormous opportunity for Apple.”

Mr. Cook and other Apple executives also highlighted an array of supporting products for the new phone, but the centerpiece of the presentation, and of the new device, is the “virtual assistant” feature, Siri, named after a company Apple acquired last year that originally developed the technology. While the iPhone 4 already responds to some basic voice commands — to make phone calls, for example — Siri is designed to comprehend a much broader range of instructions in natural language.

For example, Apple executives demonstrated the technology by asking an iPhone, “Do I need a raincoat today?” to which the device responded, “It sure looks like rain today.”

While Apple’s decision not to call its new phone the iPhone 5, as many expected, raised some eyebrows, it has some precedent. A couple of years ago the company introduced the iPhone 3GS, which made modest improvements over the iPhone 3G. Michael Mace, the chief executive of a mobile application start-up and a former Apple and Palm executive, said Apple most likely wanted to telegraph that the iPhone 4S was an incremental change to the product, rather than a big redesign denoted by a change in the model number.

“You don’t want to oversell what you’re doing so you hurt your credibility,” Mr. Mace said.

Even incremental changes to the iPhone can help sales. Mr. Munster of Piper Jaffray said the annual growth rate in the number of iPhones that Apple sold during the fiscal year the iPhone 3GS was introduced was 93 percent, compared with 78 percent when the iPhone 3G came out.

With the new phone, Apple is taking on a growing challenge in the mobile market from the Android operating system made by Google. Smartphones powered by Android now outsell iPhones by more than two to one. While Android phones also let people use basic voice commands to do simple tasks, Apple is betting that the more sophisticated capabilities of Siri will make it stand out.

Many of the best minds in technology in the last several decades have been stymied by how to decipher speech, given variations in how people talk. Mr. Mace called what Apple is doing the “holy grail” for mobile devices; voice recognition could make it much easier for people to use them on the go without having to peck words into a keyboard. But he said the technology needed to be accurate or users would ignore it.

“When you start talking to a computer you expect it to really understand you, and if it doesn’t, you get really frustrated,” he said. “If Siri is like that, forget about it.”

Using Siri, the phone can set an alarm clock with the command “Wake me up tomorrow at 6 a.m.” or provide a stock market quote if a user asks, “How’s the Nasdaq doing today?” The command “Remind me to call my wife when I leave work” will result in such a reminder on the phone, requiring a user to identify the geographic boundaries of their office on the device through its location technology.

In some ways, Siri is reminiscent of Hal 9000, the intelligent computer system in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” though the iPhone presumably won’t be able to turn on its users the way its fictional counterpart did. In one demonstration, Apple’s senior vice president, Scott Forstall, asked Siri, “Who are you?”

“I am a humble personal assistant,” the phone responded, in an awkward synthesized voice.

While the new iPhone was the headliner at the event, held at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, the executives spent nearly as much time showcasing new features in an array of supporting products, including iCloud, which allows users of Apple mobile products to automatically back up from and synchronize information between devices.

Prices for the iPhone 4S start at $199 for a model with 16 gigabytes of storage. Apple will continue to sell its older iPhone 4 through its wireless carrier partners, which will drop the price to $99 from $199 when customers commit to a two-year contract. An older model, the iPhone 3GS, will be free, instead of $49, with a two-year contract.

The new phone will be available on the AT&T, Verizon and Sprint networks and will also work internationally.

The event was a closely watched debut for Mr. Cook. Mr. Jobs was a master pitchman for Apple’s products, captivating audiences with introductions that seemed off the cuff but were always meticulously rehearsed. Mr. Jobs, the company’s founder, left for health reasons and became chairman of Apple’s board.

“It’s impossible to replace Steve Jobs, and you could feel that in the energy level in the room,” said Mr. Munster, though he said Mr. Cook “did an excellent job.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 4, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the previous price of the iPhone 3GS. It had been $49 (from AT&T), not $99. Because of an editing error, the article also misstated the day of the Apple announcement. It was Tuesday, not Wednesday.

    IPhone Gets Its Upgrade, All Under the Hood, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/t
    echnology/apple-introduces-a-new-iphone-with-a-personal-assistant.html

Yahoo Has a Crowd, Wants a Voice

October 3, 2011
The New York Times
By VERNE G. KOPYTOFF

One company dominates online news, sports and finance. It has more visitors to its news site than the runner-up in the category, CNN, more in sports than ESPN and more in finance than Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal.

That online media colossus is Yahoo, and it is in distress.

Despite a huge audience of 686 million users and resources like high-tech film studios and talent-filled newsrooms, Yahoo’s future is in doubt. Potential buyers are circling to pick up parts after the messy firing last month of Carol A. Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive.

Yahoo’s portfolio of media sites is the company’s crown jewel and potentially its savior. The company announced on Monday that it had partnered with Walt Disney’s ABC unit to showcase articles and videos from ABC News, and to create a co-branded Web site for “Good Morning America.”

But the Yahoo sites also suffer from symptoms infecting the rest of the company: shifting priorities and a shortage of innovation. Yahoo has another problem too: a lack of respect.

“If we ask somebody on the street, ‘What’s the top news brand?’ Would they say Yahoo news?” said Mickie Rosen, the senior vice president who oversees Yahoo’s media properties. “The honest answer is they probably wouldn’t.”

Yahoo built its huge audience largely by aggregating news from other sources. The Associated Press, US Weekly, Politico and The New York Times are just some of the partners that feed it content around the clock. Now Yahoo executives are pushing for original reporting, covering special events like the Emmys and creating exclusive online video programs. This month, Yahoo will exclusively video-stream a charity concert that includes performances by Lady Gaga, Usher and Bono. They say they have made it a priority to hire reporters and editors who write and break news online.

Ms. Rosen, a former executive with Fox Interactive Media and Disney online who joined Yahoo 10 months ago, said that Yahoo had not done a good job of creating “a voice” that made people take notice. Fixing that falls in large part to Jai Singh, Yahoo’s editor in chief, another newcomer. He helped build a newsroom for Arianna Huffington as a top editor at The Huffington Post just as he built the newsroom for the technology news site CNet.

“Yahoo is going through a transformation in every respect,” Mr. Singh said. “We are trying to get our digital media chops. But transformations are not a snap of the finger.”

Yahoo’s home-grown content should be highlighted more on its front page, to lift its visibility and traffic, Mr. Singh said. Linking to articles in other sections should also be routine. To encourage cooperation, Mr. Singh instituted weekly meetings for editors to talk about coming coverage and special projects. Before, individual sections often failed to talk to one another, a common complaint across the company.

To entice users to click on more articles, Yahoo is increasingly trying to personalize its site so that the topics that appear are more in tune with the tastes of individual users. Yahoo’s home page already shows more than 13 million variations daily.

Yahoo is also adopting some ideas from social networking. A new service introduced along with Facebook’s announcement of new features allows users to see and share Yahoo news articles that they and their Facebook friends have read.

Yahoo’s shortcomings in media can be traced back to top management’s indecision over whether the company should be a media or technology company, said Larry Kramer, the founder of the business news site MarketWatch and the former president of CBS Digital. The problem confronted Terry S. Semel, a former movie executive who served as chief executive from 2001 to 2007, as well as Ms. Bartz, who used to run Autodesk, a Silicon Valley software company. Yahoo has traditionally straddled both worlds and fallen short in both of them.

Aggregating from other sources made it difficult to develop innovative ways to deliver that content through smartphones and tablet computers, Mr. Kramer said. It fumbled Livestand, an iPad app that combines articles from various publications into a single and slickly designed digital magazine. Yahoo gave a splashy preview of the app at a conference this year and promised it would be introduced by the end of June, but the app is now expected by the end of the fall. The category is now crowded with competition: Zite from CNN, Editions from AOL and the apps Flipboard, Pulse, Taptu, Flud, News.me and SkyGrid.

“They could be the pre-eminent news organization in the world because they have so many customers,” Mr. Kramer said. “They have what every newspaper would kill for.”

It does have the audience. In August, Yahoo led the general news category with 81.2 million unique visitors in the United States, according to comScore. CNN, the second-place site, had 75.3 million visitors during the same period while The Huffington Post Media Group had 56.8 million. Nine of Yahoo’s media sites lead their category in traffic.

But Yahoo’s size has failed to translate into revenue growth. Revenue from display ads, the online billboards that appear when a Yahoo Web page is called up on a computer screen, were essentially flat in the first six months of the year, at $1 billion, while the online ad industry grew at about 27 percent.

Yahoo’s problem is that Internet users are spending a bigger portion of their time with Yahoo’s competitors. The percentage of time users spend on Yahoo is down a third from its high three years ago, while the share of the time spent on Facebook has catapulted more than sixfold over the same period, according to comScore.

So how does Yahoo get people to stick around longer? It thinks Yahoo Sports is the model. Over the last few years, sports, more than any other Yahoo media site, bet big on original coverage by hiring reporters and writing original articles.

The investments have led to several prominent scoops. The latest was a yearlong investigation, published in August, that showed widespread violations of N.C.A.A. rules by the University of Miami’s football team. The article received 38 times as many page views as a typical sports article, according to Yahoo.

“There’s nothing like sitting a hotel room, turning on ESPN and seeing on a ticker that Yahoo Sports breaks a story,” Ms. Rosen said. Such citations by other media outlets help to lift Yahoo’s reputation in news, she said.

Yahoo Sports also produces a number of online video shows, including game highlights and Fantasy Football Live.

Yahoo executives still say they believe that professionally produced video appeals to advertisers more than the skating dogs and off-tune singers on YouTube. Partners like ABC also provide shows, keeping costs down, according to Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s executive vice president for the Americas. “We aren’t sitting here spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating a new network,” he said.

Indeed, Yahoo now films around 26 shows a month, many of which attract large audiences, at least by Internet standards. Yahoo said that 26 million people watched its original programming in August, more than watched Hulu, the video site backed by several Hollywood studios.

They want to produce even more. Seven new series will have their premieres this week, including one about relationships, two cooking programs and another in which men get advice about making memorable wedding proposals.

Yahoo also tried to acquire Hulu earlier this year, according to a source familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record. It is unclear whether Yahoo’s board plans to press ahead amid the distraction of a strategic review of its business and a potential sale of all or parts of the company.

The possibility of its own buyout or break-up casts a shadow over Yahoo, though all the executives interviewed said that it was business as usual inside the company. Scott Kessler, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ, said that uncertainty was the norm inside Yahoo, which in recent years has had a succession of leadership changes, departures of top executives and the battle to ward off a takeover by Microsoft.

“First they need to stabilize the ship,” Mr. Kessler said, “and then they need to turn it in the right direction.”

    Yahoo Has a Crowd, Wants a Voice, NYT, 3.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/technology/yahoo-aims-to-produce-more-original-reporting.html

‘Diggnation,’ Popular Web Talk Show,

to End Its Run in December

October 3, 2011
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER

Together, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht are akin to Oprah for a certain class of tech enthusiasts.

The weekly beta-testing and beer-guzzling show they have hosted for six years, “Diggnation,” adapted the television talk show format for the Web and helped prove that there was a business model beneath the anything-goes veneer of online video. Thousands of fans have attended live shows; some even crowd-surfed during a taping last spring at the South by Southwest, the technology and music festival in Austin, Tex.

Like Oprah, though, Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht have decided to direct their energies elsewhere. They announced on Monday that “Diggnation” will cease production in December, ending one of the Web’s most popular regularly scheduled series.

Their explanation for ending it: They’ve grown up, just like the Web has. “We started this show as kids,” said Mr. Albrecht, now 35. “Both of us came into Web video at a time when ‘Web video’ wasn’t even a word.”

Said Mr. Rose, 34: “There are other things, creatively, that we’ve started to do that are a little more fresh and exciting.”

A Web video network, Revision3, was built in large part on the back of “Diggnation,” and like a traditional television network, it is carefully managing the announcement about the show’s end. “We’ve built the company to the point where, when a show goes through its natural life cycle, that’s fine,” the Revision3 chief executive, Jim Louderback, said in an interview last week.

While “Diggnation” remains one of the company’s top five shows — Revision3 says it counts roughly 250,000 views each week — it represents under 10 percent of video views and under 10 percent of revenue for the company, said David Prager, a producer of the show and a co-founder of the company. He cited three topical shows that have more monthly views than “Diggnation” now: “Epic Meal Time,” “Tekzilla” and “Film Riot.”

“We’ve been able to use ‘Diggnation’ to grow the network,” Mr. Prager said.

“Diggnation” had its online premiere in July 2005. Then, as now, Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht sat on a couch with computers and beers and reviewed both. The iPhone, the Windows operating system and out-of-this-world gadgets were three recurring topics. Some of the topics are derived from the trends on Digg, a social news Web site that Mr. Rose co-founded.

Mr. Rose’s and Mr. Albrecht’s conversations — accessible as podcasts and as video streams — attracted an ardent fan base, demonstrating the tendency of people to organize around niche online brands. “It really did feel like being part of a club,” Mr. Albrecht said. And “Diggnation” inspired other Web shows.

So far, there have been 327 episodes of the show, ranging from 20 to 60 minutes in length. It was an early indication that viewers would be willing to watch long videos on their computers. “If you make it a place that people want to hang out,” Mr. Louderback said, “it can be as long as it needs to be.”

Early advertisers were domain name registrars, but later, bigger brands like Ford and Old Spice came on board.

“Diggnation” was always an entertaining part-time job for Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht, who said they had contemplated an end to the show for more than a year as they found it increasingly hard to find time to tape the episodes. Echoing Mr. Albrecht, Mr. Rose said, “It feels like the right time. We don’t want to wake up one morning and think ‘Wow, we spent the last 20 years on the couch.’ ”

Mr. Rose is now spending most of his time on Milk, a development lab in Silicon Valley that he founded last spring after departing Digg.

Mr. Albrecht is creating and directing other Web shows and short films. But much to Revision3’s liking, they will continue to host other shows: Mr. Albrecht will remain a co-host of “The Totally Rad Show,” a daily chat about pop culture, and Mr. Rose will remain the host of “Foundation,” a monthly series about entrepreneurs and start-ups.

In a conversation last week, they laughed off the comparison to Oprah. “We’re the Martha Stewart, maybe,” Mr. Rose said.

“I make a mean Bundt cake,” Mr. Albrecht added. “A tech Bundt cake.”

    ‘Diggnation,’ Popular Web Talk Show, to End Its Run in December, NYT, 3.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/business/media/diggnation-popular-web-talk-show-to-end-in-december.html

The University of Wherever

October 2, 2011
The New York Times
By BILL KELLER

FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and “distributed” learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame. Presumably, for the Friday kegger you go to the Genius Bar.

It’s true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by M.I.T. (The New York Times Company is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.) But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award.

Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East.

One development is a competition among prestige universities to open a branch campus in applied sciences in New York City. This is Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to create a locus of entrepreneurial education that would mate with venture capital to spawn new enterprises and enrich the city’s economy. Stanford, which has provided much of the info-tech Viagra for Silicon Valley, and Cornell, a biotechnology powerhouse, appear to be the main rivals.

But more interesting than the contest between Stanford and Cornell is the one between Stanford and Stanford.

The Stanford bid for a New York campus is a bet on the value of place. The premise is that Stanford can repeat the success it achieved by marrying itself to the Silicon Valley marketplace. The school’s proposal (unsubtly titled “Silicon Valley II”) envisions a bricks-and-mortar residential campus on an island in the East River, built around a community of 100 faculty members and 2,200 students and strategically situated to catalyze new businesses in the city.

Meanwhile, one of Stanford’s most inventive professors, Sebastian Thrun, is making an alternative claim on the future. Thrun, a German-born and largely self-taught expert in robotics, is famous for leading the team that built Google’s self-driving car. He is offering his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online and free of charge. His remote students will get the same lectures as students paying $50,000 a year, the same assignments, the same exams and, if they pass, a “statement of accomplishment” (though not Stanford credit). When The Times wrote about this last month, 58,000 students had signed up for the course. After the article, enrollment leapt to 130,000, from across the globe.

Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me.

The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”

Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling — and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them
being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.

“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”

Disrupt is right. It would be an earthquake for the majority of colleges that depend on tuition income rather than big endowments and research grants. Many could go the way of local newspapers. There would be huge audiences and paychecks for superstar teachers, but dimmer prospects for those who are less charismatic.

It’s ironic — or maybe just fitting — that this is playing out at Stanford, which has served as midwife to many disruptive technologies. By forging a symbiotic relationship with venture capital and teaching students how to navigate markets, Stanford claims to have spawned an estimated 5,000 businesses. This is a campus where grad school applicants are routinely asked if they have done a startup, and some professors have gotten very, very rich.

John Hennessy, Stanford’s president, gave the university’s blessing to Thrun’s experiment, which he calls “an initial demonstration,” but he is cautious about the grander dream of a digitized university. He can imagine a virtual campus for some specialized programs and continuing education, and thinks the power of distributed learning can be incorporated in undergraduate education — for example, supplanting the large lecture that is often filled with students paying more attention to their laptops. He endorses online teaching as a way to educate students, in the developing world or our own, who cannot hope for the full campus experience.

But Hennessy is a passionate advocate for an actual campus, especially in undergraduate education. There is nothing quite like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills, he says. And it’s not at all clear that online students learn the most important lesson of all: how to keep learning.

As The Times’s Matt Richtel recently reported, there is remarkably little data showing that technology-centric schooling improves basic learning. It is quite possible that the infatuation with technology has diverted money from things known to work — training better teachers, giving kids more time in school.

THE Stanford president is hardly a technophobe. Hennessy came up through computer engineering, used his sabbatical to start a successful microprocessor company, and sits on the boards of Google and Cisco Systems.

“In the same way that a lot of things go into the cost of a newspaper that have nothing to do with the quality of the reporting — the cost of newsprint and delivery — we should ask the same thing about universities,” Hennessy told me. “When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable — as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience — and when is it secondary to the learning process?”

But, he notes, “One has to think about the sustainability of all these things. In the end, the content providers have to get paid.”

I see a larger point, familiar to all of us who have lived through digital-age disorder. There are disrupters, like Sebastian Thrun, or Napster, or the tweeting rebels in Tahrir Square. And there are adapters, like John Hennessy, or iTunes, or the novice statesmen trying to build a new Egypt. Progress depends on both.

Who could be against an experiment that promises the treasure of education to a vast, underserved world? But we should be careful, in our idealism, not to diminish something that is already a wonder of the world.

    The University of Wherever, NYT, 2.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-wherever.html

On Facebook, Neighborhoods as They Once Were

September 30, 2011
The New York Times
By JED LIPINSKI

WHEN she and her husband moved out in 1980, Kathy LaPolla DeStefano was not at all happy with Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“The neighborhood was starting to go down the toilet, honestly,” Ms. DeStefano, 56, an elementary school teacher, said over the telephone from her home in Coconut Creek, Fla. “There was a lot of drugs and crime. It was an unsafe place to raise a family.”

But lately she can hardly stop reminiscing about the Williamsburg of her youth, back when Pete’s Candy Store and Union Pool, now barrooms, were selling candy and pool supplies. The reason? She discovered a Facebook page, created expressly for Williamsburg natives, called “The Neighborhood: Who Says You Can’t Go Home?”

“I’ll be up commenting on people’s posts until 3 in the morning,” Ms. DeStefano said. “I’m like, ‘Kathy, you have to stop this!’ ”

New York City neighborhoods have always been in nonstop flux, but many are now being frozen in time on Facebook, where current and former residents have banded together to post photographs, documents and other memorabilia of their neighborhoods as they used to be. These virtual sections of the city have drawn thousands of contributors, particularly in parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Flatbush and Carroll Gardens, where zoning laws, gentrification and shifting demographics have rapidly transformed the streets.

Facebook, of course, is already famous for bringing together former classmates and friends. These pages, however, are being used not only to share memories, but also to vent about change. “The point about the old New York City neighborhoods is that they provided real social cohesion,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. “People shared responsibilities for watching each others’ children, or for keeping an eye on the property. And though new trends in urbanism try to recapture those old communal feelings, you can never recreate what emerged organically.”

Except, perhaps, online. Take Flatbush, where a neighborhood page was begun in February 2010, titled “I Loved Being a Kid in Flatbush, Brooklyn During the 70s and 80s!!!!” It drew more than 10,000 members in its first eight months, before a flood of requests to swap memories from earlier decades prompted the creation of a new page, simply called “I Loved Being a Kid in Flatbush.”

“Our mission was to give people an oasis in this world we live in now, which can be so stressful, and return them to a world where we loved living,” said Luisa Brandofino Lisciandrello, who founded the site with her boyfriend, Joe McGinn. Both 46 and natives of Flatbush, they now oversee the page’s third incarnation, “Flatbush Phantums,” from their apartment in Park Slope.

In addition to uploading pictures of Flatbush’s bygone pizza joints and movie houses, they post “Blasts From the Past” like Supremes songs and “Starsky & Hutch” episodes, evoking the feel of the old days. They raffle off local goods; this summer, a cheesecake from Junior’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue went to a former resident living in Pennsylvania.

Some contributors have even formed nonvirtual friendships. At a reunion last year organized by the site’s founders, a bond formed among five middle-aged women who grew up in Flatbush but had never met. They are now known as the Fabulous Flatbush Five. “I gave them that name,” said Mr. McGinn, laughing. “They’re inseparable. When somebody from the page dies, they all show up at the funeral together.”

Though nostalgia typically stems from pleasant memories, the occasional unpleasantness of growing up in Brooklyn has its own bonding potential. This is clear in “Old School Carroll Gardens,” a Facebook page created in 2009 for the area’s “original inhabitants.” (After the page attracted a number of viral advertisements, its creators started a new page, “I Lived in Carroll Gardens When We Still Called it Red Hook.”)

When the Gowanus Canal was declared a Superfund site in March, one member recalled how the summer heat brought out “the sweet smell of the canal!” Another remembered crossing a bridge over the canal 40 years ago and seeing the “neon green water.”

“Didn’t Telly Savalas jump into that during a filming of ‘Kojak’? ” she asked.

“I don’t remember that, Susan, but maybe that’s why he’s dead!!” another replied.

Other pages seem to have been formed in solidarity against a wave of new residents. “For all the true Greenpointers born and raised,” reads the description of “Greenpoint Natives,” a page established in March 2010 that now has 1,563 members. “Too many blogs and pages out there for the ‘new’ Greenpointers,” it explains.

Amid eulogies for departed businesses, including Truntz’s butcher shop and the Socrates restaurant, commenters protest the changes brought about by “hipsters,” “yuppies” and real estate developers since a rezoning in 2005 that has revitalized the once-derelict north Brooklyn waterfront and quickened gentrification. “These people are killing the old neighborhood!” one member wrote last year. Another evinced the hope that locals would weather this latest phase and “somehow turn it around to the old neighborhood it once was.”

The recent influx of newcomers to Williamsburg was what motivated Philip Anthony Franco to start “The Neighborhood: Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” in September 2009.

Mr. Franco, 37, had moved to Middle Village, Queens, shortly after his wedding six years earlier, because “the houses were getting too expensive.”

He returned to Williamsburg regularly to visit his mother, but became increasingly perturbed by the area’s new residents. “I was driving down Graham Avenue and one of the new persons walked right in front of my car, lost in his iPod,” he said. “My first post was a rant complaining about the so-called hipsters.”

Since then, the page has attracted more than 2,220 members and 5,500 posts, which amount to a kind of random, vibrant history of Williamsburg over 40 years, punctuated by hundreds of exclamation points and “lols.”

“It’s like we’re all sitting around on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in summertime, laughing and telling stories,” said Maria George, 47, a former resident now living in Ridgewood, Queens.

Though some contributors still live in Williamsburg, most have left, because of the rise in crime during the 1970s or the rise in rents since the late ’90s. Many say they would move back, if only they could afford it.

Patrick Drexler, 51, who left Williamsburg for New Jersey after he and his wife divorced in 2001, said he longed to live again near Lorimer Street, where his grandfather made his home after emigrating from Germany in 1892. Mr. Drexler recently asked his ex-wife, who still lives there, what kind of place he could get for about $1,200 a month.

“She told me: ‘What are you, crazy? You couldn’t get a parking place for that now,’ ” he said.

    On Facebook, Neighborhoods as They Once Were, NYT, 30.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/nyregion/on-facebook-recalling-neighborhoods-as-they-once-were.html

For Hackers, the Next Lock to Pick

September 27, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers have broken into the cellphones of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Prince William. But what about the rest of us, who might not have particularly salacious photos or voice messages stored in our phones, but nonetheless have e-mails, credit card numbers and records of our locations?

A growing number of companies, including start-ups and big names in computer security like McAfee, Symantec, Sophos and AVG, see a business opportunity in mobile security — protecting cellphones from hacks and malware that could read text messages, store location information or add charges directly to mobile phone bills.

On Tuesday, McAfee introduced a service for consumers to protect their smartphones, tablets and computers at once, and last week the company introduced a mobile security system for businesses. Last month, AT&T partnered with Juniper Networks to build mobile security apps for consumers and businesses. The Defense Department has called for companies and universities to come up with ways to protect Android devices from malware.

In an indication of investor interest, one start-up, Lookout, last week raised $40 million from venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total to $76.5 million. The company makes an app that scans other apps that people download to their phones, looking for malware and viruses. It automatically tracks 700,000 mobile apps and updates Lookout whenever it finds a threat.

Still, in some ways, it’s an industry ahead of its time. Experts in mobile security agree that mobile hackers are not yet much of a threat. But that is poised to change quickly, they say, especially as people increasingly use their phones to exchange money, by mobile shopping or using digital wallets like Google Wallet.

“Unlike PCs, the chance of running into something in the wild for your phone is quite low,” said Charlie Miller, a researcher at Accuvant, a security consulting company, and a hacker who has revealed weaknesses in iPhones. “That’s partly because it’s more secure but mostly because the bad guys haven’t gotten around to it yet. But the bad guys are going to slowly follow the money over to your phones.”

Most consumers, though they protect their computers, are unaware that they need to secure their phones, he said, “but the smartphones people have are computers, and the same thing that can happen on your computer can happen on your phone.”

Cellphone users are more likely than computer users to click on dangerous links or download sketchy apps because they are often distracted, experts say. Phones can be more vulnerable because they connect to wireless networks at the gym or the coffee shop, and hackers can surreptitiously charge consumers for a purchase.

There have already been harmful attacks, most of which have originated in China, said John Hering, co-founder and chief executive of Lookout.

For example, this year, the Android market was hit by malware called DroidDream. Hackers pirated 80 applications, added malicious code and tricked users into downloading them from the Android Market. Google said 260,000 devices were attacked.

Also this year, people unwittingly downloaded other malware, called GGTracker, by clicking on links in ads, and on the Web site to which the links led. The malware signed them up, without their consent, for text message subscription services that charged $10 to $50.

Lookout says that up to a million people were afflicted by mobile malware in the first half of the year, and that the threat for Android users is two and a half times higher than it was just six months ago.

Still, other experts caution that fear is profitable for the security industry, and that consumers should be realistic about the small size of the threat at this point. AdaptiveMobile, which sells mobile security tools, found that 6 percent of smartphone users said they had received a virus, but that the actual number of confirmed viruses had not topped 2 percent.

Lookout’s founders are hackers themselves, though they say they are the good kind, who break into phones and computers to expose the risks but not to steal information or behave maliciously. “It’s very James Bond-type stuff,” Mr. Hering said.

A few years ago, he stood with a backpack filled with hacking gear near the Academy Awards red carpet and discovered that up to 100 of the stars carried, in their bejeweled clutches and tuxedo pockets, cellphones that he could break into. He did not break into the phones, but publicized his ability to do so.

He started Lookout in 2007, along with Kevin Mahaffey and James Burgess, to prevent such intrusions. It has free apps for Android, BlackBerry and Windows phones, but not for iPhones. They are less vulnerable to attacks, security experts say, because Apple’s app store, unlike Android’s, screens every app before accepting it. Also, Android is the fastest-growing mobile platform, so it is more attractive to hackers.

Google says it regularly scans apps in the Android Market for malware and can rapidly remove malicious apps from the market and from people’s phones. It prevents Android apps from accessing other apps and alerts users if an app accesses its contact list or location, for instance.

Lookout also sells a paid version for $3 a month, which scans apps for privacy intrusions like accessing a user’s contact list, alerts users if they visit unsafe mobile Web sites or click on unsafe links in text messages, backs up a phone’s call history and photos, and lets people lock or delete information from lost devices.

T-Mobile builds Lookout into its Android phones, Verizon uses its technology to screen apps in its app store and Sprint markets the app to customers. The cellphone carriers and Lookout share the revenue when a user upgrades to the paid version.

“In mobile security circles, you never wait on it to become a problem and it’s too late,” said Fared Adib, vice president of product development at Sprint.

Meanwhile, because mobile phone attacks are still relatively rare, Lookout’s free app includes tools, including a way to back up a user’s contacts and a feature that enables users to turn on an alarm on their phone when it is lost.

“You’re way more likely to just leave it in a cab than you are going to be attacked by a hacker,” said Mr. Miller, the security researcher.

And in addition to collecting money from paying subscribers, Lookout plans to sell the service to businesses. It has a chance because consumers are increasingly bringing their own technologies into the workplace, and Lookout’s app is consumer-friendly, said Chenxi Wang, a security analyst at Forrester Research.

“It’s something a lot of I.T. guys are worried about because they have no control over what consumers are doing and what these apps are doing,” Ms. Wang said.

Giovanni Vigna, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studies security and malware, said it was only a matter of time before mobile security was as second nature to consumers as computer security.

“The moment malware starts using text messages and expensive minutes people have to pay for, things will move a lot faster,” he said.

    For Hackers, the Next Lock to Pick, NYT, 27.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/technology/companies-see-opportunity-in-stopping-cellphone-hackers.html

A Call for Opening Up Web Access at Schools

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

Students at Silver Creek High School in Longmont, Colo., held a “graffiti debate” on censorship on Wednesday: Should schools block Web sites? On sheets of white butcher paper hanging in the library, they wrote lists of the pros and cons of online access.

New Trier High School in the Chicago suburbs surveyed students about blocked Web sites after loosening its own Internet filters this year. And in New York City, students and teachers at Middle School 127 in the Bronx sent more than 60 e-mails to the Department of Education to protest a block on personal blogs and social media sites.

These were some of the efforts marking the first Banned Websites Awareness Day, organized by the American Association of School Librarians as an offshoot of Banned Books Week.

Carl Harvey, the association’s president, said that as more schools had embraced online technologies, there had been growing concern over schools that block much of the Internet.

But some school leaders and education advocates have argued that the Internet can be a distraction in the classroom, and that blocking social media is also a way to protect students from bullying and harassment at school.

“I think students should have unfettered access to the library,” said William Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, which publishes history papers written by high school students, adding that many children already spend too much time on the Internet.

Phil Goerner, a Silver Creek librarian, said the focus on banned Web sites encouraged students to wrestle with the thornier issues of censorship. He asked his students to consider whether schools should block sites espousing neo-Nazi or racist ideas. “It makes them think about it in deeper ways than if they were just to say, ‘No, don’t block it,’ ” he said.

Mr. Goerner said he decided to organize the graffiti debate as a reminder to students that censorship takes away a person’s voice or, in this case, online privileges. Silver Creek unblocked many social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, two years ago after recognizing that they could provide learning opportunities, he said.

Similarly, New Trier High School stopped blocking many sites this year after teachers voiced concerns that the filtering had grown oppressive.

Entire categories of Web sites had been blocked, including those that involved games, violence, weapons, even swimsuits, said Judy Gressel, a librarian. “It just got to the point that it became hard to conduct research,” she said, adding that students could not read sites about, say, military weapons for a history paper.

Deven Black, a librarian at Middle School 127 in the Bronx, also said that filters had blocked a range of useful Web sites. YouTube and personal blogs where educators share resources can have value, he said. “Our job is to teach students the safe use of the Internet. And it’s hard to do that if we can’t get to the sites.”

New Canaan High School, in Connecticut, cut off all access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter just for the day to show solidarity with schools without access.

“It’s not even lunchtime, and I’m already dying,” said Michael DeMattia, 17, a senior, who carries a laptop to school.

In his Advanced Placement Biology class, where lab groups have created a Facebook thread to collaborate and share data, he could not log in. In honors comparative literature, his classmates were unable to show a YouTube video during a presentation.

The Internet, Michael said, has “made cooperation and collaboration inside and outside of class much better and faster,” adding, “It’s really has become an integral part of education.”

    A Call for Opening Up Web Access at Schools, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/education/29banned.html

Dealing With an Identity Hijacked on the Online Highway

September 25, 2011
The New York Times
By NOAM COHEN

DESPITE his prominent position as a Republican candidate for president, Rick Santorum has lost control of his online identity. And for all the snickering online about it, his predicament stands as a chilling example of what it means to be at the mercy of the Google algorithm.

For those not in on the joke, Mr. Santorum’s torment is that when you look up his last name on Google, and the Bing search engine as well, you encounter a made-up definition of “Santorum” meant to ridicule him in a way that isn’t remotely fit to be described in a family newspaper.

And Mr. Santorum has responded in a way that only holds himself up to more ridicule. He has taken aim at Google, telling the Web site Politico last week: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their Web site or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle, but I suspect that’s not true.”

•

The immediate reaction to Mr. Santorum’s statement has largely been, “How quaint. He thinks he can get Google to fix the Internet for him if he asks?” Mr. Santorum could have hurt his cause more only if he had told the company’s officials to roll up their sleeves and put a plug in the tubes carrying the offensive material.

Google had its own response to Mr. Santorum: “Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web,” the company explained helpfully, concluding with a summation of its philosophy: “We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”

Its advice? “Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the company wrote. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the Web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

That advice is particularly unhelpful in Mr. Santorum’s case, however, since the new definition of “Santorum” was explicitly created by Dan Savage — the editorial director of the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger and inspiration for the anti-gay bullying campaign “It Gets Better” — to punish him for his comments in 2003 on gay marriage.

In an interview with The A.P., Mr. Santorum, who was then a senator from Pennsylvania, listed other types of relationships that likewise should not be recognized by the government: “That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

Mr. Savage did not respond to an e-mail asking how he would react if Mr. Santorum were to ask him to remove the mocking definition, but on his paper’s blog he has shown no sign of relenting. In August, he took note of criticisms of him from the right and wrote they “can say whatever they like about us,” adding, “but we’re not allowed to challenge or mock them because that wouldn’t be civil.”

But Mr. Savage’s thoughts should be beside the point. The question is best directed at the search engines. And Google’s defense — that the behavior of its ever-improving algorithm should be considered independent of the results it produces in a particular controversial case — has a particularly patronizing air, especially when it comes to hurting living, breathing people.

That’s not to say that Google’s beliefs aren’t consistent. In 2004, according to a history of Google, “In the Plex,” by Steven Levy, Sergey Brin was tempted to be subjective after receiving complaints that a search for “Jew” gave an anti-Semitic Web site as its first result.

He was angered by the results, but as Mr. Levy tells it: “The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. ‘I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,’ he said. ‘It is a bad technology practice.’ ”

But there was a case similar to Mr. Santorum’s where an offensive image of Michelle Obama was dropped from the top results. A search for “Michelle Obama” led viewers to a grotesquely racist photo much reported in 2009. Google placed its own ad above those results, saying: “We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google. Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet.”

•

Again, it was the algorithm that took the hit, and washed away accountability.

That the offensive Michelle Obama photo no longer shows up today is not because of specific filtering, Google said at the time the change was detected, but rather a reflection of a better algorithm.

The blog Search Engine Land, which has followed the many twists and turns in offensive search results, explained the change in an August post as follows: “If you’re wondering why the offensive image doesn’t show up anymore on searches for ‘michelle obama,’ Google says it’s because of algorithmic improvements, not any specific filtering on her name. The spokesperson said that the company’s internal metrics show that they’re doing a much better job of identifying the authoritativeness of individual images — and the offensive image is not authoritative for Michelle Obama’s name.”

By those lights, it is hard to understand how the current rankings for a search of Santorum are authoritative — who exactly would type in that word genuinely curious to learn about a made-up term as opposed to a controversial candidate for president?

Douglas Bowman, Google’s first outside designer, wrote on his personal blog in 2009 after leaving the company of his experience trying to instill an aesthetic vision there, recounting the now legendary story of Google’s testing 41 shades of blue to see which was the best.

“When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems,” he wrote candidly. “Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data.”

To say that Google is losing something by neglecting the human touch isn’t to mean that the algorithm isn’t reflecting humanity — after all, a motivated person created the page that tops the results for “Santorum.” But it is putting the opportunistic and sensationalistic ahead of a rare human quality: discretion.

    Dealing With an Identity Hijacked on the Online Highway, NYT, 25.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/business/media/an-identity-hijacked-on-the-online-highway.html

WikiLeaks’ Founder, in a Gilded British Cage

September 25, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR

ELLINGHAM, England

The man in the rubber boots and a thick coat to protect against the evening chill walked purposefully about a farm here, scattering pheasants as he went. He could have been an English gentleman out for a bit of hunting, except he carried no gun.

In his current circumstance, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is more hunted than hunter, fighting extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual misconduct while struggling to maintain the influence of WikiLeaks even as he remains here at Ellingham Hall, the country manor house of Vaughan Smith, a former soldier and journalist who runs a restaurant and club for journalists in London.

Mr. Assange and a few WikiLeaks staff members who are staying at the farm joined some friends of Mr. Smith on Saturday for an outdoor lunch. I took the train up from London to get a first-hand look at Mr. Assange’s gilded, remote sanctuary.

In December, Mr. Assange was unable to meet the terms of bail because he had no permanent address — he is an itinerant who leads a stateless organization that operates in an online world without borders. Mr. Smith, after consulting his wife, Pranvera Shema, decided they would provide Mr. Assange with an address, a roof over his head and a place to manage his legal case.

“None of us knew it would go on this long,” Mr. Smith said, “but I think that Julian deserves justice in the same way as anyone else, so we have found a way to make it work.”

It has not all been rural bliss. There have been times when as many of 20 people from WikiLeaks stayed at the house. “I’d open a cupboard and another one would fall out,” Mr. Smith said. And then there is the matter of the farm animals. “Julian messed with my pigs,” Mr. Smith said, smiling.

Ellingham Hall, 130 miles north of London, is a working farm, and Mr. Assange decided to use the pigs to make a film about the credit card companies that have denied him the means to raise donations. Mr. Smith said Mr. Assange induced the pigs to break through an electric fence and make themselves at home in a nearby berry patch, a bit of porcine anarchy that did not amuse the farm manager.

Standing near the pig pen at dusk, Mr. Assange said it was not his fault, pointing to two young males. “They hacked the fence,” he said, deploying the terminology that has made WikiLeaks and its founder household names.

Mr. Assange, who has become “Uncle Julian” to Mr. Smith’s young children, seems less international man of mystery than a person frozen in the odd circumstance of the moment. He wears an electronic bracelet, reports to the local police every day and, to the extent he can, continues to push the WikiLeaks agenda.

Even here he sees enemies everywhere, suggesting helicopters have swooped in for occasional reconnaissance, and at one point backing me out of a kind of war room near the kitchen. “You can’t be in here,” he said, closing the door with a wan smile.

But if Mr. Assange is in compliance with the conditions of his bail, he remains at the margins of the law. Federal authorities in the United States and Australia continue to investigate whether the release of classified information by WikiLeaks constitutes criminal behavior that has endangered various operatives. And Swedish prosecutors are seeking his extradition for questioning — he has yet to be charged — on accusations of sexual misconduct with two women.

As the controversy has grown, some WikiLeaks staff members have left, saying Mr. Assange runs the organization less transparently than he should. In his view, he is guilty of nothing more than challenging powerful elites, but his current isolation, in acute relief in the English countryside, is a consequence of his choices.

After a week in which his autobiography was published against his wishes, he was not much in the mood for another media moment, but he was friendly in an argumentative way as long as I did not take out a notebook.

Mr. Assange was willing to say on the record that he was “very grateful” for the refuge provided by Mr. Smith, and then spent time after lunch chatting about his long list of enemies: The New York Times, The Guardian, the governments of Britain, Sweden and the United States. He sees his tendency to end up at cross-purposes with almost everyone who does business with him as a measure of the threat he presents to the status quo, and not, as some have said, as a byproduct of his habit of acting unilaterally according to rules only he knows.

He has, however, not worn out the patience of Mr. Smith. Now 48, Mr. Smith has done a fair amount of brave — and perhaps foolhardy — things in his life. He was an officer in the British Army’s Grenadier Guards, serving in Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Germany.

In the 1990s, he worked as a freelance video journalist, covering conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and elsewhere. He was shot twice, and in one instance was saved by a cellphone and a wad of cash tucked into his waist. The wad is on display in the Frontline Club, a hangout for journalists that Mr. Smith runs in the London neighborhood of Paddington. It is financed in part by a restaurant of the same name that sits beneath the club and serves some of the food grown at Ellingham.

His decision to house Mr. Assange, who is not especially popular in the British press circles of which Mr. Smith is very much a part, carries its own kind of risks. A member of the Frontline Club, who asked not to be identified because he and Mr. Smith are friendly, said he thought Mr. Smith meant well, but was leaving himself exposed. “He has been a very visible supporter of Julian and has no control over what he does while he is free on bail. It’s worrisome at the very least,” the man said.

While no one, including Mr. Smith, thought Mr. Assange would still be at Ellingham 10 months later, Mr. Smith says he “made a commitment and I plan on keeping it. People support WikiLeaks, but they don’t seem to have much in the way of support for Julian.”

“Look,” he added, “you can see Julian as a kind of Bond villain, stroking a white cat and contemplating his next evil act, or you can see him as a complicated and interesting person who has really altered journalism in a historic way. I think many people in our business took an immediate dislike to him, and there has been a lot of lazy and unfair coverage.”

Mr. Smith is something of a libertarian in his political beliefs, and a bit of a renegade. As a freelance videographer, he obtained unauthorized footage of the Persian Gulf war by impersonating a British officer and bluffing his way into an active duty unit. He organized Frontline News TV as a press agency during the 1990s because he felt that video freelancers were not being credited for their work, much of it obtained at great personal risk.

“We have 1,500 dues paying members of the Frontline Club and there has been a fair amount of debate about it, but at this point, he is staying at my home, not the club,” Mr. Smith said. “I wouldn’t say that having anybody stay at your house for almost a year is a prescription for domestic tranquility, but I’m proud of the fact that we’ve worked our way through a difficult situation.”

I suggested that it was an odd move for someone who was literally “to the manor born.” Ellingham Hall has been in Mr. Smith’s family for hundreds of years.

“I was taught from a very young age that you need to stand up for the weaker party,” Mr. Smith said. “If Julian had ended up at a flat in London, it would have just been another sort of prison because of the press coverage of the case.”

The distance keeps Mr. Assange safe from the prying eyes of the press, give or take my visit, but it also means that someone who has remained in motion for many years is now fixed in place, left to operate a shadowy global enterprise from a country farm north of London.

Mr. Smith is proud of the place, but sees work to be done everywhere he looks. Mr. Assange sees Ellingham Hall through a different lens. When we step into a walled garden that would thwart any directional microphones, he looks around and suggests, “This the only place you can have a really secure conversation.”

For the time being, it will have to do.

    WikiLeaks’ Founder, in a Gilded British Cage, NYT, 25.9. 2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/business/media/julian-assange-in-a-gilded-british-cage.html

When Your Therapist Is Only a Click Away

September 23, 2011
The New York Times
By JAN HOFFMAN

THE event reminder on Melissa Weinblatt’s iPhone buzzed: 15 minutes till her shrink appointment.

She mixed herself a mojito, added a sprig of mint, put on her sunglasses and headed outside to her friend’s pool. Settling into a lounge chair, she tapped the Skype app on her phone. Hundreds of miles away, her face popped up on her therapist’s computer monitor; he smiled back on her phone’s screen.

She took a sip of her cocktail. The session began.

Ms. Weinblatt, a 30-year-old high school teacher in Oregon, used to be in treatment the conventional way — with face-to-face office appointments. Now, with her new doctor, she said: “I can have a Skype therapy session with my morning coffee or before a night on the town with the girls. I can take a break from shopping for a session. I took my doctor with me through three states this summer!”

And, she added, “I even e-mailed him that I was panicked about a first date, and he wrote back and said we could do a 20-minute mini-session.”

Since telepsychiatry was introduced decades ago, video conferencing has been an increasingly accepted way to reach patients in hospitals, prisons, veterans’ health care facilities and rural clinics — all supervised sites.

But today Skype, and encrypted digital software through third-party sites like CaliforniaLiveVisit.com, have made online private practice accessible for a broader swath of patients, including those who shun office treatment or who simply like the convenience of therapy on the fly.

One third-party online therapy site, Breakthrough.com, said it has signed up 900 psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and coaches in just two years. Another indication that online treatment is migrating into mainstream sensibility: “Web Therapy,” the Lisa Kudrow comedy that started online and pokes fun at three-minute webcam therapy sessions, moved to cable (Showtime) this summer.

“In three years, this will take off like a rocket,” said Eric A. Harris, a lawyer and psychologist who consults with the American Psychological Association Insurance Trust. “Everyone will have real-time audiovisual availability. There will be a group of true believers who will think that being in a room with a client is special and you can’t replicate that by remote involvement. But a lot of people, especially younger clinicians, will feel there is no basis for thinking this. Still, appropriate professional standards will have to be followed.”

The pragmatic benefits are obvious. “No parking necessary!” touts one online therapist. Some therapists charge less for sessions since they, too, can do it from home, saving on gas and office rent. Blizzards, broken legs and business trips no longer cancel appointments. The anxiety of shrink-less August could be, dare one say ... curable?

Ms. Weinblatt came to the approach through geographical necessity. When her therapist moved, she was apprehensive about transferring to the other psychologist in her small town, who would certainly know her prominent ex-boyfriend. So her therapist referred her to another doctor, whose practice was a day’s drive away. But he was willing to use Skype with long-distance patients. She was game.

Now she prefers these sessions to the old-fashioned kind.

But does knowing that your therapist is just a phone tap or mouse click away create a 21st-century version of shrink-neediness?

“There’s that comfort of carrying your doctor around with you like a security blanket,” Ms. Weinblatt acknowledged. “But,” she added, “because he’s more accessible, I feel like I need him less.”

The technology does have its speed bumps. Online treatment upends a basic element of therapeutic connection: eye contact.

Patient and therapist typically look at each other’s faces on a computer screen. But in many setups, the camera is perched atop a monitor. Their gazes are then off-kilter.

“So patients can think you’re not looking them in the eye,” said Lynn Bufka, a staff psychologist with the American Psychological Association. “You need to acknowledge that upfront to the patient, or the provider has to be trained to look at the camera instead of the screen.”

The quirkiness of Internet connections can also be an impediment. “You have to prepare vulnerable people for the possibility that just when they are saying something that’s difficult, the screen can go blank,” said DeeAnna Merz Nagel, a psychotherapist licensed in New Jersey and New York. “So I always say, ‘I will never disconnect from you online on purpose.’ You make arrangements ahead of time to call each other if that happens.”

Still, opportunities for exploitation, especially by those with sketchy credentials, are rife. Solo providers who hang out virtual shingles are a growing phenomenon. In the Wild Web West, one site sponsored a contest asking readers to post why they would seek therapy; the person with the most popular answer would receive six months of free treatment. When the blogosphere erupted with outrage from patients and professionals alike, the site quickly made the applications private.

Other questions abound. How should insurance reimburse online therapy? Is the therapist complying with licensing laws that govern practice in different states? Are videoconferencing sessions recorded? Hack-proof?

Another draw and danger of online therapy: anonymity. Many people avoid treatment for reasons of shame or privacy. Some online therapists do not require patients to fully identify themselves. What if those patients have breakdowns? How can the therapist get emergency help to an anonymous patient? “A lot of patients start therapy and feel worse before they feel better,” noted Marlene M. Maheu, founder of the TeleMental Health Institute, which trains providers and who has served on task forces to address these questions. “It’s more complex than people imagine. A provider’s Web site may say, ‘I won’t deal with patients who are feeling suicidal.’ But it’s our job to assess patients, not to ask them to self-diagnose.” She practices online therapy, but advocates consumer protections and rigorous training of therapists.

Psychologists say certain conditions might be well-suited for treatment online, including agoraphobia, anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some doctors suggest that Internet addiction or other addictive behaviors could be treated through videoconferencing.

Others disagree. As one doctor said, “If I’m treating an alcoholic, I can’t smell his breath over Skype.”

Cognitive behavioral therapy, which can require homework rather than tunneling into the patient’s past, seems another candidate. Tech-savvy teenagers resistant to office visits might brighten at seeing a therapist through a computer monitor in their bedroom. Home court advantage.

Therapists who have tried online therapy range from evangelizing standard-bearers, planting their stake in the new future, to those who, after a few sessions, have backed away. Elaine Ducharme, a psychologist in Glastonbury, Conn., uses Skype with patients from her former Florida practice, but finds it disconcerting when a patient’s face becomes pixilated. Dr. Ducharme, who is licensed in both states, will not videoconference with a patient she has not met in person. She flies to Florida every three months for office visits with her Skype patients.

“There is definitely something important about bearing witness,” she said. “There is so much that happens in a room that I can’t see on Skype.”

Dr. Heath Canfield, a psychiatrist in Colorado Springs, also uses Skype to continue therapy with some patients from his former West Coast practice. He is licensed in both locations. “If you’re doing therapy, pauses are important and telling, and Skype isn’t fast enough to keep up in real time,” Dr. Canfield said. He wears a headset. “I want patients to know that their sound isn’t going through walls but into my ears. I speak into a microphone so they don’t feel like I’m shouting at the computer. It’s not the same as being there, but it’s better than nothing. And I wouldn’t treat people this way who are severely mentally ill.”

Indeed, the pitfalls of videoconferencing with the severely mentally ill became apparent to Michael Terry, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, when he did psychological evaluations for patients throughout Alaska’s Eastern Aleutian Islands. “Once I was wearing a white jacket and the wall behind me was white,” recalled Dr. Terry, an associate clinical professor at the University of San Diego. “My face looked very dark because of the contrast, and the patient thought he was talking to the devil.”

Another time, lighting caused a halo effect. “An adolescent thought he was talking to the Holy Spirit, that he had God on the line. It fit right into his delusions.”

Johanna Herwitz, a Manhattan psychologist, tried Skype to augment face-to-face therapy. “It creates this perverse lower version of intimacy,” she said. “Skype doesn’t therapeutically disinhibit patients so that they let down their guard and take emotional risks. I’ve decided not to do it anymore.”

Several studies have concluded that patient satisfaction with face-to-face interaction and online therapy (often preceded by in-person contact) was statistically similar. Lynn, a patient who prefers not to reveal her full identity, had been seeing her therapist for years. Their work deepened into psychoanalysis. Then her psychotherapist retired, moving out of state.

Now, four times a week, Lynn carries her laptop to an analyst’s unoccupied office (her insurance requires that a local provider have some oversight). She logs on to an encrypted program at Breakthrough.com and clicks through until she reads an alert: “Talk now!”

Hundreds of miles away, so does her analyst. Their faces loom, side by side on each other’s monitors. They say hello. Then Lynn puts her laptop on a chair and lies down on the couch. Just the top of her head is visible to her analyst.

Fifty minutes later the session ends. “The screen is asleep so I wake it up and see her face,” Lynn said. “I say goodbye and she says goodbye. Then we lean in to press a button and exit.”

As attenuated as this all may seem, Lynn said, “I’m just grateful we can continue to do this.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 24, 2011

A caption on a picture in an earlier version of this article incorrectly described the technology used by Marlene M. Maheu to communicate remotely with patients. She uses video conferencing, not Skype.

    When Your Therapist Is Only a Click Away, NYT, 23.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/fashion/therapists-are-seeing-patients-online.html

Facebook as Tastemaker

September 22, 2011
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and BEN SISARIO

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook, the Web’s biggest social network, is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch, hear, read and buy.

The company announced new features here on Thursday that could unleash a torrent of updates about what you and your Facebook friends are doing online: Frank is watching “The Hangover,” Jane is listening to Jay-Z, Mark is running a race wearing Nike sneakers, and so forth. That in turn, Facebook and its dozens of partner companies hope, will influence what Frank and Jane and Mark’s friends consume.

Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online — and increasingly offline — life.

“We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who introduced the new features at the company’s annual conference for developers. He called what Facebook was doing an effort to “rethink some industries.”

Facebook’s moves sharpen the battle lines between the social networking giant and Google, the search giant, because Facebook is trying to change the way people find what they want online. Searching the Web is still the way most people discover content — whether it is news, information about wedding photographers or Swiss chard recipes. Facebook is trying to change that: in effect, friends will direct other friends to content. Google has its own social network product in Google+, but it is far behind Facebook.

“This is two big rivals getting into each others’ backyards,” said Sean Corcoran, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It changes the game for what social networks have been doing. What Facebook is saying is, we are your life online, and also how you discover and share.”

Facebook is not becoming a purveyor of media products, like Apple or Amazon.com. Rather, it is teaming up with companies that distribute music, movies, information and games in positioning itself to become the conduit where news and entertainment is found and consumed. Its new partners include Netflix and Hulu for video, Spotify for music, The Washington Post and Yahoo for news, Ticketmaster for concert tickets and a host of food, travel and consumer brands.

For companies that distribute news and entertainment, a partnership with Facebook can draw eyeballs and subscribers, though it still remains unclear exactly how much more revenue a Facebook friend recommendation can generate. Music industry analysts said the new Facebook offerings stand to improve the prospects of new media companies like the music service Spotify, which already has two million users worldwide. But they also pose a challenge to the biggest music seller of all: iTunes from Apple, which has added social features that have gained little traction.

For Facebook, the potential payoff is huge, especially as it seeks to make itself more valuable in advance of a possible public offering. A new feature called Timeline lets users post information about their past, like weddings and big vacations. And everywhere on the site, users will be able to more precisely signal what they are reading, watching, hearing or eating. This will let Facebook reap even more valuable data than it does now about its users’ habits and desires, which in turn can be used to sell more fine-tuned advertising.

How users will react to the new features remains to be seen. The site’s evolution could make it easier for them to decide how to spend their time and money. But it could also potentially allow them to shut out alternative viewpoints and information that is not being shared among their set of friends.

And not everyone wants to rely on their friends to shape their cultural discoveries. “Some of my friends have pretty awful taste in music,” said Alexander White, whose Colorado-based Next Big Sound tracks social media responses for artists and record labels. “It’s one filter. Its not the be-all, end-all.”

As of May, Americans spent more time with Facebook than with the next four largest Web brands combined, according to Nielsen. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, described Facebook as “sort of a walled garden” that, for better or worse, can increasingly filter every other activity on the Internet.

“As Facebook becomes more and more synonymous with the Internet experience, that is going to benefit Facebook shareholders,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said. “Facebook has been very successful in getting the lion’s share of people’s time and attention. Their challenge in the coming years is to convert that dominance in time and attention into a bigger share of consumer wallets — a bigger share of money they spend either directly on Facebook or indirectly through advertising.”

Other Internet giants have enviable assets of their own. Google has a mountain of data based on how people search. Amazon knows plenty about what you might want to buy, based on what you’ve bought. But no other technology company has Facebook’s treasure trove of social data. It has 800 million users, half of whom return to the site every day, and it also has the information they reveal about themselves, sometimes unwittingly. With it, Facebook has the ability to leverage peer pressure at a grand scale.

Facebook executives describe their efforts as upending the traditional model of marketing. Rather than just helping people buy what they need, they aim to curate what they might want.

Its partnership with Zynga, maker of the popular game FarmVille, illustrates how Facebook can leverage its platform. The alliance has been enormously lucrative for both companies. Whether that model can be replicated with movies, music, or even news remains to be seen.

Still, Facebook has become unavoidable for the entertainment business. Hollywood increasingly realizes the power of peer recommendations to sell movies and television shows; some in the industry call this the “killer gateway.”

Studios have long looked at Facebook as an important marketing tool, setting up pages for characters and movies. They have also been experimenting with offering full movies on the site. Warner Brothers, Miramax and Lions Gate Entertainment have all allowed Facebook users to watch movies they have paid for with Facebook’s virtual currency, called Credits.

Now the studios are hoping the Facebook platform will let them connect even more directly with customers — to grab a Facebook user’s attention by telling her that her friend has watched a particular television show.

Netflix wants to allow subscribers to watch its video on Facebook. But its plans face a stumbling block in Washington. A law called the Video Privacy Protection Act prohibits the release of information about what movies a person is renting. That law would have to be lifted in the United States.

The changes raise a fundamental challenge for Facebook: can it be all things to everyone? Some of its users want to share with a small group of friends, while others want to be completely open. And there are users who complain about the trivia that sometimes seems to flood the site.

“Facebook wants to be omnipresent in the Web experience by adding commerce, video and mail to their early successes with news feeds and picture tagging,” said Jodee Rich, founder of People Browsr, based in San Francisco, which analyzes data from social networks. “Trying to be all things to all people was the undoing of Microsoft and AOL. If Facebook continues to overreach, they will stumble.”

 

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles

and Nick Bilton from San Francisco.

    Facebook as Tastemaker, 22.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/technology/facebook-makes-a-push-to-be-a-media-hub.html

In Small Towns,

Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious

September 19, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

MOUNTAIN GROVE, Mo. — In the small towns nestled throughout the Ozarks, people like to say that everybody knows everybody’s business — and if they do not, they feel free to offer an educated guess.

One of the established places here for trading the gossip of the day is Dee’s Place, a country diner where a dozen longtime residents gather each morning around a table permanently reserved with a members-only sign for the “Old Farts Club,” as they call themselves, to talk about weather, politics and, of course, their neighbors.

But of late, more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 have shifted from sharing the latest news and rumors over eggs and coffee to the Mountain Grove Forum on a social media Web site called Topix, where they write and read startlingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity, about one another.

And in Dee’s Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger.

His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled “freak,” he said, which described the mother of two as, among other things, “a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS.” Not a word was true, Mr. and Ms. James said, but the consequences were real enough.

Friends and relatives stopped speaking to them. Trips to the grocery store brought a crushing barrage of knowing glances. She wept constantly and even considered suicide. Now, the couple has resolved to move.

“I’ll never come back to this town again,” Ms. James said in an interview at the diner. “I just want to get the hell away from here.”

In rural America, where an older, poorer and more remote population has lagged the rest of the country in embracing the Internet, the growing use of social media is raising familiar concerns about bullying and privacy. But in small towns there are complications.

The same Web sites created as places for candid talk about local news and politics are also hubs of unsubstantiated gossip, stirring widespread resentment in communities where ties run deep, memories run long and anonymity is something of a novel concept.

A generation ago, even after technology had advanced, many rural residents clung to the party line telephone systems that allowed neighbors to listen in on one another’s conversations. Now they are gravitating toward open community forums online, said Christian Sandvig, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“Something about rural culture seems to make people want to have conversations in public,” said Mr. Sandvig, who has studied the use of social media sites in rural areas.

Topix, a site lightly trafficked in cities, enjoys a dedicated and growing following across the Ozarks, Appalachia and much of the rural South, establishing an unexpected niche in communities of a few hundred or few thousand people — particularly in what Chris Tolles, Topix’s chief executive, calls “the feud states.” One of the most heavily trafficked forums, he noted, is Pikeville, Ky., once the staging ground for the Hatfield and McCoy rivalry.

“We’re running the Gawker for every little town in America,” Mr. Tolles said.

Whereas online negativity seems to dissipate naturally in a large city, it often grates like steel wool in a small town where insults are not easily forgotten.

The forums have provoked censure by local governments, a number of lawsuits and, in one case, criticism by relatives after a woman in Austin, Ind., killed herself and her three children this year. Hours earlier she wrote on the Web site where her divorce had been a topic of conversation, “Now it’s time to take the pain away.”

In Hyden, Ky. (population 365), the local forum had 107 visitors at the same time one afternoon this month. They encountered posts about the school system, a new restaurant and local arrests, as well as the news articles and political questions posted by Topix.

But more typical were the unsubstantiated posts that identified by name an employee at a dentist’s office as a home wrecker with herpes, accused a gas station attendant of being a drug dealer, and said a 13-year-old girl was “preggo by her mommy’s man.” Many allegations were followed with promises of retribution to whoever started the post.

“If names had been put on and tied to what has been said, there would have been one killing after another,” said Lonnie Hendrix, Hyden’s mayor.

Topix, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is owned in part by several major newspaper companies — Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy — but has independent editorial control. It was initially envisioned as a hyperlocal news aggregator with separate pages for every community in the country. But most of its growth was in small cities and towns, and local commenters wanted to shift the conversation to more traditional gossip.

Mr. Tolles acknowledged the biggest problem at the site is “keeping the conversation on the rails.” But he defended it on free-speech grounds. He said the comments are funny to read, make private gossip public, provide a platform for “people who have negative things to say” and are better for business.

At one point, he said, the company tried to remove all negative posts, but it stopped after discovering that commenters had stopped visiting the site. “This is small-town America,” he said. “The voices these guys are hearing are of their friends and neighbors.”

Mr. Tolles also said the site played a journalistic role, including providing a place for whistle-blowing and candid discussion of local politics.

He noted that the Mountain Grove Forum, which had 3,700 visitors on a single day this month, had 1,200 posts containing the word “corruption,” though it was unclear how many of them were true. One resident used the site to rail against local officials, helping build support for a petition-driven state audit of town government.

Topix said it received about 125,000 posts on any given day in forums for about 5,000 cities and towns. Unlike sites like Facebook, which requires users to give their real name, Topix users can pick different names for each post and are identified only by geography. About 9 percent are automatically screened out by software, based on offensive content like racial slurs; another 3 percent — mostly threats and “obvious libel,” Mr. Tolles said — are removed after people complain.

After a challenge from more than 30 state attorneys general, Topix stopped charging for the expedited removal of offensive comments — which Jack Conway, the attorney general for Kentucky, said “smacked of having to pay a fee to get your good name back.”

Despite the screening efforts, the site is full of posts that seem to cross lines. Topix, as an Internet forum, is immune from libel suits under federal law, but those who post could be sued, if they are found.

The company receives about one subpoena a day for the computer addresses of anonymous commenters as part of law enforcement investigations or civil suits, some of which have resulted in cash verdicts or settlements.

But at Dee’s Place, Jennifer James said she did not have enough money to pursue a lawsuit. And even if she did, she said, it would not help.

“In a small town,” Ms. James said, “rumors stay forever.”

    In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html

Facebook to Offer Path to Media

September 18, 2011
The New York Times
By BEN SISARIO

For cloud-based digital music services like Spotify and Rhapsody, which stream millions of songs but have struggled to sign up large numbers of paying users, being friended by Facebook could prove to be a mixed blessing.

This week, according to numerous media and technology executives, Facebook will unveil a media platform that will allow people to easily share their favorite music, television shows and movies, effectively making the basic profile page a primary entertainment hub.

Facebook, which has more than 750 million users, has not revealed its plans, but the company is widely expected to announce the service at its F8 developers’ conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

By putting them in front of millions of users, Facebook’s new platform could introduce the music services to vast new audiences. “If it works the way it is supposed to, it would be the nirvana of interoperability,” said Ted Cohen, a consultant and former digital executive for a major label.

But the new plan will ratchet up the competitive pressure on these fledgling services, forcing them to offer more free music as enticements to new users.

According to the media and technology executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deals were private, Facebook has made agreements with a number of media companies to develop a way for a user’s profile page to display whatever entertainment he is consuming on those outside services. Links that appear on a widget or tab, or as part of a user’s news feed, would point a curious friend directly to the content.

Spotify and Rhapsody, along with their smaller competitors Rdio, MOG and the French company Deezer, are said to be among the 10 or so music services that will be part of the service at its introduction; Vevo, the music video site, is another. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment, and media executives cautioned that details of the plan could change.

Spotify is the largest of these services with more than 10 million users, according to its most recent reporting. The service began in Europe in 2008 and arrived in the United States in July, after protracted negotiations with the major record labels over its “freemium” structure, which lets people listen to music free, with advertising, or pay $5 or $10 a month for an ad-free version.

Rdio and MOG, which charge $5 and $10 a month for subscriptions, announced free versions last week in an effort to compete with Spotify. And Rhapsody, whose service costs $10 and $15 a month, has just introduced an array of social features centered on Facebook.

The companies declined to answer questions about Facebook’s media platform. And David Hyman, MOG’s founder and chief executive, said that the development of his company’s free tier far predated Spotify’s entry into the United States.

But Mr. Hyman said that the change was being made to reduce the “friction” a nonsubscriber experiences when following a link posted by a paying user. Instead of hearing the song, the nonsubscriber would reach a page asking to sign up with a credit card — an annoyance for many potential customers.

“In the Internet world, any minuscule piece of friction blows people’s minds,” he said.

MOG provides new users with a “gas tank” of free music — supported by advertising — that increases with that user’s social activity on the site, like sharing playlists or inviting friends. Rdio’s free music will come ad-free.

Neither company would say exactly how much free music would be made available.

“We don’t want to force you to look at or listen to ads that will distract you from enjoying music,” said Carter Adamson, Rdio’s chief operating officer, “and we don’t want you to spam your friends to get more free.”

But even free music requires royalty payments to record companies — typically some fraction of a cent per stream — and some investors and technology executives are concerned that Facebook’s platform may bring in large numbers of users who are willing to listen to some free music but are not being given much incentive to subscribe. That might make success more difficult for services that have less favorable deals with record companies.

David Pakman, a partner in the venture capital firm Venrock and a former chief executive of the digital service eMusic, also said that instead of giving smaller companies a boost, the mathematics of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of links might simply allow the largest service to dominate all the others.

“It favors the big over the small,” Mr. Pakman said. “It’s a good thing for all services in that it lets them all participate. But the small guys will lose network effects, and the big guys will gain it.”

Spotify has not updated its user numbers since arriving in the United States, but music executives say it quickly drew more than 100,000 customers to its paid service alone.

MOG and Rdio have not reported their numbers, but music executives say their tallies are well under 100,000.

Not all the services involved in the Facebook platform are going free. Rhapsody, which was founded 10 years ago and has 800,000 subscribers, is sticking to its monthly subscription rate, said Jon Irwin, the company’s president.

“Our belief is that the cost of the content cannot be fully offset by the advertising dollars you can generate,” Mr. Irwin said, “and that the subsequent conversion of somebody to a paying subscriber because they’ve been able to listen to content for free on a desktop is not at a level that supports the losses you’ll incur on the advertising side.”

Mr. Irwin also believes that Facebook will further intensify the competition among the cloud services, and that Spotify and his own company will have the advantage.

“It’s going to be hard for the players not at scale to survive,” he said. “You’re looking at a two-horse race.”

    Facebook to Offer Path to Media, NYT, 18.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/business/media/facebook-is-expected-to-unveil-media-sharing-service.html

Scrutinizing Google’s Reign

September 18, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Google’s slogan may be don’t be evil, but a growing chorus of antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe want to know if the company has lived up to that creed.

This week, those concerns — especially whether Google gives its own businesses preferred placement in search results, thwarting competition and harming consumers — will have their most public airing to date, when Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, testifies before a Senate antitrust panel. Some of Google’s competitors will also testify.

The Senate proceeding is just one of an array of inquiries into Google’s behavior by various federal and state authorities in this country, as well as by regulators in Europe and Asia. And though the company and the times are different, there are echoes of a hearing before the same Senate body, the Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, 13 years ago and the last sweeping antitrust investigation of an American technology powerhouse, Microsoft. Later, the federal government, joined by 20 states, filed suit against Microsoft.

“Google is a great American success story, but its size, position and power in the marketplace have raised concerns about its business practices, and raised the question of what responsibilities come with that power,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who is a member of the antitrust subcommittee and who as the attorney general of Connecticut played a leading role among the states that sued Microsoft.

Today Google, like Microsoft then, is both admired and feared. Google has used the riches from its dominance in search and search advertising to expand into video distribution with YouTube, smartphone software with Android and Web browsers with Chrome. It has added online commerce offerings in local retail and restaurants, comparison shopping and travel, and folded them into its search engine, prompting complaints that Google is giving its businesses preferred placement in search results.

Google executives have consistently replied that its search results are the product of extensive user testing, and do not favor its own offerings. If users become dissatisfied with Google search results, the company argues, they will go elsewhere, to rival search engines like Microsoft’s Bing, sites that focus on specific products or services like Yelp, or social networks like Facebook.

“Using Google is a choice,” Amit Singhal, a senior engineering manager at Google, wrote on the company’s blog in June, after the Federal Trade Commission began its investigation. “And there are lots of other choices available to you for getting information.”

Competitors disagree. Yelp, the popular Web site for user reviews and recommendations for restaurants and other businesses, has noticed a difference in search rankings since Google established its own online businesses, said Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and chief executive of Yelp, which gets half its traffic from Google searches.

Two years ago, Google offered to buy Yelp, but the talks broke down. Last year, Google introduced Places, a Yelp-like service for listing businesses and collecting consumer reviews. A Google search for a restaurant often displays the Places entry — linked to a map, user reviews and other services — ahead of Yelp.

“Google develops its own in-house properties and it preferences those, so it’s leveraging its dominance in Web search,” he said.

Mr. Stoppelman, who is scheduled to testify at the Senate hearing on Wednesday, added, “When it comes to Web search, Google says you have great content, you rise to the top and that’s historically been true for us. But we do feel like that world is changing because Google has decided it’s not enough to own and dominate Web search.”

This month, Google acquired Zagat, the restaurant listing and review service, to strengthen its local commerce offering. Yelp is Zagat’s leading online rival.

Google, legal experts say, presents some challenges for the traditional doctrine of antitrust. The Microsoft case, too, required adapting antitrust principles to modern technology, and the complaint filed against the company was filled with technical computing terms like “cross-platform middleware” and “application programming interfaces.”

Yet Microsoft’s dominant product — the Windows personal computer operating system — was something consumers and companies paid for, as with any conventional good.

Google’s search service, by contrast, is “free and anyone who wants to use it can use it,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Iowa College of Law, so higher prices for consumers — a hallmark of competitive harm — is not an issue.

But in other ways, the accusations against Google fit comfortably into antitrust.

“If it is proven that Google discriminates in favor of its own online properties, you certainly have an antitrust issue,” Mr. Hovenkamp said.

While the technical ingredients may be different, the Google recipe is the same one used by Microsoft years ago, said Gary L. Reback, a lawyer at Carr & Ferrell who represents some of Google’s rivals.

The Microsoft case revolved around Netscape, maker of the first commercially successful Web browser, and the bullying tactics Microsoft used to thwart the threat it represented.

The browser was a new layer of software, running on top of a personal computer operating system, and developers wrote software to run on the browser. Thus the browser took on some functions similar to an operating system, potentially undermining the role and value of Windows.

“Web sites like Yelp and others in travel and shopping that help people find things are partial substitutes for Google in the same way that Netscape was a partial substitute for Windows,” said Mr. Reback, who also played a key part in the 1990s case against Microsoft.

Google’s expansion strategy beyond search is an effort to grab more online advertising dollars. Google pockets more than three-fourths of all search advertising dollars in the United States, and a higher share in many European markets.

Its share of total online ad revenue in America, including spending on larger graphic and video ads, is 41 percent, followed by Yahoo with 11 percent, Facebook with 7 percent and Microsoft with 6 percent, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

Advertising revenue, analysts say, is the prize on the Internet — the fuel that sustains services, competition and innovation.

Much of the economy may be languishing, but not in Silicon Valley, where start-ups are being created at a torrid rate, flourishing, it seems, in Google’s shadow. Facebook and Twitter, for example, are becoming powers in their own right

“The similarity between Google and Microsoft years ago is the potential for harm, the risk that a dominant company uses its power to disadvantage others,” said Mitchell Kapor, a longtime Silicon Valley technologist and investor. “But Google was born on the open Internet, and things are just generally far more open to innovators and start-ups than in the Microsoft era.”

And, as proof of the rapid turn of fortunes in technology, Microsoft is now the underdog, trailing well behind Google in search and search advertising, urging government officials to take action. Microsoft has met regularly with antitrust investigators in America and filed a complaint against Google in Europe this year.

“We appreciate the irony,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said in an interview earlier this year.

    Scrutinizing Google’s Reign, NYT, 18.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/technology/googles-to-face-congressional-antitrust-hearing.html

In E-Books, Publishers Have Rivals: News Sites

September 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN and JEREMY W. PETERS

Book publishers are surrounded by hungry new competitors: Amazon, with its steadily growing imprints; authors who publish their own e-books; online start-ups like The Atavist and Byliner.

Now they have to contend with another group elbowing into their territory: news organizations.

Swiftly and at little cost, newspapers, magazines and sites like The Huffington Post are hunting for revenue by publishing their own version of e-books, either using brand-new content or repurposing material that they may have given away free in the past.

And by making e-books that are usually shorter, cheaper to buy and more quickly produced than the typical book, they are redefining what an e-book is — and who gets to publish it.

On Tuesday, The Huffington Post will release its second e-book, “How We Won,” by Aaron Belkin, the story of the campaign to end the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. It joins e-books recently published by The New Yorker, ABC News, The Boston Globe, Politico and Vanity Fair.

The books occasionally snap up valuable spots on best-seller lists — “Open Secrets,” an e-book published by The New York Times, landed in the No. 19 spot on The Times e-book nonfiction best-seller list in February.

“Surely they’re competing with us,” said Stephen Rubin, the president and publisher of Henry Holt and Company, part of Macmillan. “If I’m doing a book on Rupert Murdoch and four magazines are doing four instant e-books on Rupert Murdoch, then I’m competing with them.”

But as much as news outlets and magazines would like a piece of the e-book market, it remains to be seen whether what they produce can match the breadth and depth of the work produced by traditional publishing houses.

“I’m doing something different than they’re doing,” added Mr. Rubin, who is in fact offering a book on the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World. “I’m going to get the book on Rupert Murdoch that is the definitive book for all time.”

The proliferation of e-readers has helped magazine and newspaper publishers find new platforms for their work, publishing executives said.

“On the one hand, a Kindle or a Nook is perfect for reading a 1,000-page George R. R. Martin novel,” said Eric Simonoff, a literary agent. “On the other hand, these devices are uniquely suited for mid-length content that runs too long for shrinking magazines and are too pamphletlike to credibly be called a book.”

Some publishers have joined forces with news organizations to produce e-books on a faster schedule. Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher, is partnering with Politico to produce a series of four e-books about the 2012 presidential race.

Many of the works sold as e-books are more of a hybrid between a long magazine piece and a serialized book. Each Random House-Politico e-book will be in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 words, and the releases will be spaced out over the course of the campaign.

“We think that the nature of a book is changing,” said Jon Meacham, an executive editor at Random House and a former editor of Newsweek. “The line between articles and books is getting ever fuzzier.”

Part of the appeal is cost. Instead of paying writers hefty advances and then sending them out on the road to report for months at a time, publishers can rely on reporters who are already doing the work as part of their day job. Politico, for example, has assigned Mike Allen, its chief White House correspondent, to write and report with Evan Thomas, a noted political writer. The e-book will be the combination of their efforts.

“Our cost,” said Mr. Meacham, “is me and Evan.”

The Huffington Post, which began publishing e-books this month, is not paying its authors advances for their work, but will share profits from the sales.

Some publishers are trying a different approach — one that requires even fewer reporting and writing resources. Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, for example, have created their own e-books by bundling together previously published works surrounding a major news event.

When the phone-hacking scandal erupted at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in early July, Vanity Fair collected 20 articles on Mr. Murdoch, his family and their businesses and put them in a $3.99 e-book that went on sale July 29. Graydon Carter, the magazine’s editor, wrote an introduction. The articles were then grouped into six chapters, each with a theme that reflected various aspects of Mr. Murdoch’s life.

“It’s like having a loose-leaf binder and shoving new pages into it,” Mr. Carter said. “E-books are a wonderful way to do a book and do it quickly. They don’t need to be fact-checked again. They do go through copy-editing. But you’re not reinventing the wheel each time.”

The New Yorker created a similar e-book about Sept. 11 using content from the magazine’s writing on the attacks and their aftermath — everything from poetry to reported pieces on Al Qaeda. It sells for $7.99.

So far, sales for the handful of digital special editions that The New Yorker has released remain relatively small. Pamela McCarthy, the deputy editor, put the number in the thousands. “The question of what constitutes well in this new world is one that seems to be up for grabs,” Ms. McCarthy said of the success so far.

Another problem for e-books that are not simultaneously published in print is that they pose a marketing challenge. With no automatic display space in thousands of bookstores across the country, making readers aware of a book that lives only online is a problem.

“I think one of the challenges for everybody is letting people know the material is there,” Ms. McCarthy said. “The e-book stores are tremendously deep, and what’s there is not at all apparent on the surface. It’s not like walking into a bookstore and seeing what’s on the front table.”

Authors who are using news organizations to publish their books also may have to miss the pleasure of seeing their work produced in print.

Mr. Belkin, whose e-book will be published by The Huffington Post, said he still hopes that his book will be released in print eventually. And if not, he’s content with the potential exposure offered by The Huffington Post, which draws some 25 million visitors each month.

“Even if the page itself is not as beautiful as a page from Oxford University Press,” Mr. Belkin said, “Oxford University Press would not be getting the word out to a million people on the first day my book is out.”

    In E-Books, Publishers Have Rivals: News Sites, NYT, 18.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/business/media/in-e-books-publishing-houses-have-a-rival-in-news-sites.html

Digital Age Drives Rally to Keep

a Georgia Inmate From Execution

September 16, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

ATLANTA — As Troy Davis faces his fourth execution date, the effort to save him has come to rival the most celebrated death row campaigns in recent history.

On Monday, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles will give Mr. Davis what is by all accounts his last chance to avoid death by lethal injection, scheduled for Wednesday.

Whether history will ultimately judge Mr. Davis guilty or innocent, cultural and legal observers will be left to examine why Mr. Davis, convicted of killing a Savannah police officer, Mark MacPhail, 22 years ago, has been catapulted to the forefront of the national conversation when most of the 3,251 other people on death row in the United States have not.

The answer, experts say, can be found in an amalgam of changing death penalty politics, concerns about cracks in the judicial system, the swift power of digital political organizing and, simply, a story with a strong narrative that caught the public’s attention.

“Compelling cases that make us second-guess our justice system have always struck a chord with the American public,” said Benjamin T. Jealous, president of the N.A.A.C.P. “Some are simply more compelling in that they seem to tap deeply into the psyche of this country. A case like this suggests that our justice system is flawed.”

Like others involved in the case, he credits Mr. Davis’s sister, Martina Correia, a media-friendly former soldier who has long argued that the police simply got the wrong man, with keeping the story alive.

And the story has been compelling. A parade of witnesses have recanted since the original trial, and new testimony suggests the prosecution’s main witness might be the killer.

There are racial undertones — Mr. Davis is black and the victim was white — and legal cliffhangers, including a stay in 2008 that came with less than 90 minutes to spare and a Hail Mary pass in 2009 that resulted in a rare Supreme Court decision.

Altogether, it had the makings of a story that has grabbed many armchair lawyers and even the most casual opponent of the death penalty.

The list of people asking that the Georgia parole board offer clemency has grown from the predictable (Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Indigo Girls) to the surprising, including 51 members of Congress, entertainment heavyweights like Cee Lo Green and death penalty supporters including William S. Sessions, a former F.B.I. director, and Bob Barr, a former member of Congress, and some leaders in the Southern Baptist church. (Unlike some other states, in Georgia the governor cannot commute a death sentence; only the parole board can.)

Propelled by a recent flood of digital media including Twitter traffic and online petition requests, the case has become fodder for discussion in fashionable Atlanta bistros, Harlem street corners and anywhere living room sleuths gather in their search for another Casey Anthony trial to dissect.

On Friday, about 1,000 people marched to Ebenezer Baptist Church here for a prayer vigil, one of hundreds of rallies being organized by Amnesty International around the world.

The facts of the case itself captured the attention of Nancie McDermott, a North Carolina cookbook author who usually spends her time in the kitchen but who took up the cause with a passion once she started reading about it on liberal Web sites.

“I think if my brother or son or dear friend from college were about to be put to death, and there was no physical evidence, and seven of nine witnesses had recanted and testified to coercion in that original testimony, would I shrug and say, ‘The jury made its decision?’ ” she wrote in an e-mail. “I just want people, particularly all the churchgoing people like me, to look me in the eye and tell me, just once, that this is justice.”

There are some larger political themes weaving through the case.

As executions becomes less common and sentences for executions decline — dropping to about 100 a year from three times that in the 1990s — the focus on execution as a means of punishment and a marker of the nation’s cultural and political divide becomes sharper, legal analysts said.

That divide results in a culture that in the same week can generate hundreds of thousands of letters of support for Troy Davis and, conversely, bring a cheering round of applause from the audience at a Republican presidential debate when Gov. Rick Perry of Texas was asked about the 234 executions in his state during his term of office.

“We’ve gotten to a critical point in the death penalty in this country,” said Ferrel Guillory, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina. “These cases are being phased out but at the same time they don’t make the front page anymore, so when one comes along with a strong narrative and a good advocate, it gets our attention.”

Matthew Poncelet, a Louisiana convict, had Sister Helen Prejean, whose story of her work with him in the final phase of his life brought “dead man walking” into popular lexicon after Hollywood released a film version of the case in 1995.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former journalist and Black Panther who was convicted of shooting a white Philadelphia police officer in 1981, rode the power of his own charisma. His case became so popular globally that a road in a Parisian suburb bears his name.

Mr. Davis’s case not only offers a good narrative with strong characters people can relate to — his father was a law enforcement officer, his mother was a churchgoer, his sister is fighting both cancer and for her brother’s innocence — but has also benefited from an explosion in social media.

“Back in 2007, nobody outside of Savannah knew who Troy Davis was,” said Laura Moye, director of Amnesty International U.S.A.’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign. “Now it’s safe to say over a million people do.”

For proof, she offers the 633,000 petitions she and others delivered to the parole board in an elaborate media event on Friday. About 200,000 of them were electronic signatures gathered by Change.org in less than a week.

“It’s a new era of activism,” she said.

Online organizing drew Anderia Bishop, 37, of Atlanta, to the case last week. She learned about Mr. Davis through an e-mail from ColorOfChange.org, a black political organization.

The fact that there was very little physical evidence and no DNA and a case built largely on witnesses who changed their story got her attention.

“I thought, literally, it could be me, and that’s something a lot of people who are casually watching this case think,” she said. “There are just too many questions.”

But public pressure and intense media attention can cut both ways, said Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights and a longtime capital defense lawyer.

“It certainly heightens the attention a case gets, but there also can be some defensiveness,” he said. “There has historically been that worry that people from out of state will come in and not understand what really happened.”

The difference, he said, is that in today’s information-rich age, people around the world actually do know most of the facts in the case.

“It tells the State of Georgia that the whole world is watching,” he said.

    Digital Age Drives Rally to Keep a Georgia Inmate From Execution, NYT, 16.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/us/supporters-rally-to-save-troy-davis-from-execution-in-georgia.html

Update Urged on Children’s Online Privacy

September 15, 2011
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Aiming to catch up with fast-churning technology that touches children’s lives every day, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday proposed long-awaited changes to regulations covering online privacy for children.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa, was enacted over a decade ago, long before the advent of social media and smartphones. It requires companies to obtain parental consent before collecting any personal information about a child under the age of 13.

The proposed revisions expand the definition of “personal information” to include a child’s location, along with any personal data collected through the use of cookies for the purposes of targeted advertising. It also covers facial recognition technology. Web sites that collect a child’s information would be required to ensure that they can protect it, hold onto it “for only as long as is reasonably necessary,” and then delete the information safely.

The F.T.C. also suggested that parental consent should no longer be obtained through a two-step e-mail and authorization process, but through alternate methods, like getting scanned versions of signed consent forms and videoconferencing.

The commission said revisions to the law were required in light of “an explosion in children’s use of mobile devices, the proliferation of online social networking and interactive gaming.” Its chairman, Jon Leibowitz, described children as “tech-savvy, but judgment-poor.”

The collecting of information on children is an emotional issue that often attracts political attention. The F.T.C. has called for comments on its proposals and is expected to finalize them next year. It can put them into effect without Congressional approval.

Coppa represents one of the most explicit protections regarding online privacy in American law. The F.T.C. is expected to release its final recommendations for broader online privacy regulations in the coming months.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington and a privacy advocate who helped draft the original law, said he was especially heartened that the rules addressed new technology that allows for location-tracking and facial recognition. “It’s a forward-looking effort to update Internet privacy law,” he said.

Common Sense Media, an advocacy group based in San Francisco, lauded the proposed changes, saying parents “should absolutely remain the gatekeepers when it comes to their children’s online privacy.”

Whether the changes will affect the way Internet companies do business is not clear. Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said that because of the existing law, many firms, especially start-ups, avoid dealing with children under 13 anyway. “The requirements of complying with Coppa are onerous and expensive, and the payoffs from having under-13 kids on the site are rarely worth the financial investment,” he said. “The revisions do nothing to change the basic economics of complying with the statute.”

Enforcement is another issue. Facebook says its policy is to not allow children under 13 to use its site, but that it is fraught with difficulty because children lie about their age. Research by Consumer Reports this year found that 7.5 million American children under the age of 13 were using the site. The Pew Research Center in 2009 found that 38 percent of American 12-year-olds were using social networks.

A Facebook official who is not authorized to speak to the media because of the sensitivity of the subject called on parents to advise their children about being safe online. “We believe it is time to focus on how to keep kids safe online and on Facebook, rather than on how to keep them off,” he said. Company officials said they are reviewing the F.T.C.’s proposals.

The F.T.C. this year imposed a $50,000 fine on W3 Innovations, a company that produces mobile phone apps, for collecting personal information on children without proper parental consent.

    Update Urged on Children’s Online Privacy, NYT, 15.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/technology/ftc-proposes-updates-to-law-on-childrens-online-privacy.html

YouTube Founders Revamping a Site for Link Sharing

September 11, 2011
The New York Tiimes
By JENNA WORTHAM

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have some experience with turning a small Web site into Internet gold. In 2006 they sold their scrappy start-up YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion.

More recently they picked an unlikely candidate to be their next Web sensation: a Yahoo castoff.

The men are trying to inject new life into Delicious, a social bookmarking service that, in its time, was popular among the technorati, but failed to catch on with a broader audience.

“What we plan to do,” Mr. Hurley said in an interview here last week, “is try to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.”

Created in 2003, Delicious lets people save links from around the Web and organize them using a simple tagging system, assigning keywords like “neuroscience” or “recipes.” It was praised for the way it allowed easy sharing of those topical links. The site’s early popularity spurred Yahoo to snap it up in 2005 — but in the years after that Yahoo did little with it.

In December, leaked internal reports from Yahoo hinted that the company was planning to sell or shut down the service.

At the same time, Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, who had recently formed a new company called Avos and begun renting space a few blocks from the original YouTube offices in San Mateo, had been brainstorming ideas for their next venture. One problem they kept circling around was the struggle to keep from drowning in the flood of news, cool new sites and videos surging through their Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, a glut that makes it difficult to digest more than a sliver of that material in a given day.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” Mr. Chen said. “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on.”

He added, “There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”

When the men heard about Yahoo’s plans to close Delicious, their ears perked up, and they placed a personal call to Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, and made him an offer. (They declined to disclose financial details of the transaction.)

At heart, they say, the revamped service will still resemble the original Delicious when it opens to the public, which Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley said would happen later this year. But their blueprint involves an overhaul of the site’s design and the software and the systems used to tag and organize links.

The current home page of Delicious features a simple cascade of blue links, the most recent pages bookmarked by its users, and it tends to largely be dominated technology news. But the new Delicious aims to be more of a destination, a place where users can go to see the most recent links shared around topical events, like the Texas wildfires or the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the gadget reviews and tech tips.

The home page would feature browseable “stacks,” or collections of related images, videos and links shared around topical events. The site would also make personalized recommendations for users, based on their sharing habits. “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing,” Mr. Hurley said.

Mr. Chen gives the example of trying to find information about how to repair a vintage car radio or plan an exotic vacation.

“You’re Googling around and have eight to 10 browser tabs of results, links to forums and message boards, all related to your search,” he said. The new Delicious, he said, provides “a very easy way to save those links in a collection that someone else can browse.”

They say they decided to buy Delicious rather than build their own service for a number of reasons.

“We know how hard it would be to build a brand,” Mr. Hurley said. “Delicious lets us hit the ground running with its existing footprint.”

A number of sites already have Delicious buttons as an option for sharing content — right alongside Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, Mr. Hurley said.

But Mr. Chen said the team also “liked the idea of saving one of the original Web 2.0 companies that started the social sharing movement on the Web.” He added: “There was some sense of history. We were genuinely sad that it would be shut down.”

Both founders acknowledge that they were never diehard Delicious users. “I signed up in 2005 and I didn’t use it again until 2011,” Mr. Chen said with an embarrassed laugh.

But Mr. Chen said it had become clear only in recent years how valuable such social data is — for personalization and to customize advertisements. Eventually the men plan to add such sharply focused advertising to the site.

Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen’s biggest challenge may be persuading already-overloaded people to start using yet another service. But Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group, which studies technology and advises companies on how to use it, said Web users who were tired of wading through silly links and other noise on Twitter and Facebook might be open to a better solution that helps them find more personalized and relevant articles, links and videos.

“It feels like there’s still an open opportunity to set a new precedent for social search,” Ms. Etlinger said.

Caterina Fake, who helped to found Flickr, the photo-sharing service, among other start-ups, recalled her initial awe of Delicious.

“It opened up the Internet in a way that was not remotely possible before,” she said. “You couldn’t stop surfing. It was infini-surf. You could be interested in a really arcane field of biology and find the five other people that shared that same interest and shared links on that topic.”

Ms. Fake said Delicious might attract a wider audience now that more people are accustomed to sharing links and information socially — something foreign to most people eight years ago.

“It didn’t quite get to the mainstream before,” she said, “but I’m optimistic that it can get there now.”

The ambitions of Delicious’s new owners make it sound as if they want to jump into the social networking turf war among Facebook, Twitter and Google — a curious challenge considering Mr. Chen was at Google until 2009 and Mr. Hurley stayed even longer, giving up his title as chief executive of YouTube in late 2010.

But they resist the notion that they are looking to compete with those companies.

“Google is still the utility for quickly finding things, like the capital of Texas,” Mr. Chen said. “But when people aren’t doing search for a simple question, we want to capture the results of that idea, that browsing, and showcase the results for the next guy.”

Before starting YouTube with Jared Kawim, Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen were among the early employees at PayPal, which helped shape the way people pay for goods online. Now they are trying to cast the same spell on Silicon Valley that YouTube did. But they are remaining true to their start-up roots with a sparsely outfitted space that houses around 15 employees, mostly engineers.

Computer desks and a few Ikea couches dot the office’s single floor, which is decorated with a few Street Fighter III and Spinal Tap posters and two slim-neck guitars — Mr. Chen’s. A flimsy computer-printed sign taped to a window announces the company’s name. There’s no sign of the bubbly excesses of some young start-ups — there isn’t even a kitchen or a sink.

“We’re trying to stay focused,” Mr. Hurley said.

Delicious still attracts around half a million visitors a month, according to comScore. Some of the early users are still fiercely protective of the service. Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley said they planned to invite the earliest users to test a version of the new site and solicit feedback about the designs and features.

“We didn’t buy it so we can kill it,” Mr. Hurley said. “Hopefully people will understand that.”

    YouTube Founders Revamping a Site for Link Sharing, NYT, 11.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/technology/youtube-founders-aim-to-revamp-delicious.html

Google Warns Users in Iran About Security Issue

SEPTEMBER 10, 2011
12:35 PM
The New York Tiimes
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Google took the unusual step of warning Gmail users in Iran to “secure their accounts,” a week after an unidentified hacker generated fake Web site verification certificates that may have allowed the Iranian state to monitor communications by its citizens, including dissidents.

On Google’s security blog late Thursday, Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering, said the company was “directly contacting possibly affected users.” He noted that users of the Google Chrome browser were unaffected by the malicious attack but urged “all users in Iran to take concrete steps to secure their accounts.”

The company spelled out five separate steps, beginning with changing passwords and verifying account recovery options to ensure that alternate e-mail addresses and phone numbers are updated. It went on to advise users to make sure unfamiliar apps and Web sites did not have access to their accounts and that e-mails were not being automatically forwarded to suspicious, unknown addresses.

Google was not the only site to be affected by the attack. The hacker produced fake certificates for other communications sites, including Skype and Facebook. The certificates could be used by a third party with control of an Internet service provider. That third party could in turn eavesdrop on supposedly secure online conversations.

    Google Warns Users in Iran About Security Issue, NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/google-warns-users-in-iran-about-security-issue/

Once a Leader, Yahoo Now Struggles to Find Its Way

September 7, 2011
The New York Tiimes
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and VERNE G. KOPYTOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo has been one of the most-visited sites on the Internet since its glory days as a Web portal. Yet as the rest of the Internet moved on to social networks and mobile devices, Yahoo has failed to keep up.

That became painfully clear Tuesday when Yahoo’s board abruptly fired its chief executive, Carol A. Bartz. She focused on bolstering Yahoo’s online media and original reporting, but neglected to develop the new social networking tools, video services or mobile apps that people now prefer to use. In that way, the tale of Yahoo’s misfortunes is not just one of management woes, but a vivid illustration of the transition from Web sites that publish professional content to a new digital world dominated by mobile phones and sites where the users are the content creators.

Yahoo’s problems are shared with another Internet pioneer, AOL. Both astutely capitalized on the first huge shift in how people read — moving online from paper — but they failed to follow Internet users and advertisers to cellphone screens and social networks. Both companies have tried to become media companies. Meanwhile, the next generation of companies, like Google and Facebook, have happily satisfied the demand for information and entertainment — not by creating content but by building mobile and social networking services that attract users and, increasingly, valuable advertisers.

“Yahoo hangs on to the pieces that made it a giant years ago,” said Shar VanBoskirk, a digital marketing analyst at Forrester Research. “It assumes people will come to its Web site, and what users are looking for now is a much more syndicated experience that allows them to go to mobile devices and co-create content.”

As the way people use the Internet changed, she said, Yahoo and AOL “hit the wall and didn’t continue to evolve as the rest of the market did.” Yahoo’s sites, like its home page, e-mail service and sites for finance and entertainment, still have a huge audience — 177.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore — second only to Google’s but more than Facebook’s. But while Yahoo’s traffic has flattened, both Google and Facebook are growing in popularity. And people spend about half as much time on Yahoo as they do on Facebook.

Advertisers are chasing what they say is more profitable prey — users of smartphones, video sites and social networks, and the companies that cater to them. Yahoo has always led in one of the most important corners of the advertising marketing: display ads, those that show images and video. But Facebook and Google are closing in on Yahoo, in large part because they can offer advertisers more personal information about users.

Yahoo’s slice of the display advertising pie has shrunk for three years in a row, according to eMarketer, a digital-marketing research firm. Last year, its share of display ads was 14.4 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for Facebook and 8.6 percent for Google. But this year, Facebook will surge ahead of Yahoo with 17.7 percent to Yahoo’s 13.6 percent, eMarketer predicts. And by next year, Google will have nearly caught up to Yahoo, too, with 12.3 percent of display ads compared with 12.5 percent at Yahoo and 19.4 percent at Facebook.

“Yahoo still has an enormous amount of traffic,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “But more and more ad buys are being made in a more targeted way.” Advertisers are attracted to information that Facebook has about a user’s friends or Google has about a user’s search queries, he said.

Mr. Hallerman compared Yahoo and its audience to the mass-circulation magazines of the 1960s, like Life and Look. Those publications were done in by the shift among advertisers to magazines aimed at specific groups like celebrity news or golf. “The idea of a portal trying to be everything to everybody is outdated,” he said.

Advertising executives also criticized Yahoo for the shortcomings of its advertising technology as well as executive turnover that meant that every few months, ad agencies had to teach a new Yahoo executive about their accounts. “When you look at Yahoo, there’s a lot of distractions,” said Christian Juhl, president of the Western region at Razorfish, a digital ad agency owned by the Publicis Groupe.

In 2007 Google bought DoubleClick, a display advertising company, to compete with Yahoo. Two years later Google had developed DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which was more efficient for buyers and sellers of ad space. It invested heavily to acquire or create tools for targeting, serving and optimizing online display ads. It has also invested in YouTube, its video site, to try to lure TV advertisers to display ads.

“You see the likes of Facebook and Google eating their lunch,” said Julie Berger, vice president and managing director for digital at the Los Angeles office of Horizon Media, a leading media agency. “Consumers’ habits are changing,” and Yahoo executives have not sufficiently realized that, she said.

But even as Internet users began to surf the Web differently — reading bits and pieces on different sites and devices — Yahoo and AOL dug in, creating content as they had in their heyday in the 1990s.

Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive since 2009, is investing heavily in news and original reporting. His biggest bet was to buy The Huffington Post, the news and aggregation site founded by Arianna Huffington, for $315 million earlier this year. He also bought the tech blog TechCrunch and is pushing into local news with Patch, which has reporters in more than 800 towns writing about city council meetings, neighborhood crimes and civic events.

But like Yahoo, Mr. Armstrong is dealing with unhappy shareholders and calls to break the company into pieces and sell them off. AOL has an investment bank and lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisition on retainer. A steady decline in its Internet access business makes increasing its overall advertising business difficult. In the latest quarter, AOL reported a 5 percent gain in global advertising sales, its first increase since spinning out of Time Warner in 2009, but it remains a money loser.

Ms. Bartz took a parallel approach at Yahoo, hiring dozens of journalists and bloggers and buying Associated Content, which enlists amateur journalists to write about a variety of topics. Its first social network, Yahoo 360, introduced in 2005, never caught on.

Inside Yahoo on Thursday, the management team held an all-hands meeting with employees to try to reassure them about the company’s future. Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, who was pushed out as chief executive before Ms. Bartz was hired, said the decision to remove Ms. Bartz was a difficult one but the company should be growing faster.

“We’re at a critical time in Yahoo’s history,” he said.

It may not have been what advertisers want to hear. “What advertisers want is an innovator, a partner that is going to help them know the next best place to reach their customers,” said Ms. VanBoskirk of Forrester. “Yahoo’s problem is they look like a legacy player that’s not thinking about the next thing.”

 

Stuart Elliott contributed reporting from New York.

    Once a Leader, Yahoo Now Struggles to Find Its Way, NYT, 7.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/technology/once-a-leader-yahoo-now-struggles-to-find-its-way.html

Google Details Electricity Output of Its Data Centers

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

Google released what was once among its most closely guarded secrets on Thursday: how much electricity its enormous computing facilities consume.

The company said that its data centers continuously drew almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant — in order to run Google searches, YouTube views, Gmail messaging and display ads on all those services around the world.

Though the electricity figure may seem large, the company asserts that the world is using less energy as a result of the billions of operations carried out in Google data centers. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, driving to the library. “They look big in the small context,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, said in an interview.

Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries, and it calculates that the average energy consumption for a typical user is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours. The overall electricity figure includes all Google operations worldwide, including the energy required to run its campuses and office parks, he added.

For years, Google maintained a wall of silence worthy of a government security agency on how much electricity the company used — a silence that experts speculated was used to cloak how quickly it was outstripping the competition in the scale and sophistication of its data centers.

The electricity figures are no longer seen as a key to decoding the company’s dominance, said Mr. Hoelzle. Google is known to have built efficient data centers. Unlike many data-driven companies, Google designs and builds most of its data centers from scratch, including its servers that use energy-saving chips and software.

Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, applauded Google for releasing the figures but cautioned that despite the advent of increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing tools, electricity use at data centers is still rising as every major corporation now relies on them. He said the figures did not include the electricity drawn by the personal computers, tablets and iPhones that use information from Google’s data centers.

“When we hit the Google search button,” Mr. Horowitz said, “it’s not for free.”

Google also estimated that its total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, with most of that attributable to carbon fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. In part because of special arrangements the company has made to purchase electricity from wind farms, Google says that 25 percent of its energy is supplied by renewable fuels, and estimates that it will reach 30 percent in 2011.

Google also released an estimate that an average search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, a figure that may be difficult for many people to understand intuitively. But when multiplied by Google’s estimate of more than a billion searches a day, the figure yields a somewhat surprising result: approximately 12.5 million watts of Google’s 260 million watt total can be accounted for by searches, the company’s bread-and-butter service.

The rest is used by Google’s other services, including YouTube, whose power consumption the company also depicted as very small.

The announcement is likely to spur further competition in an industry where every company is already striving to appear “greener” than the next, said Dennis Symanski, a senior data center project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit organization. At professional conferences on the topic, Mr. Symanski said, “They’re all clamoring to get on the podium to claim that they have the most efficient data center.”

    Google Details Electricity Output of Its Data Centers, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-electricity-output-of-its-data-centers.html

Facebook Page for Jesus, With Highly Active Fans

September 4, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON

A North Carolina diet doctor has come up with a formula to create the most highly engaged audience on Facebook in the world, far surpassing marketing efforts by celebrities and sports teams. He draws on the words of Jesus and posts them four or five times a day.

The doctor, Aaron Tabor, 41, grew up watching his father preach at churches in Alabama and North Carolina, and his Facebook creation is called the Jesus Daily. He started it in April 2009, he said, as a hobby shortly after he began using Facebook to market his diet book and online diet business that includes selling soy shakes, protein bars and supplements.

For the last three months, more people have “Liked,” commented and shared content on the Jesus Daily than on any other Facebook page, including Justin Bieber’s page, according to a weekly analysis by AllFacebook.com, an industry blog. “I wanted to provide people with encouragement,” said Dr. Tabor, who keeps his diet business on a separate Facebook page. “And I thought I would give it a news spin by calling it daily.”

Facebook and other social media tools have changed the way people communicate, work, find each other and fall in love. While it’s too early to say that social media have transformed the way people practice religion, the number of people discussing faith on Facebook has significantly increased in the last year, according to company officials.

Over all, 31 percent of Facebook users in the United States list a religion in their profile, and 24 percent of users outside the United States do, Facebook says. More than 43 million people on Facebook are fans of at least one page categorized as religious.

Much of the conversation on social platforms is fostered by religious leaders, churches, synagogues and other religious institutions turning to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to attract followers and strengthen connections with members. What is new is that millions of people are also turning to Facebook pages, like the Jesus Daily, created by people unaffiliated with a religious leader or a specific house of worship. With 8.2 million fans, the Jesus Daily counted 3.4 million interactions last week, compared with about 630,000 interactions among Justin Bieber’s 35 million fans, the AllFacebook.com analysis shows. The Bible Facebook page, run by the United Bible Societies in Reading, England, has eight million fans and also beat Mr. Bieber with about a million interactions.

Amid pages for Lady Gaga, Texas Hold’em Poker and Manchester United, Joyce Meyer Ministries is in the top 20, along with another page devoted to Jesus Christ, and the Spanish-language page Dios Es Bueno, or God Is Great. And Facebook got its first Bible-themed game recently, the Journey of Moses.

But the increase in the number of people finding faith communities via social media platforms provokes the question of what constitutes religious experience and whether “friending” a church online is at all similar to worshiping at one.

Although Pope Benedict acknowledged in a recent statement that social networks offered “a great opportunity,” he warned Roman Catholics that “virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives.”

The Rev. Henry G. Brinton, senior pastor of the Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Va., who writes a blog and whose church uses Facebook, said that it was important for people to gather to “experience the physical sensation of water in Baptism, the chance to hold hands in a service of worship or greet one another in the passing of the peace.”

That’s not possible through online worship alone, he said. “I am not saying there isn’t value to the connections that get made through social networking. But they can never replace the importance of people being together physically in the service of worship.”

Perhaps the biggest opportunity for religious leaders and institutions is finding and keeping new members, according to the Rev. Kenneth Lillard, author of “Social Media and Ministry: Sharing the Gospel in the Digital Age.” He said Facebook and other social media tools, including Google Plus, YouTube and Twitter, represented the best chance for religious leaders to expand their congregations since the printing press helped Martin Luther usher in the Protestant Reformation.

“I am looking at social media doing the same thing for today’s church,” said Mr. Lillard, a Baptist minister from Maryland.

Since making a focused effort to use social media three years ago, Rabbi Laura Baum, of the Congregation Beth Adam in Cincinnati, said the synagogue had reached thousands of people around the world and significantly expanded the number of people participating in Shabbat services on Friday evenings. They offer readings and services via live videos on Facebook, allowing Jews from all over the world to join in prayer and in conversation on Facebook, Twitter or Livestream.

“There are some people who will always prefer the in-person, face-to-face experience, who love being in a room with other Jews and smelling the freshly baked challah. And some people will prefer being online,” said Rabbi Baum, 31, who is one of the leaders of OurJewishCommunity.org. “There are those people who prefer to check out our tweets on their phone or listen to our podcast. I don’t think the use of technology needs to be for everybody. But we have found a community online. Many of them have never felt a connection to Judaism before.”

For some, the Jesus Daily has become a faith community online, where people share their troubles and provide and receive words of support. “Jesus Daily reminds me every day that I am not alone,” said Kristin Davis-Ford, a single mother and full-time student in Houston. “Every single prayer request I have posted has been answered,” she said, “and I know it is the power of God’s children, coming together and standing in agreement.”

Dr. Tabor, a medical researcher, drafts most of the posts himself, using some marketing techniques learned from his successful diet business, which he now pitches on QVC. He recently posted photographs of baby animals, asking people to name “God’s Little Helpers.” By noon, more than 147,000 people had “Liked” the post. And names for the baby animals were among the more than 7,000 comments, including this one from Steve Karimi, writing from Nakuru, the provincial capital of Kenya’s Rift Valley province: “I love Jesus Daily. Truly inspirational.”

Dr. Tabor is not sure what the future holds for the page, he said, mentioning an online television global ministry. For now, it is still his hobby.

“I want it to be about encouragement,” he said. “There are so many people battling cancer, fighting to keep their marriages together, struggling to restore relationships with their children,” he said. “There are people out of work, at the end of the line and I just want the Jesus Daily to be a central place where they find encouragement, no matter what battle they are fighting.”

    Facebook Page for Jesus, With Highly Active Fans, NYT, 4.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/technology/jesus-daily-on-facebook-nurtures-highly-active-fans.html

I’m on Facebook. It’s Over.

September 3, 2011
The New York Times
By CURTIS SITTENFELD

Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the novels “Prep” and “American Wife.”

YOU may not have heard it, but the death knell of Facebook sounded about a month ago — more precisely, on Thursday, Aug. 4, around 8 p.m. Central time. It wasn’t because the Web site’s growth slowed this past spring and the number of users shrank in the United States. It wasn’t because of the advent of Google+. It was because I, the latest of late adopters, finally joined. My embrace of the site can only mean that it’s officially passé.

It’s not that I was a Facebook snob — in fact, the opposite. I’ve always understood how the site could be a place to while away the hours, and if I could have joined when I was single, I’m sure I would have Facebook-stalked with the best of them. But now I’m a married 36-year-old, I have two children under the age of 3, and I’m bad enough at responding to e-mails, or doing anything else that involves organization or time management, without the temptation of seeing what’s become of my elementary school classmates.

Facebook is only one of many major cultural trends that have bypassed me in recent years: I’m still planning to watch “The Wire,” read the “Twilight” series, and maybe even play that Angry Birds game I keep hearing so much about.

But if I’m being honest, the time suck wasn’t the biggest reason I avoided joining for so long. The biggest reason was that I didn’t know which me would join. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg believes we should all be the same in every context. According to Time’s 2010 Person of the Year profile of him, he once told a journalist, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” To which my only response is, You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, I’m not even the same person with all the members of my immediate family. And I’ve long thought that my impulse to act differently with, say, my friend from grad school and my husband’s aunt — to adjust my personality to fit the situation and the other person — is an example of good manners, not bad ones.

I’m not under the illusion that all my selves are equally appealing, though, and this was where I got confused to the point of paralysis. Would my profile reflect Professional Writer Curtis (upbeat, friendly, responsible) or Real Curtis (disagreeable, slovenly, judgmental)? Would I use it to hawk my books, or to post pictures of my baby eating her toes? I know the obvious answer is both, but — call me old-fashioned — that just feels completely weird.

I didn’t resolve this identity confusion before joining, but my desire to be a part of things finally overrode my skittishness. On a rare evening when both my children had gone to sleep and my husband was outside reading, I opened a thank-you note for a present I’d sent to my high school friend Tanya. She’d gotten married in early June, and unfortunately, I’d missed the wedding. In her note, she included a photo of herself and her new husband and mentioned that she’d recently seen my brother, P. G., in New York.

And I thought, Tanya and P. G., who lives in Ohio, saw each other and I had no idea? And, Tanya and her husband looked so great and happy that I really wanted to see more pictures from their wedding. I had a strong suspicion that I knew where to find them.

This was not, of course, the first time that not being on Facebook had made me feel as if I lived under a rock. In spring 2010, I received e-mails from two friends announcing the births of their babies, and I hadn’t known either woman was pregnant, even though I was a bridesmaid in one of their weddings. (One e-mail began, “For those of you who we are not in touch with by cellphone, or Facebook. ...”) Last August, my friend Jesse told me that not being on Facebook was just plain rude. And I finally believed him a few months later when some other friend’s baby was born prematurely, and my wish to track the baby’s progress meant I had to directly e-mail the parents, which surely was an imposition on them. This March, when a woman who runs a moms’ Meetup group I’d taken part in sent out an e-mail suggesting that we shift to communicating via Facebook since we were all on it, I had the rather pathetic sensation of chasing on foot after a pack of people riding bikes. Wait up, ladies! I wanted to call out. Hold on! Not all of us!

And so I signed up. I admit that as I did, I entertained fantasies that I would be the billionth person to join and would be given shares of Facebook stock, though if this was the case, I haven’t yet been notified.

So far, life is not all that different. As of this writing, I have 111 friends, which I’m aware is a bit on the meager side. Seventeen are my relatives, 12 are people I haven’t spoken to in 20 years, and 9 are friends of friends I’ve never met.

I have posted nothing except an author photo because I continue to feel that confusion over how private, or not, to be. Enjoying other peoples’ comments and photos while not providing any of my own feels a little unsporting, but a late-adopting leopard can’t change her spots overnight. In the meantime, I’ve learned that my friend Annie’s 3-year-old son came home from camp in another kid’s underwear, that my former landlord’s daughter is taking piano lessons with a new teacher, and that my brother has 5,000 friends.

I’ve also had the satisfaction of shocking a few people with friend requests. My sister Tiernan wrote, “Is this really you?” My friend Jynne posted on my wall that she thought my 2-year-old must have gotten hold of my laptop. And two people told me they were pretty sure we’re all supposed to move on to Google+ now, which sounds about right. I’m hoping to be there by 2020.

    I’m on Facebook. It’s Over., NYT, 3.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/if-im-on-facebook-it-must-be-over.html

Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians

September 1, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

A recently disclosed diplomatic cable shows that a top United Nations human rights official warned the United States government five years ago that he had received information indicating that Iraqi reports of American troops executing a family were true.

Five of the victims, the official said, were children 5 years old or younger, and four were women.

The March 15, 2006, attack in Ishaqi, Iraq, was one of the most disputed episodes of the war. Iraqi police officials maintained from the beginning that the family had been lined up and executed. A video later surfaced that showed graphic images of five dead children and three dead adults; most of the victims appeared to have been killed by bullets or other flying projectiles that punctured their head, abdomen or chest.

Three months after the killings, and after the United Nations official’s warning, the American military announced that its own investigation had determined the allegations of an execution were “absolutely false.” The military admitted, however, that the raid and subsequent air strike resulted in as many as nine “collateral deaths,” a euphemism for civilian fatalities.

The Americans said the troops, who captured an insurgent leader on the mission, took gunfire from the house before the commander on the ground ordered them to return fire from machine guns and then from helicopters and jets, following proper rules of engagement. A senior Pentagon official said that both regular infantry and special operations forces took part in the operation.

The human rights official, Philip Alston, wrote a letter to the United States Embassy in Geneva 12 days after the killings, outlining information he had received that was starkly different from the American account. Mr. Alston’s letter was included in an unclassified diplomatic cable made public late last month by WikiLeaks and reported by McClatchy Newspapers on Wednesday on its Web site.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory of the Army, said on Thursday that the information revealed in the cable did not change the conclusions of military investigators that no crime or cover-up had taken place.

“There has been nothing new we haven’t already looked into here,” Colonel Gregory said.

When he wrote the letter, Mr. Alston was the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and according to the New York University Web site he is now a law professor there. He did not return a phone call and an e-mail message seeking comment.

It was not clear from his letter to the embassy how he conducted his investigation into the killings or who provided him information. But in the letter he said the autopsies on the victims were carried out in a hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, and “revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”

Mr. Alston reported that information he had received indicated the episode unfolded this way: Someone in the home fired on the Americans, then a 25-minute gunfight ensued, and then troops “entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” After that, an American air raid destroyed the house, which Iraqis had viewed as an attempt to cover up the killings.

He also said that United States forces attacked the house in part because they suspected that members of the family who lived there were involved in the killing of two American troops earlier that month.

The killings and subsequent controversy over the nature of the deaths occurred as Iraq was spiraling into a sectarian civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, and American forces were coming under increasing criticism for raids that killed civilians.

    Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians, NYT, 1.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html

Spread of Leaked Cables on Web Prompts Dispute

September 1, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — All 251,287 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks last year are now accessible in multiple locations on the Internet, a development that touched off a dispute on Thursday between the group and the British newspaper The Guardian about who was responsible for their release.

The full publication of the cables will hugely enlarge a window on American diplomacy that first opened in November when WikiLeaks and several news organizations, including The New York Times, started publishing selected cables. The process proceeded slowly, with fewer than 20,000 cables on the Web until last week, when WikiLeaks suddenly accelerated publication and placed nearly 134,000 additional cables on its site.

But the release of the unedited texts of all the cables will make meaningless past efforts by WikiLeaks and journalists to remove the names of vulnerable people in repressive countries, including activists, academics and journalists, who might face reprisals for speaking candidly to American diplomats. While no consequence more serious than dismissal from a job has been reported so far, both State Department officials and human rights advocates are concerned about the possibility that people named in the cables could face prison or worse.

The cable texts were in an encrypted file that was apparently released inadvertently by WikiLeaks and subsequently copied and posted in multiple locations on the Internet. The Times confirmed Thursday that the file can be opened using a password that was included in a book about WikiLeaks published this year by David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian. By Thursday night, Web sites were posting the unencrypted texts of all the cables along with tools to search the database.

The postings appeared to overtake WikiLeaks, which had asked for an online vote to achieve a “global consensus” on whether to post all the cables. The group suggested in a later Twitter message on Thursday that it was certain to post them. “Given that the full database file is downloadable from hundreds of sites there is only one internally rational action,” the message said.

A State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said WikiLeaks has “continued its well-established pattern of irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous actions.”

Human rights groups last year criticized WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, after it published Afghan war documents without removing the names of Afghan citizens who were identified as providing information about the Taliban to American forces. The Taliban vowed to punish such people, but the Defense Department said this week that it was not aware of any retribution.

WikiLeaks, founded in 2006 on the principle that government and corporate secrets should be disclosed, behaved far more cautiously in subsequent releases. It used software to remove proper names from Iraq war documents and worked with news organizations to redact the cables.

The possibility that diplomats’ sources could be harmed as a result of the release of all the unredacted cables touched off a bitter dispute over who was to blame. WikiLeaks, in a statement and Twitter messages, blamed Mr. Leigh, the investigations editor of The Guardian, who included the 58-character password as an epigraph of a chapter in his book, “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.”

But Mr. Leigh, in an e-mail and an article on The Guardian’s Web site, said Mr. Assange had assured him when he turned over the password that it would work for only a matter of hours, so he assumed it was long obsolete by the time his book was published. In fact, the file had been inadvertently copied by a WikiLeaks worker in December and eventually spread around the Web.

 

Jacob Harris contributed reporting from New York.

    Spread of Leaked Cables on Web Prompts Dispute, NYT, 1.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02wikileaks.html

WikiLeaks Prompts New Diplomatic Uproar

August 31, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In the Philippines this week, officials are fuming about criticism by a former American ambassador of the late Corazon C. Aquino, a national icon. Australians have learned that just two years ago American authorities were considering declaring that Australia’s air safety system no longer met international standards. People in Botswana could read a critical American account of that country’s anemic efforts against human trafficking.

In other words, WikiLeaks is at it again.

News organizations in dozens of countries are panning for nuggets in the latest and largest dump of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, which last week suddenly accelerated its posting of the confidential State Department documents. Over a few days, the group made public nearly 134,000 cables — more than six times the total number published by WikiLeaks and many news organizations over the past nine months.

Because the newly disclosed cables reveal the names of more than 100 people in foreign countries whom diplomats had marked for special protection, the cables raised new fears over the safety of diplomats’ sources. Previous cable releases had often removed the names of vulnerable people.

On top of the new WikiLeaks posting, news media reports have suggested that a file containing all 251,287 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks last year might soon be made public. Late Wednesday, WikiLeaks accused the British newspaper The Guardian of revealing a secret password that could lead to the exposure of the entire cable collection. In a statement, the group said it was that expectation that prompted its release of the cables.

David Leigh, a Guardian editor, said in an e-mail that he had included the password in a book on WikiLeaks last year only after Julian Assange, the group’s founder, assured him it would expire after a few hours. He said Mr. Assange was responsible for any breach.

Interviews this week with diplomats, defense officials and human rights advocates suggested that so far their worst fears about reprisals resulting from the cables’ publication had not been realized.

“We are not aware of anyone who has been arrested or injured because they were named in the cables,” said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of Human Rights Watch. “We remain concerned about the potential for reprisal,” especially as a result of the new batch of cables, she added.

At the same time, Ms. PoKempner said, “there have been tremendous positive consequences in terms of people’s access to information about their own countries.” She noted that the WikiLeaks revelations about official corruption in Tunisia helped fuel the first democratic revolution of the Arab Spring.

WikiLeaks has been a magnet for controversy since it began large-scale disclosures of American documents last year, and the new release stirred the same strong emotions. A cyberattack took down the main WikiLeaks Web site for a time on Tuesday, and speculation about possible perpetrators ranged from a number of governments to former WikiLeaks associates now estranged from Mr. Assange.

Representative Candice S. Miller, Republican of Michigan, issued a statement saying, “The latest release of stolen American secrets by the organization WikiLeaks once again proves that they are a terrorist operation.” She urged the Obama administration, which is conducting a criminal investigation of the group, “to take decisive action to shut this criminal operation down.”

And the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, while declining to confirm the cables’ authenticity, denounced the disclosure of classified information. (Most of the cables are unclassified, but some are classified up to the level of “secret.”)

“We continue to carefully monitor what becomes public and to take steps to mitigate the damage to national security and to assist those who may be harmed by these illegal disclosures to the extent that we can,” Ms. Nuland said.

After the initial publication of cables in November, the State Department began to warn people named in them, including dissidents, academics and journalists. In a small number of cases, people seen as especially vulnerable were given help to leave their countries. For instance, an Iranian quoted in the cables as sharply criticizing Iran’s government received help that enabled him and his family to move to the United States.

A Defense Department spokesman said American military officials were not aware that any Afghan citizen had been harmed as a result of being named in Afghan war documents published by WikiLeaks last year, despite Taliban threats to punish people who provided information to American troops. But the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory, said it was hard to be certain that revenge attacks had not taken place.

A former State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said department officials knew of a few people named in the cables who were subsequently imprisoned in their own countries. But Mr. Crowley said the impact of the WikiLeaks disclosures were uncertain because those involved, whom he would not identify by name or country, were already at risk of persecution for their own political dissent.

“Was the dissident put in prison because he talked to our guy and turned up in a leaked cable?” he said. “Or was he put in prison because of what he was doing?”

Several American diplomats spoke to The New York Times about the impact of the cables, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. None knew of any case in which someone named in a cable had been imprisoned or physically harmed as a result, though a German party official and a Turkish journalist, among others, lost their jobs for speaking too candidly. But the diplomats said that reporting from American Embassies around the world had suffered. Foreigners are now more nervous about confiding views that could get them in trouble if leaked. “There was gallows humor at first,” one veteran diplomat said. “People would say, ‘Please quote me correctly so that when it’s leaked and published, I’ll sound good.’ ”

And diplomats themselves are more reluctant to name their sources in cables, and these omissions at least marginally reduce the precision and weight of the reports.

 

Steven Lee Myers and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

    WikiLeaks Prompts New Diplomatic Uproar, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/us/01wikileaks.html

Patrick C. Fischer, Early Unabomber Target, Is Dead at 75

August 31, 2011
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Patrick C. Fischer, a computer scientist whose theoretical work helped make Internet searches possible, but who was most widely known as an early target of the so-called Unabomber, died on Friday in Montgomery County, Md. He was 75.

The cause was stomach cancer, his family said.

Mr. Fischer was a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville when a pipe bomb concealed in a package addressed to him exploded in his office on May 5, 1982, while he was lecturing in Puerto Rico. The package was opened by his secretary, Janet Smith, who suffered lacerations and powder burns on her chest, arms and hands. She returned to work after three weeks in the hospital.

Investigators told Professor Fischer that he was apparently the fifth person targeted by the mail bomber, who was identified in 1996 after his arrest as Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard-trained mathematician.

Disturbing as it was because of the injuries Ms. Smith suffered, the attack came to represent a kind of unsolved equation for Professor Fischer. He later described scouring his memory for any possible links he might have had with Mr. Kaczynski in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when both were graduate students in Cambridge, Mass. But while they knew many of the same people, he could not remember ever having met Mr. Kaczynski.

“He treated it like a puzzle,” said his daughter, Carolyn Fischer, an economist in Washington. “But there was no connection.”

Professor Fischer said he concluded that Mr. Kaczynski had gotten his name from academic journals that published his research papers. “My original research was pure math,” he told The Washington Post. “Maybe I was regarded as a turncoat by this guy. I went from pure math to theoretical computer science.”

Mr. Kaczynski, who is serving a life sentence for mail bombings that killed three people and injured 28 between 1978 and 1995, singled out university professors, scientists and business leaders in a self-styled campaign against what he considered the degrading effect that modern technology and industrial development have on human life and individual freedom.

Patrick Carl Fischer was born on Dec. 3, 1935, in St. Louis to Carl and Kathleen Kirkpatrick Fischer. He grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., where his father taught math at the University of Michigan, and graduated from the university in 1957. He earned his Ph.D. in math from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After teaching at Harvard, Cornell and Pennsylvania State University, Professor Fischer was appointed chairman of the computer science department at Vanderbilt in 1980. (The package of explosives was initially sent to his office at Penn State before being forwarded to Vanderbilt.) He served as chairman of computer science at Vanderbilt until 1995 and retired in 1998.

Professor Fischer was among an early group of mathematicians working in the field of database theory, which was founded on the work of Edgar F. Codd, an I.B.M. scientist considered the inventor of database management. Professor Fischer’s study of the mathematics of query languages — the mechanics of database searches — was crucial in the development of systems now commonly employed by Google, Amazon and every other Web site with a search box.

But while the commercial application of his work helped give birth to a generation of billionaires, Professor Fischer never regretted remaining a scholar and teacher. “He was an academic,” said Dirk Van Gucht, a professor of computer science at Indiana University and former student of Professor Fischer. “And he was a wonderful teacher.”

In 1968, Professor Fischer founded the Special Interest Group on Automata and Computation Theory, one of the first organizations to promote communication among widely dispersed computer researchers.

Besides his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Charlotte Froese Fischer, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt; a son, Carl, of Chattanooga, Tenn.; and a brother, Michael, a professor of computer science at Yale.

In wrestling with the Kaczynski puzzle, Professor Fischer reviewed a period in the early 1960s when he taught math at Harvard while Mr. Kaczynski was a student there. But Mr. Kazcynski’s specialty, complex variables analysis, was so abstruse that Professor Fischer considered it unlikely that Mr. Kaczynski would have taken one of his classes, he told an interviewer.

“I couldn’t have understood his thesis,” Professor Fischer said.

    Patrick C. Fischer, Early Unabomber Target, Is Dead at 75, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/us/31fischer.html

WikiLeaks Leaves Names of Diplomatic Sources in Cables

August 29, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials, the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks has published on the Web nearly 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables in recent days, more than six times the total disclosed publicly since the posting of the leaked State Department documents began last November.

A sampling of the documents showed that the newly published cables included the names of some people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats and whose identities were marked in the cables with the warning “strictly protect.”

State Department officials and human rights activists have been concerned that such diplomatic sources, including activists, journalists and academics in authoritarian countries, could face reprisals, including dismissal from their jobs, prosecution or violence.

Since late 2010, The New York Times and several other news organizations have had access to more than 250,000 State Department cables originally obtained by WikiLeaks, citing them in news articles and publishing a relatively small number of cables deemed newsworthy. But The Times and other publications that had access to the documents removed the names of people judged vulnerable to retaliation.

WikiLeaks published some cables on its own Web site, but until the latest release, the group had also provided versions of the cables that had been edited to protect low-level diplomatic sources.

Government officials and journalists were poring over the newly released cables on Monday to assess whether people named in them might face repercussions. A quick sampling found at least one cable posted on Monday, from the American Embassy in Australia, had a name removed, but several others left in the identities of people whom diplomats had flagged for protection.

Among those named, despite diplomats’ warnings, were a United Nations official in West Africa and a foreign human rights activist working in Cambodia. They had spoken candidly to American Embassy officials on the understanding that they would not be publicly identified.

The new disclosures are likely to reignite a debate over the virtues and perils of making public the confidential views of American diplomats, some of whom have complained that the leaks have made their work more difficult. The disclosures take place as a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., continues to hear evidence in a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks for disclosing classified information.

WikiLeaks said in a statement on Monday that the acceleration in disclosing the cables was “in accordance with WikiLeaks’s commitment to maximizing impact and making information available to all.” The statement suggested that it was intended to counter the “misperception” that the organization “has been less active in recent months.”

The statement said that “crowdsourcing” the documents by posting them will allow people of different backgrounds and nationalities to interpret the cables. It was unsigned, but WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, generally drafts or approves the group’s statements.

Even as WikiLeaks made its new postings, a German publication reported that an encrypted file containing all of the 251,287 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks last year had been posted months ago on the Web, and that the password was also available on the Internet. It was unclear on Monday whether anyone had cracked the encrypted file described by the publication, Der Freitag, a small Berlin-based, left-leaning weekly, and had made public previously unpublished material.

A State Department spokesman, Michael A. Hammer, said the department would not comment on the authenticity of the documents released. He said the United States “strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information.”

Last year, WikiLeaks was sharply criticized by human rights activists for disclosing the names of Afghan citizens who had provided information on the Taliban to the American military. It was far more cautious in subsequent releases, using software to strip proper names out of Iraq war documents and publishing versions of the cables after they had been edited by The New York Times and other publications.

The publication of cables began slowly last year, with only 2,500 made public by year’s end, often with redactions. As of last week, the total had reached about 20,000.

But the State Department has always acted on the assumption that all quarter-million cables might become public. A department task force worked with American embassies to review all the leaked cables, quietly warning people named in the cables that they might be in jeopardy. Some especially vulnerable people were given help to move, usually outside their home countries.

Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said he had reviewed several dozen cables from the new batch — all among those classified “secret” by the State Department — and found only one redaction. He said the volume of the new release made it unlikely that all the information that might endanger diplomatic sources had been removed.

“If these cables have not been carefully reviewed, it’s likely to be problematic for any number of people named in the cables,” Mr. Aftergood said.

 

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from London.

    WikiLeaks Leaves Names of Diplomatic Sources in Cables, NYT, 29.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/us/30wikileaks.html

Without Its Master of Design,

Apple Will Face Many Challenges

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR

Steven P. Jobs, one of the most successful chief executives in corporate history, once said he never thought of himself as a manager, but as a leader. And his notion of leadership revolved around choosing the best people possible, encouraging them and creating an environment in which they could do great work.

But the Apple team, analysts say, will face a far greater trial in achieving continued success without Mr. Jobs in charge.

Mr. Jobs, who said Wednesday that he was stepping down as Apple’s chief executive, said in an interview shortly after he returned to the company in 1997 that his leadership style had changed over the years, as he matured.

In his early years at Apple, before he was forced out in 1985, Mr. Jobs was notoriously hands-on, meddling with details and berating colleagues. But later, first at Pixar, the computer-animation studio he co-founded, and in his second stint at Apple, he relied more on others, listening more and trusting members of his design and business teams.

In recent years, Mr. Jobs’s role at Apple has been more the corporate equivalent of “an unusually gifted and brilliant orchestra conductor,” said Michael Hawley, a professional pianist and computer scientist who worked for Mr. Jobs and has known him for years. “Steve has done a great job of recruiting a broad and deep talent base.”

At Pixar, with a solid leadership team in place, the studio never missed a beat, and it continued to generate one critically acclaimed and commercially successful hit after another, including “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E,” long after Mr. Jobs had gone back to Apple.

It is by no means certain, analysts say, that things will go that smoothly for Apple. Mr. Jobs, they note, was far more in the background at Pixar, where creative decisions were guided by John Lasseter. Pixar was sold to Disney for $7.4 billion in 2006.

At Apple, Mr. Jobs’s influence is far more direct. He makes final decisions on product design, if not in detail. No immediate changes, analysts say, will likely be discernible.

“The good news for Apple is that the product road map in this industry is pretty much in place two and three years out,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “So 80 percent to 90 percent of what would happen in that time would be the same, even without Steve.”

“The real challenge for Apple,” Mr. Yoffie continued, “will be what happens beyond that road map. Apple is going to need a new leader with a new way of recreating and managing the business in the future.”

Mr. Jobs’s hand-picked successor, Timothy Cook, who has been the company’s chief operating officer, has guided the company impressively during Mr. Jobs’s medical leaves. But his greatest skill is as an operations expert rather than a product-design team leader — Mr. Jobs’s particular talent.

At Apple, Mr. Jobs has been the ultimate arbiter on products. For example, three iPhone prototypes were completed over the course of a year. The first two failed to meet Mr. Jobs’s exacting standards. The third prototype got his nod, and the iPhone shipped in June 2007.

His design decisions, Mr. Jobs explained, were shaped by his understanding of both technology and popular culture. His own study and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When a reporter asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

The notion of “taste” — he uses the word frequently — looms large in Mr. Jobs’s business philosophy. His has been honed by a breadth of experience and by the popular culture of his time. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino, Calif., in 1972, he said, “the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there.” He attended Reed College, a progressive liberal arts school in Portland, Ore., but dropped out after a semester.

When discussing Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a kind of hippie Wikipedia, in the same breath.

Great products, Mr. Jobs once explained, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Mr. Yoffie said Mr. Jobs “had a unique combination of visionary creativity and decisiveness,” adding: “No one will replace him.”

    Without Its Master of Design, Apple Will Face Many Challenges, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/technology/without-its-master-of-design-apple-will-face-challenges.html

Jobs Steps Down at Apple, Saying He Can’t Meet Duties

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID STREITFELD

SAN FRANCISCO — Steven P. Jobs, whose insistent vision that he knew what consumers wanted made Apple one of the world’s most valuable and influential companies, is stepping down as chief executive, the company announced late Wednesday.

“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Mr. Jobs, 56, has been on medical leave since January, his third such absence. He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, and received a liver transplant in 2009. But as recently as a few weeks ago, Mr. Jobs was negotiating business issues with another Silicon Valley executive.

Mr. Jobs will become chairman, a position that did not exist before. Apple named Tim Cook, its chief operating officer, to succeed Mr. Jobs as chief executive.

Rarely has a major company and industry been so dominated by a single individual, and so successful. His influence has gone far beyond the iconic personal computers that were Apple’s principal product for its first 20 years. In the last decade, Apple has redefined the music business through the iPod, the cellphone business through the iPhone and the entertainment and media world through the iPad. Again and again, Mr. Jobs has gambled that he knew what the customer would want, and again and again he has been right.

“The big thing about Steve Jobs is not his genius or his charisma but his extraordinary risk-taking,” said Alan Deutschman, who wrote a biography of Mr. Jobs. “Apple has been so innovative because Jobs takes major risks, which is rare in corporate America. He doesn’t market-test anything. It’s all his own judgment and perfectionism and gut.”

Mr. Cook, an expert in logistics, has been instrumental in locking up contracts in advance for critical parts in the company’s devices. It has had the effect of securing favorable prices, keeping Apple’s profit margins high. But it also has prevented rival companies from producing competing products at significantly lower prices.

While Mr. Cook is well respected in the industry, he is little known outside of it. Analysts and Silicon Valley experts said new Apple products were in the pipeline for the next few years, but the company’s success beyond that was already being debated.

Tim Bajarin, president of the technology research firm Creative Strategies, said the news about Mr. Jobs was “a shock because it’s abrupt.” But Mr. Bajarin said that “while there’s definitely concern for Steve as a person,” he had little concern for the company.

“Steve has built a very deep bench of managers, including the leadership of Tim Cook, who clearly understands Steve’s vision, goals and direction,” said Mr. Bajarin, who has followed Apple for 30 years.

Others were not so sure.

“You could make the case that Steve has injected so much of his DNA into Apple that Apple will continue,” said Guy Kawasaki, who was an Apple executive in the late 1980s. “Or you can make the case that without Steve, Apple will flounder. But you cannot make the case that Apple without Steve Jobs will be better. Hard to conceive of that.”

The technology world has never been short of strong-willed leaders (think Bill Gates at Microsoft or Larry Ellison at Oracle). But even in this select group, Mr. Jobs was noted for the control he exerted and the loyalty he commanded. Without him, his devoted team might soon fracture.

“I think the key question is whether the Apple team will continue to work as effectively as a collaborative without the single person to rely on for the final decision,” said Charles Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst.

Mr. Cook, 50, joined Apple in 1998. He was promoted to chief operating officer in 2007, overseeing the day-to-day operations. Wall Street had long assumed the soft-spoken Mr. Cook, who was raised in Alabama and is an Auburn University graduate, would be the successor to Mr. Jobs. While Mr. Jobs convalesced, Apple thrived with the continuing rise in iPhone sales and huge growth in the iPad, the dominant tablet computer.

The company and Mr. Jobs had been criticized in the past for revealing little information about his health to investors. The news of Mr. Jobs’s resignation came after the market closed Wednesday. In after-hours trading, the stock fell 5 percent.

The early years of Apple long ago passed into legend: the two young hippie-ish founders, Mr. Jobs and Steve Wozniak; the introduction of the first Macintosh computer in 1984, which stretched the boundaries of what these devices could do; Mr. Jobs’s abrupt exit the next year in a power struggle. But it was his return to Apple in 1996 that started a winning streak that raised the company from the near dead to its current position.

More than 314 million iPods, 129 million iPhones and 29 million iPads have been sold, according to A.M. Sacconaghi Jr., an analyst with Bernstein Research. This summer, Apple briefly exceeded Exxon Mobil as the most valuable United States company.

Apple does not announce or even telegraph its product pipeline. But there has been strong indication that it is very close to revealing a new iPhone, which would probably include a more powerful processor to handle the expanding multimedia demands.

The new iPhone is also likely to be thinner and lighter, as every new version has been since the original’s release in 2007. A higher-resolution rear camera has also been expected, as well as a more powerful voice recognition features borne out of Apple’s purchase of Siri in April of 2010, a small voice recognition company, is also a possibility.

Twitter, the instant messaging service, filled with an outpouring of grief and gratitude Wednesday night. The few ill-spirited comments or wisecracks were met with immediate retorts.

“Steve Jobs is the greatest leader our industry has ever known,” wrote Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com. “It’s the end of an era.”

“Funny how much emotion you can feel about a stranger,” wrote Susan Orlean, the author. “And yet every phone call I make, every time I’m on a computer, he’s part of it.”

“Very sad news about Steve Jobs at $AAPL,” wrote Jim Cramer, the CNBC host. “He is America’s greatest industrialist. Perhaps the greatest ever.”

Andy Baio, a tech entrepreneur in Portland, Ore., may have put it most directly and effectively: “We’ll miss you, Steve.”

 

Contributing reporting were Verne G. Kopytoff, Claire Cain Miller
and Nick Bilton in San Francisco, and Sam Grobart in New York.

    Jobs Steps Down at Apple, Saying He Can’t Meet Duties, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/technology/jobs-stepping-down-as-chief-of-apple.html

Google’s Coup Shifts Mobile Alliances

August 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNA WORTHAM

Major telephone makers like Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson and LG said on Monday that they supported Google’s planned purchase of Motorola. But will they still feel that way in a year?

Those companies have made plenty of money selling millions of devices powered by Android, Google’s mobile operating system. Analysts and industry specialists say the deal could sour relations between Google and its partners, who have helped Google beat Nokia and Apple to win the biggest share of the mobile software market.

“They can’t be too thrilled to find that suddenly, these companies are no longer partnering with Google — they’re competing with Google,” Michael Gartenberg, director of research at Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company, said referring to the telephone makers. “No matter how Google tries to spin it, they’re competing.”

Larry Page, one of the founders of Google who recently became chief executive, provided reassurance in a company blog post, saying that the acquisition would “not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform,” meaning that any manufacturer will continue to be able to use it. He added that Google would run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

Analysts, however, warned that it is exceedingly difficult for a company to both license its products and compete with those licensees at the same time. They pointed to Apple’s attempt to license its Mac operating system in the mid-’90s, and to Palm’s unsuccessful effort to split itself into separate software and hardware companies.

Google previously tried to enter the hardware business with its Google-branded Nexus One smartphone that it designed and sold through its Web site, rather than stores. But the phones were met with a lukewarm reception as customers were unaccustomed to buying phones without handling them first.

The Motorola deal will help cement Google’s status as a mobile player, not only among competitors but also among consumers, said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray.

“It changes Google from being just the company they turn to for search,” he said referring to consumers. “It makes them the company delivering their mobile experience in a post-PC world.”

The deal will only add to the flux in the market for mobile telephone software, where Android has surged recently. It had a 43.4 percent global share in the second quarter of this year, up from 17.2 percent a year ago, according to Gartner. Apple’s iOS devices captured an 18.2 percent share, up from 14.1 last year, while the former heavyweight Research in Motion, which makes BlackBerry devices, slipped to 11.7 percent from 18.7 percent.

The acquisition may lead some hardware makers to cast their lot with Microsoft, which is pouring resources into becoming a serious mobile competitor. Nokia has already done just that, betting on Microsoft and abandoning its own mobile operating system.

Others may try to strike out on their own and create operating systems, rather than risk becoming dependent on Google. Samsung has dipped a toe in those waters, releasing phones that run on an in-house system called Bada. HTC already had a team of engineers dedicated to customizing the version of Android that it uses on its phones, called HTC Sense.

Meanwhile RIM is struggling to move to a new operating system, QNX, to try to revive its smartphone and tablet offerings.

A statement by Peter Chou, chief executive of HTC, the Taiwanese phone and tablet manufacturer, was typical of the partners’ reactions. “We welcome the news of today’s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem,” he said.

Google stands to gain much from Motorola. Owning a hardware manufacturer could help Google better integrate its software with tablets, where it has struggled to gain footing against the iPad. Google also may be able to better integrate its services — books, music, games — into Android devices.

Analysts say that the move could bolster Google TV, Google’s poorly received attempt to wed the Web with home television sets. Motorola has a strong presence in the set-top box market, which Google could leverage.

    Google’s Coup Shifts Mobile Alliances, NYT, 15.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/technology/google-deal-could-strain-ties-with-phone-makers.html

16 Arrested as F.B.I. Hits the Hacking Group Anonymous

July 19, 2011
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

SAN FRANCISCO — In the most visible law enforcement response to a recent spate of online attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday announced the arrests of 16 people across the country in connection with strikes carried out by a loose, secretive federation of hackers called Anonymous.

In an indictment unsealed Tuesday afternoon in United States District Court in San Jose, Calif., 14 people were charged in connection with an attack on the Web site of the payment service PayPal last December, after the company suspended accounts set up for donating funds to WikiLeaks. The suspects, in 10 separate states, are accused of conspiring to “intentionally damage protected computers.”

Anonymous had publicly called on its supporters to attack the sites of companies it said were turning against WikiLeaks, using tools that bombard sites with traffic and knock them offline.

A Florida man was also arrested and accused of breaching the Web site of Tampa InfraGard, an organization affiliated with the F.B.I., and then boasting of his actions on Twitter. And in New Jersey, a former contractor with AT&T was arrested on charges that he lifted files from that company’s computer systems; the information was later distributed by LulzSec, a hacker collective that stemmed from Anonymous.

The PayPal attack came in response to the release by WikiLeaks last November of thousands of classified State Department cables. Members of Anonymous, a clique of worldwide hackers with a vague and ever-changing menu of grievances, have claimed responsibility for a number of attacks on government and corporate Web sites over the last eight months.

In recent weeks, police in Britain and the Netherlands have arrested several people suspected of having participated in those attacks. Justice Department officials said British and Dutch police also made related arrests on Tuesday. FoxNews.com reported Tuesday that the police in London had arrested a 16-year-old boy who they believed was a core member of LulzSec and used the alias Tflow.

The arrests of suspected Anonymous supporters in the United States were among the first known in this country.

Ross W. Nadel, a former federal prosecutor who founded the computer hacking and intellectual property unit at the Federal District Court in San Jose, said the arrests could be “a highly visible form of deterrence.”

The prosecution is expected to face at least two major challenges, said Jennifer Granick, a San Francisco-based lawyer who specializes in computer crimes and has defended hackers in the past. Because hackers often use aliases and other people’s computers when they carry out attacks, prosecutors will have to prove that those arrested “were the ones with their fingers on the keyboard,” she said.

Second, the conspiracy charge could be especially difficult to prove, given that Anonymous boasts of being leaderless and free-floating. “When you have a decentralized group,” Ms. Granick said, “the question is, Are there big fish, and are any of these people big fish?”

The charge of “intentional damage to a protected computer” is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, while conspiracy carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Cyberattacks are made possible by a combination of two features of the Internet economy. Poor security at many companies and agencies makes sensitive government and private data vulnerable to breaches. And mounting an attack is inexpensive and, with the right skills, relatively simple.

In the San Jose case, all 14 suspects are accused of using a free program called Low Orbit Ion Cannon to hurl large packets of data at PayPal’s site with the intention of overwhelming it.

With the exception of one suspect, whose name was redacted by the court for reasons that federal officials did not explain, those arrested were identified by their real names and nicknames, ranging from Anthrophobic to Toxic to MMMM. Most were in their 20s, and just three were above the age of 30. It is unclear if any of them knew one another.

    16 Arrested as F.B.I. Hits the Hacking Group Anonymous, NYT, 19.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/technology/16-arrested-as-fbi-hits-the-hacking-group-anonymous.html

Hackers Gained Access to Sensitive Military Files

July 14, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department suffered one of its worst digital attacks in history in March, when a foreign intelligence service hacked into the computer system of a corporate contractor and obtained 24,000 Pentagon files during a single intrusion, senior officials said Thursday.

The disclosure came as the Pentagon released a strategy for military operations in cyberspace, embodying a belief that traditional passive programs for defending military and associated corporate data systems are insufficient in an era when espionage, crime, disruptions and outright attacks are increasingly carried out over the Internet.

In releasing the strategy, William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, disclosed that over the years crucial files stolen from defense and industry data networks have included plans for missile tracking systems, satellite navigation devices, surveillance drones and top-of-the-line jet fighters.

“A great deal of it concerns our most sensitive systems, including aircraft avionics, surveillance technologies, satellite communications systems and network security protocols,” Mr. Lynn said.

Officials declined to identify the military contractor whose data system was compromised in the March attack. They also refused to name the nation they suspected was the culprit, saying that any accusation was a matter of official, and perhaps confidential, diplomatic dialogue.

However, when major intrusions against computers operated by the Pentagon, the military or defense industry contractors have occurred in the past, officials have regularly blamed China, and sometimes Russia.

The hacking attack in March, which stole important Pentagon files in the computer network of a contractor developing a military system, had not been previously disclosed. Other breaches have been discussed, including earlier this year at Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest military contractor, and at RSA Security, which produces electronic identification for computer users.

“Current countermeasures have not stopped this outflow of sensitive information,” Mr. Lynn said during a speech at the National Defense University. “We need to do more to guard our digital storehouses of design innovation.”

The Pentagon’s new strategy, the final piece of an effort by the Obama administration to defend computer networks operated across the government and private sector, calls for what is termed dynamic defense: looking for potential attackers on the Internet rather than waiting for an intruder to attack. It also calls on the Pentagon to build resiliency into its computer networks to help recover if attacked.

Mr. Lynn also stressed the importance of cooperation with foreign partners to spot computer network threats overseas, before they compromise systems here.

But James Lewis, an expert on computer network warfare at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Pentagon’s computer networks were vulnerable to security gaps in the systems of allies with whom the military cooperates. America’s allies are “all over the map” on cybersecurity issues, Mr. Lewis said. “Some are very, very capable — and some are clueless.”

The military’s Cyber Command was created to coordinate defensive and offensive operations for Pentagon and military computer networks. Officials speak obliquely of its capabilities for carrying out offensive operations in cyberspace if ordered by the president. And for now, the new strategy is centered on how the United States can defend itself.

But Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon also had to focus on offense — including the possibility of responding to a cyberattack with military action.

“If it’s O.K. to attack me, and I’m not going to do anything other than improve my defenses every time you attack me, it’s very difficult to come up with a deterrent strategy,” General Cartwright told reporters on Thursday.

He said that in regard to cyberdefense, American military commanders were now devoting 90 percent of their attention to building better firewalls and only 10 percent to ways of deterring hackers from attacking. He said a better strategy would be the reverse, focusing almost entirely on offense.

The Pentagon, he said, needs a strategy “that says to the attacker, ‘If you do this, the price to you is going to go up, and it’s going to ever escalate.’ ” He added that right now “we’re on a path that is too predictable — it’s purely defensive. There is no penalty for attacking right now.”

Officials say the main challenge for the United States in a retaliatory cyberoperation is determining the attacker. The Internet makes it relatively easy for online assailants to mask identities, even if the geographic location where the attack originated can be confirmed.

Mr. Lynn said most major efforts to penetrate crucial military computer networks were still undertaken by large rival nations. “U.S. military power offers a strong deterrent against overtly destructive attacks,” he said. “Although attribution in cyberspace can be difficult, the risk of discovery and response for a major nation is still too great to risk launching destructive attacks against the United States.”

However, he warned that the technical expertise needed to carry out harmful Internet raids was certain to migrate to smaller rogue states and to nonstate actors, in particular terrorists.

If a terrorist group obtains “disruptive or destructive cybertools, we have to assume they will strike with little hesitation,” Mr. Lynn said.

The new strategy describes how the military’s capabilities would support the Department of Homeland Security and federal law enforcement agencies. And it acknowledges how much the military relies on private sector computer networks for such vital supplies as electricity.

    Hackers Gained Access to Sensitive Military Files, NYT, 14.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/world/15cyber.html

Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds

July 14, 2011
The New York Times
By PATRICIA COHEN

The widespread use of search engines and online databases has affected the way people remember information, researchers are reporting.

The scientists, led by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, wondered whether people were more likely to remember information that could be easily retrieved from a computer, just as students are more likely to recall facts they believe will be on a test.

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. “If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example,” the researchers wrote, “do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out?”

In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder.

“That kind of blew my mind,” Dr. Sparrow said in an interview.

The experiment explores an aspect of what is known as transactive memory — the notion that we rely on our family, friends and co-workers as well as reference material to store information for us.

“I love watching baseball,” Dr. Sparrow said. “But I know my husband knows baseball facts, so when I want to know something I ask him, and I don’t bother to remember it.”

The Internet’s effects on memory are still largely unexplored, Dr. Sparrow said, adding that her experiments had led her to conclude that the Internet has become our primary external storage system.

“Human memory,” she said, “is adapting to new communications technology.”

    Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds, NYT, 14.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/health/15memory.html

Google Results Show Growing Strength

July 14, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — In Internet time, Google, founded in 1998, is ancient. But on Thursday, its financial report suggested that it could successfully become more than a search engine and compete in a modern Internet world dominated by sharing real-time information with friends and on mobile phones.

Although Google, as usual, did not break out the numbers from different strands of its business, over all its results were so robust, easily blowing past Wall Street expectations, that analysts said they indicated growing strength in more areas than just search. In after-hours trading, Google’s stock price climbed 12.64 percent. It had been down 9 percent for the year.

Part of what also gave Wall Street heart was that Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and new chief executive, participated in the conference call with analysts, and made lengthy remarks about his vision for the company’s future for the first time since he took over in April.

“They’re firing on all six cylinders now,” said Jordan Rohan, an Internet analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, pointing to Google’s six businesses — search, display advertising, YouTube, the Chrome browser, the Android mobile operating system and now Google+, its new social network. “Google’s now officially a V6.”

But other analysts said that while the results proved that Google’s core search business was even stronger than they thought, new businesses like Google+ and Android were far from generating revenue, yet the company continued to spend heavily on them.

“There are some pretty sizable opportunities,” said Colin W. Gillis, a technology analyst at BGC Financial. “But you want to own the stock a little closer to the harvesting of the fruit that the expenses bring, and right now they’re still being planted.”

Mr. Page’s participation surprised analysts, who had grumbled after last quarter’s earnings call when he made brief and curt comments and declined to speak at length about his long-term vision. He is widely known to dislike the public aspects of the chief executive job. But on Thursday, it seemed as if he had attended corporate charm school, as he repeatedly said how excited he was to be on the call.

Google still earns the vast majority of its revenue from text ads on its search engine, but it has been trying to branch into mobile phones and social networking. Mr. Page said he became chief executive partly to speed up Google’s evolution. “We have substantially increased our velocity and execution this quarter, which was a key goal of mine in taking over as C.E.O.,” he said.

Google reported that in the second quarter revenue increased 32 percent and net income climbed 36 percent.

Google’s high-flying spending, which Mr. Page has made clear he intends to maintain, has concerned investors. Its operating expenses in the second quarter were $2.97 billion, up 49 percent from the year-ago quarter. Google spent more on advertising, including its first major television ad campaign, and hired 2,452 employees, bringing the total to 28,768.

It also spent money on professional services, including lawyers and lobbyists to fight the Federal Trade Commission’s broad antitrust investigation and other regulatory challenges that have worried Wall Street.

Mr. Page addressed spending concerns and others while outlining his plans for the company. He explained that he saw Google’s search and ad businesses as the core driver of its revenue, and YouTube, Android and Chrome as products that consumers liked but that needed more investment to become profitable long term. The social networking businesses, like Google+, and the local and commerce businesses, like Google’s new Groupon competitor, Offers, are in the earliest stages.

“People rightly ask how will we monetize these businesses, and of course I understand the need to balance the short term with the longer-term needs,” he said. “But our emerging products can generate huge new businesses for Google in the long run, just like search, and we have tons of experience monetizing successful products over time.”

“We want to make products that everyone uses twice a day, like their toothbrush,” he said.

He also spoke to investors’ concerns that Google throws money at wacky experiments, like cars that drive themselves. Those types of projects are small and few, he said.

Mr. Page said he was also trying to prioritize, putting “more wood behind fewer arrows.” For instance, last month Google shut the underperforming Google Health and PowerMeter. And he is emphasizing simpler, more intuitive designs, he said. He highlighted Google+’s clean interface as well as recent redesigns of the Google search page, Gmail and Google Calendar.

Google offered statistics for the first time about Google+, the first major release under Mr. Page’s leadership, saying that more than 10 million people had joined and were sharing a billion items a day, even though the social network has been open for just over two weeks and is still available only by invitation.

Without directly addressing Facebook, but implicitly speaking to investors’ concerns that Google was falling behind in the important realm of social networking, Mr. Page took a swipe at its competitor. He said Google+ was different from other products on the market because it mimicked real-life relationships by allowing people to share with limited groups of friends and serendipitously join video chats.

Google said that 550,000 Android phones were activated each day, and that 135 million Android devices had been activated over all; it also said 160 million people used the Chrome browser. Google reported second-quarter revenue of $9.03 billion, up from $6.82 billion in the year-ago quarter. Net revenue, which excludes payments to ad partners, was $6.92 billion, up from $5.09 billion. The company said its net income rose to $2.51 billion, or $7.68 a share, from $1.84 billion, or $5.71. Excluding the cost of stock options, Google’s second-quarter profit was $8.74 a share, compared to $6.45 last year.

    Google Results Show Growing Strength, NYT, 14.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/technology/
    google-earnings-for-the-second-quarter-top-wall-street-expectations.html

Google targets Facebook with new social service

SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Jun 28, 2011
3:31pm EDT
Reuters
By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc, frustrated by a string of failed attempts to crack social networking, is taking another stab at fending off Facebook and other hot social sites with a new service called Google Plus.

Google designed the service, unveiled on Tuesday, to tie together all of its online properties, laying the foundation for a full-fledged social network. It is the company's biggest foray into social networking since co-founder Larry Page took over as chief executive in April.

Page has made social networking a top priority at the world's No. 1 Internet search engine, whose position as the main gateway to online information could be at risk as people spend more time on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Google Plus, now available for testing, is structured in remarkably similar fashion to Facebook, with profile pictures and newsfeeds forming a central core. However, a user's friends or contacts are grouped into very specific circles of their choosing, versus the common pool of friends typical on Facebook.

Enticing consumers to join another social networking service will not be easy, said Rory Maher, an analyst with Hudson Square Research.

"They're going to have an uphill battle due to Facebook's network effects," said Maher, citing the 700 million users that some research firms say are currently on Facebook's service.

"The more users they (Facebook) get, the harder it gets for Google to steal those," he said. But he added that Google's popularity in Web search and email could help it gain a following.

To set its service apart from Facebook, Google is betting on what it says is a better approach to privacy -- a hot-button issue that has burned Facebook, as well as Google, in the past.

Central to Google Plus are the so-called "circles" of friends and acquaintances. Users can organize contacts into different customized circles -- family members, co-workers or college friends, say -- and share photos, videos or other information only within those groups.

"In the online world there's this 'share box' and you type into it and you have no idea who is going to get that, or where it's going to land, or how it's going to embarrass you six months from now," said Google Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz.

"For us, privacy isn't buried six panels deep," he added.

Facebook, which has been criticized for confusing privacy controls, introduced a feature last year that lets users create smaller groups of friends. Google, without mentioning Facebook by name, said other social networking services' attempts to create groups have been "bolt-on" efforts that do not work as well.

Google Plus will be rolled out to a limited number of users in what the company is calling a field trial. Only those invited to join will initially be able to use the service. Google did not say when it would be more widely available.

The service does not currently feature advertising.

 

LEARNING FROM BUZZ

Google's stock has been pressured by concerns about rising spending within the company and increasing regulatory scrutiny -- not to mention its struggles with social networking. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, among others, is currently reviewing its business practices.

Its shares are down almost 20 percent this year after underperforming the market in 2010.

To create Google Plus, the company went back to the drawing board in the wake of several notable failures, including Google Wave and Google Buzz, a microblogging service whose launch was marred by privacy snafus.

"We learned a lot in Buzz, and one of the things we learned is that there's a real market opportunity for a product that addresses people's concerns around privacy and how their information is shared," said Horowitz.

Google, with $29 billion in revenue last year, drew more than 1 billion visitors worldwide to its websites in May, more than any other company, according to Web analytics firm comScore. But people are spending more time on Facebook: The average U.S. visitor spent 375 minutes on Facebook in May, compared with 231 minutes for Google.

Google Plus seems designed to make its online properties a pervasive part of the daily online experience, rather than being spots where Web surfers occasionally check in to search for a website or check email.

As with Facebook's service, Google Plus has a central Web page that displays an ever-updating stream of the comments, photos and links being shared by friends and contacts.

A toolbar across the top of most of Google's sites -- such as its main search page, its Gmail site and its Maps site -- allows users to access their personalized data feed. They can then contribute their own information to the stream.

Google Plus will also offer a special video chat feature, in which up to 10 people can jump on a conference call. And Google will automatically store photos taken on cell phones on its Internet servers, allowing a Google Plus user to access the photos from any computer and share them.

When asked whether he expected people to switch from Facebook to Google Plus, Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said people may decide to use both.

"People today use multiple tools. I think what we're offering here offers some very distinct advantages around some basic needs," he said.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic;

editing by John Wallace and Gerald E. McCormick)

    Google targets Facebook with new social service, R, 28.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-google-idUSTRE75R4ZI20110628

Microsoft puts Office in the cloud, confronts Google

SEATTLE | Tue Jun 28, 2011
7:26am EDT
Reuters
By Bill Rigby

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft is making its biggest move into the mobile, Internet-accessible world of cloud computing this week, as it takes the wraps off a revamped online version of its hugely profitable Office software suite.

The world's largest software company is heaving its two-decade old set of applications -- including Outlook email, Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint collaboration tools -- into an online format so that customers can use them on a variety of devices from wherever they can get an Internet connection.

It wants to push back against Google Inc, which has stolen a small but worrying percentage of its corporate customers with cheaper, web-only alternatives, which remove the need for companies to spend time on installing software or managing servers.

"It's obvious that Microsoft has to do this if they're going to remain competitive with Google," said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of money manager YCMNET Advisors. "It's something they have to do."

Microsoft shares rose 3.7 percent on Monday, the largest gain in a single trading day since September, partly buoyed by hopes that it can ultimately boost profits by extending its software dominance to the growing cloud sector.

"If they execute effectively and it's adopted, it could be a game changer," said Yoshikami. "Whether or not that will happen is a whole other story."

Microsoft has offered online versions of some Office programs -- chiefly Outlook email -- for its corporate customers for several years, and last year rolled out free versions for individual home users.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is set to present an overhauled and updated set of offerings -- collectively called Office 365 -- at an event in New York City on Tuesday morning, underlining the company's newfound online focus.

GROWING MARKET

The market for web-based software services is heating up, and every company, government department and local authority is getting pitches from Microsoft and Google whenever they reevaluate their office software.

It's a new challenge for Microsoft, which built itself up on expensive versions of software installed on individual computers. That business model turned the Office unit into Microsoft's most profitable, earning more than $3 billion alone last quarter.

Microsoft's plan is to make up for smaller profit margins from web-based applications -- due to the cost of handling data and keeping up servers -- by grabbing a larger slice of companies' overall technology spending.

Last October, when it rolled out a test version of the new service, Microsoft said it planned to charge from $2 per user per month for basic email services to $27 per user per month for advanced offerings. Google charges a flat fee of $50 per user per year for its Web-based Google Apps product, which offers email, calendars, word processing and more online.

Microsoft, like Google, will host users' data remotely, and maintain all the servers in vast data centers. Unlike Google, it will also allow companies to put their data on dedicated servers if they choose, or keep the data on their own premises.

The full launch of Office 365 will spice up the lively competition with Google for new users.

Earlier this month, Google snagged InterContinental Hotels Group as a major customer, moving 25,000 of its employees onto Google email from Outlook.

Google, which has had the most success in the small and medium-sized business range, says there are now 40 million users of online Google Apps suite. Microsoft does not publish equivalent numbers, but research firm comScore has estimated 750 million people worldwide use Office in some form.

But Internet-centric Google -- whose success is based on its dominance in web search -- is confident it has the upper hand in the cloud.

"Compared to what they (Microsoft) have in the market today, they have nowhere to go but up," said Dave Girouard, head of Google's worldwide enterprise business. "We feel we're years ahead of them in terms of building a viable cloud solution that just works."

 

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

    Microsoft puts Office in the cloud, confronts Google, R, 28.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-microsoft-idUSTRE75R03D20110628

Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored

June 25, 2011
Reuters
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

IMAGINE a world in which we are assigned a number that indicates how influential we are. This number would help determine whether you receive a job, a hotel-room upgrade or free samples at the supermarket. If your influence score is low, you don’t get the promotion, the suite or the complimentary cookies.

This is not science fiction. It’s happening to millions of social network users.

If you have a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account, you are already being judged — or will be soon. Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence — or in the lingo, rating “influencers.” Yet the companies are not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. Rather, they are beginning to measure influence in more nuanced ways, and posting their judgments — in the form of a score — online.

To some, it’s an inspiring tool — one that’s encouraging the democratization of influence. No longer must you be a celebrity, a politician or a media personality to be considered influential. Social scoring can also help build a personal brand. To critics, social scoring is a brave new technoworld, where your rating could help determine how well you are treated by everyone with whom you interact.

“Now you are being assigned a number in a very public way, whether you want it or not,” said Mark W. Schaefer, an adjunct professor of marketing at Rutgers University and the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. “It’s going to be publicly accessible to the people you date, the people you work for. It’s fast becoming mainstream.”

Influence scores typically range from 1 to 100. On Klout, the dominant player in this space, the average score is in the high teens. A score in the 40s suggests a strong, but niche, following. A 100, on the other hand, means you’re Justin Bieber. On PeerIndex, the median score is 19. A perfect 100, the company says, is “god-like.”

Companies are still refining their methodologies — sifting through data and evaluating other networking sites.

This month, Klout announced that it was beginning to incorporate LinkedIn profiles.

As Azeem Azhar, chief executive of PeerIndex, put it, “We’re at the start of this journey and we expect the journey to take us into much more nuance and granularity.”

Marketers are signing on. More than 2,500 companies are using Klout’s data. Last week, Klout revealed that Audi would begin offering promotions to Facebook users based on their Klout score. Last year, Virgin America used the company to offer highly rated influencers in Toronto free round-trip flights to San Francisco or Los Angeles. In Las Vegas, the Palms Hotel and Casino is using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to Cirque du Soleil.

“For the first time, we’re all on an even playing field,” said Joe Fernandez, the chief executive and co-founder of Klout. “For the first time, it’s not just how much money you have or what you look like. It’s what you say and how you say it.”

How does one become an influencer?

After analyzing 22 million tweets last year, researchers at Hewlett-Packard found that it’s not enough to attract Twitter followers — you must inspire those followers to take action. That could mean persuading them to try Bikram yoga, donate to the Sierra Club or share a recipe for apple pie. In other words, influence is about engagement and motivation, not just racking up legions of followers.

Industry professionals say it’s also important to focus your digital presence on one or two areas of interest. Don’t be a generalist. Most importantly: be passionate, knowledgeable and trustworthy.

Still, scoring is subjective and, for now, imperfect: most analytics companies rely heavily on a user’s Twitter and Facebook profiles, leaving out other online activities, like blogging or posting YouTube videos. As for influence in the offline world — it doesn’t count.

Mr. Azhar, of PeerIndex, calls this “the Clay Shirky problem,” referring to the writer and theorist who doesn’t use Twitter much. “He’s obviously massively influential,” Mr. Azhar said, “and right now he has a terrible PeerIndex.”

Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Altimeter Group, a digital-strategy consulting firm, wrote a few months ago that using a single metric to evaluate influence is dangerous. He noted that Klout “lacks sentiment analysis” — so a user who generates a lot of digital chatter might receive a high score even though what’s being said about the user is negative. Also, a single metric can be misleading: someone with little Twitter experience can snag a high score if they happen to post a video that goes viral.

More broadly, Mr. Schaefer of Schaefer Marketing and others are concerned that we are moving closer to creating “social media caste systems,” where people with high scores get preferential treatment by retailers, prospective employers, even prospective dates.

No wonder some people are trying to game their scores. Attaining true influence requires time and commitment. And while your flesh-and-blood self deserves a break every now and then, your digital self will pay the price.

“I went on vacation for two weeks,” said Mr. Schaefer, “and my Klout score went down.”

Stephanie Rosenbloom is a style reporter for The New York Times.

    Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored, NYT, 25.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/sunday-review/26rosenbloom.html

LulzSec hackers say disbanding after last data dump

NEW YORK | Sat Jun 25, 2011
10:43pm EDT
Reuters
By Ben Berkowitz and Paritosh Bansal

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Lulz Security group of rogue hackers announced it was disbanding on Saturday with one last data dump, which included internal AOL Inc and AT&T documents.

LulzSec, which gained wide recognition for breaching the websites of Sony Corp, the CIA and a British police unit among other targets, said in a statement that it had accomplished its mission to disrupt corporate and government bodies for entertainment.

"Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind -- we hope -- inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love," the group said.

Known for irreverence and a fondness for naval metaphors, the hacker group took to Twitter -- the microblogging site where it had more than 277,000 followers -- to release its statement.

A link to the release also was posted on www.lulzsecurity.com but there was no way to independently contact the group to confirm the release.

The abrupt dissolution came a few days after LulzSec threatened to escalate its cyberattacks and steal classified information from governments, banks and other major establishments.

LulzSec also had said it was teaming up with the Anonymous hacker activist group to cause more serious trouble.

"... Our planned 50-day cruise has expired," the hackers said in their statement, "and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind -- we hope -- inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love. If anything, we hope we had a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere. Anywhere."

CLOSING IN?

In what could be a sign that cyber police were making progress toward shutting down LulzSec, British police said on Tuesday they had arrested a 19-year-old man on suspicion that he was connected to the attacks on Sony, the CIA and a British police unit that fights organized crime.

London police declined to say if the teenager was a member of LulzSec but the hacking group said on Twitter that he had hosted one of its chatrooms on his computer server.

The arrest came after Spanish police earlier this month apprehended three men on suspicion they helped Anonymous.

So far LulzSec's publicized assaults have mostly resulted in temporary disruptions of some websites and the release of user credentials.

The data the group released Saturday was a mixed bag.

Reuters was not able to access all of the files but those that were available included a list of routers -- devices that handle Internet traffic -- and their passwords, as well as account information for an Irish private investigation service. The AOL documents appeared to be elements of an internal technical manual.

A file list on a download site indicated there also was some AT&T internal data in the dump, although the nature of that data was not immediately clear.

AOL was not immediately available for comment, while an AT&T spokesman did not have immediate comment.

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz and Paritosh Bansal; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Bill Trott)

    LulzSec hackers say disbanding after last data dump, R, 25.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/26/us-cybersecurity-lulzsec-idUSTRE75P05I20110626

Hackers attack Electronic Arts website

NEW YORK | Fri Jun 24, 2011
2:38pm EDT
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cyber hackers have breached an Electronic Arts Inc website and may have taken user information such as birth dates, phone numbers and mailing addresses, the company said on its website on Friday.

Electronic Arts is the latest victim in a spate of global cyber attacks waged against video game companies. Last week, Sega Sammy Holdings Inc reported that user information had been stolen from 1.3 million customers, while Sony Corp is still grappling with the massive breach that compromised the data of more than 100 million of its video game users in April.

Electronic Arts was not immediately available for comment on Friday. No hacker group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The video game publisher posted a set of questions and answers on its website addressing the attack, which hit a server for EA's Bioware studio in Edmonton, Canada. The hacked website was associated with the fantasy game "Neverwinter Nights."

The company said no credit card data or social security numbers were taken but other sensitive information may have been breached by hackers.

"Our investigation shows that information such as user names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, CD keys and birth dates from accounts on the server system associated with Neverwinter Nights may have been compromised," the company said on its website.

EA offered tips to consumers to avoid identity theft and directed users to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Internet fraud website.

EA shares were trading 0.3 percent lower at $21.84 on the Nasdaq on Friday.

 

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

    Hackers attack Electronic Arts website, R, 24.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/24/us-electronicarts-hackers-idUSTRE75N58J20110624

The Cloud That Ate Your Music

June 22, 2011
Reuters
By JON PARELES

I’M ready for the cloud. Soon, I hope, it will be ready for me.

Recent weeks have been filled with announcements about music taking residence in the cloud, the poetic name for online storage and software that promises to make lifetimes worth of songs available to anyone, anywhere, as long as those people and places have Internet connections. (Which of course is a long way from everyone, everywhere, but utopian tech dreams tend to ignore mere hardware.)

I can’t wait. Ever since music began migrating online in the 1990s I have longed to make my record collection evaporate — simply to have available the one song I need at any moment, without having to store the rest.

But I have, as they say, special needs. In three decades as a critic I have amassed more vinyl, CDs and digital files than I know what to do with. Periodic weeding can’t keep up with the 20 to 30 discs that arrive in the daily mailbag; the overfull floor-to-ceiling shelves are already straining under thousands of CDs and LPs. Any affection I had for physical packaging, no matter how elegant or unique, has long since vanished; it’s a reference library, not an art collection.

And it grows, and grows, because I never know what I’ll need: the limited-edition 45, the home-burned debut CD. Yet I’d much rather have it in the cloud than in my apartment.

In recent weeks Amazon, Google and Apple have announced services to store individual music collections in the cloud, ready for access online and for syncing to multiple devices. Pandora Internet radio, which extrapolates individual playlists from users’ likes and dislikes, raised hundreds of millions of dollars with a huge initial public offering (followed, however, by a steep drop in stock price; with operating costs and royalties to copyright owners, the company has never made a profit).

Dar.fm recently arrived as a free service that records radio stations — like TiVo for radio — and, as a bonus, conveniently indexes any music from those stations that has been electronically tagged. (Choose a congenial radio station and assemble a well-chosen collection.) Other companies — Rdio, MOG, Napster, Rhapsody — have been offering huge catalogs of music on demand (and transferable to portable devices) for some time as subscription services for a monthly fee, and Spotify, already online in Europe, is likely to join them in the United States soon.

That’s not to mention the many unauthorized sources for music; virtually any album can be found for downloading with a simple search. Free or paid, the cloud is already active.

Dematerializing recorded music has consequences. On the positive side it hugely multiplies the potential audience, letting the music travel fast and far to listeners who would never have known it existed. It escalates music’s portability, as it adds one more previously stand-alone function — like clocks, cameras, calendars, newspapers, video players and games — to the omnivorous smartphone. That’s instant gratification, but with a catch: Smartphones aren’t exactly renowned for sound quality. And the MP3 compression that has made music so portable has already robbed it of some fidelity even before it reaches my earphones.

The ritual of placing an LP on a turntable and cranking up a hi-fi home stereo disappeared — when? Perhaps with the cassette and the Walkman, the ancestor of the portable MP3 player. Now even the thought of having a separate music player is a little quaint. The smartphone will do it all — just adequately, but convenience trumps quality. Baby boomers who remember the transistor radio, that formerly miniature marvel that now looks and feels like a brick compared to current MP3 players, can experience again the sound of an inadequate speaker squeezing out a beloved song.

As the last decade has abundantly proved, freeing music from discs also drives down the price of recorded music, often to zero, dematerializing what used to be an income for musicians and recording companies. Royalties generated from sales of MP3 files and by online subscription services are unlikely to ever make recorded music as profitable as it was in disc form.

There has also been another, far less quantifiable, effect of separating music from its physical package. Songs have become, for lack of a better word, trivial: not through any less effort from the best musicians, but through the unexpected combination of a nearly infinite supply, constant availability, suboptimum sound quality and the intangibility I’ve always thought I would welcome.

Now everyone, not just a critic, can feel awash in music, with an infinitude of choices immediately at hand. But each of those choices is a diminished thing; attainable without effort, disposable without a second thought, just another icon in a folder on a pocket-size screen with pocket-sized sound. The tricky part, more now than ever, is to make any new release feel like an occasion: to give a song more impact than a single droplet out of the cloud. This presents a challenge to culturally ambitious musicians: before they can be larger than life, they have to be larger than the LCD screen.

Or they can try to conquer that screen and play the Internet as an instrument, using its defining attribute: interactivity. When Google replaced its logo with a virtual instrument for Les Paul’s 96th birthday — not strictly speaking a guitar but a harp, with one note per string — people worldwide played tunes on it and recorded them into the cloud. And of course there are smartphone apps to simulate guitars, keyboards, drums and recording studios.

Bjork’s next album, “Biophilia,” is due to arrive this fall with a smartphone app built around every song: apps that diagram the song in both conventional music notation and invented graphic notation, that remap the songs as scientific phenomena like (among other things) planetary systems and crystal structures, that encourage listeners to toy with components of the music to create songs of their own.

“I’m excited to embrace a different handshake between the object and sound,” Bjork said in an e-mail. “It seems like every couple of decades this takes a somersault, and I enjoy the fresh point of view, like the honeymoon of the new format where you can really have an effect on the overall direction, and things like enjoyment, love and freedom matter again.”

She added, “I definitely wanted the songs to be a spatial experience, where you can play with lightning or a crystal or the full moon and the song changes. I would like to feel the apps are equal to the song in the same way I have always aimed for the music video to be equal to the song: the 1+1 is 3 thing. Not that it works every time, but you have to aim for it.”

But while musicians learn to play in the cloud, I need it as a repository. For the moment, the much-ballyhooed cloud music players leave me unimpressed. Each has different mechanisms, features, prices and limitations, including one major one: They all depend on first uploading the collection into the cloud.

Google Music Beta’s Music Manager has been running for days on my laptop, and it’s barely one-third of the way through a mere 4,000 songs from a single hard drive — a tiny random fraction of the collection. Amazon and Apple will automatically add the music purchased through their respective stores, but the rest is slow going.

Apple is also promising that later this year, for a fee it will share with record companies, that it will implement a service called iTunes Match, which will scan and recognize music and add Apple’s own copies without uploading. That was an idea that mp3.com implemented back in 2000, when its Beam-it function recognized CDs in home computers to add immediately to online collections. But Beam-it was soon stopped by a record-company lawsuit. Now Apple has gotten permission from the major labels, though at least one independent, the archivally minded Numero Group, has turned down iTunes Match, describing Apple’s financial terms as a “pittance.”

Meanwhile, as many technology writers have pointed out, iTunes Match as currently described will in effect launder music that was copied illicitly, replacing home-ripped files with standardized, good-quality MP3s. But now record labels and publishers will receive 70 percent of Apple’s fee.

As for the far greater part of my music library that’s just on CDs, well, it’s too bad no one is bringing back Beam-it, and even then the uploading would be endless. But yes, it’s charming to see an album that’s nowhere in my phone’s memory available for listening, with the option to copy selected files for offline (which to me means subway) play. The cloud services are, after all, just getting started; speed and storage capacity will only increase.

For me, though, the great hope of the cloud is the subscription services, like MOG and Rdio. Their catalogs are deep, their interfaces sensible, their sound quality decent though not spectacular. For every fan who imagines herself a D.J., there’s a new social curatorial model arising in these services, somewhere between the old homemade cassette mixtape handed to a friend and full-scale broadcasting, with a giant potential library. You can flaunt or hide what you’re listening to; you can get ideas from others’ playlists or copy them wholesale.

But as deep as the subscription catalogs go, they aren’t deep enough: imported albums, out-of-print albums, minuscule independents and big-time holdouts like the Beatles aren’t in that sector of the cloud.

Yet, again, there’s hope. Apple’s Match is a sign that copyright holders are starting to rethink their licensing terms for the cloud, which will make subscription catalogs even larger. And, practically speaking, for those obscure, orphaned releases there is the unlicensed but hyperactive community of collectors who continue to share their finds online, with downloads just a search away. As for sound quality — well, maybe that’s wishful thinking.

But I have to stay optimistic that it won’t be another decade before all my discs really can disappear into the cloud. And then, having solved the space problem, I can turn to something even more intractable: the time to listen to it all.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 26, 2011

A cover essay this weekend about the online storage of music misstates the name of the Apple service that will scan and recognize music and add Apple’s own copies without uploading. It is iTunesMatch, not iMatch.

    The Cloud That Ate Your Music, NYT, 22.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/music/new-online-services-offer-hope-to-music-fans.html

Deploying New Tools to Stop the Hackers

June 17, 2011
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and VERNE G. KOPYTOFF

Trying to secure a computer network is much like trying to secure a building — the challenge is trying to screen out real threats without impeding the normal traffic that needs to go in and out.

And as the recent hacking attacks against Citigroup, RSA Security and Lockheed Martin show, even sophisticated security systems can be breached.

“We’re seeing an inflection point where the attackers are extremely smart, and they are using completely new techniques,” said Nir Zuk, the chief technology officer at Palo Alto Networks, a firewall company based in Santa Clara, Calif. “Every piece of content that you receive can attack you.”

Historically, the first line of computer defense, the firewall, is like the guard desk at a building. It scrutinizes the traffic going in and out of the system, looking for obviously suspicious characters.

Virtually every company also has antivirus software, which typically keeps an eye out for anything on a “black list” of well-known malware and prevents it from entering the computer system or causing havoc once inside. A more rare type of security grants access only to programs on a “white list” of safe software— the equivalent of allowing employees with ID cards to come and go as they please but preventing anyone else from entering.

But as hackers unleash ever-sneakier attacks, big corporations and government agencies are scrambling to deploy new tools and procedures to deal with all the delicate gray areas in between — the cool-looking new smartphone app, the funny Facebook link, the unknown foreign Web site. The flood of malicious software is also prompting renewed debate over how to balance access and protection.

“Right now, if an application is not known, we let it run,” said Peter Firstbrook, an analyst at Gartner, a research firm, referring to the prevailing view in most companies. “That’s the wrong thing to do.”

Companies like Symantec, the giant Internet security firm, are introducing services that assess the “reputation” of software, weighing factors like how old it is and how widely it is used to decide if it is safe. Other vendors are selling enhanced firewalls and products that can sniff out impersonators by detecting unusual file-usage patterns.

Nearly everyone agrees that a mix of defenses is vital, and that even so, some hackers will still slip through. Experts also say that the proliferation of smartphones, the growing workplace use of Facebook and other social media tools, and the shift toward storing more data in a computing cloud are providing new avenues for attackers.

Symantec’s chief executive, Enrique Salem, acknowledged at a conference in February that traditional antivirus scans “long ago failed to keep up.” As points of entry into corporate and government networks “proliferate on this seemingly insane trajectory,” he added, “so do the threats they attract.”

The growth in malicious software has been staggering, as criminal organizations seek to ferret out credit card numbers and other ways to make money and hackers in China and Russia are believed to be seeking national security secrets.

Last year, Symantec discovered 286 million new and unique threats from malicious software, or about nine per second, up from 240 million in 2009. The company said that the amount of harmful software in the world passed the amount of beneficial software in 2007, and as many as one of every 10 downloads from the Web includes harmful programs.

Unlike past blitzes of spam with clunky sales pitches, today’s attacks often rely on a familiar face and are extremely difficult to stop. In a practice known as spear phishing, hackers send e-mails that seem to come from co-workers or friends and include attachments that can release malware to steal passwords and other sensitive data. In other cases, malware can be activated when a Web link is clicked.

Some security experts say companies can better protect themselves against such attacks by expanding the use of “white lists,” which are currently in place in only 10 to 20 percent of the computers in large organizations.

Bit9, a Massachusetts company that offers such a white-list service, says it has millions of approved applications in its registry. Federal agencies, retailers, Wall Street firms and technology companies use its real-time monitoring services, which can be set to block unknown software or simply issue alerts about it.

Harry Sverdlove, Bit9’s chief technology officer, said its monitoring system stopped an attack on a national defense laboratory in March that was almost identical to the hacking that month at RSA Security, which eventually compromised the electronic security tokens that RSA sells to Lockheed and other corporations around the world.

Mr. Sverdlove said the attack on the lab came via an e-mail attachment with a heading implying that it was from the human resources department. He said a malicious file was embedded in the attachment, but the monitoring system stopped it when it noticed unauthorized activity.

Another strategy used to deflect attacks is to rate software based on its reputation. The technique, championed by Symantec, is supposed to be more flexible than strict white or black lists.

Symantec’s strategy is to rate software based on a number of factors including the file’s age and source. The company also checks data it collects from users about the kind of software they have on their computers. Software used by 100,000 people is more likely to be good, while a file that no one else has is more likely to be bad.

“You probably don’t want to be the guinea pig,” said Carey Nachenberg, a fellow with Symantec.

Reputational technology is available in Symantec’s consumer products and will be deployed for corporate customers sometime later this year. The software, when used in conjunction with other techniques like black lists and monitoring for unusual activity, is 99 percent effective, Mr. Nachenberg said.

But security vendors like Mr. Zuk of Palo Alto Networks say that in real life, people are being bombarded with all kinds of links, and a security threat can be hidden in any one of them. “It’s about clicking on a link or a presentation about how to improve your golf play,” he said.

New security technology should protect against all sources of malicious files, whether they come in by old-fashioned e-mail, a LinkedIn feed or a Twitter link, Mr. Zuk said.

He said stronger firewalls, which monitor computer networks for suspicious traffic, could also help.

Security experts say companies must also adapt their security systems to protect against attacks through smartphones and tablet computers. Although such mobile devices increase convenience for workers, they essentially a create a new door into the network, which then needs its own security watchdogs.

Mr. Firstbrook, the Gartner analyst, said that devices that run Google’s Android software, which is open to all applications, were riskier than Apple iPhones and iPads, in which every application is screened by the company before it is allowed into the App Store.

And humans remain a prime weakness in all computer networks that no security system can completely offset, said Mark Hatton, chief executive of Core Security Technologies, a company based in Boston that tests corporate networks for security holes.

“You tell the guy not to click on the link to the free iPad, and he still always clicks on the link to the free iPad,” he said.

    Deploying New Tools to Stop the Hackers, NYT, 17.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/technology/18security.html

Special report: Government in cyber fight but can't keep up

Thu, Jun 16 2011
WASHINGTON | Thu Jun 16, 2011
2:39pm EDT
By Phil Stewart, Diane Bartz, Jim Wolf and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.

The twin efforts show how President Barack Obama's administration is racing on multiple fronts to plug the holes in U.S. cyber defenses.

Notwithstanding the military's efforts, however, the overall gap appears to be widening, as adversaries and criminals move faster than government and corporations, and technologies such as mobile applications for smart phones proliferate more rapidly than policymakers can respond, officials and analysts said.

A Reuters examination of American cyber readiness produced the following findings:

* Spin-offs of the malicious code dubbed "agent.btz" used to attack the military's U.S. Central Command in 2008 are still roiling U.S. networks today. People inside and outside the U.S. government strongly suspect Russia was behind the attack, which was the most significant known breach of military networks.

* There are serious questions about the security of "cloud computing," even as the U.S. government prepares to embrace that technology in a big way for its cost savings.

* The U.S. electrical grid and other critical nodes are still vulnerable to cyber attack, 13 years after then-President Bill Clinton declared that protecting critical infrastructure was a national priority.

* While some progress has been made in coordinating among government agencies with different missions, and across the public-private sector gap, much remains to be done.

* Government officials say one of the things they fear most is a so-called "zero-day attack," exploiting a vulnerability unknown to the software developer until the strike hits.

That's the technique that was used by the Stuxnet worm that snarled Iran's enriched uranium-producing centrifuges last summer, and which many experts say may have been created by the United States or Israel. A mere 12 months later, would-be hackers can readily find digital tool kits for building Stuxnet-like weapons on the Internet, according to a private-sector expert who requested anonymity.

"We're much better off (technologically) than we were a few years ago, but we have not kept pace with opponents," said Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. "The network is so deeply flawed that it can't be secured."

 

"IT'S LIKE AN INSECT INFESTATION"

In recent months hackers have broken into the SecurID tokens used by millions of people, targeting data from defense contractors Lockheed Martin, L3 and almost certainly others; launched a sophisticated strike on the International Monetary Fund; and breached digital barriers to grab account information from Sony, Google, Citigroup and a long list of others.

The latest high-profile victims were the public websites of the CIA and the U.S. Senate - whose committees are drafting legislation to improve coordination of cyber defenses.

Terabytes of data are flying out the door, and billions of dollars are lost in remediation costs and reputational harm, government and private security experts said in interviews. The head of the U.S. military's Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has estimated that Pentagon computer systems are probed by would-be assailants 250,000 times each hour.

Cyber intrusions are now a fact of life, and a widely accepted cost of doing business.

"We don't treat it as if it's here today, gone tomorrow," said Jay Opperman, Comcast Corp.'s senior director of security and privacy. "It's like an insect infestation. Once you've got it, you never get rid of it."

The private-sector expert who requested anonymity said a top official at a major Internet service provider told him that he knew his network had been infiltrated by elite hackers. He could digitally kick them out - but that would risk provoking a debilitating counter-attack.

 

"THE THING ... THAT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT"

The idea behind the soon-to-be-announced Pentagon program for defense contractors is to boost information-sharing with the Defense Department on cyber threats. It also aims to speed reporting of attacks on firms that make up what the Pentagon calls the Defense Industrial Base.

The DIB, as it is sometimes known, provides the Defense Department some $400 billion a year in arms, supplies and other services. The new program is voluntary and builds on a smaller pilot, reflecting the persistent challenge of regulating private firms that traditionally shield proprietary data and often downplay cyber setbacks.

Ultimately, the new program may lead to agreement to put at least some Pentagon contractors behind military-grade network perimeter defenses, such as those that protect the Pentagon's own classified networks.

On another front, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is expected to launch by mid-2012 the National Cyber Range, a kind of replica of the Internet costing an estimated $130 million that would be used to test cutting-edge cyber defense technologies and help train cyber warriors.

The Obama administration has made cyber security a national priority, and tried to fashion an "all-government response" that imposes order on the competing domains and priorities of the Pentagon, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, the super-secret National Security Agency and the private sector.

"We're far better prepared than we've ever been before," said White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt.

"Notwithstanding all the threats that we see out there, the things that are making news on a regular basis about a company that's been intruded upon ... (look at) how much the system still runs," Schmidt told Reuters in an interview.

The key, Schmidt said, is resiliency, "to make sure that we're better prepared, to make sure that the disruptions when they do occur are minimum - we're able to recover from them."

Still, he said major worries remain. "The thing that I worry about that keeps me up at night is the unknown vulnerability that may exist out there."

Some officials are even less sanguine.

The Pentagon's computer systems are widely considered to be better protected than other U.S. government agencies', and far safer than the private sector's. Still, a U.S. defense official told Reuters he would give the Pentagon just a "C+" grade overall for its cyber defenses. "We're not impervious to attack by any stretch, but nor are we 'open kimono'," the official said. He added: "And we're getting better."

 

WHAT IS 'CYBER'?

Experts say that one of the toughest challenges of cyber defense is, oddly, definitions. What constitutes "cyber"? Computers and digital networks, certainly. But how about digitized pictures or video streams from a pilotless Predator drone flying over Pakistan?

Who is responsible for protecting what? Where does national security begin and privacy end?

"The other big problem is lack of policy," said one former U.S. official. "(We) lack policy because we lack consensus. We lack consensus because we haven't had an informed debate. We lack an informed debate because we don't have a common pool of data. And we don't have a common pool of data because we don't share it."

Nowhere is the problem more acute than in thinking about cyber warfare. What constitutes an act of war in cyberspace? And how do you determine who it was that fired the shot?

U.S. military officials, eager to talk about how the Pentagon has boosted computer defenses, clam up when the topic turns to offensive capabilities.

The Pentagon has put together a classified list of its cyber capabilities so policymakers know their options - just as it does for more conventional weapons.

Offensive actions against foreign systems would require White House authorization. But the Pentagon does not need special approval to do the kind of cyber surveillance work that can identify vulnerabilities in foreign networks, a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

That includes leaving hidden digital "beacons" inside adversaries' networks that could be used to pinpoint future targets. The beacons can phone home to tell U.S. military computers that they are still operational, the official said.

While the United States is trying to apply conventional military logic to the cyber realm, there is no global consensus about the rules of cyber war. A Pentagon report due out toward the end of the month is not expected to articulate case-by-case possibilities of when a cyber war could turn into a real one.

 

INTO THE CLOUD

Even as such policy debates rage, the technological landscape is being remade, seemingly by the month, posing new challenges - and opportunities. Tens of thousands of mobile applications for smartphones and tablet computers represent new vectors for hacks and attacks.

"The quick answer is we haven't been doing enough and we're semi-late to the game" on protecting mobile applications, said Rear Admiral Mike Brown, a senior Department of Homeland Security cyber security official.

U.S. government agencies are working with major commercial vendors "to start looking together at how to address the issues of mobile vulnerabilities," Brown said at a symposium sponsored by Symantec Corp.

Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government is planning to move in a big way into "cloud computing," in which off-site providers offer network and storage resources accessible remotely from a variety of computing platforms.

Potential cost savings are significant. Handled correctly, computing clouds could offer added security, specialists say. But there are also risks.

A study released in April by CA Technologies and the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute contained alarming findings. Based on a survey of 103 U.S. and 24 European cloud computing providers, it found that a majority did not view security of their services as a competitive advantage, and believed that security was their customers' responsibility, not theirs.

Most did not have dedicated security personnel on staff.

Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn met Google executives in California in mid-February to discuss cloud computing. On May 19, Lynn instructed the Pentagon's Defense Science Board to study the benefits and risks of cloud computing, "paying particular attention to attacks on communications that would destroy or delay delivery of services and information for time-critical uses."

Lynn told Reuters that "cloud computing has the potential to offer greater capability at equal or lesser costs." He added: "I want to make sure we are taking full advantage of these advanced technologies."

The Pentagon is preparing a cloud computing strategy, which it expects to complete by the end of the summer, a U.S. defense official told Reuters.

"We're trying to get to the place where warfighters or any of us can get to our information from anywhere on the planet, with any device," the official said.

Schmidt, the White House coordinator, said as many as 170 security controls are being built into government cloud computing projects from the start. "It's not deploying something and securing it later. We're setting the requirements at the outset."

 

"I'M NOT CONFIDENT THAT WE WOULD KNOW..."

So how safe are the computer networks of the United States, which perhaps more than any nation relies on them for banking, electric power and other basics of modern civilization?

In May 1998, then-President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 63, calling for a "reliable, interconnected, and secure" network by 2003, and establishing a national coordinator for protecting critical infrastructure.

The Department of Homeland Security now has lead responsibility for protecting the power grid. Yet, as with almost everything involving cyber, it's not quite that simple.

If there were a cyber attack on the power grid today, "I'm not confident that we would know what parts of the government should respond," said one former U.S. official, who asked not to be identified. "Who jumps in there? DHS, DoD, Cyber Command, NSA, the intelligence community?"

"So nothing's really happened." said former Pentagon general counsel Judith Miller, talking about grid vulnerability at a cyber event in Washington this month.

"This is a discussion we had in the 1990s. We're having it right now. Nothing really has changed, although perhaps the ability of attackers, whether they're nation states or just kids, has grown apace," she said.

A central conundrum is that the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping, has personnel with the best cyber skills, but has been until recently mostly shut out of protecting domestic networks. That's due to the highly classified nature of the NSA's work, and fears that it will stray into domestic spying.

Another complicating factor: the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars federal military personnel from acting in a law-enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by Congress.

"NSA has a long history in cyber security, on both the offensive and the defensive sides. It has great resources and expertise. But it makes privacy advocates nervous," said Stewart Baker, a former DHS official now at the law firm Steptoe and Johnson LLP.

Last October, the Defense Department and Homeland Security - responsible for protecting civilian U.S. government networks - signed a memorandum to cooperate, with the NSA sharing technology and the agencies swapping personnel.

The effort has gotten mixed reviews. Schmidt said that early reports of inter-agency tension have dissipated, and Representative James Langevin, a member of the House intelligence committee, said DHS is improving. "I don't think that they're there yet but we're moving in the right direction," he said.

However other experts, who would not be quoted for the record, said the gap between the two agencies remains wide.

Even if the NSA, DHS and other agencies worked together seamlessly, the problem remains of coaxing industries in critical infrastructure to accept more government regulation.

"There's absolutely no question that the power companies and indeed state regulators have been unenthusiastic about a federal role," Baker said. He added this warning: "The regulation that would pass after a disaster is a lot worse than they would get right now."

And then there's the Stuxnet-like "zero day" attack, exploiting a flaw no one knew existed, perhaps tucked into some off-the-shelf software like that purchased daily by federal agencies.

"Our largest fear ... is the zero day attack," said Sherrill Nicely, the CIA's deputy chief information officer. "It's very, very, very difficult to protect oneself from an attack that you did not know was coming or the vulnerability that you did not know existed."

 

(Additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky and Warren Strobel; Writing by Warren Strobel; Editing by Kristin Roberts and Claudia Parsons)

    Special report: Government in cyber fight but can't keep up, R, 16.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/16/us-usa-cybersecurity-idUSTRE75F4YG20110616

Exclusive: Hacking blitz drives cyberinsurance demand

NEW YORK | Tue Jun 14, 2011
6:24pm EDT
By Ben Berkowitz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The recent string of sensational hacker attacks is driving companies to seek "cyberinsurance" worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even though many policies can still leave them exposed to claims.

Companies are having to enhance not just their information technology practices but also their human resources and employee training functions just to get adequate coverage against intrusion -- and in some cases, they are also accepting deductibles in the tens of millions of dollars.

Insurers and insurance brokers say demand is soaring, as companies try to protect themselves against civil suits and the potential for fines by governments and regulators, but also as they seek help paying for mundane costs like "sorry letters" to customers.

"When you have a catastrophic type of data breach then yes ... the phones ring off the hook," said Kevin Kalinich, co-national managing director of the professional risk group at insurance broker Aon Corp (AON.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

In the past few weeks, the U.S. Senate, the International Monetary Fund, defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), banking concern Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), technology giant Google (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and consumer electronics group Sony Corp (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) are among those who have disclosed hacker attacks of various kinds.

In the days after Sony disclosed it had more than 100 million customer accounts compromised, the company said its insurance would help cover the costs of fixing its systems and providing identity theft services to account holders.

That helped drum up business for the still-growing segment of the industry, and the demand has only intensified since a more recent breach at Citigroup, which security experts said was the largest direct attack on a U.S. bank to date.

Some insurers say this is the moment the industry has been waiting for as the tide of bad news becomes so overwhelming that customers have no choice but to seek coverage. On Tuesday, Travelers (TRV.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) became the latest insurer to launch a package of policies covering various fraud and expense liabilities.

Aon's Kalinich said fewer than five percent of data breaches lead to costs of more than $20 million, and yet more and more companies are seeking to be insured for that and more to protect themselves against the shifting risk.

Large customers are going to extremes, taking out coverage for data breach liabilities of as much as $200 million, while also taking $25 million deductibles to keep their premiums down.

 

GOOD RISK

As with any kind of insurance, data breach policies carry all sorts of exclusions that put the onus on the company. Some, for example, exclude coverage for any incident that involves an unencrypted laptop. In other cases, insurers say, coverage can be voided if regular software updates are not downloaded or if employees do not change their passwords periodically.

"Insurers are all looking for good risks, whether it is a fire insurance company that wants a building that is sprinklered and doesn't have oily rags laying around - this is the equivalent in the IT area. They want good systems, they want good protection, they want good risk," said Don Glazier, a principal at Integro Insurance Brokers in Chicago.

Given that the average data breach cost $7.2 million last year, according to a March study from the Ponemon Institute, hundreds of millions of dollars of cover may seem extreme. But with the scale and scope of hacking attacks growing daily, some companies can not be cautious enough.

Of course, the risk they face is a moving target, both for them and for the insurance companies. After 10 years of writing policies, industry experts say a consensus is building on what "cyberinsurance" covers.

Generally, such policies now cover third-party liability, like suits filed by customers whose accounts have been hacked; direct costs like notification letters sent to affected customers; and, increasingly, fines and penalties associated with data breaches.

What is missing from the equation, however, is standards. Insurers can try to standardize the risk from hacking attacks, but cyberinsurance is still not auto insurance, where carriers can make their customers wear seat belts as a condition of a policy.

"One day the industry will actually be so robust that ... we'll have the leverage to actually create standards," said Tracey Vispoli, a senior vice president at insurer Chubb (CB.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). "We're not there yet but that to me is a win to the industry."

 

CONSUMER BURDEN

Consumers are increasingly finding themselves less protected and more liable as well. Courts are siding with vendors and not their customers in some cases when it comes to the misuse of data.

In late May, a U.S. magistrate judge in Maine recommended the district court throw out a lawsuit filed against a bank by one of its customers, a construction company.

The customer had suffered a series of unauthorized withdrawals from its account after some employees' computers were infected with a virus that captured their banking information. The company sued the bank on the grounds that the bank's systems should have caught the clearly unusual pattern.

Lawyers who litigate cyberrisk say in the current environment, many companies are only looking out for themselves, not for their customers or suppliers.

"Most companies are looking more for first party (coverage), they're worried more about their own systems," said Richard Bortnick, an attorney with Cozen O'Connor and the publisher of the digital law blog CyberInquirer.

"Not all companies deem it necessary to provide notification of a cyberbreach or incident for reasons of reputation and other marketing-related bases," he said.

 

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz, Editing by Martin Howell)

    Exclusive: Hacking blitz drives cyberinsurance demand, R, 14.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/14/us-insurance-cybersecurity-idUSTRE75D5MK20110614

Hackers break into Senate computers

WASHINGTON | Tue Jun 14, 2011
2:47am EDT
Reuters
By Diane Bartz and Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate's website was hacked over the weekend, leading to a review of all of its websites, in the latest embarrassing breach of security to hit a major U.S.-based institution.

The loosely organized hacker group Lulz Security broke into a public portion of the Senate website but did not reach behind a firewall into a more sensitive portion of the network, Martina Bradford, the deputy Senate sergeant at arms, said on Monday.

Despite the breach, the Sergeant at Arms Office, which provides security for the Senate, said that the breach had not compromised any individual senator's information.

Lulz announced the hack on Monday.

"We were responding to their allegations. Basically what we're saying that the server they got into is for public access and is in the public side," said Bradford.

Lulz Security, who have hacked into Sony's website and the Public Broadcasting System, posted online a list of files that appear not to be sensitive but indicate the hackers had been into the Senate's computer network.

"We don't like the U.S. government very much," Lulz Security said at the top of their release. "This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov - is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?"

The comment refers to reports that the military had decided that it could respond to cyber attacks from foreign countries with traditional military force.

Senate staffers were alerted about the breach late Monday.

"Although this intrusion is inconvenient, it does not compromise the security of the Senate's network, its members or staff," Bradford said in a statement. "Specifically, there is no individual user account information on the server supporting senate.gov that could have been compromised."

"The hackers may have done the equivalent of burglarizing the Senate and bragging because they managed to steal a bunch of souvenirs from the gift shop," said Stewart Baker, a former cyber official at the Department of Homeland Security. He is now with the law firm Steptoe and Johnson.

 

'ESPECIALLY EMBARRASSING'

The Senate has been the frequent target of hacking attacks, with tens of thousands thwarted each month, Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance Gainer told Reuters in early June.

Still, the break-in is just the latest in a series of embarrassing hacks against companies and organizations.

The International Monetary Fund has been hit, as have Lockheed Martin Corp, Citigroup Inc, Google and Michaels Stores.

The break-in would cause embarrassment at the Senate, said John Bumgarner of the Cyber Consequences Unit, a think tank.

"They're all valid directories," he said after looking at data that Lulz posted online. "This is an especially embarrassing incident for the Senate, because they are often asking others to explain why their cybersecurity programs have failed."

"The information disclosed online ... shows that the intruders had administrator-level access to the Senate server. This access could have potentially been used as a jump-off point to compromise other systems in the network," he said.

Lulz, which is Internet slang for 'laugh out loud,' has claimed hacks into websites owned by Sony Corp. It has also claimed responsibility for defacing the Public Broadcasting Service network websites, and for posting on Monday data from PBS servers to protest a "Front Line" documentary about WikiLeaks.

Lulz claimed credit for breaking into a Fox.com website and publishing data about contestants for the upcoming Fox TV talent show, "X Factor." Fox is a unit of News Corp.

Another loosely affiliated hacking group, Anonymous, gained prominence when it temporarily crippled the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal after they cut off financial services to WikiLeaks.

It has also attacked websites in Syria, Tunisia, Egypt and India for political reasons.

 

(Additional reporting by Donna Smith; Editing by Eric Beech)

    Hackers break into Senate computers, 14.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/14/us-cybersecurity-usa-senate-idUSTRE75C5JI20110614

Thieves Found Citigroup Site an Easy Entry

June 13, 2011
The New York Times
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ERIC DASH

Think of it as a mansion with a high-tech security system — but the front door wasn’t locked tight.

Using the Citigroup customer Web site as a gateway to bypass traditional safeguards and impersonate actual credit card holders, a team of sophisticated thieves cracked into the bank’s vast reservoir of personal financial data, until they were detected in a routine check in early May.

That allowed them to capture the names, account numbers, e-mail addresses and transaction histories of more than 200,000 Citi customers, security experts said, revealing for the first time details of one of the most brazen bank hacking attacks in recent years.

The case illustrates the threat posed by the rising demand for private financial information from the world of foreign hackers.

In the Citi breach, the data thieves were able to penetrate the bank’s defenses by first logging on to the site reserved for its credit card customers.

Once inside, they leapfrogged between the accounts of different Citi customers by inserting vari-ous account numbers into a string of text located in the browser’s address bar. The hackers’ code systems automatically repeated this exercise tens of thousands of times — allowing them to capture the confidential private data.

The method is seemingly simple, but the fact that the thieves knew to focus on this particular vulnerability marks the Citigroup attack as especially ingenious, security experts said.

One security expert familiar with the investigation wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser. “It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability,” he said. The security expert insisted on anonymity because the inquiry was at an early stage.

The financial damage to Citigroup and its customers is not yet clear. Sean Kevelighan, a bank spokesman, declined to comment on the details of the breach, citing the ongoing criminal investigation. In a statement, he said that Citigroup discovered the breach in early May and the problem was “rectified immediately.” He added that the bank had initiated internal fraud alerts and stepped up its account monitoring.

The expertise behind the attack, according to law enforcement officials and security experts, is a sign of what is likely to be a wave of more and more sophisticated breaches by high-tech thieves hungry for credit card numbers and other confidential information.

That is because demand for the data is on the rise. In 2008, the underground market for the data was flooded with more than 360 million stolen personal records, most of them credit and debit files. That compared with 3.8 million records stolen in 2010, according to a report by Verizon and the Secret Service, which investigates credit card fraud along with other law enforcement agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Now, as credit cards that were compromised in the vast 2008 thefts expire, thieves are stepping up efforts to find new accounts.

As a result, prices for basic credit card information could rise to several dollars from their current level of only pennies.

“If you think financially motivated breaches are huge now, just wait another year,” said Bryan Sartin, who conducts forensic investigations for Verizon’s consulting arm.

The kind of information the thieves are able to glean is shared in online forums that are a veritable marketplace for criminals. Networks that three years ago numbered several thousands users have expanded to include tens of thousands of hackers.

“These are online bazaars,” said Pablo Martinez, deputy special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s criminal investigation division. “They are growing exponentially and we have seen the entire process become more professional.”

For example, some hackers specialize in prying out customer names, account numbers and other confidential information, Mr. Martinez said. Brokers then sell that information in the Internet bazaars. Criminals use it to impersonate customers and buy merchandise. Finally, “money mules” wire home the profits through outlets like Western Union or MoneyGram.

“It’s like ‘Mission Impossible’ when they select the teams,” said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor who is now with CSC, an information technology services firm. “And they don’t know each other, except by hacker handle and reputation.”

In the Citi attack, the hackers did not obtain expiration dates or the three-digit security code on the back of the card, which will make it harder for thieves to use the information to commit fraud.

Not every breach results in a crime. But identity theft has ranked first among complaints to the Federal Trade Commission for 11 consecutive years, with 1.34 million in 2010, twice as many as the next category, which is debt collection.

Many of these attacks have their origins in Eastern Europe, including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Romania. In fact, the security expert familiar with the Citi breach said it originated in the region, though he would not specify the country.

In Russia, Xakep.ru, is one of the larger forums for Eastern European hackers today, with nearly 13,300 registered members, according to Cyveillance. HackZone.ru is larger, and has more than 58,000 members. In addition, attacks by Romanian hackers have grown noticeably more advanced recently, according to security experts.

On HackZone, one seller who called himself “zoloto” promised “all cards valid 100%” and that they would be sold only one time.

Underscoring the multinational nature of these rings, American law-enforcement agencies have also been putting more investigators overseas.

“The only way to address a global issue is to address it globally with your partners,” said Gordon M. Snow, assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Cyber Division.

The Secret Service established a presence in Tallinn, Estonia, last month, and has embedded agents with Ukrainian authorities since the beginning of the year. The F.B.I. has embedded agents in the Netherlands, Estonia, Ukraine and Romania, and works closely with its counterparts in Australia, Germany and Britain.

But even officials at these agencies acknowledge that as fast as they move, the hackers’ strategies are evolving at Silicon Valley speed.

“With every takedown, they regroup,” said J. Keith Mularski, a supervisory special agent with the F.B.I.

 

Riva Richmond contributed reporting.

    Thieves Found Citigroup Site an Easy Entry, NYT, 13.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/technology/14security.html

IMF cyber attack aimed to steal insider information: expert

Sun, Jun 12 2011
WASHINGTON/LONDON | Sun Jun 12, 2011
11:16am EDT
By Jim Wolf and William Maclean

WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) - A major cyber attack on the IMF aimed to steal sensitive insider information, a cyber security expert said on Sunday, as the race to lead the body which oversees global financial system heated up.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is helping to investigate the attack on the International Monetary Fund, the latest in a rash of cyber break-ins that have targeted high-profile companies and institutions.

"The IMF attack was clearly designed to infiltrate the IMF with the intention of gaining sensitive 'insider privileged information'," cyber security specialist Mohan Koo, who is also Managing Director, Dtex Systems (UK), told Reuters in London.

A June 8 internal memo from Chief Information Officer Jonathan Palmer told staff the Fund had detected suspicious file transfers and that an investigation had shown a desktop computer "had been compromised and used to access some Fund systems."

"At this point, we have no reason to believe that any personal information was sought for fraud purposes," it said.

The New York Times cited computer experts as saying the IMF's board of directors was told of the attack on Wednesday, though the assault had lasted several months.

The IMF says its remains "fully functional" but has declined to comment on the extent of the attack or the nature of the intruders' goal.

News of the hack came at a sensitive time for the world lender of last resort, which is seeking to replace former managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who quit last month after being charged with the attempted rape of a hotel maid.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde remains the frontrunner to replace him, although Stanley Fischer, the Bank of Israel Governor and a former IMF deputy chief, has emerged as a late candidate, and Mexico's central bank chief, Agustin Carstens, is another contender.

 

EMBOLDENED

Jeff Moss, a self-described computer hacker and member of the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Committee, said he believed the attack was conducted on behalf of a nation-state looking to either steal sensitive information about key IMF strategies or embarrass the organization to undermine its clout.

He said it could inspire attacks on other large institutions. "If they can't catch them, I'm afraid it might embolden others to try," said Moss, who is chief security officer for ICANN.

Tom Kellerman, a cybersecurity expert who has worked for both the IMF and the World Bank, said the intruders had aimed to install software that would give a nation state a "digital insider presence" on the IMF network.

That could yield a trove of non-public economic data used by the Fund to promote exchange rate stability, support balanced international trade and provide resources to remedy members' balance-of-payments crises.

"It was a targeted attack," said Kellerman, who serves on the board of a group known as the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance.

The code used in the IMF incident was developed specifically for the attack on the institution, said Kellerman, formerly responsible for cyber-intelligence within the World Bank's treasury team and now chief technology officer at AirPatrol, a cyber consultancy.

 

"LIFE-THREATENING"

Koo of Dtex Systems (UK) said the recent spate of attacks on large global organizations was worrying because they were targeted, well-organized and well-executed, not opportunistic.

"Perhaps most frightening of all is the fact that these type of attacks could quite easily be directed toward Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) organizations, for example Energy and Water, where the impact of such a breach would have severe, immediate and potentially life-threatening consequences for everyday citizens."

Cyber security experts said it might be difficult for investigators to prove which nation was behind the attack.

"Even developing nations are able to leverage the Internet in order to change their standing and ability to influence," said Jeffrey Carr, author of the book, "Inside Cyber Warfare."

"It's something they never could have done before without gold or without military might," Carr said.

CIA Director Leon Panetta told the U.S. Congress on June 9 that the United States faced the "real possibility" of a crippling cyber attack on power systems, the electricity grid, security, financial and governmental systems.

Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales and the biggest information technology provider to the U.S. government, disclosed two weeks ago that it had thwarted a "significant" cyber attack. It said it had become a "frequent target of adversaries around the world."

Also hit recently have been Citigroup Inc, Sony Corp and Google Inc.

 

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton, Jim Finkle, Jim Wolf, Jim Vicini
and William Maclean in London; Editing by Jon Boyle)

    IMF cyber attack aimed to steal insider information: expert, R, 12.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/12/us-imf-cyberattack-idUSTRE75A20720110612

Internet Piracy and How to Stop It

June 8, 2011
The New York Times


Online piracy is a huge business. A recent study found that Web sites offering pirated digital content or counterfeit goods, like illicit movie downloads or bootleg software, record 53 billion hits per year. That robs the industries that create and sell intellectual products of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The problem is particularly hard to crack because the villains are often in faraway countries. Bad apples can be difficult to pin down in the sea of Web sites, and pirates can evade countervailing measures as easily as tweaking the name of a Web site.

Commendably, the Senate Judiciary Committee is trying to bolster the government’s power to enforce intellectual property protections. Last month, the committee approved the Protect IP Act, which creates new tools to disrupt illegal online commerce.

The bill is not perfect. Its definition of wrongdoing is broad and could be abused by companies seeking to use the law to quickly hinder Web sites. Some proposed remedies could also unintentionally reduce the safety of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden put a hold on the bill over these issues, which, he argued, could infringe on the right to free speech. The legislation is, therefore, in limbo, but it should be fixed, not discarded.

The bill defines infringing Web sites as those that have “no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating” the illegal copying or distribution of copyrighted material in “substantially complete form” — entire movies or songs, not just snippets.

If the offender can’t be found to answer the accusation (a likely occurrence given that most Web sites targeted will be overseas), the government or a private party can seek an injunction from a judge to compel advertising networks and payment systems like MasterCard or PayPal to stop doing business with the site.

The government — but not private parties — can use the injunction to compel Internet service providers to redirect traffic by not translating a Web address into the numerical language that computers understand. And they could force search engines to stop linking to them.

The broadness of the definition is particularly worrisome because private companies are given a right to take action under the bill. In one notorious case, a record label demanded that YouTube take down a home video of a toddler jiggling in the kitchen to a tune by Prince, claiming it violated copyright law. Allowing firms to go after a Web site that “facilitates” intellectual property theft might encourage that kind of overreaching — and allow the government to black out a site.

Some of the remedies are problematic. A group of Internet safety experts cautioned that the procedure to redirect Internet traffic from offending Web sites would mimic what hackers do when they take over a domain. If it occurred on a large enough scale it could impair efforts to enhance the safety of the domain name system.

This kind of blocking is unlikely to be very effective. Users could reach offending Web sites simply by writing the numerical I.P. address in the navigator box, rather than the URL. The Web sites could distribute free plug-ins to translate addresses into numbers automatically.

The bill before the Senate is an important step toward making piracy less profitable. But it shouldn’t pass as is. If protecting intellectual property is important, so is protecting the Internet from overzealous enforcement.

    Internet Piracy and How to Stop It, NYT, 8.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/opinion/09thu1.html

U.S. says worried by cyber-attacks; committed to Asia

SINGAPORE | Sat Jun 4, 2011
4:17am EDT
Reuters
By Raju Gopalakrishnan and David Alexander

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The United States is seriously concerned about cyber-attacks and is prepared to use force against those it considers acts of war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a security meeting in Asia on Saturday.

He also assured Asian allies that the United States would protect sea lanes and maintain a robust military presence in the region despite a severe budget crunch and the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We take the cyber threat very seriously and we see it from a variety of sources, not just one or another country," Gates said at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, an apparent reference to reports that several of the attacks may have originated in China.

"What would constitute an act of war by cyber that would require some kind of response, either in kind or kinetically?" he said.

"We could avoid some serious international tensions in the future if we could establish some rules of the road as early as possible to let people know what kinds of acts are acceptable, what kinds of acts are not and what kinds of acts may in fact be acts of war."

Earlier this week, Google said it had disrupted a campaign aimed at stealing passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including senior U.S. government officials, Chinese activists and journalists.

It was the latest in a series of cyber attacks that have also targeted defense contractor Lockheed Martin and Sony Corp. Google said the latest breach appeared to originate in China but neither the company nor the U.S. government has said the Chinese government was responsible.

But the U.S. State Department has asked Beijing to investigate.

British Defense Secretary Liam Fox said cyber attacks were now regular and in large numbers. "It's....the war of the invisible enemy," he said, adding that it had become a matter of urgency and was firmly on top of the security agenda.

 

CHINA TIES

Gates said it was difficult to identify where the perpetrators of such attacks were based and added that military ties with China were improving.

But he also said the U.S. was preparing weapons systems and capabilities that would allow U.S. forces "to deploy, move and strike over great distances in defense of our allies and vital interests." Although he gave few other details, the plans could worry China, U.S. officials privately said.

Asked whether China wouldn't see the remarks as a concern, a senior U.S. defense official said it was an example of the need for greater military transparency between the two sides.

"Without transparency, we obviously have to do certain things and make certain preparations because it's not quite clear what everybody's intentions are," the official said. "So the more ... clear it is about what China's military investment is aimed at, the more clear it us for us what's going on in the region and what intentions are."

Gates said the United States was committed to its Asian allies although a decade of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan had strained U.S. ground forces and exhausted public patience, while the recession had left Washington with huge budget deficits and looking to cut military spending.

"Irrespective of the tough times the U.S. faces today, or the tough budget choices we confront in the coming years, ... America's interests as a Pacific nation -- as a country that conducts much of its trade in the region -- will endure," he said.

"The United States and Asia will only become more inextricably linked over the course of this century. These realities ... argue strongly for sustaining our commitments to allies while maintaining a robust military engagement and deterrent posture across the Pacific Rim," he said.

 

(Additional reporting by Kevin Lim and Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)

    U.S. says worried by cyber-attacks; committed to Asia, R, 4.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/04/us-singapore-defence-idUSTRE7530O920110604

Congressman Weiner admits online affairs

NEW YORK | Mon Jun 6, 2011
7:49pm EDT
Reuters
By Mark Egan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Representative Anthony Weiner on Monday tearfully admitted having a number of inappropriate relationships with women over the Internet, saying he was deeply ashamed but would not resign.

Weiner, a New York Democrat and leading liberal voice in the House of Representatives who was expected to run for mayor of New York City in 2013, admitted to inappropriate Internet and telephone conversations with six women but said none of them developed into a physical relationship.

"I'm deeply regretting what I have done and I'm not resigning," Weiner, who had been seen as a rising star among Democrats, told a news conference while wiping away tears as he apologized for his actions and for lying in the cover-up.

"I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle," he said of an image sent over Twitter of a man in his underpants, which sparked the scandal more than a week ago.

"Once I realized I had posted it to Twitter, I panicked. I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued to stick to that story, which was a hugely regrettable mistake," he said. "The picture was of me, and I sent it."

Calling his actions "very dumb" and "destructive," he stressed he did not have sex with any of the women.

Weiner is married to Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The couple was married in a ceremony officiated by former President Bill Clinton.

"I love my wife very much and we have no intention of splitting up over this," he said.

Last week, Weiner denied tweeting a photo of a man's bulging boxer briefs to a 21-year-old female student in Washington state, insisting his account had been hacked.

 

FORGET ABOUT MAYOR?

Weiner said his affairs were conducted over several years on Twitter, Facebook, email and by phone with women he met online, primarily on Facebook. He said he sent the women explicit pictures of himself but broke no law, mostly used his home computer and never used his congressional mobile device.

"Certainly he can forget about mayor," said Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs, at Baruch College in New York, adding that while Weiner might weather the storm, he will likely face a tough challenge if he seeks re-election in 2012.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called for an ethics probe "to determine whether any official resources were used or any other violation of House rules occurred." Weiner said in a statement, "I welcome and will fully cooperate with an investigation by the House Ethics Committee."

New York State Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox called for his resignation, saying, "His actions are at best despicable and at worst illegal."

"To further a cover-up he stood by while encouraging others, including Congressional employees, to lie, slander and discredit the professional reputations of those who were telling the truth," Cox said. "His inappropriate behavior has irreparably damaged his ability to serve."

Former Senate Republican aide John Ullyot, a communication consultant at Hill & Knowlton in Washington, said Weiner, "lost a big chance to salvage some dignity by resigning promptly."

"Weiner's handling of this situation is an absolute disaster -- a textbook example of how not to act in a matter involving personal scandal," he said.

"By holding a news conference and answering 30 minutes worth of questions, Weiner opened up many more lines of inquiry than he resolved: the possibility of underage victims, use of office phones, questions of whether his wife was aware ..."

Earlier this year, two other members of Congress, both Republicans, stepped down amid scandal. John Ensign resigned from the Senate amid an ethics committee probe into his extramarital affair with a campaign aide. And Representative Chris Lee resigned after he posted a shirtless and flirty photo of himself online.

On Monday, more pictures of Weiner, this time of him from the waist up sitting at his desk naked, surfaced online.

On Monday he characterized his relationships with the women as "a frivolous thing" and admitted that the affairs were conducted both before and since he was married.

Weiner's denials and eventual admission was evocative of President Bill Clinton who in 1998 admitted to an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky after vigorous denials.

Unlike Clinton, who was accused of being evasive even after admitting his dalliance, Weiner took many questions from the press on Monday, answering them plainly as he choked back his emotions, pausing to sip water on several occasions.

Unusual revelations by politicians in the New York metro area are nothing new. Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after frequenting prostitutes and former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, who was married, tearfully resigned after it was revealed he had a homosexual affair with an aide.

Still Weiner being undone by his own actions while using social media tools such as Twitter which he was successfully using to bolster his personal political brand is certainly a modern twist.

 

(Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta and Richard Chang in New York and by Thomas Ferraro and Donna Smith in Washington, Editing by Eric Walsh)

    Congressman Weiner admits online affairs, R, 6.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/06/us-usa-politics-weiner-idUSTRE7555YA20110606

U.S. weighs security after "serious" Google allegation

WASHINGTON | Thu Jun 2, 2011
2:56pm EDT Thu
Reuters
By Andrew Quinn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington scrambled on Thursday to assess whether security had been compromised after Google Inc revealed a major hacker attack targeting U.S. officials that the Internet giant pegged to China.

"These allegations are very serious," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

"We take them seriously; we're looking into them," Clinton told reporters a day after the Internet giant said it had disrupted a campaign aimed at stealing passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including senior U.S. government officials, Chinese activists and journalists.

Google's announcement fuels debate in Washington over China's intentions in cyberspace, which the United States has identified as a potential flashpoint for future conflict.

Blackberry maker Research In Motion and Microsoft Corp. could get a boost from the Google hacking incident. The companies have been fending off competitive challenges from Google's Android software and cloud computing services, as the corporate sector and the federal government explore whether Google is a secure alternative for email.

Neither Google nor the U.S. government has said the Chinese government was behind the attacks, and the U.S. State Department said it had not raised the issue with Beijing.

Google only said the attack appeared to originate in China.

Beijing nevertheless reacted angrily to Google's charge, saying it was "unacceptable" to blame Beijing and allegations that China supports hacking "have ulterior motives".

Clinton said Google told the State Department before it made its public announcement on Wednesday, and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating, with Google.

The White House said it had no reason to believe official government emails were hacked in the Google incident, and officials at many agencies stressed that government employees were directed not to use private accounts to discuss sensitive issues.

"Rule number one is: don't do anything stupid," one national security official said.

Some agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, block employees from accessing personal accounts from work. But there is no blanket ban and other agencies do allow it.

"Those of us who do run private accounts are very, very mindful of the security issues," Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead told Reuters.

Still, the government will check whether senior officials' private accounts were targeted, said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"There is a lot of awareness that whether it's a hostile intelligence service or others who may want to access this," the official said.

 

DUELING IN CYBERSPACE

Google's latest salvo looked likely to bring Internet policy to the foreground in the U.S-China relationship, where Washington and Beijing have staked out sharply contrasting approaches to censorship, freedom of speech and cybersecurity.

The United States was drawn in last year when Google temporarily shut its Chinese-language portal over censorship concerns and a cyber attack it said was traced to China. Clinton also has accused Beijing of facing a "dictator's dilemma" as it seeks to control technologies that are fueling growth and free speech around the world.

The dispute over the Internet has at times amplified existing strains in the U.S.-China relationship on everything from human rights and trade to intellectual property rights.

The United States has warned that a devastating cyberattack could result in real-world military retaliation, although analysts say it could be difficult to detect its origin with full accuracy.

The White House and the State Department have appointed officials to oversee cybersecurity issues. The Pentagon probably has the most developed strategy in the U.S. government, with a Cyber Command and thousands of people in different divisions of the military dedicated to matters of cybersecurity and cyberwafare.

The State Department's cyber coordinator, Christopher Painter, called cyber security a diplomatic priority for the United States as it seeks to defend itself from threats ranging from freelance hackers to militants to potential rival states.

"The most important thing is to build international consensus....It's not just China that we need to engage with. It is an important part of our agenda with every country," Painter told Reuters on the sidelines of a London conference.

 

(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed, Phil Stewart, Mark Hosenball, Sarah Lynch and Andrea Shalal-Esa in Washington and Peter Apps in London; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

    U.S. weighs security after "serious" Google allegation, R, 2.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/us-google-clinton-idUSTRE75140720110602

Google Says Hackers in China Stole Gmail Passwords

June 1, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA

SAN FRANCISCO — Google said Wednesday that hundreds of users of Gmail, its e-mail service, had been the targets of clandestine attacks apparently originating in China that were aimed at stealing their passwords and monitoring their e-mail.

In a blog post, the company said the victims included senior government officials in the United States, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, military personnel and journalists.

It is the second time Google has pointed to an area of China as the source of an Internet intrusion. Its latest announcement is likely to further ratchet up the tension between the company and Chinese authorities.

Last year, Google said it had traced a sophisticated invasion of its computer systems to people based in China. The accusation led to a rupture of the company’s relationship with China and a decision by Google not to cooperate with China’s censorship demands. As a result, Google decided to base its Chinese search engine in Hong Kong.

The more recent attacks were not as technically advanced, relying on a common technique known as phishing to trick users into handing over their passwords. But Google’s announcement was unusual in that it put a spotlight on the scale, apparent origins and carefully selected targets of a coordinated campaign to hijack e-mail accounts.

Google said that once the intruders had logged into the accounts, they could change settings for mail forwarding so that copies of messages would be sent to another address. The company said it had “disrupted” the campaign and had notified the victims as well as government agencies. Executives at Google declined to comment beyond the blog post. The company recommended that Gmail users take additional security steps, like using a Google service known as two-step verification, to make it more difficult to compromise their e-mail accounts. But it emphasized that the password thefts were not the result of a general security problem with Gmail.

Google acknowledged that it had been alerted to the problem in part by Mila Parkour, a security researcher in Washington who posted evidence of a type of phishing attack on her blog in February. She documented examples of what has recently been described as a “man-in-the-mailbox” attack, in which the intruder uses the account of one victim and his e-mail contacts to gain the trust of a new victim.

Ms. Parkour wrote that the method used in this attack “is far from being new or sophisticated,” but that she was posting information about it because of “the particularly invasive approach of the attack.”

She highlighted a fake document titled “Draft US-China Joint Statement” that was circulated among people with e-mail accounts at the State Department, the Defense Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency and Gmail. Clicking to download the document directed users instead to a fake Gmail log-in page that captured their passwords.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the White House was looking into the matter.

“We have no reason to believe that any official U.S. government e-mail accounts were accessed,” Ms. Hayden said in an e-mail.

Google said the attacks apparently originated in Jinan, a provincial capital in eastern China. The city is a regional command center for the Chinese military, one of seven in the country. It is also home to the Lanxiang Vocational School, which was founded with military support. Last year, investigators looking into the attack on Google’s systems said they had traced some of the hacking activity back to the school.

At the time, government and school officials strongly denied any connection with the attack, and China’s foreign ministry said linking the Chinese authorities to such attacks was “baseless, highly irresponsible and hype with ulterior motives.”

That earlier attack appeared to be aimed at gathering information on human rights activists who were involved in political campaigns aimed at China. It was part of a wave of attacks that hit a range of American companies beginning in mid-2009 and that was first publicly disclosed by Google in January 2010.

Chinese government media officials were not immediately available to comment on Google’s latest announcement.

Rafal Rohozinski, a network security specialist at the SecDev Group in Ottawa, said it was impossible to lay blame for the campaign on the Chinese government with any certainty. Because of the borderless nature of the Internet, it is easy for intruders to connect through a series of countries to mask their identities. “The fact that someone is harvesting Gmail credentials is not surprising,” Mr. Rohozinski said.

This year, the Chinese government has stepped up its controls over the Internet within the country, with increased scrutiny of news and blog sites, particularly in the wake of political upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East.

The government has also apparently crippled some virtual private network services, or VPNs, which have been used by Chinese and expatriates to gain access to corporate e-mail or get around controls that block many Web sites from being entered in China, like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Security specialists said the Google warning to users was an indication that efforts to place the responsibility for Internet security on individuals was failing.

“I think this is impossible to solve by going to one user at a time and trying to teach them how to behave on the Internet,” said Nir Zuk, founder and chief technology officer of Palo Alto Networks. “It doesn’t matter how much education you put into it — you will always have end users that will make a mistake.”

John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 2, 2011

An earlier version of this article

misspelled the surname of the founder

and chief technology officer of Palo Alto Networks.

He is Nir Zuk, not Nir Zuck.

    Google Says Hackers in China Stole Gmail Passwords, NYT, 1.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/technology/02google.html

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