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Geeks Meet at 'What the Hack' Conference - Yahoo! News
By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER, Associated Press Writer Thu Jul 28,10:37 PM ET
LIEMPDE, Netherlands - There are hundreds of tents on the hot and soggy campground, but this isn't your ordinary summertime outing, considering that it includes workshops with such titles as "Politics of Psychedelic Research" or "Fun and Mayhem with RFID."
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This is the three-day "What The Hack" convention, a self-styled computer-security conference dealing such issues as digital passports, biometrics and cryptography.
Borrowing heavily from Woodstock and the more professionalized Def Con conference that begins Friday in Las Vegas, the event held every four years in the Netherlands draws an international array of experts and geeks. About 3,000 gathered Thursday for the opening.
Unlike better-known and better-funded industry meetings, "What the Hack" had to fight for its right to exist. The mayor of the southern Dutch town of Boxtel, who oversees the village of Liempde where the convention is held, initially tried to stop the event from pitching its hundreds of tents outside his town — a reluctance stemming from the lingering public image of hackers as asocial, anarchistic and vaguely menacing.
The mayor withdrew his objections after meetings with organizers.
Some of the scheduled lectures and workshops might reinforce the convention's shady reputation, such as the talk about mayhem with RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification tags.
But other seminars appeared wholesome enough, such as the workshop on how to make homes more energy efficient or how activists can lobby governments more effectively.
Even the local police officers assigned to monitor "What the Hack" are being included in the event. Officers are holding daily workshops to educate the public about how they go about securing events like these. Such cooperation with authorities would have raised eyebrows in previous years.
Befitting the age of terrorism, the conference is taking up such security issues as biometrics and new passport technology.
But in line with its anarchic reputation, organizers have made a parody of their own security arrangements, asking attendees to screen their own belongings at an unmanned baggage scanner. Rubber gloves for a "do-it-yourself body cavity search" are provided free of charge.
Overall, the atmosphere resembles that of a music festival, with orderly people waiting in line to buy Jolt colas and vegetarian meals. Children and hammocks are as prevalent as ponytails and laptops, and a curiously popular hangout is the Slacker Salon, a computer-free zone where frenetic Web surfing is taboo.
The relaxed setting is a conscious choice, according to Internet entrepreneur Rop Gonggrijp, who in 1989 helped organize the seminal Galactic Hacker Party, an open-air convention that formed the template for What The Hack.
"The idea was to break the stereotype" of hackers as sun-averse malcontents bent on vandalism, he said. "They've never been part of this community. And now there's fortunately space in the media for more than one kind of hacker."
Rutgers University anthropologist Biella Coleman said events like these serve a critical function for the many communities of people who are acquainted online, but rarely get the chance to meet in the real world.
"Virtuality needs sociality," she said.
Klaartje Bruyn, for example, is a sign-maker by day, but came to What the Hack for social, rather than professional reasons. Electronically arranging meetings with friends both real and virtual from the comfort of her hammock, she lauded how the festival could bring together so many far-flung yet like-minded people.
"It's like a blind date with 3,000 people," she said.
July 31, 2005 at 12:27 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (52) | Top of page | Blog Home
Fifteen arrested in multinational 'phishing' scam - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
MADRID (AFP) - Argentine authorities have detained 15 people, including a Spanish national, in connection with a multi-million euro (dollar) online banking fraud, the Spanish interior ministry said.
The Spaniard was one of 15 people arrested amid allegations of "phishing", or making illegal use of online account holders' details, following a police operation in the Spanish cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Palencia and Valencia and Santa Fe in Argentina, the ministry said.
The 23-year-old Spaniard, an information technology expert nicknamed "Tasmania", was already the subject of 14 arrest warrants.
The other suspects hail from Argentina, Italy and Romania, the ministry said, adding that house to house searches had turned up a wealth of information related to the case, covering some 150 bank accounts.
The suspects allegedly infected victims' computers with so-called Trojan viruses and worms to access account information using servers as far apart as Argentina, Canada, Russia and Thailand, according to investigators.
A computer worm, unlike a virus, does not have to travel through e-mail but can spread by itself to any unprotected computer linked to the Internet.
July 31, 2005 at 12:25 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
Hackers Tinker With Microsoft Program - Yahoo! News
Fri Jul 29, 9:12 PM ET
SEATTLE - Days after Microsoft Corp. launched a new anti-piracy program, hackers have found a way to get around it. The software company's new program, called Windows Genuine Advantage, requires computer users to go through a process validating that they're running a legitimate copy of the Windows operating system before downloading any software updates except for security patches.
But the check can be bypassed by entering a simple JavaScript command in the Web browser's address bar and hitting the "Enter" key. When that's done, the validation does not run and the user is taken directly to the download.
Microsoft said it was investigating and that the glitch was not a security vulnerability.
The hack appears only to work when a computer user is trying to download software through the Windows Update service. Some software, such as Microsoft's AntiSpyware beta, isn't available there but can be found elsewhere on microsoft.com.
Such downloads also require validation, but the hack does not appear to work. On Friday, attempts to download the antispyware program resulted in a server error, with a message that read, "It appears that our activation servers are not functioning properly."
All Windows users, even those with pirated copies, can still download security patches. For any other software updates, Microsoft now requires computer users to validate that their computers aren't running counterfeit copies of Windows.
___
On the Net:
Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/about.mspx
July 30, 2005 at 09:44 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
Former IBM researcher to head Yahoo Research - Yahoo! News
Thu Jul 28, 3:52 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web media company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) said on Thursday it named Prabhakar Raghavan, a former IBM researcher, to head Yahoo Research as it competes with rivals Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) for talent.
Raghavan will lead research in key areas for Yahoo, including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility, the company said in a statement.
Prior to joining Yahoo, Raghavan was senior vice president and chief technology officer at Verity Inc. (Nasdaq:VRTY - news), a provider of enterprise search software. He is also the former head of the Computer Science Principles department at IBM's(NYSE:IBM - news) Almaden Research Center.
Yahoo Research has facilities in the California cities of Berkeley, Pasadena and Sunnyvale.
July 30, 2005 at 09:39 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
PluggedIn:Wireless wallets come closer to reality - Yahoo! News
By Sinead Carew Fri Jul 29, 2:59 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Imagine being able to pay for a song on the jukebox, buy a bag of groceries or gain admission to a sports arena by simply waving your phone by a machine.
With consumers in Asia and Europe already using their mobile phones to pay for soda and parking fees, the long discussed concept of the wireless wallet could be slowly creeping closer to reality in the United States.
In countries such as Sweden, Ireland and the United Kingdom drivers can avoid putting coins in a parking meter by simply sending a text message on their mobile phone.
About two million customers of Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc (9437.T) can already use mobile phones with built-in debit cards to pay about 20,000 merchants such as restaurants and supermarkets.
DoCoMo, which U.S. telephone carriers often look to for inspiration for new services, also plans for customers to use their phones in place of train tickets. It also invested in a credit card company as part of its bet on mobile commerce.
U.S. companies have been quiet about mobile commerce since hype about wireless wallets was deflated when the dot.com bubble burst in 2000. Many are still skeptical, but some are warming to the idea again amid U.S. and overseas developments.
"The (mobile commerce) discussion has more validity now. The technology and the business models are evolving," said Chris Bierbaum a business development executive at Sprint (NYSE:FON - news), the No. 3 U.S. operator.
The popularity of music ringtones is one sign consumers are ready to use phones for buying more than calls. Music labels now see wireless as a key market after U.S. consumers spent $223 million on ringtones in 2004 according to Yankee Group.
And as phones -- being built with everything from video players to cameras -- add even more features, soon the music industry may not be alone in seeing wireless as a lucrative alternative market to sell their products.
"You will continue to see more and more industries come to that conclusion," said Peter Ritcher chief financial officer of Cingular Wireless, the No. 1 U.S. mobile service.
Purveyors of everything from fast food to movie tickets may be next to jump on the wireless bandwagon by way of so-called contactless payment cards that can be waved at a sensor rather than swiped through a sales terminal, one executive said.
These cards are issued by U.S. bank J.P. Morgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM - news) and Randy Vandebwong1rhoff, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance said multiple banks plan tests this year.McDonald's Corp (NYSE:MCD - news) is expect to support the cards and convenience store 7-Eleven Inc. (NYSE:SE - news) plans to accept them in all its 5,300 U.S. stores by early 2006.
Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - news), the world's second biggest phone maker, is doing tests with MasterCard and it expects its phones to support credit card payments in 2006.
Sprint's Bierbaum believes that once contactless payment cards are popular it will make sense to put them in phones.
"Once they've changed the habit to waving their credit card past a reader instead of swiping it, you'll see the migration to wireless," he said. Wallet phones could help client loyalty by giving consumers a reason to keep phones longer, he said.
Along with Philips (PHG.AS) and other companies Motorola is also working on a technology that would have consumers waving their phones at posters or ads to read a Web address, where the user could then buy the goods advertised on the poster.
Some analysts question whether this technology, known as near field communications, will catch on as it requires an extra chip in phones and widespread acceptance by advertisers.
In the meantime Sprint customers can buy goods by logging onto the Web on their phones. Sprint plans to offer to keep customer credit card details in a safe place on its network to make these transactions more convenient.
Yankee analyst Adam Zawel forecast mobile commerce transactions worth over $1.2 billion in Europe in 2009, up from $243 million in 2004 while transactions in Asia will increase to $1.7 billion in 2009 up from $370 million in 2004.
He is not yet convinced mobile commerce will take off in the United States but he said it could appeal to organizations including Major League Baseball, which looks to new technologies for quicker ways to get fans into baseball parks.
"If it gets to the point where it's easier to pull out our phone than to pull out cash to pay then consumers will do it," Zawell said.
July 30, 2005 at 09:01 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
Elderly Americans lose millions to Internet scams - Yahoo! News
hu Jul 28,10:09 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scams involving Internet auctions, as well as identity theft, lotteries, prizes and sweepstakes, top the list of fraud complaints by older Americans, who lost $152 million to con artists last year, U.S. officials told a Senate panel on Wednesday.
Internet-based scams are growing and now account for about 41 percent of fraud complaints the Federal Trade Commission receives from people over 50, Lois Greisman of the FTC's consumer protection division told the Senate Committee on Aging.
"This figure is all the more dramatic when one considers that Internet-related fraud represented only 33 percent of all fraud complaints from this age group in 2002," she said.
Older consumers reported being defrauded of more than $43 million last year through Internet scams, with on-line auctions topping the complaint list, she said.
But more old-fashioned scams continue to take their toll. Lottery and sweepstakes frauds, in which victims are asked to pay "taxes" or other fees to claim prizes, cost older Americans $35 million last year, Greisman said. People over 70 are particular targets of that kind of scam, she added.
Another popular scam involves fake credit card protection or discount drug services, she said. Others involve scam artists saying they need bank account information for
Social Security or Medicare benefits.
"What is most disturbing is that these scams routinely top the FTC's annual list of consumer frauds in the nation," said Sen. Gordon Smith (news, bio, voting record), an Oregon Republican who chairs the Senate Aging Committee. "It seems that even though we are aware of their use, scam artists remain successful in pitching old scams to new victims, perpetuating a cycle of victimization."
Anthony Pratkanis, a psychology professor at the University of California who has been on a team of researchers examining elderly fraud, said con artists steal using the weapon of "social influence" to create a sense of trust rather than a gun or knife.
Research shows that not just the "frail and lonely" fall victim to scams, he said. Active people who are leaders in their communities can also fall prey.
"We find that con criminals profile their victims' psychological and other characteristics to find their Achilles' heel ... to construct the exact pitch that is likely to be most effective," he said.
In one example, con artists told a potential victim that to ask questions or hang up the phone while they were trying to verify account information was against the law.
Pratkanis said his research group was developing tools to help the elderly defend themselves against fraudulent pitches.
U.S. Postal Service inspector Zane Hill said scam artists know that many elderly people feel isolated and a telephone call from anyone is welcomed.
"Experienced con artists understand elderly citizens' vulnerabilities and know what buttons to push when they have them on the telephone," he said. ((CONGRESS-SCAMS, editing by Americas Desk; Washington Newsroom, 202 898 8300)
July 30, 2005 at 08:36 PM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home
Microsoft sees growth with premium Office, Windows - Yahoo! News
By Duncan Martell Fri Jul 29, 1:00 AM ET
REDMOND, Wash. (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. aims to boost growth and win market share by introducing premium versions of its flagship Office and Windows products for high-end corporate use, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Thursday.
Ballmer, who is into his fifth year as CEO, also told Microsoft's annual analysts' meeting that the world's largest software maker was gunning to take a bigger share of tech sector profits from its closest technology peers.
"I am very bullish about our prospects for growth," Ballmer said at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters.
"I believe in it, I think, more than you do," he said.
Despite buying back more than $8 billion worth of its own stock in its last fiscal year, Microsoft has seen its share price fall more than 10 percent in the past 12 months. The stock ended trade on the
New York Stock Exchange on Thursday at $25.75.
Microsoft also aims to gain even more market share, particularly in the lucrative market for networked server computers, this year, Ballmer said.
"We have plans in the next generation for something even higher-end in Office that we call Office Premium," Ballmer said, adding that Microsoft was also working on a premium version of its Windows product.
Microsoft is betting that the next version, Windows Vista -- formerly code-named Longhorn -- will drive a new wave of personal computer upgrades once it is launched in the second half of 2006.
Microsoft is also working on a new version of Office, currently code-named "Office 12" that will launch in same time frame.
The premium editions of the upgrades would be joined by other editions for home users, Tablet PCs and Media Center entertainment PCs.
Out of a group of 25 tech peers, including International Business Machines Corp., Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), Intel Corp. and Dell Inc., Ballmer said Microsoft captured 23 percent of combined operating profits for the group of companies in the latest fiscal year, up from 18 percent in the prior period.
"I hope we'll continue to grow our share, because of the breadth of investment that we are making in research and development," Ballmer said. "We certainly believe in our opportunity, relative to the growth in that overall pie."
Microsoft, which is expecting PC market growth of between 7 and 8 percent next year, will also be increasing prices for its premium edition products as it seeks to boost revenue and growth.
"With Windows we'll also be adding some richness in the increased price area," Gates said.
Ballmer added that Microsoft will continue to compete aggressively in the Internet services and online search marketplace, where it competes with Yahoo, the most-visited Web site, and Web search leader Google.
"If you get nothing else out of the whole day today, we are very, very, very serious and committed about driving our presence with that community, versus any and all competitors in the marketplace," Ballmer told analysts. "It is a job-one priority for our company, this transformation to services and the competition that it brings with Yahoo and Google and everybody else."
July 30, 2005 at 08:34 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home
Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Pew Internet: Teens and Technology
7/27/2005 | MemoReport | Amanda Lenhart, Mary Madden, Paul Hitlin
Today’s American teens live in a world enveloped by communications technologies; the internet and cell phones have become a central force that fuels the rhythm of daily life.
The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. Compared to four years ago, teens’ use of the internet has intensified and broadened as they log on more often and do more things when they are online.
Among other things, there has been significant growth over the past four years in the number of teens who play games on the internet, get news, shop online, and get health information.
Not only has the number of users increased, but also the variety of technologies that teens use to support their communication, research, and entertainment desires has grown.
These technologies enable a variety of methods and channels by which youth can communicate with one another as well as with their parents and other authorities. Email, once the cutting edge “killer app,” is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging (IM) and text messaging as ways to connect with their friends.
In focus groups, teens described their new environment. To them, email is increasingly seen as a tool for communicating with “adults” such as teachers, institutions like schools, and as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information to large groups. Meanwhile, IM is used for everyday conversations with multiple friends that range from casual to more serious and private exchanges.
It is also used as a place of personal expression. Through buddy icons or other customization of the look and feel of IM communications, teens can express and differentiate themselves. Other instant messaging tools allow for the posting of personal profiles, or even “away” messages, durable signals posted when a user is away from the computer but wishes to remain connected to their IM network.
July 30, 2005 at 01:16 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home
Wired 13.08: The Birth of Google
Larry thought Sergey was arrogant. Sergey thought Larry was obnoxious. But their obsession with backlinks just might be the start of something big.
By John Battelle
It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin's group.
It was hardly love at first sight. Walking up and down the city's hills that day, the two clashed incessantly, debating, among other things, the value of various approaches to urban planning. "Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people," Page recalls, contrasting that quality with his own reticence. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."
"We both found each other obnoxious," Brin counters when I tell him of Page's response. "But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going." Page and Brin may have clashed, but they were clearly drawn together - two swords sharpening one another.
When Page showed up at Stanford a few months later, he selected human-computer interaction pioneer Terry Winograd as his adviser. Soon thereafter he began searching for a topic for his doctoral thesis. It was an important decision. As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one's entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.
Page didn't start out looking for a better way to search the Web. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. "Computer scientists love graphs," Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.
Citations and Back Rubs
It proved a productive course of study. Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it. This bothered Page. He thought it would be very useful to know who was linking to whom.
Why? To fully understand the answer to that question, a minor detour into the world of academic publishing is in order. For professors - particularly those in the hard sciences like mathematics and chemistry - nothing is as important as getting published. Except, perhaps, being cited.
Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author's argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there's even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.
Fair enough. So what's the point? Well, it was Tim Berners-Lee's desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin's attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee's World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation - the practice of pointing to other people's work in order to build up your own.
Which brings us back to the original research Page did on such backlinks, a project he came to call BackRub.
He reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it "the Web would become a more valuable place."
At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."
The Audacity of Rank
In March 1996, Page pointed his crawler at just one page - his homepage at Stanford - and let it loose. The crawler worked outward from there.
Crawling the entire Web to discover the sum of its links is a major undertaking, but simple crawling was not where BackRub's true innovation lay. Page was naturally aware of the concept of ranking in academic publishing, and he theorized that the structure of the Web's graph would reveal not just who was linking to whom, but more critically, the importance of who linked to whom, based on various attributes of the site that was doing the linking. Inspired by citation analysis, Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page's rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge - you not only have to count a particular page's links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. The math gets complicated rather quickly.
Fortunately, Page was now working with Brin, whose prodigious gifts in mathematics could be applied to the problem. Brin, the Russian-born son of a NASA scientist and a University of Maryland math professor, emigrated to the US with his family at the age of 6. By the time he was a middle schooler, Brin was a recognized math prodigy. He left high school a year early to go to UM. When he graduated, he immediately enrolled at Stanford, where his talents allowed him to goof off. The weather was so good, he told me, that he loaded up on nonacademic classes - sailing, swimming, scuba diving. He focused his intellectual energies on interesting projects rather than actual course work.
Together, Page and Brin created a ranking system that rewarded links that came from sources that were important and penalized those that did not. For example, many sites link to IBM.com. Those links might range from a business partner in the technology industry to a teenage programmer in suburban Illinois who just got a ThinkPad for Christmas. To a human observer, the business partner is a more important link in terms of IBM's place in the world. But how might an algorithm understand that fact?
Page and Brin's breakthrough was to create an algorithm - dubbed PageRank after Page - that manages to take into account both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of the linking sites. This mirrored the rough approach of academic citation-counting. It worked. In the example above, let's assume that only a few sites linked to the teenager's site. Let's further assume the sites that link to the teenager's are similarly bereft of links. By contrast, thousands of sites link to Intel, and those sites, on average, also have thousands of sites linking to them. PageRank would rank the teen's site as less important than Intel's - at least in relation to IBM.
This is a simplified view, to be sure, and Page and Brin had to correct for any number of mathematical culs-de-sac, but the long and the short of it was this: More popular sites rose to the top of their annotation list, and less popular sites fell toward the bottom.
As they fiddled with the results, Brin and Page realized their data might have implications for Internet search. In fact, the idea of applying BackRub's ranked page results to search was so natural that it didn't even occur to them that they had made the leap. As it was, BackRub already worked like a search engine - you gave it a URL, and it gave you a list of backlinks ranked by importance. "We realized that we had a querying tool," Page recalls. "It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages."
Page and Brin noticed that BackRub's results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. "They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal," Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines - which ranked mostly on keywords - that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big.
Not only was the engine good, but Page and Brin realized it would scale as the Web scaled. Because PageRank worked by analyzing links, the bigger the Web, the better the engine. That fact inspired the founders to name their new engine Google, after googol, the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes. They released the first version of Google on the Stanford Web site in August 1996 - one year after they met.
Among a small set of Stanford insiders, Google was a hit. Energized, Brin and Page began improving the service, adding full-text search and more and more pages to the index. They quickly discovered that search engines require an extraordinary amount of computing resources. They didn't have the money to buy new computers, so they begged and borrowed Google into existence - a hard drive from the network lab, an idle CPU from the computer science loading docks. Using Page's dorm room as a machine lab, they fashioned a computational Frankenstein from spare parts, then jacked the whole thing into Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, they converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center.
The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection.
"We're lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford," Page recalls. "They didn't hassle us too much about the resources we were using."
A Company Emerges
As Brin and Page continued experimenting, BackRub and its Google implementation were generating buzz, both on the Stanford campus and within the cloistered world of academic Web research.
One person who had heard of Page and Brin's work was Cornell professor Jon Kleinberg, then researching bibliometrics and search technologies at IBM's Almaden center in San Jose. Kleinberg's hubs-and-authorities approach to ranking the Web is perhaps the second-most-famous approach to search after PageRank. In the summer of 1997, Kleinberg visited Page at Stanford to compare notes. Kleinberg had completed an early draft of his seminal paper, "Authoritative Sources," and Page showed him an early working version of Google. Kleinberg encouraged Page to publish an academic paper on PageRank.
Page told Kleinberg that he was wary of publishing. The reason? "He was concerned that someone might steal his ideas, and with PageRank, Page felt like he had the secret formula," Kleinberg told me. (Page and Brin eventually did publish.)
On the other hand, Page and Brin weren't sure they wanted to go through the travails of starting and running a company. During Page's first year at Stanford, his father died, and friends recall that Page viewed finishing his PhD as something of a tribute to him. Given his own academic upbringing, Brin, too, was reluctant to leave the program.
Brin remembers speaking with his adviser, who told him, "Look, if this Google thing pans out, then great. If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis." He chuckles, then adds: "I said, 'Yeah, OK, why not? I'll just give it a try.'"
From The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, copyright © by John Battelle, to be published in September by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Battelle (battellemedia.com) was one of the founders of Wired.
July 28, 2005 at 12:01 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (31) | Top of page | Blog Home
E-mail is for older people, teens say in survey - Yahoo! News
Wed Jul 27, 7:16 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - E-mail is for grown-ups and U.S. teenagers now prefer instant messaging to communicate with each other online, according to a survey released on Wednesday.
Internet users from 12 to 17 years old say e-mail is best for talking to parents or institutions, but they are more likely to fire up IM when talking with each other, the nonprofit Pew Internet and American Life Project found.
E-mail is still used by 90 percent of online teens. But the survey found greater enthusiasm for instant messaging.
Three-quarters of teen Internet users use instant messaging, compared with 42 percent of adults, Pew said. Nearly half of teens said they exchanged IMs daily, and some said they spent more than two hours each day using instant-messenger programs.
Half or nearly half of the 1,100 teenagers surveyed said they used IM to send Web links or photos to each other, while nearly one-third said they had sent music or video clips over IM. Adults were much less likely to do any of those things, the survey found.
Nearly nine out of 10 teenagers say they use the Internet, up from 74 percent in 2000. Those are who still not online are likely to be so poor that they have limited access to technology, the survey found, and are disproportionately black.
The survey, conducted in October and November 2004, has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
July 27, 2005 at 10:51 PM in email | Permalink | TrackBack (39) | Top of page | Blog Home
Motorola to add Yahoo Web services to mobile - Yahoo! News
Tue Jul 26, 2:20 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - news) will put Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) Web services such as search, instant messaging, e-mail and news on its handheld products in a new alliance to take advantage of increasingly powerful mobile devices, the companies said on Tuesday.
Yahoo's services will be available on Motorola's phones, broadband-enabled products for the home and its upcoming iRadio device, which will allow users to play Internet radio stations and their own digital music.
The companies expect products resulting from the deal to be available to consumers in major markets starting next year, although they are still finalizing details.
The deal is Yahoo's first with Motorola, which is best known as the No. 2 wireless phone maker, but also makes cable television set-top boxes and routers for home broadband.
The pact, one of Yahoo's most important with a device maker, is part of the company's ongoing work to extend its services beyond the personal computer to mobile customers and into homes, said Marco Boerries, senior vice president of Yahoo's Connected Life business unit.
This is Motorola's first large deal with an Internet company like Yahoo, operator of the Web's most-visited site.
Among other things, the agreement aims to have Motorola preinstall Yahoo's services on mobile handsets so carriers and consumers have no need to download or add the services later.
Shares of Yahoo were up 28 cents at $34.13 in early afternoon Nasdaq trade, while Motorola was up 2 cents at $20.56 on the
New York Stock Exchange.
July 27, 2005 at 10:49 PM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home
Face value | Chief humanising officer | Economist.com
Feb 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Richard Scoble
Richard Scoble
Does Robert Scoble, a celebrity blogger on Microsoft's payroll, herald the death of traditional public relations?
ROBERT SCOBLE, known in the blogosphere as “the Scobleizer”, is a phenomenon not just because he has had an unusually strange career of late, but because his example might mark the beginning of the end of “corporate communications” as we know it. Mr Scoble is, first, a blogger—ie, somebody who keeps an online journal (called a “web log” or “blog”) to which he posts thoughts and web links several times a day. But Mr Scoble is also an employee of Microsoft, the world's largest software company, where he holds the official title of “technical evangelist”. Those two roles are intertwined. It was his blogging prowess that led to his job, and much of the job consists of blogging.
Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note.
Mr Scoble started blogging four years ago. At the time, he worked for NEC, a Japanese technology company, and was based in Silicon Valley, a place rife with loathing for Microsoft. Mr Scoble's area of expertise was tablet PCs—laptop computers that allow users to handwrite their notes, and that have been mostly a dud, both then and now. But Mr Scoble used his blog to converse with NEC's customers, giving tech support and listening to feedback, with such disarming honesty that his blog became a must-read for gadget lovers.
This caught the attention of Lenn Pryor, who is—really—Microsoft's “director of platform evangelism”. Until then, says Mr Pryor, Microsoft had been evangelising mostly one-on-one, “which doesn't scale well”. But Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade”. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly. He realised that Microsoft, the target of similarly irrational fears, should have its own version of channel nine, and that public blogging by insiders should be an important part of it.
Mr Pryor figured that the straight-talking Mr Scoble would make a reassuring pilot or “a great evangelist”. So he hired him. Mr Scoble, for his part, simply kept doing what he was good at. His blog—which he has kept outside of Microsoft's computers, and to which he usually posts in the wee hours after midnight—reads like a stream of consciousness. A reader might discover, for instance, that Mr Scoble's new wife just became an American citizen, or how to win a cheese contest. “A good blog lets you see the mess; lets you see behind the scenes,” he writes in one entry.
But Mr Scoble is at his best when he opines ruthlessly on Microsoft's technology. When Google or Apple or anybody else makes a better product, he blogs it. “I've been pretty harsh on Microsoft over the years,” he says. This gives him credibility, and thus power. If somebody somewhere takes a swipe at Microsoft that is unfair, Mr Scoble can cry foul and actually have his readers concede the point.
Inspired in part by Mr Scoble's success, executives at other companies—so far, mostly in tech—are starting their own blogs. Most daringly, Jonathan Schwartz, number two at Sun Microsystems, a large computer-maker, has blogged his thoughts about possible mergers in his industry, and thrown punches at Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other rivals. Bruce Lowry, PR boss at Novell, another software firm, also wants to get his executives blogging. Boring old press releases—where everybody is constantly resigning “to spend more time with the family” and what not—are totally ill-suited for responding to most PR issues, such as rumours or independent commentary, he says. He can imagine blogs completely replacing press releases within ten years.
As easy as falling off a blog
Mr Scoble himself is careful to make no such sweeping predictions. He thinks that there will always be a place for traditional PR, with its centrally controlled corporate message, alongside the spontaneous cacophony of blogs. Microsoft's official PR boss will not even comment at all on the subject. Sun's Mr Schwartz is also circumspect. “It's not the end of PR but the end of the old PR department,” he says. “The clarifying force will be credibility and reputation.” The truth is, nobody yet knows how corporate blogging will evolve.
This caveat is especially important because it is probably “only a matter of time” before a serious blogging embarrassment leads to litigation, says Joseph Grundfest, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission. As with e-mail, but perhaps more so, “people blogging get taken in by the immediacy and the hotness of the medium and say things they later regret,” he says. This fear is now prompting internal compliance lawyers to cast an eye on their firm's bloggers.
This suggests another possible development. Will corporate bloggers start to get tongue-tied and sound just like tedious press releases? Mr Scoble, for his part, hates the question but concedes that, theoretically, Microsoft's corporate view and his own could come into severe conflict, and it is not clear what would happen then. Will he criticise only the small things, but toe the line on the big issues? As his page views, fame and influence increase, it might become increasingly difficult for him not to feel self-conscious, and to resist the deadening effect that this can have on any writer's prose.
July 26, 2005 at 02:31 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
Lost a BlackBerry? Data Could Open A Security Breach - Yahoo! News
By Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post Staff Writer Mon Jul 25, 1:00 AM ET
The ability to carry vast amounts of data in small but easily misplaced items such as computer memory sticks and mobile e-mail devices has transformed the way Americans work, but it has also increased the risk that a forgotten BlackBerry or lost cell phone could amount to a major security breach.
Worried that sensitive information could ride off in the back of a taxicab or be left in a hotel room, companies are peeling back some of the convenience of mobile devices in favor of extra layers of password protection and other restrictions. Some are installing software on their networks to make it impossible to download corporate information to a portable device or a memory stick, which is a plug-in device that holds data for use on other computers. Wireless providers are developing weapons to use against their own products, like digital "neutron bombs" that can wipe out information from long distance so one misplaced device doesn't translate into corporate disaster.
It's a nightmare that individuals and corporations fret about when their mobile e-mail or handheld devices go missing or fall into the wrong hands. With the swift stroke of a keypad, someone's e-mail, corporate data and business contacts can be laid bare for others to see -- and potentially abuse.
Personal devices "are carrying incredibly sensitive information," said Joel Yarmon, who, as technology director for the staff of Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record) (R-Alaska), had to scramble over a weekend last month after a colleague lost one of the office's wireless messaging devices. In this case, the data included "personal phone numbers of leaders of Congress. . . . If that were to leak, that would be very embarrassing," Yarmon said.
A couple of years ago, David Yach and all other workers at his Canadian company woke up to an e-mail full of expletives from an otherwise mild-mannered female employee.
But it was not sent by the woman. A thief had broken into her home, commandeered her BlackBerry wireless device and sent the note, said Yach, vice president of software at Research in Motion Ltd., the company that makes the BlackBerry, a device that allows e-mail to be sent and received.
"It's terrifying," said Mark Komisky, chief executive of Baltimore's Bluefire Security Technologies Inc., who recently lost his iPaq 6315 Pocket PC in a cab or at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. The device, a small pocket phone with a miniature keyboard, contained his e-mail, details of his company's strategy,
Social Security numbers of his wife and son, and phone numbers for high-level executives at companies with which Bluefire does business, such as Intel Corp.
"I got off the plane in Baltimore and did the pat-down, and didn't have it," he said. "It's bad," even for the head of a firm that sells security services for companies and government agencies trying to secure their wireless devices. At 10:30 p.m., he called a technician at Bluefire, who erased the information on the iPaq remotely. Luckily, it was also locked with a password, he said.
Companies are seeking to avoid becoming the latest example of compromised security. Earlier this year, a laptop computer containing the names and Social Security numbers of 16,500 current and former MCI Inc. employees was stolen from the car of an MCI financial analyst in Colorado. In another case, a former Morgan Stanley employee sold a used BlackBerry on the online auction site eBay with confidential information still stored on the device. And in yet another incident, personal information for 665 families in Japan was recently stolen along with a handheld device belonging to a Japanese power-company employee.
To combat the problem, security companies have come up with ways to install layers of password protection and automatic locks on devices. Others market the ability to erase data over the air once the device is reported lost. In Japan, cell phone carrier NTT DoCoMo Inc. started selling models that come with fingerprint scanners to biometrically unlock phones.
Some companies suffer only embarrassment from such incidents. But for public companies or financial firms, a lost device could mean violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires strict controls over disclosure of financial information. For doctors and health care companies, the loss of customer data compromises patient confidentiality, protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Potential security breaches are made scarier by the greater reliance on mobile devices. Smart phones, such as the Treo or some BlackBerry models, come with enough memory and high-speed Internet access to function as small computers. In some cases, accompanying memory cards allow users to store even more data, including client lists and contract information.
"I hear less about the cost of the devices, because it really is a pittance, but I really do hear more about the potential cost of someone gaining access to corporate data," said Kenny Wyatt, a vice president for Sprint Corp., which helps some of its business customers manage the security of wayward devices.
Three years ago, Wyatt lost a cell phone containing phone numbers of co-workers and clients. Sprint now can delete information by sending a signal to a phone over the air, he said, although if the device is turned off, the kill signal won't work.
Without the kill service, losing his phone would be a bigger deal today than it was three years ago because the device contains so much more information, he said. "It'd be like I lost an appendage."
In Chicago, 160,000 portable devices are left in taxicabs every year, according to a survey earlier this year by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a security software firm. Fifty to 60 percent of those are reunited with their owner, according to the firm, which polled cab companies.
According to another survey sponsored by software maker Symantec Corp., 37 percent of smart-phone users store confidential business data on their phones. Only 40 percent of those surveyed worked at companies that have corporate policies about wireless security.
Yarmon, the staffer for Sen. Stevens, said he sends an e-mail every few months reminding colleagues to install passwords on devices. "That is my worst fear," he said, "for a user to have it fall into the hands of somebody who disseminates it or uses that information against my boss."
July 25, 2005 at 11:12 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (55) | Top of page | Blog Home
Microsoft to debut 'Windows Vista' - Yahoo! News
Mon Jul 25, 9:30 AM ET
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), the world's largest software maker, said on Friday it will call the next version of its operating system "Windows Vista" as it prepares to release a wave of new products after posting its slowest-ever year of growth.
Windows Vista, formerly known by its code-name Longhorn, is scheduled to launch in the second half of 2006, five years after
Windows XP, the longest time lag between releases of its flagship operating system that runs on nine out of 10 personal computers worldwide.
Microsoft has promised numerous enhancements in Windows Vista, including better security, graphics and computing over the Web.
"It's in the consumer area that they have the best hope of rapid adoption," said Rob Helm, analyst at independent researcher Directions on Microsoft.
Brad Goldberg, general manager, Windows product development at Microsoft, said the new name was aimed at "communicating the idea of clarity."
More details on Vista will be released at a developer's conference in September, Goldberg said, and a beta, or test version, will be released by Aug. 3.
New products, including Windows Vista, the next version of Office, new database software and the
Xbox 360 video game console are expected to help Microsoft return to double-digit growth after the company said on Thursday that yearly revenue grew 8 percent to $39.79 billion, the slowest yearly growth since Microsoft went public in 1986.
Shares in the company fell 2.6 percent to $25.75 on Nasdaq on Friday after it said earnings for the current fiscal quarter would be just below Wall Street's expectations.
Analysts brushed off the slower revenue growth and first- quarter outlook, saying long-term contract renewals would help the company return to double-digit growth.
Unearned revenue, which reflects long-term contracts that have been signed but not recognized as income, were $350 million higher than Microsoft had projected at $9.17 billion, indicating strong business demand for future products.
"Office 12 seems to be driving unearned," said Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Charles Di Bona, referring to the next major release of Microsoft's family of business programs.
Microsoft's unearned revenue balance for the business division that included Office grew the fastest in the latest quarter, rising $542 million to $2.8 billion.
Di Bona said investors may have also been concerned over an increase in marketing spending in the latest quarter that cut into Microsoft's operating profit, but said the stock remained undervalued at current prices.
At current prices, Microsoft is valued at 16 times projected earnings, compared with the average 24 times earnings valuation seen for the broader software sector.
July 25, 2005 at 10:19 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home
Hackers target flawed backup software-survey - Yahoo! News
By Andy Sullivan Mon Jul 25, 3:04 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Flawed backup software has emerged as the latest target for hackers looking for corporate secrets, according to a survey released on Monday.
The survey by the nonprofit SANS Institute found new holes in widely used software products, even as computer users are getting better at patching some favorite hacker targets.
Attackers are now focusing on desktop software, like Web browsers and media players, that might not get fixed as frequently as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and other software widely used by business, the cybersecurity research organization found.
More than 422 significant new Internet security vulnerabilities emerged in the second quarter of 2005, the cybersecurity research organization found, an increase of 11 percent from the first three months of the year.
Particularly troubling are holes in backup software made by Computer Associates International Inc. and Veritas Software Corp., which together account for nearly one-third of the backup-software market, said Ed Skoudis, founder of the security company Intelguardians.
"If you think about it, people back up information that is their most important information, otherwise they wouldn't back it up at all, right?" Skoudis said on a conference call.
"By exploiting one of these vulnerabilities, an attacker can get in there and exploit some of the most sensitive information for some of the most sensitive organizations."
Fixes are available for all the problems outlined in the SANS report, but many of the new flaws aren't fixed as quickly as older ones.
Administrators take an average of 62 days to fix backup software and other software inside their firewall, compared to an average of 21 days for e-mail servers and other products that deal directly with the Internet, said Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technical officer of business-software maker Qualsys.
Home users typically take even longer to fix problems, said SANS chief executive Allan Paller.
Many of the new flaws were found on products popular with home users.
Flaws in media players like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes and RealNetworks Inc.'s RealPlayer could enable a hacker to get into a user's computer through a poisoned MP3 file.
Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser could be compromised simply by visiting a malicious Web site, SANS said.
Even the open-source Mozilla and Firefox Web browsers, which has gained in popularity thanks to security concerns, had flaws as well, Paller said.
July 25, 2005 at 10:18 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
FDIC urges banks to guard against spyware - Yahoo! News
Mon Jul 25, 8:32 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The FDIC on Friday urged banks to enhance their protections against spyware, to limit the risk that customers' personal data may be stolen.
The guidance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. comes amid a growing stream of reported incidents of the theft or exposure of personal customer data.
Spyware is a kind of software installed on a computer without the user's knowledge, often through a virus or when a user downloads a free program.
It is designed to let a hacker eavesdrop, collect personal or confidential information and perhaps track and record a user's activities. Some spyware can obtain such information as passwords or card numbers. It also often buries users under a blizzard of unwanted ads.
In the biggest reported security breach, details on some 40 million Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover credit cards were exposed to potential fraud through a breach at CardSystems Solutions Inc., a Tucson, Arizona, processor.
Data on hundreds of thousands of customer accounts at such banks as Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC - news) and Wachovia Corp. (NYSE:WB - news) may also have been exposed in other incidents.
"Information collected through spyware can be used to compromise a bank's systems or conduct identity theft," said Michael Zamorski, director of the FDIC division of supervision and consumer protection.
"It is critical that banks stay vigilant about the risks involved with this malicious software."
The FDIC said banks should educate customers about the risks of spyware and encourage them to take steps to prevent and detect spyware on their own computers.
Banks should also advise customers of the risks of banking online on public computers -- such as in hotels, libraries or Internet cafes -- where spyware might have been installed.
The agency said banks should also enhance internal security and Internet-use policies, such as by prohibiting Internet downloads and visits to inappropriate Web sites, and train employees about the risks of spyware. It also said banks should consider adopting new authentication methods to thwart hackers who might already have customer account numbers and passwords.
David Cole, director of product management at Symantec Corp.'s (Nasdaq:SYMC - news) security response unit, said data stolen through spyware is often sold on the black market.
"Its value is dependent on its completeness and quality," he said. "We've seen increasing sophistication across the board." Cupertino, California-based Symantec is the No. 1 maker of software that protects against Internet viruses.
Earlier this month, a Pew Internet and American Life Project survey said nine out of 10 Internet users claimed to have changed their online habits to avoid spyware and other Web-based threats. Two in three said spyware had caused slower computer performance or other problems.
July 25, 2005 at 10:17 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home
Online News Consumers Become Own Editors - Yahoo! News
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer Mon Jul 25,10:45 AM ET
NEW YORK - J.D. Lasica used to visit 20 to 30 Web sites for his daily fix of news. Now, he's down to three — yet he consumes more news online than ever. Lasica is among a growing breed of information consumers who use the latest Internet technologies to completely bypass the home pages of news sites and jump directly to articles that interest them.
He can scan some 200 Web journals and traditional news sites — all without actually going out and visiting them.
Online news consumers are increasingly taking charge, getting their news a la carte from a variety of outlets. Rarely do they depend on a single news organization's vision of the day's top stories.
"The old idea of surfers coming to your Web site and coming to your front door, that's going away," said Lasica, a former editor at The Sacramento Bee. "People are going to come in through the side window, through the basement, through the attic, anyway they want to."
Some Web sites are already responding.
"When we all started this 10 years ago, we wanted to be the one and only place people come to," said Jim Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post's Web site.
These days, he said, the Post is happy simply to be one of many sources checked daily. He sees his home page as a starting point, and during the July 7 bombings in London, the Post even linked to the BBC, something unfathomable a few years ago.
The Post and Knight Ridder Digital, meanwhile, are redesigning Web sites to spread elements previously found only on home pages.
And in a case of "if you can't beat them, join them," Knight Ridder Inc., Gannett Co. and Tribune Co. collectively bought three-quarters of Topix.net, a startup that provides tools for readers to bypass news home pages. The New York Times has been paying an undisclosed amount to have its headlines featured there.
Topix provides direct links to news stories it collects and sorts from more than 10,000 sources, and it slices story by category as well as region, down to the ZIP code.
A news aggregation service from Google Inc. scans more than 4,500 English sources and uses software to rank and display stories to which it links, while America Online Inc. and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) offer services that rely more on humans.
Yahoo News, rather than trying to keep readers from leaving, provides easy access to articles elsewhere using Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, a technology that immediately notifies users of new entries on their favorite news sites and Web journals.
"In this world where people are looking for multiple points of view, if all you're giving them is your view, ... they are going to leave anyway and maybe be less likely to come back," said Neil Budde, general manager for Yahoo News.
Many news organizations have tried to render online a packaged product in the mold of the traditional newspaper or broadcast. That mentality is changing, but slowly, Budde said.
News outlets are starting to add tools to untether readers from home pages. The Associated Press, Reuters and others, for example, are adding RSS support so readers can use tools like Yahoo's to display summaries and access stories directly.
Web journals, or blogs, present another way to bypass home pages. Many are topic-centric and carry links that present the blogger's rather than a news editor's vision of the top news items.
Some traditional news sites, including the Post, are even beginning to let their columnists link to outside sources.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Yahoo News had 24.9 million visitors in June, more than any single news outlet on the Internet, and only MSNBC and CNN had more visitors than AOL News.
Google News ranked 13th among news sites.
At The New York Times' Web site, referrals from RSS feeds account for only 2 percent of traffic but represent the fastest growth — 8.5 million page views in June compared with about a half million in late 2003.
The new tools bring opportunities such as better ad targeting, but they also present some challenges. The news agency Agence France-Presse, for one, has sued Google for copyright infringement over Google News' use of photos and story excerpts.
Aggregators and feeds also potentially let readers select only the topics they care about, ignoring other developments editors might deem important, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project and former managing editor at U.S. News and World Report.
But Charlie Tillinghast, general manager and publisher for MSNBC.com, said the new tools can also alert readers to once-obscure items they might not otherwise have seen.
Knight Ridder considers tools like Google News and Topix as "nothing but incremental traffic from people who might not have otherwise seen the site," said Ross Settles, its vice president of strategy.
During the
Scott Peterson murder trial, for instance, the chain's San Francisco area papers saw increases in traffic from outside the area.
The new age of online news will still need reporters to produce stories and editors to make judgment calls.
The need for partners to provide content will never go away, said Lewis D'Vorkin, editor in chief for AOL News.
Home pages will continue to serve as a jumping off point for some readers, and MSNBC recently beefed up its home page to include customized headlines that are chosen based on stories the reader recently read.
But to stay relevant, online news sites must ultimately overcome their reluctance to point elsewhere, said blogging pioneer Dave Winer.
"The reader wants lots of sources and doesn't particularly care whether you point offsite or onsite," Winer said. "They just want the story."
And while news executives insist their brands will remain important as trustworthy destinations, some readers prefer to trust individual bloggers or friends who forward news items via e-mail.
Nicco Mele, webmaster for
Howard Dean's presidential campaign, said he rarely visits news sites directly anymore and instead trusts bloggers like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a Dean supporter.
Pointing to Moulitsas at a recent conference, Mele remarked, "I'll read what he thinks I should read."
___
Anick Jesdanun can be reached at netwriter(at)ap.org
July 25, 2005 at 06:53 PM in Journalism | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home
Professors Make Password Protection Product - Yahoo! News
Mon Jul 25, 2:15 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO - The increase in identity theft has prompted two Stanford University professors to develop software that protects computer passwords from Internet thieves.
John Mitchell and Dan Boneh will unveil Pwdhash, software that scrambles passwords typed into Web sites, then creates a unique sign-on for each site visited, at the Usenix Security Symposium in Baltimore next week.
It's the latest attempt to thwart attempts by cyber-criminals who steal passwords by creating phony online banking or e-commerce sites. Cyber criminals dupe victims into believing the site is legitimate and lure them into typing their passwords. The crooks then use the password to loot the victim's bank account. For e-commerce shoppers, many of whom have stored credit card information at their favorite online stores, the thieves may use their information to go on a shopping spree.
Last year, Mitchell and Boneh developed SpoofGuard, which inspects Web sites users visit and hunts for clues the site may be bogus. The technology pores over URLs, graphics, and links. When there's something wrong, the software notifies the user.
All the security tools are free browser plug-ins available at Stanford's Web site.
___
Information from: San Francisco Chronicle
July 25, 2005 at 05:47 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo buys information 'widget' company Pixoria - Yahoo! News
Mon Jul 25, 1:02 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. said on Monday it bought Pixoria, a company that provides small, downloadable programs that let computer users quickly get up-to-the-minute information, such as stock quotes and weather reports without using a Web browser.
Terms of the sale, which closed July 19, were not disclosed. The products, which also include such things as an alarm clock and a launching pad for Web searches, are available free at http://widgets.yahoo.com/.
The move comes as Yahoo and chief rival Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) open their networks to independent developers, whose program tweaks at times move technology forward or result in popular products.
Pixoria, is the developer of the Konfabulator engine that builds small desktop applications to help users access Web content and other information from their desktops. The programs are built on an open platform, which allows developers to write specialized programs.
The company's three employees are joining Yahoo as full-time employees.
Shares of Yahoo (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) were up 11 cents at $33.64 in mid-day trading on Nasdaq.
July 25, 2005 at 05:44 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home
The Government's decision to introduce a national Identity Cards Scheme was announced in the Queen's Speech on 17 May 2005 and the Identity Cards Bill was reintroduced to Parliament.http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/pabills.htmhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/pabills.htmhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/pabills.htm
* Identity Cards Video
* Identity Cards Bill and Explanatory Notes
* Regulatory Impact Assessment ( PDF File size 322kb)
* Race Equality Impact Assessment ( PDF File size 526kb)
* ID Cards Briefing ( PDF File size 487kb)
* Press Release
* The Government has produced a response to the London School of Economics 'ID Cards Costs Estimates and Alternative Blueprint' Home Office Response to LSE Alternative Blueprint ( PDF File size 627kb)
The UK Passport Service Biometrics Enrolment Trial report was published on 25 May. The trial gave more than 10,000 people across the country the opportunity to experience face, fingerprint and iris enrolment, sought their views on the experience, and surveyed their attitudes towards the use of biometrics.
The full report. is available for download here as well as a management summary.
* UKPS Biometrics Enrolment Trial Summary ( PDF File size 1,350kb)
* UKPS Biometrics Enrolment Trial Full Report( PDF File size 3,708kb)
The UKPS trials is now completed and we will announce the details of any further arrangements for volunteers for future trials on this website.
Further information can also be found on the Publications archive page
July 24, 2005 at 01:56 PM in Smart Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home
ID card rebels cut Government majority to 31 - Britain - Times Online
By Times Online and Agencies
The Government’s majority slumped to 31 over the introduction of identity cards tonight in the first backbench revolt of the new Parliament.
MPs gave the Identity Cards Bill a second reading by 314 to 283, after a rebel amendment to block the measure was withdrawn.
It was the first real test of Mr Blair’s reduced 67-strong majority since Labour was returned to power in May.
It was the first real test of Mr Blair’s reduced 67-strong majority since Labour was returned to power in May.
The Bill is certain to face tough examination in committee, with critics demanding concessions on data privacy and costs.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke went some way to meeting those concerns today offering to cap the cost of ID cards but refusing to set a figure.
Mr Clarke insisted ID cards would act as a “bulwark against the Big Brother society,” providing “real benefits to the individual and society” by limiting the scope for identity theft.
There would be no open access to the information held on individuals and ethnic minorities had no reason to fear the scheme, he said.
Twenty one Labour backbenchers signed the withdrawn amendment to block the Bill’s second reading because it made “no significant contribution to the reduction or eradication of terrorism”.
Labour critic David Winnick (Walsall N) gave the Home Secretary an early taste of the strength of feeling, warning: “If this measure was on a free vote tonight, it would certainly be thrown out.”
The plans have also come under fire from the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas who dubbed them excessive and disproportionate, while a London School of Economics report warned the scheme could eventually cost £20 billion, or £300 per card.
Mr Clarke said Mr Thomas’s analysis was “incorrect,” adding: “I argue the ID card system is a bulwark against the surveillance society, the Big Brother society, and not a further contribution to it.”
Mr Clarke told critics of the cost of the scheme that he would set a cap on it before the Bill left the Commons. “It would be ridiculous to have an expensive card which people were, in some sense, forced to buy. But that is not what we will have,” he said.
Mr Clarke acknowledged there were serious practical concerns over the legislation and offered to look at resolving these in committee.
“I argue that the identity card has real benefits to the individual and society and the ID card is a means of limiting abuse in our modern information society, rather than a means of adding to it ... “It gives individuals the right to secure verification of their identity.”
Amid concerns raised on both sides of the House about the security of data held, Mr Clarke said: “There will be no open access to information on the register. “Private companies will not be able to access or buy national identity register entries.
The Bill made no difference to police stop and search powers and there would be no requirement for people to carry ID cards at all times.
The Muslim community would not be “unfairly targeted,” Mr Clarke vowed. “Ethnic minority communities, like other communities, have no reason to fear the ID card system.”
But Labour’s Diane Abbott (Hackney N and Stoke Newington) warned that while the Bill did not contain an extension of police powers it did have an “extension of pretext” by which the police could stop people.
“The last thing we need is a piece of legislation which will further turn the screw on community relations in our big towns,” she said. Shadow home secretary David Davis accused the Government of chipping away at the basic liberties of its citizens.
“Today, the party that in 1945 promised that generation welfare from cradle to grave is about to give this generation surveillance from cradle to grave,” he said. “The Home Secretary’s proposals represent a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the state.
“They are not just excessive, but also expensive. Not just illiberal, but also impractical. Not just unnecessary, but also unworkable.”
For the Liberal Democrats, Mark Oaten said the costs of the project were “spiralling out of control” and it might be this that ultimately defeated the scheme.
The whole thing was a mess that would make “the Child Support Agency mess-up look like a tea party”, he said. “It is illiberal. It is wrong and it won’t work.”
Leading Labour rebel Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak) said the “dumb and dangerous” legislation should be “killed at birth”. It was not the idea of ID cards that was objectionable but the creation of a database of personal details.
Urging party colleagues to join the opposition to the Bill, she said the vote was “more serious than the decision to go to war”.
But Labour former Home Office minister John Denham said he believed ID cards and the National Identity Register were necessary and would vote for second reading. He accused critics of overstating the level of intrusion they posed, the cost, and the risk of failure.
July 24, 2005 at 01:44 PM in Smart Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
ID cards are to Blair what poll tax was to Thatcher - Comment - Times Online
MICHAEL PORTILLO
We are in 1987. The prime minister has just won an election with a reduced majority and is celebrating by handbagging the European Union. As problems at home well up, she diverts attention by striding the world stage. Immediately after polling day, the government promised to listen to people more carefully, but it has lost no time in trundling out a piece of misconceived legislation that will bring it to the brink of catastrophe. The prime minister will not survive to the end of the parliament and neither will the new law.
In 1987 Margaret Thatcher occupied Downing Street and her ill-fated bill enacted the poll tax. Today Tony Blair presses on with identity cards. I have seen this movie before and I know how it ends.
The poll tax fiasco began when Scotland updated the valuation of homes under the old rates system.
It caused a problem because the middle classes would have to pay more. A little petty cash could have solved the difficulty. Instead, it spawned an idiotic idea that brought down Britain’s greatest post-war premier. I am not often prescient but that was one disaster I foresaw.
When Michael Forsyth, then a young Scottish Tory MP, told me that England must introduce the poll tax because the government had already decided to impose it on Scotland,
I told him that his argument was illogical and dangerous.
At first many thought we were on to a winning policy. Abolishing the rates was as popular then as deporting failed asylum seekers is now. But soon we faced riots on the streets and, more seriously for Thatcher, panic among our MPs. By then I had assumed ministerial responsibility for the poll tax. Holding office may have rendered me dishonest but it did not make me stupid. I could see that the law was doomed.
Last week Charles Clarke, the home secretary, reintroduced the identity card bill. In the few months since he last brought it to the Commons, it is striking how much closer to doom his scheme has already moved. Then he argued that the cards were needed to fight terrorism. Not now. That reasoning has been ditched. You cannot play the terror card and simultaneously promise the scheme will be voluntary and take a decade to roll out.
His reassuring estimate of what the scheme will cost has been demolished by two independent reports that put the number three times higher at between £10 billion and £19 billion. Blair and Clarke try to discredit those figures but the public would rather believe Pinocchio than any minister of the crown.
What’s more, the bill now faces parliamentary opposition. When it was last debated the Conservatives, with Michael Howard in the ascendant, backed the government. The party that claimed to stand for the bigger citizen and the smaller state made an ass of itself.
Last week, with David Davis at the helm and Howard absent, the Tories tore into the government, demolishing every one of its flimsy arguments. Ministers won the vote in the Commons but lost the argument. Their majority understates the degree of discontent on all sides. Labour backbenchers savaged the bill and its authors. The Lords will maul it further.
The identity card bill is fatally damaged. A wise government would turn around now and head for port. In a matter of weeks the whole debacle could be quietly forgotten.
But third-term prime ministers are not wise. They are too busy with their global agenda to study the detail of what their ministers have devised. A flood of testosterone dulls the messages from their political antennae. Machismo distorts their sense of proportion.
The government now argues that identity cards would help to end fraud and identity theft. But in social security the biggest scam is people pretending to have a disability that they do not have, rather than assuming another name.
Clarke pleaded that the banking sector loses £50m to identity deception. The banks’ problem does not validate spending on identity cards 380 times the sum lost through fraud, just as a small local difficulty over Scottish rates did not justify introducing the poll tax.
In truth, the government is establishing a mouth-watering target for fraudsters and terrorists. Anyone who hacks into the national identity register can make a fortune or reduce Britain to chaos.
Clarke said that the Madrid terrorists had been traced because they had produced genuine identity cards when they bought their mobile telephones. I assure him that Al-Qaeda operatives will produce fake ones next time. Meanwhile, I do not want to live in a society where I have to prove my identity to buy a mobile, or a piece of rope, video recorder, torch or anything else that the government fears a terrorist might use.
The death of privacy is a worrying challenge for this new century. Technology enables us to spy on one another. Hackers can intercept our e-mails and tap our telephone calls. They may do it for fun or to do us harm. With the miniaturisation of components, anyone you meet could be filming you and recording what you say. It would be easy for someone to bug your house. It is child’s play to access your bank account and track your movements through your mobile or by the cash withdrawals that you make. It is legal to train a camera on your front door and display your comings and goings on the internet.
So far such problems have largely affected only celebrities and so the issue has not been taken seriously. When the media achieves a scoop by printing the transcripts of the Prince of Wales’s phone calls, nobody, it seems, cares much about the implications of such espionage for our society. Our lives would be intolerable if no remark and no act were private. Think of it, because any one of us could become a victim.
The government ought to be leading the fight to protect British citizens from intrusion. In fact, it does nothing because a law to protect privacy would offend the media (although media intrusion is just a small part of the issue). Compounding its inaction, the government now seeks to maximise its own scrutiny of our lives. People arrested but not charged are fingerprinted. Ministers cheerfully propose to record the movements of our cars so as to make us pay for using the roads.
The government is excited rather than alarmed by what technology can do. It sees utility, not danger, in each opportunity to increase its surveillance. If more of our movements and purchases are logged, it will help the police to fight crime. If more of us have been fingerprinted, it will be easier to nab suspects after a robbery.
But new technology has not altered the question of balance. It has always been open to government to spy on us more closely. However, prudent governments remember that in a common-law country, the citizen is assumed to be free to do whatever the law does not forbid. That thinking underlay the abolition of identity cards in Britain after the second world war. It is presumably why the United States, despite being attacked on September 11, 2001, is not planning to introduce them now.
Crime is a scourge in a free society. But when privacy dies, the free society dies with it.
As the G8 summit approaches, the government is whipping up public demonstrations (a practice usually confined to authoritarian regimes).
It should be careful about giving others ideas. The identity card bill could provide a new opportunity for citizens to march.
As people begin to discover that they cannot receive benefits or open a bank account or borrow a book without buying an expensive card, the political temperature is going to rise. When they realise that it contains 50 pieces of private information about them, the mercury will climb higher.
As they find that some of their personal data are wrong and some are being kept secret from them, tempers may fray. If parliament cannot defeat the bill, maybe it will perish on the streets.
The poll tax is, I believe, a unique example of legislation enacted and repealed by the same government within the same parliament. The identity card bill looks set to suffer the same fate. In the case of the poll tax, the U-turn was made possible only after a change of prime minister. You see why now feels like 1987.
July 24, 2005 at 01:43 PM in Smart Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online
By Damian Whitworth
Our correspondent feels guilty at how he has been turned into a nervous, suspicious spy. But he is not alone
WE ARE all detectives now. On a normal day (remember those?) some three million passengers would use the London Underground. There were not quite that many yesterday, but there must have been a good 2½ million new recruits working for British Transport Police as suspicion, fear and panic spread like a virus through the Tube network.
The realisation that the events of July 7 were not an isolated conspiracy has changed the way that we travel on the city’s public transport system, probably for ever.
On the face of it, yesterday morning was like any other as I started out from High Barnet shortly after 8am. Commuters from this North London suburb grabbed cappuccinos from the small kiosk at the station and rushed to catch the Northern Line southwards. But a member of the station staff said that there were fewer people than usual. “The car park is half empty. It’s usually pretty full by now. After what happened yesterday, people here decided not to go to work today or are going by car.”
Those boarding the train expressed the same stoicism that characterised the reaction to the bombings a fortnight ago, but it was tinged with unease. Angela Leonard, a new mother, said that her husband had not been keen on her taking the Tube but there was no other feasible way of reaching her office, and in any case, “I just want to carry on with what I have always done”.
As the train trundled off past leafy back gardens passengers had their noses in Harry Potter and Su Doku books and women whipped out compacts to put their faces on as normal.
But the headlines on the fronts of the papers told a different story. And so too, if you watched for a couple of minutes, did the behaviour of the passengers. They frequently lifted their heads to scan the carriage. At each station, those entering and leaving were clocked by dozens of pairs of swivelling eyeballs.
However nonchalant we all tried to be, it was not subtle. The first thing that everyone looked for was the type of bag a new arrival was carrying. Anything bulky, anything that looked like a rucksack, warranted closer observation. And there was no question that passengers were profiling their fellow commuters in another way.
Yes, they were looking at the colour of their skin. A young Asian man, smartly dressed in a suit, got on with a bulky black rucksack. I cannot pretend that I did not give him a second look. No alarm bells rang, but I could see other people stealing glances too.
And so could the poor chap, who was probably looking forward to a nice weekend away somewhere. He fidgeted a little. Who could blame him, the way his fellow citizens were behaving? But the more he fidgeted, the more other passengers twitched. He got off after a couple of stops. The man sitting opposite raised his eyebrows at me. “You would think today he might have done without the rucksack,” he said.
Bizarrely for a rush-hour Northern Line train there were plenty of seats available, even at Tottenham Court Road, and then at Charing Cross we came to a halt. In more innocent times this would have been tedious, but the announcement that the line was being suspended because of a suspicious package at Kennington was a cause for more than irritation.
Giving up on public transport, I took a taxi. The driver was Muslim. I told him about the racial profiling I had detected and that I felt guilty about it.
His silence felt like a reproach, then after a minute he condemned the terrorists in the most forceful way I have heard from anyone. “If they catch them, they should torture them,” he said. “And if they won’t do it, they should give them to a country that will.”
July 23, 2005 at 06:48 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home
London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online
By Ben Macintyre
Just 24 hours on, science has turned the menace of the four unexploded bombs into a treasure trove of information
IN A barbed wire-bordered compound in Kent, forensics experts with infra-red cameras are combing and cataloguing every millimetre of a red double-decker bus, while teams of scientists tease apart volatile packs of explosives, using the tools of chemistry to rewrite the bombmaker’s signature.
In a dingy 1970s office block in Lambeth, police are hunched over screens, watching hour after hour of CCTV footage in pursuit of the fugitives.
And inside Scotland Yard and MI5 headquarters, police chiefs and intelligence officers are collating and analysing the unexpected windfall of hard scientific evidence. Part of that windfall went on display yesterday in the shape of four grainy images, proof of the speed at which technology is closing in on the terrorists.
There was something close to elation in the voice of Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, when he declared that bombs had been recovered almost intact: “We believe this may represent a significant breakthrough.”
The unexploded bombs are a treasure trove, an own-goal by the bombers that should yield vital clues about the terrorists, their bombmaker and their methods.
The contrast with the evidence available after the first wave of bombings is stark: after July 7, investigators were left to piece together tiny shards of exploded material in the wreckage, swabbing minute particles of DNA left by victims and terrorists, combing CCTV tapes for the faces of four unknowns.
This time they have several entire bombs, rucksacks with fingerprints, witnesses and film of the bombers not only before the attack but also as they fled. By yesterday morning they also had a dead body, of the man shot at Stockwell station, and a face to compare with the evidence already accumulated.
Scores of police have been diverted from normal duties, and at least 1,000 officers of the Metropolitan Police are at work on the biggest forensics investigation in British history, a vast and hugely complex jigsaw of science, technology and old-fashioned police work.
A prime focus is the No 26 bus, which was towed away from the Hackney Road yesterday by forensic officers in white suits and masks. It is be