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Andy Singer

No Exit        Cagle

21.10.2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jörn Kaspuhl

  Modern sex: Catherine Townsend logs on to the new revolution

Independent

6.12.2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/sex-industry/
modern-sex-catherine-townsend-logs-on-to-the-new-revolution-1050428.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

subscriber

sign up with

sign up to

sign in
http://edit.europe.yahoo.com/config/mail?.intl=uk

post messages

call / call

Multimedia Messaging System        MMS

MicroSoft Network        MSN
http://www.msn.com/

Bill Gates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/billgates

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

internet service provider        ISP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/24/hull-isp-pulls-plug-filesharers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/piracy.politics

net neutrality
The concept of “net neutrality’'
holds that companies providing Internet service should treat all sources of data equally.
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/net_neutrality/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/technology/05secret.html

web connection > speed
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/technology/personaltech/21basics.html

disconnection
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/piracy.politics

online service provider

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

online marketing firm

advanced technology

digital

digital television / radio

Digital Britain
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/digital-britain

digital devices
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/technology/25brain.html

satellite

satellite cluster

dish

cable

connection

network

peer-to-peer network / file-sharing network > eDonkey        2007
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2504723.ece

hardware

software
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/business-computing/25soft.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1145539,00.html

malware
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1787714.ece

spyware
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2737004

adware

use exploits (security holes)

software piracy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1478323,00.html

net pirates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1478602,00.html

open-source

versatility

smart card

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chip

chipset

microprocessor

component

superconductor
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2724217

Silicon Valley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/internet-at-40
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/19/gordon-brown-internet-foreign-policy
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6506136.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/18/digital-content-expansion
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE49Q2YW20081027

Sir Tim Berners-Lee / the inventor of the world wide web
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1747327,00.html

history of the internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

internet vs. television
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1726018,00.html

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers        ICANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/technology/31net.html

digital addiction
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/l13gadgets.html

be hooked on gadgets
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html

internet addict        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/03/excessive-internet-use-depression

internet addiction        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/23/news.internet

internet blackout        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/internationalpersonalfinancebusiness.internet

botnets        2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/technology/internet/21botnet.html

Arpanet        1969
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/oct/29/arpanet-internet-40
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2009/oct/23/internet-arpanet

"digital divide"
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/internet-boom-and-a-digital-divide-1519683.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/2006-04-20-big-wi-fi-networks_x.htm

digital revolution
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/23/digital-revolution

have high-speed Internet access

ultrahigh-speed Internet access
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/technology/companies/11google.html

web

on the web
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1928106,00.html

world wide web        WWW
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,1957375,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1839575,00.html
http://www.w3.org/

webcast
http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay2006/algore

webcast
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/30/arctic-monkeys-webcast-humbug-album

Web 2.0
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1975939,00.html

Web videos
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/business/media/06video.html

surf the Internet
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE49Q2YW20081027

wilfing - surfing the web without any real purpose
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2053340,00.html

a third of all the traffic across the world wide web

online databases

Apple
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,,1871508,00.html

Apple > iTunes
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article2500469.ece

gigabyte
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/18/digital-content-expansion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cyberspace
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/05/29/us/politics/politics-us-security-cyberspace.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120597536349250547.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

cyber war        2008-2009
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/05/29/us/politics/politics-us-security-cyberspace.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService4/idUSL1981632120080319

cyber attacks
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/technology/09cyber.html

cybercrime
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE55S55820090629
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/30/gary.mckinnon
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/infotheft/2006-10-11-cybercrime-hacker-forums_x.htm

 e-crime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/08/cyber-criminals-london-olympics

online banking > security loophole
http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,,1842176,00.html

cybercrook / cyberthief
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/hacking/2006-08-02-black-hat_x.htm

cyberlaw
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-03-13-google-justice-case_x.htm

cybersecurity
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/technology/19wifi.html

cyberstalker

cyberbullying / cyberbully / cyber bully / online bullies
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/opinion/l05bully.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/style/28bully.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article3272992.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1550626.ece

cyberbullying verdict        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27myspace.html

cyber vandal
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1800273,00.html

cyberchondria
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/technology/internet/25symptoms.html

cyber shopper
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5404384.ece

Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving        USA
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2008-11-30-cyber-monday-scams_N.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

internet users / net user
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/
internet-users-face-bills-for-piracy-crackdown-1519428.html

bank over the internet

online

 online storage
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1929123,00.html

online banking customers

online sleuth
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-06-20-parent-cyber-sleuths_x.htm

go online

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Growth of Wireless Internet Opens New Path for Thieves

By SETH SCHIESEL        New York Times

March 19, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/technology/19wifi.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

wireless internet access (Wi-Fi)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/2006-04-20-big-wi-fi-networks_x.htm

hot spot

wireless networks > giant wireless Internet network
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/2006-04-20-big-wi-fi-networks_x.htm

wireless data technology

unwire

broadband
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/broadband-for-every-home-by-2012-1519332.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/dec/15/virginmedia

broadband        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/technology/28broadband.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-29-middle-class-broadband_x.htm

broadband > fast fibre-optic cable
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/28/broadband-uk-ri-christmas-lectures

fibre optics
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6506820.ece

high-speed link

superfast internet access
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6506820.ece

normal dial-up Internet connection

data

information (U)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/29/change-your-life-learning  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

log on to / connect / visit
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/millions-poised-to-log-on-to-esales-1211123.html

dot

at

slash

stroke

slashdot
http://slashdot.org/

web site / website
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/09/best-websites-internet
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1843263,00.html

memorial websites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/blog/2009/oct/07/memorial-websites-online-tributes

file sharing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/file-sharing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/jul/27/filesharing-music-industry

file-sharing site
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1835520,00.html

filesharing / sharing pirated songs on the internet
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1696939,00.html

pirate website
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2195407,00.html

shut down
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2195407,00.html

online server

operator

The area you wish to access is behind registration

There was a problem displaying this page

username

password
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/technology/21password.html

log in details

hate site

home

home page

personalized home pages

customize

webpage

hypertext

link

come across a broken link

expire

home

dialog box

pop up

pop up
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1887917,00.html

pop-up blocker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Private Eye        Copié 6.5.2004
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/index.cfm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Varvel

The Indianapolis Star-News, Indiana        Cagle

7.10.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/varvel.asp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeff Stahler

The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio        Cagle

20.9.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/stahler.asp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chat

chatroom
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1834600,00.html

monitored chatroom

chat zone

paltalk
http://www.paltalk.com/
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1560877.ece

webcam
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1560877.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1226654,00.html

parental control filter

instant messaging

talkboard
http://www.guardian.co.uk/talk/0,1247,546387,00.html

avatar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/04/virtualworlds.secondlife

online Identity
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/us/28internet.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27myspace.html

browse

net browsing

web browser / browser
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2019982,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1260994,00.html
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1897995,00.html

browser's back button

previous page / back

next page / next

back to main

refresh this page

favorites

settings

import

"open source" movement

Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/18/firefox

online

go online

log on to / visit / go to / click on to

log in

click
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/business/media/03adco.html

click

visit

scroll down

navigate the internet / the Web

browse through

bookmark / bookmark

hidden web / deep web / Freenet software
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet

the "underweb" // the underworld

web site

template

Uniform Resource Locator        URL / url
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/06/arabic-web-addresses-internet 
 

type

type in

enter

bookmark

link

go to

web page

box

world wide web

web

on the web

site

domain name

 .xxx web domain
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jul/03/pornography-xxx-apple-ipad

screensaver

broadband

highspeed network connection

download
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/piracy.politics

downloadable

 free downloadable software

downloader
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1396209,00.html

onscreen nickname

online gaming

online dating

online gossip

broadband

emoticons  =  :-)

battle game

portals

online forum

PC room        USA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

internet banking

e-government
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/egovernment/0,12767,866760,00.html

e-commerce        USA        2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12giants.html

e-sales
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/millions-poised-to-log-on-to-esales-1211123.html

e-paper

electronic paper
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1692141.stm

e-mail / email / email

hop online to check one's e-mail
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/2006-04-20-big-wi-fi-networks_x.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

find information on the Web,
in computer hard drives and e-mail inboxes, as well as on corporate intranets

 

 

hit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/21/facebook-cant-live-without-it

 

 

search engines
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/searchengines

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/21/facebook-cant-live-without-it
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/nyregion/10about.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/search/0,,1452810,00.html

 

 

search engines > Microsoft > Bing
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/technology/personaltech/09pogue.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/technology/companies/29soft.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/05/28/technology/tech-us-microsoft.html

 

 

search / search

 

 

search features / capabilities
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-10-google-search_x.htm

 

 

a search entry box with other options to search images, news and the like

 

 

search related advertising

 

 

search billions of pages across the internet in a second
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1331537,00.html

 

 

search function

 

 

semantic web search > Wolfram Alpha
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/18/wolfram-alpha-semantic-web-competitor-google

 

 

semantic web
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1747327,00.html

 

 

meaning

 

 

online data

 

 

database

 

 

index

 

 

hit

 

 

match

 

 

Microsoft
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/microsoft_corporation/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/microsoft.useconomy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/microsoft/0,,178712,00.html

 

 

Yahoo
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/yahoo_inc/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/yahoo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/17/china-alibaba-yahoo-google
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/technology/companies/21yahoo.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2008-02-01-microsoft-yahoo_N.htm
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1864024,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-15-yahoo-makeover_x.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/business/yourmoney/06techno.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

state-of-the-art

obsolete

digital picture
http://flickr.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1403974,00.html

bit

bug

develop

virtual
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5404384.ece

virtual reality

virtual worlds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/04/virtualworlds.secondlife

virtual audience
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2008-11-22-internet-suicide-reaction_N.htm

video game

3D video

e-mail / email / email

internet user

web-user

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opinion | Bloggingheads
Bloggingheads: Put Cheney on Trial?
Jack Balkin of Yale, left, and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago debate whether
members of the Bush administration should face trial
The New York Times
copy early December 2008
http://bloggingheads.tv/nyt_clips/16225
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/12/01/opinion/1194834429849/put-cheney-on-trial.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

blogger
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/story/0,14024,1388466,00.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,641742,00.html

weblog (blog)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2053278,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/story/0,14024,1254467,00.html
http://randomreality.blogware.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/0,14024,1076754,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weblogarticle/0,6799,394059,00.html

blogosphere
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2053278,00.html

bloggingheads.TV
http://bloggingheads.tv/

moblogging

right-wing blogs        USA
http://michellemalkin.com/

podcast
http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,,1977859,00.html

podcast > Apple > GarageBand
http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/youtube
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/youtube/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/technology/17youtube.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/technology/personaltech/08basics.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/
how-can-youtube-survive-1734267.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2008-09-12-youtube_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2007-05-18-youtube-challenges_N.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/features/story/0,,1976945,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/economicdispatch/story/0,,1896706,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1891792,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1889927,00.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1834036,00.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1786562,00.html

 

 

Second Life
http://secondlife.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/13/second-life-divorce
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/architecture/story/0,,2121879,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1933933,00.html

 

 

Reuters > Second Life news center
http://secondlife.reuters.com/

 

 

celebrity gossip site > TMZ
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/01/tmz-celebrity-media-gossip-site

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

e-commerce

 

 

e-trade

 

 

cyber retailing

 

 

the internet high street

 

 

online advertising

 

 

dot.com company

 

 

dotcom crash

 

 

startup
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/what-danger-do-blippy-and-swipely-pose-to-amazon/

 

 

eBay
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/ebay

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12giants.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2052465,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/retail/story/0,,1978790,00.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1860300,00.html

 

 

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Amazon.com        USA
http://www.amazon.com/ 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/technology/23amazon.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/business/24shop.html 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12giants.html

 

 

web / internet / online retailer        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Holiday-Shopping-Online-Sales.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/technology/internet/20slashing.html

 

 

online coupons        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/technology/internet/27coupon.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opening Pandora’s inbox
Microsoft has reached a settlement with one of the world’s leading spammers
which includes a payment of $7m to the software giant.
Despite legal and technological challenges, spamming is still a big problem.
And a new form of the scourge could prove even more costly to the unwary

The Economist

Aug 10th 2005
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4269099

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

computer wizard

cookies
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1882565,00.html

upgrade / upgrade

easy to use

develop

technology

ham radio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

music and the internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/netmusic

music download service

online music service Spotify
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/04/online-music-spotify-hacked

file-sharing software
http://film.guardian.co.uk/bollywood/story/0,11871,1112281,00.html

illegal filesharers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/24/hull-isp-pulls-plug-filesharers

illegal downloaders
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/25/file-sharing-internet

Future of film is on the net        2006
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1696924,00.html

download full-length features

Napster

eMule

Kazaa

internet plagiarism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

crash

crash
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/swine-flu/5894881/
Swine-flu-emergency-website-crashes-under-weight-of-demand.html

technical failure

computer meltdown

electronic meltdown

computer engineers

screen

blank out

stare at blank screens

specialist troubleshooters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

internet sales
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1357409,00.html

online shopping
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1863470,00.html

web coupons
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/media/17coupon.html

online gambling / electronic gambling
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/us/politics/26cong.html?hpw
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1786712,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1498367,00.html

distribute games digitally
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1747339,00.html

happy-slapping on the web
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1928106,00.html

British internet users spend 50 days a year surfing web        2006
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1839247,00.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

internet safety / myths > children
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,1074,1235016,00.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,1074,1233308,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1232506,00.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/page/0,1074,759830,00.html

groom
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,1227362,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1147264,00.html

child pornography sites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/17/internet.childprotection
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-25-firms-fight-online_x.htm
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1718252,00.html

child pornography on the internet / child internet porn
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1889780,00.html

online kid porn
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-20-gonzales-child-porn_x.htm

internet pornography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jul/03/pornography-xxx-apple-ipad

violent internet pornography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1861750,00.html

internet paedophiles
http://www.guardian.co.uk/child/story/0,7369,1162476,00.html

online predators
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-MySpace-Agreement.html

monitoring chidren's instant messaging habits
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-06-20-parent-cyber-sleuths_x.htm

people detained or sentenced for internet-related offences
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1136045,00.html

internet parish
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1162787,00.html

internet for the blind
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1466742,00.html

the internet haves and have-nots across England and Wales
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1468574,00.html

fear of online crime
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1890958,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1890363,00.html

identity fraud
http://money.guardian.co.uk/scamsandfraud/story/0,,1929568,00.html

organised crime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1229875,00.html

violent adult porn on internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1558900,00.html

the trading of graphic images and transmitting of live sexual molestation
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-15-child-ring_x.htm

data theft
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-04-data-theft_x.htm

'psychonauts'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,1492457,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,1492445,00.html

suicide websites and chatrooms
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3254272.ece
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1589332,00.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

biometrics
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1241862,00.html

The Pentagon's own Internet
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article5682896.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article1637535.ece
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1800273,00.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,16559,1670711,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1661693,00.html

 

 

 

Wikipedia editors

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/nov/25/wikipedia-editors-decline

 

 

 

Wikipedians

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html

 

 

 

Wikileaks / electronic whistleblowers' platform WikiLeaks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/wikileaks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/06/wikileaks-pressure-pentagon-military-files
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-military-leaks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/21/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-breaks-cover
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/16/wikileaks-us-military-afghanistan-garani

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NYT

13.11.2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

 

August 24, 2010
THe New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

 

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

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

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”

    Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime, NYT, 24.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/technology/25brain.html

 

 

 

 

 

Findings

The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion

 

January 12, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN TIERNEY

 

When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs?

In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts.

Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity.

He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

I find his critique intriguing, partly because Mr. Lanier isn’t your ordinary Luddite crank, and partly because I’ve felt the same kind of disappointment with the Web. In the 1990s, when I was writing paeans to the dawning spirit of digital collaboration, it didn’t occur to me that the Web’s “gift culture,” as anthropologists called it, could turn into a mandatory potlatch for so many professions — including my own.

So I have selfish reasons for appreciating Mr. Lanier’s complaints about masses of “digital peasants” being forced to provide free material to a few “lords of the clouds” like Google and YouTube. But I’m not sure Mr. Lanier has correctly diagnosed the causes of our discontent, particularly when he blames software design for leading to what he calls exploitative monopolies on the Web like Google.

He argues that old — and bad — digital systems tend to get locked in place because it’s too difficult and expensive for everyone to switch to a new one. That basic problem, known to economists as lock-in, has long been blamed for stifling the rise of superior technologies like the Dvorak typewriter keyboard and Betamax videotapes, and for perpetuating duds like the Windows operating system.

It can sound plausible enough in theory — particularly if your Windows computer has just crashed. In practice, though, better products win out, according to the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. After reviewing battles like Dvorak-qwerty and Betamax-VHS, they concluded that consumers had good reasons for preferring qwerty keyboards and VHS tapes, and that sellers of superior technologies generally don’t get locked out. “Although software is often brought up as locking in people,” Dr. Liebowitz told me, “we have made a careful examination of that issue and find that the winning products are almost always the ones thought to be better by reviewers.” When a better new product appears, he said, the challenger can take over the software market relatively quickly by comparison with other industries.

Dr. Liebowitz, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said the problem on the Web today has less to do with monopolies or software design than with intellectual piracy, which he has also studied extensively. In fact, Dr. Liebowitz used to be a favorite of the “information-wants-to-be-free” faction.

In the 1980s he asserted that photocopying actually helped copyright owners by exposing more people to their work, and he later reported that audio and video taping technologies offered large benefits to consumers without causing much harm to copyright owners in Hollywood and the music and television industries.

But when Napster and other music-sharing Web sites started becoming popular, Dr. Liebowitz correctly predicted that the music industry would be seriously hurt because it was so cheap and easy to make perfect copies and distribute them. Today he sees similar harm to other industries like publishing and television (and he is serving as a paid adviser to Viacom in its lawsuit seeking damages from Google for allowing Viacom’s videos to be posted on YouTube).

Trying to charge for songs and other digital content is sometimes dismissed as a losing cause because hackers can crack any copy-protection technology. But as Mr. Lanier notes in his book, any lock on a car or a home can be broken, yet few people do so — or condone break-ins.

“An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it,” Mr. Lanier told me. In the book he disputes the assertion that there’s no harm in copying a digital music file because you haven’t damaged the original file.

“The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account,” he writes. “The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function.”

Mr. Lanier was once an advocate himself for piracy, arguing that his fellow musicians would make up for the lost revenue in other ways. Sure enough, some musicians have done well selling T-shirts and concert tickets, but it is striking how many of the top-grossing acts began in the predigital era, and how much of today’s music is a mash-up of the old.

“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Mr. Lanier writes. Or, to use another of his grim metaphors: “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”

To save those endangered species, Mr. Lanier proposes rethinking the Web’s ideology, revising its software structure and introducing innovations like a universal system of micropayments. (To debate reforms, go to Tierney Lab at nytimes.com/tierneylab.

Dr. Liebowitz suggests a more traditional reform for cyberspace: punishing thieves. The big difference between Web piracy and house burglary, he says, is that the penalties for piracy are tiny and rarely enforced. He expects people to keep pilfering (and rationalizing their thefts) as long as the benefits of piracy greatly exceed the costs.

In theory, public officials could deter piracy by stiffening the penalties, but they’re aware of another crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.

The result is a problem a bit like trying to stop a mob of looters. When the majority of people feel entitled to someone’s property, who’s going to stand in their way?

    The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion, NYT, 12.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html

 

 

 

 

 

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

 

August 24, 2009
The New York Times
By ALEX WRIGHT

 

Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

Yet many companies struggle to make sense of the caterwaul of complaints and compliments that now swirl around their products online. As sentiment analysis tools begin to take shape, they could not only help businesses improve their bottom lines, but also eventually transform the experience of searching for information online.

Several new sentiment analysis companies are trying to tap into the growing business interest in what is being said online.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Scout Labs, which is backed by the venture capital firm started by the CNet founder Halsey Minor, recently introduced a subscription service that allows customers to monitor blogs, news articles, online forums and social networking sites for trends in opinions about products, services or topics in the news.

In early May, the ticket marketplace StubHub used Scout Labs’ monitoring tool to identify a sudden surge of negative blog sentiment after rain delayed a Yankees-Red Sox game.

Stadium officials mistakenly told hundreds of fans that the game had been canceled, and StubHub denied fans’ requests for refunds, on the grounds that the game had actually been played. But after spotting trouble brewing online, the company offered discounts and credits to the affected fans. It is now re-evaluating its bad weather policy.

“This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service.

Jodange, based in Yonkers, offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

Based on research by Claire Cardie, a former Cornell computer science professor, and Jan Wiebe of the University of Pittsburgh, the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.

Jodange, whose early investors include the National Science Foundation, is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.

In a similar vein, The Financial Times recently introduced Newssift, an experimental program that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme.

Using Newssift, a search for Wal-Mart reveals that recent sentiment about the company is running positive by a ratio of slightly better than two to one. When that search is refined with the suggested term “Labor Force and Unions,” however, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments drops closer to one to one.

Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public relations strategies.

For casual Web surfers, simpler incarnations of sentiment analysis are sprouting up in the form of lightweight tools like Tweetfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr. These sites allow users to take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics.

A quick search on Tweetfeel, for example, reveals that 77 percent of recent tweeters liked the movie “Julie & Julia.” But the same search on Twitrratr reveals a few misfires. The site assigned a negative score to a tweet reading “julie and julia was truly delightful!!” That same message ended with “we all felt very hungry afterwards” — and the system took the word “hungry” to indicate a negative sentiment.

While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however. “Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.

“We are dealing with sentiment that can be expressed in subtle ways,” said Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo who co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

As sentiment analysis algorithms grow more sophisticated, they should begin to yield more accurate results that may eventually point the way to more sophisticated filtering mechanisms. They could become a part of everyday Web use.

“I see sentiment analysis becoming a standard feature of search engines,” said Mr. Grimes, who suggests that such algorithms could begin to influence both general-purpose Web searching and more specialized searches in areas like e-commerce, travel reservations and movie reviews.

Ms. Pang envisions a search engine that fine-tunes results for users based on sentiment. For example, it might influence the ordering of search results for certain kinds of queries like “best hotel in San Antonio.”

As search engines begin to incorporate more and more opinion data into their results, the distinction between fact and opinion may start blurring to the point where, as David Byrne once put it, “facts all come with points of view.”

    Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts, NYT, 24.8.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html

 

 

 

 

 

Apple Rolls Out Talking iPod Shuffle

 

March 11, 2009
Filed at 1:16 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc introduced a smaller version of its popular iPod Shuffle music player on Wednesday with a new feature that tells the user what song is playing.

The new 4-gigabyte gadget costs $79, is half the size of the previous Shuffle, and carries up to 1,000 songs -- twice as many as the last generation of the device.

All of the controls on the new Shuffle have been moved from the device to the earphone cord. The new VoiceOver feature announces songs and playlists to users in 14 different languages, according to Apple, whose shares rose 4.5 percent.

The voice function is particularly useful on the Shuffle, which does not have a display screen like most iPods or other digital music players.

Needham & Co analyst Charles Wolf said the new Shuffle design was appealing and called the voice function a "nice a little gimmick. It shows that Apple intends to keep that piece of the portfolio going. They're going to continue to innovate, upgrade the sub-$100 device."

"It won't necessarily stimulate sales, but it clearly will keep sales of the Shuffle going forward," he said.

The VoiceOver feature works by synchronizing with iTunes software, which installs a voice kit on the user's computer. VoiceOver can also tell a user how much battery life remains.

"You previously couldn't have multiple playlists on the iPod Shuffle because you couldn't really switch between them as there was no way to know how you would switch," said Greg Joswiak, Apple vice president of iPod marketing, told Reuters. "So now instead of seeing, you get to hear."

Although Apple does not break out Shuffle sales, Needham's Wolf estimated some 7.5 million units were sold in the December quarter, it's biggest-selling quarter. Apple sold 22.7 million iPod units overall in the period.

The third generation of iPod Shuffle will be the world's tiniest music player, smaller than an AA battery. It comes in two colors, silver and black.

Apple will continue to sell the second-generation version of the 1-gigabyte, 240-song Shuffle for $49. but phase out the 2-gigabyte Shuffle, which sells for $69.

The iPod music player has played an important role in the revival of Apple's fortunes. The company has sold more than 200 million iPods since they launched in 2001. It launched the first Shuffle in January 2005.

The refreshed Shuffle comes just a week after the company updated its line of Mac desktop computers. Apple refreshed it MacBook laptop computers last fall.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple rose $3.97 to $92.59 in early afternoon trading on Nasdaq.



(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke and Gabriel Madway; Editing by Derek Caney, Steve Orlofsky and Jeffrey Benkoe)

    Apple Rolls Out Talking iPod Shuffle, NYT, 11.3.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/03/11/technology/tech-us-apple.html

 

 

 

 

 

The wiki-snobs are taking over

Wikipedia is to curb its open-to-all policy after a string of howlers, its boss tells Giles Hattersley
 

February 8, 2009
The Sunday Times

 

Jimmy Wales is in the departure lounge at JFK airport, New York, sucking his breath with shame as he tells me of the moment when his beloved Wikipedia got it wrong.

“Take your pick,” I’m thinking. Was it the day Alan Titchmarsh’s Wikipedia entry stated that he had penned a sequel to the Kama Sutra? Or when Bruce Springsteen’s biography kicked off with: “This guy kinda sucks.” Or when Alistair Darling’s life story was replaced with a sentence so profane it would be impossible to reprint here?

“No, it was the Ted Kennedy thing,” sighs Wales. Ah yes. That. Also known as the day last month when Wikipedia – the world’s largest online encyclopedia, co-founded by Wales eight years ago – announced that a member of America’s most scrutinised dynasty had died . . . when, actually, he hadn’t.

It was Wales’s tipping point. Tomorrow the youthful-looking 42-year-old guardian of wiki-world is putting forward a controversial proposal to ensure that changes to the most popular wiki-pages are vetted before they go live. The biographies of living persons and hot topics such as Gaza and God will have to be scrutinised by arbitrators chosen from Wikipedia’s most active volunteer contributors. These “core users” are the wiki-devotees who have spent years posting and editing content. Some have worked on 10,000 pages from their spare room in Basingstoke or on a laptop in Tokyo – and all for free. As a thank you, they now get a say in how it’s run.

Sounds innocuous enough? But given that Wikipedia was founded on the principle that anyone can post, edit, tweak or vandalise it at any time, you have to wonder whether Wales’s libertarian experiment has failed.

A not atypical tale of how a Wikipedia entry can come into being is the story of Bertie, then 11, a friend’s son, who was charged to deliver a school report on Deal castle. He found no reference on Wikipedia, so after researching his essay the old-fashioned way (books!) he uploaded his report on the site. To be fair, young Bertie’s is by no means the least scholarly posting on the site. “I think that’s great,” says Wales, who is big on “access”.

Wales’s enthusiasm aside, there have been sceptics about the open-access model since the site was launched. Many of the first entries were lifted from the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, but most of the content is user generated. Accordingly, the site often feels like the Mrs Malaprop of cyberspace. You will no doubt be familiar with the poor spelling, shaky sources and downright misinformation. With notable exceptions, many of the 10m posts have become a dodgy crutch for lazy students with an essay due.

Last month the crisis took hold. Wales’s utopian dream of shared knowledge – built on the idea that none of us is as smart as all of us – seemed to be unravelling. The headlines stank. Miley Cyrus, Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs had all been declared dead and Margaret Thatcher’s entry claimed she was a fictitious character. Then the “Kennedy moment” occurred.

“What’s interesting is that I was personally trying to edit the page as it happened,” says Wales, scratching the designer stubble he has sported since he quit his job as a high-rolling stocks trader in the 1990s and headed to Florida to live his internet dream. “I finished watching the inauguration and the television was still on and there were these early reports that Ted Kennedy had been whisked away, so I went immediately to Wikipedia to see how things were looking and I saw that he was dead. I instantly questioned it, because CNN said they didn’t have all the facts on his condition and I thought it was pretty unlikely that we would have it before they did.

“I thought: somebody’s jumped the gun here. So I went to edit it out of the page but it was already being used so I couldn’t get on there.”

He pawed impotently at his keyboard. “It was extremely frustrating. This was a very high-profile biography on a very high-profile day and it would have been pretty straightforward to have stopped that.”

But would it? Wikipedia may be open to all, in theory, but it is in effect run by a cabal of 3,000 amateur know-alls.

“They are an extremely smart, committed group, who seem to work almost full-time on the project while at work or at home,” marvels Wales, whose paid staff number a mere 25. “I don’t know how they get anything else done.”

The know-alls squabble constantly over “facts”, undoing each other’s work and posting their own, but they tend to band together to protect their supremacy if any upstarts come along. Between them they manage more than 70% of information on the site. As Wikipedia has featured in the top 10 most visited sites globally for five years, they have become the de facto arbiters of mankind’s collective memory. Aside from the practical impossibility of sieving so much information, doesn’t the site’s gang rule fly in the face of Wales’s hippie-tastic dream of access for everyone?

“Well, I’m not a hippie,” Wales says. “I’m a centre-right, free-market capitalist. And, actually, I think the opposite to you. There is a core community who are extremely powerful but that is a good thing.

One of the great misconceptions about us is this idea that Wikipedia is anti-elitist. That’s just wrong. We are actually extremely snobby.” And proud of it? “Yes. These core users really manage and enforce our standards. If it weren’t for them Wikipedia would be chock full of rubbish.”

Perhaps that should be “more” chock full. When Wikipedia and Britannica were pitted against one another, the website was found to have 33% more errors. “I’ve always been concerned about this,” Wales says. “We get this error or that error making headlines and it’s something I don’t like to see. But at the same time I feel it’s a bit unwarranted and usually means people don’t understand how Wikipedia works.”

Or doesn’t work? “Look, if some mistake is only live for five minutes, is it really cause for thinking of us as completely insane? For one thing, in the old days with print, correcting an error took a day. We can do it fast.”

But while howlers such as Kennedy’s death are easily spotted, what of the reams of erroneous detail that the site presents as fact?

My entry features at least two errors, one libellous (unless my mother has been keeping a dark secret, I am not Roy Hattersley’s son). “Yes, sometimes a person will post something that is a commonly held error. I say to people that just because you’ve heard something somewhere does not make it valid.”

Wales claims that the plans to vet will increase accuracy. However, as Wikipedia gives more power to its vociferous elite, won’t it become just what it never wanted to be – a wannabe Académie Française?

“Wikipedia is human, evolving and democratic, so it will always be different,” he says. But will it ever be accurate?

Perhaps not, says Wales: “One of my favourite examples of a mistake was in my own biography. Someone had edited it to say I relax by playing chess with friends. I don’t. I’ve nothing against it, I just don’t happen to play chess. But this stayed on my biography for weeks.” If they can’t get it right for the guy who runs it, could it be that all of us aren’t smarter than one of us after all?

    The wiki-snobs are taking over, STs, 8.2.2009, http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article5682896.ece

 

 

 

 

 

Virtual West End for cyber shoppers

Retailers to offer 3-D replicas of top stores
 

December 28, 2008
Chris Gourlay
From The Sunday Times

 

The imaginary worlds of Sim City, Second Life and other digital utopias are about to be joined by a very different online experience – shopping in London’s West End.

An ambitious new scheme to duplicate online the real-life experience of a shopping expedition in central London is promising to transform the way Britain’s leading retailers do business.

Stung by the growing popularity of internet shopping – online sales in November were up 16% on last year – the body representing West End traders is creating a unique internet world where shoppers will be able to wander down computer simulations of London streets, click their way into exact replicas of well-known stores, and thumb through goods stacked on virtual shelves.

The aim is to combine the speed and efficiency of internet shopping with the sense of exploration and discovery that real high-street browsing entails. By turning the London shopping experience into an elaborate online haven filled with spectacular graphics and clever animations, more than 600 West End traders from Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street could sell more goods online, and lure more shoppers away from their keyboards for a taste of real shopping.

The £8m scheme is the brain-child of Alex Wrottesley, a budding media entrepreneur whose Near software company has joined forces with broadband , to provider Be, a subsidiary of O2 create an interactive computer model of the main shopping streets in central London.

“This is the first time that someone has tried to recreate a city just as you’d find it in real life,” Wrottesley said last week. His company used laser measuring devices mounted on the roofs of vans to draw up 3-D maps of the streets in the project. Employing the sort of imagery used by Hollywood special effects designers, Wrottesley created a highly realistic 3-D computer model to be known as Near London. It is due to open for business online by October 2009.

The model will allow mouse-wielding users of Near London software to click their way down mostly traffic-free streets, and to enter any shop they choose. There will be no beggars, pickpockets or graffiti soiling the pristine online landscape. Only an occasional Routemaster bus will disrupt the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic.

The projects’ designers also intend to change the weather according to live Met Office data – if it’s raining on Oxford Street there will be simulated rain online – and newspaper billboards will show up-to-date headlines.

Virtual shoppers may also contact friends through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, then head off on joint shopping expeditions using instant messaging to discuss their finds.

Any real-life shop-owners on a street included in the project can open their virtual doors to passers-by for a “rent” of £40 a month. They can then use the doors as portals to their own websites, or use Near’s designers to replicate their shop interiors in the style of the rest of the project.

“Most people see virtual reality worlds like Second Life as a bit geeky and pointless, but this is completely different,” said Jace Tyrrell, marketing manager of the New West End Company, a trade body that appears to have concluded: if you can’t bring the shoppers to Oxford Street, you need to bring Oxford Street to the shoppers.

Among retailers that have already expressed interest in a parallel London life are the fashion brands DKNY and Armani Exchange. Capital Radio, whose headquarters are on Leicester Square, may also join in.

The project’s designers hope that local museums, theatres and cinemas will sell tickets on the site.

“I think if retailers took the opportunity to design their shops in an engaging way, it could be successful,” said Trinny Woodall, the fashion adviser and television presenter. Katherine Jenkins, the mezzo-soprano, who yesterday opened the Harrods sale, said: “It could make internet shopping a lot more enjoyable. Virtual reality is seen as a bit geeky, but if they did it well I’m sure it would become popular with women.”

The danger, of course, is that shoppers will find the online London so much cleaner and more appealing than the real thing, that they will stop going to Oxford Street altogether, putting Britain’s best known high street out of business.

That thought has already occurred to Sir Philip Green, the billionaire retailer whose empire includes Topshop and Bhs. “It may work for people abroad,” he said. “But from a London perspective, where we employ thousands of staff, it doesn’t sound like it’s going to bring any more people to my stores where I’m paying rent.” Woodall said she doubted that a virtual London, however popular, could replace the traditional shopping experience.

“People will always want to try something on,” she said. Yet she acknowledged that online shopping had its advantages, especially in a recession – no parking tickets, no congestion charge, no hassle.

“That said,” Woodall added, “it’s very important to get people into the West End. I hope this system doesn’t dilute the vitality of the high street.”

    Virtual West End for cyber shoppers, STs, 28.12.2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5404384.ece

 

 

 

 

 

Modern sex: Catherine Townsend logs on to the new revolution

In the 21st century, technology is allowing people to express their desires and fulfil their fantasies in ways never before possible – and all at the touch of a button.
Catherine Townsend logs on to the new sexual revolution

Interviews by Esther Walker

 

Saturday, 6 December 2008
The Independent

 

After watching Blade Runner recently on late-night television, I wondered: whatever happened to all those scientists' predictions that humans would be having sex with robots by now – or at least in the very near future? After all, Ridley Scott's film is only set in 2019.

I still can't imagine having a hot replicant boyfriend any time soon – a battery-operated vibrator is about as high-tech as it gets for me. Others, however, are fast becoming accustomed to using technology to take things a step further: men already go online to purchase custom-made "real dolls", which are like silicon Stepford Wives minus the vocal cords, and cost several thousand pounds. Fans claim they are a viable alternative for the lonely and socially awkward. But can it really be healthy to seek out intimacy with an inanimate object?

At the same time that technology is causing some people to withdraw from the dating game – preferring online porn and virtual sex to the real thing – the sheer volume of specialised websites means that huge numbers of people are now connecting in ways that they never have before. Though most deviant sexual behaviours have been around for ages (the Romans were having orgies, after all) the Noughties have ushered in the normalisation of fetishes – and made it vastly more easy to find others with similar tastes. These days, BDSM (Bondage, Domination and Sado-Masochism) has gone from underground fringe clubs to housewives browsing spanking paddles online and in high-street sex shops.

Sex parties, too, have shed their image of dumpy, middle-aged couples circling a bowl of car keys, and now upmarket swinging events such as Fever and Killing Kittens cater to young and more conventionally attractive couples by using their website to vet applicants. These days, more and more single women are taking the plunge.

Technology has also made casual hook-ups – and infidelity – simpler than ever: a well-placed digital photo and a reasonably witty online profile can bring dozens of responses within a few hours. And there are niche markets for everything (among the more obscure I've come across: love connections for the freakishly tall and even for devotees of the American writer Ayn Rand).

But what a friend of mine calls "the crack cocaine of online dating" does have its risks. Ultimately, it's much easier to hide one's true intentions behind the anonymity of a keyboard, and to lie. I've met men who happily crop out years of their life (and children!) as easily as the woman standing next to them in their profile picture.

Of course, not everyone online is a cheater. Some people are completely open about their alter egos, and use their "avatars" to have cybersex on sites such as Second Life. And many see it purely as a form of escapism, and have no intention of actually meeting in person.

The internet does, of course, provide people with fetishes with an easy way of finding each other. I personally would not want to change an adult baby's nappy, but it seems there are people out there who want to breast-feed and role-play a nanny scenario. And it's much easier to send an e-mail through a website than to mention the subject casually on a first date.

In a world bombarded by hyper-sexualised images, even those who identify themselves as asexual or celibate are able to surf over the sea of pornography and connect with people who understand them.

Modern sex, to me, is about easy connectivity, and open-mindedness – whether your sexual soulmate wants to be spanked over a desk or likes to dress up as a giant squirrel. Today, there really is something for everyone.
 


The doll fetishist

James, 52, civil servant

I suppose you could say that I am a recluse. I've always lived on my own and find it hard to make friends or have happy relationships – I've got a history of unsuccessful relationships with women. I did hope that eventually I would find happiness settling down with a partner and I have tried internet chatrooms and online dating but nothing worked. A few years ago I watched a TV documentary about men who live with "real dolls" (see introduction) and thought it might be the perfect solution as I was extremely lonely at the time. I contacted an online company that makes dolls to order and although I was very nervous about the whole thing they put me at my ease and helped me decide what sort of doll I wanted.

Alice cost me about £6,000 and via the company's website I was able to customise every area of her looks and physical attributes – I admit it seems childish but I got a real kick out of creating my fantasy woman. She's aged about 25 and has dark hair and the perfect body. I also enjoyed being able to choose all her clothes at the click of a mouse; perhaps it's the power thing that appeals – being in control of every aspect of her.

Whe she first arrived, it was a very surreal feeling having this gorgeous and life-like silicone creature sitting opposite me in the lounge.

Very gradually, however, I have got used to having her around and now I have grown to love her as I would a real woman. I know it must seem pretty sad, but for me, she's everything. I think of her primarily as a companion, although obviously she fulfils my sexual needs too – in my experience it's a lot easier and more pleasurable than the real thing! I like the fact that she's always there for me; she eats with me, sits and watches TV with me and sleeps with me. I haven't told anyone about Alice; my work colleagues would laugh at me and if my neighbours saw her they would probably freak out too. To me, however, it's the perfect partnership – and what harm am I doing to anyone else?



The internet sex addict

Simon, 38, regional sales director

I got into internet sex by accident; I wasn't even looking for sex. I was at work about four years ago and a friend was registered to one of those dating sites, and he was having a whale of a time.

He was single at the time and went out on lots of dates with different women and met them once or twice and then slept with them and after that he didn't really see them again. I joined my first internet website for a laugh when I was bored, and I couldn't believe how easy it was to meet up with women. I said I was single on my profile but I was married, of course. I hooked up with one or two girls in the first couple of months but they were all looking for relationships and I wasn't. I felt a bit guilty, to be honest. I was already lying to my wife and I didn't want to have to start lying to another woman as well.

After that I discovered some other specialist websites where married people can contact each other for a bit of flirting and then hooking up. I usually meet the women in a bar first and then maybe we'll go to a hotel.

I spend a fair amount of time surfing the sites, maybe an hour or two a day when I'm at work and then maybe an hour or two at home. I don't think it's excessive, though – people spend hours and hours on Facebook, don't they?

It's not that I don't love my wife or that we don't have sex – we do! But we've been married for 12 years now and we've got small kids and it's not really the same as it used to be. I suppose you might call me highly-sexed. It's just sex, pure and simple. I don't sneak around with the same woman, and I'm not having a big romance behind my wife's back. And I never really have to worry about her finding out because, first, the women I sleep with are married, too – so it's not in their interests to tell my wife – and second, I'm incredibly careful. My wife could go through my computer with a toothcomb and she wouldn't find a thing.

What surprised me about it all was how many women there are out there who were really up for casual sex with someone who's not their husband. I know so many men who say things like, "Oh my wife wouldn't cheat on me," and I laugh and think, OK, whatever, mate – she probably already has, with someone just like me.
 


The modern Mrs Robinson

Marian, 54, interiors consultant

I was with my husband for 25 years and then he ran off with one of our neighbours and we got divorced. It was quite funny really, looking back on it. I don't miss him at all; it was the best thing that happened to me. But at the time I was really angry and sad.

I kept the house after the divorce and my children were grown-up and I had plenty of money and I sat down one day and thought, "What the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life?" Eventually I hit on the idea of starting my own interiors company, and I was contacted by this woman who was having her whole house re-done after getting a divorce, just like me. We started chatting and she told me about a website where she met young men online for sex. She said it was brilliant and I should give it a go.

So I went online, and within a fortnight I was dating this amazing boy. He was only about 30. He was amazing-looking and wanted to do all the things that men my age just aren't interested in. We went out to the theatre and to the movies and out for dinner and he was just so fun and alive. We saw each other for about three months and then he sort of disappeared, and I didn't mind at all. When I was younger I would maybe have been a bit upset but I didn't give a damn.

When men get into their forties and fifties they don't want to do anything. They just talk about their new cars and sit on the sofa flicking through the channels with the remote. And now I've got so much energy. Ten years ago I felt totally dead, like a zombie, but now I jump out of bed in the mornings. Life is so exciting.

No one believes me when I say it, but going out with much younger men is not just about the actual sex – even though the sex is great and young men these days know much more about it than men my age. The fundamental thing for me is that men in their twenties are a better match for women in their fifties and sixties than men of the same age are. I went on some dates with men my own age after Keith left and all they wanted was a replacement wife to wash their pants. I wasn't having any of that.

I'm seeing a couple of boys at the moment, but nothing serious. And I don't care really. This time in my life is just for me – for as long as I can remember it's been about other people, my husband and my children. Now it's just for me and I love it.
 


The party animal

Gemma, 23, shop assistant

People think that sex parties are really seedy but actually, they're not. They're much less seedy than most nightclubs, in a way. Firstly, there are so many sex-party swinging sites on the internet, so you can do lots of research in the comfort of your own home. Once you decide to actually go to a sex party, there's no pressure on anyone to do anything; it's usually just a fun atmosphere with people standing about chatting – quite often just drinking tea or something.

I got into swinging, at first, with my then boyfriend Tim, when I took him to a swingers' party in Brighton for his birthday present. He actually didn't enjoy it that much, but I thought it was really fun. The people were nice and there was hardly any drinking or taking drugs or anything like that.

There were living-room areas, where you couldn't get up to anything particularly racy, and then bedrooms upstairs, some with the lights on and some with the lights off, where you could go for more explicit action.

I broke up with Tim about a year later. We hadn't been back to any swingers' parties but I had had sex with someone else at that first party with my boyfriend looking on in the same room and I don't think he enjoyed it; we both realised that we had such different levels of inhibition. I'm not at all shy!

After I broke up with Tim, I went online and signed up for what I suppose you'd call an orgy. It's just the same as a swingers' party, really, except that not everyone is in a couple. It was just really fun. I met so many like-minded people; it wasn't just about sex, it was about being yourself and letting go a bit. There's no pussyfooting around – so if you meet someone and think, "I really like you" and if they like you back, you can just have sex without anyone judging you or thinking you're weird.

I'd never tell my family or some of my more straight friends about this. I don't think they'd get it and there's no point in trying to explain to someone who isn't open-minded what you get out of it. They'd just think I was being a bit of a slag, and I'm not at all.

I don't feel ready to have a steady relationship now. Even if a prospective partner was really amazingly cool, I wouldn't introduce him to the idea of a swinging party because nine times out of 10 he'd be scared off by it.
 


The asexual

Mark, 44, scientific glassblower

I've always known that I was different from other people, especially when I hit puberty and found that I just wasn't interested in sex in the same way that my friends were. I also found my own gender more interesting and nicer-looking than the opposite sex, so I thought I might be gay. Back in the Seventies, there was still a lot of homophobia.

I started hanging out on the gay scene, which led me to being in bed with people, sometimes men, sometimes women – and I realised that I'm not capable of sex. I just don't get aroused. I did have relationships, but they tended to be very short-lived. I greatly enjoy physical contact, such as hugging, as well as companionship, but unfortunately once people realise that there's not going to be any sex, the relationship usually comes to an end.

My longest relationship was in 1997 with a man. We were together for 10 months and it was a sort of mutually beneficial arrangement whereby he tolerated my affections and I was his ticket to friends and parties. When that ended I thought: this is a pointless pursuit.

My brother, to whom I'm really close, went through a divorce a couple of years ago and I was driving in a car with him and talking about relationships. And I told him. I said, "I'm asexual." And he said, "You lucky bastard!" We laughed so much! I think some people still assume that I'm gay but if they do then it's not an issue. My brother later told me that my parents had asked him more than once if I was gay. I suppose they thought it was strange that I never brought anyone home.

My life really changed when I saw a piece in the paper in 2004 about the differences between asexuality and celibacy – in the former there is no sexual attraction and in the latter a conscious decision is made not to have sex. I saw it and it was a total epiphany. I was so thrilled to find there were other people like me. There's a range of different kind of asexuals – some are born that way (like me) and some become that way over time. At the end of the article there was a reference to AVEN (asexuality.org), the website for the asexual community, and I joined up straight away. When I went to the first meet-up it was a revelation to meet other people who felt the same way as I did. There's always a lot of stuff going on and I've got a busy social life – although I do worry a bit about what things will be like when I get older and I'm on my own.



The adult baby

John, 45, computer programmer

My mother walked out on my family when I was four, so I think I always craved being nurtured by a female figure. My two older sisters and I were looked after by a very strict nanny at our house in Nottingham, who showed us no affection. My father would come home late from work and was of the "children should be seen and not heard" school of thought. My sisters and I spent a lot of time on our own and would invent games where they would play at being nurses and would give me baths, get me dressed and so on.

I have always been quite sexually dysfunctional and my sisters haven't managed to form lasting relationships either. When I was in my early twenties I started a string of relationships with older women and realised that I was fantasising about a mother figure. Things started to spiral out of control when I had strong fantasies about dressing up as a baby – it's called infantilism. At the beginning, being honest about my desires was very hard. I felt like a pervert and didn't know who to turn to. Then I confessed to one of my older girlfriends and she encouraged me to seek professional counselling. My counsellor helped me to understand the root causes for my predilections – a lack of love in childhood – but although she encouraged me to stop dressing as a baby I wasn't able to achieve this.

I then discovered an online adult-babies' club in south-east England where I found like-minded people who wanted, as I do, to dress up in adult-sized baby clothes and behave as a baby might do. This might include being bathed by "nannies", wearing nappies and being "breast-fed". I realise that it sounds weird, but it gives me some sort of comfort at the same time as addressing my sexual needs. The fact that it's all done anonymously through the web provides me with extra privacy, too.

    Modern sex: Catherine Townsend logs on to the new revolution, I, 6.12.2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/sex-industry/modern-sex-catherine-townsend-logs-on-to-the-new-revolution-1050428.html

 

 

 

 

 

Grandma’s on the Computer Screen

 

November 27, 2008
The New York Times
By AMY HARMON

 

DEER PARK, N.Y. — Her grandfather wanted to play tea party, but Alexandra Geosits, 2½, insisted she had only apple juice. She held out a plastic cup, giggling as she waited to see if he would accept the substitute.

That they were a thousand miles apart, their weekly visit unfolding over computer screens in their respective homes, did not faze either one. Like many other grandchildren and grandparents who live far apart, Alex and Joe Geosits (pronounced GAY-sits), 69, have become fluent in the ways of the Web cam.

“Delicious,” Mr. Geosits exclaimed from Florida, pretending to take a sip from the cup, which remained clasped here in Alex’s small hand.

Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use. And two demographic groups not particularly known for being high-tech are among the earliest adopters.

In a way that even e-mailed photos never could, the Web cam promises to transcend both distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation.

Some grandparent enthusiasts say this latest form of virtual communication makes the actual separation harder. Others are so sustained by Web cam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives.

But at a time when millions of people around the world are beginning to beam themselves across the ether, the Web cam adventures of the nursery school set and their grandparents offer a glimpse at what can be gained — and what may be lost — by almost-being there.

“We would be strangers to them if we didn’t have the Web cam,” said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, La., who will be a virtual attendee at Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren in Jersey City this year.

Over the last year, Ms. Pierce and her husband watched Dylan, 17 months, learn to walk and talk over the Web cam, and witnessed his 4-year-old sister Kelsie’s drawings of people evolve from indeterminate blobs to figures with arms and fingers and toes.

But the powerful illusion of physical proximity also sharpens their ache for the real thing. “You just wish you could reach out and cuddle them,” said Ms. Pierce, a nursing professor. “Seeing them makes you miss them more.”

Nearly half of American grandparents live more than 200 miles from at least one of their grandchildren, according to AARP. Prof. Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, has found that about two-thirds of grandchildren see one set of grandparents only a few times a year, if that.

But many grandparents find that the Web cam eases the transition during in-person visits, when grandchildren may refuse to sit on their laps or may reject their hugs because they do not recognize them. As one Web cam evangelist wrote on her blog, www.nanascorner.com: “You’ll be able to pick up where you left off without those warming up to you, awkward moments.”

On Ms. Pierce’s most recent visit to New Jersey last month, for instance, Dylan called out the nickname he uses for her over the Web cam, “Buffy!” and jumped into her arms. “It melted my heart,” Ms. Pierce said.

Urged on by strong word of mouth from fellow grandparents, they are often the ones to buy Web cams for their grandchildren (or, technically, their own adult children, who then have to plug them in). But the youngsters, who spend much of their time playing games of pretend, may shuttle more easily between the virtual and the real.

When Gail Hecox of Park City, Utah, shows her 2-year-old granddaughter Lily her cats over the Web cam, the child often pats the space on the ottoman next to the laptop and says “meow, meow,” as though “it should be able to walk through the screen,” Ms. Hecox said.

Many grandchildren play as their grandparents watch from afar, and when Coulter Medeiros, almost 3, of Cincinnati, wants to summon his grandmother in Massachusetts, he simply points to his parents’ computer and says, “Nana on there.”

Substitutions of retrograde technology are frowned on. If Nana is at work, without the Web cam-equipped computer she bought to visit with him, Coulter’s mother, Elizabeth, sometimes puts her on speakerphone. “No Nana phone,” Coulter says. “Nana on computer.”

The adult children in a family have their own reasons for encouraging the Web cam enthusiasm of the younger and older generations. When Martha Rodenborn discovered that Elena, now 4, would sit happily in front of the computer in their Upper West Side apartment while her grandmother read her piles of picture books from Ohio, the Web cam quickly became a vehicle for remote baby-sitting.

“It was a lifesaver,” said Ms. Rodenborn, who graduated from Columbia Law School last spring.

Because the Web cam connection is free, parents often keep it on as long as a grandparent is willing to make funny faces and animal sounds.

But for adult children pressed into service as real-time documentarians, the experience can also be taxing.

After Alex Geosits’s virtual apple juice party with her grandparents on a recent Sunday, her father chased her upstairs, laptop in hand, as she went to get a favorite doll. Then he followed her around the living room as she played hide-and-seek and showed her bellybutton. Finally, it was her snack time, and he could relax.

The recent inclusion of Web cams in most laptops helps account for the 20 percent growth in video calling over the last year, said Rebecca Swensen, an analyst at the technology research firm IDC.

Internet companies are also promoting “video chat” as an enhancement to standard instant-messaging and Internet phone services. Google, for instance, which makes money from the advertisements in its popular Gmail Web-based e-mail software, introduced video capability for Gmail this month.

About 20 million people around the world have made a video call for personal communication in the last month, Ms. Swensen said. American soldiers in Iraq beam themselves home over Web cams; parents on business trips (including President-elect Barack Obama) bid goodnight to their children, face-to-onscreen-face.

But grandparents and grandchildren are already working on ways to nudge the medium a little closer to actual teleportation.

When Deborah Lafferty, 55, and her granddaughter Natalie, 2, want to hug, for instance, Natalie comes to the screen in Seattle and squeezes her own face, just as her grandmother does to her when she visits from England. Ms. Lafferty, in turn, squeezes her face. “Grammy loves you so much,” she says, echoing the phrase she uses in person.

Grandparents also use their own children as surrogates to close the tactile gap. Barbara Turner once sang her fussing newborn grandson to sleep from Ottawa, watching as her son rocked him in Indiana. She said she could almost feel the baby snuggling against her shoulder.

But last week Ms. Turner and her husband rushed to Indiana to be on hand for the birth of her second grandchild. “Some things you just can’t do over the Web cam,” she said. “You make the trip.”

Still, some veterans of the technology fear that the video cam has started to substitute, rather than supplement, actual time together. Jennifer Ray, 24, of San Antonio, and her brother persuaded their parents to get a new computer so they could all video chat with their respective toddlers on split screens from different states. Now the siblings commiserate about their mother’s unwillingness to travel.

“She still comes,” said Ms. Ray of her mother, Diane Heyman, who lives in Arizona. “But not nearly as often.”

Ms. Heyman, 49, admitted: “It’s probably true. You feel like you’re actually seeing them and interacting with them, so it eases that longing.”

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worries that ever-more-real virtual encounters (holograms may be next) could make us forget what we are missing in the case of a grandchild: the smell of a grandmother’s cooking, the warmth of an embrace. In interviews, older grandchildren who video chat with grandparents say they visit them less, feeling that they have already “seen” them.

“It’s important that we not start to equate what the technology can deliver with what we can deliver to each other without the technology,” Ms. Turkle said.

But the Web cam generation may already be recalibrating how much value to place on the sharing of real space with another person. Is it better for a grandchild to video chat twice a week and visit twice a year, or to visit four times a year? Perhaps, having built intimate relationships with them early on through the Web cam, they will choose both.

For now, when Jacob Mosier’s mother, Ginny, of Las Vegas, tells him they are going to visit Mamaw and Grumpa, in Scottsdale, Ariz., the 2-year-old runs to the computer and waits happily for it to boot up.

    Grandma’s on the Computer Screen, NYT, 27.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27minicam.html?hp

 

 

 

 

 

Is surfing the Internet altering your brain?

 

Mon Oct 27, 2008
7:17am EDT
Reuters
By Belinda Goldsmith

 

CANBERRA (Reuters) - The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.

Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.

But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create Internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.

Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.

"We're seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills," Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email."

In his newly released fourth book "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," Small looks at how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.

Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, said the brain was very sensitive to the changes in the environment such as those brought by technology.

He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners.

"The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others," said Small.

"We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution."

Small said this multi-tasking could cause problems.

He said the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls "digital natives," are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.

"There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language," he said.

"But you can take steps to address this. It means taking time to cut back on technology, like having a family dinner, to find a balance. It is important to understand how technology is affecting our lives and our brains and take control of it."



(Editing by Paul Casciato)

    Is surfing the Internet altering your brain?, R, 27.10.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE49Q2YW20081027

 

 

 

 

 

Op-Ed Contributor

A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer

 

October 21, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

 

REDMOND, Wash. — In a windowless room on Microsoft’s campus here, T. J. Campana, a cybercrime investigator, connects an unprotected computer running an early version of Windows XP to the Internet. In about 30 seconds the computer is “owned.”

An automated program lurking on the Internet has remotely taken over the PC and turned it into a “zombie.” That computer and other zombie machines are then assembled into systems called “botnets” — home and business PCs that are hooked together into a vast chain of cyber-robots that do the bidding of automated programs to send the majority of e-mail spam, to illegally seek financial information and to install malicious software on still more PCs.

Botnets remain an Internet scourge. Active zombie networks created by a growing criminal underground peaked last month at more than half a million computers, according to shadowserver.org, an organization that tracks botnets. Even though security experts have diminished the botnets to about 300,000 computers, that is still twice the number detected a year ago.

The actual numbers may be far larger; Microsoft investigators, who say they are tracking about 1,000 botnets at any given time, say the largest network still controls several million PCs.

“The mean time to infection is less than five minutes,” said Richie Lai, who is part of Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement Team, a group of about 20 researchers and investigators. The team is tackling a menace that in the last five years has grown from a computer hacker pastime to a dark business that is threatening the commercial viability of the Internet.

Any computer connected to the Internet can be vulnerable. Computer security executives recommend that PC owners run a variety of commercial malware detection programs, like Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, to find infections of their computers. They should also protect the PCs behind a firewall and install security patches for operating systems and applications.

Even these steps are not a sure thing. Last week Secunia, a computer security firm, said it had tested a dozen leading PC security suites and found that the best one detected only 64 out of 300 software vulnerabilities that make it possible to install malware on a computer.

Botnet attacks now come with their own antivirus software, permitting the programs to take over a computer and then effectively remove other malware competitors. Mr. Campana said the Microsoft investigators were amazed recently to find a botnet that turned on the Microsoft Windows Update feature after taking over a computer, to defend its host from an invasion of competing infections.

Botnets have evolved quickly to make detection more difficult. During the last year botnets began using a technique called fast-flux, which involved generating a rapidly changing set of Internet addresses to make the botnet more difficult to locate and disrupt.

Companies have realized that the only way to combat the menace of botnets and modern computer crime is to build a global alliance that crosses corporate and national boundaries. On Tuesday, Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, will convene a gathering of the International Botnet Taskforce in Arlington, Va. At the conference, which is held twice a year, more than 175 members of government and law enforcement agencies, computer security companies and academics will discuss the latest strategies, including legal efforts.

Although the Microsoft team has filed more than 300 civil lawsuits against botnet operators, the company also relies on enforcement agencies like the F.B.I. and Interpol-related organizations for criminal prosecution.

Last month the alliance received support from new federal legislation, which for the first time specifically criminalized the use of botnets. Many of the bots are based in other countries, however, and Mr. Campana said there were many nations with no similar laws.

“It’s really a sort of cat-and-mouse situation with the underground,” said David Dittrich, a senior security engineer at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory and a member of the International Botnet Taskforce. “Now there’s profit motive, and the people doing stuff for profit are doing unique and interesting things.”

Microsoft’s botnet hunters, who have kept a low profile until now, are led by Richard Boscovich, who until six months ago served as a federal prosecutor in Miami. Mr. Boscovich, a federal prosecutor for 18 years, said he was optimistic that despite the growing number of botnets, progress was being made against computer crime. Recent successes have led to arrests.

“Every time we have a story that says bot-herders get locked up, that helps,” said Mr. Boscovich, who in 2000 helped convict Jonathan James, a teenage computer hacker who had gained access to Defense Department and National Air and Space Administration computers.

To aid in its investigations, the Microsoft team has built elaborate software tools including traps called “honeypots” that are used to detect malware and a system called the Botnet Monitoring and Analysis Tool. The software is installed in several refrigerated server rooms on the Microsoft campus that are directly connected to the open Internet, both to mask its location and to make it possible to deploy software sensors around the globe.

The door to the room simply reads “the lab.” Inside are racks of hundreds of processors and terabytes of disk drives needed to capture the digital evidence that must be logged as carefully as evidence is maintained by crime scene investigators.

Detecting and disrupting botnets is a particularly delicate challenge that Microsoft will talk about only in vague terms. Their challenge parallels the traditional one of law enforcement’s placing informers inside criminal gangs.

Just as gangs will often force a recruit to commit a crime as a test of loyalty, in cyberspace, bot-herders will test recruits in an effort to weed out spies. Microsoft investigators would not discuss their solution to this problem, but said they avoided doing anything illegal with their software.

One possible approach would be to create sensors that would fool the bot-herders by appearing to do malicious things, but in fact not perform the actions.

In 2003 and 2004 Microsoft was deeply shaken by a succession of malicious software worm programs with names like “Blaster” and “Sasser,” that raced through the Internet, sowing chaos within corporations and among home computer users. Blaster was a personal affront to the software firm that has long prided itself on its technology prowess. The program contained a hidden message mocking Microsoft’s co-founder: “billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!”

The company maintains that its current software is less vulnerable, but even as it fixed some problems, the threat to the world’s computers has become far greater. Mr. Campana said that there had been ups and downs in the fight against a new kind of criminal who could hide virtually anywhere in the world and strike with devilish cleverness.

“I come in every morning, and I think we’re making progress,” he said. At the same time, he said, botnets are not going to go away any time soon.

“There are a lot of very smart people doing very bad things,” he said.

    A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer, NYT, 21.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/technology/internet/21botnet.html

 

 

 

 

 

The Rise of the Machines

 

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By RICHARD DOOLING

 

Omaha

“BEWARE of geeks bearing formulas.” So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street. Years ago, Mr. Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction” — an apt metaphor considering that the Manhattan Project’s math and physics geeks bearing formulas brought us the original weapon of mass destruction, at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

In a 1981 documentary called “The Day After Trinity,” Freeman Dyson, a reigning gray eminence of math and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing.

“I have felt it myself,” he warned. “The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

The Wall Street geeks, the quantitative analysts (“quants”) and masters of “algo trading” probably felt the same irresistible lure of “illimitable power” when they discovered “evolutionary algorithms” that allowed them to create vast empires of wealth by deriving the dependence structures of portfolio credit derivatives.

What does that mean? You’ll never know. Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, “toxic” financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, “Open the bank vault doors, Hal.”

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.

How fitting then, that almost 30 years after Freeman Dyson described the almost unspeakable urges of the nuclear geeks creating illimitable energy out of equations, his son, George Dyson, has written an essay (published at Edge.org) warning about a different strain of technical arrogance that has brought the entire planet to the brink of financial destruction. George Dyson is an historian of technology and the author of “Darwin Among the Machines,” a book that warned us a decade ago that it was only a matter of time before technology out-evolves us and takes over.

His new essay — “Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?” — begins with a history of “stock,” originally a stick of hazel, willow or alder wood, inscribed with notches indicating monetary amounts and dates. When funds were transferred, the stick was split into identical halves — with one side going to the depositor and the other to the party safeguarding the money — and represented proof positive that gold had been deposited somewhere to back it up. That was good enough for 600 years, until we decided that we needed more speed and efficiency.

Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later. “The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good,” George Dyson writes. “The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments.”

It was easy enough for us humans to understand a stick or a dollar bill when it was backed by something tangible somewhere, but only computers can understand and derive a correlation structure from observed collateralized debt obligation tranche spreads. Which leads us to the next question: Just how much of the world’s financial stability now lies in the “hands” of computerized trading algorithms?



Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us. Hence his mission to kill technologists before machines commenced what he believed would be their inevitable reign of terror.



We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us. Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can’t help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers’ apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make — “derive” — and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?

When Treasury Secretary Paulson (looking very much like a frightened primate) came to Congress seeking an emergency loan, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a Democrat still living on his family homestead, asked him: “I’m a dirt farmer. Why do we have one week to determine that $700 billion has to be appropriated or this country’s financial system goes down the pipes?”

“Well, sir,” Mr. Paulson could well have responded, “the computers have demanded it.”



Richard Dooling is the author of “Rapture for the Geeks: When A.I. Outsmarts I.Q.”

    The Rise of the Machines, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12dooling.html?ref=opinion

 

 

 

 

 

Amid the Gloom, an E-Commerce War

 

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

 

WHEN the e-commerce giant eBay emerged from the last recession seven years ago with an aura of invincibility, its chief executive, Meg Whitman, boasted that “eBay is to some extent recession-proof.”

As the online auctioneer’s revenues and stock price kept climbing, one of its primary rivals, Amazon.com, just limped along.

How times have changed.

Ms. Whitman, now co-chair of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, retired from eBay earlier this year as the company struggled with stagnation. Amazon, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the most vibrant and reliable retailers in the country.

And in an unmistakable sign that Internet companies are indeed exposed to the gathering economic storm stemming from the credit crisis, Ms. Whitman’s successor, John J. Donahoe, laid off 10 percent of eBay’s 16,000 employees last Monday.

Mr. Donahoe noted that eBay was already feeling the effects of the downturn. “This looks like it is going to be a more typical economic cycle that impacts consumer spending,” he said. “We are not immune.”

That the economic crisis is washing up on Silicon Valley’s shores shouldn’t, perhaps, come as a surprise. Most tech companies are defenseless against waning advertising, business spending and consumer interest in big-ticket items like computers. Over the last three months, investors have punished tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple, extracting a fifth to a half of their market value.

E-commerce, though, was once thought to be a refuge from economic storms. People who stay away from the mall might actually be more tempted to shop online and hunt for deals, or so the thinking went.

But analysts are now revisiting that assumption. Many consumers, citing an uncertain economy, say they will clutch their wallets tightly this holiday season regardless of where they shop: 48 percent surveyed recently by eBillme, an online payment service, said they planned to delay purchases.

Traditional, brick-and-mortar stores had wrenching, double-digit declines in September sales and are bracing for a bleak holiday season. No one is certain to what degree online retailers will feel that same pain, because digital vendors have never endured a deep, protracted economic slump before.

“We still feel pretty good about this year, but I worry about next year and beyond,” said Brian J. Pitz, an analyst at Banc of America Securities. “Are people going to spend when they can’t get home equity lines of credit, a student loan or a car loan?”

For eBay and Amazon, the twin giants of e-commerce, the financial meltdown has arrived at a particularly crucial time. After years of claiming that their businesses were complementary, not competitive, the companies are now on a collision course.

Amazon has accelerated its courtship of small online vendors, allowing them to sell on its site — becoming more like eBay. And eBay, desperate to revive itself, has decided to emphasize traditional, fixed-price sales of both new and old merchandise — becoming more like Amazon.

AT stake is more than e-commerce bragging rights. On the Internet, size matters. Larger companies can collect more information about consumers, negotiate better deals with partners and use that leverage to expand their dominance (for example, Google versus Yahoo in search).

“This is a pivotal holiday season for eBay,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research who has covered the Internet for a decade. “What people fear is that Amazon is basically building a bigger sales base than eBay and will use that knowledge to sell people more and more of the things they want to buy online.”

Indeed, the balance of power in e-commerce seems to be shifting faster than anyone expected. Just three years ago, eBay had 30 percent more traffic than Amazon. Today, its total of 84.5 million active users is barely ahead of the 81 million active customer accounts that Amazon reported in June.

Amazon has exceeded eBay in other measures as well.

EBay’s market capitalization was three times Amazon’s in 2005, back when Wall Street loved the fact that it carried no inventory and generated huge profits. This year, eBay’s stock has lost over half its value and, in July, Amazon’s valuation surpassed eBay’s for the first time.

In a series of interviews, Mr. Donahoe acknowledged that eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., didn’t adapt fast enough to shifting e-commerce winds. He now embraces a “turnaround mind-set” and is refocusing its Web marketplace toward shoppers who don’t want to waste time in online auctions.

“There are times when I wish we can close this store and just open a new store, but we can’t,” he said. “We need to make bolder, more aggressive changes to the eBay ecosystem even if they are unpopular.”

Up in Seattle, meanwhile, Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, says that after years of failed experimentation, third-party vendors — the foundation on which eBay was built — now account for about 29 percent of sales on Amazon. The company has endured and outlasted critics who long complained about its high fixed costs.

Last year, it impressed investors with accelerating growth, and its stock price revisited the highs of the dot-com boom, before waning euphoria and market pessimism erased more than half of those gains this year. Mr. Bezos credits Amazon’s tolerance for risky, expensive bets like the Kindle electronic reading device.

“Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible,” he said.

EBay’s recent problems have made Mr. Bezos and his team look like shrewd and patient stewards of the Amazon franchise. And Amazon’s second wind is making eBay look as if it has missed one of the greatest opportunities in the Internet’s short history.

“EBay could have closed the door to Amazon back when Amazon was mostly just a platform to sell books and music,” said Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, the investment bank. “But what eBay did in those days was to take a very hands-off approach and let the marketplace control itself. And that ended up being the downfall of the business relative to others that have succeeded.”

OVER the summer of 2004, at the annual executive retreat that eBay insiders call “Telluride,” a product strategy team argued that eBay needed to break into the promising world of digital media. Pointing to the popularity of services like Napster and the new iTunes music store from Apple, the group predicted that media like books, music and movies would inevitably be distributed digitally, over the Web.

EBay, they argued, needed to ride that wave.

That insight — which did catch on at Amazon and is now responsible for high-profile efforts like the Kindle and Amazon’s MP3 store and video-on-demand service — went nowhere at eBay.

“Nobody really shut it down. The process shut it down,” says a former eBay executive who was on the product strategy team but requested anonymity to avoid alienating former colleagues. “The company was obsessed with making quarterly numbers.”

Whether passing on digital media was a mistake at eBay is still an open question. But the anecdote illustrates larger problems. More than a dozen current and former eBay executives, from all levels of management, say eBay routinely failed to reorient its core business.

They say eBay avoided fiddling with its auction model because it was wary of disrupting a long-profitable equilibrium between buyers and sellers.

EBay has known for years that some Web buyers were looking for a different experience. Surveys suggested that auction participants were alienated by untrustworthy sellers and hidden shipping fees, and increasingly preferred the certainty of instantly buying items at a fixed price.

Although eBay executives recognized and routinely acknowledged the problem, they never took bold, direct steps to address it.

In 2005, the company acquired Shopping.com, a comparative shopping site that catalogs products for sale elsewhere on the Web. But for years eBay did not promote the company’s listings, primarily because its vocal community of sellers — the ones paying fees to eBay — protested whenever eBay sent buyers to other retailers.

Josh Koppelman, who founded the e-commerce site Half.com and sold it to eBay in 2001, says that there was an understandable cultural reluctance inside eBay to alienate sellers. “We got paid a fee to provide a service to a community,” he said. “Hurting members of that community was difficult.”

Instead of imposing critical fixes to its slowing model, eBay searched for high-growth businesses elsewhere, acquiring Skype, the online calling service; StubHub, the ticketing site; and a series of classified-advertising Web sites.

The company did create a whole new site, called eBay Express, where it tried to satisfy buyer interest in a simpler shopping experience. EBay Express automatically amassed all the fixed-price, non-auction listings on eBay properties and presented them in an organized way with only one payment system, PayPal — also owned by eBay.

But in the two-year life of eBay Express, eBay never directed any meaningful traffic to it, fearing that it would interfere with the more profitable and popular auction-oriented site. The company shuttered eBay Express this year and has said it will move some of its innovative features to eBay.com.

Contributing to intransigence, according to several former executives, were deep divisions and constant hand-wringing among its managers over the most fundamental question: What is eBay?

One camp believed that eBay was a discount palace and that it had to continually offer deals to buyers in whatever shopping format they wanted.

But another group, resistant to change even as late as last year when eBay was clearly losing ground, believed that the brand was tied up in the excitement of auctions. Emphasizing traditional shopping destroyed what made eBay special, they argued.

“Today online shopping is mainstream, but it’s also becoming boring,” Bill Cobb, then the president of eBay North America, wrote in a June 2007 blog entry that typified this thinking. “We’re investing in the quintessential eBay experience of buying and selling — person to person — in an auction format.”

Ms. Whitman seemed to moderate this constant debate while never actually settling it. At times, she also seemed unwilling to leave auctions behind.

In an interview last week, while on a break from traveling with the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Ms. Whitman said it was hard for her to reflect on these kinds of divisions within the company, or on missed opportunities.

“There was no shortage of realistic looks in the mirror, where we asked ourselves if we were doing the best job that we could do,” she said.

She also addressed another notion raised by former eBayers, who say executives were dismissive of Amazon but focused obsessively on Google, the search leader whose tentative moves into e-commerce were viewed inside eBay as acts of aggression.

“Google is a disruptive competitor. It’s not a marketplace and it’s not a retailer but has a different way of marrying buyers and sellers,” she said. “I don’t think you can overstate any competitive threats.”

But paranoia about Google, these former executives say, fueled strategic missteps like the Skype acquisition, which Google had also pursued. Ms. Whitman and other eBay managers spent considerable energy trying to integrate Skype, and last year eBay wrote down $1.4 billion of the $3.1 billion acquisition.

As eBay obsessed about Google, the online retailer from Seattle was encroaching on its turf.

CONVERSATIONS with Jeff Bezos of Amazon inevitably provoke two kinds of outbursts. One is that famous, barking laugh that punctuates even seemingly mundane sentences. The other is his paean to the wisdom of long-term thinking.

“We are willing to plant seeds that take five to seven years to grow into reasonable things,” he said in an interview. “You can’t do big, clean-sheet invention unless you are willing to invest for long periods of time.”

Mr. Bezos has delivered these kinds of odes to patience and risk tolerance for nearly a decade. The company’s appetite for enduring short-term pain for long-term gain is clearest when comparing it with its rival, eBay.

While eBay was buying into classified advertising, online payments and Internet telephony, Amazon spent hundreds of millions of dollars building its brand as a trusted retailer — hiring customer service representatives and returning money to customers when transactions went awry.

As eBay took a pass on digital media, Amazon dove in and frustrated investors for years with margins that were diminished by a bulky R.& D. budget — but produced promising businesses like the MP3 store.

Compensation at the two companies also reflects core differences. Amazon evaluates its executives annually and gives performance-based stock grants. Until this year, when Mr. Donahoe became chief executive, eBay gave cash and stock bonuses based on quarterly performance, rewarding managers for meeting Wall Street’s short-term expectations.

Similarly, Amazon’s push to recruit the small sellers who orbited eBay was marked, at first, by patience and often-embarrassing experimentation.

In 1999, five years after Mr. Bezos first plunged his stake into the ground as an online bookseller, Amazon invaded eBay’s territory, introducing Amazon Auctions and a way for retailers to set up stores on the site, called zShops. The efforts tanked.

The problem then “was that nobody came,” Mr. Bezos said. “Actually, sellers came, but the customers didn’t care and didn’t shop there.”

Amazon tried to promote this siloed merchandise on its site by linking to it on its more popular product pages. These so-called “smart links” were hotly controversial inside Amazon and became the subject of a rivalry between its retail and technology groups.

Fearful that sending visitors to other pages would cut into their sales, retailing executives at Amazon took to removing them from the page at every opportunity, according to one senior Amazon executive who was there at the time.

SEVERAL years ago, the company introduced Amazon Marketplace, laying the groundwork for its current path by listing new and used items from third-party sellers alongside its own merchandise.

If Amazon didn’t stock a particular item, or if independent sellers could offer better prices, they would become the featured retailer on the page.

Amazon settled internal tensions by giving its retail managers credit for any products sold on their pages, even by third-party sellers. But Mr. Bezos says the arrangement still produces anxiety.

“Put yourself in place of our retail buyers,” he said. “You just purchased 10,000 units of a particular digital camera and you are told, if any third party anywhere in the world can offer a better price, we are going to give them the buy box and you are going to get stuck with the inventory. That causes some angst.”

Over the last five years, Amazon has lowered hurdles for independent vendors to sell on its site and recruited new groups of merchants as it has expanded into other countries and product categories — automotive parts in 2006 and office supplies this year, for example.

Amazon executives say they don’t specifically pursue top eBay sellers, but some merchants suggest otherwise.

David Duong, founder of Shoe Metro, a Web retailer based in San Diego, says Amazon representatives called him shortly after Amazon.com introduced a shoe category in 2005 and asked him to begin selling on the site.

“I guess they found us on eBay,” he said. “We were actually going to talk to them, but they beat us to the punch.”

Lately, small merchants and their trade organizations say, the outreach has become even more direct. The Professional EBay Sellers Alliance said that Amazon recently offered to waive some fees for the 800 members of the group, an organization of eBay power sellers, to woo them to its platform.

Because Amazon also sells many of the same products as its merchants, executives at eBay predict that competitive tensions will emerge as the Amazon Marketplace grows. Maybe so. It’s happened before.

Amazon once ran the Web operations of large traditional retailers like Borders, Circuit City and Toys “R” Us. One by one, those retailers concluded that outsourcing such a crucial feature of 21st-century retailing to a competitor was a bad idea.

But some of its newer deals with sellers indicate that Amazon is finding ways around those tensions, at least with small merchants.

Andrew and Deb Mowery of Fort Collins, Colo., who started selling home, garden and pet supplies on eBay in 1999, now make 60 percent of their sales on Amazon and about 20 percent on eBay. In addition to listing items for sale on the Amazon Marketplace, they are also a wholesale supplier to Amazon, providing it with products like heated pet beds.

Mr. Mowery is essentially competing with himself, but the arrangement works. “If they run out, I’ve got their back,” he said. “If I run out, they’ve got my back.”

Amazon wants to forge these kinds of close ties with other small sellers. A program called Fulfillment by Amazon, introduced in 2006, allows retailers to store their inventory in Amazon’s warehouses. When someone buys an item from that seller, Amazon ships it out of its warehouse in an Amazon box.

Integrating small merchants into its operations also allows Amazon to learn more about whom it can trust to sell on its site. Compared with eBay, the company says it exerts a far greater measure of control over its marketplace, calling certain vendors “featured sellers” and vetting others in product categories that are sensitive to fraud.

“At the end of the day, we believe it’s good for all of our sellers to make sure we are protecting the consumer experience first,” Mr. Bezos said. “Our first and foremost goal is to earn trust with consumers. If there are no consumers buying, nothing else matters.”

DESPITE Amazon’s success in courting independent sellers, its selection is still just a fraction of what eBay offers, and in some cases its prices are higher.

For example, there are hundreds of new, used and refurbished Trek racing bikes on eBay; as of last week, Amazon had three for sale. Acquisitive parents can buy a $90 Deux Par Deux baby sweater dress on eBay for under $30. But only a few of this French designer’s items are listed on Amazon, and for close to full price.

And that Lehman Brothers 150th-anniversary collectible tote bag, which every irony-obsessed stock market fan wants under the Christmas tree? It is available for purchase only on eBay, in auctions.

This is where Mr. Donahoe talks about a vision to fix eBay, and to create a Web discount store that offers a wide variety of new and old merchandise in auction and fixed-price formats. To get there, he must administer the sweeping, painful fixes that eBay has previously shunned.

“It was increasingly clear to me in 2007 that what felt like bold changes, and to the community felt like bold changes, were not bold enough,” he said.

His attempted fixes have started internally. In addition to making executive bonuses annual instead of quarterly, to keep employees from leaving and reward longer-term thinking, he moved the company’s focus to buyers instead of sellers.

He canceled the annual eBay Live conference next year with merchants — this year, it turned into an unwieldy complaint session — and began making eBay executives read weekly surveys that ask shoppers whether they would recommend eBay to a friend.

THE eBay facade is also undergoing its most significant renovation in its 14-year history as Mr. Donahoe tries to adjust eBay fees to tempt sellers to list more of their products at fixed prices.

EBay has also added a new 30-day listing at a fixed price that is more economical to many sellers than auctions. It has also disabled the feedback mechanism that allowed sellers to rank buyers and introduced a new “best match” search engine that promotes trusted sellers and good deals.

In another controversial change, eBay has struck special deals with large merchants like Buy.com, which pays no listing fees and offers more than half a million products on eBay.com.

The point of the arrangement is to ensure that eBay stays fully stocked in basics like batteries and printer cartridges. Other eBay sellers are enraged, though, arguing that the deal violates the sacred eBay tenet of the “level playing field.”

These sellers have vented their frustrations online about eBay’s changes. It’s hard to gauge whether the vitriol represents the majority view, but some less vocal, larger sellers on eBay say they have actually benefited.

“EBay has told all bad sellers to shape up,” said Jordan Insley, an electronics merchant who lives near Seattle. “I’ve seen a lot of sellers that used to sell a lot of product fall off the charts.”

Although he worries that buyer traffic on eBay is slowing, Mr. Insley says he will sell $13 million in gadgets this year on eBay alone. “I think eBay is moving in the right direction. We are sticking around.”

Still, Mr. Donahoe can’t count on that sentiment to carry the day. Few of his changes are expected to deliver any immediate results, other than alienating certain sellers.

Yet for eBay, the changes may be a matter of survival. The company need only look across Silicon Valley at Yahoo to see what can happen to wounded Internet companies with depressed stock prices.

In the meantime, he faces tough choices. He is weighing a possible sale of Skype by next year, and analysts think he will almost certainly make that move, since the company now acknowledges that Skype has little synergy with eBay’s other businesses.

That would free eBay to focus on its core marketplace, on getting through the torrential economic downpour, and on combating a challenger that is making greater incursions every day.

“I respect Jeff Bezos a lot as a leader and Amazon and what they’ve done,” Mr. Donahoe said. “But it is still early days in this industry. E-commerce is 7 percent of retail. I don’t think anyone thinks it’s going to end there. We think there is plenty of room for both Amazon and eBay to be successful.”

    Amid the Gloom, an E-Commerce War, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12giants.html

 

 

 

 

 

Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

 

August 30, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

 

SAN FRANCISCO — The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”

Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.

“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.

This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local I.S.P.’s but instead was routed through European operators.

The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the country’s fighting with Russia. Most of Georgia’s access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.

Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don’t have to route through the U.S.”

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, “We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.” While the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.

The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.

“Whether it’s a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand,” said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google’s Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. “Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn’t helpful.”

International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.

While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internet’s main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house.

As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible.

“We’re probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder,” said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. “We’ve given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace,” he said.

Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically.

“This is one of many dimensions on which we’ll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control.”

China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world’s Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.

By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.

The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.

Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.

“The U.S. telecommunications firms haven’t invested,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. “The rest of the world has caught up. I don’t see the AT&T’s and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity.”

    Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S., NYT, 30.8.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html

 

 

 

 

 

As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll

 

July 6, 2008
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

 

SAN FRANCISCO — Alex Payne, a 24-year-old Internet engineer here, has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital age: Is my favorite Web site working today?

In March, Mr. Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, “Down for everyone, or just me?” It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether the problem is with their own connection.

“I had seen that question posed so often,” said Mr. Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging and social networking site that is itself known for frequent downtime. “Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true.”

There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, have all suffered embarrassing technical problems in the last few months.

About a month ago, a sudden surge of visitors to Mr. Payne’s site began asking about the normally impervious Amazon. That site was ultimately down for several hours over two business days, and Amazon, by some estimates, lost more than a million dollars an hour in sales.

The Web, like any technology or medium, has always been susceptible to unforeseen hiccups. Particularly in the early days of the Web, sites like eBay and Schwab.com regularly went dark.

But since fewer people used the Internet back then, the stakes were much lower. Now the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it.

Companies like Google want us to store not just e-mail online but also spreadsheets, photo albums, sales data and nearly every other piece of personal and professional information. That data is supposed to be more accessible than information tucked away in the office computer or filing cabinet.

The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available around the clock — and even the Internet’s biggest companies sometimes have trouble making that happen.

Last holiday season, Yahoo’s system for Internet retailers, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, went dark for 14 hours, taking down thousands of e-commerce companies on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In February, certain Amazon services that power the sites of many Web start-up companies had a day of intermittent failures, knocking many of those companies offline.

The causes of these problems range widely: it might be system upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong button) or even just old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month, an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the Internet for up to five days.

“It was prolonged torture,” said Grant Burhans, a Web entrepreneur from Florida whose telecommunications- and real-estate-related Web sites were down for four days, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business.

Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective about broken promises and interrupted routines.

The volatile emotions around Web downtime are perhaps most prevalent in the discussion around Twitter, on which users post updates on who they are with, where they are, and what they are doing.

According to Pingdom, a Web monitoring firm, Twitter was down for 37 hours this year through April — by far more than any other major social networking Web site.

Instead of simply dumping the service and moving on with their lives, Twitter users have responded with an endless stream of rancor, creating “Is Twitter Down?” T-shirts, blog rants and YouTube parodies, and posting copies of Twitter’s various artfully designed error messages.

“This is a free service. It’s not like anyone’s life is depending on Twitter,” said Laura Fitton, a consultant and self-described passionate Twitter user.

“Twitter is all about the things we discover we have in common, so right there, Twitter failing is a huge thing we have in common,” she said. “It’s fun to complain to each other and commiserate.”

Twitter has said its downtime is the result of rapidly growing demand and fundamental mistakes in its original architecture.

Jesse Robbins, a former Amazon executive who was responsible for keeping Amazon online from 2004 to 2006, says the outcries over failures are understandable.

“When these sites go away, it’s a sudden loss. It’s like you are standing in the middle of Macy’s and the power goes out,” he said. “When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it’s trauma.”

He says Web services should be held to the same standard of reliability as the older services they aim to replace. “These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won’t suddenly collapse.”

By some measures, despite the high-profile failures, the Internet is performing better than ever.

“There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around the world,” said Umang Gupta, chief executive of Keynote Systems, which monitors companies’ Web performance. “These big high-visibility problems are actually very rare.”

But perhaps they are not rare enough. One morning last month, Google App Engine, a service that lets people run interactive Web applications, was unavailable for several hours.

Among those affected was Mr. Payne, who had just shifted downforeveryoneorjustme.com over to Google’s servers. It was inaccessible as well.

    As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll, NYT, 6.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/technology/06outage.html

 

 

 

 

 

Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing

 

April 16, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

 

SAN FRANCISCO — An e-mail scam aimed squarely at the nation’s top executives is raising new alarms about the ease with which people and companies can be deceived by online criminals.

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

Another piece of the software allows the computer to be controlled remotely. According to researchers who have analyzed the downloaded file, less than 40 percent of commercial antivirus programs were able to recognize and intercept the attack.

The tactic of aiming at the rich and powerful with an online scam is referred to by computer security experts as whaling. The term is a play on phishing, an approach that usually involves tricking e-mail users — in this case the big fish — into divulging personal information like credit card numbers. Phishing attacks that are directed at a particular person, rather than blasted out to millions, are also known as spear phishing.

The latest campaign has been widespread enough that two California federal courts and the administrative office of the United States Courts posted warnings about the fake messages on their Web sites. Federal officials said they stopped counting after getting hundreds of phone calls from corporations about the messages. At midday on Tuesday, one antispam company, MX Logic, said in a Web posting that its service was still seeing at least 30 of the messages an hour.

Security researchers at several firms indicated they believed there had been at least several thousand victims of the attack whose computers had been compromised.

“We have seen about 2,000 victims, more or less,” said John Bambenek, a security researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a volunteer at the Internet Storm Center, a network security organization.

Researchers were studying a list of the Internet addresses of infected computers that iDefense Labs, a research unit of VeriSign, had assembled by monitoring network traffic.

Personalized scam messages have been on the radar of security researchers and law enforcement officials for several years, but the latest variant is a fresh indication of the threat posed by such digital ruses.

“I think that it was well done in terms of something people would feel compelled to respond to,” said Steve Kirsch, the chief executive of Abaca, an antispam company based in San Jose, Calif.

Mr. Kirsch himself received a copy of the message and forwarded it to the company lawyer. “It had my name, phone number, company and correct e-mail address on it and looked pretty legitimate,” Mr. Kirsch said. “Even the U.R.L. to find out more looked legitimate at first glance.”

When the lawyer tried to download a copy of the subpoena and the computer restarted itself, they quickly realized that the file contained malicious software.

Several computer security researchers said that the attack was the work of a group that tried a similar assault in November 2007. In that case, the e-mail message appeared to come from the Justice Department and stated that a complaint had been filed against the recipient’s company.

The software used in the latest attack tries to communicate with a computer in Singapore. That system was still functioning on Tuesday evening, but security researchers said many Internet service providers had blocked access to it.

A number of clues, like misspellings, in the fake subpoena led several researchers to believe that the attackers were not familiar with the United States court system and that the group might be based in a place that used a British variant of English, such as Hong Kong.

“This is probably Chinese-based,” said Mr. Bambenek. “If all the key players are in China there is not much the F.B.I. can do.”

Several security researchers said that the real danger of the attack lay in a second level of deception, after the hidden software provided the attackers with digital credentials like passwords and electronic certificates.

“There are very subtle nuances to their attacks that are well known in the financial industry but are not well publicized,” said Matt Richard, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefense.

Mr. Richard said the criminals were going after a particular area of the financial industry, but he would not elaborate. He said that law enforcement officials were investigating the fraudulent documents.

Calls to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for comment were not returned.

Although the software package used to deliver the eavesdropping program is well known, it was hidden in such a way that it avoided detection by commercial programs in many cases, researchers said.

“This is pretty well-known code,” said Don Jackson, a researcher at SecureWorks, a computer security firm. “The issue has to do with repacking it.”

Recipients of the e-mail messages are directed to a fraudulent Web site with a copy of the graphics from the real federal court site. They are then asked to download and install what is said to be a piece of software from Adobe that is used to view electronic documents.

“There are several layers of social engineering involved here,” said Mike Haro, a spokesman for Sophos, a company that sells software to protect against malicious software and spam.

    Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing, NYT, 16.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/technology/16whale.html

 

 

 

 

 

To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You

 

March 10, 2008
The New York Times
By LOUISE STORY

 

A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 showed two dogs at a computer, with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

That may no longer be true.

A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.

These companies use that information to predict what content and advertisements people most likely want to see. They can charge steep prices for carefully tailored ads because of their high response rates.

The analysis, conducted for The New York Times by the research firm comScore, provides what advertising executives say is the first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies.

Privacy advocates have previously sounded alarms about the practices of Internet companies and provided vague estimates about the volume of data they collect, but they did not give comprehensive figures.

The Web companies are, in effect, taking the trail of crumbs people leave behind as they move around the Internet, and then analyzing them to anticipate people’s next steps. So anybody who searches for information on such disparate topics as iron supplements, airlines, hotels and soft drinks may see ads for those products and services later on.

Consumers have not complained to any great extent about data collection online. But privacy experts say that is because the collection is invisible to them. Unlike Facebook’s Beacon program, which stirred controversy last year when it broadcast its members’ purchases to their online friends, most companies do not flash a notice on the screen when they collect data about visitors to their sites.

“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”

But executives from the largest Web companies say that privacy fears are misplaced, and that they have policies in place to protect consumers’ names and other personal information from advertisers. Moreover, they say, the data is a boon to consumers, because it makes the ads they see more relevant.

These companies often connect consumer data to unique codes identifying their computers, rather than their names.

“What is targeting in the long term?” said Michael Galgon, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist. “You’re getting content about things and messaging about things that are spot-on to who you are.”

The rich troves of data at the fingertips of the biggest Internet companies are also creating a new kind of digital divide within the industry. Traditional media companies, which collect far less data about visitors to their sites, are increasingly at a disadvantage when they compete for ad dollars.

The major television networks and magazine and newspaper companies “aren’t even in the same league,” said Linda Abraham, an executive vice president at comScore. “They can’t really play in this sandbox.”

During the Internet’s short life, most people have used a yardstick from traditional media to measure success: audience size. Like magazines and newspapers, Web sites are most often ranked based on how many people visit them and how long they are there.

But on the Internet, advertisers are increasingly choosing where to place their ads based on how much sites know about Web surfers. ComScore’s analysis is a novel attempt to estimate how many times major Web companies can collect data about their users in a given month.

Web companies once could monitor the actions of consumers only on their own sites. But over the last couple of years, the Internet giants have spread their reach by acting as intermediaries that place ads on thousands of Web sites, and now can follow people’s activities on far more sites.

Large Web companies like Microsoft and Yahoo have also acquired a number of companies in the last year that have rich consumer data.

“So many of the deals are really about data,” said David Verklin, chief executive of Carat Americas, an ad agency in the Aegis Group that decides where to place ads for clients.

“Everyone feels that if we can get more data, we could put ads in front of people who are interested in them,” he said. “That’s the whole idea here: put dog food ads in front of people who have dogs.”

Web companies also can collect more data as people spend more time online. The number of searches that American Web users enter each month has nearly doubled since summer of 2006, to 14.6 billion searches in January, according to comScore.

ComScore analyzed 15 major media companies’ potential to collect online data in December. The analysis captured how many searches, display ads, videos and page views occurred on those sites and estimated the number of ads shown in their ad networks.

These actions represented “data transmission events” — times when consumer data was zapped back to the Web companies’ servers. Five large Web operations — Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace — record at least 336 billion transmission events in a month, not counting their ad networks.

The methodology was worked out with comScore and based on the advice of senior online advertising executives at two of the largest Internet companies.

“I think it’s a reasonable way to look at how many touch-points companies have with their consumers,” Jules Polonetsky, the chief privacy officer for AOL, said of the comScore findings on Friday.

But Mr. Polonetsky cautions that not all of the data at every company is used together. Much of it is stored separately.

The information transmitted might include the person’s ZIP code, a search for anything from vacation information to celebrity gossip, or a purchase of prescription drugs or other intimate items. Some types of data, like search queries, tends to be more valuable than others.

Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites — about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.

MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, and AOL, a unit of Time Warner, were not far behind.

ComScore said it recorded the ad networks using different methods and that the exact ordering of these top companies might vary with a different methodology, but the overall picture would be similar.

Google also has scores of data collection events, but the company says it is unique in that it mostly uses only current information rather than past actions to select ads.

The depth of Yahoo’s database goes far in explaining why AOL is talking with Yahoo about a merger and Microsoft is willing to pay more than $41.2 billion to acquire the company.

Traditional media companies come in far behind.

Condé Nast magazine sites, for example, have only 34 data collection events for the average site visitor each month. The numbers for other traditional media companies, as generated by comScore, were 45 for The New York Times Company; 49 for another newspaper company, the McClatchy Corporation; and 64 for the Walt Disney Company.

Some companies are trying to close the gap. Walt Disney, for example, is studying how to combine data from its divisions like ESPN, Disney and ABC. The News Corporation is exploring ways to use information that MySpace members post on that site to select ads for those members when they visit other News Corporation sites.

IAC is using data from its LendingTree site to deliver ads on its other sites to people it knows are looking for mortgages.

Some advertising executives say media companies will have little choice but to outsource their ad sales to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to benefit from their data. The Web companies may prove they can use their algorithms and consumer information to better select which ads for visitors better than media companies can.

“I think a lot of publishers are going to find they don’t have enough data,” said David W. Kenny, chief executive of Digitas, a digital advertising agency in the Publicis Groupe. “There’s only going to be a handful of big players who can manage the data.”

People who spend more time on the Internet, of course, will have more information transmitted about them. The comScore per-person figures are averages; occasional Web users have far less transmitted about them.

The comScore figures do not include the data that consumers offer voluntarily when registering for sites or e-mail services. When consumers do so, they often give sites permission to link some of their interests or searches to their user name.

The figures also do not account for information people enter on social network pages. MySpace, for example, collects billions of user actions each day in the form of blogs, comments and profile updates, said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace.

Even with all the data Web companies have, they are finding ways to obtain more. The giant Internet portals have been buying ad-delivery companies like DoubleClick and Atlas, which have stockpiles of information. Atlas, for example, delivers 6 billion ads every day. The comScore figures do not capture such data.

Executives from Web companies said they had been working to inform consumers on their data practices.

These companies noted their consumer-protection policies. AOL, for example, lets users opt out of some ad targeting, Google lets users edit the search histories that are linked to their user names, Yahoo is working on a policy to obscure people’s computer identification addresses that are connected to search results, and Microsoft says it does not link any of its visitors’ behavior to their user names, even if those people are registered.

A study of California adults last year found that 85 percent thought sites should not be allowed to track their behavior around the Web to show them ads, according to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley, which conducted the study.

    To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You, NYT, 10.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10privacy.html?hp

 

 

 

 

 

Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web

 

February 25, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

 

SAN FRANCISCO — On sabbatical in 2001 from Macromedia, Kevin Lynch, a software developer, was frustrated that he could not get to his Web data when he was off the Internet and annoyed that he could not get to his PC data when he was traveling.

Why couldn’t he have access to all his information, like movie schedules and word processing documents, in one place?

He hit upon an idea that he called “Kevincloud” and mocked up a quick demonstration of the idea for executives at Macromedia, a software development tools company. It took data stored on the Internet and used it interchangeably with information on a PC’s hard drive. Kevincloud also blurred the line between Internet and PC applications.

Seven years later, his brainchild is about to come into focus on millions of PCs. On Monday, Mr. Lynch, who was recently named the chief technology officer at Adobe Systems, which bought Macromedia in 2005, will release the official version of AIR, a software development system that will power potentially tens of thousands of applications that merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.

Adobe sees AIR as a major advance that builds on its Flash multimedia software. Flash is the engine behind Web animations, e-commerce sites and many streaming videos. It is, the company says, the most ubiquitous software on earth, residing on almost all Internet-connected personal computers.

But most people may never know AIR is there. Applications will look and run the same whether the user is at his desk or his portable computer, and soon when using a mobile device or at an Internet kiosk. Applications will increasingly be built with routine access to all the Web’s information, and a user’s files will be accessible whether at home or traveling.

AIR is intended to help software developers create applications that exist in part on a user’s PC or smartphone and in part on servers reachable through the Internet.

To computer users, the applications will look like any others on their device, represented by an icon. The AIR applications can mimic the functions of a Web browser but do not require a Web browser to run.

The first commercial release of AIR takes place on Monday, but dozens of applications have been built around a test or beta version.

EBay offers an AIR-based application called eBay Desktop that gives its customers the power to buy wherever they are. Adobe uses AIR for Buzzword, an online word processing program. At Monday’s introduction event in San Francisco, new hybrid applications from companies including Salesforce, FedEx, eBay, Nickelodeon, Nasdaq, AOL and The New York Times Company will be demonstrated.

Like Adobe’s Flash software, AIR will be given away. The company makes its money selling software development kits to programmers.

Mr. Lynch and a rapidly growing number of industry executives and technologists believe that the model represents the future of computing.

Moreover, the move away from PC-based applications is likely to get a significant jump start in the coming weeks when Intel introduces its low-cost “Netbook” computer strategy, which is intended to unleash a new wave of inexpensive wireless connected mobile computers.

The new machines will have a relatively small amount of solid state disk storage capacity and will increasingly rely on data stored on Internet servers.

“There is a big cloud movement that is building an infrastructure that speaks directly to this kind of software and experience,” said Sean M. Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president.

Adobe faces stiff competition from a number of big and small companies with the same idea. Many small developers like OpenLazlo and Xcerion are creating “Web-top” or “Web operating systems” intended to move applications and data off the PC desktop and into the Internet through the Web browser.

Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox Web browser, has created a system known as Prism. Sun Microsystems introduced JavaFX this year, which is also aimed at blurring the Web-desktop line. Google is testing a system called Gears, which is intended to allow some Web services to work on computers that are not connected to the Internet.

Finally, there is Microsoft. It is pushing its competitor to Flash, called Silverlight. Three years ago, Microsoft hired one of Mr. Lynch’s crucial software developers at Macromedia, Brad Becker, to help create it. Mr. Becker was a leading designer of the Flash programming language.

The blurring of Web and desktop applications and PC and phone applications is further encouraged by the cellphone industry’s race to catch up with Apple’s iPhone. The industry is focusing on smartphones, or what Sanjay K. Jha, the chief operating officer of Qualcomm, calls “pocketable computing.”

“We need to deliver an experience that is like the PC desktop,” he said. “At the same time, people are used to the Internet and you can’t shortchange them.”

Much software will have to be rewritten for the new devices, in what Mr. Lynch said is the most significant change for the software industry since the introduction in the 1980s of software that can be run through clicking icons rather than typing in codes. This upheaval pits the world’s largest software developer groups against one another in a battle for the new hybrid software applications. Industry analysts say there are now about 1.2 billion Internet-connected personal computers. Market researchers peg the number of smartphones sold in 2007 at 123 million, but that market is growing rapidly.

“There is a proliferation of platforms,” Mr. Lynch said. “This is a battle for the hearts and minds of people who are building things.”

The battle will largely pit Microsoft’s 2.2 million .Net software developers against the more than one million Adobe Flash developers, who have until now developed principally for the Web, as well as a vast number of other Web-oriented designers who use open-source software development tools that are referred to as AJAX.

Microsoft executives said they thought the company would have an advantage because Silverlight has a more sophisticated security model. “Desktop integration is a mixed blessing. There is potentially a gaping security hole,” said Microsoft’s Mr. Becker. “We’ve learned at the school of hard knocks about security.”

Microsoft’s competitors challenge its intent and assert that its goal is retaining its desktop monopoly. “Microsoft is taking their desktop franchise and trying to move that franchise to the Web,” said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla. He faults the design of Silverlight for being an island that is not truly integrated with the Internet.

“You get this rectangle in a Web browser and it can’t interact with the rest of the Web,” he said.

He said Mozilla’s Prism offers a simple alternative to capitalize on the explosion of creative software development taking place on the Internet. “There are jillions of applications. A million more got launched today. The whole world is collaborating on this.”

Up to now, it has been a low-level war between Microsoft and Adobe. Silverlight, for instance, got high marks from developers for its ability to handle high resolution video, but Adobe quickly upgraded Flash last year in response.

“We said, ‘Let’s put this in right now,’ ” Mr. Lynch said. With revenue last year of $3.16 billion, Adobe is large enough to fight Microsoft.

Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, Acrobat and other software, also has a strong reputation as a maker of tools for the creative class. "We’re one of the best tool makers in the world," said Mr. Lynch, who worked on software design at MicroPro, the publishers of the Wordstar word processor, and at General Magic, an ill-fated effort to create what could be called a predecessor to today’s smartphones, before joining Macromedia.

“Adobe’s known for its designer tools, but they realize that development — for the browser, for the desktop, and for devices such as cellphones — is a huge growth market,” said Steve Weiss, executive editor at O’Reilly Media, a technology publishing firm.

    Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web, NYT, 25.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/technology/25adobe.html

 

 

 

 

 

Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce

 

September 15, 2007
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

 

The age-old business of breaking up has taken a decidedly Orwellian turn, with digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases.

Spurned lovers steal each other’s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other’s e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities.

Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients’ adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.

“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. “It has completely changed our field.”

Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples’ lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.

“Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don’t really care about you,” said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. “No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you.”

Most of these stories do not end amicably. This year, a technology consultant from the Philadelphia area, who did not want his name used because he has a teenage son, strongly suspected his wife was having an affair. Instead of confronting her, the husband installed a $49 program called PC Pandora on her computer, a laptop he had purchased.

The program surreptitiously took snapshots of her screen every 15 seconds and e-mailed them to him. Soon he had a comprehensive overview of the sites she visited and the instant messages she was sending. Since the program captured her passwords, the husband was also able to get access to and print all the e-mail messages his wife had received and sent over the previous year.

What he discovered ended his marriage. For 11 months, he said, she had been seeing another man — the parent of one of their son’s classmates at a private school outside Philadelphia. The husband said they were not only arranging meetings but also posting explicit photos of themselves on the Web and soliciting sex with other couples.

The husband, who like others in this article was reached through his lawyer, said the decision to invade his wife’s privacy was not an easy one. “If I were to tell you I have a pure ethical conscience over what I did, I’d be lying,” he said. But he also pointed to companies that have Internet policies giving them the right to read employee e-mail messages. “When you’re in a relationship like a marriage, which is emotional as well as, candidly, a business, I think you can look at it in the same way,” he said.

When considering invading their spouse’s privacy, husbands and wives cite an overriding desire to find out some secret. One woman described sensing last year that her husband, a Manhattan surgeon, was distant and overly obsessed with his BlackBerry.

She drew him a bubble bath on his birthday and then pounced on the device while he was in the tub. In his e-mail messages, she found evidence of an affair with a medical resident, including plans for them to meet that night.

A few weeks later, after the couple had tried to reconcile, the woman gained access to her husband’s America Online account (he had shared his password with her) and found messages from a mortgage company. It turned out he had purchased a $3 million Manhattan condominium, where he intended to continue his liaison.

“Every single time I looked at his e-mail I felt nervous,” the woman said. “But I did anyway because I wanted to know the truth.”

Being on the receiving end of electronic spying can be particularly disturbing. Jolene Barten-Bolender, a 45-year-old mother of three who lives in Dix Hills, N.Y., said that she was recently informed by AOL and Google, on the same day, that the passwords had been changed on two e-mail accounts she was using, suggesting that someone had gained access and was reading her messages. Last year, she discovered a Global Positioning System, or G.P.S., tracking device in a wheel well of the family car.

She suspects her husband of 24 years, whom she is divorcing.

“It makes me feel nauseous and totally violated,” Ms. Barten-Bolender said, speculating that he was trying to find out if she was seeing anyone. “Once anything is written down, you have to know it could be viewed by someone looking to invade or hurt you.”

Ms. Barten-Bolender’s husband and his lawyer declined to discuss her allegations.

Divorce lawyers say their files are filled with cases like these. Three-quarters of the cases of Nancy Chemtob, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, now involve some kind of electronic communications. She says she routinely asks judges for court orders to seize and copy the hard drives in the computers of her clients’ spouses, particularly if there is an opportunity to glimpse a couple’s full financial picture, or a parent’s suitability to be the custodian of the children.

Lawyers must navigate a complex legal landscape governing the admissibility of this kind of electronic evidence. Different laws define when it is illegal to get access to information stored on a computer in the home, log into someone else’s e-mail account, or listen in on phone calls.

Divorce lawyers say, however, if the computer in question is shared by the whole family, or couples have revealed their passwords to each other, reading a spouse’s e-mail messages and introducing them as evidence in a divorce case is often allowed.

Lynne Z. Gold-Bikin, a Pennsylvania divorce lawyer, describes one client, a man, who believed his wife was engaging in secret online correspondence. He found e-mail messages to a lover in Australia that she had sent from a private AOL account on the family computer. Her lawyer then challenged the use of this evidence in court. Ms. Gold-Bikin’s client won the dispute and an advantageous settlement.

Lawyers say the only communications that are consistently protected in a spouse’s private e-mail account are the messages to and from the lawyers themselves, which are covered by lawyer-client privilege.

Perhaps for this reason, divorce lawyers as a group are among the most pessimistic when it comes to assessing the overall state of privacy in the digital age.

“I do not like to put things on e-mail,” said David Levy, a Chicago divorce lawyer. “There’s no way it’s private. Nothing is fully protected once you hit the send button.”

Ms. Chemtob added, “People have an expectation of privacy that is completely unrealistic.”

James Mulvaney agrees. A private investigator, Mr. Mulvaney now devotes much of his time to poking through the computer records of divorcing spouses, on behalf of divorce lawyers. One of his specialties is retrieving files, like bank records and e-mail messages to secret lovers, that a spouse has tried to delete.

“Every keystroke on your computer is there, forever and ever,” Mr. Mulvaney said.

He had one bit of advice. “The only thing you can truly erase these things with is a specialty Smith & Wesson product,” he said. “Throw your computer into the air and play skeet with it.”

    Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15divorce.html

 

 

 

 

 

Camera Phone Maker Mulls Gadget's Impact

 

May 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:47 a.m. ET
The New York Times

 

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (AP) -- The chilling sounds of gunfire on the Virginia Tech campus; the hateful taunts from Saddam Hussein's execution; the racist tirade of comedian Michael Richards.

Those videos, all shot with cell phone cameras and seen by millions, are just a few recent examples of the power now at the fingertips of the masses. Even the man widely credited with inventing the camera phone in 1997 is awed by the cultural revolution he helped launch.

''It's had a massive impact because it's just so convenient,'' said Philippe Kahn, a tech industry maverick whose other pioneering efforts include the founding of software maker Borland, an early Microsoft Corp. antagonist.

''There's always a way to capture memories and share it,'' he said. ''You go to a restaurant, and there's a birthday and suddenly everyone is getting their camera phones out. It's amazing.''

If Kahn feels a bit like a proud father when he sees people holding up their cell phones to snap pictures, there's good reason: He jury-rigged the first camera phone while his wife was in labor with their daughter.

''We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends,'' Kahn said, ''and there was no easy way to do it.''

So as he sat in a maternity ward, he wrote a crude program on his laptop and sent an assistant to a RadioShack store to get a soldering iron, capacitors and other supplies to wire his digital camera to his cell phone. When Sophie was born, he sent her photo over a cellular connection to acquaintances around the globe.

A decade later, 41 percent of American households own a camera phone ''and you can hardly find a phone without a camera anymore,'' said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.

Market researcher Gartner Inc. predicts that about 589 million cell phones will be sold with cameras in 2007, increasing to more than 1 billion worldwide by 2010.

Mix in the Internet's vast reach and the growth of the YouTube generation, and the ubiquitous gadget's influence only deepens and gets more complicated. So much so that the watchful eyes on all of us may no longer just be those of Big Brother.

''For the past decade, we've been under surveillance under these big black and white cameras on buildings and at 7-Eleven stores. But the candid camera is wielded by individuals now,'' said Fred Turner, an assistant professor of communications at Stanford University who specializes in digital media and culture.

The contraption Kahn assembled in a Santa Cruz labor-and-delivery room in 1997 has evolved into a pocket-friendly phenomenon that has empowered both citizen journalists and personal paparazzi.

It has prompted lawsuits -- a student sued campus police at UCLA for alleged excessive force after officers were caught on cell-phone video using a stun gun during his arrest; and been a catalyst for change -- a government inquiry into police practices ensued in Malaysia after a cell-phone video revealed a woman detainee being forced to do squats while naked.

On another scale, parents use cell-phone slideshows -- not wallet photos -- to show off pictures of their children, while adolescents document their rites of passage with cell phone cameras and instantly share the images.

One of the recipients of Kahn's seminal photo e-mail was veteran technology consultant Andy Seybold, who recalled being ''blown away'' by the picture.

''The fact that it got sent wirelessly on the networks those days -- that was an amazing feat,'' Seybold said.

Kahn's makeshift photo-communications system formed the basis for a new company, LightSurf Technologies, which he later sold to VeriSign Inc. LightSurf built ''PictureMail'' software and worked with cell phone makers to integrate the wireless photo technology.

Sharp Corp. was the first to sell a commercial cell phone with a camera in Japan in 2000. Camera phones didn't debut in the U.S. until 2002, Kahn said.

Though Kahn's work revolved around transmitting only digital still photographs -- video-related developments were created by others in the imaging and chip industries -- his groundbreaking implementation of the instant-sharing via a cell phone planted a seed.

''He facilitated people putting cameras in a phone, and he proved that you can take a photo and send it to someone with a cell phone,'' Seybold said.

Kahn, 55, is well aware of how the camera phone has since been put to negative uses: sneaky shots up women's skirts, or the violent trend of ''happy slapping'' in Europe where youths provoke a fight or assault, capture the incident on camera and then spread the images on the Web or between mobile phones.

But he likes to focus on the technology's benefits. It's been a handy tool that has led to vindication for victims or validation for vigilantes.

As Kahn heard the smattering of stories in recent years about assailants scared off by a camera phone or criminals who were nabbed later because their faces or their license plates were captured on the gadget, he said, ''I started feeling it was better than carrying a gun.''

And though he found the camera-phone video of the former Iraqi dictator's execution disturbing, Kahn said the gadget helped ''get the truth out.'' The unofficial footage surreptitiously taken by a guard was vastly different from the government-issued version and revealed a chaotic scene with angry exchanges depicting the ongoing problems between the nation's factions.

Kahn also thinks the evolution of the camera phone has only just begun.

He wouldn't discuss details of his newest startup, Fullpower Technologies Inc., which is in stealth mode working on the ''convergence of life sciences and wireless,'' according to its Web site.

But, Kahn said, it will, among other things, ''help make camera phones better.''

    Camera Phone Maker Mulls Gadget's Impact, NYT, 20.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Candid-Camera.html

 

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia a force for good? Nonsense, says a co-founder

 

April 11, 2007
From The Times
Alexandra Frean, Education Editor

 

The founder of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia criticised the Education Secretary yesterday for suggesting that the website could be a good educational tool for children.

Mr Johnson described the internet as “an incredible force for good in education” for teachers and pupils, singling out Wikipedia for praise.

“Wikipedia enables anybody to access information which was once the preserve only of those who could afford the subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica and could spend the time necessary to navigate its maze of indexes and content pages,” he told the annual conference of the National Association of Schoolteachers and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) in Belfast.

But Larry Sanger, who helped to found Wikipedia in 2001, said that the site was “broken beyond repair” and no longer reliable.

Wikipedia is among the top ten most visited sites on the internet, containing more than six million articles contributed only by members of the public. But it has been criticised for being riddled with inaccuracies and nonsense.

Last month it was revealed that a prominent and long-standing Wikipedia contributor had lied about his identity, having claimed to be a tenured university professor, when he was in fact a 24-year-old college drop-out.

Concerned about the website’s integrity, Mr Sanger left Wikipedia, and two weeks ago launched an online encyclopaedia called Citizendium.org, which he said would be monitored and edited by academics and experts as well as accepting public contributions.

He told The Times: “I’m afraid that Mr Johnson does not realise the many problems afflicting Wikipedia, from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals. While Wikipedia is still quite useful and an amazing phenomenon, I have come to the view that it is also broken beyond repair.”

Nick Gibb, the Tory schools spokesman, said: “A huge amount of the current curriculum, particularly in history, is devoted to teaching children to be discerning when it comes to information on the internet.

“It appears the Secretary of State is not quite as modern as he needs to be in this information age.”

Mr Johnson also used his speech to call on social networking websites to stop pupils posting inappropriate videos of and abusive comments about their teachers on the internet.

In one case a female teacher’s head was superimposed on to a pornographic photograph.

Mr Johnson said that the online harassment of teachers was causing some to consider leaving the profession. He called on the providers of websites to take firmer action to block or remove offensive school material, in the same way that they have cut pornographic content.

However, Chris Keates, the union’s general secretary, told Mr Johnson that his call was likely to have little impact.

    Wikipedia a force for good? Nonsense, says a co-founder, Ts, 11.4.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article1637535.ece

 

 

 

 

 

History 1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry

 

March 23, 2007
From The Times
Ben Macintyre

 

We know what was written in the first telegram, sent by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844: “What hath God wrought?” We know the words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell when he made the first telephone call in 1876, to his assistant, Thomas Watson: “Mr Watson — come here — I want to see you.” (The “polite telephone manner” had not yet been invented.) But we have absolutely no idea what was said in the first e-mail, just 35 years ago.

The digital age brought with it the false promise that everything written, filmed, photographed or recorded might now be preserved, for ever. The “save” key would eliminate the need for filing and storage. Since 1945 we have gathered 100 times more information than in the whole of human history up until that point. Entire libraries could be preserved on disks that fitted into a pocket. Paper was dead.

It has not quite worked out that way. Digital information may be impossibly voluminous and convenient, but it is also vulnerable and dangerously disposable. Already a vast amount of information has been lost. CDs disintegrate in just 20 years, whereas the Domesday Book, written on sheepskin in 1086, will still be with us in another millennium. Few people still write regular letters, but their replacement, the ubiquitous e-mail, is so easily deleted and forgotten, to say nothing of the fleeting text message.

Technology has already left behind the forms of electronic storage once expected to be eternal: the laser disk, the 5¼in, the 3.5in floppy, the Amstrad all-in-one word processor have all been flung into obsolescence, often taking their information with them. Only a small fraction of government bodies and companies even bother to archive their digital material. Who, save the most fastidious self-chronicler, takes the trouble to embalm their own e-mails electronically? Historians of the future may look back on the 1980s and 1990s as a black hole in the collective memory, a time when the historical record thinned alarmingly owing to the pace of technological change. Future biographers may be reduced to trying to extract personality from whatever electronic fragments survive, cheque stubs and those few ritual moments (birth, death and overdraft) when a subject still puts pen to paper.

I have recently spent many hours in the National Archives, ferreting through the wartime records of MI5.

The sheer richness of written material is overwhelming: letters, memos, telephone transcripts, diaries, scribbled notes in the margins. You can smell the pipe smoke and personalities wafting off the pages.

When MI5’s current files are released decades hence, historians will have a far drier time of it. Electronic messages not deemed to be of “archival” value are routinely deleted by civil servants, simply as an insurance policy — significant or potentially damaging information is strictly verbal, particularly since Jo Moore’s attempt to “bury bad news” by e-mail.

Arguably, the most important and reliable real-time histories of places such as Iraq and Iran are currently being written on weblogs, the online journals and discussion forums that are, by definition, mutable and impermanent. A historian 50 years hence would probably get the most accurate picture of life in Baghdad today by collecting and studying the blogs of the moment, but it may already be too late. The average life expectancy of a website is about 44 days, roughly the same as the common house fly.

Just as importantly, by committing to erasable electronic memory the things we once committed to paper, we may be denying future generations the chance to witness the warp and weft of our lives. Our ancestors were writers and hoarders. I have a collection of my grandfather’s letters in the attic, describing the life of a sheep farmer in New South Wales in the 1930s. They are of interest, I suspect, to no one but me, but to me they are invaluable, a chronicle of where I come from. What will we bequeath to our grandchildren? At best a bunch of antiquated disks that they may well be unable to open and read.

Anyone (with a magnifying glass and patience) can read letters, but there is a real danger that technology will leave much of the electronically written record marooned and illegible. The BBC’s Doomsday Project of 1986, intended to record the economic, social and cultural state of Britain for all time, was recorded on two 12in videodisks. By 2000 it was obsolete, and rescued only thanks to a specialist team working with a single surviving laser disk player.

When Nasa sent two Viking Lander spacecraft to Mars in 1975, the data was carefully recorded on magnetic tape. Two decades later, no one could decode it. The original printouts had be tracked down, and typed out again on paper.

And that, ironic as it seems, may be the answer. The Digital Preservation Coalition, a group encouraging governments, businesses and individuals to curate and preserve electronic information, recently published a report stating that “storage of printed copies of important documents is generally accepted as a reasonably failsafe method of preservation”.

This, then, is a plea for paper. So long as it is stored properly and acid-free, paper endures. Leave the ephemera to the electronic ether, but if you value certain words and images, preserve them on paper. The “print” button is a more faithful saviour than the “save” button.

Before the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson sent his message to the fleet by raising flags using Sir Home Popham’s telegraphic code (a rather newfangled form of communication, which not everyone approved of) — whereupon the words were written down for posterity, on paper.

Today the same message would probably be sent by text — instant, easy, and instantly perishable: “UK xpx dat evry man wll do his duT.”

    History 1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry, Ts, 23.3.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article1555570.ece

 

 

 

 

 

Man jailed for Britain's first "web-rage" attack

 

Fri Nov 17, 2006
10:26 AM ET
Reuters

 

LONDON (Reuters) - A British man convicted of what has been described as the country's first "web-rage" attack, was jailed for 2-1/2 years on Friday for assaulting a man he had exchanged insults with over the Internet.

Paul Gibbons, 47, from south London, admitted he had attacked John Jones in December 2005 after months of exchanging abuse with him via an Internet chatroom dedicated to discussing Islam.

The Old Bailey heard that Gibbons had "taken exception" to Jones, 43, after he had made the claim that Gibbons had been "interfering with children".

After several more verbal and written exchanges -- with Jones threatening to track him down and give him a severe beating -- Gibbons and a friend went to his victim's house in Essex, armed with a pickaxe and machete.

Jones himself was armed with a knife but Gibbons took it off him, held it to his throat and "scratched" him across the neck.

Gibbons, who the court heard had previous convictions for violence, admitted unlawful wounding on the first day of his trial last month.

Other charges of attempted murder and issuing online threats to kill four other chatroom users were not pursued but could be reactivated in future if he reoffends.

Media reports said it was the country's first case of "web-rage" and Judge Richard Hawkins described the circumstances as "unusual".

"This case highlights the dangers of Internet chat rooms, particularly with regards to giving personal details that will allow other users to discover home addresses," said Detective Sergeant Jean-Marc Bazzoni of Essex Police.

    Man jailed for Britain's first "web-rage" attack, R, 17.11.2006,http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-11-17T152625Z_01_L17720855_RTRUKOC_0_US-BRITAIN-WEBRAGE.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-technologyNews-3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related

 

Anglonautes > Vocabulary / Encyclopaedia > Internet > Social networking

Anglonautes > Vocabulary / Encyclopaedia > Advertising

Anglonautes > Vocabulary / Encyclopaedia  > Video games

Vocabulaire / Encyclopédie > Ordinateur

Vocabulaire / Encyclopédie > Média

Vocabulaire / Encyclopédie > Musique

Vocabulaire / Encyclopédie > Violence

The Guardian > Special Report > WWW
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/0,3147,782450,00.html

The New York Times > Technology
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/index.html

 

 

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