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Friday, November 30, 2012

Today\'s Scuttlebot: Syria\'s Blackout, and Calvin and Hobbes

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. Friday's selection includes the last typewriter produced in Britain, Staples offering to a 3-D printing service in Europe and analyses of the Syrian internet disruption.

Iranian Channel Reports Bomb Outside Its Office in Damascus

Iran's state-owned satellite channel Press TV reports that a bomb destroyed six vehicles, including a satellite news truck near the broadcaster's office in Damascus early on Friday.

Video posted on a YouTube account associated with Hussein Mortada, a Lebanese supporter of the Syrian government who directs coverage of Syria for Press TV and the Iranian government's Arabic-language satellite channel, Al Alam, was said to capture the blast. The surveillance-camera video is quite dark but, according to Press TV, the bombing took place just “after a man was caught on camera sticking something to a car.”

Video said to show an explosion in Damascus early on Friday outside the office of an Iranian satellite channel.

A second video clip posted on the same YouTube account on Friday, despite reports that the Internet remains down in Syria, appeared to offer a glimpse of a road near the airport in Damascus, and a government checkpoint, with the sounds of fighting in the distance. Fighting was reported near the airport on Thursday.

Video said to show a road near the airport in Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Friday.



Study May Offer Insight Into Coca-Cola Breach

Spend enough time with cybersecurity experts and chances are you will hear some variation of this line: There are two types of companies in the United States, those that have been hacked and those that don't yet know they've been hacked.

Government intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists say hackers - predominantly from China - are siphoning gigabytes, if not terabytes, of data from companies in the United States every day. We count on much of this information to deliver the innovative products and services that will lead to new jobs and economic growth. The security software company McAfee estimates that in 2008 alone, companies around the world lost more than $1 trillion because of this sort of intellectual property theft.

“I've seen behind the curtain,” Shawn Henry, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.'s former top cyber agent, who recently joined the cybersecurity start-up CrowdStrike, told me in an interview in April. “I can't go int o the particulars because it's classified, but the vast majority of companies have been breached.”

The problem is that such breaches rarely make headlines because companies fear what disclosure will mean for their stock price. Google was the first to try to change that mentality when, in 2010, it went disclosed that it and 34 other companies, many based in Silicon Valley, had been attacked by Chinese hackers. Of those 34, only Intel and Adobe Systems came forward, and they provided few details.

Still, news of some breaches leak out. That was the case, most recently, with Coca-Cola. This month, Bloomberg News reported that Coca-Cola was breached by Chinese hackers in 2009 during a failed $2.4 billion takeover attempt of the China Huiyuan Juice Group. That attempted deal would have been the largest foreign acquisition of a Chinese company.

Now, a 2010 case study published by the Mandiant Corporation, a cybersecurity firm, may offer further details. The stu dy, which does not mention Coca-Cola specifically, details a 2009 breach of a “Fortune 500 Manufacturer” that aligns almost perfectly with Bloomberg's account of Coca-Cola's breach.

According to the study:

In 2009, a U.S. based Fortune 500 manufacturing company initiated discussions to acquire a Chinese corporation. During the negotiations, APT [advanced persistent threat] attackers compromised computers belonging to the executives of the U.S.-based company, most likely in an effort to learn more details of the negotiations. Sensitive data left the company on a weekly basis during negotiations, potentially providing the Chinese company with visibility to pricing and negotiation strategies.

As Bloomberg reported, Mandiant's study said the company gained knowledge of the breach only when law enforcement officials notified it of the intrusion. The study also details how hackers penetrated the company via a so-called spearphishing attack, in which the attackers sent e-mails to certain executives from a fake account ostensibly belonging to the chief executive.

According to Bloomberg, an e-mail containing the subject line: “Save power is save money! (from CEO)” was sent to the e-mail account of Bernhard Goepelt, Coca-Cola's current general counsel. The e-mail contained a malicious link that, once clicked, downloaded malware that gave the attackers full access to Coca-Cola's network.

Mandiant's 2010 report said the e-mail “was crafted to look like it originated from a fellow employee and discussed a message from the CEO on conserving resources.”

Tal Be'ery, a senior Web researcher at Imperva, a data security firm, compared details of the Coca-Cola breach with Mandiant's study and said the two accounts clearly referred to the same company. Executives at Mandiant and media officers at Coca-Cola did not return requests for comment.

If Mandiant's study is, in fact, based on Co ca-Cola, then it offers new insights into the breach. According to the study, once in, hackers used password-stealing software to gain access to other systems on the company's network. They also used the compromised executive's account to launch what is known as an SQL server attack, in which hackers exploit a software vulnerability and enter commands that cause databases to produce their contents.

But one of the most interesting aspects of the breach, according to Mandiant, was how well the attackers had concealed their tracks. According to Mandiant, hackers used so-called stub malware. This is an agile agent whose code can be tweaked by hackers to use it for various functions while leaving a small forensic footprint.

The one discrepancy between the Bloomberg and Mandiant accounts was why, ultimately, the company's acquisition fell apart. According to Bloomberg, Coca-Cola's takeover attempt of China Huiyuan Juice Group was thwarted because China's Ministry of C ommerce rejected it for antitrust reasons. Mandiant's report offered a different take:

The intrusion had a significant impact on the victim organization. As a result of the compromise, the U.S. company terminated their acquisition plans. While it was not possible to determine all the data that had been lost, the victim company was not able to compete the acquisition and accomplish their business objectives.



Reading Egypt\'s Draft Constitution

As my colleagues Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick report from Cairo, Tahrir Square was filled with protesters again on Friday as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi, “galvanized and angered by his unexpected and hurried effort to pass Egypt's new constitution,” returned to the streets.

The Cairene blogger who writes as The Big Pharaoh observed that the square was full, if not as jammed as it had been three days ago, when Egyptians rallied in numbers that recalled the 18 days of protest that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

Video of Tuesday's rally, posted on YouTube by activists from the Mosireen collective, testified to the size and passion of the new protest movement against the Islamist president and the draft constitution app roved by his allies in a constituent assembly packed with his supporters.

Video of Tuesday's protests in Cairo, from the activist film collective Mosireen.

Since the new constitution has to be approved in a referendum, that document is now the focus of intense scrutiny. Hours after it was approved, The Egypt Independent published an English translation of the Arabic text prepared by Nariman Youssef. Ms. Youssef, who describes herself as “a literary translator, wannabe cultural historian and sometimes poet” on her blog, Multivalence, voiced some criticism of the text as she worked.

The BBC produced a very useful side-by-side comparison of important parts of the new document to those in Egypt's previous constitution. Issandr El Amrani, the Cairo-based journalist who blogs as The Arabist, suggested that the comparison was not flattering to the new text.

As the constituent assembly raced to pass the document on Thursday and Friday, in the absence of non-Islamist members who boycotted the proceedings, Heba Morayef, the Human Rights Watch Egypt director, provided a running and quite frequently lacerating commentary on Twitter.

Several of Ms. Morayef's objections were incorporated into an analysis of the draft constitution published by Human Rights Watch on Friday.

The rights group welcomed some parts of the text, but expressed concern about seve ral others.

Human Rights Watch has reviewed Chapter II of the final draft, entitled Rights and Freedoms, and followed the televised session in which the constituent assembly voted on each of these provisions. The rights chapter provides for strong protection against arbitrary detention in article 35 and torture and inhumane treatment in article 36, and for freedom of movement in article 42, privacy of communication in article 38, freedom of assembly in article 50, and of association in article 51. But the latest draft, unlike the earlier version, defers to objections from the country's military leadership and has removed the clear prohibition of trials of civilians before military courts.

Human Rights Watch also identified and explained in detail its concerns over limited guarantees of freedom of expression, freedom of religion and women's rights in the new framework for Egyptian law.

Gehad El-Haddad, a senior adviser to the Muslim Brotherhood and the group's political party, which nominated Mr. Morsi for the presidency earlier this year, sparred with critics, including Ms. Morayef on Twitter.

The author Rawah Badrawi, who lives outside Cairo, observed that the referendum campaign was already underway, at least for Mr. Morsi's allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, and the opposition might need to develop a “ground game” to defeat the draft constitution rather than just focus on street demonstrations.

Evidence that the campaign in favor of the draft constitution has begun was posted online by Egyptian blogger - a photograph of a Muslim Brotherhood flyer, reportedly being passed out in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.

The flyer seeks to undermine a series of objections to the draft constitution, with the help of clip art and answers to what are presented as common misconceptions.

The first panel of the flyer is a response to a voter who says, “I heard that non-Muslims won't be able to take their rights in this country!” The response reads:

What did I hear? Instead of listening to other people, see for yourself. You haven't got the draft - so come here. What is it you are saying? This constitution gave everyone rights that were not there before. Like Article 3, which says that non-Muslims - Christians and Jews - have the right to be governed by their own laws in regards to personal status. And article 27 says that freedom of thought is protected and that the state ensures freedom to establish houses of worship within the confines of the law.

But, as Human Rights Watch notes, “Article 43 on freedom of religion limits the right to practice religion and to establish places of worship to Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Previous drafts had provided for a general right to practice religion but limited the establishment of places of worship to adherents of these three Abrahamic religions. Article 43 discriminates against and excludes followers of other religions, including Egyptian Bahais.”



BitTorrent\'s Plan for 2013? Go Legit

BitTorrent, the start-up behind the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing system of the same name, has an unusual resolution for 2013: to align itself with the entertainment industry and legally distribute movies, music and books online.

“We've been trying to groom the entertainment industry to think about BitTorrent as a partner,” said Matt Mason, the executive director of marketing at the company, which is based in San Francisco.

“It's a constant challenge,” he said. “People don't even know we're a company. They think we're two teenagers in a basement in Sweden.”

The start-up says it has 160 million people using its two official software clients to upload and download files, one called BitTorrent and a smaller, lighter one called μTorrent. Forty million of those users, it says, are active daily.

Those figures, he said, amount to “more than Hulu, Spotify, Netflix combined and doubled,” he said. “We have a massive user base, one of t he largest on the Internet.”

It's the mission of Mr. Mason and the 110 employees working for the company to figure out a way to warm relations with content companies, forge partnerships and monetize the company's reach.

They have tried before. In 2008, the company introduced a rival to iTunes that struggled to gain momentum. But although iTunes still dwarfs BitTorrent's reach (and already has the credit card information of those users on file), Mr. Mason said the company is better positioned to try a slightly different approach.

“We don't want to create a store, just tools so people can figure it out themselves,” he said. “We are a technology company, not a media company.”

In addition, he sees promise in the company's expansion onto mobile. The iOS and Android versions of BitTorrent's official clients are expected to pass the 10 million download mark late next week.

Mr. Mason said that Facebook, which uses BitTorrent's protocol to qu ickly transfer files to multiple locations during server updates, is just one example of how companies could make use of the company's technology.

On the media side, he said BitTorrent was trying to prove that it can go beyond free downloads and actually generate sales.

The most recent example he pointed to was the promotion of Tim Ferriss's new book, “The Four-Hour Chef,” which BitTorrent publicized by making a “bundle” of extra materials, like notes, photos and recipes, available as a free download. Mr. Mason said that 210,000 people downloaded the bundle and another 82,000 continued on to Mr. Ferriss's Amazon page. He did not yet know how many of those visitors bought a book, but he called the preliminary results “promising.”

“We're seeing people go from consuming content in BitTorrent to paying for content,” he said.

These new deals could pave the way for other revenue streams and strengthen the company's reputation. Mr. Mason said . BitTorrent is profitable and makes money a few ways. It offers premium versions of its software clients that include extra features like antivirus measures, and it runs an ad network through the BitTorrent ecosystem, which allows advertisers to reach the service's largely male users.

The company's next move is to work with set-top box makers to embed its software into their hardware so that viewers at home can stream, download and watch content on the device itself. Those will probably come out in Asia and Europe next year, he said. “It'll probably be a little while before those come to North America.”

Part of BitTorrent's new business strategy stems from the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Mr. Mason said the company isn't worried about those services. He did say, however, that if they help cut down on the illegal downloading of movies and music, then it's a “win” for the company. He also said that unlike those businesses, BitTorrent has little to no immediate interest in trying to develop its own Web shows and programs.

“The way to solve the content delivery problem is to get out of the way of the content. No one wants to just be the pipes,” he said. “We're already the pipes and we're good at it, so it's a huge opportunity for us to make this transition work.”



Thursday, November 29, 2012

India to Revise Enforcement of Internet Law

India to Revise Enforcement of Internet Law

NEW DELHI - The Indian government will soon bar lower-level police officials from arresting people for making offensive comments on social networking sites unless the case is first reviewed by a senior police official, a top government official said Thursday.

Kapil Sibal, the communications minister, said during a television interview on Thursday that the recent arrests of two young women for their mild criticism of powerful people “are certainly an abuse of the law.”

But rather than change the law, he advocated changing its enforcement.

“The law is evolutionary, the process is evolutionary,” he said. “Let us now wait for another four to six months; let us wait to see if the process is adequate.”

The change comes a week after Shaheen Dhada, 21, a medical student from the outskirts of Mumbai, was arrested after she posted a mild protest on her Facebook account about the fact that Mumbai, India's most populous city, had been nearly completely shut down after the death of Bal K. Thackeray, a right-wing hard-liner.

After Renu Srinivasan, 20, Ms. Dhada's friend, clicked “Like” on Ms. Dhada's Facebook post, she was also arrested.

The arrests led to national outrage, a storm of coverage in Indian newspapers and television news channels, and tens of thousands of comments on Twitter and Facebook. The policemen who arrested the women were suspended, and the charges against the women were dropped Thursday, according to Indian news media reports.

A strike on Wednesday, called by a right-wing religious organization to protest the officers' suspension, closed schools, stores and transportation networks for much of the day in Palghar, the Mumbai suburb where the women were arrested. The organization, Shiv Sena, which advocates Hindu supremacy, had filed the complaint about Ms. Dhada's post that led to the arrests.

Meanwhile, the Indian Supreme Court agreed to consider on Friday whether the law that led to the arrests of the women was unconstitutional.

The justices said they were eager to become involved.

“We were wondering why no one has approached the Supreme Court and even thought of taking up the issue,” said Chief Justice Altamas Kabir, according to Indian news media reports.

Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting.



Official Syrian Web Sites Hosted in U.S.

Official Syrian Web Sites Hosted in U.S.

Even as Syrians lost access to the Internet on Thursday, people outside the country could still browse the Syrian government's many Web sites for much of the day because they are hosted in foreign countries, including the United States.

By nightfall, after being contacted by The New York Times, several host companies said they were taking down those sites. They and similar companies had been identified in reports published by Citizen Lab, a research laboratory that monitors North American Web service providers that host Syrian Web sites.

For example, the Web site of SANA, the Syrian state news agency, is hosted by a Dallas company, SoftLayer Technologies. It is one of a handful of Internet providers based in the United States that sell their services, often unknowingly, to Web sites operated by the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

HostDime.com in Orlando, Fla., hosts the Web site of Syria's Ministry of Religious Affairs. Jumpline.com hosts the site of the country's General Authority for Development. The government of Hama, a city that has seen heavy clashes between rebels and government troops, operated its Web site through WeHostWebSites.com in Denver.

An executive order by President Obama prohibits American companies from providing Web hosting and other services to Syria without obtaining a license from the Treasury Department.

On Thursday, State Department officials confirmed that providing the services was a violation of the United States' sanctions. “Our policies are designed to assist ordinary citizens who are exercising their fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly and association,” a spokesman, Mark C. Toner, said.

A SoftLayer spokesman, Andre Fuochi, would not comment about the SANA Web site, but in a statement he said the company “rigorously” enforces “prevailing laws and regulations and acts swiftly and vigorously if we find our users to be in violation.”

Dennis Henry, the vice president of operations at HostDime.com, said he had been unaware of the Syrian government Web site, but that it was hosted by a customer's server housed in HostDime.com's data center.

“We have contacted our direct client whose server is housing the Web site to express our concerns,” Mr. Henry said.

Mike Griffin, an owner of Handy Networks, a wholesale Web service and the owner of WeHostWebSites.com, said he too had been unaware of the Syrian government Web site but had asked that it be removed.

“We comply with all U.S. sanctions, including those prohibiting the exportation of Web hosting services to Syria,” he said.

Upon being told of the Syrian Web site, Jumpline's chief operating officer, Andy Mentges, said in an e-mail that it would be “shut down within the hour.”

The Internet shutdown across Syria on Thursday underscored how the 20-month conflict, which has left more than 40,000 people dead, has increasingly moved to the Web. Both sides use cyberattacks to advance their causes.

The hosting of government Web sites overseas represents a growing technological sophistication by the Assad government. “Look what they did with chemical weapons. They can do the same with communications,” said Robert B. Baer, a former C.I.A. operative based in the Middle East. “When the Syrians want to do something, they can do it.”

It is also likely that Syrian rebel and jihadi groups host Web sites inside the United States. The Syrian government appears to be aware that its Web sites are safer and easier to control when operated on servers inside the country.

In July, the Assad government ordered that all official Web sites be hosted inside Syria. But in case of an emergency or an Internet shutdown like the one on Thursday, the government also maintains Web sites based in the United States, Canada and Britain, said Helmi Noman, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab.

“This most recent Internet disruption in Syria highlights the issue of Web hosting and how the regime is able to make use of servers outside Syria to promote its message while locally hosted sites are down,” Mr. Noman said.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 30, 2012, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Official Syrian Web Sites Hosted in U.S..

Research Firm Says Windows 8 Had a Rocky Start

For much of the week, Microsoft has been trumpeting the strong start of Windows 8. On Tuesday, Tami Reller, chief financial officer and chief marketing officer for Windows, told investors that Microsoft had sold 40 million licenses to the operating system during its first month on the market. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, promoted that figure at the company's annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday.

But on Thursday, NPD, the retail sales tracking firm, published data that painted a darker picture of the Windows 8 introduction.

Unit sales of Windows PCs in retail stores in the United States fell 21 percent in the four-week period spanning Oct. 21 to Nov. 17, compared to the same period the previous year, according to the firm.

NPD said sales of Windows 8 tablets had been “almost nonexistent,” accounting for less than 1 percent of all Windows 8 device sales. NPD collects sales data in weekly increments, so the week of Oct. 21 was the first in its system to include sales of Windows 8, which went on sale on Oct. 26.

The figures suggest that Windows 8 did nothing to arrest the downward trajectory of the PC business, much less lead to a rebound in a market that has been struggling for some time. “It hasn't made the market any worse, but it hasn't stimulated things either,” Stephen Baker, an analyst at NPD, said in an interview. “It hasn't provided the impetus to sales everybody hoped for.”

There are a few things to keep in mind about what NPD does and does not count in its figures. The firm tracks sales to customers in most, but not all, American retail stores. In other words, it tracks actual consumer demand for products - in this case, Windows PCs.

Microsoft's 40 million figure, in contrast, represents copies of Windows that Microsoft sells to all of its customers. That includes some consumers but more often it reflects sales to the hardware makers that install Windows on their ma chines, some of which have not yet been bought by consumers.

Microsoft's figure also includes sales to people who are buying the new operating system to upgrade existing PCs, along with sales to business customers that don't happen at cash registers in stores, which NPD doesn't reflect. Typically, though, new versions of Windows are adopted most quickly by consumers, so it's not clear that the inclusion of the business market would show a positive direction for the PC business.

It's possible also that Black Friday, which was not included in NPD's figures, provided a jolt to PC sales.

The Windows 8 debut looks like it had much less of a positive impact on PC sales than did its predecessor, Windows 7, which went on sale to the general public on Oct. 22, 2009.

At the time, NPD said that unit sales of Windows PCs rose 49 percent during the first week Windows 7 was on sale, compared to the same period the previous year. Mr. Baker said he wasn't able to pro vide sales data for the first four weeks of Windows 7's availability for a more complete comparison to Windows 8.

The PC business in 2007 had much stronger unit sales than it has now, in large part because of a boom in the low-cost laptops known as netbooks. Fast forward to 2012, and sales of netbooks have nearly vanished, replaced by surging sales of the iPad and other tablets.



The Lede: Internet Shutdown Reported Across Syria

Last Updated, 1:35 p.m. Internet access disappeared across Syria on Thursday, and commercial air traffic was halted, prompting antigovernment activists to warn that the authorities might be planning to escalate their crackdown against the country's raging uprising. Only residents with their own satellite connections to the Internet could access the Web, activists said. Disruptions to phone service were also reported.

The network service provider Akamai posted a chart on Twitter showing the sudden drop off in Internet connections in Syria.

In a blog post reporting the shutdown, Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of Renesys, a company based in New Hampshire that tracks Internet traffic, wrote:

Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria's international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.

Arbor Networks, a company in Lexington, Mass., that provides tools for monitoring the performance of networks, confirmed that it, too, documented the sudden disappearance of Internet traffic to and from Syria on Thursday before 11 a.m. Eastern Time. According to Arbor, “a snapshot taken from the vantage point of 246 network operators around the world,” showed traffic dropped “to virtually nothing.”

Google reported that access to all of its services inside Syria was down, and an Internet security expert named Chris Ginley told Wired's Danger Room blog, “Syria is offline.”

A representative of EgyptAir in Cairo told The Times that flights to Da mascus, the Syrian capital, were suspended indefinitely and it was not clear when they would resume again. One opposition activist noted that an online flight-tracking Web site showed a blank spot over Syria.

There were conflicting reports of the reason for the airport shutdown. An antigovernment activist in Beirut said that the airport in Damascus, the capital, had been closed cut for two days as rebel fighters edged ever closer, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the airport was shut because of a fierce government counteroffensive. State media had reported that it was closed for maintenance purposes, but the activist said the shutdown was because of “hit-and-run” strikes by rebels intending to force the closure of t he facility.

In an update on the Web shutdown, Mr. Cowie added:

Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major cutoff. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.

Now, there are a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the Internet, still reachable by traceroutes, and indeed still hosting Syrian content. These are five networks that use Syrian-registered IP space, but the originator of the routes is actually Tata Communications. These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic, and perhaps not subject to whatever kill-switch was thrown today within Syria.

Opposition activists outside the country, who have relied on the Internet to distribute video documenting the uprising, scrambled to chart the contours of t he communications disruption.

Some supporters of the Syrian government reported with dismay that parts of the country bordering Turkey were still online.

Daniel Etter, a photojournalist in Istanbul who has worked in northern Syria, told my colleague Liam Stack that he was on the phone with a fixer in Aleppo on Thursday when the line cut out. He added in a note on Twitter that some Syrian towns near the Turkish border are connected to Turkey's mobile phone network.

The Internet has been a strategic weapon for the uprising and the government alike, allowing activists to organize and communicate but also exposing them to surveillance. Fighters, activists and witnesses upload video of rebel exploits and atrocities by both government and rebel forces.

Our colleague C.J. Chivers, who has reported from inside Syria, notes that the government has done the same with electricity for many months - switching it on and off in various places” to disrupt the opposition. “Utility service can be both a carrot and a stick; in other words, a weapon of sorts.”

Syria's information minister, Omran Al Zoubi, denied that the government was responsible for the Internet blackout, saying that reports that roads to the airport in Damascus had been closed were untrue.

Opposition activists, however, disagreed, reporting that roads near the airport had been cut off due to heavy fighting.

Rami Jarrah, a British-Syrian activist who coordinates a network of citizen journalists inside Syria from Cairo, reported on Twitter that Syrian state television acknowledged the Internet blackout.

The Local Coordinating Committees, a coalition of Syrian activist groups, reported the shutdown in most parts of Damascus and in its suburbs as well as “most parts of the governorates of Hama, Homs, Dara'a; in all parts of the governorates of Tartous and Swaida; and in some cities in Deir Ezzor and Raqqa.”

At the height of the protests in Egypt in 2011, that country's authorities switched off the Internet to block opposition activists from communicating and doc umenting their rebellion. Internet access was also cut in Libya last year during the revolt that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi.

Fighting has been especially intense around Damascus over the past two weeks with rebels seizing air bases and weapons there. Rebels have put the government under increasing pressure in recent weeks taking oil fields in eastern Syria and a major air base outside Aleppo and demonstrating their increasing ability to shoot down aircraft.

Rebel advances are gradually forcing the government to shrink the area it seeks to control and some analysts have speculated that if the Syrian government felt its core interests were threatened - if, for instance, Aleppo was in danger of being cut off from Damascus or the rebels succeeded in ringing the capital - the military might start an even more desperate crackdown

“Deliberately or not the rebels could be forcing the regimes hand ” said Yezid Sayigh a military analyst at the Carnegie Middl e East Center in Beirut.

The Internet cutoff apparently made some activists suspect that moment was at hand.

In a message distributed on Thursday, the Local Coordinating Committees said that they would “hold the regime responsible for any massacres that would be committed in any Syrian cities after such a move was made. Also, they call upon the world to move quickly and to take practical steps to protect civilians from the regime's crimes.”

The Beirut-based opposition blogger and journalist Shakeeb al-Jabri noted that while many antigovernment activists in Syria have a ccess to the Web through other means, that is very likely not true for many of the government's supporters.

Mai Ayyad, Hala Droubi and Liam Stack contributed reporting.



Internet Outage Reported Across Syria

Internet access disappeared all across Syria on Thursday, and airports were closed, prompting antigovernment activists to warn that the authorities might be planning to escalate their crackdown against the country's raging uprising. Only residents with their own satellite connections to the Internet could access the Web, activists said. Disruptions to phone service were also reported.

The network service provider Akamai posted a chart on Twitter showing the sudden drop off in Internet connections in Syria.

In a blog post reporting the outage, Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of Renesys, a company based in New Hampshire that tracks Internet traffic, wrote:

Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria's international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.

A representative of EgyptAir in Cairo told The Times that flights to Damascus, the Syrian capital, were suspended indefinitely and it was not clear when it will resume again. One opposition activist noted that an online flight-tracking Web site showed a blank spot over Syria.

In an update on the Web outage, Mr. Cowie added:

Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.

Now, there are a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the Internet, still reachable by traceroutes, and indeed still hosting Syrian content. These are five networks that use Syrian-registered IP space, but the originator of the routes is actually Tata Communications. These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic, and perhaps not subject to whatever kill-switch was thrown today within Syria.

Opposition activists outside the country, who have relied on the Internet to distribute video documenting the uprising, scrambled to chart the contours of the communications disruption.

Some supporters of the Syrian government reported with dismay that parts of the country bordering Turkey were still online, thanks to connections to that

The Internet has been a strategic weapon for the uprising and the government alike, allowing activists to organize and communicate but also exposing them to surveillance. Fighters, activists and witnesses upload video of rebel exploits and atrocities by both government and rebel forces.

Our colleague C.J. Chivers, who has reported from inside Syria, notes that the government has done the same with electricity for many months - switching it on and off in various places” to disrupt the opposition. “Utility service can be both a carrot and a stick; in other words, a weapon of sorts.”

The Local Coordinating Committees, a coalition of Syrian activist groups, reported the outage in most parts of Damascus and in its suburbs as well as “most parts of the governorates of Hama, Homs, Dara'a; in all parts of the governorates of Tartous and Swaida; and in some cities in Deir Ezzor and Raqqa.”

At the height of the protests in Egypt in 2011, that country's authorities switched off the Internet to block opposition activists from communicating and documenting their rebellion. Internet access was also cut in Libya last year during the revolt that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi.

Fighting has been especially intense around Damascus over the past two weeks with rebels seizing air bases and weapons there. Rebels have put the government under increasing pressure in recent weeks taking oil fields in eastern Syria and a major air base outside Aleppo and demonstrating their increasing ability to shoot down aircraft.

Rebel advances are gr adually forcing the government to shrink the area it seeks to control and some analysts have speculated that if the govt felt core interests were threatened - if, for instance, Aleppo was in danger of being cut off from Damascus or the rebels succeeded in ringing the capital - the military might launch an even more desperate crackdown

“Deliberately or not the rebels could be forcing the regimes hand ” said Yezid Sayigh a military analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

The Internet cutoff apparently made some activists suspect that moment was at hand.

In a message distributed on Thursday, the Local Coordinating Committees said that they would “hold the regime responsible for any massacres that would be committed in any Syrian cities after such a move was made. Also, they call upon the world to move quickly and to take practical steps to protect civilians from the regime's crimes.”

The Beirut-based opposition blogger and journalist Shakeeb al-Jabri noted that while many antigovernment activists in Syria have access to the Web through other means, that is likely not true for many of the government's supporters.



I.B.M. and Ohio State University to Open Center for Big Data

There is plenty of debate about just how much Big Data analytics can help businesses make smarter decisions to increase sales and cut costs. Yet there seems to be no debate that there is already a shortage of data scientists and business analysts to feed the Big Data boom.

I.B.M. is taking a step to address that problem in the American heartland by opening a new data analytics center in suburban Columbus, Ohio. The center, announced on Thursday, will combine research, client services and skills training.

I.B.M. says it plans to hire 500 analytics consultants and researchers for the center over the next three years. But the larger impact on the region's work force will likely be college students who work on projects at the center, and a partnership between I.B.M. and Ohio State University to develop new course materials for technology and business, and arrange teaching stints by Big Data professionals.

In an interview, Michael Rhodin, an I.B.M. senior vic e president, said the impetus for the new center began with the concerns of local clients, including Nationwide Insurance, Cardinal Health, Huntington Bank and The Limited. “They told us they were increasingly spending around business analytics and mathematics, and that those skills were hard to find,” Mr. Rhodin said.

I.B.M. has a sizable analytics operation in the Columbus suburb of Dublin, home of Sterling Commerce, a software company acquired by I.B.M. two years ago for $1.4 billion. The new I.B.M. center will also be in Dublin.

I.B.M., like other major technology companies, is making a bit bet on Big Data as a source of its future growth and as a major trend in business that will play out over many years - much like globalization. “But the common language of business,” Mr. Rhodin said, “is not going to be Chinese or Spanish. It's going to be math.”

That is the logic behind predictions of a surge in demand for people with Big Data skills, bo th technologists and business analysts. Last month, Gartner predicted that 1.9 million technology jobs would be created to support Big Data analytics in the United States by 2015, and three times that many jobs outside of computing.

But a talent gap looms. “Our public and private education systems are failing us,” said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's head of global research. “Data experts will be a scarce, valuable commodity.”

The largest demand will be for analytics-adept business people, predicts Christine Poon, dean of the Max M. Fisher College of Business at Ohio State. “The future is going to be owned by people who are comfortable in the quant world but have deep business knowledge,” Ms. Poon said.

The Fisher business school brings a large potential pool of manpower to the Big Data talent gap. It has 6,800 undergraduate and graduate students.



Nate Silver: Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns

SAN FRANCISCO â€" I live in Brooklyn, where President Obama won 81 percent of the vote this month. It's hard to find anywhere in the country that is more Democratic-leaning.

But San Francisco qualifies. Here, Mr. Obama won 84 percent of the vote, while Mitt Romney took just 13 percent. Even John McCain, who won 14 percent of the vote four years ago, performed slightly better than Mr. Romney did.

And unlike the New York metropolitan area, where Long Island, the borough of Staten Island and many suburbs in New York and New Jersey remain competitive in presidential elections, it is hard to find any significant pockets of support for Republican candidates in the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area.

Instead, Mr. Obama won the nine counties of the Bay Area by margins ranging from 25 percentage points (in Napa County) to 71 percentage points (in the city and county of San Francisco). In Santa Clara County, home to much of the Silicon Valley, th e margin was 42 percentage points.

Over all, Mr. Obama won the election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, more than double his 22-point margin throughout California.

Although San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley have long been liberal havens, the rest of the region has not always been so. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the Bay Area vote over all, along with seven of its nine counties. George H.W. Bush won Napa County in 1988.

Republicans have lost every county in the region by a double-digit margin since then. But Democratic margins have become more and more emphatic. Mr. Obama's 49-point margin throughout the Bay Area this year was considerably larger than Al Gore's 34-point win in 2000, for example, or Bill Clinton's 31-point win in 1992.

Even without the Bay Area's vote, Democrats would still be favored to win California by solid margins. So why does any of this matter?

The reason is that Democrats' strength in the region is hard to separate out from the growth of its core industry - information technology â€" and the advantage that having access to the most talented individuals working in the field could provide to Democratic campaigns.

Companies like Google and Apple do not have their own precincts on Election Day. However, it is possible to make some inferences about just how overwhelmingly Democratic are the employees at these companies, based on fund-raising data. (The Federal Election Commission requires that donors to presidential campaigns disclose their employer when they make a campaign contribution.)

Among employees who work for Google, Mr. Obama received about $720,000 in itemized contributions this year, compared with only $25,000 for Mr. Romney. That means that Mr. Obama collected almost 97 percent of the money between the two major candidates.

Apple employees gave 91 percent of their dollars to Mr. Obama. At eBay, Mr. Obama received 89 percent of the money from employees.

Over all, among the 10 American-based information technology companies on Fortune's list of “most admired companies,” Mr. Obama raised 83 percent of the funds between the two major party candidates.

Mr. Obama's popularity among the staff at these companies holds even for those which are not headquartered in California. About 81 percent of contributions at Microsoft, which is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., went to Mr. Obama. So did 77 percent of those at I.B.M., which is based in Armonk, N.Y.

It does not require an algorithm to deduce that the sort of employees who may be willing to donate substantial money to a political campaign may also be those who would consider working for it.

Since Democrats had the support of 80 percent or 90 percent of the best and brightest minds in the information technology field, it shouldn't be surprising that Mr. Obama's information technology infrastructure was viewed as state-of-the-art exemplary, whereas everyone from Republican volunteers to Silicon Valley journalists have criticized Mr. Romney's systems. Mr. Romney's get-out-the-vote application, Project Orca, is widely viewed as having failed on Election Day, perhaps contributing to a disappointing Republican turnout.

This is not intended to absolve Mr. Romney and his campaign entirely. There were undoubtedly many bright and talented information technology professionals who worked fo r Mr. Romney, and who might have fielded a better product given better management.

Even if only 10 percent or 20 percent of elite information technology professionals would consider working for a Republican like Mr. Romney, this is still a reasonably large talent pool to draw from.

But Democrats are drawing from a much larger group of potential staff and volunteers in Silicon Valley.

Perhaps a different type of Republican candidate, one whose views on social policy were more in line with the tolerant and multicultural values of the Bay Area, and the youthful cultures of the leading companies here, could gather more support among information technology professionals.

Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Republican, raised about $42,000 from Google employees, considerably more than Mr. Romney did.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 28, 2012

An earlier version of this post misidentified th e publisher of a list of most admired information technology companies. The list was published by Fortune magazine, not Forbes.



Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Microsoft Faces \'Year of Reckoning\' in Mobile Software, IDC Says

In its top 10 predictions for 2013, published on Thursday, the technology research firm IDC declares that next year will be high noon for Microsoft‘s mobile software.

It makes that prediction based on data and a point of view. A crucial constituency, IDC says, is developer support for a company's technology. “Mobile platforms that fail to crack the 50 percent barrier of developers who are ‘very interested' in developing apps for them,” the IDC report states, “will be on a gradual track to demise.” So IDC declares 2013 will be “a year of reckoning in mobile software.”

So what platforms die?

In cooperation with Appcelerator, a maker of programming tools, IDC conducts quarterly surveys of more than 4,800 mobile applications developers. In its most recent survey, 33 percent of developers replied they were “very interested” in writing applications for Windows 8 tablets, and 21 percent for Windows Phone 7 software.

For those wondering about the cliff Research in Motion must climb rather than fall over, just 9 percent of developers in the IDC survey said they were very interested in writing applications for RIM's Blackberry phones, and 8 percent for its PlayBook tablet.

By contrast, 85 percent of the developers were very interested in writing programs for Apple‘s iOS software on the iPhone, and 83 percent for the iPad. Google‘s Android Phone software was next, at 76 percent, and Android tablets at 66 percent. And 66 percent of developers were very interested in writing mobile applications with open-standard Web software, HTML5.

The numbers certainly suggest Microsoft has its work cut out for it. In an interview, Frank Gens, IDC's chief analyst, noted that with Microsoft's new Surface tablet, the company had an impressive piece of hardware to show off its tablet software. And its partnership with Nokia means Microsoft has a committed ally in the smartphone market.

“Now the pieces ar e together,” Mr. Gens said. “But will the developers come?”

Developers, of course, are but one of two engines Microsoft needs to become a challenger in the mobile market. The other is consumers, since developers follow consumers, whose purchasing decisions determine which are the most attractive products, both hardware and software. That is the network-effect flywheel that drives technology markets.

The stakes for Microsoft in the mobile market are underlined elsewhere in the IDC report. IDC predicts, for example, that worldwide spending on information technology will increase 5.7 percent in 2013, to more than $2.1 trillion. The growth rate is off slightly from an estimated 6.2 percent in 2012, mainly because of cooling demand in a few overseas markets, notably China.

But the increase in technology spending, Mr. Gens said, is still about double global economic growth. But take out the boom in smartphones and tablets, and projected technology spending growth would be only 2.9 percent in 2013.

“Without mobile, this starts to look like a pretty mature industry,” Mr. Gens said.



In Midst of Crisis, Egyptians Try to Untangle President\'s \'Planet of the Apes\' Metaphor

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi, is engaged in a two-front battle of wills with the country's courts on one side and a galvanized opposition in the streets on the other. In the midst of this showdown, just days after he helped to negotiate an end to the fighting in Gaza, Mr. Morsi sat down for an interview with Time magazine.

Speaking mainly in English, a language he has a fluent if idiosyncratic grasp of, the president attempted to explain himself in terms Americans might understand - making reference in one answer to “Good Morning America,” Barbara Walters, the Iran hostage crisis, the Charles Bronson war movie “When Hell Broke Loose,” and “Planet of the Apes.” He observed, near the start of the discussion with the American journalists, “The world is now much more difficult than it was during your revolution. It's even more difficult. The world. More complicated, complex, difficult. It's a spaghetti-li ke structure. It's mixed up.”

While the reference to the world's “spaghetti-like structure” attracted some attention from readers in Cairo, more puzzling still was the question of what, exactly, Mr. Morsi intended to say about his role in international diplomacy with his long aside about the 1960s science-fiction fantasy in which apes evolved from man.

The trailer for “The Planet of the Apes,” a 1968 science-fiction film with less than obvious lessons for modern day Egypt..

According to the interview transcript, the president brought up “Planet of the Apes” after mentioning that his experience of living for some time in Los Angeles - where he earned a Ph.D in engineering from the University of Southern California in 198 2 - had made him aware of the difficulty of multicultural cooperation, both inside and between countries. “Conflict does not lead to stability in the world. Cooperation, how can we do that? It's a struggle. It's a very, very difficult struggle,” Mr. Morsi said. “To have a new culture, international culture, respecting individual countries and people's cultures, their local ones, but can we have an international culture? Can we do that?”

A short time later, he added:

We can cooperate, we can integrate. As much as we can. How can we do that? I think leaders in the world have a great responsibility in this. Human beings can live together.

I remember a movie. Which one? Planet of the Apes. The old version, not the new one. There is new one. Which is different. Not so good. It's not expressing the reality as it was the first one. But at the end, I still remember, this is the conclusion: When the big monkey, he was head of the supreme court I think - in the movie! - and there was a big scientist working for him, cleaning things, has been chained there. And it was the planet of the apes after the destructive act of a big war, and atomic bombs and whatever in the movie. And the scientists was asking him to do something, this was 30 years ago: “Don't forget you are a monkey.” He tells him, “don't ask me about this dirty work,.” What did the big ape, the monkey say? He said, “you're human, you did it [to] yourself. “That's the conclusion. Can we do something better for ourselves?

A quick look at the script for the film - the original version, not to the remake, as Mr. Morsi specified - made it difficult to say which scene, in particular, the president was misremembering.

While convoluted, the simplest reading of the president's musings is that they had something to do with the moral of the film's end, in which the orangutan known as Dr. Zaius, who held the high office of Chie f Defender of the Faith, explained to the human astronaut, Taylor, that mankind had proven unfit to rule the earth and destroyed itself through nuclear warfare. Political analysts in Cairo, however, were more struck by the fact that Mr. Morsi, who recently asserted that his decrees cannot be overturned by the Egyptian supreme court, mistakenly recalled that the villainous ape leader was “head of the supreme court.”



British Man Could Avoid Extradition to U.S. in Piracy Case

November 28, 2012, 6:11 pm
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

For Children, a Lie on Facebook Has Consequences, Study Finds

A federal law designed to protect children's privacy may unwittingly lead them to reveal too much on Facebook, a provocative new academic study shows, in the latest example of how difficult it is to regulate the digital lives of minors.

Facebook prohibits children under 13 from signing up for a Facebook account, because of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which requires Web companies to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data on children under 13. To get around the ban, children often lie about their age. Parents sometimes help them lie - and in order to keep an eye on what they post, become their Facebook friends. Consumer Reports earlier this year estimated that Facebook has more than 5 million children under age 13.

That relatively innocuous family secret that allows a preteen to get on Facebook can have potentially serious consequences, including for their peers who do not lie. The study, conducted by computer scienti sts at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, finds that in a given high school, a small share of students who lie about their age in order to get a Facebook account can help a complete stranger collect sensitive information about a majority of their fellow students.

In other words, children who deceive can endanger the privacy of those who don't.

The latest research is part of a growing body of work that highlights the paradox of enforcing children's privacy by law. For instance, a study jointly authored by academics at three separate universities and Microsoft Research earlier this year found that even though parents were concerned about their children's digital footprints, they had helped them circumvent Facebook's terms of service by entering a false date of birth. Many parents seemed to be unaware of Facebook's minimum age requirement; they thought it was a recommendation, akin to a PG-13 movie rating.

“Our findings show that parents are i ndeed concerned about privacy and online safety issues, but they also show that they may not understand the risks that children face or how their data are used,” that paper concluded.

Facebook, for its part, has long said that it is difficult to ferret out every deceptive teenager and pointed to its extra precautions for minors. For children between ages 13 and 18, only their Facebook friends can see their posts, including photos.

That system, though, is compromised if a child lies about her age when she signs up for Facebook â€" and thus becomes an adult much sooner on the social network than in real life, according to the experiment by N.Y.U. researchers.

The key to the experiment, explained Keith W. Ross, a computer science professor at N.Y.U. and one of the co-authors of the study, was to first find known current students at a particular high school. A child could be found, for instance, if she was 10 years old and said she was 13 in order to sign up for Facebook. Five years later, that same child would show up as 18 years old â€" an adult, in the eyes of Facebook - when in fact she was only 15. At that point, a stranger could also see a list of her friends.

The researchers conducted their experiment at three separate high schools. They were able to construct the Facebook identities of most of the schools' current students, including their names, gender, profile pictures and other data.

The researchers identified neither the schools nor any of the students. Their paper is awaiting publication.

Using a publicly available database of registered voters, someone could also match the children's last names with their parents' - and potentially, their home addresses, Prof. Ross pointed out.

The COPPA law, he argued, seemed to serve as an incentive for children to lie, but made it no less difficult to verify their real age.

“In a COPPA-less world, most kids would be honest about their age when cr eating accounts. They would then be treated as minors until they're actually 18,” he said. “We show that in a COPPA-less world, the attacker finds far fewer students, and for the students he finds, the profiles have very little information.”

How children behave online is one of the most vexing issues for parents, to say nothing of regulators and lawmakers who say they wish to protect children from the data they scatter online.

Independent surveys suggest that parents are worried about how their children's social network posts can harm them in the future. A Pew Internet Center study earlier this month showed that most parents are not just concerned, but many are actively trying to help their kids manage the privacy of their digital data; over half of all parents said they talked to their children about something they posted.

Teenagers seem to be vigilant, in their own way, about controlling who sees what on the Facebook pages.

A separate study b y the Family Online Safety Institute and released in November found that four out of five teenagers have adjusted privacy settings on their social networking accounts, including Facebook, while two-thirds place restrictions on who can see which of their posts.



Nokia\'s New Lumia: In High Demand, or Just Short on Supply?

Nokia's new Lumia smartphone is about as difficult to buy in the United States as Apple's iPhone 5. In many online and brick-and-mortar stores, the Lumia 920 is sold out. But does that mean it's popular?

On Amazon.com, the Lumia 920 is labeled “backordered” with a shipping time of one to two weeks. In Manhattan, the phone is not available for an in-store pickup at any Best Buy location. This month, Nokia representatives even said the company was struggling to get the phones out to technology journalists who were interested in reviewing the device because there weren't enough to go around.

Nokia's last flagship phone, the Lumia 900, didn't sell very well here. Zacks Equity Research says the sold-out Lumia 920 is an early sign that Nokia has a “fighting chance” against Apple and the army of Android phones on the market.

But it's difficult to believe that the Lumia 920, an exclusive to AT&T in the United States, is drawing such a crowd. Tero Kuitti nen, an independent mobile analyst, says he thinks Nokia limited the supply of the Lumia here because it was aiming its first wave at Europe, where its smartphones have sold better in the past.

He noted that on Amazon, for instance, the Lumia 920 sold out just three days after it went on sale on Nov. 7, and the “backordered” status has stuck ever since - a sign that Nokia may simply be lowballing supply because it doesn't expect to sell many phones here.

Doug Dawson, a Nokia spokesman, declined to comment on whether the difficulty of buying the phone was related to unusually low supply. He said Nokia didn't have numbers to share about early sales.

“You can be very sure that we are working hard to meet the demand,” Mr. Dawson said.



How Much Facebook Might Make Through Gifts

Facebook's Gifts product can be lucrative for the data it can offer to Facebook. But whether it can be a moneymaker for the company remains a mystery.

Facebook has not offered any estimates of revenue through Gifts. But a thought experiment, with a back of the envelope calculation, yields some rough answers.

The company says it has 186 million users in the United States and Canada. About 168 million of them are in the United States, according to Socialbakers,  a Czech analytics company. Right now, Gifts is available only to users in this country.

Let's say 5 percent of them buy a gift on Facebook this year for one of their Facebook friends. That's almost 8.5 million people. If Facebook is correct in saying they spend an average of $25, that's a bit more than $200 million.

Facebook gets a cut of that. Let's take the high end of industry standard commission: 15 percent. That would generate about $30 million in revenue for Facebook, a fraction of th e $5 billion in revenue that the company is projected to generate this year.

Brian Blau, an analyst for Gartner, said: “Given the program only started recently, and it's only available to a limited number of Facebook users, it's difficult to say exactly how users are reacting.”

Could it expand worldwide and make more money? Possibly. To date, most of its revenue comes from advertising in North America, even though the vast majority of its users are abroad. The problem is, some of its largest and fastest-growing markets are countries like Brazil and India, emerging economies where the average user is less likely to spend $25 on a gift.

Gift giving has not been an easy market to crack for any of the Web giants. Amazon certainly has a rich history of purchases for its customers, but it doesn't offer an easy way to figure out what to buy for whom. Apple's iTunes allows customers to buy gifts for friends. But as I found out last weekend, Apple bizarrely limi ts people to giving within the same country. (So much for globalization.)

Facebook has a rich record of its users' friends all over the world and knows important gift-giving occasions â€" birthdays, graduations and the like. But it doesn't quite know â€" not yet, anyway â€" what to buy for whom. As it compiles more of its users' likes and wants, it is likely to get better at recommending the right gifts for the right people.

It could, of course, hasten that process by buying Pinterest. Now that would tell the clueless husband instantly what his wife really wants.



RIM\'s Market Share Slips Some More

Shortly after some stock analysts raised their ratings for Research in Motion, a new market share report showing that the company's once iconic BlackBerry brand now holds just 1.6 percent of the American smartphone market sank expectations for the company.

A year ago during the same quarter leading up to the end of October, the Kantar Worldpanel ComTech report estimated BlackBerry's share at 8.5 percent.

Just as surprising as the extent of RIM's collapse in the United States was the report's finding that BlackBerry was rapidly retreating in European countries where buyers previously had remained loyal to the brand.

In Britain, once RIM's largest market outside North America, BlackBerry's market share plummeted to 7.9 percent from 19 percent. In economically troubled Spain, BlackBerry went to just 3.4 percent of the market from 23.7 percent.

RIM's shares closed at $10.72 on Nasdaq on Tuesday, down $1.26 or 10.5 percent. Late on Wednesday afternoon, they were trading at $11.07, up 35 cents or 3.3 percent.

“We understand the competitive nature of the global smartphone market and the need for innovation,” Amy McDowell, a spokeswoman for RIM, said in an e-mail. “We are confident that BlackBerry 10 will provide our customers with an exciting alternative to our competitors, and we are committed to regaining market share.”

While RIM has been boasting about BlackBerry's success in Latin America, the report shows that the thrill is gone in Brazil. It estimates BlackBerry's market share there at 2.7 percent, down from 8.7 percent.

The only good news from the report by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, which is owned by WPP, the advertising, public relations and market research company, came from Germany. That, coincidentally, is the birthplace of Thorsten Heins, RIM's president and chief executive. There BlackBerry accounted for 2.5 percent, up from 1.6 percent.

Germany was also an exception in that it was the only market covered by the report where Apple's share declined despite the release of the iPhone 5. It fell to 17 percent from 22.1 percent.

By contrast, in the United States, all iPhone models accounted for 48.1 percent of the market, more than doubling last year's 22.4 percent share. Some of Apple's gain there came at RIM's expense. The report found that 6 percent of  those who bought an iPhone 5 during the period were BlackBerry owners.

Overall, however, phones based on Google's Android operating system proved to be the most popular alternative for disgruntled BlackBerry owners. Of those who switched phone brands in the United States in the last six months, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech found that 63.4 percent went with an Android handset.

The study's researchers found that many buyers were attracted by the new iPhone's larger screen, as well as its ability to use faster wireless networks known as 4G or LTE.

Mr. Heins has acknowledged that RIM would produce “challenging” numbers until it begins selling its new BlackBerry 10 phones and operating system next year. It features a screen similar in size to that of the iPhone 5, and it will be compatible with high-speed wireless networks.

Expectations that RIM will meet its planned release date of Jan. 30, as well as positive comments from wireless carriers now testing the BlackBerry 10, led to the analysts' upgrades of their share target prices.



Jeff Hawkins Develops a Brainy Big Data Company

Jeff Hawkins has been a pioneer of mobile devices, a distinguished lecturer in neuroscience, and a published author of a revolutionary theory of how the brain works. If he's right about Big Data, a lot of people are going to wish he'd never gone into that field.

Mr. Hawkins, who helped develop the technology in Palm, an early and successful mobile device, is a co-founder of Numenta, a predictive software company. Numenta's technology is based on Mr. Hawkins's theories of how the brain works, a subject he has studied and published on intensively. Perhaps most important for the technology industry, the product works off streams of real-time information from sensors, not the trillions of bytes of data that companies are amassing.

“It only makes sense to look at old data if you think the world doesn't change,” said Mr. Hawkins. “You don't remember the specific muscles you just used to pick up a coffee cup, or all the words you heard this morning; you might re member some of the ideas.”

If no data needs to be saved over a long term and real-time data can stream in all the information that is needed, a big part of the tech industry has a problem. Data storage companies like EMC and Hewlett-Packard thrive on storing massive amounts of data cheaply. Data analysis companies including Microsoft, I.B.M., and SAS fetch that data and crunch the history to find patterns. They and others rely on both the traditional relational databases from Oracle, and newer “unstructured” databases like Hadoop.

Much of this will be a relic within a few years, according to Mr. Hawkins. “Hadoop won't go away, but it will manage a lot less stuff,” he said in an interview at Numenta's headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. “Querying databases won't matter as much, as people worry instead about millions of streams of real-time data.” In a sensor-rich world of data feeds, he is saying, we will model ourselves more closely on the constant change that is the real world.

Mr. Hawkins thinks that the human neocortex, that part of the brain that includes the perception and reasoning functions, itself works as a kind of pattern-seeking and predictive system. Brain cells, starting at some of their most elemental components, work together to build expectations, initially about things like light and dark, or near and far, that they gather from sensory organs.

Patterns of one or the other are reinforced over time. As new data streams in, the brain figures out if it is capturing more complexity, which requires either modifying the understanding of the original pattern or splitting it into two patterns, making for new knowledge. Sometimes, particularly if it not repeated, the data is discarded as irrelevant information. Thus, over time, sounds become words, words occupy a grammatical structure, and ideas are conveyed.

“The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation,” he says. “You and I are streaming data engines.”

It is a model of consciousness that Mr. Hawkins has promoted not just in the tech world, but to neuroscientists. While some have questioned the idea, he published a popular book on the rudiments of the subject, “On Intelligence.” Last spring he was invited to present the work at the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures, at the University of California, Berkeley. Previous lecturers include Martin Rees, who Britain's Astronomer Royal, and Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winner and Energy Department secretary.

Numenta's product, called Grok, is a cloud-based service that works much the same way. Grok takes steady feeds of data from things like thermostats, Web clicks, or machinery. From initially observing the data flow, it begins making guesses about what will happen next. The more data, the more accurate the predictions become.

It has been much more difficult to engineer than that sounds. Modeling itself on 40 sensory receptors feeding over 128 information-seeing dendrites on each cell of the brain, Mr. Hawkins put into Grok a mathematical algorithm that he says approximates the way brain cells work together, even sometimes canceling out each other's signals to refine a sense of what's going on.

“There are the equivalent of 60,000 neurons, each one fairly sophisticated, in each Grok,” he said. That model of 300 million connections, he notes, is about one millionth the actual capability of the neocortex

Grok is still in limited release, with just a few customers in the fields of energy, media, and video processing. So far, the company claims, Grok has delivered results that are 10 percent to 20 percent better than various benchmarks, like revenue, optimal purchasing mixes, and machine servicing. The company expects to start selling Grok more broadly in the first half of 2013.

As more companies use the product, and Grok feeds on more streams of data, the world will be in a better position to judge whether Mr. Hawkins is correct. He evinces few doubts, however.

“This is the future of machine intelligence,” he said. “Twenty years from now the computer industry will be driven by this, I'm certain of it.”



What Readers Think of Facebook\'s Gifts

November 28, 2012, 12:19 pm
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Daily Report: Facebook Seeks Your Credit Card Number

Facebook is already privy to its users' e-mail addresses, wedding pictures and political beliefs. Now, as Somini Sengupta reports in Wednesday's New York Times, the company is nudging them to share a bit more: credit card numbers and offline addresses.

The nudge comes from a new Facebook service called Gifts. It allows Facebook users - only in the United States for now - to buy presents for their friends on the social network. On offer are items as varied as spices from Dean & DeLuca, pajamas from BabyGap and subscriptions to Hulu Plus, the video service. This week Facebook added iTunes gift cards.

The gift service is part of an aggressive moneymaking push aimed at pleasing Facebook's investors after the company's dismal stock market debut. Facebook has stepped up mobile advertising and is starting to customize the marketing messages it shows to users based on their Web browsing outside Facebook.

Those efforts seem to have brought some relief to Wall Str eet. Analysts issued more bullish projections for the company in recent days, and the stock is up 49 percent from its lowest point, closing Tuesday at $26.15, although that is still well below the initial offering price of $38.

To power the Gifts service, Facebook rented a warehouse in South Dakota and created its own software to track inventory and shipping. It will not say how much it earns from each purchase made through Gifts, though merchants that have a similar arrangement with Amazon.com give it a roughly 15 percent cut of sales.

If it catches on, the service would give Facebook a toehold in the more than $200 billion e-commerce market. Much more important, it would let the company accumulate a new stream of valuable personal data and use it to refine targeted advertisements, its bread and butter.

“The hard part for Facebook was aggregating a billion users. Now it's more about how to monetize those users without scaring them away,” said Colin Seb astian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird.



Integrity of Internet Is Crux of Global Conference

Integrity of Internet Is Crux of Global Conference

PARIS - A commercial and ideological clash is set for next week, when representatives of more than 190 governments, along with telecommunications companies and Internet groups, gather in Dubai for a once-in-a-generation meeting.

The “Take Action” Web site of Google calls on visitors to sign a petition for a “free and open Internet,” and ban censorship.

Hamadoun Touré has said the I.T.U. has no desire to stifle the Internet's growth.

Terry Kramer, U.S. ambassador to the meeting, vowed to veto any change in how the Internet is run.

The subject: Control of the Internet, politically and commercially.

The stated purpose of the World Conference on International Telecommunications is to update a global treaty on technical standards needed to, say, connect a telephone call from Tokyo to Timbuktu. The previous conference took place in 1988, when the Internet was in its infancy and telecommunications remained a highly regulated, mostly analog-technology business.

Now the Internet is the backbone for worldwide communications and commerce. Critics of the International Telecommunication Union, the agency of the United Nations that is organizing the meeting, see a dark agenda in the meeting. The blogosphere has been raging over supposed plans led by Russia to snatch control of the Internet and hand it to the U.N. agency.

That seems unlikely. Any such move would require an international consensus, and opposition is widespread.

Terry D. Kramer, the former Vodafone executive who is the United States ambassador to the conference, has vowed to veto any change in how the Internet is overseen.

Analysts say the real business of the conference is business. “The far bigger issue - largely obscured by this discussion - are proposals that are more likely to succeed that envision changing the way we pay for Internet services,” Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, said by e-mail.

Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the I.T.U., has repeatedly said that the U.N. group has no desire to take over the Internet or to stifle its growth. On the contrary, he says, one of the main objectives of the conference is to spread Internet access to more of the four and a half billion people around the world who still do not use it.

And yet, groups as diverse as Google, the Internet Society, the International Trade Union Confederation and Greenpeace warn that the discussions could set a bad precedent, encouraging governments to step up censorship or take other actions that would threaten the integrity of the Internet.

“This is a very important moment in the history of the Internet, because this conference may introduce practices that are inimical to its continued growth and openness,” Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, said in a conference call.

Google set up a Web site last week, “Take Action,” encouraging visitors to sign a petition for a “free and open Internet.” The campaign is modeled on the successful drive last winter to defeat legislative proposals to crack down on Internet piracy in the United States.

More energy is expected to be spent on how companies make money off the Internet. In one submission to the conference, the European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association, a lobbying group based in Brussels that represents companies like France Télécom, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, proposed that network operators be permitted to assess charges for content providers like Internet video companies that use a lot of bandwidth.

Analysts say the proposal is an acknowledgment by European telecommunications companies that they cannot hope to provide digital content. “The telecoms realize that they have lost the battle,” said Paul Budde, an independent telecommunications analyst in Australia. “They are saying, ‘We can't beat the Googles and the Facebooks, so let's try to charge them.' ”

The European lobbying group says that without the new fees, there will be no money to invest in network upgrades needed to deal with a surge in traffic. Regulators have required European telecommunications operators to open their networks to rivals, and the market for broadband is fiercely competitive, with rock-bottom prices.

In the United States, by contrast, most telecommunications companies have been permitted to maintain local monopolies - or duopolies, with cable companies - in broadband, keeping prices higher. And American regulators have ordered broadband providers to give equal priority to all Internet traffic. Such “network neutrality” is incompatible with charging content providers for moving their bits of data.

Analysts say this may explain why American telecommunications companies have not joined the European call for a new business model. “Models that try to force payment terms between nations and telecom operators run a huge risk of cutting off traffic,” Mr. Kramer said in an interview. “Liberalized markets are the only way to expand the success of the Internet.”

People who have been briefed on the conference submissions say that not a single European government delegation has endorsed the telecommunications operators' proposal, and the European Parliament has passed a resolution denouncing it. Only governments, not private groups or companies, can put items on the meeting agenda.

While many documents prepared for the conference remain secret, several people who have seen submissions say there is broad support for Internet connection fees in French-speaking Africa and among Arab nations - countries in which many telecommunications companies are still owned or heavily regulated by governments.

Much of the attention before the 12-day conference has focused on a proposal from Russia that would effectively remove control of the Internet's infrastructure from a collection of decentralized and apolitical organizations, mostly based in the United States. “Member states,” Russia proposed, “shall have equal rights to manage the Internet, including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of Internet numbering, naming, addressing and identification resources.”

Those functions are performed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private organization with an international board that operates under contract with the United States government.

The Russian proposal was widely interpreted as a call to legitimize domestic censorship of the Internet. Yet analysts note that governments inclined to filter the Web, like China and Iran, have not waited for consensus in an international meeting to do so.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 28, 2012, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Integrity of Internet Is Crux of Global Conference.

Something Missing in Chinese Newspaper\'s Entirely Accurate Summary of Onion Report

A state-run newspaper in China reported, accurately, that The Onion has named North Korea's leader its Sexiest Man Alive for 2012. Left unsaid in the report, which was featured on the English-language home page of People's Daily Online on Tuesday, is whether the editors of the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper are in on the joke that the American publication is, well, kidding.

A screenshot from People's Daily Online on Tuesday. A screenshot from People's Daily Online on Tuesday.

Although the People's Daily report, accompanied by a 55-photograph slide show, clearly cited The Onion, there was no reference in either English or Chinese to the fact that the original item was satirical.

The Chines e newspaper's three-paragraph report read:

An entirely accurate summary of a report from The Onion by the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper. An entirely accurate summary of a report from The Onion by the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper.

… The Onion has named North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un as the “Sexiest Man Alive for the year 2012.”

“With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman's dream come true. Blessed with an air of power that masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side, Kim made this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle, and, of course, that famous smile,” it said.

“He has that rare ability to somehow be completely adorable and completely macho at the same time,” said Marissa Blake-Zweiber, editor of The Onion Style and Entertainment.

For some reason, the editors in Beijing chose to omit the section of the Onion report which listed “prior ‘Sexiest Man Alive' winners,” including:

- 2011: Bashar al-Assad

- 2010: Bernie Madoff

- 2009: Charles and David Koch (co-winners)

- 2008: Ted Kaczynski

The Associated Press tried and failed to reach the editors of People's Daily for comment late on Tuesday in Beijing.

The editors of The Onion, for their part, added an update to their report on Tuesday, reading: “For more coverage on The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People's Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.†

Regular readers of The Lede will be aware that this is not the first time The Onion has been apparently mistaken for a news organization by journalists. In September, Iran's Fars News Agency plagiarized The Onion, running an edited version of a satirical report as if it were real, and then defended itself by claiming that the fake news item had uncovered a deeper truth.

Fars also pointed at the time to the ever-expanding list of news organizations that have been mistaken The Onion for a news source. Among them, as The A.P. explained, is another Chinese paper, the Beijing Evening News, which picked up a story from The Onion in 2002 “that claimed members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the building underwent a makeover that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome.”

A screenshot of the People's Daily home page on Tuesday. A screenshot of the People's Daily home page on Tuesday.

As The Lede suggested in September, the increasingly lighthearted tone in the reports of many serious news organizations, as they compete for attention on social networks in the Internet era, could be making such mistakes more common.

The image of North Korea's leader featured on the People's Daily home page on Tuesday, for instance, was taken from a recent Time magazine cover that referred to him as “Lil' Kim,” playing on a joke frequently made by bloggers who use the name of a female rapper to refer to the young leader.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



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