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Friday, February 1, 2013

New Images of Syria\'s First Lady and Iran\'s Space Monkey Cast Doubt on Two Reports

Bad news, readers: new images appear to cast doubt on the accuracy of two of the week’s most widely-reported stories â€" the rumored pregnancy of Syria’s first lady, and the pioneering space flight of an Iranian monkey.

As the Washington Post correspondent Liz Sly reported, President Bashar al-Assad’s office posted five new photographs of his wife, Asma, on Facebook, as part of an effort to disprove a curious aside in a Lebanese newspaper report that she is pregnant. In each of thephotographs, said to have been taken last week in Damascus, a very slender Mrs. Assad was pictured congratulating the winners of this year’s Syrian Science Olympiad.

A screenshot from the Facebook page of the Syrian president’s office, said to show the first lady meeting prize-winning science students in Damascus last week. A screenshot from the Facebook page of the Syrian president’s office, said to show the first lady meeting prize-winning science students in Damascus last week.

As my colleague Rick Gladstone explained, “rumors that Mrs. Assad had conceived in June,” were first reported in November by Al Bawaba, an Amman-based news Web site.

The photographs were released a day after Mr. Assad’s office issued an indignant statement taking exception to a Washington Post blogger’s reading of the Lebanese newspaper’s story. The statement said the blogger, Max Fisher, “based his analysis on false allegations that led him to wrong results which are far from reality.”

Since Syria’s Science Olympiad takes placeevery year, the president’s office could have recycled images of the first lady that were taken a year or more earlier, but that would require the cooperation of all of the students pictured with her in the photographs. At least one of the students pictured with Mrs. Assad in the new photographs, a girl with curly hair wearing brightly-patterned sneakers, does appear in another image of the winners posted on the Olympiad’s Facebook page.

While this set of images appears to back the official story coming out of Damascus, recently released photographs and video of the monkey that Iran says it sent into space seem to undermine Tehran’s claims.

Video broadcast on Iranian television this week showed what officials said were images of a monkey before and after a space flight.

As journalists at the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle pointed out on its Persian language site on Thursday, the first reports on the space mission published in Iran’s state-run media showed an anxious-looking monkey prepared for blast-off with a prominent mole above his right eye.

An image of a monkey Iran claims to have sent into space this week, in a screenshot from an Iranian state news organization. An image of a monkey Iran claims to have sent into space this week, in a screenshot from an Iranian state news organization.

When Iran got around to releasing photographs and video of the monkey’s capsule being retrieved post-flight, there was no trace of a mole on his brow in the close-ups of him waiving to reporters or smiling for the cameras at a subsequent public appearance.

A monkey Iran claims to have sent into space, during a public appearance this week.Iranian Students’ News Agency A monkey Iran claims to have sent into space, during a public appearance this week.

That led to speculation that Iran might have attempted to cover up a failed space mission by displaying a different monkey than the one that actually made a 150-mile round trip into the thermosphere and back. Or that the newly famous monkey had fallen prey to the Iranian penchant for cosmetic surgery.

The missing mole is not exactly hard evidence that Iranians had a spare monkey waiting in the wings to pretend he’d just got back from space, but Iran does have a track record of fictionalizing its achievements in the field of rocket-science. Last July, however, the Iranian Students’ News Agency â€" which released photographs of the monkey with and without the mole this week â€" did report that the space agency in Tehran had five monkeys in training for the mission.



Twitter Hacked: Data For 250,000 Users Stolen

Late Friday, Twitter announced that it had been breached and that data for 250,000 Twitter users had been stolen.

The company said in a blog post that it detected unusual access patterns earlier this week and found that user informationâ€"usernames, e-mail addresses, and encrypted passwordsâ€"for 250,000 users had been stolen in what it described as a “sophisticated attack.”

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” Bob Lord, Twitter’s director of information security, said in a blog post. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

Jim Prosser, a spokesman for Twitter, would not say how hackers were able to infiltrate Twitter’s systems, but Twitter’s blog post alluded that hackers had broken in through a well-publicized exploit in Oracle’s Java software.

Java, a widely used programming language, is installed on more than three billion devices and has long been dogged by security problems. Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, the Department of Homeland Security issued a rare alert that warned users disable Java on their computers. The exploit was particularly disconcerting because it let attackers download a malicious program onto its victims’ machines without any prompting. Users did not even have to click on a malicious link for their computers to be infected. The program simply downloaded itself.

Oracle patched the security hole, but even then the Department said that the fix was not sufficient and urged users to disable Java on their Web browsers.

“Unless it is absolutely necessary to run Java in Web browsers, disable it,” the agency said in an updated alert. “This! will help mitigate other Java vulnerabilities that may be discovered in the future.”

Twitter also encouraged users to disable the software. “We also echo the advisory from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and security experts to encourage users to disable Java on their computers,” Mr. Lord said.

While Apple no longer ships its machines with Java enabled by default. But after the alert, Apple also disabled the software remotely on Macs machines where it had already been installed. Those who do not own Macs can disable the software using detailed instructions on Oracle’s Java Web site.

Mr. Prosser said Twitter was working with government and federal law enforcement to track down the source of the attacks. For now, he said the company had reset passwords for, and notified, every compromised user. The company encouraged users to practice good password hygiene, which typically means coming up with different passwords for different sites, and using long passwords that cannot be found in the dictionary.

Twitter did say it “hashed” passwords, which involves mashing up users’ passwords with a mathematical algorithm, and “salted” them, which involves appending random digits to the end of a hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack.

Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auctionlike black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.



Police Video of Shootings at South Africa\'s Marikana Mine Raises Questions

Last year South African police shot and killed 34 miners following a strike and unrest at a platinum mine in the town of Marikana. Police have longargued they were acting in self defense. But footage aired by Britain’s Channel 4 News this week seems to show a more complex series of events.

The footage, apparently taken by a police officer on a mobile phone, was submitted to a commission of inquiry that is investigating the events, Channel 4 News reported. It centers on events in and around a cluster of rocks which has become known to some, using an Afrikaans word for the cluster, as “the killing koppie.”

My colleague Bill Keller visited the cluster recently, while reporting a story for the New York Times Magazine:

I rode up to Marikana with Greg Marinovic! h, my go-to photographer and guide when I was based in Johannesburg 20 years ago, who spent many weeks documenting the massacre. If you walk the scene, even months later, and note the bits of yellow paint peeling off the reddish rocks where forensic teams marked the fallen, it makes you wonder whether some of the strikers may have been hunted down and killed in retreat. The markings show a scattering of bodies well beyond the sightlines of the initial confrontation; one body lay wedged in the gap between two boulders.

“How do you shoot someone in that space” Greg asked. “Maybe from overhead Or maybe he crawled in there and bled out. But it looks like an execution at close range.”

The footage lends weight to that idea. It shows police officers walking and shooting far from the initial clash, and the television cameras there, near the rocks of the koppie. At one point an officer is heard over the radio imploring a colleague not to shoot someone. Gunfire can be heard, and the saky camera then shows a motionless man lying sprawled on the scrub grass. “I shot him at least ten times,” an officer is heard to say.

The position of spent ammunition, said James Nichol, a lawyer for some of the survivors of the killings told Channel 4 News, could indicate “that police officers were standing on a rock and firing down into a gulley where men were defenseless.”

The headline in the South African newspaper The Mail and Guardian is unambiguous: “Police Shot Marikana Miners Unprovoked, Video Shows,” it reads. Police will ikely use the footage, an expert told the newspaper, to support the position “that there wasn’t the mass killing that they are being accused of carrying out.” An independent investigator, David Bruce, disagreed. “I’m beginning to think that there is more of a possibility that this was a deliberate operation, rather t! han somet! hing carried out in the heat of the moment,” he said.

In a separate Channel 4 News report, survivors of the killing accused police officers of harassing them as they wait to give evidence.



Video and Images of New Clashes in Cairo

As our colleagues Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick report, Egyptian protesters clashed with riot police officers outside the presidential palace in Cairo on Friday night.

Protesters hurled rocks and launched fireworks over the building’s outer wall, setting fire to a guard tower and drawing a robust response from security forces, who protesters said fired tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot, causing many to flee through the streets of an upper-class Cairo neighborhood. A well-known rights lawyer, Ragia Omran, reported on Twitter that one protester died after being shot in the head and neck outside the palace.

Video, photographs and text reports uploaded by activist bloggers and journalists on the scene showed the clashes, as protesters hurled rocks and launched fireworks over the palace walls, setting fireto a guard tower, and officers fired tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot, causing many to flee through the streets of the upper-class Cairo neighborhood. In one instantly notorious incident that unfolded on live television, officers stripped and beat a protester outside the palace.

Earlier on Friday, video posted online by Tahrir News, an independent news organization, appeared to show officers setting fire to a small tent city that protesters had erected outside the walls of the palace.

Video shot by an Egyptian journalist outside the presidential palace in Cairo on Friday showed protesters setting fire to a guard tower.

After the protests against Egypt’s new Islamist president turned violent, the Muslim Brotherho! od’s of! ficial English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb, drew attention to video of protesters throwing rocks and launching fireworks over the walls of the palace from Al-Hayat, a satellite news channel. Mr. Morsi, long a senior leader of the Brotherhood, was the movement’s candidate for the presidency.

Video aired by Al-Hayat TV station showed protesters throwin rocks and launching fireworks over the walls of the presidential palace in Cairo.

Mr. Morsi’s office posted condemned the protesters in updates on Twitter, and even tried to reclaim the mantle of the 2011 revolution.

Until Mr. Morsi was sworn into office last summer, protests outside the presidential palace were all but unheard of and clashes with the hated security forces typically took place outside police stations or the downtown headquarters of the Interior Ministry. As the activist blogger Wael Eskandar noted, that changed in early December.

After Islamist supporters of the president attacked protesters outside the palace in December, the Muslim Brotherhood was blamed for provoking the violence. On Friday, a note posted on Ikhwanweb said that the Bro! therhood ! would not call on rank-and-file members to defend the presidential palace.

As the clashes between the security forces and protesters escalated on Friday night, Bel Trew, a British journalist for the state news site Ahram Online, reported from the scene that officers of the Central Security Forces were shooting at protesters, or those they believed to be protesters, at close range.

She also reported seeing the police shoot! one man ! with birdshot at close range outside a Costa Cafe. He was not a protester, but a cafe employee leaving work, she said.

Protesters also gathered in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo on Friday, where witnesss said the scene was much more subdued.



Video and Images of New Clashes in Cairo

As our colleagues Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick report, Egyptian protesters clashed with riot police officers outside the presidential palace in Cairo on Friday night.

Protesters hurled rocks and launched fireworks over the building’s outer wall, setting fire to a guard tower and drawing a robust response from security forces, who protesters said fired tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot, causing many to flee through the streets of an upper-class Cairo neighborhood. A well-known rights lawyer, Ragia Omran, reported on Twitter that one protester died after being shot in the head and neck outside the palace.

Video, photographs and text reports uploaded by activist bloggers and journalists on the scene showed the clashes, as protesters hurled rocks and launched fireworks over the palace walls, setting fireto a guard tower, and officers fired tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot, causing many to flee through the streets of the upper-class Cairo neighborhood. In one instantly notorious incident that unfolded on live television, officers stripped and beat a protester outside the palace.

Earlier on Friday, video posted online by Tahrir News, an independent news organization, appeared to show officers setting fire to a small tent city that protesters had erected outside the walls of the palace.

Video shot by an Egyptian journalist outside the presidential palace in Cairo on Friday showed protesters setting fire to a guard tower.

After the protests against Egypt’s new Islamist president turned violent, the Muslim Brotherho! od’s of! ficial English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb, drew attention to video of protesters throwing rocks and launching fireworks over the walls of the palace from Al-Hayat, a satellite news channel. Mr. Morsi, long a senior leader of the Brotherhood, was the movement’s candidate for the presidency.

Video aired by Al-Hayat TV station showed protesters throwin rocks and launching fireworks over the walls of the presidential palace in Cairo.

Mr. Morsi’s office posted condemned the protesters in updates on Twitter, and even tried to reclaim the mantle of the 2011 revolution.

Until Mr. Morsi was sworn into office last summer, protests outside the presidential palace were all but unheard of and clashes with the hated security forces typically took place outside police stations or the downtown headquarters of the Interior Ministry. As the activist blogger Wael Eskandar noted, that changed in early December.

After Islamist supporters of the president attacked protesters outside the palace in December, the Muslim Brotherhood was blamed for provoking the violence. On Friday, a note posted on Ikhwanweb said that the Bro! therhood ! would not call on rank-and-file members to defend the presidential palace.

As the clashes between the security forces and protesters escalated on Friday night, Bel Trew, a British journalist for the state news site Ahram Online, reported from the scene that officers of the Central Security Forces were shooting at protesters, or those they believed to be protesters, at close range.

She also reported seeing the police shoot! one man ! with birdshot at close range outside a Costa Cafe. He was not a protester, but a cafe employee leaving work, she said.

Protesters also gathered in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo on Friday, where witnesss said the scene was much more subdued.



Privacy Flaw in Path\'s iPhone App Shares Location Data

Path, a social media start-up company, has to pay $800,000 in damages for privacy violations, the Federal Trade Commission said on Friday. But this may not be the end of Path’s troubles with privacy. A security researcher has pointed out a loophole that allows Path to share location data even when a user has turned off location sharing.

Jeffrey Paul, a data security consultant, on Friday published a blog post pointing out a security flaw in Path for iPhone users. If a user posts a photo inside Path and writes a caption, the app can still share the city or other general location where the photo was taken â€" even if a user has turned off location sharing for Path in the iPhone’s privacy settings.

A quick test confirmed this loophole. The location information is shared through a photo caption if a user has decided to allow the iPhone camera to tag photos with location information.Mr. Paul said in an interview that if a user has asked that his location data not be shared through Path, Path should remove the photo’s location information before publishing it so the location is not shared. Twitter does this when a user requests that his location not be shared, Mr. Paul said.

Mr. Paul said he discovered this privacy leak unintentionally when he posted a photo on Path.

“It painted a picture to me of the company as being people that aren’t interested in taking the correct steps to safeguard their user information,” he said in an interview.

Path did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment. When reached, Apple’s public relations department had not yet prepared a comment.

Path came under scrutiny last February when a programmer discovered that its app was surreptitiously copying address book information from users’ iPhones without notifying them. The F.T.C. later filed a complaint that said Path’s app was misleading and did not give consumers a choice regarding the collection of their personal information.



Video Shows Aftermath of U.S. Embassy Bombing in Turkey

Associated Press video showing the damage to the perimeter of the United States Embassy in Turkey after a suicide bombing in Ankara on Friday.

As my colleagues Sebnem Arsu and Rick Gladstone report, a suicide bomber attacked the American Embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara on Friday, in a blast that officials said killed at least one Turkish citizen and wounded another at a side entrance to the compound.

A cameraman for the Turkish news agency Ihlas Haber Ajansı rushed to the scene, capturing raw video of the damage to the embassy’s perimeter and a brief glimpse of what appeared to be human flesh on the pavement. Some of that ..H.A. footage was used in a video report broadcast on Turkish television, showing a wounded person being loaded into an ambulance as police officers tried to cordon off the area.

Video broadcast on Turkish television on Friday showed the aftermath of a bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. (Via Telegraph TV)

As the blogger Serhatcan Yurdam reports, a woman named EsmaDinmezer posted a collection of photographs uploaded to Facebook showing first responders, officials and reporters outside the embassy later.

Another Turkish channel, TRT Haber, broadcast remarks by the United States ambassador, Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr., as he stood in front of the building beside Alaattin Yuksel, the governor of Ankara. (Readers can click ahead to about the 1:30 mark of the TRT report to hear the ambassador’s remarks, in Turkish and English.)

Speaking after the governor the American ambassador thanked the authorities for their prompt response, expressed sorrow at the death of a Turkish security guard and said his prayers were with the Turkish employee who was being treated for his wounds.

In his remarks, the Turkish official told reporters the explosion “happened inside the American Embassy.”



The Origins of \'Big Data\' : An Etymological Detective Story

Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life. And words are how we express ideas, so tracing their origin, development and spread is not merely an academic pursuit but a window into a society’s intellectual evolution.

Digital technology is changing both how words and ideas are created and proliferate, and how they are studied. Just last month, for example, the Library of Congress said its archive of public Twitter messages has reached 170 billion tweets and rising, by about 500 million tweets a day.

The Library of Congress archive, resulting from a deal struck with Twitter in 2010, is not yet open to researchers. But the plan is that it soon will be. In a white paper, the Library said that social media promises to be a rich resource that provides “a fuller picture of today’s cultural norm, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.”

The new digital forms of communication â€" Web sites, blog posts, tweets â€" are often very different from the traditional sources for the study of words, like books, news articles and academic journals.

“It’s almost like oral language instead of edited text,” said Fred R. Shapiro, a research librarian at the Yale Law School. “It’s the way of the future.”

The unruly digital data of the Web is a big ingredient in what is now being called “Big Data.” And as it turns out, the term Big Data seems to be most accurately traced not to references in news or journal archives, but to digital artifacts now posted on technical Web sites, appropriately enough.

To our modest tale of word sleuthing: Last August, I w! rote a Sunday column about 2012 being the breakout year for Big Data as an idea, in the marketplace, and as a term.

At the time, I did some reporting on the roots of the term, and I asked Mr. Shapiro of Yale to dig into it. He scoured data bases and came up with several references, including in press releases for product announcements and one intriguing use of the term by a now-famous author (more on that later).

But Mr. Shapiro couldn’t find anything as crisp and definitive as he had done for me years earlier when I asked him to try to find the first reference to the word “software” as a computing term. It was in 1958, in an article in “The American Mathematical Monthly,” written by John Tukey, a Princeton mathematician.

So, without a conclusive answer, I didn’t write about the origins of the term Big Data in that Sunday column. But afterward, I heard from people who had ideas on the subject.

Francis X. Diebold, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, got intouch and even wrote a paper, with the mildly tongue-in-cheek title, “I Coined the Term ‘Big Data’ ” I had not thought of economics as the breeding ground for the term, but it is not unreasonable. Some of the statistical and algorithmic methods now in the Big Data tool kit trace their heritage to economic modeling and Wall Street.

Mr. Diebold staked a claim based on his paper, “Big Data Dynamic Factor Models for Macroeconomic Measurement and Forecasting,” presented in 2000 and published in 2003. The economic-modeling paper was first academic reference found to Big Data, according to research by Marco Pospiech, a Ph. D. candidate at the Technical University of Freiberg in Germany.

By then, I had heard from Douglas Laney, an veteran data analyst at Gartner. His said the father of t! he term B! ig Data might well be John Mashey, who was the chief scientist at Silicon Graphics in the 1990s.

I replied to Mr. Diebold that I thought from what I had seen he probably had plenty of competition. And I passed along the e-mail correspondence I had received. Mr. Diebold said thanks much, and added that he had a University of Pennsylvania research librarian looking into it as well.

The term Big Data is so generic that the hunt for its origin was not just an effort to find an early reference to those two words being used together. Instead, the goal was the early use of the term that suggests its present connotation â€" that is, not just a lot of data, but different types of data handled in new ways.

The credit, it seemed to me, should go to someone who was aware of the computing context. That is why, in my view, a very intriguing reference, discovered by the Yale researcher Mr. Shapiro, does not qualify.

In 1989, Erik Larson, later the author of bestsellers including “The Devil in theWhite City” and “In The Garden of Beasts,” wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine, which was reprinted in The Washington Post. The article begins with the author wondering how all that junk mail arrives in his mailbox and moves on to the direct-marketing industry. The article includes these two sentences: “The keepers of big data say they do it for the consumer’s benefit. But data have a way of being used for purposes other than originally intended.”

Prescient indeed. But not, I don’t think, a use of the term that suggests an inkling of the technology we call Big Data today.

Since I first looked at how he used the term, I liked Mr. Mashey as the originator of Big Data. In the 1990s, Silicon Graphics was the giant of computer graphics, used for special-effects in Hollywood and for video surveillance by spy agencies. It was a hot company in the Valley that dealt with new kinds of data, and lots of it.

There are no academic papers to support the attribution to Mr. Mashey. ! Instead, ! he gave hundreds of talks to small groups in the middle and late 1990s to explain the concept and, of course, pitch Silicon Graphics products. The case for Mr. Mashey is on the Web sites of technical and professional organizations, like Usenix. There, some of his presentation slides from those talks are posted, including “Big Data and the Next Wave of Infrastress” in 1998.

For me, looking for the origins of Big Data has been a matter of personal curiosity, something to get back to someday and write up on a weekend.

When I called Mr. Mashey recently, he said that Big Data is such a simple term, it’s not much a claim to fame. His role, if any, he said, was to popularize the term within a portion of the high-tech community in the 1990s. “I was using one label for a range of issues, and I wanted the simplest, shortest phrase to convey that the boundaries of computing keepadvancing,” said Mr. Mashey, a consultant to tech companies and a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Diebold kept looking into the subject as well. His follow-up inquiries, he said, proved to be “a journey of increasing humility.” He has written to two papers since the first one.

His most recent paper concludes: “The term Big Data, which spans computer science and statistics/econometrics, probably originated in the lunch-table conversations at Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s, in which John Mashey figured prominently.”

Tracing the origins of Big Data points to the evolution in the field of etymology, according to Mr. Shapiro. The Yale researcher began his word-hunting nearly 35 years ago, as a student at the Harvard Law School, poring through the library stacks. He was an early! user of ! databases of legal documents, news articles and other documents, in computerized archives.

The Web, Mr. Shapiro said, opens up new linguistic terrain. “What you’re seeing is a marriage of structured databases and novel, less structured materials,” he said. “It can be a powerful tool to see far more.”



Daily Report: A New Way to Deliver a TV Drama

Binge-viewing, empowered by DVD box sets and Netflix subscriptions, has become such a popular way for Americans to watch TV that it is beginning to influence the ways the stories are told â€" particularly one-hour dramas â€" and how they are distributed, reports Brian Stelter in Friday’s New York Times.

Some people, pressured by their peers to watch “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones,” catch up on previous seasons to see what all the fuss is about before a new season begins. Others plan weekend marathons of classics like “The West Wing” and “The Wire.” Like other American pastimes, it can get competitive: people have been known to brag about finishing a whole 12-episode season of “Homeland” in one sitting.

On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political hriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

“House of Cards,” which is the first show made specifically for Netflix, dispenses with some of the traditions that are so common on network TV, like flashbacks. There is less reason to remind viewers what happened in previous episodes, the producers say, because so many viewers will have just seen it. And if they don’t remember, Google is just a click away.

Glen Mazzara, the executive producer, took a similar approach to AMC’s “The Walking Dead” this year. In the second half of the season, which will start in mid-February after a two-month break, “we decided to pick up the action right away â€" to just jump right in,” Mr. Mazzara said. Fans of the show, h! e said, have little tolerance for recaps, since many of them will have just watched a marathon of the first half to prepare for the second.

That the fans even have a choice in the matter is a testament to the fundamental changes under way in the television business. Digital video recorders, video-on-demand capabilities and streaming Web sites have given viewers command of what they watch and when, not unlike the way the invention of supermarkets gave food shoppers a panoply of new choices. In both cases, some consumers love to binge.



When Did Alicia Keys Break Up With Her iPhone

BlackBerry has named Alicia Keys, the musician, as its global creative director. At a press conference, Ms. Keys said that she and BlackBerry were now "exclusively dating." There's just one glitch: Her Twitter account shows she was very recently spending time with an iPhone.