Obama Discusses Computer Security with Corporate Chiefs

WASHINGTON - President Obama met with an invited group of 13 chief executives at the White House on Wednesday to discuss growing concerns about cybersecurity and enlist them to get behind his proposed legislation to combat the threat of computer warfare and corporate espionage.

Among those present were Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobil, Randall Stephenson of AT&T, Wesley Bush of Northrop Grumman, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, which had been attacked by foreign hackers as recently as Tuesday.

White House officials said the meeting in the White House Situation Room was designed as a “two-way” information exchange. Aides said Mr. Obama wanted to hear directly from industry leaders about how vulnerable their companies were to computer attacks. The president also wanted to discuss efforts the government is taking to address threats.

“He has seen as various corporations and business leaders have gone public with their concerns about cybersecurity and th effects of breaches of cybersecurity on their operations,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

In recent weeks, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have all stepped forward to say that their computer systems had been attacked. And since September, online banking sites of several American banks have been intermittently pulled offline by attacks that officials say originated in Iran.

But the president is also looking to drum up public support as he makes a renewed push for legislation that would give the administration new technological tools and broader authority in the battle against computer attacks by foreign governments. The president’s previous bill was killed by a Republican filibuster last year after intensive lobbying by the United States Chamber of Commerce and other business gr! oups, which argued that the legislation would prove onerous.

“He also wants to convey to them how seriously he takes this issue and what he believes the right steps are moving forward,” Mr. Carney said. “And he certainly hopes that out of this meeting and the many others he has on this topic, that we will build the kind of consensus necessary to compel Congress to take appropriate action.”

The meeting Wednesday, which also included chief executives from American Electric Power, Xerox, Marathon Oil, Honeywell, United Parcel Service, ITT Exelis, Siemens and Frontier Communications, was just the latest step in the administration’s campaign to persuade Congress to pass a computer security bill.

In recent months, several senior administration officials â€" including Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff â€" have provided closd-door briefings to members of Congress about the threat.

As a stopgap measure, the president signed an executive order last month that promotes increased the sharing of information between the government and private companies.

The president has also been making his case directly to the public in speeches and media appearances in recent months. In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama spent more time on the topic of computer attacks than he did on North Korea and Iran combined.

In an interview on ABC News broadcast on Wednesday, Mr. Obama was careful to avoid saying that the United States is engaged in a computer war with China. He said officials need to “be careful with war analogies” in discussions about the topics.

But the president said that bill! ions of d! ollars are lost when industrial secrets are stolen online. And he said that some of the attacks on the nation’s private and public computer networks are sponsored by foreign governments.

“Our companies are put into competitive disadvantage. You know, there are disruptions to our systems that, you know, involve everything from our financial systems to some of our infrastructure,” Mr. Obama said. “And this is why I’ve taken some very aggressive executive actions. But we need Congress to act.”

He said that the government is limited in what it can do to confront China and other sponsors of computer attacks. And he said the government needs the authority to require that critical infrastructure in the country is hardened against such attacks.

“There are ways that we can harden our critical infrastructure, our financial sector,” Mr. Obama said. “And the only thing that’s holding us back from doing that right now is we haven’t gotten the legislative authority out of Congress.They need to get this done.”

Networking Battles to Run the World

Cisco has a simple message: the world has bought so much of its equipment, why stop now

Both Cisco Systems and one of its biggest competitors, VMware, talked about ambitious strategies Wednesday. The powerful data centers and networks they want to build, tied to millions of sensors and devices, promise to create all kinds of efficient systems with an eye on everything we do. Just as much, they talked about competing with each other.

Even before Cisco spoke, VMware was making its claim to a world where billions of devices were sensing the world and suggesting efficient actions. Rather than depending on legacy customers, VMware is counting on inspiring thousands of software developers, who will use computer networks as a platform for new business.

It is similar to the way Microsoft used outside developers to give it an edge on the personal computer, and Google used them on the Web. Networks are more specialized technologies, however, so it’s not clear they can attract a mass of outside tlent. Cisco is hoping big companies will be better allies.

Speaking at a gathering of journalists and networking industry analysts, several Cisco executives outlined what they called a “$14 trillion opportunity” in bringing sensors, communications and data analysis to all the world’s traffic systems, hospitals, refineries, and other civil and business infrastructure.

“The first 10 years (of the commercial Internet) were really about transactions, and the last 10 were about interactions,” said Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer. “The next 10 is about processes being more efficient.”

That efficiency, she and others said, involves developing networks with enough machine intelligence to offer highly personalized experiences, big data analysis, and automated management of the overall system.

In a demonstration that blended the stirring and the slightly creepy, Cisco showed off how it has deployed wireless technology that can see how lon! g people are waiting at train platforms, or moving through markets. Cisco is installing sensors in its own parking spaces, so people can be told where to leave their cars.

Combining these two technologies, the company showed how stores could tell prospective shoppers what the waiting time is at a checkout line, and how much parking is available at the mall. There were similar examples about managing electricity grids, tracking patients, and running safety systems on oil rigs.

Cisco has already deployed about $180 billion worth of network equipment into the world, she said, and will build hardware and software that interacts efficiently with the legacy gear, so new kinds of intelligent systems can be quickly deployed.

Backing up that message of size and scale, Pankaj Patel, Cisco’s chief development officer, noted that Cisco spent $5.5 billion on research and development in 2012, “an amount larger than the revenue of some of our competitors.” VMware’s revenue for 2012 was $4.6 billin.

Impressive for Cisco, though the company has outlined this ambition before. The real challenge may be in reaching customers at stores, dams and the D.M.V., people away from its usual customer base of network engineers.

“We’ve generally dealt with an information technology route to market,” said Robert Lloyd, Cisco’s head of sales. Now, “it’s going to be Rockwell, General Electric,” and other companies that create large industrial systems, he said, adding, “it’s a major transformation for the company.”

Ms. Warrior also talked about the strategy as a way that telecommunications providers could increase the value of their products.

VMware, in announcements it made alongside EMC, which owns most of VMware, shared the idea of really big networks tied into more of our lives and systems. VMware said it was merging its Nicira property, perhaps the most advanced network dominated by software, into its data center and security groups, and not into custom hardware, with its cloud computing and security products.

It also announced that it would use its history in server virtualization to enable customers to swap computing jobs among corporate computers and public clouds of computers, like Amazon. There was, in addition, a nod to allowing many different types of devices on its network.

What it needs to do now is inspire lots of developers, filling its networks with Cisco-like futuristic applications. That is probably part of its next big announcement.

Video Shows Syrian Suicide Bomber’s Last Day

YouTube Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian rebel group linked to Al Qaeda, released a brief documentary about the final day of a suicide bomber.

Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian rebel group accused of ties to Al Qaeda, posted a video online this week that documents the last day in the life of a suicide bomber who killed himself in an attack on a government checkpoint in January.

The video appears to be an effort to publicize an attack that the group describes as “the largest martyrdom operation in Syria,” but also to humanize the group, which was blacklisted by the United States in ecember. The brief documentary offers a rare glimpse into the last day in the life of a suicide bomber as he jokes with friends, says tearful goodbyes to his fellow fighters and picks his target with the help of Google Maps.

Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian rebel group, posted the documentary about a suicide bomber in a Jan. 26 attack.

The bomber’s identity is obscured throughout the video. His face is either blurred or concealed behind a ski mask, and his real name is hidden behind a sobriquet, Abu Islam. He speaks with a Syrian accent, strongly suggesting that he was Syrian and not a foreign fighter.

Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said in an interview that he had seen many videos of foreign suicide bombers in Syria but “it is the first time I see! the video of a Syrian.”

“I heard his accent and he seemed thrilled and happy to be on this journey to heaven, and it was really moving,” Mr. Abdelrahman said. “It moved me more than if it was a foreign fighter.”

The video begins with a “martyrdom message” filmed by Abu Islam that includes an explanation for the attack as well as a final farewell to his parents. In the next scene, he is shown joking and laughing from behind a ski mask. The cameraman asks him how it feels to know he would soon drive a truck packed with 20 tons of explosives into a checkpoint.

“You’ll ride 20 tons of explosives, you’ll blow yourself up. How is that” the cameraman asks. Abu Islam breaks into a broad grin behind his ski mask and laughs before responding that he was doing it to “please God.” Knowing that he had pleased God, he says, would be a greater reward than even “paradise and the virgins” he believed were awaiting him there.

Abu Islam is next shown on a veranda saying aheartfelt goodbye to his friends in the brigade. Some laugh and joke while others sniffle or weep quietly. A solemn religious chant plays in the background. In a flourish reminiscent of reality television, text at the bottom of the screen described the scene: “Abu Islam with his brothers before departure. Minutes before his departure to the military base.”

“Abu Islam, these are the last moments of your presence with us here in this world,” the cameraman says as the bomber grins. “Say something from your heart to your brothers.”

After a pause, he looks at his friends and responds: “There is great sadness, really, in leaving. But my passion for God is honestly greater. Passion for God is greater than everything.”

“I want to say to my brothers the jihadists in the jihad, and to Muslims in general, do not give up or reduce your efforts, until Islamic law is implemented on the earth.”

The young men then begin to joke again. The cameraman asks Abu Islam if he wou! ld like t! o add more explosives to the truck, if there was space. Laughing, he replies, “I swear, I’d like to add a lot more!”

The video then shows the nuts and bolts of the operation: the large truck that Abu Islam drove to his target, the mashtal checkpoint south of the town of Quseir, as well as Abu Islam and another rebel planning which roads he would use to drive there on Google Maps.

“This is the side street, God willing, and then here is the main road,” says the other rebel, tracing the bomber’s route on a computer screen. “And here is the start of the checkpoint. The first military gathering, after the barricades.”

“God willing, this whole area will be destroyed,” he says.

Suicide bombings are becoming more common in the Syrian conflict, Mr. Abdelrahman said, and the video includes several scenes from suicide attacks in other Syrian cities, including Damascus, Aleppo and Hama.

Reflecting on the happiness that Abu Islam exhibited as he prepared for his death, M.. Abdelrahman recounted an anecdote he said he had heard from activists in the town of Saraqeb, in Idlib, who stumbled upon a suicide bomber stranded by the side of the road by a flat tire.

“He started crying, and other fighters asked why he’s so disappointed; he said that his name has been on the a waiting list for three months, and he’s devastated that he won’t be going to heaven when his turn has come,” Mr. Abdelrahman said.

The video ends with footage of Abu Islam’s truck driving down a dirt road. The footage appears to have been shot from the dashboard of a car following him. A black jihadist flag flaps in the wind and gunfire is heard in the distance.

The final scenes of the video are shown multiple times from different angles: a huge explosion on the horizon followed by volleys of retaliatory gunfire from government soldiers.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the attack, which took place on Jan. 26, “destroyed the checkpoint entirely” but! that it ! had received no information about the number of casualties. We know that at least one person died: a young man who went by the name Abu Islam.

Video Shows Syrian Suicide Bomber’s Last Day

YouTube Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian rebel group linked to Al Qaeda, released a brief documentary about the final day of a suicide bomber.

Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian rebel group accused of ties to Al Qaeda, posted a video online this week that documents the last day in the life of a suicide bomber who killed himself in an attack on a government checkpoint in January.

The video appears to be an effort to publicize an attack that the group describes as “the largest martyrdom operation in Syria,” but also to humanize the group, which was blacklisted by the United States in ecember. The brief documentary offers a rare glimpse into the last day in the life of a suicide bomber as he jokes with friends, says tearful goodbyes to his fellow fighters and picks his target with the help of Google Maps.

Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian rebel group, posted the documentary about a suicide bomber in a Jan. 26 attack.

The bomber’s identity is obscured throughout the video. His face is either blurred or concealed behind a ski mask, and his real name is hidden behind a sobriquet, Abu Islam. He speaks with a Syrian accent, strongly suggesting that he was Syrian and not a foreign fighter.

Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said in an interview that he had seen many videos of foreign suicide bombers in Syria but “it is the first time I see! the video of a Syrian.”

“I heard his accent and he seemed thrilled and happy to be on this journey to heaven, and it was really moving,” Mr. Abdelrahman said. “It moved me more than if it was a foreign fighter.”

The video begins with a “martyrdom message” filmed by Abu Islam that includes an explanation for the attack as well as a final farewell to his parents. In the next scene, he is shown joking and laughing from behind a ski mask. The cameraman asks him how it feels to know he would soon drive a truck packed with 20 tons of explosives into a checkpoint.

“You’ll ride 20 tons of explosives, you’ll blow yourself up. How is that” the cameraman asks. Abu Islam breaks into a broad grin behind his ski mask and laughs before responding that he was doing it to “please God.” Knowing that he had pleased God, he says, would be a greater reward than even “paradise and the virgins” he believed were awaiting him there.

Abu Islam is next shown on a veranda saying aheartfelt goodbye to his friends in the brigade. Some laugh and joke while others sniffle or weep quietly. A solemn religious chant plays in the background. In a flourish reminiscent of reality television, text at the bottom of the screen described the scene: “Abu Islam with his brothers before departure. Minutes before his departure to the military base.”

“Abu Islam, these are the last moments of your presence with us here in this world,” the cameraman says as the bomber grins. “Say something from your heart to your brothers.”

After a pause, he looks at his friends and responds: “There is great sadness, really, in leaving. But my passion for God is honestly greater. Passion for God is greater than everything.”

“I want to say to my brothers the jihadists in the jihad, and to Muslims in general, do not give up or reduce your efforts, until Islamic law is implemented on the earth.”

The young men then begin to joke again. The cameraman asks Abu Islam if he wou! ld like t! o add more explosives to the truck, if there was space. Laughing, he replies, “I swear, I’d like to add a lot more!”

The video then shows the nuts and bolts of the operation: the large truck that Abu Islam drove to his target, the mashtal checkpoint south of the town of Quseir, as well as Abu Islam and another rebel planning which roads he would use to drive there on Google Maps.

“This is the side street, God willing, and then here is the main road,” says the other rebel, tracing the bomber’s route on a computer screen. “And here is the start of the checkpoint. The first military gathering, after the barricades.”

“God willing, this whole area will be destroyed,” he says.

Suicide bombings are becoming more common in the Syrian conflict, Mr. Abdelrahman said, and the video includes several scenes from suicide attacks in other Syrian cities, including Damascus, Aleppo and Hama.

Reflecting on the happiness that Abu Islam exhibited as he prepared for his death, M.. Abdelrahman recounted an anecdote he said he had heard from activists in the town of Saraqeb, in Idlib, who stumbled upon a suicide bomber stranded by the side of the road by a flat tire.

“He started crying, and other fighters asked why he’s so disappointed; he said that his name has been on the a waiting list for three months, and he’s devastated that he won’t be going to heaven when his turn has come,” Mr. Abdelrahman said.

The video ends with footage of Abu Islam’s truck driving down a dirt road. The footage appears to have been shot from the dashboard of a car following him. A black jihadist flag flaps in the wind and gunfire is heard in the distance.

The final scenes of the video are shown multiple times from different angles: a huge explosion on the horizon followed by volleys of retaliatory gunfire from government soldiers.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the attack, which took place on Jan. 26, “destroyed the checkpoint entirely” but! that it ! had received no information about the number of casualties. We know that at least one person died: a young man who went by the name Abu Islam.

Google Puts Android and Chrome Under One Boss

Google announced on Wednesday a change in its executive ranks that could have broad implications for the mobile business.

Andy Rubin, who had been senior vice president in charge of Android, Google’s mobile operating system, has been replaced by Sundar Pichai. Mr. Pichai is the senior vice president of Chrome, and will now oversee Android as well.

Google has been in a confusing position because it has two unrelated operating systems: Chrome and Android.

At first, Google said they were separate: Chrome was for computers and the Web, and Android was for touch-screen mobile devices and apps.

But the lines among devices have blurred. Now, some computers (like the Chromebook Pixel that Google introduced last month) have touch screens, and people use mobile devices the way they used to use computers.

The personnel change is a sign that Google now sees the need to somehow coordinate or mrge the two operating systems.

Though Android has been wildly successful, with 750 million devices activated worldwide, computers running Chrome’s operating system have not.

At a press event to introduce the new Chromebook, Mr. Pichai drew less of a distinction between the two operating systems than Google executives had in the past.

“So far, we have been in a world which has been pretty straightforward: Android phones and tablets and Chrome laptops,” Mr. Pichai said. “But lines do blur.”

“The way we think about it internally,” he said, “is as a user, you sign in to both these devices, you use search, Maps, Gmail” and other Google products. “All your Google services work seamlessly across devices.”

The company did not provide any details about how Chrome or Android might change under the new leadership.

“Today we’re living in a new computin! g environment,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, wrote in a company blog post announcing the change. “People are really excited about technology and spending a lot of money on devices.”

Mr. Pichai has had a fast rise at Google and has experience developing hardware, a new area of focus for the company. In addition to Chrome and Android, he also oversees Google Apps, like Gmail and Drive, for consumers and businesses.

Mr. Rubin is a big name in the mobile world. He is a co-founder of Android, which Google bought in 2005 and turned into Apple’s biggest mobile competitor and the most-used mobile operating system.

Google did not say why Mr. Rubin was replaced. Despite Android’s success, it is at a crossroads as device-making partners like Samsung and Amazon increasingly become competitors.

Mr. Page praised Mr. Rubin and said he would stay at the company in a new position, though he did not say whatit would be. But there were hints that Mr. Rubin could join Google X, the company’s lab for creating new technologies like driverless cars, Google glasses and other wearable technologies. The glasses run Android.

Mr. Page wrote, “Andy, more moonshots please!” Google refers to Google X as a lab for “moonshots,” or world-changing ideas.

Motorola, the Android cellphone maker that Google spent $12.5 billion to buy, could also benefit from Mr. Rubin’s perspective as it tries to make phones that compete with those from Apple and Samsung. While Mr. Rubin was overseeing Android, Google tried to keep a strict wall between the two companies to appease Motorola’s competitors.

Live Updates on Election of a New Pope

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The Lede is tracking developments in the Vatican, where white smoke issued from a chimney, indicating that the conclave of 115 Cardinals gathered there elected a new pope on Wednesday evening in Rome.

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Netflix Allows Americans to Share Viewing Choices with Facebook Friends

You no longer have to ask your friends what they are watching on Netflix. Instead, you can now simply peer over their digital shoulder.

Netflix announced Wednesday that it will begin offering United States customers the ability to connect their Netflix account to Facebook to see what their friends are watching on the video rental service. They will also be able to share their own favorite videos.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Cameron Johnson, director of product innovation at Netflix, said that the latest sharing feature would offer two main views: customers’ favorite videos and those that they have recently watched on the service.

“You’ll see what titles your friends have watched in a new “Watched by your friends” row and what they have rated four or five stars in a new “Friends’ Favorites” row,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “Your friends will also be able to see what you watch and ratehighly.”

For people worried that a secret show will appear in their Facebook timeline for all to see, Netflix gives people explicit options to decide what they share to Facebook.

“You are in control of what gets shared. You can choose not to share a specific title by clicking the “Don’t Share This” button in the player,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

The sharing feature has been available in other countries for some time. But before Netflix could enable it in the United States, the company had to persuade Congress to amend a 1988 law, called the Video Privacy Protection Act, that prohibited video service providers from sharing customers’ viewing history without their consent.

It’s unclear whether American consumers really want to see what their inflated social networks are watching on television. Although the idea sounds great, if your Aunt Mildred is watching World War I docu! mentaries, and your nephew Luca is watching SpongeBob SquarePants, your social feed might not be very useful.

But investors thought the news was great for Netflix, sending the company’s shares up 7 percent in midday trading on Wednesday.

Netflix Allows Americans to Share Viewing Choices with Facebook Friends

You no longer have to ask your friends what they are watching on Netflix. Instead, you can now simply peer over their digital shoulder.

Netflix announced Wednesday that it will begin offering United States customers the ability to connect their Netflix account to Facebook to see what their friends are watching on the video rental service. They will also be able to share their own favorite videos.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Cameron Johnson, director of product innovation at Netflix, said that the latest sharing feature would offer two main views: customers’ favorite videos and those that they have recently watched on the service.

“You’ll see what titles your friends have watched in a new “Watched by your friends” row and what they have rated four or five stars in a new “Friends’ Favorites” row,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “Your friends will also be able to see what you watch and ratehighly.”

For people worried that a secret show will appear in their Facebook timeline for all to see, Netflix gives people explicit options to decide what they share to Facebook.

“You are in control of what gets shared. You can choose not to share a specific title by clicking the “Don’t Share This” button in the player,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

The sharing feature has been available in other countries for some time. But before Netflix could enable it in the United States, the company had to persuade Congress to amend a 1988 law, called the Video Privacy Protection Act, that prohibited video service providers from sharing customers’ viewing history without their consent.

It’s unclear whether American consumers really want to see what their inflated social networks are watching on television. Although the idea sounds great, if your Aunt Mildred is watching World War I docu! mentaries, and your nephew Luca is watching SpongeBob SquarePants, your social feed might not be very useful.

But investors thought the news was great for Netflix, sending the company’s shares up 7 percent in midday trading on Wednesday.

Researchers Find 25 Countries Using Surveillance Software

Last May, two security researchers volunteered to look at a few suspicious e-mails sent to some Bahraini activists. Almost one year later, the two have uncovered evidence that some 25 governments, many with questionable records on human rights, may be using off-the-shelf surveillance software to spy on their own citizens.

Morgan Marquis-Boire, a security researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and Bill Marczak, a computer science doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the e-mails contained surveillance software that could grab images off computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. The word “FinSpy” appeared in the spyware code. FinSpy is spyware sold by the Gamma Group, a British company that says it sells monitoring software to governments solely for criminal investigations.

Now, one yearlater, Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak have found evidence that FinSpy is being run off servers in 25 countries, including Ethiopia and Serbia, without oversight.

Until Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak stumbled upon FinSpy last May, security researchers had tried, unsuccessfully, for a year to track it down. FinSpy gained notoriety in March 2011 after protesters raided Egypt’s state security headquarters and discovered a document that appeared to be a proposal by the Gamma Group to sell FinSpy to the government of President Hosni Mubarak .

Martin J. Muench, a Gamma Group managing director, has said his company does not disclose its customers but that Gamma Group sold its technology to governments only to monitor criminals. He said that it was most frequently used “against pedophiles, terrorists, organized crime, kidnapping and human trafficking.”

But evidence suggests the software is b! eing sold to governments where the potential for abuse is high. “If you look at the list of countries that Gamma is selling to, many do not have a robust rule of law,” Mr. Marquis-Boire said. “Rather than catching kidnappers and drug dealers, it looks more likely that it is being used for politically motivated surveillance.”

As of last year, Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak, with other researchers at Rapid7, CrowdStrike and others, had found command-and-control servers running the spyware in just over a dozen countries. They have since scanned the entire Internet for FinSpy.

The Munk School is publishing their updated findings on Wednesday. The list of countries with servers running FinSpy is now Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Britain, Brunei, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Netherlands, Qatar, Serbia, Singapore, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Vietnam.

In Ethiopia,FinSpy was disguised in e-mails that were specifically aimed at political dissidents. The e-mails lured targets to click on pictures of members of Ginbot 7, an Ethiopian opposition group. When they clicked on the pictures, FinSpy downloaded to their machines and their computers began communicating with a local server in Ethiopia.

“This continues the theme of FinSpy deployments with strong indications of politically motivated targeting,” the researchers wrote in their report.

A Turkmenistan server running the software belonged to a range of I.P. addresses specifically assigned to the ministry of communications. Turkmenistan is the first clear-cut case of a government running the spyware off its own computer system. Human Rights Watch has called Turkmenistan one of the world’s “most repressive countries” and warned that dissidents faced “constant threat of government reprisal.”

In Vietnam, the researchers found evidence that FinSpy was running on Android-powered phones. ! They foun! d one Android phone infected with FinSpy that was sending text messages back to a Vietnamese telephone number. That finding was particularly troubling, researchers say, given recent clampdowns by the nation’s government. Last year, Vietnam introduced censorship laws that prohibit bloggers from speaking out against the country’s ruling Communist party. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 40 people had since been convicted and sentenced to prison terms. Many are now serving terms ranging from three to 13 years.

The sale of surveillance technology is still largely unregulated, but Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak’s findings have prompted greater scrutiny. Responding to their findings last fall, Germany’s foreign minister Guido Westerwelle called for an Europe-­wide ban on the export of surveillance technology to repressive regimes. And last month, Privacy Inernational and other groups filed complaints with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development against Gamma Group and Trovicor GmbH, a German company that also sells surveillance software.

“I don’t think you can put technology back in the bottle,” said Mr. Marquis-Boire. “I understand why police would want to use this type of technology, but I’m just not for commercial companies selling them to nondemocratic regimes with questionable human rights records.”

Google Elbows Into the Cloud in Seattle Expansion

Google Elbows Into the Cloud

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Zhang Chengliang, seated, a Google engineer in Kirkland, Wash. Cloud computing uses dozens of computer servers to create one giant machine to handle many tasks.

In a battle for dominance in cloud computing, Google is taking on Microsoft and Amazon in their own back yard.

Google’s offices in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. Google is doubling its office space and hiring more engineers.

Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology.

It is part of Google’s dive into a business known as cloud services â€" renting to other businesses access to its enormous data storage and computing power, accessible by the Internet.

In cloud computing, dozens or even thousands of computer servers are joined to create a giant machine capable of handling many tasks at once, from storing data to running Web sites and mobile apps to tackling complicated analytical problems.

Individual software developers, large companies and governments rent these services to run their operations often at a fraction of the cost of buying and managing their own machines.

Amazon Web Services, or A.W.S., is far and away the leader in this area. Amazon expects that this business will eventually be as big as its retail operation.

A.W.S. is followed by Microsoft’s Windows Azure and offerings from other companies including Rackspace, Verizon, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard.

Google says the cloud business is a new source of profit and a way to improve the Internet by providing other companies access to its sophisticated computing services.

Analysts say it is also a strategy to lure developers and businesses to use Google products instead of those of archrivals like Amazon and Microsoft.

The cloud business has become so vital to these companies, said James Staten, an analyst at Forrester, because it is crucial to other businesses like mobile apps and online video and music.

Most of the apps that run on Google Android phones, for instance, are built using Amazon’s cloud, and Google would like to wrest back control. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all competing to host online video, a booming business that relies on cloud services.

“Almost every major consultancy supports Amazon; almost every advertising agency runs on Amazon; if I need to hire 10 people tomorrow to help me build my application, it’s super easy to find people who have Amazon experience,” Mr. Staten said.

Google plans a major recruiting effort to increase its Seattle-area engineering staff by as much as five times. There is already fierce competition among tech companies for talented engineers, and many of those with skills in cloud computing work at Google’s rivals in Seattle.

“We’re not the first in this rodeo, but we have the history of Google,” said Brian Goldfarb, Google’s leader of cloud platform marketing, who joined the company last year after a decade at Microsoft. “We have the best data centers on the planet. You can’t really give engineers a bigger, badder thing to work on.”

Google is also adding 180,000 square feet to its office in Kirkland, Wash., which together with its Seattle office already houses more than 1,000 employees, making it Google’s third largest in the country after its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and its office in New York.

The new office space will have all the requisite perks of tech businesses, where typical office cubicles and fluorescent lights are not enough. It will meet green building standards, with a solar roof and wood from recycled shipping containers. The Seattle office, on a canal, has kayaks and paddleboards for employees, and the Kirkland office uses boats for conference rooms, not to mention the office’s espresso bars, massage parlor and climbing wall.

Though the cloud business is still in its early days, Google is already late to the game.

Over the years, Google, Amazon and Microsoft had each built world-class clouds, consisting of several giant data centers in different countries, to run their own businesses â€" doing things like searching the Web, hosting online video, managing business software and operating an online mall. Amazon was the first to rent its data storage and computing power to outside customers when it started A.W.S. in 2004, and Microsoft and Google followed. Another company with huge data centers and computing power, Apple, does not rent its cloud.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 13, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Google Elbows Into the Cloud.

Google Elbows Into the Cloud in Seattle Expansion

Google Elbows Into the Cloud

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Zhang Chengliang, seated, a Google engineer in Kirkland, Wash. Cloud computing uses dozens of computer servers to create one giant machine to handle many tasks.

In a battle for dominance in cloud computing, Google is taking on Microsoft and Amazon in their own back yard.

Google’s offices in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. Google is doubling its office space and hiring more engineers.

Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology.

It is part of Google’s dive into a business known as cloud services â€" renting to other businesses access to its enormous data storage and computing power, accessible by the Internet.

In cloud computing, dozens or even thousands of computer servers are joined to create a giant machine capable of handling many tasks at once, from storing data to running Web sites and mobile apps to tackling complicated analytical problems.

Individual software developers, large companies and governments rent these services to run their operations often at a fraction of the cost of buying and managing their own machines.

Amazon Web Services, or A.W.S., is far and away the leader in this area. Amazon expects that this business will eventually be as big as its retail operation.

A.W.S. is followed by Microsoft’s Windows Azure and offerings from other companies including Rackspace, Verizon, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard.

Google says the cloud business is a new source of profit and a way to improve the Internet by providing other companies access to its sophisticated computing services.

Analysts say it is also a strategy to lure developers and businesses to use Google products instead of those of archrivals like Amazon and Microsoft.

The cloud business has become so vital to these companies, said James Staten, an analyst at Forrester, because it is crucial to other businesses like mobile apps and online video and music.

Most of the apps that run on Google Android phones, for instance, are built using Amazon’s cloud, and Google would like to wrest back control. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all competing to host online video, a booming business that relies on cloud services.

“Almost every major consultancy supports Amazon; almost every advertising agency runs on Amazon; if I need to hire 10 people tomorrow to help me build my application, it’s super easy to find people who have Amazon experience,” Mr. Staten said.

Google plans a major recruiting effort to increase its Seattle-area engineering staff by as much as five times. There is already fierce competition among tech companies for talented engineers, and many of those with skills in cloud computing work at Google’s rivals in Seattle.

“We’re not the first in this rodeo, but we have the history of Google,” said Brian Goldfarb, Google’s leader of cloud platform marketing, who joined the company last year after a decade at Microsoft. “We have the best data centers on the planet. You can’t really give engineers a bigger, badder thing to work on.”

Google is also adding 180,000 square feet to its office in Kirkland, Wash., which together with its Seattle office already houses more than 1,000 employees, making it Google’s third largest in the country after its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and its office in New York.

The new office space will have all the requisite perks of tech businesses, where typical office cubicles and fluorescent lights are not enough. It will meet green building standards, with a solar roof and wood from recycled shipping containers. The Seattle office, on a canal, has kayaks and paddleboards for employees, and the Kirkland office uses boats for conference rooms, not to mention the office’s espresso bars, massage parlor and climbing wall.

Though the cloud business is still in its early days, Google is already late to the game.

Over the years, Google, Amazon and Microsoft had each built world-class clouds, consisting of several giant data centers in different countries, to run their own businesses â€" doing things like searching the Web, hosting online video, managing business software and operating an online mall. Amazon was the first to rent its data storage and computing power to outside customers when it started A.W.S. in 2004, and Microsoft and Google followed. Another company with huge data centers and computing power, Apple, does not rent its cloud.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 13, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Google Elbows Into the Cloud.

French Regulators Seek Inquiry Into Skype

Is Skype a Telephone Operator France Will Investigate

PARIS â€" French regulators said Tuesday that they had asked prosecutors to investigate Microsoft’s Skype unit over its failure to register as a telecommunications operator in accordance with local law, raising the question of what constitutes a telephone company in the age of Internet-based communications.

The regulator, known by its French acronym Arcep, said that it had, “on several occasions," asked Skype Communications, which is based in Luxembourg, “to declare itself an electronic communications operator,” and that the company had not acted.

A company acting as a telecommunications operator incurs certain obligations, the French agency said, notably that “of routing emergency calls and putting in place a means for allowing legal wiretapping.”

Skype and other Internet phone services use a system called voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, to enable conversations and video meetings over the Internet. The service, which Microsoft acquired from eBay in 2011 for $8.5 billion, says it has hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

The French action comes at a tricky time for Microsoft, which has come under pressure from digital rights groups over how data about users collected from Skype are shared with advertisers and law enforcement agencies.

Arcep noted that people could make Skype calls from a computer or smartphone. “In effect," the regulator said, “this service constitutes furnishing a telephone service to the public.”

French law does not require that a telecommunications operator obtain administrative authorization, Arcep said, but “only a prior declaration.” Failure to follow the law is a criminal offense, however, and Arcep said it was turning the matter over to Paris prosecutors.

Microsoft said that it had shared with the French authorities its view “that Skype is not a provider of electronic communications services under French law” and that it would “continue to work with Arcep in a constructive fashion.” Robin Koch, a Microsoft spokesman in Brussels, declined to comment further. The Paris prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The regulator’s announcement was the latest in a series of actions aimed at global communications companies. On Jan. 20, a study commissioned by the government of President François Hollande proposed instituting an Internet tax on the collection of personal data. Also that month, a French court ordered Twitter to identify people who posted racist messages.

French media and telecommunications companies have also argued that they are unfairly subsidizing Internet services that use their content and bandwidth without sharing the revenue. French officials reacted sympathetically earlier this year when one Internet provider, Free, sought to put pressure on Google to pay for the bandwidth it uses by blocking ads.

Current European Union law does not consider Skype and similar Internet-based services to be telecommunications companies. The office of Neelie Kroes, the E.U. commissioner for digital issues, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jean-François Hernandez, a spokesman for Arcep, said that the agency started demanding Skype’s compliance in April 2012, but that it had refused to cooperate.

Mr. Hernandez said that there were questions at the European level about the regulation of these companies, especially on data privacy and taxation, but that the agency’s dispute with Skype had nothing to do with that.

“It’s about the fact that when you act as a French operator you have to register as an operator,” he said.

Mr. Hernandez acknowledged that once a company was registered as a French operator, its French earnings would be subject to local taxes. “But you shouldn’t transform this into a tax story,” he said. “This agency has nothing to do with taxes.”

Stéphane Richard, the chief executive of France Télécom, the former state monopoly, has been critical of what he describes as an unfair advantage enjoyed by Skype and similar companies over the established companies that are required to transport rivals’ data without sharing in the revenue.

France Télécom said Tuesday: “We believe that this represents a positive first step toward a more balanced regulatory environment that encompasses the activity of over-the-top players.”

Kevin J. O’Brien contributed from Berlin.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 13, 2013, on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: French Regulators Seek Inquiry Into Skype.

Daily Report: Dell Agrees to Show Financials to Icahn

Dell has agreed to open its books to the billionaire activist investor Carl C. Icahn, signaling a possible truce on one front in the battle over the computer maker’s proposed $24.4 billion buyout.

Daily Report: Dell Agrees to Show Financials to Icahn

Dell has agreed to open its books to the billionaire activist investor Carl C. Icahn, signaling a possible truce on one front in the battle over the computer maker’s proposed $24.4 billion buyout.

France Proposes New Rules to Guarantee Equal Access to the Internet

France Proposes New Rules for Internet Equal Access

SERRAVAL, FRANCE â€" The French government on Tuesday called for a law requiring Internet service providers to give all the traffic on their networks equal priority, saying existing rules were insufficient for protecting free speech online and ensuring fair competition among Web publishers.

Fleur Pellerin, the French minister overseeing the digital economy, said the issue of net neutrality needed further study.

The proposal would mark a big shift in French policy and a break with existing European Union practice on the thorny issue of so-called net neutrality. And though almost certain to meet resistance from some Internet service providers, it could fuel calls for similar rules throughout the 27-country European Union.

The issue came to a head in France in January, when one service provider, Free, temporarily blocked users from seeing advertising sold by Google until the government ordered Free to restore access.

The proposal, by a French government advisory panel and endorsed by the minister overseeing digital commerce, pits companies that build and operate telecommunications systems against Internet players that rely on the networks to deliver their content to consumers. The French proposal would still need to be drafted as legislation and taken up by Parliament.

“I do think that what happens in France could be a test case for what happens on these tensions globally,” said Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum, a telecommunications consulting firm in London. “There are a lot of countries waiting for someone else to move.”

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has sought to impose net neutrality regulations without legislation, but the initiative has gotten bogged down by legal challenges and other hurdles.

Google and Free, France’s second-largest Internet access provider, declined to comment on the proposal Tuesday.

Thierry Dieu, a spokesman for the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association, a lobbying group in Brussels, declined to comment directly on the French proposal, but he said the group’s members favored a “harmonized” approach across the European Union, rather than country-by-country legislation.

“For the single telecommunications market in the E.U. and the certainty of business, this is very important,” he said.

Even some free-speech advocates questioned whether the rules proposed by the advisory panel were at odds with other moves by the government of the French president, François Hollande, to limit hate speech on Twitter and other social networks.

Until now, the European Union and national administrations in many of the member countries have said that no new regulations were necessary to ensure that Internet traffic â€" whether simple e-mail messages or bandwidth-hungry video files â€" was treated equitably by network operators. Telecommunications providers have generally been permitted to determine which files or traffic get priority during periods of peak network demand, which they say is essential, given ever-increasing traffic.

E.U. regulators in Brussels have said the high level of competition among Internet service providers was sufficient to prevent the kinds of abuses feared by advocates of net neutrality rules. According to the Brussels view, if a telecommunications company were to cut off access to a certain Web site for political or business reasons, users could simply move to a rival service.

The French showdown in January between Free and Google involved a dispute over the carriage of YouTube, Google’s video-sharing service. Free complained that YouTube hogs vast amounts of bandwidth, forcing the networking company to make big investments in infrastructure without generating any additional financial benefit from YouTube’s advertising revenue.

At the time, Fleur Pellerin, the French minister overseeing the digital economy, ordered Free to restore the Google advertisements. But she said the issue of net neutrality needed further study. On Tuesday, at a Paris news conference, she threw her weight behind the newly released proposal from the Conseil Nationale du Numérique, or national digital council, which recommended legislation to enshrine net neutrality as a “fundamental principle” of French law.

“At this moment,” Ms. Pellerin said, “neutrality has not been defined from a legal point view.”

The digital council, composed of experts from the private and public sectors, recommended that exceptions to net neutrality should be possible only with the approval of a judge.

“Freedom of expression is insufficiently protected under French law, amid the development of techniques like filtering, blocking, censorship and slowdowns,” the council said.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 13, 2013, on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: France Proposes New Rules to Guarantee Equal Access to the Internet.

Daily Report: Google Concedes That Drive-By Prying Violated Privacy

Google acknowledged on Tuesday that it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project when it casually scooped up passwords, e-mails and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users, David Streitfeld reports in The New York Times.

In agreeing to settle a case brought by 38 states involving the project, the search company for the first time is required to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues and to explicitly instruct the public about how to fend off privacy violations like this one.

While the settlement also included a tiny â€" for Google â€" fine of $7 million, privacy advocates and Google critics characterized the overall agreement as a breakthrough for a company they say has become a serial violator of privacy, with multiple enforcement actions in recent years and a slew of worldwide investigations into the way the mappingproject also collected the personal data of private computer users.

“Google puts innovation ahead of everything and resists asking permission,” said Scott Cleland, a consultant and consumer watchdog whose blog maintains a close watch on privacy issues involving Google. “But the states are throwing down a marker that they are watching and there is a line the company shouldn’t cross.”

The agreement paves the way for a major privacy battle over Google Glass, the much-hyped wearable computer in the form of glasses, Mr. Cleland said. “If you use Google Glass to record a couple whispering to each other in Starbucks, have you violated their privacy” he asked. “Well, 38 states just said they have a problem with the unauthorized collection of people’s data.”

George Jepsen, the Connecticut attorney general who led the states’ investigation, said he was hopeful the settlement would pr! oduce a new Google. “This is the industry giant,” he said. “It is committing to change its corporate culture to encourage sensitivity to issues of personal data privacy.”

Today’s Scuttlebot: Bitcoin Problem and Tracking the Papacy

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Tuesday, selections include Pinterest's new tool for helping businesses track the number of visitors it sends them, more ideas about how to use voice mail and a prediction that Android tablets will overtake iPads this year.