How Blogger Helped Steubenville Rape Case Unfold Online

A judge found two teenagers guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio.

On the day after two high school football players from Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty of rape, Alexandria Goddard, a crime blogger whose early and dogged research helped bring national attention to the case, is still fending off criticism that she helped create “an Internet lynch mob.”

“I am just the messenger here,” said Ms. Goddard, 45, who once lived in Steubenville and began ollowing the case closely after she read what was being said online about the 16-year-old victim after the arrest of the football players on Aug. 22.

Her expertise creating social media profiles of teenagers whose parents want to know what their children are doing online gave her a distinctive window on the situation. She applied her social media sleuthing skills to the online conversation about the victim and the events leading up to and around the Aug. 11 party.

“Within about two hours, I had a pretty decent outline of what was going on that night,” Ms. Goddard said, after finding the names of the high school football team members on a school Web site and then discovering their public Twitter streams.

“I was sickened,” she said in an interview on Monday. “It was amazing the stuff that was out there and that so many people who saw what was going on recorded it in real time and yet not one person stopped it.â! €

I hope that ALL can heal & find peace. It’s an emotional day for all involved. Many lives hurt thru bad decisions. Spread <3 not hate.

â€" Prinnie (@prinniedidit) 17 Mar 13

After the verdict on Sunday, the Ohio attorney general, Michael DeWine, said that he planned to convene a grand jury to investigate whether others should be charged in the case. At least 16 people refused to talk to investigators about the case, which has deeply divided a town with a long tradition of supporting its high school football team and players.

Attorney General Michael DWine of Ohio talking about convening a grand jury to continue the investigation.

Concerned that the popularity of the football program could influence an outcome in the case, and hearing frustration from residents and law enforcement officers over the lack of cooperation from witnesses, Ms. Goddard wrote about her findings on her blog, Prinniefied

She also grabbed screenshots of images and posts on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube before many of them were deleted. She said she sent them to a Steubenville police officer she knew from the time she lived there but never heard back from him.

Realizing that not everyone knew how to find the posts on Twitter, she said she also posted some screenshots of what football players at the parties had said about the victim.

“It was one thing for people in the ! town to h! ear about what was being said and another thing for them to be able to see it,” she said.

Among the images Ms. Goddard found was a photo on Instagram of two boys carrying the girl, while unclothed, which she did not post for months. She also found a Google cache of a video that had been posted online and then deleted.

On Aug. 26, she wrote on her blog:

I have been reading tweets and posts online for the past few days and I can tell you that I am DISGUSTED. TRULY and UTTERLY DISGUSTED at the things being posted by those who were in attendance of this brutal attack or the posts by their girlfriends who are disparaging the victim’s reputation. I am disgusted with the students who are protecting their friends and tweeting “Oh, ______ better not get in trouble for this.“ Tweet after tweet has been filled with support for the boys who were arrested, as well s vowing their support and willingness to stick together because they are “#StuebenvilleStarsForever”. No, you are not stars. You are criminals who are walking around right now on borrowed time.

“Then after the first blog post, people were hungry for information,” she said. “Local media wasn’t providing it. I kept going back.”

The outrage expressed in some of posts on the blog, with comments naming individuals at the party, deeply concerned many people in the community, which was already divided by the case. She said several old friends from Steubenville turned their backs on her. The mother of an old friend said publicly that she hoped Ms. Goddard would get AIDS.

Ms. Goddard said she was hurt and deeply disappointed by the lack of support, but others online, including the blogger Michelle McKee, jumped in to help keep on top of the case.

In October, the family of one of the Steubenville High school stu! dents, wh! o had posted images from that night on Twitter, threatened Ms. Goddard with a lawsuit against her and the blog, and anonymous commenters on her blog. The suit was dropped in December. After the the lawsuit was dropped, the young man issued a statement, which Ms. Goddard posted:

I deeply regret my actions on the night of August 11, 2012. While I wasn’t at the home where the alleged assault took place, there is no doubt that I was wrong to post that picture from an earlier party and tweet those awful comments. Not a moment goes by that I don’t wish I would have never posted that picture or tweeted those comments. I want to sincerely apologize to the victim and her family for these actions. I also want to acknowledge the work of several bloggers, especially Ms. Goddard at Prinniefied.com, in their efforts to make sure the full truth about that terrible night eventually comes out. At no time did my family mean to stop anyone from expresing themselves online - we only wanted to correct what we believed were misstatements that appeared on Ms. Goddard’s blog. I am glad that we have resolved our differences with Ms. Goddard and that she and her contributors can continue their work.” - Cody Saltsman

After a detailed account in The New York Times by Juliet Macur and Nate Schweber about the divided town and the role of social media in the case, Ms. Goddard was no longer part of a small cadre of online bloggers and Twitter users following developments.

People claiming to be associated with the hacking collective Anonymous soon began stirring up trouble in Steubenville, taking credit for bringing down the city’s Web site and hacking into Web pages for the football program. As The Atlantic reported earlier this year, images, transcripts and e-mails that people had previously thought were private were posted online.

Among the items uploaded on YouTube was a 12 1/2-minute video of a Steubenville high school graduate who had gone to Ohio State University at an Aug. 11 party, laughing and joking about the victim, and talking about rape. It now has more than one million views.

Ohio State University received so many complaints about the Steubenville high school graduate speaking in the video that the university issued a statement in January that he would not be returning as a student that semester.

Ms. Goddard said she had not tried to contact the victim during her reporting because she did not think it was appropriate.

“I hope to talk to her one day,” shesaid. “She is very courageous. A lot of rape victims don’t ever want to get on that stand and face their attackers. To be 16 years old, and to get on the stand, takes a lot of courage. She is a very brave young girl. She has empowered a lot of other women to tell their stories now.”

For Civilian Drones, the Sky is the Limit

GRAND FORKS, N.D. â€" As I wrote in Monday’s paper, crossing the hobbyist’s remote-controlled airplane with cheap electronics from the cellphone industry seems likely to yield highly capable, very inexpensive drones.

What could they be used for

At the University of North Dakota, where students can actually graduate with a degree in “unmanned aerial systems” (they wince at the term “drone”), people are dreaming up all kinds of ideas.

On a recent afternoon in Aviation 331, Systems of Unmanned Aircraft, Joel Thomas, a senior from Joshua Tree, Calif., laid out his plan: a four-rotor helicopter that would fit in a box on top of a freight train’s locomotive. The egineer has to periodically inspect all the air brakes, and the train can be nearly two miles long, so even at a brisk walk, this is time consuming. A drone programmed to fly down one side of the train and back up on the other, focusing a camera on the brakes, could do the job a lot faster, he said.

And suppose a train wanted to go backwards Freight trains no longer carry cabooses. “The conductor would have to get up and walk back two miles to protect the back of the train,’’ said Mr. Thomas. A drone could do that faster, he said.

Along with saving money for a railroad, the drone could have a strong safety function, he said. As long as it is on board, it may as well be equipped with sensors for chlorine, anhydrous ammonia or other toxic chemicals commonly carried in tank cars. In case of derailment, the drone could determine immediately whether there was a leak, saving time and saving human exposure.
And its camera could show whether there was a fire, and the extent of damage, Mr! . Thomas said.

This being North Dakota, a lot of the focus is on agriculture. Farms are a good place to try out unmanned aircraft, since a crash is unlikely to hit anything important. And farmers, experts say, often do not have a clear idea of what is going on in their fields, and they are reluctant to drive through them too often, any more than a suburban homeowner wants to walk through his flower bed. Routine inspections by drones, which can be programmed to fly a pattern like a lawnmower, can spot problems early, they say. Some people expect unmanned systems to be sold as accessories to farm tractors.

Others say that tiny helicopters with cameras and brains added will become routine for things as diverse as inspecting a rooftop air conditioner and scoping out a crime scene.

Some of the ancillary industries are already in place here. Grand Forks Air Force Base flies Global Hawks and Prdators, for border patrol duties and other uses, from this location. And Predators in the air over Afghanistan are controlled from the base here, too, although the drones are physically based closer to that country.

The area is competing to be one of several test sites to be chosen by the Federal Aviation Administration for a technology called “sense and avoid,” which will have to replace the standard method of general aviation pilots, “see and avoid,” because a drone pilot has very limited vision. The idea is that each aircraft will know its location through GPS and transmit that information to a computer on the ground, which will translate that into moving dots on a three-dimensional map, and send that back to the pilots, whether they are on the ground or in the air. The technology already exists in some places without radar, but it would have to become near-universal in use.

While drones are predominantly a military technology now, people in the emerging business see a burgeoni! ng civil ! market, extending in all directions.

Brent Eastes, a senior from Vancouver, Wash., had a different idea. Mr. Eastes is building something that looks more like a motorized glider, with an eight-foot wingspan. It will hunt thermals, he said, and could soar to 20,000 feet.

His target is a forest fire, which he called “a continuous, never-ending thermal.” With a camera attached, his drone could spot the progress of a fire and pinpoint the location of the firefighters for an incident commander.

His design includes a propeller and a small motor. It can be programmed so that if the glider sinks below a minimum safe altitude, the motor starts and the glider either climbs or lands itself. Solar panels on the wings might give enough energy, combined with the thermals, for extended flights, he said.

How to launch it Mr. Eastes is still working on that. In the right conditions, it could be thrown like a javelin. But he is considering disposable balloons, which would detach at 5,000 feet.

br>

For Civilian Drones, the Sky is the Limit

GRAND FORKS, N.D. â€" As I wrote in Monday’s paper, crossing the hobbyist’s remote-controlled airplane with cheap electronics from the cellphone industry seems likely to yield highly capable, very inexpensive drones.

What could they be used for

At the University of North Dakota, where students can actually graduate with a degree in “unmanned aerial systems” (they wince at the term “drone”), people are dreaming up all kinds of ideas.

On a recent afternoon in Aviation 331, Systems of Unmanned Aircraft, Joel Thomas, a senior from Joshua Tree, Calif., laid out his plan: a four-rotor helicopter that would fit in a box on top of a freight train’s locomotive. The egineer has to periodically inspect all the air brakes, and the train can be nearly two miles long, so even at a brisk walk, this is time consuming. A drone programmed to fly down one side of the train and back up on the other, focusing a camera on the brakes, could do the job a lot faster, he said.

And suppose a train wanted to go backwards Freight trains no longer carry cabooses. “The conductor would have to get up and walk back two miles to protect the back of the train,’’ said Mr. Thomas. A drone could do that faster, he said.

Along with saving money for a railroad, the drone could have a strong safety function, he said. As long as it is on board, it may as well be equipped with sensors for chlorine, anhydrous ammonia or other toxic chemicals commonly carried in tank cars. In case of derailment, the drone could determine immediately whether there was a leak, saving time and saving human exposure.
And its camera could show whether there was a fire, and the extent of damage, Mr! . Thomas said.

This being North Dakota, a lot of the focus is on agriculture. Farms are a good place to try out unmanned aircraft, since a crash is unlikely to hit anything important. And farmers, experts say, often do not have a clear idea of what is going on in their fields, and they are reluctant to drive through them too often, any more than a suburban homeowner wants to walk through his flower bed. Routine inspections by drones, which can be programmed to fly a pattern like a lawnmower, can spot problems early, they say. Some people expect unmanned systems to be sold as accessories to farm tractors.

Others say that tiny helicopters with cameras and brains added will become routine for things as diverse as inspecting a rooftop air conditioner and scoping out a crime scene.

Some of the ancillary industries are already in place here. Grand Forks Air Force Base flies Global Hawks and Prdators, for border patrol duties and other uses, from this location. And Predators in the air over Afghanistan are controlled from the base here, too, although the drones are physically based closer to that country.

The area is competing to be one of several test sites to be chosen by the Federal Aviation Administration for a technology called “sense and avoid,” which will have to replace the standard method of general aviation pilots, “see and avoid,” because a drone pilot has very limited vision. The idea is that each aircraft will know its location through GPS and transmit that information to a computer on the ground, which will translate that into moving dots on a three-dimensional map, and send that back to the pilots, whether they are on the ground or in the air. The technology already exists in some places without radar, but it would have to become near-universal in use.

While drones are predominantly a military technology now, people in the emerging business see a burgeoni! ng civil ! market, extending in all directions.

Brent Eastes, a senior from Vancouver, Wash., had a different idea. Mr. Eastes is building something that looks more like a motorized glider, with an eight-foot wingspan. It will hunt thermals, he said, and could soar to 20,000 feet.

His target is a forest fire, which he called “a continuous, never-ending thermal.” With a camera attached, his drone could spot the progress of a fire and pinpoint the location of the firefighters for an incident commander.

His design includes a propeller and a small motor. It can be programmed so that if the glider sinks below a minimum safe altitude, the motor starts and the glider either climbs or lands itself. Solar panels on the wings might give enough energy, combined with the thermals, for extended flights, he said.

How to launch it Mr. Eastes is still working on that. In the right conditions, it could be thrown like a javelin. But he is considering disposable balloons, which would detach at 5,000 feet.

br>

Today’s Scuttlebot: Kickstarting ‘Veronica Mars,’ and Microsoft Connections

Here are some of the more interesting items that the tech reporters and editors of The New York Times found on the Web recently. More Scuttlebot can be found here.

Penguin Plays With iPad
Holycuteness.com |  100-year-old grandmas can do it. Cats can, too. Penguins can also play with iPads. - Damon Darlin

Identities II
Behance.net |  Before and after photos of people as they age. “After,” by Ana Oliveira. - Nick Bilton

Uber, Data Darwinism and the Future of Work
Gigaom.com |  Smart piece about the challengs facing a society being rebuilt on connectedness. - Nick Bilton

How Well Do Microsoft’s Xbox, Skype, Office, and SkyDrive Work Together
Businessweek.com |  An intrepid reporter tries all Microsoft services and products to see how they work together for $350 a year. - Damon Darlin

From Ray Kurzweil to Kanye West, Everyone’s a Futurist Now
Qz.com |  A futurist who calls himself a “changeist” makes a pitch for more futurists because, well, the future is coming. - Damon Darlin

Kaifu Lee: My Chart of H! ow Often I Get Censored by Sina Weibo
Techinasia.com |  Kaifu Lee, the former Google China manager and now an entrepreneur, recounts his troubles with China’s censors. - Damon Darlin

‘Veronica Mars’ Kickstarts a Movie Project
Salon.com |  A smart take on Kickstarter’s step into big business with its latest high-profile movie project. - Jenna Wortham

More Fakery Online
Bbc.co.uk |  A look at musicians who buy Facebook likes, Twitter followers and YouTube views. Is nothing sacred - Suzanne Spector

Bloomberg Doubles Its Tech Television

5:53 p.m. | Updated In a world of shrinking newsrooms, real expansion is an increasingly rare story. But next Monday, Bloomberg West, Bloomberg Television’s show on technology, will double its daily programming to two hours. Along with the existing afternoon program, Bloomberg West will present another hour of tech news at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

“We see a real opportunity,” said Andrew Morse, head of Bloomberg Television in the United States.

“The television world is flooded with mediocre content â€" this extra hour is more of a place for big names in the Valley to come on and talk, and to dig deeper into what the news means,” he said, speaking of Silicon Valley.

Officials from Bloomberg would not provide specifics about the profitability of the show, which is mostly filmed at its news offices in San Francisco. For several months, Bloomberg has been the leadin source of online business videos, considered valuable content.

Bloomberg has also been seeking ways to make video news that works across a number of outlets, including television, tablets and smartphones. It will need more production people, and will concentrate on creating an editorial process that can efficiently produce content from the same interviews and stories for different outlets.

The show runs ads. It may also get revenue from Bloomberg’s very profitable trading terminals, which will carry the video content. Even so, the expanded coverage indicates a growing appetite for technology reporting, at least among Bloomberg’s generally educated and affluent audience, and a shift in business news reporting on television away from covering daily stock movements.

“It’s not enough to say that the new Samsung phone is out,” Mr. Morse said. “You have to say what it really means.” Coming on at 10 a.m., which is 1 p.m. in New York, “lets us get in on the agenda” of th! e day’s developments, he said.

Bloomberg aspires to have a lot of well-known technology executives on the air. It doesn’t hurt Bloomberg’s costs that on-air guests are working free.

The greater costs may come in terms of graphics, editing and reshooting material in the field to work on different devices. “You can run something in a long form on the Web, and then cut it into smaller segments for the phone,” said Wendy Brundige, bureau chief at Bloomberg West. “At South by Southwest, we shot things for Web, mobile and TV, and then some just for mobile.”

The mobile work, she said, was “quick hit, freer” than standard business news content. Mobile viewers, who are increasingly important to every news outlet, also appear to like interstitial graphics that illustrate well a few facts tied to a story.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Kickstarting ‘Veronica Mars,’ and Microsoft Connections

Here are some of the more interesting items that the tech reporters and editors of The New York Times found on the Web recently. More Scuttlebot can be found here.

Penguin Plays With iPad
Holycuteness.com |  100-year-old grandmas can do it. Cats can, too. Penguins can also play with iPads. - Damon Darlin

Identities II
Behance.net |  Before and after photos of people as they age. “After,” by Ana Oliveira. - Nick Bilton

Uber, Data Darwinism and the Future of Work
Gigaom.com |  Smart piece about the challengs facing a society being rebuilt on connectedness. - Nick Bilton

How Well Do Microsoft’s Xbox, Skype, Office, and SkyDrive Work Together
Businessweek.com |  An intrepid reporter tries all Microsoft services and products to see how they work together for $350 a year. - Damon Darlin

From Ray Kurzweil to Kanye West, Everyone’s a Futurist Now
Qz.com |  A futurist who calls himself a “changeist” makes a pitch for more futurists because, well, the future is coming. - Damon Darlin

Kaifu Lee: My Chart of H! ow Often I Get Censored by Sina Weibo
Techinasia.com |  Kaifu Lee, the former Google China manager and now an entrepreneur, recounts his troubles with China’s censors. - Damon Darlin

‘Veronica Mars’ Kickstarts a Movie Project
Salon.com |  A smart take on Kickstarter’s step into big business with its latest high-profile movie project. - Jenna Wortham

More Fakery Online
Bbc.co.uk |  A look at musicians who buy Facebook likes, Twitter followers and YouTube views. Is nothing sacred - Suzanne Spector

Bloomberg Doubles Its Tech Television

5:53 p.m. | Updated In a world of shrinking newsrooms, real expansion is an increasingly rare story. But next Monday, Bloomberg West, Bloomberg Television’s show on technology, will double its daily programming to two hours. Along with the existing afternoon program, Bloomberg West will present another hour of tech news at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

“We see a real opportunity,” said Andrew Morse, head of Bloomberg Television in the United States.

“The television world is flooded with mediocre content â€" this extra hour is more of a place for big names in the Valley to come on and talk, and to dig deeper into what the news means,” he said, speaking of Silicon Valley.

Officials from Bloomberg would not provide specifics about the profitability of the show, which is mostly filmed at its news offices in San Francisco. For several months, Bloomberg has been the leadin source of online business videos, considered valuable content.

Bloomberg has also been seeking ways to make video news that works across a number of outlets, including television, tablets and smartphones. It will need more production people, and will concentrate on creating an editorial process that can efficiently produce content from the same interviews and stories for different outlets.

The show runs ads. It may also get revenue from Bloomberg’s very profitable trading terminals, which will carry the video content. Even so, the expanded coverage indicates a growing appetite for technology reporting, at least among Bloomberg’s generally educated and affluent audience, and a shift in business news reporting on television away from covering daily stock movements.

“It’s not enough to say that the new Samsung phone is out,” Mr. Morse said. “You have to say what it really means.” Coming on at 10 a.m., which is 1 p.m. in New York, “lets us get in on the agenda” of th! e day’s developments, he said.

Bloomberg aspires to have a lot of well-known technology executives on the air. It doesn’t hurt Bloomberg’s costs that on-air guests are working free.

The greater costs may come in terms of graphics, editing and reshooting material in the field to work on different devices. “You can run something in a long form on the Web, and then cut it into smaller segments for the phone,” said Wendy Brundige, bureau chief at Bloomberg West. “At South by Southwest, we shot things for Web, mobile and TV, and then some just for mobile.”

The mobile work, she said, was “quick hit, freer” than standard business news content. Mobile viewers, who are increasingly important to every news outlet, also appear to like interstitial graphics that illustrate well a few facts tied to a story.

Congolese Warlord Wanted for War Crimes Surrenders to U.S. Diplomats in Rwanda

A Congolese warlord whose troops were routed over the weekend walked into the United States Embassy in Rwanda on Monday and asked to be sent to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. Stephen Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crime issues, confirmed that diplomats are working to facilitate the transfer of the rebel leader, Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court on seven counts of war crimes and three counts of crimes against humanity.

Bosco #Ntaganda surrenders in #Rwanda and asks to the taken to the #ICC. We are helping to facilitate his transfer.

â€" Amb. Stephen J. Rap (@StateDept_GCJ) 18 Mar 13

As Britain’s Channel 4 News explained last year, despite an international warrant for General Ntaganda’s arrest, he lived openly in eastern Congo after making peace with the government in 2009. (Be warned, the video report includes graphic images of victims of a 2008 massacre blamed on General Ntaganda’s forces.)

That changed last year when President Joseph Kabila, under pressure from the international court, called publicly for General Ntaganda’s arrest and the warlord, also known as “The Terminator,” led hundreds of his former followers back into open rebellion.

Several close observers of the region, including the New Yorker correspondent Philip Gourevitch, noted that the warlord€™s decision to surrender himself to American diplomats drew attention to the fact that the U.S. is not a signatory to the court, but has pledged to support it.

Hearing Bosco Ntaganda took taxi to US Embassy KIgali. A survivor’s move. How will non-ICC signatory USA in non-signatory Rwanda handle it

â€" Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) 18 Mar 13

Fiona Lloyd-Davies, who produced and shot the report on the warlord for Channel 4 News, also made a film in support of a Human Rights Watch campaign! to b! ring General Ntaganda to justice, featuring interviews with some of his victims.

A rape victim and a former child soldier described their ordeals at the hands of Bosco Ntaganda’s forces in a video report made for Human Rights Watch in late 2011.

Ms. Lloyd-Davies described meeting General Ntaganda in a BBC radio report and a post on her blog, illustrated with a snapshot she took of the grinning warlord at home, holding his six-year-old son and “looking like the perfect dad.”

In 2011, the same filmmaker produced a report on the work of Masika Katsuva, a rape victim in eastern Congo who helps “survivors of the worst brutalities imaginable, multiple rapes and violent assaults,” recover from the trauma and rebuild their lives.

An Oracle Veteran’s Comeback Plan

This has the makings of a decent revenge story, or at least a tech giant face-off.

Charles Phillips, who in 2010 left Oracle as co-president, has been making the rounds in his capacity as chief executive of Infor, a much smaller company that he joined soon after leaving Oracle. After a long period of quiet, he now says Infor has remade itself into a company that will give his old employer a really hard time.

“Oracle is big, but it’s focused on trying to put together a system of hardware, and it is confusing as a software company,” he said in an interview “On applications, they are easier to beat than SAP.” Oh, and he plans to beat SAP too, but there’s little doubt that he is aiming to make life hard for Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive and his old boss.

The bluster is backed up by some interesting developments. Oracle has a core business in selling relational databases to big companies that few expect to dislodge in anybody’s working life. But over the past decadeOracle has also spent billions buying all kinds of old-line applications companies, computer hardware in the form of Sun Microsystems, and more recently cloud-based applications providers in areas like human resources and talent management.

It is a lot to try to make sense of, but it is certainly big. Oracle’s applications business alone had revenue of about $10 billion in its fiscal 2012, and another $16 billion in updates and support. In the last four quarters Infor grossed less than $3 billion. From that angle, it’s barely a fair fight.

But Mr. Phillips said Infor, which has its own collection of smaller software companies, has spent the past seven years rewriting big industry-specific applications from older software languages into .Net and Java, which can be used in contemporary deployments of cloud computing and mobile devices. “It took 4000 developers and contractors, 1000 of them hired just in the past year,” he said. “It’s expensive, there’s no question.

Infor! has also built some very attractive and easy-to-use interfaces for mobile devices, and a kind of social networking software that stays close to solving business problems. The plan is to attack companies in a dozen industries, like hospitals and automobiles, targeting companies with revenue between $500 million and $10 billion in revenue - the kind of places that don’t draw Oracle’s top salesmen, and can’t afford big customization projects.

The idea is that Infor will grow in a relatively unattended part of the market, while Oracle and SAP fight with each other for bigger accounts. Mr. Phillips plans to add a new industry every 18 months, eventually, growing a company big enough to be a threat to the giants.

That would be sweet for Mr. Phillips, who was effectively pushed aside to make way for Mark Hurd after Mr. Hurd resigned from Hewlett-Packard and became Oracle’s co-president. Mr. Phillips also said he’d been frustrated carrying out a similar software modernization project at Oracl.. “We tried to integrate the applications, but we couldn’t get funding,” he said.

Mr. Phillips’ biggest worry may not be Oracle at all, however, but newer cloud-based companies like Workday, which offer an increasing range of enterprise applications to large companies and small.

“Anyone can do human resources and financials,” he said, a comment on Workday’s core offerings. “We’ve hired experts in things like automotive design, or how to make a global brewery’s beer taste the same everywhere in the world, how to bake bread at any altitude.” That kind of industry-specific knowledge offered cheap, he said, will spell victory.

Trying to Wean Britons From Unlimited Mobile Data

BERLIN â€" When the mobile operator EE started selling the first high-speed LTE wireless broadband service in Britain last autumn, it offered only packages with strict monthly limits on downloading data, effectively tying the volume of Web surfing to the price.

But whether EE, a joint venture of Deutsche Telekom and France Télécom, will succeed by marketing fiat alone in killing off access to unlimited wireless data in Britain remains to be seen.

The country’s mobile market is one of the most competitive in Europe, with four network operators, as well as resellers like Virgin Mobile and Tesco Mobile.

With the switch in network technologies from the decade-old 3G service to LTE, or Long Term Evolution, EE raised the price of subscribing to wireless broadband about £5, or $7.60. That increase was on packages starting at £41 a month for a service the company said was five times as fast as 3G. (LTE, a so-called fourth-generation technology, is a computer-based method of sending data, eliminating the mechanical bottlenecks of older grids.)

One in four EE customers in the new network’s coverage area have subscribed to the LTE service since Oct. 30, Olaf Swantee, the chief executive of EE, which stands for Everything Everywhere, said during a recent interview. In the United States, LTE is much more expensive, he noted, approaching or exceeding $100 a month.

U.S. companies usually charge more, but also tend to give consumers the option of sharing the data allotment on multiple devices. Verizon Wireless, the U.S. market leader, offers unlimited voice and text plus 2 gigabytes of monthly downloads on any device for $100.

The LTE packages from EE, most of which also include unlimited voice and texts, cost as little as £41 for 3 gigabytes of data downloads a month with a two-year contract.

“We have the most attractive 4G pricing in the world in the U.K.,” Mr. Swantee said on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

But the decision by EE, the biggest mobile operator in Britain, to phase out unlimited packages has drawn blunt criticism. The online journal Endgadget said British customers would have to “sign away a kidney” for the company’s LTE plans.

Reading the public mood has been difficult, and most of EE’s competitors seem unsure whether Britons, already coping with a government austerity plan, are ready to embrace new limits on mobile surfing as well.

The second- and third-largest operators in Britain, O2 and Vodafone, declined to say how they would sell LTE when they started service. Simon Lloyd, a spokesman for O2, said by e-mail that his company, owned by Telefónica of Spain, would commence LTE service in the summer.

“It is too early at this stage to talk about our pricing, but the plan is to ensure that as many people as possible can enjoy 4G,” Mr. Lloyd said. “Pricing will be competitive â€" certainly not prohibitive.”

A Vodafone spokesman, Richard Wray, said by e-mail that the company would turn on its LTE network by June 21 and would publish details on pricing closer to the debut. Vodafone is the largest mobile operator in Europe by market value and sales.

With consumer reaction uncertain, even EE appears to be keeping its options open, continuing to sell some unlimited 3G plans through its T-Mobile and Orange brands.

James Barford, an analyst with Enders Analysis, a research firm in London, said he expected O2 and Vodafone to follow EE and sell 4G data in distinct chunks, increasing the momentum to price wireless data in new download dosages. Mr. Barford said he would not be surprised if EE had phased out its remaining unlimited 3G plans by next year.

Mobile operators simply cannot afford to give consumers free unlimited access to wireless data at any speed in an industry where revenue fell 4 percent last year in Britain and was down 6 percent on average across Europe, Mr. Barford said.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 18, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

Hacker Case Leads to Calls for Better Law

Matthew Keys, the 26-year-old deputy social media editor at Reuters charged with assisting computer hackers, has emerged as the latest lightning rod in the continuing battle between proponents of Internet freedom and the Justice Department.

Matthew Keys, an editor for Reuters.com.

A social media specialist, Mr. Keys, 26, has used Twitter to discuss the indictment since it was announced on Thursday.

A federal indictment of Mr. Keys filed in California on Thursday met an online cacophony of protests against the 1984 computer crime law under which he was charged, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The indictment says that Mr. Keys, who previously worked as a Web producer at KTXL Fox 40, a Sacramento-based television station that, like The Los Angeles Times, is owned by the Tribune Company, provided a user name and password to hackers associated with the group Anonymous. Those hackers then changed a headline on a Times online article from “Pressure Builds in House to Pass Tax-Cut Package” to “Pressure Builds in House to Elect CHIPPY 1337,” a reference to another hacking group.

Each of the three charges against Mr. Keys could result in fines of as much as $250,000, with possible prison terms of as many as five years in one count and as many as 10 in the other two. The Tribune Company spent more than $5,000 to update its systems in response to the attack, the indictment says.

The aggressive tactics by prosecutors come amid an uptick in prominent cyberattacks in recent months. Last week, President Obama met with chief executives to discuss online security, which has become a hot issue on Capitol Hill.

In Mr. Keys’s case, the scale of the potential punishment relative to the actual harm caused â€" the vandalism to the Web site was quickly fixed â€" raised comparisons to the potential sentence in the indictment of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet freedom advocate. Accused of breaking into a university system to download an archive of scholarly papers, Mr. Swartz committed suicide in January.

“Anyone horrified by the amount of jail time” Mr. Keys faced should join in calling for Congressional reform of the computer fraud act, Trevor Timm, an advocate and blogger at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that supports an open Internet, wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday.

Still, it is not clear that an overhaul of the fraud act would change the damage charges Mr. Keys is facing. Orin S. Kerr, a former computer crimes prosecutor who now is a legal scholar at George Washington University, said that the part of the fraud act covering damage to a computer, which Mr. Keys was accused of violating, was more straightforward than the part involving authorized access, which Mr. Swartz was charged with violating; some scholars, including Mr. Kerr, have called those provisions overbroad.

Moreover, several legal specialists said that even if Mr. Keys were convicted on all three charges, they most likely would be collapsed into a single offense for purposes of calculating a sentence since they involved the same basic conduct. The sentencing guidelines would then be consulted in light of Mr. Keys’s previous criminal history, if any, and the economic harm caused by the vandalism â€" including any overtime or outside consultants piad to audit the system after the intrusion was discovered.

Mark Eckenwiler, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s computer crime section, said that statutory maximums cited in department news releases are “purely theoretical” in most cases, and that it would be inappropriate for the department to speculate at the start of the case about what an eventual sentence would be.

“The truth is that a lot of first-time offenders may well come in the very bottom band” of the sentencing guidelines, he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Keys’s defense team stoked the furor. “I think hackers are the new Communists for the D.O.J.,” Tor Ekeland, a Brooklyn-based lawyer representing Mr. Keys, said in an interview. He maintained his client’s innocence and said that he intended to “vigorously litigate” the charges.

Jay Leiderman, a criminal defense lawyer in Ventura, Calif., known for representing computer hackers affiliated with Anonymous, is also representing Mr. Keys.

The case against Mr. Keys struck a particular nerve because of his outsize, and outspoken, online presence. A popular and at times volatile figure in the world of social media, Mr. Keys is in many ways emblematic of the new-media landscape. The writer of what was described by Time magazine as one of the 140 best Twitter feeds, Mr. Keys quickly used his feed to discuss the indictment and assure his nearly 25,000 Twitter followers that he was “fine.”

Mr. Keys is among a coterie of young journalists adept at social media who see their stars rise quickly and often are snapped up by major media organizations, said Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer at Columbia.

“At a young age you can have more influence than at any time in journalistic history,” Mr. Sreenivasan said, adding, “and the mistakes you make at a younger age are more visible than ever before.”

A Thomson Reuters spokesman said on Friday that Mr. Keys had been suspended with pay. “Any legal violations, or failures to comply with the company’s own strict set of principles and standards, can result in disciplinary action,” the company said in a statement, adding that Mr. Keys joined Reuters in 2012; the apparent crimes occurred in December 2010.

Supporters of Mr. Keys echoed criticism that reached a high pitch in January, when online activists accused prosecutors of trying to bully Mr. Swartz into pleading guilty. An article in Slate was posted on Friday under the headline “Has the Justice Department Learned Anything from the Aaron Swartz Case”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 18, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hacker Case Leads to Calls For Better Law.

Daily Report: Domestic Drones on Patrol

On the pilot’s computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway in Grand Forks, N.D., the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.

To the pilot’s right, a sensor operator was aiming a camera on the plane to pan, tilt and zoom in a search among the houses on the ground for people who had been reported missing.

On his screen, cartoonlike human figures appeared in a gathering around a camp fire between the houses.

“There they are,” Andrew Regenhard, the pilot and a student, said in a flat tone that seemed out of place with a successful rescue mission.

In fact, no one was missing; the entire exercise used imaginary props and locales, Matthew L. Wald reports in The New York Times on Monday. Mr. Regenhard was taking part in a training session at the University of North Dakota. The university, the first to offer a degree program in unmanned aviatio, is one of many academic settings, along with companies and individuals, preparing for a brave new world in which cheap remote-controlled airplanes will be ubiquitous in civilian air space, searching for everything from the most wanted of criminal suspects to a swarm of grasshoppers devouring a crop.

“The sky’s going to be dark with these things,” said Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter â€" about 7,500 â€" as the United States military flies in total.

The burst of activity in remotely operated planes stems from the confluence of two factors: electronics and communications gear has become dirt cheap, enabling the conversion of hobbyist radio-controlled planes into sophisticated platforms for surveillance, and the Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered by Congress to work out a way to integrate these aircraft into the national airspace by 2015.