DXPG

Total Pageviews

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Q. and A. on Obama’s Trip to Israel

Jodi Rudoren, Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, answered questions from readers, including on Facebook and Twitter, on the first day of President Obama’s trip to Israel as president. Some questions below are composites of similar questions posed by readers.

Q.

Why didn’t Mr. Obama visit Israel during his first term as president
Tim Freeman: Wow! He went his whole first term without visiting them That seems strange, as they’re our closest ally in the Middle East.

A.

It may not be as strange as it sounds. Only four of the last 11 American presidents visited Israel while in office: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in their first terms, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush in their second.

In addition, President Obama’s early efforts on the peace process did not work well, and tensions increased between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so a visit may have seemed inappropriate. Second, Mr. Obama was dealing with a lot of other pressing matters, including health care reform, the economic crisis, the Arab Spring.

Q.

Will President Obama discuss human rights issues in the Palestinian territories

‏

A.

President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority will almost certainly talk about the ways that Israeli occupation affects the daily lives of people in both the West Bank and Gaza during their meetings in Ramallah on Thursday. Mr. Obama may also hear stories about checkpoints, travel restrictions, withheld salaries and other quality-of-life issues from the young people he will be meeting at a United States-financed center.

When Mr. Obama’s visit was announced, some analysts thought the United States might take the opportunity to try to force changes in the way Israel rules the part of the West Bank known as Area C, where most settlers live. But more recently the focus has been on whether Mr. Obama would try to negotiate a possible freeze in Israeli settlement building in exchange for a Palestinian promise not to pursue claims against Israel in United Nations agencies like the International Criminal Court.

Several Palestinians I interviewed on Tuesday in Ramallah invoked the American civil rights legacy as a reason Mr. Obama should take particular interest in the discrimination they see as inherent in the current situation. It will be interesting to see whether the president raises Palestinian rights during his public statements from the West Bank on Thursday, or in his speech back in Jerusalem later in the day.

Q.

Will Mr. Obama promise anything to the Palestinians during his trip

A.

Ah, if only news reporters had a crystal ball. The White House has described the trip as a listening mission and promised no new peace plan. The president may make broad commitments along the lines of serving as an honest broker between the sides, but any sort of specific promise would appear unlikely.

Q.

Is the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, showing any sign that he will negotiate with the Palestinians

A.

Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly stated in the weeks since Israel’s Jan. 22 elections that he is ready to return to negotiations, and he included a promise to do so in one of the agreements that formed his new governing coalition. However, he insists on “no preconditions” - and he considers as a precondition the Palestinians’ demand that the negotiations start on the basis that the future two states would be divided along the pre-1967 borders, with land swaps to balance Israeli settlements.

President Obama could seek to break this stalemate, perhaps by redefining the very notion of a precondition.

Mood might be the more interesting question. Mr. Netanyahu has just emerged from a bruising couple of months, after a disappointing election result and an even tougher coalition-building process. He is looking for a boost. Given the makeup of his coalition, which is fiercely divided on how to deal with the Palestinians, it’s in some ways hard to see this as the first thing he would try to tackle.

Then again, to let President Obama come and go without there being any perceptible movement in the peace process may be dangerous for Israel’s international position. The conventional wisdom about Mr. Netanyahu is that he is risk-averse, but he also has an impressive ability to surprise.

For instance, he secretly negotiated deals last year first with Shaul Mofaz of Kadima and later with Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu. Those were internal political strategy deals, but maybe a substantive surprise is awaiting us.

Q.

Is Mr. Obama expected to make any statements regarding settlements, the future of Jerusalem and the occupation of the Palestinian territories

A.

It’s hard to imagine the president making a big policy speech in Jerusalem without somehow addressing these issues. Stay tuned on Thursday - nytimes.com will be live-streaming the speech.

Q.

Why is Mr. Obama not visiting the Temple Mount

A.

Of all the holy sites in the area, what Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims the Noble Sanctuary is perhaps the most contested and therefore the least likely spot for an American president to visit, though “taboo” is putting it too strongly.

The site is revered by Jews as the former location of their two ancient temples and by Muslims for its Dome of the Rock and Al Aksa Mosque. Since Israel captured East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, the compound has been operated by the Waqf, the Muslim religious endowment, with security provided by Israel. Jews are allowed to visit but not to pray there.

The second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, was set off in 2000 by a visit to the site by Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the opposition Likud Party. Lately, more and more Jews have been ascending the Mount, and there have frequently been clashes there.

President Obama is also not visiting the Western Wall, a remnant of the ancient Jewish temple, largely for security reasons. He does plan to go to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on Friday.

Q.

Will Mr. Obama give more aid to the Palestinians

A.

Washington freed up some $200 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority after plans for Mr. Obama’s trip were unveiled last month. Not sure whether the visit will yield further aid - it does not seem to be high on the agenda.

Q.

What influence can Mr. Obama have on the peace process
Ouadia Satori: Mister Obama, you are the president of the USA and are clothed in immense powers. Can you use them to enforce the two states solutions you seem to believe in Safe trip.

A.

There is wide agreement among Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and Middle East experts, that an American president can exert immense influence on the peace process. That said, there is also a consensus that the process cannot be forced on the principals. Those who continue to work for a negotiated solution say it is a delicate, intangible, complicated balancing act, how to leverage change, how to lead, and make people feel as if they are doing it themselves.

Q.

What was the menu for the dinner Mr. Netanyahu held for Mr. Obama

A.

According to Israel’s government press office, Shalom Kadosh, a chef who previously cooked for Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, prepared the meal President Obama shared Wednesday night with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Here’s the menu:

First course: Ravioli filled with comfit of Jerusalem artichokes; filet of red mullet tossed with green soybeans.

Pink grapefruit and pomegranate sorbet to refresh the palate.

Main course: Roast fillet of beef in aromatic spices and a selection of spring vegetables.

Dessert: Apple crumble mixed with red fruits; Gewurztraminer zabaglione with citrus honey.

Fig and date petits fours with caramelized green almonds; coffee/tea.



H.P.’s Board Wins Re-election, but Change May Be Coming Anyway

Members of Hewlett-Packard’s board dodged a bullet Wednesday.

Despite opposition from two shareholder advisory services and several prominent institutional investors, all of the company’s 11 board members were re-elected at the company’s annual meeting in Mountain View, Calif., on Wednesday, receiving at least the minimum 50 percent of shareholder votes.

But in a few cases, the margins of victory were unusually narrow. And one highly visible and active board member, Ralph Whitworth, indicated that changes to the board would be coming soon.

“This board is among the best I’ve seen,” said Mr. Whitworth, who runs the Relational Investors fund, and owns $800 million in H.P. stock. “Having said that, all boards should evolve, certainly when they’ve had the recent past this one does. You can expect some evolution of the board over the coming years â€" months maybe.”

H.P. has had three chief executives in as many years, and last November took an $ 8.8 billion accounting charge in conjunction with its 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, a British software company, incurring shareholder wrath.

Mr. Whitworth did not say who might be going, but several members of the board have been criticized in the run-up to Wednesday’s vote.

John Hammergren, the chairman and chief executive of McKesson Corporation, and G. Kennedy Thompson, the former chief executive of Wachovia, who are the board’s longest-serving members, have come under particular fire. Raymond Lane, the board’s chairman, and Marc Andreessen, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, were also the target of critics because of their significant roles in the Autonomy acquisition.

In Wednesday’s voting, Mr. Hammergren was re-elected with a plurality of only about 54 percent of total votes cast, while Mr. Thompson got 55 percent. Mr. Lane received a 59 percent majority, while Mr. Andreessen got 70 percent.

One other board member, Rajiv Gupta, the former C.E.O. of Rohm and Haas and a board member since 2009, received a positive vote of about 80 percent. Everyone else, including Meg Whitman, H.P.’s chief executive, received a majority of 90 percent or higher.

Mr. Whitworth was extremely positive about H.P.’s prospects, echoing early comments by Ms. Whitman that the company was well along in its rebuilding plan and would have accelerated growth in 2014.

Ms. Whitman’s comments were almost a play-by-play repeat of earlier roadmaps for H.P. - get the finances under control, rebuild customer relationships, build better products, and teach the sales force to offer more profitable packages of H.P. products.

As earlier, she framed it in the context of making H.P. a leader in a technology world of cloud computing, mobile devices, data analytics and security.

While Ms. Whitman said things were proceeding according to schedule, Mr. Whitworth was even more positive.

“There are things going on under the surface here, maybe out of the spotlight, that are just incredible,” he said.



Israeli Rights Group Protests Detention of Palestinian Children Suspected of Throwing Rocks at Settlers and Soldiers

The Israeli rights group B’Tselem protested the detention, Wednesday, of 27 Palestinian children suspected of throwing rocks at settlers and soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron.

The young Palestinians were detained in connection with “recent stone-throwing incidents toward the security forces and citizens in the city,” the Israel Defense Forces confirmed in a statement to the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Most were later released, the military press office said, but seven of the young people “have been taken for a police interrogation.”

Among the Palestinians arrested by the military on Wednesday morning in Hebron, B’Tselem said, were “at least five children eight to 10 years old, with possibly others below the age of criminal responsibility.” The rights group also released video recorded by an international activist that showed some of the children being taken into custody, and the subsequent release of five boys.

Video posted on YouTube by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem showing the detention of young Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron on Wednesday.

Video of Palestinian boys being released from Israeli military custody on Wednesday in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Earlier this week, Israel’s military drew attention to the dangers posed by rock-throwing in a blog post headlined “Rocks Can Kill,” that described in detail six cases of Israelis who were killed by stones hurled at them by Palestinians over the past 30 years.

The I.D.F. post concluded: “In 1999, the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that damage caused by rocks thrown at a vehicle is considered a hate crime, not a traffic accident. Rock throwing may seem harmless, but rocks can kill. If we ignore rock throwing, we potentially encourage even more severe hate crimes and higher-scale terror attacks.”

B’Tselem noted in its statement:

The Israeli Youth Law requires that a parent or adult be present during the interrogation of child suspects. The law does not formally apply to Palestinians in the occupied territories, who are subject to Israeli military law, but the military court has recommended that the relevant provisions be taken into account in all dealings with Palestinian children.

Later on Wednesday, B’Tselem’s director, Jessica Montell, replied on Twitter to critics who called the arrests justified.

Israeli security forces are present in large numbers in Hebron to protect several hundred Jewish settlers who moved to the city of nearly 200,000 Palestinians after it was occupied by Israel’s military in 1967. The city is home and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site revered by Jews and Muslims as the traditional burial place of the founding fathers of both religions. Hebron’s original Jewish community fled in 1929, after 67 Jews were killed during Arab riots against Jewish immigration to British-ruled Palestine.



Intertrust Sues Apple, Charging Patent Violations

Intertrust, a company that nabbed a huge settlement over patents in a lawsuit with Microsoft nearly a decade ago, has turned its focus to Apple, suing the technology giant on Wednesday and charging infringements of its security and content protection patents.

Intertrust, which is largely owned by Sony and Philips, sued Apple in Federal District Court in the Northern District of California, claiming it violated more than a dozen patents throughout its product lines, including the iPhone, Apple TV, iPad, iPod and Macintosh computers. Intertrust is best known as an early developer of digital rights management technologies â€" software that is used to prevent unauthorized access to music, movies, apps and other forms of electronic content.

In its complaint, Intertrust alleges that the security technology used on Apple devices infringes its patents, which have titles like “Techniques for Defining, Using and Manipulating Rights Management Data Structures”; “Systems and Methods Using Cryptography to Protect Secure Computing Environments”; and “Systems and Methods for Secure Transaction Management and Electronic Rights Protection.”

“No other entity uses Intertrust technologies so extensively at so many levels of its enterprise,” the company said in its complaint.

Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment, citing the company’s policy of not commenting on pending litigation.

Apple and other big technology companies with deep pockets are often targets for patent lawsuits (and sometimes initiators of them). A particular irritant to these tech companies is a class of plaintiffs pejoratively called “patent trolls,” which dedicate most of their energies to suing rather than making products.

But Intertrust does not quite fit that profile. The company has been around since the early 1990s, went public in the late 1990s and was taken private in 2003 through a deal that resulted in Sony and Philips owning the vast majority of the company. The company has teams of programmers that work on security software and services, according to Talal Shamoon, chief executive of Intertrust.

“We have a very focused mission around trust and security and around open platforms,” Mr. Shamoon said. “We’re not a troll by any stretch of the imagination.”

Litigation is also rare for Intertrust, which previously has sued only one other company, Microsoft, for patent infringement, according to Mr. Shamoon. That lawsuit resulted in a $440 million settlement from Microsoft in 2004. Intertrust has reached patent licensing agreements with Adobe, HTC, Samsung and others.

Mr. Shamoon said he had sought to negotiate similar licensing deals with Apple for years but the conversations never went anywhere. “You have a culture over there where they see the courtroom as an extension of the conference room,” he said.

“I have a lot of respect for the company,” Mr. Shamoon added. “I’ve been using their equipment for years. But you can’t be the only person on earth who ever invented anything.”

Mr. Shamoon said that Sony and Philips had not directed Intertrust to go after Apple in court to further their own strategic objectives. “This is not some proxy war between big companies,” he said.



Test Run: Rdio vs. Spotify for Streaming Music

Talking about Spotify versus Rdio, two competing music streaming services, can be like arguing with someone in a bar over two baseball teams: People passionately love one or the other and will happily share their disdain for the rival. But Spotify often wins with its might and size, touting millions more users than Rdio.

Yet Rdio has become my go-to music app for one distinct reason: its beautiful design and user interface. My preference was reinforced last week, when Rdio updated its user interface for mobile.

For those just getting started in the world of streaming music apps, both Rdio and Spotify can stream music to your phone, computer or iPad. They can also store some tracks offline for listening later. They are both little social butterflies, allowing you to connect with other music listeners, share playlists and see what your friends are listening to.

Where they differ, drastically, is in their design and usability. For anyone who remembers the feeling of touching a vinyl record or the insert pamphlet of a CD or tape, there was something emotional and raw about seeing and feeling the album cover as you listened to your favorite band. In the digital music world, that’s often difficult to replicate, but Rdio seems to have come pretty close.

Rdio’s latest mobile app highlights album covers, almost filling the screen with beautiful artwork. The typography in the app is small, light and legible, and makes the entire experience feel harmonious. The same goes for its desktop application.

Spotify, Rdio’s competitor, is quite the opposite. It isn’t just that Spotify looks outdated, with thick typography and a user interface that reminds me of my first Windows computer. Worse, it just feels boring. The user interface looks like it was designed for someone with vision problems.

On its mobile app, Rdio offers some slick interactions. If you hold your finger on an album cover, it will pop up an option to “share, sync to device, add to playlist, or play later.” There are little orange and green badges that also appear, so you can easily see which songs you have added to your collection to play offline. Tapping the top left corner of the app will slide out a list of your collection, what your friends are listening to, new releases and top-song charts.

The services do not have the same music choices, and people who prefer Spotify say that its music collection is more robust than competitors. But I rarely come across an instance when Rdio can’t supply a song I’m looking for.

Spotify users also love the Collaborative Playlists feature, where you can create a shared playlist with your friends.

Although both services are great at playing music, Rdio’s design helps the experience feel visceral and beautiful.



A ‘Big Data’ Freeway for Scientists

The University of California, San Diego, this week plans to announce that it has installed an advanced optical computer network that is intended to serve as a “Big Data freeway system” for next-generation science projects in fields including genomic sequencing, climate science, electron microscopy, oceanography and physics.

The new network, which is funded in part by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and based on an optical switch developed by Arista Networks, a start-up firm founded by the legendary Silicon Valley computer designer Andreas Bechtolsheim, is intended to move from an era where networks moved billions of bits of data each second to the coming age of trillion-bit-per-second data flows.
(A terabit network has the capacity to move roughly the equivalent of 2.5 Blu-ray videodiscs each second.)

However, the new ultrahigh speed networks are not just about moving files more quickly, or even moving larger files. Increasingly, computers used by scientific researchers are starting to escape the boundaries of a single box or even cluster and spread out to become “virtual,” in some cases across thousands of miles.

The new network, known as Prism, is intended for a new style of scientific computing characterized both by “big data” data sets and optical networks that make it possible to compute on data that is stored at a distant location from the computer’s processor, said Philip M. Papadopoulos, program director for computing systems at the San Diego Computing Center, and the principal investigator for the new network.

The Prism network “enables users to simply not care where their data is located on campus,” he said.

The Prism network is targeted at speeds of 100 billion bits and is intended as a bypass network that allows scientists to move data without affecting the performance of the normal campus network, which is based on a 10 billion-bit capacity and is near saturation.

There is a range of scientific users with requirements that have easily outstripped the capacity of current-day computer networks, he said.

For example he pointed to work being done in medicine by the National Center for Microscopy Imaging Research, with both light and electron microscopes that now generate three-dimensional images that may range up to 10 terabytes of data. The laboratory stores several petabytes (a petabyte is one thousand terabytes) and will require Prism to move data between different facilities on campus.

A previous optical network, known as Quartzite, was installed at San Diego beginning in 2004. That network was built on an earlier, less powerful, model of the Arista switch. The new version of the switch will handle up to 576 simultaneous 10 billion-bit connections. In some cases the links can be “bonded” to support even higher capacity data flows.

During an event to introduce the event on campus, Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is the director of the California Institute For Telecommunications and Information Technology, a U.C.S.D. laboratory that is the focal point for the new network, demonstrated the ability to share data and scientific visualization information with other scientists by holding a videoconference with researchers at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
At one point he showed a three-dimensional image created from an M.R.I. of his own abdomen, demonstrating how it was possible to view and manipulate the digital image remotely.

“The radiologists are used to reading the two dimensional scans and turning it into 3-D in their heads, but the doctors and surely the patients have never been able to see what is in their bodies,” he said. “I’m turning the insides of my body into a video game.”



The Era of Deep Archiving Begins

As a Dartmouth student in the early 1970s, William McDonough went, somewhat casually, to hear a lecture by a visiting celebrity. Mr. McDonough had little idea beforehand who Buckminster Fuller was, but listening to the designer and futurist had a long-term effect.

Mr. McDonough was late and took one of the last seats left, in the front row. Three hours later, he realized that the rest of the audience was gone but that Mr. Fuller was still talking. “Do you want me to keep going” Mr. Fuller asked politely but unnecessarily. They ended up taking a walk around campus, Mr. Fuller expostulating all the way.

That evening put Mr. McDonough on the path to becoming a prominent architect, but it exists only in his memory, which used to be where just about everything about our pasts resided. Now Mr. McDonough is in the forefront of efforts to change that, to record instantaneously the major intellectual events in our lives. He will be the first living archive at Stanford University.

This means that the architect, a leader in sustainable development, has started filming all of his meetings and recording all of his phone conversations. He will send them in something close to real time to Stanford, which will be making much of the material immediately accessible on the Internet. Even presidents are not observed so closely and so continuously. Mr. Fuller, whose archives are also at Stanford and is something of a guiding spirit to the project, would be envious but probably not surprised.

“How many of our daily discussions are worth keeping a detailed record of” asked Roberto Trujillo, head of the Stanford University Libraries’ Special Collections. “My sense is Bill is booked solid with a lot of meaningful meetings, and so it will be a rich archive. This could well be a model for other repositories and libraries. I wouldn’t claim the idea is unique, but the scope is.”

Jeff Ubois, the founder of the Personal Digital Archiving conference - now held under the auspices of the Library of Congress â€" said he hadn’t heard of anything exactly like what Stanford was doing. Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research won wide notice a couple of years ago for his “life-logging,” which involved putting everything he had accumulated, written, photographed, presented and owns (like CDs) into what he called his “local cyberspace.” That, however, was a personal initiative, not a collaboration with an institution.

“I think this will become a common practice,” Mr. Ubois said. “Now that we know technologies go obsolete, it will be even more important to archive things contemporaneously.”

The traditional format with archives went like this: aging famous person puts together his correspondence and drafts, hires an agent and sells the material to the institution that offered the most look. Stanford, for instance, paid $1 million for Allen Ginsberg’s 300,000-item archive in 1994. Scholars would then slowly come pick through the material, which sometimes carried restrictions for decades.

Mr. McDonough told me in an interview â€" which he recorded, of course â€" that until about a year ago he kept some stuff and threw out other things. It was not a systematic approach. Now he has a full-time archivist, Ryan Martin, whose office is next door to Mr. McDonough’s. Stanford will also have an archivist or two working on this project for the next year or two. But no money is changing hands between subject and university. Mr. McDonough will still control the intellectual property rights to his material, although Stanford will own the actual material.

Sometimes, of course, people do not want their meetings with the architect preserved. “That’s happened twice out of a thousand,” Mr. McDonough said. He must get permission to tape phone calls. The privacy implications of this are still somewhat murky. But meanwhile, even the titles of the books on his shelves are being filmed for posterity.

“The benefit to me is that I’m excited about a lot of things, and I like to share,” Mr. McDonough said. “That feels good. I can get to do my work, and if someone’s affected by it, that’s great.”

As for Stanford, it already is thinking about adding other living archives. “We have some people’s names on our lists,” Mr. Trujillo said. “We’ll start with McDonough and see how it goes. He’s certainly not the only person we have an interest in.”



Autonomy Questions for Hewlett-Packard

You didn’t really think Mike Lynch would stay away from Hewlett-Packard, did you

The former chief executive of Autonomy has posted an open letter to shareholders with some questions he’d like raised at Wednesday’s shareholders’ meeting in Mountain View, Calif.

To recap the grudge: In August 2011, the company announced it would buy Autonomy, a data analytics company in Britain founded by Mr. Lynch. Hewlett paid about $11.1 billion for Autonomy, which it said would be at the center of its strategy to have more value-added software in its products.

Last November, however, the company announced it would take a $8.8 billion accounting charge, largely over what it said were irregularities with Autonomy. It also said it had notified regulators in the United States and Britain.

Mr. Lynch has repeatedly denied there were problems at his company and says Autonomy ran into trouble owing to mismanagement by Hewlett.

The substance of Wednesday’s letter repeats those charges, with a call for shareholders to raise such issues as how the board came to make its allegations against Autonomy, how Hewlett came to its impairment charge figure and whether Autonomy executives told Hewlett management early on that the merger was having problems.

“As we have said before, we believe the problem with the Autonomy acquisition by H.P. lies in the mismanagement of that business by H.P. under its ownership, making it impossible for Autonomy to deliver on H.P.’s expectations,” Mr. Lynch wrote in the open letter posted Wednesday. “Autonomy’s accounts were fully audited by Deloitte throughout the period in question, and Deloitte has confirmed that it conducted its audit work in full compliance with regulation and professional standards. We refuse to be a scapegoat for H.P.’s own failings.”

When asked about the letter, Hewlett responded with a brief statement:

“H.P.’s position is the same as it has been from the beginning. We have handed over our information of serious misrepresentations in Autonomy’s accounting to the proper authorities, namely the S.E.C. and the Department of Justice and in the U.K. the S.F.O. We continue to cooperate and provide requested information to the relevant authorities on an ongoing basis,” the letter said, referring to the Serious Fraud Office in Britain.

The company later added, “H.P. cannot disclose any information that would interfere with any of the ongoing investigations into this matter. We are cooperating with the authorities.”

In other words, this isn’t the end of the matter, and there almost certainly will be no conclusion on Wednesday.



Daily Report: U.S. Is Said to Scrutinize Microsoft Accusations

Federal authorities are examining Microsoft’s involvement with companies and individuals that are accused of paying bribes to overseas government officials in exchange for business, according to a person briefed on the inquiry, Nick Wingfield reports in The New York Times.

The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opened preliminary investigations into bribery accusations involving Microsoft in China, Italy and Romania, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is a confidential legal matter. Microsoft’s practices in those countries are being looked at for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a federal law passed in 1977 that prohibits American companies from making illegal payments to government officials and others overseas to further their business interests.

In a blog post on Tuesday afternoon, John Frank, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said the company could not comment about continuing investigations. Mr. Frank said it was not uncommon for such government reviews to find that the claims were without merit.

“We take all allegations brought to our attention seriously and we cooperate fully in any government inquiries,” Mr. Frank said in the blog post. “Like other large companies with operations around the world we sometimes receive allegations about potential misconduct by employees or business partners and we investigate them fully regardless of the source. We also invest heavily in proactive training, monitoring and audits to ensure our business operations around the world meet the highest legal and ethical standards.”

Michael Passman, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the department had a policy of not confirming or denying the existence of investigations. A spokesman for the S.E.C. did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft joins a list of about 100 other companies under investigation at present related to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, according to Mike Koehler, a professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Law and the author of a blog, FCPA Professor, about the anticorruption law. Because companies have such a strong incentive to settle cases of this sort, they rarely end up going to trial.



U.S. Files Fraud Charges in a Facebook I.P.O. Case

Charges Filed in Facebook I.P.O. Case

A former candidate for governor of Oregon was arrested in Florida on Tuesday and accused of defrauding investors who hoped to buy shares of Facebook before its initial public offering in 2012, federal authorities said.

The defendant, Craig L. Berkman, 71, falsely told investors he had access to scarce pre-I.P.O. shares of Facebook and other popular Internet companies like LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a statement.

But instead of buying shares for investors, Mr. Berkman made “Ponzi-like” payments to earlier investors and financed personal expenses, according to the commission, which filed a civil case.

Mr. Berkman received at least $8 million from various schemes, according to Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, whose office filed criminal charges against him.

Mr. Berkman “blatantly capitalized on the market fervor preceding highly anticipated I.P.O.’s of Facebook and other social media companies to fleece investors whose cash flow he treated like an A.T.M.,” said Andrew Calamari, director of the S.E.C.’s New York office.

The United States attorney’s office charged Mr. Berkman with two counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud.

Mr. Berkman lost in the Republican primary for governor in 1994 and explored a bid for governor in the 2002 race, according to The Oregonian newspaper.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 20, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Charges Filed In Facebook I.P.O. Case.

Creating Canada’s ‘Quantum Valley’

Showing how quickly an esoteric technology can become mainstream, Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, who together founded BlackBerry, are establishing a $100 million venture fund for technologies that employ practical applications of quantum physics.

The fund is based in Ontario, Canada, which they hope to make into a powerhouse for the next great trend in high technology. Though the area is flat, Mr. Lazaridis referred to it as “Canada’s ‘Quantum Valley.’”

Financing a version of Silicon Valley based on quantum science, where subatomic particles can interact across different universes, at least makes for some decent nerd humor: If you build it, they will appear in several places at once â€" some of them profitable.

Mr. Lazaridis, something of an advanced science buff himself, certainly thinks he can make money in his location.

Over the last several years, Mr. Lazaridis, who as a child won an award for reading science books, has been a key backer of research into practical applications of quantum physics.

He said he had contributed about 270 million Canadian dollars of the 650 million dollars in financing received by the Institute for Quantum Computing, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the Waterloo Institute for Nano Technology, which are all based in Waterloo, Ontario.

Researchers at these institutions have made unexpected breakthroughs, he said, and are now interested in starting companies that use their technology. “They came to us,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “They’ve proposed some applications that are really intriguing.”

“Doug and I have the engineering experience, we have the business experience” to make practical businesses that use discoveries in quantum physics, he said. “Nothing has prepared you for what we are about to see.”

Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Fregin founded BlackBerry in 1984 as Research in Motion. In 1999, RIM introduced what became for a time one of the world’s most popular communications devices, called the BlackBerry, which initially incorporated a pager and e-mail, then later phone calls and Internet browsing.

They left the company in January 2012, after Apple gained dominance in the smartphone market and RIM’s stock price collapsed. Both men are still extremely wealthy.

If successful, the new fund, called the Quantum Valley Investment Fund, could help create some exciting products. Quantum physics is concerned with the often peculiar-seeming behavior of nature at a subatomic level. It is named for discrete units of energy, which seem able to affect one another without physical contact and can exist in different energy states at the same time.

Researchers in Waterloo and elsewhere have sought to understand and exploit these properties, with an eye to building machines that could be exponentially faster and more sensitive than traditional computers and sensors.

Mr. Lazaridis said the fund would initially focus on building things like sensors and actuators (a type of small motor), as well as new algorithms that could be used by others. Applications are likely in both health care and energy, among other fields, he said.

Noting that there is a big prize being offered to build a medical tricorder like the one in “Star Trek,” he said, “It’s not possible to do this without the sensitivity that a quantum sensor would have.”

Mr. Lazaridis did not announce any investments, but indicated that such announcements would soon come. Investment in a quantum computer, which he called “the holy grail” of applied quantum research, is not planned soon, but he did not rule out other breakthroughs.

“This is happening much faster than we thought,” he said. “The buzz is here.”



Creating Canada’s ‘Quantum Valley’

Showing how quickly an esoteric technology can become mainstream, Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, who together founded BlackBerry, are establishing a $100 million venture fund for technologies that employ practical applications of quantum physics.

The fund is based in Ontario, Canada, which they hope to make into a powerhouse for the next great trend in high technology. Though the area is flat, Mr. Lazaridis referred to it as “Canada’s ‘Quantum Valley.’”

Financing a version of Silicon Valley based on quantum science, where subatomic particles can interact across different universes, at least makes for some decent nerd humor: If you build it, they will appear in several places at once â€" some of them profitable.

Mr. Lazaridis, something of an advanced science buff himself, certainly thinks he can make money in his location.

Over the last several years, Mr. Lazaridis, who as a child won an award for reading science books, has been a key backer of research into practical applications of quantum physics.

He said he had contributed about 270 million Canadian dollars of the 650 million dollars in financing received by the Institute for Quantum Computing, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the Waterloo Institute for Nano Technology, which are all based in Waterloo, Ontario.

Researchers at these institutions have made unexpected breakthroughs, he said, and are now interested in starting companies that use their technology. “They came to us,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “They’ve proposed some applications that are really intriguing.”

“Doug and I have the engineering experience, we have the business experience” to make practical businesses that use discoveries in quantum physics, he said. “Nothing has prepared you for what we are about to see.”

Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Fregin founded BlackBerry in 1984 as Research in Motion. In 1999, RIM introduced what became for a time one of the world’s most popular communications devices, called the BlackBerry, which initially incorporated a pager and e-mail, then later phone calls and Internet browsing.

They left the company in January 2012, after Apple gained dominance in the smartphone market and RIM’s stock price collapsed. Both men are still extremely wealthy.

If successful, the new fund, called the Quantum Valley Investment Fund, could help create some exciting products. Quantum physics is concerned with the often peculiar-seeming behavior of nature at a subatomic level. It is named for discrete units of energy, which seem able to affect one another without physical contact and can exist in different energy states at the same time.

Researchers in Waterloo and elsewhere have sought to understand and exploit these properties, with an eye to building machines that could be exponentially faster and more sensitive than traditional computers and sensors.

Mr. Lazaridis said the fund would initially focus on building things like sensors and actuators (a type of small motor), as well as new algorithms that could be used by others. Applications are likely in both health care and energy, among other fields, he said.

Noting that there is a big prize being offered to build a medical tricorder like the one in “Star Trek,” he said, “It’s not possible to do this without the sensitivity that a quantum sensor would have.”

Mr. Lazaridis did not announce any investments, but indicated that such announcements would soon come. Investment in a quantum computer, which he called “the holy grail” of applied quantum research, is not planned soon, but he did not rule out other breakthroughs.

“This is happening much faster than we thought,” he said. “The buzz is here.”



As ARM Chief Steps Down, Successor Talks About ‘Body Computing’

ARM Holdings, the specialist in low-power semiconductors, is looking to put computers everywhere around us, and even inside us.

On Tuesday, Warren East, the company’s chief executive, announced that he would step down after 12 years at the helm. Mr. East, 51, will be succeeded by Simon Segars, 45, who has been with ARM since 1991.

Mr. Segars said he would continue to develop Mr. East’s plan to make ARM chips a crucial element not just of smartphones and tablets, where most are now used, but also of computer servers, sensors and networking gear. “Our alliances have broadened,” he said. “There’s large growth potential ahead for ARM.”

It is, the two men said, part of a decade-long plan. “We’ve got a long-term planning horizon, to 2020 and beyond,” said Mr. East. “At 2020, I’d have been C.E.O. for over 20 years â€" that is bordering on a problem.”

ARM was originally a project inside Acorn Computer, a personal computer maker long since broken up. From relative obscurity, ARM’s chip designs now make up nearly one-third of new chip consumption, hurting companies like Intel. ARM’s designs for chips are used in computer servers that are made by Hewlett-Packard and others that are useful for high transaction computing. And theyare regarded as a potentially huge development for new Internet applications.

The big coming focus, Mr. Segars said, will be deploying chips into a sensor-rich world. “Low-cost microcontrollers with a wireless interface,” he said. “There will be billions of these.” The sensor data will be processed both locally, on millions of small computers, with capabilities to make decisions locally, or collected and passed along to even bigger computer systems.

“The systems will go through different aggregation points,” Mr. Segars said. “If an aggregator in the home can tell a fridge is using too much power, maybe it needs servicing.”

The vision of lots of information being acted on across the network was akin to one described last week by Cisco Systems. In the ARM version, however, Cisco’s custom chips would face competition from cheaper versions from ARM, much the way that ARM’s chips have pressed Intel’s. Mr. Segars noted that LSI has already deployed a networking product with an ARM design.

ARM also plans to get involved more deeply in solid state data storage, considered a crucial part of Big Data analysis inside servers.

“It’s hard to get your head around” how many semiconductors will soon line the world, Mr. Segars said. “The car is ripe for a revolution. It will evolve into a consumer electronics device, paying for parking as you pull up to the curb.”

Eventually, said Mr. East, “it’s getting into people’s bodies. Over the next several years, semiconductors will be so small and use so little power that they’ll run inside us as systems.”



As ARM Chief Steps Down, Successor Talks About ‘Body Computing’

ARM Holdings, the specialist in low-power semiconductors, is looking to put computers everywhere around us, and even inside us.

On Tuesday, Warren East, the company’s chief executive, announced that he would step down after 12 years at the helm. Mr. East, 51, will be succeeded by Simon Segars, 45, who has been with ARM since 1991.

Mr. Segars said he would continue to develop Mr. East’s plan to make ARM chips a crucial element not just of smartphones and tablets, where most are now used, but also of computer servers, sensors and networking gear. “Our alliances have broadened,” he said. “There’s large growth potential ahead for ARM.”

It is, the two men said, part of a decade-long plan. “We’ve got a long-term planning horizon, to 2020 and beyond,” said Mr. East. “At 2020, I’d have been C.E.O. for over 20 years â€" that is bordering on a problem.”

ARM was originally a project inside Acorn Computer, a personal computer maker long since broken up. From relative obscurity, ARM’s chip designs now make up nearly one-third of new chip consumption, hurting companies like Intel. ARM’s designs for chips are used in computer servers that are made by Hewlett-Packard and others that are useful for high transaction computing. And theyare regarded as a potentially huge development for new Internet applications.

The big coming focus, Mr. Segars said, will be deploying chips into a sensor-rich world. “Low-cost microcontrollers with a wireless interface,” he said. “There will be billions of these.” The sensor data will be processed both locally, on millions of small computers, with capabilities to make decisions locally, or collected and passed along to even bigger computer systems.

“The systems will go through different aggregation points,” Mr. Segars said. “If an aggregator in the home can tell a fridge is using too much power, maybe it needs servicing.”

The vision of lots of information being acted on across the network was akin to one described last week by Cisco Systems. In the ARM version, however, Cisco’s custom chips would face competition from cheaper versions from ARM, much the way that ARM’s chips have pressed Intel’s. Mr. Segars noted that LSI has already deployed a networking product with an ARM design.

ARM also plans to get involved more deeply in solid state data storage, considered a crucial part of Big Data analysis inside servers.

“It’s hard to get your head around” how many semiconductors will soon line the world, Mr. Segars said. “The car is ripe for a revolution. It will evolve into a consumer electronics device, paying for parking as you pull up to the curb.”

Eventually, said Mr. East, “it’s getting into people’s bodies. Over the next several years, semiconductors will be so small and use so little power that they’ll run inside us as systems.”



Teenage Gunman in Ohio Mocks Victims’ Families

The families of Ohio high school students who were shot last year speaking at the sentencing of the 18-year-old gunman. Via The News-Herald.

Thomas Lane wore a T-shirt with KILLER scrawled in black ink during his sentencing Tuesday in an Ohio courtroom for shooting and killing three students in a high school cafeteria and wounding two others last year.

Mr. Lane, 18, was sentenced to three life sentences without parole. He pleaded guilty last month to opening fire on the morning of Feb. 27, 2012, with a .22-caliber Ruger semiautomatic pistol at Chardon High School while waiting for a bus to attend an alternative high school.

During the proceeding Tuesday, the prosecutor noted that Mr. Lane, known as T. J., continued to show no remorse for the shooting, making obscene gestures and smirking at the families of the victims, as they remembered their lost sons, their brothers and one son paralyzed after he was shot four times.

Daniel Parmertor, 16, Russell King, Jr. 17, and Demetrius Hewlin, 16, died of their wounds. Two other students, including Nick Walczak, who is paralyzed, were wounded.

“My family will move on, not you,” said Holly Walczak, Nick’s mother, as Mr. Lane smiled and smirked.

“We will always remember that somebody tried to kill five people and all they did was want to go to school,” she said.

The Geauga County prosecutor, James Flaiz, recalled for the judge how Mr. Lane had purchased a T-shirt that said KILLER on it before the shooting. Mr. Flaiz also said Mr. Lane took his uncle’s gun to school and took it out, unprovoked, in the cafeteria. Mr. Lane has not revealed a motive for the shootings.

The prosecutor providing details of what unfolded in the cafeteria on the morning of Feb. 27, 2012. Via The News-Herald.

When the judge, David Fuhry, announced that Mr. Lane would be given three life sentences, he responded with a smile.

The judge sentencing T. J. Lane. Via The News-Herald.

Asked by the judge if he had anything to say to the court, Mr. Lane, 18, spewed forth a statement:

“The hand that pulls the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory,” he said. He cursed and then swiveled his chair toward the victims’ relatives and raised his middle finger.

A juvenile court judge ruled that Lane was mentally competent to stand trial before the case was moved to adult court last year. Mr. Lane admitted to the shooting but told investigators that he did not know why he did it.

After the proceeding, Mr. Lane’s lawyer, Ian Friedman, and Mr. Lane’s sister, Sadie Lane, made a statement to reporters.

“I want to offer my deepest sympathy to all of the families,” Ms. Lane said. “I ask that you also keep my family in your prayers.”

She recalled how she was in the cafeteria when the shooting broke out and hid in a teachers’ lounge not knowing that it was her brother with the gun. “I heard the gunshots and screams,” she said.

Ms.Lane said that she later overhead a police officer say they suspected the gunman was her brother. “I shook and cried,” she said, “and denied that this could be true.”

She said that it might be hard for people to understand that “I love my brother.” She said that in her message, she wanted to ask for “peace, forgiveness and understanding.”

“I hope we can work toward peace and compassion in the future,” she said. “The brother in the courtroom who did this was not the brother, I knew. ”

Mr. Lane’s lawyer and Mr. Lane’s sister, Sadie Lane, speaking to reporters after the sentencing. Via The News-Herald.


Teenage Gunman in Ohio Mocks Victims’ Families

The families of Ohio high school students who were shot last year speaking at the sentencing of the 18-year-old gunman. Via The News-Herald.

Thomas Lane wore a T-shirt with KILLER scrawled in black ink during his sentencing Tuesday in an Ohio courtroom for shooting and killing three students in a high school cafeteria and wounding two others last year.

Mr. Lane, 18, was sentenced to three life sentences without parole. He pleaded guilty last month to opening fire on the morning of Feb. 27, 2012, with a .22-caliber Ruger semiautomatic pistol at Chardon High School while waiting for a bus to attend an alternative high school.

During the proceeding Tuesday, the prosecutor noted that Mr. Lane, known as T. J., continued to show no remorse for the shooting, making obscene gestures and smirking at the families of the victims, as they remembered their lost sons, their brothers and one son paralyzed after he was shot four times.

Daniel Parmertor, 16, Russell King, Jr. 17, and Demetrius Hewlin, 16, died of their wounds. Two other students, including Nick Walczak, who is paralyzed, were wounded.

“My family will move on, not you,” said Holly Walczak, Nick’s mother, as Mr. Lane smiled and smirked.

“We will always remember that somebody tried to kill five people and all they did was want to go to school,” she said.

The Geauga County prosecutor, James Flaiz, recalled for the judge how Mr. Lane had purchased a T-shirt that said KILLER on it before the shooting. Mr. Flaiz also said Mr. Lane took his uncle’s gun to school and took it out, unprovoked, in the cafeteria. Mr. Lane has not revealed a motive for the shootings.

The prosecutor providing details of what unfolded in the cafeteria on the morning of Feb. 27, 2012. Via The News-Herald.

When the judge, David Fuhry, announced that Mr. Lane would be given three life sentences, he responded with a smile.

The judge sentencing T. J. Lane. Via The News-Herald.

Asked by the judge if he had anything to say to the court, Mr. Lane, 18, spewed forth a statement:

“The hand that pulls the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory,” he said. He cursed and then swiveled his chair toward the victims’ relatives and raised his middle finger.

A juvenile court judge ruled that Lane was mentally competent to stand trial before the case was moved to adult court last year. Mr. Lane admitted to the shooting but told investigators that he did not know why he did it.

After the proceeding, Mr. Lane’s lawyer, Ian Friedman, and Mr. Lane’s sister, Sadie Lane, made a statement to reporters.

“I want to offer my deepest sympathy to all of the families,” Ms. Lane said. “I ask that you also keep my family in your prayers.”

She recalled how she was in the cafeteria when the shooting broke out and hid in a teachers’ lounge not knowing that it was her brother with the gun. “I heard the gunshots and screams,” she said.

Ms.Lane said that she later overhead a police officer say they suspected the gunman was her brother. “I shook and cried,” she said, “and denied that this could be true.”

She said that it might be hard for people to understand that “I love my brother.” She said that in her message, she wanted to ask for “peace, forgiveness and understanding.”

“I hope we can work toward peace and compassion in the future,” she said. “The brother in the courtroom who did this was not the brother, I knew. ”

Mr. Lane’s lawyer and Mr. Lane’s sister, Sadie Lane, speaking to reporters after the sentencing. Via The News-Herald.


Israel’s Animated Diplomacy

On the eve of President Obama’s visit to the Middle East, Israel’s embassy in Washington rolled out the cartoon red carpet, in the form of an animated YouTube clip apparently designed to make light of reported tension between the two countries’ leaders.

A cartoon posted on YouTube by the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

The animation shows Mr. Obama and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, mouthing pleasantries at a news conference and then expressing surprise as they review newspaper reports hinting at tensions “behind the scenes,” before exchanging high-fives and shaking hands. If the two men do enjoy such a jolly encounter when they meet, it will be in stark contrast to the palpable tension that marked Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to Mr. Obama’s office in 2011, when the prime minister appeared to lecture the president in front of reporters.

Then, during the final weeks of last year’s American presidential election campaign, Mr. Netanyahu appeared in an anti-Obama television ad that ran in Florida. As my colleague Alan Cowell reported, the prime minister “was widely perceived in Israel and the United States as having supported the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.”

As the American-Israeli blogger Emily Hauser noted, the cartoon released to paper over those cracks includes a regional map that seems to incorporate the West Bank into Israel (and completely omits Gaza, Tunisia and Morocco) and ends with the saccharine tune “Thank You for Being a Friend.” That song, which played over the opening credits of the sitcom “Golden Girls,” is a 1978 pop hit with lyrics like: “If you threw a party/Invited everyone you knew/You would see the biggest gift would be from me,” and “If it’s a car you lack/I’d surely buy you a Cadillac/Whatever you need any time of the day or night.”

The music video for the American performer Andrew Gold’s “Thank You for Being a Friend.”

While the animated video might strike some observers of the Obama-Netanyahu relationship as unrealistic, this is not the first time the embassy has tried to make itself heard through cartoon diplomacy. Late last year, the embassy uploaded two similar animated clips to its YouTube channel mocking the Palestinian president’s decision to appeal to the United Nations for membership. In both, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, appears as the driver of a bus full of innocent passengers, careening toward a cliff. The scenario recalls the plot of the movie “Speed,” in which a crazed bomber seizes control of a city bus.

An Israeli animated video criticizing President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine.

Another Israeli animated video criticizing Mr. Abbas.

Israel has also attempted to use animation to deal with the complex reality of combat. During the Gaza offensive, Israel’s military was criticized by the United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees for part of its social media campaign, which used an animated video to show Hamas militants launching rockets from a United Nations school.

The original video posted on the official YouTube account of Israel’s military is no longer available, but at least one copy remains on that site, and another was posted on LiveLeak.

A copy of an animated video released by Israel’s military, which includes a scene depicting Hamas militants launching rockets from a United Nations school.

Shortly after the conclusion of the fighting in Gaza, Israel’s foreign ministry drew attention to a cartoon, “Terror in School,” which depicted Israelis as the blameless victims of bullying by Palestinians. In a Twitter message, the foreign ministry advised its 19,000 followers to watch the cartoon, shortly after it was posted online by its producers at the Israeli advertising firm Srutonim, or Scratch.

When that video was posted on Facebook by the producers, they described it as an attempt to change the perception of Israel and “fight anti-Semitism.”

Earlier in 2012, the same firm was reportedly hired by the leadership of the Israeli settlers who live on West Bank land that Israel has occupied since 1967 to make a cartoon called “Protecting the Settlements From Pirates.” In it, Mr. Netanyahu was mockingly portrayed as the captain of a ship being bombarded by a pirate ship who “tries to save the ship by politely asking the pirate to stop.”

A video made by an Israeli animation firm poking fun at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on behalf of Israeli settlers.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)