Start-Up Lets Users Track Who Tracks Them

Is your Web browsing history your business - or everyone else’s

A start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., Disconnect, which helps you track who is tracking you online, this week released its latest tool to help safeguard your browsing history. Its new browser extension works on Chrome and Firefox browsers and is meant to block an invisible network of around 2,000 separate tracking companies.

Most of the tracking is in the service of advertising: If you were browsing a camping goods site over the weekend, for instance, don’t be surprised to see an ad pop up for hiking boots when you log in to a news site the next morning or even, when you open up your Facebook page.

It is a tried-and-true digital advertising strategy called retargeting. Facebook is the latest entrant, and its advertising partners are experimenting with fine-grained ways to nudge you with ads on Facebook based on what you were looking at when you were not on Facebook.

The Disconnect filter, which Brian Kennish, a former Google engineer, started building two years ago, is squarely aimed at controlling that kind of targeted advertising.

“We are stopping that flow of data as you bounce around the Web,” said Mr. Kennish, a company co-founder. “Third-party retargeters are not going to have information about you.”

The new Disconnect filter is part of an emerging crop of privacy tools aimed at tech-savvy consumers who want to protect personal data online. Most of these companies - Abine and Ghostery are others - offer at least a basic version of their product free and charge for more advanced versions. Disconnect is offering its filter on a sliding scale.

These tracker filters are distinct from the long-debated Do Not Track signals that exist on most Web browsers and that are intended to give users a way to control whether their browsing history can be used for targeted advertising. Digital advertisers have fought hard against industrywide standards. And at the moment, even if a consumer turns on the Do Not Track signal on her browser, advertisers are not obliged to honor it.

The filters, like the one from Disconnect, stop third-party trackers altogether. It also shows you how many tracking companies are working in the background of the Web sites you visit. It still lets what are known as first-party trackers keep tabs on you. That means, Mr. Kennish said, that Amazon can still keep tabs on the kinds of books you buy to recommend others. But your book-browsing history is not monitored by other companies trying to target their ads. You will still see ads. They just won’t be based on your behavior on the Web.

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Anti-Sectarian Campaign in Egypt Urges Citizens to Remove Religion From ID Cards

via Facebook An Egyptian citizen’s national identity card with the field for religion covered up by the phrase “none of your business.”

Egyptian activists have launched an online campaign against sectarianism in the wake of a deadly attack on mourners at Egypt’s main Coptic Christian Cathedral this month.

The “None of Your Business” campaign, driven by a Facebook group and a YouTube video, urges Egyptian citizens to cover up the section of their national identity cards that states their religion, to begin the process of disentangling religion and citizenship. The group’s Facebook page describes the initiative as “a campaign against interference in citizens’ private lives by the state, and by other citizens. We are for the removal of religion from official documents - the most important of which is the personal I.D. card - as a small but important step towards ending discrimination on the basis of religion.”

“My Faith Is My Own Business,” a video by the activist filmmaker Aalam Wassef in support of an anti-sectarian campaign in Egypt aimed at removing religion from national identity cards.

In response, supporters of the campaign have uploaded photographs of their I.D. cards to social networks with messages along the lines of “my faith is my own business” obscuring their religions. One inventive blogger even used text copied from the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.

حارب #مصر الطائفية وحط ستيكر يبسطك مكان خانة الديانة المحشورة ف البطاقة انا حطيب سبونج بوب :) #حاجة_تخصني http://t.co/18rF9WRQXQ

â€" - (@Fatnnnnnnnnna) 15 Apr 13

One of the organizers, the British-Egyptian journalist and blogger Sarah Carr, explained in an e-mail to The Lede on Monday:

I reported on the Cathedral clashes last week, and was at Maspero when nearly 30 Christian protesters were killed; shot or run down by armored personnel carriers. I felt angry and powerless after both incidents until the idea of covering up the religion field on my I.D. card came to me. I couldn’t think of a single use for the religion field; the Egyptian state has a well documented thirst for bureaucracy and collecting information about its citizens but there is absolutely no need for it to have this information, which serves no purpose other than giving prejudiced state officials (and anyone else who sees the I.D. card) the opportunity to give a hard time to citizens.

So initially it was a polite “up yours” to the state: you can continue to follow divisive policies by classifying your citizens according to their religion while simultaneously bleating about citizenship but I won’t be part of it. I wrote “none of your business” on a piece of paper and covered up both the religion field and the social status field (married, single) because there is also no need for the state to document that information in this way, nor for the rest of the world to know about the progress of my romantic life.

I put this picture on Facebook and got an amazing and unexpected response from people who felt the same way. So I started the inevitable Facebook page with a friend, Mohamad Adam, and it currently has nearly 700 likes. Serendipitously, Aalam Wassaf was thinking about the same thing at the same time and made a great video, so it all came together.

Ultimately I would like I.D. cards to be abolished altogether, because they are unnecessary and sinister, but this is still some way off I think. Removing the religion field from I.D. cards is a symbolic first step towards this. If it ever did happen it would be a message that the state need not and should not have a role in defining, controlling or exploiting religious identity.

The campaign’s video was produced by Aalam Wassef, an artist, musician and blogger who made subversive Web videos during the Mubarak era under the pseudonym Ahmad Sherif.

In response to questions about the campaign from The Lede on Monday, Mr. Wassef wrote:

The idea was simply to invite Egyptians to mask the mention of their religion on the back of their I.D. (where the “religion field” is compulsory), as a statement that faith is a personal issue, and that it should stay that way.

From where I stand, starting such a campaign was a way of sparking a necessary public debate around the equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, freedom of speech, governance and religion…. Masking your religion on your I.D. is also a strong message sent to society at large, and not only to Islamists. Social pressure and domination over anyone who is not a Muslim man is, truly, a suffocating reality.

Finally, under Muslim Brotherhood rule, stating that your religion is your own business is a radical form of re-appropriation at a time when Islamists are posing as the sole gatekeepers of what it is to be a “good Muslim,” “a good Christian,” etc. Taking the liberty of masking your religion is, de facto, a way of challenging this imposture and discarding the threat of being called an infidel.

This campaign comes after repeated religious violence, the most recent examples being the killings in the village of Khusus and the siege of the Abasseya Cathedral in Cairo (that escalated with state security forces firing numerous rounds of tear gas inside the Cathedral).

These past two years, we have witnessed even more religious violence and manifestations of hatred. You remember of course the Maspero massacre in Oct. 2011. One should also remember the bombing of the Qiddissin church in Alexandria, on Dec. 31, 2010, 25 days before the revolution. But none of these are isolated cases. Egypt has, alas, a very long history of religious violence and segregation.

Over the past 50 years, there were several attempts to expose these issues, but as soon as you would come anywhere close, you would swiftly be accused of “insulting religion.” The Bassem Youssef case is a recent illustration of that, but there have been many before.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.

‘Lean In’ Software Goes Corporate

The networking technology that powers Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” campaign has its own ambitions to rise inside corporations.

“Lean In” is the best-selling book written by Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, with Nell Scovell. Its message that women need to do a better job of finding and acting on their ambitions is also the goal of a nonprofit. LeanIn.org, financed by Ms. Sandberg’s book profits and her own money, uses the Internet to help organize small groups of women across the United States and internationally.

Not surprisingly for a movement originating from Silicon Valley, social networking technology plays a part in building out these Lean In circles. This includes online software to organize people, content like videos on how to better use body language, tools for LeanIn.org’s managers to monitor user behavior, and data analytics.

And, in a nod to Silicon Valley’s often blurred line between business and altruism, on Tuesday that technology will be offered as a commercial service.

“This is a way for people to create their own branches of groups,” said Gina Bianchini, the founder and chief executive of Mightybell, a maker of the networking software. “What if an influencer, or a brand, or an organization, could go from having passive followers to an active army It’s like nothing that’s been offered before.”

Mightybell debuted in 2011 as a way for individual groups to organize online. To date, Ms. Bianchini said, “tens of thousands” of groups have used the service.

For LeanIn.org, Ms. Bianchini, who is listed as one of the group’s founders, changed the software so that it could create subgroups that refer to a central cause, while aspects of the initiative are locally managed.

Mightybell will offer the initial organizing software for free, Ms. Bianchini said, adding that likely users would include “media brands, bloggers, and corporations.” Starting this summer, the company plans to charge for premium features like data analytics, online stores and managing communications.

LeanIn.org may serve as an initial template. The organization encourages people to build social networks of eight to 10 people. Using calendaring software, they can arrange meetings 10 or more times a year, where they can watch lectures downloaded from LeanIn.org, which include ways to improve nonverbal communication or tips on how to negotiate a raise.

Additional content includes ways for circle members to discuss and develop strategies for professional opportunities. There is also software for managing online communications between formal meetings.

LeanIn.org, meantime, collects feedback by looking at how many groups are formed, how many posts are created, and how many invitations to join are sent out by members. Content from LeanIn’s 160 partners, which include both nonprofits and companies like American Express and Coca-Cola, may also be included.

“We think of them as book clubs with a purpose,” said Rachel Thomas, the president of LeanIn.org. “People can name and personalize their groups. We hope people will try an action, share the results, and continue to meet more often.” Men can also start circles, she said, though the organization expects the circles will primarily contain women.

“Our ultimate goal, which is going to take time,” is to expand the share of corporate leadership positions held women, which currently stands at 14 percent, Ms. Thomas said. To that end, she said, portions of LeanIn.org’s “programmatic” content are also being put into existing corporate training programs.

Ms. Thomas did not say how many circles had been formed since the program began three weeks ago. She noted that the group’s Facebook page has received over 140,000 likes. There has been interest in forming circles from as far away as China, Berlin, and rural Canada, although most of the early interest, she said, has been from urban areas in the United States.

Ms. Bianchini is a veteran of online social networking. In 2004, she co-founded, along with Marc Andreessen, a service called Ning for creating social networks. Ning raised over $100 million, but failed to make a profit. It was sold to Glam Media in 2011 for a reported $150 million, after Ms. Bianchini left the company.

“Ning had ‘the empty group problem,’” she said. “People form a group, but after awhile they may not have any idea what to do.” With LeanIn.org, and now the general release of the circle software, she said, “we want to make sure that there is new stuff to react to, and drive group engagement at scale.” Meetings are organized, she noted, by the leader picking four or so days that might work, then allowing others to choose a time within that constraint.

“No one has done networks like this,” she said. “It’s been done in the real world, and it is how the Web itself was built, but it hasn’t been done for groups.”

‘Lean In’ Software Goes Corporate

The networking technology that powers Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” campaign has its own ambitions to rise inside corporations.

“Lean In” is the best-selling book written by Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, with Nell Scovell. Its message that women need to do a better job of finding and acting on their ambitions is also the goal of a nonprofit. LeanIn.org, financed by Ms. Sandberg’s book profits and her own money, uses the Internet to help organize small groups of women across the United States and internationally.

Not surprisingly for a movement originating from Silicon Valley, social networking technology plays a part in building out these Lean In circles. This includes online software to organize people, content like videos on how to better use body language, tools for LeanIn.org’s managers to monitor user behavior, and data analytics.

And, in a nod to Silicon Valley’s often blurred line between business and altruism, on Tuesday that technology will be offered as a commercial service.

“This is a way for people to create their own branches of groups,” said Gina Bianchini, the founder and chief executive of Mightybell, a maker of the networking software. “What if an influencer, or a brand, or an organization, could go from having passive followers to an active army It’s like nothing that’s been offered before.”

Mightybell debuted in 2011 as a way for individual groups to organize online. To date, Ms. Bianchini said, “tens of thousands” of groups have used the service.

For LeanIn.org, Ms. Bianchini, who is listed as one of the group’s founders, changed the software so that it could create subgroups that refer to a central cause, while aspects of the initiative are locally managed.

Mightybell will offer the initial organizing software for free, Ms. Bianchini said, adding that likely users would include “media brands, bloggers, and corporations.” Starting this summer, the company plans to charge for premium features like data analytics, online stores and managing communications.

LeanIn.org may serve as an initial template. The organization encourages people to build social networks of eight to 10 people. Using calendaring software, they can arrange meetings 10 or more times a year, where they can watch lectures downloaded from LeanIn.org, which include ways to improve nonverbal communication or tips on how to negotiate a raise.

Additional content includes ways for circle members to discuss and develop strategies for professional opportunities. There is also software for managing online communications between formal meetings.

LeanIn.org, meantime, collects feedback by looking at how many groups are formed, how many posts are created, and how many invitations to join are sent out by members. Content from LeanIn’s 160 partners, which include both nonprofits and companies like American Express and Coca-Cola, may also be included.

“We think of them as book clubs with a purpose,” said Rachel Thomas, the president of LeanIn.org. “People can name and personalize their groups. We hope people will try an action, share the results, and continue to meet more often.” Men can also start circles, she said, though the organization expects the circles will primarily contain women.

“Our ultimate goal, which is going to take time,” is to expand the share of corporate leadership positions held women, which currently stands at 14 percent, Ms. Thomas said. To that end, she said, portions of LeanIn.org’s “programmatic” content are also being put into existing corporate training programs.

Ms. Thomas did not say how many circles had been formed since the program began three weeks ago. She noted that the group’s Facebook page has received over 140,000 likes. There has been interest in forming circles from as far away as China, Berlin, and rural Canada, although most of the early interest, she said, has been from urban areas in the United States.

Ms. Bianchini is a veteran of online social networking. In 2004, she co-founded, along with Marc Andreessen, a service called Ning for creating social networks. Ning raised over $100 million, but failed to make a profit. It was sold to Glam Media in 2011 for a reported $150 million, after Ms. Bianchini left the company.

“Ning had ‘the empty group problem,’” she said. “People form a group, but after awhile they may not have any idea what to do.” With LeanIn.org, and now the general release of the circle software, she said, “we want to make sure that there is new stuff to react to, and drive group engagement at scale.” Meetings are organized, she noted, by the leader picking four or so days that might work, then allowing others to choose a time within that constraint.

“No one has done networks like this,” she said. “It’s been done in the real world, and it is how the Web itself was built, but it hasn’t been done for groups.”

‘Lean In’ Software Goes Corporate

The networking technology that powers Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” campaign has its own ambitions to rise inside corporations.

“Lean In” is the best-selling book written by Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, with Nell Scovell. Its message that women need to do a better job of finding and acting on their ambitions is also the goal of a nonprofit. LeanIn.org, financed by Ms. Sandberg’s book profits and her own money, uses the Internet to help organize small groups of women across the United States and internationally.

Not surprisingly for a movement originating from Silicon Valley, social networking technology plays a part in building out these Lean In circles. This includes online software to organize people, content like videos on how to better use body language, tools for LeanIn.org’s managers to monitor user behavior, and data analytics.

And, in a nod to Silicon Valley’s often blurred line between business and altruism, on Tuesday that technology will be offered as a commercial service.

“This is a way for people to create their own branches of groups,” said Gina Bianchini, the founder and chief executive of Mightybell, a maker of the networking software. “What if an influencer, or a brand, or an organization, could go from having passive followers to an active army It’s like nothing that’s been offered before.”

Mightybell debuted in 2011 as a way for individual groups to organize online. To date, Ms. Bianchini said, “tens of thousands” of groups have used the service.

For LeanIn.org, Ms. Bianchini, who is listed as one of the group’s founders, changed the software so that it could create subgroups that refer to a central cause, while aspects of the initiative are locally managed.

Mightybell will offer the initial organizing software for free, Ms. Bianchini said, adding that likely users would include “media brands, bloggers, and corporations.” Starting this summer, the company plans to charge for premium features like data analytics, online stores and managing communications.

LeanIn.org may serve as an initial template. The organization encourages people to build social networks of eight to 10 people. Using calendaring software, they can arrange meetings 10 or more times a year, where they can watch lectures downloaded from LeanIn.org, which include ways to improve nonverbal communication or tips on how to negotiate a raise.

Additional content includes ways for circle members to discuss and develop strategies for professional opportunities. There is also software for managing online communications between formal meetings.

LeanIn.org, meantime, collects feedback by looking at how many groups are formed, how many posts are created, and how many invitations to join are sent out by members. Content from LeanIn’s 160 partners, which include both nonprofits and companies like American Express and Coca-Cola, may also be included.

“We think of them as book clubs with a purpose,” said Rachel Thomas, the president of LeanIn.org. “People can name and personalize their groups. We hope people will try an action, share the results, and continue to meet more often.” Men can also start circles, she said, though the organization expects the circles will primarily contain women.

“Our ultimate goal, which is going to take time,” is to expand the share of corporate leadership positions held women, which currently stands at 14 percent, Ms. Thomas said. To that end, she said, portions of LeanIn.org’s “programmatic” content are also being put into existing corporate training programs.

Ms. Thomas did not say how many circles had been formed since the program began three weeks ago. She noted that the group’s Facebook page has received over 140,000 likes. There has been interest in forming circles from as far away as China, Berlin, and rural Canada, although most of the early interest, she said, has been from urban areas in the United States.

Ms. Bianchini is a veteran of online social networking. In 2004, she co-founded, along with Marc Andreessen, a service called Ning for creating social networks. Ning raised over $100 million, but failed to make a profit. It was sold to Glam Media in 2011 for a reported $150 million, after Ms. Bianchini left the company.

“Ning had ‘the empty group problem,’” she said. “People form a group, but after awhile they may not have any idea what to do.” With LeanIn.org, and now the general release of the circle software, she said, “we want to make sure that there is new stuff to react to, and drive group engagement at scale.” Meetings are organized, she noted, by the leader picking four or so days that might work, then allowing others to choose a time within that constraint.

“No one has done networks like this,” she said. “It’s been done in the real world, and it is how the Web itself was built, but it hasn’t been done for groups.”

‘Lean In’ Software Goes Corporate

The networking technology that powers Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” campaign has its own ambitions to rise inside corporations.

“Lean In” is the best-selling book written by Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, with Nell Scovell. Its message that women need to do a better job of finding and acting on their ambitions is also the goal of a nonprofit. LeanIn.org, financed by Ms. Sandberg’s book profits and her own money, uses the Internet to help organize small groups of women across the United States and internationally.

Not surprisingly for a movement originating from Silicon Valley, social networking technology plays a part in building out these Lean In circles. This includes online software to organize people, content like videos on how to better use body language, tools for LeanIn.org’s managers to monitor user behavior, and data analytics.

And, in a nod to Silicon Valley’s often blurred line between business and altruism, on Tuesday that technology will be offered as a commercial service.

“This is a way for people to create their own branches of groups,” said Gina Bianchini, the founder and chief executive of Mightybell, a maker of the networking software. “What if an influencer, or a brand, or an organization, could go from having passive followers to an active army It’s like nothing that’s been offered before.”

Mightybell debuted in 2011 as a way for individual groups to organize online. To date, Ms. Bianchini said, “tens of thousands” of groups have used the service.

For LeanIn.org, Ms. Bianchini, who is listed as one of the group’s founders, changed the software so that it could create subgroups that refer to a central cause, while aspects of the initiative are locally managed.

Mightybell will offer the initial organizing software for free, Ms. Bianchini said, adding that likely users would include “media brands, bloggers, and corporations.” Starting this summer, the company plans to charge for premium features like data analytics, online stores and managing communications.

LeanIn.org may serve as an initial template. The organization encourages people to build social networks of eight to 10 people. Using calendaring software, they can arrange meetings 10 or more times a year, where they can watch lectures downloaded from LeanIn.org, which include ways to improve nonverbal communication or tips on how to negotiate a raise.

Additional content includes ways for circle members to discuss and develop strategies for professional opportunities. There is also software for managing online communications between formal meetings.

LeanIn.org, meantime, collects feedback by looking at how many groups are formed, how many posts are created, and how many invitations to join are sent out by members. Content from LeanIn’s 160 partners, which include both nonprofits and companies like American Express and Coca-Cola, may also be included.

“We think of them as book clubs with a purpose,” said Rachel Thomas, the president of LeanIn.org. “People can name and personalize their groups. We hope people will try an action, share the results, and continue to meet more often.” Men can also start circles, she said, though the organization expects the circles will primarily contain women.

“Our ultimate goal, which is going to take time,” is to expand the share of corporate leadership positions held women, which currently stands at 14 percent, Ms. Thomas said. To that end, she said, portions of LeanIn.org’s “programmatic” content are also being put into existing corporate training programs.

Ms. Thomas did not say how many circles had been formed since the program began three weeks ago. She noted that the group’s Facebook page has received over 140,000 likes. There has been interest in forming circles from as far away as China, Berlin, and rural Canada, although most of the early interest, she said, has been from urban areas in the United States.

Ms. Bianchini is a veteran of online social networking. In 2004, she co-founded, along with Marc Andreessen, a service called Ning for creating social networks. Ning raised over $100 million, but failed to make a profit. It was sold to Glam Media in 2011 for a reported $150 million, after Ms. Bianchini left the company.

“Ning had ‘the empty group problem,’” she said. “People form a group, but after awhile they may not have any idea what to do.” With LeanIn.org, and now the general release of the circle software, she said, “we want to make sure that there is new stuff to react to, and drive group engagement at scale.” Meetings are organized, she noted, by the leader picking four or so days that might work, then allowing others to choose a time within that constraint.

“No one has done networks like this,” she said. “It’s been done in the real world, and it is how the Web itself was built, but it hasn’t been done for groups.”

Intel Tries to Secure Its Footing Beyond PCs

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Intel is still looking for a chief to succeed Paul Otellini, who announced his resignation this fall.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. â€" For the last several months, Andy Bryant, the chairman of Intel, has been trying to put steel in the backs of the company’s employees. At meetings, he tells them that Intel must fundamentally change even though the computer chip maker still has what it takes to succeed in engineering and manufacturing.

It is an extraordinary message at a company with the fiercely confident unofficial motto, “Only the paranoid survive.” Intel now finds itself faced with a fundamental question: Can the paranoid also evolve

Intel became the world’s largest semiconductor maker through a partnership with Microsoft that dominated the personal computer business for a quarter-century.

PC sales are now collapsing, as users are relying more on mobile phones and tablets that rarely contain Intel chips.

Intel’s other mainstay business, chips for computer servers, is also changing. Cloud computing is creating huge demand for basic servers, but its simpler and cheaper designs may drive down prices and profit margins and offer openings to new competitors.

Amid all this turmoil in the industry, Intel is also scrambling to find a new leader. In November, Paul Otellini, who had been chief executive since 2005, unexpectedly announced his resignation. “It’s time to move on and transfer Intel’s helm to a new generation of leadership,” he said at the time, declining to elaborate on why he was leaving three years before reaching the company’s retirement age of 65.

His decision left the company in limbo. “It looks like there was no succession plan in place, and that is troubling,” said Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Raymond James. “They are probably a month away from Otellini leaving, and nothing is settled.”

While the board has been looking at external candidates, the new chief will almost certainly come from within. In contrast to Silicon Valley’s culture of job-hopping, at Intel someone with 15 years’ experience can be called a newcomer. The company’s leaders believe that it is critical for the chief executive to be steeped in the company culture.

“The job of the board is to pick the candidate who can best grow into the job,” said a person with knowledge of the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Intel has to define its next act.”

In the meantime, Mr. Bryant, who has been at Intel for 32 years and served as its longtime chief financial officer, has been trying to prepare employees for a new era.

“He says that the customers have changed, and we have to as well,” said a person attending one of Mr. Bryant’s meetings, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “Where the revenue is now is not where the revenue is coming from in the future.”

Intel declined to make Mr. Otellini, Mr. Bryant or any other officials available for an interview, citing the quiet period before its first-quarter earnings report, due out on Tuesday. Those earnings, which will most likely reflect the collapsing demand for PCs, will follow the drops in revenue, operating margins and net income of 2012.

Analysts say the two top contenders to be Intel’s next C.E.O. are Brian Krzanich and David Perlmutter, who are close to Intel’s core business. Mr. Krzanich, Intel’s chief operating officer, oversees its fabrication facilities. Mr. Perlmutter, the chief product officer, oversees chip design.

Renee James, the head of Intel’s software group, is considered a more remote chance to run what has long been a hardware company. And Stacy Smith, Intel’s chief financial officer, is well liked inside and outside the company, but like Mr. Otellini, lacks an engineering background, which diminishes his prospects.

Revealing just how hard it would be for an outsider to step into the top job at Intel, the newcomer of these four joined Intel in 1988. But close watchers of the company wonder whether its insular culture is up to the challenge of expanding to different kinds of customers and devices.

“In this new world, with smartphones and tablets, and cloud computing, things are moving around fast,” said Hector Ruiz, the former chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s top competitor in making PC chips. “Intel has the talent, engineering, and resources, but they are their own worst enemy.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 15, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Intel Tries To Secure Its Footing Beyond PCs.

More Cracks Undermine the Citadel of TV Profits

Melinda Sue Gordon for Netflix

The success of Netflix's "House of Cards," with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, suggests an attack on TV's practice of bundling.

For the longest time in the media business, the concept of the bundle has been foundational. Ads go with editorial content in print, commercials go with programming on television and the channels you desire are paired with ones you did not in your cable package.

Dish's Hopper, which skips commercials, also seems to attack TV's bundling.

People were free to shop for what they wanted, as long as they were willing to buy a bunch of other stuff they did not. The box score last night for your home team It was wrapped inside a bundle of paper that included everything from foreign news to ads for lingerie. If you liked a song, you generally had to buy an album full of others to get the goods.

As for advertisers, the audience they wanted was bundled inside a much larger audience of people they did not. To get at the milk, both consumers and businesses had to buy the cow.

Television has thrived on this kind of systematic stacking, but though bundles may be a handy way of protecting things, they also tend to obscure the weaknesses within. Those flaws are becoming more apparent as the practice of bundling comes under attack.

Networks are stepping up the fight against Dish Network’s Hopper, which automatically skips the commercials in network programming. Aereo won a court decision on April 1, letting it continue its rollout of a service through which consumers can access broadcast signals online without Aereo paying any of the estimated $3 billion that broadcasters will take in from retransmission fees by 2015.

And tellingly, there has been some breaking of ranks between the companies that make content and the people who send it through the pipes to consumers. Most notably, Cablevision filed an antitrust suit against Viacom challenging its requirement that the cable company carry rarely viewed channels to get access to Viacom’s more popular ones. (Verizon did not join the lawsuit, but is also asking for less bundling and more options.)

Finally, there is the success of Netflix’s “House of Cards,” original programming delivered over the Internet, with no cable required. The company announced on Facebook that customers had watched four billion hours of streaming video in the first three months of the year. As Peter Kafka pointed out in AllThingsD, Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research calculated that eye-popping number would make it the most-watched cable television network. Except it isn’t on cable, isn’t on television and isn’t a network.

Those initiatives represent assaults on different parts of the business, but each is an attack on the bundle, and the legacy industry is reacting ferociously. Aereo is a finger in the eye of broadcasters, prompting some to suggest they might turn off their broadcast signals and become cable channels â€" as Fox threatened last week. (The biggest losers in that situation would be the more than 11 million cable-less households that still depend on antennas.)

Charles Ergen, the chairman of Dish Network, was recently called the “most hated man in Hollywood” by The Hollywood Reporter because he dared to give consumers the ability to unbundle advertising and programming with a touch of a button using Hopper. It brings to mind the scene from Ken Auletta’s book “Googled,” when Mel Karmazin, then chief executive of Viacom, visited Google and saw a demonstration of the company’s ability to target ads. He declared that the company was, um, messing “with the magic.”

That’s because media companies have another word for those consumer inefficiencies: profits.

“The bundle is the Gibraltar of the media business,” said Tim Wu, the author of “The Master Switch,” a history of media revolutions. “It keeps the entire ecosystem alive, which is why it is so heavily and successfully defended. But there are hairline fractures beginning to appear, and you are seeing alliances shift.”

Historically, once the consumer decides, it doesn’t matter what stakeholders want. They can’t stop what’s coming.

The advent of the Internet presented an existential challenge to bundles. Once consumers got their hands on the mouse and a programmable remote, they began to attack the inefficiencies of the system. When seeking information, they sought relevant links, not media brands. And DVRs put them in the control room of their own viewing universe.

Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the author of “Captive Audience,” says she thinks television bundles will be with us for a while â€" six to eight years â€" regardless of what the consumer wants.

“It’s like the picked-on kid who tries to get home to his front porch; he has to make it past all the bullies first,” she said. “We have a heavily defended, heavily concentrated programming industry and a monopoly in distribution, with none of the big players willing to act like a maverick. No one wants to break ranks because the current system has been so lucrative.”

Of course, the government could get involved, as it did in breaking up Hollywood’s closed system of production and distribution in the 1930s and ’40s. The result was a lot of disruption, a blossoming of cinema in the ’60s and ’70s, and by the way, a movie industry that still has scale and profits.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

twitter.com/carr2n

A version of this article appeared in print on April 15, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: More Cracks Undermine The Citadel Of TV Profits.

Daily Report: European Regulators and Google Reach an Antitrust Deal

Google has for the first time agreed to legally binding changes to its search results after an antitrust investigation by European regulators into whether it abuses its dominance of online search, Claire Cain Miller reports in The New York Times on Monday.

After a two-year inquiry, the European Commission has accepted Google’s proposed settlement, according to two people briefed on the agreement who spoke anonymously because the proposal was not yet public.

Google will not have to change the algorithm that produces its search results, the people said. Under the proposal, Google agrees to clearly label search results from its own properties, like Google Plus Local or Google News, and in some cases to show links from rival search engines.

The changes will not be widely seen for at least a month, while rivals and others in the industry can weigh in on the plan, in a process called market testing.

The biggest change has to do with search results related to topics like shopping and flights, a field known as vertical search. Google has been pushing into these areas, prompting complaints from competitors like Yelp and TripAdvisor who worry that Google will favor its own results over theirs.

If the proposal is approved after market testing, the European Commission will have succeeded in demanding far more stringent concessions from Google than did United States regulators, who in January closed a two-year antitrust investigation after finding that Google had not violated antitrust statutes. Google agreed to make some minor changes related to search advertising, but avoided a formal consent decree or litigation.

A Google spokesman, Al Verney, declined to comment beyond repeating Google’s statement that it continued “to work cooperatively with the European Commission.” Antoine Colombani, a commission spokesman, did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

Europe opened its antitrust inquiry in 2010. It has focused on whether Google unfairly took advantage of its market dominance by favoring links to its own services, whether it disadvantaged competitors by including material from other Web sites in search results and whether its advertising business complied with European antitrust law.

The investigation came about because of competitors like Microsoft and Foundem, a British comparison-shopping site, which complained about the way Google conducted its search and advertising businesses.

In Europe, the agreement would be legally binding for five years, and a third party would ensure compliance, the people briefed on the proposal said. Google could face a fine of as much as 10 percent of its global annual sales for failing to keep its promises.

If it abides by the agreement, though, Google will avoid fines and a formal finding of wrongdoing. Google will also escape the lengthy and expensive antitrust battles that Microsoft faced in Europe over its media player and server software.

Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa, said the penalty faced by Google was light. “The ‘no fine’ conclusion is a pretty important one,” said Mr. Hovenkamp, who has in the past been a paid adviser to Google. “The question you have to ask is: Is labeling going to change any consumer behavior And if the answer is no, then it’s not going to do any good for Microsoft Bing or for any rival search engines.”