Officer Shot and Killed on M.I.T. Campus

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer was shot and killed near the campus in Cambridge, Mass.,Thursday night, authorities said.

The New York Times

The officer, who was not named, responded to a report of a disturbance near Vassar and Main Streets, the Middlesex District Attorney Michael Pelgro said in a statement early Friday. He was found, the statement said with “multiple gunshot wounds” and taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.

M.I.T. said in an update on its campus alert Web site after midnight that the “shooter remains at large, police continue to search the campus,” and asked students to stay indoors until further notice.

At the campus, helicopters whirred overhead, and police cars were dotted through the streets. A crime scene was cordoned off, and at least one dog unit was on the scene.

Officer Shot and Killed on M.I.T. Campus

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer was shot and killed near the campus in Cambridge, Mass.,Thursday night, authorities said.

The New York Times

The officer, who was not named, responded to a report of a disturbance near Vassar and Main Streets, the Middlesex District Attorney Michael Pelgro said in a statement early Friday. He was found, the statement said with “multiple gunshot wounds” and taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.

M.I.T. said in an update on its campus alert Web site after midnight that the “shooter remains at large, police continue to search the campus,” and asked students to stay indoors until further notice.

At the campus, helicopters whirred overhead, and police cars were dotted through the streets. A crime scene was cordoned off, and at least one dog unit was on the scene.

New, Higher-Resolution, Image of Boston Marathon Suspect Emerges

David Green

Shortly after finishing the Boston Marathon this week David Green, 49, was walking to meet friends when two bombs exploded in front of him as he faced east on the corner of Fairfield and Boylston Streets. He snapped a photograph with his iPhone before rushing to help those wounded.

He posted it to Facebook with an account of his experiences.

On Thursday, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation released images of the two suspects in the blast, Mr. Green’s friends began to notice a figure in the bottom left corner of his picture that closely resembled one of the suspects.

One posted it in a running forum, from where it went viral, and sparked a debate over its veracity.

In an interview late Thursday, Mr. Green, who runs a sportswear company in Florida, confirmed that the picture was genuine, and that the F.B.I. had contacted him and requested a copy. “I have spoken to several agents,” Mr. Green said, “and they have got the photos, they are picking up material from me, and I don’t think there’s any doubt.” Mr. Green said he took the photo at 2:50:15 p.m. on Monday.

Agents had told him, he said, that his picture was the best they had, because it was taken from a better camera than the others that were posted.

Mr. Green does not remember noticing the man in the white hat. He had, instead, called the F.B.I. earlier in the week to report another man, who was standing still and yelling instead of running.

Mr. Green provided a full-sized version of the image, which shows the suspect’s face more clearly.

Nurses Sought in Beatings at Russian Orphanage

Russian authorities have ordered the arrest of two nurses they said severely beat three young children at an orphanage during a night of drinking. One of the children, a 7-month-old, was wrapped in a sheet and stuffed in a plastic container to muffle the cries.

The other children, a 3-year-old boy and a 10-month-old girl, were hospitalized with multiple injuries, Russia’s Investigative Committee said Thursday. The 7-month-old child was initially in a coma. Their current conditions were not immediately known.

The beatings occurred at an orphanage in the far eastern Khabarovsk region on April 1, though the orphanage waited a week before reporting it to law enforcement officials, the committee said in a statement. It was unknown where the nurses were on Thursday, and warrants had been issued for their arrest.

The plight of orphans has become a sensitive and highly politicized topic in Russia. Most public discussion, though, has centered on foreign adoptions.

In December, lawmakers barred Americans from adopting Russian children in retaliation for a new American law aimed at punishing Russian human rights abuses. Even before that, the deaths of several adopted Russian children in the United States and elsewhere had prompted vocal calls to restrict foreign adoptions.

Meanwhile, critics say little has been done to improve conditions at Russian orphanages or to promote adoptions domestically. More than 600,000 Russian children live outside the custody of their biological parents, many in foster homes. But about 130,000, many with physical and mental health problems, live in orphanages, where they are sometimes neglected and abused.

It was not clear how many children lived at the orphanage in the Khabarovsk region, or whether there had been a history of abuse there.

Investigators said the beatings began after several children awoke during the night and started crying. The children were not found until the next morning, when other workers arrived. Only then were they were taken to the hospital.

On Thursday, Pavel A. Astakhov, Russia’s children’s rights ombudsman, and the most vocal advocate of restricting foreign adoptions, said via Twitter that the claims of abuse “should be thoroughly investigated.”

One on One: Tim Jones of Buzzient, Hunting Chatter on Explosives

When two bombs exploded at Monday’s Boston Marathon, good Samaritans of all sorts rushed in, from off-duty medical personnel to residents who opened their homes to evacuees. Tim Jones, the chief executive of Buzzient, a Boston-area social media management start-up, felt a similar urge to help, using his company’s ability to search Web history on forums, comments and social media, to focus on specific topics â€"  like explosives.

Mr. Jones also happens to be the former head of an explosives-detection company. Given his background, he jumped in when this week’s news broke â€" as a kind of virtual bystander. Nearly two years ago, he had offered his company’s social media monitoring tools to the Boston Police Department, pro bono. This week, his first thought was to tweak his company’s search algorithms to target online chatter about explosives, in case the police department would seek that kind of data as their investigation continued. The following is condensed and edited from an interview with Mr. Jones about his company’s volunteer efforts to assist with the investigation.

Q.

Your company, Buzzient, has been working pro bono with the Boston Police Department since 2011, shortly after the London riots. How did that relationship begin?

A.

We were big proponents of Boston’s “innovation district” about two years ago, and with that started to work more closely with the mayor’s office. I received an inquiry from the mayor’s chief of staff, and this was right after the London riots.

The London police weren’t paying attention to social networks, they had no idea that groups of people were communicating on social networks saying: “Hey, five guys, take tube and start something here. Another five guys take the tube and start something there.” The Boston Police Department saw that, thought, “Hmm, this is something we should pay attention to.”

Police Commissioner Ed Davis reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re interested in what you guys are doing, we’d like to know a little bit more.” He came over to our office, sat down with us, and saw that there was kind of a shared vision of how we could use emerging technology to at least give them a little bit of an early warning system. So what we offered to do was make this available to them pro bono. To be clear, there’s no financial relationship between Buzzient and the City of Boston, we’ve never been formally requested by the City of Boston or the F.B.I. to use Buzzient. It’s something we just did because it was the right thing to do.

Q.

How did you first hear the news on Monday about the explosions at the Boston Marathon?

A.

I saw a couple of alerts on the phone. The first thing I did was I sat down and just logged into the system myself and started making changes, based upon my knowledge of explosives. (In a prior life I ran an explosives detection company that I spun out of Georgia Tech.) There is a timeliness to this around gathering data and the best thing to do was to sit down and up the tempo of the system that we had running. So we began to focus on social media conversations and content around explosives.

Q.

With your background in explosives detection technologies, what kinds of things did you think would be helpful to look for on the social Web?

A.

As it has turned out, I believe these explosives are going to turn out to be either black powder or TNT-based. But a lot of what I worked on before was on the detection of plastic explosives and plastic explosive variants â€" C4, RDX, HMX, PETN and TATP. The analysis we conducted here was really around: were people around online talking about these much more destructive explosives? That’s to figure out if there were any telltale signs of someone asking about these complex explosives becoming frustrated, deciding they would go for less destructive explosives, like TNT. It was also to determine whether there is any ongoing threat of people trying to use these more complex explosives.

Q.

How did you get involved in the field of explosives detection?

A.

At the time I was a venture capitalist with a particular focus on spinning technology out of our national labs and major universities. 9/11 comes along and I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m making good money as a venture capitalist, but is there more to life?”

I had previously seen technology coming out of Georgia Tech that enabled you to take the equivalent of a chip, a semiconductor, and identify either explosives or biological elements to detect them based on the vapor trail they create. Every time an explosive comes into contact with air it creates a unique vapor trail, a unique signature. So the signature for TNT is different than the signature for C4. By deploying this low-cost chip technology, the thesis was, one could build a very, very low cost, very ubiquitous detector grid that you could then deploy in things like mailboxes, lamp posts, airports, etc.

The frustration we ultimately found was at that time I think the attention of the venture capital community had already shifted away from homeland and global security back to the Internet, particularly the consumer Internet. When everything happened on Monday, I kind of tilted my head and said, “I told you so.” This is the stuff we knew we needed to do and, quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of appetite for doing so.

Q.

What would be the holy grail for mining social analytics in the Boston Marathon case?

A.

The holy grail would be something similar to what happened with the ricin letters that were sent to the White House: someone who has logged onto a forum, and has logged in with some identifying piece of information â€"  a user name, an e-mail address â€"  has asked particular questions, commented, maybe, on other posts. Someone who has, in effect, self-identified, where someone basically puts out enough information you could say, “Oh, this person is kind of asking pretty much the same sorts of questions that correspond to what we found in the physical forensics.”

One on One: Tim Jones of Buzzient, Hunting Chatter on Explosives

When two bombs exploded at Monday’s Boston Marathon, good Samaritans of all sorts rushed in, from off-duty medical personnel to residents who opened their homes to evacuees. Tim Jones, the chief executive of Buzzient, a Boston-area social media management start-up, felt a similar urge to help, using his company’s ability to search Web history on forums, comments and social media, to focus on specific topics â€"  like explosives.

Mr. Jones also happens to be the former head of an explosives-detection company. Given his background, he jumped in when this week’s news broke â€" as a kind of virtual bystander. Nearly two years ago, he had offered his company’s social media monitoring tools to the Boston Police Department, pro bono. This week, his first thought was to tweak his company’s search algorithms to target online chatter about explosives, in case the police department would seek that kind of data as their investigation continued. The following is condensed and edited from an interview with Mr. Jones about his company’s volunteer efforts to assist with the investigation.

Q.

Your company, Buzzient, has been working pro bono with the Boston Police Department since 2011, shortly after the London riots. How did that relationship begin?

A.

We were big proponents of Boston’s “innovation district” about two years ago, and with that started to work more closely with the mayor’s office. I received an inquiry from the mayor’s chief of staff, and this was right after the London riots.

The London police weren’t paying attention to social networks, they had no idea that groups of people were communicating on social networks saying: “Hey, five guys, take tube and start something here. Another five guys take the tube and start something there.” The Boston Police Department saw that, thought, “Hmm, this is something we should pay attention to.”

Police Commissioner Ed Davis reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re interested in what you guys are doing, we’d like to know a little bit more.” He came over to our office, sat down with us, and saw that there was kind of a shared vision of how we could use emerging technology to at least give them a little bit of an early warning system. So what we offered to do was make this available to them pro bono. To be clear, there’s no financial relationship between Buzzient and the City of Boston, we’ve never been formally requested by the City of Boston or the F.B.I. to use Buzzient. It’s something we just did because it was the right thing to do.

Q.

How did you first hear the news on Monday about the explosions at the Boston Marathon?

A.

I saw a couple of alerts on the phone. The first thing I did was I sat down and just logged into the system myself and started making changes, based upon my knowledge of explosives. (In a prior life I ran an explosives detection company that I spun out of Georgia Tech.) There is a timeliness to this around gathering data and the best thing to do was to sit down and up the tempo of the system that we had running. So we began to focus on social media conversations and content around explosives.

Q.

With your background in explosives detection technologies, what kinds of things did you think would be helpful to look for on the social Web?

A.

As it has turned out, I believe these explosives are going to turn out to be either black powder or TNT-based. But a lot of what I worked on before was on the detection of plastic explosives and plastic explosive variants â€" C4, RDX, HMX, PETN and TATP. The analysis we conducted here was really around: were people around online talking about these much more destructive explosives? That’s to figure out if there were any telltale signs of someone asking about these complex explosives becoming frustrated, deciding they would go for less destructive explosives, like TNT. It was also to determine whether there is any ongoing threat of people trying to use these more complex explosives.

Q.

How did you get involved in the field of explosives detection?

A.

At the time I was a venture capitalist with a particular focus on spinning technology out of our national labs and major universities. 9/11 comes along and I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m making good money as a venture capitalist, but is there more to life?”

I had previously seen technology coming out of Georgia Tech that enabled you to take the equivalent of a chip, a semiconductor, and identify either explosives or biological elements to detect them based on the vapor trail they create. Every time an explosive comes into contact with air it creates a unique vapor trail, a unique signature. So the signature for TNT is different than the signature for C4. By deploying this low-cost chip technology, the thesis was, one could build a very, very low cost, very ubiquitous detector grid that you could then deploy in things like mailboxes, lamp posts, airports, etc.

The frustration we ultimately found was at that time I think the attention of the venture capital community had already shifted away from homeland and global security back to the Internet, particularly the consumer Internet. When everything happened on Monday, I kind of tilted my head and said, “I told you so.” This is the stuff we knew we needed to do and, quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of appetite for doing so.

Q.

What would be the holy grail for mining social analytics in the Boston Marathon case?

A.

The holy grail would be something similar to what happened with the ricin letters that were sent to the White House: someone who has logged onto a forum, and has logged in with some identifying piece of information â€"  a user name, an e-mail address â€"  has asked particular questions, commented, maybe, on other posts. Someone who has, in effect, self-identified, where someone basically puts out enough information you could say, “Oh, this person is kind of asking pretty much the same sorts of questions that correspond to what we found in the physical forensics.”

One on One: Tim Jones of Buzzient, Hunting Chatter on Explosives

When two bombs exploded at Monday’s Boston Marathon, good Samaritans of all sorts rushed in, from off-duty medical personnel to residents who opened their homes to evacuees. Tim Jones, the chief executive of Buzzient, a Boston-area social media management start-up, felt a similar urge to help, using his company’s ability to search Web history on forums, comments and social media, to focus on specific topics â€"  like explosives.

Mr. Jones also happens to be the former head of an explosives-detection company. Given his background, he jumped in when this week’s news broke â€" as a kind of virtual bystander. Nearly two years ago, he had offered his company’s social media monitoring tools to the Boston Police Department, pro bono. This week, his first thought was to tweak his company’s search algorithms to target online chatter about explosives, in case the police department would seek that kind of data as their investigation continued. The following is condensed and edited from an interview with Mr. Jones about his company’s volunteer efforts to assist with the investigation.

Q.

Your company, Buzzient, has been working pro bono with the Boston Police Department since 2011, shortly after the London riots. How did that relationship begin?

A.

We were big proponents of Boston’s “innovation district” about two years ago, and with that started to work more closely with the mayor’s office. I received an inquiry from the mayor’s chief of staff, and this was right after the London riots.

The London police weren’t paying attention to social networks, they had no idea that groups of people were communicating on social networks saying: “Hey, five guys, take tube and start something here. Another five guys take the tube and start something there.” The Boston Police Department saw that, thought, “Hmm, this is something we should pay attention to.”

Police Commissioner Ed Davis reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re interested in what you guys are doing, we’d like to know a little bit more.” He came over to our office, sat down with us, and saw that there was kind of a shared vision of how we could use emerging technology to at least give them a little bit of an early warning system. So what we offered to do was make this available to them pro bono. To be clear, there’s no financial relationship between Buzzient and the City of Boston, we’ve never been formally requested by the City of Boston or the F.B.I. to use Buzzient. It’s something we just did because it was the right thing to do.

Q.

How did you first hear the news on Monday about the explosions at the Boston Marathon?

A.

I saw a couple of alerts on the phone. The first thing I did was I sat down and just logged into the system myself and started making changes, based upon my knowledge of explosives. (In a prior life I ran an explosives detection company that I spun out of Georgia Tech.) There is a timeliness to this around gathering data and the best thing to do was to sit down and up the tempo of the system that we had running. So we began to focus on social media conversations and content around explosives.

Q.

With your background in explosives detection technologies, what kinds of things did you think would be helpful to look for on the social Web?

A.

As it has turned out, I believe these explosives are going to turn out to be either black powder or TNT-based. But a lot of what I worked on before was on the detection of plastic explosives and plastic explosive variants â€" C4, RDX, HMX, PETN and TATP. The analysis we conducted here was really around: were people around online talking about these much more destructive explosives? That’s to figure out if there were any telltale signs of someone asking about these complex explosives becoming frustrated, deciding they would go for less destructive explosives, like TNT. It was also to determine whether there is any ongoing threat of people trying to use these more complex explosives.

Q.

How did you get involved in the field of explosives detection?

A.

At the time I was a venture capitalist with a particular focus on spinning technology out of our national labs and major universities. 9/11 comes along and I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m making good money as a venture capitalist, but is there more to life?”

I had previously seen technology coming out of Georgia Tech that enabled you to take the equivalent of a chip, a semiconductor, and identify either explosives or biological elements to detect them based on the vapor trail they create. Every time an explosive comes into contact with air it creates a unique vapor trail, a unique signature. So the signature for TNT is different than the signature for C4. By deploying this low-cost chip technology, the thesis was, one could build a very, very low cost, very ubiquitous detector grid that you could then deploy in things like mailboxes, lamp posts, airports, etc.

The frustration we ultimately found was at that time I think the attention of the venture capital community had already shifted away from homeland and global security back to the Internet, particularly the consumer Internet. When everything happened on Monday, I kind of tilted my head and said, “I told you so.” This is the stuff we knew we needed to do and, quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of appetite for doing so.

Q.

What would be the holy grail for mining social analytics in the Boston Marathon case?

A.

The holy grail would be something similar to what happened with the ricin letters that were sent to the White House: someone who has logged onto a forum, and has logged in with some identifying piece of information â€"  a user name, an e-mail address â€"  has asked particular questions, commented, maybe, on other posts. Someone who has, in effect, self-identified, where someone basically puts out enough information you could say, “Oh, this person is kind of asking pretty much the same sorts of questions that correspond to what we found in the physical forensics.”

Updates on Aftermath of Boston Marathon Explosions

The Lede is following the aftermath of Monday’s deadly explosions at the Boston Marathon, which killed three and injured more than 170 on Monday. President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are scheduled to attend an interfaith service dedicated to the victims of the bombings, as the F.B.I. studied video clips and photos showing a man who may have planted the explosives.

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Breaking Up Is Hard When the Web Site Isn’t Ready to Quit

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Ah, those online relationships.

First you’re smitten by a social network or Web service and can’t stop spending time on it. Then it starts asking how you’re feeling, what you like, where you are, with whom, and why you don’t share as much anymore.

Pretty soon, you’re ready to call it quits.

But trying to end your relationship with some prominent online services can be like breaking up with an overly attached romantic partner â€" they make it pretty hard to say goodbye.

And with good reason â€" more users are beneficial to a company’s bottom line, which often depends on generating revenue by selling you targeted advertisements. Possibly no social network understands this better than Facebook, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, proudly announced last October that his site had surpassed one billion active users.

“Their business model is about getting users to create content,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst with the Altimeter Group. “It’s users who are creating content, liking things, and, ultimately, a brand sees this and comes to deploy advertising dollars. The product is us.”

Still, not every site takes the “Never Gonna Give You Up” approach. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of the social news site Reddit, said that if users wanted to delete an account, “they should be able to do that as easily as they signed up.”

“It puts the onus on us to keep delivering a great product, and not retaining users simply because they can’t find the exit,” he said.

And remember, even if you say goodbye, like Rick and Ilsa in “Casablanca,” you’ll always have Paris.

FACEBOOK Given Facebook’s history of privacy controversies â€" and its general tendency to occupy vast amounts of time â€" some people may eventually feel the need to leave, or at least take a break from the service.

To quit entirely, log on to your account and go to https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account. After hitting the Delete My Account box, you’ll be asked to enter your password.

If you want to download a copy of your photos, posts and messages before leaving the service, you can do that from the account settings page, which can be quickly reached by clicking on that little round gear icon at the top right of the Facebook home page.

Unlike many sites, Facebook gives you 14 days to change your mind before your account is permanently deleted. The company knows it has hooked hundreds of millions of users, many of whom won’t be able to stay away and will come crawling back.

The site will also let you take a temporary break from the relationship by letting you deactivate your account. Unlike deleting, deactivating it will merely disable your profile, although some features, including sent messages, may remain visible to others. You can return at any time, with your information intact.

But Facebook makes it harder to put the relationship on hiatus than to leave permanently. Before you can deactivate your account, Facebook asks you to provide a reason for quitting. Choices range from “I spend too much time using Facebook” to “I don’t understand how to use Facebook.” For nearly all selections, the company pleads with you to stay. Don’t find Facebook useful? It responds by advising you to connect with more friends.

According to a Facebook spokeswoman, this is less about being clingy, and more about being consumer-driven by giving users “the power to decide what action is right for them.”

After selecting your reason for leaving, hit Confirm. You’ll have to re-enter your password, then hit the Deactivate Now box.

Not surprisingly, Facebook ends things by saying, “We hope you come back soon.” Which, let’s face it, you probably will.

GOOGLE PLUS Google tries to entangle you in multiple, distinct services like Google Plus, Gmail and YouTube â€" all connected. And it can track your activity across all of them and show you ads.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.

Breaking Up Is Hard When the Web Site Isn’t Ready to Quit

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Ah, those online relationships.

First you’re smitten by a social network or Web service and can’t stop spending time on it. Then it starts asking how you’re feeling, what you like, where you are, with whom, and why you don’t share as much anymore.

Pretty soon, you’re ready to call it quits.

But trying to end your relationship with some prominent online services can be like breaking up with an overly attached romantic partner â€" they make it pretty hard to say goodbye.

And with good reason â€" more users are beneficial to a company’s bottom line, which often depends on generating revenue by selling you targeted advertisements. Possibly no social network understands this better than Facebook, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, proudly announced last October that his site had surpassed one billion active users.

“Their business model is about getting users to create content,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst with the Altimeter Group. “It’s users who are creating content, liking things, and, ultimately, a brand sees this and comes to deploy advertising dollars. The product is us.”

Still, not every site takes the “Never Gonna Give You Up” approach. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of the social news site Reddit, said that if users wanted to delete an account, “they should be able to do that as easily as they signed up.”

“It puts the onus on us to keep delivering a great product, and not retaining users simply because they can’t find the exit,” he said.

And remember, even if you say goodbye, like Rick and Ilsa in “Casablanca,” you’ll always have Paris.

FACEBOOK Given Facebook’s history of privacy controversies â€" and its general tendency to occupy vast amounts of time â€" some people may eventually feel the need to leave, or at least take a break from the service.

To quit entirely, log on to your account and go to https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account. After hitting the Delete My Account box, you’ll be asked to enter your password.

If you want to download a copy of your photos, posts and messages before leaving the service, you can do that from the account settings page, which can be quickly reached by clicking on that little round gear icon at the top right of the Facebook home page.

Unlike many sites, Facebook gives you 14 days to change your mind before your account is permanently deleted. The company knows it has hooked hundreds of millions of users, many of whom won’t be able to stay away and will come crawling back.

The site will also let you take a temporary break from the relationship by letting you deactivate your account. Unlike deleting, deactivating it will merely disable your profile, although some features, including sent messages, may remain visible to others. You can return at any time, with your information intact.

But Facebook makes it harder to put the relationship on hiatus than to leave permanently. Before you can deactivate your account, Facebook asks you to provide a reason for quitting. Choices range from “I spend too much time using Facebook” to “I don’t understand how to use Facebook.” For nearly all selections, the company pleads with you to stay. Don’t find Facebook useful? It responds by advising you to connect with more friends.

According to a Facebook spokeswoman, this is less about being clingy, and more about being consumer-driven by giving users “the power to decide what action is right for them.”

After selecting your reason for leaving, hit Confirm. You’ll have to re-enter your password, then hit the Deactivate Now box.

Not surprisingly, Facebook ends things by saying, “We hope you come back soon.” Which, let’s face it, you probably will.

GOOGLE PLUS Google tries to entangle you in multiple, distinct services like Google Plus, Gmail and YouTube â€" all connected. And it can track your activity across all of them and show you ads.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Bus Finder App, and Tabletop PC

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Wednesday, selections include the ways that digital technology changed business for Japanese electronics companies, videos on the Web from some of the first people to own Google Glass and a genealogy app from Iceland, whose 320,000 people are apparently all related in some manner.