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Monday, June 3, 2013

Most Parents Show Little Concern About Children’s Media Use, Survey Says

Do parents worry about the growing amount of time their children spend with media?

One new study suggests that most parents are largely unconcerned. And perhaps no wonder: Parents who show little concern about their children’s use of technology themselves spend big chunks of their leisure time with media.

The study, undertaken by the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University, was intended to look at how parents view technology â€" from television to smartphones to tablets â€" and how family life revolves around these devices.

The study’s co-author, Vicky Rideout, an independent researcher who over the last decade has done pioneering research into patterns of technology use, said she was surprised to find that 59 percent of the 2,300 parents surveyed were not worried that their children would become addicted to technology. About 38 percent did express such a worry.

But Ms. Rideout said the lack of concern among the majority of parents surveyed did not conform with what appears to be a popular sentiment, found in the media and among some researchers.

“We hear time and again about kids demanding more and more media devices and parents struggling to find ways to cope with it,” she said. “In reality, what we’ve discovered is that most parents of young kids aren’t concerned about media use.”

The survey also found that 78 percent of the parents in the survey did not report conflicts with their children over media use â€" meaning, the children aren’t begging while the parents grudgingly withhold.

Ms. Rideout was quick to note, however, that the parents who were less concerned about their children’s media use were themselves heavy technology users, to an extent that she said left her “totally shocked.”

Among those surveyed, parents in the families with heaviest media use, about 39 percent of families, consumed 11 hours of screen media in their leisure time â€" a figure that excludes print media and music. The figure of 11 hours double-counts time in which a parent was using two screens at once, say, watching television while using a computer to surf the Internet. In other words, an hour spent using both TV and a laptop at the same time counted as two hours of media-use time for purposes of the survey.

In households with more moderate use, about 45 percent of families, parents reported consuming five hours of screen media per day. In lighter-use households, representing 16 percent of families, parents consumed media less than two hours a day.

Research into the impact of heavy technology use on behavior and the brain is very much in its early stages. But some neuroscientists and doctors have expressed concern that heavy media use can have a number of deleterious effects, including on attention span and focus, and lead to a sedentary lifestyle.

The lead author on the new survey was Ellen Wartella, who leads the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern. Ms. Rideout, whose previous work at the Kaiser Family Foundation and at Common Sense Media was pioneering at showing explosive use of media among children, said she was also surprised in the current survey to find that parents were the ones who were introducing their children to technology, rather than children’s begging to use it in the first place.

“Parental decisions,” she said, “are what are driving the media use.”



Add Tear Gas and Stir — Images of Police Brutality Fuel Anger in Turkey

Video posted on YouTube by the Turkish journalist Serdar Akinan showed police officers in Istanbul on Monday firing tear gas in the direction of protesters in Taksim Square.

As my colleague Sebnem Arsu reports, protests continued for a fourth day in major Turkish cities on Monday, one day after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the unrest on what he called “lies” circulating on Twitter and other social networks.

While supporters of the protest movement clearly do not take the same dim view of social networks as Mr. Erdogan, it is true that, frustrated by the relatively sparse coverage of the demonstrations in the Turkish media, they have turned to the Web to share striking images of wounded protesters and police officers inflicting apparently gratuitous beatings, firing tear gas canisters and deploying pepper spray at close range.

Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish sociologist who studies the interaction between technology and protest movements explained on her blog that what started as a relatively small protest against the destruction of Gezi Park, a green space in the center of Istanbul, escalated sharply after visual evidence of police brutality against the demonstrators spread online.

It was after the Gezi protesters were met with the usual combination of tear gas and media silence something interesting started happening. The news of the protests started circulating around social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook. I follow a sizable number of people in Turkey and my Twitter friends include AKP supporters as well as media and academics. Everyone was aghast at the idea that a small number of young people, trying to protect trees, were being treated so brutally.

Some of the most dramatic footage of the police attacking protesters was recorded and posted online by Serdar Akinan, a journalist who was fired from his job in 2011 for using Twitter to report on Turkish air strikes that killed 34 Kurdish civilians mistaken for militants. That catastrophe, Ms. Tufekci noted, was also “ignored by mainstream TV channels” in Turkey, until Mr. Akinan “bought his own plane ticket and ran to the region. His poignant photos of mass lines of coffins, published on Twitter, broke the story and created the biggest political crisis for the government.”

Aaron Stein, a British academic and blogger who has been documenting the protests in Istanbul, reported on Twitter that protesters had posted placards on the trees in Gezi Park with the names of the 34 Kurds killed in those airstrikes.

When tear gas was fired at the protesters last week, Mr. Akinan was there to capture the scene on video and published it online.

Video posted on YouTube by the Turkish journalist Serdar Akinan showed police officers firing water and tear gas at protesters trying to protect a park in Istanbul on Friday.

Stung by the prime minister’s dismissal of them as extremists and liars, the protesters also shared a series of video interviews in which they attempted to give their answers to the question, “Who are these people in Gezi Park?”

In a series of video interviews, Turkish protesters explained their motivation for wanting to defend Gezi Park in Istanbul.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Malware That Drains Your Bank Account Thriving On Facebook

In case you needed further evidence that the White Hats are losing the war on cybercrime, a six-year-old so-called Trojan horse program that drains bank accounts is alive and well on Facebook.

Zeus is a particularly nasty Trojan horse that has infected millions of computers, most of them in the United States. Once Zeus has compromised a computer, it stays dormant until a victim logs into a bank site, and then it steals the victim’s passwords and drains the victim’s accounts. In some cases, it can even replace a bank’s Web site with its own page, in order to get even more information- such as a Social Security number- that can be sold on the black market.

The Trojan, which was first detected in 2007, is only getting more active. According to researchers at the security firm Trend Micro, incidents of Zeus have risen steadily this year and peaked in May. Eric Feinberg, founder of the advocacy group Fans Against Kounterfeit Enterprise (FAKE), has noticed an uptick in Zeus-serving malicious links on popular N.F.L. Facebook fan pages such as one created by a group called “Bring the N.F.L. To Los Angeles.”

Mr. Feinberg said he had noticed an increase in such pages and malicious links in recent weeks. He sent those links to Malloy Labs, a security lab, which confirmed that the links on these pages were serving up Zeus malware. The malware was being hosted from computers known to be controlled by a Russian criminal gang known as the Russian Business Network, which has been linked to various online criminal activities, ranging from malware and identity theft to child pornography.

Mr. Feinberg said he has tried to alert Facebook to the problem, with increased urgency, but wasn’t satisfied with their response. A Facebook spokesman directed this reporter to a previous Facebook statement reminding users that it actively scans for malware and offering users the opportunity to enroll in self-remediation procedures such as a “Scan-And-Repair malware scan” that can scan for and remove malware from their devices.

Mr. Feinberg said that after-the-fact approach was hardly sufficient. “If you really want to hack someone, the easiest place to start is a fake Facebook profile- it’s so simple, it’s stupid.”

“They’re not listening,” Mr. Feinberg added. “We need oversight on this.”



Motorola Plans to Make Smartphone in Texas

2:07 p.m. | Updated to add more detail about the workers hired at the factory in Texas.

Just like Apple, Google has caught the “Made in America” bug. Motorola Mobility, the handset maker acquired by Google, says its next phone, called Moto X, will be manufactured in the United States.

Speaking at the All Things D conference in Southern California on Wednesday, Dennis Woodside, the head of Motorola, said that the company would build its first new flagship phone under Google ownership at a factory outside Fort Worth. He said that the Texas location would allow Motorola to “iterate and innovate much faster.”

Google has tried making hardware in the United States before. Last year, it planned to assemble the Nexus Q, a home media player, in California. But the company postponed the device after it received poor reviews and then quietly killed it.

Mr. Woodside said Motorola and Google were taking over an old Nokia manufacturing plant that had employed 16,000 workers when it was last in use 15 years ago. He said around 2,000 employees would be hired to work at the 500,000-square-foot building. The plant will be up and running by August, he said.

The new workers will be employed by Flextronics, a manufacturing company Motorola hires for its work worldwide. They will be hired by August in jobs ranging from entry level roles to engineering, said Danielle McNally, a Motorola spokeswoman. The new jobs are “different and separate” from the more than 4,000 positions that Motorola eliminated last year, she said.

Mr. Woodside acknowledged that while the Moto X will be built in the United States, not all of its parts would necessarily come from American manufacturers.

“The components will come all over the world,” he said. Display parts will be built in South Korea, for example, and processors will be made in Taiwan, he said.

Google executives have given clues about what a Motorola phone would do. It would have batteries that last longer than a day, they have said, would not break when dropped and would include features like a better camera, artificial intelligence and sensors that recognize people’s voices in a room, for example.

“Think about your device â€" battery life is a problem, if a kid spills a drink on your tablet screen it shouldn’t die, if you drop your phone it shouldn’t shatter,” Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, told analysts last month. “There’s real potential to invent new and better experiences, ones that are much faster and more intuitive. So having just seen Motorola’s upcoming products myself, I’m really excited about the potential there.”

Mr. Woodside said Wednesday, though, that phones with unbreakable screens would not be included in this year’s Motorola phones.

Mr. Woodside said the Moto X phone was in his pocket â€" but coyly shook his head when asked to show it off.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.



With Windows 8.1, a New Start That Looks Familiar

Yes, Microsoft is bringing back some comforting hallmarks of its Windows operating system, including the Start menu. No, it is not chucking out the modern, touch-friendly, tile-based look of Windows 8, the new version of the software that has sent much of the PC industry, many pundits and some computer shoppers into a tizzy.

That’s the short version of what’s coming in Windows 8.1, an update to Windows 8 that will be out by the end of the year. In one of the first demonstrations of the operating system to an outsider, Microsoft executives showed off a bevy of changes the company has made to the operating system, a number of which were in direct response to some of the more pointed criticisms the operating system received from users after coming out last fall.

Hints from Microsoft in recent weeks about those changes, along with a slump in PC sales that analysts believe was worsened by Windows 8, have led to heated speculation that Microsoft was preparing to backpedal from the most radical changes it made in Windows 8. Not true, executives said.

“This isn’t a U-turn at all,” said Antoine Leblond, corporate vice president of Windows program management. “We really believe in the direction we started on with Windows 8.”

Indeed, Windows 8.1 looks virtually indistinguishable from Windows 8 in many respects. People who dislike its colorful mosaic of tiles will not find much in the new software to change their minds.

That’s because it is unlikely, as a practical matter, that people will be able to entirely escape the tile-based interface in Windows 8.1, even though Microsoft is making it easier to avoid it. As expected, the new operating system will allow people to configure the software so that they start in desktop mode â€" the “classic” Windows interface with a taskbar at the bottom of the screen, a background image and applications with traditional menus â€" whenever they boot up their PCs.

Microsoft didn’t allow this with Windows 8. Even if their destination was desktop mode, where Office and millions of legacy Windows applications run, Windows 8 users had to pass through the tile screen, an inconvenience to many. It’s noteworthy that Microsoft will still put users in the tile interface by default when they start up their machines.

Microsoft is also reincarnating the Start button with Windows 8.1, though it won’t behave exactly like the Windows Start buttons of yore, the primary way Windows users found and launched applications for decades.

There will be a Windows flag icon in the bottom left corner of the taskbar in the Windows 8.1 desktop. But clicking â€" or, if you have a touch device, tapping â€" the button will simply return you to the tile-based interface, from which you can launch apps. People can get to a more traditional looking menu of applications from the Start button, but they have to configure the system to do that.

What these changes mean is that someone who makes the effort to reconfigure the operating system will be able to spend most of their time in the classic desktop interface. In practice, Microsoft will keep nudging them in the direction of the tile-based interface at every opportunity because it believes that is the future of Windows.

The company thinks most devices are moving inexorably in the direction of touch screens, including laptop computers and desktops. The tile interface of Windows 8 and its successors is how the company is preparing for that future.

If developers want to distribute applications through Microsoft’s app store for Windows, they have to write them so they run through the modern Windows interface. Even if a customer only wants the old-fashioned Windows, they will be bounced into the new interface anytime they launch Netflix and any other modern app.

Over time, Microsoft believes users will become more comfortable in the modern interface. But it doesn’t want to rush them if they’re unready.

“There’s an opportunity here to help people feel more oriented if they don’t feel oriented,” said Jensen Harris, partner director of program management at Microsoft.

There are a variety of other changes in Windows 8.1 that are likely to receive less notice. People using Windows 8.1 in the modern interface will be able to have four different windows open at once, rather than two, which will make it easier for multitaskers to jump among different applications. A new built-in search function will automatically create a slick-looking mash-up of different types of data relevant to a search term, including songs, videos, photos and Wikipedia entries.

The underlying bet Microsoft is making with Windows has not changed, though. Unlike Apple, which has one operating system for the iPad and one for computers, Microsoft believes the software that powers both types of devices should be the same.

“The role of Windows is to unify that experience,” Mr. Leblond said.



Daily Report: Systems for Moving Anonymous Cash Abound Online

Experts say there are hundreds of Internet payment systems that do not require users to identify themselves, making it difficult to seize on money laundering operations, Nicole Perlroth reports in The New York Times.

For eight years, Ernie Allen, the head of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has worked to prevent child pornographers from moving illicit profits through the systems of major banks and credit card companies. Mr. Allen’s organization has collaborated with them, as well as with Internet service providers, payment processors and Internet companies like Google and Microsoft, hoping to follow the money and quash child pornography for good.

But at some point the money trail went cold. For the last year, Mr. Allen has been working with global law enforcement and financial leaders to find out why.

He may be getting closer to an answer. Today, cybersecurity experts say billions of dollars made from child pornography and illicit sales of things like national secrets and drugs are being moved through anonymous Internet payment systems like Liberty Reserve, the currency exchange whose operators were indicted on Tuesday for laundering $6 billion. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, described it as the largest online money-laundering case in history.

“What we have concluded is that illegal enterprises â€" commercial child pornography, human trafficking, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking and organized crime â€" has largely moved to an unregulated system that is not connected to any central bank or national authority,” Mr. Allen said. “The key to all of this has been anonymity.”

Liberty Reserve was shut down last weekend, but cybersecurity experts said it was just one among hundreds of anonymous Internet payment systems. They said online systems like the Moscow-based WebMoney, Perfect Money, based in Panama, and CashU, which serves the Middle East and North Africa, require little more than a valid e-mail address to initiate an account. The names and locations of the actual users are unknown and can be easily fabricated. And they worry that the no-questions-asked verification system has created a safe harbor for illicit activity.



Daily Report: Systems for Moving Anonymous Cash Abound Online

Experts say there are hundreds of Internet payment systems that do not require users to identify themselves, making it difficult to seize on money laundering operations, Nicole Perlroth reports in The New York Times.

For eight years, Ernie Allen, the head of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has worked to prevent child pornographers from moving illicit profits through the systems of major banks and credit card companies. Mr. Allen’s organization has collaborated with them, as well as with Internet service providers, payment processors and Internet companies like Google and Microsoft, hoping to follow the money and quash child pornography for good.

But at some point the money trail went cold. For the last year, Mr. Allen has been working with global law enforcement and financial leaders to find out why.

He may be getting closer to an answer. Today, cybersecurity experts say billions of dollars made from child pornography and illicit sales of things like national secrets and drugs are being moved through anonymous Internet payment systems like Liberty Reserve, the currency exchange whose operators were indicted on Tuesday for laundering $6 billion. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, described it as the largest online money-laundering case in history.

“What we have concluded is that illegal enterprises â€" commercial child pornography, human trafficking, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking and organized crime â€" has largely moved to an unregulated system that is not connected to any central bank or national authority,” Mr. Allen said. “The key to all of this has been anonymity.”

Liberty Reserve was shut down last weekend, but cybersecurity experts said it was just one among hundreds of anonymous Internet payment systems. They said online systems like the Moscow-based WebMoney, Perfect Money, based in Panama, and CashU, which serves the Middle East and North Africa, require little more than a valid e-mail address to initiate an account. The names and locations of the actual users are unknown and can be easily fabricated. And they worry that the no-questions-asked verification system has created a safe harbor for illicit activity.



Motorola Plans to Make Smartphone in Texas

2:07 p.m. | Updated to add more detail about the workers hired at the factory in Texas.

Just like Apple, Google has caught the “Made in America” bug. Motorola Mobility, the handset maker acquired by Google, says its next phone, called Moto X, will be manufactured in the United States.

Speaking at the All Things D conference in Southern California on Wednesday, Dennis Woodside, the head of Motorola, said that the company would build its first new flagship phone under Google ownership at a factory outside Fort Worth. He said that the Texas location would allow Motorola to “iterate and innovate much faster.”

Google has tried making hardware in the United States before. Last year, it planned to assemble the Nexus Q, a home media player, in California. But the company postponed the device after it received poor reviews and then quietly killed it.

Mr. Woodside said Motorola and Google were taking over an old Nokia manufacturing plant that had employed 16,000 workers when it was last in use 15 years ago. He said around 2,000 employees would be hired to work at the 500,000-square-foot building. The plant will be up and running by August, he said.

The new workers will be employed by Flextronics, a manufacturing company Motorola hires for its work worldwide. They will be hired by August in jobs ranging from entry level roles to engineering, said Danielle McNally, a Motorola spokeswoman. The new jobs are “different and separate” from the more than 4,000 positions that Motorola eliminated last year, she said.

Mr. Woodside acknowledged that while the Moto X will be built in the United States, not all of its parts would necessarily come from American manufacturers.

“The components will come all over the world,” he said. Display parts will be built in South Korea, for example, and processors will be made in Taiwan, he said.

Google executives have given clues about what a Motorola phone would do. It would have batteries that last longer than a day, they have said, would not break when dropped and would include features like a better camera, artificial intelligence and sensors that recognize people’s voices in a room, for example.

“Think about your device â€" battery life is a problem, if a kid spills a drink on your tablet screen it shouldn’t die, if you drop your phone it shouldn’t shatter,” Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, told analysts last month. “There’s real potential to invent new and better experiences, ones that are much faster and more intuitive. So having just seen Motorola’s upcoming products myself, I’m really excited about the potential there.”

Mr. Woodside said Wednesday, though, that phones with unbreakable screens would not be included in this year’s Motorola phones.

Mr. Woodside said the Moto X phone was in his pocket â€" but coyly shook his head when asked to show it off.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.



With Windows 8.1, a New Start That Looks Familiar

Yes, Microsoft is bringing back some comforting hallmarks of its Windows operating system, including the Start menu. No, it is not chucking out the modern, touch-friendly, tile-based look of Windows 8, the new version of the software that has sent much of the PC industry, many pundits and some computer shoppers into a tizzy.

That’s the short version of what’s coming in Windows 8.1, an update to Windows 8 that will be out by the end of the year. In one of the first demonstrations of the operating system to an outsider, Microsoft executives showed off a bevy of changes the company has made to the operating system, a number of which were in direct response to some of the more pointed criticisms the operating system received from users after coming out last fall.

Hints from Microsoft in recent weeks about those changes, along with a slump in PC sales that analysts believe was worsened by Windows 8, have led to heated speculation that Microsoft was preparing to backpedal from the most radical changes it made in Windows 8. Not true, executives said.

“This isn’t a U-turn at all,” said Antoine Leblond, corporate vice president of Windows program management. “We really believe in the direction we started on with Windows 8.”

Indeed, Windows 8.1 looks virtually indistinguishable from Windows 8 in many respects. People who dislike its colorful mosaic of tiles will not find much in the new software to change their minds.

That’s because it is unlikely, as a practical matter, that people will be able to entirely escape the tile-based interface in Windows 8.1, even though Microsoft is making it easier to avoid it. As expected, the new operating system will allow people to configure the software so that they start in desktop mode â€" the “classic” Windows interface with a taskbar at the bottom of the screen, a background image and applications with traditional menus â€" whenever they boot up their PCs.

Microsoft didn’t allow this with Windows 8. Even if their destination was desktop mode, where Office and millions of legacy Windows applications run, Windows 8 users had to pass through the tile screen, an inconvenience to many. It’s noteworthy that Microsoft will still put users in the tile interface by default when they start up their machines.

Microsoft is also reincarnating the Start button with Windows 8.1, though it won’t behave exactly like the Windows Start buttons of yore, the primary way Windows users found and launched applications for decades.

There will be a Windows flag icon in the bottom left corner of the taskbar in the Windows 8.1 desktop. But clicking â€" or, if you have a touch device, tapping â€" the button will simply return you to the tile-based interface, from which you can launch apps. People can get to a more traditional looking menu of applications from the Start button, but they have to configure the system to do that.

What these changes mean is that someone who makes the effort to reconfigure the operating system will be able to spend most of their time in the classic desktop interface. In practice, Microsoft will keep nudging them in the direction of the tile-based interface at every opportunity because it believes that is the future of Windows.

The company thinks most devices are moving inexorably in the direction of touch screens, including laptop computers and desktops. The tile interface of Windows 8 and its successors is how the company is preparing for that future.

If developers want to distribute applications through Microsoft’s app store for Windows, they have to write them so they run through the modern Windows interface. Even if a customer only wants the old-fashioned Windows, they will be bounced into the new interface anytime they launch Netflix and any other modern app.

Over time, Microsoft believes users will become more comfortable in the modern interface. But it doesn’t want to rush them if they’re unready.

“There’s an opportunity here to help people feel more oriented if they don’t feel oriented,” said Jensen Harris, partner director of program management at Microsoft.

There are a variety of other changes in Windows 8.1 that are likely to receive less notice. People using Windows 8.1 in the modern interface will be able to have four different windows open at once, rather than two, which will make it easier for multitaskers to jump among different applications. A new built-in search function will automatically create a slick-looking mash-up of different types of data relevant to a search term, including songs, videos, photos and Wikipedia entries.

The underlying bet Microsoft is making with Windows has not changed, though. Unlike Apple, which has one operating system for the iPad and one for computers, Microsoft believes the software that powers both types of devices should be the same.

“The role of Windows is to unify that experience,” Mr. Leblond said.



Dots, a Highly Addictive Game, Passes 3 Million Players

On Sunday afternoon my entire family sat in my sister’s living room, fingers jabbing at our iPhones, as we yelled a series of numbers aloud: “124!” “217!” “Oh, I just got to 400!” We were playing Dots, the highly addictive free game from Betaworks. (I won, with 474 points.)

It turns out we were not the only group engaged in competitive Dots playing last weekend. Paul Murphy, senior vice president for product at Betaworks, said that since the app made its debut in early May, more than three million people have downloaded the game and have collectively played 250 million games.

To play Dots, you simply connect the same colored dots together on a screen by drawing your finger to create a line that can be placed through dots. The more dots you connect, the higher the score.

On Thursday, the company announced an updated version of the game that allows people to play one another in a more competitive setting.

“When we released the game, we saw a lot of people playing on the subway, passing their phones back and forth, comparing scores,” the makers of the game wrote in a company blog post. “Now each player has the same set of dots, so it’s truly a battle of skill.”

The update also includes an official version that can be played on an iPad. The updated app also includes a two additional color modes, to accommodate color-blind players who had trouble with the first version of the game.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go and try to beat my high score of 474 dots.



Big Question for Wearable Computing: Is It Ready for Consumers?

Apple and Google seem to agree on one thing: the future of computers will be wearable. Where they disagree is which kind of computers people will actually want to wear.

This week at the D: All Things Digital, a technology conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, discussed the company’s efforts in wearable computing. “There are lots of gadgets in this space right now, but there’s nothing great out there,” Mr. Cook said. “None of them are going to convince a kid that hasn’t worn glasses or a band to wear one.” He added that the space is “ripe for exploration.”

Google, on the other hand, seems to think that it has completed that exploratory phase and is going ahead with Google Glass. But will consumers want to buy the technology?

Many readers of my column this week, which examined the challenges of wearable computing, seemed to be on the opposite side of Google. The piece generated a passionate response â€" nearly 200 comments â€" with many raising questions about the privacy implications of Google Glass.

“I believe that there should be an expectation of privacy even in a public setting,” one reader wrote. “That expectation is that you are not being spied on and recorded surreptitiously.” The reader added, “I will never speak to anyone wearing these devices.”

Some felt threatened by the device and its camera. “I predict Google Glass users upload a lot of close up shots of incoming fists,” wrote another reader.

All of this could be moot, as Evelyn Rusli of The Wall Street Journal said in an article this week, as the D: All Things Digital conference came to a close. She noted that the technology might not be ready for consumers and pointed out that even attendees “acknowledged that there was a very large gulf between the current technology and mass adoption.”

One person likened wearable computers to “the flying skateboard,” a reference to the still-not-here hover boards from the “Back to the Future” trilogy.

Apple rarely releases a product into the marketplace that isn’t ready for mainstream adoption. The company unveiled the popular Apple iPad a decade after Microsoft unsuccessfully pioneered the tablet computer.

As I have reported, Apple is developing a curved-glass smart watch that is expected to run Apple iOS. The Verge technology blog, citing unnamed sources, has reported that the device will be announced later this year.

Mr. Cook might have given a hint that such a product could be coming soon. “I think the wrist is interesting,” he said at the conference. “The wrist is natural.”

But the question still remains: if they build it, will people wear it?



Why Big Data Is Not Truth

The word “data” connotes fixed numbers inside hard grids of information, and as a result, it is easily mistaken for fact. But including bad product introductions and wars, we have many examples of bad data causing big mistakes.

Big Data raises bigger issues. The term suggests assembling many facts to create greater, previously unseen truths. It suggests the certainty of math.

That promise of certainty has been a hallmark of the technology industry for decades. With Big Data, however, there are even more hazards, some human and some inherent in the technology.

Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft Research, calls the problem “Big Data fundamentalism â€" the idea with larger data sets, we get closer to objective truth.” Speaking at a conference in Berkeley, Calif., on Thursday, she identified what she calls “six myths of Big Data.”

Myth 1: Big Data is New

In 1997, there was a paper that discussed the difficulty of visualizing Big Data, and in 1999, a paper that discussed the problems of gaining insight from the numbers in Big Data. That indicates that two prominent issues today in Big Data, display and insight, had been around for awhile.

“But now it’s reaching us in new ways,” because of the scale and prevalence of Big Data, Ms. Crawford said. That also means it is a widespread social phenomenon, like mobile phones were in the 1990s, that “generates a lot of comment, and then disappears into the background, as something that’s just part of life.”

Myth 2: Big Data Is Objective

Over 20 million Twitter messages about Hurricane Sandy were posted last year. That may seem sufficient for a picture of whom the storm affected. However, the 16 percent of Americans on Twitter tend to be younger, more urban and more affluent than the norm. “Very few tweets came out of Breezy Point, or the Rockaways,” Ms. Crawford said. “These were very privileged urban stories.” And some people, privileged or otherwise, put information like their home addresses on Twitter in an effort to seek aid. That sensitive information is still out there, even though the threat is gone.

That means that most data sets, particularly where people are concerned, need references to the context in which they were created.

Myth 3: Big Data Doesn’t Discriminate

“Big Data is neither color blind nor gender blind,” Ms. Crawford said. “We can see how it is used in marketing to segment people.” Facebook timelines, stripped of data like names, can still be used to determine a person’s ethnicity with 95 percent accuracy, she said. Information like sexual orientation among males is also relatively easy to identify. (Women are tougher to pinpoint.) That information can be used to determine what kind of advertisements, for example, that people receive.

It’s important to remember that whenever people start creating data sets, these become fallible human tools. “Data is something we create, but it’s also something we imagine,” Ms. Crawford said.

Myth 4: Big Data Makes Cities Smart

“It’s only as good as the people using it,” Ms. Crawford said. Many of the sensors that track people as they manage their urban lives come from high-end smartphones, or cars with the latest GPS systems. “Devices are becoming the proxies for public needs,” she said, “but there won’t be a moment where everyone has access to the same technology.” In addition, moving cities toward digital initiatives like predictive policing, or creating systems where people are seen, whether they like it or not, can promote lots of tension between individuals and their governments.

Sorry, IBM. Take that, Cisco. That goes for you, too, Microsoft, Ms. Crawford’s employer. All these big technology companies have Smart Cities initiatives.

Myth 5: Big Data Is Anonymous

A study published in Nature last March looked at 1.5 million phone records that had personally identifying information removed. It found that just four data points of when and where a call was made could identify 95 percent of individuals. “With just two, you can identify 50 percent of them,” Ms. Crawford said. “With a fingerprint, you need 12 data points to identify somebody.” Likewise, smart grids can spot when your friends come over. Search engine queries can yield health data that would be protected if it came up in a doctor’s office.

Myth 6: You Can Opt Out

Last December, Instagram, the photo-sharing site, changed its terms of service to allow it to share customer’s photos more broadly, even use images in ads. What it didn’t have was a paid option, in which a person could, for a fee, not be part of that. Even if that option existed, Ms. Crawford said, this would imply a two-tier system â€" people who could afford to control their data and those who could not. “Besides,” she said, given the ways that information can be obtained in these big systems, “what are the chances that your personal information will never be used?”

Before Big Data disappears into the background as another fact of life, Ms. Crawford said, “We need to think about how we will navigate these systems. Not just individually, but as a society.”



Zynga Takes Another Hit

Zynga has been trying to leap the yawning gap from Web-based games, where it thrived, to the entirely different and more brutal world of mobile. Monday, it fell into the abyss.

The San Francisco company, which pioneered the field of social games, said it was dismissing 520 workers, nearly a fifth of its staff.

“None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth,” Mark Pincus, the chief executive, told Zynga employees in a blog post. “But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward.”

There was lots more bad news: outside of its FarmVille franchise, games are “underperforming.” Second-quarter bookings will be in the lower range of the company’s estimates.

Shares in Zynga, which were briefly halted before the announcement, immediately dropped 12 percent. The company now trades for about $3 a share. That is a far cry from the heady months after its December 2011 public offering, when it was as high as $15.

Since then, the San Francisco company seemed to have hardly managed a successful move. It acquired the hot game Draw Something only to see it immediately slump. Efforts to set up a gaming platform independent of Facebook have proved underwhelming. New games like Mafia Wars II never caught on.

The company spent the second half of last year trying to retrench, with much of its senior management leaving or being reassigned.

In April the company said revenue for the first quarter was down 18 percent from 2012, but analysts were encouraged that Zynga managed to earn a penny a share. They had expected a loss.

Mr. Pincus said the cuts involved a “proactive commitment.”

“By reducing our cost structure today we will offer our teams the runway they need to take risks and develop these breakthrough new social experiences,” he said.



Apple Is Said to Be Pressing for Internet Radio Deals

Apple Is Said to Be Pressing for Internet Radio Deals

After months of stalled negotiations over its planned Internet radio service, Apple is pushing to complete licensing deals with music companies so it can reveal the service as early as next week, according to people briefed on the talks.

The singer Taylor Swift, one of Sony/ATV’s songwriters.

Apple’s service, a Pandora-like feature that would tailor streams of music to each user’s taste, has been planned since at least last summer. But Apple has made little progress with record labels and music publishers, which have been seeking higher royalty rates and guaranteed minimum payments, according to these people, who spoke anonymously about the private talks.

While it is still at odds with some music companies over deal terms, Apple is said to be eager to get the licenses in time to unveil the service â€" nicknamed iRadio by the technology press â€" at its annual developers conference, which begins June 10 in San Francisco.

Apple has signed a deal with the Universal Music Group for its recorded music rights, but not for music publishing â€" the part of the business that deals with songwriting. Over the weekend, Apple also signed a deal with the Warner Music Group for both rights. It is still in talks with Sony Music Entertainment and Sony’s separate publishing arm, Sony/ATV, whose songwriters include Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

Representatives for Apple and the music companies declined to comment.

Apple’s Internet radio feature is expected to be free and supported by advertising, and would represent a relatively late arrival by the company into what has become a fast-growing â€" if low-margin â€" sector of the music business. Pandora has more than 70 million regular users, the vast majority of whom do not pay, and similar features have been introduced by Google, Spotify and the radio company Clear Channel Communications.

The licensing fees paid by Pandora have been a sore spot for music companies, which see promise in Apple’s service, particularly since it can be linked to sales through Apple’s iTunes store, but want higher rates. Publishers, for instance, are paid about 4 percent of Pandora’s revenue, but want as much as 10 percent from Apple.

Apple is said to be negotiating directly with the music groups because it wants more extensive licensing terms.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 3, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Apple Is Said Be Pressing To Finish Internet Radio Deals.

Trial on E-Book Price-Fixing Puts Apple in the Spotlight

Trial on E-Book Price-Fixing Puts Apple in Spotlight

Government lawyers are set to face off against Apple this week in a Manhattan courtroom, trying to prove that the company conspired with publishers to raise prices in the e-book market.

Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president for Internet software and services, negotiated the company's deals with book publishers.

E-mail from Steven P. Jobs is to be highlighted in court.

But the evidence in the case will not just determine whether Apple has violated antitrust laws. It will also tell a broader story of how the introduction of e-books created upheaval in the publishing industry â€" with guest appearances by major players like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and e-mails from the late Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive.

In the case, brought a year ago, the Justice Department accused Apple and five book publishers of conspiring to raise e-book prices. The idea, the government said, was to allow publishers to set their own prices rather than letting retailers do so.

Their motivation, according to the Justice Department, was to defend themselves against Amazon, which was setting the price of most new e-books at $9.99 and becoming increasingly dominant in the market. Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and the Hachette Book Group settled the day that charges were filed; Penguin and Macmillan settled months later.

Complaints by Amazon, which now controls at least 60 percent of the e-book market, are widely believed to have incited the investigation. Amazon declined to comment.

After the lawsuit was filed, the expectation was that e-book prices would drop sharply; the publishers that settled agreed to allow retailers to discount their e-books for two years. But the price drop has still not happened.

A government victory against Apple, which would not involve monetary damages, might also not affect e-book prices.

“Are consumers going to be better off as a result of any government win here?” said Charles E. Elder, an antitrust lawyer at Irell & Manella, which is not involved in the case. “That’s going to have to be seen depending on what happens to book publishing generally. It’s in trouble, and e-books are either the savior or they’re going to hasten the demise of book publishers.”

Apple declined to comment, but has said it has done nothing wrong.

“The e-book case to me is bizarre,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said during an onstage interview at a business conference last week in Southern California. “We’ve done nothing wrong there, and so we’re taking a very principled position of this. We were asked to sign something that says we did do something, and we’re not going to sign something that says we did something we didn’t do. And so we’re going to fight.”

Apple certainly has the money to fight, and a brand to protect, at a time when its stock is sagging and its tax practices and manufacturing processes are under scrutiny. Yet it is bigger than ever â€" with hundreds of millions of its iPhones and iPads in the hands of customers all over the globe.

The trial, before Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court, is expected to feature testimony from chief executives from the five publishers, who will offer a window into their world of fierce price negotiations. But the star witness may well be Mr. Jobs, even though he died in October 2011.

In the case, the government cast Apple as the “ringmaster” of the conspiracy. It said that when the company entered the e-book industry in 2010 with the introduction of the iPad, it wanted to pressure Amazon to raise its prices above its uniform $9.99 for new e-books.

At the time, publishers’ agreements to sell e-books were made under the so-called wholesale model of print books; publishers charged retailers about half the cover price for a book, and the retailers then set their own prices. The government said Mr. Jobs had persuaded publishers to agree to agency pricing, which allowed publishers to set their own prices for e-books, giving Apple a 30 percent commission for books sold in its online store.

The publishers’ contracts with Apple included a “most favored nation” clause, requiring that no other retailer sell e-books for a lower price; if they did, the publisher would have to match the price of the e-book in Apple’s store. That, the Justice Department said, resulted in higher prices that harmed consumers.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 3, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trial on E-Book Price-Fixing Puts Apple in the Spotlight.

Vine, Twitter’s New Video Tool, Hits 13 Million Users

At the start of this year, Twitter introduced the mobile video app Vine, which let people shoot and share bite-size, six-second looping video clips. The service captivated users, who began making and uploading quirky short films, comedy bits and stop-motion animation, among other things.

On Monday, Twitter announced in a blog post that in four months, Vine had attracted 13 million people to sign up for the service. Twitter did not say how many of them were active users, but the third-party service Topsy has estimated that, on average, Vine users post 12 million videos on Twitter every day. Part of the appeal of Vine lies in its simplicity, particularly the interface of the tool, which lets people shoot and edit clips by tapping the screen and quickly uploading them to the app and to the Web. One of Vine’s creators, Dom Hofmann, said in a previous interview that the success of Vine was tied to its easy-to-use design. He said that although it took people longer to initially figure out how to use Vine, once they started shooting and sharing videos, their interest did not diminish.

“The time between the first and second post is much longer than the fifth and sixth. It get steady after that. It clicks,” he said. “People are getting creative, and the audience is growing.”

Vine seems to fit into the wave of simpler, more creative and expressive social media platforms that have been drawing attention as Facebook’s appeal fades somewhat. Services like Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat are also part of that wave.

Still, Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service acquired by Facebook that lets people add filters to their camera phone photos and share them with friends, took nearly a year to reach 10 million users.

Twitter also said Monday that it was releasing a version of its video-editing tool for Android. Previously, it was only available for iOS devices.



Microsoft Weighs Restructuring

Microsoft is considering mixing up the responsibilities of its top executives as it seeks to further its transformation into what Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, calls a “devices and services company.”

Mr. Ballmer is contemplating a number of restructuring paths, none of which have been finalized, said a person familiar with the discussions who did not want to be named when talking about confidential matters. But it’s likely the changes will result in shifts in responsibilities for Qi Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division; Tony Bates, president of Skype; Don Mattrick, president of interactive entertainment; and Satya Nadella, president of server and tools, this person said.

All Things D first reported news of the planned restructuring. Dawn Beauparlant, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

Microsoft used to restructure its divisions with some regularity, but the current shake-up would be the first of any significance at the company in nearly five years, when Microsoft divided Windows and online services into their own divisions after the departure of an executive, Kevin Johnson.

Mr. Ballmer has long been criticized for the company’s weak stock performance under his leadership and missteps by the company in the mobile phone, tablet and search markets. A recent report by Rick Sherlund, a longtime analyst at Nomura, said Mr. Ballmer could face a bigger push for change at the company by frustrated shareholders. Mr. Sherlund wrote that shareholders could press Microsoft to exit the Internet search business, off-loading its Bing site to Facebook or Yahoo, and to sell its Xbox video game unit, which is not a large part of its overall business.

However, the planned restructuring does not appear to include a big retrenchment in those categories. On the contrary, it looks as though the changes are intended to bolster a vision for Microsoft that Mr. Ballmer articulated in a letter to shareholders last October, when he said Microsoft sees itself as a devices and services company.

That description suggested a bigger emphasis at Microsoft on the design and creation of hardware, such as its Surface family of tablet computers, and services like search that are coupled to such devices. Microsoft also recently announced plans to release a new game console, Xbox One, in time for the holiday season.



Videos and Final Tweets From Storm Chasers Killed in Oklahoma

In his final post on Twitter, Tim Samaras, a highly respected storm chaser whose work has been featured on the Discovery Channel and in National Geographic, shared his concern on Friday about the “dangerous day ahead” for Oklahoma.

Later that day, Mr. Samaras, 55; his son, Paul, 24; and the meteorologist Carl Young, 45, were killed near El Reno, Okla., as they tried to document one of several tornadoes that tore through the state, The Times’s Michael Schwirtz reported. They were among at least 13 people killed in the storms.

Dozens of videos posted to YouTube in the last few years show Mr. Samaras and Mr. Young at work. One video, posted just two weeks ago by National Geographic, shows them collecting data and capturing footage of a tornado in Kansas.

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Storm footage captured by Tim Samaras in Kansas two weeks ago, published by National Geographic.

For three years, the work of Mr. Samaras and Mr. Young was featured on the Discovery Channel show “Storm Chasers.” An excerpt from a season finale is on YouTube:

An excerpt from a season finale of the Discovery Channel’s “Storm Chasers,” with Tim Samaras and Carl Young.

In this video, Mr. Samaras explains how he became interested in tornadoes, and in designing instruments to collect data that might help people stay safe.

In 2012, Tim Samaras discussed his interest in tornadoes and the instruments he had developed to help capture and measure the impact of the storms.

Past videos from National Geographic show how he and his colleagues worked to gather information on the storms.

A video from National Geographic of Tim Samaras putting down instruments to gather data from an approaching tornado.
A video of Tim Samaras and Carl Young tracking storms for National Geographic.

Mr. Samaras, his son and Mr. Young were highly respected in their field, and their deaths prompted an outpouring of grief online from many people in the meteorology community.

Mike Nelson, chief meteorologist for KMGH-TV in Denver, where Mr. Samaras did some work, wrote on Facebook:

Tim was not only a brilliant scientist and engineer, he was a wonderful, kind human being. If anyone could be called the “gentleman of storm chasing,” it would be Tim. He was iconic among chasers and yet was a very humble and sincere man.

I have known Tim for two decades and while I never had the privilege to witness a tornado by his side, I lived vicariously through his amazing videos, power points, National Geographic articles and the numerous public seminars we presented during the past 20 years (both at KMGH and KUSA).

On Sunday afternoon, the Samaras family released a statement:

We would like to express our deep appreciation and thanks for the outpouring of support to our family at this very difficult time. We would like everyone to know what an amazing husband, father and grandfather he was to us. Tim had a passion for science and research of tornadoes. He loved being out in the field taking measurements and viewing mother nature. His priority was to warn people of these storms and save lives. Paul was a wonderful son and brother who loved being out with his dad. He had a true gift for photography and a love of storms like his dad. They made a special team. They will be deeply missed. We take comfort in knowing they died together doing what they loved. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.” â€" Kathy Samaras, Amy Gregg, Jennifer Scott

Last week, on Twitter, Mr. Samaras shared his enthusiasm about traveling to Kansas.

Other storm chasers captured footage of the tornado in El Reno on Friday:

A video from other storm chasers showing the tornado in El Reno, Okla., on Friday.

Afterward, Firsthand Weather posted a photo to Twitter of the vehicle that had been carrying Mr. Samaras, his son and Mr. Young:



Floods Sweep Through Central Europe


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Footage of the flooding caused by the recent heavy rainfall in Prague. Credit: Vilem Srail

Tens of thousands of people were evacuated, some carried on the backs of rescuers or by boat, in Central Europe as heavy rainfall in the past week swelled rivers that spilled over their banks and flooded streets, businesses and houses. News reports said at least seven people were killed.

Parts of the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany were among the places overwhelmed by the flooding. Reuters reported that five people were killed over the weekend in the Czech Republic, where the flooding was the worst in a decade and a state of emergency was declared, while in Austria two people died.

Visitors or residents posted photographs in Prague of the Charles Bridge or videos of efforts to protect buildings by packing thresholds with sandbags.

The European Commission’s regional policy commissioner, Johannes Hahn, said in a statement that the organization was prepared to help through its European Solidarity Fund, which was set up after dangerous floods swept the region in 2002.

“We very much regret that number of people have lost their lives because of the floods in Austria, Czech Republic and Germany,” he said.

More than a decade ago, the Czech Republic endured its worst rains since 1890. In the summer of 2002, Peter S. Green of The New York Times wrote that the historic center of Prague was under water, and 50,000 residents were ordered evacuated as “rivers swollen by more than a week of near constant rain etched ribbons of destruction across Central Europe and southern Russia.” More than 70 people were killed.

On Monday, outlining some of this week’s hardest hit areas, the European Commission’s humanitarian aid and civil protection department said in a bulletin that heavy rainfall had made rivers overflow in southeastern Germany, and many Danube tributaries reached record water levels.

The government declared a nationwide state of emergency in the Czech Republic, where the Vlata River overflowed.

Andrej Matisak, the deputy head of the foreign desk at the Czech daily newspaper Pravda, posted on his Twitter feed @matisaksk a slide show of the flooding in the Czech Republic.

The British Broadcasting Corporation posted video of the floods, including footage of tigers from the Czech zoo in Prague being transported out of harm’s way, and people sandbagging doorways or bailing out water from inside cars.

In Austria, the Salzburg and Tyrol regions were the hardest hit. A video posted on YouTube, below, shows flooding in Linz, Austria.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



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