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Friday, June 7, 2013

Video and Images from Santa Monica Shooting Spree

The shooting spree in Santa Monica, Calif., on Friday, which left at least six people and the gunman dead, began on Yorkshire Avenue, where the Fire Department responded at 11:52 a.m. to a report of a structure fire, officials said.

Amy Margolis, a D.J. known as Reid Speed who lives in the neighborhood, reported hearing gunshots before she saw flames leap from the house. She captured multiple short videos from the scene.

As Ian Lovett and Adam Nagourney report, officials said multiple people were found dead in the home. They were among at least six victims killed before the gunman died in an exchange of fire at the campus library of nearby Santa Monica College.

According to police officials, the suspect, described as a white male, was seen leaving the house, fully clad in black and carrying an assault rifle. Witnesses reported that he commandeered a car and fired at a driver who did not get out of his way fast enough.

As the gunman made his way west on Pico Boulevard to Santa Monica College, he sprayed bullets at passing cars and a bus, leaving multiple people dead and wounded. He then reached the campus library, where he died in an exchange of gunfire with police.

The city editor of The Los Angeles Times posted a map on Twitter of where the victims were killed.

Tyler Crawford said that he was headed to meet a friend for lunch near the Santa Monica College campus when he saw a blue bus with its rear and side windows shattered by gunfire.

The student newspaper, The Corsair, posted regular Twitter updates on the shootings.

President Obama was attending a Democratic fund-raiser in Santa Monica not far from the shooting spree.



David Simon, Creator of ‘The Wire,’ Debates N.S.A. Surveillance With Readers of His Blog

A scene from “The Wire,” in which police officers intercept a phone call between two suspects in a drug deal.

David Simon, the former reporter behind the television drama “The Wire,” which President Obama calls “one of the greatest shows of all time,” came to the defense of his embattled fan on Friday, suggesting in a long post on his blog that “the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans,” was misguided.

“Is it just me or does the entire news media â€" as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle â€" not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.” Mr. Simon wrote at the start of a 2,500-word post dismissing as “hyperbole,” much of the reaction to this week’s revelations, by The Guardian and The Washington Post, of the vast data collection efforts of the National Security Agency.

His argument hinged on the difference between the government collecting communications data and actually examining it, and he used his experience as a reporter to explain it. “Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data,” Mr. Somin wrote. “It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the F.B.I. and N.S.A. are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.”

The argument is nuanced, and Mr. Simon does not deny that there is “the potential for authoritarian overreach,” but he comes down fairly clearly on the side of those who called for the N.S.A. to harness modern information technology more aggressively than it did before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a data base of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the internet. And it’s scary that your cell phones have GPS installed. And it’s scary, too, that the little box that lets you go through the short toll lane on I-95 lets someone, somewhere know that you are on the move. Privacy is in decline around the world, largely because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce â€" witness those facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure â€" and sometimes for law enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.

The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy â€" and in a manner that is unsupervised.

Not all of Mr. Simon’s fans welcomed his intervention in the debate, but the writer spent much of Friday afternoon and evening engaging with readers of the post, answering more than two dozen of the comments with some lengthy replies over the course of several hours.

Even those who do not share Mr. Simon’s perspective on the American government’s surveillance programs might find part of his post useful as an exploration of just how law-enforcement officials might try to use or make sense of such a vast amount of information.

That same issue was also addressed last year in a short film on the N.S.A. whistle-blower William Binney, which was made for the Opinion section of the New York Times Web site by Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who co-authored the Washington Post’s article on the agency’s Prism program this week.

Last year, Ms. Poitras told Glenn Greenwald, the columnist and blogger whose reporting for The Guardian revealed the extent of the N.S.A.’s work, that she had been targeted by the federal government. Ms. Poitras said that she was repeatedly singled out for questioning as she returned from trips abroad to film interviews for documentaries on America’s military response to the 2001 attacks.



David Simon, Creator of ‘The Wire,’ Debates N.S.A. Surveillance With Readers of His Blog

A scene from “The Wire,” in which police officers intercept a phone call between two suspects in a drug deal.

David Simon, the former reporter behind the television drama “The Wire,” which President Obama calls “one of the greatest shows of all time,” came to the defense of his embattled fan on Friday, suggesting in a long post on his blog that “the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans,” was misguided.

“Is it just me or does the entire news media â€" as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle â€" not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.” Mr. Simon wrote at the start of a 2,500-word post dismissing as “hyperbole,” much of the reaction to this week’s revelations, by The Guardian and The Washington Post, of the vast data collection efforts of the National Security Agency.

His argument hinged on the difference between the government collecting communications data and actually examining it, and he used his experience as a reporter to explain it. “Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data,” Mr. Somin wrote. “It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the F.B.I. and N.S.A. are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.”

The argument is nuanced, and Mr. Simon does not deny that there is “the potential for authoritarian overreach,” but he comes down fairly clearly on the side of those who called for the N.S.A. to harness modern information technology more aggressively than it did before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a data base of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the internet. And it’s scary that your cell phones have GPS installed. And it’s scary, too, that the little box that lets you go through the short toll lane on I-95 lets someone, somewhere know that you are on the move. Privacy is in decline around the world, largely because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce â€" witness those facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure â€" and sometimes for law enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.

The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy â€" and in a manner that is unsupervised.

Not all of Mr. Simon’s fans welcomed his intervention in the debate, but the writer spent much of Friday afternoon and evening engaging with readers of the post, answering more than two dozen of the comments with some lengthy replies over the course of several hours.

Even those who do not share Mr. Simon’s perspective on the American government’s surveillance programs might find part of his post useful as an exploration of just how law-enforcement officials might try to use or make sense of such a vast amount of information.

That same issue was also addressed last year in a short film on the N.S.A. whistle-blower William Binney, which was made for the Opinion section of the New York Times Web site by Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who co-authored the Washington Post’s article on the agency’s Prism program this week.

Last year, Ms. Poitras told Glenn Greenwald, the columnist and blogger whose reporting for The Guardian revealed the extent of the N.S.A.’s work, that she had been targeted by the federal government. Ms. Poitras said that she was repeatedly singled out for questioning as she returned from trips abroad to film interviews for documentaries on America’s military response to the 2001 attacks.



The New Economics Behind the Oracle-Dell Partnership

This week, Dell and Oracle announced a partnership unique to both companies. Dell would offer Oracle software on its machines and would resell Oracle services. Much head-scratching ensued among industry analysts, largely over misunderstandings about where the industry was headed.

What bothered many of these analysts was the idea that both Dell and Oracle sell commodity servers based on Intel’s x86 reference designs. Oracle picked up that business when it acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010. Sun was never a big player in that business, however, having come to it late and grudgingly. It always preferred its own machines, which used the Sparc chip.

From the Sun deal, Oracle got many loyal (or locked-in) Sparc customers and insights to make the combined hardware and software “engineered systems” that advanced its in-memory data and analytics products. If it ever wanted to compete with Dell or Hewlett-Packard on commodity servers, it doesn’t want to now. In its third fiscal quarter, Oracle had hardware revenue of $671 million, down 23 percent. Much of that was faltering x86 sales.

What Oracle still wants, and Dell can offer, is exposure to smaller and midsize companies, which Oracle’s high-ticket sales force has trouble reaching.

“Oracle has a phenomenal engine into the top 500 enterprise accounts worldwide,” said Marius Haas, the head of Dell’s enterprise business. “They’d like to go after the broader market, and we’ve got a great relationship with companies there.”

There is also some bad blood behind this story: Mr. Haas worked at Hewlett-Packard when Mark Hurd was its chief executive. He left during Léo Apotheker’s brief tenure at the top of H.P., after Mr. Hurd’s resignation in August 2010.

So putting a little more pressure on H.P. probably sweetened the deal. Mr. Haas said this week’s announcement could lead to Dell selling even more Oracle products, both applications and databases. It appears to be the first time that Oracle has entrusted another company to sell its services. Even Oracle’s enemies like SAP and I.B.M. resell Oracle databases.

More important is what the deal says about selling hardware these days: Compared with even five years ago, companies are being forced to add more capabilities to their products.

It’s not just that Oracle is fusing high-performance hardware and software, or Dell is shipping servers preloaded with Oracle products.

At the bottom of the food chain, Taiwanese companies like Quanta and Delta, which used to make motherboards that go inside servers, now sell shrink-wrapped racks of servers for big data centers. No one there cares about the brand; they care about price. Even below any kind of systems level, Intel is increasing the capability of its chips and buying software companies.

Thanks to clouds, mobility, sensors and big networks, there is so much computing around now that it has changed everyone’s economics. For a while, that creates new alliances and tensions.



The New Economics Behind the Oracle-Dell Partnership

This week, Dell and Oracle announced a partnership unique to both companies. Dell would offer Oracle software on its machines and would resell Oracle services. Much head-scratching ensued among industry analysts, largely over misunderstandings about where the industry was headed.

What bothered many of these analysts was the idea that both Dell and Oracle sell commodity servers based on Intel’s x86 reference designs. Oracle picked up that business when it acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010. Sun was never a big player in that business, however, having come to it late and grudgingly. It always preferred its own machines, which used the Sparc chip.

From the Sun deal, Oracle got many loyal (or locked-in) Sparc customers and insights to make the combined hardware and software “engineered systems” that advanced its in-memory data and analytics products. If it ever wanted to compete with Dell or Hewlett-Packard on commodity servers, it doesn’t want to now. In its third fiscal quarter, Oracle had hardware revenue of $671 million, down 23 percent. Much of that was faltering x86 sales.

What Oracle still wants, and Dell can offer, is exposure to smaller and midsize companies, which Oracle’s high-ticket sales force has trouble reaching.

“Oracle has a phenomenal engine into the top 500 enterprise accounts worldwide,” said Marius Haas, the head of Dell’s enterprise business. “They’d like to go after the broader market, and we’ve got a great relationship with companies there.”

There is also some bad blood behind this story: Mr. Haas worked at Hewlett-Packard when Mark Hurd was its chief executive. He left during Léo Apotheker’s brief tenure at the top of H.P., after Mr. Hurd’s resignation in August 2010.

So putting a little more pressure on H.P. probably sweetened the deal. Mr. Haas said this week’s announcement could lead to Dell selling even more Oracle products, both applications and databases. It appears to be the first time that Oracle has entrusted another company to sell its services. Even Oracle’s enemies like SAP and I.B.M. resell Oracle databases.

More important is what the deal says about selling hardware these days: Compared with even five years ago, companies are being forced to add more capabilities to their products.

It’s not just that Oracle is fusing high-performance hardware and software, or Dell is shipping servers preloaded with Oracle products.

At the bottom of the food chain, Taiwanese companies like Quanta and Delta, which used to make motherboards that go inside servers, now sell shrink-wrapped racks of servers for big data centers. No one there cares about the brand; they care about price. Even below any kind of systems level, Intel is increasing the capability of its chips and buying software companies.

Thanks to clouds, mobility, sensors and big networks, there is so much computing around now that it has changed everyone’s economics. For a while, that creates new alliances and tensions.



Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson Arrive in Silicon Valley

When Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson arrived on Google‘s campus to film their new comedy, “The Internship,” which comes out Friday, they were in for a bit of culture shock.

“You assume that a lot of work gets done there, but it wasn’t evident,” Mr. Wilson said during a talk after the movie’s premiere in San Francisco last week, a reference to Google’s massage rooms and volleyball courts. “It just seemed like a nice resort.”

Mr. Vaughn added, “It was definitely designed for people with more discipline than you and me.”

Still, they learned the Silicon Valley language pretty quickly. In the movie, which Mr. Vaughn co-wrote and much of which both actors improvised, there are mentions of C++, being in beta, dog fooding and, randomly, Oracle.

Mr. Wilson even understands the tech world’s hierarchy, in which the old guard is replaced by the hot new thing, virtually overnight. After Mr. Vaughn explained why he wanted to set the film at Google, Mr. Wilson said dryly, “Didn’t you talk to I.B.M.?”

Still, the two said they were hardly technophiles. Mr. Wilson told the audience of Google employees that his mark of tech savviness was getting a cellphone earlier than Mr. Vaughn, to which Mr. Vaughn replied, “I don’t know if these guys would consider that tech savvy.”

If they are just getting used to cellphones, they certainly are not ready for Google’s new Internet-connected glasses, Google Glass, they said. They discovered that during a meal with a bunch of Google employees who wore Glass.

“We went to dinner and I realized they were all filming us, and that was like three wines in and I don’t know what happened,” Mr. Vaughn said.

And even if Google feels like a fun resort, Mr. Wilson learned the hard way that there were strict rules. At one point during filming, he got kicked off campus for trying to use his character’s costume badge instead of his real badge to get into Google buildings, and trying to go to a cafeteria where he didn’t have access.

“That didn’t go over well,” Mr. Wilson said. “It wasn’t all loosey goosey.”



YouTube Founders Focus on New Video Tools

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Twitter should consider itself very flattered.

Wanpai, a new smartphone video recording app available only in Chinese, bears a strong resemblance to Vine, Twitter’s fast-growing service that lets users shoot and post six-second snippets of video.

Perhaps even more flattering is that the Vine clone was created by Avos, the start-up created by the YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen after they left YouTube. (Google bought YouTube in 2006 and is an investor in Avos.)

In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Hurley acknowledged that Vine was “the inspiration” for Wanpai (which he translated from the original Mandarin as “Play Shot”). He said that Avos’s development team in Beijing, which operates with some autonomy from the company’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., had developed Wanpai on their own initiative.

“They didn’t think Vine was serving the market,” he said. Vine “wasn’t translated and didn’t work well in China.” (Twitter is blocked by the Chinese government and Vine is tightly integrated into the social networking service.)

Mr. Hurley said Avos’s newest creation, MixBit, to be released in July or August, would be much more original.

Although he wouldn’t divulge many details about the project, which is in private beta testing, Mr. Hurley said MixBit would provide an “intuitive” interface to help people easily create content, much the way YouTube made it easy to post videos to a wide audience.

“What we ended up creating at YouTube is a solution for distribution,” Mr. Hurley said. “What hasn’t been solved yet is the act of creation.”

He said current platforms for creating and sharing images and videos, likeTwitter and Instagram (owned by Facebook), are too focused on self-promotion, which intimidates many people.

MixBit will enter a crowded market. In addition to Vine, which has grown to 13 million users in just four months, Instagram is expected to soon introduce its own quick-video product.

Avos first surfaced publicly in 2011 when it purchased the Delicious social bookmarking service from Yahoo. It has since kept a low profile, working on several projects, including Zeen, an online magazine creation tool that was supposed to go live a year ago but is still stuck in beta.

In contrast to the situation with the Wanpai app, Mr. Hurley said, he is directly involved in MixBit’s development. “This is a tool that I’m going to use,” he said.

That contrasts with a certain video site that he used to run. “Me, personally, I don’t upload video to YouTube,” Mr. Hurley said.



H.P. Explains Its Computing Shotgun

Hewlett-Packard is using its supply chain, the global network of parts and manufacturing companies it uses, to build more varied and just plain more products faster than ever.

H.P.’s shift raises fundamental questions: Should H.P. be in the business of telling customers what they want, or responding fast when the customers tell that to H.P.? And, will H.P. lose some of the pricing edge it claims it gets by buying a few products in bulk?

Where H.P. once relied heavily on semiconductors from Intel for its computer servers, “we’re now building an ecosystem of multiple chips,” also featuring suppliers like Nvidia, Texas Instruments, and the many companies building processors based on designs from ARM, said David Donatelli, who runs the servers, storage and networking business at H.P.

“It’s going to take a while for the market to understand this,” he said, emphasizing the importance of the shift for H.P. He also said this meant different types of products would come out at a quicker pace.

In personal computers and tablets, the chief executive Meg Whitman said during last month’s earnings call, “using multiple operating systems, multiple architectures, and multiple form factors, we are moving quickly to produce the devices that customers want.”

H.P.’s move reflects the changing realities of computer hardware, for both businesses and consumers. Companies have to handle an increasingly diverse set of tasks, including supercomputing, and sending lots of messages across the Internet at a high speed. Consumers’ tastes and expectations are changing quickly too, making it hard to build hit products with a long lifespan.

H.P., with $120 billion in revenue, seems to have decided to adjust its very big operation quicker than ever.

For years, H.P. was content with Intel chips, and Microsoft’s Windows operating system, in personal computers that generally looked about the same. Now, it seems, it wants to try a lot of different things at once.

By making more personal computers, servers, and printers than anyone else, Ms. Whitman previously argued, it had a price edge over anyone. She still says that “in this battle for customers, our supply chain and distribution give us a key advantage.”

The advantage may lie more in ability to put a lot of engineers on different types of products and produce them quickly, reconfiguring supply chains fast when a product hits, than it will on pure pricing power.

In many cases, the products H.P. is buying are vastly different. Nvidia semiconductors are mostly graphics chips typically used in gaming. T.I. makes digital signal processors used to convey audio and video information. ARM chips go in mobile phones. To have all of these in the mix, even inside one server, indicates a heavy deployment of software and hardware engineers creating systems suited to differing needs.

This kind of server is still a small part of H.P.’s market for now, as H.P. still makes enough Intel-based servers and P.C.s to be Intel’s single largest customer. But by talking about things in this way, H.P. is willing to take some of that focused demand away from Intel, losing some of its bargaining power, to redeploy engineers who are now focused on Intel systems.

Mr. Donatelli acknowledged as much. “It takes a big, powerful company to build an ecosystem like this,” he said. “It might seem boring or esoteric, but it’s an important business distinction.”

The approach is obviously a big departure from consumer computer companies like Apple, with a very narrow range of products. Even Samsung seems closely identified with its Galaxy phones and tablets.

In servers, Dell, which on Tuesday announced products made for different markets, is still hewing close to a few architectural principles, and indicating it is willing to cut its profit margins to win deals.

H.P.’s approach “is a spaghetti strategy, throwing everything against the wall and hoping that something sticks,” said Marius Haas, the head of Dell’s enterprise business. “In this life there are finite choices, and trying everything won’t work.”

Possibly. But then, Mr. Haas doesn’t have Ms. Whitman’s supply chain to work with. In a changing market, you try to make whatever you have into a strength.

He didn’t mention working with other types of chips, and said Dell would focus on getting higher margins from attaching peripherals, software and services to its products.



H.P. Explains Its Computing Shotgun

Hewlett-Packard is using its supply chain, the global network of parts and manufacturing companies it uses, to build more varied and just plain more products faster than ever.

H.P.’s shift raises fundamental questions: Should H.P. be in the business of telling customers what they want, or responding fast when the customers tell that to H.P.? And, will H.P. lose some of the pricing edge it claims it gets by buying a few products in bulk?

Where H.P. once relied heavily on semiconductors from Intel for its computer servers, “we’re now building an ecosystem of multiple chips,” also featuring suppliers like Nvidia, Texas Instruments, and the many companies building processors based on designs from ARM, said David Donatelli, who runs the servers, storage and networking business at H.P.

“It’s going to take a while for the market to understand this,” he said, emphasizing the importance of the shift for H.P. He also said this meant different types of products would come out at a quicker pace.

In personal computers and tablets, the chief executive Meg Whitman said during last month’s earnings call, “using multiple operating systems, multiple architectures, and multiple form factors, we are moving quickly to produce the devices that customers want.”

H.P.’s move reflects the changing realities of computer hardware, for both businesses and consumers. Companies have to handle an increasingly diverse set of tasks, including supercomputing, and sending lots of messages across the Internet at a high speed. Consumers’ tastes and expectations are changing quickly too, making it hard to build hit products with a long lifespan.

H.P., with $120 billion in revenue, seems to have decided to adjust its very big operation quicker than ever.

For years, H.P. was content with Intel chips, and Microsoft’s Windows operating system, in personal computers that generally looked about the same. Now, it seems, it wants to try a lot of different things at once.

By making more personal computers, servers, and printers than anyone else, Ms. Whitman previously argued, it had a price edge over anyone. She still says that “in this battle for customers, our supply chain and distribution give us a key advantage.”

The advantage may lie more in ability to put a lot of engineers on different types of products and produce them quickly, reconfiguring supply chains fast when a product hits, than it will on pure pricing power.

In many cases, the products H.P. is buying are vastly different. Nvidia semiconductors are mostly graphics chips typically used in gaming. T.I. makes digital signal processors used to convey audio and video information. ARM chips go in mobile phones. To have all of these in the mix, even inside one server, indicates a heavy deployment of software and hardware engineers creating systems suited to differing needs.

This kind of server is still a small part of H.P.’s market for now, as H.P. still makes enough Intel-based servers and P.C.s to be Intel’s single largest customer. But by talking about things in this way, H.P. is willing to take some of that focused demand away from Intel, losing some of its bargaining power, to redeploy engineers who are now focused on Intel systems.

Mr. Donatelli acknowledged as much. “It takes a big, powerful company to build an ecosystem like this,” he said. “It might seem boring or esoteric, but it’s an important business distinction.”

The approach is obviously a big departure from consumer computer companies like Apple, with a very narrow range of products. Even Samsung seems closely identified with its Galaxy phones and tablets.

In servers, Dell, which on Tuesday announced products made for different markets, is still hewing close to a few architectural principles, and indicating it is willing to cut its profit margins to win deals.

H.P.’s approach “is a spaghetti strategy, throwing everything against the wall and hoping that something sticks,” said Marius Haas, the head of Dell’s enterprise business. “In this life there are finite choices, and trying everything won’t work.”

Possibly. But then, Mr. Haas doesn’t have Ms. Whitman’s supply chain to work with. In a changing market, you try to make whatever you have into a strength.

He didn’t mention working with other types of chips, and said Dell would focus on getting higher margins from attaching peripherals, software and services to its products.



Obama Promises to Have High-Speed Internet in Most Schools in 5 Years

Obama Promises to Have High-Speed Internet in Most Schools in 5 Years

Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

Students taking photos of President Obama at Mooresville Middle School. They cheered as the president announced a plan to improve technology in schools.

MOORESVILLE, N.C. â€" President Obama visited an innovative middle school in central North Carolina on Thursday to demonstrate the Internet-based education programs that he is proposing to make available nationwide.

Speaking to an audience of excited teenagers in a steamy gymnasium, Mr. Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to expand an existing program to provide discounted high-speed Internet service to schools and libraries, even if it meant increasing the fees that for years had been added to consumers’ phone bills. He said the initiative could lead to better technology at 99 percent of schools in five years.

“There’s no reason why we can’t replicate the success you’ve found here,” Mr. Obama said to the students’ cheers. “And for those of you who follow politics in Washington, here’s the best news â€" none of this requires an act of Congress.” To further applause, he added, “We can and we will get started right away.”

Mr. Obama was joined by his education secretary, Arne Duncan, whose department would work with the F.C.C. to revamp the initiative, known as the Schools and Libraries program or E-rate, to provide local schools with Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, among the fastest commercially available. With the federal money that Mr. Obama proposes to redirect for this purpose, schools also could pay for wireless networks throughout their buildings and campuses.

The president singled out Mooresville for its program, which not only upgraded technology but also provided a computer to each student and extra training for teachers. School performance has improved in turn.

Mr. Duncan, speaking to reporters on Air Force One en route to North Carolina, said that he had learned of the innovations in Mooresville, a town near Charlotte, because the local school superintendent was a friend. Mr. Duncan said the school quit purchasing textbooks several years ago to pay for the technology. Mr. Obama, he added, wants to “shine a spotlight on best practices and try to take them to scale.”

To pay for a similar technology expansion throughout the United States, the administration wants to improve the efficiency of the current program, and for telephone customers to pay up to $5 a year extra, or about 40 cents monthly, on their bills.

The Schools and Libraries program is part of the Universal Service Fund, an $8.7 billion program that distributes money for several purposes. Nearly half the money goes to a program that has long subsidized telephone and Internet service to rural or remote areas. About $2.2 billion goes to Schools and Libraries, a similar amount supports phone service to low-income consumers, and $200 million pays for telephone and Internet service to health care professionals in rural areas.

As an independent agency, the F.C.C. does not answer directly to the president, but he nominates the agency’s chairman. Any changes to the program’s structure would have to go through a rule-making procedure and be approved by a majority of the commission’s members. Currently there are three members; two seats are vacant.

The program assesses the fees on phone companies, but they typically pass the cost to consumers. The tax is roughly 15 percent on the long-distance portion of phone bills, resulting in a monthly assessment of a few dollars on the average combined home and mobile phone plan.

Schools and libraries that qualify for E-rate support receive discounts of 20 to 90 percent on services and equipment, depending on the household income levels of students and whether the school is in an urban or rural area.

Administration officials say that while the E-rate program, established in 1996, provides low-cost Internet connections to community institutions, the speed of those services is rarely different from those that home subscribers can receive, about 20 megabits per second.

That is fast enough for the average home consumer to stream video, but if dozens of classrooms are trying to view video or listen to digital audio files at the same time, a school’s network will operate much more slowly.

Officials say they also expect private companies to expand their offerings of devices and products like electronic textbooks in response to the expanded program.

Jackie Calmes reported from Mooresville, N.C., and Edward Wyatt from Washington.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Promises to Have High-Speed Internet in Most Schools in 5 Years.

Obama Promises to Have High-Speed Internet in Most Schools in 5 Years

Obama Promises to Have High-Speed Internet in Most Schools in 5 Years

Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

Students taking photos of President Obama at Mooresville Middle School. They cheered as the president announced a plan to improve technology in schools.

MOORESVILLE, N.C. â€" President Obama visited an innovative middle school in central North Carolina on Thursday to demonstrate the Internet-based education programs that he is proposing to make available nationwide.

Speaking to an audience of excited teenagers in a steamy gymnasium, Mr. Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to expand an existing program to provide discounted high-speed Internet service to schools and libraries, even if it meant increasing the fees that for years had been added to consumers’ phone bills. He said the initiative could lead to better technology at 99 percent of schools in five years.

“There’s no reason why we can’t replicate the success you’ve found here,” Mr. Obama said to the students’ cheers. “And for those of you who follow politics in Washington, here’s the best news â€" none of this requires an act of Congress.” To further applause, he added, “We can and we will get started right away.”

Mr. Obama was joined by his education secretary, Arne Duncan, whose department would work with the F.C.C. to revamp the initiative, known as the Schools and Libraries program or E-rate, to provide local schools with Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, among the fastest commercially available. With the federal money that Mr. Obama proposes to redirect for this purpose, schools also could pay for wireless networks throughout their buildings and campuses.

The president singled out Mooresville for its program, which not only upgraded technology but also provided a computer to each student and extra training for teachers. School performance has improved in turn.

Mr. Duncan, speaking to reporters on Air Force One en route to North Carolina, said that he had learned of the innovations in Mooresville, a town near Charlotte, because the local school superintendent was a friend. Mr. Duncan said the school quit purchasing textbooks several years ago to pay for the technology. Mr. Obama, he added, wants to “shine a spotlight on best practices and try to take them to scale.”

To pay for a similar technology expansion throughout the United States, the administration wants to improve the efficiency of the current program, and for telephone customers to pay up to $5 a year extra, or about 40 cents monthly, on their bills.

The Schools and Libraries program is part of the Universal Service Fund, an $8.7 billion program that distributes money for several purposes. Nearly half the money goes to a program that has long subsidized telephone and Internet service to rural or remote areas. About $2.2 billion goes to Schools and Libraries, a similar amount supports phone service to low-income consumers, and $200 million pays for telephone and Internet service to health care professionals in rural areas.

As an independent agency, the F.C.C. does not answer directly to the president, but he nominates the agency’s chairman. Any changes to the program’s structure would have to go through a rule-making procedure and be approved by a majority of the commission’s members. Currently there are three members; two seats are vacant.

The program assesses the fees on phone companies, but they typically pass the cost to consumers. The tax is roughly 15 percent on the long-distance portion of phone bills, resulting in a monthly assessment of a few dollars on the average combined home and mobile phone plan.

Schools and libraries that qualify for E-rate support receive discounts of 20 to 90 percent on services and equipment, depending on the household income levels of students and whether the school is in an urban or rural area.

Administration officials say that while the E-rate program, established in 1996, provides low-cost Internet connections to community institutions, the speed of those services is rarely different from those that home subscribers can receive, about 20 megabits per second.

That is fast enough for the average home consumer to stream video, but if dozens of classrooms are trying to view video or listen to digital audio files at the same time, a school’s network will operate much more slowly.

Officials say they also expect private companies to expand their offerings of devices and products like electronic textbooks in response to the expanded program.

Jackie Calmes reported from Mooresville, N.C., and Edward Wyatt from Washington.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Promises to Have High-Speed Internet in Most Schools in 5 Years.

A Plan to Cull Ad Formats at Facebook

Ad Formats at Facebook to Be Fewer

MENLO PARK, Calif. â€" When it comes to advertising, Facebook has decided it needs a new friend: simplicity.

A prospective advertiser is confronted with 27 types of ads from which to choose, like online coupons and a bewildering assortment of sponsored posts that can be sent to the news feeds of Facebook users.

On Thursday, the social network announced that it was going to simplify the process of buying ads significantly, starting with the first question posed to a buyer.

Instead of presenting a range of ad choices, Facebook will instead ask what the goal of the ad is â€" building a brand image, for instance, or persuading customers to come into a store. Then it will suggest ad formats that it believes will be effective.

“You are going to pick an objective,” said Fidji Simo, Facebook’s product manager for ads, at a news conference at the company’s headquarters. “Based on that, we will show you a range of formats.”

As part of the overhaul, Facebook plans to cut more than half the ad formats, eliminating offerings like ads that pose a question to users. And it will condense the various types of sponsored stories, ads that resemble a friend’s post that appear in a user’s main feed, into a single type of ad.

“It should be simpler,” Ms. Simo said.

Users could benefit, too, Facebook said, by seeing more uniformity in the types of ads in their feeds.

Although Facebook executives declined to discuss the expected financial impact from the changes, the goal was clearly to make it easier for advertisers, especially smaller and medium-size businesses that lack advertising agencies or other expert advisers, to buy ads that deliver results. The changes are scheduled to be introduced in the third and fourth quarters.

Debra Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, a research firm, praised Facebook for trying to better align its products with the goals of advertisers. For a long time, she said, Facebook was promoting the idea that the social context of an ad â€" whether a user’s friend had praised a product, for example â€" was important to its value. But many advertisers found the idea, and the ad formats that accompanied it, to be difficult to navigate.

For the year, eMarketer expects Facebook to increase its ad revenue by 31 percent to $5.61 billion globally, compared with $4.28 billion in 2012. Facebook’s share of the United States online ad market is also growing, according to the research firm, which expects the social network to take in 6.5 percent of online ad dollars this year, up from 5.9 percent in 2012.

Brian Boland, Facebook’s director for product marketing, said the company was also trying to help advertisers, including smaller ones, better measure the effectiveness of their ad purchases.

Marshaling data on users to enable advertisers to customize ads better has become a major battleground for Facebook and its competitors as they vie for market share.

Twitter, another leading social network, announced on Thursday a partnership with WPP, one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, to share data and help WPP and its clients develop better marketing campaigns.

“As Twitter has grown, marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging and customer research,” Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, said in a statement.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Ad Formats At Facebook To Be Fewer.

Europe Continues Wrestling With Online Privacy Rules

Europe Continues Wrestling With Online Privacy Rules

Olivier Maire/Keystone, via Associated Press

Google’s Street View device near the Matterhorn in Switzerland. The mapping project has been fined over improper data collection.

BRUSSELS â€" More than a year ago, the European Union’s top justice official proposed a tough set of measures for protecting the privacy of personal data online.

Alan Shatter, the Irish justice minister, with Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, and Octavie Modert, right, Luxembourg’s justice minister, on Thursday.

But because of intense lobbying by Silicon Valley companies and other powerful groups in Brussels, several proposals have been softened, no agreement is in sight and governments are openly sparring with one another over how far to go in protecting privacy.

On Thursday, justice ministers from the European Union’s 27 member states agreed to a business-friendly proposal that what companies do with personal data would be scrutinized by regulators only if there were “risks” to individuals, including identity theft or discrimination.

The ministers debated a proposal that would no longer require companies to obtain “explicit” consent from users whose personal data they collect and process, instead of “unambiguous” consent, which is considered to be a lower legal threshold. And they discussed a proposal on balancing an individual’s right to data protection with other rights, including the freedom to do business.

The ministers deferred discussion of the other most fractious provision, the so-called right to be forgotten. But in recent weeks, public comments by lawmakers and draft language suggested a softening of approach.

“The right to be forgotten has been softened, made more palatable,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance at the University of Oxford. “But it is by no means dead.”

Although a final version of the legislation is not expected to be completed for many months, and maybe not until next year, the developments on Thursday are an early signal that the technology industry’s lobbying efforts are gaining some traction.

The lobbying has been “exceptional” and legislators in Europe need “to guard against undue pressure from industry and third countries to lower the level of data protection that currently exists,” said Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor, referring to countries outside of the European Union.

“The benefits for industry should not and do not need to be at the expense of our fundamental rights to privacy and data protection,” Mr. Hustinx warned in e-mailed comments.

In the last year, American technology companies have dispatched representatives to Brussels and issued white papers through industry associations arguing that stringent privacy regulations would hamstring businesses, already suffering from the recession in Europe.

United States government officials have also made trips across the Atlantic to press policy makers like Viviane Reding, the union’s justice commissioner, who drafted the original, strict measures, to press for a less restrictive approach to data privacy.

The industry’s arguments have found a ready audience among some European governments. They include Ireland and Britain, where there are acute worries that the European Union is failing to take advantage of growth opportunities from Internet businesses that might help revive the economy. Apple, Facebook and Google all have European headquarters in Dublin.

“Europe is not sleepwalking into unworkable regulations,” said Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of policy for Europe, echoing a cautious optimism among industry officials about the data privacy law. “What’s positive is that over the last year, the debate has broadened out. There are other voices in the debate, who are saying: ‘Hang on a minute. What about the economic crisis?’ ”

The proposed law would affect most companies that deal in personal information â€" including pictures posted on social networks or information on what people buy on retail sites or look for using a search engine.

Whatever is enacted would serve as the privacy law in every country in the European Union and potentially have a bearing on other countries drafting data protection laws of their own.

The ministers took up their version of the law on Thursday; another version is under discussion by the European Parliament.

James Kanter reported from Brussels and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Europe Continues Wrestling With Online Privacy Rules.

Daily Report: U.S. Is Said to Have Secretly Tapped Internet Companies

The federal government appears to have been secretly recording the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years â€" including Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple â€" according to documents that emerged on Thursday even as officials confirmed they had been compiling a vast library of Americans’ phone call records in the fight against terrorism, Charlie Savage and Edward Wyatt report in The New York Times.

While the data provided varies according to the online provider, it could include e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing, and logins â€" according to a presentation describing the highly classified National Security Agency program called Prism.

The documents also said that “special requests” for information were available. The New York Times has not confirmed the authenticity of the documents, and several of the Internet companies issued statements strongly denying knowledge of or participation in the program. The White House made no immediate comment.

But the disclosure of the documents by American and British newspapers came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding disclosures opened an extraordinary window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration.

The extraordinary revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, while The Washington Post, relying on the same presentation, simultaneously reported the Internet company recording. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach.



Europe Continues Wrestling With Online Privacy Rules

Europe Continues Wrestling With Online Privacy Rules

Olivier Maire/Keystone, via Associated Press

Google’s Street View device near the Matterhorn in Switzerland. The mapping project has been fined over improper data collection.

BRUSSELS â€" More than a year ago, the European Union’s top justice official proposed a tough set of measures for protecting the privacy of personal data online.

Alan Shatter, the Irish justice minister, with Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, and Octavie Modert, right, Luxembourg’s justice minister, on Thursday.

But because of intense lobbying by Silicon Valley companies and other powerful groups in Brussels, several proposals have been softened, no agreement is in sight and governments are openly sparring with one another over how far to go in protecting privacy.

On Thursday, justice ministers from the European Union’s 27 member states agreed to a business-friendly proposal that what companies do with personal data would be scrutinized by regulators only if there were “risks” to individuals, including identity theft or discrimination.

The ministers debated a proposal that would no longer require companies to obtain “explicit” consent from users whose personal data they collect and process, instead of “unambiguous” consent, which is considered to be a lower legal threshold. And they discussed a proposal on balancing an individual’s right to data protection with other rights, including the freedom to do business.

The ministers deferred discussion of the other most fractious provision, the so-called right to be forgotten. But in recent weeks, public comments by lawmakers and draft language suggested a softening of approach.

“The right to be forgotten has been softened, made more palatable,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance at the University of Oxford. “But it is by no means dead.”

Although a final version of the legislation is not expected to be completed for many months, and maybe not until next year, the developments on Thursday are an early signal that the technology industry’s lobbying efforts are gaining some traction.

The lobbying has been “exceptional” and legislators in Europe need “to guard against undue pressure from industry and third countries to lower the level of data protection that currently exists,” said Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor, referring to countries outside of the European Union.

“The benefits for industry should not and do not need to be at the expense of our fundamental rights to privacy and data protection,” Mr. Hustinx warned in e-mailed comments.

In the last year, American technology companies have dispatched representatives to Brussels and issued white papers through industry associations arguing that stringent privacy regulations would hamstring businesses, already suffering from the recession in Europe.

United States government officials have also made trips across the Atlantic to press policy makers like Viviane Reding, the union’s justice commissioner, who drafted the original, strict measures, to press for a less restrictive approach to data privacy.

The industry’s arguments have found a ready audience among some European governments. They include Ireland and Britain, where there are acute worries that the European Union is failing to take advantage of growth opportunities from Internet businesses that might help revive the economy. Apple, Facebook and Google all have European headquarters in Dublin.

“Europe is not sleepwalking into unworkable regulations,” said Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of policy for Europe, echoing a cautious optimism among industry officials about the data privacy law. “What’s positive is that over the last year, the debate has broadened out. There are other voices in the debate, who are saying: ‘Hang on a minute. What about the economic crisis?’ ”

The proposed law would affect most companies that deal in personal information â€" including pictures posted on social networks or information on what people buy on retail sites or look for using a search engine.

Whatever is enacted would serve as the privacy law in every country in the European Union and potentially have a bearing on other countries drafting data protection laws of their own.

The ministers took up their version of the law on Thursday; another version is under discussion by the European Parliament.

James Kanter reported from Brussels and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Europe Continues Wrestling With Online Privacy Rules.

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