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Posts Tagged ‘Scrutiny’

Chinese Black-Hat Hackers Arrested

According to reports from China Daily, what is believed to be the largest illegal hacker training and recruitment entity in China has been shut down by police.

Three people were arrested and the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars in assets frozen. The accused, who ran a now-shuttered site called Black Hawk Safety Net, are suspected of offering online attacking programs, disseminating viruses and recruiting almost 200,000 members. Police have confiscated nine servers and five computers and completely closed all associated websites.

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Over the past 5 years, the site owners had collected more than the equivalent of $1 million in membership fees. Reportedly, paying members were able to download trojans and were coached on writing programs designed to steal accounts for profit.

According to China Daily’s police sources, Black Hawk Safety Net was the subject of research and scrutiny from a team of around 50 police officers ever since 2007, when suspected hackers in another attack were found to be members of the site.

There is no word yet as to whether this site or its members of owners were affiliated with the recent attacks on Google accounts and other international entities. To read more related news, check out our ever-growing archives on China’s Internet exploits.

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Dick Durbin presses Apple on human rights in China

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple

Technology relations with China and their human rights situation is turning into a hot-button issue lately, especially given Google’s recent troubles with that country. Now, my old senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, has decided to raise the level of scrutiny, calling for a list of 30 companies, including Apple, to share information about their relationships in China with the companies there.

Durbin won’t have to look far to find issues with Apple: there have been issues in the past with Foxconn and Wintek, two contractors that Apple uses for the majority of its products, and even a recent report commissioned by Apple found that factory conditions and pay scales weren’t quite up to snuff. Still, Apple has always spoken out strongly in favor human rights, so hopefully a little bit of spotlight from queries like Durbin’s will ensure that their actions match up.

(Apple globe art by Kevin Van Aelst.)

TUAWDick Durbin presses Apple on human rights in China originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Weekly Wrapup: Facebook Privacy, RFID in iPhone, Nexus Review, And More…

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze and challenge Facebook’s sweeping new privacy policies, explore what would happen if RFID chips are integrated into the next generation iPhone, present our hands-on review of Google’s new smartphone the Nexus One, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs) and ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products).

Also read on for details about the newly released printed edition of our current premium report, about the Real-Time Web.

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Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report

At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper, we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print.

For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it.

Don’t forget about our Community Management Report. It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it!

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this week that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important

Has society become less private or is it Facebook that’s pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg’s statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data.

iPhone as RFID Tag & Reader: Coming Soon

We began a series called Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things this week, starting with a look at barcode scanning. We wrote that smartphones are increasingly being deployed as readers for barcodes – in particular via apps available on iPhone and Android. However, RFID tags are more functional and flexible than barcodes. While barcodes are cheaper and getting traction in the U.S. with the QR format, the potential for RFID tags is even greater. Apple knows this and if rumors are to believed, RFID will be integrated into the iPhone 4G later this year.

The Evolving Online Finance Ecosystem

Last week we analyzed how the Web is transforming personal finance. This week we took a broader look at the world of online finance, from personal to small business tools. To get an understanding of the online finance space, we spoke to the founder and CEO of one of the most promising startups in online finance, Rod Drury from Xero. Rod told us that he sees four types of markets in online finance: 1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee); 2)
Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow); 3)
Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce); and 4)
ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).

Editor’s note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month long look at how the Internet has transformed finance.

iPhone App Piracy Reaches $450 Million? Doubtful

According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple’s iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace. However, our sources say that the real number is closer to $15-$20 million instead.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of “5 Social Media Secrets for 2010″. While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we’d connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Boston

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort. In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston – one of the very first venture capital firms.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

VMWare, Microsoft and the Battle for the Business Market

VMware’s acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo this week points to a new form of partnership in the tech word. It’s one that could define the big winners in the battle for a major piece of the enterprise market. By packaging Zimbra’s popular, open-source collaboration software, VMware can provide a service that combines virtualization technology with email and calendar applications. It is similar to Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard’s alliance announced today that will package Microsoft technology on HP servers.

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Google Offers Satellite Images of Haiti, Post-Earthquake

In the immediate aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake that caused an unbelievable amount of destruction to Haiti’s capital, Google has been asked by relief organizations and users to show images of what’s actually happening on the ground. In partnership with geospatial imagery company GeoEye, Google released a new layer for Google Earth showing post-earthquake devastation.

Nexus One and Android 2.1: Apple Better Watch Out

Less than a week ago, Google introduced its own Android phone, the Nexus One. Over the weekend, we got a chance to take the phone through its paces and while we aren’t quite ready to give up our iPhone yet, the Nexus One is a formidable challenger. In terms of features, the Nexus One is already on par with the iPhone platform and beats it in many areas. When it comes to the overall user experience, the iPhone is still a step ahead of the Android platform – but that could easily change in the near future.

Going Mainstream: eMusic Signs Deal with Warner Music

EMusic, the popular subscription-based music service, this week announced that it has signed a deal with Warner Music – the world’s third-largest music company. This is eMusic’s second deal with a major record label. In its early days, eMusic mostly focused on featuring music from independent labels. Since the middle of 2009, however, eMusic has worked on expanding its reach by bringing more mainstream music to its catalog.

Facebook Blocked at Work? Use Your Email Instead

In our continuing obsession with all things Facebook, we looked at a new feature that was announced by the social networking behemoth that will further enmesh the site into our every waking breath: replying to comments through email. Before now, email notifications from Facebook contained a link that you had to follow, which logged you into Facebook where you could reply. You’ll now notice that the email contains a line reading “New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this link.”

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

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Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington’s question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I’ll post Zuckerberg’s sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

That’s Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is “the vector around which Facebook operates.”

I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook’s pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook’s changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook’s Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before – now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told me in December) that it’s time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It’s made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook’s Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company’s justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren’t credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they “just went for it,” to use Zuckerberg’s words from yesterday.

(Why didn’t Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos – if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples’ lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that’s old news, that people are changing. I don’t believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that’s what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users’ desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options

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Droid’s December Boom: AdMob Metrics Show Android Platform’s Growth

The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December’s stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption.

In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests while stats for HTC Magic devices remained static and those for HTC’s Dream model actually decreased. In terms of consumer use of the network and acceleration of device popularity, it seems we have a winner.

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Having been compared extensively with the iPhone, the Droid stands up solidly even under extensive scrutiny. And in terms of 3G network access, we’ve personally seen fewer issues than with any other mobile carrier we’ve tried to date. (Note: I’m a Droid owner and a former iPhone user. I’ve also suffered through my share of BlackBerries, Palms and their ilk.) If any device is to become the iPhone killer, it will be the Droid or something very close to it (here’s looking at you, Nexus One).

AdMob’s numbers show that requests from all Android-driven devices increased by 97 percent between October to December in 2009, totaling more than 1 billion requests in December alone.

The open platform has also seen a refreshing diversity of devices and manufacturers. AdMob shows that in December, 56 percent of requests were from HTC devices, 39 percent were from Motorola devices and 5 percent were manufactured by from Samsung. And in December, seven devices generated more than three percent of requests each: the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and the Samsung Moment. This stat represents a significant increase from just three devices in October (HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero).

Already, the Motorola Droid is the leading Android device on AdMob’s radar, generating a third of all the network’s requests in December. Released just under two months ago, it’s already the top-selling Android device on the market, a title it’s held since a scant fortnight after its launch.

Granted, AdMob’s metrics show a small slice of mobile device usage. But they’ve consistently been reliable in showing what mobile users use and need and in predicting trends. We are internally excited about what Android-powered devices will do in the market in the months to come, and I am personally quite optimistic about Droid adoption specifically.

Let us know what you think in the comments, particularly if you’re a fanboy or fangirl of a particular device!

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New Website Publicizes iPhone App Rejections

A new website aims to publicize the details surrounding the much-maligned iPhone application review process – Apple’s secretive procedures that have been under heavy scrutiny this year, especially since the FCC’s involvement regarding Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application. Notable iPhone developers have publically called out the company for this “broken” process and some have even announced their retirement from creating iPhone apps, including Facebook app developer, Joe Hewitt, based on philosophical differences with the perceived tyranny of the Apple gatekeepers.

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On the recently launched site, App Rejections, iPhone developer turned blogger Adam Martin, has begun to document individual app rejections in an effort to help the development community understand what they can and cannot expect from the company’s stringent, and sometimes seemingly arbitrary, vetting process for new apps.

According to the site’s About page, Martin writes that “it’s now gone from ‘easy’ to ‘tricky’ to avoid getting your app rejected by Apple.” And since Apple has refused to document or discuss the matter of application rejections, he was inspired to create this website as a place to collect all the known application rejections.

The App Rejections site itself is in the format of a basic blog. There aren’t catchy headlines, images, or accompanying snarky commentary in the individual posts as you would find elsewhere in the tech blogosphere – especially on TechCrunch where documenting high-profile app rejections has become somewhat of a pet project of blogger MJ Siegler. At the most, Adam may inject a few opinions of his own as to how certain things could be improved, but he clearly isn’t on any sort of vendetta against the company.

Instead, each post details point-blank exactly why a particular application was rejected, examining information about the APIs used or rules broken in each case. The site also documents when formerly rejected apps finally make it through to the App Store in posts titled “approved” or “overturned,” the latter referring to apps whose developers started some sort of appeal process.

Although the site is brand-new, with only two pages of posts so far, it could easily become an invaluable resource for iPhone developers confused by Apple’s murky review process which can sometimes lead to apps sitting in limbo for months on end before any word from Apple is had.

Developers looking to have their personal experience documented on the site are advised to contact Martin via his company’s Twitter account, @redglassesapps.

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Web 2.0: Carly Fiorina talks potential Senate run, breast cancer battle, and government tech policy

It was a very different Carly Fiorina who took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit dinner tonight to discuss her potential run for the U.S. Senate.

Just as it was typical when she was the first female chief executive of Hewlett Packard, part of the conversation with Web 2.0 co-host John Battelle covered her appearance. But in this case it was relevant in the discussion about her political reviews.

Fiorina’s hair was a mix of dark brown and gray and it looked as if it had been recently shaved. She said that her close-shorn look was a result of her eight-month battle with breast cancer.

“I have seen the best and the worst of our healthcare system,” she said, with her voice shaking slightly with the emotional moment that focused on her own health. But she told the audience at the dinner that she was healthy. She was there to talk about her possible bid as a Republican candidate to take on Democrat Barbara Boxer. Fiorina didn’t outright declare her candidacy, but she said she was exploring the idea.

Asked if she was ready to handle the scrutiny that politicians endure in the public limelight, she said she endured a lot of that as CEO of HP during the tumultuous years of the HP-Compaq merger, the tumultuous battle for control of the board, and her very public firing. She noted that she wrote her book Tough Choices in an honest way and in the name of being transparent.

“I have battled cancer all of these years and we had to deal with a tragedy in our family,” she said. “What people say about you publicly is important, but not profound. I felt that if you are comfortable in your own life and your own skin, bring it on.”

Five years ago, Fiorina said she would have laughed at the idea of running for public office. But she said she felt that politicians in Washington were out of touch and that the problem was that they didn’t spend enough time in private life, running businesses. She noted that she started her business career as a secretary and worked her way up. She worked at AT&T as the government broke up its monopoly on phone service.

Fiorina got polite applause, but some of her boldest comments met with silence. Perhaps that is because she was a Republican in San Francisco, a land of Democratic party dominance. But it also goes back to how she was a controversial figure when she was running what has become the world’s biggest technology company. As always, she was well spoken and her comments sometimes bordered on eloquence. That got her applause.

Fiorina wasn’t afraid to express some views. She feels that Congress doesn’t realize what it’s like to run a small business in the U.S. and how to foster innovation. She noted that she opposed the bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler — two big businesses — at the same time GM was shutting down 3,600 dealerships across the country that were run by small business people, resulting in a loss of 156,000 jobs that outnumbered the job losses at the car companies themselves. She also said that it was odd that biotech got no stimulus money, but the construction industry received a lot of it — a sign that the nation’s priorities weren’t right.

She said she is a Republican in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln in that she believes “people, left to themselves, make better decisions about their lives than the government does.” She also said that current politicians have done nothing to curb the $1 trillion deficit and that there is no one in charge of cutting costs in Washington.

She praised the way current HP CEO Mark Hurd has run the company. And she acknowledged that she made mistakes. One of them, she said, was not dealing with her “dysfunctional board” early on and instead focusing on the execution of the HP-Compaq merger instead. That ultimately came back to haunt her, leading to her ouster. But she noted with some satisfaction that the people responsible for her firing — such as Tom Perkins and Patricia Dunn — were fired themselves not long after she left. (Dunn was fired for initiating a controversial spying program aimed at finding out board leaks; Fiorina reminded the audience that she was a victim of that spying program as well).

She mentioned that politicians should be held accountable just the way that business managers and board members are, and that the U.S. government cannot continue to spend money without dealing with entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Fiorina criticized Boxer for successfully sponsoring only three relatively insignificant bills in her 18 years in the Senate.

“I don’t think that’s good enough,” she said.

Asked what she thought about regulation of the web, she said it was inevitable that there would be more regulation of it. Why, for instance, is there no protection of women and children on the Internet, when there is plenty in real life. She said this duality — where anything goes on the wild wild west of the Internet — would have to end.

Asked about political power, she noted that the worst expression of power is when someone says you have to do something ”because I say so.” She said that influencing people to do the right thing is underrated in that respect. As for the war in Afghanistan, she said that she didn’t agree with convervative commentators who believed the war effort should be separated from the idea of “nation building.” She agreed with the Obama administration approach, she said, of trying to win over the population through efforts to restore civilian security, accountability, infrastructure and education.

“People give their loyalty to those who give them security and opportunity,” she said.

As for technology in government, she said that it should be used to make government more comprehensible, accessible and transparent.

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DoJ decides that Microsoft-Yahoo deal deserves more scrutiny

The Justice Department is making a “second request” for information about the search and online advertising partnership Microsoft and Yahoo are eager to begin. The department is refusing to make a decision to approve or deny the 10-year deal without additional details.

Over the course of the review, the companies expect to be asked about their search engine investments to ensure that Microsoft’s search engine Bing is a viable product, how the companies’ online ad auctions operate, and what might happen to prices as a result of the combination. The DoJ is also interested in seeing search engine product plans from both companies to see if competition will become more vigorous or not, Bloomberg reported. 

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