Posts Tagged ‘Blogposts’
Phorm sheds directors, grumpy website and … money?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 20th, 2009
The webside adware company is getting low on directors, and possibly cash, as it prepares to announce its financial results. What's the outlook?
Remember Phorm? Of course you do - everyone's favourite (sometimes, or often, in the love-to-hate sense) webside adware company.
It's due to release its latest set of financial results on Monday morning, but in the meantime a few things have happened.
Its Stopphoulplay.com website, which it launched back in April - in what looked to most with any experience in public relations like a slightly wild attempt to smear anyone who didn't love it - is now gone. At the time it said
"Over the last year Phorm has been the subject of a smear campaign orchestrated by a small but dedicated band of online 'privacy pirates' who appear very determined to harm our company," explains the site.
"Their energetic blogging and letter-writing campaigns, targeted at journalists, MPs, EU officials and regulators, distort the truth and misrepresent Phorm's technology. We have decided to expose the smears and set out the true story, so that you can judge the facts for yourself."
Oh well, no more judging facts now. But here's a few other ones. First, its chief technology officer is no longer its chief technology officer: Stratis Scleparis, who was at BT when Phorm carried out its first (and extremely controversial) trial and subsequently joined Phorm, has left.
Second, its director of corporate communications David Sawday has also left. (Here's the cached Google page from when he was there.)
Basically, the board now looks rather thin. There's Kent Ertugrul, its founder and chief executive (we interviewed him); and then there are four, count them, non-executive directors. There's not a lot of executing going on there.
We don't think that Phorm's results will be delightful to its investors. The Telegraph is suggesting losses in the range of $15m to $20m compared to a pre-tax loss of $48m last year. It will be interesting to see what its revenues are, and what its forecast for business in the coming year is. (Investors and people discussing it don't seem bullish.)
Still, Norman Lamont is on board. Perhaps he can see some green shoots.
BT also needs to figure out whether it has a relationship with Phorm or not - there's this page on its site which says
BT Webwise has not yet been launched. We completed a trial of BT Webwise with a small proportion of BT Total Broadband customers between 30th September and 10th December 2008. After assessing the findings, we will make further announcements on this Website concerning the launch of the service for BT Total Broadband customers.
.. but there's also this page which says
On 6th July 2009 BT announced that, whilst it continues to believe that interest based advertising and BT Webwise offer major benefits for consumers and publishers alike... we have no immediate plans to deploy Webwise today.
We think the second is the more correct one, but it would be nice to be sure.
All in all, the great idea that this form of "targeted online advertising" would help ISPs out (by routing some of the money from ads back to them) has looked less and less robust. It has said that it will aim for other countries that are more interested in its products. But from where we sit, it's not looking that hopeful.
You decide: what should you do with those celebrity pics you’ve found?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 18th, 2009
You've bought a secondhand computer from an auction site. Unsurprisingly, it's not been wiped - most people are rubbish at wiping their hard drives. You're intrigued, though, and you discover some pictures and emails that haven't been deleted.
Oh my. Some pictures of a celebrity who you've heard of (and happen to like, though only on reputation; you've never met). Very intimate pictures. And they're with someone who isn't their spouse. The emails, which are similarly intimate, aren't to their spouse either. You've not seen anything about these two on the news, and a web search doesn't suggest anyone has written about their relationship.
You realise that these pictures might be worth something - perhaps quite a lot - if you sold them to a paper or website. Or you could wipe them. Or...
What do you do?
What’s the real game that Mobster World is playing on Twitter?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Games, Technology on September 18th, 2009
If you're getting invitations to join peoples' Mafia families, you might be wondering why - and whether it's safe to respond. Is it a worm or just a bit of fun?
If you're on Twitter, you may have been surprised to receive a direct message (like an email, in that it's not in the public domain) from someone who follows you, saying something like
"Hey, I just added you to my Mafia family. You should accept my invitation! :) Click here:"
And then there's a link to playmobsterworld.com, where the "Mafia family" game seems to be hosted.
If you happen to follow the link, you'll be presented with a big, mostly black screen and a big red button in the middle saying "Click here to play more". Look, here's a picture.
But what you rapidly find is that you're taken by the scruff of the internet over to Twitter where you're, um, encouraged to authorise the game to access your Twitter feed. (It uses the OAuth system, which means that the people behind playmobsterworld don't get your username or password. The owners have chosen to hide their identities by using Domainsbyproxy, and haven't left an email address on their website, so we don't know who they are, and couldn't contact them.)
Once you've done that, the "game" will then spew that invitation in the form of a direct message to everyone it can. (The people who receive it are the ones who follow you, and who you also follow. They're the only group you can direct message on Twitter.)
And so those DMs turn up in peoples' feeds, and they click them.. and so on. You'd think that by now Mobster World would be played by everyone.
Not so. Instead many people - the non-players - get annoyed by it.
It's easy to see how the spewing of invitations happens: it's so easy to miss the tiny text at the bottom of the main page that tells you about the Terms of Service (such as they are: basically, it's a website and takes no responsibility for anything) and the one that says "Click here if you don't wish to invite your contacts automatically".
See - there it is.
Oh, so that's how you do it. Except that if you click that second link (the tiny bit of yellow text on the left), you get directed to a page that looks exactly the same as the first with a link to the same Twitter OAuth link, and no indication that your friends won't get spammed just the same way again as if you had never managed to find that well-hidden link.
Although it must be said that the front page does say in a prominent position, "please read the note below for our terms of service". Prominent position, but unfortunately not prominent in any other sense; it's tiny dark grey text on a dark background, and to say that it doesn't stand out is an understatement at best.
See?
OK, now try it with some highlighting of the text:
So is there actually a game in Mobster World? Rik Ferguson, of the security company Trend Micro, has been looking at it for a while. His view?
"In essence it is very similar to the previous Twitter "game" Spymaster" which got very amusingly subverted.
"Mobster World is not a new game to social networking, it has been around on Facebook for some time already with over 1000 active users and in fact was one of the apps that was being linked to via advertising in the series of rogue apps we saw on Facebook recently.
"There is a game behind Mobster World, but in the loosest possible sense of the word. You also have to question the motives of the people behind it when the text "(please read the note below for our terms of service.)" and the terms of service themselves are greyed out almost to the point of invisibility on their front page."
However, here's the kicker: it doesn't let go of your account even if you tell if to, according to Ferguson.
"The game itself consists of doing "jobs" to earn cash and respect, using the cash to go on and buy further equipment to do yet more jobs and recruiting other to your mob through direct messaging on Twitter. Having granted read & write access to your Twitter account through OAuth though, the game can send DMs without your knowledge. [emphasis added - CA]
"The default settings on the game account definitely lead to a barrage of Update Tweets. The "Cancel Account" option, despite warning you that it is an irrevocable step, does not work - the account remains active and can be reused at any time. The OAuth permissions granted on your Twitter account are also not revoked. [emphasis added - CA]"
So it grabs hold of your Twitter account and won't let go. That's not good, in the scheme of things. What if the owners decided to start using their access to tweet links to malware links, or adverts? It would seem to come from you to your friends.
So is it dangerous, in Ferguson's view? "It's not overtly malicious, but it is definitely configured to fool the unwary into generating publicity through social worm techniques."
Our opinion: probably best avoided. You can deny it any further access to your Twitter account on Twitter's system itself, at Twitter's Settings -> Connections page, which will show you what programs and sites are allowed to access your account. If you don't want Mobster World to have that access, deny it there.
But is this a new trend in games, or just an aberration? What's your view?
How social networking is changing journalism
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 18th, 2009
A conference in Oxford explores the interaction between the internet and the news industry
The morning of the Oxford Social Media Convention focused on the impact of social media. Especially interesting were the statements on the panel 'Breaking news: the changing relationships between blogs and mainstream media'.
Richard Sambrook, the director of the BBC Global News Division, said that the impact of social media was overestimated in the short term and underestimated in long term. Mainstream media are adopting social media especially with blogging and twitter, he admited, but nobody discusses the effects on the long term.
But what is the long term? One thing he is sure of is that new organisations don't own the news anymore. There is a transformation for the journalist from being the gatekeeper of information to sharing it in a public space. Therefore citizen journalism is something, Sambrook added, that has to be taken into account. However, he doesn't see the internet as a place where news come from – although Sky News has a Twitter correspondent researching the micro-blogging platform.
What he could see evolving though, was a new objectivity. Objectivity, he then pointed out, had always been an idea important for the news. For him it was once designed to deliver journalism that people can trust. But in the new media age transparency is what delivers trust. He stressed that news today still has to be accurate and fair, but it is as important for the readers, listeners and viewers to see how the news is produced, where the information comes from, and how it works. The emergence of news is as important, as the delivering of the news itself.
Information is not journalism, he explained further. You get a lot of things, when you open up Twitter in the morning, but not journalism. Journalism needs discipline, analysis, explanation and context, he pointed out, and therefore for him it is still a profession. The value that gets added with journalism is judgment, analysis and explanation - and that makes the difference. So journalism will stay - he was optimistic about that. However, journalists must understand one rule: if you believe you are in competition with the internet, find your way out. Collaboration, openness and link culture are rules, you can't deny at the moment, he said.
John Kelly, a columnist for the Washington Post, who has published a report on the rise, challenges and value of citizen journalism for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism explained further, saying that today the Huffington Post competes with the Washington Post not in terms of journalism, but in terms of its readers.
Social media for him are not only important for citizen journalism, but for reaching out to the readers as well. Mainstream media are exploring the use of social media to drive traffic; already 8% of the Daily Telegraph web traffic comes from social media. The Washington Post is rather slow with putting the work of citizen journalists in the paper, Kelly reported. There were only a few crowdsourcing projects and they were presented as special features. The section it is mostly used is sports, where they aggregate Twitter feeds of American Football players and display it.
The commentary editor of Reuters, Jonathan Ford, finally explained that it is quite hard for a news agency such as Reuters to take social media into account. And social media has developed in the financial sphere, too. Reuters, Kelly pointed out further, is interested in blogging to set up a community offering specific trade news and information - because in the financial community, social media has started to play a role. People such as the economy expert Paul Krugman or bankers who had already made it, he said, started to shared knowledge with the public and pulled them into a financial debate to regain trust. On Twitter this remark was live-commented by drgrahamwilson with the tweet: "Bankers using blogs to regain trust in themselves. In whose mind?"
Thieves include themselves in the digital revolution
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 18th, 2009
At least the computers stolen from a taskforce trying to get more people online will be used by someone
The office of the Digital Inclusion Team, set up to get more people in the UK online, was broken into this morning in a rather more direct encouragement of computer use than the government intended.
Computers were stolen in the raid, which could set back the team’s aim of getting 6 million more people online in the next two years. The silver lining may be that at least the thieves will now be included, digitally.
Martha Lane Fox, the government’s champion for digital inclusion, broke the news on Twitter this morning: “O bloody hell the #digitalinclusion office has been broken into and all computers taken 
(.”
She declined to elaborate further when contacted by the Guardian.
The news quickly spread on Twitter, with more than one user remarking on the irony. But it seems Lane Fox may have over-dramatised the theft somewhat.
The break-in was played down this morning by Tara Maynard, media adviser to the Digital Inclusion Team, who stressed that all confidential information was secure and that not all computers had been stolen.
“A couple of laptops were taken from the office, but they did not belong to the DIT,” she said. “They were freelance workers’ personal computers and did not contain any sensitive information.”
Which seems fortunate.
The Digital Inclusion Team is funded through the Department for Communities and Local Government. It has the broad aim of encouraging the use of technology to improve the “lives and life chances of disadvantaged people and the places in which they live,” according to their website.
An estimated 17 million Britons do not use the internet. Lane Fox, who was appointed champion of digital inclusion this year, has indicated that she intends to concentrate on getting the 6 million of these who are “also socially and economically vulnerable” online first.
The Metropolitan police said they were investigating a break-in on Carlisle Street, in the West End, where the Digital Inclusion Team’s office is based.
Avatar loss afflicts twittering classes
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 18th, 2009
In a round of accidental depersonalisation, Twitter has "lost" some users' personal icons and backgrounds, and temporarily replaced them with a bird avatar. Twitter says it is fixing the problem….
The bad news is that some users woke up this morning (or noticed last night) that their personal icons had been replaced by the generic Twitter-supplied version that makes users look like newbies. The good news is that at least it's not the old icon (o_O), which looks horrible.
In one of Twitter's continuing attempts to give itself a facelift, the original icon has just been replaced by an attractive new one that features a little bird. It's even available in different colours, though these seem to be assigned at random.
Twitter is aware of the problem, and posted a note on its status page:
We're working on a bug whereby the default avatar is showing up for users who have previously uploaded their own image. We hope to resolve this soon.
Update (5:30p): We've identified the root cause of this problem and expect the issue to be resolved within the next several hours.
It's not the first time that random people have lot their personal icons, but there's no hint as to whether it's the same problem as before, or whether Twitter has found a new one.
In some cases, users have also lost their personalised backgrounds, which have been replaced with generic versions.
Last time around, the personalised icons reappeared all by themselves, though some people have been reuploading them. (But I wouldn't bet on every Twitter user having a back-up copy of their icon and background.)
Concerned Guardian readers will no doubt be overjoyed to hear that my icon has survived at @jackschofield, and I have a back-up because I just used the one I already had at Facebook. I was assuming that in the long run, Facebook would buy Twitter and the two services would merge. However, this looks increasingly unlikely. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Twitter is getting another $50m in funding, which values the company at $1bn, while Facebook is building its own version of Twitter, using @mentions instead of @replies etc.
White House announces own app store
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
Should governments promote their nation's IT companies? With Apps.Gov, the White House yesterday launched a website that does so. It is an online storefront for federal agencies, but it is open to everybody. The store allows people to buy cloud-based IT services in four categories. In a posting on WhiteHouse.gov it is explained, that the goal of this project is a shift to online applications, data storage and processing power to reduce financial government waste and ease environmental impacts.
In addition Apps.Gov is likely to create major market opportunities for IT companies. The US government spends over $75bn on IT each year. According to the New York Times the meeting was attended by executives of several high-profile US computing firms, which are offering cloud services to government agencies. Among them are Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, Vimeo and Google.
Cloud computing stores data and applications on third-party equipment anywhere, making it accessible from various devices. US chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced the project - operated by the General Service Administration (GSA) - yesterday, at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. The aim, he said, is to streamline the government purchasing process by allowing agencies to shop for applications already approved for use.
Kundra also stressed that security has high priority in the project, and that the government plans to follow different rules based on the type of information. All data must be stored in the United States and all service operators need to secure goverment clearance, but classified data will still be managed through a government operated platform.
The UK government declined to comment on whether it would follow suit with a similar scheme.
But what do you think - should the UK government focus more on the way it spends money on IT technology?
The Onion Microfiche: all the satire that’s fit to fit on your iPhone
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
What if a news organisation came up with an idea for reading newspapers on the web which involved you looking at web pages that were just representations of the paper form of the newspaper, but without the benefits of the web? Wouldn't that be marvellously ironic? Wouldn't that be what the US's finest purveyors of satire, The Onion - self-styled as "America's finest news source" (well, Fox News had taken "Fair and Balanced") - would do?
Except hang on, that was Google, with its Fast Flip experiment. Of course, Google isn't a news organisation. It just does things like this which, in the words of Paul Bradshaw, make Google look as though it's treating news organisations in the manner of a small boy with a magnifying glass on a sunny day who's found some ants.
But not to be outdone, overdone or undone, The Onion has launched its own iPhone App, costing $0.99 (£0.59 in the UK) where you can read The Onion on your iPod Touch or iPhone.
It's called The Onion Microfiche [link takes you to the Apple Store in iTunes] - but there's one little wrinkle compared to those other news-reading apps you can get for the iPhone: all it offers is headlines.
That's right - so you get "Man Unwilling To Discuss Lifetime Denny's Ban" (what is it with American newspapers and their Random Capitalisation of Initial Words?). And that's it, apart from some random background noise.
As it puts it, "You are clearly a busy person, otherwise, you wouldn't have such an important phone." (Nice.) "The Onion Microfiche application uses digital-capture technology to put a world of previously hard-to-find headlines at your fingertips." You can do most recent or random and share them on email, Twitter, or Facebook.
Actually, sharing on Twitter would be a bit de trop, as The Onion already has 1.6m followers, where it offers... the headlines. [link corrected]
Such as, at the moment: "U.S. Government Finds 20 Trillion Buried By Absentminded Reagan In 1987" and "Amish Woman Knew She Had Quilt Sale The Moment She Laid Eyes On Chicago Couple".
But to be serious (or at least truthful - and leave aside the truthiness) for a moment, what's not widely known about The Onion is that its writing starts from the headline. The writers sit around and bat ideas for headlines about, and the ones that get approved then get a story written below them.
(A version of this method is used in various celebrity magazines which try to write their next best-selling instalment of the Brangelinaniston saga, as we've noted elsewhere.)
But for some writers, there's only the pain of knowing that you had a marvellous headline that got vetoed and thus will never find its way to having three pars and a picture added below it. My favourite that never quite made it: "Man Knifed With Spork." Write the story below – if you can.
And note too how this isn't a free app. Could it be the case for The Onion too that making content costs money? Perish the thought.
Facebook now reaches 300m users
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
After five years and more than $700m of investment, Facebook is now 'cashflow positive' thanks to its 300m users worldwide
Cynics have long dismissed social networking as a fad - but the appetite for connecting online appears to be growing more rapidly than ever, after Facebook announced today that it now has more than 300 million users worldwide.
The announcement, made by the company's 25-year-old co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, underlines Facebook's reputation as one of the largest properties on the internet with an audience that could encompass almost every man, woman and child in the United States.
The number is almost as large as the entire internet population of China, and equivalent to the number of web users in Europe's ten largest countries combined.
It also marks the latest chapter in an astonishing period of growth for the company. The site reached the 250m user milestone in July, meaning that it has added an additional 50 million people in just two months.
Zuckerberg indicated that had plans to continue expansion in the future, and suggested that reaching such a large group of people was just the beginning.
"It's a large number, but the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone," he wrote on Facebook's blog.
Although Facebook is still growing in countries like the US and Britain - particularly as older users get bitten by the social networking bug - it is also expanding quickly in other parts of the world.
The news comes just a few days after the site formally rolled out Facebook Lite - a stripped-down version of the site intended for users with slower internet connections that it hopes will stimulate growth in countries like India and Brazil.
More importantly to those wondering about the company's plans for the future, however, was the news that Facebook was now cashflow positive - which means it is finally making money after five and a half years and an estimated $716m of investment.
"Earlier this year we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter," said Zuckerberg. "This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term."
The news prompted speculation that the company could prepare for a stock market launch as early as next year - a rumour that senior executives have tried to squash in the past.
Update: The original headline on the story referred to Facebook making a profit. As reader Alan Patrick rightly pointed out, being cashflow positive doesn't necessarily mean the same as being profitable - since it may not include certain extra expenses. I've amended the headline accordingly.
Archos web tablet adds Android
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 15th, 2009
Internet tablets have not been a market success so far, but Archos is launching two. The Archos 5, which runs Google Android, goes on sale tomorrow….
If you're familiar with the old Archos 5 portable media player, this one's different. The new Archos 5 Internet Tablet has the old movie- and music-playing features but is based on the Google Android version of Linux, designed for mobile phones. Apps available via Archos's AppsLib Store will presumably have been adapted for the 5 inch (actually 4.8 inch) 800 x 480 pixel touch-sensitive screen.
Archos says it will include several pre-installed Android apps "including the popular eBuddy instant messaging app, Twidroid for sending and receiving tweets, Craigsphone for posting or accessing classified ads, Thinksfree [ie ThinkFree Mobile] for viewing Microsoft Office files, Quickpedia and much more."
You can browse the internet using Wi-Fi or via a Bluetooth connection to a mobile phone. This provides access to thousands of internet radio stations and streaming videos. However, it also has built-in FM radio (receiver and transmitter), and you can use it to record TV via a DVR Station accessory or, in Europe, the optional TV Snap-on. Archos says an optional HD Cinema plug-in is needed to play WMV HD movies in 720p resolution as well as movies in MPEG-2/VOB format with AC3 sound.
The Archos 5 Internet Tablet comes in two basic versions. The first has 8GB to 32GB of Flash memory. The second -- which is naturally a lot thicker and heavier -- has 160GB to 500 GB of hard drive space.
It goes on sale tomorrow from Archos, Amazon and various retailers at prices ranging from £199.99 to £369.99. GPS features cost extra after a seven day free trial.
The Archos 5 Internet Tablet will not be Archos's only internet tablet. It will ship the 9PCtablet around October 22: it's one of the devices awaiting the public launch of Microsoft Windows 7.
The 9PCtablet is a very thin netbook-technology tablet PC with a 9 inch touch screen, Intel Atom Z510 processor, 80GB hard disk, and built-in DVBT TV. The price is expected to be around €450-€500.
The 9PCtablet will no doubt be compared with the Apple iTablet, if such a thing ever actually appears. However, the appeal of the 9PCtablet is that it doubles as an entertainment PC and a portable TV set. I rather doubt that the iTablet will handle broadcast TV.
