Posts Tagged ‘guardian.co.uk’
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.
Skype secrets stolen to help eBay sale, founders claim
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 19th, 2009
The founders of Skype have alleged its trade secrets were stolen to help facilitate its sale by its current owner, eBay, in a move which could scupper the $2bn (£1.2bn) deal.
The legal action follows another filed earlier this week by Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, accusing eBay and a group of potential investors of technology theft.
The legal action targets Index Ventures and one of its partners, Michelangelo Volpi. Acrimony between Skype's founders and Volpi, a former high-flyer at Cisco Systems has been building for some time.
Volpi served on Skype's board and the pair of entrepreneurs recruited him to head another company they founded, the Web TV venture Joost.
The founders alleged in yesterday's lawsuit that Volpi misappropriated confidential information as he moved from Joost to Index Ventures, and helped to orchestrate its bid for Skype. "Volpi has maliciously and willfully breached his fiduciary duties," Zennstrom and Friis said in their complaint.
Volpi was not available for comment, while Index Ventures declined to comment.
The legal action is the latest development in the tortuous four-year relationship between Skype's founders and chiefs at eBay. The online auction company bought Skype in 2005 for more than $3.1bn, but two years later admitted that the purchase had been a bad strategic move and wrote down about $1.43bn of its investment in Skype. eBay had hoped to use Skype's technology to increase sales of its auction business by enabling buyers and sellers in its online marketplace to talk to one another. But this failed to materialise.
Equally as serious, eBay failed to buy the core technology for Skype when it purchased the company, licensing it from Joltid, the founders' company, instead. Last month eBay said a legal dispute over its use could see the phone service close.
The peer-to-peer technology that is used to deliver video and phone services over the internet is now at the heart of the legal war.
Joltid sued eBay and the investor consortium earlier this week, claiming that Skype was using this proprietary technology without authorisation. Joltid and Skype have also been in a legal battle in Britain over rights to the technology.
There are suggestions that Zennstrom and Friis had previously contacted several private equity firms to try to buy back Skype.
However, eBay agreed to sell a 65% stake in Skype to the consortium including Index, private equity firm Silver Lake, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Yesterday's lawsuit said Volpi's knowledge of the confidential information had played a key role in the consortium's bid.
"Volpi and Index lacked the credibility and financial heft to lead a private equity investment consortium to acquire Skype unless and until they advertised their knowledge of the confidential information," it said.
Volpi was once regarded as a potential chief executive candidate at Cisco, and many in Silicon Valley had looked on with worry at his tenure at Joost since June 2007.
Although the company was a pioneer in bringing popular TV shows and movies to the internet, it struggled to tie key programming deals and find revenue.
He stepped down from his CEO role in late June, while the company cut jobs and scaled back its services.
He initially stayed on as chairman, but was removed from that role days ago and Joost had said it was investigating his actions.
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?
‘When you’re running to music, it all seems to make sense’
Posted by: Stuart O'Connor in Technology on September 18th, 2009
The iPod shuffle changed how Battlestar Galactica star Jamie Bamber exercises and now he wants it to give distance updates and directions
What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
I guess I'm going to have to go with the tiny little iPod shuffle that I've got. I love going on long runs, and I loved the idea of the Walkman back in the day, but they would jump and skip. The iPod changed my whole attitude to exercise outside. And it never jumps. I had a CD Walkman that I tried to run with, and it was a complete disaster. The idea that you can carry all your music on something that light is just brilliant.
When was the last time you used it, and what for?
I use it all the time. When I'm at home in LA I run up a canyon up the back of my house. When you're running to music, it all seems to make sense.
What additional features would you add if you could?
I would love it if it could tell you how fast you've run, and how far you've gone. If it could tell you which way to turn to, that would be fun – an interactive Google map, how's that for an idea?
Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
In the sense that there will be things that do everything I've just said, and hold a million times more songs, then yes. Everything in technology becomes obsolete.
What always frustrates you about technology in general?
The fact that it updates so quickly, there's this mad rush to get the newest thing, and by the time you take it out of the box it's almost near the end of its shelf life.
Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
When I first bought my laptop PC, I struggled to find my way around everything.
If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
At the risk of doing Steve Jobs' job for him, it would be to find the Mac version of everything.
Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
I'm a luddite.
What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
My Macbook Pro, I guess. Or I've got a big flatscreen NTV in LA – a 48in Sony Bravia.
Mac or PC, and why?
Definitely Mac. The packaging, just the simplicity of it – everything they design looks beautiful and it's as simple as can be. All the menus and different windows you open are visually simple, and it makes sense.
Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I do still buy DVDs – I buy box sets. I tend to download music these days, but with DVDs I still like to own them physically. The last thing I bought was season one of The Wire.
Robot butlers – a good idea or not?
Any butler is a good idea. Never having had one, a robot butler might be the next best thing to a real one.
What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I would love to won one of these new Red HD movie cameras. A bit out of my price range, but I'm intrigued by what they can do.
• Jamie Bamber stars as Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama in Battlestar Galactica, the entire series of which is out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday
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?"
Classics get Twitter treatment
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 18th, 2009
Emmett Rensin and Alexander Aciman distil more than 60 literary classics into fewer than 20 tweets a book
Lord Byron might have been furious. Hemingway outraged. Austen inwardly irritated. But the inevitable has happened: their prose has been reimagined through Twitter and will be published in a book distilling more than 60 classic works of literature.
There was a minor publishing sensation this summer when Penguin announced that it had bought the rights for the book, Twitterature, in which two first year university students summarise everything from Medea to Madame Bovary.
The book is not published in the UK until 5 November but an advance copy has been seen by the Guardian.
Romeo tweets his dying lament: O, I am fortune's fool! Maybe just a tool. And so I die. BTW that other woman I was into before Juliet? Would've been a safer bet.
Sherlock Holmes says: Continuing investigation. Made brilliant deductions on many snorts and very little evidence. Notice salt deposits on factory owner's shoes?
Goethe's Young Werther emotes: Have I noted how upset I am? I am very upset. #pain #angst #suffering #sexdep.
Elizabeth Bennet muses: It's as if the less he seems to care about me, the more drawn to him I am. This seems the opposite of how it should be? Oh well.
And then there's Ishmael from Moby-Dick: We set out. Follow @starbuck, @queequeg for long introspective soliloquies on the human soul. Or @tashtego if you like adorable kittens.
The book's authors, Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, have set up a Twitter page for the book and yesterday tweeted Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (example: HOLY SHIT!!!! We stole the Codex for a large-scale conspiracy that is conveniently in my area of expertise!).
Rensin and Aciman came up with the idea for the book when they were roommates at the University of Chicago. "We spent a lot of our time with three feet between us," said Rensin.
He said the book should not be seen as some sort of guide to the classics. "There has been some misunderstanding about the book in that it's been said it's going to educate people, but you couldn't do an English class with this book. The humour is heightened by having knowledge of the works."
Rensin eulogises Twitter, declaring it nothing less than an extension of the Enlightenment, and for anyone throwing their hands up in horror at tweeting classic works, he invoked Martin Luther. "People were horrified when he translated the Bible from Latin into German but he was making it accessible. I don't think anyone killed Luther so maybe we're all right."
All the works have been distilled into 20 tweets or fewer. On the Road has just the one: "For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac."
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.
Google signs deal to print 2m books on Espresso machines
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 18th, 2009
Two million out-of-copyright books that have been scanned by Google could come back into limited printed form after the search giant signed a deal with On Demand Books, the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine - a custom book printer able to produce a bound one-off 300-page paperback, with a full-colour cover, in about five minutes.
But if Google wins its case to be able to scan and reuse out-of-print books whose copyright is unclear, and those where publishers have given permission to scan them, a huge range of material that has fallen out of print could become available.
Though each Espresso machine costs £85,000, there are already more than a dozen installed in locations around the US, and its makers hopes to reach 30 by the end of next year. There is already one in Blackwell's Bookshop in London. The company offers about 1.6m books already.
The books from Google will cost about $8, of which $1 will go to Google and $1 to On Demand - which says it will give those proceeds to non-profit schemes.
"We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture," Google Books Product Manager Brandon Badger said in a blog post. "Reading digital books can be an enjoyable experience, but we realize that there are times when readers want a physical copy of a book."
The Google deal will limit available titles for printing to those whose copyright has expired, but a court case now being heard in the US - where Google is arguing that it should be able to scan and offer contents of "orphan" books whose copyright is unclear - might mean that it can offer a much larger number in the near future.
However, Google is being opposed in that court case by rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft. A decision is expected next month.
Google's aim to scan huge numbers of books will also have been enhanced by its purchase earlier this week of ReCaptcha, a scheme which aims to defeat spammers by using words that have been scanned in from books and which computers have been unable to decode. "CAPTCHA" systems try to ensure that humans rather than computers are entering text into a web page, such as a registration system.
By offering distorted words that are known to have beaten computer attempts to read them, ReCaptcha has become one of the most successful such systems online, employed by more than 100,000 sites.
"We'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process," said Will Cathcart, a Google product manager.
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.
