Tynan on Tech

Last week I was in Germany, as a guest of the IFA Berlin consumer electronics show. That means, of course, that I had to perform the airport security samba. I took off my shoes and my belt; stuffed my watch, keys, cell phone, and loose change into the pockets of my jacket; took my laptop and my tablet PC out of my backpack; and placed them all into gray plastic bins on the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt. (I’d already removed the Swiss Army Knife from my bag and drank or dumped any bottles containing more than three ounces of liquid.)

Then I stepped into the scanner, turned sideways, and did the “hands up” pose. Lord only knows how much of me the TSA agent saw. (I don’t envy them that job.) When I stepped out I got wanded to make sure I wasn’t hiding something under my clothing. At the end of the line I collected everything, put myself back together, and moved on – leaving the TSA and my fellow passengers reasonably assured I was not carrying box cutters, shoe bombs, or incendiary devices in my underwear.

This is the world we live in after 9/11. It’s not a huge sacrifice to go through airport security. I’m happy to do it, despite my suspicions that it is mostly just National Security Theater, designed primarily to reassure us that the government is doing more to protect us now than it was 10 years ago.

9/11 was many things – an enormous national tragedy, a huge wake-up call, a time when this country felt truly united, if only briefly. But it also marks the unofficial birth of the National Surveillance State.

This is a topic for a book, or even a series of books, not a blog post. So I can only touch on a handful of ways 9/11 has changed our notions of privacy. The first one being the Patriot Act.

This massive piece of legislation, passed by an overwhelming majority of Congress virtually without debate, broke down bureaucratic barriers between law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies, letting them collaborate in the hunt for terrorists. But it also turned our 4th amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure on their ear.

Peter Swire, a professor at the Moritz College of Law of Ohio State University and former top privacy official in the Clinton administration, says the Patriot Act took reforms to law enforcement that had already been proposed by the Clintons and stripped out all the privacy protections.

A month after the attacks Swire wrote an Op Ed for the Atlanta Journal Constitution in which he said, in part:

While [the Patriot Act] sharply expands how government can wiretap e-mails and Web surfing, it provides no remedy if officials  exceed that authority. It also breaks down the wall that once separated foreign intelligence-gathering from domestic law enforcement, without creating new safeguards to replace those it removes…. there are strong reasons to support new surveillance
powers. But we should stay keenly aware that we are repealing
safeguards created because of previous abuse.

What happened next?

“Sneak and peak” searches conducted on suspects’ homes prior to obtaining a warrant. National Security Letters demanding to know what books certain library patrons had checked out or to see the health records of employees. Warrantless wiretapping by the NSA. And for some, renditions, torture, and detention without trial.

A June 2005 report by Washington Post reporters Dan Eggen and Julie Tate showed that more than 80 percent of the then-400 cases where Patriot Act rules were invoked were unrelated to terrorism.

An analysis of the Justice Department’s own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people — not 200, as officials have implied — were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security…. But a large number of people appear to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations by chance — through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances or bad luck — and have remained classified as terrorism defendants years after being cleared of connections to extremist groups.

Some elements of the Patriot Act have expired, others have been found unconstitutional by the courts, but much of it remains on the books today. Supporters will of course invoke the “it kept us safe” argument. The problem with that argument is that it’s impossible to prove. Or rather, you could use it to prove anything that didn’t happen over the last 10 years. A Martian invasion, for example. There’s correlation, of a sort, but no causation.

We can, however, demonstrate what it did to our Constitutional rights.

The second big effect of 9/11 is the explosion in data mining and surveillance. When I flew to Berlin last week, my name was checked against that Kafkaesque No-Fly list of possible terrorists. My passenger name records were almost certainly entered into some kind of database, along with credit reports, supermarket shopping records, employment histories, health records – and no doubt my Facebook friends, groups, and likes – to determine if I fit the profile of a terrorist.

A massive December 2010 report by the Washington Post (again) details the massive National Surveillance Industrial Complex that has grown up since 9/11. Nearly 4,000 separate counter-terrorism organizations have sprung up, from international intelligence gathering groups to local law enforcement, all keeping a close watch on you and me.

Their job is to find the bad guys before they do something bad. The problem is that it’s too easy to make incorrect assumptions and target the wrong people – or for bad actors to abuse the system and target people for the wrong reasons.

Government spying didn’t start with 9/11, but the events that day accelerated their efforts, offering blanket justification and unlimited budgets.

There’s always been some kind of tradeoff between security and privacy. You want the police to be able to bust down your door if there’s an attacker inside; you don’t want them to be able to come in any old time they feel like snooping around.

I believe after 9/11 we tipped too far in one direction; the question still remains whether we can ever regain our balance.

ITworld TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan wishes you all safe travels on this weekend – and any other time. Visit his eHumor site eSarcasm or follow him on Twitter: @tynan_on_tech. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-to’s, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

This post originally appeared on ITworld.

Big Brother image found at GadgetCrave, of all places.

Tags: 9/11, Big Brother, post 9/11

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Lots of CEOs make products. Many make millions. Very few make history.

Steve Jobs is one of the latter. Like Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller, he’s left a mark on his times that goes far beyond the creation of shiny new widgets.

The praise (and premature eulogies) are flowing from every direction on the InterWebs this morning, following the news that Jobs is stepping down from the top post at Apple – presumably for the last time – and becoming chairman.

But I have different memories of the man. Because for more than a decade I’ve been Steve Jobs’ muse.

I remember back in that dark post-Apple period in late ‘96, when Steve was trying to make a go of the NeXT machine, he called me at some ungodly hour of the night. He didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t have to. Only one man could possibly be calling at that hour.

“Apple wants to buy us. What do you think? Should I go back?”

I just cursed and left the phone off the hook. But I think he understood my meaning. Of course, within a year he was CEO again, and Apple started to climb out of the hole it had created for itself. 

A few years went by without much contact. Then sometime in early 2001 I got an email out of the blue. It read:

“We’re coming out with a portable music player in a few months. I’m thinking of calling it the ‘iPod’. What do you think?”

I told him the Sony Walkman had the portable music market sewn up. Nobody in their right mind would spend money for a device that only played MP3s. And ‘iPod’ — seriously? That name was so 1997.

Two years later, another call. This one was about the iTunes Store. Steve sounded so excited I really hated to burst his bubble.

The music industry will crush you like a bug, I said. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Those guys make the Mafia look like a Boy Scout Jamboree.

And so on. The iPhone? A horrible mistake, I told him. The wireless companies will make you sorry you ever came up with the idea. And could you please drop the little ‘i’ in front of everything? You’re embarrassing yourself.

In late 2009 year I warned Steve against introducing a tablet PC. I was certain the iPad was a terrible idea that would sink his company.

“Remember Windows for Pen Computing?” I said. “Nobody has ever made a dime selling a tablet computer, and nobody ever will.”

Finally, a few weeks ago he called me for the last time. He told me he was thinking of handing the CEO job over to Tim Cook, if for no other reason than to get Apple’s Board off his back.

I told him not to quit, that he shouldn’t let the bastards get to him like that. “Did Napoleon have a succession plan? Did Genghis Khan?” I counseled.

So I’ve clearly played a pivotal role in dragging old media dinosaurs into the 21st century, showing the telecom industry that consumer choice matters,  offering ubiquitous connected computing to the masses, and making technology fun again.

Of course, I couldn’t have done it without Steve. And neither could anyone else. We’ll miss ya, big guy.

This post originally appeared on Infoworld.

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Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I’m not talking about Michael Corleone and the Mafia. It’s worse than the Mafia. I’m talking about AT&T.

Literally just yesterday I had the following conversation:

She: We’re running out of minutes. T-Mobile has a pretty good deal going now but that means signing another two-year contract.

Me: Sure, let’s go for it. We like T-Mobile. I have no problem committing for another two years. It’s not like they’re AT&T.

Now, of course, AT&T is swallowing T-Mobile in a deal worth $39 billion. So much for that.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. I used to be a Cingular customer, and I liked them. Decent phone quality, good customer service. Then they got swallowed by AT&T. Call quality turned into crap. Customer service?  A nightmare.

I had DSL service from a regional carrier a few years ago. They got snapped up by AT&T too. I’ve been a cable customer ever since.

Last year, when my AT&T wireless contract was finally up, I breathed a sigh of relief, ditched my Windows “smart” phone for Android, and jumped to T-Mobile. I should have known better. Assuming the deal goes through with regulators, I’ll soon be back in telecom hell.

AT&T claims that the T-Mobile deal will improve its crappy phone reception and poor Internet access. In my experience, though, AT&T routinely takes good things and turns them into offal.

T-Mobile’s got $20 unlimited data plans. You think AT&T is going to offer $20 unlimited data plans, I got a bridge in Arizona I want to sell you.

T-Mobile’s got an extremely well trained customer service squad. I mean, I can be pretty awful to a customer support rep when I’m steamed (and nothing makes me crankier than stupid technology snafus) but I talking to their Zen-like service reps usually calms me right down. What are the odds of AT&T – the poster child for terrible customer service — retaining that?

Also: T-Mobile usually hires spokesmodels like the luscious Catherine Zeta Jones and that dishy brunette in the pink-and-white polka dot dress [video]. AT&T has Luke Wilson. I rest my case.

There are a few positives, I suppose. T-Mobile customers may get access to the Apple iPhone and local 4G networks faster than they might have otherwise. But I can’t say I’m anything other than miserable. And I’m not alone.

As I write this, a CBS TechTalk poll shows that 77 percent of consumers oppose this deal. Here’s The Atlantic’s Daniel Indiviglio whacking it with a stick:

Consumers will be another big loser — probably. Most of the time when consolidation occurs in an industry with few participants and high entry costs, you see oligopolistic economics become even worse. Firms can set prices higher than if there were more competitors in the landscape. Technological progress also generally slows, because there’s less incentive to compete.

But that assumes that AT&T and Verizon don’t ramp up competition even more fiercely now that they’ll be near equals. Could they start lowering mobile plan prices and providing bigger discounts on devices? It’s possible, but unfortunately, oligopolies tend to move in the other direction, making consumers worse off.

You say you’re a Sprint/Nextel customer and you’re happy about it? Don’t get too comfortable. I’d be surprised if you weren’t part of the Verizon family within the month. Very soon there will be two major US wireless companies. 

And then, who knows? Maybe just one. AT&T/Verizon – one telecom to rule them all. 

At which point, I might be willing to give up my cell phone entirely. With any luck, by the time the regulators get through chewing on that merger I’ll be in The Old Geeks Home, where it won’t matter any more.

What do you think – is AT&T-Mobile a good idea? Dial in your opinions below or email me: Dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Tags: $39 billion, AT&T, AT&T sucks, T-mobile

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Don’t look now, but there’s a new social network coming. No, it’s not Google Circles, no matter what the Read Write Web blog says. And it’s coming from the people you’d least expect.

4chan.

Yes, that’s right — the purveyors of the most insidious (and some of the most grotesque) memes on the InterWebs – LOLcats, Rickrolling, and Justin Bieber’s North Korean tour, to name but three of the less disgusting ones – are working on a new online community called Canvas.

More accurately: Christopher “Moot” Poole, the founder of the 4chan message board, has been quietly working on his site, canv.as, for some time now. He just got a lot less quiet about it at this week’s SXSW conference, where the 24-year-old Poole took the stage and proceeded to lambast his elders – specifically 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg – about their failure to appreciate the benefits of online anonymity.

Per the UK’s Guardian:

"Zuckerberg’s totally wrong on anonymity being total cowardice. Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way," Poole said, adding that the internet allows people to "reinvent themselves" as if they were moving home or starting a new job.

"The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself," he said.

Chris Poole became somewhat infamous when he was named The World’s Most Influential Person in a 2009 online survey by Time Magazine. Of course, that survey was hacked by his pals at 4chan, which is also widely believed to be the source of the Anonymous campaigns that have bedeviled everyone from the Church of Scientology to the government of Egypt. At least, the two groups appear to draw from the same pool (if not, ahem, Poole) of digital prankster-vigilantes.

Canvas is in closed beta at the moment, so it’s impossible to gauge how much it is or isn’t like the 4chan boards (though Business Insider offers a preview of it here). But from the description it sounds like a grown up version (minus the grotesque bits) that allows users to take images others have posted and make then even sillier. The idea is to draw some or all of 4chan’s 8 million monthly visitors without a) alienating potential advertisers, or b) getting arrested.

In other words, Poole and his cohorts are finally hoping to cash in. This is what happens when you wake up one morning, realize you’re sick of living with roommates and need to make more money so you can get a place of your own.

In an interview with the New York Times’ Nick Bilton last March, Moot calls Canvas a “reboot” of 4chan. He also had this to say about the value of online anonymity:

I get a lot of e-mail messages from people who say thanks for giving them a place to vent, an outlet to say what they can’t say in real life with friends and work colleagues — things that they know are wrong, but they still want to say. Is it right? No, of course not. People say some disgusting, vile things. But just because we are hosting it doesn’t mean we agree with it. I don’t support what they are saying; I just support that there is a site like that to say that.

I’ve been writing a lot about online identity vs anonymity lately (and I seem to be doing it again), and I can appreciate Poole’s point. Still, I’m not buying the ‘anonymity = authenticity’ trope. I have a hard time considering someone ‘authentic’ when they post drive-by-slander under a made up name. Authenticity derives from identity, IMHO. And yes, the cost of failure is high – that’s the whole point.

If you need to vent about your boss or your friends or whomever online, that’s fine, but if you plan to get vile and disgusting, leave their names out of it, too. Unfortunately there’s no simple way to enforce that, so too many people use the relative anonymity of the Net as a barrier to hide behind.

I’m curious to see how Canvas pans out. But I suspect Poole will not be able to have it both ways – to create a community site where people are given free reign to roam anonymously, yet not have it turn into a cesspool where the rudest forms of communication drown out everything else.

Under what circumstances is anonymity acceptable to you? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared in slightly different form at InfoWorld.

Tags: 4chan, anonymous, canvas, christopher poole, Facebook, Infoworld

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Last week, in a straight-out-of-Hollywood B-movie plot, we learned that an obscure cyber security company was trying to take out a whistleblowing site on behalf of a Fortune 50 corporation, thanks to a shadowy group of uber geeks whose identities are as yet unknown.

(Quick, get me Matt Damon. He’s not available? Get me someone who looks like Matt Damon. OK, we’ll settle for Shia LeBeouf.)

But the saga of HBGary Federal, WikiLeaks, and Anonymous is still only unfolding, thanks to yet more private emails that have been released by Anonymous into the wild. InfoWorld blogger Woody Leonhard has a nice summary of all that has transpired so far.

Here’s a quick list of the dirty dealings buried in those emails:

* HBGary Fed (HBGF) was one of five companies that were pitching a proposal to take down WikiLeaks on behalf of Bank of America. Palantir and Berico immediately severed all ties with HBGF and apologized. As far as I know, Booz Allen and law firm Hunton & Williams have yet to issue a statement, while BofA claims it never heard of or saw this proposal. (Color me surprised.)

* HGBF was also targeting top journalists, including Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee.

* HGBF had a copy of Stuxnet, the virus allegedly developed by US and Israeli spy agencies to monkey wrench Iran’s nuclear facilities, and may have been planning to use it for its own nefarious purposes. (Now, of course, Anonymous has that code. Nervous yet?)

* According to Crowdleaks.org, HBGary may have been developing a new Windows rootkit (code name: Magenta) that is undetectable and impossible to kill.

* Fill in the blank. I’m sure more revelations will arise before I’ve finished this blog post.

Want to peek inside those emails? Try this search engine. (I know what you’re wondering; no, I am not in them. Not yet, anyway. Justin Bieber, on the other hand, is mentioned in two of them. Go figure.)

All of this is only known because various members of Anonymous took exception to a story in the Financial Times earlier this month in which HBGF spook-in-chief Aaron Barr bragged about infiltrating Anonymous using fake social network profiles and other publicly available information. He even claimed to know the real identities of the group’s “leaders.”

Except that it turns out he was dead wrong.

ITworld’s Thank You For Not Sharing blogger Dan Tynan spoke with one of those accused of being not only part of Anonymous, but its alleged kingpin, Commander X. It turns out that Ben de Vries is just an organic gardener in San Francisco who happened to run a Facebook group where alleged Anons liked to gather. Yet that was enough for HBGary Fed spook-in-chief Aaron Barr to conclude that he was the mysterious X, and to discuss with his boss submitting that info to the FBI.

A handful of commenters weighed in saying that they too had been named by Barr, incorrectly, as members of Anonymous. So much for Barr’s theory that he could penetrate the innards of a supersecret org through the magic of social media and his own innate brilliance.

Ars Technica, which has been all over this story in a way nobody else can touch, has a detailed account of how the Anons managed to pwn this alleged security firm. It used a standard weapon from the hacker arsenal, an SQL Injection, to penetrate HBGF’s custom content management system. That in turn gave them access to HBGF’s database of user names and passwords, which the Anons quickly cracked. Turns out that the principals at HBGF used simple passwords, and they used the same ones promiscuously for Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.

That, as they say, was the ballgame. Per Ars:

For a security company to use a CMS that was so flawed is remarkable…. Proper handling of passwords—iterative hashing, using salts and slow algorithms—and protection against SQL injection attacks are basic errors. …And though not all the passwords were retrieved … two were, because they were so poorly chosen.

Meanwhile, HBGary Federal – a division of HBGary – is all but dead. It slunked out of the RSA conference with its tail behind its legs. I’ll bet within a year that if parent company HBGary survives this debacle, it decides on a name change. There’s no getting the stink off them now.

As for Barr, he’s a victim of his own hubris. I’d be surprised (and, really, appalled) if he’s still employed in any capacity within a month. He thought he could fly with the Gods; instead he crashed and burned.

You might call it a classic geek tragedy.

What’s your take on HBGF, Anonymous, et al? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com. I’ll feature the best and brightest in a future post.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Tags: aaron barr, anonymouse, ars technica, hackers, hacking, hbgary

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Over the weekend the New York Times published a long piece by David Segal describing in painful detail exactly how Google’s search results have been totally pwned by JC Penney. Over the holiday shopping season, the retailer where my mother used to drag me to buy my Easter suits received an extraordinary bounty of Google love: Ranked number one in searches for “dresses,” “bedding,” “area rugs,” “furniture,” “skinny jeans,” and dozens of other terms (including, probably, “Easter suits”).

Is JC Penney really the destination of choice for all these categories of products? Hell no. But Google couldn’t tell the difference, because it had been gamed by JC Penney’s black-hat Search Engine Optimization firm, SearchDex. (SearchDex isn’t talking, but JC Penney fired them shortly after Segal called with some pointed questions. Draw your own conclusions.)

Apparently, SearchDex buried links attached to those search terms on thousands of dormant, fake, or abandoned Web sites, all of them pointing back at JCPenney.com. Google’s bots detected all those links, drew the erroneous conclusion that JCP was all that when it comes to skinny jeans and area rugs, and drove millions of Web shoppers toward the site. JC Penney had one of its best online shopping seasons ever.

The problem? This is known as link farming, and it’s banned by Google’s Webmaster terms and conditions. With its billions, Google can afford to pay people to do nothing but sniff out suspect search results driven by link farms and ‘86 them. And you’d think with an example this egregious Google would have noticed – especially given that they had warned JC Penney three times before about dicey search results. But no.

Per the Times:

Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google…sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.

Or maybe it strives not to anger companies like JC Penney, whom the Times points out spends millions on Google ads, in addition to lord only knows how much on SEO trickery. Cutts says the idea is absurd; the European Union, on the other hand, is investigating Google for this very practice. Segal writes:

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”

SEO is in the news more than ever thanks in part to AOL’s swallowing the Huffington Post last week for $315 million. HuffPo is many things, not all of them printable on the pages of InfoWorld.com, but one thing for sure is that it is SEO driven. HuffPo owes much of its success to its ability to manipulate the treatment it receives at the hands of Google (and Yahoo and Bing).

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo wrote a funny piece last week discussing how HuffPo’s SEO success isn’t going to last forever. He was immediately attacked in the comments by SEO professionals defending their turf.

Hey, everybody does SEO, or tries to – InfoWorld included. There are perfectly legitimate things you can do to make your site more Google friendly. On the other hand, many SEO “pros” are the cockroaches of the Internet – turn the light on them and they all scatter.

Operate any Web site for any length of time and you will be approached by one of these bottom feeders. They will offer to “exchange links” or even pay you about the cost of a nice lunch for placing an article on your site or even just a few link-rich sentences. And many people do this, because they figure, why not? Nobody else is paying them to write this stuff.

The downside: If Google catches you, it lands upon you like the circus fat lady falling off a high wire. After the New York Times revealed just how thoroughly Google had been punked by JC Penney, it manually “adjusted” the PageRank for all of those terms that used to be number one down into the boonies of Googledom.

In other words, JC Penney isn’t Feeling Lucky any more.

If you’re relying on PageRank to drive business to your site, then you probably want to play it safe. But if you already don’t get any Google love, it’s a no brainer – take the money and the spammy links and run.

This is a war Google won’t win. Or at least, Google’s users won’t win. Because on the Web, the search race is not to the swift or the strong but to those who are willing to pay a dirty SEO firm to cultivate link farms. And you know what link farms require? A whole lot of manure.

Do you trust Google search results? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.com.

Tags: EU, Google, jc penney, linkstar, matt cutts, new york times, SEO

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This will be the year of the hacker – or rather, the year hacking goes mainstream.

It’s been brewing for quite some time. According to McAfee, a team of Chinese hackers has been infiltrating computer networks for the world’s largest oil and gas companies. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that NASDAQ’s network was penetrated last year (though not the NASDAQ market – at least, as far as we know). And the ongoing battle between Anonymous and the folks who are aiming to take it down is really just heating up.

Before you fire up your email program or leap immediately to the comments to correct me: Yes, I know: hacker isn’t the right word for this. Hackers are not necessarily criminals or even evil doers. There are white hat, black hat, gray hat, and the occasional houndstooth hatted hackers. The appropriate word for people who attack computer systems for their own nefarious criminal purposes is ‘cracker.’ But to most people, a cracker is either something you spread cheese on or someone you try to avoid talking to at cocktail parties. These days everybody understands “hacker” – at least, the Hollywood version. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

And when hackers get tired of eating Doritos for dinner and have actual bills to pay, they grow up to be highly paid security consultants, who are then hired to do battle with their younger doppelgangers.

Case in point: The war between HBGary Federal, a security firm hired by the FBI to suss out who was behind the revenge attacks on assorted “enemies” of WikiLeaks, and Anonymous.

Last weekend, HBGary CEO Aaron Barr made the fatal mistake of bragging to the Financial Times about how his firm had managed to infiltrate the computers of leading members of Anonymous. Per the FT:

‘Of a few hundred participants in operations, only about 30 are steadily active, with 10 people who "are the most senior and co-ordinate and manage most of the decisions", Mr. Barr told the Financial Times. That team works together in private internet relay chat sessions, through e-mail and in Facebook groups. Mr. Barr said he had collected information on the core leaders, including many of their real names, and that they could be arrested if law enforcement had the same data.’

You’d think he’d know better. But no. Sure enough, HBGary’s servers got hacked and Barr’s Twitter account got hijacked by, yes, Anonymous. They posted Barr’s address, phone number, and Social Security Number on his Twitter feed, and sent out numerous taunting tweets on his behalf. They also hacked HBGary’s Web site and replaced it with this message, which reads in part:

“You have blindly charged into the Anonymous hive, a hive from which you’ve tried to steal honey. Did you think the bees would not defend it? Well here we are, You’ve angered the hive, and now you are being stung.”

Writing for CSO online, guest blogger Nick Selby sums up Barr’s boneheadedness:

‘I don’t know much about law enforcement, but I do think that, if you’re planning, say, to serve a felony warrant, it’s a bad idea to phone ahead and let the guy know you’ll be by in 15 minutes…. Criminals generally engage in criminal enterprises for the money (few people have a driving passion to establish, say, an industry-leading counterfeiting ring for the societal benefit), and those who stand between criminals and their goal risk the ire of the criminals. … Now, stating in a newspaper that you possess the secret identity of a criminal? This falls squarely into the category of "standing between a criminal and his goal." That’s a tip, kids. Write it down. To paraphrase Wendy in A Fish Called Wanda, one only briefs the public on an upcoming law enforcement action if one is congenitally insane or irretrievably stupid.’

Anonymous also published somewhere between 44,000 and 60,000 emails between HBGary and its corporate/government customers. And what was inside those emails was an eye opener.

It seems HBGary was working with Bank of America on a plan to take down WikiLeaks – and, strangely, CNN and Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald, whom it deemed instrumental to WikiLeaks’ continued existence, along with a handful of other prominent journalists.

HBGary was one of five firms allegedly involved in the discussion, along with law firm Hunton & Williams, data gathering firms Palantir and Berico, and consultants Booz Allen Hamilton. Business Insider published the slides this group prepared for BofA. It’s pretty chilling. To quote slide 5:

“Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH [hosting] transition…It is this level of support that needs to be disrupted. These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately if pushed most of them choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals. Without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks [sic] would fold.”

What do you suppose they meant by “pushed”? As in, over a cliff?

That presentation suggests strategies such as sowing dissension within the WikiLeaks org, disinformation (ie, submitting false documents to WikiLeaks in order to discredit it), cyberattacks against WikiLeaks’ service providers, a media smear campaign, and “using social media to profile and identify risky behavior of [WikiLeaks] employees.”

Does that last one sound like blackmail to you?

HBGary is trying to sell the idea that Anonymous falsified some of the documents, but I doubt anyone’s buying it. Palantir has already publicly apologized to Greenwald and severed its ties with HBGary, which suggests the information contained in that leak is accurate.

To recap: A massive US corporation is targeting whistleblowing Web sites and mainstream American journalists, with the help of several data/security/consulting firms with strong ties to the US government. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood summer blockbuster. It’s not.

So tell me: Who are the white hats and who are the black hats here?

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to get a lot more bumpy from here on out.

Does all this corporate hacking hack you off too? Vent your spleen below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.com.

Tags: anonymous, bank of america, hbgary, palantir, wikileaks

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AOL’s purchase of Arianna’s International House of Huffcakes earlier this week is sticking in my gullet, and no amount of ratswill coffee will wash it down.  I think it’s because this deal is emblematic of everything that has gone wrong with the Internet over the last three years.

(Then again, maybe I’ve just turned into one of those cranky old farts who hates everything. What do you think?)

It’s not just about AOL – never more than a bad joke in even the best of times – or The Huffington Post. It’s bigger than that. It’s about how the Web, and especially Google, rewards mediocrity. It’s what I like to call The Crappification of Everything ™.

The Web has become like television, where if a show is both good and popular it’s almost a happy accident. Mostly we get reality TV that’s cheap to produce and painful to watch yet still manages to attract lots of eyeballs. World’s Biggest Losers, indeed.

When HuffPo launched in 2005, it was unlike anything most of us had seen before. Even if you hated Arianna’s politics, you had to admit she’d found a niche — an oddball mix of actual writers and celebutantes, blogging about whatever floated their boat that particular day. It was often terrible. But it was also fresh and new.

What is the Huffington Post today? As I noted in my last post, it’s become the Wal-Mart of Web news – you’ll find the pork rinds next to the shotgun pellets and behind the lawn chairs.

What happened? Money happened. Ad dollars started rolling in, but only to a point. Arianna & Co. quickly realized the only way to boost ad revenue was to dramatically increase the volume of posts appearing on the site, and the only way to do that was to hire newbies and have them crank out high-speed rehashes of everything everyone else was reporting, with an emphasis on Google-friendly photo slide shows and celebrity gossip. Sure, the celebutantes and reporters were still there, blogging away for free, but their voices were drowned out by the cacaphony.

Arianna was simply following the old dot com mantra of Get Big Quick. Become the big fish that the little fish are afraid of. And she’s hardly the only one.

When TechCrunch first appeared, it was one dyspeptic ex-lawyer giving his candid opinions on Silicon Valley startups. It was something we hadn’t seen before – an inside look at how deals are evaluated and made – and it attracted a lot of attention and advertising revenue, despite the ego, pomposity and bombast.

But again, how many blog posts can one man write in a day? To boost revenue, TechCrunch staffed up and became a tech news/rumor/inneuendo site. And though it is still the first place VCers go to spill the beans about upcoming deals (most likely to benefit themselves and/or harm others), it too became another place where you could read about what other people were reporting about without having to open a new browser tab.

Again, fill in the blank. Mashable isn’t any better. I can’t think of a blog from the 2005 to 2006 era that got big and yet maintained the quality that made it worth reading back then.

But try telling that to Google. Because these blogs developed a devoted audience early, they became Google gold. Looking for breaking news? Unless it’s from an established source like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, you probably won’t find the site where that story originally appeared. But you will find it in its reconstituted, just-add-water-and-stir form on one of these news aggregator sites. Because they’re the ones with the Google juice. They’re the ones that ride the top of Google News like Kelly Slater on the Banzai Pipeline.  And the bigger they become, the more juice they acquire.

Of course, advertising on the Web is still dirt cheap, relatively speaking. Nobody’s dining at Del Monico’s on what a banner ad brings in. The only make to make this model work was to create editorial sweatshops (or, like L’Arianna, get people to write simply for the “prestige” of appearing on HuffPo). Thus the emergence of word factories like Examiner.com, Demand Media, Associated Content, etc,  churning out just the worst dreck humanly imaginable for pennies a story. They too, soak up a lot of Google juice, just from sheer volume and SEO trickery.

I’m not the only person saying this. Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo and Weblogs Inc (bought by AOL back in 2005), says the same thing, and he should know because at one time he was one of those who was doing it. His money quote: “We are polluting the Internet.”

My prediction: By the end of this year, all of the big traffic blogs will be owned by corporate conglomerates. Like Coke and Pepsi, they won’t be competing on who tastes better or is more nutritious, they’ll be competing on who’s better at marketing crap – or, in this case, tweaking Google.

Google blogger Matt Cutts, who’s become the unofficial voice of the company now that creepy Uncle Eric has departed, wrote last month about trying to muscle out sites “with shallow or low quality content” from Google search results. Good luck with that, Matt. When every site on the Web is a content farm, what will be left to sort out?

Will we be able to stop Internet pollution? And if not, will the last real Web blog please turn in their pajamas? Post your thoughts on this below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.com.

Tags: aol, arianna huffington, huffington post, huffpo

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It seems Facebook, the social network personally endorsed by God, is now worth more than eBay, Yahoo, and Time Warner — all without selling a single share to Joe or Jane Public.

The reason: Wall Street uber-bank Goldman Sachs, which just pumped another $450 million in venture capital into Facebook, leading to a valuation estimated at a cool $50 billion.

You remember Goldman Sachs, right?

The ones who received billions in US taxpayer bailout money and promptly issued billions of dollars in bonuses to employees? 

The ones who admitting to bamboozling investors with worthless subprime mortgage funds in 2007 and ended up paying record fines of $550 million — a fraction of the profits accrued?

The ones in $2000 Armani suits who make the Mafia look like Mouseketeers?

Those guys. They’re the ones Facebook jumped in bed with. So if Goldman Sachs says Facebook’s worth $50 billion, how can we mere mortals dispute that?

Also sleeping with Facebook: Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment firm that is largely responsible for foisting Zynga (aka Farmville etc) upon the world. They dropped another $50 mill into Facebook’s pockets, making their total investment in the company around half a billion dollars.

DST is allegedly controlled by a Russian oligarch and Putin pal named Alisher Usmanov, who is described thusly by Gawker:

Usmanov… who reportedly owns 32 percent of DST, comes with the sort of unsavory press clippings worthy of a long-surviving oligarch in anarchic, organized-crime-ridden Russia: He’s been accused by a former British ambassador of being a "gangster and racketeer" and of close ties to mafia drug trafficking and, as we’ve reported previously, controversially tried to censor bloggers who linked to news of the accusations.

How do you feel about sharing all your personal information with Facebook now?

According to the New York Times Dealbook blog, the investment gives GS the inside track on bringing Facebook public, if and when it ever decides to do an IPO. In the meantime, GS is creating a "special purpose" investment vehicle for millionaires who want to get in on the bottom floor before the elevator is officially open to the public.

(Hmm, that sounds eerily familiar. Wasn’t that subprime mortgage vehicle — the one GS sold as a Ferrari but turned out to be a jalopy — also a special purpose investment?)

To wit:

As part of the deal, Goldman is expected to raise as much as $1.5 billion from investors for Facebook at the $50 billion valuation, people involved in the discussions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the transaction was not supposed to be made public until the fund-raising had been completed.

In a rare move, Goldman is planning to create a “special purpose vehicle” to allow its high-net-worth clients to invest in Facebook, these people said. While the S.E.C. requires companies with more than 499 investors to disclose their financial results to the public, Goldman’s proposed special purpose vehicle may be able get around such a rule because it would be managed by Goldman and considered just one investor, even though it could conceivably be pooling investments from thousands of clients.

It is unclear whether the S.E.C. will look favorably upon the arrangement.

So Goldman Sachs and Facebook are hoping to receive most of the benefits of public stock ownership (buckets of money), with none of those nasty disclosure requirements — like whether the company actually makes money, or if key executives are leaving, directors are dumping their shares, or the company has been sued for anything that could severely impact its bottom line. 

In other words, Facebook wants you to share all of your secrets, but politely declines to share its own. And if you dig too closely into its investors, you may end up accidentally falling out of a window, or possibly an airplane.

Facebook isn’t the only company playing fast and loose with the notion of "public." The SEC is apparently investigating the trading of private shares in hot Net companies like Twitter, Zynga, and LinkedIn. But Facebook is the great blue whale in this fish tank.

I am not a stock broker or a securities lawyer (thank God). But if someone out there in Cringeville can explain to me how this isn’t illegal, I’d love to hear it.

I’m not saying Facebook isn’t the greatest thing since individually wrapped slices of American cheese. But the notion that it’s worth more than companies listed above without ever demonstrating to the world how much dosh those little 125-by-125 ads bring in, well, is pretty cheesy in itself.

And the pedigrees of its two closest friends make me a little green around the gills. Just sayin’.

Do you trust Facebook more or less after you know who they’re in bed with? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Tags: digital sky technologies, Facebook, goldman sachs, russian mafia

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As I write this there are but a few hours left of 2010, which I believe will be remembered as the year Facebook became the dominant force on the InterWebs, supplanting even mighty Google in its reach and depth.

What will happen in 2011? Beats me. But that won’t stop me from offering up some predictions. Because it’s cheap, easy, and nobody remembers when you get stuff wrong.

Here are ten things that will almost certainly happen to the world of social media in 2011. Remember, you read them here first (unless they’re totally wrong, in which case you read them on TechCrunch).

1. News Corp will finally find someone willing to take MySpace — sorry, My_____ — off its hands. The asking price: $5.  The buyer? Aol. of course. They will promptly change its name to My_____!

2. My____’s core user group of convenience store employees, adult entertainers, and recent parolees will leave and establish their own social network called MyTrailerPark. It will become wildly popular.

3. Facebook will surpass 700 million members. A Pew Internet and American Life Survey conducted next spring will conclude that Facebook is now more 36 percent popular than sex, and 78 percent more popular than sex with Mark Zuckerberg.

4. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss will finally give up their legal fight to own a chunk of Facebook and instead launch a reality TV show about the the lives of overprivileged chisel-jawed twins who are also Olympic class rowers. Mark Zuckerberg will promptly steal that idea and do a much better job at promoting it.

5. Google will finally launch GoogleMe, its post-Orkut social network. Bloggers will use the phrase "Facebook killer" to describe it 10,827,326 times. Nine months later no one will remember what GoogleMe is.

6. Twitter will announce an IPO in 2011. Would-be stockholders will be allowed to bid for shares via tweets. The share price will reach a high of $173 before a Fail Whale appears and brings the entire NASDAQ exchange to a screeching halt. Twitter will close the year trading for exactly 140 cents a share.

7. The US Congress will finally pass a law regulating the privacy of our personal information. It will be so watered down by lobbyists for online advertisers and the data brokerage industry that we will actually be worse off than we were before.

8. Yahoo! will reorganize itself again, and again, and one more time before the end of 2011, selling off more assets and laying off more employees each time. Eventually, the company parking lot will be empty save for the cars of Carol Bartz and her personal masseuse. You got a #@&!! problem with that?

9. WikiLeaks will launch a social network for people with absolutely no sense of personal boundaries whatsoever. No one will bother to friend Julian Assange.

10. Mashable will publish a list of ten blogs you absolutely must read in order to be truly in the know about social networks. This one won’t be among them.

ITworld TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan still sniggers every time he hears the name "Winklevoss." May you enjoy a safe, happy, and social new year. Read even more of this silliness at eSarcasm (Geek Humor Gone Wild) or follow him on Twitter:@tynan_on_tech.

This post originally appeared on ITworld.

Tags: Facebook, Google, myspace, predictions, Twitter, yahoo

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As 2010 draws to a close, that can only mean one thing: Bloggers conjuring up predictions lists so they can take a few days off around the holidays. Here in Cringeville things are much the same, but with one key difference: unlike other prognosticators, I’m totally unencumbered by facts. That tends to make my accuracy much higher.

Here’s what’s going to happen next year. You can bank on it.

Apple will unveil new iPads, iPhones, and iWhatevers, instantly making all of our lives more magical and revolutionary. The face of Steve Jobs will be seen on a tortilla; the holy bread product will later be donated to the Computer History Museum in San Jose.

Apple will apply for, and be granted, a patent on tortillas featuring the face of Steve Jobs.

Google will unveil its long-awaited social networking offering, GoogleMe. It will immediately inspire a massive kerfuffle over some stupid breach of user privacy that could have easily been avoided if only Google engineers left the Googleplex every once in a while and went to see a movie or something. The company will quietly shut down its Facebook killer 24 months later, except for the Portugeuse language version, which will inexplicably thrive.

In a speech, Google CEO Eric Schmidt will declare that the new Chrome OS will be able to actually read your mind through your keyboard. He says Google will only use this information to anonymously serve advertising to your cerebral cortex.

Steve Ballmer will declare that the ability to read peoples minds through their keyboards has been present in Microsoft operating systems since Win 98; it turns out people really do want their computers to freeze up repeatedly and run more slowly over time.

The population of Facebook members will surpass India’s by late 2011. It will then apply to the UN for nation state status but will be rejected when a majority of the governing body’s members fail to click "Like" on its application.

Facebook will not announce an IPO (Initial Public Offering). Mark Zuckerberg, however, will enjoy an ISE (Initial Shaving Experience).

Google Android will surpass the RIM Blackberry and Apple iOS to become the most popular smartphone platform on the planet. Google will also announce new tweaks to the base OS that extend an Android device’s battery life to an entire hour.

Question-and-answer-based social network Quora will become the Twitter of 2011. The most popular question asked on Quora will be, What the frak is Quora?

Yahoo will not be acquired by Microsoft. No one besides Carol Bartz will care.

Skype, Pandora, Tumblr, Groupon, Twitter, and Angry Birds will all announce IPOs, signaling the birth of a new irrationally exuberant Internet bubble. Time Warner will again allow itself to be acquired by AOL for a ludicrous sum.

The collective forces of Anonymous & 4chan will stop harrassing enemies of WikiLeaks and go after China in an attempt to tear down the Great Firewall. The Internet as we know it will cease to exist.

What do you think will happen in 2011? Post your predictions below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Tags: predictions, totally fact free

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I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been suffering a failure to communicate — and it comes from having too many ways to do it. Tweets. Facebook updates. Emails to six different accounts. Skype chats. Google voice. Text messages. Sometimes I even manage to talk to people. But mostly the efforts of the world to reach me pile up unread and unresponded to, because it’s too much damned work to keep up with them all.

Part of that problem is that I need to use different tools (or sites) to get at each type of communication. Thus we come to todays topic in TY4NS: a cool new "social CRM" tool called Nimble.

Started by Jon Ferrara, one of the brains behind GoldMine — the original 1980s power PIM and the forerunner to today’s Customer Relationship Management software suites — Nimble picks up where GoldMine left off those many years ago. Back then, contact management was all about email addresses and phone numbers. Today it’s all about Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, and LinkedIn resumes (as well as email addresses and phone numbers).

So this is what Nimble does: It gives you one-stop shopping for all your social contact needs — essentially, one Web site to rule them all. 

I got an early look at a private beta of Nimble, which is set to launch publicly next month. Right now it offers the ability to get your Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn feeds inside one universal inbox, as well as manage all of those contacts from one location. Later on it will add support for other services such as Skype, Ferrara says.

Better yet, you can take one contact from, say, your Twitter posse, and merge it with their Facebook or LinkedIn persona in one contact record — then view all of their social activities on one screen.

Anything you do in Nimble is automatically transferred to those services. So if you read or delete a Gmail message in Nimble, it’s marked as read or deleted in Gmail. You can update your Facebook and Twitter status directly from Nimble, or retweet nice things other people say about you (assuming they say nice things). You can Like things and comment on Facebook posts.

You can do the same with Google Calendar. Enter an appointment in Nimble, invite some guests from your contacts list; and it’s there in Google when you look for it.

However, I did say Nimble was still beta. As I write this, the site isn’t ready for prime time just yet. For example, I had problems importing all of my contacts into Nimble. Linked In and Twitter, no sweat. Facebook and Gmail … sweat. Also: Creating new appointments and exporting them to Google Calendar worked great. Importing existing appointments from Google to Nimble, not so much.

Ferrara says some of this has to do with limits placed on the services’ application programming interfaces; their APIs are deliberately throttled to prevent being overrun by requests. Some of it has to do with the fact that Nimble is still a work in progress.

Ultimately Nimble will be aimed at workgroups, so you can use it to not only manage contacts but also assign tasks and manage them as well. At that point it will likely be a paid service, similar to Salesforce.com. But individuals will always be able to use it for free, says Ferrara.

And then, maybe, I’ll finally get to all those messages that have been piling up on me. Possibly before the end of the next decade.

ITworld TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan is not ignoring you, really — he’s just still going through his unread email from 2007. Catch his brand of juvenile snark at eSarcasm (Geek Humor Gone Wild) or follow him on Twitter:@tynan_on_tech.

This post originally appeared on ITworld.

Tags: nimle, social CRM

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It’s been quite a year. And in what has become a tradition here in Cringeville, it’s time to honor the most malicious, obnoxious, offensive, or nonsensical behavior in technology. This year’s winners include captains of industry, titans of technology, sultans of sweat, and a number of other people desperately in need of a clue.

Among this year’s award winners: Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, and the CIA. Without further ado, I give you the 2010 Moonie Award winners:

1. I pity your grotesque ignorance on the topic but feel strangely compelled to respond anyway award. Goes to none other than Steve Jobs, who became a one-stop-email-response shop for iPhone developers miffed over being dropped from the App Store, customers complaining about iPhone 4 reception problems, would-be journalism students complaining about Apple’s less-than-responsive media team (join the club), journalist-bloggers with an axe to grind, and yes, even readers of this blog. You get the feeling maybe he’s just lonely?

2. We love our customers, but email our CEO and we’ll sue your ass award. Is presented to AT&T and its benevolent dictator Randall Stephenson. After receiving two polite emails from a ticked-off AT&T user (is there any other kind?), Stephenson’s executive team left the user a voice mail containing threats of legal action if the user didn’t back off. Naturally, customer Giorgio Galante posted the voice mail recording to his blog, Engadget published a story about it, and AT&T was once again revealed as complete and utter tools.

3. Best use of a reality distortion field not by Steve Jobs award. This year’s winner has to be Steve Ballmer, who seems to be increasingly operating in a parallel universe inside his own imagination. At various times during 2010 he called the Apple iPad “just another PC,” welcomed Google to “the world of competition,” and said Windows Phone 7 is “early” to the smartphone market. Also, when the big comet comes in 2012 to destroy the earth and spirit away the chosen people, it’s making a special stop at Redmond just to pick him up.

4. We stole your content, now you get to pay us for the privilege award. Goes to Judith Griggs, erstwhile editor of Cooks Source magazine, who managed to tick off the entire Internet at once by making the dubious claim everything published online was in “the public domain,” and then sending a snotty email to a writer who complained, saying that the writer should be paying her for the time she spent “improving” the original piece. Cooks Source magazine is now dead, and Judith is looking for work. I hear Bojangles Fried Chicken is looking for fry cooks.

5. ‘Do it to me one more time, I can never get enough’ award. Is presented to file swappin’ mama Jammie Thomas-Rassett, who keeps fighting the RIAA and losing worse each time. Having walked away from a $54,000 judgement (and a $25,000 settlement offer), Thomas-Rassett is now on the hook for $1.5 million – at least until the next trial concludes.

6. Half an hour later we feel much less self-righteous award. Is honorably presented to Google for its swift aboutface on China this year. It seems Google just can’t stay mad at those crazy commie-capitalists, despite the hack attacks and the censorship. When you control the world’s largest untapped market for digital advertising, even the world’s biggest search engine apparently feels the need to bow.

7. Worst six-word speech uttered in 2010. There were many stupid things said and caught on video this year, but the award goes to ex-BP CEO Tony Hayward’s “I would like my life back.” Hayward did ultimately manage to get his life back (though not his job); the 11 humans and thousands of animals killed by the worst environmental disaster in the history of the planet weren’t so lucky.

8. Don’t look now, but half of your corporate logo is missing award. This year’s hands-down winner is MySpace, which adopted a fill-in-the-blank approach to its new corporate identity, My_____. (My “space” — get it?) Given the once-mighty social network’s complete capitulation to Facebook this year, a blank logo seems wholly appropriate.

9. I really wish we’d brought more paper towels and possibly a squeegee award. Is bestowed upon everybody’s favorite 26-year-old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. Zucky perspired so much during an interview with All Things D’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher last June that it became a story unto itself. In addition to surpassing Steve Jobs on the list of American billionaires, little Zucker also supplanted Steve Ballmer for the title of World’s Sweatiest Geek. I understand he’s planning to come out with a new pro-perspirant called Zuck For Men.

10. Best repurposing of an obscene chat acronym by a US Federal agency. Though it’s facing stiff competition from some truly amusing acronyms (ASSBAG, anyone?) the CIA’s newly formed WikiLeaks Task Force – or WTF for short – takes the prize. And I bet you thought spooks had no sense of humor.

Who are your award winners for 2010? Post them below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld, much to their embarassment.

Tags: Apple, AT&T, china, cooks source, Google, Jammie Thomas, judith griggs, riaa, Steve Jobs

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Remember when Google could do no wrong? Those days now feel like ancient history.

I think 2010 will be remembered for a handful of really big stories, including the rise of tablets, the dominance of Facebook, and the emergence of a fifth column of Web troublemakers who can no longer be ignored, from Anonymous/4chan to WikiLeaks.

But it will also be remembered as the year Google proved that not only did it have feet of clay, it had also stepped into something really nasty, and more than once.

Consider if you will the following examples:

China.  Remember that principled stand Google took on China back in January? About how it would have to "review the feasibility of [its] business operations in China" after Chinese agents hacked into its accounts, and how it refused to do business with repressive regimes that censor search results? Fast forward to July, when Google announces "We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China." Turns out that those business operations were more feasible than they originally thought. In fact, Google came up with 1.3 billion reasons why Chinese censorship wasn’t so bad after all.

The Nexus One. Screw the telecoms and intercourse the iPhone. Google was going to both create a groovier and completely open smart phone and kill the telecom’s stranglehold over the handset market by selling the Nexus One direct to consumers. The problem? Google had no clue how to sell directly to consumers. In fact, it turns out they were kind of lousy at it. So within six months Google’s Nexus One store was taking a dirtnap. So far it hasn’t been missed.

WiFi spying. Google would never ever spy on its customers. Certainly the Googlers believed that. Then it turns out that Google Street View vans were slurping up data off open WiFi networks all around the world. Oops. The fallout from that one — class action suits, government penalties, etc — is still coming. The worst part: Google was doing this without even realizing it. What other data is Google hoovering up that it — and on one else — yet realizes?

Google Wave. Announced with great fanfare in May 2009 as the Next Big Thing in unified communications, mixing email with group scheduling, chat, project management, and ballroom dancing. (I made that last one up — did you notice?) Closed with a whimper in August 2010. The problem? Most mere mortals had no clue what Wave was or how to use it. In other words, Google was unable to communicate what its great communications tool was supposed to accomplish.

Google TV. They were finally going to bring the power of the InterWebs to the world’s couch potatos in a way people could actually use. But content providers balked at handing over the goods, and early reviews of the products were less than lavish. Now products have missed the holiday rush and Google is asking display and settop makers not to demo Google TVs at CES in January until the software is more advanced. Can you say Must Flee TV?

Meanwhile, whenever Eric Schmidt opens his mouth to make another pronouncement about what Google knows about us, he frightens the children and makes even their parents want to crawl under their beds. Consider this chilling statement Schmidt made at the last Mobile World Congress in February:

“These networks are now so pervasive that we can literally know everything if we want to. What people are doing, what people care about, information that’s monitored, we can literally know it if we want to, and if people want us to know it."

No wonder then, that the forces opposing Google are massing for a counter attack. Expect the "Google is a monopoly that must be stopped" rhetoric to ramp up significantly in 2011. Especially now that Google is in the process of gaining regulatory approval for its purchase of ITA Software, maker of software used by flight search engines — a move opposed by everyone in the online travel biz who isn’t Google, including Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft is complaining about the Google monopoly. It has really come to that.

And Google has no one to blame but itself.

What in your humble opinion is the worst Google gaffe? Post it below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Tags: evil, Google

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I know, I know: Some out there will say merely using Facebook is a mistake. This blog post isn’t for you — feel free to move along to the comment forums on OldGuysWhoSmellLikeAsparagus.com. As for the rest of you, take heed.

I’m using Facebook as the primary example here, but the many of the same rules apply to Twitter, Mypace, and the 3,247 other social networks out there. If you can, try to avoid the following social network faux pas:

1. Using your account strictly for promotional purposes. Yeah, we know, people do this on Twitter all the time (and we secretly hate them for it). But if you only use Facebook to drive people to your site/article/cause du jour, you’ll find yourself being quietly unfriended as well as ignored. Make at least half your posts personal and your peeps will find the promos more palatable.

2. Getting too personal. Did we really need to hear the intimate details of your latest Jagermeister jag or see photos of your recent colonscopy? We think not. And neither will your prospective employers (45 percent check out Facebook accounts before hiring, per Career Builder), college admissions officers (10 percent, per Kaplan), or potential mates. Remember these three letters: TMI.

3. Drunken commenting. You’ve had a few pops, so you log onto Facebook and begin leaving comments on people’s photos and posts. They seem absolutely hilarious at the time, but in the cold hangover light of morning you just look like an ass. May I recommend the Social Media Sobriety Test?

4. Falling for the "I’m an old friend you haven’t seen in 20 years and I’m stranded in London could you please wire me money" scam. Amazingly, the London Scam actually works. It happens when the fraudster hijacks your old friend’s account and then uses it to send out desperate (and convincing) pleas for help. A friend of mine was targeted by this scam and almost bit; a woman in Missouri did bite and found her wallet $4000 lighter.

5. Slagging on your boss, co-workers friends, or significant other. Listen, we all got gripes. But in the meatspace they tend to dissipate over time; on Facebook they’re forever, or as close to it as the digital world generally gets. They may fall harmlessly into the digisphere or they may come back to cause you a world of pain — there’s just no way to know.

6. Being duped by malware. These are typically spread via outrageously titled wall posts like "Justin Bieber just got erection in public" or  "Distracting beach babes." Curiosity gets the better of you and you click on the link. Instead of a video of Justin’s engorged manhood or bouncing bikini Betties, you get a bad case of Koobface or some other socially borne malware. Worse, that post now becomes part of your wall, tempting your friends to click. If  it’s too outrageous or salacious to be believed, assume it’s malware and move on.

7.  Logging in from a free public WiFi hotspot. First, there’s the question whether that "Free Public WiFi" network really is a free hotspot generously provided for your use by some benevolent business establishment, or in reality an "evil twin" honeypot that’s out to capture your information. And even if the hotspot is legit, because Facebook uses an insecure sign on protocol, your user name and password could be stolen by anyone sniffing the WiFi network (or by using Firesheep, a program designed to specifically target log-in cookies for popular social networks). Use the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s free HTTPS Everywhere plug in for Firefox to force sites to use encrypted connections.

8. Friending people because their profile pictures are hot. I have never done this. I swear. All those bikini models in my friends list are just there because I’m deeply interested in South Florida culture. What’s the downside? Best case: You get inundated with the most banal updates and/or spammy self promotion you can imagine. Worst case: They turn out to be bait for some scammer trying to socially engineer information out of you.

9. Clicking ads inside Facebook Platform games. Because you really don’t know what information those Facegames are sharing with advertisers, despite what they may claim.

10. Accepting Facebook’s default privacy settings. You can make your public profile almost negligible, thanks to Facebook’s enhanced privacy settings. But Facebook wants and needs you to share your data with the world for its ad model to work, so its default settings are still pretty generous with your information. Take my advice: Go as private as you can and let the others take the heat.

ITworld TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan has broken at least half these rules at one point or another (and there’s still plenty of time for the other half). Catch his brand of juvenile snark at eSarcasm (Geek Humor Gone Wild) or follow him on Twitter: @tynan_on_tech.

This post originally appeared on ITworld, god love em.

Tags: Facebook, mistakes, Privacy, scams

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You may have been too busy having a life this weekend to notice but, the number one movie in the nation right now is the tale of an uber-nerd.

The Social Network, David Fincher’s much-hyped film about the origins of Facebook, hit theaters this weekend to rave reviews (though if you spend most of your waking hours on the InterWebs you might think otherwise). It’s already raked in $23 million at the box office, or about the amount Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has grown in the last hour.

Full Disclosure: I too saw The Social Network this weekend (it’s my yob, mang) and I liked it. I give it a solid thumbs up for making the process of starting up an Internet leviathan– and getting your assets sued in the process — a lot sexier than it probably really is.

The Social Network is clearly a highly fictionalized treatment of Facebook’s origins, and in a weird way it makes me feel sorry for Mark Zuckerberg, something I didn’t think was possible. Yes, he is portrayed as a supreme anus (am I giving too much away here?) but it’s almost like he can’t help it — the same disease that makes him brilliant also makes him socially pathetic.

And, in case you’re wondering — plot spoiler alert — Zuckerberg did create Facebook primarily to meet chicks. Aside from one scene that takes place in the bathroom stall at a frat party, it’s not entirely clear that strategy worked. (Yes, I know in real life he has a fiance, but I’m talking about the movie here.)

Interestingly, what people think of the film depends a lot on how old they are, says the New York Times’ David Carr. He writes:

Many older people will watch the movie… and see a cautionary tale about a callous young man who betrays friends, partners and principles as he hacks his way to lucre and fame. But many in the generation who grew up in a world that Mr. Zuckerberg helped invent will applaud someone who saw his chance and seized it with both hands, mostly by placing them on the keyboard and coding something that no one else had.

Count me in among the old coots. And could you please hand me my cane? I have to go to the bathroom (again).

And though Roger Ebert calls it "splendidly well made" and Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers names it "movie of the year," it’s not all roses and chocolates from those who carry more sympathy for Facebook and its founder.

Jose Antonio Vargas, who wrote a puff piece about Zuckerberg for The New Yorker last month, slams the movie in The Huffington Post for making Zucky look like a developmentally challenged one-dimensional freak.

…it’s a movie that, at its core, stands on one glaring false premise: Zuckerberg as a flat-eyed, borderline autistic, humorless guy, a consummate outsider who wanted badly to get into one of Harvard’s "final" clubs, his considerable coding skills reduced to social awkwardness… Zuckerberg is presented as an alien from a faraway computer programming space, instead of a leading member of an entrepreneurial generation who’s grown up with the Internet and now tops Vanity Fair’s ranking of the New Establishment, ahead of Steve Jobs, the Google guys and Rupert Murdoch.

I’m sure the Mark Z. one encounters in real life is more human and likeable than the one portrayed on screen by Jesse Eisenberg. On the other hand, I’ve watched video interviews with the man, and Cary Grant he ain’t. No normal human not wrapped in wool blankets inside a Native American sweat lodge perspires as much as Zucky did on stage at D8 last June.

Even when he’s attempting to convince the world he means well — as in his Washington Post op-ed defending Facebook’s changes to its privacy policies last May, which surely was massaged to a Kobe beef-like tenderness pre-publication by Facebook’s team of PR lackeys — he comes off as snotty and condescending.

BuzzMachine bloviator Jeff Jarvis takes the film as a personal insult against the culture of the InterWebs (then again, that’s pretty much how he takes everything):

The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn’t like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds.

Except that the film doesn’t condemn the Internet or even Facebook — it just makes Zuckerberg (and his digitally-hip wingman/mentor Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake) look like tools. Given what we know about what did happen with the origins of Facebook — the non Hollywood version — I think that’s probably a fair assessment. Nobody gets that rich and powerful by being a nice guy, or a nice geek. 

Are you planning to see The Social Network? And if you already have, what did you think? Post your reviews below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post appeared in slightly different form at InfoWorld.

Tags: aaron sorkin, dvid fincher, Facebook, the social network, zuckerberg, zucky

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Tap, tap, tap.

I’m sorry, could you please speak up? the Federal employees playing monkey in the middle on our Skype call couldn’t quite make out what you were saying.

In case you missed the headlines in the New York Times this morning, or all the me-too stories in the blogosphere cranked to varying degrees of hysteria, Uncle Sam is angling to wiretap the Internet — or, at least, expand its ability to get at things like VoIP calls and encrypted emails. Per the Times report:

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

I’ll pause now while you work up a frothy head of righteous indignation. Ready? Alrighty then.

This is nothing new, by the way. The Feds have been trying to find a way to snoop on Internet communications since the Clinton administration. In fact, this story has revived the whole mid-90s debate over the proposed "Clipper chip," a backdoor that would be built into communication devices allowing the FBI and any other spooks with a legal excuse to tap into encrypted conversations. That idea eventually got shot down, as the Feds found other ways to eavedrop on the bad guys.

C|Net’s Declan McCullagh reminds us of some of the Feds’  sneakier workarounds in days gone by: 

Police can obtain a special warrant allowing them to sneak into someone’s house or office, install keystroke-logging software, and record passphrases. The Drug Enforcement Agency adopted this technique in a case where suspects used PGP and the encrypted Web e-mail service Hushmail.com. And the FBI did the same thing in an investigation of an alleged PGP-using mobster named Nicodemo Scarfo.

Another option is to send the suspect spyware, which documents obtained by CNET through the Freedom of Information Act last year showed the FBI has done in cases involving extortionists, database-deleting hackers, child molesters, and hitmen. The FBI’s spyware is called CIPAV, for Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier.

What’s different here is that the Obama administration is pushing this — despite campaign promises to enhance and expand our digital privacy. Among other things, Obama vowed to

"Strengthen privacy protections for the digital age and …harness the power of technology to hold government and business accountable for violations of personal privacy….[and support] updating surveillance laws and ensuring that law enforcement investigations and intelligence-gathering relating to U.S. citizens are done only under the rule of law."

The argument for expanded wiretapping is simple: If you and I can Skype each other in private, so can the terrorists and the mob. And, of course, government authorities would only tap into communications with proper court authorization, and would only target potential terrorist/criminals.

We saw how well that worked with the last administration and those warantless wiretaps. (Later, when it turns out that the courts didn’t authorize the taps and the targets weren’t always terror-iminals, Congress will somehow find a way to retro-actively legalize it, regardless of who’s in power.) 

Theoretically, at least, it seems perfectly reasonable to allow law enforcement authorities the same access to Net communications that they’ve had for plain-old-telephone service since J. Edgar Hoover was still wearing pleated skirts and knee socks.

In practical terms, though, this could turn out to be a nightmare from which we never awake. Because, unlike the closed phone system, we’re talking about the open Internet. And though the phone system could be hacked in its day (that is, after all, where hacking originated), it’s a whole ‘nother animal than the InterWebs. Sure, there was some freelance wiretapping going on, but not at the level you’d see today — whether we’re talking organized criminals in Eastern Europe, South American scam artists, or Chinese cyber spies.

If the Feds can sneak in through the back door via these types of communications, so can the bad guys. In fact, the bad guys will probably get there first and have enough time to tidy up the place and bake cookies.

Making our VoIP calls and encrypted communications less secure for the bad guys makes it less secure for the rest of us, too. Is the risk worth it? That’s what you, me and our elected officials need to figure out.

I think, though, that discussing what "digital privacy" truly means is a good thing. It’s a conversation that’s long overdue — and the more geeks we get involved in this discussion, the better it will be. The question is whether we can talk about it free from the partisan rancor that’s poisoned public debate for the last decade.

Should the Feds be free to tap the Net? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Snoopy Uncle Sam image found on Visibility 9-11

Tags: bush administration, CALEA, clinton administration, clipper chip, eavesdropping, fbi, feds, Obama, warrantless wiretapping, wiretaps

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God I love the InterWebs.

Years from now, scholars dissecting the complete disintegration of journalism in the 21st centure will look back at us and say, what the frak?

The example du jour: The Facebook Phone rumors, which were sparked this past weekend by TechCrunch and continue to burn.

If you believe what you read on the Web, Facebook is coming out with a phone. Unless of course it isn’t. If you think about it, a Facebook phone makes absolutely perfect sense — except for when it doesn’t. Facebook denies the whole thing, which means of course it’s lying. And a Facebook-centric phone would be cool, if you temporarily forget that Facebook apps are already on every smart phone known to mankind, and phones built around social networking have been around for over a year.

No, the details of a Facebook-built phone are less interesting to me than how this story perfectly illustrates the 10-step life cycle of a Net-borne rumor, circa 2010.

It goes something like this:

1. Facebook has a phone (TechCrunch). Never mind that the site offers no details, proof, or sources beyond some anonymous biped "who has knowledge of the project." All this meme requires are the words "Facebook phone" and we’re off to the races.

2. Is Facebook building a phone? (Everyone else). Translation: We’re not sure we actually believe this (we are talking about TechCrunch, after all) but if don’t run with this story we’re screwed, so we’re covering our asses by phrasing it as a question replete with heavy doses of skepticism.

3. Fictitious features leaked. The next wave of bloggers provide the details the original report lacked. For example: The Facebook phone will run the Android operating system. Hey, it’s a safe bet. What else would it run — the Apple OS? Symbian? Windows Mobile? The best part: It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong, because who’s gonna go back and check?

4. Early photos of Facebook phone leaked. Regardless of whether the phone exists beyond the fevered imagination of some anonymous source, somebody somewhere will dig up pictures of the alleged handset — or, even better, claim to have obtained one from a shadowy source.

(For example: Those clowns at eSarcasm claim to have unearthed a Facebook phone via circumstance not entirely unlike that of Engadget getting its hands on an early iPhone 4, only substitute a Palo Alto public restroom for a San Jose hofbrau. Given that the ‘face-fone’ bears more than a passing resemblence to a V-Tech Handy Manny toy cell phone, we suspect they’re just taking the piss, as the Brits say.)

5. Why the world needs a Facebook phone. These bloggers missed the whole "Facebook is building a phone" rush because it happened on a weekend while they were off having a life, so they’re trying to make up for it with an analytical story that discusses the many reasons why a Facebook phone would make sense.

6. Why the world doesn’t need a Facebook phone. These guys saw the last run of analytical pieces and wanted to jump in the water before it got too cold. It’s a weak play, but at this point it’s all they got. 

7. Facebook issues denials. Facebook’s PR department finally checks its Google alerts and sees storm clouds rising over the blogosphere, then issues a bland but comprehensive denial which it emails to major news outlets and gradually seeds across the Net, inciting another round of posts.

8. Facebook’s denial is further proof that it is making a phone. Now we’re back to TechCrunch again, defending its original story. If the author is Arrington (and it is), the response will include name calling and personal attacks on Facebook’s PR team.

To be fair to TechCrunch, this cycle played itself out in much the same way around a "Google phone," last winter. And sure enough, the Nexus One appeared shortly thereafter — though it didn’t quite turn out to be the earth-shattering event those blogs predicted. So it’s possible that will happen here as well.

9. Facebook vs the blogosphere.  Here’s the classic he said/she said spitting match between the blogs and the alleged phone maker, which is good for yet another round of posts. Because if Facebook were indeed making a phone, of course they would deny it. And if they weren’t making a phone, they’d also deny it. So when your odds are 50/50, you might as well go with the juicier story. Right?

10. What should a Facebook look like? These bloggers get to ignore the whole question of whether this story is true and dive straight into fantasy, which is always fun because it requires much less research. You pretty much empty your brain into Wordpress until you hit the magic 400-word minimum Google News requires and click "Publish." This is blogging at its finest.

And I guess I should add an 11th: Analysis of the whole rumor cycle, which so far includes this blog post.

We’re now living in the golden age of meta journalism, withthis post qualifying as meta-meta journalism. (Hey, I never meta journalist I didn’t like. Ba-dum-bump. Thank you, thank you very much. Please tip your waitresses.)

If Facebook were building its own phone (not that I’m saying it is), would you buy one? Share your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This story originally appeared in slightly different form on InfoWorld.

Tags: Facebook, facebook phone, facefone, mark zuckerberg, Michael Arrington, rumor mill, techcrunch

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The problem with the Internet these days? In a word: socialism.

No not that faux Obama socialism certain people like to rail against (because they’ve got to be PO’d about something). I’m talking about the real scourge of the net: social media.

Now, I use social media and I (mostly) like social media. I use Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in on a semi-regular basis. Sometimes a bit too semi-regular. (When my editor asks why a blog post is late I just tell him I’ve been drinking — I don’t want him to know I’ve really been wasting all my time on Facebook.) I’ve even dabbled a bit on MySpace, Friendfeed, Plurk, Bebo, etc. just to keep my hand in.

But I think I’ve hit social media overload, and I can’t believe I’m the only one. We’ve all gone off on a tweeting-updating-linking-liking bender, and it may be time for an intervention.

Just this week, Time.com published a story about a freak tornado hitting Brooklyn, complete with an amazing photo of the twister swirling perilously close to the Statue of Liberty. Time blogger Steven Jay Snyder found the photo via Twitter and breathlessly posted it to the Time NewsFeed ("What’s vital and viral on the Web, in real time").

Yes, a freak storm really did hit NYC this week. And yes, the photo was real. Unfortunately for Time.com, it was taken on July 7, 1976 — possibly spawned by that massive bicentennial fireworks display. One can safely assume that storm has passed.

How does a respected media site get duped like this? Because the pressure to publish first and ask questions later is overwhelming. The Web rewards speed over accuracy every single time, and Twitter updates are about as fast as it gets on the Net.

This is only going to get worse. Major media companies like Time Warner are carefully studying the effects of social media on which articles people read and the best ways to promote them, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (sorry, you’ll need a subscription to read the whole thing — don’t blame me, blame Rupert Murdoch).

Meanwhile, Google is getting ready to launch "Google Me," which will "add a social layer to your activity stream," whatever that means. (You can watch a video of Eric Schmidt talking about it on TechCrunch, but if you can divine more meaning from that exchange than I can, more power to ya.) Before long, everything you see on the InterWebs will be "social."

The idea, of course, is that you’re more likely to read stories your friends have recommended or follow links they’ve posted. And that might be true — if these people really were your friends, and not just random strangers who looked interesting (or hot), and you were tipsy at the time and decided ‘what-the-frak, I’ll send them a friend invitation.’

I admit it. I am a Facebook whore. I’ll follow almost anybody on Twitter as long they can spell reasonably well. I’ve lied on Linked In, making up tenuous connections to "colleagues" whose email addresses I’m too lazy to hunt down, just because I wanted that connection.

And 95 percent of the time, people respond with "yes, I’ll accept that connection, whoever you are." It’s called "promiscuous friending." What can I say? Guilty as charged, your honor.

I know I’m not alone here either. We’re all just lab rats in this big experiment being run by Google, Facebook, Twitter and everyone who wants to be Google, Facebook, or Twitter. And even they don’t know where this will all end up.

I am sure I will get comments from readers who say (as they always do) "I don’t use Facebook Twitter blah blah blah so this doesn’t matter to me." Guess what? It matters. Because even if you’ve never tweeted, Facebooked or Linked, decisions about the information you see on the Web are being made by the people who do.

Here’s what I want to know: When all media is social media, and your "friends" aren’t really your friends, who can you trust?

Do you trust anything you see on the Net? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This originally appeared in a slightly different form on InfoWorld.

Ridiculous Obama poster courtesy of The Debonair Dude’s World. Yes, really.

Tags: Facebook, Google, linked in, Obama, social media, socialism, time.com, Twitter

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Probably the last thing Craig Newmark ever imagined is that the little email list he started back in 1995 would one day be at the center of a controversy over prostitution, the First Amendment, and the future of the InterWebs. But now, 15 years later, Craigslist is in the thick of of a dispute over whether its ad service is aiding and abetting prostitution or an exercise in unbridled free speech.

The battle with Craigslist over its ads has been brewing for some time, thanks in part to highly publicized stories like the "Craigslist Killer" Philip Markoff, who killed one women and robbed two others who advertised massage services on the online classifieds site. (Though one has to wonder if Markoff had found identical ads in a newspaper whether anyone would have thought to call him, say, the Boston Globe Killer.)

But it really kicked into gear last year, when South Carolina state attorney general Henry McMaster made a stink, demanding Craigslist shut down its adult ads in his state. That resulting in an even stinkier response from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, which included a temporary restraining order against AG McMaster. They then proceeded to Indian leg wrestle over who owned the rights to the suffix "Master."

In May 2009, Craigslist compromised by kicking its Erotic Services category to the curb and creating a cleaner, more wholesome "Adult Services" category in its place. Craigslist also promised to monitor the ads more closely and to charge $10 per ad to keep out the riff raff and the spammers.

Fast forward to August 2010, when 17 state attorneys general collaborate on an open letter to Craiglist [PDF], asking it to drop its adult ads. The letter is a bit scant on proof of actual wrongdoing but makes up for it with extra helpings of dramatic rhetoric:  

We sincerely hope craigslist will finally hear the voices of the victims, women and children, who plead with you to make this important change. We, too, call on craigslist to listen and respond now by shutting down the Adult Services section of its website. Such action is the right thing to do to protect innocent woman and children.

Craigslist decision to slap a big black "censored" label over its adult services ad section last weekend could have been an attempt to comply with the AG’s demands, but more likely it was Craiglists’ way of saying "You want us to censor adult ads? Fine. Let’s just see what happens, shall we?"

There’s no question Craigslist’s promise to screen adult ads is essentially a joke, or putting that "censored" lavel over the Adult section has done nothing to remove these kinds of ads from the service. A simple search on the terms "escort," "exotic" or "adult" will prove both of those things (though you’ll have to wade through a fair number of ads for Ford Escorts, exotic animals, and adult swim lessons).

If you don’t let these people advertise in Adult, they’ll advertise the same services elsewhere — whether it’s personals, small business, or "skilled trade services." And, as Buckmaster has pointed out in numerous blog posts, they can certainly advertise just as easily outside of Craigslist — like in the local papers of those jurisdictions in the AG’s respective backyards, or on eBay’s classifieds. You don’t hear a lot about state AGs going after them.

There’s also no question that going after Craigslist in an election year is cheap political theater. It’s a heckovalot easier to write a strongly worded letter to Craigslist (followed by a press release) to grab headlines for being tough on prostitution without having to getting your hands dirty (by, say, actually being tough on prostitution).

Craigslist appears to be protected by the safe harbor provisions of the Communications Decency Act, which keeps Web sites free from being legally liable for the material other people post there. Yet state AG’s like Connecticutt’s Richard Blumenthal are calling for Congress to rewrite the CDA to their liking. Per The Hartford Courant:

Blumenthal criticized [the Communications Decency Act], saying it "dates from the earliest days of the Internet," and is now "completely outdated."

"I believe that the very broad immunity claimed by craigslist and other websites should be substantially reduced," Blumenthal said in an interview. "Congress should certainly modify or clarify the standard to cut back on the immunity that they claim is virtually absolute."

Blumenthal said websites such as craigslist should have the same legal status as newspapers that abet criminal activity — not blanket protection.

Imagine an Internet where every site was liable for every comment left by some halfwit. Imagine the damage you could do to a site you didn’t care for, or what could happen to political sites like Daily Kos or RedState. Most sites these days have their hands full just trying to fight comment spam, let alone trying to police content that might "abet criminal activity." If the safe harbor provisions of the CDA came down, they’d likely take vast numbers of Web sites with them.

If the states really were listening to "the voices of the victims, women and children" and wanted to crack down on prostitution, all they’d to do is have the cops call up a few advertisers on Craigslist and make appointments. After the advertisers solicited money for sex, arrest them. Once word got out that the police was cracking down on Craigslist advertisers, they’d stop advertising there. They’d move on to some other venue.

Because that’s all banning adult ads from Craigslist would do. It won’t solve the problem. It will just move it down the road a few blocks. Possibly long enough for the next round of elections to come and go. Otherwise, it changes nothing.

Should Craigslist ban adult ads, or should the state AGs focus on other things, like fighting actual crimes? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This originally appeared in a slightly different form on InfoWorld.

Tags: 17 state attorneys general, craigslist, craigslist ads, hookers, strippers

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