Tynan on Tech

As I noted earlier this week, Facebook just crested 500 million members, and it’s been pulling out all the stops to draw attention to that fact.

Mark Zuckerberg is making the TV rounds, talking to Diane Sawyer on ABC last night. Rumors swirl that a cartoon version of Zuckerberg may even appear on "The Simpsons" (wearing a hoodie, no doubt — but at least the sweat will be virtual).

[ See also: Should Facebook charge for privacy? ]

The social network is commemorating the milestone by publishing "Facebook Stories," a series of heartfelt vignettes from FB users the world over about how they reconnected with old friends and lovers, reconciled with family members, found their lost cats, etc, via the magic of Facebook — all told in the length of one status update (420 characters or less).

You can search the Stories page by theme (crime fighting, friendships, parenting, pets, etc) or via a slick Bing map interface that displays the location of each Story author. And, of course, you can add your own.  I have to say it’s beautifully done. Even I can’t find anything cynical to say about that, which should tell you something. As for privacy, well, if you choose to share this stuff, it’s your choice, right? That’s what privacy is all about.

But there are some stories Facebook doesn’t want to tell this week. Like whether Mark Zuckerberg really did sign a contract that gives 84 percent of his $25 billion baby to some obscure Web designer named Paul Ceglia. It’s clear Zucky signed something back in April 2003; whether that gives Ceglia the rights to most of Facebook seems rather dubious, but you never know what a court will decide. I’m betting Mr. Ceglia is going to walk away with a large check in his pocket when the dust has settled.

There are other stories. For the first time ever, the American Customer Satisfaction Index rated social media sites, and it published the results this week: Of the four sites surveyed, Wikipedia topped the list, garnering a rating of 77 (our of 100). YouTube was next (73), followed by Facebook (64) and MySpace (63). Per the ACSI’s survey partner, ForeSee Results:

"Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers… At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience. Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution."

Yes, people have an irrational love of Wikipedia. But landing just one point above MySpace? That’s gonna leave a mark.

And then there’s this story: As reported by Inside Facebook (and noted here previously), Facebook is actually losing members in the key 18 to 44 demographic. Yes, the same hoodie-wearing Gen X and Gen Y types who help create Facebook and built it into the juggernaut it is today are leaving the site behind.

Finally, the privacy angle. Per Inside Facebook again, one out of four women are uncomfortable with their privacy on Facebook, while four out of ten are neutral. So only about a third of women on Facebook like its privacy policies. And if hot chicks can’t fix Facebook, who can?

What’s your Facebook story? Post it below or email me: dan(at)dantynan(dot)com. I may use it in a future blog post (with your permission, of course).

ITworld TY4NS author Dan Tynan can usually be found tending his snark garden at eSarcasm (Geek Humor Gone Wild). Follow him on Twitter, if you dare: @tynan_on_tech.

This post originally appeared on ITworld.

Tags: Facebook, facebook stories, Privacy, The Simpsons, zuckerberg

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The inevitable anti-Apple backlash has begun. And I’ve got to say, it’s been mighty fun to watch.

Earlier this week Consumer Reports pulled its recommendation of the iPhone 4, after its tests determined there is indeed a problem with the phone’s external antenna. Even better, it’s called for Apple to recall all three million iPhone 4s out there and fix the problem — a solution that could cost between $900 million and $1.5 billion, depending on whose estimates you believe.

So Steve Jobs was right: You were holding it wrong. (Also, you’re using your mouse the wrong way. And they don’t like that tie you’re wearing, please change it.)

Instead of sucking it up, admitting there was a reception problem and offering to make amends, Apple tried to pull a stupid PR trick by claiming the problem was in how the phone displayed signal strength. Because, apparently, Apple believes we are all nitwits.

Honestly. What would it cost Apple to mail out free rubber "bumpers" to all its iPhone customers? About $45 million, per RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky — or a lot less than what it’s costing in bad PR right now. And if Apple had done that from the get go, we’d all be talking about something more interesting right now, like Lindsay Lohan or those Russian spies.

Of course, if you’ve got a little duct tape, just slap it on the lower left corner of the handset and you’re good to go. Or you could take this alternate route to a solution by dumping your Jesus Phone into the nearest circular receptacle and getting an Android phone.

InfoWorld’s Galen Grumman says the iPhone 4 reception problems could be Apple’s Waterloo, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the ABBA song. Now everyone else is piling on.

Once the golden boy of Wall Street, Apple share prices are dropping. Several lawsuits have been filed, alleging that Apple is selling a defective product.

Meanwhile, the iPhone4 vs HTC Evo video is climbing the YouTube charts, with 4.5 million views as I write this. This is a mock NSFW conversation between a big box employee and a dimwitted customer who just wants an iPhone and doesn’t know why. (For equal time, the same guys at Tinywatch Productions made an equally NSFW video about a stupid HTC Evo owner trying to get his phone fixed at an Apple Store.)

The videos gets pretty raunchy, languagewise (and the first one is about a minute too long), but they also cut to the heart of Apple’s success: They’ve made people crave their stuff without giving them a good reason why they really need it. 

Call that the Apple mystique. Call the iPhone 4 the Apple mistake.

There’s still time for Apple to recover its reputation, but it’s going to be expensive. And it will require something more painful than money: Apple will have to publicly admit it’s wrong.

Now that would make for a fascinating "special event."

Did Apple really screw up big time, or is this much ado over nothing? Cast your vote below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Image: iPhonebrand.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, iphone 4, jobs

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While it doesn’t quite rank up there with dumping 100’s of millions of gallons of crude oil into the ocean while your CEO goes yachting, Google’s huge WiFi spying "oops" may become the search giant’s BP moment.

To recap: Last month, Google admitted that its Street View vans — the camera-festooned vehicles that roam highways and byways to capture panoramas of every paved thoroughfare on the planet — were also slurping up data from unprotected WiFi networks. For three years. All around the globe. Without anyone (including Google) being aware of it.

The idea was to use open WiFi nets as location signposts for mobile users — they’re more accurate than cell towers and work better indoors than GPS. The idea was not to also capture data being transmitted along with the locations. But that’s what happened.

So Google’s data slurping was not intentional. It was, however, incredibly stupid, and probably illegal in many of the countries where Google operates. That may now include the US, if recent data collected by the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty proves accurate.

According to the French, Google may have captured user passwords and email along with the location information. I’m no lawyer, but that sounds like it could be enough to violate multiple state and Federal limits on surreptitious data gathering.

It’s certainly enough to prompt Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to announce a multi-state investigation into Google’s data collection habits. Hell hath no fury like a passel of state AGs in an election year, especially when their target isn’t part of their constituency. So don’t expect this to fade into obscurity any time before November.

Unlike, say, the millions of fish, birds, and unlucky humans who were victims of BP’s tragic ineptitude, nobody was physically harmed by Google’s mistake. We’re not even sure they were virtually harmed. And in this case the victims were at least partially to blame — they left their networks wide open, though they’ve certainly got a lot of company.

(And for that, you can also dump a bucket of blame on the makers of WiFi routers, who could do a lot more to make their products easier for people to use. In this age of Twitter and Facebook and iPhones, should we really expect consumers to punch 192.168.x.x into their browsers’ URL windows and navigate a ridiculously arcane control panel? Hello?)

But what this incident does is shine a hot white light on all the other data Google has been scooping up about all of us since it started in a Menlo Park garage back in 1998. Petabytes’ worth of data, in almost every conceivable form — Web searches, calendars, email, shopping transactions, status updates, etc — and, soon, the shows we watch via Google TV. It’s too much data in the hands of one company; one we are all now painfully aware doesn’t even know what kinds of data it’s been collecting.

Google doesn’t have to be evil for people to mistrust it. It just has to be too greedy. It’s been there for a while. Wifi-spygate is driving that point home to the millions of users who haven’t been paying close attention before now.

That’s bad news for Google, but good news for the rest of us. A big public smack-down may be the only thing that can quell, if not entirely quench, Google’s insatiable thirst for data.

Can Google be trusted? Should WiFi makers require users to password protect their routers? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld (and after that, Lord only knows).

Tags: BP, Google, google street view, Gulf of mexico, Oil Spill, wifi, wifi spying

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It’s like a Hollywood thriller. A military spy is arrested, betrayed by someone he thought to be a comrade in arms — a brilliant yet mentally unstable hacker. A journalist is on the run, hunted by the authorities who want to know what he knows. All we need is to add a love interest and get Matt Damon attached, and I think we can get this greenlit. (When I get through with this blog post I’m going to have my agent call Spielberg and set up a lunch.)

But first, the back story.

Last April whistle-blower site WikiLeaks published a disturbing video of a 2007 US military attack in Baghdad in which a dozen civilians were killed. It also published a confidential DoD report that enumerated several ways US intelligence agents could put WikiLeaks out of business, which I wrote about here last March. That report discussed the possibility of the WikiLeaks source being an employee of the US military. Turns out it was right.

Those documents, as well as some potentially far more serious ones, appear to have come from a single source: US Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who was arrested earlier this month for espionage and is being held right now in a Kuwait prison.

We know this thanks to Wired News’ Kim Zetter and Kevin Poulson, who reported on Manning’s identity last week. Thanks to Wired we also know who turned Manning in: legendary hacker Adrian Lamo.

Lamo became famous for breaking into the New York Times’ network back in 2002. (He also broke into Yahoo News and posted fake stories there.) He got caught and cut a deal with the Feds to avoid doing time. Last month, Wired revealed that Lamo has Asberger’s Syndrome, which would account for his extraordinary hacking abilities and apparent lack of social skills, and which may have played a role in how he acted here.

Needing someone to talk to (or maybe just wanting to brag), Manning approached Lamo a few weeks ago, thinking he had found a kindred spirit. After Manning told Lamo he’d stolen 260,000 confidential State Department cables and sent them to WikiLeaks, Lamo contacted the authorities. He then spent more time chatting with Manning online, trying to draw information out of him at the request of the Feds.

Now Lamo is receiving death threats (and a lot of media attention) for revealing a source, even though he’s not a reporter. His reason? He felt Manning posed a serious threat to US security.

WikiLeaks spokes-human Julian Assange has canceled several public appearances in the US, fearing that he will be detained. (I think he’s probably right.) But he’s also using this incident to raise funds for the struggling organization. Yesterday he sent out an email that read in part:

WikiLeaks a small organization going through enormous growth and operating in an adverserial, [sic] high-security environment which can make communication time consuming and the acquisition of new staff and volunteers, also difficult since they require high levels of trust.

To try and deal with our growth and the current difficult situation, we want to get you to work together with our other supporters to set up a "Friends of WikiLeaks" group in your area. We have multiple supporters in most countries and would like to see them be a strong and independent force.

This episode raises all kinds of questions, none of which have very clear, satisfying answers.

Is Manning a true whistleblower or an ordinary spy? Is he closer to Daniel Ellsberg or to the Falcon and the Snowman’s Christopher TK? It seems from this vantage point he started out as Ellsberg and ended up more like TK.

Does Julian Assange have those 260K cables Manning claimed to have sent him? So far Assange has only issued some vague denials via Twitter. Can he please stop being so damned coy about it and just tell us?

Was Adrian Lamo right in flipping on Manning? Did his Asberger’s play a part in that?

Was Wired right in revealing the alleged source of these leaks? Journalists are supposed to protect the confidentiality of sources. Though Manning was not one of its own sources, Lamo was. Apparently he and former-hacker-turned-reporter Poulsen are friends. Did Lamo understand that he was putting himself in jeopardy by talking to Poulsen and not securing an agreement to keep his identity secret? Did Poulsen take advantage of Lamo’s condition to get him to reveal this information?

It’s a hot sticky mess any way you look at it. And once again WikiLeaks and how it operates are called into question.

As I’ve said before: In an age where news gathering organizations are either being pared to the bone or sucked into the maw of corporate conglomerates, WikiLeaks serves an extremely useful purpose. It’s a cheap, easily accessible, hard-to-squelch outlet for news that powerful people don’t want you to hear.

But it’s also ripe for manipulation. And the material it handles on a daily basis requires the ultimate in editorial judgment and discretion, something we have not always seen from WikiLeaks. If Assange had 260K confidential cables in his possession, and some of those cables would put US operatives in mortal peril, would he withhold that info? That’s a question only WikiLeaks and Assange can answer. And so far, he isn’t talking.

Hopefully we’ll get answers to at least some of these questions, before Hollywood steps in and sugar coats everything.

UPDATE: After this post originally appeared, I got an email from Adrian Lamo. Here it is in full, reprinted with his permission:

You have a number of questions that could be answered by contacting me. I politely request that you consider doing so via my publicly-available contact details in the future – and if you did & I was somehow unreachable, I retract this & apologize.

I would suggest that Manning is neither a whistleblower nor a spy (although he may be guilty of espionage, which is a different animal in some circles.) I was aware that KLP had little interest in keeping my identity secret.

Whether I was right is not for me to globally judge (though I believe I did the right thing, which is also a different animal. Yes, I’m splitting that hair mighty thin.)

Poulsen knows I’ve been around the block a couple dozen times, and I’ve been a bona-fide confidential source, albeit never for Poulsen. I don’t feel taken advantage of. If I was pressured, it was up to me to exercise my right & ability to resist.

I object to your characterization of Asperger’s as a "disability" – it’s more-often described as a "syndrome" or "condition" in psychiatric circles, and in a less pejorative fashion to boot.

I know Poulsen isn’t my friend. We don’t socialize. We don’t go clubbing. He’s the most highly ethical journalist I know. If I were unaware that he considers me a source, not a friend, I’d be taken advantage of. I am however quite aware of this.

The government – and this is important – never asked me to be a source for them in the Manning case, in terms of eliciting information in furtherance of prosecution. This request would be improper, and I would decline in the interests of justice.

Consider it done. Also, to clarify: It would be great to be able to reach everyone I blog about here before I write about them. I agree that’s a better way to go. And if I did that, I might manage to post one a week, maybe. Because this blog is mostly opinion mixed with snark, not straight reporting, I usually don’t attempt to contact sources first; in this case, I did not attempt to reach Lamo, with whom I have corresponded in the past. In hindsight that probably would have been a better idea.

What do you think? Who’s the hero, who’s evil, and who will play them in the movie? Weigh in below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne courtesy of anomalous material.

Tags: adrian lamo, bradley manning, julian assange, kevin poulsen, wikileaks

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Getting a chance to bash AT&T twice in two weeks is like getting to hit a pinata filled with $100 bills. Hand me the stick and stand back, boys.

Last week I wrote about AT&T’s parsimonious data plan (all-you-can-eat is dead, Jim) and its chowder-headed attempt to silence an angry customer who sent CEO Randall Stephenson two mildly angry emails by threatening to send him a cease and desist letter. On voice mail. Which the customer promptly posted on Tumblr for all the world to hear.

This week of course, there’s the iSpill. A few days ago Gawker reported that hackers working at Goatse Security (more on them in a minute) had managed to steal the email addresses of 114,000 iPad owners via a flaw in AT&T’s Web site. The blog equivalent of a Level 5 hurricane erupted.

Gawker called it "Apple’s worst security breach… expos[ing] the most exclusive email list on the planet."  Even the Feds are investigating.

Before I go any further, let me do some disclosure. I’m an AT&T survivor. Last January I ditched Ma Bell’s twisted little offspring after more than two miserable years. About five seconds after my contract was up I was gone, never to return. Because when I make a phone call, I really like to be able to hear what the other person is saying, and vice versa. I’m just funny that way. So every opportunity for payback is something I relish.

That’s why it pains me to say the following: the iSpill was not actually that bad — and even security eggheads like Sophos’ Graham Cluley agree with me. It’s certainly not as bad as Gawker and all the sites that rehashed its report made it sound. Though it’s never good when your service provider just coughs up your email address on demand to a crew of hackers, it’s not exactly BPgate; this is not the Deepwater Horizon of data spills.

Here’s what happened, as I understand it. Like many Web sites, AT&T’s iPad portal was set up to automatically recognize data plan subscribers and fill in the first half of their log on — their email address. No big deal. But to identify these users, AT&T relied upon the unique 20-digit code assigned to the SIM card inside the iPad, a number that was also used in the URL of their landing page.

So the bright boys at Goatse, who judging by their names and their Web site all appear to be between 14 and 18 years old, began bombarding the AT&T site with URL requests featuring random 20-digit codes. When they hit a match, the site spit out an email address, which Goatse collected.

I’m guessing Goatse continued to do this until they ran out of 20-digit numbers or simply got bored. They then trotted this information out to the media — using the email addresses of iPad-owning journalists they’d weaseled out of AT&T as bait — in an attempt to get coverage. Apparently, Gawker bit first.

Here’s the deal. Spammers do this kind of thing all the time. It’s called a "brute force" attack (or sometimes a "dictionary" attack), during which a bot repeatedly pings a corporate email server with random email addresses, discards those that bounce, and collects the ones that are legitimate. You can visit a spammers’ forum and download a program that will do this for you for $20, if not totally free.

The difference? Goatse got two more pieces of information than most spammers collect: that 20-digit ID (fairly useless, unless you’re doing a brute force attack on a Web site) and the fact these people, like 2 million others, own an iPad. I’m not seeing huge damage potential here. Am I missing something?

Goatse (and Gawker) also made a big deal over the fact that many of the email addresses belonged to people in the White House, US Military, NASA and major corporations, as well as celebrities like Diane Sawyer and Michael Bloomberg.

And it’s true, an especially devious scammer could use this information to target an individual with bogus emails — what’s known as ’spear phishing’ — in an attempt to get him or her to give up passwords or other valuable information.

But you really don’t need AT&T’s help here either. Many of these same organizations put their employees’ email addresses on their Web sites. Even if they don’t, it’s pretty simple to guess what someone’s email address is, once you know their domain. There are only so many ways it’s done — tyan@, dtynan@, dan_tynan@, dan.tynan@, tynand@, or if they’re a teensy company and he’s their first employee, dan@. That’s about it. So you could launch your own brute force attack, one name at a time, if you really wanted to.

AT&T has since turned off that feature that spit out your email address when you log on. And that’s probably where the matter should end. Should AT&T be spanked for this? Sure. But we’re a long way from data Armageddon. Google’s egregious WiFi data snooping and even Facebook’s plans to butter your personal information all over the InterWebs are far worse, in my opinion.

Too bad. Because I was really looking forward to whacking AT&T one more time.

Can any company be trusted with your data? Who do you trust? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Tags: Apple, AT&T, data leaks, hackers, ipad

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Today of course is the first day of the Apple World Wide Developers Conference — another Steve Jobs love fest during which he gets trots out the latest life-altering technology for his fanboys to drool over.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about yesterday’s New York Times Web site, which has an entire series of articles about how technology is rewiring our brains, and not in a good way.

Apparently technology overload ruins your ability to concentrate and causes you to repeat yourself. It also ruins your ability to concentrate and causes you to repeat yourself.

I think I read that somewhere.

The more technology you consume, the more you multitask, the more gadgets you own and use, the more email/facebook/Twitter/text messages you manage, and the more you multitask, the more your brain begins to resemble a finely aged hunk of Swiss cheese. Or so says The Times.

All I can say is, thank God. I thought it was all that Lemon Pledge I’d huffed in college. Instead, it’s information/gizmo overload. In other words, my brain problems are something I might be able to file a Worker’s Comp claim for.

According to the Times:

In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

Fascinating, no? Hang on a sec while I tweet that out to my peeps. Hey, I’m the 66th person to recommend this story. And it looks like I have a few new Direct Messages. Did you know you could make thousands of dollars of passive income on Twitter in your spare time? I want me some of that.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

I’m not sure what the rest of that article said because there was a link inside to a game that tested how good I am at ignoring distractions by showing me a bunch of blue and red rectangles. I was doing pretty well at it until I noticed another test for how fast I am at juggling tasks. This one showed me a letter and a number side by side, then asked whether the letter I just saw was a vowel or consonant, or if the number was odd or even.

I was doing OK on that one until my cell phone started buzzing. I didn’t recognize the number so I listened in as the caller left me a voice mail. Yep, another PR drone calling to see if I’d received their press release. Good thing I didn’t waste any time on that.

Admittedly, I often feel like that guy in Memento (what was his name?) who had no short-term memory at all and survived by tattooing important information on parts of his body. Which explains why I woke up to find “Milk, eggs, light bulbs” written on my thigh this morning. At least, I hope it does.

Back to the Times article:

A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

So while your brain is trying to get that Boeing 737 into the air (drive to work), Bruce Willis has sprinted onto the runway (new text messages) and is trying to wrestle it to the ground (fender bender).

At least, that’s what I think it was saying. The rest of that paragraph was continued on page three of that story, and I never read past page two.

Another link on that page leads to an article that likens tech addiction to food disorders:

The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use.

Which explains why every time I read Mashable or TechCrunch I immediately feel like puking. I must be infobulemic.

I didn’t finish that article either. However, I did click a link to a graphic that lists some of the warning signs that you’re hooked on tech. Among them:

* You always check your email before doing anything else

* You try to hide how long you’ve been online

* You choose to spend time online instead of going out with others

* You weigh 400 pounds and live in your parents’ basement

OK, I made that last one up. But the other three – well, that’s not me, but I have this really good friend, and boy does he have a problem. You have to pry the keyboard out of his hands with a spatula.

Incidentally, while I’ve been writing this, 132 of my Facebook friends have “Liked” the same New York Times article. And three of these people I’ve actually met. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Hmm, I feel like there was something else I wanted to talk about but forgot. Oh well, it’ll come to me eventually.

How has tech overload affected you? Post your tales of digital despair below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This originally appeared on InfoWorld, I think.

Brain on Tech image original found here.

Tags: brain, new york times, tech

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I recently had an experience that epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Microsoft, and why it is rapidly being tossed into the Recycling Bin of history.

I have a Vista laptop and, as I’ve recently learned, I am powerless over it. (Just saying that makes me feel like I should belong to a 12-step group. But I digress.) A few months back Vista went completely into the toilet and I had to restore it, using my Gateway notebook’s Recovery with Automatic Data Backup option.

That actually worked. Vista ran again, though fitfully. And the reason it was so fitful is because that data backup soaked up nearly half of my notebook’s 80GB hard drive. Essentially I now had two complete copies of everything, giving me precious little left over for data or Vista’s insatiable appetite for cached memory.

After a few weeks I couldn’t take the slug-like pace of my laptop anymore and decided to delete the backup, which consisted mostly of programs I didn’t use anymore and a complete copy of Windows Vista.

Deleting my unused programs was easy. Deleting Vista, or any part that came with it like Internet Explorer or Windows Calendar or Windows Defender, was impossible.

My machine would cycle through 20GB worth of files in my backup Windows folder, and then after 15 minutes would conclude “You do not have permission to perform this action.” Would I like to retry? Sure. Only the same thing happened – time after time.

I had administrative rights over this laptop. I am its only user. But that wasn’t good enough for Microsoft. I still could not be trusted to not do something totally stupid, even though I knew it wasn’t totally stupid and I’d paid for the laptop.

Surely, I thought, this is some kind of bug. But no. A search on the “you do not have permission” phrase turned up entries on various (and mostly useless) Microsoft support forums proving this was a feature. Microsoft did this on purpose. 

Now, it is possible to regain permission to control files on the laptop that I nominally own. However, the process for granting myself permission to delete files, and then the power to have “total control” over them, is completely and utterly insane – requiring trips to the Command prompt and a string of DOS-like commands I haven’t used since Windows 3.0 was a puppy, followed by reboots and multiple jaunts between various tabs on the Windows Explorer Properties Security Advanced dialog box. 

I will spare both you and me the agony of repeating the ugly details. But you can find some of them here.

After getting no help from Microsoft’s online “support,” I sent out a plea for help on Twitter. My prayers were answered by old friend and ZDnet blogger Ed Bott, who took time out of working on his upcoming book (Microsoft Office 2010 Inside Out, due out this August) to guide me through the thicket. It only took four hours before I could finally hit “Delete” and actually delete something. Glory be.

Now Ed is a lot friendlier to Microsoft than I am. He’s written a dozen or so books for Microsoft Press, and I think you should buy them all. (Do it now – I’ll wait.) He blames Gateway for assigning this level of security to a Windows backup. Me, I blame Microsoft for inventing this insane process in the first place

This is Microsoft in a nutshell. Its biggest problem is that the people who work there think like engineers. And engineers tend to divide the world into two camps:  a) other engineers, and 2) people too stupid to be trusted. So everything in Windows is either maddeningly condescending and repetitive or completely incomprehensible. There is no middle ground. And Vista, with its User Account Controls and arcane permissions process, is the ultimate expression of that.

Now Apple, by contrast, has plenty of engineers. But the company doesn’t think like one. It thinks like Steve Jobs, who more than any CEO on the planet has an innate feel for what people will respond to. Google has plenty of engineers too, and while it can get pretty geeky, it also understands what people want: speed and simplicity, above all.

That’s why the future belongs to Apple and Google, and why Microsoft is dead. Oh sure, Microsoft will dominate desktops and enterprise software for years to come. But it’s lost the race for the mobile space, which as a market encompasses everything that isn’t the desktop or a desktop substitute, like a notebook. In other words, the other 90 percent. Even if Ballmer falls in some kind of internal coup d’etat (one can always hope), it will never dominate any new market again. It’s finished. 

Me, I find hope in that. How about you?

Do you think it’s time to stick a fork into Microsoft? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Photo of ponytailed dude expressing his opinion about Microsoft courtesy of Gadgetsteria.

Tags: Apple, ballmer, Google, Microsoft, Redmond

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When you’re a social network with tens of millions of users and you’ve got the attention of the US Congress, that’s almost never a good thing. And so it goes with Facebook and its naked attempt to become the central repository of consumer preferences on the Web (see "What’s to like about Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button?").

That bit of news is not sitting well with four US Senators, who have called for Facebook to roll back some of its recent changes to how it shares your information with the world.

Among the changes Facebook recently made is that even more of your information is now publicly accessible to anyone — such as your current city, hometown, education, work, likes, interests, and friends. The pages that you "Like" become part of your public profile, accessible to anyone else who views the pages you’ve "Liked," even if you don’t know them from Adam.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kurt Opsahl notes, Facebook introduced this concept using the innocuous topic of "cooking." Who wouldn’t want to be known as a fan of cooking? Unfortunately, the same rules apply to more controversial pages you might also like:

"Previously, you could list "cooking" as an activity you liked on your profile, but your name would not be added to any formal "Cooking" page. (Under the old system, you could become a "fan" of cooking if you wanted). But now, the new Cooking page will publicly display all of the millions of people who list cooking as an activity.

"Cooking is not very controversial or privacy-sensitive, and thus makes for a good example from Facebook’s perspective. Who would want to conceal their interest in cooking? Of course, the new program will also create public lists for controversial issues, such as an interest in abortion rights, gay marriage, marijuana, tea parties and so on."

You might well want to tell the world you’re an unrepentant tea bagger or that you rock your afternoons with a spliff and the Bob Marley channel on Pandora. Or you might just want to share that info with a few select friends and leave the other 400 million Facebookers out of it. No can do, compadre. The way Facebook is set up now, it’s all or nothing, in or out. You share everything with the world, or you share nothing at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I use Facebook all the time. And I probably share too much about myself. But that doesn’t mean you should.

It also irks me that we’re being told these changes to Facebook are somehow beneficial to us. I don’t see it. It’s very clear to me how sharing more information about our preferences benefits Facebook; it allows them to create larger, more targeted ad campaigns and make more money. How they benefit anyone else is a mystery.

Then there’s this lovely quote from Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications, marketing and public policy for Facebook. In response to a reporter’s question, Schrage said the following, which I’m guessing he’ll soon regret:

"Facebook is all about sharing information," he said. "Sharing information is, at some level, antithetical to secrecy, antithetical to the idea of privacy. We believe that we bridge the divide between sharing and privacy through the vehicle of [user] control."

So, in case you missed it: Facebook = sharing information = antithetical to privacy. Just so we’re clear.

Dear Mr. Schrage:

Just because I share some information does not mean I give up my right to keep other information private. I share many opinions and many of the goofy things I write, often with near or total strangers. But there are things I don’t share with these people — like, say, my social security number, my medical history, or that really embarrassing thing that happened to me in 4th grade. The way Facebook is set up now, though, my "user control" consists of either sharing everything or nothing — and, oh, by the way, the default is to share everything. Thanks for that.

I predict Facebook is going to have to back down yet again, in Beacon-style fashion, from this scheme. It can’t happen soon enough.

No, Dan Tynan will not reveal that embarrassing thing that happened to him in grade school, even if you do offer him $5,000 and an Apple iPad. But he will embarrass himself in countless ways on his geek humor site, eSarcasm.

This post originally appeared on ITworld.

Facebook graphic from KPAO (a blog, not a radio station, apparently).

Tags: Facebook, Privacy, thank you for not sharing

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What do you do when one of your employees takes your company’s top-secret prototype and leave it behind in a beer garden, only to have it end up in the hands of a gadget blog? Call in the authorities and let them play the heavy.

The whole Gizmodo iPhone prototype story just got a whole lot stranger after a team of high-tech police investigators broke into Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen’s home last Friday night and hauled off an impressive array of equipment — including three MacBooks, an iPad, a ThinkPad, a Dell machine, two digital cameras, two cell phones, five external drives, a home server, business cards, and a letter from Gizmodo’s chief counsel claiming their search warrant was invalid — allegedly relating to the "theft" of that iPhone.

This all began some time last month, when unlucky Apple engineer Gray Powell left the Gourmet Haus Staudt in Redwood City with apparently a nice buzz but not the fourth- generation iPhone model he was carrying in his pocket.

According to Wired’s Evan Hansen, the as-yet-unnamed individual (let’s just call him "John Phoe") who found the lost iPhone made some effort to attempt to reconnect it with its rightful owner (or as close as he could come to it). To wit:

The finder attempted to notify Apple and find the owner of the device but failed, even going so far as to search alphabetically through Facebook, the source said. Thoughts then turned to contacting the press about the device to confirm its authenticity and help locate the owner, but early attempts to drum up interest went unanswered. After a few days with no response, the finder expanded the search.

From there, though, the details get a bit murky. Allegedly John Phoe emailed Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired.com, and possibly others seeking to "confirm [the phone's] authenticity and help find the owner," but that email also contained "a thinly veiled request for money," per Wired.

To their credit, Engadget and Wired declined the offer (though Engadget still ran photos of the device, sent to them along with that email, in an attempt to scoop arch-rival Gizmodo — so don’t give them too much credit). Gizmodo took the bait, wrote a check for $5,000, posted the story, basked in millions of page views, and then returned the phone to Apple.

Apple could have dropped the matter right there. According to that report in Wired, they already knew the location of John Phoe — probably via the model’s Find my iPhone feature — and had sent people to his house, though they didn’t actually speak to him. So there was no need to call in the cops to unmask the leaker, if that’s what Apple wanted.

But Apple didn’t drop the matter. According to the San Jose Business Journal, Apple officials called the local DA and requested an investigation. Why? Because Apple wants to send a message. They’re not looking to quietly punish transgressors; they’re looking for a public execution.

This is totally in line with Apple’s attempts to squash leak-happy blogs AppleInsider, PowerPage, and Think Secret back in 2004 and 2005; only this time, actual felonies may be involved, so they don’t have to file a civil suit.

Everybody in this one looks bad.

Gizmodo doesn’t come off smelling like roses. First, checkbook journalism is considered one of the slimier forms of the art. Second, there was no reason for the site to out the identity of the poor guy who lost the phone. It was both gratuitous and amateurish (or, in other words, absolutely in keeping with how Nick Denton has run his Gawker blogging empire).

Third: Gizmodo claims it’s protected by California laws that shield journalists from being forced to reveal their sources. Unfortunately for them, such laws tend to be moot when it comes to criminal cases — and purchasing an item from a person whom you know is not the rightful owner is a felony.

According to Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Jennifer Granick, the cops blew it by obtaining a warrant to search Chen’s apartment instead of a subpoena. The latter is required under Federal and state laws when questioning journalists, so media organizations can challenge the order in front of a judge before the source materials are confiscated. Do these laws still apply in a criminal case? That’s unclear.

"John Phoe," of course, blew it by demanding cash for a gadget he clearly did not own. The smart play would have been to offer his story to Gizmodo for $5000 — take the thing apart, snap photos, write up his conclusions, possibly under the guidance of a professional gadget monger — and then return the lost device to Apple. There’s no law against that, as far as I know.

And then there’s Apple. No doubt they felt wronged when news of their new iPhone slipped out into public. But it’s not like it’s going to have a negative effect on sales, or reveal some ground-breaking technology its competitors will steal. (They’re already plenty busy trying to imitate Apple.)

As I speculated, at first this whole affair sounded like a clever marketing ploy to get attention for a product that might not otherwise have received the usual fawning adulation from an Apple-saturated media. Now it’s been in the headlines for weeks. So how did they get harmed, exactly?

The sporting thing would have been to acknowledge defeat and move on. But doing the sporting thing is not Steve Jobs’ way. Does this just further Apple’s reputation as a bully? Yes. Does Steve Jobs care? Hell no. Like Hebrew National, he answers only to a higher authority. And even then, I’m not entirely sure who’s giving the orders.

Who would you throw the book at in this courtroom drama? Present your verdict below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This originally appeared on InfoWorld. Yes, I am way behind with posting these suckers. Sigh.

Tags: chen, fawing adulation, gizmodo, iphone 4g, law

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Have you heard the news? Passing Net Neutrality rules will result in the loss of 340,000 jobs in the broadband industry and up to 1.5 million jobs overall by 2020. And if you don’t believe it, I have a fancy-schmancy report that says as much right here. Per IDG News’ Grant Gross:

If the FCC adopts the net neutrality rules it is now considering, close to 1.5 million jobs across the U.S. economy could be put in jeopardy by 2020, and revenue growth in the broadband industry would slow by about one-sixth during that time frame, said the study, by Coleman Bazelon, a telecom economist with The Brattle Group.

Bazelon predicted that spending in the broadband industry would decrease by US$5 billion in 2011 if the FCC passes formal net neutrality rules, with the number growing in subsequent years.

Who paid for this report? A telecom lobbying firm called Mobile Future, which sports a weird hodge-podge of member organizations, including Alligator Planet, Climate Cartoons, Goomzee, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. But the most recognizable name on the list is AT&T. Color me surprised.

You can tell the report is going to be a bit slanted when it declares US broadband "a success story," parroting the same lines Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg put out a few weeks ago and conveniently ignoring multiple reports that conclude US broadband is a) slower on average than that of more than a dozen other developed nations, while b) being more expensive.

It gets worse. That 23-page report [PDF], filled with impressive-looking charts and dire projections, is based entirely on a single assumption: Regulating US telecoms in the late 1990s and early 2000s hurt them to the tune of about 15 percent per year, relative to the cable companies. That’s it; that’s the source from whence all of Bazelon’s projections spring.

What exactly was this onerous government regulation? It was a requirement, written into the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that the Baby Bells had to open their Central Offices to competitors like Covad and Northpoint who wanted to provide high-speed Internet access over the Bells’ own copper lines. (Which Congress passed in part because the Bells were dragging their heels bringing broadband to the masses).

Not that they did this willingly. In fact, the Bells seemed to do everything in their power to avoid complying. In 1999 and 2000, Covad filed anti-trust suits against Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) and Bellsouth (now part of AT&T) for practices relating to this.

There are many reasons why DSL languished compared to cable in the early years of broadband. Delivering DSL over copper lines involves more variables and more barriers — including a customer’s proximity to a central office, the quality of their phone service, the amount of non-DSL-compatible fiber in the ground, and the Baby Bells’ own bureaucratic intransigence. This process was widely known as "DSL Hell," and it’s why the DSL Reports site was created and continues to flourish.

In any case, government regulation wasn’t the problem; the Bells’ refusal to comply with regulation was the problem. Extrapolating from that situation to Net Neutrality is like taking laws regulating manure production by draft horses to make projections about the future of the space shuttle.

Meanwhile, Brett Glass, who for many years had a popular column in InfoWorld (and now runs a small ISP in Wyoming), begs to differ with me on several key issues around Net Neutrality.

His main point: Net Neutrality rules as currently written are not actually neutral. They benefit Google in particular, because it owns its own backbone, and thus can prioritize and manage its own traffic at will, free from any government constraint.

Glass has published his own set of Net principles (which to my mind aren’t that much different than the FCC’s). They include the notions that freedom of speech should be guaranteed and anti-competitive behavior by network providers prohibited, but ISPs should be free to manage traffic as they see fit — including banning bandwidth-hogging P2P networks. He writes:

"In any event, the key point to make about "network neutrality" is that it’s really a battle of the titans: Google against all ISPs. And the stakes are huge: small, competitive ISPs such as the one that I am now operating wouldn’t be able to survive under those regulations. I’d have to sell (if I could) or die. And my customers would be very disappointed if I did either."

There’s lots more to say on this topic, but I’ve exhausted this space for now. Several Cringesters wrote me detailed, highly cogent emails on this subject, which I’ll get to in a future post.

Bottom line: If we could trust network providers to self regulate and play by the rules, that would be a better way to go than government regulation. But history tells us we cannot.

Got another point of view on Net Neutrality? Lay it on me below or shoot me an email: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared at InfoWorld.

Tags: AT&T, covad, mobile future, Net Neutrality, politics, verizon

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Have Apple and Steve Jobs gone too far? I asked this question in a blog post last week ("Steve Jobs vs. the world").

Since then, Apple rejected an app from Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore, only to rescind the rejection after a media outcry. In an email to a Apple customer, Steve Jobs threw a zinger at Google, suggesting that users who wanted porn on the iPhone might just want to adopt Android instead. (The wags at eSarcasm immediately started a "Yes, Steve, I want porn" viral campaign.) Today, Adobe threw in the towel, saying it would abandon its efforts to port Flash apps to the iPhone if Apple was going to reject its technology outright.

Not surprisingly, I got a ton of mail on this issue, both pro and con — too many to share at one time. But here are some of the best.

Reader R. V. calls Steve Jobs a "pugnacious, fanatical little nerd" and is calling for Apple’s board to oust him. (As if.) He writes:

Apple/Steve are incredibly monopolistic and controlling. More than Microsoft ever was.  Apple now controls everything that goes on the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, for the most part.  Totally locked in.  Never in the history of personal computing have things been this controlled.  Even content is being censored in the digital magazine space (Apple rejected Maxim recently).  The irony is the company that espoused freedom of thought and expression has turned into big brother.

B. S. (no jokes please) takes exception to Apple’s dissing of Adobe Flash: 

I was one of the Apple faithful–for 29 years. I learned to program on an Apple II Plus in 1980. I write this on a Macbook–the last Apple product I will purchase until this Adobe nonsense ends. I have been an eLearning designer for the past 10 years. There is absolutely no equivalent to Flash for eLearning development. One of the projects I worked on recently is the Before the Boycott web site. HTML 5 will never provide the variable continuity, animation, and branching logic that is contained in this project. The sad thing is an open iPad would be a fantastic eLearning platform. I could see companies buying them by the gross as portable training devices. But who is going to want to send their eLearning to the App Store for Apple’s approval?

Reader C. G., on the other hand, can see why Apple banned Flash — fewer performance problems and compatibility issues, lowered risk of malware infections:

By locking down an iPhone and iPad, Apple is trying to make it very hard for a user to pick up any form of malware, and they are also trying to make the systems very easy to use. …My experience of Flash on a Pentium 4, is that just one single web page could grind the CPU to 100% activity, making the system appear unresponsive, and the script kiddies have a habit of writing code that crashes browsers. Then there is the issue of all the incompatible browsers, and ensuring you have the latest version of Flash installed. … Apple kit feels like it has been designed, whereas Microsoft’s OSs feel more like the products of multiple committees that don’t talk to one another. …With Macs I’ve left it all behind. I’m therefore glad to see the back of Flash, and the desire of web designers to grind CPUs into the ground.

C. O., who apparently escaped the hell of Windows for the heaven of the Mac OS, writes with great enthusiasm about the iPad’s "flawless, elegant" design, but says you’re free buy a piece of WinTel junk if that’s what rocks your boat:

Any user has a choice — Enter the Jobs ecosystem where developers do not have free reign, and users may have to make some small compromises, but an ecosystem that works brilliantly; or remain in the so-called "open" world of behemoths like Microsoft and Google, and search and search for hardware that isn’t pure crap. 

Meanwhile, E. J. simply says I’m full of [excrement] — and that’s all he has to say about the matter. OK, fine. But since when has that not been true?

What about you? Got a strong opinion about Apple, Adobe, or what I’m full of? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

Yes this originally appeared on InfoWorld, thanx for asking.

Don’t know where I got that Steve Jobs as devil image, but I sure do like it.

Tags: Apple, satan, Steve Jobs

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Contrary to popular belief in certain circles, Steve Jobs can’t actually walk on water. But you wouldn’t know it based on how he and his company have been acting of late.

Item #1. Over the weekend, a minor kerfuffle erupted when Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber noticed Apple had updated its Developer Probram License Agreement to ban apps written using a cross-platform compiler. More specifically, "applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine," effectively nixing Adobe’s Flash and causing Mac developer and blogger Hank Williams to declare that "Steve Jobs has just gone mad."  Per Williams:

Take a pause and think about what that "originally" really means. Developers are not free to use any tools to help them. …This is akin to telling people what kind of desk people sit at when they write software for the iPhone. Or perhaps what kind of music they listen to. Or what kind of clothes they should be wearing. This is *INSANE*.

In response, Adobe product evangelist Lee Brimelow suggested Apple perform an act of love upon itself (that’s the PG-rated version). He writes:

Personally I will not be giving Apple another cent of my money until there is a leadership change over there. I’ve already moved most of my book, music, and video purchases to Amazon and I will continue to look elsewhere. … But this is equivalent to me walking into Macy’s to buy a new wallet and the salesperson spits in my face. Chances are I won’t be buying my wallets at Macy’s anymore, no matter how much I like them.

After Brimelow posted his screed, Adobe made him issue a disclaimer stating this was purely his opinion, not Adobe’s. Still, according to IT World’s Steven Jay Vaughn, the company is on the verge of suing Apple.

Item #2. Maybe now that the iPad is off Steve’s bucket list he seems to have a lot of time on his hands to respond to developer emails. (The nuts at eSarcasm have uncovered a slew of other allegedly "lost" Jobs emails as well.)

Mostly what he seems to be saying is, suck eggs. You don’t like my rules, go develop for Android.

Take app developer ContactPad. Last week, Apple informed them that its journalPad program could no longer be sold in the App store. The reason? It infringed Apple’s trademark on the word "pad." When ContactPad developer Chris Ostmo emailed Steve Jobs to complain, he got this characteristically terse Jobsian reply:

Its just common sense to not use another company’s trademarks in your app name.

There’s only one problem: Apple doesn’t own the trademark on the word "pad." It’s certainly not on the list of generic terms Apple has trademarked (which includes Aqua, Cocoa, Carbon, Charcoal, Chicago, Gadget, Geneva, Logic, Numbers, Pages, Sand, Shuffle, and Tubes).

No, Apple is simply arrogant enough to assert it owns the word simply by its inclusion in the name of an Apple product. Watch out MaxiPad, QuickMart, and Looney Tunes — you may be next.

Memo to Apple: Making cool products does not give you carte blanche to act like flaming appholes. (Note: The phrase "flaming appholes" is not yet an Apple trademark, but that probably won’t stop them from claiming it.)

Why do picayune decisions about App Store approvals matter? Because it’s not just the App Store — this level of control freakishness is built into Apple’s DNA (and by Apple, I really mean Jobs). Because when it comes to integrating technology into our daily lives, Apple is driving the bus, and it wants to be able to say who can or can’t get on and where the rest of us can or can’t get off. It’s a shift away from open systems and toward closed proprietary ones, and that almost never ends well.  

You’d think Jobs was taking lessons from the Chinese government. Or maybe he’s giving them.

Has Apple gone too far? Weigh in below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.com. Booya.

Tags: adobe, App Store, Apple, book of jobs, iPhone, jobs, Steve Jobs, walking on water

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Well, the FCC just got kicked in the gonads.

A US Circuit Court has ruled the agency does not have the jurisdiction to punish Comcast for throttling down its customers’ Bit Torrent connections without telling them. 

This throws a huge spanner into the national broadband plan as well as the hopes of getting some kind of Net Neutrality principles in place.

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of government regulation of technology, mostly because so far the Feds haven’t done the best job of it. (DMCA, anyone?) Fact is, few people in Congress understand tech enough to write intelligent rules around it, so they let the industry lobbyists do it for them. That’s changing as the old guard dies off, but very slowly.

Still, I don’t think we can just sit back and let the ‘free market’ rule. Because we’ve seen what happens when it does.

Why is Net Neutrality important? Because in most areas of this country, broadband access still largely depends on regional monopolies, or in best case duopolies. If you’re lucky, you get a choice between a Monolithic Former Baby Bell or a Big Five Cable Company, both of which want to sell you Internet, voice, video, and maybe also wireless for $100 to $200 a month.

These companies do compete on price. They might compete on features. Will they compete on neutrality? Not bloody likely. So far, the cable and telco industries have been lobbying heavily against it.

So what happens in a world where Baby Bells and Big Cable control all the bits? Try these scenarios on for size.

* Suppose you get your broadband service from a telco like AT&T or Verizon. Suppose they suddenly decide Skype or other VoIP services are competing with their own voice services and decide to block them. One day your VoIP calls work; the next day they don’t. Hope you aren’t using them to run your business.

* Let’s say you’re a Comcast subscriber. You dial up its Fancast video-on-demand service and shows stream instantly to your PC. Strangely, though, when you dial up other online video services they’re so slow and jittery as to be unwatchable. Could there be any connection?

* OK, maybe you use Time Warner or Charter or Cablevision to get 300 channels of dreck delivered to your home. But instead of renting their digital set top/DVR box for $10 or $15 a month, you go with the far superior TiVo option. Except that suddenly your TiVo no longer works, because the cable companies require their own hardware to be used.

* You’re steamed at your cable company, so you create a Web site called MyCableCompanySucks.net. Other people are also steamed at your cable company, so they jump in with their own tales of woe. One day, though, MyCableCompanySucks.net won’t resolve in your browser. Instead, visitors get redirected to a page on your cable company’s Web site warning them about violating its terms of service.

You might think I’m being excessively paranoid, if there weren’t already examples of companies doing things much like this, starting with the throttling of Bit Torrent connections. Comcast didn’t announce to its customers "hey, we’re throttling down your Bit Torrents, hope that’s OK." They didn’t even say "hey, we’re cool with using Bit Torrent, but if you exceed a certain bandwidth threshold we’re gonna ding ya."

Nope. They just did it, in secret. And then denied it. They selected the bits they allowed to go through, and blocked or throttled the ones they didn’t like.

It’s not just the big players. Earlier this week, DSL provider Windstream Communications admitted to hijacking its customers’ search queries — redirecting them from the Firefox Google toolbar to its own search portal. The company backed off this policy after it got called out by users on DSL Reports. In this instance, Windstream may have been more clueless than evil, but it points out the control your broadband ISP has over your Internet experience.

Art Brodsky at Public Knowledge puts it better than I can:

The current debate over Net Neutrality and the open Internet is not about the Net. It’s not about Neutrality. It’s not about openness. It’s about you. It’s about Personal Internet Freedom vs. Corporate Internet Control. It’s all about the money.

There’s a reason that Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and the rest of the crew are spending millions of dollars on their lobbying, campaign contributions, front groups and academics to beat up on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Congress, state regulators, state legislators and anybody else who gets in their way…. It’s so they can shape today’s Internet to their liking, and make money from it as they want the Internet to be, and what they want isn’t pretty. They want two things: 1) To do what they want, including destroying (or at least severely restricting) the Internet as we know it. 2) To do it without any government oversight or consumer protection.

It seems the FCC has three options. It can reclassify ISPs under the Communications Act as Title II common carriers, thus subjecting them to some or all of the rules that telcos must operate by. Or it can lobby Congress to pass a law giving it clear jurisdiction over ISPs (thus giving both sides something new to claw over for the next 18 months). Or it can appeal the court’s decision, with the risk of landing back in the same position it now occupies — clutching its groin and moaning.

Personally, I’m voting for option number one. Yes, government regulation is often onerous. But if you think the cable and telco industries have your best interests at heart in this debate, I’ve got a network bridge I want to sell you.

Do our Internet rights need to be protected by the FCC? Weigh in on this debate below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

InfoWorld posted this last week; I just got around to posting it here. Sorry, busy week.

Tags: cable, corporate takeover of government, fcc, ISP. monoploy, telco

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My head is throbbing, my skin feels like sandpaper, and my mouth tastes like the entire Russian army retreated through it on its way back to Moscow.

No, it was not from those Jagermeister and NyQuil jello shots. That was last week. It’s a hangover from overindulging on April Fools’ Day pranks yesterday. It’s my favorite holiday, and I just don’t know when to stop. Here are the ones that stuck most in my memory, or what’s left of it.

1. Google = Topeka

Last month, in an effort to show just how desperate it was to get Google to build it a free superfast fiber optic network, Topeka, Kansas, officially changed its name to "Google" for the month of March. Yesterday, Google returned the favor. Per the Official Google Blog:

“Google employees once known as “Googlers” should now be referred to as either “Topekers” or “Topekans,” depending on the result of a board meeting that’s ongoing at this hour. Whatever the outcome, the conclusion is clear: we aren’t in Google anymore.”

Of the many pranks Google has pulled over the years, this may be my favorite, just because it’s so simple and perfect.

2. Hulu wants brains

If you visted Hulu yesterday, called up a video, and hit the 3D option, you’d be presented with a pop-up window labeled "Hulu Confidential — For Internal Use Only." A 10-minute "Lost"-inspired training video featuring Alec Baldwin doing his best Rod Serling imitation:

"The content kept on coming and the channels kept growing, many of them beamed directly from space, culminating in the phenomenon dubbed ‘Reality TV.’ A scriptless, plotless, pointless, thoughtless, relentless genre that dished up all the experiences humans missed while sitting on their couches: their lives. And yet, no one cared. Why go to the exhausting effort of living a life when you could absorb one on TV?"

The video features some surprise cameos, including one from the Fake Steve Jobs. Yes, TV is rotting your brain — and that’s a good thing, because it’s so much more delicious that way.

3. Ben & Jerry’s “Ice screen”

Yesterday, B&J’s UK division introduced an “amazing new invention [that] allows you to taste a scoop of Ben & Jerry’s on your PC just by licking the screen.” Given how gullible many Netizens are, you know somebody tried it. Every time I think about this I have to go rinse out my mouth.

4. Wedding Wire’s "WedRoulette"

Fans of ChatRoulette would appreciate Wedding Wire’s take on the random video chat service, which is a dead on copy of CR, save for the lack of semi-comatose males typing with one hand (if you know what I mean).

5. Starbucks goes big and small

The Wal-Mart of brewed beverages scored by introducing two new sizes: Micra (2 ounces) and Plenta (128 ounces), along with some convincing PhotoShop work:

"Recognizing the potential impact the Plenta™ presents for municipal waste collection, Starbucks is also suggesting several subsequent uses for the Plenta™ cup post coffee enjoyment. Suggested usage options include popcorn receptacle, rain hat, perennial planter, lampshade or yoga block. The Micra also serves as a convenient milk dish for kittens, soft boiled egg cup or paper clip holder."

Dishonorable mentions: I also liked Google’s Gmail vowel outage and its Translate for Animals Android app,  eSarcasm’s convincing mock-up of TechCrunch, and Qualcomm’s video exposing bizarre random butterfly attacks.

Nice job, everyone. Now get back to work.

What was your favorite April Fools Day hoax? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld. No joke.

Tags: april fools, Google, hoaxes, pranks

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Two middle-aged guys sit down for a cup of coffee, and people start acting like they just saw Brad and Angelina at Starbucks. What’s the big deal?

In this case, the two guys are Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, sitting down for a morning confab over cafe lattes at a Palo Alto beanery last Friday. Some alert passersby snapped pix of the pair with their cell phone and sent them to Gizmodo, which then alerted the world. That’s the big deal.

It resembled a scene from The Sopranos, where two capos are sitting outside Satriale’s Pork Store drinking espresso and talking business, until the next thing you know one of them gets whacked. (Remember: When they come for you, they always send a friend.)

What did they talk about? Was it a conciliatory meeting to ease tensions between the two companies, or just two old friends sharing a muffin? Was Eric trying to get Apple to join Google’s anti-China movement? Was Steve telling Eric to take the Nexus One and shove it where it’s unlikely to get very good wireless coverage?

That’s the question on everyone’s minds. To answer it — or at least, get more mileage out of the topic — Gizmodo asked a body language expert from the Department of Alchohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to analyze their postures. Her conclusion? The men mostly distrust each other, and Schmidt is frightened by Jobs.

(The goofballs at eSarcasm consulted their own body language analyst, whose conclusions are slightly different.)

The reason why this silly meeting is getting so much attention is because of where Apple and Google sit in relation to the rest of the world.  These two companies are defining defining what technology is and does, just Microsoft and Netscape did in the 1990s and a litter of Web 2.0 companies did in the more recent unpronounceable decade. Increasingly, everything either of these companies do has an impact on a wide range of industries (music, video, games, publishing, etc) and, sometimes, world politics.

Last week the news was all Google all the time: First with the revelations from the Viacom YouTube lawsuit, then the fallout from Google’s dissing China. This week the tech world is revving up for the imminent release of the Jesus Slate, aka the iPad, on April 3. As I write this, nearly half of the stories on Google News’ science and technology section have something to do with the Wonder Tablet.

The two companies are an interesting study in contrasts. Google of course just made waves with its public defiance of Beijing. Apple, on the other hand, makes all of its iPhones, iPods, and iPads in China, and seems to enjoy a special relationship with Beijing. That’s not changing any time soon.

And like its Chinese hosts, Apple possesses an insatiable appetite for total control — from the apps that run on its gear to the point of requiring developers to physically tether iPad samples in locked windowless rooms. Though Google also likes to fly mostly under the radar, it seems a bit less anal retentive over what Android developers can and can’t do.

When Apple has a new product in the wings, the entire Web throbs with anticipation, and the unveiling is like the circus has just come to town. When Google has a new product, it usually just posts something on the Official Google blog. The one big exception: Its unveiling of the Nexus One phone, which if nothing else proved that when it comes to putting on a show, the Googletons have much to learn from Jobs.

Earlier this year I wrote that the battle for tech supremacy will be between these two companies — and we all will be better for it in the long run, thanks to the innovation it will inspire. I still feel that way.  Tensions between the two companies will get a lot worse before they eventually dissipate. I don’t think a cup of coffee changes that.

But here’s the real question: Who paid for the lattes? Place your bets below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

Yes, you saw this first on InfoWorld. Or maybe you didn’t.

Tags: Apple, china, coffee, Google, ipad, nexus one

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It’s been just two days since I last wrote about the Google China soap (not soup) opera, and yet it feels like weeks, so much has happened in the interim. To wit:

Earlier this week, Google’s US executive bio page suddenly displayed in Chinese. (A "bug, Google called it. Yeah, right.) On Wednesday, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook traffic was suddenly redirected to Chinese servers, allowing international Netizens a rare glimpse of how the Great Firewall operates. Some unknown parties apparently hacked one of the DNS Root Servers in Sweden, causing traffic to flow in the wrong direction. YouTube also went completely offline for about an hour on Wednesday morning (that one was due to "a technical issue," per Google).

Coincidence? No way. The nefarious machinations of the Chinese government? Maybe. My theory is that it’s either pranksters out to cause trouble or techies inside China who are PO’d about Google’s stance and flexing their geek muscle, independent of any top-down directives. In any case, I think we’re about to see a whole more of this kind of thing before the dust settles.

Meanwhile, domain registrar GoDaddy is kicking up a little dust of its own. It announced it’s no longer in the business of signing up people for .cn domains in China. The reason: The Chinese government’s onerous requirements for registering domains, which includes providing photo IDs, identification numbers, and physical copies of signed documents for every registrant. Worse, GoDaddy says China wants it to go back and provide this data on its customers for the past six years. That’s what prompted them to exit the mainland.

(The way Beijing acts, you’d think they were building the iPad.)

Yet both Wired and the ever-subtle Michael Arrington are calling GoDaddy’s move "a publicity stunt," somehow equating it with the company’s racy Super Bowl ads featuring NASCAR star Danica Patrick (all puns intended). So in other words, if you make sexy ads, everything else you do doesn’t count. GoDaddy General Counsel Christine Jones explains:

“We were having to contact Chinese users to ask for their personal information and begrudgingly give it to Chinese authorities,” Jones told Congress. “We decided we didn’t want to become an agent of the Chinese government.”

“It would be very difficult to say we don’t track publicity at Go Daddy because we do,” Jones told Wired.com on Thursday. “This is not the Go Daddy PR machine cranking up. You can point fingers at us around the Super Bowl, but not here.”

Personally, don’t think it’s a principled stand as much as a practical one. Why endure the hassle and expense of doing something you didn’t want to do in the first place? The fact that .cn registrations represent a fraction of a percent of GoDaddy’s business probably made the decision a lot easier.

Meanwhile, the US Congress — ever alert for hot-button issues where it can make a lot of noise without actually having to do anything — jumped in with both feet, praising Google and condemning Microsoft for continuing to do business as usual in the Central Kingdom.

Arrington is defending Microsoft for not taking a principled stand on China. (Makes you wonder how much MFST stock he’s holding in his portfolio.) He also called Google’s move a hypocritical publicity stunt (see "ever subtle," above).

Is Google’s move a publicity stunt? Hardly. Is it hypocritical? Perhaps. But I think Cringester G. D. summed it up rather nicely in an email:

Whether Google is leaving China for altruistic reasons or not, it still shows it has more gumption than virtually any company and many governments. One is reminded of countries and companies being afraid to offend Nazi Germany until we went to war with them. At what point does greed justify anything of good in this world? I used to think of Google as too powerful a company and that its power of necessity made it a concern for intellectual freedom. But outside of internal Chinese activists, Google is the only organization in the world that is standing up to China. …

Where is our humanity, our ethics? China is the largest creditor for our US mountain of public debt. Pretty soon we will be faced with an Icelandic question of whether we will tax our own people to pay this monstrosity? We are taking part in a serious downfall if we all do not stand up to China.

Should we all stand up to China? And if so, who’s going to pay our debts when they call in their markers? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

Hey, this first appeared on InfoWorld. Yes, that’s why it looks familiar.

Tags: censorship, china, etc, Google, Privacy

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So Google finally made good on its promise to uncensor its Chinese search engine and/or leave the Chinese market back in January. And China is now making good on its promise to make Google very sorry for ever bringing it up.

Gotta say "the G" were pretty clever about it. Redirecting Google.cn to Google.com.hk seems like a smart way to stay in China while not staying in China. And Google’s "Mainland China service availability report" — which displays which Google services Beijing is mucking with on any particular day — is sheer brilliance.

(I understand negotiations between the two parties got pretty heated near the  end — at least, according to this video.)

Symbolically, Google’s public repudiation of China is huge. They are walking away from potentially millions of dollars in ad revenue.

In practical terms, though, it doesn’t do much. China is still blocking search results. And it’s retaliating by forcing the country’s two largest telecoms, China Unicom and China Mobile, to pull their deals with Google over search engines and Android phone manufacturing. Chinese Web portals are now backing out of their deals with Google — no doubt with some strong "encouragement" from Beijing.

This morning, Google’s US corporate site was hacked and redirected to the Chinese version, according to a report in the UK’s Guardian. No clue whether this was China’s doing or just somebody’s idea of a joke (I’m guessing the latter).

I’m wracking my brain trying to come up with another example of a major US corporation saying "bite me" to a major national power because it didn’t like that government’s repressive policies. If the government is pro capitalism, US companies generally do not appear to care how they treat their citizens. Am I wrong about this?

Of course, it’s not clear that Google really cares either. Because this all came about after Google got cyberpunk’d by hackers inside China. To my admittedly warped mind, it still smacks more of revenge than anything principled.

James Fallows of The Atlantic Wire had an interesting conversation with Google chief legal beagle David Drummond, in which he states:

The initial premise, that it all started from a hacking episode, is not quite right. We did have a hacking incident. Most hacking incidents that you see are freelancers — maybe government sponsored, maybe not. … This attack, which was from China, was different. It was almost singularly focused on getting into Gmail accounts specifically of human rights activists, inside China or outside….There were political aspects to these hacking attacks that were quite unusual.

That was distasteful to us. It seemed to us that this was all part of an overall system bent on suppressing expression, whether it was by controlling internet search results or trying to surveil activists. It is all part of the same repressive program, from our point of view. We felt that we were being part of that.

Pure speculation here: I’m guessing that ever since Google decided to enter the Chinese market there’s been a roiling internal debate among Sergey, Larry, & Eric about how to deal with China’s repressive policies, and that the hacking incident flipped one or more of them over to the anti-China side. If I had to handicap it, I’d say Sergey was on the ’screw China’ camp, Eric was in the ‘let’s just keep our heads down and make millions’ crew, and Larry was the swing vote. Just my own mental fantasy playing out here. (If you’ve got inside info to the contrary, please share.)

This drama is only just beginning to unfold. I don’t see China backing down, ever. I don’t see any other US Internet giants following Google’s lead, or Uncle Sam doing anything more than issuing vague statements of support for Internet freedom. The question is whether Google will stay the course, or if its resolve will eventually melt as it loses its still-tiny foothold in the world’s largest market.

Will Google stay out of China? Should it? And what about Microsoft and Yahoo? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This piece originally appeared on InfoWorld. Tru dat.

Cool Google Tibet art courtesy of ViralBlog.

Tags: censorship, china, Google, hong kong

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Though it’s not getting quite the 24/7 cable news treatment it got when it first hit the wires, the Web cam scandal in Southeastern Pennsylvania (aka "Webcamgate") is still twisting and turning in unpredictable ways. We still don’t know exactly what happened, but we do know there are lessons here for everyone concerned about IT security and personal privacy.

For readers just tuning in, here the background: In February the Robbins family of Penn Valley sued the Lower Merion School District after it discovered MacBooks issued to all 2,620 students in the district were equipped with Web cams that could be turned on remotely by school officials. How did they found out? Because the Robbins’ 15-year-old son Blake was called into a meeting with the school vice principal, during which he was (they say) shown an image of himself at home working on his school supplied laptop, and questioned about possible inappropriate behavior. According to one report, the school apparently thought Blake was popping pills when he was really just eating candy.

The district admitted it used remote Web cams for tracking lost or stolen laptops — some 42 times over the last year — without telling anybody about it. That feature is now disabled. The vice principal in question says quite defiantly that "no time have I ever monitored a student via a laptop web cam, nor have I ever authorized the monitoring of a student via security tracking web cam." (She did not, however, confirm or deny showing Blake Robbins a snapshot of him eating Mike-N-Ikes.)

Since then, local and Federal law authorities have opened investigations into the school’s use of spy cams. The school district itself hired a computer forensics expert to do his own investigation. Senator Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) is planning to hold hearings about the topic in Philly on March 29, if for no other reason than to have something else to talk about besides health care reform

Here’s where it gets twistier.

The two IT admins who had the ability to turn on the cams are on administrative leave pending the outcome of the district investigation (standard operating procedure, says the school district). One of these techs, Mike Perbix (whose voice can be heard in this video bubbling with excitement over the LANrev tracking technology) is cooperating with the investigation. So is the vice principal, Lindy Matsko. However, the other tech, Carol Cafiero, has refused to give a deposition in the case.

According to a report in the Philadelphia Daily News:

….her attorney, Charles Mandracchia, filed a motion yesterday to block her deposition, saying that it was "premature" and "unnecessary."

Mandracchia said that his client does not have access to pertinent documents. He expressed concern that Robbins’ attorney, Mark Haltzman, would "ambush her" in a deposition.

"We didn’t say we wouldn’t produce her," Mandracchia said. "We’re just saying we’re not going to produce her now."

(In other words, maybe they’ll produce her later. Maybe after Hell freezes over. Or maybe after the District has written a large check to the Robbins family and quietly buried the affair.)

According to news reports, two members of the Harrinton High student council heard about the spy cam feature and approached school principal Steven R. Kline last year. Per the Philadelphia Inquirer:

When Kline confirmed it, students told him they were worried about privacy violations and asked about other types of monitoring. But nothing happened – not even after the students returned for a follow-up visit, according to other council members who were briefed afterward.

Another group of parents have banded together in an effort to stop the Robbins law suit. They’ve filed a motion asking the judge to allow them to intervene, with the intention of making sure it doesn’t get certified as a class action. They don’t want to be on the hook for paying a settlement essentially to themselves (and the Robbins’ attorneys). And they don’t want the district to quietly bury the affair with a large check.

The Inquirer’s Joe Tanfani has a great story detailing the history of the case, from the decision to adopt the tracking software (while forgetting to tell anyone about it) to what really happened in the Robbins case. From his account, it sounds like an accumulation of largely well-intentioned-but-brain-dead mistakes. It’s worth a read.

The lessons du jour? The unintended consequences of technology can come back and bite you in the behind (because that’s where most of us keep our wallets.

Want to protect something? Putting it under lock and key, with a security cam trained on the door and a vicious Doberman in front of it, is one way to do it. But telling everyone about the lock, the cam, and the dog is an even better way. Security is more effective when it’s not a secret.

That’s my 2.7 cents, adjusted for inflation. What about yours? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared at InfoWorld, not that anyone actually noticed.

Disturbing Web cam eye image found at Flickr.

Tags: blake robbins, harrinton high, lindy matsko, LMSD, lower merion school district, philadelphia, school spies, web cam spies, webcamgate

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It seems 2010 may be the year personal privacy makes a comeback — that, or it’s taking its final breath before it sinks into the tarpits. Every week brings news of some new affront to our personal data, accompanied by a backlash. Lately these stories have been bubbling up on an almost daily basis.

It started late last year, when Facebook arbitrarily changed its default privacy settings to make more of your profile information accessible to Google and other Facebook users. You could of course change those settings, but most people didn’t. That earned Facebook a class action suit and ongoing scrutiny by the FTC.

Then Google introduced its Twitter Wannabe service, Buzz. That emerged from the womb with two left feet, both of which it immediately thrust into its own mouth. The biggest problem? Buzz inadvertently shared information about Gmail users’ frequent contacts that Gmailers had assumed was private. Google has been eating crow by the family-sized bucket — and tweaking Buzz to make it more respectful of personal privacy — ever since.

Last week Netflix canceled its second contest to have math geeks tweak its recommendations engine after the "anonymous" data used by researchers in the first contest proved not quite as anonymous as Netflix thought. A pair of University of Texas researchers proved they could identify individuals by cross checking their movie preferences with other publicly available information.

At South by Southwest last Friday, Microsoft social media researcher Danah Boyd gave a keynote detailing how privacy has been eroded, largely because the people who build services like Google Buzz and Facebook (aka, "privileged straight white male technology executives") don’t understand the differences between privacy online and how it works in the real world.

Yesterday brought yet more proof that putting all your personal eggs into a social network basket may not be such a hot idea, especially if you (or your friends) stumble into the crosshairs of law enforcement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released documents it acquired via a Freedom of Information Act request about Federal activity on social networks. Among them: a Department of Justice presentation on how to use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linked In, etc, to gather intel on suspects and witnesses, friendly or otherwise.

(My theory: They finally heard about Mafia Wars on Facebook and decided to take a closer look.)

The document implies cops are going undercover — using false identities to befriend suspects and learn more about them — which violates the terms of service for most of these networks. (You never lie on your Facebook profile, do you?)

The arguments given for going undercover: "communicate with suspects/targets; gain access to nonpublic info; map social relationships/networks."

So if the Feds are investigating one of your Facebook/MySpace/Twitter buddies, they could very well be investigating you. And if they’re adding you to that "social map," what about your friends? At what point does the map stop? Does it even have borders?

Another key question: If an agent violates a service’s TOS, is the evidence he or she gathers admissible in court? The documents ask this question; unfortunately, they don’t answer it. Nor do they explicitly state anyone is doing this.

Still you gotta figure they are. Cops have been infiltrating "suspicious" organizations for years, mostly with good intent, sometimes with a political agenda attached. So it’s natural to assume they’d do it in the virtual world. But in the past you had to be an active member of such an org to fall under suspicion; now all you need to do is say yes to the wrong friend request.

I know what some of you are saying: "I never use Facebook/Twitter etc, so I’m not worried." But not using these things is not an option for many of us; that’s like saying "I never use a phone because it might be tapped." (And oh, by the way, it probably is — at least, the data stream.) It’s also a little like saying "I only use a typewriter because computers are the devil’s spawn."

The only logical response is to be a lot less cavalier about the information you share, and with whom you share it. So let’s just say it: the social networking honeymoon is officially over. Time to get a lot more serious about what we do and don’t do online.

Is privacy worth fighting for? What do you do to protect yourself online? Weigh in below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Computer as satan’s spawn image courtesy of PC Protocall.

Tags: buzz, Facebook, fbi, feds, Google, netflix, Privacy, Twitter

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I just received an email from Wikileaks editor Julian Assange that’s pretty wild. It accuses the US government of deliberately trying to take the whistle-blower site down two years ago.

As proof, Wikileaks has posted a 32-page classified document [PDF] from the Department of Defense Intelligence Analysis program, dated March 2008, which details "the counterintelligence threat posed to the US Army by the Wikileaks.org Web site." It reads:

The possibility that a current employee or mole within DoD or elsewhere in the US government is providing sensitive information or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out. Wikileaks.org claims that the "leakers" or "whistleblowers" of sensitive or classified DoD documents are former US government employees. These claims are highly suspect, however, since Wikileaks.org states that the anonymity and protection of the leakers or whistleblowers is one of its primary goals.

If I’m parsing the bureaucratese in this document correctly, the DoD believed the "former" employees who provide documents to Wikileaks are actually current employees whom, one assumes, could be hunted down and squelched. Or that they are agents working for foreign adversaries. Or both.

The DoD also seems to be worried that the information posted on Wikileaks isn’t true. To wit:

… the Wikileaks.org web site could be used to post fabricated information; to post misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda; or to conduct perception management and influence operations designed to convey a negative message to those who view or retrieve information from the Web site….

Of course, the US military is among the many organizations whose secrets Wikileaks has exposed (this list also includes money-laundering Swiss banks, the Church of Scientology, and repressive governments around the globe).

The document goes on to detail some of the documents that Wikileaks leaked:

• Secretive US document exploitation centers.
• Detainee operations and alleged human rights violations.
• Information on the US State Department, US Air Force, US Navy and US Marines units, Iraqi police and coalition forces from Poland, Denmark, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and El Salvador serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Nearly the entire order of battle for US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as of April 2007.
• Alleged revelations that the US government violated the Chemical Weapons Convention in Iraq and Afghanistan.[19]

In other words, Wikileaks produced a 238-page torture manual used by the US Army at Guantanamo Bay, a map of the Abu-ghraib secret prison in Iraq, and evidence that the US was violating international treaties by using toxic weapons. All of which proved to be highly embarrassing to the US government (not to mention accurate), but unlikely to compromise US soldiers in the field.

The DoD’s proposed solution? Hack Wikileaks to find out who’s spilling the beans:

The obscurification technology used by Wikileaks.org has exploitable vulnerabilities. Organizations with properly trained cyber technicians, the proper equipment, and the proper technical software could most likely conduct computer network exploitation (CNE) operations oruse cyber tradecraft to obtain access to Wikileaks.org‘s Web site, information systems, or networks that may assist in identifying those persons supplying the data and the means by which they transmitted the data to Wikileaks.org….

Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to Wikileaks.org would damage and potentially destroy [its] center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions.

This intelligence program has been brought to you by Big Brother. Please do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. We are watching.

The big caveat: We don’t know what, if anything, came as a result of this memo. Wikileaks is still around, but just barely. No major exposures of its sources have come to light. So maybe somebody in the DoD saw this report and put it in the circular file (or, probably, shared it with Wikileaks).

Still, this is the kind of document that makes you believe all your paranoid conspiracy theories are true.

Wikileaks has many flaws, as I’ve noted several times in this space over the years. They don’t always exercise sound editorial judgment, in my opinion. And they could very well be gamed by people with an agenda posting false information — though it seems most of the complaints about the site are about the opposite.

The sad truth is that sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome exist because the mainstream media can no longer be trusted to assume its role as the "fourth estate." Just one example: The New York Times sat on the NSA warrantless wiretapping story for a full year before running it, and nobody in the MSM wanted to touch AT&T whistle-blower Mark Klein before he handed his documents over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Imperfect as it is, we need sites like Wikileaks. If they present information that’s misleading, there will always be plenty of folks out there willing to correct the record. The fact that our government wanted to turn off its lights — as China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Viet Nam, and Zimbabwe have attempted to do — is chilling to me. I hope it’s chilling to you too.

So what do you think? Is it chilly enough out there for you? Post your thoughts below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post originally appeared on InfoWorld, where I thought it would get a lot more attention than it did. Are we really that inured to Big Brother?

Tags: AT&T, dod, first amendment, freedom of the press, NSA, spies, warrantless wiretaps, wikileaks

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