A Yahoo Series About Cyberterrorism

‘Cybergeddon,’ With Missy Peregrym, Hits Yahoo

Yahoo

Missy Peregrym in “Cybergeddon.”

By MIKE HALE

Published: September 24, 2012

When you’ve created “CSI,” you don’t have a lot left to prove in the entertainment business. But Anthony E. Zuiker isn’t resting on his television laurels. He writes multiplatform “digi-novels” and is a partner in a YouTube channel, BlackBoxTV, that has more than 333,000 subscribers.

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Now Mr. Zuiker is taking his biggest step so far into new media with “Cybergeddon,” a nine-part series that will be released, beginning on Tuesday, on the Yahoo! Screen video site.

An executive producer, along with Matthew Weinberg and Bill O’Dowd, Mr. Zuiker is calling the video — which should total about 95 minutes and be available in 10 languages — a “motion picture event” distributed in installments directly to Yahoo’s huge worldwide audience, should that audience happen to find it. (It has its own tab at the top of the Yahoo! Screen home page.)

Judging from the first three installments, “event” might be an optimistic description of “Cybergeddon,” but “better than your average TV-movie thriller” probably fits. Written by Miles Chapman (“Roadhouse 2: Last Call”) and directed by Diego Velasco (“The Zero Hour”), it would look at home on the Syfy or USA channels and has a network star, Missy Peregrym of the ABC series “Rookie Blue.”

Mr. Zuiker’s show is a conspiracy tale, as was Yahoo’s first original drama, the animated series “Electric City,” created by Tom Hanks, which went up in July. But Mr. Hanks’s was set in a dreamy, postapocalyptic steam-punk future.

“Cybergeddon” is very much in the here and now, positing a malevolent European criminal mastermind (Olivier Martinez, Diane Lane’s lust object in “Unfaithful”), who begins a seemingly random series of digital attacks: the controls of a Los Angeles water plant, the accounts of a Hong Kong bank.

Ms. Peregrym plays a coldly ambitious F.B.I. agent who spots the pattern but, before the first 10-minute episode ends, has been framed and arrested for cyberterrorism herself. This is not a show in which you want to sweat the plot details.

This all happens quickly, as Mr. Chapman and Mr. Velasco, operating under standard Web video rules, squeeze more twists into each 10-to-11-minute episode than it should have to bear, a feat accomplished with the help of rat-a-tat dialogue out of an old movie serial. (“Agent Jocelyn! You’re under arrest on three counts of cyberterrorism!” “Are you kidding me?”)

Another sign that we’re online: Ms. Peregrym’s cleavage plays a larger role per minute than it does in prime time on “Rookie Blue.”

Ms. Peregrym, whose distinguishing characteristics as an actress are her sad eyes and her athleticism, makes a credible action hero but is perhaps not as convincing a tech genius. Helping Agent Jocelyn in her quest to clear her name and stop the cyberattacks is a jailed hacker named Rabbit, amusingly played by the Australian actor Kick Gurry.

It would be wrong to leave a discussion of “Cybergeddon” without mentioning the commercial impediments to unfettered creativity in online drama. Among the logos prominently displayed in the opening credits is that of the digital-security company Symantec, which served as a consultant to the production but also has a significant role in the story.

This isn’t the kind of product placement in which a company’s car or navigation system is used by the heroine — this is the kind in which a sponsor is turned into a heroic character.

Producers can make all the excuses they want, but that kind of synergy puts a hard cap on how seriously their work can be taken.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 24, 2012
An earlier version of this article included a headline that misidentified the Web site where the series “Cybergeddon” is being published. It is Yahoo Screen, not YouTube.

isruptions: Your Brain on E-Books and Smartphone Apps

By NICK BILTON

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Last week, my brain played a cruel trick on me. While waiting for my flight to take off, I was reading The New Yorker, the paper version, of course — I know the rules. I became engrossed in an article and swiped my finger down the glossy page to read more.
To my surprise, nothing happened. I swiped it again. Nothing.
My brain was trying to turn the page the same way I do on my iPad, with the swipe of a finger. (I quickly realized that I had to physically turn the page.)
A few days later, my brain played another technology-related trick. In New York City, I hopped in a cab and told the driver, “59th and 6th, please.” I didn’t think anything of it when we arrived at my destination and I said thanks and hopped out of the cab, without paying.
The cabby yelled at me bluntly, clearly not very happy: “These taxis aren’t free. Are you gonna pay me?”
I quickly apologized and paid him — with a good tip — when I realized that my brain thought I was in an Uber car, not a taxi.
In San Francisco, where I live, I often use a car service called Uber when I go out for the evening. You order a car from your smartphone, it arrives, you get in, tell your driver where to go, and then get out at your destination. There is no money exchanged; your credit card is automatically billed after the trip, and you are e-mailed a receipt.
But I did spend a few moments standing at the curb trying to figure out if I was suffering from some sort of mental fatigue.
I called the closest thing to a technology doctor I know: Clifford Nass, a professor of cognitive science and communications at Stanford University, and the author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.”
“Brains love habits; brains are built for efficiency,” Mr. Nass said, noting that I wasn’t sick, maybe just a little too technological for my own good. “Our brains are built to put two things together in space and time and then say, ‘Great, I can remember that these go together.’ Then we execute on that, like you trying to scroll down a piece of paper with your finger.”
Although videos have been floating around the Web showing 1- and 2-year-olds trying to use a magazine like an iPad, you would think a 36-year-old man would know the difference. Gary Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, has performed studies showing that the human brain adapts to technology in seven days, regardless of age.
I rarely read things on paper anymore. Magazines, news articles and books are all consumed on touch-screen devices like iPads, smartphones and Kindles. (The content is the same; the device is different.) Mr. Nass explained that my brain had been habituated to change the page by sliding my finger, no matter what I read. (This is also why I uselessly swipe ATM monitors or my laptop screen.) The same thing is happening with the taxi: my brain categorizes any car I am not driving as an Uber car.
All of these brain changes hasten the adoption rate for technologies, Mr. Nass said. It’s what happened with the telephone or the use of cruise control in cars. “You no longer drive a car,” he said. “You use a car.”
What is now happening with reading, we will soon experience with paying for things without cash, check or credit cards. And it will happen quickly.
The slowest part of the process may be convincing businesses to produce the changes. “This is where businesses have a difficult time adapting to what’s happening in society,” Mr. Nass said. It wasn’t publishers, for example, who introduced electronic reading devices. “People entered the publishing industry because they loved the feel and smell of books.”
But if they don’t recognize the speed of these changes, their brains are playing tricks on them, too.

October 1, 2012, 3:18 pm1 Comment

Google Leapfrogs Microsoft in Market Value

By NICK WINGFIELD

Brendan McDermid/Reuters Steve Ballmer, the chief of Microsoft, showing the new Windows Phone software on HTC smartphones at an event last month.

8:34 p.m. | Updated
SEATTLE — For Microsoft, it was bad enough when Apple’s stock market value surpassed its own in 2010. Now Google, a company that didn’t even exist 15 years ago, just did the same thing.

On Monday, a slight bump in Google’s share price and a drop in Microsoft’s gave Google a market capitalization of $249.19 billion, just ahead of Microsoft’s $247.44 billion. Google’s market value also edged past that of Wal-Mart Stores, making it the third most valuable United States company behind Apple and Exxon Mobil. Market value is determined by multiplying a company’s stock price by the number of shares it has outstanding.
It was one more sign that the technology industry had entered what some call a post-PC era. Investors are becoming more bullish on the growth opportunities ahead for Google, a company whose fortunes are predicated on the Internet and, increasingly, on mobile devices and services.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has not been able to shake the view that its software business is still largely beholden, in one way or another, to the PC, a technology that is now looking stale next to younger, faster-growing devices like the smartphone and tablet. Microsoft’s software business, though still highly profitable, is not growing the way it once was.
Microsoft once had one of the technology industry’s highest-flying stocks, but its shares have stagnated over the past decade after many big investments by the company, especially in the consumer market, failed to pay off. Its Bing search engine is a big money-loser and a distant second in the market behind Google. Its mobile software business has been marginalized by Apple and Google with their iPhone and Android products.
Microsoft’s Xbox video game business is a bona fide hit, but it delivers nowhere near the profits of venerable Microsoft franchises like Office and Windows. Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS, said that Microsoft had done a respectable job of delivering revenue and profit growth, but that the weakness of its newer products had clouded the company’s future in the minds of investors.
“People have failed to give them a deeper multiple because everyone thinks they’re on the downhill,” Mr. Thill said.
Tony Imperati, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment, as did Niki Fenwick, a spokeswoman for Google.
Even though Google has reliably been a moneymaking machine, its stock has been held back for several years because investors have wanted proof that it can make money in ways other than selling search ads. These ads account for a large majority of Google’s revenue, and their growth is slowing.
Google’s attempts to find other sources of revenue, like display and mobile ads, have potential. But many investors had not been convinced, because it takes new businesses some time to grow, and because a business must be very profitable to be more than a drop in the bucket of Google’s earnings from search ads. At the same time, Google’s experiments, like self-driving cars or Groupon-style deals, made some worry that it was throwing money at the wrong places.
Now, however, Google is beginning to convince investors that it is more than a one-trick pony. There is evidence that it has successfully expanded beyond search ads, including with display ads on YouTube and mobile ads on Android phones and other devices. The stock is up 18 percent this year.
Google is expected to topple Facebook and Yahoo this year as the leader in online display advertising, bringing in $2.31 billion in display ad revenue, according to eMarketer. The speed at which Google has come to dominate display advertising surprised analysts who study the company and the advertising industry.
Microsoft’s revenue is still larger than Google’s and is likely to remain so for a while. For the quarter that ended June 30, Microsoft posted revenue of $18.06 billion, while Google reported revenue of $12.21 billion. But while analysts expect Microsoft’s revenue to grow in the high single digits for the next couple of years, they say they believe Google’s revenue could rise roughly 27 percent next year.
“They have vastly different growth prospects,” said Bill Whyman, an analyst at International Strategy & Investment.
Two years ago, Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, began promoting the idea that the rise of the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices heralded the arrival of a post-PC era. That argument gained credence with investors, helping to propel Apple’s market value past Microsoft’s.
Google has a long way to go before it catches Apple, which has a market value of $618.44 billion.

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle, and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

October 1, 2012, 6:21 pmComment

Today’s Scuttlebot: Debate Animations, and Apple’s Taiwanese Network

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Some interesting items that the tech reporters and editors of The New York Times found on the Web recently. See more here.
Study: Photos of Cats Bolster Productivity
Motherjones.com |  Looking at cute cats makes you more productive, according to science. – Joshua Brustein
3-D Printer Company Seizes Machine From Desktop Gunsmith
Wired.com |  A man’s plan to print a working pistol is scotched less than a week after the printer arrives. – Howell Murray
Live-GIFfing the 2012 Debates
Election.tumblr.com |  The presidential debates will be televised, but also remixed and live-blogged in short-form animations. – Jenna Wortham
You Sleep With Your iPad, Don’t You?
Niemanlab.org |  A new study finds that most news junkies turn to tablets late at night and early in the morning. – Jenna Wortham
Apple Taps Obscure Asian Suppliers
San Jose Mercury News |  A look at the electronics suppliers of Taiwan and how Apple taps them to build their products. – Damon Darlin
‘Trailer Park Computing’ Busts Out of Google and Into Mainstream
Wired.com |  More companies are using data centers in shipping containers. Do they also evade zoning concerns? – Damon Darlin
Homeland Security Secretary Says She Doesn’t Use E-mail
N.Y. Daily News |  Our Homeland Security chief doesn’t use e-mail. That’s one way to stay secure. – David Gallagher

Facebook Says Child Privacy Laws Should Not Apply to ‘Like’ Buttons

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

The social networking giant Facebook has told the Obama administration that child privacy laws should not apply to a Web site’s ability to incorporate a “like” button, because that would inhibit free expression.
The company sent a 20-page letter to the Federal Trade Commission last week in which it objected to certain proposed revisions of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa. In it, the company argued that it had no control over sites that incorporate social plug-ins, such as a “like” button, and should therefore not be held liable under the child privacy law.
A “like” counts as free speech, the company has repeatedly argued, and muzzling a user’s ability to “like” something on Facebook would infringe on a user’s constitutional rights. “A government regulation that restricts teens’ ability to engage in protected speech — as the proposed Coppa Rule would do — raises issues under the First Amendment,” Facebook wrote in its letter.
Coppa requires sites that collect personal information on children to obtain written parental permission if the child is under the age of 13. Facebook prohibits children under 13 from signing up for its services, but studies have repeatedly shown that millions of under-age children do so anyway, often with help from their parents.
The proposed revisions in the child privacy law could apply to Web sites and other services that use so-called cookies to track users’ travels across the Web. Cookies are ubiquitous across the Internet and are used to deliver targeted advertisements based on which Web sites a user has visited.
Facebook has an additional assett: the ever-present “like” buttons, integrated with over 9 million different Web sites. Facebook knows each time someone goes on a page with a “like” button, even if she or he does not click on it.
Facebook argues that it already tries to keep children under the age of 13 off its site, but it cannot always control when someone under 13 visits a Web site that contains a Facebook “like” button.

Winner Uses Contest Site and Loses Grand Prize

Winner Uses Contest Site and Loses Grand Prize

By TANZINA VEGA

Published: September 30, 2012

• 

After working as a lawyer for 22 years, Theodore A. Scott wanted a break. So he entered a contest sponsored by Gold Peak Tea, a Coca-Cola tea brand, offering the ultimate respite for weary workers: a year off work and a $100,000 prize.

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Tami Chappell for The New York Times

Theodore A. Scott, a lawyer in Decatur, Ga., has contested being disqualified after winning a contest sponsored by Gold Peak Tea.

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Mr. Scott, 60, made it to the second round for which he created a video that was voted on by Gold Peak Tea fans on Facebook. To his surprise, he won the grand prize. He and his family were elated.

“Everybody is shouting and laughing and crying and so happy,” Mr. Scott said. “It’s just like we won the Super Bowl or won the lottery.”

But the feeling was short-lived. Days later, Mr. Scott was informed that he had violated the terms and conditions of the contest and was disqualified. The reason given was that he had used an online contest forum, a Web site where people who enter crowdsourced digital sweepstakes post links to those contests and ask members to vote for them.

But Mr. Scott did not go away quietly, and Gold Peak Tea finds that it is just the latest company to try to create excitement for its brand on social media only to find that sentiment can quickly turn.

The contest, called “Take the Year Off,” was one of several this year sponsored by marketers like McDonald’s and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority aimed at downtrodden workers looking for respite in a tough economy.

An image on Gold Peak Tea’s Facebook page promoting the contest that showed a woman kneeling against a file cabinet appearing to scream caught Mr. Scott’s attention. “I get it. I see where she is. I understand her,” he said in an interview last week. In his contest entry, Mr. Scott described how his job had taken him away from his family. “I had a family. I had a home,” Mr. Scott’s letter began. “But I let my career defer them. I let my debts outweigh them. I let deadlines sideline them. I let an office, computer, phone, and e-mails crush them.”

Mr. Scott pledged to spend the year off enjoying time with his family — he has four sons, four grandsons, and has been married for more than 35 years. “I’ll enjoy simplicity. Listen to music. Read. Write. Relax. And sip a glass of iced tea — at home,” he wrote in the essay.

In his follow-up video, Mr. Scott is seen at his desk, answering calls, books stacked on his desk, shuffling from office to office.

To increase his chances, Mr. Scott became a member of an online contest forum on About.com and made his pitch to the voters there. Susan Stribling, a representative for Coca-Cola, said the company declined to comment but pointed a reporter to a statement that had been posted on the company’s Facebook page. According to the statement, Mr. Scott had been disqualified for trying “to inappropriately induce members of the public to vote for his submission, a violation of Official Contest Rules.”

In an e-mail to Mr. Scott, Sarah Tabb, an associate brand manager for Gold Peak Tea, cited Section 6B of the contest rules which states that finalists were prohibited from obtaining votes by “offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, vote farming, or any other activity that artificially inflates such finalists votes as determined by sponsor in its sole discretion.”

Sandra Grauschopf a sweepstakes consultant for brands and the writer of the contests and sweepstakes guide on About.com, said the issues with voter forums were complicated for companies. Brands are caught between wanting to drive traffic to their Facebook pages by encouraging consumer voting and managing how those votes are obtained, Ms. Grauschopf said.

“It’s a tough situation for them to be in,” she said of the companies hosting the sweepstakes. “On the other hand, they don’t want to have their image tarnished by other people saying that there is cheating going on.”

In a statement, ePrize, the company the administered the contest on behalf of Coca-Cola, said brands were seeing “success with promotional campaigns online, particularly in social and mobile channels.”

“But along with that, there will be more technologies developed and attempts to abuse the system,” the statement continued. “Of course, there are other instances in which people don’t intend to break the rules but simply do not follow them correctly.”

Mr. Scott defended his use of the forum saying he saw nothing in the rules that prohibited someone from asking for votes. “These were real people,” he said. “Not robotics or the creation of fake Facebook accounts.”

Ms. Grauschopf agreed. “In my opinion, that’s not cheating if those are real people who aren’t being induced.”

Coca-Cola declined to say who tipped the company off to Mr. Scott’s methods.

Ms. Grauschopf said, “It sounds to me like they are saying, we don’t want the public relations problems.”

One such public relations disaster happened with another online voting contest involving American Apparel, the clothing company known for its risqué ads. In 2011, the company held a contest that asked readers to vote on who should be its plus-size model.

Nancy Upton, an entrant, submitted photos of herself in daring poses, including one where she was almost naked from the waist down and another where she was bathing in a tub of salad dressing.

In the end, Ms. Upton was voted the winner, much to the chagrin of American Apparel. After some back and forth, the company decided to select another candidate as the winning model.

In Mr. Scott’s case, Gold Peak Tea chose another entrant’s submission as the winner, despite a number of posts on the company’s Facebook page calling for Mr. Scott to be reinstated as the winner. (Gold Peak Tea has removed some of the posts related to Mr. Scott’s case citing its decency rules for the Facebook page.)

Mr. Scott has since posted a rebuttal on the Gold Peak Tea Facebook page, and has created a Twitter account to support his cause, @GoTeamTheodore. He said he is deeply embarrassed.

Linda A. Goldstein, a partner and chair of the advertising, marketing and media division at the law firm  Manatt, Phelps & Phillips said there was “a very strong” legal precedent in the courts for upholding contest rules.

“There’s a broad discretion for the sponsor to disqualify an entrant,” said Ms. Goldstein, who has worked with Coca-Cola in the past. “The precedent in the courts for upholding the rules in the sponsor’s favor is quite strong.”

Attacks on 6 Banks Frustrate Customers

Attacks on 6 Banks Frustrate Customers

By NICOLE PERLROTH

Published: September 30, 2012

• 

Six major American banks were hit in a wave of computer attacks last week, by a group claiming Middle Eastern ties, that caused Internet blackouts and delays in online banking.

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Reed Saxon/Associated Press

The targets of last week’s computer attacks included Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Citibank. Some, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, have pointed accusations at Iran in the attacks, and one expert said Iran must at least have been aware of them.

Frustrated customers of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and PNC, who could not get access to their accounts or pay bills online, were upset because the banks had not explained clearly what was going on.

“It was probably the least impressive corporate presentation of bad news I’ve ever seen,” said Paul Downs, a small-business owner in Bridgeport, Pa., and a contributor to The Times’s small-business blog, You’re the Boss. “This is extremely disconcerting.”

The banks suffered denial of service attacks, in which hackers barrage a Web site with traffic until it is overwhelmed and shuts down. Such attacks, while a nuisance, are not technically sophisticated and do not affect a company’s computer network — or, in this case, funds or customer bank accounts. But they are enough to upset customers.

A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters — a reference to Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim holy man who fought against European forces and Jewish settlers in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s — took credit for the attacks in online posts.

The group said it had attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocks the Prophet Muhammad. It also pledged to continue to attack American credit and financial institutions daily, and possibly institutions in France, Israel and Britain, until the video is taken offline. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were also targeted.

On Friday, PNC became the latest bank to experience delays and fall offline. Customers said they had been unable to get access to PNC’s online banking site, and those that visited the bank’s physical locations were told it was because PNC, and many others, had been hacked.

Fred Solomon, a PNC spokesman, said Friday afternoon that the bank’s Web site was back online, but that it was still working to restore online bill payment. Asked why the bank was not better able to withstand such an attack, he said that while PNC had systems in place to prevent delays and disruption from hacker attacks, in this case “the volume of traffic was unprecedented.”

Representatives for other banks also confirmed that they had experienced slow Internet performance and intermittent downtime because of an unusually high volume of traffic.

Security researchers said the attack methods were too basic to have taken so many American bank sites offline. The hackers appeared to be enlisting volunteers for the attacks with messages on various sites. On one blog, they called on people to visit two Web addresses that would cause their computers to flood banks with hundreds of data requests a second. They asked volunteers to attack banks according to a timetable: Wells Fargo on Tuesday, U.S. Bancorp on Wednesday and PNC on Thursday.

But experts said it seemed implausible that this method would create an attack of this scale. “The number of users you need to break those targets is very high,” said Jaime Blasco, a security researcher at AlienVault who has been investigating the attacks. “They must have had help from other sources.”

Those sources, Mr. Blasco said, would have to be a group with money, like a nation, or botnets — networks of infected computers that do the bidding of criminals. Botnets can be rented through black market schemes that are common in the Internet underground, or lent out by criminals or governments.

Last week, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview on C-Span that he believed Iran’s government had sponsored the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions. The hacker group rejected that claim. In an online post, it said the attacks had not been sponsored by a country and that its members “strongly reject the American officials’ insidious attempts to deceive public opinion.”

The hackers maintained that they were retaliating for the online video. “Insult to the prophet is not acceptable, especially when it is the last Prophet Muhammad,” they wrote.

It is very difficult to trace such attacks back to a particular country, security experts say, because they can be routed through different Internet addresses to mask their true origin.

But experts said they had seen an increase in such activity from Iran and in the number of so-called hacktivists, hackers who attack for political purposes rather than for profit, based in Iran.

“We absolutely have seen more activity from the Middle East, and in particular Iran has been increasingly active as they build up their cyber capabilities,” said George Kurtz, the president of CrowdStrike, a computer security company, and former chief technology officer at McAfee. “There is also a strong activist movement underfoot, which should be concerning to many large companies. The threat is real, and what we are seeing now is only the tip of the iceberg.”

James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that in this case, the attack methods used were “pretty basic” to have been state-sponsored. But he added that even if the attacks were not the work of Iran’s government, the state would be aware of them because Iran monitors its networks extensively.

For Mr. Downs, the small-business owner in Pennsylvania, such half explanations were of little consolation.

“A major bank has a problem and gives no indication of what’s happening, when it started or when it will stop,” he said. “That’s pretty freaky if it’s your own business’s money and you need to do things with it.”