e mail

Victory on Antipiracy Issue Buoys Internet Lobby

January 27, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

If labor unions once amplified the legislative agenda of certain American industries, the antipiracy fight showed the potential power of a different force: young Americans who live and breathe the Internet.

A Pew Research Center poll this week found that the antipiracy legislation was the most closely followed news topic among Americans under the age of 30; even news of the presidential elections failed to get as much attention in this age group.

The bills in the House and Senate, backed by the entertainment industry, encountered a surprising defeat after a vast alliance of chip makers, Internet service providers, rival Web companies and digital rights groups cast them as a means of censoring the Web. Several sites went dark for a day in protest, and in Washington e-mail servers were deluged with messages from citizens opposing the bills. Soon even sponsors of the bills — the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and Protect I.P. Act, or PIPA — had backed down.

But if the Internet industry was buoyed by support from its users on this particular issue, they may find themselves on opposing sides in other cases. Consider the prospect of Washington seeking to restrict the use of facial recognition technology, which Facebook uses to speed the process of adding the names of friends to photos. It is hard to imagine Facebook users lobbying on Facebook’s behalf.

“The lesson here is not that the tech industry has millions of people blindly doing what it suggests,” said Eli Pariser, former executive director of MoveOn.org and now a member of its board. “I don’t think Google will be able to count on all the people who took action on SOPA not to challenge Google when it does something that feels counter to the ethos of the Internet.”

The scruffy nature of the digital protests was summed up by one of their informal spokesmen, Alexis Ohanian, 28, a co-founder of the popular social news site Reddit. “No one can predict what will catch on,” he said. “If SOPA and PIPA are any indication, if it’s something that threatens the Internet, I believe we can recreate this.”

Mr. Ohanian is not unlike many in his generation. He grew up in Maryland, but had not been to the Capitol until last November, when he met with members of Congress as part of a tech lobby against the antipiracy bills. He studied history in college, he voted and he consumed political news mostly through “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — and of course, he read what bubbled up on Reddit. “My focus was on building technology,” he said. “I was not engaged.”

That changed last fall. Friends alerted him to SOPA. They were starting a Web site, americancensorship.org. “I thought, O.K., let me see how can I help.”

Mr. Ohanian turned to Reddit users to find out what to say to members of Congress. To his surprise, Congress listened. “I’ve come out of this very optimistic,” he said. “Americans still do run Washington, not lobbyists — at least in this case.”

Now he is part of a flurry of online discussion about what to tackle next. There are some who oppose a global treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which the United States and many European countries have already signed. Others want to block a bill that would compel Internet providers to retain data on users’ online travels.

And some even want to take on political finance reform. Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, one of the Web sites that went dark to protest SOPA, was asked to lend his bully pulpit to that cause. He declined. “We as a community would not be able to find consensus on the question,” he said on his talk page on Wikipedia, “nor should we even try.”

Of course, the Internet industry is already involved in more old-fashioned lobbying, and spending by Silicon Valley companies has ballooned in recent years. A report compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that the computer and Internet industries spent $125 million on lobbying in 2011, outpacing the $122 million spent by the entertainment industry. Google more than doubled its spending to $11.4 million in 2011, and Facebook’s $1.4 million represented a 288 percent increase from the previous year. Copyright, patent reform and privacy were their top issues.

Silicon Valley has also become a lucrative trough for political campaigns, with President Obama’s re-election campaign frequently taking him to California for fund-raising events, including one hosted recently by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer.

Despite the industry’s growing muscle, it is improbable that political opinion in Washington about the antipiracy bills could have been swayed by corporate lobbying alone. On this issue, there was an unusual confluence of events.

“It’s the first emergence of a broad-based Internet community that brings together not only tech giants and the users, but all the young innovators and investors,” said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group backed by several technology companies. “It’s hard to predict when and how they’ll come together. What unified them was a threat to an open Internet.”

No one seems to have been more surprised by the bills’ defeat than their backers. Christopher J. Dodd, a former senator who is now chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, marveled at the technology industry’s “ability to organize and communicate directly with consumers.” Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival this week, he called it “a watershed event” the likes of which he had not witnessed in his 30 years in politics.

In some ways, it was the awakening of a generation that has come to rely on its right to digital freedom.

“What this did show is as a citizen in the Internet age, you have to add the Internet and your digital rights and liberties onto the list of things you need to be worried about if you want to retain your political freedoms,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of a book on digital rights, “Consent of the Networked.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7830c2b948adeea4e2f928be15e0be0f

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, internet lobby, news topic

Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling

January 20, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

But that protest grew out of a much wider grass-roots movement — a collective flexing of Internet muscle that started in some of the less mainstream parts of the Web, like the social news site Reddit and the blogging service Tumblr, and in e-mail chains and countless message boards.

It is no coincidence that these social sites were among those that, according to critics of the legislation in question, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act had the most to lose if it passed. And by design they were able to take the message about the threat and make it go viral.

In the resulting groundswell, lawmaker after lawmaker renounced support for the legislation. Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization that helped organize the protests, said more than 115,000 Web sites participated, and three million people e-mailed Congress to voice their opposition to the bills. “The tech community is using its own technology to rally around the issue,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley patriarch who has invested in hundreds of start-ups, and runs SV Angel, an investment fund. “We probably wouldn’t prevail here if we weren’t eating our own dog food.”

Supporters of the bills, which include major media and entertainment companies, say their only intention is to go after foreign Web sites that distribute unauthorized copies of software, videos and music. But the tech industry maintains that the language in the bills is too broad, and that they could pose a threat to free speech and stifle innovation. Among other things, they say, the bills could make sites responsible for all content or links posted by their users, a weighty burden for social sites.

Many in the industry say the legislation began to stir suspicion as early as September, with respected venture capitalists like Fred Wilson and Paul Graham calling attention to it in e-mails and on the Web.

But the cause gained visibility on Nov. 16 when Tumblr added a feature that “censored” the dashboard users see when they log into the site, and pointed them to information about the bills.

The idea for the feature came out of a three-hour meeting the weekend before, organized by people who opposed the legislation, including members of Fight for the Future; Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures; and David Segal, executive director for Demand Progress, a non-profit group.

John Maloney, the president of Tumblr, said the company volunteered its offices in Manhattan for the meeting, which included roughly 40 people in the room and another 40 or so on speakerphone. Employees of well-known sites like Kickstarter and Reddit were there.

“They told us why it was flawed and asked us to think about it as an industry and a group,” said Mr. Maloney, who added that David Karp, Tumblr’s founder, “was very quick to raise his hand and say ‘We’re in.’ ”

“I looked at David and he had a spark in his eye,” Mr. Maloney said.

Mr. Maloney said a team of people at Tumblr worked late into that evening and returned early on Sunday. That Wednesday morning they posted their work, sat back and watched it come to life and spread around the Web.

Tumblr plays host to 40 million blogs, including the official blogs of start-ups and the personal sites of many tech types, and the alert caught their eye.

“For Tumblr, a New York company with a very solid reputation, to take such a vocal stance on an issue woke people up,” said Nate Westheimer, executive director of the New York Tech Meetup, which organized a rally in Manhattan on Wednesday to protest the bills.

Mr. Westheimer said Tumblr’s alert was the first he had heard of SOPA, and it was enough to prompt him to collaborate on the protest, which attracted close to a thousand people. He said Reddit played an equally important role in feeding the dissent.

Reddit, a site where users share links and chat about tech topics, funny photos and everything else, became a hive of organizational activity in November.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f529147b927ad43fbed15a1370892aa1

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, ron conway

Bits Blog: Even Big Companies Cannot Protect Their Data

January 18, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Isaac Brekken for The New York TimesZappos.com’s chief executive, Tony Hsieh, did not say why the company’s data had been vulnerable.

9:02 p.m. | Updated

Barbara Scott just hit the trifecta of computer security breaches.

Since the New Year, Ms. Scott has been a victim of three separate cyberattacks. Two weeks ago, the online auction site eBay said in an e-mail to her that there had been suspicious activity on her account. On Monday, she received an e-mail from Zappos and another from 6PM, two online shoe retailers owned by Amazon. Both messages alerted her that — once again — her information had been compromised.

“It’s disturbing,” said Ms. Scott, who works in San Diego as a director at Redemtech, a technology services business. “Companies have to do a better job protecting our privacy. You would think companies like eBay and Amazon have the financial backing and wherewithal to take the proper security measures.”

The breaches at Zappos and 6PM may have compromised account information for 24 million customers — the largest breach of an online retailer since a series of cyberattacks against Sony last year that compromised 100 million customer accounts. The attacks point to an unsettling new world in which even the supposed stalwarts of the Internet — Amazon, eBay and even the security giants paid to keep hackers at bay — cannot seem to keep personal information safe.

And when there is a security breach, the companies and computer security experts more often than not resort to telling their consumers that it is up to them to protect their data stored on the company’s servers.

Zappos’s chief executive, Tony Hsieh, said Sunday that customer names, encrypted passwords, phone numbers, e-mail and mailing addresses and the last four digits of their credit card numbers might have been stolen in the attack. But he noted that the company quickly reset all passwords and that a separate database containing critical credit card information had not been breached.

Mr. Hsieh— who wrote the book “Delivering Happiness” and regularly invites customers to tour Zappos’ facilities — provided no explanation about why the data was vulnerable. He directed customers to an e-mail address because its customer service lines “simply aren’t capable” of handling the number of expected customer inquiries.

That response angered Eric Seftel, a Zappos customer, who posted a reply to Zappos’ e-mail alert on The New York Times’s Bits blog: “That’s it? That’s how you respond to a security exposure that may require me to change my password on a large number of other sites to protect myself? That’s how little you think of your customers, just drop this glib little note and wash your hands of the whole affair? You have a legal and moral obligation to protect my information.”

In an e-mail to The New York Times on Monday, Mr. Hsieh said the company did have a security breach response plan in place before the attack but could not discuss the specifics or about how it was breached. “Our plan specifically includes not disclosing details of our security processes or procedures,” Mr. Hsieh said. “Just like you would not expect a casino to disclose when the security guards change shifts.”

The breaches at Amazon’s sites, combined with several recent cyberattacks, could threaten to shake consumer confidence online. Over the year-end holidays, hackers who said they were members of the group Anonymous attacked the Web site of Strategic Forecasting, a research firm that specializes in security and intelligence. They dumped personal and payment details for thousands of subscribers.

In a separate attack on India’s military and intelligence servers two weeks ago, a different group of hackers managed to find and post a segment of source code belonging to Symantec, the largest security software company.

“There are a lot of people that are going to seriously reconsider before they purchase anything else on the Internet,” Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force, said in an interview on Monday.

The White House is working on a plan to increase consumers’ confidence in the security of e-commerce sites. Its initiative, called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, works with major vendors — like banks, technology companies and cellphone service providers — to adopt higher standards for the way companies verify user identities and store personal data online.

But the program is less than a year old and, Mr. Irvine says, intended to be only one step in a larger process to protect customers’ identities and personal information on the Web. “These breaches are going to be an education for people to take a more layered approach to their security,” he said.

With companies unable to provide a good solution, many companies and security experts throw the burden back to consumers.

“It is always a good practice to use different passwords on different Web sites,” Mr. Hsieh advised. Mr. Irvine recommends that consumers protect their personal data more vigilantly. He suggests not using e-mail addresses as user names, creating a unique password for every Web site and refraining from saving personal and payment details online.

“That is the only way you’re going to be secure,” Mr. Irvine said.

Ms. Scott said she already used complex alphanumeric passwords and updated them on a regular basis. “Beyond that, I guess I have to be more conscious about who I choose to do business with online,” she said. “How hard can it be to find a safe place online to buy shoes?”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f59802b9c6c09495a23e919627086d6f

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, security breach, tony hsieh

Bucks Blog: Allstate Offers Credit to Clients Unhappy With Claims Service

January 18, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Allstate says that if its car insurance customers aren’t satisfied with the service they received on a paid claim, they can get a credit for six months of auto premiums for the car in question.

The company’s new “claim satisfaction guarantee” means that if a customer “is not happy, for any reason, with the service they received on a paid auto claim, Allstate will provide a credit to the customer’s auto policy,” the company said.

Kevin Smith, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail that the guarantee is meant to “go beyond the promise of a competently repaired vehicle” and address the customer’s overall “claims experience.”

Customers must “express their dissatisfaction” in writing within 180 days of the event. And they must live in one of the 30 states or the District of Columbia where the guarantee is now in effect. (As of Jan. 1, that includes Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Wyoming.) Allstate is working to bring the feature to additional states this year.

Is there some sort of catch? What if, say, I just don’t like the claims representative’s tone of voice on the phone? Mr. Smith said that the guarantee has been widely in effect for only a few weeks and that he can’t predict what sort of problems may spur a complaint. “It does come down to satisfaction,” he said in a phone interview. Allstate tested the guarantee last year in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Georgia, he said, and received a “handful” of written complaints. He said he didn’t have details on what sort of problems led to a payout.

Details on the insurer’s Web site do mention that the company doesn’t have to agree with you before giving you the credit. “Our provision of a premium credit under this endorsement does not mean that we agree with any reasons you stated for your dissatisfaction,” it states.

Of course, the guarantee applies only to paid claims. More dissatisfaction would be expected in circumstances in which the company doesn’t pay out.

Still, a six-month premium credit may go a long way toward soothing ruffled feathers. What do you think? Would you like to see your insurance company offer such a guarantee?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=273d1366817feafe59804c6a54d57966

Filed Under: Your Money Tagged With: allstate, e mail, kevin smith

You’re the Boss Blog: What Can a Franchisee Do When the Chain Fails?

January 13, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Luke Sharrett for The New York TimesWilliam Burris, facing a “painful situation.”

Case Study

What would you do with this business?

We’ve just published a case study that profiles the bind faced by William Burris, the owner of a box-rental franchise in Washington, D.C., who learned that his franchisor had gone bankrupt.

Mr. Burris had been one of the first United States-based franchisees of Rent Your Boxes, a company founded in Australia to help people rent moving boxes without having to worry about disposing of them. After meeting the company founder at an industry trade show, he invested about $100,000 to purchase three franchise territories in 2009.

Just three months after opening shop, however, Mr. Burris and his nine fellow franchisees received an e-mail informing them that their franchisor had filed for the Australian equivalent of Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Mr. Burris, who had never received a signed copy of his franchise agreement, sprung into action by creating a new Web site and logo for a new company called Rent Our Boxes. Unfortunately, the 10 franchise owners had trouble agreeing on how to run the new company, which led Mr. Burris, who owned the intellectual property for the new company, including its Web site and trademarks, to consider going off to run the business on his own.

We asked several experts in franchising what they thought Mr. Burris should do, and you can read their comments below. Please tell us what you think. Next week, we’ll follow up with another blog post explaining what Mr. Burris decided and how it worked out.

Doug Schadle, founder and chief executive of Rhino 7, a franchise development company in Apex, N.C.: “While Mr. Burris clearly faced a painful situation, he is doing the right thing in trying to build a new company from the ashes of the old. He needs to take control because someone needs to be the chief or nothing will get done. It’s a great concept that has a lot of potential for growth. The current name benefits from strong verbal branding since the name tells you exactly what it does.”

Jim Deitz, president of Andover Franchising, a consulting firm in Atlanta: “The company needs to be aggressively investing in advertising, not cutting back. That is what a franchisor is supposed to help with. Without that help, having 10 partners who can pool resources to do that is probably better than one guy on his own. Having an existing group of business owners would also make it easier to bring on new franchisees because it makes the business look more established.”

Barry Kurtz, a franchise lawyer in Los Angeles: “Mr. Burris should aggressively try to acquire the original franchisor’s intellectual property in Australia or at least investigate who might be making any claims on it. That would help protect him down the road from any claims that his new business is infringing on any trade secrets associated with the original business. It might also be a good idea to push his new brand as another way to distance himself from the Rent Your Boxes name.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5ed4592fc90fb4dde42553bbddcee8ac

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: australian equivalent, e mail, franchise territories

You’re the Boss Blog: Small-Business Resolutions for 2012

January 1, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Transaction

Putting a price on business.

I love making New Year’s resolutions. No matter if 25 percent of resolutions are forgotten within a week, and 88 percent go by the wayside entirely. It’s a time to wipe the slate clean, reset expectations and get excited about what lies ahead. It’s a time for hope, and I’ll take hope for any reason. While I have run across a number of excellent lists for both business and personal resolutions this week, I thought I’d share some of mine and invite you to share yours. Bring on 2012!

Learn: At the top of my list for 2012 is learning how to play golf. I grew up watching my dad play golf, although it wasn’t until later in life that I wished he had taught me the game. I love playing sports and am competitive by nature – just ask my husband. I’m also intrigued by whether golf is the great game of business that everyone says it is. Also on my list is getting better with my digital SLR camera, as well as learning how to edit my photos using PhotoShop Elements. Blog posts look better with a photo, after all.

Enjoy: I am officially done with this recession. I’m done wallowing in fear and uncertainty, wondering whether my business will survive — which it thankfully has so far — and when the business-for-sale marketplace will turn around. I’m ready to move on, regardless. I’m going to tune into the noise less and enjoy life more. Among other things, there are a beautiful new art museum in my home town that I’ve only begun to explore, friends to connect with and vacations to be had. Sorry crumby economy, I’m over you.

Save: One good thing about these lean years has been figuring out how to squeeze every last expense out your business. Last year I got my company’s e-mail and documents moved into the cloud with Google Apps for Business and Dropbox, both of which I’ve been very happy with. My annual information technology expenses now total a whopping $170.40. At home we finally weaned ourselves off of the land line. In 2012 I’m going to tackle telecommunications at our business by exploring cloud-based solutions like Ring Central. I’m also going to look into using a credit card for both business and personals expenses that racks up either cash rewards or airline miles. I’m starting my research here.

Read: I mean books, as in the kind you can hold and smell (I can’t be the only one who loves to pick up a book, hold it close, flip the pages and take a whiff). I aspire to read a book a week, like a colleague of mine, but I’m a realist and have set a goal to read at least 15 books in 2012. The first three non-fiction titles on my list are “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable” by Seth Godin, “Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time” by Keith Ferrazzi, and “Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World” by Michael Lewis. Part of my 2011 savings plan was to cut down on buying books and get reacquainted with the adult section of my public library; I’ve been stuck in children’s books for about seven years now. It’s a beautiful relationship that has been a happy byproduct of last year’s resolutions.

Fix: I do most of my writing from my home office on a MacBook Pro. After almost three years of heavy use, the seven key is failing and things seem to be taking longer than they should. The old gray laptop just ain’t what it used to be. Time to visit my local geeks and get an overhaul, something my Web site is also in desperate need of. I’ve set my marketing budget for 2012, and these guys will be getting the lion’s share. It’s time to get serious about integrating my online marketing and social media strategies, regardless of how well the band-aids have worked up to this point.

I can think of plenty of others, like clean, play, write, sleep. But these are some of my New Year’s resolutions in a word, or two. What are yours?

Barbara Taylor is co-owner of a business brokerage firm, Synergy Business Services, in Bentonville, Ark. You can follow her on Twitter.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5f2c5620afaa726050975b0bd4584f36

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: digital slr camera, e mail, playing sports

Letter That Led to Downfall of Hewlett Chief Surfaces

December 30, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

A Delaware court ruled Wednesday that the letter, from the lawyer Gloria Allred to Mr. Hurd, who at the time was chief executive of H.P., may be made public. The letter set in motion internal investigations at the company that led to Mr. Hurd’s resignation on Aug. 6, 2010.

Running eight pages, the letter accuses Mr. Hurd of sexual harassment, saying he repeatedly pressed Ms. Allred’s client, Jodie Fisher, a former actress in pornographic movies and reality show contestant, for sex. It also claims that he boasted about his wealth and knowledge of business deals.

Mr. Hurd, now a president of the Oracle Corporation, had fought to keep the letter private, asserting California’s privacy laws. But the court found that the letter, while “mildly embarrassing,” was not protected in the same way as trade secrets and certain financial information.

In Oct. 2007, the letter says, Mr. Hurd met Ms. Fisher, who was working as a contract employee for H.P., in Atlanta. On the pretext of showing her some documents for China’s vice premier, the letter says, Mr. Hurd invited Ms. Fisher to his room at the Ritz-Carlton, where Mr. Hurd propositioned her.

“Ms. Fisher was horrified,” the letter says, and after an hour of refusals, she eventually left. “You told her that no one had ever rejected you before and were clearly miffed.” After describing several such encounters in detail, the letter says that Ms. Fisher’s employment with H.P. ended.

A source briefed on the case, however, says that an outside counsel for H.P. prepared a timeline of e-mails that Ms. Fisher sent around the time of the events recorded in the letter. An e-mail sent soon after the Atlanta event had the subject line “great to see you” and talked about how she was looking forward to seeing Mr. Hurd again.

Ms. Fisher settled with Mr. Hurd two days before his resignation from H.P. In a letter following the settlement, she stated that the letter from Ms. Allred contained many inaccuracies.

“The letter was recanted by Ms. Fisher,” said Ken Glueck, a senior vice president at Oracle. “She admitted it was full of inaccuracies.” A spokeswoman for H.P. declined to comment.

An H.P shareholder, Ernesto Espinoza, had filed a lawsuit against H.P. and sought a copy of the letter in court to investigate corporate wrongdoing and waste associated with the relationship and Mr. Hurd’s resignation. The Delaware court did not release the letter on Thursday, but the documents were obtained by The New York Times from sources close to the case.

Soon after receiving the letter from Ms. Allred, Mr. Hurd turned it over to H.P.’s corporate counsel, Michael Holston. Mr. Holston, acting on behalf of the company, began an internal investigation of Mr. Hurd’s behavior.

While the letter from Ms. Allred was mostly a narrative of a powerful man’s pursuit of a woman for sex (after the settlement Ms. Fisher also stated that she and Mr. Hurd never had sexual relations), it also states that in March 2008, Mr. Hurd told Ms. Fisher that he was working on a deal to purchase Electronic Data Systems. H.P. announced in May 2008 that it would buy E.D.S. for $13.9 billion.

If these accusations are true, Mr. Hurd could be found guilty of leaking insider information. Sources close to the H.P. board, however, say that its internal investigation did not prove any such transgression. Tension emerged between Mr. Hurd and the board, they say, over his changing explanations about his relationship with Ms. Fisher and discrepancies in his expense reporting.

A spokeswoman for the Securities and Exchange Commission, citing commission policy, would not comment on whether the agency looked into the charge. Given the time that has elapsed since the letter was known to several corporate lawyers and the government, it seems unlikely that there was sufficient evidence for a case.

In an e-mail to employees a few days after Mr. Hurd resigned in 2010, the company’s interim chief, Cathie Lesjak, said Mr. Hurd resigned over “inappropriate behavior in which he engaged that violated H.P.’s standards of business conduct and undermined his ability to continue to lead the company.”

Since Mr. Hurd’s departure, Hewlett-Packard has struggled to regain its bearings. He was first replaced as chief by Léo Apotheker, who himself was ousted on Sept. 22. Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay, is now H.P.’s chief.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=74f4a0a1836b5f743bb185116b517bce

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, gloria allred, reality show contestant

Media Decoder Blog: The Times E-Mails Millions by Mistake to Say Subscriptions Were Canceled

December 28, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

4:28 p.m. | Updated The New York Times said it accidentally sent e-mails on Wednesday to more than eight million people who had shared their information with the company, erroneously informing them they had canceled home delivery of the newspaper.

The Times Company, which initially mischaracterized the mishap as spam, apologized for sending the e-mails. The 8.6 million readers who received the e-mails represent a wide cross-section of readers who had given their e-mails to the newspaper in the past, said a Times Company spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy.

“We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised,” she said.

The e-mail urged recipients to reconsider subscribing to the Times at “50% off for 16 weeks.” The false message sent off a flood of Twitter reactions and lit up the Times switchboard.

The Times official Twitter feed sent this message: “If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.”

Those initial comments raised questions in some readers’ minds about whether hackers might have had access to their credit card and personal information, a misimpression that Ms. Murphy said the company was now working to correct.

She said the e-mail was sent by a Times employee, and not the third-party Epsilon Interactive, the service The Times uses to communicate with subscribers.

The Times is the nation’s third-largest newspaper in Monday to Friday print subscriptions, after The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and No. 1 in Sunday subscriptions, with 1.65 million customers receiving the Sunday print edition, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The NYTimes.com Web site had 32.3 million unique viewers in November.

Late Wednesday afternoon, the company sent an e-mail to recipients of the erroneous note to explain the error. Around that time, a short notice to readers appeared on the NYTimes.com home page.

“It’s in our interest now to make sure people understand the correct situation,” Ms. Murphy said.

In comments posted on The Times Web site, as well as on Twitter, readers wrote that they wanted in on the deal being offered in the mass e-mail. “Still wanna give me 50% off?” one reader asked via Twitter.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=91b772f6bd7fdf708947888570451119

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: 6 million, e mail, home delivery

Hackers Breach the Web Site of Stratfor Global Intelligence

December 26, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

On Saturday, hackers who say they are members of the collective known as Anonymous claimed responsibility for crashing the Web site of the group, Stratfor Global Intelligence Service, and pilfering its client list, e-mails and credit card information in an operation they say is intended to steal $1 million for donations to charity. The hackers posted a list online that they say contains Stratfor’s confidential client list as well as credit card details, passwords and home addresses for some 4,000 Stratfor clients. The hackers also said they had details for more than 90,000 credit card accounts. Among the organizations listed as Stratfor clients: Bank of America, the Defense Department, Doctors Without Borders, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Nations.

The group also posted five receipts online that it said were of donations made with pilfered credit card details. One receipt showed a $180 donation from a United States Homeland Security employee, Edmund H. Tupay, to the American Red Cross. Another showed a $200 donation to the Red Cross from Allen Barr, a recently retired employee from the Texas Department of Banking. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Barr told The Associated Press that on Friday he discovered that $700 had been transferred from his account to charities including the Red Cross, Save the Children and CARE, but that he had not been aware that the transfer was tied to a breach of Stratfor’s site.

Stratfor executives did not return calls for comment on Sunday. In an e-mail to subscribers Sunday morning, Stratfor’s chief executive, George Friedman, confirmed that the company’s site had been hacked and said his company was working with law enforcement to track down the parties responsible.

“We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other Web sites,” Mr. Friedman wrote in the e-mail. “We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained.”

The hackers took responsibility for the Stratfor attack on Twitter and said the attack would be the beginning of a weeklong holiday hacking spree. The breach was the latest in the online group’s ongoing campaign of computer attacks which, to date, has been aimed at MasterCard, Visa and PayPal as well as groups as diverse as the Church of Scientology, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Zetas, a Mexican crime syndicate.

The breach first surfaced on Saturday when hackers defaced Stratfor’s Web site with their own message. “Merry Lulzxmas!” the group wrote in a reference to Lulz Security, a hacking group loosely affiliated with Anonymous. “Are you ready for a week of mayhem?” By Sunday afternoon, the message had been replaced with a banner message that said: “Site is currently undergoing maintenance. Please check back soon.”

According to the hackers’ online postings, the group voted on what charities to contribute to. Among their choices were cancer and AIDS research, the American Red Cross, WikiLeaks and the Tor Project, a software that enables online anonymity.

Also according to their postings, the breach appears to have been conducted in retaliation for the arrest and imprisonment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst on trial on charges of leaking classified intelligence information and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks last year.

The attack was also likely intended to embarrass Stratfor, which specializes in intelligence and security. The hackers said they were able to obtain the credit card details because, they said, Stratfor had failed to encrypt them.

“The scary thing is that no matter what you do, every system has some level of vulnerability,” says Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force. “The more you do from an advanced technical standpoint, the more common things go unnoticed. Getting into a system is really not that difficult.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=23ae4b04298fc92ff196a9ac106a7d18

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, george friedman, home addresses

Pogue’s Posts: If Car Companies Were Run Like Tech Companies …

December 23, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

As we plow into 2012, it has become clear that the technology industry is like no other. Its changes come faster. Its marketing hits us more deeply. Its business models would look absurd in any other industry. Can you imagine what the world would look like if another industry worked like the tech industry? Like, say, cars?

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 9 — Here at the annual Consumer Electronic Automotive Show, the largest trade show in the world, the carheads have again made their annual pilgrimage to see what new breakthrough vehicles will be finding their way into American garages in the new year.

The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
Sign up | See Sample

Axxle, the Cupertino, Calif., automaker, is again notable by its absence. But even though its perfectionist founder, Steve Hubs, recently died, the company’s impact was everywhere at the show.
When Axxle announced its sleek, simple-to-drive iCar last year, automotive blogs like Gizmoto and Engearjet savaged it for its lack of a windshield, doors, roof and body. “Only the fanboys would want to drive a flat glass surfboard,” went a typical remark.

Once the iCar went on sale, however, it rapidly became the fastest-selling new vehicle in history. And at this year’s show, imitators are everywhere. Many are based on Andrive, a design offered by the mobile billboard giant Gogle (whose unofficial motto is, “Don’t be civil”). Andrive is regarded as a less polished but free chassis that closely resembles the iCar.

Andrive has become popular, but there are concerns. “They come out with new Andrive models too quickly,” says the auto blogger Michael Carrington. “I just bought a Motorolling Dride three weeks ago, and it’s already obsolete.”

Industry analysts are closely observing the fate of RIM (Reverse in Motion), whose Playbug vehicle, intended for business drivers, was originally released without a brake pedal or driver’s-side door. “We’ll get there,” said Mike Lazariding, co-chief executive. “We’ll release a free update to all Playbug owners once these components are finished.”

But it took longer than expected for RIM to complete these elements; in the meantime, public interest in the Playbug waned, and sales plummeted.

Of course, the fate of Fuelett-Packard is fresh on car fans’ minds. Its much-hyped TruckPad was discontinued only seven weeks after its release. Those unfortunate buyers who bought TruckPads now find themselves with orphaned vehicles, with no access to spare parts or repair facilities.

Vanazon.com, which operated unprofitably for several years before finally becoming the dominant car dealer (and now used-car dealer) online has a new vehicle. The Spindle Tire’s shockingly low price has made it a hit of the holiday car-buying season. “They’re selling each one at a loss,” says the car columnist David Coupe, “because their main business is selling gas, antifreeze and wiper fluid.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fc587d9121bfacdb3b8c04be20f75ac9

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, michael carrington, technology industry