After bogging down in the recession, internet advertising is regaining the momentum that has made it the decade's most disruptive marketing machine.
The signs of an online revival are emerging even while advertising in print and broadcasts remains in a slump that has triggered mass layoffs, pay cuts and other upheaval.
Internet advertising was just about the only bright spot in the third-quarter reports of two major U.S. newspaper publishers, Gannett Co. and McClatchy Co.
Meanwhile, the companies still are dealing with steep declines in print ads — an imbalance most analysts predict will take years to address.
More: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/10/21/online-advertising-rebound.html
Tiny Eolas Technologies is taking tech giants and major customers to court claiming they infringed its patents for working with online interactive content.
Eolas has filed suit against Adobe Systems, Apple, Google, Sun Microsystems, YouTube, Blockbuster, JP Morgan Chase, JC Penny and Playboy Enterprises, among others.
The company, which has chosen the litigant-friendly US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas to fight the case, claimed the companies infringed on two of its patents.
More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/07/eolas_browser_microsoft/
U.S. authorities are using the threat of big fines to force bloggers to disclose their relationships with the companies they write about, but jurisidictional confusion means no similar mechanisms exist or are under consideration in Canada.
The Federal Trade Commission on Monday announced new rules that require bloggers in the United States to disclose "material connections" — or "connections that consumers would not expect" — with the subjects they write about. The connections can take the form of outright payments, advertisements or free products given to the blogger by the subject.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/10/05/ftc-blogger-disclosure-standards-fines.html
Two ongoing scams are tricking Google and other search engines into prominently displaying millions of compromised webpages that attempt to hijack end users' computers or steal their credit card numbers, researchers said.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/01/mass_compromise_google_results/
The Pirate Bay saga took another twist Tuesday as one of the appellate judges set to hear the appeal of the co-founders’ criminal copyright convictions was removed over concerns of bias.
The Swedish judge in question, Fredrik Niemela, owns an unstated number of stock options in the music streaming service, Spotify, which has content deals with members of the Recording Industry Association of America.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/09/piratebaysaga/
Social website Facebook yanked a poll this week about assassinating President Barack Obama after being contacted by the U.S. Secret Service.
On Monday, Facebook dropped a question that asked voters whether the U.S. president "should be killed."
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/29/obama-poll-secret-service-facebook.html
Microsoft's free antivirus program, Security Essentials, became available for download from the company's website Tuesday.
Microsoft bills the software as providing "high-quality protection" against viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware and other malicious software. It updates and upgrades automatically.
Microsoft said its free program is not meant to cut into the business of commercial antivirus programs, by companies such as McAfee and Symantec, but will appeal to people who don't already have security software on their computers.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/29/tech-computer-windows-antivirus.html
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
A federal judge fundamentally misinterpreted a patent asserted against Microsoft Word, an error that should require a $290m infringement penalty to be overturned, attorneys for the software giant argued Wednesday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/microsoft_i4i_patent_hearing/
Facebook says it will shut down its controversial marketing feature Beacon, an application that broadcasts users' activities, including purchases, on other websites to their Facebook friends.
The feature was adopted in November 2007 and immediately drew complaints from Facebook users who said it invaded their privacy.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/21/tech-internet-facebook-beacon.html
Google has acquired a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff that seeks to cut down on spam and fraud at websites while digitizing books.
ReCAPTCHA offers simple word puzzles that users must solve when registering at a website or completing an online purchase. Computers can't decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are using the site.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/17/tech-google-recaptcha-017.html
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social networking site has more than 300 million users, and earned more money than it spent last quarter.
In a blog post on Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote that the company was "cash flow positive" in the last quarter. He had previously projected that Facebook would meet that goal in 2010.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/16/tech-facebook-300-million-users.html
A group of prominent Canadian researchers has launched an initiative to examine how closely companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo follow their own principles regarding freedom of expression and privacy.
Citizen Lab, which runs out of the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, has gained prominence this year after it uncovered an alleged internet spy network based mostly in China in March and last month aided Iranians in accessing blocked content on the web.
Now the group will turn its attention to the private sector, examining how closely technology companies follow their own agreed-upon principles for conduct.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/21/search-engines-human-rights-measure.html
Four men found guilty of promoting copyright infringement through the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay will not get a retrial, the Swedish court of appeals has ruled.
The court found Thursday that the judge who ruled in the original case in April, Tomas Norstroem, was not biased as the four men alleged.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom had called for a retrial after Norstroem publicly admitted he was a member of the Swedish Association for Copyright and sat on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.
In Thursday's ruling, the court said Norstroem should have revealed his affiliations early in the court proceedings. But his failure to do so does not mean there was wrongdoing during the proceedings that would require a retrial.
The Pirate Bay website connects BitTorrent networks to allow users to swap music, video or game files, but the site's founders had argued they were not responsible for the files they directed users toward, since they themselves did not host any of the files.
However, the court found the defendants guilty on April 17 of aiding in the committing of copyright offences "by providing a website with … sophisticated search functions, simple download and storage capabilities, and through the tracker linked to the website."
Norstroem had sentenced each of the men to one year in prison and ordered each to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($4.5 million Cdn) to a number of companies in the film and recording industry.
In life, Michael Jackson once ruled the pop charts. With his death, he dominated the internet.
As reports of Jackson's death on Thursday spread, celebrity gossip websites crashed, news sites slowed to a crawl and traffic on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook spiked.
Few sites were spared. Jackson's sudden, unexpected death led so many people to search Google for information that the search engine's software believed it was under attack, sending searchers a message saying "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application."
Even online encyclopedia Wikipedia had problems of its own, as an editing war broke out on Jackson's biography over whether the musician had actually passed away.
Shortly after 5:15 p.m. ET, gossip website TMZ.com was the first outlet to report that Jackson had been rushed to a hospital after suffering an apparent cardiac arrest. TMZ's website temporarily shut down when the volume of traffic overwhelmed it.
As viewers rushed to mainstream news sites for more information, their websites all started to experience marked slowdowns in performance, according to Keynote Systems, an internet measurement consultancy.
News sites slow to crawl
"Beginning at 5:30 p.m. ET, the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds," said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations. "During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100 per cent to 86 per cent. The index returned to normal by 9:15 p.m. ET."
From 6 until 8 p.m. ET, ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times and AOL (which owns TMZ) were among the sites that were mostly unavailable, Keynote said in a release. (Keynote had earlier reported CNN Money was also affected, but has since issued a retraction.)
Internet tracking firm Akamai reported that North America's most popular news sites saw traffic spike 20 per cent above average during the height of the story just after 6 p.m., with over four million visitors per minute, about half the traffic of last Nov. 4, the day of Barack Obama's victory in the U.S. presidential election.
As people online tried to get the latest news, social networks saw a spike in traffic, much of it Michael Jackson-related. Users flooded Facebook, and a group on the social networking site called Michael Jackson RIP was created Thursday night and has now attracted nearly 65,000 members.
Biz Stone, co-founder of the online social messaging service Twitter, told the Los Angeles Times that the frequency of Twitter posts, or Tweets, doubled after the first reports of Jackson's death surfaced.
Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was tracking Jackson-related content on Twitter and posted that Jackson had far surpassed the Iran election and swine flu as a popular topic.
"My Twitter search script sees roughly 15 per cent of all posts on Twitter mentioning Michael Jackson," he reported on Twitter on Thursday. "Never saw Iran or swine flu reach over five per cent."
Those numbers have since dropped to about three per cent of all Twitter traffic as of Friday, he said in a later post.
The first app featuring images of nude women to go up for sale on iTunes can no longer be downloaded because it was too popular, the developer reported Thursday.
"The Hottest Girls app is temporarily sold out," said a post signed by the "ATG dev team" on the website of developer Allen Leung.
They added that the servers distributing the app were crashing due to high usage. However, they noted that those who have already downloaded the app will be able to use it, and assured customers that "the topless images will still be there when it is sold again."
"Hottest Girls," which billed itself on the developer's website as the "first and only app with nudity," was updated Wednesday to include "completely naked pics," according to the description at the iTunes store. It is available for download to customers 17 or older to run on the iPhone and the iPod touch.
Previously, Apple would not approve that kind of material for sale on iTunes.
However, Apple updated its OS 3.0 iPhone software this month to include parental controls that restrict some applications to people over a certain age. That led to widespread speculation online at sites such as MacRumors.com that the door would soon be open to porn.
The "Hottest Girls" application for the iPhone and iPod touch costs $1.99 and boasts more than 2,000 photos of "hand-picked images of the finest looking girls" that are automatically updated. A previous version of the app, released in May, contained scantily clad women, but none who were naked.
At least one online review, however, said even the new, nude images are relatively tame.
Wired News columnist Charlie Sorrel called them "distinctly softcore."
"While there are nipples to be seen, that's about it," he wrote on the magazine's Gadget Lab website. "A smartly worded Google image search would do better if you're looking for titillation."
Confusion for developers?
Nigel Wallace, director of software and services for IDC Canada, a research company that analyzes the technology industry, said Apple's decision to allow explicit apps on iTunes means it has a lot of faith in its new parental controls.
"Apple cares a lot about their brand," he added. "It's an exceedingly large part of the company's worth."
Presumably, he said, the company thinks adult-oriented apps could be a huge potential market and a source of large revenues.
Wallace noted that Apple has banned a number of other applications in recent months that could potentially tarnish its image, such as one from the band Nine Inch Nails and another featuring the South Park cartoon. In April, the company also pulled the plug on the "Baby Shaker" application, which prompted numerous complaints. The app let users shut off the sound of a crying baby with a vigorous shake.
Given its recent track record, the decision to allow adult apps may confuse developers, Wallace said.
"It would be nice to have a bit more clarification from Apple in terms of what's in, what's out."
Microsoft is trying to lure Canadians to upgrade to its newest operating system by offering a half-price discount to people who pre-order.
Windows 7 won't be released until Oct. 22, but Microsoft is taking pre-orders starting Friday, the company said in a news release Thursday.
Until July 11, people running Windows XP or Vista can pre-order upgrades to the home version of Windows 7 at $64.99 instead of $129.95 and the professional version for $124.99 instead of $279.95 "while quantities last."
Similar offers are being made in the U.S., Japan, the U.K., France and Germany. For those who don't currently have Windows XP or Vista, the home version will cost $224.95 and the professional version will cost $329.95.
The company said it would also provide free upgrades for people who buy computers loaded with the current Microsoft operating system, Windows Vista, until Jan. 2010.
It had a similar program in place when Vista was released in January 2007, after numerous delays.
However, some computer vendors, such as Dell, began giving users the option of choosing Windows XP instead of Vista after complaints about Vista's speed, security alerts and lack of compatibility with some devices such as printers. Microsoft slashed the price of the boxed version of Vista in 2008 in an effort to boost sales.
The company has now renewed its effort to get people to switch from XP, promising that Windows 7 will have fewer security alerts and better device compatibility than Vista, and an XP mode to entice business users who didn't make the switch to its current Vista operating system.
The Conficker worm has begun to update the machines it has infected with a new set of instructions to spread to other machines and then self-destruct, security experts say.
Security researchers tracking the worm said some of the infected computers began receiving instructions on April 7 from other infected machines. Conficker is able to send updates to computers it has infected either by directing the computers to visit websites or through a peer-to-peer network of infected machines.
Last week Conficker had computer and internet organizations worldwide up in arms against it because it was known that a variant of the worm would begin accelerating the speed with which it reached out to websites on April 1.
It was thought the worm might send out instructions that day, but instead it appears to have waited a week before doing so, and rather than sending the instructions through a website, it sent them over the peer-to-peer network.
The instructions tell the computers to attempt to contact other computers and exploit a vulnerability in older Microsoft Windows products — Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 — that would allow the worm to take over the computer and expand its network of infected machines.
The instructions had appeared on previous versions of the worm but were removed in the Conficker C variant, leading security experts to believe the people behind the virus were trying to temporarily slow its growth to make it harder to track.
The new instructions also direct computers to visit established websites such as myspace.com, msn.com, ebay.com, cnn.com, and aol.com, but once there no code is downloaded or weaknesses are exploited, leading some firms to suggest the worm is simply checking to confirm the computer is connected with the internet.
The instructions also appear to have a time limit, Symantec reports. On May 3, 2009, the new instructions will not only stop running, but the worm will activate a self-removal program, although it's not known when it does this whether it will leave behind some legacy of the worm or perhaps another, different worm.
Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response, said the self-destruction instruction is unique, and may be the virus writer's way of making it harder for users to track its progress.
"Conficker is the name on everybody's lips right now, so if you remove the traces of Conficker but leave something else behind, users won't know what to look for," he said.
Symantec has speculated Conficker might be connected to another spam bot, called Waledac.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/09/conficker-active.html
Conficker changed the way parts of the botnet communicated overnight, but little else of note has happened so far.
The malware is far from an April Fool's joke, but it's obviously a long way from the Skynet botnet, as depicted in Terminator 3, that some of the more fevered imaginings of the media hinted at. The main activity that accompanied the run-up to the activation date was the registration of dozens of new domain names designed to advertise rogue security packages in the guise of Conficker clean-up tools.
As widely predicted by security vendors beforehand, Conficker and its 1 April activation was more about hype rather than havoc. As F-Secure notes, worms with triggers have consistently failed to do anything on that date. Previous damp squibs include the Michelangelo virus (1992), CIH (1999), SoBig (2003), and MyDoom (2004).
Nonetheless, Conficker remains implanted on many computers, anywhere between 1-4 million, according to the latest estimates.
Conficker first began spreading in November, using a variety of techniques including the exploitation of a well-known Windows vulnerability. Once it secured a foothold on infected networks the worm is capable of spreading across network shares by exploiting weak password security. The malware is also capable of spreading using infected USB drives.
Early versions of Conficker called home to 250 different domain names every day to see if updates were available. From Wednesday, machines infected by the latest version of Conficker began to poll a sample of 500 out of 50,000 domains a day, making attempts to interfere with the update process more difficult. Most compromised machines are thought to be infected by the earlier B variant, whose behaviour has not changed.
Still earlier versions of the worm include peer-to-peer functionality, so that infected computers can communicate between themselves without the need for a server. This functionality might be used to pass around software updates or initiates malicious activity without the need for update servers. And the new call home routine of the latest variant of the worm is due to take place from now on, so that "sleeper" botnet could be unleashed at any future date.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/01/conficker_activation/
China's government on Tuesday dismissed a research report outlining an extensive spy network based mostly in China as "lies" designed to hurt the country's image abroad.
Speaking to reporters, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said the conclusions of the report by Canadian researchers were symptoms of a "Cold War virus" that causes people overseas to "occasionally be overcome by China-threat seizures."
On Sunday, the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto released the report on a spy network, dubbed GhostNet, that it said had infiltrated at least 1,295 computers, including 103 belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices around the world.
The report, published after a 10-month investigation, found three out of the four servers in the network were based in China while a fourth was in the United States. Some of the IP addresses used by the hackers were traced back to Hainan Island, the location of China's major signals and intelligence agency.
But Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert told CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning that the attack could have been carried out by anyone, as the control servers were not set up securely.
Qin did not directly respond to questions about whether the network existed or if its actions were supported by the government, but instead defended his country's record on fighting cybercrime.
"China pays great attention to computer network security and resolutely opposes and fights any criminal activity harmful to computer networks, such as hacking," Qin said.
"Some people outside China now are bent on fabricating lies about so-called Chinese computer spies."
The GhostNet investigation began after the authors were asked to look into allegations that the Chinese were hacking into computers set up by the Tibetan exile community. The researchers eventually found a much wider network of computers that had been infected by hackers with malware that allowed the hackers to gain control of the computers and look at all files.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/03/31/china-ghostnet.html
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