The move would further turn Gmail, which revolutionized online e-mail, into a comprehensive communications hub. The intent is to keep people's attention centered on Google, by making Gmail, not Facebook, people's first stop online and their default place to send and receive messages. Gmail users can already chat via Jabber or AIM, make video calls, and send SMS messages from Gmail's web interface.

As the Post reports:

Google has been trying to fashion Gmail into more than an e-mail service for years. The service currently lets users set an away message, which can be a link to a Web page, that their friends see when they instant-message them. Now, it plans to launch a new interface that will aggregate updates from more friends in a stream.

The new stream will also eventually include content that a user's connections share through its YouTube video site and Picasa photo service, according to one person familiar with the matter. But whether those features will also be announced in the coming days remains unclear.

The full extent of the new features remain unclear, but Google is inviting reporters to a launch event Tuesday on its Mountain View, California, campus promising some innovations in two of our most popular products, according to an e-mail sent to reporters.

Yahoo has included similar features in its e-mail service, letting users see what photos their contacts have uploaded to Flickr, for example.

Google could integrate updates from a user's Twitter account, since most of that is public. And it could likely make it easy for Gmail users to post to Twitter as well, due to Twitter's liberal API policy.

Facebook, however, will not likely let its rival re-publish status updates, or allow users to publish to their Facebook pages through Gmail. Facebook, much like AOL and Compuserve back in the early '90s, is a controlled and sanitized version of the larger internet, but it relies on closed protocols.

via Google to Add Social Feature to Gmail - WSJ.com.

See Also:

• April 1, 2004: Gmail Hits Webmail G-Spot
• Google Turns on Gmail Encryption to Protect Wi-Fi Users
• Gmail's New 'Undo Send' Feature Saves You From Outbox Regret
• AOL Announces Lifestream App for Twitter, Facebook, SMS
• Walled Garden No More, AOL Adds Social Networks to Homepage

What a time we're living in. You can't even make fun of your competitors at your own company meeting without your words leaking out to the internet.

Apparently, this has happened to Steve Jobs, who lashed out at Google and Adobe at Apple's Town Hall company meeting held at their One Infinite Loop headquarters. Speaking to Apple employees, Steve Jobs voiced his expression with buggy Flash, lazy Adobe, and Google's fakery in the don't be evil department.

Although these words have not been (and will never be) officially confirmed, multiple anonymous people from the audience confirmed their authenticity to Wired.

Here's a couple of Steve's (inexact) quotes from the meeting: Adobe is lazy. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.

When it comes to Google, Jobs is mad at them for trying to kill the iPhone. We did not enter the search business, he said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them.

Finally, his most interesting quote is about Google's don't be evil mantra. According to Daring Fireball, Jobs simply said: it's a load of crap.

Yes, I think we can safely say we were right when we said that a) the iPad and the iPhone aren't getting full Flash support anytime soon, and b) Google is now Apple's greatest enemy.

Tags: adobe, apple, Flash, Google, steve jobs, trending

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

The world was shown a lot of new electronic products this year at CES.

This is a list of the top 5 products that are actually usable or will be in the near future when they are released.

These are what we wish we could pick up at the store today.

Enjoy the videos as well.

5. Sprint Overdrive

This is MiFi on steroids with 3G and 4G coverage. This beast is ready today. However, it is limited to certain cities and metro areas in the states. See if you're on the list and if you are, drop that cable company or DSL provider like they're hot.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

4. MSI Android slate

This was the closest I found to a slate that was responsive and accurate even for a dude with fat fingers. Maybe the others aren't up to production mode yet but they lacked the same experience, until the MSI would freeze.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

3. Vizio wifi TV's

This iteration of 3D is a huge fail. Like bad movies this should have seen limited release or straight to DVD, if you know what I mean. What is awesome are the Vizio wifi TV's that will be hitting the shelves. They've embraced almost every type of TV widget that can be made and I would expect to see some brilliant hacks coming our way.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

2. Asus T101MT

There isn't a whole lot to say that I haven't said already. This is going to be a great, usable device that I wish was running Mac OS. I used a Toshiba tablet PC back in 2006 for my job and loved it. This size would be incredibly useful and mobile.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

1. Intel Infoscape

Only exists for trade show purposes but will soon be finding its way into other displays. Look out hotels, shopping malls and people with money to burn.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

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• Wins and Fails While Covering CES 2010 (jkontherun.com)
• Dell chalks up tablet PC (reghardware.co.uk)
• Video: Highlights, Lowlights From CES 2010 (wired.com)
• Ballmer shows HP slate/tablet PC in CES snooze-athon (guardian.co.uk)

Our CES 2010 Top Picks is a post from: TechStartups.com

In my search for information about the world, what matters to me and what is good, I go no farther than an application that I wrote called Filome. I've talk about it quite a bit here at Tech Startups.

It's an app that is about 85% of the way there and is relegated being updated when I have spare time. Which in the last 8 months hasn't been very often. One of the things it is brilliant at though is helping me find what is relevant to me and what I want to write about.

About 30 minutes ago it was tablet computers. But instead of writing about them and adding to the noise, I thought that I would share my filter a tablet computer group from Filome.

First there is the feed for those that want to get right to it - http://www.filome.com/group/ksmith/1/tablet%20computers.rss

Below are the latest 25 posts regarding tablet computing. All linking to the original posts. Find one and follow it down the rabbit hole. Enjoy! (Remember: If you want to stay updated subscribe to the feed link above)

1. You Can Take It With You: Future Trends in Media
2. Who needs tablet computers anyway?
3. Can Android Tablets Find a Market?
4. Why I Hate Ereaders, And Doubt They'll Ever Hit the Mainstream [Ebooks]
5. Why Google Should Make a Tablet [Opinion]
6. Apple to Launch iTunes on the Web
7. Analyst noise: Apple tablet in March for $1k, publishers on-board, Verizon iPhone coming too
8. Apple Tablet Release Date Gets Narrowed Down, Prices Get Estimated
9. Which Companies Will Win The Battle For The E-Book Consumer?
10. A New, Now Netbook You Can Actually Buy: PsiXpda
11. Analysts Predict 1 Billion+ Mobile Web Users by 2010
12. Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split
13. Apple tablet rumored to be 'shockingly' inexpensive
14. Apple Registers TabletMac Trademark After Dueling Axiotron MacBook Modders [AppleTablet]
15. Using the Apple LP and Extras format for learning?
16. NVIDIA Tegra tablet prototype hands-on
17. What If Steve Jobs Hadn't Returned To Apple In 1997?
18. Hearst, Time, Conde iTunes For Magazines Only A Few Weeks Away
19. DigiTimes Claims Apple Tablet Delayed for OLED Upgrade [Rumor]
20. Apple tablet(s) in 2H 2010 with OLED screen and tailored content in tow?
21. Cond Nast Gets Wired Ready For Apple Tablet (In Case There Is One)
22. Adobe Air hits 2.0 this is powerful stuff
23. The death of the URL
24. Apple tablet speculation: high-end graphics, several models
25. Bookmark Away: Instapaper Comes Up With A New Way To Work With The Kindle

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• PastryKit: An iPhone Webdev Library from Apple (ajaxian.com)

Tablets, tablets, tablets The Next Devices is a post from: TechStartups.com

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a Nokia N900 today for a little while. After the Wired Store NYC debacle I thought I owed it to you to at least do something techy cool.

So I cut my trip home short and went over to the Nokia New York Flagship store on E. 57th Street in search of a the elusive N900.

Turns out in a Nokia store, it isn't so elusive.

Once inside the store it is the first phone that is on display. Right behind the N900 was the previous big dog, the N97 and the puppy, the N85.

I made my way to the back of the store near the cash wrap, grabbed a blue stool and squared myself up with one of the two N900's available for customer hands on testing. Well, available for a blogger's hands on testing, one could say.

The phone is much lighter than I expected it to be for its size. The phone is thicker than an iPhone but weighs nearly the same. It doesn't feel cheap. I have to say, the Droid, feels kind of cheap compared to the Nokia smart phone.

Something that came as a surprise was how responsive the phone was to switching between applications. It was seamless. Which is a good thing because the phone has two levels of app nagivation one for inside the application you are using and a root level.

Take for instance you are using the web browser and have a couple of sites open. The first click of the menu will display all of your open pages as thumbnails on one screen (take that iPhone weird tri-page display). A second click will take you back to the root menu system.

The root menu system of the Nokia N900 like most devices is prescribed by Nokia's developers as what they deem to be the most important applications. However, you can modify this menu like you would on most other handsets. Say, you wanted to move the feed subscription app to the root because you're an RSS nut you could do that.

Browsing on the phone was a great experience. Pages loaded quickly on T-mobile and scrolling was a breeze. What did take me a second to get a handle on was the zooming in of the content. My first instinct was to put my iPhone knowledge in place and go multi-touch in an attempt to pinch release. That failed. The N900 reacts to the not so multi-touch double tap to zoom.

The QWERTY keyboard experience was better than I expected. I fired up the note taking application and tried my best to write up stuff that made me sound smart so that the next person to pick up the phone in the store would know that a genius had just been there. It's like random phone note graffiti and a keyboard test all in one. Back to reality . . . the keyboard was very responsive and I was able to type reasonably fast. Much quicker than an iPhone or Droid with its off center keypad.

I don't know what the battery life of this phone is like or whether T-mobile outside of the store location is as good as in it. But what I do know is that this phone, unlocked, wants to fill the smart phone void in my life.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nokia N900 With Maemo Internet Browser Video Demo (mrgadget.com.au)
• Nokia N900 First Impressions are Surprising, Both Good and Bad (jkontherun.com)
• Nokia steps up attack on iPhone with free music mobile (telegraph.co.uk)
• Nokia N900 quick hands-on (engadget.com)

Nokia N900 Hands On is a post from: TechStartups.com

Why use the .rss extension?

Why not?

I received the comment below in regards to using a .rss extension for RSS feeds.

Serious question why? What benefit (besides looking cool) do you get from this, when there's no standard extension for feeds (.xml, .rdf, .atom, etc.) and lots of FeedBurner feeds with no extension at all?

My theory for doing this revolves around user acceptance of RSS and that the message we give as publishers (see; nerds) about RSS being so awesome isn't a very coherent one. We need a better message and a shiny new package. To me, .rss explains exactly what I am going to get when I use it. Simple.

Packaging feed formats of all types under the extension is a way for users to know exactly what they are getting syndicated content, a.k.a., your stuff. There is no need for all the baffling mumbo jumbo we throw at site visitors about what RSS is or how it works. I contend they don't care that, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format for sharing and distributing Web content (via CNN). Blah.

Check this Wired explanation for further mumbojumbo:

Based on the XML data format, RSS is the simplest way to add Wired News headlines to your site.

Even the part of the sentence after the comma from Wired is confusing, add Wired News headlines to your site. What if I just want to read it and not put it into my site? For most people, would they know how to put those headlines in their site? Do they have sites?

What I am trying to say is that we need to get our act together and stop being nerds about syndication formats. The nice orange RSS icon is ubiquitous and is used to link to .xml, .rdf, .atom and the like without the end user needing to know what they are. Our messaging should be as simple as the RSS icon and I think the .rss extension helps to clarify what is being delivered.

Think about how easy it is to describe what a telephone is and how to use it. Did you for a second even think about the technology that makes your phone work? Nope. Pick it up, dial and talk. Simple.

The orange RSS icon is the syndication telephone and .rss is the keypad.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Why Use the .rss Extension for Feeds? is a post from: TechStartups.com

An interesting excerpt from the article:

The Flip's success stunned the industry, but it shouldn't have. It's just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished.

Jonathan Kaplan and Ariel Braunstein, the creators of the Flip Video, noticed that most people only use their expensive camcorders for shooting simple video. So, they made a cheap camera that only shoots simple video! The Flip Video camera is far from the best camcorder available. It's not even close. But it's the most successful. These little cameras cornered 17% of the U.S. camcorder market.

The success of this camera demonstrates a powerful lesson: a product does not have to be the best', but simply good enough. Cool' extras that aren't essential to accomplishing the product's central goal won't necessarily increase the value of your product and may only complicate and increase cost. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. Keeping it simple, cheap, and getting it in the consumers hands quickly is much more valuable than making it perfect.

We follow the Agile development process, which stresses quick iterations and getting new features to users as quick as possible. With Agile, your product may not be perfect the first time your users see it, but it will be good enough. It's the 80/20 rule, get it 80% complete, get it out, and figure out the last 20% as you go.

One of our goals this month is to simplify Rypple and focus on our core strength; getting you feedback. We too fell victim to adding cool features' that were not really necessary. Marg Campbell, one of our trusted advisers, described Rypple, in her Rypple TV video, as quick, dirty, and to the point! We're keeping this great line in mind every time we think of releasing a new feature!

Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Much of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's legal arguments following this summer's $1.92 million Recording Industry Association of America file sharing jury verdict against her don't have much weight or precedent.

Clearly, that a jury in June ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 music tracks she infringed on Kazaa is outrageous and shocks the conscience and there's no rational relationship between the amount of harm suffered by the recording industry and the award granted.

Thomas-Rasset wass the nation's first sharing defendant to go before a jury. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting individuals, and most have settled out of court.

That said, in their latest court papers, (.pdf) Thomas-Rasset's legal team again is sticking to the argument that the whopping jury award is a due process violation all in a bid perhaps to secure a third trial. (The first ended in a $222,000 judgment against the Minnesota woman, but a mistrial was declared after the judge conceded he gave faulty jury instructions)

Still, it is true that the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly reduced lofty jury awards based on so-called due process breached. But those were punitive damages awards, not statutory damages awards.

Those punitive damage reductions, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, do not apply to Thomas-Rasset's case although Thomas-Rasset's defense team suggests there's always a first.

Punitive damages are the amount a jury awards to punish conduct of an offender. Up until recently, there generally has been no limit. But the Supreme Court has suggested that punitive damages should be limited to about no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages a jury awards.

Higher ratios, the courts have said, are due process breaches because defendants have no notice ahead of time about the lofty financial consequences of their actions.

But the law is crystal clear when it comes to the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Thomas-Rasset. Juries can award up to $150,000 per violation. Punitive damages do not fall under the Copyright Act.

One of the only points in Thomas-Rasset's brief that makes a compelling argument is that the Copyright Act, when amended in 1999, didn't conceive of non-commercial cases the RIAA has been bringing the past six years.

The notion that Congress decided that the award of statutory damages in this case was somehow appropriate or tailored to ensure deterrence is a fiction that the plaintiffs would have this court adopt. The Congress that enacted the statutory-damages provision of the Copyright Act could not have had the kinds of illegal but non-commercial music downloading here at issue in mind, defense attorney K.A.D. Camara argues in recent briefs.

It's true: There's no doubt that a $1.92 judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000.

That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.

Still, the RIAA is crying foul.

After Thomas-Rasset refused to settle out of court, the industry is now demanding that Thomas-Rasset pay up. The RIAA is also seeking U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to issue an injunction barring her from future file sharing.

Plaintiffs' evidence showed that defendant knew what she was doing was wrong, that she did it anyway, and then lied about it for years. Through two trials, defendant still shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions and has made it clear that she has no intention of ever satisfying any portion of the judgment against her, Timothy Reynolds, the RIAA's attorney, wrote (.pdf) Davis.

Judge Davis of Minnesota could rule on the retrial and injunction issue any time.

See Also:

• Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
• Feds Support $1.92 Million RIAA File Sharing Verdict
• Will File-Sharing Case Spawn a Copyright Reform Movement?
• Thomas Seeks New RIAA Trial; Says $1.92 Million Verdict Monstrous
• File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA
• Jury Dings File Sharer $675000, RIAA Prevails Update

When you think of a hard-core gamer, do you picture a teenage boy battling his friends in World of Warcraft?

Also on wired.com:

• Gaming Gets a Level Up On Age
• Recession Proof' Gaming Industry Ignores the Stock Market
• SXSW: LoudCrowd Turns Music into Social Video Arcade
• Big Game Publishers Muscle In On iPhone Upstarts

Nike+

I've been thinking a lot about user engagement lately, which might be why Nike+ Experiment article in last month's Wired caught my attention. Although the article only briefly touches on the topic, there's a lot that can be learned by studying very successful products. I'm going to head out on a brief tangent to take a look at three valuable lessons, then circle back at the end to look at how you can apply their Magic Number to your own applications.

For those not familiar, the Nike+ is a sensor you put in your shoe that pairs with compatible iPod/iPhones to display stats about your run or cardio, play motivational music, and upload stats to your NikePlus.com account for analysis. The article is part of Wired's Living by Numbers feature, which covers technology's pretty remarkable ability to provide tools for tracking every detail of your life and using that data for constant self-improvement (sound familiar? ). Nike would love for you to buy a pair of their Nike+ compatible shoes with a sensor pocket, but you can also use Nike+ with any shoe by duct taping the sensor to the top of your shoe or buying a special pocket that attaches to your laces.

There's a lot of really interesting stuff in there about the Apple/Nike collaboration on the iPod/Nike+ sensor and where it came from, including:

• Nike is compiling rich data about more than 1.2 million people running on their sensors. They've collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories. This real-time data about runners has never been gathered before and is shedding all kinds of insights into the habits of that population on an international scale (e.g.: people in the US run more often than those in Europe and Africa in wintertime, the average run is 35 minutes). Air Miles and other loyalty programs work on the same principle (although their rewards are arguably much less valuable): aggregated data has value greater than the sum of its parts.
  • Lesson: look for patterns that might unexpectedly emerge when you aggregate smaller pieces together. They can often inform your product design decisions much more strongly than individual data points.
• Hard data and a real time feedback loop have turned the adage people hate exercising upside down. This is revolutionary for anyone who builds a product in a space that people need but don't necessarily want (versus something like chocolate, which everyone wants but doesn't need). Technology is great at reversing long held paradigms (Wikinomics, the Long Tail, etc.), and this is no exception. This is technology mediating one human behavior (couch potativity) by leveraging another (ego flattery).
  • Lesson: you can motivate people to do surprising things when the payoff is big enough, and it's hard to get bigger than ego. Add features inspired by the world of video games to your product as a powerful carrot.
• Simple, easy to use products will always kick the ass of complex, product rich beasts. The Nike+ doesn't include GPS or heart rate sensors, two of the most common features in other running accessories. Although most people might think those are indispensable must-haves and Nike is thinking of adding them in later versions the product has outsold almost everything in its market without them.
  • Lesson: KISS! Keep It Simple Stupid. In the words of Antoine De Saint-Exuprey: You know you've achieved perfection in design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

The most interesting statistic for me is the Nike+ Magic Number: 5. To quote from the article:

Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.

Here's where we come back to user engagement. All products have a magic number a 5 Runs equivalent but figuring it out can be tricky. Consider this engagement model (note that all curves are approximate and not based on real math):

User Engagement Model

A quick guide:

• A: the first exposure a user has to your product. Their engagement (or awareness) is zero until that point.
• A - B: their awareness grows as they hear about your product on Twitter, see news stories about it, spot your ads in Wired, etc.
• B: user's first actual experience with the product. They are fully engaged during this experience so make the most of it!
• B - C1: engagement degrades immediately after they stop using the product. C1 is an arbitrary point at which you can still make them a permanent user.
• C1 - D: engagement eventually returns to basically where it started at as they slowly forget all about you.

Man is that line ever depressing. But all is not lost! Consider the crazy wave coming out of C1. For most products, particularly web apps, you can turn the sinking Engagement ship around by taking action at each C point, be it a Facebook You've been bitten by a vampire! notice, a Flickr invitation to add your photos to a group pool, or a Rypple from one of your colleagues. Sustaining engagement means routinely drawing users back into your world with carefully designed touch points, timed to arrive before they drop below a C point. Nike uses the social features on NikePlus.com as that draw: emails that Nike misses you, challenges from your friends (fastest 5km run, most km over 20 days, etc.), and the ability to have your friends and family cheer you on to goals you share with them.

Let's take a look at the curve from a Nike+ user's perspective:

Nike+ User Engagement Model

I've made their A-B curve a little steeper to reflect Nike's and Apple's combined ad budget. C1 through C5 here are basically your first five runs, interspersed with reminders from NikePlus to keep at it. Based on the article, the curve takes off sharply after that as people become heavily hooked on the stats.

What's Your 5 Runs?

Think about your product or application. What's your inflection point from casual to engaged users? My instinct says that it needs to be a simple number so that you can actively drive users to it; you can expend a lot of resource if you know you only need to get them to their fifth run. We've been spending some time figuring it out for Rypple and we have a few ideas around the number of Rypples you send, the number of replies you receive, the quality of the advice, etc. We'd love to hear from you: share your 5 Runs below. There's value in learning from each other. Let's discuss!

Background

The most interesting area of new development on the web is the innovation happening around realtime messaging, the ability to deliver updates to a website or application in one or two seconds. While various systems like Yahoo News Alerts or feed readers like Google Reader have offered some simple ways of delivering fairly fast notifications, they are still built on an infrastructure that relies upon requesting a web page repeatedly. These systems do the equivalent of hitting the "reload" button in your web browser over and over.

While those systems have been using these inefficient methods to deliver updates, newer platforms like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed have focused on building the infrastructure for efficient large-scale delivery of updates using their own proprietary networks. A lot of attention has been paid to Twitter's 140-character limit, or Facebook's News Feed, but the compelling technology that enables the user experience on these platforms is the immediacy with which updates are delivered. Earlier systems like instant messaging or chat allowed realtime messaging on a one-to-one or small group basis, but it's been harder to deliver those realtime messages to anyone in the world who wanted to receive them unless you had a lot of money, expertise and infrastructure.

Another barrier is that, while there are many different programs and clients that let you connect to Twitter or Facebook with your own applications, there haven't been any free and open options for delivering realtime messages to a large audience if you couldn't, or didn't want to, rely on those companies.

But recently, a few key pieces have fallen into place that make it inexpensive and relatively easy to add realtime messaging as an incremental upgrade to existing websites and web applications. This set of related technologies, which I'm calling the Pushbutton platform, will yield a broad new set of capabilities for users, publishers and developers on the web. Best of all, Pushbutton technologies are free, open and decentralized, meaning that the arrival of realtime on the web will not be owned or controlled by any single company.

Defining Pushbutton

The concept and potential of Pushbutton is a lot like Ajax it's not a single technology or invention, it's a whole family of technologies, some of which have been in development or deployment for nearly a decade, that together enable this new realtime web. Pushbutton's foundation is built on these systems:

• Atom and RSS: The most common feed formats, for syndication on the web
• PubSubHubBub and RSSCloud: Powerful new "hubs" for distributing messages
• Web Hooks: Simple web services for receiving messages, rather than sending them

Pushbutton systems rely on the web's fundamental HTTP protocol for communication between these component parts. The architecture of Pushbutton message delivery is also simple to understand. Before Pushbutton, in today's systems, when you create a message (a blog post, tweet or other update) that's published in your RSS or Atom feed, every application or site that wants updates from you has to repeatedly request your feed to know when it's updated. You can optionally notify ("ping") some applications to tell them it's time to come collect your new updates, but this is time-consuming and resource-intensive on both sides, especially if you want to notify a lot of people.

In the best case, the system we have now is analogous to a person coming by your house and saying "Hey, there's a new edition of your favorite newspaper today. You should go get it." And then you have to go to the newspaper's printing plant to pick it up. In a Pushbutton web, that person is delivering each story to your house the moment it's complete.

That's because Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that there's a new message, but the content of the message itself. And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it.

1. You, the Sender, create a message to be delivered via RSS or Atom
2. Your application gives the messsage to one or more PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs, which reside in the Cloud
3. The PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs deliver the message to any Receivers, the applications or sites that have requested updates from you

In this way, each time you create a new message, a large number of Receivers can consume that message in near realtime (usually less than a second) without a lot of complexity. This kind of messaging has been possible with custom-built or more obscure technologies in the past, but the Pushbutton ecosystem is a breakthrough for a few reasons:

• Sending messages just requires a minor change to an RSS or Atom feed, and a simple, well-defined update notification, instead of major changes to the application where you create your messages.
• Receiving messages is also very simple, only requiring a developer to handle incoming notifications of updates.
• Most of the system's complexity is handled in the hub servers, which are well-documented, implementable in a variety of programming languages, and built around open code that will likely attract a large developer community.
• Most of the scaling effort and expense happens at the hub level, and all current hubs are designed to run on inexpensive cloud systems like Google App Engine or Amazon's EC2.
• The software for Sending, Receiving or running a hub is free, open source and available on almost any platform.
• Messages sent on Pushbutton platforms are delivered via HTTP, which is familiar to any web developer and runs well on any hosting environment. All requests between the different layers of a Pushbutton system can be made as simple REST calls.
• Pushbutton technologies can be adopted incrementally, so that features can be added piecemeal on either the sender or receiver side, without requiring a wholesale upgrade to infrastructure or application architecture.

Who's Behind Pushbutton?

Pushbutton technologies have been created and advocated by some of the most credible and experienced developers of social web technologies. Here's a brief overview of the impressive pedigree of these components:

• PubSubHubBub was co-created by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google. Brad was founder of LiveJournal, and created or co-created fundamental social web technologies like Memcached, OpenID and more.
• XML-RPC update pings, RSS and the RSS Cloud ideas were pioneered by Dave Winer, who has been actively developing open implementations of each of these technologies.
• Web Hooks have been evangelized by Jeff Lindsay, and have been deployed by a variety of different companies and platforms which all independently developed the technique.

In addition, Google has supported Brad and Brett's development of PubSubHubBub, and enabled it on the Google FeedBurner service. A number of smaller companies are deploying large parts of this infrastructure as well. In short, some of the best reputations in developing open web systems have made Pushbutton possible, from the biggest tech companies to the most steadfastly independent developers on the web.

Related Ideas and Prior Art

There are a lot of existing technologies that have influenced the creation and evolution of Pushbutton technologies; If you're familiar with any of these systems, you're probably already ahead of the curve in understanding part of what Pushbutton is trying to enable.

• Twitter Firehose, FriendFeed SUP, TypePad Update Stream: These realtime delivery systems offer up the content of their respective platforms as an unending stream that developers can consume and use in their applications. At the present time, they all have varying licenses and degrees of openness, and slightly different formats for delivering updates, but have proven the utility of the "sending" part of Pushbutton's realtime functionality.
• XMPP (Jabber), NNTP (Usenet), IRC: These older internet protocols all delivered various degrees of realtime messaging and distributed messaging capabilities, and can form a very useful base of experience for Pushbutton developers to learn from. In some cases, fundamental architectural choices about security, authentication or architecture were made when the Internet was less populated and less complex, making them inappropriate for today's applications. In all cases, these protocols are less-known by most contemporary web developers, and thus lack familiar toolkits and development resources, which make them quite challenging to deploy in common, inexpensive environments.
• TrackBack and Pingback: These systems for delivering updates between blogging systems were very effective in enabling rich distributed conversations in the early days of the blogosphere. These have declined in usefulness due to poor or missing implementations of authentication, which led to spam problems, and a general lack of understanding of their utility by a lot of newer bloggers. Pushbutton may offer an opportunity to restore some of the value of the idea behind these systems.
• Reverse HTTP may end up being a useful component of some Pushbutton deployments, as a complement or companion to Comet and related techniques.

What should we worry about?

• A format war? If you're familiar with the communities around technologies like feeds, you may know they have a deserved reputation for being contentious and even breaking into heated disputes over arcane details. I don't think that's likely to happen this time, because there are only one or two viable formats for each layer of the platform, and the creators of each part have shown some consistent good-faith efforts to promote interoperability where possible and peaceful coexistence where necessary. In the Ajax community, for example, the "X" in Ajax often stands for JSON instead of XML, but this hasn't hindered its broad adoption at all. I'm also willing to personally commit to try to prevent any kind of interpersonal conflict that would inhibit the adoption of Pushbutton technologies. Worry? No.
• Scaling issues? There will inevitably be some learning to do about how to scale the resource-intensive hub layer of a Pushbutton system. But because the hubs live on cloud systems that make enormous amounts of computing resources easily available, because the coders creating the reference implementations of the hub software have great experience making web-scale systems, and because it's relatively simple to introduce new hubs as needed, this will likely not be a gating factor for adoption of Pushbutton. Worry? No.
• Intellectual Property Concerns? I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But there has already been a great deal of interest in these systems, and it's likely that any bad actors who were interested in throwing their patent lawyers at this sort of system would probably already be suing people left and right. And the main players who are already involved have shown a consistent desire to make truly open systems that don't have IP encumbrances. Put simply, I think anybody smart enough to invent these kinds of technologies is smart enough to not want to look like jerks by suing somebody for using them. Worry? Probably not.
• Competition from centralized systems? Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.
• Bad user experience? One of the worst things we can do in making use of new technologies is to ignore the social, personal or even political implications of their use. Messages that are immediately delivered can't, by their nature, be erased from all the places they appear. The idea of permanently archiving these types of messages is unfamiliar to a lot of less technically-savvy users. And whenever we see something shiny and new, we have the temptation to use technology for technology's sake, whether or not we're solving a real problem or providing a real value. If Pushbutton gets a bad rap early on despite having tremendous potential, this will be why. Worry? Hell, yes.

Conclusion

I have tremendous excitement about the new realtime era of web applications. While I'm fundamentally an optimistic person, I have great skepticism when it comes to mindless hype about new technologies, so it's with a bit of reluctance that I indulge in some hype myself. But I think the Pushbutton web has the opportunity to give individuals and organizations with distinct and passionate voices the ability to be even more immediate and expressive on the web, and after ten years of publishing on the web, that's the part I love the most.

I have no doubt that some skeptics will say "Pushbutton is just PubSubHubBub by another name", just like they said "Ajax is XMLHttpRequest by another name", and if that's what the super-geeky guys want to believe, I'm fine with that. And I'm sure there will still be some significant technical details to resolve. But I think by giving the overall concept an approachable, understandable name and (hopefully!) an explanation that can be understood by anyone with an interest, it can catalyze interest in a whole new area of innovation on the web. And to be honest, when I see folks like Brad Fitzpatrick and Dave Winer hacking on the same set of problems, I can't help but think something interesting will come of it.

Over the next few days, I'll be outlining some of the opportunties around Pushbutton, espousing more of the philosophy that has the potential to imbue Pushbutton with a bit more meaning than most new web tech, and providing some simple explanations of how you can get started both learning about and taking advantage of these technologies. Most of all, I hope you'll offer your pointed criticisms, thoughtful critiques, detailed corrections and even better ideas. I'll be following the conversation here in the comments, across the blogosphere, and on Twitter using the tag #pshb.

Version 5.2 also revamps the program's private sharing feature, launched in December. Rather than sharing each file with specific people, you can now create a list of files to share with all of your personal contacts, making it easier to share vacation photos, videos and so on while keeping any potentially racier content private.

Rather than creating its own social network, Limewire put its hooks into the networks people already use, which is a wise strategy. Between twitter, blogs, email, Facebook, instant messaging, text messaging, and something called a telephone, we hardly need another way to keep tabs on our friends.

Those who prefer to organize media on their own computers, rather than trusting it to Flickr, Vimeo and so on, will likely appreciate the way Limewire lets them serve media directly to their friends, even if the hey, I just shared something with you alert comes through another service (i.e. Facebook).

The main drawback to Limewire's private sharing feature is that both users need to be running Limewire at the same time in order to share. If Limewire's creators intend for us to keep the app running at all times, they might want to think about creating separate preferences for maximum upload speed for friends and maximum upload stream for strangers, to avoid running up against ISP file bandwidth limits. Limewire product manager Nathan Lovejoy told us via phone that he'll consider adding that suggestion to a future version.

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Next-gen iPod touch rumored to get camera, microphone, fairy dust coating originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Steven Levy, who was embedded with us during our State Department trip to Iraq this past April, has a feature story in this month's issue of Wired:

Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web!

Sponsor

In the TED presentation, Maes refers to this system as a "sixth sense" - a sense that would give us seamless, easy access to information on the fly about situations and objects we come across.

The current system, albeit relatively clunky, could be purchased for as little as $350. Essentially it is made up of a webcam, a battery-powered 3M projector, mirror, phone and colored finger caps. But in 10 years - according to Maes, the period of time when this type of system might be fully developed - it could be one device and as small as a watch. Or indeed maybe even a brain implant.

This type of product will undoubtedly go well beyond what mobile phones are capable of now. As Maes put it, mobile phones currently don't have easy access to all of the relevant information we need on a daily basis. A mobile phone still requires a user to change their behavior, she said.

Plus the Web as we know it today is full of manual steps, such as visiting websites and searching for information. In 10 years time we'd hope that the Web of Data would be much better realized, for example product data easily viewed outside of its official website and no matter what the context.

One example given in the TED presentation was looking at a book in a bookstore. Currently to get access to reviews information, a person would need to take out their cellphone, open up Amazon's mobile website - or a relevant iPhone app perhaps - and search for that book. Whereas with the wearable internet device demoed at TED, the user simply wiggles his or her fingers and up pops the Amazon rating on the front cover (reviews data can be reached by opening up the book).

You can see the power of this as a next generation Internet interface, as it removes several manual steps from the process of receiving relevant, contextual information about something or someone.

We've blogged a fair amount about sensors this year, because they connect the real world up to the Internet. The wearables system relies a lot on them, for example the caps on Pranav's fingers. Add that to the many other points of connection to the Web and it's a powerful system; for example the book has a barcode that, in combination with the wearable device, will pull down data from Amazon.com via the Web.

The Internet as Sixth Sense

As explained in a Wired article earlier this year (found via h+ Magazine), a lot of the information that "helps us understand and respond to the world" doesn't come from the 5 senses humans are usually born with. It comes from computers and, increasingly, the Web. So the goal of this MIT wearable device is to "harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses."

We at ReadWriteWeb are very excited about next-generation Internet interfaces, such as augmented reality and so-called cross reality. These wearable devices strike me as being the most impressive future Web interface that I've seen in a while. Check out the video and see if you agree.

I've been a strong advocate of getting a search deal done with Microsoft, Icahn, who owns about 5 percent of Yahoo and is a director on its board, told Reuters on Friday. It would enhance value if a deal got done, because of the synergies involved, he said in a phone interview.

Yahoo board member Icahn wants Microsoft deal | Technology | Reuters.

See Also:

• Icahn Still Gunning for Microhoo
• Microhoo Tea Leaf Watch: Proxy Directors Set Free
• Yahoo Investor Pushes For a Microhoo at $22 a Share
• Analysts, Icahn Stir Up Microhoo Pot
• Microsoft And Yahoo Near Ad Deal: All Things Digital
• Bartz Choice Signals Bid to be Yahoo (!) Again
• Microsoft Approaches Yahoo Again, This Time As a Partner

Despite their much-admired situational awareness, even NYC subway veterans sometimes get confused about where to find the nearest station -- and if you're a first time visitor, fuggedaboudit. For iPhone 3GS-enabled residents and tourists, it's about to get a lot easier: acrossair is offering an NYC version of the Nearest Tube augmented reality app, New York Nearest Subway.

Hold your iPhone flat and see a 2D map of the entire system... then lift it perpendicular to the ground, and the heads-up display mode shows you floating icons representing nearby stations, complete with line legends and walking distances. For anyone who's ever walked to a faraway subway stop only to realize that there was a much closer option, this is incredibly compelling. No word on price yet, and the app is awaiting approval; as noted, this app will only work on the 3GS, as the magnetometer is used to determine the direction the phone is facing.

If you've got preferred apps for navigating public transit in your city, pipe up in the comments.

[via Gadget Lab]

Continue reading Reality doesn't get more real: 2 iPhone views of the NYC subway

TUAWReality doesn't get more real: 2 iPhone views of the NYC subway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Voice, the innovative invite-only telephone communication control service, is readying a iPhone version of its mobile phone app, which just became available on Tuesday for Android OS-based phones and Blackberries.

But will Apple and AT&T let Google sell such an app without hobbling it?

For instance, Google Voice offers free SMS services that appear to come from one's Google number rather than one's mobile phone number. That means users could text all they like, without paying AT&T $20 a month. That money is virtually all profit for the telecom giant, since the messages use almost no bandwidth and even travel on a special channel separate from voice or data.

So the motive is clear.

The answer to whether they will is unclear, but history suggests it's a strong possibility.

AT&T and Apple together have blocked video applications that compete with approved ones and forced the low cost phone calling company Skype to disable its most powerful feature free phone calls using a phone's data connection if it wanted to be included in the iPhone marketplace controlled by Apple.

AT&T has said that it expects Apple to block products that compete with its services. It puts the kibosh on some other apps that might be hard on a network Slingbox's video application for one, though it is fine with other streaming media apps, like Major League Baseball's, for one.

Such practices are part of the reason that Congress, public interest groups and the FCC have all been looking skeptically at U.S. mobile carriers, wondering if they need to be regulated more closely.

A Google spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about a potential app, but did say that it was working with Apple to bring similar functionality [as the Android/Blackberry apps] to iPhone users.

Still in an invite-only beta, Google Voice lets users combine work, home and mobile phones all under a single Google number. Voicemail can be sent to all of the phones, all calling histories are combined, voicemails are turned into voice files and also machine-transcribed, and users can set custom call handling rules for every person in their address book. Users can also make free conference calls, record calls and even switch phones during a call.

Apple, per usual, ignored a request for comment.

AT&T declined to comment on whether it considered the app as competition or if it was even talking to Apple about it.

In the meantime, Google says the Google Voice mobile website is optimized for the iPhone, and that it will continue to improve the user experience for the iPhone users.

There's also already an unofficial Google Voice app for the iPhone called GV Mobile.

Photo: Flickr/Cloneofsnake

See Also:

• Google Voice Now Available for Mobile Phones
• Google Voice: Revolutionary And a Bit Unnerving
• Google Voice Speaks of World Domination
• Google Turns Voicemail Into E-mail

Photo: Flickr/CloneofSnake

Some fans objected to Reznor's claim that Topspin Media (video interview) got it right with its re-release of the Beastie Boys album Ill Communication, which offers a wide array of merchandise in just about every conceivable format at a wide variety of prices. It's become a well-worn criticism of the independent distribution model that fledgling bands need a helping hand in order to make it in the music business. Not so, says Reznor. According to him, giving away digital music while charging for scarce, premium edition is the best way forward for artists of all stripes not just Radiohead and his own band, Nine Inch Nails.

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales, wrote Reznor on his message board. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY [as DRM-free MP3s] Collect people's e-mail info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods.

It's a play straight out of Anderson's playbook (and, in fact, Anderson cites Nine Inch Nails as an example of a business that understands Free).

To put it into practice, Reznor advises that bands distribute through Amazon, TopSpin or Tunecore; set up a simple, Flash-free site outside of MySpace (which he says is dying and reads as cheap / generic); never abuse their mailing list; use free tools from Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube and SoundCloud; and give people a reason to keep coming back to their site (Reznor's own forums are an example of this strategy).

However, Reznor says the strategy of giving away music in return for e-mail addresses, then marketing pricey box sets and other premium goods to those e-mail addresses only makes sense if a band wants to keep all its money and stay in control of its image.

If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake), your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days, you'll need old-school marketing muscle, and that only comes from major labels.

Good luck with that one.

See Also:

• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
• TopSpin Lets Bands Ape Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails
• Video Interview: Ian Rogers, Topspin Media
• SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era
• Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson on the Future of Free
• Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead Dominate Amazon MP3 Chart
• It Just Got Cheaper To Sell a Song on iTunes
• MySpace Music: What Went Wrong, and What's Being Done About It

Photo: Andrea Veraart

Apparently all print subscribers haven't been asked (this by way of a full disclosure), but the New York Times is asking its dead tree readers whether they'd be willing to pay to access the paper's content online.

The numbers being floated are $2.50 a month for subscribers, and $5 a month for everyone else, according to Bloomberg.com.

Nytimes.com is currently free, and a previous attempt to put some their columnists behind a paywall, Times Select, ended with great fanfare nearly two years ago with the slogan: Now, everyone is entitled to our opinions.

But that was then: Way before the global recession, when the New York Times Co was worth four times what it is today, wasn't selling assets and cutting its payroll, the advertising market hadn't gone into freefall (the industry has lost more than $11 billion in ad sales since 2005) and Google wasn't the enemy.

The notion of beginning to charge for content that has always been free is extremely controversial. Some media observers simply think it cannot work and some industry professionals think it must absolutely happen.

Nobody can say it will work, and the risk of trying and failing could do serious permanent damage to a news brand to say nothing of being utterly demoralizing to everyone else who might have thought it was the last, best hope.

There have been some newspaper attempts to start asking readers to pay for what had been free content (like Times Select) but no major player has ever tried charging customers directly with any gusto the digital equivalent of giving no part of the print paper away for free. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have always charged online, so there was no need to re-condition their readers to go from paying zero to something. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had to shut down its newspaper to try to survive purely in digital form, and the Christian Science Monitor curtailed print editions.

But those publications, with all due respect, are not the likes of the New York Times. Were the Gray Lady to draw a line in the sand, a lot of theory would be put to the test right quick.

It might be time for some paper to stop the threats and just do it, and an iconic brand like the Times may be the best one to try.

New York Times Considers $5 Monthly Web-Access Fee Update1 - Bloomberg.com.

The 125,000-square-foot facility was one of the crown jewels of the world of particle physics back then, but at this point its sadly outdated and has outlived its usefulness. But back in the '50s, it earned a Nobel Prize for Emilio Segr and Owen Chamberlain, who discovered the antiproton within a year of the Bevatron's completion.

Just think: how long will it take for us to decide that the Large Hadron Collider is an outdated piece of junk? And what will we be replacing it with? [Wired Science]

LOS ANGELES A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, and issued a directed acquittal on the three misdemeanor charges.

U.S. District Judge George Wu granted a defense motion to overturn the jury verdict in the case after reviewing transcripts from last year's trial, in which 50-year-old Drew was convicted of three misdemeanor charges of unauthorized computer access.

Drew had faced a maximum sentence of three years and a $300,000 fine. Although prosecutors sought the maximum, probation authorities, in a pre-sentencing report sent to the court, had recommended probation and a $5,000 fine.

Drew was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against a 13-year-old girl who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government's novel argument that violating MySpace's terms of service for the purpose of harming another was the legal equivalent of computer hacking.

In September 2006, prosecutors said, Drew conspired to create a fake MySpace account for Josh Evans with her then 13-year-old daughter, Sarah, and a then-18-year-old employee and family friend named Ashley Grills.

Prosecutors alleged that Drew and the two others used the profile to lure Megan Meier, a 13-year-old neighbor, into an online relationship with Josh to find out what Megan was saying about Drew's daughter online. But in October, one of the group, writing as Josh, turned against Megan, and told her that the world would be a better place without her. Shortly afterward, Megan hanged herself in her bedroom.

MySpace's user agreement requires registrants, among other things, to provide factual information about themselves and to refrain from soliciting personal information from minors or using information obtained from MySpace services to harass or harm other people. By allegedly violating that click-to-agree contract, Drew committed the same crime as any hacker, prosecutors claimed.

But testimony in the case offered by prosecution witness Ashley Grills under a grant of immunity showed that nobody involved in the hoax actually read the terms of service. Grills also said that the hoax was her idea, not Drew's, and that it was Grills who created the Josh Evans profile, and later sent the cruel message that tipped the emotionally vulnerable 13-year-old girl into her final, tragic act.

Drew was cleared of the felony computer-hacking charges by a jury, but convicted of three misdemeanors for unauthorized computer access. The jury deadlocked on the felony charge of conspiracy.

More details to come.

Photo: AP

See also:

• Judge Postpones Lori Drew Sentencing; Weighs Dismissal
• Can Lori Drew Verdict Survive the 9th Circuit Court?
• Prosecutors Seek 3 Years in Prison for Lori Drew
• Lori Drew Not Guilty of Felonies in Landmark Cyberbullying Trial
• Prosecution: Lori Drew Schemed to Humiliate Teen Girl
• Government's Star Witness Stumbles: MySpace Hoax Was Her Idea, Not Drew's
• Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets Scary' Legal Precedent
• Blog Readers Out Anonymous Adults that Newspaper Refused to Identify

Max Ray Butler, 36, faces up to 60 years in prison for the two felonies under law, but his actual sentence will be influenced by a number of factors, not least a plea agreement with federal prosecutors that was filed under seal Monday.

Wearing an ill-fitting orange jail uniform and round glasses, his hair cut short and neat, the six-foot-plus Butler towered over the burly deputy marshals that brought him into the court room. Once he settled into his seat, he spoke softly and evenly as he answered questions from the judge, frequently drawing admonishments to speak up for the benefit of the court reporter.

I actually did the actions that are relevant in the indictment, and I am guilty, Butler said, at one point.

Butler identified himself in court as Max Vision, the name he gave himself in the 1990s when he became a superstar in the computer security community. At that time Butler was billing himself out as a $100-an-hour computer security consultant, and he earned the respect of his peers for creating and curating an open source library of attack signatures used to detect computer intrusions.

But it turned out Butler was staging recreational hacks on the side, and in 2001 he was sent to federal prison for 18 months for launching a scripted attack that closed security holes on thousands on Pentagon systems, and left backdoors behind for his own use.

While in prison, Butler met more serious criminals, and he was befriended by a professional swindler named Jeffrey Norminton. After his release, Norminton introduced him to an Orange County, California entrepreneur and former bank robber named Chris Aragon.

Butler admitted Monday that he began hacking banks, merchants and other hackers to steal credit card numbers, then sold them to Aragon. Aragon, who's pending trial on related state charges in southern California, turned that stolen data into near-perfect counterfeit cards, complete with holograms, and recruited a crew of shoppers who used the cards to snap up designer merchandise for resale on eBay. Aragon earned at least $1 million in the business, police say.

Butler became a priority to federal law enforcement officials in 2006, when, under the handle Iceman, he staged a brazen takeover of the online carder forums where hackers and fraudsters buy and sell stolen data, fake IDs and specialized underground services.

He hacked into the forums, wiped out their databases, and absorbed their content and membership into his own site, called CardersMarket.

On one of the sites he hacked, called DarkMarket, Butler later discovered that an administrator named Master Splyntr was logging in from an FBI office in Pittsburgh. Butler partnered with a Canadian hacker to try and expose Master Splyntr as a fed, but his claim was largely dismissed in the underground as inter-forum rivalry. DarkMarket went on to become a full-blown undercover FBI operation, and the FBI and Secret Service began an investigation into Iceman.

(I wrote about Butler in the January issue of Wired. I'm now working on a book about him and the carder forums for Crown publishing).

Using informants and some genuine electronic gumshoe work, the feds identified Iceman as Butler about a year later, and arrested him in September 2007 at a corporate apartment he used as a hacking safe house.

When the feds seized Butler's hard drive, they found five terabytes of encrypted data on his harddrive, the government said Monday. They later cracked Butler's crypto, and discovered 1.8 million stolen credit card numbers belonging to 1,000 different banks. The banks tallied the fraudulent charges on the cards at $86.4 million.

But Butler's defense attorney told U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill Jr. Monday that Butler and his associates weren't' responsible for all of the fraudulent charges.

Butler, noted federal public defender, Michael Novara, frequently cracked the computers of other members of the underground, and stole their stuff. Some of the credit card numbers found on Butler's hard drive had been in the hands of cyber thieves before Butler began his hacking spree.

Max is kind of a hacker's hacker, said Novara. There was a lot of stuff on his computer that he was not responsible for, and did not intend to use.

I don't think I ever heard the expression, a hacker's hacker' before, said Judge Cohill, with a smile.

Sources say Butler's plea deal will also wrap up a separate federal case in Virginia, in which Butler is charged with staging the first documented spear phishing attack against employees of a financial institution, gaining access to the corporate network of Capitol One bank.

Butler was calm and attentive at Monday's proceeding, which opened with federal prosecutor Luke Dembosky crossing to the defense table to shake hands with the hacker, who smiled and nodded.

Through his attorney, Butler released a two-paragraph statement following his plea.

Max Vision, known in this case as Max Butler, pled guilty today as a first step toward getting this sad chapter of his life behind him. It is unfortunate that his life circumstances in 2005 led him to participate in this criminal conduct, and he very much regrets doing so, he wrote.

Max has always preferred using his extraordinary computer skills his computer vision for the good of society and the cyber world, and he hopes that he will be given the opportunity in the future to once again don the white hat.

Asked afterward what kind of sentence the government expects for Butler, Dembosky was vague with reporters. Suffice to say, it won't be probation.

See Also:

• Notorious Crime Forum DarkMarket Goes Dark
• Cybercrime Supersite DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm
• 56 Arrested in DarkMarket Sting, Says FBI
• One Hacker's Audacious Plan to Rule the Black Market in Stolen Credit Cards
• A White Hat' Goes to Jail

Here are a few items on the subject that I have found highly interesting.

• Dan Conover wrote a piece called The Newspaper Suicide Pact a few weeks ago, and it really seems to have gotten a lot of traction. It was even Boing Boinged a few weeks ago. I've wanted to talk to Dan about his experiences looking at the future of newspapers for the Charleston Post and Courier and then having all recommendations ignored. What I really like about this piece is that he points out a fact I think is really important. In all these pro-newspaper articles they are really arguing the positives for a newspaper industry that hasn't existed for a long time. There are very few plucky rumpled beat reporters wearing out the shoe leather doing investigative reporting so if your argument for newspapers involves this sort of romantic self-image, it ain't reality.
• My AmigoFish recommendation feed dropped in this episode of the show Dave Winer and Jay Rosen do together called Rebooting the News. In it, Rosen discusses his Church of the Savvy analysis and I found it brilliant. I hope he writes it up soon so I can point to it. He points out that many current practitioners of journalism place their highest value on their own savviness, their own ability to be insiders and to understand the game. It really explains the mechanism for phenomena like the lousy process heavy horse race campaign reporting we get. The reporters don't want to test the campaign claims against reality, they want to talk about whether or not they will play with public and whether they will move the needle. I thank Jay Rosen for giving me a cognitive framework for my disgust with the state of reporting. It doesn't make it better, but it explains why it is this way.
• Bruce Sterling blogs about this article in the New York TImes that covers the shocking news - shocking I say - that some blogs are started and then abandoned. The subtext is unmissable - Look at these blogs that don't even keep going! How can you even compare us to them? When not giving itself a romanticized self-fluffing, the newspaper industry spends its time finding things to point to as being worse than it. Stay classy, New York Times! As much as people revere that paper, it means absolutely nothing to me in my life. I could care less if it stays afloat or sinks.

The TOSBack.org site was, in part, an outgrowth of Facebook's change in its service agreement in February that seemingly allowed the company to use its members' content forever. Facebook changed its terms after an internet revolution of sorts.

The new tracker, chronicling 44 internet companies, shows terms of service agreements side by side with older and new versions, and highlights what is new.

The companies include Facebook, Google,Wordpress, Data.gov, YouTube, Apple, GoDaddy and, among others, eBay.

See Also:

• Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets Scary' Legal
• AT&T, Comcast Deny RIAA Three-Strikes' Participation
• Comcast Deflects User's Questions - Updated
• AT&T Revokes Right to Disconnect Based on Political Speech
• Does Your ISP Sell Your Internet History? Help 27B Investigate
• Adware Maker Says Facebook Security Warning False and

An Ohio appellate court has upheld the felony hacking conviction of a man who was found guilty of unauthorized access for misusing his computer at work.

Richard Wolf acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate when he used his work computer to upload nude photos of himself to an adult web site and view other photos on porn sites, but he didn't think he should be convicted of hacking for doing so.

A jury disagreed and felt he exceeded his authorization on the computer, which the appellate court recently upheld (.pdf).

Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor of computer crimes, called the conviction a misuse of the computer hacking law.

This goes to the whole concept . . . that violation of an internal policy on the use of a computer can be piggybacked to make a crime, said Rasch, who now works as a consultant for Secure IT Experts. His uploading of nude pictures is certainly inappropriate and something he could be terminated for, but it was perfectly legal. When you use the heavy hand of the criminal law to prosecute inappropriate behavior, it's just an abuse of the criminal statutes.

Wolf was also convicted of soliciting a dominatrix online for sexual services, a misdemeanor. Rasch says using the computer evidence for proof of this crime is appropriate, but charging him separately for felony hacking goes too far.

Rasch said the problem stems from an amendment that was made to the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the federal anti-hacking law that states have added to their own statutes.

The early statute only talked about unauthorized access which is breaking into computer, he said. But then they amended it to say or exceeding the scope of authorization to access a computer'.

The amendment was intended to target employees who have access to a computer but abuse that access to obtain data they shouldn't have or go into parts of their employer's network they shouldn't enter.

The amendment arose from the case of an IRS employee who was caught looking up tax returns on an assistant district attorney who was prosecuting his father, among others. Authorities tried to prosecute him on hacking charges but ran into difficulty since he was authorized to use the computer system.

Unfortunately, Rasch says, the amendment created an opportunity for prosecutors to interpret the law too broadly.

That term exceeding authorization' is very loose and ambiguous, he says.

The case began when Larry Wise, the Superintendent of the Shelby City Wastewater Treatment Plant, where Wolf was employed, was deleting old files from a work computer and found a nude photograph of Wolf.

When police interviewed him, Wolf admitted that in January 2006 he joined a web site called Adult Friend Finder to meet women and that, in violation of established work practices, he uploaded nude photos of himself from his work computer after women he met online requested pictures. He also admitted accessing various porn sites and spending more than 100 hours doing personal business on his work computer.

Forensic analysis of the computer's temporary internet files uncovered 703 pornographic photos as well as several sexually explicit e-mails Wolf exchanged with a dominatrix named Mistress Patrice, soliciting her services.

Wolf was convicted on state charges for three counts: unauthorized access to a computer, a felony; theft of services in office (essentially for depriving the city of his paid services while he conducted the unauthorized activities on a city computer on city time), which is also a felony; and solicitation of prostitution, a misdemeanor.

He was sentenced to 15 months and a $5,000 fine for the two felony convictions and ordered to pay the city about $2,400 in restitution for personal business on city time. On the misdemeanor solicitation charge, he was sentenced to 60 days (to run concurrently with his other sentence) and a fine of $500. His sentence was later reduced to two and a half years in community control.

Wolf argued for appeal on grounds that there was insufficient evidence for any of the convictions and that the convictions for unauthorized use of computer and theft of service in particular are contrary to public policy and create such a manifest miscarriage of justice that such convictions must be reversed.

The Ohio hacking statute reads in part that No person, in any manner and by any means, including, but not limited to, computer hacking, shall knowingly gain access to, attempt to gain access to, or cause access to be gained to any computer, . . . without the consent of, or beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of, the owner of the computer, . . . or other person authorized to give consent.

The appellate court wrote that Wolf's conduct was beyond the scope of the express or implied consent and the charge of unauthorized use of a computer was based upon sufficient evidence.

The appellate court vacated the theft-of-service conviction, however.

Judge John Wise wrote that while the State presented evidence Appellant spent approximately 100 hours over a five month-period utilizing internet websites that were not related to his job, there was no evidence presented that his job performance suffered or that he failed to perform his job duties.

Furthermore, even if it could be shown that Appellant failed to perform
such job duties, while it could certainly serve as a basis for termination from his
employment, such could not be the basis of a criminal theft in office charge.

One of the judges wrote a dissenting opinion on this point, saying the state had proven that the city experienced a measurable loss for the time Wolf wasted on the computer.

The county assistant prosecutor said her office will appeal the ruling to the state supreme court.

UPDATE: David Carto, the attorney who handled Wolf's appeal, told Threat Level that Wolf was prosecuted because authorities disapproved of the material he viewed online.

The reason he was prosecuted was clearly because of the content of what he was looking at, he said. If somebody else had been on an internet site studying horticulture, I don't think he would have been prosecuted. It was not obscene. It was just something that was not approved of by certain elements of the city government and by the court in which he was tried. The prosecutor and the judge both treated this basically as a sex offense.

Carto said the photos Wolf viewed were profile pictures from the adult dating site he visited. Some of the profile photos of women on the site showed nudity but not sexual acts.

He said his client was a good worker and had even been promoted after his supervisors found the pictures. Initially he was suspended while police investigated the case, but was promoted after he returned to work. He lost his job, however, when he was convicted of the charges.

He added that the city had never actually disseminated a policy regarding internet usage to tell workers what was inappropriate.

They had crafted one but they hadn't published it, he said. So there was in effect no policy and no protections on the computer no password protection or filtering of any kind so basically anybody could access anything on the internet through the city's computer.

Photo showing a random computer: chunter01/Flickr

The legal brouhaha concerns the court's position (.pdf) that drunk drivers have the right to examine the evidence against them. But the company that supplies the state with breath-testing machines, CMI of Kentucky, isn't forking over the code and is declaring it a trade secret threatening thousands of DUI convictions.

Princeton computer science whiz Ed Felten and others point out the conundrum.

The problem is illustrated nicely by a contradiction in the arguments that CMI and the state are making. On the one hand, they argue that the machine's source code contains valuable trade secrets I'll call them the 'secret sauce' and that CMI's business would be substantially harmed if its competitors learned about the secret sauce, Felten writes on the Freedom to Tinker blog. On the other hand, they argue that there is no need to examine the source code because it operates straightforwardly, just reading values from some sensors and doing simple calculations to derive a blood alcohol estimate.

The state and CMI are involved in a separate legal flap about whether the maker of the Intoxilyzer 5000EN should turn over the code to the state.

Still, internet security guru Eric Rescorla points out another problem: that an examination of the source code may not help determine whether the machines are reliable.

Stepping up a level, it's not clear what our policy should be about how to treat evidence from software-based systems; all software contains bugs of one kind or another (and we haven't even gotten to security vulnerabilities yet). If that's going to mean that all software-based systems are useless for evidentiary purposes, the world is going to get odd pretty fast, he writes on Educated Guesswork.

What's more, an analysis of the source code of the Draeger Alcotest used in New Jersey found frightening software errors as well. But that state's high court last year ruled against challenges questioning the machines' veracity.

Despite the clear errors in the machine, Evan Levow, a New Jersey drunken-driving defense attorney said in a telephone interview, the Supreme Court in New Jersey found the Alcotest to be reliable.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor, a judge in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the replace the retiring Justice David Souter. The former private IP lawyer's cyberlaw decisions ranged from copyrights in a digitized world to warrantless computer searches, so-called click-wrap agreements and the Patriot Act .

In 2002, Sotomayor wrote a decision (.pdf) nullifying Netscape's online click-wrap agreement, which demanded binding arbitration of disputes between Netscape and its customers. The free download button for Netscape's browser software was high on the web page, with the user-agreement well below.

We conclude that in circumstances such as these, where consumers are urged to download free software at the immediate click of a button, a reference to the existence of license terms on a submerged screen is not sufficient to place consumers on inquiry or constructive notice of those terms, Sotomayor wrote.

Consumers sued Netscape claiming browser cookies amounted to illegal eavesdropping. Netscape claimed the click-wrap agreement demanded out-of-court arbitration. As we all know, it turned out that cookies are lawful and mostly harmless.

In a December case, Sotomayor joined in a unanimous appellate decision on the 2001 Patriot Act. The ruling limited the application of the automatic gag orders that bind ISPs that receive an FBI national security letter a type of self-issued subpoena demanding information on a customer.

If confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court, the TechLaw blog wrote.

As a New York District Court judge in 2007, the nominee ruled that The New York Times could digitize and sell freelancers' work, despite the writers' claims of copyright infringement. The Supreme Court reversed her decision. The court is current set to hear that case again, and Sotomayor would likely have to recuse herself from the rehearing.

In 2001, as an appellate judge, she upheld (.pdf) the warrantless search of a New York Department of Transportation computer. The accountant was suspected of neglecting his duties and the government searched his computer without a warrant, leading to his job loss. The authorities found unauthorized accounting software on Gary Leventhal's computer, which was believed to be used for his private accounting practice.

The searches, Sotomayor wrote, were reasonable in light of the DOT's need to investigate the allegations of Levanthal's misconduct as balanced against the modest intrusion caused by the searches.

See Also:

• Free-Lancers Have Just Begun to Fight
• Court Narrows National Security Secrecy, Limits Oversight

Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it dying masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region's property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.

Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won't want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation's worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. It's like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been, said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition...

Moreover, many Michiganders whose parents had been able to send them to college thanks to the middle-class salaries of assembly-line work felt the Republicans had made United Auto Workers members into hate figures on a par with the welfare queens conjured up by Reagan-era Republicans. National newspaper and television reports mostly followed rightwing Washington's cartoonishly simple version of what ails the American auto industry. Labour is totally under attack, said Mike Smith, director of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University. And who is it under attack from? The supposedly leftwing media.

Smith, a former mechanic and self-described working stiff turned librarian, is clearly an interested party, but he may have a point. In January, Ford followed GM and Chrysler in eliminating one of the UAW's most jealously guarded perks, the jobs bank, which allows workers whose services are not needed to receive pay by doing course work, community service or in some cases just showing up and watching TV. I duly recorded this in a story for this newspaper, and found myself silently cheering the move, one of the conditions of the bail-out. Then I tuned into the news on Detroit's local Channel 4 station, and listened to an auto-worker pointing out that many people at his shuttered plant were paying their grocery bills and mortgages from their jobs bank money, and did not know how they would replace the income.

(Image: Detroit Disgrace, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Extremeezine's Flickr stream, courtesy http://passionatephoto.com/

The Los Angeles authorities said John Schiefer, 27, was the nation's first defendant to plead guilty to wiretapping charges (.pdf) in connection to using botnets.

Schiefer, who went by the online handle "acidstorm," faced as many as 60 years in prison and acknowledged using a botnet to remotely control computers across the United States. Once in control of the computers, the authorities said, (.pdf) his spybot malware allowed him to intercept computer communications. He mined usernames and passwords on accounts such as PayPal and made purchases totaling thousands of dollars without consent.

The authorities said he worked by day as an information security consultant with 3G Communications. After his guilty plea, Schiefer was hired at Mahalo, the so-called "human powered search engine." Its founder, Jason Calacanis wrote that the company failed to realize that the Los Angeles company had hired a man who had pleaded guilty to being a hacker.

Calacanis point out that Mahalo users' data was not breached by Schiefer.

Note to Mahalo Users: John's work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don't store any sensitive data anyway. (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answersnot much damage can be done there since they're all public anyway).

The defendant was among eight individuals indicted or successfully prosecuted in a crack down on black hat hackers who use armies of zombie computers to commit financial fraud, attack web sites with floods of traffic and send spam. The crimes at issue involved more than $20 million in losses, according to the FBI.

The FBI dubbed the eight cases "Operation Bot Roast II" -- the second round of its investigations against botnets, one of the most dangerous threats online today. The first FBI crackdown on botnets was announced in June, 2007.

See Also:

• Weak Password Brings 'Happiness' to Twitter Hacker
• Miley Cyrus Hacker Raided by FBI
• Pop Superstar Sting Supports Pentagon Hacker, Condemns U.S. ...
• Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy
• Israeli Hacker Says He Contemplated Suicide
• Miley Cyrus Hacker Used Celebrity MySpace Accounts for Spamming ...
• Guilty Plea: Blind Hacker Admits Harassment, Eavesdropping, Fraud ...
• Hardware Hacker Charged With Selling Cable Modems That Get Free ...
• Security Report: Most PCs Run Outdated, Hacker-Friendly Software ...
• Hacker Reportedly Kidnaps and Tortures Informant, Posts Picture as ...
• Valve Tried to Trick Half Life 2 Hacker Into Fake Job Interview ...
• Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software